knew nothing about axes, which Martin had suspected when he had the man strung up. He had learned since that the man’s name was Olet and that he had been sent, as Martin had thought, by Jarl Kol with the men from Orkney — with the Witch-Queen Gunnhild, he said. She has power, he said, enough to face the goddess of the mountain. He also knew the place Martin sought and, in the end, confirmed it, whimpering.
‘And the enemy?’ Hromund asked after Martin had explained all this, wiping his hands on the uneven, ragged dags of his robe.
‘What enemy?’ Martin retorted scathingly. ‘There are so many Norway men here that these mountain hunters are no threat. Gudrod and the Witch have got ahead of us, all the same — though all that means is that they do all the fighting.’
Hromund scowled at the implied slur on his leadership and was about to bark back when the Sami grunted. They both turned, astonished to see that he grinned bloodily, a horror made worse by his face being upside down.
‘She will take you all,’ he slurred through the blood of his own bitten lip. ‘Ajatar’s handmaiden.’
‘Who is Ajatar?’ Martin demanded at once, for he had never heard Gunnhild called that before. An arrow struck the Sami as he swung, took him in the back and came out through his front in a gout of blood, with heart meat snagged on it. He arched for the last time and screamed.
Hromund and Martin pitched to the snow-covered ground, yelling; men scattered like chickens and there was shouting; someone screamed. Then silence.
By the time men had gone out of the camp to look, Hromund knew it was pointless; no-one would be found, a fact which Tormod stated, his voice a sneer at Eindride, who flushed. The bowman knew he and his men had missed the hidden Sami and marvelled at that — even on this almost bare landscape of tumbled rock and lichen and gnarled, twisted trees, he had not seen them.
Yet he cut the arrow from the dead Olet and studied it, as if it would provide some clue, while the snow whirled in and around them like white bees. A slender shaft, blackened with pitch, fletched with owl feathers. A short arrow, so the bows were wood and sinew, not powerful, but enough, all the same, to kill a man with no protection — or even with if they were shot true.
Eindride had no doubt these bowmen could shoot true. He picked up the bow the dead Sami hunter had been using and saw that it could easily have shot this arrow, noted the soft fur puffs round the string below the bow tips to muffle the sound of the release. Pitch-blackened arrows used on a bow that shot them silently — night hunters, too, then.
‘They do not want us to get to where we want to go,’ Hromund said, as men went back to cooking and making what shelters they could against the snow. Martin, blinking flakes from his eyelashes, grinned his black grin.
‘Up is where we go,’ he said and pointed to the tallest of the mountains, now no more than a shade in the white whirl. ‘Up and fast, to get there just as the Witch finds out that God will not let her have the prize.’
Hromund knew where he pointed, for they had been seeing it for days, the great grim fang of it. He shivered and not just with the cold; the smell of cooking deer mingled with the charred stink of the cross-burned Sami and, suddenly, Haakon’s Chosen Man had no appetite. Worse than that, the mountain they were heading for smoked, a plume curling from the side of it like the tail of a snow wolf.
The drum started to sound like a distant woodpecker, insistent as a racing heartbeat. When the
Crowbone’s Crew
The snow eased, started to fall in smaller and smaller flakes, until it was fine as emperor salt, sifting through the short day into long cold nights dark as raven wings save for the faint flickers of green moving like skeins of yarn far to the north.
Fox fires, Svenke Klak declared and those who had been in the high north before agreed. They heralded plague and pest some said, though Onund grunted like a rutting deer at that.
‘All it means,’ he said, ‘is that a cold is coming that will freeze fire. I had that from Finn Horsehead, who fears nothing.’
Kaetilmund had heard Finn say that once, but it was no comfort, as he whispered to Murrough when they were close together, drip-nosed by fires that never seemed to get them warm.
‘We have little provision for this,’ he muttered, which was only the truth and men knew it, giving the prince harsh glances when they thought he could not see — yet marvelling at how he sat, seemingly unaware of the cold, wrapped in a dirty-white cloak that was too small for him, with a furred collar patched and mangy.
Those who knew told them the cloak had been his first present from Vladimir of Kiev and he had been nine, so it was old, yet precious. He had had it when he, Vladimir, Orm and all the rest of the Oathsworn went into the Great White, the winter steppe, to hunt out Atil’s treasure. Small wonder the youth did not feel the cold, after that.
Crowbone was freezing, but would not show it, not even to Bergliot. He had not wanted to bring her further than Gjesvaer, but she would not be left and Crowbone did not trust Kol Hallson. The old jarl had had more than enough of visitors and Crowbone had come late to the feast, it seemed, for Haakon Jarl’s men, followed by Gunnhild and Gudrod, had all chewed their way through his winter stores.
‘Now there is you,’ he declared and was surly because, though he had heard of Crowbone and the Oathsworn even this far north, he thought the youth arrogant and with no claim to the title of prince at all. Worse than all that was the thought of what was happening in the Sami lands to have brought all these folk and whether there was profit in it that he was missing out on.
‘I have nothing left to give you,’ he said and Crowbone, who had been polite in the hope that Bergliot could be left, lost his temper with the old man, sitting on his High Seat with his great moustaches and his belly and his bowl-cut hair. He looked like a walrus with a bird’s nest upturned on its head, Crowbone thought and made the mistake of saying so.
It had not been entirely wise, as Stick-Starer and Onund and Kaetilmund and all the others had pointed out when they were forced back to their ships empty-handed — Mar simply scowled — until Crowbone bellowed at them to leave him be.
So they did, in a sullen, cold silence, all the way here — which was not even the best harbour for ships. That was taken by many longships belonging to Haakon Jarl and they had scudded past them like a rat looking for a drain, then approached the next seeming safe berth with caution, half-expecting to find the Witch-Queen’s crew. Crowbone did not know whether to be happy that they were nowhere to be seen, or unhappy to think of them lurking a short sail down the coast.
Stick-Starer and a handful were left with the ships and the rest went on towards the mountains; the only one who kept close to Crowbone now was Bergliot, which did not help for it was clear what was going on between him and the woman and men denied the same sweetness and warmth drew their brows down and muttered together with Mar.
‘Not, mind you,’ Mar was forced to admit, bringing bitter laughs from the growlers, ‘that I think I could water my colt there, for I remember her too much as Berto and that has a diminishing effect.’
They struggled into the mountains and came upon spoor almost at once — a snapped boot toggle, a broken horn spoon — that told them they were on the right trail, following northmen, though they did not know who. Others had questions on the subject.
‘Following them to where?’ Mar demanded as they huddled into the long night. ‘For what? For an axe? There is no plunder in this for us — only for this prince we have tied ourselves to.’
He said this to the men from Ireland, all the same, not to his former Red Brothers, or to the old Oathsworn, for he could not be sure that they would listen kindly to him.
Then Vandrad Sygni loped in through the snow with an arrow in one hand and a tunic in the other, neither of them his. The tunic was old and patched and had been blue once, but it was clotted with frozen blood now. The
