The Wolf Sea

She pursed her lips at that. 'What harm have I done you?'

`None,' I told her. 'Yet. Nor have you done me any good. Nor should you have killed the raven.'

`He should not have set it to spy,' she answered sharply. Odin will not be pleased,' I pointed out, 'but you have more to fear now from Sighvat, I am thinking.'

`Freyja will keep One Eye away,' Svala said confidently, and your Sighvat as a worker of seidr cannot match two women such as us.'

I sighed, for talking to her was like feeling a storm cloud rise when you are in an open boat. The pitch and toss of it was made all the worse for what had been before.

I want no quarrels between Skarpheddin's mother, you, me or Sighvat,' I replied. 'But you should stay away from all of us.'

`You?'

Especially me,' I snapped.

She straightened, dusting her knees, then looked at me, long and slow. 'This Hild,' she said, while ice crept down my veins. I have seen her, dark and fetched in the night. She has a sword and you had its twin, once.'

I was frozen, tongue-cloven. Had she seen this, out there in the Other — or heard me mutter this while I dreamed?

She smiled. 'I have gifts. Listen, then I will trouble you no more. The first thing to say is that Skarpheddin trusts his mother's power — and so he should. Thorhalla has promised him that you will reveal the secret of your treasure hoard and it would go easier if you just spoke it to him with no trouble. Otherwise, he may do something. . ill.

`The second is that you should get the sword from Starkad, for it is yours by right.'

I swallowed the clump of dry dust in my throat, but I was angry with her, this slip of a girl who thought she could make cows out of the Oathsworn.

`Witch gifts come in threes,' I croaked, which was daring, but I was young and not so convinced that her powers were more to do with keen watching than anything Other.

Her smile, though, was sweet as rumman fruit.

I know the secret of Fatty Breeks,' she said.

9

The heat of the day was leaching out of the dusty scrub, but the sky was dying in flame to the west where the hills rolled, grey-blue. Olive trees were pale purple in the twilight, their leaves black, while the air was arid with a dusty, woody smell, the ash-bite of fires springing up like a field of red blossoms.

Cloaked over it all was the great, crushing stink of an army, a throat-catcher made of leather, iron, horses, an acrid pinch of sweat and the thin, high smell of fear.

I had never seen anything like this, nor ever would again. I had thought Red Boots was bringing up a few more hundreds of men, no more, but this was Miklagard, the Great City, and the army around Antioch was a knarr on the ocean of men who came up from Tarsus.

We saw them first as a cloud to the north, rising up like a pale brown cloak over Antioch, and Brother John started to order us to lash down the wadmal tents, for he had seen such sweeping sandstorms further south, in the desert around the Sea of the Dead. But I had seen one, too, out on the steppe, and knew it was no sandstorm. It was the dust kicked up by the army of the Strategos John the Armenian, favourite of the Basileus and nicknamed Tzimisces — Red Boots.

As with Sarkel's siege, the scholars of the Great City sought me out later, when I was a trader of note.

One was Leo, who was close to my own age, but while I stood in the ranks at Antioch, he hunkered on his knees back in Constantinople learning the ways of the Christ religion. In later days, as he scratched out his saga tales — as monks do — they knew him as Leo the Deacon.

By then, all that we had done had been lost and John Tzimisces' battle at Aleppo was a hero-tale to the Romans of the Great City. Leo, sleekit as a fox though he was, once went with Basil the second of that name and the army when it was cut to pieces by the Bulgars years after these events and barely escaped with his life, so he knew a thing or two about armies.

He wanted me to tell what I knew of the fight at Aleppo, to add to the accounts he had from others, and I did so, as far as I was able. I liked Leo, so I did not tell him he had no understanding of us Norsemen at all

— he called us `Tauroskythians', as if we'd all come from the steppes north of the Dark Sea.

I told him what I knew, which was little enough and shrouded in a golden haze of dust, but he didn't want to hear that. In the end, he told me more than I gave him and we agreed it was the confusion betweeri the Miklagard Handshake and how Norsemen fight bear that had cost us the victory. The first wanted to clasp the enemy with one hand and stab them with the dagger they could not see, while the second wanted to rush in and kill the beast before being crushed in a deadly embrace.

Forty-seven thousand men marched from Antioch a week after Red Boots arrived — and there were more, sweeping through the land known as the Jezira, all the way across the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the north, before turning south and then west again, to come up behind Aleppo. It was a great raid, to drag off the Hamdanids and their allies, so that Red Boots could crush Aleppo and take all that part of Serkland known as Syria.

When we eventually met the Sarakenoi our army was formed up 2,700 yards long and in two lines. The jarl-men were in the front line, which was all scutatoi, the Great City's foot-soldiers with their huge shields.

The Norse were on the right and on the right of the right the Oathsworn. The end of the line.

I did not tell Leo the Deacon that we had come there reluctantly, that we had been too fastened by the chance to kill and loot Starkad to get away before the storm of war swept us up.

Not so Starkad, who broke his oath to Jarl Brand and vanished into the dust haze. By the time we discovered this, it was too late for us to leave without drawing to ourselves attention of the worst sort. So we joined Red Boots's ranks for the battle we knew was planned and cursed both ourselves and Starkad for being so snared in a fight none of us wanted.

The Sarakenoi came with horsemen heavy with mail and banded leather, the ragged-arsed foot they called Dailami, desert horsemen called Bedu, who swooped like swallows in and out of the dust, and the Hamdanid horsemen, who still flew the black banners of the Abbasids even though they had rebelled against them. There were even Turks from Baghdad, where the generals permitted the Abbasids to rule in name only.

They overlapped our lines by a mile either side — which was why it all went wrong, of course. The Great City's army was used to this, had a second line to take care of it, but we didn't know that. All we saw were too many enemies.

Skarpheddin had already decided on our fighting plan, which was the one we usually used. We would bang loudly on our shields and pour scorn on the size of their balls, then we would run at them, howling like wolves. Not that Finn or I, or any of the Oathsworn, knew much of even this grand plan. The army marched, with all 47,000 soldiers, 15,000 mules, camels and oxen and 1,000 carts with the bits and pieces of the artillery engines, the two jarls and all their men — and the Oathsworn, scowling and angry about it, for this was no fight we wanted to be in.

The women and children stayed in their camps around Antioch, save those few who would not abandon their men, and Gizur and four of my men, the Goat Boy with them, went back to the Elk to watch it.

Radoslav had volunteered to stay, too, at which Finn had said nothing, though his look was an entire saga poem on its own. The big Slav, seeing the scorn, had shrugged and come with us, but if Surt, the Norn-sister of What May Be, had kindly drawn it all out for us in the sand, we would probably have agreed with Radoslav and all of us would have quit the army then and there and gone to Fatty Breeks.

Fateh Baariq. Which meant Shining Conqueror in the Saracen tongue. But Svala only told me that as we clattered out in the ranks of Skarpheddin's men, too late to slip away unnoticed. Her smile was malicious and I