The Prow Beast

Perhaps it choked him, perhaps he was too tired to do more — but he nodded, which was enough.

I walked back to the gate and took my axe back from Finn. Dark Eye, impassive as a carving, wrapped the tattered cloak round her and walked out, the way she had always walked, as if she had gold between her legs, into the maw of the Pols. She did not look back.

I came back into the faces of those who knew the business was finished and that they would not die today. Yet there remained, hovering like a waiting hawk, the knowledge that it had been the girl the Pols had wanted all along — but no-one who saw my face wanted to bare their teeth on that, all the same.

Save one, of course. There is always one.

‘You fuck,’ yelled Styrbjorn, trembling with the nearness of that fearful stake. ‘It was the girl. All this time. We died so you could have a hump while the…’

I hit him with the haft of the axe, a wet smack in his face that sent him crashing to the ground, where he lay and snored out bubbling blood and teeth. Uddolf moved to him, turning him over so that he would not choke.

I was cold with it all, cold and sick. A little shape was burning on a pyre, another was staggering away to die among enemies and both had held skeins of my wyrd in their hands; with their loss, I could not see one more step in front of me. I was almost on my knees, begging Odin to take his sacrifice and I half-turned to where Randr Sterki stood, silent and watchful, almost willing him to make his move.

‘Good blow,’ said Bjaelfi after a swift look at Styrbjorn. ‘Though I am thinking it would have been better to have used the edge. A head hacked off cannot conspire, as Red Njal’s granny would say.’

Finn shifted slightly and cleared the rheum from his throat.

‘Make that the last of Red Njal’s granny,’ he growled, so that everyone could hear, ‘and be content that our Orm used the shaft and not the edge. He was always the one for leaving folk alive who should be dead, yet is known for a man who can fall in a bucket of shite and come up with a handful of silver. Perhaps there is worth in Styrbjorn yet.’

He frowned down at the groaning Styrbjorn, then hefted The Godi and clawed everyone with his gaze.

‘This needs cleaning. Then we can quit this Nowhere place.’

There were twenty of us quitting, no more; the rest were dead, and those who were not, we killed for mercy’s sake and then burned them, with all their gear and even their sea-chests, the black feathers trailing accusingly into a sullen sky behind us as we moved across fresh green and birdsong.

For most of that first day we moved grim and fearful, a scar on the land, always looking over one shoulder, for no-one trusted the Pols and we were on their side of the Odra now, heading for a tributary river called Notec, which we would have to cross. After a while, when it seemed as if we had, truly, escaped, men began to look round at the green tips and buds, to turn to where a raven harshed, or a small bird peeped.

They took deeper breaths of spring air and started to grin at each other — except the sick, who staggered or were carried, babbling. The Red Pest stayed with us, tagging along like a dog that could not be sent home and still they grinned at each other, as if they had thrown particularly good dice.

I was the only one not exulting in survival, not cheered by avoiding the cliff and the wolves, moving like a man already dead and waiting, waiting, waiting, for Odin to strike. I was a scowl on the face of their cheerfulness and men avoided me, all save Finn and Crowbone — and the monk, strangely, who strode out alongside me now and then, the uneven dagged ends of his black wool robe flapping round his calves.

Eventually, because I knew he was waiting for me to do it and would never break the silence first, I asked him what he wanted.

‘To knit you back, like the broken bone you are,’ he said, easy enough with the words and looking ahead at the trail. Crowbone loped past us, an old bow in his hand and three arrows in the other.

‘I am going hunting,’ he declared and I knew it was to take his thoughts off the dead Alyosha, so I fought for words to rein him in and yet not make it seem so, for his nursemaid was gone.

Kuritsa appeared and slapped Crowbone manfully on the shoulder.

‘Nothing with legs is edible when you kill it,’ he declared. ‘You gutshoot it and the meat is bitter when it runs. I will go with you and teach you how to hunt.’

He shot me a look over one shoulder, a reassuring grin with it, then the pair of them moved off ahead of the trail, with men chaffering them, pleased that there might be more than old bread and oats that night.

‘I do not need your Christ for my salvation,’ I told the monk and he nodded.

‘Then I do not offer him. But you need something.’

I was wondering why he cared and said so.

‘I need you to get me back to the Great City,’ he said, which was truthful enough, if not exactly the warm spirit of caring I had imagined. I laughed, the sound echoing as if my head was in a bucket and he smiled.

‘See? Now matters are better.’

‘What happens when we do get to the Great City, monk?’ I demanded. ‘It comes to me that taking such a dangerous man as yourself back to the place where he is powerful and we are not is foolish. Perhaps we should kill you here; it is no more than you deserve.’

Leo walked in frowning silence for a while, then smiled suddenly, bright and wide.

‘You will just have to trust me,’ he said. ‘I will be more use alive in the Great City than dead in a heap out here.’

‘So I will not have to offer some jewelled cross for our lives, then?’ I offered wryly. ‘Now that your bargaining counter is burned to smoke?’

‘Jesus died on a wooden one,’ he answered and I had no answer to that and felt suddenly washed with weariness, so that we walked in silence through the wood, which seemed never to end — so much so that I remember saying so and asking how far we had to walk into it.

‘Only half-way,’ Finn answered, peering at me, ‘then we are walking out of it, as any sensible man will tell you. You look like eight ells of bad cloth, Trader. Perhaps you should rest.’

The day had slithered into grey twilight, where the alfar flickered and I was only vaguely aware of Finn calling a halt for it seemed that the grey light smoked round me, so that I saw and heard them as if in a mist.

There was a steading. Once, it had been a substantial hov, a shieling of some note, built low to the ground, but it had fallen to ruin, so that the moss had reclaimed it to a mound of green; grass hung, dried and withered off what was left of the roof, drooping like the bodies of the dead on the ramparts we had so recently left.

I woke to find myself under the shelter of the only roof-space left, sharing it with groaners with sweating, plaguey faces, or wounded from the fight, or moaning with belly-rot and boils. Fires were lit, the rest of the men huddled outside, under the stars and what cloaks they had, sharing them with those who had none.

Kuritsa and Crowbone had returned, the big archer with a buck over his shoulders and it was jumped on, gralloched, cut up and spit-roasted; the smell of meat sang round the house like a memory of better times.

They brought me slivers of succulent deer, bread softened and savouried in the blood-juices of it, but I had no hunger, which I found strange and even the bit I forced down tasted like ash. Bjaelfi came and peered at me and it was then I realised, with a shock, that I was sick.

For a time, I lay and listened to the men mutter softly and start in to weaving themselves together; straps were repaired, weapons cleaned, men tried to sponge the worst stains from clothing and cloaks.

They dragged out combs — all of them had them, good bone ones and, even if some of those implements grinned like gappy old men, they still dragged them through clotted, raggled hair. Bjaelfi produced shears and some of the worst matting was cut off; beards and hair were trimmed and Leo shook his head with wonder, for he had not realised that norther warriors are more vain than women.

In the end, I drifted off in my jarl-bed under the roof with the murmuring sick, listening to the gentle shift of Bjaelfi and the monk, moving like soft, clucking hens.

I moved into a dream of smoke and water, where familiar people and places shredded mistily away when I looked at them, living only at the edge of my dream-sight, like alfar. When I surfaced from this, it was like breaching from the ocean, whooping in air and shivering, blurred and blinking. Sweat rolled off me and I shook; I knew what ate me.

I got up and the place heaved gently as if I stood on a deck in a swell; my feet seemed too far below me and did not even seem to be mine as I moved, slowly, like an old, blind man, out past the soft glow of the fire, the snorers and farters, out to where a man stood on watch in ringmail and helm.