I liked the feeling and pulled her closer still.
‘Iceland is not at the edge,’ I answered, drifting lazily. ‘Near the centre. North of Iceland is the maelstrom. You follow that star there.’ I pointed to the bright North Star and she looked, squinting.
‘What is the maelstrom?’
I told her; the place where the giant women, Fenja and Menja, turn the great millwheel Grotti, blindly churning out the last order they were given before the ship carrying them all sank — to make salt. Which is why the sea tastes the way it does. The maelstrom is a great whirlpool caused by them turning and turning the handle far beneath the waves.
Sleepily, she laughed. ‘Good tale. The Christ worshippers, though, say the centre of the world is in Jorsalir, where their White Christ was nailed to his bits of wood.’
‘What do you believe?’ I asked, but there was no reply; she slept, breathing soft and slow and I began to wonder if it was not the will of the gods to bring her back to Hestreng. What other reason could the Sea-Finn’s drum have had? It was never going to be possible to travel all the way across the land of the Pols to her own Mazur tribe, hunted every step of the way.
Of course, the gods laughed while we slept, were still laughing when the sun strengthened, rich and red-gold and we dressed and moved back to the others, me prepared to endure the jibes from Ospak and Crowbone.
I started to hear the gods cackling when I saw Crowbone rise to his feet, slow and stiff, as if he had spotted a draugr coming across the space between the wagons. But he was not staring at us, but off to our right, where I saw the old man tottering forward with his two warrior pillars and his son.
Even then I thought Crowbone had spotted the old man’s face and had been stunned by it, for it was a swung stick to the senses, that face, and I was chuckling when I came up.
‘He is not half as fierce as he looks,’ I said. ‘I would not worry over much.’
Crowbone looked at me, then back to the old man, who came up closer to us.
‘Nose,’ Crowbone said, pointing and I turned.
The shock of it dropped my jaw; the gods’ laughter grew harsh and loud as disturbed ravens.
The old man had come in his finery, from brocaded coat to red-leather riding boots and fine-hilted sabre. Round his neck he already wore the bird-ended torc, to show he had accepted the trade and we would now haggle only over the price.
But his last piece of jewellery was what staggered those who knew it by sight. Bound by a blue-silk ribbon, carefully tied to show his lack of ears, was the final statement on his flag of a face.
Sigurd’s silver nose.
SEVENTEEN
We scarred the laden drag-poles over a sodden land steaming in the new sunshine, ripe with new life and old death, thick with the smells of dark earth and rotted carcass. We scattered birds from the raggled corpses of drowned cattle and, at the end of the first day, sent up a cloud of rooks like black smoke from dead sheep the retreating waters had left hanging in gnarled branches like strange fruit.
‘Why are we pushing so hard?’ panted Kaelbjorn Rog, who only voiced what others thought. ‘We are leaving a trail a blind wean could follow, never mind some Magyar scouts.’
I said nothing, but grimmed them on through the fly-stinging, sweat-soaked day, the sick tottering along with the shite rolling down their legs rather than be bumped in drag-poles, for it was not the Magyars I feared, nor was I entirely running from enemies. Only Crowbone shared my thoughts on why we truly scowled our way so swiftly across the land and he was still mourning the distance between him and his uncle’s silver nose.
Jutos had seen Crowbone’s reaction and knew something was not quite right; slowly the tale of it was hoiked up and sense was made of things that had been said earlier, of northers encountered and hard bargains being struck.
The Oathsworn had not been the first band of Norse the Magyars had met; that honour had been given to Randr Sterki and some eighteen or so survivors of his own river-wyrd, stumbling out on the floodplain, starving and thirsting, for they dared not drink the foul water they sloshed through.
‘My father wanted the boy they had,’ Jutos told us, ‘a rare child, white as bone. Their leader, a man with skin-marks on him, offered us a Greek Christ priest, but that was no trade for us. We said to take him to the Pols, who might give them a little food, for I thought the Pols might know better what to do with a priest from the Great City.’
‘Where did they go?’ I asked and Jutos shrugged, waving vaguely in the direction of the distant blue mountains.
‘South, this side of the Odra,’ he replied. ‘After he had traded this marvellous nose for enough supplies.’
He paused and grinned widely. ‘If you happen to have ears that match, we will make ourselves go hungry to acquire them.’
I told him the torc was rich enough and tried to get the nose back, for Crowbone’s sake. In the end, though, we got supplies only — and the only bargain in it came as we were leaving, hauling the drag-poles away on a surprising gift of three horses.
Jutos came up and thrust out his hand, so I took it, wrist-to-wrist, in the Norse fashion and he nodded.
‘We part as traders,’ he said formally, then paused. ‘I will give you a day, then send riders to find the Pols and tell them of you and the Mazur girl. That will stop them raiding us when they find out we helped you. The horses we have given you will let you travel faster away from them.’
It was as fair as you could expect from Magyars and, at the end of that first day, I told the rest of the Oathsworn what we could expect and that Randr Sterki and the boy we had come to rescue lay just ahead. There was silence, mainly,
and Finn had the right of it when, later, he demanded to know what else I had expected from the crew.
‘The fact that we have enemies ahead as well as behind is not a joy of news,’ he added, to which I could find no answer.
The next day we had grown used to the smell of rot, so used to it, in fact, that we stumbled into horror when we should have been warned long since.
When we came round the side of a hill and saw the grod, we slowed and came to halt; men unshipped weapons and shields and stood uncertainly, looking from one to another and then at me.
It was a good grod, a well-raised earthwork, wooden stockade surrounding a cluster of dwellings, with a big covered watchtower over the gate. It had been built on a hill above the floodplain and the rising waters had swept round it like a moat, save for a narrow walkway of raised earth and logs, which led to the gate. The watery moat had since sunk and seeped almost back to the river, leaving bog and marsh which steamed in the sun.
The gate in the stockade was wide open and there was not a wisp of smoke. No dog barked, no horses grazed. Then the wind shifted slightly.
‘Odin’s arse,’ Finn grunted, his face squeezed up. He spat; the stink was like a slap in the face, a great hand that shoved the smell of rot down your throat.
‘A fight, perhaps,’ Styrbjorn said. ‘Randr Sterki and his men, I am thinking. The villagers have all run off, save for those he has killed.’
Styrbjorn grunted out that this was good work from only eighteen men, but most ignored him, cheered by the idea of a whole village lying open and empty and ripe as a lolling whore — perhaps Randr and his men had left some loot, too.
Then I pointed out that Randr and his men might still be there, waiting to ambush us.
‘Send Styrbjorn the Bold in,’ Abjorn declared and men laughed, which made Styrbjorn scowl and go red.
I chose Finn, Abjorn, Kaelbjorn Rog and Uddolf to go with me, leaving Alyosha to organise the others into a cautious defence; when we moved to the gates, magpies and crows rose up, one by one, flapping off and scolding us.