Scramasax (17 page)

‘I know Harald tricked Maniakes,' she said. ‘He deceived him. But you, you just laughed. Look at you, you're even grinning now.'

‘A Turkish troll,' Halfdan grunted.

‘Since when was it right to use deceit and cunning?'

Halfdan shrugged.

‘You just laughed,' Solveig reproached him.

‘If you're a fox, I'm your tail,' her father growled.

‘What does that mean?' Solveig demanded.

‘It means,' Halfdan said slowly, ‘that it's better to meet cunning with cunning. Everyone says Maniakes is not to be trusted, so Harald decided to teach him a lesson.' He reached out to Solveig.

‘No!' said Solveig angrily. ‘If even his ally can't trust Harald, why should anyone else? Why should his friends? Snorri … Skarp … Why should you? Why should I?'

‘Solveig,' said Halfdan quite gently, ‘shhh! Each of us has our faults. Me … You! You don't want me to tell you all yours, do you?'

That evening, Solveig was in no mood for company. She felt as uneasy as the fjord sliding past her farm, its surface unbroken but tugging and turbulent in its depths.

I accused him, she thought. My own father. I've never challenged him to his face before.

My words were half-sheathed, and they didn't seem to upset him, but they've upset me! Is it wrong to say what I think and feel? I wonder whether Maria's father has ever angered her, and whether she has confronted him.

Thoughts such as these shape-changed into nighthags.
Halfdan was accused of something, Solveig didn't know what, but she had to stand witness at her own father's trial. Halfway through, the law-sayer called out that they'd got things the wrong way round. He announced that Halfdan was entirely innocent and Solveig was the accused, and that her father must stand witness against her.

Solveig's heart-care only began to dissolve at dawn when the nightwatchmen blew their aurochs horns, and all the women and Varangians around her were soon stomping around, hawking and spitting, chewing lumps of pork, slurping ale, trooping off to the shit-pits, hauling down their tents and feeding and saddling their horses.

Tamas hurried up to Solveig, combing his tousled hair with his splayed fingers. ‘We're striking camp,' he told her. ‘We're heading for a hill fort. Do you want to ride Alnath?'

Solveig looked puzzled. ‘Why?'

‘Why not?' Tamas replied cheerfully.

‘I mean … which horse will you ride?'

‘Alnath.'

‘Oh! You mean …'

‘Me in front, you behind, so long as you hold on!'

The nape of Solveig's neck tingled. ‘All right, then.'

Tamas smiled like a cherub, and Solveig waved at the throng of guards.

‘I know,' Tamas said joyfully. ‘They're envious.'

‘Where to?' asked Solveig. ‘Where are we going?'

The young guard shrugged. ‘No idea,' he replied. ‘Some hill fort.'

It was only a short ride – a couple of hours at the most – but Solveig never forgot it. The shouting and whinnying, harness clinking and jingling, leather creaking, hooves pounding and thudding as the Viking army left camp. The quickening heat of the day. Holding on to Tamas,
her arms around his waist. Leaning into his broad back. Tamas spurring Alnath into a canter, a gallop, and Solveig crying out for the joy of it, and holding on to Tamas even tighter. The two of them laughing.

‘The butting one!' Tamas yelled. ‘Alnath! He'll butt the Saracens until … until they're shrieking.'

Solveig pulled away, then twice she rammed her forehead against Tamas's right shoulder. ‘And I'll butt you!' she called out.

‘I surrender!' Tamas cried. ‘Oh! I surrender!'

Yes, the heat of the day. And the heat of Tamas's body. Her own body, burning. And the high hills of Sicily rising ahead of her, so dry, so scorched and thirsty.

Rafts of cloud, thin as spear-shafts but more ragged, feathery almost, stood over the island. Now and then, Solveig stared up at them.

They're out of breath, she thought. Like I am. But they're so calm they're scarcely moving.

My heart, it's racing.

At one moment the high hills looked rusty, at another dusty pink and even milky blue. But then the Varangians and Byzantines, almost two thousand of them, crested a ridge, and below them they saw a green-and-gold valley. At the heart of it stood a walled hill fort, round as a giant mushroom, built on a steep hillock.

At once Harald Sigurdsson shouted to his guards. His mounted men began to gallop and the men on foot ran down the long incline and across the plain towards the hill fort. They completely outstripped the Byzantines, who were obediently waiting on Maniakes' instructions and encumbered by their sundry siege engines.

Rapidly as the Varangians descended, they weren't quick enough to prevent four horsemen from clattering out through the gateway of the hill fort and making off as fast as they could.

‘Carrying the word,' Solveig panted.

‘What?'

‘Carrying the word. That's what they're doing.'

‘So are we!' Tamas shouted. ‘So will you!'

‘What do you mean?' Solveig asked. But what with Alnath's thudding hooves and her own ears drumming, and being front-to-back, she couldn't hear Tamas's answer.

Harald Sigurdsson and the Varangians crossed fields of wheat and watermelon, skirted a grove of pine trees and swept round the back of the hill fort. There, on rocky ground, Harald signalled to his men to catch their breath and take stock. The stout grey walls glowered above them.

‘Why?' Solveig gasped. ‘Why not in front of the gateway?'

‘When the Saracens come out,' Tamas told her, ‘they won't be jumping off these walls, will they?'

‘Oh!'

‘They'll come out through the gateway. So the first to feel their fury will be Maniakes.' Tamas threw back his head and laughed. ‘Yes, and if we all storm the fort, Maniakes and his men will have to be the first to go in.'

Solveig unlinked her fingers and let go of Tamas.

Harald has tricked Maniakes for a second time, she thought. He's commander-in-chief, but Harald treats him like a fool. I thought they were meant to work together.

Tamas sensed Solveig's disquiet. He squirmed round in the saddle and looked at her over his right shoulder.

‘Which would you prefer?' he asked. ‘Dead Greeks or dead Vikings?'

‘Neither,' said Solveig, in a sharp voice.

‘Harald knows how to safeguard his men,' Tamas
told her. ‘That's what counts. He wants fame, and you won't win a name by kneeling to Turkish trolls.'

‘Or by trickery,' said Solveig, and she pushed herself backwards until she slid over Alnath's rump. ‘I don't like the way you laughed.'

Just a moment before, Solveig had felt closer to Tamas than she had ever done to anyone except for her own father; now she was aware of a distance between them.

As soon as Snorri had unfurled Land Ravager and jammed it into a crevice, Harald Sigurdsson rode around, issuing instructions.

‘Keep out of arrowshot. The Saracens will insult you and taunt you, they'll try to draw you in. Keep out of arrowshot or they'll pick you off.'

When he saw Solveig, Harald dismounted.

Solveig gave him a steely look.

‘Your father?'

Solveig shook her head.

‘Where is he?'

‘I don't know,' Solveig said in a truculent voice.

‘A fine daughter!' Harald said, and then he clicked his tongue. ‘I've got no time for your women's games. You heard what I said about staying out of arrowshot?'

‘Yes.'

‘Right! We've got plenty of cooks – though where we'll get enough food is another matter. Your work now is to ready my men. Use your skills, Solveig. Sharpen their axes, their short knives, their scramasaxes. Understand?'

Solveig nodded.

‘That, and grooming the horses,' Harald told her. ‘Men at the ready! Horses at the ready!' He slapped Alnath on the rump. ‘And not just this handsome Arab.'

Harald glared at Tamas under his eyebrows, remounted and rode off. And as he did so, he called out, ‘This fort won't last long. You'll see.'

*

Harald Sigurdsson was wrong.

As one scorching day succeeded another, the Saracens watched and waited. But the Byzantines were unable to make much impression on the stout stone walls with their siege engines. The Vikings, meanwhile, tightened the noose so that no one was able to enter or leave the fort by day or night, either by slipping surreptitiously through the main gateway or by scaling the walls with a ladder, and waited for the Saracens to run short of provisions.

But there were wells inside the fort, and so there was no lack of water.

One day a Saracen appeared on the wall high above the Vikings. He propped up a dead man beside him and bawled something at the Vikings below.

Solveig was standing with her father and asked him what the Saracen was saying.

‘He's speaking a kind of Greek,' Halfdan told her. He cupped his right hand to his ear.

The Saracen yelled again, and Halfdan translated.

‘Here's a Christian! A fat Christian. You think we'll surrender? We'll eat all the Christians in this hill fort first.'

‘Eat them?' exclaimed Solveig, appalled.

Then the Saracen hauled the dead man on to the top of the wall and shoved him over. His corpse hit the rocky ground in front of the Vikings with a dull thud.

Solveig covered her face; when she stared up at the Saracen again, he had disappeared.

‘It's one thing to kill a man in combat,' she gulped. ‘I know that if men fight, men must die. But it's wrong to … violate his body after he's dead.'

‘Not if it helps to strike fear in your enemy,' her father replied.

Solveig screwed up her face, remembering what Egil and Bolverk did.

Each day, the Vikings and Saracens shouted insults and now and then loosed arrows at each other; and each day, Solveig moved from one tent to another, sharpening the weapons of the guards.

‘You won't win without sharp weapons,' she told one cluster of men, ‘but you can't win without high spirits.'

‘Listen to you!'

‘Yes, grandmamma!'

But although they teased her, the men knew that what Solveig said was true.

Harald Sigurdsson, too, was aware that his men's morale was in danger of dropping and, as the last weeks of Hay Month and the whole of Harvest Month burned away, he varied their responsibilities from day to day.

If a man kept watch on the walls, checking for signs of movement behind the arrow-slits, the next day he harvested wheat or watermelons or hunted for rabbits or snared the little birds that flew to and fro all day between their nests in the hill fort and the grove of pine trees on the plain; or else he helped the carpenters with the slow work of building siege engines to replace all those lost at sea, or rode off to one of the outlying lookout posts on the surrounding hills, or else relieved his companions who were keeping watch over their ships.

At night, the musicians played their humstrums and drums and horns, the guards sang story-songs, some aching, some bawdy, while the older men told tales that crossed the rainbow bridge to Asgard or galloped nine days northward and downward to the world of monsters and the dead, and the poets raised their voices and sang of love matches and those conquests that time cannot defeat.

For her part, Solveig remembered a riddle-poem that Edith had asked her.

‘Mosquitoes,' said one guard, slapping his neck. ‘From Hel.'

‘Mosquitoes don't sing,' Solveig replied. ‘They whine.'

‘Gnats, then,' another man guessed.

‘No,' said a third. ‘Some kind of bird. Crows. Ravens. Death-birds.'

‘No,' said Solveig. ‘Crows and ravens squawk and yelp.'

‘I know,' said Tamas. ‘The birds we see here every day, they're the same as the ones around our farm. They nest in the eaves of houses, and fly to the greenwoods. House martins.'

Solveig clapped her hands, and for a moment the guards fell quiet, each remembering, perhaps, their own homes – so far away, so dear to them.

Solveig saw the light in Tamas's acorn eyes. She nodded, and smiled.

You're like I am, she thought. You care. Sometimes you pretend you don't when you're with the other guards. You bray and horseplay, but I've seen how gentle you are with Alnath.

And then, without thinking, she announced, ‘I want to talk to you.'

‘Well?' replied Tamas.

‘Oh!' exclaimed Solveig, startled by the sound of her own voice. ‘Later!'

I do, thought Solveig. I want to ask him what he really thinks about Harald's cunning and the whole army's greed. Their cruelty.

One morning, Solveig and Tamas disobeyed Harald's orders about staying beyond arrowshot.

‘If I keep loosing my arrows from such a distance,' Tamas told her, ‘I'm just wasting them. Most bounce back off the walls. Only one in ten flies over.'

So Solveig held up Tamas's shield, and the two of them cautiously advanced on the walls, Solveig in front and Tamas right behind her.

Solveig looked down at her feet, the only part of her left exposed. Then she remembered Sineus, and how a Pecheneg arrow had pierced and pinioned his left foot, and she wondered whether the Saracens poisoned their arrow-tips.

Nine times Tamas notched an arrow and stepped out from behind the shield. Nine times he drew his bowstring. He pulled it right back to his right ear and released it. The bowstring hummed and whirred and his arrow flew deep into the heart of the hill fort.

Now the Saracens began to shoot back at Tamas. Twice an arrow stuck into the ground only a few feet away from them.