Raven by Giles Kristian

been hull strakes it seemed to me, though I did not say it. They were speckled with sea-worm holes and there were even some worn scratchings that looked to me like runework.
    ‘That’s going to take some kicking-in by its looks,’ Penda said.
    The door needed no kicking at all because it was not locked. We were looking around us for something to use as a ram, when Rolf simply turned the iron ring and the door yawned open, exhaling a sweet smoke.
    Rolf’s brows hitched up in surprise and Penda rolled his eyesat our bone-headedness. We might well have smashed that door to splinters without ever trying it.
    Some of the Danes stood watch, peering north into the night for signs of more blaumen, whilst the rest of us entered the strange stone building, our eyes hungry for silver.
    ‘What is this place?’ Penda asked, grimacing at the potent smell as he turned, trying to take in that hollow, candle-lit chamber. ‘No benches. No beds. Not even a bucket to piss in! Looks like the poor bastards have been pilfered already. There’s more in big Svein’s head than in this piss-poor place.’
    ‘Is it a church, Raven?’ Rolf asked, for he had heard that I had lived for a time in Wessex amongst Christ worshippers.
    ‘If it is it’s not like any church I’ve seen,’ I said, pressing a palm against the smooth wall, which was made of countless blue stones each not much larger than a brynja ring. Some were dark like the sea and others were the blue of a summer sky. Still others, on the east wall where they lined a doorway, were the bright yellow of cowslips. Only there was no door, just the outline of one, and it led nowhere but was instead an alcove two feet deep, on which strange, sharp symbols twisted and twined with no sense of a pattern so far as I could see. ‘There would be a Christ cross somewhere if it were a church,’ I said, moving over to a stone trough of running water and splashing some on my face to wash off the drying blood.
    ‘This damn smoke is making me dizzy,’ Penda said, pointing to the north-east corner, where stone steps twisted upwards, stopping just below the bulging, beamless roof. ‘Up you go then, lad,’ he said. ‘Maybe they hide their treasures in the clouds.’
    So I drew my sword again, just in case, and started up the narrow stairwell, wondering how long it must have taken to carve each step, and hoping there were no blades waiting for me at the top. I pushed open another door and, with Penda close behind me, gingerly stepped on to the wooden platform we had seen from below. I half expected the planks to snap and for me to fall to my death, but I soon realized the gangway, likethe rest of the strange building, was well made. I would be safe so long as I didn’t lean out over the balustrade.
    ‘I’ve never been this high off the ground,’ I said to Penda, eyeing the surrounding dwellings and the shadowed alleys. A dog was barking incessantly but otherwise the place was quiet. Too quiet. If you really concentrated and turned your ears to the south you could just hear the low murmur of the sea, though you could not see it in the dark beyond the low hump of shadowed scrubland above the beach.
    ‘I feel closer to God up here,’ Penda said seriously.
    ‘Which god?’ I asked, trying not to grin. I was unused to hearing Penda talk of such things.
    ‘Fucking heathen,’ he growled. ‘Though I wouldn’t want to be up here after a skinful of Bram’s mead. My head is spinning as it is after breathing that weird stink down there.’ Up on the walkway the air was cool and clean after the pungent smoke inside. Penda gestured that I go one way round the platform while he went the other, so that all being well we would meet round the other side. I set off, peering into the night and thinking about what the Wessexman had said about feeling closer to his god.
    ‘Maybe it is a church,’ I suggested when we met on the swollen roof’s west side. ‘Maybe the folk here don’t worship the Christ