by Robert Low
When we eventually met the Sarakenoi our army was formed up 2,700 yards long and in two lines. The jarl-men were in the front line, which was all scutatoi, the Great City's foot-soldiers with their huge shields.
The Norse were on the right and on the right of the right the Oathsworn. The end of the line.
I did not tell Leo the Deacon that we had come there reluctantly, that we had been too fastened by the chance to kill and loot Starkad to get away before the storm of war swept us up.
Not so Starkad, who broke his oath to Jarl Brand and vanished into the dust haze. By the time we discovered this, it was too late for us to leave without drawing to ourselves attention of the worst sort. So we joined Red Boots's ranks for the battle we knew was planned and cursed both ourselves and Starkad for being so snared in a fight none of us wanted.
The Sarakenoi came with horsemen heavy with mail and banded leather, the ragged-arsed foot they called Dailami, desert horsemen called Bedu, who swooped like swallows in and out of the dust, and the Hamdanid horsemen, who still flew the black banners of the Abbasids even though they had rebelled against them. There were even Turks from Baghdad, where the generals permitted the Abbasids to rule in name only.
They overlapped our lines by a mile either side — which was why it all went wrong, of course. The Great City's army was used to this, had a second line to take care of it, but we didn't know that. All we saw were too many enemies.
Skarpheddin had already decided on our fighting plan, which was the one we usually used. We would bang loudly on our shields and pour scorn on the size of their balls, then we would run at them, howling like wolves. Not that Finn or I, or any of the Oathsworn, knew much of even this grand plan. The army marched, with all 47,000 soldiers, 15,000 mules, camels and oxen and 1,000 carts with the bits and pieces of the artillery engines, the two jarls and all their men — and the Oathsworn, scowling and angry about it, for this was no fight we wanted to be in.
The women and children stayed in their camps around Antioch, save those few who would not abandon their men, and Gizur and four of my men, the Goat Boy with them, went back to the Elk to watch it.
Radoslav had volunteered to stay, too, at which Finn had said nothing, though his look was an entire saga poem on its own. The big Slav, seeing the scorn, had shrugged and come with us, but if Surt, the Norn-sister of What May Be, had kindly drawn it all out for us in the sand, we would probably have agreed with Radoslav and all of us would have quit the army then and there and gone to Fatty Breeks.
Fateh Baariq. Which meant Shining Conqueror in the Saracen tongue. But Svala only told me that as we clattered out in the ranks of Skarpheddin's men, too late to slip away unnoticed. Her smile was malicious and I turned my back on it and tramped into the dust; it only came to me later that she had also told Starkad this earlier, which had made him start after Martin.
`Well,' argued Botolf, scowling, when, at the end of that first day's march, we told him what we had found. 'I don't speak their cat-yowl of a tongue. It sounded different to me. And I was being dragged in chains at the time.'
I had soothed him over it, for we knew now where our oarmates were: in the Fateh Baariq mine, east and north of Aleppo, in a place called Afrin. That left us with a new problem: how to get there. It was miles from the shield of the army, in country we did not know and seething like a maggoty corpse with Sarakenoi.
I felt the weight of the jarl torc, anvil-heavy. It was a long way and in the lands of the enemy.
It is a long way and in the lands of the enemy,' Radoslav then declared moodily, making me twitch and wonder if he could read minds, too. 'We would need our own army,' he added pointedly. 'If we had a hoard of silver we could afford one.'
Kvasir and Finn grunted and said nothing, so Radoslav, seeing he was gaining nothing, rose and went elsewhere.
`He is greed-sick, that one,' growled Finn.
`He has lost his boat,' Kvasir pointed out, but Finn hawked and spat into the fire. That night, Radoslav vanished from our ranks, which everyone thought was a nithing thing for him to do.
`He has all that a warrior needs. .' Kvasir growled wryly next day, 'except the balls.'
I wondered more on it, but was not sure what Radoslav was doing. Perhaps he was just ducking out of the fight, though I did not think much of that explanation. Perhaps he had gone back to steal the container from my sea-chest: Odin luck to him if he crept on board past the men I had left to guard it. Nor did it matter much if he succeeded; the contents were not pearls and, since Starkad would not trade, worthless now.
Worse than worthless, since they still marked us all for blinding and death by the conspirators.
Still, it nagged me. . and left me hollow, too, for I had liked the big, bluff Slav who had, after all, saved my life.
Sighvat came up into this and sat beside me, his raven as silent and brooding as my thoughts. 'I heard the girl came to you,' he said and I shot him a warning glance, for I wanted no one poking a finger in that wound.
He nodded, tickling the beak of the raven. 'She is Sami,' he added, 'from the Pite tribe in Halogaland. Her true name is Njavesheatne, which means Sun Daughter in their tongue.'
A Sami from the north of Norway. Kvasir made a warding sign, Finn spat in the fire and I felt my skin crawl. The Sami, the Reindeer People, were older than time, it was said, and full of stranger magic even than the seidr. They worshipped a troll goddess, Thorgerthr, who used seidr to call down thunder like Asa-Thor himself.
`How do you know this?' I asked.
Sighvat grinned. 'A bird told me,' he said. 'Or perhaps it was a bee.'
Finn rolled his eyes and snorted. 'A bee. Honeyed words, were they?'
Sighvat smiled quietly. 'Bees have many messages, Horsehead. If one flies into your hall it is a sign of great good luck, or of the arrival of a stranger; however, the luck will only hold if the bee is allowed to either stay or go of its own accord.
A bee landing on your hand means money, on the head means a rise to greatness. They will sting those who curse in front of them and those who are adulterers or unchaste — so, if you want a good wife, have her walk through a swarm and if she is stung, she'll be no virgin.'
I knew it was a mistake to ask,' mourned Finn, shaking his head.
`Did this singular bee tell you how we can rescue our oarmates?' I snarled, the Sami thing sick in my stomach. 'Or find Starkad and get the Rune Serpent back?'
A lie. She had been a lie. It was my curse — worse, a Loki joke — to end up snagged like a lip-caught fish by every seidr woman in the world. And Radoslav — I had thought more of him. .
Sighvat smiled, unoffended, leaving me ashamed of my anger. 'No, Trader, but I will ask.' He rose and left, the raven clinging to his shoulder and fluttering.
Kvasir shook his head. 'Sometimes our Sighvat scares me more than any Sami witch,' he said.
We marched a second day and then sat surrounded by the low, growling hum of the army, a sweating beast in the red-flowered darkness. The tail of it still curled wearily in, tramping on into the night, where Finn and Kvasir waited for me to come up with a full-cunning way to get out of this mess. I sat silent and wished they'd bugger off and give me peace, for I was an empty hold of ideas.
After a night of formless, brooding dream-shapes, I was still as empty, sitting by the smouldering firepit, pitching twigs and dung-chips into it as the dawn smeared up the sky. It took me some time to realise that men were moving and talking excitedly, flowing like ants from a broken nest.
Then I heard the blare of trumpets and Finn lumbered up to me, chewing. He tossed me a scrap of flatbread and nodded at the commotion and dust.
`Red Boots is awake then,' he said.
Nearby, Brother John crossed himself Won semper erit aestas,' he said and Finn looked from him to me, puzzled and scowling.
`Get ready for hard times,' I translated and he nodded, grim as old rock.
We were formed up the way the Great City's army was always formed up — so I learned later —
with the foot in front, backed by archers, light horse on the wings and slightly pushed forward, so that the whole would look like a gently curving bay if you could fly above it like Sighvat's raven.
Behind that was a second line, all the prized heavy horsemen and the great metal slabs that were the pride of the Miklagard army.
We had seen them ride out of Antioch's St Paul Gate on horses draped with leather sewn with metal leaves. The archers had horses covered on the front, the others had their horses completely cloaked in these little metal leaves. Some carried lances and some had maces and swords only, for when these ones — so fearsomely costly even the Great City could afford only a thousand of them — formed up it was in a boar snout, with the bowmen in the middle, the lancers on the sides and the skull-crushers in front.
All you could see of them were their eyes. They even wore iron shoes and scorned shields for the most part. They were draped in linen to try and keep the sun from broiling them, but we all.pitied those splendid soldiers, the ones the Greeks called klibanophoroi — the Oven Wearers.
There were numeri, bandae, turmae and a score of other names for their units, some of them Latin, some Greek which was the way with these people, who could not make up their minds on who they were. Red Boots had come with two of the three Hetaireiai, the Guard companies. These were the Mese and the Mikre, the former being for non-Greeks who were Christ-worshippers, the latter for foreigners who scorned the Christ. This last was full of Pechenegs and Rus Slays, though the Mese had Saxlanders, whom the Greeks call Germans. Though the Great City accepted Germans as chosen men, they did not like the nation of Otto, who occupied Old Rome and called himself Emperor.
They were almost as big as us, these Saxlanders, and they swaggered and snarled at each other like prize hounds. As Finn growled, they needed a sharp kick under their tails to show them who was better.
Most impressive of all were the Great City's chiefs, whom they called comes, or tribunus, or dux or drungarios and who, even though they had never met any of the men they led before, could get them moving as one, to the beat of ox-hide drums, with only a few words.
Truly, they were a marvel, these Romans, and, for the first time, we realised how they had ruled the world. We felt like gawping bairns.
We met our own commander then: Stefanos, who called himself Taxiarchos. He rode up with a guard of armoured horsemen and spoke with Skarpheddin and Jarl Brand.
This Stefanos, young and moon-faced, had charge of, it seemed to me at the time, the whole right of the army, a great swathe of scutatoi and the Norse and hordes of light horse archers, for it was always the way of the Romans to have their own men in command.
In fact he only ordered the last nub end of it, which was all of the Norse and some of the Greek archers and light troops. It is possible he never had command of anything ever again, thanks to us.
`We should have that sort of marking,' growled Kvasir, nodding at the coloured helmet-tufts and shields while we knelt, blowing dust out of our nostrils and trying to make sense of it all. I agreed, for even Jarl Brand's own chosen men, his dreng, had red-and-black wool braids hanging from their sheaths and shields all of one design — Odin's three drinking horns — in the same colours.
In the end, the best I could do was tear strips off the dirty-white linen surcoat I wore to stop my byrnie from heating up and get the Oathsworn to fasten them round their upper arms.
We leaned on our shields and sweated and I tried to work out where we were and what we were supposed to be doing.
It seemed the Norsemen were formed in one body, Brand and Skarpheddin side by side and three ranks deep, for that's what Skarpheddin had told us to do on his right flank — politely, since I was, nominally, as much of a jarl as he, even though I led only forty-four men. We formed in three ranks, mailed men in front
— the ones we called the Lost — and spearmen in the second and third, save for a handful with some bows, and agreed to follow the signals given by Skarpheddin's banner.
Behind us, a few hundred paces, hazed in dust, were rank upon rank of the Great City's foot archers, sticking arrows in front of them like a sheaf of barley, for easy reach.
In front, the light troops flocked, raising most of the dust now as they trotted up, with their throwing spears cased in soft leather sheaths lined with beeswax. On our left, shouldering the last men in the left of our line, were the sweating Norse of Skarpheddin. Further out to our right were the light horsemen, archers and lancers, their horses foaming at the neck with sweat, the stink of their dung and piss choking us.
There was a flurry behind us, which made everyone crane to see until Finn cursed them back to facing front.
Sweating Greek thralls appeared, rolling a barrel on a two-wheeled cart and doling out water in cups, little sips and no more, but which men grabbed eagerly. There was a priest with them, swinging his little smoking brazier of perfume and chanting something long and sonorous, while he dipped a silver baton in the cups and scattered droplets on us.
Brother John, so dry he could scarcely spit his disgust, translated the Greek for us as we grabbed and swallowed. He did not drink, for all his thirst.
Behold that after drawing holy water from the immaculate and most sacred relics of the Passion of Christ our true God — from the precious wooden fragments of the True Cross and the undefiled lance, the precious titulus, the wonder-working reed, the life-giving blood which flowed from His precious rib, the most sacred tunic, the holy swaddling clothes, the God-bearing winding sheet and the other relics of His undefiled Passion — we have sent it to be sprinkled upon you, for you to be anointed by it and to garb yourself with the divine power from on high.
The Basileus's holy-water gift to the army against the infidel. Kvasir, gulping it down, made a face and said: 'After all that, you'd think it would taste like mead instead of freshly warm sheep piss.'
I hardly noticed, being too busy wondering what 'undefiled lance' they had used, for I was sure Martin had the true one — or by now, some slave-dealer called Takoub had it. Did that mean this holy water was only slightly holy? Not holy at all?
From far off came the rasping blare of trumpets and I heard the Greek chiefs from the light javelin men, the ones they called the Hares, yelling 'Foreskins', the command for these men to peel back the covers from their throwing spears, immaculate and trim-straight.
Drums thundered from further down our own lines and a huge cry went up, 'Tydeus! Tydeus!' and then, out of the dust, cantered a group of horsemen, all red cloaks and plumes and self-importance.
Two of them carried huge swords, far too big to fight with and clearly ikons of some sort, like the huge banner with a woman painted on it that Brother John said was Our Lady of Blachernae. Another carried a huge purple banner on which was sewn a white square called the Mandylion. It was, said Brother John, a shroud from the dead Christ and had his face imprinted on it.
Out in front was a huge horseman, carrying a flag as big as a bedsheet, which they called the Labarum and on it was the symbol of the Great City. Brother John told us it was a holy symbol, adopted by the Emperor Constantine, who had named the Great City after himself.
The symbol, it seemed, meant 'In This Sign Conquer', but it looked to us like the runes Wunjo and Gebo, which read as 'a gift of success' to us. Which was not the same thing, as Sighvat grimly pointed out, Gebo being an illusion rune that cannot be merkstave, or reversed, but may lie in opposition all the same and might mean success, but at heavy cost.
As a call to war it fell far short of Feeders of Eagles or Hewers of Men, but it had been blessed by the White Christ's best priests. As Kvasir said, we couldn't fail with all this holy help and the whole of the Pharos Chapel must have been emptied of Miklagard's relics.
Behind all this came a short, stocky man riding a huge white horse eaten by its own purple drapings. He waved a lot as men cheered and was the only one who wore bright red leather boots, Armenian-style, almost to his knees.
Is that the Miklagard General? Why a
re they calling him Tydeus? I thought his name was John?'
grunted Hedin Flayer, who was to my left.
Not much to look at, the little short-arse,' growled Finn from the other side.
The man commanding the most powerful army in the world stopped, exchanged a few words with our taxiarchos, then reined round and rode off into the golden swirl of the day, the shouts of 'Tydeus!' swelling and ebbing like a tide as he passed the ranks.
`Who the fuck is Tydeus?' demanded Kvasir from down the line and Brother John leaned forward, his eyes red-rimmed with dust.
An ancient Greek hero who killed fifty men in single combat, according to Homer.'
`Did this Homer say he was a short-arse, then?'
`That sort of loose mouth will lose you your other eye.'
At which point, Sighvat stepped forward a pace and held up his hand as the raven fluttered out of the great golden pearl we stood in and down on to his wrist. It smoothed a wing feather, opened its dark maw of a mouth and said, clear as a ringing bell: 'Look out.'
We gaped. It cocked a head and said it again. Then it added: Odin,' and flew up and away as Sighvat launched it back into the air.
`The enemy are on us,' Sighvat said and then saw all our gaping mouths and alarmed eyes. 'What? Didn't you know ravens speak?'
Its speaking had struck us all dumb, but we had no time to say anything anyway. Botolf, Brother John beside him in a too-large helmet, untied Svala's banner and it had barely started to flap in the lava breath that stirred the dust when, as Sighvat had promised, the enemy were upon us.
The horsemen to our right vanished in a huge billow of dust and after that we only saw shapes, shadows in the gloom that circled like a ring of wolves and I had no idea whether they belonged to us or the enemy.
`We'll know soon enough,' yelled Kvasir above the din, hawking dust from his throat. 'The enemy will be the ones who tear us a second bung hole without warning.'