Blood Feud Read online

  Thormod looked at the dagger in his hand. In the cresset light it showed reddened to the hilt. But he had nothing to clean it on except his tunic or breeks, where the stain would show up like a wolf’s kill on a snowfield. He thrust it back into its sheath to wait for cleaning later; and we turned away from the quay, back towards the sea walls.

  The Blood Feud was over and done with, no good purpose would be served by getting the rest of the Varangians tangled in the web of it.

  By noon next day, word had found its way across the City from the Imperial Palace, and as we sat at our midday pork and greens in the Blachernae mess hall, suddenly I caught the name through the surf of voices: ‘Anders Herulfson – Anders Herulfson . . .’

  Anders Herulfson had been found at dawn, by some fishermen going to take out their boats, hanging on to a mooring rope, with a stab wound under his ribs, and was now in the Garrison hospital. ‘Who did it?’ someone at our table asked, craning backwards for the answer.

  And somebody checked in passing. ‘Set on by robbers, so he said – too dark to see their faces, so he’d not remember them again. The odd thing is that he still had his gold collar on.’

  ‘Maybe they were disturbed before they could get it off him.’

  ‘How bad is the wound?’

  ‘He’ll likely live.’

  ‘Then I’d say the hole in his hide must be less than the hole in his memory,’ said Orm, sitting across the table from me. His eyes met mine, and there was a quirk to his sandy eyebrows.

  Beside me, Thormod, his mouth full of poppyseed bread, put up a hand and idly pulled at his sleeve, making sure that it had not ridden up to show a blood-stained rag knotted above his elbow.

  I did nothing; neither moved nor spoke nor even thought, just sat there feeling rather as though someone had kneed me in the belly.

  It was evening before Thormod and I could speak alone together. We were off-duty then, and taking our ease by the cistern of Theodosius, which is a pleasant place, with shade trees about the arched entrance, and grass to sit on, and a coolness that seems to breathe up from the hidden water. I was sitting with my back against the patchy trunk of a plane tree, Thormod lying beside me, his head on his arms staring up into the branches. Women passed and re-passed with their great jars empty or dripping with the evening water.

  ‘And now?’ I said, when we had been silent a long while with the same thing in both our minds.

  ‘We must wait, yet again,’ Thormod said.

  ‘It is in my mind that already there has been overmuch of waiting.’

  Thormod turned his head on his arms; he might have been talking over the price of radishes. ‘Men have waited longer than this, for the clearing of a blood debt.’ And then with a sudden change of mood, he rolled over and banged his fist on the turf. ‘If I had thought for an instant that there was yet a spark of life in him, I would have gone down and finished him as a hunter finishes a wounded animal. Now . . .’

  ‘They’ll not keep much of a guard on the sick quarters,’ I said.

  He looked at me. ‘Could you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It is not my feud.’ The thing was said before I knew it, and I could not take it back.

  There was a sharp moment of silence; and then he said, ‘No, it is not your feud – in spite of this . . .’ And he reached out and touched the little white scar inside my wrist.

  I turned my hand over quickly and touched the matching scar on his. ‘It is mine, because it is yours, but – still I do not know.’

  He smiled lazily. ‘We’ll not argue the thing. It is my feud, I know. I could have finished him like a wounded beast, last night. Now, the moment is past and cold, and I can only wait. If he dies, I shall have killed him anyway; and if he lives – I must wait until he can give me a fight.’

  ‘And if he never can? A knife-wound under the ribs is apt to leave havoc behind it.’

  ‘If he lives, yet does not win back to his fighting strength, then I shall know that there is no justice in my own gods. Maybe I will even turn to your White Kristni.’

  17 Death in Thrace

  THE RUMOUR THAT we were being sent to Thrace turned out to be true; and a few days later, changed back from our gold-embroidered tunics into battle-grey mail, we were on the march. At this end of the world, where the winters are not so cold, War Hosts do not break off their wars during the dark months of the year, as they do in the north. Indeed, so far as cavalry is concerned, there is better grazing for the horses in the winter than in the hot months when the sun has burned the open hillsides brown. I remember cold winter nights, for all that, sleet blowing in the wind; watch-fires in the mountains, when we slept huddled close for warmth with our cloaks about us, and our feet to the flames; skirmishes fought out in the teeth of a wind that cut like a flaying knife; wolves howling uncomfortably close about the horse lines.

  Through that winter we were for the most part on our own. A Bandon of cavalry, a few Centuries of regular troops, and us – three companies of the Emperor’s new Barbarian Guard, out to prove ourselves the best, at least the most terrible, fighting men in the Empire.

  We had no big-scale fighting in those months, but a fair deal of skirmishing, for our task was to hold and harry the Bulgars and the Khazan tribesmen from the north, until with the spring, Basil should bring up more troops to thrust them westward. We did not know that we were beginning the Emperor’s life’s work for him: the driving back of the Bulgarian frontier to what it was in Justinian’s day, bringing all the lands between Macedonia and the Danube, the Inland Sea and the Adriatic again into the Byzantine Empire. It is done now. Thirty years in the doing, and treaties made and treaties broken, and a whole captured Bulgarian Army blinded along the way. (The Emperor Basil is nothing if not thorough!) But the priests tell us that it is God’s Will. And God’s Will is done.

  But that winter, with no knowledge of any such great over-all plan, with no news from the city, we followed John of Chaldea, that white-faced, black-bearded man with a fire in his belly, in a kind of small ragged war of our own. Once, towards winter’s end, a supply train got through to us, with dispatches for the Commander, and news that got loose and ran from camp fire to camp fire in a gale of laughter.

  Basil, it seemed, had listened to the tears and pleading of his sister the Princess Anna, and tried to back out of his bargain with Khan Vladimir. But at the first hint of delay about sending him his promised bride, Vladimir had seized the Byzantine port of Cherson on the Inland Sea, and threatened to do the same to Miklagard itself. ‘So our Basil has had to give in, and hand the lady over, for all her tears,’ said one of the supply-wagon men, sitting at our fire.

  I laughed with the rest, but I was still sorry for the Princess Anna. Ah well, if what I hear be true, she has had none so ill a life of it. At least she has borne sons who are like to be emperors themselves one day, and that should count for something with an Emperor’s sister. If I am sorry for her even now, it must be that I am a foolish old man.

  ‘The Emperor must be of a meeker temper than I had thought,’ said Orm, through a mouthful of wild pig.

  ‘Why, as to that,’ one of the escort riders who had also joined us, leaned forward and helped himself to the wine jar, ‘he’s about as meek as a mountain bear, but he’s got more sense. He knows he’s got few enough troops to take on the Bulgars and the Khazan hoards and Khan Vladimir at the same time, and even some of the troops he has –’

  The man checked, and Orm said blandly, ‘What of the troops he has, friend?’

  ‘Do you think he can be sure yet, of his new Barbarian Guard?’ the other said, grinning.

  I thought there was going to be a fight after that. Maybe it was only because we were all so tired, and had had a winter’s fighting anyway, that there was not. But I mind, even after we had got things sorted out, Thormod with his head high on his shoulders, and his brows almost meeting above the root of his nose, demanding, ‘Does he not understand, this Emperor of ours, who seeks to duck out from under his own
promises, that when the Northmen sell their swords, they keep their share of the bargain?’

  ‘Even against their own kind?’ said the escort man.

  ‘They keep their share of the bargain,’ Thormod said again, levelly.

  ‘So long as the man who buys, keeps his,’ Orm added. ‘If he doesn’t, then we put the swords to another use.’ And he drew his finger across his throat. ‘But clearly our little Basil is a man who keeps his bargains, even if sometimes a shade unwillingly. So – our service is his so long as he pays for it, and we die for him if need be. Quite a few of us have already; he needn’t lie awake at night under his gold and purple coverlid, worrying about that.’

  Spring came, with an outburst of sudden small flame-bright flowers that were not the flowers of an English spring, and lacking something of the birdsong. And with the spring, the Emperor came up with the long awaited troops. I mind the day he rode in, the camp resounding to shouted orders and trumpet calls and the whinnying and trampling of horses; the Emperor’s great blue and purple pavilion going up, and almost before the last rope was made fast, the Varangians mounting guard around it. Three Companies of the Varangians had come up with him, to relieve us, the three who had been up there all winter long and would be marching eastward in a few days, to take over Palace duty guarding the Emperor Constantine.

  That evening, as the shadows began to lengthen, the camp was full of reunions, as men strolled to and fro in search of old friends and comrades – or old enemies. I was kicking my heels among the crowd that had gathered about the Field Armoury, waiting to have a dint knocked out of my shield boss. The Armoury, with its red roar of flame from the forge fire, and the cheerful ding of hammer on anvil, is always a favourite gathering-place in any camp, whether or not one has need of the armourer’s skill, and some of the crowd had nothing for mending at all, but had merely drifted that way as one might to a wine-shop. Orm and Thormod were there too; and a small knot of newcomers, some of them still eating the remains of their evening meal, wandered up to join us – Varangians from the Palace Guard, whose place we should soon be taking.

  And one of them, with a great collop of pigmeat in his hand, was Anders Herulfson.

  Anders Herulfson, living or dead. For a moment, seeing him between the fading daylight and the red glow of the forge fire, I was not sure which, and the hairs crept on the back of my neck.

  Then somebody let out a shout: ‘Well! See who’s here among us! Anders Herulfson!’

  ‘Or his ghost,’ somebody else said. ‘Man! When they fished you out of the Horn that morning, I’d not have wagered much on the likelihood of seeing you carrying your sword again, this side the Rainbow Bridge!’

  ‘And you as good as new, and eating hearty,’ Orm added.

  Anders spat out a piece of gristle, and grinned briefly. ‘As good as new,’ he agreed, ‘save when something still catches me under the ribs – like a bee-sting – when I laugh. Just enough to keep me from forgetting how I came to be in the Horn that morning. No more.’

  I don’t think he and Thormod even looked at each other.

  The smith was shouting at me. ‘Hi! You! Do you want that dint beaten out or not?’

  And when I had handed over my shield, and looked round again, Anders was gone. ‘Where is he?’ I asked stupidly.

  Thormod looked round at me slowly, the corners curling a little on that straight mouth of his. ‘Gone about his own affairs for now. But I’m thinking I’ll not need to turn from my own gods to your White Kristni just yet, after all.’

  Two days later, we drove the Bulgars out of a small strong hill-town they had held all winter. We attacked at first light. It had been raining in the night, and I remember the smell of morning on the grass as we went in to the attack.

  The Bulgars were ready for us, and it was hot work for a while, among the half-ruined walls of the town, and through the narrow ways whose own people had been killed or driven out months before. Orm was killed in the first rush; we weren’t doing too badly at keeping our part of the Emperor’s bargain. He gave a surprised grunt and dropped just ahead of me with a Bulgar spear in his belly. The man put his foot on Orm’s body to drag the spearhead out – his breeks were striped red and white and blue, so he must have been a noble. It’s odd, the things one notices sometimes – I got him in that moment, my sword under his arm; but I didn’t have time for feeling anything, as I thrust on after the great sweeping war-axe of Thrand Thunderfist. There would be time for feeling, later.

  We made a fine killing, and by noon the streets and alleyways were blood-spattered, piled with dead in the gateways and at corners where the fighting had been most fierce, with the smell of the knacker’s yard about them; and we were hunting fugitives through the hillside scrub.

  Left to ourselves, I doubt if the Varangians would have hunted that trail, for the Viking Kind do not care much about fugitives, unless they have a score to settle. But the Emperor Basil has always been one for a thorough job, and no loose ends left hanging; and we had our orders.

  Such a hunting can be as dangerous for the hunters as for the hunted, especially when the hunted are in their own countryside; for often the hunters may become as widely scattered as their quarry . . . So it was that late in the day, into the time of Long Shadows, Thormod and I and a handful more found ourselves in the mouth of a narrow valley, where a little rocky stream came down from the mountains. A stream that would dry out to bare bones in the summer; what we call in England a winter bourne, as are many of the watercourses in those parts. We were tired and thirsty, three of us were wounded and we stopped to drink out of our war-caps and bathe our hurts.

  When I am tired or anxious, or when the old wound pains me, I see that little valley in my dreams even now: in a soft clear light that is not quite the light of this world. Rugged outcrops of the mountain rocks thrusting through the ragged cloak of scrub; an ancient wild almond in the loop of the watercourse, three parts dead, yet with one unvanquished branch breaking into a starry cloud of pale blossom; a peregrine falcon hanging high overhead. The water was greenish with melting snows far up in the mountains: ice cold – cold enough to drown the taste of the sweaty leather and the iron rim. Thormod and I drank in turn, both from the same war-cap – mine – and I remember how good the water tasted.

  I remember also, how, as Thormod bent to scoop it up, the piece of amber on its thong, swung forward through the slackened-off neck of his mail shirt.

  ‘We’ll not find any more now,’ Eric Longshanks said, cleaning the blade of his throwing-axe by chopping it into the turf.

  And at the same instant, even before Thormod could thrust the amber back inside his mail, Swain let out a shout: ‘Look! Up there!’

  We looked where he pointed, and something moved, high above us among the birch scrub and hill juniper. Just an instant’s flicker of movement, and then for a long moment, nothing more. And then the thing broke cover: a man, running lopsided like a bird with a broken wing, across the bare rock slope before he disappeared into the next patch of scrub. Someone raised the shout of the hunter who views the quarry, and we broke forward after him, scrambling up through the lentisk and juniper.

  Once or twice we glimpsed the man ahead of us. He was heading up valley, but seemed to have turned downhill again, making for the thicker cover of the lower slopes and the streamside. We should have been able to outrun him, wounded as he looked to be; but we were leg-weary and there were the three of us who had taken scathe of our own in the fighting; and it was as much as we could do to gain on him at all. Among the hill scrub, running hard, we scarcely noticed how the valley was changing, narrowing in on us, until we came out into the open again, and found ourselves in a rocky defile with the hillsides rising almost sheer on either hand. Not a good place to be, in enemy territory. But the man was close in front of us now; one last burst, and we should have him.

  I don’t know what made me look back as I ran. I saw a flicker of movement in the scrub behind us, the glint of late sunlight on metal.

&nb
sp; ‘Look out!’ I yelled. ‘They’re behind us!’

  Almost in the same instant, a flight of stones came whistling down the hillside into our midst. One caught Eric Longshanks on the point of the shoulder and sent him reeling. One caught Swain on the head, and he dropped like a poled ox. Whether he was outright dead, I’d not be knowing; I never saw him again.

  I have often wondered how many Bulgars there were; probably not many, but there were no more than seven or eight of us, and save for that flicker among the scrub, we could not see them; we only knew that we were all at once beset on every side; and those accursed stones whistling down on us. We had to stop them at all costs. I mind we started to scramble up the hillside to try to come to grips with our unseen enemy; but it wasn’t just pebbles they were throwing, it was sizeable chunks of rock. To keep together was to huddle like sheep for slaughter, and we scattered as we ran. All the hillside seemed coming down on us now. I saw a jagged boulder flying down towards me, and tried to leap clear – and did not quite make it. It took me on my right knee. It did not even hurt, in those first moments; there was just a numbing sense of shock, and I was lying sprawled out with my face in a patch of rough grass. I struggled to get up, but I seemed pinned to the ground by an enormous dragging weight where my right leg ought to be; and when I managed to get on to my elbow, and looked down, my knee had turned into a kind of soggy red mush with splinters of bone sticking out of it.

  Somebody was scrambling towards me along the open hillside – Thormod, bending over me, hauling me up into the slim shelter of a rocky outcrop. I glimpsed Bulgar helmets and heard the first ragged shouting of close-fighting begin. ‘My knife,’ I croaked. ‘Give me my knife and get after the rest.’

  ‘We’re all going to Valhalla, anyway,’ he said. ‘You and I will stick together on the road.’ And he side-strode over me, sword in hand. For a moment the Thracian hillside darkened and swam, and became a night-time Dublin alleyway; and I heard him, standing tree tall above me, raise the great Viking shout.