arrow was strange, black and fletched with owl feathers. Crowbone, sitting with the yellow dog and grateful as much for the friendship as the heat, looked at the archer’s face and silently followed him back to where he had found these treasures.
He led them to a small clearing in the tumble of rocks, patched with snow and lichen. Men gathered round, looking nervously right and left when they could tear their eyes from what had been done.
‘Killed by arrows,’ Kaetilmund said. ‘Howed up in rocks, as was proper — then some whoresons dug them up.’
‘For the weapons,’ said a man called Thorgils, one of the old Red Brothers. ‘They did that out in the Khazar lands, too, so that we had to break spears and swords and burn the bodies.’
There were twenty bodies and all of them blue-white and bloodless, gashes like lipless mouths, frozen with hands on their breasts, though the fingers had been broken to prise good blades from them.
‘Who are they?’ Crowbone asked and a voice answered, thick and savagely bitter: ‘Norsemen. Like us.’
Crowbone knew it was Mar and ignored it; soon enough, he would have to deal with Iron Beard, but this was not the place.
Onund straightened stiffly from one body and held out his hand; folk craned to see. It was a little ship with a dragon-prow, a neck ornament moulded from pewter and torn from its leather thong. Those who knew the style nodded.
‘Orkney made,’ Onund confirmed and Crowbone stroked his hoar-frosted beard. So Gunnhild and her last son had run into trouble — the thought was warming, though he kept the smile to himself.
It grew colder when they came on more of the same. By the time they had tallied past a hundred, men were working saliva into dry mouths and wondering why they were ploughing on along the same bloody furrow.
The last in this rimed knot of tragedy consisted of thirty-two dead and none of them had been howed up, just left to lie along either bank of a frozen stream, fringed with dwarven, snow-laden pines. Men hauled out weapons and crouched a little, like dogs expecting a kick — unburied bodies meant the survivors, if any, had fled and left them, which meant the attackers were still about.
Then, sudden as a hand-clap, the demons of the mountains came howling out at them in a shower of arrows and throwing spears and a mad, leaping charge. One minute men were turning this way and that, looking at the snow-shrouded tree line, the next, the world was full of shrieking horror.
‘Form! Form!’ bawled Kaetilmund, but some men broke and ran, yelling, sliding, tumbling over and over and cracking themselves on the iced rocks. Those left turned to fight, hard-eyed and snarling, grim as cliffs, sliding towards Crowbone and Kaetilmund like filings to a lodestone.
They took the first rush of spears and arrows clattering on their shields, then lifted their hoared eyebrows and saw the furred faces, ears and whiskers and fanged muzzles. Lesser men would have had trouble — the ones who ran, or wallowed in confusion, died for it — but even the ones who kept facing to the front felt their bowels opening. Dry-mouthed, they had to force themselves to stay rooted at the sight of animals risen on their hindlegs and snarling.
It was Bergliot who ended it. She nocked and shot as the howlers started moving down on the huddled band. The arrow took one of the beasts in the face and there was a yelp of pain; the beast muzzle seemed to come apart and the body fell the other way, a tangle of limbs with a flat face, bloodied and unbearded and undeniably Sami.
‘They are men!’ roared Murrough and, even those whose minds were numbed by the surprise and shock of it were so honed with war that their limbs knew what to do. Arms brought shields and edges up; legs moved and men slid so swiftly together that shoulders were bruised in the clash. Others, too slow to reach the shieldwall, stumbled into fighting pairs.
They are men. The roar went up, a fire that leaped from head to head. They are men and so could die.
There was a skidding moment or two, then, as the enemy felt the new resistance. They were not beasts, as Bergliot had revealed, but men in furs and masks made from the heads and muzzles of animals — wolf and fox and bear, the snarling jowled heads fitted over their own, the little ears sticking up, the withered muzzles bared with loosened fangs; from inside, he saw white eyes gleam.
A few black arrows flew, shot by unseen archers from behind the others; one shaft whirred over the front rank and hit the helmet of a man next to Onund with a clang that rattled him sideways, then it spun off, skittering dangerously over the iced rocks. The beast-men roared up enough courage to hurl themselves on the shieldwall.
Crowbone had his shield on his back, which he realised was foolish, but it was too late to swing it free. He dragged out his sword as the Sami crashed like a wave on the wall of linden shields, then washed round the flanks, shrieking and screaming; a northman spun backwards and landed on his arse, most of his face punched in with a spear — Hrolfr, the
The one who did it gave a fighting roar out of the depths of his bobbing bear mask, a great black and brown affair with puckered eye pits. He hefted the bloody spear — then hurled it through the gap at Crowbone.
No shield — I look like an easy mark, Crowbone thought with snow-crisp clarity as the spear came at him, flexing and spinning, the gore spuming off the iron tip, which grew larger and larger. He saw the pitted head of it, the notched edge as he twisted sideways to let it half pass him. He watched his hand come up, though it looked like it belonged to someone else — then he snatched the spear in a fist, reversed it and hurled it back, all in an eyeblink.
A bad throw, he thought as the spear spun from his hand; I must work on that left, it is weaker than the right. It carved to the right of the bear mask and the man howled with surprise and fear, his eyes following the spear as it clattered to the ground, as if it was a snake about to coil and spring at him.
The real danger stepped in close to him, close enough to see the weathered yellow fangs and old leather lips of the bear jaw, to see the Sami’s sweat and charcoal streaked face deep in the maw of it, the eyes wide and white. Then Crowbone stuck him under the right ribs with the sword, once, twice, three times, hard enough for the round, blunt point to rip him off his feet, on the last blow the beast-man falling away, groaning.
Another turned this way and that, wild and uncertain, so Crowbone closed with him quickly, before he could gather courage and sense round him like a cloak on a cold day. He was larger than the rest of them, Crowbone noted, though still a half-head shorter than any of us. He had the mask of a fox, with the russet ears perked up on his head — more immediately, Crowbone saw that the man carried a good Norse sword and an axe, but by the time Foxmask had worked out what was happening and which one to use, Crowbone had slashed a second mouth for him.
The man fell backwards on his arse, making guh-guh sounds and the blood slicked the haft of the sword, so that it slithered out of Crowbone’s hand as he spun, looking for another to fight.
Weaponless, he crouched and looked wildly around — the yellow dog sped past him, boring in hard and snarling on another of the masked Sami, barging him off his feet and scrabbling to get at the man’s throat. Eventually, Svenke killed the man and stopped him screaming, which was a relief for everyone; by then the Sami’s forearms were shredded by the yellow bitch’s fangs.
They had no belly for it, these little mountain men. A shower of spears and arrows and the sight of them in their beast masks and furs had always worked before, sending Gunnhild’s Orkneymen running and shrieking to be easily cut down.
We are different, Crowbone exulted and howled it out until the cords of his neck hurt, as different from what the Sami had faced before as lambs to wolves.
‘You are Olaf’s men,’ he screamed and the warriors bellowed agreement, slashed and carved their beast- masked enemy until they fled, yelping, back up into the misted treeline. Those chasing them stopped, panting and retching, hands on knees and sweating in the iced air; breath and steam smoked as if the place burned.
Crowbone stumbled over to collect his sword, half-dazedly wiping it clean with snow, while the man whose throat he had slit choked on his own blood, his hands empty of Norse-forged weapons now, grasping like claws as if trying to swim to the surface of water.
‘You have blood on you,’ Murrough noted.
‘His,’ Crowbone answered, jerking his chin at the gargler.
‘That was a wee dunt,’ Murrough said cheerfully, looking round. ‘Now these creatures know who they fight — that was a fine trick with the spear, all the same. Is it hard to learn?’
This was said loud enough for others to hear and they growled out agreements; those who had not seen it
