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I saw the other huddled, still shapes. I couldn’t even tell, now, which was the one I had killed.
‘Move,’ growled Einar and, as he passed, slapped me lightly on the shoulder. ‘Good fight, boy. You’ll do.’
And that was it. Twenty minutes later we were panting and gasping down through the trees and out on to the wet-black shingle, stumbling up to where the Fjord Elk swung.
I remember that I was more afraid trying to board her than I was in the fight, since she was so far out we had to wade to our chests and, if it hadn’t been for them throwing out the boarding plank, none of us would have got on board at all.
As it was, between rain and sea, I landed on the deck, miserable, wet, chafed, shivering and more tired than I had ever been in my life. I couldn’t believe that anyone had any strength left, but the same ones who had just fought dumped their weapons, slithered out of mail, took oars and worked the Elk out into the wind, where the sail was hauled up and we were off.
And all the time, I saw the boy’s eyes, the rain filling them like tears, felt Einar’s hand slap my shoulder and heard him say, again and again: ‘Good fight, boy. You’ll do.’
Chapter Three (#u40e66c95-74fa-5724-a4b9-65c526f2b71f)
We wintered at Skirringsaal, on the southern tip of Norway, because it was too late in the year to get back to Birka, which was further east along the Baltic and frozen in now. Skirringsaal was handy and had all that the Oathsworn needed: drink, food and women, though it was only a summer trade fair, a bjorkey, which fell quiet in winter.
Einar grumbled; he’d much rather have foisted himself on some minor jarl who, faced with sixty warriors sailing into his fjord, would have been all hospitality and smiles for the winter. Instead, he was forced to dole out hacksilver and have the men split up throughout the town, paying for roof and ale with locals, who were used to foreign travellers.
Einar himself, thanks to the foresight of the local merchants, got himself a hov in a small boatshed and was able to sit in a makeshift high seat, his prows on either side, and lord it like a jarl, with more than a few of the Oathsworn with him. All of the others dropped in daily to take advantage of the free ale and whatever was in the pot.
Almost everyone bought a slave girl at once – to the relief of those traders who thought themselves stuck with them all winter – and the hov was thus fairly crowded, with nothing to do but repairs to gear, or dice, or play endless games of hnefatafl and get into fights about who won.
That and drink and fucking seemed to make up winter, as far as the Oathsworn were concerned.
Because my father was the valued shipmaster, he and I were in Einar’s hov, which was less well built than a turfed hall like Bjornshafen. With so many of us, space by the central hearthfire was at a premium and privacy was a joke. At any one time, one of the band was humping away at a girl and, after a while, it didn’t even excite attention, never mind the senses.
Once, I saw the Trimmer, busy with a game, drop one of the ‘tafl counters. It rolled practically under the arse of one of the weary slave girls, which was bouncing on the filthy rush floor under Skapti’s grunting slams. Without even looking, Trimmer shoved her buttocks to one side, retrieved the counter and went back to the game.
Once over the reluctance at doing all this in front of others, humping slave girls was what I did whenever possible.
Several times I was dragged off one so that she could help prepare the food and, once, was slapped by Skapti when I shouted in anger. His casual blow knocked me into three or four more men, scattering whatever they were doing and, as I lay with my eyes whirling, Einar had to come in and lay about them as if they were a pack of snarling dogs.
He, of course, had his own section, hurdled off at the back. Here, he and Illugi, my father and Valgard Skafhogg would sit and scheme. Sometimes Skapti and Ketil Crow would join in.
In the end, because everyone agreed I would fuck myself to an early grave, I was reluctantly dragged, most days, away from the women. No one but Ulf-Agar minded that a beardless boy was at the high seat of things.
As the year ground through the skeins of snow, interest in everything waned. Simply getting through to the thaw became the focus of everyone’s intent; endless, freezing rain and snow, the grey-yellow ice that formed everywhere, the coughs, rheumy eyes, loose bowels, all became a test of endurance.
Except for Einar, who tried to ignore his own phlegm and fluxes, scheming on regardless, like a man pushing a plough through a stony field.
The riddle of the saint’s box had eluded him, it seemed. No one knew for sure, since he never let anyone look at the contents. Instead, he dragged in every trader who was trapped, like him, and had intense conversations with them behind the hurdle.
Then, one day, as the ice dripped from the eaves and men actually started to stagger out of the stinking hov – and it would have reeked to any Greek, used to baths and oiled massages, even before the winter – Illugi, Valgard, my father and Einar were huddled in his little private chamber, as usual.
And me. Youth had made me healthier than the rest and I was still almost permanently aroused. Since everyone else had more or less lost interest in the girls, I could pick and choose and had my eye on one, a dark beauty, almost as dark as the bluemen from the far south who were so prized in Ireland.
I was craning for a look at her as Einar was speaking, which was why I missed most of it and only came in at the end, to hear him say: ‘… before that little shit Martin gets his hands on it. But no one reads Latin here, not even those who think this place is called Kaupang.’
There were dutiful chuckles at that. Foreigners called Skirringsaal kaupang because they’d once asked what it was called and someone – probably deliberately – had told them ‘a market’. So they had continued to call the town that, thinking that was its name.
Einar sighed and shook his head. ‘I hate relying on that Latin-reading Christ priest. It would be nice to know what it is he seeks in this.’ He slapped the ornate chest.
‘Latin is a pain in the arse,’ I said, yawning. ‘If they have three words where one good one would do, they use them.’
There was silence and it took me a while to realise everyone was staring at me. Einar’s eyes were black, ferocious. ‘How do you know that, boy?’
Conscious of his tone, I considered cautiously, then answered: ‘Caomh taught me to read it, back in Bjornshafen—’
I never got the rest of it out. There was an explosion of roars; everyone was talking at once. Einar was trying to hit me, scrambling to get up and out of his furs, Illugi trying to restrain him and my father and Valgard arguing with each other, all at once.
Eventually, when it fell silent again, I raised my head. Einar was glowering at me and breathing as if he’d run up a hill. Illugi was watching him, holding his staff across his knees and between me and him. My father and the Trimmer sat staring at me, one astonished, the other stone-faced.
‘Can you read this?’ Einar demanded, thrusting a few rustling leaves at me, similar to the ones I’d seen torn from that book-chest in Otmund’s temple.
‘I’ve never read from this before,’ I told him. ‘Caomh drew the letters in the sand, or in the dirt.’
It was clearer than that, of course. Easy.
‘“The people here were lost to God’s mercy,”‘ I read, squinting at the faded, brown letters. ‘“They wallowed in their idol worship, until God Himself brought His word to them, though His humble servant, bound in duty to …”‘ I stopped, scanning the lines ahead. ‘It goes on and on – do you want to hear all this?’
Einar leaned forward, dangerous-eyed, his voice frosted. ‘Read it all,’ he snarled.
So I did. Otmund, it seemed, was full of the joy of coming to the lost people of the Karelians and returning them to the fold like so many strayed sheep. He listed, in considerable detail, his unstinting efforts to do that.
His greatest triumph came, it seemed, when he managed to gain some followers among those skin-wearing trolls.
In the end, as the chief declared for the White Christ, the last believers in the old ways stole their god’s stone, on which lay the secrets of the tomb, and spirited it away south and across the sea, into the lands of the Krivichi at Kiev and to a chief named Muzum.
‘Read that again,’ demanded Einar. Sighing, seeing my chance with the dark girl recede by the minute, I worked my way back, took a breath and laboriously read the passage again. My head hurt with the effort.
‘Secrets of the tomb?’ Einar asked Illugi, when I had finished. Illugi Godi shrugged.
‘Might be Atil’s treasure,’ he grunted. ‘Might be a poor kenning on the nature of gods. And Muzum? I know the Krivichi tribes – we passed through their lands going down to Kiev, some time back. There’s no chief called Muzum.’
‘They always do that, the Latin writers,’ I offered moodily. ‘That’s what I mean about them. They seem determined to write something and make it as long-winded and hard to understand as possible. Usually, if you take the “um” off the end you have a better chance of working out what they really mean with names.’
‘Hmm,’ mused Illugi. ‘Muz? Might be muzhi, but that just means Great Chief. Every ferret-face with two horses and a dog calls himself a great chief along the river banks around Kiev.’
‘Then we’ll just have to find one with a bloody great stone from a god,’ Einar grunted, then looked at me and rubbed his chin. ‘Next time, tell me what you can and can’t do. I wasted valuable time talking to traders – at least half a dozen over the course of this Loki-cursed winter. Now they will be carrying the news of it far and wide.’
‘I didn’t know that you needed anything read,’ I snapped back, annoyance at missing out on the dark one combining with the unfairness of it to make me daring. ‘If you had actually unpicked your lips on this, I’d have known.’
Einar considered for a moment – a long year under that obsidian stare – then chuckled. ‘Faults on both sides, then. The main thing is I now have someone who can read stuff before Martin the Christ priest does.’
‘I can read it if it is kept simple,’ I warned him, wishing now I had spent more time with Caomh and his dirt-scratchings. But who knew then that such a thing would be of more use to me than the best way to get gull eggs from a high cliff?
Einar nodded, considering.
‘What now?’ my father asked. ‘Down to Kiev and the Black Sea again?’
‘Eventually,’ Einar said, ‘but we call in at Birka and fulfil our hire. That way we get paid and I find out if Martin and Lambisson say true, since they will not know that I have all the saint’s chest has to offer. Orm, not a word to anyone else that you can read the Latin. Mind that.’
I nodded and he grinned and clapped my shoulder. ‘Truly, Rurik, you birthed a rare one and I am glad now that you bribed Thorkel to let him take his place.’
My father chuckled and I gawped and everyone laughed at the pair of us.
‘Now go and fuck that Serkland woman before your head swivels off its stalk. Not that she’ll thank you much – she has the coughs and fever all of those women get coming from the warm lands and I am thinking she will not last the winter.’
Still chuckling we moved into the main hov and, as we broke apart, my father caught my sleeve.
‘I did not know that he knew about Thorkel,’ he said quietly. ‘I forgot that Einar is a deep thinker and a cunning man. We’d both do well to remember that.’
Funnily enough, I remembered those words, even as my loins took over the thinking for me. Partly, I think, because Einar was right and the Serkland woman was already too sick to be a good bedmate, but mainly because of what Illugi had said about Atil’s treasure.
‘You sew your lips on that one, young Orm,’ my father said when I mentioned it, looking right and left to make sure no one could hear us. ‘That’s something we are not supposed to know about.’
‘We don’t, I am thinking,’ I answered.
He rubbed his head and acknowledged that with a rueful grin.
‘But this is the same Atil as the tales?’ I persisted. ‘Volsungs? All of that?’
‘All of that,’ agreed my father and then shrugged and scowled when he saw my look. ‘Learned men believe it,’ he argued. ‘Lambisson’s tame Christ priest, we found out, seems to be seeking it to solve Birka’s silver problems.’
I said nothing, but the thoughts whirled and sparked like embers in the wind. If even a tenth of what was said about the treasure hoard of Attila the Hun was true, then it was a mountain of silver you could mine for years.
Sigurd’s treasure, culled from a dragon hoard and cursed, if I remembered the saga tale of it, then handed to the Huns by the Volsungs before they fell out.
‘Just so,’ Illugi Godi said, when I came to him with questions – though his eyes narrowed at the mention of it. ‘You should put your tongue between your teeth over this matter, young Ruriksson,’ he added.
‘No secret here, it seems to me,’ I replied and he hummed and shrugged.
‘Well, so it would appear. No simple saga tale, either,’ he went on. ‘The Volsungs are lost to us, vanished like smoke, taking Sigurd Fafnirs-bane and Brynnhild and all the rest, so that the former is now a dragon-slaying hero and the latter is one of Odin’s Valkyrie. Remembered for that only and not that once they were people, like you or me.’
I sat, hunched, hands wrapped round my knees as I had once done in Bjornshafen, listening to Caomh tell stories of his Christ saints. For a moment, listening to the steady, firm voice of Illugi, I was back in the red-gleam twilight of Gudleif’s hall, full-bellied and warm and safe.
‘Atil, too, was once real, a powerful jarl-king of those tribes who live in the Grass Sea, far to the east. The Volsungs thought him great enough to be allies against the Old Romans, so they sent him a wife: Gudrun, who was once Sigurd’s woman. With her came a marvellous sword as a dowry.’
‘Sigurd’s sword?’ I asked and he shook his head.
‘No. They gave him a sword forged by the same smith who made Sigurd’s own. They called it the Scourge of God and while Atil had it, he could never lose a battle.’
‘Which made it hard for the Volsungs when they found Atil was a false friend,’ I offered and Illugi scowled.
‘Who is telling this?’
He was, of course and he hummed, mollified, when I said it.
‘Just so. The Volsungs knew they could not win; they were beaten time and again by Atil until they came upon another way. They sent him a new wife, Ildico, in peace. To tempt him to take her, she came with a great treasure of silver – Sigurd’s dragon hoard.’
‘Cursed,’ I pointed out and he nodded.
‘On her wedding night, this brave Ildico slew Atil as he slept and waited for the morning beside him, knowing she could not escape.’
We were both silent, brooding on this cunning plot, cold and coiled as a snake, and the sacrifice it had entailed: the Volsungs losing their wealth and Ildico her life, for she was chained to Atil’s death throne alive when he was howed up in a great mound of all the silver of the world, including the Volsungs’ gift. A mound long hidden, with all those who knew of it killed.
Such revenge we in the north knew well, yet even so, the warp and weft of this sucked the breath from you.
The rest of the winter dragged into spring without much event. Many of us got sick, me included, with streaming eyes and nose and coughing. Eventually, we all recovered – save for the Serkland woman, as Einar had predicted. She caught a fever, which went quickly, Illugi Godi said, through all the stages: tertian, quartan, daily and, finally, hectic.
At that point, with her breath rasping in her chest, she simply gave up, turned her head to the wall and died. Einar gave her body to the Christ priests in the town, but they refused to perform suitable rites over her, since they said she was ‘infidel’.
So Illugi Godi commended her to the true gods of the North and then tipped the body into the sea, from a rocky spit a little way out of town, as an offering to Ran, Aegir’s sister-wife, to ensure good sea journeys.
That was because the good merchant council of the town wouldn’t have a thrall howed up in their own yards – though they took Harald, whose cut foot had festered all through the winter, then turned black to the groin and stank, at which point he died.
Ulf-Agar, myself and a new Oathsworn, a fair-haired, bearded man called Hring, brought into the Oathsworn to replace Haarlaug, carried the Serkland woman out. I remember Hring because neither he nor I joined in Ulf-Agar’s cursing about having to carry a thrall to be buried. That and the fact that, because of the lice, he was the first of many to have his head shaved. Perhaps that, the mark of a thrall forced on him by circumstance, made him more aware of her.
As for me, I thought myself the only one who cared, though we had all humped her at one time or another and never had a name for her other than Dark One. But, almost with the splash of her in the black, cold water, I had forgotten; I stopped wondering what she had been in her own hot lands. By the time I was back in the hov, I was already looking for the huskiest of the girls still on her feet and trying to get her off them.
Not long after that all the girls were gone, sold off almost overnight. The winter was done and the Fjord Elk was bound for the whale road again.
No one remembers Birka now. Sigtuna, a little way to the north, now sits in its high seat, though people still speak of Gotland as being the queen of the trade places of the Baltic. But Gotland was no more than a seasonal trade fair beside Birka when it flourished.
At the time, I thought Birka was a marvel. Skirringsaal was big, even winter-empty, but Birka, when I first saw it, seemed to me an impossible place. How could so many live so close together? Now, of course, I know better – Birka was a place of rough-hewn logs that could be placed in a few streets of Miklagard, the Great City of the Romans, and not be noticed.
We came beating up to it in driving rain and a wind that wanted to tear the clothes from us. It thrummed the ropes and heaved out the soaking sail.
Because it was so wet, my father shrugged at the idea of hauling it in and the Fjord Elk ran with it, cutting like a blade through the black water, throwing up ice-white spray, snaking down the great heave of the sea so that you could feel it flex, like the muscled beast it was named after, rutting in some red autumn wood.
It was here that we lost Kalf to the waves. My father, when Pinleg bellowed out that the great fortress rock of Birka, the Borg, was in sight, knew that the sail and spar had to come down on to the rests and be lashed. If not, we would slice past it and on into the Helgo and the tangle of islands where the ice still gripped and calved off into dirty, blue-white bergs that would smash the speeding Elk to splinters.
So we all sprang to the walrus-hide ropes and began to pull, while the Elk groaned and bent and the water hissed and creamed away underneath her.
The sail fought us – and one corner of it tore loose, flapping, deceptive. Kalf leaned out to grab it. A mistake. It was wet; he missed; it slapped him like a forge hammer in the face and I just caught the sight of him out of the side of one eye, flying arse over tit, up and out and into the black water with scarcely a splash.
And he was gone, just like that.
Those who had seen it and weren’t hanging on to rope sprang to the side, but there was no sign. Even if he had surfaced, there was no hope; we were flying before the wind like a horse with the bit clenched. By the time we had got the sail stowed and the oars out and turned to row back, he’d have stiffened with the cold and sunk.
I saw my father mouth at Einar, the wind ripping the words away into the wet sail. Einar simply shook his head and pointed onward. Illugi Godi made a sign against the evil eye and Valgard roared incoherently at us, then moved in, banging shoulders and urging us to pull down the sail.
We smothered the great, wet, squelching mass of sail on to the spar and lashed the spar to the rests, panting and sweating with the effort. The rowing crew took their sea-chest benches and, slowly, the Fjord Elk, like a reined-in, snorting horse, stilled and was turned towards the great wet-black rock that marked Birka.
On it, I saw, was a fortress, a rampart of earth and stone that loomed over the settlement and, at a certain point, Einar had us take down the antlered prows, to show we came in peace and were not about to offend the gods of the land with our arrival.
We rowed on, practically level with the great rock, until the sound of a horn brayed out faintly on the water and Rurik, sharply, ordered oars to rest. We waited, the Elk rolling in the swell, water slapping spray over the side.
‘What are we doing?’ I demanded of Steinthor. ‘Going fishing?’
