‘The Danes?’ he repeated, then crossed himself. ‘Bless this weather, brother, that keeps the Dyfflin Danes from us.’
The Hammaburg priest was suddenly brisk and attentive to the fire, so that it flared briefly, before the damp wood fought back and reduced it once more to a mean affair of woodsmoke reek and flicker.
‘I had it, out on the steppes of Gardariki in the east,’ he went on, speaking to the dark. ‘I lost it. It lies there, waiting — and I wait for a sign from God, who will tell me that He considers me penance-paid for my failure and now worthy to retrieve it. That and where it is.’
Drostan was millstoned by this. He had heard of Gardariki, the lands of the Rus Slavs, but only as a vague name for somewhere unimaginably far away, far enough to be almost a legend — yet here was someone who had been there. Or claimed it; the hermit-monk of this place, Drostan had been told, was head-sick.
He decided to keep to himself the wind-swirl of thoughts about his journey here, half carrying Sueno, whom he had visited and found sick, so resolving to take him down to the church where he could be made comfortable; he would say nothing of how God had brought them here, about the storm that had broken on them. It was then God sent the guiding light that had led them here, to a place so thick with holy mystery they had trouble breathing.
The cynical side to Drostan, all the same, whispered that it was the fish oil and woodsmoke reek that made breathing hard. He smiled in the dark; the cynical thought was Sueno’s doing, for until they had found themselves only a few miles of whin and gorse apart, each had been alone and Drostan had never questioned his faith.
He had discovered doubt and questioning as soon as he and Sueno had started in to speaking, for that seemed to be the older monk’s way. For all that he wondered why Sueno had taken to the Culdee life up there on the lonely, wind-moaning hills, Drostan had never resented the meeting.
There was silence for a long time, while the rain whispered and the wind moaned and whistled through the badly-daubed walls. He knew the Hammaburg priest was right and Sueno, recalcitrant old monk that he was, was about to step before the Lord and be judged. He prayed silently for God’s mercy on his friend.
The priest from Hammaburg sat and brooded, aware that he had said too much and not enough, for it had been a time since he had spoken with folk and even now he was not sure that the two Culdees were quite real.
There had been an eyeblink of strangeness when the two had stumbled in on him out of the rain and wind and it had nothing to do with their actual arrival — he had grown used to speaking with phantoms. Some of them were, he knew, long dead — Starkad, who had chased him all down the rivers of Gardariki and into the Holy Land itself until his own kind had slaughtered him; Einar the Black, leader of the Oathsworn and a man the Hammaburg priest hated enough to want to resurrect for the joy of watching him die again; Orm, the new leader and equally foul in the eyes of God.
No. The strangeness had come when the one called Drostan had announced himself, expecting a name in return. It took the priest from Hammaburg by surprise when he could not at once remember his own. Fear, too. Such a thing should not have been lost, like so many other things. Christian charity. Long lost to the Danes of the Oathsworn out on the Great White where the Holy Lance still lay among fox turds and steppe grasses. At least he hoped it was, that God was keeping it safe for the time it could be retrieved.
By me, he thought. Martin. He muttered it to himself through the stumps of his festering teeth. My name is Martin. My name is pain.
Towards dawn, Sueno woke up and his coughing snapped the other two out of sleep. Drostan felt a claw hand on his forearm and Sueno drew himself up.
‘I am done,’ he said, and this time Drostan said nothing, so that Sueno nodded, satisfied.
‘Good,’ he said, between wheezing. ‘Now you will listen more closely, for these are the words of a dying man.’
‘Brother, I am a mere monk. I cannot hear your Confession. There is a proper priest here …’
‘Whisht. We have, you and I, ignored that fine line up in the hills when poor souls came to us for absolution. Did it matter to them that they might as well have confessed their sins to a tree, or a stone? No, it did not. Neither does it matter to me. Listen, for my time is close. Will I go to God’s hall, or Hel’s hall, I wonder?’
His voice, no more than husk on the draught, stirred Drostan to life and he patted, soothingly.
‘Hell has no fires for you, brother,’ he declared firmly and the old monk laughed, brought on a fit of coughing and wheezed to the end of it.
‘No matter which gods take me,’ he said, ‘this is a straw death, all the same.’
Drostan blinked at that, as clear a declaration of pagan heathenism as he had heard. Sueno managed a weak flap of one hand.
‘My name, Sueno, is as close as these folk get to Svein,’ he said. ‘I am from Venheim in Eidfjord, though there are none left there alive enough to remember me. I came with Eirik to Jorvik. I carried Odin’s daughter for him.’
Sueno stopped and raised himself, his grip on Drostan’s arm fierce and hard.
‘Promise me this, Drostan, as a brother in Christ and in the name of God,’ he hissed. ‘Promise me you will seek out the Yngling heir and tell him what I tell you.’
He fell back and mumbled. Drostan wiped the spittle from his face with a shaking hand, unnerved by what he had heard. Odin’s daughter? There was rank heathenism, plain as sunlight on water.
‘Swear, in the name of Christ, brother. Swear, as you love me …’
‘I swear, I swear,’ Drostan yelped, as much to shut the old man up as anything. He felt a hot wash of shame at the thought and covered it by praying.
‘Enough of that,’ growled Sueno. ‘I have heard all the chrism-loosening cant I need in the thirty years since they dragged me off from Stainmore. Fucking treacherous bitch-fucks. Fucking gods of Asgard abandoned us then …’
He stopped. There was silence and wind hissed rain-scent through the wall cracks, making the woodsmoke and oil reek swirl chokingly. Sueno breathed like a broken forge bellows, gathered enough air and spoke.
‘Do not take this to the Mother of Kings. Not Gunnhild, his wife, Eirik’s witch-woman. Not her. She is not of the line and none of Eirik’s sons left to the bitch deserve to marry Odin’s daughter … Asgard showed that when the gods turned their faces from us at Stainmore.’
Drostan crossed himself. He had only the vaguest notions what Sueno was babbling, but he knew the pagan was thick in it.
‘Take what I tell you to the young boy, if he lives,’ Sueno husked out wearily. ‘Harald Fairhair’s kin and the true line of Norway’s kings. Tryggve’s son. I know he lives. I hear, even in this wild place. Take it to him. Swear to me …’
‘I swear,’ Drostan declared quietly, now worried about the blood seeping from between Sueno’s cracking lips.
‘Good,’ Sueno said. ‘Now listen. I know where Odin’s daughter lies …’
Forgotten in the dark, Martin from Hammaburg listened. Even the pain in his foot, that driving constant from toes that no longer existed — clearly part of the penance sent from God — was gone as he felt the power of the Lord whisper in the urgent, hissing, blood-rheumed voice of the old monk.
A sign, as sure as fire in the heavens. After all this time, in a crude stone hut daubed with poor clay and Christ hope, with a roof so low the rats were hunchbacked — a sign. Martin hugged himself with the ecstasy of it, felt the drool from his broken mouth spill and did not try to wipe it away. In a while, the pain of his foot came back, slowly, as it had when it thawed, gradually, after his rescue from the freeze of a steppe winter.
Agonising and eternal, that pain, and Martin embraced it, as he had for years, for every fiery shriek of it reminded him of his enemies, of Orm Bear-Slayer who led the Oathsworn, and Finn who feared nothing — and Crowbone, kin of Harold Fairhair of the Yngling line and true prince of Norway. Tryggve’s son.
There was a way, he thought, for God’s judgement to be delivered, for the return of what had been lost, for the punishment of all those who had thwarted His purpose. Now even the three gold coins, given to him by the lord of Kiev years since and never spent, revealed their purpose, and he glanced once towards the stone they were hidden beneath. A good hefty stone, that, and it fitted easily into the palm.
By the time the old monk coughed his blood-misted last at dawn, Martin had worked out the how of it.
Folk said it was a city to make you gasp, hazed with smoke and sprawling with hundreds of hovs lining the muddy banks and spilling backwards into the land. There were ships by the long hundred lying at wharfs, moored by
