Oathsworn 2 - The Wolf Sea (16 page)

I was beginning to enjoy Starkad's vision now, for it was a good one and much better than the hoary old blood-eagle. Old beards like these would laugh at that threat, since it was more boast than fact, though there was a nut of truth in it, for Hedin Flayer hinted he had his name for having done it once, raiding the Liv lands along the Baltic. Or so he said. Others said it was because his craft was hunting wolves for the pelts, which I thought more likely.

At the end of my rant, they shuffled off silently, knowing that they had made a mistake, for only a handful of the robed Saracens were dead and, though the rest had fled, a good two handfuls were locked up in the domed church and it would be a harder fight now to get them out.

So we sat in the square while men scuttled in the narrow doorway, braving the spears to stack wood and start burning through the door, while I fretted about Farouk and his horsemen. I posted watchers and sent Hookeye and Hedin out into the darkness to listen, but there was nothing to do but wait, while the smoke billowed out of the narrow church door-passage.

Now that there was time for it, the men were reluctant to go plundering and humping, fearing the arrival of more
Sarakenoi —
though Sumarlidi pestered them to go and find a woman for him, since he wasn't so nimble on his feet. After long minutes of his whining, two men went off and dragged back a whimpering woman, whom he perched on the edge of the trough and grunted over while the Goat Boy watched with interest. No one else cared.

Eventually, Sighvat reported that the fire was out, had done some damage, but the defenders had soaked the door and were even pouring wine down through the murder holes in the roof to try and soak the place.

`Which means they have used all the water,' Brother John pointed out.

`Which means they are not planning on a long stay,' I finished for him. 'Farouk and his horsemen are expected.'

That sprang the crew into action, for they knew that a second encounter with those would be a hard fight not in our favour. They would use bows this time, standing off and snicking us one by one, like loose threads off the cuff of a tunic.

That passageway was a tricky opening, for it allowed only one at a time, though it widened at the actual door to three. The wood was charred, but still solid, so we piled in and formed shields over our heads to keep off the stabbing spears from above. Under this crept Finn and others armed with axes to chop at the door.

It was sweaty, noisy work, fetid with the stink of men afraid and, after half an hour, Finn gave a bellow of triumph, for the upper left corner had splintered into a small hole. Frenzied, he hacked and hacked, spraying wood chips everywhere, while the men behind closed up, down on one knee under the roof of shields and ready to spring forward.

Without warning, a spear thrust through the hole, fast as an eye blinking. Finn was on a downstroke, which was Odin luck for him, for the weapon scored across his shoulder and into the throat of the man behind, who gurgled out a scream and fell backwards.

There was chaos then, for the felled man screamed and kicked and had to be dragged out. In the end, everyone abandoned the work and staggered out into the chill night air, gasping and spitting. The man —

Lambi, the one whose teeth had been dunted by Sighvat's sword, I saw — was already dead, leaking a slow pulse of blood, which finally stopped.

We all looked at one another and no one spoke their thoughts, which were darker than the night.

`What we need is a battering ram,' I said.

`With a bend in the middle,' Finn pointed out wryly.

`We could use your tozzle,' Sighvat pointed out to Finn, who chuckled harshly.

`Too few men around to carry that,' he answered, but his eyes had no laugh in them when he looked back at that narrow doorway.

Then the Goat Boy came up, his eyes wide, pointing behind him while he fixed me with his dark-cat gaze.

Òne Leg has gone in the well,' he declared.

Odin's arse — could this night get any worse?

`The Norns weave in threes, Trader,' Finn said wearily when I yelled this out. Everyone trooped across to the well, where Brother John was holding the shivering woman by one wrist and peering into the dark of it.

`She pushed him off,' Brother John explained, 'while he was trying to . . . never mind. But he fell in and hasn't made a sound since.'

Finn shrugged and grabbed the bucket rope, took up the slack and his eyes widened when he felt resistance. He got three others to help and, slowly, the bucket was inched up until Sumarlidi's legs flopped over the edge and they hauled him out.

His neck was broken and his wide-eyed face still looked surprised about it. Nearby, the Arab woman huddled, moaning softly.

`There's no more for him, then,' sighed Brother John sadly and Finn agreed with a sound deep in his throat, part sympathy, part disgust.

À straw death, right enough,' he said and shivered.

I saw it differently, through the ring of that jarl torc. It seemed to me that if you fastened a good steel helm on him, he would make a battering ram with a bend in the middle.

Sumarlidi was better use in death than he had been in life, but by the time the door was broken open, even his mother would have missed him at his own corpse-washing. The helmet was rimmed into the flesh of his brow, so that it was never coming off, so we burned him with it jammed down to his eyebrows and Finn killed the Arab woman and put her at his feet, in the hope that this in some way made up for the death he had died.

Brother John didn't like any of this much, but the others glowered at him and he knew the worship of Christ was too new on them to argue. To me, who did not even try to interfere, he gave a hard look and said:

'The Abyss grows darker the longer you stare down into it.'

That was after the defenders tried to give in, which was as soon as the door broke. They were shouting frantically in their gabble, throwing down bows and spears and holding out their hands and clasping them.

The crew were past caring and cut them down for having put them to all this trouble.

`They had courage,' argued Brother John, trying to get me to stop the slaughter, which was stupid since there was no way I could do that and the fact of it made me sick and angry.

À cornered rat has that courage,' I snarled back at him, the thick iron tang of blood clogging my nose, then I went to find what we had come for. The container was where it was supposed to be, under the stone base for a brazier in what had been the monk chief's room, and I grabbed it up, stuffed it inside my tunic and ordered everyone out and away.

We paused only long enough to lay Sumarlidi and the dead, toothless Lambi out with the bloody enemy dead at their feet, then fired the church and scampered into the safety of the darkness.

Another god place burned and more men killed. In the dark, with the damp wind cooling my face, the sickness rose up in me and I boked and spat it out. I felt a gentle hand on my back and, though I wanted no one to see this, had no strength to do anything but retch.

Brother John patted my shoulder and I heard his low voice say,
Tacilis descensus Averno.'

The descent to hell is easy.

Fuck him, what did he know? He wasn't the one in the lead.

6 I held him and he felt like a bird, the racking sobs shaking him so that it seemed his thundering heart must burst out of his rib cage. I wanted to hold him tighter, but it was an awkward thing with others looking and I had no words for him; none of us had. So Brother John peeled the Goat Boy off me and took him to the swift-flowing stream to wash the snot and tears away.

The rest of us stood, cold and tired, uneasy in the dawn light, with the tendrils of haar like a witch-woman's hair slithering round the farm and the mulberry trees and the old corpses, still blackened and charred. Crows sat hunched and sour in those trees, rasping out a protest at a meal interrupted.

A fresh meal, on a small corpse. The smallest one in that field of death, dark curls clotted with old blood, the eyes already pecked into dark holes, which still managed to accuse us all. The wound that killed him was a back-to-breast skewer and Halfred tracked the tale of it.

The horsemen had ridden to the silk farm from the town of Lefkara, which meant I had judged Farouk right — he had come straight to the plumes of pyre smoke, found nothing and headed for the village after that. Now he was probably finding more dead and a burned church and we had a start on him, but not much of one. It was good Odin luck for us, since it meant we had missed each other in the dark — but for such luck One Eye takes a high price in sacrifice.

So he took little Vlasios into their path just as they saw what we had done to their friends. Like startled game, the Goat Boy's little brother had probably made a run for it, leaping on those wiry legs, twisting and turning, but no match for horsemen with lances.

They had spitted him, said Hookeye, pointing it out — quietly, so the Goat Boy could not hear — and carried him back to the charred remains of the pyre, stinking and wet from rain. Probably still on the spear-point, Hookeye thought.

And they would be laughing about it in a grim way, I thought to myself, as they tossed the corpse on to the ash, like an offering to their own dead. It came to me that we might well have done something similar, in another place, at another time, and the thought did nothing to help the sick feeling in my belly.

Then they had ridden off, leaving one more small, bewildered little fetch in a clearing, wondering why the world had grown cold and empty and shadowed.

We had found him after a couple of hard hours' travel, moving as swiftly as we could in the dark. My plan had been finely worked, everyone agreed, but the dead boy was a stone thrown in the pool of my deep thinking and not because the Goat Boy was melting to tears over it.

No, it was the little stick in Vlasios's belt, which the
Sarakenoi
had not even bothered with. The one that said, in badly cut runes: `Starkad. Go west. Dragon.'

It was from Kvasir and I knew what it meant. Starkad had arrived like a pinch of salt in clear water. Now Balantes and everyone else would know they had handed the prize to the wrong wolf and we would have all the Greeks on Cyprus after us, as well as the
Sarakenoi
and Starkad's men.

As Finn said, with a harsh chuckle, if you measured a jarl by the number of his enemies, then Orm Bear Slayer was mighty indeed. The others had joined in, the fierce laugh of men with steel to their front and fire at their back, showing a lot of teeth but little mirth.

At least Kvasir and the others had had warning, time enough to plan swiftly and send the Goat Boy's brother with the gist of it.

I knew what Dragon meant. On the way here, less than a day from Larnaca and perched bare-arsed over the lee side in friendly conversation while we emptied our bowels, Kvasir had pointed out the headland like a dragon-prow. We had argued whether it looked more like the fine antlered one on the old
Fjord Elk,
or the snarling serpent on Starkad's stolen
drakkar,
which had replaced it.

That was where Kvasir was heading, but I did not know if he had one ship or two — or if he would make it at all.

I laid it all out for them, while Brother John brought the scrubbed-faced Goat Boy back. Finn was all for hurtling back the way we had come, to take Starkad on and get the runesword back. No one else looked eager for that, however, and I was cold-sick in my insides at the way my crafted plans had unravelled so completely. I was no Einar.

`What do we do, Orm?' asked Kvasir and I felt a mad moment rise in me, a great storm sea that made me want to agree with Finn, to shriek out that we would take on Starkad and every Greek, get the runesword back, fight back to our ship and then away . . .

Instead, I looked at them, one by one, battened down my pride and admitted the truth of it. Now we run, brothers. Now we run.'

We did, a jogging lope that burst the sweat on us, despite the chill. Across the bare slopes we went like startled game, from gully to rock, to stand of trees, heading hard west and south. Eventually, when I called a rest-halt, I could taste the brine on a breeze from the sea on parched lips and sucked it into fiery lungs. There was another village – ahead and west, if I remembered Radoslav's chart – whose name sounded like air being let out of a dead sheep's belly. Paphos, it was called, but I wanted no part of that and planned to come out to the sea short of it by some safe miles.