Yngling kings to an end and brought in the new god of the Christ.
We were a weapon in One-Eye's hand and had been, as Hild had been and Einar and all the others; the silver hoard was just the goad that had driven us to fame-greatness, the shine on Odin's name.
Yet the glow of that hoard still smeared the eyes. Later, when we stopped for a brief rising-meal, the insidious glitter slid into men's minds as they laughed about the latest escape they had had and the way the men of Thrond had scattered like starlings off stubble.
It was, I heard Gizur say as he chivvied men back to their benches, a sure sign that Odin's hand was over us still and the treasure we had was nothing at all to do with Fafnir and surely could not be cursed.
'On the other hand,' Ospak said, 'it could mean Odin means us still to have all the treasure remaining in Atil's howe.'
There were groans from some at the thought of doing all this over again — yet nods of agreement from those still silver-hungry enough to consider going back. I thought it time that everyone knew, all the same, and stepped forward in such a way that made them all look round at me.
Then I told them what I had avoided saying out on the steppe, the day we had run, panting, from Atil's tomb and the warrior women who ringed it.
I had stayed behind as the others hurried away, watching the slope-headed man-killers who guarded it and the woman who called herself Amacyn. With a runesword in each hand, she had walked to the hole in the tomb roof and straddled it, while all her oathsworn comrades sat their horses on the bank of that frozen lake and bowed their heads.
I had heard the chopping sounds. If her sabre was like mine, then it could cut an anvil and both together, working on that stone support beam, would slice through it long before her arms started to ache or the edge left those blades. I turned away, then, numb and cold and. . relieved.
The others were a long way off when I thought I heard the tomb collapse, but it may just have been the blood rushing in my ears, for I hit a crippling pace to catch them up, especially for a man weakened by hunger and cold.
But we had all heard the cat-yowl wail from those female throats, a last salute to their last leader.
I could see it in my head, the collapse of that great yurt of stone and wood and earth. The ice cracking, the swirl and roil of those black melt-waters rushing in to cover silver, dirt, bones — and the falling woman, her last task done, her oath fulfilled, tumbling down to her wyrd at the feet of Attila.
Last of her line, with no daughter and no secret and no longer any need to pass that burden on. I shivered at the passing from the world of these oathsworn, like us and yet stranger than a hound with two heads. I did not like to think that I had, perhaps, seen my own future in the woman's long, slow whirl of arms and legs.
The river flow would wash the silver into the silt, scatter it and everything else for miles down the river. For years people would pick riches out of those waters; some might even brave the fetch of the place and dig for it in those times when the drought came and the lake was emptied. Perhaps, one day, someone might find a rune- serpented sword, or even two and, perhaps, marvel at how they seemed unmarked by time or weather.
But not us. Odin had given the Oathsworn his last gift of silver, I told them.
They were silent after that and eventually Gizur nodded, straightened and scrubbed his hands over his face, as if scouring away sleep and the last of a bad dream.
'Row, fuck your mothers,' he growled. 'It is a long way home.'
