Since then, I have worshipped many times in the Church of the Holy Wisdom. I have heard the singing soar and swell and echo under the vast domes, till it is like no singing of this world; and seen how, in the light of the candles and the swirling incense smoke, the wonderful jewel-bright angels of the roof mosaics can seem to float free and swim down . . . Now, I have a fairly clear idea as to the marvels that convinced Khan Vladimir’s envoys . . . Ah well, the Mysteries are in men’s souls and hearts, that can receive the Truths of another world through the Truths of this one . . .
At the time, I could only listen and marvel with the rest.
‘Wah!’ said Orm, speaking for the first time. ‘That is a wonder indeed! Yet it is hard for a man to forsake the gods he has known all his life, for a strange God who is like an untried friend.’
‘I am too old to be changing gods,’ said Hakon.
Erland’s inner laughter had returned to him. ‘As to that, there is no need, for you. You are of our old world, passing through. You are not Kievan, not Rus. And even for us, who are both these things, must one desert an old god because one prays from time to time to a New One? I took my Manhood Oath on Thor’s Ring before the men in the God-House, but when I was a child in the women’s quarters of my father’s hall, I sacrificed to the gods of my mother’s people. I prayed then to Epona the Great Mare. I pray to her still at foaling time.’
I had guessed already that, like me, he was of mixed blood; with his long bones and thick fair hair that contrasted so oddly with his sallow skin and high flat cheek-bones and those narrow dark eyes. But it was in that moment, when I should have been thinking of the things of the Spirit, there came to me for the first time an awareness of the Rus as a People, not just a southward swarming of the Viking hoards, with the Tribes as a kind of lesser folk in-gathered along the way.
While I was held by this new thought, this new awareness, the talk moved on; and when I began to listen again, the talk of the gods had taken a new turn, to include next spring’s war-hosting; and someone was saying that the Christian Faith was not the only thing that the Khan was taking from Byzantium; that despite the old treaty between them, he had demanded as part payment for his help, that he should be given the Emperor’s sister, the Princess Anna, for his wife.
I spoke up almost before I knew it, honestly bewildered. ‘But if the followers of this – this Muhammad are not allowed to drink wine, a Christian is not allowed more than one wife – and they say that Khan Vladimir has three already.’
Faces turned to me, one of the older men laughed. ‘So ha! The one who looks and listens can speak as well! The pup knows how to give tongue!’
Erland said, ‘Not to mention the concubines . . . The Khan is one to make his own laws for his own living. If he has three already, what difference can a fourth make? He will make this one his wife by the rites of the Kristni’s church, and for the rest – with so many women in his house, who shall say whether any of the others are wives or no?’
I said stubbornly, ‘Then I am sorry for the Princess Anna.’
Under the table, Thormod kicked me hard on the ankle.
There was laughter all up and down the hall, and someone said, ‘I’d not let our gentle Khan hear you say so, hound pup!’
Erland said nothing, but his eyes were on my face, a curious long look that I remembered afterwards, and he went on making that delicate finger-play with his silken yellow beard. Then abruptly he sat up straight. ‘We have had enough of talk, let’s call out the sword-dancers.’
10 The Holm Ganging
NEXT DAY WENT for the most part, as the first had done, in getting the Red Witch unloaded, her cargo warehoused, and her gear stowed for the winter, and the vessel herself slung in her place in the long ship-shed where Erland Silkbeard’s three slim galleys already lay waiting for the spring. At first I was surprised that all that day, as all the day before, Thormod made no move to seek out the two we had come to meet. ‘How long do we wait?’ I mind asking, almost angrily, for such waiting did not come easily to me, though I have learned the way of it since.
But Thormod, like most of his breed, had a strong sense of fate. He looked up from the cordage that we were stowing, and said matter-of-factly, ‘The Norns who spin the lives of men have brought us all four to the same place. As to the time – there’s no hurry. First we get the Red Witch bedded down for the winter. Plenty of time for the other thing after that. Give me a hand with the rope here.’
There was not much longer to wait, after all, as it happened.
Evening came and all was completed, and we started back for Erland’s hall. A crew stripping rotten timbers from a galley further along the boat-strand had made a fire, and a handful of other men had gathered to share it, for the autumn chill was, as Erland had said, already beginning to bite when the sun went down. The men gathered close, and beyond them the Dnieper had the hard grey glint of a sword-blade; and a little knife-edged wind was stirring the coarse grasses above the river-bank shingle. Thormod and I and a few more of the Red Witch’s crew strolled over to join them.
And then on the edge of the group, Thormod checked, and I felt him tense in his tracks, felt his hackles rising like a hound’s at the smell of wolf. I looked where he was looking, and saw two men standing on the fringe of the firelight. One of them glanced round in the same instant, and touched the other, who turned also.
I saw two broad, steady faces under rough mouse-fair hair, as alike as the faces of two brothers could be, save that one of them – he looked as though he might be a year or so the younger – had a small puckered scar along one cheek-bone. It seemed to me that everyone else had fallen back, leaving the four of us alone with empty space around us. And I knew – even if they had not so clearly been brothers, even if one had not had that small scar on his cheek-bone. I would have known by the kind of silent crackling in the air, that they were the two we had come to meet.
The elder of the two, he that must be Herulf Herulfson, was the first to break the silence. ‘You got our message, then.’
‘I found it waiting for me beside my father’s body,’ Thormod said.
‘And here is our meeting, after all.’
‘After all?’
‘We wondered if you might have cast in your lot with the King of Dublin for another year. A year would be long to wait.’
‘No, I was home in time for the Arval.’ Thormod spoke reasonably, like a friend giving his reasons for being late at an appointed meeting. ‘But the Red Witch ran into foul weather off Bornholm and we were storm-bound for five days. Maybe even a few days of waiting seem long when the hounds are on one’s track.’
‘Do you think we feared you, then?’ The younger, he with the scar on his cheek, spoke up more hotly than his brother. ‘All we feared was that we had come on a fool’s trail that you would not follow.’
‘Did you not know that I would surely come?’ Thormod said. ‘Even if it were in another year, another ten years, even if I must clamber out of my grave to follow!’
‘That is fine fierce talk. But it did just cross our minds that when you came to think it over, the odds might have seemed too big for your belly; and that would have been a pity.’
‘Odds?’
‘Two against one,’ said the elder brother.
Thormod smiled; at least he bared his teeth. ‘A pity indeed. If I had thought the odds too great, it is in my mind that my father’s blood would have cried out to me that he went down to the same odds, and without warning.’ Suddenly his hand was on my shoulder, gripping so that I felt his fingers grinding into the bone. ‘But indeed, the odds are two against two. Anders, Herulf, look well upon Jestyn my blood-brother.’
We looked at each other, across the blue and green flames of the old salty timbers burning. And the sad thing was that we could have liked each other well, if it had not been for the man lying stark in the house-place at Sitricstead with the torches burning at his head and feet.
‘So. That is well,’ Herulf said at last. ‘When sh
all we settle the matter?’
‘Now, if you like,’ Thormod said. ‘The fire will give us light to see by.’
Herulf shook his head. ‘This has been a long trail, it can wait a few hours longer. We are all weary after a day’s work. A meal, and sleep, and we shall make a fight of it that will do honour to our fathers.’
‘At daybreak, then. What place?’
‘The river levels southward shall give us elbow room for our Holm Ganging.’
I had heard something before, of this Viking way of settling a feud. In the old days, I knew, it had been a Holm Ganging, an Island Going, indeed, when two men with a quarrel to the death between them would take themselves to the nearest small island to fight it out. In these days the Fighting Ground is merely a circle marked out with hazel rods; but in these days, still, of two who carry their knives into it, only one comes out alive.
But in this Holm Ganging there would be four of us – and that night, lying under the heavy wolfskin rugs in the hayloft where we slept, I listened while Thormod explained to me the pattern of next morning’s fight.
I had thought that we should fight two against two, but it seemed that that was not the way of it.
‘Herulf and I are the elder brothers,’ said Thormod. ‘Therefore to us, is the honour of First Fight. We meet in the hazel circle in single combat, and whichever of us goes down, the other stands back and waits for the second fight to be fought out. Your fight, and Anders’s, the younger brothers.’
‘And then?’ I said, speaking muffled into the hay.
‘Then, if both of us, or both of them, be ravens’ food, the thing is finished. If it be one of them and one of us, then it is for the two left standing to finish it; and when that fight is done, then the blood will be cleansed and the debt paid and the feud over.’
‘It seems a cold way of fighting out a death quarrel,’ I said.
‘It is the pattern of the Holm Ganging.’ And Thormod turned over, hunching himself for sleep.
I could not sleep, for the coldness that was like a stone in my belly as I lay long and long afterward, listening to Thormod’s quiet breathing in the dark beside me, and the rustling of some small live creature in the hay, and wondering how I should be lying that time next night.
Alas, in cold blood, I have never been the stuff of which heroes are forged.
In the wide flat country that spreads about Kiev, one is always aware of the sky; a great bowl of sky arching over the world, with nothing to break its power of brewing up weather, and streaked in autumn and spring with the dark flight-lines of birds going north or south. I mind now, as though it were today’s dawn, the high shining steeps of sky, and a wavering arrow-head of wild duck flying over, as Thormod and I went down to next morning’s Holm Ganging. I looked up to watch them out of sight, and wondered if I should ever see wild duck against a morning sky again. I had nothing of the Northmen’s grim, amused acceptance of fate. I was young, and I wanted to live. I wanted Thormod to live. I wanted other wild duck against other shining morning skies . . . My blood was very cold.
Word of the feud had gone round, and it seemed that half Kiev had turned out to watch the fight and the kill; and in the midst of them Hakon One-eye and another man who I guessed must be Ship-Chief of the Serpent, were marking out the fighting ground with birch branches, there being no hazel in those parts. There were yellow leaves clinging to the twigs, and they fluttered in the light chill wind that brushed through the marsh grasses.
We took our stand on one side of the Fighting Ground, as Anders and Herulf came through the crowd to the other; and the gathered onlookers waited. I felt for the knife in my belt. Above the belt I was naked under my cloak; stripped for battle like the other three; and the wind blew cold, and I could feel nothing, no anger, no hate, for the two men across the Fighting Ground, to fire my blood within me. The feud was mine only because of the little white scar on my wrist, only because it was Thormod’s – though that was none so ill a reason, I suppose.
There was no signal, no blowing of horns; only, beside me, Thormod flung off his cloak and stepped forward into the ring of birch branches. And from the far side, in the same instant, Herulf did the same.
For maybe three heartbeats of time, they stood facing each other, knife in hand, while the crews of the Red Witch and the Serpent and half Kiev behind them crowded close to watch.
Then they began to circle, as hounds circle in the moment before springing at each other’s throats. Crouching a little, each trying for the advantage of the low morning light behind him. And again it seemed to me that the crowd melted away like mist, leaving nothing in the world but the space within the circle of birch branches, and the two warily circling figures. Herulf made a feint, then sprang back out of touch, and again the wary circling began. Then Thormod leapt in, and the blades rang together, before Herulf ducked out sideways with Thormod after him. Ah now, but who can remember in all detail the swift fierce patterns of a knife-fight across thirty years? Certain moments stay in the mind, no more. I remember the flash of a knife-blade in the pale marshland sunlight, and a roar going up from the crowd as the red blood sprang out from a long gash in Thormod’s right forearm. I remember the pad of feet, and the quick hiss of indrawn breath. I remember thinking that Herulf was growing tired – and then, realizing with a sudden sickness in my belly, that he was holding off deliberately, seeking to tire Thormod. Succeeding, too! For even as I watched, it seemed to me that Thormod was growing slower, less sure – unless it was the gash in his forearm. I remember being vaguely aware of the taste of blood in my mouth, though I did not know until later that it was from my own lower lip that I had all but bitten through.
Then it was as though Thormod, aware of that deadly slowing up, gathered himself together and flung all that he had left of strength and speed against his enemy. For a few moments they seemed locked together, reeling to and fro; and then they were on the ground, with Thormod underneath. I saw his left arm flung up to ward off the death-strike; he gave a desperate sideways heave, as Herulf’s dagger flashed down, and the crowd roared again as he came uppermost with his left hand gripping the other’s dagger-wrist. Oh, I remember all that well enough. I saw them straining together, and felt within myself how their muscles would be cracking and the blood pounding, and the breath panting behind the bared teeth. And then somewhere in the tensed tangle of their bodies there was a convulsive flash of movement; and for a long slow heartbeat of time, no more movement at all. Then, slowly, Thormod got to his feet. Herulf lay still on the reddening ground, with a crimson mouth open and spouting the bright lung-blood under his ribs. But the flow stopped almost at once.
Anders gave one long look to his brother’s body, and then no more, as men came to haul it from the Fighting Ground. Thormod came out through the ring of birch branches, breathing fast, and changing his knife into his left hand while he rubbed the right on his breeks, trying to wipe away the slipperiness of the blood trickling down his forearm.
We had time to exchange one look, no time for any word; and then Anders tossed off his cloak and drew his dagger from his belt, and stepped forward into the Fighting Circle.
I dropped my own cloak and kicked it behind me, and went to meet him. And standing face to face, I saw, as I had not seen in last night’s firelight, that his eyes were of odd colours, as Orm had said, one blue and the other grey. Already our hands were hovering on the edge of movement above the knives in our belts, a moment more and they would have been out. But in that moment a voice broke the waiting silence of the crowd. A voice clearly used to giving orders and having them obeyed. ‘Break! Break off, I say!’
There was a ruffle of voices, and a falling back to let someone through; and turning with the rest, I saw a man on a tiger-spot horse come riding through the cleared way.
On the edge of the Fighting Ground he reined in, and sat his fidgeting beast, looking down at Anders and me. A big man, though broad rather than tall, with a face that seemed to have been made in a hurry, the nose crooked, on
e pale bright eye set a little higher than the other, a big mouth made for savage laughter and overfull of strong yellow teeth. He wore rough woollen breeks and a goatskin jerkin with the hair inside making a dark ragged fringe at the edges; but his boots were of fine soft saffron-coloured leather, and under the rough jerkin a glint of gold showed at his throat. It seemed that he had been setting out for a day’s sport, for the knot of hearth companions behind him carried hawks – he carried a magnificent gyr falcon on his own gloved fist – or had hounds coupled in leash. I had not seen him before, but I knew without doubting, by his air of riding head and shoulders taller than other men, that this was Khan Vladimir.
His curious light eyes flickered from Anders to me, to Thormod who had come to stand with us, to the long shape of Herulf lying still under his cloak at the side of the Fighting Ground, and back again. ‘So; it has been a good Holm Ganging, and now it is ended.’
Anders gave him back look for look. ‘A good Holm Ganging, Lord, but it is not yet ended.’
The Khan smiled; a smile to make the hairs lift on the back of one’s neck. ‘It is easy to see that you are strange-comers to these parts. When you know me better, all three of you, my heroes, you will know that when Khan Vladimir says that the Holm Ganging is ended, the Holm Ganging is ended, as the night follows the day.’
There was a small silence, and then Thormod spoke, his voice at its most level. ‘There is Blood Feud between Anders Herulfson and us two. Not even the Lord of Kiev is above the laws of the Blood Feud, only the gods.’
‘At most times, I would grant you that,’ said Vladimir, with the air of a reasonable man. ‘But the call has gone out for War Hosting, and in time of Ravens’ Gatherings, all else waits.’
‘Lord, there can be no War Hosting until the spring,’ Thormod said.
‘The War Hosting began in the hour when I seized the Serpent to serve with the War Fleet when the time comes. It is quite simple – softly, softly now, jewel of my heart!’ (This to the falcon, who was growing restless as though she felt the stress like thunder in the air about her.) ‘You will swear to me on that which you hold sacred, to leave this feud lying, until the fighting in the south be done and the War Host disbanded, or you will spend the winter in chains. The choice is yours. I have too good a use for fighting men to be wasteful of them now.’