And now a shout came from the top of the grave mound. The labourers had dug down to a row of timbers. It would not be long before they broke through these rafters.
This would be the third time the Angles had turned to their long-dead hero in time of need. Starkad had first opened the tomb of Himling when the Heruli came. As a youth, Isangrim had been with Starkad the second time, before they led the alliance that drove the Goths from the north. Like war itself, it was not a thing to be entered into lightly.
‘Sure, it must be a fine sword your great-grandfather used, to go to this trouble, the digging and the disturbing the dead and all, to get it back,’ Maximus said.
‘Great-great-grandfather,’ Ballista said. ‘He never carried the sword. It was made after his death. Himling is the sword.’
‘Your dead man is the sword?’
‘When Himling was killed by the Wuffingas …’
‘I thought they were your greatest friends.’
‘It was a long time ago. Unlike you Hibernians, we are not terrible people for holding grudges.’
‘For a man who has been there, you maintain an incredible ignorance about my people. If the people of my homeland were not much given to reconciliation, would you think either of us would have left Tara alive — given all the killing and the like?’
‘Possibly not.’
‘Your grandfather’s sword?’
‘Great-great-grandfather. After Himling was cremated, the smith put some of his bones with the charcoal in the bellows pit when he forged the blade. A part of Himling’s strength, spirit and luck passed into the steel of Bile-Himling.’
‘What happened to the rest of him?’
‘The rest of his bones are in the barrow. Hopefully, as he died in battle, his shade is in Valhalla, not waiting in there with the sword and the other bones.’
A hail from the summit of the mound told them the tomb was open. Looking up, Ballista saw the ladders against the sky, before they were lowered into the pit.
Everyone waited on Isangrim. The cyning leaned on his staff, eyes focused on things the others could not see. Perhaps, Ballista thought, his father was remembering the previous times he had been here, half a century or more before. Bile-Himling had granted Starkad victory over the Goths. But, ignoring dire warnings, Starkad had not returned the blade to the tomb. Things had not gone well for him after that. He had carried Bile-Himling two years later against the Langobards. It had done him no good. It had fallen from Starkad’s hand when the Langobards had cut him down. Isangrim had returned Bile-Himling to the dark, before he had made peace with the killers of his father, taken one of their sisters as his first wife.
‘I will not go into the tomb,’ Isangrim said. ‘I am an old man, too old to wield Bile-Himling. My sons will make the descent. They will bring Bile-Himling to me, and I shall decide which of them will carry the blade.’
With his brothers, Ballista took up the offerings and walked up to the top.
Morcar stepped between him and the ladder. ‘A newcomer will not go first.’
Ballista stood back to let them go down first.
It was dark inside the pit, just the light from above, and not altogether sweet-smelling. The scattered bones of a horse lay underfoot. Gold and precious things glowed dully at the edges of the darkness. There was an urn on the seat of the throne, the receptacle of those remains of Himling that had not been used by the smith. Above it, resting across the arms of the high chair, was a heavy, single-edged sword.
Ballista placed the silver bowl he carried on the floor. He went to the throne, put out his hand towards the sword.
‘No,’ Oslac said. ‘You will not carry Bile-Himling.’
‘I have done more since I returned than you did in all the years I was away,’ Ballista said.
‘You should have been outlawed.’
Both had their hands on their hilts.
Morcar stepped between them. He turned to Oslac. ‘Most of what you do will now turn against you, bringing bad luck and no joy.’
Oslac recoiled as if struck.
Ballista wondered what this was between the two of them.
‘As the eldest, Oslac will take the thing to our father.’ Morcar spoke smoothly.
Oslac stood for a time, as if still shocked, then picked up the blade and went to the ladder.
Back above ground, in the land of the living, Oslac had recovered. He held Bile-Himling aloft. The assembled eorls and warriors hoomed in awe. Oslac offered the weapon to the cyning. Isangrim did not take it.
With sudden insight, Ballista wondered if after all these years Isangrim blamed the sword for his father’s death, or perhaps himself.
‘A time of war.’ Isangrim raised his voice. It was cracked with age, perhaps emotion. ‘Unferth will come and seek revenge for his son Widsith. If he does not, his followers would count him a nithing. They would desert him, and he would leave the north as he arrived, an outcast. He will come, and we must be ready.’
All there — the gold-bearing men of violence, the three or four shield-maidens — nodded.
‘It will happen like this,’ Isangrim said. ‘My son Dernhelm will defend our allies on the Cimbric peninsula. My son Oslac will hold Varinsey. I will take my stand here in our home of Hlymdale. My son Morcar will be here with me on Hedinsey. Latris and the islands of the south will be in the charge of Hrothgar of the Wrosns. Let all of you, all our allies, summon the fighting men. Let the war-arrow travel throughout our realm and summon men to cruel war.’
Everyone waited.
‘Bile-Himling, the blade forged from our ancestor, has returned to the light. It will be wielded by my son Morcar.’
With no expression on his face, Oslac passed the weapon to Morcar.
Amantius put the stylus and writing block down on the ground next to him. He wiped his hands on his fleshy thighs. His back rested against the rough wall of a byre. Cattle regarded him from the other side of a fence. Gods, how low he had sunk. A eunuch of the imperial court sunk to the level of a banausic slave hiding among the beasts. But no other privacy was to be found in the sprawling barbarian settlement of Hlymdale.
He picked up his writing things again.
Publius Egnatius Amantius to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Censorinus, Praetorian Prefect, Vir Ementissimus.
If you are well, Dominus, I can ask the gods for no more.
Amantius could think of nothing else to write. There was nothing to report about the embassy. As secretary, four times he had accompanied Aulus Voconius Zeno into the presence of Isangrim, the senile, petty kinglet of this squalid and insignificant Hyperborean tribe. The ambassador had uttered a few courtly platitudes — his pleasure in standing before the ruler of the Angles, his prayers that the favour of the gods would continue to fall on such a noble father of a harmonious house — all of which Amantius presumed had been translated. Not once had the imperial envoy mentioned the amber which was the ostensible cause of this hideous odyssey. There had been not so much as a hint of their true purpose. Even such diplomatic gifts as had survived the journey had not been handed over. It was as if Zeno had reneged on the sacred duty laid on him by the Augustus Gallienus. The charitable might decide Zeno was exercising discretion, biding his time until the moment was auspicious. Amantius was not of that mind. He had observed Zeno during their tribulations. Zeno was weak, a coward. Amantius knew himself little better. But he was a eunuch, and everyone, including himself, knew eunuchs did not possess the constitution of other men.
If you are well, Dominus, I can ask the gods for no more.