The Whale Road. Robert Low
I was surprised how many of these hard men had heard of Gunnar and the respect they held for him. I had always thought of Gunnar as someone who lived for free at Bjornshafen and never questioned the why of it.
Now, it seemed to me, Gunnar was known as a hard man himself, but was clearly not at ease with it. I wondered, then, why he didn’t just leave, for it was also clear that he and Einar were wary as big-ruffed wolves round each other.
I had expected Birka to be much the same as Skirringsaal, but it was different. We had women, sent by the merchants who ran the town, but these were no bought thralls, to be up-ended and tupped without thought. They were respectable wives and mothers, in embroidered aprons, with proper linen head-coverings and a beltful of keys and scissors and ear-cleaners. They had their own thralls – some of them pretty enough – but not for the likes of us to grab at.
They had no fear and sharp tongues and the cold-eyed men of the Oathsworn meekly submitted to having hair and beards trimmed and fingernails cut, as if they were children.
So we had meals and minded our manners, after a fashion – Illugi Godi had to cuff a few heads into shamefaced apologies now and then and so respected was he that he could.
I wondered about Illugi. He was a godi, a priest, of course, but most priests were jarls, too. But in the Oathsworn, Einar clearly ruled. It was bewildering for me, this new life – and for others, too, forced to go into the town to get drunk at one of the ale houses set up for foreign travellers and try out the whores there, though they grumbled at having to spend silver on humping that they could never get back.
But even if someone could be persuaded to part with a girl, taking her back to the Guest Hall was a waste of time, since the disapproving eyes of the goodwives, who came and went as they chose, tended to have a shrinking effect. Things, it was generally agreed, were not changing for the better.
There was news, too, brought by traders in coloured cloth tunics and trousers, some dressed like Skapti, who told of those lost in the cataracts of the Rus rivers that year. Like old Boslof, sucked under Holmfors, Island-force, which was an indignity to a man who had survived the insatiable, boulder-strewn torrents of the Drinker, the Courser, the notorious Wave-force and all the rest of the deadly rapids that marked the route to Konugard – Kiev, the Slavs called it. The last seven were so vicious that the Christ-worshippers called them the Deadly Sins after some tale in their holy sagas.
I also heard about Arnlaug, dead of the squits, despite offering up a good ram to the tree on Oak Island, which the Christ-men were calling St Gregor’s Island, the first haven after the last of those seven rapids. Having shat himself with fear going down all of them, it seems this Arnlaug couldn’t stop and wasted away, so that he was a husk when they came to burn him.
Burn him they did. They had turned to the old ways in the east, ever since the Kura raid some twenty years before, when two hundred ships, they say, entered that river south of Baku and put the town of Berda to the flame and the blade, all the Mahomet-worshippers there.
In turn, the raiders were attacked by Mussulmen – and the same sort of squits that took Arnlaug – and had to retreat, whereupon those Aesir-cursed heathens had dug up the respectably buried and stripped them of the fine weapons and armour left in their boat-graves.
Now the traders burned their dead instead, as hot as they could make it, so that armour melted. As well, they broke the swords into three pieces, to be reforged across the rainbow bridge, but not in this life.
That, as one silver-bearded, garrulous old veteran of the rivers and rapids pointed out, was in Igor’s time, who was seventy-five and his wife, the famous Olga, sixty when they gave the Rus their prince, Sviatoslav, whose wars on the Bulgars and Khazars now strangled the silver life out of Birka.
And everyone nodded and marvelled at the wyrd of it and shook their heads over the future.
They shook their heads, too, over the new trade agreements with Miklagard, the Navel of the World, which meant they could not purchase more than fifty gold pieces’ worth of silk and had to have a stamp to prove it.
Nor could groups of more than fifty men, all unarmed, enter that city of New Rome, which they called Constantinople. Ridiculous, everyone agreed – even, admittedly, if fifty gold pieces’ worth of silk made a fair number of trousers.
Except, noted Finn Horsehead, if they were for Skapti Halftroll. He’d be lucky to get a pair and a spare out of that much material. And everyone laughed, even the merchants, who grudgingly admitted they were given free equipment and a month’s provisions for their return to Kiev, which they now had to do, by law of the Emperor, every autumn. Miklagard’s finest did not want roistering Norsemen over-wintering in their nice city.
More to the point, as several men fresh from Denmark’s trade port of Hedeby revealed, King Hakon was dead and gone and Harald Bluetooth was now indisputable ruler of both Norway and Denmark after a great battle at the island of Stord in the Hardangerfjord. There Hakon lost both his life and his throne to those who were once both his bitterest enemies and his closest kinsmen.
And Illugi Godi rapped his staff appreciatively on the hearthstones at the news that Hakon had been carried to Saeheim in North Hordaland and howed up there with Odin rites, so that the king who had followed Christ until his moment of death was now revered by the old gods, joining his eight brothers, the sons of Harald Fairhair, in Valholl.
Now the five sons of Eirik Bloodaxe and their mother, Gunnhild, fairly to be called Mother of Kings, were returned to Norway and the armies were broken up. Most, being farmers and good, steady men, had sensibly gone home. A few – too many for some – were now prowling, looking for fresh work or easy looting.
I listened and watched and learned at the feet of these, the wondrous far-travelled, watching their faces in the flickering red firelight. I saw who was for the White Christ and who was not, who was trading and who watched for a chance to raid.
Especially, I watched Einar listen and stroke his moustache and, when he paused, knew that bit of news was more important. Then he would resume stroking and I could see him turning it over in his head.
The tidings of new armed men was what clearly concerned him: competition in a world already crowded with it. The garrison of Birka was made up of rootless men looking for somewhere to put their boots, a wife, a hall, a hearthfire. Einar could see the value of a good sword-arm drop by the day.
‘If he does not call me soon,’ I heard him confide to Ketil Crow, ‘I will have to get his attention.’
I knew at once the ‘he’ Einar spoke of: Brondolf Lambisson, the leader of the Birka merchants. Einar had sent the saint’s box up to the Borg with Bagnose and Illugi the day after we’d arrived. They gave it personally to Martin the monk and had back assurances that Brondolf Lambisson would speak to them soon – and then, nothing.
I never found out what Einar had in mind to attract attention, because the next night one of the leather-clad garrison slouched into the Guest Hall and told Einar he was expected in the Borg.
So Einar called Illugi and, surprisingly, me, to go with him. As I collected my cloak, he took me by the arm and said, almost in my ear, his breath strong with herring, ‘Not a word that you can read, let alone the Latin.’
For me, it was exhilarating to be out in the town, under the fitful stars and scudding clouds, following the flash and sway of the lantern as the garrison man led the way down the slippery planked walkways, me dodging rain barrels and trying to keep my feet.
I was delighted, amazed and repelled all at once – so much so that Illugi had to cuff my head once and mutter, ‘If you swivel that neck any more, boy, your head will fall off. Watch your feet, or you will end in the muck.’
He paused as a drunk staggered up, tried to avoid the group of us, slipped and crashed off the walkway into the stinking mire on one side. ‘Like him,’ he added, scowling and vainly trying to wipe splashes off his tunic.
Behind us, the drunk spluttered and gurgled and got up blowing, then splashed back on to the planks and squelched unsteadily off.
I