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Here, the people ate free bread and spent their time howling at the chariot and horse races in the Hippodrome, fighting mad over their Blue or Green favourites and worse than any who went on a vik, so that city-wide riots were common.
The char-black scars from the previous year still marked where one had spread out, incited by opponents of Nikephoras Phocas, who ruled here. It had failed and no one knew who had fed the flames of it, though Leo Balantes was a name whispered here and there – but he and other faces were wisely absent from the Great City.
A black-hearted city right enough, which turned the slither from the gutters crow-dark so that we knew, even if the story of it curled on itself like a carved snake-knot, that cruelty squatted in Miklagard. Blood-feuds we knew well enough, but Miklagard’s treachery we did not understand any better than the city’s screaming passion for chariots and horses that raced instead of fought.
We were wide-eyed bairns on this new ship and had to learn how to sail it, fast. We learned that calling them Greek was an insult, since they considered themselves Romans, the only true ones left. But they all spoke and wrote in Greek and most of them knew only a little Latin – though that did not stop them muddying the waters of their tongue with it.
We learned that they lived in New Rome, not Constantinople, nor Miklagard, nor Omphalos, Navel of the World, nor the Great City. We learned that the Emperor was not an Emperor, he was the Basileus. Now and then he was the Basileus Autocrator.
We learned that they were civilised and we could not be trusted in a decent home, where we would either steal the silver or hump the daughters – or both – and leave dirty marks on the floors. We learned all this, not from kindly teachers, but from curled lips and scorn.
The slaves were better off than us, for they were fed and sheltered free, while we took miserable pay every day from a fat half-Greek, which would not let us afford either decent mead – even if we could find it here – or a decent hump. My stock of Atil’s silver was all but exhausted and still no plan had come to me yet and I wondered how long the Oathsworn would stomach this.
Singly and in pairs like half-ashamed conspirators all of them had approached me at one time or another since we had been here, all with the same question: what had I seen inside Attila’s howe?
I told them: a mountain of age-blackened silver and a gifthrone, where Einar the Black, who had led us all there, now sat for ever as the richest dead man in the world.
All of them had been there – though none but me inside it – yet none could find the way back to it, navigating themselves like a ship across the Grass Sea. I knew they also felt the fish-hook jerk of it, despite all that they had suffered, no matter that they had watched oarmates die there and had felt the dangerous, sick magic of that place for themselves.
Above all, they knew the curse that came from breaking the oath they had sworn to each other. Einar had broken it and they all saw what had become of that, so none slipped away in the night, abandoning his oarmates to follow the lure of silver. I was not sure whether this was from fear of the curse, or because they did not know the way, but they were Norsemen. They knew a mountain of riches lay out on the steppe and they knew it was cursed. The wrench between fear and silver-desire ate them, night and day.
Almost every night, in the quiet of that false hov, they wanted to look at the sword, that sinuous curve of sabre wrenched from Atil’s howe by my hand. A master smith had made that, a half-blood dwarf or a dragon-prince, surely no man. It could cut the steel of the anvil it was made on and was worked along the blade length with a rune serpent, a snake-knot whose meaning no one could quite unravel.
The Oathsworn came to marvel at that steel curve, the sheen of it – and the new runes I had carved into the wooden hilt. I had come late to the skill and needed help with them, but those were simple enough, so that any one of the Oathsworn could read them, even those who needed fingers to trace them and mumbled aloud.
Only I knew they marked the way back to Atil’s howe in the Grass Sea, sure as a chart.
A chart I had now managed to lose.
All of this swilled round in my head, dark as the water from Miklagard’s gutters, as I hunched through the rain towards our ratty warehouse hall, dragging the big Slav with me. The wind blasted and grumbled and, out across the black water, whitecaps danced like stars in a night sky.
‘You look like you woke up with the ugly one, having gone to bed with golden-haired Sif,’ Kvasir growled as I stumbled in, shaking rain off, slapping the piece of sacking that was my cloak and hood. His good eye was bright, the other white as a dead fish, with no pupil. He looked the big Slav up and down and said nothing.
‘Thor’s golden wife wouldn’t look at him,’ said a lilting voice. ‘Though half the Greek man-lover crews here would. Maybe that is the way ahead for us, eh, Orm?’
‘The way behind, you mean,’ jeered Finn Horsehead, jerking lewd hips and roaring at his own jest. Brother John’s look was withering and Finn subsided into mock humility, nudging his neighbour to make sure he had caught his fine wit.
‘Never be minding,’ Brother John went on, taking my elbow. ‘Come away here and sit you down. There’s a fine cauldron of…something…with vegetables in it that Sighvat lifted and Finn made with pigeons. And a griddle of flatbread. Enough for our guest, too.’
The men made room round the brazier and Brother John ushered us to a place, gave us bowls, bread and a wink. Radoslav looked at the food and it was clear a stew made of the Great City’s pigeons was not the finest meal he had eaten, nor – with the wind hissing through the warehouse, flaring the brazier embers – was this the best hall he had been in. But he grinned and chewed and gave every indication of being well treated. I took a bowl, but my mouth was full of ashes.
I introduced Radoslav. I told them why he was here and that what we had feared had happened – the rune-serpent sword was gone. The silence was crushing, broken only by the sigh of wind ruffling the curls on Brother John’s half-grown forehead. You could hear the sky of our world falling in that silence.
Brother John had been on the boat when we had boarded it on the Sea of Darkness. The Greek and his crew thought he was one of us, we thought he was one of them and neither found out until after we were ashore. We had taken to Brother John at once for that Loki trick and afterwards he had astounded us all by telling us he was a Christ priest.
Not one like Martin, the devious monk from Hammaburg, the one I should have killed when I had the chance. Brother John was from Dyfflin and an altogether different breed of horse. He did not shave his head in the middle like the usual priests, he shaved it at the front – when he could be bothered. ‘Like the druids did in times of old,’ he offered cheerfully when asked.
He did not wear robes either and he liked to drink and hump and fight, too, even though he was hardly the height of a pony’s arse. He was on his second attempt to get to Serkland, trying to reach his Christ’s holy city, having failed the first time and, as he said himself, sore in need of salvation.
I was sore in need of the same and dare not look anyone in the eye.
‘Starkad,’ muttered Kvasir. ‘Fuck his mother.’ His head drooped. There were grunts and growls and sniffs, but it was a perfect summing up and the worst sound of all was the despairing silence that followed.
Sighvat broke it. ‘We have to get it back,’ he declared and Kvasir snorted derisively at this self-evident truth.
‘I will tear his head off and piss down his neck,’ growled Finn and I was not so sure that he was talking about Starkad and not me. Radoslav, food halfway to his mouth, had stopped chewing and looked from one to the other, only now realising that something truly valuable had been taken.
‘Starkad,’ said Finn in a voice like a turning quernstone. He stood and dragged the seax out, looking meaningfully at me. The others growled approval and their own hidden knives flashed.
Despair closed on me like dark wolves. ‘He works for the Greek, Choniates,’ I said.
‘Aye, right enough, we saw him there,’ agreed Sighvat and if there is a colour blacker than his voice was then, the gods have not seen fit to show us it yet.
Finn blinked, for he knew what that meant. Choniates had power and money and that permitted him armed guards and the law. We were Norse, with all that stood for in the Great City. Bitter experience had taught the people of Miklagard just what the Norse did in their halls during the long, dark winters, especially men with no wives to stay their hands. The Great City’s tabernae and streets did not want feasting Northmen getting drunk and killing each other – or worse, the good citizens – so the city had made a law of it, which they called the Svear Law. We could carry no weapons and would be arrested for the ones gleaming in the firelight here. We had only a limited time in the Great City and soon we would be rounded up and pitched out beyond the frontier if we did not get a ship in time to leave ourselves.
Finn wolfed it all out in a great howl of frustration that bounced echoes round the warehouse and started up local dogs to reply, his head thrown back and the cords of his neck standing out like ship’s cables. But even he knew we would not profit from charging up to Choniates’ marbled hov, kicking in the door and dangling him by the heel until he coughed up the runesword. All we would get was dead.
‘Choniates is a merchant of some respectability,’ Radoslav said, quiet and cautious about the smouldering rage round him. ‘Are you sure he has done this thing? What is this rune serpent anyway?’
Glares answered that. Choniates had it, for sure. Architos Choniates had seen the sword weeks ago and I had been expecting something since then – only to ease my guard at the last and lose it.
When we had first staggered on to the docks of the Great City, it was made clear we would remain unmolested provided we could pay our way. I had half a boot of coins and trinkets left, the last cull from Atil’s howe, but they were not seen as currency, so had to be sold for their worth in real silver – and Architos Choniates was the name that kept surfacing like a turd in a drain.
It took two days to arrange, because the likes of Choniates wasn’t someone you could walk up to, a ragged-breeks boy like me. He had no shopfront, but was known as a linaropuli, a cloth merchant – which was like calling Thor a bit of a hammer-thrower.
Choniates dealt in everything, but cloth especially and silk in particular, though it was well known that he hated the Christ church’s monopoly on making that fabric. Brother John found a tapetas, a rug dealer, who knew a friend who knew Choniates’ chief spadone and, two days later, this one turned up in the Dolphin.
Outside it, to be exact, for he wouldn’t set foot inside such a place, despite the rain. He sat in a hired carrying-chair, surrounded by hired men from the guild of the racing Blues, wearing their neckcloths to prove it. They were all scowling toughs sporting the latest in Great City fashion: tunics cinched tight at the waist and stiffened at the shoulders to make them look muscle-wide. They had decorated trousers and boots and their hair was cut right back on the front and grown long and tangled behind.
It was all meant to make them look like some steppe tribe come to town, but when one came into the Dolphin and asked for Orm the Trader, he was almost weeping with rage and frustration at the hoots and jeers of men who had fought the real thing.
We all went out, for the others were anxious to see what a spadone, a man with no balls, looked like, but were in for a disappointment, since he looked like us, only cleaner and better groomed. He was swathed in a thick cloak, drawn up over his head so that he looked like an old Roman statue, and he inclined his head graciously in the direction of the gawping mob of pirates who confronted him.
‘Greetings from Architos Choniates,’ he said in Greek. ‘My name is Niketas. My master bids me tell you that he will see you tomorrow. Someone will come and bring you to him.’
He paused, looking round at us all. I had followed his talk well enough, as had Brother John, but the others knew just enough Greek to get their faces slapped and order another drink, so they were engaged in peering at him. Finn Horsehead was practically on his knees, trying to squint into the carrying-chair, and I could see he was set on lifting clothing to get a better look at what wasn’t there.
‘We will be ready,’ I said, cuffing Finn’s ear. ‘Convey my thanks to your master.’
He nodded at me politely, then hesitated. Finn, scowling and rubbing his ear, was glaring at one of the smirking thugs who formed the bodyguard.
‘You may bring no more than three others,’ Niketas said as they left. ‘Suitably comported.’
‘“Suitably comported”,’ chuckled Brother John as we watched them go. ‘How are we to do that at all?’
In the end, I decided Sighvat and Brother John were best and left it at that, ignoring Finn’s demands to be included.
‘He may just decide to lift it,’ he argued. ‘Or send men to ambush you on the way.’
‘He is a merchant,’ I said wearily. ‘He depends on his reputation. He won’t get far by waving a blade and robbing everyone.’
How wrong that turned out to be.
The next day we were escorted by another of Choniates’ household to the expensive end of the city and were greeted by Niketas in the immaculate atrium of a large house. He eyed us with one brow raised, taking in our stained, worn clothes, flapping soles and long beards and hair. I felt like a grease stain in this marbled hov.
Sighvat, who took considerable pride in his appearance – we all did, for we were Norsemen and, compared to others in the world, a byword for cleanliness – scowled back at Niketas and hissed, ‘If you had balls left, I would tear them off.’
Niketas, who must have heard it all before, simply bowed politely and then left. It may be that Choniates was then busy for two hours, or that Niketas was vengeful.
But it gave us a chance to watch and learn in a part of the city where life seemed careless. People came and went in Choniates’ lavish hall with no apparent purpose other than to lean against polished balustrades and laugh and talk and bask in the perfect sun of their lives, warmed, on this chilly, damp day, by heat that came under the floor.
They drank wine from bowls, spilled it, laughingly daring, as an offering to older gods and chided each other for getting it on their expensive sleeves, patting their clothes with sticky-ringed hands. Sighvat and I spent some time wondering if you could get those sticky rings off without cutting their fingers and even more wondering how the heat came up from the floor without the place burning down.
Choniates, when we were finally ushered into his presence, was tall, dressed in gold and white and with perfect silver hair. He conducted affairs in a chair at first, surrounded by men who softened his face with hot cloths, slathered him with cream and then, to our amazement, started painting it with cosmetics, like a woman. They even used brown ash on his eyelids.
He was offhand, dismissive – I was a badly dressed varangii boy, after all, clutching a bundle wrapped in rags, accompanied by a big, hairy, fox-faced man and a tiny, bead-eyed heretic monk who spoke Latin and Greek with a thick accent.
After he had seen the coins, though, he grew thoughtful and that did not surprise me. They were Volsung-minted and the only ones in the world not in Atil’s dark tomb were the ones he turned over and over in his fat, manicured fingers. He knew their worth in silver – and, more than that, he knew what they meant and that the rumours about the Oathsworn were true.
He asked to see the sword and, made bold and anxious to please, I unwrapped that bundle and everything changed. He could scarcely bring himself to touch it, knew then who this Orm was and saw the beauty and the worth of that sabre-curve, even if he did not know what the runes meant, on hilt or blade.
‘Will you sell this, too?’ he asked and I shook my head and wrapped it up again. I saw in his eyes the look I was fast getting used to: the greed-sick, calculating stare of those wondering how to find out if the rumours of a marvellous silver hoard were true and, if so, where it was. The sword, as it was bundled up again, was like the dying sun to a flower as Choniates stood and watched it vanish into filthy wrappings. I knew then that showing it to him had been a mistake, that he would try something.
The barbers and prinkers were waved away; he offered wine and I accepted and sipped it – it was unwatered and I laughed aloud at his presumption. By the end of a long afternoon, Choniates reluctantly discovered that he would get no bargain for the coins, nor any clue as to other treasures.
He bought the coins and trinkets, paying some cash then, the bulk by promise – and extra for trying a cheap trick like getting me drunk.
‘That went well,’ beamed Brother John when we were out on the rain-glistening street.
‘Best we watch our backs,’ muttered Sighvat who had seen the same signs as I had.
Then, as we turned for a last look at the marble hov, we both saw Starkad, quiet and unfussed, hirpling through the gate like an old friend, not exactly fox-sleekit about it, but looking this way and that quickly, to see if he was observed. Even without the limp, which Einar had given him, both Sighvat and I knew this old enemy when we saw him – but, just then, the Watch tramped round a corner and we slid away before they spotted us and started asking awkward questions.
That had been weeks ago and Choniates, it had to be said, had been patient and cunning, waiting just long enough for us – me – to relax a little, to grow careless.
Oh, aye. We knew who had the runesword, right enough, but that only made things worse.
Finn grew redder and finally hacked the pigeon he had been plucking into bloody shreds and flying feathers until his rage went and he sat down with a thump. Radoslav, clearly impressed, picked some feathers from his own bowl and carried on eating slowly, spitting out the smaller bones. No one spoke and the gloom sidled up to the fire and curled there like a dog.
Brother John winked at me from that round face with its fringe of silly beard and jingled a handful of silver in one fist. ‘I have enough here for at least one mug of what passes for drink in the Dolphin,’ he announced. ‘To take away the taste of Finn’s stew.’
Finn scowled. ‘When you find more of that silver, you dwarf, perhaps we can afford better than those rats with wings that I catch. Get used to it. Unless we get that blade back, we will eat worse.’
Everyone chuckled, though the loss of the runesword drove the mirth from it. The pigeons in the city were fat and bold as sea-raiders, but easily lured with a pinch of bread, though no one liked eating them much. So the thought of drink cheered everyone except me, who had to ask where he had got a fistful of silver. Brother John shrugged.
‘The church, lad. God provides.’
‘What church?’
The little priest waved a hand vaguely in the general direction of Iceland. ‘It was a well-established place,’ he added, ‘well patronised. By the well-off. A well of infinite substance…’
‘You’ve been cutting purses again, holy man,’ growled Kvasir.
Brother John caught my eye and shrugged. ‘One only. A truly upholstered worshipper, who could afford it. Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas, after all.’
‘I wish you’d stop chewing in that Latin,’ growled Kvasir, ‘as if we all knew what you say. Orm, what’s he say?’
‘He says sense,’ I said. ‘Love of money is the root of all evil.’
Kvasir grunted, shaking his head disapprovingly, but smiling all the same. Brother John had no mirth in him at all when he met my eyes.
‘We need it, lad,’ he said quietly and I felt the annoyance and anger drain from me. He was right: warmth and drink and a chance to plan, that was what we needed, but cutting purses was bad enough without doing it in a church. And him being a heretic to the Great City’s Christ-men was buttering the stockfish too thick all round. All of which I mentioned in passing as we headed for the Dolphin.
‘It isn’t a church to me, Orm lad,’ he chuckled, his curls plastered to his forehead. ‘It’s an eggshell of stone, no more, a fragile thing built to look strong. There is no hinge of the Lord here. God will sweep it away in His own good time but, until then, per scelus semper tutum est sceleribus iter.’
Crime’s safest course is through more crime. I laughed, for all the sick bitterness in me. He reminded me of Illugi, the Oathsworn’s Odin godi, but that Aesir priest had gone mad and died in Atil’s howe along with Einar and others, leaving me as jarl and godi both, with neither wit nor wisdom for either.
But, because of Brother John, we were all declared Christ-men now, dipped in holy water and sworn such – prime-signed, as they say – though the crucifixes hung round our necks all looked like Thor hammers and I did not feel that the power of our Odin-oath had diminished any, which had been my reasoning for embracing the Christ in the first place.
The Dolphin nestled in the lee of Septimus Severus’s wall and looked as old. It had a floor of tiles, fine as any palace, but the walls were roughly plastered and the smoking iron lanterns hung so low you had to duck between them.
It was noisy and dim with fug and crowded with people, rank with sweat and grease and cooking and, just for one blade-bright moment, I was back in Bjornshafen, hugging the hearthfire’s red-gold warmth, listening to the wind whistle its way into the Snaefel forests, pausing only to judder the beams and flap the partition hangings, so that they sounded like wings in the dark.
Heimthra, the longing for home, for the way things had been.
But this was a hall where strangers did not rise to greet you, as was proper and polite, but carried on eating and ignoring you. This was a hall where folk ate reclining and sitting upright at a bench marked you at once as inferior, yet another strangeness in a city full of wonders, like the ornate basins which existed for no other reason than to throw water into the air for the spectator’s enjoyment.
The reason I liked the taberna was because it was full of familiar voices: Greeks and Slavs and traders from further north all talking in a maelstrom of different tongues, all with one subject: how the river trade was a dangerous business now that Sviatoslav, Great Prince of the Rus, had decided to fight both the Khazars and the Volga Bulgars.
It seemed that the Prince of the Rus had gone mad after the fall of the Khazar city of Sarkel, down on the Dark Sea – which event the Oathsworn had attended, after a fashion. He was now headed off to the Khazar capital, Itil on the Caspian, to finish them off, but hadn’t even waited for that before sending men further north to annoy the Volga Bulgars.
‘He’s like a drunk in a hall, stumbling over feet and wanting to fight all those he falls on. What was he thinking?’ demanded Drozd, a Slav trader we knew slightly and a man fitted perfectly to his name – Thrush – being beady-eyed and quick in his head movements.
‘He wasn’t thinking at all, it seems to me,’ another said. ‘Next you know, he will think he can take on the Great City.’
‘Pity on him if he does, right enough,’ Radoslav agreed, ‘for that means hard war and the Miklagard Handshake.’
That I had never heard of and said as much. Radoslav’s mouth widened in a grin like a steel trap and he laughed, causing his brow-braid to dip in his leather mug.
‘They offer a wrist-grasp of peace, but that is only to hold you close, by the sword-arm,’ he told us, sucking ale off the wet end of his hair. ‘The dagger is in the other.’
‘Let’s hope he does and dies for his foolishness. Maybe then we can go back north,’ Finn said, blowing froth off his straggling moustache.
I said nothing. The truth was that we could never go north, even if Sviatoslav turned his face to the wall tomorrow. He had three sons who would squabble over their inheritance and we had annoyed them all in the hunt for Attila’s hoard out on the steppe – the secret of which now lurked under Starkad’s fingertips.
He did not know, I was sure. Almost sure. He took the sword from me because Choniates the merchant had valued it and had probably offered highly for it. Even Choniates did not know what the scratches on the handle meant, but he knew how fine the blade was and where it had come from. Even if Starkad read runes well, he would make no sense of the ones on the sword’s grip.
Perhaps they even thought the rune serpent, carved into the steel when it was made, held the secret of the way to Atil’s tomb – and perhaps it did, for no one could read that spell in full, not even Illugi Godi when he was alive and he was a man who knew his runes. I had my own idea about what those runes did, all the same, and felt a chill of fear at not having the sword. Would all my hurts and ills come back in a rush now, no longer held at bay by that snake-knot spell?
