Man With a Sword Page 6

  Usually men knew when these moods were coming over him, because at such times he would spend hours burnishing his new sword that Harald had given him. And always he hissed like a serpent while he did this.

  Then men left him alone. All except Hardrada, who would sit beside him and burnish his own sword, Brynthvari, the Mail-piercer. Hereward never quarrelled with the King, but often told him that Brynthvari wasn’t sharp enough to cut through a piece of butter. One evening Harald said, ‘That may be so, old one, but I can tell you that it will cut through a melon.’

  Hereward stopped burnishing and said, ‘A melon? What is that nonsense, Harald? What is a melon? I have never seen one. Why has no one ever shown me a melon?’

  Harald said, ‘Because there are none in the north. A melon is as big as a man’s head; it is a fruit whose flesh is so tender that it melts in the mouth. Its juice runs down a man’s beard. That is a melon.’

  Three nights later Hereward came to the King and said, ‘I have dreamed only of melons since you last spoke, Harald. Tell me, do they have faces, with a nose and eyes? That is how I see them in my dreams.’

  Harald shook his head and said, ‘I have eaten melons in Ascalon and Tyre, but have never seen one with a face, friend.’

  Hereward went away, but returned later when the King was planning to build a church, with all the bishops round him. He said, ‘Harald, put that scroll to one side for a while, I want to ask you something. If a melon has no face, how does one melon know another?’

  The bishops began to laugh at this, but Harald silenced them with a grim look and nodded to them to leave the chamber.

  When they were alone Harald said to Hereward, ‘Look, friend, this is no way to go on. These good bishops have travelled many miles through the snow to plan their church with me. One of them who started out was even eaten by the wolves. You are not being fair to them, to break in with this talk of melons.’

  Hereward sat on a little stool at the King’s feet and said, ‘I am sorry, Harald, but there are some things a man has to know, or he will go mad. Each night, in my dreams, I see the faceless melons trying to find their husbands or wives. It will send me mad, King. Show me but one melon, and I will vow to kill all the wolves between here and Bergen. Then the ghost of the dead old bishop will be pacified.’

  King Harald scratched his beard, then said, ‘Griffog, my dear stupid one, melons are not alive as men are, so they have no wives; they have no feet, so they cannot go searching. As for the old bishop, he was too holy a man to have a gibbering ghost. As for the wolves, they might kill you, and not you them; and that would be a bad bargain for me, because you are now my most trusted carle.’

  Hereward began to nod his head backwards and forwards. So Harald said, ‘Look man, forget about melons. I am sorry I ever mentioned them. Forget them and I will make you captain of my carles. How is that?’

  Hereward said, ‘Lord, that would please me well - but I would still like to see a melon. I shall not rest until I do.’

  It was a week later, when the ice was melting in the rivers, that Harald sent for Hereward and said, ‘Very well, captain, you shall see a melon. News has come to me that my wife in Kiev is sick, so we will sail down the great rivers and visit her. From Kiev it is but a short way to Miklagard. There in the markets are armies of melons. How would that please you, friend?’

  Hereward kneeled and kissed the King’s hand. This was unusual for him - he did not often feel so moved.

  King Harald left Norway in the charge of his son, Olaf, and when the ships were tarred and their sails patched set off to the south. It was summer before they reached Kiev, and found that Harald’s wife, Elizabeth, was dead. The King of Norway had prayers said for a hundred days in her memory, then travelled on towards Miklagard.

  Hereward was not sorry to leave Kiev. The streets were too narrow to breathe in, he said; and the houses were so high that they seemed about to fall on one. Besides, rats came up from the river into the carles’ lodgings and ate their horse-hide tunics in the night. Next, they would eat the sword-scabbards, Hereward told the King; and then the swords would rust. And then the carles would be weaponless. And then the men with tall sheepskin hats, who always rode along the river banks watching the longships, would be able to kill them all.

  Hereward did not like these men, largely because they covered their bodies with mutton-fat and their eyes were black beads glittering through slits in their yellow skin. He thought they must all be wizards. Harald, who knew these men well and could even speak their language after a fashion, told Hereward that they were a wandering folk called Patzinaks, and were harmless as long as men left them alone. They only fought if attacked - and then they were furious fighters with little horn bows that could shoot arrows a great distance. Hereward said, ‘Why do they follow us, then?’

  The King answered, ‘They are an inquisitive folk. They think we are ghosts, with our pale hair and white skins. They have no longships like us and want to find out how ghosts float upon the water.’

  Hereward said, ‘They must be crack-brained then.’

  This made a number of the carles laugh, but Hereward did not know why.

  They reached Miklagard in late summer, after the sun had lost most of its fierce heat. This suited the Vikings well.

  8. Miklagard

  Most of Harald’s men had never seen Miklagard before. To them, the great harbour with its white stones and many-coloured sails seemed wonderful. Others admired the high city walls with their round look-out towers. But all were struck with amazement once the great gates were opened to them; for they saw bright-flowered gardens, more church spires than they could count, camels laden with merchandise shuffling down the long straight avenues, and the marble cupolas of the Imperial palace which seemed to touch the blue sky itself.

  A troop of dark-skinned horsemen cantered across the Square of St Sophia, laughing and showing their white teeth. Their captain was not swarthy, but as red-faced as any of the Northmen. He wore his yellow plaits almost down to his waist, though the helmet on his head was made after the ancient Greek manner, with a high plume of trimmed horsehair. He swept his eyes over the clustering Northmen, then called to his troop to halt. He trotted his great black horse over to where they stood and swung out of the gilded saddle.

  ‘Why, Harald,’ he said. ‘What brings you to Miklagard? Have you come to sign on again with the Guard? I’ll promise you, the Emperor would weep with joy to have such a band of Varangers again! It is many years since you left us, and we have never had such a captain since. All we get these days are cattle like those who sit behind me - Arabs who call themselves Christians, but change sides the moment the first arrows fly; or Armenians who turn and run if they see a sword come out of the sheath. This is good, this meeting.’

  But, when they had done embracing each other, Harald said, ‘Nay, Thord, I have done with fighting for other men. Now I look only after myself. We are in Miklagard to look round a little and to see the beauty of the world. I have a carle here, a Welshman called Griffog, who has never seen a melon. So we come to see these fruits and to let their juice run down our beards.’

  Thord slapped his thigh and began to laugh. ‘Always the same Harald,’ he said. ‘Once you came to see the horse-fights in the Hippodrome, remember? And you stayed for ten years! The old Emperor Constantine Monomachus never forgave you for trying to run off with young Anastasia! As for old Zoe, she even got the Patriarch to invent torments for you, if ever your ships were caught! But it passed over, as all things do in Byzantium, and now you would be as welcome as the first aconite of spring.’

  But Harald shook his great head and said, ‘The smell of incense sickens me, Thord. The water of my own mountain streams tastes better than your wine. The pay here was never too good, and up north a man can always find himself a coffer of gold and a few acres of land, if he likes to look round a bit.

  Besides, I have a wife or two, here and there, and I like to be able to visit them from time to time.’

&nbs
p; That evening, when the carles sat drinking and singing in a tavern near the Avenue of Justinian, the door opened and a young woman came in. She was dressed in a robe of fine white samite, over which was a hood and cloak of blue gauze. This did not hide her shining blue-black hair, nor the oval ivory-white face with its big dark eyes. In a semicircle hanging on her forehead were gold coins on a silver chain. They jingled as she bent to greet Harald.

  ‘I am Euphemia, lord,’ she said. ‘My grandfather was your old battle-friend, Wolf Glismakson, who came from Iceland. My father was an emir among the Seljuks. Now they are dead and Thord, the captain, has sent me to be your wife.’

  Harald raised the girl and pulled a stool out with his foot for her to sit on. He said, ‘My dear, there was a time when you could have kept me in Miklagard with your loveliness; but I am a busy king in the north now, and have many things to see to. Drink a little wine with us, and then go back to Thord and tell him there is no one I would sooner marry - but other things have been decreed for me by God, and I must go.’

  Euphemia began to look downcast, so Harald said, ‘Look, girl, it is not because I do not admire you. You are beautiful; I say that, who have looked at hundreds of princesses in my day. It is just that…’

  The girl began to rock backwards and forwards and to clutch Harald by the knees. ‘If you do not take me,’ she said, ‘my uncle will place me in a convent, and I shall never dance or sing in the sun again.’

  Harald was looking so worried that Hereward went up and placed his hand on the girl’s shoulder. ‘Harald,’ he said, I came down to Miklagard to see the melons, but instead I see the most lovely woman a man has ever clapped eyes on. Let me take this lady as my wife, and I will put melons out of my thoughts. Is that a bargain?’

  Harald looked relieved, but said, ‘The lady has to agree first, Griffog. I do not intend to run away from Miklagard this time, with the harbour chains drawn across to keep me in!’

  Hereward looked into the girl’s eyes and said, ‘I look old - but each year I am getting younger. I sound a fool - but each day I am getting wiser. I would love and honour you; will you have me?’

  Euphemia suddenly began to cry out loud, then knelt and touched Hereward’s feet with her smooth ivory forehead.

  ‘I will take you as my lord,’ she said. ‘And gladly.’

  So Hereward got himself a wife. They were married the next day in a side-chapel of St Sophia by a priest who had once served in Kiev and knew the sort of ceremony that Northmen liked.

  There was no dowry from Euphemia, and no wedding-gift from Hereward. They became man and wife in the clothes they stood up in - except that Hereward had to leave his sword outside the chapel while the holy water was poured over him. King Harald of Norway paid the marriage-fee to the Church. It was fifty bezants, which he got by selling the wolf-skin jacket off his back in the market. It was the fashion at that time to have something from the mysterious north hanging on one’s walls. A young Greek courtier-lord had bought the wolf-skin and was glad to get it at the price.

  Hereward was glad, too, because he had come to the age of forty and had never before seen the woman he would want to marry. Euphemia was as pretty as a bird and as merry as a cricket; just the woman to make a man feel like a boy again. The rough carles adored her; and when she was not mending their jerkins and breeches with her nimble needle, she was playing to them on her little lute; or teaching them a game called ‘cat in the corner’. It was a simple game, right for simple soldiers - not wearing to the brain, like chess. They played it in all the rooms of the tavern until the Syrian innkeeper complained that they were driving his customers away, lurking in dark corners and then jumping out and yelling in their loud northern voices, ‘You’re it! You’re the cat! Off with your tail!’

  Some guests from Egypt, who still held the cat as a sacred beast, did not like this. But much good did their complaining do them among the Northmen! Euphemia giggled out of her upper window to see these protesting ambassadors climbing, wet through, out of the fountain in the little courtyard.

  At last Harald said, ‘It is time for us to set the prows to the north, my carles. Soon the Dnieper will be frozen and the portages will be windswept. Let us be off.’

  And so they went, early one Thursday morning. Thor had blessed the day, for the sun shone across the Bosporus as though only gold and good fortune lay before them.

  At Kiev, Euphemia told Hereward that, God willing, they might have a baby to take home with them to Norway. He was so glad that he sold his dagger and his bear-skin cloak to buy ale for any man who would drink the child’s health in the inn on Jaroslav Square. He would have sold his sword, too, in his mad joy; but King Harald became very stern and said that this was one thing a carle never did - not even to buy Masses for the soul of his father.

  The going was slow and the baby came when they reached Smolensk. It was a fine boy and they called him Cnut, after the old King of England. It was during the christening that Hereward first revealed to King Harald that his own name was not Griffog, and that he was not a Welshman. This had to be done, because the priest was a precise old man who wanted to know the why’s and the wherefore’s of everything.

  At the christening feast, Harald laughed and said, ‘Well, Hereward, you can’t be so daft if you can keep a secret as long as that!’

  Hereward looked at him clearly and answered, ‘Harald, I feel better now than I have ever felt. Memories have come back to me all the time. The darkness has quite gone from me. For me, now, life is a pretty thing - and I think that if I were set face to face with Giant Kormac once more, at the holmgang, I would not wish to hurt him - and certainly not for that old shrew, Gunhilda! Indeed, I love all men.’

  9. Bad News

  then ill luck struck the voyagers. Winter came without warning and the Northmen, overhasty in rolling their longships across the portage from Smolensk to the River Dvina, stove two of them in. Though there were forests nearby, the shipwrights could not work in blinding snowstorms. The only thing to do was to up-end the other ships and use them as huts until spring came. So they fought off wolves and wandering outlaws from Novgorod way, and fed on reindeer and even bear-meat.

  Little Cnut was walking by himself before they sailed down the Dvina; and he was talking a language men could understand when they reached Kurland.

  But here they were delayed again. Both Euphemia and Hardrada fell sick with pains in the chest and much coughing, brought on, the doctors said, by the bitter winter they had suffered.

  During the many months at Kurland, Hereward spent much time with his little son, riding the boy on his back, teaching him how to fish, and even trying to show him how to fight with a small whalebone sword that one of the men had fashioned for him. Euphemia put a stop to this when she was well again. ‘Husband,’ she said, ‘I will not have the boy spoiled. You will make him grow up wild and headstrong. He is only three, and already he disobeys me.’

  Hardrada heard this and laughed. ‘Why, lady,’ he said, ‘have you never heard that my kinsman, Olaf the Holy, drank mead at six weeks, rode a horse before he could walk, and killed a bear on his second birthday?’

  He and Hereward were slapping each other on the back at these silly words when a man came in, footsore with journeying, - his ears bitten by the frost, his right arm in a bloody sling.

  He said, ‘King Harald, you have been away too long. Swein of Denmark has burned too many of our steadings. And there is worse than that.’

  Harald sat the man in a chair and gave him warm mead to drink, for his chin was shivering so badly that his words were not clear.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  After a while the man said, ‘While you have been away, the world has turned upside down. No more and no less. No one knows who is king and who is thrall, wherever you like to look, in whatever land. Some rebels say that Swein should be King in Norway; some say that Duke William the Norman should be King in England; some say that Harold Godwinson should be the Hero of the North, that you have fore
gone that title.’

  There was a fine cup of silver and crystal on the table. King Harald took it in his hand and squeezed it until it shattered and the precious stones flew out of their metal casing. Then he flung it into the hearth and gritted his teeth.

  Hereward took up an ash stave as thick as a man’s wrist that was used to beat cows out of the feast-hall, and broke it with one twist of his hands. He and Harald made such a noise of grinding their teeth that it was painful to hear.

  Harald said, ‘There is only one Hero of the North, and he sits in this room now.’

  Hereward said, ‘When I promised to love all men, I did not mean the kin of Godwine. They are not men, but wolves.’

  The messenger put down his mead-cup and said, ‘That may be so; but there is one of the brood waiting for you in Norway. He swears that if you will help him kill his brother, he will see to it that Harald Hardrada is never troubled again.’

  King Harald just stared at the man with eyes like pieces of grey glass. The man said, ‘Tostig Godwinson, once Earl of Northumbria, has come to you, Harald, and asks you to help him regain his earldom and even the crown of England.’

  Harald said, ‘Has England not got a King? Does not old Edward still mumble his prayers in his new Minster?’

  The messenger shook his head and said, ‘Old Edward has died. He was buried in his Minster on Twelfth Day, with the snow on his coffin. Now Harold Godwinson is King in England and has had his coinage struck in forty places. The excommunicated Bishop Stigand has consecrated him; the Witan have promised to obey him in all things. And he has vowed to put an end to Tostig, and to you!’

  King Harald Hardrada said at last, ‘I do not love Tostig - but I love his brother Harold still less. There is only one way to deal with a wolf - and that is to kill it and nail its hide on the barn door. This we shall do.’

  The messenger said, ‘The world is full of trouble, Harald. There are other wolves besides Harold Godwinson. The Pope has given his blessing to Duke William the Norman, and has sent him banners and the Cross of the Apostle in silver and gold, as a sign that he is still the rightful King of England. So, you will still have William to deal with when you have killed Wolf Harold.’