The house-karls answered with a gale of obscenities. ‘Sow fucker!’ ‘Corpse lover!’
The Hound calmly waited, eyes flickering, until the outburst had ended. ‘Then you will all die,’ he said. ‘I know the King.’ He pointed at Olaf. ‘When we begin again, I will kill him first.’ The tiny red eyes began to roam among the house-karls, as piercing as hot, sharp irons, and Haraldr knew what they were searching for. He was too mesmerized to look away and the moment of contact was like a knife slitting him from his groin to his windpipe, ripping out his fool’s courage and replacing it with a cold, leaden, mortal dread. ‘I think the boy is the Prince,’ said the Hound; he turned to the silent army behind him for confirmation, and several men nodded. ‘I will kill him as well.’
Olaf’s vast bulk hurtled from within his cordon of house-karls. Someone grabbed Haraldr and pulled him back and he fell hard on his seat, but before he went down he glimpsed his brother’s sword pound into the Hound’s furry hide armour. Men stepped over and on him and he thought he would be trampled. He heard a moment later the explosive collision of the two armies, the screech of clashing steel and the desperate, thundering oaths of doomed men. Then he could see Olaf and Thorir the Hound again. They seemed to move so slowly, like figures in a nightmare. Olaf’s blade flashed in long, ruby-tinted strokes, again and again, and yet the Hound still stood. Then a third man entered the dream-like vignette, one of the huge men who had come forward with the Hound. This intruder crouched low, and when his sword scythed parallel to the ground, Haraldr perceived it moving much more swiftly, everything was speeding up, and the blade struck Olaf’s massive leg and recoiled and Olaf’s knee seemed to disintegrate and he was falling. Another man stepped into Haraldr’s suddenly rushing nightmare and his spear caught Olaf under his byrnnie, jerking him up and sideways before it was pulled from his belly. Olaf’s hand clutched but he could not grasp, and his slick, coiled bowels began to ooze down his thighs. A sword struck his neck and his head tilted freakishly to the side and blood pumped onto his shoulder.
The blow knocked Haraldr on his back and something flew swiftly into his eye like an angry bird, and his vision flooded with warm serum. Stand to fight! shrieked a voice so loud, it could only have come from inside his skull. But his limbs were locked in an icy dread and a terrible truth quarrelled with the other voice: I am a coward, it said, as his fright gushed out of him and soiled his breeches with a repulsive warmth. A boot crunched with stunning force into his chest; his heart, painfully bruised by his ribs, seemed to beg for death; if only he would not have to stand and face it.
The Hound was above him. The huge nostrils, the horrible sucking. Haraldr lay there, frozen with terror, his head screaming with the dark poetry of the last instant in time. The Hound’s sword rose high, lost in blood-tinted night; it was no sword, it was a creature, a raven’s beak descending, falling from night into night. Then there was a terrific concussion, as if the sun had exploded in its final dying fury, and Haraldr fell away from its heat and light, falling, falling endlessly into the vast, airless, utterly black craw of the last dragon.
The man from Denmark grasped the jaw and turned the corpse’s puffy claret face towards him; the head flopped as if no longer attached to the neck. He fanned away the flies and slipped open the livid eyelids for a moment; the blue eyes glared in a ghostly fury. He stood and faced the Hound. This is King Olaf. Now show me the Prince. Haraldr Sigurdarson.’
The Hound’s chest heaved and the air wheezed through his gaping nostrils. ‘I struck him on the helm. There was blood all over his face. Then two men attacked me. When I finished with them, I saw him still lying there. I don’t see how he could have got away.’
‘But some men were able to flee?’
‘No more than two or three. Cowards.’
‘Or men intent on saving their Prince.’ The man from Denmark removed a bulging leather wallet from his expensive Frisian wool cloak and shook out four gold bezants. ‘My King said he would pay you the bounty for the King of Norway and his heir. I give you partial payment as the task has yet to be completed. But consider how much easier your errand has become.’ The man from Denmark hefted the wallet. ‘Before today, you had to kill a King and a Prince to earn this. Now you only have to kill a fugitive boy.’
The Hound held the gold coins in his flat palm and gently prodded them with his scarred, blood-smeared fingers, almost as if they were small, delicate creatures of a species he had never imagined existed. ‘Haraldr Sigurdarson,’ he said quietly, and then he closed his huge fist.
Isle of Prote, Sea of Marmara September 1030
‘ “Learning is but foliage compared to the fruits of a holy life, and the tree that bears nothing but foliage must be cut down and burned. But the finest result is when the fruit is set amongst its foliage.” ‘ Father Katalakon permitted himself the vanity of a slight smile as he finished his impromptu recitation. He was a tall man, his long but neatly combed hair and beard the colour of the grey sea mist that on this bright day was, blessedly, still only a dreary memory of winters past and a foreboding of the cold months ahead. Indeed, all of the fruits the Pantocrator had delivered to his Holy Brethren on the Isle of Prote were on this day brightly lit by the brilliant candle of Our Lord’s glorious vault. The September sun gleamed off the floor of rose-veined Proconesian marble and burnished the gold acanthus-leaf pattern that bordered the lacquered, coffered ceiling of the library. Father Katalakon turned to the man next to him. ‘Of course I do not intend to convey that your intimacy with the words of Theodore the Studite requires a restorative from my lips, Brother Symeon.’
‘Wisdom is never disgraced by repetition, Father Abbot, as holiness is only cultured by our efforts to emulate it.’ Brother Symeon, the new Chartophylax, or archivist, of the Monastery at Prote, was content to allow the Father Abbot to meander towards their objective. After all, Brother Symeon reminded himself, he would not have been summoned here to Prote had he not long ago achieved the state of apathia that bridled impetuous, worldly desires. He looked about the library with admiration; the sumptuous marble revetments and gilded scriptoria attested to the material abundance of Prote, while the shelves stacked with books – some bound in oak, many sheathed in carved ivory, cloisonne or gems – revealed spiritual wealth. Brother Symeon peered through the clear glass panes of the gracefully arched windows; beneath him, sun-washed rocks fell away to the gem-blue Sea of Marmara. So what I have been told of Prote was no exaggeration, reflected Brother Symeon. The island scarcely has enough arable soil to support a herb garden, and yet the splendours of the establishment rival those of the monasteries at Bithynia and Chios. Ah, well, Christ the Pantocrator will no doubt soon reveal the identity of Prote’s benefactor. All things according to His immutable plan.
Father Katalakon appraised his new archivist; like the Father Abbot, Brother Symeon wore the long black wool frock and high round cap common to all the monastic orders of the One True Oecumenical, Orthodox and Catholic Faith. Yes, Father Katalakon was satisfied that his careful inquiries had indeed been rewarded. The aged Brother Symeon had manifested no impatience on this deliberately circumlocutional tour of the facilities, nor had he evidenced any curiosity as to the source of this magnificence. Of course, Brother Symeon had become noticeably weary of the walking, his thin shoulders slumping and his lips purpling against his snowy beard. Hopefully the new Chartophylax would live long enough to finish his archival research here on Prote; most certainly he would not live long enough to speak of those labours elsewhere even if his worldly passions were somehow revived by what he might find amid the late Father Abbot Giorgios’s voluminous archives.