Crowbone

stored-up argument.

The two ships had tacked and twisted a painful way south from Hvitrann — Crowbone did not want to row the Shadow off and leave the knarr behind again — a long muscle-ache of hauling the sail up and down until the palm-welts burst. Men did not complain, all the same, for they were aware that they had burned out a borg and slain a Galgeddil lord; putting distance between them and the bodies on the shingle was well worth some blisters and ache.

‘I wish we had Finn’s weather hat,’ Kaetilmund roared out when the first wind squalled out on them, hard on the berthing side, swirling like the tongue of a lip-licking cat, so that the Shadow heeled and staggered with it.

Those who knew about Finn’s reputedly magical headgear laughed, but Crowbone stayed grim; he did not like the white-faced, fork-tailed Ran-sparrows he had seen earlier, whipping through the wave spume, low and fast as arrows.

‘St Peter’s birds,’ Gorm declared, seeing Crowbone watch them.

‘Because they seem to walk on water, like Christ as witnessed by that holy man once,’ he explained. Crowbone did not care what the Christ-followers called them; he only knew the Ran birds spoke of storm. Besides, he did not want to speak to Gorm, or the others now — he had what he wanted from Halk, the Orkney steersman, who made it clear he was too new to Hoskuld’s crew to care about them much.

‘Hoskuld had three gold coins from this priest he met in Holmtun,’ Halk told Crowbone, the wind that took them from under the smoke of Hvitrann whipping the hair away from his round, thick face. ‘One took the priest and ship to Olaf in Dyfflin, as you know. A second took him to Sand Vik, where they found me to steer for them.’

He broke off and grinned ruefully.

‘If I had known …’ he began and Crowbone’s stare silenced him as surely as if he had clapped a hand across his mouth. It was clear the prince did not care much what Halk thought, clearer still that he cared less for the regret Halk felt. The steersman wondered if he had made a mistake in allying himself to this prince, for he felt the eyes of Gorm and the others on him from the far end of the boat and the blue-brown gimlets of Crowbone from this end; now he knew how the iron felt between hammer and anvil.

‘The third,’ he went on, feeling the spit dry in his mouth under the odd-eyed stare, ‘took the priest across to Torridun, where he was left. We then went back to Mann where Hoskuld took the writing for Orm. Then on to the Baltic, charged with finding Orm Bear-Slayer and telling him of matters.’

‘Torridun?’ demanded Crowbone and had the answer — the last old fortress-town of the Painted Folk who had once been strong in the north, before the vik-raiders from Norway ended them and let the kings of Alba reduce them further. Torfness, some knew it as, because the folk there found grass sods that burned like wood. Why would a monk be plootering in the ruins of that place?

He asked Halk, who shrugged.

‘Not ruined entirely — traders from Norway still go there. Besides, he is a priest,’ he corrected. ‘Not a monk.’

‘They are all the same,’ Crowbone declared, waving a dismissive hand and Halk, politely enough, Crowbone noted, put the matter to rights. A priest was more of a Christ-follower than a monk. Anyone could become a monk, but a priest was trained by others of his kind to talk to their god personally.

‘He was a hard man, this Drostan,’ Halk ended. ‘A skelf has more meat, yet he was wiry for all that — and the foot must have pained him a great deal, judging by the limp he had, but he never made a sound on matters. Not that you could have understood it much, between his lack of teeth and his way of speaking. Saxlander, Gorm said. From Hammaburg.’

The hackles rose on Crowbone’s neck.

‘We have to run with the wind,’ Stick-Starer yelled, whirling Crowbone to the sound of his voice. The wind keened and he saw the rain sheet between him and the knarr; he fretted like the spume- ragged tops of the waves, wanting to keep the knarr in sight.

He was vaguely aware of it, as if, like the alfar, it was truly visible only out of the corner of the eye. His mind was back on the winter steppe, the Great White, where he huddled in the lee of Orm’s armpit under an upturned cart as the howling wind scoured snow over the enemies who had kidnapped them. They had been led by a priest from Hammaburg called Martin, a man with a mouthful of ruined teeth, who had lost his shoe trying to kick out at Orm before vanishing into the shrieking whiteness, staggering towards Kiev, four days away.

Much later, Crowbone had heard how this Martin had been picked up and carted to Kiev. In return for them saving his life, he had told the ruler there, Yaropolk, all he knew of Orm and the men out on the steppe hunting all the silver of the world. He had lived, too, Crowbone had heard — though it had cost him a foot and he limped badly.

Martin. Orm’s bane. The one who had set the Oathsworn on the path of silver riches, in the days when Einar was jarl.

The dark grew; things sparked in it and Thor rumbled out a laugh.

‘Third reef,’ bellowed Stick-Starer and men sprang to the walrus-hide ropes. Mar blinked rain from his lashes and saw the grim jut of Crowbone’s jaw; the knarr could no longer be seen, yet the boy, shaven face pebbled with water, stared stubbornly at where it had been, as if he could reel it in with the force of his odd eyes.

Nothing, Mar thought, would surprise me about this prince — yet the world was reduced to grey and black, as if it sat on them like a gull on eggs. Then the searing light split it with a flash that left the jagged print of it on the back of his eyeballs and the stone in Mar’s belly sank, cold and deep.

‘Not even Finn’s Weatherhat will find a safe harbour now,’ Onund roared and even through the tearing wind the bitterness in his voice was gall to Crowbone. The waves had no rhyme to them, torn and ragged by the wind before they could take shape or order. They hurtled at the Shadow and a sheet of water creamed down the length of her, the spray horizontal as braced spears.

Yet they all saw Crowbone, still as the prow beast, standing with one hand on a line and the wind whipping his braids on either side of his face, staring straight ahead as the Shadow plunged into the long dark, the scowl on him darker yet.

They thought he was raging at being separated from the knarr, or furious at the storm itself. They were wrong. Crowbone’s head was full of a name which told him almost everything he needed to know.

Martin.

Run with the wind, Thorgeir had said, for that is what the Shadow will do. Bergfinn had no better option, so that is what they did. It was a good knarr, even laden as it was, coursing up the great glassy swells, cutting through the white spume-mane, planing down the far side. It was built for this, after all, more so than a drakkar.

After a while, with the sail reefed to the last knot, enough only to keep them steering, men curled their bodies a little less; they would ride the storm out and, with the luck of whatever gods they followed, perhaps meet the Shadow when the last clouds blew themselves to rags.

Thorgeir began to ease the thought that had padded blackly after him since he and Bergfinn had been sent back to this knarr — that the boat was their doom, a wyrd woven in wood by the Norns. He looked to where the wrapped body of Fastarr Skumr rolled in the wet, waiting a decent burning; next to it, Kari Ragnvaldrsson hugged his shattered hand and his misery, facing nothing better than a purse of hacksilver and an uncertain future no matter where they reached.

Cripples and the dead, Thorgeir brooded. Not the best crew, but fitting for such a ship as this.

The wyrd of it cracked open not long after when the steering oar collar snapped for the second time.

Torvold, a fair smith in his day, could do nothing with his forge-built muscle. He should have let the steerboard go, but without it they were all doomed, so he dared not and the weight of it dragged him over the side even as men, their screams torn away by the howl of wind, sprang too late to help him.

The Swift-Gliding balked, whirled like a stung stallion, no more use than a wood chip in a flood. Bergfinn had time to look at Thorgeir, to see his answering, flat-eyed gaze, all hope sucked from it as he watched the Norn curse come at them, woven now in water.

Then the great black-glass curl of sea fell on them like a cliff.

Later …