head of Gunnbjorn, trotting through the yelling, milling people, hurling them aside to get to his jarl. Vigfus scrambled up and White Gunnbjorn grinned and made for me, a blade in his hand. His eyes, I saw were strange, colourless – even his lashes were white.
‘Leave him,’ Vigfus gasped. ‘Help me – get out of here. Einar is coming.’
Gunnbjorn snarled at me, then hooked a shoulder under his master’s armpit and hauled him up. They were four steps further on when, nearly sobbing with the sheer anger and frustration of watching them get away, I hurled the seax.
It whirled through the gap between us and smacked Gunnbjorn in the back. There was a crack and he shrieked and collapsed in a heap, knocking Vigfus over in front of him.
Gunnbjorn was flailing, trying to reach his back, gasping for help. Vigfus, cursing, saw his state, scrambled up and hopped off, vanishing into the milling throng. I tried to follow, but the pain in my ankle made me shriek as loud as Gunnbjorn, so I fell and Einar and the rest found me, sprawled in the street, pounding it with my fists, face streaked with blood and snot and sweat.
Gunnar Raudi rolled me over, had two men haul me up. Einar hunkered down by Gunnbjorn, who was moaning and still trying to reach his back.
‘Take it out,’ I heard him groan. ‘I can’t feel my legs. Take it out.’
There was nothing to take out. The seax was no throwing knife; the haft had hit him on the spine and broken something vital.
Einar rolled him over surprisingly gently and spoke quickly, for we didn’t have much time left before someone hefty and armed came to find out what the trouble was.
‘Gunnbjorn,’ he said, ‘you are done for.’
‘It would seem so,’ the man answered painfully, through clenched teeth. His face was as white as the bone hair plastered limply to his skull, even through the patina of dust. His eyebrows and lashes were white; his eyes were not colourless, I saw, but a faint shade of violet.
‘I can let you die as a man,’ said Einar, ‘with a good blade in your hand and a bench in Valholl.’
You could see the nod in Gunnbjorn’s eyes, even if his neck could no longer make it.
‘Or I can leave you here,’ he said, ‘in this street, where you will probably live long enough to be carried to a bed and cared for a little, until you die a nithing.’ He paused and shrugged. ‘Perhaps you may even live. I have seen such. A man I saw once in Miklagard had a marvellous seat with an awning and was carried about by thralls after having his legs crushed under a ship he was careening.’
Having made the point, he leaned closer, dangling Gunnbjorn’s own knife by the blade, haft tantalising inches from the man’s palm. ‘Tell me where Vigfus is going with the girl,’ he said.
Gunnbjorn moaned.
‘He left you to die here,’ Einar pointed out.
Gunnbjorn’s voice was scarcely above a whisper now. ‘I have a mother, Hrefna Ulfsdottir. In Solmundsteading in the Vestfold …’
‘I will send word that you died well. And the purse under your left armpit.’
He closed his eyes then, already seeing the ravens. ‘The Sea Storm. The howe of the Sea Storm, looking for Atil’s hoard. The girl knows. To the north-west, one, maybe two days, she says.’
Einar dropped the knife-haft into Gunnbjorn’s palm at the same moment he slit his throat. Then we left, while the blood pooled into a scarlet mud-puddle beneath his head and the street emptied, for no one wanted to answer questions about a dead man.
It was like being on the sea in a swell. We crossed the seared steppe under a sun like a fist, kicking up puffs of black soil as we moved over the rolling yellow grass, heading for the next green line on the horizon.
Eventually, the line would thicken, grow larger, haze out of the heat into stands of pine and alder and birch. The slow, undulating steppe was studded with them, each huddled like a herd of living creatures round a gulley, where water trickled sluggishly to the Dnepr. Under the trees was heady with resin, thick with needles and mulch, and an even more oppressive heat. But it offered shelter from what we feared most: Pecheneg horsemen.
It was, as Valknut never seemed too tired to point out, a truly bad idea, heading out on to the steppe on foot, with no more than two days’ hard flatbread, rank cheese and some of the dried meat strips the Rus horsemen used.
They stuck it under their saddles and cloths, where the horse sweat softened it and juiced it up – mare sweat tasted better, they swore – but we had no such luxury and, at the third forest of the day, I stopped trying to chew it and swore it would be better kept to repair my boot soles with.
‘Give it here,’ shouted one of the band, a pox-faced half-Slav called Skarti. ‘I’ll stick it down my breeks for you. Same idea, different sweat.’
They laughed, this dripping, evil-smelling bunch. They panted like dogs and filled leather bottles with river water, softened bread and meat in the stream before trying to eat it, gasped on their needle couches with the weight of the heat – and joked.
Einar had to turn eager men down when he told them of his plan and that he needed sixty good men from the company to get Hild back. He had sent word to Sviatoslav and his three sons that men of Prince Vladimir’s druzhina had broken oath and run into the steppe, taking with them a slave from Einar, and that he had gone to bring all of them back. That, he hoped, would excuse his own absence.
Einar’s assured calm had gone, replaced by a morose nervous energy, where he stroked his moustaches feverishly and gave every sign that his luck had deserted him.
Then the chosen sixty had struck off north and west, following the signs Bagnose and Steinthor, those two tracker hounds, were leaving as they followed the spoor of Vigfus and his crew to the mysterious howe of the Sea Storm.
And I had gone with them, despite Einar and Illugi and everyone else’s misgivings over my strapped-up ankle and the limp I’d had before we’d even started.
But I was determined and Einar didn’t put up too much resistance to it. I caught Gunnar Raudi’s eye as we started out across the steppe and remembered his words to me, his warnings. Einar, I thought, would be pleased to have me founder on the plains outside Kiev, where he could find a good, sensible excuse to leave me for dead.
The prospect was another good argument for staying behind, but I was more afraid of looking afraid than anything else. That fair-fame trap was closing like steel teeth – I was the Bear Slayer, after all, the young Baldur. I had to go to the howe of the Sea Storm.
‘What the hell is the Sea Storm?’ Einar had demanded of Illugi Godi, after sending men flying on errands everywhere and gathering gear for the pursuit. He added, in a muttered afterthought. ‘What is she doing?’
‘It is no secret in these parts. Dengizik, the Sea Storm, was a Hun lord,’ Illugi corrected. ‘They know his name round here. They say he was Atil’s son.’
Einar’s head came up and he and Illugi looked at each other, exchanging the gods knew what in their glances.
‘Perhaps there is a clue there to Atil’s hoard,’ I offered. ‘Maybe that is Atil’s hoard and she is leading them to it.’
Einar swung his glare at me, pure black ice, and I felt the weight of it. I should have stopped then, but somehow could not, as children do when they start in on horse-goading for the first time. A savagery comes on them then that those who know watch for, dragging the offenders away and cuffing them round the head.
‘I think not,’ Illugi offered pensively. ‘This Hun tomb is one everyone knows and almost certainly has been raided already. Atil’s hoard, it is well known, is hidden.’
‘Just so,’ I said, testing the ankle now that I had slung all my gear on. ‘So well hidden that a madwoman knows how to find it.’
Einar stayed silent,