Raven

by Giles Kristian

  My arms and hands were numb so I flapped them, trying to get the blood back into them, and looked up to see Floki with his long knife at Arsaber’s throat. The soldier who had been guarding Nikephoros threw his spear down and fell to his knees, squawking in Greek, but Bardanes didn’t break stride and slashed him to death anyway, which made a mess I would not have wanted to clean up. Then the general carefully pulled the gag from his master’s mouth and cut his bonds, so that Nikephoros stood there rubbing life back into his own hands and the two of us must have looked like men come inside to a hearth from the freezing cold.

  ‘Fetch the others, Raven,’ Sigurd said, nodding towards the ruined golden-skinned door and the chamber beyond, in which the rest of the Wolfpack waited in their shieldwall for the flames to die and the Greeks to crash against them like an iron wave. Taking a long shield from a dead Greek I picked my way round corpses, stumbling on legs that suddenly felt dead and heavy as two sacks of rocks, into the huge chamber where so many had died. Grey-black smoke was slung thick as sea-fog beneath the great bowl of the roof and scraps of singed silk floated down like black snow, tainting with bitterness air that was already thick with death’s stink. Here and there candelabra still burnt, though most of the candles had been thrown into the fire, so that the chamber was dim now. Darkness stalked the corners.

  ‘Rolf! Bjarni! We have Arsaber!’ I called, vaguely aware that I was standing on the massive picture of a man’s face made from thousands of little square stones. It had been hidden before by the bolsters and silks which were now mostly piles of glowing ash before our skjaldborg. Several grim, soot-stained faces turned towards me, the eyes in them the only clean things in all that filth and gore.

  ‘Fall back to the next room and re-build the shieldwall there,’ I said to Rolf whose right eye was a closed, swollen red lump. He nodded, barking orders to the men around him, who grumbled because they knew that by backing off they would be making it easy for the Greeks to flood in. They would have to be quick to get into the emperor’s chamber too, for over Rolf’s shoulder I saw that the fire had all but gone out now. Half-burnt corpses crackled and popped, twisted and pulled into grotesque shapes by shrunken tendons and stinking like roasted pigs and molten copper. The Greeks swarmed beyond that threshold, a mass of scale armour, shields and bright red helmet plumes below a forest of swaying spears. Perhaps they were awaiting Karbeas’s command to attack – if Karbeas was still living – or perhaps despite their hundreds they were reluctant to attack men who had no choice now but to fight to the death. A boar that is surrounded by spears is more likely to rip out a man’s guts than the boar that sees a way out through the thickets and Bjarni said as much, leaning on a spear, his blood-soaked leg tied above the wound to keep what blood he still had in his body.

  ‘The emperor is safe?’ Father Egfrith asked, clutching my shoulder. He reeked of burnt hair and I saw that half of his beard was shrivelled and singed.

  ‘Which one?’ I asked petulantly, coughing on the putrid, sweet scent of burning flesh and looking over at Cynethryth who was standing behind Asgot and Arnvid. On the blade of her spear was skewered a severed hand, charred so that it looked more like the claw from some nightmare creature. ‘He’s alive,’ I gnarred at Egfrith. ‘We’ve got Arsaber too. Though I’d wager Floki has cut the bastard’s throat by now.’ The monk’s beady eyes blinked with the shock of that, then he turned and tried to wriggle through the shieldwall, but no one would let him through and so he ran to the end of the line, spitting Greek across the smouldering dead.

  Rolf scowled at me, his swollen, battered eye weeping, so that when he cuffed at it he smeared wet soot across his cheek.

  ‘He’s telling those fish-scaled Greek goat-humpers that Arsaber is dead and the real emperor is back on his throne,’ I explained. The Dane hoisted his brows, which I took to mean that he thought there was about as much chance of those plumed warriors believing Egfrith – if they could even understand him – as there was of Bjarni not bleeding to death from that fist-sized hole in his leg.

  ‘Back we go then, lads!’ Rolf yelled. ‘Steady now and keep it tight.’ And with that the skjaldborg edged backwards, retreating like the tide and giving up the ground we had fought tooth and nail for.

  ‘Don’t be shy, ladies!’ Wiglaf taunted the Greeks whose eyes we could see above their shield rims. ‘Come and see what we have waiting for you! I am Wiglaf son of Godwine and I have come to show you how Wessexmen fight!’ Those men of Miklagard must have heard the son of Godwine then, because the first of them edged forward into the room, shields raised and heads down as they stepped over dead men – theirs and ours.

  ‘Keep it tight!’ Bjarni shouted, dragging his ruined leg across the mosaic floor as the shieldwall moved backwards through the dark chamber that had earlier blazed like a sunlit sea, smothered with soft silks and colour, but which was now a dingy, stinking, fug-thick place where dead men lay leaking foul juices, reminding the still-living what lay in store for them.

  We were halfway back to the emperor’s chamber, our shieldwall bowed to stop the Greeks getting behind us, by the time there were enough of them through the door to put their own shields edge to edge, spears poking through the gaps to make a bristling hedge. Then that hedge parted and men came forward carrying water skins which they unstoppered and emptied into the smouldering remains of the fire. Steam hissed up in a thick grey curtain, weaving into the smoke that still swirled below the bowl ceiling and releasing a sweet, putrid smell that made men wince. And because I wasn’t locked into the skjaldborg I turned and loped back into the emperor’s chamber – where Sigurd and Floki were hanging Arsaber out of the great windhole by his feet. Nikephoros was beside them, swathed in the purple robes that reached to the floor and hung like a waterfall over his left arm, and wearing the stiff gold cloth and the jewels that had recently smothered Arsaber. The emperor was yelling into the warm night, bellowing at the crowds below like a man trying to calm the seething sea.

  ‘Naked as a bairn,’ Penda said through a grin, which answered the question on my lips as to what Arsaber was left with, for I could only see his bare feet and ankles poking above Sigurd and Floki’s two-handed grips, though I could hear him screeching like a snared fox. I moved to one of the other windholes and looked down and the hairs bristled on my neck because the vast fountain-strewn, tree-lined courtyard was thronging with Greek soldiers. Flaming torches lit great knots amongst the thousands, their faces turned up to the Bucoleon and their armour and blades glinting in the dark. The smell of so many men gathered in one place rose on the heated air, so that I caught their stink even through the blood and snot crusting in my swollen nose. Leaning further out, I saw that the armed mass butted right up to the palace’s western door, meaning that these men were just waiting for their turn to come into the palace and kill us. Our shieldwall beyond the gold-skinned door was like a child’s sand wall scraped up on the strand to stop the waves. Penda said our lives were hanging by a cunny hair, but I think a spider’s thread was more like it. Yet Nikephoros lived. And he was the Emperor of Miklagard.

  Like a flea jumping from head to head the news of the emperor’s return spread across the swarming mass and to Nikephoros’s obvious pleasure the Greeks began to cheer. Hearing this, Bardanes nodded to Sigurd who with Floki hauled the naked traitor back into the room. His body was soft and white and pathetic as a merchant’s as he stood there trying to cover his manhood, his oiled beard laced with spittle and his eyes wide with terror. Sigurd shoved him to Bardanes, who grabbed Arsaber by his scrawny neck and dragged him stumbling out of that chamber into the massive room beyond. The rest of us hefted shields and followed, joining our sword-brothers in the shieldwall come what may as Bardanes displayed the broken usurper to the imperial soldiers. They were less than three spear-lengths from our wall now, which was close enough for us to see the bristles in their horsehair plumes and smell the wine on their breath. Fear-sweat dripped from my beard as I gripped my battered sword and waited, listening to Bardan
es and hoping that his stream of words would put the flames of this whole thing out.

  ‘Looks to me like some of the bastards know Bardanes,’ Penda said, eyeballing the enemy wall, a spear gripped and ready to fly. He had lost his helmet in the chaos and his hair stood up in spikes, which along with his blood-smeared face only made the Wessexman look fiercer.

  ‘Then they’re bound to want to kill us,’ I said grimly, for I did not like Bardanes and did not care who knew it.

  But it was Nikephoros himself who put an end to that night’s butchery. He strode up behind us and Sigurd growled at us to split the shieldwall so that the emperor could pass through it, which he did like a sharp knife through tender meat. When the Greeks saw him there was a gasp and a murmur like the sea. Their eyes bulged and they dropped to their knees in a great creak and clatter of leather, iron and steel.

  ‘You’d think they were thralls,’ Olaf said, shaking his head in disgust. But most of us were grinning, drying blood crumbling from our faces with the stretch of those grins. For the Greeks had their foreheads pressed against the gore-stained stone floor. Curled up like hounds they were, awaiting their master’s scourging hand.

  And we were alive.

  We did not leave the emperor’s side for the next few days. Bardanes wanted Nikephoros guarded at all times whilst he rooted out all those known to have helped Arsaber seize Miklagard’s throne, and until he had done that he would not trust the job to his own people. As Sigurd put it, his mouth tight with sadness, we had proved our loyalty with our blood and there was no denying that. We had lost so many brothers. Men like Gap-toothed Ingolf and Yrsa Pig-nose. Many of the dead were Danes who, for all their ferocity in a fight, lacked the skill and discipline of Sigurd’s original crew. Big Beiner was amongst them, his friends having gathered up his gut rope and pushed it back through the gaping slice in his belly so that he could be whole again in Valhöll. Great warriors were gone and we would never see their faces again. Men like Bothvar whose skill with a sword matched his skill with the cook pot, and Aslak who was one of the best fighters I had ever seen. Men like Baldred of Wessex, who had once served Ealdorman Ealdred but had become a rider of the waves – a sea wolf. But the brother I would miss most was Svein the Red, whose loss dragged my soul down like rocks in a fishing net. The giant had been my friend and the bravest man I have ever known. My tears for Svein fell like rain.

  With Bram and Svein gone now the Fellowship felt like a shadow of what it once was. They had been with Sigurd from the beginning and nobody mourned them more than he. We burnt all our dead on heroes’ pyres, though Miklagard was riddled with White Christ men like a good oak beam squirming with worms, and those men, priests many of them, came to sneer and shout and wave their crosses at us, even braying at Father Egfrith because the monk was standing with the rest of us, staring into the flames. They dared not come too close though, for we growled at them and hurled colourful curses which they believed were spells, and Asgot threatened them with his sharp knife. Added to this, Nikephoros had sent us the wood for the pyres along with imperial soldiers to lug it from here to there, so that the Jesus men knew not to push their disapproval too far. To the emperor’s credit he sent plenty of wood, enough to send the greasy flames high into the Miklagard night so that our friends’ souls were borne straight to Asgard, for we would not risk Óðin’s Valkyries being unable to find them in that faraway country.

  Those of us who were left were showered with all manner of things such as fine cloth, Greek coins, rich food and endless jars of red wine, all of which were as treasure to a Norseman. We stayed in the Bucoleon, which at first had put a sour taste in our mouths because of what we had suffered there. But the silks and finery were all replaced and the blood was scrubbed from the floors and by the time the Greeks had finished it was hard to imagine what had taken place on those marble stairways and in those vast chambers. Besides which, all we had to do was peer out of the southside windholes overlooking the emperor’s harbour and we could see Serpent, Fjord-Elk and Wave-Steed sitting restfully at anchor on the sparkling blue sea.

  But not as restfully as us. We stayed as close to Nikephoros as a scabbard to a sword as he set about gathering the reins of his empire of the east once again. Yet there was no sniff of a threat so far as we could see. Bardanes had seen to that. The general lined the Mese – that wide street running through Miklagard – with more than thirty wooden crosses each twice the height of a man. And on these crosses he nailed those who he thought had been involved with Arsaber’s plot to overthrow Nikephoros and his son and co-emperor Staurakios. Women were hung up there too, their nakedness for all to see as they wailed and suffered and died, which soured my spit and made me hate Bardanes even more. But it seemed to do the trick, for no one so much as farted in Nikephoros’s direction let alone made any move against him, which meant that we spent our days eating and drinking and whoring in the richest city on the face of the earth.

  Those days turned into weeks, during which two more men died of wound rot. One of them was Kalf, the Norseman who had survived an arrow in the shoulder in Frankia. This time he was not so lucky and a gash in his thigh festered in the terrible heat of Miklagard, so that he died stinking and sweating and burbling like a stream but making less sense. The other loss was a Dane named Kolfinn who had lost three fingers and half of his left hand where a Greek sword had carved through his shield. Asgot had cleaned and bound the wound and Kolfinn had not complained, even making a joke about how it could have been worse for it could have been his drinking hand. But within two weeks his arm was green to the elbow. In three the rot was up to his shoulder and not even the emperor’s physicians with all their skill could save him. So one night he drank enough wine to float a longship and when he had passed out his friend Skap cut his throat and that was that for Kolfinn.

  The Greeks saved Bjarni though, which was worth its own hoard for the joy it gave us all. The Norseman had known the rot would come, specially in that blistering heat, besides which that tourniquet had near enough strangled his leg, as he put it, starving it of blood so that it would be good for nothing anyway other than warning him of impending rain and giving dogs something to sniff at. So Bjarni took the wolf of that by the tail.

  ‘Take it off,’ he said to Sigurd four days after the fight, sweat gathering on the tight line of his mouth as he lay in the shade of the Bucoleon watching the imperial dromons come and go. His leg was bound in clean linen but the flies were buzzing around it. Above us, gulls swirled on the warm breezes, shrieking news of fishing boats casting off from the main harbour.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you to ask,’ Sigurd told him with a hard grin and nod. But Sigurd did not do it, the emperor’s physicians did with their wicked toothed blades and knives sharp enough to cut a fart in half. They burnt his ruined leg and gave him a wooden one carved from some dark, glossy wood and into the thigh of it Bjarni etched some runes which we thought must be some powerful seidr, perhaps commemorating the battle in which he had lost the original limb. So Bjarni lived, stumping around on his new leg and grumbling that it itched like arse worms, though we did not see how it could being dead wood.

  And Emperors Nikephoros and Staurakios made us rich beyond imagining.

  When I think of Miklagard I see gold. My memory chest burns my mind’s eye with the blaze of it. Gold roofs, gold statues and doors and tapestries. Gold mosaics and coins and the gold sun glaring down, reflecting off the Marmara Sea and the whitewashed houses and palaces and domes. The emperors rewarded Sigurd and our jarl rewarded us and no ring-giver was ever more generous. But Sigurd knew that the oath he had bound us all with had exacted a heavy price of its own. The Fellowship’s heart had been ripped out with the deaths of Bjorn, Halldor, Bram Bear and Bothvar. Of Gap-toothed Ingolf, Yrsa Pig-nose, Svein the Red and Aslak. Men like those could not be carved again from Greek wood and perhaps Sigurd hoped that the glint of coin would distract us from that hard loss. And yet we had such a story to tell and the gold to pay the skalds to tell it. Th
ey would weave the saga of it round the hearthfires of the north and folk would drink it in, jealous of our fame but eager to hear more. We had come so far along the sea road that men began to say they could no longer remember the faces of their wives and children back home. I was like that with old Ealhstan who had fostered me. I thought I remembered enough to picture him in my mind until I actually tried, at which point it was like looking at something beneath the surface of the sea. But no one ever found a hoard beneath his own bed, as Olaf put it. We had come far, lost much, got rich. And maybe that would have been the end of it if the gods had left us alone to enjoy our hard-won spoils.

  The other colour that fills my head when I think of the Great City is black. Perhaps because black is the colour of blight and decay, of rot and the eventual end of all things. Or maybe it is the blackness of deepest rage, when your mind sinks to the coldest depths and you are no longer in control of yourself.