When it came my turn, I faced west, spat three times while renouncing Satan and all his ways, was thrice immersed in water, dabbed all over with oil, and became in the eyes of the world a Christman—and so sank into the chasm which opened at my feet.
I mean that chasm which lies between the old ways and the new, between heathen and Christman, barbarian and city-man; a chasm that I have wandered in for many years now, nor have I hope any longer of finding my way safely to one precipice or the other.
14
Between Two Wolves
Easter eve.
The cathedral was filled to overflowing. The service lasted hours. We knelt, we rose, we knelt again; we crossed ourselves times without number. The gilded icon screen glowed in the light of a hundred tall candles and the air was heavy with the smell of wax. At the altar, priests came and went, each performing his mysterious office, while the choir chanted: the high clear voices of the boys, the booming bass voices of the men: all together and each alone, singing to their god.
At midnight Bishop Yefrem stood in the doorway, surrounded by all the congregation holding lighted candles, and proclaimed: “Khristos voskres,” and we replied, “Voistine voskres.” That is to say, “Christ is risen. Truly risen.” Whereupon everyone kissed everyone else.
After more hours of chanting and priest-craft inside the flower-filled church, we were dismissed to our homes as dawn broke over the city; each of us carrying his candle stub and a red-painted egg. All the next day, too, we kissed whomever we met in the street and told them that Christ was risen. This Easter of theirs is a fine, happy holiday and made me, for a little while, think better of the Christmen.
Yet even at this glad season, all was not love and sweet peace in Yaroslav’s dvor. Jarl Ragnvald had come up from Aldeigjuborg to keep Easter with his cousin Ingigerd and Eilif, his son. Having been out of touch with Novgorod during the winter months, he had no idea how things now stood. What he found was worse, I imagine, than anything he could have pictured to himself: Harald deep in Yaroslav’s confidence, the druzhina divided, Ingigerd balked, Eilif made a fool of, and even the upcoming marriage with Yelisaveta cast in doubt, for that sweet maid was flatly refusing to marry Eilif no matter if they put out her eyes, branded her with irons, or flayed her right down to the bare bones—she loved to imagine herself enduring these ridiculous tortures. Moreover, with an ingenuity worthy of her mother, she was tireless in finding ways to exchange notes with Harald, using me once again as go-between.
Inge’s threat to pack her off to her uncle in Pskov had to be abandoned. Yelisaveta broke into a meeting of the Duma one day to cling, weeping, to her father’s knees, and Inge, knowing that to interfere with a father’s power over his children was a humiliation which even Yaroslav could not brook, pretended that the child had misunderstood her and dropped the matter.
To come back to Ragnvald, he no sooner arrived than he began to abuse his son for sluggishness and cowardice in a voice that could be heard all over the palace. Eilif looked more sullen than ever when he emerged from this parental scolding. But we should have taken no comfort from this; nothing is more dangerous than an angry stupid man.
To me, Ragnvald was frosty, but that was always his manner and so I could gather nothing from it. I assumed Inge told him that I was not and never had been their agent. Whether she went on to tell him of our affair, I am doubtful, and yet she might have—they were very close.
Summer came with long white nights, when the sun, as in Iceland, barely dipped below the horizon. At midnight you could stand on Slavno Hill and count the boats plying the river below.
But even without the cloak of darkness, Inge and I continued our meetings, each more reckless than the last. I spent most of one night crouched naked in the clothes chest when the prince paid an unexpected visit to his wife’s bedroom (his usual day was Thor’s day). Another time I met him riding to Gorodische as I was riding back, and just had time to turn off into the trees before he recognized me.
Moreover, Inge’s appetite for love-making was matched by her contempt—which I did not entirely share—for her husband’s intelligence; she had actually begun to make broad references to my youthful vigor in his hearing, as if daring him to suspect us.
For my part, I began to grow weary of being Harald’s man by day and Inge’s by night. Time and again I made up my mind to put an end to the business. But always and always I found my way back to her bed.
I can scarcely account for my feelings at this time. Had love made me that weak and foolish? No better than silly Yaroslav himself? Or was it something more sinister—witchcraft or binding-runes? I took that possibility seriously, for Inge knew more about those things than people suspected.
Whatever it was, I yielded the more easily because she still did not question me concerning Harald, nor enlist me in any treachery against him, nor admit to any such thing herself—even though suspicion was piled on suspicion as mysterious ‘accidents’ began to occur.
One night early in the summer a fire broke out in Harald’s dvor while he was lying drunk in bed. His body guards barely got him out alive. A few weeks later he nearly met his death again, this time from poisoning. Someone claiming to be a peasant from the neighboring village of Menevo appeared at his door with a basket of mushrooms (the villagers often did things like this to curry favor). The mushrooms were put into a stew which Harald ate that night. Four days later he began to suffer from cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, and fever.
Yaroslav, who knew everything about mushrooms, recognized the symptoms of poisoning when this was reported to him, and rushed to the dvor in person to investigate. A few mushrooms remained in the basket and his trained eye picked out several that had reddish, wrinkled caps, like little brains—a very noxious variety—mixed up with the others.
Impossible, he said, for country people to have made such a mistake. He, Dag, and I rode straight to Menevo to look for the ‘peasant’ who had brought them, but the villagers swore that they knew no one answering his description.
There followed some very tense days. Failing to find the culprit, Dag flogged the cook half to death and threw her out. At one point Harald motioned Dag and me to his side and whispered, “If I die, kill her.” Meaning, of course, Ingigerd. “I will do it with my own hand,” Dag replied, looking hard at me.
Fortunately, the effects of the poison were overcome by Harald’s tough constitution, assisted by various herbal concoctions that Yaroslav prepared and fed him with his own hands.
Just as with the ambush, the sickness runes, and the fire, there was no evidence pointing inescapably at Inge, but Dag and Harald believed her guilty all the same. They only differed in how to respond.
Harald was for storming her apartment and hacking off her head. Against this, Dag pleaded for patience. We were already winning the battle for Yaroslav’s trust, he said; Ingigerd’s increasingly desperate stratagems proved it. And Harald’s conquest of Yelisaveta Yaroslavna—her father’s darling—would work in our favor, too, even though it had been no part of the original plan. Everything would come to us if only we moved cautiously.
Sterling advice, Harald shot back, except for the fact that he had nearly died three times already; and who could be sure that the next attempt wouldn’t succeed?
To this Dag had no good answer.
In private, he pressed me again about Inge. What did I know that I wasn’t telling him? he demanded at the top of his lungs. Damn it all, hadn’t he ordered me to spy on her? Then how could I have failed to pick up even the smallest hint concerning the fire and the poisoning? He had befriended me and this was how I repaid him! He paced up and down in a fury.
I could only give the same reply as before. “Dag, I swear to you I know nothing. Inge and I never talk about Harald—the subject vexes both of us so much that we leave it alone. Please believe me, Dag. I respect you more than anyone I know. Your anger hurts me.”
The strain was beginning to tell on Dag. He was always tight-lipped and irritable now—the old easy m
anner all but gone. He knew his influence over Harald was wearing thin and he must have wondered sometimes if all this conspiring was worth the effort.
I know I did. Einar Tree-Foot spoke the truth when he said I was like a man caught between two wolves—and I was no longer feeling as cocky about it as I had earlier. What a muddle I was in! Here were Inge and I deceiving both her husband and Harald, while at the same time Harald and her daughter were busy deceiving Inge, with my connivance. Dag, half-convinced I was a traitor, treated me like a stranger, and Harald, with growing truculence, demanded to know why I spent so much time away from him. (I had used Stavko for an alibi so often that it began to embarrass me and I had to rack my brains for new excuses.)
It only required a little imagination to guess whose head was the likeliest of all to roll—and I’ve always been cursed with too much imagination. I was beginning to sleep poorly—whenever, that is, Inge allowed me to sleep at all.
So passed the summer and the early fall.
You may easily picture, then, with what relief I greeted the messenger whose stumbling, foam-flecked horse carried him into Yaroslav’s courtyard one September day at dusk. The animal sank to its knees and died on the spot. Its rider looked about ready to do the same.
Kiev was besieged by a great horde of Pechenegs, he gasped; the garrison was starving, a relieving force under Mstislav was being formed, but Yaroslav, too, must to fly to the rescue of his father’s holy city!
It came like the answer to a prayer. To escape, at last, from wretched Novgorod, from women and intrigue! For Harald, for Dag, for all of us, a chance to live like men again and exercise our sword-arms against honest foes—how much better than this wretched life we were leading!
As we gathered round that mud-spattered courier, pressing him for details, I felt as though a great weight had suddenly been lifted from me.
15
To Kiev!
The courier who brought us the news of Kiev’s peril was the servant of one Ugonyay Ekimovich, a boyar of Smolensk. In just eight days he had driven his horse over four hundred versts of forest and swamp.
Yaroslav summoned the whole druzhina to a council of war. Word traveled fast and the great hall was soon overflowing with druzhiniks, while the citizens of Novgorod milled outside.
“It’s four weeks now,” said the young courier, “that the pagans have besieged the city. They lay waste the land like wolves. They build haystacks of heads. One Kievan got away and brought word to Prince Mstislav at Chernigov. And he sent a rider up the river to Smolensk, where his son Eustaxi rules.”
Mstislav, the courier explained, had ordered his son to join him at once in a relief expedition, but also, and most important, to prevent any word of the siege from spreading farther north. On no account was Prince Yaroslav to know anything about it until it was over. Eustaxi made that plain to his boyars. “In order,” he said, “that I and my father shall have to ourselves all the glory of delivering Kiev from the Pechenegs.”
These words sent a wave of indignation throughout the crowded hall. “But my master,” the courier continued, “bears a grudge against Mstislav and so he decided to send me to inform you of it. He asks only that you don’t betray him.”
The muttering in the hall grew louder, but Yaroslav called for silence and asked how numerous the Pechenegs were and who their leader was.
The youth replied that all of the eight hordes had banded together and were led by Tyrakh Khan himself.
“Tyrakh!” Yaroslav struck the arm of his high-seat. “Is it possible? The very same who sixty years ago cut off my grandfather Svyatoslav’s head and used it for a goblet! He must be close on ninety.”
“Prince,” said the messenger, “I’ve not yet told all.”
“Eh?”
“The trading fleet from Miklagard, sir. The Pechenegs shadowed them all the way up from the coast, not attacking at the cataracts where they were expected, but waiting till the strugi were beached on Kiev’s shore and the gates of the city were wide open. At one swoop they caught both the fleet and the city defenseless. The slaughter in those first few minutes was horrible.”
Yaroslav started from his chair. “Dear God, my son!”
The courier gazed at the floor. “Nothing was said about him, Prince. He might still be alive.”
Vladimir Yaroslavich—Volodya as he was always called—now twelve years old, had gone with the trading fleet on his first embassy to the Imperial City.
Yaroslav sank back in his seat, buried his face in his hands, and groaned, “My son’s life in peril and Mstislav—may he dream of the Devil—tries to keep the news of it from me! What is wrong with the man? Has he gone mad?”
“Oh, hardly mad, you simple soul. Say, rather, shrewd and quick to seize the main chance when it’s offered.”
This was Ingigerd. “His treachery comes as no surprise to me. I never thought him to be the drunken, amiable bear that he likes to seem. He’s had his eye on Kiev all along but dared not seize it without a pretext. Now, under guise of liberating it from the Pechenegs, he will enter it a hero. And once installed, my husband, you will never get him out. That’s what lies behind this secrecy. You must go there at once and assert your rights to the place.”
“Go there!” cried Yaroslav in anguish. “By Saint George, I’ll go there! And if a hair of my son’s head is harmed, why, I shall have such vengeance—on Tyrakh Khan and on my brother—as never a man had!”
I’d never heard such strong speech from those lips. To defend his child, Yaroslav the mouse could be a lion.
“Under siege these four weeks, you say?” Ingigerd questioned the messenger. “Then they didn’t get their crops in?”
“Princess, the autumn rye was just coming ready for the scythe. Tyrakh Khan timed his attack with care. Very little grain was brought inside the city before he struck, and now the Pechenegs have the bulk of it in their own hands. The Kievans will be eating their shoes by now. Unless Prince Mstislav raises the siege they must surrender soon.”
Instantly both palace and city fell into a frenzy of activity. Within the hour a galloper was sent flying to Pskov to alert Sudislav, the youngest of the brothers Vladimirovich, to marshal his warriors and sail at once for Kiev. And we hastened to do the same.
In the days that followed, I learned that there is more to war-making than fighting; in fact, fighting may be the least of it. Half the battle is getting there, the other half is finding enough to eat.
With the trading fleet away, Yaroslav’s navy was revealed to be woefully small and derelict. Harald’s big dragon ship, which had formerly been called Sea Stag but was now re-christened the Saint Olaf (another of Dag’s suggestions) was ship-shape and ready to sail. But for the rest of the druzhina Yaroslav had on hand just twenty ships of various types and sizes, and most of them in poor condition.
Transport, however, was not the only problem. The army, even on short rations, must consume a ton of bread and porridge a day. Now, we could not reach Kiev in less than fourteen days of hard rowing, with no stops for foraging, and we should have at least three days’ provisions to spare when we got there.
Nothing had been harvested yet around Novgorod. Yaroslav now ordered the peasants into the fields as far as thirty miles from the city. Desperate to be off, the prince allowed time for only one hasty threshing of the grain and none at all for milling. Instead, an assortment of grinding stones was hastily collected with which to grind the rye and oats as we sailed. Astonishingly, in under a week we had our supply of grain—and with it the curses of every toiling, starving peasant in the neighborhood.
During those hectic days of preparation, I nearly succeeded in putting Inge out of my mind, and felt much the better for it. I found myself in the thick of things because Yaroslav seized on this moment to raise Harald to the rank of boyar and make him co-commander with Eilif of the whole druzhina.
Ingigerd fought bitterly against it in the Duma, but, with the backing of the mayor and others of our faction, the prince, for a change, ha
d his way. Of course, to divide the command between two enemies was utter folly. Apart from chasing brigands, this was to be the druzhina’s first campaign in a year, and the prospect of action raised everyone’s spirits. Particularly Harald’s. His energy and optimism were boundless. Even so, he was Harald all the same—thankless and brutal without the smallest awareness of it.
On the night before we were to sail he turned quite casually to Dag—the three of us were supping together in Harald’s dvor—and said, “You’re not coming with us.”
“What did you say?”
“You’re not coming.”
His voice was husky and he couldn’t meet Dag’s eyes. I sensed he’d been working up to this for a long time.
“If you like, you can stay here and keep an eye on Ingigerd—sort of thing you’re good at. That or go your own way.” There was a long silence during which Dag seemed to consider and reject several possible replies. In the end he simply said, “I see,” and left the hall. Harald let him go with a shrug.
I couldn’t believe what I had just witnessed. As soon as Dag was out of earshot, I exploded:
“Harald, the man saved your life! He’s done everything for you!”
“Exactly,” he answered coolly. “Done everything. Grateful and all that but one can’t be in tutelage forever. I can’t breathe around him and that’s the long and short of it. I weary of his always being right. And hasn’t he used me for his own ends, if the truth be told? Well, all that’s over now, friend skald. I won’t be used by anyone again. By anyone.” He repeated those words, looking straight at me.
Later that night I went searching for Dag and found him, at last, in a tavern that he liked in Vitkova Street, alone with a jug.
“Well, that was short and sweet, wasn’t it?” He made a wry face at me as I sat down. “Wine?” He pushed the jug across the table.
The Ice Queen Page 14
