an oarmate,’ repeated Bagnose. ‘Regin had Sigurd as fostri. He was brother to Fafnir, who became a dreaded wyrm through gold-greed and a curse. Regin was a skilled smith, though, who made Sigurd a marvellous sword. Sigurd killed Fafnir the wyrm and ate his heart, which gave him wisdom to see Regin planned his murder, so he killed Regin, too.’
‘That’s a lot of killing, it seems to me,’ Steinthor said, ‘even for a saga tale.’
‘Over a hoard, too,’ noted Bersi and we all fell silent, brooding on that, until it was time to move off.
‘It’s all just tales for fucking children,’ growled Wryneck. ‘Why we bother with this is the only mystery in it.’
Two other men died in Kiev, of the same sort of thing, their wounds swelling and turning black. A Greek doctor, whom Illugi summoned in desperation, shook his head and said the men must have had something get in the wound, a miasmic rot that festered their injuries.
We never told him where we had been, but knowing looks were exchanged. Dengizik’s reach was long, it seemed, and everyone agreed that it had been deep thinking not to have taken his swords, even if they had been Regin’s work.
We wrapped and buried our dead in Kiev and I listened to Illugi’s soft, long chants on the wyrd of men, one usually sung by mothers mourning children.
Deep into the night before the army left for Sarkel it went on, for Gunnar Raudi, for all the others who had died and, I was thinking, hunched up with my chin on my knees, for Illugi himself and his lost gods:
‘Hunger will devour one, storm dismast another,
One will be spear-slain, one hacked down in battle;
One will drop, wingless, from the high tree,
One will swing from the tall gallows,
The sword edge will shear the life of one,
At the mead-bench, some angry sot,
Soaked with wine, his words too hasty,
Will cut one down and make his wyrd.’
A thousand barrels of ale, fifty thousand sheep, the same in bushels of barley, the same yet again in bushels of millet and wheat. Sixty thousand horses, ropes, awnings, tents, hoes, mattocks ... I heard all this when accounts of the siege were being studiously written up by scholars in the Great City, years later.
I remember one old beard, pen poised, blinking at me as we sat with olives and bread and wine on my pleasant balcony in the Foreign Quarter, enjoying the breeze across the Horn from Galata.
‘How many cheesemakers?’ he asked and frowned when I laughed.
I told him a number, but I doubt if there were any. I never saw a decent cheese in all the time we floated with Sviatoslav’s army down the Don, or sat under those rune-tiled walls at Sarkel, sweating and fevered and scheming and trying not to die before we got rich.
If we had needed cheese, though, Sviatoslav would have provided it. For a man who famously made war on the run, as they say – no wagons, no means of cooking, just strips of leathery meat sweat-soaked under a saddle – he had changed his methods for the attack on Sarkel.
I saw him once, while sweating to load arrows and barrels of salt mutton – no pork, for half of his army wouldn’t eat it, for one reason or another – on the boats, already packed with timbers and Greek siege engineers. There was a great commotion along the river bank, men cheering and breaking off what they were doing to run and line the route a cavalcade was taking.
It was Sviatoslav, cantering along in a cloud of dust at the head of his druzhina, mailed men with horsehair-plumed helmets and bright blue fur-trimmed cloaks, mounted on magnificent horses. In this heat, they would be baking ovens, but the forest of their lances never wavered.
He was visiting each of his sons and it was Yaropolk’s turn, but we were too late to turn out smartly for it. To Einar’s annoyance, the Oathsworn greeted the moment like gawping yokels, stripped to the waist, streaked and sweating and loading gear like slaves – mainly because we didn’t trust the slaves to do it properly.
I don’t know what I had expected, but the ruler of the Rus, of Kiev and Novgorod, who controlled from the Baltic to the edge of the territory ruled by the Romans of Miklagard, was a burly little man with a nub of nose and a yellow beard.
He wore white tunic and trousers, like all the Rus under their armour, but his were dazzlingly clean. His head was shaved save for that silver-banded braid over one ear. There was the sparkle of a huge gold ring in the other.
‘Not much to look at, is he?’ grunted Bersi, pausing in his lifting. He wiped his brow, his great mane of red hair plastered to the middle of his back with sweat.
‘You can tell him that when he shoves a stake up your arse and leaves you hanging there,’ countered Wryneck, swigging watered ale from a skin. He wiped his snow-white beard and tossed the ale skin to me.
‘Is that what they do here? For what?’ demanded Bersi incredulously.
‘For some, it is saying the Great Lord of Kiev is not much to look at,’ a voice broke in and we turned to see one of the magnificent cavalrymen, helmet held in the crook of his arm, his bald head glistening.
He was smiling, as was the boy with him, a lad of about six or thereabouts, so the panic that had gripped us fled. I squinted up at him while others moved quietly, examining the boy’s horse and gear, the beautifully crafted mail of the man, the great metal fishscales of his lamellar coat.
We marvelled and questioned. Three years it took to train a cavalryman in the druzhina of a Rus chieftain, we learned. Six for his horse.
The horseman spoke good Norse – East, of course, but most understood him. We admired his two sabres, his lance, the mace that dangled from one wrist, the cased bow.
‘Are the Khazars the same?’ I asked and he smiled down at me.
‘Not so brave or good-looking,’ he replied. ‘But they are the same; all cavalrymen are. You need to be mad to be one and your horse doubly so. It takes the same time to train them – half the army has Khazar blood in them anyway. We always end up fighting our relations in these affairs.’
We chuckled and said it was the same in the north. I tossed him the skin and he drank and gave it back, wiping excess off his moustaches.
Suddenly, Yaropolk was there, with Einar at his stirrup, both scowling.
‘Father is leaving, brother,’ the pimpled Yaropolk said pointedly to the boy, then flushed and inclined his head graciously to the man. ‘Uncle,’ he said and we now realised, with a shock, that the boy was young Prince Vladimir and the man Dobrynya, his uncle on his mother’s side. The uncle now raised his helmet, slipped it back over his head and then raised one hand in salute.
‘Prince Vladimir,’ acknowledged Einar and the boy paused as Yaropolk rode off.
‘I like your men, Einar the Black,’ he said in a sweet, unbroken voice. ‘If you survive Biela Viezha, we shall speak again.’
And he was gone, leaving us in a cloud of dust. Einar stroked his moustaches thoughtfully.
‘What was all that about?’ demanded Bersi. ‘Was that really a Rus prince?’
‘Kingship was what it was all about,’ grunted Einar. ‘When you are born to a thrall woman, you need more of it to survive.’ Then he bent to a barrel and heaved. ‘Back to work, you useless farts.’
As we fell into the rhythm of passing barrel and sack, someone said plaintively, ‘What the fuck is Biela Viezha?’
The White Castle, the Slav name for the Khazar fortress at Sarkel, was what it was. The great, white-limestone fortress on a dun-coloured rise in a bend of the Don, almost at the Black Sea was what it was. The greatest insult to the Rus was what it was, for they had to pay ten per cent on every trade flotilla that went up or down from the Black Sea and politely beg for permission