The Prow Beast

I did not answer that; young Crowbone had developed a hunger for silver, ever since he had worked out that that was where ships and men came from. He needed ships and men to make himself king in Norway and I did not want him snuffling after any moonlit burials of mine – he had had his share of Atil’s silver. That hoard had been hard come by and I was still not sure that it was not cursed.

I offered horn-toasts to the memory of dead Sigurd, Crowbone’s silver-nosed uncle, who had been the nearest to a father the boy had had and who had been Vladimir’s druzhina commander. Crowbone joined in, perched on the high-backed guest bench beside me, his legs too short to rest his feet like a grown man on the tall hearthstones that kept drunk and child from tumbling in the pitfire.

His men, too, appreciated the Sigurd toasts and roared it out. They were horse-eating men of Thor and Frey, big men, calloused and muscled like bull walruses from sword work and rowing, with big beards and loud voices, spilling ale down their chests and boasting. I saw Finn’s nostrils flare, drinking in the salt-sea reek of them, the taste of war and wave that flowed from them like heat.

Some of them wore silk tunics and baggier breeks than others, carried curved swords rather than straight, but that was just Gardariki fashion and, apart from Alyosha, they were not the half-breed Slavs who call themselves Rus – rowers. These were all true Swedes, young oar-wolves who had crewed with Crowbone up and down the Baltic and would follow the boy into Hel’s hall itself if he went – and Alyosha was at his side to make the sensible decisions.

Crowbone saw me look them over and was pleased at what he saw in my face.

‘Aye, they are hard men, right enough,’ he chuckled and I shrugged as diffidently as I could, waiting for him to tell me why he and his hard men were here. All that had gone before – politeness and feasting and smiles – had been leading to this place.

‘It is good of you to remember my uncle,’ he said after a time of working at his boots. The hall rang with noise and the smoke-sweat fug was thicker than the bench planks. Small bones flew; roars and laughter went up when one hit a target.

He paused for effect and stroked his ringed braids, wanting moustaches so badly I almost laughed.

‘He is the reason I am here,’ he said, raising his voice to be heard. It piped, still, like a boy’s, but I did not smile; I had long since learned that Crowbone was not the boy he seemed.

When I said nothing, he waved an impatient little hand.

‘Randr Sterki sailed this way.’

I sat back at that news and the memories came welling up like reek in a blocked privy. Randr the Strong had been the right-hand of Klerkon and had taken over most of that one’s crew after Klerkon died; he had sailed their ship, Dragon Wings, to an island off Aldeijuborg.

Klerkon. There was a harsh memory right enough. He had raided us and lived only long enough to be sorry for it, for we had wolfed down on his winter-camp on Svartey, the Black Island, finding only his thralls and the wives and weans of his crew – and Crowbone, chained to the privy.

Well, things were done on Svartey that were usual enough for red-war raids, but men too long leashed and then let loose, goaded on by a vengeful Crowbone, had guddled in blood and thrown bairns at walls. Later, Crowbone found and killed Klerkon – but that is another tale, for nights with a good fire against the saga chill of it.

Randr Sterki had a free raiding hand while matters were resolved with Prince Vladimir over the Klerkon killing, but when all that was done, Vladimir sent Sigurd Axebitten, Crowbone’s no-nose uncle and commander of his druzhina, to give Randr a hard dunt for his pains.

Except Sigurd had made a mess of it, or so I heard, and Crowbone had grimly followed after to find Randr Sterki and his men gone and his uncle nailed to an oak tree as a sacrifice to Perun. His famous silver nose was missing; folk said Randr wore it on a leather thong round his neck. Crowbone had been wolf-sniffing after his uncle’s killer since, with no success.

‘What trail did he leave, that brings you this way?’ I asked, for I knew the burn for revenge was fierce in him. I knew that fire well, for the same one scorched Randr Sterki for what we had done to his kin in Klerkon’s hall at Svartey; even for a time of red war, what we had done there made me uneasy.

Crowbone finished with his boots and put them on.

‘Birds told me,’ he answered finally and I did not doubt it; little Olaf Tryggvasson was known as Crowbone because he read the Norns’ weave through the actions of birds.

‘He will come here for three reasons,’ he went on, growing more shrill as he raised his voice over the noise in the hall. ‘You are known for your wealth and you are known for your fame.’

‘And the third?’

He merely looked at me and it was enough; the memory of Klerkon’s steading on Svartey, of fire and blood and madness, floated up in me like sick in a bucket.

There it was, the cursed memory, hung out like a flayed skin. Fame will always come back and hag-ride you to the grave; my own by-name, Bear Slayer, was proof of that, since I had not slain the white bear myself, though no-one alive knew that but me. Still, the saga of it – and all the others that boasted of what the Oathsworn were supposed to have done – constantly brought men looking to join us or challenge us.

Now came Randr Sterki, for his own special reasons. The Oathsworn’s fame made me easy to find and, with only a few fighting men, I was a better mark to take on than a boatload of hard Rus under the protection of the Prince of Novgorod.

‘Randr Sterki is not a name that brings warriors,’ Crowbone went on. ‘But yours is and any man who deals you a death blow steals your wealth, your women and your fame in that stroke.’

It was said in his loud and shrill boy’s voice – almost a shriek – and it was strange, looking back on it, that the hall noise should have ebbed away just then. Heads turned; silence fell like a cloak of ash.

‘I am not easily felled,’ I pointed out and did not have to raise my voice to be heard. Some chuckled; one drunk cheered. Red Njal added: ‘Even by bears,’ and got laughter for it.

Then the hall was washed with murmurs and subdued whispers; feasting flowed back to it, slow as pouring honey.

‘Did you come all this way to warn me?’ I asked as the noise grew again and he flushed, for I had worked out that he had not been so driven just for that.

‘I would have your Sea-Finn’s drum,’ he answered. ‘If it speaks of victory – will you join the hunt for Randr Sterki?’

Vuokko the Sea-Finn had come to us only months since, seeking the runemaster Klepp Spaki, who was chipping out the stone of our lives in the north valley. Vuokko came all the way from his Sami forests to learn the true secret of our runes from Klepp and no-one was more surprised than I when the runemaster agreed to it.

Of course, in return, Klepp had Vuokko teach him his seidr-magic, which was such that the little Sea-Finn was already well-known. Since seidr was a strange and unmanly thing, there were whispers of what the pair of them did all alone up in a hut in the valley – but muted ones, for Klepp was a runemaster and so a man of some note.

Vuokko, of course, was an outlander Sami sorcerer and not to be trusted at all, but it seemed folk were coming over the sea to hear the beat of his rune-marked drum and watch the three gold frogs on it dance, revealing Odin’s wisdom to those brave – or daft – enough to want to know it.

I saw Thorgunna, serving ale to Finn, Onund Hnufa and Red Njal, three heads close together and bobbing with argument and laughter. She smiled and the warmth of that scene, of my woman and my friends, washed me; then she gently touched her belly and moved on and the leap of that in my heart almost brought me to my feet.

‘Will you hunt down Randr, Sigurd’s bane, with me?’

The voice was thin with impatience, jerking me back from the warmth of wife and unborn. I turned to him and sighed, so that he saw it and frowned.

The truth was I had no belly for it. We had gained fame and wealth at a cost – too high, I often thought these days – and now the idea of sluicing sea and hard bread and stiff joints on a trip even across to Aldeijuborg made me wince. Even that was a hare-leap of joy compared to sailing off with this man-boy to hunt round the whole Baltic for the likes of Randr Sterki.

I said as much. I did not add that I thought Randr Sterki had a right to feel vengeful and that Crowbone had played a part in fuelling the fire on Svartey.

I heard the air hiss from him and there was petulance as much as disappointment in that, for young Crowbone did not like to be crossed.

‘There is fame and the taste of victory,’ he argued, pouting into my twist of a smile.

I already had fame, while victory, when all is said and done, tastes as blood-foul as failure – which was the other side of the spinning coin in this matter. He scowled at that, his eyes reflecting me to myself – what I saw there was old and done, but it was the view from a boy of twelve and almost made me chuckle. Then Crowbone found himself and smiled blandly; more signs of the princely things learned from Vladimir, I saw.

‘I will have the drum-frogs leap for me, all the same,’ he said and I nodded.

As if he had heard, Vuokko came into the hall, so silently that one of the younger thrall girls, too fondled by these new and muscled warriors to notice, gave a scream as the Sea-Finn appeared next to her.

Men laughed, though uneasily, for Vuokko had a face like a mid-winter mummer’s mask left too long in the rain, which the wind-guttered sconces did not treat kindly. The high cheekbones flared the light, making the shadows there darker still, while the eyes, slits of blackness, had no pupils that I could see and the skin of his face was soft and lined as an old walrus.

He grinned his pointed-toothed smile and sidled in, all fur and leather and bits of stolen Norse weave, hung about with feathers and bone both round his neck and wound into the straggles of his iron-grey hair.

In one hand was the drum of white reindeer skin marked with runes and signs only he knew, festooned with claws and little skulls and tufts of wool; on the surface, three frogs skittered, fastened to a ring that went round the whole circle of it. In his other hand was a tiny wooden hammer.

Men made warding signs and muttered darkly, but Crowbone smiled, for he knew the seidr, unmanly work of Freyja though that magic was, and a Sea-Finn’s drum held no terrors for a boy who saw into the Other by the actions of birds. I wondered if he still had some more of the strange stories he had chilled us all with last year.

‘This grandson of Yngling kings,’ I said pointedly to the Finn, ‘wants a message from your drum on an enterprise he has.’

The Sea-Finn grinned his bear-trap grin, as if he had known all along. He produced a carved runestick from his belt and then drew a large square in the hard, beaten earth of the floor – folk sidled away from him as he came near.

Then he marked off two points on all the sides and scraped lines to join them; now he had nine squares and folk shivered as if the fire had died. In the middle square, the square within a square, he folded into a cross-legged sit and cradled the drum like a child, crooning to it.

He rocked and chanted, a deep hoom in the back of his throat that raised hackles, for most knew he was calling on Lemminki, a Finnish sorcerer-god who could sing the sand into pearls for those brave enough to call on him. The square within a square was supposed to keep Vuokko safe – but folk darted uneasy looks at the flickering shadows and moved even further away from him.

Finally, he hit the drum – once only – a deep and resonating bell of sound coming from such a small thing; men winced and shifted and made Hammer signs and I saw Finn join his hands in the diamond-shape of the ingwaz warding rune as the gold frogs danced. No man cared for seidr magic, for it was a woman’s thing and to see a man do it set flesh creeping.

Vuokko peered for a long time, then raised his horror of a face to Crowbone. ‘You will be king,’ he said simply and there was a hiss as men let out their breath all at once together, for that had not been the enterprise I had meant.

Crowbone merely smiled the smile of a man who had had the answer he expected and fished in his purse, drawing out his pilfered coin. He flicked it casually in the air towards Vuokko, who never took his eyes from Crowbone’s face, ignoring the silver whirl of it.

I was astounded by the boy’s arrogance and his disregard – you did not treat the likes of Vuokko like some fawning street-seer, nor did you break the safety of his square within a square while he was in the Sitting-Out, half in and half out of the Other, surrounded by a swirl of dangerous strangeness.

Crowbone had half-turned away in his proud, unthinking fashion when the scorned miliaresion bounced on the drum, the tinkle of its final landing lost in the thunder it made. He turned, surprised.

‘What was that sound, Sea-Finn?’ he demanded and Vuokko smiled like a wolf closing in.

‘That was the sound of your enterprise, lord,’ he replied after a study of the frogs, ‘falling from your hand.’

After that, the feasting was a sullen affair coloured by Crowbone’s morose puzzlement, for now he did not know what the Sea-Finn had promised. Most of his followers only recalled the bit about him becoming king in Norway, so they were cheered.

I stood with Crowbone on the sand and dulse two days later, while his men hefted their sea-chests back on the splendid Short Serpent and got ready to sail off.

He was wrapped in his familiar white fur and a matching stare, waiting to see if terns or crows came in ones or twos, or went left or right. Only he knew what it meant.

‘All the same,’ he said finally, clasping my wrist and staring up into my gaze with his odd eyes, ‘you would do well to join me. Randr Sterki will come for you. I hear he is sworn to Styrbjorn.’

That was no surprise; Styrbjorn was the brawling nephew of my king, Eirik Segersall. Now just come into manhood, he had designs on the high seat himself when Eirik was dead and sulked when it became clear no-one else liked the idea.

Foolishly, King Eirik had given him ships and men to go off and make a life for himself and Styrbjorn now prowled up and down off Wendland on the far Baltic shore, snarling and making his intentions known regarding what he considered his birthright. Someday soon, I was thinking, he would need a good slap, but he was only a boy. I almost said so to Crowbone, then clenched my teeth on it and smiled instead.

I saw Alyosha hovering, a mailed and helmeted wet-nurse anxious to see his charge safely back on the boat. I widened my smile indulgently at Crowbone; I was arrogant then, believing Oathsworn fame and Odin’s favour shield enough against such as Randr Sterki and having no worries about Styrbjorn, a youth with barely seventeen summers on him. I should have known better; I should have remembered myself at his age.

‘Have you a tale on all this?’ I asked lightly, reminding Crowbone of the biting stories he had told us, a boy holding grown freemen in thrall out on the cold empty.

‘I have tales left,’ he answered seriously. ‘But the one I have is for later. I know birds, all the same, and they know much.’

He saw the confusion in my face and turned away, trotting towards the ship.

‘An eagle told me of troubles to come,’ he flung back over his shoulder. ‘A threat to its young, on the flight’s edge.’

The chill of that stayed with me as I watched Short Serpent slither off down the fjord and even the closeness of Thorgunna under my arm could not warm it, for I was aware of what she carried in her belly and of what her sister cradled in her arms.

Young eagles on the flight’s edge.

TWO

The sun clawed itself higher every day; snow melted patch by patch, streams gurgled and I started to talk earnestly about joint efforts to harvest the sea, of ploughing and seeding cropland and how Finn could borrow my brace of oxen if he liked.

He looked at me as if I was a talking calf, then went back to drinking and hunting with Red Njal, while Onund Hnufa and Gizur went to make the Fjord Elk ready for sea and Hlenni Brimill and others fetched wood for new shields and pestered Ref to leave off tinsmithing nails against rust to put a new edge on worn blades.

After the feasting night for Crowbone, Finn had come to me and asked if the Oathsworn were going raiding after Randr Sterki, though he knew the answer before I spoke. When I confirmed it, he nodded, long, slow and thoughtful.

‘I am thinking,’ he said softly, as if the words were being dragged from him by oxen, ‘that I might have to visit Ospak and Finnlaith in Dyfflin, or perhaps go to find Fiskr in Hedeby.’

The idea of not having Finn there made me swallow and he saw my stricken face. His own was a hammer that nailed his next words into me, even though he said them with a lopsided grin.

‘It is either that or challenge for the jarl’s seat.’

Well, there it was, the fracture cracked open and visible. I bowed my head to it; the curse of Odin’s silver right enough.

‘I will stay for one more season and, if the raiding is good, it may change my mind. If not, I am thinking it best to leave, Orm.’

This would be the third season and, I was thinking, a remarkable feat of patience for the likes of Finn. Yet I was no more certain that this raiding season, which involved a long, uncomfortable voyage up and down the Baltic and sometimes into the mouths of a few rivers, pretending to trade and looking for something to steal, would be any better than the last two. There was seldom anything worthwhile for the Oathsworn, who were choking on all they already had. Yet they trained daily, making shieldwalls and breaking them, fighting in ones and threes, showing off and honing their battle skills. The lure of the prow beast, as the skalds had it, still dragged us all back to the dark water.

Now Finn wanted more jarl-work from me and threatened either to leave or take over. I could only nod, for words were ash in my mouth. After that, the promise of summer sunshine was ominous.

The women bustled the grime and stink out of Hestreng’s buildings and took clear joy in drying washing in the open air; Cormac and Helga Hiti tumbled about on sturdy legs, shouting and playing.

Into this, just after the blot offerings for the Feast of Vali, a ship slid up the fjord to us. I knew about it two hours before it arrived, which pleased me – I had set two thralls to watch in shifts and suffered Thorgunna’s waspishness over it.

‘A waste of work,’ she declared, while she and Ingrid and two female thralls hurled sleeping pallets out. ‘They could be beating the vermin out of these.’

‘I would rather know who is coming to me,’ I answered, ‘than have dust-free sleeping skins.’

‘Tell me that when next your backside is chewed by a flea,’ she spat back, blowing a wisp of hair which had fought free of her head-cloth down onto her nose. ‘And if I am doing this, I am not making butter – you will feel differently when you have to choke on dry bread.’

From this, I knew she was happy that winter was over and that she had life in her – life I would rather see grow than be burned out if Randr Sterki arrived and we did not know of it. I said as much and had her snort back at me but when word came of this ship, I saw her stiffen and turn and start chivvying thralls and Ingrid to fetch the children, gathering them to her like a hen with chicks.

I let her for a while, though I knew it was no threat; the sail was large and plainly marked with Jarl Brand’s sign and unless someone had taken Black Eagle from him intact – as unlikely as wings on a fish – then it was himself coming up the fjord.

He came up showing off, too, the sail flaked down and the oars bending as his men made Black Eagle cream through the sea. Then, at a single command we all heard as we stood watching on the shore, the oars were lifted clear and taken in until only a quarter of their length was left.

Along this sprang a figure, dancing and bouncing from stem to stern; we all cheered, knowing it was probably his prow man Nes-Bjorn, called Klak – Peg – because he was shaped like one, having oar-muscled shoulders, but skinny hips and legs. He could walk the oars with those skinny legs, all the same, swinging from one side to the other on a loose line.

The crew were equally skilled and slid the thirty-oar drakkar neatly to the stone slipway, where the Fjord Elk was propped up, with scarcely a dunt on its gilded side. Men spilled ashore then, shouting greetings to those who went to meet them. Thorgunna sighed, scattered the children and roared for thralls; there were sixty new mouths to feed and precious little left in the stores.

She stopped scowling, all the same, when she found what Jarl Brand had brought. He came off smiling, as usual, bone-white as he had always been, wearing a gold-embroidered black tunic trimmed with marten, fine wool breeks that flared over kidskin boots and his neck and arms heavy with amber and silver.

At his side trotted a boy as white as Brand was and people stared for he was Cormac’s double, only older, at least five; Aoife kept her head meekly down and said nothing. On Jarl Brand’s other side was a strange little man dressed in a black serk to his toes, young, moon-faced and glum.

‘My son,’ Brand declared gruffly, indicating the sombre, white-haired boy. ‘I bring him to you to foster.’

That took my breath away and I was still struggling to suck more in when he indicated the moon-face on his other side.

‘This is one called Leo,’ he said. ‘A Greek monk of sorts, from the Great City.’

I shot Jarl Brand a look and he chuckled at it, shaking his head so that his moustaches trembled like melting icicles.

‘No, I am not turned to the White Christ,’ he replied. ‘This Greek is sent by the Emperor to take greetings to our king. I picked him up in Jumne.’

‘Like a sack of grain,’ agreed the man with a slight smile. ‘I have been stacked and shipped ever since.’

It took me a moment to realise he had spoken Greek and that Jarl Brand had been talking Norse, which meant this Leo knew Norse and also that both Jarl Brand and I understood Greek. Jarl Brand chuckled as I brought Thorgunna, introduced her and had her take Leo into the hall.

‘Watch him,’ Brand said, tight into my ear as the monk reeled away from us, his legs still on the sea. ‘He is more than a monkish scribbler, which he does all the time. He is clever and watches constantly and knows more than he reveals.’

I agreed, but was distracted by what was now unloading from Black Eagle – two women, one young and fat with child, the other older, almost as fat and fussing round her like a gull round a chick.

Jarl Brand caught my stare and grunted, the sound of a man too weighted to speak.

‘Sigrith,’ he said, pulling me away by the elbow. ‘Fresh returned from visiting her father, Mieczyslaw, King of the Polans, and near her dropping time – which is why we are here. King Eirik wants his son born in Uppsalla.’

I blinked and gawped, despite myself. This was Sigrith, splendid as a gilded dragon-head, no more than eighteen and a queen, yet young and bright-eyed and heavy with her first bairn; she was just a frightened child of a Slav tribe from the middle of nowhere.

‘The fat one is Jasna, who was her nurse when she lived with her people,’ Jarl Brand went on, miserably. ‘I am charged with bringing them to the king, together with whatever the queen unloads, safe and well.’

‘That’s a cargo I could do without,’ I answered without thinking, then caught his jaundiced eye. We both smiled, though it was grim – then I noticed the girl at the back. I had taken her for a thrall, in her shapeless, colourless dress, kerchief over what I took to be a shaved head, but she walked like she had gold between her legs. Thin and small, with a face too big for her and eyes dark and liquid as the black fjord.