The Prow Beast

‘You should have finished Randr Sterki,’ Hlenni pointed out and, even washed by the safe and loving press of friends and those who held me dear, I could feel Randr’s hate and wondered why the boy had not pressed the fight.

‘He still has Sigurd’s nose,’ I said to him.

‘Your sword also,’ he replied, then lost the grin and sighed. ‘I would have, but…’

Right there and then I heard the crack as his voice broke to manhood. He cleared his throat and looked bewildered for a moment or two, then spoke on, his voice breaking on every second or third word, to his annoyance.

‘I came short-handed to the feast. Alyosha was concerned.’ Then he motioned, so that a mere ten men stepped forward from the shadows behind him. If Randr had decided to fight, Crowbone and his men would almost certainly have gone under. Alyosha peeled off his gilded, face-mailed helmet, puffing out sweat-sheened cheeks and grinning from behind a damp beard.

‘We left too many men with Short Serpent,’ he declared and shot Crowbone a sharp, sideways look that made it clear whose fault that had been; the boy loved his ship too much. Crowbone ignored him and held out his small fist; I clasped him, wrist to wrist and heard his voice, rising and falling like a ship on a bad sea.

‘I will take back Sigurd’s nose one day, from off the stump of Randr Sterki’s neck,’ he said, trying to growl and only half succeeding. ‘But all is done with for now.’

The grin returned, making it clear who I had to thank for it. Somehow, I knew there would be a price to pay for that — if Odin let me live that long.

‘Will he be done with this now that he has your silver?’ Red Njal asked and I remembered Randr’s hate-mask of a face. My look told him all he needed to know.

Still, we were free of danger for now, so that people clapped each other on the shoulder, or hugged one another, smiling and the children, caught up in the moment, laughed and danced. But the joy of it was soured by the weeping for Botolf — and, later, the great red glow which I knew was Hestreng hall burning, a last spiteful act that told me Randr had not finished yet with his hate.

‘That and your silver loss,’ Crowbone mused, watching the red glow, ‘must be a sore dunt — but I saw the state Dragon Wings was in and it comes to me that those burned strakes will maybe leak him all the way to the bottom of the Baltic, weregild silver and all.’

I said nothing. The one child not laughing was red-faced, flame-haired Helga Hiti, wailing because her mother wailed for Botolf — yet it was still birdsong to me, as was every other voice I heard, for they were alive and safe and I said as much, so that the new man that was Crowbone nodded soberly.

‘Fitting, then, for that old tale,’ he said and, through the pain of Thorgunna spooning the blood clots from my tortured nose, I managed to tell him that I owed him for the telling of it, which made him grin. The grin broadened as Thorgunna and her sister told me to be still and to weesht and stop behaving like a bairn while they tortured my neb further.

Through the tears I saw Crowbone, too pleased to take the news of it blandly, as an older prince would do. He managed to stammer out that nothing was owed between friends and I am sure he meant it, seeing the baleful red eye turning Hestreng to ashes and Randr Sterki running off with my wealth.

Well, that was one moonlit burial and, though it was the largest amount of Atil’s cursed silver, it was not the only hoard of it; only a careless man piles all his wealth in one hole. I kept my teeth shut on that matter around Crowbone, all the same, for it is a doubly-careless man who boasts of such cleverness.

Anyway, if I had opened my mouth at all, only foul curses would have come from it at what Thorgunna and her sister were doing to my nose, which would have left me with cold oatmeal and a turned back for weeks. With everything else, that would have been a mountain weight on my shoulders.

The air was a sharp breath of ash and snow around Hestreng hall on the day we trundled back to it. A ribcage of wet, black timbers it was, collapsed on itself like a dead beast and a light rain sifting down like tears to turn the ground round it to black mud.

‘I am sorry for it,’ said the queen, coming up behind Thorgunna and Aoife and me as we stood, stilled by the loss, while the others poked about and cried out when they recognised the remains of something they had once known well.

‘Aye,’ agreed Crowbone, though too young to make his pretended sombre look work. He had seen too much of this — done a deal of this himself — up and down the Baltic to be truly moved by a tragedy that was not his to bear. It came to me then that I had done the same, in my time.

‘I shall have men and timber sent,’ the queen said, ‘when I am home.’

I remembered Finn telling Botolf about what a king such as Eirik would do for those who saved his little prince and hoped the big man heard this now in Odin’s hall, enough to nod and smile at it all, standing proud and tall on two good legs.

Thorgunna and Thordis embraced, then bustled off to choke their tears in ordering folk about, to set up what shelters and cooking fires we could; Ingrid, red-eyed, chivvied Helga away from the ruins of Hestreng hall, too late to prevent black streaking her dress and face.

‘At least the bairns are safe,’ Red Njal offered, trying to be bright. ‘And if you need silver…well, I have most of my share in a secret hole. Hlenni Brimill, too.’

I felt the warmth of them then, felt the other side of that cold Oath we had sworn when we had followed the prow beast and owned no more than could be safely stowed in a sea-chest. I told him I still had my own secret hole, at which he nodded as if he had known it all along. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and went off to help sort matters out; the old yard of Hestreng rang with noise and bustle, just as if it was not burned.

Yet not all the bairns were safe. Somewhere, out on the slow-heaving grey-green water of the whale road, Jarl Brand’s son shivered and hoped.

NINE

It was an island humped like Onund’s shoulder, where green slopes ran down to meet sand, then water; on a day of bright sunshine and birdsong it would have been a pretty place to be, but on this day, with what we had come for and the rain in our faces, it had no charm.

On the shore were buildings, mean as sties most of them, but others large and prosperous-looking, with carved wooden doorways and thatched roofs. In the quiet curve of this cluster of houses lay a series of wharves, like spokes on a half-wheel, where ships were tied up; more vessels were run up on the beach not far away and most were the solid, heavy riverboats the Slavs call strugs, carved from a single tree. The others were fat trading knarrer, but the only raiding ship other than the one I stood on was hauled up for careening; I knew it at once as Ljot’s ship.

‘Look at them run,’ laughed Ospak, pointing and a few others joined in, harsh with the excitement of it all. They were all the newer crew, who had never been anywhere; the old hands hardly looked up.

There was a clanging noise from the solid fortress, a square of fat timber piles, their sharpened points softened by age and moss, with square towers at each corner and flanking the gate. I had taken the prow beasts off, but the settlement swarmed like an anthill and the alarm was sounding in the fortress which glowered over it.

‘Send a man to the prow,’ I said to Crowbone. ‘Unarmed and without byrnie. Let him stand there with his arms out and weapon-free, to show we mean no harm.’

He acknowledged it with a small nod and passed it on to Alyosha, who cut a man from the pack and sent him. So far, so good — but having Crowbone and his crew as Oathsworn was like walking on the edge of a seax; I would not have done it had it not been for Jarl Brand and Koll.

Jarl Brand had been the only one not at the feast King Eirik gave for the safe return of his queen and his son. As Finn had said, once we had done with our greetings, that was not because Brand was lacking the strength or grit for it, but just because he had a wounded face that would put folk off their eating.

Not that everyone at the feast, where King Eirik presented his son, had an appetite; too many of the guests