The White Raven (34 page)

'Shite,' I clarified and he cracked the ice of his face with a smile, then left me to my own awkward business.

An hour later, at the lip of a great scar of
balka,
the axle pin on a cart snapped and the wheel came off.

Ref Steinsson took an axe and the handle of another and fashioned a new pin with delicate, skilled strokes, while men heaved and strained to unload the cart then lift it and put the wheel on again.

Red Njal, crimson with effort, looked up at me, then to where Olaf stood, a quiet smile on his face.

'Shite,' said Red Njal, bitterly accusing and I shrugged. If this was as bad as it got . . .

'Heya, Trader — look at that.'

Hauk Fast-Sailor, arms full of bundle from the unloaded cart, nodded across the steppe with his chin.

'The
djinn,
Trader — remember them?'

I remembered them, and the little Bedu tribesman Aliabu telling us of the invisible demons who could never touch the earth, whose passing was marked by the swirl of dust and sand. For a moment, the memory of Serkland heat was glorious.

The snow swirled up in an ice crystal dance. Those who had never fared farther from home than this —

most of these new Oathsworn, it came to me — gawped both at the dance of it and at Hauk and me, realizing now just how far-travelled we were, to have seen
djinn
in the Serkland desert.

'I did not know the
djinn
were here, too,' Hauk said, grunting with the effort of moving the bundles. 'Lots of them, it seems.'

I did not like it and did not know why. Snow curled in little eddies and rose in the air, dragging my eyes up to a pewter sky and the figure flogging a staggering horse towards us and yelling something we could not hear.

Work stopped; the wheel was on, but the pin still had to be hammered in and all eyes turned on the horse and rider, the frantic fever of them soaking unease into us.

It was Morut the tracker, shouting as he came up, his voice suddenly whipped towards us by the wind.

'The
buran
is here!'

We had just enough time to find shelter. Just enough before it pounced on us, hard as the lash of a whip, a scour of ice that shrieked like frustrated Valkyries.

We unhitched the ponies and dragged and pushed them down the V-shaped
balka,
taller than three men and so steep that most of us went down it on our arses. Those too slow were moaning in agony at the barbs of flying ice; horses screamed, flanks bloodied by it. We huddled, people and beasts together, while the world screamed in white fury.

Light danced like laughter on the water, the sea creamed round the skerries and d drakkar
bustled with life on the edge of a curve of beach. I watched the boy stand in the lee of the ship,
up to his calves in cold water, clutching a bundle and his uncertainty tight to himself, his shoes
round his neck.

Someone leaned from the boat, yelled angrily at him. Someone else thrust out a helping hand
and he took it, was pulled aboard. The drakkar oars came out, dipped and sparkled; the dragon
walked down the fjord.

Me. It was me, leaving Bjornshafen with Einar the Black and the Oathsworn on board the
Fjord Elk. I was young . . .

'Fifteen,' said the one-eyed man. He was tall and under the blue, night-dark cloak he exuded
a strength that spoke of challenges mastered. Little of his body showed, other than a hand,
gloved and clutching a staff.

His single eye, peering like a rat from the smoked curl of hair framing his face, shaded by the
brim of the broad hat he wore, was blue as a cloudless sky and piercing. I knew him.

'All Father,' I said and he chuckled. One Eye, Greybeard, the Destroyer, The Furious One.

Frenzy.

Odin.

'Part of him and all of that,' he answered. He nodded at the scene, which wavered and
swirled as if the sudden wind ruffled it, like the reflection in a pool. •

'The White Christ priest with Gudleif,' he said and I saw the head on a pole, a head which
had once been Gudleif, the man who had raised me as a fostri. Caomh, the Irisher thrall who
had once been a priest — always a priest, he used to say — stood beside the horror Einar had
created and watched us row away.

'Bjornshafen was woven together after Gudleirs sons died and the White Christ priest did it,
so that they are all. followers of the One God now.'

He said it bitterly, this Father of the Aesir. Why did he permit this White Christ, this Jesus
from the soft south? He was Odin, after all . . .?

'We wear what the Norns weave, even gods,' he answered. 'The old Sisters grow weary, want
to lay down their loom, perhaps, and can only do that when the line of the Yngling kings is
ended.'

It was a long line. Crowbone, great-grandson for Harald Fairhair, was part of it. Did the
Norns seek to kill him, too?

One-Eye said nothing, which annoyed me. You would think a god would know something
about such matters, about such a rival as the Christ.

He grunted with annoyance. 'I know enough to know that enough is not yet enough. I know
enough to know what I may not do and that is true wisdom.'

Something rumbled, thunder deep and a grey wedge pushed forward from shadows. Amber
in stone, the eyes looked me over and the steam from its grey muzzle flickered as the wolf licked
the god's gloved hand.

'See, Freki,' said One Eye, 'she is coming back.'

In the wind, a shredded blackness fought forward, descending in starts and jumps until it
thumped on his shoulder. The black, unwinking eye regarded me briefly, then it bent and nibbled
One Eye's ear, while he nodded.

Munin, who flies the world and remembers everything inside that tiny feathered skull,
returning to the ear of All Father Odin with a beak like a carving of ebony, whispering of slights
and wrongs and warriors for Valholl still unslain. I felt no fear, which was strange enough to
make me realize this was the dreamworld of the Other.

'So it is,' answered One Eye, as if I had spoken. 'And you want to know what will happen.

That, of course, is in the hands of the Norns.'

'Silver,' I said and, though there was a whole babble of words, of questions that should have
come from me, that seemed to be enough and he nodded.

'Silver,' he replied. 'They can weave even that, the Sisters, but they weave blind and in the
dark, which helps me. The silver has to be cursed, of course, otherwise it will not work for this
weaving.'

I understood nothing.

'Ask this, Orm Gunnarsson — what is silver worth?' rumbled the voice.

Farms and ships, warriors and women . . . everything.

'More,' agreed One Eye. 'And that Volsung hoard, the one they gave to Atil is a king's gift. A
cursed gift. My gift.'

And what does the god want in return? What could a god possibly want that did not already
have? Warriors for the final battle? If so, all he had to do was kill us.

One Eye chuckled. 'There are more wars than you know and the battles in them last a long
time. This one I have been fighting since before the days of Hild's mother's grandmother's
grandmother, back to the first one of that line. Remember this, when all seems darkest, Orm
Trader — the gift I give is the one I get. What you are, I am also.'

I did not understand that and did not need to say so —but he had spoken of Hild. The one eye
glittered as he looked at me, amused and knowing.

'The first of her line was the spear thrown over the head of the White Christ priests to tell
them a fight was on,' he said and left me none the wiser. He chuckled, a turning millwheel in his
throat, and added: 'You have to hang nine nights on the World Tree for wisdom, boy.'

The raven, Munin, spread tattered wings and launched itself into the air. We watched it go,
then One Eye grunted, as if his back bothered him, or he needed his supper.

'He goes to find his white brother and bring him home — Fimbulwinter is not on us yet and
he has shaken enough pin feathers.'

The blue eye turned to the amber of a wolf even as I watched it and I felt no fear at it, only
curiosity to see All Father shapechange, for that was his nature, to be neither one thing nor the
other and never to be trusted fully because of it.

'That is one knowing you take from this place back to the world,' he rumbled, his voice
deepening. 'The second is that One Eye will force a sacrifice from you and it will be something
you hold dear.'

The wind shrieked and the snow drove in like white oblivion, stinging my eyes and driving me
to my knees. But I was not afraid, for this was not Fimbulwinter . . .

'That's a fucking comfort right enough, Trader,' said the voice in my ear, 'but not to those still buried to their oxters in snow.'

Hands hauled me upright, shook me until my eyes rattled and opened. Light streamed in. Light and the sear of cold air, as if I had stopped breathing entirely. Onund Hnufa, a great lumbering walrus, peered into my face from his iced-over tangle of moustache and gave a satisfied grunt.

'Good. You will live — now help the others and stop babbling about Fimbulwinter.'

We kicked and dug them out. Snow mounds shifted and broke apart; people growled and gasped their way back into the living light of day.

Fifteen were dead, ten of them thralls, among them Hekja. Thorgunna and Thordis, pinch-faced and blue, clung to each other and made sure the tears did not freeze their eyes shut.

Three of the
druzhina
were also dead and two of Klerkon's men, which left one alive, the large snub-nosed Smallander Kveldulf, Night Wolf, dark and feral under a dusting of ice. He and Crowbone glared at each other and I saw, in that moment, that Kveldulf was more afraid than the boy.

'That was a harsh wind,' noted Hauk Fast-Sailor.

'If it had not been for the timely warning, it would have been harsher still,' growled Gyrth, slogging heavily up through the snow which lay hock-deep in the V of the
balka
. His tattered furs trailed behind him like tails.

'Worth an armring,' I said, turning to Morut, who was grinning into the tangle of lines his journey had ploughed into his face. 'Which I promise when I can get it off my arm in the warm.'

He acknowledged it with a bow and then turned his grin on the scowling Avraham.

'See? I have returned, as I said I would,' he declared. 'The steppe cannot kill me and I hear you have been seeking a way across the Great White, you who could not find your prick with both hands.'

Avraham, eyes ringed in violet in a face blue-white, had not the strength to answer, nor hide his relief that Morut was back.

Led by the little tracker, we hauled the horses down the
balka
to where it shallowed and opened out into a great expanse of opaque ice, tufted with rimed grass and across which the new snow of the
buran
drifted in a hissing wind. This let us backtrack to where the carts were, but so many horses were dead that a score of carts were abandoned and anything that could be was left with them.

No horses remained for the
druzhina
and even little Vladimir was on foot now Cleverest of us all were Thorgunna and Thordis, who had the frozen horse carcasses chopped up and loaded on to a cart, with the smashed-up wood from several others. Now we had food and wood to cook it with, even if Finn said he was hard put to decide which of the two items would be more tasty.

'I thought you could make anything tasty,' Thorgunna chided, her wind-scoured cheeks like apples as she smiled and Finn humphed with mock annoyance, staring with a rheumy eye at one stiff, hacked off pony haunch.

'You boil it in a good cauldron with one of its own horseshoes,' he growled. 'It will be tasty when the shoe is soft.'

The rest of the carts we burned that night, making camp there and hauling out the large cooking kettles to boil more meat in, as much as we could. Horseshoe or not, we had heat and full bellies that night, enough to stitch us together again. We, who seemed set to die this day or the next, even started to talk about what lay ahead.

'Another storm like that will end us,' growled Red Njal and little Prince Vladimir scowled at his elbow, for we were all one sorry band now, leaching the same heat from the same fire.

'We will succeed,' he piped and no-one spoke until Morut fell to telling us of his journey.

He had tracked the Man-Haters a long way, down a
balka
filled with ice to a big frozen lake with an island. All the way, he had come upon ruined carts, dead horses and dead men; those of Lambisson. He had seen no women, though — but the brass-coloured horse, he said, was dead of cold and hunger, as were others that were clearly steppe ponies. Avraham groaned at the loss of the heavenly horse.

That, I offered up, was a good sign, for surely now it meant all the Man-Haters had died.
Save one
, I thought to myself, for you cannot kill the fetch who owned that sheened horse, or swung the twin of my sabre. I had not planned to say anything, but reached up one hand to touch the rag-wrapped bundle of the sabre on my back and caught Finn's knowing eye across the fire.

He growled and would have spat his disgust, save that he was nestling Thordis in the crook of his arm and thought better of it.

'There's no Hild-fetch, Trader,' he said. 'That bitch-tick is long dead.'

He knew I did not believe him and I looked for Kvasir to take my shieldless side in this argument, but he was wrapped in the arms of Thorgunna and asleep.

'Well, at least I know it isn't Fimbulwinter,' I offered them.

The I told them of my dream. A few, Gyrth among them, simply shrugged; they wanted to say that it was only a dream brought on by a dunt on the head, but kept their chapped lips together out of politeness to me.