Styrbjorn did not answer, but Crowbone fixed him with that odd-eyed stare.
‘You would go if you knew what the lad felt,’ he said, in a voice which had deepened considerably since it had snapped free of boyhood. ‘If you were far from home, among enemies, treated as a thrall, thrashed and bound and starved, all that would keep you taking one breath after another was the hope that someone was coming to get you.’
We all remembered, then, the saga of Crowbone’s life to this point — a fugitive from the womb, his father dead. A thrall at six, his foster-father slain, his mother the usage of Klerkon’s camp, bairned by Kveldulf and then kicked to death by him. At nine, he had been freed by me into the world of the Oathsworn, which was no gentle place for a growing boy.
He looked at me and acknowledged that rescue with only his eyes. Now, at twelve, Crowbone’s last foster-father, his Uncle Sigurd, was also dead and, though he had sisters and kin somewhere too dangerous still to visit, he was more alone than the moon. It came to me that this was the reason, more than any, which had made him take our Oath — any family, even the Odin-hagged Oathsworn, was better than none.
‘Aye, such a wyrd would be a sore one to swallow,’ Styrbjorn agreed, then beamed and slapped Crowbone’s shoulder. ‘Skalds would make a fair tale about someone so rescued. You have convinced me that there is, after all, enough fame in it — we will hunt down the little bairn and bring him safe home, even if Orm ends up swinging in a cage here.’
‘A comfort, for sure,’ I muttered darkly and he laughed.
‘Where is Randr Sterki going, I am wondering?’ Finn asked, frowning. ‘I thought he wanted us to come to him, so why is he running?’
For the lack of men, I was thinking. He would want to find a place where there were shiftless swords for hire, for I was betting sure he was crew-light now. I said so and Styrbjorn chuckled.
‘Well,’ he said brightly, ‘in a way you have me to thank for that.’
I could not speak at all, but Red Njal always had a ready tongue.
‘The jarl would favour you,’ he pointed out, his mildness only adding to the venom of it, ‘save that it is unlikely you will survive, even if this Saxlander lord does release us for the Mazur girl. You he wants to keep and play with.’
Styrbjorn’s fear slid under the clear surface of his face and he swallowed.
I could scarcely see their features now; their faces were white blobs in the dim and the glow of the brazier coals seemed brighter now that the dark had raced in like Sleipnir, One-Eye’s eight-legged stallion.
‘If you have a spell to snap this lock, Finn Horsehead,’ I grunted, annoyed by their talk of my Odin-wyrd — and, I confess it, belly-clenching afraid of it, too. Finn chuckled and drew out his iron nail, a slash of black in the grey.
‘No spell, but duergar-magic, all the same,’ he said. ‘I need your leg bindings, Red Njal.’
Slowly, Red Njal unwound one leg. Once they had been fine, green wool bindings, embroidered in red and with silver clasp-ends — but the ends had gone on dice or drink long since and the frayed ends of wool, now stained to a mud-dark with only the memory of embroidery, were tucked roughly in the bind itself.
For all that, he passed an unravel of them over sullenly, one breeks leg flapping loosely over his shoes. We all watched Finn tie one end of the wool length to his nail and swing it like a depth-line, testing weight and knot — then, sudden as a spark, the whole room lit up in blue-white light.
For an instant, everything stood out, stark and eldritch and the barred squares were etched on the far wall. I saw the faces of the others in that eyeblink, flares of fright and bewilderment and knew my own was no different.
In the utter dark that followed, we heard the millstone grind of thunder, slow and low and then a hiss of rain, faint through the high, barred squares. A storm; the darkness had indeed raced like Sleipnir for it was not proper night, this.
‘I came to knowing of this thanks to the rot,’ Finn said calmly, ignoring the light and noise as he adjusted the knot. ‘I like this iron nail, for it has served me well from the day I picked it up. On Cyprus, as you will remember, Orm and Njal, when Orm fought the leader of some Danes in a holmgang. We used nails like this as tjosnur, to properly mark out the fighting boundary.’
The light flared again, flicking him in an instant, frozen image, as he draped the dangling nail through the bars, swung it backwards and forwards a few times, then lobbed it out, trailing the wool binding behind it. The nail whispered through the darkness and slammed on the table, hard enough to leap everything upwards; a wooden beaker fell over on its side and rolled.
The great, rolling rumble of thunder swallowed all sounds of it, seemed to tremble the backs of my teeth and come up through my feet from the floor. Red Njal looked up, just a pale blob of face in the darkness, blooded on one side by the brazier. The brightest thing in that face was the white of his eyes.
‘Thor is racing his chariot hard tonight,’ he muttered. ‘Plead all you please with the gods, but learn a good healing spell, as my granny used to say.’
Thor could race his goats until their hooves fell off, I was thinking, for it hid the noise of Finn’s nail-madness — he hauled it off the table onto the flags of the floor and what should have been a bell-loud clatter went unheard in the grinding of the Thunder-God. Finn pulled it back to him and might just as well have been dragging it over eiderdown.
‘Being iron,’ he said into the silence between thunders, ‘it needed careful attention, but I saw that it did not get the same rot as other things of iron. Swords, for example, and axe-heads.’
‘Different rot?’ muttered Red Njal, with the voice of a man who thought Finn addled. The light flared; Thor’s iron-wheeled chariot ground out another teeth-aching rumble.
Finn swung the nail back and forth and launched it again; one more crash on the table set the cup bouncing off with a clatter. Once more the nail hit the floor with a clang and was dragged back.
‘If your plan was to alarm the guards,’ Styrbjorn muttered, ‘it may yet succeed, despite Thor.’
‘The rot,’ Finn went on, as if Styrbjorn had not spoken at all, ‘on most swords and every axe-head I have seen, is the colour of old blood. Everyone knows that and even the best of swords gets it. It leaches from the metal like sap from a tree.’
Thor hurled his hammer in another blue-white flare. The nail trailed its wool tail through the air and slammed into the table-top again. My bone-handled seax fell off this time — together with the key to the cell lock.
‘Aha,’ said Crowbone. ‘Careful when you pull it off the table…’
He fell silent when Finn jerked the nail off the table and made no attempt to try and hook the key with it — which, I was thinking, would have been a clever trick if he could have managed it, for he would have to somehow get the nail through the ring of the key, if it was large enough even to take it…
‘So,’ Finn went on, winding his nail back to him, ‘I am watching my nail for signs of blood rot and seeing none. Instead, I am finding grit on my fingers, black as charcoal.’
A cold wind through one of the barred squares set the brazier glowing enough to send up some sparks, then trailed fingers through our beards, with the smell of rain and turned earth and escape. Finn bent low and slithered the nail out, underhand, towards the key. It overshot by a few finger-lengths. Again the thunder rumbled and the blue-white scarred our faces into the dark.
‘This, I thought, was also rot, so I scraped it all off first time I found it, then laid the nail down to fetch some fat to grease it with,’ Finn went on, tentatively tugging the nail this way and that with the wool. ‘Yet, when I came back to it, all the grit I had scraped off was back on the nail again.’