It felt good to be king — khagan — of such a fertile land. Helgi climbed down the tower to take in the celebrations going on below. The Slavs might have some funny customs but they liked a blot — a celebration and feast — as well as any man of the north. Helgi took to the streets, his bodyguard closing in behind him. He stood for a while watching some sacrificed slaves, naked and painted, swinging from a gallows under the wide blue sky. The sight of this proof of his power and riches was pleasing to him. The smell of the piss and shit that had fallen from the dead men as they choked mingled with the temple incense, the stink of the animals, the perfume of the garlands that the young girls wore, the herbs of the beer in the horn he drank from. He found the sensation rich and intoxicating.
Summer in the lands of the Rus was a beautiful thing — you could almost smell the heat, although there was a freshness to it that blew in off the river and made even the midday sun bearable. This was an abundant land: wheat in the fields, the nets of the fishermen on the lake heavy with fish, furs and honey in great supply and fine forests for hunting and firewood.
The nine dead men dangled from the scaffold in the temple to Svarog, master of wolves, who was Odin by another name, as far as Helgi could see. The ruler’s concessions to Slav culture stopped at changing the names of his own gods, who had brought him such fortune, and he had actually sacrificed the dead men to Odin, lord of the hanged. By that stage the locals were so drunk they assumed the sacrifice was to Svarog. But Helgi had been careful to honour the native gods too. The temple of Perun had even been given a new statue of the god, with his great hammer raised, ready to strike the blows that split the sky with thunder and lightning.
Their creeds were very similar, thought Helgi, especially the belief in a world tree on which sat the various realms of existence. The Slavs were wrong to believe it was as oak because Helgi knew very well that it was an ash called Yggdrasil, but the difference in detail was so small that the khagan had taken it for confirmation of the compatibility of the northern and Slavic peoples and evidence of the truth of their beliefs. Even the blot was a Slav tradition. They called it a bratchina — a brothering — but they were talking about the same thing. Drink, women, sacrifice and a good scrap to round it off in all likelihood.
Ladoga was thronging that day. The harvest was shaping up to be a good one; the khagan had donated ten prize cows to be slaughtered, and the army was in fine shape. Helgi’s own men from Skania had accepted the name the Slavs had given them as the ruler’s bodyguard — druzhina — and a good fleet was moored on the river and out on Lake Ladoga. Khazars had joined the force too, and the farmers and fishermen of the wider countryside were behind him, keen to move south and east for a taste of plunder. They were all in town, happy to throw flowers upon the river by day and drink and fuck their way into their gods’ favour by night.
Helgi paraded the streets, handing out small gifts of money and loaves to the people, conspicuously directing his heir Ingvar to assist him. He needed to be seen to direct Ingvar because the boy was not his son, only his nephew. Part of the bargain that had seen him gain the loyalty of his druzhina — four hundred men — was that his own sons would be overlooked.
The arrangement was not unusual, and the Norsemen had no tradition that the first son, or any son, should immediately take the throne when a king died, but Helgi was a modern man. He saw the virtue of a clear heir and of that heir being beyond dispute. However, Ingvar was not subject to the special curses the gods held in reserve for those who killed their fathers. A blood heir might be more patient than a named successor in waiting for the current king to die. Ingvar was now six. In ten years, maybe as little as six, he would seek his inheritance. And Helgi was only khagan thanks to the Slavs. They remembered his father Rurik and had backed him for the throne. Ingvar, his dead uncle’s child, had as many warriors from Skania as Helgi, and the boy’s own uncles had forced oaths from Helgi that he would be his heir.
Helgi touched his sword and remembered the words he had spoken to his sons on the days of their birth as he placed it between their infant hands: ‘I shall bequeath you no wealth and you will have nothing except what you gain for yourself by this sword.’ It was supposed to be a formality, an encouragement to be self-reliant. But Helgi had started with nothing himself and had hoped to give more than that to his boys.
The king, though, had schemes. The cities to the south and the east, Novgorod and Kiev, were tiny and barbarous. He intended to take them and to give Ingvar the task of ruling them. He’d call Novgorod his capital first, and when he was ready to strike at Kiev would say it was time to move on there. Ingvar could spend his time fending off the mad Pechenegs and the incursions of the Greeks from Miklagard. When the boy failed, as he would, his authority would be fatally undermined and Helgi could step in to take over with the support of Ingvar’s own kinsmen. Perhaps Ingvar would even be killed fighting the maniac southerners.
Helgi would not have broken his oath to protect and nourish the child; he would have fulfilled it by putting him to work as a ruler before he was even eight.
‘ Khagan.’
It was one of the druzhina, a small wiry man who on ceremonial occasions wore full war gear including a coif of mail that covered his entire face apart from the eyes. Over it he wore a gold-inlaid round helmet and he carried a fine sword by his side.
‘Yes, friend.’ This was the traditional way the Slav khagans addressed their bodyguards, and the Norsemen had quickly picked up the habit.
‘The priestess begs your presence.’
‘For what?’
‘You have sacrificed mightily. You are a great friend to the wolves, so much a feast do you prepare. The priestess of Svarog, of the sky and the blue of the sky, would entertain you now.’
Helgi grimaced. The idea of sex with the woman didn’t appeal to him, though he knew it might be required. The Slavs had all sorts of traditional rituals for their kings, which could be pleasant when it came to deflowering virgins to bless the land but asked a little too much when it came to lying with one of the ancient, unwashed and crazy priestesses of Svarog.
‘She would grant you a prophecy.’
Helgi laughed. ‘I hope I can keep my trousers on for it.’
‘I understand you can, lord. You just have to go down to see their oracle.’
‘Good, good. I should think our sacrifice should have ensured a fine prediction. The witch should be happy with what I gave her.’
He would remember that place for the rest of his life, the darkness of the hut, the closeness of the fire and the cloying smoke of the herbs the priestess had thrown onto it, foul things that burned with the smell of pitch. He never knew whether he had only dreamed that they had brought the corpses in to sit beside him in the tiny room.
The priestess had said only that Svarog was a complicated god, lord of the bright air and of the sun but also guardian of the sun in the underworld when it disappeared at night. Svarog knew the dark places of the earth and the realms of the dark gods, and it was to that side of his nature that the rite of prophecy appealed.
She had cast her herbs into the fire, murmured her rituals and uncovered the oracle, a carved tree of wood, a face daubed on it in a childish way.
His mind lost focus and wandered. When he came back to himself, his limbs were stiff and he felt far too hot. The dead men were around him, their ripe berry heads dark and swollen in the light of the witch’s baking fire. The place was an oven, and Helgi wanted to get up and leave, but it was up to him to bless his kingship by emerging with a favourable prophecy.
He had had no idea that the ritual would be so arduous. He had thought he would go in, receive good words from the priestess and come out again. Not so. He was to prophesy; he was to be the gate through which the magic would pass, so said the witch. And for that he needed to suffer.
More logs were put on the fire, more herbs, and he tried to tell her he had endured enough, that kings were to be obeyed not tortured, but the herb smoke seemed to rob him
of speech. Were the corpses there? It seemed so one moment, not the next. Helgi was a warrior, a man of cold certainties. It bothered him greatly that these dead men were neither quite there nor quite absent. They seemed to blame him for something, their eyes bulging and bloody. And, strangely, he seemed to care. He seemed sorry, although he had no idea why. He had paid for them: their lives were his. No man could say he had done wrong by killing them.
The daubed face looked at him, its expression seemed full of smirking knowledge. The oracle knew things, Helgi could tell. The oracle had inside information, he was a sly one, a secret titterer behind the backs of great kings, he was no woolly headed man that oracle, he was a smart fellow indeed. What was happening to Helgi’s thoughts? He chewed at nothing, he stretched the muscles of his face and stuck out his tongue; his nose streamed with snot; he longed for water but could not move.
The priestess was alongside him, a woman in a wolfskin snuffling and scratching near his side. No, not a woman. A wolf.
‘Where am I?’
‘At the well.’
He looked around. The room was gone, the dead men too. Instead he stood on a wide plain of black ash under a bright steel sky. The plain was utterly featureless apart from a protrusion that seemed like something grown from the same stuff as the ground, like the stump of a tree but rootless, black and hollow.
He walked up to it and looked in. A sheen of silver water was inside it, coming right to the brim of what he realised was indeed a well.
Helgi looked to his side. Two figures were there. One was a terrible old man, his face contorted into the drooling fascination men show when watching dog fights or duels. Around his neck was a strange noose tied in a complicated knot, and he stood frozen, his hands out wide. He carried something in one of them, something that dripped blood to the floor. It was an eye, his own. Helgi realised the man had torn it from his head. He stood by the well as if offering it to the heavens.
On the ground was another figure, headless. Next to it lay the crude head of the oracle, looking up at Helgi from the black floor.
‘This is the well.’ Helgi couldn’t tell who was speaking.
‘Whose well?’
‘Of Mimir, the first man.’
Helgi knew the legend. This was the well of wisdom where Odin had given his eye for lore. Helgi plunged his hands into the water and drank deeply. Now he was no longer on a barren plain — a gigantic tree stretched up above him, a black ash tree spreading its branches across all of the sky. Snakes slithered and spat at its base, all around his feet, around the well, around the body on the ground, around the feet of the strange old man who had ravaged his eye.
Helgi saw visions. A rearing horse with eight legs was stamping him down, all his lands were burning and Ingvar was at the head of his army, taking his glory, stealing his plunder. He was being buried alive, a thick stream of earth dropping into his mouth, stopping his nostrils, denying him breath. He was in a pit, a pit that was being filled up, a grave in the Christian manner, sealed in and weighed down by soil.
He heard a voice in his ears: ‘Odin is coming and will tear you from your throne. Ingvar will be king. You will be killed by the creature of hoof and mane, and Ingvar will take your glory.’
‘I shall kill him.’
‘You will never kill him. The god is coming, and his manifestation is your death. Bar his way.’
Helgi choked on the soil, his vision gone, his breath denied.
And then he was in the light and the air of the market square, under a cool and smoky evening sky, his people around him, his druzhina offering him wet cloths, drink and food.
‘A premonition, khagan?’
Helgi swallowed, spat and forced his voice to speak. ‘Great fortune,’ he said, ‘great fortune.’
‘This,’ shouted a druzhina to the crowd, ‘is the blessing of the gods, a prophecy sent to honour the birth of the khagan ’s child!’
25
A Change of Identity
It was not the wind that awoke Jehan, nor the clear blue cold of the spring day. It was the voices of the Norsemen. He heard them shouting, one phrase heard many times: ‘King-slayer, king-slayer, we will find you!’
He had an intense pain in his eyes, a searing ache. He put his hands up to his face and blinked. The agony of his torn eyelid was gone. This was another sort of pain. He blinked again and again.
He had a sensation of light, swimming brown and green and gold. There was a broad vertical line in front of him. What was it? A tree, a big oak. Jehan coughed and tasted blood. He turned to his left. There was a flash of bright gold. The river.
He breathed out, leaned back on his hands and realised it wasn’t a dream. He could move. He could see.
He got up and staggered against a tree, unused for so long to standing. At his feet was the body of Saerda, his head twisted almost to face the opposite way nature intended. Jehan sank to his knees in prayer.
‘Dear Lord God almighty and father everlasting, who hast safely brought me to the beginning of this day, by thy holy power, grant that this day I fall into no sin but that by thy restraining care my thoughts be set to keep thy holy laws and do thy holy will.’
Jehan had never cried, not as long as he had lived, but he cried then. God had granted him release from the bondage of his body, and Jehan had used it immediately to kill. The commandment was clear: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ But the Viking had been a devil, an enemy of Christ.
Jehan put his hands to his head. He felt in such confusion. What was happening to him?
‘A Frank!’
Three men were dashing towards him, two with spears, one with an axe. He wanted to wait for them, wanted to accept the punishment of God’s will, but he couldn’t. His legs began to move, haltingly at first but with increasing fluidity. He was running, for the first time since he was very young, he was running.
The sensations were nearly overwhelming — the feel of the forest floor digging into his tender and uncalloused bare feet, the dazzle of the light through the trees, the rush of greens and browns as he fled from his pursuers — and he just wasn’t used to it all. He fell, stood and tripped again. Finally, a tree root took his leg and they were on him. It was then that he gave up. He had surrendered all right to try to preserve his life. He had partaken of unclean meat. He would accept death and, inevitably, damnation. A man must accept the will of God no matter what it might be.
Others were around him now, faces pink and angry. He was unused to seeing, to focusing, and the faces seemed to whirl and smear, a circle of flesh hemming him in. He had to get back to what he knew. Jehan closed his eyes.
‘Is this the king-slayer?’
‘It’s a monk by his clothes, though a rough one.’
‘He’s not a monk; they cut their hair funny.’
‘Well, whatever he is, he’s a Frank. Shall I kill him?’
‘Best.’
‘Hang about, son.’
Jehan opened his eyes again to see a fat Viking with a big blond beard shoving through the crowd of faces.
‘Before you go killing anyone, why not ask who might have a use for him?’
Jehan recognised the voice. It was Ofaeti, the one who had carried him from the church.
‘Can you speak our tongue?’
Jehan tried to remain still but found himself nodding.
‘How did you get here? Are you one of that party that ambushed the king last night?’
‘He couldn’t ambush a tree with a piss. Look at him — he’s as frail as an old woman.’ It was another voice.
Ofaeti crouched beside him. ‘What happened to your confessor? He’s a mess. Did the Raven get him? Hang on, that shield looks like the king’s. And I recognise those arrows.’
‘The king was robbed after he’d been killed. Maybe one of the thieves paid the price,’ said someone else.
‘Maybe the king was felled with arrows and the thieves dropped it here in their flight,’ said another.
‘Those are the Raven’s arrows.’
>
‘Did he kill the king?’
‘More like whoever stole the king’s stuff.’
‘Perhaps this is the killer.’
‘Are you saying our king could have been killed by an unarmed slave like this?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Well don’t open your mouth if you can’t speak sense.’
‘Watch who you’re talking to.’
The men fell to arguing. Ofaeti ignored the rising hullabaloo and spoke to Jehan.
‘There’s one of our men with his head facing the wrong way down there. I guess you’d have noticed if someone had done that in front of you.’
Two of the Norsemen picked Jehan up and dragged him back to where the bodies of Abram and Saerda lay.
‘Are these the god’s bones?’ said one, poking at the bloody remains of the monk with his foot.
‘Last time I noticed the Raven was mutilating monks. That’s a mutilated monk. Raven’s arrows are in the king’s shield down there. Leaving aside how that got here, that makes the man down there that confessor, I reckon,’ said Ofaeti.
‘Are we in the god bones trade now, Ofaeti?’
‘Well after two nights making the lady who we’d been sent to kidnap fetch us drinks, and then the man who was going to pay us for her being killed, I’d say we should move out of the noblewoman abduction line of work and into something else, wouldn’t you? We can’t be any worse at it.’
‘I can’t believe we had her there and didn’t know.’
‘I’m going to pretend it never happened. I thought she was too good-looking for a slave.’ Ofaeti shook his head and looked at Jehan again. ‘You, Frank, we’ve got your saint’s bones. If you want them back, you’ll have to pay for them.’
Jehan hadn’t thought of that. Abram would need a proper Christian burial. He couldn’t allow him to be taken by wild animals.
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