their mounts along the north bank of the Don, as sweaty as we were cool.
They were the heavy horse; the lighter ones, the bowmen who rode fat-headed, short-legged, hairy dogs of ponies, were further out, wheeling like flocks of starlings on the far steppe, keeping the Khazar scouts at bay.
If there was any fighting, we never heard of it; we spent most of the time dicing, lazing about, trading fighting tips and hurling apple cores and rye-bread crusts at the luckless, sweating cavalrymen, who took it all in good part, it seemed to me.
But when we saw the White Castle, we knew why they didn’t mind. It was dazzling, blinding white and the walls were huge and solid, with four towers and two gates and a bloody great ditch. I had been told that the Khazars had cities of tents and flimsy structures, easily destroyed and just as easily rebuilt. Even their palaces were just mud brick and they lived in them only during the winter.
Not Sarkel. It will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that the Great City had a hand in building it, ever-helpful to balance the power in the area. Sarkel was built with solid pillars and Roman know-how – and now they had sent their cleverest men and their biggest engines to knock it down, which is statecraft to these Romans.
As our boat was manhandled into the shore, one of the horsemen broke away and trotted over to us, peeling off his helmet to reveal a beaming, sweating face with a huge curl of moustache. ‘Welcome, sword-brothers,’ he chuckled and swept his hand towards the huge edifice squatting on the plain. ‘I hope you enjoyed the rest and the apples. Now it is time to play your part.’
We looked at each other, then to those yellow-white walls on which we had to hurl ourselves and no one was smiling when he trotted off, his bellowing laugh drifting back to us, echoed by his companions.
He had to wait to see us suffer, though. The first days were spent tumbling out everything that had been brought, while horsemen raced off everywhere and dust hazed the world. At night, the cookfires were a field of flickering red blossom.
In two weeks, Sarkel had been cut off and the engineers were doing things with the timbers they’d brought. Spearmen – not the druzhina like us, but the great mass of unarmoured levy, sucked in from every tribe for hundreds of miles – stacked their weapons and dug level pits and raised platforms.
We all watched, fascinated, the first time three of these great efforts lobbed sheep-sized boulders across the steppe at the walls to get the range. They hit with a booming crash and a great puff of dust – but nothing happened; nothing collapsed. Disappointed, we went back to the sweaty, stinking job of scraping and boiling cowhides for glue to help fix the assault towers we would use.
That night, hunkered round our own collection of cook-fires, we chewed flatbread, sucked down a good meat-gruel, endured the insects and traded our thoughts back and forth.
‘There’s no place left to shit,’ Bersi complained.
‘Sit here,’ offered my father.
‘Shit,’ Bersi clarified. ‘No place to shit. I’m fed up with stepping in it, everywhere you go.’
It was true enough. I’d heard the army was anything from sixty thousand to a million men and either could be true, though such a number was impossible to get inside your head.
All I knew was that there were a lot of them and even more animals and women and children. Even for people like us, who’d grown up with shit, things were getting out of hand.
Illugi Godi said there would be trouble over it. People would start to get sick. Einar said that, tomorrow, he would have a place marked out and a pit dug. Everyone would shit there and nowhere else.
‘Don’t try it drunk,’ advised Wryneck, who claimed to have had done this sort of thing before, ‘or you’ll fall in and stink for a week. If you even get out again, that is.’
But it was Ketil Crow who said what we all wanted to say. ‘When are we leaving this?’ he growled at Einar. ‘Before we get slaughtered on those walls, or die of shit-sickness here, I am hoping to hear you say.’
Einar stroked his moustaches. ‘We need to plan it well.’
‘Plan what?’ demanded Valknut, who was burned dark as a Fir Gorm, the black-men thralls from the very south of the world, so that only his eyes and teeth were seen clearly in the twilight. ‘We know where to go – what else is there?’
‘Of course,’ said that quiet voice from the dark behind Einar. ‘That’s all you really need, after all.’
She was like a cold wind through an open door. Everyone fell silent under the weight of her renewed presence, but Ketil Crow just half glanced at her, irritated, then spat in the fire. ‘Do we know where to go?’ he demanded. ‘I am wondering why I am following some hag-ridden Finn woman.’
‘You think I do not know the way?’ Hild challenged, squatting so that her knees came up almost round her ears, the dress pooled in her lap. Her feet, I saw, were neat and bare.
No one spoke, or looked at her long, but Ketil Crow looked from her to where Einar sat, his back to Hild, staring at the fire from under the wings of his hair and saying nothing.
‘The others may be afraid of you,’ Ketil Crow growled, ‘but I am not. If you prove false in this I will rip you from cunt to jawline.’
Hild did not flinch, though a few of us did. Instead, she smiled that fey smile. ‘It is good you are not afraid, Ketil Crow,’ she said in a voice like the whisper of bat’s wings. ‘You will need that courage, I am thinking.’
Einar stirred then, half turning to where Hild crouched like some black spider. He shook his head and stroked his moustaches again. ‘There’s more than just finding it,’ he said.
‘So you say,’ growled Wryneck, ‘but I am with Ketil Crow in this matter. It seems to me that a witless girl is about to lead us into the sea of grass. I never trusted women and that has always stood me in good stead.’
‘You won’t become old and rich,’ declared Hild suddenly, in a growl so unlike her own voice that everyone froze. The wind hissed, flattening the fire. Wryneck hawked and spat, deliberately loudly, a sneer of sound.
‘You bicker like women,’ Illugi declared scornfully. ‘What has Einar to say on this?’
It seemed to me that if Einar had had anything to say he would have hoiked it out before now. I wondered if Hild had laid some seidr on him that kept his lips fastened on the matter – but he stirred like a man coming out of a sleep.
‘We will get there,’ he said, so softly that those at the back had to have it repeated to them. ‘Then what?’ He looked around us, challengingly. ‘We get there and do what? Knock on the door and ask politely if we can have the hospitality of this dead hov? Some ale and meat and, oh, by the way, all the silver we can hold? What if there is no door, no way in – how do we make one?’
He wiped his mouth, reached for a skin and filled his horn, which was held between his knees, for the ground was too baked hard to stand it upright.
‘More to the point,’ he added, slashing us all with that black stare, ‘how do you carry it away? In our shirts? Stuff it down our boots, or in our hats?’
‘True enough,’ Bagnose said cheerfully. ‘There’s a mountain of silver. We’ll need a few big boots for that.’
They chuckled and Einar explained, ‘We need rope and hoes and mattocks and carts to carry all of that – and to take the silver away in. And ponies to haul the carts. Not oxen, for they are too slow.’
There was silence while we all chewed on that and how to go about it. In the end, of course, Bersi put it to Einar.
‘We wait,’ he said. No one liked that answer.
‘For what?’ demanded Ketil Crow. ‘We can take all those things—’
‘And get how far – a mile? Two?’ growled Illugi, shaking his head. ‘Those horsemen move