‘No man. This is not a man, it is a slave.’
‘You lied to us.’
‘Not so. To us a slave is less than a dog. Would you count your dog as a man?’
The big Viking grunted and looked Aelis up and down.
‘What’s your name, kid?’
‘He is a mute and a eunuch,’ said Leshii, ‘taken from Byzantium, or Miklagard as you call it, when Helgi the Prophet attacked that town.’
‘Why’s he skulking in the woods?’
‘He stinks,’ said Leshii, ‘so he sleeps where his smell can’t bother me or the mules.’
Fastarr laughed. ‘Smells all right to me, but I’ve been fighting a siege for six months and probably couldn’t smell a bear if it got into bed with me.’
‘Bears have better taste than that, Fastarr,’ said one of the warriors.
‘You’d know, you married one.’
More laughter. Then Fastarr spoke again: ‘Wait here,’ he said to Leshii. ‘In fact, Svan, can you stay with him and make sure he goes nowhere?’
Svan was a huge man with forearms as big as Leshii’s thighs, two heads higher than the merchant with a great axe slung across his shoulder. He smiled pleasantly, thought Leshii.
‘I’m glad to stay,’ he said. ‘I’ll get dry by the fire and this merchant can tell me tales of the east.’
‘You’ll do well under Svan’s protection,’ said Fastarr, ‘but you’ll find his nice manners disappear quick enough in a scrap.’
Leshii gave a thin smile at the threat. He was a captive and knew it.
The men fanned out into the forest, calling to the lady, calling to the dog. Leshii heard their voices fading down the hillside.
He sat staring into the fire, making conversation with the hulk at his side and wondering how best to survive the night with his body, his goods and his grip over the lady intact. He needed to make this man his ally. Svan wasn’t keen to talk about himself, so Leshii told him stories of the east, of the towns of Ladoga and Novgorod, where the Norsemen ruled over the native population, partly by strength of arms, partly by consent. The tribes had been unable to agree on how to govern themselves, so they had called in the Norsemen, the Varangians as they were known, and asked them to rule in their place. Prince Helgi, the Varangian ruler, was said to be descended from Odin himself and to have powers of prophecy and who knew what other magic.
‘So how did you come by the protection of the Ravens?’ asked Svan. ‘You seem like a sociable fellow. Why are you consorting with cannibals and lunatics?’
Leshii, who missed very little when it came to human weakness, noted the little glance Svan took behind him as he spoke. He was scared of these Ravens, whoever they were.
‘Sometimes one doesn’t choose: one is chosen,’ said Leshii.
‘Well spoken,’ said Svan. ‘So they forced their company upon you?’
‘They frightened me half to death.’ If Svan was afraid, he thought, he would be afraid too. Similarity and agreement, he knew, were the keys to getting this man to like him and perhaps ultimately to survival.
‘As they should,’ said Svan. ‘He’s a hard bastard that Hugin and you have to respect him for that, whatever else he is, but his sister’s as mad as the moon. What’s her name, friend? Remind me.’
Svan, thought the merchant, wasn’t as stupid as he looked. He’d detected some uncertainty in Leshii regarding the Ravens and wanted to probe further. Luckily the merchant had a healthy appetite for stories and was well travelled. Odin’s ravens, he recalled were Hugin and …
‘Munin,’ he said.
‘Ah, that’s it, though you couldn’t have got much chat out of them.’
‘Less than from the boy here.’ Leshii glanced towards the lady.
‘Does he always sit with his arms folded?’
‘It is the habit of his people.’
‘They’d be better keeping their hands on their swords, that way they wouldn’t end up as slaves,’ said Svan.
Leshii grinned and pointed at the berserker as if to say ‘you’re a wise one there!’ and Svan looked well pleased with his response.
There was a stirring in the trees. Leshii thought of the wolfman. He didn’t know whether his return would be his salvation or damnation. Could Chakhlyk take on so many warriors? But it was just the dog, which had lost interest in the chase and returned to the spot where it had obtained its last meal.
‘You are Danes?’ said Leshii.
‘So you call us, but we are Horda men, from the land to the north and west of the Danish kingdoms,’ said Svan. ‘We’re mates from a raiding longship. There are twelve of us in all.’
‘Isn’t twelve a magic number for a berserker clan?’
‘I believe so.’
‘Are you berserkers?’ Leshii was wary of berserkers and had found them a very unsettling presence whenever they had turned up in Ladoga. They went into battle crazy with mushrooms and herbs, impervious to wounds that would kill normal men. It was said that they didn’t leave the fight in the fight. That is, they treated their whole lives as a fight. It was one thing, thought Leshii, to have a bad temper, quite another to cultivate one.
‘We are known as the Hammer God’s Berserks, which is another way of saying that we’re not. Nowadays “berserker” is used for any fierce warrior, and in that way we are berserkers. In my grandfather’s time it meant only the cult of Odin lot, real madmen. We’re not those, though it doesn’t hurt to let people think we are.’
‘Who do you follow?’
‘God or king?’
‘Both.’
‘We follow Sigfrid because he pays us for our service – he has offered a bounty on the lady. For a god, we follow many, but my favourite is Thor, god of thunder. A more straightforward god than your raven lord, Odin. No madness, no magic, no stringing people up to sacrifice, just “Do as I say or get a hammer in the head.”’
‘That’s your philosophy?’
‘Not at all. I use an axe, not a hammer. Ah, here comes Fastarr now.’
The warriors were back, sweating and dirty from their exertions.
‘Have you found her?’ said Leshii.
‘She’s gone,’ said Fastarr. ‘Here, crack open the wine. Tell your boy, merchant, to bring me wine.’
Leshii knew the lady would not know which pack contained the wine so he stood instead.
‘Don’t let the boy see which pack the wine’s in, honoured Dane. Brother, your slaves must be trustworthy indeed that you allow them such knowledge. I’ll serve you myself.’
Fastarr laughed. ‘In Hordaland there are two types of slaves. The first are the trustworthy ones. They can be allowed to know the whereabouts of valuable things.’
‘And the second?’
‘The dead ones,’ said Fastarr.
The men burst out laughing and Leshii gave a deep smile. In the east it was said that laughter was a family house – you needed an invitation to get in. Laughing too enthusiastically would have been an intimacy too far, he thought. Better share the joke quietly and not cause resentment.
‘If we killed all the bad slaves in the east we’d have none left,’ he said.
He made a big show of making Aelis turn her back to him as he opened the pack with the worst wine in it. He took out two bottles and came back to the fire with them. He sat and took out the wood stoppers and removed the oily hemp padding that had kept them in place.
‘Here, friends,’ he said, ‘drink your fill.’
‘Two bottles is not our fill, merchant,’ said the rat-faced berserker, taking one from him and swigging it back.
‘You must leave me something for the king,’ said Leshii. A silence fell and he felt the mood darken. Fastarr looked at the merchant.
‘You’re a friend of our lord?’ he said.
‘A second father,’ said Leshii.
‘Very good. I think it’s the least we could do to take you to him.’
‘I have to wait here for my protector,’ said Leshii.
‘That Raven’
ll be back in camp soon enough, I should think, provided he hasn’t found anyone dead to eat,’ said Fastarr. ‘Come on, Hastein. Svan, grab hold of those mules and packs and let’s get back down to the camp. I want to be the man who brings such a dear friend to the king’s sight.’
‘I must wait here,’ said Leshii.
But it was no good. Fastarr took his arm, pulled him to his feet and led him down the hill while the other men loaded up his mules. He’d be lucky, he knew, to ever see those packs again.
‘I have gifts for the king in there. Don’t open them,’ said Leshii.
‘We won’t,’ said Fastarr, ‘until you’ve met him.’
Leshii looked back towards Aelis.
‘Well don’t just stand there, you idiot boy,’ he said. ‘Roll up my carpet and make sure it’s stowed fast. If it hits the mud again you’ll follow it.’ Aelis stood looking at him in incomprehension and Leshii realised he had spoken in Norse. Still, it would benefit the girl’s disguise if he treated her badly.
‘I said get the carpet!’ he screamed at her. He grabbed the edge of the carpet, mimed rolling it up and pointed at the mule. Aelis still hadn’t understood a word he said.
‘That is a bad slave who makes twice the work for his master!’ said the rat-faced one.
‘Are you sure it’s the boy who’s the slave here, merchant?’ laughed Svan.
‘Put the carpet on the mule,’ said Leshii in a low voice to Aelis. Then, more loudly and in Norse, ‘I ought to beat you, but bruises would make you even more useless. Do it, put the carpet on the mule.’
Aelis hurried to roll the carpet and Leshii mocked her, miming her inexpert actions, pulling faces at her. The Norsemen thought this high entertainment but Leshii had achieved what he wanted. By placing the lady beneath their contempt he had made her true nature invisible to them. They were looking at a simple boy, they thought, and had enjoyed Leshii’s ridicule. He had placed the idea of a stupid slave in their minds and made it difficult for them to see anything that didn’t fit that conception. It was a kind of everyday magic, but one he normally used in reverse, to make someone see the rarity and value of commodities that were neither rare nor valuable.
Leshii turned to Fastarr. ‘I look forward to your hospitality.’
The Dane smiled at him. ‘And we to yours,’ he said, gesturing down to the twinkling lights of the Norse camp that lay in the deep dark of the valley like a mirror to the stars.
7 An Awakening
Aelis felt sure she would not survive until the dawn. Everything was going badly for her, right down to the smallest detail. The mules refused to move, the packs slipped on their backs, she stumbled and fell on the slippery mud of the slope into the camp, her toes were numb with cold and she feared discovery at any second.
All that she could have borne. She had been raised on a country estate and spent many nights roaming the forests near her home, sleeping out with her friends under the stars, drinking from streams and going hunting with the daughters of the count. Her aunt had taught her how to use a bow and said that Aelis might not be good but was certainly lucky when it came to shooting deer. She held the bow wrong, nocked the arrow wrong, drew it wrong, moved when she shot and, like as not, hit what she was aiming at. So she was used to the discomforts of the outdoors. She was unused, however, to the ridicule.
Her fear brought on clumsiness, and every time she slipped or a mule wouldn’t move, Leshii led the chorus of derision. The little Norseman with the mean mouth had been particularly cruel, walking behind her and tripping her with his spear, laughing all the time. No one had ever treated her like that and she found it very hard to bear. Tears started to come down her face but that only made the men mock her more. In the end Leshii had come to her rescue, telling the spiteful little elf who was tormenting her that if his slave came to damage, he would ask for compensation from the prince.
The camp was a vision of hell. Hard faces, scarred and filthy, loomed from the firelight; women and men copulated like animals in the open air while, not three paces away, someone else sat eating from a bowl or sharpened an axe. This army had been ravaging the countryside for years and was more like a travelling town. The children were goblins, pulling at the packs, jabbering at her in their strange language, touching her even. The Vikings had taken over many of the mean houses, though their numbers were too great for all of them to be accommodated that way. So there were tents and shelters built from branches and foliage, but many were content to sleep huddled together beneath blankets and furs in the open air. What do they do if it rains? thought Aelis. There were so many of them, so many spears stuck upright in the mud, so many shields and axes. It really seemed as if this camp stretched as far as the night itself.
The mules pressed on, the warriors swatting away the children, calling to friends. They approached the river and Fastarr talked to a man on the bank. He gestured them towards a small beached longship. It was lying at an angle and the man put a plank up to its side.
The Viking turned from his negotiation and spoke directly to her but she didn’t understand what he said.
‘Come on,’ said Leshii. ‘Get the mules on the boat.’
Aelis wanted to speak, to tell the merchant that would be impossible. She loved horses and had grown up around enough mules to know they only worked for people they trusted. Mules were more intelligent than horses and needed to be coaxed rather than bullied. The animals were not going to walk up a plank onto a precarious boat for her.
She felt an intense shame building within her, an anger and a deep resentment. Her legs hurt and she had bruises down her back where she had been prodded. That feeling she had had since she was a girl returned, the ability to sense people’s emotions, to hear their character almost as a musical note, to see it as a colour. When she was a small girl and given to sentimental descriptions she had told her nurse that she could hear the ‘strings of the heart-harp’. The sickly sweet description made her blush now that she was a grown woman. But it really did feel like that, and the feeling was intensifying. The Norsemen were a mixture: toughness, cruelty, generosity, bravery, humour; she experienced their minds as a thin band of sound, bright colours, a feeling both hard and cold. The merchant was more complex. When she thought of him she had a taste in her mouth sweet like honeyed almonds, but underneath was something else bitter and astringent: cloves and smoke, vinegar and tar.
One of the Vikings was screamng at her in Norse, gesturing to the mules and then to the boat. It was the little one again, the nasty imp with his pinched face and thin, strong limbs. Aelis understood nothing of what he said, but his presence was dull and heavy, baleful and narrow. He kicked her and her legs went from under her. She hit the ground hard, driving the wind from herself and banging her head. He was screaming at her, gesturing for her to get up with one hand and prodding her with the butt of his spear with the other. His voice was shrill and high like a pipe blown by a child, almost hysterical.
Fastarr grabbed him by the shoulder and spoke to Leshii: ‘I am sorry for my kinsman, merchant; he has been unlucky in battle these two years.’ His voice was softer, like a flute, she thought. What was happening to her? Her senses were jumbled by the fall but something else was taking over and the world was not as it had been. All her sensitivities seemed amplified, people and personalities understandable to her in new and confusing ways. It was as if the uncommon stress had unlocked something in her.
‘Wounded?’ Again Leshii spoke in Norse. She heard the word as two thudding syllables, like the beat of a drum and, though its exact meaning was obscure to her, she understood well enough what was meant. It was as if all the feelings and emotions of those around her were an open book. She understood what the Norsemen were saying but in a way that went beyond the comprehension of a straightforward translation.
‘No kills,’ said Fastarr. ‘A case of bad luck, not cowardice as his enemies maintain.’
‘What use is a slave that will not work?’ It was the shrill pipe again.
‘About th
e same as a warrior who does not kill,’ said Fastarr. ‘Now let the boy put the mules on the boat, Saerda, and try picking your next fight with a Frankish man-at-arms, not a mute idiot.’
Though the words were not quite clear to Aelis, she understood that the Viking with the hammer shield was defending her and that he was mocking the thin little one, who he felt obliged to have in his company out of some debt of duty. Aelis realised that Saerda – she recognised the word as a name – was in as much danger as she was from his fellows and, more than that, he knew it.
She stood up and the night seemed to teem about her, the thoughts and emotions of the people in the camp buzzing like insects over a swamp. An image came to her. She saw herself on a tall mountaintop overlooking a vast valley. Something was living inside her – it seemed to glow and pulse. It was one of many things, a note, a vibration, that she carried in her bones. She could not name it but she envisaged it as a shape, like a shallow Roman one thousand, M, shining in the darkness of her mind. It had a living lustre to it, deep like the flow of light on a bay mare’s back. She smelled horse too, and the shape seemed to steam and stamp and sweat. It was like a living thing, something that expressed itself through her and that she, in living, expressed. She tried to give the shape a name in her mind but the only word that came to her was ‘horse’. The shape, she knew, was associated with horses – more than that, it was linked in a fundamental way to the creatures.
‘Get the mules on the boat.’ It was Leshii who spoke. She looked at the animal nearest her. As she moved towards it, it turned away, but she persisted and put her hands up to its head. She envisaged that glowing, rippling shape floating before her and the sound of its breathing emanating from her. She could feel the mule’s fear and mistrust, but the shape gave her a calmness that seemed to pass to the animal. The mule became quiet and nuzzled into her hand. Then she led it up the plank into the boat.
When all the animals were on board, the warriors climbed in, along with Leshii, and they pushed off for the far shore. The Vikings all sat down but there was no space for her, so she leaned her backside on the rail. She had never felt so strange in her life. It was as if her mind was no longer her own but had things growing in it, living there, shapes like the horse symbol that danced and spun at the very edge of her sight. She had sensed them before, she thought, when ill with scarlatina as a child. It was as if extraordinary fear and uncertainty called them forth, that the raw panic she felt under the eyes of the berserks had shut down her conscious mind and allowed them to appear.