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‘Pirates,’ growled Radoslav and spat over the side. ‘Nikephoras Phokas drove the burnous-wearing shits out of Crete about five years ago, but the survivors took to the other islands and are now like ticks on an old bitch. Sooner or later, the Great City will have to do something, for attacks on merchants are becoming too frequent.’
‘They might scare Greeks,’ growled Finn, ‘but they haven’t met us yet. Now we are raiders of the sea, not just some goat-worriers in a boat.’
Radoslav nodded thoughtfully. ‘Those goat-worriers forced the Basileus to use hundreds of ships and Greek Fire to stamp them out of Crete. Took him a year.’
Finn grinned and wiped his mouth. ‘There’s too much Slav in you and not enough good Norse blood. Eh, Spittle?’
Kvasir growled something which no one heard clearly, but Finn beamed. ‘The Basileus should have used us,’ he boasted, slapping his chest. ‘Our steel and Orm’s thinking.’
My thinking was simple enough, arrived at after a Thing held on board as we reached the island, saw the lights and moved round to the other side of it, where we land-fastened the Volchok.
No one was left aboard, for we needed every man, but I had explained a plan to them that they thought cunning enough to agree on. Everyone was eager as hunting dogs for this, sure that we had Starkad cornered and that the secret of Atil’s silver howe would be back in our grasp before long.
Save me. I knew Starkad was not here. No pack of Arab dogs would have had such an easy time of it if he had been aboard the knarr. They were his men, right enough – but where he was remained a mystery, though I was sure he was heading in the right direction in another fat knarr. He could even be lurking somewhere close, out on the black, moonglittered sea.
Short Eldgrim and Arnor and two others circled round to the left, carrying the dead men we had fished out of that sea. Brother John had insisted on this, to give them a decent burial rather than leave them to Ran, wife of Aegir the sea god and mother to the drowned. I had agreed, but not because of his Christ sensibilities; I had thought of a better task for them.
The men came back, all save Arnor. Short Eldgrim was still chuckling.
‘All is ready,’ he grunted. ‘When we see the camel-humpers move, Trader, we should rush them.’
The low wailing started almost as soon as he had finished speaking. Heads came up; mouths stopped chewing.
It was a good howl, one of Arnor’s finest: he was noted for being the very man you needed in a northern fog up a Hordaland fjord, with a voice to bounce off cliffs. I settled my shield and hefted my axe, good weapons and cheap enough for us all to afford from my vanishing store of silver. I checked a strap and tried not to let the dry-spear in my throat choke me; no matter how often I did this, my guts turned to water, yet everything else dried up and shrank.
A man stood up, shouted and two more gathered up weapons – swords curved like a half-moon and short bows like those of the steppe tribes, only smaller – and moved off. I marked the shouter, with his black, flowing robes and curling locks, as the leader.
There was a pause. Another wolf-howl wail split the night.
‘Get ready,’ I said.
The men came running back, shouting and waving. I knew what they had found: the naked bodies of the two they had left far behind in the water, dead, were now at the edge of town, seemingly wailing. I learned later that Short Eldgrim had come upon two tethered donkeys and had added a touch of his own, by strapping the men to their backs using tunic belts. Now the donkeys were braying, not at all happy with their loads, and trailing the fleeing men down the street, hoping to be unloaded of the stinking, leaking burdens.
The effect was better than I could have hoped. I had thought only to create some unease and confusion, but the sight of dead men, seemingly charging them on horseback, set all the Arabs shouting and screaming.
At which point I rose up and broke into a dead run towards the fire, yelling.
‘Fram! Fram! Odinsmenn, Kristmenn!’ bawled Brother John, and the whole pack of us, lumbering like bulls, roaring into the face of our fear, hurtled in a stumbling run down the slope, through the huddle of ramshackle houses and into the confusion of those milling round the fire.
Radoslav, who had crashed his way into the lead, suddenly leaped in the air and it was only when my knees hit something that pitched me face-first to the ground that I realised he had hurdled a rickety fence I hadn’t spotted.
I sprawled, skidding along on the shield and wrenching that arm. Cursing, my knees burning, I scrambled up and saw Finn and Short Eldgrim, axe and spear together, stab and cut their way into the pack, with the others howling in behind.
Kol Fish-hook took a rushing Arab on his shield and casually shouldered him sideways into the spear-path of his oarmate, Bergthor, whose point caught the Arab under the breastbone. Kol then slammed another one into the fire and his robes caught, so that he stumbled around, shrieking and flailing, spraying flames and panic.
The Arabs broke and scattered, Black Robe shouting at them. A few heard him and followed, back across the square to the white-painted church, a solid, domed affair that glowed pink in the firelight.
About six of them got in and thundered the wooden double doors shut before anyone could stop them and I cursed, for everyone was too busy killing and looting the others to bother with that.
I limped into the firelight, saw that the knees of my breeks were tattered and bloodstained. Sighvat came up, saw me looking and peered closely.
‘Wounded, Trader?’ he asked and grinned as I scowled back. Some jarl, looking at his skinned knees like some bare-legged, snot-nosed toddler.
‘We have to get them out of there,’ I said, pointing to the church.
He considered it, seeing the stout timbers and the studded nail-heads, then said: ‘It will burn, I am thinking.’
‘It will also burn everything inside it, including what we want,’ I replied. ‘I will be pleased to find that all the battle-gear and plunder is somewhere else – but that’s where I would put it.’
‘Just so,’ mused Sighvat, peeling off his leather helm and scrubbing his head. Screams and groans came from the darkness beyond the fire.
‘You should know, Orm,’ said Brother John, panting up like an overworked sheepdog, ‘that we need not worry about what to do with Starkad’s men.’
He jerked his head at a building behind him, a place with solid walls and one door, which looked to have once been the hov of a leather-worker, judging by the litter around it.
Inside, all of Starkad’s men were naked and dead, eleven fish-belly white corpses buzzing with flies and dark with blood, which had soaked everywhere.
‘They brought them all this way just to kill them?’ muttered Sighvat, bewildered.
‘No, indeed,’ Brother John pointed out. ‘They gelded them to be sold as slaves, but they were not clever about it. Two died because the blood poured out and would not stop and, once the thing was done, the men were untied – I think to help themselves and the others with the wounds. The others, it seems, died of strangling and this one here has had his brains bashed out.’
He straightened, wiping his hands on his tunic. ‘If I was asked,’ he said grimly, ‘I would say the ones who survived gelding strangled each other with the thongs that had once bound them and the last one ran at the wall until his head broke.’
‘Is Starkad there?’ demanded Radoslav and the silence gave him as good an answer as he would get. We stared, the sick, iron smell of blood and the drone of flies filling the space as we considered the horror of it.
Doomed, they had chosen a death that did not lead to Valholl and, because they had no weapons in their hands, led straight to Helheim, especially for the last man, who had slain himself. No man who was not whole could cross Bifrost to be Einherjar in the hall of the gods, waiting for Ragnarok. That was something I knew to my cost, for I had already lost fingers off my own hand and it was my wyrd that they were lost for ever and that I would never see the rainbow bridge.
I made a warding sign against the possibility of a fetch lurking in the fetid dark here, for I had had experience of such a thing before, with Hild in Attila’s grave-mound. Then I added the sign of the cross, but Brother John was too busy offering prayers, kneeling without a thought in the gory slush of the floor.
I wondered if the dead men were followers of Christ or Odin, for it seemed the Christ-god had a more forgiving nature and would accept them into his hov whether they had balls or no. Or fingers. Then I shook the thought away; Valaskjalf, Odin’s own hall, was open to me and that was enough. There were many halls in Asgard who would welcome the hero-dead, whole or no.
Finn and the others arrived, speckled and slathered with blood, to be told of the tragedy. That sealed the fate of the ones in the church, for even if they had been enemies, Starkad’s men were good Northmen and should not have been handled so badly.
‘There is too much of this ball-cutting for my liking,’ muttered Kol. ‘Like that greasy thrall of the Greek merchant – what was his name?’
‘Niketas,’ growled Kvasir and spat.
‘He was a spadone,’ answered Brother John. ‘The kindest treated.’
‘Eh? What’s kind about gelding?’ demanded Finn. ‘Fine for horses, but men? We do it to shame them.’
‘It is done sometimes to men for the same reason it is done to horses,’ Sighvat pointed out, ‘but I did not know there were different names for it.’
‘Different types,’ corrected Brother John. ‘A spadone has been gelded – the testicles removed neatly with a sharp blade.’ He paused, gave a little gesture and a sschikk then grinned as Finn and others shifted uncomfortably, drawing their knees tighter together.
‘They do that even to some high-borns, when they are babes,’ he went on as we gawped with disbelief. ‘Only whole men may become the Basileus, and some of these princes get it done so they can then hold high office and yet be no threat.’
‘There are also thlassiae, ones whose testicles have simply been crushed between stones.’ He slapped his hands together so that men jumped and Finn groaned.
‘And the third kind?’ I asked, curious now.
Brother John shrugged and frowned, waving a hand at the clotted corpses. ‘You do not get these in Miklagard much these days but further east, where men are permitted many wives and concubines and the women are kept apart in a place of their own. They have slaves attend them and, if they are male, they have to be…made harmless.’
‘Ah…so they can’t hump the big bull’s heifers,’ chortled Finn with considerable insight.
‘How?’ I persisted.
‘They remove everything, leave you a straw to piss through,’ answered Brother John, to be greeted with a chorus of disbelief. ‘The Greek-Romans of Miklagard call them castrati.’
There was silence where gorged flies buzzed.
‘This is what happened here?’ I asked.
Brother John nodded sombrely. ‘Yes. It is a Mussulman thing.’
Men grunted, as if dug in the ribs, for Northmen were no strangers to cutting balls, though it was rare – so rare, I had not seen it myself. Along with cutting a man on the buttocks, it was a klammhog, a shame-stroke that told everyone how unmanned this enemy had been and was done when we considered the defeated warrior’s fighting had been cowardly.
There was silence while we chewed over this; then Finn spat on his hands and took up a brace of hand axes and led us all back to the door. Even as the chips flew like snow, it was clear it was too stout for even his strength and fierce anger.
‘They built it well,’ Sighvat said, ‘as a fortress in time of trouble, I am thinking.’
‘Burn the door,’ I said and men dragged parts of the huge fire in the square over to the door, while others hauled anything that would burn out of the long-abandoned houses of the village.
Then we sat down and waited, while the smoke rose up and the door charred and the dawn fingered a way up into the night sky. I had two men stand watch, got Kvasir and two others to break down one of the mud-brick hovels for the frame-wood and stack it in the house with Starkad’s dead.
The two who had served us well on the donkeys were beginning to turn green-black, so they too were added and then it was fired. It was as close to a decent funeral as I could think of and, though the Oathsworn were tired and Kvasir had taken a cut to his side, they raised no protest at it.
The others and myself sat and watched the burning door of the church and put an edge back on blunted axes. I had others collect up the spilled weapons of the dead; though it was generally agreed that those half-moon swords were poor weapons, being single-edged and sharp-pointed for stabbing and little use to a slashing man.
Behind us, the funeral pyre for Starkad’s men growled in the wind, for the baked-mud bricks of the house acted like an oven and it would not catch fire, but seemed to glow in the intense heat. Bits of it ran like water.
Radoslav went off, poking about in the houses on his own and came back with a double-handful of something that was a puzzle to him. He held them out, a handful of sharp points. ‘I found a barrel of these iron things,’ he said, bemused.
All of us knew what they were, for we had laboured to load similar barrels for Sviatoslav’s army when it headed for Sarkel.
‘Raven feet,’ I said to him, taking one. ‘You use them to keep horsemen away from you – like so.’ I tossed one and it bounced and rolled and landed, one point upward. Radoslav saw the possibility at once: a carpet of these, scattered like sown seed in front of you. No matter how they landed, one point was always up and just right for piercing the soft flesh under a hoof.
‘Calcetrippae,’ Brother John said. ‘That’s what the Romans called them.’
‘Whatever the name,’ I declared, ‘we can take them, too, since we are headed for a land where men fight on horses.’
‘A good spear, well braced, would do it,’ growled Finn. ‘Or a Dane axe. A Dane axe is best against horsemen.’
The others nodded and growled their assent and told stories of men they had heard of who cleaved horse and rider in two with one stroke using a long-handled axe. The fire crackled against the door and the night wind breathed down the street; somewhere, the donkeys brayed.
I leaned back, having picked all the bits of dirt, stone and splinters out of my knees that I could find and remembered big-bellied Skapti Halftroll, who could make a Dane axe dance and whirr like a bird wing and would have been one of those one-stroke horse cleavers.
I remembered, too, the inch of throwing spear jutting from his mouth after it had caught him in the back of the neck as we jogged away from the three-handed fight with Starkad and the local villagers – close to two years ago, though it seemed longer. All that skill, that strength, all that Skapti had been or would be, snuffed out by a badly made javelin hurled by a Karelian sheep farmer with his arse hanging out of his breeks.
That was the day Einar had fought Starkad and given him his limp. Starkad. He had gods’ luck, that one, to have survived the wound, the vengeful locals and the battle with the Khazars at Sarkel – which we had missed by running off in search of treasure.
Gods’ luck, too, to have plucked the Rune Serpent from me, easy as whipping a toy from a squalling baby and even more to have been on the other boat, the one which did not sail into a pack of Arab pirates. Where was he, with all his gods’ luck? Where was he, with my sword?
I had luck of my own, all the same, I thought, feeling my eyelids droop. Odin luck, that gave Starkad the prize, but not the knowledge of what he truly had…
‘Trader…wake…Trader.’
I jerked back out of an already shredding dream, blinking into the firelight and the burning-pork stink of the funeral pyre.
Kvasir watched me for a moment longer, expressionless. Had I been calling out? What had I said? I shook the trailing smoke of the dream away.
‘It is dawn.’
I struggled up, wiping my dry mouth, and he handed me a skin of water, which I took gratefully, squinting at the brightness. It was the promise of a cold, brilliant day, of blue sky, whitecap sea and one of those brass-bright suns that never seemed to get warm. The men were nearby, watching and waiting, while the fire at the church door was out, though the blackened timbers still stood firm, smouldering in the morning air. The funeral-pyre house was out, too, but greasy smoke drifted from it and the building had melted like tallow.
Finn stepped forward, an axe in either hand. He tapped the door, pretended to listen, then turned to the rest of us. ‘Perhaps they are not home. Should we wait?’
The men chuckled, but I knew there was no way out of the church that could be seen, for I had studied it from all sides. Finn spat on his hands, hefted and swung, settling into the rhythm that boomed like a bell to us and must have sounded like the knell of death to those inside.
In five strokes the blackened wood caved in, exposing the equally blackened bar beyond. In four more strokes, that fell to pieces and the doors crashed open left and right, revealing the gaping maw of blackness inside, doubly dark because of the brightness outside.
Kol yelled, ‘Ha!’ and rushed forward before anyone could speak; there was a sound like thrumming bees and he shrieked and flew backwards, five arrows in him. A sixth hissed over his head and just missed Finn, who dragged the writhing Kol away from the door by one arm, but by the time he had done that and we had reached him, Kol’s shrieks had stopped. His eyes were already glazed, though his heels kicked for a bit longer.
I blinked and squatted beside him. I remembered Kol at the siege of Sarkel, huddled behind his shield as the arrows from the walls shunked into it, as if he was sheltering from rain. And on the steppe at my back, prepared to rush in and fight if I failed to persuade the Pecheneg horsemen to accept silver to let us pass without hindrance.
Gone. Another. I had wanted rid of the Oathsworn so much I had once begged Thor and Loki to intercede and let me loose from the Odin-oath, had then sworn to the Christ to try and be rid of it. But you should be wary of involving the gods in such affairs, for they are cold and cruel and it seemed their way of answering was to get them all killed, one by one. I could almost hear bound Loki laugh.
Kol’s death gave us thought on what to do next and Finn came up with a sound plan. With Kvasir and Short Eldgrim, I formed a shieldwall of three, all that would fit abreast in the space, and we lunged forward, knowing what would happen.
The arrows whirred from somewhere unseen, for the step from light to dark lost us our eyesight and, until we gained it back, we simply had to stand and brace. The first flight smacked the shields and we huddled, grunting and sweating, with Finn, Arnor and others sheltering behind, shieldless and double-armed with axes and spears.
The next thrumming sound brought arrows lower, aiming for feet and legs, but we saw them now, seven men behind a barricade of a thick table. Kvasir yelped as an arrow stung his ankle, but the angle was awkward and they bounced and skittered everywhere.
We waited, sweating and breathing in jagged rasps. I could see nothing behind the shield, but Finn, hefting a spear, watched and calculated and, suddenly, yelled, ‘Now!’
A slew of axes and spears smashed across the space, just as the archers popped up for another salvo. At the same time, we three hurled forward, roaring out our challenge.
Finn’s spear took one full in the chest and hurled him backwards. An axe took another in the shoulder, blade on, a second axe slammed into the head of a third, shaft first.
Then we were on them and Black Robe, spitting curses, hurled himself at me.
We fought across the upturned table and he had clearly done sword-work before, for he knew the moves. He stabbed out, that serpent’s tongue curve of blade darting swiftly, so that my axe swings looked even more clumsy by comparison. I shield-parried, axe-parried, swung, roared and nothing made any difference while, around me, men panted and grunted and shrieked and died.
He had battled shielded men before, but ones of his own sort, with metalled shields, which was his undoing. His breath was ragged and he knew he was done for anyway, but he fought with the savage-grinned panic of a rat in a barrel – and stabbed at the lower half of my shield, which would force it forward and expose my neck.
That tactic worked only on a wooden shield like mine if the point of the sword was rounded and almost blunt, like a good Norse sword. When his sharp point stuck in mine, the alarm showed briefly in those olive-dark eyes and he made another mistake – he tried to pull it out instead of letting go at once and finding another weapon.
When I back-cut, under his outstretched sword-arm, the axe blade went in on the upstroke under his armpit and only the shoulder blade stopped it. He screeched, high and thin like a woman in childbirth, and jerked away, freeing the axe for a downstroke that, because I was clumsy and hasty with panic, did not take him neatly between neck and shoulder, but carved away his bearded jaw on the left side.
