Crowbone

Crowbone, last to leave, turned to look at the stone-ringed mound of Grima’s howe, a fresh scab just above the tideline, as far removed from the north mountains as you could get. Crowbone wondered if his fetch would be content with that.

He walked away, feeling the unseen eyes on his back from under that boat-grave, thinking on a band of sworn-brothers and the wyrd of their last leader, old, alone and dying on a distant shore.

FOUR

The Frisian coast, a day’s sail later …

CROWBONE’S CREW

ONLY the Norse do not fear the dark on the open sea. At least, so any who travel on the whale road tell folk. The truth is that only the whales do not fear the night sea – but men from the north sail it anyway, when the likes of Greeks and Englisc and Saxlanders and Franks give in and snag their ship close to the shore with ropes.

Grima’s gift-ship was called Skuggi and it well-matched the name, Crowbone thought, for it was pitch-tarred all over the hull so that the wood was as black as if it had been burned, though streaked with salt and gull shit here and there. Skuggi meant shadow to most people, but northmen took more from the name, to them it spoke of an ominous shade, a spectre.

The sail did not make the ship or name sweeter, for when it was hauled up it was the colour of old blood. Crowbone was well content, all the same, for this was a proper drakkar of twenty oars a side – old, Onund said, and stiff with new wood here and there, but sound.

Fast, too – they had to leash the Shadow so that Hoskuld’s panting Swift-Gliding could keep pace. Crowbone had left Rovald and Kaetilmund on board the knarr, just to make sure the new steering oar kept Hoskuld on the same course; he needed Hoskuld yet, to point out this Drostan to him when they found him, but the trader was more reluctant and scowling than ever since Berto had whacked him with an axe handle, ruining his attempt to be the figure of a warrior.

They had a long, good sail that day. Crowbone had confirmed men in their old standings, so that the Shadow’s shipmaster was still Tjorvir Asmundsson, who was called Stikublig. Stick-Starer was an apt by-name for him, since he spent a lot of time throwing little wood chips over the side and watching intently to judge the speed, the better to work out where they were.

Crowbone was content; with the men working at familiar things it seemed little had changed save for the jarl standing next to the steersman and a few new faces. Mar and Kaup and some others knew that everything had changed but, by the time they ran up on a quiet shore, the crew seemed happier than they had been at the start of the day.

Fires were lit and food cooked; Kaup surprised Crowbone and others by making something tastier than they could have done themselves from little twisted packets of herbs and spices he had hidden round himself in various places. The crew who knew him well chuckled at the delight on the new faces.

After they had finished eating, in the thin light before sunset, Crowbone sat with Onund and Murrough, waving Mar and Kaup, the Burned Man, to join them.

‘How is it with them?’ he asked Mar and the man knew at once what Crowbone meant.

‘They sit a little apart from your Gardariki men,’ he said, ‘though that will change over time. Most of the men here are new and have not seen what men who were with Grima for a long time have seen. Those ones are easier in their minds – though no-one is yet comfortable with the Oath they swore.’

‘You?’ asked Crowbone and Mar nodded. His questioning eyes at Kaup got him back a nod and a grin like the flash of a magpie wing. Crowbone was silent for a time.

‘I hope Grima’s fetch will be content where we put him,’ he said eventually, ‘in a land far removed from the north mountains.’

Mar looked at Crowbone curiously.

‘It is as fitting an end for a Red Brother as any,’ he answered then, to Crowbone’s surprise, smiled sweetness into his face. ‘Do you know how that band got their name?’

That band, he had said and Crowbone marked it. They were already gone, the Red Brothers, sliding into the grey haar of yesterday, the Oathsworn stepping into their worn boots. Crowbone shook his head and waited to hear how the Red Brothers were so called; such a blood-dyed name must have a good tale behind it.

‘On their first voyage, with Grima as shipmaster of them,’ Mar said, ‘they had the Shadow, then a new ship and a fine new sail, dyed with reád-stán. When it was rinsed, it came in stripes – dark red and yellow-gold – and Grima was pleased.’

Onund nodded. A sail coloured with reád-stán – ochre – was a fine sight, though he preferred, he said, to weave the colours in strips and sew them. Mar smiled again.

‘Aye, that’s an expense, but worth it, as we found,’ he went on. ‘When such a dyed sail as we had is sea-washed, the colours are fastened in the cloth – except that when it dries in the wind for the first time afterwards, it gives off a dust and that blew all over Grima and all of us. Everything. Then the damp soaked in and everything was dyed. When the ship came to berth next, it was completely red and everything in it – clothes, faces, hands, sea-chests, everything. We had to pitch-paint the hull to change the colour of it, but the sail had turned mostly as you see it – the colour of blood. It has faded a little, but not by much – it took longer to lose the skelpt-arse look of our faces. That was us. The Red Brothers.’

Murrough chuckled and Mar saw that even the prince they called Crowbone managed a smile. This prince, Mar was sure, knew the power in names, no matter how you came by them – none better, since the name of Crowbone was one any sensible man walked carefully around.

‘You were with Grima a long time, then?’ Crowbone asked and Mar nodded.

‘All my far-travelling life,’ he said. ‘It is strange that he is missing now. It feels as though I have left something valuable and cannot remember where.’

Crowbone knew that feeling well enough and had the fading memories to prove it – Lousebeard, his foster-father, vanishing over the side of Klerkon’s ship, pitched out because he was too old; nowadays, Crowbone could only remember him as a face made up mostly of the black O of his open, surprised mouth as he went backwards into the grey water.

Then there was his mother. Sometimes Crowbone had to squeeze his eyes tight to summon up the face of his mother and, once to his horror, had forgotten her name for a moment. Astrid. He said it to himself, as if to nail it to the inside of his head.

They sat, each man wrapped in his own thoughts, watching the little peeping birds that run at the tideline. As each wave hushed in, the birds would all wheel about and bundle busily away across the gold-gleaming shore, piping anxiously to one another. As each wave slid out, they would advance again, all together as a patter of tiny feet. When the silly yellow bitch ran at them, they rose together, and swirled overhead in a wild whirring of sound.

‘Like Pechenegs,’ Crowbone said and both Onund and Murrough laughed, for they had seen these steppe gallopers, climbing over and under their little ponies, wheeling and darting as one and with no-one seemingly ordering it. Then Crowbone saw Kaup and Mar nodding and smiling and it came to him that they had seen a lot, too.

Onund sighed a little at the sight of Crowbone and Mar together, for Mar had the same way about him as Crowbone did – as if some old man had settled in a much younger body.

They traded tales for a while and Mar discovered that Crowbone, stripling or not, had been up and down Gardariki, even in the worst of winters, had fought the Pechenegs and worse, it seemed, for Mar had heard of the Oathsworn legend of how they came by all the silver of the world in Atil’s hidden tomb. Why they still raided, then, seemed a mystery to Kaup, but he kept his fine white teeth clicked shut on that and most other matters.

Mar told of the Red Brothers faring beyond the Khazar Sea, which the Rus call Khvalyn, and how they had joined in battles there, first with one people, then another. Not that it mattered who they battled as long as they won, for plunder and death was the same and the chance for both equal in any red war.

Then Crowbone told him of the Great City – which neither Mar nor Kaup had seen, for all their Gardariki travel – and some of the marvels in it, such as the clever constructs that throw water in the air, for amusement. And Kaup managed to astound Crowbone when he spoke of meeting a strange people out along the Silk Road. They called themselves the Soong, were yellow as old walrus ivory and had flatter faces than even the Sami and eyes which were not only slitted as if they were always trying for a hard shit, but set slantwise in their heads.

Crowbone and the others looked at him closely once or twice to see if he was just clever-boasting, but in the end had to believe him, even when he told how these folk had made toys out of a fire which roared like Thor with his arse ablaze and then bokked coloured stars up in the air. He had, Kaup confessed, shat himself and then run away when he had first witnessed this.

There was laughter – a good sound, Crowbone thought. Then the Burned Man sucked back to the marrow of the meeting.

‘I have taken this Oath,’ he declared, frowning, ‘but it does not bind me. I am not afraid of it.’

Mar shifted uncomfortably, but Kaup’s eyes were like lamps on Crowbone’s face.

‘I am Christian,’ he said, then dazzled out a smile and spread his hands. ‘Well,’ he added, ‘I am, but not a Christian the others like. For all that, they have asked me to speak.’

This was new and Crowbone shifted.

‘They?’

Kaup put his fingers to his mouth and let out as good an imitation of a hunting owl as any Crowbone had heard; a few moments later, men slid out of the dark, silent and heavy with unease. They looked at Kaup, who grinned back, not realising the truth was not so much that they had asked him to speak on their behalf, but that they had picked him as the most expendable if Crowbone took offence.

A dozen, Crowbone reckoned – and Berto one of them, the yellow dog at his heels. Crowbone laid a stilling hand on the forearm of Onund, who had started to rise, grunting like a threatened bull walrus.

‘I am Thorgeir Raudi,’ said one man peering out from under a great tangle of curls, made even more red-gold by the firelight. ‘All of us here are Christmenn.’

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