I looked at Finn and Ospak, Kuritsa and the others — Crowbone, his odd-eyed stare bland and cool and Onund Hnufa, his face strange, a cliff that set itself hard against the terror of old memories. I saw his unnatural, crooked shoulder and the way he stared at the flat, hollowed, stained stone and knew, with a shock of understanding, that this should have been his wyrd, yet somehow he had avoided it. I wanted to ask him how he had done it, but he caught my look, held it until it was me who looked away, sliding from gaze to gaze until I was back at the hollowed stone, feeling the eyes of the Oathsworn rest on me.
The Oathsworn, still bound one to another tighter than the ties of brothers — and now the only family I knew. In the bleak dark of me, a small ember glowed warmly.
‘Heya, Jarl Orm,’ Finn said softly and stared out to sea, his eyes narrowing against the glare. ‘I am told that raiding has started again in the lands of the Englisc. Good pickings to be had, I hear.’
‘Vladimir will want us in Novgorod, for sure,’ Crowbone countered, with a glare at Finn. ‘To fight for him against his brothers.’
‘Anywhere but back to the Wendish lands,’ added Ospak and looked meaningfully at me. ‘I hear red sickness rages there.’
There was a long pause which the wind filled with a mournful, gentle sigh. I looked at them, one at a time, finally settling back on the grim-faced hunchback.
‘We will need a new Fjord Elk,’ I said to Onund Hnufa.
Down on the blue-grey water, the prow beast rocked, nodding as if satisfied.
HISTORICAL NOTE
The Odra — the Oder — in the tenth century was a boundary river and has stayed that way for a thousand years, marking the frontier between Germany and Poland — or, in A.D. 975, the Saxlanders of the Holy Roman Empire and the Slavs to the east, chief among them the Pols.
The Holy Roman Empire saw itself as a bastion of Christian civilisation against the heathens from the east and that view persists even to the twenty-first century, no matter what political correctness dictates — any manifesto of the right-wing parties of Europe is worthless unless it includes a diatribe against the economic migrants beyond the Oder.
Dealing with the tenth century along the Oder you can see the same strains, the same hatreds, the same divides, the same naked warfare not far from the surface of any meeting. Scores of small tribes clutched the last of their lands on both sides of the river, swearing allegiance to whichever of the major powers held most sway at the time. Like the river itself, politics were fluid in this region.
Yet this was a trade route of some note, part of the Amber Road, that lesser-known son of the Silk Road and the Silver Way, which led from the Baltic to the north of Italy when Rome was more of a power and that capital city the centre of the world. In the tenth century, the Ottos of the Holy Roman Empire, father and son aspiring to be as great as the Emperor in Constantinople, had revived the fortunes of the city of Rome and trade was on the move again.
New breeds were straddling the tenth-century Amber Road, too, turning the Balkans into the forge-fire it has remained to this day — the Magyars, only recently brought to a stop in their westward expansion, were now settling in what would become Hungary and had been forced to become Christians though they, like everyone else, quickly saw the benefits of belonging to that club.
The Bulgars would bump against the Byzantine Empire with a friction so irritating that, in the end, one of the best of Byzantium’s emperors would be known as Bulgar-Slayer.
The last thing such a delicate thread of a trade river needs is a boatload of pagan warriors snarling their way up it and scowling at everyone who gets in their way. The last thing a boatload of pagan warriors would want to do is go up it at all — so why would Orm and the Oathsworn?
Because of Koll, Jarl Brand’s heir and, more importantly, Orm’s foster-son. The importance of the fostri in Norse lands of the time is not so hard to work out — how many reading this would entrust their son with another family for the formative six or seven years of his life, trusting that he is brought up properly? If that son represented all the hopes and dreams for the future of a dynasty? Think of a public school — I mean a real one, not some limp-wristed Hogwarts — with one pupil and an ethos of edged weapon sport and you might get some idea.
The one so entrusted had a supreme responsibility from the moment the child was declared a fostri — not least for the safety of the boy — and this was doubled because accepting the task also acknowledged that the foster-father had bound himself to the real father, accepting a degree of fealty as well as admitting that his status was slightly better than your own.
To lose such a boy was the worst stain on your fame. Since ‘fair fame’ then was all that truly mattered, worth more than any amount of gold, retrieving such a reputation was worth any hardship, any risk.
As ever, I have tried to weave real people into a fictional tale. Queen Sigrith is real, as is King Eirik the Victorious and the babe that Orm fought so hard to defend went on to become King Olaf, called Skotkonung, the Lap King. Styrbjorn is also real, as is Pallig Tokeson — though his brother Ljot is fictional — and their subsequent fates are no part of this tale.
Leo is also real — Leo the Deacon is the prime historical record for this era in Byzantium, but I have almost certainly maligned the man by making him into a combination of Moriarty and George Smiley.
Real, too, of course, is Crowbone, Olaf Tryggvasson, and the relationship between him, Queen Sigrith and King Svein Forkbeard might have been different if Sigrith had been nicer to a teenage boy. In later years, the widowed Sigrith tried to interest Olaf in marrying her and he took advantage of it, enjoyed the fruits and then, at the last, cast her aside in revenge for the slights she gave in his youth.
Enraged, Sigrith then had more luck with Svein Forkbeard and worked at turning that king against his former ally and friend. In the end, Olaf went under the swords of all his enemies, brought together by Svein as much for Sigrith’s revenge as any gain in lands.
Crowbone’s stories of Dyl U’la-Spegill are my take on the origins of the later tales of the trickster Till Eulenspiegel, or Dyl Ulenspegl — the name translates, roughly, as ‘mysterious owl-mirror’ — although the original Low German is believed to be ul’n Spegel, which means ‘wipe the arse’ and altogether is a more satisfying soubriquet for a character who so viciously ripped the pith out of the venal and pompous in society.
Till Eulenspiegel’s social satire tales are almost certainly older than the tradition that has him born in 1300. Since the same tradition has him dying in the sixteenth century, I have no trouble assigning him to an altogether darker time, before his tales were sanitised for children and turned into a tone poem by Richard Strauss in the nineteenth century, thus bringing him to the attention of an English-speaking culture.
As ever, this tale is best told round a fire against the closing dark. Any mistakes or omissions are my own and should not spoil the tale.