Blood Feud Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Historical Note

  Glossary

  1. Wind from the West

  2. The Shore-Killing

  3. The Viking Breed

  4. The Amber Talisman

  5. A First Time for Everything

  6. Home-coming

  7. The Blood Brotherhood

  8. The River and the Trees

  9. Six Thousand Fighting Men

  10. The Holm Ganging

  11. Viking Wind

  12. Battle for Abydos

  13. Faces by Firelight

  14. The Varangian Guard

  15. The Emperor’s Hunting

  16. ‘He still had his gold collar on’

  17. Death in Thrace

  18. Wind Smelling of Wet Grass

  19. The House of the Physician

  20. Shade on a Dusty Road

  21. ‘For you too, there was a Patroclus’

  22. The End of an Old Bondage

  About the Author

  Also by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Jestyn the Englishman had once been Thormod the Viking’s slave, but after saving Thormod’s life he became his shoulder to shoulder man and sworn brother in the deadly blood feud to avenge Thormod’s murdered father, a feud that would take them all the way to Constantinople.

  With over forty books to her credit, Rosemary Sutcliff is now universally acknowledged one of the finest writers of historical novels for children. Winner of the Carnegie Medal and many other honours, Rosemary was awarded the CBE in 1992 for services to children’s literature.

  To all those who answered the author’s distress

  signals, and without whose help and advice this

  book would never have got written at all.

  Historical Note

  When one thinks of the Northmen, the Vikings, one generally thinks of them following the seaway westward, raiding the coasts of Britain, colonizing Orkney and Iceland and Greenland, maybe even reaching America. One does not think so much of the other great Viking thrust, south-eastward – the men of Sweden and the Baltic shores of Denmark forcing their way along the vast rivers that link the Baltic with the Black Sea, to Constantinople, and on to carry their trade and sometimes their dreaded raven war-banners the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. Yet this south-eastward thrust of the Viking Kind, sometimes in the peaceful ways of trade, sometimes as a fighting aristocracy, the trading posts and settlements they founded as they went along (which presently became cities such as Novgorod and later Kiev), the gradual mingling of their own blood with that of the wandering Slav tribes who were there before them – all these were the beginning of Russia, more than twelve hundred years ago.

  Khan Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, was a real person, one of the first rulers of what was beginning to be a nation; he was later made a saint for bringing his people to Christianity (but why he did not bring them to the Muhammadan faith instead, you will know when you have read this story). He really did, for an agreed price, lead his six thousand Vikings down to Constantinople, to help the sorely-pressed Emperor of Byzantium Basil II deal with rebellion at home and an enemy on his frontiers, in the year A.D. 987. And it was some of these six thousand, remaining behind when the rest went north again, who became the famous Varangian Guard, the Emperor’s bodyguard, serving him and his successors until the last of them – by that time they were mostly English – died at their posts when Constantinople fell to the Turks almost six hundred years later.

  All the big background events and the big background people of this book are real. But the small foreground people, Jestyn Englishman who tells the story, Thormod Sitricson and Anders and Herulf, Hakon Ship-Chief, and Demetriades the Physician, fat Cloe and the Lady Alexia and the rest are all of my making; and so is the blood feud which in one way or another bound them together.

  Glossary

  arval A funeral ‘ale’ or feast; as Bride-ale was a wedding feast

  Basil II 963–1025. The greatest of the Macedonian Emperors, known as ‘the Bulgar Slayer’. The last of the Bulgarian wars ended in the Byzantine victory of 1014, when 15,000 Bulgarian prisoners were blinded

  Blues and Greens Rival factions in the chariot-races held at the Hippodrome. So called because of the colour of their caps

  bothy A hut

  byrnie A shirt or breast-plate of mail

  Epona the Great Mare A mother goddess, associated with horses and mules, worshipped by the Celts, and in one form or another by all Horse People, including Roman cavalry

  King Malachy mazelin Maelsechlainn II. 949–1022. King of Ireland nit-wit

  Mesé The central street in Constantinople

  Miklagard The Norse name for Constantinople

  sark A shirt

  Vladimir 980–1014. Prince of Kiev. His baptism led to the conversion of Russia to Christianity

  wadmal Coarse wool used for cloaks and the sails of ships

  wankle Weak in health, delicate

  Wyr Geld ‘Man Money’: the price of a man’s life

  1 Wind from the West

  IN THE LENGTHENING spring evenings the light lingers behind the dome of St Mary Varangarica, St Mary of the Barbarians, long after the lanterns are pricking out among the shipping and along the crowded wharves and jetties of the Golden Horn. It is a sight that I never tire of, when life spares me time for looking at it: the clear green twilight over the roofs of Constantinople.

  Then Alexia brings the candles. It is a task she never leaves to our daughter, or to the house slaves. And the spring twilight beyond the window deepens into full dusk, and this small crowded study at the top of the house warms out of the shadows, so that when she has gone again, I can see it twice over – once in reality, once by its disjointed reflection in the glass window-panes: the cherished books on the shelves, the locked cabinet where I keep my most precious or most dangerous drugs, the white oleander in its painted pot, newly broken from bud into flower. In the window glass, too, I can see myself, as though I looked at another man sitting at the table with its litter of books and specimens and writing materials – there is always so much to learn, so much to record, so many notes to take. A big man, I suppose, lean and rangy and scarred as an old hound, with a mane of hair brindled grey and yellow. Jestyn the Englishman, so most men call me, though indeed I am but half Saxon and half of an older breed.

  Alexia always brings the candles a little too soon. Maybe she is afraid that I shall be trying to work without enough light to see by. Maybe she is afraid that in the dusk I shall start remembering and grow home-hungry. It is true that dusk is a good time for remembering, and of all times a spring twilight is apt to turn the heart homeward. And I do remember so many things, small unimportant things: gorse, honey-scented along the headlands, and the crash and cream of the long sea rollers beating on the jagged Western coast, curlew crying over the high moors, the smell of a new-born calf brought in from the herd. But I have learned, as Alexia, born and bred under these skies, has not had to learn it, that Home is not Place but People. Kinship, the ties that we make as we go along. My ties are with her, here in this tall crumbling house in the Street of the Golden Mulberry Tree, in a shallow scooped-out grave in the Thracian hills, among the poor folk in the hospital where much of my work is done. I have no ties, no kinships in the land where I was a boy. I do remember, but without any longing to go back over the road.

  My father was a wandering smith out of the far south-western horn of Britain, where the folk claim no kinship with the Saxon kind, but are of the older breed I spoke of. Smithing is a fine trade for a man with wandering in his feet, and a smith is sure of work and welcome where
ver he goes. My mother was a Saxon farmer’s daughter who left her own folk to follow him when he went back into the west again. So I was born in a village of the high moors far over beyond the Tamar River. And my first memory is of squatting in the sun-warm dust before my father’s smithy, playing with the little clay horse daubed with ochre spots that was the darling of my heart, and hearing the ding of my father’s hammer on the anvil; and of my mother coming out from the living-place behind the smithy, and scooping me up, saying, ‘Come, Baba, it is time for sleep.’

  Why that evening above any other, I’d not be knowing, but it was that evening I noticed for the first time that she spoke to me in a tongue she used to no one else, and that no one else in the village used at all. I thought for years that it was some kind of private language that was for me because she loved me, until I came to understand that it was the Saxon tongue. Why, I have never known; maybe it was for some kind of last link with her own world and her own people. At all events it has stood me in good stead, for I have needed both tongues in my time, and when I needed a third, I found it easier, I think, to learn that also, than a child who has been reared speaking only one.

  When I was five summers old, my father was kicked by a horse that he was shoeing, and died of the hurt. Then my mother might have taken me and gone back to her own world. But maybe her own world would not have taken her back; and one of the Chieftain’s hearth-companions had looked long in her direction, and so she went to him instead. I grew up under my stepfather’s roof, and ran with the hounds and the pigs, and joined the other boys scaring the birds from the newly sown barley, and began to take a hand with the cattle as I grew older.

  My stepfather must have hoped that my mother would have other children for him, but she never did, and I think, for that, he hated me. He was not cruel to me, but on the night she died, while she lay in the house-place with her hair combed and her hands folded, and the candles burning at her head and feet, he opened the house-place door and said to me, ‘The door is open.’

  And I walked out through it and away. And did not see the priest come to sign her with the cross and speak the prayers for her soul. I was just twelve years old.

  Like enough, I could have found shelter with someone else in the village, if I had asked for it. But I did not think of that. I was not thinking very clearly of anything at all; and maybe the wandering that had been in my father’s feet was in mine also. It was getting near to dawn, and there was nothing and no one to wait for, so I started walking.

  The dark was paling to ash grey as I came down to the old trading track that ran below the village, and a soft buffeting wind from the west was combing the white-tufted moor-grass all one way; there was beginning to be a thin flurry of rain, and I turned eastward along the track, simply for the sake of having it behind me.

  I have wondered, since, what shape my life would have taken if the wind had been blowing from the east, in that grey dawn.

  Later, I came to a place where the track forked, and took the left-hand branch for the very good reason that, at least on that first stretch, it led downhill. My memory of the days that followed is blurred, as though I looked back through a moorland mist. For the most part, I must have lived off the country, though it was growing late in the year for birds’ eggs. Once or twice I think I begged from a woman at a steading gate; once I know I helped a man droving cattle, whose dog had gone lame, and shared his supper and his fire at the day’s end. And then one day, towards evening, I came, with the shoes worn off my feet, round the shoulder of a wooded ridge, and saw – away to my left – a narrow combe running down to something shimmering sword-grey between two juts of land, that I knew from listening to the tales of travelling men must be the sea.

  I headed towards it, and lost it as I dropped downhill. Instead, the combe widened before me. Behind me were the high moors and the wild wind-stunted oak woods; below, I saw rough pasture that men had in-taken from the wilds; and in the small fields across the valley, below the turf-and-thatch huddle of a village, they were getting in the harvest. I stood looking across to the homely pattern of fields, and knew suddenly that I was tired and hungry. It was the first time I had thought clearly about anything since the night my mother died. I thought, ‘It may be that in this place they will give me work and food and a night’s shelter,’ and I walked on downhill, forded the little stream at the bottom where it ran bright and shallow over speckled stones, and came up the far side to the in-fields, where the men were cutting the last swathes of the evening.

  I checked among the hawthorns of a wind-break, and stood looking on, wishing that I had been there earlier, when the women would have been bringing out the great noon-time jars of butter-milk to set in the shade. And as I stood there, I heard a low growl behind me, and swung round, to see a man with a couple of leashed deerhounds standing not a spear’s length away. He stood leaning on his hunting spear and looking down at me. He was hard-faced and weather-beaten, and wore a rough woollen tunic like any of the men in the fields; but it was strapped round his waist by a belt of fine crimson leather, and by this, and by the fact that he walked abroad with his hounds while everyone else slaved at the harvest. I guessed that he must be the chief. A Thane, my mother would have called him.

  I made the sign for coming in peace, with open hands to show that there were no weapons in them; and he grinned. ‘You ease my mind. For if you had been the leader of a warband in disguise, surely we should all have had cause to tremble in our shoes! Where are you from, skinned rabbit?’ He spoke in the Saxon tongue, and I knew that I had come back into my mother’s world.

  ‘From further west,’ I said, too weary even to resent the jibe. ‘Along the trade road.’

  ‘And where do you go?’

  I hunched a shoulder. ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘You haven’t the look of a wandering beggar-cub. Have you run away from your village?’

  It is ill-mannered to ask such questions of a stranger before he has eaten; at any rate of a grown man, but I was only twelve, and anyway I was past caring. I wanted food and shelter and I was most likely to get it if I told the man with the deerhounds what he wanted to know. ‘My mother died, and there was no place for me in the hut of the man she was wedded to.’

  ‘And so you went on your travels. Is it in your mind to spend your life wandering up and down the world claiming Guest-Right at every hall you come to?’

  ‘I can work,’ I said. ‘I can set my hand to most things, and I’m good with cattle.’

  ‘Are you so? Well, come you up to the village with the rest. Food and shelter for the night, you shall have; and in the morning it may be that we will see as to this cattle skill of yours.’ And with his hounds at heel, he went on, up towards the village, where the bracken-thatched roof of the Hall rose whale-backed among the clustering bothies.

  So that night I ate my fill of kale broth and cheese and barley bannock, squatting in the Guest Place nearest to the door of the Chief’s Fire Hall, and slept warm between the peat stack and the pig-pen hurdles. And next morning I was shaken into wakefulness by a man with a small red angry eye, who demanded if I meant to sleep all day while the cattle waited.

  That was my first encounter with old Gyrth the cattleherd, who was to be my master for the next five years.

  2 The Shore-Killing

  I WAS QUITE happy, in the five years that I spent with Gyrth. I made no friends; that was nothing new, for I had always been something of a lone wolf. But I had the cattle and I had the two big savage cattle-dogs, above all, the bitch, Brindle. I got into the way of talking to Brindle in the British tongue, as my mother had talked to me in the Saxon; and I suppose for the same reason. The life was hard, and there were bad times in it: the winter nights spent hunting for a strayed cow; the feast days when as soon as our prayers were said in the little wattle church, and the merrymaking began, Gyrth got drunk and beat me – though before I was fifteen, the beatings came to an end because by then I
was taller and stronger than he was. But there were the good times too: long lazy days spent lying up among the furze on the headlands above a crooning summer sea, with Brindle beside me alert for any beast that strayed from the slow-grazing drift of the herd, and a kestrel hovering high overhead; calving time, and the little leggy calves still wet from their birth to be lifted up to the cows’ flanks and coaxed to suck. The only time I ever knew Gyrth gentle was in the calving season, especially with a cow in trouble and needing help to bring her calf into the world. He was the best cattleman and the best cattle doctor in five manors; and if he beat me, he also taught me his skills; and something more, for it was working with him at such times that I learned a thing about myself which it was good that I should know, though I did not understand it for years afterwards.

  And then my time with Gyrth and the cattle was over.

  One evening a storm blew up. It was no greater than others of the late summer gales along that black-fanged coast, that send ships running for shelter where little enough shelter is to be found. But it struck without warning, out of a clear sky. There had been a soft offshore breeze all day, warm with the scents of bracken and bog myrtle; then almost between gust and gust, it shifted, and changed and began to blow low along the ground, brushing up the leaves of the thorn trees to a rough silver; and in a little, the sky was covered by a thin membrane of cloud, like the skin of warm milk, and there began to be a hollow sounding of the sea. But even Gyrth, who was as weatherwise as most of his kind, did not guess how soon the storm would be upon us. He sniffed the wind like a hound and squinted at the sky. ‘Going to be a bit of a blow before morning. Rain too, I’d not wonder. Best take Brindle and get the yearlings down off Black Head.’

  I whistled the old bitch after me, and set off; but before I was half-way up to Black Head, the wind was roaring through the oak woods, the sky racing with darkly huddled cloud like flocks of driven sheep; and by the time I came out on to the open Head above its deep sea inlet, fine grey swathes of rain were driving in from the west, cutting sight to a couple of spear throws. Most of the yearlings were bunched in the lea of the outcrop of dark rocks that gave the place its name; but three or four were lacking. Most like, I thought, they had drifted on down the lea slope before the wind. I left Brindle to keep the rest together, and pushed on after the strays.