The Wolf Sea

turned my back on it and tramped into the dust; it only came to me later that she had also told Starkad this earlier, which had made him start after Martin.

`Well,' argued Botolf, scowling, when, at the end of that first day's march, we told him what we had found. 'I don't speak their cat-yowl of a tongue. It sounded different to me. And I was being dragged in chains at the time.'

I had soothed him over it, for we knew now where our oarmates were: in the Fateh Baariq mine, east and north of Aleppo, in a place called Afrin. That left us with a new problem: how to get there. It was miles from the shield of the army, in country we did not know and seething like a maggoty corpse with Sarakenoi.

I felt the weight of the jarl torc, anvil-heavy. It was a long way and in the lands of the enemy.

It is a long way and in the lands of the enemy,' Radoslav then declared moodily, making me twitch and wonder if he could read minds, too. 'We would need our own army,' he added pointedly. 'If we had a hoard of silver we could afford one.'

Kvasir and Finn grunted and said nothing, so Radoslav, seeing he was gaining nothing, rose and went elsewhere.

`He is greed-sick, that one,' growled Finn.

`He has lost his boat,' Kvasir pointed out, but Finn hawked and spat into the fire. That night, Radoslav vanished from our ranks, which everyone thought was a nithing thing for him to do.

`He has all that a warrior needs. .' Kvasir growled wryly next day, 'except the balls.'

I wondered more on it, but was not sure what Radoslav was doing. Perhaps he was just ducking out of the fight, though I did not think much of that explanation. Perhaps he had gone back to steal the container from my sea-chest: Odin luck to him if he crept on board past the men I had left to guard it. Nor did it matter much if he succeeded; the contents were not pearls and, since Starkad would not trade, worthless now.

Worse than worthless, since they still marked us all for blinding and death by the conspirators.

Still, it nagged me. . and left me hollow, too, for I had liked the big, bluff Slav who had, after all, saved my life.

Sighvat came up into this and sat beside me, his raven as silent and brooding as my thoughts. 'I heard the girl came to you,' he said and I shot him a warning glance, for I wanted no one poking a finger in that wound.

He nodded, tickling the beak of the raven. 'She is Sami,' he added, 'from the Pite tribe in Halogaland. Her true name is Njavesheatne, which means Sun Daughter in their tongue.'

A Sami from the north of Norway. Kvasir made a warding sign, Finn spat in the fire and I felt my skin crawl. The Sami, the Reindeer People, were older than time, it was said, and full of stranger magic even than the seidr. They worshipped a troll goddess, Thorgerthr, who used seidr to call down thunder like Asa-Thor himself.

`How do you know this?' I asked.

Sighvat grinned. 'A bird told me,' he said. 'Or perhaps it was a bee.'

Finn rolled his eyes and snorted. 'A bee. Honeyed words, were they?'

Sighvat smiled quietly. 'Bees have many messages, Horsehead. If one flies into your hall it is a sign of great good luck, or of the arrival of a stranger; however, the luck will only hold if the bee is allowed to either stay or go of its own accord.

A bee landing on your hand means money, on the head means a rise to greatness. They will sting those who curse in front of them and those who are adulterers or unchaste — so, if you want a good wife, have her walk through a swarm and if she is stung, she'll be no virgin.'

I knew it was a mistake to ask,' mourned Finn, shaking his head.

`Did this singular bee tell you how we can rescue our oarmates?' I snarled, the Sami thing sick in my stomach. 'Or find Starkad and get the Rune Serpent back?'

A lie. She had been a lie. It was my curse — worse, a Loki joke — to end up snagged like a lip-caught fish by every seidr woman in the world. And Radoslav — I had thought more of him. .

Sighvat smiled, unoffended, leaving me ashamed of my anger. 'No, Trader, but I will ask.' He rose and left, the raven clinging to his shoulder and fluttering.

Kvasir shook his head. 'Sometimes our Sighvat scares me more than any Sami witch,' he said.

We marched a second day and then sat surrounded by the low, growling hum of the army, a sweating beast in the red-flowered darkness. The tail of it still curled wearily in, tramping on into the night, where Finn and Kvasir waited for me to come up with a full-cunning way to get out of this mess. I sat silent and wished they'd bugger off and give me peace, for I was an empty hold of ideas.

After a night of formless, brooding dream-shapes, I was still as empty, sitting by the smouldering firepit, pitching twigs and dung-chips into it as the dawn smeared up the sky. It took me some time to realise that men were moving and talking excitedly, flowing like ants from a broken nest.

Then I heard the blare of trumpets and Finn lumbered up to me, chewing. He tossed me a scrap of flatbread and nodded at the commotion and dust.

`Red Boots is awake then,' he said.

Nearby, Brother John crossed himself Won semper erit aestas,' he said and Finn looked from him to me, puzzled and scowling.

`Get ready for hard times,' I translated and he nodded, grim as old rock.

We were formed up the way the Great City's army was always formed up — so I learned later — with the foot in front, backed by archers, light horse on the wings and slightly pushed forward, so that the whole would look like a gently curving bay if you could fly above it like Sighvat's raven.

Behind that was a second line, all the prized heavy horsemen and the great metal slabs that were the pride of the Miklagard army.

We had seen them ride out of Antioch's St Paul Gate on horses draped with leather sewn with metal leaves. The archers had horses covered on the front, the others had their horses completely cloaked in these little metal leaves. Some carried lances and some had maces and swords only, for when these ones — so fearsomely costly even the Great City could afford only a thousand of them — formed up it was in a boar snout, with the bowmen in the middle, the lancers on the sides and the skull-crushers in front.

All you could see of them were their eyes. They even wore iron shoes and scorned shields for the most part. They were draped in linen to try and keep the sun from broiling them, but we all.pitied those splendid soldiers, the ones the Greeks called klibanophoroi — the Oven Wearers.

There were numeri, bandae, turmae and a score of other names for their units, some of them Latin, some Greek which was the way with these people, who could not make up their minds on who they were. Red Boots had come with two of the three Hetaireiai, the Guard companies. These were the Mese and the Mikre, the former being for non-Greeks who were Christ-worshippers, the latter for foreigners who scorned the Christ. This last was full of Pechenegs and Rus Slays, though the Mese had Saxlanders, whom the Greeks call Germans. Though the Great City accepted Germans as chosen men, they did not like the nation of Otto, who occupied Old Rome and called himself Emperor.

They were almost as big as us, these Saxlanders, and they swaggered and snarled at each other like prize hounds. As Finn growled, they needed a sharp kick under their tails to show them who was better.

Most impressive of all were the Great City's chiefs, whom they called comes, or tribunus, or dux or drungarios and who, even though they had never met any of the men they led before, could get them moving as one, to the beat of ox-hide drums, with only a few words.

Truly, they were a marvel, these Romans, and, for the first time, we realised how they had ruled the world. We felt like gawping bairns.

We met our own commander then: Stefanos, who called himself Taxiarchos. He rode up with a guard of armoured horsemen and spoke with Skarpheddin and Jarl Brand.

This Stefanos, young and moon-faced, had charge of, it seemed to me at the time, the whole right of the army, a great swathe of scutatoi and the Norse and hordes of light horse archers, for it was always the way of the Romans to have their own men in command.