Finn and I looked at each other and knew what each thought – this was no great place for us to fight. I moved to him then as the gathering broke up into muttering twos and threes and he scrubbed his face furiously, a sure sign of his confusion.
‘Well?’ I asked.
‘Well what?’ he countered, scowling, his beard scrubbed into a mad fury of spikes.
‘Do you think we can win?’
He stopped then, for he knew I would not voice that out loud when there was more than just him to hear it.
‘Well,’ he growled. ‘I am no stranger to woman-killing, as you keep wanting to tell me, as if it was something to be shamed at. All the same, I have never killed a bairn that had no proper life and I am reluctant to begin.’
‘Kill one to save us all?’ I answered, with a wry smile, for this thought had been running like spate-water in me. He grinned, then spat.
‘It is not about numbers – one or a hundred bairns, it would still be a price worth paying for such a reward as the life of wee Helga and the boy Hroald, whom I have acknowledged as mine. It is about what is right and what is not. He may be a great king, this fledgling eagle. Who can say what wonders he may bring about?’
I laughed with the sheer, surprising delight of him and pointed out the other side of the coin; that he would most likely turn out to be another Harald Bluetooth.
‘If I thought that,’ he growled, ‘I would kill it before the head appeared between the mother’s thighs.’
We were smiling, then, when Botolf limped up, towing Ingrid and Bjaelfi in his wake. Behind them, I saw the Greek, Leo, allowing Koll to lead him by the hand towards us.
‘How is the leg?’ I demanded and Botolf waved an answer away, hauling Helga up high in the air, so that she shrieked with delight and bone-haired Cormac stood, wanting the same but older and so too proud to ask. When Botolf hoisted him up, he shrieked his delight all the same, but Botolf grunted with pain.
Bjaelfi gave me a look and I moved to him, so he could tell me, soft and low.
‘I cut too little from the bone,’ he said tersely. ‘I warned him not to go back to lifting carts with the pony in them, but Botolf is Botolf.’
I remembered it well, the hot, fetid boat heading into the hard-pull of the Middle Sea up to the Great City, Botolf delirious with wound-fever, rolling great fat drops of sweat. Bjaelfi, sheened like some mad black dwarf in a cave, kept cutting and sewing, so that there was skin to wrap round and stitch for a stump, with the blood washing in the scuppers.
‘I think the skin is splitting round the stump-bone,’ he added bleakly. ‘If it does, he will not be able to have such an end in the socket of a wooden leg, clever harness or no.’
I looked at Botolf, standing tall, Cormac held giggling and wriggling to the sky. The big man would not like being reduced to the crutch he had endured once before, while the stump healed. He would not like that at all.
Koll broke in just then, his high-pitched voice querulous and demanding.
‘Tell me if what this priest says is true, Jarl Orm, for you have been to the Great City. That people live in halls set one on top of the other.’
I looked at Leo and answered his bland smile, then nodded.
‘Just so,’ I replied. ‘And they have marvellous affairs built for no other reason than to throw water into the air, for the delight of it. And they eat lying down. Much more besides – I shall take you there when all this is done with.’
‘If we live,’ the boy answered, suddenly grim. ‘Leo says the bearcoats are better warriors.’
Leo spread his hands in apology. ‘A careless remark. I had heard such warriors were to be feared because they had no fear of their own.’
‘They will find some when they meet us,’ I answered and Toki, appearing sudden as a squall, declared that Kuritsa would shoot them all with his bow. The man himself, wheezing still, but grinning, agreed from a little way away and Finn chuckled.
‘By the time this is all done away with,’ he declared, ‘we will have to give Kuritsa a new name, I am thinking. And put Prince at the head of it.’
‘Hunter will be title enough,’ Kuritsa replied and I marvelled; already it was hard to tell this man from the droop-headed, silent thrall he once had been. ‘I can shoot an arrow for miles and still hit true. Even round a corner. Such a thing once saved my life.’
Koll and Toki, bright-eyed and struck silent, watched him. Finn, grinning, sat down and others gathered. Kuritsa, lean-faced, shave-headed, hirpled to the wagon and sat heavily by the wheel.
‘Before I was taken, in my own lands, I was set upon by the Yeks, a tribe who hated us. They were many and I was one and was, I admit it, hunting in their lands – so what do you think happened?’
‘You were killed, for sure,’ chuckled Botolf, leading Helga and Cormac to where they could listen, ‘for there are times when you work like a dead man.’
‘Not as dead as some, I am thinking,’ answered Kuritsa smartly. ‘I was lucky. I had my own bow with me, one I called Sure in my own tongue. Sometimes the power of that bow frightened me, for I lost many arrows and sometimes wondered whether one that vanished from my sight hit a friend in the next village, or a king in another country. It took me a time to get the grip of that bow, but after a while, I could hit a fat deer as far as I could see it – though I might have to turn half-round if it were a pair rutting, to be sure of hitting the deer and not the stag.’
Finn laughed out loud at that one, slapping his thigh with delight, then waved Kuritsa to go on, while the others, child and man both, listened open-mouthed.
‘Well,’ Kuritsa said, ‘I spotted an elk far off – so far off it was no bigger than a tiny beetle and I pointed at it, so that the skin-wearing trolls of Yeks stopped and looked while I nocked an arrow in Sure and took aim. I waited until the tail twitched out of sight over the hill, then I shot – allowing for the breeze and a touch of snow in the air.’
Botolf and Finn collapsed at this point, howling and wheezing. I could make out, between the grunts and snorts, the words ‘allowing for the breeze’ and ‘snow in the air’. Kuritsa, haughty as a jarl, ignored them.
‘I persuaded those Yeks to go over the hill, with me as prisoner, on the promise that if they had elk meat at the end of it, I could go free. They agreed, for it was on their way and it took the best part of the rest of that day to walk it – but there was the elk, my arrow in him and dead. They were delighted at having the horns and the meat and so let me go.’
‘A fine shot,’ Finn said eventually, spluttering to halt. Kuritsa shook his head sorrowfully.
‘It was that moment when I knew I was cursed – not long after, of course, the gods allowed me to be captured and taken into slavery. I have not shot such a long shot since.’
‘Why?’ demanded Botolf. ‘Did your gods order it?’
Kuritsa sighed. ‘No, my own failing eye and hand. I had aimed for the heart and there was that old bull elk, gut-shot in the worst way. I was ashamed.’
‘Yet you shot today,’ Toki pointed out into the chuckles following that and Kuritsa shrugged.
‘Not so long. At that range I can shoot the balls off a clegg.’
‘Do cleggs have balls, then?’ Koll demanded, frowning and Kuritsa, serious and unsmiling, shook his head.
‘No horsefly has any when I am around with a bow.’
It was good laughter, washing away the lurking horrors of eight bearcoats and lasted well into the rattle of skillet and cauldron, while the sun staggered out from behind clouds and showed me the rain, small-dropped and fine as baby hair.
It was a good evening and you would not think we were hunted folk at all, so I thanked Freyja for that moment of goddess-peace.
Of course, it did not last until morning.
I woke to screams and fire, scrabbling for a sword and cursing the sleep out of me; then a soft voice I knew well told me to put on a tunic and stop shouting.
Thorgunna squatted by a goat, working the teats relentlessly into a bowl. It was dark, but there were fires everywhere it seemed and the place bustled with movement and purpose; somewhere, a woman moaned and then yelled aloud.
‘Why are you milking a goat in the dark?’ I asked, still stupid with sleep and Thorgunna, grunting with the effort of bending, jerked her head in the direction of the yelps.
‘Her waters broke. I need the milk to bathe the bairn in.’
The mother-to-be appeared a second later, out from where she had been moved for more comfort, which had banished me and all the other men to find sleep and shelter where we could. She moved ponderously, splay-legged, held up by Aoife on one side and Thordis on the other.
‘She has no strength,’ Thordis hissed. ‘She needs a birthing stool.’
‘Aye, well,’ grunted Thorgunna, sharp as green apples, straightening with the bowl of milk held in the crook of one arm. ‘It was a thing I forgot in all the confusion of finding things for food and shelter in a hurry, with my husband’s enemies at my heels.’
I shrugged into my tunic, seeing the fires lit in a circle to keep the
alfar
at bay, for there is nothing those unseen, flickering creatures like better than stealing a newborn wean and leaving one of their own twisted wee horrors.
Ingrid appeared, dripping blood from her hands and the other women fell back a little in deference. She came up to the moaning Sigrith and clasped her rune-cut, bloodied palms on the queen’s joints, to give her strength and ease. I knew Ingrid was Hestreng’s
bjargrygr
, the Helping Woman for all the steading’s births, which role had some
seidr
work in it, too; Thorgunna and her sister, I knew from old, had no
seidr
in them at all.
‘Jasna…’ moaned the queen.
‘We cannot support her and deliver the bairn,’ Thordis insisted. ‘Especially at the last.’
I knew this was when the mother got on her elbows and knees, the bairn delivered from behind. Ingrid moved busily, undoing knots and loosening straps and buckles where she saw them, another spell to ease the birth. The women’s hair was also unbound, tucked into their belts at the waist to keep it out of the way.
The queen moaned and sagged. ‘Jasna,’ she said.
‘I have a birthing stool,’ Ingrid said, then waved to the shadows and all heads turned as Botolf stumped into the middle of the fires, grinning. Thorgunna and Thordis looked at each other; no men were allowed at a birthing by tradition and usage.
‘Oh, I am half a bench,’ grunted Botolf, sitting himself on a sea-chest, ‘so half of me is not here at all. The other half will close my eyes if you like.’
He hauled the queen to him, holding her in powerful arms, her legs splayed over his knees, her head resting, intimate as a lover, on his great chest.
‘You’ll ruin those breeks,’ Thorgunna said wryly and Botolf chuckled.
‘I could take them off.’
There was a chorus at that and, suddenly, the queen, sheened face raised, muttered: ‘Not seemly. I will buy you a new pair, Birthing Stool.’
‘That’s better, my pet,’ Ingrid said, sure that her palm-carved runes were working. ‘A little pain and sweat and then the joy of a son.’
‘Jasna…’ whispered the queen.
‘Will someone rout out that fat cow Jasna from her sleep?’ bellowed Thorgunna angrily.
Ingrid looked pointedly at me. I realised I was not welcome in the circle of fires and backed off hastily, while Botolf crooned softly to the bundle in his arms and Ingrid raised her arms and started a muttered prayer-chant to Freyja.
Beyond, where men were, seemed darker away from the fires and I almost fell over Finn and Abjorn, talking urgently with each other.
‘Banished, were you?’ chuckled Finn. ‘Just as well. No place for a man, that. I pity the stupid big arse who is now high-seat for a birthing queen.’
I told Abjorn to send out watchers and he nodded, his face grim and grey in the dark.
‘Those fires…’
He let it trail off, for there was little need to voice it all. Those fires were a sure beacon and I could see the hunting packs of bearcoats and Randr Sterki’s skin-wearing trolls slithering through the dark towards us.
‘There is worse,’ growled Hlenni Brimill, looming out of the dark, dragging a squirming figure by the hair; the Mazur girl yelped as he swung her into the circle of us.
‘That fat cow of a thrall woman is dead,’ he declared. ‘When I went to get her, she was cold and stiff – and this one made a bolt out from under the wagon she was in.’
I blinked. Dead? Jasna?
We went to the wagon in a crowd, the Mazur girl dragged back with us and yelping whenever Hlenni jerked her savagely by her hair. Bjaelfi was climbing out, rubbing his chin and spreading his hands.
‘She is dead, right enough,’ he announced. ‘Not a mark on her I can see – but it is hard enough in torchlight. Perhaps daylight will let me know more.’
‘Not a mark,’ muttered Red Njal from over Bjaelfi’s shoulder. ‘That is
seidr
work, if ever I saw it. Her hand will wag above her grave, as my granny used to say.’
Desperate eyes raked the girl, who felt them and struggled until Hlenni jerked her hard and she shrieked. An answer came from the dark, from where the fires blazed and I had had enough of it all.
‘Let her go, Hlenni,’ I said and he reluctantly opened his fist; the girl sank to the ground, then stood, with a visible effort. She squared her shoulders and looked at me, chin out, eyes dark and liquid as a seal. I felt a lurch in my stomach, for I had seen such looks before on women and all of them had been rich in
seidr
and had done me no good with it.
‘Drozdov,’ I said. ‘Is that your name?’
‘What they call me,’ she answered, her Norse of the eastern type and further bent out of shape by her accent; those eyes were fixed on mine, swimming at the brim but not spilling over.
‘Chernoglazov,’ I remembered and she nodded, then said, ‘Yes, lord,’ before Red Njal had lifted his hand to correct her.
‘Did you kill her, then?’ I said, waving one hand at the dark, dead bulk in the wagon.
‘No…lord. Someone came in the night. I heard her make little noise and then silent. I stay hidden.’