Scramasax (7 page)

‘She'll take it out on her courtiers,' asserted Snorri.

‘For what they didn't do,' said Skarp.

‘And never knew.'

But their grim satisfaction soon gave way to talk about what Solveig could do, and couldn't do, alongside the Varangians.

‘Women,' said Skarp. ‘Good for bed and for bearing our whelps.'

‘Some women have second sight,' observed Snorri.

Skarp wrapped his arms around himself, and stared at Solveig.

‘We only admire them,' Snorri added, ‘if they behave like men.'

‘Not that we expect them to fight in battle,' Harald interrupted. ‘It may come to that. Solveig may have to fight, but I hope not.'

Snorri raised his right hand. ‘Blood splattered her
mail-coat,' he declared, ‘and a sun-ray shone from her spear.'

‘I know that poem,' Harald told him. ‘But it's about a Valkyrie, not a woman.'

‘Valkyries are women,' Solveig objected.

‘More than women,' stated Harald. ‘You can help the cooks, Solveig. You can pluck and skin and gut and chop. You can groom the horses, and muck out the stables …'

‘I'll find out,' Solveig asserted. ‘I'll find out what I can do.'

Harald looked as if he'd tasted something sour, but his pale blue eyes were shining. ‘And be so good as to inform me,' he told her.

‘How far is it to Sicily?' asked Solveig.

Harald shook his head. ‘You'll have to ask one of the helmsmen.'

‘I can fish,' she volunteered. ‘I can ice-fish too!'

Everyone laughed.

‘Good idea!' said Skarp. ‘Where will you find the ice?'

‘When winter comes.'

‘No,' said her father. ‘Not this far south. There's no ice.'

‘And it never snows,' Skarp added. ‘Except when pretty Viking maidens show us their—'

‘Skarp!' Harald warned him.

‘Never snows!' exclaimed Solveig. ‘But we need frost and ice and snow … to scour the year.'

‘And chill our blood,' Harald agreed.

‘We do,' said Solveig. ‘Before the world grows green again. I can mend sails.'

Harald nodded. ‘Talk to one of our boatmen.'

‘And weapons. I think I could.'

Skarp leered at Solveig. ‘You can mend mine,' he told her. ‘It's a bit rusty.'

‘Oh, Harald!' cried Solveig, and she flung her arms wide. ‘I'm so glad. So glad.'

‘Hmm!' grunted Harald. ‘Sing me the same song in a year's time.'

‘If I had to stay in this palace,' Solveig told him, ‘I'd be imprisoned, like a songbird in a golden cage.'

‘Pretty words,' said Harald. ‘But now, Solveig, you must prove your worth.'

‘I will.'

Harald wagged his right forefinger. ‘When you go back to your quarters … you mustn't breathe a word of this to Maria.'

‘Of course not.'

‘Not even in your manner.'

‘Sometimes,' observed Snorri, ‘what we do not say tells no less than what we do say.'

‘When will we sail?' Solveig asked Harald.

Harald Sigurdsson shrugged. ‘Soon. Very soon.'

Solveig looked at him warmly and expectantly.

‘Before an army sets sail …' Harald said, and he spread his big hands. ‘All the clothing, the weapons, all the provisions, all the horses.'

Solveig nodded.

‘And then we'll have to wait until the Empress, the divine Empress, gives us permission.'

‘And asks her bishops to bless us,' Snorri added in a cutting voice.

‘There's nothing wrong with that,' argued Halfdan. ‘Better to have more gods on our side than too few.'

‘Wait until I send you word,' Harald told Solveig. ‘And when I do, you must come at once.'

‘At once,' repeated Solveig.

‘In the meantime, arouse no suspicion. None. Understand, Solveig, if anyone finds out, not only will it endanger your life, it might endanger mine.'

*

No sooner had Solveig returned to her quarters than Maria came to see her.

‘What's happened?' asked Solveig.

Maria quickened across the receiving room, smiling, and embraced Solveig.

‘What is it?'

‘I have permission to take you with me to see my father.'

‘Me?' Solveig stiffened. ‘When?'

‘You do not want?'

‘Yes, yes, of course I do. But …'

Maria looked at Solveig, perplexed. ‘What has changed?' she asked.

Solveig shook her head and gave Maria a wooden smile. ‘Nothing,' she protested. ‘When do we go?'

‘Tomorrow. We must be back before sundown.'

I'll be glad to be out of this palace, thought Solveig. I'm a farm girl, not a princess. And I know Maria's servants are watching me.

As they left the palace together, Maria said, ‘First we go to the almond-seller. My father likes fresh almonds. Almonds and oranges. Oranges make him stronger in his blood.'

In the Hippodrome, the girls met seven Varangian guards running towards the palace, scarlet cloaks flying, and seeing them in such a hurry made Solveig nervous that the fleet might be about to set sail.

No, she thought. That's impossible. Not already.

‘Men,' said Maria gaily. ‘Varangians are men. Harald is the most man.'

‘And my father,' Solveig declared.

Is it possible, she wondered, that Maria and Harald could make a marriage? After all, she's the niece of the Empress, and Harald's the half-brother of King Olaf. She
worships him, but Harald … What about him? What are his feelings?

I can't ask Maria. Not yet. She wouldn't open all her heart. But before I sail for Sicily, I'll try to find out.

In the same market where Solveig's father grew so anxious that he had lost his daughter, the two girls bought almonds and oranges, and Solveig told Maria how her father had to repay a porter for sending him and his whole basket of oranges spinning.

‘And he made the porter even more angry by throwing one orange into the air, and slicing it in half with his sabre,' Solveig exclaimed.

‘Harald's the best swordsman in the whole of the Varangian guard,' Maria said.

‘Is there anything at all that Harald cannot do?' Solveig demanded, laughing.

Maria lowered her eyes, and her eyelashes flickered. ‘Come on now,' she purred. ‘Before my father, we go to see silk-weavers.'

Maria guided Solveig through the bustling market to an aisle selling nothing but leather – boots, belts, purses, trousers, straps, bridles, bits, saddles, shoulder bags. Then she dived between two stalls and led Solveig into a much quieter, wider aisle, decorated with banners – scarlet and orange, saffron and lime and grass-green, dusky pink and indigo – hanging from the supports of each of the stalls.

‘Silks,' Maria told Solveig in the most silken of voices. ‘Nothing but silks.'

Solveig stared up the aisle and down the aisle.

‘The Jews are not Christian,' Maria said with a little frown. ‘Sometimes dark flies buzz in their heads and fly out of their mouths, but … they weave silk like angels. Better than anyone in the world.'

As soon as the two girls began to walk along the
spacious aisle, now and then pausing to finger a silk, this one so gauzy it almost floated, that one thick and heavy, Solveig realised Maria must be a regular and welcome visitor to the silk stalls. Many of the merchants stood up from their stools to greet her, and smoothed their long black beards between their fingers.

Then one merchant held up two goblets, smiling and inviting the girls to drink with him, and Maria replied to him in his own language.

‘What were you saying?' asked Solveig. ‘I didn't know you could speak … speak …'

‘Hebrew,' Maria told her. ‘I can't. Not much. But I learned some in the Holy Land. I was saying part of a poem about drinking old wine among myrrh and lilies.'

‘What's myrrh?'

‘In the orchard of pomegranates,' Maria went on, ‘and palms and vines, full of scented flowers and tamarisks …'

‘What?'

But now Maria was in full flood. ‘. . . to the hum of fountains …'

‘I've seen one of those. The fountain in the palace!'

‘. . . and the throb of lutes. There we shall drink, drink out of goblets!'

By now, quite a group of merchants had gathered round, delighting not only in Maria's spirited recitation but in the girls themselves – the one sallow, the other so fair. Haltingly, Maria explained that today she didn't want to buy anything, but only to show her friend ‘this silken paradise'.

One merchant shook out a panel of glistening silk, and held it up in front of Solveig, and it kept changing colour. It was woad and ice-blue and bluebell; it was the light in the north on the longest summer day that never darkened, not even at midnight.

Solveig gazed at it, astonished.

‘Not today,' Maria repeated. ‘But we'll come back soon. It suits you, Solveig.'

‘I could never wear anything like that,' Solveig protested when they had emerged from the aisle. ‘It's much too grand for me. Anyhow, I have no money.'

‘None?' exclaimed Maria, surprised.

Solveig shook her head.

‘I'll give you some,' Maria said. ‘I've no freedom,' she added fiercely, ‘and a mother in a nunnery and an ill father, but money …' She shrugged and spread her hands.

They walked out of the market and down a sun-baked street, and Solveig slipped a hand through Maria's arm. ‘I'll carve something for you,' she said.

‘The Jews are richer than anyone else in Miklagard,' Maria informed her. ‘They lend money to lots of people.'

Solveig looked puzzled. ‘What happens if you can't pay them back?'

‘The worse for you,' Maria replied. ‘If you borrow three
nomismata
—'

‘What's that?'

‘Gold coins. After twelve months you have to pay back four. And if you can't, the Jews will have the furniture out of your house and the clothes off your back.'

‘No!'

‘Or else, they'll take it in meat.'

Solveig crossed her hands across her chest. ‘What do you mean?'

‘They'll slaughter your lambs and calves. To the value of four
nomismata
. Or else they'll complain to the city justices, and have you thrown into prison.'

‘Prison,' repeated Solveig. ‘Like the nunnery where your mother is.'

‘Yes,' said Maria. ‘That's like a prison.' She indignantly tossed her luxuriant dark hair. ‘The Empress only allows me to visit her once in each season.'

‘Why?'

‘She thinks we might start plotting. Or that I'll be carrying messages for her. And she won't allow my mother to see my father at all, even though he's so ill. I don't think he can live much longer.'

‘Surely Empress Zoe knows that,' Solveig said.

‘She knows everything,' Maria replied. ‘I told you, she hates my mother.'

The street in which Maria's father lived was very narrow – people living on opposite sides could almost have stretched out from the upper windows and touched fingertips. Little sunlight ever touched the damp walls of the houses, and Solveig noticed that some were stained with dark, angry patches.

It's as if Maria has brought me to another city, she thought.

Maria stopped at a big wooden door with a smaller door cut out of it.

‘My father knows you're coming,' she told Solveig, ‘and he will be pleased. His name is Leo.'

Maria had to knock on the door four times before a stooping servant opened it. The hinges groaned.

‘They need olive oil,' said Maria with an apologetic smile. ‘So does his servant.'

The servant shuffled down a short passage and led the girls up twisting stone steps. In the bedroom facing the top of the staircase, Maria's father was waiting for them, lying on a kind of raised divan, propped up with cushions and pillows.

Solveig saw at once how handsome he was or, rather, had once been. His brow was broad, his nose aquiline, he had a generous mouth and a sweeping wave of grey
hair. But he looks like a spirit or a ghost, she thought. I can almost see through him.

First, Maria embraced her father, and then Solveig stood before this noble man. She courteously cupped her hands and inclined her head, and Maria's father, who spoke no Norwegian, indicated that she should sit on one side of the divan, and his daughter on the other.

Maria said something to her father. ‘I tell him,' she explained, ‘how you followed your father. How you travel all the way from Norway to Miklagard.'

Leo murmured a few words and gently nodded.

‘My father says,' translated Maria, ‘you are your father's true daughter as well as a daughter of the gods.'

Solveig wasn't entirely sure what Maria's father meant, but she understood it to be some kind of compliment and smiled prettily at him.

During the following months, Solveig thought quite often of her meeting with this man, reduced to such a sorry shell, and she remembered not only his bearing and dignity but also his flashes of wit, and how readily they had talked about fathers and daughters, about trust and friendship.

‘I believe,' Leo told Solveig, ‘that you can be a true friend to Maria.'

But I'm not, thought Solveig. I know I haven't betrayed her but I haven't told her about Sicily.

‘A Varangian guard told me an old saying of yours,' Leo went on. ‘“When I was young, I walked alone and so I soon lost my way. But when I found friends I felt rich. Each of us needs and delights in others.”'

Solveig gave Leo a tight smile. ‘I will be as true to Maria as I can be,' she said.

After this, Leo talked with his daughter for a while.
To begin with, Solveig listened to the music of their words, but she soon began to grow nervous about how long she had been away from the palace, and whether Harald might have summoned her during her absence.