by Robert Low
Finn shook his head. 'Not the one I killed. He was sword-calloused, for sure — a Greek or a Bulgar by the way he cursed. Strong, too, for a man on melons and beans.'
Then Brother John turned over the bones in the midden-pit and came up with a skull that was no animal and the sickening rush of it came over me. Not just melons and beans. Meat. In a land where we had seen not so much as a lizard.
We found the larder where you'd expect to find it. . underground, in the cool. They could have wrapped the cuts better, in linen to keep the flies off, for some of the meat we came across was already too far blown to eat.
Not that they needed to. They had come across a way of keeping their meat fresher, longer: they cut off what they needed from the living, then tied off the wounds to prevent them bleeding to death. When we came across four men, with arms and legs missing, hung up on hooks through their shoulder blades, I was near to hoiking and Finn wanted to hunt down the ones we had seen fleeing to the hills.
Three of the four were dead. The fourth was barely alive — and was known to us. Finn knew him as Godwin, a Christ-sworn Saxon from the Danelaw, and called him by the name everyone had used: Puttoc, a Saxon word which, it seemed, meant 'buzzard', on account of his great beaked nose. We knew him because he was one of Starkad's men, had stood and scowled darkly at his master's back when we had exchanged words over Ivar's pyre.
After we'd cut him out of the hanging hooks — more meat off him, not that it mattered, since he would not live more than a day — he lay in the cool dark of that stinking place and clawed his one remaining hand on Sighvat's sleeve. The other arm was off just below the shoulder and tied with blood-crusted thongs.
`Help me,' he hissed and Sighvat leaped up and backward as if he had been stabbed, which caused us some concern. Brother John moved in, knelt and began the low, ritual drone that would call Godwin to his Christ-god and we gathered in that throat-catching gloom and listened to his confession, as harsh a sagatale as any Skallagrimsson himself came up with.
Sighvat, after a moment of sitting, silent and clasped and rocking, got up and went outside. I did not notice at the time, too engrossed in what spilled from Godwin's crusted mouth.
Godwin was one of Starkad's crew, so that relentless hound had been here. That probably meant Martin the monk had come this way and the wyrd of it rocked me back on my heels, for it seemed the Norns wove our threads in and out like a cat's cradle. For all we wanted Starkad dead, we generally agreed that he was a grim and questing hound, every bit as good as his reputation. I hoped the monk was stew, but I doubted it; he could wriggle out of a closed cauldron, that one.
The mine guards, Godwin said, in a voice like the whisper of a moth wing, had run off, in groups and singly, until the prisoners had broken their shackles and freed themselves — by which time, of course, they were already starving. Godwin thought that some of the slaves were former soldiers from the Great City and they had taken over, raiding out to this Aindara for food, chasing off the villagers in the process. Then that source had run out, too, and the ex-slaves had turned on their own.
At this point, Godwin had arrived with Starkad and his men, hungry and thirsting. The leader of the freed prisoners, the one the Greeks called Pelekanos and the Sarakenoi called Qalb al-Kuhl, had attacked at once, so that many on both sides were killed and Starkad had been forced to flee with what remained of his men. It was here that Godwin had been taken prisoner and kept for weeks eating beans before they had. started to carve him up.
`Well, I'm sorry we missed killing Pelekanos today,' growled Short Eldgrim. 'I would thank him for giving Starkad a fair dunt — and then cut the liver from him and force him to eat it as a lesson.'
Godwin's laugh was a dust-dry rasp of sound. 'You didn't fight Pelekanos today. That was Giorgos the Armenian. He did not want to go with Pelekanos, who is mad and seems to want to kill Starkad. They parted and not as friends. Pelekanos took some people with him, chasing Starkad, some as soldiers, some as fodder.
The others went with Giorgos and came here.'
`The mine is empty then?'
`No one. . there. Gone.'
His head lolled and Brother John poked and peered and shrugged. 'Alive and deep asleep. That tie round his arm will need loosening or else it will fester and he will die. If we loosen it, though, he will lose more blood than is good for him and will die.'
I hardly heard him, but reached out and cut the crusted leather thongs out of mercy. While I watched the blood ooze out of the half-formed scabs, my mind was crashing like surf on a shoal.
Valgard and the crew we'd come to rescue were gone and we were too late. I had thought of that, that they might all already be dead, had even prepared for it in my head. But not this. Dragged off by dead-eaters? Not even Svala and her seidr magic could have foreseen this.
Odin, it seems, was not easing up on his revenge for oath-breaking at all.
13
Brother John wanted us to go after the Greek Giorgios and, as he said 'end his affront to God'. I told him we would go south as fast as possible, because I thought soldiers would arrive. Aliabu, when we got back to him, proved that I had the right, scratching out the warp and weft of it in the sand.
Around Aleppo, he told us, marking it out in stones while we gathered round, were the Hamdanids, who had led the fight against the Great City's army at Antioch.
Many of the ones we had fought had been made up from the Kitab tribe of Bedu.
To the east were the Buyyids, latest in a long line of such who held the Abbasids caliphs of Baghdad hostage. They had joined the Hamdanids to fight us, but were no real friends to them, while the Qarmatians of Damascus seemed to be the same sort of Mussulmen as the Fatimids, but the Fatimids said the Qarmatians were no Mussulmen at all. The Qarmatians were, it was generally agreed by everyone, not ones to fall prisoner to.
To the south — busy celebrating victory in the newly-named Cairo — were the Fatimids of al-Muizz under his general, Jawhar, with their pink and green flags. They were no friends to anyone who did not believe as they.
And all around were the almost hidden Bedu, with their own allegiances and blood-feuds.
`Fuck,' said Kvasir, grim with disgust. 'There are so many camel-humpers fighting over this place you would think it worth something, but look at it. It's stones and dust. Now, soft green fields I can understand fighting over. But what does this place have? Even the silver mines are empty.'
For one thing, Aliabu told us, there were horses. The asil, he said, is the best horse in the world and people kill for them. It was this horse, Aliabu revealed, that had landed him in the clutches of Jarl Brand at Antioch.
In the Kitab tribe was a powerful clan called the Mirdasid and Aliabu had been sent to them by his own people, the Beni Saher from around the Pitch Sea, to find out the pedigree of the forty head of horses the Beni Saher had lifted from them months earlier, a great feat which the Kitab still mourned.
`Wait, wait,' demanded Finn, thrusting his chin out with disbelief. 'What does he mean? Is he trying to tell us he went to the camp of the people his people had just robbed and asked him the value of what they had taken?'
It was exactly so. It seems that Aliabu's presence was as sacred as that of any herald, because the first thing a Bedu who gets an asil horse wants to know is its descent.
However, now that he had that information, Aliabu did not want to overstay his welcome in Kitab country and was taking the fast route home when he stopped to trade with the army at Antioch — and had his sons taken in care by Jarl Brand.
He would get them back when he delivered us to the Pitch Sea, as the Greeks call it. The Sarakenoi call it the Dead Sea, though it wasn't true that it was dead. In fact, as we saw, it was greener than anywhere, though the shoreline of it was white with salt and the water undrinkable, even if you strained it through wadmal.
Finn heard out Aliabu's marvellous tale, shaking his head and marvelling at how someone could walk, unharmed, in and out of the camp of someone they had jus
t raided. Everyone talked of that all day — save Sighvat, who sat apart, drawing runes in the sand and scrubbing them out.
Brother John, meanwhile, spent his time protesting that it was not right to leave dead-eaters like Giorgios behind. I soothed him by reminding him that we had soaked Godwin in oil and burned him and all the rest of that underground larder. Giorgios and his friends would have to eat each other now, which was only fitting.
`Maybe they will manage it before soldiers come and finish them off,' I offered.
Brother John, his face burned leather-brown so that the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes showed white, looked at me and shook his head. `Malesuada fames,' he said. 'And there is more than one kind of hunger.'
A hunger that persuades to evil. Perhaps he was right, looking back on it. We were all full-sail with it, driven across this sand sea, still hungry for the silver of Atil's hoard. Still on the whale road, yet not a whitecapped wave in sight.
Not all were happy with this. There were thirty-eight of us left, burst-lipped, sun-slapped, sweating and weary and only a handful were the old Oathsworn. Two or three Danes from Cyprus, led by a muttering Hookeye, were already growling about being no closer to this silver hoard and others were starting to listen.
It did not help that Hookeye reminded me of myself when Einar led the Oathsworn; now I knew how he had felt.
Like him, I tried to ignore it and plough on, even if the furrow was stony. We staggered from shadow to shadow, the only safe way to travel in a land where the sun will kill you and even veils won't shield you from the glare that flashes up to your face.
Anyone who stopped — or worse, collapsed and lay on the hot ground — was hauled up at once, because that sucked the water right out of your body. We learned to wrap our robes tight, which was better against the heat than having them flap loosely, and all our waterskins were coated with fat churned from camel milk to stop seepage.
Lie only in the shade, the Bedu told us. Maybe one of the lizards there will stand guard while you sleep
— since they are twice the length of your forearm, they make formidable watchdogs and only eat small animals. If you can't sleep, count the camel fleas, so big you can see them clearly.
We also learned a lot about food. The Bedu of the Beni Saher, for example, eat lean fox meat, which they say is good for sick bones. They also like rabbit, which they skin and gut like a goat, then cut the meat into pieces. Then they stuff the meat back into the skin and tie it up. A hole is dug in the sand and into that is put burning wood and two stones, one under with the wood and one over. The whole thing is then covered with embers and sand and left for three to four hours — perfect during the rest-up period of a long hot day, when no one wants to be near a fire. When it comes out, the meat looks like gold.
We ate it with the bread they made every day, taking wheat live with worms and mixing it with water and salt, the dough flattened and then covered in ash and cooked for five minutes on both sides, then removed.
The black soot was easily knocked off and it was a good taste.
All of us now had great respect for Aliabu, his brothers and his wives — but we were surprised to find that they considered us worthy of the same.
It's because you sail on the sea,' the Goat Boy told us. `They call it Ocean and fear it.'
Ocean, it turned out, has many of the most dangerous jinn, which seem to be like fetches are to us. They are everywhere else, too, but never touch the earth and you can only see them when the wind of their passing whirls the sand into little circles.
The Bedu don't talk about them much, which is sensible, for neither do we like to speak of fetches and for the same reason. These jinn can inhabit the bodies of men and make them mad in the head and Aliabu remembered seeing one such, so crazy he ate sand and had to be held down and prayed over. Even so, it seems, he was never the same.
He told us this because he was concerned about Sighvat, who was showing all the signs this man had before he started eating sand.
I was, too, and could not work it out, but Sighvat remained apart and silent and brooding all through the long days down to another ancient city, nothing but fallen pillars and ruin and which, I learned later, had been called Palmyra. We were then heading further south, into the true desert, said Aliabu, before turning west to reach the head of the Pitch Sea and then to Jerusalem.
`True desert?' gasped Short Eldgrim, sand on his lips and not enough wet in his mouth to spit with digust.
'What can be worse than we have already come through?'
We found out, moving in the dark between the colonnaded ruins of the old city of Palmyra and the Saracen stronghold called al-Gharbi, like ghosts in the night, unseen and unheard.
We rested up, as usual, all that next day, in a heat like a bread oven, with the sky a washed and weary blue. The land wriggled and the horizon was sliced through with sheets of water that were not there, or hills whose summits were halfway between earth and sky.
In the cool of the evening we set off again and, when night fell, the land leached out most of the heat and grew chill as a summer fjord.
`Muspell,' growled Finn, exasperated. 'We are in Muspell.'
`What is Muspell?' the Goat Boy wanted to know, so Finn told him. Burning ice and biting flame, that was Muspell, the place where life began.
It seethed and shone here, too, and before we had been on our way two hours, Thor unloaded his own fury and a great storm marched across our path just as we reached the remains of an old Silk Road stopping place, which was Odin luck for us.
We stopped and took shelter in this collection of ancient stones, huddled in a world gone dark, where blue-white sparks flickered in great masses of cloud, which we saw for the eyeblink of the flash.
The Thunderer spoke from them and then came a howl of sand-hail, until we were scourged and bent by a wind that scurried over the plain and took possession of the world. For all that fury, not one drop of moisture fell, which was strangest of all to us, who expected a soaking from a storm.
Even Brother John was cowed by all this, though he was more furious that we had travelled hard and fast by night, so that he had missed seeing the pillar near Aleppo where some Christ saint called Simon had perched like a bird for years, or the Street Called Straight in Damascus, or the old ruins of Palmyra.
If this was a simple journey, one of those walks you peregrinatores take,' I snapped back at his latest brooding, 'I would be agreeing with you.' I paused to let the latest flash light up his scowl, then added: 'But this is no silly Christ walk. We are surrounded by enemies and only by sneaking along in the dark can we get to where we must go.'
And where is that, young Orm?' Brother John answered bitterly. 'We pursue men, pursuing men, who pursue a priest into the bowels of Satan. If anything smacked of jinn-madness, this it it.'
It was not altogether wrong, I was thinking, and there were other faces flickering grimly in the darkness, other thoughts on the same subject.
Our way home lies along the track Starkad leaves,' I said, loud enough for them to hear, I hoped. 'We came to get the rune-serpent sword and free our Oathsworn comrades. After that, I will be going back to the Elk and sailing away from this gods-cursed country and hope never to see it again. Those still oathbound can follow if they will.'
On to a hoard of silver that will make you all kings,' Kvasir reminded them and there was silence while they drank in the rich mead of that and the sky grumbled.
If our comrades are not already eaten,' growled Short Eldgrim, his eyes white in the darkness. Thunder rumbled, as if agreeing with him. 'What if we are too late and they have already lost their balls?'
All the more reason for haste,' Finn said vehemently. If it were any of us. . By the gods, think of it.
Dragged along by dead-eaters, already having lost your balls? You would give up all hope, even of the Oathsworn.'
At least, if they have lost their balls,' Kvasir pointed out moodily, 'it is one less thing for the dead-eaters to cook.'
There were grunts and growls of derision at this, while Kvasir spread his hands and demanded to know what was so bad about what he had just said.
I said nothing, for the fear and uncertainty was rich in the voices I had heard. I caught Botolf's eye and the look that passed between us let me know he was thinking the same.
It isn't a disease,' said a voice into the sullen silence of this, in between the moody mumbling of the thunder. Sighvat.
`What say you? Woken up, have you? About time,' growled Finn.
Sighvat ignored him, shuffling closer as the wind screamed and Redbeard's unseen goat-chariot banged about the sky on iron-rimmed wheels. 'Eating the dead isn't a disease, nor are they fetch-haunted. It is hunger only, so bad that meat is meat no matter what it looks like.'
`Men are never the same after they have done it,' Brother John persisted. 'At best, they cannot be trusted.'
`None of us can be trusted then,' answered Sighvat sonorously, 'for we are all as likely to turn to it, given the same circumstance.'
`You would be last on my list of fare,' I offered, trying to make lighter of all this. A few chuckled, but Sighvat, curse him, was not for bringing cheer into that Thor-raging night.
I may be first available,' he said, flatly. 'For my doom is on me.'
`What's this?' demanded Botolf, alarmed. Doom was not a word anyone cared for and, for all his muscles, the giant was mortally afraid of the Norns and their weaving.
`That Godwin, the Saxon,' said Sighvat. 'He spoke to me first. My wyrd, as my mother has told me.'
The sky banged like a great flapping door and the blue-white seared my eyes. I felt the sick in my belly like a ballast stone, smooth and round and sinking, saw him look at the greyed sky on Cyprus and tell me how his mother had it from a volva in the next valley that her son would find his doom when the kite spoke to him.
Godwin's name, Puttoc, did not mean 'buzzard' — my Englisc was limited. It meant 'kite'.
Sighvat told them of it and everyone was silent. Those nearest to him touched a shoulder, or clasped his forearm in sympathy and none doubted the fact of his doom — save Brother John, of course, who was driven to a near frenzy of tongue-lashing over it.