staves pointing downward and, set across the entrance so that anyone had to step or stumble between them, was a second set of stumps, the ends dark with stains which might just have been old paint. The whole matter had been designed to look like a mouth, gaping open to swallow any who went in and the effect of it was such that it needed only a brace of bored guards, who lolled and leaned.
‘Let me guess,’ Finn said, strolling up to the guards, ‘you can get in on foot only, but not out at all. Am I right?’
They looked back at him with eyes unmoving as boulders, a pair of sweating men in leather with spears and long knives. If they had any humour it was in a locked chest in a deep cellar.
‘If you are selling or buying,’ one said, after a long pause filled with the reedy cries of hucksters, ‘you can come and go as you please. If you are bought and sold, you never leave through this gate, only enter.’
‘Which are you?’ the other asked, after looking Finn up and down. His voice was heavy with greasy dislike.
‘Tell Takoub that Orm Trader is here,’ he said. ‘Also known as Bear-Slayer. Tell him the Oathsworn are at his gates.’
The guards stared back blankly and one squinted, eyeing the pair up and down. They saw a jut-jawed northman with a black and salt beard plaited and ringed with silver, hard eyes and a worn-hilted blade in a scuffed sheath. They saw the man with him, younger by some years, with missing fingers, a scar across his forehead and lines at the corner of eyes that had stared at horrors few men ever looked at.
Seeing no overt sign of wealth the guard sneered.
‘You have heard of the Oathsworn?’ Finn demanded, his chin thrust out.
‘Aye,’ answered the guard. ‘Slayers of dragons and witches, or so I have heard children tell it.’
‘For men who found all the silver in the world,’ the other chirped, ‘you have clearly buried far too much of it and bought far too little.’
‘You should not scoff,’ Finn said to him, stepping closer and squinting sideways at him, ‘with a nose like that.’
The guard raised an eyebrow and touched his neb reassuringly, then scowled.
‘What is wrong with my nose?’ he demanded.
Finn’s right fist smashed it. Blood flew out, the guard flew back with a yelp and landed in the dust, throwing up a cloud of it and rolling over, groaning. The other one, taken by surprise, tried to grab his spear and back away at the same time, only succeeding in dropping the weapon. There was shouting and a deal of screaming from the man with the bloodied nose; Orm could sympathise, for he had had that done to him in the past and remembered the considerable pain.
The clamour had an effect; more men appeared led by a sword-waver, which showed that he had more rank than the others. Before matters could boil over, Orm told him who they were and the captain glanced at the disarmed gate guard, the one sitting dripping blood and then back to Orm.
‘Pick up your spear,’ he ordered the gate guard, with the sort of lip curl that promised the man a deal of pain later for such carelessness.
‘Wait,’ he said to Orm — though politely — and turned to go and find Takoub. Then he turned back, almost apologetically.
‘There would have been less trouble over this had you tried the gate on the far side. This is the Eater of Hope, where only slaves enter and through which no-one leaves.’
‘I said so,’ Finn declared to Orm, grinning. Orm shook his head in mock sorrow.
‘This place will make me remember to pay more attention to your wisdom,’ he replied wryly. ‘And save on noses.’
It was not, in the end, what they would most remember of the place. What they remembered most, when they came to the tale of it later, was the smell — the tented room was cloyed with it, a swirl of strong, spiced perfumes that hazed the still, hot air inside the canopy and, for all its muslin thickness, it had only managed to reduce the stink of rot to a faint thread.
Orm saw two men, one standing, the other swallowed by cushions and swathed in silk that had been drooped over his head and draped round his face, so that only the eyes showed, dark and shifting like rats in a hole.
The standing man stepped forward. He was big, had once been muscled but was running to fat, had once worn expensive silk but had stained and ragged it to near worthlessness. He had grimy hands and put one of them on a jewel-hilted dagger stuck carelessly in a sash-belt.
‘I say we kill them now,’ he growled and looked right and left into the shadows, to reassure himself that his hidden men were near. ‘We have removed their weapons and they will never be more in our power.’
‘You may have removed the weapons you can see,’ said the silk-wrapped man, ‘but this is the Oathsworn. That is Finn, who has at least one blade hidden about him. That is Orm, slayer of white bears and dragons and so favoured by his north god that he was led to all the silver of the world.’
It was rheum-thick, that voice, black with rot and Orm did not recognise it, or him, until the man leaned forward, his breath hissing painfully.
‘Is that boy still with you?’ he asked. ‘The one who axed Klerkon in the square in Novgorod?’
Takoub. It was Takoub the slave dealer and life had not been good to him.
‘Crowbone,’ Orm answered, recovering from his shock. ‘He stuck another axe into Klerkon’s right-hand man not long after. Same style — smack between the eyes. Then he did the same to Yaropolk, brother to Prince Vladimir of Kiev.’
‘He has grown a little,’ Finn added, grinning. ‘He does not have to jump up so far.’
There was a hiss and Takoub slumped limply on his cushions.
‘I dream of that boy,’ he said. ‘I dream he comes, sent by you for what happened to those of the Oathsworn I took as slaves and sold.’
This was blunt and clearly the other man thought so, too, for he growled and spun round to face Takoub.
‘Enough, brother — we can sweeten your dreams with their death, here and now.’
‘Barjik,’ said the whisper-thin voice. ‘Go and do something elsewhere.’
Barjik glared at his brother, then at Orm and Finn and finally rammed his scowl between them and went out, the wind of him trailing the rot and perfume over them like a lover’s fingers.
Takoub forced himself upright, a process of grunts and pain, then slowly unwrapped the silk from his head. Even Finn gasped.
It was worm-pale and eaten, that face. The nose was a collapsed ruin of wet blackness, the lips smeared with blotches, the cheeks looked as if rats had gnawed them and one eye was a shrieking agony of yellow pus. The rot was inside his throat too and made his voice a whispering rasp.
‘The Alexandrine disease,’ Takoub said. ‘There is no cure.’
‘Scale,’ Orm answered, then said it in Greek —
‘I am punished,’ Takoub said, ‘whether by your god or someone else’s is of little matter. But my own god has brought you here to give me some relief.’
‘Aye,’ Finn said before Orm could speak. ‘I could find my hidden blade and give you relief, right enough.’
There was a sound like wings falling and it took Orm a moment to realise that it was laughter.
‘I cling to what is left of my life, pain and all,’ Takoub answered. ‘It would be less bitter if sleep was the balm it is supposed to be.’
‘You want me to help with your sleep?’ Orm asked, bemused by all this.
‘My dreams,’ he hissed. ‘We are traders. I will trade for a lack of dreams. I have what you seek.’
‘You want this as a blood-price,’ Orm said, realising the path this was on. ‘You want to be told that I will not send Crowbone to you, armed with a little axe for what you did to my men.’
There was a rustling, like roaches in straw, as Takoub shuddered and nodded. Strange, Orm was thinking, how sickness and the nearness of death took some people’s minds. Here was Takoub, rank and cunning as a hunting stoat in his day, fearful of the boy he had seen once in the square in Novgorod. So fearful he was seriously bargaining for forgiveness and peaceful sleep, now more precious to him than silver or jewels. He was not to know, he thought, that the Oathsworn he had sold had turned on their former oarmates and had been killed for it.
Fleetingly, Orm wondered where Crowbone was and if he had uncovered the weft of matters concerning Eirik’s Bloodaxe — by now he would have uncovered who Drostan really was and what he had written. If he had had
