“I begin to long to go to sea again,” said Orm, “if only for the chance of encountering such a ship as yours.”
The Gothlanders laughed. “Many men cherish that longing,” they said, “but such as try to requite it go home, if at all, with grievous wounds to nurse. For you must know that we are strong fighters and are not afraid to show our strength when the need arises. Styrbjörn we feared, but no man else. But enough of this talk. Let us know at once whether you wish to buy from us or no; for there are many others waiting their turn.”
Olof Summerbird bought his sacks and paid for them with few words; but when Orm reckoned up the amount he would have to pay, he began to grumble loudly. His brother touched him with his hand; opening his fist, he revealed a small heap of silver coins, which he carefully placed in the palm of Orm’s right hand.
“You see!” said the Gothlanders. “We spoke the truth. He has plenty of silver. Now you cannot doubt any longer that he is your brother.”
Orm glanced uncertainly at the silver. Then he said: “From you, Are, I will accept this money; but you must not suppose that I am either mean or poor, for I have enough wealth for both of us. But it is always humiliating to pay money to merchants, especially when they are such men as these.”
“They outnumber us,” said Olof, “and we must have salt, whatever the price. But it is certainly true that a man has to be rich to deal with men from Gotland.”
They bade the merchants a curt farewell, rowed their salt ashore, and started homewards; and Orm hardly knew whether to rejoice or be sad that he was bringing home a brother so fearfully maimed.
During their journey, when they had pitched camp for the night, Orm and Olof sought, by means of many questions, to learn from Are what had befallen him. Olof Summerbird could not remember having seen him in Miklagard; after much questioning, however, they at length gathered that he had been a chieftain in one of the Emperor’s warships. He had not been maimed as a punishment, but while in captivity, after some fight; Olof had been correct, however, in guessing that it had been the Byzantines who had treated him thus. But more than this they could not discover, though they worded their questions skillfully; for all that Are could do in reply was to signify either yes or no, and they could see that it galled him bitterly that they could not find the right questions to ask him and that he could not guide their thoughts. They understood that he had been involved in some strange adventure, in which gold and treachery had played their part, and that he possessed some knowledge that he wished to impart to them; but all their efforts to discover what this might be proved vain.
“There is nothing for it but to be patient,” said Orm at length. “It is useless for us to plague you with any more of this guessing, for it will lead us nowhere. When we reach home we will get our priest to help us, and then we may, perhaps, find a way to your secret; though how we shall manage to do so is more than I know.”
Olof Summerbird said: “Nothing that he has to tell us can be more amazing that the fact of his having found his way home across so many miles of land and sea in such a state of helplessness. If so strange a thing can happen, let us hope that it may not be impossible for us to hit upon some way to discovering his secret. Certain it is that I shall not go home from Gröning until I know more of what he has to tell us.”
Are sighed and wiped the sweat from his brow and sat rigid.
When they came to within sight of Gröning, Orm rode ahead of the others to break the news to Asa, for he feared that otherwise the joy and sorrow of seeing Are again might prove too great a shock for her. At first she was confused by what he told her and began to weep bitterly; then, however, she fell on her knees to the floor, beat her head against a bench, and thanked God for returning to her the son whom she had so long regarded as lost.
When they led Are to the house, she ran wailing to embrace him, and for some time would not let him go; then she began straightway to chide Orm for having doubted that this was his brother. After she had calmed herself, she said she would make a better bandage for his eyes; then, when she heard that he was hungry, she became more cheerful and went to prepare with her own hands those dishes which she remembered he liked best. For several days she moved as though in a dream, thinking of nothing but Are and what she might do to comfort him. When he showed a good appetite, she sat watching him happily; when, once, he placed his hand on hers to signify his thanks, she broke into tears of joy; and when she tired him with incessant prattling, so that he pressed his hand and the stump of his wrist against his ears and moaned aloud, she closed her mouth and sat humbly silent for a full minute before commencing afresh.
All the house-folk were filled with compassion toward Are and helped him in every way they could think of. The children feared him at first, but soon came to like him. He loved especially to be led down to the river in the mornings and sit fishing on the bank, with someone to help him bait and cast his line. Blackhair was his favorite fishing companion, and Rapp, too, whenever the latter had time, perhaps because, of all the household, they most liked to sit in silence like himself.
Everyone was curious to know more of the bad luck that had befallen him, for Orm had told them all that he had been able to learn during the journey from Kivik. Olof Summerbird sent his men home with his salt, keeping only two of them with him at Gröning; he told Ylva that he would like, if he might, to stay until they had succeeded in discovering more of Are’s secret, as he had the feeling that it might contain matter of some importance. Ylva was happy to let him stay, for she liked him and was always glad when he visited them; besides which, she observed that his eyes turned ever more frequently toward Ludmilla, who was by now a full-grown woman of fifteen, waxing lovelier every day.
“It is lucky for us that you are willing to stay,” said Orm, “for we shall never learn much from Are without your help; you are the only one of us here who knows Miklagard and the people who live in it.”
But, despite all their efforts and those of the priest and the women, they could not elicit much more of Are’s story. The only certain new fact they learned was that what had been done to him had been done on the river Dnieper, in the land of the Patzinaks, near the great portage beside the weirs. But more than that they could not discover; and Olof Summerbird found it difficult to imagine what Byzantines could be doing there.
Then Orm thought of a plan that might help them. Are was skilled in the use of runes; so Orm bade Rapp make a board of limewood, white and smooth, in order that Are might write on it in coal with the hand that had been left to him. Are was eager to do this and worked hard at it for a time; but with his left hand he could write only awkwardly and, in his blindness, he blurred his runes into one another, so that nobody could make out what he wished to say. At length he was seized with anger and flung the board and the coal away and would try no more.
In the end, it was Rapp and the priest who thought of a better method, one day while they were sitting and scratching their heads about the matter. Rapp axed a short beam of wood, smoothed and polished it, and carved on its surface the sixteen runes, very large and clear, with a deep groove separating each from the next. They put the beam into Are’s hands, bidding him feel it; and when he understood what they intended, it could be seen that his heart was lightened. For now he was able to touch rune after rune to make the words he wished to say, and Father Willibald sat beside him with sheepskin and pen, writing down the words as Are spelled them out. At first the work went slowly and with difficulty, but gradually Are came to learn the position of each rune, and everyone sat full of joy and expectation as intelligible sentences began to appear on the sheepskin. Each evening the priest read out to them what he had written down during the day. They listened greedily, and after three weeks the whole story lay written there. But the first part of it, which told where the treasure lay hidden, he read only to Orm.
CHAPTER THREE
CONCERNING THE STORY OF THE BULGAR GOLD
I AM the poorest of men, for my eyes have been taken from me, a
nd my tongue and my right hand, and my son, whom the Emperor’s treasurer killed. But I can also call myself the richest, for I know where the Bulgar gold lies hidden. I shall tell you where it lies, that I may not die with the secret still hidden in my breast, and you, priest, shall repeat it to my brother, but to no other man. He shall then decide whether he wishes it to be repeated for other ears.
In the river Dnieper, where the portage climbs beside the great weirs, just below the third weir as a man comes from the south, off the right bank between the skull-mound of the Patzinaks and the small rock in the river on which the three rosebushes grow, under the water in the narrow channel where the rock-flat is broken, hidden beneath large stones where the rock-flat juts out and hides the bed beneath—there lies the Bulgar gold, and I alone know its hiding-place. As much gold as two strong men might carry lies drowned there, in four small chests sealed with the Emperor’s seal, together with silver in five sacks of skin, and the sacks are heavy. This treasure first belonged to the Bulgars, who had stolen it from many wealthy men. Then it became the Emperor’s, and from him it was stolen by his treasurer, Theofilus Lakenodrako. Then it became mine, and I hid it where it now lies.
I shall tell you how all this came about. When I first came to Miklagard, I entered the Imperial bodyguard, as many Northmen had done before me. Many Swedes serve in it, and Danes too, and men from Norway, and from Iceland also, far out in the western sea. The work is good, and the pay also, though I came too late to partake in the plundering of the palace when the Emperor John Zimisces died, which was a fine plundering, still much talked of among those who took part in it. For it is the ancient custom there that whenever an emperor dies, his bodyguard is permitted to plunder his palace. There is much that I could tell you, priest, but I shall speak only of those things that it is necessary to know, for this fumbling upon a beam wearies me. I served in the bodyguard for a long while, and became a Christian and took a woman to wife. She was called Karbonosina, which means with coal-black eyebrows, and was of good family according to Byzantine reckoning, for her father was brother to the wife of the second wardrobe-master of the three royal Princesses.
You must know that in Miklagard, as well as the Emperor Basil, who is childless, there rules also Constantine, his brother, who is also called Emperor. But Basil is the true Emperor. It is he who rules the land and crushes revolts and goes to war each year against the Bulgars and Arabs, while Constantine, his brother, sits at home in the palace playing with his treasure and his courtiers and the eunuchs who crowd about him. When any of them tells him that he is as good as his brother, or better, he strikes the speaker on the head with his little black staff, which bears a gold eagle on it, but the blow is always light, and the speaker is afterwards rewarded with rich gifts. He is a cruel man when his humor is darkened, and worst when he is drunk.
It is he who is father to the three Princesses. They are held to be greater than all other people in the world, save the Emperors themselves; for they are the only children of Imperial blood. Their names are: Eudokia, who is hunchbacked and disfigured by the pox, and whom they keep hidden; Zoe, who is one of the fairest of women, and who has lusted eagerly after men since she was a young girl; and Theodora, who is weak-brained and pious. They are unmarried, for there is no man in the world worthy to marry them, say the Emperors—which has for years been a source of vexation to Zoe.
We of the bodyguard took it in turns to go to war with the Emperor Basil and to remain in the palace with his brother. There is much that I remember and would tell you, but this telling goes slowly, and I shall now speak to you of my son.
My woman called him Georgios and had him christened thus, I being in the field with the Emperor when he was born. For this I whipped her on my return, and called him Halvdan, a good name. When he grew up, he was known by both names. With her and others he conversed in the Greek tongue, which is the speech that women and priests use there, but with me he spoke our tongue, though the learning of it came more slowly to him. When he was seven years old, my woman ate a surfeit of mussels and died; and I took no other wife, for it is a bad thing to marry a foreign woman. The women of Miklagard are worth little. As soon as they marry, they become thoughtless and lazy, and childbearing ages them and makes them fat and insubordinate. When their husbands try to tame them, they run shrieking to their priests and bishops. They are not like our women, who are understanding and work diligently and whom childbearing makes wiser and more comely. This was the opinion of all of us Northmen who served in the bodyguard. Many of us changed our wives every year and still were not satisfied.
But my son was my joy. He was shapely and swift-footed, quick-tongued and merry. He was afraid of nothing, not even of me. He was such that women in the street turned to look at him when he was little, and turned more swiftly as he grew to manhood. This was his misfortune, but there was no help for it. He is dead now, but is seldom out of my thoughts. He and Bulgar gold are all I can think about. It could have become his, if all had gone well.
When my woman died, my son spent much time with her kinsfolk, wardrobe-master Symbatios and his wife. They were old and childless, for the wardrobe-master, as befitted one who worked in the royal women’s apartments, was a eunuch. He was married, though, as Byzantine eunuchs often are. He and his wife both loved Halvdan, though they called him Georgios, and when I was away with the Emperor they took care of him. One day I returned from the wars to find the old man weeping for joy. He told me that my son had become the Princesses’ playmate, especially Zoe’s, and that Zoe and he had already fought and proved equally strong, she being two years older than he. Although they had fought, she had said that she much preferred him as a playmate to the Metropolitan Leo’s niece, who fell on her knees and wept when anyone tore her clothes, or chamberlain Nikeforos’s son, who was harelipped. The Empress Helena herself, he said, had clapped the boy on the head and called him a little wolf cub and told him he must not pull Her Imperial Highness Zoe’s hair when she maltreated him. Gazing up at the Empress, the boy had asked her when he might pull it. At this the Empress had condescended to laugh aloud with her own mouth, which, the old man said, had been the happiest moment in his life.
These are childish things, but to remember them is one of the few joys that remain to me. In time things changed. I pass over many things, which would take too long to tell. But some five years later, when I was commanding a company of the bodyguard, Symbatios again came weeping to my chamber, but not this time for joy. He had that day gone to the innermost clothing chamber, where the coronation garments were kept, and which was seldom visited, to see if there were any rats there. Instead of rats, he had found Halvdan and Zoe playing a new kind of game together, a game the sight of which had terrified him exceedingly, on a bed they had made of coronation garments that they had dragged from their chests. As he stood there speechless, they had grabbed their clothes and disappeared, leaving the coronation robes, which were of purple-dyed silk from the land of the Seres,1 severely crumpled, so that he knew not what to do. He had pressed them as well as he was able, and had replaced them carefully in their chests. There could, he said, be only one fate for him if this business was discovered—namely, that he would lose his head. It was lucky that the Empress was sick abed, for all the courtiers were in her chamber and had no time to think of anything else, which was the reason the Princess was less carefully guarded than usual and had been able to find this opportunity to seduce my son. There could be no doubt, he said, that the blame was wholly hers; for nobody could suspect a boy still in his thirteenth year of harboring such ideas. But nothing could alter what had happened, and he held this to be the worst stroke of ill luck that had ever befallen him.
I laughed at his story, thinking the boy had behaved like a true son of mine, and tried to comfort the old man by telling him that Halvdan was too young to be able to present Princess Zoe with a little emperor, however hard they might have striven to do so; and that though the coronation robes might be crumpled, they could hardly have
sustained any real damage. But the old man continued to weep and moan. He said all our lives were in danger—his, his wife’s, my son’s, and my own—for the Emperor Constantine would immediately order us to be killed if he ever learned of what had happened. Nobody, he added, could suppose that Zoe had been frightened at being discovered thus with Halvdan, for she was by now a full fifteen, and of a temper more akin to that of a burning devil than of a blushing virgin, so that it could not be doubted that she would shortly start afresh with Halvdan, he being the only person she was allowed to associate with who was not a woman or a eunuch. In time the scandal must inevitably be discovered, when Princess Zoe would receive an admonition from a bishop, and Halvdan and the rest of us would be killed.
As he spoke, I began to be afraid. I thought of all the people I had seen maimed and killed for offending the imperial humor during the years I had served in the bodyguard. We sent for my son and remonstrated with him for what he had done, but he said that he regretted nothing. It had not been the first time, he said, and he was no child who required seducing, but knew as much about love as Zoe. I realized that nothing now could keep them apart and that disaster would overtake us all if the affair was allowed to continue. So I shut him up in the wardrobe-master’s house and went to call on the chief officer of the bodyguard.
He was called Zacharias Lakenodrako, and bore the title of Chief Sword-bearer, which is an office much honored among the Byzantines. He was an old man, tall and venerable-looking, with red and green jewels on his fingers, a wise and skillful talker, but sly and malignant, like everybody who holds high office in Miklagard. I bowed humbly before him, said that I was unhappy in the bodyguard, and begged that I might spend the remaining years of my service on one of the Emperor’s warships. He considered this request and found it difficult to grant. At length he said he thought he might be able to arrange it if I did him a small service in return. It was his wish, he said, that the Archimandrite Sophron, who was the Emperor Constantine’s confessor, should receive a sound drubbing, for the latter was his worst enemy and had of late been talking evil of him to the Emperor behind his back. He wanted, he said, no bloodshed, so that I must use no edged or pointed weapons against the Archimandrite, but merely stout sticks, which would make his flesh smart. He said the deed would best be done beyond the palace gardens in the evening when he was riding home from the Emperor on his white mule.
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