Crowbone

Crowbone felt her hand on his arm and shook it off, irritated, feeling her stiffen.

‘Together,’ he agreed looking at Orm, though both of them knew that was only until matters declared themselves.

‘I have lost interest in the working of birds,’ he added. ‘I do not fear the Mother of Kings as much as I did.’

‘Dimidium facti, qui coepit, habet,’ said Adalbert from nearby. Orm turned, saw the raw-boned priest, hands shoved deep in his sleeves, cowl up and the beginnings of a good beard. Adalbert smiled.

‘He has done …’ he began.

‘He has done half, who has begun,’ Orm interrupted. ‘I know that one, priest.

‘You keep strange company these days,’ he added softly to Crowbone, who frowned back at him, sullen as slush.

‘Adalbert,’ he declared. ‘He came with me from Hy. To save my soul — “probae etsi in segetem sunt deteriorem datae fruges, tamen ipsae suaptae eniten”. Was that not what you said, priest?’

‘Very good, young prince,’ Adalbert murmured. Orm grinned.

‘At least you will learn the Latin,’ he declared, then looked at Bergliot.

There was a pause, long and awkward.

‘Bergliot,’ she said stiffly, when it became apparent that Crowbone would not introduce her. ‘I am from Wendland.’

‘A thrall,’ added Crowbone, then looked pointedly at her. ‘To a princess.’

Orm did not say anything, though he was sure this Bergliot thought herself more than that and certainly much more than that to Crowbone. He merely nodded and turned away, his heart leaden; he was grown, was Crowbone, but still had much to learn, about love as much as friendships and the power of an oath.

They went on, shedding men like slug slime. The Oathsworn were fittest, almost untouched by the fighting — because, Crowbone thought bitterly, it has all been done for them.

Yet the cold and the bad food did for them all and men were staggering with the shite freezing down their legs, some falling down and begging to be carried even as others begged for death rather than be left to the Sami. Yet others simply vanished, dropped out unseen and unheard.

The ties that bound them all now were a snake-knot tangle of oaths and fear and hope. It kept men from each other’s throats, but did not dispel unease or mistrust — the snow-buried dead braided the tension on them and the last, panting climb to the smoking gash in the mountain twisted fear out of them like water from a tight rope.

It was grim and grey as a hag’s head, with the almost sheer wall of a cliff where they wanted to go and a tumbled ruin of snow behind where rocks breached like the backs of whales, all the way to the faint line of dripping, mist-shrouded pines where the beast-men skulked. No birds sang here and only the dark gash with its pall of rotten-egg stink offered a way ahead. Finn alone took delight in it because it was warm.

‘Warm enough to have vanished away all that fallen snow,’ he pointed out, almost cheerfully, as if that was somehow a good matter. Everyone had noted the warmth that blew fetid from the mouth of the gash in the mountain; it did nothing to make them easier in their minds about entering the place, as Svenke Klak declared.

‘I mean,’ he argued, ‘if the creature laired in it breathes warm enough to turn snow to water for yards, chances are it is not a hare hole we are looking at.’

‘Melts my bowels to water, for sure,’ growled Kaetilmund, then glared at Crowbone. ‘Those oath-breakers without the protection of Odin should be trembling.’

Crowbone soured him with a withering stare. His shoulder throbbed and burned and his head felt light as a ball of air.

‘I did not come here to tremble on the edge,’ he growled. ‘I will go — but if it will make folk easier, then I will go alone and take a first look ahead.’

He had courage, Orm saw — but he had always known that about the boy. It was the rest Orm did not like, all he had learned from Onund and Kaetilmund and the others. He had hoped Crowbone would understand about the Oath, keep to it, use the strength of it, but it was clear that he was too much of an Yngling prince for that. He was not Oathsworn, that was sure — but what he is becoming, Orm thought, is less clear.

‘Best not, prince,’ he advised. ‘That dog can talk and we will need you here, I am thinking. Send someone else.’

The yellow hound was ruffed and stiffly pointing off into the snow haze; men shifted uneasily and started thinking about shields and weapons.

Crowbone moved to the entrance, where the walls rose up on either side and no more than three men could stand abreast — the yellow bitch whined and moaned as loudly as the wind, so that Bergliot reached down and patted her.

‘By the Hammer,’ Finn growled, looking round him at the smoking ground. ‘I hope this is no goddess fud I have crawled into, though it reminds me of a woman I knew.’

‘I was married to such a one once,’ muttered Murrough, which brought crow-laughter from throats dry from fear and twisted with attempts to breathe. Even Bergliot managed a smile, bright-eyed with fear.

Crowbone turned his odd eyes on Klaenger, who groaned a little. Freyja’s tits, he thought to himself, is mine the only face he sees? Yet he had seen the fight with Od and had more respect than ever for this young prince, was sure he was braided for greatness; it only remained to hope that his greatness was not threaded round Klaenger’s doom. Then he put his head down, as if walking into a downpour and plunged into the reeking smoke ahead.

The tension seemed to hiss away then and the men left outside turned away from the cleft, putting backs to the shroud of white and the sick heat of dragon breath, to face the sort of enemy who was almost a comfort now — the dark little Sami with their reindeer skins and beast masks and the desperation of those who have already lost.

They all knew the men were coming now, for even the blind could have seen them flit between the misted trees lower down, had caught clear sight of knots of them skulking cautiously towards them over the open white slide of new snow, so that they did not need the yellow bitch’s fresh warning growls.

There were not as many as before and a lot of them had no masks now, but they still had their little bows and vicious black-shafted, owl-feathered arrows.

‘They will have to come at us here,’ Orm shouted out to the backs of the men forming up, battered, scarred shields ready. ‘Up Finn’s woman’s fud, which he has clearly not ploughed enough, for it is very narrow.’

They snarled out laughter and their backs straightened. The ones in front, The Lost, hunkered their ring- mailed bodies behind shields and the spearmen closed up a little to force their hedge of points through to the front.

Finn folded up the brim of his hat and clapped his helmet over it, then stuck his iron nail between his teeth. Folk chuckled at the sight and Murrough shook his head.

‘I do not see why you bother with that hat, Finn Horsehead,’ he declared, ‘for it has never once nailed the weather the way we want it, so it has not.’

Finn frowned. The battered, rag-brimmed hat was spoil from the rann-sack of Ivar’s steading, him who had been by-named Weatherhat, for his headgear was reputed to ease storms. It was this that Finn had taken and, in all the years he had worn it, he had never, as he confessed, mastered the way of working it. Yet he would not part with it and said so.

‘You should at least tie that helmet under your chin,’ Murrough noted, for Finn simply clapped the dented effort on his head.

Finn snorted. ‘I have broken the neck of many a man using his own helmet,’ he pointed out, ‘and throttled a few more besides.’

Men tying their own helmet-thongs nearby looked stricken and paused. Crowbone almost smiled, but could not bring himself over the edge of it, for he wished his own men were as snarling grim and sure of themselves, of each other, as the Oathsworn.

He looked at his men, cat-nervous and still strangers, yet he took comfort from the fact that they stood, looking to him, oathed to him. He swelled himself up a notch; he was Prince Olaf, son of Tryggve, an Yngling and a chooser of the slain.

‘Do not listen to Finn,’ he bellowed. ‘To break a neck as Finn describes has to be done from behind and so it