Varanger

by Cecelia Holland

  “Pull,” Raef shouted. “Backboard, damn it, pull hard!” Conn bent to the long stroke of his oar, waiting for the shot to come.

  “They shoot,” Janka cried, above his head.

  There was a distant shout, and another stroke, with his head bent, waiting for the burst of fire on his back. Then a pelting hail of little sharp scraps and dust. Another stroke, and he looked up and back across the gunwale between Leif and a guardsman’s brawny bare back, to see on the point the Greeks struggling to turn their clumsy weapon around. No fire. He laughed. And now they were out of range. He was afraid of nothing now. “Pull,” he shouted. “Pull backboard, up steerboard.”

  The steerboard oars rose in a kind of salute; the backboard side dug in, and the ship turned neatly to the south. “Pull!” He shipped his oar and stood up, looking forward past the jaw of the dragon head, toward Chersonese.

  On the white sand there a line of men was forming, with lances and big shields. Helmets. They had two more slings, one at either end of the line.

  “Oars up!” He wouldn’t even need to say that. The ship was gliding forward under its own weight now. Raef was beside him, his hand on Conn’s back, his head pushed up beside him to look. The first sling fired, a clatter of rocks, and they hunched in against the ship for cover. Then the keel of the dragonship touched sand, Raef struck Conn once hard in the back with the flat of his hand, and they charged.

  Raef had a leather shield, which he held over his head as he plunged through the shallows. The second barrage from the slings rattled down around him, splashing all around him into the water and hitting the shield hard enough to jar his arm. Conn was a step ahead of him, going for the middle of the shield wall.

  He knew two things about these battles, which were to keep his feet moving and Conn on his left side; nothing got through him. The tall shields locked ahead of him, and he chopped with his axe. A sword blade pierced right through his leather shield and he jerked it wide, shield and sword and all, hacked with his free arm at the arm behind the sword, saw another sword jabbing at him from knee level, and slashed wildly at it, hitting nothing, offbalance, his mind a clutter of shields and blades.

  The guardsman on his right staggered backward, blood gushing from his face, and the Greeks pounding him swung toward Raef, two men at once, stabbing high and low together. He had to back up. His shifting feet dodged them as if he had eyes on his toes. Somewhere a horn blew, over and over. The Greeks were calling in more men. Frantically he parried off the high blow and dodged the low blow and stayed hard by Conn.

  The guardsman next to him was down, and dying, and the hallooing Greeks plunged over him toward Conn. He slashed out wide with the axe, a mistake, and fended off the incoming spear with his bare forearm. They were pushing him back. He anchored himself to Conn’s side; there was nothing behind him but the sea. He pushed with his legs, his feet paddling the ground. The horns whooping off somewhere distant. He hacked down through a tall shield and saw the face behind it twist, driving the spear at him.

  Then on his left he felt more than saw Conn lunge forward, and followed that way, blindly crashed after him through a gap in the line. Suddenly there was space around him. For a moment then he stood toe-to-toe with the man with the spear, stabbing and hacking at each other; another part of the Greek’s shield went flying, and then the other man whirled and ran. Conn was running; Raef raced after him, up onto the broad street at the top of the beach.

  There some of the Greeks were trying to stand again, shield-to- shield, shouting to each other, waving their arms to each other. The horns were still blowing, somewhere on the other side of the town. Raef gave a bellow. He realized Volodymyr had attacked. Maybe that was what the horns meant, that Volodymyr was attacking. Or maybe, when the horns blew the alarm over Conn and Raef, Volodymyr had realized his chance.

  Conn bellowed, “Gather! Get together!” Behind the little knot of Greek shields across the street people were running screaming from the nearby houses and away. The Varanger charged the standing Greeks in a mass and smashed them back, crowding their own shields back into their faces, and some fell and the rest broke and ran.

  Raef yelled, pointing; on the far side of the hill, beyond the rooftops, a thick black cloud of smoke rose. Conn flung one arm out to stop him. They stood, panting, looking around.

  Conn gave a wild whoop. The main street was empty except for the Varangers, and the people in the side streets were all running away. There was a terrible yell in the distance. The smoke billowed higher. “I told you they’d attack,” he said. Some of the men were breaking into the houses along the beach, and he veered over toward them. Raef thought of Merike, and turned back toward the dragonship, floating in the shallow water.

  She was wading ashore. Janka came with her. Raef turned around to face the city again. At the corner of his mind something twinkled and gleamed. It had been shining bright as a lantern there since he came ashore but he could only now heed it. With Janka and Merike behind him he crossed the main street and went into a narrow uphill lane, following that golden gleam.

  The street beyond the beach was deserted. The wooden-slatted doors hung open in the stonework block of rooms on either side. He looked in one opening and saw a shop, a square workspace with stools and benches, pottery on the shelves, a counter. He looked into another and saw rugs and cloth. He could hear somebody screaming, in a nearby building, somebody fool enough to stay put, and then the scream abruptly cut off.

  He walked straight toward the brightening glow of the basileus. On the next street, this course brought him to a blank wall, overgrown with white roses. Midway along the wall was a broad wooden gate sheathed and studded with iron. He tried the hasp and it was solid, moveless, barred on the inside. He took his axe, and hacked a hole in the wood panel by the hasp until he could reach in and push the bar out.

  The gate opened easily, well balanced for its weight. He went inside, with Merike, and turned to Janka and handed him the axe.

  “Stay here. Let no one else inside, except Conn. I’ll handle this.”

  Conn pulled Leif, Bjorn the Christian, Ulf, and a handful of the guardsmen away from the looting and followed the fleeing people. They were all going in one direction and he was content with that. Whenever he saw anybody stopping he ran at them, howling like a wolf, and the Greeks fled away. Leif swerved into an open doorway and came out with a skin half full of wine, and they passed it around as they walked up the street. Ahead of them, a few people burst out of a house and fled, and Conn chased them half a block to harry them along.

  Ahead of them rose the round top of the church, with its cross; that was where these people were fleeing, to that sanctuary. The smoke billowed up beyond it and he heard a great crash like a roof falling in. Suddenly, on the street ahead of him, Pavo appeared, and a dozen of his Sclava behind him.

  Conn slowed, one arm out, holding his men back. From here he could see the masses of people packed around the church, too many to fit inside; the wailing of children and the sobbing of women sounded from them in a great mournful, single cry. Sclava walked around the outside of the crowd, their hands on their swords. The wind was rising, and the sky was full of white billowing clouds. There was still a lot of day left before the sun went down.

  Then from the church came a blast of horns. The Varanger stopped, on the free side of the Sclava ring. The two doors of the church swung open and several men came out onto the flat porch. Among them was Volodymyr, who lifted a hand up over his head in salute.

  Conn yelled; the Sclava and the other Varanger all shouted in response. The captive people moaned. Among the men behind Volodymyr was one in the long gown and domed hat of a Christian priest and he came forward to the edge of the porch.

  His voice carried weakly out across the crowd. He was speaking Greek but with his hands he was signing to them to sit down, to be quiet, to accept what was happening to them. Behind him Volodymyr stood straight and proud. As Conn watched, Dobrynya came up behind him, and stood behind the prince. The
quavering voice of the priest dissolved in the wind into an empty twittering.

  What mattered was that they were surrendering. Conn turned to the other men.

  “This part’s done. Let’s go look for loot.”

  Raef went in through the broken gate in the wall, and across a strange little garden laid out in perfect squares, trimmed in white rock, all the growing stuff thorny and rank and dried up. The hall ahead of him was of stone, blank except for the door. He went in through the door, and it was like walking into a different world.

  He knew at once there was no one living in the place. The air felt hollow, old, long unbreathed. He stood in a room with a floor of mottled green stone, whose walls were painted with pictures of fish, and ships, and a city on a seacliff. In the middle of this first space was a stone basin, in the center a naked green woman, half the size of a real one, with her feet inside a metal wave and her uplifted arms curled around a shell. The basin was empty, but he saw a dark stain a foot deep on its stone side and knew it usually flowed with water.

  Beyond was an open courtyard, with stone blocks filled with dead flowers, and several figures of stone, painted like real people. People also were painted on the walls around the courtyard, each side pierced with several doors. He stood looking at the image of a woman, her large lovely eyes pointed at each end, her hair in ringlets, her red lips slightly pursed, as if she were thinking him over.

  In the middle of the courtyard was a stool, overturned, and a woman’s hairpiece, very pretty, made of shell and gold. Even the stool was beautiful, with smooth curving legs, and a little leather cushion. A stone table stood next to it.

  On the table was a piece of birch bark, and in the center of the birch bark was his basileus.

  He picked up the basileus, warm from the sun. Merike whispered, behind him, “Where all go?”

  “They left,” he said. “As soon as they knew we were coming.” Including Rashid. He went on through the courtyard and out another door.

  Here was another garden, square on square of white pebble pathways, all the plants inside the squares gone gray from lack of water. These looked like kitchen herbs, and when he went into the smaller building behind the garden, it was a cooking house.

  A huge hearth took up half the wall, well built of brick, with spits and pothooks of iron. Along the south wall were two stone basins; on a counter next to them he found a chunk of mouldy bread, and a knife, much used, the edge honed white. Half a strange fruit, the coarse red husk filled with little jewels of seeds. Two big stone jars stood at one end of the room, and he took the seal from one and found it full of wine. The other was already opened, and gone to vinegar. On a shelf above them were goblets made of glass, and bright colored clay cups.

  Merike poked at the hearth with a stick. She said a word in her language and then struggled with it in dansker; finally she shrugged. There was wood beside the hearth in a box and she laid out a fire, as if it were a cold day, and went around opening casks and cases. On a shelf Raef found some cheese in pots, little packages of crushed herbs, a jar of some syrupy stuff, astonishingly sweet. There were baskets of round red apples. The Greeks had had plenty of food, even salted meat, and grain. At least, some of these Greeks. At the far end from the wine, Raef came on a little side room behind a curtain.

  As soon as he pulled the curtain, he knew by the smell what this was. The box stood before him, a comfortable height for sitting, with a hinged lid. Next to it, in its own little box, was a stick with something dry and white and lumpy as a wasp nest on the end. He opened the lid and looked down, far into the dark, and saw a gleam of water.

  He stepped away, letting the curtain swing. He said, “They didn’t even have to go outside to shit.”

  Merike spoke a rattle of hunnish; on the counter she was making something out of grain and the sweet syrup and apples. Raef went out the back of the cookhouse.

  There, under a roof covered with flowering vines, was another big basin, made of stone. It had benches along the insides and a hole in the bottom with a wooden plug. In a hollow directly beneath the floor was a space full of charcoal and ashes, the ruins of old fires. He stood there a moment imagining people cooking to death. Beyond this, across a pavement, was a long low barn, maybe for horses, maybe for slaves. It was empty now.

  He went back around the outside of the cookhouse, and into the hall, with its great open square in the middle, and the doors opening into rooms on either side. He went from one room to another, looking at everything. The rooms were small, some with long cushioned sleeping benches, a few still covered with silk sheets. The floors were the hard mottled green stone but over them were mats of thick cloth, plush and colorful, with intricate patterns of flowers and animals. In one room a wooden chest stood against the wall, the hinges and hasps of gold, its top inlaid with nacre in a scene of helmeted warriors carrying spears, captive women with their heads bowed and hands bound. On the top of this chest lay a scattering of little bits of gold—hoops for ears, a few rings. Above it, on the wall, in a polished disk of glass, he saw his own face.

  He stared at himself, startled; he saw himself so seldom his first sense was curiosity, as if he looked at a stranger. The glass reflection softened the lines of his face. Made his long sun-bleached hair white as sand, his beard like a nest his mouth and nose and eyes rose out of. A streak of dried blood ran down the side of his face. He looked younger than he thought he was. He stood a long while, staring at himself, in the midst of all this wealth.

  In the next room, the bed was neatly made up; in the corner, on a little wooden stand, was the golden image of a prancing horse, only two hands high, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen that he thought had been made by a human being.

  He went into each room, and came out of the last one and went into the center of the courtyard. Turning over the stool, he sat down. He still had the basileus in his hand, and he put it into his belt pouch, and looked at the square of birch bark.

  It was the map he had drawn of the world, with Hedeby at the center.

  He wondered what Rashid had meant by this. If anything. Somehow Rashid had known he would come here, if he didn’t die first. He remembered the Baghdad man saying that he wished him well. He looked up into the open air above him. Smoke was drifting across the sky. The sun was gone down out of sight behind the high wall. It was very quiet. He did not feel like rising. Presently Merike brought him a little cake. He felt the walls around him like a shelter. He reminded himself the walls had not saved the people who had been here before. Yet everywhere he looked was something beautiful.

  Merike stood beside him, holding out one of the green glass goblets full of wine. Her hand rested on his shoulder. She said, “Who?”

  “Mine, now,” he said. He drank the wine, already uneasy about that.

  Later, with evening falling, he went around looking for a torch, noticed the little burnt wick in a pot of oil in a niche in the wall, and lit it with a splinter from Merike’s kitchen fire. It sent up a little yellow glow, not as smoky as a torch, not as much light, either. He went all around the open space, finding more pots of oil and lighting them, and while he was doing this, Conn came in, trailed by the rest of the Varanger, each carrying a bulging sack over his shoulder.

  “Well,” Conn said. “How did you find this?”

  Raef blew out the splinter, and sat down on his stool. Leif and Ulf and Bjorn the Christian had thrown their sacks of booty down and were walking around the courtyard, ogling the pictures, and stroking the stone people. “There’s room for everybody,” Raef said. “Everybody we like, anyway. Take a room. That’s mine, over there.” He waved at the room with the golden horse in it, where he had also put the birch-bark map.

  Conn found another stool, and sat beside him. Merike came silently from the kitchen with more cakes and a big ewer in the shape of a swan. The other men went quietly around the place, with only an occasional yell of surprise.

  Conn said, presently, “This is nice.”

  “You haven’t se
en half of it.” The wine was making Raef muzzy-headed. “Where’s Volodymyr?”

  “On the other side of the city. The Greeks have surrendered.

  Apparently they’ve been out of water for a while. They’re sending to Constantinople with our terms.” He finished his glass of wine and filled it again from the swan. “Dobrynya says we should take care of this end of the city. Let the local people come back if they want, he says. Don’t steal too much.” He glanced after the other men, with their sacks of loot.

  “They’ll come back in when we bring the water flowing again,” Raef said. “We’ll likely have to set up some kind of lawgiving.”

  “You can fix the water?”

  “Probably. Are you still thinking about Oleg?”

  Conn shrugged. “Not so much. We did this for him. Maybe it makes up somehow. Everybody dies.” He drank deep of the wine. “We could name the city for him. Chersonese is a stupid name anyway.”

  The lamps filled the space with half-light; the other men had chosen one or another of the rooms, dragged his loot into it, and gone out to the cookhouse to eat. Raef sat thinking about how they had come here. He remembered the fighting on the beach, when the Greeks raised their shield wall, their last chance to keep the Varanger out. He remembered again how he and Conn had broken the wall. Without Conn he thought he would have died there. The whole attack would have died there, and if they had fallen back, maybe Volodymyr would have failed too.

  He reached his hand out between them and Conn took hold of it, and they sat there a while in silence, having no words that said more than the hand clasp. In the shadowy lamplight the pictures on the walls were like people watching them.

  The little birds who had been twittering around the eaves of the courtyard had gone away with the sunset, but now abruptly, out in the garden, another bird began to sing, a long peal of pure, rippling notes, as sad as death. Raef sat drinking, Conn silent beside him, and listened to the endless, almost weeping song of the bird, as if the night itself sang for him, and for the first time in all his life, it seemed, he felt no need to move on.