Oathsworn 2 - The Wolf Sea (28 page)

— gods, the boy — who had killed Rurik, the man I'd thought my father.

Àn eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a finger .

He stopped when he saw my face and he was right to do so, for I was trembling with the idea of killing him, remembering how he had put that boy and his brother on our trail, an event which had ended in the death of Rurik, his own two nephews and the loss of my fingers. The memory of how I had come by those lost fingers came back to Martin and he blanched and clamped his lips shut, feral as a wildcat.

`Watch him,' I said to Botolf. 'Keep him unharmed, but keep him.'

Martin smiled and inclined his head as if accepting some gracious donation. 'A gift for a gift,' he said.

'Hurry to the rescue of your men, Bear Slayer. I escaped when I did because I know what will happen when your men reach the mine and, though I have foresworn the pleasures of the flesh on God's behalf, I still prefer not to pass water down a straw.'

Then I was outside in the howl and horror, with fear rising like morning haar off a fjord and a flood of anger that he should have thrown that at me. I wanted to kill him, but needed him close; Starkad would come for him and we would be waiting.

For now, the men I was supposed to command, that rune-serpent torc round my neck, bayed and snarled like wolves. No one would hear that it was Hookeye who humped a Hamdanid princess to ruin, or that Kvasir cut the fingers from sixteen men and women for their rings, or that Finn poked bloody fingers in the bellies of the dead he had gutted open to find their swallowed wealth.

Instead, everyone would hear that these and all the other things done that day were done by the Oathsworn of Orm Bear Slayer, for my name was their name and theirs mine.

It was dawn before they could be rounded up, wincing in the molten light of day, a few of them sorry for what they had done, the rest sorry for what they felt and all of them so foundered by the event that they could only haul away the lightest part of the stuff they had plundered, stuffed down their boots and inside tunics. Furious and scowling, they could only watch others come up to steal what they had gained.

I marched them back to where the army had been, across a corpse-strewn field where the kites and crows rose in flocks and the flies in clouds. Entrails skeined a ground slippery with fluids, wounds gaped like lips and eyes, pecked sightless, implored us still for help. Though we looked for it, I could not find Amund's body. He was our only casualty and we could not even find him.

We had won, as it turned out — or so Red Boots claimed, though it was doubtful. The mad charge of the Norse had dragged most of the
scutatoi
with it, for all their boasted discipline. Once they had stopped hacking down the Dailami, were puking and gasping, open-mouthed and on their knees, the enemy's
ghulam
horsemen in their fish-scale armour and lopsided maces had splintered them apart and ridden down the screamers who fled.

It was only when the Oven Wearers were released that Red Boots saved the day and claimed a victory —

but he quit the field and took the army back to Antioch all the same and we straggled to the Orontes, where the air was thick with grief and funeral smoke and wailing women.

Jarl Brand's men were grim and licking wounds, but at least they had managed to bring back both their dead and wounded. Skarpheddin's men had fled and those who had made it back now had to return to that field of scavenging birds, cursed by the women who were hunting for their men. A battle drawn is worse than one lost, for it promises that it all has to be done again the next day.

We arrived at our own wadmal-tent camp dusty, bloody and sick at heart, the worst affected puking froth and snot down their beards by this time. Some of the Hares thought they had found a perfect billet, which almost came as a welcome release. Finn, blowing on his skinned knuckles and bellowing as they ran off, eventually threw himself down, too exhausted even to start a fire. Botolf flung down the monk who was leashed to him and sat in sullen, weary silence.

There, within an hour of us squatting, heads hanging and souls cut by the keening grief and the clouds of insects and the sick despair, came Gizur with Odin's latest twist to our beard.

`The Goat Boy is gone and Radoslav with him,' he said. `That skald of Skarpheddin, Harek, came to tell us. The seidr women have them at some place called the Sumerian palace, north of the city.'

10 The sky began to lighten and we all waited in the narrow mouth between cliffs, where pillars of splintered stone, worn by weather into tall, thin mushrooms, stabbed a charcoal sky. There were men all around me, I knew, but it seemed as if I was as alone as I would ever be, standing in what could have been a pillared hov, where sand sparkled faintly as the moon rose. A Freyja dawn, a night as light as day.

The silver light cast crawling shadows on the jagged rocks, fingered into corners and slid into cracks, then swept over us, turning us all into blue fetch shadows and washing the riverbed with glow. Sighvat's raven fluttered silently from his shoulder and whirred away, playing hide and seek with the moon.

It was a trap, of course, but we had all known that. It was how you sprung it and got away that mattered, as Hedin Flayer said. Since he was our expert on traps, having been a wolf-hunter in his time, we listened politely, though all he had to offer that was useful involved how bad a trap it was.

`Too big,' he frowned. 'Like using a bear trap to catch a wolf because you don't care what happens to the pelt.'

We all nodded, for we knew what he meant. You hunted wolf with meat and a small sliver of green wood, sharpened at both ends and no longer than your finger. Tied with gut into a circle and placed in the heart of the meat, it would be gulped down and, when the gut eventually parted, the sliver would spring apart and, sooner or later, rip the wolf's innards to bloody shreds. You could track it by the bloody vomit and it would die sooner rather than later, with no damage at all to a valuable pelt.

That was deep thinking, but the seidr women's plot was not.

Ìf they sought the way to the hoard of Attila,' Finn growled, `why could they not find it in the Other?

Did they not go into the seidr trance and seek it, then?'

Ìf they did, they failed, which shows they are not very good,' answered Sighvat.

I remembered Svala's voice telling me of seeing Hild and it came to me then that they had done what seidr women do and found Hild there guarding that road, as terrible in death as she had been in life. I said as much and the ones who remembered her nodded.

Svala and Skarpheddin's mother were bad enough, though seidr was a subtle magic and a good edge, strongly swung, was a ward against all of it in the end. But there was Skarpheddin and his
dreng,
those men who clung to him by oath and gifted rings. His men had been torn to shreds in the battle and women were cleaning and burying them still, but he had these last thirty or so grim blades and the desperation of a man seeing his luck flow away from him.

So I went to Jarl Brand and laid it all out at his feet, even what it was Skarpheddin thought to get from me. Jarl Brand, like an old bone in the flickering torchlight, stroked his icicle moustaches and looked at me warily, while the light flung away from the silver on his arms.

Ànd can you tell him of this treasure hoard?' he asked mildly.

`Lord,' I answered, feeling the sweat trickle down my backbone. 'Of course not.' Which was no lie without the rune-serpent sword. 'Once, we followed the trail of it, but it led to death and despair in the Grass Sea,' I added, which was also true.

`So you say,' Brand answered, then grinned. 'I, too, had heard of Einar's hoard. A good saga tale. I took him for someone as crazed as a bag of frothing dogs and it seems I was right, for I heard he and most of his men died.'

I smiled, almost sagging with relief. Let him think so, Odin. Just this once, you one-eyed raven of treachery . . .

Ì will help you,' Brand went on, 'but you must help me.'

A trade. Now trading I understood . . .

Ì will help you root out Skarpheddin, for the sake of his people if nothing else,' he went on mildly. 'I am going back to claim my lands and help fight for a throne soon and will take them with me when he is dead.'

I blinked at. that, for he delivered it with the same flat calm as if he announced he was taking Skarpheddin's old ox drinking horn. The truth was, of course, that Skarpheddin had finished himself in that battle and now Jarl Brand would step in and take everything the old man had, including the high regard of the Great City.

Ì will also give your men the pick of battle-gear stripped from the dead, which you will need if you go in search of Starkad and lost comrades,' Brand added and then nodded sombrely. 'Worthy though I think that is, I am also thinking that your arse will end up roasting on a stake, but that is your affair.'

`Just so,' I offered, weak at the image he had made for me. If it had just been seeking out my comrades, I might have thought twice about it then — but, of course, I could not tell him I sought out the sabre and the secret of the path back to Atil's treasure.

`What you must do for me is hunt Starkad. Kill him. Bring me proof of it — his head, unless it stinks too much by then. His jarl torc otherwise. He has offended me and no man does that.'

`He is Harald Bluetooth's man,' I offered weakly, thinking it only fair to bring him visions of serious bloodprice, but he shrugged.

`Bluetooth knows when to cut his losses. Two
drakkar
and a couple of fistfuls of his chosen men and their battle-gear are enough, I am thinking, for I hear he has trouble with the Saxlanders of Otto now. He will not worry overly much about the loss of a chosen man two years missing.'

I left, swallowing my own sick fear, knowing that Jarl Brand was bound for greatness, for the gold rune serpent he wore round his neck hardly weighed on him at all. His men by-named him Ofegh and some of the Greeks had picked it up, thinking this was his proper name and were told it meant `long-lived'. But
ofegh
is more subtle than that; it means 'one who has no doom on him' and no one was better named than Jarl Brand Ofegh.

He sent his own
dreng
battle captain, Ljot, a man as dark as his jarl was white and he brought sixty men with him, which was too many when we tried to flit moth-silent up this riverbed.

At the end of this crack between cliffs sat the palace, which wasn't a palace at all but a tomb to some old king of a people called Sumerians, long dusted to eternity. Still, what they had left was worrying enough in the blue moonlight: lion-headed lumps of stone, worn and twisted by age and weather into something that so much resembled trolls that it made us all grunt and grip our slippery hilts the harder.

They flanked a set of steps, leading down to darkness, and Finn looked at me, licking his lips. Kvasir, squinting his one eye into the darkness, squatted on one knee, as if to begin a Thing on the matter, but Botolf, growling, pushed on to the head of the steps, Sighvat with him. The raven had returned to his shoulder and said, in his voice: 'Odin.'

À fine bird,' said Skarpheddin's skald, Harek, 'but I wish it was a tongueless breed.'

The skald's nickname was Gjallandi, so it was enough to raise a chuckle when a man called Boomer started wishing for silence. I was still wondering where his allegiance lay; though he had brought the message to us, as instructed by his lord, it seemed he was in no hurry to go back to Skarpheddin's side. Still, I had set Brother John to watch him.

Ljot pushed up, looked round us all, then at me. 'Well?'

I thought about it, frowning, then decided to sneak down with Short Eldgrim, Finn, Sighvat, Kvasir and big Botolf. I would take the skald and Brother John, too, to keep that verse-maker close. When we came to the need for blades, I would call on Ljot who should then, as I pointed out firmly to him, come at the run.

Which was a lot more calmly said than done, as I took the lead and moved down the steps into that maw of darkness. Perhaps it was the cold stone closing around me in a desert night chill, but I had to clamp my teeth hard to stop them chattering. When I turned to make sure I was not doing this alone, though, I saw Finn grinding froth round his Roman nail.