Robert Low - The Prow Beast

After the feasting night for Crowbone, Finn had come to me and asked if the Oathsworn were going raiding after Randr Sterki, though he knew the answer before I spoke. When I confirmed it, he nodded, long, slow and thoughtful.

‘I am thinking,’ he said softly, as if the words were being dragged from him by oxen, ‘that I might have to visit Ospak and Finnlaith in Dyfflin, or perhaps go to find Fiskr in Hedeby.’

The idea of not having Finn there made me swallow and he saw my stricken face. His own was a hammer that nailed his next words into me, even though he said them with a lopsided grin.

‘It is either that or challenge for the jarl’s seat.’

Well, there it was, the fracture cracked open and visible. I bowed my head to it; the curse of Odin’s silver right enough.

‘I will stay for one more season and, if the raiding is good, it may change my mind. If not, I am thinking it best to leave, Orm.’

This would be the third season and, I was thinking, a remarkable feat of patience for the likes of Finn. Yet I was no more certain that this raiding season, which involved a long, uncomfortable voyage up and down the Baltic and sometimes into the mouths of a few rivers, pretending to trade and looking for something to steal, would be any better than the last two. There was seldom anything worthwhile for the Oathsworn, who were choking on all they already had. Yet they trained daily, making shieldwalls and breaking them, fighting in ones and threes, showing off and honing their battle skills. The lure of the prow beast, as the skalds had it, still dragged us all back to the dark water.

Now Finn wanted more jarl-work from me and threatened either to leave or take over. I could only nod, for words were ash in my mouth. After that, the promise of summer sunshine was ominous.

The women bustled the grime and stink out of Hestreng’s buildings and took clear joy in drying washing in the open air; Cormac and Helga Hiti tumbled about on sturdy legs, shouting and playing.

Into this, just after the blot offerings for the Feast of Vali, a ship slid up the fjord to us. I knew about it two hours before it arrived, which pleased me — I had set two thralls to watch in shifts and suffered Thorgunna’s waspishness over it.

‘A waste of work,’ she declared, while she and Ingrid and two female thralls hurled sleeping pallets out. ‘They could be beating the vermin out of these.’

‘I would rather know who is coming to me,’ I answered, ‘than have dust-free sleeping skins.’

‘Tell me that when next your backside is chewed by a flea,’ she spat back, blowing a wisp of hair which had fought free of her head-cloth down onto her nose. ‘And if I am doing this, I am not making butter — you will feel differently when you have to choke on dry bread.’

From this, I knew she was happy that winter was over and that she had life in her — life I would rather see grow than be burned out if Randr Sterki arrived and we did not know of it. I said as much and had her snort back at me but when word came of this ship, I saw her stiffen and turn and start chivvying thralls and Ingrid to fetch the children, gathering them to her like a hen with chicks.

I let her for a while, though I knew it was no threat; the sail was large and plainly marked with Jarl Brand’s sign and unless someone had taken Black Eagle from him intact — as unlikely as wings on a fish — then it was himself coming up the fjord.

He came up showing off, too, the sail flaked down and the oars bending as his men made Black Eagle cream through the sea. Then, at a single command we all heard as we stood watching on the shore, the oars were lifted clear and taken in until only a quarter of their length was left.

Along this sprang a figure, dancing and bouncing from stem to stern; we all cheered, knowing it was probably his prow man Nes-Bjorn, called Klak — Peg — because he was shaped like one, having oar-muscled shoulders, but skinny hips and legs. He could walk the oars with those skinny legs, all the same, swinging from one side to the other on a loose line.

The crew were equally skilled and slid the thirty-oar drakkar neatly to the stone slipway, where the Fjord Elk was propped up, with scarcely a dunt on its gilded side. Men spilled ashore then, shouting greetings to those who went to meet them. Thorgunna sighed, scattered the children and roared for thralls; there were sixty new mouths to feed and precious little left in the stores.

She stopped scowling, all the same, when she found what Jarl Brand had brought. He came off smiling, as usual, bone-white as he had always been, wearing a gold-embroidered black tunic trimmed with marten, fine wool breeks that flared over kidskin boots and his neck and arms heavy with amber and silver.

At his side trotted a boy as white as Brand was and people stared for he was Cormac’s double, only older, at least five; Aoife kept her head meekly down and said nothing. On Jarl Brand’s other side was a strange little man dressed in a black serk to his toes, young, moon-faced and glum.

‘My son,’ Brand declared gruffly, indicating the sombre, white-haired boy. ‘I bring him to you to foster.’

That took my breath away and I was still struggling to suck more in when he indicated the moon-face on his other side.

‘This is one called Leo,’ he said. ‘A Greek monk of sorts, from the Great City.’

I shot Jarl Brand a look and he chuckled at it, shaking his head so that his moustaches trembled like melting icicles.

‘No, I am not turned to the White Christ,’ he replied. ‘This Greek is sent by the Emperor to take greetings to our king. I picked him up in Jumne.’

‘Like a sack of grain,’ agreed the man with a slight smile. ‘I have been stacked and shipped ever since.’

It took me a moment to realise he had spoken Greek and that Jarl Brand had been talking Norse, which meant this Leo knew Norse and also that both Jarl Brand and I understood Greek. Jarl Brand chuckled as I brought Thorgunna, introduced her and had her take Leo into the hall.

‘Watch him,’ Brand said, tight into my ear as the monk reeled away from us, his legs still on the sea. ‘He is more than a monkish scribbler, which he does all the time. He is clever and watches constantly and knows more than he reveals.’

I agreed, but was distracted by what was now unloading from Black Eagle — two women, one young and fat with child, the other older, almost as fat and fussing round her like a gull round a chick.

Jarl Brand caught my stare and grunted, the sound of a man too weighted to speak.

‘Sigrith,’ he said, pulling me away by the elbow. ‘Fresh returned from visiting her father, Mieczyslaw, King of the Polans, and near her dropping time — which is why we are here. King Eirik wants his son born in Uppsalla.’

I blinked and gawped, despite myself. This was Sigrith, splendid as a gilded dragon-head, no more than eighteen and a queen, yet young and bright-eyed and heavy with her first bairn; she was just a frightened child of a Slav tribe from the middle of nowhere.

‘The fat one is Jasna, who was her nurse when she lived with her people,’ Jarl Brand went on, miserably. ‘I am charged with bringing them to the king, together with whatever the queen unloads, safe and well.’

‘That’s a cargo I could do without,’ I answered without thinking, then caught his jaundiced eye. We both smiled, though it was grim — then I noticed the girl at the back. I had taken her for a thrall, in her shapeless, colourless dress, kerchief over what I took to be a shaved head, but she walked like she had gold between her legs. Thin and small, with a face too big for her and eyes dark and liquid as the black fjord.

‘She is a Mazur,’ Jarl Brand said, following my gaze. ‘Her name turns out in Slav to be Chernoglazov — Dark Eye — but the queen and her fat cow call her Drozdov, Blackbird.’