Читать книгу The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 5 - Robert Low - Страница 20

Eight men were dead; twenty-four more had wounds, some of them deep. In the stunned twilight of battle, Ketil Crow and Illugi took me under the armpits and hauled me up and away from Gunnar Raudi.

I let them, numbed by what I thought I knew, never taking my eyes off Einar. Had he stabbed Gunnar Raudi in the back, hard enough to wound, to distract him? In that half-light and confusion I turned it over and over and still it vanished like smoke.

In the end, I knew, with a deep, sick feeling, that he had, but there was nothing I could do. He was, I thought with a flush of fear, as fetch-haunted as Hild. And had broken his oath yet again in that mad moment.

Then I kept hearing Gunnar Raudi’s warnings and knew, with a nauseating certainty, that I would be next.

None of it would bring Gunnar Raudi back. Illugi and I, working without a word between us while the others bound up wounds and sorted out their gear, cleaned Gunnar Raudi as best we could and laid him out on his back, hands folded on his sword. I had to tear strips off his underkirtle to bind his shoulder back to his body, rather than have that terrible gape, so like a lipless mouth.

Einar came across after we had done this, stared down at the body and where we hunkered near it. ‘A good man,’ he said. ‘He died a good death.’

I could not speak. Blood leaked into my mouth from biting the inside of my lip to keep from screaming at him: You killed Gunnar Raudi. You killed him. Like you killed Eyvind.

Einar ordered him laid at the feet of the throne, where the mouldering, fur-rotted remains of Dengizik sat, skeletal hands on the stone arms, the fur rim of his rusting helmet festering on his neck.

Everyone wanted out of that place, especially when Hild drifted like silent smoke down the stairs, to stand over the carved remains of Vigfus and smile her beautiful, fey smile.

‘Dengizik has no head,’ Einar noted, his voice cracked with dryness.

‘The Romans took it and put it on a pole,’ Hild answered, her voice seeming sucked out of her in a hiss. ‘His faithless young brother Ernak, who would not stand with him against the Great City, had permission to take the body, on condition the Romans sealed the tomb, lest his fetch return. Five hundred years and more it has sat here. My mother told me this.’

There were looks flying one to another, from eyes round and white with fear. Tongues snaked over dry lips as the dust settled, mote by mote and almost sibilant. No one liked talk of a fetch in such a place.

‘Is there anything we need from here?’ Einar demanded of her, his voice crow-harsh in the blood-reeked twilight.

‘Not for me,’ she answered, soft as the rustle of a shroud. ‘But this is Atil’s son and those swords were made by the same smith who forged Atil’s blade from the end of the Christ spear. My distant kinsman, Regin the Volsung.’

Two swords lay across the cobwebbed, dusty brocade of Dengizik’s robed lap, but no one even wanted to go near them, never mind claim them as spoil.

We left that place, treasureless and afraid, not even having looted Vigfus’s men. By the time we had got back across the timber bridge – knocking it spinning into the waterfalled chasm after everyone was safely across – and down the steps, the storm had ended. The sun was out, the sky a clear-washed cloudless blue, and the ground steamed in the heat. But every leaf had a muddy wash, rapidly drying to dust in the heat.

At the stream, we refilled leather skins and bottles, soaked our heads, and considered how best to go on. There were seven of us with wounds likely to slow everyone down and I was one of them, but we were paired with others who helped us back up the brush-covered ravines and on to the steppe.

Thereafter, it was simply a long world of pain, step by fire-laced step, hour after hour, back to Kiev.

That ankle has never been right since; it aches in cold weather and, now and then, simply gives out and throws me over like a sack of grain, always when I am trying to impress with my gravitas and dignity. Each time it flicks pain at me, I remember Gunnar Raudi.

Others suffered much more. By the second day, the man whose forearm had been speared was running a high fever and his arm had swollen like a balloon. By the time we reached the outskirts of Kiev he was being carried in a cloak held at all four corners by his oarmates, drenched in sweat and moaning piteously, while the arm had turned black to the armpit.

Illugi tried what he knew, a potion made from bark of aspen, quickbeam, willow and wych-elm: fifteen barks in all made up this one. It failed, so he tried a poultice made from the ashes of burned hair and everyone contributed some, even Bersi, whose waist-length flame-red hair had never, ever been cut and who believed it bad luck to do so.

It was certainly bad luck for Illugi’s patient, who died thrashing in his sleep that night in Kiev, having made it to safety. I watched him being wrapped for burial and knew only that his name was Hedin and that he had once kept bees in Uppsala.

On the open steppe we had spotted distant horsemen, beyond arrow range and moving with us like a pack of questing wolves. But they did not come near and everyone agreed it was probably because we had come out of the tomb. Perhaps, it was argued, they thought we were fetch warriors and did not dare to contest us.

I thought it was because of Hild, the only one unconcerned by them. She walked with bold, long strides in her red half-boots, swishing the skirt of her long, blue, red–embroidered dress and only slightly soiled overmantle, a Rus zanaviska, her dark hair spilling free.

She was the perfect picture of a Norse maiden – until she turned to look at you and you saw that almost all her eyes were almost entirely black, all dark pupil, with only a thin corona of white. Regin’s kinswoman and, if you knew of him, you could see the resemblance.

‘Is that the same Regin from the tales, then?’ demanded Bersi during one rest halt, when we all hunkered and panted, wiping sweat out of our eyes. ‘Sigurd’s oarmate?’

‘So she seems to say,’ Skarti growled, glancing uneasily at where Hild sat, neat in her dress and staring at the horizon.

‘Not an oarmate,’ growled Bagnose, putting one finger to his nose and snotting to the side.

‘Eh?’

‘Not an oarmate,’ repeated Bagnose. ‘Regin had Sigurd as fostri. He was brother to Fafnir, who became a dreaded wyrm through gold-greed and a curse. Regin was a skilled smith, though, who made Sigurd a marvellous sword. Sigurd killed Fafnir the wyrm and ate his heart, which gave him wisdom to see Regin planned his murder, so he killed Regin, too.’

‘That’s a lot of killing, it seems to me,’ Steinthor said, ‘even for a saga tale.’

‘Over a hoard, too,’ noted Bersi and we all fell silent, brooding on that, until it was time to move off.

‘It’s all just tales for fucking children,’ growled Wryneck. ‘Why we bother with this is the only mystery in it.’

Two other men died in Kiev, of the same sort of thing, their wounds swelling and turning black. A Greek doctor, whom Illugi summoned in desperation, shook his head and said the men must have had something get in the wound, a miasmic rot that festered their injuries.

We never told him where we had been, but knowing looks were exchanged. Dengizik’s reach was long, it seemed, and everyone agreed that it had been deep thinking not to have taken his swords, even if they had been Regin’s work.

We wrapped and buried our dead in Kiev and I listened to Illugi’s soft, long chants on the wyrd of men, one usually sung by mothers mourning children.

Deep into the night before the army left for Sarkel it went on, for Gunnar Raudi, for all the others who had died and, I was thinking, hunched up with my chin on my knees, for Illugi himself and his lost gods:

‘Hunger will devour one, storm dismast another,

One will be spear-slain, one hacked down in battle;

One will drop, wingless, from the high tree,

One will swing from the tall gallows,

The sword edge will shear the life of one,

At the mead-bench, some angry sot,

Soaked with wine, his words too hasty,

Will cut one down and make his wyrd.’

A thousand barrels of ale, fifty thousand sheep, the same in bushels of barley, the same yet again in bushels of millet and wheat. Sixty thousand horses, ropes, awnings, tents, hoes, mattocks ... I heard all this when accounts of the siege were being studiously written up by scholars in the Great City, years later.

I remember one old beard, pen poised, blinking at me as we sat with olives and bread and wine on my pleasant balcony in the Foreign Quarter, enjoying the breeze across the Horn from Galata.

‘How many cheesemakers?’ he asked and frowned when I laughed.

I told him a number, but I doubt if there were any. I never saw a decent cheese in all the time we floated with Sviatoslav’s army down the Don, or sat under those rune-tiled walls at Sarkel, sweating and fevered and scheming and trying not to die before we got rich.

If we had needed cheese, though, Sviatoslav would have provided it. For a man who famously made war on the run, as they say – no wagons, no means of cooking, just strips of leathery meat sweat-soaked under a saddle – he had changed his methods for the attack on Sarkel.

I saw him once, while sweating to load arrows and barrels of salt mutton – no pork, for half of his army wouldn’t eat it, for one reason or another – on the boats, already packed with timbers and Greek siege engineers. There was a great commotion along the river bank, men cheering and breaking off what they were doing to run and line the route a cavalcade was taking.

It was Sviatoslav, cantering along in a cloud of dust at the head of his druzhina, mailed men with horsehair-plumed helmets and bright blue fur-trimmed cloaks, mounted on magnificent horses. In this heat, they would be baking ovens, but the forest of their lances never wavered.

He was visiting each of his sons and it was Yaropolk’s turn, but we were too late to turn out smartly for it. To Einar’s annoyance, the Oathsworn greeted the moment like gawping yokels, stripped to the waist, streaked and sweating and loading gear like slaves – mainly because we didn’t trust the slaves to do it properly.

I don’t know what I had expected, but the ruler of the Rus, of Kiev and Novgorod, who controlled from the Baltic to the edge of the territory ruled by the Romans of Miklagard, was a burly little man with a nub of nose and a yellow beard.

He wore white tunic and trousers, like all the Rus under their armour, but his were dazzlingly clean. His head was shaved save for that silver-banded braid over one ear. There was the sparkle of a huge gold ring in the other.

‘Not much to look at, is he?’ grunted Bersi, pausing in his lifting. He wiped his brow, his great mane of red hair plastered to the middle of his back with sweat.

‘You can tell him that when he shoves a stake up your arse and leaves you hanging there,’ countered Wryneck, swigging watered ale from a skin. He wiped his snow-white beard and tossed the ale skin to me.

‘Is that what they do here? For what?’ demanded Bersi incredulously.

‘For some, it is saying the Great Lord of Kiev is not much to look at,’ a voice broke in and we turned to see one of the magnificent cavalrymen, helmet held in the crook of his arm, his bald head glistening.

He was smiling, as was the boy with him, a lad of about six or thereabouts, so the panic that had gripped us fled. I squinted up at him while others moved quietly, examining the boy’s horse and gear, the beautifully crafted mail of the man, the great metal fishscales of his lamellar coat.

We marvelled and questioned. Three years it took to train a cavalryman in the druzhina of a Rus chieftain, we learned. Six for his horse.

The horseman spoke good Norse – East, of course, but most understood him. We admired his two sabres, his lance, the mace that dangled from one wrist, the cased bow.

‘Are the Khazars the same?’ I asked and he smiled down at me.

‘Not so brave or good-looking,’ he replied. ‘But they are the same; all cavalrymen are. You need to be mad to be one and your horse doubly so. It takes the same time to train them – half the army has Khazar blood in them anyway. We always end up fighting our relations in these affairs.’

We chuckled and said it was the same in the north. I tossed him the skin and he drank and gave it back, wiping excess off his moustaches.

Suddenly, Yaropolk was there, with Einar at his stirrup, both scowling.

‘Father is leaving, brother,’ the pimpled Yaropolk said pointedly to the boy, then flushed and inclined his head graciously to the man. ‘Uncle,’ he said and we now realised, with a shock, that the boy was young Prince Vladimir and the man Dobrynya, his uncle on his mother’s side. The uncle now raised his helmet, slipped it back over his head and then raised one hand in salute.

‘Prince Vladimir,’ acknowledged Einar and the boy paused as Yaropolk rode off.

‘I like your men, Einar the Black,’ he said in a sweet, unbroken voice. ‘If you survive Biela Viezha, we shall speak again.’

And he was gone, leaving us in a cloud of dust. Einar stroked his moustaches thoughtfully.

‘What was all that about?’ demanded Bersi. ‘Was that really a Rus prince?’

‘Kingship was what it was all about,’ grunted Einar. ‘When you are born to a thrall woman, you need more of it to survive.’ Then he bent to a barrel and heaved. ‘Back to work, you useless farts.’

As we fell into the rhythm of passing barrel and sack, someone said plaintively, ‘What the fuck is Biela Viezha?’

The White Castle, the Slav name for the Khazar fortress at Sarkel, was what it was. The great, white-limestone fortress on a dun-coloured rise in a bend of the Don, almost at the Black Sea was what it was. The greatest insult to the Rus was what it was, for they had to pay ten per cent on every trade flotilla that went up or down from the Black Sea and politely beg for permission to do so.

All the way down the Don, floating gently, poled by yelling, sweating Chud rivermen, we had taunted the accompanying horsemen, who rode and walked their mounts along the north bank of the Don, as sweaty as we were cool.

They were the heavy horse; the lighter ones, the bowmen who rode fat-headed, short-legged, hairy dogs of ponies, were further out, wheeling like flocks of starlings on the far steppe, keeping the Khazar scouts at bay.

If there was any fighting, we never heard of it; we spent most of the time dicing, lazing about, trading fighting tips and hurling apple cores and rye-bread crusts at the luckless, sweating cavalrymen, who took it all in good part, it seemed to me.

But when we saw the White Castle, we knew why they didn’t mind. It was dazzling, blinding white and the walls were huge and solid, with four towers and two gates and a bloody great ditch. I had been told that the Khazars had cities of tents and flimsy structures, easily destroyed and just as easily rebuilt. Even their palaces were just mud brick and they lived in them only during the winter.

Not Sarkel. It will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that the Great City had a hand in building it, ever-helpful to balance the power in the area. Sarkel was built with solid pillars and Roman know-how – and now they had sent their cleverest men and their biggest engines to knock it down, which is statecraft to these Romans.

As our boat was manhandled into the shore, one of the horsemen broke away and trotted over to us, peeling off his helmet to reveal a beaming, sweating face with a huge curl of moustache. ‘Welcome, sword-brothers,’ he chuckled and swept his hand towards the huge edifice squatting on the plain. ‘I hope you enjoyed the rest and the apples. Now it is time to play your part.’

We looked at each other, then to those yellow-white walls on which we had to hurl ourselves and no one was smiling when he trotted off, his bellowing laugh drifting back to us, echoed by his companions.

He had to wait to see us suffer, though. The first days were spent tumbling out everything that had been brought, while horsemen raced off everywhere and dust hazed the world. At night, the cookfires were a field of flickering red blossom.

In two weeks, Sarkel had been cut off and the engineers were doing things with the timbers they’d brought. Spearmen – not the druzhina like us, but the great mass of unarmoured levy, sucked in from every tribe for hundreds of miles – stacked their weapons and dug level pits and raised platforms.

We all watched, fascinated, the first time three of these great efforts lobbed sheep-sized boulders across the steppe at the walls to get the range. They hit with a booming crash and a great puff of dust – but nothing happened; nothing collapsed. Disappointed, we went back to the sweaty, stinking job of scraping and boiling cowhides for glue to help fix the assault towers we would use.

That night, hunkered round our own collection of cook-fires, we chewed flatbread, sucked down a good meat-gruel, endured the insects and traded our thoughts back and forth.

‘There’s no place left to shit,’ Bersi complained.

‘Sit here,’ offered my father.

‘Shit,’ Bersi clarified. ‘No place to shit. I’m fed up with stepping in it, everywhere you go.’

It was true enough. I’d heard the army was anything from sixty thousand to a million men and either could be true, though such a number was impossible to get inside your head.

All I knew was that there were a lot of them and even more animals and women and children. Even for people like us, who’d grown up with shit, things were getting out of hand.

Illugi Godi said there would be trouble over it. People would start to get sick. Einar said that, tomorrow, he would have a place marked out and a pit dug. Everyone would shit there and nowhere else.

‘Don’t try it drunk,’ advised Wryneck, who claimed to have had done this sort of thing before, ‘or you’ll fall in and stink for a week. If you even get out again, that is.’

But it was Ketil Crow who said what we all wanted to say. ‘When are we leaving this?’ he growled at Einar. ‘Before we get slaughtered on those walls, or die of shit-sickness here, I am hoping to hear you say.’

Einar stroked his moustaches. ‘We need to plan it well.’

‘Plan what?’ demanded Valknut, who was burned dark as a Fir Gorm, the black-men thralls from the very south of the world, so that only his eyes and teeth were seen clearly in the twilight. ‘We know where to go – what else is there?’

‘Of course,’ said that quiet voice from the dark behind Einar. ‘That’s all you really need, after all.’

She was like a cold wind through an open door. Everyone fell silent under the weight of her renewed presence, but Ketil Crow just half glanced at her, irritated, then spat in the fire. ‘Do we know where to go?’ he demanded. ‘I am wondering why I am following some hag-ridden Finn woman.’

‘You think I do not know the way?’ Hild challenged, squatting so that her knees came up almost round her ears, the dress pooled in her lap. Her feet, I saw, were neat and bare.

No one spoke, or looked at her long, but Ketil Crow looked from her to where Einar sat, his back to Hild, staring at the fire from under the wings of his hair and saying nothing.

‘The others may be afraid of you,’ Ketil Crow growled, ‘but I am not. If you prove false in this I will rip you from cunt to jawline.’

Hild did not flinch, though a few of us did. Instead, she smiled that fey smile. ‘It is good you are not afraid, Ketil Crow,’ she said in a voice like the whisper of bat’s wings. ‘You will need that courage, I am thinking.’

Einar stirred then, half turning to where Hild crouched like some black spider. He shook his head and stroked his moustaches again. ‘There’s more than just finding it,’ he said.

‘So you say,’ growled Wryneck, ‘but I am with Ketil Crow in this matter. It seems to me that a witless girl is about to lead us into the sea of grass. I never trusted women and that has always stood me in good stead.’

‘You won’t become old and rich,’ declared Hild suddenly, in a growl so unlike her own voice that everyone froze. The wind hissed, flattening the fire. Wryneck hawked and spat, deliberately loudly, a sneer of sound.

‘You bicker like women,’ Illugi declared scornfully. ‘What has Einar to say on this?’

It seemed to me that if Einar had had anything to say he would have hoiked it out before now. I wondered if Hild had laid some seidr on him that kept his lips fastened on the matter – but he stirred like a man coming out of a sleep.

‘We will get there,’ he said, so softly that those at the back had to have it repeated to them. ‘Then what?’ He looked around us, challengingly. ‘We get there and do what? Knock on the door and ask politely if we can have the hospitality of this dead hov? Some ale and meat and, oh, by the way, all the silver we can hold? What if there is no door, no way in – how do we make one?’

He wiped his mouth, reached for a skin and filled his horn, which was held between his knees, for the ground was too baked hard to stand it upright.

‘More to the point,’ he added, slashing us all with that black stare, ‘how do you carry it away? In our shirts? Stuff it down our boots, or in our hats?’

‘True enough,’ Bagnose said cheerfully. ‘There’s a mountain of silver. We’ll need a few big boots for that.’

They chuckled and Einar explained, ‘We need rope and hoes and mattocks and carts to carry all of that – and to take the silver away in. And ponies to haul the carts. Not oxen, for they are too slow.’

There was silence while we all chewed on that and how to go about it. In the end, of course, Bersi put it to Einar.

‘We wait,’ he said. No one liked that answer.

‘For what?’ demanded Ketil Crow. ‘We can take all those things—’

‘And get how far – a mile? Two?’ growled Illugi, shaking his head. ‘Those horsemen move fast and charge hard.’

‘Shouldn’t have thrown so many apple cores at them,’ offered Skarti, his lumpy face a nightmare in the red fire-glow. No one laughed much at that, remembering the horsemen, their armour and lances and bows.

‘Wait for what then?’ demanded Valknut sullenly, pitching a dung chip into the fire. ‘I’m sick of gods-cursed cowhides and glue.’

‘Better that than a ladder up those walls,’ said a voice from further in, a deep growl I recognised as a Novgorod Slav called Eindridi. There were a few growls of assent at that.

‘We wait until we get hungrier than this,’ Einar declared quietly. ‘Until the animals are being slaughtered and salted because there isn’t enough good grass for them around here. Until the saddles of those grain-fed horses go in a notch or two.’

Everyone stared blankly, bewildered. But I knew what he was making them think. Gods, he was clever and cold as the edge of winter, right enough.

‘Forage parties,’ said Illugi triumphantly. ‘Good reasons for being away from here with carts and horses and gear.’

‘Right enough,’ agreed Bersi and chuckled. ‘Now there’s deep-minded.’

I kept my counsel, for I had already seen forage parties going out, a collection of carts and horses, with thralls and women for the labouring and lance-armed cavalry for the muscle. Never foot warriors of the druzhina, though.

There was only one way, I realised, for varjazi like us to be away from all others, on the steppe with carts and horses and no questions asked, out of deference to our own rituals.

And some of us would have to die first.

‘Forage parties. Deep thinking, right enough,’ agreed Steinthor and tipped his ale horn empty. ‘Now give us a riddle, Bagnose, and brighten up the evening.’

And, as Bagnose screwed up his face and worked one out in his head, Einar met my stare across the fire, knew what I was thinking, dared me to speak it.

‘I am a strange creature, for I satisfy women, grow very tall and erect in bed, am hairy underneath and, now and then, a brave daughter of some fellow dares to hold me, grips my reddish skin, robs me of my head and puts me in her pantry. She remembers the meeting, her eyes moisten—’ Bagnose intoned.

‘An onion,’ roared someone from the back. ‘Heard that one when I was still crawling …’

Eventually, Einar dropped his eyes, but I ached with too much tension to claim a triumph.