The White Raven

Surprised, we all looked at him and he became aware of the eyes, stopped searching for more food and grew flustered at our stares.

'I had it from a Jew trader,' he explained. 'They hang those condemned who are Christ followers upside down. Like their god on the tree, only the other way up.'

Martin's eye twitched, for it was a terrible thing, it seemed, for Christ men to be hung — crucified, they called it — upside down. It was also a hard and long way to die.

'Our little Christ priest is used to that,' Finn sneered. 'He has been hung upside down before.'

Those who remembered Martin from the first time we had met him — slung from the mast of our ship, spraying tears and piss on to the planks together with everything he thought we might want to know — chuckled.

'He can do it standing on his head,' agreed Kvasir sombrely and the hoots and thigh-slaps chased after the flapping hem of Martin's robe as he strode from the hall.

'He will run,' Kvasir said, tilting his head to peer closely at his strap work.

'Not without his little stick,' Finn declared.

They took odds on it but I knew he would run only when he had the spear cradled in his arms and was sure of being able to run to somewhere safe; out on the winter steppe, I was thinking, the only safe place was with us.

Finn and others, meanwhile, muttered with their heads touching about how, when the time came, we might have to fight the druzhina of Vladimir to get their silver hoard. I let them; it was as lunatic as trying to throw a loop around the moon, but it kept them from becoming too morose. All the same, when the time came, I was thinking, I would have to come up with some gold-browed plan or they would be looking upward and shaking out hopeful rope.

Later, as I sat with Jon Asanes composing a careful letter to Jarl Brand, I paused to watch the bustle in the courtyard, dictating as Jon scratched in his best hand.

'Now there's the thing of it,' declared Jon, following my gaze as I rubbed one of Thorgunna's salves into the ankle that always gave me trouble in cold weather. 'Old Sveinald there is no fool and could not miss such preparation as this, yet he rides off without a backward glance at all these carts and loading and such. Is he burning too much at what happened to his boy to wonder what we are doing?'

'It is his boy who is burning,' I pointed out, 'and will, I am thinking, for a long while yet.'

'Yet one more trouble to add to the heap,' answered Jon and his voice was so wormwood bitter that I turned to look at him. By then, however, he was hidden behind his hair, hunched over, scratching away at the vellum with his tongue between his teeth.

Jon was smart, even when he sulked. Our going to seek out Atil's silver was the worst secret never kept; the markets were alive with it and men arrived every day to clamour to join Vladimir's druzhina, or the Oathsworn.

Sveinald knew of it, for all his indifference. That meant Jaropolk, whom I had last seen as a spotty youth, knew of it. So would Oleg, the second of Vladimir's brothers and even allowing for the fact that there were stones more clever than him, he would know the importance of it, even if someone had to spell the words of it for him.

It was, I was thinking, as if Odin — a Volsung himself, I remembered — had bent and twisted and heated and forged this treasure hoard into an ever-increasing curse, dragging more and more people into it, beating it white-hot and ever-larger. But for what?

The wet feathers of the white raven drifted, light and cold on my upturned face, making me blink as they fastened on my lashes. Perhaps Crowbone had the right of it after all — perhaps this was Fimbulwinter, the heralding freeze at the end of the world.

Then, on the day the white raven stuck its head under a wing and roosted, permitting a blue sky and a red sun, we left Novgorod and went out on to the wolf sea.

9

'The Oathsworn were lined up in a parody of the prince's druzhina but only half-mocking. Anything the dour folk of Novgorod could do, good men from the vik could do better they had decided.

Vladimir rode out to look his own men over. He was all gleaming with gold and silver, wearing a little sabre and perched like an acorn on a too-large black horse — so I had to wear my own finery and that cursed sabre and stride out to look the Oathsworn over.

The good people of Novgorod cheered and the carts creaked and the horses and ponies stamped in the cold, dropping cairns of steaming dung on to the freshly-swept oak walkways. I felt, at that moment, closer to being a jarl than I had ever felt.

They did not look too bad, the Oathsworn, for all that they had drunk through most of the money they had won from raiding Klerkon and rattled every whore in the city until her teeth loosened. Some had even thought to squander money on sensible gear fit for a winter steppe.

There was Kvasir, wearing a new coat padded and sewn like a quilt and stuffed with cotton. We called it aketon, which was as close as any norther could get to mouthing al- qutn, the Serkland word for cotton.

We knew the benefits of having padding under mail, but three wool tunics were usually enough, until we had found the soldiers of the Great City wearing these Turk garments. Not only did they keep off arrows but dulled a hard dunt that might otherwise break your ribs — and kept you warm in weather like this, too.

On the other hand, there was Lambi Pai, the Peacock, barely old enough to grow a wisp of beard and shivering in his new, fat silk breeks striped in red and white, with a silly hat fringed with long-haired goat. Which was still not as silly as the one Finn wore, which was Ivar's weather hat with a strip of wadmal tied round it and over his ears — but at least Finn's would keep him warm.

They were all grinning back at me, stamping feet and blowing out smoke-breath and stuffing their fingers inside cloaks and tunics to keep them warm; Klepp Spaki, Onund Hnufa, Finnlaith the Irisher, Bjaelfi — whom we called Laeknir, Healer, because he had some skills there — Gyrth, wrapped in sensible furs so that he looked like a dancing bear and all the others. Well — all grinning save Jon Asanes, who looked sour as turned milk and stared blankly back at me.

I saw Gizur and Red Njal and nodded acknowledgment of Hauk Fast Sailor's wave. Beyond them all, wrapped up like bundles in the carts, Thorgunna and Thordis watched me, while the deerhounds alone seemed immune to the chill on a day of blue skies and a blood sun with no heat left in it.

I wanted to tell them it was foolishness, of how many had already died on this quest, but I knew they had heard all that already from those who had survived the first time. It did not matter now — the silver hook was sunk deep and Odin reeled us all in. Bone, blood and steel — that oath would haul us all out on to the cold-wasted steppe.

So we trooped out through the gate, a long, winding column of sledge-carts and horses, men and boys, thralls and women and one reluctant Christ priest.

The little princes rode together, surrounded by the hulking shapes of Sigurd and Dobrynya and picked men of the druzhina in full mail and helmets and lances with forked pennants fluttering, forcing the thralls and drovers to scamper or be ridden over. I saw that a lot of the drovers were Klerkon's crewmen, reduced to hiring on as paid labour and lured to this demeaning thrall-work by the gleam of distant silver.

I vowed to watch them, in case any were holding grudges for Klerkon's death — though I did not think the man attracted such loyalty, I remembered what we had done on Svartey.

I forgot my vow, of course, a week later, when the winter steppe closed its icy jaws and gnawed even reasoning out of us.

There was snow, night and day and yet again, then it eased but only to give the snell wind a chance to catch up. Then it snowed again, small-flaked and dry, piling round the camp in high circles where the fires kept it at bay.

It fell, fine as flour from a quern, from a lead-dulled sky, sifted like smoke along the land, stinging the face