tired yellow light of a dying day, questing here and there after the trail like a bat among moths.
They came on a line of slow cattle, the drovers wisely hiding until they knew who came up on them, stepping out suddenly from behind trees to stand, packbags on their backs, while Congalach shot Irish at them and had it fired back in measure. Eventually, he turned to Crowbone.
‘Two handfuls of men passed them a quarter-day ago,’ he said. ‘They tried driving off a beast or two, but were bad at it and gave up. They have one of their number with a bow and the shafts for it.’
‘That will be Lief Svarti,’ Mar said. ‘He is as good with that weapon as he is with his little-headed axe, so we should be wary.’
Crowbone almost asked why the drovers had not fought back, then thought better of it; they were not fighting men and the cattle were not their own, but belonged to Gilla Mo and were meant for feeding his army.
‘What’s ahead?’ he asked Congalach and had a squint look and a shrug in return; the man was fretting over his son, Maelan, who had wanted to come with them and had been refused. Crowbone knew already that Congalach found it hard to refuse his boy anything. Besides that, Congalach had been sent to shepherd these Norse and did not care for the task.
‘Not much,’ Congalach growled. ‘The Boinne, which we do not wish to cross, for that will take us too close to the Dyfflin Norse. We are out in front of the whole army here.’
Crowbone heard the annoyance in his voice and offered the man his two-coloured stare, seeing the truculent twist to Congalach’s jaw and the rain pearling off his black moustaches.
‘Then that is where they are going,’ he said, seeing it clearly. ‘They are Norse themselves and will arrive with news that will make Olaf Irish-Shoes smile.’
‘What news?’ demanded Congalach, blowing rain off his moustaches.
‘Numbers,’ Crowbone explained patiently. ‘That and how the High King has drovers with cattle, which means he has prepared not only for a fight at Tara but for a siege at Dyfflin.’
Congalach was impressed despite himself, but pretended scepticism; he knew numbers only as others did — a handful, some, many and, finally, enough to run away from.
‘What can folk like those know of numbers?’ he snorted and Crowbone sighed, wiping the drops that ran round the rim of his helmet and down the nasal.
‘Gorm and his men are traders,’ he answered patiently, ‘who can tally in at least three tongues. Unlike your Irishers, they can do it without the need to take their boots off and use their toes. Olaf Irish-Shoes is a king, so he knows the worth of this. I am a prince, so I do also.’
You are nothing much at all, so you do not understand it, was what was not said, though Congalach felt the lash of it and hunched bristling, though he could find nothing to say as they rode. He saw the Burned Man and the yellow dog questing ahead and thought them as ugly a brace of animals as any he had seen. Then the light turned to pewter and, finally, to white.
‘We should seek shelter out of this,’ Congalach declared suddenly, reining sideways into the face of Crowbone’s pony, so that it shied away and tossed its head high and hard enough to almost hit Crowbone in the face.
‘You seek it,’ Crowbone replied sourly and jerked the reins hard, turning the pony off after the faint shape of the yellow bitch, a small sun in the white. He saw a figure ahead and thought it was Berto, since he and the dog were never far from one another; behind, he heard Congalach spit out some Irish and knew it for a curse.
Something snaked through the white, a little blur, fast as a whirring bird. Congalach gave a sharp cry and fell; men yelled and milled uncertainly.
Crowbone was bewildered, heard the yellow bitch baying, saw it contract its whole body as if to squeeze the yelping howls out of it. A second bird whirred, struck his helmet and rang his head like a bell, so that he jerked hard away from it.
The pony reared and almost flung him off. Arrows, he thought. Lief Svarti …
He was a sack on a horse and he knew it. When the pony lost reason and bolted, all he could do was hang on grimly, jouncing on the saddle. He went past two figures, panting and seemingly locked together; one was Berto — then they were gone behind him into the mist and he half-turned to try and see, almost pitched off and clung round the pony’s neck as it sped off.
It seemed a lifetime and a half to Crowbone but the ride ended as he had known it would — the pony came to something it could not go through or over and simply veered sideways, pitching Crowbone off. He crashed into something which splintered under him, hit the ground hard enough to drive the air out, rolled over and over, feeling the sword batter down the length of him, the hilt gouge his ribs.
There was a moment when he knew he had just woken, but had no idea if he had been out of it for a minute, an hour, or longer, for the world was still white and his body ached so much he thought the pony might have galloped back and forth on him for malice.
It was nowhere to be seen, though something loomed out of the pearling mist. He was lying at the foot of it and, as he started to climb to his knees, wincing and checking for bits broken, he saw it was a great stone cross with a ring round the join of it, one of those Christ runestones, worked with panels showing scenes from their sagas. Every inch of it was covered and there was a little steading house carved right on the top, a representation in stone of one of those boxes Christmenn kept their saint bones in.
Under him he saw wood, new-white where it had broken and realised he had crashed through a rough fence and rolled to the foot of the cross; he looked up at it and wondered if this was an omen.
‘I would not move at all were I you,’ hissed a voice and Crowbone jerked, which he realised in the next second had been the wrong thing to do; the steel felt wet and cold against his neck. His helmet, he saw, was some feet away and the ties on it had snapped.
‘I will be after slitting you, so I will,’ the voice said and this time Crowbone got control of himself. It was a slight voice and he squinted sideways to see the hand that held the steel; a small fist, white round the knuckles with gripping.
‘You are holding that too tight,’ Crowbone offered politely. ‘For if someone did this …’
He rolled and whipped one hand up, cupping the little fist in his own and squeezing. There was a sharp cry and then Crowbone had the knife in one hand and the front of a tunic in the other.
It was a boy, with a snub nose, a shock of flame hair and a face as red as the arse of a sunburned pig. He glared back at Crowbone, rubbing his hand, truculent rather than afraid.
‘Who are you, then, who sticks a knife at the throat of a prince of Norway?’ Crowbone demanded and the boy wriggled a little until he saw the grip on his tunic front was not about to slacken.
‘Echthigern mac Oengusso,’ he said, then added defiantly. ‘My da is lector here.’
‘Odin’s arse,’ Crowbone snarled. ‘Do you folk have no easy names to call yourself? And where is here? And what is a lector?’
The boy told him, his voice slightly strained until Crowbone eased the pressure on his throat a little. Mainistir Buite was the place, a monastery where Echthigern’s da read the tracts and lessons — lector, Crowbone was told, was the Latin that meant ‘reader’.
‘Will you kill me?’ demanded the boy at the end of this and Crowbone cocked his head a little at him and grinned.
‘Why for would I?’ he asked and the boy blinked once or twice, suddenly seeing the odd-coloured eyes for the first time and not liking them much.
‘Because the rest of your heathen Dane kin are in the church,’ he answered bleakly, then his lip trembled. ‘My da is there.’
Crowbone let the boy go and he sank, rubbing his throat and looking up into Crowbone’s face.
‘No kin of mine,’ Crowbone said. ‘I am here with King Gilla Mo’s men to hunt them down, so you can show me where they are.’
‘You fight for Brega?’ the boy declared, grinning and hopeful. ‘But you are a Dane.’
‘Not all Norse are Danes, boy,’ Crowbone answered climbing to his feet and fetching his helmet. He winced as he tested various muscles. ‘Not all Norse care for the Dyfflin king, either.’
The running figure took them both by surprise; the boy yelled and Crowbone whirled, cursing and trying to drag out his sword. The figure burst forward, a dark stain out of the mist, stumbled over the ruins of the fence and then skidded to fall at Crowbone’s feet.
Crowbone looked down and saw the white, frightened face of Berto looking up.
