Bracelet of Bones (23 page)

23

I
n the milling covered market, all the merchants had their own shouts and snares.

One little dark-skinned man, like an exotic bird in his scarlet and saffron robes, was piping out “coriander cinnamon cumin” and then “ginger pepper mace” in two short bursts over and over again. One woman bowed so low to Solveig that her left fingertips almost swept the ground, and then she dabbed Solveig’s cheek with perfume as delicate and yellow-green as the first day of spring. And one man actually uncurled Solveig’s fingers and pressed a pearl into her palm before smiling at her with his pearly teeth and taking it away again. All around her, people were calling and shouting, jostling, sidestepping, clapping their hands and laughing, weighing, bargaining.

In the market at Ladoga, thought Solveig, I began to list everything around me. Antlers and ale cakes and apples and awls, ash wood bowls, amber, blueberries and brown cheese and bronze bottles, birch-bark carvings and bone combs, crystal beads, cockerels, crabs, crayfish. Oh! And clay cups
and carrots and cornelian . . . I only got as far as C, and that’s nothing compared to this market. I don’t even know what half these things are. This bowl here, smoking. Thick and sweet. What is it?

“You Christian?” asked a merchant with eyebrows as coarse as the bristles of a wild boar.

“Yes,” gasped Solveig. “I mean, no. I don’t know.”

“You Moslem,” said the man encouragingly, and he beckoned her with a hooked little finger. “Come see.”

Solveig walked on, feeling dazed. Unsteady on her feet after so many days at sea, she began to climb the hill toward Hagia Sophia.

The sky was curdled. The day was growing hotter. And high above Solveig the dome floated, as if it were suspended from the sky by a golden thread.

As she drew close to it and at last saw the enormous dark buttresses supporting it, she remembered what King Vladimir’s envoys had said.

“We didn’t know,” they reported, “whether we were still on earth or had entered heaven.”

Solveig took a deep breath. Then she put down her bag of clothing and bones and stretched and braced her shoulders.

At once Solveig thought of the shoulder blade. I’ve carried it all the way here, she thought, and I’ve heard the battle ghosts singing:

I vowed to carve runes for them, and I will. I will. But . . . with my journey, with my words and tears and laughter, I have already been singing for them. Isn’t that what we must all do?

Solveig sucked her cheeks and swallowed loudly.

Mihran says it’s right to come here first, she thought. Because the Empress Zoe worships here each day and her guards escort her. He says they’re all Norwegians, Norwegian to their back teeth. He knows everything, Mihran.

I feel so nervous. I haven’t felt as fearful as this since I told Asta I’d gotten cramps in my stomach . . .

You told King Yaroslav about me. You said you’d regret not telling me you were leaving for as long as you lived. Surely you’ll be glad, won’t you?

Solveig picked up her bag. Anyhow, she thought, I don’t even know where you are. You may not be here in Miklagard. You may be away, fighting shoulder to shoulder with Harald Sigurdsson. For all I know, you may be at the other end of the Great Sea.

Inside Hagia Sophia, it was gloomy and damp and chilly.

Solveig stopped just inside the entrance door and listened.

It’s the distant ocean, she thought. Humming. Almost growling. No. It can’t be that. It’s every sound ever made in here, trapped and circling around and around.

Little by little Solveig grew used to the half-light. She saw that she was in a huge hall and that there was the most enormous dark cavern in front of her. At the far end of the hall, several men were standing at the bottom of a wide ramp lit by flickering horn lanterns.

Slowly she walked toward them, and when she drew close, Solveig could see they were fair-skinned and fair-haired. All of them! Then one of them said something, and never in her life had language sounded so sweet or so welcome.

“Look!” one man with a ruddy face called out. “Here comes an angel!”

“I could do with a real woman myself,” one of his companions replied.

Their voices ricocheted down the hall.

“Look how fair and tall she is,” exclaimed a third man. “A Valkyrie!”

“Almost like a Norwegian.”

By now Solveig was smiling to herself, and she walked right up to the men.

“From a farm,” she told them. “In Trondheimsfjord.”

“What?”

“She is! She’s Norwegian.”

The five men stood in a ring around Solveig and marveled at her.

“I’m . . . I’m looking for Asser Assersson,” Solveig said in a level voice, low as murmuring bees.

“Who?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Some people call him Halfdan.”

“Halfdan!”

“The old sod!”

“Some men get all the luck.”

“Is he here?” asked Solveig, and her voice faltered.

The five Viking guards would happily have gone on cracking jokes and teasing Solveig, but they were interrupted by a great shout from the cavern.

“Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

Solveig stepped backward and straight into one of the guardsmen’s arms.

“Hello!” he said. “I’m Hakon!”

Solveig quickly extracted herself. “I didn’t even know anyone was in there,” she said, waving at the vast space under the dome.

“Hundreds of people,” the ruddy-faced guard told her. “One thousand, maybe. And the empress herself.”

“She’s here!” exclaimed Solveig.

“Up there,” he said, nodding at the ramp. “In the gallery.”

“And . . .” Solveig began hesitantly.

The guards eyed each other.

“So’s he,” Hakon told her.

“Here?” cried Solveig, and she clamped her hand over her mouth.

“Unless he’s away with the birds.”

“No one’s allowed up,” said the ruddy-faced man. Then he gave Solveig a wink and politely stepped aside.

Solveig thanked them all and began to stride up the twisting ramp.

“So young, too,” one guard called after her.

“Young enough to be his daughter.”

The five men guffawed. And Solveig, steadily she rose from darkness to light.

Two guards were standing at the top of the ramp, and one immediately challenged her.

“Halt! Drop that bag!”

Solveig glanced at him. Dark-skinned. Dressed in baggy trousers. Grasping a saber.

“In the name of the empress!” the other guard countered. “She’s just a girl! You see terror lurking behind every bush.” Then he waved his right hand airily. “Pass!” he told Solveig.

That voice. That imperious tone.

When Solveig had stepped into the brightly lit gallery, she quickly looked back.

So very tall. A hand’s height taller than a tall man. That blond beard. And one eyebrow higher than the other.

Solveig’s heart lurched.

It was Harald Sigurdsson.

He didn’t recognize me, she thought. Have I changed so much? She rubbed her face and ran her fingers through her tresses.

Yes. Yes, I have. I was only ten. And I’ve crossed half of middle-earth.

To Solveig’s right as she walked along the gallery were high windows, and the walls between them were covered with thousands and thousands of little gold tiles. So was the ceiling. To her left were massive marble columns and, far below, the circular cavern and all the worshippers.

Solveig passed a crowd of people and wondered whether they were surrounding the empress herself. Empress Zoe and her lover, Michael, the boy-man. Many of the male courtiers had strange, hairless faces like plucked chickens, and Solveig couldn’t tell whether they were old or young.

Solveig stared up at the soaring dome, and then she peered right over the marble balustrade into the vast body of the church. It was a dark murmuring ocean.

“Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

The shouts echoed and answered each other. They rose and circled around and around in the dome.

Where? Where is he? Solveig’s heart was battering in her chest. Next to the empress, guarding her? I can’t force my way through there.

Near the end of the gallery, a face stared down at Solveig from the wall—a man’s face made entirely of tiny tiles.

He looks so strong, she thought. But gentle too. So wise. So sad.

Solveig walked right up to him and examined the tiles.

Snowflake, sealskin. Cormorant. Ice-blue, flax flower, forget-me-not. Poppy and cherry and orange. Holly, water-mint green. Gold and silver . . . silver and gold . . .

Ah, thought Solveig, quite breathless now, this man, he’s all the colors of my own journey.

It’s so light above me, so dark below me. Like Asgard and Hel.

Then Solveig turned the corner from her gallery into a second one, leading away to the left, almost as long as the one she had just walked down.

She closed her eyes and opened her eyes.

At the far end, at least fifty paces away, a man was leaning into the balustrade. Solveig could see he was holding a knife and incising the marble.

How long did she stand there, staring at him? However many times she thought about it, she was never quite sure. For a moment. Forever. Until she was quite weightless.

So stooping. And cumbersome. I’d recognize you at any distance, anywhere.

Always I have loved you. I’ve never questioned that. But now I question it, and I love you all the more, strong and weak, weak but strong. Not a god. A man.

My father.

My own blood.

She couldn’t wait. Not any longer. She stepped forward, she dropped her bag, and the dry bones clattered. She quickened and ran toward the man, calling, “Father! Father!”

Halfdan looked up. He looked toward her.

And without one word, father and daughter, they reached toward each other.

Solveig closed her eyes. I’m wide and deep as the ocean, she thought. Small as a hazelnut. Then she allowed Halfdan to sweep her up and lift her off her feet.

“You were carving,” Solveig said at last in a husky voice.

“Look!” said her father, pointing to the balustrade and brushing a tear from his left cheek. “Solva, my Solva!”

SUN-STRONG, sang the runes.
.

Solveig’s own hot tears dripped onto the marble ledge. She swept back her golden hair, and then she took the shining knife from her father’s hand.

“With salt and stone,” she said. “With bone and blood. I’ll cut your name next to mine.”

A
fair-haired young woman, tall, willowy almost, and a cumbersome man with a limp were loping down the hill from Hagia Sophia.

She kept turning to him. Then she threw back her head and laughed, and that was the most joyous sound anyone in Miklagard heard all that day.

Waiting for them at the top of a wide flight of stone steps leading down to the ancient cistern, the water pool that supplied the whole city, were a cordial-looking man with buckteeth and such a pretty, dark-haired young woman, plainly pregnant.

The two men stared unblinking across oceans into each other’s eyes. They clasped hands.

Then the two young women embraced. And without a word the fair-haired one pressed into her companion’s right hand a wide, flat ring of walrus bone. A teething ring!

Again they embraced.

A swarthy little man with the most extravagant mustache came bounding up the stone steps. His eyes were liquid and black.

He pointed and led them down the steps and opened his arms as wide as this middle-earth.

In front of them stretched an immense pool of water, lit by hundreds, thousands even, of floating, flickering candles: a magical, underground night sky.

The girl with the golden hair stepped a little apart. She gazed into the water.

Water rocking and fractious and seductive and bottomless, clicking and kissing, cradling and drowning, a mirror, no, a broken mirror, a dream, this water shining, violet and gray, green as her growing.

The girl knelt and trailed her fingertips through it. The water of life.