Raven (51 page)

We sailed to a small island north of Elaea and there, by a copse of gnarled olive trees, Sigurd himself and Olaf dug a hole in the dry, sun-baked earth. A man-sized hole it was, too, which was lucky for them seeing as I was to go in it. Floki was there and Rolf and some of the others and they all stood a little way off, grim-faced and watching me the way an owl watches the long grass from atop a post.

Earlier I had told myself that I would keep a hold on my pride and let them do what they must, my head high and my back spear-straight. When it came to it I fought like a beard-frother, even one-armed managing to knock Olaf on his arse and smash out two of Byrnjolf’s rotten teeth, which earned me a split lip. But Bragi the Egg and Skap grappled the fight out of me and between them all they shoved me into that hole and began to pile the earth back in, so that I was choking on the dust and filth as I cursed them all in rage and terror.

‘We will come back in three days, Raven,’ Sigurd announced solemnly, as a muttering, bloody-mouthed Byrnjolf stamped the earth down around my face, taking altogether too much pleasure in it so it seemed to me. I could hardly breathe for the earth pressing against my chest. There was only a finger’s length between my chin and the scalding sand, and my arms – one of which was broken anyway – were buried somewhere down by my sides and about as useful as tits on a boar.

‘This is the silver you give me … for feeding … the birds with your enemies,’ I snarled at Sigurd, fighting for the breath to spit insults. ‘Hounds are better treated! You are all whoresons! Wait for me in the afterlife, you pus-filled horse-fuckers!’

‘I will not doom the Fellowship for one man,’ he said, glancing up at the sun, which was in the west now, beginning its slide towards the world’s lip. ‘Not even for you, Raven, whom I have treated as a son.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘If our gods are with us here … if they can see so far, they will decide your wyrd.’

Olaf worried at his bird’s nest beard and scratched his tanned
cheek below the white creases he had gained round his eyes from squinting against the southern sun. There were tears of frustration in my own eyes as the men murmured and nodded at their work and made to leave me there alone on that deserted place beneath the blazing hot sun.

‘Uncle!’ I yelled, tasting the sweat on my lips. ‘Don’t leave me here! Uncle! You arse-maggots!’ But they did not even look back and disappeared through the trees and were gone and I closed my eyes against the glare, even then seeing the red threads blooming bright inside my eyelids.

I was alone. Left to whatever fate the gods, who are spiteful and capricious, chose for me. And yet even if the gods wanted me alive, because they love to torment us and I was young enough still to have a hundred threads of anguish braided into my wyrd, how could they keep me alive? Four days and three nights in that heat without a slurp of water, without shade or food and left to whatever creatures came sniffing by in the dark. Even a crow could dig the eyes out of my head and I could do nothing about it.

Now that the others were gone, the fury was melting in my chest, turning into ice-cold fear. This was no way to die. I would rather turn green with the wound rot and have Penda cut my throat than be buried and left for the worms and thirsting to death. I was scared enough to piss myself and feel no shame for it.

Because I was a dead man.

BLACK-HEADED GULLS CAME FIRST, A NOISY SWIRL OF THEM TRYING
to work up the courage to land and get their beaks in me. The first to dare sidled up to my face, mistrust and greed swimming in its beady red-rimmed eye as its friends circled above, laughing with the thrill of it all. I yelled, sending the bird shrieking into the purple bruise of dusk, then cursed because I knew that there were other creatures that came out at night and could not be scared off so easily.

For a while I tried to move, hoping that the slightest shift in the packed earth would enable me to eke out more room to squirm. But the only things I could move were my toes and that only made it worse because it made every other limb and muscle scream with frustration and resentment. Perhaps it was the weight of earth on my chest and the painfully shallow breaths that made me drift in and out of sleep, but some time later I woke as if I had been stabbed, my mind flailing to catch the memory of what had happened to me. The terror was a beast and my soul was in its jaws, being shaken viciously. Yet my body was as still as a corpse in its coffin.

Night had fallen and there was no moon. Insects were chirruping in the breeze-stirred grass and I could hear the
sea lapping at the shore in long, lonely sighs. Something was crawling up my face and I tried to twist my mouth and blow it off me, but whatever the creature was it had enough legs to cling on and so I tried to put it from my mind, knowing that it was the least of my problems.

My ears were straining at every sound: the snap of a twig in the olive grove, a rustle in the nearby gorse. But it was not my ears that warned me I was no longer alone. Somehow I just knew. It was a prickle in my blood, a cold wind scuttling up the back of my neck. I held my breath, desperate to sift through the night sounds, to discover where this other living thing was. Then my heart thumped in my chest hard enough to hurt, because whatever it was was behind me. Again I fought with every sinew, hoping that by some miracle I could break out of that tomb if not by brute strength then by strength of will. But it was no use and I blinked the cold sweat from my eyes and waited. Then I smelt it. Wolf. It was pungent and unmistakable and if anyone should know the smell of a wolf it was me. I clenched my eyes shut and held my breath, waiting for the teeth to rip into my face, for the beast to chew the flesh from my skull. I would be eaten alive. That was the wyrd those bitches the Norns had spun for me.

But the bite did not come and, slowly, I half opened my eyes. Teeth glinted in the dark but the eyes were not a wolf’s eyes. Even by the dim light of the stars I could see that. They were green. Beautiful.

‘Cynethryth,’ I rasped like a sword across a scabbard’s throat.

She was crouched, head cocked to one side, and staring at me as though she had never seen a man buried up to his neck in the earth before. Though if anyone should have been staring it was me, for she had a wolf’s pelt draped over her back, the beast’s face, jaws and all, resting on her head, its silver hair ruffling in the night breeze. It was Sköll, or rather what was left of it. Even dead I did not like it being near me.

I noticed Asgot’s knife in Cynethryth’s hand and I grimaced at the sight of that blood-hungry thing, because I thought she had come to avenge the godi.

‘Better to die by a blade than be pecked to death by gulls,’ I said through a snarl that matched Sköll’s.

‘I have not come to kill you, Raven,’ she said, the tug of a smile at the corner of her mouth. ‘I have come to make sure you live.’ She pursed her lips. ‘If that is what the gods want.’

‘They do want it,’ I gnarred, ‘so get me out of this fucking hole.’ But Cynethryth shook her head at that.

‘You must stay buried,’ she said, ‘but I do have food and water for you and I will come back.’ Fear flooded through me like the sea through a torn hull.

‘Get me out, Cynethryth!’ Again she shook her head. ‘How did you get here?’ I asked. I could see no one else but then again I couldn’t see much of anything.

‘A fisherman brought me. He’s waiting beyond those trees. Sigurd paid him.’

‘Sigurd?’ My mind was knotting itself like eels in a barrel.

‘I cannot stay long,’ she hissed. ‘The others will suspect something.’

‘Fuck the others!’ I bawled. ‘Those whoresons put me in this hole and left me to rot!’

‘Listen to me, Raven,’ she seethed, and there was a cold edge to her voice that made me hold my tongue as still as the rest of me. ‘Sigurd sent me to help you. He had to do this,’ she said, pointing the blade at the stamped earth around my head. ‘For the sake of the Fellowship he had to do something. You killed our godi.’

‘I remember when you followed the White Christ,’ I growled, unable to resist. She ignored that.

‘Your jarl told me to keep you alive if I could. Olaf was in on it, too. And some of the others, I think.’

‘Black Floki?’ She nodded, plunging Asgot’s knife into the earth by my mouth. When she had made a shallow hole she
unslung a water skin from a strap across her shoulder and laid it down in front of my mouth, making a ridge on which she rested the neck.

‘Drink,’ she said. I got my dry lips around the neck and sucked and the cold water flooded my mouth. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now eat.’ She fed me cheese and cured meat and I chewed fast, biting off more before I had swallowed because I knew Cynethryth would leave me soon. Then she pulled a ridiculous-looking Greek hat from her belt and put it on my head. ‘This will keep the sun off you,’ she said. ‘I will try to come back tomorrow night. If I can.’

‘You could dig me out, Cynethryth,’ I barked through a mouthful of food.

She cocked her head to one side again in a gesture that had too much wolf about it to like.

‘How will we know what the gods want, then?’ she asked. Then she stood. ‘I will be back tomorrow night. Stay alive until then, Raven.’

‘Sigurd sent you?’ I asked, desperate to cling to that floating timber but hardly daring to believe. I did not want her to go.

‘Who else would he send?’ she asked. ‘Who else can interfere with what the gods are weaving? You killed his godi,’ she accused, a finger stabbing blame at me. There were two black holes where Sköll’s eyes once were. ‘So tell me, Raven, who else would Sigurd send but his völva?’ she said, which was an arrow into my thumping heart. That explained the wolf pelt and rituals, for witches are known to dress in skins or wear blue, the colour of death.

‘You are Sigurd’s völva?’ I almost choked on the word.

‘Stay alive, Raven. Your jarl needs you.’

And with that she loped off into the darkness, into the trees at the edge of my vision. And was gone.

I SLEPT IN THAT HOLE, ALBEIT FITFULLY. WHAT ELSE WAS THERE
to do? I slept and I dreamt of Cynethryth, but in my dreams she was golden-haired and pale-skinned and still followed the White Christ. Perhaps she loved me in my dreams but perhaps not. It did not matter though for in the faint, confused spin of those dreams we were together and she was not a völva. Dreams are cruel like that. They give you glimpses of how things might have been, filling your soul with a strange and pure joy only to rip it all away too soon. It is like losing a silver hoard you have fought hard for. Only worse.

Much of the night I spent awake and in pain. My right forearm, which Sköll’s jaws had broken, had been slung across my chest when they buried me and now it ached terribly under the weight of all that earth and because there was not enough blood getting into it. But worse was to come. Dawn broke with a damp mist that did not last long enough. The sun climbed above the still-shadowed hills until it was a great golden shield whose blazing fire flooded the sky as far as I could see, filling the world with the heat of a furnace. The wide-brimmed hat that Cynethryth had put on me at least saved my head and face from that searing sun, but the sandy earth around me bounced
that heat towards me, so that streams of sweat were running through my beard.

I drank sparingly, which I was not used to doing and which was even harder in that heat, careful not to nudge the water skin off the low ridge it rested on, because I could not be sure that Cynethryth would return. But she did come back that evening just as she had said she would. The scorching sun had all but boiled the brains in my skull, but the terrible heat was waning now when Cynethryth came through the olive trees, appearing like a shadow creature in the half light, Sköll’s forelegs crossed and pinned over her chest.

Again I asked her to dig me out and again she refused, saying that I deserved to suffer for what I had done to Asgot.

‘You would not be our völva if that old sheep’s turd was still breathing,’ I said.

‘And you would not be breathing if I did not bring you water,’ she replied, at which I managed a grim smile. At least we were speaking to each other again.