Free Crowbone by Robert Low

cage and cracked it open with a sharp blow that made the dog squeeze out a bark. Murrough hauled out the man, gently enough, and the thrall knelt by his head. When Crowbone moved up, the thrall fixed him with summer-sky eyes dulled with misery.
    ‘My thanks,’ the grey-hair said to Crowbone. ‘This is Berto. He is from the Wend lands. I am called Grima, from Bjarmaland.’
    ‘A long way from home,’ Crowbone noted and Grima chuckled, a moth-wing of sound. His wrapped hands soaked some fresh blood on to the old stains of his tunic. There was gold thread in that tunic, Crowbone noted.
    ‘Need help with those fingers, old yin?’ Kaetilmund asked. ‘We have a skald who knows some healing runes.’
    Grima smiled and raised both blood-swaddled hands.
    ‘Hrodfolc’s joke,’ he said. ‘He fed me bowls of good stew with meat in, but cut a finger off and never let me know which stew it was in. Where is he, by the way?’
    Crowbone told him and Grima’s grin was sharp and yellow.
    ‘Good. Nithing Frisian
fud
– he thought I would not eat for fear of swallowing my own flesh,’ Grima said and then laughed. ‘He knew better when I asked him to cook it longer – my own meat is a little too aged to be tender.’
    Crowbone and Kaetilmund smiled at this, a defiance they appreciated.
    ‘Balle did this to me, the whore’s by-blow,’ Grima wheezed.
    His eyes closed while pain washed through him, keen enough for Crowbone to feel it as well.
    ‘This flatness is no place for a man from the north mountains to die,’ he added. ‘Who are you, then, who is here to witness it?’
    Crowbone told him, adding that the death was still a way off – then Kaetilmund finished unwrapping the first of the hands and Crowbone saw the ugly black and red and pus yellow of it. He realised the bright glitter of Grima’s eyes was fever.
    ‘Good,’ said Grima. ‘Now all truths are almost unveiled. The gods are kind, for I know your fame. With your help I will leave this cursed place and die where I belong. But I have little time, so listen, Olaf, son of Tryggve, now of the Oathsworn. I am Grima. Once I was known as you are known, for I led the
Raudanbrodrum
– do you know of them?’
    The Red Brothers. Crowbone had heard of this
varjazi
band and their leader’s name, which meant ‘a full helm’ in the honest tongue of the north and was usually given to a man whose face was hard and set as iron, so that only his eyes gave anything away. He had not heard these names for some years and said so; Grima nodded weakly.
    ‘This is the last you see here. We are rule-bound – though not as fiercely oathed as you – and most of us did not do well faring out in the east, along the Silk Road, so we came down on to the decent waters of the Baltic and raided the Wend lands, where I thought they would be fat and lazy, since it had not seen
rann-sack
for some years. Well, here I am, dying for lack of luck – the raiding was poor and all we had was Berto here, which a certain Balle did not think enough. He is wrong – Berto is worth a deal as you may discover when the matter is ripe. I hear you were luckier – all the silver of the world, eh?’
    ‘Yet we are here, in the same flat shit-hole,’ Kaetilmund pointed out, hoping to take Grima’s mind off the second unwrapping, for the bindings were matted to the stumps and Grima hissed blood on to his teeth from his bitten lip.
    ‘You still fare better than me, I am thinking,’ he answered wryly, when he could speak, ‘since most of your fingers are still on the end of your hands and your life is not unravelled yet. Now here is the way of it. Balle was my Chosen Man, but he grew tired of waiting and did not want to challenge in the usual way, the white-livered tick. He killed all the men who were loyal to me – not many, the years had thinned them, but I realised that too late – and threw me over the side of my own ship. I would have been red-murdered then if Berto had not leaped after and towed