Just then, a fourth prisoner was yanked to his feet so that the dark-cloaked foe could impale him with a spear. Two enemy warriors held the Sea Wolf while a third put a spear through his belly.
'No one can save us now,' I said bitterly.
'Then farewell, Aeddan,' Gunnar said.
The unfortunate Dane was still twitching on the ground when the leader of the dark ones arrived, seated on a brown horse. I suppose he had directed the battle from a safe distance, and now that it was over, felt sufficient courage to come and inspect the spoils, such as they were.
He rode directly to where the prisoners were being slaughtered and slid from the saddle. Taking hold of the man who had murdered the last prisoner, he struck the warrior twice in the face, and shoved him away hard. Then he turned and began shouting at the others; I watched the mirth disappear from their faces. They put up their weapons and the killing stopped at once.
'He works fast, this Christ of yours,' whispered Gunnar knowingly. 'What is that one saying?'
'I do not know.'
'They are Arabs?'
'Maybe,' I answered. 'But they do not speak like the amir and his people.'
The leader of the dark ones shouted some more commands, and then climbed back onto his horse and rode away. The few remaining prisoners were then bound hand-to-hand, one to another, with rope made of leather strips. We were prodded to our feet at spearpoint and made to stagger back down the hill over the still-warm corpses of the fallen.
The dead lay in very heaps on the ground: whole families cut down as they ran, Danes in tight battle groups, toppled over one another. It was as if a forest had been laid waste, the trees levelled and left where they dropped. Women and children and merchant men lay in silent scores upon the bloody ground, ridden down and slaughtered, their bodies hacked, split, broken and discarded. The stink of blood brought bile to my mouth; I retched and gagged, and closed my eyes to shut out the sight.
My God, I wailed within myself, why?
I lurched blind over the uneven ground, stumbled, and fell over a battered corpse-a mother with her infant clutched tight in her arms, both pierced with the same spear. Christ have mercy! I cried. But there was no mercy for them, or for anyone else that day. God had abandoned them, like he abandoned everyone in the end.
I passed the body of the eparch, still lying with the spear in his back, an expression of contemplation on his face. I heard the strangled call of a crow and looked to the corpse-strewn hillside where the carrion birds were already commencing their cruel feast. I hung my head and wept. Thus, I began my long torturous walk to the caliph's mines.
PART THREE
The shade of death lies on thy face, beloved,
But the Lord of Grace stands before thee,
And peace is in his mind.
Sleep, O sleep in the calm of all calm,
Sleep, O sleep in the love of all loves,
Sleep, beloved, in the Lord of life.
44
A thousand curses on his rotting corpse!' muttered Harald, bringing the pick down sharply on the stone. 'May Odin strike his treacherous head from his worthless shoulders.'
'And feed it to the hounds of hel,' Hnefi added, and spat into the dust for emphasis. He raised his pick and swung it down as if he were smiting an enemy.
Harald swung the pick high and smashed it down once more. 'As I am a king,' he intoned ominously, 'I will yet kill the traitor who has brought us to this slavery. Odin hear me: I, Harald Bull-Roar, make this vow.'
He was talking about Nikos, of course; and the vow, though heartfelt and infinitely sincere, was not new. We had all of us heard the same promise, with slight variations, ten score times since coming to Amida where we had been sold in the Sarazen slave market. Danes were considered too wild and barbaric to be used in any way other than for the most brutish labour. Thus Harald, together with the sad remnant of his once-fearsome Sea Wolf host, had been purchased by the caliph's chief overseer and promptly put to work in the silver mines.
To be a slave was a humiliation intolerable to Harald, who would have preferred death a thousand times over-save for the fact that it would have placed him beyond revenge, and wreaking his vengeance on the one who had brought him to such ignominy had become the sole aim and purpose of his life. The Roaring Bull of Skania was now intent on keeping himself and his few men alive with the hope of returning to Trebizond, reclaiming his ships, and sailing to Constantinople to rend Nikos body from soul in the most brutally painful way possible.
It was Jarl Harald's belief that Nikos had betrayed us to the enemy-a conviction which the captive Danes supported with the undying zeal of true believers. Sure, I was no dissenter. I thought Nikos guilty, too, but could not work out why he should have done such a thing. Hundreds of people on both sides had died to further Nikos's dark design. But what was the gain? I kept asking myself. What hidden purpose did it accomplish?
Following the ill-fated battle, our captors had pursued a relentless pace through a wasteland of arid hills and rock-filled ravines. Settlements were rare, the land desolate and unfriendly. We rested little, and ate less; our captors gave us only enough sleep and food to keep us on our feet. Since so little of our time was taken up with resting or eating, we had ample leisure to speculate on our plight and the chances of making good an escape, and did so as we walked along. All our contemplation counted for nothing in the end, however; we neither escaped, nor learned the nature of the fate awaiting us.
Twelve or thirteen days after the ambush, we arrived footsore and hungry in Amida, with its low buildings of white-washed mud, and were marched to the open square of wind-blown dust they called a market. It was only when-along with another group of thirty Greek captives-we were herded into the ragged, thorn-infested hills north of Amida, that the nature of our fate penetrated our hunger-dazed minds: we were consigned to the caliph's silver mines.
These mines were no great distance from Amida, which, to my best reckoning, lay far to the south and east of Trebizond, well beyond the borders of the empire, and deep in Sarazen lands. Some of the Greeks with us knew of the caliph's mines; I heard several of them talking, and what they said did not make for glad rejoicing.
'It is death they have given us,' said one slave, a slight young man with curly dark hair. 'They work you until you drop.'
'We could escape,' suggested the captive beside him, an older man. 'It has been known.'
'No one ever escapes from the caliph's mines,' replied a third, shaking his head slowly. 'This is because anyone who tries is beheaded at once, and the guard who is responsible is disembowelled with his own sword. Believe me, they make certain no one escapes.'
I relayed what the Greeks were saying to Harald, who merely grunted and said, 'That may be. Either way, I do not intend to remain a slave very long.'
The mines occupied the whole of a tight, many-folded valley at the foot of a range of high barren hills. A single road passed into the valley, overlooked by guard posts on either side along its length, with three or four Arab guards at each position. At the valley entrance a great stone wall had been erected with a huge timber gate through which all who would come or go must pass.
Once beyond the gate, we entered a veritable city of small white-washed dwellings built from packed mud where the guards and mine overseers lived, many with their families, judging from the clots of women and children
