by Robert Low
The one camel and the last mule were packed, the latter uneasy with the smell of blood from its late partner, whose wrapped head Kvasir swung over his shoulder, though I thought at the time it would be poor eating. We filed down from the Church of Aaron's Tomb and, at the foot of the hill, the men assembled.
I looked at them, stepping back a little in my head, that ability Einar had prized so much.
They were built like huge oxen, with muscled shoulders and broad chests, giants in a land of small men.
They had a wild tangle of bleached hair, beards that hung halfway to their chests and faces and forearms reddened by the sun. Their boots flapped, their tunics were ragged and almost all the same colour now, and their shields were scarred and battered — but they held axes and spears with sweat-oiled shafts and sharpened edges, their ring-coats were carefully rolled and stowed and helmets swung from tunic belts on firm leather fastenings.
They were grim as an edge, with eyes like pale stone in the blue dark before morning.
I knew what to say. I pointed south, beyond the dusty, moon-washed fields and the huddled town and told them how that was the way home. I reminded them of what Starkad had done to us and to our comrades.
I reminded them of the reward for disposing of the dead-eating brigands and hinted that even more plunder might be had there. I reminded them we were here to fulfil our oath to our oarmates, even if most of us had never seen them.
After all that, into the silence of their indifference, I spoke with Einar's voice. 'We are sworn one to another,' I said.
`There are other varjazi and we have heard recent saga tales of the men from Wolin, whom they call Jomsvikings and who are bright with fame. They say these live all together in one house and no women are allowed.' I let that drift like an insect in the night air, then shrugged. 'Well, that's a fame I could do without myself. If they take turns on the ninth night to be used as a woman that's their own affair.'
There were heyas and some sharp intakes at this, for this was strong stuff; that particular insult, to accuse a man of behaving like a woman every ninth night, was so bad it was forbidden by law in Iceland and other parts. I had heard it from old Wryneck once, who had died at Atil's howe, and thanked him for it now.
Our fame will be brighter still after this,' I said. 'In winter halls from now until Ragnarok, they will sing of Botolf's hair, Finn Horsehead and the mighty Godi, the gold-browed wit of Kleggi.'
And Kvasir One Eye's shame pole,' Kvasir said into the pause I took. He unwrapped the mule head and stuck it on the spear with the runemarked shaft, then drove the whole thing into a cleft in the rocks, turning the head to point towards Jerusalem. I said nothing, for only something momentous would have forced Kvasir to interrupt his jarl in mid-speech.
I set up this shame pole and turn this shame against Jorsaland and the guardian spirits who inhabit this land, so that they shall go astray, unable to detect or discover their dwellings, showering discord on this land until every person in it comes to the true gods of the Aesir and Vanir.'
He raised both hands and spread them. 'I say further and now that, though I was prime-signed a Christ-follower by Brother John, it was a mistake on my part, for if the Christ-god refuses even to save his own priests, what use is he to me? I say here that I am of the gods of the Aesir and the Vanir, and that I will honour the Disir, my hearth-gods, from now until my end and will not be turned from them again.
Now I promise that I owe them many sacrifice-deaths in payment for my lapse and shall fulfil my bargain.'
This was powerful stuff and, taken with all else, ran a stir through the rest of the Oathsworn, like a breeze ruffling dust. Shoulders went back, heads came up, hands went to hilts and, like a pack of wolves scenting blood, they growled in the backs of their throats.
They wanted riches, fame and the favour of the gods — as we all did — and I knew I had them with me then, though the way of it left me sickening. This jarl business was, in the end, like sucking silver — it seems as if something so prized would be sweeter, but it is always just a foul taste of metal in the mouth.
The same taste as blood.
We moved off into the darkness and on to the unknown, Oathsworn still.
15
Out of dust thick as gruel the rabble army spilled down the road, all rags and weathered, wary looks, darting this way and that, looking for fruit or roots, flowers and dung chips. The flies followed them, heavy with blood.
They washed up to us, broke like water round a stone and then milled in a confusion of fear, backing out of swinging range. Those dull-eyed children who had the energy to try and beg from us were grabbed by their sunken-eyed mothers and dragged back. They had fled their homes and the peace they had known and their god, it seemed, had turned his back on them.
About two hundred or so,' Gardi said, sitting down to inspect the ruin of his bare feet. He had run in from scouting and where he had stood was spotted with fresh blood.
`Where from?'
Gardi jerked his head in the general direction of south and shrugged. 'About half a day away, no more. It seems this Black-hearted One attacked and they fled.'
Two hundred villagers, about a third of them men. These brigands were growing in number and boldness if they could attack a village of that size and win.
A figure pushed through the throng, which was beginning to sink down and wail like a pack of anxious cats. He walked with a staff, his robes were ragged and stained with dust, his beard matted and he stopped in front of us and looked at us with mournful olive eyes in a long, sunken-cheeked face. Then he bowed and greeted us in Arabic and looked surprised when a half-dozen sun-blasted foreigners with faces like slapped arses gave the formal response.
He gabbled out a fresh stream, of which I understood something about us finishing them off, for they had no weapons and it was the will of Allah. The Goat Boy nodded and smiled and soothed him with soft hand movements.
`He thinks we are part of the brigands, though he has hope since we have not yet fallen on them and killed them all,' said the Goat Boy. 'His name is Ahmad, which means Most Praiseworthy, and he is the leader of these people, who are all from the town of Tekoa, which lies under the Cliff of Ziz.'
`Talkative, isn't he?' growled Kvasir.
`Shifting himself,' noted Finn, then squinted at me. 'What do you think, Trader?'
What I thought was that we were short of water and food and far too far away from where the sun sparkled on water and gulls chuckled for the joy of it. What I thought was that two men had been left with the monks on Aaron's hill, with faces the colour of straw and their lives leaking in stinking dribbles down their legs. What I thought was that they were the first of many.
That's what I thought. What I said was to the Goat Boy, to ask this village elder about Martin and Starkad and any other sightings of wild afrangi men like us, not expecting anything from it.
The Goat Boy gabbled and then Ahmad gabbled and the Goat Boy grew excited and the gabbling got faster until, suddenly, the Goat Boy whirled to me, his thin, brown body trembling, his arms waving like leather thongs in a breeze.
`There is a Roman church in Ahmad's village, an old ruin,' he told us. 'A Christ monk is there, not a Greek one, but one like those from the Church of Aaron. And there were other afrangi there, who stayed to fight the brigands, who were led by a man with scarlet hair. Ahmad fears the monk and the afrangi who stayed must be dead, for there were too many brigands for them to fight and their red-haired leader was a powerful warrior. He says the brigands are jinn-mad, but are afraid to stay long, for fear the garrison at En Gedi will find them.'
`Well,' said Finn at the end of all this. He ruffled dust from the Goat Boy's beaming head and, dropping his pack, began undoing leather thongs so that the mail shirt unrolled with a soft shink of sound. 'Time for battle-gear, eh, Trader?'
`Who is this red-haired man?' demanded Sighvat. 'He sounds like one of us.'
It will be Inger,' Kvasir decided.
Inger? Who's In
ger?' asked Sighvat.
`Short,' Finn grunted, struggling into his mail. 'Bow-legged. From the Hedemark.'
`That was Sturla and he was more brown than red,' Kvasir answered scornfully. 'Inger was the big Slav we took on in Aldeigjuborg.'
`Fancied himself as a wrestler?' Botolf asked.
Kvasir nodded. 'That's the one. Had hair the colour of old blood. Almost as nice as yours was once, Ymir.'
Pig-humper.' growled Botolf amiably. 'Why do you think it is him, then?'
Kvasir shrugged. 'He has the reddest hair I know, he was one of the crew so I know he is around this place. and he was part Hallander and so cannot be trusted.'
Botolf scowled. 'I am from Halland.'
Kvasir spread his hands, smiling like a shark. 'Exactly. I give you two for one that Inger is the treacherous, camel-humping turd that old Sarakenos is speaking of.'
`Done,' declared Botolf. 'I have an ounce in hacksilver that says you are a mush-mouthed chicken-fucker.'
Finn looked at me and I met his flat, sea-grey gaze. He didn't have to say anything; if it was Inger, it meant he had turned his back on his oarmates, had broken the Oath.
While that hung overhead like the dust and wails made by the villagers, we slid into mail and leather and checked straps and argued and grumbled, falling into the old, familiar pattern that was our lives, the only one we had.
Gardi climbed back to his feet and I saw he was wearing new footwear, no more than a sole with thongs, which he had just bartered for. A villager gnawed a horse bone and contemplated his naked feet while Gardi, grinning, unshipped his bow and knuckled me a farewell before shoving through the crowd and flapping out on to the road. Hedin Flayer joined him and the pair of them loped off like hunting dogs.
Ahmad gabbled at the Goat Boy, who gabbled back.
`He asks if we are going to fight the brigands.'
`Tell him we are,' I said. 'And we will expect food and water as payment for returning his village to him and his people.'
`Fuck him and his people,' growled Thorstein Blaserk in passing, his underlip thrust out petulantly. 'We take what we need — that's what we do.'
`We have to come back this way once all is done,' I pointed out. 'Do you want to find them friendly or angry?'
He subsided, muttering, and Short Eldgrim chuckled savagely at him, the network of scars making his face look like tree bark.
`He's a rare one for the thinking is the Trader,' he noted. `You, on the other hand, have nothing in that head worth protecting with a good helmet.'
I listened to them squabble and growl while I put on my own mail, grease-slick and cold even in that heat, checked straps and the edge of my sword and all the time wondered about the red-haired man and if it was indeed Inger the Slav, one of the ones we'd come to rescue.
If so, what was he doing leading the people who were holding his oarmates prisoner? Were the rest of them already dead and eaten? Was the monk really Martin? And who were the men who had defended the village? Valgard and the others, who had escaped, perhaps?
The questions circled and flocked like the birds whirling out of the fields as we moved on, leaving the wailing behind. Black and white, they swooped low and one circled and landed on a fence post as we came up to it, cocking its head and looking at us.
Sighvat stopped dead and the rest of us, anxious and wary, fell into fighting crouches, looking this way and that, shields up.
`What?' I hissed at him.
`Magpie,' he declared morosely.
Odin's balls,' growled Kvasir. 'If it isn't bees it's birds. What now, Sighvat?'
I saw the Goat Boy cross himself and he caught me looking and clutched his Thor amulet. 'Very bad.
Magpie is the only bird who did not wear mourning for Christ. One means sorrow.'
Finn spat with disgust. 'Now even the boy is at it.'
Sighvat shrugged. 'I don't know what the Christ-men believe, though it is interesting to hear of it. This is the bird of Hel, 'Loki's daughter, made like her face, half black ruin, half pale flesh. It is her fylgia, come to take those who can never make Valholl.'
The men made signs and the fear rose in them, like stink from a swamp.
`We are all doomed, then?' demanded a voice from the pack and I knew then what I had to do, the sour taste of jarl silver in my mouth as I spoke.
`No, not all,' I said. 'Only one is marked, by his own admission.'
Sighvat looked at me, closed his eyes briefly and then nodded. I could almost hear Einar chuckle his appreciation as the others sighed out loud with relief.
`Move,' I said, harsh as winter, and they trotted on. Sighvat, with a twisted grin at me, followed after them and the magpie preened and fluttered across the road, tail bobbing. Botolf watched it, half turning as he jogged after the others.
`Will he die?'
The voice was a soft pipe of sound from the Goat Boy, looking up at me, fingering the Thor amulet.
`Cattle die and kinsmen die,
Yourself will soon die,
Only fair fame never fades. .'
I gave him the words as I remembered Einar saying them on that hill in Karelia another world ago, just before he had fought Starkad and given him his limp. Whether the Goat Boy understood any of it was another matter, but he nodded with a wisdom beyond his small years.
Then he tilted his head to one side and said: 'The villagers are starving. There isn't a goat or a chicken to be seen, so how will they feed us if they cannot feed themselves?'
He was clever and I remembered Einar looking at me as I supposed I looked at the Goat Boy now, one eyebrow up, squinting thoughtfully.
`Most men think in a straight line,' I said, hearing the echo of the words as Einar had said them to me in Birka before we burned it. 'They see only their own actions, like a single thread in the Norns' loom, knotted only when they thrust their life on others. They see through one set of eyes, hear through one set of ears, all their life. To look at things through someone else's eyes is a rare thing, which cannot be learned.'
He nodded as if he understood and I waited, while he frowned and thought. He had recovered well from his wound and only winced now and then at the pain from his healing lung.
`You lied to them?' he suggested. 'You knew these villagers could not feed us, but you made the bargain anyway, to get our men to fight. You did the same with Sighvat because he says he will die anyway.'
I said nothing, for his saying it stripped it bare and revealed it for what it was and I was ashamed and trying not to show it. He just smiled and nodded happily, as if he had uncovered a great secret, then trotted off on legs like knotted thread.
I looked at Hers bird and it looked back at me with its bright, unblinking eye, black as the Abyss Brother John had always warned of, until I broke the gaze and jogged after the others.
The town had the strangeness of a stone circle, which made you walk soft and speak hushed. No birds fluttered and sang here. There were no goats, dogs, cats or any living thing that walked and only the insects and soft plash of water from a fountain split the stillness.
When I arrived, past a crust of white, flat-roofed houses on the earth, under palms like feathers on sticks, the Oathsworn were moving, silent and awkward, wary as cats, poking in doorways and turning in half-circles.
The only sign of life was the insects, humming and thrumming from hanging basket to pot, from blood trail to gutted corpse. There were a lot of gutted corpses.
I went to the fountain, a simple affair of basin and spout, peeled off my helmet and dipped my hand in to cup cool water on my face. My other hand rested on soft moss and, beneath it, an outcrop of stone had a perfect, round dip in it. As I watched, a drip formed above and trembled and fell with a spiderweb splash, moving one more grain of stone.
Years it had been here, this fountain, this place, watching the likes of us come and go, flitting like moths through the world. I felt like a spark, whirling on the wind, and had to grip the edge of the mossy lip to keep from falling.
`Signs of a struggle, Trader,' growled Kvasir, his voice booming. 'Blood. Bodies stripped; some opened.
Look here.'
He scooped water into his helmet, then I walked with him to where the fish-white corpse lay, sightless eyes filmed with dust. A fly crawled, bloated, from one nostril.
`See here. Gutted neatly and the liver removed.'
He did not have to say more. Raw liver was good eating when you were in a hurry and hungry and I had eaten it myself, warm from a fresh-killed deer.
I fought back to the now, blinking into his tilt-headed concern.
`The church?' I managed.
`Finn's off to find it. You should soak your head a bit, Trader. You look heat-felled to me.'
`Where are Gardi and the Flayer?' I asked, ignoring him.
Kvasir rubbed his bearded face with water, blowing it off his moustache. He shrugged. 'Scouting, I suppose. That's what they do.'
The Goat Boy came up on his thin legs, massaging his side where the lung punished him for his running, and announced that Finn had found the church and that I was to come at once. I went.
It was as typical a Roman church as any we had burned: solid walls, a dome, a stout door flung wide, narrow entrance, a floor of coloured tiles, some of them smashed away. It had long been abandoned to the spiders and rats but, as Finn said, stern as a whetstone, it had worshippers now and I had better see.
I slid in through the door, blinking at the sharp change from light to dark, heat to cool. The place seemed as empty as the inside of a bell, thick with shadows, and my feet crunched on the spill of little floor tiles from what had once been some holy picture from the Christ sagas.
Gradually, the shadows slid into the shapes of two people, one sitting cross-legged and facing me, the other kneeling, facing him, his head on the floor as if in obeisance, a magnificent rust-red cloak draped over his shoulders and back and a carpet of the same for him to kneel on. There was a dull droning, as if unseen priests muttered in the dark corners.