Blood Feud (16 page)

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.

‘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.

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.

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.