Bracelet of Bones (22 page)

“Almost unwise. I don’t think that, though. You knew this journey would be long and difficult.”

“And dangerous,” said Edith.

“But unless we take risks . . .” said Edwin. “I mean, you can sit at home by the fire and stir the stew pot and nothing much will change, or you can say your prayers and step out and face what’s unknown.”

The nearer they came to their journey’s end, the more precious to Solveig her companions became. You’re my lifeblood, she thought. I can’t wait to reach Miklagard, but I can’t bear to think of being without you.

How strange I am, all made up of opposites: brave and afraid, and laughing and crying, and friendly and lonesome, turn by turn, or even at the same time.

Solveig went on shaping the bone slat, and as she did so she gave a secret smile. Yes, she thought. That’s what I’ll carve. I won’t tell Edith, though.

But she did ask Edith two questions. The first was: “What was your mother’s name?”

“The same as mine,” said Edith. “Why?”

“So if your baby’s a girl, will you call her Edith too?”

“How should I know?” said Edith. “I won’t decide until I’ve seen it.”

On the fourth evening after they had reached the Black Sea, Solveig was fishing with some of the hooks Vigot had given to her when she noticed that although the east wind was still shouldering them toward the shore, the water beneath the boat was pushing them away from it.

“Danube,” said the river pilot, waving at the shore. “Huge river. The river water pushes us.”

“I can feel it,” said Solveig.

“Now last danger,” Mihran said. “We must cross open sea.”

“Not in this . . . tree trunk!” exclaimed Solveig.

“We sail overnight,” Mihran told them. “We sail across open sea, very far from land.”

“Do we have to?” Edith asked, alarmed.

“No choice,” said Mihran, shrugging his shoulders. “The Danube is our strong mistress.” He reached forward and patted her lap. “We do it.”

“We can!” insisted Solveig. “We’ve come through the cataracts.” But then she wished she hadn’t said that and avoided Edith’s eye.

“The danger,” said Mihran, “is black wind, sudden storm. The danger is . . . we roll over. If the wind gets up and snatches us, I take our sail down.”

“What if we do?” asked Edwin.

“Do?”

“Roll over.”

The river pilot pursed his lips. “Very far from land,” he said in a flat voice. “No other boats . . .” Mihran didn’t complete the sentence.

“Couldn’t we right her?” asked Solveig. “I think we could.”

“Next morning,” said Mihran. “Maybe. Sleep now. Try to sleep. I am your guide.”

But Solveig couldn’t sleep. She stared into the dark until her eyes ached. She sniffed the thick scents of a summer night in the south. She listened to the whirr and slap of the water passing under the boat, and the boat itself groaning, the mast cracking, the sail straining and easing . . .

In the middle of the night, Solveig and her companions were sprinkled by a shower; the raindrops were warm.

Then Solveig remembered Asta telling her that each day, childbearing women must drink a little of the dew that falls from Yggdrasill, the ash tree with arms spread out over the whole world.

I think Edith should drink some of this sweet rain, she thought. It will keep her baby safe.

Before long, there was a second shower, sharper than the first, and as it died away Solveig could see lightning on the eastern horizon. Not forked sticks or sharp spears but whole sheets, momentarily lighting up the whole sky, the sea, their little boat.

Mihran cleared his throat. “You, Solveig,” he said quietly. “You boat woman. What you think?”

“You’re asking me?” Solveig replied, not taking her eyes off the eastern horizon, not for one moment. “The lightning and thunder aren’t going away, but they’re not coming closer. Don’t take down the sail yet. Otherwise we won’t be making any headway.”

“Boat woman,” Mihran said again, and Solveig could hear the approval in his voice.

“I’ll keep watch with you,” said Solveig. “One is one. Two is better.”

In the darkness, Mihran smiled. “Two is better,” he repeated. “For them, too, I think. Edith and Edwin.”

“You mean . . .”

“Yous see,” said Mihran.

When the danger came, it wasn’t in the shape that Solveig or Mihran had imagined. It wasn’t a lightning strike, it wasn’t a sudden squall or a half-submerged tree trunk, it wasn’t a leak or a ravening sea monster or the rocky shore of a floating island.

As day began to dawn in the murky eastern sky, while Edith and her baby and Edwin still slept the sleep of the English, Solveig spotted a boat coming up astern.

Mihran gazed at it intently.

“Who?” asked Solveig. “Who are they?”

The river pilot shrugged.

The boat was a good deal larger than their dugout, in fact not much smaller than Red Ottar’s boat. It had two sails as grubby as the dawning day, and after a while Solveig and Mihran were able to count at least thirteen people.

“There may be more,” said Solveig. “In the hold. Why do I feel afraid?”

“Wake Edith and Edwin,” Mihran told her. “Tell them I change course.”

Without letting go of the sail, Mihran grabbed hold of the steering paddle. He dragged it to one side so that the dugout lurched and swung right around from the south to the west.

At once the boat behind them changed course too and quickly closed in.

The men aboard the boat began to yell, and as soon as she’d woken Edith and Edwin, Solveig scrambled down to the stern.

“No weapons,” she told Mihran. “Not as far as I can see.”

Then Solveig and Mihran heard wailing.

“Women!” exclaimed Solveig. “Women as well!”

Solveig saw two of the men were holding long grappling hooks. They waved them at the wicked sky, they reached toward the dugout . . . And only then did Solveig see the rotting faces and club hands of the passengers.

“Lepers!” growled Mihran, and he covered his eyes in terror.

The witch fingers of the two hooks grabbed the inside of the dugout and hoicked it sideways. Still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, Edith and Edwin were thrown back into the bottom of the boat.

“Away!” cried Mihran. “Away!” And he warned his companions. “Don’t touch their hooks! Don’t look at them! Don’t breathe the air they breathe!”

The passengers moaned. Some of them grunted.

Solveig did look up at them. One man was reaching down toward her, and Solveig could see he had only two fingers on one hand, three on the other, and they were more green than white. She looked up and saw one woman with bluish-red nodules all over her face, each as big as her own glass bead, and another whose face was twitching on one
side but stiff as ice on the other, and a man without a nose and no eye in the left socket.

“Don’t look at them!” Mihran begged her. “You become one of them.”

“No,” said Solveig. “That can’t be true.”

One of the lepers called out in Solveig’s language. “In the name of the gods,” he bawled, “in the name of whichever god you believe in, Mokosh or Odin, Christ, Allah . . .”

Around him, all the passengers cried and wailed and tore at their own bodies.

“In the name of all the gods,” begged the man, “give us alms. Give whatever you can.”

Edwin stood up and pulled off his little wooden cross inlaid with silver from around his neck. Then he murmured something to Edith and tore a narrow strip from the bottom of her tattered shift. Edwin wrapped the cross in the material and threw it up to the leper boat.

Seeing this, Mihran dug into a pocket and pulled out a bronze coin and tossed that up too without looking exactly where he was throwing it.

“You,” he told Solveig.

“What?”

“You throw.”

“What?”

Edwin reached up toward them. “May Christ sail with you in your terrible plight,” he called out. “May Christ save your souls.”

“Food?” asked Solveig nervously. “Our wheaten loaf?”

“No!” snapped Mihran.

“What about the sprats?”

“No!”

While Solveig was still hesitating, the two lepers loosened their hold on the dugout with an experience born of practice. They set the dugout adrift, and it bobbed on the water like a cork.

Then the leper boat swung away from them.

“It’s looking east,” said Edwin with a deep sigh. “As we Christians must.”

“And Muslims,” said Mihran.

“Where are they going?” asked Solveig.

Mihran shrugged. “Around and around. They only come to land to buy food.”

For a while the four companions sat silent, still troubled, still sorrowful.

Edith gave Solveig an anxious look. “I wish you’d given them something,” she said.

Blood rushed to Solveig’s cheeks. “I wanted to. I did! I even thought I’d give them my glass bead, but that would have betrayed Oleg.” Solveig shook her head fiercely. “But I’d rather be dead than alive like that.”

“Lepers aren’t animals,” Edith protested. “They’re human beings. Humans in need.”

“You Vikings!” said Edwin scornfully. “God will call each of us when He chooses.”

My father, thought Solveig. What would he have done? Did he see those lepers? Did he look into their faces?

What if I get there and no one has seen him? Would Harald Sigurdsson help me? It’s true, I’ve got the gold
brooch. My father told me it’s worth more than our farm and all our animals. If he’s not there and Harald’s not there . . . My father’s gift, that could save me.

“I remember,” said Edith in a dreamy voice, as if she were thinking of something that had happened in a far-off land long ago. “Red Ottar told me that one of the Åland Islands—where we sailed to, me and Solveig, after we left Sweden—yes, one of the Åland Islands was a leper island.”

“In that case,” ventured Solveig, “maybe that ship sweeping past us in the middle of the night . . .”

“You’re right,” agreed Edith. “When Torsten saved us. Maybe the crew weren’t ghosts but lepers.”

The bleary-eyed sun rose in the east.

Mihran puffed out his cheeks and dragged his fingers through his oily dark hair. “Today,” he informed them, “and one more night.”

“At sea?” exclaimed Solveig.

Mihran thrust up his chin and raised his eyes.

“You didn’t tell us,” said Edwin, frowning.

“Say one day at a time,” Mihran replied.

That night, the sea breeze was light and the sea swell gentle, and the four companions gossiped and ate and drank and dozed, but then Solveig had a terrible dream. The leper boat had grappled their dugout for a second time, and because Solveig hadn’t given them a gift, the lepers lifted her, dangling, with their grappling hooks. They lowered her into their own boat and began to take away the parts of her body they were missing themselves. One gouged out her left eye, and
one twisted off her nose, and one snapped off most of her fingers, and one tore at her growing right breast.

Solveig was too terrified to go back to sleep again, and she jammed herself against Mihran in the stern.

But day did dawn. It dawned at last, and Solveig could see land, a blue rib to the south, steep slopes to the west.

Mihran opened his arms as wide as the world. “This!” he said rather proudly. “All this. The Empire of Byzantium.”

22

A
s they drew closer to the shore, Solveig could see dozens of little boats, some with sails as green as water mint, as blue as herons, as pink and scarlet as the wings of flamingos. Mihran steered their dugout into a wide water passage leading south, where they were surrounded by countless vessels—just as many, thought Solveig, as all the water boatmen shooting across the pond behind our farm.

Water bottles, she thought, and waterfowl and waterlogged and water spirits and goddesses like Mokosh . . . all this journey has been water—on water and in water and near water.

“Where are we?” she asked Mihran. “I keep thinking and feeling faster and faster.”

Mihran smiled. “Nearly,” he said. “This waterway is Bosphorus.”

“What’s that?”

“Greek word,” he said, and then he shrugged. “Greek to me!”

“Where does it go?”

By now Edith and Edwin were listening too. “All this land,” he told them, “is the Empire of Byzantium. The greatest empire on earth. It stretches far beyond the Black Sea to the east and south to Antioch and all the way west through Greece to Italy. Miklagard is the hub, the great city at the center. And here is the waterway to Miklagard.”

Solveig hugged herself, excited and fearful. Then she threw herself back against her side of the dugout, almost turning it over.

“Careful!” Edwin warned her. “Many’s the mission foiled at the last footstep.”

“Miklagard,” said Mihran, “is a great magnet.”

“What’s a magnet?” asked Solveig.

“You know,” said Edwin. “Lodestone.”

“No,” said Solveig.

“Metal stone,” explained Mihran. “It pulls all other metals toward it.”

“It attracts them,” added Edwin.

Like the maelstrom, thought Solveig. The maelstrom at the bottom of the ocean that drags down boats and the people and grinds everything into salt.

“City . . . people . . . market . . . music . . . marble . . . money . . .” The river pilot let go of the steering paddle and waved his arms and shook his head in wonder. “Church of Hagia Sophia! Divine Wisdom! Yous see.”

“The largest church in the world,” said Edwin. “That’s what I’ve heard.”

“But!” said Mihran. He paused and looked Solveig straight in the eye.

“What?” asked Solveig.

“Snake pit.” Mihran turned his whole body into a slowly squirming, sidling snake. “Empress Zoe is a very, very dangerous woman. Man-eater! Knives. Poison.” Mihran darted a look at Edith. “Strangling! She kills as she pleases, and many people, many, would be pleased to kill her.”

Edwin made a sound somewhere between a hum and a growl. “Hmmm! I’ll have to watch my words, then.”

“Your message is for the empress?” Mihran asked him.

Edwin nodded. “And . . . the emperor,” he said carefully.

Mihran snorted. “Michael. Boy-man.”

Edwin raised his eyebrows.

“Empress Zoe is old woman. Fifty-four . . . fifty-five. Michael, nineteen!”

“So I’ve heard,” said Edwin thoughtfully.

“Empress Zoe and boy-man have Viking guards,” Mihran said.

“I know,” replied Solveig. “The Varangian guard. My father told me.”

“What’s Varangian?” asked Edith.

“Viking guards who serve the emperor,” Solveig said. “Harald’s their leader.”

“Man-man!” said Mihran. “Harald is only one year more than Michael, but he is man-man!”

“My father . . .” mused Solveig, “I think he’s one of those guards.”

Mihran nodded. “Where Empress Zoe is, Harald Sigurdsson is. And where Harald is, your father is. All Norwegians.”

For a few minutes, Solveig sat in the hazy sunlight and watched the way in which Mihran so expertly threaded their little boat between the swarm of craft advancing toward them, sometimes only narrowly missing them, and she kept looking from shore to shore, astonished at the way both sides of the channel, sometimes no more than eight hundred paces apart, were almost completely lined with stone towers, houses, sheds, rickety piers, staithes.

“Yes,” said Edwin after a while, “a snake pit. And I suspect Red Ottar’s boat will be a snake pit by now.” He paused and put a friendly arm around Edith. “What with Bergdis and all her venom.”

He cares for her, thought Solveig, and not just because she’s English. She cares for him too. He’s no good at fishing or knots or rowing or anything, but all the same, he’s strong and kind. So could they . . . ?

Edith smiled at Solveig as if she could read her thoughts.

“Gæ
ð
a wyrd swa hio scel!”
she said.

“Huh?”

“Oh!” Edith shrugged. “Fate goes as it must!”

“Is that what you really think?”

Edith gave Solveig a knowing look. “Well,” she said with a pretty smile, “sometimes we can help it along.”

“But you’re Christian,” said Solveig.

“Fate moves in the mind of God,” explained Edwin. “Yes, as I was saying, Bergdis and her venom. But it’s not just her. Torsten and Bruni, too. On their own they’re each decent men.”

“Torsten is,” said Solveig.

“But put them together and there’s trouble.”

“Red Ottar told me about Bruni,” said Edith.

“He did?” exclaimed Solveig.

“Yes, Bruni killed Torsten’s cousin Peder and stole his wife.”

“No!” exclaimed Solveig.

“Yes,” said Edith. “She was called Inga. Bruni stole her and bedded her and sailed away with her from Norway to Iceland. Bruni doesn’t know that Torsten and Peder were cousins. Torsten recognized him not just because of his name but by his black tooth; that’s what he told Red Ottar.”

“And because Bruni had lived in Norway before he went to Iceland,” Edwin added.

“Red Ottar told me Torsten will avenge his cousin’s death,” Edith went on, “and he’ll avenge Inga’s disgrace.”

“He must,” insisted Solveig.

“But he made them both swear to keep the peace until after our journey.”

“It’s not our journey any longer,” said Edwin. “Not now that Red Ottar’s dead.”

“That’s one reason Bruni wanted us all to stay together,” said Edith. “There’s safety in numbers.”

“The rat!” exclaimed Solveig vehemently. “I’m not surprised, though. Not really.”

“So, Solveig,” Edwin said, “is this what your gods teach you? To scheme? To kill? To blind an eye for an eye and extract a tooth for a tooth?”

“If a woman’s dishonored,” Solveig replied, “she must be avenged.”

“With violence?” Edwin challenged her.

“And if a man’s injured or killed without reason, he must be avenged. That’s how it’s always been.”

“Until everyone is blind and toothless,” said Edwin quietly.

Solveig could feel the roots of her hair tingling and an angry blush creeping down to her chest.

“You Christians!” she retorted. “You’re always looking at people with lamb eyes and turning the other cheek and forgiving. At least you say you do.”

“Solveig!” Edwin warned her.

“Always waffling like Slothi. Or not speaking at all.”

“Don’t say words you’ll regret later.”

“You Christians will choke on your compassion,” Solveig snapped, “and murderers will roam free, free to kill again.”

“Solveig, how can your feuding—violent revenge, brutal killing—ever be preferable to healing?”

“You call it feuding. We call it justice. We call it law. We call it order.”

Edwin clamped his jaw and sighed. “Nothing’s ever easy in the kingdom of earth,” he said.

“No, it’s not,” cried Solveig. “And that’s what Christians can’t accept. People become Christian because they can’t bear all the pain on middle-earth and need empty promises about high heaven. That’s what I think.”

“Oh, Solveig!” exclaimed Edith, so sad, so understanding. And then she clutched Solveig and tried to hug her.

“You English!” Solveig yelped. “You always think you know best.”

For a while Solveig and Edwin were silent. They’d hurt each other and hurt themselves, and Edith didn’t know quite how to soothe them.

But after a while Edwin began to sing and say part of a poem:

We’re not moored, thought Solveig. And there’s no cliff, anyhow. Just slopes, scrubby bushes.

Despite herself, Solveig listened. He’s Christian, she thought. And he made me angry. I think he wanted to. And yet . . .

Half listening, half thinking, Solveig began to feel almost as fond of Edwin as she had felt angry before. She smiled cautiously at Edith and shook her head.

Edwin finished his song. “Now,” he said, “let’s not end our long journey with an argument.”

“Look!” said Mihran, pointing to starboard.

Solveig and Edwin and Edith looked. And in the hazy sunlight they saw a hill covered in buildings, most of them flat-roofed, and soaring above them a huge dome.

“What is it?” asked Edith.

At first Mihran didn’t reply.

Edwin opened his arms.

“Floating,” marveled Solveig. “Well, it looks as if it is.”

“High on the hill,” Mihran agreed.

“Above the hill,” Solveig corrected him.

“Heavy stone and mortar,” Mihran told them. “Hagia Sophia.”

“Hagia Sophia!” Solveig and Edith and Edwin cried together. For a while the three of them gazed at it, speechless.

Mihran knew when to keep silent. He watched his companions, and the corners of his mouth twitched.

“What keeps the dome up?” exclaimed Solveig.

Mihran smiled and nodded. “Yous see,” he said obligingly.

What they saw was an inlet, a wide harbor opening to starboard. It was seething with little craft, some entering, some busily crossing from side to side.

“Not just cobles and knarrs and skutes,” cried Solveig. “All kinds of boats I’ve never even seen before. What are they, Mihran?”

“Feluccas,” the pilot told her. “The little boats you can row. And dahabiahs. And dhows—they’re the ones with three-pointed sails. This is the Golden Horn!”

“The Golden Horn?” exclaimed Edwin, and he all but stood up but then thought better of it and plumped himself down again. “The harbor of harbors.”

Around the shoulder of land facing them beyond the entrance to the harbor, there was a massive wall, at least seven men high, stretching south from the Golden Horn along the shore of the Bosphorus as far as Solveig could see.

“This is Miklagard. It is, isn’t it?” Solveig said out loud. Not really doubting it, she still needed Mihran to confirm it.

Mihran just smiled at her and rubbed his mustache between his right thumb and forefinger. Solveig filled her lungs with salty air and noisily blew it all out again. “I know,” she said.

Inside the harbor, there was a hubbub: boats crisscrossing, carcasses and all kinds of muck floating in the water, people shouting, scents and stinks . . .

Solveig felt thrilled and alarmed. She was almost gagging on her own excitement.

“We each have to go our own way,” Edwin told them. “I to the Empress Zoe, and Edith with me.”

“Edith bazaar,” Mihran suggested. “Best on middle-earth.”

“Edith with me,” repeated Edwin. “We to the empress, and you, Solveig, to your father.”

“I will,” said Solveig. She felt out of breath and dry-mouthed.

Edwin nodded. “Wherever he may be,” he said. “But we must meet. We must be sure . . .”

“Yes,” said Edith, taking Solveig’s hands between her own.

“Oh, Edie!” whispered Solveig.

“At noon tomorrow,” said Edwin. “At the landing stage where we leave this boat.”

“No,” said Mihran. “Too many.” He thought for a moment. “There’s a water pool . . .” he began.

“Water pool?” repeated Edwin.

“Underground. A sunken palace. It waters the whole city. The cistern, people call it.” Mihran spread his arms. “Water! Dream!”

Water, thought Solveig. Dream. That’s what my journey has been made of.

“We meet there,” Mihran told them. “Noon tomorrow.”

And I’ve become a water girl. More water than earth.

“And me,” said Mihran, “I go with Solveig.”

Solveig gave a start. “What did you say?”

“I go with you.”

Solveig smiled with her mouth. She smiled with her eyes. Then she rubbed her face against the river pilot’s right shoulder.

“I promised,” said Mihran.

“You did,” said Solveig. “But, Mihran . . . this journey, I began it alone, and if I can I must end it alone.”

For a moment Solveig closed her eyes. She was rowing away from the farm, and it was still masked by night. Now she was under sail, running before the east wind.

“Ægir,” she was praying, “don’t shout at me with your rough wave tongues. Ran, don’t snare me with your drowning net. Lift me and carry me to Miklagard.”