Rubbing his ear, Crowbone scrambled dazedly to his feet, pulling his dignity and his white cloak round him. His eyes filled with tears — more of rage than pain, I was thinking — and Thordis moved to him, glaring seax-sharp looks at Finn.
'Not now, boy,' growled Finn, blowing on his freshly-burst knuckles. Hauk Fast-Sailor chuckled and shook his head at Finn's audacity.
'Hel slap it into you,' noted Onund mildly, 'which is all you deserve if that notable man-boy takes it into his head to work curse-magic on you for that blow. Anyway — I like his stories.'
'Fuck him,' growled Finn. 'I am just after recalling how we got to this place, thanks to him and his little axe. And his stories are always like eating those limon fruit from Serkland, which look so sweet and clappit your jaws. Besides — how much more cursed can I be?'
Those who heard this last, despite their admiration for a man who had tasted limon from Serkland, groaned and shook their heads, with much clutching of amulets and talisman pouches.
Even I had to shake my head with mock sorrow, though there was less mock in it than I would like. That was not the sort of matter you aired when you suspected any gods were listening — sure enough, we would have an answer to it.
Red Njal's da's ma, as ever, had something to say.
'When you hear the gods whisper,' he offered, savage as a wet cat in a bag, 'hurl your spear into their breath.'
Not long after, we saw smoke as we slid down and round the black, ice-fringed river that had started to wander like a drunk down a street. We steered for those fuzzed grey curls, round one bend which almost had us pulling in opposite directions to turn the strug, and came across a swathe of sand and pebble beach with a clot of yurt beyond.
People scattered and yelled and I had to balance awkwardly in the prow, my arms upraised to show how my hands held no weapons. Behind me, hidden from view, Fish nocked an arrow and watched.
We came in slowly, not wanting to beach the boat, because Gizur warned that we might not get her off again in a hurry. Finnlaith and Hauk splashed ashore with lines and fastened them securely; slowly, creep by creep, cautious people came closer to us.
They were Khazars, wintering here in their yurts with flocks and herds. When they found the magic glint of silver rather than steel in our fists, all fear was forgotten and we carried Thorgunna off and into a yurt, which amazed me with its bright comfort. Almost as amazing as finding I was paying for it with coins stamped with the head of some ruler called Valentian and dedicated to the glory of Old Rome.
We stayed there all that day and the rest of the night, in the cloak-wrap comfort of sights, sounds and smells we had all but forgotten — the hanging braids of garlic and onions, the limp, naked, dangle-necked bodies of duck and hare, the stink of burning hair and singed feathers, the quarrelling snarls of dogs fighting over the same scrap.
That night, Klepp Spaki proudly held up a louse between finger and thumb and declared that, with the return of such vermin, he now knew he was alive.
We spoke no common tongue with these Khazars, for all that we could summon up Greek, Latin, our own Norse, a good smattering of Serkland Arab and even some Krivichian and Chud. The Khazars spoke their own tongue, which some said was the same as the one spoken by Atil's Huns long ago and so no-one among us knew that. They also had the language of the Jews, but all anyone knew of this were the foul swearwords Morut used.
However, trade is a common tongue to all and so we had food and even some green wine — which Finn immediately took charge of — and, above all, news that the ice was melting from the centre of the Azov, for the whole sea had been frozen. It meant that there was now a flow to it and that had broken the ice in the narrowest part, where it entered the Sea of Darkness.
'So there is a way out for us,' beamed Gizur, having laboriously learned all this. 'We can sail anywhere you want, Jarl Orm.'
Onund cleared his throat meaningfully. 'As long as it does not take us more than a long swim from land. I do not trust this log boat.'
In the morning, I was chivvying them up and loading stores on board. In the night, we had howed up the Bjornsson brothers, re-wrapping them in full view of the Khazars so that they would see the dead had nothing with them worth digging up. That and a gift of hacksilver from the hoard would make sure the Khazars let the brothers sleep peacefully. They had no weapons or armrings, but I had openly promised their shares to their mother, so I thought their fetches would stay happy with what had been done.
Kvasir stayed with us, all the same, though I was not sure where he would finally rest — he would not last all the way back to Ostergotland — but Thorgunna had to have a say in that and she was pale as milk and sleeping when we brought her into the shelter of the boat's prow.
We pushed sweatily away into the middle of the river, while children ran up and down, cheering and pitching sticks at us as their parents looked on and waved, smiling.
Slowly, groaning with the effort of it, we swung the riverboat round the bend and away down the black river, the oars chopping up the thin porridge of ice, while the banks grew thicker with birch and willow. I watched until even the smoke of the Khazar camp had vanished, then turned and almost fell over Crowbone, wrapped in his filthy white cloak and staring over my shoulder with his double-coloured gaze.
'What?' I asked, thinking he still brooded on Finn's blow. 'Do not let Finn's manner bother you; he thinks well enough of you, but tempers are short. .'
'No,' he said, still looking over my shoulder, 'I am not concerned with Finn — one day, I will claim weregild for that blow, all the same. It is the birds I am watching.'
Then I turned to look, squinting into the low, creeping mist. A skein of ducks arrowed high overhead.
'Good to see birds back,' I agreed, smiling. 'The winter is losing grip.'
'All the ducks are skinny,' remarked Crowbone. 'Like the ones hanging in that village we left. They are feeding furiously now that the ice is broken.'
I frowned, remembering the skinny ducks and not understanding why he was so concerned. Then he turned his flat, two-coloured gaze on me.
'Why, then, are hungry ducks flying off the water?'
It took me several seconds to answer that in my head and when I did, my heart leaped up and threatened to bang through my teeth and out my mouth entirely. Everyone else started with astonishment when I suddenly sprang forward, screaming.
'Row, fuck your mothers — row!'
We were too few and too late. The long black shapes slithered round from where they had set up feeding ducks, seemed to fly up to us, even laden with Vladimir and his mailed druzhina warriors.
Two boats; my heart collided with my battered boots. One would have been enough. In the end, I told my crew to ship oars and they did so in a scramble and started sorting out weapons and equipment, even before they had stopped puking and heaving in air.
'Well,' growled Finn, climbing up beside me in the prow that faced them. 'This will be a hard dunt of a day, I am thinking.'
A deadly dunt of a day, I was thinking, as I hefted the only weapon left to me, an adze axe I had found on board. All they had to do was sit back and have those Slavs and their curved bows shoot us down; half of us had no shields and we had one bow and a handful of arrows left.
The boats came closer, one with Dobrynya and the little shape of Vladimir up in the prow, the other with Sigurd Axebitten and a strange half-animal which dragged gooseflesh up on my arms until I realized it was Kveldulf, with a whole wolf pelt draped round his shoulders, the mask up and over his helmet.