temporary love had long ago become a fact of life among the Varangian, purchased without shame and openly discussed. The hardest working of these women, although they sold themselves to men, kept young girls as their lovers, often paying them as extravagantly as they themselves were paid. The whores of whores. Some were astonishingly beautiful, but carried in their eyes the emptiness of people in the twilight of their years.
Halfdan was as wary of women as he was of Christianity, the splendours of both being never far from view in Miklagard. This city was the centre of the Holy Roman church, and the vastness of its temples dwarfed the crude pillars of our Norse religion.
Halfdan pretended to have no knowledge of Christianity and no interest in it either, but secretly he hired a Christian to teach him about the religion. In this way, he believed, they might have less chance of taking advantage of him. We even attended a service in the great church of the Hagia Sofia, but Halfdan found it so dull that he spent the time carving his name in runes on the marble balustrade. Meanwhile, interminable chanting droned on down below, punctuated by puffs of sandalwood smoke. The lessons lasted two weeks, after which Halfdan sent the Christian away and decided he would never trust those people, though he had never trusted them in the first place. Halfdan could not understand why anyone would pray to only one god, or why someone should be expected to believe that only humans had souls. He wondered why people would spend their time here on earth worrying about what would happen to them in the next world, bribed into submission with the promise of heavenly rewards. Most worrisome to him was that Christians did not accept the godsof others, sanctioning the death of those who would not follow their own faith.
To fight the Emperor’s wars, we sailed aboard his Black Sea ships, and voyaged out across the burning blue Mediterranean. We travelled through the desert of the Abbasids and slept in the coppery sand, wrapped in our capes to ward off the night chill, waiting for the sky to turn the colour of our eyes.
In each new place, Halfdan would find something to mark his journey – sometimes a belt, sometimes a shield, once a helmet stolen from the dust-dry corpse of a Roman legionnaire, who we found buried under a shallow pile of stones at a dried-up oasis in the desert. His chest had caved in like the roof of an abandoned house. Some grey and pasty scraps of flesh remained upon the forehead and the hands, which lay folded on his chest. The hair had slid away from the top of the skull, leaving the chalkiness of bones on which a large black scorpion had made its nest.
The most prized of all Halfdan’s possessions he acquired when we were campaigning against the Gotul tribesmen in the mountainous region of Arak, a fight which cost us almost half our number. Retreating across a frozen plateau, we came across a long-dead animal the likes of which none of us had seen before. It was a kind of elephant, but with long, matted hair and huge tusks that curved around in front of the animal’s face. The creature must have been attacked but escaped to die with a spear still piercing its flank. The flesh had dried as hard as rock and the shaft of the spear had rotted away, but the bronze spear-head remained preserved inside. Its long point was shaped like a narrow tear-drop with strange circles carved into the metal. Halfdan gouged it out and named the weapon Gungnir, after Odin’s own spear, which never missed its mark.
In that place, we had come to the edge of the world. Foul-smelling steam rose from open sores in the ground and yellowblooms of sulphur patched the earth, as on the mottled skin of corpses left unburied.
What lay beyond, in the endless emptiness of rolling hills and stunted trees, filled us all with wordless terror, because of what had happened to a group of Norsemen who had set out across these plains some years before. They were led
Halfdan was as wary of women as he was of Christianity, the splendours of both being never far from view in Miklagard. This city was the centre of the Holy Roman church, and the vastness of its temples dwarfed the crude pillars of our Norse religion.
Halfdan pretended to have no knowledge of Christianity and no interest in it either, but secretly he hired a Christian to teach him about the religion. In this way, he believed, they might have less chance of taking advantage of him. We even attended a service in the great church of the Hagia Sofia, but Halfdan found it so dull that he spent the time carving his name in runes on the marble balustrade. Meanwhile, interminable chanting droned on down below, punctuated by puffs of sandalwood smoke. The lessons lasted two weeks, after which Halfdan sent the Christian away and decided he would never trust those people, though he had never trusted them in the first place. Halfdan could not understand why anyone would pray to only one god, or why someone should be expected to believe that only humans had souls. He wondered why people would spend their time here on earth worrying about what would happen to them in the next world, bribed into submission with the promise of heavenly rewards. Most worrisome to him was that Christians did not accept the godsof others, sanctioning the death of those who would not follow their own faith.
To fight the Emperor’s wars, we sailed aboard his Black Sea ships, and voyaged out across the burning blue Mediterranean. We travelled through the desert of the Abbasids and slept in the coppery sand, wrapped in our capes to ward off the night chill, waiting for the sky to turn the colour of our eyes.
In each new place, Halfdan would find something to mark his journey – sometimes a belt, sometimes a shield, once a helmet stolen from the dust-dry corpse of a Roman legionnaire, who we found buried under a shallow pile of stones at a dried-up oasis in the desert. His chest had caved in like the roof of an abandoned house. Some grey and pasty scraps of flesh remained upon the forehead and the hands, which lay folded on his chest. The hair had slid away from the top of the skull, leaving the chalkiness of bones on which a large black scorpion had made its nest.
The most prized of all Halfdan’s possessions he acquired when we were campaigning against the Gotul tribesmen in the mountainous region of Arak, a fight which cost us almost half our number. Retreating across a frozen plateau, we came across a long-dead animal the likes of which none of us had seen before. It was a kind of elephant, but with long, matted hair and huge tusks that curved around in front of the animal’s face. The creature must have been attacked but escaped to die with a spear still piercing its flank. The flesh had dried as hard as rock and the shaft of the spear had rotted away, but the bronze spear-head remained preserved inside. Its long point was shaped like a narrow tear-drop with strange circles carved into the metal. Halfdan gouged it out and named the weapon Gungnir, after Odin’s own spear, which never missed its mark.
In that place, we had come to the edge of the world. Foul-smelling steam rose from open sores in the ground and yellowblooms of sulphur patched the earth, as on the mottled skin of corpses left unburied.
What lay beyond, in the endless emptiness of rolling hills and stunted trees, filled us all with wordless terror, because of what had happened to a group of Norsemen who had set out across these plains some years before. They were led
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