The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 5
The band of Viking brothers, The Oathsworn, are here. These are the first 5 epic novels in Robert Low’s brilliant Oathsworn series.The ultimate Viking series, all five books in one place.Launch fully into the world of the Oathsworn, led by Einar the Black, and new recruit Orm Bearslayer, whose story this is and whose adventure is unforgettable. But as Orm and his war-wise band finally become feared and respected throughout the Viking world, fate’s hammer will still seek them out and fall hard.In the entire series: The Whale Road, The Wold Sea,The White Raven The Prow Beast and Crowbone you will experience bloody revenge, violence and true Viking grit.
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The Whale Road The Wolf Sea The White Raven Prow Beast Crowbone
ROBERT LOW
CONTENTS
The Whale Road
ROBERT LOW
To my darling wife Katie, who makes sure my keel is straight and all my oars are in the water.
CONTENTS
Runes are cut in ribbons, like the World Serpent eating his own tail. All sagas are snake-knots, for the story of a life does not always start with birth and end with death. My own truly begins with my return from the dead.
There was a beam, knotted and worn smooth where nets and sails hung, with a cold-killed spider hanging by the slenderest of threads, swaying in the breeze, swimming in my vision.
I knew that beam. It was the ridge beam of the naust, the boatshed at Bjornshafen, and I had swung on those hanging nets and sails. Swung and laughed and had no cares, a lifetime ago.
I lay on my back and looked up at it and could not understand why it was there, for I was surely dead. Yet my breath smoked in the chill of that place.
‘He’s awake.’
The voice was a growl and everything canted and swung when I tried to turn my head to it. I was not dead. I was on a pallet-bed and a face, jut-jawed and bearded like a hedge, floated in front of me. Others, too, peered round him, all strangers, all wavering, as if underwater.
‘Get back, you ugly bollocks. Give the boy room to breathe. Finn Horsehead, you would frighten Hel herself, so I am thinking you should bugger off out of it and fetch his father.’
The hedge-bearded face scowled and vanished. The owner of the voice had a face, too; this one neat-bearded and kind-eyed. ‘I am Illugi, godi of the Oathsworn,’ he said to me, then patted my shoulder. ‘Your father is coming, boy. You are safe.’
Safe. A priest says I am safe, so it must be true. A moment’s vision-flash, like something seen in the night when a storm flickers blue-white: the bear, crashing through the roof in a shower of snow and timbers, roaring and snake-necked, a great mountain of white …
‘My … father?’
The voice didn’t even sound like mine, but the kind-eyed stranger called Illugi nodded and smiled. Behind him, men moved like shadows, their voices ebbing and flowing in a tide of sound.
My father. So he had come for me after all. The thought of that stayed with me as Illugi’s face faded to a pale orb; the others, too, dwindled like trailing bubbles as I slid away, down into the dark water of sleep.
But the priest lied. I was not safe. I would never be safe again.
By the time I could sit up and take broth, the story was round Bjornshafen: the story of Orm the slayer of the white bear.
Alone, when the White Bear, Rurik’s Curse, came for revenge on the son – and then, presumably, the father – brave Orm, a mere boy becoming a man fought it over the headless body of Freydis the witch-woman. Fought it for a day and a night and had finally driven a spear into its head and a sword into its heart.
There was more of the same, of course, as my father told me when he came to me, hunkering by my bed and rubbing his grizzled chin and running his hand through his lank, once-gold hair.
My father, Rurik. The man who had fostered me on his brother Gudleif at Bjornshafen. He carried me there under his cloak when I was no more than fat knees and chubby fists, in the year Eirik Bloodaxe lost his throne in York and was cut down at Stainmore. I am not even sure if that was a true memory, or one patched back to the cloak of my life by Gudleif’s wife, Halldis, who liked me above the other fostris who came and went, because I was blood kin.
She it was who taught me about sheep and chickens and growing things, who filled in the rents in my memory while she sat by the fire, the great hangings which portioned the hall stirring and flapping in the winds which thundered Bjornshafen’s beams.
Patient and still, click-clicking her little bone squares as she wove strips of bright wool hemming, she would answer all my piped questions.
‘Rurik came back only once, with a white bear cub,’ she said. ‘Said for Gudleif to keep it for him and that it was worth a fortune – and it was, too. But Rurik, of course, couldn’t stop long enough to make it into one. Always off on the next tide, that one. Not the same man after your mother died.’
Now here he was, sprung like a breaching whale from the empty sea.
I saw a nut-brown face and, since folk said we looked alike, tried to see more handsome in it than, perhaps, there was. He was middling height, more silvered than fair now, his face roughened by wind and weather and his beard cropped short. His blue eyes laughed, though, from under hairy eyebrows like spiders’ legs, even when he was being concerned.
And what did he see? A boy, tall for his age, with good shoulders and the scrawn of youth almost gone, with red-brown hair that fell in his eyes unless someone rough-cut it with shears. Halldis had done it while she lived but no one much bothered after the coughing sickness took her.
