The Ice Queen (26 page)

Throughout the remainder of the day the necessaries were seen to. By that I mean bringing into the city whatever food could be found before the wolves made off with it, and disposing of the dead before they poisoned the air. Of these, the Christians, including about fifty of Harald's men, were buried all together in a common grave, to which, in sorrow, I added Einar's slight remains, laying his cross-shaped sword on his breast so that, whether bound for Heaven or Valhalla, he would be ready. As an offering to the ghosts of our dead, the hundred ‘noble' prisoners were variously burnt, impaled, used for archery practice, sawn limb from limb, and dragged to death by horses while the good people of Kiev howled curses and, for a little while at least, forgot their empty bellies. We flung the bodies into the Dnieper. Rus towns and nomad wagon-camps from here to the Black Sea would watch those swollen corpses floating by and rejoice or grieve accordingly.

Late in the afternoon, towers of purple cloud swept up from the south as if by command and poured out a drenching rain that scoured the battlefield clean.

During the days that followed, I plunged into constant activity. With the foragers I combed the fields, with the huntsmen I prowled the forests, and waded into the streams with the fishermen. Of game and fish we found sufficient, but of grain and fruits there was little. Still, if we could not do much for the Kievans' bellies, something, at least, could be done for their souls. On the morning following our victory a solemn thanksgiving mass was held in the open air where all could attend. The four sons of Vladimir the Great knelt side by side before a make-shift altar: Pozvizd and Bryacheslav, both strong men and handsome; Yaroslav, bearing himself with a palpable air of pride, for, despite his lameness and his bookish soul, he had shown real bravery in battle; and kneeling beside him a pathetic and chastened Mstislav.

Abbot Feodosy and his monks were sent for by Yaroslav—I carried the invitation myself. Those of them who agreed to come up (which were by no means all) emerged blinking like moles into the light. Yaroslav met Feodosy at the gate to the citadel, knelt at his feet, kissed him, and personally led him inside to the wild cheering of the populace.

That same evening a victory feast was held in the palace. We called it a feast, although there was scarcely a drop to drink of wine or ale. I chanted two victory odes, which I had composed in haste that very afternoon; one praising Harald and the other Yaroslav. Harald presented me with my twenty silver grivny, while Yaroslav was so pleased with his poem that he promised me a horse from his own stables and a falcon from his mews as soon as we returned to Novgorod.

When it came time for the drinking of toasts, we were embarrassed, as I have said above, by the lack of strong drink. But Harald summoned his cup-bearer anyway. That youth produced, with a flourish, a round white bowl, filled it with wine, and proffered it to Yaroslav. It was, of course, a skull.

I had watched Harald earlier in the day when he sawed the cap off above the eyebrows, scooped out the brains, peeled away the scalp, and dried the bone over a slow fire. The wine was what Christmen call the blood of their Lord—a jar of which the bishop of Kiev had hoarded in secret. Harald, with his usual directness, threatened to chop the man's hands off if he didn't hand it over.

Yaroslav, for some reason thinking that it was Eilif's skull, recoiled; but we assured him that it belonged to none other than his enemy, Tyrakh Khan.

“Drink, Grand Prince,” said Harald, bowing low, “and pay the debt of blood owed to your grandfather Svyatoslav's ghost.”

Yaroslav looked as if he really would rather not, but took a small sip and passed the bowl to Mstislav (who by now was recovered enough to sit at table). With a bearish growl, he tipped back his head and drained it at a gulp. “Never was wine sweeter, by God! Fill her again!” he roared.

He held the last bowlful to the pale lips of Eustaxi, his dear son, who lay on a pallet beside the bench, so weak that he could scarce lift his head. The wine ran down his cheek.

If Mstislav's son was a sorry sight, Yaroslav's was a proud one. Volodya's heroism was on every Kievan's lips. When their mayor was killed early in the siege, said the bishop, it was this lad of twelve who took command of the defenses, refusing to hear of surrender, and eating never a mouthful more than the poorest of his men. “And at the end! Only a heart inspired by God could have dared such a deed as he did!” the bishop cried, clasping his hands together.

While his praises were being sung, the boy kept his eyes fixed on the floor and blushed. How splendid he looked in his dark blue caftan; his scarlet cloak, trimmed with gold and fastened with a ruby clasp; his boots of soft yellow leather; his tall sable hat. It was the costume he had worn for his audience with the emperor of the Greeks.

Yaroslav gazed on his son with fond, proud eyes as though unable to believe that he had fathered this image of perfection. And the thought occurred to me—surely, for the first time in my young life—that I would most likely have sons someday and that I would give anything in the world to have one like Vladimir Yaroslavich.

(What pain it is, now in my old age, to think how soon fate would make him hate me; and how one day, not many years later, we would face each other in bitter war, he on the deck of his warship and I commanding the flame cannons that guarded the harbor of Miklagard.)

“Hallo, Odd Tangle-Hair, my friend!” came a voice behind me. “You here, too? By God, is good to see you, ha, ha!”

He had grown so thin that I barely recognized Stavko Ulanovich as he bounded up to me, as usual speaking, chuckling, and salivating all at once. I hadn't known that he was traveling with the convoy. He embraced me with one arm, the other was in a sling.

“You're wounded.”

“Ah. Is nothing, I am lucky. Was bloody murder, my friend, when they jumped us. And me having to protect not only myself but fifteen screaming women. Beauties they were. Cost me fortune. Now poor things are skin and bone; I could not give 'em away. Well, not to complain. Scrawny woman better than none at all, eh? Ha, ha! I've got 'em locked up. You come around whenever you want and help yourself.”

To return to the Swedes, Harald rightly argued that they were spoiled beyond recovery and that men even once guilty of disobedience on the battlefield could never be trusted again. They made matters worse for themselves by looting houses in the town, brawling in public, and raping a number of women. Kiev to them was just another captured city and they felt free to treat it so.

Harald had the solution.

When the following Sunday came round, all the druzhiniks were ordered to attend a special mass for the dead. Yaroslav was insistent that the Swedes be given a last chance to confess and take holy communion, even if it was all for the sake of a trap. When it came their turn, they entered the cathedral, stacking their arms outside. When they came out again it was to find their arms gone and a cordon of Rus warriors surrounding them. We cut down every one of them while the Kievans looked on in dismay.

No doubt this was another example of Harald's faithlessness, but this time, in my opinion, justified. Yaroslav later pretended to be shocked by the deed, though in fact he had agreed.

The day of the Swedish massacre happened also to be Harald's seventeenth birthday. I, myself, turned twenty a week later. Prince Eustaxi would have been twenty-seven in the same month had he lived; but, after clinging to life for so many weeks, he died quietly in the night while his father slept beside him.

Mstislav was laid low by this. He had stayed on in Kiev only because his son was too weak to be moved. Now, sorrowing, he made ready to take him home for burial. It was a sad remnant of his once proud army that straggled out of Kiev on a bleak October morning. What had begun as a bold, if underhanded, grab for power ended as a funeral cortege.

Had Yaroslav wanted then and there to scrap the treaty with his half-brother and declare himself Grand Prince of all Rus (as he was already being called), who could have faulted him? But, despite Harald's urging, Yaroslav would not break his Christian oath just because his rival was a beaten man. Whether ‘Yaroslav the Wise' would be better called ‘Yaroslav the Fool', I leave to others to decide.

By the end of October, the prince was eager to return to the comforts of his familial hearth. He had already sent the Novgorod merchants back to the city with news of our victory and of Harald's promotion to command of the druzhina. (The true version of Eilif's death was covered up to spare Jarl Ragnvald's feelings.) For our transport he commandeered twenty-five strugi, promising to return them to their owners next spring. But the common people, when they got wind of this, came crowding round the palace to beg their prince not to abandon them. When he came out and tried to reason with them, they drowned his words with shouts, and actually menaced him. The horrors of the Pecheneg raid were still too fresh in their minds. Their prince must spend the winter with them, they insisted—he and his miraculous son and the giant captain of his druzhina. They needed this time for forging weapons, drilling the militia, and rebuilding their herd of cavalry horses. If Yaroslav tried to desert them now, as God was their witness, they would burn all his ships!

And, at last, though he longed to return to his books, his comforts, and, most of all, to the arms of his loving and faithful wife, Yaroslav yielded.

Now, Harald, too, was anxious to be quit of Kiev and go home to take more sweet, stolen kisses from Yelisaveta, but like it or not he must stay with his prince. Which meant that I would be staying, too. Of the three of us, only I was content. I'd succeeded in pushing Inge and everything to do with her far to the back of my mind. That had cost me an effort and I was in no hurry now to go home and face it all again.

The winter passed pleasantly enough. I devoted much of it to improving my Slavonic with the assistance of a girl from the town whom I slept with.

And I spent much time in the company of young Volodya. He too was happy to be staying in Kiev. Novgorod, with his mother, nurse, and tutor, held no charms for him, while here were chances for danger and adventure. The Pechenegs disappointed him by never once showing their faces, but still there was tracking and hunting, skating, skiing, and sleigh-riding to occupy him—all of which he was keen on.

Harald often invited himself along on these outings. From the start he patronized the boy, pretending they were great chums while never missing a chance to show him the ‘correct' way to draw a bowstring, to build a camp fire, to launch a falcon (which Harald himself had not known before a year ago). Volodya bore all this patiently enough, but when Harald boasted to him one day, “You shall soon have me for a brother-in-law, young'un, what d'you say to that?” the boy regarded him silently for a moment and replied:

“Eilif once said the same thing to me, friend Harald—those very words—and look at him now.”

“What?” Harald spluttered, “Why, damn you—!”