The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 5. Robert Low

biggest and fastest of them.

      We hauled Brother John off his worshipping knees, scrambled for ropes and canvas and, as we hauled out of the harbour, I was thinking bitterly that Odin could not have picked a better night for this chase – it was the night he whipped up the Wild Hunt hounds and started out with the restless dead for the remainder of the year.

      Yet nothing moved in the dark before dawn and a mist clung to the wharves and warehouses, drifting like smoke on the greasy water, like the remnants of a dream. The city slept in the still of what they called Christ’s Mass Day and no-one saw or heard us as the sail went up and we edged slowly out of the harbour, on to a grey chop of water.

      Wolf sea, we called it, where the water was grizzled-grey and fanged with white, awkward, slapping waves that made rowing hard and even the strongest stomachs rebel. Only the desperate put out on such a sea.

      But we were Norse and had Gizur, the sailing-master. While there were stars to be seen, he stood by the rail with a length of knotted string in his teeth attached to a small square of walrus ivory and set course by it.

      He also had the way of reading water and winds and, when he strode to the bow, chin jutting like a scenting hound, turning his head this way and that to find the wind with wettened cheeks, everyone was eased and cheerful.

      Him it was who had spotted the knarr ahead, not long after we had quit the Great City, on a morning when the frost had crackled in our beards. For two days we kept it in sight, just far enough behind to keep it in view. Only one, all the same – and, if we saw it, it could see us.

      ‘What do think, Orm Ruriksson?’ he asked me. ‘I say she knows we are tracking her wake, but then I am well known for being a man who looks over one shoulder going up a dark alley.’

      Then a haar came down and we lost her – or so we thought. Finn was on watch while the rest of us hunkered down to keep warm. The sail was practically on the spar and yet we swirled along, for we were caught in the gout that spilled through the narrow way the Greeks call Hellespont and only us and fish dared run it in the dark. I had resigned myself to casting runes to find Starkad when Finn suddenly bawled out at the top of his voice, bringing us all leaping to our feet.

      By the time I reached the side, there was only a grey shape sliding away into the fog. Finn, scowling, rubbed the crackling ice from his beard.

      ‘It was a knarr, right enough – we nearly ran up the steer-board of it, but when I hailed it, it sheered off and vanished south.’

      ‘As would I have done,’ Brother John chuckled, ‘if you had hailed me in your heathen tongue. Did you try Greek at all?’ Finn admitted he had not mainly because, as he said loudly and at length, he could not speak more than a few words as Brother John knew well and if he had forgotten he, Finn, would be glad to jog his memory with a good kick up the arse.

      ‘Next time, try your few words first,’ advised Brother John. ‘“Et tremulo metui pavidum junxere timorem” as the Old Roman skald has it. “And I feared to add dreadful alarm to a trembling man” – bear it in mind.’

      Everyone chuckled at a shipload of Greeks being scared off by a single Norse voice, while Finn, spilling ale down his beard and trying to stuff bread in his mouth as he drank, grumbled back at them.

      Sighvat pointed out that if Finn did hail another ship as Brother John wished, it would turn round and vanish as well, for who wants to hear someone wanting to know how much it costs to have your balls licked?

      ‘Either that,’ added Kvasir, ‘or they will be confused by a demand for two more ales and a dish of mutton.’

      But Radoslav looked at me and both of us knew, because we were more traders than the others, that the ship had held Starkad, or at least some of his men. Traders thrived on gossip: what cargo was going where, what prices for what goods in what ports. They sucked it up like mother’s milk and, to get it, they talked to every other trader they saw coming up against them or sailing down a route with them. Unless you looked like a warship, or a sleek hafskip, which could be more wolf than sheep, you hailed them all for news; you didn’t sheer away like a nervous maiden goosed behind her mother’s back.

      Nor, if you were anyone but the Norse, did you run the Hellespont at night.

      But it had vanished south and we followed. In the morning, Sighvat cast his bone runes on the wet aft-deck and tried to make sense of it, Short Eldgrim peering over his shoulder. In the end, Sighvat made his pronouncement and Gizur leaned on the steering oar as the sail cranked up; I saw we were taking the most likely trade route and wondered if that course had truly been god-picked or was Sighvat’s common sense.

      What nagged me more was where the second boatload was – and if the one we had seen had had Starkad in it. For days I wondered where either had gone and whether we had passed them.

      As always, Odin showed the truth, with a finger-nail trace of smoke against the sky.

      The smoking boat was a Greek knarr, listing and down at the stern. It had been on fire, but the waves had soaked out the flames, leaving a smouldering hulk. Two bodies rolled and bobbed among the ash and spars nearby, reluctant to leave even in death.

      Up in our bow, Arnor used his harpoon to gaff one of the bodies and drag it closer. He was an Icelander and everyone had mocked at him for seeking out a whaling harpoon instead of a spear – but Arnor knew the weapon and it had certainly been of use now.

      The bodies were gashed and torn, bled white so that the wounds were now pale, lipless mouths. They had been stripped of everything and made a sorry sight on the deck of the Volchok, leaking into the bilges.

      ‘Stabbed and cut,’ remarked Brother John, examining them. ‘That’s an arrow wound, for sure, but they recovered it. Barbed, too – look where it hooked out heart-meat when it was pulled.’

      ‘I know this one,’ said Finn suddenly.

      ‘Which one?’ I asked.

      ‘That one with the heart-wound and the squint. He was in the Dolphin guarding Starkad’s back. I remember thinking that he was an ugly troll and that if I had the chance I would knock his eyes straight for him.’

      Anything can happen on the whale road …

      I had that proved as the knarr gurgled and sank. Brother John fell to his knees and offered up prayers to his god and the Christ, which seemed a little harsh to me, for he was congratulating this Jesus on having led these men to this doom rather than us. I had not thought the Christ, white-livered godlet of peace, was so harsh – but I had much to learn; as Finn said, even as he followed me, the horn-moss was barely rubbed off me.

      Of course, the rest of us joined in piously and those, like me, who thought no harm in getting all the help we could offered silent thanks to Odin, whose hand was in this for sure.

      Now we knew.

      We sat and worked out what had happened as the remains of the knarr hissed away to nothing, leaving only the stink of wet char. A ship, perhaps more than one, had come on it and there had been a fight, though Finn reckoned the attackers had sat back and shot arrows until the defenders had given in.

      It seemed to him that the others had been taken, probably as slaves, because there were only two bodies, but the defenders had given in when the ship had been fired. This showed that the attackers were skilled, not just for having fire aboard for arrows, but because they would have to have worked swiftly to secure cargo and prisoners in little time before the ship burned and sank.

      ‘It is a blade path we are on and no mistake,’ Sighvat offered mournfully, which got him some hard looks; a blade path was what steersmen call a hard pull into a gale, where the only progress was by the oarblade.

      It also meant the road walked by those who had died as oathbreakers, a trail studded with sharp edges, so that those who cared enough howed such wyrd-doomed up with thick-soled ox-hide shoes, to help them walk their way to Hel’s hall.

      While they were shaking their heads and making warding signs,