Raven Read online

  Next morning, we waited for Gregor. The ancient city around us stirred to a new day as it had done innumerable times before, its people going about their lives in the shade of Rome’s golden past. The river exhaled a putrid damp mist across the wharves, which rolled amongst the poor houses and pissy alleys near the water and up between the grander buildings of the lower Palatinus. When the sun had burnt the river mist away and it began to look as though the day would be bright and warm, and the traders and merchants of Rome began to crow about their goods and the guide had still not shown his face, many of the men lost patience and went ashore. But we waited.

  ‘I knew we couldn’t trust that lying, bloody Roman whelp,’ Wiglaf growled, just as Gregor called down to us from the quay. Wiglaf flushed red beneath his beard.

  ‘Are you ready to see the arena, Wiglaf?’ Gregor asked, shaming the man further by knowing his name.

  ‘Arena?’ Wiglaf said, bushy brows arched.

  ‘The Amphitheatrum Flavium!’ Gregor said, spreading his arms. ‘And you, Raven, are your eyes prepared to see our great city as it used to be, before the Roman people found the light of Christ?’

  ‘My eyes itch to see what Rome was like before the nailed god,’ I said, glancing at Penda who looked just as eager as me despite his being a Christian.

  ‘Very well,’ Gregor said soberly. ‘We will go now. But if there is trouble I will not be able to help you.’

  ‘What kind of trouble,’ Sigurd asked, climbing over Fjord-Elk’s sheer strake to come aboard. He had been talking with Rolf and Bragi since sunrise.

  ‘You will know if it happens,’ Gregor said, ‘for the city has become a dangerous place these last weeks.’ He seemed to wrestle with the next words on his tongue. ‘You may want to bring some silver. Coins this time,’ he added with the shadow of a grimace. ‘They don’t deal in warrior rings in the Amphitheatrum Flavium.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I NEVER HEARD ARNGRIM THE DANE WEAVE A VERSE ABOUT THE arena but I should have liked to. For I am no skald and do not have the tongue-craft for telling it so that you can feel and smell and taste it the way that I did that day. Before we entered the place we stood outside, and our necks snaked as we looked up at the immense, unimaginable mass of perfectly cut stone, tree-sized smooth glistening pillars and fine red bricks. From the Palatinus we had seen Rome and the Amphitheatrum Flavium as just one of many giant remains from a long-dead past. From the ground, though, amongst the stalls and statues and lean-tos and traders, I could not fit the place into my eyes. We stood at the threshold of one of the entrances but had to move aside soon enough. It seemed we were not the only ones who had come to the arena that day. Groups of two and three, and even whole crews by the looks, were coming from every direction. Warriors and merchants, women and gangs of filth-smeared boys were streaming through the many pillar-framed openings, all of them chattering like birds at dawn. There was a low hum like that of the ocean coming from beyond the walls before us, reminding me of a packed mead hall before the food is served. And talking of food, the air was thick with the smell of frying onions and mushrooms, fish, spices and garlic from a dozen crowded stalls, the owners of which had that frenzied look that merchants get when they’re doing a better trade than normal.

  ‘This one building covers more ground than any village back home,’ Sigurd said, admiring the statue of a naked woman that stood on a ledge above the entrance. The woman’s breasts were so plump and soft-looking that I was half tempted to climb up just to check that they had been carved from stone like everything else. There was another stone figure next to the woman but only the legs and lower torso remained now. A dark thought slunk through my head of some Roman being killed by a stone man’s torso falling from the sky.

  ‘How many men standing on each other’s heads would get to the top?’ Sigurd asked.

  Olaf pushed out his bottom lip and scratched his beard, looking up at the heights and shielding his eyes against the midday sun. ‘Thirty?’ he suggested. Sigurd nodded, satisfied with the guess. ‘But by all the gods, Sigurd, I cannot think how they did it. Raven, you’re a deep thinker. How could men build such a thing?’

  I shrugged as two warriors with tattooed faces jostled past reeking sourly of wine and garlic. ‘Perhaps their gods helped them, Uncle,’ I said.

  ‘Pah!’ Olaf backhanded that suggestion flying. ‘When I built my mead hall I didn’t see Frey or Heimdall or Thór there hefting planks or bashing their damn thumbs with a hammer. We even bled my best bull in their honour, too. Remember, Sigurd?’

  ‘I remember, Uncle,’ Sigurd said, smiling. ‘I remember Halldor falling off the roof, too.’

  ‘He was ill-lucked that one,’ Olaf said, remembering poor Halldor whom Sigurd had killed so long ago now it seemed. ‘He would have liked to see Rome.’

  ‘We will have much to tell him when we meet in Óðin’s hall,’ Sigurd said. ‘Bjorn too and all the rest.’

  ‘Well?’ Bram said, slapping Olaf on the shoulder. ‘Are we going to stand outside in this garlic fug all day or are we going in there?’ He nodded at the entrance where a father and son hand in hand were passing beneath the stone woman with the big tits.

  And so we followed, leaving behind the bustle of the city and entering a place whose seidr hung in the air as thick as barley porridge.

  ‘Frigg’s tits,’ Olaf growled, his hand instinctively clutching the sword grip at his hip.

  Sigurd whistled, his eyes shining, and my breath escaped me as though my lungs had been pierced. I spun round, almost losing my footing. ‘All of Rome must be here,’ I said, even more awestruck by the inside of the Amphitheatrum Flavium than I had been by the outside. Thousands of people were standing or sitting among the countless levels that ran round the inside of the place, encircling an open space in which you could have built my old village of Abbotsend five times over. And yet, bristling as it was with so many people, it was not even half full. We had walked through dark, damp-smelling tunnels, our voices changed by the cool stone walls, blindly following the man to our front. Then we had made our way up through the shadows, climbing endlessly, so that I soon lost count of the stone steps, the hairs stiffening on the back of my neck and the blood chilling in my veins. The boots of men whose faces I could not see scuffed against the ancient stone and it seemed to me that we were like a procession of the dead abandoned by Óðin’s choosers of the slain and left to tramp our gloomy way to the afterlife. Shafts of light sliced that cold warren and eventually one of them drew us blinking and unbalanced out into the white glare of midday. We had emerged a third of the way up the inside of the giant bowl and for luck I touched the scrag that was all that remained of the raven’s wing Cynethryth had once tied in my hair, which was part of the thick braid hanging against my right cheek.

  Each tier of long stone benches was separated by low walls and curved passages and cut further into wedges by steps emerging from other tunnels evenly spaced all the way round. Many of these dark mouths were disgorging their own eager crowds that spread along the age-pitted rows, looking to claim their piece of the Amphitheatrum Flavium. Folk took their seats excitedly, called and waved greetings to friends on different levels, rubbed their hands eagerly or gaped around in astonished wonder.

  ‘This place is buzzing like a kicked hive,’ Bram Bear said, shoving a big Roman out of his way. The man turned angrily, took one look at Bram and backed away, palms raised.

  Around the edge of the arena floor were lean-tos and wooden dwellings and even some stone-built Christ houses outside which crosses had been driven into the ground. Across the rest, shadows, foundation trenches and scraps of timber and brick betrayed where other buildings had stood until recently, and more remains sat piled here and there against the base of the walls.

  ‘People have been living here,’ I said, looking to Gregor. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Men have lived here since they stopped using the arena more than three hundred years ago,’ he said. ‘Perhaps these men were paid to lea
ve,’ he suggested, nodding down at the scars in the earth. ‘But I don’t think so.’ Just then a war horn bellowed somewhere below.

  ‘Here we go,’ Olaf muttered. The ocean’s roar of the crowd shrank to a murmur as thousands of eyes looked down into the empty space. The horn blew again, the sound small and flat and far away.

  ‘I must go now, Sigurd,’ Gregor said. He made the sign of the cross, which made me think of Egfrith who was not with us. Instead, he was off visiting Rome’s churches and in particular one to the south of the city beneath which Saint Peter lay buried. As far as I could make out, Peter had been the White Christ’s second, as Olaf was Sigurd’s, and the Christ followers still worshipped the man’s ghost though it was nothing more than a fart in the wind by then.

  ‘Where’s he going?’ Bram asked, nodding at Gregor’s back before it was lost amongst the crowd.

  ‘He made the White Christ sign and scurried off like a mouse from a burning barn,’ I said.

  ‘Well the damn fool is going to miss whatever is just about to happen,’ Bram said, turning back to the arena. Three men walked out into the open and turned their faces up to the crowds. Even they looked impressed and yet surely they knew what was about to happen. Two of the men were warriors, each armed as though he were about to go into a battle, which he was. One was a big, fair-haired man, Norse or Dane perhaps. The other was dark and, though slight, was well muscled and moved like a hunter. The third man looked wealthy, a long red cloak stopping above tall boots of soft-looking leather. He was dark like the smaller warrior and though his fine clothes hid any obvious signs of his being a warrior too, he had a sword scabbarded at his hip.

  ‘Hólmgang?’ Sigurd gave the word the weight you’d expect from a man who was half killed in one.

  ‘Aye, they’re going to fight all right,’ Olaf said with a nod. ‘I can smell it.’ That’s when I noticed several clusters of men gathered along the bottom row just two spear-lengths above the arena floor and the three men waiting there.

  ‘They’re making wagers,’ Svein the Red said, pushing through the crowds to get to us. He, Black Floki and some of the others had become separated from us in the tunnels, but now they’d found us. ‘We have money on it, too!’ He thumbed behind him and shook his head, a wide grin splitting his beard. ‘Black Floki has wagered three silver coins on the small man. Anyone can see that the other man is much stronger. That puny sheep’s dropping does not have a hope.’ Black Floki’s face was as cold as the stone bench against the backs of my knees as he eyeballed the warriors below. ‘Where has that beardless pup gone? He could have told us what that Roman is saying,’ Svein said. To me it looked as though the rich-looking man was introducing the warriors, for the big Norse-looking man bowed to the crowd, raising a cheer. Then with a flourish he threw off his brown cloak and bent his right arm, so that the muscle below the short sleeve of his brynja bulged. The crowd roared again. The Roman-looking man paid his opponent no attention at all. Instead, he was rolling his shoulders and stretching his back and chest, loosening his muscles for the coming fight. He wore a polished helmet from which hung strips of fine red cloth that fluttered in the breeze. Curved iron plates protected his shins and beneath his bright white tunic he wore a lamellar brynja whose scales glinted. Which all showed he was proud enough in his own way and must have known how to fight, too, to own such fine arms.

  Then the two fighters were told to pick up their shields and pace in opposite directions to put some distance between them. The man who had called up to the crowds strode to the edge of the arena and gave an order at which sixteen warriors armed with shields, spears and swords spilled from one of the nearby passages and ran to take their places forming a circle around the fighters. When the brown dust had cleared and the guards were all in place, to ensure that neither man tried to run, we guessed, the richly dressed man nodded to another man, who blew the horn again.

  ‘Don’t cry, Floki,’ Svein said, ‘I will buy you a wineskin with the money I win.’

  ‘It feels good being one of those watching this time,’ Sigurd said, a half smile in his beard. For the heavy sweat stench of the crowd was cut now with the tang of violence, and the fight had begun.

  Neither fighter risked throwing his spear. Instead, they closed on each other, making quick thrusts with the weapons, searching for weaknesses and testing each other’s speed. As was expected, the smaller man was the faster, his spear blade whipping out and back out of harm’s way in fast neat moves. But his opponent was fast for his size and his thrusts came with the power to break a shield and so the smaller man was using much of his speed to avoid his enemy’s blade. He was moving his feet well, trying to keep the other man off balance because a man cannot put his weight behind a thrust if his feet are dancing. A spear blade thudded against a shield, glanced off a helmet, deflected off mail. Boots scuffed dust into the air, teeth flashed and the crowd roared. The darker man’s blade sliced into his opponent’s right arm, gouging out a piece of flesh that flapped against the man’s biceps, hanging by a scrap of skin. I saw the roar of pain but could not hear it for the baying crowd. A moment later the man’s whole arm was sheeted in bright blood that dripped on to the earth.

  ‘That big bastard is getting angry now,’ Penda said, as the injured warrior lunged at the cause of his pain, missing again because the other man was already moving to his right, his quick feet taking his torso out of harm’s way. In and out of range he moved, his own spear jabbing here, cutting there.

  Then, because he needed to wipe the blood off his hand or risk the spear slipping from it, the big man shook the shield from his left arm and flung it behind him. It was a brave thing to do against a fast opponent, but he knew he could now get more control over the spear and both arms behind his thrusts.

  ‘I think this fight doesn’t end with the first blood, either,’ Sigurd said, brows raised as the other man discarded his own shield. The crowd clamoured because a fight without shields cannot last too long. I remembered the hólmgang between Sigurd and Mauger, which had ended with the Wessexman’s mutilation and death and Sigurd leaking blood from a dozen wounds. I had never seen a fight like it. If Sigurd or Mauger were in that arena now fighting either of those two warriors it would have been long over. I said as much to Sigurd.

  The jarl shook his head. ‘The dark-haired fighter is good. He is dragging this thing out to please the crowd. He could have killed that ox five times over and the ox knows it, too.’

  ‘Why would he take such a risk by keeping the fight going?’ I asked. ‘If the ox lands that spear it will likely be a killing blow.’

  ‘Because he is Red-Cloak’s man,’ Sigurd said, nodding down towards the rich man who waited at the arena’s edge. ‘So are they,’ he said, gesturing at the warriors with the spears and long shields that formed the enclosure of iron and flesh around the two fighters. ‘More than once the fighter has glanced at Red-Cloak for approval. Men have silver riding on the back of this fight,’ he said with half a smile, his eyes flicking across to Svein who was cheering for his man. ‘And those men will feel better about losing that silver if it has at least bought them some excitement and a tale to tell.’ I shook my head at my own callowness. Now that Sigurd had said it it seemed obvious. All the smaller man’s movement, all his feints and parries and dust-whipping footwork – even the pride-stinging arm wound: all of it had been to keep the fight going for the sake of those who had come to see a real contest.

  The two warriors circled, each knowing that a single mistake now could mean his death. They probed and their spear staves clacked time and again. Then the big man swung his spear from far right, round his head, as if to sweep aside his enemy’s spear before thrusting, but the other man was ready and stepped back, dropping his spear, so that the big man’s stave hit nothing. Then the small man stepped inside, bringing his right arm up and smashing the butt end of his own spear into his enemy’s chin. The blond man staggered backwards from the blow, which would have felled a horse, then he thrust again for the other
’s lead arm and this time the small man used the oar block, rotating his spear down and deflecting his opponent’s blade wide. Then he whipped his own blade up, gashing open the big man’s throat in a spray of gore. The blond warrior took three steps forward then fell to his knees, still jabbing his spear towards his enemy. Around me folk were yelling in languages I could not understand, though it was clear some were happier than others. The small warrior glanced at Red-Cloak, who looked up at the raucous crowd before nodding sharply at his man. The fighter nodded back and, thrusting his spear into the ground, strode forward, drawing his sword. Then he stopped, because the big man, whose neck wound was spilling blood like a waterfall, had dropped his spear and was fumbling for the sword at his waist. Not because he still thought he could fight, but because he was a Norseman and wanted to drink with his ancestors in Óðin’s hall. The small man waited until his blood-drenched enemy had drawn his sword and then he moved closer and the big man gave an almost imperceptible nod. The blade plunged into the gaping wound, down into the chest where it ripped into the big man’s heart. He shuddered and died and the last sound he heard in this life was the cheering of the thousands who had won money by his death.

  The corpse was dragged away and Red-Cloak’s man drew his spear from the ground and walked between two of the Long Shields, sharing a look with his lord before disappearing back into the tunnel from which he had come, his work done.