them with icy talons. The sky was still blue, scudding with white clouds and the great rolling white expanse they had just come up folded away behind them. If Erling squinted, he could just make out the ships, slithered half up out of the grue of ice that wanted to be the Tana River.
‘Jiebmaluokta,’ Gunnhild said, her breath smoking out from under the veil she wore, a contrivance of silk that showed only her eyes, old as a whale’s. She turned her whole upper body, swathed in a white-furred cloak of grey- blue trimmed with red; another swaddled her legs so that only the sealskin toes of her boots peeped out and she had hands thrust in a great muff of white fox. The chair she sat in like a throne had poles thrust through it and the four men who carried her now knelt at each one, panting like dogs.
‘What?’ her son replied, distracted. This place was already cold and the guide, a Sami supposedly friendly, had disappeared. Gudrod did not like that much.
‘Bay of Seals,’ Gunnhild answered dreamily, ‘in the tongue of the Sami.’
Erling, vicious with hate for her and afraid she might know, thought bitterly that she was the only one enjoying all this. Well, apart from Od, who crouched like an adoring hound, staring up into the veiled face, wrapped in a wolfskin she had given him. Erling did not like the way the boy fawned on her.
Gudrod did not much care what this place was called. When they had heaved six ships into Gjesvaer, old Kol Hallson had welcomed them well enough, but pleaded to go lightly on his stores.
‘Haakon Jarl’s men have already eaten me out of half the winter,’ he moaned. ‘Now there is you — what is so interesting here that brings both Gudrod Eiriksson and the king of Norway’s men to Finnmark so late in the year?’
He had been warily respectful when Gunnhild was brought in to the fire all the same and did not stint on his stores after that, though it seemed to consist of whale and walrus and salmon. Gudrod learned that eight ships of the king of Norway had come to Gjesvaer two weeks ago, led by Haakon’s Chosen, Hromund Haraldson and including the king’s favourite, the thrall Tormod. There was also a Christ priest, Kol recalled, whom no-one liked the look of.
‘Is there to be war up here, then?’ he asked, alarmed. Gudrod soothed him, for though the steading was small, with almost no men and only three ships, it was the only decent shelter for days in any direction.
Kol lent them Olet, a broad-faced Sami who traded seal and walrus with him. He had, he confessed, offered the man to Hromund and Tormod, but they had refused, because the Christ priest said so. The priest knew the way, Kol said, clearly curious to know where the priest and everyone else seemed to be going. It was clear to Gudrod that this Christ priest was the Drostan everyone had heard of, though he was puzzled why the letter had been written by a priest called Martin and sent to Jarl Orm of the Oathsworn.
Another contender for the prize, Gudrod thought moodily and was not about to tell the Sami guide where they were headed before they left, which was two days later. He did not need Kol adding his interest to the crowd chasing the Bloodaxe.
Kol and the Sami guide made it clear, however, that chasing anything in Finnmark was beyond foolish — it was late in the year for plootering about up the Tana; the long night was closing in and the day scarcely a flicker.
Now Olet the Sami had vanished and Gudrod was hunched like a stunted tree among the rocks, two hundred men shivering around him and the mist trailing hag-hair over them. Somewhere ahead and heading for the prize was Haakon Jarl’s crew and the mad Christ priest, but Gunnhild was certain that they would not get the goddess to part with it. That needed her, she claimed, though Gudrod saw that no-one was happy hearing the word ‘goddess’; such magic did not sit well with them.
There was a movement off to one side and men tensed, weapons up; Olet wraithed up, his gait odd, as if he was trying to avoid leaving anything like a mark and the odd furrows and holes he shuffled into existence in the snow seemed to lack any destiny and collapsed as soon as he had passed.
He slid out like a tendril of the mist and moved through the knots of men to Gudrod’s side, where he took a knee and wiped his face, thick with bear grease against the cold.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Up ahead are some trees and a little hunting hut. There are reindeer everywhere, those big-horned ones, females fat against the winter. Someone will be watching over them.’
Gudrod did not doubt it; he had felt eyes on him for some time and the place was not helpful — grey rock patched greenish red with lichen, cut with gullies and sudden drops where water was turning to porridge, studded with icing tarns, stuck with little wizened trees like claws, clotted with early snow. He stood up and waved scouts ahead, to right and to left, then started forward, his presence dragging everyone else.
Erling rose up, stiff and cold. If he had known what Gudrod was thinking, he would have agreed and added in the reindeer, which scared him shitless, since they could hardly be seen at all except at the last and stood and stared instead of running off like sensible beasts. The fact that he was afraid of them did not help his mood.
After a toiling climb, they came to the hut, a low affair of stone, the roof a wither of old summer growth and branches. Beyond, a line of stunted grey trees hung with a witch-hair of frost-covered lichen, twisted themselves to the skyline; in the summer, Erling thought, they would be bright and there would be cloudberry bushes too …
Gudrod grunted, as if the sight had slotted something into place and now the whole cunning tiling was clear. In fact, he was now thinking it was time to give this up for the day, for plootering about in the sleet and mist as the dark grew was not sensible. Yet the night already seemed interminable.
‘Did you see Hrapp? Kjallak?’ he asked, naming the leaders of the scouts he had sent out, but Olet shook his head.
‘Well,’ said Erling, looking at him. ‘There is the hut. At least we can shelter from the cold in it.’
There were some two hundred men here; twenty under Hrapp scouted to the east, a similar group under Kjallak to the west, while Olet alone skulked out in front. There were more men back with the ships and Erling, turning to look, swore he could see the red flower of their fires and envied them.
Gudrod did not like the hut, for the mist was closing in and they were going to be stuck there for the night, which was not a prospect with much flavour in it. He said as much, turning to his mother, and Gunnhild, snapping like an annoying dog at the men who were lurching her too much, glared embers through her veil and said: ‘Well, you are the man for the leading here — so lead.’
He hated her and feared her, yet he had seen her power, knew it well. She wanted him a king and he had thought he had wanted that, too, like all his brothers — but all his brothers were dead.
‘I am after getting cold here,’ Erling said pointedly and Gudrod blinked out of the thinking and into his scowl, then nodded. He signalled; men moved forward.
They were creeping-soft, as cautious as rats approaching that hut, along the length of the stream which slid past it, heavy with ice. It started to snow, fine as querned flour.
‘Look lads,’ said Ozur Rik, pointing with his spear. They followed it, shaking sweat and meltwater from their eyes to see the reindeer skins pegged out on a wooden frame. They were only half-frozen, newly flayed, a simple domestic task that showed the place had been occupied only recently — perhaps still was.
‘A proper cured one of those would be warm,’ a man growled.
‘The hut,’ Gudrod reminded them, more harsh than he had intended and men hunched hastily under his frown. From somewhere in the misted trees came a coughing bark; those who had heard it before knew it as one of the reindeer, but most thought it was a loose hound.
‘Hold the dog,’ a man called Myrkjartan shouted, which caused chuckles, for it was the traditional greeting you gave to announce to a hov that you were no threat, even though you were arriving as a stranger.
Then all the animals of the stunted wood rose up on their hind legs and howled down on them out of the misted trees.
Crowbone’s Crew
The snow lay clumped on the sand, packed and powdered where the water had not melted it away; pools crackled with ice, luminous in a world of eldritch moonlight almost clear as day. The world seemed filled with the flicker of
To the left, Crowbone saw the bulk of the fort that gave the place its name, perched on a headland reached by a narrow neck. It had many names — Torridun, in the days when Sigurd of Orkney had come and pillaged it. Torfness, too, after the way the people who lived here cut up turves that burned like wood or coals.
