A Burning Sea by Theodore Brun (snow like ashes series TXT) 📗

‘Your lads?’

‘My sons. They deserve a thrashing, the pair of them – and they’ll get one next time I catch up with them. But they left a thread behind them, see.’ He nodded at the little girl.

Lilla listened as Valrik told her how his daughter was the only one who knew of Erlan’s departure with the boys. Valrik was ashamed to admit that he had beaten it out of her since it was obvious she knew something though her brothers had sworn her to secrecy. Eventually she gave up what she knew – that the boys had thrown in their lot with the Aurvandil and gone in search of the king of kings in the south.

‘The king of kings?’ repeated Lilla. ‘Who is he?’

‘That’s all they said. Best I can tell, that’s all they knew.’

‘Perhaps they meant Ringast,’ said Gerutha. ‘If they didn’t know he was already dead.’

Valrik shook his head. ‘Ringast was west. They were heading south.’

‘The king of kings. Bah!’ scoffed Einar. ‘Well, that ain’t worth a stale turd, let alone a gold ring.’

But Lilla was watching Valrik’s face, and the smile playing at the corners of his mouth. ‘He knows more. Or he thinks he does.’

Valrik chuckled. ‘I can’t be certain. But you’re right – I’ve a notion where they’re headed.’

‘Well?’

‘Happens that I’ve travelled further than any other man you’ll meet in this place. Far to the south, beyond the great rivers to the Black Sea. Do that and you get to hear many stories. And I heard tell of a kingdom in the south greater than any other – a kingdom, they said, that ruled the world.’

‘Well, that’s a lie,’ said Gerutha. ‘The north has its own kings. And queens,’ she added, glancing at Lilla.

‘True, merchants and travellers are prone to exaggeration. But you hear a name enough times and you begin to think maybe there’s a grain of truth to it.’

‘What name?’ said Lilla.

‘The Great City,’ said Valrik. ‘Miklagard.’

CHAPTER NINE

‘Byzantium,’ said the Goth beside him.

Erlan dipped his head, still pulling the oar, his curiosity outweighing the pain in his hands. But the flashes of white stone he glimpsed through the oar-hole were too fleeting to make much sense of. Only that there was a lot of it.

‘Where will they take us?’ he asked the Goth in Greek. He’d learned as much of the language as he could from the man to whom Ramedios had chained him, mostly in whispers in the dead of night. The Goth had taught him willingly, as much to keep his own sanity as to help the northern stranger. His name was Ildur. He had a hooked nose, a tuft of beard and a head completely shaven, but for a rat’s tail hanging off the back of his skull.

‘Straight to market,’ Ildur grunted. ‘Or else a lock-up till they can get rid of us.’

The whip crack came from nowhere and bit painfully across Erlan’s forearm, drawing blood.

‘Keep your mouth shut, you sack of sheep shit,’ snarled the overseer above them. Erlan kept rowing. He understood more of the crew’s language now, not that much of it was worth the hearing.

‘No more with the whip, you witless fool,’ Ramedios yelled. ‘We want them unmarked on the block.’

The air was stifling, and hot as a forge-fire under the decking of the ship. If Ramedios was concerned for their welfare now, he’d shown little enough over the last two weeks, sparing barely enough food and water on his human chattels to keep them alive.

When they weren’t called upon to row, the slaves were left to fester in the slop of bilge water and urine and vomit and worse which remained despite the token efforts every couple of days to flush it out.

Since Erlan had lost his freedom, they’d seen three other ports on their progress around the Black Sea – or Friendly Sea, as the Greeks called it – and the number of slaves in the hold had grown. Finally, their prow swung due south into a narrow strait that Ildur called the Bosporus. Here, the sea traffic increased, and the shores rose up into a narrow bottleneck of leafy hilltops and steep-backed bays.

In the straits, even the smaller towns were bigger than anything Erlan had ever seen, their tiled roofs spreading inland like blooms of pink moss. It was early summer now. The nights were shorter and a cool relief from the long, hot days of blazing sunshine. And all the while, the bitter irony that his quest for freedom had made him a slave chaffed as sore as the chains around his wrists.

The ship changed course, its bows swinging to the west. The order was given to cease rowing. The sails were lowered. There was a new smell on the air.

‘Stinks, doesn’t it?’ muttered Ildur.

‘What is it?’

Ildur chuckled. ‘The city. What else?’

He still couldn’t see much. Peering through the oar-hole, he glimpsed a huge pillar of stone and beyond it a mishmash of shapes – spikes, towers, arches, domes as big as giants’ skulls – each appeared and vanished from view in an instant. The noise also grew, crewmen shouting at each other, laughing and calling out to sailors on other ships and the smaller craft bustling around them.

‘Must be coming into harbour,’ replied Ildur.

Some of the crew were bantering in animated voices on the steer-board side of the ship. ‘What are they saying?’

Ildur listened a while. ‘They’re asking about the Arabs.’

‘Arabs?’ He didn’t know this word.

‘The enemy of the Byzantines. They say an army is on its way here. I heard the same rumours back in Krim.’

‘An army? Is it war then?’

‘Worse.’ Ildur gave a grim chuckle. ‘It’s the end of the world.’

There was a bang as another smaller craft came alongside the ship. ‘Get them on deck,’ shouted Ramedios, appearing above the hold. ‘We’ll lower them down in pairs, then ferry them over a dozen at a time.’

Two by two the slaves were unchained from the benches and dragged up on deck. This wasn’t