The White Raven

clasped the hilt and made his chilling vow, as promised to the god in the pit prison of Novgorod.

I was filled with a distant, dull pain, a swill of memories of myself at the same age as Jon Asanes, hunting out thrall women in Skirringsaal in the first long winter with the Oathsworn, while Einar plotted and watched. Had Einar felt this same ache? He had been as separate and alone, I remembered.

I was a couple of summers past twenty but I felt there were stones under that frozen, dun earth that were younger than me.

Two days later, we crawled out on to that snow-scattered waste and headed away from the village, leaving the boat-marked ground that was the last home of Harelip and Cod-Biter.

14

'A brass sun seeped through the dull lead of the sky and the stands of birch, no higher than a man on a horse and clumped like a bad beard on the face of the world. They were grim, clawed affairs, these trees, as black as if they had sucked their own shadows back up. Snow lay clotted on a brown heave of land and the air was still and raw.

The carts lurched and rumbled to a halt, ponies standing splay-legged, heads bowed. We had fitted the wheels since there was more earth than snow, but that had been a mistake — the ground was hard frozen and the carts banged and slapped in every iron-forged rut, so that even the tired and sick got out and trudged with everyone else rather than suffer the lurch and bruise of it.

Gizur and I stood at the stirrup of Vladimir's big black, all rib and bone hips, while he looked at the trees. We all looked at the trees and the opaque ribbon they fringed — the Don.

'See,' said Gizur, his breath freezing in his beard as he spoke. 'The middle is darker, where the water is only just starting to form hard.'

'A thaw is coming,' Dobyrynya declared, but Gizur knew the ways of water and shook his head, hard enough to rattle the ice points of his moustache.

'No. The ice was broken recently. Less than an hour — look, you can see where the grue of it reformed from a time before that, too.'

'There is traffic on the river,' Sigurd grunted, wiping the icicles from the bottom of his silver nose, where they clogged the hole that let him breath.

'Just so,' Gizur beamed. 'Boats are breaking their way up and down to Sarkel and regularly enough to stop the centre channel freezing hard.'

We all knew that we were on the Don, where it turned east into a great curve that went south, then slithered west to the Maeotian Lake, which the Khazars call Azov, meaning 'low' for it is so shallow. Following that great curve would bring us to Sarkel and take weeks.

Gizur was beaming, because he had navigated us from a point four days east of Kiev to here as if we had been the ocean — give or take a tack here and there, as Avraham declared later, sullen and mournful over the loss of Morut. Yet now we had to choose, either the short way, a plunge straight across the Great White, or follow the Don's long, cold curl to Sarkel.

'A long way still,' Dobrynya said 'with no respite at Biela Viezha.'

No-one had to ask why; the Prince of Novgorod, arriving with a tattered band like us, miles from his own domain and firmly at the far frontiers of his brother's lands, would excite more than a little attention. If his brother's name still held sway at Sarkel — called Biela Viezha, the White Castle, by the Slavs — now that Sviatoslav was gone.

All eyes were on me. Somewhere in that bleak ice waste was what we sought and I had to steer them all to richness with the hilt runes on my sabre. The smile I gave them back was, I hoped, as bright and sure as sunrise.

We turned back to the line of carts and people, where only a few of the druzhina were now horsed and everyone else so swathed in chapeless bundles that it was hard to tell man from woman, or warrior from thrall. They huddled into their clothes and stamped feet made fat in braided straw overshoes, which the horses kept trying to eat.

'What now, Trader?' demanded Kvasir, wiping the weep from his good eye. Thorgunna made to help and he slapped her hand away, irritated. She scowled in return.

'It needs proper attention.'

'I am doing so. Go and weave something.'

Thorgunna fixed him with her sheep-dropping eyes. 'It is time I died,' she declared firmly. 'Time I was dropped in my grave, for I have nothing left, it seems, to offer this life or the man I have in it.'

'You may live or die as you see fit,' growled Kvasir, sullenly, 'providing you decide without poking my eye. Whatever your decision, we will all have to live with the consequences.'

Finn, hunched up like a seal in clothes and swaddled cloak, offered up a cracked bell of a laugh as Thorgunna threw up one hand in annoyance and left Kvasir and his eye.

'We should cut across the Great White, south to Sarkel,' Finn added. Avraham, hearing this, gave a short, sharp bark of laughter, while Gizur frowned and crushed the ice out of his beard, for the Great White was one sea he could not navigate.

Did you bleat?' Finn asked, sour-faced.

'What has been crossed so far is as nothing compared to what lies out there,' Avraham said, waving a hand in the general direction of the east. 'That is a howling wilderness, which offers nothing to men, summer or winter.'

'You have been there?' Gyrth interrupted and Avraham cocked a haughty eyebrow.

'I am Khazar. I have been everywhere.'

'But there especially?'

Avraham shifted a little. 'No,' he admitted, then thrust his chin out belligerently. 'What sane man would go where there is often no water for flocks in summer, nor reason to be there in the depths of winter? Anyway, it is. . cursed.'

He looked half-ashamed, half-defiant, but it was clear he believed it and it came to me then that where Atil's tomb lay would be thought a cursed place, even if no-one knew it was there. So many deaths to build it, stock it, carry him to it; the steppe here was crowded with moaning fetches every time the wind blew.

'So,' said Jon Asanes sadly, 'you cannot guide us then, if we choose that route.'

Avraham bristled. 'I am Khazar and this is my land — I can guide you anywhere. For a reasonable price.'

'Ha!' growled Finn. 'This is not your land now, though, you prick-cut thief. The Rus rule here.'

'What price?' I asked, seeing Avraham's face darken. He remained staring into Finn's glare for a moment longer — which was brave of him, I had to admit — then quoted the cost of a small farm.

Finn roared before I could even speak. 'You can have the rust off my balls, you arse.'

Avraham smeared a sneer on his face.

'Balls of poor iron — that explains the clinking I heard, for I knew a man such as yourself could not have a purse so rich.'

'My balls were smelted in northern forges, little man,' Finn replied with a broad grin, 'in such a heat where the likes of you would smoulder like an eider duck's tail. They were quenched in cold that makes this seem like a balmy day.'

'I suspect we are speaking in the singular,' Avraham answered. 'I had heard the Norse had to share a pair between two.'

'You heard wrong. Gulls use my prick as a perch, thinking it a mast. When I shit over the side of a racing drakkar, my turds choke whales. I piss fire and fart thunder. And that which you call a howling wilderness is just another little sea to me.'

Others were gathering, hugely enjoying this. It drove away the cold and misery and I was grateful for that. Better still, the chances of them coming to serious blows had slipped away.

'You spout a deal of empty nothing like a whale does, that much I have seen,' Avraham replied and those nearest gave approving noises that made Finn scowl.