I would not give it, for I was not about to risk my life for a filthy little coastal fish-trader like this.
Sarkel had fallen, the captain told us, trying to judge our reaction to that news. No one blinked much at it – what was Sarkel now to us? We had no ship and were crushed with loss. We could not set foot in the Rus lands now, so the only safe place was the Great City, where we had no prospects.
Well, that last was not quite true and Kvasir voiced it for all. He hunched himself up by my side, the wind whipping the greasy tangles of his hair. ‘You have the right of it, Trader,’ he growled, ducking as the spray lashed us. ‘This is not the ship for us.’
‘Just so,’ Finn echoed. ‘What we need is a solid knarr. Or one of those Greek dromon ships.’
‘A big-bellied one,’ agreed Short Eldgrim, picking a scab on his face. ‘That can carry a lot. There are many in Miklagard.’
‘And some more good men,’ offered Sighvat. ‘Good Norsemen or Slavs, not afraid of a hard oath.’
And they grinned like wolves, yellow-fanged in the dark, so that my stomach turned over.
I knew why they needed all this, and were looking to me to come up with a deep-minded plan to get it. I sat in the salt-slick wind, feeling the bite of it, the damp seeping through the stained wool of my tunic and the despair settling on me like morning haar in a fjord.
It was what they did – what they were. The fear they had felt just weeks before had eased, leaving only the lure of what was still out there to be found. You could not be a Northman, have the knowledge of a mountain of silver and simply leave it there.
They had not seen what I had seen and none of my horror tales of Hild’s fetch would keep them from going back.
We were still on the whale road and, in the wind that keened and thrummed the ropes, I swore I could hear Odin laugh.
The Whale Road is set in and around the year 965AD, an era when the line of kings in Norway and Denmark is confidently set out by historians and, for the same era, the nation that would end up as Sweden is generally marked as ‘chaos and confusion’, with not even the names of the protagonists known for certain.
More confidently, the history of several hundred years earlier does record that Attila died on the night of his wedding to Ildico, who was found beside the bloody corpse the next day. No one knows where he is actually interred, though the Hungarians make the loudest claim for it, at the same time as repudiating that the Hun part of their name has anything to do with that barbarous tribe. I prefer the idea of his being interred out on the open steppe, but that is pure invention on my part.
He did have a famous battle-winning sword and both he and it seemed to have been interchangeably called The Scourge of God – but who made it, its twin and what they were made from is also my own invention.
The Volsungs are real – well, more real. They figure in the classic Saga of the Volsungs – no one has yet confidently identified who they actually were – composed anonymously between 1200 and 1270, almost certainly in Iceland and probably using all the stories, in prose and poetry, which had been handed down about the Volsungs and Gjukungs.
In it, the whole relationship with Attila the Hun, tributes of treasure and more is an integral part of the story. Elements of that and other Icelandic eddas went on to become the basis for Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle and, later, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Birka and the other trading ports along the Baltic all suffered from the lack of eastern silver around this time, but Birka suffered most of all and, by 972AD was all but gone from history. Gotland, until then a seasonal fair, picked up the trade and now some of the richest archaeological finds of Dark Age silver come from that island.
The rise of the Rus into a nation at this time is fascinating. The Norse, the Slavs, the strange Khazars and all the steppe tribes swirled in the huge cauldron of central Russia, slowly being moulded into an empire, first by Sviatoslav, then Vladimir and finally, Yaroslav, the Wise, who re-fashioned Kiev in the image of Byzantium, laid the foundations for a new Kremlin and built the famous Golden Gates, as well as the Saint Sophia cathedral.
Finally, there are the varjazi, the Rus name for those bands of Norse warriors hiring themselves out for pay. They had carved out the kingdoms of the Norse, but now those kingdoms had no use for them – they were busy making themselves into nations and the sea raiders of the past were now interlopers to be fought off.
Even their gods were under threat from the rise of Christianity and only the growing rift between the Greek church of Byzantium and the western worship of Rome seemed to slow the process. The final schism between those two churches came in the 11th century, but arrived too late to prevent the demise of the Aesir gods of the north. Stubbornly, the varjazi fought on until only their name was left – the Greek rendering of it was Varangii and the famed Varangian Guard of the Byzantine emperors was composed of 6000 originals sent by Vladimir to Byzantium only some 20 years after the events of this story.
Less than a hundred years later the ranks of this elite Viking guard were almost all filled by Saxons from England, fleeing after Hastings, having been defeated, ironically, by the Normans – the Vikings who had settled in France.
The so-called Dark Age was coming to an end. Those who imagine this meant civilisation coming out of a long, dark tunnel of barbarism, where beleaguered souls huddled round fires in skins, bemoaning the loss of a good Roman bath and waiting desperately for someone to reinvent underfloor heating, should consider that the Norse, at this time, traded, raided and settled from Iceland to Russia, from Orkney to Jerusalem. Byzantium, at this time, was a city of more than a million people when Paris was a collection of huts with a few thousand – and the Norse attacked both with equal arrogant confidence.
Finally, this is a saga, to be read round a fire against the lurking dark. Any errors or omissions I claim as my own – but don’t let it spoil the tale.
ALDEIGJUBORG – Starya Ladoga, a town near the eventual site of St Petersburg and a trading port at the entrance to the first of the rivers leading south into Russia.
BIRKA – Main trading port of the Baltic in the 9th and 10th centuries, it was also noted for being the site of the first Christian congregation in Sweden, founded by Angskar (see Hammaburg, below). After 972AD, Birka vanished from historical record - it is thought that a combination of silting harbours and a failure in the flow of silver from the east killed it off. Gotland, further east, rose in its stead.
BJORNSHAFEN – Orm’s home – fictional, it is based on archaeological evidence in many farm sites, such as Ribblehead in Yorkshire.
DYFFLIN – ‘Dubh Linn’ (Black Pool) was established in the 10th century and became a favoured trading place for the Norse.
GARDARIKI – Norse name for early Russia, the kingdoms of Novgorod and Kiev. Usually translated as ‘kingdom of cities’.
HAMMABURG – Early name for Hamburg, seat of Bishop Angskar, whose missionary zeal drove Christian priests out to convert the north. In reply, Vikings sacked the place in 845AD and the bishop barely escaped with his life.
HEDEBY – One of the best-known centres for commerce and industry, situated at the bottom of the Danish peninsula of Jutland; the territory at that time was part of Denmark but it now belongs to Germany. This thriving ‘town on the heather’, was destroyed in 1066 and no longer exists.
HOLMGARD – ‘Island town’, the Viking name for Novgorod, which was originally the chief town of Gardariki (see above) until the capture of Kiev, further south.
ITIL – Capital of the Khazarian Empire - moved to this city in 750AD from