Robert Low - Crowbone

Finnmark, A.D. 981

Their skin was already slack and waxen yet unsettling, with meltwater frozen from their final cooling beaded like new sweat. Black and orpiment bruising, red wounds gaping like lipless mouths, black blood thick as porridge crusting in the cold.

One face seemed to be looking at everyone who looked at it, a bewildered question frozen in the glassed eyes. His knuckles were clenched so tight on his belly that the rough pelt he wore oozed between fingers clamped on either side of the great gash, as if trying to force it shut on the blue snakes coiling from it. His hair was wild and uncombed and his nose needed wiping.

Too late for all of that, Crowbone was thinking.

They were tough, these dark little Sami from the snow hills, feared even by the Norse from Gjesvaer, who hunted whale and walrus and ice bears over the northern floes. They knew that the Sami could stalk a man and he would never know it until the bone tip of an arrow came out of his heart.

Even in a stand-up fight they are killing us, Crowbone thought, carving us like chips off a great tree. Men lay not far off, arms folded on their breasts and faces covered by cloaks. Men of skill and wit, gone from boasts and laughter to sacks of clothing, laid out like fresh-cut logs and just as stiff in the cold.

As for the Sami, they had now fought these mountain hunters too many times, but this was the first time they had seen so many of them dead in the one place. The crew moved among them silently, save for a muttered growl here and there, peered and prodded, knelt now and then to search in the blood and splintered bone. They were trying hard to ignore the strangeness of these beast-masked warriors and all the old fear-tales of Sami wizards.

It was Murrough, cleaning the great hook-bearded Dal Cais axe with one of their skin masks, who gave voice to all their fears, as he squinted at one lolling body and nudged it with his foot.

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘and I killed this one yesterday, so I did.’

Island of Mann, A.D. 979

Three sheltered in the fish-reeked dim of the keeill , cramped up and feeling the cold seep into their bones — but only one of them did not care, for he was dying. Though truth was, Drostan thought, glancing sideways at the red-glowed beak-face of the Brother who lived here, perhaps this priest cares even less than the dying.

‘I am done, brother,’ said Sueno and the husked whisper of him jerked Drostan back to where his friend and brother in Christ lay, sweat sheening his face in the faint glow from the fish-oil light.

‘Nonsense,’ Drostan lied. ‘When the storm clears tomorrow we will go down to the church at Holmtun and get help there.’

‘He will never get there,’ said the priest, voice harsh as the crow dark itself and bringing Drostan angrily round.

‘Whisht, you — have you so little Christian charity in you?’

There was a gurgle, which might have been a laugh or a curse, and suddenly the hawk-face was thrust close, so close that Drostan bent backwards away from it. It was not a comfort, that face. It had greasy iron tangles of hair round it, was leached of moisture so that it loomed like a cracked desert in the dark, all planes and shadows; the jaws clapped in around the few teeth in the mouth, which made black runestones when he spoke.

‘I lost it,’ he mushed, then his glittering priest eyes seemed to glass over and he rose a little and moved away to tend the poor fire, bent-backed, a rolling gait with a bad limp.

‘I lost it,’ he repeated, shaking his head. ‘Out on the great white. It lies there, prey to wolves and foxes and the skin-wearing heathen trolls — but no, God will keep it safe. I will find it again. God will keep it safe.’

Shaken, Drostan gathered himself like a raggled cloak. He knew of this priest only by hearsay and what he had heard had not been good. Touched, they said. A pole-sitter who fell off, one or two claimed with vicious humour. Foreign. This last Drostan now knew for himself, for the man’s harsh voice was veined with oddness.

‘God grant you find it soon and peace with it, brother,’ Drostan intoned piously, through his gritted teeth.

The hawk-face turned.

‘I am no brother of yours, Culdee,’ he said, his voice a sneer. ‘I am from Hammaburg. I am a true follower of the true church. I am monk and priest both.’

‘I am merely a humble anchorite of the Cele Dei, as is the poor soul here. Yet here we all are,’ answered Drostan, irritated. ‘Brother.’

The rain hissed on the stone walls, driving damp air in to swirl the scent of wrack round in the fish-oil reek. The priest from Hammaburg looked left, right and then up, as if seeking God in the low roof; then he smiled his black-rotted smile.

‘It is not a large hall,’ he admitted, ‘but it serves me for the while.’

‘If you are not one of us,’ Drostan persisted angrily while trying to make Sueno more comfortable against the chill, ‘why are you here in this place?’

He sat back and waved a hand that took in the entire keeill with it, almost grazing the cold stone of the rough walls. A square the width of two and half tall men, with a roof barely high enough to stand up in. It was what passed for a chapel in the high lands of Mann, and Drostan and Sueno each had their own. They brought the word of God from the Cele Dei — the Culdee — church of the islands to any who flocked to listen. They were cenobites, members of a monastic community who had gone out in the world and become lonely anchorites.

But this monk was a real priest from Hammaburg, a clerk regular who could preach, administer sacrament and educate others, yet was also religious in the strictest sense of the word, professing solemn vows and the solitary contemplation of God. It stung Drostan that this strange cleric claimed to be the united perfection of the religious condition — and did not share the same beliefs as the Cele Dei, nor seem to possess any Christian charity.

Drostan swallowed the bitter bile of it, flavoured with the harsh knowledge that the priest was right and Sueno was dying. He offered a silent apology to God for the sin of pride.

‘I wait for a sign,’ the Hammaburg priest said, after a long silence. ‘I offended God and yet I know He is not done with me. I wait for a sign.’

He shifted a little to ease himself and Drostan’s eyes fell to the priest’s foot, which had no shoe or sandal on it because, he saw, none would have fitted it. Half of it was gone; no toes at all and puckered flesh to the instep. It would be a painful thing to walk on that without aid of stick or crutch and Drostan realised then that this was part of the strange priest’s penance while he waited for a sign.

‘How did you offend God?’ he asked, only half interested, his mind on Sueno’s suffering in the cold.

There was silence for a moment, then the priest stirred as if from some dream.

‘I lost it,’ he said simply. ‘I had it in my care and lost it.’

‘Christian charity?’ Drostan asked without looking up, so that he missed the sharp glitter of anger sparking in the priest’s eyes, followed by that same dulling, as if the bright sea had been washed by a cloud.

‘That I lost long since. The Danes tore that from me. I had it and I lost it.’

Drostan forgot Sueno, stared at the hawk-faced cleric for a long moment.

‘The Danes?’ he repeated, then crossed himself. ‘Bless this weather, brother, that keeps the Dyfflin Danes from us.’

The Hammaburg priest was suddenly brisk and attentive to the fire, so that it flared briefly, before the damp wood fought back and reduced it once more to a mean affair of woodsmoke reek and flicker.