The White Raven (47 page)
Authors: Robert Low
It was, I heard Gizur say as he chivvied men back to their benches, a sure sign that Odin's hand was over us still and the treasure we had was nothing at all to do with Fafnir and surely could not be cursed.
'On the other hand,' Ospak said, 'it could mean Odin means us still to have all the treasure remaining in Atil's howe.'
There were groans from some at the thought of doing all this over again — yet nods of agreement from those still silver-hungry enough to consider going back. I thought it time that everyone knew, all the same, and stepped forward in such a way that made them all look round at me.
Then I told them what I had avoided saying out on the steppe, the day we had run, panting, from Atil's tomb and the warrior women who ringed it.
I had stayed behind as the others hurried away, watching the slope-headed man-killers who guarded it and the woman who called herself Amacyn. With a runesword in each hand, she had walked to the hole in the tomb roof and straddled it, while all her oathsworn comrades sat their horses on the bank of that frozen lake and bowed their heads.
I had heard the chopping sounds. If her sabre was like mine, then it could cut an anvil and both together, working on that stone support beam, would slice through it long before her arms started to ache or the edge left those blades. I turned away, then, numb and cold and . . . relieved.
The others were a long way off when I thought I heard the tomb collapse, but it may just have been the blood rushing in my ears, for I hit a crippling pace to catch them up, especially for a man weakened by hunger and cold.
But we had all heard the cat-yowl wail from those female throats, a last salute to their last leader.
I could see it in my head, the collapse of that great yurt of stone and wood and earth. The ice cracking, the swirl and roil of those black melt-waters rushing in to cover silver, dirt, bones — and the falling woman, her last task done, her oath fulfilled, tumbling down to her wyrd at the feet of Attila.
Last of her line, with no daughter and no secret and no longer any need to pass that burden on. I shivered at the passing from the world of these oathsworn, like us and yet stranger than a hound with two heads. I did not like to think that I had, perhaps, seen my own future in the woman's long, slow whirl of arms and legs.
The river flow would wash the silver into the silt, scatter it and everything else for miles down the river.
For years people would pick riches out of those waters; some might even brave the fetch of the place and dig for it in those times when the drought came and the lake was emptied. Perhaps, one day, someone might find a rune-serpented sword, or even two and, perhaps, marvel at how they seemed unmarked by time or weather.
But not us. Odin had given the Oathsworn his last gift of silver, I told them.
They were silent after that and eventually Gizur nodded, straightened and scrubbed his hands over his face, as if scouring away sleep and the last of a bad dream.
'Row, fuck your mothers,' he growled. 'It is a long way home.'
A lot of the joy in writing historical fiction comes from the bits that are stranger than fiction. For example — I needed Orm to get in big trouble with Prince Vladimir in the year 972 A.D. in the market square of Novgorod. Enter Crowbone, otherwise known as Olaf Tryggvasson, aged nine and burying his axe in the forehead of his hated captor, Klerkon. You could not make it up.
Unless you were a twelfth-century Benedictine monk called Oddr Snorrason, that is — the story of Olaf Tryggvasson is one of the best-known of the Norse sagas and, even allowing for twelfth-century 'journalistic licence' it sounds plausible. It also fitted in so exactly with what I needed that it raised hackles on my neck.
The saga-story of little Olaf is exactly as I tell it here. The only major change I made to the tale is that it was his Uncle Sigurd who found and rescued him and not Orm — and Klerkon, though a real character, was handed a fictional life.
A couple of other changes were cosmetic — Uncle Sigurd did not have a silver nose, nor did Crowbone have different-coloured eyes as far as I know. I handed out the former on whimsy and the latter because it was a sign of greatness and magic, which described Crowbone perfectly for me.
Nor did Crowbone have a fund of stories, but everything else about Olaf 'Crowbone' Tryggvasson is as the supposed history tells it, including his nickname and the fact that he divined the future through the actions of birds, right up until he converted to Christianity when he became king of Norway in 995 A.D.
To get the necessary cash for it, this viking's Viking invaded Britain in 991 A.D., fought and won a legendary battle at Maldon — according to Saxon accounts — and extorted a deal of Danegeld, that fat payment made by desperate English kings to get Vikings to go away. He extorted even more in subsequent years and, suitably bankrolled, then went off and won the throne of Norway, though he did not hold it long.
All of that, of course, was much later and after he had helped Prince Vladimir of Novgorod defeat his brothers and become sole ruler of the Kievan Rus. The peace between the three Rus princes lasted five years and it was, predictably, Lyut and Sveinald who broke it.
Like Vladimir and his Uncle Dobrynya, Sveinald and his abominable son, Lyut, are also historical characters and much as described — arrogant and domineering. If anyone deserved to be pitched in a fire by Finn, it was Lyut — in 977 A.D., Lyut made the mistake of hunting in Prince Oleg's private domain and then telling the prince to sod off when challenged. The arrogant Lyut then found himself dead and his enraged father Sveinald persuaded Jaropolk to go to war.
Oleg was defeated and killed, Vladimir fled north to seek help from the Swedes and got it; eventually, he returned with an army of Vikings, defeated brother Jaropolk and was finally crowned sole ruler of the Rus in Kiev in 980 A.D. - and young Crowbone was at his elbow, by all accounts. That began the process of turning the loose confederation of Slav states into what would become mighty Mother Russia.
In his three-year exile in the north, Vladimir spent two of them with Olaf Tryggvasson raiding up and down the Baltic as a Viking. It should be no surprise to anyone that, in the tenth century, noble youths aged eighteen and fifteen respectively should be commanding boatloads of hairy-faced veteran warriors, who never questioned the rightness of it.
Finally, the real-life character of Uncle Dobrynya has since been translated into a Russian myth of Dobrynya Nikitich, the hero who fought a great Worm or dragon — which, of course, is Orm in Old Norse.
In other words, the historical facts — even allowing for medieval embellishment — are as good a set of bones to use to flesh out a tale. In order to weave that tale and create the legend of the Oathsworn, I needed legendary enemies who were all-too real. So enter the Man-Haters.
German archaeologist Renate Rolle found the first evidence of Amazons, at Certomylik in the Ukraine.
Other finds, by Elena Fialko at Akimovka, support the idea of women warriors and the work of Jeaninne Davis-Kimball at Pokrovka, on the Russian—Kazhakstan border revealed many fascinating finds, including one girl of no more than fourteen, with bowed leg bones suggesting her short life was spent on horseback.
She had dozens of arrowheads in a quiver made of leather and a great boar's tusk at her feet.
There could be no better way of Orm and the Oathsworn gaining legendary fame than following in the footsteps of Hercules and taking .on the Amazons — and I just plain liked the idea of Attila's most faithful warriors being women.
The intent of this story was to create the 'fair fame' of the Oathsworn, so great that it stood as a monument to Odin and served as one small check to the tide of Christianity sweeping across the north at this time.
Well, if you want to have a Dark Age northern hero at least as famous as Beowulf, then you need a Dark Age enemy at least as monstrous as Grendel. However, I had always been struck by the saga of Beowulf and Grendel and had difficulty in deciding who was the true monster of the tale — Beowulf, the human who slaughtered both Grendel and his mother, or the monstrously-shaped mum and son, who seemed to have been relegated to the realms of evil demons, yet somehow engender a deal of pity.
Scotland has its own monstrous myths, none more chilling than changelings and elf-shot babies. Many of such tales are now thought to be excuses for child-murder, even as late as the nineteenth century. It is easier to be rid of a strangely-diseased and unwanted baby if you claim it has been swapped for your perfectly good one and is inherently evil.
Tales of fishskinned bairns and scaled changelings take on a new meaning in the light of an affliction which has haunted the ages — and, sadly, is still with us — known as ichthyosis. A genetic condition, it causes the skin to keratinize and scale, like nails, all over the body and the tightening that results sometimes deforms the face. The worst form of it, Harelequin Ichthyosis, is a truly distressing disease and babies who suffer from it rarely survive forty-eight hours. It is exactly as I describe it here and the sight of such a newborn would break our heart.
Of course, people so afflicted are no different from the rest of us, appearances apart, and it seemed right to me that such a nest of seeming monsters would have more family feeling and humanity than the healthy people who sent Orm to kill such feared 'were-dragons'. The legend, as it always does, swallows the shame of such an act.
Finally, there is the runestone, preferred method of leaving your name and deeds to posterity. The range and number of runic inscriptions during the Iron and Viking Ages is impressive, from the Black Sea to Greenland, from Man to Athens. Iceland has few, Denmark has about 500, Norway has around 750 — but Sweden has some 3000 and one-third of them are from the province of Uppland.
Best known is the Rok Stone, a ninth-century memorial block found in Ostergotland, Sweden. Carved in granite to commemorate a lost son, it has the longest runic inscription known — 725 runes of legible text which scholars still argue over. It is full of secret formulas, lost allusions, verses of epic character and a poetic vocabulary which showed, to me at any rate, that the composer, Varinn by name, was a Norse Shakespeare.
I thought the Oathsworn deserved no less a memorial.
As ever, this is best told round a fire in the darkness. Any mistakes or omissions are my own and should not spoil the tale.
The End