M. Lachlan: Lord of Slaughter

The charge faltered and then the cavalry fled, spreading panic through the rebel forces. So the emperor let loose his Varangians — the Vikings. No solid Roman lines there but six thousand men with long axes and spears howling like wolves into the fight.

Snake in the Eye went with them and he waved his axe and screamed his insults, but something held him back from killing. What? Other boys of his age took part in the battle. He defied anyone to call him a coward. He placed himself before the enemy’s spears; it was just that the enemy ran before he could engage them. Snake in the Eye told himself this was no honourable way to kill. He wanted to face his opponent, equally armed and armoured, and to best him one on one. He would not take part in slaughter.

But as the visions of the day returned to him as he waited for sleep, he wished he had at least killed one. A fantasy came upon him in which an Armenian had come for him.

‘Fancy your chances, do you, boy?’

‘I’m no boy, foreigner,’ he’d said. They’d swung and cut, hacked and blocked in the mud. He imagined the thrill as he threw himself aside to dodge a lethal thrust, felt the tearing of the fabric of his tunic as the sword grazed his belly. He relished the panic on the face of his enemy as he realised he had committed too far, the thump as a backhanded blow of Snake in the Eye’s axe took away half the Armenian’s head. Then they’d all come at him, all the ironclad Armenian hordes, and he had been a scythe and they the barley.

It hadn’t happened, but Snake in the Eye hoped one day it would. It must. He was hungry for stories to tell.

He had tried to test himself ever since he was old enough to hold an axe, seeking fights with men, offering them insults and anger. They had never taken him seriously. Too small, too much a boy to be considered worth killing. When his hand went to his axe to make them take him seriously or die, something would come over him. His hand would not move; his feet were rooted. He’d been beaten, humiliated on many occasions, longing to kill but paralysed in the face of his enemies. His father had been kind to him, wanting to believe his son would eventually emulate his ancestors.

‘It’s the battle fetter,’ he had said. ‘It strikes the best of warriors. It’s a gift. Only Odin can impose it. He’s saving you for something special. He won’t let you waste yourself in a pointless scrap with a man twice your size. You will grow and you will become mighty, believe me.’

Snake in the Eye shifted on his pillow and touched the stone he wore at his neck on a thong of leather, asking it for luck — blood luck, fine enemies and glory kills. It was not an expensive piece of jewellery, just a triangular pebble marked with the head of a wolf. His grandfather had owned it, an amulet for the blessing of the gods, and his mother gave it to Snake in the Eye when the boy was five. He’d worn it ever since.

A slinking shame crawled through his mind when he thought of his grandfather, Thiorek, son of Thetmar. Sometimes called the fat warrior, he had killed so many men it was said ravens followed him where ever he went and fell from the skies they became so fat. But his grandfather had been a head taller than other men by his thirteenth year. Snake in the Eye was short for his age, his stature slight, and his skin was like a girl’s.

He would kill, he would kill. Not soon, though. The Armenians had fled or died — at least the ones who fought for the rebel — the Normans and the Turks too; the camels had run and the Greeks lay bleeding. In Constantinople, he thought, Miklagard, the world city, he would find his cure. There he would throw off the battle fetter.

He tried to sleep but his mind was wild with memories and fantasies. He remembered the mad delight that had followed the victory, recalled the coming of the rain — rain, said the Greeks, like Noah saw. Snake in the Eye knew that story, he had been at many campfires and heard tales from all over the world. Looking up at the wet cloth of the tent, he had the idea he had called the rain himself, to blot out his shame.

The images and sensations of the day played out again and again in his thoughts and eventually began to fade, as if his mind was heavy with blood and torpid like a gorged leech. Snake in the Eye dreamed of a rain-black night and a field of the slain where a wolf came nosing towards where he lay.

Then the wolf was at the tent and it had never been a wolf — just the idea of a wolf, an idea you could catch by looking at it. It was a man. The rain-blind guard at the tent’s rear was taken down in silence, his neck broken. The killer drew a sword that shone even in the dream’s dark night like the cold crescent of the moon tumbled to earth, a wicked talon of silver, a razor curve shaped and sharpened by death.

Snake in the Eye stirred, opened his eyes and knew his dream was over. Above him was a man who was not a man, a wolf who was not a wolf, and in his hand was a cruel curved sword that the boy sensed was an ancient killer.

His thoughts cleared and, in the brazier’s faint light, he saw standing over the emperor a man wrapped in little more than a wolfskin, which he wore with the head over his own. At first he thought it was a legionary because one of the Greeks had worn the skin of a great cat like that. But this wasn’t a legionary. It was a wild man, stained with mud, his skin dyed grey like a wolf’s, the water dripping from him.

Snake in the Eye shouted and leaped foward. The man caught him with one hand and held him by the throat with a terrible strength. The boy squirmed and choked, desperate fingers unable to prise away the crushing grip.

No one came, the boy’s choking unheard beneath the rush of the rain, the songs of the camp and the screams of the dying.

The emperor woke, his eyes wide with surprise. He gave a snort, almost resigned, more like a man cursing his luck the last wineskin had gone from a market stall than someone about to die.

He looked at the weapon.

‘I am a Roman emperor, born in the purple, friend, so if you are of some conquered people and expect to see me beg, you will be disappointed. You are unwelcome but not unexpected. Do what you have to.’

Snake in the Eye fought against unconsciousness. The tent blurred and the brazier’s light cut trails in front of his eyes. The wolfman released his grip, dropping the boy to the floor. Then he threw his sword at the emperor’s feet and spoke two words in hacking, guttural Greek.

‘Kill me,’ he said.

‘I ingest your eyes. I drink your blood. I eat your liver. I put on your skin.’

‘What are you talking about, Loys?’

The young woman propped herself up by one elbow on the bed, gazing down at the man who lay beside her in the dawn light. She nibbled on a little figure of a man made from bread while her companion gently twisted a strand of her long blonde hair between his fingers and gazed up at her, smiling.

‘It’s a charm — I heard it in the market. It’s to make you love me. That’s what the bread people are for. That’s me-’ He tapped his finger on the bread in her hand, ‘and this in my tummy was you.’

‘Idolatry!’

‘It would be if we believed it. As we don’t, it’s just bread.’

‘You don’t need a charm, I already love you.’

‘But you wish you did not, don’t you, Lady Beatrice?’

He drew her to him and kissed her. Then they broke and she turned her eyes from his gaze.

‘I wish I did not.’

‘So serious.’ He took her hand and held it to his mouth.

‘Intemperate love is serious, so the Church tells us,’ she said.

‘It is a woman’s weakness to be governed by unruly passions. But I love you immoderately too and I do not have the excuse of my sex to hide behind.’