Crowbone

enough you let Haakon’s people go free and kept this festered monk …’

‘Thank you,’ Martin lisped, puffing blood on to the wild matting of his beard. ‘That tooth pained me more than the others.’

Then he smiled, showing the bloody ruin of his swelling tongue and the blood in his mouth.

‘I have had the winter eat my foot to endless pain,’ he puffed at Gudrod. ‘Brondolf Lambisson, whom you never knew and should thank God for it, broke my mouth long since. I have suffered the wrath of my God, little man, and there is no pain the equal of that. Think you are a king in making, a hard man from the vik? My first baby shite was harder than you can hit.’

Crowbone heard the delighted ‘heya’ from behind him. He turned to where Finn grinned, shaking his head with admiration.

‘You have to say it,’ he declared, beaming into Gudrod’s thunder, ‘our Martin speaks true enough. He is the hardest man I know, for sure.’

Our Martin. Crowbone could hardly believe he heard it — there was even affection there. Martin wobbled his head round and fixed it on them.

‘Is that yourself, Finn? Ja, I think so. Orm also must be there. For certain you have sold yourselves to the Devil, to have come this far. You should both be dead.’

‘I know you planned matters differently,’ Orm answered coldly. ‘Good men died for that and there is not much left of you. I have decided that this foolishness between us ends here.’

‘You have decided?’

It was Gudrod’s cracking bone of a voice and his eyes blazed behind it. ‘You? In my own hall, you say this. To me?’

‘Arnfinn’s hall,’ Finn answered with a scowl. ‘You have no hall of your own.’

‘Nor will have if you do not behave like a king …’ Gunnhild interrupted, her voice cracking like the paint on her twisting face.

‘Quiet!’

The thunder of it rang them all to silence and Gudrod stood, his face dark and his whole body heaving with the effort of controlling his anger. His eyes raged at them all and, momentarily, he put a hand to one temple, then let it drop.

‘I should kill you now,’ he declared and sat down, suddenly, like a dumped bag of winter oats.

‘That you can is undeniable,’ Crowbone answered. ‘You will not, of course. Because your mother wishes it and you wish to defy her. Because you wonder if you have the beating of me in the game of kings.’

‘Son, there is danger …’ Gunnhild began and Gudrod rolled his head and shoulders and bellowed incoherently until she was quiet, glowering in the dark, seeing his blood-suffused cheeks and feeling the threads slipping away from her.

‘After I beat you,’ Gudrod said slowly to Crowbone, ‘if you have played half well, I shall keep you for the amusement of it. The others I will kill.’

‘When I win,’ Crowbone countered, ‘I may stay the winter with you, for the amusement of it. The others will go free, the priest with Orm and Finn.’

Gudrod paused for a moment, then shoved the board forward slightly, pushing the axe into the spear so that, for a moment, they nestled together.

‘Choose,’ he said.

Orm watched. He had played hnefatafl, as most northmen of worth did but he was middling fair at it and saw that Crowbone had opted to be the attacker. That gave him sixteen dark counters — taeflor, or table-men — surrounding Gudrod’s eight white-bone pieces, plus the hnefi, the King piece.

The object was simple — surround the King and capture him before he was escorted to safety in any corner, using moves up and down, left and right only. The safety-corner was the Norwegian way of playing, for most folk settled for escape to the table-edge on small boards, allowing the more difficult corner escape for larger boards with more pieces.

At first sight, then, it seemed to onlookers that Crowbone had all the advantages — twice as many men and no easy escape for the hnefi. Yet that was the deception of the game of kings — the King’s men need only arrange for their Lord to escape the board, so the King player must try to capture as many attackers as possible to clear an escape route, while not trying too hard to protect his own men since they, too, can block the King’s escape. He was the chooser of the slain and it did not matter to him how many died, only that the King got away.

The attacker had not only to prevent the King’s escape, but also capture him, which was not as simple as it seemed. The best way was actually to avoid taking any pieces early in the game, instead scattering the attackers so that they got in the way and also blocked possible escape routes.

They played in silence, until Gudrod, hovering over a piece, hesitated and smiled.

‘You play well,’ he said. ‘I am pleased.’

‘You should drink less,’ hissed his mother from the dark, where she gnawed her knuckles and tried to make spells. Crowbone saw her and laughed aloud, making Gudrod turn, scowling.

‘Enough of that, mother,’ he said lightly. ‘He is good and I shall keep him — but I am better and will win without your help.’

‘She has no power over me,’ Crowbone chuckled, hoping it was true. A move later, he stroked his thickening beard and smiled ruefully.

‘Perhaps we should have played brandubh instead,’ he said and Gudrod laughed, hugely enjoying himself. Brandubh was the same game, but played by the Irish using dice; every norther knew that the true game of skill was played without those marked cubes.

Yet the next move, Crowbone announced, as the game bound him to do: ‘Watch your King’, meaning he had the capture of it in the very next move. Frowning, Gudrod managed to avoid the trap and Finn let out his breath and shifted in his seat.

They played in silence for the next few moves. Crowbone looked over to where Orm and Finn sat, tense as birds on a washing line. The plan had been spelled out beforehand, but it now seemed less obvious; he wriggled his toes in his boot, where the dagger nestled. He knew Finn’s nail was down his and that the guards had missed it, too. Three guards only — and Crowbone knew that, no matter what shouts and noise happened here, no-one was coming to Gudrod’s aid in this hall.

How quickly could he pull out the dagger? It did not seem to Crowbone that he would get it out of the boot before the guards saw him and even without them, Gudrod seemed a big, powerful man, which Crowbone had not expected. The idea of pulling a knife on a man that size seemed suddenly ludicrous and Crowbone’s mouth went dry, while the sheath-straps burned round his ankle. Then he saw the shadowed planes of Gunnhild’s cheekbones, the eyes fixed on him, feral as a mad cat and he was sure she was trying to read his thoughts.

‘Passage,’ Gudrod declared triumphantly. ‘Doubled.’

Which meant he had two ways to freedom and Crowbone saw at once that he could block only one. Gudrod watched Crowbone’s face, looking for the moment hope left it and was surprised to be denied that. To provoke it, he added: ‘The King has escaped you.’

Crowbone slumped a little, as if dejected, his hands dropping beneath the table. Then he raised his head.

‘There is more than one way to play the game of kings,’ he said and the knife came out of his boot.

Too slow, too fumbled — and it was the saving of them all. If he had managed it properly and slashed the throat of Gudrod, the guards would have hacked them all to pieces — instead, Gudrod came roaring out of his seat and backhanded Crowbone off the bench to the floor, then pounced on him.

‘You dare,’ he bellowed. ‘You dare this?’

Instead of hacking and slashing, his guards sprang forward to help him; one found himself shrieking and dying with a nail in his eye; half-turning, the other was confused, caught between leaping on Crowbone, or fighting Orm and Finn. He hesitated too long and was piled over by the pair of them.

The third guard sprang from behind Gudrod’s chair to help wrestle the knife away from Crowbone — but a small, wizened figure leaped into his path, not even looking at him, one hand clawing for the table and the spear that lay on it. Cursing, the guard stumbled over him and the pair of them crashed to the ground, while Gunnhild