The White Raven

other in Sviatoslav's kingdom.

I had thought of taking the Elk down to Novgorod but was glad I had not as we were poled along the cold river, through the dripping fir and pine forests where people still struggled to work the hacked-out clearings using their strange little three-toothed ploughs. The Volkhov seemed even more swirling and treacherous with currents than I remembered from sailing it with Einar.

It seemed all marsh and fish to me this time, an ugly place when the trees were stripped to claws. Further south was where the good black steppe earth was, the stuff the Slavs call chernoziom and so rich you need plough it just the once and, after letting it fallow for a few years, harvest wheat a number of times without tillage.

'Aye, poor land, this,' decided Red Njal. 'And what are they doing boiling water in those huge pans?'

'Salt,' grunted Kvasir. 'There is water here from springs and it is salt as the sea.'

'Not a bad trick at all,' noted Ospak. 'Selling people boiled sea water.'

It was his first visit and everything was new.

'Just so,' chuckled Finn. 'So you see we are richer aboard the Elk even than Kvasir Spittle here, for we are always floating in the stuff.'

Everyone laughed, while Kvasir ignored them, punching careful holes in his share of the gold dinar coins, making his necklace for Thorgunna. For her part, she still sat fussing over Crowbone, who now had a tow fuzz under the healing scabs. It was also clear that we could hardly treat him as a thrall, no matter what he was, so I went to him as we climbed aboard the strug.

'Prince you may be, or you may not,' I said, while a knowing Thorgunna beamed, 'but free you can be, for sure.'

I held out my hand. He blinked those marvellous eyes at me, then grinned and took my wrist in his own small grip.

Later, when we were sliding between the green banks, poled by chanting Krivichi rivermen, Kvasir came to me with what he and Thorgunna had coaxed from this little Prince.

'He says,' Kvasir told me, speaking low, 'that he was with his mother and staying with his grandfather and his foster-father, whom he knew as Old Thorolf. He was hunted by men, that much he knows, for his mother warned him always of it. They were hiding in this place, which he cannot remember the name of, for he was three when they fled it, heading, he says, for Novgorod. He has an uncle here, or so his mother told him, but does not know his name. They were coming to this uncle when they ran out of luck.'

I thought on it, rolling it over and over like a new coin in my head while Kvasir looked at me, his one good eye dulled as a dying fish in the growing twilight.

'Klerkon took him? Or bought him from someone else?' Kvasir frowned, getting the story straight.

'Took him. Killed the foster-father right off. The boy remembers him doing it, saying Thorolf was too old and pitching him into the sea to drown.'

'The mother?'

Kvasir shrugged. 'I think she died later. He knows more but either will not or cannot say more. Only that she died on Svartey.'

Probably under Klerkon, I thought moodily.

'Anything else?'

Kvasir shrugged. 'He knows the names of his mother, father and grandfather, but he will not say them. I think his mother made him swear it. Which is not a surprise if men are hunting you — a closed mouth keeps you hidden.'

There was something here half-buried. I felt like someone who finds a ring in the dirt and knows if he gives it a hard enough tug it will unearth the whole glorious oathing-sword whose hilt it is attached to.

We were silent again, then Kvasir shook his head, bemused.

'We are in a saga here,' he declared. 'A hunted prince, captured by raiders. Sold to slavery and rescued by the Bear Slayer and the Oathsworn — if that boy doesn't end up a great man, then I am no reader of the Norn's weave.'

'Read less of his Norn-weave and more of our own,' I answered. 'Let's hope there is not a thread in it that winds his greatness round our doom.'

That thought occupied both of us all the way to where the strug tied up to the wharf at Novgorod. Then the Norns showed us what they had weaved so far and Odin's laughter was louder still.

6

The great walled fortress of Novgorod, with its central keep — the Slavs call them kreml and detinets — was a formidable affair even in those early days, before it was rebuilt in stone. All sharpened wood and earthworks, it glowered above the town like a stern father.

Inside, it was then and is now, as snug as a turf-roofed Iceland hall, with fine hangings and sable furs and such — but it also has a stinking pit prison, all filth and sweating rock walls and meant for the likes of the ragged- arse Krivichi, Goliads and Slovenes, not decent Norse like us.

The druzhina guards didn't see it that way at all when they pitched us in, jeering and pointing out that no-one climbed out who was not destined either to be nailed upside down or staked.

We were all there — me, Finn, Kvasir, Jon Asanes, Thorgunna, Thordis, two thrall women who gabbled in some strange tribe tongue and Olaf who, for all his defiant chin, was trembling, both at what might happen and at the fact he had killed his first man.

In the dark, chill and crushing as a tomb, our ragged breathing was all that told me anyone was there at all and yet it seemed to me that there were shapes, blacker shadows in the dark, shifting and moving. I felt them, as I had felt them the night of the fox-fires back in the stables in Hestreng; the restless dead, come to look and leach the last warmth of life from someone about to join them. Aye, and gloat, too, perhaps.

The day started well enough, when we had made our way over the great split-log walkways, greasy with soft mirr and age, to the Gotland quarter where the Norse trading houses sat. I was seeking Jon Asanes, known to us as The Goat Boy.

Eventually we found Tvorimir, into whose care we had handed The Goat Boy to be taught how to trade, deal with sharp men and read and write birch-bark accounts. Tvorimir, it was generally agreed, was the best for this, since he was nicknamed Soroka — Magpie — for his attraction to anything even vaguely sheened.

His house, of the better sort called an izba, was like a steading hall dropped into a town, arranged on three sides around a courtyard, with stables, storage for hay and grain and one of the bath houses they liked so much. Instead of a pitfire, it had a clay oven in one corner, which was a fine thing.

He looked less like a magpie than a fat fussing hen, a man built, as Kvasir noted, in a pile of circles, from the ones which made his fat legs, to the one that made his belly and the little red one framed with a puff of white hair that made his head.

After we had been hugged and backslapped, been given bread and salt and ale from the cellar, he puffed himself to a wooden bench near the big clay oven and shook his head at the mention of Jon Asanes.

'Quick and clever that one,' he told me. 'Works well, too — when he can be fastened to it. Has taken to writing, but not for accounts.'

He paused, shut one eye and laid a finger along his nose. 'Love verse,' he said and laughed, an alarming effect of wheeze and wobble. He rolled his eyes heavenward and intoned: 'What fire in my heart and my body and my soul for you and your body and your person, let it set fire to your heart and your body and your soul for me and for my body and for my person.'

'Tyr's bones,' breathed Finn, half admiring, half disgusted. 'We have arrived just in time, it seems,' Kvasir declared. 'You should write such for me,' declared Thorgunna, nudging Kvasir, who looked shocked at the very idea, then grinned.

'Happily, I am unable to read or write, save a bit of rune here and there. And now that I am down to one eye, I will not risk straining it on such.'