The White Raven

'He is getting Klepp Spaki to paint his forehead with the valknut,' she said harshly. 'Soon he will come to you and ask for that amulet you have.'

I blinked at that. If it was true, then Finn was dedicating himself to live or die at the whim of Odin and that was as good as hurling himself off a cliff for, in a fight, he would not retreat until he had had some clear sign from One Eye that it was good to do so. I felt like a house whose roof was falling.

I finished the stew, though the joy in it had gone by then. I lay back, feeling the warmth and the full belly, my head full of shrieking gulls; Vladimir and his uncle and what they would do when the howe was reached. Finn. Odin. The silver hoard. The Man-Haters and whether the one who led them was really Hild. The rune sword she had. The one I had.

I tried not to sleep in the hope that I would, but all of that whirled like an ice wind inside my head until it scoured the back of my eyeballs sore. When Finn loomed out of the dark and hunkered beside me, it was almost a relief and I handed him the amulet before he spoke, unlooping it from around my neck.

He did not ask how I knew but took it and looped it round his own neck.

'This is a hard road you take,' I muttered, sick with it. Sailing once in a badly-trimmed knarr I had felt like this — every time the wind hit a certain quarter it would heel over and the steerboard would lift clean out of the water, so there was nothing to do but run until the wind died enough to drop the steerboard back in the water — or you hit something.

'Rather this one than another,' he growled, miserable as mirr.

'Which one is that, then?'

He shifted uncomfortably, then looked at me, flat and grindstone hard. 'The one that ends with me drooling by a fire, with women laughing behind my back at how my vingull is limp and my back bowed.'

For all that he was grim with it, I had to swallow a smile, since the word he used — vingull — meant the prick of a horse rather than that of a man. So I knew he still had some pride in him yet.

'You listened too long to Martin the monk,' I gave him back. 'Too afraid to live? Too old? Is this Finn Bardisson from Skane?'

'Who knows? Who will know? Who will remember Pai? Or Harelip? When all of us are dead, Bear Slayer, only Pinleg and Skapti and others will be remembered, locked in that stone we raised in Aldeigjuborg. They are the ones with fame-luck.'

'We will have a stone. .'

'Too late, Trader. It seems to me unlikely we will make it back to where Klepp Spaki can carve it. And if we do — what then? Back to that steading with the chickens and all the silver we can carry? What then, the point of raiding? So we squat and wait for the Norns to snip off the last threads of our life.'

'So all that is left to do is find a good death, Finn Bardisson?'

He grunted and said: 'I made a vow in the pit prison. To One Eye. He kept his side of the bargain.'

Then he straightened and forced a grin. 'In the end, as Pai knew, there is only one thing.' Then he intoned:

'Cattle die and kinsmen die,

you, too, soon must die

but one thing never will die,

the fair fame of one who has earned it.'

'There is that, right enough,' I said, bitter as lees at him for finding it so easy to follow this path. Then I gave him back a verse of the Sayings of the High One, the one everybody forgets.

The lame can ride a horse, the handless drive cattle,

the deaf one can fight and prevail,

happier for the blind than for him on the bale-fire,

but no man cares for a corpse.'

Finn might have had a reply to it, but Cod-Biter woke up and moaned then. He did that for most of the night and then died, his screams shaving the hairs off our arms, just as the dawn came up.

There was too much food in the end and men came down with the squits and belly gripes, so that Bjaelfi had to feed them a cure made from the newest root of a bramble which had both ends in the earth, boiled up with mugwort and everlasting and the milk of a mare, a goat and a cow.

'Does it work?' demanded Skula, a raw-boned youth who had started skinny and was now yellow and wasting. Thorgunna, who was feeding him with it, assured him it was infallible, but from the face he made swallowing it down I was glad I did not have the squits.

'He will get more out of the other part of Bjaelfi's cure,' Thorgunna muttered as she passed me. The bit that has him rest in the soft and warm.'

Too many were dead, or dying, or sick. In the end, I had to gather the Oathsworn together and ask for people to stay with those too sick to travel, partly to make sure the villagers remembered their manners, partly to try and make sure they lived.

I had expected a torrent of volunteers, but was surprised; only two said they would stay, making out that is was for the good reason of tending their sick comrades but really because they were too weak themselves and knew they could go no further. The others were determined to go on and, in the end, I had to tell two more they would stay and listen to them grumble.

One was Skula and, though he curled his lip at my decision, looked more relieved than annoyed; he was weak enough to die if he left the village and knew it.

The other was Tjorvir, whose boils were now beyond Bjaelfi's powers to prevent and Thorgunna and Thordis' lancing prowess with a needle and wool. They erupted where clothing chafed, so that his neck and wrists were a mass of sores and pus — but he was frowning at my leaving him behind.

'This is not a good thing,' he declared, shaking his head, so I pointed out that he could barely walk, use a sword or wear a helm but it made no difference. In the end, Finnlaith clapped him on the back — from Tjorvir's wince, he had found a new boil — and said: 'Don't worry — I will serve the weregild and make sure you get your share.'

It was Jon Asanes who explained it to me, which did not make me feel any better about being put on the straight path by a stripling and one who had been weeping-sad since his friend, Pai, had died.

'The ones who came with Thorkel feel bad for what he did and do not wish you to think badly of them,' he told me. 'They will follow you to the door of Helheim — as will the others and not because of the oath they made in the eye of Odin.

'They don't call you Bear Slayer, they call you Trader,' he added with a quiet grin, 'because everyone knows that, if you fare with Orm, you get a good deal. They know you are All-Father's favourite and think that will bring most of them home, too.'

We spoke quietly, under four eyes only, about Olafs plan to keep Jon in Novgorod. I knew enough about Crowbone not to find it strange that a mere boy of nine should be deciding the future of one I had known since he was a child himself.

Jon did not smile. He looked uncomfortable and scrubbed at what I saw was the beginnings of a passable beard, dark against the pale olive of his skin. The gesture made my heart skip, for it was so like old Rurik, the man I'd thought my father, as to have been a copy. Then I realized he had picked the gesture up from me.

Crowbone dreams his dreams,' Jon said wryly, 'and depends on the actions of birds to make them come true — one more to a flock here, a flutter to the left there. He will fail in the end, for no true god guides his hand in that.'

'You can say that?' I countered. 'Even after all you have witnessed with us?'

'Always the hand of the White Christ — the Hvitkristr — is in it,' Jon answered levelly. 'That has ever been a barrier between us.'

Not on my account, nor would it and I said as much, so that he flashed those white, straight teeth at me, big as rune-stones now in a face made too thin from hunger.