The Wolf Sea o-2

by Robert Low

  The cross-legged one looked up as I crunched forward, one slow, bewildered step after another. His spiderwebbed face was harsh as a sun-cracked plain, stretched tight over cheeks in which black, haunted eyes peered familiarly at me.

  Orm,' said Martin in a tired voice. 'Welcome to the house of God, idolatrous though it may be. Here also is one other you know: Starkad. Forgive him if he does not get up. I fear he is past that.'

  I moved closer and sideways slightly. The kneeling figure was Starkad right enough, and he wasn't wearing a red cloak on his back, he was wearing his lungs; I hunkered down, tremble-legged and dry-mouthed at the sight of a real bloodeagling.

  They had cut his ribs free from his backbone moved them forward so that they could lift his lungs out and drape them on his back, like wings. He was caked in old blood, knelt in a crusted-over pool of it and the priest-droning sound was every blood-gorging insect in the land enjoying a feast.

  I hid,' Martin said flatly. 'When Starkad and his men caught up with me here, I hid. They were looking for me — politely, so as not to annoy the locals — when they were attacked. Hundreds of them. Screams and death, young Orm.'

  He shifted slightly and the insects rose in a puff, like smoke, then settled again.

  `When I came out, everyone had gone — save him. So I sat with him and offered him the peace of God until he died.'

  `He was. . alive?'

  Oh yes,' Martin said calmly. 'He lived for a good hour, did Starkad, though he didn't say much. I sprinkled water on his lungs to keep them from drying out, but even that touch was pain to him.'

  I wiped dry lips and batted insects away, trying to suck in the enormity of it. This was. . vicious and meaningless. It had to have been done by a Norseman — no renegade Arab or Greek would even know of this — and such a thing was done to strike fear, or as a warning. Which meant this Red Head knew who we were and did not like it much. He was as dark-hearted as he was red-haired.

  Martin looked at me across Starkad's corpse, hazed by the insect flutter. `Starkad was a hound from Satan,' he declared harshly, 'who hunted me all the way from Birka to here — two long years of running, curse him. I found a place to hide here, but I could not take the Holy Lance in it. He had won, I thought — then this.' Savage as a fanged grin, he was trembling with the triumph of it. If you did not believe in God before, Orm, look on this and tremble. He smites His enemies with a terrible Hand.'

  I blinked the stinging sweat from my eyes; the air was thick with death and blood and flies and I wanted out of that place. I looked at Starkad and saw only a man, stripped naked and blood-eagled. No helm, no mail, no holy spear.

  And no rune-serpent sword.

  Martin smiled. A fly crawled at the edges of it, but if he felt it at all he gave no sign. 'Indeed,' he said.

  'The spear is gone. Your famous sword is gone. Whoever killed him has it now. We must find them-'

  There were shouts from outside and the slither of feet. The Goat Boy hurled into the church, his voice echoing and shrill. `Trader. . men are coming. Hundreds of them. And a man with red hair.'

  I looked at Martin as I rose. 'We do not need to find them, priest,' I answered. 'I would run back to your little hole. They have found us.'

  By the time I had hauled out my sword and unshipped my shield, they were on us, spilling over the dusty fields where they had been hiding, darting among the houses, a tide of screaming, rag-arsed men, desperate with outlaw fear and well armed.

  The Goat Boy skittered back from the entrance as a figure hurled in, panting and grunting. I saw a mass of matted black hair and beard, a ragged, stained tunic and a long spear. His feet slapped and skidded on the ruined mosaic tiles and he crouched, snarling Greek curses and blinking in the transition from light to dark.

  I stepped forward; he spotted the movement and hurled himself at me like a mad dog, the fat spearhead slamming hard enough into the shield to stagger me backwards. He tugged; it stuck. I shook the shield free and the weight of it falling dragged the spear down. While he was trying to put out a foot and pull it free, I spun round, up the shaft of the spear in a half-turn, my sword whirring in a killing arc.

  The bite juddered me to my teeth and he shrieked and fell over as ribs crunched. When I spun the rest of the way round he was sprawled out, writhing like a landed fish and gasping and moaning. I saw he was barefoot, the soles black as ash.

  The Goat Boy darted in then, a little knife flashing as he cut Black Hair's throat and looked up at me, panting with effort, teeth bared like a savage little dog. Another for his dead brother.

  I took four steps to the narrow entrance, to where I could see the street outside: a madness of men, flashing axes and spears and swords, where figures slid and screamed like vengeful ghosts in the shrouding dust.

  The flash of flame hair was beacon-bright in it and I saw Kvasir had won his bet. Inger came crashing through the wolf pack of his own ragged men, heavy with ringmail and carrying, I saw with a shock that puckered my arse, a byrnie-biter, a three-foot long, three-edged spear-blade, with only a foot of wooden shaft to wield it with. It was a vicious stabbing spear that could carve through three thicknesses of ringmail if a man of strength used it. And Inger fancied himself as a wrestler.

  He saw me, knew me. His mouth opened in an O, framed by matted red beard, a roar of challenge I couldn't hear above the din and he hauled out a seax, slinging his shield on his back. Now with a weapon in either fist, he hurled himself at me from behind the mass of men, all hacking and cursing and slipping and dying in the dirt and blood of the street.

  Botolf was trying to get to him, roaring spittle, but Inger dropped a shoulder and slammed him sideways, which staggered him off-balance, so that Sighvat thought he had a chance and leaped in, slashing.

  I saw it framed neatly in the narrow doorway like an ikon painting. Inger took the blow on that byrnie-biter spear of his, half turned on the run and sliced with the seax, so that I saw the spray of blood arc out from Sighvat's throat as his head was flung back.

  I shrieked then, howled like a dog as Sighvat vanished into the maw of the fighting, tumbling backwards.

  Inger was still running as I headed for the narrow entrance, but he was faster and stronger and I was dead, for sure, against that vicious byrnie-biter spear. The thought of it melted my bowels and I skidded to a halt, frozen, shieldless. Doomed.

  He knew it, was screeching his triumph as he pounded through the doorway, the byrnie-biter up like a cavalry lance, aimed right at my chest and looking like a ship's mast as it hurtled down on me.

  Then the shield on his back slammed into the doorposts, too wide to pass.

  Even as the strap fastening it to his back snapped his legs flew out from underneath him, dumping him hard on his arse. The byrnie-biter flew in the air, turning end over end, right over my head and clattered to the mosaic floor, bouncing and scattering blood-fat flies into the air.

  I stepped forward, raised my sword and swung. Just the last three or four inches caught him on the forehead, above the right eye, splitting his skull like a rumman fruit, even as he blinked away the dust and whirling stars and realised what had happened to him.

  He had time, I was thinking afterwards, to see the edge of that wave-patterned blade come down on him, the new oil on it running with the colours of Bifrost. I did not care what he felt, only that he was dead. He wore Starkad's gilt-edged dagged mail, so I knew who had done the blood-eagling.

  I got your message,' I said to his splintered face, then stepped over him and out into the hazed dust and the bodies and dark shapes, looming like ships in fog. Steel flashed; there was the wet sound of edge on flesh.

  Botolf loomed like the Cliff of Ziz, holding up one hand as he saw me drop into fighting stance. I relaxed; the fight seemed over.

  `We would not be standing if they had not arrived,' panted Botolf, jerking his beard in the general direction of the 'Dead Sea. I looked up in time to see, through a swirl of red-gold dust, a magnificent figure on a white horse that was al
l arched neck and proud tail. One hand held a riding whip, the other peeled off a plumed helmet — the only armour he wore — to reveal a shaved head, and a young, sweat-streaked, bearded face, smiling with dazzling teeth.

  He wore a white jubba over a long full tunic and the trader in me recognised satin from the Great City and that his cloak was hemmed with golden Arabic squiggle-writing and he smelled of aloes, even through the stink of shit and dust and death.

  I am the Bilal al-Jamil ibn Nidal ibn Abdulaziz

  he declared. 'If you do not have a letter I have been told of, make your peace with whatever gods you worship.'

  I fumbled like a sleepwalker in my pouch and fished out the governor's crumpled, stained letter, then bowed, which seemed only right in the circumstances. He plucked it, smoothed it, read it, then handed it back to me with a small smile, raised the whip in salute, wheeled that magnificent horse round and pranced off the way he had come.

  `What the fuck was that?' demanded Finn, lumbering up, sword out and shield scarred with fresh marks.

  Our saviour,' I said, still bewildered.

  `So be nice,' added Botolf with a grim chuckle. Finn laughed back, just as savagely, and ruffled the Goat Boy's dust-mtted hair. His young laugh was high and shrill and ended on a rack of coughing. Everyone joined in the laughter, even me. The mad relief of survivors.

  Then Kvasir stuck his one eye into it and brought us back to the now 'Ten dead, six wounded,' he said to me, flat and grim as an altar stone. `Sighvat is one of the dead. We found Gardi and Hedin Flayer out in the bean fields, gutted and stripped.'

  Botolf let out a long, weary groan and Finn flung his head back and howled like a sick dog until Kvasir shook him out of it.

  It would have been more if those Sarakenoi had not come up,' he said, taking Finn's bowed head on one shoulder. 'Old Ahmad here says their leader is commander of the garrison at En Gedi.'

  I saw the haunted-cheeked leader of the community hovering in the background and he inclined his head in a stiff little bow, then went off as his people flooded back in to reclaim their village.

  Sighvat lay on his back with two grins, one a wistful affair from cheek to cheek, the second a lipless grimace from ear to ear. The blood had pooled to muddy slush under his head.

  `That magpie had the right of it after all,' said Short Eldgrim morosely. 'His doom was on him.'

  At least that Inger was killed for it,' Botolf growled, coming out from the ruined church and hefting the byrnie-biter in one massive fist. 'We can put him at the feet of Sighvat and the others.'

  Which we did, making a good boat-grave a little way outside the village, helped by the villagers themselves. We howed Sighvat up with Gardi and Hedin Flayer, Oski, Arnfinn, Thorstein Blue Shirt, Thord, Otkel, Karlsefni and Hrolf the Dane woodworker, all washed and laid out neat and clean, with their weapons and mail and Inger at their feet, as was right.

  We added Starkad and what was left of his men, picking our way through the ravaged fields and irrigation ditches to find them.

  Kleggi, black-browed at the death of Hrolf the woodworker, was sure these men would be dug up as soon as we had left, for we had buried them with their mail and swords, but Ahmad looked so astounded and shocked when the Goat Boy told him this that I believed they would rest quietly.

  We slumped down in the lee of the ruined church for the night — no one wanted to go in it, for it still stank of blood and death, even after the weary villagers had collected the dead brigands and buried them somewhere else.

  For all that they were going hungry themselves, Ahmad and the others did their best, bringing what had been scavenged from the fields, but it was poor stuff. However, that and our own meagre provisions allowed us to eat and we tried to ignore the cooking smells from the Sarakenoi camp nearby.

  `We took a sore dunt today,' Kvasir said and everyone hunkered round the fire, morose as crows in the red glow, growled agreement.

  `Sorer for some than others,' grumbled Botolf, two ounces of hacksilver lighter after his bet with Kvasir

  — but even Kvasir was not grinning at his win.

  `There is worse to come,' I said and that fell on stony silence, so I closed my teeth on it and stared into the flames, brooding on what had happened to Martin — vanished during the fighting — and his holy spear and the serpent sabre. Neither had been found on Inger or anywhere nearby and the only prize taken was from Inger: he wore Starkad's jarl neckring as well as his dagged mail and so I had what Jarl Brand wanted.

  Whether it was worth all the dead was another matter.

  Two sarkenoi loomed out of the dark, fully armed and armoured, to invite me to speak with Bilal al-Jamil ibn Nidal ibn Abdulaziz I almost sprang up with the relief of getting away from the fire and the despair that hunkered at it, signalling the Goat Boy to come with me; on the way he told me that this Bilal al-Jamil's name meant 'Father of Salim, Bilal the beautiful, son of Nidal, son of Abdul the Magnificent, the Egyptian'.

  `But you may call him Lord,' he added pointedly, when I grumbled about constantly filling my mouth with so much name.

  This Bilal al-Jamil had a brilliant gold and white tent, blazing with lanterns and carpets and tables and cushions. He ushered me and the Goat Boy to sit and, aware of the dust and blood and worse that stained me, I almost refused.

  `You are Orm,' said Bilal al-Jamil, in Greek and almost without accent. 'Al-Quds sent word you were pursuing brigands who have been a plague for some weeks now. At least we were able to dispatch some -

  about thirty in the end, including kinsman of yours, I understand.'

  `No kinsman,' I answered hastily. 'From the north like us, but not a kinsman. We thought him a prisoner of these brigands, but it seems he was leading them.'

  Bilal al-Jamil frowned while a silent, padding slave offered suitable nabidh in silver cups and sugared nuts, which the Goat Boy crammed until his cheeks bulged.

  `Not the leader,' he said with a dismissive wave. 'A captain, not a general. Not the Dark Hearted One.

  That one has taken all the foodstuffs he has raided from here back to his lair with the bulk of his forces, some three hundred men.'

  He made a grimace of distaste. 'They are eaters of their own dead,' he confided, as if it had been a mystery to me.

  Then he smiled, that dazzling, open, happy smile you see on madmen and drunks 'But we will beard him in his lair, this Qualb al-Kuhl, you and I.'

  I choked on my nabidh. I had thought the affair done with and now this. As far as I could see, this Amir had a small unit of horsemen, what the sarakenoi call a saga, plus some foot soldiers. Together, he had a hundred men at best and there were a handful of Oathsworn left, no more. I wanted to tell him to go fuck a goat, that I would be lucky to get the Oathsworn to stay together until tomorrow, never mind march off to the gods knew where and take on too many enemies.

  Instead, I wiped my lips and managed to ask where the Dark-Hearted One had his lair.

  Bilal al-Jamil smiled happily. 'Masada,' he declared airily, `not far from En Gedi.'

  16

  It was, as Finn said, Hel's privy and a suitable place for a baby-killer like old Herod. His grasp of the Christ Gospel sagas was loose, but he had the right of it for all that.

  A flat-topped camel-dropping, the mountain of Masada was a dung-coloured horror slashed with the white of Old Roman camps and the great spillway of the ramp they had made to get to the top was a waterfall of scree.

  The ramparts were crumbling, but it was a sheer cliff, high enough to be seen from En Gedi, so they didn't have to be in good repair. Even climbing that old ramp would take half an hour and, in the merciless sun and under a hail of arrows and rocks, it would be a bloody killing ground.

  `Then we will attack at night,' declared al-Misri. I wiped sweat from my face and looked at his troops: Bathili from Egypt, the blue-black Masmoudi, some local Bedu. Only the Masmoudi were footsoldiers, wearing robes and turbans, armed with shield, spear and bow, and they couldn't find their own pricks in daylight, never
mind climb a mountain at night.

  There was another way up, for I had asked that. It was called the Serpent Path — and there was Odin's hand, right there — round to the north and east of that great ship-prowed fortress-mountain. Bad enough in daylight, it was a narrow place where one good man could hold off hundreds. At night it would be easier to close with any guards, but treacherous to climb — worse still, the defenders had blocked off the last part of it, according to scouts al-Migi had sent out.

  `The only way up is climbing a cliff the height of ten men,' they had reported.

  Finn looked at me and I looked at Kvasir and my heart shrank as my bowels twisted.

  `Piece of piss to a boy who hunted gull eggs in Bjornshafen,' Finn growled cheerfully, clapping me on the back.

  If you see that child, let me know,' I answered bitterly. `Perhaps you may like to ask him if he has ever done such a thing in the dark, on a strange cliff in a foreign country.'

  But I already knew it had to be done, had suspected my wyrd was on me from the moment the Goat Boy had come to the quiet fire beside me in En Gedi and, with one simple question, ripped the veil from the face of truth.

  En Gedi, when we came to it, was a Dead Sea jewel in that land of wasted folds of tan and salt-white hills, a place of feathered palms and — wonder of wonder — waterfalls. We simply stood, faces raised like dying plants to have the mirr on our cheeks and dreams of ships and sea and wrack-strewn strand circling in our heads like gulls.

  We were honoured guests of al-Kunis, but settled in cool tents outside the towers and fortress built to protect the balsam fields, whose plants soaked the air with scent. Our host was too wise a commander to allow the likes of us inside his walls.

  We lit fires and soft-footed thralls brought food in bowls — such food. Mutton and lamb and young doves, cooked in saffron and limon and coriander, with rosewater and murri naqi. We ate with fingers, stuffed ourselves and belched through greasy beards.