Then, on a day where the sky was the colour of Odin's one bright eye, I was moving carefully to a private spot — but not out of sight — to risk a shit and saw little Olaf standing wrapped in his once-white cloak like a pillar of dirty snow on the dark earth, watching black birds wheel.
They were waiting for us to quit the latest wolf-chewed remains, followed us, hungry and hopeful as gulls on a fishing boat and, like them, a handful of wary men trailed little Crowbone, seeking scraps of wisdom.
'So — you are saying that if one more bird joins them from the west something terrible will happen?'
Red Njal's voice was suspicious, but the thickness of disbelief in it was like the ice on the Don — broken and uncertain.
'Mind your words, too, boy,' he added, 'for there is naught so vile as a fickle tongue, as my granny used to say.'
Olaf said nothing at all, merely nodded, watching intently.
Treyja's arse,' growled Klepp Spaki, his voice muffled. No more than his eyes could be seen in the swaddle of hood and wadmal round his head. 'What makes that happen? How do you know? What runes do you use?'
'The birds are their own runes,' answered Olaf.
'How?' demanded Onund Hnufa, lumbering up and towering over Crowbone, who did not even glance up at the terrible hunch-shouldered effigy hanging over him like a mountain. 'By what rules? What signs?'
'Here,' said Olaf and touched his head, then his heart. He hunched himself back in the cloak as Red Njal grunted scornfully.
'Thor's red balls, boy — I was the same when I was your age. Running about making black dwarves and trolls appear and fighting them with a wooden sword.'
We all chuckled, for all of us had done the same. Olaf boke his gaze from the birds to turn his odd eyes on Red Njal's cold-roughed face. The seidr, it seemed to me rolled off him like heat haze, so that I had to blink to steady my eyes.
'No offence,' muttered Red Njal hastily. 'Be never the first to break the bonds of friendship, as my granny used to say.'
A bird fluttered in and landed. 'Aha,' said Crowbone. 'Today, something bad will happen.'
'This is all shite. A boy's will is the will of the wind, my granny said,' declared Red Njal when Olaf had trudged out of earshot. He turned and looked at me, his eyes like small animals in the ice-crusted hair of his face.
'Is it not shite, Trader?'
'I saw and was silent, pondered and listened to the speech of men,' I offered, remembering the old saying; his frown chewed that until I thought his forehead would crack.
'Shite,' I clarified and he cracked the ice of his face with a smile, then left me to my own awkward business.
An hour later, at the lip of a great scar of balka, the axle pin on a cart snapped and the wheel came off. Ref Steinsson took an axe and the handle of another and fashioned a new pin with delicate, skilled strokes, while men heaved and strained to unload the cart then lift it and put the wheel on again.
Red Njal, crimson with effort, looked up at me, then to where Olaf stood, a quiet smile on his face.
'Shite,' said Red Njal, bitterly accusing and I shrugged. If this was as bad as it got. .
'Heya, Trader — look at that.'
Hauk Fast-Sailor, arms full of bundle from the unloaded cart, nodded across the steppe with his chin.
'The djinn, Trader — remember them?'
I remembered them, and the little Bedu tribesman Aliabu telling us of the invisible demons who could never touch the earth, whose passing was marked by the swirl of dust and sand. For a moment, the memory of Serkland heat was glorious.
The snow swirled up in an ice crystal dance. Those who had never fared farther from home than this — most of these new Oathsworn, it came to me — gawped both at the dance of it and at Hauk and me, realizing now just how far-travelled we were, to have seen djinn in the Serkland desert.
'I did not know the djinn were here, too,' Hauk said, grunting with the effort of moving the bundles. 'Lots of them, it seems.'
I did not like it and did not know why. Snow curled in little eddies and rose in the air, dragging my eyes up to a pewter sky and the figure flogging a staggering horse towards us and yelling something we could not hear.
Work stopped; the wheel was on, but the pin still had to be hammered in and all eyes turned on the horse and rider, the frantic fever of them soaking unease into us.
It was Morut the tracker, shouting as he came up, his voice suddenly whipped towards us by the wind.
'The buran is here!'
We had just enough time to find shelter. Just enough before it pounced on us, hard as the lash of a whip, a scour of ice that shrieked like frustrated Valkyries.
We unhitched the ponies and dragged and pushed them down the V-shaped balka, taller than three men and so steep that most of us went down it on our arses. Those too slow were moaning in agony at the barbs of flying ice; horses screamed, flanks bloodied by it. We huddled, people and beasts together, while the world screamed in white fury.
Light danced like laughter on the water, the sea creamed round the skerries and d drakkar bustled with life on the edge of a curve of beach. I watched the boy stand in the lee of the ship, up to his calves in cold water, clutching a bundle and his uncertainty tight to himself, his shoes round his neck.
Someone leaned from the boat, yelled angrily at him. Someone else thrust out a helping hand and he took it, was pulled aboard. The drakkar oars came out, dipped and sparkled; the dragon walked down the fjord.
Me. It was me, leaving Bjornshafen with Einar the Black and the Oathsworn on board the Fjord Elk. I was young. .
'Fifteen,' said the one-eyed man. He was tall and under the blue, night-dark cloak he exuded a strength that spoke of challenges mastered. Little of his body showed, other than a hand, gloved and clutching a staff.
His single eye, peering like a rat from the smoked curl of hair framing his face, shaded by the brim of the broad hat he wore, was blue as a cloudless sky and piercing. I knew him.
'All Father,' I said and he chuckled. One Eye, Greybeard, the Destroyer, The Furious One. Frenzy.
Odin.
'Part of him and all of that,' he answered. He nodded at the scene, which wavered and swirled as if the sudden wind ruffled it, like the reflection in a pool.
'The White Christ priest with Gudleif,' he said and I saw the head on a pole, a head which had once been Gudleif, the man who had raised me as a fostri. Caomh, the Irisher thrall who had once been a priest — always a priest, he used to say — stood beside the horror Einar had created and watched us row away.
'Bjornshafen was woven together after Gudleirs sons died and the White Christ priest did it, so that they are all. followers of the One God now.'
He said it bitterly, this Father of the Aesir. Why did he permit this White Christ, this Jesus from the soft south? He was Odin, after all. .?
'We wear what the Norns weave, even gods,' he answered. 'The old Sisters grow weary, want to lay down their loom, perhaps, and can only do that when the line of the Yngling kings is ended.'
It was a long line. Crowbone, great-grandson for Harald Fairhair, was part of it. Did the Norns seek to kill him, too?
One-Eye said nothing, which annoyed me. You would think a god would know something about such matters, about such a rival as the Christ.