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.
'You call him hvitkristr for a reason,' he answered. 'Perhaps you have used it for so long that you no longer hear it as I do.'
'Which way is that?' I asked, though I already knew it.
'The way that hvit means not just "white" but cowardly,' he replied, then dropped his eyes from mine. 'That and worse. So I am tarred with the same. I cannot fight well, nor can I take the Odin-oath. I am neither fish nor fowl in this company.'
It was true enough, though I did not see how a godlet who let himself be nailed passively to a lump of wood could be anything but white-livered, as we Northmen say. I did not say that, all the same, out of deference to Jon Asanes' beliefs.
I had not known or not thought of any of this and it came as a shock of cold water to hear him speak as though we were strangers. I looked at him and remembered him as the skinny Greek boy on Cyprus. It rose up in me and barred the door of my mouth, so that the words I should have spoken were blocked.
He grinned, shamefaced, his too-large eyes bright. 'I know bribage and port dues and lading weights,' he said. 'I know the worth of a dozen coins and how they relate to each other and how to tell bad amber from good. I speak Greek and Latin and write in both and my runes are passable. I will be a good trader myself one day. But I am not a northman and I am not a pagan and I am not Oathsworn and never will be so.'
'All true,' I managed to reply, but the wormwood of the moment made my tongue bitter. 'Perhaps you should also remain here, being so valuable.'
He shook his head sadly, which shamed me to silence. Then, he lowered his eyes to stare at the floor.
'When you first arrived in Novgorod I was. . ashamed. Finn stank and Kvasir was not much better. Even you, Trader.'
'When you first arrived in Novgorod I was. . ashamed. Finn stank and Kvasir was not much better. Even you, Trader.'
I shrugged. He had been too long away from honest Northmen, that was all. And we had left him when he was but a boy. I said as much and he nodded, still ashamed.
'You looked like all the tales the priests told hard men, who smell bad and spend your days killing men and humping unwilling women.'
'Not unwilling, some of them,' I managed and that trembled a grin on him but it vanished just as quickly.
'I am a Greek who is no longer a Greek, fighting with a varjazi and yet not a Northman. Crowbone imagines he is favouring me; the prince also but I have my own ideas on what my life will be.'
It was true enough and the ache of knowing it, having it said and so made real, was keen and swirled in me like molten metal until it finally forged itself into anger. We had been good to Jon Asanes and I said so. Whatever his life would be, he owed it to us.
He looked at me and there was dark fire in those olive eyes.
'You came to Cyprus and what you did there killed my brother and forced me to go with you into the scorching Serkland. I was shot by an arrow and almost died, then finally carried far from the world I knew to the far north, a bitter cold place of unwashed folk who wear skins.'
That made me blink with the harsh of it, but he had more of the same.
'I have had no say until recently and had plans of my own until you returned to my life. As soon as you did I faced the stake and am now here, in this frozen waste, where I may die.'
He stopped and smiled sadly. 'That is your goodness to me? I would hate to have you be bad to me, Trader.'
The anger went from me; sadness and loss surged in to fill the space. Whatever the future held, it seemed the Goat Boy was gone from us.
As Gunnar, my real father, had often said everything you need should be in a sea-chest; everything else can be left behind. Like all simple solutions, it was flawed, relied on making no attachments to people. In the end, of course, even he realized that for he could not leave me behind.
'It would be nice all the same,' Jon Asanes added wistfully, 'if I could have a cut of those runes on your stone, just like all the others.'
I nodded, unable to speak. Runes on a stone, or a finekenned verse. That is why no-one wanted to be left behind, huddled in a bed in a village those left standing get the most honour from skalds, unless their death was particular.
Finn, it seemed, had decided on a particular death.
As the dawn struggled up, we stood and watched him stand in the cold no Northman kneels, even to the gods bareheaded and facing north, sprinkling the best white emperor salt in a cup of meltwater, which he then dedicated to Odin with all of All Father's names. Finally, he rammed The Godi into the earth, bowed his head, clasped the hilt and made his chilling vow, as promised to the god in the pit prison of Novgorod.
I was filled with a distant, dull pain, a swill of memories of myself at the same age as Jon Asanes, hunting out thrall women in Skirringsaal in the first long winter with the Oathsworn, while Einar plotted and watched. Had Einar felt this same ache? He had been as separate and alone, I remembered.
I was a couple of summers past twenty but I felt there were stones under that frozen, dun earth that were younger than me.
Two days later, we crawled out on to that snow-scattered waste and headed away from the village, leaving the boat-marked ground that was the last home of Harelip and Cod-Biter.
14
'A brass sun seeped through the dull lead of the sky and the stands of birch, no higher than a man on a horse and clumped like a bad beard on the face of the world. They were grim, clawed affairs, these trees, as black as if they had sucked their own shadows back up. Snow lay clotted on a brown heave of land and the air was still and raw.
The carts lurched and rumbled to a halt, ponies standing splay-legged, heads bowed. We had fitted the wheels since there was more earth than snow, but that had been a mistake the ground was hard frozen and the carts banged and slapped in every iron-forged rut, so that even the tired and sick got out and trudged with everyone else rather than suffer the lurch and bruise of it.
Gizur and I stood at the stirrup of Vladimir's big black, all rib and bone hips, while he looked at the trees. We all looked at the trees and the opaque ribbon they fringed the Don.
'See,' said Gizur, his breath freezing in his beard as he spoke. 'The middle is darker, where the water is only just starting to form hard.'
'A thaw is coming,' Dobyrynya declared, but Gizur knew the ways of water and shook his head, hard enough to rattle the ice points of his moustache.
'No. The ice was broken recently. Less than an hour look, you can see where the grue of it reformed from a time before that, too.'
'There is traffic on the river,' Sigurd grunted, wiping the icicles from the bottom of his silver nose, where they clogged the hole that let him breath.
'Just so,' Gizur beamed. 'Boats are breaking their way up and down to Sarkel and regularly enough to stop the centre channel freezing hard.'
We all knew that we were on the Don, where it turned east into a great curve that went south, then slithered west to the Maeotian Lake, which the Khazars call Azov, meaning 'low' for it is so shallow. Following that great curve would bring us to Sarkel and take weeks.
Gizur was beaming, because he had navigated us from a point four days east of Kiev to here as if we had been the ocean give or take a tack here and there, as Avraham declared later, sullen and mournful over the loss of Morut. Yet now we had to choose, either the short way, a plunge straight across the Great White, or follow the Don's long, cold curl to Sarkel.
'A long way still,' Dobrynya said 'with no respite at Biela Viezha.'
No-one had to ask why; the Prince of Novgorod, arriving with a tattered band like us, miles from his own domain and firmly at the far frontiers of his brother's lands, would excite more than a little attention. If his brother's name still held sway at Sarkel called Biela Viezha, the White Castle, by the Slavs now that Sviatoslav was gone.
All eyes were on me. Somewhere in that bleak ice waste was what we sought and I had to steer them all to richness with the hilt runes on my sabre. The smile I gave them back was, I hoped, as bright and sure as sunrise.
We turned back to the line of carts and people, where only a few of the druzhina were now horsed and everyone else so swathed in chapeless bundles that it was hard to tell man from woman, or warrior from thrall. They huddled into their clothes and stamped feet made fat in braided straw overshoes, which the horses kept trying to eat.