Robert Low - The Prow Beast

‘I think the skin is splitting round the stump-bone,’ he added bleakly. ‘If it does, he will not be able to have such an end in the socket of a wooden leg, clever harness or no.’

I looked at Botolf, standing tall, Cormac held giggling and wriggling to the sky. The big man would not like being reduced to the crutch he had endured once before, while the stump healed. He would not like that at all.

Koll broke in just then, his high-pitched voice querulous and demanding.

‘Tell me if what this priest says is true, Jarl Orm, for you have been to the Great City. That people live in halls set one on top of the other.’

I looked at Leo and answered his bland smile, then nodded.

‘Just so,’ I replied. ‘And they have marvellous affairs built for no other reason than to throw water into the air, for the delight of it. And they eat lying down. Much more besides — I shall take you there when all this is done with.’

‘If we live,’ the boy answered, suddenly grim. ‘Leo says the bearcoats are better warriors.’

Leo spread his hands in apology. ‘A careless remark. I had heard such warriors were to be feared because they had no fear of their own.’

‘They will find some when they meet us,’ I answered and Toki, appearing sudden as a squall, declared that Kuritsa would shoot them all with his bow. The man himself, wheezing still, but grinning, agreed from a little way away and Finn chuckled.

‘By the time this is all done away with,’ he declared, ‘we will have to give Kuritsa a new name, I am thinking. And put Prince at the head of it.’

‘Hunter will be title enough,’ Kuritsa replied and I marvelled; already it was hard to tell this man from the droop-headed, silent thrall he once had been. ‘I can shoot an arrow for miles and still hit true. Even round a corner. Such a thing once saved my life.’

Koll and Toki, bright-eyed and struck silent, watched him. Finn, grinning, sat down and others gathered. Kuritsa, lean-faced, shave-headed, hirpled to the wagon and sat heavily by the wheel.

‘Before I was taken, in my own lands, I was set upon by the Yeks, a tribe who hated us. They were many and I was one and was, I admit it, hunting in their lands — so what do you think happened?’

‘You were killed, for sure,’ chuckled Botolf, leading Helga and Cormac to where they could listen, ‘for there are times when you work like a dead man.’

‘Not as dead as some, I am thinking,’ answered Kuritsa smartly. ‘I was lucky. I had my own bow with me, one I called Sure in my own tongue. Sometimes the power of that bow frightened me, for I lost many arrows and sometimes wondered whether one that vanished from my sight hit a friend in the next village, or a king in another country. It took me a time to get the grip of that bow, but after a while, I could hit a fat deer as far as I could see it — though I might have to turn half-round if it were a pair rutting, to be sure of hitting the deer and not the stag.’

Finn laughed out loud at that one, slapping his thigh with delight, then waved Kuritsa to go on, while the others, child and man both, listened open-mouthed.

‘Well,’ Kuritsa said, ‘I spotted an elk far off — so far off it was no bigger than a tiny beetle and I pointed at it, so that the skin-wearing trolls of Yeks stopped and looked while I nocked an arrow in Sure and took aim. I waited until the tail twitched out of sight over the hill, then I shot — allowing for the breeze and a touch of snow in the air.’

Botolf and Finn collapsed at this point, howling and wheezing. I could make out, between the grunts and snorts, the words ‘allowing for the breeze’ and ‘snow in the air’. Kuritsa, haughty as a jarl, ignored them.

‘I persuaded those Yeks to go over the hill, with me as prisoner, on the promise that if they had elk meat at the end of it, I could go free. They agreed, for it was on their way and it took the best part of the rest of that day to walk it — but there was the elk, my arrow in him and dead. They were delighted at having the horns and the meat and so let me go.’

‘A fine shot,’ Finn said eventually, spluttering to halt. Kuritsa shook his head sorrowfully.

‘It was that moment when I knew I was cursed — not long after, of course, the gods allowed me to be captured and taken into slavery. I have not shot such a long shot since.’

‘Why?’ demanded Botolf. ‘Did your gods order it?’

Kuritsa sighed. ‘No, my own failing eye and hand. I had aimed for the heart and there was that old bull elk, gut-shot in the worst way. I was ashamed.’

‘Yet you shot today,’ Toki pointed out into the chuckles following that and Kuritsa shrugged.

‘Not so long. At that range I can shoot the balls off a clegg.’

‘Do cleggs have balls, then?’ Koll demanded, frowning and Kuritsa, serious and unsmiling, shook his head.

‘No horsefly has any when I am around with a bow.’

It was good laughter, washing away the lurking horrors of eight bearcoats and lasted well into the rattle of skillet and cauldron, while the sun staggered out from behind clouds and showed me the rain, small-dropped and fine as baby hair.

It was a good evening and you would not think we were hunted folk at all, so I thanked Freyja for that moment of goddess-peace.

Of course, it did not last until morning.

I woke to screams and fire, scrabbling for a sword and cursing the sleep out of me; then a soft voice I knew well told me to put on a tunic and stop shouting.

Thorgunna squatted by a goat, working the teats relentlessly into a bowl. It was dark, but there were fires everywhere it seemed and the place bustled with movement and purpose; somewhere, a woman moaned and then yelled aloud.

‘Why are you milking a goat in the dark?’ I asked, still stupid with sleep and Thorgunna, grunting with the effort of bending, jerked her head in the direction of the yelps.

‘Her waters broke. I need the milk to bathe the bairn in.’

The mother-to-be appeared a second later, out from where she had been moved for more comfort, which had banished me and all the other men to find sleep and shelter where we could. She moved ponderously, splay-legged, held up by Aoife on one side and Thordis on the other.

‘She has no strength,’ Thordis hissed. ‘She needs a birthing stool.’

‘Aye, well,’ grunted Thorgunna, sharp as green apples, straightening with the bowl of milk held in the crook of one arm. ‘It was a thing I forgot in all the confusion of finding things for food and shelter in a hurry, with my husband’s enemies at my heels.’

I shrugged into my tunic, seeing the fires lit in a circle to keep the alfar at bay, for there is nothing those unseen, flickering creatures like better than stealing a newborn wean and leaving one of their own twisted wee horrors.

Ingrid appeared, dripping blood from her hands and the other women fell back a little in deference. She came up to the moaning Sigrith and clasped her rune-cut, bloodied palms on the queen’s joints, to give her strength and ease. I knew Ingrid was Hestreng’s bjargrygr , the Helping Woman for all the steading’s births, which role had some seidr work in it, too; Thorgunna and her sister, I knew from old, had no seidr in them at all.

‘Jasna…’ moaned the queen.

‘We cannot support her and deliver the bairn,’ Thordis insisted. ‘Especially at the last.’

I knew this was when the mother got on her elbows and knees, the bairn delivered from behind. Ingrid moved busily, undoing knots and loosening straps and buckles where she saw them, another spell to ease the birth. The women’s hair was also unbound, tucked into their belts at the waist to keep it out of the way.