Oathsworn 2 - The Wolf Sea (34 page)

When I came back to the square, the bodies were being dragged away and Finn, seeing me, blew out with relief.

`Thought you'd run into trouble, Trader,' he said. I shook my head, scooped water from the well and doused my head in it, surfacing with muddy runnels coursing down face and beard.

`Here's some fresh,' said the Goat Boy, hefting a bucket, and I drank. 'There is food cooking,' he added and the men cheered him. Those who could cheer, that is.

We had six wounded, none badly enough to have to drink from Brother John's onion-water flask. One was dead, though: Town Dog had taken an arrow in the armpit, having unpicked the rings of a too-tight byrnie so that it would fit better.

Ì told him to keep his arms by his sides,' mourned Kvasir moodily, shaking his head. 'But he waved that silly spear in the air and that's what happened.'

Àt least he
had
such a coat,' Botolf growled pointedly, cleaning the blood off the heft-seax. He had unfastened the raven banner and was washing the blood off it as best he could, though the end result simply made it even more streaked and grisly.

`Who were they, do we know?' demanded Brother John, standing hipshot like a man four times his size, spear held tall and proud in one hand. Sometimes I wondered if he really was marked by his Christ-god for a priest, for he was like no robed monk we had ever seen.

Who were they? I had no answer for Brother John, but had sat and looked at the man I'd killed for long enough to see that he was too thin, dirty and had the old sores of manacles at wrists and ankles.

When we had laid out Town Dog as best we could, I took a dozen men down the white road, between the irrigation ditches and the fields of plundered beans and herbs, past the abandoned olive presses and out on to the stony desert plain, back along the route the brigands had come.

As we came up the hill to the columns of the Hittite temple, dust marked where the remnants of the band were fleeing towards the hills, Black Beard with them.

I did not know what a Hittite was — another people turned to dust — but they built well, for this was a flat area flagged with great square stones and studded with the remains of pillars, some toppled like trees.

There was an altar and low, square buildings and several stairs that led down to underground places.

This was where the brigand band had been staying, that was clear, for it had been made into a fort, after a fashion, with dug-up flagstones and earth. They had been here a while, too, judging by the firepits and gear.

`Quite a jarl-hall,' Finn noted admiringly, nodding towards the village. 'Water to hand, too, when they needed it — though they'd have done better to leave men to guard it and prevent the likes of us wandering in.'

`Water,' I said. 'But only melons and beans, if any are left. Small wonder they were scrawny. Escaped men from the mines, I am thinking.'

Finn shook his head. 'Not the one I killed. He was sword-calloused, for sure — a Greek or a Bulgar by the way he cursed. Strong, too, for a man on melons and beans.'

Then Brother John turned over the bones in the midden-pit and came up with a skull that was no animal and the sickening rush of it came over me. Not just melons and beans. Meat. In a land where we had seen not so much as a lizard.

We found the larder where you'd expect to find it . . . underground, in the cool. They could have wrapped the cuts better, in linen to keep the flies off, for some of the meat we came across was already too far blown to eat.

Not that they needed to. They had come across a way of keeping their meat fresher, longer: they cut off what they needed from the living, then tied off the wounds to prevent them bleeding to death. When we came across four men, with arms and legs missing, hung up on hooks through their shoulder blades, I was near to hoiking and Finn wanted to hunt down the ones we had seen fleeing to the hills.

Three of the four were dead. The fourth was barely alive — and was known to us. Finn knew him as Godwin, a Christ-sworn Saxon from the Danelaw, and called him by the name everyone had used: Puttoc, a Saxon word which, it seemed, meant 'buzzard', on account of his great beaked nose. We knew him because he was one of Starkad's men, had stood and scowled darkly at his master's back when we had exchanged words over Ivar's pyre.

After we'd cut him out of the hanging hooks — more meat off him, not that it mattered, since he would not live more than a day — he lay in the cool dark of that stinking place and clawed his one remaining hand on Sighvat's sleeve. The other arm was off just below the shoulder and tied with blood-crusted thongs.

`Help me,' he hissed and Sighvat leaped up and backward as if he had been stabbed, which caused us some concern. Brother John moved in, knelt and began the low, ritual drone that would call Godwin to his Christ-god and we gathered in that throat-catching gloom and listened to his confession, as harsh a sagatale as any Skallagrimsson himself came up with.

Sighvat, after a moment of sitting, silent and clasped and rocking, got up and went outside. I did not notice at the time, too engrossed in what spilled from Godwin's crusted mouth.

Godwin was one of Starkad's crew, so that relentless hound had been here. That probably meant Martin the monk had come this way and the wyrd of it rocked me back on my heels, for it seemed the Norns wove our threads in and out like a cat's cradle. For all we wanted Starkad dead, we generally agreed that he was a grim and questing hound, every bit as good as his reputation. I hoped the monk was stew, but I doubted it; he could wriggle out of a closed cauldron, that one.

The mine guards, Godwin said, in a voice like the whisper of a moth wing, had run off, in groups and singly, until the prisoners had broken their shackles and freed themselves —by which time, of course, they were already starving. Godwin thought that some of the slaves were former soldiers from the Great City and they had taken over, raiding out to this Aindara for food, chasing off the villagers in the process. Then that source had run out, too, and the ex-slaves had turned on their own.

At this point, Godwin had arrived with Starkad and his men, hungry and thirsting. The leader of the freed prisoners, the one the Greeks called Pelekanos and the
Sarakenoi
called Qalb al-Kuhl, had attacked at once, so that many on both sides were killed and Starkad had been forced to flee with what remained of his men. It was here that Godwin had been taken prisoner and kept for weeks eating beans before they had. started to carve him up.

`Well, I'm sorry we missed killing Pelekanos today,' growled Short Eldgrim. 'I would thank him for giving Starkad a fair dunt — and then cut the liver from him and force him to eat it as a lesson.'

Godwin's laugh was a dust-dry rasp of sound. 'You didn't fight Pelekanos today. That was Giorgos the Armenian. He did not want to go with Pelekanos, who is mad and seems to want to kill Starkad. They parted and not as friends. Pelekanos took some people with him, chasing Starkad, some as soldiers, some as fodder.

The others went with Giorgos and came here.'

`The mine is empty then?'

`No one . . . there. Gone.'

His head lolled and Brother John poked and peered and shrugged. 'Alive and deep asleep. That tie round his arm will need loosening or else it will fester and he will die. If we loosen it, though, he will lose more blood than is good for him and will die.'

I hardly heard him, but reached out and cut the crusted leather thongs out of mercy. While I watched the blood ooze out of the half-formed scabs, my mind was crashing like surf on a shoal.

Valgard and the crew we'd come to rescue were gone and we were too late. I had thought of that, that they might all already be dead, had even prepared for it in my head. But not this. Dragged off by dead-eaters? Not even Svala and her seidr magic could have foreseen this.

Odin, it seems, was not easing up on his revenge for oath-breaking at all.

13 Brother John wanted us to go after the Greek Giorgios and, as he said 'end his affront to God'. I told him we would go south as fast as possible, because I thought soldiers would arrive. Aliabu, when we got back to him, proved that I had the right, scratching out the warp and weft of it in the sand.

Around Aleppo, he told us, marking it out in stones while we gathered round, were the Hamdanids, who had led the fight against the Great City's army at Antioch.

Many of the ones we had fought had been made up from the Kitab tribe of Bedu.

To the east were the Buyyids, latest in a long line of such who held the Abbasids caliphs of Baghdad hostage. They had joined the Hamdanids to fight us, but were no real friends to them, while the Qarmatians of Damascus seemed to be the same sort of Mussulmen as the Fatimids, but the Fatimids said the Qarmatians were no Mussulmen at all. The Qarmatians were, it was generally agreed by everyone, not ones to fall prisoner to.

To the south — busy celebrating victory in the newly-named Cairo — were the Fatimids of al-Muizz under his general, Jawhar, with their pink and green flags. They were no friends to anyone who did not believe as they.

And all around were the almost hidden Bedu, with their own allegiances and blood-feuds.

`Fuck,' said Kvasir, grim with disgust. 'There are so many camel-humpers fighting over this place you would think it worth something, but look at it. It's stones and dust. Now, soft green fields I can understand fighting over. But what does this place have? Even the silver mines are empty.'

For one thing, Aliabu told us, there were horses. The
asil,
he said, is the best horse in the world and people kill for them. It was this horse, Aliabu revealed, that had landed him in the clutches of Jarl Brand at Antioch.

In the Kitab tribe was a powerful clan called the Mirdasid and Aliabu had been sent to them by his own people, the Beni Saher from around the Pitch Sea, to find out the pedigree of the forty head of horses the Beni Saher had lifted from them months earlier, a great feat which the Kitab still mourned.

`Wait, wait,' demanded Finn, thrusting his chin out with disbelief. 'What does he mean? Is he trying to tell us he went to the camp of the people his people had just robbed and asked him the value of what they had taken?'

It was exactly so. It seems that Aliabu's presence was as sacred as that of any herald, because the first thing a Bedu who gets an
asil
horse wants to know is its descent.

However, now that he had that information, Aliabu did not want to overstay his welcome in Kitab country and was taking the fast route home when he stopped to trade with the army at Antioch — and had his sons taken in care by Jarl Brand.

He would get them back when he delivered us to the Pitch Sea, as the Greeks call it. The
Sarakenoi
call it the Dead Sea, though it wasn't true that it was dead. In fact, as we saw, it was greener than anywhere, though the shoreline of it was white with salt and the water undrinkable, even if you strained it through wadmal.

Finn heard out Aliabu's marvellous tale, shaking his head and marvelling at how someone could walk, unharmed, in and out of the camp of someone they had just raided. Everyone talked of that all day — save Sighvat, who sat apart, drawing runes in the sand and scrubbing them out.

Brother John, meanwhile, spent his time protesting that it was not right to leave dead-eaters like Giorgios behind. I soothed him by reminding him that we had soaked Godwin in oil and burned him and all the rest of that underground larder. Giorgios and his friends would have to eat each other now, which was only fitting.

`Maybe they will manage it before soldiers come and finish them off,' I offered.

Brother John, his face burned leather-brown so that the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes showed white, looked at me and shook his head.
`Malesuada fames,'
he said. 'And there is more than one kind of hunger.'

A hunger that persuades to evil. Perhaps he was right, looking back on it. We were all full-sail with it, driven across this sand sea, still hungry for the silver of Atil's hoard. Still on the whale road, yet not a whitecapped wave in sight.

Not all were happy with this. There were thirty-eight of us left, burst-lipped, sun-slapped, sweating and weary and only a handful were the old Oathsworn. Two or three Danes from Cyprus, led by a muttering Hookeye, were already growling about being no closer to this silver hoard and others were starting to listen.