Randr yelped with the shock of it and we both saw it was the monk, black-robed and tense as coiled wire, his hand gripping Randr’s sword-arm. Randr, with a savage howl, flung Leo away from him and cursed in pain as he did so.
‘Get away, you Christ-hagged little fuck,’ he snarled, rubbing his forearm and scowling. ‘Once I deal with this dog, you will be next.’
Leo rolled over and came up to his knees. Strangely, he was laughing through the blood on his mouth. Behind him, I saw Finn sprinting forward, The Godi in one fist, nail in the other.
‘You nithing fud,’ he shrieked, but it was desperation, for he knew he would never make it. I knew he would never make it, watched the slow, silver arc of my own sword curl on me like a great wave. I smelled crushed grass and new earth, heard Odin laugh — though it may have been Leo. This way was better, I was thinking. Quicker than the Pest, praise be to AllFather after all.
The laugh sounded softly again as the wave of that silvering sword cracked and broke; Randr’s hand faltered, seemed to lose the strength to grip and the blade fell from it, tumbling point over haft to land in the crushed grass. He stood, shook his head a little, looked like a bull which had just butted a rock.
‘I…’ he began and rubbed his forearm with his spare hand, the forearm where Leo had gripped him so tightly.
‘Itches,’ said Leo gently and spat a little blood from his mashed lip. ‘Those scratches are deep.’
I almost felt Randr Sterki nod. He stood like a blot ox waiting for the knife, one which had been fed enough mash to still it, so that it barely managed to hold the great mass of its own head up.
Finn arrived in a rush and skidded to a halt, panting, uncertain, as Leo held up one hand to stop him striking Randr.
‘Kill,’ said Randr, blinking and dull-voiced. ‘You. All.’
‘I do not think so, Randr Sterki,’ Leo said flatly.
Randr staggered two steps and then fell toward me, toppling like a great wind-blown oak; his head bounced at my feet.
There was silence for a moment — then shapes moved in the dark, sliding easily to the side of the stunned Finn, armed and ready and alerted by Ospak.
‘It would be better, I am thinking,’ said Crowbone, ‘if someone were to help me with Jarl Orm. You, Styrbjorn, since you brought all this on us.’
Styrbjorn licked his lips, looked from one to the other and back again and could have been on the edge of pointing out how it had been Crowbone’s bloody vengeance that had brought all this. He stayed silent and stared, finally, at the toppled giant that had been Randr Sterki, the fear of seidr magic washing off him like heat from a sweating stallion.
There was no magic here, as Crowbone pointed out.
‘Battle luck for you, Jarl Orm,’ he said, stepping past where the monk still sat, working the jaw Randr had hit, his left hand sitting quiet as a white spider on one knee. Crowbone picked up my sword, handed it to a bemused Finn and looked at me with chiding sorrow.
‘You should have paid more heed when I told you how the monk ate his food,’ he added.
I blinked like a light-blind hare; then it came to me. Leo ate with his right hand — like a Mussulman, Crowbone had said. In fact, he did everything with his right hand. I had never seen Leo use his left hand at all, save to strike with. We had all wasted our time looking for a cunningly hidden needle.
The monk shrugged and held up the white spider, where long nails on thumb and forefinger, both splintered from use, gleamed balefully in the light.
‘I have no idea how much is left,’ he said, ‘after so long without renewing.’
Enough to kill Randr Sterki dead as a flayed horse, I thought but could manage no more words. I watched Leo smile his bland smile, his face wavering as if he sat under water, while Bjaelfi and others pounded up, shouting.
‘You are strong,’ he said to me, though he seemed to be receding, growing pale as mist. ‘With God’s help and some simple skills, we will all get safe to Constantinople.’
‘Aye,’ said Finn, flexing his fingers on both sword hilts and glancing at the poison-dead Randr Sterki. ‘You have saved our jarl for sure, monk — but forgive me if I do not grasp your wrist in thanks over it.’
Hestreng , high summer
The rock was old and stained from use. Just a stone on a hill, flat here and hollowed there, small enough for a tiny body. It was here, then, that Odin had claimed the life I had offered him and there was nothing left to show for it after so long, for the birds and the foxes had picked it clean and scattered the remains.
A long, hard birth, Aoife told me, weeping with the memories of it. The bairn — a boy — had arrived with a head too big and a leg too short and the little chest heaving for breath, so that Aoife knew, as they all knew, that it was broken inside as well as out.
It was the last of Thorgunna’s womb, too, and she must have known that wee crippled mite was all the bairn she would ever have, all the son she would ever give, for a man she did not even know would come safe home.
Yet it lived, so Thorgunna did what all good wives did when a bairn was born who would never be whole. She stumbled with it up to this place, offered blot to the gods to wrap it safe and warm in their hall and left it there, naked on the rock.
She had never been back to it, Thordis told me, even after she had been brought from the brink of death herself. Not, she added with bitter accusation, in all the time I had been away.
Yet the bairn on the rock lived in front of Thorgunna’s eyes every day, so that she could see nothing else and sat, staring. She left her own life on that rock, all that she was, all that she would ever be and Thordis took a long, hard time telling me how she had gone off with a Christ priest and others who followed him. West, Thordis said, to Jutland, perhaps even to Saxland or beyond, for the god of the White Christ, it seemed, did not condemn twisted bairns to the wind and rain and cold.
A hand on my shoulder; I knew it was Finn, his eyes doglike and round. The others were there, too, standing awkwardly as you do when you see someone you care for so stricken and not able to offer anything other than mumbles of sympathy.
I climbed to my knees from that stone and looked up at the sky, that great, cold, blue eye of Odin that watched all I did and regarded me now as I worked out the measure of what I had offered as sacrifice. It had been a puzzle, intricate as a secret box, when I recovered from the Red Pest with only a few pockmarks to show for it. Down on the strand, a knarr with our battered elk prow crudely tied to it rocked heavily, fat with flagons of olive oil and bales of silk; our rich prize from a grateful Leo. I had lived and prospered and did not understand why Odin had spared me and taken little Koll.
I heard Aoife calling on her son and turned, knowing what I would see.
The pale of him, the bone-white of little Cormac running in and out of the tide-shallow as men splashed back and forth. Laughing, with his hair like spume on a wave, he brought back the crushing sight of Brand when I had told him his son was dead.
He was already a wasted man, the muscle and bulk burned off him with wound-fever so that his knees and elbows were big as galls on an oak, while one side of his face was a scarred horror. I told him his son, my fostri, was dead and sent to Odin with his sword. I told him his enemy, Styrbjorn, lived.
He said nothing, but when I left I knew there would be no more visits from him and that what friendship we had was ended. Soon, he would ask me for the boy Cormac and his mother, too, in a way that could not be refused, even if I had a mind to. Not long after that he would find a way to take Hestreng back.
One-Eye had been cold and cruel and wolf-circling as ever. He had taken the life I offered as surely as if he had struck me down with the spear Gungnir — Dark Eye, Thorgunna, my son, Hestreng, all made as dust, so that there was now nothing for me in the world save the Oathsworn of the Fjord Elk.