The White Raven

I slept with an egg in there and lopped off the far end next morning. By the yolk, it will be a boy.'

I sat back a little, looking from her to Kvasir, feeling that, somehow, they had conspired against me. One of the big Slavs — the same who had sworn he could eat someone's leg — growled, 'An egg,' in a tone that wanted to know where she had got such a prize.

'So you see, Trader,' Thordis went on, ignoring all this, 'why we are concerned.'

I did and felt twice as ashamed as before, had to shake my head to clear it.

'The words were hasty,' I admitted, 'the reason was sound. What's done is done. The unwise man is awake all night and ponders everything over; when morning comes he is weary in mind and all is a burden as ever.'

'As your foster-mother used to say,' added Red Njal. 'She knew my granny, I am thinking.'

This last was greeted with chuckles; talk resumed, low and soft round the fire. But I could not take my eyes from Thorgunna, kept flicking back to her, wondering about the life there, marvelling at it happening at all in this place, fearing it at the same time.

I had women and youths enough to crush me with the worrying. Now the unborn were weighing my shoulders, even before they sucked in their first breath.

15

I stood on the back of a dun-coloured whale breaching a frozen sea and stared into the maw of its blowhole, listening to Finn and Kvasir and the others scoffing at me for having failed to recognize the place when I had seen it from the edge of the frozen lake.

We came to it down a slick of cold tragedy, each rimed droplet a huddle of stiff, jutting limbs and fleeing scavengers.

Little Morut led the way, waiting patiently for us now and then, stopping to feed his rib-thin horse on chopped straw mixed with animal fat. I admired the little Khazar, in the same way I had admired the Bedu who tracked so easily over the Serkland deserts and for the same reasons. Even Finn offered a nod to the little man while Avraham, that noble Khazar Jew, had scorn and relief chasing each other across his face like fox and chicken.

It was Morut who pointed out the splendid golden horse, no longer glowing, its limbs stuck out like a wooden carving and that glorious coat now sheened with ice. Wolves slunk from it when we came up, red-muzzled and thin, though they did not go far. They dropped to their bellies on the frozen, stiff-grassed steppe and waited, paws crossed, for us to go away. Patient as stones, Odin's hounds, for they had put in a lot of work on the beasts and men littering the area; there were no soft parts to start gnawing on an icebound corpse.

'A waste,' mourned Avraham and those coming staggering and shuffling up in time to hear his words, nodded and grunted agreement — except that the Khazar was not talking of the dead men, but of the golden horse.

Morut merely grunted scornfully, which gained him a withering look from Avraham. Curious, little Vladimir asked the tracker what he meant by it.

The tracker indicated the once-splendid horse and then looked as his own rag-maned, shaggy mount. 'They are the same,' he said with a grin. 'Turkmen horses. But the Blood-Sweating Horse is too fine for this place, while my little one is trained for it.'

'Can you train a horse for this?' asked Thorgunna, who was eyeing the rimed litter with a look I knew well. She and Thordis could teach wolves about scavenging.

Morut nodded as men moved among the bodies, though they gave up trying to plunder them when it became clear they were were frozen to the steppe, or each other.

'It will kill two out of five who undergo it,' he admitted and, horsebreeder that I was, I reckoned at once this was only possible with the possession of an unlimited number of animals costing next to nothing to keep.

'Pick out a likely one, rising seven or eight,' Morut said, feeding another handful of fat and chopped straw to his mount. 'Before that age no horse should be selected for such training, which is for war and raiding, after all.

'You load a saddle with a sack of earth or sand, at first only the weight of a rider but gradually increased for eight days, until the horse carries the weight of two steppe riders — about one of you big northers with your mail and all your weapons to hand. As the weight grows, the horse's ration of food and water is lessened. He is trotted and walked six or seven miles daily.

'After the first eight days you gradually make him lighter over another eight days — still, however, decreasing the food. When the load has gone completely, you give him two or three days of absolutely nothing at all, simply tightening the girth at intervals.'

'By which time,' growled Avraham, poking a foot under a corpse and trying to wrench it from the ice, 'you have killed him.'

'One like that Heavenly Horse, yes,' agreed Morut. 'And those you rode for the great Bek's army. But not this one.'

'What do you call your marvellous horse?' asked Crowbone in a thin piping query from the crowd — then held up one hand and waved the answers away before the scorn crashed on him. You did not give a name to something you might have to eat.

'I should be grateful, then,' he muttered, 'that I have a name.'

Morut, still grinning, went on talking while we moved among the litter of gear and wreckage and dead, his voice like soothing balm on that bruise of horror.

'About the twentieth day you work him until he sweats, unsaddle him and pour buckets of ice-cold water all over him, from head to tail. Stake him, all wet, to a peg on the open steppe, allow him to graze, giving him, every day, a little more rope for seven or eight days, after which you turn him loose to run with the herd as usual.

'A horse that has undergone this discipline is a valuable animal and a fortune to a man, being able to travel almost continuously for four or five days together, with only a handful of fodder once in every half-day and a drink of water once in a long day.'

He stroked the whiskered muzzle of the unassuming beast. I vowed then to have Morut and his horse-skills back in Hestreng.

'Perhaps these men should have undergone something of the same,' growled Hlenni Brimill, jutting his chin at the dead as he stamped his feet against the cold.

'No dead Man-Haters here,' noted Ref. 'Either they suffered no loss, or carried their dead away.'

'No plunder taken, either,' growled Gyrth and we all stared at the men, still in their helms and their mail, all white with ice.

'Perhaps these amazonia did not have the stomach for it, being only women,' Jon Asanes noted and Kveldulf's hawk and spit answer to that made the boy flush with anger. No-one spoke up for him, all the same, for Kveldulf had the right of it; it wasn't stomach the women lacked, but strength to waste. For the same reason, we left those dead untouched and unburied, but not because we were squeamish about breaking limbs to straighten, them for burial — what was that to the dead?

It was the strength we grudged. As Onund pointed out to Jon as we shuffled away, a man can make himself a shelter and sleep out a three-day blizzard provided he has not exhausted himself beforehand. It is exhaustion that turns such a snow-wrapped, snug sleep into death. What would be the point of struggling to gain plunder we could not carry, or waste energy digging a shallow grave that the wolves would scratch out an hour after we had vanished over the milk-white horizon?

So we kept our strength to stumble down the frozen scree of a slope to the great bowl in the earth which held a frozen lake and an island in the middle. An island so shaped that it looked like the back of a whale breaching a sea. An island with a huddle of six carts and a hole on it.

It took me a while to work it out, as we staggered down to where the survivors of Lambisson's party had chipped out the lip of the iced lake's bank down to a level where they could struggle carts over it to the island.

Here was where Finn and Short Eldgrim had hauled me out of the brown, roiling water the first time. Down there, locked somewhere in the ice, lay the bones of Wryneck, Long Eldgrim, Sighvat and the others. This was the place, right enough — we had just come up on it from another direction, in another season, and seven years difference. It came to me then that I had no need of the runed sabre.

The weight of that was crushing; we had slid and staggered across half Serkland in pursuit of this sabre. Men