Tom Harper - The mosaic of shadows

Anna was already awake, wrapped in a heavy, woollen palla and bustling about purposefully with a small chest of medicines.

‘This is the salve to rub on the wounds,’ she told me, pointing to a small clay pot. ‘And in this bag are clean bandages. You should replace them after each day’s riding. There’s some bark in there as well for him to chew on if the pain is too great. If you find fresh water in the forest, you can rinse his leg with it.’

I scowled; the early hour, a lack of food, and the tension of the moment had soured my stomach. ‘I have fought in a dozen battles,’ I reminded her, ‘and seen men march twenty miles after them with worse wounds than the boy’s. I do not need lessons in field medicine.’

She ignored my petulance. ‘Sigurd knows my instructions; he can see to Thomas. And keep him well fed. He needs to regain his strength.’

‘Indeed.’ Although I did not wish the boy ill, the last thing I wanted was for him to be restored to full health while we travelled. If he escaped, I doubted either of us would long survive it.

All this time the boy had stood mutely in a corner. Anna had found him a monk’s coarse tunic, which sat high on his tall frame, and a thick cloak; now she kissed him on the cheek, pulled up a fold of the cloak to mask his face, and pushed him gently towards me.

‘You’ll want to hurry,’ she said, peering out of the open door. ‘The sun will be risen soon.’

That thought had been uppermost in my mind too, yet I delayed a moment further in the unlikely half-hope that I too would merit a kiss. I shook my head in wry reproval. I was thinking like an adolescent, I chided myself, not like a grown man, a father and a widower.

I led the boy outside. He did not resist as I slipped rope manacles over his wrists and tied them fast, leaving enough slack between them that he could steady himself in the saddle. My horse was nervous, perhaps absorbing my mood, and I patted her neck to try and calm her fidgeting as Sigurd effortlessly hoisted the boy up so that he sat before me. I glanced about, ever wary of danger, for now shutters were beginning to be thrown back, and figures could be seen moving behind the windows. I looked at the boy in front of me and imagined him squinting down the stock of the tzangra from the ivory-carver’s rooftop as the Emperor’s retinue processed past. Was there another man, even now, taking the same sighting?

I kicked my horse over to where Sigurd conferred with Aelric.

‘We’ll make for the gate of Charisios,’ he announced. ‘It’s the fastest way.’

‘Too obvious,’ I argued. ‘They may be watching it. We should take the gate of Saint Romanos, and cross the river further upstream.’

Sigurd glared at me. He had a leather sling for his axe, I noticed, hanging from his saddle just before his knee. ‘They? Who are your they ? Do you think we face an army of darkness with spies on every corner? A lone monk and a handful of Bulgar mercenaries cannot be everywhere.’

‘If we delay any longer they will find us without trying. Krysaphios agreed that in matters of practicality, my decision would prevail. We go to Saint Romanos.’

Sigurd pulled back on his reins, and rapped a fist against his bronze greave. ‘This is what prevails, Demetrios: the power of a man’s arm. If our enemies await us, let them come.’

‘Your arm will be as feeble as your armour against the weapons these men wield, unless we meet them at a time of our choosing. Have you spent so long tramping the corridors of the palace, Sigurd, that you’ve forgotten the importance of reconnoitring your adversary?’ I spurred my horse forward, before he could retaliate. To my relief, I heard the clatter of hooves following on behind me.

We rode as swiftly as I dared with the invalid boy on my horse, through the dirty light and waking streets of the morning, until we reached the gate of Saint Romanos. At the sight of Sigurd the guards waved us through, and soon we were out in the broad fields which stretched away from the walls. The harvest was long since gathered in, but teams of men and boys were there with their oxen, ploughing under the old year’s stumps and chaff. The rising sun was wan through the grey clouds, but the unaccustomed effort of riding soon had me pulling my cloak back off my arms, and then bundling it into a saddlebag altogether. We had slowed our pace to avoid aggravating Thomas’s wounds, and I could enjoy the freshness of the morning as I tried to ignore Sigurd’s lowering bulk ahead of me. He had not spoken to me since we left the monastery.

The jangling of iron to my left turned my head, and I saw that Aelric had come up beside me. Despite his fading hair and his lengthening years, he sat comfortably in the saddle, humming something I did not recognise.

‘You’ve upset the captain,’ he said, breaking off his tune. ‘He’s a warrior — he doesn’t care to be reminded that he’s as much the Emperor’s ornament as his huscarl . Parading to impress ambassadors and nobles sits uncomfortably on him when he’d rather be killing Normans.’

I glanced nervously forward, but either Sigurd could not hear or would not show it. ‘I’ve heard he has no love for the Normans. He told me they stole your kingdom — as they stole the island of Sicily from us, and would perhaps have taken Attica if the Emperor had not defied them.’

Aelric nodded. ‘Thirty years ago, they came, and even the mightiest king that ever ruled our island could not resist them. Sigurd was only a child then, but I was a man, and I took my place in the king’s battle-line.’

‘You fought the Normans?’ Though there was yet a wiry strength in Aelric’s arms, it was hard to imagine this genial grandfather hammering foes with his axe in the mountains of Thule.

‘I fought their allies,’ Aelric corrected me. ‘The Normans conspired to invite a Norse army into the north, while they skulked in the southern sea which divides our island from their country. We fought two great battles by the rivers of the Danelaw; we lost the first but won the second. As the Norse king discovered, it’s only the last battle that matters.’

I was already lost, for he seemed to make as many fine distinctions between Norsemen and Normans and the Northmen of Thule as the ancients once made between their feuding cities. But they must have been distinct in his own mind, for he continued without hesitation.

‘That second battle, that was a warrior’s day. I killed seventeen of them myself, yet while a single man stood they would not leave the field. Even Sigurd remembers it.’

I craned my head back in my saddle. Sigurd was riding in silence immediately behind us, an ill humour still written across his face.

‘You were there?’ I asked, braving his antagonism. ‘But if it was thirty years ago, you must have been too small even to lift an axe.’

Sigurd lifted his chin contemptuously. ‘I carried an axe at an age when you probably slept in a crib,’ he informed me. Then, too proud to resist the story: ‘But I was there at the battle. I was only six, but my father, who fought for our King Harold, brought me there and left me under a tree behind our line.’

‘Sigurd saw more of it than most,’ Aelric interrupted. ‘More than us who couldn’t even see our elbows for all the death about us.’

‘I remember I saw the banner of their king, Harald the Land Waster, held aloft when all his army was routed.’ Sigurd’s rough voice was strangely wistful now. ‘His bodyguard hacked and parried all who came, marooned in a sea of English warriors. When he fell they fought on, and when at last the fighting was done and our men came to retrieve his body, they first had to pull away seven corpses who had fallen protecting him. Later I discovered that they learned their war craft here, in Byzantium, serving as Varangians.’