Читать книгу The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3 - Robert Low - Страница 15

Long, painful, sweaty. There – to say it takes three words and I wish it had been as easy to get to the top of that gods-cursed forge mountain. But I remember the climb as being tough, mainly because I was wearing mail: the weight of a small boy on my shoulders. That and all the other stuff – two shields, because I felt guilty and offered to share the burden of one of those who had to carry Hild up it on the spear-bed.

At the top, I was too busy ripping off my salt-stained boots and woollen socks to care about a cairn of stones. The cold air on my aching, throbbing feet almost made me moan with pleasure and, after I had inspected the rawest bits, I then took time to look around.

Everyone else was in a similar state. Men wriggled out of mail, stripped off layers of linen and wool, sat with their heads lowered, dripping under the unexpectedly warm spring sun. Skapti’s face looked like it would burst.

But Einar, if he was suffering, showed no sign of it. He stood, pensively staring at the cairn and the poles that surrounded them. Every one but four of them bore a skull, leering and weatherbeaten. The four that didn’t had recognisable heads, with eyes gone, lips peeled back, strips of skin pecked from cheeks.

‘Vigfus’s men,’ said Valknut, who was nearest me, massaging his calf muscles.

I shed my mail like a wriggling snake, then wandered over to have a closer look. The heads were ruins; you couldn’t tell if they’d even been men, save for one who had a fringe of beard left.

The cairn was waist height, with fallen stones around it. When I looked more closely, I realised it wasn’t a cairn, but a ring of stones round a blackened opening. Peering down revealed only more blackness.

Ketil Crow joined me, as did a few others. And, of course, Bodvar picked up a stone and dropped it in. There was a short pause, then a faint splash.

‘A well?’ queried Bodvar.

‘On a mountain top?’ responded Ketil Crow with a curl of his lip.

‘I wish you had not done that,’ Illugi Godi said, frowning at Bodvar, who merely shrugged.

‘If not a well, what?’ demanded Skapti, lumbering up.

‘A smoke hole,’ said Einar absently, then kicked one of the stones at his feet. We all saw that the blackening was an age of soot.

‘For the forge,’ someone said, enlightened.

‘His charcoal is a little damp,’ commented Valknut and there were chuckles.

We milled and peered and argued this and that for a while. Einar stood and thought and, apart from the whirr and song of birds, there was only the muttered rant of Hild, that constant background noise we had all become used to.

‘Rope,’ said Einar. There was some – Valknut had a length; two others had coils of it round their waists. Einar had a fire lit, made a torch, held it over the hole and let it drop. We all watched it fall, turning lazily, trailing sparks. We saw the shaft, where it suddenly widened out, the gleam of water – then the torch hissed and was gone.

‘Take a sounding on that,’ ordered Einar and the ropes were knotted firmly, then a bearded boarding axe tied to one end and lowered. When the rope end was reached, it still hadn’t gone slack and that meant some two hundred feet. We hauled it up and found it dry.

‘That’s a deep hole,’ muttered Skapti uneasily and everyone agreed. Deep holes were to be avoided: the lair of dragons or black dwarves.

‘Let’s find out how deep,’ said Einar and had us take off the leather neck straps from our shields and fasten them to the rope. Then we lowered it again. At 250 feet, the rope went slack and, when it was hauled up, the last twenty or so was wet.

‘So, now we know,’ said Einar. ‘Who will be lowered, then?’

There was a shifting from leg to leg and a studious attempt to be looking somewhere else.

‘I would go,’ offered Skapti and everyone groaned and laughed.

‘Just so,’ said Einar. ‘Someone small and light, then.’

‘Send the Christ priest,’ shouted someone. ‘He’s scrawny enough.’

There was laughter and Martin’s face went white. But Einar shook his head, tugging on the leash a little. ‘The black dwarves will eat him,’ he said. More laughter.

‘I will do it,’ offered Pinleg and there were nods and some appreciative noises at his bravery.

‘Can you swim?’ added Einar and Pinleg acknowledged his lack with a wry wave.

It took me a while to realise they were silent and all looking at me.

‘Can you swim?’ asked Einar.

I swallowed, for I swam like a fish, the legacy of sometimes falling off those black gull cliffs. I could lie, but Gunnar Raudi knew, so I nodded.

There was a single exhale of relief and a few hands clapped my back, more because the owners weren’t going than at my courage.

Skapti knotted the rope into a kind of sling, which made it a seat rather than round my waist, which cut the wind from you. They made a new torch and I climbed on to the crumbling edge of the cairn, while Skapti wrapped two coils round his ample frame and braced himself. Two others, shoulders humped with muscle from rowing, stood to help him.

‘Jerk the rope twice to have us stop,’ he growled.

‘What if I need to come up in a hurry?’

‘If the dragon is burning your skinny arse,’ he replied, ‘we’ll hear you scream.’

As the others laughed, Einar lit the torch. Then I kicked out and started down.

At first they went so fast that I clattered off the sides, but I yelled up to them, my voice bouncing crazily in my ears and they slowed the descent. Turning slowly I was lowered, down and down and down into the dark shaft, the torch guttering.

I saw a small, round opening midway down, set into one side of the shaft like a dark lidless eye. I almost called out, but then I was sinking below it and, suddenly, out of the shaft entirely.

There was the impression of airiness, a great expanse of vaulted rock, which the torch only dimly revealed. Water dripped and the air felt damp and cold and smelled musty. When I saw the water gleaming red in the torchlight, I jerked the rope and stopped.

Swinging gently, I lowered the torch a little, peering around. There was nothing but water. I swallowed the dry spear in my throat and realised I had no way of telling them to haul me up save one.

So I yelled. The sound boomed off the wall. I was jerked up like fish bait, shot back up the shaft so quickly I hit the sides and yelped in pain, which only made them haul harder. I almost shot out into the sunlight, the torch falling back into the darkness.

I was cursing them as they dragged me over the side of the cairn stones and, when they saw I was unharmed, everyone laughed at my fury. I didn’t think it was funny; both my elbows and one knee were bloodied.

‘You’ve had worse humping on a dirt floor,’ observed Skapti, hauling me up and grinning. Then they all wanted to know what I had seen.

‘A shaft, widens out into a chamber full of water,’ I revealed.

‘That much we found out without lowering you,’ Einar grunted.

‘There isn’t much more,’ I bridled. ‘Short of going in the water and swimming about in the dark, I couldn’t find out more.’

‘It might come to that,’ Einar growled and I saw he was serious. The thought of being in that black water in the pitch dark shut me up and focused my mind. I remembered the opening, and thought more about it.

‘I am thinking that there is something of the heathen sacrifice about this place,’ Martin the monk said slowly. ‘I can smell it.’

‘You … have the … right … of it.’

The voice was weak, but so unexpected that we all whirled and stared. Hild was upright, swaying, her face bloodless.

‘The only way in is here,’ she said, speaking in a rush, as if trying to get it all out as fast as she could. ‘Was once to be my fate … All who know go into the dark. There is a way to the door if you can find it. If you do, you can choose – to unbar it, or stay. No one has unbarred the door since the woman of the first smith. She went in for her sin, gave sin and secret to her children.’ She paused, sagged. ‘My mother is in there. When I had provided a daughter, that was to be my fate.’

We all chewed that over. Martin crossed himself. So that was the ‘dark’ Hild spoke of, the ‘she’ who haunted her. Her mother. In the black pit of that forge, probably mouldering at the bottom of that lake. And if she still spoke to her daughter, she was a fetch of rare fierceness.

‘They threw them in, all the smith’s daughters?’ demanded Valknut.

‘The heirs of Regin,’ muttered Illugi. ‘I have heard that name before …’

The others, even though they did not know the whole of it, were equally uneasy faced with this. Like them, I was thinking that a village capable of heaving their own down a hole were not ones to walk up to as a stranger.

I was so petrified I couldn’t stand – and I wasn’t going swimming down there, even if Einar cut my bollocks off with his truth-seeking knife.

‘There is an opening, midway down,’ I babbled to Einar. ‘The edges are smoke-blackened, upwards, but not beneath. I think that is the true smoke hole.’

Einar glared at me. ‘Can you get in it?’

I paused, trying to think, then nodded. As I peeled off my tunic, I felt Hild’s black eyes on me. She was wrapped like a corpse bundle in my cloak and shivering in the warm sun.

‘Bodvar, you and Valknut pick three more and go back to the barred door. When Orm here reaches it, he may need help. Send back for the rest of us to come, too.’

Both men groaned at that. The idea of tramping all the way back down that gods-cursed hill was not appealing. On the other hand, I saw, it was still better to them than going down the shaft. And Einar had spoken of ‘when’ I reached the door. Not ‘if’.

I felt Hild at my side, her hand on my naked arm. I looked into the dark eyes and saw fear. But not for me, I thought as I turned away, stuffing a firestarter and my eating knife in my boot.

At the edge of the loose-stone cairn, Einar caught my arm, his black eyes like nails on my face. He said nothing and, after a moment, let me go.

Then I was down the shaft again, torch in hand. When I got to the round opening, I had them stop and swung for a bit, studying it. Then I hooked myself near it, slid my feet in to the knees.

It would be a tight squeeze and what to do with the torch bothered me, for I couldn’t take it lit, but maybe couldn’t fit with it unlit and stuffed in my belt. And I didn’t want to be in the dark wherever that smoke hole ended.

In the end, I worked it out. I undid my breeks and hauled the ties out of them. As they slid and flapped round my boots, I stubbed the torch into sparks and embers, fastened my breeks cord to one end and made a loop at the other.

In the dark, I looped it round my neck, then slithered further into the smoke hole, let go the rope and was alone. In the dark. In a hole no bigger than a burial chamber.

It went down at a sharp angle, as it had to, but I was offering up extravagant sacrifices to all the gods, Aesir and Vanir and any others I could think of, that it didn’t get narrower. My hands were out above my head, palms flat on the rough stone – a natural crag, this, I thought with the part of my mind not screaming in terror at the fact that my nose was so close to it.

Like a tomb. Dark … I hit an obstacle and stopped. An obstacle. Solid. I was stuck.

There is no feeling like that. The hardest thing I ever did was not scream and thrash. I felt the weight of it above me, had the sweat of fear and labour stinging my eyes, heard the rasp of my own breath in that hot, cloistered dark.

I lay, hands up behind my head, palms flat, pushing. Nothing. My feet were on something solid. I brought my knees a little way up, hard up against the roof of the shaft until I felt them puncture and bleed to try and shove against the obstruction – and found nothing beneath my feet.

I blinked away sweat and gasped and tried to think. It bent. Of course it did. It turned from an angled shaft to a straight one.

I wriggled, legs lowered, felt them slide down and was just sighing with relief when I realised that if it angled down it was a sheer drop. At which I shot forward, ripping the skin from the palms of my hands, straight down, crashing into something that seemed soft, though the hard edges of it cracked my head and an already battered elbow.

There was a choking dust, too. I couldn’t breathe; it was smothering me. I thrashed, then lost the last of my courage and, gibbering and choking, floundered out of what I thought was a bed and tumbled, this time on to something hard.

I saw light then, but it was inside my head, and when I eventually groaned upright and felt the place that hurt, it came away sticky. But I was breathing, though I could taste the swirling dust still.

I hauled myself together, along a ladder, it seemed. The torch was still attached, mercifully, and both knife and firestarter were in my boot. Using the firestarter in the dark was no problem and the first brief spark was so bright in that place that I saw, at once, that I was on an ore-track, the ‘ladder’ being wooden rails.

The next spark, then the next and the dried mosses caught into faint pinprick embers. I blew, slowly and carefully, nurtured it into a flame, fed that to the torch and, suddenly, I had light.

I was in a square chamber. I had fallen maybe ten feet and what I thought had been a bed was the metal-edged forge, the soft landing being the remains of charcoal ash, now settling slowly. I was black with it.

There were barrels and, next to them, a sagging table with dust-shrouded tools. The ore-tracks I lay on stretched ahead and behind, into darkness both ways, half buried in rubble spill. An old shovel lay discarded on them.

I got up, wiping the sweat from my eyes, torch held high. The forge still had the bellows, but when I touched them, they sighed to dust. The anvil, however, was what caught my eye. It was layered with dust and cobwebs, at least as heavy as two Skaptis and rusty. But it had a split in it, deep as the first joint of my finger, across its width.

I spat dust out and moved to the sagging table, passing the barrels and seeing the dark contents spilling from two of them. I bent and sniffed, tasted iron: they were filing and discards. The other had held sand. On the other side of the table was a stone tub which had, presumably, held water for quenching.

The tools seemed to be the sort of thing you would have in a forge: hammers, pincers, mallets, all cobwebbed and rusting. And, on the wall above, something that gleamed.

I moved the torch closer and saw a ledge hewn out of the rock. Above it was a long, single string of runes. I couldn’t read them and the thought struck me that it was strange that a Northman could read Latin, but not runes.

In the ledge lay what appeared to be a batten of wood, seemingly oiled and fresh. It had a squarish head, with two bright rivets holding a nub of shining metal, a thumb-length sticking out of the wooden shaft and neatly sheared off. I didn’t touch it – after the bellows had fallen apart, I didn’t want to touch anything. I was sure the rubble spill had come from the roof; the sheer weight of that place pressed on me.

But it was more than that. There was something about that piece of wood that kept me from touching it, that was strange and Other and I could not work it out.

In the end, though, I picked up a heavy hammer, rusted iron with an iron shaft, too. Having a weapon made me feel better. What good it would do against the fetch of a dead woman was another matter.

I backed away, considering, trying to orientate myself so that, when I chose a route out of that room, I wasn’t heading off down into some labyrinth of forgotten and dangerous mineworkings, but towards that barred door.

I was still trying to work it out when the torch guttered and my heart nearly stopped. I looked wildly at it, but it was nowhere near burned down. I held it up; a breeze caressed it and I cursed myself for a ninny and followed where the breeze was coming from.

The door, when I finally saw it, was almost an anti-climax. The bar was stiff and I had to force it up with the hammer until it finally toppled out. Then I shoved, heard shouts, saw a sliver of light and then fingers curling round the exposed edge of the door.

With a wrench and a shower of dust, it racked open, spilling sunlight into the shaft. I shuffled out, my breeks manacling my ankles.

Valknut loomed up, Bodvar and the others behind. They stopped, recoiled, stared. Then Valknut seemed to sag, wrapped his arms round himself and reeled away. Bodvar pointed, his mouth working.

Scared witless, I whirled round in case something was creeping up, but there was nothing. I heard them gasp and wheeze and choke and, with a sudden burst of fury and shame, realised they were helpless with laughter.

It took them ages to recover and my sulking only made it worse. Bodvar actually volunteered to reclimb the hill to get the others because, he said later, he’d have burst from laughing.

Valknut later admitted he’d thought it was a black dwarf stumping out to tell them all to piss off, his hammer at the ready, and had nearly wet himself with terror. The relief when he saw who it was made him laugh all the more.

I saw the funny side. Eventually. The door opens and there is a boy, naked but for his boots, his breeks tangled round his ankles, black with charcoal dust, streaked white with sweat runnels and blood … I would have hooted, too.

I was still like that an hour later – though my breeks were up and the sun a lot less warm, so that I was shivering and goose-bumped. I needed water to wash, but there was none spare for that, so I stayed black and gave everyone a fresh laugh.

Einar nodded appreciatively, as if he knew what I had done. Ordinarily I would have swelled with proud delight at this, but there was too much doom about Einar now for me to hold him in such esteem.

More torches were lit and I led them, less four to guard the open door, back to the forge room, Hild staggering at my side. Martin kept darting eagerly ahead, just like the dog Einar had made him, tangling his leash and making his keeper, Skapti, curse.

We crept in and I showed them what I had found: the forge, the bellows, the barrels and the table.

Both Illugi Godi and Martin the monk dropped to their knees, to the astonishment of all – what could have made that pair worship together? They, too, were astonished, not realising what the other had seen.

‘The spear,’ Martin breathed reverently. ‘The spear …’ He couldn’t say anything else, just sat with his hands clasped and prayed.

‘That?’ queried Ketil Crow. ‘There’s only a shaft.’

‘It is – was – a Roman spear,’ Martin said, his voice filled with awe, then he bowed his head and actually sobbed. ‘But the pagan devils have removed the long metal point, steeped in the blood of Christ. May God punish them all.’

Ketil Crow, with a scornful look at the weeping monk, stepped forward, making to pluck the spear-shaft from its ledge. Illugi Godi’s voice was booming loud when he roared: ‘Stay!’ He pointed to the rune line. ‘A runespell. A new one. A new runespell.’

That stunned us all. Valknut dropped to his knees and bowed his head at the enormity of it.

There were few runespells. Odin himself, who had hung nine days on the World Tree, had only ever learned eighteen, as Illugi now reminded us.

‘And had a spear thrust into his side, too,’ Pinleg growled pointedly to Martin. ‘But at least he got Knowledge out of it.’

‘Was it?’ interrupted Valknut. ‘I thought it was Wisdom.’

‘Perhaps the pair of you need to hang on the same tree,’ Illugi Godi said wryly. ‘That way one of you would have the wisdom or knowledge to shut up.’

‘It’s all pagan nonsense,’ Martin declared.

‘Take your prize, then,’ Einar offered. ‘Surely some pagan nonsense is no danger to you, under the protection of your god? After all, didn’t your Bishop Poppo wear a red-hot iron glove and come to no harm?’

Martin licked his lips, looked as if he would try it, then settled back like a sullen dog.

Ketil Crow, shaken at his narrow escape – the runespell might have cursed him, or worse – wiped his dry mouth with the back of one hand. Unless you know what you are doing, you walk warily round a runespell, neither speaking it aloud nor laying a hand on it.

‘There’s no rust on that spear-shaft,’ Valknut noted and I blinked, realising only now what the strange Otherness had been. No rust. Or dust. Or cobwebs. Everything looked as if it had been made the day before.

There was a general backing away. I saw Hild stagger, heard her mutter, moved closer and put one arm round her shoulders. She was cold, but sweating and swaying wildly, like a mast in a high wind.

‘So what happened?’ demanded Ketil Crow. ‘Did they forge a sword out of bits of an old spear? Is that the right of it?’

‘Essentially,’ muttered Illugi Godi, leaning forward to study the runes and speaking absently, his voice sounding like a man speaking underwater. ‘It was written here by someone … who knew … how to do it well. For the smith to copy on to the sword he was forging.’

Ketil Crow shrugged. ‘I can’t think that you would get much of a sword out of some old spearhead,’ he scoffed and Illugi peered briefly at him.

‘Depends on the spearhead. With the blood of a god on it …’

He left the rest unsaid, but Ketil Crow had it terrier-gripped and would not let go. ‘Not one of our gods.’

‘A god is a god,’ Illugi remarked. ‘Ours are more powerful, obviously …’

Martin’s snort stopped Illugi, but Ketil Crow wanted no theological debate. He kicked the metal forge moodily, for he had wanted lots more – treasure, swords, all the stuff of sagas. ‘I still don’t see that a sword made from an old spear is much of a weapon.’

‘Perhaps you should look at the anvil,’ said Einar laconically, ‘where they tested it.’

That great cut across the anvil, where the smith had tested the edge of his blade, made Ketil Crow click his teeth sharply together. Everyone craned to see and Valknut gave a low whistle of appreciation.

‘Deep. Through mail, a cut like that. And helmet-steel, maybe more. Solid iron, that anvil.’ He turned and nudged Ketil Crow. ‘Some spearhead. Some sword.’

Ketil Crow scowled, but it was half-hearted and the old, avaricious glow was back in his eyes.

‘What’s this?’ asked a voice and everyone turned, thrusting torches. The man – a grey-bearded veteran called Ogmund Wryneck because of a head-jerking tic he had – stood looking up another shaft, behind the barrels. The wooden rungs of a ladder led upwards.

‘Well spotted, old eye,’ Einar said, clapping him on the shoulder. He stepped on the ladder, moved up one rung – and it fell apart with a puff of rotting wood.

‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, then looked at me. ‘A strong lad, bracing himself, could work himself up that shaft with a rope if he had a mind.’

‘He could,’ I answered bitterly. ‘When you find one, ask him.’

Illugi Godi, impatiently grabbing the nearest torch, was almost nose to rock now, poring over the runes and muttering, but careful not to touch. But he was not so engrossed that he could not try to grasp more. He turned to me, his eyes wild.

‘Yes, yes, you must. There might be another runespell. Think of it! Another spell.’

‘Or a sword,’ added Ketil Crow enticingly.

‘Or some of Atil’s treasure,’ said Einar. The rest of the faces round me glowed with the greed of it and their eyes burned on me.

Fuck your runes, I wanted to say. Fuck your magic swords. Fuck you, too, godi. You haul your holy arse up the shaft if you feel so strongly about it.

Yet, at the same time, I was taking the offered rope, coiling it round my waist, looping the torch round my neck again and heaving myself into the shaft.

In the end it was an easy climb. The rungs broke into dust, but there were rusted metal sockets for them and they stayed intact for the most part, so it was simple. At the top, I lit the torch and looked around.

There was a collapsed shelf and more barrels, whose splayed staves spilled the contents out. There was a chest which looked interesting, but only because I tried to move it and knew it was heavy and perfect as an anchor for the rope.

I slung it down, told them that the room was too small for everyone and then turned back to the other thing I had spotted. The door.

It was half open, swung limply on sagging hinges and revealed, at first, what seemed to be an old wooden-framed bed and a collection of rags. Then I realised the rags had form; white gleamed. Bone.

As Einar panted up the rope into the room I realised, from the hanks of hair and the remains of jewellery, that this could be Hild’s mother. Einar, peering over my shoulder, rubbed his moustaches and nodded when I offered my explanation.

‘Interesting,’ he said and then pointed out the obvious, which I had overlooked. ‘If it is, she could have unbarred the door, got out and returned to her child.’

That made me jerk. Perhaps it wasn’t her, after all, but some other luckless relative – a grandmother or older – but why they hadn’t walked out was still a mystery. However, as I pointed out to Einar and Illugi, the only two who came up, best not to mention this to Hild.

They nodded, though I wasn’t sure they heard. Illugi was too busy hunting for more runes and stirring up only the old dust of dried beans and insect husks. Einar, however, was at the metal chest and working a seax into the rusted lock.

It gave with a dull sound and he lifted the lid. We all peered, half expecting gold, swords, gem-studded crowns. Instead, there were a lot of cloth bundles which, when we unwrapped them, unveiled a series of blackened tin plates, some bound together through holes with the remains of leather thongs.

‘Like the book of leaves in St Otmund’s temple,’ I pointed out and Einar nodded, rummaging furiously and annoyed that there was only this and the metal was only tin.

‘Indeed,’ said Illugi, his eyes gleaming, ‘that’s what it is. Hold the torch closer, Orm. Let’s see … Yes, runes. Excellent …’ A moment later, he straightened, the disappointment palpable. ‘Apart from advice on never allowing two blades to lie across each other and a list of plants to rub into the anvil to give it more strength, there isn’t much here on smelting that I haven’t heard before.’

‘Useless, god-fucked place,’ muttered Einar moodily. ‘No treasure, no clues.’

‘There is the runespell on the wall below,’ Illugi said brightly.

‘Know what it says?’ demanded Einar.

‘I think it is something about truth, or being true. And there’s an eternity rune in there, which means long-lasting. And, of course, it all depends on how you cut them …’

‘You have no idea, do you?’ Einar challenged and Illugi shrugged, grinned sheepishly and admitted that to be true.

‘It seems to be what you’d expect to find on a good sword – a runespell to make a blade true and long-lasting,’ he said. ‘But the runes are old, different from the ones we know now.’

The shriek made us all jerk, an ear-splitting sound that bounced off the walls, ringing the whole place like a bell.

‘What the fuck … ?’

Einar was down the rope in a fast slide that must have flayed skin from his palms. I followed, only marginally slower, since I was almost certain I knew who had screamed.

I was right. Hild stood in the centre of a ring of wary warriors, clutching the spear-shaft to her chest. She was still as a carved prow, her eyes wide and staring at nothing, her mouth open and chest heaving, as if she could not breathe.

‘The monk made her do it,’ Bodvar said. ‘We were all thinking it a bad idea when she started to, but that little rat said someone had to and it might as well be her.’

Einar glared at Skapti, who tugged the leash so that Martin jerked. Halftroll shrugged and said, ‘He wasn’t wrong, Einar. Someone had to risk it.’

Martin, straightening, adjusted his cowl and smiled. ‘I was right. I have been right all along. This Hild is linked to the sword made here, a powerful weapon now thanks to the blood of Christ on that holy spearhead they used to forge it.

‘The heathens may have perverted the Spear of Destiny, but the blood stays true. True also is the blood of the smiths – she knows where the sword is and so also where the Great Hoard is.’

‘Kill the little fuck now,’ growled Ketil Crow.

‘He has the right of it,’ announced Hild in a strange, gentle, calm voice. ‘I am linked by the blood of the smiths who made this sword.’

‘How many spears were stuck in this Christ, then?’ Finn Horsehead demanded to know. ‘For I have heard that the Emperor of the Romans in the Great City has hundreds of Christ ikons, from a little cloth with the god’s face on it to a crown made of thorns. And a spear that was thrust in the side of this Jesus as he hung on his tree.’

‘False. I have the real spear,’ snapped Martin angrily and Einar whacked him on one ear, sending the little monk stumbling.

‘You have nothing at all, monk,’ Einar said in a voice thick and slow as a moving glacier. ‘You have your life only by my leave.’

Hild shook her head, as if scattering water from her. ‘I know where the sword of Attila is. I can take you there, far to the east, along the Khazars’ river.’

‘Where in the name of Odin’s arse is that?’ demanded Einar.

‘I know,’ said Pinleg like an eager boy. No one laughed now, not after what they had seen him do. ‘It’s down the Don,’ he announced triumphantly.

‘The Don?’ repeated Einar.

‘That’s Khazar territory,’ insisted Pinleg. ‘If it is the same Khazars who spit little arrows at you and worship the god of the Jewish men.’

‘The same,’ Hild said and there was silence, loud as a clanging hammer. The shock of it all was still chilling us when one of the door guards came in out of the dark tunnel, blinking into the light.

‘Rurik says to come quick,’ he told Einar, ‘for something has happened.’

‘Rurik? What is he doing here?’

We charged out, back along the passage and into the daylight, where the weak sun seemed searing and blinding. Blinking, we saw Rurik and Valgard Trimmer and four others. My father, grim-faced, stepped forward and I saw he had a bloody, unbound cut along the length of his forearm, seeping thickly through the rent in his tunic.

‘One of Starkad’s ships came,’ he said, ‘with Starkad and Ulf-Agar. There was a fight; eight of us were killed.’

‘How did you get the Elk away with so few?’ demanded Einar.

My father paused, scrubbed his face and the sickening realisation was dawning on us all before he even told us.

‘We didn’t. We came overland, with Starkad hot on our heels. We left the Elk burning to the waterline.’