The White Raven (9 page)

A few kept their heads. Runolf Harelip spilled into the red light of the
rann-sack
in the hall, dragging a struggling thrall-boy with him, cuffing the child round the head, hard enough to throw him at my feet and almost into the hearthfire. I looked down as the boy looked up and a jolt went through me, as if I had been slapped.

A sensible man crops the hair of a thrall — it keeps the nits down and reminds them of their place — but this boy had been shaved and badly, so that hair stuck in odd dirty-straw tufts between scabs. He wore an iron collar with a ring on it and I knew there would be runes that told how he was the property of Klerkon.

None of the other thralls, I noted, had as much as a thong and bone slice, for Klerkon's steading was an island with no place for a thrall to run — but this one had tried. More than once, I suspected, for Klerkon to collar him; Harelip had noted that, too, and thought it strange enough to bring him to me rather than kill him.

'Chained up outside the privy,' Harelip grunted, confirming my thoughts. Fastened like a mad dog, dumped near filth for more punishment.

The boy continued to stare at me. Like a cat, that stare, out of the muck and bruises of his face.

Unwavering and strange — then I saw, with a shock, that he had one eye blue-green and one yellow-brown and that was what was strangest in that gaze.

'Klerkon is not here,' offered Ospak, stepping away from the weeping woman, though not without a brief look of regret. Light speared through the badly-daubed walls of the rough hall, dappling the stamped-earth of the floor.

'That much I had worked out,' I answered, glad of the excuse to break away from the boy's eyes and angry at being made so twitched by him. I stepped towards what was Klerkon's private space in the hall, throwing back the curtain of it.

Furs, purest white fox. A cloak with bright-green trim. The frame of a proper box-bed, planked over and thick with good pelts. No chest. No money. No Thordis.

'I am a Northman,' the boy said. A West Norse tongue, stumbling through the Slav he had been forced to speak, stiff with the old misuse of defiant silences.

I turned back into those eyes. He stood, chin up and challenging and, for a moment; reminded me of the Goat Boy as he had been when we found him on Cyprus. About the same age as the Goat Boy was then, I noted. Of course, we had stopped calling him the Goat Boy when he had grown into resenting it — Jon Asanes he was now, being schooled by a trader I knew in Holmgard, which the Slavs call Novgorod.

'I am from Norway and a prince,' the boy added. Throst Silfra gave a loud laugh and those strange eyes swung on him, eagle fierce. I saw Throst quail in an eyeblink, then recover as quickly, also angered at having been so disconcerted by a thrall boy. He moved, lip curled.

'Stay,' I warned and, for a moment, he glowered at me, then lowered his hand and stepped back.

'I
am
a prince,' the boy insisted.

'Aye, just so,' thundered Finn, ducking into the middle of all this. 'Wipe the muck off every thrall and they will swear they were pure gold in their own country.'

'A prince of where?' I asked.

The boy stirred uncomfortably. 'Somewhere,' he said, hesitantly. Then, more firmly: 'But my mother was a Princess. She died. So did my
fostri.
Klerkon killed them both.'

'There isn't so much as a bead in this place,' Finn growled, ignoring the boy. 'Klerkon did not return here with his loot, so he must have sailed straight to Aldeigjuborg.'

'The storerooms are full,' Kvasir added, coming in to the hall. 'Winter feed. Honey in pots, seal and deer hides, fox pelts, feathers for pillows, sacks of acorns . . .'

'Feathers,' sneered Finn. 'Fucking acorns.'

'Take it, load it,' I said and Kvasir nodded. 'When you have everything, burn this place to the ground.

Leave the thralls —they take up too much room and they are not what we came for.'

Kvasir ducked out of the hall, bawling for people to help him; Red Njal came in and glanced at me, then looked away. His knees and hands were clotted with gore where he had knelt to plunder a woman and the bairns he had killed; I had stepped in on him and being watched had shamed him away from the small bodies.

'Is it wise to burn it?' Finn asked.

'Wise?'

'You know Klerkon,' Finn offered. 'Unless we finish him, he will have his revenge. He has already torched Gunnarsgard and half of it was mine — he may decide to kill all the thralls and Thordis with them, out of fury.'

He was right and this was reason enough, as Finn often pointed out, for not owning anything you could not stuff into a sea chest. Yet, outside, I could hear what we had brought to this place, in the screams and the harsh laughter. Humping a dead woman on the flank of a dead ox in the yard was the least of it. I said that, too and we glared at each other.

'Fear the reckoning of those you have wronged,' Red Njal said mournfully and I shot him a savage glance; he, above all, had much to fear, for I suspected the bairns whose blood he had been paddling about in were Klerkon's own.

He saw my look and stiffened, then shrugged.

'The shame you cannot lift you had better let lie, as my granny used to say,' he muttered darkly.

'Happy woman who never saw you guddling in the blood of bairns for what you could steal,' I spat at him and he winced away from it. It was unfair, for others had done worse and none of us were snow-pure.

'I know where Klerkon's gold is,' the boy said. 'I will tell you if you do not fire the steading.'

'If I tickle you with a hot blade you will tell us anyway,' Throst Silfra growled, but the boy's double-coloured eyes never left mine.

'I would have thought you would warm yourself at such a fire,' I said, flicking the iron collar. He flinched.

'The thralls you leave will die without shelter,' he replied. 'It is enough that you take their food. They are not able to run, are not to blame and some are my friends here.'

'Other princes?' chuckled Finn scornfully.

The boy grinned. 'No. But some have been kinder than kings. The free folk here are another matter and I have my own thoughts on that.'

Was he the age he looked? Nine, I had reckoned — but he spoke like someone ten times as old.

'So it is agreed,' I said. 'Show us Klerkon's secret.'

'Lend me your axe,' demanded the boy and Kvasir, after a moment's narrow-eyed pause, handed it over.

The boy weighed it with little bounces of his thin arm, then stepped to the boxbed and swung it, hard. Chips flew.

He swung it again and part of the frame cracked. A coin flew out and smacked on the beaten earth of the floor. Kvasir picked it up, turned it over, bit it. 'Gold, by Odin's arse,' he said. 'A Serkland
dinar
in gold, no less.'

The boy swung again and more chips flew.

'Here, give me that — you need more muscle,' said Runolf Harelip with a grin. The boy handed him the axe and stepped back. Harelip split the bed in two blows and Kvasir, Tjorvir, Throst and the others scrambled to gather the coins that spilled from the hollow frame.

In the end, they filled a sack the size of a the thrall boy's head, all gold coins, most of them Serkland
dinar
with their squiggly markings, each worth, I reckoned it up in my head, about twenty silver
dirham
each. It was as great a loss for Klerkon as it was a gain for us.

The boy stood, unsmiling and straight. I saw that the iron collar was rubbing his skin raw and looked at Kvasir, who had also seen it.

'Ref Steinsson has tools,' he said, 'that can strike that off.'

'Just so,' I said, then turned to the boy, feeling that heart-leap as our eyes met. 'Do you have a name, then, or will we simply call you Prince?'

'Olaf,' said the boy with a frown. 'But Klerkon called me
Craccoben.'

There was silence. The name squatted in the hall like a raven in a tree. It was a name you gave to a full-cunning man, rich in Odin's rune magic and one who, like him, could sit at the feet of hanged men to hear the whispered secrets of the dead.

Not a name you took or gave lightly and I wondered what had made Klerkon hand it out to this thrall boy.

Crowbone.

5 We came up the coast, running before a freezing wind until we had found the narrow mouth of the river we sought and had to drop sail or risk running aground.

We all groaned, for we would have to row upriver now and crew light at that. It was a heavy, lumbering beast of a ship when there were not even enough men on benches for one oar shift, never mind two.

I sweated with the others, which at least took my mind off the boy, who had been cooed over by Thorgunna the minute she had set eyes on him. Ref had deftly struck off the iron collar and Thorgunna had at once started to wash and salve the sores it had made on his neck — not to mention the ones on his head, which showed where he had been shaved by ungentle hands. Old, white scars showed that such a razoring had not been his first and she tutted and crooned at him.

Finn, grinning and happy now that he was raiding and getting money out of it rather than feathers and acorns, gave Kvasir a nudge where he sat, in front of Finn and pulling hard to the stroke.

'You have been hung up like old breeks, Spittle,' he chuckled, nodding to where Thorgunna was wrapping the boy in a warm cloak and patting him. I wondered if she would croon quite so softly when she found out the whole story of what he had done, what he had urged hard men to do back there in Svartey.

The wind hissed, the skin of the river crinkled and the thrall women huddled, blowing into chapped, cupped hands, but none of that was as cold as the dead we rowed away from.

'It seems,' Kvasir agreed, grunting the words out between pulls, 'that I brought back a treasure greater than my share of those
dinar
coins, which I plan to make into a necklace for her.'

'She's broody as an old hen. You will have to bairn that one and soon,' agreed Finn, which left Kvasir silent and moody.

There was a flash behind my eyes of the fat limbs and round little belly, fish-white and so small it made Thorkel's blood-smeared hand look massive. The bud-mouth and wide, outraged blue eyes crinkling in bawls in a red face while, somewhere off to the right and pinioned, the mother screamed.

Crowbone had glared at her with savage triumph, then looked back to Thorkel and nodded; Thorkel hurled the bairn against a stone and the bawling ended in a wet slap and the mother's even louder screams.

And I watched, doing nothing, saying less.

What had she done to Crowbone? He would not say, save that she was one of Randr Sterki's women, so the bairn was his and hers. Most probably she had been less than kind to him — perhaps even the one who shaved him so cruelly. There was no point in trying to stop the shrieking, bloody mess he had fermented, so that the mother's death soon after was almost a mercy.

Aye, he was a strange one, that boy. Afterwards, men could scarce look each other in the eye for what they had done, though they were no strangers to hard raiding and red war. Yet there had been something slimed about what he had driven them to do that left even these ashamed.

If it was not unmanly
seidr
he had unleashed, it was a close cousin and further proof of his powers came when we ran up to the river mouth, slashing through the ice-grue water, Gizur looking this way and that, cupping the sides of his eyes with his cold-split red hands, looking for the signs that would tell us where land lay in the mist.

Then the boy had stood up and pointed. 'That way,' he said. There were chuckles and a few good-natured jibes at Gizur.

Then Pai, the lookout, shouted out that there was smoke. 'No,' said the boy, certain as sunrise. 'It is not smoke. Those are birds.'

So it was, a great wheeling mass of them. Terns, said the boy, before even sharp-eyed Pai could spot whether they were terns or gannet.

'How do you know that?' demanded Hauk Fast-Sailor.

'You can hear them,' said the boy. 'They are calling each other to the feast, shouting with delight. Herring are there, too, if you want to fish.'

He was right — terns were diving and feeding furiously and it was easy to follow them to where Gizur picked up the marks for steering to the mouth of the Neva and into Lake Ladoga, where we turned south on the Volkhov river.