‘Yours,’ he said. ‘All that is left of this ship.’
‘The ship is exactly like my carving,’ Onund agreed, mournful as a wet dog. ‘Finished.’
I did not need him to tell me that, for the whole proud curve of the bow was staved in and the water frothed and gurgled in and down the length of it. The prow beast, white with gouges, still snarled even though the teeth in its mouth were broken and it hung by a splinter.
‘We could cut new planks,’ argued Trollaskegg and looked desperately at Crowbone for support, but even little Olaf knew, with all the wisdom of his twelve years, that we could not repair his wonderful ship.
‘Short Serpent put up a good fight against that tree,’ Crowbone said softly and Abjorn picked up the elk head.
‘Lash that to a spear shaft,’ I told him. ‘We will have new fierceness yet. Light fires in hollows where they will not be seen — these Magyars are safe enough, but others are out hunting us — then give me half-a-dozen men with drag-poles to fetch back supplies. Finn — you command here. I will go back and stay with the Magyars, for the trading.’
Their faces asked all the questions, but their mouths stayed shut. Abjorn simply nodded and went off to see some of it done, handing his armful of prow beast to Onund, who gave a grunt and sloshed off to higher ground to see to the camp, rolling in his great, bear way. Crowbone and Trollaskegg stood, twin pillars of misery, looking at the ship.
‘When it is empty of everything we can use,’ I said, knowing I sounded crow-voiced and that they would not realise it was from the river and not from harshness, ‘cut it free and let the river take it. With luck, the Saxlanders will see it — or find it if it makes it to the opposite bank — and think us dead.’
I found my sea-chest, and Red Njal sitting on it, with Finnlaith and Murrough nearby. All the Irishers were happy to hear that Ospak had survived. Alyosha and Kaelbjorn Rog and others came up to see for themselves the marvellous event that was Orm, returned from the river with Ospak in tow. Not one of them, or anyone else, cared whether Dark Eye had lived or died, I noted.
I rummaged in the chest and found what I was looking for in the last of my treasures — a handful of hacksilver and three armrings, one of them already cut almost to nothing.
But there was a torc, too, and I took it out so that it gleamed pale in the last light of day. The Irishers were drawn to it like bright-eyed magpies and it has to be said it was a fine piece I had guarded carefully, an old necklet taken from Atil’s hoard.
Not as fine as the one I wore round my neck, the torc of a jarl — even with its dragon-head ends battered and the twisted length of it nicked and cut — but a rich thing, of gold and ambermetal, which the Romans call electrum, with bird-head ends. It was those I had remembered, seeing the old man’s cloak-pin.
Jutos’ eyes widened when I presented it to him back at the camp as what I had to trade. He turned it over and over in his hands, the firelight sliding along it and folk coming up to look and admire. I saw them point to the bird-heads and heard the word turul repeated in awe and wonder. It turned out that I had been right — this bird, the turul, was worshipped by the Magyar.
Jutos wanted to know where it had come from and I gave him it straight, so he would know he dealt with more than just another trader from the north. The treasure hoard of Attila, I told him and watched his eyes grow round and black as old ice, for Attila was as good as a god to them.
Then he looked at Crowbone, who had come along because he had never seen Magyars before, and you could see the thoughts flit across his face like hound and hare, for the distant, misted tales of the Oathsworn and the strange odd-eyed boy who was one of them had suddenly arrived at the fire where he was sitting.
So he went to the old man with the torc in his hand while we ate and drank in a dusk thick and soft as unseen smoke, with the quarrelling of women and the bark of dogs comforting as a cloak. Enough food for a night’s decent meal was sent off back to the Oathsworn, so I was content enough with the start of this Thing.
Later, in the black of night, we went away from the others, to where the pool shimmered and there she moved to me. Others moved, too, so that the beech mast rustled; there was a laugh in the throat here, a groan from over there.
There was no love-talk — little talk at all between us, though she murmured soft, cooing sounds in her own tongue — nor even much kissing or hugging, but we moved as if we had known each other before and there was little need of any of the rest, for my heart was huge and urgent and in my throat and I knew it was the same for her.
She was white and thin, all planes and shadows, smelled of woodsmoke and warmth and crushed grass and there was not night long enough for us. As the dawn silvered up I lay back, with her breathing slow and even on my chest, snugged up under the same cloak.
‘What will you do with me?’ she asked.
‘Give me a minute,’ I answered. ‘Perhaps two.’
She thumped me on the chest, no more than the flutter of a bird wing and I laughed.
‘Will you take me back to my father?’
‘Was that what this was about?’ I asked, made moody by her now. She struck me again and this time it was a small, hard nut of knuckle that made me wince.
‘You think that?’ she demanded and her eyes were big and round and bright in the dark. Just her eyes alone made me ashamed of it, so that I shook my head.
‘If you are not taking me back,’ she went on, slow and soft in the dark, ‘then why am I here?’
I told her; because the Sea-Finn’s drum had said to bring her. She was silent, thinking.
‘Did it say to bring me to your home, after the ice-headed boy is found?’
That made me blink a bit, thinking of Thorgunna and what she would have to say about a second woman — wife, I realised with a shock, for I would have to marry Dark Eye. I was still thinking of an answer when she shivered.
‘I will not marry you,’ she said.
‘Why not?’ I wanted to know, chastened and wondering if she could read thoughts. She raised her head for a moment, then pointed out across the water of the tarn, where a mallard drake, all jewel-flashing in green and purple, swung down into the waters with a hissing splash.
‘That is why not,’ she said. The drake made for the nearest of the ducks and mounted her, vicious and uncaring, leaving her half-drowned and squawking.
‘That is the lot of such as me,’ she said, ‘no matter whose I am at the time. A strange woman in a house of women. The men will all want to mount me, the women to peck my feathers off.’
Half-sick with the truth of it, I growled some bluster about what would happen to any who treated her in such a way, but she laid her head on my chest again and I could feel her soft smile.
‘I do not know what path I am to take,’ she answered. ‘I am away from my people and cannot go back to them, since that would start a war. I am Mazur and if I am to marry I do not intend to do it in a land of ice.’
She stopped and looked into my face, her eyes looming like a doe’s.
‘But there will be a child,’ she declared with certainty and I felt the skin-crawling whenever seidr presented itself to me. ‘It will be a son and I can only offer it a safe place if I go with you.’
She stopped and shivered. ‘Iceland,’ she said. ‘A country made from ice.’
I laughed, more from relief at being able to steer off the topic we had been on.
‘It is not made of ice,’ I told her. ‘Anyway, I am not from Iceland. Onund is.’
‘Somewhere as cold,’ she muttered, snuggling tight to me. ‘At the edge of the world.’