‘Imagine the dark foliage that garlands her thigh-gorge, heretic-hewer.’ Grettir grimaced as he struggled to steady the girl’s writhing head. ‘You had better expect a fight if you try to sail up this fjord.’
Hakon grinned. ‘The blood from the wound Freyja hews will bless our journey!’ His disproportionately small penis now stood with plum-hued stiffness. He reached out with an enormous apelike arm, seized the girl’s long black mane, and forced her to stumble between his massive, spread thighs; she became curiously acquiescent, and merely glared as he brought her mouth to his. There was a moment of contact, and then her head jerked violently. Hakon bellowed and almost pitched backwards off his perch. Blood streamed from his lacerated nose.
Hakon dabbed at his nose with one hand. The other wrapped almost entirely around the girl’s neck. Jarl Rognvald decided that he would intercede if Hakon tried to kill the girl. The lewd chorusing of the Varangians quieted. Hakon’s eyes wandered, as if he were looking for a signal. The clearly voiced verses lilted over the crowd.
Sable-haired
Plundered from the strand that is sea
Dauntless to spill the wine of ravens
Swan-white stands she.
A fair snippet of verse, thought Haraldr as he savoured the skald’s words. The poet has imagined her coming from the desert, which is said to be a sea of beaches, and because she has spilled the brute’s blood she can yet wear her hair uncovered, like a maiden, and so is still white and pure . . . Why are they all looking at me? Haraldr wondered. Then he realised what had happened, and his veins iced. He was the poet. He had spoken aloud, perhaps not in his own voice, but the words had certainly come out of his mouth.
‘Hvat?’ bellowed Hakon, as astounded as he was furious. Grettir took two slow paces towards Haraldr and looked at him as if he had just seen a serpent talk. Jarl Rognvald’s heart soared in the instant before he furiously began to reason how to get Haraldr out of there alive.
Haraldr felt the pressure of Hakon’s dagger against his windpipe almost before he saw the gleam of steel. ‘I’m sorry, Jarl Rognvald, but your bodyguard has mocked me,’ Hakon growled; there was no sorrow in his voice. ‘I’m going to have to ask him if his sword is as sharp as his tongue.’
‘He’s carved from a tall tree,’ jibed Grettir, ‘but it looks as if the wood is still green.’
‘Hakon!’ Jarl Rognvald’s hand gripped the pommel of his sword. ‘Hold back. This boy is my ward. He is not paid to defend me. But I am bound by honour and love to defend him.’
Hakon weighed his own decision, the satisfaction of butchering a meddlesome old Jarl against the huge bonus he would receive when he delivered his recruits in Constantinople. And he needed the Jarl’s Rus pilots to ensure that delivery. But when they reached the Rus sea and no longer needed the river men’s expertise, he vowed that the lobsters would taste old Norse meat. And as for the Jarl’s turd-chewing ward, he would never see the river’s end.
Hakon dropped his sword and he shrugged and sniffed contemptuously. ‘Yes, Grettir, this wood is too green to whittle. Perhaps,’ he added ominously, ‘a few weeks on the river will season it.’
The Varangians hooted with derision. Too green to whittle!’ echoed through the crowd.
Grettir turned back to Haraldr. ‘It would have been an honour to die at the hand of Hakon. But listen to the praise they’re singing you now. You’ve a hard tongue but a soft back.’ The laughter rose like the thunder of a coming storm. A wind screamed inside Haraldr’s skull, whipping humiliation into a suicidal frenzy.
Haraldr’s wet palm slipped against the bone handle of his sword, but almost at the same moment Hakon flung his arm towards the sand and something thudded against Haraldr’s foot; he felt a minute searing, as if he had stepped on a spark. He looked stupidly at his feet and saw a gold pommel staring up at him. Hakon’s dagger had sliced through the sole of his heavy boots and had just nicked his big toe. Haraldr reflexively tried to pull his foot away, but his boot was pinned to the firm, damp sand and he stumbled. He lost his balance and fell to his knees.
The laughter shrieked like a tempest. ‘Hakon has toppled the tallest tree with a nick of his dagger!’ Grettir chortled.
‘Green-wood!’ bellowed Hakon.
‘That’s his name, Green-wood!’ echoed voices from the crowd.
‘Green-wood, next time I see you with your hand on your sword, I’ll aim two ells higher. I’ll make you the tallest geld in the East.’ Hakon paused, hawked, and spat a great yellow wad on Haraldr’s hand. ‘And then I’ll make you shorter by a head.’
The howling north wind blew away the drunken haze. Haraldr recognized a voice that he knew but had not heeded since that terrible day four years ago, when he had shut his ears to it. It was strange, so thunderous and yet so intimate, as if it not only knew him but also was of him, as if another soul, separated from him at Stiklestad, stood partially inside him and partially outside, sharing some of him and rejecting the rest. There had been times when Haraldr had sensed that he could completely enter this twin soul and share his power, which he knew to be considerable, for he had on occasion felt the other’s fist, as hard as an iron ingot yet as light to lift as down. Still, he could not simply take a slight step and embrace his fugitive twin; he knew that he had to cross through the spirit world, cold and ancient, filled with the furies of the old gods and the beasts of the deepest abyss. So he had long feared the other and had struggled against him, fettering the part of him that wanted to begin that journey.
Now, for the first time in four years, he pulled against those bonds, somehow feeling that the fetters might at last be broken if only his will to do so was great enough. His vision darkened with a ferocious mind storm, and his hand flexed and trembled and strained for the handle of his sword. If only he could reach it!
Jarl Rognvald’s hands clutched Haraldr’s arm like a vice, but it was not that which was able to restrain him. ‘Wait,’ whispered the strange inner voice, which for an instant was his own.’Wait.’
‘His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor, Basileus and Autocrator of the Romans.’
The Empress Zoe sat up. The head of her chamberlain, Symeon, framed by the leaden silk curtains of her canopy and illuminated by the single oil lamp he had brought into her bedchamber, seemed to float in the darkness, an ancient, hairless mask of white parchment. She nodded quickly and the curtains swished vaporously aside. Zoe stepped onto the thick carpet beside her bed. She was entirely naked, and for an instant her generous bosom and satiny flank gleamed like honey-tinted white marble. A second eunuch wrapped her in a gauzy robe. Her already erect nipples, dark and thick, pressed against the sheer fabric. The two eunuchs left a lamp on a small table and swept silently out of the room, their slippers whispering on opus sectile.
She met the Emperor in the more intimate vestibule of her cavernous, domed bedchamber. The miniature eagles embroidered all over his robe flickered dully, like gold insects flitting in the moonlight. She could see at once the hint of weariness in the otherwise impeccable carriage of his broad shoulders and muscular chest. She pressed her lush bosom against him and kissed him fiercely. She had become accustomed to his slight, almost palsied recoil.
‘I … I came to say I will be unable to stay with you,’ he said when she took his hand and urged him to the direction of her canopied bed. His voice, deep and resonant, had a natural command, but this was offered without inflection. He was apologising, though he did not wish to.