Robert Low - The Whale Road

He fell away, choking. I lashed at her and she turned the blade slightly to meet it. There was a high ting of sound and my sword halved just above the hilt, the main part spinning into the darkness. Now, it seemed, I had the gods' answer for my having stolen it in the first place.

Valknut hacked down, reversed, hacked back. Each time it was met with a delicate parry. I stood there and gawped at the ruin of Bjarni's blade and the only thing that I could think was that he was going to be really annoyed about that.

Then I staggered away, fell over Ketil Crow and sprawled backwards at the foot of the throne, scrabbling in the heavy silk, dragon-embroidered robes that had draped Attila's corpse. Bones crunched and scattered and I dropped the useless sword, which was so perfectly broken it barely had a jagged edge.

Valknut, panting and gasping, backed away, unable to sustain his attacks. Illugi was writhing and choking to death in his own blood as it splashed on the floor. I wondered why he had smiled . . .

Splashing. I was wet through and not because I had pissed myself. The floor was wet. The floor was wet .

. . ?

Valknut started to launch himself again, but she swung, he deflected and his sword shattered into three and the pieces flew off, clattering into the dark. Before he could even curse, she whicked the sabre left and right and left and blood flew, an arm circled lazily and then Valknut folded from the waist, his bottom half falling backwards and gore spraying everywhere.

Wet. The floor was wet because water was sliding greasily up the tunnel, thick with slurry and mud. And I remembered us arriving here, and Einar's marvelling voice: `To hide the entrance, they turned a river across it. This was once . . . a lake, a great pool, with water flowing in there and running out there to the Don.'

Illugi had smiled because he'd had an answer from the gods and, as usual, it was a Loki joke. Not once a lake. Always a lake when it rained—as it had done far to the north all night.

She came to me then, scarcely making splash or a ripple as she stepped, her hair wild, her eyes as black as I realised her heart now was. She had known this would happen all along, I remembered, had pleaded with me to stay away.

'Hild . . .' I said. I begged, if truth is being told here. I remembered, with a bright flash, how she had looked just like a fine princess, once, with a fine prince by her side. We ate meat on wooden skewers, drank honey mead on a perfect day.

This was not her, though. Not this avenging Valkyrie, sword up, moving with sickening speed, fluid as shadow. She laughed, high and fierce with triumph and . . . what? Revenge, for all that had been done to her, to her mother and all her kin before? Or, if she was truly fetch-hagged, for being Ildico, chained and left to a slow death?

She only had to whirl that rune blade and I was done, with nothing under my hand . . . but something hard.

A hilt it felt like, but not Bjarni's ruined sword. This was round and perfect and slid into my palm.

I flicked it out, a reflex more than anything. It was a hilt and on it a blade, as curved and true as the one she wielded and they rang like bells.

She howled like a wounded wolf, tried again and again and each time my blade held. The water was round my ankles now and I scrabbled back; she flailed wildly, slashed, shrieked and each time I parried, until the hall rang like a Christ temple on a feast day.

Two swords. Each bell-clear tang of sound as they struck drove the surety of it into me. Two swords. I saw them lying across Dengizik's dead lap. His father had had them, too—all great steppe lords had them: the mark of their lordship.

The Volsung smiths had made two swords, not one, as gifts for Attila: she had one and I had the other.

Ridill and Hrotti the saga tales called them, part of Sigurd's cursed Fafnir treasure. I did not stop to wonder which one was clenched in my fist.

I darted for the tunnel and she was too late to prevent it. I backed up it, feeling the water surge round my boots; she followed, still swinging and stabbing. Two roof supports shattered under her blows. She wailed and hurled forward as the earth poured in.

I last saw her as nothing but a snarl in a pale face, her mouth like a red wound, the sword thrusting still as the earth piled up with a soft, sighing rush of sound.

I almost laughed with the sheer relief of it. Until the water in the tunnel, unable to go anywhere else, surged up and I was sucked in the muddy slush of it.

I wriggled and splashed. The tunnel was full now and I saw earth silting through it, knew it was filling the whole tunnel, knew I was almost as trapped as she.

I went mad then, a little. I fought, grunting, jabbing with the sword to get through. I was choking; there was nothing in that tunnel but slurry now—then a last, quicksand moment of resistance and I was out, neck deep, pulling in air in great maddened whoops.

The balky was a surging mass of tan slurry, pouring down, spilling out and round the mound to make the lake, filthy brown with mud and rolling with old corpses. Soon it would swallow the mound itself, drown it until the next drought.

Someone yelled as I struggled to the steep sides, where the crumbling earth calved like bergs off a mountain of ice. I should have floated, but didn't. I was drowning in greed.

Frantically, I hauled my belt off, let my tunic fly free and everything in it that was dragging me down.

Brooches, rings, coins: all vanished. I could not get my boots off, they were pulling me down . . . but still I held on to the sabre.

Òrm! Orm!'

The voice came from above. Short Eldgrim's face appeared, a length of rope slithered like a wet snake and I stuck the sabre in my mouth and grabbed it. Willing hands hauled me and I never even felt the pain in my ruined left hand until long afterwards.

I lay on the edge of the dawn-smeared steppe, which crumbled even as we stood there, so they dragged me away again. Eventually, gasping, I sat up. I couldn't believe I was alive and neither could they.

Èveryone else?' asked Kvasir.

I shook my head.

Èinar too?' said Sighvat.

I nodded. The muddy lake swirled and gurgled. I thought of them all under it, wondered if the tunnel was so blocked it would keep the chamber from filling . . . remembered her open mouth and the hate in her eyes.

Not that it mattered. No one was getting in now. The treasure was buried once more, safe under the lake, as had been intended by those who had brought Attila here.

And I laughed, then, thinking of a time when . . . if . . . others ever came back here, did what we had done and dug through to Attila's throne when drought bared it once more.

They'd find Einar on that throne, not Attila, think him the great lord, wonder at his riches and how he died.

That's if they had time, for I had the idea that Hild's fetch would haunt that hall a long time, thanks to her runespelled sword.

I never wanted to go back there.

The others looked at me laughing and I got up, winced, and stood for a moment.

`Well,' said Short Eldgrim, holding up the battered plate of silver, with its embossed rim of little fruits and bees and birds. 'Looks like this is the only hoard of silver we will see this day.'

Òr any day,' agreed Kvasir. He sounded almost relieved.

Short Eldgrim turned it over in his hands and then tossed it back in the waters, an offering to the tortured fetches of Einar and the others.

No one protested.

`Sigurd's cursed silver,' muttered Finn.

`Right enough,' agreed Short Eldgrim.

I hoped not—but no one suggested I throw the sabre back, so I stayed quiet. They had rescued three ponies and some supplies and a dozen men, those fit enough actually to run for it. All the rest had died, were rolling and tumbling in the maelstrom of muddy water.

There was no rain that day, so we made a fire and I watched what was left of them huddle round it, beyond my hearing, talking. I knew what they were doing and, with a black despair, what I would do when they came to me, their secret whisperings done. I did not care about that: I had my own secret.

It was done simply enough the next day. It had rained then, just when I thought we couldn't be more miserable and I was sitting in it, enduring, when Kvasir came to me and hunkered down where I sat tracing the runes along the sabre's shining, watered blade. Ridill or Hrotti, I wondered.

`Scrubbed up well, that sticker,' he grunted, cautiously probing his red eye, which now leaked green pus and was blind, I knew, from the way he cocked his head.

The rest of them had sabres, too, stripped from cavalrymen who had attacked us, but no one thought much of them—a pig-sticker, too light and pointed for men who fought with the double slashing edge. None were like this one, but if any of the others noticed that, they bit down on it and stayed silent.

I turned the blade in the pearl light of the wet day and agreed it had scrubbed up well, knowing that it was as different from the other sabres we had as night from day.

Eventually, Kvasir cleared his throat and said, 'So, will you lead us then, now that Einar has gone?'

So it was done, despite the fact that the youngest of them was older than me by a decade. I was Orm the White-bear Slayer, who had survived the howe of Attila.

I was sick with it, though. We stood in the hissing wind of that bare steppe and I sacrificed a hare on a rock, as I had seen Illugi do an age ago on the beach at Birka—and it was a sacrifice, for getting the thing was hard enough, let alone not eating it.

Then we looked at each other across the acrid fur-burning stink and nodded and spoke the words together.

`We swear to be brothers to each other, bone, blood and steel. On Gungnir, Odin's spear, we swear, may he curse us to the Nine Realms and beyond if we break this faith, one to another.'

A hard oath to swear. To break it now, I would have to become a Christ-follower in Constantinople, or find some fool to take my place—and who could replace the jarl without killing him first?

But I was young and dared to think I could spit in All-Father's one eye.

My first jarl test came when horsemen thundered up to us on the steppe, as we squelched miserably towards the Don. They were a cautious, fur-clad, flat-nosed, fierce-looking bunch of Kipchak dogs who had never seen our like before—which was our good luck.

They stopped some way beyond long arrow-shot and considered us. Their bows were uncased, but no arrows were nocked, which gave me hope.

`They could shoot us down like sheep in a pen,' Kvasir said, his voice tight, his shield up.

'But they have not,' I answered and jerked my downy chin at the rider who had broken away from them and was ambling his scraggy pony towards us, his hands up and clear of his body.

`They want to talk,' Finn Horsehead said. `Maybe we can frighten them into letting us pass without a fight.'

I looked at him; he was serious. I looked at the rest of them, this tattered band of grim men, prepared to fight and die. I shook my head, half in sorrow at their thick heads, half in sorrow for what I realised, even then, was passing.

`There is another way, I am thinking,' I said, pulling off my boots and spilling out the ringmoney, the brooches, the coins that would have pulled me down but for Short Eldgrim's rope. My secret.

They gaped, circle-mouthed. I grinned back at them.

'Now we trade,' I said.

In the light of the dancing lantern, guttering fish-oil smoke that was whipped away by the wind, only their eyes gleamed as they hunkered down out of the spray at one end of the ship.

I felt those eyes like brands but tried to ignore them, concentrating on the Greek captain and staring at him in turn, until he felt the burn of my eyes and whirled on his men, barking angry and pointless orders in his unease.

He had taken us aboard in two minds, that captain, caught between greed and fear. On the one hand, we had paid him well and stacked all our weapons—save mine—and that reassured him.

On the other, he knew what we were, suspected we were deserters from the Rus army at Sarkel and knew that, even armed with just eating knives and horn spoons, we might try to take his ship.

Finn suggested as much, hissing it in my ear, and they waited for my signal, huddled and miserable. I would not give it, for I was not about to risk my life for a filthy little coastal fish-trader like this.

Sarkel had fallen, the captain told us, trying to judge our reaction to that news. No one blinked much at it—what was Sarkel now to us? We had no ship and were crushed with loss. We could not set foot in the Rus lands now, so the only safe place was the Great City, where we had no prospects.

Well, that last was not quite true and Kvasir voiced it for all. He hunched himself up by my side, the wind whipping the greasy tangles of his hair. 'You have the right of it, Trader,' he growled, ducking as the spray lashed us. 'This is not the ship for us.'

`Just so,' Finn echoed. 'What we need is a solid knarr. Or one of those Greek dromon ships.'

À big-bellied one,' agreed Short Eldgrim, picking a scab on his face. 'That can carry a lot. There are many in Miklagard.'

Ànd some more good men,' offered Sighvat. 'Good Norsemen or Slavs, not afraid of a hard oath.'

And they grinned like wolves, yellow-fanged in the dark, so that my stomach turned over.

I knew why they needed all this, and were looking to me to come up with a deep-minded plan to get it. I sat in the salt-slick wind, feeling the bite of it, the damp seeping through the stained wool of my tunic and the despair settling on me like morning haar in a fjord.

It was what they did—what they were. The fear they had felt just weeks before had eased, leaving only the lure of what was still out there to be found. You could not be a Northman, have the knowledge of a mountain of silver and simply leave it there.

They had not seen what I had seen and none of my horror tales of Hild's fetch would keep them from going back.

We were still on the whale road and, in the wind that keened and thrummed the ropes, I swore I could hear Odin laugh.

The Whale Road is set in and around the year 965 AD, an era when the line of kings in Norway and Denmark is confidently set out by historians and, for the same era, the nation that would end up as Sweden is generally marked as 'chaos and confusion', with not even the names of the protagonists known for certain.

More confidently, the history of several hundred years earlier does record that Attila died on the night of his wedding to Ildico, who was found beside the bloody corpse the next day. No one knows where he is actually interred, though the Hungarians make the loudest claim for it, at the same time as repudiating that the Hun part of their name has anything to do with that barbarous tribe. I prefer the idea of his being interred out on the open steppe, but that is pure invention on my part.