Blood Feud (8 page)

‘If I make the Miklagard run yearly till I’m a hundred, I shall never find my way among these outland names!’

‘And most of Schlerus’ troops have rallied under Phocas’s banner, to march on Miklagard. They’re at Chrysopolis now; nose to nose with the city, as you might say, across just that narrow strip of water that they call the Bosphorus. And what’s left of Basil’s troops are mostly still away in the west, holding back the Bulgars. So the Emperor Basil is sweating.’

‘It is in my mind that well might the Emperor Basil be sweating,’ said Hakon, throwing a bone over his shoulder to the hungry dogs that scavenged about the fire. ‘And so he sends envoys to Prince Vladimir? Maybe there is a new Viking wind a-blowing.’

‘Aye, the same thought was in all our minds; and the thought that with such a wind blowing, Vladimir was not
one to sit at home with his sail furled. If he agreed to help the Emperor, he’d be wanting ships – all the ships he could lay his hands on here and now, beside sending north for more. So we finished loading in a hurry, and I, the Ship-Chief, went up to the Palace and told him we were pulling out for home, and offered to carry his ship summons for him. That way, we got clear ourselves.’

In the silence, somebody leaned forward and put a fresh branch on the fire. Smoke was the only thing to keep off the stinging clouds of mosquitoes that made life a torment after sundown.

‘Some nerve, that must have taken,’ Orm whistled softly. ‘I doubt this Lord Vladimir is one who likes his thoughts being put to him, before he has had time to think them himself!’

‘Some nerve, yes. But behold, we are free and on our homeward way.’

Thormod was looking intently at Hakon; I was watching Thormod; and above us the fir tops whispered together in the little wind that never reached the ground.

Then Hakon said, ‘All this, you told to the
Serpent’s
crew, and still they held on for Kiev? How was it different, between them and you?’

The other grinned. ‘They were heading south anyway. And did you know any of the Northern Kind to turn back from a fight when there was a fight brewing? All other things being equal. For us it
was
different; we’d made our trading trip, and a good one, too. We were heading north, and we’d been long away from home.’

‘We also are heading south anyway, and are not yet hungry for our homes. And it is in my mind that a man grows rusty like a sword-blade, if he holds too long to the ways of peace.’ Hakon’s one little bright eye was suddenly dancing in his battered face. ‘How say you, brothers?’

The crew of the
Red Witch
gave tongue in agreement, to a man.

Thormod and I looked at each other, and let our breaths go, gently.

NEXT MORNING HAKON
paid off the ox drivers, and we ran the
Red Witch
down into the water and set off on our river-faring once again. The worst was behind us now. The flow of the river was with us instead of against; and sometimes we could just let it take us, with the steersman at the stern and a few men rowing.

We passed high-piled beaver dams that choked the water here and there into dark spreading lagoons; and presently villages began to appear on the banks, and the fir trees that had hemmed us in so long began to give place to open woodlands of ash and elm and a kind of sycamore already touched with the first fires of autumn. Soon there were stretches of grassland too. It was so good to be able to see wide skies again, and let the eyes go free into a distance. And all the while, day by day, the river broadened, until at last we came into the great Dnieper.

And on an evening of clear long lights, and a fresh north wind ruffling the water, and with our dragon-head at the prow, and every man on the oars, we brought the
Red Witch
swinging down the last stretch of the river, round a last bluff of the western shore, and saw, over our shoulders, the crowding roofs of a town rising from the boat-sheds and crowded jetties along the waterfront, to the high halls along the hillcrest that caught the westering light as though they were brushed with gold. The evening smoke of cooking-fires making a blue haze over all, and the shadows lying long across the water and the Kiev marshes.

Kiev, the High City of the Rus, that had become so when the Northmen first pushed south from their earliest settlements round Novgorod. Kiev, spreading its power up and
down the great rivers and through the forests and across the empty steppe-lands, wherever the Viking breed had made their land-take, wherever they had bred their own blue eyes and fair hair into the darkness of the Tribes; wherever they held the trade and the weapons. But I knew little of that at the time, and my foremost thought, as we came down the last stretch towards the crowded wharves, and the shadow of the city fell across us, was that somewhere among the long dark shapes of the shipping must be the
Serpent
; and on board, or somewhere among the crowded ways of the town, Anders and Herulf, waiting for our coming.

And a shadow that was more than the shadow of the city seemed to fall across me. I snatched a glance at Thormod swinging to and fro to the oar beside me; but his face, what I could see of it, was shut, and told me nothing.

‘Lift her! Lift her!’ came the chant of Hakon, Ship-Chief at the steering oar.

We brought the
Red Witch
in to the boat-strand and ran her up the beach clear of the river-line; and when we had made all secure, Hakon took about half of us, and leaving the rest on guard, set off for the hall of one of Prince Vladimir’s nobles, who it seemed was a friend of his from past river-farings.

We left the shipyards and the merchants’ quarter beside the Dnieper, and turned to the steep streets that led up towards the Prince’s palace. We soon learned to call it the Khan’s palace, for Vladimir, we found, had lately taken to himself the title of Khan, which until then had belonged to the Tribes. I suppose that was to show that he was the Lord of the Tribes as well as of the Northmen. But that day it was still, to us, the Prince’s palace.

The steep narrow streets were paved with logs, and wound in and out between log-built, turf-roofed houses, that were set back, each behind its own byres and fenced cattle-yard. Erland
Silkbeard had his hall nearly at the top of the hill, only a little below the encircling turf walls of the palace itself. It was much like any other timber hall of the Northmen; like the Chief’s Hall at Thrandisfjord, I thought, glancing about me as we came to the gate; but the byres and store-sheds and sleeping lodges gathered about the big central hall were many of them joined to each other and to the far end of the hall itself, so that one would be able to pass the length and breadth of the place without going out of doors. ‘They have grown soft, these Northmen of the south,’ I thought, not yet having known the cold of a winter night at the heart of the Rus Lands.

But there was not much time, just then, for looking round, for the Master of the Hall was just returned from hawking. He had that moment dismounted, his big goshawk still on his fist, and his horse was being led stableward as we came into the forecourt; a tall, long-boned man with a beard the colour of ripe barley, who wore his soft leather boots and goatskin jerkin as though they were dark silks. When he saw us, he gave the hawk to one of his hearth companions, and came striding across the forecourt. Hakon stumped forward to meet him with a shout, and they came together mid-way, flinging their arms round each other like a couple of bearcubs at play.

‘Erland Silkbeard!’

Erland held our Ship-Chief at arm’s length, and looked at him out of long dark eyes that were not like a Northman’s at all. ‘Hakon Ketilson! Hakon One-Eye! So the amber wind blows you south again!’

‘Aye, and I am come in the old way, to claim Guest-right at your hearth, for me and my men.’

‘And warm is your welcome!’ Erland said. ‘And long shall you bide at my hearth, this time of coming!’

‘As long as may be, so that we are clear before ice closes the way south.’

‘Longer than that, my friend.’

Hakon cocked his head on one side. ‘Ah-huh! the tale was true, then? We shared camp fires with a north-bound crew at this end of the Great Portage, and heard a tale of an embassy from Miklagard, seeking help against troubles within the Empire. They had got their ship out quickly, lest, if the Lord Vladimir was minded to honour the old treaty, he should cast his eye on her to swell his war-fleet.’

‘That will be the crew that carry his Ship Summons north with them,’ said Silkbeard. ‘He was a bold man, that Ship-Chief . . . Aye, the tale was true. And so you come to join the fight?’

‘Did you ever know Hakon One-eye or the men who sailed with him to turn back from sword-clash? Besides, we were not minded to carry our cargo home again.’

‘So; you will have long enough to see to your merchanting, and the
Red Witch
shall pass her winter safe and welcome in one of my own boat-sheds.’

‘There is a moon and more before the ice,’ Hakon said. ‘What do we wait for?’

‘Vladimir has promised two hundred ships, six thousand fighting men. Such a war fleet cannot be gathered and away before the ice closes the Dnieper, therefore it must wait until the ice breaks in the spring.’ Erland, his hand still on Hakon’s shoulder, turned back towards his hall. ‘Come your ways in – already there’s nip in the air once the sun is down. I will send men to see to the
Red Witch
, and bring up the rest of your crew.’

The next night, when the evening meal was over in Erland’s hall, and Erland’s men and
Red Witch
men together, we were sprawling at our ease with loosened belts while the great jars of ale and fermented mares’ milk went round, Hakon leaned forward with his elbows on the table, and asked, ‘What is it that they are building up yonder beside the Khan’s palace?’

‘There are always new buildings going up in Kiev, even beside the Khan’s palace,’ Erland said, making gentle finger-play with his beard, in the way he had. ‘We are a growing city.’

‘But this was a strange shape.’ Hakon dipped his finger in his ale cup, and drew something on the table boards. ‘Somewhat the shape of a God-House of the White Kristni.’

Erland nodded, and I had a feeling he was amused, not at Hakon but at the thing they were talking about. ‘Aye, so.’

‘And a man was overseeing the work. A dark fellow, with his hair cut – so.’ Hakon drew the finger round his head, out-lining a priest’s tonsure. ‘And garments on him such as the priests of the White Kristni wear, in Miklagard.’

Erland was leaning back against the red and saffron hangings on the wall behind him. He was a man who could relax more than most men, like a cat lying out in the sun. (But he could spring like a cat, too.) ‘There are three such men in Kiev. They are here to teach us how to build this new kind of God-House beside the Khan’s palace, and how to worship the White Kristni in it when it is built.’ He looked round at our startled faces in the flare of the resin torches, and laughed. ‘Nay now, it is simple enough. Our great Khan Vladimir has thought in his mind, that for a great people such as we have grown to be, the gods that we brought with us from our old world in the north are too rough-hewn, too homespun. We must take to the gods of the world that we now reach out to. We must turn to Islam or to the faith of the White Kristni.’ He held out his silver-bound drink-horn to one of the women for refilling, and took a long drink before he went on. ‘Islam, he finds, will not serve, for the followers of the Prophet Muhammad may drink no fermented liquor, and a faith which forbids a man his drink is clearly no faith for the Northmen.’

Hakon nodded, seeing the point. ‘And so it must be the White Kristni.’

‘In the spring, we sent men to Miklagard, to ask more
concerning this faith. They came back in early summer, with what they had learned. And with strange stories beside –’ The faint sheen of amusement that was so much a part of him faded for the moment, and he seemed grave, almost puzzled. ‘They said that they were taken to a great gathering in the chief God-House of the city – St Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom. And there was wonderful singing and strange-smelling magic smoke that made their heads swim; and at the moment of the Sacrifice – they have a make-believe Sacrifice, pretending like children that bread and wine are the body and blood of their God – at the moment of Sacrifice, strange-winged spirits came down from the high roof, and hovered above their heads; and by this, they judged that the faith was a true and a powerful one.’

Since then, I have worshipped many times in the Church of the Holy Wisdom. I have heard the singing soar and swell and echo under the vast domes, till it is like no singing of this world; and seen how, in the light of the candles and the swirling incense smoke, the wonderful jewel-bright angels of the roof mosaics can seem to float free and swim down . . . Now, I have a fairly clear idea as to the marvels that convinced Khan Vladimir’s envoys . . . Ah well, the Mysteries are in men’s souls and hearts, that can receive the Truths of another world through the Truths of this one . . .

At the time, I could only listen and marvel with the rest.

‘Wah!’ said Orm, speaking for the first time. ‘That is a wonder indeed! Yet it is hard for a man to forsake the gods he has known all his life, for a strange God who is like an untried friend.’

‘I am too old to be changing gods,’ said Hakon.

Erland’s inner laughter had returned to him. ‘As to that, there is no need, for you. You are of our old world, passing through. You are not Kievan, not Rus. And even for us, who are both these things, must one desert an old god because one prays from time to time to a New One? I took my Manhood
Oath on Thor’s Ring before the men in the God-House, but when I was a child in the women’s quarters of my father’s hall, I sacrificed to the gods of my mother’s people. I prayed then to Epona the Great Mare. I pray to her still at foaling time.’

I had guessed already that, like me, he was of mixed blood; with his long bones and thick fair hair that contrasted so oddly with his sallow skin and high flat cheek-bones and those narrow dark eyes. But it was in that moment, when I should have been thinking of the things of the Spirit, there came to me for the first time an awareness of the Rus as a People, not just a southward swarming of the Viking hoards, with the Tribes as a kind of lesser folk in-gathered along the way.