Eventually, because I knew he was waiting for me to do it and would never break the silence first, I asked him what he wanted.
‘To knit you back, like the broken bone you are,’ he said, easy enough with the words and looking ahead at the trail. Crowbone loped past us, an old bow in his hand and three arrows in the other.
‘I am going hunting,’ he declared and I knew it was to take his thoughts off the dead Alyosha, so I fought for words to rein him in and yet not make it seem so, for his nursemaid was gone.
Kuritsa appeared and slapped Crowbone manfully on the shoulder.
‘Nothing with legs is edible when you kill it,’ he declared. ‘You gutshoot it and the meat is bitter when it runs. I will go with you and teach you how to hunt.’
He shot me a look over one shoulder, a reassuring grin with it, then the pair of them moved off ahead of the trail, with men chaffering them, pleased that there might be more than old bread and oats that night.
‘I do not need your Christ for my salvation,’ I told the monk and he nodded.
‘Then I do not offer him. But you need something.’
I was wondering why he cared and said so.
‘I need you to get me back to the Great City,’ he said, which was truthful enough, if not exactly the warm spirit of caring I had imagined. I laughed, the sound echoing as if my head was in a bucket and he smiled.
‘See? Now matters are better.’
‘What happens when we do get to the Great City, monk?’ I demanded. ‘It comes to me that taking such a dangerous man as yourself back to the place where he is powerful and we are not is foolish. Perhaps we should kill you here; it is no more than you deserve.’
Leo walked in frowning silence for a while, then smiled suddenly, bright and wide.
‘You will just have to trust me,’ he said. ‘I will be more use alive in the Great City than dead in a heap out here.’
‘So I will not have to offer some jewelled cross for our lives, then?’ I offered wryly. ‘Now that your bargaining counter is burned to smoke?’
‘Jesus died on a wooden one,’ he answered and I had no answer to that and felt suddenly washed with weariness, so that we walked in silence through the wood, which seemed never to end — so much so that I remember saying so and asking how far we had to walk into it.
‘Only half-way,’ Finn answered, peering at me, ‘then we are walking out of it, as any sensible man will tell you. You look like eight ells of bad cloth, Trader. Perhaps you should rest.’
The day had slithered into grey twilight, where the alfar flickered and I was only vaguely aware of Finn calling a halt for it seemed that the grey light smoked round me, so that I saw and heard them as if in a mist.
There was a steading. Once, it had been a substantial hov, a shieling of some note, built low to the ground, but it had fallen to ruin, so that the moss had reclaimed it to a mound of green; grass hung, dried and withered off what was left of the roof, drooping like the bodies of the dead on the ramparts we had so recently left.
I woke to find myself under the shelter of the only roof-space left, sharing it with groaners with sweating, plaguey faces, or wounded from the fight, or moaning with belly-rot and boils. Fires were lit, the rest of the men huddled outside, under the stars and what cloaks they had, sharing them with those who had none.
Kuritsa and Crowbone had returned, the big archer with a buck over his shoulders and it was jumped on, gralloched, cut up and spit-roasted; the smell of meat sang round the house like a memory of better times.
They brought me slivers of succulent deer, bread softened and savouried in the blood-juices of it, but I had no hunger, which I found strange and even the bit I forced down tasted like ash. Bjaelfi came and peered at me and it was then I realised, with a shock, that I was sick.
For a time, I lay and listened to the men mutter softly and start in to weaving themselves together; straps were repaired, weapons cleaned, men tried to sponge the worst stains from clothing and cloaks.
They dragged out combs — all of them had them, good bone ones and, even if some of those implements grinned like gappy old men, they still dragged them through clotted, raggled hair. Bjaelfi produced shears and some of the worst matting was cut off; beards and hair were trimmed and Leo shook his head with wonder, for he had not realised that norther warriors are more vain than women.
In the end, I drifted off in my jarl-bed under the roof with the murmuring sick, listening to the gentle shift of Bjaelfi and the monk, moving like soft, clucking hens.
I moved into a dream of smoke and water, where familiar people and places shredded mistily away when I looked at them, living only at the edge of my dream-sight, like alfar. When I surfaced from this, it was like breaching from the ocean, whooping in air and shivering, blurred and blinking. Sweat rolled off me and I shook; I knew what ate me.
I got up and the place heaved gently as if I stood on a deck in a swell; my feet seemed too far below me and did not even seem to be mine as I moved, slowly, like an old, blind man, out past the soft glow of the fire, the snorers and farters, out to where a man stood on watch in ringmail and helm.
He looked at me and I stared blankly back at him; it took long seconds for me to recognise Ospak, by which time he had come close enough to give me his concern.
‘You should go back to the fire, Jarl Orm,’ he said flatly. I wanted to tell him to leave me alone, that I needed a shit — which was a lie, of course. What I needed was privacy to find out what I already knew in my heart.
All that I croaked out of me, all the same, was ‘shit’. He nodded slowly, and turned back to his guard duty. I struggled on, to where the dark ate the fireglow and beyond, to where only the half-veiled moon gave light.
I dropped my breeks, bent my head to look. I saw the red spots crawling out of my groin and on to my thighs like embers from a forge-fire. I touched the burn of them, knew the truth and either it or the fever swam my head, so that I half stumbled and nearly fell.
‘Steady, Bear Slayer,’ said a voice, cold as quenched iron. ‘I would not wish you hurt. That is my pleasure alone.’
Randr Sterki moved blackly out of the dark to stand in front of me, where I could see him if I could raise my head. I could do that only a little but the blade he held gleamed like an old fang in the moonglow. Naked from the waist, the white of his body seemed eaten by whorls of darkness, which I slowly realised were his Rus skin-markings.
The stupidity of him made me laugh and I saw myself as he saw me — swaying, head-bowed, breeks around my ankles. It only made matters funnier and the laughing choked me, so that I suddenly found myself with my arse on the wet grass.
‘Get up,’ he hissed angrily. ‘Or die on your knees.’
On my arse, I wanted to correct. I am on my arse here and dying of the Red Pest and whether you slit me here or wait for me to die makes no difference and will not bring any of the ones you loved back again. Odin takes his sacrifice-life — in the cruelest way, of course, that being the mark of One-Eye.
But all that came out was ‘arse’. Which, given the moment and the matter, was not gold-browed verse likely to sway him from his path.
He grunted, moved like a lowered brow, black and angry and the sword silvered through the shadows, seemed to leave a trail behind it as it moved, like the wake of a ship on a black sea. My sword, I noted dully; I could see the V-notch in it, as if the dark had taken a bite from the blade.
‘Hold, Randr Sterki,’ growled a voice and a figure scowled out of the shadows and grabbed Randr’s arm. ‘Do not kill him. We need him…’