‘Useful, too,’ said Oengusso. ‘Who knew that wearing the bone from a cod on your head takes away belly ache before she came? Or the Nine Herb Charm she worked on your head?’
Crowbone looked at her sideways.
‘
‘God love us all,’ Oengusso exclaimed, crossing himself.
‘For ever and ever,’ Thorgunna responded, then smiled at Crowbone.
‘Old healing is hardly
Oengusso looked frantically from one to the other and Crowbone stared at him from under a single brow, his odd eyes glowering.
‘One crow, sorrow, two crows, mirth, three crows, a wedding, four crows, birth,’ he said, then winked at the astounded monk. ‘See what women bring down on your house?’
Oengusso crossed himself again and then frowned, seeing he was mocked.
‘You should not be so hard on women, boy,’ he said firmly. ‘Sure, was it not one who kept my benediction from breaking the egg of your head entire?’
‘What woman?’ Crowbone demanded, puzzled and Thorgunna looked at him and laughed, seeing the truth of it.
‘The one you have clearly imagined to be a boy for some time,’ she said. Then, into his open-mouthed disbelief, she added:
‘The Wend you call Berto. Her real name is Bergliot.’
NINE
Crowbone’s Crew
She walked beside Thorgunna in to where Crowbone stood — still a little pale, she thought, with a lurch. She was wearing a dress for the first time in months and the catch of it round her knees felt strange.
‘You kept the secret cleverly,’ Crowbone said, his face stiff. He had had some time of lying about recovering to recall all the clues he had missed about her, from her unnerving softness to the way she had avoided taking off her wet clothes on the night of the storm.
The strangeness of her was like something seen through rippled water — the face was familiar, like a round owl, the dark hair was down to her ears and raggedly cut, the eyes big and soft. Yet now it all belonged to a girl and not the youth he had thought and the dress she wore, even if it was made for Thorgunna and too large, only accentuated the curves everyone had failed to notice.
‘I wore a few tunics,’ she answered in a small voice, hearing the flat, bitter tone of his own. It would be the shared man-moments, she thought, when he told of how many women he had taken. ‘To hide the shape of me.’
Small wonder, Crowbone thought, looking her over. How in the name of Odin’s hairy arse had she hid those breasts from all of them? Those hips? She saw him stare and grinned, the old grin when she was one of the crew and not a woman.
‘You see what you want to see,’ she declared. ‘I had to hold in my business until landfall a lot of the time. Once or twice I could not and did it in my breeks, but folk just thought me smelly. Like all boys.’
She saw her error in the grim reef of his face and the smile wavered like a faint flame in a wind, then was lost entire.
‘Aye, you hid it well,’ Crowbone said, remembering all the little moments, feeling his face flame at some of them. It explained how he had felt, at least — which was a relief; those moments when his groin had tightened had been for a girl after all. Still, he did not understand how his body had known even if his mind had not and it was more than a little disturbing.
‘Did Grima know?’ he asked, sitting down. ‘Bergliot — is that the name now?’
She saw the strain in him then and made a move; the odd-coloured eyes stopped her like two fists in the chest and she stepped back a little way.
‘Stick to Berto,’ she said, a little more harshly than she had intended. ‘It is easier.’
‘Hardly,’ he answered wearily. ‘Those days are gone.’
‘Do not judge too harshly,’ Thorgunna said softly and he looked at her, sitting quietly with her hands folded in her lap and then shook his head.
‘I have problems enough with the men who follow me,’ he said. ‘They think my luck is flowing from me — they may be right. Now one they thought a comrade turns out to be a cuckoo in the nest.’
‘A cuckoo who saved your life,’ Thorgunna pointed out, but Bergliot saw the truculent flex of Crowbone’s jaw and the centre of her sagged.
‘Grima knew,’ she answered and left it perched there like a crow on a branch. She saw him work through it, his head tilted and thoughtful, as if he was a bird with a beakful of snail and a stone in front of it.
‘He did not touch you,’ he said slowly, weaving it as he spoke. ‘Made out that you were a boy of no worth …’
‘He stumbled on me during a raid,’ she replied flatly. ‘Just him alone. He thought I was someone else, then realised I was not.’
‘Still of worth,’ Crowbone mused. ‘Grima would have tupped you in an eyeblink and flung the remains of you to the others — save that you had value. Made you dress like a boy and keep the secret of it absolute, because he no longer trusted any of them.’
‘A bad matter,’ Thorgunna flung out, ‘when trust is shattered. Who is the betrayer then, little Olaf?’
He looked sharply at her, then back to Bergliot.
‘You went over the side after him,’ he rasped. ‘Why?’
‘Balle would have killed me,’ she answered simply.
‘And who are you, then?’
She shrugged and the tremble in her was obvious.
‘Bergliot. No more. Grima thought I was Geira, but I was only her handmaiden and he knew he had missed the greater prize. His men would have scorned his battleluck, he knew, and would take out their annoyance on me. But I was Geira’s friend, too, so that she would pay to have me back and Grima saw that.’
‘Geira?’ Crowbone asked and Thorgunna put her arm round the girl’s shoulders and drew her away.
‘Geira,’ she said. ‘Eldest daughter of Burisliev, King of Wendland, and a queen in her own right.’
A queen’s close friend. Close enough, Crowbone thought, to be worth something, one way or another and he said as much later, when he went to the men waiting uneasily in the church outbuildings, taking Bergliot with him.
They had already heard the tale of it; some could not look her in the eye as she stood there, wrapped in a warm, fur-trimmed cloak — another gift from Thorgunna, who had not, Crowbone thought wryly, left Hestreng too distraught to forget possessions entirely. Most of the old crew who had been with Grima would not even look this new Bergliot in the face. A few — the Oathsworn gifted from Orm, Crowbone noted — were easier about it.
‘This explains why you are not good with a pole lathe or an axe,’ Kaetilmund declared with a smile.
‘Just so,’ she answered with brittle brightness. ‘Does this mean you will stop calling me No-Toes?’
Kaetilmund scrubbed his beard with wry embarrassment while Stick-Starer and Halfdan chuckled and nudged him. For a moment, she felt the old warmth, then saw the men’s faces as they looked at Crowbone. More was revealed there than the surprise she had presented them with.
Crowbone saw it also, the blank stones of their stares, and had to heave himself up against the crush of it. Well, he thought to himself, if they cannot be made to love me, they can be made to fear, which is the way princes and kings must think.
‘Where are the prisoners?’ he asked and Mar stepped forward, his helmet dangling from his beltline and a spear in his hand. Behind came Kaup and Murrough shepherding a shuffling group whose sorrow and fear came off
