flames exactly as Roman Fire was supposed to. I watched the flames leap up the proud horns of Botolf’s carving, saw ruin in them even as the frantic crew of Dragon Wings saw those same flames leap to their own ship. Then Botolf yelled out that there was a second ship.
A second ship. Roman Fire. Bearcoats. These had been no part of Randr Sterki before now. I blinked and stared, my thoughts wheeling like the embers of my burning ship while men struggled and slipped and died, raving curses.
‘Orm – on your steerboard…’
I half-turned into a wet-red maw, where spittle skeined like spume off a wave. He had a greasy tangle of wild hair and eyes as mad as a kennel of frothing dogs, while the axe in his hand seemed as big as a wagon tree. I swung and missed, felt my sword bite into the wood of the mast, where it stuck.
I got my shield in the way a little, so that his axe splintered it and tore it sideways, out of my finger-short grasp. His whole body hit me then and there was a moment when I smelled the woodsmoke and grease stink of his pelt, the rankness of his sweat. My hand was wrenched from the hilt of my trapped sword.
Then there was only the whirl of silver sky and dark water and the great, cold plunge, like a hot nail in the quench.
Six weeks before…
The year cracked like a bad cauldron, just as winter unfastened its jaws a little and the cold ebbed to drip and yellow grass. Those from further south would say it was March and spring, but what did they know? It was still winter to us, who counted the seasons sensibly.
In the northlands we also know what causes the ground to move: it is the pain-writhing of Loki, when Loki’s wife has to empty her bowl, leaving her bound husband in agony, his face ravaged by the dripping poison of the serpent for the time it takes her to return and catch the venom again. The gods of Asgard gave dark Loki a hard punishment for his meddlings.
His writhings that year folded the cloak of the earth to new shapes with a grinding of stones, and great scarred openings, one of which swallowed an entire field close to us, kine and all.
A sign from the Aesir, Finn said moodily, echoing what others thought – that we should be back on the whale road and not huddled on land trying to be farmers. It was hard to ignore his constant low rumbling on the matter, harder still to put my head down and shoulder into the loud unspoken stares of the rest of them, day after day.
Odin had promised us fame and fortune and, of course, it was cursed, for he had not warned us to beware of what we sought so fiercely. Now that we had it, there was no joy in it for raiding men – what point raiding, as Red Njal grumbled, if you have silver and women enough? Nor was there any joy in trying to forsake the prow beast and cleave to the land, digging it up like worms, as Hlenni pointed out.
I heard them and their talk of the crushing wyrd of Odin. Others, still claiming to be Oathsworn, had wandered off into the world, with promises to be back at my side if the need arose, the old Oath binding them – We swear to be brothers to each other, bone, blood and steel, on Gungnir, Odin’s spear, we swear, may he curse us to the Nine Realms and beyond if we break this faith, one to another.
I accepted their promises with a nod and a clasping of hands, to keep the Oath alive and them from harm, though I did not expect to see any of them again. Those who remained struggled with the shackles that kept them from following the prow beast. They plodded grimly through winters in the hope that better weather might bring a new spark to send them coldwards and stormwards. It never seemed to flare into a fire of any fierceness, all the same.
The only ones who no longer moaned and grumbled were Botolf and Short Eldgrim, the first because he was no good on a raiding ship with one timber leg and, besides, had Ingrid and a daughter he cared more about; the second had no clear idea half the time of where he was, the inside of his head knocked out of him in a fight years before.
Finn had bairned Thordis in the fever that followed our return, silver-rich and fame-rich, and now she cradled their son, Hroald, in a sling of her looped apron. Finn looked at the boy every day with a mix of pride and misery, the one for what every father felt, the other for the forging of another link in a chain that chafed, for Thordis hourly expected a marriage offer.
On the other hand, when I looked across at Thorgunna and she let me know with her eyes that her own carrying was fine, there were no words, no mead of poetry that described how I felt at the news. It was a joy doubled, for she had lost a bairn before this and to find that it had not broken Thorgunna as a mother was worth all the silver Odin had handed us.
Yet the dull haar of disappointed men hung over Hestreng, so that the arrival of young Crowbone in a fine ship brought heads up, sniffing eagerly at his fire and arrogance like panting dogs on a bitch’s arse.
Crowbone. Olaf Tryggvasson, true Prince of Norway and a boy of twelve whose fair fame went before him like a torch and was so tied in with my own that swords and axes were lowered, since no-one could believe Crowbone had come to raid and pillage his friend, Orm of Hestreng.
He sat in my hall rubbing sheep fat into his boots, the price you pay for being splendidly careless and leaping off the prow of a fine ship into the salt-rotting shallows.
I had not seen him in three years and was astounded. I had left a nine-year-old boy and now found a twelve-year-old man. He was sharp-chinned and yellow-haired, his odd-coloured eyes – one brown as a nut, the other blue-green as sea ice – were bland as always and his hair was long enough to whip in the wind, though two brow braids swung, weighted with fat silver rings woven into the ends. I was betting sure that the one thing he wanted, above all else, was to grow hair on his chin.
He wore red and blue, with a heavy silver band on each arm and another, the dragon-ended jarl torc of a chief, at his neck. He had a sword, cunningly made for his size, snugged up in a sheath worked with snake patterns and topped and tailed with bronze. He had come a long way in the three years since I had freed him from where he had been chained by the neck to the privy of a raider called Klerkon.
I said that to him, too, and he smiled a quiet smile, then answered that he had not come as far as me, since he had started as a prince and I had come to being jarl of the legendary Oathsworn from being a gawk-eyed stripling of no account. Which showed what he had learned in oiled manners and gold-browed words at the court of Vladmir.
‘A fine ship,’ I added as his growlers, all ringmail and swagger, filed in to argue places by the hearthfire. He swelled with pride.
‘Short Serpent is the name,’ he declared. ‘Thirty oars a side and room for many more men besides.’
‘Short Serpent?’ I asked and he looked at me, serious as a wrecking.
‘One day I will have one bigger than this,’ he replied. ‘That one I will call Long Serpent and it will be the finest raiding ship afloat.’
‘Is Hestreng ripe for a strandhogg, then?’ I asked dryly, for already the fame of this boy was known in halls the length of the Baltic, where he had been hit-and-run raiding – the strandhogg – all year.
Crowbone only grinned and shook his head so that the rings tinkled. Then I saw they were not rings at all, but coins with holes punched through them and Crowbone’s grin grew wider when he saw I had spotted that. He fished in his pouch and brought out another, a whole one, which he spun at me until I made it vanish in my fist.
‘I took it and its brothers and cousins from traders bound for Kiev,’ Crowbone said, still grinning. ‘We will choke the life from Jaropolk before we are done.’
I looked at it – a glance was all it took, for minted silver was rare enough for me to know all the coins that whirled like bright foam along the Baltic shores. It was Roman, a new-minted one they call miliaresion and silver-light compared with other, older cousins that spilled out of Constantinople, which we called Miklagard, the Great