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The Erlings were raiders and pirates, ravaging in their longships all through these lands and waters and— increasingly—down south. But even pirates could be seduced by the lure of trade, and Firaz ibn Bakir (and his partners) had reaped profit from that truth. Enough so to have him back now for a third time, standing in a knife-like wind on a bitter morning, waiting for them to get on with burning Halldr Thinshank on a boat with his weapons and armour and his best household goods and wooden images of the gods and one of his slave girls … and a horse.
A pale grey horse, a beauty, Halldr’s favourite, and missing. On a very small island.
Ibn Bakir looked around. A sweeping gaze from the town square could almost encompass Rabady. The harbour, a stony beach, with a score of Erling ships and his own large roundship from the south—the first one in, which ought to have been splendid news. This town, sheltering several hundred souls perhaps, was deemed an important market in the northlands, a fact that brought private amusement to the merchant from Fezana, a man who had been received by the khalif in Cartada, who had walked in the gardens and heard the music of the fountains there.
No fountains here. Beyond the stockade walls and the ditch surrounding them, a quilting of stony farmland could be seen, then livestock grazing, then forest. Beyond the pine woods, he knew, the sea swept round again, with the rocky mainland of Vinmark across the strait. More farms there, fisher-villages along the coast, then emptiness: mountains and trees for a very long way, to the places where the reindeer ran (they said) in herds that could not be numbered, and the men who lived among them wore antlers themselves to hunt, and practised magics with blood in the winter nights.
Ibn Bakir had written these stories down during his last long journey home, had told them to the khalif at an audience in Cartada, presented his writings along with gifts of fur and amber. He’d been given gifts in return: a necklace, an ornamental dagger. His name was known in Cartada now.
It occurred to him that it might be useful to observe and chronicle this funeral—if the accursed rites ever began.
He shivered. It was cold in the blustering wind. An untidy clump of men made their way towards him, tacking across the square as if they were on a ship together. One man stumbled and bumped another; the second one swore, pushed back, put a hand to his axe. A third intervened, and took a punch to the shoulder for his pains. He ignored it like an insect bite. Another big man. They were all, ibn Bakir thought sorrowfully, big men.
It came to him, belatedly, that this was not really a good time to be a stranger on Rabady Isle, with the governor (they used an Erling word, but it meant, as best ibn Bakir could tell, something very like a governor) dead and his funeral rites marred by a mysteriously missing animal. Suspicions might fall.
As the group approached, he spread his hands, palms up, and brought them together in front of him. He bowed formally. Someone laughed. Someone stopped directly in front of him, reached out, unsteadily, and fingered the pale yellow silk of ibn Bakir’s tunic, leaving a smear of grease. Ofnir, his interpreter, said something in their language and the others laughed again. Ibn Bakir, alert now, believed he detected an easing of tension. He had no idea what he’d do if he was wrong.
The considerable profit you could make from trading with barbarians bore a direct relation to the dangers of the journey—and the risks were not only at sea. He was the youngest partner, investing less than the others, earning his share by being the one who travelled … by allowing thick, rancid-smelling barbarian fingers to tug at his clothing while he smiled and bowed and silently counted the hours and days till the roundship might leave, its hold emptied and refilled.
“They say,” Ofnir spoke slowly, in the loud voice one used with the simple-minded, “it is now known who take Halldr horse.” His breath, very close to ibn Bakir, smelled of herring and beer.
His tidings, however, were entirely sweet. It meant they didn’t think the trader from Al-Rassan, the stranger, had anything to do with it. Ibn Bakir had been dubious about his ability, with two dozen words in their tongue and Ofnir’s tenuous skills, to make the obvious point that he’d just arrived the afternoon before and had no earthly (or other) reason to impede local rites by stealing a horse. These were not men currently in a condition to assess cogency of argument.
“Who did it?” Ibn Bakir was only mildly curious.
“Servant to Halldr. Sold to him. Father make wrong killing. Sent away. Son have no right family now.”
Lack of family appeared to be an explanation for theft here, ibn Bakir thought wryly. That seemed to be what Ofnir was conveying. He knew someone back home who would find this diverting over a glass of good wine.
“So he took the horse? Where? Into the woods?” Ibn Bakir gestured at the pines beyond the fields.
Ofnir shrugged. He pointed out into the square. Ibn Bakir saw that men were now mounting horses there— not always smoothly—and riding towards the open town gate and the plank bridge across the ditch. Others ran or walked beside them. He heard shouts. Anger, yes, but also something else: zest, liveliness. The promise of sport.
“He will soon found,” Ofnir said, in what passed here in the northlands for Asharite.
Ibn Bakir nodded. He watched two men gallop past. One screamed suddenly as he passed and swung his axe in vicious, whistling circles over his head, for no evident reason.
“What will they do to him?” he asked, not caring very much.
Ofnir snorted. Spoke quickly in Erling to the others, evidently repeating the question.
There was a burst of laughter. One of them, in an effusion of good humour, punched ibn Bakir on the shoulder.
The merchant, regaining his balance, rubbing at his numbed arm, realized that he’d asked a naive question.
“Blood-eagle death, maybe,” said Ofnir, flashing yellow teeth in a wide grin, making a complex two-handed gesture the southern merchant was abruptly pleased not to understand. “You see? Ever you see?”
Firaz ibn Bakir, a long way from home, shook his head.
He could blame his father, and curse him, even go to the women at the compound outside the walls and pay to have them evoke seithr. The volur might then send a night-spirit to possess his father, wherever he was. But there was something cowardly about that, and a warrior could not be a coward and still go to the gods when he died. Besides which, he had no money.
Riding in darkness before the first moon rose, Bern Thorkellson thought bitterly about the bonds of family. He could smell his own fear and laid a hand forward on the horse’s neck to gentle it. It was too black to go quickly on this rough ground near the woods, and he could not—for obvious reasons—carry a torch.
He was entirely sober, which was useful. A man could die sober as well as drunken, he supposed, but had a better chance of avoiding some kinds of death. Of course it could also be said that no truly sober man would have done what he was doing now unless claimed by a spirit himself, ghost-ridden, god-tormented.
Bern didn’t think he was crazed, but he’d have acknowledged freely that what he was doing—without having planned it at all—was not the wisest thing he’d ever done.
He concentrated on riding. There was no good reason for anyone to be abroad in these fields at night—farmers would be asleep behind doors, the shepherds would have their herds farther west—but there was always the chance of someone hoping to find a cup of ale at some hut, or meeting a girl, or looking for something to steal.
He was stealing a dead man’s horse, himself.
A warrior’s vengeance would have had him kill Halldr Thinshank long ago and face the blood feud after, beside whatever distant kin, if any, might come to his aid. Instead, Halldr had died when the main crossbeam of the new house he was having built (with money that didn’t belong to him) fell on his back, breaking it. And Bern had stolen the grey horse that was to be burned with the governor tomorrow.
It would delay the rites, he knew, disquiet the ghost of the man who had exiled Bern’s father and taken his mother as a second wife. The man who had also, not incidentally, ordered Bern himself bound for three years as a servant to Arni Kjellson, recompense for his father’s crime.
A young man named to servitude, with an exiled father, and so without any supporting family or name, could not readily proclaim himself a warrior among the Erlings unless he went so far from home that his history was unknown. His father had probably done that, raiding overseas again. Red-bearded, fierce-tempered, experienced. A perfect oarsman for some longship, if he didn’t kill a benchmate in a fury, Bern thought sourly. He knew his father’s capacity for rage. Arni Kjellson’s brother Nikar was dead of it.
Halldr might fairly have exiled the murderer and given away half his land to stop a feud, but marrying the exile’s wife and claiming land for himself smacked too much of reaping in pleasure what he’d sowed as a judge. Bern Thorkellson, an only son with two sisters married and off the island, had found himself changed—in a blur of time—from the heir of a celebrated raider-turned-farmer to a landless servant without kin to protect him. Could any man wonder if there was bitterness in him, and more than that? He’d loathed Rabady’s governor with cold passion. A hatred shared by more than a few, if words whispered in ale were to be believed.
Of course no one else had ever done anything about Halldr. Bern was the one now riding Thinshank’s favourite stallion amid stones and boulders in cold darkness on the night before the governor’s pyre was to be lit on a ship by the rocky beach.
Not the wisest action of his life, agreed.
For one thing, he hadn’t anything even vaguely resembling a plan. He’d been lying awake, listening to the snoring and snorting of the other two servants in the shed behind Kjellson’s house. Not unusual, that wakefulness: bitterness could suck a man from sleep. But somehow he’d found himself on his feet this time, dressing, pulling on boots and the bearskin vest he’d been able to keep so far, though he’d had to fight for it. He’d gone outside, pissed against the shed wall, and then walked through the silent blackness of the town to Halldr’s house (Frigga, his mother, lying somewhere inside, alone now, without a husband for the second time in a year).
He’d slipped around the side, eased open the door to the stable, listened to the boy there, snuffling in the dreams of a straw-covered sleep, and then led the big grey horse called Gyllir quietly out under the watching stars.
The stableboy never stirred. No one appeared in the lane. Only the named shapes of heroes and beasts in the gods’ sky overhead. He’d been alone in Rabady with the night-spirits. It had felt like a dream.
The town gate was locked when danger threatened but not otherwise. Rabady was an island. Bern and the grey horse had walked right through the square by the harbour, past the shuttered booths, down the middle of the empty street, through the open gates, across the bridge over the ditch into the night fields.
As simple as that, as life-altering.
Life-ending was probably the better way to describe it, he decided, given that this was not, in fact, a dream. He had no access to a boat that could carry the horse, and come sunrise a goodly number of extremely angry men— appalled at his impiety and their own exposure to an unhoused ghost—would begin looking for the horse. When they found the son of exiled Thorkell also missing, the only challenging decision would be how to kill him.
This did raise a possibility, given that he was sober and capable of thought. He could change his mind and go back. Leave the horse out here to be found. A minor, disturbing incident. They might blame it on ghosts or wood spirits. Bern could be back in his shed, asleep behind Arni Kjellson’s village house, before anyone was the wiser. Could even join the morning search for the horse, if fat Kjellson let him off wood-splitting to go.
They’d find the grey, bring it back, strangle and burn it on the drifting longship with Halldr Thinshank and whichever girl had won her spirit a place among warriors and gods by drawing the straw that freed her from the slow misery of her life.
Bern guided the horse across a stream. The grey was big, restive, but knew him. Kjellson had been properly grateful to the governor when half of Red Thorkell’s farm and his house were settled on him, and he had assigned his servants to labour for Thinshank at regular times. Bern was one of those servants now, by the same judgement that had given his family’s lands to Kjellson. He had groomed the grey stallion often, walked him, cleaned out his straw. A magnificent horse, better than Halldr had ever deserved. There was nowhere to run this horse properly on Rabady; he was purely for display, an affirmation of wealth. Another reason, probably, why the thought of taking it away had come to him tonight in the dangerous space between dream and the waking world.
He rode on in the chill night. Winter was over, but it still had its hard fingers in the earth. Their lives were defined by it here in the north. Bern was cold, even with the vest.
At least he knew where he was going now; that much seemed to have come to him. The land his father had bought with looted gold (mostly from the celebrated raid in Ferrieres twenty-five years ago) was on the other side of the village, south and west. He was aiming for the northern fringes of the trees.
He saw the shape of the marker boulder and guided the horse past it. They’d killed and buried a girl there to bless the fields, so long ago the inscription on the marker had faded away. It hadn’t done much good. The land near the forest was too stony to be properly tilled. Ploughs broke up behind oxen or horses, metal bending, snapping off. Hard, ungiving soil. Sometimes the harvests were adequate, but most of the food that fed Rabady came from the mainland.
The boulder cast a shadow. He looked up, saw the blue moon had risen from beyond the woods. Spirits’ moon. It occurred to him, rather too late, that the ghost of Halldr Thinshank could not be unaware of what was happening to his horse. Halldr’s lingering soul would be set free only with the ship-burial and burning tomorrow. Tonight it could be abroad in the dark—which was where Bern was.
He made the hammer sign, invoking both Ingavin and Thünir. He shivered again. A stubborn man he was. Too clever for his own good? His father’s son in that? He’d deny it, at a blade’s end. This had nothing to do with Thorkell. He was pursuing his own feud with Halldr and the town, not his father’s. You exiled a murderer (twice a murderer) if need be. You didn’t condemn his freeborn son to years of servitude and a landless fate for the father’s crime—and expect him to forgive. A man without land had nothing, could not marry, speak in the thringmoot, claim honour or pride. His life and name were marred, broken as a plough by stones.
He ought to have killed Halldr. Or Arni Kjellson. Or someone. He wondered, sometimes, where his own rage lay. He didn’t seem to have that fury, like a berserkir in battle. Or like his father in drink.
His father had killed people, raiding with Siggur Volganson, and here at home.
Bern hadn’t done anything so … direct. Instead, he’d stolen a horse secretly in the dark and was now heading, for want of anything close to a better idea, to see if woman’s magic—the volur ’s—could offer him aid in the depths of a night. Not a brilliant plan, but the only one that had come to him. The women would probably scream, raise an alarm, turn him in.
That did make him think of something. A small measure of prudence. He turned east towards the risen moon and the edge of the wood, dismounted, and led the horse a short way in. He looped the rope to a tree trunk. He was not about to walk up to the women’s compound leading an obviously stolen horse. This called for some trickery.
It was hard to be devious when you had no idea what you were doing.
He despised the bleak infliction of this life upon him. Was unable, it seemed, to even consider two more years of servitude, with no assurance of a return to any proper status afterwards. So, no, he wasn’t going back, leaving the stallion to be found, slipping into his straw in the freezing shed behind Kjellson’s house. That was over. The sagas told of moments when the hero’s fate changed, when he came to the axle-tree. He wasn’t a hero, but he wasn’t going back. Not by choice.
He was likely to die tonight or tomorrow. No rites for him when that happened. There would be an excited quarrel over how to kill a defiling horse thief, how slowly, and who most deserved the pleasure of it. They would be drunk and happy. Bern thought of the blood-eagle then; pushed the image from his mind.
Even the heroes died. Usually young. The brave went to Ingavin’s halls. He wasn’t sure if he was brave.
It was dense and black in the trees. He felt the pine needles underfoot. Wood smells: moss, pine, scent of a fox. Bern listened; heard nothing but his own breathing, and the horse’s. Gyllir seemed calm enough. He left him there, turned north again, still in the woods, towards where he thought the volur’s compound was. He’d seen it a few times, a clearing carved out a little way into the forest. If someone had magic, Bern thought, they could deal with wolves. Or even make use of them. It was said that the women who lived here had tamed some of the beasts, could speak their language. Bern didn’t believe that. He made the hammer sign again, however, with the thought.
He’d have missed the branching path in the blackness if it hadn’t been for the distant spill of lantern light. It was late for that, the bottom of a night, but he had no idea what laws or rules women such as these would observe. Perhaps the seer—the volur—stayed awake all night, sleeping by day like the owls. The sense of being in a dream returned. He wasn’t going to go back, and he didn’t want to die.
Those two things together could bring you out alone in night approaching a seer’s cabin through black trees. The lights—there were two of them—grew brighter as he came nearer. He could see the path, and then the clearing, and the structures beyond a fence: one large cabin, smaller ones flanking it, evergreens in a circle around, as if held at bay.
An owl cried behind him. A moment later Bern realized that it wasn’t an owl. No going back now, even if his feet would carry him. He’d been seen, or heard.
The compound gate was closed and locked. He climbed over the fence. Saw a brewhouse and a locked storeroom with a heavy door. Walked past them into the glow cast by the lamplight in the windows of the largest cabin. The other buildings were dark. He stopped and cleared his throat. It was very quiet.
“Ingavin’s peace upon all dwelling here.”
He hadn’t said a word since rising from his bed. His voice sounded jarring and abrupt. No response from within, no one to be seen.
“I come without weapons, seeking guidance.”
The lanterns flickered as before in the windows on either side of the cabin door. He saw smoke rising from the chimney. There was a small garden on the far side of the building, mostly bare this early in the year, with the snow just gone.
He heard a noise behind him, wheeled.
“It is deep in the bowl of night,” said the woman, who unlocked and closed the outer gate behind her, entering the yard. She was hooded; in the darkness it was impossible to see her face. Her voice was low. “Our visitors come by daylight … bearing gifts.”
Bern looked down at his empty hands. Of course. Seithr had a price. Everything in the world did, it seemed. He shrugged, tried to appear indifferent. After a moment, he took off his vest. Held it out. The woman stood motionless, then came forward and took it, wordlessly. He saw that she limped, favouring her right leg. When she came near, he realized that she was young, no older than he was.
She walked to the door of the cabin, knocked. It opened, just a little. Bern couldn’t see who stood within. The young woman entered; the door closed. He was alone again, in a clearing under stars and the one moon. It was colder now without the vest.
His older sister had made it for him. Siv was in Vinmark, on the mainland, married, two children, maybe another by now … they’d had no reply after sending word of Thorkell’s exile a year ago. He hoped her husband was kind, had not changed with the news of her father’s banishment. He might have: shame could come from a wife’s kin, bad blood for his own sons, a check to his ambitions. That could alter a man.
There would be more shame when tidings of his own deeds crossed the water. Both his sisters might pay for what he’d done tonight. He hadn’t thought about that. He hadn’t thought very much at all. He’d only gotten up from bed and taken a horse before the ghost moon rose, as in a dream.
The cabin door opened.
The woman with the limp came out, standing in the spill of light. She motioned to him and so he walked forward. He felt afraid, didn’t want to show it. He came up to her and saw her make a slight gesture and realized she hadn’t seen him clearly before, in the darkness. She still had her hood up, hiding her face; he registered yellow hair, quick eyes. She opened her mouth as if to say something but didn’t speak. Just motioned for him to enter. Bern went within and she pulled the door shut behind him, from outside. He didn’t know where she was going. He didn’t know what she’d been doing outside, so late.
He really didn’t know much at all. Why else come to ask of women’s magic what a man ought to do for himself?
Taking a deep breath he looked around by firelight, and the lamps at both windows, and over against the far wall on a long table. It was warmer than he’d expected. He saw his vest lying on a second table in the middle of the room, among a clutter of objects: conjuring bones, a stone dagger, a small hammer, a carving of Thünir, a tree branch, twigs, soapstone pots of various sizes. There were herbs strewn everywhere, lying on the table, others in pots and bags on the other long surface against the wall. There was a chair on top of that table at the back, and two blocks of wood in front of it, for steps. He had no idea what that meant. He saw a skull on the nearer table. Kept his face impassive.
“Why take a dead man’s horse, Bern Thorkellson?”
Bern jumped, no chance of concealing it. His heart hammered. The voice came from the most shadowed corner of the room, near the back, to his right. Smoke drifted from a candle, recently extinguished. A bed there, a woman sitting upon it. They said she drank blood, the volur, that her spirit could leave her body and converse with spirits. That her curse killed. That she was past a hundred years old and knew where the Volgan’s sword was.
“How … how do you know what I …?” he stammered. Foolish question. She even knew his name.
She laughed at him. A cold laughter. He could have been in his straw right now, Bern thought, a little desperately. Sleeping. Not here.
“What power could I claim, Bern Thorkellson, if I didn’t know that much of someone come in the night?”
He swallowed.
She said, “You hated him so much? Thinshank?”
Bern nodded. What point denying?
“I had cause,” he said.
“Indeed,” said the seer. “Many had cause. He married your mother, did he not?”
“That isn’t why,” Bern said.
She laughed again. “No? Do you hate your father also?”
He swallowed again. He felt himself beginning to sweat.
“A clever man, Thorkell Einarson.”
Bern snorted bitterly, couldn’t help it. “Oh, very. Exiled himself, ruined his family, lost his land.”
“A temper when he drank. But a shrewd man, as I recall. Is his son?”
He still couldn’t see her clearly, a shadow on a bed. Had she been asleep? They said she didn’t sleep.
“You will be killed for this,” she said. Her voice held a dry amusement more than anything else. “They will fear an angry ghost.”
“I know that,” said Bern. “It is why I have come. I need … counsel.” He paused. “Is it clever to know that much, at least?”
“Take the horse back,” she said, blunt as a hammer.
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t need magic to do that. I need counsel for how to live. And not go back.”
He saw her shift on the bed then. She stood up. Came forward. The light fell upon her, finally. She wasn’t a hundred years old.
