Blood Feud (7 page)

So we took the road to Miklagard.

Some days later, we sold the ponies at Aarhus, where the
Great Sound opens south into the Baltic Sea. And that same evening, while we sat in a waterside ale-shop under an old ship’s awning, with a pot of ale and a platter of pig-meat between us, a man turned in from the alleyway outside, spoke to the old one-legged pirate who kept the place, then came threading his way through the elbows and sprawling feet to the corner where we sat. He was rangy and loose-limbed, so tall that his rough sandy hair brushed the salt-stained canvas overhead, with a fair, freckled skin, and grey-green sea-water eyes.

‘Which of you is Thormod Sitricson?’ he asked.

‘I am,’ Thormod said.

‘So. You have been asking in the town, for two men.’

‘Aye.’

‘Would there be a drink in it, for me?’

‘If you can tell me where they are, and if they are the right men, as much drink as you can hold without bursting like an old wine-skin.’

The man hitched up a stool and sat down, leaning his elbows on the ale-stained trestle boards. ‘Anders and Herulf Herulfson, are their names; and one of them – Anders, it would be? – has a small scar on his cheek-bone, and odd eyes, one blue, one grey.’

Thormod nodded. ‘Where are they?’

‘I am thirsty,’ said the man, and grinned.

Thormod looked at him a moment, then turned and shouted to the potboy, ‘Drink, here!’

A brimming ale jug was brought, and the man hitched it towards him. ‘Drink heil!’ he said, and poured about half the jugful down his throat.

‘Wass heil!’ Thormod drank also. ‘Where are they?’

The man set down the jug and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Not here.’

‘I did not think they would be.’ Thormod reached out and removed the jug. They were grinning at each other, enjoying every moment of the game. ‘And I’d no mind to waste my time hunting them through Aarhus, and them already away. When did they sail? And what ship?’

‘Three days ago.’ The man took back the jug, drank again, and set it down. ‘They came to us of the
Red Witch
first. Hakon Ketilson is gathering a crew for the Kiev voyage and on to Miklagard; but the
Serpent
was sailing a few days ahead of us; and they seemed eager to be away.’

‘They would be,’ Thormod said.

The other cocked an eyebrow. ‘Friends of yours?’

There was a small sharp silence. Then Thormod said, ‘Until my father killed theirs by mischance; and they cried Blood Feud, and killed mine.’

‘So-o!
That
is the way of it! Small wonder they took oar with the
Serpent
rather than wait for the
Red Witch
. Yet they took no pains to cover their tracks.’

‘They would not be hiding their tracks,’ said Thormod into the ale-pot, and passed it to me.

The other stared at him a moment, then shrugged and turned again to his own drink. And in a little, Thormod said, ‘Would this Hakon Ketilson of yours be still gathering his crew?’

‘If it was me,’ said the man, ‘I’d appeal to the Judgement of the Thing, and accept their settlement as to Wyr Geld. Blood will not bring the old wolf back, and gold has always its uses.’

Watching Thormod, I saw his eyes slowly widen, fixed on the other’s face, and the muscles stiffen in his neck. ‘Yet for the old wolf – blood may give him the better right to sit with his head high in Valhalla.’

I was a Christian of sorts. I had thought of the Blood Feud as a matter of vengeance. It was not until that moment that I understood that for Thormod and his kind, it was a matter of a dead man’s honour. I was learning fast.

‘Each to his own way,’ the man said. ‘Yours, then, is to Kiev?’

‘And beyond to Miklagard if need be. Shall we go now and speak with this Ship-Chief of yours, while maybe he still has need of two more rowers?’

‘The lad comes with you, then?’ The man jerked his chin in my direction.

‘Jestyn, my blood-brother, comes with me. Aye.’

‘So, now we are getting to names. Thormod and Jestyn – and I am called Orm. Now we are name-friends, almost ship-mates. Another jug of ale, and we’ll drink to a fortunate river-faring, and a fine bloody end to your feuding, before we go.’

So another jug of ale was brought, and we drank, passing it among the three of us. ‘Wass heil! Drink heil! Wass heil!’

IN THE DUSK
of the short summer night, we ran Hakon Ketilson to earth in the ale-house where he was drinking with others of the
Red Witch’s
crew.

A square, squat man, with a face that looked as though it had been hewn from old ship’s timbers, and only one eye, but that a very bright one that looked as though it did not miss much. He looked us over with it, and clearly he was one to pick his crews and not take any boat-strand garbage that drifted his way. But Orm claimed us for friends of his, forgetting to mention the fact that our friendship was barely an hour old. And so, in a little, we each took the knucklebone which Hakon produced out of a greasy pouch, and found ourselves part of the
Red Witch
’s crew; and together with the rest, we drank to good fortune and fair winds; and at last wavered our way down the boat-strand, with arms about each other’s shoulders, singing, to spend what was left of the night huddled under the
Red Witch
’s awning, where she lay ready for the launch.

Two days later, with the stores and trade goods safely stowed in the narrow space beneath the deck planking, we ran her down into the water, and swung out the oars for Bornholm and the Baltic.

But weather-luck was not with us. We ran into a northerly gale and spent five days storm-bound in the lea of Bornholm’s Western tip; and when we came at last into the broad mouth of the Dvina, with its trading post of wattle and tarred canvas sprawling among the river marshes, and stopped to water ship and take on last-minute stores, the
Serpent
was eleven days ahead of us.

‘Small matter,’ said Thormod. ‘It is a long road to Miklagard.’

I remember two things chiefly of those first weeks of our river-faring: one is the unceasing, back-breaking hard work, and the other is the forest – the black, whispering pine forest that crowded to the banks on either side, as though it would have engulfed and smothered the river and the
Red Witch
and us toiling rowers along with it.

Sometimes the Dvina was wide enough for four vessels to pass abreast; and from time to time we met other ships making the return trip with embroidered linens and slave-girls and great jars of southern wine. When the river was broad so that the current slackened, if there was a following wind we would hoist the square sail and get a bit of help from that. But for the most part, it was just rowing, pulling up-river all day long against the current; day after day swinging to and fro to the oars, and the forest crawling by, black and unchanging so that it might have been the same stretch of trees every day.

At night we landed, and pulled the
Red Witch
up the bank, and made camp. Most times we fished for our supper, fresh fish being better than dried meat that grew more maggoty every day. Once or twice, when we made camp early enough, some of us would go off hunting, but without much success, scarce anything moves in those forests except the great bearded wild oxen – not the kind of beast to be easily knocked over in a spare hour after the day’s work.

And at night, too, beside the camp-fire, Thormod would get up and draw his sword – one did not go unarmed in that country, no matter how much the day’s work might be over and the time come for rest – and stand watching me until I got up and drew likewise. Then, however tired we were, we would fall to, cut and thrust and parry; the great sweeping strokes of the blades catching the light of fire and pine-knot torches. For it was on that long river-faring that he taught me,
who had been a cowherd and a thrall, to be something of a fighting man.

Aye, there was hard work enough, those long river weeks, even without the sword-training at the day’s end; and some of us muttered darkly as time went by, grumbling that Hakon Ship-Chief demanded too long at the oars each day. But there was a harder stretch to come.

‘When you come to the Great Portage, you’ll learn what work is,’ Hakon said to those of us who hadn’t made the trip before. And when we came to the Great Portage, we learned indeed.

The Dvina that flows north to the Baltic, and the Dnieper that goes looping southward past Kiev to the Inland Sea, rise many days apart in the dark forest heart of things; and ships making the river-faring must be man-handled across country from one to the other.

Where the portage-way started out from Dvina, there was a small settlement of the Rus; Northmen who had settled down with women of the forest tribes; narrow-eyed, high-cheeked tribesmen, and others of mixed stock between the two, who made their living from the ship folk passing by. From them, Hakon hired ten oxen with their drivers, and a kind of sledge to carry the goods and gear (for one lightens ship of all things movable, for a portage); and great runners for lashing along the
Red Witch’s
keel. We laid in a store of pitch and pork-fat for greasing the hauling gear; and on a grey day with mosquitoes hanging in stinging clouds under the trees, we started out.

‘There are men who make this portage every year or so,’ said Orm. ‘It must be that someone dropped them on their heads when they were very small.’

With eight of the oxen harnessed to the
Red Witch
, and the remaining two to the sledge, it might have seemed that the crew would have an easy time of it. But we had constantly to scout ahead, making sure that the portage-way, cut deep
through the forest, was clear of branches and fallen trees; and we toiled at the great rollers, pulling each one from beneath the ship’s stern as it came free, and racing forward to set it beneath her forward-lurching prow. We must keep the runners daubed with pig-fat whenever they start to smoke. And though the oxen could keep her moving on the level, whenever the way ran up-hill, it needed all our strength and straining added to theirs to keep her going; while on a downhill stretch, we must dig in our heels and hang on to the check-ropes, lest she run wild and kill the oxen and maybe wreck herself into the bargain. And I was not the only one to have the feeling that the
Red Witch
, unhappy on land, was fighting us every step of the way.

So we toiled and sweated and cursed our way across country, filling the forest with the noise of our going. The forest that gave back no sound out of its own darkness, save the hush of a little wind among the fir tops, that never reached us, sweating down below; and now and then the harsh alarm cry of some bird. But on the evening of the eighth day, we came over a last ridge, and saw before us through the trees, the dark shining loop of a river, and the same kind of rough settlement as the one at the Dvina end of the portage.

Someone let out a hoarse shout. ‘The Dnieper!’

But Hakon Ship-Chief laughed. ‘Not yet, though it runs into the Dneiper. The tribesmen have some name for it that no one else can get their tongues round. Mostly, our folk call it Beaver River.’

‘But it
is
the end of the portage?’ said Thormod, just ahead of me, somewhat breathless, for we were hanging on to one of the check-ropes.

‘Aye, it’s the end of the portage. Clear water now, down to Kiev.’

We feasted that night in company with the crew of a
northward bound trader who were for the portage-way the next morning; sharing food and cooking fires and the news of North and South. Presently Thormod asked for news of the
Serpent
. ‘You’ll have passed her a few days since?’

‘Aye.’ The stranger Ship-Chief counted on his fingers. ‘We shared camp one night. She’ll be ten or twelve days ahead of you. But she’ll not make it through to Miklagard this season.’

‘Why should that be?’ demanded Hakon Ship-Chief. ‘There’ll be open water out of Kiev for more than two moons yet.’

The other man spat a gobbet of pig gristle into the fire. ‘It’s not the ice that’ll hold her, but Prince Vladimir. He’ll be having a use for extra ships and fighting crews.’

We all pricked up our ears, and Hakon said, ‘What use? Having said so much, say more, friend.’

I mind sitting with my arms across my knees, and my eyes full of firelight, half asleep after the day’s labour, and listening to the ‘more’ that the man had to say. After more than a year among the Northmen, I knew something of the background to it. I knew that Byzantium had been at war for a good while with a people called the Bulgars, whose frontiers ran with their own. I knew that not so long since, the Bulgars had swarmed south into a part of the Empire called Greece, and that the Emperor Basil II had led an army into the heart of Bulgaria in return, and got very much the worst of it there. Also I seemed to have heard that while he was out of the way, two of his generals – both had given trouble before, and one been exiled and one given the post of Commander of Asia, which came to much the same thing – had seized their chances, and each gathered all the troops he could lay hands on and proclaimed himself Emperor; which made four, because Basil had a younger brother, Constantine, who officially shared the throne with him, though he cared more
about dancing-girls and feasting than he did about ruling an Empire.

It had all sounded very complicated and somehow rather comic, when I had heard men talking of it in ale-houses in Dublin or round a driftwood fire in Aarhus, discussing its effects on trade with southern markets. But somehow, though just as complicated, it didn’t seem so comic now.

‘Just the day before we were due to sail,’ the stranger Ship-Chief was saying, ‘a Byzantine Red-ship came up-river, with three men on her afterdeck – two of them high-ranking officials of some sort, I’d say. And one a soldier; you could glimpse the mail under his silks . . . Well, you know how it is; by next morning word of their business with Vladimir was all over Kiev. One of the generals who revolted – Bardas Phocas –’

‘That’s the Commander of Asia?’ put in Hakon.

‘Aye; that’s the one – has got the upper hand of the other – Bardas Schlerus – and penned him up in one of his own fortresses –’