The Wolf Sea

`What else can we do?'

Brother John shrugged. 'Pray he lives to reach Antioch and pray that the Greeks have not slaughtered all the Sarakenoi and pray that the ones they left alive include a doctor. The Sarakenoi have the best doctors, as any will tell you.'

`That's a lot of praying,' I pointed out and he nodded and smiled wanly.

I have them to spare for him, all the same,' he said.

I went to the Goat Boy, who was barely awake, with a voice like the whisper of a distant wind.

`You should have let me die,' I heard him say.

`Your mother would have killed me,' I managed. 'Anyway, Finn Horsehead needs a helper at the cookfire and you have been selected. When you have finished lolling here, that is.'

He managed a smile, then a small tear, pearl-bright and fat, squeezed from the corner of one eye. His skin was so pale the blue-purple veins stood out like the scars on Short Eldgrim's face. Will I ever see my mother again?' came the whisper.

I nodded, unable to speak now, for his heimthra was choking me.

Short Eldgrim saved the day, shoving his scarred face into the tremble between us, offering the Goat Boy what was supposed to be a friendly grin but looked like a bad carving left too long in the rain. 'I'll take you back after this little trip is over,' he growled, 'for I have left my washing. Don't worry, little bear, enjoy a ship journey and an adventure in a strange place, some sweet things to eat and then home.'

The Goat Boy smiled at that, then his eyelids closed and he slept, his breath a rattle in the tiny cage of his chest. I sat and brooded on it, alone in the prow, while men went to their sea-chest benches and hauled us away.

Away from Balantes — and also away from Starkad and the sword we needed, though I knew he would follow and made the mistake of saying so when Radoslav pointed out that Starkad did not know where we had gone.

I told them, feeling the sick taste of the jarl torc in my mouth, hearing Einar. chuckle.

`He knows,' I said flatly, 'because I told Arinbjorn.'

Radoslav's eyes widened slightly, then he nodded, quiet and thoughtful. I knew he had a new weight to add to his scales: Arinbjorn had been given command of the Volchok and I had told him my plans in case we were separated on the journey.

Now Starkad would make Arinbjorn tell all he knew — and I was sure he would keep that knowledge to himself. Starkad had come from the east, so he must have ploughed all the way to Jaffa, the Serkland harbour most used by Christ pilgrims heading for Jorsalir, and found I had lied, for a Christ priest like Martin could not have arrived without comment there. Now he wanted me alive long enough to tell him what he still believed I knew: where Martin was.

In the hiss and gurgle from the water creaming away from the bow, I heard Einar's laughter and drove it out with sweat and grunting, taking my place at a bench and hard-rowing all the thoughts out of me. We pulled in shifts for half a day until the wind swung round to a useful quarter, by which time my arse and back and thighs ached.

When a man took my place, I stood to the watch like everyone else, taking the prow and pulling on the new mail I had taken as my share from Patmos. It was snug. My old mail, which I had sold to help get us down the Dark Sea to Miklagard, would now have been too tight round the bunched muscle of my shoulders and it had been made for a grown man in Strathclyde. For a moment, quick as a flick of light, I saw the rain pooling in the dead eyes of the boy I had killed in that fight.

A lifetime ago.

Then, after a long ache of time, Sighvat called out a sighting of land ahead and, not long afterwards, a ship. By the time I reached him, he had changed that to ships, so that everyone, clenched and anxious, craned to see.

`Greek ships,' he said, pointing, and, sure enough, there were the great curled sterns you could not mistake. Three of them. Then four. Behind them, land bulked up and there was a smear of smoke, so that Gizur, frowning and shading his eyes with one hand, shook his head.

`This is where we should be,' he growled. `Seleucia, for sure.'

`Well, we are in trouble now,' Kvasir growled, thinking these were the Greeks who pursued us.

I did not think so, for it could not be ships from Cyprus. I thought it more likely they were ships from Miklagard supporting the army — which meant the Greeks were still in Antioch.

Short Eldgrim grinned and bet Finn an ounce in hacksilver that I had the right of it and Horsehead, who would lay money on anything, took it, spat on his hand and sealed the event. A minute later he scowled, having realised that if he won he would be hard put to get a dead man to pay up.

Short Eldgrim was still grinning when the dromon washed up to us, backed water neatly and hailed us.

He stuck out a hand, waggling the fingers delightedly until Finn, grumbling, started fishing his purse out from under his armpit.

On the Greek ship, a man waved at us with a golden stick. He wore a simple white tunic, but had a splendid helmet with a great fountain of horsehair maned across it.

'I am quaestor of the port,' he yelled across the gap between us. 'I did not know your Curopalates Nabites had any ships here. Where have you been?'

That made me blink. My who? I told him we had come from the Great City and did not know any Nabites, at which the quaestor indicated he would come aboard. We slithered our ships together in a soft swell, Gizur wincing and roaring at each dunt on the fingerwidth-thick pine strakes, and the Greek clambered aboard, clutching his golden stick.

It then turned out that Curopalates wasn't a name but a title worth three pounds of gold to whoever had it, but the Nabites confused us all, for it seemed this quaestor spoke of a Norseman. It was not a name anyone knew, either in the decent tongue of the West Norse, or the crippled way they spoke to the east of Norway.

But the quaestor said this Nabites was favoured by the Strategos John, commander of the Basileus's armies here, and had some six hundred men, plus ill his women and even his dogs, brought down from the north.

It's a mystery right enough,' said Brother John, coming from attending the Goat Boy, who lay bundled in warm cloaks, his hair like night against the pale skin. But he breathed, ragged and laboured though it was.

The quaestor handed us a stamped bronze medallion which would give us passage to the harbour, and we chewed on the strange name of Nabites, scratching heads all the way into safe anchorage.

That was in the curve of a bay, where the little white houses of the fair-sized town of Seleucia straggled up from a rough harbour and, confusingly, there seemed to be a forest right down at the water's edge. It was a puzzle to us all — until we realised that the trees were ships' masts.

I had never seen so many ships in one place and neither had anyone else. We gawped until Gizur roared and banged a pine-tarred rope's end on the deck to get all our attention fixed on not running into the massive fleet anchored there.

We flitted in like a chip of driftwood, dwarfed by huge supply ships and even bigger warships, dodging the smaller galleys and fat-bellied little Greek merchant ships — for they would not miss a chance like this

— which were as like our own knarrer as to be brothers misplaced at birth. Finn stood in the prow, waving the bronze medallion at any guard ships and cursing them in the few Greek words he knew when they came too close.

Ours was the only hafskip, though, which made it easy to find a good spot near the village — none of the other ships could go as shallow. I wanted it run up on the beach, since I knew we'd be gone from her for a while, but Gizur baulked at putting five years of neglected timbers to that sort of test.

The hafskip had one other effect, which happened as we took it as close to the breaking waves as Gizur cared to go, then splashed ashore to cable it to the land. I was halfway over the side when Short Eldgrim gripped my shoulder and, when I looked at him, he nodded towards a group moving down to us.