‘I wish you had not spoken of the woman and the dead ox. Things were clearer to me out on the whale road, when we followed the prow beast and everything we owned was in a sea-chest.’
Finn’s head came up at the reference to the woman and the dead ox and he looked from me to Botolf and back. Then he grunted and hunched himself against the cold memories.
‘Well, we have fame, land, women and bairns,’ he spat angrily. ‘Odin’s gifts. Should we spurn them, then, because of what we are?’
Botolf shrugged. ‘What we were,’ he corrected sullenly. ‘Now we are the ones raided and our women are likely to be humped on a dead ox.’
‘Be dumb on that,’ Finn savaged. ‘What do you know? Look at you. You do not even possess the thought-cage of a mouse. Where would you be without Hestreng? Without Ingrid and little Helga Hiti, eh? That is your wyrd, for sure, and running back to the whale road after the prow beast will not change what we are now, nor what we once did. Aye — and may do again, for I know myself to be a vik-Norse, until they burn me up as a good Odinsmann.’
I was astounded; Finn, above all others, had been the one muttering and raging against the shackles of land, women and bairns. Botolf sulked at Finn’s rage, not knowing that it was because Finn was the humper in the story of the woman and the dead ox. Finn, for all his bluster, was aware that it was that, in part, which had brought Randr Sterki down on us — aware, also, of the threat to little Hroald, the son he did not know what to do with.
‘You should not say such things to me,’ Botolf muttered. ‘About not having the thought-cage of a mouse.’
‘Just so,’ agreed Finn poisonously. ‘I take it back. You do have the thought-cage of a mouse.’
‘Enough,’ I managed to say at last and then coughed and spat; pain lurked, dull and hot in my chest. ‘I am thinking we will not have thought-cages at all, if we do not act. I am thinking Randr Sterki will not be content with claiming a victory over the Oathsworn and stealing some chickens and pigs. Not a man who brings bearcoats and Roman Fire with him.’
‘Aye, right enough,’ agreed Botolf, mollified by what he saw as Finn giving in.
‘What do we do, then, Orm?’ Finn asked. ‘It will be a sore fight whatever you decide.’
I shot him a look, for he did not even try to hide the cheerful in his voice. I did not like what we had to do. We had to find out what was happening and to do that someone had to get close. Since there was no flaring fire, the great longhouse was not burned and that was because Randr and his men were using it — so someone had to sneak into the hall and find out what all this was truly about.
They looked at me in the dark, one whose idea of stealth was not to roar when he charged, the other who was half a bench; it was not hard to work out who had to be the fox.
Finn handed me his seax, as if to seal the bargain.
No starlight. A limping moon that stumbled from cloud to cloud, driven by the same wind that whipped the tops off waves and drifted sand through the grass. We moved, soft as roe deer towards the shadowed bulk of Hestreng hall and the lights scattered about.
For all his size and lack of leg, Botolf could move quietly enough and the sand muffled the thump of his timber foot, while Finn crept, shoulder-blades as hunched as a cat’s. We stopped, licking dry lips and sweating like fighting stallions.
The harsh stink of burned wood hit me and I saw the looming shadow, lolling like a dead whale, slapped with soothing waves — Dragon Wings, beached and blackened along half its length. Botolf made a bitter laugh grunt in the back of his throat at the sight and we moved into the lee of it, where the wet char stink was worst and the shadows darkest. Beyond, rocking at its tether near the slipway, was the second ship. I did not recognise it.
I sat down to pull off my sodden boots and handed them to Finn — then we froze at a sharp, high sound. I knew that sound well, that mating fox shriek of frantic fear; someone was being hard-used by pain.
I looked at Finn, then Botolf, then slid towards Hestreng hall, feeling the wet wool of my breeks chafe and tug, the sand sliding under my feet, sharp with shell and shingle. My ankle burned, as if it had one of Ref’s hot nails through it; an old injury, like the stumps of my missing fingers, which itched maddeningly; I knew what Botolf meant about his leg.
I found what I sought and made sure no-one was in it — then I climbed on to the lean-to roof of the privy and up on to the hog-back hall roof. My soles were stabbed by wooden slates I was willing not to crack or creak as I crabbed across it to where the crossed gables with their dragon-head ends snarled blindly up into the night.
There I paused, shivering as the wind keened through my wet tunic, yet sweating. Then I grabbed one of the dragon-heads and swung over into the dark, square pit of the smokehole, just wide enough to take me in onto a beam. Voices growled up through the blue reek that told me the pitfire was still lit.
It was a strangeness, this having a smokehole at either end rather than in the middle and had been done by the previous master of the Hestreng longhouse, a Dane, before he had backed the wrong side. The twin holes had merits — sucking reek the length of the hall and high into the rafters, killing vermin and smoking hanging meats, for one — but none better than letting me slide unseen into the shadows along the roof-trees.
I slithered in, surprised at what it took to squeeze silently through; I had not realised the breadth of shoulder on me and was still a skinny boy in my head. Just as well, or I would have been too afraid to even try this.
The voices were louder, the blue reek stung my eyes; someone had opened the further door, driving the pitfire smoke up, spilling it out of the hole at this end. I touched the hilt of the seax sheathed in my lap and fought to keep my breathing shallow, while my heart pounded and my throat and eyes stung; it had been a time since I had done anything this foolish or daring.
Up in the ash-tainted dark, I perched like a raven on a branch and looked down into the fire-lit dimness, edging forward slightly, one hand on the cross-beams over my head for balance. Below me hung whalemeat and cheeses and fish, smoke-blacked and trembling on their lines; I stepped more softly still — then froze, smelling the mouth-wetting scent of roasting meat wafting in from the outside breeze.
Nithings. Odin curse them to the Nine Hells. They were spit-roasting my brace of oxen in my own cookhouse and, at last, I was bitten by the sense of loss of what was mine. I had some fifteen male thralls somewhere, most of them scattered into the night, shivering and weeping — those oxen cost more than twelve of them to buy and more than all fifteen to keep.
That was because they turned more land than harnessing fifteen thralls to a plough — and now they were greasing the chins of hard raiding men. I tried not to think of it, or of the times I had done it to others, or the dying ox in a yard on Svartey. Instead, I squinted down into the fetid dim of the hall.
I saw a huddle of men and had a heart-leap at the sight of them; two were Red Njal and Hlenni, not dead, but sitting with their arms clasped under their raised knees, wrists bound. Another was Onund, naked and strung up by the thumbs, gleaming with sweat and streaked with darker, thicker fluids. A fourth lay smiling two smiles and seeping blood through cloth wrappings; Brand’s luckless steward, Skulli, whose throat had been cut in his sickbed.
There was litter scattered, what was left after men had plundered the place, and I felt a cutting pang at the sight of eider feathers sprayed like snow; Thorgunna’s favourite pillows, which she would mourn.
There was a man I did not know sitting on a bench with an axe and a sword nearby. He chewed bread, which he tore idly from a chunk, and he was smeared with black — wet charwood, I was thinking, from where he had fought a fire earlier. There was the red line of a helmet rim on his forehead and brown marks on his nose from the noseguard iron-rot.