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  The White Raven

  ( Oathsworn - 3 )

  Robert Low

  Robert Low

  The White Raven

  Novgorod , Winter, 972 A.D.

  On a crisp day with a grey sky and only a blinding white smear to show where the sun lurked, the prince's executioners cut a good pine pole slightly taller than the height of a man, thin at one end, thick at the other.

  The thin end they sharpened and greased, then they took the legs of the face-down woman and roped them by the ankles, pulling them wide apart. A man took a saddle-cloth, placed it on her back then sat on it to keep her still, while another bound each of her wrists with leather thongs, then tied them to two stakes, also wide apart. She screamed blood on to her teeth.

  'On this day, in the eighth year of the lordship of Prince Vladimir,' intoned the crier, 'this Metcherak woman was found guilty. .' and so on and so on.

  Danica,' muttered Thordis, soft enough so only we heard it. 'Her name is Danica.'

  Morning Star, it meant in the tongue of her Slav tribe. There would be no more morning stars for her. The stake was driven up into her while the executioners ignored her shrieks but made sure her white buttocks were decently covered as they hammered and pushed, to preserve her dignity from the droolers in the crowd. The white shift she wore was soon clinging provocatively to her all the same, soaked with her blood.

  Impalement is not simple savagery; there is art to it and Vladimir's executioners knew their work.

  The sharpened stake was pushed, slowly and with skill up the woman's body. It was, in a Loki joke, a healer's art they used, for they knew how to avoid all the serious soft organs, the lungs and the heart and liver, despite her jerks and screams. There were frequent stops for adjustment, brief panting instructions and advice, one expert to another, as obscenely intimate as if they were all lovers. They stopped only once, to scatter wood shavings on the bloody snow and prevent them slipping in the slush of it.

  One slash with a knife helped the point of the stake out through the skin of the upper back on the right side of the spine, proving that the stake had missed her heart; the crowd roared and the dignified, well-dressed worthies of Novgorod's veche nodded their beards in approval as Danica was skewered like an ox on a spit. Still alive, as was proper.

  They unroped her, then re-tied her legs together to the foot of the stake to avoid slippage when they raised it — gently, so as not to jolt the body — into a hole, which they packed with earth. It began to feather with new snow as the pole was then strutted with supports — and that was that, everything done according to the law and the' rights of the veche.

  Her bound feet offered no support and slowly, agonizingly, her own body-weight dragged her down the pole. It would take three days for the moaning, bleeding woman to die, while the snow turned crimson at her feet.

  There was skill there and much to be admired in it as a statement of justice that made even the hardest balk at committing crimes in a city whose people called it Lord Novgorod the Great. All the same, it was difficult to appreciate the full merit of this justice, since I was next in the queue — but I wondered if it was possible to find a price that would make the rulers of Novgorod keep that stake from my own puckering hole.

  Would a burial mound with all the silver of the world be enough?

  1

  Hestreng, Ostergotland, early autumn, 972AD

  The day before we were due to bring the horses down, it rained. I stuck my head out the door and, from the way the wind drove it, hissing like snakes from the sea, I knew it would rain for days.

  Inside, Thorgunna fed the fire, stirring a cauldron already on it. Elfin-faced and breasted like a fine ship, that was Thorgunna. Dark haired and, as Kvasir put it 'a prow-built woman', she had a way of arching an eyebrow and staring at you with eyes black as old sheep droppings that made most of us wither. Everyone had marvelled at Kvasir marrying her — as Finn said, drunk at the wedding: 'Too long at sea. What does the like of Kvasir Spittle want with a wife? Six months wintering with one of those and you will be begging to be back behind the prow beast.'

  Beside her, Ingrid chopped kale, as blonde and slim as Thorgunna was not, her braids bobbing as she shot what she thought were sly looks for Botolf. She was already pupped by him and promised in public.

  From Gunnarsgard, the next toft over, Thorgunna was sister to Thordis, who had married Tor Iron-Hand. The sisters had half-shares in Gunnarsgard — an unnatural way to treat a good steading, which should always go to the eldest — and their cousin, Ingrid, lived with them.

  Tor had had a good life of it, some said, with three women under his roof. Those who knew better pointed out how that meant three times the trouble. He had wanted to marry Thorgunna as well and so gain the other half of the steading until Kvasir spoke up and brought her to Hestreng, with Ingrid in tow, not long after fetching up here with the rest of us.

  'What does it look like out there?' Thorgunna asked me.

  'The yard's a lake,' I reported, hunkering down by the fire. 'Throw something special in that pot — everyone will need cheering.'

  She snorted. 'No doubt. And no work done for it on a day like this.'

  Which was unfair, for there was always work, even indoors. There were two looms that had never been still for weeks as a brace of thrall women wove the panels of wadmal into a striped sail for the Elk. Everyone had sewing, or binding, or leather, or wood to work, even the children.

  Still, they circled big Botolf in the pewter dark, demanding stories. There were three older ones, all boys and bairned on the thrall women by the previous owners and two new babes by my own Oathsworn — and one cuckoo from Jarl Brand. The hall rang with the sound of them as the men straggled in for their day meal, grey shapes in a grey day, blowing rain off their noses and shaking out cloaks.

  I moved to the high seat, where I wouldn't be bothered, while the hall filled with chatter and the smell of wet wool. The Irisher thrall woman, Aoife, was trying to put her son's chubby arms in a wool tunic and he kept throwing it off again. In the end, she managed it, just as Thorgunna smacked her shoulder and told her to fetch mussels from the store. She left, throwing anxious glances as her boy — Cormac, she called him — crawled towards the deerhounds in the corner.

  I sat, hunched in wool and brooding like a black dog, the rune sword curving down from my hands to the earth floor while I stared at the hilt of it and the scratches on it. I had made them, with Short Eldgrim's help, as we staggered back from Attila's howe and the great hoard of silver hidden there; for all I was not good with runes, they were enough for me to find my way back to that secret place.

  The deaths and the horror there had resolved me never to go back, yet I had made these marks, as if planning to do just that. Odin's hand, for sure.

  I had thrashed and wriggled on the hook of that and found good reason and salted it with plunder to keep the Oathsworn from forcing me back to Atil's howe. Even so, I had always known I would have to lead Kvasir and the others to that cursed place — or give Kvasir the secret of it and let him go alone. I could not do that, either, for we were Oathsworn and my fear of breaking that vow was almost as great as facing the dark of the howe again.

  That oath.

  We swear to be brothers to each other, bone, blood and steel, on Gungnir, Odin's spear we swear, may he curse us to the Nine Realms and beyond if we break this faith, one to another.

  It bound us in chains of god-fear, drove us coldwards and stormwards, goaded us to acts that skalds would sing of — and others best hidden under a stone in the night for the shame of it. Yet, when we stood with our backs to each other and facing all those who were not us, we knew each shoulder that rubbed our own belonged to a man who would die rather than step away from your side
.

  It lifted me from nithing boy to the high seat of my own hall — yet even the seat itself had not been my own, taken as spoil from the last gasp of fighting for Jarl Brand and the new king, Eirik. I lifted it from the hall of Ivar Weatherhat, whose headwear was reputed to raise storms and he should have waved it at us as we rowed into his bay, for by the time we sailed off on a calm sea, he was burned out and emptied of everything, even his chair.

  After that raid, we had all sailed here. Hard men, raiding men, here to this hall which reeked of wet wool and dogs, loud with children and nagging women. I had spent all the time since trying to make those hard, raiding men fit in it and had thought I was succeeding, so much so that I had decided on a stone for us, to root us all here like trees.

  There are only a handful of master rune-carvers in the whole world who can cut the warp and weft of a man's life into stone so perfectly that those who come after can read it for a thousand years. We want everyone to know how bravely we struggled, how passionately we loved. Anyone who can magic that up is given the best place at a bench in any hall.

  The stone for the Oathsworn would be skeined with serpent runes, tip-tapped out with a tool delicate as a bird's beak by the runemaster Klepp Spaki, who says he learned from a man who learned from a man who learned from Varinn. The same Varinn who carved out the fame of his lost son and did it so well that the steading nearby was called Rauk — Stone — ever after.

  The first time I ran my fingers down the snake-knot grooves of the one Klepp made for us they were fresh-cut, still gritted and uncoloured. I came to rune-reading late and never mastered the Odin-magic of its numbers, the secret of its form — or even where to start, unless it was pointed out to me.

  You read with your fingers as much as your eyes. It is supposed to be difficult — after all, the very word means 'whisper' and Odin himself had to hang nine nights on the World Tree and stab himself with his own spear to uncover the mystery.

  Klepp runed the Oathsworn stone with my life as part of it and I know that well enough, even as age and weather smooth the stone and line me. I could, for instance, find and trace the gallop of the horse called Hrafn, bought from a dealer called Bardi the Fat.

  He was black that horse, with not one white hair on him and his name — Raven — sat on him easier than any rider ever would. He was not for riding. He was for fucking and fighting. He was for making dynasties and turning the Oathsworn from raiders to breeders of fine fighting horses on the pastures Jarl Brand of Oestergotland had given us in the land of the Svears and Geats, which was being crafted into Greater Sweden by Eirik Victorious.

  Hrafn. I should have been warned by the very name of the beast, but I was trying too hard to live in peace on this prime land, trying too hard not to lead the Oathsworn back into the lands of the east chasing a cursed hoard of silver. So a horse called Raven was a good omen, I thought.

  As was the name of our steading: Hestreng, Meadow of Stallions. Rolling gently along the edge of one of the better inlets, it was good land, with good hayfields and better grazing.

  Yet it stood on the edge of Austrvegrfjord, the East Way Fjord. It was called that not because of where it lay, but because it was the waterway all the ships left to go raiding and trading eastwards into the Baltic.

  The Oathsworn, for all they tried to ignore it, felt the whale road call of that fjord every waking day, stood on the shingle with the water lapping their boots and their hair blowing round their faces as they watched the sails vanish to where they wanted to go. They knew where all the silver of the world lay buried and no norther who went on the vik could ignore the bright call of that. Not even me.

  I watched the women bustle round the fire, thought of the stone that would root itself and hoped I had settled them all to steading life — but all they were doing was waiting for the new Elk to be built.

  I had that made clear to me one day when Kvasir and I went up to the valley where our horses pastured out their summer and he kept looking over his shoulder at the sea. Because he only had the one eye, he had to squirm round on the little mare he rode to stare back at the fringe of trees, all wind-bowed towards him as if they offered homage, and so I noticed it more.

  You could not see the hayfields or grassland beyond, or the ridge beyond that, which offered shelter to fields and steading from the slate grey sea and the hissing wind. But you could taste the sea, the salt of it, rich on the tongue and when Kvasir faced front again and saw me looking, he tilted a wry head and rubbed under the patch at the old ruin of his dead eye.

  'Well,' he gruffed. 'I like the sea.'

  'You have a woman now,' I pointed out. 'Learn to like the land.'

  'She will, I am thinking, perhaps have to learn to like the sea,' he growled and then scowled at my laugh. . before he joined in. Thorgunna was not one who perhaps had to learn anything unless she wanted to.

  We had ridden in broody silence after that, into that valley with the hills marching on either side, rising into thick green forests, shouldering them aside and offering their bare, grey heads to the sky and the snow. It was a green jewel, perfect summer pasture that never got too dry. The hills at the end of it sloped up into pine and fir; fog roofed the tall peaks.

  There was a but in this snake-slither of a valley, almost unseen save by a thread of smoke, where Kalk and his son, the horse-herders, lived all summer. As we came up, Kalk appeared, wearing what thralls always wore — a kjafal, which had a hood at the top, was open on the sides, had no sleeves and fastened between the legs with a loop and a bone toggle. It was all he ever wore, summer or winter, save for some battered ox-hide shoes when the snow was bad.

  He greeted us both with a nod of his cropped head and waited, rubbing the grizzled tangle of his chin while we sat our ponies.

  'Where is the boy?' I asked and he cleared his throat a little, thought to spit and remembered that this was his jarl. It was, I was thinking, hard for him to believe that such a youngster was his master and that came as little surprise to me; I needed no brass reflection or fancy-glass to know what I looked like.

  Thin faced, crop-bearded, blue eyed, hair the colour of autumn bracken braided several times and fastened back, reaching down to shoulders that had too much muscle on them for a youth with barely twenty-one years on him.

  These shoulders and a breadth of chest told tales of oar and sword work. Even without the telltale scars on the knuckles that spoke of shield and blade, you could see this youth was a hard man.

  Rich, too and travelled, with a necklet of silver coins from Serkland, punched and threaded on a thong and finished off with a fine silver Odin charm — the three locked triangles of the valknut, which was a dangerous sign. Those who wore it had a tendency to end up dead at the whim of the One-Eyed God.

  There was a fine sword and several good arm rings of silver, too. And the great braided rope of a silver torc, the rune-serpent mark of a jarl, the dragon-headed ends snarling at each other on the chest of a coloured tunic.

  I knew well enough what I looked like, what that made Kalk think and took it as my due when he dropped his eyes and swallowed his spit and came up grinning and bobbing and eager to please.

  Jarl Brand's return, complete with mailed men with hard eyes, had sent more than a few scurrying off his lands and the farms they left behind made fat prizes for chosen men like me. For the likes of Kalk and his son, the change made little difference — thralls were chattels, whoever sat in the high seat of the steading.

  He told us it was time to bring the horses down from the high pasture, that one had a split hoof and of how Tor Ironhand was still turning his own mares loose in the valley, which he considered his own.

  We said we would be back the next day and then rode back to the hall, towing the limping colt behind us.

  'Is this Tor's valley, do you think?' Kvasir asked eventually.

  I shrugged. 'I hope not. Thorgunna says it belongs to her, as her share of the steading. I use it because I am your jarl and the pair of you live under my roof — b
ut both you and she can tell me to get out of it if you choose. Why do you ask?'

  Kvasir hawked and spat and shook his head. 'Seems as if you would know a thing like that. Owning a whole valley, like a pair of boots, or a seax.'

  'What? Should the land roll over and ask you to tickle its grass belly when you ride over it? Offer you a grin of rocks and congratulate you for being its owner?'

  Kvasir grunted moodily and we rode in silence again, slowly so that the lamed grey could limp comfortably. We did not speak again that day, though I felt the brooding of him on me like an itch I could not scratch.

  The next day he moved to my side, squatting by the high seat as I watched Aoife's Cormac put his fat little arms round the neck of one of the deerhounds, which licked his face until he laughed. He was so pale-headed he might have been bairned on Aoife by the white-haired Jarl Brand himself, which we suspected, since he had been given that comfort as an honoured guest. No-one knew, least of all Aoife for, as she said, 'It was dark and he had mead.'

  Which did not narrow the search much, as we all admitted when we tried to work out who the father was.

  'What will you do about Thorkel?' Kvasir asked eventually and I shrugged, mainly because I didn't know. Thorkel was another problem I hoped would just go away.

  He had arrived on Hoskuld's trading knarr, which carried bolts of cloth and fine threads and needles that set all the women to yowling with delight. Stepping off the boat, pushing through the women, he had stared at me with his sea-grey eyes and grinned a rueful grin.

  I had last seen his grin on a beach in that bit of Bretland the Scots called the Kingdom of Strathclyde. That was where he had stepped aside and let me into the Oathsworn without having to fight, having arranged it all beforehand. I had been fifteen and raw as a saddle-sore, but Einar the Black, who led us then, had gone along with the deception with good grace and jarl cunning.