I nodded to Finn, who raised the torch even higher, as if to see better.
‘Not arrogance,’ I answered into the planes and shadows of his flickering face and jerked my chin. ‘Planning.’
The shink-shink sound of ringmail made him half-whirl, then back to me.
‘Is that an escort you are having there, Jarl Orm?’ called a familiar voice. ‘Or do we have to axe off their heads and piss down their necks?’
I looked at Ljot, his lip-licking face pale under the ornate helm and horsehair plume.
‘Your choice,’ I said easily. ‘What answer do I give Ospak and the rest of the Oathsworn?’
I was so sure of Ljot I was already starting to move round him, sure that he did not have the balls to do this. Bearcoats, though — you should never depend on those mouth-frothers for anything sane.
This one had a head full of fire and howling wolves, for he brought them all out in a hoiking mourn of sound that made me jerk back. Then he flew at the pack of us.
Out of the side of one eye I spotted Finn, hauling his Roman nail from his boot with a wide-mouthed snarling curse while, beyond him, Styrbjorn dived for the shadows and rolled away. Out of the other, I saw Crowbone leaping sideways, fumbling for the only weapon he had, an eating knife.
Ahead, though, was only the great descending darkness of the bulked bearcoat, rank with the stink of sweat and ale and badly-cured wolfpelt. Too slow to move, or reach for the eating knife at my belt, I was caught by him, but his wolf-mad eagerness undid him, for he crashed into me, too close to swing the great notched blade he had.
I clutched at him and we went over, crashing to the ground hard enough to make us both grunt and to drive the wind from me. He scrabbled like a mad beast to get away and stand, find room to start swinging, but I was remembering the fight between Hring and the berserker Pinleg, when the latter had gone frothing mad and chopped the luckless Hring into bloody pats; I clung to this bearcoat’s skin like a sliding cat on a tree trunk.
He roared and beat me with the pommel end, each blow wild, so that I felt the crash of it on my shoulder, then one that rang stars into me and scraped the skin down my face. I tasted blood and knew the end was on me, for I could not hang on any longer.
Light burst in me at the next blow and my head seemed far away and filled with fire and ice. Then something rose up from the depths, a dark and cold and slimed something; for all I knew it well, Brother John’s dark Abyss, I opened myself like lovers’ legs to it, licked the fear and fire of it. Polite, that feral snarl of a place, it asked me at the last, winking on the brim of dark madness.
‘Yes,’ I heard myself say and opened my eyes to where the pallid pulse of the bearcoat’s throbbing throat nestled against my chin. I felt the harsh kiss of his beard on my lips.
Then I opened my mouth and savaged him.
They peeled me from the dead man not long after, but I knew nothing of it. Ljot was dead, with Finn’s Roman nail in his eye and the rest of his men were slashed bloody and pillaged swiftly, for the uproar had caused the rest of the hall to spill out like disturbed bees.
It was the sight of me chewing the throat out of a berserker that had done it, Finn claimed later to the awe-struck Oathsworn. Ljot and his men had hesitated on the spot at seeing that, so killing them had been simple. Then we had all run for the ship and the river, Styrbjorn included.
I knew nothing of it for a long time, only that my body ached and my head thundered and I felt sick and slathered inside. I had felt the toad-lick of the berserk once before, when I had fought Gudlief’s son after he had killed Rurik at Sarkel; I had lost the fingers off my left hand without even knowing it.
At least then I had fought decently with sword and shield and put the madness of it down to excessive grief, for I had thought Rurik my father until he told me the truth two heartbeats before he went to Valholl.
This time, though, there had only been the dark madness and the small-bird pulse of his throat, the taste of his blood in my mouth and the flood of his fear when he knew he would die.
I had enjoyed it.
ELEVEN
Perched as high as he could get, arms wrapped lovingly round the prow beast, Red Njal peered out ahead, looking for the ripple of water that told of hidden snags. He did not try and speak, for the wind took words and shredded them, as it flattened his clothes to his ribs and whipped his hair and beard, so that it looked as if it grew out of one side of his head only.
The oars bowed, the crew grunted with effort, eyes fixed on the stroke men — no-one beat time, like they did on Arab and Greek ships; what would be the point in sneaking up on a strandhogg raid while hammering a drum?
We were not silent, all the same. Short Serpent crabbed, rattling and creaking, up the wide river, which was stippled by that chill lout of a wind, bulling over the floodplain like a rutting elk, sweeping and swirling down the river, crashing through the fringing of trees on both banks.
I stood on the mastfish and smiled and grinned at the rowers, who had stowed their ringmail; half of them were naked to the waist and sweating hard despite that wind and because of it, too — it circled and beat sometimes on the steerboard, sometimes running into the teeth of the prow beast. The wind and the current meant hard work at the oars.
‘We should lay up and wait for the wind to change,’ Crowbone said in his cracked bell of a voice, hunched into his white cloak. I had no doubt that was what he would have done and had the men thank him for it and toast his name in the ale he would no doubt have broken out. Truth was, I would have done it myself if he had not mentioned it, but now he had and so I ignored it — and that made me irritated at myself.
‘We stop when I say,’ I answered shortly and, after a pause, the white-swathed figure stumbled to where he could sit and brood. I glanced at him briefly as he went and caught the eye of Alyosha, watching as always; he irritated me also.
‘Something to say, Alyosha?’
He raised his hands in mock surrender and grinned.
‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I am charged by Prince Vladimir to watch the little man and see he comes to no harm. There is no part in that which tells me to interfere when he is being taught the ways of the real world. He took the Oath like everyone else, save me and Styrbjorn, and now he must settle with it.’
I eased a little, half-ashamed at myself for being twitched as a flea-bitten dog. Crowbone had held to his promise at King Eirik’s feast and the whole crew with him, not a few bewildered to be taking such a binding Oath, but all of them awed by the fact that, having done so, they were now part of the fame that was the Oathsworn.
As godi, I did what was expected with an expensive ram and the whole business was done properly and drenched in blood — much to the annoyance of the competing Christ priests and King Eirik’s embarrassment at having such a ritual done in front of them.
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.
Simple enough for a mouse-brain to remember and harder to break than any chains, even the one that bound Loki’s cursed son, the devouring wolf Fenrir. Yet two handfuls of Odin oath-words were stronger.
At the time, Finn growled and grumbled at the business, certain that Crowbone would get someone from his crew to challenge me for jarlship of the Oathsworn and try to take over. He and Hlenni Brimill, Red Njal and others started taking bets on who it would be, the favourites being Alyosha and the half-sized, black-haired Yan, by-named Alf because, it was said, he was so fast in his movements that you only ever saw him flicker out of the corner of your eye, like one of the alfir.