others, it seems, died of strangling and this one here has had his brains bashed out.’
He straightened, wiping his hands on his tunic. ‘If I was asked,’ he said grimly, ‘I would say the ones who survived gelding strangled each other with the thongs that had once bound them and the last one ran at the wall until his head broke.’
‘Is Starkad there?’ demanded Radoslav and the silence gave him as good an answer as he would get. We stared, the sick, iron smell of blood and the drone of flies filling the space as we considered the horror of it.
Doomed, they had chosen a death that did not lead to Valholl and, because they had no weapons in their hands, led straight to Helheim, especially for the last man, who had slain himself. No man who was not whole could cross Bifrost to be Einherjar in the hall of the gods, waiting for Ragnarok. That was something I knew to my cost, for I had already lost fingers off my own hand and it was my wyrd that they were lost for ever and that I would never see the rainbow bridge.
I made a warding sign against the possibility of a fetch lurking in the fetid dark here, for I had had experience of such a thing before, with Hild in Attila’s grave-mound. Then I added the sign of the cross, but Brother John was too busy offering prayers, kneeling without a thought in the gory slush of the floor.
I wondered if the dead men were followers of Christ or Odin, for it seemed the Christ-god had a more forgiving nature and would accept them into his hov whether they had balls or no. Or fingers. Then I shook the thought away; Valaskjalf, Odin’s own hall, was open to me and that was enough. There were many halls in Asgard who would welcome the hero-dead, whole or no.
Finn and the others arrived, speckled and slathered with blood, to be told of the tragedy. That sealed the fate of the ones in the church, for even if they had been enemies, Starkad’s men were good Northmen and should not have been handled so badly.
‘There is too much of this ball-cutting for my liking,’ muttered Kol. ‘Like that greasy thrall of the Greek merchant – what was his name?’
‘Niketas,’ growled Kvasir and spat.
‘He was a spadone,’ answered Brother John. ‘The kindest treated.’
‘Eh? What’s kind about gelding?’ demanded Finn. ‘Fine for horses, but men? We do it to shame them.’
‘It is done sometimes to men for the same reason it is done to horses,’ Sighvat pointed out, ‘but I did not know there were different names for it.’
‘Different types,’ corrected Brother John. ‘A spadone has been gelded – the testicles removed neatly with a sharp blade.’ He paused, gave a little gesture and a sschikk then grinned as Finn and others shifted uncomfortably, drawing their knees tighter together.
‘They do that even to some high-borns, when they are babes,’ he went on as we gawped with disbelief. ‘Only whole men may become the Basileus, and some of these princes get it done so they can then hold high office and yet be no threat.’
‘There are also thlassiae, ones whose testicles have simply been crushed between stones.’ He slapped his hands together so that men jumped and Finn groaned.
‘And the third kind?’ I asked, curious now.
Brother John shrugged and frowned, waving a hand at the clotted corpses. ‘You do not get these in Miklagard much these days but further east, where men are permitted many wives and concubines and the women are kept apart in a place of their own. They have slaves attend them and, if they are male, they have to be … made harmless.’
‘Ah … so they can’t hump the big bull’s heifers,’ chortled Finn with considerable insight.
‘How?’ I persisted.
‘They remove everything, leave you a straw to piss through,’ answered Brother John, to be greeted with a chorus of disbelief. ‘The Greek-Romans of Miklagard call them castrati.’
There was silence where gorged flies buzzed.
‘This is what happened here?’ I asked.
Brother John nodded sombrely. ‘Yes. It is a Mussulman thing.’
Men grunted, as if dug in the ribs, for Northmen were no strangers to cutting balls, though it was rare – so rare, I had not seen it myself. Along with cutting a man on the buttocks, it was a klammhog, a shame-stroke that told everyone how unmanned this enemy had been and was done when we considered the defeated warrior’s fighting had been cowardly.
There was silence while we chewed over this; then Finn spat on his hands and took up a brace of hand axes and led us all back to the door. Even as the chips flew like snow, it was clear it was too stout for even his strength and fierce anger.
‘They built it well,’ Sighvat said, ‘as a fortress in time of trouble, I am thinking.’
‘Burn the door,’ I said and men dragged parts of the huge fire in the square over to the door, while others hauled anything that would burn out of the long-abandoned houses of the village.
Then we sat down and waited, while the smoke rose up and the door charred and the dawn fingered a way up into the night sky. I had two men stand watch, got Kvasir and two others to break down one of the mud-brick hovels for the frame-wood and stack it in the house with Starkad’s dead.
The two who had served us well on the donkeys were beginning to turn green-black, so they too were added and then it was fired. It was as close to a decent funeral as I could think of and, though the Oathsworn were tired and Kvasir had taken a cut to his side, they raised no protest at it.
The others and myself sat and watched the burning door of the church and put an edge back on blunted axes. I had others collect up the spilled weapons of the dead; though it was generally agreed that those half-moon swords were poor weapons, being single-edged and sharp-pointed for stabbing and little use to a slashing man.
Behind us, the funeral pyre for Starkad’s men growled in the wind, for the baked-mud bricks of the house acted like an oven and it would not catch fire, but seemed to glow in the intense heat. Bits of it ran like water.
Radoslav went off, poking about in the houses on his own and came back with a double-handful of something that was a puzzle to him. He held them out, a handful of sharp points. ‘I found a barrel of these iron things,’ he said, bemused.
All of us knew what they were, for we had laboured to load similar barrels for Sviatoslav’s army when it headed for Sarkel.
‘Raven feet,’ I said to him, taking one. ‘You use them to keep horsemen away from you – like so.’ I tossed one and it bounced and rolled and landed, one point upward. Radoslav saw the possibility at once: a carpet of these, scattered like sown seed in front of you. No matter how they landed, one point was always up and just right for piercing the soft flesh under a hoof.
‘Calcetrippae,’ Brother John said. ‘That’s what the Romans called them.’
‘Whatever the name,’ I declared, ‘we can take them, too, since we are headed for a land where men fight on horses.’
‘A good spear, well braced, would do it,’ growled Finn. ‘Or a Dane axe. A Dane axe is best against horsemen.’
The others nodded and growled their assent and told stories of men they had heard of who cleaved horse and rider in two with one stroke using a long-handled axe. The fire crackled against the door and the night wind breathed down the street; somewhere, the donkeys brayed.
I leaned back, having picked all the bits of dirt, stone and splinters out of my knees that I could find and remembered big-bellied Skapti Halftroll, who could make a Dane axe dance and whirr like a bird wing and would have been one of those one-stroke horse cleavers.
I remembered, too, the inch of throwing spear jutting from his mouth after it had caught him in the back of the neck as we jogged away from the three-handed fight with Starkad and the local villagers – close to two years ago, though it seemed longer. All that