The White Raven

and piling up, all the time piling up so that, finally, you could not get your feet above it and had to plough through it. Yet, when I turned, once, to get the sting out of my face and free my lashes from ice, there was not a mark; all smoothed and smothered, the snow left not even the voice of it to show where we had been.

The Great White, Tien called it and he should know, being a Bulgar from the Itil River, which Slavs call Volga. Vladimir had brought him, along with some Khazars as guides and his name, he told.us with a grin, meant nothing. It was a good joke for it was true — tien was the name of a small coin, a trifle in the language of his tribe, the Eksel.

'I will trade you my fine name,' moaned Pai when he heard this, 'for your hat and coat.'

Tien laughed with fine, strong teeth. He wore a cone-shaped fur hat with flaps right down over his ears, a long sable coat belted at the waist with a sash and long fur boots, all of which were eyed enviously. In the sash, though, Tien had a curved dagger in a sheath and his hand was never far from it — particularly when the Khazars were close.

Sviatoslav had broken the power of the Khazars before he died and the tribes of the Bulgars, once dominated by the Khazars, were now free — nothing marked this more than Tien, who had gone back to the old ways of the Eksel, even to calculating the seasons and the years. It was a deliberate heathen insult to the Khazar Jews.

'This is the Time Of Small Frosts, in the second year of the Hedgepig,' he told us on the last night of our first week in the steppe, the oval of his face flickered by firelight. The camp was so sunk that no-one wanted to go far from it for private business, for you could not see it a hundred steps away, save for blue smoke in the last hour of evening — at night, even the red glow vanished.

'Small frosts?' grunted Gyrth. 'Any larger and Finn's other ear will drop off.'

Finn, who did not like mention of his missing ear, scowled and there were chuckles at Gyrth getting the better of him for once — but not many and not for long. The cold seeped into bones, even round the fire, so that your face and toes were warm but your back was numbed. It sucked away even the desire to laugh.

Tien shrugged. 'It has been colder,' he said and looked across to where the Khazars sat, stolidly listening and saying nothing.

He graciously accepted a refill from Kvasir's horn — green wine, I knew, cold as a whore's heart and which burned satisfyingly in your belly — and smacked his lips. Finn gave a sharp grunt of annoyance as Kvasir's shivering spilled some while pouring, for he loved that green wine and there was precious little of it with us.

'There was a time,' Tien went on, 'when we fought the Khazars, even as we were part of the Khazar nation and even when no-one else dared.'

The Khazars stayed quiet, though their eyes were chips of blue ice in the firelight. Red haired and blue eyed were the Khazar Jews, while the little Eksel Bulgar was dark as an underground dwarf — which he may well have been, as Jon pointed out, for he knew more than any other Greek about the Old Norse.

'Alas,' said Tien, 'we were forced to flee, for I was a boy then and, clearly if I had been a full fighting man, we would have won. We went north and more north still and winter came.'

He swallowed and we waited. He smacked his lips and grinned, his eyes drink-bright in the firelight. 'That was when the green wine poured like honey, thick and slow,' he said, almost dreamily, 'so cold it was. When trees exploded with a crack and shot blue fire when they fell. When first I saw the whisper of stars.'

'What?' we demanded.

'The whisper of stars,' he repeated and blew out his breath in a long stream of vanishing grey. 'When you speak, the very breath in your body turns the words to ice and they fall to the ground with the sound of a whisper,' he explained.

There was silence, then a snort from Avraham, one of the Khazars, a big man with a bigger scowl and the haughtiness of a man who thought well of himself.

'Your stories are like your name, little man,' he said. 'But, as you say, you fled there having been beaten by us, so perhaps grief and shame clouded your boyish memories.'

'Once Kiev paid you scat, of a sword and a squirrel skin for every home,' Tien answered smartly, 'but Kiev came and destroyed you, which is clearly the will of Senmerv, Mother Goddess. Nothing will cloud my memory of Itil burning.'

Avraham half-raised himself, but was stopped by the smaller one, Morut. 'Bolgary, too, if I remember,' he said softly and Tien acknowledged, with a slight nod, that Sviatoslav had torched his people's capital city as well.

Avraham waved a deprecating hand and added: 'Which is what comes from worshipping a woman. The maker of heaven and earth must, of his nature, be male, otherwise the creator would be female. Which is absurd since, all over the world we know, the female is subject to the male. How, then, can it be different in heaven?'

There was a derisive snort from the other side of the fire and some, recognizing Thorgunna, chuckled.

Oior pata,' said Tien and both the Khazar Jews stiffened.

'We do not speak of them,' Avraham replied flatly.

'What is it?' demanded Jon Asanes curiously. 'Is it the name of a Jewish goddess?'

Avraham grunted and glared back at Jon, with little courtesy. 'If I thought you genuinely sought the truth, I would enlighten you,' he declared. 'Yet, afterwards, you will still worship those evil, heathen spirits of the North, unconvinced.'

'I am a Christian,' Jon answered indignantly, but Avraham curled a lip.

'Only the Jews, the Chosen People of God, have been granted the true insight into the nature of the creator,' he said stiffly.

'That did not help you much against Sviatoslav and the gods of the Slavs,' growled Finn and the Khazar scowled.

'We are the people of exile,' he commented bitterly. 'The world lines up to scatter us every time we gain a country of our own, paying scat to no man. They envy us for being the Chosen of God.'

'More likely they wanted to be rid of paying scat of their own,' I offered him back. 'The Romans, for one, will help one people one day and another against you the next.'

'They are Christian,' Avraham noted with a scowl, shooting a glance at Jon. 'They hate us.'

'What does he mean?' Finn wanted to know and Jon shrugged.

'The Jews killed Jesus,' he answered. 'Everyone knows that.'

'Truly?' enthused Finn, turning to Avraham. 'You killed this White Christ? You are the torturers of the Tortured God?'

'No,' replied Avraham, defiantly sullen. 'The Romans did, but now they follow the Christ ways and blame us for it.' Finn sat back, his delight at what he had learned tempered.

He shook his head, sorrowful and bemused.

'Even dead this white-livered Christ certainly knows how to cause trouble in an empty room,' he declared and Jon shot him an angry look.

'Still — it was no Christ-follower who warred on the Khazar and Bulgar,' I offered and there was silence at that as folk remembered Sviatoslav, great Prince of Kiev.

'Idu na vy,' said Tien sadly and everyone fell silent. Idu na vy — I am coming against you — was what Sviatoslav had sent as his last message to those he planned to conquer. Now he, too, was gone and the steppe was unleashed. Avraham scowled at the memory.

'Will they fight each other?' Jon asked softly and I shrugged. Tien said nothing for a moment, while we all watched with interest — it was nothing to us if they snarled at each other like dungheap dogs.

'We will see how cold it gets,' the little Bulgar said at last in his halting, thick-accented Norse. 'I can read the signs. If we stay this far north in the Great White you will see the green wine turn to syrup.'

'Well,' grunted Gyrth, looking like a mangy bear woken too early from winter-sleep, 'we had better drink it all then before such a tragedy happens.'

Finn toasted him, then thrust his drinking horn at Thordis, who looked at him steadily, then accepted it and drank. 'Move closer,' Finn ordered her, 'and find warmth.'

'That's an old trick,' Thordis replied flatly.

'No trick,' said Finn. 'You are cold. I am cold. I owe you heat, at least, as weregild.'

Her eyes widened, for it was the first time that such had been mentioned, though the fact of it had hung between us all like a blade — her husband had died because raiders came looking for the Oathsworn, after all, yet