Hawk Quest (65 page)

The dog threw itself down, arched itself into a bow and gnawed at its belly.

Wayland ran back. ‘What’s wrong?’ He took the dog’s head in both hands and pulled it away from its midriff. ‘Oh God!’

A broken arrow shaft jutted from the dog’s abdomen. He couldn’t tell how deep the head had penetrated. The dog lay on its side as though inviting him to deal with the wound. He reached for its head and the dog gave him a quick lick and stared away. He took hold of the shaft and gave a tentative pull. The dog uttered a low whine. ‘Ssh,’ he whispered. He pulled harder, feeling solid resistance, and the dog whimpered and clamped its jaws around his wrist. Gently he undid them. The arrow was barbed and had penetrated deep. The dog lay panting, its topaz eyes fixed on some faraway place. With swimming eyes Wayland looked about for some remedy or inspiration. There was none to be found – only the sight of Lapps running at him through the trees.

He pulled the dog to its feet. ‘Come on. I’ll deal with the arrow when we’re back at the boat.’

The dog matched him stride by stride for about a hundred yards. Then it stopped again and gave a piteous whine such as Wayland hadn’t heard it utter since it was a pup. It looked at him. The Lapps were getting closer. ‘Come!’ he ordered, clapping his hands. ‘We’re nearly at the river. Hero will have that arrow out in a trice. Come!’

The dog looked at him, its meaning so plain that Wayland groaned. There was no cure for the wound. The barbed arrow was buried so deep in its guts that no surgeon could have removed it.

The Lapps were only fifty yards away. Wayland stumbled back. ‘Come! Please!’

The dog looked at him for the last time. It turned towards the Lapps, shook itself and hurled itself towards them. He saw it bowl over one of the attackers and then it disappeared, swallowed up in a crowd of axemen and spearmen. The frenzy of hacking and stabbing stopped and the Lapps squatted in a busy cluster, doing things with ropes and branches. When they rose, they carried the dog’s carcass strung under a pole. It took four men to bear its weight. They shouldered their trophy and hurried away into the forest.

Wayland found the river and followed it upstream. The clouds shredded and the sun broke through. It was going down in a dim red ball when he caught up with the longship on the north shore of Lake Onega. His companions rose as he limped into camp. They opened their mouths to frame questions, then saw the answers plain on his face and held their tongues. Syth ran and threw her arms around him. He held her to his chest and stroked her hair.

Vallon limped over. ‘The dog, too?’

Wayland nodded.

‘I’m sorry. Are you hurt?’

‘A prick from an arrow and some bruises. Nothing serious.’

‘So you say. I want Hero to look you over. After that, food and sleep.’

Wayland shoved past. ‘I can’t sleep while the falcons starve.’

‘I fed them,’ Syth said. ‘Vallon had one of the horses killed. There’s enough meat to keep the falcons until we reach Rus.’

Vallon nodded in confirmation. ‘I told you I wouldn’t let them go hungry.’

*

Wayland woke in the longship, one shore a faint haze, the other invisible. It took four days to cross the lake, and the only thing he remembered of the passage was the geese passing overhead in ragged streamers, tens of thousands of voices raised in lamentation.

XXXVII

A broad river called the Svir flowed from Onega to Lake Ladoga and the land of Rus. Empty huts began to appear in clearings slashed into the forest. The dwellings were the summer quarters of hunter-gatherers. After weeks of sleeping rough, the travellers were grateful for the shelter offered by the simple lodgings. It was now early October and winter was treading at their heels. Each day the numbers of wildfowl passing overhead grew fewer. Each night the cold gripped tighter. Two more Icelanders had died, starved beyond recovery despite Vallon ordering the slaughter of the remaining horses.

His wound had knitted cleanly. He kissed Hero and told him that without the Sicilian’s physicking he would have died a slow and suppurating death. Hero was trying to take satisfaction from that as he and Richard plodded one morning along the riverbank ahead of the longship. It was the only comfort he could dredge from their situation. Still days from Novgorod, the food almost gone, many of the travellers sick. Wayland was restored and spent most of the daylight hours hunting, but without the dog’s help he couldn’t kill enough to satisfy the falcons’ appetites. All of them had lost so much muscle that their keels stuck out like knives, and one of them screamed for food from dawn to dark.

The Vikings and Icelanders couldn’t understand why the falcons should receive any meat while they themselves were forced to boil moss for soup and chew on horse hide to dull their hunger pangs. The previous day, when Wayland and Syth returned from a hunting trip with a hare to show for their efforts, the Vikings and Icelanders had crowded round demanding that the carcass be handed over. Vallon had forced them to back off, but it had been close. If they didn’t find food in the next day or two, a violent breakdown was inevitable.
After that, barbarism and worse. The weak left behind to die, cannibalism …

Richard seemed to read his thoughts. ‘Drogo takes care to stand back, but have no doubt, he’s waiting for the moment when he can move against Vallon.’

Hero sighed and shook his head. The sky, heavy with clouds the colour of ploughshares, mirrored his mood.

They trudged on. Grey spots floated past Hero’s eyes. He rubbed them and saw that snow was falling – big downy flakes already beginning to settle.

Richard stopped. ‘We’d better go back.’

‘There’s a path,’ said Hero, pointing to a winding depression highlighted by the snow. ‘It probably leads to a cabin. We might not spot it from the ship.’

Soon the snow obliterated all trace of the path and only the sound of the river gave them their direction. Hero was about to step around a stunted bush when it jumped up and shouted. More shouts and vague figures darting through the snow. An arrow whizzed past his head.

‘Peace!
Pax! Eirene!
’

The commotion stilled. Through the feathery whiteness he made out figures crouched behind dark bales. Three men with arrows trained on him stalked forward. They were dressed in pelts, their eyes narrowed in hostile squints. One of them jabbered in Russian.

‘We’re merchants. Travelling to Novgorod.’

The Russians understood ‘Novgorod’. Their spokesman jabbed behind Hero, asking how many were with him.

He counted thirty on his fingers and the Russians yammered at each other.

The drakkar’s dragon stem slid out of the snow with Vallon at the prow looking like death warmed up and Drogo beside him in his mail coat and iron helmet.

The Russians scattered. ‘Varangians!’

‘No! Wait. Not Varangians.’

Wulfstan shouted in Russian and vaulted off the longship. The woodsmen stopped at a distance. Wulfstan called again, making beckoning gestures. The woodsmen skulked back, bowing and begging the travellers’ pardon. Wulfstan spoke a smattering of their language and established that they were frontiersmen who’d spent the
summer trapping game and collecting honey and beeswax. They were on their way home by canoe to their village at the mouth of the Volkhov river, three days to the west.

Wayland emerged from the forest while the parties were negotiating. He took one look at the Russians and hurried up to a boy with a string of willow grouse slung around his neck. He flinched away when Wayland reached out for them. Wayland turned to Wulfstan. ‘Tell him I want to buy them.’

The boy’s father came over. He assessed Wayland’s desperate gaze and said something that made the other Russians laugh.

Wayland lurched round. ‘What did he say?’

‘You can have them for five squirrels,’ said Wulfstan.

‘I don’t have five squirrels. If I did, I wouldn’t need the grouse.’

Wulfstan grinned. ‘The backwoodsmen measure money in furs. Squirrels is their smallest unit of currency. Reckon a penny will buy all those grouse and a haunch of venison thrown in.’

For two silver pennies, Wayland purchased enough game to feed the falcons for three days.

Later, at the Russians’ camp, Richard traded fox skins for a sack of rye flour and two dripping honeycombs. That night the wanderers squeezed hugger-mugger into a cabin and ate bread for the first time in a month. The cooked dough was of the crudest manufacture – charred and gritty bannocks consumed in a smoke-filled hut chinked up with moss – yet all sank their heads in reverential silence when Father Hilbert said grace.

Civilised Rus began at Staraja Ladoga, a fortified town a few miles up the Volkhov river. Here they stopped briefly to take on supplies. South of the town the forest thinned into sandy heath dotted with steely ponds and clumps of pines and birches. Then the voyagers came to farmland, rowing past sturdy log cabins set in meadows where geese hissed and flapped and cockerels crowed. Between the farms were fine stands of oak and maple that rang with the sound of axes. Farmers straightened up from their toil to watch the longship pass. Many of them crossed themselves, perhaps remembering their grandparents’ tales of an olden time when the appearance of a dragon ship would have put the populace to flight. Their children had no such misgivings and chased the longship along the banks waving sticks. ‘Varangians! Varangians!’

Four days after leaving the lake they reached Novgorod. North of the city the river branched around a large island with a tollbooth at its tip. Here an armed and mounted delegation directed them towards the shore. Their leader, a man with a face pitted by smallpox, was elegantly turned out in an ankle-length fur coat fastened with silver buttons. He addressed the stinking rabble as if they were exarchs on a mission from Byzantium.

‘Welcome to Novgorod the Great,’ he said in Norse. ‘The hunters you met on the Svir sent news of your arrival. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Andrei Ivanov, steward to Lord Vasili, a boyar of the city and master of its guild of merchants.’ His eyes flickered about. ‘Who speaks for you?’

Hands pointed at Vallon.

‘The hunters said you travelled from the White Sea, but they didn’t know where you began your voyage.’

Vallon looked for Wayland. ‘You tell him.’

‘We sailed from England this spring and journeyed here by way of Iceland and Greenland.’

Andrei guffawed. ‘Listen, I’ve been in the shipping trade too long to be taken in by travellers’ tales.’

‘Believe what you like,’ said Wayland. ‘I’m English and so is that girl. Vallon our leader is a Frank. Those two are Normans. That lot are Icelanders. The rest are Vikings from Halogaland. If you doubt my word, ask the thin man with the tonsure. He’s a monk from Germany. Until a few weeks ago, we had another German with us. He was killed by Lapps in the forest.’

Andrei traded wondering looks with his escort, then took off his hat. ‘Forgive my scepticism. You’re the first travellers to reach Nov -gorod by such a roundabout route. What goods are you carrying?’

‘Walrus ivory, sea unicorn horns, eider down, sulphur, seal oil.’

‘The hunters said you had gyrfalcons?’

‘It’s true. I trapped them myself in Greenland’s northern hunting grounds.’

‘Please, if you don’t mind, I would like to see.’

Not without pride, Wayland uncovered the cage holding the white haggard.

Andrei crouched to inspect the falcon. When he spoke, his tone was matter of fact. ‘My lord has a wealthy client who loves to follow the
falcon’s flight. He’s a prince who pays handsomely for his pleasures. Even though this specimen looks like a feather duster, I’ll give you a price far higher than you could obtain in the marketplace.’

‘The falcons aren’t for sale.’

Andrei frowned. ‘Why bring them to Novgorod if not to sell them?’

‘We’re not stopping here. We’re just passing through on our way to Anatolia.’

‘Rum? You’re going to Rum?’

‘As soon as we’ve rested and purchased the necessities.’

Andrei laughed. ‘Novgorod is as far as you’ll get this year. Sell the falcons while they’re still healthy.’

‘I’m sorry. They’re already spoken for.’

Andrei backed off. ‘Do you have silver to pay for your stay in Novgorod?’

Wayland glanced at Richard. ‘We can pay our way.’

Andrei bowed to Vallon. ‘Then your comfort is assured. Our city has a quarter set aside for foreign merchants. You’ll find Novgorod a welcoming place. It even has a Roman church.’

Vallon bowed in turn. ‘Thank you. We’ll need three separate establishments. The Icelanders and Vikings aren’t here by my choosing.’

‘Leave it to me,’ said Andrei. His escorts assisted him into the saddle. ‘You’re only five versts from Novgorod. About three miles.’ He spurred forward. ‘I’ll be waiting to welcome you.’

The longship rowed up the right-hand channel and soon the voyagers saw the city of Novgorod straddling both banks.

Richard whistled. ‘I never expected anything half so grand.’

The metropolis was constructed entirely of wood except for a great stone citadel and a church crowned with five cupolas on the west bank. The company rowed under a covered bridge wide enough to let cart traffic pass in both directions. On the other side Andrei waved to them from a wharf on the east bank. A gang of labourers stood ready. The voyagers rowed to shore and tied up.

‘Your lodgings are being prepared,’ Andrei told them. ‘My men will carry your cargo.’ He clapped his hands and the porters jumped into the boats and began loading the cargo into handcarts.

‘We don’t want him to find out too much of our business,’ Hero murmured to Vallon.

‘I suspect that before we go to our beds tonight, he’ll know our worth down to the last clipped penny.’

The steward led them up lanes paved with split logs and lined with stockaded houses. Most of the lots were about a hundred feet by fifty, but some were two or three times that size. Andrei stopped first at a gateway recessed in a paling fence. He opened the gate and pointed at a barn. ‘This is for your Norwegians. No luxuries. Just straw to sleep on and clean well water. My men will make sure that they have enough to eat and don’t disturb the peace.’