The White Raven

heard the trellis bones of it crack and the commotion inside. Light flared as the door-curtain was flung back and someone hammered out shrill, angry words, a dark shadow against the light. I snarled and the woman spat at me; I showed her a fistful of sharp metal and she yelped and vanished back inside, shrieking.

I had lost the others. Blinking, my night vision shattered, I moved on before any other yurt-dwellers reappeared with weapons. There was a wolf-howl up ahead, a sound I knew well; Finn had found his enemies.

I came up on the nearest fire, where Vladimir's men had been huddled. A dark hump lay in the shadows beyond and I saw, as jog-trotted up, that it was one of the druzhina, a luckless sentry, fully-armoured and very dead.

Shadows grunted and struggled; sparks flew, men cursed and slashed. A figure lunged away from the howling pack and ran towards me, though whether he came to attack or was unlucky to find me as he fled I did not know, nor care.

I hit him as he came within arm's reach, a vicious backhand upswing that took the axe blade into his groin and launched him headlong, screaming. Then I knelt to look at him as he writhed and his heels drummed; no-one I knew, so one of the enemy. I heaved a sigh of relief at that and hacked his throat open, vowing to pay more attention.

I turned back the fight round the fire and heard Ref Steinsson yell: 'Watch out for the big one. .'

Now I was paying attention and I saw him, a tall, muscular Slav with the face of a young boy scarcely bearded, who came leaping out of the firelight and straight at me, sword up and screaming as loud as he could, exactly as his best mate had probably taught him.

His best mate, I was thinking, was lying at my feet with a second, bloody smile under his chin — but if he had been there to advise, he would have told this giant Slav boy to hold his sword lower and not to swing so wildly.

I stepped out of the way of the downward crash of that fat blade, spun on one foot and hit him with the axe on the lower back, so hard that I heard the crack of his backbone breaking and lost my balance, even as he arched once and went down with a scream. I scrambled up, frantic that someone else was coming up on me, spun round, axe slathering blood into the air in a ribbon of droplets.

'It's me, Finn — watch what you are doing with that woodchopper, Orm.'

He had a grin like a bear-trap, but his eyes were wary. I straightened from my fighting crouch and acknowledged him with a wave of the axe.

'You are safe enough. Get to the boats.'

'Too late,' growled Finn. 'They have fallen back and are between us and the boats.'

A score of paces further on, the Oathsworn, panting and circling like dogs, waved weapons and taunts in the faces of Vladimir's men, who were shadows and pale blobs of faces in the dark. Behind them was the river and the boats we needed to escape — but we had neither found Thorgunna, or a way of getting to those boats.

'We are finished,' someone said grimly.

'Stow that,' Finn bellowed and spun his iron nail. 'We are not done yet.'

It was not a convincing statement, for it would be moments only before Dobrynya recovered the courage of his men and made them realize there were only a handful facing them. Then they would come at us, Oathsworn fame or not; I saw men plant themselves more firmly, rolling their shoulders and touching amulets, for it was more than likely that they would die here.

Then Gizur came up, huffing, with Gyrth lumbering like a dancing bear behind him.

'We have found Thorgunna,' Gizur yelled and pointed.

On the lip of the long, iced slope that ran down to the river, no more than a long jogtrot from us, a strug perched on wooden sledge-runners, staked to the ground for safety. Stacks and bundles showed where the gear waited to be loaded, so that it was light for the final, careful slither down the slope to the water. The crew had wisely made themselves scarce when armed men turned up and Vladimir had thought it a good place to use to shelter the sick wife of Kvasir.

It was as strange as a fish on a horse, that boat stuck on a hill, but we ran for it, stumbling and sliding over the iced snow; beyond were the snow-frozen stacks of rolling logs for ship-hauling between Volga and Don in the summer and, beyond that, the fortress, that brooding ghost shifting noisily awake with light and clanging alarms.

The men swarmed aboard, careless of the creaks and the tremble of the over-straining ropes.

'Thorgunna?' I yelled and a chorus of voices answered me. I leaped up and scrambled aboard the strug and Gizur led me to where she lay, wrapped and pale. Her eyes were open and she managed a smile, though one pearled tear fluttered on her eyelash, bright silver in the moonglow. Thordis fell on her knees beside her and both of them shook with grief and happiness in equal measure, it seemed to me.

'We brought him with us,' I said awkwardly into the storm of tears, even as men struggled aboard with the stiff, blood-marked bundle that had been Kvasir. 'We are going home.'

'What about the silver?' demanded Gizur and his stiff beard quivered, so that he looked like a man caught halfway eating a hedgepig.

'We must go back for it, surely, after all this,' thundered Hauk.

'Back for it,' echoed Short Eldgrim, then shook his head. 'Back for what? Who are we fighting now?'

Beyond the humped dead and the fire there were shouts; lights flared and there was the unmistakeable sound of chains and creaking hinges as a heavy gate opened in the fortress wall.

'There is no silver, nor tomb,' I said. 'Only a vengeful boy-prince and a frightened garrison. With luck they will fight each other and let us escape with our lives.'

'We will never manhandle this boat to the river in time,' muttered Gizur, as men sprang to the frozen ropes.

'Time I was gone,' Morut called from below and I sprang off the boat to stand beside him.

'Come with us,' I said, for I liked the little man and his knowledge of horses. He shook his head, grinning. 'What? Spend my life hauling ships across the steppe from river to river? Besides, that great fool Avraham may decide to come up with these folk from the keep and I do not want to have to fight him. If you have to, try not to kill him.'

'Anyway — how can I leave that marvellous horse of mine behind?' he added, 'I must get back to where I tethered him before some Khazar ben shel elef zona finds him. You know what these people are like.'

I smiled, then fished out the armring I had taken from Kvasir before we had wrapped him.

'As I promised,' I said, 'in case that son of a thousand whores has indeed stolen your scrubby little pony. I will find a richer mark of favour to bury with Kvasir.'

Morut caught it deftly and touched it briefly to his heart before making it vanish inside his tunic.

'Good journey,' I said and he waved once, then was gone into the shadows. He had barely vanished when the horsemen came on us out of the dark of the fortress.

'Cut the ropes!' yelled Finn and the men trying to knock out iced tether-pegs stopped and then fumbled out blades. 'Cut them, fuck your mothers!'

They hacked and swore; and one of them — I could not see who it was — turned with a shrieking gurgle as an arrow took him in the throat.

At the same moment a horseman surged forward out of the dark, kicking his unwilling mount. Hauk, flailing furiously at the tether with a too-blunt sword, spun round, dipping as he did so, taking the horse in the forelegs, which snapped like twigs. It fell, kicking a blizzard of snow and screaming, the rider's own cries of pain lost in that skin-crawling horse-squeal. Trapped, the rider struggled, wide-eyed, until Hauk's blunt sword crashed on his face and ruined it.

The strug lurched and, panicking, men flung themselves aboard with the job only half done. There was a crashing sound as Gyrth dropped over the side and ran at us; Hauk turned as another horseman roared out of the dark and I saw they were all round us now.

'Get aboard,' I yelled at Hauk and brandished the axe to show what I intended. He hesitated only briefly, then leaped up for the side of the strug and caught it with his one free hand as others pulled him over.

Gyrth looked at me, his yellow teeth bared; he must have known when he flung himself back over the side, that he would never get back aboard — it had taken four men to haul him up the first time. He turned in a whirl of