The Wolf Sea

eh, Trader?'

`Who is this red-haired man?' demanded Sighvat. 'He sounds like one of us.'

It will be Inger,' Kvasir decided.

Inger? Who's Inger?' asked Sighvat.

`Short,' Finn grunted, struggling into his mail. 'Bow-legged. From the Hedemark.'

`That was Sturla and he was more brown than red,' Kvasir answered scornfully. 'Inger was the big Slav we took on in Aldeigjuborg.'

`Fancied himself as a wrestler?' Botolf asked.

Kvasir nodded. 'That's the one. Had hair the colour of old blood. Almost as nice as yours was once, Ymir.'

Pig-humper.' growled Botolf amiably. 'Why do you think it is him, then?'

Kvasir shrugged. 'He has the reddest hair I know, he was one of the crew so I know he is around this place. and he was part Hallander and so cannot be trusted.'

Botolf scowled. 'I am from Halland.'

Kvasir spread his hands, smiling like a shark. 'Exactly. I give you two for one that Inger is the treacherous, camel-humping turd that old Sarakenos is speaking of.'

`Done,' declared Botolf. 'I have an ounce in hacksilver that says you are a mush-mouthed chicken- fucker.'

Finn looked at me and I met his flat, sea-grey gaze. He didn't have to say anything; if it was Inger, it meant he had turned his back on his oarmates, had broken the Oath.

While that hung overhead like the dust and wails made by the villagers, we slid into mail and leather and checked straps and argued and grumbled, falling into the old, familiar pattern that was our lives, the only one we had.

Gardi climbed back to his feet and I saw he was wearing new footwear, no more than a sole with thongs, which he had just bartered for. A villager gnawed a horse bone and contemplated his naked feet while Gardi, grinning, unshipped his bow and knuckled me a farewell before shoving through the crowd and flapping out on to the road. Hedin Flayer joined him and the pair of them loped off like hunting dogs.

Ahmad gabbled at the Goat Boy, who gabbled back.

`He asks if we are going to fight the brigands.'

`Tell him we are,' I said. 'And we will expect food and water as payment for returning his village to him and his people.'

`Fuck him and his people,' growled Thorstein Blaserk in passing, his underlip thrust out petulantly. 'We take what we need — that's what we do.'

`We have to come back this way once all is done,' I pointed out. 'Do you want to find them friendly or angry?'

He subsided, muttering, and Short Eldgrim chuckled savagely at him, the network of scars making his face look like tree bark.

`He's a rare one for the thinking is the Trader,' he noted. `You, on the other hand, have nothing in that head worth protecting with a good helmet.'

I listened to them squabble and growl while I put on my own mail, grease-slick and cold even in that heat, checked straps and the edge of my sword and all the time wondered about the red-haired man and if it was indeed Inger the Slav, one of the ones we'd come to rescue.

If so, what was he doing leading the people who were holding his oarmates prisoner? Were the rest of them already dead and eaten? Was the monk really Martin? And who were the men who had defended the village? Valgard and the others, who had escaped, perhaps?

The questions circled and flocked like the birds whirling out of the fields as we moved on, leaving the wailing behind. Black and white, they swooped low and one circled and landed on a fence post as we came up to it, cocking its head and looking at us.

Sighvat stopped dead and the rest of us, anxious and wary, fell into fighting crouches, looking this way and that, shields up.

`What?' I hissed at him.

`Magpie,' he declared morosely.

Odin's balls,' growled Kvasir. 'If it isn't bees it's birds. What now, Sighvat?'

I saw the Goat Boy cross himself and he caught me looking and clutched his Thor amulet. 'Very bad.

Magpie is the only bird who did not wear mourning for Christ. One means sorrow.'

Finn spat with disgust. 'Now even the boy is at it.'

Sighvat shrugged. 'I don't know what the Christ-men believe, though it is interesting to hear of it. This is the bird of Hel, 'Loki's daughter, made like her face, half black ruin, half pale flesh. It is her fylgia, come to take those who can never make Valholl.'

The men made signs and the fear rose in them, like stink from a swamp.

`We are all doomed, then?' demanded a voice from the pack and I knew then what I had to do, the sour taste of jarl silver in my mouth as I spoke.

`No, not all,' I said. 'Only one is marked, by his own admission.'

Sighvat looked at me, closed his eyes briefly and then nodded. I could almost hear Einar chuckle his appreciation as the others sighed out loud with relief.

`Move,' I said, harsh as winter, and they trotted on. Sighvat, with a twisted grin at me, followed after them and the magpie preened and fluttered across the road, tail bobbing. Botolf watched it, half turning as he jogged after the others.

`Will he die?'

The voice was a soft pipe of sound from the Goat Boy, looking up at me, fingering the Thor amulet.

`Cattle die and kinsmen die,

Yourself will soon die,

Only fair fame never fades. .'

I gave him the words as I remembered Einar saying them on that hill in Karelia another world ago, just before he had fought Starkad and given him his limp. Whether the Goat Boy understood any of it was another matter, but he nodded with a wisdom beyond his small years.

Then he tilted his head to one side and said: 'The villagers are starving. There isn't a goat or a chicken to be seen, so how will they feed us if they cannot feed themselves?'

He was clever and I remembered Einar looking at me as I supposed I looked at the Goat Boy now, one eyebrow up, squinting thoughtfully.

`Most men think in a straight line,' I said, hearing the echo of the words as Einar had said them to me in Birka before we burned it. 'They see only their own actions, like a single thread in the Norns' loom, knotted only when they thrust their life on others. They see through one set of eyes, hear through one set of ears, all their life. To look at things through someone else's eyes is a rare thing, which cannot be learned.'

He nodded as if he understood and I waited, while he frowned and thought. He had recovered well from his wound and only winced now and then at the pain from his healing lung.

`You lied to them?' he suggested. 'You knew these villagers could not feed us, but you made the bargain anyway, to get our men to fight. You did the same with Sighvat because he says he will die anyway.'

I said nothing, for his saying it stripped it bare and revealed it for what it was and I was ashamed and trying not to show it. He just smiled and nodded happily, as if he had uncovered a great secret, then trotted off on legs like knotted thread.

I looked at Hers bird and it looked back at me with its bright, unblinking eye, black as the Abyss Brother John had always warned of, until I broke the gaze and jogged after the others.

The town had the strangeness of a stone circle, which made you walk soft and speak hushed. No birds fluttered and sang here. There were no goats, dogs, cats or any living thing that walked and only the insects and soft plash of water from a fountain split the stillness.

When I arrived, past a crust of white, flat-roofed houses on the earth, under palms like feathers on sticks, the