The White Raven (27 page)

'A good tale,' I said to Olaf. 'You gave him what he wanted and not every man can do that for a dying friend. You have a gift.'

Crowbone, his different-coloured eyes glittering bright, shook his head, made so white in the light that he looked like a little old man.

'Sometimes,' he whispered, 'it is an affliction.'

There was talk of treating our dead in the old way, for we were all sure the people of the village would dig up the bodies and strip them of their finery. Vladimir refused, since that would have involved demolishing a building for the timbers to burn him.

'You have stripped them of winter feed, so that they will have to slaughter what livestock they have left,'

growled Sigurd, annoyed that his men might not lie peacefully under the snow for long. 'They will be eating their belts and lacing thongs by Spring — what does one building mean now?'

Vladimir folded his arms and glared back at his
druzhina
captain. 'They are still my brother's people —

but I will rule them one day. I want them to fear me — but not hate me.'

Sigurd could not see the sense of it, that was clear — I was having trouble working out this princely way of ruling myself — but Jon Asanes made Vladimir smile and nod.

'The Prince is a shepherd to his people,' he observed. 'A shepherd fleeces his flock. He does not butcher them.'

I left them weaving words round it, feeling like a man walking on greased ice. I knew what Jon and Vladimir and little Olaf did was the future of the world, the way jarls and princes and kings did things these days and in the ones to come. I also knew I did not have one clear idea of how to do it myself and that Jon Asanes was more fitting to be a jarl of this new age than I was.

But not a jarl of the Oathsworn. Not them, stamping their feet against the cold as they stood in sullen clumps round the dark scars of new-mounded graves, hacked out with sweat and axes from a reluctant earth.

These were men of the old ways.

I took the chance to braid them back to one with a few choice words on breaking oaths and what it had cost. No-one needed much telling; all those who had run off with Martin and Thorkel had died and Finn made it glaringly clear that anyone else who tried the same would not live to feel Odin's wrath.

We spent the morning sorting gear and finding new ways to wrap against the cold. Then we untied the tether ropes, bashing the stakes out of the frozen ground, chipped ice out of the horse's hooves with a seax and lurched off south, into the steppe.

I twisted in the saddle once, to stare back at the settlement. On the earthwork walls I saw a figure and, though I could not clearly make it out, I knew it was Tien and felt his eyes on me long after he had vanished from sight.

The steppe spread out like a sea, like frozen waves. The sky was so big, the clouds in it rushing, whipped into strange shapes and sliding fast, like driven woodsmoke.

'Only the wind saves us,' Gyrth noted gloomily which, since it made life colder still, brought grunts and growls of disagreement.

'Snow has a plan,' Gyrth went on between gasps, his breath smoking and freezing his beard to spines. 'It wants to cloak the world in white, purest white, like a bleached linen sheet — but the wind says no. We will have some more here than there, says the wind. Get it off that roof and on that tree, says the wind. The snow hates the wind but cannot stop it from blowing. Which is why, when it is a windless day in winter, you can hear the snow sigh, for it knows the wind will come and make a mess of all its work.'

Which was nearly good enough to laugh some warm into us, but not quite. Our fingers and toes ached and we bound them in
wadmal
and layered grass between, the fuzzed tops of the yellow steppe grass, which was the best barrier against the cold. It kept toes from turning black, but made our feet so fat they would not fit in the stirrups.

One day merged into the next, shadows of life. Horses died, one after the other and the men on them now staggered and stumbled on foot. One or two of the
druzhina
threw their armour away because the long skirts and the weight of it made walking twice as hard. The Oathsworn, used to walking, jeered at them — then Sigurd killed one of the
druzhina
as a warning and that ended all laughter and armour-throwing.

So we listened to the snow sigh.

Sixteen more men died in as many days, mostly the
druzhina,
though two of the Oathsworn had to be left, too stiff even to be laid out flat, arms broken so as to fold them on their breasts. Klepp Spaki, blowing on his fingers, tapped out the runes of their names on small squares of bone — Halli was one and the other was Throst Silfra. Both just lay down, patiently waiting for the sweet relief from the hunger and cold, the gentle frozen sleep as the white raven folded them in huge wings.

Throst's closest oarmates, Tjorvir, Finnlaith and Ospak, threw some hacksilver into the shallow grave, then Finnlaith came to me, his wide face reddened with cold and buried in a tangled mass of cold-stiffened beard. His eyes were iced blue.

'It seems to us three that Throst also knew of Thorkel's treachery,' he said, which was flat-out bold enough to make me blink. These were words for an
Althing,
where convention kept the speaker from being killed.

'It is no surprise to us, then, that Odin took his luck,' he went on levelly. 'If more of those who came with Thorkel die, we want you to know, Jarl Orm, that it will be the wish of another god and not Odin's curse on an oath-breaker.'

Then he nodded and stumped off, leaving it clear to me that, if I could trust no others, I could depend on those three at my back.

It was, I noted wryly to myself, good to know. There were fewer now who could truly be depended on, even among the Oathsworn. Bone, blood and steel were all brittle in the cold and even the binding fear of the wrath of Odin was cracking. They had taken enough and all of us, hugging our shivers to ourselves, wondered whether we would do the same as Throst, this day or the next, just lie down and let our heart stop and think ourselves winners of that bargain. Some, I knew, wondered whether to let matters get that far.

Then there was the sabre and the runes on it. I took to wearing it, wrapped in the bundle Martin had made of it, looped over my shoulder like -a bow. Folk thought it was so it was handy for me to study the hilt, but the truth was that I just wanted it to look that way.

The truth was that the runes were useless, for we were coming down from the north and would have to reach Sarkel and track back to find Atil's howe. It was a truth I did not want men who were dying to know.

We stuck Klepp's runed squares on dead men's tongues, in the hope that we would be able to identify them on the way back, for the wolves would dig them up from the shallow scrapings we rolled them into.

There were a few who wondered if that was a waste of time and Klepp's talents, sure we would never be back in the warm lap of summer to howe their bones up properly.

The wind won and the land changed, from glaring white to patched brown and then to limitless miles of dun-coloured earth, frozen solid and dusted with snow, thick in drifts here and there. Leafless trees, squatting in sullen clumps, brushed their skeletal fingers across an icicle sky and the wind rattled the frozen stalks of yellow grass like chattering teeth.

'The whole world is ice,' whimpered Jon Asanes that night, shivering close to anyone he could find — as we all did — and the dung fires. Anyone close scooped it up as the horses dropped it, sticking it inside their clothes to leach the warmth and stop it freezing too hard to burn later. But the fodder was running out; horses were eating less and shitting less. Those that were not dying.

'This is nothing,' answered Onund Hnufa. 'I have hunted whales up where the ice forms mountains. I am an expert on ice.'

'Aye,' agreed Gizur, as if he had done the same, though he only wished he had.

'It is a world of ice, up there in Bjarmaland,' Onund went on, in a bass rumble like a mating seal. 'Sea ice forms in autumn and early winter, out of the milk sea, which is thick with grit ground out of the land by the moving ice.

'Fast ice is what we call ice that is anchored to land; it breaks up with tides in spring. Floes are large and flat bits of ice, like those tiles they make pictures with in the churches you spoke of, Trader. They are broken up by wind and wave and moved with the same.

'Pack ice is formed from floes that herd like sheep and are crushed against each other. There is pack ice a hand's breadth thick and more, yet which bends on waves, fitted to them like cloth.

'Ice grows old, too, like people. You need to see that if you plan on taking a ship near it. Young ice is clear, a hand-width thick and brittle as stale bread — you can carve through that easily enough. First-year ice is as thick as a man is long and at two years it is thicker still, stands higher in the water, has small puddles and bare patches and is the colour of Olaf's left eye. You sail far round that stuff if you are smart.'

Olaf smiled and winked his blue-green eye to let everyone see what Onund meant. He had wandered over from Vladimir's fire, attracted by the savoury smells from ours and offered a story for a bowl of what we had. He gulped and chewed it down even as it burned his lips.

'Good,' he said and then made the mistake of asking what it was.

'Does it matter?' Finn demanded with a grin, but the boy's pinched face was unsmiling when he replied.

'You have never been a thrall Finn Horsehead,' he said, serious as plague. 'It is never necessary to know what it is you are eating; it is, I have found, vital to know what it
was
.'

Grinning, Gyrth tossed him the frozen, bloodied paw of a deerhound. 'That's Other Dog,' he said, rheum-throated with the cold. 'Dog we ate yesterday.'

'The oldest ice is thicker than two men, one standing on the other's shoulders. It is sometimes as blue as the sky,' Onund continued, in a voice heavy with
heimthra,
the longing for things that have been and are now lost, perhaps forever.

'Enough ice talk,' muttered Kvasir. 'I am cold enough already.'

They called for Olaf's story while I was marvelling at old humpbacked Onund, a man who had walked on a mountain of ice and saw that it had puddles and bare patches and was coloured blue-green. Even the Great White did not bother him.

In the morning, after an hour of travel, the Khazar scouts came back, flogging their bone-thin horses into staggering runs towards us. They spoke urgently with Vladimir, who was perched on his horse like the white raven itself.

Later, warily, we came up on what the scouts had found; the remains of a couple of
wadmal
and
felt
tents, a litter of snow-dusted debris; a saddle, brassware, a wooden bowl, a sword stuck in the earth and abandoned to rust, the hub of a wheel with a couple of spokes left in it. There were dead horses, thin steppe ponies sprawled on their sides, their legs stuck out straight like carved wooden toys that had fallen over.

And there were sharpened stakes, each with a head screaming frozen pain at us from rimed faces.

'Anyone you know?' asked Dobrynya, moving his horse to my side. There was no-one we recognized, though Gyrth hefted the sword and said: 'This is a good north-made weapon, Jarl Orm.'

'Lambisson's men,' Finn said, squinting at the signs of it. 'This one has braids like Botolf — see. That's the way the Svears and Slavs do them. It was said Lambisson had many Baltic Slavs with him.'

'Horsemen took them by surprise, scattered them,' added Avraham, pointing out the signs of it. 'Probably they were in the rear of the column. Hard to say when this happened or where the rest of them went — the ground is too frozen. They were not after plunder, else that sword would not have been left.'

'A day ago,' Morut said, hunching himself into his furs. 'Two, perhaps. The wolves have already been at these heads and the wounds are still raw, so were done when the flesh was unfrozen, which would be only a matter of hours, but there is no snow in the eye-sockets. There are three hoof-prints showing the attackers went south. I could track them.'

'Do so,' ordered Dobrynya, then turned to Sigurd and me, while Avraham scowled at Morut for his cleverness.

'Whoever attacked them may still be close,' Dobrynya said. 'We will close up and keep watch.'

The Man-Hater women, I wanted to say, but decided not to. I did not worry as much as he over it —

those steppe ponies were proof that the women warriors were in as bad a condition as ourselves and, besides, Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter were so close now I could touch them if I shut my eyes and reached.

I shared this, quietly, with the rest of the Oathsworn, adding that the warrior-women might all be dead. I was thinking it would bring some cheer to the flames of the night's fire as we kicked snow off the earth to let it breathe a little smoke and ash.

'After all,' I declared brightly, 'if the
buran
didn't kill them, then the trek to here would. They would have had less fodder for those ponies and I am thinking most of them are on foot, if they live at all.'

'And a woman on foot,' Gyrth Steinnbrodir beamed, ignoring the scowls from Thorgunna and her sister,

'is an opportunity.'

Finn laughed, but you should never tempt the Norns. The next day, we stumbled over all our enemies at once.