“This,” he shouted at them, “is how Northmen deal with the Pechenegs and always will!” And he spat at them.
Throughout the Pecheneg camp now arose a shrill keening, growing louder as more and more took up the cry. The great khan was dead.
Nothing could be done now until he was wailed over for many days and finally buried with his horses and his women, in a mound by the bank of the Dnieper far to the south. Meanwhile a murderous struggle over the succession would begin at once among the lesser khans, who were all his sons or grandsons by various wives and concubines. Much blood would flow before one of them emerged victorious.
“Grand Prince, look there—” said a Rus warrior to Yaroslav, pointing toward the west. We all looked and saw a dust cloud, which soon grew into a line of horsemen, hundreds of them, racing over the plain. The Pechenegs ran in terror, leaving behind everything but the remains of their khan. And this time it was not the wily feigned retreat for which they were so famous, but the genuine thing.
Within minutes not a live Pecheneg could be seen from the walls of Kiev.
“Our cursed luck!” said Bryacheslav, Prince of Volhynsk, to Pozvizd, Prince of Izyaslavl, as they reined in their sweating mounts. “To have come all this way and missed the fun!”
19
A Skull and other Matters
After the flight of the Pechenegs, Harald, Yaroslav, and I rode back across the littered plain to fetch Eustaxi from Vyshgorod and unite him with his father. We took armed men with us, as we were uncertain what sort of reception to expect from the Swedes.
We ought not to have worried. They mobbed Harald as he rode through the gate, holding onto his stirrup, calling him ‘Jarl’ and ‘Boyar’, and begging his forgiveness. Helgi Whale-Belly held up Eilif’s head on the point of a spear.
“He lied to us, Jarl Harald,” pleaded Helgi. “He came out of the woods, where he’d been hiding, just as we were making ready to attack the camp. He called us fools, for we’d be massacred, he said, while you and your men plundered the khan’s tent and made off with all the treasure. Well, we didn’t know what to think, for it’s plain you’ve always favored your own men over us. He convinced us to stay back and wait for you to be killed. Pardon us, Harald, we were too hasty. See, we’ve punished the liar as he deserved. Now let us be your men. One druzhina, one captain!” These last words were taken up as a chant by all the others crowding around.
Harald looked grim; I had an idea what he was thinking. We had only ourselves to blame for this. Allowing the Norwegians to be a guard within the guard had been a mistake from the beginning, it was easy to see that now.
To the Swedes’ entreaty Harald replied only, “You’ll oblige me by helping the people of Vyshgorod to bury their dead and repair their houses.”
Thinking this to mean they were forgiven, they rushed to obey.
We proceeded to the church to see Eustaxi. He was feverish and seemed weaker than he had been the day before, but he understood us when we told him of our victory, and he was anxious to see his father. We carried him to Kiev.
It would be hard to say which of the two looked more pitiful. Mstislav lay in bed in the bishop’s house while healing-women plastered him from head to toe with moss and mud, and others massaged his shoulders. I was there and saw their faces—father and son, each so full of pain at seeing the other’s condition, and neither admitting to being hurt himself. We shooed the women out and left them alone. What words passed between them, no one would ever know.
Throughout the remainder of the day the necessaries were seen to. By that I mean bringing into the city whatever food could be found before the wolves made off with it, and disposing of the dead before they poisoned the air. Of these, the Christians, including about fifty of Harald’s men, were buried all together in a common grave, to which, in sorrow, I added Einar’s slight remains, laying his cross-shaped sword on his breast so that, whether bound for Heaven or Valhalla, he would be ready. As an offering to the ghosts of our dead, the hundred ‘noble’ prisoners were variously burnt, impaled, used for archery practice, sawn limb from limb, and dragged to death by horses while the good people of Kiev howled curses and, for a little while at least, forgot their empty bellies. We flung the bodies into the Dnieper. Rus towns and nomad wagon-camps from here to the Black Sea would watch those swollen corpses floating by and rejoice or grieve accordingly.
Late in the afternoon, towers of purple cloud swept up from the south as if by command and poured out a drenching rain that scoured the battlefield clean.
During the days that followed, I plunged into constant activity. With the foragers I combed the fields, with the huntsmen I prowled the forests, and waded into the streams with the fishermen. Of game and fish we found sufficient, but of grain and fruits there was little. Still, if we could not do much for the Kievans’ bellies, something, at least, could be done for their souls. On the morning following our victory a solemn thanksgiving mass was held in the open air where all could attend. The four sons of Vladimir the Great knelt side by side before a make-shift altar: Pozvizd and Bryacheslav, both strong men and handsome; Yaroslav, bearing himself with a palpable air of pride, for, despite his lameness and his bookish soul, he had shown real bravery in battle; and kneeling beside him a pathetic and chastened Mstislav.
Abbot Feodosy and his monks were sent for by Yaroslav—I carried the invitation myself. Those of them who agreed to come up (which were by no means all) emerged blinking like moles into the light. Yaroslav met Feodosy at the gate to the citadel, knelt at his feet, kissed him, and personally led him inside to the wild cheering of the populace.
That same evening a victory feast was held in the palace. We called it a feast, although there was scarcely a drop to drink of wine or ale. I chanted two victory odes, which I had composed in haste that very afternoon; one praising Harald and the other Yaroslav. Harald presented me with my twenty silver grivny, while Yaroslav was so pleased with his poem that he promised me a horse from his own stables and a falcon from his mews as soon as we returned to Novgorod.
When it came time for the drinking of toasts, we were embarrassed, as I have said above, by the lack of strong drink. But Harald summoned his cup-bearer anyway. That youth produced, with a flourish, a round white bowl, filled it with wine, and proffered it to Yaroslav. It was, of course, a skull.
I had watched Harald earlier in the day when he sawed the cap off above the eyebrows, scooped out the brains, peeled away the scalp, and dried the bone over a slow fire. The wine was what Christmen call the blood of their Lord—a jar of which the bishop of Kiev had hoarded in secret. Harald, with his usual directness, threatened to chop the man’s hands off if he didn’t hand it over.
Yaroslav, for some reason thinking that it was Eilif’s skull, recoiled; but we assured him that it belonged to none other than his enemy, Tyrakh Khan.
“Drink, Grand Prince,” said Harald, bowing low, “and pay the debt of blood owed to your grandfather Svyatoslav’s ghost.”
Yaroslav looked as if he really would rather not, but took a small sip and passed the bowl to Mstislav (who by now was recovered enough to sit at table). With a bearish growl, he tipped back his head and drained it at a gulp. “Never was wine sweeter, by God! Fill her again!” he roared.
He held the last bowlful to the pale lips of Eustaxi, his dear son, who lay on a pallet beside the bench, so weak that he could scarce lift his head. The wine ran down his cheek.
If Mstislav’s son was a sorry sight, Yaroslav’s was a proud one. Volodya’s heroism was on every Kievan’s lips. When their mayor was killed early in the siege, said the bishop, it was this lad of twelve who took command of the defenses, refusing to hear of surrender, and eating never a mouthful more than the poorest of his men. “And at the end! Only a heart inspired by God could have dared such a deed as he did!” the bishop cried, clasping his hands together.
While his praises were being sung, the boy kept his eyes fixed on the floor and blushed. How splendid he looked in his dark blue caftan;
his scarlet cloak, trimmed with gold and fastened with a ruby clasp; his boots of soft yellow leather; his tall sable hat. It was the costume he had worn for his audience with the emperor of the Greeks.
Yaroslav gazed on his son with fond, proud eyes as though unable to believe that he had fathered this image of perfection. And the thought occurred to me—surely, for the first time in my young life—that I would most likely have sons someday and that I would give anything in the world to have one like Vladimir Yaroslavich.
(What pain it is, now in my old age, to think how soon fate would make him hate me; and how one day, not many years later, we would face each other in bitter war, he on the deck of his warship and I commanding the flame cannons that guarded the harbor of Miklagard.)
“Hallo, Odd Tangle-Hair, my friend!” came a voice behind me. “You here, too? By God, is good to see you, ha, ha!”
He had grown so thin that I barely recognized Stavko Ulanovich as he bounded up to me, as usual speaking, chuckling, and salivating all at once. I hadn’t known that he was traveling with the convoy. He embraced me with one arm, the other was in a sling.
“You’re wounded.”
“Ah. Is nothing, I am lucky. Was bloody murder, my friend, when they jumped us. And me having to protect not only myself but fifteen screaming women. Beauties they were. Cost me fortune. Now poor things are skin and bone; I could not give ’em away. Well, not to complain. Scrawny woman better than none at all, eh? Ha, ha! I’ve got ’em locked up. You come around whenever you want and help yourself.”
To return to the Swedes, Harald rightly argued that they were spoiled beyond recovery and that men even once guilty of disobedience on the battlefield could never be trusted again. They made matters worse for themselves by looting houses in the town, brawling in public, and raping a number of women. Kiev to them was just another captured city and they felt free to treat it so.
Harald had the solution.
When the following Sunday came round, all the druzhiniks were ordered to attend a special mass for the dead. Yaroslav was insistent that the Swedes be given a last chance to confess and take holy communion, even if it was all for the sake of a trap. When it came their turn, they entered the cathedral, stacking their arms outside. When they came out again it was to find their arms gone and a cordon of Rus warriors surrounding them. We cut down every one of them while the Kievans looked on in dismay.
No doubt this was another example of Harald’s faithlessness, but this time, in my opinion, justified. Yaroslav later pretended to be shocked by the deed, though in fact he had agreed.
The day of the Swedish massacre happened also to be Harald’s seventeenth birthday. I, myself, turned twenty a week later. Prince Eustaxi would have been twenty-seven in the same month had he lived; but, after clinging to life for so many weeks, he died quietly in the night while his father slept beside him.
Mstislav was laid low by this. He had stayed on in Kiev only because his son was too weak to be moved. Now, sorrowing, he made ready to take him home for burial. It was a sad remnant of his once proud army that straggled out of Kiev on a bleak October morning. What had begun as a bold, if underhanded, grab for power ended as a funeral cortege.
Had Yaroslav wanted then and there to scrap the treaty with his half-brother and declare himself Grand Prince of all Rus (as he was already being called), who could have faulted him? But, despite Harald’s urging, Yaroslav would not break his Christian oath just because his rival was a beaten man. Whether ‘Yaroslav the Wise’ would be better called ‘Yaroslav the Fool’, I leave to others to decide.
By the end of October, the prince was eager to return to the comforts of his familial hearth. He had already sent the Novgorod merchants back to the city with news of our victory and of Harald’s promotion to command of the druzhina. (The true version of Eilif’s death was covered up to spare Jarl Ragnvald’s feelings.) For our transport he commandeered twenty-five strugi, promising to return them to their owners next spring. But the common people, when they got wind of this, came crowding round the palace to beg their prince not to abandon them. When he came out and tried to reason with them, they drowned his words with shouts, and actually menaced him. The horrors of the Pecheneg raid were still too fresh in their minds. Their prince must spend the winter with them, they insisted—he and his miraculous son and the giant captain of his druzhina. They needed this time for forging weapons, drilling the militia, and rebuilding their herd of cavalry horses. If Yaroslav tried to desert them now, as God was their witness, they would burn all his ships!
And, at last, though he longed to return to his books, his comforts, and, most of all, to the arms of his loving and faithful wife, Yaroslav yielded.
Now, Harald, too, was anxious to be quit of Kiev and go home to take more sweet, stolen kisses from Yelisaveta, but like it or not he must stay with his prince. Which meant that I would be staying, too. Of the three of us, only I was content. I’d succeeded in pushing Inge and everything to do with her far to the back of my mind. That had cost me an effort and I was in no hurry now to go home and face it all again.
20
I Swear a Great Oath
The winter passed pleasantly enough. I devoted much of it to improving my Slavonic with the assistance of a girl from the town whom I slept with.
And I spent much time in the company of young Volodya. He too was happy to be staying in Kiev. Novgorod, with his mother, nurse, and tutor, held no charms for him, while here were chances for danger and adventure. The Pechenegs disappointed him by never once showing their faces, but still there was tracking and hunting, skating, skiing, and sleigh-riding to occupy him—all of which he was keen on.
Harald often invited himself along on these outings. From the start he patronized the boy, pretending they were great chums while never missing a chance to show him the ‘correct’ way to draw a bowstring, to build a camp fire, to launch a falcon (which Harald himself had not known before a year ago). Volodya bore all this patiently enough, but when Harald boasted to him one day, “You shall soon have me for a brother-in-law, young’un, what d’you say to that?” the boy regarded him silently for a moment and replied:
“Eilif once said the same thing to me, friend Harald—those very words—and look at him now.”
“What?” Harald spluttered, “Why, damn you—!”
Volodya turned his back and marched away, leaving the captain of the druzhina fuming.
What led up to this boast of Harald’s was the following. The previous night Yaroslav had drunk rather deeper than he was used to and was in an expansive mood. (Barrels of wine and ale had, by now, been brought in from the towns upriver.) As we all sat talking after supper, he turned to Harald suddenly and said:
“Look here, Harald Sigurdsson—been meaning to bring this up, waiting for the proper moment. You needn’t answer right away but give it a thinking over, will you? I mean to say, Eilif’s dead now, isn’t he, God help his soul, and so his betrothal to my Yelisaveta—well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? But still I favor the idea of uniting the captain of the druzhina to my family by a marriage. Now, I know what you’re going to say—she is a bit wild, feuds with her mother and that sort of thing, but she’s young, she’ll settle down, and she is a lovely thing to look at, now you must admit that. Of course, Ingigerd has it in for you a bit, hasn’t she? Oh, I notice things, you know, though really I don’t know why. She has her moods and quirks. Well, I suppose, married to a man so much older than herself, and Novgorod’s a gloomy place, I’m the first to admit it. Sometimes, you know, I think I should have been a monk, I crave the solitary life. But we princes have our duty, like it or not. We must father more princes to take our place—and what a prince I have fathered, eh? What a young lion!” He embraced his son, who sat quietly beside him, and kissed his cheeks. “Now, what was I saying—oh yes, your marriage to Yelisaveta. We’ll bring Ingigerd around to it, just you let me handle that part of it. But here I am running ahead of myself and don’t even know if you favor the match or not.”
He paused and looked at Harald expectantly.
“You do me great honor, Prince,” replied Harald gravely. “Though I have only a passing acquaintance with your daughter, she seems to me a virtuous and good-hearted girl, as befits the child of such a father. With your permission I will begin my suit the very day we return to Novgorod, and furthermore I will make it my business to gain the friendship of the Lady Ingigerd, whose dislike of me I find both painful and mystifying.”
He avoided my eyes for fear he would burst out laughing in the old man’s face.
Ye gods, I thought, if only Dag were here! This smooth piece of work is worthy of the master himself!
Inside him I knew that Harald was shouting with glee, and, as soon as Yaroslav had limped off to bed, he did precisely that: shouted, pranced, and drank until dawn in a state of mind that seemed equal parts joy and madness.
Without his knowledge, Yaroslav’s words had had an effect on me, too. As I said, I had succeeded pretty well over the winter in driving Inge from my thoughts. Novgorod and its intrigues seemed very far away, and the question of Inge’s part in those various attacks on Harald was no more to me than a sort of weary perplexity, when I allowed myself to think of it at all. But the first breeze of spring carried the scent of her perfume on it and seductive memories invaded my waking and my sleep: of Inge’s skin, slick with sweat, in the steam bath; of the nervous excitement before each tryst; of late nights sipping wine before her fire; of rolling in her bed while good Saint Irene, veil over face, saw nothing.
The Ice Queen Page 19