Robert Low - The Prow Beast

The Oathsworn wolfed them, snarling and clawing. The last man turned his pony and flogged it back downhill, men chasing him, screaming. Kaelbjorn Rog, panting and sprinting, fell over his feet, bounced up and hurled his axe at the fleeing back in a fury of impotent rage, but it fell well short.

The arrow hissed out, a blur of speed and the smack of it hitting the rider’s back was almost drowned in the great roar of approval that went up as the fleeing man spilled from the saddle. The pony kept going and I knew, with a cold, heavy sink of feeling, that we had failed.

There was a heavy silence, reeking of blood and vomit and moans. Men moved, counting the cost, clapping each other on the shoulder in the sudden ecstasy that comes with surviving a battle, or else retching, hands on their knees and bent over.

Randr Sterki lay flat out, a great bruise on the side of his face and Onund looming over him like a scowling troll. He had made for Randr as soon as the fight started and slammed him in the face with the boss of his shield. Now Randr lay on his back, propped up on his elbows and spitting out teeth and blood.

‘I owe you that and more,’ Onund growled at him, touching his chest where, under his stained tunic, the glassy scars of Randr’s old burning still wept.

‘The severed hand seldom steals again,’ Red Njal pointed out, scowling. ‘And a head in a tree plots only with the wind.’

‘Your granny was never one for a boy to snuggle into,’ Crowbone muttered, hunching himself against the black glare Red Njal gave him in passing.

The rest of Randr’s men, cowed and gasping, sat sullenly, aware that they had leaped out of the skillet into the pitfire. As I came up, Onund handed me a sheathed sword, taken from Randr; it was mine, taken when he had me prisoner and the V-notch in it undammed a sudden, painful torrent of remembering — of my sword biting into the mast of the Fjord Elk , of being slammed into the water, of Nes Bjorn’s charred remains, of the loss of Gizur and Hauk and all the rest.

Randr must have seen that gallop across my face like chasing horses, for he stayed silent.

There was a survivor from the horsemen, a sallow-faced scowler with blood on his teeth and still snarling, for all that he had the stump of a hunting arrow in his thigh and his left arm at the ugly angle only a twisted break would allow.

I wanted answers, but his black eyes were sodden with anger and pain and defiance. Then Dark Eye came up and spoke to him, a string of coughing sibilants. He replied, showing bloody teeth in a snarl. She answered. They shot sounds like arrows, then were silent.

‘He is a Vislan,’ she said. ‘That tribe are all Christ worshippers.’

‘All that for so little?’ I answered and she sighed.

‘He called me names. He calls you all flax-heads, which is what they call the Saxlanders. Barbarians.’

There was more, I knew, but caught the warning spark from her and let Finn erupt instead.

‘Barbarian?’ he bellowed. ‘I am to be called this by a skin-wearing troll?’

‘ Quisque est barbarum alio ,’ said a weary voice and, turning, we saw Leo the monk, with Koll behind him and Thorbrand trailing after.

‘Everyone,’ Leo translated, with a wan smile at Finn, ‘is a barbarian to someone.’

I gave him no more than a glance, my attention on Koll, who came up and stood in front of me.

‘You have fared a fair way from home,’ I said, awkward and cursing myself for not having more tongue-wit than that.

‘I knew you would come,’ he answered, staring up into my face with the sure, clear certainty of innocence. He was thin and his bone-white colour made it hard to see if he was ill or not, but he seemed hale enough. Yet the pale blue eyes had seen things and it showed in them.

‘Well,’ drawled Finn, circling the monk like a dunghill cock does hens. ‘You have led us a long dance, monk.’

Leo acknowledged it with a wry smile. His hair was long and stuck out at odd angles and he had gathered the tattered ends of his black robe up under his belt, so that it looked like he wore baggy black breeks to the knee; beneath them, his legs were red and white, mud-splattered and bloody from old cuts and grazes. He reeked of grease and woodsmoke and did not look much, but I knew he had a needle of poisoned steel on him and said so.

He widened his eyes to look innocent and Finn growled at him.

‘Find a rope,’ Red Njal spat. ‘Make him dance a new dance. The breathless tongue never conspires.’

‘No.’

It came from two throats — Koll’s and Finn’s — and took everyone by surprise, even the pair who had hoiked it out.

‘Kill him another way,’ Finn growled, scrubbing his beard as he did when he was discomfited.

‘Do not kill him at all,’ Koll declared defiantly. ‘He helped me, saved me when the rest of these pigs wanted to sell me to the Magyars. Him and Randr Sterki stood against them.’

I knew why Randr would want to keep the boy, but not the monk and I said so to Leo, who shrugged.

‘I took him as a counter in a game,’ he said diffidently. ‘He still had value.’

Koll blinked a bit at that, but I had expected not much more. I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder, to show him he was safe once more — then Randr Sterki struggled weakly to his feet and growled to me across the trampled, bloody underbrush of the clearing.

‘Well? Will you finish it, Bear Slayer? What you started on Svartey?’

I wondered how many of the Svartey crew were left and wondered it aloud; the answer was straight enough — only him alone. All the others had died and the men of his crew who sat, shivering and sullen, had no connection with that old strandhogg.

‘Kill him and be done with it,’ Styrbjorn said and Randr Sterki curled a lip at him.

‘So much for fighting shoulder to shoulder,’ he answered bitterly. ‘Well done is ill paid, as the saying goes. Here is the dog who fought, the chief who led and the ring-giver who paid — only the fighting dog dies, it seems.’

I looked from Styrbjorn to Leo and back to Randr. He had the right of it, for sure — all of those who had helped the Norns weave the wyrd of what happened were here, including the Oathsworn, who had scoured Svartey in one bloody thread of it.

‘Matters would have gone better for me,’ Randr Sterki went on morosely, ‘but for this bloody habit of slaughter you Oathsworn have. The death of that village you visited has called out an army of Pols, all bent on skewering Northmen — my bad war luck to run into them before you.’

‘Truly,’ agreed Onund coldly, ‘when you annoy the gods, you are fucked.’

Finn added his own bloody growl to that by cutting the throat out of the Vislan and, while he choked and kicked, Abjorn and Alyosha counted the cost of the fight and the heads left.

There were fourteen of Randr’s men left, including himself. We had two dead and four men wounded; the two dead were Eid and the Dyfflin man, whose name, I learned from Thorbrand, was Ranald. Finn could not understand what had made them charge out as they did and asking Thorbrand only brought a weary heave of his shoulders and the answer that he had followed the other two. I thought I knew, for I had felt it myself — little Koll, the prize for all that had been suffered, was in danger of being snapped up by someone else.

It had cost us, all the same and we would need Randr and his men, I was thinking and I said that to them and him. Red Njal cursed and one or two others made disapproving grunts, but I laid it out for them; we were alone and together made no more than sixty. Somewhere, hordes of Pols hunted us.

‘Turn Randr Sterki and his men loose, then,’ Kaelbjorn Rog offered truculently. ‘Let the Pols hunt them down while we get away.’