One of the basileus’s ships belched another stream of fire, but in their impatience the Greeks had loosed that fire too early and the wind was not with them, so that the searing red gush fell a spear-length short of Wave-Steed’s stern as she pulled away. Her oar banks were beating fast as crow’s wings, every available blade chopping into the sea, and some of the Danes were loosing arrows whilst others hefted shields, protecting the rowers. Behind them the sea burnt, and around me men cursed and shook their heads because flaming water is about as natural as a talking corpse.
‘There’s some god’s hand in that, mark me,’ someone gnarred behind me.
‘Ah, we’ve all seen Finna breathe fire when she’s caught you swiving one of your small-titted thralls, Hastein,’ Bjarni said, though there were few laughs at this as we pulled the oars, watching the black bloom of smoke stain the sky now that we could no longer see the blazing ships over Serpent’s stern. I looked over to see Fjord-Elk matching us stroke for stroke, Nikephoros’s men apparently rowing well enough now that the alternative was burning to death.
‘At least the bastards don’t have the arms for the chase,’ Penda said a while later when it became clear that the Greek dromons were not pursuing us. They had raised their enormous white sails now and turned their bows north-west, retreating back up the throat of the Aegean like spiders back to the middle of their webs. Which meant we had stowed our oars and raised our sails again, keeping them reefed and catching just enough wind to keep us moving towards the eastern shore whilst we decided what to do next.
‘They know they’ll get nothing from coming after us,’ Sigurd said, peeling off his heavy brynja. ‘There are too many islands for them.’
‘Aye, it’d be like chasing someone round a table,’ Olaf put in, palming sweat from his face.
Svein the Red emptied a bucket of seawater over his head, then spat and blew snot and swept the tangle of hair back over his forehead. The great slab of his face was dark with confusion the way it often was before a question, so we knew just to wait for what was coming. ‘If they’re the emperor’s ships,’ he said, water dripping from his beard, ‘why doesn’t he wave his bloody crown at them and have them kiss his Greek arse? It seems to me that we should be getting better treatment than this.’
It was a fair question and Sigurd said as much, then asked Nikephoros the same thing.
‘It would be like putting your hand in that wolf’s mouth and hoping it would not bite it off,’ Nikephoros replied, pointing at Sköll who was lapping water from the bilge because Cynethryth was not there to stop it and no one else cared enough either way. Those who understood what the emperor had said nodded and ayed for we all knew the story of how Týr had had his hand chewed off by Fenrir Wolf. Nikephoros bent his knees as Serpent rolled over a wave. We were not going fast enough to cut the water cleanly. ‘It is impossible to know which men remain loyal to me and which are traitors,’ he said. He had swapped his scale armour for a knee-length tunic of white linen which was belted at the waist with a blood-red sash. I noticed he was hardly sweating at all, unlike the rest of us. ‘When you ascend the throne of Constantinople you are wise to buy yourself some powerful friends even before you put on the purple robes.’ A sour twist gripped his lips. ‘Arsaber has no doubt had his hand in my treasury by now. He will have replaced many good and loyal men with his own.’
‘That’s what we did,’ Bardanes said, earning himself a scolding look from Nikephoros. The general shrugged, then slapped at a fly that had landed on his wrist.
‘Then how do we get past those fire-spewing monsters of yours,’ Olaf asked the emperor, ‘as I for one do not like sharing the sea with them.’ Nikephoros clenched his jaw like a man who dislikes being asked questions – and perhaps, if he really was as powerful as he would have us believe, he was not used to answering them either.
‘We nestle into the shore like you would a cool, plump pair of tits,’ Sigurd said, nodding towards the brown coast off Serpent’s steerboard bow. Waves that we barely noticed swelled and billowed as they sped towards land, then churned in the shallows, hurling white spume up on to the strand. We were close enough to hear each breath of it and just the sound of it cooled the skin a little.
‘It is the best way, my lord,’ Bardanes agreed, answering the questioning look he was getting from Nikephoros. ‘Our ships have deeper hulls than these and cannot go so close to the shore.’ He turned to Sigurd, a half smile twitching his otter-slick beard. ‘We have not had to defend our great city from men such as you, Jarl Sigurd. The Moors’ ships are like ours and need deep water. Our captains will not patrol the shallows. They have no need to.’
‘I’ll remember to tell my sons that when they’re old enough to go raiding,’ I said, at which Sigurd and Olaf chuckled. Bardanes did not see the funny side of it and maybe that’s because I was only half joking. But that man’s displeasure was my enjoyment, for I had decided that I did not like General Bardanes. Not one bit.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS WE PLOUGHED THE SHALLOWS AN ARROW-SHOT from the polished pebble shore. At first, Knut had shaken his head and rumbled like a distant rock fall. His long, smooth beard swishing, Serpent’s steersman had said that sailing so close to an unknown shore was the same as humping another man’s wife. There is a certain thrill in the danger, he said, but everyone knows that no good can come of it. Still, even Knut agreed that if it came to it he would rather drown than burn and then drown. For we were all still reeling from the horror of the Greeks’ fire-spewing ships and none of us wanted to meet them again. It was only by some rare luck and the bravery of Wave-Steed’s crew that none of the Danes had been killed. Three or four had burn wounds to hands or faces and these burns blistered and leaked fluids but were not serious in themselves. Three men had arrow wounds either from the blaumen or from the Greeks, though none of the shafts had fully penetrated their brynjas, for which they owed their jarl who had given them war gear that few warriors could ever hope to own. Even the loss of Sea-Arrow could be borne, as there were enough empty oars on the other three ships to accommodate her crew and this meant that none of the ships was now crew-light. But the blaumen had not been so fortunate and in my mind I kept seeing them flailing, writhing in flaming robes and leaping into the sea which should have put out the fire but did not.
Rolf was pride-sore, which was only to be expected given that he had been forced to leap from a handsome snekkje and watch it burn, narrowly escaping by a singed arse-hair. It was clear that the Dane felt he had failed his jarl by losing the ship, but Sigurd had tried to lighten Rolf’s burden. ‘Who could have foreseen liquid fire?’ he had said, dark-browed with the loss of Sea-Arrow. And that was a fair question, prompting more beard-shaking and mumbles that these Greeks must know some powerful seidr and that we would have to be prepared the next time we met them.
Which would be soon. Because it was a sleeping sea, still and flat as a jarl’s feast table, and we were clinging to the coast, rowing so that we had Serpent on a short leash and could better guide her through the shallows. We had stowed Jörmungand, and Fjord-Elk and Wave-Steed had removed their own prow beasts because we did not want to anger the spirits of this land. For Asgot said that judging by the land itself those spirits were likely to be ancient, dry-humoured and capricious and we had never been further from our own lands. Sun-bleached white rock rose from the sparkling sea; hills studded with dark green brush and, higher up, poplar, chestnut, pine and fir as well as plenty of other trees and plants we could not put names to. Above the high ground dark shapes soared against the endless blue. These black birds were twice the size of the largest raven and barely flapped their wings as they traced great wheels in the sky. We saw sea-eagles too, as well as herons, cormorants, wagtails and swallows which twisted and turned almost too fast for the eye to follow as they snatched insects from the warm air. A shrieking cloud of gulls billowed in our wake, the birds hoping for scraps and splashing white turds across the stern and those who rowed there, so that some of
the men wore skin hats despite the heat. Sometimes Sköll growled and leapt at the birds but mostly it ignored their mocking cries, too hot in its fur to do anything but follow the evermoving shade or cool down in the bilge water, though even that was hot. For the sun was so fierce that I feared the air itself would clot, so that we would not be able to suck it into our lungs and then we would suffocate and die.
It had not rained for many days and the only water we had left was stale and stinking. We still had a few skins of Roman wine which we added to the water to improve the taste, sipping gingerly even as sweat dripped from our skin. But in that heat the watered wine made your head swim, so that all you wanted to do was lie down and sleep and what we really craved was cold barley ale. Yet with the loss of Sea-Arrow still sore as a fresh burn in our minds we dared not make landfall to replenish our supply.
‘Your men will want for nothing once I am returned to my throne,’ Nikephoros had told Sigurd as he watched us sharing what there was, wetting our tongues and passing the horn to the next man. But the jarl had laughed at that.
‘A Norseman who lusts for nothing more than what he already has is as rare as a happy Christian,’ he had said, at which the emperor had frowned as though to prove Sigurd’s point.
So we rowed and sweated and roasted beneath that relentless southern sun, passing fishing boats and small trading vessels but not coming across the fire dromons, and eventually we came to the strait known as the Hellespont. We moored in the clear calm water on the eastern edge of its great gaping mouth, the land on both sides flat and barren, and there we watched the shield-round sun sink towards the darkening sea. When heated iron turns a red-gold colour the swordsmith knows it is time to start hammering. The sky was that colour now, rich and molten and ablaze, though soon, like sword iron, it would cool to dark red and then grey. Just above the sea a thin dark streak of cloud stretched across the horizon, so that as the sun passed behind it created the picture of an enormous dragon’s eye watching us balefully, burning at the world’s edge.
‘So this gullet leads to Miklagard,’ Olaf said, scrubbing his beard, eyes turned to the north-east.
‘Aye, Uncle,’ Sigurd said, his teeth dragging his beard over his bottom lip, ‘to the empire of the Greeks who call themselves Romans.’
‘More bloody White Christ men who’ll want to chew us up and spit us out, hey, Raven,’ Olaf said. Men were settling down in the thwarts, nesting amongst skins and furs as though they had every comfort a man could wish for.
‘I think the fish keep spitting my hook out, Uncle,’ I moaned, leaning over the sheer strake and peering down into the water. I’d had a line over the side long enough for the twine to have pressed fine furrows in the flesh of my fingers, but so far I had caught nothing. Some of the others had pulled up fish we had never seen before, our favourite being one with stripes the colour of iron rot, whose flesh was sweet and delicious.
‘It’s true you are not much of a fisherman, lad,’ Olaf said thoughtfully. The bedimmed ocean was still clear enough for me to see small fish darting around my line as if to humiliate me.
‘But the lad has patience, Uncle,’ Sigurd said with a smile, ‘and patience is a good weapon against fish.’
Olaf nodded and said this was so. ‘There are two things I know about fishing,’ he added, holding up two thick gnarled fingers. ‘The first is that the least experienced fisherman always catches the biggest fish.’ There were ayes at this. ‘And the second is that fish are like women. They both stop shaking their tail soon enough after you’ve caught them.’ We laughed at that and it was a comforting sound in that red-gold dusk, for in truth we still felt Bram’s loss keen as a seax blade. It was a knot of iced rope in my guts, which was why the warmth of laughter was so welcome.
Bjarni twisted round on his sea chest, knife in hand. He was trimming his beard, pulling and sawing off tuft after tuft and peering into his polished sword blade to see that he made a decent job of it.
‘I once caught a fish that measured one foot,’ he said.
‘Ha! That is not so big,’ Svein barked, unimpressed.
‘One foot between the eyes!’ Bjarni said, and we laughed again because Svein had walked into that one right enough.
And still I caught nothing, but at least I was not one of those woken by a dig in the ribs from the butt end of Olaf’s spear. For it turned out we had not moored there for the night at all. We had simply been waiting for darkness, though no one had told us that and now men who had settled down for the night were cursing and grumbling as they climbed out of their dens like bears roused early from their winter sleep.
Nikephoros, Bardanes and Sigurd had spun this plan, deciding that night’s shroud would give us the best chance of slipping unseen down this moon-silvered gullet to Miklagard. ‘Further in it gets narrow, lads,’ Olaf had explained, pointing into the murky throat of the Hellespont beyond Serpent’s bow. ‘Bardanes says at one point a man can shout from one shore to the other and be heard, if he’s got a big mead-hole and the wind with him.’ His grimace gleamed white in the gloom. ‘The Greeks have got more of those fire-breathing ships in there,’ he said and men touched Thór’s hammer amulets to ward off that strange and powerful seidr. Our minds were still trying to unravel the knot of fire that burns even in water. ‘So it would be better if we did not have to get our bollocks burnt fighting them.’ Even those whom Olaf had poked awake agreed with that and so we had taken to our sea chests, plunged the blades into the sleeping sea and were rowing again.
It is bowel-melting work rowing in the dark. You don’t talk. You don’t even think about singing. You listen, your staves clumping in their ports. Between each wet plunge of the oars your ears draw tight as a rat’s arsehole around every sound. You are waiting for the scrape of the keel along submerged rocks, or the wash of the waves on a shore that is closer than you thought. You half expect your oar blade to thump against something granite-hard and wood-splintering, and your sweat sluices as cold as glacier run-off. Serpent led the other two ships and all of us had hidden our blades and helmets and anything else that might reflect what little moon and starlight there was. At our bow Olaf and Sigurd stood either side of the stem post peering into the channel ahead and looking down into the water. Cynethryth and Asgot watched from the port side, Cynethryth’s young eyes combined with the old godi’s experience, whilst Nikephoros and Bardanes leant on the steerboard side sheer strake. Sigurd did not make the general row now that we were getting close to Miklagard and needed the man’s Greek eyes more than his arms. Theo rowed, though, and rowed well, too, which was only right given that he was the man who had killed Bram and now churned the sea in our old friend’s stead.
It was lucky for us that there was not much wind and the Hellespont was smooth, because it meant Knut and the steersmen of the other ships could hold a true course without too much trouble. Besides which, our Greek companions claimed to know the strait better than the fish knew it, which I doubted of course. I reckoned those Greek fish were cunning enough bastards who knew a baited hook and a nettle-hemp line when they saw one, and were probably still laughing at me somewhere down there in Rán’s cold wet dark. Still, when we came to the narrowest part of the strait mine were not the only eyes riveted to the Greeks, for the truth was we needed them now. It was worse than rowing into the unknown and the fear of it was worse too: a cold dread that stirred in your guts and then crawled up your spine to slicken the back of your neck and make the hairs stiff as bristles. Miklagard, or Constantinople as the Roman Greeks called it, was, we had learnt, a kingdom of unequalled power. Tens of thousands of people lived in the city, safe behind enormous walls which Nikephoros claimed were impregnable. Having seen the ancient walls of Rome with my own eyes I now knew some things were possible that most men would dismiss as the lie-weave of skalds, so that I think I would have believed Nikephoros if he’d said the stars hung as lanterns from Miklagard’s walls.
Now we sweated, scuffing our slick faces against our shoulders because we could not bre
ak the even pull of the oars which sent us gliding through the pinched part of the strait. On both sides we could see the land looming charcoal dark, pinpricks of flame here and there along the shore. No one uttered a word, for Bardanes had warned us that this was where three of their dromons prowled and even now their captains would be peering into the murk as we were. Except they would be ready with flint and steel to ignite the liquid fire should a Moor ship’s silhouette ghost out of the gloom. Or a dragon ship come to that. And so every creak of timber or rope had men wincing. Fjord-Elk and Wave-Steed ploughed our wake, silent as shadows as their oar blades stirred a white froth with each plunge. With each lift those blades dripped water in broken silver strings and now and then Máni, whom men call the moon, gave me a grey glimpse of a rower’s back and shoulders as he toiled.
I expected that at any moment the dark would be devoured by ravenous flame and we would be sheathed in fire tight as a sword in a scabbard. I was waiting for it, the knot of fear in my stomach growing with each dip of my oar because I thought we must be coming closer to the Greek ships and their vicious seidr fire. I could still see the blaumen leaping overboard, trailing flame that could not be quenched, and those are the kinds of memories you can do without.
My body laboured, warmed by the endless repetition of the stroke which had piled muscle on my chest, shoulders, back and arms, but my soul was frozen ice-still in clenching fear. And yet fear, it turns out, has more layers than an onion. Just when you think you cannot be more afraid something happens which stops your heart and squeezes it small as a mouse stuffing itself through a tiny hole. That thing was Sigurd hissing like a goose. I caught the glint of his eye as he threw up a hand and turned an ear towards the moon-licked open water on our port side. We lifted our oars clear and heard the other crews do the same, then we listened to the soft gush of our bows through the still sea.
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