The White Raven (40 page)

She came on, black cloak billowing, hair snaking in dark braids around her sloped brow. I swallowed; she held up an arm and in it was a scythe of light — the rune sword. Hild's sword.

The voice floated across, slathering my bowels with ice. 'Orm, who is called Bear Slayer.'

It was in good Greek, but even those who did not know the tongue could recognize the name — even Finn, who knew just enough Greek to get his face slapped — and he looked at me as I stood, stricken. He knew what I was thinking . . . Hild.

'Your girl wants you,' he said into the air around us, tense as creaking bowstrings, but the chuckles were forced.

'Let him speak soft words and offer wealth, who longs for a woman's love,' Red Njal intoned as I shouldered to the front, my legs trembling. I could not feel my feet, but tested the sharp of my tongue on him.

'One day, Red Njal, you must tell me how this marvellous annoying relative of yours lived so long in the close company of other folk,' I snarled.

He grinned at me with chapped lips. 'True, my da's ma was given a place of her own and rarely visited —

but there was wisdom in her, all the same.'

Then he nodded out to the ring of horse.

'Do not keep her fretting there, Bear Slayer,' he said wryly.

I saw the woman nudge her pony on and all the bows dropped a little, though the arrows stayed nocked. I moved forward; she moved forward, off the ice and on to the lip of the island, where the pony had more purchase. She swung a leg over its neck — no small feat in her lamellar coat and thigh-greaves — and dropped lightly, the cloak floating down like hair.

It was not Hild. I thought she wore a Serkland veil until I stepped closer and saw it was a whirl of skin-marks covering her chin, nose and cheeks, a blue-black knot of some steppe magic marred by the deep scores of old scars, three on each cheek. Her head sloped backwards, too, in that long, eldrich way — but I did not care what she looked like, for it was not Hild.

She lifted the sabre, the twin of the one I held, wary and watching — then she slammed it into the earth and moved to one side, an arm's length from the hilt and squatted.

Dry-mouthed, I moved forward, careful to stay beyond sword reach of her, out of politeness. Then I did the same as she had done and took a knee, Norse-style.

We faced each other, the width of a man apart, no more, and studied each other in silence, while the wind sighed, lifting little
djinn
of snow over the stippled ice of the lake.

She was nail-thin and wasted, but had all her finery on, from golden beads in her braids to necklets of silver animals and fine bangles. Her armour was polished bone leaves pared from the hooves of horses and she wore baggy breeks worked with gold threads. But what glittered most brightly on her were her polished jet eyes.

The silence stretched until I could stand it no longer, so I nodded politely at her and said:
'Skjaldmeyjar:
She cocked her head like a quizzical bird and, in good Greek, answered me with a smile. 'I hope that is friendly in your tongue.'

I told her what it meant — shieldmaiden — though she seemed more like someone who could be called
valmeyjar,
which most ignorant people who are not from the fjords translate as shield-maiden, or battle-maiden. Really, that word means corpse-maiden, chooser of the slain and is a name to hand out to a woman who looks like a wolf's grandmother two weeks dead. I did not tell her this.

'You know my name,' I added and left that hanging like a waiting hawk.

'Amacyn,
they call me,' she answered. 'Which is the name given to me as leader of the
tupate
and the name given to all such leaders, who then forsake all other family ties. It means Mother of the People, but the foolish Greeks once thought it stood as name for us all and so called us
amazonoi.'

'Who are the
tupate?'
I asked, my mind whirling already.

She spread her hands to encompass all the riders. 'We are. In Greek it would be
tabiti.
It is hard to translate correctly, but the nearest would be — oathsworn.'

I sat back on one heel at that.
Oathsworn
. Like us. I said so and she made a little head gesture, as if to say perhaps yes, perhaps no.

'You have a sword,' I said in Greek. 'Like mine. Hild had it last.'

She smiled, covering her face with her hand, which was custom, I learned. 'Hild. Is that the name you gave her, then? The one in the tomb of the Master of the World?'

'That is the name she gave herself,' I answered, breathing heavily, for I felt on the edge of a cliff with a mad desire to fly. 'How did you come by the sword?'

'Hild,' she repeated, then laughed, a surprising sound of lightness. 'Ildico. Yes, that would be part of her penance. Or a twisted joke.'

I did not understand any of this and she saw it, nodded seriously and adjusted her squat more comfortably, so that her knees came up round her chin, long, thin hands clasped in front of her.

'Long ago,' she said, 'when the Volsungs brought their treasure and a new wife called Ildico to Atil, Master of the World, we were the Chosen Ones, charged with making sure of our Lord's undisturbed afterlife.'

She waved a hand, slim, pale and languid as a dragonfly in summer heat and talked as if she had been there herself, as if it had been yesterday, or the day before.

'This place,' she added. 'We made sure those who laboured on it could not reveal the secret of it, every one, from those who dug, to those who planned, to those who brought the treasure to place in it.'

She paused and looked at me with those black eyes, so that my heart clenched. I could almost believe she had been there herself, dealing out the slaughter.

'The steppe ran with blood for days,' she said, 'so that, in the end, only the Chosen Ones and the flies knew where the tomb lay and if the flies passed it on, mother to daughter, generation to generation, I never knew of it. But that is what the Chosen Ones did.'

There was a long, wind-sighing pause while she fiddled with the thongs of her soft boots and gathered her thoughts. Mine were of all the shrieking fetches who drifted in this place and if this woman was one, for she spoke so knowingly of five centuries before. No wonder the rest of the steppe kept clear.

'We did not expect the Master of the World to occupy it for some time, of course,' she went on, 'but the Volsungs came, with their gift of silver and swords and Ildico, the new bride. They did not stay for the wedding — did not dare, of course, since Ildico planned red murder — and when they left, one of us went with them.'

'One of . . . you?' I asked, uncertainly. 'A Chosen One?'

She nodded and shifted. 'Her name, as far as any Volsung knew, was my name — Amacyn. She was then leader of the
tupate
but forgot her oath for love of the smith, the one called Regin. She went back with him to the north and by the time it was discovered, it was too late. The Master of the World wanted her death, to keep the secret of his tomb, but we were told to wait until after his wedding.'

By which time it was too late, for Ildico killed him on the wedding night. I licked dry lips, thinking on all the years between then and now and what that love had cost.

'The oathbreaker was not hunted down, then,' I said, the mosaic of it filling in for me even as I spoke.

The woman shrugged. 'The
tupate
had lost face and the one who favoured us was dead,' she said. 'The sons of the Master of the World did not care for us as much — but we had sworn to guard his tomb and so we did, as best as we were able. The last task of that
tupate
was to carry the Lord of the World to this place

— then slay everyone who was not one of us.

'After that, the Chosen Ones went home — but daughters were trained in war, given the secret and served, as best as could be done, down the long years. Faithful to the last task — to keep the secret of the tomb. The oath would not let us do less.'

I knew that oath and how it bound.
Who
it bound. Hild. The woman nodded.

'The oathbreaking Amacyn could not live with what she had done in the end, so it became known,' she went on softly. 'She birthed a daughter and did what we all do — passed on the secret of the tomb. My mother did so to me, which is how I know that the oathbreaking Amacyn then went into Regin's forge and would not come out, sealed it so that it could never be used again. Regin the smith died and some say his heart snapped because of both his loves were gone, woman and forge. All this was found out, piece by piece, over the years.'

I saw the weft of it then, a harsh-woven cloak of misery visited on the innocent daughters of that forge village. All the ones who came after would not break that chain, waited until a girl was born — or chosen, even — and reached the full of their womanhood, then passed on the secret of Atil's tomb, an echo of what Regin's woman had once been. Then they went into the forge mountain, for the shame of what had been done. Probably those who thought twice about it were forced in; it became a god-ritual for the people who lived by the forge and they would be afraid to break it.

The woman sat quietly and said nothing while I stammered all this out, hammering it straight as I said it.

'Except for Hild,' I said, seeing it clearly, the sad, untangled knot of it. She had been stolen from that little Karelian village because Martin the priest thought he had found a secret and hired a man called Skartsmadr Mikill, Quite The Dandy, to get it. When he could not find it he and his crew of Danes tried to force the knowledge from the villagers by taking what they clearly valued — the young, bewildered Hild, still raw with the whispered secret, still weeping from the loss of her mother, gone into the forge.

In the end, Quite The Dandy found out how much she was valued; the villagers attacked them with such ferocity that those hard Danes had run for it, dragging Hild with them as their only prize. By the time she was delivered to Martin of Hammaburg they had taken out their anger and frustration on her so badly that her mind was cracking.

I laid out the tale of Hild for this latest Amacyn — poor demented Hild, rescued by us, burdened with a secret and a centuries-old sin, burning for revenge on those who had used her and prepared to lead us all to Atil's tomb in return for the death of Skartsmadr Mikill and all his men.

We had done that and Hild had fulfilled her part of the bargain —. at the cost of her mind. Had she been made mad by the goddess of the steppe, or the fetch of Ildico, or the guilt of knowing she betrayed the long line of those who had died and kept the secret?

'Perhaps all of them,' agreed Amacyn, uncoiling slowly to her feet. 'It does not matter — the secret was revealed. She broke her oath.'

And all who break such an oath end up dead. That I knew well enough.

'After you quit this place,' Amacyn continued, 'those few of us who survived came here, but war was raging on the steppe and it took some time for us all to assemble, so we missed you.'

I swallowed at that. If they had caught us then, staggering raggedly down to the Azov and the Sea of Darkness . . .

'Afterwards,' she went on, 'the Khazar fist had gone, so the last of us came here in force. We had to dig through the roof to find out what had been done. There we saw a strange dead man on the throne and the Master of the World cast down and other strangers dead, including a woman. She had one of the Lord's swords; we realized then that one of those who had survived had the other.'

My cracked lips were glued, now Hild was dead; Finn had been right all along. Then I realized what this woman wanted.

'Yes,' she said, though I had not spoken. Then she sighed and rubbed the sores on her hands; I realized, suddenly, that she was in as bad a state as I was — as we all were, out on that frozen waste.

'We are the last of our kind,' she went on, 'It falls to me to be the
Amacyn
in whose time his tomb is no longer a secret. We knew you would be back and listened for word that northmen were moving on the Grass Sea. It cost us much to come out on the steppe and kill them — but we did not expect another band and certainly not a prince from Novgorod. Then we knew it was all finished for us.'

She stopped, stiff as the yellow stalks of frozen-dead grass; her eyes burned.

'We are few and growing fewer,' she said, in a voice like a
djinn
of wind. 'Man-Haters, you call us, but that is not true. We have fathers and brothers and some of those here have men and children that they value.

Too many have already died. We have failed to keep the secret and this fight on the steppe has ended us. We are passing from the world. We will go home to men, stop binding the foreheads of our girl children and cutting their cheeks, so that they feel the endurance of wounds before the nourishment of milk. But there is one last service we can perform for the Master of the World.'

The words beat on me like raven wings. Passing from the world. Perhaps all Oathsworn are passing from the world, I was thinking, even as I saw, too, that she had ridden out to find a way to resolve matters other than with blood. I understood that only too well.

Once before, this way had saved the Oathsworn at Atil's tomb and I did not think it would fail us now I looked at the sabre, then at the woman who wanted it more than the world itself. I knew now how she knew my name and what she thought we would want, but I asked, for form's sake.

'What do you have to trade?'