The Prow Beast (24 page)

Something about that disturbed me – but, then, I was all disturbance, like a cat in a high wind, fur-ruffled this way and that and made uneasy and twitched. Having your doom laid on you will do that. Ripping the throat from a man with your teeth will do that.

‘You are not worried?’ I managed and she shook her head.

‘No. You brought me because the flatfaced one with the drum told you to. You brought me because the Polanians will want me and you might have to bargain with them. It is dangerous; they will certainly try and take me by force when they find out.’

She had not missed the mark of it, right enough and spoke it in a detached way, as though it concerned someone else. The other fact of it was that, no matter what, she would not get back to her people, far to the east of the Polanians. Yet I was sure she clutched the hope of that tight to her.

She looked at me with her wood-carved look, then dropped those swimming eyes, saying nothing more.

‘Well,’ I said, though it was like pushing boulders uphill, ‘you have listened and watched, I am thinking. Now I need you to talk.’

I needed her to tell me of the river, for we had no guide. I needed to know where it narrowed, or shallowed, what settlements of size were on it and whether they could be trusted and where the Saxlander and Wend forts were. Further up still, I needed to know of the Polanians and what lay even beyond them, up to where the river stopped being navigable by a boat such as
Short Serpent.

‘The river runs for days,’ she answered, ‘it runs for weeks. Forever. Here, where it is wide and slow are Wends, on both sides, but they do not live near the river unless there is high ground. They keep sheep and cattle and do not farm much, because the river floods.’

She paused and her mouth twisted.

‘They are sheep and cattle themselves, who do not fight.’

That was good to know, but beyond it Dark Eye was not much use. There was a Wendish settlement called Sztetëno further up, where two rivers met and made almost a lake, with islands in the middle. Saxlanders were there, too.

Beyond that – and by the time you could just shoot an arrow from a good bow to reach the far bank – there would be thicker woods and higher ground on either side. The river shallowed once that she could remember, at a place the Slavs called Sliwitz and the Saxlanders Vrankeforde – Free Ford – and there they had built a big log fort.

There were fur and amber traders there, she remembered, but mostly slavers, for both the Wends and the Polanians raided each other and sold the captives as slaves. Beyond that, further into the mountains, was a place called Wrotizlawa but Dark Eye had never been there. The only settlement either of us knew north of that was the end of the Amber Road, Ostrawa.

‘I was young when they took me down this river,’ she added defiantly, seeing my look of disappointment and I nodded and acknowledged it with a rueful smile.

‘This ford – is it passable upriver by boats?’

She frowned. ‘The riverboats are hauled over it by long lines from the bank, but they take everything out to make them lighter. It is hard work and they can do it only because the boats are made from a single trunk. It is stony beneath the water, which comes up over the hub of a cart wheel. Another river comes to it here and there are islands in the middle, where it joins the Odra.’

If we took the steerboard up, Onund said later when I mentioned it, we could also haul
Short Serpent
over it, though there was a chance we would break its back and the keel would take bad damage.

‘Since we are not bringing it back on to a real sea,’ he added, with a sideways look at me, ‘that does not make much difference.’

I had not mentioned such a matter, of course, but should have known Onund would have spotted it. We would never get
Short Serpent
all the way upriver and I was prepared to follow this Leo through the Bulgar lands to the Great City if he took Koll there. I said as much and Onund nodded, with no sign of remorse for all his wood-skill.

‘Why all this, then?’ I added, nodding at the half-carved elk-head prow.

‘If we burn this ship,’ he rumbled, ‘I thought to burn her as the
Fjord Elk.
It is fitting – besides, I am trying to have the fame of being the shipbuilder who has lost more vessels of that name than any other.’

We laughed, though grimly; the tally of lost
Elks
was growing fearsome. I told him not to say anything to Crowbone and he grunted. That boy, however, had other matters on his mind and came up to me to air them.

‘She will run,’ he said, perched at my elbow like a white squirrel. ‘The first chance she can take.’

I did not need to ask who and he perhaps had the right of it. I asked if his birds had told him what Dark Eye was planning, but he scowled at that, though I had not meant it as a sneer. Still, I told Finnlaith and Ospak to watch as much for the girl escaping as for visitors with their pricks in their hands as we snagged up for the night. There was some daylight left under the pewter sky, so that those who wanted to hunt could do it.

By the time darkness came we were eating duck with the horse beans, with some fresh-caught river fish and wild onions. I broached the ale, enough to put some flame in the mouth but not enough to cause trouble; by the fireglow, men laughed and sang filthy songs, arm wrestled and watched admiringly as Onund Hnufa brought an elk to life out of the ash-wood with each careful paring of his knife.

The night sang with freshening life and Bjaelfi unwrapped a harp. It was really Klepp Spaki’s instrument, but he had given it to Bjaelfi before we left; neither he nor Vuokko came with us, for they had the memory stone to finish and I had no quarrel with that. So Bjaelfi bowed us a tune, which even Finnlaith and his Irishers nodded and smiled at.

‘Though it has to be said,’ Finnlaith added seriously, ‘that while your instrument is like a harp, it is only as like a harp as a chicken is a duck.’

‘For a true harp,’ added one of the Irishers, a great lump of a red-haired giant who, like all of those rich-named folk, was called Murrough mac Mael, mac Buadhach, mac Cearbhall, ‘is a dream of sound which comes from being strung with fine deer gut and plucked, not hung with horsehair strings and scraped, like a sharp edge on the chin.’

‘They are braiding together well,’ Finn noted quietly while the argument and laughter rolled on, his face blooded by firelight and his loose hair ragging in the wind.

‘Save for Crowbone,’ he added, nodding to where the boy sat, scowling at the clever work Onund was making; he did not want to see a new prow on his ship, nor it renamed
Fjord Elk.

‘We will pay his price for all this by and by,’ I answered and Finn nodded, then sighed as Bjaelfi bowed his harp and sang on.

Eager and ready, the weeping lone-flyer,

Frets for the whale-path, the heart lured

Over tracks of ocean. Better that from Odin,

Than the dead life he loans me on land.

Those close enough to hear grunted low appreciation and Finn’s soft ‘heya’ was a world of praise all on its own. It came to me then that he was the most content I had seen him in a long time and the moon-shadow of the prow beast that rose suddenly behind him was no accident; Finn was where he was happiest.

Worse was, it came to me with a stab of guilt for all those I imagined labouring away in Hestreng, that I shared the feeling, if only because the Oathsworn were the only family who would not shrink from me completely on learning what I had done.

TWELVE

The wind went to the stern, or died to a whisper and let us make better time over the next few days, though it rained soft and hard, stippling the skin of the water. As Dark Eye had said, we saw no sign of life beyond the tree-fringed banks save in the far distance, but I thought it likely our presence was now well-known. I wanted to find peaceful folk to ask about a monk, a boy and a boat full of hard-faced men.

The ship, powered by all the oars, slid along so that the water creamed under the prow beast’s neck and the crew had an easy pull of it. Trollaskegg would not put up the sail, for the wind was twitchy and we did not have enough sea room for mistakes; the sky veered from a faded blue to a mottled grey, where harsh clouds piled up and looked like the face of a great, grim cliff.

The men, serene as swans on this water, sang their rowing songs, where each line was repeated by the opposite side, a pulling chant that helped keep time out on the open sea, where we did not need stealth. Here, the thinking was, everyone knew we were on the river and being loud would make folk realise we meant no harm.

What do we care, how white the minch is?

Who here bothers about wind and weather?

Pull the harder lads, for every inch is,

Taking us on to gold and fame.

This last was always boomed out, rolling over the water like the wind, which whined now, a hound too long tied up. It came in strange gusts, leaping and whirling round like an eager pup, then vanishing, so that I wondered where it went. Did it bowl on and on across the long floodplain, endlessly blowing?

‘Perhaps it is another type of
djinn
,’ Red Njal put in when I voiced this aloud. ‘Like the circling sand ones we saw in Serkland.’

‘Or the snow ones we had out on the Great White,’ added Crowbone, ‘the ones which always came before those
buran
storms.’

The Svears, who had sailed up and down the Baltic a few times and thought themselves far-farers, looked at the old Oathsworn differently after that, realising now just where we had been and nudged into remembering the tales of what we had done. That a boy of twelve had seen and done more than them, with their tangle of beard and growling, was to be considered; like all who knew Crowbone for a length, they were coming to realise that he was not the stripling he appeared.

The thought of all these clever far-farers as oarmates cheered them, all the same, so that they sang until their throats burned.

Skanish women have no combs.

Pull, swords, pull,

They fix their hair with herring bones.

Pull, swords, pull away.

The song floated out across the water, rippling past the tree-fringed shore, out across the meadowland of the floodplain, to where deer heard it, or, I thought aloud, perhaps a herdsman who hid himself and watched, unseen by us.

‘Deer,’ snorted Kuritsa when he heard this. ‘Not enough brush for deer.’

So far the hunters had shot five ducks, three geese and, once, a half-a-dozen fat wood pigeons, but nothing else. Further along, Kuritsa said, if the woods thicken like the girl said, we would find deer and maybe elk, too.

‘We need a
strandhogg
,’ Finn grunted. ‘Fuck your deer – let us find a place with flour and smoked meat and ale that we can raid. Aye, and women, too, else we
will
be fucking your deer.’

The Varmland men have no sleds.

Pull, swords, pull.

They slide downhill on old cod heads.

Pull swords, pull away.

The singing stopped late on in that day, when the wind came skittering down on the prow beast again and stole our breath away with the effort of rowing against it. The sky grew too dark for it to be night and then, across the front of us like a herd of black bulls, stormclouds rolled, spitting white stabs at the earth; rain lanced the river.

We took the sail over and used some awning canvas as well, but it was a miserable wet night, despite hot coals on the ballast stones near the mastfish which gave us grilled fish and soggy bread. We drank the last of the ale and hunched into ourselves listening to the rain hiss and the night bang; the blue-white flashes left us blinking and the air was thick and heavy with a strange, blood tang.

Red Njal said that it was a pity Finn had not worked out the use of his hat and Finn told the tale of it, of how he had taken Ivar Weatherhat’s famed headgear in a raid. Those who had laughed at the crumpled, stained object with the wide, notched brim now looked at it with more respect.

‘Keep away from your ring-coats and helms, lads,’ warned Alyosha, ‘for when the night smells of a hot forge, Perun is hurling his axe at any byrnied warrior he can see.’

‘Is that true?’ demanded Bjaelfi and men hummed and hemmed about it.

‘It is true, bonesmith,’ Alyosha declared, ‘for I have seen it and Perun is as like your Thor as to be a parted birth-brother. Once I saw a
druzhina
horseman in an autumn storm such as this near Lord Novgorod the Great. A proud man and brave, too, all splendid in brass and iron and he rode with his tall spear sticking into the rain and wind as if he did not care. Then there was a flash and Perun’s axe smacked him.

‘There was nothing much left but twisted metal and a black affair that might have been him. The horse had been turned inside out and we found one of its shoes in the summer, when we went to the wood a good walk away. It was stuck in a birch, half-way up the tree.’

Another flash and bang showed the white-eyed stares of the listeners and everyone hunkered deeper into their own shoulders, shifted a little away from stowed weapons.