Haraldr stood over the Seljuk like an ancient Titan. ‘The first question saves his eyes.’
After a few minutes of verbal interrogation the Seljuk had gratefully saved everything except his previously forfeit right ear. It was an ominous tale. The Seljuks had been in the pay of the Emir of Aleppo but now planned to keep the Empress as their own property. They intended to rendezvous with a larger Seljuk force riding from the east, then retreat with their prize to a series of mountain redoubts in northern Persia, beyond the reach of any power, even the Romans. The ransom they extorted would finance their westward ambitions. For this reason they saw no need to deliver the Empress once their demands had been met; for if their demands were met, they would soon enough be at war with the Romans.
Blymmedes asked Haraldr and Gregory to accompany him. They climbed a rocky path that snaked to the summit of a sheer outcropping. The kastron, now four or five bowshots away, was a sinister apparition in the moonlight, a dungeon rather than a town. The dark walls were only about two bowshots on a side, but they were a good twenty-five ells high and were rooted in a roughly faceted summit that scarcely allowed purchase to a few scrubby trees. Toothlike merloned battlements ran along the top of the wall; in the crenellated openings the robes of the Seljuk sentries were visible as a pale luminescence.
‘I don’t like sieges,’ said Blymmedes. It is work for engineers, not soldiers. Towers, tortoises, fire blowers, mangonels. Of course it would take weeks to bring the equipment up here, dig the tunnels and entrenchments, and erect the engines. And there are too many Seljuks inside such a small place, so they would first slaughter the inhabitants to preserve food. A disagreeable business altogether.’ Blymmedes paused and frowned even more deeply; the lines were like slits in his leathery forehead. ‘Of course that is the simple problem, and now its solution offers us nothing. My akrites have already encountered the reconnaissance elements of the Seljuk force and have interrogated - though not as eloquently as you, Komes Haraldr - one of their scouts. The relief is quite a large force and only a day away. Even if my infantry arrives tomorrow evening to help us initiate the siege, we would not be able to withstand both the relief force and the force inside. And of course we do not know when Constantine will return with his thematic forces, though with such assistance as he will offer we might hope he is delayed indefinitely. I do not see any way we can prevent the Empress’s abductors from escaping into the Plain of Aleppo, and from there to wherever they may wish to go.’ Blymmedes folded his arms, looked up at the brooding kastron, and shook his head.
Haraldr studied the walls. At the back of the kastron the crenellations were almost crested by a twenty-ell-wide lip of tortured rock that fell away to a sheer drop of almost two hundred ells. ‘How wide are those walls on top?’ asked Haraldr.
‘Three men abreast,’ answered Blymmedes, his brow slightly unfurrowing.
‘So despite the considerable number of these Seljuks inside, were I to gain access to those walls I would only have to worry about three men. At a time, that is.’
‘True,’ said Blymmedes. ‘But how would you get on the walls, and what objective could you accomplish on the walls alone, for you could never survive a descent into the town.’
‘My comrade,’ said Haraldr with renewed vigour, ‘the Seljuk who leads this army impresses me as a bold, ambitious leader who can count on the fanatical loyalty of his men; why else would they have joined him in this daring escapade? Up on those walls, my objective will be to meet face to face with this noble warrior. But before I can achieve this intercourse, I will need you to help me with a diversion.’
The drums broke the dawn. The kastron was a blocky silhouette against a radiant sunrise still hidden by the summit. Five light cavalry vanda of the Imperial Excubitores and four hundred Varangians advanced in stately formation to within a bowshot of the walls. The Mandator of the Imperial Excubitores, Domestic Nicon Blymmedes at his side, formally called upon the walled town to surrender to his Majesty Michael, Emperor, Basileus and Autocrator of the Romans. For several minutes the only sounds were the snorting of horses in the Roman ranks and the faint crowing of roosters from inside the Citadel. The scream began inside the walls. For a very long minute the sound left the kastron and was amplified among the surrounding crags, finally assaulting the Roman forces like a dry, biting, nerve-scraping wind. Then the scream lifted into the sky and became pure and clear: sheer human terror. The body flew against the lightening sky, arms and legs milling madly. For a moment it seemed to succeed in gaining desperate flight. Then it plunged sickeningly, the scream lowering in pitch and ending with the sound of a bag of wet sand smashing into a wooden wall. Naked, arms akimbo like a huge, pitiful, plucked bird, the body lay on the rocks in front of the Roman formation. The head was cocked perpendicular to the spine; Blymmedes walked forward and gently lifted it. Haraldr did not know the man at first because the facial skin had been slit at the forehead and peeled off like a rabbit’s pelt. Then he saw the eyes, terror still intact. Leo, the Empress’s eunuch.
Blymmedes faced the Citadel. A figure stood framed in a crenellation just above the thick wooden main gate. The Seljuk’s white silk seemed to have a phosphorescent corona. He called down in a powerful voice that bounded stridently off the rocks. The mandator translated.
‘His name is Kilij. He is the leader of these Seljuks. He says withdraw or he will see if the woman can fly any better than the eunuch.’ Cold hands knotted Haraldr’s intestines. He struggled with a maddening urge to run forward and settle with Kilij. But no. The plan. He must meet this Kilij.
Blymmedes and Haraldr discussed Kilij’s ultimatum with animated gestures, just the type of argument among commanders one might expect before a cowardly retreat. After a few minutes Haraldr stomped angrily to the rear. Blymmedes gave the order to withdraw. Within minutes the cavalry and the Varangians were winding down the narrow, dusty road to Harim. Haraldr could hear the Seljuks jeering from the walls, and the cold hands made the knots ever tighter.
Grettir squinted. The sun was now a golden globe just resting on the kastron’s east wall, preparing to break loose and float into the sky. The mist had contracted into purplish streaks in the shadowed ravines. Grettir stepped forward proudly and gratefully. Odin had favoured him by sparing his leader, Haraldr Si--no, Nordbrikt, if he so wished, and by giving his tongue Grettir this chance to atone for his stupid treachery. The eagle-feeding Saracen-Slayer had asked for the most amusing man among them, and Grettir had been a virtually unanimous choice. Well, it was true; a skald who skinned onions for half a year had to become a prankster or he would drown in his own tears. Besides, as Odin’s din hastener had told him, today his humour would be worth a thousand swords. Judging that he was just outside bowshot, Grettir cocked his big knife-edged hat and stepped onto his stage, a patch of fairly even ground illuminated by a sun that had now been freed to the pond-blue sky.
This morning I’ll teach even mischief-making Loki a thing or two,
Grettir told himself, hoping to calm his quaking hands.
Haraldr waited at the base of the sheer drop beneath the east walls of the kastron. When he heard the dim but clearly perceptible sound of a human imitating, with comic hyperbole, the crow of a cock, he turned to Halldor. ‘Good. Grettir has begun.’ Haraldr looked two hundred ells up the crusty face of the cliff. Wafting slightly in the breeze, the rope ladders hung like glorious braids in the dazzling sun. Haraldr clapped Joli Stefnirson and his brother, Hord, on the back and winked at Ulfr. ‘I told you that any man from Geiranger can climb like a goat. But Joli and Hord can fly. They are Norway’s eagles, and today they will bring us Seljuk meat.’ Next Haraldr checked an apparatus the Domestic had called a ‘fire blower’. This was a long brass tube attached to a leather bladder worn on the back. The infantryman carried the hollow tube in his hands and had a wood-and-leather bellows strapped under his left arm; tapers tipped with some incendiary substance used to ignite the liquid fire were stuck in his belt. ‘Let’s give Grettir enough time to win his audience,’ Haraldr told the clustered, eager-eyed Varangians.
Grettir skipped drunkenly; dozens of arrows bristled the ground a few steps in front of him. Doffing his hat with exaggerated gestures of deference, Grettir veered towards the arrows with freakish bounding steps, stopped suddenly as he encountered the feathered shafts, teetered forward while waving his arms as if he were about to pitch into an abyss, then staggered backwards before tripping over his flapping legs, tumbling into a heap, and starting all over again. The Seljuks, at first incredulous at the assault of this single addle-brained infidel, had begun to join in the game, sending down their arrows every time Grettir lurched close. Grettir saluted the salvos with increasingly elaborate flourishes of his silly hat. The jeering Seljuks soon crowded the walls.
Suddenly Grettir dropped his hat and jerked his head up as if a rope were pulling against his neck. Swivelling his head on his distended neck, he reached down and clutched at his crotch, then began increasingly vigorous scratching motions. The Seljuks howled with laughter. Grettir turned his back to the walls, pulled from beneath his tunic the specially shaped pig bladder he had contrived and pumped his hips and jerked his free hand up and down as he blew into the bladder. When he had the device inflated and in place, he turned with his arms wide. The Seljuks shrieked with delight and began an immediate chorus of trilling observations. Grettir surged wildly with his hips, showing off a pig-bladder phallus as long as a man’s arm, complete with a melon-size scrotum.
Grettir continued to stalk with his absurd giant steps, his hips pumping in enormous circular motions. Within minutes the Seljuks had several of their concubines up on the walls, stripped naked and gyrating their pelvises in reply to Grettir’s prodigious thrusts. The walls swarmed with Seljuks now; they jammed the crenellated openings and balanced on top of the merlons. One warrior fell from his perch and lay in a cream-coloured heap at the base of the wall; no one even noticed. ‘Loki,’ Grettir said aloud, as happy as he had ever been, ‘I have shamed you.’
At the base of the cliff Haraldr could clearly hear the rising din of mirth. He started up the rope ladder first, followed by Halldor, Ulfr, the fire blower, and then a gradual procession that ultimately would total a hundred picked men. Haraldr climbed quickly, repeating the phrases the Mandator had taught him and reflecting on the strange hilarity that accompanied their grim ascent. He soon reached the jagged rock lip at the summit; he gripped the stone and easily pulled himself over the natural obstacle.
The lance blurred by him and he heard Halldor grunt. Haraldr swung his shield to his front and looked back. Halldor hung by one hand, his face gushing blood. Haraldr’s shield took a blow and he had to turn. His sword lifted the Seljuk into the air and sent him flailing into the gorge. Haraldr crouched atop the rock lip. He could see right through the crenellation into the walled town. As if the kastron were a box tipped to one side, every man in the city seemed to have spilled onto the west wall or stood below it, waiting for an opportunity to view Grettir’s performance; apparently only a single guard had remained posted along the entire east wall. Haraldr surveyed the route he intended to take as the others began to gather beside him. Halldor’s face was severely gashed. ‘Can you go on?’ asked Haraldr.
‘They didn’t cut my legs off,’ snapped Halldor.
Haraldr dropped to the grey-brick pathway atop the wall. They already had twenty-five men on top now; enough. The rest should be able to join them quickly. Flanked by Halldor and Ulfr, Haraldr took his axe with one hand, set his shield, and positioned the Roman with the fire blower almost against his back.
The first Seljuks to notice the Varangian invaders were lost in the clamour near the centre of the west wall. Haraldr could see them distinctly pounding and tugging at their fellows like miniature actors in a raucous comedy. Then a few more Seljuks began to turn, but most were held rapt by Grettir and the naked mime of their whores. When the Varangian phalanx reached the southwest corner of the kastron, they met the unwary Seljuk spectators like a whirring, relentless steel engine.
The carnage was appalling; hastily produced scimitars did almost nothing to deter the Varangian advance. The first Seljuks to fall screamed their oaths to Allah or simply ululated with surprise, but their distress was blanketed by the blaring revelry of their fellows. Only after dozens had pitched off the battlements did the change in tenor begin to spread orchestrally north, to the centre of the wall, but the crowding made a concerted defence impossible. Only the sheer weight of frantic bodies began to stop the Varangian push. Haraldr shouted to the infantryman armed with the fire blower.
The long brass tube, a glowing taper now fastened to the tip, jutted past Haraldr’s shield, a phallus far more obscene than the pig bladder Grettir still played with below. Haraldr grimaced against the intense heat as the fire streamed out. The molten lance virtually seemed to blow a hole in the first Seljuk, then splattered; Haraldr quickly stomped his boots to shake off the singeing droplets. The spout of flame swept in a slow arc across the breadth of the battlements, quickly extending its reach as flaming Seljuks plunged from the wall. Within seconds the Seljuks began to leap well in advance of the fiery tongue. When the liquid was exhausted, Haraldr looked ahead, just past the blackened bricks that defined the fire blower’s deadly range. Waiting for him was an armoured guard cordoning the white-silk-clad figure of Kilij. With Ulfr and Halldor at his side, and now almost a hundred Varangians on the walls behind him, Haraldr pushed forward across the scorched bricks. The Seljuk guard died quickly, their elegant scimitars and oaths to Allah no match for Hunland steel and Odin’s fury.
‘Kilij,’ said Haraldr. He handed his shield to Ulfr and gripped his axe with both hands. He had already calculated that the next arc of his blade would be perhaps more fateful than the blow that had killed Hakon, and yet he did not need Odin to strengthen his arm, only to assuage his fears. Before he had climbed to these walls, he had been certain that when Kilij’s head rolled into the streets, his Seljuk followers would immediately give up their cause and their captives. But now that wager seemed far less certain.