The Ice Queen (37 page)

“The very next day, his betrothal to Yelisaveta was called off, he was stripped of his rank and lands, and ordered to take himself far away. Which he did, four days ago, with a handful men whom he bribed or bullied into going with him. All we know is that they sneaked off in the middle of the night with a string of Yaroslav's best horses. By now he could be anywhere. He's a beaten man, Odd—for the moment anyway.”

None of this surprised me, but I would not give up so easily. “Yelisaveta knows where he is, by God, I'll wring it out of her!”

“How? By breaking into her bed chamber at night? My boy, you have a positive genius for self-destruction.”

I sank down on the river bank and put my head in my hands. “Dag, I'm tired of losing, tired of running, tired of starting over, tired of being cheated of my revenge. My luck is hopeless. I think I will drown myself.”

“Now look,” he said, easing himself down beside me, “stow that. Anyone as fearsome to look at as you are shouldn't be talking such talk. And, as for Harald, he's not the boy to stay hidden for long. That great carcass? Just give him time. You'll have your chance yet. In the meantime, though, you really have to get clear of Novgorod, unless you plan to spend the rest of your life in disguise. Yaroslav has put a price of fifty grivny on your head.”

“But where shall I go?”

“Not easy to say. For one thing, you've no money left. Harald ran off with everything he could carry, including your savings. In his mind you owed it to him. I'd urge you to come back to Norway with King Magnus and me, but we may be here for weeks yet and you need to do something before that. Have you no ideas at all?”

“None.”

“Well, now look, here's a thought. The boyars have made Yaroslav agree to cut down the number of Swedish mercenaries in the city—which, in fact, the old boy doesn't mind doing; you know Yaroslav—fewer mouths to feed. The first to go will be Yngvar and his men—off to the Volga and Serkland to claim it for the new Grand Prince.

“Yes, Yaroslav said something about that.”

“Why not go with them, Odd? Pull an oar, bash some skulls—best thing for you! Who knows, you might come back rich. Tell him you know the Volga blindfolded—Jesu, you look like you do. By the time he finds out you're an impostor it'll be too late to do anything about.”

“Except kill me for raping his aunt.”

“Oh, Yngvar's got more sense than that. You just tell him the truth, I don't think he has any illusions about Ingigerd. Besides, he likes you.”

“The last person you said that about was Harald.”

“Did I? Why, I never—, I mean—” He looked at me and I looked at him, and we began to chuckle, and then to laugh out loud, and then to roar, helplessly, till our sides ached. People in the street stopped and smiled in spite of themselves. Still howling like a couple of madmen, we went reeling down the street arm in arm in search of the nearest tavern.

Four days later, a flotilla of dragons and strugi pulled away from Yaroslav's dock and pointed south. On a rowing bench in the flag-ship, straining with his shipmates against the Volkhov's rushing current, sat Churillo Igorevich. Well, it seemed like a good idea, the way Dag put it; and only Black-browed Odin sees the ends of things.

Yngvar stood in the stern, his yellow hair streaming in the breeze and his hand resting lightly on the tiller stick. He gave a wave of his arm to the small crowd who had come to see us off. Among them were the Grand Prince and Princess with Putscha by her side. The dwarf had walked into the palace the day before, as bold as you please (Dag told me) and spouting some lie about where he'd spent the past week.

The ‘sucking pigs' were there—but not their nurse; no, not old Thordis. The children didn't appear to miss her. The younger ones skipped up and down the dock, whooping and playing at pirates. A year ago young Prince Volodya would have joined in with them; now the hero of Kiev kept a proper demeanor. Yelisaveta, too, stood apart from the rest, seemingly enclosed by a wall of despair that neither sight nor sound could pierce. One could only guess at her thoughts, but surely here was another Ingigerd in the making. Magnus was there, even in his king's regalia still managing to look like a lost waif. Ringing him like so many mountains stood the Tronder jarls—big of bone, loud of voice, and greedy of heart.

Dag was there. He had bought me a change of clothes, a mail shirt,
and a sword and dagger. He was a fine man, Dag. Brave, generous, and quick-witted. I never saw him again. The wound in his leg festered, so I heard long afterwards and he died of it. I think he already knew he was a dead man that day when we laughed together.

Of all those gathered on the riverbank this bright, brisk morning, only Dag and Putscha knew my true identity. Yaroslav and Ingigerd had seen me walk right past them, close enough to touch, without a flicker of recognition. The same with Yngvar when I offered myself as a guide to the Volga country.

I pulled at my oar and watched the figures on the bank grow smaller. In my mind's eye I saw another youth: short, dark, tangle-haired, his head humming with dreams of adventure, his heart high with hope; saw him warping his ship out of Nidaros harbor with a grin and a wave as his men churned the water with their oars.

“Yngvar Eymundsson,” I murmured, “with all my heart I wish you better fortune than that other youth has found.”

Churillo Igorevich had only a brief existence. When we were a week gone from Novgorod, I revealed myself to Yngvar and explained the truth concerning Ingigerd and me. At home, I suppose, we would have had to fight, but out here all that seemed far away.

“So,” he grinned, “I lose a guide but I gain a skald—not a bad exchange.”

Unhappily, it was a very bad exchange, as things turned out.

Yngvar's plan was more ambitious than the one Yaroslav had conceived. In earlier days, the lower Volga had often been visited by the Rus. For more than a generation, however, there had been no contact because of the continual movement of new and ever more savage tribes across the steppe. Yngvar vowed that we would dip our helmets in the Volga and drink of its waters. He wanted to see if the region was still as rich in gold as it was rumored to be and whether the river was safe once again for merchant ships.

His idea was to follow it from its source to the point where it enters the Khazar Sea; then to coast along the western shore of that sea and return to Tmutorakan by a river route, if there was one; otherwise by foot.
From Tmutorakan it would be an easy voyage round the peninsula of Chersonesos to the mouth of the Dnieper and home.

The force he commanded was not a large one. It consisted of his seven dragon ships with about three hundred Swedes to man them, and eight strugi carrying about the same number of merchants and adventurers recruited from the streets of Novgorod.

You may have heard somewhat of Yngvar's famous expedition to Serkland. A liar by the name of Ketil-Garda, who wasn't even there, invented a fabulous account of it which has spread far and wide. According to him, we spent our first winter at the court of a beautiful queen, whom our leader instructed in the Christian faith. Later, we slew a giant and carried away his foot, which we afterwards used to lure a dragon from its hoard of gold. And much other nonsense besides.

If only the truth were so amusing.

Our route took us from Lake Ilmen up the Lovat to the Valdai hills where, instead of portaging to the Dnieper as one would if he were going on to Kiev, we portaged to the Volga, which also rises here. That river is big beyond imagining and unpredictable besides. In some places giant tributaries flow into it and the water runs deep and fast. Elsewhere the channel, though broad, is so shallow that even our flat-bottomed strugi had to be dragged over the stony bed.

Now and then we passed Rus villages. At each one, Yngvar stopped and made a speech to the assembled warriors (some of the older ones with scalp-locks and arms tattooed like mine), informing them that they had now the good fortune to be subjects of Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise of Kiev, and that they must swear allegiance to him (Yngvar) as the Grand Prince's representative. Some repeated the oath with laughing and foolery; some wandered off; some just stood and stared. Yngvar fumed, but there was nothing he could do.

Spring, summer, and fall we followed the Volga, stopping often to hunt and gather fruits and berries along the way. After a while we encountered no more Rus, but Volga Bulgars instead, whom we sometimes surprised watering their ponies at the river bank. In answer to our questions they invariably pointed downstream and bade us continue to the mouth of the river, where we would find the place we sought—the rich and far-famed city of Atil. There we would be treated as honored guests, they said, and could pass the winter amidst every kind of luxury.

We pressed on. Atil, we knew, had been the capital of the once mighty Khazar empire. The city had fallen to Grand Prince Svyatoslav, long ago, when he warred against that people. Despite its capture on that occasion, we saw no reason to doubt that it flourished still.

But all we found was a desolate ruin, haunted by wolves and ghosts. The Rus had savaged the city so badly that survivors, if there were any, fled away and never returned. (I was one day to befriend a Khazar warrior in Golden Miklagard, Moses the Hawk, who knew his homeland only from the tales his old father told. When I described to him this scene of desolation, even that fierce, hard-bitten man shed a tear.) Perhaps our Bulgar informants up-river were ignorant of all this. Or, more likely, they simply lied to be rid of us.

Though we were angry and disappointed, we set about to explore the ruins of the khagan's stone-built palace, which lay on an island in the middle of the shallow river. Here, we had been told, he kept his twenty-five wives, his hundred concubines, and the four thousand warriors of his druzhina. It was hard to see all that in the toppled wreckage that lay before us.

Elsewhere we found traces of what seemed to have been churches for Christians, Saracens, and Jews. The Khazars, themselves, practiced the Jewish religion, though it was remembered of them that they tolerated all religions equally. Now all were equally laid low.

We had hardly arrived at Atil and were debating whether to go on or not, when winter struck like a man with a knife. We awoke one morning to find our ships frozen fast in the river. Now we could go neither forward nor back but must make do with what little shelter the derelict city offered, while we cursed old Svyatoslav for his unrivaled stupidity.

Being an Icelander, I thought I knew about cold. But this was a cold so bitter that crows fell dead from the sky; a cold that cracked stones and split tree trunks; a cold that turned your beard rock hard and made icicles of the water dripping from your nose; a cold in which you feared to lower your breeches long enough to shit; a cold sharp enough, when the wind howled across the estuary flats, to peel the hide off you. I wore three fur coats, the inmost with the fur against my body. I wore felt boots, over which I pulled a pair made of horse-hide and lined with bearskin. Fur leggings, mittens and a hat completed my outfit. I was so bundled up I could hardly walk, and still I was cold.

We would surely have died if it hadn't been for the Oghuz. These men—whom, at first sight, I took to be Pechenegs—were a tribe of nomads, swarthy and bow-legged with jet black eyes and heavy beards, who pitched their leather tents in the ruins of the city. One old man amongst them could speak the Slavonic tongue tolerably well and he conveyed Yngvar's speech to the rest of them, explaining that we were servants of the great Rus Khan in the West.

Much to our astonishment they hailed us as friends, declaring that they were allies of the Rus from long ago when the two peoples made war together against the Khazars. In short, they befriended us, and all through that winter shared with us their food, their tents, and their precious fur coats. Even so, frostbite claimed many noses, toes, and privates, and the smell of gangrene was ever present.

But we endured. Most of us.