Crowbone Read Online Free PDF

tight crew of six who depended on each other and the trade they made. Crowbone did not much trust Hoskuld, for all he had come from Mann to deliver his mysterious message – without pay, no doubt, for Christ monks were notoriously empty-pursed.
    ‘For the love of God,’ Hoskuld had replied when Crowbone had asked the why of this and his face, battered by wind and wave into something like a headland with eyes, gave away nothing. His men said even less, keeping their eyes and hands on work, but Crowbone felt Hoskuld’s lie like a chill haar on his skin. Yet Hoskuld was a friend of Orm and that counted for much.
    Crowbone sat and watched the land slip sideways past him while the sea rose and fell, dark, glassy planes heaving in a slow, breathing rhythm.
    He watched the gulls. Hoskuld never got far enough from the land to lose them and Crowbone listened to them scream to each other of finding something that moved and promised fish. One perched on the mast spar, heedless of the sail’s great belly and Crowbone watched this one more carefully than the others. He felt the familiar tightening of the skin on his arms and neck; something was happening.
    The crew of the
Or-skreiðr
coiled lines
,
bailed, reefed sail, took the steering oar and stared at Crowbone and his eight men. He could almost feel their dislike and their distrust and, above all, their fear. Here were the plunderers, pillagers and pagans that peaceful Christ-anointed traders, farmers of the sea-lanes, could do without as they ploughed up and down from port to port.
    Here were red murderers, sitting on their sea-chests, talking in their mush-mouthed East Norse way – made worse by all the time spent with Slavs – and eyeing up the crew with almost complete indifference when not with sardonic smiles at watching men work while they stayed idle.
    Crowbone knew his eight Chosen well, knew who was more Svear than Slav, who had washed that weekday, who doubted their own prowess.
    Young men – well, all but Onund – hard men, who had all, without showing fear, taken that hard oath of the Oathsworn:
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.
    Crowbone had taken it when he was too young for chin hair, driven to it as those desperate and lost in the dark will run to a fire, even if it risks a scorching. He had kin somewhere, sisters he had never seen – but mother, father, guardian uncle were all dead and Orm Bear-Slayer of the Oathsworn was the nearest thing he had to any of the three.
    He watched his Chosen Men. Only Onund knew what the Oath meant, for he had taken it long enough ago to have marked the warp of it on his life. Most of the others would come to know just what they had sworn, but for now they were all grins and wild beards in every colour save grey, laughing and boasting easily, one to the other.
    Hoskuld, beaming at the way they were skipping along, announced that he had many skills, one of them navigation.
    ‘We go out on to a big expanse of water dead ahead,’ he added. ‘Land on the berthing side, so you cannot really miss it. After a bit, we turn north. That is to the right. The steerboard side. The hand you use to pull yourself off.’
    Crowbone forced a smile as Hoskuld moved off into the grins of his crew, while Murrough turned and looked at his fellow Oathsworn lazing there.
    ‘Never be minding, lads,’ he bellowed. ‘We have bread and fish and water if this short-arsed little trading man loses us. Also, there are Crowbone’s birds to steer by, when all else fails.’
    Crowbone raised one hand in acknowledgement, while Hoskuld and his crew stared for a moment, stilled. Then they busied themselves and Crowbone smiled, for he knew no Norseman, especially Christ-sworn, liked the idea of a
seidr
-man and none of these liked to be reminded of the strange tales that surrounded Crowbone.
    ‘We will need no