Swords From the Sea (78 page)

With his shield before him, and his sword point out, Hrolf ran at Leif. And the ax swung low at his knee, as it had done with Starkad. Jumping aside, Hrolf kept clear of it. And the shining ax swung wide.

Gripping it with both hands, Leif let it swing and hurled it at Hrolf. It flashed over the shield into Hrolf's face. It smashed the bones in his head, and he dropped there, where he stood.

Leif did not wait for him to fall. He caught up his ax and rushed at the weapon men, smoking as he was. Beating down their swords, he leaped among them, and they closed their shields together, crouching, afraid of the anger of this lank man. They had seen Starkad and Hrolf smashed down, and they were afraid. So they pushed close their shields, trying to crush him.

Then they heard running feet. Spears and axes struck their backs, while voices shouted Leif's name. Twenty Leifs seemed to have come out of the darkness, in the smoke. Here the weapon men had caught Leif, and he had multiplied himself into twenty maddened fighters. The glare of the flames made it hard for the weapon men to see these new Leifs.

"Peace!" they yelled-those who lived-throwing down weapons and shields.

So they begged for their lives before they realized that Leif's men had come back to the burning homestead. Those shipmates had heard Leif's yell, and they had run to him fast, out of the darkness ...

A week later Leif himself was fitting a new steering oar on the aft deck of Hrolf's dragon ship, which he had appropriated because it was better than his own vessel.

Now that he had washed in fresh water, cutting his hair, and putting on new wool garments, Brana, who sat with him, knew that he looked like any other boy of the quiet Viking coast. Yet he was making ready to go on the West voyage toward that unknown land of his as if it were no more than a jaunt down to Gothland.

"Leif," she said, helping to hold the pole he was shaping with his ax, "you have a fine new ship, with plenty of gold and silk and precious things in it. Stay here, then, in my place and we will build a new homestead."

On the shore by the landing, the people who had survived in Orn's Firth were tending the cattle again, around the black ruin of the hall. Troubled, Leif leaned on his ax, looking at them.

"No," he said, "I must get to the Green-land before the winter storms."

Brana took his hand, with the scars of work on it. "Then tell me-do you remember nothing at all of how you killed Hrolf?"

"Nothing." Leif frowned, trying to think.

"The men say you went berserk."

Leif shook his head. "I remember a spear that flew by me. And then I felt anger."

"Why, Leif?" she breathed softly.

"They were hurting you."

Gripping tight his hand, Brana closed her eyes. When she did that she felt safe. And she knew she had found what she had been searching for. No matter upon what unknown seas Leif chose to steer, Brana would be there with him.

The first thing I noticed was her red hat in the crowd when the ship came in. It was a red beret, pushed back from a slim, pale face that seemed to be made for laughter. The beret had a feather stuck in it, and the girl wore a jaunty karakul jacket. But her young face was tense with a kind of hunger, and her gray eyes, slanting a little, never left the transport coming in to the Haidarpasha landing by the bridge-the place of honor, you know-horns playing somewhere because the Turkish brigade was coming home. The survivors had been relieved, after heavy losses in Korea. The thing that struck my mind about the girl in the beret was that she had been starving for a long time until that transport docked.

Fantastic? Well, it might be. Man does not live by bread alone. Tell me a man's dream, and I'll tell you what kind of person he is. Soldiers of any nation can usually get themselves food enough-after two World Wars I can testify to that-yet most of them carry some pin-up pictures, or letters, or even a card with a Hail Mary. Why?

By coincidence I ran into the girl in the red beret again the next day. Having made a hobby of legends and what people call antiquities, I'd managed to be stationed at Istanbul, the old city, whereas most of the Army group of AMAT-American Mission for Aid to Turkey-had duties at the new capital of Ankara. And usually after lunch I walked down the boulevard with the trams to the Aya Sufia, which is what they call the oldest standing church on earth. It's in the parkway where the palace used to be, and it has been made into a museum, so I would find only a stray tourist or a class of schoolkids there. Well, as I reached the gate a polished limousine pulled up at the curb, the driver slid around to open the door, and out stepped the girl who had been waiting at the dock. She went straight into the courtyard of the church.

She had not been alone in the car. In the back sat a solid youth in a camel's-hair coat. I knew him-Masur Aridag, the son of a member of Parliament, and the successful head of one of the new motion-picture studios. We exchanged the usual bows and how-are-you's, but Aridag stayed put in his car and I went on in. The girl was no longer visible. That surprised me, because she had been only some thirty paces ahead of me. And the carpeted floor, bright with sunlight, stretched clear without partitions or furnishings to those incredible marble walls, fourteen centuries old.

The next day it rained. When I took my walk past the Aya Sufla, there was the black limousine parked again at the curb with the driver dozing and young Aridag reading a newspaper. Did you ever stop to think how we take for granted that the strangers we meet are doing the most ordinary things, like catching trains or going to the movies? They might be on their way to rob a museum or to hear a doctor's diagnosis that meant life or death. Well, here was matter-of-fact Aridag waiting like a businessman on Fifth Avenue for a very attractive girl who might be his fiancee to come out of St. Patrick's doors. I told myself that, and then remembered the strange hunger in her face when she watched the transport coming to its moorings.

I would have bet dollars against piasters that she was inside-but where? People don't usually vanish when they step into St. Patrick's. Even Cinderella had to go away somewhere. This time I wandered around the dim walls, passing an attendant who tried to keep warm in his overcoat, and a stocky Turkish infantryman who got up to salute me, or rather my lieutenant colonel's insignia. Turkish soldiers are not allowed to wear service ribbons or bright metal insignia of rank.

I heard the faint tapping of small heels on stone, not far off, but evidently not from the carpeted floor within sight. It took me a moment to place the sound overhead and to realize that there must be a narrow gallery above the massive pillars of the ground level. Going back to the entrance I found a stone stair, almost dark, leading up. Then I remembered Byzantine ladies had used the galleries to be secluded from the men below.

Perhaps I should not have gone up-a middle-aged American officer, merely curious about what seemed odd. The girl was waiting by one of the narrow windows close to the stairhead. Almost she ran at me, holding out her arms, her face a white blur. Before she touched me she stopped, rigid, saying something I didn't understand, and then in English, "Will you please excuse me? I did think you were somebody else."

Probably I had been the only person to climb that obscure stair after her, and Cinderella had sighted my uniform in the dim light. The way her eyes strained up at me showed she had had a shock. She kept on talking in her careful, learned-at-school English, "We always did come here before. In his letter Karal wrote how, if I did not find him at the gumi-the ship-come here or he would send me a message."

I broke off a stupid apology, realizing what was back of her words. The girl had not expected to see Karal at the ship. Still, she came to this gal lery to wait, as his last letter had asked. To hold on to a last link with her soldier, who was probably reported missing. "Did they report him missing, Miss ..."

"My name is Lailee Baibars ... No, sir. They said he must be killed: but they did not recover his body."

After that, I didn't try to go away. This Turkish girl, lightweight, dark hair, and gray eyes, had taken two beatings already-one watching troops at the dock, the other when I blundered up the dark stair, an idiot more than twice her age. Her lips quivered over those last words, tension in her was near to breaking. I knew the symptoms, and also that there was a mighty slim chance of a combatant missing in action in Korea turning up again.

As we walked that corridor, she kept telling me that Karal was no ordinary man; he had a way of doing things like climbing the Karadagh above their town, and getting money to send her, Lailee, to medical school at the University, and waiting outside the door of her room one morning for her to wake up and dress an arm he had torn. I gathered that the Lailee part of the twosome kept all the rules, while the boy Karal made his own rules; he got his commission without benefit of the military academy, and they were to be married after his return. When two kids grow up together that way, the tie between them doesn't break easily.

She had depended on this boy who had chosen to do the crazier kind of things, like volunteering to fight a battle halfway around the world. Somehow she would have to get over him, and the best way to do that seemed to be to go down where Masur Aridag waited in a warm car. Aridag, it appeared, was kind; he drove her around in the car and telephoned every morning; I gathered he would wait patiently until Lailee was ready to marry him. Probably some part of her woman's mind told her she ought to get out of that silent gallery, with its memories.

So I held out my hand to help her down the steps. Turkish women, even of Lailee's age, were homebodies; they went from the family home to the husband's. It wasn't a question of a medical career or marriage with Lailee; it was only a question of which man she would marry-Aridag, waiting alive and rich, or the other, no more than a memory. So I made a mistake.

Instantly she backed away to the wall, saying, "Please. Aridag is jealous and he did not want me to come back to this place."

How can you size up a strange woman's mind? After long strain, little things could hit her with the impact of bullets. Probably she felt that if she took the first step down from the gallery she would be leaving this Karal.

"He said he would send a message. He always kept a promise to me."

I couldn't leave her in that state of quiet hysteria. The chances of any word from Karal reaching Lailee now across thousands of miles of winter in Asia were practically nil. Don't argue about that, instinct warned me. Talk to her someway, to quiet her.

Right then I saw an odd thing. The girl pressed back against the wall, beside the life-size figure of a man in a jeweled coat with a plump, satisfied face-a Byzantine emperor of fourteen centuries ago, preserved in mosaics. I knew him and his portraits.

"Who is that?" I asked sharply.

Justinian the Great, she answered mechanically, who built the great church and made the famous Code of Law, and preserved civilization in this city after Rome fell to the barbarians.

Yes, it was Justinian all right, the great politician who built so many memorials to himself. And they say he did a lot for civilization as wellcollecting its books and churches and people here during those dark ages. But did he?

Beside the gorgeous Justinian, in my mind, appeared the dim outline of another man, who never had his portrait made because the emperor wanted no memory of him to survive. "No," I said, "the other man did that. The one who isn't here."

At that, watching my face, she listened.

He was a big man (I told her in my cocktail-table talk, not knowing the historical lingo) with a beard like a yellow flame until it turned gray. Because he limped, he used to ride a white horse up the avenue here almost every day in the lunch hour. When he had any money, he'd detour around the Strategion Square and give it away to the war vets sunning themselves there. You see, he had a screw loose in his head.

Well, he was the one they called for that day. That morning was worse than the air strike at Pearl. Until then the citizens of Constantinople, as it was called in the time of these emperors, believed themselves safe from any danger, behind their triple walls. Then all at once disaster came racing on them, hell-bent, and this church filled up in no time with civilians praying and carrying on, and calling for this forgotten man, Count Belisarius.