two masters. We have this letter, to be carried to an Archbishop who has never seen Starkad or his men. At most he may have been told Norsemen are coming.’
Radoslav grinned. ‘We are Norsemen.’
‘Just so,’ I replied and turned into Finn’s grin.
‘You are a man for clever, right enough,’ he growled. ‘Where, on this chart of Radoslav’s, is this Cyprus?’
The Volchock was no sleek drakkar, or even hafskip, as I have said. It bounced on the waves rather than slicing them, and fought us, as a little bear might. But you could see why the people of the Middle Sea called ships ‘she’ – that was how you sailed a knarr, teasing her into the wind rather than using force, persuading her until you found one she liked.
Finn spat derisively when I started that, saying that you did the same with bulls and stallions and old boar pigs if you were sensible, adding that a ship was a ship and no good would come of dressing it in skirts. Especially skirts, for a woman was a useless thing at sea. There was good reason, he finished, that the word for ship in Norse is neither woman nor man.
Sighvat said it was a good thing. ‘After all,’ he added, ‘there is always expense with a ship as with a woman. And always a gang of men around. And a ship has a waist, shows off a top and hides a bottom.’
‘It takes an experienced man to get the best out of a ship and a woman,’ added Kvasir into the roars of laughter. They went on with it, finding new comparisons while they cursed it in equal measure. If you could gybe or tack, a knarr was a good vessel, but when the wind failed, you hauled down the sail and waited, rolling and wallowing, until another came up from the right quarter – or just sailed in the wrong direction.
Gizur had his own views on Radoslav’s ship. ‘The rigging needs to be served, seized or whipped properly,’ he declared to me with disgust. ‘The beitiass should be shortened, the cleats moved and blocks rigged to tighten it.’ He raised a hand, as if presenting a jewel of great value, though his face was twisted with disgust. When he opened his fist, there was a handful of what looked like oatmeal. ‘Look at this. Just look at it.’
‘What is it?’ demanded Radoslav fearfully and I was close behind him. Some wood-rotting disease? A rune curse?
‘Shavings, from the rakki lines,’ Gizur said with a snort. I looked up at the rakki, the yoke which snugged round the mast and took all the strain of hauling the sail up and down.
‘The lines are rubbing the mast away,’ Gizur went on, frowning. ‘It is falling like snow!’
Radoslav rubbed his chin and tugged his brow-braids, then shrugged shamefacedly and said, ‘The truth of it is that this is only the second sea voyage I have ever done. I am a riverman, a born and bred oarsman. I traded happily up and down from Kiev, furs for silver, and made a good living at it until the troubles started with the Khazars and Bulgars. So I bought this, thinking to change my luck.’
Gizur at once changed, clapping the mournful man on one shoulder and all sympathy, for that was his way – which the others said came from being named for his mother, Gyda. His father, it was believed, had sailed off west following tales of a land there and had never come back.
We were rarely out of sight of land in this scattering of islands, so that we could put ashore each night. I preferred not to sleep there all the same, lying at anchor instead, since I was never sure of what lurked beyond the beach.
When it suited us, we sailed into the night, which was a dangerous business that no other seamen dared try – but we were Norsemen and had Gizur. The days turned warmer, but it still rained and we needed the sail as a tent on most nights, even though we slung it under a great wheel of stars in a seemingly cloudless sky. The last filling of waterskins was before the long, deep-water run to Cyprus and a succession of days followed one on the other, with a steady wind that let the ship run on blue-green water.
We never saw another ship but, on the last night before Cyprus, as the sun sank like blood-mist, Finn split and sizzled fresh-caught fish on the firebox atop the ballast and we settled cross-legged and ate them with thick gruel and watered ale flavoured with the limon-fruits, something we had all taken to doing to take away the stale taste of the drink, which had been too long casked. It was also as good as cloudberries at taking away the journey-sickness that brought out sores and loosened teeth in your gums.
We missed the taste of the cloudberries, all the same, and Arnor started singing mournful songs full of haar mists and the milk-white sea of the North, where the grit is ground out of the rocks by the ice.
Then talk turned to Cyprus and Serkland and the runesword and our oarmates and, in the end, always came down to that last, turned over and over like some strange coin, in the hope that handling and looking would suddenly reveal what the true worth of it was.
Only Radoslav knew much about Cyprus, for the Romans had only just recovered it from the Arabs. For some years, it seemed, both had tried to live shoulder to shoulder on the island, but then the Basileus had ordered the Arabs out two years before and any who stayed were warred against.
‘Just our Loki luck,’ mourned Finn moodily. ‘More heads to pound.’
As for Serkland, the only one who had been there was Brother John. Amund and Oski were two of the most far-travelled of us – with Einar, they had once raided down the coast of the Ummayads and through the Pillars of Hercules, which we called Norvasund, into the Middle Sea.
But Serkland, which we also called Jorsaland, was an unknown place to most of us. I only knew that they called it Serkland because the people there wore only serks – white underkirtles – instead of decent clothing.
Others had heard tales from freshly made Norse Christmen, who had gone there and swum across a river called Jordan, tying a knot in the bushes on the far side to prove they were true travellers for the White Christ. The tales were of carpets that flew and how the White Christ turned water into wine, or made a flatbread and a herring feed an army.
Brother John told us of the incredible number of snakes there, the heat and how the people who ruled it, the Abbasid Arabs, were now the very worst of infidel pagans.
‘Worse than us, eh?’ grinned Kvasir.
‘Just so,’ answered Brother John soberly. ‘For you at least can be called to see the error and embrace the true God, while these believe in their Mahomet and will kill rather than convert to the true faith.’
‘Kill rather than die,’ Sighvat pointed out and Brother John nodded sadly.
‘It is to the eternal shame of good Christians that these heathens are in control of the holiest of places.’
‘Yet,’ Radoslav pointed out, ‘they have no quarrel with Christ-men, I have heard, even though the soldiers of Miklagard are making war on them. They even tolerate the Jewish-men, though that is less trouble-free, for they were ever a hard people to rule. Even the Old Romans never managed it completely.’
‘True,’ admitted Brother John and sighed. ‘Omnia mutantor, nos et mutamur in illis – times change and so must we.’
Finn grunted appreciatively. ‘The Old Romans never ruled us, either. Maybe we can get together with these Jewish-men and give Starkad a smack. If they are like the Jew-men of the Khazars, I know they can fight well enough. They did at Sarkel.’
‘Easier to get one of those flying rugs, I am thinking,’ Sighvat said, stroking the head of one of the two remaining ravens, both of which had become almost too tame to be of use. It was unnerving to see Sighvat with one on either shoulder, like some Odin fetch.
‘I am hoping we run into Starkad without having to sail to Serkland,’ I pointed out and Amund agreed, saying it was the snakes there that bothered him most. Brother John patted his shoulder.
‘That