where they get water, for sure — recently, too. A trail leads up into the rocks.'
'Any green-haired beauties there?' demanded Finn scornfully. 'Combing their tresses, perhaps?'
Morut chuckled while the big Slavs sucked in the reference to slope and rocks. Not the words the great, trudging, drip-bearded warriors wanted to hear, but Sigurd adjusted his silver nose and whistled scorn down it at them. They shipped shields on their backs, took the peace-strings off their swords and stumbled on, those mailed coats flapping at their feet. Those left to guard the horses were no happier, a few men on their own and looking right and left.
The pool was just as Morut had described — opaque, stippled ice with black in the middle where it had been chopped to the water. If there was a trail away from it, all the same, I could not see it — but it was hardly necessary. A boy raced away from it, bounding like a hare, leather bucket flapping in one hand, pointing the way up the slope as clearly as a blazed sign.
With a whoop and a roar the
'Can bulls catch a hare like that? My bet is on the boy.'
He won, but only just. The boy half-turned on the run to look at the roarers who waddled after him — and went straight into a tree, flying backwards on to his arse, the bucket bouncing back down the slope. One of the Slavs gave it a kick in passing and a triumphant bellow.
The boy was caught, for sure — he was up and reeling, but the breath had been driven out of him and you could see his little chest heave. Dark, wild hair, I saw and skins over ragged wool and scraps of fur. Barefoot. Doomed.
The first one to him was Gesilo, reaching out one hand to grab him, the other heavy with a big, straight blade.
'Take him alive,' roared Sigurd, but who knows what Gesilo might have done. Not that he had a chance; his horny, broken fingernails barely brushed the boy's skin-covered shoulders and something broke from the snow- splattered rocks nearby with a throaty roar and a spear that drove straight into the Slav's face.
He howled and went over backwards with his jaw flapping loose and blood flying. A hand grabbed the boy and shoved him further up the slope. I say a hand, but it was more of a claw. What stood in front of the boy, spread-legged and spear-armed and snarling protectively, brought all the roaring Slavs to a skittering stop. Everybody gawped.
It was the shape of a man, but the face was warped, as if the bones had been squeezed and the skin tightened, so that it looked like a wide-mouthed frog. The eyes bulged, hair patched in a parody of a beard and straggled in wisps across the skull and it was naked, save for a skin wrapped round the loins.
And scaled. Every visible inch of it. Scaled as a chicken leg, just as we had been told, from thick-nailed feet to that wisp-haired skull. The hands that gripped the spear — a well-made weapon, I saw — were yellow-horned with nails long as talons.
There was silence, save for the scrabble of the boy vanishing up the trail into the rocks of the slope and the harsh panting of the Scaled Troll standing guard as he did so. Then Finn gave a rheum-thick growl, hefted The Godi and charged, howling out Odin's name and elbowing aside the startled, rooted Slavs.
Cursing that
As Finn came up, the Scaled Troll braced, stepped back, reversed the spear and dropped low, scything it in a tripping arc. A lesser man would have been ankle-felled, but Finn leaped up and over it and the Scaled Troll was open for a downward cut — except that Finn's foot slipped on the iced rocks and he fell flat on his face.
With a howl, the Scaled Troll stepped back, spun the spear back to the point and stabbed. I got my shield there a second before; the spear thunked into it, wrenched it out of my grip and spun it down the slope like a wheel.
Kvasir, an eyeblink later, brought his wave-sword glittering down on the Troll's neck where it joined his left shoulder, carving deep so that blood and collarbone flew up. He — it — died with a howl and a series of skin- crawling mews, slushing blood in streams down the rocks while Finn and I hauled each other up, wrist to wrist.
'Good stroke,' Finn grunted, blowing blood from where his nose had battered the stones. Then half his face twisted in a grin at Kvasir. 'Outlaws,' he added. 'My arse.'
Kvasir did not grin. He stood and stared at what he had killed, while the scaled heels drummed and an arm twitched once or twice. The
Later, when we had recovered our courage, we examined the Scaled Troll more closely and discovered that it was a man after all, though barely old enough to be called one. The scales were like callouses all over the creature, flowed together, thick as fingernails, though here and there, the creases seemed cracked and red-raw.
'A disease, perhaps,' Sigurd said, using his sword to unravel the skin loincloth. 'Look — he has a prick like a man and that isn't scaled.'
'Yet,' growled Finn, unimpressed. 'It is a youngling.'
Sigurd, whistling through his silver nose, plunged his sword into the snow to wipe it clean and even then stared at it as if wondering whether to keep it or not.
There were other parts of the dead boy that were free of scale — a hip, a patch behind one, knee, most of a buttock — and the skin here was as normal as any slain man's, turning blue-white with death and cold.
'The other boy was not like this one,' Morut pointed out, looking up the slope to where the wild-haired little boy had run.
'That you could see,' Kvasir pointed out.
'This one protected him, died for him,' Avraham pointed out. 'Hardly the act of a monster.'
Finn spat. 'Wolves will fight for the pack,' he answered. 'Does that make them men?'
It made these creatures monsters to the Slavs, were-wyrms, or scaled trolls or worse. That and the threat of some strange disease made them grumble and mutter among themselves and, in the end, Sigurd came across to me and admitted, furious with the shame of it, that they believed these scaled creatures to be offspring of Chernobog, black god of death. It would be difficult, he thought, to get his men to go on.
'How difficult?' I demanded, angry myself and not anxious to unhook him from his shame easily. He glared back at me, the skin white round his silver nose, which was answer enough.
'Then we will go on without you,' I said, hoping it sounded bold enough for a Norseman and wishing I was Slav right then. Finn added a 'heya' of approval; his bad foot-luck had annoyed him and he was anxious to prove, to himself and Odin, that these scaled Grendels were no match for him and The Godi.
'I will go, if you will have me,' said Morut and I nodded at once, for his tracking skills would be good to have.
'And I,' added Avraham, 'for I have never seen the like of this before on my steppe and would know more of it.'
'As much mine as yours,' Avraham snarled back defiantly. They fell into the familiar chaffer of it, as comforting to them as a pitfire and thick-walled hov is to a man from the north.
Crowbone wanted to go too, which was brave of him, but Sigurd told him — more abruptly than he had done in previous times — to stow his tongue in the chest of his head and stay where he was. Crowbone, cowed for once, obeyed without comment.
We left them milling round the drinking pool, gathering sticks to make a fire and not at all eager to even be there. They would not go near the stiffening body of the creature, though they hauled Gesilo off to where they could bury him.
'I said he would not care for Crowbone's tale and I was right,' Avraham noted with grim amusement, though the smile died on his face when he saw the scowls of the rest of the
An hour later, the sun was up over the edge of the world, but not this rock. In the lee of it, the mist clung, cold as the white raven's eye, threading between the gnarled trees and patched thick as eiderdown here and there.
