Robert Low

The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3


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was a sure sign that you would die.

      Illugi seized the man in return and shook him. ‘What was in your head?’ he demanded in a fierce hiss.

      Eyvind looked at him, his eyebrows closed into one, and he shook his head again, bewildered. ‘Head? What do you mean … ?’

      ‘Were you remembering, or just thinking?’

      ‘Thinking,’ he answered.

      Illugi grunted. ‘What thought?’

      Eyvind screwed up his face, then it smoothed and he looked at Illugi. ‘I was looking at the town and thinking how easily it would burn.’

      Illugi patted him on the shoulder, then indicated the pile of dropped gear. ‘Get to the Guest Hall and don’t worry. It was Odin’s pet right enough – but not with a message for you. For me, Eyvind. For me.’

      The eagerness in him was almost obscene to watch. ‘Really? You say true?’

      Illugi Godi nodded and the man scrabbled to collect his things, then stumbled off towards the butter-glow of the Hall.

      Illugi leaned on his staff a moment, looking round. I was annoyed; Eyvind thought he had seen one of Odin’s ravens, herald of death, and had then gone off, not the least bothered that the doom of it was claimed by another. I said as much and Illugi shrugged.

      ‘Who knows? It could have been Thought … That raven is as deep and cunning as Loki,’ he replied. Then he looked at me, his fringe of grizzled, red-gold beard catching the lamp glow. ‘On the other hand, it might have been Memory – Birka has burned before.’

      ‘You think it a warning, then? Since it came to your sacrifice for the dead?’ I asked, shivering slightly.

      ‘On yet the other hand,’ Illugi Godi said wryly. ‘Eyvind is Loki-touched. He loves fire, is mad for fire. Twice before people have stopped him lighting one on the Fjord Elk. Oh, he always had good reason – hot food for us all, dry boots and socks – but he was also the one who wanted to torch all the buildings at St Otmund’s chapel, after we knew the fyrd were roused.’

      I remembered – so it had been him who had called for it.

      ‘So he was mistaken?’ I asked as Illugi hefted his belongings and, with no other word, led me to the Guest Hall.

      I wanted to ask him what would happen when Eyvind told the others, but should have realised what Illugi already knew: that Eyvind would say nothing. He would now, as the fear and relief fell away, realise what a nithing he had become at that moment and would certainly tell no one how his bowels had turned to water.

      The Guest Hall was spacious, clean and well equipped, with a good hearth pitfire and a lot of boxbeds – not enough for us all, so it was a chance to see who was who in the Oathsworn.

      Of course, I ended up on the floor near the draughty door, but that was no surprise. My father got a good boxbed, as did Einar and Skapti and others I had expected. To my surprise, Pinleg got one, too and, after a moment of raised hackles and growling, Gunnar Raudi forced Steinthor out of his. Chuckling, Ulf-Agar watched the archer slouch off, scowling.

      ‘Watch your back, flame-head,’ he advised. ‘You may be picking arrowheads out of it.’

      ‘Watch your mouth, short-arse,’ Gunnar growled back, ‘or you will be picking my boot out of it.’

      At which all those who heard it laughed, including Steinthor. Ulf-Agar bristled, thought better of it and subsided sullenly, for he had also heard of Gunnar Raudi.

      I was surprised how many of these hard men had heard of Gunnar and the respect they held for him. I had always thought of Gunnar as someone who lived for free at Bjornshafen and never questioned the why of it.

      Now, it seemed to me, Gunnar was known as a hard man himself, but was clearly not at ease with it. I wondered, then, why he didn’t just leave, for it was also clear that he and Einar were wary as big-ruffed wolves round each other.

      I had expected Birka to be much the same as Skirringsaal, but it was different. We had women, sent by the merchants who ran the town, but these were no bought thralls, to be up-ended and tupped without thought. They were respectable wives and mothers, in embroidered aprons, with proper linen head-coverings and a beltful of keys and scissors and ear-cleaners. They had their own thralls – some of them pretty enough – but not for the likes of us to grab at.

      They had no fear and sharp tongues and the cold-eyed men of the Oathsworn meekly submitted to having hair and beards trimmed and fingernails cut, as if they were children.

      So we had meals and minded our manners, after a fashion – Illugi Godi had to cuff a few heads into shamefaced apologies now and then and so respected was he that he could.

      I wondered about Illugi. He was a godi, a priest, of course, but most priests were jarls, too. But in the Oathsworn, Einar clearly ruled. It was bewildering for me, this new life – and for others, too, forced to go into the town to get drunk at one of the ale houses set up for foreign travellers and try out the whores there, though they grumbled at having to spend silver on humping that they could never get back.

      But even if someone could be persuaded to part with a girl, taking her back to the Guest Hall was a waste of time, since the disapproving eyes of the goodwives, who came and went as they chose, tended to have a shrinking effect. Things, it was generally agreed, were not changing for the better.

      There was news, too, brought by traders in coloured cloth tunics and trousers, some dressed like Skapti, who told of those lost in the cataracts of the Rus rivers that year. Like old Boslof, sucked under Holmfors, Island-force, which was an indignity to a man who had survived the insatiable, boulder-strewn torrents of the Drinker, the Courser, the notorious Wave-force and all the rest of the deadly rapids that marked the route to Konugard – Kiev, the Slavs called it. The last seven were so vicious that the Christ-worshippers called them the Deadly Sins after some tale in their holy sagas.

      I also heard about Arnlaug, dead of the squits, despite offering up a good ram to the tree on Oak Island, which the Christ-men were calling St Gregor’s Island, the first haven after the last of those seven rapids. Having shat himself with fear going down all of them, it seems this Arnlaug couldn’t stop and wasted away, so that he was a husk when they came to burn him.

      Burn him they did. They had turned to the old ways in the east, ever since the Kura raid some twenty years before, when two hundred ships, they say, entered that river south of Baku and put the town of Berda to the flame and the blade, all the Mahomet-worshippers there.

      In turn, the raiders were attacked by Mussulmen – and the same sort of squits that took Arnlaug – and had to retreat, whereupon those Aesir-cursed heathens had dug up the respectably buried and stripped them of the fine weapons and armour left in their boat-graves.

      Now the traders burned their dead instead, as hot as they could make it, so that armour melted. As well, they broke the swords into three pieces, to be reforged across the rainbow bridge, but not in this life.

      That, as one silver-bearded, garrulous old veteran of the rivers and rapids pointed out, was in Igor’s time, who was seventy-five and his wife, the famous Olga, sixty when they gave the Rus their prince, Sviatoslav, whose wars on the Bulgars and Khazars now strangled the silver life out of Birka.

      And everyone nodded and marvelled at the wyrd of it and shook their heads over the future.

      They shook their heads, too, over the new trade agreements with Miklagard, the Navel of the World, which meant they could not purchase more than fifty gold pieces’ worth of silk and had to have a stamp to prove it.

      Nor could groups of more than fifty men, all unarmed, enter that city of New Rome, which they called Constantinople. Ridiculous, everyone agreed – even, admittedly, if fifty gold pieces’ worth of silk made a fair number of trousers.

      Except, noted Finn Horsehead, if they were for Skapti Halftroll. He’d be lucky to get a pair and a spare out of that much material. And everyone laughed, even the merchants, who