a long knife and a tattooed whorl between his eyes, which I knew was the Ægishjalm, the Helm of Awe, a runesign supposed to send your enemies away screaming in terror with the right words spoken. I wished he would turn it off, for it was working well on me.
‘I heard him call you pig fart,’ he said in good East Norse, his eyes and teeth bright in the alley’s twilight. ‘So I reasoned he bore you no goodwill. And, since you are Orm the Trader, who has a crew and no ship, and I am Radoslav Schchuka, who has a ship and no crew, I was thinking my need for you was greater than his.’
He helped me up with a wrist-to-wrist grip and I saw that his bared forearm had several thick-welted white scars. I looked at the dead Dane as this Radoslav bent and rifled his purse, finding a few coins, which he took, along with the seax. Then it came to me that I should be dead in the alley and my legs trembled, so that I had to hold on to the wall. I looked up to see the big man – a Slav, for sure – cutting his own arm with the seax and realised the significance of the scars.
He saw my look and showed me his teeth in a sharp grin. ‘One for every man you kill. It is the mark of my clan, where I come from,’ he explained, then helped me roll the Dane in his cloak and back into the shadows of the alley. I was shaking now, but not at my narrow escape – it had come to me that the Dane would have gone his way and left me lying in the muck, alive – but at what had been lost. I could have wept for the shame of losing it, too.
‘Who were they?’ asked my rescuer, binding up his new scar.
I hesitated; but since he had painted the wall with a man’s blood, I thought it right that he knew. ‘A chosen warrior of one Starkad, who is King Harald Bluetooth’s man and anxious that he get something from me.’
For Choniates, I suddenly thought, the Greek merchant who had coveted that runed sword when he’d seen it. It was clear the Greek had sent Starkad to get it and would be unhappy about the death. The Great City had laws, which they took seriously, and a dead Dane in an alley could be tracked back to Starkad and then to Choniates.
Radoslav shrugged and grinned as we checked no one could see us, then left the alley, striding casually along as if we were old friends heading for a drink-shop. My legs shook, which made the mummery difficult.
‘You can judge a man by his enemies, my father always said,’ Radoslav offered cheerfully, ‘and so you are a great man for one so young. King Harald Bluetooth of the Danes, no less.’
‘And young Prince Yaropolk of the Rus also,’ I added grimly to see his reaction, since he was from that part of the world. Beyond a widening of his eyes at this mention of the Rus King’s eldest son there was silence, which lasted for a few footsteps, long enough for my racing heart to settle.
I was trying desperately to think, panicked at what had been lost, but I kept seeing that little knife come out of the Dane’s neck under his ear and the blood hiss like spray under a keel. Someone who could do that to a man is someone you must walk cautiously alongside.
‘What did he steal?’ Radoslav asked suddenly, the rain glistening on his face, turning it to a mask of planes and shadows.
What did he steal? A good question and, in the end, I answered it truthfully.
‘The rune serpent,’ I told him. ‘The roofbeam of our world.’
I brought him to our hov in a ruined warehouse by the docks, as you would a guest who has saved your life, but I did this Radoslav no favours. Sighvat and Kvasir and Short Eldgrim and the rest of the Oathsworn were huddled damply round a badly smoking brazier, talking about this and that and, always, about Orm’s plan to get them back to sea in a fine ship, so that they could be proper men again.
Except Orm didn’t have a plan. I had used up all my plans getting the dozen of us away from the ruin of Attila’s howe months before, paying the steppe tribes with what little I had ripped from that flooding burial mound – and had nearly drowned to get, the weight of it stuffed in my boots almost dragging me down.
I could not get rid of the Oathsworn after we had all been dumped on the quayside. Like a pack of bewildered dogs they had looked to me. Me. Young enough for any to call me son and yet they called me ‘jarl’ instead and boasted to any they met that Orm was the deepest thinker they had ever shared an ale horn with, even as I spun and hung my mouth open at the sheer size and wealth and wonder of the Great City of the Romans.
Here, the people ate free bread and spent their time howling at the chariot and horse races in the Hippodrome, fighting mad over their Blue or Green favourites and worse than any who went on a vik, so that city-wide riots were common.
The char-black scars from the previous year still marked where one had spread out, incited by opponents of Nikephoras Phocas, who ruled here. It had failed and no one knew who had fed the flames of it, though Leo Balantes was a name whispered here and there – but he and other faces were wisely absent from the Great City.
A black-hearted city right enough, which turned the slither from the gutters crow-dark so that we knew, even if the story of it curled on itself like a carved snake-knot, that cruelty squatted in Miklagard. Blood-feuds we knew well enough, but Miklagard’s treachery we did not understand any better than the city’s screaming passion for chariots and horses that raced instead of fought.
We were wide-eyed bairns on this new ship and had to learn how to sail it, fast. We learned that calling them Greek was an insult, since they considered themselves Romans, the only true ones left. But they all spoke and wrote in Greek and most of them knew only a little Latin – though that did not stop them muddying the waters of their tongue with it.
We learned that they lived in New Rome, not Constantinople, nor Miklagard, nor Omphalos, Navel of the World, nor the Great City. We learned that the Emperor was not an Emperor, he was the Basileus. Now and then he was the Basileus Autocrator.
We learned that they were civilised and we could not be trusted in a decent home, where we would either steal the silver or hump the daughters – or both – and leave dirty marks on the floors. We learned all this, not from kindly teachers, but from curled lips and scorn.
The slaves were better off than us, for they were fed and sheltered free, while we took miserable pay every day from a fat half-Greek, which would not let us afford either decent mead – even if we could find it here – or a decent hump. My stock of Atil’s silver was all but exhausted and still no plan had come to me yet and I wondered how long the Oathsworn would stomach this.
Singly and in pairs like half-ashamed conspirators all of them had approached me at one time or another since we had been here, all with the same question: what had I seen inside Attila’s howe?
I told them: a mountain of age-blackened silver and a gifthrone, where Einar the Black, who had led us all there, now sat for ever as the richest dead man in the world.
All of them had been there – though none but me inside it – yet none could find the way back to it, navigating themselves like a ship across the Grass Sea. I knew they also felt the fish-hook jerk of it, despite all that they had suffered, no matter that they had watched oarmates die there and had felt the dangerous, sick magic of that place for themselves.
Above all, they knew the curse that came from breaking the oath they had sworn to each other. Einar had broken it and they all saw what had become of that, so none slipped away in the night, abandoning his oarmates to follow the lure of silver. I was not sure whether this was from fear of the curse, or because they did not know the way, but they were Norsemen. They knew a mountain of riches lay out on the steppe and they knew it was cursed. The wrench between fear and silver-desire ate them, night and day.
Almost every night, in the quiet of that false hov, they wanted to look at the sword, that sinuous curve of sabre wrenched from Atil’s howe by my hand. A master smith had made that, a half-blood dwarf or a dragon-prince, surely no man. It could cut the steel of the anvil it was made on and was worked along the blade length with a rune serpent, a snake-knot whose meaning no one could quite unravel.
The Oathsworn came to marvel at that steel curve, the sheen of it – and the new runes I had carved into the