Robert Low - Crowbone

Later, as he stumbled from the hall, the rain and battering wind were as much of a relief as goose-grease on a burn.

The coast of Frisia, a week later …

Crowbone’s Crew

It was no properly straked, oak-keeled drakkar , but the Or-skrei?r was a good ship, a sturdy, fat-waisted knarr with scarred planks and the comfort of ship-luck. It had carried the trader safely from Dyfflin to Hammaburg and elsewhere — even back to the trader’s home in Iceland. Hoskuld boasted of its prowess as it hauled Crowbone and his Chosen Men out of Hammaburg to the sea, then west along the coast. The Or-skrei?r , Swift-Gliding, was Hoskuld’s pride.

‘Even when Aegir of the waters is splashing about in the worst way,’ he declared, ‘I have never had a moment’s unease.’

Crowbone’s eight Oathsworn, jostling for sea-chest space with the crew and the cargo of hoes and mattocks and kegged fish, found little humour in this, though some gave dutiful laughs. But not Onund.

‘You should not dangle this stout ship in front of the Norns, like a worm on a hook,’ Onund growled morosely to Hoskuld. ‘Those Sisters love to hear the boasts of men — it makes them laugh.’

Crowbone said nothing, for he knew Onund had sourness seeped into him, for all he had agreed to this voyage. The other men were less frowning about matters. Murrough macMael was going back to Mann and possibly Ireland and that pleased him; the others — Gjallandi the skald, Rovald Hrafnbruder, Vigfuss Drosbo, Kaetilmund, Vandrad Sygni and Halfdan Knutsson — were happy to be going anywhere with the Prince Who Would Be King. They were all seasoned Swedes and half-Slavs who had been down the cataracts from Kiev with the silk traders at least once and had sailed up and down the Baltic with Crowbone, raiding in the name of Vladimir, Prince of Novgorod and now Kiev.

Ring-coated most of them, exotic in fat breeks and big boots and fur-trimmed hats with silver wire designs, they swaggered and bantered idly in the fat-waisted little knarr and made Hoskuld and his working men scowl.

‘How do we know their worth?’ one seaman grumbled in Crowbone’s hearing. ‘Who decided on these instead of a decent cargo?’

‘They think we are just barrels of salt cod,’ Gjallandi announced, appearing suddenly at Crowbone’s ear, ‘while your new Chosen Men believe it is a day’s sail, with a bit of sword-waving at the end of it and yourself crowned king of Norway, no doubt. All will find the truth of matters, soon enough.’

He was shaking his head, which made all those who did not know him laugh, for he was not the figure of a raiding man. He was a middling man in most respects save two — his head and his voice.

His head was large, with a chin like a ship’s prow and two full, beautiful lips in the centre of it, surrounded by a neat-trimmed fringe of moustache and beard. The hair on his head was marvellously copper-coloured, but galloping back over his forehead on either side of his ears; when the wind blew it stuck straight out behind him like spines. Murrough said it was not his hair that was receding but his head growing from all the lore he stuffed in it.

That lore and his voice had made his fortune, all the same, first as skald to a jarl called Skarpheddin and then to Jarl Brand. He had left Brand after arguing that it was not right to come down so hard on Jarl Orm for the loss of Jarl Brand’s son — which, according to Murrough and others, showed how Gjallandi’s voice sometimes worked before his thought-cage did.

Now he had come with Crowbone because, he said, Crowbone had more saga in him and the tale of the exiled Prince of Norway reclaiming his birthright was too good to miss. Crowbone had joined in the good-natured laughter, but secretly liked the idea of having someone spread his fame; the thought was as warming a comfort as a hearthfire and a horn of ale.

‘The crowning will come in time,’ Crowbone answered, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘Until then, there are ships and men waiting to join us.’

‘No doubt,’ said the steersman whose name was Halk and his Norse was strange and lilting. ‘Do they know you are coming?’

His voice had a laugh in it which removed any sting and Crowbone smiled back at him.

‘If you know where you are going,’ he replied, ‘then — there they will all be.’

It was clear that Hoskuld had told his men nothing much, which was not sensible in a tight crew of six who depended on each other and the trade they made. Crowbone did not much trust Hoskuld, for all he had come from Mann to deliver his mysterious message — without pay, no doubt, for Christ monks were notoriously empty-pursed.

‘For the love of God,’ Hoskuld had replied when Crowbone had asked the why of this and his face, battered by wind and wave into something like a headland with eyes, gave away nothing. His men said even less, keeping their eyes and hands on work, but Crowbone felt Hoskuld’s lie like a chill haar on his skin. Yet Hoskuld was a friend of Orm and that counted for much.

Crowbone sat and watched the land slip sideways past him while the sea rose and fell, dark, glassy planes heaving in a slow, breathing rhythm.

He watched the gulls. Hoskuld never got far enough from the land to lose them and Crowbone listened to them scream to each other of finding something that moved and promised fish. One perched on the mast spar, heedless of the sail’s great belly and Crowbone watched this one more carefully than the others. He felt the familiar tightening of the skin on his arms and neck; something was happening.

The crew of the Or-skrei?r coiled lines, bailed, reefed sail, took the steering oar and stared at Crowbone and his eight men. He could almost feel their dislike and their distrust and, above all, their fear. Here were the plunderers, pillagers and pagans that peaceful Christ-anointed traders, farmers of the sea-lanes, could do without as they ploughed up and down from port to port.

Here were red murderers, sitting on their sea-chests, talking in their mush-mouthed East Norse way — made worse by all the time spent with Slavs — and eyeing up the crew with almost complete indifference when not with sardonic smiles at watching men work while they stayed idle.

Crowbone knew his eight Chosen well, knew who was more Svear than Slav, who had washed that weekday, who doubted their own prowess.

Young men — well, all but Onund — hard men, who had all, without showing fear, taken that hard oath of the Oathsworn: we swear to be brothers to each other, bone, blood and steel, on Gungnir, Odin’s spear we swear, may he curse us to the Nine Realms and beyond if we break this faith, one to another.

Crowbone had taken it when he was too young for chin hair, driven to it as those desperate and lost in the dark will run to a fire, even if it risks a scorching. He had kin somewhere, sisters he had never seen — but mother, father, guardian uncle were all dead and Orm Bear-Slayer of the Oathsworn was the nearest thing he had to any of the three.

He watched his Chosen Men. Only Onund knew what the Oath meant, for he had taken it long enough ago to have marked the warp of it on his life. Most of the others would come to know just what they had sworn, but for now they were all grins and wild beards in every colour save grey, laughing and boasting easily, one to the other.

Hoskuld, beaming at the way they were skipping along, announced that he had many skills, one of them navigation.

‘We go out on to a big expanse of water dead ahead,’ he added. ‘Land on the berthing side, so you cannot really miss it. After a bit, we turn north. That is to the right. The steerboard side. The hand you use to pull yourself off.’