The White Raven

the same Oathsworn had risked their lives to rescue her from slavery. It would take a lot of waggling grey beards to law-speak that one out at a Ting.

Thorgunna nudged her sister pointedly and she moved up the fire a way and into the lee of Finn's body. He grunted, satisfied.

'Well,' declared Kvasir, beaming round, 'here we all are, warm and fed and heading for riches. Life could be worse.'

'As the swallow said,' answered a familiar, lilting voice from the darkness. Olaf stepped in, the elkhound padding after him to the fire, while all the eyes watched him and only Thorgunna's were warm.

'What swallow?' demanded Jon and Crowbone, so pale his lips and cheeks were blood-red, gathered the great swathe of fur-trimmed white wool round him and sat down at Thorgunna's feet, while she dreamily took off his white wool cap and began to comb his lengthening yellow hair.

'There was a swallow who ignored winter,' Olaf said and everyone grunted and shifted to be more comfortable, for though he unnerved them, they liked his stories.

'Let's call it Kvasir,' he added and people chuckled. Kvasir raised his wooden cup across the fire to the little prince.

'So Kvasir-Swallow dipped and swooped and enjoyed himself all summer and well into the russet days, when all his friends and brothers and sisters told him they were leaving to be warm elsewhere, before the snows came.

'But Kvasir-Swallow was having too much fun and ignored them, so they left without him. And he continued to swoop and dip, though it grew colder and he caught less to eat with his swooping.

'Then, one day, it was so cold he knew he had made a mistake. 'I must fly hard and fast and catch up with my brothers and sisters and friends,' he said to himself. So he did, but it was too late. Blizzards came and howled down on him, flinging him this way and that and far, far off course. .'

'Sounds like every journey in the Elk,' growled Klepp Spaki, who had discovered he hated the sea. People shushed him and Olaf went on.

'Half freezing, he flew on and on, then the snowstorms blew harder than ever until his wings froze entire and he tumbled, beak over tail, down from the sky.'

He paused, for he had a feel for such things — he was never nine, that boy.

'What happened?' demanded an impatient Jon, leaning forward.

'He died, of course,' growled Finn, which brought some belly laughs, for that was an old tale-telling trick.

Olaf, grinning, said: 'He would have — but he fell into the biggest, fattest, freshest heap of dung just shat by a grain-fed milk cow in the farm that lay under his flight. The heat of it thawed him. In fact, it made him realize what a narrow escape he had just had, so he fluttered about and sang loudly about how lucky he was — at which point the farm dog heard it, came out, sniffed and ate him in one gulp.'

There was silence and into it, looking round the stunned faces, Olaf smiled.

'So it is clear,' he said slowly. 'If you end up in the shite and are warm, happy and safe — keep your beak shut and stay quiet, for worse will happen.'

We laughed long at that one, for it was a fine tale, well told and made us forget the keen edge of winter for those moments. Though, as Kvasir said when he had stopped laughing, it was no good omen to hear your name spoken in such a way. Olaf merely smiled, as if he knew more he was not saying and moved quietly to me when we were alone.

'There are men to be watched,' he said, unblinking serious. 'Klerkon's old crew — especially the one called Kveldulf.'

I knew Crowbone had some reason for hating this Kveldulf but, even so, his warnings made sense — the men from the Dragon Wings kept to their own fires and, more often than not, Martin sat with them. This had suited me, since his company was not one I cared for, but now Crowbone's warning made me uneasy.

Yet, I was thinking, what could they do? Out in this cold, we lived or died by what we did together; no-one would survive long alone.

This was proved the next morning, when we found two good horses dead from that cold, solid as stones, their eyes open and frosted and their hides too hard even to flay off them for the leather.

We trudged on, slithering and sliding across frozen grass, the snow blown into drifts and frozen-crusted on top, cloud soft beneath. One day followed the next and more horses died, all the ones too fine for the steppe and mostly ridden by the druzhina warriors. Then it was the turn of people to suffer.

Four of the hunter-scouts Vladimir had hired — all Klerkon's men — came to Bjaelfi Healer after being out on the steppe on their own, showing him their blackened toes and one the tip of his nose.

Onund Hnufa knew what it was at once and told them. 'The cold rots the flesh. When it turns black it is dead and such will spread. The only cure is to have it lopped off and quick.'

The least hurt was the big, strong, dangerous Kveldulf, who submitted to having the ends of three toes nipped. Two of the others, however, died of the cure the next day, for Bjaelfi had to take a foot from one of them and most of all the toes from another. Before he died, the toeless one revealed that he had seen the smoke of fires, no more than a day's journey to the west — for a man with two good legs, he added mournfully.

The last one, with most of his nose removed — and part of the tip of an ear — told us nothing at all, but moaned and wept about his plight.

Onund was hard on him. 'You should have spent more on fur and less on fucking,' he growled. 'At least you had the sense of a pair of good wool socks. Those others had bare feet in their boots.'

'You should have spent Orm's money wisely,' Gyrth added, stamping his warmly-booted feet. The others of Klerkon's crew looked grimly and pointedly at one another and I marked it — though the village we came on next day was such a welcome sight that it made me forget. Again.

The Rus called them goradichtches and I thought it was the name of the place at first, but it turned out only to be their name for villages. In summer, it would have been a pretty place, snuggled up to the banks of a river, which flowed quietly and dreamily between two rows of gently sloping hills, clumped with lush, tall willows. Now the trees were skeletal and the river marked only as a glittering ribbon between the faint snow-blown squares of fields and meadows.

On the far side of the river was a vast flat plain_ that glittered, studded with the tufted spears that told us this was marsh in summer. In the distance, a faint haze of blue hinted at ground higher than the rolling steppe.

There were no fences, only rows of willows to mark boundaries around this place and the snow piled deep at the base of a sea of those trees, which sheltered the fields. In summer, they would be orchards, fields of hemp and sunflowers, grain and, in the fringes of the marsh, thick-growing sedge. Now they were just clumps of stiffened tawny grass across which the snow blew.

The village was an earthwork circle with a huddle of houses, hunched low to the ground to fool the winter snow and the summer heat. The gaps between the houses were lined with tall willows that seemed to have been planted there on purpose, but the big Khazar said they were willow fence poles which had taken root, for this was the rich lands of the south, where you could stick a stripped pole in the ground and it would sprout.

A high tower dripped with ice and held a bell and there was a brewhouse and a brace of forges, for these Polianians were noted for sword-making and made most of their trade in blades. The place had been well fortified against the Khazars when they were a power and now there were new and uncertain dangers with the death of the Great Prince of Kiev.

As we rode up, the bell rang out and the place seethed. Women shrieked and children burst into tears because their mothers were crying and their fathers were shouting.

Sigurd rode forward and called out to them, which was not, perhaps, the cleverest move with his silver nose. Where it touched his face, the cold had turned the flesh as purple as an emperor's robe and if it had been me I would have kept the gates shut on him, for he looked blue-black as a dead man.

But they were Polianians and knew of Sigurd Axebitten, so eventually, the gates opened and we rode in — though the wailing had not stopped and the headman, his face as blank as the white steppe, stood with his hat in his hands as we slid misery through his gates.