Lord of Slaughter (9 page)

The instinct to leave Rouen had been just that – an instinct. ‘You will know,’ the strange man had said. She did know. The thing that sought to harm her was there and she had to run from it.

A disturbance in the street, men’s voices, Greeks. She craned from the window to see what it was, but couldn’t. Boots tramped on her stairs – a man’s footfall. It wasn’t Loys. This fellow jingled like a shook purse. She recognised the sound. A hauberk of mail. A warrior was outside her door.

She went to the back room to hide, not knowing what to do. The door was bolted but any man who wanted to have it down could do so in a second. She had only the little knife she used to cut her thread. She took it up as a voice, thick and foreign, spoke loudly in Greek.

‘Open. Lady Beatrice, we know you and your station. Open the door and we will do you no harm.’

Beatrice crossed herself. She came back into the main room and ran to the window. The street was too far to jump.

‘No man enters here without a chaperone!’

Too late. A heavy blow, the door smashed in and she stood facing the soldiers.

7
The Road to the Dark

The wolfman trembled before the walls of Constantinople. They were vast, stretching from the water up the hill as far as he could see, almost too bright to look at in the morning sun, burning like he imagined the walls of the city of the gods would burn. Could Asgard be so vast?

The army had disembarked at a port ten miles down the coast so it could march into the city and receive the accolades of its people. The Varangians – Vikings and their kin from the Russian steppes – led the column. The wolfman was behind, with the emperor’s Greek guard, who marched leaderless and subdued. He had watched their great men hang.

It had been a weak and yellow dawn, the sun trapped beneath deep cloud, burning like a poor candle seen through the vellum of a window. The light had come up but the rain had not relented. They hanged them on a plum tree, one after the other. Everything was wet through and the hanging ropes were swollen and would not slip, so they’d tied the ropes as tight as they could, thrown them over a branch and pulled, leaving the men to dance and throttle. None of the victims said a word and none of their men made any protest. It was, said the soldiers, the Roman way.

Their job was to guard the emperor, and someone had got through. There was no excuse. Many among the Hetaeriean ranks thought Basileios was being lenient. Other emperors might have ordered the regiment decimated – every tenth man killed.

Now the army had outrun the bad weather and the day was bright under a sharp sun. The wolfman, though, scented something on the horizon. Smoke. A sooty rain had fallen on the battle and the wolfman tasted it here, even under the heat of the Greek autumn sun.

The front of the column burst into clamour as the army passed through the shanty town that spilled from the city walls like litter from the back of a house. Already hostile eyes were on him; a crowd jeered and a couple of bystanders threw mud and stones. The guards barked at them to stop and, dazzled by the exotic sight of the emperor and his new northern army, they forgot the wolfman as they poured forward to acclaim the victors.

The army arrived at the city gates. The wolfman looked to the head of the procession, where the emperor rode his white horse. On the journey home the emperor had put on plain soldier’s clothes but now he wore a sparkling crown and a great collar flashing with emeralds and rubies.

The emperor addressed the Varangians. The wolfman couldn’t understand what he said. He knew only a handful of words in Greek and he’d used all of them when he’d asked the emperor to kill him. The boy who had been in the tent translated into Norse. The Vikings would be guests outside the city walls for a while. When proper accommodation had been arranged for them they would enter. In the meantime, their every need would be met and all services provided. The northerners grumbled and moaned – some saying they had been tricked – but then a big Viking dressed all in red spoke.

He said the emperor honoured his promises and the Vikings would be well rewarded. As a gesture of goodwill, the Varangians would be paid within a week for the work they had done for Vladimir even though they had fought for Constantinople for less than a month. And tents would be delivered to them.

This assuaged their anger and the men pulled off the road and down the slope towards the sea, dragging their baggage with them, women, children, dogs and flocks of goats and sheep all trailing alongside. The Norsemen travelled light, used to sleeping on their ships, stretching the sail across as a canopy. Few had tents. Much of their treasure was in their ships, under guard down the coast, and so there were few carts or horses to move – just their personal possessions and weapons, their families and their livestock.

The Hetaereia advanced to the gate and the wolfman found himself near the front of the army behind the standard bearers, one carrying an image of St Helena, the other the sickle and star banner of Constantinople.

Past him came two riders, one in blue and one in green. They went up to the gates and hammered on them with gold-tipped staves.

‘Open in the name of the emperor!’

‘There is only one emperor, that is Basileios, born in the purple, king of all the world! The gates open for none but he!’ It wasn’t one man who spoke but hundreds, it seemed to the wolfman.

‘It is the king of all the world who is here!’ shouted both riders together. ‘Basileios Porphyrogenitus, autokrator, ordained by God on high. Bow down before him.’

‘We bow down!’

The gates swung open, and it was as if some great weight of waters swept down on the wolfman. He had been on the Ever-Violent Rapids on the Dneiper on his way from Kiev and been awed by their force. Here it was similar, a great roar sweeping out of the city and over him. He could suppress his fear, tell himself that his fate did not matter and that not one twist in the skein of his destiny would be different for worrying about it, but he could not control his wonder. This place was like nothing he had seen and, though he sat bound on an open cart, he forgot his discomfort, forgot the menace that faced him and just gaped at the spectacle.

The horses of the outriders lurched forward and the Greeks filed into the city. They walked through the gates, the crowd howling and clapping, people pushing out of the city to greet the strange northerners, to touch their hair and beards, feel their muscles – kiss them, even, in the case of some of the more excitable women. The Vikings weren’t slow to respond, hugging the women and crying out to more to join them. The column halted, pressed in by the throng coming out of the town – merchants carrying silks, food and tents, doctors rushing out waving bandages to advertise their trade, men with great pots of what the wolfman thought must be beer.

His cart jolted forwards and he really did start to feel a little afraid. The whiteness of the streets dazzled him and the noise of the great mass of people was almost unbearable. Giants looked down on him and a seething growl rose within him, but then he realised these were men of stone or metal – statues, though much bigger than any he had ever seen.

Alongside the column merchants ran, tugging on the tunics of the Greek warriors, trying to get them to buy fish, bread, candles, gaming pieces, weapons and many things the wolfman just didn’t recognise. It was an uproar the equal of any battle. A man ran along with a table twice his height, poking a hand out from beneath it to tug at the warriors. It reminded him of a creature he had once seen in the possession of a southern merchant – a tortoise.

The procession moved on, down the avenue of porches, through splendid squares, past huge and gaudy columns, beside what appeared to be an endless bridge following the route of the road. These things seemed monstrous to the wolfman, his head pounded and he was covered in sweat. The biggest town he had been in was Kiev – a village compared to this place.

He had to endure. His first mission to be killed by the emperor had failed; the harder route now opened to him, the one that would require all his courage. There was a reason for the splendour of Constantinople, Miklagard, the world city. It lay below it, in the waters that flowed under its streets – in the flooded caves that had been made to serve as cisterns to hold water for the fountains, drinking troughs and baths, and beyond them, deeper, to where older waters lay.

People spat at him and a few threw dung and stones. His guards warned them away, shouting that this was the emperor’s prisoner and whatever harm was to come to him was not for commoners to decide. The warnings proved useless and the crowd continued to curse and throw things. In the end two of the Hetaereia jumped up alongside him and protected him with their shields. They had been instructed by the emperor to deliver the prisoner to the Numera alive, and they knew Basileios’ tolerance for mistakes had evaporated at Abydos.

The wolfman steeled himself. He’d put up with worse, much worse – with freezing mountain winters, with the hardships of the lone hunter, with weeks spent starving and chanting beneath the harsh sun and the cold moon, singing the song his wolf brother had put into his head.

He once had a name: Elifr. He remembered it but it had no emotional connection to him now. He’d lived with a family in the north, by the great cliff of the Troll Wall. He’d never felt part of them. While his brothers were broad, tall and blond, he was smaller, thin, but with strong arms as spare and lean as the roots of a tree. Though his mother cared for him, she did not love him as she did her natural sons. He had been taken in as a child, as the return for a favour from a healer who had saved his father from a fever that looked set to kill him.

So Elifr had grown up lonely, wandering the hills, volunteering to take the sheep to the furthest pastures.

He remembered the night his wolf brother had come to him. It was summer and he slept only lightly. In the day he had found fresh wolf spoor and he knew the predators must be close by. He’d brought the sheep into a natural bowl in the hillside and lay down on one of its sides, watching over them. He kept his fire going, though the night was warm, to make the wolves more wary.

Its heat lulled him and he slept. When he woke the fire was dead and a fog lay low on the land, filling up the bowl in the hillside like a milky broth. The sheep had come near and stood beside him, out of the mist. The sky was clear. It wasn’t full dark, but the washed-out light of the northern midnight, and only the moon and the morning star beside it were visible.

He gazed over the fog, up to the mountains of the north, to the mighty cliff of the Troll Wall looming like something too big for the horizon, as if it should be nearer.

The wolf appeared on the other side of the bowl of fog almost exactly at his level. The big black creature sat as if upon a cloud. Elifr picked up his spear and scanned for others, his vision swimming in the floating light.

He shook the spear as if to throw it at the wolf.

‘Go! Go on!’

The wolf didn’t move, just sat watching him.

Elifr put the spear down, picked up his sling and fitted a stone. Still the wolf stayed. The boy raised an arm to take aim at the wolf but didn’t release the stone. There was something odd about the wolf. It didn’t behave like a normal animal. Wolves were not stupid and didn’t sit still while shepherds aimed slings at them.

‘Are you a ghost?’ he said.

Then he heard himself say: ‘You are the ghost of a wolf.’

He spoke again, but not with quite his own voice. It was lower and slower, as if he didn’t fully command his tongue and his lips: ‘You are waiting in a wolf.’ What did he mean by that? Elifr thought he really should know what his own words meant.

A voice seemed to speak in his mind and he mumbled along with the words: ‘You are the rocks and the stream and the rain on the mountain and the light through the rain. You are the movement of the shadow, a shape cut by moonlight, and you are the gold of the sun on the summer grass. You lie still beneath the frosts of winter and are set free by summer’s heat. You are me, as I was.’

The wolf kept watching him across the bowl of mist.

A restless feeling came over Elifr – no, more than restlessness, a feeling of cold torment. The wolf was trying to express something. Elifr mouthed some words: ‘Until the act is done.’

‘What act? What …’

But the voice in his head went quiet and the wolf turned back up the hill. Elifr abandoned his sheep and set out after it, on the journey to magic and misery.

The cart stopped, and Elifr, the wolfman who had been Elifr, was in front of a squat block of a building that sat in the shadow of a great domed cathedral. Elifr peered up. A gold structure sat on top of the dome, a bulbous pillar supporting a crescent moon. It seemed to shimmer in the hazy air. Again, Elifr tasted smoke.

Elifr had no time to sit and wonder. The Hetaereia lifted him from the cart and set him down on the ground. His limbs ached from the age he had spent sitting.

‘Prisoner of the emperor!’ shouted one of the Hetaereia.

‘Stand forward with the emperor’s prisoner!’ shouted a tall Greek guard with a bushy black beard and a short whip at his belt.

They pulled him in front of a doorway which sat like a square of blackness cut out of the bright day.

‘Emperor’s prisoner is forward!’ said the man at the side.

‘We will receive the prisoner!’