‘He is kin to Harald Bluetooth,’ Crowbone offered brightly. ‘The wife he took pains to introduce us to is Bluetooth’s daughter and the sister of the Svein who was at King Eirik’s feast.’
He stared into the astonished faces, then innocently up into mine and I knew now what he had been doing, while seeming to play the eyebrow-batting boy with the womenfolk.
Bluetooth was not a name you ignored lightly, as Gudmund persisted. Finn spat and pointed out that we had been ignoring Bluetooth for years, had stolen his ships and killed his men and were none the worse for it, which cheered everyone, for they knew we were going upriver, no matter what.
Then Onund cleared his throat, which he always did before he said something important and we all stopped, thinking it would be ship talk and being as wrong as a two-headed cow.
‘If it is such a bad thing to be going upriver, for the trouble it will cause the brothers of Joms,’ he rumbled thoughtfully, ‘I am wondering why they let Randr Sterki and his dogs go up?’
TEN
Having hurled the axe of that into the middle of us, the hunchback laid out the saga of how he had found out about Randr. While we spoke with Pallig, he had gone off to find decent wood to fix the steerboard and quickly found an entire steerboard, in good condition, which he thought was ship-luck.
A few traders further on, as he looked for just the right cut of ash wood to make an elk prow for the ship — Crowbone shifted and scowled at that part of his tale — he had found good nails and ready-cut ship planks, far better quality than he would have expected in a place such as Joms. Then a trader said it would be better to have a whole prow rather than go the trouble of carving one and showed Onund one he had.
‘So I asked him where he had it from,’ Onund told us. ‘I had to be firm with him, too, for he was reluctant. I picked him up by the heel and hung him for a while until he spoke and we concluded the business. I was pleased to have done it with no violence.’
That got him chuckles and I wished there was no feasting that night, for I wanted to be away as fast as supplies could be loaded, if for no other reason than to avoid the results of Onund’s firmness with a trader.
In the end, Onund was shown the source of the snarling dragon prow he knew well — we all knew well. On the far side from the settlement, wallowing half-in, half-out of the weak Baltic tideline, stripped to the ribs and the keel and the charred strakes no-one wanted, was what was left of Dragon Wings.
‘We should go to Pallig and his brother,’ Finn growled after this news was out, ‘and use your little truth knife on them.’
Those who knew of the truth knife, which whittled off body parts until the victim stopped lying, agreed with relish and I felt the little, worn-handled blade burn where it nested in the small of my back. It had belonged to Einar the Black once and had served me as well as it had him, but there was no need for it now.
‘Randr Sterki had ship-luck to make it this far,’ I pointed out. ‘He would be coming to have it out with Ljot for leaving him and I bet he had more men bailing than rowing by the time he ran Dragon Wings ashore here.’
They nodded and growled assent to that.
‘What of the hoard they had from you?’ demanded Finn of Onund and the hunchback shrugged, a frightening affair.
‘If he did not take it with him, then it is scattered through the settlement,’ he answered. ‘And so lost to you, Orm — these rann-sack pigs took every last rivet from the wreck.’
There would be no hoard found, I was bitter-sure, for Randr would have used some of it to buy supplies and one of those tree-carved riverboats. The rest would be either with him or buried secretly and I had no doubt a deal of it went to Pallig, for no balm soothes like silver.
‘Why is he going upriver at all?’ Finn had asked. That one was easier still; to get Koll and the monk. The monk, in Randr Sterki’s hate-splintered eye, either owed money or blood or both and the boy was my fostri. He would want the boy alive, would know I was coming after him with Crowbone. All his enemies, sailing straight towards the revenge he was not yet done with.
‘He did not take the lesson from your last story,’ I said to Crowbone and he shrugged.
‘I will tell him a harder one, then,’ he growled back and everyone laughed at his new, deep voice, so that his cheeks flushed. He looked at me, those odd eyes glittering like agate.
‘I have a thought on how to get Styrbjorn away,’ he said, then inclined his head in a gracious little bow.
‘If my lord is pleased to hear it,’ he added and folk chuckled. I heard Finn mutter, though, and did not need to hear it clearly to know what he was saying: that boy is older than stones.
‘A prince’s wisdom is always welcome,’ I said and he grinned his sharp-toothed mouse grin and then laid it out. It was a good plan, put him at the centre of matters and at no little risk — which was what the fame-hungry little wolf cub wanted — and gave the skill and strength of it to Finn. I looked at Finn after Crowbone had finished.
‘Can you do this?’
Finn’s grin was the same one seen an instant before fangs closed on a kill and folk chuckled at so eloquent an answer with not a word spoken.
It seemed less of a good plan in the flickering red roar of Pallig’s feasting. He sat on my high seat flanked by two big men in ringmail and helms who scowled at having to miss the best of the feast because of this duty. Pallig beamed greasily while his men growled and gorged and threw bones at one another, or grabbed the female thralls who stumbled in with platters of mutton boiled outside in a stone-lined pit heated by rocks.
I sat on a bench directly across the pitfire from Pallig, horn-paired with Crowbone for the feasting. None of my own men were here and Pallig knew why — they were with the ship, pointedly kept there because I did not trust him. I had already noted that, while Pallig’s women were clustered round him, there was no sign of Ljot, nor of the two bearcoats, last of the beasts, it seemed. Styrbjorn, his mouth in a thin, tight line, sat clenched in on himself on a lower bench and far enough away from the door that he could not make a run for it if he chose.
A skald had been wintering here, a man with a lean face and a body thin as gruel. His name was Helgi and he claimed the by-name of Mannvitsbrekka — Wisdom-Slope — though it was clear any deep thinking he had was long since slid away, for he persisted in trotting out the same old stuff he had most likely been giving them for months. Even the commands of Pallig failed to stop men deep in their ale from flinging bread and bone at him.
Crowbone looked at me with his odd eyes and grinned his mouse grin. Then he stood up.
‘I have a tale or two,’ he said.
Silence fell almost at once, for the marvellous tales of this man-boy were fame-richer than my own supposed heroics. Graciously, Pallig waved a hand for him to continue.
Crowbone told tales of Dyl U’la-Spegill, which was perfect for the audience he had. They were old tales and still told today, for the laughter in them. Dyl U’la-Spegill is sometimes a youth, sometimes an old man and his very name is as much a whispered mystery as runes; there were those present, I saw, who fancied Crowbone was Dyl U’la-Spegill himself and I could not have refuted it if asked, for he held them as if enchanted.
‘Once,’ Crowbone said into the silence, ‘there was a man down on his luck — we shall call him Ljot — who was given a piece of bread. Hoping this was a sign from Asgard’s finest, he went to the market stalls and begged, thinking some meat or a little fish would go well with his bread. They all turned him away with nothing, but Ljot saw a large kettle of soup cooking over the fire. He held his piece of bread over the steaming pot, hoping to thus capture a bit of flavour from the good-smelling vapour.’
Folk chuckled — those, I was thinking, who knew how it felt to be that hungry. Pallig glared them to silence.