Varanger

by Cecelia Holland

  Michael was looking around, at the magnificent pictures on the wall, the fountain, and the courtyard beyond, now littered with clothes and gear of the Varangers. He said, “I passed one of the most interesting evenings of my life here once, discussing Homer’s understanding of fate and honor. That was with Stultius, the previous owner. He was quite the scholar.” He faced Conn again. “I understand your anger. I have heard stories, since I got— in fact, before I even got here—of you men—of you two, you Corbanssons, especially. You won this city for them. That was why I came, to see such heroes.” He stepped forward, his hand out. “I came to shake your hands.”

  He put out his hand to Raef, who almost refused, not wanting his dirty palm to touch something so clean and white, but then, slowly, laid his fingers against the Greek’s. To his surprise, the touch was firm and strong.

  Conn shook the offered hand without hesitation. He said, “I am Conn Corbansson, and this is Raef.”

  “I have heard wonderful stories,” the Greek said, again. “How you got them here across the trackless seas. Saved them from the fire. How you stormed the city like a pack of wolves. You’ll be famous for this. You’ll be talked of from Constantinople to Novgorod and beyond.”

  “We killed nobody in this house,” Raef said. He did not know why this seemed important. “Nobody was here when we came.”

  “I believe you,” Michael said. “Stultius would have fled at the first warning of any unpleasantness. Probably he went to Sinope. He has a villa there. Please let us sit. All of you.” He looked around at Ulf and Bjorn and Leif. “I have a proposal for you all.”

  Conn waved him toward the red leather stool, and sat down on the other, and Raef went to the side and brought back a bench and put it beside his cousin. Ulf, Bjorn, and Leif came slowly up and sat down on the ground around them. Janka had come to the edge of the courtyard, and Raef made signs at him toward the cookhouse. All around the courtyard, people were peeping out of doors. Janka skittered by on his way out the back.

  Michael Whatever His Name Was had settled himself calmly on the stool, his hands on his knees. He said, “I must explain. Among my duties for His Imperial Majesty are the oversight of the Imperial Guard, which is made up of a good many men like yourselves—Norse, Danes, Swedes, even some Icelanders. And so I speak your language passingly.” He said “His Imperial Majesty” in Greek, as he had before, as if there were no other way to say it. On the other hand, Raef thought, they probably had all immediately recognized what it meant.

  He imagined himself trying to speak Greek. The sensation was so odd he stirred around on the bench, turning away, and watched Merike come in with glass cups and the big swan ewer. She set the ewer down, gave each of them a cup, beginning with Raef, and then went around to fill the cups. This time she started with Michael the Greek. He gave her the same warm, eyecrinkling smile he had given to Raef at the first, welcoming as the sun coming up.

  He said, “I see you are divinely attended. Thank you, my dear.”

  Merike mumbled, her eyes shining as if she understood, her ears turning red, and scooted away back into the kitchen. Halfway out the bedroom door behind Michael, Conn’s latest woman was staring at them, her mouth ajar.

  Conn said, “Whoever this house used to belong to, it’s ours now.” His voice had a hard edge.

  Michael said, “Well, you’re here, aren’t you. It’s very beautiful and comfortable, and you’ve earned it. ‘Leading your host like a consuming fire!’ “ He flourished with his hand. “Believe me, it sounds much better in Greek.”

  “Has Volodymyr agreed to everything?” Conn asked. “How certain is this, that we have to give Chersonese back?”

  “Well, he has,” Michael said. He drank some of the wine. “Excellent. Stultius always had the best. I’m sorry to tell you, but he has indeed acceded to all the terms, including the city as part of the wedding gifts.”

  “He gave in, just as if he had lost!” Raef leapt up, and circled around once, turning back to face Michael again, his temper simmering. “So, that’s why you came walking all over here to see us? To tell us you beat us anyway?”

  Michael did not try to smile this down. His face was open, serious, smoothly handsome, his eyes candid. On their side. He said, “No, not at all. I came as I said because I heard the stories. I wanted to meet you. Especially you two.” He sat forward a little, looking from Conn to Raef and back again.

  “Besides, you didn’t really lose. That’s a lot of money, among five men. You’ll be justly famous for this, as I said.” He paused a moment, and then said, in another, harder, voice, “The deal is done, and you can’t really fight it, can you. The five of you.” His eyes switched from side to side, where creeping in like dogs Ulf and Leif and Bjorn were picking up the farthest-scattered of the gold pieces. “The two of you,” Michael said, looking back to Conn and Raef.

  Conn grunted. He stood with his mouth clamped tight. Raef thought, We could murder him. Right now, just the two of us, we wouldn’t need any help. He saw no use in that. He realized they had just seen this Greek somehow bribe their own men under their eyes and there was nothing they could do.

  Michael was talking again, in his open, easy voice. “This should never have come so far, anyway. The Palace has known for a while Vladimir was ambitious. I warned the Emperor myself a year ago to take more heed of him. But His Imperial Majesty has other things on his mind.” The smile returned, ingratiating, irresistibly friendly. The clear eyes candid as a baby’s.

  “In fact part of the agreement with Vladimir is for a Rus’ army to come to the Emperor’s support in his current difficulties. That is my proposal to you. Come to Constantinople. Become part of the Guard. I promise you wealth and honor beyond anything Volodymyr ever dreamed of.”

  Raef had heard this before, somewhere. He drank the wine in a gulp. He let his gaze travel over the house around him again, with all its beauties, which now he had to give away, and go shuffling again off into somebody else’s war.

  Something in his mind cracked like a bone. He stood up suddenly and went off, getting away from this. Michael, behind him, said, “Did he misunderstand me? I meant no offense, certainly— you’ll be given very high rank in the Guard, your names known everywhere.” Raef went out a door, into the little garden.

  He wondered if this were how it felt to be a slave, passed along from hand to hand. He moved out to the warmth of the sunlight. The church bells rang, one, two strokes. The water running again had brought the garden back to green, and there were even some little blue flowers in the prickly herbs. He could have made this all work, he thought.

  But he knew better than that. He stood looking around him, at the walls, the buildings. He thought again how long this place had been here. Years, he thought, and remembering the huge old tree in the ruined house: hundreds of years. Years past hundreds. Forever. He struggled to get his mind around what that meant, the sons upon sons upon sons, gone in and out of the house, the ships in and out, the buildings raised, and lived in, and fallen down. The layers of men’s lives laid down here, maintaining what was there, adding more. That was what made this possible, that a man here could have clothes and furniture and beautiful pictures around him and good food and talk, comfort, something to build on.

  He understood, now, why the Greeks had not fought to the death; they had known all along, if they could endure, the empire would come and restore them. In the end, Chersonese would be here, but Volodymyr would be gone. He and Conn, gone, tramping through the world living in holes in the ground, fighting other people’s fights. He felt the huge lie under Michael’s serene and transparent honesty, talking to them as if they were equals. Probably he had learned that with the dansker, how to talk like that, like a free man. He remembered thinking Michael might have walked down off one of the pictures in the hall. His massive assurance. He belonged here. And Raef never would.

  Nor his sons. For the first time in his life, he thought that he might someday have sons of his own, and he wondered how they would
live, in caves like Thorfinn’s, at the oars of somebody else’s ship, dying in somebody else’s battles.

  Conn had come out to the garden behind him. Raef stood ruffling the blue flowered herb branches with his hand, making the savory aroma rise up.

  “He’s gone,” Conn said.

  “Good.”

  His cousin came up beside him, into the sunlight. “Do you want to do this? Take up arms with them?”

  Raef blurted out, “You want to fight for these people? Conn, look at this. We won this city. But somehow the Greeks won the war. How did they do that? Why is Volodymyr giving them everything back, and us, as if we were a bunch of pieces on a chessboard? They outtalked him, and outthought him, just the way that”—he nodded after the departed Greek—“outtalked us, just now.”

  “I didn’t believe him,” Conn said. “He didn’t outtalk me.”

  “Oh? Why didn’t we just kill him, then?”

  Conn’s eyes widened, and he said nothing. Raef went on. “Because it’s really Volodymyr and Dobrynya who agree to all this, not us. It’s the kings. All we do is carry the swords. And now people like this Michael will come to Kiev, and probably even to Holmgard. And those people will talk their way into running everything. And you and I will have nothing more than they care to throw us, like a scrap to the dogs.”

  Conn said, “If we go with them, to Constantinople, maybe we can have this. Something like this.”

  Raef crushed up a handful of the herbs and threw the broken leaves down. “Do you think you could be Emperor? More likely we’d stand around all day like statues, in corners and at the doors. Get a knife in the back, as soon as we’re not useful anymore. You heard him. They let us have Chersonese because they were too busy doing something else. Something bigger, wider, in languages we don’t know, with people we’ve never heard of. Do you want that? You want to hear yourself called some other odd name? Some new joke? All for a few gold rings, and some stories?”

  The Greek girl sauntered out of the hall, and went by them, going toward the cookhouse. Her black hair was curly as Michael’s, caught up in a blue ribbon. As she walked by Conn she gave him a sideways look, and her hips swayed. Conn ignored her; she would be gone by nightfall.

  He said, “What do you want, Raef?”

  “I want to go back where we belong,” Raef said, not knowing until he said it that it was true.

  “Where we belong.” Conn’s eyes widened in shock. “You mean—back to the island?”

  “I don’t think we can ever get back to the island. I don’t think even Corban is there anymore. Somewhere that could be home to us. Hedeby. Denmark. Jorvik. Where we speak the right language. Where we know how things go. Where the people look like us. Where we belong.” He figured this into words as it came up, like the water rising in the fountain and spilling out. He remembered the birch-bark map, with Hedeby at the center. “The old woman was right, the world is a ring, but there are a lot of rings, one after another, maybe going on forever. And each ring thinks it’s the only one. And it is, in a way, to the people in it. We have to get back to our own ring, or nothing we do is going to come to anything. Not for us, at least.”

  He looked around at the hall and the garden, aching for what was already lost, for what he had never really had. “I want this. I want to live like this. If I can’t have it here, I want to build it. Start building it. And if I have to fight and bleed, it’s going to be for my own sake, not some king’s.”

  Conn said nothing; building was not something that interested him. Raef could feel his cousin’s uncertainties like an unraveling in his mind. Raef said, “We have a good ship, sweet, and lucky. We could follow this sea back to our sea. It would take a long while.”

  Conn faced him, knotted up again to some purpose. “I want to go back to Kiev. There’s a woman there—”

  Raef stood up, angry. “You and your cunts.”

  “You dragged that stupid hun bitch all this way—”

  Raef clenched his fist. Conn looked calmly down at that and raised his eyes again. “Do you mean that? Because I’m of a mind to beat the shit out of somebody.”

  Raef looked away, and let his hand open. The cookhouse door swung wide and Merike came out, and called, “Food. Meat. Come.” She gave the two of them a startled look and went inside again.

  “All right,” Conn said. “She has her uses.”

  Raef said, “We’ll go back to Kiev.”

  Conn smiled at him, and lifted one hand up to his shoulder; Raef suddenly gripped him into an embrace. They stood holding each other a moment, head beside head, Raef thinking as long as he had Conn with him, he could get through anything. He could give up this house. It was only a house. It wasn’t really the house, anyway.

  They stood apart. Conn said, “We should have killed him.’

  “If we had,” Raef said, “there would only be another one just like him, right behind him.” The smell of the roasted meat reached them and they went in together to eat.

  He lay that night with Merike in his arms and thought about Rashid. He had liked Rashid, and then disliked him, and now he thought he liked him again. He didn’t know why. Merike snuggled close to him in her sleep, murmuring something in hunnish with his name in it, and he kissed her and stroked her hair back and went to sleep.

  A month later, as the summer waned, the Greek princess arrived.

  The orders came down from Volodymyr even before the ship carrying the Emperor’s sister appeared off the cape. All the Rus’ army would meet her; the Varanger would stand on the edge of the market street where it ran along the beach, with guardsmen on either side. Along with the orders came bales of new clothes, and chests full of swords and gold armrings and earrings and fingerrings.

  “They don’t want us talking it over,” Raef said. He was watching Conn hand out the gold to the other Varanger; there was enough for everybody to have his choice. Raef guessed also Michael had reported back to Voloydmyr and Dobrynya that the Corbanssons were less than happy with the overall arrangement.

  Conn said, “I don’t care. I want to get out of here.” He had found some gold ear hoops and was poking one of them in through the soft part of his left ear. A little blood dribbled down his hand. Below them the beach spread out its broad white apron, dimpled with footprints and dappled with trash. Pavo and his Sclava were already milling around on it, taking food from the sausage vendors and shouting at the packs of running children. The Sclava were all wearing fancy body armor, with metal studs and plates. Pavo was watching Conn narrowly, his head turning constantly as he strolled up and down the sand, stopping every once in a while to bellow something to his men.

  Conn fixed the first hoop in his ear, and began to worry the second through the other. He had gold bands on his upper arms, too. Raef sniffed, to see if he smelled like a Greek.

  The princess’s ships came into view, and the whole crowd roared. The Greeks came pouring down from the city, shouting and waving their arms. Raef thought, She is their salvation. He looked down to his left and saw the last of the Varanger and thought, idiotically, Still, we could take them.

  He wanted only to get out of here. He felt the cross-purposes of the Greeks and Volodymyr meshing around him like the work of spiders and he knew the prince no longer trusted them, if he ever had. What he and Conn had done for them was nothing, now that it was done. The prince had sent down no body armor for them, and when the soldiers lined up to welcome the princess, the Varanger stayed at the back, along the street, and out of the way.

  There were three Greek ships, each as big and black and shiny and ponderous as the ship that had taken Michael the Blabbermouth away. Volodymyr had brought carpets down, and laid them along the beach to give his new bride a pathway up to the litter that would carry her to his church. A little barge, also stacked with carpets, went out to carry her in from the Greek ship.

  Raef folded his arms over his chest. She was not young, this princess, not even as young as Merike, and not pretty, either. She was tall and stoutly built;
she wore a headress so spangled with pearls and jewels he could not see the color of her hair.

  She rode inward on the barge, and among the men and women who accompanied her she stood so that no one could have doubted who was born to the purple. She had a way of carrying herself that drew everybody’s eyes, and brought everybody to an awed silence. The Greeks all knelt. Lined up on either side of the carpetway, the Sclava, one by one, began to kneel also. Only the five Varanger, shoulder-to-shoulder along the market street, stood where they were, their feet widespread, their hands at their sides by their weapons.

  She came up the beach along the carpets, glittering from head to foot, magnificent as a walking, living idol. Volodymyr met her, with his uncle behind him, and reached out his hand.

  He bowed first, in spite of himself. Dobrynya bowed from the waist. The princess made an elegant inclination of her head and chest. They spoke—her in Greek, him in Rus’ dansker, but it made no difference, since they already knew all the words. She stepped to one side, so that some of her followers could come forward and be made known to the prince.

  One was the high priest, who would douse Volodymyr with water. Sheathed in splendid robes, he said more lengthy incomprehensible words. The sun was high and bright, the waters of the harbor glittered, all around, and the people cheered when they were supposed to. Finally the princess and her retinue, with Volodymyr, walked up the trail of the carpets and were carried off to the church, where he would be made Christ’s man, and marry her.

  An hour later, the seagulls screamed over the empty, rumpled beach, the big ships were anchored out in the cove, and nothing seemed changed at all.

  C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - O N E

  The Greek ships carried the Sclava, Dobrynya, the princess and Volodymyr, and all their followers back up to the mouth of the Sclava River; the Varanger went in the dragon, with the guardsmen who had sailed to Chersonese with them to fill out the oars. They all rowed the whole way, but the Varanger got to the lagoon first, and were roasting an ox over the fire when the Greek ships finally arrived.