The char-black scars from the previous year still marked where one had spread out, incited by opponents of Nikephoras Phocas, who ruled here. It had failed and no one knew who had fed the flames of it, though Leo Balantes was a name whispered here and there — but he and other faces were wisely absent from the Great City.
A black-hearted city right enough, which turned the slither from the gutters crow-dark so that we knew, even if the story of it curled on itself like a carved snake-knot, that cruelty squatted in Miklagard. Blood-feuds we knew well enough, but Miklagard's treachery we did not understand any better than the city's screaming passion for chariots and horses that raced instead of fought.
We were wide-eyed bairns on this new ship and had to learn how to sail it, fast. We learned that calling them Greek was an insult, since they considered themselves Romans, the only true ones left. But they all spoke and wrote in Greek and most of them knew only a little Latin — though that did not stop them muddying the waters of their tongue with it.
We learned that they lived in New Rome, not Constantinople, nor Miklagard, nor Omphalos, Navel of the World, nor the Great City. We learned that the Emperor was not an Emperor, he was the Basileus. Now and then he was the Basileus Autocrator.
We learned that they were civilised and we could not be trusted in a decent home, where we would either steal the silver or hump the daughters — or both — and leave dirty marks on the floors. We learned all this, not from kindly teachers, but from curled lips and scorn.
The slaves were better off than us, for they were fed and sheltered free, while we took miserable pay every day from a fat half-Greek, which would not let us afford either decent mead — even if we could find it here — or a decent hump. My stock of Atil's silver was all but exhausted and still no plan had come to me yet and I wondered how long the Oathsworn would stomach this.
Singly and in pairs like half-ashamed conspirators all of them had approached me at one time or another since we had been here, all with the same question: what had I seen inside Attila's howe?
I told them: a mountain of age-blackened silver and a gifthrone, where Einar the Black, who had led us all there, now sat for ever as the richest dead man in the world.
All of them had been there — though none but me inside it — yet none could find the way back to it, navigating themselves like a ship across the Grass Sea. I knew they also felt the fish-hook jerk of it, despite all that they had suffered, no matter that they had watched oarmates die there and had felt the dangerous, sick magic of that place for themselves.
Above all, they knew the curse that came from breaking the oath they had sworn to each other. Einar had broken it and they all saw what had become of that, so none slipped away in the night, abandoning his oarmates to follow the lure of silver. I was not sure whether this was from fear of the curse, or because they
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did not know the way, but they were Norsemen. They knew a mountain of riches lay out on the steppe and they knew it was cursed. The wrench between fear and silver-desire ate them, night and day.
Almost every night, in the quiet of that false hov, they wanted to look at the sword, that sinuous curve of sabre wrenched from Atil's howe by my hand. A master smith had made that, a half-blood dwarf or a dragon-prince, surely no man. It could cut the steel of the anvil it was made on and was worked along the blade length with a rune serpent, a snake-knot whose meaning no one could quite unravel.
The Oathsworn came to marvel at that steel curve, the sheen of it — and the new runes I had carved into the wooden hilt. I had come late to the skill and needed help with them, but those were simple enough, so that any one of the Oathsworn could read them, even those who needed fingers to trace them and mumbled aloud.
Only I knew they marked the way back to Atil's howe in the Grass Sea, sure as a chart.
A chart I had now managed to lose.
All of this swilled round in my head, dark as the water from Miklagard's gutters, as I hunched through the rain towards our ratty warehouse hall, dragging the big Slav with me. The wind blasted and grumbled and, out across the black water, whitecaps danced like stars in a night sky.
`You look like you woke up with the ugly one, having gone to bed with golden-haired Sif,' Kvasir growled as I stumbled in, shaking rain off, slapping the piece of sacking that was my cloak and hood. His good eye was bright, the other white as a dead fish, with no pupil. He looked the big Slav up and down and said nothing.
`Thor's golden wife wouldn't look at him,' said a lilting voice. 'Though half the Greek man-lover crews here would. Maybe that is the way ahead for us, eh, Orm?'
`The way behind, you mean,' jeered Finn Horsehead, jerking lewd hips and roaring at his own jest.
Brother John's look was withering and Finn subsided into mock humility, nudging his neighbour to make sure he had caught his fine wit.
`Never be minding,' Brother John went on, taking my elbow. `Come away here and sit you down.
There's a fine cauldron of. . something. . with vegetables in it that Sighvat lifted and Finn made with pigeons. And a griddle of flatbread. Enough for our guest, too.'
The men made room round the brazier and Brother John ushered us to a place, gave us bowls, bread and a wink. Radoslav looked at the food and it was clear a stew made of the Great City's pigeons was not the finest meal he had eaten, nor — with the wind hissing through the warehouse, flaring the brazier embers -
was this the best hall he had been in. But he grinned and chewed and gave every indication of being well treated. I took a bowl, but my mouth was full of ashes.
I introduced Radoslay. I told them why he was here and that what we had feared had happened — the rune- serpent sword was gone. The silence was crushing, broken only by the sigh of wind ruffling the curls on Brother John's half-grown forehead. You could hear the sky of our world falling in that silence.
Brother John had been on the boat when we had boarded it on the Sea of Darkness. The Greek and his crew thought he was one of us, we thought he was one of them and neither found out until after we were ashore. We had taken to Brother John at once for that Loki trick and afterwards he had astounded us all by telling us he was a Christ priest.
Not one like Martin, the devious monk from Hammaburg, the one I should have killed when I had the chance. Brother John was from Dyfflin and an altogether different breed of horse. He did not shave his head in the middle like the usual priests, he shaved it at the front — when he could be bothered. 'Like the druids did in times of old,' he offered cheerfully when asked.
He did not wear robes either and he liked to drink and hump and fight, too, even though he was hardly the height of a pony's arse. He was on his second attempt to get to Serkland, trying to reach his Christ's holy city, having failed the first time and, as he said himself, sore in need of salvation.
I was sore in need of the same and dare not look anyone in the eye.
`Starkad,' muttered Kvasir. 'Fuck his mother.' His head drooped. There were grunts and growls and sniffs, but it was a perfect summing up and the worst sound of all was the despairing silence that followed.
Sighvat broke it. 'We have to get it back,' he declared and Kvasir snorted derisively at this self-evident truth.
I will tear his head off and piss down his neck,' growled Finn and I was not so sure that he was talking about Starkad and not me. Radoslav, food halfway to his mouth, had stopped chewing and looked from one to the other, only now realising that something truly valuable had been taken.
`Starkad; said Finn in a voice like a turning quernstone. He stood and dragged the seax out, looking meaningfully at me. The others growled approval and their own hidden knives flashed.
Despair closed on me like dark wolves. 'He works for the Greek, Choniates,' I said.
Aye, right enough, we saw him there,' agreed Sighvat and if there is a colour blacker than his voice was then, the gods have not seen fit to show us it yet.
Finn blinked, for he knew what that meant. Choniates had power and money and that permitted him armed guards and the law. We were Norse, with all that stood for in the Great City. Bitter experience had taught the people of Miklagard just what the Norse did in their halls during the long, dark winters, especially men with no wives to stay their hands. The Great City's
