was bad.
He greeted us both with a nod of his cropped head and waited, rubbing the grizzled tangle of his chin while we sat our ponies.
‘Where is the boy?’ I asked and he cleared his throat a little, thought to spit and remembered that this was his jarl. It was, I was thinking, hard for him to believe that such a youngster was his master and that came as little surprise to me; I needed no brass reflection or fancy-glass to know what I looked like.
Thin faced, crop-bearded, blue eyed, hair the colour of autumn bracken braided several times and fastened back, reaching down to shoulders that had too much muscle on them for a youth with barely twenty-one years on him.
These shoulders and a breadth of chest told tales of oar and sword work. Even without the telltale scars on the knuckles that spoke of shield and blade, you could see this youth was a hard man.
Rich, too and travelled, with a necklet of silver coins from Serkland, punched and threaded on a thong and finished off with a fine silver Odin charm – the three locked triangles of the valknut, which was a dangerous sign. Those who wore it had a tendency to end up dead at the whim of the One-Eyed God.
There was a fine sword and several good arm rings of silver, too. And the great braided rope of a silver torc, the rune- serpent mark of a jarl, the dragon-headed ends snarling at each other on the chest of a coloured tunic.
I knew well enough what I looked like, what that made Kalk think and took it as my due when he dropped his eyes and swallowed his spit and came up grinning and bobbing and eager to please.
Jarl Brand’s return, complete with mailed men with hard eyes, had sent more than a few scurrying off his lands and the farms they left behind made fat prizes for chosen men like me. For the likes of Kalk and his son, the change made little difference – thralls were chattels, whoever sat in the high seat of the steading.
He told us it was time to bring the horses down from the high pasture, that one had a split hoof and of how Tor Ironhand was still turning his own mares loose in the valley, which he considered his own.
We said we would be back the next day and then rode back to the hall, towing the limping colt behind us.
‘Is this Tor’s valley, do you think?’ Kvasir asked eventually.
I shrugged. ‘I hope not. Thorgunna says it belongs to her, as her share of the steading. I use it because I am your jarl and the pair of you live under my roof – but both you and she can tell me to get out of it if you choose. Why do you ask?’
Kvasir hawked and spat and shook his head. ‘Seems as if you would know a thing like that. Owning a whole valley, like a pair of boots, or a seax.’
‘What? Should the land roll over and ask you to tickle its grass belly when you ride over it? Offer you a grin of rocks and congratulate you for being its owner?’
Kvasir grunted moodily and we rode in silence again, slowly so that the lamed grey could limp comfortably. We did not speak again that day, though I felt the brooding of him on me like an itch I could not scratch.
The next day he moved to my side, squatting by the high seat as I watched Aoife’s Cormac put his fat little arms round the neck of one of the deerhounds, which licked his face until he laughed. He was so pale-headed he might have been bairned on Aoife by the white-haired Jarl Brand himself, which we suspected, since he had been given that comfort as an honoured guest. No-one knew, least of all Aoife for, as she said, ‘It was dark and he had mead.’
Which did not narrow the search much, as we all admitted when we tried to work out who the father was.
‘What will you do about Thorkel?’ Kvasir asked eventually and I shrugged, mainly because I didn’t know. Thorkel was another problem I hoped would just go away.
He had arrived on Hoskuld’s trading knarr, which carried bolts of cloth and fine threads and needles that set all the women to yowling with delight. Stepping off the boat, pushing through the women, he had stared at me with his sea-grey eyes and grinned a rueful grin.
I had last seen his grin on a beach in that bit of Bretland the Scots called the Kingdom of Strathclyde. That was where he had stepped aside and let me into the Oathsworn without having to fight, having arranged it all beforehand. I had been fifteen and raw as a saddle-sore, but Einar the Black, who led us then, had gone along with the deception with good grace and jarl cunning.
Thorkel had gone to be with a woman in Dyfflin. Now he sat in my hall drinking ale and telling everyone how he had failed at farming, how the woman had died and how he had failed at selling leather and a few other things besides.
He sat in my hall, having heard that the story of the hoard of Atil silver was true, the tale he had scoffed at and the reason he had wanted to leave the Oathsworn in the first place.
‘We should call you Lucky,’ Finn grunted, hearing all this. Thorkel laughed, too hearty and trying to be polite, for what he wanted was back into the Oathsworn and a chance at the mound of treasure he had so easily dismissed.
‘Ever since he came back,’ Kvasir mused pitching straw chips into the pitfire, ‘all our men have been leaning to the left a little more.’
I did not understand him and said so.
‘As if they had axes or swords weighing their belts,’ he answered flatly. He shifted sideways to allow a deerhound to put its chin on my knee and gaze mournfully up at me.
‘Eventually, a man has to choose,’ he went on. ‘We came up the Rus rivers of Gardariki with Jarl Brand almost five years ago, Orm. Five.’
‘We agreed to serve him every year,’ I pointed out, feeling – as I always did when I fought this battle – that the earth was shifting under my feet. ‘I am remembering that you, like the rest, enjoyed the pay from it.’
‘Aye,’ Kvasir admitted. ‘The first year and the next were good for us, though we lost as much as we gained, for so it is with men such as we – it comes hard and goes easy. Those were the times we thought you had a plan to get us outfitted and so return to the Grass Sea to find Atil’s silver tomb again. Then you took land from the jarl.’
‘We had no ship of our own until we built one,’ I protested, feeling my cheeks and the back of my neck start to prickle and flame at the lie of it. ‘We need a…’ The word ‘home’ leaped up in me, but I could not say it to these, whose home was the shifting sea.
‘Anyway,’ I ploughed on stubbornly, ‘while there was red war we were welcome in any hov that esteemed Jarl Brand; when red war is done with, no-one cares for the likes of us. Why – there are probably not two halls along the whole coastline here glad to see a boatload of hard men like us sail into their happy lives. Would you prefer sleeping in the snow? Eating sheep shite?’
‘The third year of war was hard,’ admitted Kvasir, ‘and made a man think on it, so that we were glad, then, of a hall of our own.’
That third year of red war against the enemies of Jarl Brand had spilled a lot of blood, right enough, but I had not known the likes of Kvasir had thoughts such as he admitted to now. I gave him a sharp look, but he matched me, even with one eye less.
‘Last year made it clear you were finding reasons not to go where we all thought you should,’ he declared. ‘And while we spent, you hoarded, which we all thought strange in a young jarl such as yourself.’
‘Because you spent I hoarded,’ I replied hotly. ‘A jarl gives and armrings are expensive.’
‘Aye, right enough,’ replied Kvasir, ‘and you are a byword for the giving out, for sure. But this year, when Eirik became rig-jarl of all, you had to be made to start the Elk building and thought more of trade and horses.’
‘A ship like the Elk costs money,’ I bridled back at him. ‘Good crewmen need purse-money and keep – or had you planned to go silver-hunting with what remains of the Oathsworn only? There are a dozen left in all the world and two of them are in Hedeby, one caring for the addled