The Varangian

by Bruce Macbain

  There passed whole years that I cannot account for. And then one day I saw my reflection in a glass and realized I was an old man. My hair white, my face creased, my eyes dim. Surely, death’s hand was on me. But if so, I wanted to die in Iceland, in my old home, where my father and his father lie buried. It was just as the old noaidi in Lapland foresaw all those years ago; I knew when the time had come. And so I came back. And here you see me, waiting for death, and, while I wait, telling you my saga, for no other reason but to pass the time. It’s a poor tale and of no profit to a pious young deacon like yourself, Teit, or to the bishop, your father. Frankly, I’m surprised you’ve stuck it out this long…

  Post scriptum

  Odd pushed himself away from the table where we sat and stretched his broad back.

  “You’ve had my story, Teit Isleifsson. T’wasn’t what you wanted to hear, was it? Well, time you were going back to Skalholt. Leave me alone now.”

  I sat clutching my quill in my inky fingers amid the heaps of parchment that covered the table. I tried to speak and couldn’t. At last, I knew Odd’s secret—what had driven him back to Iceland and brought him to this pitiful condition, and my heart ached for him. I had no words. I searched his face in the fading light and, as I often had during these days and weeks, tried to see in it the proud, laughing, black-headed youth that had once been Odd Tangle-Hair. A priest should give comfort, but he wanted none. Absolution, but of what sin? He rose and walked to the far end of the room where he stood watching in silence while I gathered my pages and bundled them up.

  “What will you do with it all?” he asked at last.

  “We have a scribe at the monastery,” I answered. “His name is Brother Ambrose. A skillful copyist. I will have him make a fair copy and bind it in calfskin. It will go in the library.”

  “Alongside your psalms and your saints’ lives?” A bitter smile crossed his lips; he was mocking me, of course, as he always did. I didn’t mind. “Calfskin, eh? Your father will balk at the expense.”

  “He’s still in Rome.”

  “Your older brother, then.”

  “I don’t care what Gizur says.”

  “How you’ve changed!”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. But he was right. I mumbled my farewell and hurried out the door into the summer twilight. As I mounted my pony, I cast a glance up at the brooding bulk of Hekla, the volcano where Odd’s forefathers slept. Soon he would sleep among them, I thought, if there is any sleep for the damned.

  A month later I knocked upon Odd’s door again. This time I had brought a visitor with me.

  “You again, boy?” He peered through a crack in the door. “Have you not troubled me enough?” Surly, as always.

  “There is someone I want you to meet, if you’re willing. An old friend of yours.”

  “Of mine? They’re all dead.”

  “Except for one.”

  After a long moment, Odd pulled the door open. I stood aside to let Brother Ambrose precede me into the dim interior. He was a man of Odd’s age, tall and very thin, stoop-shouldered. He threw off his monk’s hood, showing a tonsured head fringed with white.

  “A black-robe?” Odd muttered. “I’ve no friend among them.”

  Ambrose took another step into the room, leaning on his crutch, dragging the shriveled leg that hung uselessly from his shattered right hip. I knew now where he’d got that injury.

  “Did I do right to come, Odd Tangle-Hair,” Ambrose said in a soft voice. “Will you welcome an old shipmate?”

  “Kalf Slender-Leg?” Odd gaped. “It can’t be you.”

  Ambrose—Kalf—ventured a shy smile. And Odd’s face—how can I describe the change that came over it? The hard lines of the mouth softened. The eyes filled with sudden tears.

  “Kalf!”

  The two old men gazed at each other in silence, each, I think, shocked by the ravages that time had wrought. Then Odd threw his arms around his boyhood friend and dragged him inside. They stood with their arms wrapped round each other, remembering, I think, what they had meant to each other—how, as boys, they had left Iceland in a stolen ship to go a-viking; how Kalf had saved Odd from his mutinous crew in Lapland, and how they had quarreled bitterly in Norway when Kalf turned pious and joined King Olaf’s army; how Odd had carried him half dead from the field of Stiklestad; and how, at last, they had become friends again. (All this I had heard from Odd, of course, but also from Kalf—and, as people do, they remembered many things differently.)

  Odd drew him down onto the bench with him. And I, watching them, could not hold back my tears. I withdrew to a far corner of the room to give them privacy, but I overheard what they said.

  “I left you behind in Nidaros, at Bergthora’s inn, still weak from the wound that Glum dealt you with his ax. Nearly fifty years ago. How have you..?”

  “Oh,” Kalf chuckled, “I’ve dragged this leg over half the world. Rome, Compostela, Monte Casino, Jerusalem, Bethlehem. Not a shrine that I haven’t visited or a hospice that I haven’t lived in. And then finally back to Iceland, oh six years ago now, where it suits me to live a quiet life as Brother Ambrose. The family that hated your father, and my grandfather for helping him, is still powerful in this land. Halldor and Bolli are old men with long memories. I’ve been careful not to say that I know anything about you.”

  “Six years.” said Odd wonderingly. And only a day’s ride away. Both of us living like hermits—”

  “And neither of us knew it,” Kalf replied, “until I was given your saga to copy. Odd, I weep for you. How you have suffered, my friend.”

  Odd’s expression froze. He frowned and turned his head away. “I ask no one for sympathy. If you came here only to pity me you can turn around and go back. I left Miklagard because I could not stand the pitying looks of my friends.”

  “I know. I left Nidaros for the same reason. Odd, God’s will is at work here. Even if you can’t forgive yourself, He can, he has.”

  “And that’s what you came to tell me?” Odd shot back. “You Christmen. You’re drawn to misery like a cat to cream—you want to soak your whiskers in it. You see me brought low and you think now you will convert me—but you won’t. By the Raven, you won’t.”

  Kalf looked down and smiled. “I know better than that, Tangle-Hair. No, I haven’t come to convert you; I’ve come to beg a favor of you.”

  Odd’s eyes narrowed. “Of me? What sort of favor?”

  “I’m a restless fellow, a wanderer, even at my age. My health is still good, I have a little money put by, and there are places in the world I haven’t seen.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as Golden Miklagard.”

  Odd leapt up in anger. “Ah, I see what this is! You and the young deacon, scheming together. To lure me back there. Why? To see a son and daughter who no longer remember me if they’re even alive? To find a new Emperor on the throne, who owes me nothing. To find that Psellus, all my friends, are dead, or, worse, embarrassed at the sight of me? What would I do there? How would we live when your little money runs out? I won’t beg.”

  “Then I will. Odd, you must go back. You owe it to your children to show them who their father was—what a warrior, what a poet, what a fine man. They deserve to know it, Odd. Let us go together. And who knows what we may find? When you and I were sixteen and we stole Hrut’s ship, we and Stig and the rest, and we sailed away into the wide ocean with the glacier twinkling behind us and dolphins in our wake, we didn’t know what fate had planned for us. No more do we now. Odd Tangle-Hair, let’s be those boys again. What is there here for us but bitter old age and poverty?”

  A year has passed since the day they sailed away on a merchant ship bound for the south. Two old men, but they could work their passage. Odd is a steersman and a navigator still, and Kalf can speak the dialects of Spain and Italy. I went down to the coast to see them off. For all their wrinkled skin and white hairs I saw in them the brave faces of youths, alight with the fire of adventure. How I longed to go with t
hem, to walk those streets and gaze upon those gleaming towers, to see and do all the things that Odd’s words have conjured in my imagination. But no, I am no warrior, no sailor. My path is a different one, but it is the one I’ve been given and I must follow it.

  In the end it was Odin—Satan, as we Christmen call him, though I have come to the opinion that God is God, whatever we call him—who made up Odd’s mind for him. He consulted the runes and they spoke to him. (He would say no more about this, and I didn’t press him.)

  And did they ever reach Miklagard? you will ask. Did Odd find his children alive? And was there still a bosom friend to welcome him and give him comfort? I can only believe that a merciful God granted him his heart’s desire.

  Teit the Deacon

  Skalholt, AD 1081

  Author’s Note

  A tale of adventure needs not only a hero but a villain. My villain is Harald—no doubt, unfairly. He wasn’t called Hardrada—‘the Ruthless’—for no reason, but I have ascribed acts of villainy to him that the real Harald certainly never committed. Patriotic Norwegians are entitled to take umbrage.

  If Odd returned to Miklagard in the 1080’s, he would have found his friend Psellus still alive. Philosopher, orator, historian, polymath, Imperial secretary, Psellus was not only an actor in the events narrated in the novel but is our primary source for them. No other Byzantine chronicler of the age imparts the richness of detail and shrewd insight into character and events that he does. It is to him that we owe, among other things, the description of Zoe’s perfumery, her color-changing figurine of Christ, and her preference for comfortable clothes. His history, the Chronographia, can be read in the Penguin Classics translation by E. R. A. Sewter, Michael Psellus: Fourteen Byzantine Rulers.† Psellus is silent, however, about the early stages of his own career, and it is only my notion that he served in the Office of Barbarians. Under Constantine IX, he became one of the most powerful men at court. We do happen to know that his daughter died in childhood and that he adopted another young girl (Odd’s?) to take her place.

  Nothing about Harald’s career during his Varangian years is beyond dispute. Did he or did he not blind an emperor, as we read in King Harald’s Saga, and if so, which one? Why was he imprisoned and how did he escape? And how is this related to the more-or-less simultaneous Rus attack? For all this, I refer the reader to the invaluable The Varangians of Byzantium by Sigfus Blondal (Cambridge University Press, 1978). What is clear is that Harald returned with Yelisaveta to Norway, where he briefly shared the throne with his young nephew, Magnus, until the latter’s death in 1047. Thereafter, he ruled alone over an empire that included Norway and Denmark. By 1066 he was the most feared Viking warrior in northern Europe. In that year he invaded England (William the Conqueror was invading it too, at precisely the same moment). Harald’s death at the battle of Stamford Bridge marked the end of an era.

  Halldor Snorrason, Harald’s right hand man and fellow Varangian, returned with him to Norway. But Harald soon found Halldor’s blunt manners disagreeable and the two parted ways. Halldor returned to Iceland, where he lived to an old age. The same is true of Halldor’s brother-in-law, Bolli Bollason. Of all the Icelanders in the Guard, only Ulf Ospaksson stayed with Harald, in high favor, until his death.

  Setting a historical novel in Medieval Byzantium comes with peculiar difficulties. The complexity of Byzantine ceremonial, the bewildering multitude of officials with unpronounceable titles, the great number of men all named either Constantine, George or Michael—these pose problems for the novelist who wishes to convey the flavor of court life without overwhelming the reader with needless detail.

  Almost nothing survives of the Great Palace. There are numerous reconstructions based on the literary sources, none of them convincing. The astonishing flying throne was seen and described by one Liutprand, Bishop of Cremona, who in the tenth century went on an embassy to the Byzantine court. The passage is worth quoting at length:

  In front of the Emperor’s throne [he writes] there stood a certain tree of gilt bronze, whose branches…were filled with birds of different sizes which emitted the songs of different birds corresponding to their species. The throne of the Emperor was built with skill in such a way that at one instant it was low, then higher, and quickly it appeared most lofty; and lions of immense size (though it was unclear if they were of wood or brass, they certainly were coated with gold) seemed to guard him, and, striking the ground with their tails, they emitted a roar with mouths open and tongues flickering … Thus prostrated for a third time in adoration before the Emperor, I lifted my head and the person whom earlier I had seen sitting elevated to a modest degree above the ground, I suddenly spied wearing different clothes and sitting almost level with the ceiling of the mansion.§

  Liutprand, a man of no curiosity, had no idea how any of it worked. My explanation is merely a hypothesis, which owes something to the way that a stage magician levitates a woman on a couch. Hydraulic engineering was certainly well understood by the Greeks.

  The Khazars are one of history’s most fascinating vanished races. In origin a nomadic Turkic people, they ruled an immense empire that stretched from the Volga to the Caucasus until they were defeated and scattered by the Rus. Subsequently, many of them served as mercenaries in the army of Byzantium. While neighboring peoples were converting to Christianity or Islam, the Khazars, or at least their ruling elite, somehow converted to Judaism. That they are actually the ancestors of modern Ashkenazic Jews seems improbable, though it is still an open question.

  As for the Varangian Guard—the ‘Emperor’s Wineskins’, as they were fondly called—I again refer interested readers to Blondal’s book, which collects every scrap of evidence on the subject and engages in complex (not always persuasive) argumentation. They were recruited from Scandinavians and Rus. Originally, they may have numbered six thousand, but I found that number unwieldy for my purpose. We don’t know where their barracks was, how their command structure was organized, nor what they did in their off-hours. All of that must be imagined. But, of course, therein lies the fun.

  Finally, Teit Isleifsson, Odd’s amanuensis, is a real character. The son of Iceland’s first native born bishop, he lived to teach Latin and theology to the grandsons of Vikings in the cathedral school at Skalholt.

  †Although Constantine was his birth name, Psellus entered holy orders during an enforced hiatus from political life and took the monastic name of Michael; it is under this name that his works have come down to us.

  ‡The Penguin Classics edition by Magnus Magnusson is one of several available translations.

  §Translation by Paolo Squatriti, The Complete Works of Liutprand of Cremona. Catholic University of America Press, 2007

  About the Author

  Bruce Macbain grew up reading history and historical fiction and eventually acquired a master’s degree in Classical Studies and a doctorate in Ancient History. As an assistant professor of Classics, he taught courses in Late Antiquity and Roman religion and published a few impenetrable scholarly monographs, which almost no one read. He eventually left academe and turned to teaching English as a second language, a field he was trained in while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Borneo in the 1960s.

  Macbain is also the author of historical mysteries set in ancient Rome, (Roman Games, 2010, and The Bull Slayer, 2013) featuring Pliny the Younger as his protagonist. Following Odin’s Child and The Ice Queen, The Varangian is the third in his Viking series, Odd Tangle-Hair’s Saga.