did so.
It took Einar’s shield just below the rim, a solid pine on pine wheel of wood, and split it lengthwise. With a swift shrug, Einar was out of the straps, both hands on the hilt of his sword and Vigfus, still holding the buried axe, was jerked sideways by the dead weight of the dropped shield.
Too late, he released his grip. Einar’s two-handed blow spanged off one side of that helmet, took Vigfus on the top of the left shoulder with the splintering crack of bone and sheared down through mail, bone, flesh and sinew until it popped out of his armpit with a sucking sound and a spray of ruined iron rings.
Vigfus roared, spun away from his falling arm and clapped his remaining hand over the great rush of blood from the stump. The second blow crushed mail rings into his ribs. The third slashed a steak out of his thigh. He went down, bellowing as Einar hacked shreds off him until there was no more noise.
The others of his crew tried to give up, but Hild would not have that. Screeching, hair flying like a Valkyrie, she demanded they all die.
Two of the Dandy’s men threw down their weapons and Einar cut them down where they stood with a few swift strokes. After that, the others fought on with the desperate ferocity of the cornered, but it was short and they were all chopped to bloody ruin by packs of Oathsworn.
Then there was silence, save for the pant and gasp of ravaged lungs. Someone was puking, hard and noisy, and the impaled man was growling and yelling as others tried to lever his arm off the spear-point. The iron stink of blood was everywhere; the floor of the tomb was slushed with viscous red mud.
And I sat there in a widening slick of Gunnar Raudi’s blood, his head in my lap, watching the other sluggish pool form slowly from the stab wound in his back.
Eight men were dead; twenty-four more had wounds, some of them deep. In the stunned twilight of battle, Ketil Crow and Illugi took me under the armpits and hauled me up and away from Gunnar Raudi.
I let them, numbed by what I thought I knew, never taking my eyes off Einar. Had he stabbed Gunnar Raudi in the back, hard enough to wound, to distract him? In that half-light and confusion I turned it over and over and still it vanished like smoke.
In the end, I knew, with a deep, sick feeling, that he had, but there was nothing I could do. He was, I thought with a flush of fear, as fetch-haunted as Hild. And had broken his oath yet again in that mad moment.
Then I kept hearing Gunnar Raudi’s warnings and knew, with a nauseating certainty, that I would be next.
None of it would bring Gunnar Raudi back. Illugi and I, working without a word between us while the others bound up wounds and sorted out their gear, cleaned Gunnar Raudi as best we could and laid him out on his back, hands folded on his sword. I had to tear strips off his underkirtle to bind his shoulder back to his body, rather than have that terrible gape, so like a lipless mouth.
Einar came across after we had done this, stared down at the body and where we hunkered near it. ‘A good man,’ he said. ‘He died a good death.’
I could not speak. Blood leaked into my mouth from biting the inside of my lip to keep from screaming at him: You killed Gunnar Raudi. You killed him. Like you killed Eyvind.
Einar ordered him laid at the feet of the throne, where the mouldering, fur-rotted remains of Dengizik sat, skeletal hands on the stone arms, the fur rim of his rusting helmet festering on his neck.
Everyone wanted out of that place, especially when Hild drifted like silent smoke down the stairs, to stand over the carved remains of Vigfus and smile her beautiful, fey smile.
‘Dengizik has no head,’ Einar noted, his voice cracked with dryness.
‘The Romans took it and put it on a pole,’ Hild answered, her voice seeming sucked out of her in a hiss. ‘His faithless young brother Ernak, who would not stand with him against the Great City, had permission to take the body, on condition the Romans sealed the tomb, lest his fetch return. Five hundred years and more it has sat here. My mother told me this.’
There were looks flying one to another, from eyes round and white with fear. Tongues snaked over dry lips as the dust settled, mote by mote and almost sibilant. No one liked talk of a fetch in such a place.
‘Is there anything we need from here?’ Einar demanded of her, his voice crow-harsh in the blood-reeked twilight.
‘Not for me,’ she answered, soft as the rustle of a shroud. ‘But this is Atil’s son and those swords were made by the same smith who forged Atil’s blade from the end of the Christ spear. My distant kinsman, Regin the Volsung.’
Two swords lay across the cobwebbed, dusty brocade of Dengizik’s robed lap, but no one even wanted to go near them, never mind claim them as spoil.
We left that place, treasureless and afraid, not even having looted Vigfus’s men. By the time we had got back across the timber bridge – knocking it spinning into the waterfalled chasm after everyone was safely across – and down the steps, the storm had ended. The sun was out, the sky a clear-washed cloudless blue, and the ground steamed in the heat. But every leaf had a muddy wash, rapidly drying to dust in the heat.
At the stream, we refilled leather skins and bottles, soaked our heads, and considered how best to go on. There were seven of us with wounds likely to slow everyone down and I was one of them, but we were paired with others who helped us back up the brush-covered ravines and on to the steppe.
Thereafter, it was simply a long world of pain, step by fire-laced step, hour after hour, back to Kiev.
That ankle has never been right since; it aches in cold weather and, now and then, simply gives out and throws me over like a sack of grain, always when I am trying to impress with my gravitas and dignity. Each time it flicks pain at me, I remember Gunnar Raudi.
Others suffered much more. By the second day, the man whose forearm had been speared was running a high fever and his arm had swollen like a balloon. By the time we reached the outskirts of Kiev he was being carried in a cloak held at all four corners by his oarmates, drenched in sweat and moaning piteously, while the arm had turned black to the armpit.
Illugi tried what he knew, a potion made from bark of aspen, quickbeam, willow and wych-elm: fifteen barks in all made up this one. It failed, so he tried a poultice made from the ashes of burned hair and everyone contributed some, even Bersi, whose waist-length flame-red hair had never, ever been cut and who believed it bad luck to do so.
It was certainly bad luck for Illugi’s patient, who died thrashing in his sleep that night in Kiev, having made it to safety. I watched him being wrapped for burial and knew only that his name was Hedin and that he had once kept bees in Uppsala.
On the open steppe we had spotted distant horsemen, beyond arrow range and moving with us like a pack of questing wolves. But they did not come near and everyone agreed it was probably because we had come out of the tomb. Perhaps, it was argued, they thought we were fetch warriors and did not dare to contest us.
I thought it was because of Hild, the only one unconcerned by them. She walked with bold, long strides in her red half-boots, swishing the skirt of her long, blue, red–embroidered dress and only slightly soiled overmantle, a Rus zanaviska, her dark hair spilling free.
She was the perfect picture of a Norse maiden – until she turned to look at you and you saw that almost all her eyes were almost entirely black, all dark pupil, with only a thin corona of white. Regin’s kinswoman and, if you knew of him, you could see the resemblance.
‘Is that the same Regin from the tales, then?’ demanded Bersi during one rest halt, when we all hunkered and panted, wiping sweat out of our eyes. ‘Sigurd’s oarmate?’
‘So she seems to say,’ Skarti growled, glancing uneasily at where Hild sat, neat in her dress and staring at the horizon.
‘Not an oarmate,’ growled Bagnose, putting one