by Robert Low
I trotted forward, heading for the church, hearing the panicked screams and shrieks as the Oathsworn ripped through the village. I passed some huts and houses, heard doors crack under axes, the thump of booted feet and screams. A robed figure skidded round the side of a building, slammed into a mud wall, looking back over his shoulder. Then he turned, saw me and ran back the way he had come, straight into a skewering spear.
A woman screamed and, through the door, I saw her flung to the ground, two men frantically fumbling down their breeches and I cursed. It would be the Danes, who hadn’t tasted that sweetness in five years. I should have planned for that.
I trotted across the square, saw Finn and yelled to him. Sighvat burst out of a building, saw me and ran across, laughing. Hookeye appeared, an arrow nocked and his bow straining. He grinned in a wolfish way and looked like he had been caught with his hand in my purse for a moment, then shrugged. The four of us headed for the dark entrance to the church, a narrow way only one man wide.
It was far too late, for the smart ones had already gone in and barred the door and the church had been designed as a refuge. The narrow entrance was a passage, which sloped down, then up to a stout door, making a ram impossible to use. On the roof above, I saw holes and barely jumped aside as a spearhead thrust down, then back, like the tongue of a snake.
Keeping to the sides, we slid up, studied the door, then slithered our backs down the wall to the entrance and out. I wandered to the middle of the village square, to a well surrounded by a series of water troughs, stopped and sat down, resting my shield on my knees and my sword on one shoulder, listening to the shrieks and screams, seeing the figures flit like dark bats. Then there was the bright flare of flame and a roof collapsed.
Finn growled and I wearily nodded. He trotted off, dragging Hookeye with him, who seemed inclined to stay near me, yelling at them to put the fire out or he would tear their arms off and beat out the flames with the wet ends.
‘It’s a fortress, that gods-cursed Christ dome,’ Sighvat said. ‘We’ll have to burn them out.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Same problem as last time … what we want is in there and will burn with them.’
‘We can burn the door, same as last time,’ he answered and rose, cupped water in his hands and splashed his face. Shaking himself like a dog, he wandered off, looking to drag a few others into fetching dry wood and anything that would burn.
Two figures, laughing and yelling, chased a shrieking woman from a house and Sighvat polearmed one of them to the ground; he was Arnfinn, an old hand, I saw. His friend skidded to a halt, confused.
‘I need you pair,’ he said and Arnfinn’s companion, seeing the woman shrieking round a corner and gone, snarled at Sighvat for the loss.
‘Who made you a chief?’ he growled, hefting a bloody axe.
‘He did,’ said Sighvat amiably, jerking a thumb at me. I waved. ‘And this did,’ he added, slamming the flat of his blade into the man’s mouth. He went over spitting teeth and blood. Arnfinn got to his feet and grinned, shamed now at behaving like a raw beginner.
‘Didn’t expect that when you said to grab the woman, eh, Lambi?’ he chuckled, hauling the bloody-mouthed man to his feet. ‘What is it that you are wanting us for, Sighvat?’
While Sighvat explained, I heard hoofs and nearly wet myself, then I saw Brother John and the Goat Boy leading in the horses, the wounded Sumarlidi waving a spear while holding a shield and trying to keep his balance, for he was no good rider.
‘Help me down, help me down,’ he snarled. ‘It’s too far off the ground up here.’
Brother John and I dragged him down and the Goat Boy gawped at what was going on round him.
‘You should have kept him away from sights like this,’ grumbled Sumarlidi to Brother John as he dragged himself to the edge of the well. That leg of his, I saw, was ruined completely, a useless thing that might as well not be there at all, for it served no purpose for him now and was a dead weight he’d drag about for the rest of his life.
‘I think he is well used to them already,’ Brother John declared. ‘Pede pes et cuspide cuspis, arma sonant armis, vir petiturque viro – it is the way of things round here, I am thinking.’
‘If I knew what it meant, I would know more,’ answered Sumarlidi. There was a pause as the burning house fell in with a roar and a cloud of flying embers. Finn yelled and cuffed left and right.
‘It means people are always fighting in these lands,’ I told Sumarlidi. ‘How’s the leg?’
‘Useless,’ he grunted and eyed me warily. ‘But stay a blade length from me, Bear Slayer – I want no Valkyrie visits just yet.’
‘Nor am I planning any such thing,’ I snapped, angry with him now. Was I some butcher here?
‘You’ll beg for the Priest before long, One Leg,’ growled Finn, coming up in time to hear the last of this exchange. His face was smeared with soot.
It took an hour to sort out the chaos and collect a sorry, panting bunch, two of whom were already drunk, three dripping blood and one with claw marks down the side of his face.
‘I had her skirts up,’ he was telling the man next to him, ‘and getting no protests. Then I thought to see what I was getting, so I took the cover from her face. She went crazed at that, kicking and bucking and screaming. Clawed my face. Best hump I’ve had …’
‘Stow it,’ ordered Finn and the man’s mouth closed with a click.
I told them what I thought and laid it on thick as a slab of week-old porridge. I warned them that if anyone disobeyed me again I would let them walk their entrails round the pole.
I was beginning to enjoy Starkad’s vision now, for it was a good one and much better than the hoary old blood-eagle. Old beards like these would laugh at that threat, since it was more boast than fact, though there was a nut of truth in it, for Hedin Flayer hinted he had his name for having done it once, raiding the Liv lands along the Baltic. Or so he said. Others said it was because his craft was hunting wolves for the pelts, which I thought more likely.
At the end of my rant, they shuffled off silently, knowing that they had made a mistake, for only a handful of the robed Saracens were dead and, though the rest had fled, a good two handfuls were locked up in the domed church and it would be a harder fight now to get them out.
So we sat in the square while men scuttled in the narrow doorway, braving the spears to stack wood and start burning through the door, while I fretted about Farouk and his horsemen. I posted watchers and sent Hookeye and Hedin out into the darkness to listen, but there was nothing to do but wait, while the smoke billowed out of the narrow church door-passage.
Now that there was time for it, the men were reluctant to go plundering and humping, fearing the arrival of more Sarakenoi – though Sumarlidi pestered them to go and find a woman for him, since he wasn’t so nimble on his feet. After long minutes of his whining, two men went off and dragged back a whimpering woman, whom he perched on the edge of the trough and grunted over while the Goat Boy watched with interest. No one else cared.
Eventually, Sighvat reported that the fire was out, had done some damage, but the defenders had soaked the door and were even pouring wine down through the murder holes in the roof to try and soak the place.
‘Which means they have used all the water,’ Brother John pointed out.
‘Which means they are not planning on a long stay,’ I finished for him. ‘Farouk and his horsemen are expected.’
That sprang the crew into action, for they knew that a second encounter with those would be a hard fight not in our favour. They would use bows this time, standing off and snicking us one by one, like loose threads off the cuff of a tunic.
That passageway was a tricky opening, for it allowed only one at a time, though it widened at the actual door to three. The wood was charred, but still solid, so we piled in and formed shields over our heads to keep off the stabbing spears from above. Under this crept Finn and others armed with axes to chop at the door.
It was sweaty, noi
sy work, fetid with the stink of men afraid and, after half an hour, Finn gave a bellow of triumph, for the upper left corner had splintered into a small hole. Frenzied, he hacked and hacked, spraying wood chips everywhere, while the men behind closed up, down on one knee under the roof of shields and ready to spring forward.
Without warning, a spear thrust through the hole, fast as an eye blinking. Finn was on a downstroke, which was Odin luck for him, for the weapon scored across his shoulder and into the throat of the man behind, who gurgled out a scream and fell backwards.
There was chaos then, for the felled man screamed and kicked and had to be dragged out. In the end, everyone abandoned the work and staggered out into the chill night air, gasping and spitting. The man – Lambi, the one whose teeth had been dunted by Sighvat’s sword, I saw – was already dead, leaking a slow pulse of blood, which finally stopped.
We all looked at one another and no one spoke their thoughts, which were darker than the night.
‘What we need is a battering ram,’ I said.
‘With a bend in the middle,’ Finn pointed out wryly.
‘We could use your tozzle,’ Sighvat pointed out to Finn, who chuckled harshly.
‘Too few men around to carry that,’ he answered, but his eyes had no laugh in them when he looked back at that narrow doorway.
Then the Goat Boy came up, his eyes wide, pointing behind him while he fixed me with his dark-cat gaze.
‘One Leg has gone in the well,’ he declared.
Odin’s arse – could this night get any worse?
‘The Norns weave in threes, Trader,’ Finn said wearily when I yelled this out. Everyone trooped across to the well, where Brother John was holding the shivering woman by one wrist and peering into the dark of it.
‘She pushed him off,’ Brother John explained, ‘while he was trying to … never mind. But he fell in and hasn’t made a sound since.’
Finn shrugged and grabbed the bucket rope, took up the slack and his eyes widened when he felt resistance. He got three others to help and, slowly, the bucket was inched up until Sumarlidi’s legs flopped over the edge and they hauled him out.
His neck was broken and his wide-eyed face still looked surprised about it. Nearby, the Arab woman huddled, moaning softly.
‘There’s no more for him, then,’ sighed Brother John sadly and Finn agreed with a sound deep in his throat, part sympathy, part disgust.
‘A straw death, right enough,’ he said and shivered.
I saw it differently, through the ring of that jarl torc. It seemed to me that if you fastened a good steel helm on him, he would make a battering ram with a bend in the middle.
Sumarlidi was better use in death than he had been in life, but by the time the door was broken open, even his mother would have missed him at his own corpse-washing. The helmet was rimmed into the flesh of his brow, so that it was never coming off, so we burned him with it jammed down to his eyebrows and Finn killed the Arab woman and put her at his feet, in the hope that this in some way made up for the death he had died.
Brother John didn’t like any of this much, but the others glowered at him and he knew the worship of Christ was too new on them to argue. To me, who did not even try to interfere, he gave a hard look and said: ‘The Abyss grows darker the longer you stare down into it.’
That was after the defenders tried to give in, which was as soon as the door broke. They were shouting frantically in their gabble, throwing down bows and spears and holding out their hands and clasping them. The crew were past caring and cut them down for having put them to all this trouble.
‘They had courage,’ argued Brother John, trying to get me to stop the slaughter, which was stupid since there was no way I could do that and the fact of it made me sick and angry.
‘A cornered rat has that courage,’ I snarled back at him, the thick iron tang of blood clogging my nose, then I went to find what we had come for. The container was where it was supposed to be, under the stone base for a brazier in what had been the monk chief’s room, and I grabbed it up, stuffed it inside my tunic and ordered everyone out and away.
We paused only long enough to lay Sumarlidi and the dead, toothless Lambi out with the bloody enemy dead at their feet, then fired the church and scampered into the safety of the darkness.
Another god place burned and more men killed. In the dark, with the damp wind cooling my face, the sickness rose up in me and I boked and spat it out. I felt a gentle hand on my back and, though I wanted no one to see this, had no strength to do anything but retch.
Brother John patted my shoulder and I heard his low voice say, ‘Facilis descensus Averno.’
The descent to hell is easy.
Fuck him, what did he know? He wasn’t the one in the lead.
SIX
I held him and he felt like a bird, the racking sobs shaking him so that it seemed his thundering heart must burst out of his rib cage. I wanted to hold him tighter, but it was an awkward thing with others looking and I had no words for him; none of us had. So Brother John peeled the Goat Boy off me and took him to the swift-flowing stream to wash the snot and tears away.
The rest of us stood, cold and tired, uneasy in the dawn light, with the tendrils of haar like a witch-woman’s hair slithering round the farm and the mulberry trees and the old corpses, still blackened and charred. Crows sat hunched and sour in those trees, rasping out a protest at a meal interrupted.
A fresh meal, on a small corpse. The smallest one in that field of death, dark curls clotted with old blood, the eyes already pecked into dark holes, which still managed to accuse us all. The wound that killed him was a back-to-breast skewer and Halfred tracked the tale of it.
The horsemen had ridden to the silk farm from the town of Lefkara, which meant I had judged Farouk right – he had come straight to the plumes of pyre smoke, found nothing and headed for the village after that. Now he was probably finding more dead and a burned church and we had a start on him, but not much of one. It was good Odin luck for us, since it meant we had missed each other in the dark – but for such luck One Eye takes a high price in sacrifice.
So he took little Vlasios into their path just as they saw what we had done to their friends. Like startled game, the Goat Boy’s little brother had probably made a run for it, leaping on those wiry legs, twisting and turning, but no match for horsemen with lances.
They had spitted him, said Hookeye, pointing it out – quietly, so the Goat Boy could not hear – and carried him back to the charred remains of the pyre, stinking and wet from rain. Probably still on the spear-point, Hookeye thought.
And they would be laughing about it in a grim way, I thought to myself, as they tossed the corpse on to the ash, like an offering to their own dead. It came to me that we might well have done something similar, in another place, at another time, and the thought did nothing to help the sick feeling in my belly.
Then they had ridden off, leaving one more small, bewildered little fetch in a clearing, wondering why the world had grown cold and empty and shadowed.
We had found him after a couple of hard hours’ travel, moving as swiftly as we could in the dark. My plan had been finely worked, everyone agreed, but the dead boy was a stone thrown in the pool of my deep thinking and not because the Goat Boy was melting to tears over it.
No, it was the little stick in Vlasios’s belt, which the Sarakenoi had not even bothered with. The one that said, in badly cut runes: ‘Starkad. Go west. Dragon.’
It was from Kvasir and I knew what it meant. Starkad had arrived like a pinch of salt in clear water. Now Balantes and everyone else would know they had handed the prize to the wrong wolf and we would have all the Greeks on Cyprus after us, as well as the Sarakenoi and Starkad’s men.
As Finn said, with a harsh chuckle, if you measured a jarl by the number of his enemies, then Orm Bear Slayer was mighty indeed. The others had joined in, the fierce laugh of men with steel to their front and fire at their back, showing a lot of teeth but little mirth.
At least Kvasir and the others had had warning, time enough to plan swiftly and send the Goat Boy’s brother with the gist of it.
I knew what Dragon meant. On the way here, less than a day from Larnaca and perched bare-arsed over the lee side in friendly conversation while we emptied our bowels, Kvasir had pointed out the headland like a dragon-prow. We had argued whether it looked more like the fine antlered one on the old Fjord Elk, or the snarling serpent on Starkad’s stolen drakkar, which had replaced it.
That was where Kvasir was heading, but I did not know if he had one ship or two – or if he would make it at all.
I laid it all out for them, while Brother John brought the scrubbed-faced Goat Boy back. Finn was all for hurtling back the way we had come, to take Starkad on and get the runesword back. No one else looked eager for that, however, and I was cold-sick in my insides at the way my crafted plans had unravelled so completely. I was no Einar.
‘What do we do, Orm?’ asked Kvasir and I felt a mad moment rise in me, a great storm sea that made me want to agree with Finn, to shriek out that we would take on Starkad and every Greek, get the runesword back, fight back to our ship and then away …
Instead, I looked at them, one by one, battened down my pride and admitted the truth of it. ‘Now we run, brothers. Now we run.’
We did, a jogging lope that burst the sweat on us, despite the chill. Across the bare slopes we went like startled game, from gully to rock, to stand of trees, heading hard west and south. Eventually, when I called a rest-halt, I could taste the brine on a breeze from the sea on parched lips and sucked it into fiery lungs. There was another village – ahead and west, if I remembered Radoslav’s chart – whose name sounded like air being let out of a dead sheep’s belly. Paphos, it was called, but I wanted no part of that and planned to come out to the sea short of it by some safe miles.
The men were on one knee, panting, mouths open, tossing a flopping waterskin from one to the other and I saw the Goat Boy sit with his knees at his chin, his dark eyes big and round and fixed on me. I had worried about him keeping up, but that had been foolish – this was the boy’s country and he had young legs that had chased all over it since he could toddle.