Syracuse held out for eighteen months. By the time it surrendered, the city would be the haunt of dogs and vultures, its defenders few, sick, and starving, and our own army worn down to the point of mutiny. And I—I would be twenty-seven years old: ravaged by fever, my skin a map of battle scars, my feet nearly crippled, and my heart sore with longing. Abandoned. Angry. If the Logothete had agents in the city I never found them.
Maniakes had ordered a forced march from Catania, hoping to take Syracuse by surprise. We covered the thirty-seven miles that lay between them in two days. But the Saracens knew we were coming. The city was crammed with provisions and fighting men, and their commander, Ibn al-Thumnah, was a stubborn man. The city’s ramparts stand thirty feet high on the landward side. In its wide harbor is a fortified island called Ortygia, connected to the city by a walled causeway which was the work of ancient kings, rich, proud men who made their city a jewel of the ancient world.
It was the job of our fleet to capture this island. Of course, Stephen failed at this, as he did at everything. Meanwhile, our catapults began to pound away at the walls and towers. This was work for specialists, and we Varangians were mere spectators. All day long, I listened to the creaks and groans, whoosh and snap of the great, long-armed trebuchets. I watched while boulders the size of wagons and great bundles of flaming pitch, baskets of scorpions and sacks of quicklime, arced toward the walls. The defenders hung out mats of woven hemp and sacks of grain husks to protect them, and answered our fire with their own catapults, launching showers of missiles, which sometimes pierced a man through the body or took off his head. We did some damage, breaking the teeth of the battlements, pulverizing the stone facing here and there to expose the brick core, but it wasn’t enough. The walls stood firm. And before long, we ran out of boulders or anything else we could send at them. Then the trebuchets stood silent, like cranes at an abandoned building site. Maniakes began to pace and fume. His temper grew more savage every day.
He decided to order an assault with ‘tortoises’. We had left six of these outside Catania because they were slow to move. Now it took us a week to take them apart, load them on carts, and reassemble them. And then they were too short for Syracuse’s walls and needed extra stories added at the top. At last, one morning in the half-light before dawn, they rumbled toward a section of the wall, seeming to move by themselves, the men pushing them from inside. We Varangians, together with the Lombards and Normans, crouched behind the gangplanks at the top. Through a slit, I watched the enemy’s fire arrows streak toward us. I felt the shock of stones strike us. I later learned they had begun tearing apart old buildings for ammunition. I felt the whole tower wobble and tip crazily as if it would go over with us, heard the squeal of wheels, the grunts of the pushers. I gave a wink and a nod to Gorm, who was beside me, tightened my grip on my spear, and sent up a prayer to Odin. Finally, I could forget everything, could lose myself, in the madness of battle.
The gangplank fell with a crash. We flung our spears and swarmed over the parapet, screaming our war cry and slashing right and left with our swords and axes. Harald was in the front, Halldor beside him, holding high our dragon-headed standard. “Varangians to me!” Harald yelled but his words were drowned by the answering roar of Allahu akhbar. from the Saracen fighters. They loosed a storm of arrows at us. Arrows in legs. Arrows in throats. Men went down, tumbled backward off the wall, falling screaming to the rocky ground below. Al-Thumnah’s elite guard faced us. Broad shouldered, with white turbans and gilded armor, they came at us, whirling their long straight swords around their heads. One of them struck me, cracked my shield with a blow, my arm numb with the shock. Step by step, he drove me back over the blood-slick stones, and suddenly I was hanging in space, legs kicking in empty air, shield gone, sword gone, fingertips scrabbling at the parapet’s edge, letting go, falling …
Then a grip like iron had me by the wrist and pulled me up, as if I were as weightless as a rabbit. I looked into the face of the Norman giant, William de Hauteville. He covered me with his long shield while I scrambled to my feet. I snatched up a spear, used it with both hands and stabbed at two of the enemy until it shattered. Then I rushed in under another man’s guard, grappled him around the waist, tripped him with a wrestler’s move, went down on top of him, got my dagger in under his jaw, the blood spurting up over my hand. I took his sword from him—a magnificent weapon, finer steel than ours—and turned to fight another. But now the sun was coming up over the bay, pouring into our eyes, the heat beginning to tell on us. We had hoped to clear the rampart of defenders and race down the inner steps to open one of the postern gates. But we were too few.
“Back, back!” someone shouted. We retreated, trying to carry our wounded, as many as we could. The gangplanks went up, the ‘tortoises’ began to move away, all of them shaggy with arrows, their cowhide covers smoldering, the stink of it in our throats. A shout of victory went up from the wall, Allahu akhbar, again and again. The kettle drums roared.
Later, when Harald mustered us, some ninety men had been killed or crippled from our whole force of five hundred, twenty-three from the Fourth Bandon alone. Halldor took a sword cut across his handsome face, which spoiled his appearance and did nothing for his mood. All of us were battered and bleeding one way or another. Three of the ‘tortoises’ were a total loss and there was not enough big timber in the neighborhood to build more.
After this, we settled down for a long siege. We scoured the countryside for food and firewood, finding not enough of either. Autumn came. Winter bore down on us with heavy rains and sickness in the camp. We grew thin. Wounds would not heal. Then summer and another winter. It was only a question now of who would break first. The defenders launched sorties against us, which we beat back, with heavy losses on both sides. Eventually, these came less and less often. And we assaulted the walls again, with ladders, but could never get a foothold.
The passage of time could be marked by the deterioration of our kit. Shields were battered into uselessness; sword blades nicked and bent, sharpened and re-sharpened until the steel wore away; helmets dented and hammered back into shape; the leather backing of our hauberks rotted away from sweat; our red tunics and cloaks patched and faded. Everything we owned had to be replaced from army stores, so that at the end we looked more like Greek soldiers than Varangians. Harald took the opportunity to adopt a cavalry officer’s long surcoat made of overlapping gilded bronze plaques. Its skirt being nearly as long as a girl’s dress, the men dubbed it ‘Emma’. “Does pretty Emma keep you warm at night?” they joked.
By the time a year had passed we had lost nearly half our men to wounds or disease. We buried them in wide trenches, and remembered them with stories—this one’s word-wit, that one’s fine head of hair. Men whose wives and parents back in Snaefellsness and Laxdaela, in Varmaland and Uppsala, in Aland and Jutland would wait and wonder and never know what became of them, and eventually set up rune stones: Thorir, or Ermund, or Bodolf fared east in Grikland and fed the crows there.
By mutual agreement between Maniakes and Harald, who couldn’t bear the sight of each other, we Varangians continued to bivouac apart from the rest of the army. The Lombards and Normans joined us, leaving the Greeks to themselves. Although I was still not officially a Guardsman, everyone—except for Halldor and Bolli—seemed to have forgotten that I wasn’t. And because of the closeness of camp life and the brotherhood of battle, a bond grew up between me and these men that never could have happened back in Constantinople. There were a few Icelanders in every bandon and most of them were willing to be my friends, whatever my religion. Halldor, being a great chieftain’s son, tried to lord it over them and wasn’t, in fact, very popular.
The days crept by. We devoted much time to sports. Harald insisted that we keep fit, and he took the lead in wrestling and running and lifting rocks. Every bandon had its champions, and rivalry was fierce. The nights we passed around our campfires, faces flushed with firelight and wine, drinking, telling stories (mine were always in demand), and, like soldiers everywhere, complaining. Harald took the lead in this, too. Did that brute, Maniakes, that ex-waiter, know his business? Harald spat the man’s name, always with a sneer on his face and a hard edge to his voice. He never missed an opportunity to mention Maniakes’s low birth in comparison to his own, the half-brother of a king. The saintly Olaf was always in Harald’s mouth. We stifled yawns listening to him repeat, for the hundredth time, the shining tale of Stiklestad, how at the age of fifteen he had stood over his brother’s corpse, beating back the heathen rebels; how he had escaped and made his way to Gardariki; how he wooed and won the Rus prince’s beautiful daughter whom he would marry and carry home to Norway one of these days, and damnation to her wicked mother. All of this I knew well—too well—and none of it was quite the way I remembered it. But I held my tongue.
The Normans, William and Drogo, would listen to him, though they only understood a little of our language. One constant visitor, however, picked up our speech with amazing quickness. This was Arduin the Lombard, the henchman of Duke Gaimar of Salerno. He was a man of about thirty-five with a long beard, after the fashion of his people, and shrewd, intelligent eyes. And, unique among his fellows, he had been educated in Greek and spoke it fluently. His manners were thoroughly Greek, too. No one would have guessed he was a barbarian. He knew something of poetry and appreciated my telling of Homeric tales, contributing details himself. But most of all he listened to Harald and would question him about laws and taxes and such things. Here is a man, I thought, who aims to be a king in his own country someday. We spoke Greek to each other, and I helped him with his Norse. We got on well, and I have always been sorry that we ended as enemies. I blame Maniakes for that, too.
Like the other men, I acquired a woman. Her name was Demetra. Camp women had followed us all the way from Messina. They cooked our food, washed our clothes, guarded our belongings, polished our armor, collected herbs for the stewpot and leaves and roots for healing—all for a few coins and protection from rape and beatings. I wanted a woman to sleep with, but one who would remind me as little as possible of Selene, who was so lithe and quick. Demetra was typical Sicilian: olive-skinned, heavy-breasted and thick-ankled, short and sturdy with a round, smiling face and a deep laugh. She went barefoot in every weather—her feet were black, the toes splayed, the soles tough as shoe leather. She could march as well as a man, carried a donkey’s load of stuff on her back, and never complained. The fellow she was with when I met her was hitting her for some reason. I shoved him away and put my hand on the hilt of my sword. She turned a questioning eye on me. I gave her a silver coin, which she tested with her teeth, and then smiled.
She was older than I and, in a certain way, more a mother than a mistress. She had had a husband who’d died of something or other, and children, too, though she never spoke of them. We spoke very little, in fact, as I could barely understand her dialect, but she knew how to cook rice and onions with a scrawny chicken or a hare or some other meat that I didn’t care to examine too closely. She would bathe my face and cradle me whenever my fever returned, and at night she would pick lice from my hair and then comb it and oil it. It was between her muscular thighs that I fathered a child, a baby girl, who was born that winter and lived only a few months. Demetra buried it and never said a word. Once another woman came and offered herself to me and Demetra broke her nose.
I shared a tent with five other men and their women. Some evenings we would just lie by the embers of our fire, while rain drummed on the canvas, and brag about how we would spend our loot if we ever got the chance. At sunset and sunrise, the Infidels’ call to prayer carried to us from the city. Life went on there, too, though grimmer every day. The wind carried the smell of rotting flesh. It was plain that the inhabitants were starving to death faster than they could be buried.
We entertained ourselves as best we could with lizard races and scorpion fights and such things. And sometimes musicians would gather in the nearby villages to celebrate some saint’s day or a wedding and afterwards come through our camp, hoping to make a few coins. They played the zambogna, the skin of a whole goat, tied at neck and feet, with pipes attached. It made a wild, shrieking sound and Demetra loved it, dancing and snapping her fingers. But Gorm grimaced at the sound and paid them just to go away.
One evening a Greek cavalry trooper came around with a ‘tables’ board, hoping no doubt to win some money from us ignorant Northmen. I played him and cleaned him out. But the sudden flood of memory, of Selene touching the tip of her tongue to the space between her teeth when she studied a move, was almost unbearable. That night I dreamed of her. I was chasing her down endless streets in a vast city, she, always ahead of me, and just when I was about to touch her she would vanish and reappear streets away.
Nothing could distract me from thoughts of her. I tried to imagine her life. What was she doing? Who was she with? How did she fill her days? And I longed to see my son. What did he look like at one, at one-and-a-half, at two? I tried to notice children around the camp who might be his age, children with black, curly hair, just to have something to fasten my imagination on. And where, where was this promised agent of the Logothete who would bring me her letters and take mine to her? If he was trapped in the city, why weren’t there others? The woman at Messina, the priest in Catania?
Christmas came and then Epiphany of the year six thousand five hundred forty-eight from the Creation (one thousand and forty, as we would call it), though we celebrated with little joy. It was a cold and misty morning and Maniakes ordered the whole army and most of the ships’ crews out on parade while the priests went among them, hearing confessions and giving communion. I pleaded fever, which was not a lie, and stayed in my tent with Demetra, drinking wine with a pellet of opium in it, gnawing a pig’s knuckle, and thinking of home. Why was I forgotten so completely? Why had Psellus, my old friend, broken his promise?
I drifted into a drugged sleep, thinking about him.