The Prow Beast (20 page)

Everyone was too occupied in marvelling at the colours Styrbjorn was turning in his rage to notice the real import of that last bit, but I did. While the bearcoats hauled the youth off, I pilled some bread idly and thought matters through.

Leo the monk was gone.

It came to me then that perhaps King Eirik and I and everyone else had woven the tapestry of this in the wrong colours. After a while, I asked: ‘So, where did the Greek monk go, then?’

Pallig frowned for a moment, then glanced at Crowbone. He was wondering, no doubt, if tales of little Olaf’s bird-magic were true and that, somehow, the monk’s arrival and departure had been seen by some
seidr
-possessed crow on a branch. Crowbone grinned at him and I saw the realisation flash in Pallig that he had been the one to give it away, like a bad move in a game of tafl.

‘Gone back to the Great City,’ he said, scowling. ‘Down to Ostrawa and into the Magyar and Bulgar lands.’

The old Amber Road; I had not thought that trail still existed and Ljot, while his brother fumed at his slip and poured ale to cover his annoyance, explained that it was not much of one, not for boats unless they flew, nor carts. Pack horses could make it and men with small loads, so it was usually little stuff that got carried that way – amber and furs, or the cargo that carried itself, slaves.

‘Small boys and monks?’ asked Crowbone. Pallig managed a laugh.

‘Aye, probably slaves by now, or dead. They went together and the monk hired some men – Sorbs – as guards.’

So there it was. Pallig had not been the final destination of the fleeing Leo. The little turd of a monk was heading for home, though it was unlikely he would ever reach it, as Finn pointed out.

‘Sorbs,’ he said and would have spat if there had been anywhere to do it without offending. Pallig cocked an unapologetic eyebrow.

‘What is this monk to me now?’ he said. ‘He came, he invited us to fight for Styrbjorn and he came back when all had failed. I do not expect him to return in a hurry to invite us again. He took the boy with him, thinking to use him to control Jarl Brand and through him influence King Eirik since Brand is his right arm, as everyone knows.’

He stopped and laced his hands across the trembling belly, frowning.

‘This Styrbjorn business was ill-paid. It is not good to have such a stain on your fame,’ he grumbled and looked at me. ‘You know how it is, Jarl Orm – this is just red war and the way such matters are done. Having poor battle luck is bad for the fame at Joms.’

‘Perhaps you will think differently, when such red war visits you one day,’ I told him and watched his eyes narrow.

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘I am sorry you were caught up in this and for your losses. I want no trouble from you. I will pay blood-price for what was done at Hestreng and it is this – I will permit you to leave and tell King Eirik that he can have that useless lump Styrbjorn if he offers me a fair price. Then you should go back to Hestreng, fasten the peace-strings on your hilt and be grateful the Northmen of Joms are not turning out on you.’

This was enough for Finn, who leaned forward with his face as hard and ugly and grim as a hidden rock in a sound.

‘You wobbling nithing,’ he began. ‘All your Northmen are Wendish trolls and never saw a decent vik…’

Before I could act, Crowbone laid a quiet hand on Finn’s arm, which made the man blink from his rage and look round. The boy shook his head and smiled; Finn subsided like a scrap-fed hound, to my amazement.

The spell of it broken, I stood up and nodded.

‘As to Styrbjorn,’ I said with a shrug, ‘you may do as you see fit – but when we leave we will go upriver, not down.’

Ljot shook his head and Pallig made a pig-grunt of sound.

‘Not good,’ Ljot said, then smiled a rueful, apologetic smile. ‘Look you – I know Jarl Brand’s boy was taken and that he was your
fostri
, so it will sit hard with both of you. The boy is gone, all the same – almost certain dead or a slave of the Sorbs or the Wends or the Pols, which is all the same thing. That monk was a chief of the
gestir
of the Great City’s emperor, but it will make no difference – those skin-wearing trolls along the river are all supposed to be Christ men, but they will kill him, just the same.’

Gestir
, he had said. Well, it had been obvious enough, but it was good to have it said out loud. There are two kinds of oathed men in a king’s hall. The first are the great louts, like those standing guard at Pallig’s door. The second are the
gestir
, clever men who can spy and make trade agreements and treaties and more. Leo the monk, it seemed, was one of them, working for the emperor in Constantinople and so a man of considerable skills – among them, I was sure, the ability to deal with skin-wearing trolls along the Odra.

‘Besides,’ Pallig grumbled. ‘I do not want you going upriver. You will cause upset in a boat like that and interrupt the trading.’

He dipped one finger in his ale and drew a wet, wiggly line on the table.

‘Here is the Odra, flowing south from the mountains beyond Ostrawa to us in the north. It is a frontier land. Here we are at the mouth of it, where are the Wends, who you call trolls and the Saxlanders call Wilzi and others call Sorbs. There are many small tribes of them, on both banks of the river, but most are subject to the Saxlanders on the west.’

He stopped and sucked his wet finger while we all peered at the wiggly line as if it were about to come alive on the table and snake along it.

‘On the east bank are more Wends and Sorbs and such, but also the Pols of Miesko, who are coming north pretty fast – only last year they beat the Saxlanders at Cidini which is very close to us. Now the Saxlanders and Pols glare at each other across the river and the trade on it is a
fud
-hair away from being ruined.’

He frowned and wiped the wiggly snake away with a sweep of one hand, breaking the spell on us.

‘No-one will want to see a raiding boat such as yours on the river,’ he added. ‘Otto’s Saxlander forts on the west bank will think I sent you up to cause trouble. The east bank has Pol forts who will think the same.’

‘Not that you will get that far,’ added Ljot, almost beaming with the finality of it, ‘for there are other tribes, who will eat you.’

No-one spoke for a long heartbeat, then Pallig cleared his throat and spread expansive arms.

‘Well, there is the way of it,’ he said, then beamed. ‘I would not wish you to sail away from here feeling less than well-treated so I invite you and the young Prince Olaf here to be feasted in my hall tonight.’

I agreed and smiled, which was hard work on the cheek muscles since I was working against a lot of scowl. There was the arrogance of these brothers, the problem of Styrbjorn and how to free him and, worst of all, the thought of what the Polanians – the ones the brothers scornfully called ‘Pols’ – would do if they found the Mazur girl they thought safely hostaged in a foreign land with the daughter of their king.

Not for the first time, I wondered what Vuokko had seen in his drum later on that feast night for the return of Eirik’s bairn. The Sea Finn had appeared out of the shadows like some nightmare, just as Finn and I were picking our way in the salt-tanged dark to see Jarl Brand.

‘I have called it and the drum has spoken,’ he told us in his rheum-thick accent. ‘It says to take the Mazur girl.’

With three runes to speak with it might have said more, but I had gone to Sigrith in the night, half-ashamed at doing it just because of the Sea Finn’s drum, and asked her to let me have Blackbird, whose real name was Dark Eye. She, even knowing the worth of the girl to her father and where I was headed, did so, as she said, ‘for the loss of her Birthing Stool’.

Now Blackbird was stowed like baggage on
Short Serpent
and as nagging as a broken nail in my mind as we clumped back down to the ship, where Finnlaith and Alyosha were growling at men to get them loading supplies.

They crowded round, wanting to hear what had been said and by whom, so I laid it out for them.

‘Take these Joms bladders now,’ growled a big Swede called Asfast when I finished.

‘Burn them,’ snarled Abjorn, ‘as Ljot burned Hestreng.’

‘Ljot did not burn Hestreng,’ Rorik Stari pointed out. ‘It was Randr Sterki who did that.’

There were rumbles for and against charging up and cutting them down, calls for blood and fire. There were also growls about going upriver at all, for there was little in it that raiding men could see.

So I put them on the straight course of that simply enough.

‘There are two matters that must be done,’ I told them. ‘One is to free Styrbjorn, for King Eirik’s sake.’

Finn grunted, but said nothing, for only he and I knew that it was also to kill him, for Jarl Brand’s sake, though neither he nor I had worked out a way to make a square out of that circle.

‘I am also going after my
fostri
,’ I added, ‘for it is my honour and good name here. You may follow if you choose, but will break your Oath if you do not. The only other way is for one of you to become jarl.’

That silenced them, so much so that I was sure they could all hear the bird-fluttering beating of my heart at the idea of one of them challenging me for the dragon-torc of jarl. Fame, that double-edged sword, held them at arm’s length, for this was Orm, single-handed slayer of white bears, killer of scaled trolls, who had once won a
holmgang
with a single stroke and only recently had fought and killed berserkers, two at a time.

Yet they were sullen about it and a broad-faced growler called Gudmund could not let the bone of it loose.

‘Pallig does not want us to go upriver,’ he offered moodily.

‘So?’ spat Red Njal, fanning the flames of it. ‘Who is Pallig Tokeson to tell the Oathsworn of Orm Bear Slayer where they can go or not?’

‘He is kin to Harald Bluetooth,’ Crowbone offered brightly. ‘The wife he took pains to introduce us to is Bluetooth’s daughter and the sister of the Svein who was at King Eirik’s feast.’

He stared into the astonished faces, then innocently up into mine and I knew now what he had been doing, while seeming to play the eyebrow-batting boy with the womenfolk.

Bluetooth was not a name you ignored lightly, as Gudmund persisted. Finn spat and pointed out that we had been ignoring Bluetooth for years, had stolen his ships and killed his men and were none the worse for it, which cheered everyone, for they knew we were going upriver, no matter what.

Then Onund cleared his throat, which he always did before he said something important and we all stopped, thinking it would be ship talk and being as wrong as a two-headed cow.

‘If it is such a bad thing to be going upriver, for the trouble it will cause the brothers of Joms,’ he rumbled thoughtfully, ‘I am wondering why they let Randr Sterki and his dogs go up?’

TEN

Having hurled the axe of that into the middle of us, the hunchback laid out the saga of how he had found out about Randr. While we spoke with Pallig, he had gone off to find decent wood to fix the steerboard and quickly found an entire steerboard, in good condition, which he thought was ship-luck.

A few traders further on, as he looked for just the right cut of ash wood to make an elk prow for the ship – Crowbone shifted and scowled at that part of his tale – he had found good nails and ready-cut ship planks, far better quality than he would have expected in a place such as Joms. Then a trader said it would be better to have a whole prow rather than go the trouble of carving one and showed Onund one he had.

‘So I asked him where he had it from,’ Onund told us. ‘I had to be firm with him, too, for he was reluctant. I picked him up by the heel and hung him for a while until he spoke and we concluded the business. I was pleased to have done it with no violence.’

That got him chuckles and I wished there was no feasting that night, for I wanted to be away as fast as supplies could be loaded, if for no other reason than to avoid the results of Onund’s firmness with a trader.

In the end, Onund was shown the source of the snarling dragon prow he knew well – we all knew well. On the far side from the settlement, wallowing half-in, half-out of the weak Baltic tideline, stripped to the ribs and the keel and the charred strakes no-one wanted, was what was left of
Dragon Wings.

‘We should go to Pallig and his brother,’ Finn growled after this news was out, ‘and use your little truth knife on them.’

Those who knew of the truth knife, which whittled off body parts until the victim stopped lying, agreed with relish and I felt the little, worn-handled blade burn where it nested in the small of my back. It had belonged to Einar the Black once and had served me as well as it had him, but there was no need for it now.

‘Randr Sterki had ship-luck to make it this far,’ I pointed out. ‘He would be coming to have it out with Ljot for leaving him and I bet he had more men bailing than rowing by the time he ran
Dragon Wings
ashore here.’

They nodded and growled assent to that.

‘What of the hoard they had from you?’ demanded Finn of Onund and the hunchback shrugged, a frightening affair.

‘If he did not take it with him, then it is scattered through the settlement,’ he answered. ‘And so lost to you, Orm – these
rann-sack
pigs took every last rivet from the wreck.’

There would be no hoard found, I was bitter-sure, for Randr would have used some of it to buy supplies and one of those tree-carved riverboats. The rest would be either with him or buried secretly and I had no doubt a deal of it went to Pallig, for no balm soothes like silver.

‘Why is he going upriver at all?’ Finn had asked. That one was easier still; to get Koll and the monk. The monk, in Randr Sterki’s hate-splintered eye, either owed money or blood or both and the boy was my
fostri.
He would want the boy alive, would know I was coming after him with Crowbone. All his enemies, sailing straight towards the revenge he was not yet done with.

‘He did not take the lesson from your last story,’ I said to Crowbone and he shrugged.