The Wolf Sea

15

Out of dust thick as gruel the rabble army spilled down the road, all rags and weathered, wary looks, darting this way and that, looking for fruit or roots, flowers and dung chips. The flies followed them, heavy with blood.

They washed up to us, broke like water round a stone and then milled in a confusion of fear, backing out of swinging range. Those dull-eyed children who had the energy to try and beg from us were grabbed by their sunken-eyed mothers and dragged back. They had fled their homes and the peace they had known and their god, it seemed, had turned his back on them.

About two hundred or so,' Gardi said, sitting down to inspect the ruin of his bare feet. He had run in from scouting and where he had stood was spotted with fresh blood.

`Where from?'

Gardi jerked his head in the general direction of south and shrugged. 'About half a day away, no more. It seems this Black-hearted One attacked and they fled.'

Two hundred villagers, about a third of them men. These brigands were growing in number and boldness if they could attack a village of that size and win.

A figure pushed through the throng, which was beginning to sink down and wail like a pack of anxious cats. He walked with a staff, his robes were ragged and stained with dust, his beard matted and he stopped in front of us and looked at us with mournful olive eyes in a long, sunken-cheeked face. Then he bowed and greeted us in Arabic and looked surprised when a half-dozen sun-blasted foreigners with faces like slapped arses gave the formal response.

He gabbled out a fresh stream, of which I understood something about us finishing them off, for they had no weapons and it was the will of Allah. The Goat Boy nodded and smiled and soothed him with soft hand movements.

`He thinks we are part of the brigands, though he has hope since we have not yet fallen on them and killed them all,' said the Goat Boy. 'His name is Ahmad, which means Most Praiseworthy, and he is the leader of these people, who are all from the town of Tekoa, which lies under the Cliff of Ziz.'

`Talkative, isn't he?' growled Kvasir.

`Shifting himself,' noted Finn, then squinted at me. 'What do you think, Trader?'

What I thought was that we were short of water and food and far too far away from where the sun sparkled on water and gulls chuckled for the joy of it. What I thought was that two men had been left with the monks on Aaron's hill, with faces the colour of straw and their lives leaking in stinking dribbles down their legs. What I thought was that they were the first of many.

That's what I thought. What I said was to the Goat Boy, to ask this village elder about Martin and Starkad and any other sightings of wild afrangi men like us, not expecting anything from it.

The Goat Boy gabbled and then Ahmad gabbled and the Goat Boy grew excited and the gabbling got faster until, suddenly, the Goat Boy whirled to me, his thin, brown body trembling, his arms waving like leather thongs in a breeze.

`There is a Roman church in Ahmad's village, an old ruin,' he told us. 'A Christ monk is there, not a Greek one, but one like those from the Church of Aaron. And there were other afrangi there, who stayed to fight the brigands, who were led by a man with scarlet hair. Ahmad fears the monk and the afrangi who stayed must be dead, for there were too many brigands for them to fight and their red-haired leader was a powerful warrior. He says the brigands are jinn-mad, but are afraid to stay long, for fear the garrison at En Gedi will find them.'

`Well,' said Finn at the end of all this. He ruffled dust from the Goat Boy's beaming head and, dropping his pack, began undoing leather thongs so that the mail shirt unrolled with a soft shink of sound. 'Time for battle-gear, eh, Trader?'

`Who is this red-haired man?' demanded Sighvat. 'He sounds like one of us.'

It will be Inger,' Kvasir decided.

Inger? Who's Inger?' asked Sighvat.

`Short,' Finn grunted, struggling into his mail. 'Bow-legged. From the Hedemark.'

`That was Sturla and he was more brown than red,' Kvasir answered scornfully. 'Inger was the big Slav we took on in Aldeigjuborg.'

`Fancied himself as a wrestler?' Botolf asked.

Kvasir nodded. 'That's the one. Had hair the colour of old blood. Almost as nice as yours was once, Ymir.'

Pig-humper.' growled Botolf amiably. 'Why do you think it is him, then?'

Kvasir shrugged. 'He has the reddest hair I know, he was one of the crew so I know he is around this place. and he was part Hallander and so cannot be trusted.'

Botolf scowled. 'I am from Halland.'

Kvasir spread his hands, smiling like a shark. 'Exactly. I give you two for one that Inger is the treacherous, camel-humping turd that old Sarakenos is speaking of.'

`Done,' declared Botolf. 'I have an ounce in hacksilver that says you are a mush-mouthed chicken-fucker.'

Finn looked at me and I met his flat, sea-grey gaze. He didn't have to say anything; if it was Inger, it meant he had turned his back on his oarmates, had broken the Oath.

While that hung overhead like the dust and wails made by the villagers, we slid into mail and leather and checked straps and argued and grumbled, falling into the old, familiar pattern that was our lives, the only one we had.

Gardi climbed back to his feet and I saw he was wearing new footwear, no more than a sole with thongs, which he had just bartered for. A villager gnawed a horse bone and contemplated his naked feet while Gardi, grinning, unshipped his bow and knuckled me a farewell before shoving through the crowd and flapping out on to the road. Hedin Flayer joined him and the pair of them loped off like hunting dogs.

Ahmad gabbled at the Goat Boy, who gabbled back.

`He asks if we are going to fight the brigands.'

`Tell him we are,' I said. 'And we will expect food and water as payment for returning his village to him and his people.'

`Fuck him and his people,' growled Thorstein Blaserk in passing, his underlip thrust out petulantly. 'We take what we need — that's what we do.'

`We have to come back this way once all is done,' I pointed out. 'Do you want to find them friendly or angry?'

He subsided, muttering, and Short Eldgrim chuckled savagely at him, the network of scars making his face look like tree bark.

`He's a rare one for the thinking is the Trader,' he noted. `You, on the other hand, have nothing in that head worth protecting with a good helmet.'

I listened to them squabble and growl while I put on my own mail, grease-slick and cold even in that heat, checked straps and the edge of my sword and all the time wondered about the red-haired man and if it was indeed Inger the Slav, one of the ones we'd come to rescue.

If so, what was he doing leading the people who were holding his oarmates prisoner? Were the rest of them already dead and eaten? Was the monk really Martin? And who were the men who had defended the village? Valgard and the others, who had escaped, perhaps?

The questions circled and flocked like the birds whirling out of the fields as we moved on, leaving the wailing behind. Black and white, they swooped low and one circled and landed on a fence post as we came up to it, cocking its head and looking at us.

Sighvat stopped dead and the rest of us, anxious and wary, fell into fighting crouches, looking this way and that, shields up.

`What?' I hissed at him.

`Magpie,' he declared morosely.

Odin's balls,' growled Kvasir. 'If it isn't bees it's birds. What now, Sighvat?'

I saw the Goat Boy cross himself and he caught me looking and clutched his Thor amulet. 'Very bad.

Magpie is the only bird who did not wear mourning for Christ. One means sorrow.'

Finn spat with disgust. 'Now even the boy is at it.'

Sighvat shrugged. 'I don't know what the Christ-men believe, though it is interesting to hear of it. This is the bird of Hel, 'Loki's daughter, made like her face, half black ruin, half pale flesh. It is her fylgia, come to take those who can never make Valholl.'

The men made signs and the fear rose in them, like stink from a swamp.

`We are all doomed, then?' demanded a voice from the pack and I knew then what I had to do, the sour taste of jarl silver in my mouth as I spoke.

`No, not all,' I said. 'Only one is marked, by his own admission.'

Sighvat looked at me, closed his eyes briefly and then nodded. I could almost hear Einar chuckle his appreciation as the others sighed out loud with relief.

`Move,' I said, harsh as winter, and they trotted on. Sighvat, with a twisted grin at me, followed after them and the magpie preened and fluttered across the road, tail bobbing. Botolf watched it, half turning as he jogged after the others.

`Will he die?'

The voice was a soft pipe of sound from the Goat Boy, looking up at me, fingering the Thor amulet.

`Cattle die and kinsmen die,

Yourself will soon die,

Only fair fame never fades. .'

I gave him the words as I remembered Einar saying them on that hill in Karelia another world ago, just before he had fought Starkad and given him his limp. Whether the Goat Boy understood any of it was another matter, but he nodded with a wisdom beyond his small years.

Then he tilted his head to one side and said: 'The villagers are starving. There isn't a goat or a chicken to be seen, so how will they feed us if they cannot feed themselves?'

He was clever and I remembered Einar looking at me as I supposed I looked at the Goat Boy now, one eyebrow up, squinting thoughtfully.

`Most men think in a straight line,' I said, hearing the echo of the words as Einar had said them to me in Birka before we burned it. 'They see only their own actions, like a single thread in the Norns' loom, knotted only when they thrust their life on others. They see through one set of eyes, hear through one set of ears, all their life. To look at things through someone else's eyes is a rare thing, which cannot be learned.'

He nodded as if he understood and I waited, while he frowned and thought. He had recovered well from his wound and only winced now and then at the pain from his healing lung.

`You lied to them?' he suggested. 'You knew these villagers could not feed us, but you made the bargain anyway, to get our men to fight. You did the same with Sighvat because he says he will die anyway.'

I said nothing, for his saying it stripped it bare and revealed it for what it was and I was ashamed and trying not to show it. He just smiled and nodded happily, as if he had uncovered a great secret, then trotted off on legs like knotted thread.

I looked at Hers bird and it looked back at me with its bright, unblinking eye, black as the Abyss Brother John had always warned of, until I broke the gaze and jogged after the others.

The town had the strangeness of a stone circle, which made you walk soft and speak hushed. No birds fluttered and sang here. There were no goats, dogs, cats or any living thing that walked and only the insects and soft plash of water from a fountain split the stillness.

When I arrived, past a crust of white, flat-roofed houses on the earth, under palms like feathers on sticks, the Oathsworn were moving, silent and awkward, wary as cats, poking in doorways and turning in half-circles.

The only sign of life was the insects, humming and thrumming from hanging basket to pot, from blood trail to gutted corpse. There were a lot of gutted corpses.

I went to the fountain, a simple affair of basin and spout, peeled off my helmet and dipped my hand in to cup cool water on my face. My other hand rested on soft moss and, beneath it, an outcrop of stone had a perfect, round dip in it. As I watched, a drip formed above and trembled and fell with a spiderweb splash, moving one more grain of stone.

Years it had been here, this fountain, this place, watching the likes of us come and go, flitting like moths through the world. I felt like a spark, whirling on the wind, and had to grip the edge of the mossy lip to keep from falling.

`Signs of a struggle, Trader,' growled Kvasir, his voice booming. 'Blood. Bodies stripped; some opened.

Look here.'

He scooped water into his helmet, then I walked with him to where the fish-white corpse lay, sightless eyes filmed with dust. A fly crawled, bloated, from one nostril.

`See here. Gutted neatly and the liver removed.'

He did not have to say more. Raw liver was good eating when you were in a hurry and hungry and I had eaten it myself, warm from a fresh-killed deer.

I fought back to the now, blinking into his tilt-headed concern.

`The church?' I managed.

`Finn's off to find it. You should soak your head a bit, Trader. You look heat-felled to me.'

`Where are Gardi and the Flayer?' I asked, ignoring him.

Kvasir rubbed his bearded face with water, blowing it off his moustache. He shrugged. 'Scouting, I suppose. That's what they do.'

The Goat Boy came up on his thin legs, massaging his side where the lung punished him for his running, and announced that Finn had found the church and that I was to come at once. I went.

It was as typical a Roman church as any we had burned: solid walls, a dome, a stout door flung wide, narrow entrance, a floor of coloured tiles, some of them smashed away. It had long been abandoned to the spiders and rats but, as Finn said, stern as a whetstone, it had worshippers now and I had better see.

I slid in through the door, blinking at the sharp change from light to dark, heat to cool. The place seemed as empty as the inside of a bell, thick with shadows, and my feet crunched on the spill of little floor tiles from what had once been some holy picture from the Christ sagas.

Gradually, the shadows slid into the shapes of two people, one sitting cross-legged and facing me, the other kneeling, facing him, his head on the floor as if in obeisance, a magnificent rust-red cloak draped over his shoulders and back and a carpet of the same for him to kneel on. There was a dull droning, as if unseen priests muttered in the dark corners.

The cross-legged one looked up as I crunched forward, one slow, bewildered step after another. His spiderwebbed face was harsh as a sun-cracked plain, stretched tight over cheeks in which black, haunted eyes peered familiarly at me.

Orm,' said Martin in a tired voice. 'Welcome to the house of God, idolatrous though it may be. Here also is one other you know: Starkad. Forgive him if he does not get up. I fear he is past that.'

I moved closer and sideways slightly. The kneeling figure was Starkad right enough, and he wasn't wearing a red cloak on his back, he was wearing his lungs; I hunkered down, tremble-legged and dry-mouthed at the sight of a real bloodeagling.

They had cut his ribs free from his backbone moved them forward so that they could lift his lungs out and drape them on his back, like wings. He was caked in old blood, knelt in a crusted-over pool of it and the priest-droning sound was every blood-gorging insect in the land enjoying a feast.

I hid,' Martin said flatly. 'When Starkad and his men caught up with me here, I hid. They were looking for me — politely, so as not to annoy the locals — when they were attacked. Hundreds of them. Screams and death, young Orm.'

He shifted slightly and the insects rose in a puff, like smoke, then settled again.

`When I came out, everyone had gone — save him. So I sat with him and offered him the peace of God until he died.'

`He was. . alive?'

Oh yes,' Martin said calmly. 'He lived for a good hour, did Starkad, though he didn't say much. I sprinkled water on his lungs to keep them from drying out, but even that touch was pain to him.'

I wiped dry lips and batted insects away, trying to suck in the enormity of it. This was. . vicious and meaningless. It had to have been done by a Norseman — no renegade Arab or Greek would even know of this — and such a thing was done to strike fear, or as a warning. Which meant this Red Head knew who we were and did not like it much. He was as dark-hearted as he was red-haired.

Martin looked at me across Starkad's corpse, hazed by the insect flutter. `Starkad was a hound from Satan,' he declared harshly, 'who hunted me all the way from Birka to here — two long years of running, curse him. I found a place to hide here, but I could not take the Holy Lance in it. He had won, I thought — then this.' Savage as a fanged grin, he was trembling with the triumph of it. If you did not believe in God before, Orm, look on this and tremble. He smites His enemies with a terrible Hand.'

I blinked the stinging sweat from my eyes; the air was thick with death and blood and flies and I wanted out of that place. I looked at Starkad and saw only a man, stripped naked and blood-eagled. No helm, no mail, no holy spear.

And no rune-serpent sword.

Martin smiled. A fly crawled at the edges of it, but if he felt it at all he gave no sign. 'Indeed,' he said.

'The spear is gone. Your famous sword is gone. Whoever killed him has it now. We must find them-'

There were shouts from outside and the slither of feet. The Goat Boy hurled into the church, his voice echoing and shrill. `Trader. . men are coming. Hundreds of them. And a man with red hair.'

I looked at Martin as I rose. 'We do not need to find them, priest,' I answered. 'I would run back to your little hole. They have found us.'

By the time I had hauled out my sword and unshipped my shield, they were on us, spilling over the dusty fields where they had been hiding, darting among the houses, a tide of screaming, rag-arsed men, desperate with outlaw fear and well armed.

The Goat Boy skittered back from the entrance as a figure hurled in, panting and grunting. I saw a mass of matted black hair and beard, a ragged, stained tunic and a long spear. His feet slapped and skidded on the ruined mosaic tiles and he crouched, snarling Greek curses and blinking in the transition from light to dark.

I stepped forward; he spotted the movement and hurled himself at me like a mad dog, the fat spearhead slamming hard enough into the shield to stagger me backwards. He tugged; it stuck. I shook the shield free and the weight of it falling dragged the spear down. While he was trying to put out a foot and pull it free, I spun round, up the shaft of the spear in a half-turn, my sword whirring in a killing arc.

The bite juddered me to my teeth and he shrieked and fell over as ribs crunched. When I spun the rest of the way round he was sprawled out, writhing like a landed fish and gasping and moaning. I saw he was barefoot, the soles black as ash.

The Goat Boy darted in then, a little knife flashing as he cut Black Hair's throat and looked up at me, panting with effort, teeth bared like a savage little dog. Another for his dead brother.

I took four steps to the narrow entrance, to where I could see the street outside: a madness of men, flashing axes and spears and swords, where figures slid and screamed like vengeful ghosts in the shrouding dust.

The flash of flame hair was beacon-bright in it and I saw Kvasir had won his bet. Inger came crashing through the wolf pack of his own ragged men, heavy with ringmail and carrying, I saw with a shock that puckered my arse, a byrnie-biter, a three-foot long, three-edged spear-blade, with only a foot of wooden shaft to wield it with. It was a vicious stabbing spear that could carve through three thicknesses of ringmail if a man of strength used it. And Inger fancied himself as a wrestler.

He saw me, knew me. His mouth opened in an O, framed by matted red beard, a roar of challenge I couldn't hear above the din and he hauled out a seax, slinging his shield on his back. Now with a weapon in either fist, he hurled himself at me from behind the mass of men, all hacking and cursing and slipping and dying in the dirt and blood of the street.

Botolf was trying to get to him, roaring spittle, but Inger dropped a shoulder and slammed him sideways, which staggered him off-balance, so that Sighvat thought he had a chance and leaped in, slashing.

I saw it framed neatly in the narrow doorway like an ikon painting. Inger took the blow on that byrnie-biter spear of his, half turned on the run and sliced with the seax, so that I saw the spray of blood arc out from Sighvat's throat as his head was flung back.

I shrieked then, howled like a dog as Sighvat vanished into the maw of the fighting, tumbling backwards.

Inger was still running as I headed for the narrow entrance, but he was faster and stronger and I was dead, for sure, against that vicious byrnie-biter spear. The thought of it melted my bowels and I skidded to a halt, frozen, shieldless. Doomed.

He knew it, was screeching his triumph as he pounded through the doorway, the byrnie-biter up like a cavalry lance, aimed right at my chest and looking like a ship's mast as it hurtled down on me.

Then the shield on his back slammed into the doorposts, too wide to pass.

Even as the strap fastening it to his back snapped his legs flew out from underneath him, dumping him hard on his arse. The byrnie-biter flew in the air, turning end over end, right over my head and clattered to the mosaic floor, bouncing and scattering blood-fat flies into the air.

I stepped forward, raised my sword and swung. Just the last three or four inches caught him on the forehead, above the right eye, splitting his skull like a rumman fruit, even as he blinked away the dust and whirling stars and realised what had happened to him.

He had time, I was thinking afterwards, to see the edge of that wave-patterned blade come down on him, the new oil on it running with the colours of Bifrost. I did not care what he felt, only that he was dead. He wore Starkad's gilt-edged dagged mail, so I knew who had done the blood-eagling.

I got your message,' I said to his splintered face, then stepped over him and out into the hazed dust and the bodies and dark shapes, looming like ships in fog. Steel flashed; there was the wet sound of edge on flesh.

Botolf loomed like the Cliff of Ziz, holding up one hand as he saw me drop into fighting stance. I relaxed; the fight seemed over.

`We would not be standing if they had not arrived,' panted Botolf, jerking his beard in the general direction of the 'Dead Sea. I looked up in time to see, through a swirl of red-gold dust, a magnificent figure on a white horse that was all arched neck and proud tail. One hand held a riding whip, the other peeled off a plumed helmet — the only armour he wore — to reveal a shaved head, and a young, sweat-streaked, bearded face, smiling with dazzling teeth.

He wore a white jubba over a long full tunic and the trader in me recognised satin from the Great City and that his cloak was hemmed with golden Arabic squiggle-writing and he smelled of aloes, even through the stink of shit and dust and death.

I am the Bilal al-Jamil ibn Nidal ibn Abdulaziz

he declared. 'If you do not have a letter I have been told of, make your peace with whatever gods you worship.'

I fumbled like a sleepwalker in my pouch and fished out the governor's crumpled, stained letter, then bowed, which seemed only right in the circumstances. He plucked it, smoothed it, read it, then handed it back to me with a small smile, raised the whip in salute, wheeled that magnificent horse round and pranced off the way he had come.

`What the fuck was that?' demanded Finn, lumbering up, sword out and shield scarred with fresh marks.

Our saviour,' I said, still bewildered.

`So be nice,' added Botolf with a grim chuckle. Finn laughed back, just as savagely, and ruffled the Goat Boy's dust-mtted hair. His young laugh was high and shrill and ended on a rack of coughing. Everyone joined in the laughter, even me. The mad relief of survivors.

Then Kvasir stuck his one eye into it and brought us back to the now 'Ten dead, six wounded,' he said to me, flat and grim as an altar stone. `Sighvat is one of the dead. We found Gardi and Hedin Flayer out in the bean fields, gutted and stripped.'

Botolf let out a long, weary groan and Finn flung his head back and howled like a sick dog until Kvasir shook him out of it.

It would have been more if those Sarakenoi had not come up,' he said, taking Finn's bowed head on one shoulder. 'Old Ahmad here says their leader is commander of the garrison at En Gedi.'

I saw the haunted-cheeked leader of the community hovering in the background and he inclined his head in a stiff little bow, then went off as his people flooded back in to reclaim their village.

Sighvat lay on his back with two grins, one a wistful affair from cheek to cheek, the second a lipless grimace from ear to ear. The blood had pooled to muddy slush under his head.

`That magpie had the right of it after all,' said Short Eldgrim morosely. 'His doom was on him.'

At least that Inger was killed for it,' Botolf growled, coming out from the ruined church and hefting the byrnie-biter in one massive fist. 'We can put him at the feet of Sighvat and the others.'

Which we did, making a good boat-grave a little way outside the village, helped by the villagers themselves. We howed Sighvat up with Gardi and Hedin Flayer, Oski, Arnfinn, Thorstein Blue Shirt, Thord, Otkel, Karlsefni and Hrolf the Dane woodworker, all washed and laid out neat and clean, with their weapons and mail and Inger at their feet, as was right.

We added Starkad and what was left of his men, picking our way through the ravaged fields and irrigation ditches to find them.

Kleggi, black-browed at the death of Hrolf the woodworker, was sure these men would be dug up as soon as we had left, for we had buried them with their mail and swords, but Ahmad looked so astounded and shocked when the Goat Boy told him this that I believed they would rest quietly.

We slumped down in the lee of the ruined church for the night — no one wanted to go in it, for it still stank of blood and death, even after the weary villagers had collected the dead brigands and buried them somewhere else.

For all that they were going hungry themselves, Ahmad and the others did their best, bringing what had been scavenged from the fields, but it was poor stuff. However, that and our own meagre provisions allowed us to eat and we tried to ignore the cooking smells from the Sarakenoi camp nearby.

`We took a sore dunt today,' Kvasir said and everyone hunkered round the fire, morose as crows in the red glow, growled agreement.

`Sorer for some than others,' grumbled Botolf, two ounces of hacksilver lighter after his bet with Kvasir

— but even Kvasir was not grinning at his win.

`There is worse to come,' I said and that fell on stony silence, so I closed my teeth on it and stared into the flames, brooding on what had happened to Martin — vanished during the fighting — and his holy spear and the serpent sabre. Neither had been found on Inger or anywhere nearby and the only prize taken was from Inger: he wore Starkad's jarl neckring as well as his dagged mail and so I had what Jarl Brand wanted.

Whether it was worth all the dead was another matter.

Two sarkenoi loomed out of the dark, fully armed and armoured, to invite me to speak with Bilal al-Jamil ibn Nidal ibn Abdulaziz I almost sprang up with the relief of getting away from the fire and the despair that hunkered at it, signalling the Goat Boy to come with me; on the way he told me that this Bilal al-Jamil's name meant 'Father of Salim, Bilal the beautiful, son of Nidal, son of Abdul the Magnificent, the Egyptian'.

`But you may call him Lord,' he added pointedly, when I grumbled about constantly filling my mouth with so much name.

This Bilal al-Jamil had a brilliant gold and white tent, blazing with lanterns and carpets and tables and cushions. He ushered me and the Goat Boy to sit and, aware of the dust and blood and worse that stained me, I almost refused.

`You are Orm,' said Bilal al-Jamil, in Greek and almost without accent. 'Al-Quds sent word you were pursuing brigands who have been a plague for some weeks now. At least we were able to dispatch some -

about thirty in the end, including kinsman of yours, I understand.'

`No kinsman,' I answered hastily. 'From the north like us, but not a kinsman. We thought him a prisoner of these brigands, but it seems he was leading them.'

Bilal al-Jamil frowned while a silent, padding slave offered suitable nabidh in silver cups and sugared nuts, which the Goat Boy crammed until his cheeks bulged.

`Not the leader,' he said with a dismissive wave. 'A captain, not a general. Not the Dark Hearted One.

That one has taken all the foodstuffs he has raided from here back to his lair with the bulk of his forces, some three hundred men.'

He made a grimace of distaste. 'They are eaters of their own dead,' he confided, as if it had been a mystery to me.

Then he smiled, that dazzling, open, happy smile you see on madmen and drunks 'But we will beard him in his lair, this Qualb al-Kuhl, you and I.'

I choked on my nabidh. I had thought the affair done with and now this. As far as I could see, this Amir had a small unit of horsemen, what the sarakenoi call a saga, plus some foot soldiers. Together, he had a hundred men at best and there were a handful of Oathsworn left, no more. I wanted to tell him to go fuck a goat, that I would be lucky to get the Oathsworn to stay together until tomorrow, never mind march off to the gods knew where and take on too many enemies.

Instead, I wiped my lips and managed to ask where the Dark-Hearted One had his lair.

Bilal al-Jamil smiled happily. 'Masada,' he declared airily, `not far from En Gedi.'