Varanger Page 3

  Raef went quickly over and knelt beside him. Pressed his hand flat to his cousin’s chest, his own breath stopped in his lungs, his own heart stalled in his throat, until he felt under his hand the solid thump-thump-thump of Conn’s life beating. A shudder of relief went through him. Under his hand, now, Conn stirred a little, also.

  The big man was roaring, “Everybody get out of here. You, get him out of here, or I’ll whip him on the ground.” Raef stood up, hauled his cousin’s arm up over his shoulder, and started away toward Thorfinn’s cave.

  The torchlight faded; those people were going away. Einar had already bolted. Raef stopped and looked around, thinking about Magnus’s men maybe lurking somewhere. He began to shiver, and Conn still hung almost limp against him, breathing hard. The distance to Thorfinn’s hall seemed forever. Then the outcast boy Vagn appeared in front of him, holding out Conn’s bearskin.

  “Here. He dropped this.”

  “Where’s Magnus’s crew?”

  “They took off running,” Vagn said. “They’re probably back in Magnus’s hall by now.”

  Raef slung the cloak awkwardly around Conn’s body, pulling the hood up, and wedging the flaps in against his own side, to keep them closed. “That was Pavo, I take it.”

  “Pavo,” Vagn said. He nodded toward Conn, inside the cloak, who was trying to stand on his own feet and not succeeding. “He was winning, I thought.”

  Raef said nothing; carrying most of Conn’s weight he crossed the broad marketplace. The dark was blustery with wind, and down on the way to the river something was banging, as if some hopeless creature tried to get inside. With a mutter below words Conn began to walk, still leaning on Raef.

  “Pavo cheats, you know,” Vagn said, behind them.

  “I saw that,” Raef said. Slowly they were picking a way through the horse pens toward Thorfinn’s red sun door. The wind swept into his face, steely with the new snow. His feet were like blocks of ice that he dragged forward. Conn stumbled and Raef clutched him and they both nearly went down together, staggering in the wind and snow.

  Thorfinn’s door was just ahead, standing a little open, a dim patch of light coming through. He could hear Einar’s voice inside, high and excited. Conn whispered, “I can walk,” and Raef let him go and watched him creep down the steps by himself.

  On the top step, Raef turned toward Vagn.

  “Are you coming in?”

  “I can’t.” The boy backed up a step. “They’ll kill me.”

  “I’ll watch out for you,” Raef said.

  The boy was backing away. “Thorfinn already paid me,” he said, and went off into the dark.

  “It felt as if he hit me with a rock,” Conn said.

  “Something like that,” Raef said. “He got something from his belt, the back of his belt.”

  Thorfinn said, “I warned you, but you didn’t listen to me. He can beat anybody. You found that out—no, I don’t care if he cheats, he beat you, which is what matters.”

  Conn gritted his teeth together. His head throbbed and he felt a little dizzy and sick to his stomach. “He let Magnus’s men jump us. Then he let them go.”

  Thorfinn leaned back on his seat. “Perhaps. He’s as weak for a little gold as any man, Pavo. Or maybe he just decided you needed knocking down.”

  Conn lowered his eyes; worse even than the pulsing of his head was knowing he had lost a fight. He felt as if all the world were staring at him, thinking maybe he wasn’t as good as they had thought before. In the hall behind them everybody else had gone to bed; he wanted to lie down and sleep but he knew to sleep when he felt this way might kill him. He turned his eyes toward the ruddy blear of the fire, his heart a burning coal.

  “So,” Thorfinn said. “I guess you’re staying here for the winter?”

  Conn said, “Until I beat Pavo.” On the bench beside him Raef stirred in a sudden twitch of alarm and stared at him.

  Thorfinn said, “What?” He laughed, as if Conn had made a joke, or as if Thorfinn wished it were. “Well, then, I may have you here a long while.” He turned toward a shelf on the wall next to him.

  “I’m going to bed,” Raef said, harsh, and left.

  “Do you play chess?” Thorfinn put a board down on the table between him and Conn and set a leather sack onto it, carefully opening out the drawstring.

  Conn put his elbow on the table and set his head in his hand. “Not much. But I’ll try.” The table was whirling around before his eyes. His head was swelling where Pavo had hit him. He fixed his attention on the chess pieces, as Thorfinn took them from the sack and lined up in front of him, and tried to remember how to play.

  Conn’s head stopped spinning after a while, and he slept, and woke the next day considerably steadier. His eyes were clear now and even the great swollen bruise hurt less. He got something to eat and helped stoke the fire; the wood stack inside the hall was nearly gone, and he and Raef set about bringing in more.

  He could hear the storm howling in the thatch; from old times he knew what to expect. When he wrenched open the door he faced a wall of snow packed into the entry all the way up to the lintel. He sent a slave for shovels and with Raef began to claw into the snow. The south-facing door and the deep eave of the house had sheltered the doorway from the worst of the storm but the drift filled the space nonetheless. Just outside the door, he turned to his left, and with the shovel dug away the snow up to ground level, and then up under the eave, where the woodpiles were. Raef followed him, packing the snow into the low side of the eave, and they passed logs back hand-to-hand through this tunnel under the eave to the slaves in the doorway.

  Conn’s teeth were chattering when they were done, and he went hurriedly down into the hall again. Raef was already standing almost in the fire; the slaves were stacking up the wood against the wall.

  Conn went over to the nearer hearth, rubbing the feeling back into his hands. Down the hall he could see Einar and Helgi at the other fire, burning wood they hadn’t fought the frost gods for. Thorfinn was nowhere, the curtain over his alcove drawn. The air was smoky and raw in Conn’s throat but at least now his hands and feet were warming up.

  He said, “We’ve got to keep the smokeholes open.”

  Raef grunted something; nearby a slave, short and brown, said, “We do that, not idiots. Master.” Raef laughed; he always had a kind heart for slaves.

  Conn glanced down the hall again. The wood they had brought in almost filled the space between this hearth and the other, leaving only enough room for the looms where the women worked and the space in front of the other hearth where Einar and Helgi sat dicing.

  Conn said, “You know, about Einar.”

  Raef gave a harsh short laugh, and said nothing. Conn stood thinking about Einar, what he had said the night before when they were walking toward the oak tree, and how he had gone down so fast when Magnus’s men attacked them. He glanced at Raef again and saw his cousin’s pale eyes watching him.

  “Do you want help?” Raef said.

  “No.” Conn straightened, flexing his shoulders. “I’ll do it.” He went down the narrow lane through the hall, past the three big looms where the women sat working, to the other hearth.

  Einar and Helgi were sitting on a blanket on the floor, throwing bones; Conn stood directly over Einar’s shoulder, so he had to look up. The light from the hearth dappled his long yellow hair. He saw Conn’s face and scrambled up onto his feet.

  “I guess—” He glanced past Conn, saw Raef wasn’t there, and seemed suddenly jauntier. He stuck his thumbs in his belt. “I guess you found out about Pavo, didn’t you, there. How’s your head today?” Helgi stood up beyond him and stood watching them, his face set. He was younger than Einar, and quieter.

  Conn said, “You weren’t much help, Einar.” He stood solid and still, his hands at his sides.

  Einar puffed himself up a little, twitching, looking from side to side, his face trying to smile. “They got the jump on us, pretty good, I thought, there, didn’t they.”

/>   “On us,” Conn said. He was staring at Einar, who would not meet his eyes. “I get the feeling it wasn’t much of a surprise to you, now, was it?”

  On the last words, he bounded forward; Einar scurried back a step but Conn got him by the left arm. When Einar swung a wild fist at him Conn twisted him around and pulled Einar’s left wrist up between his shoulder blades.

  Einar stiffened with a gasp, perched on his toes, trying to keep his arm in the socket. Predictably he kicked backward, and Conn lunged against him as he went off balance and drove him down on his knees, his arm still twisted behind him. Over Einar’s head Conn faced Helgi.

  “Are you in this?”

  Helgi stepped delicately toward the hearth. “Do I look as if I’m in it?” He put out his hands to the fire.

  “Do you know he’s been taking Magnus’s penny?” Conn said. He wrapped his free arm around Einar’s neck.

  Helgi’s eyes widened slightly; he looked from Conn to Einar and back again. He said nothing.

  Einar gasped. “I’m not. I’m not!”

  “No,” Conn said, into his ear. “Not anymore. From now on, you’re mine, you take your orders from me. No penny, just orders. Understand?”

  Einar said, “Yes.” His breath rasped in his throat and there were tears in his eyes.

  “You’d better,” Conn said. He let go with a yank on Einar’s arm that sent the other man sprawling, and went up the hall again toward Raef, at the other fire.

  Raef had gotten a cup somewhere, which he held out silently, and Conn took it and drank. The kick of the wotka matched the hot excitement of the fighting all through his body. He said, “That was good.”

  Raef took the cup back. “What are you trying to do?”

  “If anybody is going to be first here,” Conn said, “it’s going to be me.”

  He had thought that before, not in his mind, but in his body; he realized he had thought that all his life.

  “What about Pavo?” Raef said.

  “I’ll see about Pavo.”

  The curtain over Thorfinn’s alcove swayed, and the fahrman came out, yawning and stretching, his shirt rumpled up over his hairy belly. He saw Raef and Conn standing there, watching him, and something in their faces seemed to startle him; he said, sharply, “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” Conn said. “Tell me what you need me to do, here, I am already bored.”

  C H A P T E R T H R E E

  The storm blew furiously over them for a long while; each day Raef cut a mark into the wall with his knife, to keep track. He played dice with Helgi and Einar, winning himself new boots and a belt he liked with a silver buckle. Years before he had discovered that when he picked up dice, if he let his mind go empty, he knew before the roll how the spots would come up, which meant he could win whenever he wanted to. He had never told anybody else this and he made sure to lose as much as he won. What he lost was just money, which he didn’t care about, except the little gold piece.

  He took this out of his purse now and then and studied it, the face on either side, and the runes, and polished it with his thumb. It seemed to him that he should know something from this object.

  The storm seemed endless. They all drank, told stories by the fires; they all slept a lot. The women clattered away at their looms. The hall stank of close bodies, piss, smoke. On the day after he cut the fifth mark on the wall the snow finally blew out. Nobody could bear, then, to be any more in the hall, and they crowded toward the door, pushing and cursing each other, until Thorfinn shouted them back and the slaves, for once working hard, bashed and shoveled up through the snow and they all burst up into the clear blue slanting sunlight and a shocking, fearsome cold.

  The snow covered everything, Thorfinn’s hall somewhere beneath a powdery mountainous drift, scooped hollow around each of the holes in the roof where the smoke rose in dirty plumes. The horse pens had turned into a pattern of graceful glittering bluewhite windrows. The horses were already pawing their way out of their shelter, and from all around, other people also were digging their way up out of the buried mounds of their houses. Their voices rose, laughing, singing, and across the snow they shouted to each other as if they were returning from far voyages.

  Soon they were building a fire in the marketplace, a great stack of flame that crackled and leapt as if it were fighting its way into the air. The whole city seemed to be gathering around it, passing drink from hand to hand, not caring where one jug went since another would soon come from somewhere, and sharing stories about the storm. Most of the people were the Sclava but there were several other men who looked dansker, the crews of other ships, from other halls. Screeching children dashed around pelting each other with snowballs. Conn disappeared. Raef wandered around, glad to be moving, even if only in circles around the fire. Down through the happy mob the posadnik Dobrynya came, riding on a bay horse; slaves ran ahead of him to clear away the snow under the oak tree and he took his place there. The man with the white cloth on his head was with him and sat talking to him

  Dobrynya’s golden hair was braided and strung with beads; Raef marked again how piercing bright his blue eyes were. As the posadnik spoke to the other man, his hands rose in a sudden gesture, like setting loose a flock of birds.

  Raef drifted on. Some way away he saw Conn, walking with the pie girl, who was calling her wares. Even from this distance, by the way Conn walked and the way she looked at him, he knew his cousin had already sampled what she had. He turned away, his groin aching; he had no way with women, certainly not as Conn had. Yet he wanted one, not in the easy way that Conn had, over and done in a moment, but something more.

  “Koljada!” someone shouted, near him. “Koljada!” All around, a cheer went up.

  By the market there were people now grilling meat, and offering little oddly-shaped cakes. He went there, fingering his purse; he had lost his real money at dice, and all he had left was the little gold piece, which he did not want to give up. His mouth watered. He walked along ‘looking at the meat, and a man hunkered behind a little round grill waved him over and held out a skewer with some beef dripping juices.

  “No,” Raef said, his belly yearning, “no money, I have no money,” not knowing how to say this in Sclava, and the man laughed at him, his mustaches flaring up.

  “Koljada!” He thrust the skewer into Raef’s hands. “Eat! Eat!” Laughing, he went back to his grill.

  Raef devoured the meat and licked his fingers. Around him, in the unsteady warmth of the fire, people were joining hands and dancing. He backed away a little to watch. Bjorn the Christian who had stood for Thorfinn at the council walked by and waved at him. Raef wondered where he lived—he saw him go up among some of the other Varanger. He saw the scrawny boy Vagn lingering at the edge of everything.

  All around the fire they danced, men in their baggy leggings, women in aprons and shawls, shrieking red-faced children, first in a ring, and then the ring broke open and they danced in a snaky procession, singing and laughing, twining several times around the oak tree, and then off into the city. Conn was one of them. He watched his cousin dance away into the distance. Around the fire another ring folined. The man next to him turned to him and handed him a cup and he drank deep of the fiery wotka, liking the Sclava a lot better suddenly, all of them. Somebody leapt and gamboled by him wearing the horns of a goat.

  Part of him wanted to join the dancers. He trailed this line of singing, leaping people around the oak tree and off across the marketplace; going down a lane, they went from house to house, singing and yelling, and people came out and gave them things. But he did not join them, not knowing the words of their songs.

  A goat pulling a cart led another jubilant train of people down the street. One was holding up a stick with a yellow circle hung from the top, which he kept whirling by flicks of the wrist. Raef saw a dancer with a goatskin pulled over his back and head, the tail at one end, the horns at the other, and then a swarm of children with more spinning disks; all these things looked old, worn, as if
they were kept in a chest somewhere and only came out at special times. One procession after another began at the fire, circled around the oak tree, around the fire, and set off through the city.

  Raef steered wider of them, passed by the oak tree again, where many men crowded around Dobrynya; the man with the white headcloth was gone. Instead, behind Dobrynya stood Pavo, taller than anybody, bald as a pared fruit except for the long scalplock hanging down from under his cap.

  Raef slowed down, going by, staring at him, and the big sleek head swung toward him, a narrow, warning glare. Raef looked quickly away.

  He went back to the warmth of the fire. The sun was already lowering, the day draining away, as if the light leaked from the sky. He wondered where Conn was. He thought sadly of going back into Thorfinn’s hall. They were still dancing around him, but now in their dancing he felt something desperate. Many people were thrusting the whirling disks up toward the sky, as if to show the sun what to do. The wind was rising, keen-edged, whistling in the branches of the oak tree. The cold began to bite, even near the fire. He trudged on back toward shelter, his head down.

  Conn stared down at the chessboard, where his king stood helpless between Thorfinn’s rooks; he said, “Why do you always win?”

  “Because you always make mistakes,” Thorfinn said. “You’re learning. But you’ll never beat me.”

  Conn reached out for the pieces and began setting them up again. From the far side of the table Thorfinn watched him with a gentle smile on his face. He said, “This clear weather should hold for a few days, and we’re running low on wood. Tomorrow I’m sending the slaves down the river to get some more, and you’re to go and stand guard over them.”

  Conn set his elbows on the table. “Who am I guarding against?”

  “There are huns in the forest. Sometimes they try to pick off a wood gatherer. Other strange people. And Magnus, of course.”