The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 5. Robert Low

and naked, the hearthfire glowing on her body, her face hidden by the long, unbound straggles of her streaked hair, one hand holding upright the ash spear. In front of her were … objects.

      I saw a small animal skull, the teeth blood-red in the light, the eye-sockets blacker than night. There were carved things and a pouch and, over them all, Freydis hummed, a long, almost continuous drone that raised the hair on my arms.

      I hung on to the sharkskin hilt of Bjarni’s old sword while the dead crowded round, their eyes glittering in the dark holes of their heads, pale faces like mist.

      Whether she called them for help, or called the bear, or tried to weave a shield against it, I don’t know. All I know is that when the bear struck the wall, the hall boomed like a bell and I jumped up, half-naked, sword in hand.

      I shook my head, scattering memories like water drops. A last, brief flash of the curving swipe of paw and her head, spinning, flailing blood to the rafters. Had there been a smile on it? An accusing look?

      My father rightly guessed the memories, wrongly assumed I was mourning for the lost Freydis and clapped my shoulder again, giving it a slight squeeze and a half-smile. Then he walked me slowly to the hall across the sun-sparkled snow. The eaves were dripping with melting spires of ice.

      Everything seemed the same, but the thralls avoided my eye, keeping their heads down. I saw Caomh down by the shore, standing by a pole with a ball on it – one of his strange White Christ totems, probably. Once a monk, always a monk, he used to say. Just because he had been ripped from his cloister didn’t make him less of a holy man for the Christ. I raised a hand in greeting but he never moved, though I knew he saw me.

      Gudleif’s hall was dim inside, misted with cold light from the smoke hole. The hearthfire crackled, breath coiled in wisps and the figures hunched on benches at the foot of the high seat turned to us as we came in.

      I waited until my eyes had accustomed and then saw that someone else sat in Gudleif’s high seat, someone with hair to his shoulders, dark as crow wings.

      Black-eyed, black-moustached, he wore blue-checked breeks like the Irish and a kirtle of finest blue silk, hemmed in red. One hand leaned on the fat-pommelled hilt of a sheathed sword, point at his feet. It was a fine sword, with a three-lobed heavy silver end to the hilt and lots of workings round the cross guard.

      The other hand clasped a furred cloak around his throat. Gudleif’s furred cloak, I noticed. And Gudleif’s high seat – but not his ship prows. I saw them stacked to one side and the ones that flanked the high seat now were the proud heads of an antlered beast with flaring nostrils.

      Hard men, my father’s oarmates, who thought highly of him because he was their shipmaster and could read waves like other men did runes. Sixty of them had come to Bjornshafen because he had wished it, even though he did not lead this varjazi, this oathsworn band and their slim snakeship, the Fjord Elk.

      Einar the Black led them, who now sat on Gudleif’s high seat as if it were his own.

      At his feet sat others, one of them Gunnar Raudi, hands on his knees, cloaked and very still, his faded red tangles fastened back from his face by a leather thong. He looked at me and said nothing, his eyes grey-blue and glassed as a summer sea.

      The others I did not know, though I half recognised Geir, the great sack of purple-veined nose that gave him his nickname wobbling in his face as he told the tale of finding me half-frozen and slathered in blood, the headless woman nearby. Steinthor, who had been with him, nodded his shaggy head in agreement.

      They were cheerful about it now but, at the time, had been afraid when they found the great white bear dead, a spear in its brain and Bjarni’s sword rammed in its heart. As Steinthor happily admitted, to the grunts and chuckles of the others, he had shat himself.

      There were two other strangers, one of them the biggest man I had ever seen: fat-bearded, fat-bellied, fat-voiced – fat everything. He wore a blue coat of heavy wool and the biggest seaboots I had ever seen, into which were tucked the baggiest breeks, striped blue and silver, that I had ever seen. There were ells of silk in those breeks.

      He had a fur hat with a silver end, which chimed like a bell when he accidentally brushed it against the blade of the huge Dane axe that he held, rapping the haft on the hard-packed hall floor now and then and going ‘hoom’ deep in his throat when Geir managed a better-than-usual kenning in his story.

      The other was languid and slim, leaning back against one of the roof poles, stroking his snake moustaches, which were all the fashion then. He looked at me as Gudleif looked at a new horse, weighing it up, seeing how it moved.

      But no Gudleif, just this crow-dark stranger in his chair.

      ‘I am Einar the Black. Welcome, Orm Ruriksson.’

      He said it as if the hall belonged to him, as if the high seat was his.

      ‘I have to say,’ he went on, leaning forward slightly and turning the sword slowly on its rounded point as he did so, ‘that things turned out more interesting and profitable than when Rurik came to me with this request to sail here. I had other plans … but when your shipmaster speaks, a wise man listens.’

      Beside me, my father inclined his head slightly and grinned. Einar grinned in return and leaned back.

      ‘Where is Gudleif?’ I asked. There was silence. Einar looked at my father. I saw it and turned to look at him, too.

      My father shrugged awkwardly. ‘The tale I heard was that he had sent you into the mountain snows to die. And there was the matter of the bear, which had not been settled—’

      ‘Gudleif’s dead, boy,’ Einar interrupted. ‘His head is on a spear on the strand, so that his sons will see it when they finally arrive and know that bloodprice has been taken.’

      ‘For what?’ growled the large man, turning his axe so that the blade flashed in the dim light. ‘It was done when we thought Rurik’s boy was killed.’

      ‘For the bear, Skapti Halftroll,’ said Einar quietly. ‘That was an expensive bear.’

      ‘Was it Gudleif who killed it, then?’ asked the slim one, stroking his moustaches slowly and yawning. ‘I am thinking I have just been listening to Geir Bagnose recount the saga of Orm Ruriksson, the White-bear Slayer.’

      ‘Was he then to weigh the cost when it came at him in the dark?’ growled my father. ‘I can see you count it up, Ketil Crow – but by the time you got your boots off to use your toes, it would have been your head split from your body, for sure.’

      Ketil Crow chuckled and acknowledged the point with the wave of one hand. ‘Aye, just so. I cannot count, that is true enough. But I know how many beans make five, just the same.’

      ‘Of course,’ said Einar, smoothly ignoring all this, ‘there is the woman, Freydis, who was killed. No thrall, that one. Freeborn and there’s a price to be paid for that, since her death came because Gudleif let the bear go in the first place. Anyway, the bear was mine and worth a lot.’

      My father said nothing about whose bear it was. I said nothing at all, since I had just realised that the pole with the ball Caomh had been standing near was a spear with Gudleif’s head on it.

      Einar shifted again and drew the cloak tighter around him, his breath smoking in the cold hall as he declared, ‘In the end, you can argue in circles about whose fault it was – from Rurik bringing the bear here, to Gudleif letting it escape. And then there is why he sent the boy late into the mountain snow to that lonely hall. Perhaps he and the bear were in this together.’

      It was half in jest, but Skapti and Ketil both warded off the evil with some swift signs and grasped the iron Thor’s hammers hung round their necks. I realised, even then, that Einar knew his men well.

      I said nothing, rushed with a fluttering of memories, like bats spilling from a hole in the ground.

      After the bear had slammed into the wall, there was silence, though I swear I heard it huffing through the snow, paws crunching.