Varanger

by Cecelia Holland

  “It must be very old, then.”

  “No.” The other man’s voice lowered, a little, admitting this flaw in his city’s perfections. “But it is built nearby to Babylon, which is the oldest city in the world. Or nearly.” His hand made a gesture minimizing any qualification. “Babylon is ruins now, and Baghdad is the heart of the world, with places of learning, and great mosques, and the richest of palaces—Novgorod would fit into a single quarter of it, a poor quarter, even Dobrynya’s palace is nothing by comparison.”

  “I’m surprised you bothered to come all this way to see it, then,” Raef said.

  “Yet I have seen it, and I tell you, you and your brother have seen nothing, until you come to Baghdad,” Rashid said. His voice turned sleek. “And you will be rewarded there as you deserve. The Caliph will give you a place in his army, higher than anything Dobrynya can offer you.”

  “We have given our pledges to Dobrynya,” Raef said.

  “Pledges to an infidel. You know Dobrynya cannot be trusted.” Rashid’s voice was slick as fish meat. “We offer you everything you wish. Gold while you are on earth, and if you die in the service of Allah, the most wonderful paradise is prepared for you, every delight, every pleasure.”

  Raef thought of what Vagn had said. “Yes. And Odin has his Valhalla, and the Christ has his heaven. It’s a wonderful place, the world after this one. Too bad you always have to die to get there.”

  Rashid’s face clenched like a fist. “You are cursed. You are an evil thing, you can believe in nothing.” He strode off, furious.

  Raef watched him go. He thought that Rashid was right, in a way. He was cursed, as Corban had been cursed; perhaps his mother had cast him off even in that instant when his father forced him into her, so that he lived forever in some gap between. He lifted his gaze again to the river. Maybe that was why he loved the water, never stopping, never resting, always hurrying on to somewhere else, girdling the world. He turned away and went slowly back toward the other men, around the campfire.

  In the morning, again, with his whole army lined up behind him, Dobrynya made a long grave speech to the river, and cast a handful of coins into it, and some salt. When they put the monochs back into the water everybody gave a cheer. The boats pushed off and Dobrynya and his horsemen rode along on the bank. On this river the current ran with them. The spring flood had subsided, leaving behind gravel shoals and impenetrable snags of brush, through which the course snaked along, sometimes over deep pools where the bottom was forty feet down, and sometimes over riffles so shallow the monochs struck and stuck and had to be pushed across. On the west bank, the land rose up into steep yellow bluffs, but on the east, the broad plain stretched off flat from the river’s edge.

  After some days of this, they came to the first rapids.

  Raef had felt them coming for a long while. Even before they came around the curve at the top of the fall, they could hear the thundering water ahead, and Dobrynya had sent orders for the boats to stop and hold against the surging river.

  Raef climbed up onto the bank, to see what lay ahead; the western bluff here was high, and the current cut in against it, foaming brown over the rocks. Soaked from the spray, he scaled up to the top and looked south over a long stretch of boiling water.

  Conn had come up after him. “What do you think?”

  Raef shook his head. “What does Dobrynya want us to do?”

  “They say we can haul them along against the far bank. Leif says he knows how.”

  “Let’s do that.”

  They went back down to the boats, still laden with their cargos. Along the east bank the river ran shallow and Leif showed them what to do—they waded into the water, which even here tugged and pushed and battered at them, and holding the boats by their gunwales walked them carefully along under the very overhang of the bank, down past the rapids.

  Raef hated this. He loved to be on the water, not in it. The river roared by over the rapids so loud he could hear nothing else, bounded up in towers of spray and crashed and slopped and whirled along in a wild tumult. With his whole heart he wanted to ride through that, and not creep along up to his armpits in muddy water, nursing the monoch along step by step, or worse, heaving and grunting it over a sandbank. Twice they had to stop and clear brush and broken trees out of the way.

  Dobrynya and his men were following them along on the top of the west bank, and got to the bottom of the rapids much ahead of them; it was after sundown before the Varanger managed to get the last of the log boats safely down and over to the western shore again.

  When they went on in the morning they had clear running, and fast. The river plunged down through the plain, broke into several streams, curled back and forth and around again on itself, leaping with fish, crowded with white birds that rose shrieking and whirling at their approach. Scuds of foam billowed up behind the flood drift in the shallows. Here and there rocks broke up from the streamway, crosswise ridges like ribs, as if the water cut down into the corpse of the earth. Raef paddled hard, kept them all at a pace even faster than the river’s. Ahead, he knew, lay another rapids, and this one, he intended to challenge.

  Conn sank down on his heels, looking out at the foaming, surging stretch of river ahead of them; from the high bank here he could see a long way south but he saw no end to the wild water. He gave Raef a keen look. “You think so?”

  “Not in one of these hulks,” Raef said. “In a boat like Pap’s— the old one, the hide boat.” His hands shaped a boat in the air before him. “They killed one of those giant oxen today, to feed us—tell Dobrynya we want the hide. Any other hide they have. Make them save the fat.”

  “We’d better get started,” Conn said. He got to his feet, glad of the chance to fight something.

  The bluffs here were high, pocked with holes and caves, and topped with close-packed trees. The flood, undercutting the bank, had toppled some trees downward, so it was easy to climb down to the river shore. There, and on a gravel shoal in the middle of the river, thickets of willow grew. They cut the longest withies they could find, bundled them up, and hauled them back up the bluff. Dobrynya’s men brought the green hides of two oxen. All the other men, Sclava and Varanger alike, drifted over to watch what Conn and Raef were doing, even Pavo.

  Conn had not built a boat in a while but he remembered it well. He and Raef worked quickly and almost without talking. They laid out the longest of the willow withies crisscross on the ground, sun-shaped, and lashed them together at the center with strips of hide, which dried quickly into a joint hard as a nut. Bowing these ribs up they bound them to a ring of willow, so the whole thing formed a bowl.

  The rest of the army circled them, watching, but Conn let no one else help them. Only, after the dark fell he had them light torches and hold them, so that he could see to work.

  When he and Raef had the round form of the boat, they turned it turtle, and stretched the larger of the green ox hides over it, with the hair out. It didn’t fit very well and they had to cut pieces from the second hide and sew them on to patch the gaps. Raef cooked the few scraps of fat until they all melted together.

  Dobrynya said, “You’re mad. You can’t do this. I’ll lose two of my best men.”

  Conn laughed. “If you have to pull us out of the water, Dobrynya, I hope I am dead.” He was carving a paddle from a piece of green wood with a nice natural curve to it. Raef was going around and around the new boat, smearing the seams with fat. Everybody else had gone to sleep, except Janka, who sat on his heels watching them, and holding the only torch.

  They slept a few hours; in the dawn Conn woke, already too excited to stay still. He took off all his clothes except his drawers, because of the heat and the good chance they would have to swim. Raef, he knew, was less sure of this than he acted. Raef too was eager, his eyes shining, a constant smile on his face. Conn stowed his gear in one of the monochs, dumped everything out of his leather belt pouch, and brought that along to bail with.

  The whole army came down to the b
ank to watch them put in. The monochs would go as before, creeping along the low bank. Just before they put the hide boat in, Janka came up to Conn’s side.

  He said, quietly, “Raven, watch.” He waved his hand up toward the bluff. “Watch.”

  “Watch what?” Conn gave him a hard look.

  Janka grimaced, out past the limit of his words, but he banged himself in the chest several times, and then pointed toward the bluff again. Saying nothing, he went back among the Sclava and the other Varanger.

  Raef was watching them. Conn said, “You see that?”

  “Let’s get going,” Raef said. He gave a snort, his mouth curling in the scraggle of his beard, contemptuous. “Nobody is going to make any trouble for us from the bluff.”

  They carried the hide boat into the reedy shallows and climbed in. Raef took the paddle. With a few hard strokes he sent them down past the gravel shoal, where the two streams of water rippled together. As soon as they were past the island, the current caught them. Raef nudged them out toward the center of the river, running clear and green past the first lips of the rocks. From this level Conn could see nothing ahead at first but the smooth breast of the water, and beyond that, some white spray leaping up, constant as a fence.

  The boat rode high and light, like a leaf. Raef steered rather than drove it; Conn, in the front, felt every tug and jar of the current. The broad sleek water swept them along. Ahead lay another of the low willow-covered islands, a deep green thicket, streaming branches out into the water. On either side the river rumbled over shallows, crisscrossed with patches of leaping white. Raef managed them quickly out past the island, and then worked the boat neatly back and forth between sudden eruptions of rock. He yelled once and Conn leaned out to fend them away from a looming tree trunk.

  The roar of the rapids ahead grew steadily louder. The river was narrowing, crowded toward the high bluff on the west. The boat bucked over a swell, and the water broke up over the side and sloshed in. Conn began to bail, first with his hands and then with the pouch. Raef yelled. Conn flung his arm out to grab hold of the side as a great crumpled rock loomed up over him, and the boat tilted up, and then abruptly slid away in a wild careening spin that tossed him sideways.

  He caught a glimpse of Raef, poised at the back of the boat, the paddle cocked, his face wild, his eyes popping out, his mouth open, every hair on end. The boat struck a wave and skidded off the other way, and Raef suddenly was stroking madly downward into the river. They swayed past another huge lip of a rock and another wave crashed into them. Raef thrust down the paddle and the boat slewed around and swooped down and up again. Conn wheeled to look out, on his knees, clutching the willow rim of the boat.

  All around them the water leapt up in glistening towers, crashing down in foaming white. On either side, in front and behind, the rocks burst up through the surface like the teeth of monsters. The thundering of the rapids was the roar of monsters. The boat climbed a slick green slope and for an instant stood on the crest of a standing wave and he saw all below him the wild water, studded with great rocks that flung it back and forth and churned it into shattered gusts of foam. He felt the air gusting in and out of his lungs and knew he laughed, exhilarated, part of this tumult, this masterless fury. Then the boat was sliding down so steep a curve of water he saw nothing ahead of him but swirling green.

  He was kneeling in water and he bailed again, taking the gust of an incoming wave square in the face as he hurled out whatever he could of the last one. They surged close against the west bank, Raef getting them somehow around an enormous snag that stuck up from a nest of boulders, and high above his head, he saw people looking out over the rim of the land at him. Remembering what Janka had said he stopped casting out water long enough to throw his hand up in a taunting salute. Then the boat rocketed down between rising ledges of rock streaming slick green weed, smashed first into one side and then into the other, and bounced out onto a pool, where the current broke up to the surface in great spreading blisters, and a boulder dam shut them off from the onrush of the river.

  He bailed. The eddy carried them slowly around the pocket of water, toward where the river poured on over a half-submerged ledge. He looked over at Raef and saw him scrubbing his face with his hand.

  “How do we get out of here?”

  Raef gave a crow of laughter. He was soaked head to foot, his shirt plastered against him, his hair and beard matted to his skull. “Only one way—straight down. We have to get the right channel. It’s worse, up ahead—watch out—” He took up the paddle again and thrust it over the side of the boat.

  His first hard stroke sent them over the edge of the pool and down a narrow twisting run white from edge to edge with foam. The rocks loomed in close overhead like a tunnel. Streamers of slimy weed whacked them in the face. Abruptly their course veered right, and Raef leaning into the paddle swung them around out of the foam, out of the deep water. Conn wailed, hapless; they were losing the river, but where the river ran was a jumble of rocks.

  An eddy carried them backward a few feet, and then Raef thrust the boat hard forward onto broad pebbly shallows, propping them along like a bird with one leg. They shuddered across a gravel bar, and then spun off again, bouncing down a ladder of rapids, turning so that when they reached the bottom Raef was in front. They passed under a fall of water that hammered down on Conn’s head and shoulders so hard he could not breathe. Raef whirled them around again with what was left of the paddle, which had split its length, and got them out of the waterfall. Conn shook his hair out of his eyes and bailed. The boat dragged, heavy with its burden of water. It rocked up in front, standing almost on end, and he clutched at the rim and missed and fell into Raef and they grabbed each other, half-drowning, and then the boat was diving forward again and they rolled over each other up against the front, pitching down and down. A wave broke green over them. Conn swallowed river water.

  Raef shouted something. Abruptly they were gliding smoothly out into the sunlight. Dazed, Conn realized the thunder of the rapids was fading. He got up on his knees, letting Raef squirm out from under him. His ears were still ringing. His hands were scraped bloody. They were wallowing along in a boat half full of water over a stretch of flat blue river, far from the bluff, the sun beating down on them from a hard blue sky.

  “Are we through?”

  Raef was leaning back against the side of the boat, his anus spread out along the rim. “For a while.” He looked dreamily down the river, his face soft. “Until after the city up there.”

  Conn gave a startled look down the river, seeing no sign of any city. His gaze swept up the western bluff, where he had noticed the people watching. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s see what’s over there.”

  “The boat’s sinking, anyway,” Raef said.

  He worked the remnant of the paddle awhile, and Conn bailed. As Raef had said, water was leaking in fast through all the seams in the boat. Two of the ribs had broken and the hide was pouched inward. Still they kept it afloat, bailing and paddling, traveling slowly down the river until they reached the west bank. The bluff rose high over them, small trees sprouting out of it here and there; along the yellow shore, the willows grew dense as a hedge. They pulled the boat out onto the shoal, and Conn looked up at the bluff.

  “How can we get up there?”

  Raef shrugged; with his fingers he peeled his soaked shirt away from his body.

  “You’re no good at this on land, are you,” Conn said. Raef laughed. Picking out a way along the face of the bluff, they started upward.

  C H A P T E R T E N

  Scaling along the crumbling yellow face of the bluff, hanging on to bushes and the bare earth, they at last reached a deep runoff channel, and climbed more easily up through that to the top. The trees on the crest of the bluff were noisy with birds, rising in raucous gusts out of the branches. Conn walked away from the river, the trees thinning out quickly as he left the water behind, and came out on an open meadow. He wore nothing but his drawers, now drying ou
t, and the sun burned his shoulders.

  From the north came a distant shouting, and a dust cloud hung in the air, but he could see nothing else of what was going on up there. Raef came up beside him, raking his hair back; the sun was drying them both out, and his hair stuck together like clumps of white moss. He pulled up the tail of his shirt and wiped his face. “Dobrynya and Pavo,” he said, nodding toward the north. “Chasing those people off. Janka’s people, likely.” He pointed off ahead of them. “See there?”

  Conn turned toward the broad treeless slope running westerly away from him, scored deep and broad with another brush-filled ravine. He shaded his eyes with his hand against the blazing overhead sun. On the far bank of the ravine, he could make out a herd of horses, close held, which meant not wild, and some blocky shapes he thought were small houses.

  “Come on,” he said, and started at a jog through the high grass.

  Raef followed him. As they drew closer to the ravine Conn could see people over there, too, now, standing in a little group on the far side of the horses, facing away to the north. Watching whatever was happening there. He reached the ravine and slid down the bank, sending a shower of dirt and stones ahead of him into the tiny pebbly watercourse at the bottom. Raef on his heels, he clambered up the far side, where some animals had worn a long slanting trail down.

  They came up onto the flat ground again close enough to the horses that the herd began to shift and stir within their rope fence. On the far side of them, he saw the blocky shapes he had thought were houses were wagons, four of them, with high square covers. One of the horses let out a warning neigh that rang in the broad air.

  Raef yelled something. Conn waved to him to stay where he was, at the back edge of the pen, and ran around the rope fence toward the far side. He wanted the horses to run north, not south. Ahead, the people out there past the wagons were turning around toward him, warned by the horses, and a faint scream went up. They were women, mostly, women and children. He reached the north edge of the pen and pulled the rope down.