They brought the horses inside the snow fort, and, as the night settled over them, and the cold, they ate the bread and cheese Thorfinn had sent with them, told stories to scare each other, made the fire crackle and leap, and slept finally bundled up in their furs and packed in together like a litter of puppies. Raef could hardly sleep; all the night long, wolves howled in the forest and closer, and once he heard something snuffling along the outside of the snow wall, something big. He dozed, and dreamt of his mother, as he often saw her, tall as heaven, her head among the stars, her feet upon the mountains, walking away from him. He was too small. He could not keep up with her. He woke with an ache in his chest and a fleeting, immeasurable sorrow. Overhead, blue and silver curtains of the armor-light shimmered over the black arch of the sky.
He lay on his back thinking of his mother, her eyes gray like Conn’s eyes, her hair long and thick and black; Raef with his pale hair and blue eyes looked nothing like her. Every time she saw him, she must have remembered his horrible getting. He did not understand how she could ever love him. The sky danced above him with the light of stars. The sky was the same here as it had been on the island, which reassured him. Nothing else was the same. He searched for Corban’s stars, the wanderers, but saw none of them.
He dozed; when he woke again, just before dawn, snow was falling. Conn was hustling everybody up, his voice urgent.
The sledge was nearly full of wood and hastily they put on all they had already cut. The wind was rising, and the snow fell in whirls and sudden gusts, sharp-edged, whistling. Janka climbed onto the seat of the sledge. “Horses take us back,” he said, over and over. “Horses take us back.” They got the sledge moving and started off across the lake toward Holmgard, Raef and Conn crowded in beside Janka.
The snow fell thick and white, and the wind came roaring straight into their faces. The horses trudged along, their heads down, but as they pulled on they tried to move away from the wind. They drifted off the way to Holmgard, veering out toward the middle of the lake. In the white blast of the snow nobody could see anything anyway. Raef could feel they were off course, and finally he climbed down from the sledge and went up to the front horse, and led it along, forcing it around again to the north, into the wind.
“Horse take us home,” Janka shouted. His teeth chattered. He was bundled to the eyes in his cloak, plastered with snow, crouched on the seat like a white boulder. Conn came up to walk beside Raef.
“We should stop.”
“No,” Raef said. “It’s not that far. We can make it.” He thought if they tried to stay out on the lake they would die.
The cold pierced him through, as if his flesh became ice inside his clothes, his feet solid and unfeeling. He clutched the horse’s bridle and forced the team on toward the narrowing end of the lake, into the river. His fingers began to throb with pain and then turned numb. The wind shrieked around him, battered at him. He sensed nothing before him but the blank whiteness. They should have stopped. If they had stopped he would be asleep by now. He was walking into nothing, endlessly into emptiness. Every step heavier. His eyes were full of snow. He heard voices in the wind, laughter, hands pulling at him, his feet like weights at the end of his legs. A mocking whisper just below hearing. Lie down, give up. Conn appeared on the other side of the front team, head down, shoulders hunched, and plodded along with him. Raef dragged each foot forward with an effort that drained him. He could not stop or Conn would stop. On the far side of the front team his cousin just a dim moving lump. He hung on the horse to stay on his feet. He would not stop before Conn stopped.
Then ahead of them snow was cascading through a hazy yellow light, and a real voice yelled. They trudged up to the bank of Holmgard and into the light of torches and a dozen men shouting. “You’re alive! You’ve made it! We thought—we thought—” He plodded on, still filled with white and cold, into the hall, to the warmth of the fire there, and the red-gold warmth spilled into his mind, flowing light and heat into every corner of himself, until his frozen center thawed, and he could turn to Conn beside him, and laugh.
Coming through the storm had matted Conn’s beard into a black thicket. The next day he had Raef cut it off, honing his knife before he started and a few times during. Raef was surprised at how much it changed his looks; Conn’s whole face looked thinner and stronger. Conn rolled up the cut-off hair, twisted it and knotted it until it was a nub, and kept it in his purse.
Raef never cut his hair. He combed it out as much as he could, and braided it up, but he thought perhaps there was some essence of himself in every hair, and it would be a mistake to cut it. His beard grew slowly and thin, anyway, and he braided that too, to keep it out of his way.
C H A P T E R F I V E
For three days they were penned into the hall, fighting the storm just to go out and piss, and then the weather grew kind again. Raef had gotten into the habit of helping Janka with the horses, to have something to do; he went out very early on the first clear morning, before the sun came up, to haul hay and water.
The dawn was just breaking. The night sky still blazed above him like a great crackling icy white fire. The fresh snow squeaked under his feet. The horses’ lean-to, with its walls packed deep with snow, kept surprisingly warm, and the half-dozen shaggy little beasts who came plodding out of it at the sight of him turned the air around them into a misty steam, that caught the first light, so they seemed wrapped in halos. He smashed the ice on the water trough, and while they shuffled and plodded up to drink, nickering, he went around to the hay pile.
Janka was already forking out hay. Raef looked up into the sky, and there, at the edge of the horizon, above the top of the earthworks, was the great blue-white wanderer, Corban’s favorite star.
A start of excitement went through him. “Here,” he said. “You do this.” He thrust the fork into the hay and went over to the earthworks and climbed it. There were trails all over it, like a net, and he followed one up to the top, where he could see the horizon better.
The sun was just below the edge of the sky. In the purple flag of light above it, the blazing blue-white wanderer shone like a crystal teardrop. As he walked, more of the horizon came into his view. He let out a gasp. Right next to the great blue-white star were two more of the wanderers, in a row, like steps of light leading down to the sun.
His heart leapt; he felt as if Corban had somehow reached across the world and touched him on the shoulder. The wind slashed through his shirts and wraps, and to keep warm he walked on toward the highest part of the wall, behind Dobrynya’s compound, where he would see best. Then, to his surprise, he saw someone already there ahead of him, hunched up inside a mountain of fur robes.
He knew, even before he reached him, who it was. He said, “Peace, Rashid. Have you come to see the wanderers?”
The man of Baghdad jumped, startled, and looked up out of his nest of furs. “Raef,” he said. “Well, I’m glad to see you. Yes, I’m here to observe the conjunction, Allah be praised.” His eyes were sharp. “Yet I’m surprised one of . . . that you know how amazing this is.”
Raef sank down on his heels next to Rashid, not wanting to sit on the ice. “Sometimes one of us ignorant people just happens to notice things.”
Rashid said, “I apologize. I mean to be courteous.” His arm shot out, pointing into the east. “They are coming. Behold, the glories of God.”
Above the pink edge of the eastern horizon the line of the wandering stars burned like lamps, half-veiled in the gathering sunlight. The thin edge of the new moon hung just above them. It was like something written in the sky in a strange language. Raef again thought of Corban, sending a message to him, some promise, some direction. He felt suddenly, unbearably, the urge to be home again. But he had no home.
“Zuhra,” Rashid said, in a placid voice. “Queen of the sky.” He held up a round metal plate at arm’s length, laid the edge against the highest of the wandering stars, and then squinted toward the runes on the disk’s edge. With the other hand he scrib
bled on a bit of birch bark laid against his knee.
“How beautiful she is.” He lowered the metal disk and stared at the stars. “You see, she sits before her mirror, making herself beautiful for the day to come. And behind her, Mushtarie, the king, in his grandeur. And see after him Zuhal, the old man, hobbling along.”
“How do you know all this?” Raef asked. He was watching the three stars fade into the daylight. Rashid was right, he, Raef, lived in a cloud of unknowing; he had never even guessed these stars had names.
“In Baghdad we have a palace where nothing is done but the translation of old writings by the wisest men of the past. And we have found the wisdom of the ages, which includes the working of the stars.”
He cleared his throat, and Raef knew he was about to educate him. Rashid said, sonorously, “They don’t really wander aimlessly through the sky, these stars. They travel in circles, as all objects must that move by natural motion. It seems as if they wander because their circles are connected at their centers to other circles, sometimes very many circles.”
“Why?” Raef asked.
Rashid looked down his nose at him. “Because that explains how they move.”
“There are others, too,” Raef said. “What does it mean, that these three are so close together?”
Rashid turned back to the sky, his face tipped up, his eyes wide. The daylight grew steadily stronger; the stars were fading away. Everything seemed much more ordinary. Eventually, he said, “I don’t know. Something.”
Raef choked back a laugh. Rashid gave him a dark look.
“You are Christian, surely.”
“Christian,” Raef said. “No. I have no god.”
The other man’s jaw fell open. He shrank off a little, frowning. “That is blasphemy.”
“Whatever it is,” Raef said, “I see that there are gods, like the four faces under the oak trees, but none of them are mine. Who is your god?”
“There is only one god,” Rashid said, straightening up, zealous, “and his name is Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.” He studied Raef a moment, very grave. “God chose Mohammed, peace be upon him, the holiest of men, to bring His last, final revelation into the world. What Mohammed has given us is God’s plan for the whole world. Thus may all mankind be saved and perfected.”
“What does God tell you to do?” Raef asked swiftly.
“Five things. To acknowledge Him as God. To pray to Him. To keep holy the month of Ramadan, when His word was revealed to Mohammed. To go once in every man’s lifetime to Mecca, the holy city, where Mohammed received His word. And to give alms to the poor.” Rashid held up five fingers, triumphant. “Very simple, very pure.”
Raef said nothing, disappointed. Rashid watched him intently, and finally said, “What do you say, Raef Corbansson?”
Raef said, “I don’t see why you needed a god to tell you this.”
Rashid’s cheeks flushed dark red above the graying strands of his beard, and his eyes glistened with temper. “You blaspheme. Every word from your ignorant pagan mouth is a blasphemy.” He got up in a swirl of his white robes and heavy cloak and stalked off along the icy earthworks, toward Dobrynya’s compound.
Raef stayed where he was. He knew he had hurt Rashid’s feelings, but he had expected something more. Something new. He thought about the Christian god, the Father god, who wanted the same things, actually, as Rashid’s god did—faith, prayer, taking care of little people. As if this were all a man could do. Building a nest of small dependable virtues, while the real world went roaring on outside.
Something in this reminded him of the basileus. He took the gold coin from his belt pouch and turned it over in his hand, looking at the face on either side, the one haloed, the other crowned; he was beginning to understand what it meant.
At sunset he went out with Janka again. The cold seemed to be breaking; there was no wind, and a little fog had gathered along the ground, knee-high. While Janka watered the horses Raef dragged the small sled down toward the river, where Thorfinn kept a great store of hay. He heaped the sled high with swags of the hay, cold and smelling of snow, but as he bent to pick up the towrope again, he looked into the western sky and stopped short.
Above the last purple stain left from the going down of the sun, two more of the wandering stars shone, the red one, which he had seen both brighter and dimmer than this, and the tiny one that never got too far from the sun at all. He thought that was all of them, the ones that appeared now in the morning, and these ones coming out at night. They were all together now, for some reason, hovering around the sun like an escort, some when it went down, and some when it rose. The moon, too, he remembered, as if all the great lights held council.
Rashid had not known this, even with his star measurer and his house of wisdom; for all his story of the lady with the mirror, it was just a story: Rashid knew no more than Raef did. It broke in on him that nobody really knew anything. He stood staring toward the horizon, and the immensity of the world overcame him. Through the eye at the center of his mind he saw the whole vast explosion, the myriad stars in their wheels, each one a life far huger than his own, millions on millions, and the presumption that anybody could ever understand them pierced him through like an invisible radiance.
Is this god? he thought, dizzy. Is this what god means?
His astonishment faded into the dull ordinary fatigue of the day. Into his usual fretful momentary self. The stars went down with the sun. He shook himself back to the now, bent and picked up the rope of the sled, and went off to feed the horses. Within a few nights, anyway, all the wandering stars had gone their own ways.
Every day now, the sun rose higher into the sky, and stayed longer, and the snow began to melt, dripping off the roofs of the houses and turning to filthy slush where people walked. The horse pen was a swamp and Thorfinn had them move the horses to pasture just outside the earthworks. The frozen river groaned and the ice cracked and heaved up, erasing Conn’s sledge road, creasing the ice into ridges of dirty chunks. The wind swept up from the south, warm as love. One morning Conn noticed a green fuzz all over the branches of the tall elm tree by Thorfinn’s hall, tiny shoots coming up through the thinning snow. He went into the hall, and found Thorfinn gone, and none there but the three women, working at their looms.
His heart bounded; he went over by Alla, with her golden braids, and stood watching her hands move with the shuttle. She began to blush, although she never took her gaze from the work; she reached out and moved the beater up, to tighten the warp, and Conn put his hand out and touched hers.
“Alla,” he said.
“Please.” She licked her lips. Her voice was low. “Please.”
He wondered what she was asking; she would not look at him. Then the door opened, and Helgi came in, and it was all gone anyway.
“Come on,” Helgi said. “Help me get these bundles up to the pelt house.” Conn gave her one last longing look and went away.
Dobrynya’s pelt house, which Pavo’s guardsmen watched over night and day, was at one end of his compound, a square made of thick logs, its door clasped in iron and always locked. When Thorfinn sent in a day’s worth of pelts, the guard made a great ceremony of unlocking the door, and a scribe who sat always just inside the door counted every pelt and made a tally on a stick; the stick, which had a loop of leather around the end, hung on the wall behind him with several other tallies. Thorfinn’s tally, Raef saw, was longer and more notched than any of the others.
The scribe took a clean tally, and on it made a replica of the cuts he had just made in Thorfinn’s master stick, and gave it to Raef to take back to the house of the red sun. Raef stuck it in his belt and went out, and the door shut behind him, and the lock clicked shut.
The sun was lowering, but the courtyard was still full of people, coming and going, the Sclava lords in their fancy coats, each surrounded by his underlings, and Dobrynya’s slaves. Near the gate, where the guards kept a brazier for warmth, Raef found Rashid, sitting on the ground, writing on
a sheet of birch bark. He had brought out a carpet from the hall to sit on, and a cushion for his back, and was sitting close on the brazier, but still he paused every few moments to blow on his hands to warm them up.
Raef sat down on his heels next to him. “You should wear gloves.” He himself thrust his hands inside his cloak, up under his armpits.
Rashid said, “I can’t write with gloves on.” He stretched his back and shoulders. “But soon, you know, the warm weather will come again, praises to Allah.” He smiled at Raef. “You’ve been busy. It’s been a great season for fur, I see.”
“I don’t know, never having seen another. But I suppose so.” Raef turned his head a little, to look at the little stack of birchbark sheets next to Rashid; writing seemed to him very useful and he wished he knew how to do it. The marks on the thin gray sheets were not like the runes he knew from Denmark, sharp-angled and harsh, hacked hard-edged into stones with chisels. Rashid’s script was beautiful, with long curves, loops, coils. The charcoal gave them a subtle shading. He watched the other man draw another swooping elegant line on the brittle gray surface.
“That’s very nice,” he said. “Like clouds, or the ripples of rivers.”
Rashid laughed, looking quickly up at him, as if to catch him in a joke. Seeing Raef was serious, his laugh turned into a snort of disdain. “It is the writing of God. It is more perfect and beautiful than any cloud. You must lift your mind above the ordinary things of the world.”
Raef shrugged. The ordinary things of the world seemed amazing enough to him. “What will you do with it all, when you’re done? Will you ever be done?”
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