The Wolf Sea

11

The click of wooden goat bells and the bleat of camel calves snatched me from a dream which smoked away like prow-spray into the morning, where shadows already grew fat beyond the sheltered overhang of rock where we were camped.

Men yawned and unrolled from cloaks and stretched, farting. Two fires were already lit and Aliabu, our guide, was slapping wet dough backwards and forwards in his hands, expertly making it into thin bread for the hot stones. He grinned, all white teeth and eyes. Nearby, Finn ducked the smoke from his own fire, moving to the lee as he stirred oats and water in a pot, a good Norse day-meal.

Short Eldgrim strolled up as I rolled out from my own cloak and finally found the gods-cursed stone that had stuck in my ribs for most of the night.

`You look like a camel's arse, Trader,' he grunted amiably, hunkering down awkwardly in his robes and mail. Finn threatened him with the wooden spoon as he craned to look in the pot.

`Fine talk from the likes of you,' I gave him back, 'with a face like a bad chart.'

The Goat Boy brought me some of the Arab flatbread and hot goat's milk, at which a few of the men chuckled. The Goat Boy, still pale and weak, had refused to be left behind with Gizur and the six we had sent to guard the Fjord Elk and the Oathsworn admired his bravery — and enjoyed poking fun at me for his doglike devotion. I had to spit out flies drinking his hot milk, though; even this early they swarmed on any food.

Most of the band were awake and had been since first light, slithering into leather and mail. After that, they shrouded it all in the flowing robes of the Bedu tribes, leaving helmets dangling like pots from the waists and wearing cloth wrapped round their heads in a strange way, which Aliabu and his brothers, Asil and Delim, had to do for the band every day.

That had been Aliabu's idea, that and the handful of goats and camels which carried our gear, since it made us look more like Sarakenoi in the country that we travelled through. Not that, so far, we had seen many others and those we did find sprinted for it. Ruined farms, shattered houses, broken lives — the armies of both sides were ravaging those who always suffer: the weak.

Now, eight days out from Antioch, we had gone beyond even the Miklagard army scout patrols and the two ravaged steadings we had come across had been destroyed by the Sarakenoi themselves, who were fighting each other now. I thanked the gods we were more battle-ready than we had ever been.

Jarl Brand had been a ring-giver of note to us, for sure. In front of the assembled ranks of his own men and us — and what was left of the sullen, wailing company of Skarpheddin — he had offered his aid to each and every one of the Oathsworn, who had then picked spears, axes, helmets shields and prized ring-coats from a heap gathered up from the battlefield.

There were a few swords, too, but he gave them to me to hand out, which was a fine jarl-gesture and not lost on all there, so that the women who wailed at the sight of familiar battle-gear being lifted by strangers were made easier. That, of course, and the fact that Jarl Brand had swept them into his own hov, which at least gave them a future and made it harder to protest.

He also provided a feast, with heaped platters of food and fat jugs of nabidh, consumed under the stars down by the Orontes, with clever jugglers and fire-eaters and all in honour of the Oathsworn and their leader, Orm Bear Slayer.

Harek, who had now become court-skald to Brand as he had been to Skarpheddin, composed as complicated a draupa as he could manage on the greatness of Orm Bear Slayer while half-drunk, but thehooms' and `heyas' that made my face flame simply made his tongue more wild.

Of course, as Brand confided to me, his face so close to mine that I could see the light sparkle on his silver lashes, it was what the Oathsworn deserved for having such Odin luck as to have attacked the main baggage camp of the enemy just as it looked as if the Sarakenoi might win.

Instead, they had panicked and tried to get back to defend it, at which point Red Boots and his horsemen fell on them, rescuing something from a bad day. Which was double luck for us: if the Sarakenoi had got back to their camp, we'd have been skewered and considered ourselves fortunate to die so quickly after what we had done there.

`General Red Boots now commends me,' Brand went on, `which is only right and proper. He has made me Curopalates in Skarpheddin's stead.'

I smiled and nodded, though I did not think he would have the enjoyment of it for long — Red Boots had not beaten the wily old Hamdanid ruler and, as long as he threatened from Aleppo, Antioch would have to be abandoned yet again. The army would be reduced once more, until next year, or the year after. As seemed usual, neither the Great City nor the Sarakenoi had gained anything for all the blood spilled.

Perhaps Skarpheddin chuckled at that from Helheim where he surely was, for he and his mother were both carefully casked in a Christ coffin lined with lead stripped from Antioch's outraged churches. This was so that they wouldn't leak until they were howed, with due solemn ceremony, four days after we were gone.

Of Svala there was no word at all.

`So you did me a good turn there, too, young Orm,' Brand was saying, stroking his grease-stiffened moustaches, so that they looked more like frozen eaves-water than before. 'Which is why I equip you well, as promised. I will also give you some good Arabs, the ones they call Bedu from hereabouts, three brothers and their women led by one Aliabu. . something. He will make you look more like his people and, if you travel with the camels I will give him, there is a better chance of avoiding that stake up the arse.'

It was a good plan and I simply nodded, thinking more about how I might just miss getting arrested by Red Boots, who was now galloping off back to Tarsus. I did not hold out much hope of it, all the same -

now that he had time to think on it, Red Boots would want that silly container and the lives of all connected with it.

There wasn't much else to do, I was thinking, except brood on it and watch Kleggi and Svarvar arm-wrestle while Hookeye and Arnfinn raced each other to swallow whole ox-horns at one go. Hookeye finished, dripping and triumphant, while Finn bellowed that he had won only if the bet had been to try and drown himself in nabidh instead of swallow it. Hedin Flayer interrupted to excuse Hookeye on the grounds that his squint made it hard for him to get horn to meet mouth first time out.

I remembered Hookeye, draped like a Miklagard priest and arse going like a washerwoman's elbow, while the Hamdanid chief's woman under him shrieked and squealed. She had not been a pretty Sarakenoi princess afterwards.

None of that, though, drove the certainty of what I had to do out of me. So, swallowing the spear in my throat, I did it: I told Brand what we had done on Cyprus, for he was the only one who could, I was thinking, protect us from Red Boots and get the secret to the Basileus of the Great City. I did not tell him we had lifted the prize to trade for the sword Starkad had, all the same. I just told him what we had lifted and what I thought it meant.

He sat and frowned on it for a long time, while the din of feasting roared and flowed like a river in spate round us. So long, in fact, that I grew more wary and began to consider a way out of that place. Then he stirred, stroking his icicle moustaches.

`Here's the way of it,' he said, bent close to speak in my ear. I could see Finn watching and it came to me that it did no harm for my reputation to be seen touching heads and planning at the high seat of a jarl such as Brand.

I am pledged for a season to the Basileus Nikephoras,' he went on. 'This, of course, also means his commander, John Red Boots.'

My eyes must have narrowed too much, for he waved a soothing hand.

It comes to me that the business of thrones in the Great City is nothing much to do with either you or me, young Orm,' he went on. 'After my season is up, why should I care what happens in their blood-feuds?

It comes to me also that keeping this a secret until I see the Basileus — a costly and long-drawn out affair of bribes, I might add — will be difficult. Red Boots, I understand, is already made aware of your name and will certainly want you dead.'

I was more afraid than ever and he saw that and chuckled. I can help you, but you must place your hands in mine over this. I shall take these twigs and eggs to Red Boots and say that you were my man when you did this offence and that you did it for gain and no more and thought it richer than it turned out to be. I will tell him you are a fool who does not understand what was lifted, only that it was not as golden a prize as you thought — which is no lie, after all. Nothing bad has come of it and he will have my pledge on your silence.

It is as well no Romans were killed in getting this prize,' he went on, taking a swig from his nabidh, then passing it to me as if we were horn-paired at this feast, another thing that did not go unnoticed and gave me even more standing. I also saw that he had done it deliberately for that effect.

As it is, of course,' he went on, wiping his lips and talking as if he was discussing a winter cull of livestock, 'Red Boots will still try and have you killed in the dark, for it is the Great City's way of things and another reason to be off smartly. He would like to do the same to me, but he needs me. He cannot hold Antioch unless the whole army stays and that isn't something that can be afforded for long. He will march off and leave a garrison behind to be besieged by the camel-humpers. That garrison will be me and most of my men.'

I blinked at that and again Brand chuckled.

Of course, my ships will lay off around Cyprus, which is where you can find me, providing you are back by the end of the year. After that, I will be off up to Kiev and then home and if you want to be with me, as a chosen man, you had better make it in time. Then both of us will be beyond Red Boots and he can do what he likes.'

`What happens if you get besieged in Antioch?' I blurted and he smiled like a bear trap being set.

`No "if" about it. I will, of course. Red Boots knows it. I will also negotiate the surrender of Antioch to the Hamdanids — at a price and amicably. Red Boots knows that, too. The Hamdanids will prefer that to fighting several hundred well-armed men from the viks, having seen how we do it. Naturally, I will wait for the safe withdrawal of the Great City's armies to Tarsus, which is all Red Boots wants. Next year, or the year after, he will be back and the business will start again.'

There are those who say Brand got his jarldom by rolling on his back and having his belly tickled by his King, Eirik, and, after him, his son, Olof. They say Olof only got to be King of the Svears and Geats because he climbed into the lap of Svein Forkbeard like a little dog and that made Brand the lapdog of a lapdog.

That's not the right of it. They called Olof the Lap King — Skotkonung — because he took what his father Eirik had made of the Svears and Geats and made them pour a handful of dirt from their tofts into his lap, a ritual that admitted he owned the earth they walked on and would pay him in silver to keep those tofts.

Taxes, in other words.

Olof, like all the jarl-kings, made those easterners who couldn't even speak decent Norse into a kingdom called Greater Sweden — and Brand was at his shieldless side through all of it and his father's before that.

The rune-serpent torc sat round Brand's neck lighter than swansdown.

I knew what he offered was the perfect solution. It saved me from the Great City and offered protection from Sviatoslav and his hawk-fierce sons, allowing us to take the shorter route back to the North. It went a long way to lifting the weight of that jarl torc pressing on my shoulders, the ends of it forged with the runesword on one side and my thralled oathsworn oarmates on the other. The swaying balance-rod of it, hauling me this way, then the other, was crushing.

But all I could think of at that moment was her and I said her name aloud, a question.

`What of Svala?' I asked and Brand studied me.

`You don't even ask about this Alia bu,' he frowned. 'A jarl needs to think of such things.'

I saw my mistake and managed to grin and dance lightly on my tongue. 'I would say, if I had a gold-brow, that any choice of the jarl is sound,' I replied and he chuckled, acknowledging that.

`But I am also knowing you have taken this Aliabu's two children to care until he returns, always within reach, as it were,' I went on. 'What you offer is good and I will find Starkad on your behalf. It may be that I can put my hands in yours when we put a keel on good Baltic water. Then again, it may not.

I would also say,' I went on, the nabidh numbing my lips, `that my men watch you and I closely and it would be better for us both if some token changed hands here when this leather container is handed over, as if it held a treasure worth having. A bag that chimes softly, as they say, makes the loudest sound.'

Brand smiled and nodded, stroking his fine moustaches. 'It is no good-luck thing to kill a volva woman,'

he said after a while, surprising me by picking up on a subject I'd thought deliberately ignored. Somewhere, a bench went over and a knot of men roared and fought good-humouredly. Brand watched them, stroking his ice-moustaches, then continued speaking to me and looking at them. 'I am hoping your man Finn has the grace of the other gods, so that they can calm Frejya for the loss of Skarpheddin's mother. A spike of Roman iron — heya, she could not blunt that. I wish I could have known what went through her mind at that moment.'

A spike of Roman iron,' I answered wryly and he chuckled. In the next breath he was stone grim.

`This Svala, who is really a Sami witch with an outlandish name, I will keep until she is healed,' he said flatly. 'After that, I will thrall her to some Mussulman or Jew, who will not be affected by her seidr and once she has been broken into, the strength of her will be diminished.'

I was silent for a moment. It wasn't that a Mussulman or a Jew couldn't be affected by seidr just that it didn't much matter to us if they were driven mad by it. I was sure she could work her magic on a stone Christ saint, but I did not like the idea of her being 'broken into', like a locked temple. It spoke of pain and blood. In his way, Jarl Brand was being generous-handed and lenient with her — yet, still, there was that lingering scent of rumman fruit.

Will you sell her to me?' I asked, surprising both Brand and myself with those words.

Frowning, he thought about it. 'She is dangerous, I am thinking. Odin's arse, young Orm, she has a face like a chewed fig thanks to that raven and is a well of hatred for us all, yet still she weaves her seidr and makes you come to her rescue. What more warning do you need on this?'

'Will you sell her?'

He thought for a little longer and shook his head, so that my heart dipped.

It would be your doom, I am thinking,' he said. 'But it is also your wyrd and no one flaunts the Norns'

weave without price. I am reluctant to sell a Sami witch to a good man from the Vik, but here is what I will do. Return with proof that Starkad is dead. That, surely, will be a sign that you are gods-lucky and you will also have had time to consider whether you are favoured enough to take this woman.'

I knew this was as much as he would do on it, so I nodded. Brand nodded back and the bargain was struck. I expected a purse of hacksilver when I handed over the container there and then, but Brand was a jarl of different stock than that and surprised me. He stood and thumped on the bench until people fell silent, then peeled off the fine silver torc from around his neck and presented it to me.

He did not have to say anything, for the Norse knew what it meant and those Jews, Arabs and Greeks would have it explained to them later. The roar and bench-thumping went on a long time as I took the twelve ounces of braided silver from him and placed it round my own neck. For all the night was leprous with sweat, the silver was cold on my skin for a long time.

Now, in the desert heat of the early day, I fingered it, the snarling wyrm-head ends and the runes skeined on it and wondered if all the blood was off it, for it was only later that I realised it had belonged to Skarpheddin and preferred not to tell of that. There were those who would think it a bad move to be wearing the rune-serpent jarl torc of one who had been so luck-cursed.

Of course, I did feel a moment of guilt over the container and its secret, but that was not for more than a year, when I heard how Red Boots, Leo Balantes and others had crept into the palace bedroom of the Basileus of the Great City and stabbed him to shreds while he slept, Red Boots walking out and on to the throne. Red Boots, I heard, had even smashed the Basileus's teeth from his head with the butt end of his sword and kicked in his head, which was a sorry way for the most powerful man in the world to end up.

But blood-feuds in the Great City were no business of mine, as Brand had said, and, in this gods-abandoned waste of heat and dust, I considered the trade worth it at the time. The Oathsworn, I was thinking as I sat there blowing flies off porridge, were under Odin's best smile, for many problems had been fixed and money and battle-gear gained.

Aliabu's woman, Nura, crossed to the camels with a milking bowl they called an ader and stood by one of the camels. Sixteen of the beasts, I had learned, were she-camels and five had calves, so that those who were not suckling were heavy with milk.

While Delim gathered in the four males from where they had been hobbled and turned them loose to graze the sparse shrub, Nura unfastened the covers on the udders of one she-camel and encouraged her with sucking sounds. Standing on one leg, the other balanced against her knee, she took the fat teats in her hand and started squirting expertly into the bowls.

I sat and watched while the morning grew to glory and started to sing and hum with strange life. She saw me and smiled with her eyes, which was all that could be seen.

She had a blue cloth wrapped round her in a single piece, which they called mehlafa, and it covered her from her silver-ringed feet to her braided hair, though, unlike other Saracen women, she did not seem to mind exposing her face.

She unloaded milk into a fat pottery pot and, from there, Alia bu's other woman, Rauda, poured it carefully into goatskins. Even with just her eyes visible, this Rauda was a rare beauty, it seemed, for her full name, Aliabu had told me proudly, meant the Pool that Gathers after the Rain.

Not a pool others drank from, even among his own. None of his brothers had women, but Aliabu had two and his brothers did not seem to mind this, nor ever demand their use. Neither, of course, did we, though a few thought of it.

But Aliabu had a long and wickedly curved knife hidden in his robes and had made it clear he would use it on any afrangi who caused him offence. We needed his skills and goodwill more than we needed a hump, as I told the Oathsworn.

Aliabu had told me his full name and those of this brothers, but the most any of us could remember of it was the first part and that 'Abu' meant 'father', which title you take in Serkland when you have sons.

Short Eldgrim sat back with a sigh, waiting for Finn's morning gruel, listening to the wooden goat bells and savouring the water he had dug up. Aliabu had taught us to bury the waterskins each evening: after a night buried in the chill, they were cold as a winter fjord first thing in the morning, which made that the best part of the day.

Usually, we should have been up and away, with a few hours' walk under our belts before we stopped for the day-meal, but we were travelling in the cooler part of the day — practically evening — and for a good part of the night, so would lie up in the shade of the rocks which overhung this crack in the ground all that day.

It is a nice sound, the goat bells,' Short Eldgrim mused, then shook his head. 'But I wish it was on a wether in a meadow under hills which had snow on them.'

Aye, blowing a snell wind that promises a winter digging it and all the other sheep out of drifts,' grunted Kvasir, crunching through the stony desert to squat beside him. He took a wooden bowl from Finn with a grunt of thanks and fished his horn spoon out from the depths of his tunic. He ate, waving at the flies and spitting out those he could. Most he ate along with the gruel.

If Short Eldgrim had been meant to thank his luck that he wasn't digging sheep out of snowdrifts, it didn't work. He nodded, wistful-sad, his heimthra made the worse for the view Finn had seidr-magicked up for him.

`Don't worry,' growled Finn, passing him the porridge while it was too hot for flies to land on. 'One day you'll be back with the snow wind blowing up your backside and then you'll look back on the days you spent lolling in the warmth of Serkland.'

One day. There were forty of us left now and four were already sick. I was cursing myself and all the gods that we had stayed for Brand's feasting — not that we had much choice in it. Brother John had warned us, right enough, looming grim-eyed out of the dark a day after we had come back from killing Skarpheddin and his seidr women.

`They are wrapping red-rashed corpses down by the river,' he had told me and needed to say nothing more, for I had seen all this before at the siege of Sarkel. Sure enough, the next day, four of our men started to shiver and water flowed from them in fat drops.

The day after that was the feasting and the day after that was when we left and three were dead by then, put in the great howed pit Brand was digging to cope with the numbers. The fourth we left with the Greek doctors in Antioch, while we ran into the desert's heat and Gizur and the Elk crew ran to the sea winds. I offered prayers to Odin that all of us had escaped the sickness and that I had made the correct choice — to go after our oarmates first, then chase Starkad down.

Now we lay and thought of green hills and slate-blue seas capped with white and the snow whipping off the tall mountains like Sleipnir's mane. It was better with your eyes closed, for then you did not see this strange land, nor the massive winding ribbon of stones we lay in, whose walls rose like tongues of orange flames to a washed blue sky.

Here were no sheep, but little scaled lizards that popped out and scuttled down the blind turnings that led only to holes where little birds lived. It was a world of brown and pale green, of strange boulders shaped like mushrooms and swirling patterns of sand, which seemed to be all the colours of Bifrost. I supposed Aliabu and his people had as many names for sand as the Sami have for snow.

I lay and thought of her, too, all through the day until it was my time to stand watch and even then.

Always the same, too: the laugh; and the day she and I and Radoslav had enjoyed in the city of Antioch on the Orontes, a day as perfect as a rumman fruit — yet one whose heart had already rotted unseen. A cracked bell of friendship and love, even then. One such betrayal would have been enough, Odin. Two was larding it thick.

Finn and Brother John came to me as Aliabu and the others were packing the groaning camels to start the day's journey, taking a knee where I sat and eyeing me grimly. I eyed them back and jerked my chin for them to speak.

`Three were felled by heat,' Brother John said. 'They will recover if they are fed water and kept shaded for a day.'

`Good news,' I said, knowing with a sick dread what came next.

`There is a fourth down, but he does not have the red pox,' Brother John said. 'He has the squits, or the sweating sickness, or both. He will die, for sure, just the same. His vomit has blood in it. Dabit deus his quoque finem.'

God would, indeed, grant an end to these troubles. I remembered the sweats from Sarkel. Old oarmates, Bersi had it one day and was dead of it the next and Skarti, whose lumpen face told how he had survived the red pox, would probably have died of the sweats if an arrow hadn't killed him first. The squits were better, in that you could recover from them after some days of misery and mess — but when the blood streaks showed, you were finished.

`He needs the Priest,' said Finn, looking at me. I remembered that look from the last time, across the body of Ofeig. Next time, Bear Slayer, he had said, you do it.

I held out my hand and he slid the hilt of the sword into it.

It was Svarvar, the coin-stamper from Jorvik, lying on a pallet of scrub and his own cloak and soaking his life away, so that you could see him shrink to a hollow man by the minute, while he shook and trembled and his eyes rolled. The stink of him filled the air, thick enough to cut.

I called his name, but if he heard it he gave no sign, simply lay and muttered through chattering teeth, shaking and streaming with water. Brother John knelt and prayed; Finn hefted a seax hilt between Svarvar's hands and I could not swallow. The Priest, when I guided the blade of it to his neck, felt cold as ice.

His eyes flickered open then and, just for a moment, I knew he knew.

`When you get across Bifrost,' I said to him, 'tell the others about us. Say, "Not yet, but soon". Good journeying, Svarvar.'

It didn't take much pressure, for Finn had spent the day putting an edge on the Priest, a rasp that had irritated us all at the time. The neck-flesh parted like fruit skin and he jerked and thrashed only a little while the blood poured out with an iron-stink that brought flies in greedy droves almost at once.

`Heya,' Finn said approvingly, and I rose, wiping clean the blade and handed it back to him, hoping my hand did not tremble as much as my legs did.

Then Sighvat and Brother John and others gathered rocks and stones and used them and a shallow scoop in the stony sand to howe up the coin-maker from Jorvik. Five years he had spent digging stones, only to be freed to end under a pile of them. Odin's jokes were never funny, but sometimes you could not even grin for the clench of your teeth.

It was not a good omen and made the long journey through the shivering night a bleak, moon-glowed tramp. When the sun trembled up, a great, golden droplet on the lip of the world, we squatted and panted and licked our own salt-sweat into stinging, mucus-crusted mouths until it died again and gave us the mercy of cooling night and the right to drink.

Some began to shiver with the change and hoped that was all it was, checking each other for sign of sweating sickness or red pox. The three who had been heat-afflicted were showing signs of recovery, though they were calf-weak when they tried to walk.

Aliabu and his people silently got ready to move on. In the last light of day, at the ridge that had sheltered our little camp, he turned and looked back, as if searching the twilight for his unseen sons. For a moment, his ragged robes hidden and silhouetted against the sky, he looked as jarl-noble as any man I have seen.

There grew in me then the respect of a whale-road rider who sees another of his kind and marks him even though there is no sign on him other than the stare which has searched far horizons.

Until now, the Sarakenoi had been screaming Grendels with weapons, or flyblown savages who squatted in their own filth, ate using one hand, wiped themselves with the other and worshipped one god, though they had blood-feuds with each other over how best to do it.

But the Bedu navigated their own sea out here, as skilfully as any raiders in a drakkar two weeks out of sight of land, and found sustenance here as we would from the waves. Eaters of lizards and rats and raw livers, they took the jelly from camel humps, squirted it with the gall-bladder juice and sucked the lot down, smacking their lips as we would over a good bowl of oats and milk.

`By Odin's sweaty balls,' Finn growled when I mentioned this, 'just because they can eat shit and ride a horse with a hunched back doesn't make them worth anything, Trader.'

`They are proud and noble, for all that,' I answered. 'They are masters of this land and survive on it.

Could you?'

Finn spat, shouldering along in the blue dark. 'Take them to a cold winter in Iceland, see how well they fare. They are masters of this land, Trader, because no one fucking wants it and are left in peace because they haven't a hole to piss in, nothing anyone would want to steal, not even their sorry lives. They are the colour of folk two weeks dead and that shortarsed little lizard-chewer Aliabu thinks the best name he can give his favourite woman is Puddle, by Odin's arse. That tells you all you need to know.'

He stumbled, cursed and recovered his walking rhythm. 'I never had the ken of why the Irishers liked Blue Men as slaves. They always die on you when the snows come and Dyfflin's a long way to cart the buggers while trying to keep them alive on a hafskip.'

I grunted, which was all that was needed. Finn looked at the world down the blade of his sword, measuring its worth in what he could take. But, even travelling along Odin's edge as I was, I still saw these Bedu as knarrer in this ocean of sand and stone, charting ways less travelled and always open when others were shut. One day that would be of more use to me than plundering them — if Odin spared me.

Aliabu's shout shook me back into the now, where the sweat stung my eyes and the desert grit rasped in every fold and crack. I stopped, panting, dropped to one knee like all the others, pushing up the little tent of robe with the stick I carried.

One of my boot soles flapped; the thong that had fixed it in place had snapped and been lost on the trail and I fumbled to find one of the few I had left. We all had flapping seaboots, cracked and split in the heat, the soles held on by thongs and whose bone-toggle fastenings had long since vanished.

Hookeye moved up, his bow out and strung, so I knew it was serious. In this heat, he kept both wrapped and greased with camel fat to stop them drying out.

Another group of camels,' he reported. 'There are men there, armed and ready.'

I climbed to my feet and gave my orders. Botolf, the only one not wearing padded leather and mail, since none large enough had been found to fit him, unravelled the raven banner, but it flopped like a hanged man on the pole.

The Goat Boy and Aliabu came up as we formed into a loose shieldwall. Aliabu waved his hands and rattled off a stream of words and I knew I was getting better at things, for I made out a word in six.

`These are outcast men,' the Goat Boy translated, 'men from weak tribes who have fled their masters and make a life here. Aliabu knows them, but they are not Shawi He asks if you understand?'

I did. Shawi meant something about grilling and was a term the Bedu proudly used, since it meant they offered such shelter and hov-rest that they would slaughter and roast a prized animal for a guest. If these were not Shawi they could not be trusted.

Between the three of us, we worked out a plan. Camps would be made, the Oathsworn would show their strength and Aliabu and his sons would smile and talk to these outcasts. With luck, we would get news, perhaps some water and supplies and no blood would be shed.

`No different from meeting ships in a strange fjord,' growled Finn, hunched under his loop of robe.

`Save for the heat,' muttered Kvasir.

And the absolute lack of water,' noted Brother John wryly. `Sod off,' grunted Finn, too hot to argue.

'Shouldn't you be there, Trader?'

He was right, but Aliabu had pointedly not invited me, so I stayed on the course he had set and sweltered through another hour while the outcasts put up their tents. We had no tents.

In the end, Delim and two of the strange Bedu came back and, effusively, invited me down to the shade of the awning where everyone sat. I went, conscious of the envious, seared eyes of the rest of the band.

The leader of these outcast Bedu was called Thuhayba, which I was told means 'small bar of gold', a man shrunk like a dried-out goatskin, with bristles of grey hair on his chin and more gap than teeth. But he had eyes like something seen at night through the bushes.

There then followed a conversation like a game of 'tafl, a three-handed affair where I was a goose chased by foxes. Eventually, though, the tale of it was squeezed out like curd from cheese.

The Goat Boy told me: 'Ahead, a day away, lies the village of Aindara, which these ones used to visit now and then, but will not do so now. The last time they did, which was recently, they found it deserted and the people fled — those who had not been killed. It was there they found the afrangi, whom they now wish to sell to us.'

I knew that afrangi meant 'Frank', which name the Arabs called us, having got it from ignorant Greeks.

`Like us?' I asked.

They talked to each other like pine logs popping in a good blaze, then the Goat Boy turned and said: 'No, Trader, not big and fair-haired like you. Dark. A Greek, I think. They say they found him after the fight which the yellow-haired man won.'

My hackles rose at that and it took a flurry of sharp questions to tease the weft of it out and even then only one part was clear. Starkad had come this way and had men with him still.

In the end, when they saw I was interested, they hauled their prisoner out, a shivering individual called Evangelos — either that or he was praying, for his mind was so far gone he could not stop drooling and babbling. Getting answers from him was like holding water in your fingers.

At first it had been my thought that he was a runaway from the Miklagard army, but he had shackle-marks on his legs, old sores that still wept.

'Fatal Baariq?' I said to him and his head came round at that name. I said it again and a shiver ran through him. If he'd been a dog, his tail would have curled between his legs.

Telekanos,' he said softly. Then louder. Then he screamed it, so that everyone was startled and men from both sides got to their feet and had to be placated with hand gestures.

`Who is Pelekanos?' I asked the Goat Boy and he shrugged.

Or what. It means carpenter. Perhaps it is his craft, Trader?'

The Greek heard the word again and nodded, rolling head and eyes. Then he hunched himself deeper, almost a ball, and whimpered: 'Qulb al-Kuhl.'

There was a movement, a rustle of robes and indrawn breath from Aliabu, while the wizened old Bedu muttered some sort of charm against evil.

The Goat Boy looked at me and shrugged. 'I think he said something about "the one with a dark heart", but these Bedu talk like true Arabs only some of the time, so it is hard to follow.'

That was all the Greek managed that made sense and, when it became clear I did not want him, he was dragged off and more profitable trading began, for water and food. Of course, the outcasts wanted our shiny weapons and gave us so much water and food I was convinced they'd starve or parch. I hoped the single axe they took for it was worth it.

Brother John was angry that I had left a good Christ-man to rot, but everyone else agreed with me that dragging a useless mouth along would make us as daft in the head as the Greek in question.

`There was a time, Orm Bear Slayer, when you would not have done this,' Brother John said, almost sadly, and the truth of it made me bark back at him.

`There was a time, priest, when I did not wear a jarl torc.'

And, as ever, I heard Einar's death-husked whisper about discovering the price of that rune-serpent neck ring. Now, of course, there was another rune serpent slithering round my life; the one snake-knotted down that cursed sabre which I had to retrieve.

We put some distance between ourselves and the outcasts, for I did not want them trying out that axe in any of our skulls. We had travelled only a little way into the cool of the night when Aliabu came up beside me where I walked with Brother John, both of us trying to find a way back to friendship. In the twilight, robed and bearded as he was, Aliabu looked like one of those seers Brother John talked of in his Gospels.

I will not go nearer to Aindara than this,' Aliabu said through the Goat Boy. `Not far from that village is a temple to the old Hittites and beyond that, in the hills, is where the mine lies. I am going no closer than this, but will wait for you seven nights, no more.'

`Why? Are you afraid?' I taunted and should have known better, for he nodded with no shame of it, which is the Bedu way, I learned.

He told us, in that quiet, insect-singing twilight: `Those outcasts told tales that all was not well here.

Friends of friends, they say, have told that some of the soldiers at the mine ran off, for they had not been paid and no supplies came from Aleppo, because the silver was gone and there is so much fighting that the mine has been forgotten. Some say the ones who remained started to raid and they have grown strong indeed if Aindara is no more.'

Camels were being hobbled, tents pitched, fires lit and it was clear his mind would not be changed. The Oathsworn, confused, sat and waited and watched.

I saw the Goat Boy's face as he translated all this and knew there was more, tilted my head in a silent question. The Goat Boy shrugged. 'He is afraid of more than soldiers. I heard him talk with his brothers and could not hear it all, but they are terrified, Trader.'

Ask him,' I said and so he did. Aliabu waved his hands as if he did not want to discuss it at all, but he saw the blood in my eye and knew that I would go on anyway. He was torn between his fear and his pride in Bedu hospitality, which would not let a man who had sheltered in his hov walk into unwarned danger.

His eyes were all that could be seen now, though the fire that flared up cast his shadow, wavering and long.

`Ghul,' he said and the other Bedu heard it and stopped, as if frozen. Then they went about their work again, almost frenzied, as if to try and drive out fear by being busy. Aliabu spoke swiftly, spitting the words out as if it hurt him to talk, wanting to get them out of his mouth as fast as possible.

The Goat Boy, when he turned to me, was a pale oval of a face in the darkness. 'He hears they have become eaters of their own at the mine, Trader. He says it happens now and then, when there is a drought and hunger drives people to it. He himself has been reduced to eating the shrivelled remains found in camel dung — but not yet to eating other beings.'

The others, when this was laid out for them, made wardings against evil and there was a lot of amulet-touching and prayers from Brother John.

We Norse are half afraid of the dead-eaters, half disgusted, and will shun any such who are found, no matter that they have been snowed in and forced to it. Almost all had a tale, heard from some hall round a comfortable fire, and many of these stories were children-scarers, no more.

But there was worse than all that in this tale, as Kvasir and Sighvat both pointed out. If no food had been sent to the mine and all that had been in the village was consumed, so that rumours of dead-eating were now abroad, then things were desperate for those guarding the mine.

So whom were they eating?

`We have to move fast, Bear Slayer,' Finn growled in a voice thick and black as the wheel of night,

'before our oarmates are stew.'