‘You are not worried?’ I managed and she shook her head.
‘No. You brought me because the flatfaced one with the drum told you to. You brought me because the Polanians will want me and you might have to bargain with them. It is dangerous; they will certainly try and take me by force when they find out.’
She had not missed the mark of it, right enough and spoke it in a detached way, as though it concerned someone else. The other fact of it was that, no matter what, she would not get back to her people, far to the east of the Polanians. Yet I was sure she clutched the hope of that tight to her.
She looked at me with her wood-carved look, then dropped those swimming eyes, saying nothing more.
‘Well,’ I said, though it was like pushing boulders uphill, ‘you have listened and watched, I am thinking. Now I need you to talk.’
I needed her to tell me of the river, for we had no guide. I needed to know where it narrowed, or shallowed, what settlements of size were on it and whether they could be trusted and where the Saxlander and Wend forts were. Further up still, I needed to know of the Polanians and what lay even beyond them, up to where the river stopped being navigable by a boat such as Short Serpent.
‘The river runs for days,’ she answered, ‘it runs for weeks. Forever. Here, where it is wide and slow are Wends, on both sides, but they do not live near the river unless there is high ground. They keep sheep and cattle and do not farm much, because the river floods.’
She paused and her mouth twisted.
‘They are sheep and cattle themselves, who do not fight.’
That was good to know, but beyond it Dark Eye was not much use. There was a Wendish settlement called Szteteno further up, where two rivers met and made almost a lake, with islands in the middle. Saxlanders were there, too.
Beyond that — and by the time you could just shoot an arrow from a good bow to reach the far bank — there would be thicker woods and higher ground on either side. The river shallowed once that she could remember, at a place the Slavs called Sliwitz and the Saxlanders Vrankeforde — Free Ford — and there they had built a big log fort.
There were fur and amber traders there, she remembered, but mostly slavers, for both the Wends and the Polanians raided each other and sold the captives as slaves. Beyond that, further into the mountains, was a place called Wrotizlawa but Dark Eye had never been there. The only settlement either of us knew north of that was the end of the Amber Road, Ostrawa.
‘I was young when they took me down this river,’ she added defiantly, seeing my look of disappointment and I nodded and acknowledged it with a rueful smile.
‘This ford — is it passable upriver by boats?’
She frowned. ‘The riverboats are hauled over it by long lines from the bank, but they take everything out to make them lighter. It is hard work and they can do it only because the boats are made from a single trunk. It is stony beneath the water, which comes up over the hub of a cart wheel. Another river comes to it here and there are islands in the middle, where it joins the Odra.’
If we took the steerboard up, Onund said later when I mentioned it, we could also haul Short Serpent over it, though there was a chance we would break its back and the keel would take bad damage.
‘Since we are not bringing it back on to a real sea,’ he added, with a sideways look at me, ‘that does not make much difference.’
I had not mentioned such a matter, of course, but should have known Onund would have spotted it. We would never get Short Serpent all the way upriver and I was prepared to follow this Leo through the Bulgar lands to the Great City if he took Koll there. I said as much and Onund nodded, with no sign of remorse for all his wood-skill.
‘Why all this, then?’ I added, nodding at the half-carved elk-head prow.
‘If we burn this ship,’ he rumbled, ‘I thought to burn her as the Fjord Elk. It is fitting — besides, I am trying to have the fame of being the shipbuilder who has lost more vessels of that name than any other.’
We laughed, though grimly; the tally of lost Elks was growing fearsome. I told him not to say anything to Crowbone and he grunted. That boy, however, had other matters on his mind and came up to me to air them.
‘She will run,’ he said, perched at my elbow like a white squirrel. ‘The first chance she can take.’
I did not need to ask who and he perhaps had the right of it. I asked if his birds had told him what Dark Eye was planning, but he scowled at that, though I had not meant it as a sneer. Still, I told Finnlaith and Ospak to watch as much for the girl escaping as for visitors with their pricks in their hands as we snagged up for the night. There was some daylight left under the pewter sky, so that those who wanted to hunt could do it.
By the time darkness came we were eating duck with the horse beans, with some fresh-caught river fish and wild onions. I broached the ale, enough to put some flame in the mouth but not enough to cause trouble; by the fireglow, men laughed and sang filthy songs, arm wrestled and watched admiringly as Onund Hnufa brought an elk to life out of the ash-wood with each careful paring of his knife.
The night sang with freshening life and Bjaelfi unwrapped a harp. It was really Klepp Spaki’s instrument, but he had given it to Bjaelfi before we left; neither he nor Vuokko came with us, for they had the memory stone to finish and I had no quarrel with that. So Bjaelfi bowed us a tune, which even Finnlaith and his Irishers nodded and smiled at.
‘Though it has to be said,’ Finnlaith added seriously, ‘that while your instrument is like a harp, it is only as like a harp as a chicken is a duck.’
‘For a true harp,’ added one of the Irishers, a great lump of a red-haired giant who, like all of those rich-named folk, was called Murrough mac Mael, mac Buadhach, mac Cearbhall, ‘is a dream of sound which comes from being strung with fine deer gut and plucked, not hung with horsehair strings and scraped, like a sharp edge on the chin.’
‘They are braiding together well,’ Finn noted quietly while the argument and laughter rolled on, his face blooded by firelight and his loose hair ragging in the wind.
‘Save for Crowbone,’ he added, nodding to where the boy sat, scowling at the clever work Onund was making; he did not want to see a new prow on his ship, nor it renamed Fjord Elk.
‘We will pay his price for all this by and by,’ I answered and Finn nodded, then sighed as Bjaelfi bowed his harp and sang on.
Eager and ready, the weeping lone-flyer,
Frets for the whale-path, the heart lured
Over tracks of ocean. Better that from Odin,
Than the dead life he loans me on land.
Those close enough to hear grunted low appreciation and Finn’s soft ‘heya’ was a world of praise all on its own. It came to me then that he was the most content I had seen him in a long time and the moon-shadow of the prow beast that rose suddenly behind him was no accident; Finn was where he was happiest.
Worse was, it came to me with a stab of guilt for all those I imagined labouring away in Hestreng, that I shared the feeling, if only because the Oathsworn were the only family who would not shrink from me completely on learning what I had done.
TWELVE
The wind went to the stern, or died to a whisper and let us make better time over the next few days, though it rained soft and hard, stippling the skin of the water. As Dark Eye had said, we saw no sign of life beyond the tree-fringed banks save in the far distance, but I thought it likely our presence was now well-known. I wanted to find peaceful folk to ask about a monk, a boy and a boat full of hard-faced men.