The Whale Road

I last saw her as nothing but a snarl in a pale face, her mouth like a red wound, the sword thrusting still as the earth piled up with a soft, sighing rush of sound.

I almost laughed with the sheer relief of it. Until the water in the tunnel, unable to go anywhere else, surged up and I was sucked in the muddy slush of it.

I wriggled and splashed. The tunnel was full now and I saw earth silting through it, knew it was filling the whole tunnel, knew I was almost as trapped as she.

I went mad then, a little. I fought, grunting, jabbing with the sword to get through. I was choking; there was nothing in that tunnel but slurry now—then a last, quicksand moment of resistance and I was out, neck deep, pulling in air in great maddened whoops.

The balky was a surging mass of tan slurry, pouring down, spilling out and round the mound to make the lake, filthy brown with mud and rolling with old corpses. Soon it would swallow the mound itself, drown it until the next drought.

Someone yelled as I struggled to the steep sides, where the crumbling earth calved like bergs off a mountain of ice. I should have floated, but didn't. I was drowning in greed.

Frantically, I hauled my belt off, let my tunic fly free and everything in it that was dragging me down.

Brooches, rings, coins: all vanished. I could not get my boots off, they were pulling me down . . . but still I held on to the sabre.

Orm! Orm!'

The voice came from above. Short Eldgrim's face appeared, a length of rope slithered like a wet snake and I stuck the sabre in my mouth and grabbed it. Willing hands hauled me and I never even felt the pain in my ruined left hand until long afterwards.

I lay on the edge of the dawn-smeared steppe, which crumbled even as we stood there, so they dragged me away again. Eventually, gasping, I sat up. I couldn't believe I was alive and neither could they.

Everyone else?' asked Kvasir.

I shook my head.

Einar too?' said Sighvat.

I nodded. The muddy lake swirled and gurgled. I thought of them all under it, wondered if the tunnel was so blocked it would keep the chamber from filling . . . remembered her open mouth and the hate in her eyes.

Not that it mattered. No one was getting in now. The treasure was buried once more, safe under the lake, as had been intended by those who had brought Attila here.

And I laughed, then, thinking of a time when . . . if . . . others ever came back here, did what we had done and dug through to Attila's throne when drought bared it once more.

They'd find Einar on that throne, not Attila, think him the great lord, wonder at his riches and how he died.

That's if they had time, for I had the idea that Hild's fetch would haunt that hall a long time, thanks to her runespelled sword.

I never wanted to go back there.

The others looked at me laughing and I got up, winced, and stood for a moment.

`Well,' said Short Eldgrim, holding up the battered plate of silver, with its embossed rim of little fruits and bees and birds. 'Looks like this is the only hoard of silver we will see this day.'

Or any day,' agreed Kvasir. He sounded almost relieved.

Short Eldgrim turned it over in his hands and then tossed it back in the waters, an offering to the tortured fetches of Einar and the others.

No one protested.

`Sigurd's cursed silver,' muttered Finn.

`Right enough,' agreed Short Eldgrim.

I hoped not—but no one suggested I throw the sabre back, so I stayed quiet. They had rescued three ponies and some supplies and a dozen men, those fit enough actually to run for it. All the rest had died, were rolling and tumbling in the maelstrom of muddy water.

There was no rain that day, so we made a fire and I watched what was left of them huddle round it, beyond my hearing, talking. I knew what they were doing and, with a black despair, what I would do when they came to me, their secret whisperings done. I did not care about that: I had my own secret.

It was done simply enough the next day. It had rained then, just when I thought we couldn't be more miserable and I was sitting in it, enduring, when Kvasir came to me and hunkered down where I sat tracing the runes along the sabre's shining, watered blade. Ridill or Hrotti, I wondered.

`Scrubbed up well, that sticker,' he grunted, cautiously probing his red eye, which now leaked green pus and was blind, I knew, from the way he cocked his head.

The rest of them had sabres, too, stripped from cavalrymen who had attacked us, but no one thought much of them—a pig-sticker, too light and pointed for men who fought with the double slashing edge. None were like this one, but if any of the others noticed that, they bit down on it and stayed silent.

I turned the blade in the pearl light of the wet day and agreed it had scrubbed up well, knowing that it was as different from the other sabres we had as night from day.

Eventually, Kvasir cleared his throat and said, 'So, will you lead us then, now that Einar has gone?'

So it was done, despite the fact that the youngest of them was older than me by a decade. I was Orm the White-bear Slayer, who had survived the howe of Attila.

I was sick with it, though. We stood in the hissing wind of that bare steppe and I sacrificed a hare on a rock, as I had seen Illugi do an age ago on the beach at Birka—and it was a sacrifice, for getting the thing was hard enough, let alone not eating it.

Then we looked at each other across the acrid fur-burning stink and nodded and spoke the words together.

`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.'

A hard oath to swear. To break it now, I would have to become a Christ-follower in Constantinople, or find some fool to take my place—and who could replace the jarl without killing him first?

But I was young and dared to think I could spit in All-Father's one eye.

My first jarl test came when horsemen thundered up to us on the steppe, as we squelched miserably towards the Don. They were a cautious, fur-clad, flat-nosed, fierce-looking bunch of Kipchak dogs who had never seen our like before—which was our good luck.

They stopped some way beyond long arrow-shot and considered us. Their bows were uncased, but no arrows were nocked, which gave me hope.

`They could shoot us down like sheep in a pen,' Kvasir said, his voice tight, his shield up.

'But they have not,' I answered and jerked my downy chin at the rider who had broken away from them and was ambling his scraggy pony towards us, his hands up and clear of his body.

`They want to talk,' Finn Horsehead said. `Maybe we can frighten them into letting us pass without a fight.'

I looked at him; he was serious. I looked at the rest of them, this tattered band of grim men, prepared to fight and die. I shook my head, half in sorrow at their thick heads, half in sorrow for what I realised, even then, was passing.

`There is another way, I am thinking,' I said, pulling off my boots and spilling out the ringmoney, the brooches, the coins that would have pulled me down but for Short Eldgrim's rope. My secret.

They gaped, circle-mouthed. I grinned back at them.

'Now we trade,' I said.

In the light of the dancing lantern, guttering fish-oil smoke that was whipped away by the wind, only their eyes gleamed as they hunkered down out of the spray at one end of the ship.

I felt those eyes like brands but tried to ignore them, concentrating on the Greek captain and staring at him in turn, until he felt the burn of my eyes and whirled on his men, barking angry and pointless orders in his unease.

He had taken us aboard in two minds, that captain, caught between greed and fear. On the one hand, we had