The Bone Thief (42 page)

Ketil scowled.

‘But why deal with Eirik?’

‘His was the name we were given, but we haven’t committed ourselves to anyone yet.’ Ednoth was wide-eyed, frank, utterly plausible.

Ketil was definitely frowning this time. ‘But Eirik looks to Toli
Silkiskegg
. And he’s too far north. Why should you go to him if you want to deal with Stamford?’ He looked from Ednoth to Wulfgar and back again.

To Wulfgar’s amazement, Ednoth took this, too, in his stride.

‘Ermin Street, of course, my Lord. We thought that the man who controls the great south road would be the right person to talk to.’

‘You thought wrong.’ Ketil swung round and summoned one of his men. ‘Wine. Stools.’ He turned back to them. ‘You want the man who holds Watling Street. Me. And, in any case, little
Silkiskegg
does not hold Ermin Street, no matter what he might claim. We need to talk about this.’ Ketil waved a hand towards the group of women. ‘Serve us. Is that you hiding there, Bolladottir? Bring us some wine.’

‘An honour,
herra
.’ If Gunnvor was being sarcastic there was no sign in her reverent face or her deep curtsey.

While she was doing the rounds with the great horn, Ketil looked back at them.

‘So, is this a deal? I get you all the pottery you want to sell south, and you give me a share? How much were you giving Eirik?’

Wulfgar blinked. Again, he wasn’t given a chance to reply.

‘Forgive me, my Lord, but we need to know whether the goods you can provide are fine enough for us.’ Ednoth’s expression said,
I’m being perfectly reasonable
. ‘We’re thinking of supplying the Lord
and
Lady of Mercia, you know. Possibly even the West Saxon court. We can’t accept anything but the best. Eirik’s pottery samples were superb. Wonderful yellow glazes.’

Wulfgar felt panic rise in his throat. You might have the old dog-wolf safely trapped but you still don’t goad him with a stick.

But Ketil stretched his face into a smile. It was a terrible sight.

‘Not a problem. You’ve seen what Gunnvor Bolladottir uses at the Wave-Serpent? What Heremod has here?’

Wulfgar nodded, trying not to wince.

‘Good enough for you? We can get you yellow if you want yellow, or green, or red. Cooking pots, lamps, tableware, storage jars. Tell my men how much you need. We can arrange packing, transport.’ He was in his element.

And so, it seemed, was Ednoth.

Ronan caught Wulfgar’s eye and winked at him.

Wulfgar turned his head away and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to think about how Ronan had bullied him. How the priest had flirted with the fires of damnation, just to ingratiate himself with Leicester’s terrifying Jarl.

‘Come along and sit down.’ Ronan reached out a hand from the other side of the fire, gesturing at a stool. ‘Well done, subdeacon. You and the boy are learning fast, aren’t you?’

Wulfgar went over to Ronan and stood in front of him, spoiling for a fight. ‘What sort of a priest do you call yourself?’

Father Ronan’s face went still. ‘Not the kind you’re used to, I’m guessing. I’m sorry, Wuffa. It was a dirty trick.’

Wulfgar just listened, his face tight, incapable of speech.

Father Ronan rubbed his beard. ‘But I had my reasons. I don’t think you realised the danger you were in just now, you and the
lad
. How could I have known you were planning to sacrifice the Bishop’s ring?’

‘Your reasons?’

Father Ronan shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t break the seal of the confessional lightly, lad. But we needed to keep Ketil at bay, just long enough for his temper to cool.’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’

As Wulfgar ruminated on the priest’s words, he found the first blaze of his anger subsiding. Buying time for me, he thought. It’s only what I hoped I was doing myself, for the Lady. He nodded slowly.

‘You mean, he would really have hanged us? If we hadn’t found the right things to say?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Father Ronan said. ‘Hanging would have been the least of it.’ He reached up and ruffled Wulfgar’s hair. ‘Tell you what, lad, if we can lay our hands on a harp, I’ll teach you that song about the raven and St Oswald. That’ll brisk you up.’

The trestle tables were being laid with enormous platters of food. Gunnvor was still holding the great horn, now empty, on her knee, as she sat with the others on the stools around the hearth. Red hair and gold and silver jewellery glinted in the firelight as one of Ketil’s hangers-on came forward to squat down on his haunches between Gunnvor and Wulfgar.

‘All right, Cat’s-Eyes?’ he said to Gunnvor. He turned to Wulfgar. ‘All right, Englishman?’

Wulfgar nodded. The man looked hauntingly familiar. Where, he wondered, had he seen that combination of glittering bullion and fox-coloured hair before?

‘Yes, thank you,’ Gunnvor said, without turning her head. She was still listening to Ketil and Ednoth’s cheerful haggling.

‘Where’s my drink, Cat’s-Eyes?’

‘Get it yourself, Ormsson,’ she retorted. ‘I’m busy.’

And Wulfgar trapped the elusive memory. The sun slanting though into Father Ronan’s little Margaret-kirk in Leicester, and Orm Ormsson glittering like motes of dust in a ray of light. And then that watershed of a conversation in the yard at the Wave-Serpent. How could he conceivably have forgotten? But so much had happened to him, in the interim.

Orm Ormsson sighed and shook his head.

‘Word is you’re going soft, Cat’s-Eyes.’

This did get her attention. She didn’t say anything, but she shifted round on her stool and gave him a long stare. He balanced himself by holding on to the edge of her stool with one hand and toyed with the trinkets at his neck with the other, looking up at her from under his long lashes.

Father Ronan was talking to another of Ketil’s men now, still apparently on his quest for a harp, and Wulfgar had nothing to do but drink and listen.

Orm shook his head sadly.

‘First you turn down the chance to fund my eastern trip. Where’s the fun in that? Then I hear you’re buying more land – that’s an Englishman’s game, Cat’s-Eyes. A fool’s game. You want to stick to portable goods. Keep to what you know.’ He jingled his pendants at her.

‘I’m not short of silver, Ormsson. Unlike you, I have the taste not to wear it all at the same time.’

‘And now you’re jaunting around with these English. Pets of yours, are they? Someone told me you’d bought them, but I said you had a better eye for a bargain.’

His tone was taunting.

Wulfgar, wincing, didn’t know where to look.

‘Pets?’ she said. ‘You could say that, Ormsson.’ She looked over his head and straight into Wulfgar’s eyes. ‘But I prefer to think of them as my friends.’

She held Wulfgar’s astonished gaze for a moment, and he tried to find something to say.

But by the time he had gathered his wits and opened his mouth, her attention was already turned elsewhere: she had shifted back to watch Ednoth and Ketil again, over the far side of the fire. He looked at her back-lit profile.
My friends
, she had said. Gunnvor Bolladottir, I am proud to be called your friend, he thought. But was it even possible for a man and a woman to be friends? What’s more, she’s one of the lost, he thought. A heathen. One of the damned.

And you, Wulfgar of Winchester?

Where had that voice come from? He swung round on his stool.

Are you so cocksure of your own salvation?

Clear as a bell in his ear. But there was no one there. He shivered, suddenly and violently. Nobody else seemed to have noticed anything.

Orm tossed his russet hair back and rolled his eyes.

‘As I said, Cat’s-Eyes. Soft.’ The firelight caught the gold and silver at his throat, a dozen or more filigreed and chased and embossed and chip-carved ornaments hanging against his breast-bone, jingling gently against tiny hammers and spears. Most of his hoard looked like English work, or Irish, and Wulfgar wondered bitterly how many of those trinkets had been gouged from reliquaries and book-bindings.

Then his face froze. What was that?

He blinked and looked again.

There must be hundreds of such things. A little slip of silver wire, looped round and twisted back on itself, to make a ring.

Hundreds, thousands, of such things, yes. But Wulfgar would have laid his hands on the Holy Cross itself and sworn that he knew that particular one.

He had dangled it in front of Electus’s fascinated little hands just – he counted – four days ago, outside Leoba’s hut at Hanworth. He only had to close his eyes to see her unlooping that strand of blue wool from around her neck and pressing the ring into his hand. He squinted. Three twists, yes, and a protruding end of wire, and surely that was a snag of wool caught on the end?

He had never thought to check whether the ring on its loop of yarn was still around Leoba’s neck, before they had done what little they could to bury her.

He was very cold of a sudden, despite his proximity to the fire.

And here was Ronan, holding a harp aloft.

‘Success! Make room, boys. Time for the glee of St Oswald and the Raven!’

I’ve got to know, Wulfgar thought. But how?

‘It’s not exactly my Uhtsang,’ Ronan said, ‘but it’ll give us a tune.’

Wulfgar leaned in close to Orm.

‘Didn’t you say something about looking for St Oswald, back in Leicester?’ he breathed in the other man’s ear. ‘Any luck?’

Orm shifted almost imperceptibly towards him.

‘What’s your interest, Englishman?’

Under the cover of Ronan tuning the harp and uttering loud complaints about the quality of its strings, Wulfgar breathed, ‘I speak for the Lady of Mercia. We can pay … almost anything … for the right bones.’

A sideways flicker of the amber eyes.

‘Count a long hundred, then come outside.’

Wulfgar clasped his cold hands between his knees, forcing himself to hold them loosely, to keep his shoulders slack, his breathing even. He had no idea what he was going to do. He wasn’t even sure if Orm Ormsson had really left the hall, or whether he was being watched from behind a pillar.

He didn’t dare say a word to Gunnvor.

Ednoth was still engrossed with Ketil.

‘Straw for packing?’ he heard Ednoth ask, and ‘Moss is best,’ Ketil replied. It was an elaborate game that the boy was playing. Wulfgar wondered what Ketil would say when he learned that Ednoth had no intention of following through with this deal.

He counted his heartbeats.

‘Where are you going, Wuffa?’ Ronan bellowed. ‘I’ve just got this wretched lump of bog-oak tuned!’

‘Skitter-house,’ he said.

‘Men use the stable,’ said Heremod, ‘ladies the byre.’

Traitor. Turncoat. Wulfgar squeezed his way through the crowd.

The courtyard was dark now, and quiet. The mounds of provisions had been packed into Ketil’s carts, and the cobbles stood bare under the moon. There was no sign of Orm Ormsson. Wulfgar took another few steps and the hall door swung to behind him, cutting off the cheerful roar within.

‘Where’s your money, Englishman?’

He had heard nothing, but Orm was at his back, breath warm in Wulfgar’s ear, his sweet musky odour mingling with the smells of the stable. Wulfgar tried to turn and found himself seized by the left elbow, a cold blade at the right side of his throat.

‘Don’t move,’ the voice said behind him. ‘Where’s your money?’

‘I haven’t any.’

The blade pressed closer.

‘Don’t lie.’

‘I’m not.’ He almost shook his head, stopped just in time. Cutting your own throat, how foolish would that look? ‘Search me, if you like. But I’ve nothing on me. You’ll need me alive if you want money for the relics.’

A quick, intimate hand, groping and patting his armpits, waist, groin. A sigh, and the knife was taken away.

‘How unfortunate.’ Orm moved round to stand in front of him. ‘It was worth a try, though.’

‘Indeed. Now, St Oswald.’

‘The stable.’

Orm led the way sure-footed in the dark and Wulfgar stumbled after him. A heap of straw, a pile of bags, the smell of malted grain, the rustling and squeaking of rats, a pale rectangle of moonlight in the doorway.

‘Here.’ A bulky leather bag in Orm’s hands. He stepped into the moonlight. ‘Look.’

Wulfgar knelt and opened the neck of the bag. Long bones, small bones, ribs, those strange winged elements of the pelvis, footbones like dice … everything seemed to be there. His fingers danced along a femur: he knew that strange, polished sheen. He bent his head.

‘My Lord. My King. Pray for us.’

Orm was restless in the doorway, his knife still drawn. He held his hand flat, palm down, balancing the point on the back of his hand, catching it by the hilt when it toppled and fell, over and over.

‘So?’

‘Yes. The real thing.’ Wulfgar stood up. You unspeakable murdering filth, he thought. ‘How much?’