‘It is a bad habit to get into,’ he declared, ‘this having to be hauled out of water just before you drown.’
Dark Eye, cat-wet and scowling, glared at him and then turned a soulful look on me.
‘I shall try and break it,’ I managed to hoarse back at him and he chuckled at that and the slap from Dark Eye as he reached out a grimy hand towards my nose.
‘That neb of yours is cursed, I am thinking,’ he said and then tilted his head slightly. ‘It is only straight on your face if I stand like this. And it looks flatter than it did.’
If the pain was anything to go by, I did not doubt it, but I was more concerned with what had happened. I had thought him dead, for sure, a thought I shared with him while Dark Eye fussed.
‘I thought the same when I went over,’ he told me grimly and showed me the blue-black welt on his upper arm. ‘That rope seemed set with a life of its own and it took me a while to get clear of it.’
‘Double thanks, then,’ I rasped, ‘for hauling me out.’
He chuckled. ‘Not me. The Mazur girl did that.’
I looked at her and she smiled.
‘I was supposed to save you,’ I said to her and she fixed me with her seal eyes; it came to me then that we were alone, the three of us, soaked to the skin on a patch of wet barely raised above a black swamp where the mud and water oozed and new, sodden reeds stood straight up like hairs on a boar snout.
‘Where are the others?’ I said, sick with the possibilities and scrambling to my feet. I was weary to my bones, my head pounded, my chest burned and the whole front of my face felt seared, but I forced it off; I was ashore and the ground might squelch, but it was solid enough for me to feel safe after that muscling river. There was freshness in the air, too, as if the storm had finally gasped itself out, tangled and shredded in the branches and brush by the tiny sprigs of green. A bird sang somewhere unseen.
‘Back upriver,’ answered Ospak with a shrug, ‘if they are still in the world at all. You and me and that girl were all tangled in the one rope, which is a strange thing. Perhaps the Norns wove it that way for a purpose.’
‘Well,’ I said, pushing the crushing weight of it grimly, like a bad plough, ‘it seems we have a walk back to camp, then, if camp there is.’
I rose, weaving. Dark Eye straightened, wiped the palms of her hands down her sodden skirts and bent to pick up something beside me. My sword, still sheathed, the baldric loop missing a few silver ornaments.
‘I hauled you ashore with it,’ she said in her thin little voice. ‘I had to take it off, for it was round your neck and strangling you.’
I felt the burning welt of that now, too, and fingered it, wondering at the strength in her to have managed that. I smiled and took the sword — Jarl Brand’s sword. At least we still had that and I turned to Ospak and told him so, for the cheer in it.
‘Aye, sure and that’s a good thing, for I have an eating knife only,’ he answered and then tilted his beard off to one side. ‘And they were a worry.’
I followed his gaze and saw the six horsemen sitting at the limit of bow range, watching, resting easy on hipshot horses, bows out and arrows ready.
I looked back at Ospak and then at Dark Eye, whose face was a carving block.
‘Magyar,’ she said.
Which was hardly a comfort.
Two things happened then and it is sometimes strange how such weight as your life can hang on the thinnest thread — a voice understood and a scratch behind the ear.
Dark Eye moved two paces forward and hailed them, in her own Mazur tongue, which it was clear they understood. At the same time, a dog trotted out from the horsemen, a smooth, long-legged loper the colour of old bracken; it headed straight for me. Though smooth-coated, it reminded me of the big grey, wiry wolfhounds that had been with me not long before; we had eaten them out on the Great White and left nothing much more than the paws and I had been sorry for that later.
This one came close and sat while I moved to it, a few paces, no more. It let me scratch behind one ear.
The horsemen shifted then. The leader came forward, his hands out to either side and empty; when he got close, he halted and waited for me to walk to him. The dog followed me.
He was sallow, black moustached, with a clean chin and dark eyes over high cheeks. His hair hung under a fur-trimmed cone and was knotted in hundreds of small braids, like ropes and he wore an embroidered coat over loose breeks tucked into high boots which had what looked like silver coins down each side.
We fished for understanding for a while and found Greek. He grinned whitely at me and placed one hand on his chest.
‘Bokeny fia Jutos,’ he declared, which I took to be a name. Later, I learned that he was Jutos, son of this Bokeny.
‘Orm,’ I answered, slapping my own chest. ‘Ruriksson.’
‘You are Ascomanni, from Wolin,’ he said and I put him right on that. He frowned.
‘Sipos says you are to be trusted,’ he answered and sounded as if that was strange to him. It took me a moment to realise he was speaking of the dog.
‘Sipos,’ said Dark Eye, coming up beside me; the dog licked her hand and grinned, pink tongue lolling wetly. ‘It means Piper. The Magyar call these dogs viszla, which means “deerhound” and they are much prized for hunting.’
‘Mazur,’ said Jutos, looking at her and it was a statement, not a question. Then he nodded and turned the horse.
‘Come,’ he said. Ospak looked at me and I shrugged. It was not as if we had much say in the matter, for the horsemen closed round us, like herders on cattle. We went a little east, away from the river which fretted me, for I thought it was further from the others and said so.
‘If there are others,’ Ospak answered moodily. ‘That was a big tree.’
We left the floodplain for soft rolling hills and then, beside a rill that ran white between great smooth boulders until it made a large, dark pool, came up to their camp of wagons, some covered, some with two wheels and some with four. Horses snickered; smoke drifted, thick and pungent and a woman, squatting by the stream with her skirts spread for decency, took a piss and smiled at us.
The dog, wedge-head held low, snuffled and quested and answered a bark from the centre of the wagon circle with a hoarse one of its own, which seemed to be squeezed out of the red-gold body. It set ducks up off the water of the pool and Jutos laughed.
‘Home,’ he said and I could not disagree. We came up to a fire whose perfume was as heady as incense to me and the warmth made us all realise how chilled and cold we were.
People milled; we were given blankets to wrap ourselves and stripped of our clothes under the decency of them, made to sit down under a wadmal canopy and presented with bowls. A woman, grinning and nodding her head while she spoke a trill of softness I did not understand, cracked eggs in a cauldron of barley broth and meat, then filled our bowls. I ate, sopping fat chunks of bread with it, ravenous.
In the end, sated, we all sat back.
‘By the gods,’ sighed Ospak after a while, which said it all.
The camp moved with soft life while the sun of late afternoon slanted through the surrounding trees and Dark Eye curled up and slept with the dog, both cradled in the dry beech mast near the fire. The ducks came warily back to the pool, planing in to land with creamy wakes.
Folk passed and stared curiously, but left us alone. Ospak nodded, half-asleep; a woman came to where our clothes hung, studied them, poked a finger in a hole and tutted. Then she fetched needle and thread.
Jutos startled me from my half-sleep by looming up and squatting, face smiling.
‘I have been told of others of your kind, not far. An hour’s ride, perhaps more. They are by the river and their boat is badly damaged.’
That sounded like Finn and the others and I wanted to know if he knew how many. Jutos shrugged.