by Robert Low
He sat and frowned on it for a long time, while the din of feasting roared and flowed like a river in spate round us. So long, in fact, that I grew more wary and began to consider a way out of that place. Then he stirred, stroking his icicle moustaches.
‘Here’s the way of it,’ he said, bent close to speak in my ear. I could see Finn watching and it came to me that it did no harm for my reputation to be seen touching heads and planning at the high seat of a jarl such as Brand.
‘I am pledged for a season to the Basileus Nikephoras,’ he went on. ‘This, of course, also means his commander, John Red Boots.’
My eyes must have narrowed too much, for he waved a soothing hand.
‘It comes to me that the business of thrones in the Great City is nothing much to do with either you or me, young Orm,’ he went on. ‘After my season is up, why should I care what happens in their blood-feuds? It comes to me also that keeping this a secret until I see the Basileus – a costly and long-drawn out affair of bribes, I might add – will be difficult. Red Boots, I understand, is already made aware of your name and will certainly want you dead.’
I was more afraid than ever and he saw that and chuckled.
‘I can help you, but you must place your hands in mine over this. I shall take these twigs and eggs to Red Boots and say that you were my man when you did this offence and that you did it for gain and no more and thought it richer than it turned out to be. I will tell him you are a fool who does not understand what was lifted, only that it was not as golden a prize as you thought – which is no lie, after all. Nothing bad has come of it and he will have my pledge on your silence.
‘It is as well no Romans were killed in getting this prize,’ he went on, taking a swig from his nabidh, then passing it to me as if we were horn-paired at this feast, another thing that did not go unnoticed and gave me even more standing. I also saw that he had done it deliberately for that effect.
‘As it is, of course,’ he went on, wiping his lips and talking as if he was discussing a winter cull of livestock, ‘Red Boots will still try and have you killed in the dark, for it is the Great City’s way of things and another reason to be off smartly. He would like to do the same to me, but he needs me. He cannot hold Antioch unless the whole army stays and that isn’t something that can be afforded for long. He will march off and leave a garrison behind to be besieged by the camel-humpers. That garrison will be me and most of my men.’
I blinked at that and again Brand chuckled.
‘Of course, my ships will lay off around Cyprus, which is where you can find me, providing you are back by the end of the year. After that, I will be off up to Kiev and then home and if you want to be with me, as a chosen man, you had better make it in time. Then both of us will be beyond Red Boots and he can do what he likes.’
‘What happens if you get besieged in Antioch?’ I blurted and he smiled like a bear trap being set.
‘No “if” about it. I will, of course. Red Boots knows it. I will also negotiate the surrender of Antioch to the Hamdanids – at a price and amicably. Red Boots knows that, too. The Hamdanids will prefer that to fighting several hundred wellarmed men from the viks, having seen how we do it. Naturally, I will wait for the safe withdrawal of the Great City’s armies to Tarsus, which is all Red Boots wants. Next year, or the year after, he will be back and the business will start again.’
There are those who say Brand got his jarldom by rolling on his back and having his belly tickled by his King, Eirik, and, after him, his son, Olof. They say Olof only got to be King of the Svears and Geats because he climbed into the lap of Svein Forkbeard like a little dog and that made Brand the lapdog of a lapdog.
That’s not the right of it. They called Olof the Lap King – Skotkonung – because he took what his father Eirik had made of the Svears and Geats and made them pour a handful of dirt from their tofts into his lap, a ritual that admitted he owned the earth they walked on and would pay him in silver to keep those tofts. Taxes, in other words.
Olof, like all the jarl-kings, made those easterners who couldn’t even speak decent Norse into a kingdom called Greater Sweden – and Brand was at his shieldless side through all of it and his father’s before that. The rune-serpent torc sat round Brand’s neck lighter than swansdown.
I knew what he offered was the perfect solution. It saved me from the Great City and offered protection from Sviatoslav and his hawk-fierce sons, allowing us to take the shorter route back to the North. It went a long way to lifting the weight of that jarl torc pressing on my shoulders, the ends of it forged with the runesword on one side and my thralled oathsworn oarmates on the other. The swaying balance-rod of it, hauling me this way, then the other, was crushing.
But all I could think of at that moment was her and I said her name aloud, a question.
‘What of Svala?’ I asked and Brand studied me.
‘You don’t even ask about this Aliabu,’ he frowned. ‘A jarl needs to think of such things.’
I saw my mistake and managed to grin and dance lightly on my tongue. ‘I would say, if I had a gold-brow, that any choice of the jarl is sound,’ I replied and he chuckled, acknowledging that.
‘But I am also knowing you have taken this Aliabu’s two children to care until he returns, always within reach, as it were,’ I went on. ‘What you offer is good and I will find Starkad on your behalf. It may be that I can put my hands in yours when we put a keel on good Baltic water. Then again, it may not.
‘I would also say,’ I went on, the nabidh numbing my lips, ‘that my men watch you and I closely and it would be better for us both if some token changed hands here when this leather container is handed over, as if it held a treasure worth having. A bag that chimes softly, as they say, makes the loudest sound.’
Brand smiled and nodded, stroking his fine moustaches. ‘It is no good-luck thing to kill a volva woman,’ he said after a while, surprising me by picking up on a subject I’d thought deliberately ignored. Somewhere, a bench went over and a knot of men roared and fought good-humouredly. Brand watched them, stroking his ice-moustaches, then continued speaking to me and looking at them. ‘I am hoping your man Finn has the grace of the other gods, so that they can calm Frejya for the loss of Skarpheddin’s mother. A spike of Roman iron – heya, she could not blunt that. I wish I could have known what went through her mind at that moment.’
‘A spike of Roman iron,’ I answered wryly and he chuckled. In the next breath he was stone grim.
‘This Svala, who is really a Sami witch with an outlandish name, I will keep until she is healed,’ he said flatly. ‘After that, I will thrall her to some Mussulman or Jew, who will not be affected by her seidr and once she has been broken into, the strength of her will be diminished.’
I was silent for a moment. It wasn’t that a Mussulman or a Jew couldn’t be affected by seidr just that it didn’t much matter to us if they were driven mad by it. I was sure she could work her magic on a stone Christ saint, but I did not like the idea of her being ‘broken into’, like a locked temple. It spoke of pain and blood. In his way, Jarl Brand was being generous-handed and lenient with her – yet, still, there was that lingering scent of rumman fruit.
‘Will you sell her to me?’ I asked, surprising both Brand and myself with those words.
Frowning, he thought about it. ‘She is dangerous, I am thinking. Odin’s arse, young Orm, she has a face like a chewed fig thanks to that raven and is a well of hatred for us all, yet still she weaves her seidr and makes you come to her rescue. What more warning do you need on this?’
‘Will you sell her?’
He thought for a little longer and shook his head, so that my heart dipped.
‘It would be your doom, I am thinking,’ he said. ‘But it is also your wyrd and no one flaunts the Norns’ weave without price. I am reluctant to sell a Sami witch to a good man from the Vik, but here is what I will do. Return with proof that Starkad is dead. That, surely, will be a sign that you are gods-lucky and you will also have ha
d time to consider whether you are favoured enough to take this woman.’
I knew this was as much as he would do on it, so I nodded. Brand nodded back and the bargain was struck. I expected a purse of hacksilver when I handed over the container there and then, but Brand was a jarl of different stock than that and surprised me. He stood and thumped on the bench until people fell silent, then peeled off the fine silver torc from around his neck and presented it to me.
He did not have to say anything, for the Norse knew what it meant and those Jews, Arabs and Greeks would have it explained to them later. The roar and bench-thumping went on a long time as I took the twelve ounces of braided silver from him and placed it round my own neck. For all the night was leprous with sweat, the silver was cold on my skin for a long time.
Now, in the desert heat of the early day, I fingered it, the snarling wyrm-head ends and the runes skeined on it and wondered if all the blood was off it, for it was only later that I realised it had belonged to Skarpheddin and preferred not to tell of that. There were those who would think it a bad move to be wearing the rune-serpent jarl torc of one who had been so luck-cursed.
Of course, I did feel a moment of guilt over the container and its secret, but that was not for more than a year, when I heard how Red Boots, Leo Balantes and others had crept into the palace bedroom of the Basileus of the Great City and stabbed him to shreds while he slept, Red Boots walking out and on to the throne. Red Boots, I heard, had even smashed the Basileus’s teeth from his head with the butt end of his sword and kicked in his head, which was a sorry way for the most powerful man in the world to end up.
But blood-feuds in the Great City were no business of mine, as Brand had said, and, in this gods-abandoned waste of heat and dust, I considered the trade worth it at the time. The Oathsworn, I was thinking as I sat there blowing flies off porridge, were under Odin’s best smile, for many problems had been fixed and money and battle-gear gained.
Aliabu’s woman, Nura, crossed to the camels with a milking bowl they called an ader and stood by one of the camels. Sixteen of the beasts, I had learned, were she-camels and five had calves, so that those who were not suckling were heavy with milk.
While Delim gathered in the four males from where they had been hobbled and turned them loose to graze the sparse shrub, Nura unfastened the covers on the udders of one she-camel and encouraged her with sucking sounds. Standing on one leg, the other balanced against her knee, she took the fat teats in her hand and started squirting expertly into the bowls.
I sat and watched while the morning grew to glory and started to sing and hum with strange life. She saw me and smiled with her eyes, which was all that could be seen.
She had a blue cloth wrapped round her in a single piece, which they called mehlafa, and it covered her from her silverringed feet to her braided hair, though, unlike other Saracen women, she did not seem to mind exposing her face.
She unloaded milk into a fat pottery pot and, from there, Aliabu’s other woman, Rauda, poured it carefully into goatskins. Even with just her eyes visible, this Rauda was a rare beauty, it seemed, for her full name, Aliabu had told me proudly, meant the Pool that Gathers after the Rain.
Not a pool others drank from, even among his own. None of his brothers had women, but Aliabu had two and his brothers did not seem to mind this, nor ever demand their use. Neither, of course, did we, though a few thought of it.
But Aliabu had a long and wickedly curved knife hidden in his robes and had made it clear he would use it on any afrangi who caused him offence. We needed his skills and goodwill more than we needed a hump, as I told the Oathsworn.
Aliabu had told me his full name and those of this brothers, but the most any of us could remember of it was the first part and that ‘Abu’ meant ‘father’, which title you take in Serkland when you have sons.
Short Eldgrim sat back with a sigh, waiting for Finn’s morning gruel, listening to the wooden goat bells and savouring the water he had dug up. Aliabu had taught us to bury the waterskins each evening: after a night buried in the chill, they were cold as a winter fjord first thing in the morning, which made that the best part of the day.
Usually, we should have been up and away, with a few hours’ walk under our belts before we stopped for the day-meal, but we were travelling in the cooler part of the day – practically evening – and for a good part of the night, so would lie up in the shade of the rocks which overhung this crack in the ground all that day.
‘It is a nice sound, the goat bells,’ Short Eldgrim mused, then shook his head. ‘But I wish it was on a wether in a meadow under hills which had snow on them.’
‘Aye, blowing a snell wind that promises a winter digging it and all the other sheep out of drifts,’ grunted Kvasir, crunching through the stony desert to squat beside him. He took a wooden bowl from Finn with a grunt of thanks and fished his horn spoon out from the depths of his tunic. He ate, waving at the flies and spitting out those he could. Most he ate along with the gruel.
If Short Eldgrim had been meant to thank his luck that he wasn’t digging sheep out of snowdrifts, it didn’t work. He nodded, wistful-sad, his heimthra made the worse for the view Finn had seidr-magicked up for him.
‘Don’t worry,’ growled Finn, passing him the porridge while it was too hot for flies to land on. ‘One day you’ll be back with the snow wind blowing up your backside and then you’ll look back on the days you spent lolling in the warmth of Serkland.’
One day. There were forty of us left now and four were already sick. I was cursing myself and all the gods that we had stayed for Brand’s feasting – not that we had much choice in it. Brother John had warned us, right enough, looming grim-eyed out of the dark a day after we had come back from killing Skarpheddin and his seidr women.
‘They are wrapping red-rashed corpses down by the river,’ he had told me and needed to say nothing more, for I had seen all this before at the siege of Sarkel. Sure enough, the next day, four of our men started to shiver and water flowed from them in fat drops.
The day after that was the feasting and the day after that was when we left and three were dead by then, put in the great howed pit Brand was digging to cope with the numbers. The fourth we left with the Greek doctors in Antioch, while we ran into the desert’s heat and Gizur and the Elk crew ran to the sea winds. I offered prayers to Odin that all of us had escaped the sickness and that I had made the correct choice – to go after our oarmates first, then chase Starkad down.
Now we lay and thought of green hills and slate-blue seas capped with white and the snow whipping off the tall mountains like Sleipnir’s mane. It was better with your eyes closed, for then you did not see this strange land, nor the massive winding ribbon of stones we lay in, whose walls rose like tongues of orange flames to a washed blue sky.
Here were no sheep, but little scaled lizards that popped out and scuttled down the blind turnings that led only to holes where little birds lived. It was a world of brown and pale green, of strange boulders shaped like mushrooms and swirling patterns of sand, which seemed to be all the colours of Bifrost. I supposed Aliabu and his people had as many names for sand as the Sami have for snow.
I lay and thought of her, too, all through the day until it was my time to stand watch and even then. Always the same, too: the laugh; and the day she and I and Radoslav had enjoyed in the city of Antioch on the Orontes, a day as perfect as a rumman fruit – yet one whose heart had already rotted unseen. A cracked bell of friendship and love, even then. One such betrayal would have been enough, Odin. Two was larding it thick.
Finn and Brother John came to me as Aliabu and the others were packing the groaning camels to start the day’s journey, taking a knee where I sat and eyeing me grimly. I eyed them back and jerked my chin for them to speak.
‘Three were felled by heat,’ Brother John said. ‘They will recover if they are fed water and kept shaded for a day.’
‘Good news,’ I said, knowing with a sick dread what came next.
‘There is a fourth down, but he does not have the red pox,’ Brother John said. ‘He has the squits, or the sweating sickness, or both. He will die, for sure, just the same. His vomit has blood in it. Dabit deus his quoque finem.’
God would, indeed, grant an end to these troubles. I remembered the sweats from Sarkel. Old oarmates, Bersi had it one day and was dead of it the next and Skarti, whose lumpen face told how he had survived the red pox, would probably have died of the sweats if an arrow hadn’t killed him first. The squits were better, in that you could recover from them after some days of misery and mess – but when the blood streaks showed, you were finished.
‘He needs the Priest,’ said Finn, looking at me. I remembered that look from the last time, across the body of Ofeig. Next time, Bear Slayer, he had said, you do it.
I held out my hand and he slid the hilt of the sword into it.
It was Svarvar, the coin-stamper from Jorvik, lying on a pallet of scrub and his own cloak and soaking his life away, so that you could see him shrink to a hollow man by the minute, while he shook and trembled and his eyes rolled. The stink of him filled the air, thick enough to cut.
I called his name, but if he heard it he gave no sign, simply lay and muttered through chattering teeth, shaking and streaming with water. Brother John knelt and prayed; Finn hefted a seax hilt between Svarvar’s hands and I could not swallow. The Priest, when I guided the blade of it to his neck, felt cold as ice.
His eyes flickered open then and, just for a moment, I knew he knew.
‘When you get across Bifrost,’ I said to him, ‘tell the others about us. Say, “Not yet, but soon”. Good journeying, Svarvar.’
It didn’t take much pressure, for Finn had spent the day putting an edge on the Priest, a rasp that had irritated us all at the time. The neck-flesh parted like fruit skin and he jerked and thrashed only a little while the blood poured out with an iron-stink that brought flies in greedy droves almost at once.