Читать книгу The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 5 - Robert Low - Страница 21

Up close, the dazzling walls of the White Castle were a disappointing tan and yellow, pocked with the scabs of hurled rocks and scored with lashes of black where fireballs had gored.

Merlons had crumbled, giving it the gap-toothed grin of a crone at whose feet was a litter of smashed tiles: Turk pictures of horses and men that looked like runes to us. Tamgas, they called them, and our battering stones had ripped them away.

The plain before the city seethed like an anthill. Horsemen thundered, lance-tips glittering through the huge pall of dust that hazed everything to a golden fog.

I sweated and longed for a drink. My eyes stung from the dust and it gritted in every crease under the armour and my helmet, even in the corners of my mouth, turning to mud with my spittle.

To my left was Bersi, shield lying against his knees, tying a leather thong round the fourth of his red braids, trembling from fever fits. To my right, Wryneck stuck the finger of one gnarled hand up his nose and dug out a plug of dust and snot, which he wiped absently on his breeks.

I saw the glassy white of old scars on the back of his hand, the mark of seasoned warriors everywhere – the marks that were still raw and new on my own – since hands were almost always cut in fights, even friendly ones.

Behind us came the screeching groan of a giant with bellyache. It went on and on and ended with a clunk. Then there was a sudden blast of heat and I shrank my head down into my neck, seeing that others were doing the same.

A pause. A huge blast of hot air and a deep booming thump: the great engine heaved a fireball over our heads, a streak of orange-red, trailing oily black smoke through the golden haze. I never saw or heard where it landed.

I saw a woman and child moving through the Oathsworn ranks, carrying yokes of clay water pitchers into which the men dipped, then drank gratefully. The woman smiled at Bersi, who grinned back through the fat, rolling globules of sweat on his face and said something in her ear that earned him a thump on the shoulder. But as she moved on, she was still smiling.

A horseman, bare-armed and wearing a leather helmet, trotted up to where Einar stood, a silhouette in the dust-gloom.

‘Shit,’ muttered Wryneck and I tensed, sensing his unease.

The horseman and Einar exchanged words, then the man galloped off and Einar said something to Valknut.

The Raven Banner went up so that everyone could see it. Then it dipped twice, three times in quick succession, the signal to move forward.

There was a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, a coldness that reached to my groin and shrank it to the kernel of a nut. I was in the front rank: the Lost. Behind was another mailed rank and behind that two ranks of unarmoured men with long spears. A fifth rank contained Bagnose, Steinthor and every other man who knew which end of a bow was which.

Twenty men wide, five ranks deep, the Oathsworn tramped through the haze to war.

I had no idea who was to our left or right – or if anyone was. I knew our job was to protect this engine, now thrust close to the walls, which loomed now and then through the swirl of dust and smoke.

‘Are we attacking?’ I asked Wryneck and he grunted, hefting his shield to a more comfortable position.

‘Nah, they are coming at us, I am thinking,’ he replied, blinking sweat from his eyes.

The Raven Banner swung side to side. I had forgotten what that meant, but no one moved so I stayed where I was, too. Then I saw bowmen and realised Einar had called them out to skirmish in front of us.

Engines thumped and whooshed, men shrieked and cried in the unseen haze, horses galloped back and forth. Horns blared somewhere. A block of spear-armed men jogged diagonally across our front, heading to our rear. Ours? Khazar? Attacking? Running? I was licking cracked lips and looking wildly left and right when Wryneck nudged me.

‘Don’t try to eat it, Orm Bear Slayer,’ he growled. ‘If they come up our arse, there is nothing you can do now to prevent it. If it happens, we will deal with it, but there’s no sense in chewing on it. That way, you not only end up with men up your arse, but you have ruined all this perfectly quiet time.’

Perfectly quiet? Horns blasted again. Horsemen cantered up and past us. I saw one … then another … and another turn in the saddle, nock arrows and let fly behind them.

‘Get ready,’ said Bersi, hunching his shoulders.

‘Shield!’ roared Einar. A pause. ‘Wall!’

The shields came up with a single great clash of overlap. My right hand slammed the crosspiece of my sword hard against the join with my neighbour and we were now locked. Einar and Valknut turned and moved to one end, rather than force a way through us.

Arrows hissed out of the murk, skittering along the raw, tramped earth, slapping weakly off a shield here and there. Bersi was shaking, the sweat rolling off him and mixing with the dust to turn his back and underarms to mud.

Our bowmen scampered back, trying to make for the ends of our line. Those who couldn’t pitched their bows over our heads and dived for our feet, wriggling like eels between our boots.

The ground trembled. More horsemen appeared, swirling like sparrows when they saw us. They looked no different to our own: men on horses with bows, fur-clad helmets, tan cloaks, white tunics. They shrieked from black-bearded faces, loosed a straggle of arrows and wheeled away, back into their own dust.

We stood. Wryneck reached over his locked shield, swept his sword down and sheared off the shaft of an arrow I had not even seen or heard. I swallowed the hot lump in my throat, but it stuck and choked me.

The ground shook and thunder rolled somewhere.

‘Spears,’ Einar called and they came hissing past my ear, sticking beyond us, a hedge of points.

‘F-fucker,’ stammered Bersi, his teeth clattering. ‘Nearly had m-m-my f-f-fucking ear then.’

The ground danced; the thunder resolved to a rolling drum of noise. The dust seethed, figures loomed and the Khazar horse crashed out of the gloom.

They were unsure where we were, moving too slowly and too late to speed up when they spotted us. They were a sally force to wreck the siege engines and were out to hit hard and run, but the sight of a hundred-odd men, mailed, with the obvious red cloaks of a druzhina and the grim faces of seasoned warriors, made them haul on reins.

The spear-points did the rest. That hedge wasn’t for them. They came to a halt, rank upon rank crashing into each other, ruining their formation.

Our archers sailed arrows at them from flanks and over our heads, which clattered on them but did little harm. Then they lumbered round, cursing and shrieking, and moved off like some giant, frustrated beast, back into the mirk.

Someone cheered and we all took it up, pounding sword on shield and offering deep ‘hooms’ of taunt to them until the dust choked us.

We stayed there for another hour, eating the dry steppe until we were spitting mud, sweltering and baking, locked in the shieldwall, until someone remembered and sent word to stand down.

Weary, we tramped back to our scraps of cloth awnings and tents near the river – anything that gave shade – and dropped, gulping water the women and children brought, too choked and hot and tired to think of food. The whining insect clouds plunged on us at once.

‘That was well done,’ beamed Skarti, clattering helmet and shield down. ‘We saw them off and no one got a scratch. A good day for the Oathsworn of Einar.’

A few agreed with grunts; most were too tired to say anything. We swatted flies when we had the energy and Skarti lost his good humour, maddened by them. ‘What did they eat before we came?’ he demanded, slapping furiously. Like all of us, he was covered in the red weals of their bites.

‘A pity Skapti never made it this far,’ growled Kvasir from the dark of a makeshift lean-to. ‘They could have eaten him all day and left us alone.’

Women slithered between us as the sun died, lighting pitfires and hooking cauldrons on their chains and tripods over them. The smell of woodsmoke made my heart ache for remembered fires and the eye-sting of it was a small price to pay for the disappearance of the insects.

Gradually, as the heat seeped out of the ground, the Oathsworn moved closer to the fires, found fresh energy and started to weave themselves back together. I knew they were recovered when Finn Horsehead hunkered down beside me and shoved a coin into my face. ‘What’s this, young Orm? You know coins like ostlers know horses.’

‘He knows horses like ostlers know horses,’ Ketil Crow reminded him and Finn acknowledged it with a wave as I looked at the coin.

It was gold, from the Great City, called in Greek nomisma and in Latin a solidus. It had the heads of Constantine VII and Romanus I, for the Greeks who called themselves Romans nearly always had two rulers, foolish though that was.

‘Makes you wonder why they have lasted so long,’ growled Eindridi.

‘They have big walls,’ Valknut pointed out.

‘Apart from their big walls,’ argued Eindridi, ‘which can be scaled.’

‘Lots of warriors,’ mused Bagnose. ‘Who are not sometime farmers, but warriors all the time.’

‘Just so,’ admitted Eindridi. ‘Apart from the walls and the warriors.’

‘These,’ I said, tossing the coin so that it caught the fire-light, turning red and yellow-gold, end over end, and locking all their gazes, like a snake on a rabbit.

Finn snatched it out of the air and the cave of his fist broke the spell. He scowled at them.

‘Aye,’ sighed Eindridi. ‘Coins like that would do it, right enough.’

‘Is it any good then?’ demanded Finn. ‘I had it off a dead man out there, but I have never seen stamped gold before.’

‘It’s a full-weight,’ I told him, ‘worth twelve of their silver milaresia, which is about the same in Arab dirham. The Great City mints gold coins and the only other ones who do that are the Arabs of Serkland. You can tell the difference because the Serkland coins have no little people on them, only squiggles of writing.’

‘Just so,’ breathed Finn, while the others craned to see. He held it between finger and thumb, turning it this way and that.

‘Is the treasure of Atil like this?’ demanded Wryneck and I missed the bite of his voice and the fact that this was more for the shadowed figure of Einar than me.

‘No,’ I said scornfully. ‘You are lucky, Finn, because this coin was minted about ten years ago. The ones of the new Emperor, Nicephorus, are identical, but gold-lighter by one-twelfth and traders are wary of them. You won’t get any of them in a hoard from the age of the Volsungs. No gold at all, probably, only silver.

‘In truth,’ I ploughed on, ‘silver milaresia are always full weight and pure, but getting rarer these days. The hoard of Atil will be pure, for that is the Volsung treasure that Sigurd took from the dragon Fafnir.

‘Of course,’ I blundered on, airing my skills, ‘pure is a relative term, since it is also cursed—’

I stopped, realising the mire I had stepped into with both feet. There was silence, broken only by the distant droning hum of the army, the soft mutter of women, the crackle and hiss of fire and cauldron.

‘Odin’s balls, young Orm,’ declared Finn admiringly. ‘You are the one for business, right enough.’

Across in the shadows, made deeper by the fire’s light, I suddenly saw the gleam of Einar’s eyes, watching me as Finn showed his marvellous prize to the others and the stare went on and on until the arrival of one of the Greek priests broke the spell.

These priests, invited by Sviatoslav to cater to the spiritual needs of his prized Greek engineers, missed no chance to spread the Christ doctrine, determined to bring the whole of the Rus to their god.

This one, black-bearded and simply robed, introduced himself as Theotokios and had brought a flask of wine, for he knew how to win his way to the fires of the Norse. Wine was a rare treat and we welcomed him, as we had others of his kind, and proceeded to drink his gift and ignore his attempts to convert us.

After we had eaten, as the women were clearing up, Finn pulled one on to his lap and she, being a thrall and having no say in it, gave in to him after a token squeal or two. Certainly having Finn’s greasy beard wiped over her face and his fingers in her secret places was preferable to slogging down to the river and washing out pots. Just.

Theotokios made a noise in his throat and Finn looked up from what he was doing, which involved hooking a breast out of the shift the woman wore and popping it in his mouth. ‘What are you looking at?’ he growled and Theotokios replied – in Greek, which Finn didn’t understand.

I had picked up enough of it to tell him Theotokios was concerned for his sinful soul. Finn laughed and shook his head. ‘That’s the problem with Christ-followers,’ he said. ‘Everything is a sin, it seems to me, if you are tempted. Yet how is it a sin if you can’t help yourself? The more beautiful a woman is, the less you can help yourself, so the less of a sin it is, says I.’

I was impressed by this – but Spittle wasn’t. He grabbed the woman next to him and pulled her down beside him, grinning as she fought and cursed.

‘Nonsense,’ he growled. ‘As usual, Finn Horsearse, you have the wrong grasp of the Christ way of things. You will enjoy having your beautiful woman and so that is a sin. Me, on the other hand—’ He broke off and jerked the woman forward into the fireglow. She was short, red-faced with anger and pig-eyed with hate, which a squint did not help. Those who liked them fat might have found pleasure in her. ‘I won’t get much enjoyment out of this,’ Spittle declared mournfully, ‘so it won’t be a sin. In fact, now that I see her clearly, I’ll hardly have sinned at all. I may even get to this Christ Valholl, Heaven, on the strength of what I do next.’

Theotokios clearly had more Norse than I thought, for he had followed this and shook his head sorrowfully. ‘The way to Heaven is through self-denial,’ he intoned sonorously and the laughter brought heads round from neighbouring fires.

‘I prefer a prettier road,’ yelled Finn and set to work finding it. Kvasir Spittle, with another mournful look at his catch, let her scramble up and away, amid the laughter and jeers of the others.

‘I do not feel up to being saved for Christ tonight,’ he growled. ‘Perhaps our Orm will do it for me, for I hear that he can hump a pile of shavings on a wooden floor.’

And that brought more laughter and a thump or two on my back. Across the fire, my father raised his ale horn in toast and, for a brief spark of a moment, I was one with them, this hard family, so that even the weight of Einar’s eyes was almost a caress.

But that night, Bersi died raving, burned to a husk by fever.

By the end of the week, the corpses were piling up so fast Sviatoslav ordered them burned, had camps moved – and launched an all-out attack, presumably before his army melted like rendered grease into the steppe.

And that pimpled boy, Yaropolk, curse his memory, demanded the honour of leading the assault with his druzhina.

Us.

He was splendid with us; nothing was too good the night before and he brought ale and soft-skinned, doe-eyed women to our campfires, offered wine and choice food – well, by then, any food without worm in it – and the priests of our choice to cater for our spiritual needs.

But those who weren’t shaking and dribbling evil bile were too knotted to eat and too shrunk with fear to attack the women, while the priests were too busy trying to keep the sick alive until morning to be bothered by those wanting simple comfort.

Nor was the friendly reminder that the garrison of Sarkel numbered no more than a thousand any help. Even with all the able-bodied in their city added in, their forces were outnumbered ten to one. That was supposed to make us feel better, but most of us were depressed by the news that so few could hold off so many.

I saw, to my amazement, that Martin was moving among the fires, scowling and uncomfortable about it, but sent by his master Oleg to help the Christ-men of his brother’s druzhina.

‘I thought you’d be safe in Kiev,’ I said to him in that redglow night and saw his white smile in the dark beyond the fire.

‘There are God’s chosen among you heathens still,’ he said, ‘and they cry out for succour.’

‘And you are the only Christ priest of your kind here,’ Valknut pointed out grimly, having a sharp grasp of the religious realities. ‘If you did not come, then the Greek Christ priests would score another victory, eh?’

‘There is only one true God,’ Martin pointed out, kneeling to place a pot on the fire and stir it. Then he stiffened as Einar loomed out of the darkness, Hild a dark presence at his side. She crouched like a hound at his feet, staring at Martin and smiling, her head tilted as if she was sniffing him.

‘Is it safe, priest?’ she demanded and he regarded her with narrowed eyes, knowing what she meant.

‘Safe from you,’ he answered levelly and I couldn’t help but admire him, since I did not even dare look her in the eyes these days.

She smiled her fey smile and cocked her head like a bird. ‘I may reclaim that stick of mine one day, priest.’

Martin rose, smoothed his ratty brown robes and picked up the pot from the fire. Then he made the sign of the cross at her and she laughed as he moved into the darkness.

Einar, fish-belly pale, knelt by the fire and heated his hands, for it was cold now – that gods-cursed steppe baked all day and then froze at night, so that Bersi had once woken up with his red-gold braids iced to the ground.

Bersi, who was now ash and memory.

‘We should run for it tonight,’ my father declared morosely from where he sat at my side. I glanced at him, since it was the first time he had shown any sign of such things. But Einar didn’t even bother to reply – it was too late to do that now and I think my father had known it even as he spoke.

So, huddled together and wrapped in cloaks against the cold, we sat and stared at the fire, listening to the shift and stamp and murmur of the vast camp, fiddling with straps and honing the serrated edges of blades, too tense to sleep.

‘After your mother died,’ my father said suddenly, as the sky began to grey out of the night black, ‘her father, old Stammkel, whom they called Refr, Fox, on account of his cunning, wanted the farm back. It came as Gudrid’s dowry, see, so he had claim on it after she died.’

He was silent for a long time and I was breath-locked with this. I felt I was hovering on the edge of something, as if trying to persuade a sheep back from the edge of a cliff, where one sudden movement would make it shy and plunge over.

‘Of course, so did I,’ he said eventually. ‘And so did you, though you were barely getting to your feet at the time and were wet-nursed by a good thrall.’

‘What happened?’ I asked, driven to make a movement, however reckless, when the silence that followed became too harsh to bear.

He stirred. ‘He took it to a Thing for judgement. He had many to speak for him and I had no one.’

‘What of Gudleif? Or Bjarni? Or Gunnar Raudi, even?’ I demanded, astonished that none of those had helped. My father laughed softly.

‘Gudleif and Bjarni would not speak against Stammkel. Not big-balls Stammkel, he who roared and bellowed. Not even after he came back from his raid on Dyfflin, which they they went on. Some six hundred men went and four hundred of those never came back and the whole sorry episode nearly ruined Stammkel, which was why he wanted the farm in the first place.’ He paused and shrugged, scrubbing his face. ‘I think Gudleif and Bjarni felt they could not stand in Stammkel’s way, having in some way failed him in the raid.’

‘They only got back because of Gunnar Raudi,’ I said, remembering what Halldis had told me. ‘Didn’t he help you?’

My father shifted, as if something dug him in the ribs. ‘Ah,’ he said, gentle as a sighing breeze into the night. ‘Gunnar Raudi. He was away so long everyone thought him and the others dead …’

He stopped for a long moment, then: ‘Did you know that Gudrid Stammkelsdottir had hair the colour of yellow corn and could tuck it in the belt round her waist?’ He shook his head with the bright memory of it. ‘Gold she was. Gold and glowing and slender as a wheatstalk – and everyone wanted her. But she came to me in the end. Came to me when her father came hirpling back from Dyfflin with his balls shrunk to walnuts and too many lives laid at his door.’

He stirred and heaved a long sigh. ‘Narrow in the waist she was – and too narrow in the hip, as it turned out. But she wanted me and Stammkel had to give up a farm which he could not afford to do and still keep the partitions from going up in his hall.’

There was silence again.

‘What of Gunnar Raudi?’ I asked and my father stared at the fire for a moment longer.

‘Gunnar spoke for me at the Thing and judgement was given in my favour,’ he said, all in one swift sentence and I blinked at that, for I had expected a different tale entirely. Which was stupid of me, for I remember my father telling me he had sold the farm when he fostered me on Gudleif.

Still, I was thinking, this could not be the end of it and said so.

‘No,’ agreed my father, ‘it was not. Stammkel hated Gunnar Raudi before this and, after that, tore his beard out over it and made it known he would have his farm, one way or the other. He hired two known hard men, Ospak and Styrmir, who claimed to be berserkers. Then he sent them round with two thralls to deal with me.’

He stirred a log back into the fire with his foot and watched the embers swirl like red flies in the dark.

‘Why did Stammkel hate Gunnar Raudi so much?’ I asked and he shot me a sideways glance.

‘No matter,’ he answered. ‘So these men came to the hov this night, as they had announced they would, all four of them and well armed and me with only myself to face them.’

Wide-eyed, I waited and, when nothing came, I demanded, ‘What happened?’

‘I died, of course,’ he said and grinned as I blinked, then realised he had led me into the oldest and worst joke in saga-telling, which is just what a father does to his child at some point. I grinned back at him, my heart leaping with the warmth of it.

‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I would have done just that, save that Gunnar Raudi swaggers up, as was his way, and winks at me as he passes me. “Hello, lads,” he says to these four. “No need for this, for Rurik here has decided to quit this place.”

‘Which was news to me and must have sounded strange to them, looking at me standing there with a seax in one hand and a wood axe in the other and the look of a man not about to quit anything.’

He shook his head and chuckled. ‘A deep thinker was Gunnar. “Listen, lads,” he says. “We’ll drink on it and part friends and you can tell Stammkel to turn up the day after tomorrow, for then this place will be empty.” And he winks at me again and walks all four of them into the hall of my hov and sits them down, calling for ale and food.’

‘What did you do?’ I demanded and he shrugged.

‘What else? I followed them in and sat down with them and we drank until it ran down our noses. After a long while, Gunnar Raudi gets up and announces he is off for a piss and goes outside. After a bit longer, we all remember he went and laugh at him, thinking he had probably fallen in the privy.

‘But I had seen him wink on the way out, so I say to Ospak to go find him and he is drunk enough to do just that. After a while longer, of course, Ospak never comes back either and I mention this and put my head on my arms and pretend to sleep.

‘So Styrmir gets up and goes out and the two thralls carry on drinking and laughing at me snoring, so that when Gunnar Raudi steps in, his blade all red and dripping, they piss themselves all over my floor.

‘And that was that,’ my father said. ‘Gunnar tells the two thralls to carry the bodies of Ospak and Styrmir back to Stammkel and tell him to give up any claims on the farm. “The heads,” he says, “I will keep and stick on poles, to watch out for more of Stammkel’s foolishness.” Which he did.’

He stopped and squeezed his eyes shut, then rubbed them, for he had been staring into the embers too long. ‘By the time all this had been done you were toddling around and causing trouble and, though I was left alone after that, I had no stomach for it, so I sold the place and went over to Gudleif with you.’

He looked at me, eyes watering from the staring so that they made my heart thunder, for the moistness was as like tears as not. ‘I always meant to return,’ he said. ‘But I knew you would be safe with Gunnar. More so with him than me.’

I wanted to ask more, but he clapped a hand on my shoulder and levered himself to his feet, then patted me gently a couple of times, as you would a horse or a dog, and moved off into the dark, leaving me with the fire and my thoughts whirling like the sparks.

At some point, I fell asleep and dreamed, though. Or thought I did. Or stepped into the fetch world, that half-lit Other.

I was in Dengizik’s tomb again, alone, in a blue dark, like a night with a shrouded moon. The lines of soldiers, dead but still with eyes that followed me, were sitting patiently and Hild sat at the foot of the throne, chained to it by the neck.

I took a step to her and the soldiers shifted. I took another and they rose, with a hissing rustle like insect wings.

Then I ran and they surged on me, a blinding mass like bats, like a blizzard of dust and fury with no more substance than memory.

And, suddenly, I was there, looking into the great white-rimmed pools of Hild’s eyes, while she smiled up at me. My arm rose and fell, the sword in it chopping the withered hand from Dengizik, which held Hild’s neck chain.

It fell, slowly, slowly, tumbling, shredding scraps of flayed skin, dusty bone.

Then I was awake, by the fire, staring into the limpid eyes of Hild, who sat astride me, her face inches from mine. Her mouth worked, twisting this way and that; sounds tore from her in a rippling, wheezing hiss: ‘Don’t … go … with us. Live …’

Limpid eyes, dewed with … tears? I watched them expand, to where the black ate all the white, saw the hands which cupped my face claw like talons, felt her quiver and then, with a sickening liquid surge, rise up over me and step away, into the darkness.

I breathed. I know I did, because I heard it, ragged and thundering in my ears. There was no other sound for a moment, then all the noise of the world crashed back and I blinked at the camp murmur, the hiss of dung-chips on the fire, my father’s groan and stir, Skarti’s fluttering fart.

I sat up, looked wildly around, but everything was as it should be – and yet nothing was. Had it happened? Had I dozed and woken in my dream? Did I dream still?

All the rest of that night I wondered, staring into the glowing embers until my eyeballs seared.

There were horns and drums sounding, like ships lost in a golden fog. Under our feet the steppe had crumbled, crusted over and was kicked to dust again, hanging in the air, gritting our eyeballs, scorching tongue and nose and throat.

The acrid stink of horses hung in that dust as they sluiced nervous piss and moved to our flanks, ghosts in the murk, to make sure the assault wasn’t smacked by a counter-foray from the once-white city.

This time there were just sixty-two of us, half with their teeth clamped tight because otherwise they’d chip or crack them with the fever’s jaw-quaking chatter. Twenty more lay under awnings back at a new camp, amid the hundreds of other sick gathered in one place so that what aid there was could be more easily given. Not that there was much ... they lay and shook and died in pools of their own loosened bowels.

But we stood and waited, while fire and death occupied the space between us and the ravaged city. In the yellow shroud of dust, five dark towers moved, like the fingers of a hand, while archers rushed forward in pairs, one holding a pavise of reeds, the other shooting, then ducking under to reload.

There were hoots and screeches and shrieks and, through it all, the high, thin scream of horses dying, a sound which, to me, seemed worst of all.

I leaned on my shield, on one knee, watching, almost detached from it. Skarti, shivering, was glass-eyed and shit dribbled down one leg, but he didn’t seem to notice. The smell of that and dust and oil on steel – that was battle and any component part of it reaching my nostrils later in my life would bring my head sharply up, like a chariot horse of the Blues when it hears the roar of the crowd.

A block of sweating men heaved and strained, some in front and some behind, moving the tower foot by slow foot towards the walls, from which rained death, unseen in the murk.

Unseen but felt. Like some giant snail, the block of men round the tower left a slick, viscous trail of blood and sprawled bodies behind, felled by arrows, fist-sized stones fired from small engines and large spears fired from bigger engines.

There was a bird, amazingly. It flitted out of the dust and perched briefly on the shaft of one of the hedgehog maze of arrows sticking from the assault tower, then whirred off again, gone in an eyeblink.

Then a flock of small boys appeared, darting out of the saffron haze with bunches of arrows: they got silver for every twenty they recovered. A dog was with them, limp-running on three legs, then four, then three again. The boys plunged on, laughing, panting, sneezing, carefree dancers on the edge of the abyss.

I laughed, too, at the sheer incongruity of it. Skarti heard it and his lumpy head came up, tight-mouthed. He shook it, saw what made me chuckle and managed a savage grin. He was holding himself to prevent the shakes – even his hair looked clenched – yet he leaned forward and spoke.

‘S-s-see many s-s-strange things in b-b-battle,’ he managed. ‘B-b-birds, b-b-beasts, w-w-women, d-dogs. S-s-saw a s-s-stag once, r-run between two armies.’ Then he shut one eye, which fluttered as he did so, and placed a quivering finger alongside his nose in a grotesque parody of the knowing look. ‘B-but you n-n-never see a c-c-cat on a battlefield,’ he finished portentously and, drained, sank back to lean on his shield.

Mounted couriers galloped to and fro. A man on foot spilled out of the shimmer, looked wildly around and spotted the Raven Banner.

He stumbled towards Einar, his tunic streaked with dark sweat patches and worse, spoke quickly, pointed, waved his hands furiously and then, done, slumped down, his legs buckling. Einar began to pace, slowly, up and down.

I realised, eventually, that he was counting. On five hundred of my count, he stopped, signalled to Valknut and the Raven Banner went up, then bobbed three times.

The Oathsworn lurched upright and moved at a walk, then broke into a jog. Skarti weaved and staggered with me and I slowed to let him keep up as he clattered into me and almost fell, caught my shoulder, muttered an apology.

In a loose bunch, shields up, we headed into that sulphurous maw, shrinking ourselves as small as possible and wishing we were anywhere else. I caught sight of others, equally thick with dust, trotting forward in small groups, their own banners up. My father appeared from the crowd, raised his sword briefly in salute, then was gone again. I loped on and the arrows arrived.

The sagas will tell you of arrows like rain, like sleet. Not so. They come in flurries, in flocks, like birds. You see a brief flicker in the air and then they hit with a drum-roll smack.

I had three in my shield almost at the same time, the shushu-shunk of them making me stagger. Another whicked past my head; Skarti went down, gurgling, drowning in his own blood. Another hit his thigh as he rolled.

I half stopped, wanting to turn to help him, but dared not expose my back. Another bird-flicker through the dust and a man to my right yelled, hirpled a few steps, then started hopping, his injured leg held up, the shaft through the calf from one side to the other.

‘Ah, fuck,’ he yelled, then fell over. ‘Fuckfuckfuck.’

A dark shape loomed: our assault tower, now hard against the scabbed wall. Close up, that white wall was a yellowed fang, rough and pitted, the base littered with rag-bag corpses in dust-tanned white, stained ominously black and clumped on the shards of picture tiles torn from the walls.

Fireflies sparkled in the dust and I stared at them until they whunked into the earth and the tower. One sizzled past me; someone behind screamed and Eindridi staggered out of the pack of men squeezing up the lower entrance, waving his arms wildly, a shaft sticking from his neck and his hair on fire.

‘Help me. Tyr help me …’ But he reeled off into the dust before anyone, man or god, could lay a hand on him.

Fire-arrows smacked the tower. It smouldered already and the haulers were trying to keep the cowhides wet with frantic licks of water from wooden buckets, but the heat was drying them out almost as fast. Inside, men struggled up ladders in a dripping rain of mud, sliding and cursing and sweating.

I waited, shuffling forward with the rest, breathing ragged and still hunched, though the tower offered shelter from the arrows. Almost. The man in front of me – not one of the Oathsworn – half turned to say something to the man next to him and his head jerked with a sudden high clang. He dropped, twitching and I saw there was a huge dent in his helmet and the blood was pouring from his nose.

I pushed past him. Something slammed into the timber nearest me and, unable to go further in the queue, I ended up staring at the round, pebble-sized lead shot embedded there. I swallowed and looked back at the felled man, who was thrashing now, his back arched off the ground and blood coming out of his ears and nose and even streaking down his cheeks from his eyes, like tears.

There was a flurry of movement ahead. I was almost on the ladder when the whole tower shook and, just as I was putting my foot on the first rung, a body plunged to the ground with a clatter of iron and breaking bones.

The tower lurched again, then embers and chunks of burning timber rained down through the muddy drips. Another body crashed down, then several more and people above me were scrambling back down the ladder. I took the full weight of a man on me, scrambling, kicking.

He stepped on me and another one would have done the same if I hadn’t lashed out and sent him spinning, which let me scramble back out, away from the tower, which had suddenly gone crazy. The ladder had tilted.

No, not the ladder. The whole tower. As I scrambled away on all fours, losing my shield in the process, the assault tower toppled like a falling tree. The top half was on fire; it had then been hooked with grapples from the wall and hauled over sideways.

It fell with a great bell of a crash and a blast of choking air, thick with dust and smoke. Flaming debris spun and whirled in it, like the end of the world.

I found my shield, got up and stumbled backwards over half-seen figures on the ground, caught my boot and fell over one on to another and lay on it, panting for breath. I levered up, felt stickiness under my hand and heard the clang of steel.

It made no sense – had they sallied? I got up on one knee, looked at the body and blinked. Steinkel. My cousin, last seen being dragged out of Martin’s company, scowling and sullen.

Now he lay on his back with dust in his glazed eyes and entrails oozing from between the shattered rings of his fine mail. And something dark and gibbering rose in me. Gudleif’s sons.

Fresh clangs, a grunt, a series of triumphant shrieks and, for the first time, I saw the figures nearby, hazed silhouettes in the gold. One crumpled as I watched, the other hacking with frantic blows, each one heralded by a grunt.

I rose and moved, half blurred in my head, and saw the horror of it; saw the fear that had been rising in me, shapeless and screaming, given truth.

Bjorn turned from hacking my father to bloody ruin, his mouth slack, his eyes wild. He saw me and snarled, but his voice came out too high-pitched. ‘You. Now it is complete.’

My father. I wanted to brush him aside, not to be bothered by his idiot raving and his quarrel, to get to the side of that bloody, leaking thing that had been my father.

But Bjorn was there and his sword was up, thick, fat blood runnels sliding down the blade. My father’s blood. His face was still young, round with puppy fat, but the mouth was twisted in fear and hatred.

I stepped back in my mind and saw, for a flashing second, through his eyes, what faced him: his age, but leaner, axe-faced and wiry with new muscle, bulked unnaturally at the shoulder by oar and sword, blasted brown by sun and wind.

He was too young and soft, this boy, for trying to exact bloodprice – but he and his brother had hacked my father down.

I went for him then and I don’t remember much of it, save that, for the first time, I had no fear. Perhaps that was what Pinleg had found, that disregard for death or harm in the pursuit of something desperate. Maybe berserk was different, but I tasted something of it then, in the dancing golden dust in front of the White Castle.

How did the fight go? A good skald would have made much of it, but all I know is that when I blinked back into the Now of it, Bjorn was laid out on his back with his head all bloody and one ankle almost severed.

I saw that blood was dripping from a cut on my forearm, that my shield was slashed and tattered and that I had lost the last two fingers of my left hand.

My father was still alive when I knelt by him, but only just, and I had nothing to offer, not even water and certainly not help. I knelt there, my hands waving uselessly because I couldn’t even work out where to start in the slick gore of what he had been. All I did was drip blood and snot-tears on him and I have always remembered, with shame, how useless I was then.

He grinned at me, his teeth stained red. ‘Dead, are they?’

I nodded, trapped in silence, hands fluttering.

‘Good. Fucks – should have known they’d never leave it alone. Got one – that silly little arse, Steinkel. Had no sword-sense at all. Should both have stayed away. That fucking Christ priest …’

He would have spat, but had no fire left to do it. Blood worked into froth at the corners of his mouth and he was gargling when he spoke. He looked at me, still grinning. ‘Bad business. That fu-fucking bear. You look like your mother.’

Again I couldn’t say anything and the tears were splashing muddily on his shoulder.

‘Good woman. Loved her after a fashion and she me, I am thinking. Never had a chance to grow.’

He coughed up more blood and I patted aimlessly, helplessly.

‘Lies,’ he said. ‘For good reasons. We each had our true loves. Mine rode the whale road, swift and sure. With a good sail on it I could cut a day ... off any … journey anywhere. Find my way by the stars to the end of the world.’

He spasmed; the grin froze. ‘You are my pride, though.’ His eyes went glassy and he hissed, one hand grasping me by the wrist: ‘But not my son. Her true love was Gunnar …’

And he went across the rainbow bridge, while the world spun and crashed and roared like the sea and all my thoughts were dust.

I would have stayed there, but some others passing dragged me away and dropped me safely out of arrow range, beside the huge engines with their Lebanese cedar throwing arms and sweating Greek engineers.

They loaded and fired, loaded and fired, for the assault had failed dismally and the only way into the city now was to pound the walls to rubble. Some of them, seeing the state I was in, gave me water and bound my wounds up with only slightly dirty rags, while I sat and let them, solid as a stump on the outside. Inside, I was … disconnected, like sea-rotted mail, falling link by link.

Not my father. Gunnar her true love. Stammkel hated Gunnar. The new links locked and riveted themselves into place and, though it was patchy, the shape of it was there.

My mother, already carrying me and knowing it, brings herself to my father … no, to Rurik, I realised. To Rurik, who marries her and gets a farm for his old age, he thinks, taking someone else’s son with it. Someone thought dead until he turns up, like a ghost at the feast.

Gunnar. No wonder he had stayed at Bjornshafen and no one dared say anything of it. No wonder, too, that Gudleif had to be sleekit about trying to do away with me, for he must have known.

And Gunnar had stayed with Einar because I was there – had died for being a father and kept it all to himself to the grave. I wept for that, splashing muddy tears down my face, for all the things we would not now say to each other, for all the remembered things that now made sense.

Gunnar Raudi. Swaggering, bracken-haired hard man, a sea-raider who had more in him for fathering than Rurik, who had wanted a farm and peace. Somehow, in a Loki joke, they had swapped lives.

Eventually, the dullness lifted and the tears stopped. I thought of him lying out there, dead in the dust and unclaimed. I couldn’t let that happen, so I went to find the Oathsworn.

I found a man I knew, Flosi, who had been my oarmate on the old Elk and he greeted me with a weary wave. ‘Thought you were gone,’ he said, jerking a grimy thumb behind him. ‘The rest are over yonder – Illugi is taking a tally. I’ve been sent to fetch food and water for us.’

He stood there, grinning madly, his hair a wild tangle and his beard stiff with matted blood and all the same tawny yellow from the dust. His eyes showed white and red-rimmed from the crusted scab of his face but he had no colour in anything he wore, just a coating of that dust. It came to me, then, that I looked no different – save for the tear-tracks, which he did his best to ignore.

Nor did any of the others, slumped in slack-mouthed exhaustion round the remains of what had been our camp, trampled by horsemen at some point, our flimsy shelters scattered. Illugi and Einar were finding out who lived, and who did not.

I was greeted with a raise of the hand, or a nod. Einar, blood streaked in his hair, turned and grinned a lopsided smirk, then jerked his head at Illugi. ‘Better mark him off the dead roll,’ he said.

‘Leave the mark,’ I replied, heaving up a slack skin of tepid water. I sluiced it over my head, then drank some. It was foul.

‘Fair enough,’ said Wryneck. ‘You look more dead than alive – and you just used all the water we had left, so some of us might kill you anyway.’

‘Leave the mark,’ I repeated, but tally it to my father.’

‘Aah,’ groaned Wryneck. ‘Old Rurik? Gone?’

‘A loss we will feel sorely,’ Einar added sorrowfully, ‘when we have the wind at our back and a fair sea. How will we find a course now?’

‘Any course will do,’ I snarled, ‘on the whale road.’

Einar nodded and tried to pat my shoulder as if I was merely overwrought; I glared at him through the streaked crust of my face. Illugi stepped forward, just one pace into that space heating up between us.

‘Anyone else you saw go down?’ he asked.

I blinked away from Einar, into the ravaged creases of Illugi’s worn face, made deeper by the dust caked in them. ‘Skarti,’ I said. ‘Took an arrow.’

‘In the throat,’ agreed Valknut, cross-legged. He was trying to comb the matted tangle of his hair and beard. He looked up, eyes blank, his voice full of wonder. ‘He drowned. I heard him drown in the middle of all the dust.’

‘I saw Eindridi,’ muttered Ketil Crow. ‘At least I think it was him, for I could not see his face. His head was on fire.’

‘A fire-arrow took him in the neck,’ agreed Wryneck. ‘I saw him get it, but he ran off before anyone could help.’

‘We have to recover our dead,’ I said and others growled. Einar nodded, looked round us all, then squinted at the dust. No one mentioned wounded. By now there would be no wounded, for anyone who couldn’t make it back off that field would have had their throats cut by looters. From our own side, most likely.

‘Wait for this to settle, else you will be blundering around achieving nothing,’ Einar said. ‘Food and water will arrive for us. Rest, regain strength and then honour the dead.’

It made too much sense to oppose, so that’s what we did, all through the settling haze of that golden day, while the great engines thumped and the sick and injured moaned and screamed.

The rations arrived, were prepared by women, some of whom were genuinely weeping for men who were lost. For once, we had more than enough to eat, since they had given rations for more than a hundred and there were, by Illugi’s final tally, forty-three of us fit enough to eat.

The dust never quite went away, but cleared enough for us to see the sun begin to die in streaks of gold and purple on a distant horizon, so we went out, naked to the waist in the shimmering heat, shoving the cart that rations had come in.

Until it became too dark to see, we loaded the bodies of those we recognised on to the cart and trundled them back to a place by the river, where the women keened and cleaned them as best they could, even though the entire Don was tinged pink and the twilight insects came in stinging clouds.

I found Rurik, untouched by the hordes of plundering boys, no longer after arrows but out to rob the dead. Skarti, however, had been stripped, his body white under the soft golden layer of dust.

We prised him from a crusted pool of his own blood, thick with gorged insects, and the arrow in his throat came out with a soft suck of sound and a gobbet of red. The one in his thigh wouldn’t come out at all, so I had to saw the shaft short, an awkward job with my bound hand.

All the while I could feel the eyes on me from the cart, the dead eyes of the man I had known as my father, and the storm in me rolled and swelled, for I was angry at him for having kept the secret so long, so that I did not even have my real father. Sad as a wolf-howl for him, too, that he had borne it all this long.

Skarti’s pox-ravaged head lolled sideways as I closed his eyes, hearing his voice say: ‘But you never see a cat on a battlefield,’ and we placed him on the cart, too.

We also laid out Eindridi – well, we were reasonably sure it was him, from the shield and weapons he bore, but even his own mother would not have known the blackened, peeling thing that had been his face.

We found Hrut, who knew more riddles than Bagnose, and Kol Otryggsson, who could carve out delicate, swirling patterns in leather with an awl, and Isleif from Aldeigjuborg and Rorik, the half-Slav from Kiev, who had come up to Holmgard for the season and joined us there, had hardly been with us long enough for anything to be known about him.

Then there was Ranvaik Sleekstone-eye, one of the old Oathsworn, his odd-coloured eyes closed for ever, the centre of his face punched bloody by one of those lead pebbles.

And more, each ragdoll body a new keening for the women, another stone in the heart of us all.

Einar and Valknut looked at Ranvaik’s corpse, blank-faced and wordless. Ketil Crow, almost tenderly, wiped the crusted mess from the dead face. There were, I knew, no more than a handful of the original Oathsworn left, the ones who had once sailed from where the bergs calved off in floating mountains to the lands where sand was drifted by the wind into a parody of the ocean.

Flosi came back for the cart eventually, eyeing with distaste the smear of fluids streaking it, for our bread and meat had to be piled there. Grumbling, he headed down to the river to clean it out, muttering that he wished he had known all this before he had taken that binding oath.

And, on the way, he flung back carelessly at Einar: ‘A new lot have arrived from up north, well-mailed and – armed Danes. Maybe you can tempt fresh men from them. Their leader is talking to Sviatoslav. Walks with a bad limp, calls himself Starkad.’