Blood Feud (14 page)

The girl looked up at me, unmoving. Everything was suddenly very silent. I saw the blood welling from three long gashes in her forearm, and turned to the first thing that must be done.

‘Your arm – you’re bleeding like a pig.’ I held out my knife. ‘Cut me the hem from your skirt.’

‘It can wait. We must help Maia.’

‘You first,’ I said. ‘Will you do it, or shall I?’

She was one – I saw it even in that moment – who would not waste time in useless protesting. She got up, holding out her hand for the dagger, and slashed through the hem of her gown, then ripped off the long blue strip as quickly and without fuss as a man might have done. I took it from her and bound it round her arm: knotting it off cruelly tight to stop the bleeding. ‘That will serve until it can be bathed and properly bandaged.’

She never flinched; but she pulled free and knelt again beside the gazelle almost before the knot was tied. ‘Your hunting has been fine sport.’

‘Not mine,’ I said, ‘the Emperor’s.’

‘Then I wish him joy of it.’

‘The beast ran off on its own.’

‘It must have caught the scent,’ she said dully, her arms round the gazelle, her cheek down against its dappled hide. ‘She never goes so far from the house. She must have strayed off to drop the fawn – and it caught the scent . . .’

I knelt down also. The gazelle was indeed in labour, and the fawn near to birth; but her beautiful hide was ripped and seamed with crimson at the neck, and the soft eyes already beginning to film over. She lifted her head as her mistress called her name, then let it fall back on to the girl’s knee, and a great shudder ran though her.

The girl looked up at me, quite calmly. ‘She’s dead.’

I nodded. ‘I am sorry. But we might save the fawn.’ I felt, quickly, but the fawn was not quite near enough to birth for me to get hold of it; and if it was to be saved, there was not a heart beat of time to spare. Once, I had helped old Gyrth to bring a living calf into the world after the mother had died; and I had not known until that moment, that I remembered.

I took up my knife from the grass, still juicily red with the blood of the cheetah. ‘Let me have her,’ I said, ‘and look the other way.’ And I lifted the limp carcass from her lap and laid it in the position I wanted.

She made no protest; no sound at all.

Only, again in the evening silence, the cicadas were chirring.

I cut, quickly and carefully. I must cut deep and clean, there was no time for fumbling, and yet not deep enough to harm the young one trapped within its dead mother. I laid aside the knife, and put my hands into the hole that I had made. I had the fawn. I pulled it out, deliberately breaking the life-cord as I did so, since among cattle and deer that is the natural way of things. I felt the life stir faintly under my hands; and it was a good feeling. I began to rub away the dark birth-damp with handfuls of summer-dry grass; then went on rubbing with my empty hands, until suddenly the small thing shuddered – but this was a shudder of life coming, not life going – and sneezed, and began to make vague kicking movements with its legs. A she-fawn, and living! I looked at it, already beautiful, the still-damp tawny hide dappled as
though with the sun-spots and shadows of the olive leaves. Then I got up and turned round to the girl. She was standing quietly waiting, against the twisted trunk of the old tree; and I knew that from first to last, she had not looked the other way. She held out her arms, and I put the fawn into them.

‘I am sorry that I could not save the dam, but here is the daughter for you.’

She looked at the fawn, then up into my face. ‘It is a wonderful thing, that you have done this for me,’ she said. ‘And I think that I must thank you for my own life also.’

There was a stillness about her; I noticed it even then, and thought that not many girls would be so quiet at such a time. And it was in that moment, in the quiet of that moment, that I first really saw her.

She was about my own age, or maybe a year or so younger; her face almond-shaped and almond-coloured, set with long very dark eyes in the paleness of it, and a wide grave mouth. Her dark hair that had been knotted up in an embroidered kerchief, was breaking loose and falling about her shoulders. She wore a straight blue gown, rough as any farm girl’s, and splashed and spotted now with blood. But her kerchief had gold threads in its embroidery, and I saw – not by the gold threads alone – that she was no farm girl.

‘Where is your house?’ I said, glancing about me as though I expected it to spring up among the almond trees. ‘There will be time enough for thanks when you are safely home.’

‘Are there more leopards loose from the Emperor’s hunting, then?’ she said. ‘Nay, but come you back to the house with me, and wash off the blood while I teach this small one to suck.’ She looked down at the little creature in her arms, and then at its dead mother. ‘I will send one of the men to look to Maia – and the leopard.’

‘I must take the leopard back to its master,’ I said.

‘So. And there will be trouble?’

‘I do not know. But like enough, there will be trouble.’

‘Meanwhile, come up to the house.’

So we went up through the almond trees, and skirted a walled olive garth beyond; and so came to the house: not tall and narrow like the houses in the city, but long and low, forming one side of a courtyard, with farm buildings round the other three. In the courtyard an oleander arched over a stone wall-head and a brilliant painted Persian cock strutted among his duller hens. The main room of the house was full of dusk, though there was still an echo of sunlight in the sky outside. A great clattering of pots and pans came from some room beyond. The girl called ‘Cloe!’ but there was no answer, and the clattering went on unabated.

‘She grows deaf,’ said the girl, ‘and everyone else is out in the lower garden, harvesting the green olives. That is why no one heard me – save you.’ She gave the fawn back to me – ‘Bide here, I’ll not be long’ – and left me sitting on a cushioned bench just within the door, with the tiny creature on my knees. I heard her from the next room, speaking slowly and clearly to somebody, and the clattering gave place to clucking lamentations. When she came back, she brought a lamp with her, and set it on the table, and the room sprang out of its gathering shadows into a golden glow. It was a room of contrasts, like the girl herself; a floor of beaten earth, but a silk rug, as golden as the lamplight, hanging on one of the rough-plastered walls; and the lamp itself of fine blue-glazed pottery. She looked at me in the new light, and I saw a faint shadow of laughter at the corners of her mouth.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘I was wondering what your comrades of the Barbarian Guard would think of you now – though to be sure, you are suitably bloody.’

My mouth must have opened wide enough to catch a cuckoo. ‘How did you know?’

‘I don’t live all my life here on the farm,’ she said. ‘I saw Khan Vladimir’s men roistering through the streets of Constantinople often enough last winter. And old Michael was in the city yesterday with a cartload of farm stuff, and brought back word of the Emperor’s new bodyguard. You wear the Imperial Guard’s buckle on your belt, and yet your hair is long like a Northman’s – and I put all these things together, and guessed.’

A fat old woman shuffled in from the further room, her face crumpled and distressful, a basin and great jug of hot water in her hands. The girl took them from her and set them on the table beside the lamp.

The old woman’s gaze was on her roughly bandaged arm. ‘Now let me tend to that – tak, tck! I never saw such clumsy binding!’

‘Thank you, Cloe dear – no, I can deal with all things here. Now go and send one of the men to fetch Maia as I told you.’

And when the old woman had departed, still clucking and protesting dolefully, the girl fetched strips of fresh linen and a flask of some pungent smelling salve from a chest in the corner.

She brought an old soft rug, too, and made it into a nest on the floor. ‘Now, put the fawn down and come here. We must salve our own hurts, or each other’s; Cloe means well, but she is too heavy-handed.’

So I did as she bade me, and came to the table; and there in the bright heart of the lamplight, we washed off the blood and cleaned and salved each other’s hurts – though mine was the merest scratch, and most of the blood on me was the leopard’s – like friends after battle. And looking at the reddened water in the bowl, I thought suddenly of the moon-white night in the apple garth at Sitricstead . . .

After, when I had finished re-binding the claw slashes on
her arm, she brought wine in a cup of green crystal, and while I drank it, gathered up the fawn from its nest, and sat with it on her lap, coaxing it to drink by sucking at her fingers cupped in a bowl of milk. Many’s the calf I have taught that way. ‘See, baba, suck; the milk is good – so shall you grow strong and beautiful . . .’

But suddenly there was a tremor in her voice, and something bright fell on the fawn’s head. She dashed the back of her hand quickly across her eyes, like a child too proud to let it be seen that she had been crying; and added a smear of milk to make things worse. I set down the wine-cup, and got up. I was glad in a way, for it had seemed to me that she was too quiet and too controlled for her own good; but still, I did not know what to do. ‘Is it Maia?’ I asked, which was a fool question.

‘I had her for more than three years, ever since I found her on the stream bank, abandoned by her mother – and not much bigger than this one – and now . . .’

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘I wish there was a thing – anything, that I could do.’

‘You saved the fawn for me. I shall call her Maia, too. And I shall remember always, how you saved her for me.’ She looked up. ‘What name shall I remember you by?’

‘Jestyn,’ I said. ‘Sometimes Jestyn Englishman.’

I never asked her name, and she did not tell it to me. I touched the fawn’s head, still damp where her tears had fallen on it. ‘May the small one flourish,’ I said.

And I went out into the twilit courtyard, leaving her sitting in the pool of lamplight, with her head bent over the tiny creature in her lap. I went back through the almond trees, wondering if I should have to spend half the night trailing my horse. But a hunting-pony is trained in such things, and he had wandered only a little way, and came to my whistle. I gathered up the body of the cheetah from where
it still lay under the wild olive tree, and flung it across his withers. The farm people had fetched away the dead gazelle, and the next rain would wash the blood from the grass.

Then I mounted the pony and headed back for Miklagard.

Later that night there was a certain amount of unpleasantness, when I confronted the Master of the Hunting Kennels, with the cheetah’s body lying on the ground between us.

‘There was no time to swither around with the lure and the lasso. I had to kill her to save the girl,’ I told him, after I had heard him out. ‘If your huntsmen were better at their work –’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Well, like enough, you’ll soon be back to your own kind of work – your own kind of hunting.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Haven’t you heard the rumour? It was around all day.’

‘I came straight to bring you this –’ I stirred the cheetah’s body with my foot. ‘I’ve had no word with anyone on the way.’

‘They’re saying that your fine new Barbarian Guard – two or three Companies of you at any rate – are being sent off to join John of Chaldea in Thrace. Bulgar hunting.’

I REPORTED BACK
to the Illarch – Thrand Ericson, that was, but mostly, from his seafaring days, he went by the name of Thrand Thunderfist from the way he had of showing when he was not pleased with any of his crew. Himself, he was one of the biggest men I have ever known. I reported back, and went off to join the rest.

The Guardroom was hazy with lamp-smoke; and men were sitting on the benches or lounging around the open doorway to the Armourer’s Court, playing Fox-and-Geese or cleaning their gear. One man was sitting on the floor with his bare feet stuck straight out before him, playing an alder pipe and wagging time to the tune with his big toes. I looked around for Thormod, but could not see him, nor Orm, for that matter.

Then Gunna Butason looked up from his game and saw me. ‘Aha, Jestyn is back to the fold. Did you find the cheetah?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I found the cheetah. Where’s Thormod?’

‘Gone off with Orm and a few more. Our company wasn’t good enough for them, so they went seeking for better.’

‘Where?’ I said.

Gunna shrugged his shoulders; but Wulf Aikinson spat on the belt buckle he was polishing and said, ‘The Silver Salamanda, I’d not wonder.’

‘Have you heard the rumour?’ somebody put in.

‘Yes, I’ve heard.’ There was a sudden uneasiness at the back of my mind. The Silver Salamanda had been a favourite meeting-place from the first, for the Viking Kind. It was about midway between the Blachernae and the Imperial Palace; and with word going round that in a few days the Varangian
Guard would be split up and some of us sent to Thrace, it seemed horribly likely that Thormod and Anders would be heading that way, looking for each other.

‘I’ll go after them,’ I said.

‘Best go across to the kitchen and get a bite in your belly first.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ I said, and flung round and headed back through the outer Court to the Night Gate. The main gates of both the Blachernae and the Imperial Palace were closed at three o’clock every afternoon until the following dawn, as a sign that for that day official business of state was over, and for the rest of the day the lives of the Emperor and his Court were their own. After that, all going and coming was by one of the side gates. I was afraid I might have trouble getting out, so late in the night. But I knew some of the Gate Guard; and from the first, the Varangians have been pretty much a law unto themselves. So beyond a few jeering inquiries as to whether my mother knew I was abroad at that hour (I was still young-looking for my nineteen years, my beard no more than a yellow fuzz), I got through without trouble and set out for the Silver Salamanda.