The White Raven

'That which we have called the Great White,' Avraham went on, 'is merely those who know being kind to you. The real Great White is a few wheel turns from here, directly south. You will see it from a long way off, because it is a dazzle of ice. After that, if you should survive, you will just have time to make peace with your heathen gods before your famous perch freezes and snaps like a twig. If you ever find this silver hoard it will be because some wolf, tired of gnawing your arse-bone, drops it nearby.'

Finn made a dismissive gesture into admiring 'heyas' of those who thought this a good flyting.

'You are like all who have not had the benefit of being born in Skane, when faced with open space, whether sea or land,' he declared expansively. 'You fear to lose sight of safety. No open space frightens us from Skane and a horizon is an invitation, not a limit. Odin and Vili and Ve fixed the stars for us to find our way and, with them, I know where I am in this world to the length of a sparrow's fart.'

He cocked his head and closed one eye reflectively, blowing out his ice-hung moustaches.

'Anyway,' he added, 'you have never seen a blowing whale, you land-fastened nithing.'

There were appreciative hooms and nods at this, though everyone knew Finn could not find his arse with both hands when it came to navigating a ship and had never seen any live whales himself.

'The steppe respects no-one,' Avraham declared haughtily and I thought this had gone on long enough and said so.

'If the steppe respects no-one, then a guide such as yourself would be useless,' I added and everyone cheered at that — even Finn. Avraham acknowledged defeat with a rueful smile, which he lost when I asked if he could, in fact, guide us.

He looked from me to Finn's challenging grin, to Gyrth and Jon Asanes and then back to me. Then he shook his head and would not meet anyone's eye.

Gizur shifted a little and thumbed snot out of his nose.

'Well,' he declared challengingly, 'I admit it with now shame — the Great White is not known to me and none of my skills will take you safe across it. Best we follow the rivet'

'Ah — who needs this Khazar,' Kvasir bellowed. 'Cross the Great White. It will not be a hard trail to find, I am thinking, Just follow the ruin of Lambisson.'

That thought threw ice into all our veins, though none admitted it as we set off across the Great White. In the end, Avraham came with us, since he had the choice of doing that or staying by the river to die, but it could not be said he guided us anywhere after that.

The Great White swallowed us. The snow drove down in small, slanted flakes, persistent as gnats, piling high round camping places and kept at bay only by the heat of fires and our own bodies. We woke every morning, moving carefully within tents and shelters so as not to shake down the frost which had formed on the inside. We chipped the horse tethers out of the frozen earth, made fires, cooked porridge and, after three hours, were usually ready to move off.

The cold rot turned more noses and toes black; Bjaelfi, Thorgunna and Thordis kept little knives sharp for paring off the spoiled flesh and, at first, we seemed aimless as ants on a sheepskin. Then, as Kvasir had said, matters grew simple; we followed the ruin of Lambisson, while the snow sifted out of the pewter sky, trailed along the land like smoke, stung like thrown gravel in our faces.

It was a trail of tears a blind man could track, from splintered wagon to dead horse to blue-white corpses, little knots of tragedy in an ice-rope that most thought would hang us all. At each one, sick with apprehension, I searched for the familiar face of Short-Eldgrim.

Then, on a day where the sky was the colour of Odin's one bright eye, I was moving carefully to a private spot — but not out of sight — to risk a shit and saw little Olaf standing wrapped in his once-white cloak like a pillar of dirty snow on the dark earth, watching black birds wheel.

They were waiting for us to quit the latest wolf-chewed remains, followed us, hungry and hopeful as gulls on a fishing boat and, like them, a handful of wary men trailed little Crowbone, seeking scraps of wisdom.

'So — you are saying that if one more bird joins them from the west something terrible will happen?'

Red Njal's voice was suspicious, but the thickness of disbelief in it was like the ice on the Don — broken and uncertain.

'Mind your words, too, boy,' he added, 'for there is naught so vile as a fickle tongue, as my granny used to say.'

Olaf said nothing at all, merely nodded, watching intently.

Treyja's arse,' growled Klepp Spaki, his voice muffled. No more than his eyes could be seen in the swaddle of hood and wadmal round his head. 'What makes that happen? How do you know? What runes do you use?'

'The birds are their own runes,' answered Olaf.

'How?' demanded Onund Hnufa, lumbering up and towering over Crowbone, who did not even glance up at the terrible hunch-shouldered effigy hanging over him like a mountain. 'By what rules? What signs?'

'Here,' said Olaf and touched his head, then his heart. He hunched himself back in the cloak as Red Njal grunted scornfully.

'Thor's red balls, boy — I was the same when I was your age. Running about making black dwarves and trolls appear and fighting them with a wooden sword.'

We all chuckled, for all of us had done the same. Olaf boke his gaze from the birds to turn his odd eyes on Red Njal's cold-roughed face. The seidr, it seemed to me rolled off him like heat haze, so that I had to blink to steady my eyes.

'No offence,' muttered Red Njal hastily. 'Be never the first to break the bonds of friendship, as my granny used to say.'

A bird fluttered in and landed. 'Aha,' said Crowbone. 'Today, something bad will happen.'

'This is all shite. A boy's will is the will of the wind, my granny said,' declared Red Njal when Olaf had trudged out of earshot. He turned and looked at me, his eyes like small animals in the ice-crusted hair of his face.

'Is it not shite, Trader?'

'I saw and was silent, pondered and listened to the speech of men,' I offered, remembering the old saying; his frown chewed that until I thought his forehead would crack.

'Shite,' I clarified and he cracked the ice of his face with a smile, then left me to my own awkward business.

An hour later, at the lip of a great scar of balka, the axle pin on a cart snapped and the wheel came off. Ref Steinsson took an axe and the handle of another and fashioned a new pin with delicate, skilled strokes, while men heaved and strained to unload the cart then lift it and put the wheel on again.

Red Njal, crimson with effort, looked up at me, then to where Olaf stood, a quiet smile on his face.

'Shite,' said Red Njal, bitterly accusing and I shrugged. If this was as bad as it got. .

'Heya, Trader — look at that.'

Hauk Fast-Sailor, arms full of bundle from the unloaded cart, nodded across the steppe with his chin.

'The djinn, Trader — remember them?'

I remembered them, and the little Bedu tribesman Aliabu telling us of the invisible demons who could never touch the earth, whose passing was marked by the swirl of dust and sand. For a moment, the memory of Serkland heat was glorious.

The snow swirled up in an ice crystal dance. Those who had never fared farther from home than this — most of these new Oathsworn, it came to me — gawped both at the dance of it and at Hauk and me, realizing now just how far-travelled we were, to have seen djinn in the Serkland desert.

'I did not know the djinn were here, too,' Hauk said, grunting with the effort of moving the bundles. 'Lots of them, it seems.'

I did not like it and did not know why. Snow curled in little eddies and rose in the air, dragging my eyes up to a pewter sky and the figure flogging a staggering horse towards us and yelling something we could not hear.

Work stopped; the wheel was on, but the pin still had to be hammered in and all eyes turned on the horse and rider, the frantic fever of them soaking unease into us.

It was Morut the tracker, shouting as he came up, his voice suddenly whipped towards us by the wind.

'The buran is here!'

We had just enough time to find shelter. Just enough before it pounced on us, hard as the lash of a whip, a