I dreamed up a new Hestreng, with soaring roof and many high rooms, grand as any king’s and rich with cunning carvings. I summoned up Thorgunna in it and a fine-limbed boy and thralls and a forge and sturdy wharves where all my ships swung gently.
It was a good dream, save for some annoyances; the face of the fine-limbed son was always Koll and accusing. Nor could I place myself anywhere in this neatly-crafted hall.
Worst of all, I could not put a remembered face on Thorgunna at all and summoning up the night moments, hip to hip and thigh to thigh, languorous and loving, only brought a small, tight-muscled body and a sharp face with those huge, seal eyes.
‘Well,’ said a voice, cracking Hestreng apart; I was almost grateful to see Red Njal hunkered near.
‘Well?’ I countered and he gave me a look as glassed and grey as a Baltic swell.
‘I am thinking we will not get out of this.’
‘A man’s life is never finished until Skuld snips the last thread of it,’ I said.
‘Aye, right enough — but best to search while a trail is new, as my granny told me. I can feel the edge of that Norn’s shears and wish only to make it known to you and the gods that I bear no malice, for we are oathed to each other and I took it freely. I would not want to come as a
It took me a moment to realise he meant he would die because of my wyrd, which I had brought on myself with my sacrifice-promise to Odin. I swallowed any venom I had to spit at him for it all the same and thanked him nicely, though I could not help but add that it was only my wyrd to die and not his. Perhaps the gods would be content with just the one death, I told him, just to watch him brighten like a bairn who had been promised a new seax for his name-day.
‘Ah, well,’ he answered. ‘I thought to mention it, all the same. Care gnaws the heart when a man cannot tell all his mind to another.’
‘Your granny was a singular woman,’ I told him, straight-faced into his delighted grins.
And all the while I felt Einar at my back, the old leader who had brought his own wyrd down on himself and whom we had cursed for it, sure he was leading all the Oathsworn of that time into their doom. Not for the first time, I knew how Einar the Black had felt.
‘I do not think it is my wyrd to die here,’ frowned Crowbone and that did not surprise me either; the arrogance of youth was doubled and re-doubled in that odd-eyed man-boy.
‘Then you can be the one to rescue Koll,’ Finn decreed.
Styrbjorn sniffed and tentatively marked out the edges of pain on his lumped forehead.
‘Jarl Brand is a good man,’ he agreed, ‘and a generous ring-giver, it is true — but would we be plootering through the rain after him if Orm did not owe him it as foster-father to his son?’
Again my fault and I let some anger slip the leash into my voice.
‘Would you not go after the boy only to save him, then?’ I demanded. ‘It is all your wyrd that he is taken and we are in this mire.’
Styrbjorn thought about it, frowning and serious.
‘You have the truth of it being as a result of my quarrel with my uncle,’ he admitted, then waved one hand to dismiss it. ‘That is the way of such matters and folk cannot go putting all the blame of it on me — war is war, after all.
‘As to the boy,’ he went on, ‘if the reward was good for me, I would go after him. For you it is losing the stain on your fame and regaining the friendship of the jarl who gave you land and a steading. Good reasons — the fame and the friendship of great men is half the secret to ships and men, as you know, Jarl Orm. The other half is silver. But there is too little fame here for me, while Jarl Brand is too small a friendship for a man of my standing.’
He was a nasty twist of a youth, this one, and his arrogance sucked the breath from you. I saw it then, clear as Iceland’s Silfra water — Styrbjorn would die from his unthinking attitude, one day or the next.
‘You would not try for rescue at all, then?’ Finn growled, a twisted grin on his face. ‘From where I look, wee man with a lot to say for yourself, you have no standing. You are sitting in piss, with a dunted head and no good fame at all.’
Styrbjorn did not answer, but Crowbone fixed him with that odd-eyed stare.
‘You would go if you knew what the lad felt,’ he said, in a voice which had deepened considerably since it had snapped free of boyhood. ‘If you were far from home, among enemies, treated as a thrall, thrashed and bound and starved, all that would keep you taking one breath after another was the hope that someone was coming to get you.’
We all remembered, then, the saga of Crowbone’s life to this point — a fugitive from the womb, his father dead. A thrall at six, his foster-father slain, his mother the usage of Klerkon’s camp, bairned by Kveldulf and then kicked to death by him. At nine, he had been freed by me into the world of the Oathsworn, which was no gentle place for a growing boy.
He looked at me and acknowledged that rescue with only his eyes. Now, at twelve, Crowbone’s last foster- father, his Uncle Sigurd, was also dead and, though he had sisters and kin somewhere too dangerous still to visit, he was more alone than the moon. It came to me that this was the reason, more than any, which had made him take our Oath — any family, even the Odin-hagged Oathsworn, was better than none.
‘Aye, such a wyrd would be a sore one to swallow,’ Styrbjorn agreed, then beamed and slapped Crowbone’s shoulder. ‘Skalds would make a fair tale about someone so rescued. You have convinced me that there is, after all, enough fame in it — we will hunt down the little bairn and bring him safe home, even if Orm ends up swinging in a cage here.’
‘A comfort, for sure,’ I muttered darkly and he laughed.
‘Where is Randr Sterki going, I am wondering?’ Finn asked, frowning. ‘I thought he wanted us to come to him, so why is he running?’
For the lack of men, I was thinking. He would want to find a place where there were shiftless swords for hire, for I was betting sure he was crew-light now. I said so and Styrbjorn chuckled.
‘Well,’ he said brightly, ‘in a way you have me to thank for that.’
I could not speak at all, but Red Njal always had a ready tongue.
‘The jarl would favour you,’ he pointed out, his mildness only adding to the venom of it, ‘save that it is unlikely you will survive, even if this Saxlander lord does release us for the Mazur girl. You he wants to keep and play with.’
Styrbjorn’s fear slid under the clear surface of his face and he swallowed.
I could scarcely see their features now; their faces were white blobs in the dim and the glow of the brazier coals seemed brighter now that the dark had raced in like Sleipnir, One-Eye’s eight-legged stallion.
‘If you have a spell to snap this lock, Finn Horsehead,’ I grunted, annoyed by their talk of my Odin-wyrd — and, I confess it, belly-clenching afraid of it, too. Finn chuckled and drew out his iron nail, a slash of black in the grey.
‘No spell, but
Slowly, Red Njal unwound one leg. Once they had been fine, green wool bindings, embroidered in red and with silver clasp-ends — but the ends had gone on dice or drink long since and the frayed ends of wool, now stained to a mud-dark with only the memory of embroidery, were tucked roughly in the bind itself.
For all that, he passed an unravel of them over sullenly, one breeks leg flapping loosely over his shoes. We all watched Finn tie one end of the wool length to his nail and swing it like a depth-line, testing weight and knot — then, sudden as a spark, the whole room lit up in blue-white light.
For an instant, everything stood out, stark and eldritch and the barred squares were etched on the far wall. I saw the faces of the others in that eyeblink, flares of fright and bewilderment and knew my own was no different.
In the utter dark that followed, we heard the millstone grind of thunder, slow and low and then a hiss of rain, faint through the high, barred squares. A storm; the darkness had indeed raced like Sleipnir for it was not proper night, this.
‘I came to knowing of this thanks to the rot,’ Finn said calmly, ignoring the light and noise as he adjusted the knot. ‘I like this iron nail, for it has served me well from the day I picked it up. On Cyprus, as you will remember, Orm and Njal, when Orm fought the leader of some Danes in a
