Oathsworn 2 - The Wolf Sea (45 page)
Read Oathsworn 2 - The Wolf Sea Online
Authors: Qaz
The sabre. I climbed down and prised it from Skafhogg's dead grip and could not help but examine the blade, having heard it shriek like triumph down the stone as he fell. There was no mark on it. Even the sunlight stepped carefully along the gleaming length of it and the strange warped and twisted reflection of my own face slid down the long serpent of runes, curling and crooning their secret to the steel.
This had cost us pain and death. This sensuous curve, grinning like the smile on a skull, had led us to an Odin-forge of a country, where the One-eyed God hammered and folded us into what he desired, casting aside the dross.
And for what? To be given the gift of all the silver in the world? To be worthy of this rune-serpent blade? I wrapped it in a tattered Arab serk and snugged it up in my sea-chest, cheek by jowl with the equally cursed spear which had helped make it, both buried under a spare tunic, breeks and a folded cloak.
Yet I could feel the seidr heat of them all the time, feel the scratches I had carved on the hilt, the secret to Atil's silver. After all that had happened, I still had no idea of Odin's purpose, only what it had cost.
In that chest also was a withered leaf, the one I took from Arnor's mouth after the battle by the mulberry trees. It reminded me of how we had lost him and Vlasios, the Goat Boy's brother, among others, and of the deaths I could have prevented, but did not. As Jarl Brand said, what were Roman blood-feuds to us? Still, I tasted the jarl-torc silver of it for a long time, that blood-metal tang that makes you want to spit.
It also held Starkad's silver torc until I handed it to Brand when we reached him, just as he was stowing a heap of dirhams for giving up Antioch and sailing for the Dark Sea, as he had planned. Svala was gone, sold to an Arab, and I would have been angry save for the. relief — and the shame for feeling that. So we joined his ships as chosen men, as he had promised.
My sea-chest also held a short length of ship's rope from the
Fjord Elk,
tight-wrapped and stitched with cord, thickened with pine tar to stop it fraying. I have it still.
When I open the chest for a bone needle, or dry socks, the smell of it brings back the sea and the
Elk
and all the Oathsworn of that time: the Goat Boy, serious, pale and thin, with limbs like knotted thread and the great white-mauve scar on his side; Finn's savage grin; Botolf, raving and locked in wound-fever while his leg-stump wept; Short Eldgrim, who woke up to find he could not remember anything much from one day to the next, the inside of his head scoured clean.
There, too, are the dead: Valgard Skafhogg and Bristle Beard, Thrain Life Taker and the others who had lost their manhood and their Odin faith and finally their lives, fetches drifting like
jinn
and forever lost in the Serkland sand.
Balancing that on One Eye's scales were those who survived: Finn, Gizur, Kvasir, Hlenni Brimill, Thorstein Cod Biter and the others, scarcely more than two handfuls, but all Odin-forged Oathsworn brothers now They took the
Fjord Elk's
oars in their calloused fists and rowed away with Jarl Brand to the promise of waters where the spray froze like silver beads.
The
Elk's
prow turned north and they heaved up the sail, sure that the Bear Slayer, favoured of Odin, would steer them yet to that secret hoard now that he had his rune-serpent sword back. And if some wondered about their jarl, hunched and brooding over a silly nub-end of pine-tarred rope used to beat time for the rowing, they kept their teeth together on it, Orm Bear Slayer, they reminded themselves, had once killed a man in a
holmgang
with a single stroke.
The shipmasters, as ever, have their own name for even this stub of unattached line and the Loki joke of it was not lost on me, trying to weigh the deaths of Skafhogg and the others against Odin's cursed gift of silver.
They call it a bitter end.
Making sense of the Middle East of the late tenth century —at any time period, it would seem — makes your head hurt.
The Sunni Abbasid Caliphate was slowly crumbling under the weight of its own Mamluk armies, composed of Turks, Slays and Berbers, with a succession of trembling caliphs appointed and then murdered by the Buyyid family in Baghdad.
At the same time, another dynasty, the Hamdanid, held Aleppo as an independent fief, but still flew the black Abbasid flags, vowing lip-service allegiance to the caliphs in Baghdad.
Meanwhile, the triumphant Fatimid Shias stormed across North Africa, took Alexandria and renamed it Cairo (Victorious), then pushed north, bringing an end and a measure of stability to the chaos of little kingdoms in Syria and Palestine, one of which was ruled by the self-styled Ikshid Muhammad ibn Tugh from Jerusalem.
At the same time, a resurgent Byzantine Empire fought over Antioch and Aleppo and a series of campaigns by Nicephoras Phocas led to the taking of Tarsus and, in the year or so covered by this book, a great raid which laid waste the Jezira.
Some two years later, Nicephoras Phocas was murdered by John Tzimisces (Red Boots) and Leo Balantes — with the connivance of the Empress Theophano — while he slept in his palace. John became the new Emperor and there are those who believe this act actually saved the Byzantine Empire. Red Boots — and after him Basil II — finally took control of Antioch, as well as half of Syria, the Halab and most of Palestine all the way south to Nazareth, in a religious
reconquista
that anticipated the First Crusade by a century or more.
The Jarls Brand and Skarpheddin are based on several accounts of Norse chieftains ousted in various conflicts —mainly from the north of what is now Sweden — who went raiding in the Mediterranean with entire populations of men, women and children, mainly in Spain, which was ruled by al-Hakam II until 976 and afterwards by the legendary al-Mansur.
There is no record of a massive battle at Antioch involving the full panoply of the Byzantine forces at this time but there were almost certainly several large ones. Since I wanted Orm and the Oathsworn to take part in such a conflict, I engineered a great battle with no shame.
As ever, when anyone writes of this period, a debt is owed to Leo the Deacon (Leo Diaconus), born around the year 950. In his early youth he came to study at Constantinople and, in 986, took part in the war against the Bulgars under the Emperor Basil II, was present at the siege of Triaditza (Sofia), where the imperial army was defeated, and barely escaped with his life.
Around 992 he began to write a history of the empire, presumably at Constantinople, but he failed to finish before he died. The history, divided into ten books, covers the years from 976: that is, the reigns of Romanus II (959-63), Nicephorus Phocas (963-9) and John Tzimisces (969-76).
It describes the wars against the Arabs, including the recovery of Crete in 961, the conquest of Antioch and Northern Syria (968-9), the Bulgarian War (969) and the defeat of the Rus (971), one of the most brilliant periods of the later empire. For the reigns of Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces, Leo the Deacon is the only contemporary source, from whom all later historians of this period have drawn their material.
The idea that, more than a hundred years before the Crusades, the Byzantines launched a religious war to retake Jerusalem is frequently overlooked. Jerusalem was considered a city of three faiths — Jew, Christian and Muslim — and defended as such by the Arabs, regardless of who warred beyond its walls.
This allowed Christians to pilgrimage to the Holy Land, visit the sites mentioned in the scriptures and do so in reasonable certainty of protection. More of a surprise still is that many of them were freshly converted Norsemen, or Norse/Slays of the Rus lands, unfazed by far-travel and foreigners and ready to swim the Jordan to prove their new faith.
It seems right, then, that those who believed in the old Norse gods should also find a renewal of faith in a country called the Holy Land.
As ever, this is a saga to be told round a fire in the long dark reaches of the night. Any errors or omissions are my own and should not spoil the tale.
The End