Raven

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Utinam barbari spatium proprium tuum invadant!’ he called.

  ‘Don’t waste your prayers on those goat-fuckers,’ I said, eyeballing the Greeks as we cleared their stern.

  ‘Prayers?’ Egfrith said. ‘I told them may barbarians invade their personal space!’ And this made us laugh as we drew into the great harbour which was noisy with shrieking gulls, creaking boats and men calling from ship to ship. What was even funnier was that we had thought to raid Miklagard with less than fifty men and I said so, at which Sigurd shook his head bewildered, glaring up at the enormous dawn-stained harbour walls.

  ‘You could not do it with five hundred men,’ he said and that was true enough.

  The closer we came the larger Miklagard grew. It seemed to swell, rising into the sky before our eyes, so that I suddenly knew how an insect must feel when it looks up at a king’s hall. You cannot imagine such a wonder, all glitter and gleam and whitewashed brilliance blazing beneath the pink-blushed morning light. All rolling off its seven hills on that fat thumb peninsula thrust into the sea. Tendrils of smoke from countless hearthfires coiled and wove together, drifting upwards to swell the huge filthy brown pall hanging over the heights.

  We were amongst smaller craft now that we were so close to the cliff-face that was the harbour wall rising up from the sea. Tenders ferried crews out to larger vessels and skiffs carried food and other goods from place to place along the waterfront and everywhere was chaos. Men were calling to us from the quayside and from several boats, fighting to get our attention with waving arms and smiles, so that I grudgingly accepted that we were lucky to have Theo with us, for a few Greek words from him was enough to deflect their offers of help and trade on to others. On we went, slowly now because there was not much wind in the lee of that huge wall and what there was seemed to swirl in all directions, so that after a while old Silver Hair muttered angrily, wriggled between us and thrust his oars into the water. But his spindly arms were about as useful as throwing a drowning man both ends of a rope, said Sigurd, and so I took the oars off the old man and rowed us the rest of the way, which was harder than pulling an oar on Serpent.

  Several times I had to use an oar to push other craft away, for as we drew nearer to one of the many thronging mooring places, the boats became thicker than flies on dung.

  ‘We could walk to the shore from here without getting our boots wet,’ Black Floki suggested only half in jest. But someone was bound to take offence at us tramping across their boat to get ashore and even Floki had to admit that a fight would probably not help our chances of entering the city unnoticed. Theo pointed to a narrow gap at the wharf between two larger fishing boats and I aimed for it, though before I had pulled three strokes a rope slapped the inside of the hull, thrown by a boy on the dock. Theo pulled us in and we clambered ashore but not until the Greek had threatened the fisherman with some or other horrible death if he told anyone about having seen the Basileus alive.

  ‘He could have just paid the poor man,’ Egfrith said unhappily. ‘We took his day’s catch after all, and made him come all this way.’

  Sigurd slapped the monk’s back, making Egfrith wince, then said: ‘And he’d have taken the coin to the nearest tavern, drunk like a jarl at Yuletide and told anyone who would listen that he now supplied fish to the emperor himself.’ Which was all true of course. Though Theo did flick a small coin at the boy who had thrown us the rope and that didn’t really seem fair on old Silver Hair.

  The wall was the height of ten men, a huge curtain of red stone which we followed east, half gazing up at its heights and half watching the chaos out in the harbour. Armed men in red cloaks collected harbour taxes from ship captains. Boys ran up and down, shrieking and making deals and offering themselves as guides to new arrivals. Barrels, chests, huge clay storage jars and boxes were piled everywhere along the wharf’s edge and the air was thick with the yells of buyers and sellers and captains and crewmen. Every few steps brought a different food smell to my nose: meat, onions, garlic, spices, and we were not even inside the city yet. But there was also the foul stink of shit and slops and refuse of all kinds, which wafted up from the thickly scummed water.

  Then we came to a seething throng of folk before one of the massive gates in the red wall, all eager to gain entry to Miklagard. Spear tips glinted in the morning sunlight, so that we knew there were soldiers manning the gate, checking who was entering the city. I looked down at my hands, noting how brown my skin was now after sailing the southern sea road. Yet we would still not pass for Greeks, not least because Sigurd’s hair was as gold as Cynethryth’s and most of the Greeks I had seen had black hair. Then there were our scars and our bulk, for the Greeks were certainly smaller than us on the whole. I was thinking all this when Black Floki stopped us by clasping Sigurd’s shoulder, so that the jarl turned to him, the crowds flowing round us like a stream round a boulder.

  ‘An old one-eyed crone with a skull full of spiders would know that we are warriors,’ Floki said, ‘and know too that we do not follow the tortured god, come to that.’

  ‘He is right, Sigurd,’ I said, ‘they will not like us any more than the Franks did.’

  ‘We’re in the Greek’s hands now,’ Sigurd said. ‘We are pieces on his tafl board until we know more about this place.’ I glanced round and was just about to ask where Theo was anyway, when he suddenly appeared, that chafing half smile on his face and a bulging sack over his shoulder. Behind him through the crowd I saw two poorly dressed merchants counting coins and grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘What game is he playing now?’ I grumbled, hating the idea that we might have to be grateful to Bram’s killer for getting us into the city.

  Which is what he did. The guards peered into the sack and one of them shook his head wearily, took the money Theo offered and waved us all through as easy as that. It was only once we were inside the gate that I got a look at what had bought our entry. Theo thrust a hand into his sack and pulled something out. It was a trinket made of whitewashed clay – a dome the size of a man’s fist with a flat bottom and a Christ cross set on the top.

  ‘What in Heimdall’s hairy arse is that?’ Sigurd asked, instinctively turning to Father Egfrith because the object had everything of the White Christ about it. But it was Theo who gave us our answer. He pointed west and we turned to see, up on one of Miklagard’s hills and nestled amongst other domes, tiled roofs and palaces, a giant version of what the Greek held in his hand.

  ‘It’s a White Christ church for ants,’ Black Floki spat, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Even the insects cannot escape this nailed god.’

  ‘Pilgrims must surely buy such things,’ Egfrith said, grinning as he gazed up at the miracle that was the Golden City. ‘They take them home with them to remind them of their time within the shining city.’ Theo’s sack was full of the things, all exactly the same as each other.

  ‘There must be fifty of the things in there,’ Floki said.

  ‘Whoever pays good money for something like that must have a hole in his skull leaking all the sense he was born with,’ I said and both Sigurd and Floki nodded in agreement with that, though Egfrith seemed rather taken with the things for some reason I could not fathom.

  The city we now entered reminded me of Rome, except that Miklagard had an overwhelming sense of order about it whereas Rome had been twisted into many shapes by many hands and ravaged by time.

  The wide street was made of small square stones all the same size and sunk into the ground to create a solid surface that meant your boots wouldn’t become clumps of mud. Not that there was any mud. I even saw boys spading horse dung into sacks, which I pointed out to Floki who shook his head in wonder at it all. But the street was clotted with people, many of whom looked as awestruck by the place as we were, so that I thought we could have been a family of slobbering trolls and no one would have noticed us.

  We turned into a narrower side street that was much quieter where I could gather my swimming thoughts together and sift them into
order. Even this street was lined with countless statues of gleaming white stone and all of them the size of living men, which to our eyes was very strange, as though some seidr spell had turned them all to stone where they stood.

  For a time we simply watched the ebb and flow of the crowds and perhaps would have stood there jaw-slack all day if Theo had not grown bored with waiting and stalked off. We looked at each other and Sigurd shrugged, so we followed Theo wherever he might take us. Which was deeper into the city. We joined the murmuring tide of hundreds of folk with skin more or less sun-blackened, who dressed in every colour of Bifröst. We gave ourselves over to wonder and confusion in equal measure as we gazed at endless rows of stone dwellings three times the height of a jarl’s hall, with windholes at several levels which were covered with glass! Many of the dwellings had platforms which hung out over the street and from whose edges flowers and plants cascaded, besieged by bees. Other streets shot off in all directions lined with even taller buildings, though many of these were not richly adorned but shabby and clearly built so that several families could live one atop the other. They stood cheek by jowl with rich churches, palaces and trade houses, making me think of those tall white mushrooms that can spring up overnight.

  I had half expected armed men on the streets ready to stamp on any trouble, for the emperor had been deposed and new hands were on the reins. But Egfrith explained that in such a city as Constantinople life goes on as normal no matter who is calling himself emperor. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘can stand in the way of greed, and even a usurper knows that trade must flow on like a river. Nothing must stop his subjects from making money.’ He wriggled through the press to keep up with us. ‘There is twice the wealth here that there is in Rome!’ he went on. ‘See what man can achieve, Sigurd, when he lives within the true faith under the protection of a God-fearing prince.’ I had thought the monk had given up trying to make a Christ man out of Sigurd, but it seemed the Great City had renewed him. Which was worth a muttered curse or two by my reckoning.

  ‘The White Christ followers in your land still live in shit, monk,’ Sigurd replied, and if Egfrith had an answer for that I did not hear what it was for I was muscling through the throng to get to a wine-seller who stood in the shade of a tree with a vast green canopy. In the time it takes to drain a horn of good mead we were on our third cup of watered wine, thanks to Theo’s Greek coin. It was sweet and delicious and it sluiced the dry sting of sea salt from our throats, making us grin like gormless fools.

  ‘Aah, now I can think straight,’ Sigurd announced with a smile, dragging a palm across his lips. I blinked at that.

  ‘I do not think straight thinking is what is needed in Miklagard,’ I said, lifting an eyebrow. Black Floki and Sigurd shared a look, then the jarl turned back to me and his smile stretched into a grin.

  ‘That is well said, young Raven,’ he said, for though we had only just arrived in Miklagard, it was already clear as new ice that there was nothing straightforward about the city.

  * * *

  We walked east along a wide tree-lined street, the sun fully risen now, so that it squashed us with strength-sapping heat. Yet even the wine sweat burning our eyes could not stop us gawking. Every house looked as if it could belong to the emperor. Each was set within its own abundance of trees and flowers and protected by a wall twice a man’s height. The wooden doors in these walls were elaborately carved and so huge that Thór himself could have staggered through drunk and swinging his hammer and still not scuffed the edges. The houses themselves boasted painted lintels and some even had statues standing guard on ledges either side of the windholes or peering down on us mortals from flat, flower-strewn roofs.

  On we went, passing fountains flowing with cool, clear water and bridges set upon tall columns, which we soon learnt carried not people but water to every part of the city. We had seen similar things in Rome but there you would see a ruin next to a palace, or a hovel up against a church. Here almost everything looked as though its purpose was to impress and Sigurd said as much. ‘Where we are from a rich jarl may have a hall, a good ship or two and Baldr-beautiful war gear. Then he is less only than a king. But here it seems that everyone is as rich as a jarl. Richer!’

  ‘It is easy to see why this Arsaber wanted the city for himself,’ Black Floki said as though he appreciated the traitor’s silver-lust.

  ‘And why Nikephoros wants it back,’ I said, cuffing sweat from my eyes as we reached the top of a church-crowned hill on which a whisper of breeze brought a welcome respite from the oppressive heat. With the gust came the sweet scent of flowers and honey. Egfrith hurried over to the church, which was so bright white I could barely look at it, then he rapped on the door. When I next looked over he had disappeared inside. The rest of us were gazing down to the east. Below, spreading out from the foot of the hill, was the largest market we had ever seen. The hum of thousands floated up to us, sounding like the sea, or as Sigurd said a distant battle, as merchants and customers traded word blows amongst a vast tapestry of rich-coloured canopies. It was like a seething ocean and far more tumultuous than the real sea into which the peninsula stretched a little further east. But before your eyes got to the huge curtain wall with its many soaring towers, they fell upon the place Nikephoros had tasked Theo with showing us – the Great Palace. It sat behind an enormous blade-shaped arena on the south-eastern edge of the peninsula. Further north, set upon a low hill, was the biggest White Christ church I had ever seen, whose roof was the same shape as the blaumen’s church we had named Gerd’s Tit, but this roof was all blazing gold and had a cross on the top. As for the palace itself, it seemed to be a sprawl of rounded roofs and buildings – some white, some painted red but all grander and more richly adorned than anything we had seen in Frankia or even in Rome.

  ‘Basileus … emperor. Live here,’ Theo said, nodding down at the palace. Black Floki muttered that he had gathered that much for himself, but then the Greek warrior seemed to point beyond the palace and at first I thought he was pointing at the sea or one of the many craft gliding across it.

  ‘Where’s the damned monk when we need him?’ Sigurd snarled.

  ‘He means that building which is detached from the main complex,’ I said, squinting into the shimmering midday glare.

  Theo spat a stream of words of which I only caught one, which was ‘Arsaber’, though the hate smeared across his brown face said more in its own way.

  ‘My Greek is, I’m sorry to say, very poor,’ Egfrith said, appearing suddenly, ‘but I think Theophilos is trying to tell you that the traitor Arsaber prefers to live in the Bucoleon Palace. Which is that grand-looking building on the shore. Do you see it? The one incorporated into the harbour walls.’

  ‘I see it, monk,’ Sigurd said, clenching his jaw as he took his golden hair in two hands and tied it back with a leather thong. ‘Now, Raven, tell Egfrith why this Arsaber is an arse-witted fool,’ he said, the twist of a grin threatening his salt-cracked lips.

  I glanced at Floki, who nodded encouragingly because he knew the answer was sitting on my tongue.

  I felt the warm air across my teeth. ‘He is a fool because he lives a spear’s throw from the breakers,’ I said, eyeballing Egfrith. ‘And we are wolves of the sea.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THAT NIGHT WE SLEPT IN A THUNDEROUSLY NOISY TAVERN ON THE waterfront outside the harbour wall. It was a stinking place choked with whores and drunks, rough men from the port who could afford the wine there because most of it they had pilfered from their own cargoes and sold cheaply to the tavern owners. As soon as goods passed through one of the city gates their price tripled, which was for two main reasons as I understood it from Theo through Egfrith’s rough translating. Firstly, the merchants had to cover the tax imposed on them for the pleasure of selling their goods within the Great City, and secondly because Miklagard’s inhabitants were so rich they would pay stupid prices just because they could.

  But we weren’t there for the cheap wine, though we had plenty
of it. We had come for the blather and by the time I was raging drunk and staggering like a dancing bear I had to admit a grudging respect for Theo because he’d gathered two earfuls of it and told us more besides. It turned out that Staurakios was not only Basileus Nikephoros’s son, he was co-emperor of the eastern Roman Empire, crowned less than two years previously by Nikephoros himself.

  ‘I can’t fathom why Nikephoros made no mention of this,’ Black Floki slurred, chewing the words then belching loudly enough to wake the dead.

  ‘I can,’ Sigurd said, swallowing. ‘I might have doubted his ability to get his hands on the silver he’s going to owe us if I had known there was another emperor with keys to the hoard.’

  This seemed as good an explanation as any to me and even Floki admitted as much with another belch.

  ‘Arsaber captured Staurakios as he made his move on the throne,’ Egfrith explained as Theo quenched his tongue and eyeballed the room. ‘Albeit they seem to be treating Staurakios well so as not to upset the other lords of Miklagard or provoke plots against Arsaber. He is guarded day and night and kept somewhere, no one seems to know where exactly, in the Great Palace. But …’ a grin stole on to the monk’s face at this bit, ‘he is permitted to pray to God once a day in the church of the Holy Wisdom, which the Greeks call Hagia Sophia.’ Sigurd’s eyes lit up at this. ‘By freeing Staurakios,’ Egfrith went on, ‘we would rob Arsaber of that leverage.’

  In my head I heard Bram say that sounded easy enough. Cut up the guards and take the son, he growled. But I knew it would not be that easy, for we could never get enough armed men inside the city, never mind getting out again. Also, if we made a proper fight of it Arsaber would know to expect an attack and would plant a forest of spears around himself.

  ‘We’ll go to this Christ church tomorrow,’ Sigurd said, scrubbing his beard as though hoping a scheme might jump out of it. ‘If there is a chance to do it then – take the boy quietly – we will. But if not, we will get a better look at the problem.’ You have never seen two more different faces then than Father Egfrith’s and Black Floki’s, both of them sculpted by the same prospect: of visiting the biggest god house in Miklagard.