Throst Silfra. Both just lay down, patiently waiting for the sweet relief from the hunger and cold, the gentle frozen sleep as the white raven folded them in huge wings.
Throst's closest oarmates, Tjorvir, Finnlaith and Ospak, threw some hacksilver into the shallow grave, then Finnlaith came to me, his wide face reddened with cold and buried in a tangled mass of cold-stiffened beard. His eyes were iced blue.
'It seems to us three that Throst also knew of Thorkel's treachery,' he said, which was flat-out bold enough to make me blink. These were words for an Althing, where convention kept the speaker from being killed.
'It is no surprise to us, then, that Odin took his luck,' he went on levelly. 'If more of those who came with Thorkel die, we want you to know, Jarl Orm, that it will be the wish of another god and not Odin's curse on an oath-breaker.'
Then he nodded and stumped off, leaving it clear to me that, if I could trust no others, I could depend on those three at my back.
It was, I noted wryly to myself, good to know. There were fewer now who could truly be depended on, even among the Oathsworn. Bone, blood and steel were all brittle in the cold and even the binding fear of the wrath of Odin was cracking. They had taken enough and all of us, hugging our shivers to ourselves, wondered whether we would do the same as Throst, this day or the next, just lie down and let our heart stop and think ourselves winners of that bargain. Some, I knew, wondered whether to let matters get that far.
Then there was the sabre and the runes on it. I took to wearing it, wrapped in the bundle Martin had made of it, looped over my shoulder like — a bow. Folk thought it was so it was handy for me to study the hilt, but the truth was that I just wanted it to look that way.
The truth was that the runes were useless, for we were coming down from the north and would have to reach Sarkel and track back to find Atil's howe. It was a truth I did not want men who were dying to know.
We stuck Klepp's runed squares on dead men's tongues, in the hope that we would be able to identify them on the way back, for the wolves would dig them up from the shallow scrapings we rolled them into. There were a few who wondered if that was a waste of time and Klepp's talents, sure we would never be back in the warm lap of summer to howe their bones up properly.
The wind won and the land changed, from glaring white to patched brown and then to limitless miles of dun-coloured earth, frozen solid and dusted with snow, thick in drifts here and there. Leafless trees, squatting in sullen clumps, brushed their skeletal fingers across an icicle sky and the wind rattled the frozen stalks of yellow grass like chattering teeth.
'The whole world is ice,' whimpered Jon Asanes that night, shivering close to anyone he could find — as we all did — and the dung fires. Anyone close scooped it up as the horses dropped it, sticking it inside their clothes to leach the warmth and stop it freezing too hard to burn later. But the fodder was running out; horses were eating less and shitting less. Those that were not dying.
'This is nothing,' answered Onund Hnufa. 'I have hunted whales up where the ice forms mountains. I am an expert on ice.'
'Aye,' agreed Gizur, as if he had done the same, though he only wished he had.
'It is a world of ice, up there in Bjarmaland,' Onund went on, in a bass rumble like a mating seal. 'Sea ice forms in autumn and early winter, out of the milk sea, which is thick with grit ground out of the land by the moving ice.
'Fast ice is what we call ice that is anchored to land; it breaks up with tides in spring. Floes are large and flat bits of ice, like those tiles they make pictures with in the churches you spoke of, Trader. They are broken up by wind and wave and moved with the same.
'Pack ice is formed from floes that herd like sheep and are crushed against each other. There is pack ice a hand's breadth thick and more, yet which bends on waves, fitted to them like cloth.
'Ice grows old, too, like people. You need to see that if you plan on taking a ship near it. Young ice is clear, a hand-width thick and brittle as stale bread — you can carve through that easily enough. First-year ice is as thick as a man is long and at two years it is thicker still, stands higher in the water, has small puddles and bare patches and is the colour of Olafs left eye. You sail far round that stuff if you are smart.'
Olaf smiled and winked his blue-green eye to let everyone see what Onund meant. He had wandered over from Vladimir's fire, attracted by the savoury smells from ours and offered a story for a bowl of what we had. He gulped and chewed it down even as it burned his lips.
'Good,' he said and then made the mistake of asking what it was.
'Does it matter?' Finn demanded with a grin, but the boy's pinched face was unsmiling when he replied.
'You have never been a thrall Finn Horsehead,' he said, serious as plague. 'It is never necessary to know what it is you are eating; it is, I have found, vital to know what it was.'
Grinning, Gyrth tossed him the frozen, bloodied paw of a deerhound. 'That's Other Dog,' he said, rheum-throated with the cold. 'Dog we ate yesterday.'
'The oldest ice is thicker than two men, one standing on the other's shoulders. It is sometimes as blue as the sky,' Onund continued, in a voice heavy with heimthra, the longing for things that have been and are now lost, perhaps forever.
'Enough ice talk,' muttered Kvasir. 'I am cold enough already.'
They called for Olafs story while I was marvelling at old humpbacked Onund, a man who had walked on a mountain of ice and saw that it had puddles and bare patches and was coloured blue-green. Even the Great White did not bother him.
In the morning, after an hour of travel, the Khazar scouts came back, flogging their bone-thin horses into staggering runs towards us. They spoke urgently with Vladimir, who was perched on his horse like the white raven itself.
Later, warily, we came up on what the scouts had found; the remains of a couple of wadmal and felt tents, a litter of snow-dusted debris; a saddle, brassware, a wooden bowl, a sword stuck in the earth and abandoned to rust, the hub of a wheel with a couple of spokes left in it. There were dead horses, thin steppe ponies sprawled on their sides, their legs stuck out straight like carved wooden toys that had fallen over.
And there were sharpened stakes, each with a head screaming frozen pain at us from rimed faces.
'Anyone you know?' asked Dobrynya, moving his horse to my side. There was no-one we recognized, though Gyrth hefted the sword and said: 'This is a good north-made weapon, Jarl Orm.'
'Lambisson's men,' Finn said, squinting at the signs of it. 'This one has braids like Botolf — see. That's the way the Svears and Slavs do them. It was said Lambisson had many Baltic Slavs with him.'
'Horsemen took them by surprise, scattered them,' added Avraham, pointing out the signs of it. 'Probably they were in the rear of the column. Hard to say when this happened or where the rest of them went — the ground is too frozen. They were not after plunder, else that sword would not have been left.'
'A day ago,' Morut said, hunching himself into his furs. 'Two, perhaps. The wolves have already been at these heads and the wounds are still raw, so were done when the flesh was unfrozen, which would be only a matter of hours, but there is no snow in the eye-sockets. There are three hoof-prints showing the attackers went south. I could track them.'
'Do so,' ordered Dobrynya, then turned to Sigurd and me, while Avraham scowled at Morut for his cleverness.
'Whoever attacked them may still be close,' Dobrynya said. 'We will close up and keep watch.'
The Man-Hater women, I wanted to say, but decided not to. I did not worry as much as he over it — those steppe ponies were proof that the women warriors were in as bad a condition as ourselves and, besides, Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter were so close now I could touch them if I shut my eyes and reached.