Oathsworn 2 - The Wolf Sea (43 page)

I waited, crouched and watching, while the milk-smear on the horizon grew wider and more honey-stained and the wind mumbled through the ruins like a hot breath. Yet I shivered.

Kvasir was first up, panting and grunting, hand over hand. I helped him over and he collapsed, breathing like a fighting bull. 'Odin's. Arse. Tough . .

Finn swarmed up as if he were climbing the rigging of a large mast. Barely out of breath, he handed me my shield and sword, which he had brought up with his own, and his grin was feral-yellow.

`Well done, Trader. You are the one for the climbing, right enough.'

They came up one by one, rasping with hard breathing, clinking and clanking in mail and shields and weapons. I winced at every noise, never considering the feat of it until afterwards. Even with a rope that had been a hard climb for men in mail — and Botolf brought my own up, wrapped neatly and slung over one shoulder.

Last up was the Goat Boy, struggling, with the slight strength of his knot-muscled arms almost gone, and my belly was in the back of my throat — until I saw him fastened to Botolf by tunic belts.

Botolf, grinning, got to the top, reached down and plucked the Goat Boy up as if he were picking an ear of wheat. I swallowed drily, for I had not wanted the Goat Boy on this one but that had got me sideways looks from everyone else, since he had been in every other hard place with us.

I measured the distance to the nearest building, which was a grand affair, once two storeys, now partially collapsed into ruins. It was a long run across the open plateau and I didn't like the look of it much . . . The Arabs were set to attack when the sun was up, which meant we were here for too long a time, squatting like stupid ewes in fast-vanishing shadows.

`What do you reckon, Trader? Make a run for it?' breathed Finn in my ear.

Truth was, I didn't know. Either way seemed to mean discovery and even if most of the brigands were close round those fires, someone would go for a piss and the Serpent Path Gate was a hawk and spit away.

There was almost certainly a guard on that who could not fail to see us as the light grew and I could not rely on him being as blind as he clearly was deaf and stupid.

As if he heard me thinking, there was a query from the darkness, neither Greek nor Arab, but West Norse.

We froze. The query came again, harsher this time, and I heard the shink-chink sound, saw the spark of flint and steel as the guard tried to light a torch. Folk looked at each other, bewildered eyes white in the dark, and Finn growled. He peeled the slavered Roman nail from his mouth, so that I knew he was about to reply

— but then the Goat Boy bleated.

It was as perfect a bleat as any pathetic goat I had heard and he did it twice more. I stilled Finn with a hand on his arm, felt rather than saw his unease in the darkness. A Norseman on guard? Not friend, but foe . .

.

There was a muttered curse of annoyance and the guard moved back. Silently, Botolf ruffled the Goat Boy's hair and his grin was white in the darkness.

I looked at the sky, trying to judge how much time we had, but could make no sense of it. The whole horizon was an ugly yellow and the wind had died to nothing.

Odin is the All-Father, the Great God. He is a shapechanger when he is seen at all, but if you want to feel the presence of One Eye, go into a lonely place and wait and listen. I have done it and felt the passing of him through a forest, in the thousands of mysterious sounds and breaths, in the soft sough of wind that blows through the leaves and branches, in the storm-wind that racks trees and shows where the All-Father passes on the Wild Hunt.

But most of all, you'll feel him in the strange and awful stillness that settles sometimes on sea and hill and wood.

It is easy to feel One Eye in a land of mirrored fjords, tumbling ice water, bare, granite cliffs and the hot, heavy pine forests of summer — but that night, on the bare waste of a flattened mountain in Serkland, we all felt One Eye descend in a silence that seemed to suck the air.

Eyes gleamed, looking one to the other, aware in the hackles and creeping of arm flesh that something was happening. Something smacked my bare arm and I jumped, touched it, felt wetness and grit.

Another time, another place. On a rock stairway outside a Hun chief's tomb near Kiev I had been splashed by gritty water from a sky yellow as a wolf's eye.

Dengizik,' I said in Finn's ear and saw his wide-eyed look, saw him remember the Hun chief's name and what had happened there, even as the wind rushed in, flattening the distant flower-fires to the ground.

`Run.'

We sprinted as the world turned to darkness.

The sandstorm had roared in under cover of night from the parched Nabatean hills bloated with heat from the wastes of Zin, flexing muscles all the way from Aqaba.

It seared everything in its path in the long Wadi Araba, shrieking with dancing dust
jinn
and blurted itself into the Valley of Salt. Then it crushed its massive shoulders between the rusted stones of the Moab and the folds of the Judean hills round the Dead Sea, so that it reared up like a screaming stallion and fell on Masada with hooves of wind and scouring dust.

It sucked the air from lungs, shoving us with huge blows this way and that and howled like Fenris released, while the sun was stillborn and dawn never came.

We staggered like drunks, clung to each other, were bowled over as the wind caught shields like sails.

Scrabbling on all fours like dogs, we clawed to the shelter of the ruined building, scurrying ratlike into the gaping holes in the back walls, hurling down behind anything that was shelter. Anything to get away from that sand-studded wind that drew blood like a lash.

There was light and heat — lanterns and a fire, throwing long, strange shadows on the men round it, who rose up as we crashed in, panting and gasping, stumbling over the rubble litter.

They gabbled in surprise and I heard Greek and Arabic, but all they heard were grunts and hissing steel and it was only when their worst nightmare snarled down on them that they realised these men who had staggered in were not friends.

It was a struggle as short and vicious as most of them were. In the end, eight men lay dead and no one cared how loudly they screamed, for no sound would be heard above the vengeful shrieking wind outside.

Only one had actually managed to get a hand on the hilt of a weapon and that was as he died.

Slack-jawed and heaving, the Oathsworn sank down, heads drooping. I looked round, kicking scattered embers back to the fire. We were in one large room with a huge square of stone in it — an altar, I recognised, to the Roman Christ.

There was one door in and out and it was still shut, though it fluttered and battered against its lintel as the wind hammered it. Sand filtered in from the ruined room we had just come from and the fire guttered, making huge shadows dance strangely on the walls.

`Thor's wind,' muttered Kvasir, then grinned. 'Our Orm weaves his own wyrd, it seems. Perhaps we have found favour with old One Eye at last and he called in a marker with the Thunderer for us.'

Men made warding signs and held amulets to their own gods for protection, for on this night, when it seemed the membrane between worlds was thinner than before, it was not wise to talk of such things.

It was widely known that a man's wyrd — his Norn-weaving — was not set, but could be unravelled.

Einar had believed it and, for a while, it seemed he had succeeded, but boasting of it tempted those three sisters to weave something worse —especially Skuld, mistress of That Which Might Be.

Anyway, I had my own thoughts on the matter. Odin, unless I had misjudged One Eye as a kindly old uncle, had made his purpose clear to me, if not everyone else. I knew what we yet had to face and could not bring myself to tell the others.

Now that we were squatted in this blood-reeked place, looking around at the shadows and the strangeness, men licked their lips and wondered at it.

`The Great City's men made the Christ altar, but before that this was where this Herod kept his thralls,'

Finn told them knowingly. 'He was King of the Jews.'

Ànd he stayed here?' demanded Hlenni Brimill. 'Anyway, I thought the Christ was King of the Jews.'

Finn shrugged. 'Maybe this was another one. Anyway, nine hundred Jewish warriors were once besieged here by the Old Romans, who built that ramp to get to them.'

There was silence, for we had all seen and marvelled at the ramp. As Finn said, it was as if Bagnose had leaned his neb against the mountain, but there were few left who remembered old Geir Bagnose, so his joke fell flat.

Did they win?' asked Botolf.

`Who?'

`The Old Romans. Did they beat the Jewish warriors?'

Òf course,' answered Finn, but Kvasir hawked and spat.

`No warriors died here,' he growled. 'That Syrian whore in En Gedi, the one with the wen, told me of this place when she learned that was where we were going. When the Old Romans attacked they discovered no one to fight. All the Jews had killed themselves: men, women and children.'

There was a deeper silence and men tried not to look over their shoulders at the fetches haunting this place.

I climbed into my mail and we waited, watching through the hole in the back wall as the storm thrashed and the dust whirled in and flared like embers in the fire.

It was as dark as I remembered it, gleaming still with those great, age-blackened piles of silver
and the throne he sat on was massive. The shackles that had once held Ildico to it dangled from
one arm, but of her bones — or Hild — there was no sign.

There was only Einar, sitting on Atil's throne as I had first seen him sitting in Gudleif's at
Bjornshafen, bulked by a great fur-collared cloak, one hand resting on the hilt of a straight-bladed
sword, turning it gently on its point, the other stroking his moustaches.

Framed by the crow wings of his hair, his face was how I remembered it last in this howe, milk-pale, with yellow-cream cheeks and eyes so sunk they had disappeared into black pits. I had
shoved my sword through him at the last, a bloodprice blow for his murder of my father.

`Will you tell them what you know — or let them find out?'

And when my silence was the answer, he lowered it again.

`Now you know the price of a rune serpent,' he whispered and the light caught the blade of that
turning sword, flash on flash on flash, blinding me . . .

The sun was up, shining in my eyes and Finn was standing over me, kicking my tattered boots to wake me. Stiff from sleeping in a coat of iron rings, I stumbled upright into the day and we waited, watching the sun arrive through the hole in the back wall.

When the first warmth of it touched my face, spearing into the room and spilling us all with gold, I turned to see the last of the Oathsworn, waiting and silent, faces hard as grindstones.

Then I knew, felt the Other-rush of it, the surety of it, and I told them that we had been tested and that those who stood here, in this room, were those Odin had deemed fit to have his Oath in their hearts and on their lips. We were Odinsmenn and the way home was one last battle. Einar's curse was lifted. Kvasir gave a hoom in the back of his throat and I waited, half hoping one of them would have enough clever to work out the part I had not told them. For a moment I thought Kvasir had, but then he shrugged. Finn's grin was tight and harsh and he spoke through his teeth when he turned to the rest of them.

`Hewers of Men, Feeders of Eagles: pray to Odin and take up your shield and weapons, for we are once more brothers of the blade and this will be a hard dunt of a day, I am thinking.'

Then Botolf, looking round, asked: 'Where is the Goat Boy?'

And al-Misti sounded his horns and attacked up the ramp.

We were supposed to hold them for twenty minutes, no more. We fought them alone for twice that and, in the end, were in a shrinking ring of shields and dog-panting terror and bloody weapons, where those who had bare feet were better balanced than those sliding on the bloody slush in what was left of their boots.

There was a saga tale for a good skald in it, but like so many it went unsung. I have since tried to tell it, without success.

I can remember only splinters of it, like images in the shards from a broken mirror-glass — Kleggi, stumbling in circles, complaining that he had lost his shield, the blood arcing from the stump of his arm. The Arab falling back from me, his teeth flying from his mouth like the little tiles of a shattered mosaic.

And Finn, hacking and slashing and slamming shields until, suddenly, he stopped, gaping at the man he was about to kill, who snarled back at him and swung.

Finn lost a hank of hair and his ear because of his astonished hesitation, shrieked with the pain of that and the horror of the truth he had just discovered and hacked lumps off the man's shield until, finally, one carved through bone and ringmail and a second stroke took his enemy in the hedgehog of his face.

Haf Hroaldsson, whom we called Ordigskeggi, Bristle Beard, was dead. One of the Oathsworn we had come to rescue.

By the time the Masmoudi piled up over the lip of the ramp, scattering the brigands and hunting them down, we were on our knees in the bloody slush, drooling, bleeding, every breath a sob. It was as if I walked underwater then; I could see the pearl-string of bubbles stream from my mouth and feel my lungs burn with bad air. The ground and the sky lurched, changed places . . .

In the whole vault of the sky, only two crows moved, rich, black crosses on a translucent blue that was heavy with wavering heat, so that it seemed I lay on the bed of the ocean, looking up at the surface of the water.

Widdershins, the crows circled lazily. All crows are left-handed, according to Sighvat. Unless they were ravens. I thought they might be ravens, a sign from Odin.

I was on my back . . . how did that happen?

`Trader?'

The sky blotted out, a shape loomed, a silhouette with black streamers of hair in a wind that hissed over the plateau. For a moment, just a heart-ending moment, I thought of Hild crawling over me in the dark, hissing her warnings. But she was long gone, buried in Atil's howe.