I knew the reason for the yellow-black scorch marks on his fingertips – which was one of the few familiar signs about him now. He had both grown and withered since I had seen him last. He had a beard now and his bald patch – a tonsure, I had learned – was freshly shaven. Yet he was thinner and something had chiselled away at his face, sinking his eyes deeper, while they blazed with a strange, yellow fervour.
He waved at the litter on the table in front of him, while Steinkel trembled and everyone else waited to hear what Valknut found outside. So we listened to Martin.
‘These are what will make you and your kind fade to nothing and the word of God triumph,’ he went on, grinding slowly and smiling at Einar.
‘What is my kind?’ Einar countered and Martin’s mouth went thin.
‘Doomed,’ he said.
The silence was something you could taste.
‘These are rolls, for tribute and taxes,’ Martin went on, to the chink-chink of his grinding. ‘These poor heathens used to make marks on tally sticks and even strips of birch bark. But you can’t run a kingdom like that. Oleg values me, for I can tell him who owes what and when. In time, his sons and his sons’ sons will know. The mixture bites into the vellum and leaves a mark. As my words will bite into the future and leave a mark.’
‘Aye, you are a clever man, right enough,’ Einar answered, unfazed. ‘Once before you showed me your cleverness.’ And he drew out his little knife and nonchalantly trimmed a thread from the weave on one cuff.
Martin winced at the memory and I saw him pause in his grinding to touch the scabbed stump of his finger. Then he recovered his smile. ‘If you had not come to me, I would have come to you, Einar,’ he said easily.
‘Just so,’ Einar replied. ‘It was lucky for us both then that you showed these bold lads and their friends where to find me and mine. Such polite messengers.’
Martin shrugged. ‘These boys came to me because I am a priest and they are baptised Christians. When they told me who they were, I knew whom they sought. That was God’s work.’
‘Just so,’ my father said. ‘Your god must be pleased at the helping hand you gave him to point these young lads and their killers in our direction. Some guidance from a Christ priest. Are you not supposed to tell them not to kill?’
‘You killed my father …’ Steinkel declared sullenly.
‘I did indeed, nephew,’ my father said and I looked at him, shocked. I had always thought it had been Einar. ‘He killed my bear,’ my father went on. ‘And he tried to kill Orm here—’
‘Enough,’ Einar interrupted and glared darkly at Martin. ‘Why would you have come to me?’
Martin put down the pestle carefully as Valknut came back in, looked at Einar and shook his head.
Martin said, ‘Take the boy outside.’
Steinkel’s head whipped from one to the other, bemused, angry. When Valknut grabbed an arm, he pulled back. ‘What are you up to, monk?’ he yelled, his voice high and shrill. Valknut wrenched him into an embrace, whirled him round and took the collar of his tunic at the back of the neck, twisting it tight so that it choked him. He hauled the boy up so that his toes danced furiously for a grip on the floor, then the pair of them staggered through the door and into the night.
Einar cocked his head expectantly at Martin, who sighed and put off sharpening his writing quill. ‘I have told Oleg nothing,’ he declared. ‘In return for this continued silence, I want the return of my Holy Lance.’
‘Your what?’ demanded my father.
‘Hild’s spear-shaft,’ I told him, ‘which she won’t like to give up.’
My father looked from one to the other. ‘Why does he … What use is that? It has no point.’
If he meant it as a joke, no one laughed. I looked at Martin and knew. ‘He has promised Oleg,’ I said. ‘In return, Oleg has promised … what? A Christ church in Kiev, or here in Holmgard?’
Martin’s smile was blade-sharp and twisted. ‘Kiev. And when he succeeds his father, he will make me bishop there, with the blessing of the Pope. This country seeks a new and Christian religion.’
‘And it won’t be the Greek one from the Great City,’ I finished for him. He inclined his head generously in my direction.
‘There are two more of Sviatoslav’s sons,’ my father growled, ‘who may not fall in with this great scheme.’
Martin shrugged. I saw he was confident of switching allegiances to whichever brother triumphed – if he had a great Christ charm to promise.
Einar was silent for a moment. Martin and he exchanged sword-cut glances across the room, each knowing what the other was thinking. What was to stop Einar killing Martin now and thus shutting his mouth?
The fact that he was Oleg’s man and that would mean trouble. Steinkel would know who had done it, so he would have to die. His brother would suspect, so they would have to find and kill him, too … there was too much blood, even for Einar.
‘How do I know you will keep your word, monk?’ demanded Einar flatly.
‘You will surely kill me if I don’t,’ he replied easily, ‘and I will swear it on the Christ cross, an oath if you will. You like oaths, Einar.’
There was a moment of deadly stillness. I saw visions of blood everywhere and then Einar shook his head and I breathed again.
‘Swear on your Christ-god if you will,’ he said quietly. ‘Swear also to Odin.’
Martin hesitated, then nodded. A pagan oath was easily broken in Martin’s mind, but one to his own god might hold. Of course, Einar would try to kill him anyway, as quietly and secretly as possible and everyone saw that – including Martin. It would be a harder task to find him after all this, I was thinking.
As we drifted into the night, I was less easy about taking the spear-shaft away from Hild and said as much. No one had a thought on it as we made our way back to the Elk.
In the end, it was surprisingly easy. She held on tight to it, white-knuckled, until Ketil Crow – none too gently, it seemed to me – prised her loose from it. I expected rants, rages, even those rolling-eyed fits.
Instead, she sank down on the deck with a weary sigh, slumped like a sack.
Ketil Crow and Illugi Godi went off into the night to deliver it and witness Martin’s oath. As they left, with my warning to watch out for my cousins, doubly mad now, I would wager, she looked blackly at Einar. ‘There is a price to pay for this,’ she said and the blank chill of it made me shiver. Even Einar, sunk in morose contemplation of the subject, was jerked back by the simple vehemence of it.
‘Can you still find the howe of Attila?’ he demanded, alarmed, and she nodded, her eyes startling pits of pitch in the yellow lantern light.
‘Nothing will now keep me from that burial place,’ she declared. ‘But I will need something from you.’
We moved to Kiev not long afterwards, in a mad, shouting, frantic chaos of boats and men, leaving Valgard and a dozen Oathsworn with the Elk.
Novgorod was as far as foreign ships went. All the traders were forced to the Rus boats: the strugi and the larger nasady, which were expensive, but could withstand Baltic storms and the grind of dragging them over portages. It was as sound a way as any of making sure the Prince of Kiev controlled the river trade.
But the traders stayed in the crowded anchorage this time, fuming and cursing, because every boat had been taken by Sviatoslav to move men and gear swiftly down to Kiev the Golden. From there, we’d move across to the Don and down it to face the Khazars.
I remember the journey as one of the laziest I have ever had. The only lazier one was the sail down the Don afterwards.