That thought had floated with us all the way to the berth, bringing little cheer. No sooner had we lashed ourselves to the land than Finn and Kvasir, swathed in cloaks and wrapped to the ears in wadmal and hats, came up and nodded in the direction of another drakkar, snugged up to the bank and with it's mast off, the sail tented up across the deck, which spoke of an over-wintering. Klerkon's ship, Dragon Wings. Two men all wild hair and silver arm rings watchfully tended a box-brazier of charcoals on the mid-ballast stones.
'Small crew only,' Kvasir reported after a brief open-handed saunter in their direction. They had seen us and were guarded after events in Gunnarsgard, though it was not a sensible thing to start swinging swords in someone else's realm. What would happen when they learned what we had done on Svartey was another matter entirely.
'Klerkon has gone south to Konugard,' he added, cocking his head in that bird way he had these days.
'He will have taken his captives,' Finn said, almost cheerfully. 'They will sell better in that place.'
I scowled at him, while. Kvasir said nothing. I knew why Finn was so joyous he was out on the raid and expected to winter in Novgorod and then head off in the spring to find the mountain of silver he thought we had left alone too long.
I was hoping that it would be a long winter and that, at the end of it, Sviatoslav, Prince of the Rus, would renew his mad fight against the Great City and make it too dangerous to travel south of Konugard, which the locals called Kiev. I was hoping those events had trapped Lambisson with Short Eldgrim and Cod-Biter.
I also knew I was Odin-cursed with this mountain of silver It was like being in a thorn patch the harder you struggled, the worse you were caught. Sooner or later, I was thinking day after day, I would have to go back to Atil's howe and every time the thought came to me it was like swallowing a stone.
But first there was Thordis to get back and Eldgrim and Cod-Biter to rescue.
We stayed long enough in Aldeigjuborg to find that Lambisson, if he had been there at all, was long gone. We stayed a little longer, to stand by the Oathsworn Stone which Einar had raised to those we had lost getting this far on the original journey down to seek Atil's treasure.
Six years since and now the survivors of that time stood round it, a mere handful and a half Hauk, Gizur, Finn, Kvasir, Hlenni Brimill, Runolf Harelip, Red Njal and me. Thorkel stood with us, for he had known Pinleg and Skapti Halftroll and the others the stone remembered but he had not been with us at the time. Crippled Cod-Biter and the addled Short Eldgrim were two more and we remembered on their behalf.
'Someone has been,' Kvasir noted, nodding at the garland of withered oak leaves fluttering on the stone's crown.
Not for a long time. Yet the names were there and, though the paint had faded, the grooves were etched deep on the stone and the story was there still. We made our prayers and small offerings and left.
Finn thought the garland might have been left by Pinleg's woman, who had stayed in the town with her son and daughter. When we went to where they had been, those who had known them told us they had left for the south long since. I remembered, then, that Pinleg's wife had been a Slav, his children half-Norse Rus.
Only the stone was left, where the wind traced the grooves of all their names.
The Elk stayed in Aldeigjuborg with everybody on it save me, Finn, Kvasir and Thorgunna and Crowbone, who trembled and scowled and stared at Dragon Wings and the men he saw there. I did not want him starting trouble and hoped Gizur had enough men to keep the Elk safe, but it would be a dangerous time, even berthed as far from Dragon Wings as we could get and both sides leashed by what would happen if we started in to killing each other in Sviatoslav's kingdom.
I had thought of taking the Elk down to Novgorod but was glad I had not as we were poled along the cold river, through the dripping fir and pine forests where people still struggled to work the hacked-out clearings using their strange little three-toothed ploughs. The Volkhov seemed even more swirling and treacherous with currents than I remembered from sailing it with Einar.
It seemed all marsh and fish to me this time, an ugly place when the trees were stripped to claws. Further south was where the good black steppe earth was, the stuff the Slavs call chernoziom and so rich you need plough it just the once and, after letting it fallow for a few years, harvest wheat a number of times without tillage.
'Aye, poor land, this,' decided Red Njal. 'And what are they doing boiling water in those huge pans?'
'Salt,' grunted Kvasir. 'There is water here from springs and it is salt as the sea.'
'Not a bad trick at all,' noted Ospak. 'Selling people boiled sea water.'
It was his first visit and everything was new.
'Just so,' chuckled Finn. 'So you see we are richer aboard the Elk even than Kvasir Spittle here, for we are always floating in the stuff.'
Everyone laughed, while Kvasir ignored them, punching careful holes in his share of the gold dinar coins, making his necklace for Thorgunna. For her part, she still sat fussing over Crowbone, who now had a tow fuzz under the healing scabs. It was also clear that we could hardly treat him as a thrall, no matter what he was, so I went to him as we climbed aboard the strug.
'Prince you may be, or you may not,' I said, while a knowing Thorgunna beamed, 'but free you can be, for sure.'
I held out my hand. He blinked those marvellous eyes at me, then grinned and took my wrist in his own small grip.
Later, when we were sliding between the green banks, poled by chanting Krivichi rivermen, Kvasir came to me with what he and Thorgunna had coaxed from this little Prince.
'He says,' Kvasir told me, speaking low, 'that he was with his mother and staying with his grandfather and his foster-father, whom he knew as Old Thorolf. He was hunted by men, that much he knows, for his mother warned him always of it. They were hiding in this place, which he cannot remember the name of, for he was three when they fled it, heading, he says, for Novgorod. He has an uncle here, or so his mother told him, but does not know his name. They were coming to this uncle when they ran out of luck.'
I thought on it, rolling it over and over like a new coin in my head while Kvasir looked at me, his one good eye dulled as a dying fish in the growing twilight.
'Klerkon took him? Or bought him from someone else?' Kvasir frowned, getting the story straight.
'Took him. Killed the foster-father right off. The boy remembers him doing it, saying Thorolf was too old and pitching him into the sea to drown.'
'The mother?'
Kvasir shrugged. 'I think she died later. He knows more but either will not or cannot say more. Only that she died on Svartey.'
Probably under Klerkon, I thought moodily.
'Anything else?'
Kvasir shrugged. 'He knows the names of his mother, father and grandfather, but he will not say them. I think his mother made him swear it. Which is not a surprise if men are hunting you a closed mouth keeps you hidden.'
There was something here half-buried. I felt like someone who finds a ring in the dirt and knows if he gives it a hard enough tug it will unearth the whole glorious oathing-sword whose hilt it is attached to.
We were silent again, then Kvasir shook his head, bemused.
'We are in a saga here,' he declared. 'A hunted prince, captured by raiders. Sold to slavery and rescued by the Bear Slayer and the Oathsworn if that boy doesn't end up a great man, then I am no reader of the Norn's weave.'
'Read less of his Norn-weave and more of our own,' I answered. 'Let's hope there is not a thread in it that winds his greatness round our doom.'
That thought occupied both of us all the way to where the strug tied up to the wharf at Novgorod. Then the Norns showed us what they had weaved so far and Odin's laughter was louder still.
6
The great walled fortress of Novgorod, with its central keep the Slavs call them kreml and detinets was a formidable affair even in those early days, before it was rebuilt in stone. All sharpened wood and earthworks, it glowered above the town like a stern father.
Inside, it was then and is now, as snug as a turf-roofed Iceland hall, with fine hangings and sable furs and such but it also has a stinking pit prison, all filth and sweating rock walls and meant for the likes of the ragged-arse Krivichi, Goliads and Slovenes, not decent Norse like us.
The druzhina guards didn't see it that way at all when they pitched us in, jeering and pointing out that no-one climbed out who was not destined either to be nailed upside down or staked.
We were all there me, Finn, Kvasir, Jon Asanes, Thorgunna, Thordis, two thrall women who gabbled in some strange tribe tongue and Olaf who, for all his defiant chin, was trembling, both at what might happen and at the fact he had killed his first man.
In the dark, chill and crushing as a tomb, our ragged breathing was all that told me anyone was there at all and yet it seemed to me that there were shapes, blacker shadows in the dark, shifting and moving. I felt them, as I had felt them the night of the fox-fires back in the stables in Hestreng; the restless dead, come to look and leach the last warmth of life from someone about to join them. Aye, and gloat, too, perhaps.
The day started well enough, when we had made our way over the great split-log walkways, greasy with soft mirr and age, to the Gotland quarter where the Norse trading houses sat. I was seeking Jon Asanes, known to us as The Goat Boy.
Eventually we found Tvorimir, into whose care we had handed The Goat Boy to be taught how to trade, deal with sharp men and read and write birch-bark accounts. Tvorimir, it was generally agreed, was the best for this, since he was nicknamed Soroka Magpie for his attraction to anything even vaguely sheened.
His house, of the better sort called an izba, was like a steading hall dropped into a town, arranged on three sides around a courtyard, with stables, storage for hay and grain and one of the bath houses they liked so much. Instead of a pitfire, it had a clay oven in one corner, which was a fine thing.