by Robert Low
‘Heya,’ Finn said approvingly, and I rose, wiping clean the blade and handed it back to him, hoping my hand did not tremble as much as my legs did.
Then Sighvat and Brother John and others gathered rocks and stones and used them and a shallow scoop in the stony sand to howe up the coin-maker from Jorvik. Five years he had spent digging stones, only to be freed to end under a pile of them. Odin’s jokes were never funny, but sometimes you could not even grin for the clench of your teeth.
It was not a good omen and made the long journey through the shivering night a bleak, moonglowed tramp. When the sun trembled up, a great, golden droplet on the lip of the world, we squatted and panted and licked our own salt-sweat into stinging, mucus-crusted mouths until it died again and gave us the mercy of cooling night and the right to drink.
Some began to shiver with the change and hoped that was all it was, checking each other for sign of sweating sickness or red pox. The three who had been heat-afflicted were showing signs of recovery, though they were calf-weak when they tried to walk.
Aliabu and his people silently got ready to move on. In the last light of day, at the ridge that had sheltered our little camp, he turned and looked back, as if searching the twilight for his unseen sons. For a moment, his ragged robes hidden and silhouetted against the sky, he looked as jarl-noble as any man I have seen.
There grew in me then the respect of a whale-road rider who sees another of his kind and marks him even though there is no sign on him other than the stare which has searched far horizons.
Until now, the Sarakenoi had been screaming Grendels with weapons, or flyblown savages who squatted in their own filth, ate using one hand, wiped themselves with the other and worshipped one god, though they had blood-feuds with each other over how best to do it.
But the Bedu navigated their own sea out here, as skilfully as any raiders in a drakkar two weeks out of sight of land, and found sustenance here as we would from the waves. Eaters of lizards and rats and raw livers, they took the jelly from camel humps, squirted it with the gall-bladder juice and sucked the lot down, smacking their lips as we would over a good bowl of oats and milk.
‘By Odin’s sweaty balls,’ Finn growled when I mentioned this, ‘just because they can eat shit and ride a horse with a hunched back doesn’t make them worth anything, Trader.’
‘They are proud and noble, for all that,’ I answered. ‘They are masters of this land and survive on it. Could you?’
Finn spat, shouldering along in the blue dark. ‘Take them to a cold winter in Iceland, see how well they fare. They are masters of this land, Trader, because no one fucking wants it and are left in peace because they haven’t a hole to piss in, nothing anyone would want to steal, not even their sorry lives. They are the colour of folk two weeks dead and that short-arsed little lizard-chewer Aliabu thinks the best name he can give his favourite woman is Puddle, by Odin’s arse. That tells you all you need to know.’
He stumbled, cursed and recovered his walking rhythm. ‘I never had the ken of why the Irishers liked Blue Men as slaves. They always die on you when the snows come and Dyfflin’s a long way to cart the buggers while trying to keep them alive on a hafskip.’
I grunted, which was all that was needed. Finn looked at the world down the blade of his sword, measuring its worth in what he could take. But, even travelling along Odin’s edge as I was, I still saw these Bedu as knarrer in this ocean of sand and stone, charting ways less travelled and always open when others were shut. One day that would be of more use to me than plundering them – if Odin spared me.
Aliabu’s shout shook me back into the now, where the sweat stung my eyes and the desert grit rasped in every fold and crack. I stopped, panting, dropped to one knee like all the others, pushing up the little tent of robe with the stick I carried.
One of my boot soles flapped; the thong that had fixed it in place had snapped and been lost on the trail and I fumbled to find one of the few I had left. We all had flapping seaboots, cracked and split in the heat, the soles held on by thongs and whose bone-toggle fastenings had long since vanished.
Hookeye moved up, his bow out and strung, so I knew it was serious. In this heat, he kept both wrapped and greased with camel fat to stop them drying out.
‘Another group of camels,’ he reported. ‘There are men there, armed and ready.’
I climbed to my feet and gave my orders. Botolf, the only one not wearing padded leather and mail, since none large enough had been found to fit him, unravelled the raven banner, but it flopped like a hanged man on the pole.
The Goat Boy and Aliabu came up as we formed into a loose shieldwall. Aliabu waved his hands and rattled off a stream of words and I knew I was getting better at things, for I made out a word in six.
‘These are outcast men,’ the Goat Boy translated, ‘men from weak tribes who have fled their masters and make a life here. Aliabu knows them, but they are not shawi. He asks if you understand?’
I did. Shawi meant something about grilling and was a term the Bedu proudly used, since it meant they offered such shelter and hov-rest that they would slaughter and roast a prized animal for a guest. If these were not shawi, they could not be trusted.
Between the three of us, we worked out a plan. Camps would be made, the Oathsworn would show their strength and Aliabu and his sons would smile and talk to these outcasts. With luck, we would get news, perhaps some water and supplies and no blood would be shed.
‘No different from meeting ships in a strange fjord,’ growled Finn, hunched under his loop of robe.
‘Save for the heat,’ muttered Kvasir.
‘And the absolute lack of water,’ noted Brother John wryly.
‘Sod off,’ grunted Finn, too hot to argue. ‘Shouldn’t you be there, Trader?’
He was right, but Aliabu had pointedly not invited me, so I stayed on the course he had set and sweltered through another hour while the outcasts put up their tents. We had no tents.
In the end, Delim and two of the strange Bedu came back and, effusively, invited me down to the shade of the awning where everyone sat. I went, conscious of the envious, seared eyes of the rest of the band.
The leader of these outcast Bedu was called Thuhayba, which I was told means ‘small bar of gold’, a man shrunk like a dried-out goatskin, with bristles of grey hair on his chin and more gap than teeth. But he had eyes like something seen at night through the bushes.
There then followed a conversation like a game of ’tafl, a three-handed affair where I was a goose chased by foxes. Eventually, though, the tale of it was squeezed out like curd from cheese.
The Goat Boy told me: ‘Ahead, a day away, lies the village of Aindara, which these ones used to visit now and then, but will not do so now. The last time they did, which was recently, they found it deserted and the people fled – those who had not been killed. It was there they found the afrangi, whom they now wish to sell to us.’
I knew that afrangi meant ‘Frank’, which name the Arabs called us, having got it from ignorant Greeks.
‘Like us?’ I asked.
They talked to each other like pine logs popping in a good blaze, then the Goat Boy turned and said: ‘No, Trader, not big and fair-haired like you. Dark. A Greek, I think. They say they found him after the fight which the yellow-haired man won.’
My hackles rose at that and it took a flurry of sharp questions to tease the weft of it out and even then only one part was clear. Starkad had come this way and had men with him still.
In the end, when they saw I was interested, they hauled their prisoner out, a shivering individual called Evangelos – either that or he was praying, for his mind was so far gone he could not stop drooling and babbling. Getting answers from him was like holding water in your fingers.
At first it had been my thought that he was a runaway from the Miklagard army, but he had shackle-marks on his legs, old sores that still wept.
‘Fateh Baariq?’ I said to him and his head came round at that name. I said it agai
n and a shiver ran through him. If he’d been a dog, his tail would have curled between his legs.
‘Pelekanos,’ he said softly. Then louder. Then he screamed it, so that everyone was startled and men from both sides got to their feet and had to be placated with hand gestures.
‘Who is Pelekanos?’ I asked the Goat Boy and he shrugged.
‘Or what. It means carpenter. Perhaps it is his craft, Trader?’
The Greek heard the word again and nodded, rolling head and eyes. Then he hunched himself deeper, almost a ball, and whimpered: ‘Qulb al-Kuhl.’
There was a movement, a rustle of robes and indrawn breath from Aliabu, while the wizened old Bedu muttered some sort of charm against evil.
The Goat Boy looked at me and shrugged. ‘I think he said something about “the one with a dark heart”, but these Bedu talk like true Arabs only some of the time, so it is hard to follow.’
That was all the Greek managed that made sense and, when it became clear I did not want him, he was dragged off and more profitable trading began, for water and food. Of course, the outcasts wanted our shiny weapons and gave us so much water and food I was convinced they’d starve or parch. I hoped the single axe they took for it was worth it.
Brother John was angry that I had left a good Christ-man to rot, but everyone else agreed with me that dragging a useless mouth along would make us as daft in the head as the Greek in question.
‘There was a time, Orm Bear Slayer, when you would not have done this,’ Brother John said, almost sadly, and the truth of it made me bark back at him.
‘There was a time, priest, when I did not wear a jarl torc.’
And, as ever, I heard Einar’s death-husked whisper about discovering the price of that rune-serpent neck ring. Now, of course, there was another rune serpent slithering round my life; the one snake-knotted down that cursed sabre which I had to retrieve.
We put some distance between ourselves and the outcasts, for I did not want them trying out that axe in any of our skulls. We had travelled only a little way into the cool of the night when Aliabu came up beside me where I walked with Brother John, both of us trying to find a way back to friendship. In the twilight, robed and bearded as he was, Aliabu looked like one of those seers Brother John talked of in his Gospels.
‘I will not go nearer to Aindara than this,’ Aliabu said through the Goat Boy. ‘Not far from that village is a temple to the old Hittites and beyond that, in the hills, is where the mine lies. I am going no closer than this, but will wait for you seven nights, no more.’
‘Why? Are you afraid?’ I taunted and should have known better, for he nodded with no shame of it, which is the Bedu way, I learned.
He told us, in that quiet, insect-singing twilight: ‘Those outcasts told tales that all was not well here. Friends of friends, they say, have told that some of the soldiers at the mine ran off, for they had not been paid and no supplies came from Aleppo, because the silver was gone and there is so much fighting that the mine has been forgotten. Some say the ones who remained started to raid and they have grown strong indeed if Aindara is no more.’
Camels were being hobbled, tents pitched, fires lit and it was clear his mind would not be changed. The Oathsworn, confused, sat and waited and watched.
I saw the Goat Boy’s face as he translated all this and knew there was more, tilted my head in a silent question. The Goat Boy shrugged. ‘He is afraid of more than soldiers. I heard him talk with his brothers and could not hear it all, but they are terrified, Trader.’
‘Ask him,’ I said and so he did. Aliabu waved his hands as if he did not want to discuss it at all, but he saw the blood in my eye and knew that I would go on anyway. He was torn between his fear and his pride in Bedu hospitality, which would not let a man who had sheltered in his hov walk into unwarned danger.
His eyes were all that could be seen now, though the fire that flared up cast his shadow, wavering and long.
‘Ghul,’ he said and the other Bedu heard it and stopped, as if frozen. Then they went about their work again, almost frenzied, as if to try and drive out fear by being busy. Aliabu spoke swiftly, spitting the words out as if it hurt him to talk, wanting to get them out of his mouth as fast as possible.
The Goat Boy, when he turned to me, was a pale oval of a face in the darkness. ‘He hears they have become eaters of their own at the mine, Trader. He says it happens now and then, when there is a drought and hunger drives people to it. He himself has been reduced to eating the shrivelled remains found in camel dung – but not yet to eating other beings.’
The others, when this was laid out for them, made ward-ings against evil and there was a lot of amulet-touching and prayers from Brother John.
We Norse are half afraid of the dead-eaters, half disgusted, and will shun any such who are found, no matter that they have been snowed in and forced to it. Almost all had a tale, heard from some hall round a comfortable fire, and many of these stories were children-scarers, no more.
But there was worse than all that in this tale, as Kvasir and Sighvat both pointed out. If no food had been sent to the mine and all that had been in the village was consumed, so that rumours of dead-eating were now abroad, then things were desperate for those guarding the mine.
So whom were they eating?
‘We have to move fast, Bear Slayer,’ Finn growled in a voice thick and black as the wheel of night, ‘before our oarmates are stew.’
TWELVE
The Sarakenoi say that their god, Allah, has one hundred names and that ninety-nine of them are written in their holy book. The camel, it seems, is the only living thing that knows the one-hundredth name of God, which accounts for the way he looks down at you, curling his lip like a prince with a dead rat shoved under his nose.
They have little else to be haughty about. True, they can carry a pack which weighs the same as two big battle-geared prow-men and will outlast a horse on a walk – but a man on two legs can walk faster than a camel with four.
Riding one is not something I would do twice, for it sways like a badly trimmed ship side-on to a swell and while I never get sick on a deck, I felt like hoiking up my guts the one time I climbed on the back of a camel.
Even getting on one is harder than boarding one knarr from another in a two-foot sea. Because they tire if you get on while they kneel, you mount by pulling on a cord attached to the beast’s nostrils, which makes it lower that snake neck and head. Then you stick one foot in the crook of the neck and let go of the cord, at which it will raise its neck and swing you up.
If you are steady, you can settle yourself on the hump; if not, you end up falling off and having to do it all over again.
Aliabu gave us three of the four male camels, since we could not milk the she-camels (for all that a couple of the band tried, being good husbandmen once). Well, that had been years before and a camel is not a cow or a goat. When a raging Botolf fisted teeth from one for spitting at him, Delim and the others, scowling, took their camels out from our reach. That one beast then kept trying to get at Botolf and bite him with her remaining teeth, yellowed as boar tusks, which at least kept us smiling at something in that place.
However, we knew how to manage three male camels and moved off with them in the cool of early morning, making for Aindara and hoping to get to it before it grew too hot.
The flat plain, fox-red and weathered ochre, sprouted a white ribbon of road and then, almost an ache to the eye, a great swathe of olive groves and vegetable plots splashed the land with dusty green. Ahead lay rounded hills; below them a dash of whitewashed mud-brick and stands of palms. Clouds were gathering in a sky that had been washed blue and tiny red birds sang in the stunted trees along the road.
‘See anything?’
Hookeye, shading his eyes with one hand, looked a moment longer then shook his head. His face was the colour of old leather and his tunic, which had once been red, was now a washed-out pink. I realised we must all look the same, seared by the sun. My hair, when I saw it flutter loos
e round my face, had paled from red to yellow-gold.
Hookeye and Gardi loped ahead, having shed their heavy tunics and kept their robes and head-coverings. Gardi had also stowed his boots, since the soles had vanished completely and he was now barefoot.
We followed them at camel-pace and soon a wind soughed out of the hills, driving a fine spray of grit and dust against us. I leaned into it, the white robe, now rusted with dust, wrapped tight around my head and shoulders. Gravel, whipped by the wind, stung at my legs through my breeks as we ploughed on, the camels grumbling, heads lowered.
The green fields surrounding the town were hazed with dust now; beyond them only rocky hills and an endless plain of stone and scrub and broad dry streambeds.
‘This is a bad storm coming,’ Brother John said, having to raise his voice against the wind and the hiss of grit. ‘We must get to shelter.’
Hookeye and Gardi sat hunched and waiting for us, wrapped tight against the driving sting. Together, we moved into the village of Aindara, where only the sound of a batting shutter welcomed us.
The centre of the village was a square of bare earth fronting a sad mosque of brick, whose great arched horseshoe of an entrance had two huge doors flung wide. Slats of wood, painted to look like marble, flanked this entrance, which led to a courtyard of bare earth, stamped hard and smooth as stone.
In the middle of the village square was a raised stone trough with a well on one side where women had once drawn water and beaten clothes clean. The water in the trough was ruffled slightly by the wind and a fine layer of dust sifted down on it, so I knew the villagers had long since gone; the Mussulmen think all water has to flow and standing water is unclean. Other buildings crowded round, their doors dark and empty and a garden wall jutted out from a house, ornamented by a trailing tendril of green, fluttering with little blue and white flowers.