by Robert Low
Short Eldgrim sat back with a sigh, waiting for Finn's morning gruel, listening to the wooden goat bells and savouring the water he had dug up. Aliabu had taught us to bury the waterskins each evening: after a night buried in the chill, they were cold as a winter fjord first thing in the morning, which made that the best part of the day.
Usually, we should have been up and away, with a few hours' walk under our belts before we stopped for the day-meal, but we were travelling in the cooler part of the day — practically evening — and for a good part of the night, so would lie up in the shade of the rocks which overhung this crack in the ground all that day.
It is a nice sound, the goat bells,' Short Eldgrim mused, then shook his head. 'But I wish it was on a wether in a meadow under hills which had snow on them.'
Aye, blowing a snell wind that promises a winter digging it and all the other sheep out of drifts,' grunted Kvasir, crunching through the stony desert to squat beside him. He took a wooden bowl from Finn with a grunt of thanks and fished his horn spoon out from the depths of his tunic. He ate, waving at the flies and spitting out those he could. Most he ate along with the gruel.
If Short Eldgrim had been meant to thank his luck that he wasn't digging sheep out of snowdrifts, it didn't work. He nodded, wistful-sad, his heimthra made the worse for the view Finn had seidr-magicked up for him.
`Don't worry,' growled Finn, passing him the porridge while it was too hot for flies to land on. 'One day you'll be back with the snow wind blowing up your backside and then you'll look back on the days you spent lolling in the warmth of Serkland.'
One day. There were forty of us left now and four were already sick. I was cursing myself and all the gods that we had stayed for Brand's feasting — not that we had much choice in it. Brother John had warned us, right enough, looming grim-eyed out of the dark a day after we had come back from killing Skarpheddin and his seidr women.
`They are wrapping red-rashed corpses down by the river,' he had told me and needed to say nothing more, for I had seen all this before at the siege of Sarkel. Sure enough, the next day, four of our men started to shiver and water flowed from them in fat drops.
The day after that was the feasting and the day after that was when we left and three were dead by then, put in the great howed pit Brand was digging to cope with the numbers. The fourth we left with the Greek doctors in Antioch, while we ran into the desert's heat and Gizur and the Elk crew ran to the sea winds. I offered prayers to Odin that all of us had escaped the sickness and that I had made the correct choice — to go after our oarmates first, then chase Starkad down.
Now we lay and thought of green hills and slate-blue seas capped with white and the snow whipping off the tall mountains like Sleipnir's mane. It was better with your eyes closed, for then you did not see this strange land, nor the massive winding ribbon of stones we lay in, whose walls rose like tongues of orange flames to a washed blue sky.
Here were no sheep, but little scaled lizards that popped out and scuttled down the blind turnings that led only to holes where little birds lived. It was a world of brown and pale green, of strange boulders shaped like mushrooms and swirling patterns of sand, which seemed to be all the colours of Bifrost. I supposed Aliabu and his people had as many names for sand as the Sami have for snow.
I lay and thought of her, too, all through the day until it was my time to stand watch and even then.
Always the same, too: the laugh; and the day she and I and Radoslav had enjoyed in the city of Antioch on the Orontes, a day as perfect as a rumman fruit — yet one whose heart had already rotted unseen. A cracked bell of friendship and love, even then. One such betrayal would have been enough, Odin. Two was larding it thick.
Finn and Brother John came to me as Aliabu and the others were packing the groaning camels to start the day's journey, taking a knee where I sat and eyeing me grimly. I eyed them back and jerked my chin for them to speak.
`Three were felled by heat,' Brother John said. 'They will recover if they are fed water and kept shaded for a day.'
`Good news,' I said, knowing with a sick dread what came next.
`There is a fourth down, but he does not have the red pox,' Brother John said. 'He has the squits, or the sweating sickness, or both. He will die, for sure, just the same. His vomit has blood in it. Dabit deus his quoque finem.'
God would, indeed, grant an end to these troubles. I remembered the sweats from Sarkel. Old oarmates, Bersi had it one day and was dead of it the next and Skarti, whose lumpen face told how he had survived the red pox, would probably have died of the sweats if an arrow hadn't killed him first. The squits were better, in that you could recover from them after some days of misery and mess — but when the blood streaks showed, you were finished.
`He needs the Priest,' said Finn, looking at me. I remembered that look from the last time, across the body of Ofeig. Next time, Bear Slayer, he had said, you do it.
I held out my hand and he slid the hilt of the sword into it.
It was Svarvar, the coin-stamper from Jorvik, lying on a pallet of scrub and his own cloak and soaking his life away, so that you could see him shrink to a hollow man by the minute, while he shook and trembled and his eyes rolled. The stink of him filled the air, thick enough to cut.
I called his name, but if he heard it he gave no sign, simply lay and muttered through chattering teeth, shaking and streaming with water. Brother John knelt and prayed; Finn hefted a seax hilt between Svarvar's hands and I could not swallow. The Priest, when I guided the blade of it to his neck, felt cold as ice.
His eyes flickered open then and, just for a moment, I knew he knew.
`When you get across Bifrost,' I said to him, 'tell the others about us. Say, "Not yet, but soon". Good journeying, Svarvar.'
It didn't take much pressure, for Finn had spent the day putting an edge on the Priest, a rasp that had irritated us all at the time. The neck-flesh parted like fruit skin and he jerked and thrashed only a little while the blood poured out with an iron-stink that brought flies in greedy droves almost at once.
`Heya,' Finn said approvingly, and I rose, wiping clean the blade and handed it back to him, hoping my hand did not tremble as much as my legs did.
Then Sighvat and Brother John and others gathered rocks and stones and used them and a shallow scoop in the stony sand to howe up the coin-maker from Jorvik. Five years he had spent digging stones, only to be freed to end under a pile of them. Odin's jokes were never funny, but sometimes you could not even grin for the clench of your teeth.
It was not a good omen and made the long journey through the shivering night a bleak, moon-glowed tramp. When the sun trembled up, a great, golden droplet on the lip of the world, we squatted and panted and licked our own salt-sweat into stinging, mucus-crusted mouths until it died again and gave us the mercy of cooling night and the right to drink.
Some began to shiver with the change and hoped that was all it was, checking each other for sign of sweating sickness or red pox. The three who had been heat-afflicted were showing signs of recovery, though they were calf-weak when they tried to walk.
Aliabu and his people silently got ready to move on. In the last light of day, at the ridge that had sheltered our little camp, he turned and looked back, as if searching the twilight for his unseen sons. For a moment, his ragged robes hidden and silhouetted against the sky, he looked as jarl-noble as any man I have seen.
There grew in me then the respect of a whale-road rider who sees another of his kind and marks him even though there is no sign on him other than the stare which has searched far horizons.
Until now, the Sarakenoi had been screaming Grendels with weapons, or flyblown savages who squatted in their own filth, ate using one hand, wiped themselves with the other and worshipped one god, though they had blood-feuds with each other over how best to do it.
But the Bedu navigated their own sea out here, as skilfully as any raiders in a drakkar two weeks out of sight of land, and found sustenance here as we would from
the waves. Eaters of lizards and rats and raw livers, they took the jelly from camel humps, squirted it with the gall-bladder juice and sucked the lot down, smacking their lips as we would over a good bowl of oats and milk.
`By Odin's sweaty balls,' Finn growled when I mentioned this, 'just because they can eat shit and ride a horse with a hunched back doesn't make them worth anything, Trader.'
`They are proud and noble, for all that,' I answered. 'They are masters of this land and survive on it.
Could you?'
Finn spat, shouldering along in the blue dark. 'Take them to a cold winter in Iceland, see how well they fare. They are masters of this land, Trader, because no one fucking wants it and are left in peace because they haven't a hole to piss in, nothing anyone would want to steal, not even their sorry lives. They are the colour of folk two weeks dead and that shortarsed little lizard-chewer Aliabu thinks the best name he can give his favourite woman is Puddle, by Odin's arse. That tells you all you need to know.'
He stumbled, cursed and recovered his walking rhythm. 'I never had the ken of why the Irishers liked Blue Men as slaves. They always die on you when the snows come and Dyfflin's a long way to cart the buggers while trying to keep them alive on a hafskip.'
I grunted, which was all that was needed. Finn looked at the world down the blade of his sword, measuring its worth in what he could take. But, even travelling along Odin's edge as I was, I still saw these Bedu as knarrer in this ocean of sand and stone, charting ways less travelled and always open when others were shut. One day that would be of more use to me than plundering them — if Odin spared me.
Aliabu's shout shook me back into the now, where the sweat stung my eyes and the desert grit rasped in every fold and crack. I stopped, panting, dropped to one knee like all the others, pushing up the little tent of robe with the stick I carried.
One of my boot soles flapped; the thong that had fixed it in place had snapped and been lost on the trail and I fumbled to find one of the few I had left. We all had flapping seaboots, cracked and split in the heat, the soles held on by thongs and whose bone-toggle fastenings had long since vanished.
Hookeye moved up, his bow out and strung, so I knew it was serious. In this heat, he kept both wrapped and greased with camel fat to stop them drying out.
Another group of camels,' he reported. 'There are men there, armed and ready.'
I climbed to my feet and gave my orders. Botolf, the only one not wearing padded leather and mail, since none large enough had been found to fit him, unravelled the raven banner, but it flopped like a hanged man on the pole.
The Goat Boy and Aliabu came up as we formed into a loose shieldwall. Aliabu waved his hands and rattled off a stream of words and I knew I was getting better at things, for I made out a word in six.
`These are outcast men,' the Goat Boy translated, 'men from weak tribes who have fled their masters and make a life here. Aliabu knows them, but they are not Shawi He asks if you understand?'
I did. Shawi meant something about grilling and was a term the Bedu proudly used, since it meant they offered such shelter and hov-rest that they would slaughter and roast a prized animal for a guest. If these were not Shawi they could not be trusted.
Between the three of us, we worked out a plan. Camps would be made, the Oathsworn would show their strength and Aliabu and his sons would smile and talk to these outcasts. With luck, we would get news, perhaps some water and supplies and no blood would be shed.
`No different from meeting ships in a strange fjord,' growled Finn, hunched under his loop of robe.
`Save for the heat,' muttered Kvasir.
And the absolute lack of water,' noted Brother John wryly. `Sod off,' grunted Finn, too hot to argue.
'Shouldn't you be there, Trader?'
He was right, but Aliabu had pointedly not invited me, so I stayed on the course he had set and sweltered through another hour while the outcasts put up their tents. We had no tents.
In the end, Delim and two of the strange Bedu came back and, effusively, invited me down to the shade of the awning where everyone sat. I went, conscious of the envious, seared eyes of the rest of the band.
The leader of these outcast Bedu was called Thuhayba, which I was told means 'small bar of gold', a man shrunk like a dried-out goatskin, with bristles of grey hair on his chin and more gap than teeth. But he had eyes like something seen at night through the bushes.
There then followed a conversation like a game of 'tafl, a three-handed affair where I was a goose chased by foxes. Eventually, though, the tale of it was squeezed out like curd from cheese.
The Goat Boy told me: 'Ahead, a day away, lies the village of Aindara, which these ones used to visit now and then, but will not do so now. The last time they did, which was recently, they found it deserted and the people fled — those who had not been killed. It was there they found the afrangi, whom they now wish to sell to us.'
I knew that afrangi meant 'Frank', which name the Arabs called us, having got it from ignorant Greeks.
`Like us?' I asked.
They talked to each other like pine logs popping in a good blaze, then the Goat Boy turned and said: 'No, Trader, not big and fair-haired like you. Dark. A Greek, I think. They say they found him after the fight which the yellow-haired man won.'
My hackles rose at that and it took a flurry of sharp questions to tease the weft of it out and even then only one part was clear. Starkad had come this way and had men with him still.
In the end, when they saw I was interested, they hauled their prisoner out, a shivering individual called Evangelos — either that or he was praying, for his mind was so far gone he could not stop drooling and babbling. Getting answers from him was like holding water in your fingers.
At first it had been my thought that he was a runaway from the Miklagard army, but he had shackle-marks on his legs, old sores that still wept.
'Fatal Baariq?' I said to him and his head came round at that name. I said it again and a shiver ran through him. If he'd been a dog, his tail would have curled between his legs.
Telekanos,' he said softly. Then louder. Then he screamed it, so that everyone was startled and men from both sides got to their feet and had to be placated with hand gestures.
`Who is Pelekanos?' I asked the Goat Boy and he shrugged.
Or what. It means carpenter. Perhaps it is his craft, Trader?'
The Greek heard the word again and nodded, rolling head and eyes. Then he hunched himself deeper, almost a ball, and whimpered: 'Qulb al-Kuhl.'
There was a movement, a rustle of robes and indrawn breath from Aliabu, while the wizened old Bedu muttered some sort of charm against evil.
The Goat Boy looked at me and shrugged. 'I think he said something about "the one with a dark heart", but these Bedu talk like true Arabs only some of the time, so it is hard to follow.'
That was all the Greek managed that made sense and, when it became clear I did not want him, he was dragged off and more profitable trading began, for water and food. Of course, the outcasts wanted our shiny weapons and gave us so much water and food I was convinced they'd starve or parch. I hoped the single axe they took for it was worth it.
Brother John was angry that I had left a good Christ-man to rot, but everyone else agreed with me that dragging a useless mouth along would make us as daft in the head as the Greek in question.
`There was a time, Orm Bear Slayer, when you would not have done this,' Brother John said, almost sadly, and the truth of it made me bark back at him.
`There was a time, priest, when I did not wear a jarl torc.'
And, as ever, I heard Einar's death-husked whisper about discovering the price of that rune-serpent neck ring. Now, of course, there was another rune serpent slithering round my life; the one snake-knotted down that cursed sabre which I had to retrieve.
We put some distance between ourselves and the outcasts, for I did not want them trying out that axe in any of our skulls. We had travelled only a little way into the cool of the n
ight when Aliabu came up beside me where I walked with Brother John, both of us trying to find a way back to friendship. In the twilight, robed and bearded as he was, Aliabu looked like one of those seers Brother John talked of in his Gospels.
I will not go nearer to Aindara than this,' Aliabu said through the Goat Boy. `Not far from that village is a temple to the old Hittites and beyond that, in the hills, is where the mine lies. I am going no closer than this, but will wait for you seven nights, no more.'
`Why? Are you afraid?' I taunted and should have known better, for he nodded with no shame of it, which is the Bedu way, I learned.
He told us, in that quiet, insect-singing twilight: `Those outcasts told tales that all was not well here.
Friends of friends, they say, have told that some of the soldiers at the mine ran off, for they had not been paid and no supplies came from Aleppo, because the silver was gone and there is so much fighting that the mine has been forgotten. Some say the ones who remained started to raid and they have grown strong indeed if Aindara is no more.'
Camels were being hobbled, tents pitched, fires lit and it was clear his mind would not be changed. The Oathsworn, confused, sat and waited and watched.
I saw the Goat Boy's face as he translated all this and knew there was more, tilted my head in a silent question. The Goat Boy shrugged. 'He is afraid of more than soldiers. I heard him talk with his brothers and could not hear it all, but they are terrified, Trader.'
Ask him,' I said and so he did. Aliabu waved his hands as if he did not want to discuss it at all, but he saw the blood in my eye and knew that I would go on anyway. He was torn between his fear and his pride in Bedu hospitality, which would not let a man who had sheltered in his hov walk into unwarned danger.
His eyes were all that could be seen now, though the fire that flared up cast his shadow, wavering and long.
`Ghul,' he said and the other Bedu heard it and stopped, as if frozen. Then they went about their work again, almost frenzied, as if to try and drive out fear by being busy. Aliabu spoke swiftly, spitting the words out as if it hurt him to talk, wanting to get them out of his mouth as fast as possible.