A Burning Sea

by Theodore Brun

  Love is more powerful than death.

  She was still murmuring His name when her eyes closed for ever.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Erlan ran.

  He ran though he wasn’t made to run. He ran, ignoring his aching thighs, and the cuts and bruises and everything else he’d suffered these last days and weeks. He ran along marbled colonnades, across courtyards, past fountains. Aska bounded alongside him until at last the great Golden Hall rose in front of them out of the gloom. There was the terrace, there the staircase. Erlan stopped and doubled over, his chest heaving. ‘Come here, boy.’ He caught hold of Aska’s collar and offered him the scent off Lilla’s shawl. Then he could do nothing but watch Aska hunt around, dying with each second lost, but knowing that without the hound on her scent pursuit was hopeless.

  At last Aska caught something and immediately he was off along the edge of the terrace to the south, skirting the Golden Hall and loping along the colonnades that led downhill towards the Boukoleon Palace. Erlan hardly knew this part of the palace and so had to rely on Aska’s nose. When Aska stretched too far ahead, Erlan had to call him back. They ran on, down the labyrinthine pathways, under arches until his legs could carry him no further. He slowed to a halt. He had lost sight of Aska. Despair crashed in on him like a cold wave, overwhelming him. What was he doing? What was he hoping for? It was absurd. There was no hope. He put his head in his hands. . . no hope.

  That was when he heard a voice.

  Run on, my son, my chosen son. Run on. His father’s voice.

  And so he ran.

  He reached the next corner and there was Aska, waiting for him. They ran together, still on the trail, until they came to a large imposing building standing in isolation against the sea walls. This had to be the Boukoleon Palace, he realized, and the stone gateway to the right must lead to the emperor’s private harbour.

  Except Aska turned east along its outer wall until they came to a smaller building beside it. Then he disappeared inside. Erlan slowed only long enough to register the terracotta domes of a bathhouse. Inside all was darkness. His footsteps echoed off hard tiles. ‘Aska? Aska!’ he hissed. A shaggy head appeared at the top of a staircase. Erlan flung himself down it, not knowing where it would lead. The sound of running water murmured off the walls. He reached the bottom, blindly following Aska’s skittering footsteps past empty bath cells to the end of the corridor until a grille gate barred their way. Erlan snapped open the bolt and they slipped through. The running water grew louder and there was a different smell on the air, noisome and damp. More steps, slick with mould, to a still lower level where the water became a rush and the stink overpowering.

  ‘Aska – where the Hel are you?’

  He couldn’t see a thing. The dog yowled softly in the dark a few paces ahead but he seemed reluctant to go on. There was a slight lessening of the darkness to the right. Erlan moved towards it and suddenly his foot jarred down with a splash.

  He guessed he was standing in the effluent from the bathhouse – or maybe even the whole palace. He felt around for the top edge of the opening. It was low but not too low for a man to pass through. Was this where they had come? It had to be. Aska couldn’t possibly have led him to such an obscure corner of the palace if it wasn’t. Could he? But if they came this way, how long ago? Was he already too late? He inhaled a deep breath, foul with the reek of excrement, then bellowed Lilla’s name.

  Lilla and Anna had kicked and bitten and scratched like wildcats, doing all they could to hold up their kidnappers’ flight. But it served them nothing; the eunuch and his men had merely picked them up and carried them like corpses with hands clamped over their mouths.

  Katāros, cockroach that he was, knew every shadow and nook in which to conceal them. Not that much discretion was needed; the grounds were as good as deserted. When they had gone underground, her hope of any pursuit had died. It was only out of sheer stubbornness that she had fought every inch in the tunnel where they could no longer carry her. She had thrown herself down in the filth, jammed her toes into every crack she could find, writhed like a netted serpent despite the sword-point at her back, deaf to the curses her captors spat at her. Because she knew that once outside the walls, their fate was sealed.

  To her surprise, Anna fought as gamely as she did but it was exhausting work and the younger girl tired more quickly and was soon mere deadweight. They were passing her down from the effluent pipe to the rocks below when Lilla heard Erlan’s voice. She screamed, screamed with all the air left in her lungs.

  Katāros lashed her face, butting her head against the stone. ‘Shut your mouth, whore,’ he snarled, then shoved her over the edge. She hit the rocks hard, skinning her shins and jarring her kidneys. Katāros leaped down after her. ‘Pick her up.’

  The Arab leader, the one called Battal, barked an order and the two other men seized her. Battal, meanwhile, had a knife at Anna’s throat and was already driving her across the rocks towards the flight of steps that led into the water a hundred yards away. The harbour was deserted but for a handful of small boats bobbing up and down. ‘There it is!’ he cried.

  They were covering the distance too fast. They would soon be there. And then. . . Lilla screamed again, willing the sound to carry help faster, but earning herself only a punch in the face. Battal snarled something angrily at his underling, probably chastening him for damaging valuable goods. As recompense for his reprimand the man clamped his fist even tighter over her mouth, digging long, cruel nails into her cheeks, making her eyes water with pain.

  Erlan clawed his way through the slime like an animal escaping a snare, the water rushing past him. At last his fingers curled over the edge of the outlet. He saw the faint ring of sea and sky. Next moment he threw himself onto the rocks below, so intent on closing the distance that he hardly felt the blows. Behind him Aska yelped and, at last catching sight of his prey, leaped down, landing on top of Erlan.

  They untangled themselves, scrambling up and over the rocks under the Boukoleon’s grim facade. Erlan’s gaze raced ahead to their quarry. The figures had already reached the landing steps. The kidnappers were separating a boat from the flotilla of launches. The women were struggling in the shallows but to no avail. The men flung them into the boat like pig carcasses at a fair.

  Erlan yelled her name, running, running, but she seemed a world away. As he reached the steps one of the men turned back. Aska was beside him. Arbasdos’s blade was in his hand, his throat was dry, thirsty for blood.

  The Arab struck at him but Erlan never broke stride, smashing aside the blade and driving forward. They went down in a tumble. He got a grip around the man’s throat and with a single jerk of his arm, he smashed his head against the stone, hearing the skull crack. Aska was on the crumpled body at once, fangs ripping at his throat.

  The boat was just there; one of the men was frantically trying to lever them clear with an oar. There was a rope trailing on the surface. Erlan leaped for it into the water, his fingers snatched, and he had it, waist deep, winding his fist around the rope. He braced his legs and heaved on it, hard as if he had to move a mountain. The bow-post jerked round towards him, and the man with the oar fell into the water.

  Lilla was in the hold, curled tight as in her mother’s womb, fighting for her last chance, wriggling and straining to squeeze the binding around her wrists past her buttocks. It was the sudden jerk that did it. Her hips were through.

  Katāros was screaming above her, shrill as a gull’s cry, ‘Cut the rope! Cut us free, you imbeciles!’ but someone had fallen out.

  There was still a chance. She worked her hands to her knees, twisting her legs till her joints nearly popped. Then one heel was through, now the other. There was a mooring pole in the hold. Her fingers curled around the wood, she took a deep breath and stood up.

  The last Arab was struggling to fix the oars in place. Behind her, Katāros was screaming at Battal who was in the water. With no time to see more, she swung the pole into the side of the Arab�
�s head, stoving it in with one blow.

  She heard Erlan’s voice yelling for her to jump. But she couldn’t, not without Anna. She bent down and seized the girl. Behind her, Katāros was scrambling over the thwarts. Anna had just strength in her legs to take her own weight for a second – long enough for Lilla to shove her overboard. The girl flipped over the gunwale like a piece of timber. There was a splash, Lilla felt fingers in her hair, yanking her off her feet, then a thud as her head connected with a thwart. For a second she was stunned, a knife was at her throat. But she refused to be beaten. She drove with her legs, slamming her head upwards before Katāros had a chance to secure her. She felt her skull crunch into his nose and his head whip back. He fell backwards, tripping over another thwart but somehow catching a fold of her dress as he fell, pulling her on top of him. His hair came loose, a black mane everywhere, his hand was still on the blade, his nose streaming blood. She punched him double-fisted in the face, felt the blade slash her forearm then her shoulder but his cuts were wild. Her double grip got a hold on the hand with the knife. His other was pulling back her hair, exposing her throat. Pain shrieked through her skull, the blade pressed closer and closer his breath blowing like bellows past her ear. With a final surge of defiance, she jerked her head forward, feeling a clump of hair tear from her skull. She twisted, the knife stabbed and with the sudden shift in weight the point went past her and drove into the eunuch’s side. His scream was a blast of savage, shrill air into her eyes. Seizing her chance, she raked his face until his grip broke and he fell backwards. She had a hand on the gunwale, she pulled, lurched forward, slipped, glimpsed a whirl of dark sky above her for an instant, then her head clunked against wood, then cold water enveloped her. . .

  The Arab struggled out of the water and before Erlan could get to him he’d cut the rope. The boat started drifting away while Erlan tried to bring his sword to bear, but the depth of the water made it impossible.

  There was another splash, another body floundering in the water. The Arab turned and lunged for the sternpost. Erlan wrenched his sword clear of the water at last and slashed down at the limit of his reach. Battal’s left hand flew off, severed at the wrist even as his right had caught the gunwale. He screamed in agony, his legs churning the water madly to drive himself up into the boat. He got an elbow over and kicked again, too far now for Erlan to reach him. But suddenly there was Aska, calmly paddling out to the boat. Without breaking stroke, the hound sank his teeth into the Arab’s flailing calf. Battal roared in protest, but Aska held on with savage tenacity. Katāros’s face appeared like the moon above them, clutching at his side. He reached over to drag Battal into the boat, but Aska still gripped him. A blade glinted in the dark, the hound yelped and at last fell away.

  The boat was drifting further, the swirling currents of the Marmara now catching it and carrying it out of reach. Aska wasn’t moving. The woman thrashing in the shallows had reached the steps and was on her feet, coughing out seawater, her hair a smear across her face. It wasn’t Lilla’s hair. It wasn’t Lilla’s face.

  Erlan waded out to the clump of grey fur floating on the surface, his heart breaking. He pulled the body towards him, seeing the ugly gash across Aska’s chest, feeling the warmth leaching out of his faithful hound into the cold water. He moaned in despair.

  There was a splash to his left. The water’s surface broke, just for a moment. It was like a lightning bolt to his brain. Dropping the sword, he plunged under the water, eyes searching in the darkness. His fingers touched a swirl of cloth, then a fistful and a limb inside it. He grasped about in a frenzy for the rest of the body and then dragged it upwards, bursting through the surface in a snarl of hair and silk and wool.

  Pale hair. Lilla’s hair.

  She was unconscious, her wrists still bound together. He pulled her towards the steps until he could feel solid ground underfoot. At the steps, he lifted her head clear of the water and tipped it back. Her eyes were closed as if in sleep – or death. Desperate, he pressed down hard on her chest, once, twice. . . and suddenly her eyes opened, her mouth opened, and she vomited a fountain of water between them.

  He brushed the strands of hair out of her face. She was breathing again, staring up at him, struggling to focus. ‘Erlan?’ she murmured. ‘Erlan? Is that you?’

  ‘No, my love,’ he whispered over her. ‘My name is Hakan. And it’s time to go home.’

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  A note about names, first of all.

  The term ‘Byzantine’ was not coined until the sixteenth century. In fact, those we have come to know as the Byzantines called themselves Romans, or ‘Rhōmaioi’ to use the Greek. The Eastern Roman Empire centred on Constantinople was the direct successor to the empire centred on Rome and survived for over a thousand years: from the last centuries of antiquity well into the High Medieval Period, at last falling in AD 1453. Complicating matters, the Romans ceased to use Latin as their primary language (particularly of law and administration) in the late sixth century, so by the early eighth century – the setting of this novel – both the common tongue and the official language of the empire was Greek. It seemed to me that to use the term ‘Roman’ risked evoking the wrong epoch and could be confusing for any reader not already familiar with this period of history. Hence my use of ‘Byzantine’.

  Coupled with this, I felt it was clearer to refer to the Imperial City as Byzantium and not Constantinople throughout. Byzantium is easier to read (and to write!) and created the link with the name I was using for its inhabitants. Thus, although my pedant nerve was twitching violently all the way, this is the choice I made. In any case, Constantinople has had many names: the City, the Great City, the Queen of Cities, the Imperial City, the Mother of Cities, New Rome, Second Rome, Miklagard (the Norse name for it, which translates simply as ‘Big City’), in time Stambul; and finally Istanbul.

  The Arabs, too, might have been called several other names: Saracens, Muslims, Syrians, Ishmaelites, Mohammedans, and more. I went with ‘Arabs’ simply because as a collective noun it seemed to best encompass the actual people involved.

  Unusual though Erlan and his friends’ presence in Constantinople was at this date, by around a hundred and fifty years later Norsemen and women would become commonplace there. In particular, those Scandinavians serving as the famous Varangian Guard. (So-named because in their early days they swore an oath of allegiance to the emperor on the name of Vár, the Norse goddess of oaths and agreements.)

  However, there were one or two adventurous spirits from the North who made it that far, and further, during this period. The earliest reference I found was a short tale entitled Eireks Saga Ví∂förla, the text of which dates from around AD 1300 but refers to the journey of two men who travelled from Scandinavia via Constantinople and onward as far as the Yemen (or perhaps India) at some point in the mid-eighth century. Their names were Eirek the Traveller (a Norwegian) and Eirek the Dane. The fact that the two protagonists shared a forename lends the story a ring of truth, at least to my mind. They paid court to the emperor at the time – possibly Leo the Isaurian himself given the dates of his reign, or else his son. There the Northmen heard all about the Christian faith, picked up the Greek tongue, and impressed the emperor with their intelligence and manly bearing, before continuing onwards on their quest to find Údáinsakr – the Deathless Acre. This was a mystical place said to lie beyond the limits of Mi∂gard, the world of men, and appears to be a conflation of a Norse pagan concept with the Christian conception of heaven. Be that as it may, Eirek the Traveller’s quest to find the Deathless Acre was the result of a bet made during a particularly heavy drinking session with his Norwegian mates.

  Plus ça change. . .

  The route that Erlan and then Lilla and her companions take south is more or less the same route that came to be favoured by traders between the Baltic and the Black Seas. From the Gulf of Estonia, this followed the Dvina river (which I call by its older name, the Dagava), then branched into a tributary of this called the Kasp
lya leading to an overland portage that linked up with the larger Dnieper river roughly where the city of Smolensk is situated today. The route would still have been relatively uncharted at this point and was probably known only to the most enterprising and pioneering of northern skippers. It was only with the establishment of a Viking settlement at the site of Kiev and the draw of the slave market (and silver) of Baghdad in the ninth century that the trade route began to flourish.

  The episode of the couple caught in adultery, while rather grisly, was not entirely my own invention but was adapted from an account in Ibn Fadlan’s adventures two centuries later in a region a little further to the east. He describes witnessing the summary judgement of a couple condemned for adultery. The wretched transgressors were despatched in turn by bending two young saplings to the ground and tying their limbs to each, then cutting the restraints so that the trees sprang upright. The end result was much the same.

  Cometh the hour; cometh the man.

  Emperor Leo III, the ‘Isaurian’, was indeed the man, and for the empire the hour was desperate. A brilliant soldier, strategist, diplomatist and spymaster, he was exactly what the Romans/Byzantines needed at this moment in their history. There is no doubt at all that the empire faced an existential threat from the ascendant Umayyad Caliphate; a hundred years after Mohammad burst out of the desert, the Muslim conquests seemed destined to win to their cause the whole world. Moreover, the early eighth century was a time of huge internal instability within the Byzantine Empire, even as the Arab threat grew. The imperial crown changed heads no fewer than seven times in the span of two decades – known as the Twenty Years’ Anarchy. Only with Leo’s usurpation of the throne from its former occupant, an accountant named Theodosios III (himself a usurper installed by one faction of the army), did the purple of imperial office come to rest on the same shoulders for a while. And not a moment too soon, as far as the empire was concerned; the Arab host appeared before the walls of Constantinople less than five months after Leo’s coronation.