Robert Low - The Whale Road

Bagnose came in, loping like a weary dog, laid his bow and quiver down and took a swig from a horn that was offered. Then he made a face and spat. 'Water, you arses!'

The men chuckled; Bagnose was a lift to the spirits, the one man who really did thumb his nose at the gods and never questioned that what he was doing was the way things should be. The whale road was as natural to him—and Steinthor—as if they were a pair of the great beasts it was named after.

He grabbed a bowl, hauled out a horn spoon from inside his tunic and sucked gruel into his mouth, chewing gobbets of tough gristle, spitting sideways. We all waited until he had finished, then Einar asked,

'Well, Geir Bagnose?'

Bagnose wiped his glistening beard, stuffed flatbread in, washed it down with another swig of water and sighed, then belched. 'Twenty, perhaps thirty horsemen, those little ones on little ponies. Moving north to east, circling us.'

Ènemy?' asked a voice and Bagnose snorted.

Àrse! Every horseman is our enemy now.'

`Those turds on their dog-horses are not fighters,' said Flosi with a sneer and a spit. `You can fight them off armed with a bladder on a stick.'

Bagnose shook his head sorrowfully. 'Tell me more when they shoot you full of arrows from a distance,'

he growled. 'They'll make you look like a hedgepig, then cut off your little bladder on a stick and shove it in your flapping mouth.'

More chuckles and Flosi acknowledged that they were, it had to be said, nasty with their little bows. But all of us had begged, stolen, bought—or, in my case, inherited—the thick underkirtle for mail. It made movement even harder, but kept the arrows off unless the little nithings got to close range, or you had Loki luck. I wore my father close to my skin and there was some comfort in that.

`Steinthor in yet?' asked Bagnose. Ketil Crow shook his head and Bagnose frowned, then shrugged and held out his wooden bowl for a refill. 'Have you heard this one, lads? Stop me if you have. I flee the deep earth, there is no place for me on the ground, nor any part of the poles . . .'

His voice covered me like a blanket and I drifted off to it before I heard the answer—but I knew it already and it was apt enough. I lay watching the clouds scud in the wind until my eyes closed and I dozed until kicked awake. We moved out.

Two miles further on we found Steinthor. His head, at least, stuck on a short spear, straggled hair and beard matted with blood. A great black bird hopped off it, wiping its beak with quick sideways flicks and completely unconcerned.

Illugi Godi made a quick, chanting prayer, but Sighvat, whom we called Deep-minded and whose mother had been the same, gave a snort of scorn.

`That's a crow, a big hoodie,' he said. 'Any minute it will fly off, widdershins, not sunwise.'

As if in response, the bird flapped off to the left, sluggish with Steinthor's eyes.

Sighvat felt our stares and looked at us, bemused. 'What? All crows are left-handed.'

`Crows don't have hands,' Ketil Crow replied, staring at Steinthor's flesh-flaked head.

`Nothing to do with these,' snapped Sigh-vat, holding up his hands. 'It's all here,' he went on and tapped his head. 'Why do you think you are called Ketil Crow?'

And that was true enough. Ketil Crow was corrie-fisted, a left-hander and a fearsomely difficult man to fight.

Bagnose, however, said nothing at all, just stood by that head looking wildly round for the rest of the body. We all spread out and looked, too, but found nothing and it was my thought that he had been killed elsewhere and the head carried to where we could not fail to find it, as a warning.

Illugi Godi and Bagnose lifted the grisly thing off the spear and put it in a hole we dug. We mounded earth over it but, like the bigger mound we'd left far behind, I had a notion that scavengers would dig it up before we'd gone too far.

It was a poor thing for the likes of Steinthor and, for days afterwards, I kept hearing his voice telling the story of finding me with the white bear, in that other world where I had once been a boy whose biggest adventure was finding a gull's nest with four eggs.

That done, we moved on, reaching the river as darkness fell, but Bagnose was not asked to go scouting again. That night, as we huddled round the small fire, eaten by the crushing dark, we knew there would be no more riddles or saga tales from the dark, hunched figure who sat and stared, not at the flames, but into the darkness.

Even whales die on the whale road.

The endless rolling steppe affects your mind, paring away thoughts until there is little more left than the desire to put one foot in front of the other. At one point I had the sick, dizzying feeling that I wasn't walking forward at all, but that the whole steppe was moving backwards.

I even stopped, to see if it carried me backwards and, when it seemed to do just that, as everyone kept on moving, I cried out with fear and dropped to my knees. It was Wryneck, coming up behind me, who grabbed me by the back of my mail and hauled me upright. As my feet stumbled forward I snapped out of it and turned to gasp my thanks.

The flicker of movement silenced everyone, making all heads turn. Hild, in one strange, fluid movement, stood, the red cloak falling from her. She leaped from the cart and strode forward in her bruise-blue dress, long dark hair whipping in that endless, soughing wind.

We all stared. She strode forward for another dozen paces, then stopped. One arm rose slowly and pointed. 'There,' she said. And we looked. And saw only the endless steppe.

À magic, invisible mountain, is it?' growled Flosi. No one else spoke, but we moved forward to where Hild stood—giving her a wide berth, I noticed, as if she smelled bad.

And we gaped, the shock of realisation coming to us as the steppe fell away into another balka, a big one, dust-dry and spilling out in a steep-sided canyon. Not a mountain. A pit. They had dug a pit into the steppe, a vast thing, big as a city, then mounded the middle of it back up in the shape of a great steppe lord's tent, but still below the original ground level.

`They diverted the stream,' Einar marvelled after we had moved down further. `To hide the entrance, they turned a river across it. This was once . . . a lake, a great pool, with water flowing in there'—he pointed—'and running out there to the Don.'

Everyone marvelled, save Illugi. The godi had not said much of anything other than muttered chants.

Once, in the night, I had seen him by the fire casting his rune bones and muttering to himself and thought then that he was growing as dark as Hild in some ways.

Àtil's howe,' breathed Valknut.

Ìf this one is to be believed,' growled Ketil Crow, moving past him to where Hild squatted. She smiled beautifully up at him and he scowled. 'Cunt to jawline,' he reminded her and moved on.

Einar took us in a scramble down the balka, where it led like a road straight to a cleft in the brooding mound.

Hild, silent and hugged to herself, raised one pale hand and pointed at the stones on either side of it, fat stones as tall as a man, ones you would not be ashamed to rune and set up on a hill in memory. But these, though pocked and scarred, were unmarked; however, Illugi looked at them suspiciously.

`The door,' declared Einar with his wolf-grin, his crow-hair flapping in the breeze. `We can set up camp here and start digging at first light.'

Men found fresh energy, unloaded gear and supplies and rubbed their hands with glee. Round the fire that night there was banter and talk of what they would do with all that silver. There was no doubting it now, for we had all seen the marvel of it.

Ketil Crow and Einar said nothing at all, but sat with their own dreams whirling in their heads. I doubted if they shared the same ones, though.