Byzantium

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  “I am thirsty,” Harald declared at last. We had walked the length and breadth of the market, enduring shrugs, silence, and insults for our trouble. “Some öl, I think, will help us decide what to do.”

  Crossing the market square, we directed ourselves to one of the larger houses, distinguished by the small mountain of ale casks stacked haphazardly outside. Several women were sitting on the bench, watching the activity of the market and enjoying the thin sun. At our approach, they began preening for us, to show their virtues to better advantage, I suppose. They were odd-looking women: black, black hair as fine as spider wisp, and deep dark eyes lightly aslant in full-cheeked faces round as moons, firm-fleshed short limbs with skin the colour of almonds.

  The king paused to observe them, but found little to his liking and walked on into the house, which had been constructed on the order of a drinking hall, but with an upper gallery where, from sleeping places like stalls, people could look down on the proceedings below. Long benches lined the walls, with boards and trestles set up around a large square central hearth. A few men sat at the tables eating and drinking; more sat on the benches with jars in their hands. The huge room was loud and murky and dim, for there was neither windhole in the wall, nor smokehole in the roof, and everyone seemed bent on shouting at one another. One step into the room and I felt the gorge rise in my throat from the stink of vomit, dung, and urine. Filthy straw covered the floor, and skinny dogs slunk along the walls and cringed in the far corners.

  Harald Bull-Roar had no difficulty in making his presence known. He strode boldly into the room and cried, “Heya! Bring me öl!” The whole house shook with the force of this demand, and three dishevelled men scrambled to serve him—each with a jar of ale and several large cups. They sloshed the rich dark beer into cups and thrust them into our hands. I got one, but Thorkel and Harald got two each, which they guzzled down greedily—to the ardent encouragement of the jar-bearers, who vied with one another to keep our cups supplied.

  I drank my first bowl at once, and then sipped the second slowly and looked around. There were men from many different tribes and races, most of them new to me: big, burly, fair-haired men dressed in pelts; short swarthy men with quick slender hands and hooded eyes above noses like hawk beaks; long-limbed, slender pale-skinned men in long, loose-fitting clothes and soft boots of dyed leather; and others whose appearance made me think of arid desert places. The only tribes I recognized were either men from our own ships, or other Danes. There were no Britons or Irish at all.

  As the king and Thorkel drank, they let their feet take them where they would. The king’s boldness and conspicuous good will drew other northmen to him, and he soon had assembled an amiable group of sailors and river traders. From these he began coaxing the information he sought. “You must be brave men indeed,” the king observed, “if you have been in the south. For it is said that only the bravest boatmen dare face the rapids south of Kiev.”

  “Oh, they are not so bad,” boasted one great shaggy Dane who smelled of beargrease. “I have twice been as far as the Black Sea this summer.”

  “Ah, Snorri!” chortled his companion. “Twice, to be sure, but once was on the back of a horse!”

  “The other time was with a ship.” The big man bristled. “And difficult it is to say which is the more dangerous.”

  “They say,” continued Harald, directing more ale into the cups, “there are ten cataracts, each larger than the last, and each big enough to swallow ships whole.”

  “It is true,” said Snorri solemnly.

  “Nay,” said the small man with him, “there are not so many as that—four perhaps.”

  “Seven at least,” amended Snorri.

  “Maybe five,” put in someone else. “But only three are large enough to swamp a ship.”

  “What do you know of this, Gutrik?” big Snorri challenged. “You stayed all summer in Novgorod with toothache.”

  “I went there seven summers ago,” Gutrik said. “There were but four cataracts then and I do not think the river has changed so much.”

  “If only your memory was as reliable as the river,” taunted another man lightly. “I myself have seen six.”

  “Of course, six,” sneered an increasingly belligerent Snorri, “if you count the little ones as well. I myself took no notice of them at all.”

  Thorkel, though still holding cups in both hands, drank from neither, but listened to each man intently, trying to patch a whole truth from the various scraps each man contributed. “I am beginning to think that none of them have been down the river at all,” he whispered to Harald at last.

  “Then that is what we must discover,” replied the king. Turning to the men, who now numbered seven or so, he said, “You all speak like men of considerable experience. But, aside from Snorri, who has been down the river this very summer?”

  Each one looked to the other and, when they found no answer, gazed into their cups. Then the man called Gutrik spoke up. “Njord has been downriver,” he declared. “He has just returned with the ships this very day.”

  “Heya,” they all agreed, “Njord is the very man for you.”

  “Find Njord,” Gutrik assured us, “and you will learn all there is to know about the Dnieper. No man knows it better.”

  “A piece of silver for the first man to bring this Njord to me,” said the king, withdrawing a small silver coin from his belt. “And another if that be soon.”

  Three of the men disappeared at once, and we settled back to wait. Thorkel and the king continued to talk to the rest, but I grew curious and looked around. It soon became apparent that the house had much more to offer than food and drink. From time to time, one of the women from the bench outside would enter, towing a seafarer behind her. Sometimes they would go up to the gallery to one of the sleeping stalls and lie down together; more often they would simply find a seat on one of the benches along the wall and copulate in full sight of anyone who cared to look.

  This happened so casually, and occasioned so little notice from anyone that it might have been pigs or dogs in heat, rather than human beings. I saw a man enter the house and go directly to his friend who was engaged in such intercourse. The two exchanged greetings and spoke for a few moments, then the first man sat down on the bench beside the amorous couple while his friend continued the sexual act to its consummation, whereupon the two men then changed places and the second man took up where the first man had left off.

  The iniquity of it was breathtaking. I could only shake my head in despair. But they were barbarians, after all. It did me good to remember this from time to time.

  As it happened, Njord was similarly occupied in another house nearby. When he had finished his drink and his woman, he came along with Gutrik, who claimed his silver by presenting the pilot to King Harald saying, “The best helmsman from the White Sea to the Black stands before you. I give you Njord the Deep-Minded.”

  The man who stood before the king could not have been less impressive. A wizened stick demands greater consideration. Njord was a hump-shouldered, long-boned, jug-eared Dane with skin creased and tanned to leather from the wind and sea salt; like Thorkel, he was squint-eyed, and his long moustache all but covered his mouth. His hands were rough from the ropes and tiller, and his stance splay-footed from maintaining his balance on the slanted boards of a heaving hull. The hair on his head had been blasted to a mere grizzled wisp of sun-faded grey. He looked like a gristle-bone the dogs had gnawed clean and discarded.

  “Greetings, friend,” bawled the king. “We have been hearing of your skill and knowledge from your friends. They speak most highly of your shipwise abilities.”

  “If they do me honour, my thanks to them,” replied the pilot with a small bow of his round, grizzled head. “If they do me insult, my curse on them. I am Njord, Jarl Harald, and my best greetings to you.”

  “Friend,” said the king expansively, “it would cheer me to have you drink with me. Cup bearers, be about your work! More öl! Our bowls are empty and o
ur throats are dry!” Turning to Njord, he said, “All this talk has made me hungry, too. Let us sit down and eat together, and you can tell me of your journeys.”

  “A man must be careful when sitting down with kings,” observed Njord narrowly, “for it is a costly business paid out in life and limb.”

  I understood then why he was called Deep-Minded, for it soon became apparent that he believed himself a philosopher with a gift for expressing his insights in witty aphorisms.

  The men around him stared, but the king threw back his head and laughed. “Too true, I fear,” Harald conceded happily. “But let us hazard health and fortune, heya? Who can say but it may prove worth the risk.”

  Thorkel and I found a place for the king and his strange new friend. Gutrik, Snorri and the rest joined us, shoving aside others in order to remain near enough to reach the meat and ale that soon began appearing on the board. So we settled down for a meal that stretched all the way to dusk, and ended with the king and Njord exchanging solemn, if drunken, vows: the pilot to guide us past the treacherous cataracts, and the king to reward him handsomely out of the proceeds of his business venture. The precise nature of this venture, I noticed, Harald failed to articulate.

  The small matter of Njord’s obligation to lead his own jarl’s ships on their homeward voyage was quickly overcome when Harald offered to repay the pilot’s share of the summer’s spoils as compensation for the loss of his services. The ship’s master was summoned and quickly agreed; the bargain was struck on the spot.

  Having obtained all he came for and more, the king was now eager to depart. Up he rose from the table, and hastened for the door, trailing a considerable body of serving men, each demanding payment and shouting at the top of his lungs to make himself heard above the others. The king’s progress was halted at the door; he turned and reached into his belt and brought out a handful of silver. This he delivered to the foremost server, saying, “Share this out among yourselves as you deem best.”

  The serving men gaped in astonishment at the paltry reward and shouted all the more loudly. “This is our reward?” they shrieked incredulously. “A whole day’s food and drink, for this?”

  But the king merely raised his hand in admonishment as he stepped through the door. “Nay, I will hear no word of thanks. For the pleasure was mine alone. Farewell, my friends.”

  Njord nodded his head in admiration of Harald’s aplomb. “There breathes a king indeed,” he muttered.

  Even though it meant exchanging one stench for another, it was good to be quit of the drinking hall, I thought, as we passed the wooden post of Odin with its rancid gifts. A whole day weltering in the sun had made the putrefying sacrifices most pungent. Yet, on the whole, the stink of rotting meat was preferable to the noisome stew of smoke, sweat, faeces, sour beer and vomit dished up in the drinking hall.

  There was no one aboard ship but the guards—not the same ten who had been left behind to watch the vessels, for these had been replaced earlier in the day by kinsmen who had sated themselves on both cup and copulation, and who were now fast asleep on deck. The sleeping men were roused and commanded to retrieve their fellow shipmates.

  Separating the Sea Wolves from the delights of Kiev proved far more difficult than anyone could have foreseen. The pleasure houses were large and contained many rooms—some of which were completely enclosed, for those seeking more private expression of the carnal arts—and each house and room had to be searched and the seafarer led or, more often, carried back to the waiting ships.

  The moon had risen and gained its peak by the time all Harald’s raiders were assembled once more and the ships pushed away from the bank. Fortunately, rowing was not required; the southward flow of the river carried us along. Thus, no one was forced to grapple an oar and disaster was held at bay.

  The next day, however, we were not so fortunate. Below Kiev the Dnieper passed through ragged hills that squeezed the river into a swift-running stream carving its way through high stone banks barely wide enough to admit the ships. Sure, an oar held either side would have been scraped to splinters. It was all Thorkel could do to keep the keels centred in the deepest part of the channel. All day long he wore a brow-furrowed haunted look, as if he expected calamity to overtake us at any moment. Njord, on the other hand, spent the day with his head under his cloak, sleeping off the revel of the night before.

  When he finally emerged, the worst of the passage was behind us and the water had grown placid once more. “Ah, you see now,” he declared, looking around, “this is splendid. I think you are a true helmsman, friend Thorkel. Your skill is equal to mine in every respect save one.” He declined to say what the singular lack might be, but went on to pronounce upon the seaworthiness of the ship instead. “Oh, but it is a fine ship, heya? I think so. Stout-masted, but easy on the tiller—a fine longship all in all.”

  “We have always thought as much,” replied Thorkel a little stiffly. “But I am glad to hear you say it.”

  “In three days the contest begins, however,” Njord continued. “The first cataracts are not so bad—little more than rapids. We shall go through four of them very easily, for the water is not so swift this time of year. When the spring rains flood the valleys, it is an entirely different matter. We have good reason to thank our stars it is not spring.”

  “What of the remaining cataracts?” wondered Thorkel.

  “Every man acquires debts,” answered Njord cryptically, “but only a fool borrows trouble.” He walked away, running his hands over the smooth rail.

  “I did not care to borrow it so much as to merely catch a far-off glimpse,” muttered the pilot.

  The Lord Christ himself said that each day’s cares are sufficient to the day and that tomorrow’s worries are best left for the morrow. This I told Thorkel, who only blew his nose at the notion and would not speak to me the rest of the day.

  25

  The first three cataracts were mastered with poles. As Njord had predicted, the water was low in the pinched crevices through which the river pushed its way to the Black Sea. Using the ends of the oars, we poled the boats slowly around the rocks—now bracing, now guiding, now pushing—until we reached calm water again. By the time we had cleared the third cataract, King Harald was wishing he had not brought so many ships with him; after the fourth, he was contemplating the wisdom of leaving two boats behind and retrieving them later.

  Greed awakened just in time to persuade him that he would need all his ships to carry the plundered wealth of Miklagård away, and that, if anything, he was foolish not to have brought more and even larger vessels.

  The fifth and sixth cataracts taxed the strength and endurance of every crewman, save the king and ten warriors who stood on the bank to guard the supplies against ambush. A devious local tribe known as the Patzinaks liked, according to Njord, nothing more than to lie in wait where the boats were most vulnerable.

  Toting burden after burden, I aided the laborious process as each vessel was beached and unloaded: every grain sack and water butt, each cooking pot, every spear and sword, all the ropes and sails and rowing benches. When every vessel was but an empty hull, the men stripped off their clothes and waded naked out into the swirling, waist-deep water where they shouldered the ropes—some at the bow and others amidships—and with brute force hauled the unwieldy vessels along. Some of the crewmen employed oars to fend the hulls off the nearer rocks, and the whole party proceeded slowly, keeping as close to the bank as possible to avoid being swept out into swifter water and thrown against the sheer rocks. Once the ships were safely past the danger, all the supplies and weapons were trundled downriver and loaded into the craft once more.

  This labour occupied the whole of two days for each cataract. And if the first six were not bad enough, the seventh cataract was by far the worst. Not only were there rocks and whirlpools, but also two falls to be traversed. Njord, who had until now been less help than the king thought sufficient, was not forthcoming with a ready solution.

  “What are
we to do?” demanded the king, growing impatient in the face of the impossible task before us.

  “A man may journey by many roads,” observed Njord sagely, “but only one way leads to his destination.”

  “Yes, yes,” growled Harald. “That is why I have brought you with me. Show us the way to go.”

  Njord nodded, his narrow eyes became slits, and his teeth gnawed his lower lip as if he were working out a complicated calculation. “It is difficult,” the grizzled pilot conceded at last. “Your ships are too big.”

  “What is this!” roared the king, making the earth tremble with the force of his cry. “Have I taken you this far only to be told my ships are too big?”

  “It is not my fault your ships are too big,” Njord answered petulantly.

  If ever a man stood on sinking sand, Njord was that man; yet, he seemed oblivious to the danger he faced at that moment. “If you had asked me,” the pilot sniffed, “I would have told you.”

  “Is there anything which you will yet tell me?” wondered the king, his voice menacing and low. I could almost hear the knife sliding from its sheath.

  Njord pursed his lips and stared at the water with an expression of deep inscrutability. “If the mountain is too tall to climb,” he pronounced suddenly, “then you must go around.” Turning to the king, he said, “Since you ask my advice, I tell you the ships must be carried.”

  The king gaped at him in disbelief.

  “Impossible!” cried Thorkel, unable to contain himself any longer. He thrust himself forward to appeal to the king. “Strike his worthless head from his shoulders and be done with him. I will do the deed gladly.”