The White Raven

Kvasir scowled. Olaf waited patiently, until they subsided, then cleared his throat again. In the dark, his one pale eye caught the fire and flashed like pearl.

‘The boy gave them the spear and the hunters went out and killed the deer. But in the hunt the shaft of the spear was splintered. “See what you’ve done with my spear!” the boy cried. “Don’t fuss about it,” the hunter said. “Here is a horse for you in place of your spear.”

‘The hunter gave him a horse with fine leather trappings and he started back toward the village. On the way he came to where some farmers were keeping crows off their rye, running at them and waving sheets. This made the horse frightened and it ran away.’

‘This sounds like the story of my life,’ growled Thorkel from across the fire and everyone laughed, for they had heard of his lack of luck.

Finn bellowed at them to shut up and listen. ‘For I want to hear this. This sheep-herding boy seems much like a trader I know.’

There were some chuckles at my expense, then the story went on.

‘The horse had gone for good,’ Olaf said. ‘But the farmers told the boy not to worry. They gave the boy an old wood axe and he took it and went on towards his home. He came to a woodcutter who said: “Lend me your large axe for this tree. Mine is too small.” So the boy did and the woodcutter chopped with it and broke it.’

‘He should have quit and gone home when he had the horse,’ shouted someone.

Olaf smiled. ‘Perhaps so, for the woodcutter gave him the limb of a tree, which he then had to load on his back and carry. When he came near the village a woman said: “Where did you find the wood? I need it for my fire.”

‘The boy gave it to her, and she put it in the fire. As it went up in flames he said: “Now where is my wood?” The woman looked around, then gave him a fine tafl board, which he took home with the sheep.

‘As he entered his house his mother smiled with satisfaction and said: “What is better than a tafl board to keep a small boy out of trouble?”’

The roars and leg-slapping went on a long time, especially when Olaf, with a courtly little bow, handed the tafl board and bag of counters back to Thorgunna, who took it, beaming with as much delight as if she was mother to this princeling.

Into the middle of this, his breath smoking with cold and reeking of porridge and fish as he leaned closer to my ear, Kvasir hissed: ‘That boy is not nine years old.’

I stepped off a strug, one of those blocky riverboats the Slavs love so much, on to the wooden wharf of Novgorod, which we call Holmgard. I had been here before, so it felt almost like a home.

We had taken the strug from Aldeigjuborg, since it had been a hard enough task to work the Elk along the river to that place, never mind to Novgorod. My lungs had burned in the cold with the effort and, for days afterwards, my shoulders felt as if someone had shoved a red-hot bar from one side to the other. I was, I admitted ruefully to myself, no longer used to pulling on an oar.

The weather did not help. Gizur, when the Elk had edged painfully into the mouth of the river on which Aldeigjuborg stood, heaved the slop bucket over the side and hauled it in. He looked briefly, then shoved it at me. Ice rolled.

‘I did not need that to tell me how cold it is,’ I said, blowing on my hands. He nodded and emptied the water, then set the bucket in its place with red-blue hands, already studded with sores. Everyone had them, split from the cold and the rowing. Noses were scarlet; breath smoked and the air was sharp enough to sting your throat.

‘Too early for such ice,’ Gizur growled. ‘By a month at least. The river is freezing and this close to the sea, too. The sea will freeze for a good way out this winter, mark me.’

That thought had floated with us all the way to the berth, bringing little cheer. No sooner had we lashed ourselves to the land than Finn and Kvasir, swathed in cloaks and wrapped to the ears in wadmal and hats, came up and nodded in the direction of another drakkar, snugged up to the bank and with it’s mast off, the sail tented up across the deck, which spoke of an over-wintering. Klerkon’s ship, Dragon Wings. Two men all wild hair and silver arm rings watchfully tended a box-brazier of charcoals on the mid-ballast stones.

‘Small crew only,’ Kvasir reported after a brief open-handed saunter in their direction. They had seen us and were guarded after events in Gunnarsgard, though it was not a sensible thing to start swinging swords in someone else’s realm. What would happen when they learned what we had done on Svartey was another matter entirely.

‘Klerkon has gone south to Konugard,’ he added, cocking his head in that bird way he had these days.

‘He will have taken his captives,’ Finn said, almost cheerfully. ‘They will sell better in that place.’

I scowled at him, while Kvasir said nothing. I knew why Finn was so joyous – he was out on the raid and expected to winter in Novgorod and then head off in the spring to find the mountain of silver he thought we had left alone too long.

I was hoping that it would be a long winter and that, at the end of it, Sviatoslav, Prince of the Rus, would renew his mad fight against the Great City and make it too dangerous to travel south of Konugard, which the locals called Kiev. I was hoping those events had trapped Lambisson with Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter.

I also knew I was Odin-cursed with this mountain of silver. It was like being in a thorn patch – the harder you struggled, the worse you were caught. Sooner or later, I was thinking day after day, I would have to go back to Atil’s howe and every time the thought came to me it was like swallowing a stone.

But first there was Thordis to get back and Eldgrim and Cod-Biter to rescue.

We stayed long enough in Aldeigjuborg to find that Lambisson, if he had been there at all, was long gone. We stayed a little longer, to stand by the Oathsworn Stone which Einar had raised to those we had lost getting this far on the original journey down to seek Atil’s treasure.

Six years since and now the survivors of that time stood round it, a mere handful and a half – Hauk, Gizur, Finn, Kvasir, Hlenni Brimill, Runolf Harelip, Red Njal and me. Thorkel stood with us, for he had known Pinleg and Skapti Halftroll and the others the stone remembered but he had not been with us at the time. Crippled Cod-Biter and the addled Short Eldgrim were two more and we remembered on their behalf.

‘Someone has been,’ Kvasir noted, nodding at the garland of withered oak leaves fluttering on the stone’s crown.

Not for a long time. Yet the names were there and, though the paint had faded, the grooves were etched deep on the stone and the story was there still. We made our prayers and small offerings and left.

Finn thought the garland might have been left by Pinleg’s woman, who had stayed in the town with her son and daughter. When we went to where they had been, those who had known them told us they had left for the south long since. I remembered, then, that Pinleg’s wife had been a Slav, his children half-Norse Rus.

Only the stone was left, where the wind traced the grooves of all their names.

The Elk stayed in Aldeigjuborg with everybody on it save me, Finn, Kvasir and Thorgunna – and Crowbone, who trembled and scowled and stared at Dragon Wings and the men he saw there. I did not want him starting trouble and hoped Gizur had enough men to keep the Elk safe, but it would be a dangerous time, even berthed as far from Dragon Wings as we could get and both sides leashed by what would happen if we started in to killing each other in Sviatoslav’s kingdom.

I had thought of taking the Elk down to Novgorod but was glad I had not as we were poled along the cold river, through the dripping fir and pine forests where people still struggled to work the hacked-out clearings using their strange little three-toothed ploughs. The Volkhov seemed even more swirling and treacherous with currents than I remembered from sailing it with Einar.

It seemed all marsh and fish to me this time, an ugly place when the trees were stripped to claws. Further south was where the good black steppe earth was, the stuff the Slavs call chernoziom and so rich you need plough it just the once and, after letting it fallow for a few years, harvest wheat a number of times without tillage.

‘Aye, poor land, this,’ decided Red Njal. ‘And what are they doing boiling water in those huge pans?’

‘Salt,’ grunted Kvasir. ‘There is water here from springs and it is salt as the sea.’

‘Not a bad trick at all,’ noted Ospak. ‘Selling people boiled sea water.’

It was his first visit and everything was new.

‘Just so,’ chuckled Finn. ‘So you see we are richer aboard the Elk even than Kvasir Spittle here, for we are always floating in the stuff.’

Everyone laughed, while Kvasir ignored them, punching careful holes in his share of the gold dinar coins, making his necklace for Thorgunna. For her part, she still sat fussing over Crowbone, who now had a tow fuzz under the healing scabs. It was also clear that we could hardly treat him as a thrall, no matter what he was, so I went to him as we climbed aboard the strug.

‘Prince you may be, or you may not,’ I said, while a knowing Thorgunna beamed, ‘but free you can be, for sure.’

I held out my hand. He blinked those marvellous eyes at me, then grinned and took my wrist in his own small grip.

Later, when we were sliding between the green banks, poled by chanting Krivichi rivermen, Kvasir came to me with what he and Thorgunna had coaxed from this little Prince.

‘He says,’ Kvasir told me, speaking low, ‘that he was with his mother and staying with his grandfather and his foster- father, whom he knew as Old Thorolf. He was hunted by men, that much he knows, for his mother warned him always of it. They were hiding in this place, which he cannot remember the name of, for he was three when they fled it, heading, he says, for Novgorod. He has an uncle here, or so his mother told him, but does not know his name. They were coming to this uncle when they ran out of luck.’

I thought on it, rolling it over and over like a new coin in my head while Kvasir looked at me, his one good eye dulled as a dying fish in the growing twilight.

‘Klerkon took him? Or bought him from someone else?’ Kvasir frowned, getting the story straight.

‘Took him. Killed the foster-father right off. The boy remembers him doing it, saying Thorolf was too old and pitching him into the sea to drown.’

‘The mother?’

Kvasir shrugged. ‘I think she died later. He knows more but either will not or cannot say more. Only that she died on Svartey.’

Probably under Klerkon, I thought moodily.

‘Anything else?’

Kvasir shrugged. ‘He knows the names of his mother, father and grandfather, but he will not say them. I think his mother made him swear it. Which is not a surprise if men are hunting you – a closed mouth keeps you hidden.’

There was something here half-buried. I felt like someone who finds a ring in the dirt and knows if he gives it a hard enough tug it will unearth the whole glorious oathing-sword whose hilt it is attached to.

We were silent again, then Kvasir shook his head, bemused.

‘We are in a saga here,’ he declared. ‘A hunted prince, captured by raiders. Sold to slavery and rescued by the Bear Slayer and the Oathsworn – if that boy doesn’t end up a great man, then I am no reader of the Norn’s weave.’

‘Read less of his Norn-weave and more of our own,’ I answered. ‘Let’s hope there is not a thread in it that winds his greatness round our doom.’

That thought occupied both of us all the way to where the strug tied up to the wharf at Novgorod. Then the Norns showed us what they had weaved so far and Odin’s laughter was louder still.

SIX

The great walled fortress of Novgorod, with its central keep – the Slavs call them kreml and detinets – was a formidable affair even in those early days, before it was rebuilt in stone. All sharpened wood and earthworks, it glowered above the town like a stern father.

Inside, it was then and is now, as snug as a turf-roofed Iceland hall, with fine hangings and sable furs and such – but it also has a stinking pit prison, all filth and sweating rock walls and meant for the likes of the ragged-arse Krivichi, Goliads and Slovenes, not decent Norse like us.

The druzhina guards didn’t see it that way at all when they pitched us in, jeering and pointing out that no-one climbed out who was not destined either to be nailed upside down or staked.

We were all there – me, Finn, Kvasir, Jon Asanes, Thorgunna, Thordis, two thrall women who gabbled in some strange tribe tongue and Olaf who, for all his defiant chin, was trembling, both at what might happen and at the fact he had killed his first man.

In the dark, chill and crushing as a tomb, our ragged breathing was all that told me anyone was there at all and yet it seemed to me that there were shapes, blacker shadows in the dark, shifting and moving. I felt them, as I had felt them the night of the fox-fires back in the stables in Hestreng; the restless dead, come to look and leach the last warmth of life from someone about to join them. Aye, and gloat, too, perhaps.

The day started well enough, when we had made our way over the great split-log walkways, greasy with soft mirr and age, to the Gotland quarter where the Norse trading houses sat. I was seeking Jon Asanes, known to us as The Goat Boy.

Eventually we found Tvorimir, into whose care we had handed The Goat Boy to be taught how to trade, deal with sharp men and read and write birch-bark accounts. Tvorimir, it was generally agreed, was the best for this, since he was nicknamed Soroka – Magpie – for his attraction to anything even vaguely sheened.

His house, of the better sort called an izba, was like a steading hall dropped into a town, arranged on three sides around a courtyard, with stables, storage for hay and grain and one of the bath houses they liked so much. Instead of a pitfire, it had a clay oven in one corner, which was a fine thing.

He looked less like a magpie than a fat fussing hen, a man built, as Kvasir noted, in a pile of circles, from the ones which made his fat legs, to the one that made his belly and the little red one framed with a puff of white hair that made his head.

After we had been hugged and backslapped, been given bread and salt and ale from the cellar, he puffed himself to a wooden bench near the big clay oven and shook his head at the mention of Jon Asanes.

‘Quick and clever that one,’ he told me. ‘Works well, too – when he can be fastened to it. Has taken to writing, but not for accounts.’

He paused, shut one eye and laid a finger along his nose. ‘Love verse,’ he said and laughed, an alarming effect of wheeze and wobble. He rolled his eyes heavenward and intoned: ‘What fire in my heart and my body and my soul for you and your body and your person, let it set fire to your heart and your body and your soul for me and for my body and for my person.’

‘Tyr’s bones,’ breathed Finn, half admiring, half disgusted.

‘We have arrived just in time, it seems,’ Kvasir declared.

‘You should write such for me,’ declared Thorgunna, nudging Kvasir, who looked shocked at the very idea, then grinned.

‘Happily, I am unable to read or write, save a bit of rune here and there. And now that I am down to one eye, I will not risk straining it on such.’

‘Then whisper me such things instead,’ countered Thorgunna, while Tvorimir closed one eye reflectively and said nothing. He was well-travelled was Magpie, but he was more Slav than Swede and, like all of them, knew women had their place. As all Slavs will tell you, a chicken is not a bird, as a woman is not a person – but they do not say it around a prow-built woman from the vik.

‘Where is Jon Asanes?’ I asked and Tvorimir arranged his blackened teeth into a smile.

‘At the Yuriev Monastery,’ he declared and did his wobble and wheeze laugh again at our faces.

‘It used to be a salt-maker’s yard,’ he added, ‘until some Bulgar monks arrived from a place called Ohrid with their White Christ and Greek ways. The young Prince Vladimir is interested in such things. It is useful, for they owe me and I can get the boy taught to write Latin and Greek.’

It made good sense, for Jon Asanes was a Christ-follower from the island of Cyprus, where his mother still lived – if she still lived – and of the Greek style, too. He had done us a service on Cyprus and we had brought him away with us but, for all we had become his family, the gods of Asgard had made no headway in him.

‘He spends all his time with the Greeks there – priests and lay brothers, mainly, as well as merchants from the Great City,’ Tvorimir continued. ‘He learns a deal, but it has to be said that he prefers their ways to ours. He is pestering me to send him to the Great City, which he insists on calling Constantinople and tells me I am a barbarian for saying it is Miklagard, or even just the Great City.’

‘Ach – young Pai is just the same,’ Thorgunna offered. ‘Young men coming to manhood are always fretting with opinions on this and that.’

Which was true enough and seemed an end of the matter. I should have paid it more attention, but had more to think about, so we sat and talked, of Jon’s health – good, considering he was olive-skinned and practically a Serklander, none of whom cared for the ice and snow – and trade and Sviatoslav’s mad war with the Great City that made it impossible.

Tvorimir asked if we wanted to use his bath house, at which Kvasir choked on his ale and Finn gave the Slav merchant a look to strip the gilding off his house’s fancy carvings. We were good Norsemen and, unlike the filth of the Franks and Saxlanders and Livs and Ests, were not against washing most weeks – though, in winter, you tend to be sensible about such things.

Rus bathing was another matter altogether. I have seen these people at their baths, which they heat fiercely, then go into naked and pour some sort of oil over themselves, then beat themselves with young twigs until they stagger out, half dead.

After that, they pour cold water over themselves. They do this every day, without being forced, in order to bathe and not as any strange personal torment. Even the Greek-Romans of the Great City are not as vicious at getting clean.

Instead, we idled round the clay oven, picking salt out of the elegantly-carved little throne of a salt holder, sprinkling it on good bread and drinking. We talked of people we knew and what fish were plentiful in the Ilmen and, because it led to it from there, argued about how many rivers flowed into that lake – fifty-two, we counted in the end, though only one, the Volkhov, flowed out and down to Kiev.

It was pleasant talk and easily turned to the trade in slaves and who was doing it and whether they had any new ones.

Frowning, Tvorimir said: ‘Late in the year for it. The Ilmen is freezing early and soon you will not get a boat out the mouth of the Volkhov south. If your slaves are from the north, you will be looking to go south. The only dealer still in Novgorod who is still planning to go south is Takoub.’

Finn grunted and we all shifted a little. Takoub we knew well, because he was the one who had bought our oarmates as slaves some years before, when we had thought them snugged up in Novgorod while Einar led the rest of us in search of Atil’s secret tomb and the silver in it.

We had annoyed Sviatoslav doing it and he had seized our men and sold them to Takoub, who had sold them to an emir in Serkland. Those of us left after Einar had died had the unpleasant task of going after them, among other matters and it had been on that journey we had found the Goat Boy.

We were still in the memory of it when the lad himself arrived, blasting in the cold air and a smile that warmed us all. He glowed and beamed and was wrapped in bearhugs by Kvasir and buried in Finn’s beard, both at the same time, until all three broke apart, faces twisted.

‘Fauugh, you stink.’

‘Is that perfume, boy?’

They looked at each other and all of us burst out laughing. Of course Jon Asanes would be clean, washed and perfumed, for he was Greek and had been three years away from the honest sweaty wool and fish smell of us from the north. So far away it wrinkled his nose now, even as Finn wrinkled his nose at the sweet-smelling boy.

All the same, we clasped forearms as old friends and I felt the leap of my heart at that – him, too, I fancied, from the look in his eyes. He had grown from the skinny boy with only a dozen years on him and his tangled black curls were combed and oiled and fell to the shoulders of the white shirt he wore over sea-green breeks.

‘Is that a beard?’ demanded Finn and Jon Asanes, laughing and blushing, batted the gnarled and filthy hand which was trying to feel his chin. Little Olaf watched it all with interest, saying nothing.

‘Either you flew,’ Jon said, looping a leg over a bench as if it were a horse and pouring ale, ‘or my message to you is still sailing.’

‘What message?’ grunted Kvasir, then was nudged by Thorgunna into making introductions. Jon Asanes had been told of Kvasir’s marriage, but this was his first meeting with Thorgunna and everyone could see she was dazzled by him. It was hard not to be for, with a youth’s summers on him, The Goat Boy now had a breadth of chest and a slender waist and a bright and even smile that was always echoed in his dark eyes.

Then Olaf stepped up, having to look up to Jon Asanes, who now had some height on him, too. Jon was, I realized as I watched him and Olaf study each other, about the same age now as I was when we had met on Cyprus and called him Goat Boy. Yet, with less than a handful of years between us, I felt old enough to be the Goat Boy’s grandfather.

‘You smell nice,’ said Olaf. ‘Not like a man, though. Like a flower.’

Jon Asanes astounded me and showed how much he had learned about dealing with traders, for he didn’t bristle at this, as I expected from someone of his age. Instead, he grinned.

‘You smell like fish dung,’ he countered. ‘And your eyes cannot make up their minds on colour.’

They stared for a moment longer, then Olaf laughed with genuine delight and you could see the pair of them were friends already.

‘The message?’ I asked and Jon Asanes smiled a last smile at little Olaf and turned to me, a storm gathering on his brow.

‘I sent it awhiles since, by a Gotland trader,’ he said and looked sideways at me. ‘An old friend is arrived,’ he added. ‘He is staying with Christ-followers in the German quarter. I say friend, but I doubt if it is true.’

He paused and looked at me, then the others.

‘I did not tell Tvorimir,’ he added, ‘since it was a matter best kept between few, I was thinking.’

I felt the chill then and it was nothing to do with draughts from the door. Magpie caught my eye and slapped a grin on his red face.

‘I will go if you like,’ he said, but I shook my head; I trusted Tvorimir – well, as much as I trusted any trader – and, besides, we had few friends in this part of the world. Instead, I turned to Jon Asanes and asked, though I already knew the answer.

‘Who?’

‘Martin, the monk, with news for you, he says.’

‘Odin’s eye,’ growled Finn. ‘That name again, like a strange turd in your privy. I thought he had died.’

‘Not yet,’ Jon answered with a grin, ‘though he looks much like a corpse.’

‘I had thought to have seen the last of him in Serkland,’ Kvasir admitted. Thorgunna, who had heard some of this, kept quiet and Magpie, who was bemused by all of it, looked from one to the other, demanding explanations.

‘What does he want?’ I asked and, again, I already knew the answer – his holy spear, which I had in my sea chest, wrapped in sealskin. Jon Asanes confirmed it.