by Robert Low
My skin crawled at once. She was old, but had her hair unbound, falling in iron-grey straggle-tails to her shoulders. She wore a dress the colour of blue twilight in the far north, fastened at the waist with a belt looped like a man’s and hung about with all manner of things: a couple of drawstring purses; the skull of a small animal; the tail bones of a snake. Round her neck was a circle of amber beads big as gull eggs.
But it was the catskin cloak thrown round her shoulders that let me know what she was: that and the seidr flowing off her so that the hairs on my arms stood up, as if a storm was coming. I had made a sign against evil before I’d thought of it and she gave a short laugh, like a dog barking.
‘Do you fear this volva, then, Orm Bear Slayer?’
I found my tongue locked to the roof of my mouth, but it was Sighvat who spared me with a calm answer, as if he were greeting her politely as an ordinary woman.
‘There is nothing to fear as long as I am here,’ he said levelly and Skarpheddin chuckled at the woman’s frown, while both of them eyed the pair of ravens that Sighvat now took everywhere perched on his shoulders. Used to them, I suddenly saw it from the other side and how it marked Sighvat as a full-cunning man, one of seidr power himself, which was why the rest of the crew both respected and looked sideways at him; for a man to dabble in seidr was considered strange and unmanly.
‘Well, Thorhalla,’ said Skarpheddin, finally. ‘It seems the Bear Slayer is well served with his own seidr And that,’ he added, pointing to Radoslav’s tattoo, ‘is a useful mark to have, I am thinking.’
Radoslav grinned. ‘Your witch spells won’t work on me,’ he boasted. ‘I am Perun’s man and his hand is strong over me.’
Thorhalla hissed like the cats she wore and made a movement of her fingers.
‘Now, now, old one,’ Skarpheddin chided with false bravado, ‘that’s enough of that. These are guests.’
Then, as the woman slid back into the shadows, he spread his hands in apology. ‘Forgive my mother. She clings to the old ways and too many of my people are considering Christ here.’
His mother. At once I felt pity for Skarpheddin doubled from before. Here he was, exiled and wasting away in a foreign land and, like bitter gall on the rotten meat of it, he had a mother like that, a real spaekona. As Sighvat laid it out later: ‘If it had been me, I’d have killed her long since as the cause of all his grief.’
After that came the hard talk and I knew Skarpheddin wanted us, not only for what he had heard of our skills, but for what he had heard of the hoard. I told him we were new-sworn Christmen, heading for Jorsalir with our own Christ priest and he nodded, frowning. I could feel his own greed-plans ooze from him like sweat.
‘I am of the Aesir,’ he added, with a mild smile, ‘and though prime-signed for Christ I will offer my help, of course. If you were to place your hands in mine, naturally I would be oathbound then to provide aid.’
I thanked him for that, but told him I did not want any more oaths than the one I had already taken to my sword-brothers, at which he frowned. I did not tell him it was an Odin-oath, but let him think it one made to the White Christ. I added that I would be pleased to accept his hospitality and, when our task was done, would return. If he were then to offer a fair price for our services for a season, as the Basileus in Miklagard had done with him, then that was another matter and closer to my heart.
He brightened at that: the idea of being like the Basileus in Miklagard appealed and so he did not quibble, which was a relief. This meant my men had the chance of free food and ale for the time it took to find out what was needed – where Starkad and our old oarmates were – and did not fasten us to this doomed jarl.
Skarpheddin then said my men could find warm beds and hospitality both in the tents of his own hov and those of others in his company. I saw that shoal and steered round it, saying my men preferred to stay with their own ship, which had been their hov for so long; I did not want the men split up and scattered in a strange camp. Einar would have been proud of me.
After that, we were horn-paired round two large firepits and feasted, while the abilities and far-sighted vision of Skarpheddin were hailed by a skald and his skill and bravery lauded by men with grease-glistening faces and hefty roast ribs in their hand. Red-faced and bellowing, they declared Jarl Skarpheddin the finest ring-giver who had stepped on the earth each time a glowing woman refilled the horns.
My horn partner was Torvald, one of Skarpheddin’s chosen men, but he was dark and dour and I looked all night for the girl they called Svala, so we had little to say to each other.
Next day, bleary-eyed and hurting, I went down to the river with Radoslav and, shivering in the morning chill, we sloughed off the ale and grease. When I straightened, scattering water like a dog, she was standing there, a hip arched and a wry smile on her face. I was aware that I stood wearing nothing but drenched small-clothes.
‘Odin’s arse,’ roared Radoslav, surfacing and blowing like a bull seal. ‘But that feels better … Oh, I didn’t see you there.’
Grinning, he sloshed naked out of the river and stood drying himself while Slava raised an eyebrow and managed not to turn a hair doing it. She was, I noted, older than I was by a year, perhaps two.
‘You are smaller than you look,’ she said tartly to Radoslav. ‘Perhaps you should get the Helm of Awe tattooed on something lower.’
Radoslav chuckled. ‘It’s only the cold, girl. It will grow bolder, like a chick rescued from snow, in the warmth of a loving hand.’
She snorted. ‘Your own, I am sure.’
I liked her and she saw me grinning.
‘I came to tell you that your priest, Brother John, and the man with the face like a fresh-gelded horse are looking for you. They said to tell you the Goat Boy is in good hands. Is he the little one they carried to the Greek chirurgeons?’
I nodded, pulling on my breeks and wondering if she dared face Finn with her description of him. In the end, as she smiled sadly over the plight of the Goat Boy, I decided she probably would.
‘Is he badly hurt?’ she asked.
I told her what had happened to us on the Cyprus shore – missing out what had brought us to it – and her eyes widened. I thought I saw something new there towards me, but I was probably wrong.
‘Thank you for letting me know,’ I said politely. ‘Do you know where Olvar is? I would like him to come with us into the city, for I am thinking a guide would be a good thing there.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘You don’t need Olvar. I will take you.’
‘Perhaps your mother would not like that,’ Radoslav offered, ‘seeing as how going off with two handsome men, dangerous in the loving as they are, would be seen as reckless.’
Svala eyed him up and down and smiled, a dimpled, impish smile. ‘Sadly she is dead – but had she lived to see two such as you describe,’ she returned, ‘she would have been concerned. However, there is only a limp man with a stamp between his brows and a boy.’
While my hackles rose foolishly at that, Radoslav threw back his head and roared with laughter and, eventually, I saw the humour of it and we all three went off, laughing, to meet Brother John and Finn and go into the city.
That, even with the sheen of past remembering on it, was the last truly good time of my life.
SEVEN
The Goat Boy lay under clean linen in a cot in a shady room whose doors were framed with vines. It was at the end of a wide avenue so quiet that we were half afraid to speak and the whirr of a pigeon wing was enough to startle us.
It had been, one of the red-tunicked staff said, a place where Arab potion-makers – the staff man called them saydalani – mixed up their elixirs, and the place was ripe with the smells of spices. Some of them we knew; others, like musk, tamarind, cloves and a sharp tang Brother John said was aconite, were new to most of us.
Now it was a place where chirurgeons from the army treated their wounded and one of these blood-letters eyed us up and down before, reluctantly, letting us in
to see the Goat Boy, on condition that we did not touch him, his wound or anything else.
Brother John asked him what he had done to it and the man, a grizzle-haired individual with skin like old leather, said he had put in a drain to rid the wound of accumulating fluid and that the boy’s lung would heal itself if he was given time and rest.
‘That’s laudable pus,’ exclaimed the priest, outraged. ‘You will kill him if you take it away. It is meant to be there.’
The chirurgeon looked Brother John up and down, taking in the ragged breeks and tunic, the unkempt hair and beard. ‘I have read Galen’s Tegni and the aphorisms of Hippocrates,’ he said. ‘I have studied the Liber Febris of Isaac Judaeus. Have you?’
Brother John blinked and scowled. ‘I cut the arrowhead out of him,’ he answered.
The chirurgeon nodded, then smiled. ‘The surgery was smart work but heathen prayers and chants are not suitable for healing. Next time, clean the blade, or heat it. If you want your boy to survive, let me do what I do best.’
Muttering, Brother John let the leash of his annoyance fall slack and we went into the shaded, quiet place, where a few recovering soldiers sat and chatted. They looked up when we came in and a couple offered up salutes and cheers to Svala, who merely grinned back at them.
The Goat Boy was asleep, but the rasp of his breathing had gone and, though his closed eyes looked like two bruises, there was, I thought, more colour to him than before.
We chatted to the soldiers for a while, hoping he would wake, but he slept on. Instead, we learned how the Great City’s army had come up against a great mass of Arab horse and foot determined to defend Antioch and the battle had been a vicious affair, though short.
An Armenian archer called Zifus, perched with his leg in a sling, said that this was the second time he had been to take Antioch and that this was something like the tenth war between the Great City and the Arabs. The Hamdanids from Mosul and Aleppo always managed to take Antioch back.
‘Red Boots means to have it all this time,’ Zifus observed, ‘for he has heard that old Saif al-Dawla is failing in health and he is the leader of the Hamdanites and the man who has kept the Romans of the Great City at bay here for twenty years, fuck his mother.’
It was all news and I was glad to have it, but only took it in with half an ear, as they say, while Brother John translated for Finn. Those silkworm eggs made the footing treacherous here and I planned to be gone just as soon as the Goat Boy was well enough – sooner, if I found out what we needed to know, though I would leave silver enough for him to be cared for.
If I wanted to make use of that silkworm stuff and save us all, I had to either trade it with Starkad or kill him and then get it to the Basileus of the Great City, the only one I could be sure was not part of any plot. Either way seemed like digging through a mountain with a horn spoon.
We sat and drank nabidh, which is made from dates and raisins soaked in water, and talked more, with Zifus adding ‘fuck his mother’ to the end of every other sentence he spoke.
The gist of what he revealed was that, after the Serkland army fled, the city gave up and the marks we’d seen on the walls came from stray pots of Greek Fire, shot from the great throwers the engineers called onagers, which means ‘wild asses’. I had seen these machines at Sarkel, watched them leap in the air and kick at every released shot, while those tending them ran for cover. They were well named.
‘We will look after the boy for you, friends,’ said Zifus when it came time for us to leave the still-sleeping Goat Boy. ‘He is a sorry soul now, but even so he shows courage. A curse on the one who shot him, fuck his mother.’
We left in silence and, outside, Finn smacked a fist into his other hand.
‘One day I will come face to face with this Starkad,’ he vowed. ‘Then I will pay him back for all he has done.’
‘Fuck his mother,’ we chorused and, laughing, strolled on into the city.
The five of us wandered wide, stone-paved streets lined with tall columns, which supported vines to make a roof that sheltered walkers from the sun. It was cloudy and damp and hot as we strolled along the length of this street, past a basilica and a building Svala said had been a palace, made from yellow and pink marble. There were others here from Skarpheddin’s force, mostly the younger men from his own house guard, swaggering along with hands on their sword hilts.
They did not impress us much. In fact, Finn had lost patience with a pair of them he caught at swordplay outside Skarpheddin’s hov, leaping and dancing and clashing steel on steel until no one could stand it any longer. Finn had hurled his shield between them, so that it skittered ankle-dangerous along the dust and they had whirled angrily, then spotted him.
He had said nothing, but they knew what he had meant – no warrior places edge against edge, since a sword is too valuable a weapon to ruin in that way. Sword on shield is the way and only if you must do you block with a good edge. A warrior knows this.
‘They are farmers, whose palms are calloused from ploughs, not swords,’ growled Finn with disgust. ‘They think they are snugged up in the meadows of home and that this is all a dream. They raise their horns and shout: “Til àrs ok fridar!” By Odin’s hairy balls, what use is that to those out on the viking?’
Til àrs ok fridar. To the year’s crops and peace. There was a flash of Gudleif, my foster-father, flushed and grinning, almost shining in the dark reek of the Bjornshafen hov, horn held high, triumphant with what had been achieved: a good harvest, winter hunger kept at bay and no deaths among us or the thralls or livestock. Gudleif, whose head had been left on a pole by the dulse-strewn beach when the Oathsworn sailed away with me, stuck there by his own brother.
Maybe Skarpheddin’s men saw that in us, or felt it, for they altered course far round us, wisely leaving us alone to enjoy the sights and swaggering only when they thought themselves beyond reach.
Antioch had countless tall buildings, domed Christ churches and some more mosques with their fat-topped towers. Then we came out into a great round place surrounded by what seemed a high stone wall and tiers of seats.
There were stalls everywhere, selling bread and vegetables and chickpeas and figs. Svala bought two red fruits with tufts at one end and tough skin, but she held it in both hands, gave a twist of her wrist and split it open to reveal hundreds of little seeds, glistening like the lalami, the rubies in Radoslav’s earring.
He admired her skill and had her show him how to do it, while the rest of us marvelled at the tart sticky sweetness of the seeds in what she called a rumman fruit.
‘What is this place?’ asked Finn, wiping juice from his beard.
‘An amphitheatre,’ answered Brother John, ‘where the old Romans used to have gladiator shows.’
‘I have heard of them,’ Radoslav said. ‘They were fighting contests, sometimes men against wild beasts as well as other men.’
‘That sounds like more fun than the chariot races in Miklagard,’ Finn growled.
Brother John scowled at him. ‘It was banned in the time of the Emperor Justinian. It is the death penalty for anyone staging such contests now.’
‘They do it all the same,’ Svala said and we all looked at her. ‘There are contests held in secret and bets laid,’ she told us. ‘If you know someone, they will tell you where they are to be held that night and give you a ticket to get in.’
‘Bets?’ said Finn and then fell silent, thinking about it.
We strolled and gawped and finally I thought it was time we went back to the ship, which would take us all day. I had arranged for food and drink for the men there and knew they would have rigged the sail as a tent, but if I did not fix ways by which some could go to the city and some stay behind, they would all take it into their heads to abandon the Elk to the Norns and go humping and drinking.
So we sat in a shaded taberna near the amphitheatre for one last wine and my head swam from the night before, so that all I wanted was to close my eyes and listen to Radoslav flirt with Svala, while
Brother John and Finn argued about who could spit olive seeds furthest.
I saw myself back on the Elk, rowing hard away from Cyprus and was not sure whether the harsh whistle of breathing was my own or the Goat Boy’s. But someone, somewhere was beating time for the oarsmen and each blow was a question, over and over … where was Starkad? Where were our oarmates? Where was Starkad? Where were our oarmates?
Adrift on a black sea, I stood at the prow of a dead ship, with the sails flapping, ragged and torn, though there was no wind at all. Ahead, bergs had calved off a glacier and moved like ponderous white bears. Ahead, a pale face surrounded by rags of hair, eyes so sunken and dark they looked like the accusing pits of little Vlasios. Ahead, a face I knew and, in that dark place, bright as a tear, sharp as a sliver of moonlight, the curved sword she raised …
‘Heya, Trader … enough.’
The voice snapped me back to the taberna, where concerned faces loomed, pale as butter and swimming until I managed to focus.
‘Bad head right enough,’ said Radoslav and Brother John offered me watered wine, which I drank, suddenly parched.
‘Who is Hild?’ asked Svala archly and my stomach heaved, so that I couldn’t speak. She waited for an answer and, when it was clear none was forthcoming, shrugged, pouted and walked off. Even long gone, the mad woman who had led us first to Atil’s treasure still managed to poison my life.
‘The sun has boiled your head,’ Brother John offered helpfully. ‘We’d better return to the Elk.’
‘And you can go and boil yours,’ announced Finn cheerfully, striding back into the company, tossing something in his hand, ‘for it would be a shame to leave now and miss seeing the fighting men.’
Then he showed us the carved wooden token he had been given and the information that, when a bell was sounded, all those with tokens would make for the main entrance to the amphitheatre.
‘A bell?’ scoffed Brother John. ‘What bell?’
‘Did you part with money for this, Finn Horsehead?’ demanded Radoslav with a chuckle. ‘I fancy the man that took it is now wearing out shoe leather heading for a drinking place on the other side of the city.’