the boy in a warm cloak and patting him. I wondered if she would croon quite so softly when she found out the whole story of what he had done, what he had urged hard men to do back there in Svartey.
The wind hissed, the skin of the river crinkled and the thrall women huddled, blowing into chapped, cupped hands, but none of that was as cold as the dead we rowed away from.
‘It seems,’ Kvasir agreed, grunting the words out between pulls, ‘that I brought back a treasure greater than my share of those dinar coins, which I plan to make into a necklace for her.’
‘She’s broody as an old hen. You will have to bairn that one and soon,’ agreed Finn, which left Kvasir silent and moody.
There was a flash behind my eyes of the fat limbs and round little belly, fish-white and so small it made Thorkel’s blood-smeared hand look massive. The bud-mouth and wide, outraged blue eyes crinkling in bawls in a red face while, somewhere off to the right and pinioned, the mother screamed.
Crowbone had glared at her with savage triumph, then looked back to Thorkel and nodded; Thorkel hurled the bairn against a stone and the bawling ended in a wet slap and the mother’s even louder screams. And I watched, doing nothing, saying less.
What had she done to Crowbone? He would not say, save that she was one of Randr Sterki’s women, so the bairn was his and hers. Most probably she had been less than kind to him – perhaps even the one who shaved him so cruelly. There was no point in trying to stop the shrieking, bloody mess he had fermented, so that the mother’s death soon after was almost a mercy.
Aye, he was a strange one, that boy. Afterwards, men could scarce look each other in the eye for what they had done, though they were no strangers to hard raiding and red war. Yet there had been something slimed about what he had driven them to do that left even these ashamed.
If it was not unmanly seidr he had unleashed, it was a close cousin and further proof of his powers came when we ran up to the river mouth, slashing through the ice-grue water, Gizur looking this way and that, cupping the sides of his eyes with his cold-split red hands, looking for the signs that would tell us where land lay in the mist.
Then the boy had stood up and pointed. ‘That way,’ he said.
There were chuckles and a few good-natured jibes at Gizur. Then Pai, the lookout, shouted out that there was smoke.
‘No,’ said the boy, certain as sunrise. ‘It is not smoke. Those are birds.’
So it was, a great wheeling mass of them. Terns, said the boy, before even sharp-eyed Pai could spot whether they were terns or gannet.
‘How do you know that?’ demanded Hauk Fast-Sailor.
‘You can hear them,’ said the boy. ‘They are calling each other to the feast, shouting with delight. Herring are there, too, if you want to fish.’
He was right – terns were diving and feeding furiously and it was easy to follow them to where Gizur picked up the marks for steering to the mouth of the Neva and into Lake Ladoga, where we turned south on the Volkhov river.
By that time, of course, the men were silent and grim around a boy who could hear birds and knew what they said and was called Crowbone. He reminded me of Sighvat and when I mentioned it, Finn and Kvasir agreed.
‘Perhaps he is Sighvat’s son,’ Finn offered and we fell silent, remembering our old oarmate and his talk of what birds and bees did. Remembering, too, him lying in the dusty street of a filthy Serkland village with the gaping red smile of his cut throat attracting the flies.
By the time the dark rushed us on our first day’s pull upriver to Aldeigjuborg, we were still too far away to risk going on, so headed to the bank. Cookfires were lit and the awning stretched on deck, so that we ate ashore and slept aboard.
Kvasir, Finn and I, sitting together as usual, talked about the boy and wondered. Kvasir said Thorgunna was good at finding things out and would listen while she and the boy talked.
All of us agreed, half-laughing at ourselves, that little Prince Olaf was a strange child. Finn half-joked that it was just as well we had kept to our bargain and left the thralls alive, for he looked like a dangerous child to cross.
I did not think it a laughing moment, for we had killed all the freeborn there, wives and weans – even the dogs – of Klerkon and his crew. That little nine-year-old boy had taken his revenge on everyone who had done him wrong, so that he was red-dyed to the elbows with his hate, even if others had done the slaughter.
Thorgunna bustled up not long after, looking for the same strange child and fretting about him being alone in the dark on an unknown shore, so we all had to turn out and look for him.
He turned up after an hour, sauntering out of the shadows so silently that Thorkel nearly burned his own hair off jumping with fright with a torch in his hand.
‘Where were you?’ demanded Thorgunna and those two-coloured eyes, both reddening in the torch glow, turned on her.
‘Listening to the owls talk about the hunting,’ he said.
‘Was it good for them?’ chuckled Finn and the boy shook his head, serious as a stone pillar.
‘Too cold,’ he said and walked to the fire, leaving us trailing in his wake, stunned and thoughtful.
‘Here,’ said Thorgunna sharply, thrusting something at him. ‘Play this and stay by the fire. It will keep you out of mischief.’
It was a tafl board and some polished stones for it in a bag. Men chuckled, but the boy took the wooden board politely enough and laid it beside him.
‘It is too dark to play,’ he said, ‘but I know a story about a tafl board, which I will tell.’
Men blinked and rubbed their beards. This was new – a boy of nine was going to tell all of us full-grown a story; Kvasir laughed out loud at the delight of it.
The boy cleared his throat and began, in a strong, clear, piping little voice. And all those hard axe men leaned forward to listen.
‘Once a man in a steading in Vestfold carved a beautiful tafl board for his son,’ the boy began. ‘He made it from oak, which is Thor wood. When he was finished he showed his son how to play games upon it. The boy was very glad to have such a beautiful thing and in the morning, when he went out with the sheep up to the tree-bare hills where they grazed, he took his tafl board along, for he could always get stones as counters for it.’
The boy paused and the men leaned forward further. He had them now, better than any skop. I marvelled at the seidr spell he wove round the fire, even as I was wary of it. How did he know this story? It was certain Klerkon never tucked him in at night with such tales and his foster-father had died when he was young. Maybe his mother had, before she turned her head to the wall.
‘Everywhere he went he carried his board under his arm,’ the boy went on. ‘Then, one day, he met some men from the next village up, making charcoal around a small fire. “Where in this country of yours can a man get wood?” the charcoal burners asked. “Why, here is wood,” the boy said. And he gave them the fine tafl board, which they put into the fire. As it went up in flames, the boy began to cry. “Do not make such fash,” the charcoal burners said, and they gave him a fine new seax in place of the game board.’
‘That was a good trade,’ growled Red Njal from out of the shadows. ‘A boy will get more use from a good seax than a tafl board. That and the forest is the best teacher for a boy, as my granny used to say.’
They shushed him and Olaf shifted to be more comfortable.
‘The boy took the knife and went away with his sheep,’ he went on. ‘As he wandered he came to a place where a man was digging a big stone out of his field, so that he could plough it. “The ground is hard,” the man said. “Lend me your seax to dig with.” The boy gave the man the seax, but the man dug so vigorously with it that it broke. “Ah, what has become of my knife?” the boy wailed. “Quiet yourself,” the man said. “Take