nudging Kvasir, who looked shocked at the very idea, then grinned.
‘Happily, I am unable to read or write, save a bit of rune here and there. And now that I am down to one eye, I will not risk straining it on such.’
‘Then whisper me such things instead,’ countered Thorgunna, while Tvorimir closed one eye reflectively and said nothing. He was well-travelled was Magpie, but he was more Slav than Swede and, like all of them, knew women had their place. As all Slavs will tell you, a chicken is not a bird, as a woman is not a person – but they do not say it around a prow-built woman from the vik.
‘Where is Jon Asanes?’ I asked and Tvorimir arranged his blackened teeth into a smile.
‘At the Yuriev Monastery,’ he declared and did his wobble and wheeze laugh again at our faces.
‘It used to be a salt-maker’s yard,’ he added, ‘until some Bulgar monks arrived from a place called Ohrid with their White Christ and Greek ways. The young Prince Vladimir is interested in such things. It is useful, for they owe me and I can get the boy taught to write Latin and Greek.’
It made good sense, for Jon Asanes was a Christ-follower from the island of Cyprus, where his mother still lived – if she still lived – and of the Greek style, too. He had done us a service on Cyprus and we had brought him away with us but, for all we had become his family, the gods of Asgard had made no headway in him.
‘He spends all his time with the Greeks there – priests and lay brothers, mainly, as well as merchants from the Great City,’ Tvorimir continued. ‘He learns a deal, but it has to be said that he prefers their ways to ours. He is pestering me to send him to the Great City, which he insists on calling Constantinople and tells me I am a barbarian for saying it is Miklagard, or even just the Great City.’
‘Ach – young Pai is just the same,’ Thorgunna offered. ‘Young men coming to manhood are always fretting with opinions on this and that.’
Which was true enough and seemed an end of the matter. I should have paid it more attention, but had more to think about, so we sat and talked, of Jon’s health – good, considering he was olive-skinned and practically a Serklander, none of whom cared for the ice and snow – and trade and Sviatoslav’s mad war with the Great City that made it impossible.
Tvorimir asked if we wanted to use his bath house, at which Kvasir choked on his ale and Finn gave the Slav merchant a look to strip the gilding off his house’s fancy carvings. We were good Norsemen and, unlike the filth of the Franks and Saxlanders and Livs and Ests, were not against washing most weeks – though, in winter, you tend to be sensible about such things.
Rus bathing was another matter altogether. I have seen these people at their baths, which they heat fiercely, then go into naked and pour some sort of oil over themselves, then beat themselves with young twigs until they stagger out, half dead.
After that, they pour cold water over themselves. They do this every day, without being forced, in order to bathe and not as any strange personal torment. Even the Greek-Romans of the Great City are not as vicious at getting clean.
Instead, we idled round the clay oven, picking salt out of the elegantly-carved little throne of a salt holder, sprinkling it on good bread and drinking. We talked of people we knew and what fish were plentiful in the Ilmen and, because it led to it from there, argued about how many rivers flowed into that lake – fifty-two, we counted in the end, though only one, the Volkhov, flowed out and down to Kiev.
It was pleasant talk and easily turned to the trade in slaves and who was doing it and whether they had any new ones.
Frowning, Tvorimir said: ‘Late in the year for it. The Ilmen is freezing early and soon you will not get a boat out the mouth of the Volkhov south. If your slaves are from the north, you will be looking to go south. The only dealer still in Novgorod who is still planning to go south is Takoub.’
Finn grunted and we all shifted a little. Takoub we knew well, because he was the one who had bought our oarmates as slaves some years before, when we had thought them snugged up in Novgorod while Einar led the rest of us in search of Atil’s secret tomb and the silver in it.
We had annoyed Sviatoslav doing it and he had seized our men and sold them to Takoub, who had sold them to an emir in Serkland. Those of us left after Einar had died had the unpleasant task of going after them, among other matters and it had been on that journey we had found the Goat Boy.
We were still in the memory of it when the lad himself arrived, blasting in the cold air and a smile that warmed us all. He glowed and beamed and was wrapped in bearhugs by Kvasir and buried in Finn’s beard, both at the same time, until all three broke apart, faces twisted.
‘Fauugh, you stink.’
‘Is that perfume, boy?’
They looked at each other and all of us burst out laughing. Of course Jon Asanes would be clean, washed and perfumed, for he was Greek and had been three years away from the honest sweaty wool and fish smell of us from the north. So far away it wrinkled his nose now, even as Finn wrinkled his nose at the sweet-smelling boy.
All the same, we clasped forearms as old friends and I felt the leap of my heart at that – him, too, I fancied, from the look in his eyes. He had grown from the skinny boy with only a dozen years on him and his tangled black curls were combed and oiled and fell to the shoulders of the white shirt he wore over sea-green breeks.
‘Is that a beard?’ demanded Finn and Jon Asanes, laughing and blushing, batted the gnarled and filthy hand which was trying to feel his chin. Little Olaf watched it all with interest, saying nothing.
‘Either you flew,’ Jon said, looping a leg over a bench as if it were a horse and pouring ale, ‘or my message to you is still sailing.’
‘What message?’ grunted Kvasir, then was nudged by Thorgunna into making introductions. Jon Asanes had been told of Kvasir’s marriage, but this was his first meeting with Thorgunna and everyone could see she was dazzled by him. It was hard not to be for, with a youth’s summers on him, The Goat Boy now had a breadth of chest and a slender waist and a bright and even smile that was always echoed in his dark eyes.
Then Olaf stepped up, having to look up to Jon Asanes, who now had some height on him, too. Jon was, I realized as I watched him and Olaf study each other, about the same age now as I was when we had met on Cyprus and called him Goat Boy. Yet, with less than a handful of years between us, I felt old enough to be the Goat Boy’s grandfather.
‘You smell nice,’ said Olaf. ‘Not like a man, though. Like a flower.’
Jon Asanes astounded me and showed how much he had learned about dealing with traders, for he didn’t bristle at this, as I expected from someone of his age. Instead, he grinned.
‘You smell like fish dung,’ he countered. ‘And your eyes cannot make up their minds on colour.’
They stared for a moment longer, then Olaf laughed with genuine delight and you could see the pair of them were friends already.
‘The message?’ I asked and Jon Asanes smiled a last smile at little Olaf and turned to me, a storm gathering on his brow.
‘I sent it awhiles since, by a Gotland trader,’ he said and looked sideways at me. ‘An old friend is arrived,’ he added. ‘He is staying with Christ-followers in the German quarter. I say friend, but I doubt if it is true.’
He paused and looked at me, then the others.
‘I did not tell Tvorimir,’ he added, ‘since it was a matter best kept between few, I was thinking.’
I felt the chill then and it was nothing to do with draughts from the door. Magpie caught my eye and slapped a grin on his red face.
‘I will go if you like,’ he said, but I shook my head; I trusted Tvorimir – well, as much as I trusted any trader – and, besides, we had few friends in this part of the world. Instead, I turned to Jon Asanes and asked, though I already knew the answer.
‘Who?’