drowned. You saw the corpse. Perhaps the servants were . . .
‘They say someone held his head under. A Varangian. The Hetairarch, they say.’
‘And who will be physician to my affliction?’ The Emperor stood up, pulled his robe over his shoulders, and stepped away from his wife’s bed. ‘For even if I wash seven times in the River Jordan, I cannot heal the infection of my soul.’
‘Don’t touch it!’ The arrow had drifted lazily out of I the sky like a wounded bird and clattered harmlessly on the deck. ‘It might be poisoned.’ Jarl Rognvald walked to the foredeck, crossing the planks that covered the main cargo hold. He carefully picked up the metal-tipped, neatly feathered shaft and held it up for all to see. ‘What a bowshot.’ He looked across the still, yellow river toward the startlingly green, thickly wooded bank. ‘I’d measure it over five hundred ells.’
‘Gleb!’ shouted Jarl Rognvald to his Slav pilot. ‘Call for a tight file.’
Haraldr squinted at the mysterious, dense wall of foliage. Ten days already on the river, the placid monotony of the waters like the sultry, unsettling stillness before a lightning storm. Each day with its whispered drifting warning of the hidden enemy. The eerie tranquillity of the star-flecked nights, and the creeping, subtle terror that one might awaken to find that one’s boat has drifted from anchor and thudded into the bank, into the hands of the unseen demons. (It had happened to one crew last night; the watch had got drunk, and in the moonless night no one knew until they heard the screams.) Jarl Rognvald was increasingly withdrawn when he was not preoccupied with command, staring down the river like a seeress struggling to spy the future. And for Haraldr, dreams. So many dreams here. Not only of a dying sun and blood on the land but also of a place of wind and cold and endless blackness. The voice, always that voice now, whispering, cajoling, drawing him into that deepening dark void where his fears stalked on nightmare feet. On the river, the beasts of those inner depths had become more fierce, and his fugitive soul seemed ever more distant.
Haraldr was certain he saw a glint of metal in the distance. Another. Yet another! Far ahead, the left bank lowered and the verdant screen was interrupted by a dun patch filled with colours and flashes of steel and bustling movement. ‘Larboard bank! Larboard!’ he yelled. ‘Pechenegs!’
Gleb the pilot limped along the gangplanks, coming forward to stand in the prow with Haraldr and Jarl Rognvald. He was a short, grey-eyed man who shaved his head save for a long grey lock above each ear. Gleb had obtained his limp on his first Dnieper trip, when his boat had been tossed on the rocks. After that he had lived to ‘vanquish the river’, and that was why he had taken three more trips. But it was said that Yaroslav had had to make Gleb’s sons and grandsons rich men before he could persuade Gleb to become lead pilot for this expedition. ‘A man needs the luck of the whole world to go four times down the Dnieper,’ Gleb had told Jarl Rognvald. ‘By the time he starts his fifth trip, he will have used up all the luck there is.’
‘They’ll be giving us a show now,’ muttered Gleb.
Jarl Rognvald looked at him quizzically.
‘That crew they captured,’ groused the pilot, ‘be sure that they haven’t yet killed all of them.’
A distant shout boomed across the water. ‘The famished eagle feeds at last!’
Haraldr’s stomach roiled. Several ships, oars churning, had moved up fast on the larboard. From the prow of the lead boat, gold returned the sunlight; byrnnie, helmet and gold-tinselled braided beard. Hakon.
Little had been heard from Hakon since they had left Kiev. He had communicated with Jarl Rognvald through a messenger, and his men were quietly disciplined on the water. Now, just when Haraldr was beginning to think that Hakon was simply another of his deviling dreams, here he was.
‘Jarl Rognvald, we must moor our ships up ahead!’ Hakon was commanding, not requesting. ‘The skeleton- copulators are sure to entertain us. I want them to know that we also have art-skills!’
Jarl Rognvald cocked a frosty eyebrow at Gleb.
The pilot nodded. ‘Fear is the Pecheneg’s sharpest blade. We need to show them that our steel is just as good.’
The Pechenegs had trampled a path to the river like a vast herd of giant lemmings; only a dozen or so trees at the water’s edge, stripped to mastlike shafts and curiously paired, rose above a river of human and horse heads thousands of ells wide and long enough to disappear over a hill far in the distance. The warriors had dismounted and stood in their own rough clothes as well as the plunder of a dozen other races: homespun robes with leather caps and jerkins, skin and fur tunics, spiked and conical helmets over glossy black hair, tattered Frisian cloth, byrnnies of chain mail and iron discs, even a cluster of Pecheneg potentates in silk robes and gleaming armlets. The makeshift horde erupted into a cataclysmic, shrilling, droning welcome.
Hakon’s ship drifted closer to shore. ‘Bring me the instruments on which I’ll play my ditty!’ hollered the gilded giant. Five dark little men, roped at hands and feet, were brought to the prow of the ship; the Varangians had captured some Pechenegs just outside Kiev and intended to sell them as slaves in Constantinople, if they did not find more expedient uses for them.
Hakon began to speak again, but his words were lost against the screeching gale from the shore. There was a flurry of movement round one of the pairs of tree trunks. The two towering shafts were bowed towards each other until their tips crossed, forming a crude arch.
The Rus boats buzzed with speculation. Gleb spat angrily and his jaws clenched. A struggling, flailing man, his naked white skin clearly visible, was hoisted up and tied between the tree trunks, his arms and legs spread wide so that he looked like a huge white spider amid a rope web. The Pechenegs howls ascended and then abruptly drifted away until only a single sound floated across the water: the sound of one man screaming.
A Pecheneg sword flashed like a silver spark at the base of the nearest tree trunk. The crossed tops of the trees twitched almost imperceptibly. Then, with a terrifying suddenness, the shafts snapped apart and the white spider exploded in a burst of crimson. A torso seemed to spin slowly through the air. The trees snapped upright, each dangling one arm and one leg.
Hakon’s face was sunset-purple amid the ashen complexions of his Varangians. Without speaking, he selected his instrument; the dark little man let out an unworldly shriek until Hakon clamped one huge hand around his windpipe. In his other hand Hakon held a broad-axe polished to an antimony gleam. He turned the Pecheneg’s back towards the river-bank and laid it open with two lightning-quick strokes along either side of the spine. Before the blood could really flow, Hakon had dropped his axe and cracked open the ribs and peeled them back. With both hands he scooped into the body cavity and drew out the foaming pink lungs. He held the Pecheneg by the hair and spread the lungs like wings over writhing shoulders. The little man’s mouth spewed pink froth, and Hakon let him slump to his knees, then tore away his loincloth. He grabbed a spear and carefully probed the Pecheneg’s rectum. After several deft shoves the gory tip sprouted between the spread lungs.
Hakon seized the spear shaft with both hands and held his creation aloft like a winged battle standard. ‘The blood eagle, marmot-fuckers!’ he screamed. ‘The blood eagle, wives of dogs!’ He shook his macabre standard in fury. The blood eagle! We’ll strangle you with the cunts of your women!’
The Pechenegs on the shore had prepared another victim. The trees snapped and limbs dangled again. Hakon raised another gory standard in response. The ritual exchange continued until five Varangians held the purpling blood eagles aloft and the Pechenegs had run out of trees.
An almost palpable silence descended, as if the air had become thick with some sound-absorbing ether. One of the blood eagles twitched like a fish on a pike. Finally a group of silk-robed Pechenegs moved to the water’s edge. The vividly coloured chieftains held pinkish, hemispherical bowls in their hands. They raised the vessels and chanted a salute to the wallowing Rus ships before emptying greedy draughts into their upturned mouths.
They’re wassailing us?’ asked Haraldr numbly.
Gleb spat. ‘No. They are showing us their new drinking vessels. Cut from the skulls of our men.’
Hakon shifted his grim, fire-flecked gaze to the remaining Pecheneg. He yanked the wide-eyed little man in front of the first of the blood eagles. His dagger flashed and severed the impaled Pecheneg’s testicles. ‘We’ll fatten him with belly-oysters!’ crowed Hakon as he popped the surviving Pecheneg’s mouth open with one hand and shoved the bloody morsel down his throat with the other.
