Blood Feud (11 page)

The torches shifted, and I lost Anders among the crowding shadows.

Next day we ran the ships down the keel-strand and the southward voyage began. Squadron after squadron, we went, each following our own Raven – Erland’s, it was said, had golden hairs from his own beard stitched into its eyes and beak and talons – all following the great black-winged banner of Khan Vladimir. And so we headed down the Dnieper; close on two hundred long-ships in all; six thousand men of the Rus and the north, sweeping down the Viking wind, to the aid of the Golden Emperor in his golden city.

Orm, who had a knack with such things, made a song about it, and we sang it as we swung to the oars.

It was really a very bad song, I suppose, it did not even rhyme properly, and after a while as we got further south, it seemed better to change it here and there; but it pleased us well enough at the time.

I SUPPOSE NO
man who has once seen Constantinople ever forgets that first sight. For me – for us – it came in the honey-coloured light of an early autumn evening, as we swarmed ashore from the Golden Horn, with half the city, as it seemed, turned out to greet us. I remember city walls that seemed to have been built for a fortress of giants, tall buildings set about with cypress trees and roofed with russet and purple, gold and green, vast arches upheld on marble columns that twisted as fantastically as bindweed stems, towers that seemed straining up to touch the sky and great aqueducts that strode across the city on legs of white stone. I remember little fretted balconies that clung like swallows’ nests high overhead to the walls of tall narrow houses; and wide streets that opened into gardens and open spaces where statues of marble heroes and golden saints and bronze horsemen stood tall and proud among shade-trees; and everywhere the domes of Christian churches catching the last of the run-honey light. I, who thought that I knew cities because I had seen Dublin and Kiev, had never imagined that there could be such a city in the world of men.

Later, it became a city in which real people lived and died, where one could buy melons or have one’s boots re-soled, with barracks and wine-shops as well as palaces, and children playing on doorsteps, and evil smells, and dark alleys where it was not wise to go without a friend so that you could cover each other’s backs if need be. But to this day, the city that I saw on that first evening remains in my memory a city in a crowded dream.

The camp outside the great walls of Theodosius, where we
slept under tents of striped ship’s canvas in the months that followed, was much closer to the world I knew.

We had expected to be unleashed at once against the Emperor’s enemies, whose watch-fires flowered in the darkness every night, clear across the narrow waters of the Bosphorus; but instead, we spent the autumn months training with the Imperial Guards.

‘Patience, children,’ said Erland Silkbeard, when some of us grew restive, ‘no War Host can fight its best when its two halves have not learned to fight together and know nothing of each other’s ways of warfare.’

‘But meanwhile, time goes by,’ grumbled Hakon Ship-Chief.

‘Surely. But that’s no matter. The Emperor has one advantage – besides that he has our swords behind him – his Red Ships hold the seas, and so long as they do that, he can afford to wait, and choose his own fighting-time. Also’ – he was playing gently with his beard, much as a man gentling the neck-feathers of his falcon – ‘the Byzantines know that the men of the north seldom make war in the winter; so when the last leaves are off the almond trees, these rebel Byzantines will lower their guards, at least a little. That is when we strike.’

Aye, and on a winter’s night, with snow to aid us, we struck.

Led by Basil himself, the whole War Host – us, that is, and the Guards; the rest of the Emperor’s troops were still in Thrace – were ferried across the Bosphorus under cover of flurrying snow. And in the dark just before dawn we descended on Chrysopolis while the rebels were still asleep.

I had looked ahead to that fight, while it still lay in the future, with an odd mingling of feelings, with little cold queazes in the pit of my stomach when I woke in the night, but also with an eagerness that I had caught from Thormod
and the rest; for to the Northmen, fighting is almost like love, a kind of flowering of life. But when it came, there was no true fight, only a messy and undignified slaughter of half-awakened men before they could reach for their weapons. Oh, I played my part with the rest, my sword drank its share of blood and filth . . . Hardly a man escaped us. Bardas Phocas himself was some otherwhere, gathering more troops, but his leaders were crucified on the spot. The whole night’s work left a foul taste in the mouth . . .

After Chrysopolis was lost to him, Bardas Phocas took his newly-gathered troops and headed south for Abydos, the Customs port, where the Emperor’s dues were exacted from the Corn Fleet passing up and down the long narrows that men call the Hellespont. He laid siege to the fort; I suppose he had some thought of using the corn-ships to get his troops across to link up with the Bulgars in Thrace; and some such plan might have worked, if the Red Ships had not held command of the sea. As it was, they relieved Abydos almost at once, while we of the War Host followed our little square-set Emperor down the coast, to raise the siege.

And now again, we saw their line of watch-fires in the night; but with no Bosphorus between us and them, only a few hundred paces of sandy scrub. And they were ready and waiting for us, and the fight that was coming with the morning would not be like Chrysopolis; not like Chrysopolis at all.

It was a spring night, but the light wind brushing through the tamarisk scrub had still an edge to it after dark, and we huddled close about the camp fires, feeding them with dry branches, long after we had eaten the evening food. We had ceased to be a fleet, and become a land army over the past few months; but old ships’ crews still had a way of hanging together, and most of us from the
Red Witch
had gathered to the same fire, and sat companionably going over our gear, the mail-shirts and nut-shaped helmets that made us look much
like any other of the Byzantine front-line troops, and making ready our weapons against tomorrow. And rubbing away at my sword-blade, I thought suddenly that if we won this battle for him, and the Emperor had no more need of his Viking War Host, and we were paid off, and free of the oath taken in the Kieve marshes . . . But maybe we should just be dead. Tomorrow night would be time enough to start worrying about the old feud again . . . I rubbed harder at the blade; and my hand slipped and I gashed my thumb on the keen edge. It was only a small cut, but the blood sprang out dark in the firelight, and I cursed and sucked it.

Orm laughed. ‘Jestyn is so eager for tomorrow’s fight that he must start blooding his blade already!’

Hakon cocked his one eye from the new strap he was fixing on his shield. ‘At least tomorrow is like to give us work in hotter blood than we found at Chrysopolis.’

‘Chrysopolis was a shore-killing,’ I said, scowling at my gashed thumb.

‘So – but the pickings were good.’ Orm shook the chain hung with little silver pomegranates that he wore about his neck.

And Thormod said with that familiar edge of laughter in his voice, ‘You’d better not wear that into battle tomorrow, old bell-wether, or they’ll hear you coming and single you out a mile away.’

There was a snatch of laughter round the fire; but a long sough of wind came shivering up through the tamarisks, and somewhere a dog howled.

Morning swallowed the watch-fires; and the walls of Abydos that had been a low black cliff behind the enemy camp, shone dusty pale against the deepening blue of the sky. We had eaten bread and raisins, and prayed to our different gods, as men pray in the dawn before the battle. And we stood
ready, drawn up in fighting-line along the dunes. The light wind that had hushed through the shore scrub all night, stirred the blue and purple standards of the Guards, and spread the black raven banners above our ranks. And across the open ground, the coloured flicker of enemy standards answered them.

The Emperor had come out from his tent to pray with his troops for victory. And now, with his standard-bearer and his staff officers about him, and his brother Constantine at his side, he came riding the length of our battle-line. Square and short-legged on a horse too big for him – he always rode horses too big for him in his younger days; but he could handle them as though he and they were one. Standing in the second rank of Erland Silkbeard’s following, I watched the sacred standard draw near, the figure of the Virgin embroidered on it jewelled and brilliant in the cool morning light, her cloth-of-gold halo catching the first rays of the sun in an answering sunburst. It drew level with our black-winged ravens, then passed on. And in its passing, all along the ranks of the Imperial Army, it left a wake of silence; the silence that comes in the last moments before battle. Only, above the heavy drubbing of my own heart, I heard from the cavalry wings the jink of a bridle as a horse here and there fidgeted and tossed its head, smelling the coming fight.

Between the helmets of the two men in front of me, I could see where the glittering banner of Bardas Phocas flew above the small tump of higher ground on which he had taken up his position. I could see the shimmer of movement among the dark knot of horsemen surrounding it, and one among them – it must have been Phocas himself by the white plume in his helmet – came pricking out from the rest. I thought I saw his arm go up; another instant and the trumpets would be yelping, the whole rebel line spilling forward to the charge.

And then something happened – we heard later that a
quail, sitting tight on her nest among the scrub until the last possible moment, had got up almost under the hooves of the rebel leader’s horse. From our lines we could not make out the details, but we heard the quail’s alarm-call; and saw the sudden tumult of horses flinging this way and that under the rebel standard.

‘Someone’s been thrown,’ Thormod said, and caught his breath. ‘It’s Phocas himself by the look of things! Thor’s Hammer! what an omen for his men to follow!’

I had my eyes screwed up, reaching into the distance. ‘Looks as though he’s up again.’

‘Someone’s bringing him another horse,’ Orm put in.

All along the battle-line the murmur ran.

Then from the little group out in front of us where Basil sat his horse under the Imperial Standard, a bare blade flashed down in the morning sun; and all up and down the battle-lines, the trumpets sounded and were answered; royal and rebel Byzantine trumpets and our own booming war-horns shouting against each other like fighting-cocks at dawn. For a long heartbeat of time, both armies seemed held on the edge of movement, like wine rising on the rim of a tilted cup before it spills over; and then we moved forward. I remember the tightening in my belly, and putting one foot before the other, and knowing that the waiting was over and the thing had begun.

Between the heads of the front rank I could see the rebel standard, the moving ranks, the dust already beginning to curl up, and through the dust, the white helmet-plume of their leader. I could see also that something was hideously amiss with Bardas Phocas; the white plume was swaying from side to side, more and more widely as it drew nearer, until suddenly – and nothing startled the horse this time – he flung out his arms and pitched from the saddle.

There was a kind of faltering, a break in rhythm, in the
rebel ranks. Phocas’s bodyguard came spurring forward to cover him and get him away; and in the same instant the Emperor’s sword flashed again in the sun, and we heard his voice, loud as any trumpet – even now that he is old he has the kind of voice a Ship-Chief might envy – shouting for the charge.

We burst forward like hounds slipped from the leash. We crashed into the enemy battle-line before they had time to steady again, and hurled their front rank back into the ranks behind. I heard afterwards that our men broke clear through at that first charge, and turned about to thrust home again from the rear, cutting the enemy into separate, ragged clots of men to be cut down piecemeal. I heard that the rebels fought stubbornly; but that one moment of uncertainty when their leader went down made sure of their defeat.

But at the time, all I knew of that battle before Abydos – all, I am thinking, that most men except the leaders ever do know of a battle – was a confusion of trampling and shouting and weapon-ring and choking dust all about me; and the widened eyes of the man who was going to kill me unless I first killed him, glaring at me across our shield-rims, and the snake-dart of a spear past my cheek, and somewhere the scream of a wounded horse; and the fighting-smell of blood at the back of my nose.

All the formless tumult of a dream; and only one thing real – the steadying consciousness of Thormod’s shoulder somewhere alongside mine.

THE EMPEROR DID
not sleep in Abydos that night. He was always a man more at home in an armed camp than within city walls, and always a man to bide with his men. So while Constantine went off in search of city comforts, he spent the night after the battle as he had spent the night before it, in his great blue and purple tent pitched beside a few oleander trees in the midst of the camp.