Blood Feud (15 page)

It was very late when I got there; but the long low-ceilinged room was still crowded, loud with voices and thick with lamp smitch and the smell of wine and sweat and the meat roasting over charcoal braziers at the far end. Again I could see no sign of Thormod; but a handful of our lads were gathered in a corner playing dice, and among them I could make out Orm’s big sandy head. I pushed my way across the room towards him, dodging elbows and stepping over sprawling legs.

He looked up and saw me coming, and checked between throw and throw.

‘Where’s Thormod?’ I said.

‘You’re late back from your hunting.’

‘One of the cheetahs went missing. Where’s Thormod?’

‘Gone with Anders Herulfson,’ he said, and made his throw.

I heard the rattle of the dice as though in a sudden silence. Neither of us looked to see what he had thrown.

‘Just – the two of them?’

He nodded. ‘He came looking for Anders, and in a while Anders came looking for him. They drank together, and then they went out.’

‘And you let him go, and stayed here, playing dice?’

He quirked up his sandy brows above those lazy grey-green eyes. ‘It’s not my feud.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s mine.’

And I turned and made for the door.

‘They went downhill,’ somebody shouted after me.

So I headed downhill towards the sea walls, and the quaysides along the Golden Horn. There would be few people along the waterfront at that hour. Space to finish a Holm Ganging that had begun on Kiev marshes, two years ago . . .

In the dim streets, the torches burning at corners cast pools of fish-scale light across the cobbles, with long secret stretches of shadow between, and there were other, moving shadows, of people, and voices that seemed shadowy also, and sometimes a snatch of laughter. And I remembered suddenly and sharply another night when I had hunted Thormod through the winding ways of Dublin, with his piece of amber stowed in the breast of my sark, and something of the same fear upon me that was cold upon me now.

Somewhere in the distance I could hear a hubbub which was like enough a band of Varangians – the city was full of our kind that night, raising a triumphal uproar in praise of the Emperor’s new bodyguard.

It grew fainter behind me as I passed out by the gate on to the lower Fish Quay. A little movement of air came to meet
me off the water. There was the faint cool snail-shine of a low moon, and the night was pinpricked by lights from the houses of Sycae across the Horn. I heard the slapping of the dark water among the boats below the quay, and far off, the rumble of cartwheels, the bark of a dog, all the ordinary sounds of Miklagard by night. I rounded a pile of masts and rigging and a couple of sails spread out to dry – and saw Thormod. Just Thormod, standing with his back to me, where the light of a cresset on the corner of a warehouse wall spilled over the edge of the quay into the water. He was looking down, and he barely glanced round as I went towards him, knowing my step, I suppose, then looked down again. I also. It was wolf-black among the boats under the wall, and nothing moved but the water tonguing at the mooring-posts. Of Anders, no sign at all.

‘My knife took him under the ribs,’ Thormod said, in that dead-level voice of his. ‘He must have been fish-bait before he hit the water.’

I nodded. The weight of his high studded boots and sword-belt and the gold collar about his neck would have been enough between them to carry his body straight down. ‘So it is finished,’ I said, with relief that was like the sudden ending of physical pain.

But there was a kind of grief in me, all the same.

‘He slipped on a bit of stinking fish,’ Thormod said.

And then, with a dark swirl of movement and voices upraised in singing, a bunch of the Varangians in full cry came spilling out from a side alley on to the end of the quay. You could know them even at that distance and in the dark, for they were yelling a faintly recognizable version of one of the rowing lilts that I had come to know during the long days on shipboard; and even drunk, no one but a Northman could make that hellish din.

Thormod looked at the dagger in his hand. In the cresset
light it showed reddened to the hilt. But he had nothing to clean it on except his tunic or breeks, where the stain would show up like a wolf’s kill on a snowfield. He thrust it back into its sheath to wait for cleaning later; and we turned away from the quay, back towards the sea walls.

The Blood Feud was over and done with, no good purpose would be served by getting the rest of the Varangians tangled in the web of it.

By noon next day, word had found its way across the City from the Imperial Palace, and as we sat at our midday pork and greens in the Blachernae mess hall, suddenly I caught the name through the surf of voices: ‘Anders Herulfson – Anders Herulfson . . .’

Anders Herulfson had been found at dawn, by some fishermen going to take out their boats, hanging on to a mooring rope, with a stab wound under his ribs, and was now in the Garrison hospital. ‘Who did it?’ someone at our table asked, craning backwards for the answer.

And somebody checked in passing. ‘Set on by robbers, so he said – too dark to see their faces, so he’d not remember them again. The odd thing is that he still had his gold collar on.’

‘Maybe they were disturbed before they could get it off him.’

‘How bad is the wound?’

‘He’ll likely live.’

‘Then I’d say the hole in his hide must be less than the hole in his memory,’ said Orm, sitting across the table from me. His eyes met mine, and there was a quirk to his sandy eyebrows.

Beside me, Thormod, his mouth full of poppyseed bread, put up a hand and idly pulled at his sleeve, making sure that it had not ridden up to show a blood-stained rag knotted above his elbow.

I did nothing; neither moved nor spoke nor even thought, just sat there feeling rather as though someone had kneed me in the belly.

It was evening before Thormod and I could speak alone together. We were off-duty then, and taking our ease by the cistern of Theodosius, which is a pleasant place, with shade trees about the arched entrance, and grass to sit on, and a coolness that seems to breathe up from the hidden water. I was sitting with my back against the patchy trunk of a plane tree, Thormod lying beside me, his head on his arms staring up into the branches. Women passed and re-passed with their great jars empty or dripping with the evening water.

‘And now?’ I said, when we had been silent a long while with the same thing in both our minds.

‘We must wait, yet again,’ Thormod said.

‘It is in my mind that already there has been overmuch of waiting.’

Thormod turned his head on his arms; he might have been talking over the price of radishes. ‘Men have waited longer than this, for the clearing of a blood debt.’ And then with a sudden change of mood, he rolled over and banged his fist on the turf. ‘If I had thought for an instant that there was yet a spark of life in him, I would have gone down and finished him as a hunter finishes a wounded animal. Now . . .’

‘They’ll not keep much of a guard on the sick quarters,’ I said.

He looked at me. ‘Could you do that?’

‘I don’t know. It is not my feud.’ The thing was said before I knew it, and I could not take it back.

There was a sharp moment of silence; and then he said, ‘No, it is not your feud – in spite of this . . .’ And he reached out and touched the little white scar inside my wrist.

I turned my hand over quickly and touched the matching
scar on his. ‘It is mine, because it is yours, but – still I do not know.’

He smiled lazily. ‘We’ll not argue the thing. It is my feud, I know. I could have finished him like a wounded beast, last night. Now, the moment is past and cold, and I can only wait. If he dies, I shall have killed him anyway; and if he lives – I must wait until he can give me a fight.’

‘And if he never can? A knife-wound under the ribs is apt to leave havoc behind it.’

‘If he lives, yet does not win back to his fighting strength, then I shall know that there is no justice in my own gods. Maybe I will even turn to your White Kristni.’

THE RUMOUR THAT
we were being sent to Thrace turned out to be true; and a few days later, changed back from our gold-embroidered tunics into battle-grey mail, we were on the march. At this end of the world, where the winters are not so cold, War Hosts do not break off their wars during the dark months of the year, as they do in the north. Indeed, so far as cavalry is concerned, there is better grazing for the horses in the winter than in the hot months when the sun has burned the open hillsides brown. I remember cold winter nights, for all that, sleet blowing in the wind; watch-fires in the mountains, when we slept huddled close for warmth with our cloaks about us, and our feet to the flames; skirmishes fought out in the teeth of a wind that cut like a flaying knife; wolves howling uncomfortably close about the horse lines.

Through that winter we were for the most part on our own. A Bandon of cavalry, a few Centuries of regular troops, and us – three companies of the Emperor’s new Barbarian Guard, out to prove ourselves the best, at least the most terrible, fighting men in the Empire.

We had no big-scale fighting in those months, but a fair deal of skirmishing, for our task was to hold and harry the Bulgars and the Khazan tribesmen from the north, until with the spring, Basil should bring up more troops to thrust them westward. We did not know that we were beginning the Emperor’s life’s work for him: the driving back of the Bulgarian frontier to what it was in Justinian’s day, bringing all the lands between Macedonia and the Danube, the Inland Sea and the Adriatic again into the Byzantine Empire. It is done now. Thirty years in the doing, and treaties made and treaties broken, and a whole captured Bulgarian Army blinded along the way. (The Emperor Basil is nothing if not
thorough!) But the priests tell us that it is God’s Will. And God’s Will is done.

But that winter, with no knowledge of any such great over-all plan, with no news from the city, we followed John of Chaldea, that white-faced, black-bearded man with a fire in his belly, in a kind of small ragged war of our own. Once, towards winter’s end, a supply train got through to us, with dispatches for the Commander, and news that got loose and ran from camp fire to camp fire in a gale of laughter.

Basil, it seemed, had listened to the tears and pleading of his sister the Princess Anna, and tried to back out of his bargain with Khan Vladimir. But at the first hint of delay about sending him his promised bride, Vladimir had seized the Byzantine port of Cherson on the Inland Sea, and threatened to do the same to Miklagard itself. ‘So our Basil has had to give in, and hand the lady over, for all her tears,’ said one of the supply-wagon men, sitting at our fire.

I laughed with the rest, but I was still sorry for the Princess Anna. Ah well, if what I hear be true, she has had none so ill a life of it. At least she has borne sons who are like to be emperors themselves one day, and that should count for something with an Emperor’s sister. If I am sorry for her even now, it must be that I am a foolish old man.

‘The Emperor must be of a meeker temper than I had thought,’ said Orm, through a mouthful of wild pig.

‘Why, as to that,’ one of the escort riders who had also joined us, leaned forward and helped himself to the wine jar, ‘he’s about as meek as a mountain bear, but he’s got more sense. He knows he’s got few enough troops to take on the Bulgars and the Khazan hoards
and
Khan Vladimir at the same time, and even some of the troops he has –’

The man checked, and Orm said blandly, ‘What of the troops he has, friend?’

‘Do you think he can be sure yet, of his new Barbarian Guard?’ the other said, grinning.

I thought there was going to be a fight after that. Maybe it was only because we were all so tired, and had had a winter’s fighting anyway, that there was not. But I mind, even after we had got things sorted out, Thormod with his head high on his shoulders, and his brows almost meeting above the root of his nose, demanding, ‘Does he not understand, this Emperor of ours, who seeks to duck out from under his own promises, that when the Northmen sell their swords, they keep their share of the bargain?’

‘Even against their own kind?’ said the escort man.

‘They keep their share of the bargain,’ Thormod said again, levelly.

‘So long as the man who buys, keeps his,’ Orm added. ‘If he doesn’t, then we put the swords to another use.’ And he drew his finger across his throat. ‘But clearly our little Basil is a man who keeps his bargains, even if sometimes a shade unwillingly. So – our service is his so long as he pays for it, and we die for him if need be. Quite a few of us have already; he needn’t lie awake at night under his gold and purple coverlid, worrying about that.’

Spring came, with an outburst of sudden small flame-bright flowers that were not the flowers of an English spring, and lacking something of the birdsong. And with the spring, the Emperor came up with the long awaited troops. I mind the day he rode in, the camp resounding to shouted orders and trumpet calls and the whinnying and trampling of horses; the Emperor’s great blue and purple pavilion going up, and almost before the last rope was made fast, the Varangians mounting guard around it. Three Companies of the Varangians had come up with him, to relieve us, the three who had been up there all winter long and would be marching eastward in a few days, to take over Palace duty guarding the Emperor Constantine.

That evening, as the shadows began to lengthen, the camp was full of reunions, as men strolled to and fro in search of old friends and comrades – or old enemies. I was kicking my heels among the crowd that had gathered about the Field Armoury, waiting to have a dint knocked out of my shield boss. The Armoury, with its red roar of flame from the forge fire, and the cheerful ding of hammer on anvil, is always a favourite gathering-place in any camp, whether or not one has need of the armourer’s skill, and some of the crowd had nothing for mending at all, but had merely drifted that way as one might to a wine-shop. Orm and Thormod were there too; and a small knot of newcomers, some of them still eating the remains of their evening meal, wandered up to join us – Varangians from the Palace Guard, whose place we should soon be taking.