The Wolf Sea

but I did not like the idea of her being 'broken into', like a locked temple. It spoke of pain and blood. In his way, Jarl Brand was being generous-handed and lenient with her — yet, still, there was that lingering scent of rumman fruit.

Will you sell her to me?' I asked, surprising both Brand and myself with those words.

Frowning, he thought about it. 'She is dangerous, I am thinking. Odin's arse, young Orm, she has a face like a chewed fig thanks to that raven and is a well of hatred for us all, yet still she weaves her seidr and makes you come to her rescue. What more warning do you need on this?'

'Will you sell her?'

He thought for a little longer and shook his head, so that my heart dipped.

It would be your doom, I am thinking,' he said. 'But it is also your wyrd and no one flaunts the Norns'

weave without price. I am reluctant to sell a Sami witch to a good man from the Vik, but here is what I will do. Return with proof that Starkad is dead. That, surely, will be a sign that you are gods-lucky and you will also have had time to consider whether you are favoured enough to take this woman.'

I knew this was as much as he would do on it, so I nodded. Brand nodded back and the bargain was struck. I expected a purse of hacksilver when I handed over the container there and then, but Brand was a jarl of different stock than that and surprised me. He stood and thumped on the bench until people fell silent, then peeled off the fine silver torc from around his neck and presented it to me.

He did not have to say anything, for the Norse knew what it meant and those Jews, Arabs and Greeks would have it explained to them later. The roar and bench-thumping went on a long time as I took the twelve ounces of braided silver from him and placed it round my own neck. For all the night was leprous with sweat, the silver was cold on my skin for a long time.

Now, in the desert heat of the early day, I fingered it, the snarling wyrm-head ends and the runes skeined on it and wondered if all the blood was off it, for it was only later that I realised it had belonged to Skarpheddin and preferred not to tell of that. There were those who would think it a bad move to be wearing the rune-serpent jarl torc of one who had been so luck-cursed.

Of course, I did feel a moment of guilt over the container and its secret, but that was not for more than a year, when I heard how Red Boots, Leo Balantes and others had crept into the palace bedroom of the Basileus of the Great City and stabbed him to shreds while he slept, Red Boots walking out and on to the throne. Red Boots, I heard, had even smashed the Basileus's teeth from his head with the butt end of his sword and kicked in his head, which was a sorry way for the most powerful man in the world to end up.

But blood-feuds in the Great City were no business of mine, as Brand had said, and, in this gods-abandoned waste of heat and dust, I considered the trade worth it at the time. The Oathsworn, I was thinking as I sat there blowing flies off porridge, were under Odin's best smile, for many problems had been fixed and money and battle- gear gained.

Aliabu's woman, Nura, crossed to the camels with a milking bowl they called an ader and stood by one of the camels. Sixteen of the beasts, I had learned, were she-camels and five had calves, so that those who were not suckling were heavy with milk.

While Delim gathered in the four males from where they had been hobbled and turned them loose to graze the sparse shrub, Nura unfastened the covers on the udders of one she-camel and encouraged her with sucking sounds. Standing on one leg, the other balanced against her knee, she took the fat teats in her hand and started squirting expertly into the bowls.

I sat and watched while the morning grew to glory and started to sing and hum with strange life. She saw me and smiled with her eyes, which was all that could be seen.

She had a blue cloth wrapped round her in a single piece, which they called mehlafa, and it covered her from her silver-ringed feet to her braided hair, though, unlike other Saracen women, she did not seem to mind exposing her face.

She unloaded milk into a fat pottery pot and, from there, Alia bu's other woman, Rauda, poured it carefully into goatskins. Even with just her eyes visible, this Rauda was a rare beauty, it seemed, for her full name, Aliabu had told me proudly, meant the Pool that Gathers after the Rain.

Not a pool others drank from, even among his own. None of his brothers had women, but Aliabu had two and his brothers did not seem to mind this, nor ever demand their use. Neither, of course, did we, though a few thought of it.

But Aliabu had a long and wickedly curved knife hidden in his robes and had made it clear he would use it on any afrangi who caused him offence. We needed his skills and goodwill more than we needed a hump, as I told the Oathsworn.

Aliabu had told me his full name and those of this brothers, but the most any of us could remember of it was the first part and that 'Abu' meant 'father', which title you take in Serkland when you have sons.

Short Eldgrim sat back with a sigh, waiting for Finn's morning gruel, listening to the wooden goat bells and savouring the water he had dug up. Aliabu had taught us to bury the waterskins each evening: after a night buried in the chill, they were cold as a winter fjord first thing in the morning, which made that the best part of the day.

Usually, we should have been up and away, with a few hours' walk under our belts before we stopped for the day-meal, but we were travelling in the cooler part of the day — practically evening — and for a good part of the night, so would lie up in the shade of the rocks which overhung this crack in the ground all that day.

It is a nice sound, the goat bells,' Short Eldgrim mused, then shook his head. 'But I wish it was on a wether in a meadow under hills which had snow on them.'

Aye, blowing a snell wind that promises a winter digging it and all the other sheep out of drifts,' grunted Kvasir, crunching through the stony desert to squat beside him. He took a wooden bowl from Finn with a grunt of thanks and fished his horn spoon out from the depths of his tunic. He ate, waving at the flies and spitting out those he could. Most he ate along with the gruel.

If Short Eldgrim had been meant to thank his luck that he wasn't digging sheep out of snowdrifts, it didn't work. He nodded, wistful-sad, his heimthra made the worse for the view Finn had seidr- magicked up for him.

`Don't worry,' growled Finn, passing him the porridge while it was too hot for flies to land on. 'One day you'll be back with the snow wind blowing up your backside and then you'll look back on the days you spent lolling in the warmth of Serkland.'

One day. There were forty of us left now and four were already sick. I was cursing myself and all the gods that we had stayed for Brand's feasting — not that we had much choice in it. Brother John had warned us, right enough, looming grim-eyed out of the dark a day after we had come back from killing Skarpheddin and his seidr women.

`They are wrapping red-rashed corpses down by the river,' he had told me and needed to say nothing more, for I had seen all this before at the siege of Sarkel. Sure enough, the next day, four of our men started to shiver and water flowed from them in fat drops.

The day after that was the feasting and the day after that was when we left and three were dead by then, put in the great howed pit Brand was digging to cope with the numbers. The fourth we left with the Greek doctors in Antioch, while we ran into the desert's heat and Gizur and the Elk crew ran to the sea winds. I offered prayers to Odin that all of us had escaped the sickness and that I had made the correct choice — to go after our oarmates first, then chase Starkad down.

Now we lay and thought of green hills and slate-blue seas capped with white and the snow whipping off the tall mountains like Sleipnir's mane. It was better with your eyes closed, for then you did not see this strange land, nor the massive winding ribbon of stones we lay in, whose walls rose like tongues of orange flames to a washed blue sky.

Here were no sheep, but little scaled lizards that popped out and scuttled down the blind turnings that led only to holes where little birds lived. It was a world of brown and pale green, of strange boulders shaped like mushrooms and swirling patterns of sand, which seemed to be all the colours of Bifrost. I supposed Aliabu and his people had as many names for sand as the Sami have for snow.

I lay and thought of her, too, all through the day until it was my time to stand watch and even then.

Always the same, too: the laugh; and the day she and I and Radoslav had enjoyed in the city of Antioch on