The Wolf Sea

the Orontes, a day as perfect as a rumman fruit — yet one whose heart had already rotted unseen. A cracked bell of friendship and love, even then. One such betrayal would have been enough, Odin. Two was larding it thick.

Finn and Brother John came to me as Aliabu and the others were packing the groaning camels to start the day's journey, taking a knee where I sat and eyeing me grimly. I eyed them back and jerked my chin for them to speak.

`Three were felled by heat,' Brother John said. 'They will recover if they are fed water and kept shaded for a day.'

`Good news,' I said, knowing with a sick dread what came next.

`There is a fourth down, but he does not have the red pox,' Brother John said. 'He has the squits, or the sweating sickness, or both. He will die, for sure, just the same. His vomit has blood in it. Dabit deus his quoque finem.'

God would, indeed, grant an end to these troubles. I remembered the sweats from Sarkel. Old oarmates, Bersi had it one day and was dead of it the next and Skarti, whose lumpen face told how he had survived the red pox, would probably have died of the sweats if an arrow hadn't killed him first. The squits were better, in that you could recover from them after some days of misery and mess — but when the blood streaks showed, you were finished.

`He needs the Priest,' said Finn, looking at me. I remembered that look from the last time, across the body of Ofeig. Next time, Bear Slayer, he had said, you do it.

I held out my hand and he slid the hilt of the sword into it.

It was Svarvar, the coin-stamper from Jorvik, lying on a pallet of scrub and his own cloak and soaking his life away, so that you could see him shrink to a hollow man by the minute, while he shook and trembled and his eyes rolled. The stink of him filled the air, thick enough to cut.

I called his name, but if he heard it he gave no sign, simply lay and muttered through chattering teeth, shaking and streaming with water. Brother John knelt and prayed; Finn hefted a seax hilt between Svarvar's hands and I could not swallow. The Priest, when I guided the blade of it to his neck, felt cold as ice.

His eyes flickered open then and, just for a moment, I knew he knew.

`When you get across Bifrost,' I said to him, 'tell the others about us. Say, 'Not yet, but soon'. Good journeying, Svarvar.'

It didn't take much pressure, for Finn had spent the day putting an edge on the Priest, a rasp that had irritated us all at the time. The neck-flesh parted like fruit skin and he jerked and thrashed only a little while the blood poured out with an iron-stink that brought flies in greedy droves almost at once.

`Heya,' Finn said approvingly, and I rose, wiping clean the blade and handed it back to him, hoping my hand did not tremble as much as my legs did.

Then Sighvat and Brother John and others gathered rocks and stones and used them and a shallow scoop in the stony sand to howe up the coin-maker from Jorvik. Five years he had spent digging stones, only to be freed to end under a pile of them. Odin's jokes were never funny, but sometimes you could not even grin for the clench of your teeth.

It was not a good omen and made the long journey through the shivering night a bleak, moon-glowed tramp. When the sun trembled up, a great, golden droplet on the lip of the world, we squatted and panted and licked our own salt-sweat into stinging, mucus-crusted mouths until it died again and gave us the mercy of cooling night and the right to drink.

Some began to shiver with the change and hoped that was all it was, checking each other for sign of sweating sickness or red pox. The three who had been heat-afflicted were showing signs of recovery, though they were calf-weak when they tried to walk.

Aliabu and his people silently got ready to move on. In the last light of day, at the ridge that had sheltered our little camp, he turned and looked back, as if searching the twilight for his unseen sons. For a moment, his ragged robes hidden and silhouetted against the sky, he looked as jarl-noble as any man I have seen.

There grew in me then the respect of a whale-road rider who sees another of his kind and marks him even though there is no sign on him other than the stare which has searched far horizons.

Until now, the Sarakenoi had been screaming Grendels with weapons, or flyblown savages who squatted in their own filth, ate using one hand, wiped themselves with the other and worshipped one god, though they had blood-feuds with each other over how best to do it.

But the Bedu navigated their own sea out here, as skilfully as any raiders in a drakkar two weeks out of sight of land, and found sustenance here as we would from the waves. Eaters of lizards and rats and raw livers, they took the jelly from camel humps, squirted it with the gall-bladder juice and sucked the lot down, smacking their lips as we would over a good bowl of oats and milk.

`By Odin's sweaty balls,' Finn growled when I mentioned this, 'just because they can eat shit and ride a horse with a hunched back doesn't make them worth anything, Trader.'

`They are proud and noble, for all that,' I answered. 'They are masters of this land and survive on it.

Could you?'

Finn spat, shouldering along in the blue dark. 'Take them to a cold winter in Iceland, see how well they fare. They are masters of this land, Trader, because no one fucking wants it and are left in peace because they haven't a hole to piss in, nothing anyone would want to steal, not even their sorry lives. They are the colour of folk two weeks dead and that shortarsed little lizard-chewer Aliabu thinks the best name he can give his favourite woman is Puddle, by Odin's arse. That tells you all you need to know.'

He stumbled, cursed and recovered his walking rhythm. 'I never had the ken of why the Irishers liked Blue Men as slaves. They always die on you when the snows come and Dyfflin's a long way to cart the buggers while trying to keep them alive on a hafskip.'

I grunted, which was all that was needed. Finn looked at the world down the blade of his sword, measuring its worth in what he could take. But, even travelling along Odin's edge as I was, I still saw these Bedu as knarrer in this ocean of sand and stone, charting ways less travelled and always open when others were shut. One day that would be of more use to me than plundering them — if Odin spared me.

Aliabu's shout shook me back into the now, where the sweat stung my eyes and the desert grit rasped in every fold and crack. I stopped, panting, dropped to one knee like all the others, pushing up the little tent of robe with the stick I carried.

One of my boot soles flapped; the thong that had fixed it in place had snapped and been lost on the trail and I fumbled to find one of the few I had left. We all had flapping seaboots, cracked and split in the heat, the soles held on by thongs and whose bone-toggle fastenings had long since vanished.

Hookeye moved up, his bow out and strung, so I knew it was serious. In this heat, he kept both wrapped and greased with camel fat to stop them drying out.

Another group of camels,' he reported. 'There are men there, armed and ready.'

I climbed to my feet and gave my orders. Botolf, the only one not wearing padded leather and mail, since none large enough had been found to fit him, unravelled the raven banner, but it flopped like a hanged man on the pole.

The Goat Boy and Aliabu came up as we formed into a loose shieldwall. Aliabu waved his hands and rattled off a stream of words and I knew I was getting better at things, for I made out a word in six.

`These are outcast men,' the Goat Boy translated, 'men from weak tribes who have fled their masters and make a life here. Aliabu knows them, but they are not Shawi He asks if you understand?'

I did. Shawi meant something about grilling and was a term the Bedu proudly used, since it meant they offered such shelter and hov-rest that they would slaughter and roast a prized animal for a guest. If these were not Shawi they could not be trusted.

Between the three of us, we worked out a plan. Camps would be made, the Oathsworn would show their strength and Aliabu and his sons would smile and talk to these outcasts. With luck, we would get news, perhaps some water and supplies and no blood would be shed.

`No different from meeting ships in a strange fjord,' growled Finn, hunched under his loop of robe.