The Prow Beast (35 page)

‘If there are others,’ Ospak answered moodily. ‘That was a big tree.’

We left the floodplain for soft rolling hills and then, beside a rill that ran white between great smooth boulders until it made a large, dark pool, came up to their camp of wagons, some covered, some with two wheels and some with four. Horses snickered; smoke drifted, thick and pungent and a woman, squatting by the stream with her skirts spread for decency, took a piss and smiled at us.

The dog, wedge-head held low, snuffled and quested and answered a bark from the centre of the wagon circle with a hoarse one of its own, which seemed to be squeezed out of the red-gold body. It set ducks up off the water of the pool and Jutos laughed.

‘Home,’ he said and I could not disagree. We came up to a fire whose perfume was as heady as incense to me and the warmth made us all realise how chilled and cold we were.

People milled; we were given blankets to wrap ourselves and stripped of our clothes under the decency of them, made to sit down under a
wadmal
canopy and presented with bowls. A woman, grinning and nodding her head while she spoke a trill of softness I did not understand, cracked eggs in a cauldron of barley broth and meat, then filled our bowls. I ate, sopping fat chunks of bread with it, ravenous.

In the end, sated, we all sat back.

‘By the gods,’ sighed Ospak after a while, which said it all.

The camp moved with soft life while the sun of late afternoon slanted through the surrounding trees and Dark Eye curled up and slept with the dog, both cradled in the dry beech mast near the fire. The ducks came warily back to the pool, planing in to land with creamy wakes.

Folk passed and stared curiously, but left us alone. Ospak nodded, half-asleep; a woman came to where our clothes hung, studied them, poked a finger in a hole and tutted. Then she fetched needle and thread.

Jutos startled me from my half-sleep by looming up and squatting, face smiling.

‘I have been told of others of your kind, not far. An hour’s ride, perhaps more. They are by the river and their boat is badly damaged.’

That sounded like Finn and the others and I wanted to know if he knew how many. Jutos shrugged.

‘Enough for my hunters not to go too near,’ he answered, grinning. ‘There are too many riders out on the land these days. Something has stirred them up.’

He said it in a way that let me know he thought part of that stirring was us, but he seemed friendly enough still and we talked until the shadows stretched and our clothes were dry enough to wear again.

These folk were, I found, Magyars, a trading party who travelled part of the old Amber Road, which once led to the north of Langabardaland and then down to Old Rome.

‘Not now,’ Jutos explained. ‘Now we take it to our land and trade it on to the Bulgars and others, who take it down to the Great City, where the power and the gold now is.’

‘I thought there was power and gold back in Old Rome,’ I answered, to show I knew some matters of trade, ‘now that Otto the Saxlander has declared himself Emperor, like his father of the same name before him.’

Jutos spat so that the embered fire sizzled.

‘Best not to speak of the Ottos when my father comes,’ he said grimly. ‘Our
fejedelem
is Géza, who has eaten salt with the Saxlanders and Romans to gain peace. He has even taken a Christ worshipper to his household, a monk called Bruno – but friendship with the Saxlanders is not something that sits lightly with one of the Seven.’

I knew the word
fejedelem
meant something akin to ‘ruling prince’ and I had heard how this Géza had been forced to accept the Christ worshippers because the Great City and Otto had made an agreement. Of course, since Géza had little say in the matter, his Christ worship was not entirely full-hearted – but there it was again, that working of kings that always seemed to favour the White Christ. I said as much and Jutos grinned.

‘Perhaps, after all, the Tortured God has more power,’ he growled. ‘It is certain our own gods did not help us when my father became one of the Seven.’

I did not recognise the reference to the Seven and wanted to know more, but Ospak bridled at this discussion, for he was an Irisher who had embraced Thor and loved him.

‘This Christ has no power,’ he argued. ‘If you need proof of that, look at my god and him together. The Christ is nailed to a lump of wood; my god has a Hammer.’

He spat on one palm and slapped his hands together, as if he had made a good legal point at a Thing and even Jutos joined in my laughter.

Still, I did not have to wait long to find out about the Seven, for Jutos’ father came to us soon after. At first he was just a tall, thin shadow against the red-dyed sky, moving slow and stooped, flanked by two other, stockier shadows who wore ring-coats and the high-crested helms favoured by Magyars and Khazars. Closer, the white blur of face resolved into features and what I had taken for a bald head was white hair, iron-streaked and dragged back.

Closer still and Ospak sucked in his breath, while Dark Eye went still and quiet, as she always did when faced with horrors, sliding into the earth and stones, becoming invisible.

This Bökény had a face like a skull. There was no nose and he had no ears and age had shrunk the cheeks so that the skin on the knobs under his eyes looked to be splitting. Hard wrinkles marked him, deep-scored plough-lines across his forehead and great scars down the side of his mouth, deep enough to lose a finger up to the first joint. One eye was milk, the other black-bright as a crow and his hair was dragged back and tied at the nape of his neck, yet it spilled down almost to his belt.

I marked that. Finn had lost an ear long since and never tied his hair back. This man, this Magyar
horka
, did not care; more than that, he offered his face like a defiant, triumphant banner.

He squatted stiffly, and I saw his cloak, fastened at the shoulders by two discs, each marked with a bird holding a sword. That sight ran a shock through me, for the sword was a sabre and I had heard that these Magyars worshipped the sword of Attila, for they were Huns, when all was said and done. It also reminded me of something I had in my sea-chest – if I still had a sea-chest.

The old man gathered his cloak round him then spoke, while Jutos translated; it was the usual welcome and prettily enough done, so I gave him back the same.

He spoke again and Jutos answered him, then shrugged and turned to me.

‘He wonders what you have to trade. You may count so far as hospitality, but if those are your men we found, they will perhaps need food and other things. Can you trade?’

Ospak grunted, for he did not like all this talk of trade, being – like the rest of the Oathsworn – a man who preferred to consider what he wanted down the length of a blade. Unless, as I told him sharply now in Norse, he was outnumbered and out-ranged, which he admitted with a scowl and another grunt.

I did not know what was left to trade and thought a salting of truth was best, so I said there had been riches enough aboard the ship before it was smashed and was sure all could not have been lost.

Jutos rattled this off to his father, who considered it for while, the blood-egg sun doing things to his face that would have sent bairns screaming into their ma’s skirts. Then he spoke again and Jutos turned, almost resignedly.

‘He wishes to know if you will trade the Mazur girl and what you will take,’ he said. I looked at him steadily, so that he knew the answer without me having to speak. With a brief, almost relieved nod, he told his father, who grunted and muttered.

‘He says,’ Jutos told me, ‘that you northers are hard to bargain with. He is fated to see unusual slaves he cannot get. He does not wish to meet any more of you on this trip.’

Ospak chuckled at that. ‘Well, we are equal matched then,’ he answered, grinning to take the sting from it, ‘for this is one norther who does not wish to see a face like that again. How did he come by it?’

I closed my eyes and waited for the storm this would cause, but I had it wrong, for it was no insult to note this singular face.

‘He is one of the horde of Bulcsú,’ Jutos answered and the old man’s head came up at the sound of that name. ‘Last of the Seven.’

‘Bulcsú,’ the old man repeated and then began talking, in his own tongue, a great solemn, slow-rolling chant, thick as a saga tale and, though none of the three of us understood it, we were all struck by the telling of it.

He was as good as any skald versing on the giant Ymir whose skull forms the dome of the world, or of Muspell, at once burning and freezing, or of Odin and the gods of Asgard. But the old man’s tale was no misted saga, but recent, from his own life and, as he poured it out, thick-voiced with remembering, Jutos translated the meat of it.

The old man told of Lechfeld some twenty summers before, when the Magyar, the fire of Attila still coursing in their veins, had come to take on the might of Otto the Great, the present Otto’s father. The old man spoke lovingly of the clans all arrayed and the colours they wore and the myriad tiny, fluttering signal banners of the chieftains, Lél, Súr and Bulcsú.

He brayed and clashed his palms together to bring back the horns and the drums and the brass discs they struck, howled out the old warcries, showed how they were wild to fight. He stood up, no longer stiff but straddle-legged, riding an unseen horse, firing backwards as he feigned flight with all the others – twenty thousand and more – on that day.

I had heard of this battle. In the end, the bowmen on their light horses, fur hats scrugged down tight on their heads, had been mastered by the solid ranks of Saxlanders, had hurled themselves like heroes to be cut down, until only a handful were left, the chiefs among them.

Jutos, grim as a dark cliff and his eyes bright with water, watched the old man slump; someone brought him drink and it ran down the harsh grooves off his chin.

‘The Saxlanders cut the ears and noses off the survivors and sent seven back to our ruling prince of that time, Taksony,’ Jutos added blankly. ‘They hung Lél and Bulcsú from a tower in Regensberg. Súr came back as one of the seven, and he was killed for causing such a tragedy, for he was not of the line of Arpad. The last warriors who survived that day were honoured for their courage, all the same, and my father is the only one left. The Magyar have stayed in their homeland since that day and have no love for the Saxlanders.’

‘Heya,’ said Ospak, his Irisher soul stirred by such a tale and the old man raised his head and nodded acknowledgement to that salute.

‘Since then, we have travelled the Amber Road as traders,’ Jutos went on. ‘There are more of us now. All the men of this clan who rode with my father were killed in that battle, but slowly we grow stronger. One day, we will be strong enough to pay the Saxlanders back.’

I looked at the old man, milk-white in the dusk, slumped and spent now, sitting in a ring of some forty wagons, with horses, men, women and bairns. I thought of Hestreng and how we were not so far from each other, Magyar and Northman.

Horses were brought, but I told Ospak to stay with the Mazur girl. Stone-faced Jutos sat on his horse and said nothing as I climbed onto mine, flanked by a half-dozen Magyars armed with lances and bows and wearing their pointed helmets with elaborate nasals. Bökény rose stiffly and nodded to his son, who returned it. Then he hirpled away to his tent, leaving me with the vague idea that some message had passed between them.

In silence, we rode out into the dying day and, for a while, nothing more was said. That let me work on how this horse moved, for it was a rangy, bow-nosed creature, not one of the short, stiff-maned, fast-gaited ponies I knew. After a while, I felt Jutos arrive at my knee, where he cleared his throat, like the dull rumble of distant thunder. Here it comes, I was thinking.

‘There is a lot of happening up and down the Odra for the time of year,’ he said in a low, even voice. ‘Particularly when the rains have been so bad.’

I stayed silent, feeling my stomach turn slowly, like a dead sheep in the river; I gave great attention to the sitting of my horse.

‘We came past an old settlement we had visited before,’ he went on, ‘and found it burned out and everything dead. Everything. Children, dogs. Everything.’

He shook his head with the memory of it and I swallowed the sick rise of shame in me.

‘There are riders out everywhere,’ he added, ‘from the Pols. A force is out and not a small one – hundreds. I have not seen so many since the Pols marched this way two summers ago, heading for war in the north against the Pomorze.’

‘I have heard the Pols are swallowing other tribes,’ I said, in order to say something and give away nothing at all, even though the thought of hundreds of Pols searching along the Odra was a chill knife in my bowels. I had not thought they would be so stirred by the burning of a Sorb village. I had it right – they were not and the next thing Jutos said made that clear.

‘They seek a Mazur girl and a band of northers,’ he said flatly and that made me look at him. Here it was, then, out in the open. I waited to see what came next, strung tight as a drawn bowstring.

‘You have eaten salt with us,’ Jutos went on, slowly, carefully, like a man picking his way across a marsh. ‘This means you will come to no harm from us, neither you nor your band by the river. My father, of course, is more honourable than I am, for he sought to buy the Mazur girl and so save your life; I argued that it was too much danger brought on us, but he insisted.’

I saw he was not lying and was both surprised and a little shamed at my thoughts, which had been along the path of how their elaborate hospitality was more to do with fearing to tangle with a band of armed growlers like the Oathsworn. Now I saw they pitied us and regarded us as already dead, which was not a comforting thing.

‘Then we will trade for food and be gone,’ I answered, ‘before you are made sorry for your hospitality.’

Jutos crooked one leg casually over the saddle, an elegance I envied.

‘Of course,’ he added, white teeth gleaming in the dusk of his face, ‘our obligation ends when trading ends. Usually, we allow a day between us before considering matters.’