by Robert Low
We gripped shields and stood, sweat running from us, hilts and shafts slippery with it. We had been standing, that was all, yet we panted open-mouthed like dogs and I sent Brother John to get the waterskins we had stashed in the rear ranks. We sucked hot, brackish water as if it was nabidh.
Time passed and dust swirled. There was a constant low drone, broken by the shriek of the enemy horns and the thunder of drums from both sides. I was aware of Hedin Flayer's rank breath and the press of Finn's big shoulder. Behind us came the sound of a giant tearing his cloak in half: the archers, letting loose a volley on something we couldn't even see.
Out of the dust in front we saw the Hares skipping back like their namesakes, sprinting hard and clutching their empty spear-bags. Most broke round us, but some came dashing up, the dust spurting from their sandalled feet like water, skidding against our shields and hammering on them as if on a door.
When we wouldn't open up, they reeled frantically away, though a few hurled themselves down and wriggled between our feet, so we kicked them in the ribs for their pains.
Then, suddenly, there were robed men in the dust, a massive black banner, the glint of spears — and the Dailami foot came hurtling down on us.
They had crashed towards the centre, splattered by arrows and throwing spears from front and either flank, so that they moved like stumbling sleepwalkers now, a great black-robed beast trailing blood and slime and bodies, screaming: Illa-lala-akba.'
We braced; they hit the shieldwall, but they were almost done by the time they stumbled up to our swords.
A knot of five or six crashed in on us, thrusting spears and screaming. I slashed at a black-bearded face and felt the edge bite, heard him scream. I saw a spear-shaft stab past my cheek and the point went in under a turban, straight into the owner's ear, so that he shrilled and fell away, holding his head.
Then they were gone and, with a huge wolf-roar, the whole Norse shieldwall surged after them. I was shouldered to one side, watched Finn and Kvasir howling into the haze, saw Botolf lumbering past me, banner held high in one hand, red mane streaming.
Stefanos the taxiarchos flailed furiously, his angry screams lost in the bellows of the Norse, he and his little guard no more than a rickle of stones in a flood. Wearily, I trotted after them, stepping over the robed bodies that they had hacked down.
`Bring your men back,' Stefanos squealed at me, red-faced with fury. 'Now. At once!'
I didn't bother to answer him, but jog-trotted on, leaving him squeaking his fury until he disappeared into the swirling dust behind me.
No more than twenty paces later, sitting in the middle of a scatter of Sarakenoi, some still twitching and groaning, I came on Amund, the strip of white cloth that had marked him as one of the Oathsworn now tied round the stump of his wrist, one end gripped in his teeth as he strained to halt the black-red dribble from it.
Black-robed bodies were everywhere, a few still moaning or writhing.
I stacked shield and sword and knelt to help him, snapping off a discarded arrow shaft to use as a lever in his binding to squeeze harder. The iron stink of blood was thick in the dust, so it seemed I breathed through linen.
`See if you can find the hand,' he said, calm as you please. I had a ring I liked.'
Then his eyes rolled and he fell backwards, shivering and shaking. I put his sword in his good hand and stayed with him until his heels stopped kicking, while the screams and yells and drums and trumpets floated from the gold shroud of the battlefield. Then I found his severed hand, a white spider in the bloody slush nearby, and tucked it inside his tunic, so that we could bury him whole later.
I collected my shield and sword and moved on.
Four hundred paces later I came on the Oathsworn, where the air had cleared enough to show the great brassy glare of the sun in a sky pale and blue as Svala's eyes. I staggered over the stones and scrub bushes into a place of hummocks like burial mounds: black tents made from the hair of camel and goat, erected low to the ground to fool the heat.
There were shrieks and shouts and I saw someone I knew — Svarvar, the die-maker from Jorvik -
stumbling along with his tunic full of brass lanterns and blue-stone talismans.
`What do you call this?' I shouted at him, thinking they had all been sucked into some dreadful battle and angry that they were not. He grinned, hugging the great mass of plunder to his tunic.
`Fun,' he yelled and plunged on into the haze.
The Oathsworn had hit the Saracen baggage camp, as if they had plotted a straight course to it using Gizur's little ivory reckoner. The few troops left to guard it were dead or scattered and the Oathsworn were enjoying themselves.
There were horses and women, arms in stacks like corn-stooks, mail suits, ewers and vases of gold and brass — and leather bags of money, for the Saracen soldiers insisted on regular pay, something we had all already learned from stripping the dead.
I stood in the middle of this maelstrom, watching men stagger and stumble and howl like dogs, wrecking good pottery and gutting the dead to make sure they had swallowed nothing of value. They ripped rings from corpses; they threw screaming women on the ground, or bent them over cart shafts.
I saw Hookeye, a black turban askew over his squint, a richly brocaded robe over one shoulder and a richer cloak over the other, pumping furiously at the naked buttocks of a screeching woman and waving a jewelled dagger in the air. For a head-swimming moment, it seemed that the spade-bearded high priests from Miklagard's cathedrals were here, baying with lust, and not the Oathsworn men at all.
I roared, I threatened, I even pleaded, but it was like herding cats. A hand gripped my arm and I found Brother John at my elbow, face grim as a crucifixion. 'Best let this fever run its course,' he said. 'Anyway, we have found something.'
I followed him to a black tent and ducked into it, blinking at the move from light to dark, from the realm of stark Helheim to a place cool and coloured bright as Bifrost. The light of fat candles bounced off the dazzling rugs lining the floor and the gilded drinking vessels and carvings teetering on low wooden tables.
Botolf crouched, Dane axe butted in front of him and the raven banner laid out on the floor, grinning at the figure opposite.
Sitting on one of the many fat cushions, hawk-faced and dark-eyed, his skin a spiderweb stretched over his face, was Martin the monk. His eyes had a secret, secluded look, like a turf house seen between trees.
`He was caught by the Sarakenoi making for Jorsalir, which fact he let slip in the joy of his rescue by Botolf here,' Brother John said. 'Since he is an escaped slave, they were not planning to be lenient or merciful.'
Someone burst through the flap of the door and Botolf whirled and snarled at him like a dog. The figure yelped and backed out.
`Some of your hounds can still be leashed, it seems,' Martin said in that dry rasp.
`Be grateful for it,' I said. 'If Starkad comes, things will be different, I am thinking.'
Martin blinked a little and the harsh little lines round his mouth tightened so hard it looked like a cat's arse. 'So, is my life any happier in your hands, Orm Ruriksson?'
I sighed and picked up one of the drinking vessels, but it was empty. Botolf shoved an almost-flat waterskin at me and I drank the tepid stuff, straining the worst of what was in it through my teeth.
I have no quarrel with you this day, monk,' I said. 'The world is washed in blood and I command no one, as you see. Tell me of my men, the ones who were with you, while we wait until this pack have looted and humped themselves to sleep.'
`Your men?' answered Martin, adding a twist of a smile. He massaged the manacle sores on his wrists. 'I hardly think that, Orm Bear Slayer. Their leader is Valgard Skafhogg and all of them take their lead from him and believe their gods have betrayed them.'
Are they together still? Bound for the same place, this mine?'
Martin nodded. 'Yes. I escaped. Two men, good Christians, went with me. They were killed and I was taken.'
I di
d not wonder at this, for Martin had many talents, his best being the skill to wriggle like an eel out of any trouble. The other was convincing men that the White Christ could save them.
`What of the spear?' demanded Brother John and Martin, sensing the eagerness in his voice, twisted out a smile.
`That I still have to get. I will, do not fear. You have an interest?'
Brother John's hackles rose at the implication of greed. `Don't presume to judge me, priest. The Great City also has a Holy Lance. For all I know what you have is a lump of wood and iron, no more.'
`But if it is not that?'
Martin's question hung in the air, unanswered. In the end, Brother John uncurled from the floor and ducked out of the tent.
I looked at the monk, remembering the blow I had given him once, turning blade to the flat and sparing his life at the last, which I had come to regret. Here he was again and once more I would let him live, for I was sick to my stomach of death this day.
I raised a hand to bring Botolf over from where he had been standing at the entrance. Martin saw it, saw my missing fingers and chuckled, raising his own, the one lacking the little finger. That had been lopped off by Einar, while Martin hung upside down from the Elk's mast and told all he knew about everything, screaming and pissing himself. You could tell by the look in his eye that the memory was bright in him and would always be.
He looked at my own maimed hand, two fingers less than it should be, legacy of the fight with the man
— gods, the boy — who had killed Rurik, the man I'd thought my father.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a finger.
He stopped when he saw my face and he was right to do so, for I was trembling with the idea of killing him, remembering how he had put that boy and his brother on our trail, an event which had ended in the death of Rurik, his own two nephews and the loss of my fingers. The memory of how I had come by those lost fingers came back to Martin and he blanched and clamped his lips shut, feral as a wildcat.
`Watch him,' I said to Botolf. 'Keep him unharmed, but keep him.'
Martin smiled and inclined his head as if accepting some gracious donation. 'A gift for a gift,' he said.
'Hurry to the rescue of your men, Bear Slayer. I escaped when I did because I know what will happen when your men reach the mine and, though I have foresworn the pleasures of the flesh on God's behalf, I still prefer not to pass water down a straw.'
Then I was outside in the howl and horror, with fear rising like morning haar off a fjord and a flood of anger that he should have thrown that at me. I wanted to kill him, but needed him close; Starkad would come for him and we would be waiting.
For now, the men I was supposed to command, that rune-serpent torc round my neck, bayed and snarled like wolves. No one would hear that it was Hookeye who humped a Hamdanid princess to ruin, or that Kvasir cut the fingers from sixteen men and women for their rings, or that Finn poked bloody fingers in the bellies of the dead he had gutted open to find their swallowed wealth.
Instead, everyone would hear that these and all the other things done that day were done by the Oathsworn of Orm Bear Slayer, for my name was their name and theirs mine.
It was dawn before they could be rounded up, wincing in the molten light of day, a few of them sorry for what they had done, the rest sorry for what they felt and all of them so foundered by the event that they could only haul away the lightest part of the stuff they had plundered, stuffed down their boots and inside tunics. Furious and scowling, they could only watch others come up to steal what they had gained.
I marched them back to where the army had been, across a corpse-strewn field where the kites and crows rose in flocks and the flies in clouds. Entrails skeined a ground slippery with fluids, wounds gaped like lips and eyes, pecked sightless, implored us still for help. Though we looked for it, I could not find Amund's body. He was our only casualty and we could not even find him.
We had won, as it turned out — or so Red Boots claimed, though it was doubtful. The mad charge of the Norse had dragged most of the scutatoi with it, for all their boasted discipline. Once they had stopped hacking down the Dailami, were puking and gasping, open-mouthed and on their knees, the enemy's ghulam horsemen in their fish-scale armour and lopsided maces had splintered them apart and ridden down the screamers who fled.
It was only when the Oven Wearers were released that Red Boots saved the day and claimed a victory -
but he quit the field and took the army back to Antioch all the same and we straggled to the Orontes, where the air was thick with grief and funeral smoke and wailing women.
Jarl Brand's men were grim and licking wounds, but at least they had managed to bring back both their dead and wounded. Skarpheddin's men had fled and those who had made it back now had to return to that field of scavenging birds, cursed by the women who were hunting for their men. A battle drawn is worse than one lost, for it promises that it all has to be done again the next day.
We arrived at our own wadmal-tent camp dusty, bloody and sick at heart, the worst affected puking froth and snot down their beards by this time. Some of the Hares thought they had found a perfect billet, which almost came as a welcome release. Finn, blowing on his skinned knuckles and bellowing as they ran off, eventually threw himself down, too exhausted even to start a fire. Botolf flung down the monk who was leashed to him and sat in sullen, weary silence.
There, within an hour of us squatting, heads hanging and souls cut by the keening grief and the clouds of insects and the sick despair, came Gizur with Odin's latest twist to our beard.
`The Goat Boy is gone and Radoslav with him,' he said. `That skald of Skarpheddin, Harek, came to tell us. The seidr women have them at some place called the Sumerian palace, north of the city.'
10
The sky began to lighten and we all waited in the narrow mouth between cliffs, where pillars of splintered stone, worn by weather into tall, thin mushrooms, stabbed a charcoal sky. There were men all around me, I knew, but it seemed as if I was as alone as I would ever be, standing in what could have been a pillared hov, where sand sparkled faintly as the moon rose. A Freyja dawn, a night as light as day.
The silver light cast crawling shadows on the jagged rocks, fingered into corners and slid into cracks, then swept over us, turning us all into blue fetch shadows and washing the riverbed with glow. Sighvat's raven fluttered silently from his shoulder and whirred away, playing hide and seek with the moon.
It was a trap, of course, but we had all known that. It was how you sprung it and got away that mattered, as Hedin Flayer said. Since he was our expert on traps, having been a wolf-hunter in his time, we listened politely, though all he had to offer that was useful involved how bad a trap it was.
`Too big,' he frowned. 'Like using a bear trap to catch a wolf because you don't care what happens to the pelt.'
We all nodded, for we knew what he meant. You hunted wolf with meat and a small sliver of green wood, sharpened at both ends and no longer than your finger. Tied with gut into a circle and placed in the heart of the meat, it would be gulped down and, when the gut eventually parted, the sliver would spring apart and, sooner or later, rip the wolf's innards to bloody shreds. You could track it by the bloody vomit and it would die sooner rather than later, with no damage at all to a valuable pelt.
That was deep thinking, but the seidr women's plot was not.
If they sought the way to the hoard of Attila,' Finn growled, `why could they not find it in the Other?
Did they not go into the seidr trance and seek it, then?'
If they did, they failed, which shows they are not very good,' answered Sighvat.
I remembered Svala's voice telling me of seeing Hild and it came to me then that they had done what seidr women do and found Hild there guarding that road, as terrible in death as she had been in life. I said as much and the ones who remembered her nodded.
Svala and Skarpheddin's mother were bad enough, though seidr was a subtle magic and a good edg
e, strongly swung, was a ward against all of it in the end. But there was Skarpheddin and his dreng, those men who clung to him by oath and gifted rings. His men had been torn to shreds in the battle and women were cleaning and burying them still, but he had these last thirty or so grim blades and the desperation of a man seeing his luck flow away from him.
So I went to Jarl Brand and laid it all out at his feet, even what it was Skarpheddin thought to get from me. Jarl Brand, like an old bone in the flickering torchlight, stroked his icicle moustaches and looked at me warily, while the light flung away from the silver on his arms.
And can you tell him of this treasure hoard?' he asked mildly.
`Lord,' I answered, feeling the sweat trickle down my backbone. 'Of course not.' Which was no lie without the rune-serpent sword. 'Once, we followed the trail of it, but it led to death and despair in the Grass Sea,' I added, which was also true.
`So you say,' Brand answered, then grinned. 'I, too, had heard of Einar's hoard. A good saga tale. I took him for someone as crazed as a bag of frothing dogs and it seems I was right, for I heard he and most of his men died.'
I smiled, almost sagging with relief. Let him think so, Odin. Just this once, you one-eyed raven of treachery. .
I will help you,' Brand went on, 'but you must help me.'
A trade. Now trading I understood. .
I will help you root out Skarpheddin, for the sake of his people if nothing else,' he went on mildly. 'I am going back to claim my lands and help fight for a throne soon and will take them with me when he is dead.'
I blinked at. that, for he delivered it with the same flat calm as if he announced he was taking Skarpheddin's old ox drinking horn. The truth was, of course, that Skarpheddin had finished himself in that battle and now Jarl Brand would step in and take everything the old man had, including the high regard of the Great City.
I will also give your men the pick of battle-gear stripped from the dead, which you will need if you go in search of Starkad and lost comrades,' Brand added and then nodded sombrely. 'Worthy though I think that is, I am also thinking that your arse will end up roasting on a stake, but that is your affair.'