Grass Sea of the Rus; and it is a place of gloom and penetrating damp. There may be a flicker of late summer and even pleasant days at the start of the year, but you cannot count on sun, only rain, between the last days of harvest and the first ones of the festival of Ostara, which the Miklagard priests call Paschal.
`Come and warm me,' one of the girls said. 'I can teach you how to make a beast with two backs if you do.'
I knew that trick and moved on, trying to keep the man in sight by turning and exchanging some good insults, then bumped into a carder of wool coming up the other way, demanding that people buy his mattress stuffings or risk freezing their babies by their carelessness.
The street slithered wetly down to the docks, grew crowded, sprouted alleyways and spawned people: bakers, sellers of honey, vendors of tanned leather for making cords, those selling the skins of small animals.
This was not the fashionable end of Miklagard, this collection of lumpen faces and beggar hands. They were the halt, the lame and the poxed, most of whom would die in the cold of this winter unless they got lucky.
It was already cold in the Great City, cold enough to numb my senses into thinking to find out who this man was and why he followed me.
So I slid up one of the alleys and hefted the bundle that was the runesword, it being the only weapon I had besides an eating knife. My plan was to tap him with the cushioned blade of it as he passed, drag him in the alley and then threaten him with the sharp end until he babbled all he knew.
He duly obliged, even pausing at the mouth of the alley, having lost me and wondering where I had gone.
If I had stayed in the shadows, I would have shaken him off, for sure — but I stepped out and rapped him hard on the head.
There was a clatter; he staggered and yelled:
The third thing I found out was that his cap was a metal helmet covered in leather and most of the blow had been taken on it. The fourth was that he was from Falster and I had made him angry.
That was what I learned. I missed many things, but the worst miss of all was his oarmate, coming up behind me and leaving me gasping in the alley, the sword gone and pearled rain dripping off the Falstermann's blade, raised to finish me.
`Starkad won't be pleased,' I gasped and the big Dane hesitated for long enough to let me know I had it right and he was a chosen man of an old enemy we had blooded before.
Then I lashed out with my right leg, aiming for his groin, but he was too clever for that and whacked my knee hard with the flat of the blade, which he then pointed at me.
He wanted to kill me so bad he could taste it, but we both knew Starkad wanted me alive. He would want to gloat and wave the stolen runesword in my face, the one now long vanished up the alley. The Falstermann, wanting to be away himself, started to say a final farewell, which would have included how lucky I was and that the next time we met he would gut me like a fish.
Except that all that came out was `guh-guh-guh' because a knife hilt had somehow appeared beneath his right ear and the blade was all the way into his throat.
A hand pulled it out as casually as if it were plucking a thorn and the hiss of escaping blood was loud, the splatter of it everywhere as the Dane collapsed like an empty water-skin.
Blinking, I looked up to what had replaced him against the yellow lantern glow of the window lights beyond the alley: a big man, shave-headed save for two silver-banded braids over each ear, wearing the checked breeks of the Irish and a tunic and cloak that was Greek. He also had a long knife and a tattooed whorl between his eyes, which I knew was the?
'I heard him call you pig fart,' he said in good East Norse, his eyes and teeth bright in the alley's twilight.
'So I reasoned he bore you no goodwill. And, since you are Orm the Trader, who has a crew and no ship, and I am Radoslav Schchuka, who has a ship and no crew, I was thinking my need for you was greater than his.'
He helped me up with a wrist-to-wrist grip and I saw that his bared forearm had several thick-welted white scars. I looked at the dead Dane as this Radoslav bent and rifled his purse, finding a few coins, which he took, along with the seax. Then it came to me that I should be dead in the alley and my legs trembled, so that I had to hold on to the wall. I looked up to see the big man — a Slav, for sure — cutting his own arm with the seax and realised the significance of the scars.
He saw my look and showed me his teeth in a sharp grin. One for every man you kill. It is the mark of my clan, where I come from,' he explained, then helped me roll the Dane in his cloak and back into the shadows of the alley. I was shaking now, but not at my narrow escape — it had come to me that the Dane would have gone his way and left me lying in the muck, alive — but at what had been lost. I could have wept for the shame of losing it, too.
`Who were they?' asked my rescuer, binding up his new scar.
I hesitated; but since he had painted the wall with a man's blood, I thought it right that he knew. 'A chosen warrior of one Starkad, who is King Harald Bluetooth's man and anxious that he get something from me.'
For Choniates, I suddenly thought, the Greek merchant who had coveted that runed sword when he'd seen it. It was clear the Greek had sent Starkad to get it and would be unhappy about the death. The Great City had laws, which they took seriously, and a dead Dane in an alley could be tracked back to Starkad and then to Choniates.
Radoslav shrugged and grinned as we checked no one could see us, then left the alley, striding casually along as if we were old friends heading for a drink-shop. My legs shook, which made the mummery difficult.
`You can judge a man by his enemies, my father always said,' Radoslav offered cheerfully, 'and so you are a great man for one so young. King Harald Bluetooth of the Danes, no less.'
And young Prince Yaropolk of the Rus also,' I added grimly to see his reaction, since he was from that part of the world. Beyond a widening of his eyes at this mention of the Rus King's eldest son there was silence, which lasted for a few footsteps, long enough for my racing heart to settle.
I was trying desperately to think, panicked at what had been lost, but I kept seeing that little knife come out of the Dane's neck under his ear and the blood hiss like spray under a keel. Someone who could do that to a man is someone you must walk cautiously alongside.
`What did he steal?' Radoslav asked suddenly, the rain glistening on his face, turning it to a mask of planes and shadows.
What did he steal? A good question and, in the end, I answered it truthfully.
`The rune serpent,' I told him. 'The roofbeam of our world.'
I brought him to our hov in a ruined warehouse by the docks, as you would a guest who has saved your life, but I did this Radoslav no favours. Sighvat and Kvasir and Short Eldgrim and the rest of the Oathsworn were huddled damply round a badly smoking brazier, talking about this and that and, always, about Orm's plan to get them back to sea in a fine ship, so that they could be proper men again.
Except Orm didn't have a plan. I had used up all my plans getting the dozen of us away from the ruin of Attila's howe months before, paying the steppe tribes with what little I had ripped from that flooding burial mound — and had nearly drowned to get, the weight of it stuffed in my boots almost dragging me down.
I could not get rid of the Oathsworn after we had all been dumped on the quayside. Like a pack of bewildered dogs they had looked to me. Me. Young enough for any to call me son and yet they called me lad' instead and boasted to any they met that Orm was the deepest thinker they had ever shared an ale horn with, even as I spun and hung my mouth open at the sheer size and wealth and wonder of the Great City of the Romans.
Here, the people ate free bread and spent their time howling at the chariot and horse races in the Hippodrome, fighting mad over their Blue or Green favourites and worse than any who went on a vik, so that city- wide riots were common.
