Lord of Slaughter

1

Under a dead moon, on a field of the dead, a wolf moved unseen beneath the rain’s great shadow.

The downpour had started with nightfall as the battle ended. There was too much blood for Christ to bear, said the victorious Greeks, and he had decided to wash it away.

The wolf slipped through the ranks of dead and dying, past the little cocoons of light where men nurtured lamps or candles in their sagging tents. Even there it was just a smudge in the darkness, a spectre made by the rain.

The boy Snake in the Eye looked out of the imperial tent for signs of a break in the weather. Any moon would have made looting possible but its slim crescent had faded the previous evening and the clouds had rolled in. He saw nothing in the sodden night beyond the weak glow of the lamps.

He was sure men would try to claim what plunder they could, even in that black deluge. The ground was a mire, though, and not all the wounded were beyond defending themselves. Why die ingloriously in the dark to the knife of one of the rebel’s half-dead Normans or Arabs? If you were going to die, better to do it where your fellows would see you and credit you for your warrior’s heart.

Snake in the Eye often dreamed of a famous death — surrounded by a press of enemies, their spears bright under a cold sun, his sword flashing arcs of sunlight and crimson — filled with the elation of killing and dying.

‘Twenty faced him and twenty went with him to the halls of the dead, to cheer him to the mead bench at the All Father’s side.’ So the skalds would sing for him one day.

He had never feared death and thought it a fine thing to die well and live for ever in the tales of his kin at the fireside and in the marketplace, though he would not throw his life away. For now he would sit tight behind the ditches of the camp and begin searching the bodies and the baggage train with the crows in the morning light. After that, he would go dancing with his loot to Abydos, to see the grateful town throw open its gates to the men who had lifted its siege. Then he would enjoy all the pleasures available to the liberator, including that of watching the rebel leaders impaled on the walls.

The rain fell so hard that no lamp or fire could be had outside and men huddled in their soaking tents waiting for dawn — those who had tents. In the summer most of the army slept in the open. When the rain had come in, fast, cold, unseasonable and heavy, the soldiers had crammed into any available shelter, fighting for cover before the blind blackness fell. The unlucky and the weak stood shivering and stamping in the bare scrub, clinging together for warmth in the sightless dark.

The horses of the cavalry moaned under the onslaught of the water and the warriors sang in the night to keep up their spirits. Snake in the Eye heard the songs of the Rus, of how Helgi won the battle at Kiev. He heard those of the Greeks, who called themselves Romans and sang of how Constantine had raised the greatest city in the world. And he heard those he loved the most — old songs of the north, from the Viking warriors, his people. Songs of heroes, dragons and battles against incredible odds. He understood each language. He’d been a market boy at Birka in Skania and it had paid him to be able to speak to as many varieties of men as he could.

He heard more than songs under the beating rain. Men and animals still lay dying in the storm and, to Snake in the Eye, their cries were a sort of music too. They filled him with a physical joy that tingled from his boots to his tongue.

‘Any sign of this weather clearing, boy?’ A voice from inside the tent.

‘No, lord.’

‘I thought not. Come back in here. I need to talk to you.’

Snake in the Eye turned away from the guard who sat shivering at the tent’s dripping entrance despite his three cloaks.

The emperor was alone, his war council having finished digesting the events of the day. He gestured for Snake in the Eye to sit next to a small and ornate brazier. The boy did so. The brazier fascinated him. The basket that held the fire was wrought with little lizards that seemed to wriggle in the heat, black against the light of the coals. At the emperor’s feet lay something equally as fascinating — the head of the rebel Phokas, scarcely recognisable as human — the rebel had fallen from his horse and been trampled by his own cavalry — but Snake in the Eye knew it was him. He had been there when Bollason, the famous Viking, had found the body and decapitated it.

The emperor’s eyes flicked momentarily to a trickle of water dropping from a corner of the tent.

‘You did us good service today in translating my commands. You are a Varangian but you speak Greek like a true Roman. How did you learn our language?’

‘I make it my study, sir. I have travelled this way with my father trading furs, and your countrymen come to our market.’

‘You speak impressively.’

‘I find all tongues easy, sir. I can converse with the Arabs as well, enough to trade anyway.’

‘Then you can be useful to us. I should order you castrated so you can attend me formally at court.’

The boy paled.

‘Don’t look so terrified. Many poorer sons have made that career choice. The chamberlain who rules in my place in Constantinople when I am on campaign is a eunuch and not of good family. Do you think he could have risen to be so mighty had he stayed intact? Of course not. He would not have been allowed as close to the purple.’

Again, the boy said nothing.

‘Don’t worry, I shan’t command it but it’s an option you should consider. You handled yourself well under the pressure of the battle today. You would benefit by ongoing access to my presence. It’s not so much to give up. You’re not even a proper man yet, it’s apparent to any who look at you.’

‘I am a man, sir.’

‘Listen to your voice. Look at the smoothness of your chin. I’m a Roman emperor, boy, I’ve seen enough eunuchs and ordered enough cut to know the difference between a man and a boy. You can’t miss what you’ve never had. What is your name?’

‘Snake in the Eye.’

‘Why so?’

The boy pointed to his left eye. The emperor beckoned him forward. Snake in the Eye held the eye open wide and the emperor peered into it. Around the pupil curled a second blackness, a deformity of the eye.

‘It does look like a snake,’ said the emperor. ‘What is its meaning?’

‘Death,’ said Snake in the Eye, ‘so my mother told me.’

The emperor pursed his lips, impressed.

‘I have always paid attention to things like this. It is an important mark, something from God.’

‘Our people say it is an image of the world snake — a serpent whose coils stretch across the whole earth. When it shakes, the seas boil and the land splits.’

‘Would you shake the earth and boil the seas, Snake in the Eye?’

‘I would, sir, on your behalf.’

The emperor touched his tongue to his upper lip.

‘A snake in a boy’s eye. One thing among many strange ones recently. Two days ago — you saw the fireball in the sky?’

‘It was a good omen.’

‘We made sure it was. I had to drum up a legion of fortune tellers and wonder workers to convince the men it was a sign God was with us.’

‘He surely was, sir.’

‘Who knows what these things mean? Men call comets the terror of kings. I tell you for nothing, it put the wind up me. Must have been a good sign, I suppose. We won, didn’t we?’

Snake in the Eye stayed silent. He sensed the emperor just wanted to voice his concerns. Snake in the Eye’s one purpose was to provide a pair of ears so Basileios could talk out loud without considering himself mad.

‘The rebel drops dead in front of me, then this downpour arrives out of nowhere in high summer in a land that hasn’t seen rain in a year. What do you think of that?’

‘The land is grateful. You have removed the rebel and reset the natural order. Perhaps the rebellion caused the drought.’

‘You speak like a man twice your age. Are all the Varangians like you?’

‘I come from a line of wise men and have been brought up in their company but I am wise enough to know that I know only a little of the world. This is why I spend my time listening, when I can, to people who know more.’

‘A good policy. It is better to listen than to speak, even for kings. Only the king who keeps his secrets to himself knows he can never be betrayed.’

He took a sip of his wine and swirled the remaining liquid around in the bottom of his cup, staring into it as if he expected it to reveal the answer to some troubling question.

‘There are envious men working against me by supernatural means, I am sure, envious men in league with envious demons. Fascinus, St Jerome called it, so says my chamberlain. Envy turned to hurt. Harm in the gaze. Was it Christ who came to our aid? I hope so. But this will excite the envy of demons even more. If the rebel can be struck down in such a way, why not me? These past years I have…’

He stopped speaking.

Snake in the Eye had spent his time in the Greek camp learning everything he could about the emperor and the organisation of the Byzantine forces. Basileios had not had a woman in five years. His closest advisers insisted he had no time for such things. He thought of conquest, not women. The soldiers whispered that an Anatolian witch had cursed his cock to limpness for the ravages of his armies. That explained why he didn’t marry. But there again his mother had been a murderous witch — she killed her husband, the emperor Romanos, with poison and married his successor. When she grew tired of him she had him killed too and would have married a third emperor if the Church hadn’t interceded. With a mother like her, Basileios had learned to be wary of women. He was known to be a superstitious man and may have seen wives as bad luck.

The emperor seemed to get irritated with his own deliberations. He pointed to the boy’s eye.

‘An interesting mark. Perhaps a sign of great fortune.’

‘Not for my enemies,’ said the boy.

Basileios laughed. ‘Ah, let’s hope not. You amuse me, Snake in the Eye, and that in itself is a great fortune.’

‘I hope to be of greater service than making you laugh, lord. I am a man now, just, and my axe is restless in my hand. I would kill for you. That is my destiny. I was raised as a merchant but in the northern way — as a warrior too. I have a skill at arms unmatched by my fellows and one day it will be unmatched by men throughout the world. Your enemies are my enemies and I would watch them fall.’

Snake in the Eye believed the words as he said them. He beat most older boys in their fighting games, despite his size. Would it be so different to face a grown man with sharp steel? Not if you kept your wits, he thought.

‘Perhaps you will, one day. If you get some hairs on your chin and a sword, I think that would be a start. First, tell me about these Norsemen, their customs and their ways. To command them, I must know them.’

So Snake in the Eye told the stories of his people — of battles, journeys by ship, incredible hardships. The emperor listened with conspicuous pleasure — happy he had secured the services of unusually violent and hardy men. One fact particularly pleased him.

‘When we give an oath it is our solemn bond,’ said Snake in the Eye. ‘We will not break it for anything — not starvation, not death or poverty. A man, to us, is only as good as his word.’

‘That is your boast, but is it your practice?’ said the emperor. ‘Many men who swear loyalty to Christ do not act as Christians when their betters are not looking.’

‘If our men swear, they swear in earnest,’ said the boy. ‘In the market at Birka I have never known a man of my people fail to keep a promise. When a Norseman says he will pay you in ten days, you will be paid in ten days, even if he has to cut another merchant’s throat to do it.’

The emperor glanced at the cloaked back of the Hetaereian guard who sat cross-legged in the rain at the small open entrance to the tent.

‘Romans have no such code,’ he said. ‘They live in terror of the emperor or they slit his throat. They have known no other way since the beginnings of the empire.’

‘Our men are not like that,’ said Snake in the Eye, who had not mistaken the direction of the emperor’s thoughts. ‘If we pledge allegiance to a lord, we will die rather than betray him. We are dependable. Above all else, we are dependable.’

The emperor took a fig from a silver bowl at his side and toyed with it in his hand. ‘Did you take an oath to Vladimir before you deserted him?’

‘We did but he released us from it to send us to you.’

‘He never paid you. Six thousand of you and no attempt at rebellion?’

‘Our leaders had sworn. That was the end of the matter.’

‘I will think on it,’ said the emperor. He replaced the fig and fell to silence.

The rain kept coming, harder and harder. Eventually the emperor grew tired and ordered the flap of the tent closed to the minimum necessary for ventilation, and had the coals in the brazier reduced to just a couple. The soaking eunuch guard ducked into the tent and went to shoo the boy out but the emperor raised a hand.

‘He has earned a dry night,’ he said.

Snake in the Eye lay down to sleep on a silk cushion, pulling a blanket of fine goat wool about him, and staring up at the tent’s roof by what remained of the brazier’s glow. He glanced across at the head of the rebel. He smiled to see the swollen slits of eyes watching him in the dim light.

You were greater than me, he thought, but now look at you. The poets will sing of me, not you.

His limbs were sore from the day’s exertions but he was not sleepy. His mind hummed with the thrill of battle. He ached to do it all again, but this time, this time at least, to get in on the kill. At the great northern market at Birka Snake in the Eye met many foreigners and saw many remarkable sights but nothing like he had seen that day.

He’d stood next to the emperor, translating his commands for the Varangians as the armies engaged, right by his standard and the portrait of St Helena exhibited on a pole to face the oncoming enemy. The emperor’s Greeks, foot soldiers at the front, slammed into the rebel’s iron-armoured Armenians with a sound like the fall of a million metal plates and the battle started. Images from the day came back to him — the rain of arrows from both sides, the strangeness of the enemy’s Bedouin camel riders, the grace of the Anatolian cavalry as they harried the infantry with arrows dispatched at full gallop, the similarity of the troops as Greek fought Greek in tight and ordered lines. With the fighting at its fiercest, the rebel led a charge with his heavy cavalry into the emperor’s flank.

Snake in the Eye found the horsemen fascinating — kilbanophoroi, they were called — the men all swathed in scale armour, their faces invisible beneath masks of mail, the horses covered in thick felt skirts so they seemed almost to move without legs. They rumbled forward at the trot, a rolling wave, slow but irresistible. But as the rebel had come on at their head, his pennant streaming from his lance, he had fallen, gone straight down as if hit by an arrow. No arrow had been fired. The Greek infantry had fled before the lances of the horsemen, trampling through their own archers in their desperation to get away. The bowmen, shoved down and aside, caught the panic and ran themselves. No one had fired an arrow — it was obvious from the vantage point Snake in the Eye shared with the emperor — and yet the rebel had gone down.

The charge faltered and then the cavalry fled, spreading panic through the rebel forces. So the emperor let loose his Varangians — the Vikings. No solid Roman lines there but six thousand men with long axes and spears howling like wolves into the fight.

Snake in the Eye went with them and he waved his axe and screamed his insults, but something held him back from killing. What? Other boys of his age took part in the battle. He defied anyone to call him a coward. He placed himself before the enemy’s spears; it was just that the enemy ran before he could engage them. Snake in the Eye told himself this was no honourable way to kill. He wanted to face his opponent, equally armed and armoured, and to best him one on one. He would not take part in slaughter.

But as the visions of the day returned to him as he waited for sleep, he wished he had at least killed one. A fantasy came upon him in which an Armenian had come for him.

‘Fancy your chances, do you, boy?’

‘I’m no boy, foreigner,’ he’d said. They’d swung and cut, hacked and blocked in the mud. He imagined the thrill as he threw himself aside to dodge a lethal thrust, felt the tearing of the fabric of his tunic as the sword grazed his belly. He relished the panic on the face of his enemy as he realised he had committed too far, the thump as a backhanded blow of Snake in the Eye’s axe took away half the Armenian’s head. Then they’d all come at him, all the ironclad Armenian hordes, and he had been a scythe and they the barley.

It hadn’t happened, but Snake in the Eye hoped one day it would. It must. He was hungry for stories to tell.

He had tried to test himself ever since he was old enough to hold an axe, seeking fights with men, offering them insults and anger. They had never taken him seriously. Too small, too much a boy to be considered worth killing. When his hand went to his axe to make them take him seriously or die, something would come over him. His hand would not move; his feet were rooted. He’d been beaten, humiliated on many occasions, longing to kill but paralysed in the face of his enemies. His father had been kind to him, wanting to believe his son would eventually emulate his ancestors.

‘It’s the battle fetter,’ he had said. ‘It strikes the best of warriors. It’s a gift. Only Odin can impose it. He’s saving you for something special. He won’t let you waste yourself in a pointless scrap with a man twice your size. You will grow and you will become mighty, believe me.’

Snake in the Eye shifted on his pillow and touched the stone he wore at his neck on a thong of leather, asking it for luck — blood luck, fine enemies and glory kills. It was not an expensive piece of jewellery, just a triangular pebble marked with the head of a wolf. His grandfather had owned it, an amulet for the blessing of the gods, and his mother gave it to Snake in the Eye when the boy was five. He’d worn it ever since.

A slinking shame crawled through his mind when he thought of his grandfather, Thiorek, son of Thetmar. Sometimes called the fat warrior, he had killed so many men it was said ravens followed him where ever he went and fell from the skies they became so fat. But his grandfather had been a head taller than other men by his thirteenth year. Snake in the Eye was short for his age, his stature slight, and his skin was like a girl’s.

He would kill, he would kill. Not soon, though. The Armenians had fled or died — at least the ones who fought for the rebel — the Normans and the Turks too; the camels had run and the Greeks lay bleeding. In Constantinople, he thought, Miklagard, the world city, he would find his cure. There he would throw off the battle fetter.

He tried to sleep but his mind was wild with memories and fantasies. He remembered the mad delight that had followed the victory, recalled the coming of the rain — rain, said the Greeks, like Noah saw. Snake in the Eye knew that story, he had been at many campfires and heard tales from all over the world. Looking up at the wet cloth of the tent, he had the idea he had called the rain himself, to blot out his shame.

The images and sensations of the day played out again and again in his thoughts and eventually began to fade, as if his mind was heavy with blood and torpid like a gorged leech. Snake in the Eye dreamed of a rain-black night and a field of the slain where a wolf came nosing towards where he lay.

Then the wolf was at the tent and it had never been a wolf — just the idea of a wolf, an idea you could catch by looking at it. It was a man. The rain-blind guard at the tent’s rear was taken down in silence, his neck broken. The killer drew a sword that shone even in the dream’s dark night like the cold crescent of the moon tumbled to earth, a wicked talon of silver, a razor curve shaped and sharpened by death.

Snake in the Eye stirred, opened his eyes and knew his dream was over. Above him was a man who was not a man, a wolf who was not a wolf, and in his hand was a cruel curved sword that the boy sensed was an ancient killer.

His thoughts cleared and, in the brazier’s faint light, he saw standing over the emperor a man wrapped in little more than a wolfskin, which he wore with the head over his own. At first he thought it was a legionary because one of the Greeks had worn the skin of a great cat like that. But this wasn’t a legionary. It was a wild man, stained with mud, his skin dyed grey like a wolf’s, the water dripping from him.

Snake in the Eye shouted and leaped foward. The man caught him with one hand and held him by the throat with a terrible strength. The boy squirmed and choked, desperate fingers unable to prise away the crushing grip.

No one came, the boy’s choking unheard beneath the rush of the rain, the songs of the camp and the screams of the dying.

The emperor woke, his eyes wide with surprise. He gave a snort, almost resigned, more like a man cursing his luck the last wineskin had gone from a market stall than someone about to die.

He looked at the weapon.

‘I am a Roman emperor, born in the purple, friend, so if you are of some conquered people and expect to see me beg, you will be disappointed. You are unwelcome but not unexpected. Do what you have to.’

Snake in the Eye fought against unconsciousness. The tent blurred and the brazier’s light cut trails in front of his eyes. The wolfman released his grip, dropping the boy to the floor. Then he threw his sword at the emperor’s feet and spoke two words in hacking, guttural Greek.

‘Kill me,’ he said.