Robert Low - The Wolf Sea

I was sore in need of the same and dare not look anyone in the eye.

`Starkad,' muttered Kvasir. 'Fuck his mother.' His head drooped. There were grunts and growls and sniffs, but it was a perfect summing up and the worst sound of all was the despairing silence that followed.

Sighvat broke it. 'We have to get it back,' he declared and Kvasir snorted derisively at this self-evident truth.

I will tear his head off and piss down his neck,' growled Finn and I was not so sure that he was talking about Starkad and not me. Radoslav, food halfway to his mouth, had stopped chewing and looked from one to the other, only now realising that something truly valuable had been taken.

`Starkad; said Finn in a voice like a turning quernstone. He stood and dragged the seax out, looking meaningfully at me. The others growled approval and their own hidden knives flashed.

Despair closed on me like dark wolves. 'He works for the Greek, Choniates,' I said.

Aye, right enough, we saw him there,' agreed Sighvat and if there is a colour blacker than his voice was then, the gods have not seen fit to show us it yet.

Finn blinked, for he knew what that meant. Choniates had power and money and that permitted him armed guards and the law. We were Norse, with all that stood for in the Great City. Bitter experience had taught the people of Miklagard just what the Norse did in their halls during the long, dark winters, especially men with no wives to stay their hands. The Great City's tabernae and streets did not want feasting Northmen getting drunk and killing each other — or worse, the good citizens — so the city had made a law of it, which they called the Svear Law. We could carry no weapons and would be arrested for the ones gleaming in the firelight here. We had only a limited time in the Great City and soon we would be rounded up and pitched out beyond the frontier if we did not get a ship in time to leave ourselves.

Finn wolfed it all out in a great howl of frustration that bounced echoes round the warehouse and started up local dogs to reply, his head thrown back and the cords of his neck standing out like ship's cables. But even he knew we would not profit from charging up to Choniates' marbled hov, kicking in the door and dangling him by the heel until he coughed up the runesword.

All we would get was dead.

`Choniates is a merchant of some respectability,' Radoslav said, quiet and cautious about the smouldering rage round him. 'Are you sure he has done this thing? What is this rune serpent anyway?'

Glares answered that. Choniates had it, for sure. Architos Choniates had seen the sword weeks ago and I had been expecting something since then — only to ease my guard at the last and lose it.

When we had first staggered on to the docks of the Great City, it was made clear we would remain unmolested provided we could pay our way. I had half a boot of coins and trinkets left, the last cull from Atil's howe, but they were not seen as currency, so had to be sold for their worth in real silver — and Architos Choniates was the name that kept surfacing like a turd in a drain.

It took two days to arrange, because the likes of Choniates wasn't someone you could walk up to, a ragged-breeks boy like me. He had no shopfront, but was known as a linaropuli, a cloth merchant — which was like calling Thor a bit of a hammer-thrower.

Choniates dealt in everything, but cloth especially and silk in particular, though it was well known that he hated the Christ church's monopoly on making that fabric. Brother John found a tapetas, a rug dealer, who knew a friend who knew Choniates' chief spadone and, two days later, this one turned up in the Dolphin.

Outside it, to be exact, for he wouldn't set foot inside such a place, despite the rain. He sat in a hired carrying-chair, surrounded by hired men from the guild of the racing Blues, wearing their neckcloths to prove it. They were all scowling toughs sporting the latest in Great City fashion: tunics cinched tight at the waist and stiffened at the shoulders to make them look muscle-wide. They had decorated trousers and boots and their hair was cut right back on the front and grown long and tangled behind.

It was all meant to make them look like some steppe tribe come to town, but when one came into the Dolphin and asked for Orm the Trader, he was almost weeping with rage and frustration at the hoots and jeers of men who had fought the real thing.

We all went out, for the others were anxious to see what a spadone, a man with no balls, looked like, but were in for a disappointment, since he looked like us, only cleaner and better groomed. He was swathed in a thick cloak, drawn up over his head so that he looked like an old Roman statue, and he inclined his head graciously in the direction of the gawping mob of pirates who confronted him.

`Greetings from Architos Choniates,' he said in Greek. 'My name is Niketas. My master bids me tell you that he will see you tomorrow. Someone will come and bring you to him.'

He paused, looking round at us all. I had followed his talk well enough, as had Brother John, but the others knew just enough Greek to get their faces slapped and order another drink, so they were engaged in peering at him. Finn Horsehead was practically on his knees, trying to squint into the carrying-chair, and I could see he was set on lifting clothing to get a better look at what wasn't there.

`We will be ready,' I said, cuffing Finn's ear. 'Convey my thanks to your master.'

He nodded at me politely, then hesitated. Finn, scowling and rubbing his ear, was glaring at one of the smirking thugs who formed the bodyguard.

`You may bring no more than three others,' Niketas said as they left. 'Suitably comported.'

"Suitably comported",' chuckled Brother John as we watched them go. 'How are we to do that at all?'

In the end, I decided Sighvat and Brother John were best and left it at that, ignoring Finn's demands to be included.

`He may just decide to lift it,' he argued. 'Or send men to ambush you on the way.'

`He is a merchant,' I said wearily. 'He depends on his reputation. He won't get far by waving a blade and robbing everyone.'

How wrong that turned out to be.

The next day we were escorted by another of Choniates' household to the expensive end of the city and were greeted by Niketas in the immaculate atrium of a large house. He eyed us with one brow raised, taking in our stained, worn clothes, flapping soles and long beards and hair. I felt like a grease stain in this marbled hov.

Sighvat, who took considerable pride in his appearance — we all did, for we were Norsemen and, compared to others in the world, a byword for cleanliness — scowled back at Niketas and hissed, 'If you had balls left, I would tear them off.'

Niketas, who must have heard it all before, simply bowed politely and then left. It may be that Choniates was then busy for two hours, or that Niketas was vengeful.

But it gave us a chance to watch and learn in a part of the city where life seemed careless. People came and went in Choniates' lavish hall with no apparent purpose other than to lean against polished balustrades and laugh and talk and bask in the perfect sun of their lives, warmed, on this chilly, damp day, by heat that came under the floor.

They drank wine from bowls, spilled it, laughingly daring, as an offering to older gods and chided each other for getting it on their expensive sleeves, patting their clothes with sticky-ringed hands. Sighvat and I spent some time wondering if you could get those sticky rings off without cutting their fingers and even more wondering how the heat came up from the floor without the place burning down.

Choniates, when we were finally ushered into his presence, was tall, dressed in gold and white and with perfect silver hair. He conducted affairs in a chair at first, surrounded by men who softened his face with hot cloths, slathered him with cream and then, to our amazement, started painting it with cosmetics, like a woman. They even used brown ash on his eyelids.