by Robert Low
‘Another one gone,’ Starkad observed, caressing the hilt of the sabre as if it was a woman’s thigh. ‘If this goes on, there won’t be enough of you left to bother anyone.’
‘You seem a little diminished yourself, Starkad,’ I launched back at him, trying not to look at his fingers tracing the runes I had scratched on the hilt. ‘But we gave your dead on Patmos a decent send-off, in the old style, with the Sarakenoi who killed them at their feet. Of course, we took all they had as well.’
Starkad twitched a smile. ‘Soon the Strategos will have word from Leo Balantes on Cyprus,’ he snarled. ‘Then it may be that we will have it all back and more.’
‘Perhaps the Basileus will have word before that,’ I answered sweetly. ‘I am sure he knows Choniates’ finest hand in a letter that mentions your name and a package that will have your eyes out, you and all your crew.’
There was muttering behind him at that, but he ignored it and forced a smile. ‘There is no need for this,’ he said. ‘My quarrel is not with you and Jarl Brand could be persuaded to help deflect any blow at you from Cyprus. We should be oarmates, for I understand you have as little regard for the Hammaburg monk as I do. I did not know this before, so perhaps we were pulling oars on the wrong stroke. I am prepared to overlook the lie you told about the monk coming to Serkland, for I have since discovered it was true – though you did not know that.’
I tried not to blink at that one; he had a deal of clever, had Starkad, and ways of weaselling out the truth that knocked you off balance.
‘Hand back that sword you stole,’ I said, which was all I could think of.
He cocked his head like a curious bird. ‘You put great store by this blade,’ he mused thoughtfully. ‘A good blade and valuable, but still …’
‘Will you trade?’ I asked and he did not need to ask for what. He laughed instead.
‘Why should I? Before long I will have what you took on Cyprus – and if the Greeks don’t gather you up and blind you for it, then I will come for you myself. I have the protection of Jarl Brand, remember; you have no one.’
‘Does Jarl Brand know you are King Harald’s man?’ I asked him and saw the blood in his eye at that. ‘What will Bluetooth think of you swearing also to Jarl Brand? You take an oath too lightly to be now swearing peace to us.’
‘For all that,’ he answered thickly, ‘peace is what I offer.’
I could not turn round, but I knew the eyes were skewering me and two of the deepest daggers in my shoulder blades belonged to Botolf. Deeper still were the eyes of those who could not see, kept in the dark and shackled. The weight of the invisible jarl torc, that other rune serpent round my neck, was crushing.
‘Peace?’ I replied sharply and paused. ‘Why? Some of you are still alive.’
There were rumbling chuckles at that from behind me and Starkad whirled in a flare of red cloak and stalked off while the ranks of his men closed round him, looking darkly at us as they went.
The Oathsworn came round me, banging my shoulders and laughing. Botolf, rumbling with pleasure like some giant’s cat, announced that he had seldom heard as gold-browed an exchange as that and others agreed. I did, too, when my knees stopped twitching. I thanked the gods for baggy Rus breeks.
‘Well,’ growled Finn, ‘that settles matters. He will not trade, so we will have to take it from him.’
Back at the wadmal camp, hunkered round the pitfire and watching the black feathers of Ivar’s fire thread the sky, Kvasir and Finn, whom I had appointed battle captains, agreed that the only thing left to do was seek out Starkad and fight him. What no one had an answer to was the problem of what to do with the container, for Starkad was right in that: as soon as he arrived, Red Boots would swoop on us.
‘We could find out where Starkad sleeps and take him at night. That way we will offset his numbers a little,’ Radoslav declared.
Finn curled a lip at him. ‘At night? That would mean it was murder and not red war.’
I explained it to Radoslav. Any killing done in the night was considered murder, even if we decently covered the body and immediately reported the matter.
‘Hardly matters,’ muttered Kvasir. ‘Jarl Brand will have our heads, even if we win. Even if only one man is left standing, he will have his head.’
I was sure that man would be either Finn or Kvasir, but was equally sure that it would not be a Dane. The Danes knew the sabre was valuable and why and had sworn our Oath, same as everyone else, but I still did not feel they would charge into a sure-death fight over it. The chance for unimaginable wealth was lure enough to keep them with me – that and the Oath they swore – but this? This was something else entirely.
There was other talk, too, as Finn prepared mahshi, an Arab pot with lamb, onion, pepper, coriander, cinnamon, saffron and other things, including murri naqi, a seasoning oil made from fermented barley. And this from a man who had learned the names of those spices only a few weeks ago.
While we watched with interest and drooled, we spoke of Red Boots and the Roman army he was bringing. Few of us could understand what riches or benefit could be got from conquering a land as dun-coloured as this – especially as this was the latest of many wars between the Great City and the Sarakenoi.
‘I spoke with that soldier, Zifus,’ Brother John declared, sniffing Finn’s pot appreciatively. ‘He told me that the Basileus has promised God to bring His Word to the heathens. This is a Holy War.’
I knew all our wars were blessed by the gods of the North, who supported one side or the other depending on how well disposed they were to your offerings. I did not know what the Greeks meant by Holy War, but wanted no part of it. I learned – too late – that it meant a land-ravager war, where everyone was killed and everything burned. Since the Sarakenoi preached the same, it meant a wasteland, where even hope was murdered.
We were drooling at the smell of Finn’s cooking when up strolled Svala, as silencing to the talk as a hand on your mouth. She looked round us all, almost sadly, and I was the only one who met her eye, though I was sweating as I did so.
Kleggi the Dane opened his mouth to offer something witty, but she looked at him and he snapped it shut. Short Eldgrim glared at her, but while his scarred face carried no fears for the likes of her, no one dared even move to ward against evil as she crossed and hunkered down beside me, dressed simply now, her hair in coiled braids. I had never seen these hard men so cowed.
‘Now you know,’ she said, ‘and I am sad for it, since you seem afraid of me.’
‘You are the third volva I have met,’ I said, which widened her eyes, since most men steered a clear course away from even one. ‘Only one of them did me any good and even that was a blade that cut both ways.’
She pursed her lips at that. ‘What harm have I done you?’
‘None,’ I told her. ‘Yet. Nor have you done me any good. Nor should you have killed the raven.’
‘He should not have set it to spy,’ she answered sharply.
‘Odin will not be pleased,’ I pointed out, ‘but you have more to fear now from Sighvat, I am thinking.’
‘Freyja will keep One Eye away,’ Svala said confidently, ‘and your Sighvat as a worker of seidr cannot match two women such as us.’
I sighed, for talking to her was like feeling a storm cloud rise when you are in an open boat. The pitch and toss of it was made all the worse for what had been before.
‘I want no quarrels between Skarpheddin’s mother, you, me or Sighvat,’ I replied. ‘But you should stay away from all of us.’
‘You?’
‘Especially me,’ I snapped.
She straightened, dusting her knees, then looked at me, long and slow. ‘This Hild,’ she said, while ice crept down my veins. ‘I have seen her, dark and fetched in the night. She has a sword and you had its twin, once.’
I was frozen, tongue-cloven. Had she seen this, out there in the Other – or heard me mutter this while I dreamed?
She smiled. ‘I have gifts. Listen, then I wil
l trouble you no more. The first thing to say is that Skarpheddin trusts his mother’s power – and so he should. Thorhalla has promised him that you will reveal the secret of your treasure hoard and it would go easier if you just spoke it to him with no trouble. Otherwise, he may do something … ill.
‘The second is that you should get the sword from Starkad, for it is yours by right.’
I swallowed the clump of dry dust in my throat, but I was angry with her, this slip of a girl who thought she could make cows out of the Oathsworn.
‘Witch gifts come in threes,’ I croaked, which was daring, but I was young and not so convinced that her powers were more to do with keen watching than anything Other.
Her smile, though, was sweet as rumman fruit.
‘I know the secret of Fatty Breeks,’ she said.
NINE
The heat of the day was leaching out of the dusty scrub, but the sky was dying in flame to the west where the hills rolled, grey-blue. Olive trees were pale purple in the twilight, their leaves black, while the air was arid with a dusty, woody smell, the ash-bite of fires springing up like a field of red blossoms.
Cloaked over it all was the great, crushing stink of an army, a throat-catcher made of leather, iron, horses, an acrid pinch of sweat and the thin, high smell of fear.
I had never seen anything like this, nor ever would again. I had thought Red Boots was bringing up a few more hundreds of men, no more, but this was Miklagard, the Great City, and the army around Antioch was a knarr on the ocean of men who came up from Tarsus.
We saw them first as a cloud to the north, rising up like a pale brown cloak over Antioch, and Brother John started to order us to lash down the wadmal tents, for he had seen such sweeping sandstorms further south, in the desert around the Sea of the Dead. But I had seen one, too, out on the steppe, and knew it was no sandstorm. It was the dust kicked up by the army of the Strategos John the Armenian, favourite of the Basileus and nicknamed Tzimisces – Red Boots.
As with Sarkel’s siege, the scholars of the Great City sought me out later, when I was a trader of note. One was Leo, who was close to my own age, but while I stood in the ranks at Antioch, he hunkered on his knees back in Constantinople learning the ways of the Christ religion. In later days, as he scratched out his saga tales – as monks do – they knew him as Leo the Deacon.
By then, all that we had done had been lost and John Tzimisces’ battle at Aleppo was a hero-tale to the Romans of the Great City. Leo, sleekit as a fox though he was, once went with Basil the second of that name and the army when it was cut to pieces by the Bulgars years after these events and barely escaped with his life, so he knew a thing or two about armies.
He wanted me to tell what I knew of the fight at Aleppo, to add to the accounts he had from others, and I did so, as far as I was able. I liked Leo, so I did not tell him he had no understanding of us Norsemen at all – he called us ‘Tauroskythians’, as if we’d all come from the steppes north of the Dark Sea.
I told him what I knew, which was little enough and shrouded in a golden haze of dust, but he didn’t want to hear that. In the end, he told me more than I gave him and we agreed it was the confusion between the Miklagard Handshake and how Norsemen fight bear that had cost us the victory. The first wanted to clasp the enemy with one hand and stab them with the dagger they could not see, while the second wanted to rush in and kill the beast before being crushed in a deadly embrace.
Forty-seven thousand men marched from Antioch a week after Red Boots arrived – and there were more, sweeping through the land known as the Jezira, all the way across the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the north, before turning south and then west again, to come up behind Aleppo. It was a great raid, to drag off the Hamdanids and their allies, so that Red Boots could crush Aleppo and take all that part of Serkland known as Syria.
When we eventually met the Sarakenoi our army was formed up 2,700 yards long and in two lines. The jarl-men were in the front line, which was all scutatoi, the Great City’s footsoldiers with their huge shields. The Norse were on the right and on the right of the right the Oathsworn. The end of the line.
I did not tell Leo the Deacon that we had come there reluctantly, that we had been too fastened by the chance to kill and loot Starkad to get away before the storm of war swept us up.
Not so Starkad, who broke his oath to Jarl Brand and vanished into the dust haze. By the time we discovered this, it was too late for us to leave without drawing to ourselves attention of the worst sort. So we joined Red Boots’s ranks for the battle we knew was planned and cursed both ourselves and Starkad for being so snared in a fight none of us wanted.
The Sarakenoi came with horsemen heavy with mail and banded leather, the ragged-arsed foot they called Dailami, desert horsemen called Bedu, who swooped like swallows in and out of the dust, and the Hamdanid horsemen, who still flew the black banners of the Abbasids even though they had rebelled against them. There were even Turks from Baghdad, where the generals permitted the Abbasids to rule in name only.
They overlapped our lines by a mile either side – which was why it all went wrong, of course. The Great City’s army was used to this, had a second line to take care of it, but we didn’t know that. All we saw were too many enemies.
Skarpheddin had already decided on our fighting plan, which was the one we usually used. We would bang loudly on our shields and pour scorn on the size of their balls, then we would run at them, howling like wolves. Not that Finn or I, or any of the Oathsworn, knew much of even this grand plan. The army marched, with all 47,000 soldiers, 15,000 mules, camels and oxen and 1,000 carts with the bits and pieces of the artillery engines, the two jarls and all their men – and the Oathsworn, scowling and angry about it, for this was no fight we wanted to be in.
The women and children stayed in their camps around Antioch, save those few who would not abandon their men, and Gizur and four of my men, the Goat Boy with them, went back to the Elk to watch it.
Radoslav had volunteered to stay, too, at which Finn had said nothing, though his look was an entire saga poem on its own. The big Slav, seeing the scorn, had shrugged and come with us, but if Surt, the Norn-sister of What May Be, had kindly drawn it all out for us in the sand, we would probably have agreed with Radoslav and all of us would have quit the army then and there and gone to Fatty Breeks.
Fateh Baariq. Which meant Shining Conqueror in the Saracen tongue. But Svala only told me that as we clattered out in the ranks of Skarpheddin’s men, too late to slip away unnoticed. Her smile was malicious and I turned my back on it and tramped into the dust; it only came to me later that she had also told Starkad this earlier, which had made him start after Martin.
‘Well,’ argued Botolf, scowling, when, at the end of that first day’s march, we told him what we had found. ‘I don’t speak their cat-yowl of a tongue. It sounded different to me. And I was being dragged in chains at the time.’
I had soothed him over it, for we knew now where our oarmates were: in the Fateh Baariq mine, east and north of Aleppo, in a place called Afrin. That left us with a new problem: how to get there. It was miles from the shield of the army, in country we did not know and seething like a maggoty corpse with Sarakenoi.
I felt the weight of the jarl torc, anvil-heavy. It was a long way and in the lands of the enemy.
‘It is a long way and in the lands of the enemy,’ Radoslav then declared moodily, making me twitch and wonder if he could read minds, too. ‘We would need our own army,’ he added pointedly. ‘If we had a hoard of silver we could afford one.’
Kvasir and Finn grunted and said nothing, so Radoslav, seeing he was gaining nothing, rose and went elsewhere.
‘He is greed-sick, that one,’ growled Finn.
‘He has lost his boat,’ Kvasir pointed out, but Finn hawked and spat into the fire. That night, Radoslav vanished from our ranks, which everyone thought was a nithing thing for him to do.
‘He has all that a warrior needs …’ Kvasir growled wryly next day, ‘e
xcept the balls.’
I wondered more on it, but was not sure what Radoslav was doing. Perhaps he was just ducking out of the fight, though I did not think much of that explanation. Perhaps he had gone back to steal the container from my sea-chest: Odin luck to him if he crept on board past the men I had left to guard it. Nor did it matter much if he succeeded; the contents were not pearls and, since Starkad would not trade, worthless now. Worse than worthless, since they still marked us all for blinding and death by the conspirators.
Still, it nagged me … and left me hollow, too, for I had liked the big, bluff Slav who had, after all, saved my life.
Sighvat came up into this and sat beside me, his raven as silent and brooding as my thoughts. ‘I heard the girl came to you,’ he said and I shot him a warning glance, for I wanted no one poking a finger in that wound.
He nodded, tickling the beak of the raven. ‘She is Sami,’ he added, ‘from the Pite tribe in Halogaland. Her true name is Njávesheatne, which means Sun Daughter in their tongue.’
A Sami from the north of Norway. Kvasir made a warding sign, Finn spat in the fire and I felt my skin crawl. The Sami, the Reindeer People, were older than time, it was said, and full of stranger magic even than the seidr. They worshipped a troll goddess, Thorgerthr, who used seidr to call down thunder like Asa-Thor himself.
‘How do you know this?’ I asked.
Sighvat grinned. ‘A bird told me,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps it was a bee.’
Finn rolled his eyes and snorted. ‘A bee. Honeyed words, were they?’
Sighvat smiled quietly. ‘Bees have many messages, Horsehead. If one flies into your hall it is a sign of great good luck, or of the arrival of a stranger; however, the luck will only hold if the bee is allowed to either stay or go of its own accord.
‘A bee landing on your hand means money, on the head means a rise to greatness. They will sting those who curse in front of them and those who are adulterers or unchaste – so, if you want a good wife, have her walk through a swarm and if she is stung, she’ll be no virgin.’
