Crowbone

FOURTEEN

Finnmark, the mountain of Surman Suuhun …

Crowbone’s Crew

Thorgerth Holgabruth she said her name was and Gjallandi went pale at the sound of it, for he knew that name well. Orm only knew that the name somehow meant a bride and had the taint of seidr on it — but Thor was in it and that bluff, red-haired god was not noted for spawning women of magic.

Crowbone did not care what her name was, for up close she was not Gunnhild and that was all that mattered to him. Oh, she had the cat’s arse mouth and a skin soft as chewed reindeer hide, but she was taller, thinner, both old and young at the same time, with eyes that were curious, resting on his own with the blue intensity of old ice.

‘You have an axe in your care, mistress,’ Crowbone managed to growl, keeping polite in his voice for he was aware that Klaenger had gone down on his knees, while Adalbert had done the opposite and drawn himself up as tall as he could, sticking his chin defiantly at her and making the sign of the cross back and forth on his chest.

She ignored all of this, while her Sami guard dogs fanned out warily.

‘I had,’ she answered, her voice cracked as a bad pot, the Norse in it blurred with neglect. ‘A wise woman came for it. Though I am not so sure she was all that wise, for she had fetched it once before and it had killed her man and all her other sons but one. Now she wants it for this last.’

‘Ave Maria, gratia plena,’ Adalbert intoned, his face raised and eyes closed. ‘Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui Iesus.’

‘So Erling had the truth of it,’ Crowbone spat bitterly. ‘Gunnhild and her son have the Bloodaxe.’

‘Was there a Christ priest here?’ Orm demanded. ‘With a bad leg and looking like something freshly dug up?’

‘There was — gently, gently,’ she said, the last spoken to the Sami, grown restive with the priest’s chanting, for they clearly thought he was casting some spell. She held her hands straight down by her sides, palms level with the earth and the furred warriors sank down on one knee, gathered protectively round her.

‘That axe is mine,’ Crowbone declared, his eyes narrowing. The woman nodded, as if she had known that.

‘Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae …’

‘In the name of Thor’s hairy arse, priest, shut up,’ Finn roared.

‘Amen,’ said Adalbert. Finn looked askance at the woman.

‘I meant no disrespect to the Thunderer,’ Finn added hastily and she smiled.

‘It is cold,’ the woman said. ‘I am going to the fire. When you are ready to talk, come and join me.’

She turned and walked off, confident and sure-footed, trailing her hands through the pack of Sami, who rose up and trotted after her.

‘You know this Thorgerth, Boomer,’ Orm said and Gjallandi jerked his eyes away from the woman’s retreating back and nodded, licking his big, firm lips.

‘She was the bride of King Helgi of Halagoland,’ he said, then shook his head. ‘That cannot be, for it was long ago, before the time of our grandfathers’ grandfathers.’

‘Perhaps she is that old,’ Finn muttered and made a warding sign. ‘She has the look, like the last leaf before winter.’

‘More than likely there is a sisterhood,’ Adalbert offered, ‘of which she is the latest. They all call themselves the same name.’

‘Like Christ nuns, you mean?’

Adalbert glared and denied it, but Crowbone shrugged.

‘I have seen such nuns, in the Great City and elsewhere. A sisterhood, who all seem to be called Maria.’

‘These heathens are not the same,’ Adalbert insisted.

‘A sisterhood? So you do not think anyone can be so old, Christ priest?’ Orm asked. ‘What of the one in your holy book — Methus … something?’

‘Metushelach,’ Adalbert answered levelly, ‘son of Enoch, father of Lamech. He died old — but he was one of God’s chosen.’

‘Which this witch clearly is not,’ interrupted a harsh voice and all heads turned to where Finn stood, glaring after the goddess of the Sami. He turned to Adalbert and astounded everyone.

‘Nine hundred, sixty and nine years when he died,’ he growled, then turned from astonished face to astonished face.

‘What? You cannot spend time in the Great City and not pick up a few things,’ he spat. ‘I had the saga of that old Christmann from an Armenian whore. Which is not the point. The sharp end of this affair is what we do now — that little fuck Martin had a plan, but I cannot fathom it. Unless it was to mire us in this place, surrounded by Sami and with no way out, in which case it is a very good plan.’

‘He laid a full-cunning plan,’ Orm admitted, his face quern grim. ‘I am thinking it was a Norn-weave of plot, but Martin does not have the skill of those blind sisters. I am thinking it unravelled a little in his hand.’

He stared, blindly thoughtful and spoke almost to himself.

‘Gudrod was meant to be here, not away with the axe — Haakon’s men were meant to secure that. All of us were meant to be killing each other and Martin, like a raven, would pick from the dead what he wants most in life. Not good enough, little priest — but many good northmen were wyrded to die in this affair and that must be answered.’

‘Where is the axe?’ demanded Crowbone and Orm blinked, then shrugged.

‘Orkney, if it is anywhere. The priest, too.’

‘Beyond us all if it is there,’ Finn agreed. ‘Even if we get out of this place.’

‘Aye,’ Orm agreed, which made men shift nervously and look about. The whole place, the situation, had them walking on dewclaws, looking to where the woman they had heard was a goddess sat beside the fire, to the Sami around her, to the woman again, who had stood up for some reason.

‘Do you want this axe for yourself?’ Crowbone demanded flatly and Orm fixed him with a silent, cold stare.

‘That is the second time you have asked me that,’ he answered coldly. ‘Do not ask it again.’

‘Will you help me against Gunnhild if I get us out of this place?’

Orm nodded with narrowed, questioning eyes and Finn snorted.

‘I will help you against Loki himself if you get us out of this place,’ he answered, with a lash in his voice that suggested it was beyond even Crowbone’s strange seidr.

Crowbone looked along the line of men and grinned; they grinned back, wolf snarls with no laughing in it at all and that only increased Crowbone’s delight, for he knew now how matters stood, knew it with the certainty of the next move in a game of kings, for he had seen the Sami goddess rise up from the fire and clap her hands, had seen what had delighted her.

He went to the fire and looked at the woman, who did not look much like a goddess now, with her mouth drooping a little and her eyes full of what she had seen.

‘What can we trade to leave here with no fight from these hounds of yours?’ he rasped, knowing the answer already and Thorgerth blinked her eyes up into his — then slid them back to Bergliot. Crowbone smiled, a long, slow triumphant smile and nodded.

For a moment, Bergliot stared at him bewildered, disbelieving, then her eyes widened, Finally, she screamed.

Sand Vik, Orkney, three weeks later …

The King Piece

Gudrod sat at the far end of a long table, drinking from a green-glass cup. His gilded helmet was perched on the end, the nasal of it scoring a new mark in the scarred wood, the ringmail puddling round it. A board of nine squares sat in front of him, glowing soft as red-gold in the sconces, the pieces winking back fire.

In front of that, stretching the width of the table, lolling like the whore of fortune that she was, lay Odin’s Daughter, the long handle of the Bloodaxe dark with age and sweat and old wickedness, the head gleaming, worked with the inlaid silver mystery of endless snake-knots and strange gripping beasts.

In front of the axe lay another long batten of wood, also dark with age, slightly swollen in the middle and with a nub-end of dark metal licking from the tapered wooden point. It had been taken, swaddled in cloth, from Orm’s shoulder when their weapons had all been removed. It was an Old Roman spear, Crowbone knew, which the priest Martin coveted as a seidr of his own.

Crowbone had not known what to expect from this last son of the Mother of Kings, but what he saw was a big man whose neck was thick and roped with great veins down either side, a fleshy face with a neat-trimmed beard more iron than black and eyes a little too bright with drink. Gudrod gestured, the cup in that meaty hand seeming as dainty as an eggshell.

‘Olaf, son of Tryggve,’ he said. Crowbone nodded curtly and walked forward a little, to where the swirling blue dim of the hall broke against the torchlight. Here he was, the killer of his father, the son of Gunnhild who had scattered the lives of him and his mother like chaff to the wind. And there, behind him …

She shifted from the dark like a detaching shadow and the light fell on the stiffened planes of her face, so that he caught his breath. Gunnhild, the hand who wielded the sword, the power which had conspired. He tried to see the eyes, but saw only the knobbed fingers of a hand. He tried to find the hate, but discovered that, strangely now that he was so close after the years running from her, he had no fear, only curiosity.

‘Orm,’ said Gudrod. ‘Finn.’

Each name was a flat slap and, at each one, the owner stepped into the light. Out of the side of an eye, Crowbone saw the iron pillars which followed them, one for each, like watching hounds.

‘Who was it who told you I play ’tafl?’ Gudrod asked Crowbone suddenly.

‘The abbot on Hy,’ Crowbone replied. ‘Or perhaps Erling, before I killed him. I forget which.’

‘Just after he killed that strange lad,’ Orm added. ‘Od.’

The sibilant hiss came from the dark, a herald of the dust and rheum voice to follow.

‘You have them in your power here,’ she said warningly and Gudrod stiffened a little, then hunched his shoulders, as if against a chill breeze on his neck.

‘You are resourceful,’ he said, ignoring her. ‘Survived the Sami and the cold, Erling and that boy. Especially that boy. He was strange and gifted, that one. I respect that — admire it even — but I am not witless. Do you really think to beat me at the game of kings? And that I will hand over the axe if you do?’

That had been the plan when Orm and Finn, Crowbone and the others had reached the Finnmark shore, using axes to break up the forming ice and having to leave two ships behind because they did not have men enough to sail them. Even those who climbed on to their rimed sea-chest oar benches were burst-lipped growlers, trembling with cold.

Crowbone had stood with Orm and Finn on the snow-clotted shingle amid the frozen puddles of the beach arguing this plan; he knew they thought it madness, yet Orm went with it because he saw the hand of Odin in it and Finn went with it because it was mad and bold. Crowbone had known that, too, for they were all pieces in the game of kings.

Orm, watching the boy now, felt the grey slide into his heart, for he knew that whatever happened here, Crowbone was gone from him. He wondered what would become of the boy he had loosed from Klerkon’s privy all those years ago.

Not yet into the full of his life, he had said for as long as he could recall, fooling himself with it. Crowbone was into the full of his life now and, just as Orm had predicted long since, was not a man you wanted to be around; the Wend woman had shown that, if nothing else. Orm hoped that Odin had not abandoned them completely — and that Crowbone could play ’tafl.

‘I had heard you could play a bit,’ Crowbone said to Gudrod, with an off-hand shrug, then nodded towards the black-handled axe. ‘Now that you have that blade of victory, I thought to come and lay matters to rest between us. If I win, you and your mother stop working against me.’

Gunnhild’s hiss was enough to bend Gudrod’s backbone and he half turned as if irritated by something between his shoulderblades. Then he drank from the blue-glass cup and set it down gently.

‘You seem to believe you can trade,’ he said. ‘You have nothing to trade. Two words from me and you are a corpse.’

Finn growled and Gudrod glanced up and twisted his fleshy face into a grimace of smiles.

‘I hear you, Finn-who-fears-nothing,’ he sneered. ‘And I feel your stare, slayer of bears. You were foolish to entangle yourselves in this.’

Orm spread his hands and smiled, easy and loose.

‘I am a trader, if you have heard anything of me at all,’ he answered. ‘I thought to help a prince I know. I thought I would be dealing with a Christ priest, mark you.’

‘Ah,’ Gudrod said knowingly and raised one hand above his head. There was a stirring in the shadows and then another iron pillar came forward, thrusting a figure by one shoulder. So, Crowbone thought, three guards …

‘Martin,’ said Orm and the figure raised its slumped head. He was blackened with ice rot and lurched, hip-shot to take the weight off his crippled foot. One hand was held awkwardly, the fingers of it clearly broken and sticking out at odd angles and his mouth was a fester of brown and black that showed when he breathed, for his nose was smashed and he sucked air in over raw gums.

Yet the eyes were a glittering grue at the sight of the Roman lance and he stretched out his good hand towards it.

‘Mine,’ he said and Gudrod backhanded him, so that the priest’s head flew sideways. Finn and Orm both half started to their feet and Crowbone stared at them, astonished. Here was their arch-enemy — why did they care how badly he was handled?

Orm laid a hand on Finn’s arm and they both sank back to their benches, so that the ring-mailed hounds behind them eased a little and let their swords slide back into sheaths.

‘Mine,’ Gudrod replied mockingly as Martin struggled to his feet.

‘Tscha,’ spat Gunnhild, forcing herself forward into the light. ‘Kill them now and be done with this. It is bad enough you let Haakon’s people go free and kept this festered monk …’

‘Thank you,’ Martin lisped, puffing blood on to the wild matting of his beard. ‘That tooth pained me more than the others.’

Then he smiled, showing the bloody ruin of his swelling tongue and the blood in his mouth.

‘I have had the winter eat my foot to endless pain,’ he puffed at Gudrod. ‘Brondolf Lambisson, whom you never knew and should thank God for it, broke my mouth long since. I have suffered the wrath of my God, little man, and there is no pain the equal of that. Think you are a king in making, a hard man from the vik? My first baby shite was harder than you can hit.’

Crowbone heard the delighted ‘heya’ from behind him. He turned to where Finn grinned, shaking his head with admiration.

‘You have to say it,’ he declared, beaming into Gudrod’s thunder, ‘our Martin speaks true enough. He is the hardest man I know, for sure.’

Our Martin. Crowbone could hardly believe he heard it — there was even affection there. Martin wobbled his head round and fixed it on them.

‘Is that yourself, Finn? Ja, I think so. Orm also must be there. For certain you have sold yourselves to the Devil, to have come this far. You should both be dead.’

‘I know you planned matters differently,’ Orm answered coldly. ‘Good men died for that and there is not much left of you. I have decided that this foolishness between us ends here.’

‘You have decided?’

It was Gudrod’s cracking bone of a voice and his eyes blazed behind it. ‘You? In my own hall, you say this. To me?’

‘Arnfinn’s hall,’ Finn answered with a scowl. ‘You have no hall of your own.’

‘Nor will have if you do not behave like a king …’ Gunnhild interrupted, her voice cracking like the paint on her twisting face.

‘Quiet!’

The thunder of it rang them all to silence and Gudrod stood, his face dark and his whole body heaving with the effort of controlling his anger. His eyes raged at them all and, momentarily, he put a hand to one temple, then let it drop.

‘I should kill you now,’ he declared and sat down, suddenly, like a dumped bag of winter oats.

‘That you can is undeniable,’ Crowbone answered. ‘You will not, of course. Because your mother wishes it and you wish to defy her. Because you wonder if you have the beating of me in the game of kings.’

‘Son, there is danger …’ Gunnhild began and Gudrod rolled his head and shoulders and bellowed incoherently until she was quiet, glowering in the dark, seeing his blood-suffused cheeks and feeling the threads slipping away from her.

‘After I beat you,’ Gudrod said slowly to Crowbone, ‘if you have played half well, I shall keep you for the amusement of it. The others I will kill.’

‘When I win,’ Crowbone countered, ‘I may stay the winter with you, for the amusement of it. The others will go free, the priest with Orm and Finn.’

Gudrod paused for a moment, then shoved the board forward slightly, pushing the axe into the spear so that, for a moment, they nestled together.

‘Choose,’ he said.

Orm watched. He had played hnefatafl, as most northmen of worth did but he was middling fair at it and saw that Crowbone had opted to be the attacker. That gave him sixteen dark counters — taeflor, or table-men — surrounding Gudrod’s eight white-bone pieces, plus the hnefi, the King piece.

The object was simple — surround the King and capture him before he was escorted to safety in any corner, using moves up and down, left and right only. The safety-corner was the Norwegian way of playing, for most folk settled for escape to the table-edge on small boards, allowing the more difficult corner escape for larger boards with more pieces.

At first sight, then, it seemed to onlookers that Crowbone had all the advantages — twice as many men and no easy escape for the hnefi. Yet that was the deception of the game of kings — the King’s men need only arrange for their Lord to escape the board, so the King player must try to capture as many attackers as possible to clear an escape route, while not trying too hard to protect his own men since they, too, can block the King’s escape. He was the chooser of the slain and it did not matter to him how many died, only that the King got away.

The attacker had not only to prevent the King’s escape, but also capture him, which was not as simple as it seemed. The best way was actually to avoid taking any pieces early in the game, instead scattering the attackers so that they got in the way and also blocked possible escape routes.

They played in silence, until Gudrod, hovering over a piece, hesitated and smiled.

‘You play well,’ he said. ‘I am pleased.’

‘You should drink less,’ hissed his mother from the dark, where she gnawed her knuckles and tried to make spells. Crowbone saw her and laughed aloud, making Gudrod turn, scowling.

‘Enough of that, mother,’ he said lightly. ‘He is good and I shall keep him — but I am better and will win without your help.’

‘She has no power over me,’ Crowbone chuckled, hoping it was true. A move later, he stroked his thickening beard and smiled ruefully.

‘Perhaps we should have played brandubh instead,’ he said and Gudrod laughed, hugely enjoying himself. Brandubh was the same game, but played by the Irish using dice; every norther knew that the true game of skill was played without those marked cubes.

Yet the next move, Crowbone announced, as the game bound him to do: ‘Watch your King’, meaning he had the capture of it in the very next move. Frowning, Gudrod managed to avoid the trap and Finn let out his breath and shifted in his seat.

They played in silence for the next few moves. Crowbone looked over to where Orm and Finn sat, tense as birds on a washing line. The plan had been spelled out beforehand, but it now seemed less obvious; he wriggled his toes in his boot, where the dagger nestled. He knew Finn’s nail was down his and that the guards had missed it, too. Three guards only — and Crowbone knew that, no matter what shouts and noise happened here, no-one was coming to Gudrod’s aid in this hall.

How quickly could he pull out the dagger? It did not seem to Crowbone that he would get it out of the boot before the guards saw him and even without them, Gudrod seemed a big, powerful man, which Crowbone had not expected. The idea of pulling a knife on a man that size seemed suddenly ludicrous and Crowbone’s mouth went dry, while the sheath-straps burned round his ankle. Then he saw the shadowed planes of Gunnhild’s cheekbones, the eyes fixed on him, feral as a mad cat and he was sure she was trying to read his thoughts.

‘Passage,’ Gudrod declared triumphantly. ‘Doubled.’

Which meant he had two ways to freedom and Crowbone saw at once that he could block only one. Gudrod watched Crowbone’s face, looking for the moment hope left it and was surprised to be denied that. To provoke it, he added: ‘The King has escaped you.’

Crowbone slumped a little, as if dejected, his hands dropping beneath the table. Then he raised his head.

‘There is more than one way to play the game of kings,’ he said and the knife came out of his boot.

Too slow, too fumbled — and it was the saving of them all. If he had managed it properly and slashed the throat of Gudrod, the guards would have hacked them all to pieces — instead, Gudrod came roaring out of his seat and backhanded Crowbone off the bench to the floor, then pounced on him.

‘You dare,’ he bellowed. ‘You dare this?’

Instead of hacking and slashing, his guards sprang forward to help him; one found himself shrieking and dying with a nail in his eye; half-turning, the other was confused, caught between leaping on Crowbone, or fighting Orm and Finn. He hesitated too long and was piled over by the pair of them.

The third guard sprang from behind Gudrod’s chair to help wrestle the knife away from Crowbone — but a small, wizened figure leaped into his path, not even looking at him, one hand clawing for the table and the spear that lay on it. Cursing, the guard stumbled over him and the pair of them crashed to the ground, while Gunnhild shrieked for help in her cracked bell of a voice.

Gudrod held both Crowbone’s wrists, knife hand and free hand, trying to lurch the weight of himself to pin the struggling youth down. Crowbone, for his part, snarled and writhed and kicked, so that Gudrod freed one hand to try and punch the youth senseless.

Instead, he found himself turned, felt a sharp blow in his cods and yelped as he lost control of Crowbone’s knife hand. In desperation, he saw the blood staining the youth’s shoulder, saw an old wound and an opportunity and smashed at it, making Crowbone howl and roll away, knife spilling free.

Blind and blurry, with fireflies dancing at the edge of his vision, Crowbone saw Gudrod snatch up the knife, just as the third guard tore himself free from the tangle that was Martin. Orm sprang forward and he and the guard clashed like rutting stags, straining and grunting, sliding and scrabbling for purchase on the floor and getting in Gudrod’s way.

Finn rose up from where he had broken the neck of the second guard, into the mad shrieks and shrills of Gunnhild, screaming for help that never came; he gave a growl as he stepped for her. She waved her hands frantically at him, yelling: ‘Blunt, blunt,’ but Finn, lumbering and grinning like a bear woken too early, shook his head.

‘That old spell worked on me once when I fought another witch like you,’ he snarled. ‘Now I do not bother with edged steel.’

His fist took her on the point of her jaw, breaking it, shattering the mask of her face to shards of powder and artifice, snapping her head back and cutting off her howls. Gudrod saw it as he weaved to his feet at last, panting, the knife in his hand and ready for Crowbone’s throat. Instead, he saw his mother slumped, blood trickling from her nose and he howled like a trapped wolf and started toward Finn.

Crowbone leaped up, a salmon leap as good as any he had ever done before. He hit the table and scattered the board and the pieces into the shoulder and face of Gudrod, who reared back, his mouth opening with horror at what he saw.

The Bloodaxe, snatched up by Crowbone, coming down on him, all glitter and dark shaft, the edge growing bigger and bigger until it was the whole world crashing on Gudrod’s forehead and splitting him to the chin.

Finn was leaping to the aid of Orm even before the black blood and gleet had washed down Gudrod’s falling chest. Before he hit the floor, Finn had broken the neck of the last guard — and there was stillness, suddenly, where the rasp of their breathing was loud and ugly, the iron stink of blood cloying their throats. The King piece rolled backwards and forwards and finally toppled off the table, landing with a sticky little slap of sound in Gudrod’s blood.

‘Game to me,’ Crowbone said and his own voice sounded like a stranger far off.

Finn got off his knees, canting his head sideways to where Crowbone still stood on the table, arms dropped to his side, staring at the body of Gudrod with the axe buried deep in what remained of his skull.

‘You were ever handy with an axe and a skull,’ Finn declared climbing wearily to his feet and wiping his hands down his breeks. ‘I thank the gods for it now, of course.’

Crowbone barely heard it. The death of Gudrod, the axe that had done it, sent a thrill through him from soles to crown; the side of his head, where it had been smacked, seemed suddenly to have an ice spear thrust into it.

Here was a sign. The axe had betrayed Gudrod, who was clearly not worthy and the weapon had sprung almost unbidden into Crowbone’s own hand to prove that he clearly was. And yet …

He blinked away from the corpse of Gudrod to the slumped figure on the High Seat.

Her. It was her. He peered across at her, no more than four steps away. Gunnhild, the Witch-Queen, who had ordered the death of his father — and, next to her, Gudrod, the son who had carried out the deed. Because of her, that bundle of rags there, everything that the Norns had woven for Crowbone’s life had been unpicked then re-woven in suffering and the death of his mother; Crowbone could not move for breathing.

When he did, he slid from the table into the sticky mess of Gudrod’s blood and plootered through it to the figure on the chair, her head lolling, the veil fluttering free to show her ancient, ravaged face and open, dead eyes. The gnarled fingers which had worked her last spell curled like a cold-killed spider.

She was dead, for sure, though Crowbone, feeling the fresh burn in his shoulder, had to reach out and touch the cheek, snake-scaled with age and marbling into cold death; when he brought his fingers back they were wet. A tear? Yet the thin lips were drawn slightly back, fretted all round with lines like a badly-fired clay pot and revealing teeth yellow as walrus tusks, a last snarl of defiance.

Here she was, then, the Mother of Kings, his enemy from the moment he drew his first breath — from before even that. Crowbone stood, feeling the insistent heartbeat agony of his shoulder, blinking with the pain and trying to feel as if something had ended, that his father was close by nodding approval, his mother’s presence draping him with love and thanks.

But there was only an old dead woman, with a mouth dropped open to make her look foolish and eyes turning to dull ice.

A grunt and a whimper broke him from the moment and he turned, to where Martin levered himself upright to the table and reached out one clawed hand to grasp the spear. In one swift movement, Crowbone snatched it up, just as men spilled into the hall.

Orm and Finn were poised like dogs spotting wolves, but Crowbone merely glanced up at Arnfinn and his Orkneymen, smiling. He nodded towards Gudrod and Gunnhild.

‘Done and done,’ he declared and Arnfinn, after the briefest of glances, stared back at him.

‘It were best if you were gone swiftly from here,’ he said and Crowbone nodded. This, too, had been part of his plan, for Crowbone knew how to play the game of kings in life and he had surrounded the King piece before he had even sat down with Gudrod.

‘Mine,’ Martin managed out of the crazed ruin of his mouth and Crowbone looked at him, then at the spear in his hand.

‘There was a dog,’ Crowbone said and Martin scowled.

‘No more tales,’ he mushed. ‘I have heard enough of your tales.’

For an eyeblink, Crowbone was back on the steppe, huddled with Orm round a mean fire, with Martin and the men he had persuaded to kidnap them. He had told a story then, though he could not remember it — but he remembered Martin’s fury at it. Next day, in a raging blizzard the warrior women of the steppe had attacked and killed everyone save Orm, Martin and himself. That had been his last sight of Martin, Crowbone thought, scuttling into the snow like a wraith, clutching his holy stick and wearing only one shoe.

Crowbone glanced at Orm and saw that he, too, had remembered. Finn’s grin was wolfen.

‘The dog had stolen meat. “What a good time I shall have eating this meat when I get home,” thought the dog as it started to cross a stream of water,’ Crowbone went on. ‘Then he looked down at his own shadow in the water and saw a dog with a large piece of meat in its jaws. “That dog has a larger piece of meat than mine,” he thought. “I want it. I will have it!” He growled, but the dog in the water did not move, nor did he drop his piece of meat. He snapped at the dog in the water. The meat he carried slipped from his mouth and sank to the bottom of the stream — and the dog in the water lost his meat at the same time.’

‘You have your axe,’ Martin mumbled. ‘Give me my spear.’

Crowbone looked at the axe, slanting blackly up from the body of Gudrod. He smiled.

‘Odin’s Daughter does not look so attractive in this light. I do not believe I wish to marry her this day, or the next — though I will in time. I have no need of this cursed axe to cut a path to the High Seat of Norway. It is only a hunn in the game of kings — besides, it may not be Christian enough if what Adalbert says holds true.’

A hunn, a ‘lump’, was the slang word for all other pieces on the board, easily sacrificed for the victory of the King. Orm and Finn looked at each other. Arnfinn tilted his head slightly and stared at the axe in Gudrod’s head.

‘Heya,’ Finn sighed, ‘I wish you had realised all this before we came to this hall. Before you set off on the entire Thing of it.’

‘Just so,’ Orm said, then shrugged. ‘It seems wise to me, mark you. Perhaps you will be a great king after all.’

Martin shrieked then, a long howl of anguish and utter rage. He did it until he coughed and spat more blood up, then collapsed on the ground, panting. Orm stared at him, remembering the years — gods, the long years — since he had first set eyes on the priest, neatly tonsured, smoothly robed, with a smile that had white, even teeth in it and eyes that welcomed him and Einar to the warmth of Birka’s borg.

Now the crippled mouth spewed curses, the eyes were wild little beasts leaping in the matted forest of his hair and beard. Martin sank to his knees, babbling curses and prayers to his god, beat the ground with his fists; even Finn, Orm saw, was beginning to feel some sorrow.

‘The lance, the lance,’ Martin babbled and Crowbone, halfway to the door of the long hall, turned and held the spear up. Martin’s cries stopped at once, like a bairn handed honeycakes; he seemed to freeze on the spot, fixed on the sight like a hound on a spoor.

‘This stick?’ Crowbone said and raised it. He had never seen it closely before, now felt the heft of it, the fattened end, weighted to bring more power when the spear reached the falling point. The long iron end had gone, of course, but there was a nub of black metal left, a half-thumb of it in the tapered sleeve of the shaft.

A good spear in its day, Crowbone thought and I should know spears. He tested it; it was awkward, for the metal was missing, but he found the balance point, bounced it once or twice, then drew back and hurled it.

‘Take it, then, since you want it so badly,’ he said quietly. It slid through the air, revolving along its length, a perfect, curving throw and Martin rose to meet it, held out his hands as if to catch and cradle it, his face bright, his eyes exultant.

It went through his fingers and into his breastbone, which it cracked like a pry-bar on a ship plank. There was so much force in it that it buried itself deep in him, the last nub end of black metal splitting his heart as if it were a skin bag, slicing through the entire of him and out the far side.

Martin was thrown back by it. The lance came out of his back, to the left of his spine and went into the beaten earth floor, softened to mud by Gudrod’s blood, so that the priest hung on it, his hands grasping at the air, his face turned to the sky and his mouth working.

‘Iesu,’ Martin wheezed, his hands scrabbling bloodily on the shaft, his voice fading to dust and moth wings as he gasped.

‘Dimitte nobis debita nostra, libera nos ab igne inferni.’

‘What’s he say?’ demanded Finn hoarsely, staring fixedly at the choking, dying Martin. Arnfinn and his men had all taken a step or two back from the impaled monk and they made frantic cross-signs.

‘A prayer to keep himself from Hel’s hall,’ Orm replied, then looked dully at Crowbone, stunned by the sudden death of the bane of his life.

He was gone. Sixteen years, Orm realised suddenly, since the Norns had woven Orm and Martin’s threads into the weave of life and the rushing flood of images that broke on Orm’s mind almost drowned him. Martin, lean and smooth and urbane in the polished hall of Birka; hanging upside down on the mast of The Fjord Elk while Einar’s Truth Knife whicked his little finger off; burned by the Serkland sun; sitting beside the blood-eagled ruin that had been Starkad in an old church of the Constantinople Romans; hobbling off into the snows of the steppe; sly and black-toothed in the main square of Kiev.

Gone. All his plans and viciousness, gone like smoke. Orm shivered and shook himself back into the Now, stared astonished at the youth who had done it, easy as throwing.

Crowbone shrugged, then looked at the stunned Orm and Finn, took a breath and puffed out his cheeks.

‘You should have done that years since,’ he declared. ‘If you ever planned to play the game of kings.’