The Wolf Sea o-2

by Robert Low

  The Goat Boy, when he turned to me, was a pale oval of a face in the darkness. 'He hears they have become eaters of their own at the mine, Trader. He says it happens now and then, when there is a drought and hunger drives people to it. He himself has been reduced to eating the shrivelled remains found in camel dung — but not yet to eating other beings.'

  The others, when this was laid out for them, made wardings against evil and there was a lot of amulet-touching and prayers from Brother John.

  We Norse are half afraid of the dead-eaters, half disgusted, and will shun any such who are found, no matter that they have been snowed in and forced to it. Almost all had a tale, heard from some hall round a comfortable fire, and many of these stories were children-scarers, no more.

  But there was worse than all that in this tale, as Kvasir and Sighvat both pointed out. If no food had been sent to the mine and all that had been in the village was consumed, so that rumours of dead-eating were now abroad, then things were desperate for those guarding the mine.

  So whom were they eating?

  `We have to move fast, Bear Slayer,' Finn growled in a voice thick and black as the wheel of night,

  'before our oarmates are stew.'

  12

  The Sarakenoi say that their god, Allah, has one hundred names and that ninety-nine of them are written in their holy book. The camel, it seems, is the only living thing that knows the one-hundredth name of God, which accounts for the way he looks down at you, curling his lip like a prince with a dead rat shoved under his nose.

  They have little else to be haughty about. True, they can carry a pack which weighs the same as two big battle-geared prow-men and will outlast a horse on a walk — but a man on two legs can walk faster than a camel with four.

  Riding one is not something I would do twice, for it sways like a badly trimmed ship side-on to a swell and while I never get sick on a deck, I felt like hoiking up my guts the one time I climbed on the back of a camel.

  Even getting on one is harder than boarding one knarr from another in a two-foot sea. Because they tire if you get on while they kneel, you mount by pulling on a cord attached to the beast's nostrils, which makes it lower that snake neck and head. Then you stick one foot in the crook of the neck and let go of the cord, at which it will raise its neck and swing you up.

  If you are steady, you can settle yourself on the hump; if not, you end up falling off and having to do it all over again.

  Aliabu gave us three of the four male camels, since we could not milk the she-camels (for all that a couple of the band tried, being good husbandmen once). Well, that had been years before and a camel is not a cow or a goat. When a raging Botolf fisted teeth from one for spitting at him, Delim and the others, scowling, took their camels out from our reach. That one beast then kept trying to get at Botolf and bite him with her remaining teeth, yellowed as boar tusks, which at least kept us smiling at something in that place.

  However, we knew how to manage three male camels and moved off with them in the cool of early morning, making for Aindara and hoping to get to it before it grew too hot.

  The flat plain, fox-red and weathered ochre, sprouted a white ribbon of road and then, almost an ache to the eye, a great swathe of olive groves and vegetable plots splashed the land with dusty green. Ahead lay rounded hills; below them a dash of whitewashed mud-brick and stands of palms. Clouds were gathering in a sky that had been washed blue and tiny red birds sang in the stunted trees along the road.

  `See anything?'

  Hookeye, shading his eyes with one hand, looked a moment longer then shook his head. His face was the colour of old leather and his tunic, which had once been red, was now a washed-out pink. I realised we must all look the same, seared by the sun. My hair, when I saw it flutter loose round my face, had paled from red to yellow-gold.

  Hookeye and Gardi loped ahead, having shed their heavy tunics and kept their robes and head-coverings.

  Gardi had also stowed his boots, since the soles had vanished completely and he was now barefoot.

  We followed them at camel-pace and soon a wind soughed out of the hills, driving a fine spray of grit and dust against us. I leaned into it, the white robe, now rusted with dust, wrapped tight around my head and shoulders. Gravel, whipped by the wind, stung at my legs through my breeks as we ploughed on, the camels grumbling, heads lowered.

  The green fields surrounding the town were hazed with dust now; beyond them only rocky hills and an endless plain of stone and scrub and broad dry streambeds.

  `This is a bad storm coming,' Brother John said, having to raise his voice against the wind and the hiss of grit. 'We must get to shelter.'

  Hookeye and Gardi sat hunched and waiting for us, wrapped tight against the driving sting. Together, we moved into the village of Aindara, where only the sound of a batting shutter welcomed us.

  The centre of the village was a square of bare earth fronting a sad mosque of brick, whose great arched horseshoe of an entrance had two huge doors flung wide. Slats of wood, painted to look like marble, flanked this entrance, which led to a courtyard of bare earth, stamped hard and smooth as stone.

  In the middle of the village square was a raised stone trough with a well on one side where women had once drawn water and beaten clothes clean. The water in the trough was ruffled slightly by the wind and a fine layer of dust sifted down on it, so I knew the villagers had long since gone; the Mussulmen think all water has to flow and standing water is unclean. Other buildings crowded round, their doors dark and empty and a garden wall jutted out from a house, ornamented by a trailing tendril of green, fluttering with little blue and white flowers.

  The mosque was the biggest building to hand, so we went there, taking the camels in through the courtyard to an enclosed space, barn-large and pillared. High up on the walls were arched windows, some of the shutters banging loose and letting dust sift on to the flagged floor and a short stairway that led up the wall. . to nowhere.

  I was too relieved to be out of the wind and grit to chew the problem of the stairway, or the large arched recess flanked

  by stone pillars that looked like a door but also led nowhere.

  Among the forest of pillars, we quickly tethered camels, unpacked them and shoved armfuls of their rough fodder at them. A camp was made, watches posted on the door leading to the courtyard, the only way in or out, it seemed.

  The doors were thick and studded and it took three of us to close them, for it didn't seem ever to have been done and the hinges squealed like stuck pigs. There was a smaller postern door in one, which was easier to guard.

  Finn and Gardi scouted around and found lanterns with oil in them and Kvasir managed to spark up a fire using some of the camel-fodder shrubs. Hookeye and Botolf discovered the stair that led nowhere was made of painted wood and cheerfully began breaking it up to feed the cookfires.

  Then Kleggi and his oarmate Harek Gunnarsson, who was called Town Dog, found a doorway at the back, which led to a narrow, winding stair up to the top of the tower we had seen attached to the mosque.

  We had seen Saracen priests up these narrow little towers in Antioch, wailing out to call their worshippers to prayer. Now I sent Gardi up it as a lookout, though he had to come part-way down after a while, as the sand was scouring his eyeballs from his head even through the shroud of a robe.

  The Goat Boy was uneasy at all this, saying it was a bad thing to defile a mosque, but that made everyone laugh. We had raided, burned and broken god temples from here to Gotland and back — what was one more to us?

  Brother John patted the Goat Boy gently on his sand-matted curls and said, `Salus populi supremo lex esto — which is to say, young man, that our need is greater than that of the infidel's god.'

  Sighvat, passing with some of the wood broken from the stair that led nowhere, chuckled and added:

  'Don't fret, little bear, this Allah doesn't seem to have thunderbolts, from what I hear.'

  So we settled down to wait out the storm, while the wind his
sed and sighed like the sea on shingle, a sound that ached in all our hearts through that long night.

  Of course, you should never mock the gods, even those of other people, since they have a nasty way with them. In the cool of next morning, with the storm blown out, we found out how much we had pissed this Allah off.

  `Trader. . we have company.'

  A dream smoked away like spume off a gale-torn wave, a dream where Starkad and I fought and he hacked off my arm — but it turned out to be Finn, smacking me on it to wake me up. I scrambled up into the mill of men collecting their leather and mail and weapons.

  Behind Finn, hovering and anxious, was Runolf Skarthi, whose watch it had been in the tower and, though the harelip that gave him his nickname warped his speech, he gave it clear enough: men were coming from the temple on the hill nearby. A lot of men, moving in one body.

  `How many?'

  A hundred,' he mushed. 'More, maybe.'

  Armed?'

  I sent Town Dog and Hookeye to have a look,' growled Kvasir, tossing my ringmail at me. I caught it with fumbling fingers, then slid myself into the cold byrnie. My sword rasped from the wool-lined wooden sheath and sand grains dribbled. Finn made an annoyed noise in his throat at the sight of such neglect.

  Fastening the stiff thongs of my helmet round my chin, I collected my shield and looked round at the men, faces red-brown, all snarling smiles and grim lips. There was that familiar smell of sweat-soaked leather and fear, the tang of iron and savage eagerness.

  A better jarl would have come up with gold-browed words, calling them Widow Makers, Sword Breakers, Hewers of Men, promising them rivers of gold and silver and more glory than Thor. Instead, I could only turn to the Goat Boy and tell him to start a fire, for once we were finished we'd want our day-meal. At which they all hoomed and beat their shields and grinned those fox-in-the-coop grins.

  Hookeye and Town Dog lurched back through the door, panting. 'A good hundred, I would say,' gasped Town Dog. `But armed with nothing much: a few bows, spears that are no better than sharpened sticks, clubs.

  Hardly an axe or a sword to be seen.'

  If it is the villagers of this place,' Brother John said, his unfastened helmet tilted ludicrously over one eye, 'then we should treat with them. Maybe-'

  Not after what we have done to this mosque,' the Goat Boy piped and Brother John shot him a savage look, made harsher by his own anger at having ignored the boy's warnings.

  Anyway, I was thinking, wide awake now, where had they all been to leave every home deserted?

  Hookeye, too, was shaking his head and stringing his bow. `Not villagers, I am thinking,' he growled.

  'And not from here. All men, no women or bairns. They dress like thrall scum, but they have weapons.'

  He was right. They were as ragged-arsed a band of thieves as ever disgraced the ground they walked on, slouching their way through the streets into the square, clutching skin bags and clearly making for the water trough and the well. A cool breeze sifted last night's sand in skeins across the square and it lay in drifts against the trough, where the water was scummed with it.

  When they saw us lope up, shieldwall stretching from wall to wall across the other side of the square, they stopped and milled about, confused. I heard some shouts of Warangii', which let me know some of them knew Greek. Deserters, I was thinking, from the Great City's army.

  They circled and looked at each other and I waited, for soon the one who led them would appear. Finn, though, was chewing on his Roman nail and slavering round it that we should hit them now, while they were thinking about things.

  Then the leader appeared, a Greek or a Jew by the look of his oiled black curls and beard, waving a curved sword but wearing a Norse ring-coat — you could see the thick, riveted ringwork in the byrnie he wore from here and the Saracen ones were thinner, because they liked them light in the heat. That closed the door on these men as far as I was concerned, for there was only one way Black Beard could have got his paws on such an item.

  `Now,' I said quietly and Finn bawled out for us to form the shieldwall while the raven banner snapped out in the cool early morning breeze, which hissed like a snake suddenly and raised dancing whorls of dust and grit, settling them into a new pattern. It looked like a face with one eye, I noticed, and wondered if it was an omen.

  They should have run for it then, but the leader saw how few we were compared to the mob he had with him and that, with the fact that they needed the water, made him bold. He snarled, waved his little curved Saracen sword once or twice in the air, then thrust it towards us and charged. Howling, his men followed. Of course, by the time they reached us, Black Beard had managed to drop back a rank or two.

  I didn't have time to think of much else before they were on us, a spear rushing at me, behind it a red-mouthed, mad-eyed face in a tangle of hair and beard, like a wild animal plunging from a forest. I knocked the spear-point away with the flat of my blade, then bulled in, slashing overhand. The man was scrawny, hesitant, and he jumped back. His movements seemed slow, though it was clear he knew something of spear-work.

  A soldier once, I was thinking, even as I moved in, slapping the spear away with my shield, moving up the shaft before he could recover, then chopping hard at the knee. He tripped over someone else's foot and my edge slashed his thigh open in a red crescent that split apart even as he fell back with a high, wailing scream.

  He was done for, so I left him. Our shieldwall had dragged apart, though the Oathsworn were still working in teams of two or three.

  To my left, some of the brigands were hopping into buildings, shooting their little bows, and I saw Kvasir, with a handful of others, rush through the doorway. A figure loomed, screeching, and I blocked and struck, all in the one movement that was now second nature.

  The watered blade blurred in the haze of dust and grit, took the man in the neck, cutting upwards so that his jaw flew off. He tried to cry out, but the sound was choked off in a gurgle and I kicked the body away with one flapping boot. Still sharp, I thought, for all I had neglected the blade.

  There was a yell; I spun, blocking the snake-tongue strike of a spear with my shield. Another man rushed me, shouting wildly, but mad-eyed Town Dog skewered him, then swung the man furiously to one side to shake him off his spear.

  They broke then, running wildly everywhere while the Oathsworn hunted them down. Arrows whicked and clicked on the stones and hard-packed bare earth, and at the point the houses slithered down to fields of melons and beans, I killed my last man of the fight, a series of desperate, weary strokes that carved out his ribs from his backbone as he stumbled and fell and scrabbled, wailing, away from me.

  I had to follow it up by breaking his skull like an egg, for he was still alive, leaking blood and whimpering, trying to crawl to safety. Afterwards, I sat beside him while the flies droned greedily in, feeling sick and wondering who he had been, what he had thought that day would bring when he woke up and went with everyone else to fetch water.

  When I came back to the square, the bodies were being dragged away and Finn, seeing me, blew out with relief.

  `Thought you'd run into trouble, Trader,' he said. I shook my head, scooped water from the well and doused my head in it, surfacing with muddy runnels coursing down face and beard.

  `Here's some fresh,' said the Goat Boy, hefting a bucket, and I drank. 'There is food cooking,' he added and the men cheered him. Those who could cheer, that is.

  We had six wounded, none badly enough to have to drink from Brother John's onion-water flask. One was dead, though: Town Dog had taken an arrow in the armpit, having unpicked the rings of a too-tight byrnie so that it would fit better.

  I told him to keep his arms by his sides,' mourned Kvasir moodily, shaking his head. 'But he waved that silly spear in the air and that's what happened.'

  At least he had such a coat,' Botolf growled pointedly, cleaning the blood off the heft-seax. He had unfastened the raven banner and was washing the blood off it as best he could, though t
he end result simply made it even more streaked and grisly.

  `Who were they, do we know?' demanded Brother John, standing hipshot like a man four times his size, spear held tall and proud in one hand. Sometimes I wondered if he really was marked by his Christ-god for a priest, for he was like no robed monk we had ever seen.

  Who were they? I had no answer for Brother John, but had sat and looked at the man I'd killed for long enough to see that he was too thin, dirty and had the old sores of manacles at wrists and ankles.

  When we had laid out Town Dog as best we could, I took a dozen men down the white road, between the irrigation ditches and the fields of plundered beans and herbs, past the abandoned olive presses and out on to the stony desert plain, back along the route the brigands had come.

  As we came up the hill to the columns of the Hittite temple, dust marked where the remnants of the band were fleeing towards the hills, Black Beard with them.

  I did not know what a Hittite was — another people turned to dust — but they built well, for this was a flat area flagged with great square stones and studded with the remains of pillars, some toppled like trees.

  There was an altar and low, square buildings and several stairs that led down to underground places.

  This was where the brigand band had been staying, that was clear, for it had been made into a fort, after a fashion, with dug-up flagstones and earth. They had been here a while, too, judging by the firepits and gear.

  `Quite a jarl-hall,' Finn noted admiringly, nodding towards the village. 'Water to hand, too, when they needed it — though they'd have done better to leave men to guard it and prevent the likes of us wandering in.'

  `Water,' I said. 'But only melons and beans, if any are left. Small wonder they were scrawny. Escaped men from the mines, I am thinking.'