Thunder God (5 page)

I learned, from dozens of smacks on the head, not to talk to Halfdan unless he spoke to me first. Even then I was not to answer unless he had actually asked for a reply. This did not mean that we travelled in silence. He often talked about his home in the north country, where he came from a people called the Svear. Upon the death of his father, his older brother had inherited the family land, leaving Halfdan to seek his own fortune. He had been moving from place to place for many years and no longer seemed to know what he was searching for.

Often Halfdan would take the black hammer from around his neck and examine it carefully. Again and again he asked me where I had found it.

I said I had been given it, and that was all I would say.

‘There was another black hammer,’ he said, ‘sent down by the gods to be the anchor of our faith. But I heard that it was lost long ago.’

From then on, until the day he died, the hammer never left its resting place, tucked against the hollow of his throat.

Each day, wherever our boat put in to shore, Halfdan would find a secluded place to pray. The first time I saw him do this,
we had come to a clearing in the vast and ghostly white birch forests south of Starya Ladoga. Sunlight filtered through the trees. Leaf shadows dappled the ground and shimmered in the branches above me. The smell of heated sap hung in the air. Halfdan’s voice remained so quiet and steady that it did not stop the birds from singing in the nearby trees.

There were different prayers for whatever dangers faced him, as well as different gods to whom he prayed.

I saw an unexpected gracefulness to his gestures, as he drew his sword and carved a ring around himself in the dirt. He would empty from his leather prayer bag a linen bundle containing rock salt, a tiny fat lamp made of soapstone and a shallow grey-white bowl, which was the brain-pan of the first man he had ever killed. He faced north as he prayed, judging direction from the growth of old moss on the old trees. Holding his arm out straight, he would take up a handful of dirt and let it sift slowly through his fingers. Then he sprinkled some salt, only a few crystals, into the bone cup and added water from his drinking skin. If he had any fat for the lamp, he would light it and hold the cup over the tiny flame, dissolving the salt. He would lift the cup and pour the water over his head, then kneel with his hands on the hilt of his sword, sinking the blade into the earth.

This ritual marked the beginning of every prayer, which was always followed with these words:

Sometimes our fellow travellers, draped in furs and weaponry, would come to watch. They kneeled at a respectful distance, swords laid out on the ground in front of them. Whatever words Halfdan had for his god, these others seemed to lack. They had no affection for Halfdan, but when it came time to ask for help in cruising the cataracts of the Dnieper, its banks strewn with wreckage and the rag-clothed bones of those whose luck ran out, these men would trust him with their lives.

To take his mind off the cataracts and the Petcheneg, Halfdan spent his time gambling. By the time we put ashore one night, he had lost half of what he owned, and took out his frustration by striking me for some imagined offence until my front teeth were loose and one of my eyes was swollen shut. Then he walked me out onto a treeless plain through which a river twisted sluggishly.

I wondered if he was going to kill me, and realised that I was less afraid of the beatings, or even of dying, than of the fact that I never knew what he was going to do next.

Halfdan pushed me far out through the rustling, knee deep grass.

‘Here,’ he said, suddenly, and pointed to the ground.

I understood then that he had only been looking for a place to pray.

A storm came down upon us while we prayed, twisting the gut of the sky into coils of greenish-grey. He took no notice of the first claps of thunder, but when the rumbling drew closer, stabbing the clouds with lightning, he grew afraid and lay flat in the middle of his sword-drawn ring. Storm clouds, veined with fire, tumbled across the plain.

‘Get down!’ shouted Halfdan. ‘Get down!’

But I stayed on my feet. The only way to defy him was to sacrifice his property, which was what my life had become. The grass thrashed in sudden gusts of wind and soon it was raining
so hard that I could barely stay on my feet. The bellowing of the storm was all around us, whipping past in a stampede of fire-legged beasts. The sky crackled like fat spitting from cooked meat. I breathed the burnt air and felt the pressure in my ears as the bolts cut through the sky above me. In all its wordless fury, the lightning raged but never hurt me, as if its only chance had failed, and I laughed as Halfdan cowered at my feet.

After the storm, sunlight blinded us with its sharp and twitching glare as we made our way back over the wet grass. A rainbow arced through the settling sky. Halfdan looked at me as if I might at any moment climb its colour-banded path and disappear into the clouds.

I had meant only to defy him, but in his mind, I had defied much more than that.

After that day, he addressed me in tones of respect, and put aside the beating of his slave. I became more of a student than a servant. There were times he even treated me like a son. The only way to keep his respect was to listen to his teaching, and in spite of myself, I could not help wanting to learn.

Soon I knew the names of all the Norse gods, not only Odin, Thor and Frey, about whom I had learned from my father, but Baldur, Bragi, Forseti, Heimdall, Njord, and Ull. He made me recite their names, and the names of the seasonal rites – The Feast of the Dead, Winter Solstice, Samhain, Walpurgisnacht, Imbolc, Spring Equinox, Sun’s Turning, Lunasa, The Feast of Fallen Warriors and so on – until they merged in my head into one long barely-pronouncable incantation.

About each god, he would give only one or two details – Odin’s single eye and frequent treachery to those who worshipped him; Thor’s red hair, his stubborn loyalty and fearsome temper; war-god Tyr’s one hand; Heimdall standing guard upon the rainbow bridge which spanned the gaps
beween the worlds. But any more than this, it seemed, was left to the mind of each one who prayed to them. In that way, the gods took on the faces of people who passed through our lives, broken down and reassembled in the workshops of our brains.

As well as different prayers, particular substances were used for invoking the various gods. For summoning Odin, Halfdan needed a gold coin, to be set inside a drawing of a raven, which he traced in the ground with a stick made from yew. For Thor, a piece of iron would be placed on the symbol of a double-headed axe, drawn with a sliver of oak. For Frey, it was the symbol of a boar marked out with a pine branch and fastened to the earth by a knuckle of brass.

It was expected, and seemed natural, that each person would pick a god in whom they confided the most.

For Halfdan, that was Tyr, a god not only of war but of seafaring and of the persecuted. For prayers to Tyr, he used a hawthorn twig to draw the outline of a sword, in which he laid a lump of bronze.

It made sense for Halfdan to have chosen Tyr as his patron god, since although Halfdan had not been persecuted by anyone I ever saw, his mind was filled with notions of conspiracies against him. The fact that no one could be bothered to oblige him by actually persecuting Halfdan meant that he had, in the end, to persecute himself.

When ordered to choose, I picked Thor, who stood for order, strength in conflict and trust of instinct. This last quality spoke to me most clearly of all. Halfdan did not mind that my choice was different than his own. He saw it as correct that I would choose the Thunder God, especially after what he had witnessed in the storm and the hammer he had found around my neck.

As our journey toward Miklagard progressed, Halfdan sometimes asked me to choose the places where we would
pray. At first, I had no idea how to go about this, and would just point to the nearest patch of flat, dry ground. Halfdan would move us on until we found a different place, and I could not deny that these locations did have a kind of balance absent from the spaces I had chosen. It was only when he explained to me that there was a gift to ground-choosing – a gift which he felt I possessed – that I began to understand.

Our world, he said, was made of layers, more than most people could perceive. Beyond the reach of untrained senses, the world of the gods swirled all around us, unchecked by the boundaries of space and time which fenced our tiny fraction of the earth.

Halfdan told me that each thing contained a kind of life beyond what anchored it inside its visible form. This life belonged not only to people and animals but to every tree and rock, to every cloud that drifted by. Even possessions which had seen many years of service took on a kind of life, burnished into them by the sweat of their owners. You could feel the faint vibration of it; in a sword or a shield, a set of carpenter’s tools or even an old pair of shoes. It was everywhere, like the rumble of a river running deep beneath the ground. You could learn to sense the places where it was strongest, often around a particular tree, suspended in its leaves as raindrops are after a storm. Or it spread like a veil of fog across certain fields. It could be found near springs which bubbled from the soil. Halfdan said these marked the places where the veil between the worlds was thinnest, where the crossing could be made as easily as walking through a doorway, if only you knew how.

This ground-choosing was the first time the other world appeared truly alive to me, no longer a collection of names, and stories, and complicated prayers. At first, I could get no further than an understanding of how much it was that I had failed to
understand. But even this, Halfdan said, was a necessary step towards the changes that would come. After many stages of transformation lay a voyage beyond the bone cage of the body, when people lay as if dead while their spirits ranged across the earth, sometimes inhabiting the forms of animals, sometimes disguised as breaths of wind.

Slowly, I began to see. New instincts appeared inside me, as if awakened from a hibernating sleep. When I walked through the forests to choose the ground on which we prayed, I felt the sharpening of those nameless senses which drew me to the sacred sites. Soon I could lead us to them as easily as Halfdan had done.

Just as this gift refused to be held within the flimsy clutches of our sight or touch or hearing, it also lay beyond the grasp of words, defying all who tried to measure it with speech. And yet it was there. When I prayed at Halfdan’s side, the world around me seemed to shimmer with this life, reducing it to the grainy dream of an illusion, which my life back in Altvik, and the family and friends I left behind, had already begun to resemble.

Halfdan had come to Miklagard in order to offer his services to the Emperor Basil II who, at the age of eighteen, had just begun his rule over Byzantium.

Miklagard, its capital city, was a place so vast and crowded, steeped in the smell of unnameable spices and filth, that in all the time I spent there, I never felt truly at ease.

There were already a number of Norsemen working for the Emperor. In time, they became known as the Varangian Guard. They came from every corner of the Norseman’s world, and in their meshing of the Eastern and the Western languages, as well as of words borrowed on their way across the Mediterranean or down the crooked path of the Dnieper, they had emerged with a language of their own. This suited them, because they were separated now, by much more than distance, from what they were before they left their pine-forested homes and the jade-coloured water of the fjords.

Any Norseman who could survive the voyage to Miklagard had already achieved a great deal, and if he passed the tests of swordsmanship and horseback riding, he would be welcome. Still, in those first weeks of their initiation, the sun often rose on empty beds, whose recent occupants had fled in the night for reasons they never gave or were expected to explain.

Among the ranks of the Varangian, I met the most hardheaded, sharp-instincted and pain-denying people that ever walked the earth. They had been drawn to this place like a migrating beast is drawn to its ancestral hunting ground.

The Varangian lived in a complex within the Emperor’s palace walls. They were extravagantly paid, both for their loyalty and for their viciousness, the likes of which the Emperor could not find among his own people. They saw themselves as a kind of shifting brotherhood, with their own laws and traditions. It was in the torch-lit Varangian halls, that people like Halfdan found the first place they had ever thought of as home. These men took more pride in carrying the red-painted shield, which was the mark of the Varangian, than in anything they’d ever done before.

Like Halfdan, many Norsemen kept servants, who followed them everywhere, even into the fighting. I spent twelve years in Halfdan’s shadow and lay each night like a dog at the foot of his bed.

The Varangian slept in long, stone rooms. There were thirteen beds in each, six against either wall and one in the centre at the back, reserved for whoever held the highest rank. Carpets were hung on the walls, and shuttered windows opened out onto walkways shaded by olive trees, reserved for the Varangian alone.

Training was carried out daily in high-walled gravel courtyards, where as Halfdan’s sparring partner, I learned to handle weapons almost as well as he could. Soon, the skill of wielding them no longer required conscious thought. The movements of axe and spear and sword became so fluid that it was as if they had not been learned but remembered, from a time more distant than my birth.

Afterwards, in heated marble baths, we used sea sponges and olive oil soap to wash away the dust of Miklagard.

At long tables, we were served mutton and fish, flat bread and goat’s cheese, black olives cured in oil. We ate dripping chunks of honeycomb and drank more wine than water.

Beneath these rooms, at the end of a passageway deep underground, was the temple of the Varangians. The pillars here were not made of wood but of stone and illuminated with fire pits fueled by olive branches. The wooden benches which lined the walls had been carved with flared crosses, sun wheels and dragon heads, all copied from Norse war-shields.

It was here that Halfdan went to pray each day. I would follow at his heels, the heat of the day fading as we travelled underground and the smell of olive wood fires gradually filling our lungs.

This was the only place where he and I were equals. It served to remind me that, as masters went, Halfdan treated me better than most.

I knew one boy whose master cut off his fingers one by one for such trivial mistakes as spilling food. When the boy had no fingers left, the man set him free. The last time I saw that boy, he was wandering away into the dust of a gathering sandstorm in the wastelands west of Itil.

For his part, Halfdan did not expect anything more from me than belligerent obedience. Anything else would have seemed to him insincere.

But no matter how well Halfdan treated me, I still hated him. No slave can love his master. His infrequent acts of grudging kindness, like the cast-off clothes he gave me and the food he sometimes shared, only made me hate him more. I watched him while he slept, when he would bark at all the demons in his head. I saw the blood pulse in his neck and thought about setting that blood free from its endless wanderings down the tunnels of his body.

In the end, I did not kill him, because it seemed more cruel to
let him live. I even learned to pity Halfdan. He had been on the move most of his life and had travelled to places that could not be found on any maps, nor named, nor found again. He was as sick in the head from the things he had watched people do to each other as he was from the beauty of what he had seen but could not find the words to describe. As a result, he lived half in and half out of the past. It was Halfdan’s curse that his thoughts did not live in the same world as his body.

My own thoughts swirled endlessly around the memories I kept of home. Slowly, these memories began to unravel. When the images faded, I tended to them as if repairing an old tapestry that hung against the inside of my skull. In the end, what remained was not really a picture of my home, only the idea of it. But it was an idea that made life bearable. Sometimes, the promise I had made to return there was the only thing keeping me alive.

Meanwhile, it seemed as if the only thing keeping the Emperor alive was the Varangian Guard. He was a short and stocky man, with pale blue eyes and a face as round as a coin. Unlike his courtiers, who swathed themselves in silk and gold brocade, the Emperor usually appeared in a simple purple tunic. Although he was physically frail compared to the average Varangian, the Emperor was strong in other ways. He was quietly and thoroughly aware of the vast complexities behind the workings of the empire he ruled. The wealth he commanded was almost unimaginable – rooms stacked with gold, sacks of jewels spilled across the floor – all the substance of fantastic rumour until you saw them for yourself. He stood like the hub of a wildly-spinning wheel, in which the Varangian were only one of a hundred spokes. He alone could navigate the canals of lies and bribery and blackmail which sluiced beneath the treasure rooms and incense-smoky halls of Miklagard. These backwaters were the Emperor’s proving ground, from which he
emerged unscathed time and again, while his enemies begged for mercy, found none and glimpsed the world for the final time through the veil of blood-dimmed eyes.

The codes by which a Varangian lived could not have contained a man like the Emperor, and yet it was because of him that the Varangian existed at all. The only thing we shared with him was a mutual loyalty, symbolised each month by the Emperor’s inspection of his private army.

In the days leading up to the inspections, all the servants like myself busily polished shields, repaired clothes and sharpened swords.

It was the edge on a Norseman’s sword which brought the Varangian into being, or so the story went. A group of Norsemen had been captured in a raid on Miklagard. The Emperor decided that their heads would be struck off with their own weapons. As the first man knelt before the executioner, he asked that his long hair not be cut by the blow of the sword. The Emperor granted the request. One of Emperor’s men took the hair in his hand, wrapped it around his wrist and held it away from the raider’s neck. As the sword came down, the raider jerked his head to one side, and the blade went through the arm of the man who held his hair, missing the raider’s neck entirely. Impressed by the ingenuity of this, the Emperor offered to spare the man’s life. The Norseman accepted, but only on condition that those who had been captured with him would be spared as well. A deal was struck, and they went on to become the Emperor’s personal guard.

At the inspection, all Varangians would kneel in a line before the Emperor, hands on the hilts of swords balanced upright in front of them. Often, the Emperor reached out from the folds of his robes and touched our hair. The blonder it was, the greater his fascination, but red hair intrigued him most of all. This made Halfdan of interest to the Emperor, who sometimes
stopped to brush his hand across the top of Halfdan’s head.

Halfdan could barely contain his disgust. ‘I may be on my knees before that man, but at least I know who I am. He and all his kind are lost in a maze and they cannot leave because they do not even know they are lost.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because they have grown more comfortable in dreams than in the waking world.’

I looked around at the bowed heads of the Varangian,
heavy-knuckled
hands resting on the hilts of their swords, eyes closed, peaceful in their reverence for the man who rented out their bravery from year to year. Suddenly, none of it seemed to have any substance. It all appeared to ripple, the way the surface of a pond moves in a breeze. And then, just as suddenly, I found myself again on solid ground, with the confusion of a sleep-walker shaken from his dreams.

Soon after our arrival, the Varangian had chosen Halfdan as their priest, to guarantee the favour of the gods. This role removed him from the lures of the outer world, in whose perfumed arms the others wrapped themselves from time to time. It was no rule which kept Halfdan away from women. Rather, it was the women who steered clear of him. They knew who he was, knew the powers he was said to have. He frightened them and the only kindness he could show was to keep his distance.

For the rest, caught up in Varangian life, the lack of natural balance between men and women made for its own frustrations.

Days would go by in Miklagard when I did not see a woman my own age. Most were old cleaning women brought in to wipe the floors and prepare food. They never spoke to Norsemen, nor did they look us in the eye. Others were children of the Emperor’s men, who looked on us as monsters come to life
from bed-time stories. Or they were concubines, who we almost never saw but only heard, laughing behind closed doors. Others were whores, the buying of whose temporary love had long ago become a fact of life among the Varangian, purchased without shame and openly discussed. The hardest working of these women, although they sold themselves to men, kept young girls as their lovers, often paying them as extravagantly as they themselves were paid. The whores of whores. Some were astonishingly beautiful, but carried in their eyes the emptiness of people in the twilight of their years.

Halfdan was as wary of women as he was of Christianity, the splendours of both being never far from view in Miklagard. This city was the centre of the Holy Roman church, and the vastness of its temples dwarfed the crude pillars of our Norse religion.

Halfdan pretended to have no knowledge of Christianity and no interest in it either, but secretly he hired a Christian to teach him about the religion. In this way, he believed, they might have less chance of taking advantage of him. We even attended a service in the great church of the Hagia Sofia, but Halfdan found it so dull that he spent the time carving his name in runes on the marble balustrade. Meanwhile, interminable chanting droned on down below, punctuated by puffs of sandalwood smoke. The lessons lasted two weeks, after which Halfdan sent the Christian away and decided he would never trust those people, though he had never trusted them in the first place. Halfdan could not understand why anyone would pray to only one god, or why someone should be expected to believe that only humans had souls. He wondered why people would spend their time here on earth worrying about what would happen to them in the next world, bribed into submission with the promise of heavenly rewards. Most worrisome to him was that Christians did not accept the gods
of others, sanctioning the death of those who would not follow their own faith.

To fight the Emperor’s wars, we sailed aboard his Black Sea ships, and voyaged out across the burning blue Mediterranean. We travelled through the desert of the Abbasids and slept in the coppery sand, wrapped in our capes to ward off the night chill, waiting for the sky to turn the colour of our eyes.

In each new place, Halfdan would find something to mark his journey – sometimes a belt, sometimes a shield, once a helmet stolen from the dust-dry corpse of a Roman legionnaire, who we found buried under a shallow pile of stones at a dried-up oasis in the desert. His chest had caved in like the roof of an abandoned house. Some grey and pasty scraps of flesh remained upon the forehead and the hands, which lay folded on his chest. The hair had slid away from the top of the skull, leaving the chalkiness of bones on which a large black scorpion had made its nest.

The most prized of all Halfdan’s possessions he acquired when we were campaigning against the Gotul tribesmen in the mountainous region of Arak, a fight which cost us almost half our number. Retreating across a frozen plateau, we came across a long-dead animal the likes of which none of us had seen before. It was a kind of elephant, but with long, matted hair and huge tusks that curved around in front of the animal’s face. The creature must have been attacked but escaped to die with a spear still piercing its flank. The flesh had dried as hard as rock and the shaft of the spear had rotted away, but the bronze spear-head remained preserved inside. Its long point was shaped like a narrow tear-drop with strange circles carved into the metal. Halfdan gouged it out and named the weapon Gungnir, after Odin’s own spear, which never missed its mark.

In that place, we had come to the edge of the world.
Foul-smelling
steam rose from open sores in the ground and yellow
blooms of sulphur patched the earth, as on the mottled skin of corpses left unburied.

What lay beyond, in the endless emptiness of rolling hills and stunted trees, filled us all with wordless terror, because of what had happened to a group of Norsemen who had set out across these plains some years before. They were led by a Swede named Ingvar. Hundreds came along, sailing in a great fleet across the Baltic, down the Dnieper, across the Black and Caspian seas, rolling their ships on logs or hauling them overland on huge carts, even as far as the sea of Aral. From there, Ingvar and his men set out on foot. Somewhere in that emptiness, they disappeared. Afew made it back. Barely a handful of men. One of the survivors was Halfdan. What had happened to them, and who or what had scythed them down, Halfdan either would not say or could not recall. The horror of it stood like a wall around his memories.