Scramasax (23 page)

The Vikings dressed themselves in their finest clothing – what survived of it after the murderous encounter with the pirates and three months in baking Sicily. Brick-red tunics with long narrow sleeves. Sealskin boots. Scarlet and purple cloaks fastened by a brooch at the right shoulder.

Most guards combed and tidied their red hair, their moustaches and beards.

Not Tamas, though. ‘What's the point?' he asked Solveig when she hurried over to his tent and sat him on a stool so that she could dress the oozing wounds on his back. ‘It only curls again.' He reached up and ruffled Solveig's hair. ‘Yours is growing back now.'

‘You can't join the cortège,' Solveig told him. ‘Your back hasn't healed yet.'

‘No choice,' Tamas said curtly. ‘We've drawn lots in this tent already.'

‘But …'

‘No choice,' Tamas repeated.

‘I'm coming too,' Solveig told him. ‘All the women have to.'

Tamas shook his head very slowly. ‘That's wrong. Quite wrong. Not honourable.'

‘Shhh!' Solveig cautioned him. ‘He'll have you beaten again.'

‘This is men's work,' Tamas said forcefully, ‘not women's work.'

‘Shhh!'

Tamas stroked Solveig's soft cheek. ‘Solveig,' he said tenderly. ‘Solveig.'

Solveig felt flushed. She could feel her breath quickening. Slowly she dipped her head towards Tamas' pink, upturned face.

Their eyes met. Just for a moment.

Then their lips met. So warm. So yielding.

Tamas pulled Solveig down towards him and Solveig wrapped her arms around his neck. She closed her eyes.

She felt so utterly tender, so vulnerable. She could feel her whole body quickening.

Tamas sighed, and under his breath he murmured, ‘You are wearing it. You are, aren't you?'

‘My scramasax?' Solveig replied at once. ‘Yes. And I'll wear the veil they gave me on the Hill of Healing. I'll be all right.'

The funeral cortège stretched all the way from the Viking encampment to the soaring walls of the Saracen town.

It took six men to carry Harald Sigurdsson's stout oak coffin, and it was surmounted by a canopy of precious purple silk. His standard Land-Ravager was laid along the top of it.

But all of a sudden, as they were passing beneath the town gates, the six pall-bearers wheeled round and
lowered the coffin to the ground – a wedge between the gates.

A Viking guard blew short, sharp bursts on his trumpet.

Then Harald hoisted the lid of his coffin and scrambled out, roaring.

All around him, his guards were yelling and baring their shining swords, their axes and scramasaxes, while more Vikings at once came running from their tents to join them.

The Vikings made no distinction between men, women, children, Christians, Jews, Muslims, priests, laymen. They whooped and swung their weapons, they hacked their way into the town.

The Saracens may have been unprepared, but not all of them were unarmed. And they were no more fastidious than the Vikings.

They attacked the Varangian guards; they swung their scimitars and lopped off the limbs of the screaming women.

Then Solveig saw a burly woman running down the narrow street towards her, grasping a knife.

Not me, she thought.

Solveig reached around to the back of her belt and, biting fiercely on her lower lip, slid out her scramasax.

The dark-skinned woman headed straight for her, wide-eyed and wailing. She aimed the point of her knife at Solveig's heart. Solveig watched, alert as a cat, she waited, she sprang aside and jabbed her scramasax into the woman's stomach.

At once Solveig jerked her arm back. The Saracen woman reeled away, gasping; she tried to clutch at the stone wall, and collapsed into the dust.

Solveig stared at her scarlet blade, horrified.

Then a man came charging down the narrow street towards Solveig. He levelled his spear at her.

‘Down!' bawled a voice from behind her. ‘Solveig!' Then one of the Varangian guards knocked her forward on to her knees, her elbows.

The Saracen leaped right over Solveig, howling. He drove his spear straight through the body of the Viking behind her.

The young man fell on to his back. His eyes were bolting and his face fringed with acorn curls. He shuddered. He kept shuddering.

Then, with his right hand, he reached towards Solveig.

He shuddered again.

He lay still.

Solveig howled. She threw herself over Tamas's pierced, broken, bloodstained body. She clutched him. She wrapped him in her arms.

Down, down, Solveig drowned in her own darkness.

She knew nothing at all of how, that day, Harald Sigurdsson and the Vikings put every single Saracen to the sword – each man, each woman, each child – and how they ransacked all the churches, all the guardrooms and houses, and rounded up more plunder and rich pickings than they could carry. She knew nothing of how Harald decided to keep almost all of it for himself and for his men, and pass over no more than a pittance to Empress Zoe.

Solveig was numb. She no longer cared whether she were dead or alive.

Tamas.

Tamas.

She couldn't even remember how, late that afternoon, she had been half dragged, half carried back through the town gates. She didn't know how Harald's men had dug a long, shallow grave in one of the churchyards and
laid Tamas and all their dead in it. Forty-three young men.

The Vikings buried them, they sang a dirge over them and blew their aurochs horns, they called on the Valkyries to fly down and lift those dead warriors to Asgard.

The next dark morning, still wearing her gauzy veil, Solveig rode Alnath back to the boats, sick in her head and heart.

I
t was there, inside her. As Solveig rode with the Varangian guard and their retinue along the sun-scorched valley between bare hills, and across the great baking plain towards the sea, it was always there: sometimes a lumpy stone lodged in her heart, sometimes a cold emptiness, an absence. It was there at first waking, and all day, and there when she tried to escape into sleep – her tearing grief for Tamas.

Only when Alnath plodded across the foreshore and Solveig saw her father standing on the gangplank, waving, did she realise how deeply she had missed him and how long it was since she had last seen him.

Not since she had begged him not to hang the two children and their grandfather, and accused him of drinking blood. Not since, in the dark, she had called out for him on the rocky mountainside, and he was not there. Not since the mountain people had rescued her and she had seen Christians and Muslims, Muslims and Christians, praying together. Not since she had met Abu Touati. Not since …

‘Your hair's growing back,' Halfdan called out. But then, seeing his daughter's face, puffy and stricken, and at once understanding what must have happened to Tamas, he awkwardly pulled her to him.

‘Solva, my Solva. Solva, my Solva.' That's all he said
and kept saying, and all Solveig needed, just as a baby needs only a simple lullaby. ‘Solva, my Solva.'

Even as she shook and sobbed, feeling the warmth and strength of her father's love, Solveig recognised how stiff in his body Halfdan was. Because of his size, she thought. His hamstring. Because of the worm in his gut. But he's my father. My own father. My obstinate, awkward, loyal father.

As soon as the helmsman, Nico, had weighed anchor and swung round their
ousiai
to the east, Solveig had to work in the stables and with the cooks in the galley, but always Tamas was there too, in her head, in her heart, always there.

When she and her father did find time to talk, and Solveig asked him about the worm in his gut, and which medicines he was taking for it, she kept seeing Tamas spreadeagled, eyes bolting, with the Saracen spear in his gut.

And when she began to tell her father about the mountain people, Halfdan interrupted her and said he knew how Tamas had disobeyed orders in an effort to find her, and got beaten because of it, and that's when he had known for sure how much Tamas cared for her.

Yes, Tamas was there and the scramasax was there, scarlet, dripping.

After Solveig had been pulled away from Tamas's body and half dragged, half carried through the town gates, she had walked back to her tent as though she were in a trance, and it was only when she sat down that she realised she was still holding her bloody scramasax. She had wiped the blade with tufts of grass and then with a strip of canvas, and secured it to the back of her belt. But she knew it would never be clean, and kept drawing it to check it wasn't scarlet and dripping again.

Solveig's scramasax – it was there when at sunset she looked at the orange-and-pink blades of the sea and their dark undersides. It was there when she told her father about Abu Touati and how his mulberries had stained her fingers; it was there when she remembered pressing the lump of ice against her throat and the back of her neck.

After a second day's work, Solveig told her father about Abu Touati. But he wasn't all that interested, though he did relish the Saracen's description of the Vikings he had met on the River Dnieper.

‘The finest people on earth!' he repeated cheerfully. ‘That's what he said?'

‘“The finest people to look at”,' Solveig corrected him. ‘On Allah's earth. And he told me the next step on my path is to turn back,' Solveig told her father.

‘Turn back where?'

‘Home.'

‘What does he know about it?'

Everything, thought Solveig. Everything. He's a wise man.

‘Mmm,' growled Halfdan, and he slowly shook his head. ‘He's right, of course. An army like this, it's no place for my daughter. I know that.'

Solveig began to sniff. ‘“Your own husband.” That's what Abu Touati told me. “Your own children.”' Her eyes flooded with tears … and she began to sob.

‘“May the P-P-Prophet protect you. May Allah go with you.”'

Halfdan grunted.

I haven't told him anything, Solveig thought. I told him almost nothing.

But one way and another, Halfdan understood. He understood from the little his daughter had told him and from her silences. The sudden leaping terror that
convulsed her body, her faraway looks of loss and hopeless longing. He understood from what Snorri and Skarp told him about how they had deceived Solveig, and how Tamas had saved Solveig's life at the cost of his own …

Wearily, Halfdan waved the two of them away. He gritted his teeth.

This middle-earth, he thought, it's on the rack. It's cankering. It's rotting from the inside out. Like my poor body.

I'll get back to Miklagard, no doubt. But after that? What?

And you, my Solva? What will you do then?

Solveig knew how her father shouldered his own sorrows, and suspected he was hiding the worst from her. When she asked him how he was feeling, more often than not he dismissed her enquiry with a grunt and a wave, or with some terse reply that his illness was a gift from the gods or that men must learn to accept their fate, whatever it was.

Accept, thought Solveig. Accept. That's what Harald kept telling me I must do. Learn to accept.

I know it's no use banging my head against a door like a battering ram. But if I accept without asking questions, I'll become mild and milky and toothless. Why else should I think and feel, and listen and argue, and learn, and compare?

On the third morning after leaving Sicily, Solveig woke not with a lightness of heart but with some new sense of purpose. Thinking what Tamas would say to her and want her to do, she stretched her arms and legs, and briskly walked up and down between the bows and the stern.

Yes, she said to herself. He would. He'd say I must look forward as well as back.

Solveig felt as if she were waking from a suffocating dream that kept winding its dark tentacles around her, and she began to look around.

‘How long?' she asked Nico.

The helmsman shook his head and shrugged.

‘But how long?'

‘Five days with this wind behind us.'

Solveig opened her eyes and stared ahead. She thought of seeing Maria again, and wondered whether her old father was still alive … Alive, she thought, when Tamas is dead. That's the wrong way round. Then she started thinking about the Saracen woman she had killed, and wondered whether she was a mother, and whether her old father was still alive … And then, amidships, she saw something jammed between the bottom stringer and the deck timber. Something shining.

She knew what it was at once. She swooped on it.

Her violet-grey eye, her third eye that Oleg had given her in his little workshop in Ladoga.

I saw it, thought Solveig; it bounced three times and escaped that clutching Saracen and jumped over the gunwales. But my eyes tricked me.

For a long while, she cradled the little stone in the warm palm of her right hand and examined it – the way it shone with its quiet inner light.