The White Raven

We did not speak again that day, though I felt the brooding of him on me like an itch I could not scratch.

The next day he moved to my side, squatting by the high seat as I watched Aoife's Cormac put his fat little arms round the neck of one of the deerhounds, which licked his face until he laughed. He was so pale-headed he might have been bairned on Aoife by the white-haired Jarl Brand himself, which we suspected, since he had been given that comfort as an honoured guest. No-one knew, least of all Aoife for, as she said, 'It was dark and he had mead.'

Which did not narrow the search much, as we all admitted when we tried to work out who the father was.

'What will you do about Thorkel?' Kvasir asked eventually and I shrugged, mainly because I didn't know. Thorkel was another problem I hoped would just go away.

He had arrived on Hoskuld's trading knarr, which carried bolts of cloth and fine threads and needles that set all the women to yowling with delight. Stepping off the boat, pushing through the women, he had stared at me with his sea-grey eyes and grinned a rueful grin.

I had last seen his grin on a beach in that bit of Bretland the Scots called the Kingdom of Strathclyde. That was where he had stepped aside and let me into the Oathsworn without having to fight, having arranged it all beforehand. I had been fifteen and raw as a saddle-sore, but Einar the Black, who led us then, had gone along with the deception with good grace and jarl cunning.

Thorkel had gone to be with a woman in Dyfflin. Now he sat in my hall drinking ale and telling everyone how he had failed at farming, how the woman had died and how he had failed at selling leather and a few other things besides.

He sat in my hall, having heard that the story of the hoard of Atil silver was true, the tale he had scoffed at and the reason he had wanted to leave the Oathsworn in the first place.

'We should call you Lucky,' Finn grunted, hearing all this. Thorkel laughed, too hearty and trying to be polite, for what he wanted was back into the Oathsworn and a chance at the mound of treasure he had so easily dismissed.

'Ever since he came back,' Kvasir mused pitching straw chips into the pitfire, 'all our men have been leaning to the left a little more.'

I did not understand him and said so.

'As if they had axes or swords weighing their belts,' he answered flatly. He shifted sideways to allow a deerhound to put its chin on my knee and gaze mournfully up at me.

'Eventually, a man has to choose,' he went on. 'We came up the Rus rivers of Gardariki with Jarl Brand almost five years ago, Orm. Five.'

'We agreed to serve him every year,' I pointed out, feeling — as I always did when I fought this battle — that the earth was shifting under my feet. 'I am remembering that you, like the rest, enjoyed the pay from it.'

'Aye,' Kvasir admitted. 'The first year and the next were good for us, though we lost as much as we gained, for so it is with men such as we — it comes hard and goes easy. Those were the times we thought you had a plan to get us outfitted and so return to the Grass Sea to find Atil's silver tomb again. Then you took land from the jarl.'

'We had no ship of our own until we built one,' I protested, feeling my cheeks and the back of my neck start to prickle and flame at the lie of it. 'We need a. .' The word 'home' leaped up in me, but I could not say it to these, whose home was the shifting sea.

'Anyway,' I ploughed on stubbornly, 'while there was red war we were welcome in any hov that esteemed Jarl Brand; when red war is done with, no-one cares for the likes of us. Why — there are probably not two halls along the whole coastline here glad to see a boatload of hard men like us sail into their happy lives. Would you prefer sleeping in the snow? Eating sheep shite?'

'The third year of war was hard,' admitted Kvasir, 'and made a man think on it, so that we were glad, then, of a hall of our own.'

That third year of red war against the enemies of Jarl Brand had spilled a lot of blood, right enough, but I had not known the likes of Kvasir had thoughts such as he admitted to now I gave him a sharp look, but he matched me, even with one eye less.

'Last year made it clear you were finding reasons not to go where we all thought you should,' he declared. 'And while we spent, you hoarded, which we all thought strange in a young jarl such as yourself.'

'Because you spent I hoarded,' I replied hotly. 'A jarl gives and armrings are expensive.'

'Aye, right enough,' replied Kvasir, 'and you are a byword for the giving out, for sure. But this year, when Erik became rig-jarl of all, you had to be made to start the Elk building and thought more of trade and horses.'

'A ship like the Elk costs money,' I bridled back at him. 'Good crewmen need purse-money and keep — or had you planned to go silver-hunting with what remains of the Oathsworn only? There are a dozen left in all the world and two of them are in Hedeby, one caring for the addled other. Hardly enough to crew a knarr, never mind go raiding.'

Kvasir rode out the storm of my scorn, then thumbed snot from his nose and shrugged. He took to looking at me with some sadness, I was thinking, which did not make my temper any cooler.

'You have tried to make those left into herders of neet and horses, with a hayfield to plough and a scatter of hens scratching at the door,' he growled.

'Shows what you know,' I snapped back, sulky as a child, digging the point of the sabre into the beaten earth at my feet and gouging out a hole. 'We coop our hens — had you not noticed?'

He wiped his fingers on his breeks.

'No. Nor want to, when it comes to it,' he replied levelly. 'I am thinking none of the others know much about hens, or hay, or horses either. They know ships, though — that's why all of them are cutting and hauling timber for Gizur every day, building the new Fjord Elk. That's why they stay — and I would not be concerned at gaining a crew, Orm; Thorkel, I am thinking, is only the first to arrive looking for a place at an oar. Even after five years the silver in that hoard is bright.'

'You have a wife,' I pointed out, desperate now, for he was right and I knew it. 'I was thinking you meant it when you hand-fasted to her — is she as easy to leave as the chickens?'

Kvasir made a wry face. 'As I said — she will have to learn to like the sea.'

I was astonished. Was he telling me he would take her with us, all the way to the lands of the Slavs and the wild empty of the Grass Sea?

'Just so,' he answered and that left me speechless and numbed. If he was so determined, then I had failed the tap-tap of the adze and axes drifting faintly from the shore was almost a mockery. It was nearly done, this new Fjord Elk, the latest in a long line. When it was finished. .

'When it is finished,' Kvasir said, as if reading my thoughts, 'you will have to decide, Orm. The oath keeps us patient — well, all but Finn — but it won't keep us that way forever. You will have to decide.'

I was spared the need to reply as the door was flung wide and Gizur trooped in with Onund Hnufa, followed by Finn and Runolf Harelip. Botolf and Ingrid had moved to each other, murmuring softly.

'If you plane the front strakes any thinner,' Gizur was saying to Onund, who was shipwrighting the Elk, 'it will leak like a sieve.'

The hunchbacked Onund climbed out of the great sealskin coat that made him look like a sea-monster and said nothing, for he was a tight-lipped Icelander at the best of times and especially when it came to explaining what he was doing with ship wood. He sat silently, his hump-shoulder towering over one ear like a mountain.

They all jostled, looking for places to hang cloaks so that they would not drip on someone else and yet be close enough to the fire to dry. The door banged open again, bringing in a blast of cold, wet air and Red Njal, stamping mud off his boots and suffering withering scorn for it from Thorgunna.

'The worst of wounds come from a woman's lips, as my granny used to say,' he growled, shouldering into her black look.

Ingrid unlocked herself from Botolf to slam it shut. Botolf, grinning, stumped to the fire and sat, while the children swarmed him, demanding stories and he protesting feebly, swamped by them.

'I would give in,' Red Njal said cheerfully. 'Little wolves can bring down the biggest bear, as my granny used to say.'

'Pretty scene,' growled a voice in my ear. Finn hunkered down at my elbow in the smoke-pearled dimness of