The Prow Beast

SIXTEEN

The Odra roared and spat like a boiling cauldron, brimmed over into the woods and growled among the trees. It slashed the higher bank, so that sections of it slithered and sighed in slow splashes and turned the water black-brown. Trees came down, too, teetering slowly with a noise like ripping linen, clawed roots tangling so that they chained to the broken shore and made dams against which other drifts piled.

We watched it all warily, for the current in the river slithered like a coil of mating snakes, first one way, then the other, breaking round Short Serpent and fattening out into the floodplain so that we had no idea now where the old shore had been.

The rain fell, too. It had caused all this on the slopes of the distant mountains, now unseen through the fine, misted water that lisped on us and filled the very air so that every breath came as if we held linen cloths over our mouths and noses.

‘This is no time to be sitting on this river, I am thinking,’ Onund observed mournfully, ‘for we can neither use oars nor sail in this and if we sit here, a floater will get us, for sure.’

It was no time to be moving, either, for though we all feared the current and the clutch of water, we feared the floaters most and had seen three or four already, looming out of the boil like whales with great thrashing root-limbs. Hovering for a moment in the current, they would sink from sight again and, like the bergs of the north, most of the dangerous part was unseen. One of those great earth-clogged claws would swipe in the planks of Short Serpent.

There was no possibility of stopping, all the same; we had to put distance between us and Kasperick, keeping to the east bank and trusting that the spate prevented him crossing. I was sure, all the same, that I had seen horsemen, faded as fetches through the rain-mist, splashing a miserable way up the west bank, appearing and disappearing as the swollen river widened and narrowed.

‘Time to haul away,’ Trollaskegg said cheerfully and the men groaned, for this was almost too much when added to the lack of food and ale and the soaked cloaks and blankets on a boat filmed with water.

Little Yan went up the mast with the rope and fastened it, then it was paid out and men leaped overboard, to the places where the water was shallow, or had not yet reached. Then they pulled, so that Short Serpent, balking like a stubborn goat on a tether, slowly moved forward; the linden-bast rope hummed and water spurted out of it, while the mast curved.

Everyone lent a hand, the strong ones pulling and staggering through the shallows or over the brush of the bank, the weaker ones using the oars as poles to fend off the drift. Even Dark Eye bailed and I did not care for that, though I told myself, and everyone else who saw my unease, that it was because it would not do for her to get sick or injured, for we might need her yet. I had already provided my good sealskin cloak for her as a makeshift shelter.

Finn, squeezing the water from his beard so that it squirted through his knuckles, had squinted from under the drooped, sodden brim of his weather-hat and smiled, a quizzical, knowing smile I tried to ignore, all the while feeling it nag me as badly as the ache in my ankle.

She had clasped me tight when we lumbered, sodden and uneasy, spilling hurriedly onto Short Serpent and sliding off into the dark, rain-hissing river. In the storm’s searing white light, her face was raised to mine, eyes bright, streaming with rain so that she looked as if she wept. I almost kissed her then, but the corner of my eye caught Finn’s scowl in that eyeblink of light and I patted her like a wet dog instead.

In the dark, we had hauled a little way upriver, all that could be managed, before settling on the east bank to wait for daylight and the storm to growl out. By then the river was mud-coloured, frothing like a mad dog in the sullen light of morning and it stayed that way for the next few days, with no sign of stopping, so there was nothing to be done but pull.

‘Bank is not made for towing,’ Onund growled at me, coming up with an oar to fend off something that rolled and turned, shapeless in the water.

‘Nor the current for rowing, nor the wind for sails,’ I answered, more sharp than I had intended, for the truth of it nagged me like a broken tooth.

‘Trees down to the water,’ Onund added, which was true. Once they had been the edge of a considerable wood, set back from the river, but it had spilled over and swamped them; hipdeep in it, the men looped rope over one shoulder, padded a tunic, or a cloak or a spare serk under it and hauled, stumbling and sliding. To their left, Alyosha and a handful of men, weighed with shields, weapons and ring-coats, splashed to keep up, as a flank guard.

‘The mast might go,’ added Trollaskegg, watching the bowing curve of it.

‘Or the line,’ added Yan Alf, almost cheerfully.

I wondered if anyone had something good to say and asked it aloud. No-one answered — then Kuritsa appeared, sloshing calf-deep through the water and calling out, so that men stopped pulling and braced instead, holding Short Serpent against the current.

He came up to where the water deepened to the river proper, stopping when it got to his waist. He had his unstrung bow in his hand and a young doe draped round his shoulders like a fur cloak, the hooves cinched on his chest; men yelled at him and grinned, for this meant good hot eating at the end of a wet misery of hauling.

It took some time, but we got Short Serpent closer to him, while he came out until the current threatened to sweep him off his feet. Crowbone threw him a line, he tied the deer to it and it was hauled aboard; another line drew him in like a fish, until he stood on the deck, streaming water and grinning. The rain had stopped.

‘Good hunt,’ I told him and he nodded, blowing snot from his nose. He pulled off his leather cap and checked that the bowstring was dry, then coiled it up again and stuck the hat back on.

‘Up ahead is trouble,’ he said. ‘A barrier of drift.’

Trollaskegg grunted; that was a bad thing to have happen now, but you could have foreseen it without throwing rune-bones, on a river like this and weather like we had.

It was a fallen tree, undercut and ruined, a fine big oak — a keel tree, as Onund pointed out. If we had been wanting one that would be cause for grinning, as I told him; those nearest laughed, though it was a sound as grim as tumbling skulls.

Drift had piled against it, sodden birch and gnarled pine from far upriver, willow branches swollen with new buds, all forming a great dam the length of twenty men out from the east bank and solid enough that men could walk on it.

Around the end swept the water, rippling like muscle, then breaking into dirty-white foam and growling up spits of spray. The air stank with the cloy of death, for there were bloated bodies here, sheep and cattle that had drowned, bobbing and sinking and rising again as they spun in a stately dance down to the sea.

Onund and Trollaskegg and others walked, cat-careful, out onto the barrier and peered and prodded here and there, while the men stood like patient oxen, hock-deep in the water and braced to stop Short Serpent spiralling backwards with the flowing current.

A tree came down, with an animal on it and men yelled and shouted cheerfully; it was a water-slicked wildcat, yowling and snarling, running this way and that as the tree caught the water’s flow and half-turned beneath it.

‘Shoot it,’ Crowbone yelled to Kuritsa, who merely shook his head.

‘Not me,’ he declared. ‘I almost died from shooting one once and I will not do it again.’

‘How could you die from shooting a cat?’ demanded Yan Alf, watching the tree in case it came too close. Kuritsa, his face serious, said it was the speed of the beast that had been his undoing and Crowbone made the mistake of asking how that was so.

‘I came upon one while hunting deer,’ Kuritsa said. ‘Suddenly, without warning. I do not know who was the more surprised — but I had an arrow nocked and shot it, straight down the open mouth.’

He paused and shook his head.

‘This was my undoing, for that cat, like all of its breed, was faster than Perun’s thrown axe. It spun round to run away and my own arrow shot out of its arse. I felt the wind of it on my cheek; an eyelash closer and I would be dead.’

People laughed aloud and watched the tree and the yowling misery of its passenger spin away downriver.

Then Onund hauled himself aboard, dripping like a walrus, with Trollaskegg not far behind. Their faces were gloomier than Hel’s bedspace.

‘It will not be chopped up this side of summer,’ Onund declared.

‘Nor will it be hauled apart,’ added Trollaskegg.

There was a pause and I waited, trying to be patient. Onund grunted and shrugged, the hump of his shoulder rising like a mountain.

‘We will have to pull round it,’ he said and all our hearts sank at that. It meant tethering Short Serpent and bringing everyone on board to take an oar — then loosing the lines and bending to rowing to the west bank. We would lose way, of course, probably back to where we had started pulling that day, before we could tether on the opposite bank. Then we would have to pull all the way back again, this time with the threat of Saxlander horsemen.

It would be a long, hard pull, too, for we would have to put some distance between us and the barrier; no-one wanted to spend a night on the west side of the river, so we would have to repeat the process to take the ship to the east bank again, on the far side of the barrier — with enough room to allow for losing way that would not carry us smack into that gods-cursed drift of trees and sodden corpses in the fading light.

The black, wet misery of it settled on us as we grunted and cursed and slithered the ship to where it could be tethered. The panting, exhausted crew slackened off, the linden-bast rope was hauled in and loosed from the masthead and folk spilled wetly over the side, sloshing towards rowing ports, sorting out their sea-chest seats.

I nodded to Finn and he went round with two green-glass flasks and men grinned wearily and brightened as the fiery green-wine spirit was passed down the line. Dark Eye and a couple of others offered soggy bread and hard cheese, pungent with its own sweat; men chewed and grunted and, slowly, began to chaffer and argue, so that I knew they were recovered.

Then Yan Alf called out that there was a boat snagged in the barrier.

This time, I went with Finn and Onund and others, stepping cautiously out onto the slick, wet tree, treacherous with stubs and broken ends, draped with crushed willow. The boat was half-swamped, cracked like an egg and ragged with splintered wood, but clearly a strug, the solid riverboats Slavs made. It would not have been important at all — there were lots of them and it was hardly a surprise to find one as part of the wreck of this swollen river — save for the crew it still held.

He was snagged by his own belt, hair drifting like weed, pale face fat with water and curdled as old cheese. For all that, it was a face I knew and I remembered him, stumbling back from where he had dug up my silver, showing handfuls of it to the rest of his oarmates, that bloated face bright with the wonder of it. Hallgeir, I remembered suddenly. His name was Hallgeir.

Finn nodded and growled when I told him this, peering up the river; he pinched one side of his nose and blew snot down into the wreck.

‘So, Randr Sterki has met with some trouble,’ he growled. ‘Which can only be a good weaving for us, thank the Norns.’

I did not answer; I was too busy searching the water for signs of a small corpse, my belly sick with the thought of Koll, turning in a slow, stately dance like the sheep dead in the mucky water.

The oak finally behind us, days melted, one into the other and went unnoticed. No-one saw much else other than the red-brown water and the sucking mud as they stumbled, heads down and rope over one shoulder, through the shallowest parts they could find. The boat, that great shackle they were fastened to, fretted this way and that, the prow beast snarling and jerking.

The land changed, started to roll into short hills rising out of the flood, some of them flat-topped, others already undercut by the merciless waters. Half-drowned trees shouted out all their green buds even as they died; others huddled like herded cattle on the hills above the water.

The rain sighed itself out and the sun broke through, so that the ground steamed up a crawling mist and the insects came, bloated and fat on carrion, yet still wanting more from the living.

Gudmund died, raving and bursting sweat off him, despite Bjaelfi’s best prayer-runes binding the black-rotted holes where the hayfork had gone in, so we rolled him into the water and consigned him to Ran and Aegir, which was as much as we could do in that place.

Freed from that, Bjaelfi now went to treat the ones shivering and sweating and leaking their insides down their legs from some sickness or other — probably in the water, Bjaelfi thought, or perhaps poison from the insects.

‘Not good, Orm,’ he told me, as if I needed him to inform me of that. He slapped angrily and cursed the stinging insects.

‘Perhaps it will rain again,’ Crowbone offered cheerfully, ‘and drive the insects away.’

‘Not as if you suffer,’ Yan Alf countered gloomily. ‘I want that charm you have.’

Those on board — bailing, poling, or too weak and sick to pull — laughed, but uneasily, for the way the biting hordes avoided Crowbone was too close to magic for comfort and most remembered the reputation of the odd-eyed boy.

‘They do not bite him,’ Finn declared, bellowing from where he leaned on the sweep, fighting to keep the prow beast snarling into the current, ‘because he has no man-juice in him.’

‘They do not bite you, either,’ observed Dark Eye suddenly, her clear voice made stranger by the silence that had gone before from her. Finn squinted calculatingly, then grinned.

‘They do, but if you look closely, you will see them falling dead at my feet,’ he growled, ‘since there is too much man-juice in me for those little bodies to handle. One taste is all it takes.’ And he winked lewdly at her, so that I found myself bristling like an old hound and had to turn away with the shock of it, hoping no-one could see.

The next day, hungry and wet and tired as always, men looked sideways at Crowbone and at me, him for bringing the rain back, or so it seemed and me for…everything else. They were muttering more openly now, about forging on after this boy when there was little else in it for anyone. Yet they were fairly trapped, for they could not go downriver now, into the clutches of the waiting Kasperick. Ahead was not any more attractive.

Ahead, growling and spitting white lances and ferns, another storm fretted; the river, fresh fed, surged again the next day and the men started to stumble and fall and it was all I could do to keep them moving. We were close to the Vrankeforde now and I knew Randr Sterki would be there, what men he had as worn out as ourselves; if we were fast enough, he would not have time to find others, for when he thought he had enough, we would not have to chase him — he would come for us.

Then, so close I could almost taste the woodsmoke fires of Vrankeforde, there was a day that began under a vaulted sky of milk-silver, where the air clung to the skin and the men hauling and falling up the river, mouths open and panting, had almost lost the strength to put one soaked foot in front of another.

I saw Gunnliefr, best spearman we had, sink to his knees and weep, all his strength gone. I watched Osnikin, from Sodermannland, fall with a great splash and have to be hauled up by Murrough, or else he would have lain there and drowned.

‘Orm,’ Trollaskegg began and I did not need him to tell me what was best, so that my look was harsher than a slap and made him click his teeth on his next words.

‘Pull, fuck your mothers,’ roared Finn, seeing my face. ‘Haul away, you dirty swords.’

She moved beside me and I felt a hand on my forearm, but when I turned, she was that little wooden carving, staring out over the river, saying nothing, looking at the distant rolling black of cloud, dragging all our eyes to it. As if, some said later, she had magicked it up.

The air tightened, twisting like the iron rods of a smith starting on a new sword. The wind rose, knotting with force, hissed stipples on the river and the dark swooped like a cloak of crows.

The storm broke on us, a great laughter of Thor howling out of the sudden new dark, his Hammer sparking blue-white with a banging that seemed to split the air and fist our ears. The men leaned and the linden bast threw up skeins of water and trembled, while the mast bowed and sang like a harp string.

‘It will break,’ shrieked Trollaskegg, but the wind grabbed his words and whirled them away down the river, which was a mercy for Yan Alf, since he was clinging to the top of that whipping pole, searching the river ahead while the rain drowned his eyes.

It was the end and it came swift as a secret knife. Through the sheeting veils of rain, I watched a tree blaze and heard the sky crack, looked up and half-expected to see the wheelrim of Redbeard’s goat chariot breaking through the dome of the world.

Instead, there was Yan Alf, clinging to the rakki as the mast swung and sawed, his face a pale blob in the dark, shouting something the wind snatched away. He pointed out beyond the prow beast where, looming up like some snake-head goddess, the great tree crashed down on us, a huge ram with horns of clotted roots.

The prow beast rose up, dragging the men on the bank backwards, tearing the rope and the skin from their hands. I had time to turn, to think that all our struggle, all the days of effort to this place, hung on a thin, stretching line and the skidding crew who held it — when the linden bast spurted water, snapped and whipped back. Ospak yelped with the lash of it, spun half-round and went over the side.

The drakkar, locked in what seemed a raging battle, spun round; timber shrieked, planks splintered and men were mouthing bellows no-one could hear. The ship seemed to rear up like a stallion in a horse fight, right up until the stern went under and it tilted. I saw oars and chests slide away — saw Dark Eye slide away and milled my arms to try and grab her.

Water slapped me, snagged me, dragged me down and round and round, so that the silver trail of bubbles from my mouth circled me like a flock of birds.

I saw them, like pearls, like the last thought trailing from my mind — Odin would have to fight Aegir for his sacrifice offering.

Then there was only darkness.

The moon was a bright eye and an owl shrieked, a thrown chip of a cry. From the rolling charcoal of hills came the scream of some animal, high and thin and trembling with loneliness and then there was Vuokko, sitting beside me on a flat, black rock, cradling his drum.

‘I can only do this because it is Valpurgis,’ he said, ‘when the veil between the worlds is thinnest.’

May Eve, when the Wild Hunt staggered to a halt. Einmanuthur, the lonely month. I felt the crush of it, wanted to be home…

‘There is a loss coming,’ Vuokko said. ‘Keener than winter. Odin will take his sacrifice soon.’

I wanted to be home more than ever, wanted to tell the Sea-Finn, who I knew was soaring in the Other watching me die, to take messages with him, of love and friendship and last words. But when I started to speak, he hit his drum and kept on hitting it, a thundering sound that jarred me, pounding on and on and on…

The blood thundered in my ears and my chest ached with each huge, retching breath; my throat burned and my nose throbbed. There was the iron taste of blood in the back of my throat. Ospak peered at me long enough to make sure I had come to my senses, then stopped pounding my chest and rose up, his knees cracking.

‘It is a bad habit to get into,’ he declared, ‘this having to be hauled out of water just before you drown.’

Dark Eye, cat-wet and scowling, glared at him and then turned a soulful look on me.

‘I shall try and break it,’ I managed to hoarse back at him and he chuckled at that and the slap from Dark Eye as he reached out a grimy hand towards my nose.

‘That neb of yours is cursed, I am thinking,’ he said and then tilted his head slightly. ‘It is only straight on your face if I stand like this. And it looks flatter than it did.’

If the pain was anything to go by, I did not doubt it, but I was more concerned with what had happened. I had thought him dead, for sure, a thought I shared with him while Dark Eye fussed.

‘I thought the same when I went over,’ he told me grimly and showed me the blue-black welt on his upper arm. ‘That rope seemed set with a life of its own and it took me a while to get clear of it.’

‘Double thanks, then,’ I rasped, ‘for hauling me out.’

He chuckled. ‘Not me. The Mazur girl did that.’

I looked at her and she smiled.

‘I was supposed to save you,’ I said to her and she fixed me with her seal eyes; it came to me then that we were alone, the three of us, soaked to the skin on a patch of wet barely raised above a black swamp where the mud and water oozed and new, sodden reeds stood straight up like hairs on a boar snout.

‘Where are the others?’ I said, sick with the possibilities and scrambling to my feet. I was weary to my bones, my head pounded, my chest burned and the whole front of my face felt seared, but I forced it off; I was ashore and the ground might squelch, but it was solid enough for me to feel safe after that muscling river. There was freshness in the air, too, as if the storm had finally gasped itself out, tangled and shredded in the branches and brush by the tiny sprigs of green. A bird sang somewhere unseen.

‘Back upriver,’ answered Ospak with a shrug, ‘if they are still in the world at all. You and me and that girl were all tangled in the one rope, which is a strange thing. Perhaps the Norns wove it that way for a purpose.’

‘Well,’ I said, pushing the crushing weight of it grimly, like a bad plough, ‘it seems we have a walk back to camp, then, if camp there is.’

I rose, weaving. Dark Eye straightened, wiped the palms of her hands down her sodden skirts and bent to pick up something beside me. My sword, still sheathed, the baldric loop missing a few silver ornaments.

‘I hauled you ashore with it,’ she said in her thin little voice. ‘I had to take it off, for it was round your neck and strangling you.’

I felt the burning welt of that now, too, and fingered it, wondering at the strength in her to have managed that. I smiled and took the sword — Jarl Brand’s sword. At least we still had that and I turned to Ospak and told him so, for the cheer in it.

‘Aye, sure and that’s a good thing, for I have an eating knife only,’ he answered and then tilted his beard off to one side. ‘And they were a worry.’

I followed his gaze and saw the six horsemen sitting at the limit of bow range, watching, resting easy on hipshot horses, bows out and arrows ready.

I looked back at Ospak and then at Dark Eye, whose face was a carving block.

‘Magyar,’ she said.

Which was hardly a comfort.

Two things happened then and it is sometimes strange how such weight as your life can hang on the thinnest thread — a voice understood and a scratch behind the ear.

Dark Eye moved two paces forward and hailed them, in her own Mazur tongue, which it was clear they understood. At the same time, a dog trotted out from the horsemen, a smooth, long-legged loper the colour of old bracken; it headed straight for me. Though smooth-coated, it reminded me of the big grey, wiry wolfhounds that had been with me not long before; we had eaten them out on the Great White and left nothing much more than the paws and I had been sorry for that later.

This one came close and sat while I moved to it, a few paces, no more. It let me scratch behind one ear.

The horsemen shifted then. The leader came forward, his hands out to either side and empty; when he got close, he halted and waited for me to walk to him. The dog followed me.

He was sallow, black moustached, with a clean chin and dark eyes over high cheeks. His hair hung under a fur-trimmed cone and was knotted in hundreds of small braids, like ropes and he wore an embroidered coat over loose breeks tucked into high boots which had what looked like silver coins down each side.

We fished for understanding for a while and found Greek. He grinned whitely at me and placed one hand on his chest.

‘Bokeny fia Jutos,’ he declared, which I took to be a name. Later, I learned that he was Jutos, son of this Bokeny.

‘Orm,’ I answered, slapping my own chest. ‘Ruriksson.’

‘You are Ascomanni, from Wolin,’ he said and I put him right on that. He frowned.

‘Sipos says you are to be trusted,’ he answered and sounded as if that was strange to him. It took me a moment to realise he was speaking of the dog.

‘Sipos,’ said Dark Eye, coming up beside me; the dog licked her hand and grinned, pink tongue lolling wetly. ‘It means Piper. The Magyar call these dogs viszla, which means “deerhound” and they are much prized for hunting.’

‘Mazur,’ said Jutos, looking at her and it was a statement, not a question. Then he nodded and turned the horse.

‘Come,’ he said. Ospak looked at me and I shrugged. It was not as if we had much say in the matter, for the horsemen closed round us, like herders on cattle. We went a little east, away from the river which fretted me, for I thought it was further from the others and said so.

‘If there are others,’ Ospak answered moodily. ‘That was a big tree.’

We left the floodplain for soft rolling hills and then, beside a rill that ran white between great smooth boulders until it made a large, dark pool, came up to their camp of wagons, some covered, some with two wheels and some with four. Horses snickered; smoke drifted, thick and pungent and a woman, squatting by the stream with her skirts spread for decency, took a piss and smiled at us.

The dog, wedge-head held low, snuffled and quested and answered a bark from the centre of the wagon circle with a hoarse one of its own, which seemed to be squeezed out of the red-gold body. It set ducks up off the water of the pool and Jutos laughed.

‘Home,’ he said and I could not disagree. We came up to a fire whose perfume was as heady as incense to me and the warmth made us all realise how chilled and cold we were.

People milled; we were given blankets to wrap ourselves and stripped of our clothes under the decency of them, made to sit down under a wadmal canopy and presented with bowls. A woman, grinning and nodding her head while she spoke a trill of softness I did not understand, cracked eggs in a cauldron of barley broth and meat, then filled our bowls. I ate, sopping fat chunks of bread with it, ravenous.

In the end, sated, we all sat back.

‘By the gods,’ sighed Ospak after a while, which said it all.

The camp moved with soft life while the sun of late afternoon slanted through the surrounding trees and Dark Eye curled up and slept with the dog, both cradled in the dry beech mast near the fire. The ducks came warily back to the pool, planing in to land with creamy wakes.

Folk passed and stared curiously, but left us alone. Ospak nodded, half-asleep; a woman came to where our clothes hung, studied them, poked a finger in a hole and tutted. Then she fetched needle and thread.

Jutos startled me from my half-sleep by looming up and squatting, face smiling.

‘I have been told of others of your kind, not far. An hour’s ride, perhaps more. They are by the river and their boat is badly damaged.’

That sounded like Finn and the others and I wanted to know if he knew how many. Jutos shrugged.

‘Enough for my hunters not to go too near,’ he answered, grinning. ‘There are too many riders out on the land these days. Something has stirred them up.’

He said it in a way that let me know he thought part of that stirring was us, but he seemed friendly enough still and we talked until the shadows stretched and our clothes were dry enough to wear again.

These folk were, I found, Magyars, a trading party who travelled part of the old Amber Road, which once led to the north of Langabardaland and then down to Old Rome.

‘Not now,’ Jutos explained. ‘Now we take it to our land and trade it on to the Bulgars and others, who take it down to the Great City, where the power and the gold now is.’

‘I thought there was power and gold back in Old Rome,’ I answered, to show I knew some matters of trade, ‘now that Otto the Saxlander has declared himself Emperor, like his father of the same name before him.’

Jutos spat so that the embered fire sizzled.

‘Best not to speak of the Ottos when my father comes,’ he said grimly. ‘Our fejedelem is Geza, who has eaten salt with the Saxlanders and Romans to gain peace. He has even taken a Christ worshipper to his household, a monk called Bruno — but friendship with the Saxlanders is not something that sits lightly with one of the Seven.’

I knew the word fejedelem meant something akin to ‘ruling prince’ and I had heard how this Geza had been forced to accept the Christ worshippers because the Great City and Otto had made an agreement. Of course, since Geza had little say in the matter, his Christ worship was not entirely full-hearted — but there it was again, that working of kings that always seemed to favour the White Christ. I said as much and Jutos grinned.

‘Perhaps, after all, the Tortured God has more power,’ he growled. ‘It is certain our own gods did not help us when my father became one of the Seven.’

I did not recognise the reference to the Seven and wanted to know more, but Ospak bridled at this discussion, for he was an Irisher who had embraced Thor and loved him.

‘This Christ has no power,’ he argued. ‘If you need proof of that, look at my god and him together. The Christ is nailed to a lump of wood; my god has a Hammer.’

He spat on one palm and slapped his hands together, as if he had made a good legal point at a Thing and even Jutos joined in my laughter.

Still, I did not have to wait long to find out about the Seven, for Jutos’ father came to us soon after. At first he was just a tall, thin shadow against the red-dyed sky, moving slow and stooped, flanked by two other, stockier shadows who wore ring-coats and the high-crested helms favoured by Magyars and Khazars. Closer, the white blur of face resolved into features and what I had taken for a bald head was white hair, iron-streaked and dragged back.

Closer still and Ospak sucked in his breath, while Dark Eye went still and quiet, as she always did when faced with horrors, sliding into the earth and stones, becoming invisible.

This Bokeny had a face like a skull. There was no nose and he had no ears and age had shrunk the cheeks so that the skin on the knobs under his eyes looked to be splitting. Hard wrinkles marked him, deep-scored plough-lines across his forehead and great scars down the side of his mouth, deep enough to lose a finger up to the first joint. One eye was milk, the other black-bright as a crow and his hair was dragged back and tied at the nape of his neck, yet it spilled down almost to his belt.

I marked that. Finn had lost an ear long since and never tied his hair back. This man, this Magyar horka, did not care; more than that, he offered his face like a defiant, triumphant banner.

He squatted stiffly, and I saw his cloak, fastened at the shoulders by two discs, each marked with a bird holding a sword. That sight ran a shock through me, for the sword was a sabre and I had heard that these Magyars worshipped the sword of Attila, for they were Huns, when all was said and done. It also reminded me of something I had in my sea-chest — if I still had a sea-chest.

The old man gathered his cloak round him then spoke, while Jutos translated; it was the usual welcome and prettily enough done, so I gave him back the same.

He spoke again and Jutos answered him, then shrugged and turned to me.

‘He wonders what you have to trade. You may count so far as hospitality, but if those are your men we found, they will perhaps need food and other things. Can you trade?’

Ospak grunted, for he did not like all this talk of trade, being — like the rest of the Oathsworn — a man who preferred to consider what he wanted down the length of a blade. Unless, as I told him sharply now in Norse, he was outnumbered and out-ranged, which he admitted with a scowl and another grunt.

I did not know what was left to trade and thought a salting of truth was best, so I said there had been riches enough aboard the ship before it was smashed and was sure all could not have been lost.

Jutos rattled this off to his father, who considered it for while, the blood-egg sun doing things to his face that would have sent bairns screaming into their ma’s skirts. Then he spoke again and Jutos turned, almost resignedly.

‘He wishes to know if you will trade the Mazur girl and what you will take,’ he said. I looked at him steadily, so that he knew the answer without me having to speak. With a brief, almost relieved nod, he told his father, who grunted and muttered.

‘He says,’ Jutos told me, ‘that you northers are hard to bargain with. He is fated to see unusual slaves he cannot get. He does not wish to meet any more of you on this trip.’

Ospak chuckled at that. ‘Well, we are equal matched then,’ he answered, grinning to take the sting from it, ‘for this is one norther who does not wish to see a face like that again. How did he come by it?’

I closed my eyes and waited for the storm this would cause, but I had it wrong, for it was no insult to note this singular face.

‘He is one of the horde of Bulcsu,’ Jutos answered and the old man’s head came up at the sound of that name. ‘Last of the Seven.’

‘Bulcsu,’ the old man repeated and then began talking, in his own tongue, a great solemn, slow-rolling chant, thick as a saga tale and, though none of the three of us understood it, we were all struck by the telling of it.

He was as good as any skald versing on the giant Ymir whose skull forms the dome of the world, or of Muspell, at once burning and freezing, or of Odin and the gods of Asgard. But the old man’s tale was no misted saga, but recent, from his own life and, as he poured it out, thick-voiced with remembering, Jutos translated the meat of it.

The old man told of Lechfeld some twenty summers before, when the Magyar, the fire of Attila still coursing in their veins, had come to take on the might of Otto the Great, the present Otto’s father. The old man spoke lovingly of the clans all arrayed and the colours they wore and the myriad tiny, fluttering signal banners of the chieftains, Lel, Sur and Bulcsu.

He brayed and clashed his palms together to bring back the horns and the drums and the brass discs they struck, howled out the old warcries, showed how they were wild to fight. He stood up, no longer stiff but straddle-legged, riding an unseen horse, firing backwards as he feigned flight with all the others — twenty thousand and more — on that day.

I had heard of this battle. In the end, the bowmen on their light horses, fur hats scrugged down tight on their heads, had been mastered by the solid ranks of Saxlanders, had hurled themselves like heroes to be cut down, until only a handful were left, the chiefs among them.

Jutos, grim as a dark cliff and his eyes bright with water, watched the old man slump; someone brought him drink and it ran down the harsh grooves off his chin.

‘The Saxlanders cut the ears and noses off the survivors and sent seven back to our ruling prince of that time, Taksony,’ Jutos added blankly. ‘They hung Lel and Bulcsu from a tower in Regensberg. Sur came back as one of the seven, and he was killed for causing such a tragedy, for he was not of the line of Arpad. The last warriors who survived that day were honoured for their courage, all the same, and my father is the only one left. The Magyar have stayed in their homeland since that day and have no love for the Saxlanders.’

‘Heya,’ said Ospak, his Irisher soul stirred by such a tale and the old man raised his head and nodded acknowledgement to that salute.

‘Since then, we have travelled the Amber Road as traders,’ Jutos went on. ‘There are more of us now. All the men of this clan who rode with my father were killed in that battle, but slowly we grow stronger. One day, we will be strong enough to pay the Saxlanders back.’

I looked at the old man, milk-white in the dusk, slumped and spent now, sitting in a ring of some forty wagons, with horses, men, women and bairns. I thought of Hestreng and how we were not so far from each other, Magyar and Northman.

Horses were brought, but I told Ospak to stay with the Mazur girl. Stone-faced Jutos sat on his horse and said nothing as I climbed onto mine, flanked by a half-dozen Magyars armed with lances and bows and wearing their pointed helmets with elaborate nasals. Bokeny rose stiffly and nodded to his son, who returned it. Then he hirpled away to his tent, leaving me with the vague idea that some message had passed between them.

In silence, we rode out into the dying day and, for a while, nothing more was said. That let me work on how this horse moved, for it was a rangy, bow-nosed creature, not one of the short, stiff-maned, fast-gaited ponies I knew. After a while, I felt Jutos arrive at my knee, where he cleared his throat, like the dull rumble of distant thunder. Here it comes, I was thinking.

‘There is a lot of happening up and down the Odra for the time of year,’ he said in a low, even voice. ‘Particularly when the rains have been so bad.’

I stayed silent, feeling my stomach turn slowly, like a dead sheep in the river; I gave great attention to the sitting of my horse.

‘We came past an old settlement we had visited before,’ he went on, ‘and found it burned out and everything dead. Everything. Children, dogs. Everything.’

He shook his head with the memory of it and I swallowed the sick rise of shame in me.

‘There are riders out everywhere,’ he added, ‘from the Pols. A force is out and not a small one — hundreds. I have not seen so many since the Pols marched this way two summers ago, heading for war in the north against the Pomorze.’

‘I have heard the Pols are swallowing other tribes,’ I said, in order to say something and give away nothing at all, even though the thought of hundreds of Pols searching along the Odra was a chill knife in my bowels. I had not thought they would be so stirred by the burning of a Sorb village. I had it right — they were not and the next thing Jutos said made that clear.

‘They seek a Mazur girl and a band of northers,’ he said flatly and that made me look at him. Here it was, then, out in the open. I waited to see what came next, strung tight as a drawn bowstring.

‘You have eaten salt with us,’ Jutos went on, slowly, carefully, like a man picking his way across a marsh. ‘This means you will come to no harm from us, neither you nor your band by the river. My father, of course, is more honourable than I am, for he sought to buy the Mazur girl and so save your life; I argued that it was too much danger brought on us, but he insisted.’

I saw he was not lying and was both surprised and a little shamed at my thoughts, which had been along the path of how their elaborate hospitality was more to do with fearing to tangle with a band of armed growlers like the Oathsworn. Now I saw they pitied us and regarded us as already dead, which was not a comforting thing.

‘Then we will trade for food and be gone,’ I answered, ‘before you are made sorry for your hospitality.’

Jutos crooked one leg casually over the saddle, an elegance I envied.

‘Of course,’ he added, white teeth gleaming in the dusk of his face, ‘our obligation ends when trading ends. Usually, we allow a day between us before considering matters.’

I rode the gentle threat and stared him down.

‘We are not so generous,’ I gave him back, ‘feeling half that is distance enough, should one side feel aggrieved.’

The dog, Sipos, ambled over to run alongside me and Jutos widened his grin.

‘He likes you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you have something to trade for him?’

I shook my head, feeling annoyed at the smile of this man, bland as oatmeal and curved sharp as a sabre blade.

‘I like dogs,’ I answered. ‘All us northers do. With some winter roots, a peck of salt and the lees of old wine they make good eating.’

Scowling, he jerked the head of his horse savagely round and away and left me staring down into the mournful eyes of the dog until I blinked and looked away.

The rest of the ride was silence until, in the gathering dusk, Jutos hissed out a command and men galloped off and the rest of us reined in. A few minutes later, a rider returned and spoke briefly to Jutos, who turned to me.

‘Your men have made camp, but lit no fires,’ he declared, almost admiringly. ‘None of my scouts have been able to approach closely without being seen. Perhaps you should ride out and hail them before there is unpleasantness.’

I was pleased as I edged the horse forward — and not a little anxious that Kuritsa would do something rash in the twilight, for I was sure he was watching. When I could no longer see the Magyars behind me, I decided enough was enough and bellowed out my name.

The voice, soft and almost in my ear, made me leap and teeter in the saddle with the shock of it.

‘I see you, Orm Bear Slayer.’

Finn slithered out of the dark, with Kuritsa close behind, arrow nocked.

‘Good to find you alive,’ Finn growled with a grin. ‘With a horse, too. And new friends.’

‘Magyar traders,’ I answered flatly, as if such a thing was no more than to be expected from the likes of me. ‘Ospak and Dark Eye are safe in their camp. How are things with us?’

Kuritsa shook his head admiringly.

‘I had heard that if Orm Trader fell in a barrel of shite he would find the only bag of silver in it,’ he laughed. ‘Until now, I had not believed it.’

I acknowledged the praise with a nod and a grin, but kept looking at Finn for an answer to my question.

‘Four dead,’ he said flatly. ‘Or so we believe. They were the weakest of the sick and have not, like you and Ospak, surfaced from the river.’

‘The ship?’

He did not answer, but turned away, so I rode down to the river with him, past men iron-grey in the growing dark, shields up and helms on. One or two grinned and called greetings; just as many gave me blank looks, or even scowls.

Short Serpent was snagged tight to the heavy bole of a tree, which was furred green with moss. Slimy clumps of frog eggs drifted in tattered skeins along the riverbank, while the river itself growled and spat still, a mud-brown coil like a snake’s back.

Men clustered round the drakkar, leaping on and off her, fetching and carrying; a smaller group stood by the prow — Onund, Crowbone, Trollaskegg and Abjorn — who turned as I came up.

‘Odin’s arse,’ Onund said, his pleasure as clear as a dog’s. ‘Here is a good sight.’

‘Doubled,’ Finn said, ‘for he has Ospak safe and found us food and shelter.’

‘If my sea-chest survived,’ I added and Trollaskegg said that it had and a lot of gear had been saved. Crowbone, eyes bright, nudged Abjorn.

‘See? You owe me six ounces of silver — I said he was not dead.’

Abjorn looked at me and shrugged apologetically.

‘It was a wild river,’ he said by way of excuse, ‘but I am glad it did not claim you, for we have been holding a Thing on it and could not agree on who would now lead.’

‘Aye, well, include me out of that now,’ shouted a cheerful voice and Styrbjorn hurled something over the side of the ship, then followed it, both splashing wetly on the bank and spraying mud, to a chorus of curses. Undaunted, Styrbjorn hefted his prize and held it out to Onund; it was his carving of the elk head, antlers proud against the wood.

‘Yours,’ he said. ‘All that is left of this ship.’

‘The ship is exactly like my carving,’ Onund agreed, mournful as a wet dog. ‘Finished.’

I did not need him to tell me that, for the whole proud curve of the bow was staved in and the water frothed and gurgled in and down the length of it. The prow beast, white with gouges, still snarled even though the teeth in its mouth were broken and it hung by a splinter.

‘We could cut new planks,’ argued Trollaskegg and looked desperately at Crowbone for support, but even little Olaf knew, with all the wisdom of his twelve years, that we could not repair his wonderful ship.

‘Short Serpent put up a good fight against that tree,’ Crowbone said softly and Abjorn picked up the elk head.

‘Lash that to a spear shaft,’ I told him. ‘We will have new fierceness yet. Light fires in hollows where they will not be seen — these Magyars are safe enough, but others are out hunting us — then give me half-a-dozen men with drag-poles to fetch back supplies. Finn — you command here. I will go back and stay with the Magyars, for the trading.’

Their faces asked all the questions, but their mouths stayed shut. Abjorn simply nodded and went off to see some of it done, handing his armful of prow beast to Onund, who gave a grunt and sloshed off to higher ground to see to the camp, rolling in his great, bear way. Crowbone and Trollaskegg stood, twin pillars of misery, looking at the ship.

‘When it is empty of everything we can use,’ I said, knowing I sounded crow-voiced and that they would not realise it was from the river and not from harshness, ‘cut it free and let the river take it. With luck, the Saxlanders will see it — or find it if it makes it to the opposite bank — and think us dead.’

I found my sea-chest, and Red Njal sitting on it, with Finnlaith and Murrough nearby. All the Irishers were happy to hear that Ospak had survived. Alyosha and Kaelbjorn Rog and others came up to see for themselves the marvellous event that was Orm, returned from the river with Ospak in tow. Not one of them, or anyone else, cared whether Dark Eye had lived or died, I noted.

I rummaged in the chest and found what I was looking for in the last of my treasures — a handful of hacksilver and three armrings, one of them already cut almost to nothing.

But there was a torc, too, and I took it out so that it gleamed pale in the last light of day. The Irishers were drawn to it like bright-eyed magpies and it has to be said it was a fine piece I had guarded carefully, an old necklet taken from Atil’s hoard.

Not as fine as the one I wore round my neck, the torc of a jarl — even with its dragon-head ends battered and the twisted length of it nicked and cut — but a rich thing, of gold and ambermetal, which the Romans call electrum, with bird-head ends. It was those I had remembered, seeing the old man’s cloak-pin.

Jutos’ eyes widened when I presented it to him back at the camp as what I had to trade. He turned it over and over in his hands, the firelight sliding along it and folk coming up to look and admire. I saw them point to the bird-heads and heard the word turul repeated in awe and wonder. It turned out that I had been right — this bird, the turul, was worshipped by the Magyar.

Jutos wanted to know where it had come from and I gave him it straight, so he would know he dealt with more than just another trader from the north. The treasure hoard of Attila, I told him and watched his eyes grow round and black as old ice, for Attila was as good as a god to them.

Then he looked at Crowbone, who had come along because he had never seen Magyars before, and you could see the thoughts flit across his face like hound and hare, for the distant, misted tales of the Oathsworn and the strange odd-eyed boy who was one of them had suddenly arrived at the fire where he was sitting.

So he went to the old man with the torc in his hand while we ate and drank in a dusk thick and soft as unseen smoke, with the quarrelling of women and the bark of dogs comforting as a cloak. Enough food for a night’s decent meal was sent off back to the Oathsworn, so I was content enough with the start of this Thing.

Later, in the black of night, we went away from the others, to where the pool shimmered and there she moved to me. Others moved, too, so that the beech mast rustled; there was a laugh in the throat here, a groan from over there.

There was no love-talk — little talk at all between us, though she murmured soft, cooing sounds in her own tongue — nor even much kissing or hugging, but we moved as if we had known each other before and there was little need of any of the rest, for my heart was huge and urgent and in my throat and I knew it was the same for her.

She was white and thin, all planes and shadows, smelled of woodsmoke and warmth and crushed grass and there was not night long enough for us. As the dawn silvered up I lay back, with her breathing slow and even on my chest, snugged up under the same cloak.

‘What will you do with me?’ she asked.

‘Give me a minute,’ I answered. ‘Perhaps two.’

She thumped me on the chest, no more than the flutter of a bird wing and I laughed.

‘Will you take me back to my father?’

‘Was that what this was about?’ I asked, made moody by her now. She struck me again and this time it was a small, hard nut of knuckle that made me wince.

‘You think that?’ she demanded and her eyes were big and round and bright in the dark. Just her eyes alone made me ashamed of it, so that I shook my head.

‘If you are not taking me back,’ she went on, slow and soft in the dark, ‘then why am I here?’

I told her; because the Sea-Finn’s drum had said to bring her. She was silent, thinking.

‘Did it say to bring me to your home, after the ice-headed boy is found?’

That made me blink a bit, thinking of Thorgunna and what she would have to say about a second woman — wife, I realised with a shock, for I would have to marry Dark Eye. I was still thinking of an answer when she shivered.

‘I will not marry you,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ I wanted to know, chastened and wondering if she could read thoughts. She raised her head for a moment, then pointed out across the water of the tarn, where a mallard drake, all jewel-flashing in green and purple, swung down into the waters with a hissing splash.

‘That is why not,’ she said. The drake made for the nearest of the ducks and mounted her, vicious and uncaring, leaving her half-drowned and squawking.

‘That is the lot of such as me,’ she said, ‘no matter whose I am at the time. A strange woman in a house of women. The men will all want to mount me, the women to peck my feathers off.’

Half-sick with the truth of it, I growled some bluster about what would happen to any who treated her in such a way, but she laid her head on my chest again and I could feel her soft smile.

‘I do not know what path I am to take,’ she answered. ‘I am away from my people and cannot go back to them, since that would start a war. I am Mazur and if I am to marry I do not intend to do it in a land of ice.’

She stopped and looked into my face, her eyes looming like a doe’s.

‘But there will be a child,’ she declared with certainty and I felt the skin-crawling whenever seidr presented itself to me. ‘It will be a son and I can only offer it a safe place if I go with you.’

She stopped and shivered. ‘Iceland,’ she said. ‘A country made from ice.’

I laughed, more from relief at being able to steer off the topic we had been on.

‘It is not made of ice,’ I told her. ‘Anyway, I am not from Iceland. Onund is.’

‘Somewhere as cold,’ she muttered, snuggling tight to me. ‘At the edge of the world.’

I liked the feeling and pulled her closer still.

‘Iceland is not at the edge,’ I answered, drifting lazily. ‘Near the centre. North of Iceland is the maelstrom. You follow that star there.’ I pointed to the bright North Star and she looked, squinting.

‘What is the maelstrom?’

I told her; the place where the giant women, Fenja and Menja, turn the great millwheel Grotti, blindly churning out the last order they were given before the ship carrying them all sank — to make salt. Which is why the sea tastes the way it does. The maelstrom is a great whirlpool caused by them turning and turning the handle far beneath the waves.

Sleepily, she laughed. ‘Good tale. The Christ worshippers, though, say the centre of the world is in Jorsalir, where their White Christ was nailed to his bits of wood.’

‘What do you believe?’ I asked, but there was no reply; she slept, breathing soft and slow and I began to wonder if it was not the will of the gods to bring her back to Hestreng. What other reason could the Sea-Finn’s drum have had? It was never going to be possible to travel all the way across the land of the Pols to her own Mazur tribe, hunted every step of the way.

Of course, the gods laughed while we slept, were still laughing when the sun strengthened, rich and red-gold and we dressed and moved back to the others, me prepared to endure the jibes from Ospak and Crowbone.

I started to hear the gods cackling when I saw Crowbone rise to his feet, slow and stiff, as if he had spotted a draugr coming across the space between the wagons. But he was not staring at us, but off to our right, where I saw the old man tottering forward with his two warrior pillars and his son.

Even then I thought Crowbone had spotted the old man’s face and had been stunned by it, for it was a swung stick to the senses, that face, and I was chuckling when I came up.

‘He is not half as fierce as he looks,’ I said. ‘I would not worry over much.’

Crowbone looked at me, then back to the old man, who came up closer to us.

‘Nose,’ Crowbone said, pointing and I turned.

The shock of it dropped my jaw; the gods’ laughter grew harsh and loud as disturbed ravens.

The old man had come in his finery, from brocaded coat to red-leather riding boots and fine-hilted sabre. Round his neck he already wore the bird-ended torc, to show he had accepted the trade and we would now haggle only over the price.

But his last piece of jewellery was what staggered those who knew it by sight. Bound by a blue-silk ribbon, carefully tied to show his lack of ears, was the final statement on his flag of a face.

Sigurd’s silver nose.