fell over one on to another and lay on it, panting for breath. I levered up, felt stickiness under my hand and heard the clang of steel.
It made no sense—had they sallied? I got up on one knee, looked at the body and blinked. Steinkel. My cousin, last seen being dragged out of Martin's company, scowling and sullen.
Now he lay on his back with dust in his glazed eyes and entrails oozing from between the shattered rings of his fine mail. And something dark and gibbering rose in me. Gudleif s sons.
Fresh clangs, a grunt, a series of triumphant shrieks and, for the first time, I saw the figures nearby, hazed silhouettes in the gold. One crumpled as I watched, the other hacking with frantic blows, each one heralded by a grunt.
I rose and moved, half blurred in my head, and saw the horror of it; saw the fear that had been rising in me, shapeless and screaming, given truth.
Bjorn turned from hacking my father to bloody ruin, his mouth slack, his eyes wild. He saw me and snarled, but his voice came out too high-pitched. 'You. Now it is complete.'
My father. I wanted to brush him aside, not to be bothered by his idiot raving and his quarrel, to get to the side of that bloody, leaking thing that had been my father.
But Bjorn was there and his sword was up, thick, fat blood runnels sliding down the blade. My father's blood.
His face was still young, round with puppy fat, but the mouth was twisted in fear and hatred.
I stepped back in my mind and saw, for a flashing second, through his eyes, what faced him: his age, but leaner, axe-faced and wiry with new muscle, bulked unnaturally at the shoulder by oar and sword, blasted brown by sun and wind.
He was too young and soft, this boy, for trying to exact bloodprice—but he and his brother had hacked my father down.
I went for him then and I don't remember much of it, save that, for the first time, I had no fear. Perhaps that was what Pinleg had found, that disregard for death or harm in the pursuit of something desperate. Maybe
How did the fight go? A good skald would have made much of it, but all I know is that when I blinked back into the Now of it, Bjorn was laid out on his back with his head all bloody and one ankle almost severed.
I saw that blood was dripping from a cut on my forearm, that my shield was slashed and tattered and that I had lost the last two fingers of my left hand.
My father was still alive when I knelt by him, but only just, and I had nothing to offer, not even water and certainly not help. I knelt there, my hands waving uselessly because I couldn't even work out where to start in the slick gore of what he had been. All I did was drip blood and snot-tears on him and I have always remembered, with shame, how useless I was then.
He grinned at me, his teeth stained red. `Dead, are they?'
I nodded, trapped in silence, hands fluttering.
`Good. Fucks—should have known they'd never leave it alone. Got one—that silly little arse, Steinkel. Had no sword-sense at all. Should both have stayed away. That fucking Christ priest . . .'
He would have spat, but had no fire left to do it. Blood worked into froth at the corners of his mouth and he was gargling when he spoke. He looked at me, still grinning. 'Bad business. That fu-fucking bear. You look like your mother.'
Again I couldn't say anything and the tears were splashing muddily on his shoulder.
`Good woman. Loved her after a fashion and she me, I am thinking. Never had a chance to grow.'
He coughed up more blood and I patted aimlessly, helplessly.
`Lies,' he said. 'For good reasons. We each had our true loves. Mine rode the whale road, swift and sure.
With a good sail on it I could cut a day . . . off any . . . journey anywhere. Find my way by the stars to the end of the world.'
He spasmed; the grin froze. 'You are my pride, though.' His eyes went glassy and he hissed, one hand grasping me by the wrist: `But not my son. Her true love was Gunnar . . .'
And he went across the rainbow bridge, while the world spun and crashed and roared like the sea and all my thoughts were dust.
I would have stayed there, but some others passing dragged me away and dropped me safely out of arrow range, beside the huge engines with their Lebanese cedar throwing arms and sweating Greek engineers.
They loaded and fired, loaded and fired, for the assault had failed dismally and the only way into the city now was to pound the walls to rubble. Some of them, seeing the state I was in, gave me water and bound my wounds up with only slightly dirty rags, while I sat and let them, solid as a stump on the outside. Inside, I was . . . disconnected, like sea-rotted mail, falling link by link.
My mother, already carrying me and knowing it, brings herself to my father . . . no, to Rurik, I realised. To Rurik, who marries her and gets a farm for his old age, he thinks, taking someone else's son with it.
Someone thought dead until he turns up, like a ghost at the feast.
Gunnar. No wonder he had stayed at Bjornshafen and no one dared say anything of it. No wonder, too, that Gudleif had to be sleekit about trying to do away with me, for he must have known.
And Gunnar had stayed with Einar because I was there—had died for being a father and kept it all to himself to the grave. I wept for that, splashing muddy tears down my face, for all the things we would not now say to each other, for all the remembered things that now made sense.
Gunnar Raudi. Swaggering, bracken-haired hard man, a sea-raider who had more in him for fathering than Rurik, who had wanted a farm and peace. Somehow, in a Loki joke, they had swapped lives.
Eventually, the dullness lifted and the tears stopped. I thought of him lying out there, dead in the dust and unclaimed. I couldn't let that happen, so I went to find the Oathsworn.
I found a man I knew, Flosi, who had been my oarmate on the old
'Thought you were gone,' he said, jerking a grimy thumb behind him. 'The rest are over yonder—Illugi is taking a tally. I've been sent to fetch food and water for us.'
He stood there, grinning madly, his hair a wild tangle and his beard stiff with matted blood and all the same tawny yellow from the dust. His eyes showed white and red-rimmed from the crusted scab of his face but he had no colour in anything he wore, just a coating of that dust. It came to me, then, that I looked no different—save for the tear-tracks, which he did his best to ignore.
Nor did any of the others, slumped in slack-mouthed exhaustion round the remains of what had been our camp, trampled by horsemen at some point, our flimsy shelters scattered. Illugi and Einar were finding out who lived, and who did not.
I was greeted with a raise of the hand, or a nod. Einar, blood streaked in his hair, turned and grinned a lopsided smirk, then jerked his head at Illugi. 'Better mark him off the dead roll,' he said.
`Leave the mark,' I replied, heaving up a slack skin of tepid water. I sluiced it over my head, then drank some. It was foul.
`Fair enough,' said Wryneck. 'You look more dead than alive—and you just used all the water we had left, so some of us might kill you anyway.'
`Leave the mark,' I repeated, 'but tally it to my father.'
Aah,' groaned Wryneck. 'Old Rurik? Gone?'
A loss we will feel sorely,' Einar added sorrowfully, 'when we have the wind at our back and a fair sea.
How will we find a course now?'
Any course will do,' I snarled, 'on the whale road.'
Einar nodded and tried to pat my shoulder as if I was merely overwrought; I glared at him through the streaked crust of my face. Illugi stepped forward, just one pace into that space heating up between us.
Anyone else you saw go down?' he asked.
I blinked away from Einar, into the ravaged creases of Illugi's worn face, made deeper by the dust caked in