Only I knew they marked the way back to Atil’s howe in the Grass Sea, sure as a chart.
A chart I had now managed to lose.
All of this swilled round in my head, dark as the water from Miklagard’s gutters, as I hunched through the rain towards our ratty warehouse hall, dragging the big Slav with me. The wind blasted and grumbled and, out across the black water, whitecaps danced like stars in a night sky.
‘You look like you woke up with the ugly one, having gone to bed with golden-haired Sif,’ Kvasir growled as I stumbled in, shaking rain off, slapping the piece of sacking that was my cloak and hood. His good eye was bright, the other white as a dead fish, with no pupil. He looked the big Slav up and down and said nothing.
‘Thor’s golden wife wouldn’t look at him,’ said a lilting voice. ‘Though half the Greek man-lover crews here would. Maybe that is the way ahead for us, eh, Orm?’
‘The way behind, you mean,’ jeered Finn Horsehead, jerking lewd hips and roaring at his own jest. Brother John’s look was withering and Finn subsided into mock humility, nudging his neighbour to make sure he had caught his fine wit.
‘Never be minding,’ Brother John went on, taking my elbow. ‘Come away here and sit you down. There’s a fine cauldron of…something…with vegetables in it that Sighvat lifted and Finn made with pigeons. And a griddle of flatbread. Enough for our guest, too.’
The men made room round the brazier and Brother John ushered us to a place, gave us bowls, bread and a wink. Radoslav looked at the food and it was clear a stew made of the Great City’s pigeons was not the finest meal he had eaten, nor – with the wind hissing through the warehouse, flaring the brazier embers – was this the best hall he had been in. But he grinned and chewed and gave every indication of being well treated. I took a bowl, but my mouth was full of ashes.
I introduced Radoslav. I told them why he was here and that what we had feared had happened – the rune-serpent sword was gone. The silence was crushing, broken only by the sigh of wind ruffling the curls on Brother John’s half-grown forehead. You could hear the sky of our world falling in that silence.
Brother John had been on the boat when we had boarded it on the Sea of Darkness. The Greek and his crew thought he was one of us, we thought he was one of them and neither found out until after we were ashore. We had taken to Brother John at once for that Loki trick and afterwards he had astounded us all by telling us he was a Christ priest.
Not one like Martin, the devious monk from Hammaburg, the one I should have killed when I had the chance. Brother John was from Dyfflin and an altogether different breed of horse. He did not shave his head in the middle like the usual priests, he shaved it at the front – when he could be bothered. ‘Like the druids did in times of old,’ he offered cheerfully when asked.
He did not wear robes either and he liked to drink and hump and fight, too, even though he was hardly the height of a pony’s arse. He was on his second attempt to get to Serkland, trying to reach his Christ’s holy city, having failed the first time and, as he said himself, sore in need of salvation.
I was sore in need of the same and dare not look anyone in the eye.
‘Starkad,’ muttered Kvasir. ‘Fuck his mother.’ His head drooped. There were grunts and growls and sniffs, but it was a perfect summing up and the worst sound of all was the despairing silence that followed.
Sighvat broke it. ‘We have to get it back,’ he declared and Kvasir snorted derisively at this self-evident truth.
‘I will tear his head off and piss down his neck,’ growled Finn and I was not so sure that he was talking about Starkad and not me. Radoslav, food halfway to his mouth, had stopped chewing and looked from one to the other, only now realising that something truly valuable had been taken.
‘Starkad,’ said Finn in a voice like a turning quernstone. He stood and dragged the seax out, looking meaningfully at me. The others growled approval and their own hidden knives flashed.
Despair closed on me like dark wolves. ‘He works for the Greek, Choniates,’ I said.
‘Aye, right enough, we saw him there,’ agreed Sighvat and if there is a colour blacker than his voice was then, the gods have not seen fit to show us it yet.
Finn blinked, for he knew what that meant. Choniates had power and money and that permitted him armed guards and the law. We were Norse, with all that stood for in the Great City. Bitter experience had taught the people of Miklagard just what the Norse did in their halls during the long, dark winters, especially men with no wives to stay their hands. The Great City’s tabernae and streets did not want feasting Northmen getting drunk and killing each other – or worse, the good citizens – so the city had made a law of it, which they called the Svear Law. We could carry no weapons and would be arrested for the ones gleaming in the firelight here. We had only a limited time in the Great City and soon we would be rounded up and pitched out beyond the frontier if we did not get a ship in time to leave ourselves.
Finn wolfed it all out in a great howl of frustration that bounced echoes round the warehouse and started up local dogs to reply, his head thrown back and the cords of his neck standing out like ship’s cables. But even he knew we would not profit from charging up to Choniates’ marbled hov, kicking in the door and dangling him by the heel until he coughed up the runesword. All we would get was dead.
‘Choniates is a merchant of some respectability,’ Radoslav said, quiet and cautious about the smouldering rage round him. ‘Are you sure he has done this thing? What is this rune serpent anyway?’
Glares answered that. Choniates had it, for sure. Architos Choniates had seen the sword weeks ago and I had been expecting something since then – only to ease my guard at the last and lose it.
When we had first staggered on to the docks of the Great City, it was made clear we would remain unmolested provided we could pay our way. I had half a boot of coins and trinkets left, the last cull from Atil’s howe, but they were not seen as currency, so had to be sold for their worth in real silver – and Architos Choniates was the name that kept surfacing like a turd in a drain.
It took two days to arrange, because the likes of Choniates wasn’t someone you could walk up to, a ragged-breeks boy like me. He had no shopfront, but was known as a linaropuli, a cloth merchant – which was like calling Thor a bit of a hammer-thrower.
Choniates dealt in everything, but cloth especially and silk in particular, though it was well known that he hated the Christ church’s monopoly on making that fabric. Brother John found a tapetas, a rug dealer, who knew a friend who knew Choniates’ chief spadone and, two days later, this one turned up in the Dolphin.
Outside it, to be exact, for he wouldn’t set foot inside such a place, despite the rain. He sat in a hired carrying-chair, surrounded by hired men from the guild of the racing Blues, wearing their neckcloths to prove it. They were all scowling toughs sporting the latest in Great City fashion: tunics cinched tight at the waist and stiffened at the shoulders to make them look muscle-wide. They had decorated trousers and boots and their hair was cut right back on the front and grown long and tangled behind.
It was all meant to make them look like some steppe tribe come to town, but when one came into the Dolphin and asked for Orm the Trader, he was almost weeping with rage and frustration at the hoots and jeers of men who had fought the real thing.
We all went out, for the others were anxious to see what a spadone, a man with no balls, looked like, but were in for a disappointment, since he looked like us, only cleaner and better groomed. He was swathed in a thick cloak, drawn up over his head so that he looked like an old Roman statue, and he inclined his head graciously in the direction of the gawping mob of pirates who confronted him.
‘Greetings from Architos Choniates,’ he said in Greek. ‘My name is Niketas. My master bids me tell you that he will see you tomorrow. Someone will come and bring you to him.’
He