'Orm,' I told him, as pleasantly as I could, for it does no harm to start politely, offering names and smiles.
'A Norse,' said Kovach, rasping a gnarled hand across his stubble. 'I know some of that tongue. Your name is. . serpent?'
'Wyrm,' I said lightly, then leaned forward. 'It would be better to speak, old one. We are hungry as serpents and you know what hungry serpents are like.'
He blinked and nodded, then smiled, more gap than grin.
'My pleas,' he said and, remembering I had asked, I nodded. Dobrynya cleared his throat pointedly, but we ignored him.
Wodoniye,' he said and there was a hiss of breath from Dobrynya and Sigurd. Little Vladimir went pale. I had no idea what he meant and said so.
'Creatures,' muttered Dobrynya. 'They feast on the souls of the drowned.'
'Child's tales,' added Sigurd, but he did not sound convinced.
'They live in the high ground in the middle of the swamp,' Kovach went on, his voice flat and level and bitter as wormwood. 'There are forty-eight families in this village and all of them have suffered.'
'Suffered how?' demanded Dobrynya.
'They come, these vodoniye, to steal our women and make them into rusalka. For years, once, perhaps twice every year. They came in the autumn this year and took another. My grand-daughter.'
He fell silent and I felt a chill in this warm, stove-heated but that had nothing to do with winter draughts.
'Yet you have done nothing,' piped Vladimir and Kovach cocked one spider-legged eyebrow in his direction.
'We sent men into the swamp at first,' he said. 'Six died the first time and we did it again and lost four and they were all good forgemen. We did not send any more, for we need men to make blades and work fields and can fight most things, but not this. So we built up our defences instead and each year we send to Kiev for help and each year it never comes.'
'Your defences are not good, old man, if they keep stealing from you,' I said.
'Magic, one supposes,' Kovach said matter-of-factly, though his eyes were cunning slits. 'They come at night and from the marshes. I saw one, once — scaled like a serpent, running through the streets in the moonlight, making no sound. Now you have come. Perhaps Perun has sent us a warrior called Wyrm to bring an end to these Scaled Ones, who are clearly hatched from a serpent's egg. The god has, after all, sent this cold, which has frozen the impassable marsh; I cannot remember the marsh ever having frozen.'
From the looks on the faces of those who knew him, I guessed it was the most that old Kovach had said in one place at any time and the silence after it was longer and more still as a result. It was broken only by the sudden pop of a log bursting in the fire; sparks flared and flames dyed everyone red.
'So — if we end this menace, you will share your hidden food, is that it, cunning old man?' growled Sigurd. He greeted the nod of reply with a sharp snort of disapproval.
'Hung from your stringy thumbs,' he added, 'you will tell us soon enough.'
'Hung from thumbs,' Dobrynya said into the silence that followed, 'any one of your charges would tell us. Do you want us to do that? I can bring, say, the mother of your granddaughter.'
Kovach blinked and his head went down; when all was said and done, he was a poor man, with no say in the storms that lashed him — but there had been so many storms in his life they had honed him; he had less fear than Finn, I was thinking.
Dobrynya and I exchanged glances, all the same. Dealing harshly with these nithing farmers and smiths was a privilege that belonged to Vladimir's brother and abusing them could provoke the very conflict Novgorod did not want.
'A small trek across some frozen marsh,' Dobrynya said finally, shrugging and and looking at me. 'Little enough.'
'Then let him take it,' growled Finn bitterly when I shared this out in the place the Oathsworn had been bundled into and proudly called a hall. 'What the fuck is a voy-ded-oy, or the other thing?'
Wodoniye,' answered Crowbone brightly. 'Water draugr. It is said they take young girls and make them into rusalka, spirits of the marshes and water's edge. These rusalka are beautiful, pale-skinned and with long green hair that is always damp — if their hair ever dries out, they die, and thus they always carry combs with them, combs which can cause floods when pulled through their tresses. They are said to be able to turn into waterbirds and have webbed feet. .'
He tailed off when he realized we were all staring at him. 'I know a tale about them,' he added, defiantly.
'Then keep it behind your teeth,' rasped Finn, furious with frustration. 'This old fuck of a headman has a thought-cage twisted by the cold. Does he seriously believe all this?'
'If he is touched,' Thorgunna declared, 'then others are, too — there is a woman and her man mourning for the loss of a daughter in this very house.'
She was Kovach's own daughter, who stood with wooden spoons in each hand, stirring life back into some old ale as she told us — between sobs — of seeing a shadow in their house, hearing a muffled scream. Her round face was chapcheeked, brown eyes red-rimmed and mournful; I did not tell her how things could have been worse for her, strung up by the thumbs and questioned by Sigurd and Dobrynya. She sounded scared enough, all the same and her tears were real.
Her husband claimed to have tackled the creature with a hand-scythe and I looked him over as he dragged out the tale of it. He had a broad, flat face, where the cheeks and nose stuck like galls on an oak and the wind had ploughed out wrinkles in it until tree bark looked softer. His hair was braided and had never been cut, only burned, so that the ends were crumbled.
He did not look like a man easily cowed and had arms hard with work-muscle, skin-marked roughly with the outline of a horse.
'Scaled like a chicken's leg,' he confirmed, but his eyes kept shifting and I wondered why.
The creature had run off with their daughter, fourteen summers old and corn-hair pretty, according to her ma and others I spoke to. There were other stories, some of daughters stolen, others of livestock taken and, because they were who they were, it seemed the grief-loss was equal to these people. Yet there was something rank as lutefiske about the affair.
Later, in the lumpen, shifting shadows, surrounded by murmur and the laughter of those with full bellies and warm feet, I sat and breathed in the smell of ale and unwashed bodies, while a small girl, one eye blind-white as a boiled egg, played fox-and-hens with the men and made them laugh when she won with considerable skill.
Huddled in a corner, faces murked by the uneasy glow of the fire, me and Finn, Kvasir and some others talked round this matter we had clearly been tasked with, quiet as the smoke which swirled round a sooted kettle.
None of us liked the idea of scaled creatures who could scamper silently over a deadly marsh, cross a stream, then a palisade and evade all the guards, both in and out, laden with struggling women or bawling calves.
By the time our tongues hurt, it came down to the same as it had been at the start; we would have to go to this place in the marsh and see for ourselves.
'We will find only some ragged-arse outlaws,' Kvasir declared. 'Mark me. Runaways, living badly out on the steppe and stealing what they need — including a decent hump.'
'Invisible outlaws I do not need either,' I growled back and that left them, like me, chewing on whether Kovach and the villagers were being entirely truthful.
In the end, Red Njal broke his silence, heaving himself up and sighing.
'Well, there is no way but to do it,' he growled. 'Steady and careful. The sun rises little by little, but it crosses all the world in a day, as my granny told me.'