Robert Low - The Wolf Sea

As if he heard me thinking, there was a query from the darkness, neither Greek nor Arab, but West Norse.

We froze. The query came again, harsher this time, and I heard the shink-chink sound, saw the spark of flint and steel as the guard tried to light a torch. Folk looked at each other, bewildered eyes white in the dark, and Finn growled. He peeled the slavered Roman nail from his mouth, so that I knew he was about to reply

— but then the Goat Boy bleated.

It was as perfect a bleat as any pathetic goat I had heard and he did it twice more. I stilled Finn with a hand on his arm, felt rather than saw his unease in the darkness. A Norseman on guard? Not friend, but foe.

.

There was a muttered curse of annoyance and the guard moved back. Silently, Botolf ruffled the Goat Boy's hair and his grin was white in the darkness.

I looked at the sky, trying to judge how much time we had, but could make no sense of it. The whole horizon was an ugly yellow and the wind had died to nothing.

Odin is the All-Father, the Great God. He is a shapechanger when he is seen at all, but if you want to feel the presence of One Eye, go into a lonely place and wait and listen. I have done it and felt the passing of him through a forest, in the thousands of mysterious sounds and breaths, in the soft sough of wind that blows through the leaves and branches, in the storm-wind that racks trees and shows where the All-Father passes on the Wild Hunt.

But most of all, you'll feel him in the strange and awful stillness that settles sometimes on sea and hill and wood.

It is easy to feel One Eye in a land of mirrored fjords, tumbling ice water, bare, granite cliffs and the hot, heavy pine forests of summer — but that night, on the bare waste of a flattened mountain in Serkland, we all felt One Eye descend in a silence that seemed to suck the air.

Eyes gleamed, looking one to the other, aware in the hackles and creeping of arm flesh that something was happening. Something smacked my bare arm and I jumped, touched it, felt wetness and grit.

Another time, another place. On a rock stairway outside a Hun chief's tomb near Kiev I had been splashed by gritty water from a sky yellow as a wolf's eye.

Dengizik,' I said in Finn's ear and saw his wide-eyed look, saw him remember the Hun chief's name and what had happened there, even as the wind rushed in, flattening the distant flower-fires to the ground.

`Run.'

We sprinted as the world turned to darkness.

The sandstorm had roared in under cover of night from the parched Nabatean hills bloated with heat from the wastes of Zin, flexing muscles all the way from Aqaba.

It seared everything in its path in the long Wadi Araba, shrieking with dancing dust jinn and blurted itself into the Valley of Salt. Then it crushed its massive shoulders between the rusted stones of the Moab and the folds of the Judean hills round the Dead Sea, so that it reared up like a screaming stallion and fell on Masada with hooves of wind and scouring dust.

It sucked the air from lungs, shoving us with huge blows this way and that and howled like Fenris released, while the sun was stillborn and dawn never came.

We staggered like drunks, clung to each other, were bowled over as the wind caught shields like sails.

Scrabbling on all fours like dogs, we clawed to the shelter of the ruined building, scurrying ratlike into the gaping holes in the back walls, hurling down behind anything that was shelter. Anything to get away from that sand-studded wind that drew blood like a lash.

There was light and heat — lanterns and a fire, throwing long, strange shadows on the men round it, who rose up as we crashed in, panting and gasping, stumbling over the rubble litter.

They gabbled in surprise and I heard Greek and Arabic, but all they heard were grunts and hissing steel and it was only when their worst nightmare snarled down on them that they realised these men who had staggered in were not friends.

It was a struggle as short and vicious as most of them were. In the end, eight men lay dead and no one cared how loudly they screamed, for no sound would be heard above the vengeful shrieking wind outside.

Only one had actually managed to get a hand on the hilt of a weapon and that was as he died.

Slack-jawed and heaving, the Oathsworn sank down, heads drooping. I looked round, kicking scattered embers back to the fire. We were in one large room with a huge square of stone in it — an altar, I recognised, to the Roman Christ.

There was one door in and out and it was still shut, though it fluttered and battered against its lintel as the wind hammered it. Sand filtered in from the ruined room we had just come from and the fire guttered, making huge shadows dance strangely on the walls.

`Thor's wind,' muttered Kvasir, then grinned. 'Our Orm weaves his own wyrd, it seems. Perhaps we have found favour with old One Eye at last and he called in a marker with the Thunderer for us.'

Men made warding signs and held amulets to their own gods for protection, for on this night, when it seemed the membrane between worlds was thinner than before, it was not wise to talk of such things.

It was widely known that a man's wyrd — his Norn-weaving — was not set, but could be unravelled.

Einar had believed it and, for a while, it seemed he had succeeded, but boasting of it tempted those three sisters to weave something worse — especially Skuld, mistress of That Which Might Be.

Anyway, I had my own thoughts on the matter. Odin, unless I had misjudged One Eye as a kindly old uncle, had made his purpose clear to me, if not everyone else. I knew what we yet had to face and could not bring myself to tell the others.

Now that we were squatted in this blood-reeked place, looking around at the shadows and the strangeness, men licked their lips and wondered at it.

`The Great City's men made the Christ altar, but before that this was where this Herod kept his thralls,'

Finn told them knowingly. 'He was King of the Jews.'

And he stayed here?' demanded Hlenni Brimill. 'Anyway, I thought the Christ was King of the Jews.'

Finn shrugged. 'Maybe this was another one. Anyway, nine hundred Jewish warriors were once besieged here by the Old Romans, who built that ramp to get to them.'

There was silence, for we had all seen and marvelled at the ramp. As Finn said, it was as if Bagnose had leaned his neb against the mountain, but there were few left who remembered old Geir Bagnose, so his joke fell flat.

Did they win?' asked Botolf.

`Who?'

`The Old Romans. Did they beat the Jewish warriors?'

Of course,' answered Finn, but Kvasir hawked and spat.

`No warriors died here,' he growled. 'That Syrian whore in En Gedi, the one with the wen, told me of this place when she learned that was where we were going. When the Old Romans attacked they discovered no one to fight. All the Jews had killed themselves: men, women and children.'

There was a deeper silence and men tried not to look over their shoulders at the fetches haunting this place.

I climbed into my mail and we waited, watching through the hole in the back wall as the storm thrashed and the dust whirled in and flared like embers in the fire.

It was as dark as I remembered it, gleaming still with those great, age-blackened piles of silver and the throne he sat on was massive. The shackles that had once held Ildico to it dangled from one arm, but of her bones — or Hild — there was no sign.

There was only Einar, sitting on Atil's throne as I had first seen him sitting in Gudleif's at Bjornshafen, bulked by a great fur-collared cloak, one hand resting on the hilt of a straight-bladed sword, turning it gently on its point, the other stroking his moustaches.

Framed by the crow wings of his hair, his face was how I remembered it last in this howe, milk-pale, with yellow-cream cheeks and eyes so sunk they had disappeared into black pits. I had shoved my sword through him at the last, a bloodprice blow for his murder of my father.