Everyone turned; a brindle hound circled the yellow bitch, the pair of them sniffing each other’s arse while men chuckled.
‘Well,’ said Kaetilmund to Berto, ‘there was me thinking your yellow bitch was as magic as Finn’s Weatherhat, or Crowbone himself — yet it was all because she is as prick-struck as a weasel in heat.’
‘Different magic, same effect,’ muttered Rovald. ‘What I want to know is — who owns the other dog?’
‘I fancy the light will tell us,’ Gorm growled and pointed to where the faint yellow glow of the lantern bobbed and swayed.
The owner was a cloak-wrapped figure looking for his dog and cursing it for having run off on such a foul night. Instead of his dog he came on a pack of wolves and, screaming, dropped the lantern and fled into the dark.
‘Fuck,’ said Vigfuss Drosbo with some disgust. ‘All we want is a bit of shelter.’
‘And some food,’ added a voice.
‘Ale would be good,’ said Vandrad Sygni. ‘And a woman or two.’
‘And all the gold and silver they have,’ Murrough finished, making everyone laugh as the rain dripped down their necks.
It was not hard to find where the man had come from — a huddle of buildings shut tight save for one back door of the main steading, left banging in the wind; the owners had fled into the storm night. Murrough stepped inside and found the fire in the hearth and a cauldron bubbling; a little salty, but that could as well be kale as the owners having gobbed in it before they left. As good a stew as you could hope to find in Ireland, he announced after tasting it.
‘If we are in Ireland,’ Crowbone growled back, with a pointed look at Stick-Starer, who shrugged.
‘Storms run us where the gods wish,’ he answered, ducking under Crowbone’s black look and into the warmth and shelter. One by one, men crowded in, grateful to be out of the wind and rain, dumping sea-chests and shaking themselves like dogs.
Crowbone sent Kaetilmund off to explore the other outbuildings; when he came back, he announced that the place had storerooms, a brewhouse, a decent cookhouse with a bread oven, a byre with plough oxen contentedly chewing — and the building Crowbone had been most concerned about, a stable.
‘Four wee ponies, five stalls,’ Kaetilmund said and Murrough spat into the hearthfire.
‘So they have sent word somewhere,’ he growled, then helped himself to the stew.
Crowbone went to the door and looked out; the wind was rising and the rain pelting. Blue-white light rippled, the sky cracked and he could not see the sea from here, though he knew it would be lashing itself. He did not think a messenger would make good time to any warriors, nor they back to this place — and no man would want to drape himself with metal when Thor hurled his Hammer. He turned back to the fire and said so and Gjallandi shrugged.
‘Unless there is a borg close by,’ he pointed out. ‘Where would the folk from this place be running to, after all?’
Murrough snorted.
‘Anywhere. Too many women and weans to risk putting up a fight. They will find what shelter they can and spread the word of us for miles … gods curse it, boy, get your wet serk and breeks off or you will die.’
This last was directed at Berto, who was shivering near the fire in his wet clothes while men stripped and tried to find space to dry their clothes. The Wend eyed the big Irishman with a jaundiced look.
‘When the same sort of men as we found in Galgeddil arrive here,’ he piped back, ‘I would rather be dressed and wet than have to face them bare-arsed.’
Which made a few laugh — and even more decide to get dressed again.
Crowbone looked to where Hoskuld’s crew hugged themselves in wet misery — Halk was apart from them now — and looked pointedly at Gorm.
‘How good are your trading skills?’ he asked and had back a wary stare. ‘Let us suppose they are great and we manage to persuade the people of this place that we mean no harm. Let us suppose that, if they had not run off, you might have helped in this and that, as a result, they generously agree to providing a good eating horse in exchange for, say, four new slaves. Seems a shame to wait for all this to work itself out, so we shall take the horse now.’
‘I am no thrall, to be bought and sold,’ Gorm exclaimed. ‘It is against the law to sell a decent freeman as a thrall, never mind a Christian.’
Crowbone cocked his head to one side and curled his lip, having waited for this moment to let Gorm and the others of Hoskuld’s crew know where they stood.
‘I am the law,’ he answered. ‘And no decent Christian, as you pointed out before. You are thralls now, whatever you were before.’
Kaetilmund, on his way back to the stables with two others and a throat-slitting knife, laughed at the look on Gorm’s face — but the Christians, Mar noted, kept their eyes on the floor.
They spit-roasted the best of the pony and had shelter, food and warmth in a storm, which was enough for everyone to feel content. Lolling in the steading, with a good hearthfire and watchers posted in case folk crept up, they listened to the storm whine and shriek, so that it was generally agreed only madmen would come to a war in this. The only fighting was between those jostling for drying space or the last of the horse and, apart from growls and scowls, nothing much came of it.
The wind heightened during the night and only the yellow dog slept soundly, for strong winds made men restless, as did the lurking possibility of armed men arriving. So men checked edges and helmet thonging in preference to sleep.
Gjallandi came to Crowbone after a little while, squatting beside him and nodding to where Berto sat, shivering a little and staring into the flames.
‘I am thinking death sits hard on that boy,’ he said softly. ‘It occurs to me that the man he killed in Hvitrann was his first.’
Crowbone looked, then nodded and Gjallandi moved away. After a moment, Crowbone moved quietly to the side of the little Wend, who jerked from the flames as if stung.
‘It is a hard matter to kill a man,’ Crowbone said and Berto’s deep brown eyes seemed luminous as moonlit pools when he looked in them. He remembered his first killing; Klerkon, the raider who had taken him and his mother and his foster-father. His mother and foster-father dead, Crowbone had been freed from his privy-shackling by Orm who, though he did not know who Crowbone was, had treated him kindly. More than kindly — in Novgorod, he had sent him off with Thorgunna to buy clothes and other necessities, part of which had been a little axe, for the nine-year-old Crowbone had argued that he was a warrior and so needed a weapon.
In the main square of Novgorod, he had seen Klerkon with Orm and Finn and the others — Martin had been there, too. Crowbone did not even see them clearly, did not know then that they had been arguing about momentous events. He simply saw Klerkon.
He remembered the feelings then — a sudden, savage exultation that had taken him across the square with a hop and a skip, for he was too small to reach high, that took him up into the face of Klerkon, burying the axe in the man’s forehead.
It had gone in like a knife on an egg, he remembered as he told this to Berto. He did not tell how that feeling had come back to him night after night for a long time, bringing a strange sick itch to the palm of the hand that had held the axe. He did not need to, for Berto saw it all in the clouded eyes and, suddenly, laid a hand along Crowbone’s wrist.
That stirred the prince from his darkness and he shivered a little, then rheumed some gruff into his voice, for he was supposed to be consoling Berto, not the other way round.
‘Later,’ he added, ‘I killed Kveldulf, the man who killed my mother, in much the same way, but I did not have dreams about him.’
Berto had eyes like the yellow dog when Crowbone glanced at him and it made him uncomfortable — reminded him, in fact, of the Khazar girl he had first lain with and he said so, trying to change the subject. Berto’s cheeks flamed and his eyes grew round.
‘You have had many women?’ he asked and Crowbone considered the matter.
‘The first was the Khazar girl. Vladimir and I called her Bench because she always did it on her hands and knees.’
