Her eyes fogged and she turned her face away so that I would not see her tears, and even after everything, I wished I could take those spite-curdled words back, wished I could hold Cynethryth and make things between us golden again as they used to be.
‘I have to tell them what you did,’ I said, gripping the bear’s claw as though by holding it I could somehow hold on to Bram. ‘They have to know.’
‘If you do, they will blame you for his death,’ she said, turning back to me. I knew she was right. And perhaps Asgot was right, too. Maybe I was the poisoned blade in the Fellowship’s side. Maybe I was the raven, the herald of death, the scavenger of the slain. I had brought death to the men and women of Abbotsend. Bjorn was worm food because of me and now Bram was gone, dead because my feigr had become his. How many others sat in Óðin’s hall waiting for me that they might avenge their deaths? ‘Take this for the pain,’ Cynethryth said, offering me another purse. I kept my hands by my sides. ‘It is just herbs,’ she said, putting the purse on my chest and standing. ‘In water it will taste foul but in wine or mead it is not so bad.’
She walked away, leaving me with the boulder weight of Bram’s death, and I yelled at Penda to bring more wine.
There was no pissing rain to spoil Bram’s death pyre. The moon had waned and much of the ancient city was cloaked in night’s thick pelt, but the stone wharf and towering walls built long ago to keep Rome’s enemies out glowed red with a hero’s flames. The Tiberis was a sluggish flow of molten iron upon which our blaze-kissed ships waited patient yet eager to ride that flow back to the sea. As were we all eager now. But first we would honour our fallen sword-brother with a feast worthy of the Aesir. Beasts were slaughtered and their cookfires added a greasy glow to the night sky, so that folk came from all around, drawn by the unnatural dawn that flooded our camp. Men traded and argued and wenched and ate, but mostly they drank, in honour of Bram who had enjoyed mead more than any man ever did. The Bear’s name rang round the camp like the kiss of swords. Stories spilled from greasy lips, weaving a saga-tale too great for any one skald, and the golden weft in all those tellings was Bram: Bram who killed King Hygelac Storm-Temper’s champion, and swam the Kattegat Sea. Bram who had once knocked out a bull with one punch, and whom no man had ever outdrunk. Bram who had killed a troll.
Penda came over to where I lay, his hair sticking out like hedgehog spines and his scarred cheeks red from the fires’ heat.
‘You’ve got the right idea, lad,’ he slurred, waving his drinking horn through the air and sloshing wine across my skins. ‘If you drink lying down you can’t fall over.’ Sigurd and Olaf had all but carried me between them over to Bram’s pyre so that I could pay my last respects before flint and steel summoned the flames, and I had laid the pouch containing Bram’s bear claw in the crook of his folded arm. Neither Sigurd nor Olaf had asked what was in that pouch, for which I was glad, and they had taken me back to my bed because just being upright made my head swim and my side scream with pain.
‘Seeing as you’re here you can empty that for me,’ I said, nodding at the half-full piss bucket by my feet. ‘This wine runs through me like brine through a fish’s gills.’
‘I can see that,’ Penda squeezed through a grimace. ‘But it’s the least I can do for the man who has made us all rich as bloody kings. That sly-looking bastard Guido is here with the silver you won us.’
‘He’s here now?’ I twisted, ignoring the searing pain to look for Lord Guido amongst the sea of firelit faces. ‘He was supposed to come tomorrow.’
‘Sigurd was hardly going to turn the man away, was he?’ Penda said. ‘Not with that much silver burning a hole through Guido’s sea chest.’ All in all I’d had enough of burning, one way or another, and said as much.
‘Hurts, does it, lad?’ Penda asked, nodding at my right side where the flesh still smelt burnt. I didn’t dignify that with an answer, instead telling Penda to help me over to where Sigurd was hosting Guido and his men.
‘This is Raven,’ Sigurd announced to Lord Guido, who nodded respectfully from his furs, showing that he remembered me from the arena.
‘I hope your wounds heal quickly and cleanly, Raven,’ Guido said. ‘You fought with great heart today, as did your friend,’ he added, glancing at Bram’s charred shape at the heart of the raging pyre. The heat made you have to dip your head or else risk blistering your cheeks. As it was, there were plenty of us with singed beards.
I nodded at Guido but my gaze was drawn to the man with the stockier build and deep-set eyes sitting beside him. He was the soldier who had spoken to me before the fight, though now he wore a long silken tunic with three-quarter arms and over this a blue cloak embroidered with white crosses. His boots were studded with pearls.
‘Must be a White Christ man,’ Svein muttered through his beard. Though he was nothing like Father Egfrith, this one. He was a man of some standing.
‘We have brought you that which you won fairly by skill and bravery,’ Guido said, sweeping a palm towards the ironbound chest around which seventeen of his Long Shields stood sweating like a Norseman after a roll in a whore’s bed. Theo the Greek was amongst them, I noticed, and I was not surprised to see the glisten on his face, seeing as he had killed the man we now honoured with fire and drink.
‘One thousand, two hundred and fifty Roman libra,’ Guido said, which meant nothing to me, but I remembered Sigurd saying it was five men’s weight in silver, and that I understood well enough.
Sigurd nodded, eyeballing the two men sitting across from him on thick furs.
‘I said to come tomorrow,’ he said, pointing his mead horn accusingly. ‘Why have you come now? You can see we are burning a sword-brother. It is no good thing to be busy with scales and talk of money at such a time.’ The jarl’s eyes flickered in recognition of Theo, who stood with his head bowed like the other Long Shields.
Guido was about to reply but the smaller man stopped him with a hand. His beard, which glistened like wet otter, half hid a smile just as well greased.
‘Sigurd, please forgive my English. I learnt the tongue from a priest many years ago, but …’ he shrugged, ‘a blade soon rusts if it is never used.’ I suspected that the man’s English was better than Sigurd’s, and the jarl suspected that too, from the squinch of his eye, though he was not going to admit it. Instead he circled two fingers in a gesture telling his guest to spit out whatever was on his rusty tongue.
‘My name is Nikephoros and this is General Bardanes Tourkos.’
‘Not Guido then?’ Sigurd asked, to which the man we had known first as Red-Cloak, then Guido and now Bardanes shook his head and inclined it towards Nikephoros as though to warn Sigurd that his companion was not a man to be interrupted. Father Egfrith drifted over to us like a silent fart.
Nikephoros said: ‘I am Basileus Romaiôn. Emperor of the Romans and God’s anointed protector of the true faith.’ Wine sprayed from Sigurd’s lips and some of it struck Nikephoros’s face. Bardanes looked horrified, but Nikephoros dabbed at his cheek and beard with the long sleeve of his tunic, never taking his eyes off Sigurd. ‘You do not believe I am who I say I am?’ he asked.
‘Oh I believe you,’ Sigurd said, grinning at Olaf, ‘and did you know that Olaf here is the Christ-humping son of a dog they call the pope?’
Nikephoros shook his head. ‘That I do not believe, for I met with Pope Leo three days ago and he certainly looked nothing like this rough fellow.’
‘He’s got me, Sigurd!’ Olaf barked, slapping a tree-trunk thigh. ‘There’s no fooling this fox.’ We were all grinning like fools, except for Nikephoros and Bardanes, and his Long Shields who did not seem to understand English at all.
‘Besides,’ Sigurd said, ‘I have met the emperor. I have … traded with Karolus. We are old friends.’ His wolf grin gleamed in the fire’s glow.
‘The barbarian Karolus is not without power,’ Nikephoros admitted, ‘which is why Pope Leo needs him; indeed, why Leo placed the crown on his head. But my kingdom in the eas
t out-shines anything the west can boast. For five hundred years men have called it New Rome.’ He threw out his arms. ‘This city is a ruin, Sigurd, a shadow of what it once was. Ruins lie on ruins and all is tainted by unbelievers. Pope Leo is not strong enough to keep the wolves out of his fold.’ Sigurd hitched an eyebrow at that. ‘But Constantinople? My city is blinding in its glory.’
‘Constantinople?’ Sigurd said, scratching his cheek.
Nikephoros nodded, glancing at Bardanes. ‘I believe you men of the north know it by another name, Miklagard.’ He smiled at the simplicity of that name, for Miklagard means the Great City.
‘You are from Miklagard?’ Olaf growled, his eyelids heavy with wine.
Nikephoros and Bardanes shared a look of bewilderment, then Nikephoros gave an order to one of the Long Shields, who unslung a leather bag from his back and, approaching Nikephoros, unthreaded the straps from their silver clasps. Nikephoros climbed to his feet and the soldier knelt, offering the open bag like a hard-won prize.
What’s he got in there, Óðin’s frothing mead horn? Bram gnarred in my mind. I looked at his death fire and saw the Bear’s rib bones pulsing black and copper at the heart of the flames. Then an intake of breath brought me back and I saw what Nikephoros was clutching. My eyes fed on it. It was a crown of wrought gold, with a gold Christ cross on top and two more golden crosses dangling from strings of pearls either side of the brow band. But those White Christ things could be pulled off and tossed in the river or melted down and then it would be the kind of treasure a jarl would weigh anchor and go raiding for. It was the kind of treasure my mind had summoned before with the tale of Beowulf ringing in my ears. And in my mind it belonged to the hoard Beowulf found in the cave dwelling of Grendel’s mother. To look at the thing was to want it. The flame-licked gleam of it wrenched men from whores’ clutches and drew them over, their fire-bright faces hard as cliffs and their eyes wide and hungry.
Nikephoros placed the crown on his head and those crosses hung down below his short, oiled beard, and every man whose eyes drank the gold blaze of that crown imagined its weight on his own head. But none, not even Sigurd, would sit so comfortably beneath it as Nikephoros did, and I would have put money on the man’s belonging to the crown.
‘If you are the Emperor of Miklagard,’ Sigurd said, tearing his eyes from the whispering gold, ‘then what are you doing here?’
‘Aye.’ A thrum came from somewhere deep in Olaf’s throat. ‘If your city is as Freyja-fair as you say, why are you here with us and the stinking river rats?’ He slapped the back of his hand. ‘And the arse-biting flies,’ he added, wiping the mess on his breeks.
Beneath the golden band Nikephoros’s eyes narrowed. ‘Maybe it would be better if we came back tomorrow, Jarl Sigurd, when you have honoured your dead.’
Sigurd eyeballed Nikephoros, his head slightly cocked towards his right shoulder. ‘Bram liked a story as much as any man,’ he said. ‘But a story told with a dry tongue tends to be a dry story.’ He looked up at Wiglaf, who was half listening and half fondling a plump, grey-haired woman who looked old enough to be his mother. ‘More wine for our guests!’ Sigurd said, then he glanced at the ironbound chest that sat between Nikephoros and Bardanes. ‘And bring my scales.’
* * *
Nikephoros’s story was a good one, the kind that Norsemen like regardless of whether there’s a spit of truth in it, because it was full of betrayal and murder and feuds and fights. For the sake of the tale Sigurd said he was happy to believe that Nikephoros was indeed the Emperor of Miklagard, for, he said, men who have the most to lose often have the best stories to tell. And so it proved, because the basileus had lost his throne to a noble he had himself raised up, a man called Arsaber. Olaf pointed out helpfully that no one with any sense would trust a man whose name sounded so much like ‘arse’, but that was by the by. This Arsaber and his nest of vipers had turned on their master and it was only by the grace of God that the basileus escaped with his life. ‘The grace of God and General Bardanes’s unfailing sword arm,’ Nikephoros added, heaping high praise on the eagle-faced Bardanes, who accepted the flattery with both hands. It turned out that the emperor and some of his loyal men – those Long Shields that stood now amongst us – had fought their way to the royal berth, losing many to Arsaber’s spears, and by the hairs of their balls caught enough wind in their sail to outrun the traitors.
‘At least they didn’t have to row,’ Svein rumbled, that sore memory of our escape from the Franks never far below the surface for any of us. It seemed that Arsaber’s heart was not in the chase now that his hands were on the key to the emperor’s treasury, and this, Sigurd said, showed that for all his low cunning and treachery Arsaber was not a deep thinker after all.
‘If you steal a man’s hoard you had better steal his life, too, or you will sleep with one eye open for the rest of yours,’ the jarl put in, which stirred grunts and nods of agreement for the cold truth of it.
Nikephoros had pointed his prow towards the one city where a Christian emperor might hope to seek friends or money or men or all three. Rome. But the high lords who serve the White Christ – Karolus, Pope Leo and Nikephoros – though they share their God, would not be seen sharing a drinking horn, so we learnt from these Greeks.
‘I will take back my throne and see the traitors dead before anyone discovers this shameful betrayal,’ Nikephoros said. ‘I cannot have men look at my empire and see cracks in the stone,’ and by men I was guessing he meant Emperor Karolus and Pope Leo. ‘We have greater enemies than Arsaber and his rebels. The Moors have coveted my city for many years. They shall not have it while I live.’
Whilst this might have been the truth, we had heard that Nikephoros had withheld the tribute which the last empress, Irene, had promised Caliph Harun ar-Rashid. The Moors would have blood if they could not have gold.
‘Forgive me, lord, but I would ask a question if I may,’ Egfrith said, shuffling from the shadowed press of men, so that his weasel face was dyed red with flame. I saw Bardanes’s lip curl as though he did not think Egfrith worthy of speaking to his master, and this did not surprise me, for with his scruffy beard and straggled, untonsured head, Egfrith looked more like a farm thrall these days than a monk. But Nikephoros nodded, extending a hand as an invitation to speak. ‘These ungodly spectacles in the Amphitheatrum Flavium,’ Egfrith began, ‘these barbarous fights that have dragged Rome back to the dark, bloody years before her emperors found Christ …’ He let that word-rope hang, unsure, it seemed, how to tie it off.
‘The basileus does not answer to any man, only God,’ Bardanes lashed, but again Nikephoros stilled him with a gesture.
‘Seven weeks ago we came to Rome, our plan having grown over many days at sea,’ Nikephoros said, turning his gaze back to the man who counted – Sigurd. ‘General Bardanes became Lord Guido, a cloth merchant from Venice, and I became a common soldier in his guard.’ A smile touched Nikephoros’s lips at this part, which told me that he was a man who enjoyed a good Loki-scheme for all his love of the White Christ. There were Christians and Christians, it seemed to me. ‘We had money. Not enough to buy the soldiers we would need, but enough to upset the grain cart.’
‘Grain cart?’ Sigurd repeated, twirling the end of his beard round a ringed finger.
Nikephoros smiled, pleased with himself. ‘My men buzzed through the city, like bees from flower to flower, buying up every loaf of bread, every sack of grain.’ He glanced at Olaf. ‘If you want grain you have only to ask,’ he said, brows arched, his short black beard glistening wetly. ‘At night we sabotaged the aqueducts, sank rotting animal carcasses in the public fountains, lit fires here and there. We killed men’s pigs and oxen. Took animals from one man’s pen and put them in another, anything to encourage suspicion and feud.’
‘That’ll get men feuding all right,’ Olaf said appreciatively.
‘We did whatever we could think of, sowing seeds of disorder that began to sprout all across the city. After four weeks of this Rome
was like dry tinder waiting for a spark,’ Nikephoros went on. ‘You could smell trouble in the air.’
‘But not bread,’ Olaf muttered into his mead horn. I had smelt that trouble myself and seen the burnt lean-tos and fountains guarded by armed men.
Bardanes glared at Uncle but the Norseman simply dragged his forearm across his bushy beard and flapped a hand at the Emperor of Miklagard to continue.
This Nikephoros has patience, I thought, and patience can make a man a dangerous enemy, which was another reason why Arsaber should have tried harder to catch Nikephoros and kill him before making himself a nest in the man’s throne.
‘Lord Guido,’ the basileus went on, fox-smiling, ‘secured an audience with Pope Leo. Armed mobs were roaming the streets. Murder and theft were rife. The poor blamed the rich and the rich blamed Pope Leo.’
‘The pope has soldiers,’ Sigurd said, as though that should be enough.
‘He has some,’ Nikephoros said, ‘but not enough to keep the peace. He needed them to guard his palace and his churches.’
‘Like all rich men Pope Leo wants to stay rich,’ Bardanes took up at a nod from his lord. ‘He sent for Karolus of course, but the Frankish king is up to his elbows in heathen blood and meanwhile the people of Rome are battering down Leo’s door.’ Bardanes sipped at his wine, more for show, I felt, than because he enjoyed it. ‘I gave Leo what he needed.’
What Pope Leo needed was peace in Rome. And Lord Guido the cloth trader from Venice sold him the idea of peace steeped in blood. He suggested that if the people of Rome could be distracted, they would forget about their hungry bellies. Give them a reason to stay off the streets and, better still, give them the chance to make money. The idea of staging fights in the Amphitheatrum Flavium had appalled and disgusted Pope Leo. He had raged at the iniquity of the idea, the foulness of letting the arena be used for spectacles of death as it had been in Rome’s past. But Lord Guido had been persuasive. Let a few willing fighters die in the arena and keep the good people of Rome safe on the streets, he had said. Four weeks was all he would need, Guido assured Pope Leo, by which time Karolus would be here with enough soldiers to restore order.
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