She snorted. 'No doubt. And no work done for it on a day like this.'
Which was unfair, for there was always work, even indoors. There were two looms that had never been still for weeks as a brace of thrall women wove the panels of wadmal into a striped sail for the Elk. Everyone had sewing, or binding, or leather, or wood to work, even the children.
Still, they circled big Botolf in the pewter dark, demanding stories. There were three older ones, all boys and bairned on the thrall women by the previous owners and two new babes by my own Oathsworn and one cuckoo from Jarl Brand. The hall rang with the sound of them as the men straggled in for their day meal, grey shapes in a grey day, blowing rain off their noses and shaking out cloaks.
I moved to the high seat, where I wouldn't be bothered, while the hall filled with chatter and the smell of wet wool. The Irisher thrall woman, Aoife, was trying to put her son's chubby arms in a wool tunic and he kept throwing it off again. In the end, she managed it, just as Thorgunna smacked her shoulder and told her to fetch mussels from the store. She left, throwing anxious glances as her boy Cormac, she called him crawled towards the deerhounds in the corner.
I sat, hunched in wool and brooding like a black dog, the rune sword curving down from my hands to the earth floor while I stared at the hilt of it and the scratches on it. I had made them, with Short Eldgrim's help, as we staggered back from Attila's howe and the great hoard of silver hidden there; for all I was not good with runes, they were enough for me to find my way back to that secret place.
The deaths and the horror there had resolved me never to go back, yet I had made these marks, as if planning to do just that. Odin's hand, for sure.
I had thrashed and wriggled on the hook of that and found good reason and salted it with plunder to keep the Oathsworn from forcing me back to Atil's howe. Even so, I had always known I would have to lead Kvasir and the others to that cursed place or give Kvasir the secret of it and let him go alone. I could not do that, either, for we were Oathsworn and my fear of breaking that vow was almost as great as facing the dark of the howe again.
That oath.
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.
It bound us in chains of god-fear, drove us coldwards and stormwards, goaded us to acts that skalds would sing of and others best hidden under a stone in the night for the shame of it. Yet, when we stood with our backs to each other and facing all those who were not us, we knew each shoulder that rubbed our own belonged to a man who would die rather than step away from your side.
It lifted me from nithing boy to the high seat of my own hall yet even the seat itself had not been my own, taken as spoil from the last gasp of fighting for Jarl Brand and the new king, Eirik. I lifted it from the hall of Ivar Weatherhat, whose headwear was reputed to raise storms and he should have waved it at us as we rowed into his bay, for by the time we sailed off on a calm sea, he was burned out and emptied of everything, even his chair.
After that raid, we had all sailed here. Hard men, raiding men, here to this hall which reeked of wet wool and dogs, loud with children and nagging women. I had spent all the time since trying to make those hard, raiding men fit in it and had thought I was succeeding, so much so that I had decided on a stone for us, to root us all here like trees.
There are only a handful of master rune-carvers in the whole world who can cut the warp and weft of a man's life into stone so perfectly that those who come after can read it for a thousand years. We want everyone to know how bravely we struggled, how passionately we loved. Anyone who can magic that up is given the best place at a bench in any hall.
The stone for the Oathsworn would be skeined with serpent runes, tip-tapped out with a tool delicate as a bird's beak by the runemaster Klepp Spaki, who says he learned from a man who learned from a man who learned from Varinn. The same Varinn who carved out the fame of his lost son and did it so well that the steading nearby was called Rauk Stone ever after.
The first time I ran my fingers down the snake-knot grooves of the one Klepp made for us they were fresh-cut, still gritted and uncoloured. I came to rune-reading late and never mastered the Odin-magic of its numbers, the secret of its form or even where to start, unless it was pointed out to me.
You read with your fingers as much as your eyes. It is supposed to be difficult after all, the very word means 'whisper' and Odin himself had to hang nine nights on the World Tree and stab himself with his own spear to uncover the mystery.
Klepp runed the Oathsworn stone with my life as part of it and I know that well enough, even as age and weather smooth the stone and line me. I could, for instance, find and trace the gallop of the horse called Hrafn, bought from a dealer called Bardi the Fat.