The White Raven

‘It is as Jarl Orm says,’ Finn growled. ‘Obey him. Obey me and Kvasir Spittle here, too, for we are his right and left hands. You are no strangers to red war, so I will not give you the usual talk, of Hewers of Men and Feeders of Eagles.’

He paused, hauled out his long Roman nail and grinned.

‘Just remember – this is Jarl Orm, who slew the White Bear. Jarl Orm, who has stood in the tomb of Atil, Lord of the Huns and has seen more silver in a glance than any of you will see in a thousand lifetimes. Jarl Orm, who has fought with the Romans against the Serklanders. Jarl Orm, who is called friend by the Emperor of the Great City.’

I winced at all this, only some of which was true – but Finn’s audience would have howled and set up a din of shield- clanging if we had not been looking for stealth.

As we moved off, I saw Thorkel grin at me and raise his axe in salute and I realized that a lot of those things had been done by me right enough. I was now in my twenty-first year in the world, no longer the boy Thorkel had let into the Oathsworn on a shingle beach like this one, on a night much like this one, six years ago. I touched the dragon-ended silver torc round my neck, that great curve that snarled at itself and marked me as a man men followed.

No-one challenged us as we watched and waited above Klerkon’s holding, looking to count hard men and seeing none. The trees dripped. A bird fluttered in, was shocked and whirred out again, cackling. I did not like this and said so.

‘We had better move fast,’ said Kvasir, his mouth fish-breath close to my face. ‘Sooner or later we will give ourselves away and the lighter it gets…’

The sky was all silver, dulling to lead beyond the huddle of wattle huts. I half-rose and hauled out my sword – not the sabre this time, but a good, solid weapon given to me by King Eirik himself, with little silver inserts hammered into the cross- guard and a fat silver oathing ring in the pommel. I had a shield, but it was mostly for show, since I only had two fingers and a thumb on that hand to grip it with and any sound blow would wrench it away.

Grunting, red-faced, teeth grinding on his nail, Finn slid down through the trees, letting the rest of us follow. He had The Godi, his big sword, in one hand and carried no shield. The free hand was for that nail.

Then, just as he was seen by the two thralls squatting to shit, he ripped the nail from his mouth, threw back his head and let out a howl that raised the hairs on my arms.

The Oathsworn wolfed down on the camp, skilled and savage and sliding together like ship planks. The first thralls, gawping in terror and surprise with their kjafal flapping round their knees, vanished in a red flurry of blows and it was clear, from the start, that there were no warriors here.

Well, there was, but not much of one. He barrelled out of a doorway with only his breeks on, mouth red and wet and screaming in his mad-bearded face and a great shieldbreaker sword swinging.

Finn and Kvasir, like two wolves on a kill, swung right and left and, while Mad Beard was turning his shaggy head, deciding which one to go for first, Finn darted in with his Roman nail and Kvasir snarled from the other side with his axe, though he missed by a foot with his first swing. It did not matter much, though, for there were two of them and only one defender.

When they broke apart, panting, tongues lolling like dogs, I saw that the man they had been hacking to bloody pats of flesh was Amundi, who was called Brawl. We had all shared ale and laughed round the same fire three summers before.

‘So much for him, then,’ growled Finn, giving the ruined thing a kick. He shot Kvasir a hard look and added accusingly, ‘You need more practice with that axe.’

I had done nothing much in the fight save snarl and wave a menacing blade at a couple of thralls armed with snatched- up wood axes, who thought better of it and dropped them, whimpering. Now I watched these hard men, the new Oathsworn, do what they did best, standing back and weighing them up, for this was a new crew to me for the most part. It was also an old crew, let loose like a pack of hunting dogs too-long kennelled.

Hlenni Brimill and Red Njal and Hauk Fast-Sailor were old Oathsworn, yet they raved through that place, mad with the lust of it, so that the terror in faces only made them worse. Others, too, showed that they were no strangers to raiding and, for all that I had done this before, this time seemed too bloody and harsh, full of screaming women, dying bairns and revenge.

I saw Klepp Spaki, bent over with hands on his thighs, retching up at the sight of Brawl’s bloody mess. Now he knew the truth of the bold runes he carved for brave raiders who would never come home.

I saw Thorkel and Finnlaith laughing and slithering in the mud trying to round up a couple of pigs, which was foolish. We wanted no livestock on this raid – we had provision enough for where we were going.

It was the others who brought red war and ruin to that place. Women and thralls died there, right away or later, after they had been used. Weans died, too.

In the dim, blue-smoked hall, men overturned benches, flung aside hangings, cursed and slapped thralls, looking for loot. When they saw me, they fell silent and went still. Ospak, Tjorvir and Throst Silfra, like three bairns caught in the larder with stolen apples, dropped their thieving when they saw me. It was a half-naked, weeping thrall woman they had stripped between them – but they only dropped her because I had told them to leave the women until we were sure all the fighting men were dead.

Finn lost himself in it – him most of all. Like a drunk kept from ale, he dived headfirst into the barrel and tried to drown himself, losing his sense so much that I had to save him from the boy who was trying to avenge his mother. Since Finn had killed her before he flung her down on a dead ox in the yard and started humping her, it was futile, but I had to kill the boy anyway, for he had a seax at Finn’s exposed back.

A few kept their heads. Runolf Harelip spilled into the red light of the rann-sack in the hall, dragging a struggling thrall- boy with him, cuffing the child round the head, hard enough to throw him at my feet and almost into the hearthfire. I looked down as the boy looked up and a jolt went through me, as if I had been slapped.

A sensible man crops the hair of a thrall – it keeps the nits down and reminds them of their place – but this boy had been shaved and badly, so that hair stuck in odd dirty-straw tufts between scabs. He wore an iron collar with a ring on it and I knew there would be runes that told how he was the property of Klerkon.

None of the other thralls, I noted, had as much as a thong and bone slice, for Klerkon’s steading was an island with no place for a thrall to run – but this one had tried. More than once, I suspected, for Klerkon to collar him; Harelip had noted that, too, and thought it strange enough to bring him to me rather than kill him.

‘Chained up outside the privy,’ Harelip grunted, confirming my thoughts. Fastened like a mad dog, dumped near filth for more punishment.

The boy continued to stare at me. Like a cat, that stare, out of the muck and bruises of his face. Unwavering and strange – then I saw, with a shock, that he had one eye blue- green and one yellow-brown and that was what was strangest in that gaze.

‘Klerkon is not here,’ offered Ospak, stepping away from the weeping woman, though not without a brief look of regret. Light speared through the badly-daubed walls of the rough hall, dappling the stamped-earth of the floor.

‘That much I had worked out,’ I answered, glad of the excuse to break away from the boy’s eyes and angry at being made so twitched by him. I stepped towards what was Klerkon’s private space in the hall, throwing back the curtain of it.

Furs, purest white fox. A cloak with bright-green trim. The frame of a proper box-bed, planked over and thick with good pelts. No chest. No money. No Thordis.

‘I am a Northman,’ the boy said. A West Norse tongue, stumbling through the Slav he had been forced to speak, stiff with the old misuse of defiant silences.

I turned back into those eyes. He stood, chin up and challenging and, for a moment, reminded me of the Goat Boy as he had been when we found him on Cyprus. About the same age as the Goat Boy was then, I noted. Of course, we had stopped calling him the Goat Boy when he had grown into resenting it – Jon Asanes he was now, being schooled by a trader I knew in Holmgard, which the Slavs call Novgorod.

‘I am from Norway and a prince,’ the boy added. Throst Silfra gave a loud laugh and those strange eyes swung on him, eagle fierce. I saw Throst quail in an eyeblink, then recover as quickly, also angered at having been so disconcerted by a thrall boy. He moved, lip curled.

‘Stay,’ I warned and, for a moment, he glowered at me, then lowered his hand and stepped back.

‘I AM a prince,’ the boy insisted.

‘Aye, just so,’ thundered Finn, ducking into the middle of all this. ‘Wipe the muck off every thrall and they will swear they were pure gold in their own country.’

‘A prince of where?’ I asked.

The boy stirred uncomfortably. ‘Somewhere,’ he said, hesitantly. Then, more firmly: ‘But my mother was a Princess. She died. So did my fostri. Klerkon killed them both.’

‘There isn’t so much as a bead in this place,’ Finn growled, ignoring the boy. ‘Klerkon did not return here with his loot, so he must have sailed straight to Aldeigjuborg.’

‘The storerooms are full,’ Kvasir added, coming in to the hall. ‘Winter feed. Honey in pots, seal and deer hides, fox pelts, feathers for pillows, sacks of acorns…’

‘Feathers,’ sneered Finn. ‘Fucking acorns…’

‘Take it, load it,’ I said and Kvasir nodded. ‘When you have everything, burn this place to the ground. Leave the thralls – they take up too much room and they are not what we came for.’

Kvasir ducked out of the hall, bawling for people to help him; Red Njal came in and glanced at me, then looked away. His knees and hands were clotted with gore where he had knelt to plunder a woman and the bairns he had killed; I had stepped in on him and being watched had shamed him away from the small bodies.

‘Is it wise to burn it?’ Finn asked.

‘Wise?’

‘You know Klerkon,’ Finn offered. ‘Unless we finish him, he will have his revenge. He has already torched Gunnarsgard and half of it was mine – he may decide to kill all the thralls and Thordis with them, out of fury.’

He was right and this was reason enough, as Finn often pointed out, for not owning anything you could not stuff into a sea chest. Yet, outside, I could hear what we had brought to this place, in the screams and the harsh laughter. Humping a dead woman on the flank of a dead ox in the yard was the least of it. I said that, too and we glared at each other.

‘Fear the reckoning of those you have wronged,’ Red Njal said mournfully and I shot him a savage glance; he, above all, had much to fear, for I suspected the bairns whose blood he had been paddling about in were Klerkon’s own.

He saw my look and stiffened, then shrugged.

‘The shame you cannot lift you had better let lie, as my granny used to say,’ he muttered darkly.

‘Happy woman who never saw you guddling in the blood of bairns for what you could steal,’ I spat at him and he winced away from it. It was unfair, for others had done worse and none of us were snow-pure.

‘I know where Klerkon’s gold is,’ the boy said. ‘I will tell you if you do not fire the steading.’

‘If I tickle you with a hot blade you will tell us anyway,’ Throst Silfra growled, but the boy’s double-coloured eyes never left mine.

‘I would have thought you would warm yourself at such a fire,’ I said, flicking the iron collar. He flinched.

‘The thralls you leave will die without shelter,’ he replied. ‘It is enough that you take their food. They are not able to run, are not to blame and some are my friends here.’

‘Other princes?’ chuckled Finn scornfully.

The boy grinned. ‘No. But some have been kinder than kings. The free folk here are another matter and I have my own thoughts on that.’

Was he the age he looked? Nine, I had reckoned – but he spoke like someone ten times as old.

‘So it is agreed,’ I said. ‘Show us Klerkon’s secret.’

‘Lend me your axe,’ demanded the boy and Kvasir, after a moment’s narrow-eyed pause, handed it over. The boy weighed it with little bounces of his thin arm, then stepped to the boxbed and swung it, hard. Chips flew.

He swung it again and part of the frame cracked. A coin flew out and smacked on the beaten earth of the floor. Kvasir picked it up, turned it over, bit it. ‘Gold, by Odin’s arse,’ he said. ‘A Serkland dinar in gold, no less.’

The boy swung again and more chips flew.

‘Here, give me that – you need more muscle,’ said Runolf Harelip with a grin. The boy handed him the axe and stepped back. Harelip split the bed in two blows and Kvasir, Tjorvir, Throst and the others scrambled to gather the coins that spilled from the hollow frame.

In the end, they filled a sack the size of a the thrall boy’s head, all gold coins, most of them Serkland dinar with their squiggly markings, each worth, I reckoned it up in my head, about twenty silver dirham each. It was as great a loss for Klerkon as it was a gain for us.

The boy stood, unsmiling and straight. I saw that the iron collar was rubbing his skin raw and looked at Kvasir, who had also seen it.

‘Ref Steinsson has tools,’ he said, ‘that can strike that off.’

‘Just so,’ I said, then turned to the boy, feeling that heart- leap as our eyes met. ‘Do you have a name, then, or will we simply call you Prince?’

‘Olaf,’ said the boy with a frown. ‘But Klerkon called me Craccoben.’

There was silence. The name squatted in the hall like a raven in a tree. It was a name you gave to a full-cunning man, rich in Odin’s rune magic and one who, like him, could sit at the feet of hanged men to hear the whispered secrets of the dead.

Not a name you took or gave lightly and I wondered what had made Klerkon hand it out to this thrall boy.

Crowbone.

FIVE

We came up the coast, running before a freezing wind until we had found the narrow mouth of the river we sought and had to drop sail or risk running aground.

We all groaned, for we would have to row upriver now and crew light at that. It was a heavy, lumbering beast of a ship when there were not even enough men on benches for one oar shift, never mind two.

I sweated with the others, which at least took my mind off the boy, who had been cooed over by Thorgunna the minute she had set eyes on him. Ref had deftly struck off the iron collar and Thorgunna had at once started to wash and salve the sores it had made on his neck – not to mention the ones on his head, which showed where he had been shaved by ungentle hands. Old, white scars showed that such a razoring had not been his first and she tutted and crooned at him.

Finn, grinning and happy now that he was raiding and getting money out of it rather than feathers and acorns, gave Kvasir a nudge where he sat, in front of Finn and pulling hard to the stroke.

‘You have been hung up like old breeks, Spittle,’ he chuckled, nodding to where Thorgunna was wrapping the boy in a warm cloak and patting him. I wondered if she would croon quite so softly when she found out the whole story of what he had done, what he had urged hard men to do back there in Svartey.

The wind hissed, the skin of the river crinkled and the thrall women huddled, blowing into chapped, cupped hands, but none of that was as cold as the dead we rowed away from.

‘It seems,’ Kvasir agreed, grunting the words out between pulls, ‘that I brought back a treasure greater than my share of those dinar coins, which I plan to make into a necklace for her.’

‘She’s broody as an old hen. You will have to bairn that one and soon,’ agreed Finn, which left Kvasir silent and moody.

There was a flash behind my eyes of the fat limbs and round little belly, fish-white and so small it made Thorkel’s blood-smeared hand look massive. The bud-mouth and wide, outraged blue eyes crinkling in bawls in a red face while, somewhere off to the right and pinioned, the mother screamed.

Crowbone had glared at her with savage triumph, then looked back to Thorkel and nodded; Thorkel hurled the bairn against a stone and the bawling ended in a wet slap and the mother’s even louder screams. And I watched, doing nothing, saying less.

What had she done to Crowbone? He would not say, save that she was one of Randr Sterki’s women, so the bairn was his and hers. Most probably she had been less than kind to him – perhaps even the one who shaved him so cruelly. There was no point in trying to stop the shrieking, bloody mess he had fermented, so that the mother’s death soon after was almost a mercy.

Aye, he was a strange one, that boy. Afterwards, men could scarce look each other in the eye for what they had done, though they were no strangers to hard raiding and red war. Yet there had been something slimed about what he had driven them to do that left even these ashamed.

If it was not unmanly seidr he had unleashed, it was a close cousin and further proof of his powers came when we ran up to the river mouth, slashing through the ice-grue water, Gizur looking this way and that, cupping the sides of his eyes with his cold-split red hands, looking for the signs that would tell us where land lay in the mist.

Then the boy had stood up and pointed. ‘That way,’ he said.

There were chuckles and a few good-natured jibes at Gizur. Then Pai, the lookout, shouted out that there was smoke.

‘No,’ said the boy, certain as sunrise. ‘It is not smoke. Those are birds.’

So it was, a great wheeling mass of them. Terns, said the boy, before even sharp-eyed Pai could spot whether they were terns or gannet.

‘How do you know that?’ demanded Hauk Fast-Sailor.

‘You can hear them,’ said the boy. ‘They are calling each other to the feast, shouting with delight. Herring are there, too, if you want to fish.’

He was right – terns were diving and feeding furiously and it was easy to follow them to where Gizur picked up the marks for steering to the mouth of the Neva and into Lake Ladoga, where we turned south on the Volkhov river.

By that time, of course, the men were silent and grim around a boy who could hear birds and knew what they said and was called Crowbone. He reminded me of Sighvat and when I mentioned it, Finn and Kvasir agreed.

‘Perhaps he is Sighvat’s son,’ Finn offered and we fell silent, remembering our old oarmate and his talk of what birds and bees did. Remembering, too, him lying in the dusty street of a filthy Serkland village with the gaping red smile of his cut throat attracting the flies.

By the time the dark rushed us on our first day’s pull upriver to Aldeigjuborg, we were still too far away to risk going on, so headed to the bank. Cookfires were lit and the awning stretched on deck, so that we ate ashore and slept aboard.

Kvasir, Finn and I, sitting together as usual, talked about the boy and wondered. Kvasir said Thorgunna was good at finding things out and would listen while she and the boy talked.

All of us agreed, half-laughing at ourselves, that little Prince Olaf was a strange child. Finn half-joked that it was just as well we had kept to our bargain and left the thralls alive, for he looked like a dangerous child to cross.

I did not think it a laughing moment, for we had killed all the freeborn there, wives and weans – even the dogs – of Klerkon and his crew. That little nine-year-old boy had taken his revenge on everyone who had done him wrong, so that he was red-dyed to the elbows with his hate, even if others had done the slaughter.

Thorgunna bustled up not long after, looking for the same strange child and fretting about him being alone in the dark on an unknown shore, so we all had to turn out and look for him.

He turned up after an hour, sauntering out of the shadows so silently that Thorkel nearly burned his own hair off jumping with fright with a torch in his hand.

‘Where were you?’ demanded Thorgunna and those two-coloured eyes, both reddening in the torch glow, turned on her.

‘Listening to the owls talk about the hunting,’ he said.

‘Was it good for them?’ chuckled Finn and the boy shook his head, serious as a stone pillar.

‘Too cold,’ he said and walked to the fire, leaving us trailing in his wake, stunned and thoughtful.

‘Here,’ said Thorgunna sharply, thrusting something at him. ‘Play this and stay by the fire. It will keep you out of mischief.’

It was a tafl board and some polished stones for it in a bag. Men chuckled, but the boy took the wooden board politely enough and laid it beside him.

‘It is too dark to play,’ he said, ‘but I know a story about a tafl board, which I will tell.’

Men blinked and rubbed their beards. This was new – a boy of nine was going to tell all of us full-grown a story; Kvasir laughed out loud at the delight of it.

The boy cleared his throat and began, in a strong, clear, piping little voice. And all those hard axe men leaned forward to listen.

‘Once a man in a steading in Vestfold carved a beautiful tafl board for his son,’ the boy began. ‘He made it from oak, which is Thor wood. When he was finished he showed his son how to play games upon it. The boy was very glad to have such a beautiful thing and in the morning, when he went out with the sheep up to the tree-bare hills where they grazed, he took his tafl board along, for he could always get stones as counters for it.’

The boy paused and the men leaned forward further. He had them now, better than any skop. I marvelled at the seidr spell he wove round the fire, even as I was wary of it. How did he know this story? It was certain Klerkon never tucked him in at night with such tales and his foster-father had died when he was young. Maybe his mother had, before she turned her head to the wall.

‘Everywhere he went he carried his board under his arm,’ the boy went on. ‘Then, one day, he met some men from the next village up, making charcoal around a small fire. “Where in this country of yours can a man get wood?” the charcoal burners asked. “Why, here is wood,” the boy said. And he gave them the fine tafl board, which they put into the fire. As it went up in flames, the boy began to cry. “Do not make such fash,” the charcoal burners said, and they gave him a fine new seax in place of the game board.’

‘That was a good trade,’ growled Red Njal from out of the shadows. ‘A boy will get more use from a good seax than a tafl board. That and the forest is the best teacher for a boy, as my granny used to say.’

They shushed him and Olaf shifted to be more comfortable.

‘The boy took the knife and went away with his sheep,’ he went on. ‘As he wandered he came to a place where a man was digging a big stone out of his field, so that he could plough it. “The ground is hard,” the man said. “Lend me your seax to dig with.” The boy gave the man the seax, but the man dug so vigorously with it that it broke. “Ah, what has become of my knife?” the boy wailed. “Quiet yourself,” the man said. “Take this spear in its place.” And he gave the boy a beautiful spear, trimmed with silver and copper.’

A few chuckled, seeing where the story was going and others asked where a farmer who could not afford a decent shovel got a silver-trimmed spear – but they were quickly silenced by the others.

‘The boy went away with his sheep and his spear,’ little Olaf continued. ‘He met a party of hunters. When they saw him one of them said: “Lend me your spear, so that we may kill the deer we are trailing.” So the boy did.’

‘Piss poor hunters,’ muttered Kvasir, ‘without a spear between them.’

Thorgunna glared her worst glare at him.

‘Oho,’ chuckled Finn. ‘There’s a look to sink ships. This is why you should not take a wife out on the vik.’