The Wolf Sea

promised. I will also give you some good Arabs, the ones they call Bedu from hereabouts, three brothers and their women led by one Aliabu. . something. He will make you look more like his people and, if you travel with the camels I will give him, there is a better chance of avoiding that stake up the arse.'

It was a good plan and I simply nodded, thinking more about how I might just miss getting arrested by Red Boots, who was now galloping off back to Tarsus. I did not hold out much hope of it, all the same -

now that he had time to think on it, Red Boots would want that silly container and the lives of all connected with it.

There wasn't much else to do, I was thinking, except brood on it and watch Kleggi and Svarvar arm-wrestle while Hookeye and Arnfinn raced each other to swallow whole ox-horns at one go. Hookeye finished, dripping and triumphant, while Finn bellowed that he had won only if the bet had been to try and drown himself in nabidh instead of swallow it. Hedin Flayer interrupted to excuse Hookeye on the grounds that his squint made it hard for him to get horn to meet mouth first time out.

I remembered Hookeye, draped like a Miklagard priest and arse going like a washerwoman's elbow, while the Hamdanid chief's woman under him shrieked and squealed. She had not been a pretty Sarakenoi princess afterwards.

None of that, though, drove the certainty of what I had to do out of me. So, swallowing the spear in my throat, I did it: I told Brand what we had done on Cyprus, for he was the only one who could, I was thinking, protect us from Red Boots and get the secret to the Basileus of the Great City. I did not tell him we had lifted the prize to trade for the sword Starkad had, all the same. I just told him what we had lifted and what I thought it meant.

He sat and frowned on it for a long time, while the din of feasting roared and flowed like a river in spate round us. So long, in fact, that I grew more wary and began to consider a way out of that place. Then he stirred, stroking his icicle moustaches.

`Here's the way of it,' he said, bent close to speak in my ear. I could see Finn watching and it came to me that it did no harm for my reputation to be seen touching heads and planning at the high seat of a jarl such as Brand.

I am pledged for a season to the Basileus Nikephoras,' he went on. 'This, of course, also means his commander, John Red Boots.'

My eyes must have narrowed too much, for he waved a soothing hand.

It comes to me that the business of thrones in the Great City is nothing much to do with either you or me, young Orm,' he went on. 'After my season is up, why should I care what happens in their blood-feuds?

It comes to me also that keeping this a secret until I see the Basileus — a costly and long-drawn out affair of bribes, I might add — will be difficult. Red Boots, I understand, is already made aware of your name and will certainly want you dead.'

I was more afraid than ever and he saw that and chuckled. I can help you, but you must place your hands in mine over this. I shall take these twigs and eggs to Red Boots and say that you were my man when you did this offence and that you did it for gain and no more and thought it richer than it turned out to be. I will tell him you are a fool who does not understand what was lifted, only that it was not as golden a prize as you thought — which is no lie, after all. Nothing bad has come of it and he will have my pledge on your silence.

It is as well no Romans were killed in getting this prize,' he went on, taking a swig from his nabidh, then passing it to me as if we were horn-paired at this feast, another thing that did not go unnoticed and gave me even more standing. I also saw that he had done it deliberately for that effect.

As it is, of course,' he went on, wiping his lips and talking as if he was discussing a winter cull of livestock, 'Red Boots will still try and have you killed in the dark, for it is the Great City's way of things and another reason to be off smartly. He would like to do the same to me, but he needs me. He cannot hold Antioch unless the whole army stays and that isn't something that can be afforded for long. He will march off and leave a garrison behind to be besieged by the camel-humpers. That garrison will be me and most of my men.'

I blinked at that and again Brand chuckled.

Of course, my ships will lay off around Cyprus, which is where you can find me, providing you are back by the end of the year. After that, I will be off up to Kiev and then home and if you want to be with me, as a chosen man, you had better make it in time. Then both of us will be beyond Red Boots and he can do what he likes.'

`What happens if you get besieged in Antioch?' I blurted and he smiled like a bear trap being set.

`No 'if' about it. I will, of course. Red Boots knows it. I will also negotiate the surrender of Antioch to the Hamdanids — at a price and amicably. Red Boots knows that, too. The Hamdanids will prefer that to fighting several hundred well-armed men from the viks, having seen how we do it. Naturally, I will wait for the safe withdrawal of the Great City's armies to Tarsus, which is all Red Boots wants. Next year, or the year after, he will be back and the business will start again.'

There are those who say Brand got his jarldom by rolling on his back and having his belly tickled by his King, Eirik, and, after him, his son, Olof. They say Olof only got to be King of the Svears and Geats because he climbed into the lap of Svein Forkbeard like a little dog and that made Brand the lapdog of a lapdog.

That's not the right of it. They called Olof the Lap King — Skotkonung — because he took what his father Eirik had made of the Svears and Geats and made them pour a handful of dirt from their tofts into his lap, a ritual that admitted he owned the earth they walked on and would pay him in silver to keep those tofts.

Taxes, in other words.

Olof, like all the jarl-kings, made those easterners who couldn't even speak decent Norse into a kingdom called Greater Sweden — and Brand was at his shieldless side through all of it and his father's before that.

The rune-serpent torc sat round Brand's neck lighter than swansdown.

I knew what he offered was the perfect solution. It saved me from the Great City and offered protection from Sviatoslav and his hawk-fierce sons, allowing us to take the shorter route back to the North. It went a long way to lifting the weight of that jarl torc pressing on my shoulders, the ends of it forged with the runesword on one side and my thralled oathsworn oarmates on the other. The swaying balance-rod of it, hauling me this way, then the other, was crushing.

But all I could think of at that moment was her and I said her name aloud, a question.

`What of Svala?' I asked and Brand studied me.

`You don't even ask about this Alia bu,' he frowned. 'A jarl needs to think of such things.'

I saw my mistake and managed to grin and dance lightly on my tongue. 'I would say, if I had a gold-brow, that any choice of the jarl is sound,' I replied and he chuckled, acknowledging that.

`But I am also knowing you have taken this Aliabu's two children to care until he returns, always within reach, as it were,' I went on. 'What you offer is good and I will find Starkad on your behalf. It may be that I can put my hands in yours when we put a keel on good Baltic water. Then again, it may not.

I would also say,' I went on, the nabidh numbing my lips, `that my men watch you and I closely and it would be better for us both if some token changed hands here when this leather container is handed over, as if it held a treasure worth having. A bag that chimes softly, as they say, makes the loudest sound.'

Brand smiled and nodded, stroking his fine moustaches. 'It is no good-luck thing to kill a volva woman,'

he said after a while, surprising me by picking up on a subject I'd thought deliberately ignored. Somewhere, a bench went over and a knot of men roared and fought good-humouredly. Brand watched them, stroking his ice- moustaches, then continued speaking to me and looking at them. 'I am hoping your man Finn has the grace of the other gods, so that they can calm Frejya for the loss of Skarpheddin's mother. A spike of Roman iron — heya, she could not blunt that. I wish I could have known what went through her mind at that moment.'

A spike of Roman iron,' I answered wryly and he chuckled. In the next breath he was stone grim.

`This Svala, who is really a Sami witch with an outlandish name, I will keep until she is healed,' he said flatly. 'After that, I will thrall her to some Mussulman or Jew, who will not be affected by her seidr and once she has been broken into, the strength of her will be diminished.'

I was silent for a moment. It wasn't that a Mussulman or a Jew couldn't be affected by seidr just that it didn't much matter to us if they were driven mad by it. I was sure she could work her magic on a stone Christ saint,