Blood Feud (10 page)

There was a ruffle of voices, and a falling back to let someone through; and turning with the rest, I saw a man on a tiger-spot horse come riding through the cleared way.

On the edge of the Fighting Ground he reined in, and sat his fidgeting beast, looking down at Anders and me. A big man, though broad rather than tall, with a face that seemed to have been made in a hurry, the nose crooked, one pale bright eye set a little higher than the other, a big mouth made for savage laughter and overfull of strong yellow teeth. He wore rough woollen breeks and a goatskin jerkin with the hair inside making a dark ragged fringe at the edges; but his boots were of fine soft saffron-coloured leather, and under the rough jerkin a glint of gold showed at his throat. It seemed that he had been setting out for a day’s sport, for the knot of hearth companions behind him carried hawks – he carried a magnificent gyr falcon on his own gloved fist – or had hounds coupled in leash. I had not seen him before, but I knew without doubting, by his air of riding head and shoulders taller than other men, that this was Khan Vladimir.

His curious light eyes flickered from Anders to me, to Thormod who had come to stand with us, to the long shape of Herulf lying still under his cloak at the side of the Fighting Ground, and back again. ‘So; it has been a good Holm Ganging, and now it is ended.’

Anders gave him back look for look. ‘A good Holm Ganging, Lord, but it is not yet ended.’

The Khan smiled; a smile to make the hairs lift on the back of one’s neck. ‘It is easy to see that you are strange-comers to these parts. When you know me better, all three of you, my heroes, you will know that when Khan Vladimir says that the Holm Ganging is ended, the Holm Ganging is ended, as the night follows the day.’

There was a small silence, and then Thormod spoke, his voice at its most level. ‘There is Blood Feud between Anders Herulfson and us two. Not even the Lord of Kiev is above the laws of the Blood Feud, only the gods.’

‘At most times, I would grant you that,’ said Vladimir,
with the air of a reasonable man. ‘But the call has gone out for War Hosting, and in time of Ravens’ Gatherings, all else waits.’

‘Lord, there can be no War Hosting until the spring,’ Thormod said.

‘The War Hosting began in the hour when I seized the
Serpent
to serve with the War Fleet when the time comes. It is quite simple – softly, softly now, jewel of my heart!’ (This to the falcon, who was growing restless as though she felt the stress like thunder in the air about her.) ‘You will swear to me on that which you hold sacred, to leave this feud lying, until the fighting in the south be done and the War Host disbanded, or you will spend the winter in chains. The choice is yours. I have too good a use for fighting men to be wasteful of them now.’

‘Lord,’ Thormod seemed to have become the spokesman for the three of us, ‘we deny your right –’

Vladimir made a sound at the back of his throat; a kind of coughing snarl like a mountain lion. ‘My right! Was it not told to you two nights since, that I make my own right? Even to the number of my wives before the throne of the White Kristni?’ His eye was on me at that moment, and I kept my head up to meet it, but my stomach knotted with fear. I saw the laughter in his pale bright glance, but it might be the laughter of the God behind the thunderbolt, and I was not reassured.

It was then that I remembered how Erland Silkbeard had looked at me, two nights since, and it seemed to me that it had been an enemy’s look. But like enough it saved all our lives, for that time.

‘So,’ said Khan Vladimir. ‘Will you swear? Or will you pass the winter chained like hounds in the palace forecourt?’

The three of us looked at each other. And I heard the little wind through the marsh grasses, and the stir and rustle of
the crowd, and a horse ruckling down its nose. Then Anders quoted softly, ‘“Keep a stone in your pocket seven years for your enemy, take it out and turn it and keep it seven more, then take it out and throw.” There is no hurry; and I am thinking that none of us three will forget, if we live to see the end of the fighting in the south.’

Thormod had turned back to the Khan. ‘Since it seems that in one way or another way, the thing must wait, whether we swear or no, and since we would spend the winter out of chains – on what shall we swear?’ Suddenly and unexpectedly, his level voice had that glint of laughter. ‘On Thor’s Ring?’

The Khan’s mouth widened at the corners, over the strong yellow teeth. ‘That is a question, to be sure. Not on Thor’s Ring, no. You and you, on your father’s graves.’ His gaze flickered between Thormod and Anders, then passed on to me, consideringly. ‘You, on this –’ And he thrust a hand into the breast of his jerkin and pulled out a heavy cross of rough gold set with turquoise that blazed in the morning sun.

So the three of us swore; and the Blood Feud was laid by until the fighting in the south should be over; and we turned ourselves to the coming winter.

And Herulf Herulfson, his part in it played out and finished for all time, was howe-laid in the rich black earth of the Kiev marshes.

THE FIRES OF
the maples burned themselves out, and the Dnieper froze over, and soon the Kiev marshes were deep in snow that drifted before the blizzard winds. It was warm within doors, where the fires of wood and cattle-dung were kept blazing day and night. And from outside, you could see the patches of melted snow round the smoke-holes in the roofs. But out of doors the cold, striking through hide breeks and jerkin and thick wadmal cloak from the slop kist in Erland’s hall (we of the
Red Witch
counted as Erland’s men now, his food in our bellies, his clothes for our backs), was like no cold that I had ever felt before.

Autumn, and the more open days of winter, was a time of tree-felling in the forest land north of the city; and the trunks were roped and dragged down by oxen, and stacked above the keel strand to weather as much as might be before the ship-building that would come with the first days of spring.

And speaking for myself, I got to seeing the steam rising from the nostrils of the straining oxen and hearing the crack of the long whips in my sleep.

‘A green fleet,’ said Hakon One-eye. ‘But if it holds together as far as Miklagard, we can have vessels of gold and cedar to carry us home again.’

All winter long we worked in the boat-sheds. Thormod and Anders and I, with the rest, re-fitting vessels already there, renewing blocks and tackle, pitching sides and re-caulking seams. All winter the rope-walk was busy, and from the town above came the ding of hammer on anvil, where the armourer smiths were at work mending old weapons and forging new; while, in the Khan’s palace and the fire-halls of his nobles, the women gathered to stitch the wadmal sails
and work the spread-winged raven banners as women have done in the north whenever the Viking Kind gather for war.

So the winter passed; longer and colder than any winter of our old world; dragging on and on, the cold seeming to grow more bitter as the days lengthened, until it was hard to believe that spring would ever come again to the frozen white wastes that stretched from the world’s end to the world’s end.

But at last a day came when the wind went round to the south and there was a different smell in it, and the cattle grew restive in their yards, under the cloud of their steaming breath. By next morning it had gone round to the north again, and there was a blizzard, and spring seemed as far away as ever. But in a few days more, the icicles began to lengthen under the eaves; and one night in the sleeping-lodge behind Erland’s Hall, I woke to a sound like the cracking of a bull-whip. I rolled over and kicked Thormod, but Thormod was already awake. ‘It will be the ice going,’ he said.

And a Kievan on the other side of the lodge added, ‘There’ll be clear water from here down to the Inland Sea in a few days’ time.’

Spring in the land of the Rus proved to be a wet and muddy time. The blocks of broken ice piled up and dammed the Dnieper, so that soon there were floods all across the marshes; and for a while, the world that had been frozen under white snow seemed foundering in black mud. But it was spring! Pipits flittered among the alders along the river-bank that were suddenly frithy with dark catkins. The long-ships were run out from the high-crested keel-sheds down on to the slipways. And the ship-building that had begun with timber felling in the autumn got into full swing, so that all day long the waterside of Kiev rang with shipyard sounds: adze on timber, hammer on anvil, the shovelling of great fires that steamed the light planks into shape for the sides of the new
vessels. And everywhere was the smell of pitch and new timber and the sharp tang of burning cattle-dung, and the green freshness of the spring.

And spring passed into summer: a dry hot summer of dust blowing in from the steppes, and quick-piling thunderstorms; and for a little while there were nightingales, and brief bright dusty flowers, cornflowers and crimson poppies along the edges of the barley.

Back in the early spring the messengers had begun to come and go, riding the small sturdy tarpan, the half-wild ponies of the Steppes, carrying the Khan’s summons the length and breadth of the Rus country. And soon, from all directions, by boat down the waterways that fed into the Dnieper, and on horseback raising the summer dust behind them, the fighting men began to gather; while long-ship after long-ship came sweeping down-river from the north, bringing fresh Viking crews from the Baltic shores, eager for the fighting and the promise of gold that our northbound friends of the Great Portage must have shouted broadcast.

While it was still early summer, another Embassy came up from Miklagard; two of the great red-painted naval galleys of Byzantium; one of them clearly the escort, while on board the other, a little group of men in rich light cloaks as gaily coloured as flower petals, held themselves proudly aloof on the afterdeck.

I mind looking up from a rope that I was splicing, to see them come, and asking of the world in general, ‘Could it be that they are bringing the Princess?’

Orm, who was working beside me, laughed. ‘They’re businessmen, the Byzantines, they don’t pay until the payment has been earned.’

‘They’ll be here to see why we haven’t come yet,’ said someone else.

‘Na, na, they’ll know that it takes time to raise six
thousand fighting men and the ships to carry them. Just to see how the thing goes.’

And watching them come up-river at racing speed, the rowers tossing up their oars at the last instant, so that they slid alongside the jetty under their own way. Thormod said, ‘Yon was well done! These men of Miklagard are seamen in their own fashion.’

Orm nodded, his eyes screwed up against the sun-dazzle off the water. ‘Though I’m thinking ’twould be interesting to see how they would handle a keel in Sumburgh Roost at ebbtide.’

As summer went by, the low ground around Kiev became an armed camp; and ship after ship went down the slipways; and all along the strand up and down-river of the city the long keels lay like basking sea-beasts, old and flank-scarred by many voyages, young and green-timbered with their first seafaring yet ahead of them. And still the weapon smiths worked on, forging the great two-handed swords and the war axes of the Viking Kind.

At last, with the late summer drying out in grey dust and the first sparks of another autumn already showing here and there among the maples, close on a year after the
Red Witch
came down-river into Kiev, close on a year after the unfinished Holm Ganging, all was ready, men trained and armed, ships fitted for sailing.

On the last day, there was a great service held in the church of the White Kristni, long since finished, to pray for the victory of the Viking fleet – and for the victory of Byzantium over the rebels, but that was an afterthought.

In the old dark God-House above the boat-strand, men gathered also, the men who had come down that summer from the north, the crews of the ships that did not belong to Kiev and therefore were not bound to the Khan’s new faith.

I went to the God-House with the crew of the
Red Witch
.

It was not easy for me, the choice; and I lay awake most of the night before, pulled now this way and now that, between two loyalties. But when the great bronze bell that we had hauled up the hill through rejoicing crowds to the new church in the spring, sounded its call to Christian Kiev, I did not answer it.

Many of those who went with Khan Vladimir to fill the church and crowd the open space around it, would be down at the God-House later, I knew; as Erland Silkbeard had said, one need not desert the old gods because one occasionally prayed to a new one; the Viking Kind can always make room for another god, having several of their own to start with. But I could not do that, having only one to start with. So I went away and sat on the shore where the wild birds were calling, and prayed, all the same, with my face in my hands. ‘Dear God. I do not ask you to forgive me, only to believe that there isn’t any other way.’

And when the day faded into the dusk, and the Viking Kind came down with their torches. I got up and went and joined them.

The Leaders and the Ship-Chiefs went inside; the rest of us, for whom there was no room, crowded before the door, in the russet light of the torches and the white light of a waning moon. We heard the dying bleat of the goat, and saw the priest come out to daub the blood on the dragon-carved door-posts, and took the oath on Thor’s Ring that he held up for us to see, to maintain the War-Brotherhood until the Host should be disbanded. And standing there beside Thormod. I looked across and saw Anders in the crowd, and met his gaze, as if it were waiting for mine. We had kept the vow for almost a year already, letting the feud lie fallow. But now? How much longer? A few weeks? A few months? I wished again that I could feel this long-drawn quarrel as my own;
that I could have the anger in my belly to warm the waiting. And now I had prayed to strange gods, and so in all likelihood I was damned. But I wasn’t wasting time regretting that, it was just a fact. I was Thormod’s shoulder-to-shoulder man, Thormod’s follower wherever he went; and I supposed I could face damnation with Thormod if I had to; assuredly I could not leave him to face it alone. It was simply, as I had explained to my own God, that there wasn’t any other way.