Swords From the North

by Henry Treece

  And when the storm had worn itself out and the men had rested, they began their long march down the far hill-slope towards Licata. Now in a pine-wood they were lucky once again, for they found a herd of swine picking about under the low boughs. And that night the wood was heavy with the smell of roasting pork.

  Before dawn the next day they struck a tributary of the river Salso and followed it down towards the coast. The water had chiselled such a deep gully through the rocks in this part that the whole army could march onwards without being seen. Haldor was in high glee at this and called out to Harald, ‘I feel in my bones that this time we shall be in great luck. I would wager my front teeth with any man that this time we shall have good cause to rejoice. What do you say, Gyric?’

  But Gyric was in one of his dark moods and answered, ‘No one wants your front teeth, friend. They have teeth of their own, so keep them where they belong for chewing your meat with. As for rejoicing, you should know well enough that it ill becomes any warman to rejoice before his foes lie stark at his feet. I shall say no more.’

  Wulf said, ‘And that is just as well, if you are going to croak at us like a Lichfield raven.’

  After that the Varangers went down towards the coast in silence. Once Harald climbed to the lip of the gully and looked to the sea. Then he cried out, ‘The Tunisians have indeed come. Their galleys lie off-shore in great droves like sheep. It is as well that Bouid stayed where he was, with his famous siege engines, at Syracuse. He is a wise commander, that much I will say for him.’

  Eystein snorted and said shortly, ‘I hope we shall say the same of you by the time we have taken Licata, brother.’

  But when the Varangers had had a chance of looking at that castle, they began to wonder if there was any commander who could take it by storm, without the help of engines. Its walls were high and had broad platforms jutting out on every side, from which flaming asphalt and pitch could be poured down on to any attacker. Moreover, there was no cover for three bowshots all round the defences, so that a siege-party would have to move over an open space to get close to the walls. Since the Varangers carried with them no bows or defence-engines, they stood in danger of losing half their number at least in trying to breach this place.

  Gyric looked up at it wryly from the cover of the gully and said, ‘I see that their roofs are tiled here. We cannot use our little friends the birds this time.’

  So the Varangers sat down beside the sheltered river and there was a great gloom over them all. But Haldor was still in high spirits, and he went off to spy out the land. When he came back, he said to Harald, ‘There is one place where this river loops round and runs within fifty paces of a comer tower of the castle, brother.’

  Harald said shortly, ‘What is in your mind, then? Have you some new way of fighting wars too?’

  Haldor slapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Now, look, brother, a man does not have to be a great scholar to dig a hole in the ground, does he?’

  Harald said, ‘So this time we must burrow like moles and come up from under the floor inside Licata, is that it?’

  Haldor nodded. He said, ‘I have examined the earth down here and it is soft. Though we have no entrenching tools, our swords and spears would pick away the earth. We could approach this tunnel-making in a long line, each man passing back the earth we dig out in cloaks. Then the last man could fling the soil into the river and it would float away and leave us a clear entrance.’

  Just then Wulf came back from foraging and said, ‘I have even a better thing to tell you. God has done half the work for us already. There is a little underground stream that comes out into the river. If we enlarged the tunnel it makes, I have the feeling that it would lead us up into the castle well-shaft.’

  Now Harald said, ‘You both speak good sense. Forgive me if I was short with you. I am often a dull dog. So now, since the luck seems to be with us, let us do nothing to drive it away. We must light no fires from now on; we must not even talk in whispers to one another. There will be no eating and drinking until we break up through the floor into this castle. Is that understood?’

  All the Varangers nodded that they understood their captain’s orders, and then they filed up the gully to the place where the little stream flowed out. And there they began to dig, as silently as ghosts.

  Though the men worked in relays it was no easy labour. They had two consolations, though: first that the path into the fortress was already marked for them, and secondly that their spears were of the broad-bladed Varangian sort and not the thin-pointed lances which the Bulgar regiment carried.

  As the day wore on and the bright sunshine outside turned to dusk, the Varangers drew nearer and nearer to the well-shaft. And at last, when they had been picking away for twelve hours, Harald whispered to Haldor, ‘I am standing knee-deep in cool water and all about me I can feel stones, set in a circle above my head. Above me, I think I see chinks of light, as though torches are shining up there, beyond the well-cover. What should we do now, brother?’

  Haldor whispered back softly, ‘We have no mounting-ladders but it seems to me that this shaft is only an arm’s width broad. So we must go singly, each man pressing his back against one side and his feet against the other and inching his body upwards.’

  Harald said, ‘I am not in favour of that. If the top man fell, as he might do easily enough on this slippery stonework, then he would take the others down with him and we should all be trapped in the tunnel for them to do with us as they pleased.’

  Wulf pushed up towards them and whispered, ‘You two chatter like the washerwomen of Bergen round their well. Let someone who knows put an end to this talk. Now listen to me: you, Harald, being the heaviest man in the world, must stand at the bottom forming a stirrup with your two hands locked. Haldor must then mount on to your hands and then on to your shoulders and stand with his back against the wall. I shall then climb up both of you with my axe in my hand, and from Haldor’s shoulders I shall easily reach the well-cover. This I shall hack across with three skilful strokes in my usual maimer, then I shall jump inside the room and draw Haldor up after me. The other men will follow on up while he and I hold back the Tunisians. Is that clear?’

  Harald said glumly, ‘And I am to stand down here in the water while all the army climb on to my back? Is that the part for a captain to play?’

  Wulf said, ‘That’s your fault for being so tall.’

  Haldor said, ‘If you think I am going second into this castle, Wulf, then you must think again. Unless I go in first, with the luck upon me as I feel it now, I shall not go in at all. Then you will have that to explain when we get back home to Iceland - how you deprived your closest friend of his greatest moment.’ Wulf said sullenly, ‘Very well, since I can hear tears in your voice, little one, you shall go up first. But I tell you this, if we meet with disaster because of your childishness, then I will vow to kick you every inch of the way back to Reykjavik.’

  So Haldor began to smile again and pushed Harald hard against the wall and made him stand firm. Then Wulf went up on to the captain’s shoulders and at last Haldor clambered up both of them with his sword between his teeth.

  His heart was so light, at being first of the host, that his throat wanted to sing like a blackbird. His feet went up and up, over hands and shoulders, until he thought that, with a little practice, he could learn to climb a castle wall. Oh, he thought, how good it is to be a Varanger! Is there any trade like this in the whole wide world? Tell me, but is there?

  Then his head struck the wooden well-cover and, pressing hard with one hand to balance himself against the slippery wall, he took the sword from between his clenched jaws and struck upward with a mighty clout. He had judged the grain of the wood aright and the cover split back in two halves, leaving Haldor blinking in the bright torchlight for a second.

  And that second of blindness was enough to bring his downfall. For at the very lip of the well stood a dark-faced Tunisian guard with a moon-shaped battle-axe. As the viking swung himself up
into the chamber, this axe flailed out in a wide sweep, and Haldor found himself swept aside with the blow’s force, one side of his head sadly hurt.

  Wulf heard his high cry of pain and leapt like a lynx from Harald’s broad shoulders into the room. Seeing his comrade lying so broken, he roared with fury and took the Saracen below the helmet flaps with a savage thrust. The man fell backwards and in falling knocked down the flaring torch and put the place in darkness.

  Down below in the tunnel the Varangers began to cry out with battlelust. Now they made no pretence at silence but swarmed upwards into the dark chamber. One of them had the sense to strike flint on steel and light the torch again, and then as they assembled in this room they saw that it was not a feast hall but a food larder and that its great inner door was secured with five iron bolts.

  Four of the Varangers drew up Harald on the end of their knotted sword-belts. He was the last of the host to enter Licata and the saddest.

  He gazed down at Haldor who lay senseless and wept without shame, like a young girl. He said, ‘Our poor brother offered us his front teeth earlier today. But now he lacks any teeth at all to offer. In return for this blow Maniakes shall know what it is like to eat porridge for the rest of his dark days.’

  And then there was a great knocking on the door and a stern voice called, ‘I am the King of Tunisia’s emir. Who are you within there?’

  Harald shouted back in rage, ‘I am Sigurdson, the Hardrada of Norway, the Bear of the North. I have come for Maniakes the Greek, and after I have taken him, I shall crunch up all others I can find in my jaws.’

  As he spoke the froth gathered at his lips so thickly that Eystein and Gyric were afraid for his reason. But the Tunisian emir on the other side of the door said quite calmly, ‘Maniakes is no friend of ours. He is not here, I can assure you. If he were, it would give me pleasure to watch you crunching him up as you say.’

  Now all the Varangers crowded into that dim food larder began to shout, ‘Where is Maniakes? Where is Maniakes?’ And to beat their swords and axes against anything that would ring out and make a noise.

  And at last the emir answered, ‘Where should he be but in Palermo? That is where his Norman allies are gathering like vultures. Why do you not go there and leave us to our own affairs? We have work enough to do in Sicily, without fighting your battles for you.’

  Now Haldor was starting to moan with the pain that had come to him when his wound had lost its numbness, and Harald sat on the floor cradling his comrade’s head and rocking backwards and forwards in grief.

  He waited a while, then said, ‘I am in such a mind, Saracen, to destroy all the world for what has happened to my friend today.’

  And the Tunisian answered evenly, ‘What else did you expect to happen, when you break into a defended castle? Have you not grown out of your dream yet, Sigurdson? Do you still think that war-making is a sweet pleasure, then? Have you not seen your comrades lying stark before? Then you must have met slight opposition, my friend.’

  Gyric could see that this sort of talk would lead nowhere, so he called through the heavy door, ‘Tunisian, we hold your food supplies and inside three days we could starve you out of Licata. Then where would you be?’

  And the emir answered, ‘So, if we are to starve then we will see that you do not profit by your possession. We will fire the whole castle and sit outside the walls to hear you howling as you roast.’

  So it was that in the end Eystein, who still kept his head clear, arranged that the Varangers should come out unharmed and that the emir’s physician should do what he could for Haldor.

  But despite his skill this was little enough. The doctor, who was a quietly spoken Berber with hair as russet as any Frank’s, said with pity, ‘It is a sin to ruin God’s handiwork in such a trade as you folk follow. You rush like fire across the earth, you north-folk, foraging and destroying, giving ghastly wounds and taking them for mere plunder. We physicians spend our lives trying to repair the damage you do; yet once it is repaired you are off again trying your hardest to give us more work.’

  Eystein and Gyric felt ashamed to hear him say this. But Harald stayed in a dark corner, brooding silently, and holding Haldor’s cold hand.

  Two young girls who had been trained in medicine at Basra helped the Saracen to deal with Haldor. After binding his wounds with salves and herbs, they made a mask of doeskin which they hoped might help to give shape back to his features. They did not cut eyeholes in this mask because the Berber physician thought it was most unlikely that Haldor would ever see again.

  And that was how the Varangers tunnelled into Licata to find Maniakes. It was two months later before Haldor was able to be moved from that castle again; and when he went out it was not on his own two feet but in a litter like an old man.

  Yet his spirit was as strong as ever. When Wulf asked him if he wished to travel with the host to seek the Greek general in Palermo, he nodded so violently that the physician forbade them to speak to him any more that day.

  28. The Other Brothers

  At length, as they came to those fertile lowlands near Palermo that men call the Golden Shell, Harald was in such a dour frame of spirit that few men dared to talk with him. Even before they had left Licata, Eystein had seen this coming on and had sent a secret messenger to Bouid in Syracuse to tell him of the Tunisian garrison on the coast. And, since Harald seemed to have lost interest in what they would do after they had caught Maniakes, Eystein had also dispatched a company of Varangers by night to Syracuse, sufficient in number to bring the fleet round to lie off the Palermo Roads until they were needed. Harald did not miss them. Men said that Haldor’s wound had so upset him that he would not have missed his left hand if it had been taken from him in the night.

  But his right hand was another matter. When he was not clasping Haldor’s hand with it, he was clenching it and striking out at anything that stood in his way; and each time he struck, he cried out, ‘Maniakes! Maniakes!’ and then gritted his teeth so frightfully that those closest to him expected him to grind them to dust before long.

  Wulf was little better. He would stand and stare at Haldor for an hour at a stretch, and then run away into the woods to weep and to slash out with his axe at the trees as though they were Greeks.

  As for Haldor, he lay for a long while in a dazed sleep, as though he did not wish to drag himself back to life. The great hardship was that his jaws were so broken he could neither eat nor drink. But as soon as he dared, the Berber physician inserted the narrow tip of a cow’s horn into an incision which he made just below Haldor’s jaw and through this his friends poured milk sweetened with wild honey, or sometimes stout red wine, and even fine-flavoured meat broth. And in this way the life stayed with him.

  Then one day, when the host looked down on Palermo, Haldor suddenly shuffled upright in his bed and reached for his sword. Gyric, who was sitting with him, was afraid lest the Icelander had come to the end of his tether and wished to make away with himself as the old Romans used to do, by falling on the blade. But Haldor signalled to him that all was well; and when he had the sword in his hand he felt its balance as though he had never held a weapon in his life before.

  Then all at once he stood up, threw back his head, and struck out at the ashpole of the tent. The blade sheared through it like a knife through cheese, and then the canvas flapped down on Haldor and Gyric, sweeping them to the ground.

  Varangers came running up to see what had happened, and when Gyric told them, they knew that this was the best sort of news and crowded round Haldor cheering him and laughing. And when he signed to them to cut away the doeskin mask from his face, they found a small keen knife and obeyed him, though the features that glared out at them were not those of any man they had ever seen before.

  But all men observed that Haldor’s eyes were open and clear, so there was that much to be thankful for. And as the vikings gathered round him, nodding and smiling at him, he pointed to his lips and then they saw that he was able to open his mouth a littl
e way. They bent towards him listening, and he said in a faint whisper, ‘The axe has not yet reached the anvil that could lay me down.’

  Wulf burst into tears at this and flung himself on the ground. Eystein ran at a fresh ale-cask and knocked the bung out so that the liquid spouted all over the place. Gyric took up a new linen shirt and ripped it into small pieces in his joy. Then he ran to Harald’s tent and told him what had happened.

  For a while the Varanger glared as though his senses had left him. Then he rose and took Gyric by the hands and clasped him so hard that the Englishman cried out, half-way between glee and agony.

  Then, with the tears streaming down his face, and his great sword over his right shoulder, and holding it by the point, Harald stumbled away from the encampment into the wood to be alone.

  He found a small glade surrounded by pine trees with a little stream running through it among the light green mosses, and there he knelt and prayed as best he could, in thanks for his friend’s deliverance.

  And when he had run out of all the words he knew, he rose and roared out wordlessly, his head thrown back. Then he flung his sword from him across the glade and saw it stick bolt upright and a foot deep in a little green hummock beyond the stream.

  Then all at once he knew how hungry and thirsty he was. And he recalled that no food or drink had passed his lips for three days while he had sat beside his wounded friend. So he shambled towards that little stream and fell to his hands and knees and lapped at the clear water like a dog.

  And even as he lapped his eyes caught a strange shimmering in the water, a shadow that passed as fast as a lightning streak and then was gone. And at the same time Harald heard something hiss behind him through the air, and as by instinct he drew aside. A sharp-pointed lance plunged viciously into the turf beside him where his head had been an instant before. It was a Bulgar lance.