The Prow Beast (37 page)
But his last piece of jewellery was what staggered those who knew it by sight. Bound by a blue-silk ribbon, carefully tied to show his lack of ears, was the final statement on his flag of a face.
Sigurd’s silver nose.
We scarred the laden drag-poles over a sodden land steaming in the new sunshine, ripe with new life and old death, thick with the smells of dark earth and rotted carcass. We scattered birds from the raggled corpses of drowned cattle and, at the end of the first day, sent up a cloud of rooks like black smoke from dead sheep the retreating waters had left hanging in gnarled branches like strange fruit.
‘Why are we pushing so hard?’ panted Kaelbjorn Rog, who only voiced what others thought. ‘We are leaving a trail a blind wean could follow, never mind some Magyar scouts.’
I said nothing, but grimmed them on through the fly-stinging, sweat-soaked day, the sick tottering along with the shite rolling down their legs rather than be bumped in drag-poles, for it was not the Magyars I feared, nor was I entirely running from enemies. Only Crowbone shared my thoughts on why we truly scowled our way so swiftly across the land and he was still mourning the distance between him and his uncle’s silver nose.
Jutos had seen Crowbone’s reaction and knew something was not quite right; slowly the tale of it was hoiked up and sense was made of things that had been said earlier, of northers encountered and hard bargains being struck.
The Oathsworn had not been the first band of Norse the Magyars had met; that honour had been given to Randr Sterki and some eighteen or so survivors of his own river-wyrd, stumbling out on the floodplain, starving and thirsting, for they dared not drink the foul water they sloshed through.
‘My father wanted the boy they had,’ Jutos told us, ‘a rare child, white as bone. Their leader, a man with skin-marks on him, offered us a Greek Christ priest, but that was no trade for us. We said to take him to the Pols, who might give them a little food, for I thought the Pols might know better what to do with a priest from the Great City.’
‘Where did they go?’ I asked and Jutos shrugged, waving vaguely in the direction of the distant blue mountains.
‘South, this side of the Odra,’ he replied. ‘After he had traded this marvellous nose for enough supplies.’
He paused and grinned widely. ‘If you happen to have ears that match, we will make ourselves go hungry to acquire them.’
I told him the torc was rich enough and tried to get the nose back, for Crowbone’s sake. In the end, though, we got supplies only – and the only bargain in it came as we were leaving, hauling the drag-poles away on a surprising gift of three horses.
Jutos came up and thrust out his hand, so I took it, wrist-to-wrist, in the Norse fashion and he nodded.
‘We part as traders,’ he said formally, then paused. ‘I will give you a day, then send riders to find the Pols and tell them of you and the Mazur girl. That will stop them raiding us when they find out we helped you. The horses we have given you will let you travel faster away from them.’
It was as fair as you could expect from Magyars and, at the end of that first day, I told the rest of the Oathsworn what we could expect and that Randr Sterki and the boy we had come to rescue lay just ahead. There was silence, mainly,
and Finn had the right of it when, later, he demanded to know what else I had expected from the crew.
‘The fact that we have enemies ahead as well as behind is not a joy of news,’ he added, to which I could find no answer.
The next day we had grown used to the smell of rot, so used to it, in fact, that we stumbled into horror when we should have been warned long since.
When we came round the side of a hill and saw the
grod
, we slowed and came to halt; men unshipped weapons and shields and stood uncertainly, looking from one to another and then at me.
It was a good
grod
, a well-raised earthwork, wooden stockade surrounding a cluster of dwellings, with a big covered watchtower over the gate. It had been built on a hill above the floodplain and the rising waters had swept round it like a moat, save for a narrow walkway of raised earth and logs, which led to the gate. The watery moat had since sunk and seeped almost back to the river, leaving bog and marsh which steamed in the sun.
The gate in the stockade was wide open and there was not a wisp of smoke. No dog barked, no horses grazed. Then the wind shifted slightly.
‘Odin’s arse,’ Finn grunted, his face squeezed up. He spat; the stink was like a slap in the face, a great hand that shoved the smell of rot down your throat.
‘A fight, perhaps,’ Styrbjorn said. ‘Randr Sterki and his men, I am thinking. The villagers have all run off, save for those he has killed.’
Styrbjorn grunted out that this was good work from only eighteen men, but most ignored him, cheered by the idea of a whole village lying open and empty and ripe as a lolling whore – perhaps Randr and his men had left some loot, too.
Then I pointed out that Randr and his men might still be there, waiting to ambush us.
‘Send Styrbjorn the Bold in,’ Abjorn declared and men laughed, which made Styrbjorn scowl and go red.
I chose Finn, Abjorn, Kaelbjorn Rog and Uddolf to go with me, leaving Alyosha to organise the others into a cautious defence; when we moved to the gates, magpies and crows rose up, one by one, flapping off and scolding us.
The place was empty, just as we had hoped. Wooden walkways led to a central raised platform of wood, with a tall pole on it, carved with four faces – their meeting place, with their god presiding over it. No Christ worshippers these. At first there were no bodies either, yet the smell of death was thick as linen as we prowled, turning in half-circles, hackles up and wary as cats. A goat skipped out of an alley and almost died under Abjorn’s frantic axe; a cow bawled plaintively from an unseen byre.
Uddolf poked a door open and then leapt back with a yelp; two dogs sidled out, whimpering, tails wagging furiously, tongues lolling from want of water – but they were full-bellied and the smell made my hair rise, made me breathe short and quick, not wanting to get the air anywhere deep in me.
I peered in, squinting through the gloom at the three bodies, black, bloated and chewed by the dogs. A man, his clothes tight against puffed flesh. A woman. A youngster, who could have been girl or boy.
After that we found others, one by one, two by two; a woman slumped against a wall, part-eaten, part-pecked. A boy whose face seemed to be peppered with scabs. A man with a bloated face that looked like oatmeal had been thrown at it and stuck. I grew afraid, then.
‘Sickness,’ Kaelbjorn Rog declared and he was right, I was sure, so I sent him back to fetch up Bjaelfi, who knew about such matters. We prowled on uneasily.
There were two handfuls of long timber houses, where kettles and cauldrons, horn spoons and looms sat, waiting for hands. There were storerooms and barns, hay in the barns and barrels of salted meat in the storehouses, while the bawling cow had teats swollen and sore, being so overdue for milking. The strange stillness became even more hackle-raising.
‘The livestock has been turned loose,’ Finn said, nodding to a brace of chewing goats. ‘So someone was alive to do that.’
Not now. We found them when we came up to a larger building, clearly a meeting hut. Here the truth unravelled itself from this sad Norn-weave.
‘Look here,’ Abjorn called and we went. A man and a woman lay at the door of the meeting hut, part-eaten but not as long-dead as the others. The woman had a wound in her chest, the man a knife in his throat and we circled, calling the tale of it as we read the signs.
‘The last ones left alive. He stabbed the woman,’ Finn declared.
‘Thrust the knife in his own throat,’ added Uddolf, pointing. ‘Missed, but bled. Did it again by putting it against his throat and falling on it, so he could not fail.’
We wore that little tragedy like a cloak as we filtered through into the meeting hut, almost having to push again the smell. Here they were, on pallets or slumped against the walls, dead, swollen, scabbed, eaten by scavengers, brought here to be more easily cared for, though there was no care that kept them from dying.
Bjaelfi came up, the fear slathered on his face. He had seen the other corpses, but he took one look at the stabbed woman’s body and turned it with his foot so that the flies rose up with the stink. One arm flopped and he pointed at the untouched, mottled flesh down her arm, where small red and white dots stared accusingly back.
‘Red Plague,’ he said and it hit us like a stone, so that we scrambled from the place. Fast as we were, the news of it was faster and, by the time we were hawking the bad air out of us, everyone knew.
Red Plague. We moved away as fast as we could, but I knew we would not outrun the red-spotted killer, that we probably carried it with us. I had expected to die for Odin, but the thought of thrashing out my life in a straw death, the sweat rolling off me in fat drops, my face pustuled and no-one wanting to be near me, was almost enough to buckle my knees.
We made camp at the top of a hill, in the shelter of some trees, where two fires were lit, smoking up from wet wood. Beyond a little way, bees muttered and bumbled, stupid with cold and spilled from their storm-cracked nest; men moved, laughing softly when one was stung, fishing out the combs of honey and pleased with this small gesture from Frey.
Warmth and sweetness went a long way to scattering the thought of Red Plague, as did Finn’s cauldron of meat and broth, eaten with bread and fine, crumbling cheese. Their bellies no longer grumbled, but it would not be long, as I said to Finn when our heads were closer together, when their mouths did it instead.
That night one of the sick died, a man called Arnkel, who had bright eyes and a snub nose and told tales almost as good as the ones Crowbone had once given us. Bjaelfi inspected him for signs of plague, but it was only the squits he had died of and he had been struggling for some time.
‘Ah, well, there’s an end to truth entire, then,’ Red Njal mourned when Bjaelfi brought the news of it to the fire in the dull damp of morning. ‘No more tales from him.’
‘Truth?’ demanded Kaelbjorn Rog, his broad face twisted with puzzlement. ‘In bairns’ tales?’
‘Aye,’ Red Njal scowled. ‘Told by those old enough to remember. Wisdom comes from withered lips, as my old granny told me.’
‘Was this just before she told you one of her tales?’ Kaelbjorn Rog persisted. ‘Made up completely, for sure.’
‘Only those written down,’ persisted Red Njal and men craned to listen, for this was almost as good entertainment as one of Arnkel’s tales.
‘You mean,’ Abjorn offered, weighing the words slowly and chewing them first to make sure the flavour was right, ‘that stories are only true if they are not written?’
Red Njal scowled. ‘If you are laughing at me, Abjorn, I will not take it kindly. Let no man glory in the greatness of his mind, but, rather, keep a watch on his wits and tongue, as my granny said.’
Abjorn held up his palms and waggled his head in denial. Finn chuckled.
‘Ask Crowbone. He is the boy for stories, after all.’
Crowbone, staring at the flames of the fire, stirred when he became aware of the eyes on him and raised his chin from where it was sunk in his white, fur-trimmed cloak.
‘When you hear something told, you can see the teller of it and pass judgement. But if you read it, you cannot tell who wrote it, and so cannot say whether it is true or not.’
Red Njal agreed with a vehement growl and Finn chuckled again, shaking his head in mock sorrow.
‘There you have it,’ he declared, ‘straight from an ill-matched brace of oxen, who cannot read anything written, not even runes – so how would they know?’
‘You do not understand,’ Red Njal huffed. ‘There is magic in such tales and if you needed the measure of it, remember Crowbone when he told them.’
Which clamped Finn’s lip shut, for he did remember, especially the one which had once snatched us from the wrath of armed men. He acknowledged it now with a bow to Crowbone and, seeing the boy only half notice it, added: ‘Perhaps the prince of storytellers will grace us with the one he is dreaming of now?’
Crowbone blinked his odd eyes back from the fire and into the faces round it.
‘It was not a tale. I was remembering the whale we found once.’
Short Serpent
’s old crew stirred a little, remembering with him and, bit by bit, it was laid out…on a desolate stretch of shingle beach, pulling in for the night, they had come upon a small whale, beached and only just alive. No matter that it was another man’s land, they flensed it, cutting great cubes of fat, thick as peats, thick as turf sod. They ate like kings, bloody and greasy.
It was the dream of home, of north water and shingle and it fixed us all with its brightness. For a reason only Odin could unravel, I kept thinking of the patch of kail and cabbage at the back of Hestreng
hov.
Thorgunna had grown a lush crop there, using the stinking water from the boilings of bairns’ under-cloths and it had survived everything, untrampled and unburned, when Hestreng was reduced to char and smoulder.
Uddolf crashed into the shining of this, asking for men to come and howe Arnkel up. His closest oarmates went and, in the end, we all stood by the mound; as
godi
, I placed one of my last three armrings in it, to honour him, which went some way against the grey grief of his loss.
It was a cloak that descended on us all. Onund wept and when he was asked why, said it was for the black sand and milk sea of his home. No-one mocked him, for we were all miserable with similar longings.
Through it all, two figures caught my sight. One was Dark Eye, still and slight and staring at the dark beyond the fire while men sighed and crooned their longings out; it came to me that this was how she must feel all the time, yet bore it without a whimper.
The other was the fire-soaked carving of the
Elk
, proudantlered, lashed to its spear-haft. I was thinking that a prow beast was leading us still, further than ever from where we wanted to be.
