The Wolf Sea

Once, Radoslav had been an oarmate, a sword-brother; now he was pillage and it came to me then that he had managed to avoid taking our Oath and that I had missed that sign, too. I thanked him for it now, all the same; the Oath had not been broken by his treachery and death.

`He thought you were lying about the runesword,' said Brother John softly, looking down at the ruin that had been Radoslay . Tibenter homines et id quod volunt credunt.'

What men wish, they like to believe. It did not seem much to mark the passing of a man who had once saved my life.

Jarl Brand, his hair and eyes picking up all the red torchlight, stepped over to the groaning Skarpheddin and his dead mother. His sword was one befitting a great jarl, for it took only two strokes — deep, wet sounds — and their heads were off. Then he turned to Svala.

`Take her and bind her. Cask those two up,' he said to Ljot, and place the heads on the thighs.'

Which was the correct way, of course, to lay any witch-fetch vengeance to rest, for they cannot walk abroad as undead if they cannot see. Svala would not be killed; no one sensible killed a witch and it was not good that Finn had killed Thorhalla, but I trusted to Odin to watch over him for that. I watched Brand's men haul Svala by the armpits and take her up the worn steps, her calfskin shoes bumping as they dragged her, blood dripping, fat and red.

Brand turned to me and smiled. 'A good service,' he declared. I shall keep my word. Come to me in the daylight and we will see your men well fitted out.'

We left that old tomb, stinking with fresh blood and new fetches to haunt it down the ages, scampering away from it down the moonlit crack between high rocks and out to where the river flowed. There we stopped and splashed water and told Botolf what a saga tale he had made, though all he could think of was his lost hair.

It did make such a tale, too, for that skald Harek — who had stayed true enough to us — took the bones of it and fleshed it into a saga. Though when I heard it, years later, it was part of another tale entirely, about the jomsvikings from Wolin, and nearly all lies.

As we trooped back to the wadmal-camp, the Goat Boy striding beside me, fist clenched tight in the hem of my mail, all I could see were Svala's red cheeks, lips pursed to blow a strand of hair off her face with a littlepfft' of sound.

`Lovely,' she had said.

I could not get the stink of rumman fruit out of my nose all night — and the gods revealed the price to be paid for killing a witch when we stumbled back to our mean camp. The man I had set to watch Martin confessed he had ducked from the tent for a moment — a moment only — to take a piss, for the prisoner had been bound.

When he came back, the monk had gone.

11

The click of wooden goat bells and the bleat of camel calves snatched me from a dream which smoked away like prow-spray into the morning, where shadows already grew fat beyond the sheltered overhang of rock where we were camped.

Men yawned and unrolled from cloaks and stretched, farting. Two fires were already lit and Aliabu, our guide, was slapping wet dough backwards and forwards in his hands, expertly making it into thin bread for the hot stones. He grinned, all white teeth and eyes. Nearby, Finn ducked the smoke from his own fire, moving to the lee as he stirred oats and water in a pot, a good Norse day-meal.

Short Eldgrim strolled up as I rolled out from my own cloak and finally found the gods-cursed stone that had stuck in my ribs for most of the night.

`You look like a camel's arse, Trader,' he grunted amiably, hunkering down awkwardly in his robes and mail. Finn threatened him with the wooden spoon as he craned to look in the pot.

`Fine talk from the likes of you,' I gave him back, 'with a face like a bad chart.'

The Goat Boy brought me some of the Arab flatbread and hot goat's milk, at which a few of the men chuckled. The Goat Boy, still pale and weak, had refused to be left behind with Gizur and the six we had sent to guard the Fjord Elk and the Oathsworn admired his bravery — and enjoyed poking fun at me for his doglike devotion. I had to spit out flies drinking his hot milk, though; even this early they swarmed on any food.

Most of the band were awake and had been since first light, slithering into leather and mail. After that, they shrouded it all in the flowing robes of the Bedu tribes, leaving helmets dangling like pots from the waists and wearing cloth wrapped round their heads in a strange way, which Aliabu and his brothers, Asil and Delim, had to do for the band every day.

That had been Aliabu's idea, that and the handful of goats and camels which carried our gear, since it made us look more like Sarakenoi in the country that we travelled through. Not that, so far, we had seen many others and those we did find sprinted for it. Ruined farms, shattered houses, broken lives — the armies of both sides were ravaging those who always suffer: the weak.

Now, eight days out from Antioch, we had gone beyond even the Miklagard army scout patrols and the two ravaged steadings we had come across had been destroyed by the Sarakenoi themselves, who were fighting each other now. I thanked the gods we were more battle-ready than we had ever been.

Jarl Brand had been a ring-giver of note to us, for sure. In front of the assembled ranks of his own men and us — and what was left of the sullen, wailing company of Skarpheddin — he had offered his aid to each and every one of the Oathsworn, who had then picked spears, axes, helmets shields and prized ring-coats from a heap gathered up from the battlefield.

There were a few swords, too, but he gave them to me to hand out, which was a fine jarl-gesture and not lost on all there, so that the women who wailed at the sight of familiar battle-gear being lifted by strangers were made easier. That, of course, and the fact that Jarl Brand had swept them into his own hov, which at least gave them a future and made it harder to protest.

He also provided a feast, with heaped platters of food and fat jugs of nabidh, consumed under the stars down by the Orontes, with clever jugglers and fire-eaters and all in honour of the Oathsworn and their leader, Orm Bear Slayer.

Harek, who had now become court-skald to Brand as he had been to Skarpheddin, composed as complicated a draupa as he could manage on the greatness of Orm Bear Slayer while half-drunk, but thehooms' and `heyas' that made my face flame simply made his tongue more wild.

Of course, as Brand confided to me, his face so close to mine that I could see the light sparkle on his silver lashes, it was what the Oathsworn deserved for having such Odin luck as to have attacked the main baggage camp of the enemy just as it looked as if the Sarakenoi might win.

Instead, they had panicked and tried to get back to defend it, at which point Red Boots and his horsemen fell on them, rescuing something from a bad day. Which was double luck for us: if the Sarakenoi had got back to their camp, we'd have been skewered and considered ourselves fortunate to die so quickly after what we had done there.

`General Red Boots now commends me,' Brand went on, `which is only right and proper. He has made me Curopalates in Skarpheddin's stead.'

I smiled and nodded, though I did not think he would have the enjoyment of it for long — Red Boots had not beaten the wily old Hamdanid ruler and, as long as he threatened from Aleppo, Antioch would have to be abandoned yet again. The army would be reduced once more, until next year, or the year after. As seemed usual, neither the Great City nor the Sarakenoi had gained anything for all the blood spilled.

Perhaps Skarpheddin chuckled at that from Helheim where he surely was, for he and his mother were both carefully casked in a Christ coffin lined with lead stripped from Antioch's outraged churches. This was so that they wouldn't leak until they were howed, with due solemn ceremony, four days after we were gone.

Of Svala there was no word at all.

`So you did me a good turn there, too, young Orm,' Brand was saying, stroking his grease-stiffened moustaches, so that they looked more like frozen eaves-water than before. 'Which is why I equip you well, as