`They laugh,' he said. 'I heard them when they washed the red-haired man.'
`Well,' I offered, only half listening, 'he was their enemy.' He had, I thought, probably sent them screaming and running and had maybe thrown at least one on her back.
The Goat Boy knew what I meant; he knew us well by now He shook his head, swallowed the last of his
nothing,' he said and grabbed his crotch. 'Does Short Eldgrim have a pisser, Trader?'
The night air was suddenly blade cold, enough to creep my flesh. 'What?'
He heard the change in my tone and grew uneasy at it, wary and silent.
`What about Inger?' I demanded, more fiercely than I had intended, and he blinked and shrank. I took a breath and smiled. Asked him again, gently.
`When they stripped him, he had no pisser. The women laughed and said he was no man. Had no balls, nor pizzle.'
I was dry-mouthed and silent, thoughts tumbling like water down the falls. No balls. No pisser. Cut.
And then the other thought that had nagged me crept in and grinned with wolf teeth, making a mockery of all, leaving me stunned and silent and lost.
I was still lost when we were standing under the dawn-smeared night at the top of the Serpent Path, rope coiled round me and the rest of the Oathsworn hunkered down, watching, pale and grim in the blue shadows.
Easy as shinning up a mast,' growled Finn, mistaking my silence for worry about the climb. He looked even more worried when I didn't tell him to go fuck his mother or something like it, but he clapped a hand on my shoulder after a moment and both of us looked up at the wall of it, which seemed to tower into the dawn.
It wasn't the climb that bothered me but what I would find at the top. What I could not — dare not — tell the others, though they would have to know soon.
The first four feet went well enough and the night wind hissed puffs of dust from under my handholds, which was a sign I did not miss. This was no black sea-rock, slick with spray and gull shit, where terns screamed at you and puffins whirred out of their secret holes into your face — that I knew well enough. This was dry and crumbling and treacherous with dust.
I went on, fumbling in the half-dark for small folds and fissures that didn't even deserve the name of handhold, feeling the weight of the rope drag at me, feeling the wind bite with the chill of night, yet the sweat on me was slick as oil.
Halfway and I rested, looked down, saw only a black fleece of shadows. Out on the horizon, the smear of light was larger, brighter, and I knew I had little time left.
Two feet further up and my foot slipped, pulling loose my left hand, the one with the fingers missing. I swung, held only by my right arm, dangling like a hanged man, feet flailing. I would have screamed if I hadn't bitten my lips until they bled; the sinews in my arm were doing all the shrieking for me anyway.
I heard my grunts, loud in my ear. My feet kicked rocks loose and, from below, I heard a faint hiss that might have been curse or query.
Panting, I curled at the waist, as far as the rope would let me, scrabbled, caught one foot, lost it, caught it again. Swung against the rock, slapped my ruined hand back on rock and clawed into a niche.
Sagging a little, I felt the sweat run in my eyes and tasted salt in my mouth. My arms and thighs and calves all creaked with pain, trembling against the rock.
I reached up, my hand fluttering like a lost moth, found another handhold, clamped fingers on it and brought a foot up, hearing the leather seaboots rasp, knowing they would be finally wrecked, shredded on these rocks. Strange what bothers you at the oddest times.
The top came as a surprise and I heaved myself over the last of it, panting and gasping. The Serpent Path was lost in darkness away to my left and there were no ramparts here. The bulk of Herod's tiered palace slouched to my right and the wind hissed and moaned over the plateau, studded with strange shadows and the red flowers of fires. Somewhere, goats bleated.
I moved up slowly, trying hard to listen and not scrabble like a mad chicken on the rock and loose scree.
There was a nub of stone, the last of a fat pillar that had once held up a shaded walkway. Now it took a loop of the rope and the rest of it slithered over the edge in a rustle of stones and dust.
I waited, crouched and watching, while the milk-smear on the horizon grew wider and more honey-stained and the wind mumbled through the ruins like a hot breath. Yet I shivered.
Kvasir was first up, panting and grunting, hand over hand. I helped him over and he collapsed, breathing like a fighting bull. 'Odin's. Arse. Tough.
Finn swarmed up as if he were climbing the rigging of a large mast. Barely out of breath, he handed me my shield and sword, which he had brought up with his own, and his grin was feral-yellow.
`Well done, Trader. You are the one for the climbing, right enough.'
They came up one by one, rasping with hard breathing, clinking and clanking in mail and shields and weapons. I winced at every noise, never considering the feat of it until afterwards. Even with a rope that had been a hard climb for men in mail — and Botolf brought my own up, wrapped neatly and slung over one shoulder.
Last up was the Goat Boy, struggling, with the slight strength of his knot-muscled arms almost gone, and my belly was in the back of my throat — until I saw him fastened to Botolf by tunic belts.
Botolf, grinning, got to the top, reached down and plucked the Goat Boy up as if he were picking an ear of wheat. I swallowed drily, for I had not wanted the Goat Boy on this one but that had got me sideways looks from everyone else, since he had been in every other hard place with us.
I measured the distance to the nearest building, which was a grand affair, once two storeys, now partially collapsed into ruins. It was a long run across the open plateau and I didn't like the look of it much. . The Arabs were set to attack when the sun was up, which meant we were here for too long a time, squatting like stupid ewes in fast-vanishing shadows.
`What do you reckon, Trader? Make a run for it?' breathed Finn in my ear.
Truth was, I didn't know. Either way seemed to mean discovery and even if most of the brigands were close round those fires, someone would go for a piss and the Serpent Path Gate was a hawk and spit away.
There was almost certainly a guard on that who could not fail to see us as the light grew and I could not rely on him being as blind as he clearly was deaf and stupid.
As if he heard me thinking, there was a query from the darkness, neither Greek nor Arab, but West Norse.
We froze. The query came again, harsher this time, and I heard the shink-chink sound, saw the spark of flint and steel as the guard tried to light a torch. Folk looked at each other, bewildered eyes white in the dark, and Finn growled. He peeled the slavered Roman nail from his mouth, so that I knew he was about to reply
— but then the Goat Boy bleated.
It was as perfect a bleat as any pathetic goat I had heard and he did it twice more. I stilled Finn with a hand on his arm, felt rather than saw his unease in the darkness. A Norseman on guard? Not friend, but foe.
.
There was a muttered curse of annoyance and the guard moved back. Silently, Botolf ruffled the Goat Boy's hair and his grin was white in the darkness.
I looked at the sky, trying to judge how much time we had, but could make no sense of it. The whole horizon was an ugly yellow and the wind had died to nothing.
Odin is the All-Father, the Great God. He is a shapechanger when he is seen at all, but if you want to feel the presence of One Eye, go into a lonely place and wait and listen. I have done it and felt the passing of him through a forest, in the thousands of mysterious sounds and breaths, in the soft sough of wind that blows through the leaves and branches, in the storm-wind that racks trees and shows where the All-Father passes on the Wild Hunt.
But most of all, you'll feel him in the strange and awful stillness that settles sometimes on sea and hill and wood.
It is easy to feel One Eye in a land of mirrored fjords, tumbling ice water, bare, granite cliffs and the hot, heavy pine forests of summer — but that night, on the bare waste of a flattened mountain in Serkland, we all felt One Eye descend in a silence that seemed to suck the air.
