'The boy gave them the spear and the hunters went out and killed the deer. But in the hunt the shaft of the spear was splintered. "See what you've done with my spear!" the boy cried. "Don't fuss about it," the hunter said. "Here is a horse for you in place of your spear."
'The hunter gave him a horse with fine leather trappings and he started back toward the village. On the way he came to where some farmers were keeping crows off their rye, running at them and waving sheets. This made the horse frightened and it ran away.'
'This sounds like the story of my life,' growled Thorkel from across the fire and everyone laughed, for they had heard of his lack of luck.
Finn bellowed at them to shut up and listen. 'For I want to hear this. This sheep-herding boy seems much like a trader I know.'
There were some chuckles at my expense, then the story went on.
'The horse had gone for good,' Olaf said. 'But the farmers told the boy not to worry. They gave the boy an old wood axe and he took it and went on towards his home. He came to a woodcutter who said: "Lend me your large axe for this tree. Mine is too small." So the boy did and the woodcutter chopped with it and broke it.'
'He should have quit and gone home when he had the horse,' shouted someone.
Olaf smiled. 'Perhaps so, for the woodcutter gave him the limb of a tree, which he then had to load on his back and carry. When he came near the village a woman said: "Where did you find the wood? I need it for my fire."
'The boy gave it to her, and she put it in the fire. As it went up in flames he said: "Now where is my wood?" The woman looked around, then gave him a fine tafl board, which he took home with the sheep.
'As he entered his house his mother smiled with satisfaction and said: "What is better than a tafl board to keep a small boy out of trouble?"'
The roars and leg-slapping went on a long time, especially when Olaf, with a courtly little bow, handed the tafl board and bag of counters back to Thorgunna, who took it, beaming with as much delight as if she was mother to this princeling.
Into the middle of this, his breath smoking with cold and reeking of porridge and fish as he leaned closer to my ear, Kvasir hissed: 'That boy is not nine years old.'
I stepped off a strug, one of those blocky riverboats the Slavs love so much, on to the wooden wharf of Novgorod, which we call Holmgard. I had been here before, so it felt almost like a home.
We had taken the strug from Aldeigjuborg, since it had been a hard enough task to work the Elk along the river to that place, never mind to Novgorod. My lungs had burned in the cold with the effort and, for days afterwards, my shoulders felt as if someone had shoved a red-hot bar from one side to the other. I was, I admitted ruefully to myself, no longer used to pulling on an oar.
The weather did not help. Gizur, when the Elk had edged painfully into the mouth of the river on which Aldeigjuborg stood, heaved the slop bucket over the side and hauled it in. He looked briefly, then shoved it at me. Ice rolled.
'I did not need that to tell me how cold it is,' I said, blowing on my hands. He nodded and emptied the water, then set the bucket in its place with red-blue hands, already studded with sores. Everyone had them, split from the cold and the rowing. Noses were scarlet; breath smoked and the air was sharp enough to sting your throat.
'Too early for such ice,' Gizur growled. 'By a month at least. The river is freezing and this close to the sea, too. The sea will freeze for a good way out this winter, mark me.'
That thought had floated with us all the way to the berth, bringing little cheer. No sooner had we lashed ourselves to the land than Finn and Kvasir, swathed in cloaks and wrapped to the ears in wadmal and hats, came up and nodded in the direction of another drakkar, snugged up to the bank and with it's mast off, the sail tented up across the deck, which spoke of an over-wintering. Klerkon's ship, Dragon Wings. Two men all wild hair and silver arm rings watchfully tended a box-brazier of charcoals on the mid-ballast stones.
'Small crew only,' Kvasir reported after a brief open-handed saunter in their direction. They had seen us and were guarded after events in Gunnarsgard, though it was not a sensible thing to start swinging swords in someone else's realm. What would happen when they learned what we had done on Svartey was another matter entirely.
'Klerkon has gone south to Konugard,' he added, cocking his head in that bird way he had these days.
'He will have taken his captives,' Finn said, almost cheerfully. 'They will sell better in that place.'
I scowled at him, while. Kvasir said nothing. I knew why Finn was so joyous — he was out on the raid and expected to winter in Novgorod and then head off in the spring to find the mountain of silver he thought we had left alone too long.
I was hoping that it would be a long winter and that, at the end of it, Sviatoslav, Prince of the Rus, would renew his mad fight against the Great City and make it too dangerous to travel south of Konugard, which the locals called Kiev. I was hoping those events had trapped Lambisson with Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter.
I also knew I was Odin-cursed with this mountain of silver It was like being in a thorn patch — the harder you struggled, the worse you were caught. Sooner or later, I was thinking day after day, I would have to go back to Atil's howe and every time the thought came to me it was like swallowing a stone.
But first there was Thordis to get back and Eldgrim and Cod-Biter to rescue.
We stayed long enough in Aldeigjuborg to find that Lambisson, if he had been there at all, was long gone. We stayed a little longer, to stand by the Oathsworn Stone which Einar had raised to those we had lost getting this far on the original journey down to seek Atil's treasure.
Six years since and now the survivors of that time stood round it, a mere handful and a half — Hauk, Gizur, Finn, Kvasir, Hlenni Brimill, Runolf Harelip, Red Njal and me. Thorkel stood with us, for he had known Pinleg and Skapti Halftroll and the others the stone remembered but he had not been with us at the time. Crippled Cod-Biter and the addled Short Eldgrim were two more and we remembered on their behalf.
'Someone has been,' Kvasir noted, nodding at the garland of withered oak leaves fluttering on the stone's crown.
Not for a long time. Yet the names were there and, though the paint had faded, the grooves were etched deep on the stone and the story was there still. We made our prayers and small offerings and left.
Finn thought the garland might have been left by Pinleg's woman, who had stayed in the town with her son and daughter. When we went to where they had been, those who had known them told us they had left for the south long since. I remembered, then, that Pinleg's wife had been a Slav, his children half-Norse Rus.
Only the stone was left, where the wind traced the grooves of all their names.
The Elk stayed in Aldeigjuborg with everybody on it save me, Finn, Kvasir and Thorgunna — and Crowbone, who trembled and scowled and stared at Dragon Wings and the men he saw there. I did not want him starting trouble and hoped Gizur had enough men to keep the Elk safe, but it would be a dangerous time, even berthed as far from Dragon Wings as we could get and both sides leashed by what would happen if we started in to killing each other in Sviatoslav's kingdom.
I had thought of taking the Elk down to Novgorod but was glad I had not as we were poled along the cold river, through the dripping fir and pine forests where people still struggled to work the hacked-out clearings using their strange little three-toothed ploughs. The Volkhov seemed even more swirling and treacherous with currents than I remembered from sailing it with Einar.