by Robert Low
‘I will go,’ declared the eldest, striking his chest proudly with a hand red-scarred by harsh work. ‘But I will need a sword and a shield. And possibly a helmet.’
Finn chuckled, gave him all three items from his own person and watched him wilt under the weight. ‘A good coat of rings as well, brave Baldur?’ He smiled, then tapped the top of the helmet which was swallowing the boy’s head and asked if there was anyone in there. He took it off, ruffled the boy’s hair and said: ‘Stick to your sling, I am thinking.’
The Goat Boy laughed and handed the battle-gear back, glad to be rid of it. I realised I could not keep calling him the Goat Boy and asked his name.
Finn groaned. ‘You should not have done that, Trader,’ he said, shaking his head in mock sorrow. ‘We may as well all take a seat.’
The boy took a deep breath and threw out a proud little chest. ‘John Doukas Angelos Palaiologos Raoul Laskaris Tornikes Philanthropenos Asanes,’ he intoned and beamed. No one spoke and Finn was grinning.
‘His name is bigger than he is,’ I noted. ‘I think I preferred Goat Boy. I will not make the mistake of asking your brother the same question.’
‘His name is Vlasios,’ answered the boy, then stared, bemused and angry, as everyone roared with laughter.
Then, with spears and round shields and leather helmets sent out by Tagardis, the rest of the Danes lined up with my old crew and we headed off, laden with waterskins and dried meat and bread, into the depths of the island, on the day it started to rain.
Three days later, neither it nor the cold wind that brought it showed signs of stopping and we were high in the hills, having circled round to the east. We were now close to Kato Lefkara and the bigger town of Lefkara, which was said to be Farouk’s stronghold, and the rain was a mirr that you had to wipe off your face and eyelashes. Yet the day was warm enough to make us all sweat in our battle-gear.
Those whose turn it was to carry the heavy sacks I had ordered brought along grumbled twice as much, but no one was happy about being soaked inside and out.
The scouts came in from three different directions. They were all Danes, for none of the original dozen Oathsworn had the skill of hunting or tracking much. These three did and the best of them was Halfred, who had spoken up against Thrain. Hookeye, they called him, since his left one was hooked tight to his nose – yet, squint or no, he read signs and tracks as easily as monks scan Latin.
He came in with the easy, ground-breaking lope of a seasoned tracker, which he had been for Knud, whose hov was in Limfjord. Knud was known the length of Denmark as a greedy man and made his wealth dealing in slaves, Ests and Livs from further up the Baltic, which he sold to traders bound for Dyfflin and Jorvik.
It had been his job, Halfred Hookeye told us, to track down the runaways and, since Knud skimped on proper securing, Halfred had been kept busy until he grew restless for other things. That set him apart from the others, since no one liked a hunter of runaway men, even thralls.
I was glad of Knud’s stinginess now, for Halfred Hookeye could read ground like my father once read wind and current – like those old, Oathsworn scout-hounds, Bagnose and Steinthor, once did, before Odin gathered them to Valholl.
‘One of those domed Christ places, Trader,’ Hookeye said, addressing me as he had heard Finn and others do – which was a good sign. ‘Ruined, like the Goat Boy says.’
‘It is called a church,’ sighed Brother John. ‘How many times must I tell you?’
Two Danish trackers, Gardi and Hedin Flayer, kneeling and blowing snot through their fingers, reported that they had seen nothing else but rain and stones and distant hills.
‘There is not a living creature here,’ Hedin Flayer said morosely, ‘though I saw goat droppings, so something lives in this Christ-cursed country.’ And, like the good Christ-man he was, he said sorry to a bedraggled Brother John and crossed himself while making a good Odin-ward against evil at the same time.
We moved up warily to the domed church, as silently as nearly three-score Norse could move with battle-gear, which wasn’t very.
We crested a bald hillock, descended a scrub slope, then crossed a swollen stream and climbed up the other side to where the church stood – or three blackened walls of it and the dome, partially collapsed on one side. The sun was white and distant and threw no shadows; there was the faint stink of charred wood over the smell of damp earth – and something else, faint and sweet as mead-sick.
‘Heya,’ grunted Arnor, pinching the scabbed cleft of his nose. ‘The dead are here.’
They were, too, and now that I was looking for them, it was as if a doe in a dappled wood had suddenly moved and showed all.
The dead lay everywhere, slumped and sunken like empty waterskins, the grass grown up through them. I saw the tattered remains of worn robes, the yellow of bone and, when Gardi pulled at what he thought was a brown stick, he dragged out a bone, attached to a maggot-crusted brown mass that released a waft of stinging stink to make eyes water.
Cautiously, we wandered through the place, which had been gutted and burned. I posted watchers at once, even though the signs were months old. Brother John knelt and prayed, while the others poked and prodded in the ruins. The rain slid down again: a delicate offering, like tears.
‘Strange place,’ muttered Sighvat, ‘even allowing for it being a Christ house. I have seen those – so have you, Trader – but this is different. Why have they all these wheels?’
Now that he had spoken of it, I saw what he meant. There were the remains of shattered and burned wood, bits of metal and, everywhere, charred wheels and bits of spoke. As he said, even allowing for the strangeness of the Greek Christmen, this was new.
‘Perhaps the Goat Boy knows,’ I said, but Sighvat wasn’t listening. He was staring at the sky and, when I looked up, I saw the small, circling black shapes.
‘Crows?’ I asked, for his eyes were sharp as needles and I couldn’t see which way they were wheeling – crows were lefthanded, as Sighvat constantly told us.
He shook his head. ‘Kites. Loki birds and treacherous. They will tell our enemies where we are, for they have smelled the old death unearthed here and think they can make new ones to scavenge.’
He shivered and that raised my hackles, for Sighvat was always sure with animals and birds. When I said so, he turned a grim face on me and shrugged. ‘My mother said I would find my doom when the kite spoke to me. She had that off a volva from the next valley,’ he said.
‘Can kites talk, then?’ I asked. ‘I have been told crows can.’
‘Neither has a voice,’ Sighvat corrected morosely and shrugged again. ‘There are many ways of speaking.’
‘Getting darker, Bear Slayer,’ announced Hookeye. ‘We should move.’
Bear Slayer. He had been listening to the campfire tales and clearly liked how I had been found beside the body of a great white bear from the North, a spear up through its chin. I had not killed it, though no one knew that save me, but it was not a name I preferred. It was one of those names that made fame-starved warriors with scarred faces scowl, as if you’d just challenged them to a pissing contest.
I looked again at the sky, which was pearl-grey and empty save for the distant kites. I knew we had water and shelter here, but the violent dead made it an uncomfortable place to be near at night.
Turning, I signalled to move on, indicating that the scouts should move out ahead. Then I saw Brother John, his arm round the Goat Boy, crooning soothingly. The Goat Boy shuddered in spasms and turned his snot-smeared face to me, twisted in a grief so hard on him that he could barely make a noise with his weeping.
‘His friends,’ Brother John said and swept a hand at a litter of corpses.
I looked closer. They were all small, ruined little rag bundles of bone and weather-wrecked cloth. Children. Scores of them.
‘This is a silk factory,’ Brother John said. ‘John Asanes here once laboured for them on these wheels, teasing silk from cocoons – all the silk-teasers are boys �
�� but fled because his hands hurt too much from the boiling water they use. He has never been back until now, but had heard the monastery had been attacked by this Farouk. That’s why he wanted to come.’ He paused and patted the boy’s shoulder. ‘He thought he would be coming with an army to rescue them all, like some hero. He wasn’t expecting this, I am after thinking. All dead. Ah well, lad – consumpsit vires fortuna nocendo.’
I doubted whether the Norns had exhausted their power of hurting. Those three sisters, I had found, were infinite in their capacity to inflict pain on the world of men. The Goat Boy certainly didn’t believe it, for he was blubbering on his knees, then sank full length, shoulders heaving.
‘Qui jacet in terra, non habet unde cadat,’ intoned Brother John.
If one lies on the ground, one can fall no further. There was truth in it but no help for the lad.
‘Get him up, we are moving,’ I said, harder than I intended, the stink of all those little deaths sharp in my nose. Brother John bent and tugged at the heaving shoulders, teasing the Goat Boy upright with soothings and croons and we moved away from that dead place.
An hour later, Gardi trotted back to us with news of a farm ahead and another stream beside it, just as the wind grew colder and the dark slid in like black water. ‘There are dead there, too,’ he added, which made my heart sink, for we could go no further now and had, it seemed, changed one field of corpses for another.
The farm was a huddle of ruins, but the outbuildings had suffered most, being almost all made of gnarled wood culled from the stunted pines. The main building had lost its roof, but the thick walls were intact, though blackened. Surrounding it were smoothed fields and what I had taken at first to be olive groves, but these were different trees, skeletal in the dusk. There were also the remains of splintered and burned wooden frames, like racks used to smoke herring in quantity, except that these were not slatted, but solid trays.
Finn turned a dry corpse over with a foot, a hissing rustle ending in a cracking sound as the shafts of two rotted arrows crumbled. ‘Two dead here, no more. I think the others probably fled to the church, thinking it safer,’ he muttered. He made a sign against any lurking fetch and I told Brother John to lay their Christ fetches to rest, just in case, for we had no choice but to spend the night here.
We had a fire, though I did not like the idea of it and weighed it against the hunched, pinch-faced fears of the crew, who did not like the idea of sitting in the dark beside strange dead and wandering fetches.
The flames chased out the dark and the fear. Hot food helped; after an hour there was even banter.
I moved to one side, staring out at the trees and trying to work out what this place had farmed, but could not. I wanted to ask the Goat Boy, but he was sleeping, exhausted by grief, and I had not the heart to wake him.
Finn appeared beside me, picking his teeth. He jerked his head back at the fire and grinned. ‘We are almost one crew now, Trader,’ he said, ‘and a good fight will caulk the seams of it, I am thinking.’
‘There won’t be a long wait for such a caulking,’ I replied and after that we were silent, gloomy – until Arnor started a riddle contest with one about mead which every child learns before they can walk.
‘That had moss on it when I was a boy,’ thundered Finn, heading towards the fire. ‘You gowk, you incompetent. How dare you sit there with a nose shaped like your arse and present us with riddles so poor.’
Arnor, shamefaced and blinking, had no reply, but Vagn, a Dane they called Kleggi – Horsefly – for his stinging wit, had one ready.
‘What cuts but does not kill?’ he demanded, which set everyone looking at his neighbour and scratching.
‘Finn’s tongue,’ said Kleggi triumphantly and everyone roared appreciation.
‘Better, better,’ said Finn amiably, shoving someone up to get a seat by the fire. ‘Any more like that, little arse-biter?’
I listened to them, remembering how Einar had sat in silence, part and yet apart. Did he feel as I felt now? I slid down the wall and leaned my head back, feeling the faint heat of the flames, hearing the voices and laughter round the fire. The sword burned the back of my eyelids when I closed them. The Rune Serpent, dancing just out of reach.
A wind touched my cheek, a tendril of salt in it from a dream sea, and I lay back on the tussocked grass of Bjornshafen, where the gulls wheeled and the wrack blistered in a summer sun on sand and shingle. Somewhere, a horse whinnied and I could see it, a grey with a flea-bitten back, curling back its top lip to taste the scent of a mare …
In the dark, a rhythmic clanging and a blaze of sparks, each one flaring, for that brief instance, the redglowed shape of a man, naked from the waist up and sweat-gleamed, a powerful arm rising and falling, bringing the hammer down on a glowing bar on the anvil.
It looked like Thor. I thought it was, but his face had high cheekbones, almond eyes like slits. A Finn. Was the Thunderer a Finn, then? No, not a Finn. A Volsung, who were all Odin’s children, descended from him and able to shapechange as a result. I had forgotten that until now.
A shape changed the darkness beside me, too shadowed to make out, but I knew, somehow, that it was Einar, could see him standing beside me even without turning, the hanging wings of his hair like black smoke on either side of his head.
‘I killed you,’ I said and then:
‘You deserved it, though.’
‘I thought you were my doom,’ he answered, ‘and so it proved.’
‘You killed my father,’ I pointed out.
There was silence.
‘Is it true that Valholl is made from battle shields and the roof from spears?’ I asked.
‘How would I know? I cannot cross Bifrost – I broke an Odin-oath, made on Gungnir,’ he replied, and half turned, so that the shadow of his face was broken by the gleam of one eye. ‘Until that is braided up anew, I am lost,’ he added, in a voice that trailed off to a whisper.
I said nothing, for I had the notion he meant for me to fix it and I had no idea how.
The clanging went on without pause and he raised one hand – firm and strong, I saw, as it had once been. I even saw the scars on his knuckles, the marks all swordsmen get at play and practice.
‘He did not make this for Starkad,’ he said, pointing at the smith. In the dark, the serpent of runes curled along the sabre’s blade, red-dyed in the forge glow.
‘For Atil,’ I said, confused that he should not know this, he of all people who now sat on that lord’s throne.
‘He is dead,’ Einar replied. ‘Your hand grips it now. You need to get it back.’
I felt him fade, the clanging of the hammer growing louder and louder.
‘What is death like?’ I wanted to know, almost desperately.
‘Long,’ he replied and was gone.
The thunderous clanging tore me back to the ruined room and the embers of the fire. Men were spilling up and out of the building, to where Hookeye, last man on watch for the night, rang a spearhead on a rusted iron wheel-rim. Those with byrnies struggled them over their heads.
‘What the fuck—?’ demanded Finn, a question chorused by everyone, bleary-eyed but weapons up and ready. Hookeye merely pointed.
On the hillside beyond, almost like the grey-green scrub they stood against, a dozen horsemen sat and watched us.
‘They just appeared,’ Hookeye said. ‘At first light.’
‘Form,’ I told them and they obediently moved into a solid block, mailed men to the front, shields up. The horsemen moved down, fluid riders who took the wet scree slope with ease. In their lead, a black-turbaned man did it with his hands held out clear of his sides, to show he was unarmed and wanted to talk.
The horsemen were well mounted and a chill went through me at the sight of them as they came closer still, until Black Turban was no more than a few paces away.
The horse was large and powerful and he sat it easily. He had a cased bow, wickedly curved. A quiver was strapped to his left hip, angled backwards and
cut deep to show the shafts of the arrows, which would, I saw, make it faster to get them out.
He had a sword on the other side – not a curved sabre, but one that was almost straight. From the saddle hung an axe and a mace with a strange animal head and, dangling from the strap, a conical helm with a mail aventail tucked neatly inside it.
He wore mail and had proper padding beneath it, but no protection other than fat trousers of some fine black linen on his legs – so slash at their knees, I noted. He had a shield, small and round and metal-fronted, and the horse was barded in leather made to look like leaves and covered in fat tassels of coloured wool and gilded medallions. A black cloak hung almost all the way over his back and the horse’s rump.
And they were all like this, save that the others also had long lances.
We stood in silence, each weighing the other. He had the dark skin of the Blue Men from the southern deserts, a close-cropped, neatly trimmed black beard and eyes like chips of jet. I called out to the Goat Boy to translate this Arab’s tongue to Greek, for Brother John confessed he actually knew only a few words of it – which got him hard looks from me after all his boasting.
The Goat Boy stood, trembling like a whipped dog under my hand on his shoulder as the Arab spoke.
‘I am Faysal ibn Sadiq,’ he announced. ‘Who trespasses on the lands of the Emir Farouk?’
‘I am Orm Ruriksson,’ I replied, hoping my voice was not pitched too high or trembled. ‘I was told these lands belong to the Emperor in the Great City.’
The Goat Boy said it all and Faysal’s eyes widened a little.
‘You are a beardless boy.’
I rubbed my chin, which had some fine hairs on it – but inclined my head in acknowledgement and smiled ingratiatingly. Does no harm …
Faysal made a dismissive gesture. ‘We were masters here before the Greeklings,’ he declared haughtily. ‘And know no others above us. Why are you here?’
‘We seek the temple of the Archangel Michael in Kato Lefkara,’ I told him. ‘To worship there and speak with the holy men.’