The Viking Saga Page 23

  Harald grinned and said, ‘And do you recall, Haro, that when we first looked down on King MacMiorog’s cattle ranch, we said that it must surely rival Miklagard!’

  Haro nodded and said, ‘It was to this place what a ladybird is to a stallion!’

  Then the many trumpets blew and at the signal the two ships pulled into the white-stoned harbour.

  ‘Look, look!’ said Marriba, excitedly, ‘in that litter with the purple canopy decorated with silver! That is the Emperor, he has come to meet me! Oh, look!’

  Harald and Haro nudged each other and stood aside to let the girl go forward on to the plank. The three officers from the war vessel waited on the harbour to lead her to the Emperor Constantine.

  Harald and Haro followed at a respectful distance, staring about them at the many soldiers, all in their golden armour and red cloaks, or draped in long purple vestments as they sat on their motionless white horses, their black helmet plumes nodding in the morning breeze that blew down, soft and odorous, from the high city.

  Marriba stood before the litter, which was carried by four great Negro slaves. She seemed irresolute and nervous, as though now that she had reached Byzantium, she wished she could be back in the safety of her father’s house at Jebel Tarik, where she was the most important person …

  Then the curtains of the litter were drawn aside and the Emperor slowly got down on to the red carpet which had been spread on the harbour stones.

  Haro’s eyes grew wide and his mouth fell open.

  ‘What!’ he gasped. ‘Can that be the Great One we have come so far to meet!’

  Constantine was a weak and sickly child, there was no gainsaying it. His thin fair hair hung lankly down his pale face; his light-blue eyes seemed faded and almost colourless; his small red mouth was as petulant as a baby’s. And not all the bright, tall diadems, the robes and cloaks, stiff with fine metals and jewels, could make him look other than what he was.

  ‘Poor little puppet!’ said Harald, under his breath.

  ‘I would rather be a shepherd lad along the fjords than this pretty doll,’ said Haro, in contempt.

  The many officers bowed low before the Emperor, and even Marriba knelt on the stones, for the red carpet did not reach as far as the spot where she was made to stand.

  The Emperor Constantine looked down at her haughtily, his heavy-lidded eyes half-closed. Then he extended his thin pale hand, heavy with pretty rings, and speaking in a high voice, bade her stand by him.

  When she had done this, he looked past her and said slowly, ‘Where are the brave men who brought you to Byzantium? Where are the men who stole you away from your father to bring you to me?’

  Marriba was about to speak when the senior officer said, ‘Most High, there are the Syrian rowers, still sitting in the ship.’

  The Emperor waved his white hand languidly and said, ‘I do not mean the rowers. Their work is finished now. I give them the ship they sit in for their pains. They may go when they will and row away, wherever they please. That is all one to me. I ask who was the captain of that ship, the one to whom thanks must be given for this lady’s safe passage here.’

  The officer turned and beckoned to Harald and Haro to step nearer the Emperor.

  ‘These are the men, both Northmen, Most High,’ he said.

  The Emperor Constantine gazed at them for a moment or two, his petty mouth half-smiling. Then he said abruptly, ‘Those who know how to steal such a lady from her father might one day know the way to steal her away from me. That must not be. Take these men to a place where they will steal nothing else. What is done to them there, to prevent them from harming any other man, I care not.’

  While the Vikings were still numb with the shock of this command, many soldiers closed in on them from every side, and they felt their arms being dragged behind them and pinioned.

  Harald shouted out, ‘Lady Marriba, help us! We served you well!’

  But a soldier clapped his hand over Harald’s mouth, and he could say no more.

  Marriba did not look at him. Her head was bowed and she did not seem to see what was happening. Then, struggling as violently as they could, the Vikings were dragged away from the harbour.

  17. The Challenge

  The admiration with which the two Vikings had first greeted Miklagard had now turned to disgust and even hatred. The narrow cell in which they had spent their last three days was dank and stinking; its earthen floor was covered with a mess of rotting rushes; the only light came down to them from a window set high in the wall, and level with the pavement of the street outside, for this cell was partly an underground structure.

  Twice a day, a sour-faced gaoler thrust two flat pannikins into the cell; the one containing a mixture of broken rye bread, pieces of cold meat, and grease-scummed gravy; the other filled to the brim with water, which, more often than not, was cloudy and of a rusty-brown colour. Always it was brackish and next to undrinkable.

  The Vikings complained loudly, but the gaoler ignored them and went away after he had pushed the repulsive food at them.

  There was one other occupant of this cell, a bent and wizened old man, dressed in a single garment of rough sacking. His hair was quite white and his eyes sightless. When he heard them complaining, he said haltingly, in a dialect which was a mixture of Arabic and Greek, ‘This food is not so bad; it has kept me alive for twenty years! Be thankful that they left you your eyes to find the food when the gaoler brings it in. They were not so kind to me, my friends.’

  The Vikings wondered about the terrible nature of the crime for which the old man had been so punished, but one day he told them that he had once been a Chancellor in the court, and had been thrown into prison, blinded, in the time of the Emperor Constantine Copronymus, because he would not confess that he had received bribes from certain of the bishops.

  Haro said directly, ‘And did you receive bribes?’

  The old man shook his head and replied, ‘No, but that made no difference. They did not believe me. They blinded me in their usual manner, by making me look at a white hot iron held close to my eyes. It has happened to countless people in Byzantium, and will no doubt happen a countless number of times again. You are lucky to have escaped it. It is a distressing thing to happen, especially to a young man, and I was only thirty at the time.’

  Harald said bitterly, ‘It seems to me that Miklagard is most like a beautiful but cruel woman, nothing better.’

  The old man smiled and said, ‘I could give it a harsher name, but there, I am old now and must not shorten my days by hatred.’

  Haro said, ‘But things are changed now, surely; that happened many years ago. Now that there are new monarchs, why do they not let you go free?’

  The old man answered, ‘They have forgotten me, my friend. One expects no justice in Byzantium, in any case. It is a hard city. And anyway, if they set me free, I should starve, for my family has gone away, and I have nothing. I am content here, that is all. So you see why I do not complain about the food, bad as it is; it keeps life in one’s body.’

  Another day Harald said to the old man, ‘Why do you want to live? This life is a living death, no more.’

  The old man shrugged his white head and said, ‘No, one lives after a fashion. You see, every other day a little street beggar comes to this window and tells me what is going on in the city, what is happening at the Court, and so on. In that way I live, for I can picture the scenes in my head, as though I had my eyes again; and at night I dream that I am amongst the courtiers again, listening to gossip, meeting the new arrivals at the Court, and such like. Yes, it is a sort of life and I would rather have that than have no life at all.’

  Then he went on to tell them many things; that Byzantium was not a happy city; that the taxes were always high, and no justice to be had; that the Court, the Church, and the Judges were all corrupt; that Irene the mother of the Emperor-to-be, hated her son and wished to rule herself over the Eastern Roman Empire.

  ‘She refused to take the oath of fe
alty to him,’ said the old man, ‘although all the others did – the provincial governors, the ministers, the senators – even the artisan guilds, the common workers, you know. But not Irene! No, she has already tried to break off the young man’s betrothal to the daughter of Charlemagne, in case her son might become too powerful if the marriage took place. And’ – here his old voice fell to a whisper – ‘they tell me that in a great quarrel with him, in the full Court, some days ago, she even threatened to have him blinded, if he did not mend his ways and obey her in all things.’

  Haro blew out his cheeks and said, ‘I thought my old mother was strict when she used to thrash me with a broom-handle, but that was the gentlest of love compared with this. No, friends, I would not be a little emperor for all the wealth of Miklagard.’

  The old man smiled and said, ‘And Miklagard, as you call it, is very wealthy, very rich. I know that from my own experience here. There are treasure houses of the Court situated in many unlikely places throughout the town, and even beyond the town walls. Look, just to show you …’

  He took up a straw and began to sketch out a plan of Miklagard in the soft earth of the floor. Harald and Haro watched, amazed at the old man’s detailed knowledge, though he was blind.

  ‘There,’ he said, when he had finished. ‘I have shown you ten treasure houses. What think you of that? And I know only a little of what must be the final truth.’

  The two Vikings surveyed the sketch earnestly, letting it bite into their memories like acid on a plate of metal.

  ‘Wonderful,’ they said. ‘And are you sure that this will not have changed since you have been in this prison?’

  The old man shook his head. ‘They have never changed, those treasure cells, since Byzantium was founded. They will not change now.’

  That night, as they lay trying to get to sleep on the hard floor, Haro whispered to Harald, ‘If ever we do get free, I know one way of getting our revenge on that little puppet of an Emperor!’

  ‘So do I, my friend,’ said Harald. ‘But how should we carry it away with us?’

  Haro whispered, ‘Let us cross that bridge when we come to it, shipmaster! First catch the pig before you eat him!’

  The next day they evolved a plan of escape, though when they told the old man, he only laughed and said that it would never work. All the same, they determined to see what would happen.

  So Harald climbed on to Haro’s shoulders and when the passers-by became most numerous, began to call out in his rough Arabic, ‘There is not a man in Byzantium I would not fight! Not one I would not meet, with my right hand tied behind me! No, not one!’

  For a time, no one answered Harald’s hoarse cries. Then a passing beggar-man, trundling a solid-wheeled cart, flung an armful of refuse – old rags, bones, and pieces of broken metal, into the cell.

  This time Haro took a turn on his friend’s shoulders and cried, ‘The men of Miklagard are cowards! They are rats, ruled over by a puppy and a cat! Nothing more – just rats!’

  The blind man in the corner cried out in fear at this, saying that the secret police of the city would surely hear and then they would all regret those words.

  ‘For they will leave you no tongue with which to make your apologies,’ he shouted.

  But Haro shouted back, ‘I am not the man to make apologies! I say that the men of this dunghill are cowards; such cowards as would be laughed to scorn along the fjords, where men take a pride in answering any challenge, whencesoever it comes!’

  Suddenly, Haro noticed that the bustle outside the cell window was still. A shadow fell upon his head and at eye level he saw a pair of feet, wearing heavy red and gilt sandals which reached so high that he lost them above the small window.

  Once more he called out, ‘I challenge any man, yes, any man, to combat; and I will bet my tongue that I will beat him in fair combat, though he has a sword and I a stick.’

  And when Haro had finished, a deep voice from the street said loudly, ‘Do you then, hairy one? Let us see what you have to say when I come down to you!’

  The gilded feet passed from before the little opening, and then the sun shone down faintly into the cell again.

  The old man clucked miserably to himself in the corner, while the two Vikings stood back against the wall and waited for what should happen – each one already feeling the searing iron on his tongue, before his eyes, in imagination.

  Then at last the grumbling gaoler flung open the door, and a man stood beside him on the upper steps – a man so immense that he had to bend to come under the doorway and down into the cell.

  Harald stared at him in admiration, for he was a soldier and was dressed in all the golden glory of an officer of the Byzantine Guard. His purple cloak swung heavily behind him; his gilded scabbard slapped against his great thigh. This was a man above ordinary men, thought the Vikings.

  As he walked down among the rotting straw, he pinched his aquiline nose delicately and blew out his curled moustaches in disgust. Then he came on towards the two men, who stood to face him, trying to put on the bravest face that hunger and exhaustion would allow them.

  ‘Which of you two challenged me a moment ago?’ he said, his thin lips curled into a strange smile.

  Both men spoke, ‘I did!’

  He smiled and then called to the old man who was praying in the corner, stiff with fear, ‘Which of these two challenged me, old fellow?’

  The old man said, ‘I heard no one challenge anyone, lord.’ The splendid soldier stood back for a moment, his hand on the hilt of his great sword.

  Then he said lightly, ‘Two heroes and a wise man in one small cell. I did not think Byzantium could boast such a gathering.’

  His quick eyes surveyed the Vikings from head to foot; it seemed to them that he noticed everything. And then, after a long silence, he said, ‘To fight with you would be to waste good men, for I should assuredly kill you.’

  The Vikings burst out at this, suddenly angry, but he waved them to silence with a commanding gesture and went on, ‘You are real men, I can see that; and warriors, I can see that also, from the scars you bear. I observe, moreover, that you come from the north – by your accent and by your fondness for bears’ claw necklaces!’

  Harald broke out, ‘What is wrong with that? We killed the bears ourselves to get the necklaces! We did not buy our trinkets from any goldsmith’s booth, my friend!’

  For a moment the officer regarded Harald sternly, as he twisted his own gold chain between his strong brown fingers. But at last he smiled again and said, ‘Have it your own way, Northman. But let me speak; I say that I would not fight you and kill you – if such were my fortune; I would rather buy you and use your courage and your strength.’

  Then for a moment his gaze rested on the old man in the corner. ‘You are not of the north, I know, old one. You are one whom we all know, we of the Palace. Yet I will buy you too, and though I have no use for you, I think you could find a better home than this for yourself. What say you?’

  But the old man shook his head. ‘Thank you, Kristion,’ he said. ‘For it is Kristion, I know; no other man has such a voice and such a heavy footfall! No, thank you, Captain of the Guard, but I am too old and too weak to beg my bread in the streets where I once rode in glory.’

  The Captain, Kristion, strode to him and took him by the shoulder. ‘Don’t be an old fool,’ he said, smiling. ‘You can go to my sister’s house, in the country. Her children need a tutor. That would be easy for you, and the children are gentle little ones.’

  He turned to the Vikings. ‘I offer you a place as soldiers in the Palace Guard – in Irene’s Company. You will get food and clothes, and enough pay to enjoy yourselves on without being pampered. Will you come?’

  Harald and Haro stepped forward, smiling, their hands held out. ‘We will come,’ they said. ‘That is, if the old man will agree to leave this place too.’

  And when the old man was turned round, so that the question could be put to him again, they saw that he was crying lik
e a child.

  The Captain, Kristion, turned away suddenly, flicking his cloak hem over his own eyes. He went up the steps in silence, and at the top turned and said, ‘There will be some trifling matter of signing the papers of purchase. I will return tomorrow, Guardsmen, have no fear. And when I do, see that you spring to attention. None of this northern slackness in my Company, my friends.’

  Then the door was shut behind him, and the prisoners put their arms about each other, in glee, like children who had just been promised a wonderful present.

  18. The Mousetrap and What It Caught

  Harald lounged in the gateway of the great Palace, chuckling to himself in the sunshine. Everything was like a dream, he thought. Three weeks ago, he and Haro and the old man had been in prison, in the depths of despair. Now the old man was no doubt sunning himself and chattering in Greek or Latin to the children of Kristion’s sister – and the Vikings were full-blown guardsmen in the Palace of Irene!

  Harald would hardly have believed it himself, if he had not his armour and weapons to prove it! There was the fine bronze helmet, with the lion’s head moulded on it, and the red horse’s plume which swept halfway down his back; the purple cloak of thick Khazar wool, its hem weighted with small silver buttons shaped like acorns; the breastplate of polished silver with Irene’s insignia emblazoned on it in rich enamels of red and blue and deep yellow.

  As for the weapons – Harald almost wept with pleasure at their rare beauty, and wished the folk along the fjord could have seen them – the long sword with the gold wire round its sharkskin hilt; the short broad dagger with the thin gold inlay along the blade; the javelin of ebony, butted with silver … It was all like a dream, as was the great hall into which he looked from time to time.