Byzantium - A Novel

by Michael Ennis

  Jarl Rognvald turned to the Varangians. ‘Yes. All we need do is stay on our feet until then.’ But inwardly the Jarl suspected not. What he had seen looked more like a treacherous desertion than a strategic retreat.

  Aeifor roared on. The Pechenegs jittered and waited, occasionally launching a few spears or arrows; the Varangians fielded the missiles on their shields as though playing a game. The game became less amusing as the current continued its numbing assault; Haraldr’s legs were turning to dead stumps. Finally there was a commotion, and the teeming mass of Pechenegs was parted by a silk-clad chieftain accompanied by three or four byrnnie-clad subalterns and dozens of variegated retainers, including some women in expensive Frisian cloth robes apparently just looted from the Rus ships. ‘The turd on top of the dung heap,’ said the handsome Varangian in a remarkably laconic voice.

  The Pecheneg chief had wide, thick shoulders; a scowling, beetlish face peered out beneath a finely embossed Norse-style helm. He stood with his hands at his hips and shouted furiously at the Norsemen, then at his own men. He stomped up and down the beach for a few minutes, every now and then pausing to exhort the heavens or kick at the sand. This exhibition concluded, he simply sat on his haunches and waved his retainers away.

  The Varangians began to discuss a break-out, but the handsome young Varangian was adamant in his faith in Hakon. ‘We’re pledge-men,’ he reminded his comrades. ‘That’s what Varangian means. Men who pledge their lives in defence of one another. It is an inviolable troth.’ It was as if this Varangian believed the invocation of this pledge would almost magically transport Hakon and the rest of the Varangians to their side.

  ‘Maybe they are pinned down upriver,’ offered a shorter, thick-necked Varangian with boyish, rock-crystal eyes.

  Haraldr admired the loyalty of the Varangians. They’re good men, he decided. They deserve a better leader.

  The Pecheneg chief suddenly leapt to his feet, screaming and gesturing as if he had been seated over a fire. Almost immediately the Pechenegs swarmed the nearest ship upriver from the Norsemen. The blood that chilled in Haraldr’s aching limbs seemed to crystallize, cold water turning instantly to ice.

  ‘We’ve got to move now!’ shouted Haraldr; he did not bother to explain why, and only distantly wondered why he was giving commands. ‘If we clasp arms and form a ring, we can drift together until we get to the rocks!’

  The handsome Varangian quickly appraised the situation. Like industrious ants, the Pechenegs had already lifted the massive hull from the log rollers and were creeping towards the water. ‘That’s the best plan now,’ he calmly agreed. His eyes had a wounded look, not of fear but of betrayal. Hakon has lost something more valuable than all the gold in Grikia, thought Haraldr.

  The ship was almost floated, due less to organisation than to the numbers and the verminous frenzy of the Pechenegs. Thirteen ells at beam, fifty ells long, and careening down the river, the big river craft would crush the Norsemen like snails. The desperate human raft floated away just as the looming hull began to bob towards them.

  The Dnieper’s suction drew them on at a fantastic speed, but the ship, a more seaworthy craft, came on faster. The white water was just ahead. Haraldr’s foot smashed into a rock but his feet were so numb that he hardly noticed. His head went under, and water surged up his nostrils like solid plugs of ice. The ring broke up. Insensible feet scrambled to gain a foothold on the treacherous bottom. The ship whooshed past; seconds later a series of muffled cracks announced its destruction on the rocks.

  ‘Make the boar!’ yelled Jarl Rognvald. The boar-array was a wedge of men driven into the heart of the enemy. The Varangians quickly found their places. Jarl Rognvald took the snout, grabbed Haraldr’s arm, and placed him at his right flank; the handsome Varangian took the same position on the Jarl’s left. The essential Gleb was tucked safely in the middle of the wedge.

  The boar moved warily through the spiky, foaming shallows. The Pechenegs crowded the bank, spears thrusting and sabres waving. ‘Follow my cadence!’ growled Jarl Rognvald. The Pechenegs were only a few ells away. Voices were screaming deafeningly both inside and outside Haraldr’s skull.

  ‘Fast!’ Jarl Rognvald lurched forward at a near run. His axe rose and fell like a woodcutter’s. Haraldr pushed against the mass of Pechenegs with his shield, but it was as if the beast of his fear had seized his sword; he still could not lift it. He struggled to keep moving forward against the weight on his shield. He could see a rock-strewn rise ahead and promised himself that if they made it, they would live. Then sun-flared metal showered over the rise. Not Norse steel but Pecheneg mail jerkins and captured Hunland swords. The Pechenegs had brought up their best footmen.

  The Pecheneg footmen pushed forward, crushing their less-heavily armoured comrades against the Norse boar. The wedge quickly became a circle, a desperate shield-fort. The crystal-eyed Varangian took a spear in his thick neck, drew a final, desperate arc with his axe and fell. Another Varangian raised a forearm lashed to a limp red rag by the Pecheneg sabres. Jarl Rognvald smashed two Pechenegs with his axe and sent them reeling in a mist of blood, but three more leapt forward and clutched at his shield and the Jarl could not throw them off. Thin sabres whirled around him like furious, shrilling birds, and long red streaks appeared on his face. A spear drove into his byrnnie, and he fell.

  Something struck Haraldr’s chest so hard that his lungs emptied and he thought he had lost his sword in the darkness. The noise of the battle was like a great wind that kept him from regaining his breath. His upper arm touched something white-hot, and his forehead tickled. He shoved hard with his shield to keep it from crushing his chest, but a greater force pressed back. All he could see was blood, not before him but in memory. Black-red blood. Stiklestad. His body began to freeze. He saw Elisevett, very clearly for a second, and then his mother. He fell, not to the earth but in a great spiralling plunge to the abyss of his own being, a spirit world haunted by mythic beasts given substance by the real horrors of Stiklestad. Here, riot in the realm of flesh, would be Haraldr’s last battle, here his tormented soul would finally be forced to confront its own demons.

  Haraldr knew he had been here before. It was a dark, featureless plain scoured by a bitter-cold wind that wet and stung his eyes. Someone told him that if he stopped to rest, he would be warm for ever but another voice thundered and ordered him on against the ravening gale. The fire exploded before him but it was colder than the wind and blacker than burned coal. Within the lightless magma he could see the great gaping black jaws. The Dragon. You can run, now, for ever, he told himself, but the voice commanded him to stand, and the creature blasted him with its cold obsidian-hued flame. He stood and faced it. . . The journey ended, as suddenly as a fitful dream.

  He awoke to ice crystals in the sun. Steel-ice. The Pecheneg wore a conical Norse-style helm, a steel jerkin sheathing his stocky chest. Haraldr’s body was liquid and iron at once, flowing, changing between the two at some unthinking but complex suggestion. His sword at last lifted, blown by the cyclone from the spirit world. And then it fell.

  The Pecheneg’s sword arm and half his torso were gone, and the gaping slash spewed blood as if his heart had exploded.

  It is not a rage, Haraldr thought very clearly, but a will, a cataclysmic necessity that must discharge itself as a storm cloud spits fire. His sword lifted again, no longer a thing of steel but a force of nature that beat like the raven’s wing, ripped like the eagle’s talon. The Pechenegs fell inexorably back from the horrifying circle that it described.

  Three Varangians were still beside him, and Gleb was huddled at his back. Haraldr reached down and grabbed the collar of Jarl Rognvald’s byrnnie, and as he did, he saw a force of armoured Rus battling over the rise, only sixty ells away.

  Dragging Jarl Rognvald and carving his terrible crimson path through the Pechenegs, Haraldr led the rest to safety.

  ‘So we have ascertained that Alexandras is no enthusiast of romantic verse.’ Maria’s eerily enchanting blue
eyes roamed from Alexandras, the young man seated at her right, to Giorgios, on her left. Her velvety tongue flicked at the gilded rim of her murrey-tinted agate goblet. ‘And what do you think of the Digenes Akrites, Giorgios?’

  Giorgios extended his tautly muscled neck slightly, as if he found the high, pearled collar of his ceremonial robe too tight. He had curly, sand-coloured hair; an elegant, Grecian nose; and strangely innocent brown eyes. His sweat-glazed forehead glowed in the light of the huge pewter candelabra that floated high above the table. He glanced nervously at his friend, as if seeking direction. The evening had not been what they had expected. They had heard the tales about the Mistress of the Robes, of course, and they had envisioned an evening of sexual abandon that could otherwise be provided only by the pox-eaten whores of the Studion, Constantinople’s notorious slum. Instead the Mistress of the Robes had confounded them with rigid decorum and a trying discussion: ancient Hellenist philosophers, the several religious heresies with which the city was currently rife, and the economic possibilities presented by renewed trade with the northern barbaroi; it had been rumoured that a trade fleet might arrive from Rus within the next few weeks. Now the subject was literature. The Digenes Akrites was a popular epic of heroism and romance on the far-flung borders where the Empire abutted the Saracen caliphates and emirates.

  ‘I would not think that the Digenes Akrites is an accurate depiction of life on the Eastern frontier,’ offered Giorgios hesitantly. Maria had quickly concluded she preferred Giorgios to Alexandros, though the latter had a piercingly blue-eyed, scarcely restrained lasciviousness that she found appealing. But Giorgios, despite his studied Scholae swagger, had the gift of self-doubt.

  ‘But truth and romance are two very different qualities,’ said Maria. In a choreographed burst, five silk-robed eunuchs swept away the large golden tureens containing the dessert fruits, poured unwatered wine into the agate goblets, and promptly vanished. The heavy bronze doors slid silently shut behind them. ‘If we perceived only truth, we would be incapable of love.’

  ‘Do you mean physical love or spiritual love?’ asked Alexandros. ‘Perhaps a spiritual love could fool the senses. But a physical love?’ Emboldened by the wine, he allowed his eyes to rake his hostess. She lifted her dark eyebrows slightly and focused on him; he felt as if a current had swept from her eyes into his testicles.

  ‘You are asking in what fashion naked bodies can withhold the truth?’ Maria wryly pursed her livid, glistening lips. ‘But if a lover could see the truth of his partner’s flesh, its conception in the bowels of a woman, and its decomposition into putrescent sludge, and the trail of mastications and excretions and discharges that flesh will deposit in its transit between those two states, then I fear we would all become eremites, happy with the solitude of a barren cell.’

  Giorgios leaned forward. ‘But isn’t truth what is, not what has been or what will be?’

  ‘That is merely the state of a thing. What cannot conquer time has no truth.’

  ‘Then beauty has no truth? Only decay and death?’ Giorgios frowned.

  Maria tilted her head slightly. Her sable-black hair was parted in the middle and coiled at either side of her head; the coils were laced with pearls. ‘Plato believed that beauty resides outside a thing, in an eternal state. Or so Psellus informs us.’

  ‘Psellus?’

  ‘He is one of the Hellenists at court. The most gifted, I think. He is quite taken with this Plato.’

  ‘The Hellenists are heretics,’ Alexandros said petulantly.

  Maria’s lips hovered over the rim of her goblet. Like a snake striking, her hand flashed out towards Alexandros. The full measure of wine struck him directly in the face and he jerked with surprise, flung his head, and rubbed his eyes. Giorgios stared in astonishment. Maria rose without a word and went to Alexandros. She wiped at his eyes with her linen napkin. After a moment she began to laugh, an elegant, musical sound. ‘Your robe is soaked,’ she said. Her teeth were like perfect pearls. She unlaced Alexandros’s robe and yanked it to his ankles. Giorgios stood up as if frightened. Maria pulled Alexandros’s linen breeches down and took his penis in her hand. He was almost immediately erect. With her other hand she swept Alexandros’s goblet and chased silver platter to the floor; the clatter echoed harshly, as if malevolent spirits were mocking her laugh. Then she pulled her scaramangium, a tight robe of scarlet silk, up to her waist. She sat on the edge of the table, spread her legs, and guided Alexandros inside her. She gasped and wrapped her legs around his back.

  ‘Unlace me!’ she shouted to Giorgios, twice. When her scaramangium was unfastened, she threw it over her head; she wore nothing beneath. She had rounded woman’s breasts and delicate white skin, but there was an athletic, almost adolescent sinuousness to her arms and legs. With the fingernails of one hand she raked Alexandros’s pumping buttocks. Her other hand found Giorgios’s, and she placed his trembling fingers to her searing breast.

  ‘His vitals have been pierced.’ Gleb shook his head almost in rhythm with the gentle rocking of the ship in the Dnieper.

  Haraldr leaned over Jarl Rognvald and lifted the linen bandage they had applied to the gaping wound in the Jarl’s abdomen. They had given the Jarl a drink of leek-mash, and now the escaping odour told them that the organs had indeed been punctured. No man survived such injuries.

  Jarl Rognvald opened his eyes. His irises were dark, as if already clouded with a vision of the waiting spirit world. He parted his mist-blue lips in a painful effort to smile. ‘The death-fragrance,’ he said. ‘But I knew I would die before the spear struck me. Odin’s third gift is prophecy.’

  Haraldr clutched the Jarl’s cold, rough hand. He felt that if he spoke, he would release the terrible sob clawing at his throat.

  ‘You took the gift today. Didn’t you?’ The Jarl’s voice was weak but still commanding. His business in the middle realm was not done.

  Haraldr fought for control. Had he really entered the spirit world? Where had the dream ended - for surely his encounter with the beast had been a dream, a dream in an incredible instant of sleep - and the reality resumed? And he had just as surely led them out of that ring of death; other men had seen it. Yet those last moments on the beach had also been part of his dream. Where had the dream ended? And what had reddened the wolf’s jaws in that time of indescribable terror, beauty and rage? His mind or his arm?

  He did not know. But, yes, it had happened.

  Haraldr leaned next to Jarl Rognvald’s ear. This was their secret, the bond that would tie them between worlds and beyond time. ‘I met the beast. I stood. But I think there is still a test ahead of me.’

  The Jarl turned to him, his lips barely moving. ‘There is always another beast to slay. When the last beast is slain, time will end. I will be there then, to raise my sword against the last dragon. Now I know that you will be there as well. So I die happy.’

  The sob struggled out of Haraldr’s throat.

  Jarl Rognvald mustered a final, robust grip. ‘Don’t mourn this old pagan,’ he said. ‘Odin has already set my place at the benches in the Valhol. I will drink with your brother tonight. Honour me by listening to me now.’ The Jarl paused to marshal his strength. ‘I’m turning my command over to you. The entire flotilla. I’ve already talked to Gleb, and he agrees.’

  Haraldr was shocked. What did he know of command? Wasn’t it enough that he now commanded his own courage? ‘Jarl, I’m not--’

  The Jarl cut off Haraldr’s protest. ‘Yours is the blood of kings and the gods. King Haraldr Fairhair was your great-great-grandfather, and he was descended from the god Frey. That’s what gives you the power to command. It was there today, just like the Rage.’

  Is it? considered Haraldr, wondering at the person he had discovered on this bloody day, unable now to discount any possibility. Perhaps it is. Your father was a king from kings. You sat in many times on your brother’s counsel. You did not always fear to lead.

  ‘Anyway, I am not asking. My last command is that you a
ssume my duties. I’ll have you roped with the slaves if you disobey. Now bring me my sea-chest.’

  Haraldr set the weathered wooden box by Jarl Rognvald. The interior gleamed with the treasures and utilities of a lifetime. Tools, knives, gold and silver coins, a walrus tusk, a silver Hammer of Thor, glass beads, a robe of Frisian cloth and another of silk, a bear carved in wood. And a superb byrnnie with tight, heavy links, polished and lacquered like new. Haraldr hadn’t known that Jarl Rognvald had two byrnnies. He never wore this one.

  ‘I’ve talked with Gleb. He says there is a place at Kherson where Kristr’s wizards will clean the flesh off my bones and put them in another chest. Then I’ve arranged to have both chests shipped back to Norway. I won’t lie in the Rus Sea or this cursed river or Yaroslav’s dirt. I’ll go home at last.’

  Haraldr started to close the chest.

  ‘Wait. There is something in there that I won’t need in the Valhol. It belongs to you. That shirt.’

  Haraldr started to stir through the clothing in the chest. What did the Jarl mean?

  ‘The shirt the hammer sews.’

  Haraldr was speechless. He reached out tentatively and touched the cold, almost silky smooth links of the byrnnie.

  ‘Well, put it on. It’s Grik steel and construction, built to fit a Norseman’s size.’

  Haraldr slipped into the byrnnie; it fitted as well as a fine wool tunic, so snugly and evenly that its great weight was hardly noticeable. The shirt the hammer sews, the invulnerable second skin of the mightiest warriors.

  ‘Emma is her name,’ said Jarl Rognvald. ‘I bought her for you in Kiev, when I learned that you would come with me. I was going to give her to you when I knew she would fit. Now she does.’