Still, I’d taken the step too far, and there wasn’t anything I could do to put it right, so the logical thing seemed to be to make the best of the situation and accept the change in the rules. It’s a bit like being in a ship that gets blown off course: you ride out the storm, and if you fetch up in some strange and exotic place, you might as well go ashore and explore a bit while you’re there.
‘Fine,’ I said, in Greek. ‘So, what does threyja mean?’
The other old man assured me that I really didn’t want to know ‘But we’re impressed,’ he added. ‘You’re the first one of your lot we’ve come across who can talk our language. To be honest, you don’t look the type.’
I did my modest shrug; I think it was wasted on them. ‘It’s just something I can do,’ I said, in Varangian; showing off, you see. Then, in Greek: ‘Did I get that right, or did I say something else funny?’
‘No,’ replied the first old man gravely, ‘that was pretty good. In time, a bit of practice, you could probably make yourself understood. Actually, languages are something our people never seem to have any bother with. We just pick them up as we go along, wherever we happen to be.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘That’s a useful talent.’
The other old man shrugged. ‘Nothing special,’ he said. ‘Easy, really. Specially since we don’t mess our heads up with writing things down, like your lot do. I’ve noticed this while I’ve been down this way. You get so used to writing, you forget how to talk.’
That made absolutely no sense as far as I was concerned, but I really didn’t want to get into a discussion about linguistics. ‘Well,’ I said, making an effort; in fact, I may even have smiled. ‘Since we’re talking to each other now, let me introduce myself. My name is John.’
The two old men looked at each other, as though I’d just done something weird or rude. I suppose they decided to make allowances; anyway, the first old man looked a bit sheepish for a moment; then he nodded, and said: ‘My name is Eyvind Thorhallson; my friend here is Kari Sighvatson, and the miserable-looking bugger over there is Harald Sigurdson. If he deigns to talk to you he’ll probably tell you he’s the rightful King of all Norway, but the truth is, his lot slung him out when he was just a kid because they couldn’t face the thought of having him around where they’d have to see him every day. So he came here, because he knew you lot aren’t particular.’
I guessed that was supposed to be a joke, but probably not the laugh-out-loud kind; so I did a sort of mute-acknowledgement sideways nod of the head, and hoped it wasn’t a mortal insult or anything. ‘You certainly speak Greek well,’ I said.
‘He doesn’t,’ said the man called Kari, jerking his head at the purported King of all Norway ‘Mind you, he can barely speak Norse. Eyvind and I, on the other hand, are good at that sort of thing. You need to be, in our line of work. Anyway, what used to be our line of work, before we took up this soldiering business. You never know from one day to the next where you’re likely to end up, so it helps if you know how to keep your ears open.
‘Soldiering’s better,’ the other old man put in. ‘Wish I’d known about it years ago.’ He shrugged. ‘Too late now, though.’
‘Funny sort of a language, Greek,’ Kari went on. ‘When I first started picking it up, seemed to me you could say a whole load of stuff in it that you just couldn’t find words for in Norse; and the other way round, too. Now I’m not so sure, though. Truth is, I’ve been using it so long I have to stop and think before I know which language I’m talking. Same with the rest of the lads, the ones that’ve been here a while, anyhow You’re talking, like you do, and I’ll say something in Greek and you’ll answer in Norse, and neither of us’ll know we’re doing it, after a while it all goes straight into your head, like drinking bad wine fast so you don’t taste it. Wine,’ he repeated, and shook his head. ‘That’s another bad sign. Used to hate the stuff, but now I’m getting a taste for it. No choice in the matter, of course.’
That was supposed to be significant, I guessed. ‘You don’t have wine where you come from?’ I said.
Kari laughed. ‘Grapes don’t grow that far north,’ he said. ‘We drink beer instead. Though actually, where me and Eyvind are from, Iceland, barley and wheat don’t grow either, we have to ship it in from Norway or wherever. Though I was in a place once, I’m talking about years ago now, where grapes and wheat grew wild, everywhere you looked, like weeds. And that was a long way north.’ He shrugged. ‘One time I was there we had a German with us, he went crazy soon as he saw the grapes; reckoned it had to be the earthly paradise, the one where Adam got thrown out of. He was all for making wine, but we never got round to it, and nobody else fancied the idea anyway But we took half a shipload of the grapes home with us, only they went bad on the way and we had to ditch them. Pity, we could’ve done a bloody good trade for them.’
I nodded. ‘You used to be a merchant, then.’
Kari grinned. ‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘More like a karl; no word for it in Greek, you’re all either free men or slaves, and anyhow it’s such a different system, I couldn’t make you understand. Doesn’t matter. Best way to put it is, me and Eyvind used to work for merchants, or with them; we used to help work the ship, and it was the boss who decided where we were headed for. It’s-‘ He rolled his eyes. ‘It’s much simpler than the way you people do things, and much more complicated at the same time. If you see what I’m getting at.’
‘Different,’ I said.
‘Different, and leave it at that.’ Kari yawned. ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘I’ve been over here I don’t know how long, and that’s probably the longest conversation I’ve had with a Greek. I always figured your lot for different, but maybe you aren’t as different as all that.’
Was that a compliment? Looking back, I suppose it was, though of course he knew perfectly well when he said it that I’d have to think about it before I could make up my mind; and presumably that’s why he phrased it that way. It’s one of the things Varangians like to do: they say things in such a way that they sound like insults but turn out to be compliments, or the other way round. I think that’s a strange way to behave, since in their culture it’s not only acceptable but expected of you to cut a man’s head off on the spot if he insults you a certain way; other insults, on the other hand, are just the conventional way of being friendly and good-humoured. I don’t think I could live like that. You’d forever be having to think about what you’re saying before you actually say it, and that’d be no good for a Greek. Most of what we say is thinking aloud, and most of the rest is the same but without any thinking at all. If we saw things the way the Varangians do, we’d all be dead inside a week.
Before we could take matters any further, the other old man, Eyvind, let off the biggest yawn you could ever imagine, and said he was dead beat and needed to sleep. It was, he pointed out, his watch first; but what the hell was the point of carting around a useless great lump like Harald Sigurdson if you couldn’t slide off your duty assignments on him? Harald - the young, silent man - pulled an even sadder face than the one he’d been wearing and pulled his cloak a bit tighter round his shoulders; the other two lay down on their backs without another word, shut their eyes and were both fast asleep a heartbeat later. That’s another thing Varangians can do, by the way. Some of them, anyhow.
I suppose friendship is a bit like a disease. Once you’ve caught it, you’re stuck with it, and it spreads. You can’t just back out of it once it’s begun. Either you stay with it or you bring it to an end, turn it into something else - hatred, contempt - like turning grape must into wine. What I mean is, once I’d taken the step and started talking to the Varangians, I couldn’t very well stop, not unless I was prepared to offend them and turn them into enemies. Not that I minded terribly much. It made a pleasant change to have someone to talk to on the long drag through Illyria and down through Greece. I just have this thing about irrevocable steps, that’s all. If I can, I stay clear of them, even if I’m pretty sure they’d be no bother, or even to my advantage. It’s just the way I am. Sometimes I get the feeling that I’ve lived my whole life like a man on a beach who’s taken off all his clothes but can’t actually bring himself to get into the water; so he just stands there naked, can’t go back into town with no clothes on, can’t go forward into the sea. Not that that’s anybody’s business but my own.
We talked a lot, the Varangians and I. It was a curious system. Before I opened my mouth that night, they were always nattering away among themselves, and I didn’t exist. Then I changed all that; and from then on, they - well, the two old men - they never talked to each other, they always said everything to me, even if they were having a discussion about something. It was like finance committee meetings where, if you want to say something, you’ve got to address your remarks to the chairman, even when you want to tell the man sitting next to you that he’s being a bloody fool. On the other hand, Kari and Eyvind never seemed even the slightest bit interested in anything about my life, or what I did, my family or my home or anything. They wanted to tell me things, things that both of them already knew but usually didn’t agree about. It was like I’d suddenly become the official arbitrator for everything. I suppose you could see that as a compliment, but it wasn’t really. It puzzled me, until I gathered from things they said that they’d known each other all their lives - born within a week of each other on the same farm, went to sea together, sailed on all the same journeys, left the North and came to the City together - so it sort of stands to reason that they’d long since either reached agreement on everything or else come to a rock-solid impasse, so there simply wasn’t any point going over the issues again. Introduce me into the equation, and you’ve got a whole new set of rules. No wonder they never seemed to shut up, all the way from Heraclea to bloody Corinth.
Which reminds me: it was not far from Corinth that we ran into a spot of trouble. I shouldn’t say this, being a loyal servant of the Empire, but once you’re south of Thebes, the roads are terrible. Bone dry all the year round, of course, and so much traffic up and down; no wonder the tracks are rutted axle-deep in places, which can be pretty terrifying on those mountain passes, where the highway’s just this little scratch on the side of the cliff-face, and most of what there is looks like it’s all set to crumble away right under your wheels. All things considered, it’s a miracle, and a tribute to good solid Galatian craftsmanship, that our cart axles lasted as long as they did - all that heavy gold coinage bumping up and down, plus four grown men, over ruts and potholes and rocks as big as your head.
The wheel eventually came off on the stretch between Corinth and Sparta. Don’t suppose you know it; very dry, very stony, grey and brown dirt with a sort of steel-green blur in the distance as you look out over the olive groves. Now our family’s supposed to be from Greece proper, way back - Athens, in case you’re interested, and I’m supposed to be a remote descendant of Eupolis the comic poet, who was around at the time of the Great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta; but that’s fifteen hundred years ago, so I don’t suppose it’s true - but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a rotten country and you can have it. It’s got this all-used-up feeling about it everywhere you go; you can’t travel a few miles without seeing bits of ruined building sticking up out of the dirt, like stones in a ploughed field. I find it rather depressing, as if nobody could be bothered to tidy the place up.
But about the wheel. The consensus of opinion was, the axle sheared when we bounced off a rut into the trough, and all the weight of the cart landed on it. Anyhow, even I could see we didn’t have a hope in hell of mending the wretched thing ourselves; and the drivers of the other carts in the train were no help at all. The most they’d agree to do for us was find a blacksmith in Sparta and send him out to fix it. I pointed out that there we were, best part of two days from Sparta, further from Corinth, with several million gold tremisses and just the four of us to keep them safe for the Emperor until help came. My idea was to shift the money over onto the other carts, but that didn’t go down at all well. The extra weight, they insisted, would bugger up their axles as well, and then all four carts would be stranded out in the wilderness. I suppose they had a point, of sorts, but their attitude didn’t impress me very much. Nor was I materially reassured when they pointed out that I had three soldiers of the Varangian guard at my command to keep the money safe.
Kari and Eyvind, on the other hand, didn’t seem bothered at all, even when I told them that the mountains of the Peloponnese were notorious for bandits, free-company men, Saracen pirates and Catalan privateers. Good, they said; let ‘em come, and if Harald Sigurdson wouldn’t mind leaving a few for us, we can have a bit of sport. I pointed out that neither of them were exactly in the first flush, but they pretended they hadn’t heard me, so presumably it was insulting to bring the matter up. It didn’t matter to them either way, they insisted; a bloody good scrap, and either victory or Valhalla, what more could anybody ask? I have no idea what Valhalla means, but from the way they said it, I don’t suppose it’s something I’d like, and I couldn’t be bothered to ask them to explain.
So the rest of the train creaked off and left us. I was all for sitting in the shade of the cart and sulking like mad till we were rescued or died of thirst, but Eyvind decided to come over all brisk and useful. He pottered around for a bit until he found a spring of water, and then he pottered around a bit more, came back and told us he’d found a handy abandoned building where we could sleep and get shade from the sun.
Turned out, of course, it was a tomb. Wonderful. At least, that’s what I think it must have been, though you never saw the like. Imagine the dome of Saint Sophia, but made of slates, carefully fitted together without fixings or mortar; and the only entrance is a little hole you have to crawl through on your hands and knees- ‘This is useless,’ I pointed out. ‘It’ll mean we’ve got to leave the cart outside.’
Kari made a so-what gesture with his shoulders and hands. ‘We can get the money boxes in through the hole, no bother; and the cart’s not going anywhere, is it? That’s the whole point.’