Scramasax (2 page)

Solveig clicked her tongue, and around her there was a certain lightness and brightness.

‘There you are!' she exclaimed.

‘Where have you been?'

‘I was just a few steps ahead of you.' Solveig opened her eyes wide, reached out and affectionately laid her right hand on her father's brow. She looked as if a pat of her cow Gerda's softest butter wouldn't have melted in her mouth. ‘I'm all right.'

‘You've no idea,' Halfdan told her. ‘None. It's not enough to be sun-strong.'

‘I am! That's what you named me.'

‘I know that. But that's not enough, not here. You've been in Miklagard for less than a day. And the more days you're here, the more you'll understand. There's only one wolf chasing the sun, but in this market there are a thousand wolves, ready to chase a golden girl.'

Halfdan looked around him, and although they couldn't understand a word he was saying, at least a dozen dark-skinned young men nodded. Their white teeth flashed.

‘I've heard of more than one young woman,' Halfdan told her, ‘who entered this market and was never seen again.'

Solveig reached up and smoothed away her father's frown with her pink fingertips.

‘Father,' she said gently, ‘Father, the daughter standing in front of you now isn't the same child you left behind in Norway.'

Halfdan pursed his mouth at his daughter's words – not defiant, scarcely reproachful, so self-knowing.

‘She isn't,' said Halfdan, ‘but she is. I thought I'd lost you.'

‘You never did lose me,' Solveig replied. ‘I lost you and had to find you.'

Halfdan shook his head. ‘The length of the grim Baltic,' he began, ‘and Ladoga, Novgorod, the great rivers, the forests, the cataracts …'

‘I haven't begun to tell you,' said Solveig, smiling.

‘I want to know,' said Halfdan. ‘My eyes can see you, my ears can hear you, but I scarcely believe you're here.'

‘I am!' cried Solveig. ‘Father, I am!'

Halfdan wrapped Solveig in his scarlet cloak. ‘You're more at risk than you know,' he told her. ‘Solva, to be wise is to be wary, to listen and learn, always to know how much you do not know.'

‘This market is even bigger than the ones in Ladoga and Kiev,' Solveig said, ‘so I did expect to get lost in it. But remember what you used to tell me. You have to get lost …'

‘To be found,' her father said.

‘To find yourself,' Solveig corrected him.

Then Halfdan turned round again, rather more circumspectly than before, and began to retrace his steps.

‘I've seen this aisle already,' Solveig objected. ‘Let's go down another one.' She tucked her hand through her father's right arm, but he resisted.

‘A debt,' he said. ‘I've got to settle a debt.'

When the angry stallholders saw the Viking limping towards them again, and the pretty young woman on his arm, they blocked the aisle.

Halfdan nodded and smiled, and when Solveig let go of his arm he spread both hands in a gesture of peace.

‘Just a mistake,' he told the traders. ‘I was clumsy.' He shook his head and nodded at his daughter. ‘I thought I'd lost her.'

The man who had been carrying the basket of oranges threw one in the air and swiped at it with the blade of his hand.

‘Just a joke,' said the Viking.

The stallholder spat into the dust right in front of Halfdan.

The Viking grimaced. He reached into an inner pocket and fished out a small silver coin and gave it to the stallholder.

‘I sent him flying,' Halfdan told his daughter. ‘Him and his oranges. You know me.'

‘A clumsy great frost-giant,' Solveig said. ‘I saw fruit like this on Saint Gregorios. A whole army of them bobbing in the harbour.'

Seeing Solveig's interest, the stallholder smiled and bowed and offered her a plump orange.

Solveig hesitated.

‘Take it,' her father told her. ‘What is freely offered is often best accepted.'

So Solveig took the orange. She thanked the
stallholder, and then felt his fingertips just brush the inside of her wrist. She lowered her eyes.

‘Come on now,' said Halfdan. And as he and Solveig continued down the aisle, ‘They're tricksters and charlatans, the lot of them. But Varangian guards don't get paid for stirring it. We're here to keep the peace.'

‘And to guard Empress Zoe,' Solveig said.

‘And Emperor Michael,' added her father in a dry voice. ‘We mustn't forget him.'

‘Boy-man,' said Solveig. ‘That's what Mihran called him.'

‘Shhh! Walls have ears. Even aisles can have ears.'

‘And Harald's your leader?'

‘He is,' said Halfdan. ‘The gods be praised.'

‘Man-man!' Solveig told him. ‘That's what Mihran calls him.'

‘Three hundred of us,' her father declared. ‘Three hundred Vikings. The Varangians of the City. We garrison the city.'

‘Garrison?' enquired Solveig.

‘We guard the place and keep peace in Miklagard. And there are lots more of us Vikings, as many as five thousand, in the field.'

‘What field?'

Halfdan spread his arms. ‘All over the empire. The Byzantine Empire and west across the Great Sea. We have to protect the far borders. They're like old sleeves, always unravelling. Always needing to be sewn up.'

Solveig tugged at her father's left arm, and then she made claws of her fingers and screwed up her face like a savage troll.

‘What?' Halfdan demanded.

‘Is she … like they say she is?'

‘I've warned you already,' growled her father. ‘People
with secrets do well to sit behind closed doors, and speak in low voices.'

‘You and your sayings,' said Solveig. Then she tugged at her father's arm again. ‘Look! Those little plums.'

‘Dates. Very sweet. This market is the largest on middle-earth. It's where all the empire's nations meet every other nation. Their products, their coinage, their language, their stories and sayings, their habits, their wit, their gods, their beliefs – they all meet here. Bulgarians and Slavs and Armenians and Arabs and Georgians and Serbians and Jews and—'

‘Actually,' said Solveig, ‘Red Ottar's boat was a kind of meeting place. We were Norwegians and Swedes, with one Icelander. Us and Edith too – she's English. Then Edwin came aboard – you met him.'

‘Yes,' said Halfdan thoughtfully.

‘And so did a Slav – he got an arrow through his left foot – and Mihran, our pilot, he's Armenian.'

‘So what message was Edwin bringing to Empress Zoe?' Halfdan asked his daughter.

Solveig shook her head. ‘He's very good at not saying.'

‘Wordsmiths,' said Halfdan with no great liking. ‘So, what about your carving?'

‘I'll tell you about that,' Solveig replied. ‘But first …'

Solveig and her father had walked right out of the market on to the Varangian quay reserved for foreign and other trading boats. White-tailed gulls swept around them in the warm south-west wind, mewing and shrieking. And there, right below them, like a shrimp among dolphins and water-dragons, was the tiny dugout in which Solveig had sailed all the way from Saint Gregorios to Miklagard with her companions.

For a moment the two of them stood there, looking down. Then Solveig slid over the edge into the boat and looked up at her father, smiling.

‘What do you think?' she asked, smiling and bursting with pride.

‘In this?'

‘Yes!'

‘This piddler! This piece of driftwood!'

Solveig nodded eagerly.

‘Where from?'

‘Saint Gregorios. You know, just before the River Dnieper flows into the Black Sea.'

‘And you? You left home without telling Asta or the boys?'

‘Father, I'll tell you everything!' Solveig cried. ‘My journey, my carving, the shaman, the angel.'

‘What angel?'

Standing there in the hot sunlight, Solveig shuddered. ‘Everything. When there's time, I will. Then you'll understand.'

‘Fathers sometimes admire their daughters, sometimes shake their heads, sometimes punish them,' Halfdan said, ‘but I'm not sure they ever really understand.'

Solveig reached up with her right hand. ‘Something's worrying you,' she said. ‘Come down.'

Halfdan squatted on the quay, lifted himself on his hands and levered himself down.

‘Four of us,' Solveig told him. ‘Me and Mihran and Edwin and Edith. Well, five if you count her baby.'

‘Much smaller than our coble,' said Halfdan, running a hand along the gunwale. ‘And nothing like as well made. Just hacked out of a tree trunk.'

Solveig gazed at her father. ‘In this boat …' she began. ‘Oh! I can't explain. I felt so brave and so afraid, I laughed and cried, I thought my companions were my own lifeblood and yet I felt so lonely.'

Up on the quay traders shouted and dogs yelped and little children wailed, around them wavelets sucked and
slapped, and the wind went on warbling. For a moment Solveig closed her eyes and they all sounded as if they came from miles and even years away.

‘Sit down,' she told her father.

Then she swung her bag off her right shoulder and dropped it into the bottom of the dugout. She unloosed the tie and thrust her right hand down through a stew of bones, implements, filthy clothing, bits of rag, her rolled-up cloak, and closed her fingers round it.

‘What is it?' asked Halfdan.

Solveig unfolded and opened a wad of grubby bog cotton. And there, shining in the sunlight of the Golden Horn, lay the glorious gold brooch Harald Sigurdsson had given to Halfdan more than five years before – the token of his lifelong friendship, the heirloom Halfdan had hidden inside Solveig's woollen pillow-sack before he left their farm.

Halfdan stared at the brooch: the little boat incised on it, with its single square sail hoisted, the two people sitting in it.

‘I've looked at it and looked at it,' Solveig told him in a quiet voice, ‘and I've wondered. The one in the bows, he's a man. A man or a god. But the one in the stern's smaller. Arms outstretched. Am I that one? Did you want me to follow you? Or did you … did you give it to me because …'

Halfdan didn't answer her. Not exactly. Not, anyhow, as Solveig really wanted.

He picked up the brooch between his thick fingers. He turned it over and stared at the runes scratched on the back of it.

‘
and
' he pronounced. ‘Harald Sigurdsson and Halfdan son of Asser. Harald cut these.'

‘You told me.'

‘I never thought I'd see this again.'

‘Why not?' demanded Solveig.

‘I mean …'

‘Did you think I'd sell it?' Roses flared in Solveig's cheeks. ‘Is that what you thought?'

Halfdan quietly shook his head and sighed. ‘No, no.'

‘You did.'

‘Solveig,' said her father, ‘I gave you my word that I would take you with me, but even as I did so, I felt the fates were turning against me.'

‘I could see it in your eyes. Your heart and your eyes disagreed.'

‘Sometimes people know things about us that we scarcely know ourselves,' Halfdan said.

‘Especially daughters,' Solveig replied.

Halfdan replaced the brooch on the wad of bog cotton and closed his daughter's fingers around it. ‘Keep it,' he said.

‘No.'

‘For the time being.'

‘Why?'

Halfdan didn't reply.

‘I don't understand,' Solveig said, frowning.

‘It's better that way,' Halfdan told her. He drew her to him. ‘We're in the same boat.'

So Solveig carefully wrapped the brooch again and pushed it down to the bottom of her heavy bag. She looked up at her father.

‘Battle-ghosts,' she said. ‘Life-songs.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Father! There's so much to ask, so much to tell you. It will be Ragnarok before we've finished.'