The Road to Miklagard Read online

  The Road to Miklagard

  Contents

  About this Book

  Map

  PART ONE

  1. The Dark Stranger

  2. The Feast and What Befell There

  3. The Sailing

  4. Dun-An-Oir

  5. The Island Treasure House

  6. The Bargainers

  7. The Small Dark Men

  8. Slave Market

  PART TWO

  9. The House at Jebel Tarik

  10. What Happened in the Great Courtyard

  11. The Empty Bed

  12. The Vengeance of Abu Mazur

  13. To Sea Again

  PART THREE

  14. Marriba’s Command

  15. The Ship of War

  16. Miklagard

  17. The Challenge

  18. The Mousetrap and What It Caught

  19. A New Enemy

  20. Unexpected Ally

  21. Marriba’s End

  22. City in Flames

  23. The Inland Sea

  PART FOUR

  24. The Empty Land

  25. A Surprise by the Fjord

  About this Book

  In Viking’s Dawn, I described how a young Northman, Harald Sigurdson, sailed on a voyage with Thorkell Fairhair about the year AD 780, and how, after many adventures in Scotland and the Hebrides, he returned home to the village by the fjord, the sole survivor of the ship’s company.

  The Road to Miklagard is set about five years later, when Harald has grown to be a warrior, respected in his village, and describes how once more he has the urge to ‘go a-viking’; but this time his travels take him farther afield – to Ireland, where many kings still reigned; to Spain, where the victorious Moors had set up their Muslim kingdom; to distant Miklagard, or Constantinople, where the wicked Irene fought to gain power over her weak son, Constantine, so as to rule the Eastern Roman Empire herself; and finally, across the great plains of what is now Russia, and so home again.

  On such occasions, many men set out, but few returned. Yet such was the Viking wanderlust that the hazards of their journeys in no way deterred them; indeed, one can imagine that the possible dangers lent attraction to their voyages!

  They were a grimly humorous people, who loved nothing better after the voyaging and the fighting were done than to sit at the feast-board and spin their long and sometimes impossible yarns about the places they had been to and the wonders they had seen.

  Besides, they were insatiable treasure-hunters; and who would not sail halfway round the world if, at the journey’s end, there was waiting such wealth as might stagger the imagination to dream of it, even!

  To the Northmen, Miklagard was the storehouse of such riches; the magnetic City of Gold. So, it is inevitable that at last Harald Sigurdson must find his face set towards Miklagard.

  HENRY TREECE

  PART ONE

  * * *

  1. The Dark Stranger

  The late afternoon sun burned a deep copper-red behind the gaunt hills of the west, slowly sinking to its salty bed among the great grey breakers beyond Ultima Thule, the Last Island, whose silvery beaches of a myriad shells were strewn with the countless wrecks of all the fine longships that had never come back to the fjords. And now they were no longer fine; only grim spars of blackening, salt-encrusted wood, home for the barnacle, playground for the merry barking seals who danced in the secret silver light of the moon, calling to each other in their age-old language, the tongue of those who were familiar with all the rocks in all the seas of all the world – long before man had dared leave his caves to paddle his frightened little shell of a coracle across the width of a meadow stream.

  A tall, golden-haired boy sat thinking things as he watched over a herd of swine on a little plateau of green grass, at the edge of a thick beechwood, high up above the dark green waters of the fjord.

  ‘I am Harald Sigurdson,’ he said to himself sadly; ‘the son of a great sea-rover. Yet I have made only two voyages, and now my dear father is dead and gone to Odin. We shall never sail together again; and all I am fit for is to watch that old Thorn’s pigs do not get carried away by a wolf, or eat something which disagrees with them!’

  He gave a wry smile of resignation and looked down at his hands and arms. They were burnt almost black by the sun, and scarred from finger-tip to elbow. And as he looked at each scar, he recalled the occasion which had created it …

  ‘This one came when I fought in the torchlight beside Bjorn, in the long-house in Pictland, when they betrayed us while we slept. Poor Bjorn, rest in Valhalla … And this one came when I tried to drag the rocks off great Aun Doorback, as we escaped from Leire’s dungeon. May Aun be happy in Valhalla with his comrade, Gnorre Nithing … I almost wish I were with them, to hear the tales they will tell … And this scar came when I struggled with the sinking curragh, far off the coast of Caledonia, with John the Priest supporting me until the Danish longship found me …’

  Harald Sigurdson passed his hand over his eyes and said, ‘Dear John, we shall never see your like again. The priests who have come here are not of your mettle, good friend. They think more of words than deeds. Alas, that I shall never see you again. Your heaven is not my own.’

  He glanced over his shoulder, down the steep hill, to where the village lay, snuggling along the shore of the great fjord. The blue woodsmoke was twisting now as the sun set. They would be laying the tables with barley bread and a roast pig, filling the drinking horns with honey mead and heather ale; all for the feast.

  Harald must be there, he knew, for he was the shipmaster of the village by the fjord, after his experiences a-viking, adventures which no other man in the place could equal. Yet his heart was heavy.

  ‘My father should be the shipmaster,’ he said to himself. ‘I am not worthy to step into his shoes. But he is gone, gone after only one voyage with me …’

  Bitterly he recalled the one foray they had made on a sleepy little coastal village in Northumbria. The Northmen had been confident that all would be well, that they would return to their ship with bags of barley meal and baskets of eggs. Then Sigurd had been struck down by an arrow that flew out of the darkness, and the others had turned to find their longship ablaze … They had sailed, empty-handed, carrying their dead leader, in a ship that more resembled a funeral pyre than a vessel. Harald remembered how they had wallowed offshore, trying to put out the blaze with their cloaks, with salt water from their helmets, even by rolling on the flames, stifling them with their own bodies.

  It had been a sad homecoming for them, for that ship had cost the villagers three years of harvest to buy. Old Thorn, the headman, had been furious, waving his stick and spluttering all manner of curses on the weary Vikings who dragged the charred hulk ashore.

  Yet even Thorn had let fall a tear when they carried the body of Sigurd up the runway, back to his lonely hut, for of all men, old Thorn most loved and respected Sigurd, the noble warrior who had chosen to make his home in the sprawling wattle-and-daub village by the fjord.

  And now Sigurd’s only son, Harald, sat mourning for his father at sunset, among the grubbing swine at the edge of the high beechwoods.

  But at last he rose and fastened the hide strapping round his breeches, getting ready to go down to the feast.

  ‘Only the bear’s widow mourns for more than one day,’ he said, recalling an old Norse saying. ‘And she soon gets caught!’

  He was about to lay his stick on the back of an old pig that would not herd with the others and come down the hill, when he heard a sudden quick movement among the bushes just within the wood. He waited for a moment, expecting to see a fox or a badger, but when nothing appeared, he forgot the noise and turned once more towards the little path that spidered
its way downwards to the thatched roofs of the village.

  And at that moment, a man ran out from the beechwoods, swift as an attacking wolf, and kicking Harald’s feet from under him, sat astride the boy, his knees pinning Harald’s arms. The pigs grunted and stopped once more, searching for something else to eat among the heather-covered rocks. The man above Harald snarled, ‘If you shout I shall kill you. Believe me, I am a hungry man. I set no store by the laws of this place.’

  Harald did his best to smile up at him and said, ‘By your black hair and the sort of brooch you wear, I judge you to be a Dane. We have a saying in my village: “Trust a snake before a Frank, a Frank before an Englishman – but do not trust a Dane at all!”’

  The man grinned down with fury and said, ‘It is true. I am a Dane, and I am proud to be such. But that is neither here nor there. I am a hungry man at this moment, and I swear by my gods and yours that I will let nothing stand between me and my hunger. I want only one of your pigs, a small one will do. But I cannot carry it whole into the forest. I shall kill it and carve it here. So lie still, for I intend only to give you such a knock on the head as will keep you quiet until I have done what needs to be done.’

  He leaned over and took up a round stone that lay by them. Harald tried to move, but was powerless under the great weight on his chest. So he smiled again, as the man raised his hand, and said, ‘My friend, why should you knock me on the head, when I can help you? I thought you Danes were better bargainers than that.’

  The Dane said, ‘Why should you help me to steal your swine? That does not sound likely, coming from a Norseman! No, I must knock you on the head, my friend. You are too strongly built for me to take any chances.’

  He raised the stone once more, taking aim. But Harald looked up into his dark eyes with his own sky-blue ones and smiling still, said, ‘Very well, what must be, must be; but let me tell you before you go to all this trouble that I would willingly give you a fat pig, and help you to skin and carve it. They are not my pigs, and the man to whom they belong is no special friend of mine.’

  Slowly the Dane let fall the stone and got up from Harald’s chest. He looked very tired, and Harald observed that a trickle of blood had run from a wound in his shoulder and had dried on his arm. In spite of his rich clothes and his gold-studded belt, he looked like a man who was near the end of his tether.

  He stood watching the boy suspiciously. ‘You must go before me,’ he said ‘Choose me a good pig and do what needs to be done. If you try to trick me, I shall …’

  But even as he said that, Harald’s leg shot out, striking the Dane at the side of the knee. He staggered, with a hoarse cry, but before he could regain his balance, the boy had slipped sideways and had flung him face-downwards on to the springy turf.

  ‘Now,’ said Harald, drawing the man’s arms behind him as he sat astride the Dane, ‘who shall be knocked on the head, my friend?’

  The Dane said, ‘I am a fool, and I deserve to die for trusting the word of a Norseman. Kill me and I shall be satisfied.’

  But Harald said suddenly, ‘Why should I kill you? You look like a warrior to me, and it would ill-become a swineherd to kill a warrior with a stone. No, instead, I will offer you friendship. You shall come down to the village with me and eat your pig there. What do you say to that?’

  For a while the man did not speak. Then at last he said, ‘No, I would rather be killed by a swineherd than let any gap-toothed villagers jeer at me for being caught so easily.’

  In reply, Harald got off the man’s back and stood away from him, his hands open, palms upward, to show that he carried no weapon, not even a stone.

  ‘I am no boaster,’ he said. ‘I would not say that I had caught you by a trick. But later, when you have fed, if you still wish to die, I will borrow a sword from someone and will do what you ask, decently, in the proper manner.’

  Then he took up his stick, and ignoring the Dane, gathered his pigs together into a neat herd, and started off with them down the hill.

  When he had gone twenty paces, he heard a cry behind him.

  ‘Wait,’ shouted the Dane. ‘I will come with you. We can talk about swords when I have a meal inside me.’

  Harald nodded and said, ‘That is just what I told you, my friend.’ He handed the staff to the Dane.

  ‘I see you are limping, my friend. Lean on this. I can drive the pigs on with a smack of the hand.’

  The Dane took the staff, wondering. Then he smiled and said, ‘Judging by the size of your hands, my friend, I wager the pigs would rather be struck with your staff!’

  So, laughing, they reached the village.

  2. The Feast and What Befell There

  Old thorn was beside himself with rage when he saw the guest he was to entertain. Though half-crippled with rheumatism, he bobbed up and down in his anger on the hide-thong bed where he usually lay, and threatened Harald with his stick, saying that the village had little enough for itself, without giving entertainment to good-for-nothing Danes, who ate up all they could, then brought their families in longships the next year to pillage their hosts.

  As he raved in the smoke-filled hut, the Dane shuffled his feet with irritation; but Harald still smiled as he laid his hand on the man’s shoulder.

  ‘Send him away, and send me, Thorn,’ he said softly. ‘My father would have counselled you as I do. My father, Sigurd, would not have forgotten the laws of hospitality.’

  Thorn’s eyes goggled and a vein stood out in his thin neck. But at last he was quiet again and said, ‘Be it as you say. He shall stay as long as he wishes. But mark me, he has the look of a pursued man about him, and that bodes no good to anyone. What if he is a nithing, then? What if his king sends for him, and takes our heads too?’

  The Dane said, ‘I am no nithing, old man. As for my king, he is dead and will never send here for me. He was my brother, and I should have ruled in his place, but for my taste for sailing the seas in longships.’

  When Thorn heard that their visitor was of royal blood, he put a rein on his temper and even tried to smile.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘then you still may be useful to us. Though you have indeed a look about you which I have seen on the faces of men who are pursued.’

  The Dane said, ‘We are all pursued, old man; and the one who pursues us will get us, each one of us, in the end.’

  Old Thorn, who was very superstitious, crossed his fingers at those words, to keep away Loki, the evil spirit, who listened at the chimney hole to what men said.

  Harald laughed and said, ‘So, you have been a-viking, Dane! What sights did you see?’

  The Dane snorted and replied, ‘Such sights as may not be told, young fellow, for fear of keeping sleep from a boy’s eyes for a year or more!’

  Harald answered, ‘I could match them, Dane.’

  But the Dane had turned and was looking across the village compound, up towards the hills again, listening, as though he expected someone to come leaping down the heather-covered rocks towards the houses.

  Then the horn sounded to summon the villagers to the feast in the long-hall.

  Soon the oaken table was thronged about with men and women, for this was not a warrior-meeting, where only the men gathered; and soon the long pinewood hall was thick with smoke from the wood fire in the centre, so that one could hardly see from one side to the other. The village folk ate their pork and barley bread ravenously, each trying to outdo his neighbour and to get good value from the occasion, for each had contributed his share. Then, when the mead-horn had passed round the board a time or two, and the heather ale had been poured into the great helmet and sampled by all, men began to cry out for a song.

  The village sagaman, old Nessi, so old that he had to be carried in his chair by two boys wherever he went, began to strike on a little drum with the flat of his dry old hand, giving himself a rhythm to work to. His drum was an earthen gourd, covered by a tight and thinly-scraped sheepskin, bound about with deer sinews. It gave off a sharp little note th
at cut through the talk about the table and caused all the villagers, even the most quick-tongued woman, to fall silent, while the bard declaimed his words.

  ‘There are three things a man should fear,

  A wolf, a sword, and a woman.’

  He sang, smiling wickedly.

  The men began to laugh and the women to make angry faces at the old poet. But when the uproar had died again, he started again more seriously and sang,

  ‘It came from no man knows where;

  It hides beneath the deepest rocks;

  It will not be wooed with promises;

  Yet most men love it better than life itself.

  What say you, wise ones, that it is?’

  The hall was filled with the voices of men and women, who tried to guess the answer to the riddle. But at each attempt, the sagaman shook his head and smiled.

  Then he looked towards the Dane who sat between Thorn and Harald, at the head of the table.

  ‘You seem to be a quick-witted fellow,’ said the bard. ‘Will you not try to guess?’

  The Dane shrugged his broad shoulders and smiled. ‘I shall not need to guess,’ he said. ‘For I know what the answer is. I made up that song myself, at my brother’s house in Hedeby, many years ago. The answer is: Gold, nothing more!’

  At first there was silence, then there was an excited shouting among the people. The sagaman smiled and said, ‘I recognized you, Arkil the Prince, as soon as you came in. That is why I tried your own song on you. Here, take the drum; I hand it to a better bard than myself.’

  The people clapped Arkil on the back and made him go forward, against his will, to stand beside the fire and sing them a song. He struck the drum a time or two, but then flung it back to the sagaman, saying, ‘I can get along better in my own way, Nessi the Bard’.

  And he began to clap his hands against each other, making many different sounds, and many complicated rhythms. The folk in the hall would have been well contented to hear him clapping like that for long enough, but the Dane suddenly began to sing in a deep musical voice: