The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 3

by Robert Low

  ‘I knew it was a mistake to ask,’ mourned Finn, shaking his head.

  ‘Did this singular bee tell you how we can rescue our oarmates?’ I snarled, the Sami thing sick in my stomach. ‘Or find Starkad and get the Rune Serpent back?’

  A lie. She had been a lie. It was my curse – worse, a Loki joke – to end up snagged like a lip-caught fish by every seidr woman in the world. And Radoslav – I had thought more of him …

  Sighvat smiled, unoffended, leaving me ashamed of my anger. ‘No, Trader, but I will ask.’ He rose and left, the raven clinging to his shoulder and fluttering.

  Kvasir shook his head. ‘Sometimes our Sighvat scares me more than any Sami witch,’ he said.

  We marched a second day and then sat surrounded by the low, growling hum of the army, a sweating beast in the red-flowered darkness. The tail of it still curled wearily in, tramping on into the night, where Finn and Kvasir waited for me to come up with a full-cunning way to get out of this mess. I sat silent and wished they’d bugger off and give me peace, for I was an empty hold of ideas.

  After a night of formless, brooding dream-shapes, I was still as empty, sitting by the smouldering firepit, pitching twigs and dung-chips into it as the dawn smeared up the sky. It took me some time to realise that men were moving and talking excitedly, flowing like ants from a broken nest.

  Then I heard the blare of trumpets and Finn lumbered up to me, chewing. He tossed me a scrap of flatbread and nodded at the commotion and dust.

  ‘Red Boots is awake then,’ he said.

  Nearby, Brother John crossed himself ‘Non semper erit aestas,’ he said and Finn looked from him to me, puzzled and scowling.

  ‘Get ready for hard times,’ I translated and he nodded, grim as old rock.

  We were formed up the way the Great City’s army was always formed up – so I learned later – with the foot in front, backed by archers, light horse on the wings and slightly pushed forward, so that the whole would look like a gently curving bay if you could fly above it like Sighvat’s raven.

  Behind that was a second line, all the prized heavy horsemen and the great metal slabs that were the pride of the Miklagard army.

  We had seen them ride out of Antioch’s St Paul Gate on horses draped with leather sewn with metal leaves. The archers had horses covered on the front, the others had their horses completely cloaked in these little metal leaves. Some carried lances and some had maces and swords only, for when these ones – so fearsomely costly even the Great City could afford only a thousand of them – formed up it was in a boar snout, with the bowmen in the middle, the lancers on the sides and the skull-crushers in front.

  All you could see of them were their eyes. They even wore iron shoes and scorned shields for the most part. They were draped in linen to try and keep the sun from broiling them, but we all pitied those splendid soldiers, the ones the Greeks called klibanophoroi – the Oven Wearers.

  There were numeri, bandae, turmae and a score of other names for their units, some of them Latin, some Greek which was the way with these people, who could not make up their minds on who they were. Red Boots had come with two of the three Hetaireiai, the Guard companies. These were the Mese and the Mikre, the former being for non-Greeks who were Christ-worshippers, the latter for foreigners who scorned the Christ. This last was full of Pechenegs and Rus Slavs, though the Mese had Saxlanders, whom the Greeks call Germans. Though the Great City accepted Germans as chosen men, they did not like the nation of Otto, who occupied Old Rome and called himself Emperor.

  They were almost as big as us, these Saxlanders, and they swaggered and snarled at each other like prize hounds. As Finn growled, they needed a sharp kick under their tails to show them who was better.

  Most impressive of all were the Great City’s chiefs, whom they called comes, or tribunus, or dux or drungarios and who, even though they had never met any of the men they led before, could get them moving as one, to the beat of ox-hide drums, with only a few words.

  Truly, they were a marvel, these Romans, and, for the first time, we realised how they had ruled the world. We felt like gawping bairns.

  We met our own commander then: Stefanos, who called himself Taxiarchos. He rode up with a guard of armoured horsemen and spoke with Skarpheddin and Jarl Brand.

  This Stefanos, young and moon-faced, had charge of, it seemed to me at the time, the whole right of the army, a great swathe of scutatoi and the Norse and hordes of light horse archers, for it was always the way of the Romans to have their own men in command.

  In fact he only ordered the last nub end of it, which was all of the Norse and some of the Greek archers and light troops. It is possible he never had command of anything ever again, thanks to us.

  ‘We should have that sort of marking,’ growled Kvasir, nodding at the coloured helmet-tufts and shields while we knelt, blowing dust out of our nostrils and trying to make sense of it all. I agreed, for even Jarl Brand’s own chosen men, his dreng, had red-and-black wool braids hanging from their sheaths and shields all of one design – Odin’s three drinking horns – in the same colours.

  In the end, the best I could do was tear strips off the dirty-white linen surcoat I wore to stop my byrnie from heating up and get the Oathsworn to fasten them round their upper arms.

  We leaned on our shields and sweated and I tried to work out where we were and what we were supposed to be doing.

  It seemed the Norsemen were formed in one body, Brand and Skarpheddin side by side and three ranks deep, for that’s what Skarpheddin had told us to do on his right flank – politely, since I was, nominally, as much of a jarl as he, even though I led only forty-four men. We formed in three ranks, mailed men in front – the ones we called the Lost – and spearmen in the second and third, save for a handful with some bows, and agreed to follow the signals given by Skarpheddin’s banner.

  Behind us, a few hundred paces, hazed in dust, were rank upon rank of the Great City’s foot archers, sticking arrows in front of them like a sheaf of barley, for easy reach.

  In front, the light troops flocked, raising most of the dust now as they trotted up, with their throwing spears cased in soft leather sheaths lined with beeswax. On our left, shouldering the last men in the left of our line, were the sweating Norse of Skarpheddin. Further out to our right were the light horsemen, archers and lancers, their horses foaming at the neck with sweat, the stink of their dung and piss choking us.

  There was a flurry behind us, which made everyone crane to see until Finn cursed them back to facing front.

  Sweating Greek thralls appeared, rolling a barrel on a two-wheeled cart and doling out water in cups, little sips and no more, but which men grabbed eagerly. There was a priest with them, swinging his little smoking brazier of perfume and chanting something long and sonorous, while he dipped a silver baton in the cups and scattered droplets on us.

  Brother John, so dry he could scarcely spit his disgust, translated the Greek for us as we grabbed and swallowed. He did not drink, for all his thirst.

  Behold that after drawing holy water from the immaculate and most sacred relics of the Passion of Christ our true God – from the precious wooden fragments of the True Cross and the undefiled lance, the precious titulus, the wonder-working reed, the life-giving blood which flowed from His precious rib, the most sacred tunic, the holy swaddling clothes, the God-bearing winding sheet and the other relics of His undefiled Passion – we have sent it to be sprinkled upon you, for you to be anointed by it and to garb yourself with the divine power from on high.

  The Basileus’s holy-water gift to the army against the infidel. Kvasir, gulping it down, made a face and said: ‘After all that, you’d think it would taste like mead instead of freshly warm sheep piss.’

  I hardly noticed, being too busy wondering what ‘undefiled lance’ they had used, for I was sure Martin had the true one – or by now, some slave-dealer called Takoub had it. Did that mean this holy water was only slightly holy? Not holy at all?

  From far off cam
e the rasping blare of trumpets and I heard the Greek chiefs from the light javelin men, the ones they called the Hares, yelling ‘Foreskins’, the command for these men to peel back the covers from their throwing spears, immaculate and trim-straight.

  Drums thundered from further down our own lines and a huge cry went up, ‘Tydeus! Tydeus!’ and then, out of the dust, cantered a group of horsemen, all red cloaks and plumes and self-importance.

  Two of them carried huge swords, far too big to fight with and clearly ikons of some sort, like the huge banner with a woman painted on it that Brother John said was Our Lady of Blachernae. Another carried a huge purple banner on which was sewn a white square called the Mandylion. It was, said Brother John, a shroud from the dead Christ and had his face imprinted on it.

  Out in front was a huge horseman, carrying a flag as big as a bedsheet, which they called the Labarum and on it was the symbol of the Great City. Brother John told us it was a holy symbol, adopted by the Emperor Constantine, who had named the Great City after himself.

  The symbol, it seemed, meant ‘In This Sign Conquer’, but it looked to us like the runes Wunjo and Gebo, which read as ‘a gift of success’ to us. Which was not the same thing, as Sighvat grimly pointed out, Gebo being an illusion rune that cannot be merkstave, or reversed, but may lie in opposition all the same and might mean success, but at heavy cost.

  As a call to war it fell far short of Feeders of Eagles or Hewers of Men, but it had been blessed by the White Christ’s best priests. As Kvasir said, we couldn’t fail with all this holy help and the whole of the Pharos Chapel must have been emptied of Miklagard’s relics.

  Behind all this came a short, stocky man riding a huge white horse eaten by its own purple drapings. He waved a lot as men cheered and was the only one who wore bright red leather boots, Armenian-style, almost to his knees.

  ‘Is that the Miklagard General? Why are they calling him Tydeus? I thought his name was John?’ grunted Hedin Flayer, who was to my left.

  ‘Not much to look at, the little short-arse,’ growled Finn from the other side.

  The man commanding the most powerful army in the world stopped, exchanged a few words with our taxiarchos, then reined round and rode off into the golden swirl of the day, the shouts of ‘Tydeus!’ swelling and ebbing like a tide as he passed the ranks.

  ‘Who the fuck is Tydeus?’ demanded Kvasir from down the line and Brother John leaned forward, his eyes red-rimmed with dust.

  ‘An ancient Greek hero who killed fifty men in single combat, according to Homer.’

  ‘Did this Homer say he was a short-arse, then?’

  ‘That sort of loose mouth will lose you your other eye.’

  At which point, Sighvat stepped forward a pace and held up his hand as the raven fluttered out of the great golden pearl we stood in and down on to his wrist. It smoothed a wing feather, opened its dark maw of a mouth and said, clear as a ringing bell: ‘Look out.’

  We gaped. It cocked a head and said it again. Then it added: ‘Odin,’ and flew up and away as Sighvat launched it back into the air.

  ‘The enemy are on us,’ Sighvat said and then saw all our gaping mouths and alarmed eyes. ‘What? Didn’t you know ravens speak?’

  Its speaking had struck us all dumb, but we had no time to say anything anyway. Botolf, Brother John beside him in a too-large helmet, untied Svala’s banner and it had barely started to flap in the lava breath that stirred the dust when, as Sighvat had promised, the enemy were upon us.

  The horsemen to our right vanished in a huge billow of dust and after that we only saw shapes, shadows in the gloom that circled like a ring of wolves and I had no idea whether they belonged to us or the enemy.

  ‘We’ll know soon enough,’ yelled Kvasir above the din, hawking dust from his throat. ‘The enemy will be the ones who tear us a second bung hole without warning.’

  We gripped shields and stood, sweat running from us, hilts and shafts slippery with it. We had been standing, that was all, yet we panted open-mouthed like dogs and I sent Brother John to get the waterskins we had stashed in the rear ranks. We sucked hot, brackish water as if it was nabidh.

  Time passed and dust swirled. There was a constant low drone, broken by the shriek of the enemy horns and the thunder of drums from both sides. I was aware of Hedin Flayer’s rank breath and the press of Finn’s big shoulder. Behind us came the sound of a giant tearing his cloak in half: the archers, letting loose a volley on something we couldn’t even see.

  Out of the dust in front we saw the Hares skipping back like their namesakes, sprinting hard and clutching their empty spear-bags. Most broke round us, but some came dashing up, the dust spurting from their sandalled feet like water, skidding against our shields and hammering on them as if on a door.

  When we wouldn’t open up, they reeled frantically away, though a few hurled themselves down and wriggled between our feet, so we kicked them in the ribs for their pains.

  Then, suddenly, there were robed men in the dust, a massive black banner, the glint of spears – and the Dailami foot came hurtling down on us.

  They had crashed towards the centre, splattered by arrows and throwing spears from front and either flank, so that they moved like stumbling sleepwalkers now, a great black-robed beast trailing blood and slime and bodies, screaming: ‘Illa-la-la-akba.’

  We braced; they hit the shieldwall, but they were almost done by the time they stumbled up to our swords. A knot of five or six crashed in on us, thrusting spears and screaming. I slashed at a black-bearded face and felt the edge bite, heard him scream. I saw a spear-shaft stab past my cheek and the point went in under a turban, straight into the owner’s ear, so that he shrilled and fell away, holding his head.

  Then they were gone and, with a huge wolf-roar, the whole Norse shieldwall surged after them. I was shouldered to one side, watched Finn and Kvasir howling into the haze, saw Botolf lumbering past me, banner held high in one hand, red mane streaming.

  Stefanos the taxiarchos flailed furiously, his angry screams lost in the bellows of the Norse, he and his little guard no more than a rickle of stones in a flood. Wearily, I trotted after them, stepping over the robed bodies that they had hacked down.

  ‘Bring your men back,’ Stefanos squealed at me, red-faced with fury. ‘Now. At once!’

  I didn’t bother to answer him, but jog-trotted on, leaving him squeaking his fury until he disappeared into the swirling dust behind me.

  No more than twenty paces later, sitting in the middle of a scatter of Sarakenoi, some still twitching and groaning, I came on Amund, the strip of white cloth that had marked him as one of the Oathsworn now tied round the stump of his wrist, one end gripped in his teeth as he strained to halt the black-red dribble from it. Black-robed bodies were everywhere, a few still moaning or writhing.

  I stacked shield and sword and knelt to help him, snapping off a discarded arrow shaft to use as a lever in his binding to squeeze harder. The iron stink of blood was thick in the dust, so it seemed I breathed through linen.

  ‘See if you can find the hand,’ he said, calm as you please. ‘I had a ring I liked.’

  Then his eyes rolled and he fell backwards, shivering and shaking. I put his sword in his good hand and stayed with him until his heels stopped kicking, while the screams and yells and drums and trumpets floated from the gold shroud of the battlefield. Then I found his severed hand, a white spider in the bloody slush nearby, and tucked it inside his tunic, so that we could bury him whole later.

  I collected my shield and sword and moved on.

  Four hundred paces later I came on the Oathsworn, where the air had cleared enough to show the great brassy glare of the sun in a sky pale and blue as Svala’s eyes. I staggered over the stones and scrub bushes into a place of hummocks like burial mounds: black tents made from the hair of camel and goat, erected low to the ground to fool the heat.

  There were shrieks and shouts and I saw someone I knew – Svarvar, the die-maker from Jorvik – stumbling along with his t
unic full of brass lanterns and blue-stone talismans.

  ‘What do you call this?’ I shouted at him, thinking they had all been sucked into some dreadful battle and angry that they were not. He grinned, hugging the great mass of plunder to his tunic.

  ‘Fun,’ he yelled and plunged on into the haze.

  The Oathsworn had hit the Saracen baggage camp, as if they had plotted a straight course to it using Gizur’s little ivory reckoner. The few troops left to guard it were dead or scattered and the Oathsworn were enjoying themselves.

  There were horses and women, arms in stacks like corn-stooks, mail suits, ewers and vases of gold and brass – and leather bags of money, for the Saracen soldiers insisted on regular pay, something we had all already learned from stripping the dead.

  I stood in the middle of this maelstrom, watching men stagger and stumble and howl like dogs, wrecking good pottery and gutting the dead to make sure they had swallowed nothing of value. They ripped rings from corpses; they threw screaming women on the ground, or bent them over cart shafts.

  I saw Hookeye, a black turban askew over his squint, a richly brocaded robe over one shoulder and a richer cloak over the other, pumping furiously at the naked buttocks of a screeching woman and waving a jewelled dagger in the air. For a head-swimming moment, it seemed that the spade-bearded high priests from Miklagard’s cathedrals were here, baying with lust, and not the Oathsworn men at all.

  I roared, I threatened, I even pleaded, but it was like herding cats. A hand gripped my arm and I found Brother John at my elbow, face grim as a crucifixion. ‘Best let this fever run its course,’ he said. ‘Anyway, we have found something.’

  I followed him to a black tent and ducked into it, blinking at the move from light to dark, from the realm of stark Helheim to a place cool and coloured bright as Bifrost. The light of fat candles bounced off the dazzling rugs lining the floor and the gilded drinking vessels and carvings teetering on low wooden tables. Botolf crouched, Dane axe butted in front of him and the raven banner laid out on the floor, grinning at the figure opposite.