Читать книгу The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 5 - Robert Low - Страница 22

A wind snaked out of the north and drove a thin spray of grit and dust against me, whipping my cloak so hard I stumbled sideways. It was driving against our shield side and a few had decided to walk with the things up as shelter.

My arm was too sore for that, the pain throbbing out from the missing fingers all the way up to my elbow, so I had hauled up the cloak round my head and hunched into it, wondering whether my ankle hurt more than my hand, or if I had miasmic rot in the stumps of my fingers. I remembered the bee-keeper from Uppsala and his arm, blackening as he raved into the long night.

Up ahead strode Einar, alongside the jolting cart where Hild sat, cross-legged, swathed and veiled in his fine red cloak.

When he had heard Flosi’s news, Einar had stopped in his tracks and the matted yellow dust on his face had not hidden how he had paled. Ketil Crow had hawked and spat and said, ‘Loki’s hairy arse.’ Illugi had just looked sick with weariness.

Then Einar shook himself – physically, like a dog, so that the dust came off him like water – and growled, ‘Time for us to go, then, I am thinking.’

‘Do we have enough dead yet?’ I snarled back at him and he whirled, taking a step towards me. I think he expected me to back from him, remembering the steel of his fingers round my neck, but I was savage for it, wanted it more than my life, even though the thought flashed through me that I was dead.

‘Enough for what?’ asked a bemused Wryneck, with his tic-twitch.

Einar stopped, forced a grin and shrugged. ‘Our Bear Slayer has lost his father,’ he declared, for all to hear, ‘and it is not surprising a little of his mind has gone with him.’ He turned to Wryneck. ‘Look after him, old one, while I arrange for the proper rites for our fallen.’

Then he looked round the rest of us, raising his voice so all could hear. ‘Wash. Dress in your finest, for these are your oath-brothers and deserve it.’

So we all straggled out, searching for our scattered belongings from where the horsemen had dragged them, then went down to the river and cleaned ourselves and our clothes, as much as we could in that pink-tinged, mud-tainted flow.

But the Don was wide here and swallowed all our filth. By the time Ketil Crow and Einar came back, with thralls leading a dozen carts, each with two solid wheels and a stringy pony, we were, if not shining, more fitting than we had been before.

But I did it only for Rurik. I wanted to spit in Einar’s eye.

We took the bodies north into the steppe as the twilight grew, far out from where the city smouldered, until the fires of our own camp were distant enough for some to be uneasy about getting back. Of course, I knew we weren’t going back.

In the half-dark, thralls dug out a great boat-shaped pit in the black earth and placed the bodies in it, for there wasn’t enough wood left for a pyre after all the great burnings we’d already had.

It was a dark and silent affair, of hissing wind and the grunts of the thralls as they dug the earth with chopping sounds. Nearby, like a great storm crow, Hild squatted in her dark dress, knees up at her ears, hands clasped in her lap, presiding over it like some idol.

I folded Rurik’s hands on his chest over the hilt of his sword and silently asked the All-Father to guide him. Then the thralls filled the pit in with furious, nervous energy, as the dark came down and they grew ever more fearful.

They were right to be afraid. Maybe one or two suspected, but most were scared of the wrong people for, after they had unloaded the head-sized white stones we had begged or stolen from the Greek engineers and placed them as a border round the grave, Ketil Crow had them all seized.

Illugi Godi led the chanting prayers as, one by one, their throats were slit and they were laid out in a circle, head towards the mound, feet away. Hild stirred then, as the iron stink of blood swirled on the steppe wind and unfolded herself.

‘Are we done here?’ she rasped and heads turned angrily to her, only to be silenced by the cold stare they had in return.

It was a hasty excuse, half-ashamed in the dark, for a proper burial in the old way, with fire and dignity, but I made my own peace with Rurik then, for I thought it unlikely I would be back here – or that the scavengers would leave much. But all were safely across Bifrost, the rainbow bridge.

Afterwards, Einar told them what he planned: to strike out north and east, round the city, then back to the river beyond it and on down to the greatest wealth of silver they had ever seen.

Thirty agreed at once and eight thereafter, reluctant and muttering about every hand being against them.

‘Did you think such a prize was to be had lightly?’ Einar demanded, as much to all of us as to them.

‘No,’ answered one of those who still refused – baptised Christ-followers to a man, I noted. ‘I did not think to have to pay my soul as the price.’

‘Your soul?’ snarled Ketil Crow. ‘What is this? The afterlife in Christ-Valholl? If so, it seems a poor place, full of poor people and gods who scorn a hard arm.’

The man, a Dane from Hedeby called Aslaf, was not fazed by Ketil Crow and merely shrugged, since he had no gold-browed argument and Christ hung on him like a new tunic, still creased and scratchy here and there.

For all that, he and his three oarmates would not give in and stood their ground, shuffling their feet and keeping a wary eye and a hand on a hilt.

‘You swore an oath,’ Illugi reminded them and Aslaf glanced at him, uneasy now that this door had opened. But he had courage, this Dane, and pushed it a little wider.

‘Not made to the One God we follow,’ he countered defiantly, then licked his lips and stared hard at Einar. ‘Anyway, I am not the first to break that old oath. I will not follow a madwoman into the Grass Sea in search of a tale for children.’

The words hung in the air with the flutter and whine of insects and the gutter of new torches in the rising wind.

‘Nithing turds,’ Ketil Crow growled, waving a dismissive hand. ‘I hate fucking Christ-men; they are not even worth killing.’

Hild laughed, high and crazed and cracked like a bell, and half of those who had already agreed to go almost changed their minds there and then, I saw. I was one.

For a moment I thought Aslaf would ruin it all, for his eyes narrowed and I could feel him flush from where I stood. If he fought, he would die, that was certain.

Then he relaxed, took two or three steps backwards, insultingly, until he was beyond range of a backstab, whirled and trotted into the night, back to the sprawling fires of the camp. With a brief wild look at each other, the other three did the same.

‘If Yaropolk doesn’t kill him,’ Einar growled to the uneasy stirrings around him, ‘then Sviatoslav will. If Starkad doesn’t get to them first, that is.’

The men round him growled with bare-toothed, savage delight at that, the fate these oath-breakers deserved. But it was the wolf-grin of the desperate.

There wasn’t much left now to bind us. Not oath, certainly – like a badly built hov, the roofbeams of which were splitting. For some, the lure of the hoard was still enough. For most it was the sick realisation that, unsteady as it was, the shrinking band of Oathsworn was the safest place to be for the moment.

And for me? There was only one reason I was going now. A son cannot leave his murdered father without taking revenge.

We moved out through the darkness, keeping the fires to our back until they disappeared. Then we turned east, with Steinthor questing ahead and Bagnose to our shield side.

Now the men knew of the plan, a few were cursing that they had left this or that behind, thinking they’d return. Short Eldgrim and Kvasir were the most loud and furious, since they’d bought a concubine between them and spent almost all they had on her only to have left her behind.

Most were as varjazi always had been. They wore all they possessed, carrying wealth in boot or under armpit. If you could not leave something behind in an eyeblink, you were a fool.

By dawn, the wind had risen to a snake-hiss and we trundled across short grass peeking from between stones, over endless, rolling hills, cut with steep-gulleyed streams, some dust-dry, some trickling with water and almost choked with eager growth.

It was well named, this Grass Sea, a great, undulating vastness unmarked as an ocean. When the city had shrunk behind us to a scab on the distant horizon, Einar put the wind at our back and headed us to the river. Now and then he spoke softly with Hild, but she made not a sound and no one wanted to go near her, not even me, for the Other rose off her like a sweat-stink and made the hairs on your arms stand up.

We spotted the first dust, whipped away like smoke on a sighing wind, as we tramped tiredly up to another of the steep gulleys, which those Novgorod Slavs among us called balkas. They were annoying, for the shelter let scrub and stunted trees spring up and the carts had to be manhandled over them. Even the tough little ponies were tiring.

Einar decided to rest for a while in one and wait for Steinthor and Bagnose to come back in. Sheltered from the wind, with water and some kindling, we got a couple of fires going and those with the skill for it boiled up meat into a gruel and made flatbread on a griddle.

Bagnose came in, loping like a weary dog, laid his bow and quiver down and took a swig from a horn that was offered. Then he made a face and spat. ‘Water, you arses!’

The men chuckled; Bagnose was a lift to the spirits, the one man who really did thumb his nose at the gods and never questioned that what he was doing was the way things should be. The whale road was as natural to him – and Steinthor – as if they were a pair of the great beasts it was named after.

He grabbed a bowl, hauled out a horn spoon from inside his tunic and sucked gruel into his mouth, chewing gobbets of tough gristle, spitting sideways. We all waited until he had finished, then Einar asked, ‘Well, Geir Bagnose?’

Bagnose wiped his glistening beard, stuffed flatbread in, washed it down with another swig of water and sighed, then belched. ‘Twenty, perhaps thirty horsemen, those little ones on little ponies. Moving north to east, circling us.’

‘Enemy?’ asked a voice and Bagnose snorted.

‘Arse! Every horseman is our enemy now.’

‘Those turds on their dog-horses are not fighters,’ said Flosi with a sneer and a spit. ‘You can fight them off armed with a bladder on a stick.’

Bagnose shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Tell me more when they shoot you full of arrows from a distance,’ he growled. ‘They’ll make you look like a hedgepig, then cut off your little bladder on a stick and shove it in your flapping mouth.’

More chuckles and Flosi acknowledged that they were, it had to be said, nasty with their little bows. But all of us had begged, stolen, bought – or, in my case, inherited – the thick underkirtle for mail. It made movement even harder, but kept the arrows off unless the little nithings got to close range, or you had Loki luck. I wore my father close to my skin and there was some comfort in that.

‘Steinthor in yet?’ asked Bagnose. Ketil Crow shook his head and Bagnose frowned, then shrugged and held out his wooden bowl for a refill. ‘Have you heard this one, lads? Stop me if you have. I flee the deep earth, there is no place for me on the ground, nor any part of the poles …’

His voice covered me like a blanket and I drifted off to it before I heard the answer – but I knew it already and it was apt enough. I lay watching the clouds scud in the wind until my eyes closed and I dozed until kicked awake. We moved out.

Two miles further on we found Steinthor. His head, at least, stuck on a short spear, straggled hair and beard matted with blood. A great black bird hopped off it, wiping its beak with quick sideways flicks and completely unconcerned.

Illugi Godi made a quick, chanting prayer, but Sighvat, whom we called Deep-minded and whose mother had been the same, gave a snort of scorn.

‘That’s a crow, a big hoodie,’ he said. ‘Any minute it will fly off, widdershins, not sunwise.’

As if in response, the bird flapped off to the left, sluggish with Steinthor’s eyes.

Sighvat felt our stares and looked at us, bemused. ‘What? All crows are left-handed.’

‘Crows don’t have hands,’ Ketil Crow replied, staring at Steinthor’s flesh-flaked head.

‘Nothing to do with these,’ snapped Sighvat, holding up his hands. ‘It’s all here,’ he went on and tapped his head. ‘Why do you think you are called Ketil Crow?’

And that was true enough. Ketil Crow was corrie-fisted, a left-hander and a fearsomely difficult man to fight.

Bagnose, however, said nothing at all, just stood by that head looking wildly round for the rest of the body. We all spread out and looked, too, but found nothing and it was my thought that he had been killed elsewhere and the head carried to where we could not fail to find it, as a warning.

Illugi Godi and Bagnose lifted the grisly thing off the spear and put it in a hole we dug. We mounded earth over it but, like the bigger mound we’d left far behind, I had a notion that scavengers would dig it up before we’d gone too far.

It was a poor thing for the likes of Steinthor and, for days afterwards, I kept hearing his voice telling the story of finding me with the white bear, in that other world where I had once been a boy whose biggest adventure was finding a gull’s nest with four eggs.

That done, we moved on, reaching the river as darkness fell, but Bagnose was not asked to go scouting again. That night, as we huddled round the small fire, eaten by the crushing dark, we knew there would be no more riddles or saga tales from the dark, hunched figure who sat and stared, not at the flames, but into the darkness.

Even whales die on the whale road.

The endless rolling steppe affects your mind, paring away thoughts until there is little more left than the desire to put one foot in front of the other. At one point I had the sick, dizzying feeling that I wasn’t walking forward at all, but that the whole steppe was moving backwards.

I even stopped, to see if it carried me backwards and, when it seemed to do just that, as everyone kept on moving, I cried out with fear and dropped to my knees. It was Wryneck, coming up behind me, who grabbed me by the back of my mail and hauled me upright. As my feet stumbled forward I snapped out of it and turned to gasp my thanks.

The flicker of movement silenced everyone, making all heads turn. Hild, in one strange, fluid movement, stood, the red cloak falling from her. She leaped from the cart and strode forward in her bruise-blue dress, long dark hair whipping in that endless, soughing wind.

We all stared. She strode forward for another dozen paces, then stopped. One arm rose slowly and pointed. ‘There,’ she said. And we looked. And saw only the endless steppe.

‘A magic, invisible mountain, is it?’ growled Flosi. No one else spoke, but we moved forward to where Hild stood – giving her a wide berth, I noticed, as if she smelled bad.

And we gaped, the shock of realisation coming to us as the steppe fell away into another balka, a big one, dust-dry and spilling out in a steep-sided canyon. Not a mountain. A pit. They had dug a pit into the steppe, a vast thing, big as a city, then mounded the middle of it back up in the shape of a great steppe lord’s tent, but still below the original ground level.

‘They diverted the stream,’ Einar marvelled after we had moved down further. ‘To hide the entrance, they turned a river across it. This was once ... a lake, a great pool, with water flowing in there’ – he pointed – ‘and running out there to the Don.’

Everyone marvelled, save Illugi. The godi had not said much of anything other than muttered chants. Once, in the night, I had seen him by the fire casting his rune bones and muttering to himself and thought then that he was growing as dark as Hild in some ways.

‘Atil’s howe,’ breathed Valknut.

‘If this one is to be believed,’ growled Ketil Crow, moving past him to where Hild squatted. She smiled beautifully up at him and he scowled. ‘Cunt to jawline,’ he reminded her and moved on.

Einar took us in a scramble down the balka, where it led like a road straight to a cleft in the brooding mound.

Hild, silent and hugged to herself, raised one pale hand and pointed at the stones on either side of it, fat stones as tall as a man, ones you would not be ashamed to rune and set up on a hill in memory. But these, though pocked and scarred, were unmarked; however, Illugi looked at them suspiciously.

‘The door,’ declared Einar with his wolf-grin, his crow-hair flapping in the breeze. ‘We can set up camp here and start digging at first light.’

Men found fresh energy, unloaded gear and supplies and rubbed their hands with glee. Round the fire that night there was banter and talk of what they would do with all that silver. There was no doubting it now, for we had all seen the marvel of it.

Ketil Crow and Einar said nothing at all, but sat with their own dreams whirling in their heads. I doubted if they shared the same ones, though.

Atil’s howe. A mountain of treasure. She had known after all, it seemed, and the realisation of that made me shiver – for how could she have led us so unerringly to this unmarked, unknown place? How could anyone have done that and still be like the rest of us?

I watched her sitting upright in front of those two stones and that cleft, which was like the dark invite of a woman’s body. Her hair floated in the wind, a dark snake-crown, and, even with her back to us all, she exuded something that made the fear rise in you like old mead fumes. She sat there all night, was still there in the morning, she had not moved.

Did not move, until the horsemen swept on us.

Einar had split us, sensibly enough. There were those to guard and we wore all our gear, while those digging had stripped to the waist and were hacking away at the earth. A cart was being broken up, so that the wood could be used as shoring, for we had no clear idea of how much we’d have to dig to break in.

The drumming of hooves brought all heads up. The diggers ran for the cover of the carts; those on guard hefted their weapons. Of the twenty, about half knew how to use a bow and were nocking arrows. But they also had mail and fat padded arms, all of which made drawing and loosing accurately a nightmare.

The horsemen swept down the balka in a cloud of dust, without any shouts or cries. They skidded at full tilt down the slopes we had taken ages to traverse, shooting arrows as they came.

I heard them thud into the earth around me. One hissed over my head. Another smacked my shield boss with a clang and dropped to the ground.

They were true steppe warriors, these, all sheepskins and wool hats and active as cats on those horses. They didn’t so much ride them as climb all over them, shooting their little arrows until they got close, then whipping out their light swords, darting them like snake-tongues at us from the other side of the horse, and swooping away before we could strike.

They swirled and whooped and vanished and appeared again in the dust until we were dizzy with it, whirling our heavy swords and axes at nothing.

A figure stepped out of our ranks into the dust.

‘Hold!’ yelled Einar. ‘Don’t let them drag you out into their killing ground.’

But it was Bagnose and he was past caring. He nocked, took aim, shot and a man pitched off. Walking forward, he nocked, took aim, shot and another horseman shrieked.

They saw him then and the arrows hissed. He took two full in the chest, staggering him. But he walked forward, nocked, took aim …

He had no mail, no padding, for he was an archer who took pride in it and never missed, wanted nothing to tangle his flights or string.

But Bagnose was already dead, though his legs and heart didn’t know it and he was still roaring something when he fell.

We ignored Einar and went after him, of course – it was Bagnose, after all – charging into the dust, screaming. But by then the horsemen had thundered off and all we could do was drag back the corpse, studded with arrows.

‘Like a hedgepig,’ said Flosi mournfully. Out on the slope of the balka, though, six corpses lay, each killed with a single shot.

‘What was he shouting?’ asked Valknut, who had been one of the diggers.

‘He wasn’t shouting,’ answered Einar softly. ‘He was making verses. On his own death. A good song, but only he knows it.’

‘Odin’s balls,’ Valknut growled, shaking his head. ‘The cost of seeing them off was high.’

‘A test?’ Ketil Crow hazarded, wiping his streaming face. ‘To see how good we are?’

‘Now they know,’ spat Wryneck with a brief twitch. ‘Six for one.’

‘Let’s hope the price is too high for them,’ I offered.

Of course, it wasn’t. But they waited until the next day to try to wipe us out.

We dug feverishly, well into the night, taking it in turns to stand guard or swing a pick, so that no one got any real rest. Valknut and Illugi Godi did their own digging, another boat-grave for the animals to dig up, while Hild sat and watched us, perched on a wagon-trace with her knees at her chin. She reminded everyone of a carrion crow.

It was Valknut who speared the first of the treasure, with the very last hack of a mattock, dragging earth back out of the hole we had made between the stones.

He held up what he had found, scraping the dirt off and, in the red glow of a torch, something gleamed. He spat, polished it and the flash of silver shone. We all gawped.

Einar took it from him, turning it this way and that. ‘A bowl,’ he hazarded. ‘Or a plate, flattened and bent. Good workmanship, though.’

‘It’s silver, right enough,’ breathed Valknut and would have gone back in, save that the stretch he had cleared out needed roof supports and it was too dark to see properly to put them in. The tunnel we had dug was six foot long, three high and leaking loose dirt like water because we were using wood sparingly; we needed all the carts to carry our haul away in.

All night long the men turned that bent semi-circle of age-black silver to and fro, cleaned it, marvelled at it, discovered the delicate border of leaves and fruit, birds in flight and even bees, all embossed in the silver in perfect little portraits.

Sighvat studied it with interest and said, ‘Those are the dreams of birds.’

‘You and your birds,’ growled Valknut. ‘What do they dream of?’

‘Songs, mostly,’ Sighvat replied seriously, then wagged a finger at Valknut. ‘If we scorn the wisdom of birds and beasts, we fool only ourselves.’

‘What wisdom?’ asked Wryneck, curious now, while he smoothed the notched edge of his sword back to sharpness in a comforting, rhythmic rasp of whetstone.

‘Well,’ said Sighvat, considering. ‘Bees know when fire is coming and will swarm. Hornets and wasps know the very tree that Thor will hurl his hammer at. And a frog is better at being a frog than a man.’

We chuckled at that, but Sighvat merely shrugged and said, ‘Could you live naked in a pool all winter and survive?’

‘What else?’ demanded Wryneck, for this was decent compensation for the sad lack of Bagnose’s wit.

‘My mother could speak with birds and some beasts,’ said Sighvat, ‘but never could teach it to me. She told me hedgepigs and wasps will not spy for anyone, but woodpeckers and starlings can be persuaded to tell what they know. And most hawks hate autumn.’

‘Why?’ demanded Einar, suddenly interested. ‘I have hunted a hawk in autumn, but it never does well and I have always wondered why that is.’

‘You should have had someone like my old mum ask it,’ Sighvat replied. ‘But it is simple enough. Here is a bird that hangs in the air, looking for the least little movement on the ground, which is its supper. And there are thousands of blowing leaves.’

Einar stroked his moustaches thoughtfully and nodded.

Valknut waved a dismissive hand, adding: ‘That’s just … sense.’

‘You did not know it,’ Sivhgat pointed out and Valknut fumed, having no answer to that.

‘And,’ I said, half dreamily, ‘you never see a cat on a battlefield.’

There was amazed silence for a moment, then Sighvat grinned. ‘Exactly – you know a thing or two, young Orm.’

‘All I know is that this’ – Valknut held up the battered silver – ‘is a sign that riches lie in that hill.’

‘Just so,’ declared Einar with a slight smile, ‘and here’s something for you to think on. Riches are like horse shit.’

We looked at each other. Some shrugged; no one could understand it and more than a few, never having heard him do it before, were not sure if Einar was making a joke.

Einar grinned. ‘They stink when they are in a heap in someone else’s patch, but make everything fruitful when spread about.’

And we laughed and felt almost like the old brotherhood, sitting by the fire, fretting for light so we could get back to digging.

But when morning did come, we had hardly blown life back into the fire embers, barely had time for a stretch and a fart, before the horsemen appeared on the steppe above the balka and everyone sprinted for weapons and armour.