He grunted with annoyance. 'I know enough to know that enough is not yet enough. I know enough to know what I may not do and that is true wisdom.'
Something rumbled, thunder deep and a grey wedge pushedforwardfrom shadows. Amber in stone, the eyes looked me over and the steam from its grey muzzle flickered as the wolf licked the god's gloved hand.
'See, Freki,' said One Eye, 'she is coming back.'
In the wind, a shredded blackness fought forward, descending in starts andjumps until it thumped on his shoulder. The black, unwinking eye regarded me briefly, then it bent and nibbled One Eye's ear, while he nodded.
Munin, who flies the world and remembers everything inside that tiny feathered skull, returning to the ear of All Father Odin with a beak like a carving of ebony, whispering of slights and wrongs and warriors for Valholl still unslain. Ifelt no fear, which was strange enough to make me realize this was the dreamworld of the Other.
'So it is,' answered One Eye, as if I had spoken. 'Andyou want to know what will happen. That, of course, is in the hands of the Norns.'
'Silver,' I said and, though there was a whole babble of words, of questions that should have come from me, that seemed to be enough and he nodded.
'Silver,' he replied. 'They can weave even that, the Sisters, but they weave blind and in the dark, which helps me. The silver has to be cursed, of course, otherwise it will not work for this weaving.'
I understood nothing.
'Ask this, Orm Gunnarsson — what is silver worth?' rumbled the voice.
Farms and ships, warriors and women. . everything.
'More,' agreed One Eye. 'And that Volsung hoard, the one they gave to Atil is a king's gift. A cursed gift. My gift.'
And what does the god want in return? What could a god possibly want that did not already have? Warriors for the final battle? If so, all he had to do was kill us.
One Eye chuckled. 'There are more wars than you know and the battles in them last a long time. This one I have been fighting since before the days of Hild's mother's grandmother's grandmother, back to the first one of that line. Remember this, when all seems darkest, Orm Trader — the gift I give is the one I get. What you are, I am also.'
I did not understand that and did not need to say so — but he had spoken of Hild. The one eye glittered as he looked at me, amused and knowing.
'The first of her line was the spear thrown over the head of the White Christ priests to tell them a fight was on,' he said and left me none the wiser. He chuckled, a turning millwheel in his throat, and added: 'You have to hang nine nights on the World Tree for wisdom, boy.'
The raven, Munin, spread tattered wings and launched itself into the air. We watched it go, then One Eye grunted, as if his back bothered him, or he needed his supper.
'He goes to find his white brother and bring him home — Fimbulwinter is not on us yet and he has shaken enough pin feathers.'
The blue eye turned to the amber of a wolf even as I watched it and I felt no fear at it, only curiosity to see All Father shapechange, for that was his nature, to be neither one thing nor the other and never to be trusted fully because of it.
'That is one knowing you take from this place back to the world,' he rumbled, his voice deepening. 'The second is that One Eye will force a sacrifice from you and it will be something you hold dear.'
The wind shrieked and the snow drove in like white oblivion, stinging my eyes and driving me to my knees. But I was not afraid, for this was not Fimbulwinter. .
'That's a fucking comfort right enough, Trader,' said the voice in my ear, 'but not to those still buried to their oxters in snow.'
Hands hauled me upright, shook me until my eyes rattled and opened. Light streamed in. Light and the sear of cold air, as if I had stopped breathing entirely. Onund Hnufa, a great lumbering walrus, peered into my face from his iced-over tangle of moustache and gave a satisfied grunt.
'Good. You will live — now help the others and stop babbling about Fimbulwinter.'
We kicked and dug them out. Snow mounds shifted and broke apart; people growled and gasped their way back into the living light of day.
Fifteen were dead, ten of them thralls, among them Hekja. Thorgunna and Thordis, pinch-faced and blue, clung to each other and made sure the tears did not freeze their eyes shut.
Three of the druzhina were also dead and two of Klerkon's men, which left one alive, the large snub-nosed Smallander Kveldulf, Night Wolf, dark and feral under a dusting of ice. He and Crowbone glared at each other and I saw, in that moment, that Kveldulf was more afraid than the boy.
'That was a harsh wind,' noted Hauk Fast-Sailor.
'If it had not been for the timely warning, it would have been harsher still,' growled Gyrth, slogging heavily up through the snow which lay hock-deep in the V of the balka. His tattered furs trailed behind him like tails.
'Worth an armring,' I said, turning to Morut, who was grinning into the tangle of lines his journey had ploughed into his face. 'Which I promise when I can get it off my arm in the warm.'
He acknowledged it with a bow and then turned his grin on the scowling Avraham.
'See? I have returned, as I said I would,' he declared. 'The steppe cannot kill me and I hear you have been seeking a way across the Great White, you who could not find your prick with both hands.'
Avraham, eyes ringed in violet in a face blue-white, had not the strength to answer, nor hide his relief that Morut was back.
Led by the little tracker, we hauled the horses down the balka to where it shallowed and opened out into a great expanse of opaque ice, tufted with rimed grass and across which the new snow of the buran drifted in a hissing wind. This let us backtrack to where the carts were, but so many horses were dead that a score of carts were abandoned and anything that could be was left with them.
No horses remained for the druzhina and even little Vladimir was on foot now Cleverest of us all were Thorgunna and Thordis, who had the frozen horse carcasses chopped up and loaded on to a cart, with the smashed-up wood from several others. Now we had food and wood to cook it with, even if Finn said he was hard put to decide which of the two items would be more tasty.
'I thought you could make anything tasty,' Thorgunna chided, her wind-scoured cheeks like apples as she smiled and Finn humphed with mock annoyance, staring with a rheumy eye at one stiff, hacked off pony haunch.
'You boil it in a good cauldron with one of its own horseshoes,' he growled. 'It will be tasty when the shoe is soft.'
The rest of the carts we burned that night, making camp there and hauling out the large cooking kettles to boil more meat in, as much as we could. Horseshoe or not, we had heat and full bellies that night, enough to stitch us together again. We, who seemed set to die this day or the next, even started to talk about what lay ahead.
'Another storm like that will end us,' growled Red Njal and little Prince Vladimir scowled at his elbow, for we were all one sorry band now, leaching the same heat from the same fire.
'We will succeed,' he piped and no-one spoke until Morut fell to telling us of his journey.
He had tracked the Man-Haters a long way, down a balka filled with ice to a big frozen lake with an island. All the way, he had come upon ruined carts, dead horses and dead men; those of Lambisson. He had seen no women, though — but the brass-coloured horse, he said, was dead of cold and hunger, as were others that were clearly steppe ponies. Avraham groaned at the loss of the heavenly horse.