Robert Low - Crowbone

Crowbone blinked a little at that; these were the two companions who had come with Orm and Finn and both were prizes for any ship crew. Murrough macMael was a giant Irisher with an axe and always cheerful. Onund Hnufa, was the opposite, a morose oldster who could make a longship from two bent sticks, but he was an Icelander and none of them cared for princes, particularly if they came from Norway. Besides that, he had all the friendliness of a winter-woken bear.

‘One is your best axe man. The other is your shipwright,’ he pointed out and Orm nodded.

‘No matter who pays us, we are out on the Grass Sea,’ he answered, ‘fighting steppe horse-trolls, without sight of water or a ship. Murrough would like a sight of Ireland before he gets much older and you are headed that way. Onund does not like looking at a land-horizon that gets no closer, so he may leap at this chance to return to the sea.’

He stared at Crowbone, long and sharp as a spear.

‘He may not, all the same. He does not care for you much, Prince of Norway.’

Crowbone thought on it, then nodded. Wrists were clasped. There was an awkward silence, which went on until it started to shave the hairs of Crowbone’s neck. Then Orm cleared his throat a little.

‘Go and make yourself a king in Norway,’ he said lightly. ‘If you need the Oathsworn, send word.’

As he and Finn hunched out into the night and the squalling rain, he flung back over his shoulder, ‘Take care to keep the fame of Prince Olaf bright.’

Crowbone stared unseeing at the wind-rattling door long after they had gone, the words echoing in him. Keep the fame of Prince Olaf bright — and, with it, the fame of the Oathsworn, for one was the other.

For now , Crowbone added to himself.

He stirred the silver with a finger, studying the coins and the roughly-hacked bits and pieces of once-precious objects. Silver dirham from Serkland, some whole coins from the old Eternal City, oddly-chopped arcs of ring, sharp slivers of coin wedges, cut and chopped bar ingots. There was even a peculiarly shaped piece that could have been part of a cup.

Cursed silver, Crowbone thought with a shiver, if it came from Orm’s hoard, which came from Atil’s howe. Before that the Volsungs had it, brought to them by Sigurd, who killed the dragon Fafnir to possess it; the history of these riches was long and tainted.

It had done little good to Orm, Crowbone thought. He had been surprised when Orm had announced that he was returning to Kiev, for the jarl had been brooding and thrashing around the Baltic, looking for signs of his wife, Thorgunna, for some time.

She had, Crowbone had heard, turned her back on her man, her life, the gods of Asgard and her friends to follow a Christ priest and become one of their holy women, a nun.

That had been part of the curse of Atil’s silver on Orm. The rest was the loss of his bairn, born deformed and so exposed — the act which had so warped Thorgunna out of her old life — and the death of the foster-wean Orm had been entrusted with, who happened to be the son of Jarl Brand, who had gifted the steading at Hestreng to Orm.

In one year, the year after Orm had gained the riches of Atil’s tomb, the curse on that hoard had taken his wife, his newborn son, his foster-son, his steading, his friendship with the mighty and a good hack out of his fair fame.

Crowbone studied the dull, winking gleam of that pile and wondered how much of it had come from the Volsung hoard and how bad the curse was.

Sand Vik, Orkney, at the same time …

The Witch-Queen’screw

The wind blew from the north, hard and cold as a whore’s heart so that clouds fled like smoke before it and the sun died over the heights of Hoy. The sea ran grey-green and froth flew off the waves, rushing like mad horses to shatter and thunder on the headlands, the undertow smacking like savouring lips until the suck was crushed by another wild-horse rush.

The man shivered; even the thick walls of this steading did not seem solid enough and he felt the bones of the place shudder up through his feet. There was comfort here, all the same, he saw, but it was harsh and too northern, even for him — the room was murky with reek because the doors were shut against the weather and the wind swooped in through the hearthfire smokehole and simply danced it round the dim hall, flaring the coals and flattening flame. It made the eyes of the storm-fretted black cat glow like baleful marshlights.

A light appeared, seeming to float on its own and flickering in the wild air, so that the man shifted uneasily, for all he was a fighting man of some note, and hurriedly brought up a hand to cross himself.

There was a chuckle, a dry rustle of sound like a rat in old bracken and the night crawled back from the flame, revealing gnarled driftwood beams, a hand on the lamp ring, blackness beyond.

Closer still and he saw an arm but only knew it from the dark by the silver ring round it, for the cloth on it was midnight blue. Another step and there was a face, but the lamp blurred it; all the man could see clearly was the hand, the skin sere and brown-pocked, the fingers knobbed.

That and the eyes of her, which were bone needles threading the dark to pierce his own.

‘Erling Flatnef,’ said the dry-rustle voice, rheumed and thick so that the sound of his own name raised the hackles on his arm. ‘You are late.’

Erling’s cheeks felt stiff, as if he had been staring into a white blizzard, yet he summoned words from the depth of himself and managed to spit them out.

‘I waited to speak with my lord Arnfinn,’ he said and the sound of his voice seemed sucked away somehow.

‘Just so — and what did the son of Thorfinn Jarl have to say?’

The moth-wing hiss of her voice was slathered with sarcasm, for which Erling had no good reply. The truth was that the four sons of Thorfinn who now ruled Orkney were as much in thrall to this crumbling ruin, Gunnhild, Mother of Kings, as their father had been. Arnfinn, especially, was hag-cursed by it and had merely brooded his eyes into the pitfire and then waved Erling on his way without a word, trying not to look at his wife, Ragnhild, who was Gunnhild’s daughter.

Erling’s silence gave Gunnhild all the answer she needed. As her face loomed out from behind the blurring light of the lamp he was unable even to cross himself, was paralysed at the sight of it. Whatever The Lady wanted, she would get; not for the first time, Erling pitied the Jarls of Orkney and the mother-in-law they wore round their necks.

Not that it was an ugly face, aged and raddled. The opposite. It was a face with skin that seemed soft as fine leather with only a tracery of lines round the mouth, where the lips were a little withered. A harsh line or two here and there on it, which only accentuated the heart-leaping beauty that had been there in youth. Gunnhild wanted to smile at the sight of him, but knew that would crack the artifice like throwing a stone on thin ice. She used her face as a weapon and clubbed him with it.

‘I had a son called Erling,’ she said and Erling stiffened. He knew that — Haakon Jarl had killed him. For a wild moment of panic Erling wondered if she sought to raise the dead son and needed to steal the name …

‘I have a task for you, Flatnose,’ she said in her ruin of a voice. ‘You and my last, useless son Gudrod and that Tyr-worshipping boy of yours — what is his name?’

‘Od,’ Erling managed and mercifully Gunnhild slid away from him, back into the shadows.

‘Listen,’ she said and laid the meat of it out, a long rasp of wonder in that fetid dark. The revelations left him shaking, wondering how she had discovered all this, awed at the rich seidr magic she still commanded — the gods knew how old she was, yet still beautiful and still a power.