Crowbone

since he had first set eyes on the priest, neatly tonsured, smoothly robed, with a smile that had white, even teeth in it and eyes that welcomed him and Einar to the warmth of Birka’s borg.

Now the crippled mouth spewed curses, the eyes were wild little beasts leaping in the matted forest of his hair and beard. Martin sank to his knees, babbling curses and prayers to his god, beat the ground with his fists; even Finn, Orm saw, was beginning to feel some sorrow.

‘The lance, the lance,’ Martin babbled and Crowbone, halfway to the door of the long hall, turned and held the spear up. Martin’s cries stopped at once, like a bairn handed honeycakes; he seemed to freeze on the spot, fixed on the sight like a hound on a spoor.

‘This stick?’ Crowbone said and raised it. He had never seen it closely before, now felt the heft of it, the fattened end, weighted to bring more power when the spear reached the falling point. The long iron end had gone, of course, but there was a nub of black metal left, a half-thumb of it in the tapered sleeve of the shaft.

A good spear in its day, Crowbone thought and I should know spears. He tested it; it was awkward, for the metal was missing, but he found the balance point, bounced it once or twice, then drew back and hurled it.

‘Take it, then, since you want it so badly,’ he said quietly. It slid through the air, revolving along its length, a perfect, curving throw and Martin rose to meet it, held out his hands as if to catch and cradle it, his face bright, his eyes exultant.

It went through his fingers and into his breastbone, which it cracked like a pry-bar on a ship plank. There was so much force in it that it buried itself deep in him, the last nub end of black metal splitting his heart as if it were a skin bag, slicing through the entire of him and out the far side.

Martin was thrown back by it. The lance came out of his back, to the left of his spine and went into the beaten earth floor, softened to mud by Gudrod’s blood, so that the priest hung on it, his hands grasping at the air, his face turned to the sky and his mouth working.

‘Iesu,’ Martin wheezed, his hands scrabbling bloodily on the shaft, his voice fading to dust and moth wings as he gasped.

‘Dimitte nobis debita nostra, libera nos ab igne inferni.’

‘What’s he say?’ demanded Finn hoarsely, staring fixedly at the choking, dying Martin. Arnfinn and his men had all taken a step or two back from the impaled monk and they made frantic cross-signs.

‘A prayer to keep himself from Hel’s hall,’ Orm replied, then looked dully at Crowbone, stunned by the sudden death of the bane of his life.

He was gone. Sixteen years, Orm realised suddenly, since the Norns had woven Orm and Martin’s threads into the weave of life and the rushing flood of images that broke on Orm’s mind almost drowned him. Martin, lean and smooth and urbane in the polished hall of Birka; hanging upside down on the mast of The Fjord Elk while Einar’s Truth Knife whicked his little finger off; burned by the Serkland sun; sitting beside the blood-eagled ruin that had been Starkad in an old church of the Constantinople Romans; hobbling off into the snows of the steppe; sly and black-toothed in the main square of Kiev.

Gone. All his plans and viciousness, gone like smoke. Orm shivered and shook himself back into the Now, stared astonished at the youth who had done it, easy as throwing.

Crowbone shrugged, then looked at the stunned Orm and Finn, took a breath and puffed out his cheeks.

‘You should have done that years since,’ he declared. ‘If you ever planned to play the game of kings.’

EPILOGUE

Sand Vik, Orkney, the next day …

The three of them stood on the sighing shingle watching their men load the ships. They had just been to see Martin kisted up in a stone-lined grave, the spear lying on his breast; only the three of them and Adalbert had witnessed it and, after mumbling what words were necessary, he had started asking Crowbone about the spear. Orm wondered how long the grave would lie undisturbed.

‘What of the axe?’ Finn asked and Crowbone grinned.

‘It will end up with Haakon Jarl, of course,’ he said and the other two looked at him quizzically. Crowbone ticked the matters off on his fingers.

‘Already Arnfinn and his brothers are shouldering each other to have it, even before the blood of Gudrod’s head is wiped clean,’ he told them. ‘When they have ruined each other for it, Haakon Jarl will move in and take it from them and Orkney, too, perhaps — much good may either do him.’

‘Why do men want it so badly if all it brings is ruin?’ Orm wondered aloud and Crowbone’s smile was scornful.

‘For one it will bring victory. The worthy one.’

They looked at him then and it was clear who he thought that Yngling hero was.

‘I shall take it back from Haakon’s hand, together with the throne of Norway,’ Crowbone added blandly. ‘He is not the one worthy to marry Odin’s Daughter — but I will prove my worth by taking Haakon’s High Seat with my own strength and fame. Then Odin’s Daughter will be worthy of me, as well as me of her. Together we will make an empire in the north.’

Orm smiled back at him, a little sad twist of a smile.

‘Make sure you get it before that axe goes all the way home to that goddess. I am thinking you may not survive another encounter with the Sami.’

‘Especially their new goddess,’ Finn growled and then stopped, shaking his head.

‘That was a poor way to treat a Wend woman,’ he added.

Crowbone’s glance was cool.

‘I am after thinking it was no good matter with her,’ Finn persisted, squinting and rubbing his iron beard. ‘It seems she had feelings for you and did not take kindly to becoming the next goddess of the mountain.’

‘Fear and love are fox and dog,’ Crowbone said and his voice was a chill down their necks. ‘They do not walk well together and so it is best to choose one or the other. In balance, it is safer for princes and kings to be feared than loved.’

Then he sighed and shrugged.

‘I am sorry for it, all the same,’ he added, killing their sympathy in the next second. ‘I could not persuade the yellow hound to leave her. I will miss that hound — but I hear there are good ones to be had raiding the Englisc these days.’

They watched him slosh, boot-careless through the half-frozen shallows, and be hauled up into the ship where his Stooping Hawk banner flew. Oars clattered and the drakkar sloughed away through the grue of ice, men yelling and setting a blood-red mourn of sail — in time, Crowbone had told them, he would paint the ship black too, and call it Shadow.

It was an echo of the Oathsworn and their Fjord Elk, but a distant one that left Orm more forlorn than comforted.

‘May the gods save us when he becomes Norway’s king,’ Finn grunted, then scrubbed his beard.

‘Ireland, is it?’ he said and Orm smiled grimly. Ireland and Thorgunna.

‘Digging an unwilling wife out of a Christ place in Ireland,’ growled Finn, shaking his head and following him to their own ships.

‘It might well be safer following bloody Crowbone.’

HISTORICAL NOTE

Eric Bloodaxe was the second king of Norway (930–934) and the eldest son of Harald Fairhair. One theory for the wonderful name is that he quarrelled with his other brothers and had four of them killed. My own is that the name (Blotoks) translated as ‘blood axe’ but is probably more accurately rendered as ‘sacrifice axe’ — the Old Norse equated sacrifice with blood — and I liked the idea of such a weapon, thought to be the treacherous gift of Odin.