than that.
‘I knew you would come,’ he answered, staring up into my face with the sure, clear certainty of innocence. He was thin and his bone-white colour made it hard to see if he was ill or not, but he seemed hale enough. Yet the pale blue eyes had seen things and it showed in them.
‘Well,’ drawled Finn, circling the monk like a dunghill cock does hens. ‘You have led us a long dance, monk.’
Leo acknowledged it with a wry smile. His hair was long and stuck out at odd angles and he had gathered the tattered ends of his black robe up under his belt, so that it looked like he wore baggy black breeks to the knee; beneath them, his legs were red and white, mud-splattered and bloody from old cuts and grazes. He reeked of grease and woodsmoke and did not look much, but I knew he had a needle of poisoned steel on him and said so.
He widened his eyes to look innocent and Finn growled at him.
‘Find a rope,’ Red Njal spat. ‘Make him dance a new dance. The breathless tongue never conspires.’
‘No.’
It came from two throats — Koll’s and Finn’s — and took everyone by surprise, even the pair who had hoiked it out.
‘Kill him another way,’ Finn growled, scrubbing his beard as he did when he was discomfited.
‘Do not kill him at all,’ Koll declared defiantly. ‘He helped me, saved me when the rest of these pigs wanted to sell me to the Magyars. Him and Randr Sterki stood against them.’
I knew why Randr would want to keep the boy, but not the monk and I said so to Leo, who shrugged.
‘I took him as a counter in a game,’ he said diffidently. ‘He still had value.’
Koll blinked a bit at that, but I had expected not much more. I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder, to show him he was safe once more — then Randr Sterki struggled weakly to his feet and growled to me across the trampled, bloody underbrush of the clearing.
‘Well? Will you finish it, Bear Slayer? What you started on Svartey?’
I wondered how many of the Svartey crew were left and wondered it aloud; the answer was straight enough — only him alone. All the others had died and the men of his crew who sat, shivering and sullen, had no connection with that old
‘Kill him and be done with it,’ Styrbjorn said and Randr Sterki curled a lip at him.
‘So much for fighting shoulder to shoulder,’ he answered bitterly. ‘Well done is ill paid, as the saying goes. Here is the dog who fought, the chief who led and the ring-giver who paid — only the fighting dog dies, it seems.’
I looked from Styrbjorn to Leo and back to Randr. He had the right of it, for sure — all of those who had helped the Norns weave the wyrd of what happened were here, including the Oathsworn, who had scoured Svartey in one bloody thread of it.
‘Matters would have gone better for me,’ Randr Sterki went on morosely, ‘but for this bloody habit of slaughter you Oathsworn have. The death of that village you visited has called out an army of Pols, all bent on skewering Northmen — my bad war luck to run into them before you.’
‘Truly,’ agreed Onund coldly, ‘when you annoy the gods, you are fucked.’
Finn added his own bloody growl to that by cutting the throat out of the Vislan and, while he choked and kicked, Abjorn and Alyosha counted the cost of the fight and the heads left.
There were fourteen of Randr’s men left, including himself. We had two dead and four men wounded; the two dead were Eid and the Dyfflin man, whose name, I learned from Thorbrand, was Ranald. Finn could not understand what had made them charge out as they did and asking Thorbrand only brought a weary heave of his shoulders and the answer that he had followed the other two. I thought I knew, for I had felt it myself — little Koll, the prize for all that had been suffered, was in danger of being snapped up by someone else.
It had cost us, all the same and we would need Randr and his men, I was thinking and I said that to them and him. Red Njal cursed and one or two others made disapproving grunts, but I laid it out for them; we were alone and together made no more than sixty. Somewhere, hordes of Pols hunted us.
‘Turn Randr Sterki and his men loose, then,’ Kaelbjorn Rog offered truculently. ‘Let the Pols hunt them down while we get away.’
‘Tcha!’ spat Red Njal. ‘At least make it easy for the Pols — the foot removed cannot scurry far.’
‘I am now sure I dislike this granny of yours,’ Crowbone said, shaking his head, then stared his odd-eyes into the pig-squint glare Red Njal tried to burn him with.
‘If the wind changes, your face will stay like that,’ he added grimly. ‘My ma told me that one and she was a princess.’
‘It is too late for running,’ I said, before matters boiled. ‘The Pols will know where we all are in a few hours.’
‘Why so?’ demanded Crowbone, moody because he had been effectively kept out of the fight by his iron wet- nurse, Alyosha. ‘We have killed all these dog-riders.’
‘But not their horses,’ Alyosha told him, seeing it now. ‘They will track back and find us.’
It was then that folk realised some of the bow-nosed ponies had galloped off and those who knew their livestock knew what horses did when riderless. They went home. I knew it, as well as I knew we could not stay here to fight, nor run somewhere else out on the wet plain.
There was only one place we could go which would give us a chance of fighting at all and it was not one I wanted to visit. When I laid it out, the words fell into a silence as still as the inside of an old howe, which was answer enough.
Save for Leo, who always had something to say, even about stepping into a plague-ridden fortress.
‘
‘A cliff in front, wolves behind,’ Finn translated. ‘I have heard that one before, priest. It is the place the Oathsworn fight best.’
EIGHTEEN
His breathing, as Bjaelfi took pains to tell us, was just a habit, for the fever had fired him so that his blood had boiled up into his thought-cage and destroyed his thinking entire. What was left sucked in air the way a deer kicks long after you have gralloched it.
It was a habit strong in him, for he took three days to be quit of it and, at the last, was open-mouthed and desperate as a fish. Ulf, his name was, called Amr by his oarmates, which meant Tub on account of his considerable belly. Well, it had been considerable, but in three days of vomit and leaching sweat he had melted like grease on a skillet, become a wraith, his face pocked red and white and pus yellow and his eyes gone white as boiled eggs.
Bjaelfi tied his mouth back up with a scrap of cloth and we sat back and stared; Ulf, the emptied Tub, first to die of the Red Plague and lying there with drooping hare-ears of cloth on top of his head, making him look as if he was being silly to amuse bairns.
‘They are coming again,’ roared a voice from outside the dim hut.
I heaved myself wearily up, took up the blood-gummed shaft of the bearded axe and looked at Bjaelfi.
‘Burn him,’ I said and he nodded. Then I lumbered out to war.
We first saw our enemy when they filtered out onto the soaked plain in front of the
Their horsemen trotted up, spraying water up from the steaming ground, to be greeted by great black feathers of reeking smoke; close behind came foot soldiers in unbleached linen and only helmets and spears and round shields. Behind them came a knot of iron-clad horse soldiers, sporting lances with proud pennons and one
