Oathsworn 2 - The Wolf Sea (23 page)

Delighted, Botolf came and presented them to me for approval and I duly admired them. Behind, I saw the same giggling girls as before and, as he went off, they slid to his side. Svala snorted.

`That Thyra is always in rut, so she comes as no surprise — but Katla and Herdis have no right to be doing that,' she declared. 'Their mothers will be furious, to say nothing of their fathers. And Katla should know better, for she only has to look at a prick and her belly swells. She has two babes already and a stupid husband, though his brain is not so addled he'll assume another is his, too.'

It was the word 'prick' that did it. On her lips it would have made one of the Christ saints kick in the door of his own church. Dry-mouthed, I could only stare at her and she must have felt it, for she turned, saw my look . . . and looked down to where my new breeks, fat and striped as they were, could not hide what I was thinking.

A slow smile spread on her face and she looked me straight in the eye, put her head to one side and then laughed. 'As well you got some extra ells of material in the fork of those new breeks,' she said archly. 'Let us go into the city, for the walk will cool you, I am thinking.'

So we did that day. And the next. And the one after. We saw gold from Africa, leather from Spain, trinkets from Miklagard, linens and grain from the Fatamid lands, carpets from Armenia, glass and fruit from Syria, perfumes from the Abbasids, pearls from the sea in the south, rubies and silver from even further east.

On the fourth day, Brother John came with us, for we still searched for the strange Fatty Breeks and, though we again discovered nothing of that, I learned of the lands of Cathay, from which poured shiny-glazed pottery, the feathers of peacocks, excellent saddles, a thick, heavy cloth called
felt
and richer stuff worked with fine gold and silver wires. There was also a strange, purple-coloured stick with leaves known as
rhubarb
which was worth its weight in gold — though I did not know why, for it clapped your jaws with its tartness and made your belly gripe.

There was also the achingly familiar: the amber, wax, honey, ivory, iron and good furs from my homeland. Most painful of all, though, was the sight of speckled stone, the fine whetstones of the north. I snuffled them like a pig in a trough, fancied I was drinking in the faint scent of a northern sea, a shingle strand, even snow on high mountain rocks.

It was that night, thick with evening mist, floating with songs from the firepits around my own wadmal hov, that I kissed her on soft lips, at a lonely spot near the river, keening with insect songs.

It was that night that she panted and gasped and writhed against me, while at the same time warning that nothing must happen — then gripping me in a strong hand, like she was about to chop wood, she gave three or four deft strokes, for all the world as if she milked an annoyed goat, and there I was, gasping, squint-eyed and bucking like a mad rabbit, emptied.

It had been a time since, I consoled myself, while she chuckled and said that it was for the best — yet while she spoke to me like a polite matron, her lower body had not stopped twisting and grinding against me, so that when I put my hand down, she guided it to a spot and gave a gasp.

After that, she became a moaning snake woman, until, suddenly, she subsided, panting and smiling at me from flame-red cheeks, her eyes bright, her face sheened with sweat. Then she blew a strand of hair off her face with a sharp littlèpfft' and heaved a sigh. 'Lovely,' she said brightly. 'That was good.'

Ìt could be better,' I said, lost in those eyes, desperate for what they could give, for what they promised.

For love, which I felt once with the doomed Hild, for a moment as brief as the flick of a gnat's wing. My head drowned in a sea of dreams.

`So you think,' she said, 'but that's as good as it gets.'

Àfter we are married, I shall expect more,' I answered, astounded at myself. I don't know what reaction I expected, but the one I got made me blink. She laughed.

`No,' she said. 'Do not think of it. It will not be approved.'

`Why? Am I not good enough?'

She stuck the tip of her tongue between her teeth and grinned at me. 'You are a jarl-hero, are you not?

That's good enough. But you may have to kill more than a white bear to get what you want.'

She mocked me and I was not so young as I had been when first I had boarded Einar's ship, that I would rise to it. Instead, I wondered why she made light of it, but nothing more was said, though it was plain that she was a treasure hoard as removed from me as any belonging to Attila.

Nothing more was said because she had recovered her breath and desire and was starting to guide my hand again. But for all that she was sticky as a
rumman
fruit, it would have taken Miklagard engineers to storm that citadel — and I was too easy to disarm.

Afterwards, as I lay listening to the squeal-clunk of the
norias,
feeling the night breeze drift her hair on my cheek, I counted that night one of the best times I ever had, for I did not dream at all, whereas afterwards, I did not spend one night where I slept without my head crowded with the dead.

I should have known then, of course, that Odin sleeps, as they say, with his one eye open, waiting for his chance to punish the smug. It was a harsh raven trick when it came —and heralded by the arrival of a banner with that black-omened bird on it.

Svala and I had parted with the first thin-milk smear of dawn and later, just as I was eating the day-meal by the firepit with the rest of the band, she walked up as if nothing had happened.

Radiant and smiling, she held out a swathe of folded white cloth, while I became conscious of the others looking at me looking at her. I saw Short Eldgrim nudge Sighvat and whisper something I was glad I couldn't hear.

Ì have heard tales of this brave band,' she said, cool and clean as new snow, 'but saw that you lacked one thing. So I have made one for you.' And she unfurled a strip of dagged white cloth embroidered with a thick black raven.

`Heya,' said Finn admiringly and the others rose up, wiping their greased fingers on beards and tunics, to admire the stitching.

I managed to stammer my thanks and she smiled, even more sweetly than before.

`You need a good long pole for it,' she said archly, looking straight at me. 'Do you know where to find one? If not, I do.'

I was dry-mouthed at the cheek of her and felt the blood rush to my face, for her words had inspired exactly what she sought. I sat quickly before it became obvious. There was the taste of
rumman
fruit in my mouth when I managed to stammer my thanks.

She left, swishing the hem of her dress over the grass, and I felt Sighvat come up behind me. He fingered the new banner and nodded.

`Fine work,' he offered, then looked at me. On his shoulder, a raven fluffed and preened. 'That one is a danger,' he went on, which made me blink and almost spit back angrily at him to mind his own business, save that I had good respect for Sighvat and what he knew. He saw the questions and the anger in my face and stroked the head of the raven.

`Neither of the ravens will sit near her,' he went on. 'Now one is gone, for I set it to watching the jarl's witch-mother and have never seen it since. There is something Other at work here, Trader.'

Coldness crept into my belly and crouched there. I knew the Other well enough and the sudden vision-flash of Hild, black against black, that snake-hair blowing with no wind, almost made me drop the new banner in the firepit.

Big Botolf scooped it up and put it back in my lap, grinning. 'A fine banner. Do you want me to find a pole for it? I was thinking of putting a new shaft on this heft-seax and if I made it a long one, there would be a weapon at the end of the banner-pole, which would be useful.'

There and then, to his delight, I made him banner-bearer and he was still grinning when Kvasir trundled up, saw the raven flag hanging in Botolf's griddle-iron fists and grunted his appreciation.

`Just in time, Trader,' he said, 'for another jarl has arrived — a score of good
hafskipa
are now in the harbour and a thousand people, no less.'

This was news right enough and the tale of it bounced from head to head. Jarl Brand of Hovgarden, a Svear chieftain who had backed out of the fighting there for a while, had gone west and south, down past the lands of al-Hakam of Cordoba, through the narrows of Norvasund, which the Romans call the Pillars of Hercules and into the Middle Sea, with twenty ships and a thousand people, at least six hundred of them warriors.

Suddenly, in the middle of a distant, Muspell-hot country of the
Sarakenoi,
there were more good Norse than I had ever seen in one place in my life.

We stood with the throng and watched him and his hard men come up the road from the port to the city of Antioch, he on a good horse, they striding out, despite the heat, in full helms and gilt-dagged mail and shields.

He was ice-headed, was the young Jarl Brand Olafsson, as white then as he would be later in life, when he had become one of the favoured men of Olof Skotkonung, King of the Svears and Geats both and called the Lap King, they say, because he sat in the lap of King Harald Bluetooth's son, Svein Forkbeard, and begged for a kingdom.

Brand's face was already sun-red, though he had wisely covered his arms and he wore a splendid helm worked with gold and silver. He was glittering, this silver jarl. Gold sparkled at his throat and wrists and seven bands of silver circled each arm of the bright red tunic he wore. I watched him and his men march up the road and over the bridge into the city, to be presented in all pomp to the Roman general who commanded everything here, which honour Skarpheddin had not been given.

I ate the dust of their passing and smiled wryly at how I was a jarl also, which was the old way, when anyone with their buttocks not hanging out their breeks and two men to call on could be a jarl. Now the jarls wanted to be like the Romans and make empires. There was, I was seeing, less and less place for the likes of the Oathsworn.

Then Finn gave a curse pungent enough to strip the gilding off Brand's fancy mail, staring into the swirl of yellow dust like a prow-man searching for shoals in a mist.

I followed where he looked and saw a man limping along in the wake of the Svear chieftain, eating even more dust than I was, leading a pack as lean and wolf-hungry as he seemed himself. I did not see what he wore, nor what battle-gear his men carried. I saw only the curve of the sabre at his side.

Starkad was here.

8 It was the final day of the Greeks' Paschal ceremonies, which had gone on for weeks, it seemed to us Norse, complete with banging bells and swinging gold ornaments reeking incense and priests wearing so much gold in their robes that we were tempted to storm them then and there.

There had been an image of the dead Christ in a wonderfully decorated coffin, taken in procession with chanting and the beating of a book, which Brother John —

with a hawk and a spit to them — said was the Greek idea of Gospels. It was only two years since I had known what a book was.

There had been singing and a scattering of bay leaves. There had been vigils and fasts and feasts. Of course, we had to join in, being good Christ-men, but I saw offerings of budded boughs being floated down the Orontes in honour of Ostara when it was thought no one could see. Not all of those who did it were our own Odinsmenn.

Brother John didn't care, for he regarded the Greeks as heretics and they, who considered most western Christ-men to be misguided, looked on him as worse. Come to that, every Christ-man seemed to look on the likes of Brother John as no true follower of the Dead God, which is why we all liked the little priest and had let him prime-sign us Christians. The shackles of that signing, never tight, were now falling away, I saw, for the reason we had done it had clearly failed: the Odin-oath was as binding as ever.

So we stood in the hot spring sunshine in our finery and watched the Greek priests, sweating in gold-dripping robes heavier than mail, wobble round Antioch's streets with their ikons and their Christ in a box.