“They were all going for Volodymyr,” Leif said. “They didn’t stop to try to kill us. They’re a single-minded bunch. What do we do now?”
Conn said, “That depends on Dobrynya.” He intercepted the jug of wotka and poured some down his throat. The sun was going down and he was hungry. “Get this fire built—Raef! Does this woman cook?”
Raef turned and gave him the broadest smile Conn had ever seen on his face. Helgi said, “I brought a boiled haunch down from the palace. Where’s that grill?” Vagn and Skinny Harald were bent together over the firepit; Vagn snapped flint and steel together in the shelter of Harald’s cupped hands.
“Hold,” Leif said. “I think we’re being visited.”
Conn turned to look over his shoulder up the path. Down from the top of the bluff came Dobrynya, looking much sounder, Pavo on his heels, and three Sclava fighters behind them, carrying broadswords and big axes. Conn guessed Dobrynya would not be going around much without guards now.
He shifted his weight a little on the log he was sitting on and said, “Excuse me from getting up. My leg’s a little sore.”
Dobrynya came in among them. The sudden burst of firelight glittered on his golden clothes. He said, “I think I owe my life to you, Varanger. Certainly Volodymyr’s life.”
The men around the fire muttered and shifted their feet. Conn said, “The Tishats saved us all, I think.” He jogged his head toward Pavo, on the path. He looked back up at Dobrynya. “Sit down, will you, you’re hurting my neck. Where is Blud Sveneldsson?”
Dobrynya laughed. “Nobody’s ever taught you to talk gently, Raven. I will sit.” He looked around, and two of his guards dragged up a log for him. The other Varanger went back to spreading the fire and laying down the grill. The jug came by, full again.
Dobrynya took a drink of it and passed it back to Pavo. “Blud is gone. He left this morning, he sneaked out of Kiev without anybody knowing. He has gone back to Rodno. Likely he expected to have a summons to come back, and become Knyaz, but that will not happen.”
“What about the ship?” Raef said.
“The ship is sound. We got it back on the cradle before sundown. My news is this. Volodymyr believes this was a sign from God. There is only one way he had become truly master of Kiev, of all Rus’. We are setting sail against Chersonese as soon as we have the ships in the water and well rigged and the proper ceremonies conducted.”
“You’d leave the place to Blud?” Raef said.
“When we come back victorious and with the Emperor’s blessing Blud won’t matter anymore.”
Conn took a long pull on the jug. The smell of the roasting meat began to reach him and his belly growled. He said, “I’ll be glad to be out of here,” and Raef gave a grunt of agreement.
“I think so will Volodymyr,” Dobrynya said. His gaze went around the fire, at the other Varanger. “You have all proven yourselves loyal, as well as fighters beyond match. I wish I had one thousand of you. When we have accomplished our desire I shall see you all rewarded beyond your most extravagant dreams. We’ll take four ships. Each will have two of you—one, clearly, three. Choose captains among yourselves, in your way.”
“Who are the crews?” Conn asked.
“Pavo’s men. And some such of the Faithful Band as actually proved faithful.” Dobrynya sucked his cheeks suddenly hollow. The fire leapt and crackled as the fat from the grilling meat dripped into it and the orange light flashed across the posadnik’s face. “Yet I trust none of them anymore.”
Conn remembered the man who had given up his back to the enemy so that Volodymyr would have a sword. They were Thor’s men, he thought; maybe they thought Volodymyr had betrayed their loyalty, and absolved them of their oaths. He himself was thinking he had never sworn a pledge to Volodymyr. Dobrynya was leaning forward, his hand out to Conn. “I am honored to know true Varanger.”
Conn shook his hand, and one by one, the other men around the fire did also, while Pavo stood in the darkness, his hands on his hips, saying nothing. After a while Dobrynya moved away up the path and his Sclava went with him. Conn’s leg hurt and he poured wotka on it and down his throat. He glanced at Raef, who was busy cutting slices off the haunch and laying them on the grill.
Raef straightened up, chewing. He said, “I’m taking Merike.”
Conn said, “You watch out for her.” His leg throbbed all the way up to his hip and he reached for the jug again, to fight the pain.
Raef wanted more now than the bargain with Merike; he wanted to talk to her. In the dark, lying next to her, he touched her breasts with their small firm unused nipples, and he said, “No child?”
She murmured, half asleep, and took his hand and slid it down her body, using him to caress herself. He stroked her flat belly. “No baby? No man?” He knew he had not been the first with her.
She said, drowsily, “Man,” as if she understood that. But she was drifting away into sleep. He could not talk to her, nor she to him, and she didn’t even seem to care much.
He lay next to her and wondered if this were all there was to it, the rutting and grunting in the dark. He wondered if among her own people she had been a whore, and that was why she had come to him so easily.
When he thought that, he shrank away from her, as if she had turned to dirt in his arms.
He knew that was unfair. Whores had babies; in fact, when he considered it, he thought that whores should have more babies than most women. Maybe Merike was a widow. Or a barren wife. Or the husband had no seed. When he thought that, he felt better, and now he wanted to hold her again.
He shut his eyes, looking inward, into the black heart where everything turned into confusion; nothing was different about her, except the way he thought of her.
She had come to him of her own will, that was something. He knew she had her reasons for doing it; if she had not chosen him, somebody else would have taken her whether she wanted him or not.
He wondered what she thought of him. If she thought of him at all, aside from what he gave her. If she missed her own people. If she had left anyone behind.
He had already taught her some words—come, and go, and eat and drink. He had no idea how to teach her words like love, or trust.
He did not love her. He knew what love was, he had seen Corban and Benna together. He loved Conn. He loved his mother, who even in his dreams was out of his reach. He wondered if he could love Merike, if she learned the right words.
Or maybe Ieave it alone. Lies were made of words.
He knew Dobrynya was lying, or anyway that his honeyed praises to the Varanger were false, and that he had his own purposes, in which the Varanger were only tools. Volodymyr’s whole rule here depended on pulling off this attack on a city somewhere in the middle of the sea, that nobody had ever taken before. He thought of Pavo, who hated Conn. He thought of Rashid, who would reach Chersonese ahead of them, and who knew their plans.
Ahead of him lay something tangled and dark and thorny, a test, a trap, water and fire and death. And yet at the center of it. something glowed. Something golden, like his basileus. Something he had to know. It was like before Hjorunga Bay. He could not turn aside; he felt drawn on like the river rushing into the sea.
Merike, also, was drawn into that wild rush, their lives wound together like streams flowing into the river. He wound his arms around her like the currents of the river. For now, maybe, he knew her well enough. He began to sleep, and dreamt of his mother, watching him from a great distance, suns shining through her eyes.
In Volodymyr’s council room the prince greeted them all with solemn gestures, his hands lifted as if he gave them some blessing. He spoke about courage and loyalty but the words were round and empty; standing in among the Varanger, the few remaining blue-coated guards, and Pavo’s Sclava, Conn knew that Volodymyr didn’t even remember his name.
“You have proven yourselves to me,” the Knyaz said, as if somehow he had arranged the battle on the ship just to find out who was loyal. “Tomorrow we shall sail for
Chersonese. You see here.” He pointed to the table, where there was a big piece of skin spread out, and drawn on with marks.
All the men moved forward, Raef pushing up closer to look at this skin, craning his neck to see over the shoulders of the men in front of him. Conn hung back, bored with all this. When they got to this Chersonese, everything would turn up different than what they thought and talked about now, and he saw no reason to worry about it until he had to act. He looked over the remaining blue coats, some twenty of them. One was Oleg, their captain, frowning down at the skin on the table.
Oleg said, now, “This is the coast of Taurica? So broken—it will be hard just to find the city, in all those bays and inlets.”
On the far side of the table, Dobrynya held up something that flashed, a metal moon.
“This is a star measurer. It was a present to the Knyaz from the Mahmettan king in Baghdad, and with it we shall sail straight across the sea to Chersonese.” He pointed toward the skin. “You see, there, how it is marked on the chart.”
The other men all gave a general murmur of amazement. Raef crossed his arms over his chest, his mouth kinked down at one corner; clearly this went against the grain with him. Conn glanced over at the far end of the room, at the carved screen.
He heard nothing from behind it. The spaces between the elaborate swirls and curls of the carving were dark. He backed up slowly, until he came up against it, and sliding his hands behind him laid his palms flat against the wood. The men around the table were all bent forward, talking as if they knew what they were talking about, except for Raef, who stood impassive, saying nothing. Dobrynya stood smiling and nodding, while Volodymyr behind him watched everything with his quick, intense dark eyes.
Then, behind Conn, through a hole in the carving, a warm fingertip ran over his palm and stroked his wrist where the pulse beat.
He almost cried out, he almost turned around. He kept still, his hands flat to the screen; for an instant nothing. Then he felt her lips brush his palm.
The council was breaking up. Dobrynya beckoned to a servant who came and rolled up the skin. Raef, in among the others, turned to look around for him. Conn drew his hands forward; he gave a quick glance over his shoulder at the screen and saw nothing. Quickly he went across the room to the door, to join Raef.
The next morning they killed a goat, and let it bleed into the river. and people gathered on the riverbank and cheered. One by one they put the ships into the river, and the crews into them, Volodymyr and Dobrynya each took a ship, and the third they gave to Pavo; Raef and Conn took the fourth. But they divided up the Varanger as Dobrynya had said, two to each crew; Vagn they made a great joke of not being a Varanger at all, and put with Pavo. They put almost all the remaining blue coats of the Faithful Band into Raef and Conn’s crew, with Oleg leading them. Janka went with Conn and Raef also.
The Sclava, who were used to boats with paddles, learned to use the long oars quickly enough, rowing up and down Kiev’s reach of the river. The guardsmen, who were horsemen, had to learn. Raef sat in the stern of the ship, by the steerboard, and Conn limped up and down changing men from side to side and oar to oar, to get them balanced, and whacking them when they faltered or cut the water and roaring at them to keep together. The day’s heat was terrific and they were all half naked.
The first time they went downstream two oars clashed, and one man lost his oar entirely and the current pushed the ship around almost broadside. Conn shouted and kicked and beat them into pulling her straight again and then on the upstream leg they let the bow fall out of line and ran aground on an underwater shoal.
Conn showed them how to work the ship loose. When he came swearing and red-faced back into the stern, Raef said, “Move Oleg back here, where he can watch what’s going on. He’s got a better grip on them than you do, for now.”
His cousin gave him a white-eyed glare. “He’d better not have.-
He gimped off, the black-stitched wound on his leg looking like a grotesque ornament. But he moved Oleg back, to the last sternboardside bench, balancing him with another big guard across the ship.
They went down the current this time a little better, and got back up without incident, and then ran down well enough that Conn put them through a reverse, changing sides on their oars, so they could go back without pivoting. The maneuver was hard to do without tipping the ship over but they managed it, although it took too long.
“Good enough,” Conn said, when they pulled into the shore. “We’ll get better on the trip downstream. Go get ready. We leave tomorrow early. Do what you like tonight, but show up tomorrow at dawn, or I’ll hunt you down.”
The crew dragged themselves off, their bodies streaming sweat, their hair and beards soaked and matted, and trudged away up the bank. A crew of slaves had brought down the masts from some storeroom somewhere and Raef went over to look at them.
The masts were straight and long, their yards bundled to them with rigging, and there were enough for each ship to take two. Raef said, “We’ll need extra yards, too. Poles, to bend the leech. I’ll find out about those.” He was rocking back and forth from heels to toes, smiling, excited, and Conn punched him lightly in the belly.
“There’s the sails.”
The slaves were spreading striped red canvas out on the bank, to check for rips and seams, and Raef and Conn went over to watch them. Raef said, “There’s at least eleven. Make sure you get three for us.”
“Where are you going?”
“To find the rest of the rigging.” Raef smiled back at him. “I think I’ll bring my sea chest down here and sleep here tonight.”
“Oh, you would,” Conn said, but he laughed. He bent absently to itch at the black-stitched mess on his leg. “Get going. I’ll handle this.”
Raef went down alone to the riverbank, to sleep by the ships, at sundown. The evening twilight stayed almost as bright as daylight for a long while, and before the sky had turned deep purple-blue the rest of the Varanger had come down to join him.
It was too hot for a fire. They sat in a circle anyway and told stories of wars and sailing and heroes, Harald Fairhair and Turf- Einar and Ragnar, Loki’s tricks and Thor’s strength. Raef was sitting next to Bjorn the Christian, and as the others were arguing over some name or another, he said, “I don’t understand you, how you can follow the Cross, and still be Varanger.”
Bjorn sat with his arms on his widespread knees, cracking nuts between his hands. He stopped to take the cross out of his shirt and kiss it. “Because Christ is winning.”
Raef thought briefly of a footrace, all the gods running. “What do you mean by that?”
“Everywhere, the Christians have the most power. Maybe they’re Roman, maybe they’re Greek.” He shrugged, looking down at the nuts between his fingers. “I want to be with the winner.” He crushed his hands together with a crackling of shells.
Raef said nothing to that. He turned his gaze toward the rest of them, exploding into laughter at some joke Conn had just told, the firelight all around them, on Skinny Harald’s face, on Leif with his peg teeth. Vagn was looking at Conn with a shy admiration. He thought, Some of these are going to die. A rabbity fear climbed his backbone. His hands and feet were tingling. He thought if he tried a little harder he would know which ones. I don’t want to know, he thought, and realized he had spoken aloud.
“What?” Bjorn said, startled.
“Nothing,” Raef said, and ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbing out the visions.
The river wound south through flat reedy marshlands on the east, past low bluffs and pastures on the west, all the green fading into dusty brown in the late-spring sun. The shores were loud with waterbirds and on the grasslands herds of wild cattle and horses grazed. There were no trees. Sometimes in the distance they saw packs of the huns watching them from horseback. At night, they pulled out onto the shore, usually near a fishermen’s settlement, where they could get some food. The fishermen often didn’t want to give it up but Pavo took it a
nyway.
Although they were divided among the four ships, at night all the Varanger came to gather in one camp, and since most of the blue-coated guards were in Conn’s ship they camped with them too. This was a problem, since Pavo gave the guards the worst of the food—the rotten fish, the moldy grain, nothing but water to drink.
Oleg, the guard captain, said, “I can see how this is going,” and sent his men scavenging around the shoreline for eggs and birds and fish. Conn gave half of his meat to the guards; when they saw this, the other Varanger did also, and Merike found herbs in the wild pastures that she brewed into drink, heating up water from the river on a tiny fire in their midst.
After a few days they came to another rapids. From far upriver they could hear it, not only the roar of the water, but the screeching of birds. A wooden post, carved with faces, marked where they should haul the ships out, and the trail along the bank past the rough water was wide and beaten to dust. From the trail they could look out over the thrashing white water, jumping and tumbling over layers of rock in the river. As white as the foam on the water, clouds of birds soared and swept and squabbled over it all, pelicans with their long baggy beaks, and seagulls by the thousands. On the rocks the pelican nestlings huddled together screeching for food. Above them the seagulls wheeled on their black-tipped wings, waiting for a chance to steal the food or the naked baby.
It took a day to get all the ships past the rapids, while Pavo stalked up and down the line cursing them and threatening with his whip. But here even Dobrynya had to walk, since they had no horses. The great ships were like corpses on land, heavy as coffins. At the sight of clear water ahead, all the men cheered.
When they sailed, Merike rode along behind Raef, tucked into the stern of the ship. The other men cast looks at her but she kept her eyes always on the riverbank, or on Raef, and what he was doing. Nonetheless, one night, Leif asked Raef if he would throw dice for her.
Varanger Page 19
