‘You are not as welcome here as you make it seem, little bear,’ Finn said with a dry laugh. One of the men who had followed Styrbjorn into the room, bald-headed and stubbled on a sharp chin, spat at him then, which narrowed Finn’s eyes.
‘Your welcome is worse,’ Stubble-Chin said. ‘This Styrbjorn killed Pall, which is red murder. No matter what happens, he will swing in a cage for it.’
‘Which one are you?’ asked Crowbone. ‘Freystein? I did not ever hear the name of the fourth man.’
‘I am Freystein,’ said the second man and jerked a thumb at the bald-headed one. ‘He is Thorstein, Pall’s brother.’
‘Ah,’ said Finn knowingly. ‘Same litter – I thought I saw it, but was not sure. All rats look the same to me.’
The door opened again and the Saxlander guards straightened a little as Kasperick came in, lifting the trailing hem of his robe from the floor of the place. He surveyed the scene with a satisfied smile and moved to the table where our possessions had been left, lifting Crowbone’s sword admiringly.
‘A fine and cunning weapon,’ he said, drawing it out and swinging it once or twice. ‘A little light, but perfect for a boy.’
Then he drew mine, which was Jarl Brand’s and he smiled like a cream-fed cat over that one. Then there was Styrbjorn’s; the silk wrapping was gone. When he drew The Godi, Finn growled, hackled like a hound on a boar scent.
‘Four swords of price,’ he declared. ‘Not a bad day – you three can take the rest of their possessions as reward. Get out.’
Bjarki and the others blinked and Bjarki looked as if he would argue, but the two huge guards leaned forward a little and the three of them left, summoning up as much swagger as they could, which was not much.
‘They expected more,’ I said, ‘for whispering in your ear about the Mazur girl.’
Kasperick waved a languid hand. ‘They are little yaps, from that large dog Pallig Tokeson. One day, we will deal with Pallig, but his little pups are useful and of small account to me when they have barked. To each other, too, I am thinking – the death of Pall will not concern them much, save that they can now split the reward I gave them into thirds instead of fourths.’
He settled his rump on the edge of the table and looked us over.
‘You will send word to release the Mazur girl,’ he declared. ‘In return, I will release all of you – except the one they call Styrbjorn, for he is guilty of murder.’
‘Styrbjorn? What does one of Pallig’s little yappers matter to you?’ I countered and he nodded, a nasty smile on his face.
‘Nothing,’ he agreed, ‘save that justice must be seen to be done – anyway, I have gone to all the trouble of lighting a brazier and started heating up instruments. I will not have all my enjoyment removed.’
The threat was plain enough and he saw it had hit home as he slid his arse off the table.
‘You have until first light to think,’ he added flatly. Then he swept out, followed by the two guards; the door banged shut behind them, leaving us alone in the fetid half-dark.
‘One who sees a friend roasting on a spit tells all he knows,’ Red Njal noted. ‘My granny said so and it remains true.’
‘Spit-luck for us, then, that Styrbjorn is a few wrist-clasps short of a friend to any of us,’ Finn answered and prodded the luckless subject with one toe. Styrbjorn groaned and Red Njal bent briefly to look at him.
‘Lump like a gull’s egg and a bruise, nothing much more,’ he growled, straightening. Finn took the pisspot and emptied the contents on Styrbjorn, who surfaced, wheezing and blowing.
‘Better?’ Finn inquired as Styrbjorn blinked into the Now of it all. The enormity of where he was crashed on him like creaming surf and he subsided.
‘I thought it was a dream,’ he groaned.
‘If it is,’ Red Njal told him, ‘dream me out of it.’
‘No dream,’ I told him harshly. ‘What did you do to Pall?’
Styrbjorn shifted, rolled over and sat up slowly, like a sobering drunk after a feast. He touched the lump on his forehead and winced.
‘Pall made straight for his three friends,’ Styrbjorn explained. ‘We just looked for the cheapest, noisiest drinking place in the settlement and, sure enough, there they were, having already poured Pallig’s poison in the ear of this Kasperick about us. Pall told them of the value of the Mazur girl, said we should tell Kasperick and he would surely reward us.’
‘I said he was a rat and that releasing him was a bad idea. And you went with them,’ Finn growled meaningfully. Styrbjorn held his head and groaned.
‘Aye, well, I was not all that welcome there, since they blamed me for much that had happened, especially the one called Bjarki – silly name for a grown man, is it not?’
No-one argued with that, so he sat up a little more and then began sniffing suspiciously at the damp on him.
‘The other three went off, saying that Pall and me should watch the ship – what did you just pour on me, Finn Horsehead?’
‘Healing balm,’ I said, wanting him to keep to the sharp of his tale. ‘What happened then?’
He blinked and made himself more comfortable, closing his eyes. I remembered a time when I had taken a dunt to the head and almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
‘Then we waited in the rain for a while,’ Styrbjorn went on after a moment. ‘We saw the crew coming back, not all at once, but in ones and twos and seeming to be easy and light about it until they were aboard. Pall said the ship was getting ready to leave, which was clear to any sailing man; he said he was off to warn Bjarki that the prize was slipping away.’
He paused and frowned, then sniffed again.
‘This is piss,’ he declared accusingly.
‘What happened?’ I snarled and he raised an eyebrow at me, then shrugged, which act made him wince. This time I felt no sympathy.
‘I thought it best not to let him,’ he said. ‘So I slit his throat and dropped him in the river.’
‘Heya,’ growled Finn admiringly and Styrbjorn smiled. I looked at the youth with some new and grudging respect; he had decided to save us and killed a man without so much as a blink – yet it was a throat-cut in the dark.
I was thinking that was what kept Styrbjorn from being the hero-king he wanted to be. He could kill, right enough, but would rather be sleekit about it than face a man in a fair fight; even his saving of me was a stab to my enemy’s back.
Nor had he been sleekit enough about the killing of Pall, either, since he got caught.
‘Aye,’ he agreed wryly when I pointed this last fact out to him. ‘I was making for the ship, for it was now the safest place for me to be after dropping the little turd in the water, when Bjarki and the others turned up with some armed men. They grabbed me and Bjarki asked where Pall was, so the whole matter came out in the open soon after.’
He paused, defiantly.
‘If it had not been for them being so bothered with me,’ he added, ‘the ship might not have pulled safely away at all.’
I let him think it, even if I doubted it to be true. Not that any of that helped us here, as I whispered to Finn, drawing him a little apart from the others.
‘Aye,’ he answered, then grinned. ‘Though there may yet be a way out of this cage. Best if we wait for dark. Best also if I keep it to myself, just in case this Kasperick grows impatient for spit-roasts and questioning.’
The thought that he had a plan when I did not was nagging enough, but the idea that he did not want to share it made matters worse. As the faint light from the barred squares in the wall faded we sat in silence; I did not know what the others were thinking, but home swam up in the maelstrom of my thoughts.
I dreamed up a new Hestreng, with soaring roof and many high rooms, grand as any king’s and rich with cunning carvings. I summoned up Thorgunna in it and a fine-limbed boy and thralls and a forge and sturdy wharves where all my ships swung gently.
It was a good dream, save for some annoyances; the face of the fine-limbed son was always Koll and accusing. Nor could I place myself anywhere in this neatly-crafted hall.
Worst of all, I could not put a remembered face on Thorgunna at all and summoning up the night moments, hip to hip and thigh to thigh, languorous and loving, only brought a small, tight-muscled body and a sharp face with those huge, seal eyes.
‘Well,’ said a voice, cracking Hestreng apart; I was almost grateful to see Red Njal hunkered near.
‘Well?’ I countered and he gave me a look as glassed and grey as a Baltic swell.
‘I am thinking we will not get out of this.’
‘A man’s life is never finished until Skuld snips the last thread of it,’ I said.
‘Aye, right enough – but best to search while a trail is new, as my granny told me. I can feel the edge of that Norn’s shears and wish only to make it known to you and the gods that I bear no malice, for we are oathed to each other and I took it freely. I would not want to come as a
draugr
to bother your family.’
It took me a moment to realise he meant he would die because of my wyrd, which I had brought on myself with my sacrifice-promise to Odin. I swallowed any venom I had to spit at him for it all the same and thanked him nicely, though I could not help but add that it was only my wyrd to die and not his. Perhaps the gods would be content with just the one death, I told him, just to watch him brighten like a bairn who had been promised a new seax for his name-day.
‘Ah, well,’ he answered. ‘I thought to mention it, all the same. Care gnaws the heart when a man cannot tell all his mind to another.’
‘Your granny was a singular woman,’ I told him, straight-faced into his delighted grins.
And all the while I felt Einar at my back, the old leader who had brought his own wyrd down on himself and whom we had cursed for it, sure he was leading all the Oathsworn of that time into their doom. Not for the first time, I knew how Einar the Black had felt.
‘I do not think it is my wyrd to die here,’ frowned Crowbone and that did not surprise me either; the arrogance of youth was doubled and re-doubled in that odd-eyed man-boy.
‘Then you can be the one to rescue Koll,’ Finn decreed.
Styrbjorn sniffed and tentatively marked out the edges of pain on his lumped forehead.
‘Jarl Brand is a good man,’ he agreed, ‘and a generous ring-giver, it is true – but would we be plootering through the rain after him if Orm did not owe him it as foster-father to his son?’
Again my fault and I let some anger slip the leash into my voice.
‘Would you not go after the boy only to save him, then?’ I demanded. ‘It is all your wyrd that he is taken and we are in this mire.’
Styrbjorn thought about it, frowning and serious.
‘You have the truth of it being as a result of my quarrel with my uncle,’ he admitted, then waved one hand to dismiss it. ‘That is the way of such matters and folk cannot go putting all the blame of it on me – war is war, after all.
‘As to the boy,’ he went on, ‘if the reward was good for me, I would go after him. For you it is losing the stain on your fame and regaining the friendship of the jarl who gave you land and a steading. Good reasons – the fame and the friendship of great men is half the secret to ships and men, as you know, Jarl Orm. The other half is silver. But there is too little fame here for me, while Jarl Brand is too small a friendship for a man of my standing.’
He was a nasty twist of a youth, this one, and his arrogance sucked the breath from you. I saw it then, clear as Iceland’s Silfra water – Styrbjorn would die from his unthinking attitude, one day or the next.
‘You would not try for rescue at all, then?’ Finn growled, a twisted grin on his face. ‘From where I look, wee man with a lot to say for yourself, you have no standing. You are sitting in piss, with a dunted head and no good fame at all.’
Styrbjorn did not answer, but Crowbone fixed him with that odd-eyed stare.
‘You would go if you knew what the lad felt,’ he said, in a voice which had deepened considerably since it had snapped free of boyhood. ‘If you were far from home, among enemies, treated as a thrall, thrashed and bound and starved, all that would keep you taking one breath after another was the hope that someone was coming to get you.’
We all remembered, then, the saga of Crowbone’s life to this point – a fugitive from the womb, his father dead. A thrall at six, his foster-father slain, his mother the usage of Klerkon’s camp, bairned by Kveldulf and then kicked to death by him. At nine, he had been freed by me into the world of the Oathsworn, which was no gentle place for a growing boy.
He looked at me and acknowledged that rescue with only his eyes. Now, at twelve, Crowbone’s last foster-father, his Uncle Sigurd, was also dead and, though he had sisters and kin somewhere too dangerous still to visit, he was more alone than the moon. It came to me that this was the reason, more than any, which had made him take our Oath – any family, even the Odin-hagged Oathsworn, was better than none.
‘Aye, such a wyrd would be a sore one to swallow,’ Styrbjorn agreed, then beamed and slapped Crowbone’s shoulder. ‘Skalds would make a fair tale about someone so rescued. You have convinced me that there is, after all, enough fame in it – we will hunt down the little bairn and bring him safe home, even if Orm ends up swinging in a cage here.’
‘A comfort, for sure,’ I muttered darkly and he laughed.
‘Where is Randr Sterki going, I am wondering?’ Finn asked, frowning. ‘I thought he wanted us to come to him, so why is he running?’
For the lack of men, I was thinking. He would want to find a place where there were shiftless swords for hire, for I was betting sure he was crew-light now. I said so and Styrbjorn chuckled.
‘Well,’ he said brightly, ‘in a way you have me to thank for that.’
I could not speak at all, but Red Njal always had a ready tongue.
‘The jarl would favour you,’ he pointed out, his mildness only adding to the venom of it, ‘save that it is unlikely you will survive, even if this Saxlander lord does release us for the Mazur girl. You he wants to keep and play with.’
Styrbjorn’s fear slid under the clear surface of his face and he swallowed.
I could scarcely see their features now; their faces were white blobs in the dim and the glow of the brazier coals seemed brighter now that the dark had raced in like Sleipnir, One-Eye’s eight-legged stallion.