12
The Sarakenoi say that their god, Allah, has one hundred names and that ninety-nine of them are written in their holy book. The camel, it seems, is the only living thing that knows the one-hundredth name of God, which accounts for the way he looks down at you, curling his lip like a prince with a dead rat shoved under his nose.
They have little else to be haughty about. True, they can carry a pack which weighs the same as two big battle-geared prow-men and will outlast a horse on a walk — but a man on two legs can walk faster than a camel with four.
Riding one is not something I would do twice, for it sways like a badly trimmed ship side-on to a swell and while I never get sick on a deck, I felt like hoiking up my guts the one time I climbed on the back of a camel.
Even getting on one is harder than boarding one
If you are steady, you can settle yourself on the hump; if not, you end up falling off and having to do it all over again.
Aliabu gave us three of the four male camels, since we could not milk the she-camels (for all that a couple of the band tried, being good husbandmen once). Well, that had been years before and a camel is not a cow or a goat. When a raging Botolf fisted teeth from one for spitting at him, Delim and the others, scowling, took their camels out from our reach. That one beast then kept trying to get at Botolf and bite him with her remaining teeth, yellowed as boar tusks, which at least kept us smiling at something in that place.
However, we knew how to manage three male camels and moved off with them in the cool of early morning, making for Aindara and hoping to get to it before it grew too hot.
The flat plain, fox-red and weathered ochre, sprouted a white ribbon of road and then, almost an ache to the eye, a great swathe of olive groves and vegetable plots splashed the land with dusty green. Ahead lay rounded hills; below them a dash of whitewashed mud-brick and stands of palms. Clouds were gathering in a sky that had been washed blue and tiny red birds sang in the stunted trees along the road.
`See anything?'
Hookeye, shading his eyes with one hand, looked a moment longer then shook his head. His face was the colour of old leather and his tunic, which had once been red, was now a washed-out pink. I realised we must all look the same, seared by the sun. My hair, when I saw it flutter loose round my face, had paled from red to yellow- gold.
Hookeye and Gardi loped ahead, having shed their heavy tunics and kept their robes and head- coverings.
Gardi had also stowed his boots, since the soles had vanished completely and he was now barefoot.
We followed them at camel-pace and soon a wind soughed out of the hills, driving a fine spray of grit and dust against us. I leaned into it, the white robe, now rusted with dust, wrapped tight around my head and shoulders. Gravel, whipped by the wind, stung at my legs through my breeks as we ploughed on, the camels grumbling, heads lowered.
The green fields surrounding the town were hazed with dust now; beyond them only rocky hills and an endless plain of stone and scrub and broad dry streambeds.
`This is a bad storm coming,' Brother John said, having to raise his voice against the wind and the hiss of grit. 'We must get to shelter.'
Hookeye and Gardi sat hunched and waiting for us, wrapped tight against the driving sting. Together, we moved into the village of Aindara, where only the sound of a batting shutter welcomed us.
The centre of the village was a square of bare earth fronting a sad mosque of brick, whose great arched horseshoe of an entrance had two huge doors flung wide. Slats of wood, painted to look like marble, flanked this entrance, which led to a courtyard of bare earth, stamped hard and smooth as stone.
In the middle of the village square was a raised stone trough with a well on one side where women had once drawn water and beaten clothes clean. The water in the trough was ruffled slightly by the wind and a fine layer of dust sifted down on it, so I knew the villagers had long since gone; the Mussulmen think all water has to flow and standing water is unclean. Other buildings crowded round, their doors dark and empty and a garden wall jutted out from a house, ornamented by a trailing tendril of green, fluttering with little blue and white flowers.
The mosque was the biggest building to hand, so we went there, taking the camels in through the courtyard to an enclosed space, barn-large and pillared. High up on the walls were arched windows, some of the shutters banging loose and letting dust sift on to the flagged floor and a short stairway that led up the wall. . to nowhere.
I was too relieved to be out of the wind and grit to chew the problem of the stairway, or the large arched recess flanked
by stone pillars that looked like a door but also led nowhere.
Among the forest of pillars, we quickly tethered camels, unpacked them and shoved armfuls of their rough fodder at them. A camp was made, watches posted on the door leading to the courtyard, the only way in or out, it seemed.
The doors were thick and studded and it took three of us to close them, for it didn't seem ever to have been done and the hinges squealed like stuck pigs. There was a smaller postern door in one, which was easier to guard.
Finn and Gardi scouted around and found lanterns with oil in them and Kvasir managed to spark up a fire using some of the camel-fodder shrubs. Hookeye and Botolf discovered the stair that led nowhere was made of painted wood and cheerfully began breaking it up to feed the cookfires.
Then Kleggi and his oarmate Harek Gunnarsson, who was called Town Dog, found a doorway at the back, which led to a narrow, winding stair up to the top of the tower we had seen attached to the mosque.
We had seen Saracen priests up these narrow little towers in Antioch, wailing out to call their worshippers to prayer. Now I sent Gardi up it as a lookout, though he had to come part-way down after a while, as the sand was scouring his eyeballs from his head even through the shroud of a robe.
The Goat Boy was uneasy at all this, saying it was a bad thing to defile a mosque, but that made everyone laugh. We had raided, burned and broken god temples from here to Gotland and back — what was one more to us?
Brother John patted the Goat Boy gently on his sand-matted curls and said,
Sighvat, passing with some of the wood broken from the stair that led nowhere, chuckled and added:
'Don't fret, little bear, this Allah doesn't seem to have thunderbolts, from what I hear.'
So we settled down to wait out the storm, while the wind hissed and sighed like the sea on shingle, a sound that ached in all our hearts through that long night.
Of course, you should never mock the gods, even those of other people, since they have a nasty way with them. In the cool of next morning, with the storm blown out, we found out how much we had pissed this Allah off.
`Trader. . we have company.'
A dream smoked away like spume off a gale-torn wave, a dream where Starkad and I fought and he hacked off my arm — but it turned out to be Finn, smacking me on it to wake me up. I scrambled up into the mill of men collecting their leather and mail and weapons.
Behind Finn, hovering and anxious, was Runolf Skarthi, whose watch it had been in the tower and, though the harelip that gave him his nickname warped his speech, he gave it clear enough: men were coming from the temple on the hill nearby. A lot of men, moving in one body.
`How many?'
A hundred,' he mushed. 'More, maybe.'
Armed?'
