'Eventually, they ran out of wood and drew lots to see who would brave the dark and fetch some time. One — we shall call him Orm — drew the shortest twig and reluctantly left the safety and fireglow for the dark of the hill.'
'Now there's the lie of it, right there,' grunted Kvasir. Tor I cannot remember Orm ever having fetched wood. Or water. Or. .'
'I am the jarl, you dog turd,' I gave back, looking for a bit of flyting to put an end to this Olaf-saga — but Crowbone's tales were like the magic salt-mill that tainted the seas; once started, there was no stopping.
'Orm went out,' Crowbone continued. 'The trees seemed to reach for him like claws, so he resolved to gather what fallen wood he could, as swiftly as he could and return to the cave, which was now a welcome glow above and behind him.
'Then he heard a noise. A grinding-grim sort of a noise. When he turned, there was a rock troll, tall as a house, made up of stones in the shape of a man, like a well-made dyke. When it spoke, it had a voice like a turning quern and demanded to know what Orm was doing in this place and why he had annoyed his old grandfather.
'Orm, puzzled, decided it would be a bad idea to speak of treasure, so he answered that he was collecting sticks for a fire and surely there was no harm in that and how could gathering a few sticks annoy this large troll's grandfather?
'The large stone troll raised his large stone fists and it was clear he was going to smash Orm into the ground. Orm, unable to get away and facing his doom, demanded again to know how gathering sticks for a fire should have annoyed the troll's old grandfather.
'There was screaming and the light of the fire went out above Orm's head, then the screaming of his friends was cut off. The big stone fists were raised to smash Orm to pulp and the big stone head smiled like a cleft in a cliff.
"You should not have lit your fire in his mouth," answered the troll.'
There was silence and those with the great dark rock behind them hunched down a little, as if feeling breath on the back of their necks. Everyone was now remembering how much like the top of a head it had looked, sticking up through the glistening marsh, thin-furred with trees like the nap on a thrall's skull.
Avraham chuckled at Gesilo's stricken face. 'I said you would not like it.'
Gesilo — and the rest of them — liked it even less the next morning, when the light crept up and turned the trees into shadowed hands. It slid, honey slow, like the milk mist that tendriled the scarred slopes of that dark place, looping in chilled coils round our knees. No-one was happy.
The rock was no higher than a few hundred paces, but in that flat, white nothing, seemed big as a mountain, cut and slashed as if one of Crowbone's trolls had taken a frenzied flint axe to it. It made us all move quiet and speak soft.
Crowbone stood, wrapped in his white cloak as usual, head cocked to one side as if listening, while men moved around like wraiths, upset if a horse stamped too loudly or snorted. Naturally, someone had to ask him.
'What do you hear?'
Crowbone turned his coloured eyes on the speaker, a vast. bearded giant called Rulav, who was standing at the head of his big horse.
'Nothing,' he said. 'Not a sound.'
Which was only the truth, but the way he said it made us all suddenly discover the utter silence of the place. No wind sighed, no bird fluttered or sang. Men made warding signs and muttered.
'White-livered bunch,' growled Sigurd blackly, though he saved some dark looks to shoot at his nephew. Morut laughed and slithered on to his shaggy steppe pony. He moved out into the mists, faded, then vanished and the shaggy-bearded giants in their long, leather-backed ring-coats watched him go and wished for his courage.
I laid a hand on Crowbone's shoulder as we sorted ourselves out.
'Time you learned the value of such a silence as you have found here,' I said to him and he nodded, now as pale and afraid as any nine-year-old.
The druzhina were more unhappy than ever, once they discovered that they had to leave their horses behind and go on foot towards this dark rock. Finn and I and Kvasir, on the other hand, were pleased and, when we shrugged into our light ring-mail coats, caught the envious stare of the big Slavs, encumbered with their own weighty garments, split to the crotch for riding and dangling heavily down to their ankles.
We waited; Morut ghosted back to us, wiping the pearls of mirr from his dripping face where the freezing mist had melted.
'There is a pool, the ice fresh cracked, not far ahead and just where the steep slopes begin,' he said. 'It is where they get water, for sure — recently, too. A trail leads up into the rocks.'
'Any green-haired beauties there?' demanded Finn scornfully. 'Combing their tresses, perhaps?'
Morut chuckled while the big Slavs sucked in the reference to slope and rocks. Not the words the great, trudging, drip-bearded warriors wanted to hear, but Sigurd adjusted his silver nose and whistled scorn down it at them. They shipped shields on their backs, took the peace-strings off their swords and stumbled on, those mailed coats flapping at their feet. Those left to guard the horses were no happier, a few men on their own and looking right and left.
The pool was just as Morut had described — opaque, stippled ice with black in the middle where it had been chopped to the water. If there was a trail away from it, all the same, I could not see it — but it was hardly necessary. A boy raced away from it, bounding like a hare, leather bucket flapping in one hand, pointing the way up the slope as clearly as a blazed sign.
With a whoop and a roar the druzhina lumbered after him, despite Sigurd's furious bellows and Finn stopped, blew drops off the straggle of his moustache and shook his head.
'Can bulls catch a hare like that? My bet is on the boy.'
He won, but only just. The boy half-turned on the run to look at the roarers who waddled after him — and went straight into a tree, flying backwards on to his arse, the bucket bouncing back down the slope. One of the Slavs gave it a kick in passing and a triumphant bellow.
The boy was caught, for sure — he was up and reeling, but the breath had been driven out of him and you could see his little chest heave. Dark, wild hair, I saw and skins over ragged wool and scraps of fur. Barefoot. Doomed.
The first one to him was Gesilo, reaching out one hand to grab him, the other heavy with a big, straight blade.
'Take him alive,' roared Sigurd, but who knows what Gesilo might have done. Not that he had a chance; his horny, broken fingernails barely brushed the boy's skin-covered shoulders and something broke from the snow-splattered rocks nearby with a throaty roar and a spear that drove straight into the Slav's face.
He howled and went over backwards with his jaw flapping loose and blood flying. A hand grabbed the boy and shoved him further up the slope. I say a hand, but it was more of a claw. What stood in front of the boy, spread-legged and spear-armed and snarling protectively, brought all the roaring Slavs to a skittering stop. Everybody gawped.
It was the shape of a man, but the face was warped, as if the bones had been squeezed and the skin tightened, so that it looked like a wide-mouthed frog. The eyes bulged, hair patched in a parody of a beard and straggled in wisps across the skull and it was naked, save for a skin wrapped round the loins.
And scaled. Every visible inch of it. Scaled as a chicken leg, just as we had been told, from thick-nailed feet to that wisp-haired skull. The hands that gripped the spear — a well-made weapon, I saw — were yellow-horned with nails long as talons.
There was silence, save for the scrabble of the boy vanishing up the trail into the rocks of the slope and the harsh panting of the Scaled Troll standing guard as he did so. Then Finn gave a rheum-thick growl, hefted The Godi and charged, howling out Odin's name and elbowing aside the startled, rooted Slavs.