Vladimir waited by the mast. He wore a bronze breastplate and was surrounded by several wispy-bearded, heavily armoured Rus Boyer whelps no more impressive than himself. Vladimir, observed Haraldr, had his father’s unimpressive height and extensive girth, his mother’s fair skin, and his sister’s delicate hands; his blotchy, adolescent face had at last been overgrown by thin blond whiskers. In addition to his armoured retainers, Vladimir also employed several hulking Norse bodyguards who lounged in the darkness at the stern of the vessel.
‘So,’ said Vladimir with a smirk and a nonchalant flip of his head. ‘Haraldr Nordbrikt Sigurdarson. The coward of Stiklestad. Running errands for the Greeks, I see.’
‘How is your Mother, Vladimir?’ asked Haraldr genially. He had nothing to prove to this pathetic lot.
‘She misses your cock-hound brother.’
Haraldr struggled for control. ‘And is Elisevett well?’
‘She is still sitting on her little twat and waiting for you to come back and marry her, even when she heard that you are the famous coward. You must have fucked the wits out of her.’
Haraldr stepped forward and jammed his fingers under the lower lip of Vladimir’s breastplate and lifted him off the ground with one hand. ‘Your sister was very dear to me. If you speak about her again in such a fashion, I will make you swim back to Kiev to apologize to her. Now, I can help you gain entry to Byzantium if you promise to watch your manners.’ He set Vladimir down slowly. ‘The Droungarios of the Imperial Fleet--’
‘I didn’t come to beg my way in,’ interrupted Vladimir, apparently undeterred by his humiliation. ‘I came to ask the city to surrender.’ Halldor burst into laughter.
Haraldr was less amused. ‘You little fool. Have some of your Norse bodyguards blown you up with dreams of conquest, or is this a self-invented folly? Whatever the source, I suggest you reconsider. There are enough fire-ships waiting for you out there in the night to turn the Bosporus into a river of flame.’
Another voice responded from the darkness. ‘And there are enough Norsemen here to bring down the walls of the Great City.’ The shrouded Norseman came forward along the catwalk and drew back the hood that concealed his steel helm. Haraldr immediately recognized him.
Thorvald Ostenson,’ said Haraldr, greeting the former Centurion of the Grand Hetairia. ‘I should have known that the hand of Mar Hunrodarson was in this.’ Haraldr recalled Mar’s cryptic words upon dying.
Ostenson bowed. ‘We have three thousand Norsemen and five thousand Rus. This morning Mar will attack the walls from within the city and open the gates for us. Apparently he has spared you to flee from our triumph. So go. And leave the pillage of Rome to true warriors.’
Halldor looked at Haraldr with a rare expression of uncontainable mirth. He laughed again and looked at Ostenson. ‘The last time I saw your Mar Hunrodarson, he was trying to imitate a pigeon taking wing. Unsuccessfully.’
Ostenson drew his sword. ‘You crow-shit eater! I’ll take you back to Mar and let you share your jest with him.’
Halldor stepped forward and sent Ostenson plunging into the hold with a single shove. ‘I’ll wait to jest with your Mar when the Valkyrja take me to him, boy-lover,’ Halldor called down to Ostenson. ‘Your Mar is drinking with Odin tonight.’
‘Liar!’ shouted Ostenson. He struggled to his feet and his head emerged above the catwalk. ‘No man could have vanquished Odin’s champion!’
Halldor pointed to Haraldr. ‘This man did. He hugged him to death. Broke his back with one squeeze.’
This time the laughter, a soft, quiet chuckle, came from the vicinity of the cowed young Rus nobles. Haraldr wondered which of these hapless whelps could possibly find their situation amusing. Then he saw the second Norseman. The bear-like giant wore a hide cape. He came round in front of Vladimir and his retainers. Haraldr knew the face at once and felt the sudden lightness and liquid knees of terror. The hacked-away eyebrows, the white-streaked beard, the horrible truncated nose and huge, sucking nostrils. ‘I am Thorir, called the Hound,’ said the Berserk in his curious, quiet voice. ‘The Haraldr Sigurdarson I remember soiled his breeches when I killed his brother. He was then a coward, he is now a coward. And a liar. Mar Hunrodarson is one of us.’
Haraldr and Halldor stood transfixed by the fearsome Hound. Ostenson seized the opportunity and pulled Halldor’s legs out from under him, pitching him into the hold; he cracked Halldor on the head with a loaded bucket and stunned him and drew his knife to finish him off. Haraldr jumped down into the hold and grabbed Ostenson’s arm with both hands and snapped it; the crack was like an old, dry tree trunk snapping. He dragged the astonished Ostenson to the catwalk and clamped his hands on either side of his face and picked him up. ‘Ostenson!’ he demanded, ‘were you privy to Mar’s plan to abandon the Middle Hetairia to the Bulgars? If you were not, I give you this chance to beg for your life!’ Ostenson’s face reddened and he glared with defiance. Haraldr roared from the blackest pit of the spirit world and snapped Ostenson’s neck instantly. He seized the suddenly limp body and, almost unseeing from inside some red-hued haze, flung the huge, fresh corpse into the mast; the vehemence of the throw was so great that the sturdy wooden trunk fractured with yet another crack and began to tilt towards starboard. The mast cracked again, came down with a huge boom, and fell over the starboard side of the boat. Ostenson’s mangled body lay beneath a web of toppled rigging.
The utterly dumbfounded Rus nobles leapt for the sanctuary of the hold. Haraldr turned to the Hound with a blood-red glow in his eyes. He whipped his sword out of his scabbard with a terrifying screech and stepped forward, within reach of the Hound’s own murderous blade. ‘I am one of you as well,’ he said in a fierce, rapt voice. ‘But I am not a cowardly Berserk who needed two of his comrades to kill Norway’s king. I am Haraldr Sigurdarson, King of Norway.’ He remembered as clearly as yesterday the Hound’s own words at Stiklestad. ‘When we begin, I will kill you.’
The Hound’s brutal jaw was as slack as an old dotard’s. His huge sloping shoulders sagged. His eyes were burned-out coals. He slumped to his knees like a figure of melting wax. Haraldr looked down on him with pitiless eyes. ‘You have told the world for years how you slew a king in single combat and then fouled a prince’s breeches. Half of that is true. I was a coward then. But you were a coward then, and you are a coward now. And you will die a coward.’ Haraldr brought his blade screaming down on the thick, brutish neck. The head jerked and then slumped to the chest, held by a flap of flesh. The neck gushed bright blood, and the body of Thorir the Hound pitched into the hold. Prince Vladimir screeched in terror.
Haraldr yanked the Rus Prince back up on the catwalk. ‘You need to agree to the Droungarios’s conditions immediately. The fire-ships will not wait for ever on your answer.’ Vladimir stood mute, his lips beginning to twitch. He burst into tears.
‘It is too late!’ shrieked the Rus Prince, tears streaming down his cheeks. ‘This negotiation was only to deceive the Greeks! The attack has already begun!’
Haraldr ran to the bow. The front echelons of the Rus fleet were advancing through the white-capped sea, a wall of thick hulls descending on the dhromons. The wind hurled scudding black clouds after them, and sheets of rain ripped by at a sharp angle. Haraldr could only stare in rigid agony. The advance echelon was already within range.
The night turned to fire.
‘It is impossible!’ shouted Halldor. ‘We cannot sail through it! As soon as the fire touches the pitch on our hull, we will become a floating torch!’ Halldor and Ulfr and Hord wrestled Haraldr until he stopped resisting. The burning sea lit their faces an eerie orange and brought sweat to their foreheads. The scene before them was unimaginable, the fiery lakes of damnation raised to the surface of the earth. The entire Bosporus, as far as one could see, was a sheet of flame, and upon this floating pyre scores of ships had become towering, wind-whipped flares. Here and there the flares exploded in immense orange fireballs that illuminated the glowering, low clouds; it was as if enormous, black-shrouded lanterns had been suspended over the sea. The rain, descending in sheets, did nothing to quench these flames.