heard the clatter of hooves following on behind me.
We rode as swiftly as I dared with the invalid boy on my horse, through the dirty light and waking streets of the morning, until we reached the gate of Saint Romanos. At the sight of Sigurd the guards waved us through, and soon we were out in the broad fields which stretched away from the walls. The harvest was long since gathered in, but teams of men and boys were there with their oxen, ploughing under the old year’s stumps and chaff. The rising sun was wan through the grey clouds, but the unaccustomed effort of riding soon had me pulling my cloak back off my arms, and then bundling it into a saddlebag altogether. We had slowed our pace to avoid aggravating Thomas’s wounds, and I could enjoy the freshness of the morning as I tried to ignore Sigurd’s lowering bulk ahead of me. He had not spoken to me since we left the monastery.
The jangling of iron to my left turned my head, and I saw that Aelric had come up beside me. Despite his fading hair and his lengthening years, he sat comfortably in the saddle, humming something I did not recognise.
‘You’ve upset the captain,’ he said, breaking off his tune. ‘He’s a warrior — he doesn’t care to be reminded that he’s as much the Emperor’s ornament as his
I glanced nervously forward, but either Sigurd could not hear or would not show it. ‘I’ve heard he has no love for the Normans. He told me they stole your kingdom — as they stole the island of Sicily from us, and would perhaps have taken Attica if the Emperor had not defied them.’
Aelric nodded. ‘Thirty years ago, they came, and even the mightiest king that ever ruled our island could not resist them. Sigurd was only a child then, but I was a man, and I took my place in the king’s battle-line.’
‘You fought the Normans?’ Though there was yet a wiry strength in Aelric’s arms, it was hard to imagine this genial grandfather hammering foes with his axe in the mountains of Thule.
‘I fought their allies,’ Aelric corrected me. ‘The Normans conspired to invite a Norse army into the north, while they skulked in the southern sea which divides our island from their country. We fought two great battles by the rivers of the Danelaw; we lost the first but won the second. As the Norse king discovered, it’s only the last battle that matters.’
I was already lost, for he seemed to make as many fine distinctions between Norsemen and Normans and the Northmen of Thule as the ancients once made between their feuding cities. But they must have been distinct in his own mind, for he continued without hesitation.
‘That second battle, that was a warrior’s day. I killed seventeen of them myself, yet while a single man stood they would not leave the field. Even Sigurd remembers it.’
I craned my head back in my saddle. Sigurd was riding in silence immediately behind us, an ill humour still written across his face.
‘You were there?’ I asked, braving his antagonism. ‘But if it was thirty years ago, you must have been too small even to lift an axe.’
Sigurd lifted his chin contemptuously. ‘I carried an axe at an age when you probably slept in a crib,’ he informed me. Then, too proud to resist the story: ‘But I was there at the battle. I was only six, but my father, who fought for our King Harold, brought me there and left me under a tree behind our line.’
‘Sigurd saw more of it than most,’ Aelric interrupted. ‘More than us who couldn’t even see our elbows for all the death about us.’
‘I remember I saw the banner of their king, Harald the Land Waster, held aloft when all his army was routed.’ Sigurd’s rough voice was strangely wistful now. ‘His bodyguard hacked and parried all who came, marooned in a sea of English warriors. When he fell they fought on, and when at last the fighting was done and our men came to retrieve his body, they first had to pull away seven corpses who had fallen protecting him. Later I discovered that they learned their war craft here, in Byzantium, serving as Varangians.’
Normans and Norsemen, and now two King Harolds: was it just that the barbarian words all sounded alike to my unfamiliar ear, or were they all named identically?
‘I thought you said the Normans stole your kingdom. Yet now you say you eventually defeated them.’
‘We defeated Harald and the Norsemen in the north,’ said Aelric. ‘But a week later William, bastard duke of the Normans, landed on our southern shore. We marched the length of the country and brought him to battle, but we were too weary and they fought with the desperation of men without retreat. They killed our king, and took his throne. As I said, the last battle is the only one that matters.’
‘So you fled their victory, and came here?’
‘Not immediately.’ Aelric paused a moment to scratch his grey beard. ‘For three years the Bastard contented himself despoiling the south, gorging his accomplices with morsels of our land and fastening his grip on power. Then he came north. Some of our lords who had pledged themselves to him rebelled, but too late: they could not withstand the army he led, and one by one they were destroyed, or surrendered. The Bastard turned the fertile country along that coast into a wasteland: bodies lay in the streets by their thousands, and some of the living grew so hungry they gnawed on the bones of the dead. There was not one village or field that he did not raze to the ground, not one ounce of food he did not tear up and burn before our eyes. Then he invited the Danes to come and ravage our shores, so that those few shoots of life which had survived the first devastation were uprooted and consumed. After that there was no life left in the north: a man could ride through the wilderness for days, and never hear a single voice but his own. That was when I came to Byzantium.’
‘And I too.’ Sigurd’s face was pale under his bronze helmet, and his eyes twitched as if beyond his sway. ‘The Normans came to our village one evening; they killed my father and entered his house. All through the night I could hear my mother and my sisters screaming, and at dawn they were dead. I could not even bury them, for the Normans turned our home into their pyre. I was taken away by my uncle, first to Caledonia, then across the sea to Denmark, and at last, by way of many roads and rivers, to this city.’
He wiped a gauntleted hand over his cheek, then grasped his axe just below the head and pulled it from its sheath.
‘You see these notches, Demetrios? These are the number of the Normans I have killed since then.’ He snorted. ‘Or at least, the number I have killed since the last haft snapped from all the wood I carved out of it.’
‘It could still be worse,’ Aelric observed. ‘Look at the eunuch.’
‘Which eunuch?’ I asked, failing to understand his meaning.
‘The chamberlain, Krysaphios.’
‘What of him?’ In his dress, his manners, his language, he seemed as pure a Roman as I had met. ‘He did not come from Thule, did he?’
It was an innocent question, but Aelric and Sigurd laughed so loudly in response that their horses bucked and shied in alarm. ‘From England,’ Sigurd repeated. ‘Why, Demetrios, do you see a resemblance to us?’
I thought of the eunuch with his smooth, olive skin and hairless face, next to these blistered, shaggy, blue- eyed giants. ‘Not much.’
‘Krysaphios had his own encounter with the Normans,’ Aelric explained, subduing his merriment. ‘When he was a young man, he lived in Nicomedia.’
‘It was Malagina,’ Sigurd interrupted.
‘I heard Nicomedia, but it does not matter. It was in the reign of Michael Ducas, more than twenty years ago. One of the Emperor’s Norman mercenaries named Urselius proved treacherous, as is their habit, and turned against the man who paid him. He took many of the Asian provinces before he was finally captured, and during his rising there was much looting and barbarity. The rumour I have heard is that one night some of Urselius’ Norman army captured Krysaphios, then just a boy, and took him to their camp.’ There was no humour in Aelric’s face now. ‘When they released him in the morning, he had become a eunuch.’
It was not the first time I had heard such a story, for I knew that the western barbarians found the third sex at once fascinating and repellent; that many derided us for our reliance on them, and believed our whole race to be tainted by their manlessness. It needed little imagination to think what torment a gang of mercenaries, filled with drink and such beliefs, might effect on a hapless prisoner. If that had been the ordeal Krysaphios suffered, I could only admire the will he must have had to turn it to his advantage, to attain the rank he now enjoyed.
Sigurd’s voice broke into my thoughts. ‘You know that the Emperor relies on the Varangians because of the hatred we bear the Normans. You may guess how he relies on the eunuch.’
Such tales of horror dampened further conversation, and we rode on in silence, save for Father Gregorias grumbling at the back of our column: that his horse was lame, that his saddle chafed, that the water in his flask
