The Varangian

by Bruce Macbain

  His speech astonished me and thrilled me. Odin is Hermes? Cells of secret worshipers? Gold from lead? I was dumbfounded. It was as if a door had just opened into another world. Could this strange, kindly man be a new father to me? How I longed for one!

  But again, Selene broke in, with a hard, challenging look at me. “Thor—whatever your name is, you are learning much about us but we know nothing about you. Who are you? What brings you here? What keeps you here? What do you do here besides hang about the tavernas? I’m afraid of you. What trouble might you bring down on our heads. I beg you, please leave us alone.”

  And she was right, of course. What could I tell them? That I came here to murder a man, then took an oath to serve him, but was now betraying him? That I was, more or less, a police spy? That, beyond that, I had no business here and no idea what to do next?

  While I mumbled and stammered, Melampus said, “No, daughter, you are wrong. There is no danger here, I would know it if there were. I don’t feel the ‘Bad Hour’ hovering near, I don’t hear the Stringlos cry. My young friend, my daughter worries too much about me. Since my dear wife’s spirit ascended to the stars we only have each other.” He pushed back his stool. “If you will excuse me now. It is obvious that you came here to see Selene. Whether we are to continue this interesting conversation another time, I leave to her, she is the mistress of the house. And I—I have a night’s work ahead of me. It goes best when the moon is rising. I’ll say good night, then.” He kissed Selene on the forehead—it was plain that he adored her—and with that, he left us, entering another room by a low door. As it opened, all those metallic and sulfurous odors came rushing out.

  I searched for something to say. “Selene, your father doesn’t seem like a man who’s greedy for gold.”

  This only seemed to anger her more. “It’s not greed. It’s a spiritual quest. The quest for perfection. The alchemist must be pure, without guile, without greed. That is my father.”

  “And he can really make gold?”

  She allowed herself a bitter smile. “If he could, would we be living like this? But some of our neighbors think he has made gold; people have broken in to look for it, and so we bolt our door and bar our windows.”

  “But is it even possible?”

  “Why not? A seed becomes a flower, what a man puts into a woman becomes a baby. So why may not a tiny seed of gold reproduce itself infinitely? Base metal wants to become gold, just as a baby wants to be born. The alchemist is merely the midwife.”

  “You believe it?”

  “I have to believe it. I love him.”

  “And in the meantime you support him by gambling in the taverns.”

  “I prefer it to begging or street-walking.”

  “There are girls your age who are servants, cooks—”

  “I’m not much good at taking orders.

  “Marriage?”

  “I told you once already, I have no dowry.”

  Why was I badgering her like this? It wasn’t what I’d meant to do.

  “You want to know about me? Listen, then,” she said. “My mother died two years ago when I was sixteen. She had earned most of the money we lived on. Now there was nothing, no food in the house. My father is a brilliant man but—impractical. I had beautiful, thick hair down to my waist. Without asking him, I went and sold it. When he saw my cropped head, he wept. But I looked in the glass and liked what I saw. I could pass as a boy, and a boy can do whatever he pleases. I went to the tavernas. I like the life.”

  “But how long can you go on being ‘Andreas’? Sooner or later you’ll be found out, or get badly hurt.”

  She shrugged, looked away.

  “And you can live on your winnings?”

  “My father earns a little also, selling amulets, purifying houses after childbirth, casting horoscopes, curing impotence and binding curses, scaring away the Nereids. People come to him when the priest fails them. But all his clients are as poor as we are. You must pay him for your visit, you know—six folles.”

  “But I will! In fact, I think the onion juice in my navel is doing me a world of good already.”

  “Don’t make fun,” she said—but she was smiling as she said it. The first real smile I had seen from her. And what a smile! Sweet and mischievous all at once. It softened the sharp angles of her face, it rose from her wide mouth to her large black eyes. In the instant before it vanished it revealed a different Selene—one who could laugh, could tease. I had not seen that Selene before. My heart leapt up.

  On an impulse, I went and fetched her game box from the sitting room, opened it and set out the black and white counters in their triangles. I brought out a handful of silver from my purse and tossed it on the table. “Please allow me to lose to you again.”

  She pushed the coins aside with an angry gesture. “What do you imagine you’re buying with this?”

  “An hour’s relief from loneliness, Selene. Grant me that much and then I’ll leave.”

  Her expression gentled, the smile crept back. “You’re a hopeless player. I don’t steal.”

  “All right. Your father invited me to visit again, Selene. May I?” I held my breath.

  She touched a counter with her fingertips as though contemplating her next move. “If you like,” she said quietly.

  I touched her fingertip with mine and she didn’t pull away. “You’d better leave now,” she said. “Our neighbors will be asking themselves what you’re doing here so long.”

  I galloped my horse back to the city, singing out loud and drawing curious looks from passersby. I didn’t care. I was in love. A thousand plans whirled around in my brain. I must talk to Psellus. He would teach me how to court her like a civilized gentleman and not a rude barbarian.

  That day was the beginning for me of greater joy than I had ever known—and, at the end, greater sorrow. But I won’t—can’t—speak of that now.

  15

  I Take a Wife

  The next month was a happy time. I saw Selene often. While the city baked in August heat, I spent most days and evenings in the countryside at her house. Old Melampus would sit in his cramped laboratory off the kitchen, grinding, pouring, heating, cooling, fermenting, distilling, tending his little domed furnace, which he called an athanor. He watched, with infinite patience, the beads of quicksilver slide along the glass tubing of his alembic, or he sat hunched over the pages of great musty volumes, dense with indecipherable diagrams and curious script. During these times he and I would talk of the gods, theirs and mine, and exclaim over their similarities—Odin and Hermes, Zeus and Thor, Aphrodite and Freya, Titans and Trolls, Nereids and Elves. The tortured ravings of my father that had frightened me so as a child now took on the luster of ancient, deep and universal wisdom. I would never doubt again. Selene would tease us for being a pair of dull old men, but she always had something to say that brightened the conversation. And she smiled at me and let our hands touch. I brought food and wine with me and we three would make a pleasant meal together.

  There were other magicians and alchemists too who visited from time to time, a half dozen or so. The men, shaggy and solemn as ancient trees, the women, plump and matronly. I was impressed by their dignified manners and the lively intelligence in their eyes. They came and went stealthily, always after sundown, and they muttered darkly about the police and about monks at the nearby monastery, whose violence they feared. They were wary of me at first, but took me on trust as Melampus’s friend. Their talk was over my head, but what struck me was their patient optimism. Always, the goal was just beyond reach, but they would reach it one day, they would, with just a little more of this, a refining of that…

  I noticed that most of them suffered from the same tremors in their hands as Melampus did. “It is the quicksilver,” he told me one night as we sat watching the apparatus bubble. “I don’t allow Selene to touch it, nor must you.”

  “But if it does you harm—?”

  “Nature does not give up her secrets without exacting a price. The see
ker must be willing to pay it. My dear wife…” Suddenly tears filled his eyes and the life seemed to go out of him, his chin sank to his chest.

  “It killed her?” I murmured.

  “We don’t know that,” Selene said firmly. “Come, Odd, leave him alone now. When he’s like this he wants to be alone.” She kissed the top of his head and drew me away into the sitting room.

  She and I often sat together while Melampus worked. He knew it was her I had come to see and he would shoo me out of the laboratory and close the door. We played tables for pennies until I got good enough to win an occasional game. We talked of this and that, of magic and healing, about which she knew a great deal. I told her about my home, my adventures at sea—the bits I was proud of, anyway. About Finland and my escape from Louhi the Witch. I mentioned Ainikki, who sacrificed her life to save us. That brought a sharp look from Selene.

  “Was she pretty?”

  “All young girls are pretty. Why?”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Selene, darling, that was long ago. I was young. Anyway, we barely knew each other.”

  “I wish I were brave.”

  “But you are.”

  “Not brave enough, not for the world you come from.”

  “You’re my world.”

  She looked away. “You mustn’t say that, Odd.” She changed the subject. “And so you’ve come here to enlist in the Emperor’s Guards and live on savings until you can join?” (That was what I had told them finally, only that.) “And you’ve been in the Great Palace? Tell me what it’s like.”

  “Splendid beyond anything you can imagine. I’ll take you there one day.” (And one day she would see it—though hardly in the way I expected. But I will tell that in its place.)

  On a morning when the breeze from the sea was fresh, we went sailing in my little boat. Selene changed her boy’s clothes for a pretty dress and red stockings. She had never sailed before. I gave her the tiller stick to hold, and she laughed and whooped as we shot along, and nearly capsized us. Ramesses, her monkey, squeaked and covered his eyes with his hands. I tied up along the coast a few miles beyond the great fortification wall, where there was nothing around but fields and woods, and we spread out a picnic lunch in the shade of a plane tree.

  “I want to marry you.”

  “You’d regret it,” she answered frowning. “I won’t be confined to the women’s quarters, treated like a servant, like a brood mare. My mother didn’t live like that and I won’t.”

  “My mother died swinging a battle ax, splitting the heads of our enemies. No one ever confined her.”

  “Barbarian!”

  “Proud of it,” I smiled.

  “And if I wanted to keep gambling in the tavernas?”

  “You wouldn’t have to, I have money enough.”

  “But if I wanted to?”

  “I would worry about you.”

  “But you wouldn’t try to stop me?”

  “No.”

  “We’d fight. You’d come to hate me.”

  “Never.”

  And suddenly she was in my arms and we rolled together in the long grass. She ran her hands up under my shirt but drew them back shocked when she felt the welts of the slaver’s lash and the X branded on my shoulder. “My God, what you’ve suffered!” She filled her hands with my hair and drew me to her breast, pressed her lean, strong body against mine. Her tears wet my flesh.

  “It’s nothing. Long in the past.”

  “Odd, I’ve been around rough men, not much scares me. But the world you come from? I don’t know if I could live with that.”

  I put my finger to her lips. What could I say? Someday I would ask her to go back with me to that world of ice and blood.

  We made love then, fast and hard. Her naked body was thinner than I even imagined. I felt her ribs, the bumps on her spine. I was almost afraid I’d break something. But I knew too the strength in that frail-looking body. And afterwards, when our hearts were still again, we lay on our backs and watched the clouds, like sailing ships, drift across the sky.

  “You’re my first,” she said. “I’m not very good at it. You still want me?”

  I squeezed her hand and we were quiet for a while.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “Just that in the olden times, before the White Christ came to Iceland, a bridegroom would open the tomb of an ancestor, take the sword from it, and throw it at his bride’s feet. I have no old sword to give you.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “What a blood-thirsty people you are! Never mind, we will invent our own ceremony.”

  Ramesses jumped up on her chest; she dipped a bit of bread in olive oil and put it between his lips.

  “You treat him like a baby,” I said.

  “I hope our babies are better-looking.”

  “Then you should have picked a handsomer husband.”

  She lay her head on my chest. “I love you, Odd Tangle-Hair. It frightens me how much I love you.”

  If I had died that day, I would have died content.

  It was Freya’s Day, named for our goddess of love, whom the Greeks call Aphrodite. The wedding celebration spilled out into the alley, Melampus’s house being too small to contain all the guests.

  Of course, we should have been more cautious.

  The alchemists and magicians came. And the neighbors and their children, scrubbed and wearing their best clothes: Christians, all of these, and yet they respected Melampus as a physician who charged them little for his cures; and they had loved his wife, who helped deliver their babies and foretold their futures. Even the local priest came to wish us well: a fat, comfortable man who took his religion lightly and never refused a drink or a bite of food. He mumbled a few words over us to make our union ‘official’ and we didn’t object. Finally my friend Psellus came, bringing me the gift of a fine manuscript of Homer (only that bookish man would have thought of such a thing.) He showed great interest in Melampus’s apparatus and books and asked if he might visit again and learn more of his experiments. He exchanged some words with Selene and found her charming.

  During the previous two weeks I had bought a house in the neighborhood with the money Harald had given me; four rooms built around a small courtyard. It was even more ruinous than Melampus’s, but I had ambitious plans to repair it. I kept the old widow I bought it from as a housekeeper, though she was deaf and half-blind. I had two gold rings made for Selene and me and I had brought in casks of mead and a great deal of food for the wedding feast. Melampus’s cook, Maria, who was some sort of distant cousin, pinned a bunch of daisies to her shapeless black dress and was thrilled to have such fine ingredients to work with. She and the neighbor women toiled over the hearth, baking bread and pastries, stirring pots of lamb stew, and roasting fowls. I had paid Melampus a bride-price of fifty ounces of silver for his daughter and asked for no dowry in return except her mother’s best dress and jewelry. She stood proudly in them now.

  A little marble statue of a naked Aphrodite, about as high as my knee and so old that it had lost most of its paint and gilding, was set up on a makeshift altar in the sitting room; we stood before her and poured a libation of mead and asked her blessing on us; then Selene gave me a sip of the golden liquid to seal our union. I made the sign of Thor’s hammer over the cup to consecrate it. We wore wreaths of flowers on our heads. Everyone cheered. Melampus laughed and wept all at once. Outside, we danced to the music of flutes and tambourines. I did my hopping Icelandic step while Selene whirled around and clapped her hands until we fell in each other’s arms, laughing. The neighbors, who had never tasted mead before, got thoroughly drunk and everyone wanted to shake my hand and kiss my bride.

  As evening fell, the torches were lit. One old magician was offering to cast my horoscope and I was explaining, as best I could over the uproar, that I didn’t know what month I was born in…and just then I caught a fleeting glimpse of someone—a slim figure in dark clothing—hovering at the edge of the crowd. He could have b
een a neighbor, I didn’t know them all by sight, or just a passerby attracted by the noise of revelry. But somehow I didn’t think so. When I looked again, he was gone. But now a procession was forming up to escort Selene and me (and Ramesses) to our new home, and I put it out of my mind. Carrying torches and singing and shouting lewd remarks, as the custom is, the guests led us to our bedroom. We shut the door on them, and I kissed Selene.

  “I’m pregnant,” she told me later as we lay in bed. “I hope you’re happy, I am. I love you.”

  “You know so soon?”

  “I sprinkled drops of water into a bowl of oil and saw it. I’m not as light-shadowed as my mother but I do see things. You will have a son. He’ll be a magician like my father and yours—a great one, I’m sure of it. All the true believers will pay homage to his wisdom and power. Perhaps he’ll even make gold. We’ll move to the city and live in a fine house. Wouldn’t that be nice? Are you pleased?” When I didn’t answer, she raised herself on an elbow and looked at me. “Odd darling, what is it?”

  “Nothing at all.” I kissed her again. “Of course, I’m pleased.”

  But there were troubling thoughts stirring deep inside me. Selene imagined us spending our lives in this city, growing old with our children and grandchildren around us. But I had sworn an oath to return to Iceland one day to avenge my dead ones and reclaim my home. That thought had lived with me over all these years and all those thousands of leagues that I had travelled since the night when I crouched trembling in the thicket of reeds at the edge of Rangriver and watched the embers of my burning house whirl up into the midnight sky. Could I put that aside now? Did I belong here among these Greeks? Odd Thorvaldsson, the outsider, the barbarian? As much as I might dress like them, eat like them, speak like them, could I ever be one of them?

  Selene was almost instantly asleep. But I lay awake long, listening to her gentle breathing and aching with love for her and our unborn son. And my heart torn with doubt.

  “Congratulations on your marriage, Odd Thorvaldsson,” The Guardian of Orphans twisted his lips into a hideous imitation of a smile. “What a surprise for all of us.”