by Robert Low
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 suprema 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 hissed 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 myelf 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 redbrown, 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 ‘Varangii’, 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, madeyed 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 madeyed 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 the 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.’
Finn shook his head. ‘Not the one I killed. He was sword-calloused, for sure – a Greek or a Bulgar by the way he cursed. Strong, too, for a man on melons and beans.’
Then Brother John turned over the bones in the midden-pit and came up with a skull that was no animal and the sickening rush of it came over me. Not just melons and beans. Meat. In a land where we had seen not so much as a lizard.
We found the larder where you’d expect to find it … underground, in the cool. They could have wrapped the cuts better, in linen to keep the flies off, for some of the meat we came across was already too far blown to eat.
Not that they needed to. They had come across a way of keeping their meat fresher, longer: they cut off what they needed from the living, then tied off the wounds to prevent them bleeding to death. When we came across four men, with arms and legs missing, hung up on hooks through their shoulder blades, I was near to hoiking and Finn wanted to hunt down the ones we had seen fleeing to the hills.
Three of the four were dead. The fourth was barely alive – and was known to us. Finn knew him as Godwin, a Christ-sworn Saxon from the Danelaw, and called him by the name everyone had used: Puttoc, a Saxon word which, it seemed, meant ‘buzzard’, on account of his great beaked nose. We knew him because he was one of Starkad’s men, had stood and scowled darkly at his master’s back when we had exchanged words over Ivar’s pyre.
After we’d cut him out of the hanging hooks – more meat off him, not that it mattered, since he would not live more than a day – he lay in the cool dark of that stinking place and clawed his one remaining hand on Sighvat’s sleeve. The other arm was off just below the shoulder and tied with blood-crusted thongs.
‘Help me,’ he hissed and Sighvat leaped up and backward as if he had been stabbed, which caused us some concern. Brother John moved in, knelt and began the low, ritual drone that would call Godwin to his Christ-god and we gathered in that throat-catching gloom and listened to his confession, as harsh a sagatale as any Skallagrimsson himself came up with.
Sighvat, after a moment of sitting, silent and clasped and rocking, got up and went outside. I did not notice at the time, too engrossed in what spilled from Godwin’s crusted mouth.
Godwin was one of Starkad’s crew, so that relentless hound had been here. That probably meant Martin the monk had come this way and the wyrd of it rocked me back on my heels, for it seemed the Norns wove our threads in and out like a cat’s cradle. For all we wanted Starkad dead, we generally agreed that he was a grim and questing hound, every bit as good as his reputation. I hoped the monk was stew, but I doubted it; he could wriggle out of a closed cauldron, that one.
The mine guards, Godwin said, in a voice like the whisper of a moth wing, had run off, in groups and singly, until the prisoners had broken their shackles and freed themselves – by which time, of course, they were already starving. Godwin thought that some of the slaves were former soldiers from the Great City and they had taken over, raiding out to this Aindara for food, chasing off the villagers in the process. Then that source had run out, too, and the ex-slaves had turned on their own.
At this point, Godwin had arrived with Starkad and his men, hungry and thirsting. The leader of the freed prisoners, the one the Greeks called Pelekanos and the Sarakenoi called Qalb al-Kuhl, had attacked at once, so that many on both sides were killed and Starkad had been forced to flee with what remained of his men. It was here that Godwin had been taken prisoner and kept for weeks eating beans before they had started to carve him up.
‘Well, I’m sorry we missed killing Pelekanos today,’ growled Short Eldgrim. ‘I would thank him for giving Starkad a fair dunt – and then cut the liver from him and force him to eat it as a lesson.’
Godwin’s laugh was a dust-dry rasp of sound. ‘You di
dn’t fight Pelekanos today. That was Giorgos the Armenian. He did not want to go with Pelekanos, who is mad and seems to want to kill Starkad. They parted and not as friends. Pelekanos took some people with him, chasing Starkad, some as soldiers, some as fodder. The others went with Giorgos and came here.’
‘The mine is empty then?’
‘No one … there. Gone.’
His head lolled and Brother John poked and peered and shrugged. ‘Alive and deep asleep. That tie round his arm will need loosening or else it will fester and he will die. If we loosen it, though, he will lose more blood than is good for him and will die.’
I hardly heard him, but reached out and cut the crusted leather thongs out of mercy. While I watched the blood ooze out of the half-formed scabs, my mind was crashing like surf on a shoal.
Valgard and the crew we’d come to rescue were gone and we were too late. I had thought of that, that they might all already be dead, had even prepared for it in my head. But not this. Dragged off by dead-eaters? Not even Svala and her seidr magic could have foreseen this.
Odin, it seems, was not easing up on his revenge for oathbreaking at all.
THIRTEEN
Brother John wanted us to go after the Greek Giorgios and, as he said ‘end his affront to God’. I told him we would go south as fast as possible, because I thought soldiers would arrive. Aliabu, when we got back to him, proved that I had the right, scratching out the warp and weft of it in the sand.
Around Aleppo, he told us, marking it out in stones while we gathered round, were the Hamdanids, who had led the fight against the Great City’s army at Antioch. Many of the ones we had fought had been made up from the Kitab tribe of Bedu.
To the east were the Buyyids, latest in a long line of such who held the Abbasids caliphs of Baghdad hostage. They had joined the Hamdanids to fight us, but were no real friends to them, while the Qarmatians of Damascus seemed to be the same sort of Mussulmen as the Fatimids, but the Fatimids said the Qarmatians were no Mussulmen at all. The Qarmatians were, it was generally agreed by everyone, not ones to fall prisoner to.
