Byzantium (2 page)

‘My back is ready. If you are going to fight here, I am staying with you.’

‘I do not have the time to convince you that I am not jesting, little brother. We are not playing games at Nidaros.’

‘I am aware of that.’

Olaf’s hands gripped so hard that Haraldr thought his bones would be ground to meal. ‘You are about to shame yourself. If I have to have you tied up, I will.’

‘And if I have to tie my sword to my hand, I am going to fight today!’ Haraldr was momentarily startled by his own shrill shouting. His face was suddenly brilliant with outrage.

Olaf reached swiftly for Haraldr’s sword and whipped the blade out of his brother’s scabbard. Haraldr leapt like a springing cat, his eyes wild. He clamped both hands on Olaf’s wrist, which was as thick as a small tree, and wrestled it with mad fury, as if it were indeed a tree he was trying to uproot. With his free hand Olaf tried to prise Haraldr’s astonishingly powerful grip but after a moment gave up. He drew back his immense fist and clobbered Haraldr just behind the ear.

Haraldr dizzied and fell to his knees, sparks popping in his head. ‘You don’t have to truss me up,’ he said meekly. This isn’t finished, he told himself.

Olaf gave Haraldr’s sword to Guaka. ‘You must go before it gets too light.’ He brought his bristling, burly face close to Haraldr’s and his eyes were dark, endlessly deep, as if fate had somehow chased the entire star-flecked universe into their void. This can’t be happening, Haraldr told himself. But Olaf’s eyes said it was. ‘Do you swear on your father’s soul not to reveal your name to anyone?’

Haraldr swallowed thickly; a cold stone seemed to be stuck in his throat. ‘I swear it.’

Olaf’s eyes filled again, not with life but with the swirling mists of memory. ‘Haraldr, when you get to Rus, you must remember me to Queen Ingigerd. Tell her she was with me.’ He snatched his brother into his arms and held him against his massive metalled chest. ‘I will always be beside you,’ Olaf said. ‘No matter where you are, no matter where I am. I love you, little brother.’

The next thing Haraldr knew, he was walking into the pall of the new day, Guaka and Asti flanking him, and the tears on his cheeks were cold.

‘I’ll carry it.’ Guaka shrugged and handed Haraldr his sword. The dense forest was dappled with mid-morning light; the patches of sky visible through the trees were like glazed cerulean tiles. The ether of the pine resin was intoxicating. To the right, only fifty ells away the woods parted and a field of large jumbled black rocks descended to a nearly dry creek.

‘Guaka, I have to piss.’

Guaka turned to Asti. The towering, armoured house-karl shook his head as if to ask, ‘We have to go all the way to Rus with him?’

Haraldr pointed to a dark, almost mysterious clump of pines to his left. ‘I need to go in there.’

Guaka grinned knowingly at Asti and again shook his head. ‘You can go right here. We don’t mind.’

Haraldr hiked up his byrnnie and tunic. His urine splashed over the pine needles for a moment and then he turned quickly and directed the stream over Guaka’s bare knees.

‘Kristr, damn!’ shouted Guaka, and he danced backwards several steps. Haraldr immediately dashed to his right, through the woods and onto the field of boulders. In spite of his gawky frame, he moved across the big rocks with the grace of a panther. The house-karls followed, bellowing obscenities, but they had nowhere near Haraldr’s agility or speed on such crude terrain. Haraldr crossed the trickling creek, loped over the rocks on the opposite side, and disappeared into the forest.

Haraldr crouched behind a parapet of smooth black boulders on a small hill overlooking his brother’s encampment. The meadow was like an emerald platter before him; at one end half a dozen huge, fractured black boulders lay on the grass as if tossed there by a giant’s hand. Olaf’s men had already set themselves in the classic shield-wall defence, a circle three men thick and five hundred men round, shoulder to shoulder, an enormous ring plated with steel and bristling with spears. Inside this human fort were the King, his skalds and his house-karls. Haraldr could easily distinguish the tiny, jewel-like figure of Olaf; he wore a blue silk tunic over his lacquered steel byrnnie, and his white enamelled shield was embossed with a large gold cross. Three bowshots beyond this formation, almost directly opposite Haraldr, the forested, slightly elevated rim of the meadow teemed with the vanguard of the opposing horde. In their predominantly brown canvas byrnnies they looked like a muddy wave, silted with silvery steel blades and armour, about to burst from the forest and crash down the slope.

The battle oath of Olaf’s army was clearly discernible: ‘Forward, forward, Kristr-men, cross-men!’ The shield-wall advanced towards the line of trees, virtually without distortion of its immaculate geometry. From the forest came a vast exhalation: ‘Thor crushes all!’ The metal-flecked, turbid wave of the Dane’s men came out of the trees, multihued battle standards carried along like the masts of a vast, miniature fleet. Dense clouds of arrows rose up from both armies, flying as swiftly as passing shadows. Spears and javelins darted in quick, glittering volleys. The wave surged against the shield-wall and halted.

Haraldr watched the miniaturized conflict in utter fascination, forcing himself to adhere to his plan: wait until the crucial moment and then rush to his brother’s rescue. He had a vision of himself in the setting sun, acclaimed on the field of fray, amid the corpses of his foes, the youngest marshal in the history of Norway. As he dreamed, he vaguely wondered why the sky was darkening.

A small portion of the shield-wall buckled in and Haraldr’s heart thudded as his brother’s gold-embroidered standard, ringed by his house-karls, moved to buttress the defence. But it was not yet time; the breach was quickly repaired. Haraldr noticed that the cloud had still not moved from the sun and that it was a very dark cloud. Yet why was the rest of the sky a flawless, deep cobalt blue? He finally gave up a moment of his battle for a look over his head. He gasped and stood, gaping, no longer concerned about revealing his hiding place.

It was another wonder, a celestial parallel to the marvel at his feet. In the still-brilliant, unmarred sky, the sun was dying. It was as if a crescent chunk had been taken by some great jaws. He distantly remembered a man at court talking about a day when the sun had vanished and the midday became midnight. Much more distinct in his mind were the pagan tales he had raptly listened to; Jarl Rognvald had often talked of Ragnarok, the doom of the gods, when the wolf Fenrir would swallow the sun, only to be devoured in turn by the black Dragon of Nidafell in the last night of creation. Haraldr weighed the two theories and concluded that this portent was too coincidental with the affairs of men to be merely an accident of nature. It was the work of the old gods.

He squinted at the sky until his face hurt. Fenrir only slowly ingested the sun, but the day darkened more quickly than a sunset in a deep fjord. The din of battle fell in concert to the fading light. Thousands of heads tilted upwards to watch an even more epochal confrontation. The unearthly wails of the wounded, no longer masked by the screams of combat, carried across the meadow.

The landscape became coppery, almost fiery, as the mythic jaws swallowed all but a final, desperately glimmering fragment of the sun. Haraldr looked at his sword, his arms. Blood. Blood sun, blood sky, blood on the land. His mind went blank, perfectly suspended between wonder and fear. The wind gusted from the meadow, carrying with it the ferric scent of opened flesh. The dying voices rose in a harrowing dirge. Haraldr plunged into fear. He scrambled from his redoubt, tumbled part of the way down the slope, and then he was conscious only of the blood-tinted grass racing beneath him.

No one stopped Haraldr from entering the shield-wall. He looked about, bewildered, at the craning warriors. A wounded man moaned, only a few ells from him. Shouting began, from the front of the shield-wall, but Haraldr could not see what was happening because the huge armoured backs of the house-karls blocked his view. Men pushed back towards him in large groups, their faces drenched with sweat. The shouts were louder still, and they were joined by the shriek of metal on metal; it seemed to Haraldr that he could actually feel the noise, like needles in his bones. A house-karl staggered towards him like a careening metal beast, coughing up blood, his lips and chin glazed crimson.

And then they were all running. He followed them to his right, not really knowing why, until they stopped abruptly. He did not know where he was until he realized that the huge black boulders he had seen from his perch were now at his back; he could reach out and feel the cold stone. He saw Olaf’s standard only half a dozen ells in front of him, the gold dragon embroidered on it bloodied by the moribund sun. The grip on his arm was like a sword stroke.

‘By all the gods, where did you come from!’ shouted Jarl Rognvald. His byrnnie was smeared with blood and two deep, open cuts intersected the seams on his cheeks. The Jarl bellowed almost frantically for Olaf. Olaf finally shouldered through the crush of house-karls. His demonchased eyes did not change expression when he saw Haraldr. He shouted in Jarl Rognvald’s ear. Without looking at Haraldr again, he turned and immediately went forward. Jarl Rognvald let Haraldr’s arm go but stayed by him.

It was too much for Haraldr to acknowledge that this was all that was left, that the shield-wall had been shattered and most of Olaf’s men engulfed by the brown wave, that the house-karls had set this last line of defence against the boulders. Instead a heedless bravado seemed to pump up his gangling limbs and he wriggled between the metal torsos of the house-karls, pushing to the front. The enemy, separated from the house-karls by a no man’s land no broader than two arms spans, were a sword-waving, spear-thrusting, barking, howling wall, teeming like an immense pack of monstrous deadly vermin. He was close enough to see their gnashing teeth. Their eyes were thousands of fiery coals.

An eerie hush fell as five huge men stepped into the no man’s land. Four of them wore steel byrnnies, but the man in the centre, the tallest and stoutest of them, wore an armour of layered hides with the fur still attached. Berserks, or bear-shirts, were said to wear such hide armour, and when Odin gave them the Battle-Rage, no man could stand before them.

The Berserk took another step forward. His black beard had white streaks; his eyebrows, hacked away in countless frays, were bestial, whiskered tufts above tiny red eyes. The end of his nose had been sliced off in one of his previous combats; his truncated nostrils were huge and upturned like a pig’s snout. ‘I am Thorir, called the Hound,’ he said, his voice strangely tranquil. ‘You are lost. Give up your King and your Prince, and our accounts will be settled.’

The house-karls answered with a gale of obscenities. ‘Sow fucker!’ ‘Corpse lover!’

The Hound calmly waited, eyes flickering, until the outburst had ended. ‘Then you will all die,’ he said. ‘I know the King.’ He pointed at Olaf. ‘When we begin again, I will kill him first.’ The tiny red eyes began to roam among the house-karls, as piercing as hot, sharp irons, and Haraldr knew what they were searching for. He was too mesmerized to look away and the moment of contact was like a knife slitting him from his groin to his windpipe, ripping out his fool’s courage and replacing it with a cold, leaden, mortal dread. ‘I think the boy is the Prince,’ said the Hound; he turned to the silent army behind him for confirmation, and several men nodded. ‘I will kill him as well.’

Olaf’s vast bulk hurtled from within his cordon of house-karls. Someone grabbed Haraldr and pulled him back and he fell hard on his seat, but before he went down he glimpsed his brother’s sword pound into the Hound’s furry hide armour. Men stepped over and on him and he thought he would be trampled. He heard a moment later the explosive collision of the two armies, the screech of clashing steel and the desperate, thundering oaths of doomed men. Then he could see Olaf and Thorir the Hound again. They seemed to move so slowly, like figures in a nightmare. Olaf’s blade flashed in long, ruby-tinted strokes, again and again, and yet the Hound still stood. Then a third man entered the dream-like vignette, one of the huge men who had come forward with the Hound. This intruder crouched low, and when his sword scythed parallel to the ground, Haraldr perceived it moving much more swiftly, everything was speeding up, and the blade struck Olaf’s massive leg and recoiled and Olaf’s knee seemed to disintegrate and he was falling. Another man stepped into Haraldr’s suddenly rushing nightmare and his spear caught Olaf under his byrnnie, jerking him up and sideways before it was pulled from his belly. Olaf’s hand clutched but he could not grasp, and his slick, coiled bowels began to ooze down his thighs. A sword struck his neck and his head tilted freakishly to the side and blood pumped onto his shoulder.

The blow knocked Haraldr on his back and something flew swiftly into his eye like an angry bird, and his vision flooded with warm serum.
Stand to fight!
shrieked a voice so loud, it could only have come from inside his skull. But his limbs were locked in an icy dread and a terrible truth quarrelled with the other voice:
I am a coward,
it said, as his fright gushed out of him and soiled his breeches with a repulsive warmth. A boot crunched with stunning force into his chest; his heart, painfully bruised by his ribs, seemed to beg for death; if only he would not have to stand and face it.

The Hound was above him. The huge nostrils, the horrible sucking. Haraldr lay there, frozen with terror, his head screaming with the dark poetry of the last instant in time. The Hound’s sword rose high, lost in blood-tinted night; it was no sword, it was a creature, a raven’s beak descending, falling from night into night. Then there was a terrific concussion, as if the sun had exploded in its final dying fury, and Haraldr fell away from its heat and light, falling, falling endlessly into the vast, airless, utterly black craw of the last dragon.

The man from Denmark grasped the jaw and turned the corpse’s puffy claret face towards him; the head flopped as if no longer attached to the neck. He fanned away the flies and slipped open the livid eyelids for a moment; the blue eyes glared in a ghostly fury. He stood and faced the Hound. This is King Olaf. Now show me the Prince. Haraldr Sigurdarson.’