The White Raven

the hall. 'As like what you see in a still fjord on a sunny day, eh, Orm? All that seems real, written on water.'

I glanced from him to Kvasir and back. Like twin prows on either side of my high seat, I thought blackly. Like ravens on my shoulders. I stared, unseeing, at the hilt of the sabre as I turned it in my fingers, the point cutting the hole at my feet even deeper.

Finn stroked the head of the blissful deerhound and kept looking at this pretty scene, so that I saw only part of his face, red-gleamed by the fire. His beard, I saw, threw back some silver lights in the tar-black of it; where his left ear should have been was only a puckered red scar. He had lost it in Serkland, on that gods-cursed mountain where we had fought our own, those who had broken their Oath and worse.

There were few left of those I had sailed off with from Bjornshafen six years ago. As I had said to Kvasir — hardly enough to crew a knarr.

'Keep looking,' I said sourly to Finn. 'Raise your hopes and eyes a little — written on water below, real enough above.'

'Real as dreams, Orm,' he said, waving a hand to the throng round the pitfire. 'You are over-young to be looking for a hearthfire and partitioning a hall. Anyway — I know how much you had and how much you have laid out and your purse is wind-thin now, I am thinking. This dream feeds on silver.'

'Perhaps — but this steading will make all our fortunes in the end if you let it. And the silver itch is not on me,' I answered, annoyed at this reference to my dwindling fortunes and to dividing my hall up into private places, rather than an open feasting space for raiding men.

He looked at me at last, his eyes all white in the dark of his face, refusing to be put aside. I saw that look and knew it well; Finn only had one way of wresting silver from the world and he measured it by looking down the length of a blade. In that he was not alone — truth was that I was the one out of step with the Oathsworn.

'But the sea itch is on you. I have seen you look out at it, same as the rest of us,' he answered and I was growing irritated by this now. The closer the new Elk got to being finished the worse it became and I did not want to think of the sea at all and said so.

'Afraid, Bear Slayer?' Finn said and there was more taunt in it than I think even he had intended. Or perhaps that was my own shame, for the name Bear Slayer had come to me falsely, for something I had not done. No-one knew that, though, save the white bear and a witch-woman called Freydis and they were both dead.

I was afraid, all the same. Afraid of the sea, of the tug of it, like an ebbing tide. There was a longing that came on me when I heard the break of waves on the shoreline, sharp and pulling as a drunk to an ale barrel. Once on the whale road again, I feared I would never come back. I told him so and he nodded, as if he had known that all along.

'That's the call of the prow beast. There's too much Gunnar Raudi in you for sitting here, scratching with hens,' he said. He was one of the two — the other was Kvasir — who knew I was not Orm Ruriksson, but Orm Gunnarsson. Gunnar. My true father, dead and cold these long years.

Finn's stare ground out my eyeballs, then he flicked it to the hilt of that rune blade as I turned it slowly.

'Strange how you can scratch into the hilt, yet that rune serpent spell is supposed to keep it and you safe from harm,' he murmured.

His voice was low and scathing, for he did not believe that my health and lack of wounds came from any runes on a sword and both he and Kvasir — the only ones I had shared this thought with — spent long hours trying to persuade me otherwise.

'The spell is on the blade,' I answered, having thought this through myself, long since. Hilts and trappings could be replaced; it was the blade itself that mattered in a sword.

'Aye, perhaps so, for it never gets sea-rot or dull-edged,' he admitted, then added a sharp little dismissive laugh. 'The truth of it is that the power of that blade is in the hand of the one who wields it.'

'If that was true,' I answered, 'then you and I would be worm food.'

There was a pause, while both of us remembered the dying and the heat and the struggle to get back this sword after it had been stolen. Remembered Short Eldgrim, who had lost the inside of his head and was looked after now by Cod-Biter who hirpled from side to side when he walked. Remembered Botolf losing a leg to the curve of this same sword whose hilt now rested under my palm, heavy with the secret of all the silver in the world. Remembered all those who had chased the mystery of Atil's silvered tomb and fallen on the road.

Then Finn shifted, rising to his feet.

'Just so,' he grunted heavily. 'Oarmates have died under wave and edge and fire from the waters of the North Sea to the sands of Serkland in order to be worthy of Odin's gift of all the silver of the world. I can hear the Oathsworn dead growl that they did not suffer all that to watch us sit here growing old and wondering about what might have been. I hear better with just the one ear than you do with both, it seems.'

There it was, that oath. 'Odin's gift is always a curse,' I answered dully, knowing he was right. Every feast brought the inevitable bragafull — the toasts drunk and wild promises made — followed later, when the drink had made us mournful, by the minni, the horns raised in remembrance. It grew harder, in the harsh, sober light, to ignore either of them.

This hov had double-thickness walls, was sunk deep into the soil, windproof and waterproof and sitting in it made you feel as solid and fixed as the runestone I planned to have carved. Yet a fierce wind was blowing us all away and I felt the scent of it in the air, with the wrack and flying salt spume that leaped the ridgeline and hunted round the roofs. It was the breath of the prow beast, snorting and fretting at anchor and wanting to be free.

We sat for a while in the swirling smoke, listening to the wind fingering the door and rapping to get in, while Botolf, more belly and less muscle on him these days, stretched out his carved timber foot to ease the stump and told stories to the children.

He told them of Geirrod the Giant and Thor's Journey to Utgard and the Theft of Idun's Apples and Otter's Ransom. This last was told deliberately, I thought, for it touched on the dragon Fafnir, Regin the Smith and a hoard of cursed silver, the very one sent to Attila, the one buried with him — the one we had found.

Into the silence that followed came Thorgunna and Ingrid, doling out bowls of stew and it was so good everyone forgot Otter's Ransom. She had taken me at my word and made good cheer in a cauldron; there was mutton, hare, duck, eel, prawns, mussels, barley, onions and root vegetables in that stew. I tasted kale and seaweeds and watercress and the lees of red wine.

'By Thor's balls, Thorgunna,' growled Red Njal, 'the sea is the test of a man as the cauldron is of a woman, as my granny once said. Jarl Brand doesn't eat as well as this.'

'He does,' Thorgunna answered, 'but he adds cinnamon to his, I have heard. And watch your tongue.'

'Cinnamon,' muttered Gizur. 'There's fancy for you. I cannot think that it would add much to the taste of this, all the same.'

'We had buckets of the stuff once,' Hauk Fast-Sailor said as I elbowed him aside to get a place on a bench nearer the fire. The high seat was my right, but too far from a good heat.

'Remember, Orm?' he said, nudging me so that stew slopped over my knuckles. 'On that island where we fought the Serkland pirates? We used the dead Dane for a battering ram on the door to their stronghold.'

'That was later,' Kvasir growled, wiping ale from his beard. 'The island where we got the cinnamon was where we found some of Starkad's men who had been taken prisoner and had their balls and tozzles cut off by the camel-humping Arabs. They had killed themselves in their shame. The last ran himself at his prison wall until his head broke open.'

'I have missed some moments, it seems,' Thorkel said into the silence that followed. I ignored him as much as I could, though I felt his eyes on me as I spooned my stew.

The smoke eddied, dragging itself to the eavesholes and out into the rain and wind while I listened to Red Njal and Harelip arguing about where other enemies and old oarmates had died. All gone, pale-faced fetches sailing my dreams as dark shapes on a charcoal sea.

Thorgunna came softly up behind me, dragged the hair back over my shoulders and began to tie it off.

'Don't get your hair in your food,' she said softly. 'And those stories are not ones for children.'

Finn clattered his bowl angrily to the ground and rose, while the deerhounds came in among us, licking platters and fingers and wolfing scraps. Cormac came with them, scrabbling and laughing.

'Perhaps we should set this one to routing out a stag or two before winter comes,' chuckled Botolf, sweeping the gurgling boy up. Aoife grinned and Ingrid fired arrows at her from her eyes.

Finn looked at them, then at me, then shook his head and banged out in a blast of rain-cold wind.

'Why does Finn have a face like a goat chewing a wasp?' demanded Botolf as Ingrid glared at Aoife and hung