Crowbone (25 page)

Again he nodded.

‘You believe Orm knew it was Martin who sent word? That he sent you without telling you of this because he desires this silly axe for himself?’

It was the sick heart of what Crowbone believed and she saw it in his eyes. For a time, she did not say anything at all and, eventually, Crowbone regained some strength, so she went on.

‘The matter of Eirik’s axe is certainly true,’ Thorgunna said, ‘otherwise there would be nothing to tempt Dyfflin or Orkney at all. Martin will be promising them a dazzle of prizes. Olaf Irish-Shoes needs men and the axe will also make him feel he has one more triumph over his old enemy, Eirik. Gunnhild in Orkney – well, you know more of that. She wants you as much as she wants her man’s old axe.’

‘I had worked this much out,’ he answered and she raised an eyebrow.

‘Had you now? This cleverness did not give you cause for an easy sleep, or ease the worry of what Orm’s part in all this was.’

He acknowledged it with a flap of one hand and Thorgunna sucked in a deep breath until her prow-built breast threatened the seams of her dress.

‘Ask yourself what Martin truly wants,’ she said simply. ‘Ask yourself what Orm truly wants.’

Crowbone blinked a bit, but his mind was smoke and mirrors, so he smiled wanly at her and risked standing up.

‘Orm wants you, lady,’ he said and she laughed, a bitter, sad affair that reminded Crowbone of blowing red leaves and claw-branched trees.

‘Aye, may be,’ she said simply and then waved one hand. ‘He has his faults in that regard – he is always saying how he hates faring here and there, yet he was away more often than home. He loves his gods and his men more than he loves me.’

‘Come back to Hestreng and see,’ Crowbone said, but she shook her head.

‘I will never go back to Hestreng.’

‘Somewhere else, then,’ Crowbone answered, remembering why she would hate Hestreng, where the malformed mite she had given birth to had been left on a stone, put into the care of the gods. Crowbone had stood with Orm and others round that stone, had seen the tears in Orm’s eyes and said as much.

‘Aye, aye,’ Thorgunna said. ‘If tears would undo the gods of Asgard, then I had enough to drown them all. They are unmoved; I am done with Asgard and Hestreng and the Oathsworn. If it means I am also done with my man, then so be it.’

She stopped and sighed, then held up her hands.

‘I miss my sister Thordis and cousin Ingrid, though,’ she added, ‘not least because no-one here can sew me into my sleeves, or unpick them again at night.’

‘So you are one of Christ’s women?’ Crowbone said and could not quite keep the sneer from his voice. She looked sharply at him, then smiled.

‘A nun? Not me. I am not about to climb off my knees to Odin just to get back on them to Jesus.’

Óengusso shook his head in sorrow and made the sign of the cross at her, but Thorgunna patted him lightly on one arm.

‘I am a Veiled Woman,’ she said. ‘Permitted to remain alongside priests and monks, provided I do not molest them or turn them from their ways. This is possible here in Ireland, less so elsewhere. I am happy here.’

‘Useful, too,’ said Óengusso. ‘Who knew that wearing the bone from a cod on your head takes away belly ache before she came? Or the Nine Herb Charm she worked on your head?’

Crowbone looked at her sideways.

‘
Seidr
?’ he replied. ‘You always said that magic neither worked for you or against you.’

‘God love us all,’ Óengusso exclaimed, crossing himself.

‘For ever and ever,’ Thorgunna responded, then smiled at Crowbone.

‘Old healing is hardly
seidr
,’ she said. ‘Not like you and those birds.’

Óengusso looked frantically from one to the other and Crowbone stared at him from under a single brow, his odd eyes glowering.

‘One crow, sorrow, two crows, mirth, three crows, a wedding, four crows, birth,’ he said, then winked at the astounded monk. ‘See what women bring down on your house?’

Óengusso crossed himself again and then frowned, seeing he was mocked.

‘You should not be so hard on women, boy,’ he said firmly. ‘Sure, was it not one who kept my benediction from breaking the egg of your head entire?’

‘What woman?’ Crowbone demanded, puzzled and Thorgunna looked at him and laughed, seeing the truth of it.

‘The one you have clearly imagined to be a boy for some time,’ she said. Then, into his open-mouthed disbelief, she added:

‘The Wend you call Berto. Her real name is Bergliot.’

Mainistir Buite (Monasterboice), Ireland, not long after …

CROWBONE’S CREW

SHE walked beside Thorgunna in to where Crowbone stood – still a little pale, she thought, with a lurch. She was wearing a dress for the first time in months and the catch of it round her knees felt strange.

‘You kept the secret cleverly,’ Crowbone said, his face stiff. He had had some time of lying about recovering to recall all the clues he had missed about her, from her unnerving softness to the way she had avoided taking off her wet clothes on the night of the storm.

The strangeness of her was like something seen through rippled water – the face was familiar, like a round owl, the dark hair was down to her ears and raggedly cut, the eyes big and soft. Yet now it all belonged to a girl and not the youth he had thought and the dress she wore, even if it was made for Thorgunna and too large, only accentuated the curves everyone had failed to notice.

‘I wore a few tunics,’ she answered in a small voice, hearing the flat, bitter tone of his own. It would be the shared man-moments, she thought, when he told of how many women he had taken. ‘To hide the shape of me.’

Small wonder, Crowbone thought, looking her over. How in the name of Odin’s hairy arse had she hid those breasts from all of them? Those hips? She saw him stare and grinned, the old grin when she was one of the crew and not a woman.

‘You see what you want to see,’ she declared. ‘I had to hold in my business until landfall a lot of the time. Once or twice I could not and did it in my breeks, but folk just thought me smelly. Like all boys.’

She saw her error in the grim reef of his face and the smile wavered like a faint flame in a wind, then was lost entire.

‘Aye, you hid it well,’ Crowbone said, remembering all the little moments, feeling his face flame at some of them. It explained how he had felt, at least – which was a relief; those moments when his groin had tightened had been for a girl after all. Still, he did not understand how his body had known even if his mind had not and it was more than a little disturbing.

‘Did Grima know?’ he asked, sitting down. ‘Bergliot – is that the name now?’

She saw the strain in him then and made a move; the odd-coloured eyes stopped her like two fists in the chest and she stepped back a little way.

‘Stick to Berto,’ she said, a little more harshly than she had intended. ‘It is easier.’

‘Hardly,’ he answered wearily. ‘Those days are gone.’

‘Do not judge too harshly,’ Thorgunna said softly and he looked at her, sitting quietly with her hands folded in her lap and then shook his head.

‘I have problems enough with the men who follow me,’ he said. ‘They think my luck is flowing from me – they may be right. Now one they thought a comrade turns out to be a cuckoo in the nest.’

‘A cuckoo who saved your life,’ Thorgunna pointed out, but Bergliot saw the truculent flex of Crowbone’s jaw and the centre of her sagged.

‘Grima knew,’ she answered and left it perched there like a crow on a branch. She saw him work through it, his head tilted and thoughtful, as if he was a bird with a beakful of snail and a stone in front of it.

‘He did not touch you,’ he said slowly, weaving it as he spoke. ‘Made out that you were a boy of no worth …’

‘He stumbled on me during a raid,’ she replied flatly. ‘Just him alone. He thought I was someone else, then realised I was not.’

‘Still of worth,’ Crowbone mused. ‘Grima would have tupped you in an eyeblink and flung the remains of you to the others – save that you had value. Made you dress like a boy and keep the secret of it absolute, because he no longer trusted any of them.’

‘A bad matter,’ Thorgunna flung out, ‘when trust is shattered. Who is the betrayer then, little Olaf?’

He looked sharply at her, then back to Bergliot.

‘You went over the side after him,’ he rasped. ‘Why?’

‘Balle would have killed me,’ she answered simply.

‘And who are you, then?’

She shrugged and the tremble in her was obvious.

‘Bergliot. No more. Grima thought I was Geira, but I was only her handmaiden and he knew he had missed the greater prize. His men would have scorned his battleluck, he knew, and would take out their annoyance on me. But I was Geira’s friend, too, so that she would pay to have me back and Grima saw that.’

‘Geira?’ Crowbone asked and Thorgunna put her arm round the girl’s shoulders and drew her away.

‘Geira,’ she said. ‘Eldest daughter of Burisliev, King of Wendland, and a queen in her own right.’

A queen’s close friend. Close enough, Crowbone thought, to be worth something, one way or another and he said as much later, when he went to the men waiting uneasily in the church outbuildings, taking Bergliot with him.

They had already heard the tale of it; some could not look her in the eye as she stood there, wrapped in a warm, fur-trimmed cloak – another gift from Thorgunna, who had not, Crowbone thought wryly, left Hestreng too distraught to forget possessions entirely. Most of the old crew who had been with Grima would not even look this new Bergliot in the face. A few – the Oathsworn gifted from Orm, Crowbone noted – were easier about it.

‘This explains why you are not good with a pole lathe or an axe,’ Kaetilmund declared with a smile.

‘Just so,’ she answered with brittle brightness. ‘Does this mean you will stop calling me No-Toes?’

Kaetilmund scrubbed his beard with wry embarrassment while Stick-Starer and Halfdan chuckled and nudged him. For a moment, she felt the old warmth, then saw the men’s faces as they looked at Crowbone. More was revealed there than the surprise she had presented them with.

Crowbone saw it also, the blank stones of their stares, and had to heave himself up against the crush of it. Well, he thought to himself, if they cannot be made to love me, they can be made to fear, which is the way princes and kings must think.

‘Where are the prisoners?’ he asked and Mar stepped forward, his helmet dangling from his beltline and a spear in his hand. Behind came Kaup and Murrough shepherding a shuffling group whose sorrow and fear came off them like stink and, behind that, he saw Congalach, bound hand cradled in the crook of the other and his eyes wet with pain and misery.

Eight of them, Crowbone saw – Halk was there, sorrowed as a whipped dog, pleading with every look, though he knew there was no hope. And Fridrek, all sullen and twisted mouth.

He looked them over for as long as it took for Óengusso to come up, his arm across his son’s shoulder, then he turned to the lector.

‘What would you do with them?’ he asked. ‘Since it was you they offended last.’

‘Sure I would hang them,’ Óengusso said and there was a stir among the men.

‘No Christ mercy, then?’ Crowbone demanded harshly. ‘Some of them are Christ baptised.’

Óengusso laced his hands together, while his snub-nosed piglet of a son gazed adoringly up at him.

‘A mind prepared for red martyrdom, a mind prepared for white martyrdom,’ he said sonorously. ‘Rules Eight and Nine. Fervour in singing the office for the dead, as if every faithful dead was a particular friend of thine – Rule Twelve.’

‘That is not what the blessed Columba had in mind when he made the Rules,’ Mar declared bitterly. ‘I am sure of that.’

‘They broke the oath,’ Crowbone pointed out and Kaetilmund studied him for a moment, trying to work out if the odd-eyed boy spoke of the Oathsworn’s oath or the oath he knew others had sworn personally to the prince. He was still no wiser when Kaup started dragging the men away.

Halk babbled and pleaded, but Fridrek, half-stumbling, flung curses back at them over his shoulder and men who had known him a long time shifted and shuffled.

‘If you have a mind to allow it,’ Crowbone said, ‘I would like that dove flag you have.’

Óengusso blinked, then smiled and nodded, sending his son scampering to get it, then went off on his own; not long after they heard his great bell of a voice and the singing chants of the monks. They waited in the dripping day, while the bast ropes creaked and scoured the tree branches, hauling their kicking burdens high into the air.

When the dead had stopped swaying, Crowbone said his farewells to Thorgunna, who stood like a cloaked shadow in the shelter of the church, the great tower hunching itself into the sky over her shoulder.

‘What would you have me tell Orm if I meet him?’ Crowbone asked and she flicked a little smile on her cheeks, made old and withered in the harsh daylight, he saw suddenly, like the last winter apple in the barrel.

‘That you are sorry you did not hold to the Oath,’ she answered and the slap of that made him take a step back.

‘I meant about yourself,’ he answered, which was as good as admitting the truth of what she said, though he only realised this much later. ‘Shall I tell him where you are?’

‘You will or you won’t,’ she answered sadly, which left him no wiser. Then she dragged her woollens tighter round her and looked up at the sky.

‘I am leaving,’ she said, shivering a little, as if a wind had kissed her neck. Crowbone did not know whether she meant now, or this place entirely.

‘I am gone,’ she whispered, her eyes black as an iced sea and turned away; the bleakness she left was more of a desert than before.

As he marched out of the place, conscious of the men filtering along behind him, sullen as rainclouds, Crowbone turned to the woman he had known as Berto and held out the blue flag.

‘Here,’ he said, vicious as a slap. ‘You are a woman now. Sew this in the way I tell you.’

Teamhair, the Hill of Tara, some weeks later …