Stephen Baxter - Conqueror

Indeed, far from fearful, Belisarius was curious. A seller of books, he fancied himself a writer, and in his travels, from Germany to Iberia, Persia to Britain, he had recorded his observations – a mosaic of his times, as he thought of it. For now his project was just a heap of disparate notes, jottings and sketches. But when he got time, when he settled down in his Constantinople town house with his wife and boys, he would pull it all together into a coherent narrative. Even a tale of a town of mud hovels as unprepossessing as this might have a certain appalling fascination for a matronly reader of the east…

It was with his head full of such musings that he came upon the church, and the trial.

Curious, he paused by the open door. Compared to the ecclesiastical glories of Constantinople, he would barely have recognised this as a church at all. It was stone-built, however, to a sound rectangular plan, and the lichen on the rain-streaked stone told of age. But the small, dark, crowded space within, which had a sharp, hot stink like a forge, was host to no ceremony Belisarius recognised.

Near the altar a fire was burning in a brazier, and a rod of iron lay across the fire, so that it was glowing red-hot. A dark, low-browed fellow waited by the brazier, looking distinctly ill at ease. A priest took a cup of water and walked up and down lines of waiting men, sprinkling their foreheads as they grunted their way through Germanic prayers.

Then the priest donned a heavy glove, lifted the iron from the fire, and laid the bar on a wooden post which scorched with a hiss. Evidently it was hot enough. The priest nodded to the dark man and stood back.

The dark man, the victim, raised his bare hand to the iron. He looked around at the others, even at the priest, with evident contempt – but then his eyes lit on Belisarius, and widened a little, as if in recognition. Belisarius had no desire to be drawn into this personally. But he could not withdraw from the spectacle.

The dark man closed his hand around the rod. There was a gruesome sizzling sound, and a smell like burned pork. The men in the church, perhaps this victim's accusers, flinched and turned away. But the dark man stood defiant, glaring at them, holding the bar aloft with his smoking hand. Admirably, he made no sound. Then he marked out paces, counting deliberately, walking between the two lines of men. After nine paces he opened his hand. The metal stuck to his burned flesh, pulling it away from his palm, before the rod dropped to the floor with a clatter.

The priest wrapped the wounded hand in a grubby cloth. The accusers, solemn, began to file out of the church. Belisarius understood little of the ragged tongues spoken by the Germans, but he picked out one phrase, intoned gravely by the priest: 'Three days.'

And when the dark man walked out of the church, to Belisarius's dismay, he approached the Greek directly. He looked perhaps thirty, and his small face was dominated by thick black eyebrows that underlined a low forehead. He was smaller than Belisarius, his clothes might once have been smart but were now much repaired and shabby, and he was pale and slick with sweat. He raised his bandaged hand, and said in accented Latin: 'My name is Macson. I know you.'

'I'm afraid I don't-'

'Help me.' And he fainted dead away, crumpling at Belisarius's feet.

Gudrid had always been fascinated by the old family legend of her ancestor Ulf the Wanderer and Sulpicia, the British girl he had loved and lost, and the strange prophecy of the Roman Christ-god which Ulf had remembered – and then forgot, and so, in a way, lost too. Perhaps it was because her own life was so drab that she was drawn to a tale of doomed love in the past.

But it was not until the chance arrival of a British slave that she had the opportunity to do anything about it.

She was working alone that day, in a patch of forest high above the fjord. The trees here had already been felled, and Gudrid's job was to strip away branches from the trunks, which would then be hauled down the hill. She worked with a will, and the iron blade of her axe, coated with whale-oil, flashed as she drove it into the wood. She was twenty years old, tall and strong. This wasn't a woman's work – but then, as her husband Askold had once told her in his cruelly indifferent way, a wife who had failed to deliver a single son was barely a woman at all.

Anyhow she liked the slog. It was like rowing or running, hard work that made your sweat break out and your lungs pump, and dissolved your thoughts, your doubts and worries and fears.

And she liked it up here. She took a break, straightening a stiff back. The sky was empty of cloud, a rich blue dome. Before her the green-clad mountains that walled the fjord rose almost vertically from the water, marching to a horizon softened to blue by sunlit mist. She could see bare patches of cleared forest working their way up the slopes, places where the people had built their farms, slowly turning the wood that cloaked the mountains into houses and halls and ships.

Today the water was still as oil. Boats of all sizes slid like insects, sails gently billowing, oars plashing, dragon prows proud, utterly dwarfed by the mountains around them. This was a gentle spring day, but even when the winters were at their worst the fjord's salty waters, branching from the ocean, never froze. Indeed it was in the winter that the whales came gliding into the fjord from the ocean in search of herring. The fjord was a larder – and a highway. In this place of deep-cut valleys and steep ridges there were few roads; the small and scattered communities of one fjord communicated with the next by boat.

It was said that the fjords were as deep as the mountains around them were high, though how anybody could possibly know that she had no idea. Perhaps it was a memory of the giants from the edge of the world who were said to have built this fjord, and the hundreds like it along this Viking coast. Well, the giants had done a good job, Gudrid thought. The fjords had to be deep, for otherwise there would be no room for the whales.

Her back a little less sore, she spat on her palms, picked up her axe and went back to her trunk-stripping.

About noon her husband came climbing up the slope. In the misty air his stocky frame looked dark, solid. His first words were a grumble. 'I should have known I'd find you up here. I had to ask Birgitta.'

She straightened up and took a heavy draught of water from her leather pouch. 'A man reduced to asking his sister-in-law where his wife is. What a wretched life you lead, Askold.'

They exchanged these blows almost listlessly. After five years of marriage their sparring was routine.

'So what do you want? Couldn't you persuade Birgitta to cut you some meat?'

He dug into a pocket and pulled out a parcel wrapped in a bit of skin. He threw it to the ground at her feet. 'I brought you your food. And I came to tell you your father's back from Britain.'

Frowning, she knelt and unwrapped the parcel. It was a slab of mutton and half a loaf of bread. 'All right, I'm sorry.' She broke the bread in two, tore the meat with her teeth, and handed the larger portions to Askold. 'Here.'

He sat beside her, solid, round-shouldered, his hair greasy. With ill grace he took the food. Sitting side by side, not touching, they ate.

Askold had always been a bit short, solidly built, not the brightest – 'muscle all the way to the top of his head', her father liked to joke. He wouldn't have been her first choice of husband. But he had been the first to come courting, in his clumsy way, when she was fourteen. Since then he had stuck with her, and she had never seen him do a deliberate unkindness to another – although she had heard he could be brutal when he went raiding. He wasn't a bad man, then. Probably.