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

who was sitting astride a thwart in the bows. Girthy Einar might be, but Lilla thought he had never looked better. His ruddy jowls had leaned out, his forehead was brown as leather and his bushy eyebrows were dyed blonde with the sun.

Gerutha suddenly leaped to her feet. ‘Sweet lies of Loki! Would you look at that?’

Lilla peered into the thinning mist. She saw first colours, then shapes. A slope daubed red and white and green, slanting away towards a distant ridge. Then all at once sunlight exploded over everything, bathing the red and white city in a coral dawn. She saw bands of pink-grey blocks and red brick, and above them bank after bank of rust-red tiles climbing away, punctuated with fans of dark cedar trees.

‘What in the Nine Worlds is that?’ cried Einar, pointing at a hall seated on the eastern shoulder of the promontory, whose massive buttresses of red ochre dominated every other building.

‘The Church of the Holy Wisdom,’ said Demetrios the Greek. ‘There’s no finer building in all the wide world.’ Lilla could well believe it.

‘And there?’ asked Gerutha, pointing further south.

‘They call it the hippodrome.’

‘Hippo—what?’ said Einar.

The Greek laughed. ‘They race horses there, you damned barbarian.’

‘You don’t need a stone hall to race horses,’ said Gerutha.

‘Apparently you do in this city,’ replied Einar.

They had picked up the Greek in Constanta, a port further up the Black Sea coast. Or Einar had, when he’d knocked over the man’s wine pitcher in a tavern there and bought him another to make amends. He soon discovered this Demetrios had three useful qualities: he spoke a northern dialect which Einar could understand; he was a helmsman by trade; and he knew the way to Miklagard. Or Byzantium as he insisted they call the city.

‘Vy zánt io,’ muttered Lilla.

‘Excellent!’ Demetrios cried. ‘I’ll make a Byzantine of you yet.’

That felt a distance off. Lilla had made only a little progress learning the Greek tongue. For some days after awaking from her fever she had been too weak to do anything but rest and, at Gerutha’s insistence, eat. Eventually she started to feel stronger, and as soon as the Greek joined them, she was determined to make use of him.

Poor Gerutha struggled to make any headway with the new tongue, but to Lilla’s surprise, Einar took to it like a moorhen to water. No one, least of all himself, could fathom how. When she asked him his secret, he only shrugged and said he could hear the music of it, that was all.

Just as well: Lilla had decided to send Demetrios back with the ferry to oversee Fasolt until their return. It was her ship now. Her ship, her gold, her men – at least the few left of them. She had judged it best to leave them in the smaller port of Chalcedon to guard the ship and to stay out of trouble, and Demetrios could make himself useful staving off any nosy officials who turned up to pester them.

Meanwhile, she and Grusha and Einar would cross the straits to the city, and then. . . then they would find him. She wished it were that simple.

Gerutha glanced back at her from the bows. ‘Are you all right?’ Lilla was too nervous to do more than smile and nod in reply.

All the way south from Constanta they had heard rumours of war. And then they were rumours no longer but reports. The largest army ever assembled was marching north out of Syria, leaving in its wake devastation, vast tracts of land desolated and abandoned, left to be reclaimed by wild beasts. They called them Arabs, and other names. ‘Muslims’ – followers of a new god, so she had heard, or a new idea. It wasn’t clear to her. But in the imperial hinterlands their armies had swept all before them, and now they were only days away from closing an iron fist around the city.

‘Looks peaceful enough,’ observed Einar. ‘They said the caliph’s army was circling from the south but all I see that way is sea.’

‘This here is the Sea of Marmara.’ Demetrios swept his arm to the south. ‘It is small, hardly a day’s voyage one side to the other. That end lies another strait, even narrower than this one, called the Hellespont. The caliph’s armies have crossed there and are marching north towards the far side of the city.’

‘That wine merchant in the tavern last night said they had a strength of a hundred thousand. That must have been an exaggeration, hey?’

Demetrios spat over the side. ‘I hope so, my friend. Truly, I hope so.’

The oarsmen were pulling them through the wide entrance to a harbour on the south side of the promontory. ‘Behold, my friends!’ cried Demetrios. ‘The New Rome.’

The harbour was buzzing with crafts of every shape and size – from two-man skiffs to bulky merchant vessels, butting and buffeting each other in the choppy waters. Stone quays sprang like dragon’s teeth from a causeway that ran along the foot of the huge sea wall.

Their boatman yelled something in a bored voice. ‘Hands in,’ Demetrios told them, ‘unless you want to lose a finger.’

The ferry shouldered its way into one of the quays like a wolf pup trying to get at its mother’s teat. The bows struck the quayside aglance and an oarsman jumped off to secure the bow-rope. A small crowd was already waiting at the top of the steps, presumably the ferryman’s return fares for the pull back to Chalcedon.

‘Time to pay Charon,’ said Demetrios.

‘Who?’ said Lilla.

‘Never mind.’ The Greek held out a calloused hand. ‘A copper coin for each of you. Two for me if I’m going back. That’s if you’re sure. . .’

Lilla wasn’t sure of much just then but she refused to appear timorous. ‘You’ll be more use looking after Fasolt. And the men.’

‘I doubt they’ll listen to me. They are Northmen, after all.’

‘Just keep them out of trouble.’ She opened her leather purse and let him count out five copper