The Valkyrja hovered, preparing to snatch away that day. Bulgar infantry by the many hundreds, the vanguard of thousands, were now trudging into the muck that separated the two Varangian forces, intending to encircle them both. They were armed with long spears and good steel helms and metal-plated canvas byrnnies. Haraldr knew that if his men were stopped and forced to form a shield fort, the Numeri would never reach them. The Middle Hetairia would dwindle to a pile of twitching corpses over a long, desperate afternoon. There was only one escape: to continue relentlessly forward, to the very heart of the Bulgar army, and pierce it with Hunland steel.
Haraldr fought forward with a renewed frenzy and a solid front of Bulgars, spears set, panicked and ran. Their retreat exposed a muddy little creek running perpendicular to Har-aldr’s advance. And behind the creek was a wall of wide-eyed, jittery horses, crowded flank to flank, their chests covered with quilted batting. The riders wore mail byrnnies and heavy steel greaves. This was the vaunted Bulgar heavy cavalry.
What had Maria said? The king beyond the creek. But the creek was not safety. In her dream he had died before he reached the creek. As he would here. But if he could cross that creek, could he defeat that fate? He screamed at Ulfr and Halldor. ‘Those men are not afraid, but their horses are! We must let them know the axe and push beyond the creek!’ And for some reason he could not fathom, he added, ‘The Bulgar Khan is just beyond it!’
The little creek was muddied by the rain, not diamond-faceted as Maria had seen it in her dream, and the water was blood-russet. Haraldr waded in, prayed to Odin to accept these innocent animals as sacrifice, and buried his axe blade into a horse’s quilted chest; the scream of the poor dumb beast sickened him. The horse toppled and Haraldr pushed forward to yet another slaughter; as he killed his second horse he realized that his feet were no longer in water. And the men behind him were now able to start coming across the creek.
Their masters brought the horses to what seemed unending slaughter; for a time the sky almost seemed to rain equine blood. Soon the shallow slope rising from the creek was littered with dead beasts and their riders. But Haraldr knew that the torturous ascent was rapidly draining his reserves; the axe was a weapon for short bursts, not this sustained butchery. Haraldr prayed to all the gods that this cavalry was the Khan’s last line of defence.
The head-flinging frantic horses retreated. Haraldr looked back and saw most of his men advancing well up the slope. When he looked ahead, he saw the Khan’s last defence and knew that he would never see the king beyond the creek. At the top of the rise waited another wall, not terrified animals but huge, fierce-eyed, red-faced men in long mail coats, armed with Hunland steel: the Khan’s elite guard. And they were so many, they blocked the horizon.
Haraldr knew that there was nothing left but to take as many of these souls as possible with him to the Valhol. They came forward eagerly, grunting, thrusting spears, hammering at Emma’s silky invulnerability; his ribs ached with the blows that had yet to break the links but were breaking him up inside. His men were dying all around him, and in some strange, reflexive requiem he silently tolled their names as they fell: Joli Stefnirson, Kolskeg Helgison; Thorvald Kodranson. A javelin glanced off his neck and he could feel the blood immediately. That was what her dream had promised him, that was the destiny he had seen in her eyes the first night she had drawn him into them.
He was isolated; it seemed that even the final desperate shield-fort had collapsed. His arm seared with every stroke, and yet the furiously cursing metal demons still could not overwhelm him. He had no idea where his men were – Ulfr, Halldor, the Emperor. Was he tolling their names because they, too, had fallen? A blow from behind almost knocked his helm off, a light flashed before his eyes. He shook his head to clear it but the light still glared. The sun. The sun had burst through the clouds and driven a slender, brilliant shaft into the Bulgar horde just ahead of him. He knew that he must reach it. He hurled himself forward in one last, desperate assault before that light, like Odin’s voice, faded beneath the black wings of the last dragon. He sent a jaw flying in a crimson spray. His sword crunched a byrnnie so hard, he could feel the bones shatter beneath the steel skin. He went forward on faith and courage, not knowing why he had to reach the light, and he realized that other men had joined him, the men he had thought lost: first the Emperor, and then Ulfr, and Halldor, and Joli’s brother, Hord. He could look back now and see hundreds of his men still with him, still advancing, questing with him for the light. The push from behind was now the blood lust of the Middle Hetairia.
Something fractured in the great body of the Bulgar army. For a moment the Khan’s guard hesitated, stunned at the resilience of the bloodied yet still furious beast that had penetrated to the living heart of their great horde, to the last human redoubt of their Khan. And then they gave in to some collective, primal fear. Many dropped their weapons and ran towards the encircling skeins of the Roman cavalry, preferring capture to a less certain fate on the tusks of the beast they could never kill. Some of those too close to the boar to think they could outrun it had simply dropped to their knees to beg for mercy. Among those terrified petitioners was the Bulgar Khan.
Haraldr looked around, wondering. He stood within the shaft of sunlight now, a light reflected off the helms and byrnnies of the Bulgars as they humbled themselves in sun-glazed mud. All around them was a litter of discarded weapons, as if a ghost army had vanished, leaving behind only artefacts borrowed from the living. Far to the left and right, the horsemen of the Scholae, Hyknatoi and Excubitores could be seen, standards proudly aloft as they herded huge, ragged groups of Bulgar prisoners. Behind the bloody, horribly diminished ranks of the Middle Hetairia were nothing but corpses.
The Emperor stepped in among the kneeling Bulgars. ‘Alounsianus!’ he commanded: the name of the Bulgar Khan. A desperate-looking, medium-sized man, whatever cleverness or courage he had employed to gain his throne utterly blanched from his face, rose up from the mud and clasped his trembling hands in supplication. The tossing clouds closed on the sun and the dimming light flickered over the defeated Khan. Then the clouds rolled aside, the sun exploded in its full radiance, and as he swooned from loss of blood, Haraldr was certain that he was floating up towards a golden dome.
VI
The Prefect of the City and the Logothete of the Symponus waited for the Parakoimomenos of the Imperial Palace beneath the arch of the Golden Gate. The Great Land Wall loomed above them, the invincible ashlar expanse glazed with the morning sun. Attended by his retinue of Imperial cubiculari, gleaming like antimony in his white silk and crowned with his pure silver hair, the Parakoimomenos exchanged nods with the Prefect and the Logothete. ‘Exquisitely done,’ said the Parakoimomenos as he looked down the avenue before them. Freshly swept and watered, almost bone-white, the Mese extended east towards the distant Imperial Palace, and as far as one could see, the entire route was a multihued corridor of brilliant hanging carpets and tapestries. A human tide, held back by cursores and Khazars, crushed in on either side of the avenue.
The Parakoimomenos blinked into the ascending sun and gauged that it was time for the long day to begin. ‘Komes of the walls,’ he directed, ‘open the gates.’ The komes’s ceremonially armoured assistants cranked open the massive bronze gates and the dignitaries stood aside to let the procession enter the city.
The first rider was seated on a dull-eyed, decrepit donkey. He wore tattered rags, and garlands of pig intestines, swarming with flies, were draped over his shoulders. The rider could not see the spectacle before him because he was seated backwards on his transport; he could not see behind, either, because his eyes, crusted with scabs and ooze, had been put out with hot irons. The sightless man raised his head in response to the fantastic gale of obscenities and jeers that greeted him, and the Empress City could now see the hideous, noseless face of the man who had dared to assault her. Alounsianus, Khan of Bulgaria, had finally breeched the walls of Rome.
The Bulgar generals followed on foot, then their officers and men, an unending procession of haggard, confused, sullen faces and filthy brown tunics; as the Pantocrator is merciful, most had been spared their eyes and noses. The army of the vanquished, flanked by steel-trimmed Khazars, became a strange, dirt-coloured serpent of misery slowly crawling through the brilliant polychrome of the triumphant city.
The Parakoimomenos again computed the time as the last of the Bulgars disappeared down the Mese. Incredible. He had had no expectation that so many
