agreed my father, ‘it was not. Stammkel hated Gunnar Raudi before this and, after that, tore his beard out over it and made it known he would have his farm, one way or the other. He hired two known hard men, Ospak and Styrmir, who claimed to be berserkers. Then he sent them round with two thralls to deal with me.’
He stirred a log back into the fire with his foot and watched the embers swirl like red flies in the dark.
‘Why did Stammkel hate Gunnar Raudi so much?’ I asked and he shot me a sideways glance.
‘No matter,’ he answered. ‘So these men came to the hov this night, as they had announced they would, all four of them and well armed and me with only myself to face them.’
Wide-eyed, I waited and, when nothing came, I demanded, ‘What happened?’
‘I died, of course,’ he said and grinned as I blinked, then realised he had led me into the oldest and worst joke in saga-telling, which is just what a father does to his child at some point. I grinned back at him, my heart leaping with the warmth of it.
‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I would have done just that, save that Gunnar Raudi swaggers up, as was his way, and winks at me as he passes me. “Hello, lads,” he says to these four. “No need for this, for Rurik here has decided to quit this place.”
‘Which was news to me and must have sounded strange to them, looking at me standing there with a seax in one hand and a wood axe in the other and the look of a man not about to quit anything.’
He shook his head and chuckled. ‘A deep thinker was Gunnar. “Listen, lads,” he says. “We’ll drink on it and part friends and you can tell Stammkel to turn up the day after tomorrow, for then this place will be empty.” And he winks at me again and walks all four of them into the hall of my hov and sits them down, calling for ale and food.’
‘What did you do?’ I demanded and he shrugged.
‘What else? I followed them in and sat down with them and we drank until it ran down our noses. After a long while, Gunnar Raudi gets up and announces he is off for a piss and goes outside. After a bit longer, we all remember he went and laugh at him, thinking he had probably fallen in the privy.
‘But I had seen him wink on the way out, so I say to Ospak to go find him and he is drunk enough to do just that. After a while longer, of course, Ospak never comes back either and I mention this and put my head on my arms and pretend to sleep.
‘So Styrmir gets up and goes out and the two thralls carry on drinking and laughing at me snoring, so that when Gunnar Raudi steps in, his blade all red and dripping, they piss themselves all over my floor.
‘And that was that,’ my father said. ‘Gunnar tells the two thralls to carry the bodies of Ospak and Styrmir back to Stammkel and tell him to give up any claims on the farm. “The heads,” he says, “I will keep and stick on poles, to watch out for more of Stammkel’s foolishness.” Which he did.’
He stopped and squeezed his eyes shut, then rubbed them, for he had been staring into the embers too long. ‘By the time all this had been done you were toddling around and causing trouble and, though I was left alone after that, I had no stomach for it, so I sold the place and went over to Gudleif with you.’
He looked at me, eyes watering from the staring so that they made my heart thunder, for the moistness was as like tears as not. ‘I always meant to return,’ he said. ‘But I knew you would be safe with Gunnar. More so with him than me.’
I wanted to ask more, but he clapped a hand on my shoulder and levered himself to his feet, then patted me gently a couple of times, as you would a horse or a dog, and moved off into the dark, leaving me with the fire and my thoughts whirling like the sparks.
At some point, I fell asleep and dreamed, though. Or thought I did. Or stepped into the fetch world, that half-lit Other.
I was in Dengizik’s tomb again, alone, in a blue dark, like a night with a shrouded moon. The lines of soldiers, dead but still with eyes that followed me, were sitting patiently and Hild sat at the foot of the throne, chained to it by the neck.
I took a step to her and the soldiers shifted. I took another and they rose, with a hissing rustle like insect wings.
Then I ran and they surged on me, a blinding mass like bats, like a blizzard of dust and fury with no more substance than memory.
And, suddenly, I was there, looking into the great white-rimmed pools of Hild’s eyes, while she smiled up at me. My arm rose and fell, the sword in it chopping the withered hand from Dengizik, which held Hild’s neck chain.
It fell, slowly, slowly, tumbling, shredding scraps of flayed skin, dusty bone.
Then I was awake, by the fire, staring into the limpid eyes of Hild, who sat astride me, her face inches from mine. Her mouth worked, twisting this way and that; sounds tore from her in a rippling, wheezing hiss: ‘Don’t … go … with us. Live …’
Limpid eyes, dewed with … tears? I watched them expand, to where the black ate all the white, saw the hands which cupped my face claw like talons, felt her quiver and then, with a sickening liquid surge, rise up over me and step away, into the darkness.
I breathed. I know I did, because I heard it, ragged and thundering in my ears. There was no other sound for a moment, then all the noise of the world crashed back and I blinked at the camp murmur, the hiss of dung-chips on the fire, my father’s groan and stir, Skarti’s fluttering fart.
I sat up, looked wildly around, but everything was as it should be – and yet nothing was. Had it happened? Had I dozed and woken in my dream? Did I dream still?
All the rest of that night I wondered, staring into the glowing embers until my eyeballs seared.
There were horns and drums sounding, like ships lost in a golden fog. Under our feet the steppe had crumbled, crusted over and was kicked to dust again, hanging in the air, gritting our eyeballs, scorching tongue and nose and throat.
The acrid stink of horses hung in that dust as they sluiced nervous piss and moved to our flanks, ghosts in the murk, to make sure the assault wasn’t smacked by a counter-foray from the once-white city.
This time there were just sixty-two of us, half with their teeth clamped tight because otherwise they’d chip or crack them with the fever’s jaw-quaking chatter. Twenty more lay under awnings back at a new camp, amid the hundreds of other sick gathered in one place so that what aid there was could be more easily given. Not that there was much ... they lay and shook and died in pools of their own loosened bowels.
But we stood and waited, while fire and death occupied the space between us and the ravaged city. In the yellow shroud of dust, five dark towers moved, like the fingers of a hand, while archers rushed forward in pairs, one holding a pavise of reeds, the other shooting, then ducking under to reload.
There were hoots and screeches and shrieks and, through it all, the high, thin scream of horses dying, a sound which, to me, seemed worst of all.
I leaned on my shield, on one knee, watching, almost detached from it. Skarti, shivering, was glass-eyed and shit dribbled down one leg, but he didn’t seem to notice. The smell of that and dust and oil on steel – that was battle and any component part of it reaching my nostrils later in my life would bring my head sharply up, like a chariot horse of the Blues when it hears the roar of the crowd.
A block of sweating men heaved and strained, some in front and some behind, moving the tower foot by slow foot towards the walls, from which rained death, unseen in the murk.
Unseen but felt. Like some giant snail, the block of men round the tower left a slick, viscous trail of blood and sprawled bodies behind, felled by arrows, fist-sized stones fired from small engines and large spears fired from bigger engines.
There was a bird, amazingly. It flitted out of the dust and perched briefly on the shaft of one of the hedgehog maze of arrows sticking from the assault tower, then whirred off again, gone in an eyeblink.
Then a flock of