The White Raven

pulling his cloak round him and trying to keep up with my strides.

'You were right,' I said to him angrily. 'That is an affliction.'

He shook his head, glancing up at me with that two-coloured frown and I was disconcerted, for he looked wise as a greybeard, then grinned like the boy he was.

'That was clever about Odin,' he declared. 'As you say — beware his gifts, as the nine thralls should have done.'

Then he was gone, silent as an owl, leaving me with the vision of those thralls, scrabbling for the whetstone One Eye threw in the air and cutting their own throats with their scythes in their greed. I shook my head over him, and not for the first time. Like his eyes on colour, I could not make up my mind on Olaf Crowbone.

At the hut we had taken over, the original family bobbed and grinned, eager to please and keep their lives while they tried to hide valuables and food. The Oathsworn counted, washed and prepared the dead for burial.

'How many?' I asked and Kvasir looked up, his good eye red and weeping. Thorgunna had warm water and was bathing it.

'Two will lie on either side of Harelip — Snorri and Eyolf.'

Snorri I remembered getting an arrow through the foot. I did not recall seeing Eyolf, whom we called Kraka — Crow — because he was left-handed.

'Aye, Snorri got pinned in the one place and danced round his foot until he ran out of steps,' Kvasir said, waving Thorgunna away irritably. She made a disgusted face at him and went. I saw she had applied more soot- black round his good eye.

'A big Slav cut him down when he could dance no further,' Kvasir finished.

'Eyolf?'

'His sheath killed him.'

I remembered how Eyolf had loved his hand-tooled sheath, leather the colour of old blood, stretched over oak and sheep-lined. I looked at Kvasir and he shrugged.

'He would not take it off and the baldric caught on the timbers on top of the gate. He could not get free and hung there, afraid of being shot with arrows. So he wriggled until the strap broke and he fell — the sheath snapped and the wood of it drove into his liver and lights and he died.'

I remembered the man struggling at the top of the gate while I fought for Cod-Biter's life. I remembered, too, the same man crashing down, the screaming and writhing. An idiot death; no man wears a sheath in a battle, for if it does not tangle in your legs then something stupid like this happens. Stabbed by his own sheath — there was a straw death to make Odin's hall ring with laughter.

'Cod-Biter?'

Kvasir shrugged and pointed to where Bjaelfi was working, Jon Asanes holding up a pitch torch for more light. Bjaelfi's elbow was pumping furiously and I knew what he was doing — trimming Cod-Biter's arm straight, cutting more bone and flesh from him. Cod-Biter was mercifully limp but not dead, otherwise Bjaelfi would not be bothering.

Finn sat nearby, watching and silent and Thordis, between tending to the fire and the food bowls and other business, shot him frequent, worried glances. Then she fetched me a bowl that steamed and a chunk of black bread, hunkering at my knee as she delivered it.

'This looks good,' I said and it was no lie; I was astonished at how savoury the stew was.

'Food is not a problem now, Jarl Orm,' she said. 'It seems these nithings we defeated had stolen most of the supplies from Lambisson. The ones who went on will be hungry by now, I am thinking.'

I would have been pleased, save that Short Eldgrim was one of them. I had the feeling Cod-Biter would not last the night and now Short Eldgrim looked more doomed than ever. What with Runolf Harelip's death, it seemed the old Oathsworn were fated not to get back to Atil's hoard.

Thordis nodded seriously when I said this. She jerked her head in Finn's direction.

'He is getting Klepp Spaki to paint his forehead with the valknut,' she said harshly. 'Soon he will come to you and ask for that amulet you have.'

I blinked at that. If it was true, then Finn was dedicating himself to live or die at the whim of Odin and that was as good as hurling himself off a cliff for, in a fight, he would not retreat until he had had some clear sign from One Eye that it was good to do so. I felt like a house whose roof was falling.

I finished the stew, though the joy in it had gone by then. I lay back, feeling the warmth and the full belly, my head full of shrieking gulls; Vladimir and his uncle and what they would do when the howe was reached. Finn. Odin. The silver hoard. The Man-Haters and whether the one who led them was really Hild. The rune sword she had. The one I had.

I tried not to sleep in the hope that I would, but all of that whirled like an ice wind inside my head until it scoured the back of my eyeballs sore. When Finn loomed out of the dark and hunkered beside me, it was almost a relief and I handed him the amulet before he spoke, unlooping it from around my neck.

He did not ask how I knew but took it and looped it round his own neck.

'This is a hard road you take,' I muttered, sick with it. Sailing once in a badly-trimmed knarr I had felt like this — every time the wind hit a certain quarter it would heel over and the steerboard would lift clean out of the water, so there was nothing to do but run until the wind died enough to drop the steerboard back in the water — or you hit something.

'Rather this one than another,' he growled, miserable as mirr.

'Which one is that, then?'

He shifted uncomfortably, then looked at me, flat and grindstone hard. 'The one that ends with me drooling by a fire, with women laughing behind my back at how my vingull is limp and my back bowed.'

For all that he was grim with it, I had to swallow a smile, since the word he used — vingull — meant the prick of a horse rather than that of a man. So I knew he still had some pride in him yet.

'You listened too long to Martin the monk,' I gave him back. 'Too afraid to live? Too old? Is this Finn Bardisson from Skane?'

'Who knows? Who will know? Who will remember Pai? Or Harelip? When all of us are dead, Bear Slayer, only Pinleg and Skapti and others will be remembered, locked in that stone we raised in Aldeigjuborg. They are the ones with fame-luck.'

'We will have a stone. .'

'Too late, Trader. It seems to me unlikely we will make it back to where Klepp Spaki can carve it. And if we do — what then? Back to that steading with the chickens and all the silver we can carry? What then, the point of raiding? So we squat and wait for the Norns to snip off the last threads of our life.'

'So all that is left to do is find a good death, Finn Bardisson?'

He grunted and said: 'I made a vow in the pit prison. To One Eye. He kept his side of the bargain.'

Then he straightened and forced a grin. 'In the end, as Pai knew, there is only one thing.' Then he intoned:

'Cattle die and kinsmen die,

you, too, soon must die

but one thing never will die,

the fair fame of one who has earned it.'

'There is that, right enough,' I said, bitter as lees at him for finding it so easy to follow this path. Then I gave him back a verse of the Sayings of the High One, the one everybody forgets.

The lame can ride a horse, the handless drive cattle,

the deaf one can fight and prevail,

happier for the blind than for him on the bale-fire,

but no man cares for a corpse.'

Finn might have had a reply to it, but Cod-Biter woke up and moaned then. He did that for most of the night and then died, his screams shaving the hairs off our arms, just as the dawn came up.

There was too much food in the end and men came down with the squits and belly gripes, so that Bjaelfi had to feed them a cure made from the newest root of a bramble which had both ends in the earth, boiled up with