Blood Feud Read online

  Then the hillside swam clear again, and I saw a figure a couple of spear-throws away, sharp-edged in the evening light, that I thought for an instant was one of us, because it wore Varangian harness; and yet it did not carry itself like a friend . . .

  I saw that it was Anders Herulfson, with his light throwing-axe in his hand.

  In the last moments before the Bulgars closed in, he came running lightly between the rocks and the grey hillside scrub, and I saw the circling flash of the axe blade he whirled above his head, the bright, spinning are of it as he sent it free.

  A throwing-axe always seems to be travelling so slowly that there should be time to avoid it. But in truth, there is not.

  It took Thormod between the neck and shoulder.

  He made a horrible choking sound, cut off short. The blood came in a hot red stinking wave, bursting out over both of us as he crumpled slowly to his knees and then on to his face on top of me, the axe blade still wedged in the bones of his neck. Beyond him I saw Anders almost upon us; his face looking down, somehow not real, like a mask of Anders’s face with something piteous and horrible behind it. My turn next. I heaved my right arm free from Thormod’s body, struggling to come at my dagger – and on that instant, clear on the evening air, came the silver crowing of Byzantine trumpets.

  Anders checked, and for an instant, across Thormod’s body, our eyes met. Then he turned and melted into the hillside scrub. There was quick quiet movement all around, as the men who had ambushed us pulled back from the fight. And I wondered, in a detached sort of way, whether he would get clear, from both our own troops and the Bulgars. It seemed heavy odds against.

  There was blood everywhere. Thormod’s blood and mine, soaking into the ground together, like those few scattered drops on the edge of the apple-garth at Sitricstead; but more of it now – much more . . .

  I was aware of a flurry of men like a flurry of shadows, and the clash of weapons and a cry cut off short, and the squeal of a horse somewhere on the lower slopes that all seemed to be the shadows of sounds far off. Everything was far off, and going further; confused like a sick man’s dream. Then the dream cleared a little; and the daylight was fading, and somebody in a cavalry helmet was bending over me, head and shoulders dark against a green crystal sky. Thormod’s dead weight was being lifted off me; and someone said, ‘Christ! A Viking throwing axe! This was done by one of their own lot!’

  And the man bending over me said, ‘That can be cleared up later, here’s another, with the life still in him.’

  And then the buzzing darkness closed over me.

  18 Wind Smelling of Wet Grass

  SO THORMOD WENT to Valhalla alone – no, not alone; he went in good company, but without me. It did not come to me until long after, that that must have been the way of it in any case, for if I had died that day on the Thracian hillside, I would have had another road that I must follow – unless, indeed, I had lost that road for ever when I took my oath with the rest of the old Red Witch’s crew on Thor’s Ring at Kiev.

  Somewhere in the Scriptures, the Christ is set down as saying that in His Father’s House there are many mansions; and from that saying, I draw hope that there is a Valhalla for Thormod at the end of the Rainbow Bridge. He and Orm and Hakon One-eye and the rest, they would not be happy in our Christian Heaven; and yet God made them, and I cannot believe in a God who would waste such man-stuff on Damnation. The priests would say that such a thought was sin and heresy. And so I have never spoken it to a priest. I can only trust in God, His mercy.

  But as I say, that thinking came later. Much later.

  For many days all things were hazy, and my memories of the hospital tents at Berea are as ragged as an old cloak and full of holes, in part, I think, from the effect of the poppy draughts they gave me to deaden the pain of my smashed knee. It is said that a hurt to the knee or elbow or the palm of the hand gives more pain than a hurt of the same size to any other part of the body; a saying which I have remembered since, in my own dealings with injured men.

  And my next clear memory is of a sky fiercely blue above me, and the jolting of the ox-cart carrying wounded men back to Constantinople.

  I lay staring back at that fierce blue stare of the sky that was like the somehow accusing gaze of the Christ Pantocrator in the roof of the church of St Irene, and nerving myself to every lurch and judder of the ox-cart under me. The flies were a torment, and I mind fumbling up my hand to brush away one that was stinging my neck, and feeling as I did so, the piece of amber shaped like Thor’s Hammer that was stowed inside my tattered sark. The axe-blade that had killed Thormod must have severed the thong, and it had been in my hand when they found me; and someone thinking that it was mine, had knotted the blood-stained thong round my neck. It was warm and alive as though with Thormod’s life under my hand, as it is now when I feel for it inside my tunic where it hangs still. It had come to me as a parting gift, a parting command from my blood-brother. And holding it, as the ox-cart jolted onward. I felt the old Blood Feud as my own at last; the feud that had never been quite my own before. Now that it was too late, and somebody else must have killed Anders long ago – Anders, who should have been for my killing, because he had killed Thormod.

  And I had lost my brother, and I had lost my enemy, and I had lost my way . . .

  I took the wound fever, and was like to die after all, and so find the way out of all my problems. And for long after the fever let me go, the wound festered and would not heal. And then that passed also. But it was the edge of autumn again before they had done with me in the old military hospital in the heart of the city, and I was free to go where I chose and do what I would, except return to my comrades. No room in the Varangian Guard for a man with a smashed knee, who must swing one leg stiff as a broomstick to the end of his days.

  Byzantium plays fair by its soldiers, with a lump sum in good solid gold after their service years are ended. But for the Mercenary, all the world over, it is another thing. We hire out our swords to a Lord who is not our own by birth; we fight for him, and he pays us, and the loot is good, and that is the bargain. But when, through age or wounds, our swords cease to be worth the hiring, the payment stops, and we may find other work if we can, or get ourselves home to wherever we came from, turn beggar or bandit, or drown ourselves in the nearest horse-pond. That is all in the bargain, and fair enough, too, in its way. But with only twenty summers under his belt, a man is something young to find himself on the garbage heap.

  The Varangians would stand by their own in a casual way, I knew, always good for the price of a meal or a drink, maybe even for odd jobs around the barracks. But I had no stomach for hanging around other men’s camp fires.

  So what should I do now? What road was I to follow?

  I remember standing in the narrow crowded street, leaning on my staff – for my knee was barely up to my weight as yet – and wondering what I should do from that moment forward, with the unlived part of my life, long or short, that lay ahead of me. The slow fire that I had lacked and longed for, was burning in my belly now, and the only thing that seemed to me worth doing was to hunt down and kill Anders Herulfson, if by any wild chance he was not dead already. But I had enough sense left to know that, even with a sound knee, to go hunting a man who had almost certainly been dead for months, through the enemy mountains of Thrace would be to run mad. If he lived, he would have a far better chance of finding me; and I knew that I could trust him to come seeking . . . Dark Thorn had said that I had the mark of the Blood Feud on my forehead . . .

  What in God’s name should I do?

  I realized suddenly that I was standing almost in the doorway of a little church. And – maybe it was in part to get away from the crowds, for after the months within the long halls and cloistered courts of the old hospital, the constant swirling come and go of the open city made my head swim – I did a thing that I have done all too seldom in my life; I went inside to ask my way.

  It was cool and full of shadows inside; faintly smelling of s
tale incense and candlewax and the coldness of old stone. There was a shimmer of candles before a picture of a woman’s face – just the face, dark and almond-shaped, with full dark eyes and a grave mouth, and all the rest of the picture covered with smoky silver. I knew that it was a picture of Christ’s Mother, but she reminded me of someone else. I could not think who. I suppose I prayed, though I did not think of it as praying at the time, standing before her, my hands clasped on my staff.

  I said, ‘Lady, once, for a friend’s sake, I took an oath to Thor in a God-House of the Northmen in Kiev, and it may be that for that, I am damned. But if I am not damned, let you ask your Son for me, that He will show me what I must do when I go out from here; for I do not know. I do not know at all.’

  I did not even add a candle to those glimmering before the picture, though I had the price of one; the remains of my last pay. But in a while, I turned and went back into the street.

  After the shadows and the cold incense smell and the quiet within the church, the sights and sounds and smells of the outside world fell on me like a shout. A sudden gust of wind, warm with the last lingerings of summer, came up the street, raising a little dust cloud and scattering a waft of mingled scents from an unseen garden behind the high wall that joined the church. Somebody must have been watering the grass, for it was the green scent of rain on parched earth and the leaves of trees. And all at once I was filled with an aching longing for open country; and memory flung up in my mind the day almost a year ago, when I had followed the Emperor in his hunting, and the smell of the world after the autumn rain – and I knew who it was that the smoke-darkened face set in dim silver had reminded me of. The girl of the wild olive tree, the girl with the tame gazelle. Standing there in the crowded and noisy street, I remembered her quietness, a cool quietness like shade on a dusty road . . .

  She had brought milk for the fawn; so maybe they had cattle on the farm. If not, I could learn to tend goats. Maybe they needed a goat-herd – or someone to do odd jobs and help with the olive harvest . . .

  And so, for the second time in my life, the wind set me on the road I was to follow.

  19 The House of the Physician

  I BOUGHT BREAD and black figs at a market stall, and added them to my few possessions bundled in a cloak, and set out.

  I went out through the Kirkoporta, the small gate close beside the Blachernae Palace, my shadow already beginning to lengthen behind me, and headed westward into the rolling country. It had not seemed far, that evening coming the other way, with the dead cheetah lying across my horse’s withers, but it was a long way now, on foot; and I spent the night on the road, in the corner of a disused cattle fold; and it was not far short of noon next day when I came to the place where the track branched below the farm. I took the right-hand fork, then came up through the almond trees, past the walled olive garden. In the heat of the day, no one seemed to be about, save for an old man snoring in the shade, and the cicadas loud as always among the olive trees.

  Fat Cloe came from one of the outbuildings as I reached the farm courtyard, shooting before her a flurry of hens that had evidently got somewhere they should not have been. She gave them a final shoo and abandoned them at sight of me; and standing hands on hips, demanded my business. She did not recognize me. I had not thought she would.

  ‘I came to speak with the lady,’ I said.

  ‘Eh? Speak up, whoever you are – everybody mumbles these days.’

  I remembered that Cloe was deaf, and asked again more loudly, for the mistress, the one with the fawn.

  ‘There’s no need to shout!’ said the fat woman. ‘If people don’t mumble, they shout! It will be the Lady Alexia you’re meaning?’

  I nodded. I did not know her name, but I knew it must be the Lady Alexia I was meaning.

  ‘She’s not here,’ said the woman. ‘She’s in the city.’

  ‘I’ve just come from there . . .’

  ‘So you’ve had a long walk for nothing.’ And then I suppose she saw that I was tired and wayworn, and maybe I looked as lost as I suddenly felt; and her face grew kinder. ‘Aye, and on that leg – too long a walk, by the looks of you. Sit down in the shade and cool your throat for a start.’

  There was a bench under the oleander, and I sat down thankfully, stretching my aching leg out in front of me; and she brought me ice-cold water in an earthen cup, and I drank, and gave the cup back to her. ‘I thought she would be here – it’s still hot weather –’

  She sat down also, and returned to the basket of almonds she must have been shelling when the hens interrupted her. ‘Oh no.’ She cracked an almond with a stone, and began breaking off the brown shards of husk. ‘Even in the summer she’s to and fro between here and the city.’

  ‘And she’s there now?’ I said, stupidly.

  ‘Aye, with her father. He cannot spare her for long; and himself, he seldom has time to come out here at all. So many sick folk there are in the City; and no finer doctor, they tell me, than Alexius Demetriades, in all Constantinople.’ She checked, and looked up from her task. ‘It was not really him you wanted, for that leg of yours?’

  I shook my head. ‘I doubt there’s any more to be done about that. I came because I thought – I hoped the Lady Alexia might need some work doing – I needed work, and I remembered her – and this place.’ I sounded confused in my own ears, but I was so tired.

  She let out a screech like a pea-hen. ‘Husband!’ and a little man as lean and sharp-angled as a cicada appeared, yawning, from another doorway, and grunted inquiringly.

  Cloe jerked her head in my direction. ‘He’s come looking for the Lady Alexia – wants work.’

  The little man looked me up and down, and I got wearily to my feet to be looked at. It seemed the best thing to do.

  ‘I’m good with livestock,’ I said, ‘and I can turn my hand to most things about a farm.’

  He pulled at his scraggy beard. ‘Does the Lady Alexia know you?’

  ‘She only saw me once, and it was almost a year ago; but I think she would remember me. One of the Emperor’s cheetahs ran wild after a day’s hunting and –’

  ‘And some hairy-heeled Viking of the Emperor’s new Barbarian Guard saved her when she was attacked by it.’

  ‘It was the gazelle that it was really attacking,’ I said.

  Cloe let out a squeal. ‘He could be the one! Now I come to look at him, he could so!’ I have noticed the same thing about some other deaf people, that they can hear none so ill when they want to.

  There was a small silence, while the old man took another stare at me. ‘Are you telling me you’re one of the Barbarian Guard? You don’t look like it.’

  ‘Not now,’ I said. ‘I did – I was, until I got this knee fighting in Thrace in the spring.’

  He considered, still tugging at his beard. ‘Easy enough to come here with an old soldier’s hard-luck story –’

  ‘Don’t you believe me, then?’

  He sniffed. ‘I wouldn’t say I don’t, and I wouldn’t say I do. Either way it makes no odds; I’ve two men under me, and I can manage with that – just about. I won’t say I couldn’t do with another hand, but I’m not my own master, to take on extra men without the word of the Lady Alexia or her father.’

  ‘I’m sorry I woke you from your noon sleep for nothing. I’ll go.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ he said. ‘You want the Lady Alexia – you go back to the city and speak with her, and bring me back a bit of parchment with her name writ on it by herself. I can’t read, but I know how the Lady Alexia writes her name – and I’ll find you work on the farm – so that you do it properly.’

  ‘How shall I find the Lady Alexia in the city?’

  ‘The Street of the Golden Mulberry Tree, close by the Hippodrome. It’s the last house on the right-hand side, going up. But anyone round that way will tell you, if you ask for the House of the Physician.’

  ‘I’ll be on my way,’ I said.

  ‘You do that.’

  Cloe cut in, picking u
p her basket of almonds and lumbering to her feet. ‘But not before you’ve some food in your belly and a night’s sleep behind you. For shame, Michael, we don’t need the mistress’s word to give a night’s shelter to a guest.’

  She was kind, fat Cloe. She fed me and gave me some broken harness to mend, and an old rug in a corner under the vine arbour for my night’s sleep. And in the morning she gave me bread and olives and a draught of thin wine to see me on my way, and said, ‘Do not you be cast down. If your story is true, and I’m minded that it is, the more I look at you, the Lady Alexia will remember and be grateful, and her father will help you. They are not folk to let a debt go unpaid.’

  She meant it so kindly. Only I had not thought of it like that – not as claiming gratitude and the payment of a debt. It had been only that the wind had smelt of rain on parched grass, and the dark quiet face of the Madonna had brought the girl with the fawn back into my mind, and with it the idea that she might have work for me on the farm – the kind of work that my hands and heart knew. Cloe’s kindly meant words took me like a blow in the belly. I was sick and wretched, and something that had been clear and simple had become tangled and muddied. (So much for my prayer in the little dark church, so much for the summer-scented wind that I had taken for something more than it was. I was glad that I had not wasted good money on that candle!) But when I had forced down the food that I no longer wanted, and remembered to thank the woman for it, I set out for the city, all the same.

  Starting early in the day, I got a lift in a market-cart for a good part of the way, and it was not much past noon when I came in through the side arch of the Golden Gate.

  The crowds in the Mesé, that runs magnificently from end to end of the city, seemed somewhat thinner than usual; and I wondered why, until I came close to the towering colonnaded walls of the Hippodrome and heard the roar of the crowd within, and then I realized that it must be a chariotracing day, and half the city had gone to shout for the Blue or the Green. Later, there would be faction-fighting in the streets, there always was, and is, on a race day. But for the moment, it was oddly peaceful.