Crowbone, on his knees, started to dig, while I lay there, head muzzed and pounding, waves of sick pain flowing up my leg from the kick on the shin.
Now I saw how dark it had become, how most of the shrieking was the Wind and that the horse warriors were vague shapes in the seething snow and barely moving. I managed to get to my knees just as one of the horse-warriors lumbered out of the swirl, bow cased and a curved sword in one hand. I heard a series of shrill screams as the sword went up and came down, threw up the bundle I had and heard the edge whack on it, the blow almost jerking it from my hand and flinging me flat again. The rider gave a howl of triumph, fought the horse round, leaning out to be able to hit me.
Then Thorkel snarled out of the white mist of snow, the sword swinging, smacking the rider out of the saddle. Roaring and hacking, Thorkel flurried more blows on the fallen shape, half of them bouncing off because he was wild with fear and anger and using the flat as much as the edge.
'In here, Jarl Orm,' shouted Crowbone, tugging my leg. 'In here.'
He had dug out the snow at the edge of the cart, like the sunken door to an Iceland toft and, even as I moved, Thorkel spotted it and lumbered towards me, a hedgepig bristled with arrows that seemed to have done him no harm at all.
Then, as ever with Thorkel, his luck ran out. He was three steps from me when the last arrow whirred out of the snowstorm, fired blind by riders already making off for shelter. It took him in the left eye, seemed just to appear there and came out above his right ear in a great gout of dark blood and bone shards. He was whirled by the force of it and fell away with a last, despairing shriek on the bad cess of his life.
I scrabbled furiously, while the dawn turned to midnight and was half-hauled by little Olaf into the shelter of the cart. In the dark, panting and sobbing with pain, I lay for a long time, while the snow-wind hissed through the cracks in the planks and the cart shook and trembled with the power of it.
We did not speak for a while. I fell asleep, or lost my senses more like, for when I awoke, it was clear Crowbone had been busy and had adjusted his eyes to the gloom under here. The wind howled, the snow flurried in the cracks, but not so much now, which meant it was piling up on that side.
Crowbone had stacked three bundles at the door he had clawed out, to stop the wind. As my eyes adjusted, I saw one of the sacks was split and rye spilled out.
'Well,' I managed, 'we have grain and snow for water. If we had a fire we could make flatbread.'
'If we had meat and gravy we could make a feast,' he answered, then grinned. 'But we have some old bread and even some strips of dried meat, so we will not starve. Do these storms last a long time, Jarl Orm?'
I shrugged, which could have meant anything. I did not know, but thought it best not to admit that for all his resource, little Olaf was still but nine years old and his voice quavered when he asked.
I chewed and scooped snow to drink, plastered more on my aching leg and wished I could see how bad it was. That turd Martin had kicked me but he had lost his shoe doing it. He was out there, surely dead by now I hoped he had frozen slowly, starting with his bare foot that he had used to take the skin off my shin.
I remembered the bundle now and dragged it over. The sword cut I had parried had slashed the ties and the wadmal cloth hung in tatters, so I peeled it off. I half-expected to see Martin's Holy Spear, but it was my rune-marked sabre and I realized that the monk had stolen it as part of the package to sell to Sveinald me and the rune blade, the secret of the silver hoard.
Then I had to wonder at the Odin-marvel of getting it back.
'That's the one you took from Atil's howe,' Crowbone said, peering at it. I turned it over in my hand, seeing the beautifully carved hilt and the runed scratches on it, how the blade gleamed even in this poor light, how it looked rainbow-slick as if oiled, the serpent of forged runes curling down the blade.
'Is it magical?' he asked and reached out one finger to touch it. He stopped a knuckle-length away and drew his hand back. He looked at me. I wrapped the weapon up and it seemed even darker with it covered.
We sat for a while longer as the storm swooped and swirled, savaging us through the knotholes in planks and rocking the upturned cart. Snow sifted in. My head hurt and little Olafs teeth clattered loudly.
'Get closer if you are cold,' I said. There was silence but he did not move. Then he cleared his throat.
'I pissed myself,' he chattered, his piping voice thick with the shame of his battle fear.
'Never mind,' I grunted at him. 'It will be the last piss you ever take if you do not get closer, for it will freeze you to the marrow.'
I felt him creep to me then, huddling in the lee of my arm, where we leached warmth from each other and trembled with cold in the fetid dark but, in the confined space, with the cart wrapped in snow, it grew warm enough for the rime to melt and freeze into new and stranger shapes on the inside of the cart.
He smelled faintly of piss and the shame came off him in waves, as like heat as made no difference to me.
I watched the rime-shapes, slipping into sleep, knowing it and fighting it, for there is not a man from the north who does not know the cold that droops your eyes towards death.
I was in the prow of the Elk as it curved andflexed over a great swell of cold sea, the spray flying. When I turned I saw old faces the closest to me was Kalf, who had vanished over the side on my first-ever run to Birka, slapped overboard in a careless moment by sodden sails and gone in an eyeblink. He grinned at me and waved and I knew I must be dead and heading for Aegir's kingdom though how I had ended up in that underwater hall when I had died on land was a puzzle.
I turned back to stare beyond the prow for a clue to it, but the spume stung like an angry byke of bees, then a creature flew up in my face, a squid, or a jellyfish, straight on to my face, sucking and squelching. .
'Leave off him. Good boy, well done leave him, you hole.'
Light blinded me, white and flickering with shapes. Something whuffed and panted and rasped my face with hot wetness.
'Get off.'
The deerhound yelped as Finn whacked it, then his great grinning face loomed over me and he chuckled.
'He deserves a few kisses, all the same, Bear Slayer, since his nose has found you where nothing else could. Good trick, that cart business.'
11
'I was lucky, as Bjaelfi pointed out back in the shelter of the village, while he poked and prodded the back of my skull. There was a bruise between neck and shoulder the colour of Bifrost, the rainbow bridge to Valholl, while my shin was scraped raw, but no bones were broken.
I saw Kvasir look at me and shake his head with wry mirth. He knew I believed the sabre had powers to heal its owner and kept pointing out that nothing had happened to me that could not be put down to youth, strength and Odin-luck.
I looked back at him and nodded, adding: 'Bone, blood and steel.'
He acknowledged my thanks for the rescue with a dismissive flap of one hand, then tossed me an object, which I caught awkwardly. It was Martin's thick-ridged shoe.
'We unearthed it from the snow, just outside the entrance you dug under the cart,' he said. 'Near where we found Thorkel.'
I weighed the oxhide shoe, bouncing it in my hand and realizing how lucky I had been, for such a kick with one of these could have snapped my leg like a twig. I said so and Kvasir rubbed his good eye and shrugged.
'Its owner perhaps had a hand in that good luck or a foot,' he answered with a grim chuckle and nodded at the shoe when I looked at him with bewilderment.
'Helshoon; he said and I blanched and carefully put the thing down, seeing now what it was. A Hel shoe, crafted for one wearing and one wearing only on the feet of a man whose lack of mercy would take him to Hel's hall along a last road studded with thorns and across a river sharp with iron. With such thick-soled shoes he could avoid the pain of being sliced to shreds, an unwarranted kindness from those who had howed him up.
'Aye,' growled Finn, coming up in time to catch this. 'Somewhere on the road to Hel, a hard-hearted man is cursing that monk for robbing his grave.'
It would not have bothered Martin much, unearthing the dead he considered heathen to steal what he needed. Still, it marked how far Martin had sunk from the neat, fastidious Christ priest who had once argued gods with Illugi Godi in the polished hall of Birka's fortress.
'The boy?' I asked and Finn grinned.
'Piss-wet and a little cold. You saved his life.'
'He saved mine,' I answered. 'The trick with the cart was his.'
Finn raised both eyebrows and looked at me, which was enough speech on the matter, for he knew what I must be feeling, owing weregild to that boy for my life.
What was I feeling, then? As if I had slithered into a mire. Sooner or later, little Crowbone would claim his due from me and it would not be cheap nor simple. There was worse to worry about now, all the same.
'And the other. . body?' I asked, hoping against hope that it had somehow changed from what had been unearthed alongside Thorkel's corpse.
'Still a woman, Trader,' grunted Finnlaith and we all turned to stare at the cloth-wrapped bundle, stiff with cold, that we had brought back from where Thorkel had killed it. Her. For a dizzying moment I heard her scream, saw the whirl of snow and the mad-mouthed frenzy of Thorkel, howling his hate and his blade on her before he died.
'Oior-pata,' Tien had whispered when Ospak had cleared the snow from the woman's face. The little Bulgar had hunched into himself after that and would say nothing more. It was Avraham, the big red-haired Khazar, who had finally told us it was an old Skythian word meaning 'man-haters'.
She was hacked bloody by Thorkel's mad rage, but enough was there to see the fine decorated clothing, the tattoos on her face made stark with her blood-drained pallor, the marks of old scars blue white on her cheeks, the hair gathered in braids and tied back, the way a fighting man does.