'I wish it was your granny who was going and not me,' Finn grunted back.
In the morning, it had been decided that myself, Kvasir and Finn would go, with Sigurd and a dozen of his men, all suitably mailed and armed, as well as Morut and Avraham. Jon Asanes was sulky, because I had said he could not come with us for, as he admitted himself, he was no great fighter.
'Olaf is going,' he pouted back bitterly. Crowbone was going because his Uncle Sigurd was going and I had no say in that, but it did not help Jon's sulk. Crowbone teased him about wanting the princely gift of a smile from Vladimir, which made Jon flush to his ears and stamp off.
Blowing and stamping, we came out to our horses. We all had horses, which Finn looked at dubiously, for he hated riding; it did not help to see me easy in the saddle and smiling down into his scowl.
'Take care,' Thorgunna said to Kvasir, tugging his cloak tighter round his neck. 'There are bannocks and cheese and the last of our meat in a bag on the saddle horn. Oh, and a skin of ale is hooked there. I don't expect you home before dark, so wrap warm this night.'
'Don't fuss, woman,' he said, though it was lightly done. Finn heaved himself up into the saddle, black-browed at all this. He aimed a storm-scowl at Crowbone and rumbled: 'We are not having that silly dog.'
Crowbone agreed with a nod, for I had already made it plain that the elkhound was staying behind. He was tied up and yowling as we left through the main gate, circling round to the opaque ribbon of the river, watched by cold-pinched, anxious faces and one of the village curs, who had routed out a bird frozen in the eaves of a house and fallen to the rutted path.
The river was iced and drifted with powdered snow, so we crossed it where there would have been a shallow ford and never as much as cracked it. In a moment we were into the tussocked, snow-scoured marsh and the palisade of the village shrank to a line behind us as we moved away from it, towards the faint scar at the edge of the sky.
The marsh glistened and, when it was full thawed, would be a formidable place of bog and sink holes — impassable, as Crowbone pointed out, if you did not know the secret way of it, as these creatures surely did.
'Outlaws,' Kvasir corrected, rubbing his weeping eye and we hugged that hope to us with our cloaks as we slithered through the stiff-spiked sedges, towards the scab of rock that grew even darker as we came up on it.
The sun hovered like a blood-drop on the edge of the world and our shadows grew eldritch, thin and long in front of us, while that black rock seemed more ominous with every mile. There was something about it that lined the heart with chill. Trees sprouted, grew stark claws and thickened in clumps as we came up on the dark-cragged gall on the steppe, which was choked with them. In summer, it would be a mass of green and the rock would be softer and more rounded — but now it looked as if Jormundgand, the world dragon, had brushed a coil through the crust of the earth and left a single scale behind.
'A real outlaw lair,' Kvasir remarked, chewing on some thick bran bread and spitting out little pieces of grit.
Closer still, we heard strange sounds, like bells would make if they were made of water. The hairs on my neck were up and we all put hands on weapons and went slower, peering this way and that through the scatter of bare, twisted trees; Finn climbed off the horse, for he would not fight on it and.had been complaining about his sore buttocks for so long now that I knew more about his arse than his own breeks.
Morut found the source of the sounds soon after; in one taloned tree hung the whitened skull of a cow, with other bones dangled from it, fastened by tail hair. In the wind, they turned and chimed against each other and the big, bold, bearded men of the druzhina shifted uneasily and made warding signs until Sigurd snarled at them to stop being women.
'Outlaw signs,' Finn growled sarcastically. Kvasir said nothing, but glanced back to where the sun trembled on the edge of the world. His look was enough; the idea of being in this place when it got dark was turning my bowels to gruel.
There was no choice, all the same and at least we had wood for a fire — though it was not only the chill that made us bank it high. We perched round it warily, under a millstone moon and a blaze of stars, so many, when the clouds flitted clear of them, that they made a man hunch his neck into his shoulders, as if ducking under a low arch.
'There was once a band of men,' Crowbone said, staring into the fire, 'up in the Finnmark, who thought they would hunt out troll treasure.'
I wished he would not tell one of his tales; they had a nasty way of stinging you. I said as much and he merely blinked his two-coloured eyes and hunched himself under his now dirty white cloak.
'Let the boy speak,' growled one of the Slavs, a big slab-faced scowl of a man called Gesilo. His comrades in the druzhina nicknamed him Bezdrug, which meant 'friendless' and you could see why.
'You will not like it,' Avraham growled back, but Gesilo only grunted. Crowbone cleared his throat.
'There were three of them and they knew the rock trolls in that part of the world were always gathering gold and silver to them and they thought it would be a fine thing to get some of it. One — we shall call him Gesilo — said that it would be easy, for rock trolls became boulders in daylight and only came alive at night. It would be a little matter only to rob them when they were stone and be gone by nightfall.'
'A smart plan,' agreed Gesilo. 'This man has a good name, for it is a plan I would have come up with myself.'
He nudged his neighbours, who did not laugh.
'The three friends travelled high up into the Dovrefell,' Crowbone went on. 'They saw many a boulder like a stone-fixed troll, but none with any sign of treasure and it was growing harder and harder to find a night-camp where there were no such stones at all.
'The other two were wanting to go home after a few nights of this, but Gesilo pointed to a great hill, a lump of rock that stood high above the Fell and was shrouded with trees like the claws of birds. He was sure there would be troll treasure there.'
The listeners shifted and it was not hard to see why, since Crowbone had just described the very place we sat under. I wanted to tell the little cow's hole to clip his teeth to his lips, but I could not do it. Like a man in a longship heading off the edge of the world, I could not turn the steerboard one way or the other for wanting to see what lay through the mirr of falling water.
'The three friends took all day to travel to the place,' Crowbone went on in his bone-chiming little voice. 'It was growing dark when they came up on it, a great hump of black rock thick with bare-branched trees and surrounded by crops of rocks and boulders, many of which could easily be sun-fastened trolls. The other two said that there would be trouble, for there was no shelter and as soon as it grew dark the trolls would come out, stamping and angry.
'But Gesilo started up the steep sides of the rock, shouting out that there was a cave half-way up and it was too small for any of these boulder-sized perhaps-trolls to get in if they did come alive.
'That settled it; the other two followed on and soon reached the cave, which was as Gesilo described. It was too dark to see how far back it went, though it narrowed considerably, so could not be a bear den. It was just tall enough for them to sit in and light a fire, which they did. Darkness fell, but everyone was cheerful, because they seemed safe and had a big roaring fire going.'
Kvasir threw a stick on our own, which caused the sparks and flames to flare up and some of the listeners to shift. Grinning, rueful and half-ashamed, they sank down as Crowbone tugged his dirty-white cloak round him and went on.