so,’ he grunted heavily. ‘Oarmates have died under wave and edge and fire from the waters of the North Sea to the sands of Serkland in order to be worthy of Odin’s gift of all the silver of the world. I can hear the Oathsworn dead growl that they did not suffer all that to watch us sit here growing old and wondering about what might have been. I hear better with just the one ear than you do with both, it seems.’
There it was, that oath. ‘Odin’s gift is always a curse,’ I answered dully, knowing he was right. Every feast brought the inevitable bragafull – the toasts drunk and wild promises made – followed later, when the drink had made us mournful, by the minni, the horns raised in remembrance. It grew harder, in the harsh, sober light, to ignore either of them.
This hov had double-thickness walls, was sunk deep into the soil, windproof and waterproof and sitting in it made you feel as solid and fixed as the runestone I planned to have carved. Yet a fierce wind was blowing us all away and I felt the scent of it in the air, with the wrack and flying salt spume that leaped the ridgeline and hunted round the roofs. It was the breath of the prow beast, snorting and fretting at anchor and wanting to be free.
We sat for a while in the swirling smoke, listening to the wind fingering the door and rapping to get in, while Botolf, more belly and less muscle on him these days, stretched out his carved timber foot to ease the stump and told stories to the children.
He told them of Geirrod the Giant and Thor’s Journey to Utgard and the Theft of Idun’s Apples and Otter’s Ransom. This last was told deliberately, I thought, for it touched on the dragon Fafnir, Regin the Smith and a hoard of cursed silver, the very one sent to Attila, the one buried with him – the one we had found.
Into the silence that followed came Thorgunna and Ingrid, doling out bowls of stew and it was so good everyone forgot Otter’s Ransom. She had taken me at my word and made good cheer in a cauldron; there was mutton, hare, duck, eel, prawns, mussels, barley, onions and root vegetables in that stew. I tasted kale and seaweeds and watercress and the lees of red wine.
‘By Thor’s balls, Thorgunna,’ growled Red Njal, ‘the sea is the test of a man as the cauldron is of a woman, as my granny once said. Jarl Brand doesn’t eat as well as this.’
‘He does,’ Thorgunna answered, ‘but he adds cinnamon to his, I have heard. And watch your tongue.’
‘Cinnamon,’ muttered Gizur. ‘There’s fancy for you. I cannot think that it would add much to the taste of this, all the same.’
‘We had buckets of the stuff once,’ Hauk Fast-Sailor said as I elbowed him aside to get a place on a bench nearer the fire. The high seat was my right, but too far from a good heat.
‘Remember, Orm?’ he said, nudging me so that stew slopped over my knuckles. ‘On that island where we fought the Serkland pirates? We used the dead Dane for a battering ram on the door to their stronghold.’
‘That was later,’ Kvasir growled, wiping ale from his beard. ‘The island where we got the cinnamon was where we found some of Starkad’s men who had been taken prisoner and had their balls and tozzles cut off by the camel-humping Arabs. They had killed themselves in their shame. The last ran himself at his prison wall until his head broke open.’
‘I have missed some moments, it seems,’ Thorkel said into the silence that followed. I ignored him as much as I could, though I felt his eyes on me as I spooned my stew.
The smoke eddied, dragging itself to the eavesholes and out into the rain and wind while I listened to Red Njal and Harelip arguing about where other enemies and old oarmates had died. All gone, pale-faced fetches sailing my dreams as dark shapes on a charcoal sea.
Thorgunna came softly up behind me, dragged the hair back over my shoulders and began to tie it off.
‘Don’t get your hair in your food,’ she said softly. ‘And those stories are not ones for children.’
Finn clattered his bowl angrily to the ground and rose, while the deerhounds came in among us, licking platters and fingers and wolfing scraps. Cormac came with them, scrabbling and laughing.
‘Perhaps we should set this one to routing out a stag or two before winter comes,’ chuckled Botolf, sweeping the gurgling boy up. Aoife grinned and Ingrid fired arrows at her from her eyes.
Finn looked at them, then at me, then shook his head and banged out in a blast of rain-cold wind.
‘Why does Finn have a face like a goat chewing a wasp?’ demanded Botolf as Ingrid glared at Aoife and hung on Botolf’s big arm.
‘He thinks we are living in a dream and going soft,’ Kvasir said, wiping bread round his platter and tossing it into the snapping maw of a deerhound. He looked softly at his wife. ‘Being chided for how we speak and needing our hair cut. He thinks we should be off on a hunt for silver.’
Botolf, who knew what he meant, grunted thoughtfully. Thorgunna, who simply thought it was warriors being restless, snorted.
‘Go raiding then – though it is no pastime for honest men if you ask me. At least you will be putting in some effort for the food in your bowl. Seems to me Jarl Orm is overly tolerant of every lazy one of you.’
She scooped up bowls with meaningful noise and shot me one of her looks as she went. No-one spoke for a moment or two, for it is a well-known saying that there are only two ways of arguing with a woman and neither work.
There was moody silence after this.
‘Play music instead,’ I said to Botolf, ‘in the event you find yourself attracted to the story of Otter again.’
Botolf, grinning ruefully, fetched his hand-drum and Hauk fished out his pipes and they tootled and banged away while the children danced and sang and even the thrall women joined in, sheathed in drab grey wadmal cloth, linen kerchiefs tied around brows and braids. For a while they stopped being chattels worn threadbare to the elbows – the power of drum and piping whistle has never ceased to amaze me.
A heathen thing that scene these days, thanks to the White Christ priests. The hand-drum is banned for being pagan and fine children all stained with bastardy, where no such mark was when Odin smiled on us and every child was as good as the next.
That day, while the wind wrecked itself against the hall and the rain battered in from the sea, it was as warming a heartscene as any sailor could dream of on a rolling, wet deck – but somewhere, I was sure of it, Odin had persuaded the Norns to weave in blood scarlet for us.
The thought worried me like a dog on a rat’s neck, made me get up and go out into a night smelling of rain and sea, to where the horses were stabled. They stirred and stamped, unused to being so prisoned, swirling up the warmth and sweet smell of hay and bedding. In the dark, the air was thick and suddenly crowded, as if a host of unseen people were there, circling me.
I felt them, the hidden dead of the Oathsworn, wondering what they had given their lives for and my belly contracted. I thought someone laughed and the dark seemed odd, somehow glowing.
It came from outside, in the sky, where faint strokes of green and red light danced in the north. I had seen this before, so it held no real terrors, but the mystery of the fox fires always raised my hackles.
‘Others’, too. Thorkel stepped out of the darkness and stood beside me.
‘Troll fires,’ he said, wonderingly. ‘Some hold that the red in those fires marks battle, where the warriors fight in Valholl.’
‘I had heard it marks where dragons fight and bodes ill,’ I replied. ‘Pest and war omens.’
‘All it means,’ said a voice, a blade cutting through the hushed reverence of our voices, ‘is that winter comes early and it will freeze the flames in a fire.’
Turning, we saw Finn come up, swathed in a thick green cloak against the cold, his breath smoking into ours as he joined us.
‘The sea will be cold when we sail,’ he added and left that dangling there, like the