The Dvina that flows north to the Baltic, and the Dnieper that goes looping southward past Kiev to the Inland Sea, rise many days apart in the dark forest heart of things; and ships making the river-faring must be man-handled across country from one to the other.
Where the portage-way started out from Dvina, there was a small settlement of the Rus; Northmen who had settled down with women of the forest tribes; narrow-eyed, high-cheeked tribesmen, and others of mixed stock between the two, who made their living from the ship folk passing by. From them, Hakon hired ten oxen with their drivers, and a kind of sledge to carry the goods and gear (for one lightens ship of all things movable, for a portage); and great runners for lashing along the Red Witch’s keel. We laid in a store of pitch and pork-fat for greasing the hauling gear; and on a grey day with mosquitoes hanging in stinging clouds under the trees, we started out.
‘There are men who make this portage every year or so,’ said Orm. ‘It must be that someone dropped them on their heads when they were very small.’
With eight of the oxen harnessed to the Red Witch, and the remaining two to the sledge, it might have seemed that the crew would have an easy time of it. But we had constantly to scout ahead, making sure that the portage-way, cut deep through the forest, was clear of branches and fallen trees; and we toiled at the great rollers, pulling each one from beneath the ship’s stern as it came free, and racing forward to set it beneath her forward-lurching prow. We must keep the runners daubed with pig-fat whenever they start to smoke. And though the oxen could keep her moving on the level, whenever the way ran up-hill, it needed all our strength and straining added to theirs to keep her going; while on a downhill stretch, we must dig in our heels and hang on to the check-ropes, lest she run wild and kill the oxen and maybe wreck herself into the bargain. And I was not the only one to have the feeling that the Red Witch, unhappy on land, was fighting us every step of the way.
So we toiled and sweated and cursed our way across country, filling the forest with the noise of our going. The forest that gave back no sound out of its own darkness, save the hush of a little wind among the fir tops, that never reached us, sweating down below; and now and then the harsh alarm cry of some bird. But on the evening of the eighth day, we came over a last ridge, and saw before us through the trees, the dark shining loop of a river, and the same kind of rough settlement as the one at the Dvina end of the portage.
Someone let out a hoarse shout. ‘The Dnieper!’
But Hakon Ship-Chief laughed. ‘Not yet, though it runs into the Dneiper. The tribesmen have some name for it that no one else can get their tongues round. Mostly, our folk call it Beaver River.’
‘But it is the end of the portage?’ said Thormod, just ahead of me, somewhat breathless, for we were hanging on to one of the check-ropes.
‘Aye, it’s the end of the portage. Clear water now, down to Kiev.’
We feasted that night in company with the crew of a northward bound trader who were for the portage-way the next morning; sharing food and cooking fires and the news of North and South. Presently Thormod asked for news of the Serpent. ‘You’ll have passed her a few days since?’
‘Aye.’ The stranger Ship-Chief counted on his fingers. ‘We shared camp one night. She’ll be ten or twelve days ahead of you. But she’ll not make it through to Miklagard this season.’
‘Why should that be?’ demanded Hakon Ship-Chief. ‘There’ll be open water out of Kiev for more than two moons yet.’
The other man spat a gobbet of pig gristle into the fire. ‘It’s not the ice that’ll hold her, but Prince Vladimir. He’ll be having a use for extra ships and fighting crews.’
We all pricked up our ears, and Hakon said, ‘What use? Having said so much, say more, friend.’
I mind sitting with my arms across my knees, and my eyes full of firelight, half asleep after the day’s labour, and listening to the ‘more’ that the man had to say. After more than a year among the Northmen, I knew something of the background to it. I knew that Byzantium had been at war for a good while with a people called the Bulgars, whose frontiers ran with their own. I knew that not so long since, the Bulgars had swarmed south into a part of the Empire called Greece, and that the Emperor Basil II had led an army into the heart of Bulgaria in return, and got very much the worst of it there. Also I seemed to have heard that while he was out of the way, two of his generals – both had given trouble before, and one been exiled and one given the post of Commander of Asia, which came to much the same thing – had seized their chances, and each gathered all the troops he could lay hands on and proclaimed himself Emperor; which made four, because Basil had a younger brother, Constantine, who officially shared the throne with him, though he cared more about dancing-girls and feasting than he did about ruling an Empire.
It had all sounded very complicated and somehow rather comic, when I had heard men talking of it in ale-houses in Dublin or round a driftwood fire in Aarhus, discussing its effects on trade with southern markets. But somehow, though just as complicated, it didn’t seem so comic now.
‘Just the day before we were due to sail,’ the stranger Ship-Chief was saying, ‘a Byzantine Red-ship came up-river, with three men on her afterdeck – two of them high-ranking officials of some sort, I’d say. And one a soldier; you could glimpse the mail under his silks . . . Well, you know how it is; by next morning word of their business with Vladimir was all over Kiev. One of the generals who revolted – Bardas Phocas –’
‘That’s the Commander of Asia?’ put in Hakon.
‘Aye; that’s the one – has got the upper hand of the other – Bardas Schlerus – and penned him up in one of his own fortresses –’
‘If I make the Miklagard run yearly till I’m a hundred, I shall never find my way among these outland names!’
‘And most of Schlerus’ troops have rallied under Phocas’s banner, to march on Miklagard. They’re at Chrysopolis now; nose to nose with the city, as you might say, across just that narrow strip of water that they call the Bosphorus. And what’s left of Basil’s troops are mostly still away in the west, holding back the Bulgars. So the Emperor Basil is sweating.’
‘It is in my mind that well might the Emperor Basil be sweating,’ said Hakon, throwing a bone over his shoulder to the hungry dogs that scavenged about the fire. ‘And so he sends envoys to Prince Vladimir? Maybe there is a new Viking wind a-blowing.’
‘Aye, the same thought was in all our minds; and the thought that with such a wind blowing, Vladimir was not one to sit at home with his sail furled. If he agreed to help the Emperor, he’d be wanting ships – all the ships he could lay his hands on here and now, beside sending north for more. So we finished loading in a hurry, and I, the Ship-Chief, went up to the Palace and told him we were pulling out for home, and offered to carry his ship summons for him. That way, we got clear ourselves.’
In the silence, somebody leaned forward and put a fresh branch on the fire. Smoke was the only thing to keep off the stinging clouds of mosquitoes that made life a torment after sundown.
‘Some nerve, that must have taken,’ Orm whistled softly. ‘I doubt this Lord Vladimir is one who likes his thoughts being put to him, before he has had time to think them himself!’
‘Some nerve, yes. But behold, we are free and on our homeward way.’
Thormod was looking intently at Hakon; I was watching Thormod; and above us the fir tops whispered together in the little wind that never reached the ground.
Then Hakon said, ‘All this, you told to the Serpent’s crew, and still they held on for Kiev? How was it different, between them and you?’
The other grinned. ‘They were heading south anyway. And did you know any of the Northern Kind to turn back from a fight when there was a fight brewing? All other things being equal. For us it was different; we’d made our trading trip, and a good one, too. We were heading north, and we’d been long away from home.’
‘We also are heading south anyway, and are not yet hungry for our homes. A
nd it is in my mind that a man grows rusty like a sword-blade, if he holds too long to the ways of peace.’ Hakon’s one little bright eye was suddenly dancing in his battered face. ‘How say you, brothers?’
The crew of the Red Witch gave tongue in agreement, to a man.
Thormod and I looked at each other, and let our breaths go, gently.
9 Six Thousand Fighting Men
NEXT MORNING HAKON paid off the ox drivers, and we ran the Red Witch down into the water and set off on our river-faring once again. The worst was behind us now. The flow of the river was with us instead of against; and sometimes we could just let it take us, with the steersman at the stern and a few men rowing.
We passed high-piled beaver dams that choked the water here and there into dark spreading lagoons; and presently villages began to appear on the banks, and the fir trees that had hemmed us in so long began to give place to open woodlands of ash and elm and a kind of sycamore already touched with the first fires of autumn. Soon there were stretches of grassland too. It was so good to be able to see wide skies again, and let the eyes go free into a distance. And all the while, day by day, the river broadened, until at last we came into the great Dnieper.
And on an evening of clear long lights, and a fresh north wind ruffling the water, and with our dragon-head at the prow, and every man on the oars, we brought the Red Witch swinging down the last stretch of the river, round a last bluff of the western shore, and saw, over our shoulders, the crowding roofs of a town rising from the boat-sheds and crowded jetties along the waterfront, to the high halls along the hillcrest that caught the westering light as though they were brushed with gold. The evening smoke of cooking-fires making a blue haze over all, and the shadows lying long across the water and the Kiev marshes.
Kiev, the High City of the Rus, that had become so when the Northmen first pushed south from their earliest settlements round Novgorod. Kiev, spreading its power up and down the great rivers and through the forests and across the empty steppe-lands, wherever the Viking breed had made their land-take, wherever they had bred their own blue eyes and fair hair into the darkness of the Tribes; wherever they held the trade and the weapons. But I knew little of that at the time, and my foremost thought, as we came down the last stretch towards the crowded wharves, and the shadow of the city fell across us, was that somewhere among the long dark shapes of the shipping must be the Serpent; and on board, or somewhere among the crowded ways of the town, Anders and Herulf, waiting for our coming.
And a shadow that was more than the shadow of the city seemed to fall across me. I snatched a glance at Thormod swinging to and fro to the oar beside me; but his face, what I could see of it, was shut, and told me nothing.
‘Lift her! Lift her!’ came the chant of Hakon, Ship-Chief at the steering oar.
We brought the Red Witch in to the boat-strand and ran her up the beach clear of the river-line; and when we had made all secure, Hakon took about half of us, and leaving the rest on guard, set off for the hall of one of Prince Vladimir’s nobles, who it seemed was a friend of his from past river-farings.
We left the shipyards and the merchants’ quarter beside the Dnieper, and turned to the steep streets that led up towards the Prince’s palace. We soon learned to call it the Khan’s palace, for Vladimir, we found, had lately taken to himself the title of Khan, which until then had belonged to the Tribes. I suppose that was to show that he was the Lord of the Tribes as well as of the Northmen. But that day it was still, to us, the Prince’s palace.
The steep narrow streets were paved with logs, and wound in and out between log-built, turf-roofed houses, that were set back, each behind its own byres and fenced cattle-yard. Erland Silkbeard had his hall nearly at the top of the hill, only a little below the encircling turf walls of the palace itself. It was much like any other timber hall of the Northmen; like the Chief’s Hall at Thrandisfjord, I thought, glancing about me as we came to the gate; but the byres and store-sheds and sleeping lodges gathered about the big central hall were many of them joined to each other and to the far end of the hall itself, so that one would be able to pass the length and breadth of the place without going out of doors. ‘They have grown soft, these Northmen of the south,’ I thought, not yet having known the cold of a winter night at the heart of the Rus Lands.
But there was not much time, just then, for looking round, for the Master of the Hall was just returned from hawking. He had that moment dismounted, his big goshawk still on his fist, and his horse was being led stableward as we came into the forecourt; a tall, long-boned man with a beard the colour of ripe barley, who wore his soft leather boots and goatskin jerkin as though they were dark silks. When he saw us, he gave the hawk to one of his hearth companions, and came striding across the forecourt. Hakon stumped forward to meet him with a shout, and they came together mid-way, flinging their arms round each other like a couple of bearcubs at play.
‘Erland Silkbeard!’
Erland held our Ship-Chief at arm’s length, and looked at him out of long dark eyes that were not like a Northman’s at all. ‘Hakon Ketilson! Hakon One-Eye! So the amber wind blows you south again!’
‘Aye, and I am come in the old way, to claim Guest-right at your hearth, for me and my men.’
‘And warm is your welcome!’ Erland said. ‘And long shall you bide at my hearth, this time of coming!’
‘As long as may be, so that we are clear before ice closes the way south.’
‘Longer than that, my friend.’
Hakon cocked his head on one side. ‘Ah-huh! the tale was true, then? We shared camp fires with a north-bound crew at this end of the Great Portage, and heard a tale of an embassy from Miklagard, seeking help against troubles within the Empire. They had got their ship out quickly, lest, if the Lord Vladimir was minded to honour the old treaty, he should cast his eye on her to swell his war-fleet.’
‘That will be the crew that carry his Ship Summons north with them,’ said Silkbeard. ‘He was a bold man, that Ship-Chief . . . Aye, the tale was true. And so you come to join the fight?’
‘Did you ever know Hakon One-eye or the men who sailed with him to turn back from sword-clash? Besides, we were not minded to carry our cargo home again.’
‘So; you will have long enough to see to your merchanting, and the Red Witch shall pass her winter safe and welcome in one of my own boat-sheds.’
‘There is a moon and more before the ice,’ Hakon said. ‘What do we wait for?’
‘Vladimir has promised two hundred ships, six thousand fighting men. Such a war fleet cannot be gathered and away before the ice closes the Dnieper, therefore it must wait until the ice breaks in the spring.’ Erland, his hand still on Hakon’s shoulder, turned back towards his hall. ‘Come your ways in – already there’s nip in the air once the sun is down. I will send men to see to the Red Witch, and bring up the rest of your crew.’
The next night, when the evening meal was over in Erland’s hall, and Erland’s men and Red Witch men together, we were sprawling at our ease with loosened belts while the great jars of ale and fermented mares’ milk went round, Hakon leaned forward with his elbows on the table, and asked, ‘What is it that they are building up yonder beside the Khan’s palace?’
‘There are always new buildings going up in Kiev, even beside the Khan’s palace,’ Erland said, making gentle finger-play with his beard, in the way he had. ‘We are a growing city.’
‘But this was a strange shape.’ Hakon dipped his finger in his ale cup, and drew something on the table boards. ‘Somewhat the shape of a God-House of the White Kristni.’
Erland nodded, and I had a feeling he was amused, not at Hakon but at the thing they were talking about. ‘Aye, so.’
‘And a man was overseeing the work. A dark fellow, with his hair cut – so.’ Hakon drew the finger round his head, out-lining a priest’s tonsure. ‘And garments on him such as the priests of the White Kristni wear, in Miklagard.’
Erland was leaning back against the red and saffron han
gings on the wall behind him. He was a man who could relax more than most men, like a cat lying out in the sun. (But he could spring like a cat, too.) ‘There are three such men in Kiev. They are here to teach us how to build this new kind of God-House beside the Khan’s palace, and how to worship the White Kristni in it when it is built.’ He looked round at our startled faces in the flare of the resin torches, and laughed. ‘Nay now, it is simple enough. Our great Khan Vladimir has thought in his mind, that for a great people such as we have grown to be, the gods that we brought with us from our old world in the north are too rough-hewn, too homespun. We must take to the gods of the world that we now reach out to. We must turn to Islam or to the faith of the White Kristni.’ He held out his silver-bound drink-horn to one of the women for refilling, and took a long drink before he went on. ‘Islam, he finds, will not serve, for the followers of the Prophet Muhammad may drink no fermented liquor, and a faith which forbids a man his drink is clearly no faith for the Northmen.’
Hakon nodded, seeing the point. ‘And so it must be the White Kristni.’
‘In the spring, we sent men to Miklagard, to ask more concerning this faith. They came back in early summer, with what they had learned. And with strange stories beside –’ The faint sheen of amusement that was so much a part of him faded for the moment, and he seemed grave, almost puzzled. ‘They said that they were taken to a great gathering in the chief God-House of the city – St Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom. And there was wonderful singing and strange-smelling magic smoke that made their heads swim; and at the moment of the Sacrifice – they have a make-believe Sacrifice, pretending like children that bread and wine are the body and blood of their God – at the moment of Sacrifice, strange-winged spirits came down from the high roof, and hovered above their heads; and by this, they judged that the faith was a true and a powerful one.’