The Ice Queen (38 page)

The coming of spring brought with it great shoals of fish, heading up-river to spawn. We ate them till our bellies bulged and salted them by the hundredweight to take with us. Then, saying goodbye to the Oghuz, we sailed out of the Volga into the Khazar Sea.

Taking two young Oghuz along as guides, we coasted south, looking for the mouth of the Terek river where a Rus town, called Semender, was said to be. We reached the Terek after several days and, for once, were happily surprised. There really was a town there, and a thriving one at that. The people of Semender owned Mstislav to be their overlord, though they had never seen him, and when Yngvar told them that that man's noble brother now ruled in his stead, they received us kindly.

We felt now that we had accomplished the first part of our mission and should think of returning. Our plans were changed, however, by the arrival of envoys from a certain Shah Malik. This man, though an Oghuz by birth, ruled over the Saracen Emirate of Gand in the land of Kwarizm, which lies at the southern end of the sea. He was, said his envoys, raising rebellion against the dynasty of the Ghaznawids, who oppressed his country, and, in view of the old alliance between Oghuz and Rus, the Emir felt he had a claim on Semender's help, and ours too. They promised that we would be well rewarded just as soon
as Allah allowed their Emir to gallop his horse over the bodies of the Ghaznawid dogs.

Yngvar leapt at the chance to earn glory for himself in battle, as well as putting the Oghuz in Yaroslav's debt. So it came about that at the head of a fleet of twenty ships, our own and those of Semender, he set sail for the Kwarizmian shore.

Our campaign, so bravely begun, ended as a sorry tale of treachery and bad luck. Let it be enough to say that Shah Malik had no stomach for a real fight and only hoped to frighten his overlords with a show of force. When that failed, he informed us that our services were no longer wanted and closed his gate in our faces.

Some of the Semender warriors went home, the rest enlisted under Yngvar, for he, refusing to be cheated of his booty and fame, spent the summer raiding the coast of Kwarizm and plundering many a rich harbor—until one night our luck deserted us.

A storm demolished all our ships as they lay exposed on the beach. When we appealed to our erstwhile ally for shelter, we were answered with arrows. There was nothing to do but march back along the coast to Semender, carrying on our backs as much of our plunder as we had been able to salvage.

Our route took us around the eastern spur of an enormous mountain range whose snow-capped peaks touched the clouds. On the lower slopes, sheep grazed and villages clung to jutting crags of rock. Between these mountains and the sea was only a narrow pass, rocky and rough, and affording many places for ambush.

Day after day we pushed on over the sun-scorched ground, leaving a trail of jewelry, coin, and other costly trash behind us. We were meat for the eagles. Some were picked off by the arrows of marauding Albani mountaineers, others succumbed to a bloody flux in the bowels. Yngvar died of this one night, calling on Christ to save his soul.

Not long after that, near a pestilential Saracen town called al-Bab, the Emir of that place, one Mansur bin Maymun, invited the leaders of our band to parlay with him. After Yngvar's death I was chosen as one of several leaders by the men. While he entertained us, his warriors fell upon the main body of our men, hemmed in between the mountains and the sea, and cut down every last one. We survivors were thrown into chains. And that is how, for the second time in my life, I became a slave.

It was Mansur's idea to give us away as gifts to the neighboring emirs and chieftains with whom he wanted to have good relations. Tall yellow-haired men were prized by these rather short, rather dark people. I, however, being short and dark myself, was not considered worth giving away. And so, one by one, I saw my comrades disappear.

Slavery was more galling to me now than my experience of it in Finland had ever been. There, I was the captain of a crew who looked to me to lead them. Here, I was alone, with no one to be brave for. I dreamt of escape at first, but by degrees I sank into a state of hopelessness from which there was no brave and beautiful Ainikki to rouse me.

The only profit I derived from the endless drudgery of hauling water and wood to the Emir's kitchen, was that I learned somewhat of the Greek tongue. Among the slaves of Mansur's household was a Greek sea captain—a leather-skinned man by the name of Leonidas. His ship had been seized by pirates on the Black Sea, and for years he had been traded from pillar to post until finally washing up here.

For three years he and I were chained together in the slave barracks each night. Since we had no language in common and he absolutely refused to learn mine, I was forced to learn his. Along with his language I learned, too, that I was a ‘barbarian': a lower form of life than himself, though, he grudgingly admitted, cleverer than others he had known. What he loved to talk about most were the great seaports that he had spent his life sailing amongst: Sinope, Trebizond, Cherson, but, above all, the great, the incomparable City of Constantine. In a tone of awe he would describe its miles of soaring battlements, its church whose dome was like the vault of heaven, its hoard of priceless relics among which were the Virgin's robe, Moses' staff, the head of John the Baptist, the foot of Saint Paul—the list went on and on.

Leonidas and I became close despite our contrary natures. To my mind he was a braggart and a liar—telling things about this Constantinople so fantastic that none but a fool would believe them. From his point of view, I was a most unsatisfying partner in the ‘Greek wrestling' that he urged upon me night after night and to which, from sheer loneliness, I sometimes gave way.

He was a quarrelsome man, too, and often we would argue about the most trifling things, only to make up again later. We had quarreled one night about something or other, I forget what, and kept up a row until the
other slaves pelted us with their shoes. Leonidas turned his back to me and I to him and so we lay angrily until we fell asleep.

In the morning when Mansur's overseer banged on his brass pot to awaken us, Leonidas lay dead beside me, without a mark on his body. He had complained the previous day of a gripping pain in his jaw and arm; it had made him worse-tempered than usual. But how could a man die of that?

And it seems to me that I went mad for a time, though I don't remember clearly; that I began to weep and to beat on his chest with my fists, and wouldn't leave off until the steward drove me away with blows and curses. I speak of it now only to show how just a single Greek can corrupt a Northman's spirit. Imagine, then, the effect of a city full of them! After Leonidas's death, I sank into such a state of melancholy that the Emir lost patience with me and sold me for a few coppers to a leather tanner in the town. The tanner passed me on to a wool dyer, who traded me to a butcher, who sold me to a quarryman. The quarryman used me to pay off a gambling debt that he owed to an itinerant merchant, a Turk by the name of Murad.

The very devil of a man.

Murad's business consisted in selling cheap goods made in the coastal towns to the tribesman who dwelt deep in those mighty mountains that hung above us. He used me as a beast of burden, to carry his tinker's pack up mountain paths so steep that even the mules could not manage them. And how he loved to use the rod on me!

Once, and still near the beginning of my time with him, I felt that I could not stand one more beating and decided to kill myself by falling off a high rock ledge. But the pack on my back broke my fall and all I got were bruises. For punishment, Murad branded me with an X on my chest.

As savagely as he was accustomed to beat his mules, so he beat me. And after a time I became, like the mules, stupid, stolid, and mean.

The Rus have a saying: ‘Day after day as the rain falls, week after week as the grass grows, year after year as the river flows'.

Sluggish and bitter on the tongue, the waters of my life crept by for four long years.

It was now the spring of the year 1037 (as Catholics count the years; Greeks and Rus would call it the six thousand-five hundred-and-forty-sixth year from the Creation of the world, and the Mohammedans, the four hundred-and-fifteenth from the flight of their Prophet). I was twenty-five years old and felt a hundred. I had long ago ceased to hope.

But my master's business prospered. So much so, in fact, that he was able to purchase some quite beautiful girls, captives in a raid of one mountain tribe upon another, and with this valuable cargo and several camels to carry his other goods, he joined the great caravan that came each spring up the western shore of our sea. The caravan brought horses and spices from Arabia, steel from Damascus, pistachio nuts and dried fruits from Persia, and every sort of beautiful and costly trifle from the workshops of Kwarizm. I could scarcely picture to myself the country from which it had started. As to its destination, my fellow slaves were as ignorant as I, and our masters did not see fit to enlighten us.

With the soaring mountains on our left, we headed west, gradually turning to the north until the tallest peaks were lost to view. Our way was across the open steppe. Crossing that endless expanse of grass and stony
barrens was, to me, exactly like being adrift at sea. The sun told me we were making westward, but how far we were to the north or south I had no clear idea.

Still, as day followed day, I began to suspect that I knew our destination. I tried not to hope, for fear I was mistaken, but the closer we approached the more unbearable was my anticipation.

As we approached the city wall, acres of young fruit trees bloomed and green ears of grain bowed in the wind, where I remembered only charred stubble, corpses, and vultures. But it was still the same citadel that looked down from its heights upon the wide Dnieper. Kiev! My unsuspecting master had brought me to within an inch of freedom.

We halted at a caravanserai on the left bank. As the hour was already late, the Saracens faced east to say their evening prayers while we slaves, released from the long coffle-chain, saw to watering the camels and performing all the other business of setting up camp.

Later, after chewing my few scraps of dinner, I was manacled, as always, and my slave collar was attached by a short chain to a camel's hind leg—an arrangement which the camel resented as much as I. That night I could not close my eyes. My brain was in a fever. Somehow, somehow I would find a way to escape. If I didn't, then I deserved to die a dog's death.

The next morning, our masters mounted their horses and camels, loaded us slaves with bundles of trade-goods, and drove us through the waist-high water at the ford, where the mid-channel island lies.

Once beyond this wooded island, I could see the podol sprawled along the river bank: risen from its ashes, and once again a noisy, lively jumble of shop-houses, tents, stalls, and pens for animals and slaves. The river bank, moreover, was thick with strugi—fifty hulls at least, with workmen crawling over them like ants, hammering, scraping, tarring, to make them ship-shape. The time was early June and this was a part of the great trading convoy making ready for its yearly voyage to Golden Miklagard—New Rome, New Jerusalem, Constantine's great city.

A space had been reserved in the busiest part of the market for our caravan. Scarcely were we installed than hordes of customers crowded round us. My master's string of girls were set out for inspection on a low platform built of planks. I, too, mounted the platform—not as merchandise, but to carry my master's stool, fan, and parasol, for the day was a hot one.

A stream of buyers passed before us while Murad and his fellows kept up a constant sing-song chant, advertising the quality and price of this girl and that one. I was standing by his stool, fanning him listlessly while my eyes drank in every detail of the scene before me, when I saw a face I knew! Five years had not changed it: the same pushed-up nose, the same bulging eyes, the same greasy braids weighted at the tips with lead balls. He was examining a young girl of my master's string, pinching her jaw between thumb and forefinger and peering into her mouth while tears ran down her cheeks.

“Stavko!” I hissed.

He gave a start and looked up to see who spoke.

In Norse I said, “Stavko, it's me!” I was nearly close enough to touch him; I stretched out my hand. “In God's name, buy me!”

“Strong back, sir, good legs.” Murad, smelling a sale, sprang from his stool and propelled me forward, going into his pitch in the Arabic-Turkic-Slavonic pidgin that all the merchants spoke. “Simple-minded, but I've taught him to fear the rod. Give you a good day's work.” He thumped my chest with his fist. “Good health, last you for years.”

Stavko's eyes looked straight into mine. He seemed to hesitate a moment, then frowned. “No. I buy only females; how much for girl?”

They bargained over her while I watched in despair. Stavko knew me. He knew me, damn his eyes!

“Get back, you!” Murad noticed how I stared at them and shoved me away.

I cannot describe the torment that racked me for the rest of that day. Truly, I was abandoned—By Odin All-Father, by the White Christ, even by Stavko Ulanovich, the slaver. Might they all rot! I would make one more try for freedom and if I died, so be it.

I had a plan.

At dusk, Murad and his friends covered their stalls and drove their slaves back into the river, loaded down with the unsold goods which they would guard over-night in the caravanserai. I was lucky in that I had only the stool, umbrella, and fan to carry.

We were at the island now, midstream; Murad, on his camel riding ahead of me, not looking back; the leafy branch of a tree between us. I let go the umbrella and other things, sank under water and swam until my lungs were ready to burst. Ten or a dozen breaths would bring me
opposite the cave's mouth, high up on the bank, where Kuchug and I had climbed up the rope that night long ago; the entrance to the Monastery of the Caves. Father Feodosy and his monks—they would remember me, and would surely redeem a Christian from slavery to the Infidel. How thankful I was at that moment to be a Christman!