The Prow Beast

‘Just so,’ panted Red Njal, struggling with Onund’s bonds. ‘Help me here instead of gloating or we will all feel the lick of that heat – pray to the gods if you must, but carry a keen blade, as my granny used to say.’

I gave Red Njal the seax and hefted the familiar weight of my sword as I opened the door cautiously, expecting at least one guard outside. There was nothing – then a bulk moved, darker than the shadows; fear griped my belly and I had to fight not to run. I smelled him then, all sweat and leather and foul breath and I knew that stink well.

Finn.

‘You took so long I came to find you,’ he rasped hoarsely, gleaming teeth and eyes in the dark. ‘I saw folk leaving and thought to chance matters. What did you find?’

I said nothing, but heard him grunt when he saw Hlenni and Red Njal, Onund half-carried, half-dragged between them.

‘This way,’ he said, as if leading them to clean beds in a dry room and we shadowed into the night, from dark to dark like owls on a hunt, every muscle screaming at the expected bite of steel, every nerve waiting for the shout of discovery.

Somewhere out on the pasture, where the hall was a dim-lit bulk in the distant dark, we stopped, while I put my boots back on. We headed towards the north valley, prowling and fox-silent.

All the time, circling like wolves in my head, was what had passed between Randr Sterki and Ljot – and, when those wolves put their muzzles on weary paws, the old dead rose in their place, leering and mocking me.

FOUR

It rained, a fine mirr that blotted out the stars, so that we fumbled along, panting like dogs and stumbling. I led the way, hoping more than knowing, into the wet dark where trolls leered and alfar flickered at the edge of vision.

A darker shape against the black; I froze. Finn stumbled into the back of me, almost knocking me over and rain dripped off our noses as we stuck them close to each other to hiss in whispers.

‘What is it?’ he hoarsed out and, even as he asked, I knew.

‘The stone. Our stone…’

Slick and rain-gleamed, the great stone, half-carved with Klepp’s handiwork, half-painted by Vuokko the Sea-Finn, was as large as our relief and we hugged it close, delighting in the wet-rock smell of it, for it meant we were at the entrance to the valley.

Nearby was a hut, once the home of the horse-herder thralls, now Klepp’s hov until it grew too cold to work stone. Dark as a cave, of course, because he would be gone, with Vuokko and Thorgunna and Thordis and all the others, heading further up the valley to the foothills of the mountains.

‘Ruts,’ said Finn suddenly, catching my sleeve and guiding my hand to the wet ground. The scar and the smell of new-turned soil gave truth to it; ruts, where a cart had passed, maybe more than one.

‘At least they are safe,’ I muttered and we moved after the struggling figures carrying Onund into the shelter of the dark hut.

It was a rough affair, for use in the summer only and made of low split-log walls and roof-turfs and daub. Inside was the smell of leather and iron and oil, the cold-tomb smell of stone dust and the harsh throat-lick of paints.

‘How is Onund?’ I asked of the shadows grunting him down, panting with the effort.

‘Heavy,’ growled Hlenni Brimill sourly.

‘Babbling,’ added Red Njal and I moved closer to the wheezing bulk of Onund, wishing I had light to see how badly he was hurt.

‘Bairn,’ he bubbled through his broken nose. ‘Bairn.’

‘He’s been saying that since we cut him down,’ muttered Red Njal, wiping his own streaming face. Botolf stumbled over something and cursed.

‘Hist, man!’ Finn spat hoarsely. ‘Why don’t you bang on a shield, mouse-brain?’

‘I was looking for a horn lantern,’ came the sullen reply. ‘Some light would be good.’

‘Aye – set fire to the hut, why not?’ Finn cursed. ‘Why have our trackers fumbling in the cold and wet and dark when we can lead them right to us?’

Botolf rubbed his shin sullenly. ‘Why is it always the real leg that gets hit?’ he demanded. ‘Why not the gods-cursed wooden one…?’

I wanted quiet and hissed it out, for there were sounds outside I did not like; movement, someone blowing snot and rain off their nose, the suck of hooves lifting from muddy ground.

Finn’s eyes gleamed and he slid away from me, out into the night; we crouched in the hut, waiting and listening.

Three, I worked out. Maybe four. And a horse, though not ridden.

‘A hut,’ said a voice. ‘At least we can get dry.’

‘Perhaps a fire…butcher the horse and have a decent meal, at least,’ said another.

‘Oh aye – tell them all where we are, eh, Bergr?’ rumbled a third. ‘Before you go in that hut, Hamund, I would scout round and make sure we are alone.’

‘Of course we are alone,’ spat the one called Hamund. ‘By the Hammer, Bruse, you are an old woman. And if we are not to eat this spavined nag, why did we bring it, eh?’

‘We will eat it in good time,’ Bruse answered. They were all hunkered down in the lee of the hut, no more than an arm’s length and the width of a split-log wall between us.

‘I will be pleased when Randr Sterki is done with this,’ muttered Bergr. ‘All I want is my share, enough for a farm somewhere. With cows. I like the taste of fresh milk.’

‘Farm,’ snorted Hamund. ‘Why buy work? A good over-winter in a warm hall with a fat-arsed thrall girl and a new raid next year, that will do for me.’

‘I thought you were scouting?’ Bruse grunted and Hamund hawked in his throat.

‘For what? They are far from here. Everyone is far from here. Only the rain is here – and us. Who are these runaways anyway? A hump-back more dead than alive, I heard, and a couple of survivors from a battle we won, no more. Hiding and running, if they have any sense. The rest of them will be half-way over the mountains and gone by now. We should take what loot we can and leave.’

‘Go and scout – one of them is Finn Horsehead,’ Bruse answered, straightening with a grunt. There was a pause, then the sound of splashing and a satisfied sigh as he pissed against the log wall.

‘Finn Horsehead?’ muttered Bergr. ‘Of the Oathsworn? They say he fears nothing at all.’

‘I can change that,’ sneered Hamund.

‘Pray to Odin you never meet him,’ Bruse said, adjusting his stance and spurting in little grunts, his voice rising and fading – talking over his shoulder, I was thinking. ‘I raided with him, so I know. I saw him rise up and walk – walk, mark you – towards a shieldwall on his own and before he got there it had split and run.’

‘I know,’ said the voice and I knew, as I knew my own hands, that it was right in Bruse’s ear, a knell of a voice, tomb-cold and deep as a pit.

‘The others said it was my ale-breath. What do you think, Bruse?’

The splashing stopped. Everything stopped. Then Bergr whimpered and Hamund yelped and everything was movement.

‘The ice will not be cleaved from within,’ Red Njal grunted, ‘as my granny used to say.’

So we rose up and hit the door at a fast run as the screams and chopping sounds began.

By the time we got there, the work was done and Finn, flicking blood off the end of The Godi, stirred one of the three bodies with the toe of his muddy boot.

‘I do not recognise him,’ he said, frowning. He looked at me. ‘Do you know him?’

The man – Bruse, I was thinking, because his breeks were at his knees – was bearded, the blood and rain streaking his face and running in his open, unseeing eyes. I did not know him and said so. Finn shrugged and shook his head.

‘He knew me, all the same,’ he grunted. ‘Seems a pity that he knew me so well and I did not know him from a whore’s armpit. Does not seem right to kill such a man on a wet night.’

Botolf lumbered up, clutching a rope end attached to a halter and a horse fastened to that. It limped almost in step with him and Finn laughed at the sight. Botolf, mistaking it for delight at his find, beamed.

‘Well, all that talk of horse-eating made me hungry. Now that they are dead, we can have a fire and cook this beast.’

I moved to the horse’s head and had it whuff at me, for it knew me well and I knew it – a young colt, a good stallion in the making, whose brothers still charged up and down the valley. I ran a hand down the offending leg, felt the heat and the lump on the pastern; not spavined at all, just ring-bone from a kick and not too badly injured at that. He was under-nourished – as they all were after the winter, rough-coated and stiff with mud – but not bound for a platter just yet. I said so and wondered why the night and Odin had brought this horse to me at all.

Botolf scrubbed his head in a spray of rain and frustration.

‘He is done,’ he argued. ‘What – are we to wait until he drops dead?’

‘He will not drop dead. Some decent grass and a little attention and he will be fine,’ I told him, then looked Botolf in his big, flat, sullen face. ‘If he does die, all the same, it will be in this valley, when his time has come and for more reason than to provide a meal.’

‘Odin’s arse,’ Finn growled. ‘I am not usually agreeing with mouse-brain – but this is a horse. Do you think he cares much how he dies?’

Odin cared and I said so.

Botolf growled and yanked the halter harder than he needed, jerking the colt’s head after him as he plootered through the rain to the hut. Finn shrugged, looked at me, looked at the horse, then at the sprawl of dead bodies, which was eloquence enough.

‘Well,’ he growled, ‘at least we can load Onund on the beast – unless your darling pony is too poorly for that?’

I ignored the dripping sarcasm and the matching rain. Onund would not help the colt, but it would not harm him badly if it was only for a little while.

‘What makes you think it will be a little while?’ Finn countered, looking up from looting the corpses. ‘We cannot stay here until light – more of these may come. If we move in the dark, we will travel in half circles, even if we are careful. It could take all night.’

We would not travel in half circles and I told him so; we would easily find our way to Thorgunna and Thordis, bairns, wagons and all, in an hour or less.

‘Another Odin moment, Bear Slayer?’ he asked, grunting upright and wiping bloody hands on his breeks. ‘Have the Norns come to you in the dark and shown you what they weave?’

‘Look north,’ I told him, having done so already; he did and groaned. The faint red eye of a fire, certain as a guiding star, glowed baleful in the rain-misted dark.

‘What are they thinking?’ Finn growled.

‘I was thinking,’ Thorgunna said, ‘that bairns needed food and everyone else needed some dry and warm. I was thinking that thralls have run off in panic and, with nowhere to go, will be looking to find us again in the dark.’

She looked up at me, blinking. ‘I was thinking,’ she added, trying to keep her voice from breaking, ‘that menfolk we thought dead might not be and would want to find a way home.’

I held her to me and felt her clutch hard, using her grip instead of tears. Across from me, Ingrid held Botolf and he patted her arm and rumbled like a contented cat.

‘I said Thorgunna was a deep thinker,’ Finn lied cheerfully, while Thordis clutched his wet tunic so tightly it bunched and squeezed water through her knuckles. ‘Was I not saying that all the way here, eh, Orm?’

They swept us up and swamped us with greetings and warmth and pushed food at us. Onund Hnufa was gathered up and wrapped and cooed over, while I laid out the tale of the fight to the flame-dyed faces, grim as cliffs, who gathered to listen.

‘Nes-Bjorn,’ muttered Abjorn, who led the six men left out of the crew Jarl Brand had lent me. ‘Someone is owed a blow for that.’

‘Gizur and Hauk,’ added Ref, shaking his head. ‘By the Hammer, a sad day this.’

Finn went off to look at his sleeping son and Botolf went to his daughter, leaving Hlenni Brimill and Red Njal to expound the tale; the hooms and heyas and wails rose up like foul smoke as I moved from it into the lee of a wadmal lean-to, where Thorgunna bent over Onund. Bjaelfi sat with him.

‘Can he speak?’ I asked and Bjaelfi shook his head.

‘Asleep, which is best. He was hard used with hot irons.’

Thorgunna saw me frown and asked why, so I told her that I thought Onund had something to say that would cast a light on all this.

‘I thought it simple enough,’ she replied tightly. ‘Randr Sterki is come to visit on us what once we visited on him.’

I shot her a look, but she kept her head down from me, fussing pointlessly with a cowhide for Onund’s bedcovering. She had been there on Svartey when we raided Klerkon, but waiting with the ship while we hewed the place to rack and ruin. We were urged on by that cursed little Crowbone, I said and she lifted her head, eyes black as sheep-droppings.

‘Don’t blame it all on that boy,’ she spat. ‘I saw then what raiders were and never wish to see it again. It was not all that boy.’

No, not all, she had the right of it there. There had been raiders too long caged, who sucked in a whiff of blood-scent started by Crowbone, and went Odin-frenzied with it. When all was said and done with it, it was a strandhogg, like many others – a little harsher than most, but blood and flame had been our lives for long enough and it was only, I was thinking, that we now were the victims that made the matter of it here in Hestreng so bitter.

None of which answered the mystery of why Styrbjorn’s man was here alongside Randr Sterki, nor why bearcoats and Roman Fire had been given to the enterprise. I laid that out for Thorgunna, too, and watched her sit heavily, folding her hands in her lap as she turned it over in her head.

‘Styrbjorn wants what he has always wanted,’ she said eventually, rising to fetch spoon and platter, busying herself with the things she knew while her mind worked. She filled a bowl with milk-boiled beef and handed it to me absently, then fetched a skin of skyr – thick fermented cow’s milk thinned down with whey – for me to drink.

‘Have we brought away enough?’ I asked and she shrugged.

‘Anything that was ready to hand and easily lifted,’ she answered. ‘Food. Three wagons and the horses for them. Shelters and wood for fire. Goats for milk for the bairns. This and that.’

I nodded and ate the beef, watching her rake through her only rescued kist, picking out items to show me. Two spare over-sarks, one in glowing blue, both patched and re-hemmed with braid more than once. A walrus-ivory comb, carved with gripping beasts. A whetsone. Some small stoppered pots with her ointments and face-paints. A walrus-skin bag with a roll of good cloth in it, snugged up in the dry because it had many little pockets sewn into it, all of them stuffed with carefully wrapped spices and herbs.

I nodded and smiled and praised, knowing she mourned for what was left behind – fine bedlinen and cloaks and clothes and food stores. It would all be looted and the rest burned before things were done with; I did not mention her eiderdown pillows.

‘Where will we go?’ she asked suddenly, her voice tight with a fear she tried hard not to show.

‘Over the mountains,’ I said, making it light as I could. ‘Down to Arne Thorliefsson at Vitharsby. There is a seter of his, a summer place, just over the high point on the far side - it will not be occupied this early and will give us some shelter.’

We would need it by then, for the way was thawed just enough to be a sore, hard climb at the best of times, never mind the frantic haste we would need to put distance between us and what pursued.

Arne was a good tarman and had three sons, the two youngest needing their lives sorted, since only the eldest would inherit. The younglings were tired of the filthy, backbreaking work of rendering pine root resin into tar for fresh boat planks and Arne would help on the promise of them joining me, the raiding jarl, when the time came.

‘Hlenni Brimill went there last year,’ Thorgunna said suddenly, remembering, ‘when we bought the tar for the Elk.’

The Elk, now burned and sunk with Gizur and Hauk and all the others floating down and down to the bottom of the black water fjord. I chewed slowly, the beef all ashes in my mouth. Raiding jarl my arse; no ship, no hall and no future if Randr and his bearcoats had their way.

Thorgunna brought me flatbread and sat while I tore chunks off and stuffed it in, trying to look as if I relished eating, but glad of the skyr to wash down the great tasteless lumps, my throat too filled with the fear of those bearcoats. Somewhere in the questing dark they prowled, waiting for the scouts to bring them news. Then they would be unleashed on us.

‘Will they stop then, when we reach the other side of the mountains?’ she asked, as if reading my thoughts.

I did not know. I did not think so. I was thinking only death would stop Randr Sterki – but Styrbjorn’s man, this Ljot, wanted something else and I did not know what it was and that part I mentioned to her.

Thorgunna hauled a cloak round her shoulders as the rain-chilled air smoked her breath into the night.

‘Styrbjorn is King Eirik’s nephew and so his heir,’ she answered, slowly working it through her head. ‘He was so until he became such a ranter and raver that he was thrown out for his pains. But he still is heir and will be king if Eirik dies.’

‘Aye, maybe,’ I said, forcing a final swallow. ‘Though more than few will not like the idea much. Anyway, he is young yet, though it seems he does not want to wait to be king.’

‘He will not be at all,’ Thorgunna answered meaningfully, ‘if Eirik has a son.’

There it was, like a cunning picture of little tiles seen too close up; step back from it and it swam into view; Queen Sigrith. Styrbjorn wanted Sigrith – well, he wanted the child she carried and he wanted it dead.

Thorgunna watched my mouth drop like a coal-eater and then she rose, taking me by the hand. I followed her through the bodies huddled round the fire or close together under shelters, dank with misery. In one of the wagons lay a bulky, moaning figure and, squatted next to her like a bull seal, was Jasna, stroking and crooning soothing balm into the groans of the other.

‘How is she?’ asked Thorgunna and Jasna raised her pudding face, jowls trembling, and patted the sweat-greased cheeks of Queen Sigrith.

‘Not good. No easy birth. Soon, little bird, soon. All the pain will be over and then a beautiful son, eh…’

I looked wildly at Thorgunna, who said nothing, but led me a little way away.

‘The queen will birth, in a day, perhaps less.’

It was as good as an axe to the hull of all our hopes, that simple phrase; there would be no swift moving from here, banging her about in the back of a cart and, soon, we would have to stop entirely until the bairn was birthed. I thought I heard the bearcoats roar their triumph to the wet-shrouded moon.

Botolf added another log to the fire as Aoife collected wooden platters, Cormac locked to one hip and nodding, half-asleep. Thorgunna came to me with dry breeks and tunic and serk, made me strip and change there and then, taking my sea-sodden boots to be rubbed with fat.

I sat next to Finn, sticking my bare feet closer to the flames as he cleaned the clotted blood from The Godi. The rain spat on the wadmal canopy and hissed in the fire just beyond it. Ref came up, carrying my sword; I had not even realised I had let it go, probably when Thorgunna hugged me.

‘Not too bad,’ he said cheerfully. ‘There’s a great notch out of it and I cannot grind it out, for it is all of the edge metal from that part.’

Then his face changed, like a sudden squall on a mirror fjord.

‘Cannot grind it out properly anyway,’ he added with a sigh. ‘My forge is gone and all the tools with it.’

He handed it to me and I looked at the v-notch he pointed to. The sliver was in the mast of the Elk, for sure and I told him so. We all went quiet then, thinking of the black fjord and the sunken Elk and our oarmates, rolling in the slow, cold dark with their hair like sea-wrack.

‘We should make blot for them,’ Finn said and Abjorn came up at that moment, with little Koll at his heels.

‘I have set watchers,’ he told me from the grim cliff of his face, then jerked a thumb at the boy behind him. ‘Like me, young Koll wishes news of his father.’

‘I have none,’ I answered, feeling guilty that, of all the fledglings who had occupied my thoughts, the one I had been charged with fostering had not been one of them. I signalled him closer and he stepped into the light and out of the rain, the firelight on his face showing up the white of him and the grit of his jaw, making a fierce light in his pale eyes.

‘You are safe here,’ I said, hoping it was true. ‘Your father, once he has dealt with Styrbjorn, will come and help us defeat these nithings. Until then, we will get a little damp and have an adventure in the mountains.’

‘My mother…’ he said and I felt a stab, felt foolish. Of course…he had heard at the beach how Styrbjorn had dealt with all his family. Ingrid swept in then, gathering the boy into her apron and making soothing noises about honey and milk and sleep, for it was late.

I looked round the fire then, at all the expectant faces – Klepp Spaki, the blank, strange mask of Vuokko, the droop-mouthed Ref, bemoaning the loss of his forge and tools, Red Njal and Hlenni and Bjaelfi, staring at me across the flames, faces bloody with light and hoping for wisdom.

And there, in the shadows, no more than a pale blob of face, was Leo the monk.

‘Roman Fire,’ I called to him and he stepped forward, all the faces turning from me to him.

‘So I heard,’ he answered, arms folded into the sleeves of his clothing. ‘Though we call it Persian Fire. Sometimes Sea Fire.’

‘No matter what you call it,’ I spat back into his plump smile, ‘it is never let far from the Great City. Nor into the hands of such as Styrbjorn. I had heard it was a great crime to do so.’

‘Indeed,’ he replied sombrely. ‘The ingredients of what you call Roman Fire were disclosed by an angel to the first great Constantine. It was he who ordained that there should be a curse, in writing and on the Holy Altar of the Church of God, on any who dare give the secret to another nation.’

He paused and frowned.

‘Whether this is giving the secret is a matter for debate – the likes of Styrbjorn could not learn how to make it from what he has been given. However, such an event is cause for concern among many departments of the Imperium, where such weapons are strictly regulated.’

Concern? Burned ships and dead men were more than concern and I bellowed that at him. The rage gagged in my throat, both at his diffidence and the implication that the northers were barbarians too stupid to find out the secret of Roman Fire from weapons handed out like toys to bairns. It did not cool me any to know he was right in it, too.

He nodded, smooth as a polished mirror and seemingly unconcerned by my glaring.

‘Indeed. I would not be surprised if certain of those departments took steps to find out what has happened to their missing amounts.’

‘Such as sending someone to find out?’

He inclined his head, face blank as an egg.

‘I would not be in the least surprised.’

I watched him for a moment longer, but nothing flickered on it, no firm sign that he was the one sent to find out. He was young – not in the way we counted it, but certainly in the way the Great City did – but I suspected he had been sent and that made him a man to be watched. In the end, I broke the locked antlers of our eyes, turning to tell everyone that Styrbjorn had sent warriors here to end the life of Sigrith and the child she carried in her belly, so that he would remain sole heir to the high seat of the Svears and Geats.

The women grunted, while the men stayed silent. I did not say anything about why Randr Sterki had – I was sure – begged Styrbjorn to be the one to take on the task; those who remembered what we had done on Svartey did not need reminding of it. I told them all we would move north, across the mountains, as soon as it was light enough to see, trying to keep my voice easy, as if I was telling them when we would sow rye and in what field that year.