It was a long hike back to Vyshgorod, and late at night before we reached it. I roused Harald from his sleep and described my adventures to him, sketching a rough map of the Pecheneg camp with some idea of the caves and tunnels beneath it. When I was done, he burst out laughing to think of starveling monks saving Kiev with such an absurd trick, and he promised me a bonus of twenty silver grivny if the plan succeeded.
“And if it doesn’t?”
“In that case, Tangle-Hair, surrender to the first Pecheneg you meet and beg to be his slave; you’ll live longer and happier that way than if you show your face to me again. Now go get some sleep, you look about done in.”
Some hours later, after I’d slept a little and Kuchug had gently washed my wounds and doctored them with some concoction of his, Yaroslav convened his war council. We met in the church, where Eustaxi lay, and Kuchug and I reported to the assembly all that we had seen. I couldn’t avoid mention of the sad state of the prisoners and the great number of dead.
“And my son?” the prince asked, tight-throated with dread.
“We saw nothing of him. I’m sorry. But many may have gotten to safety inside the citadel.”
“Yes, yes, of course, of course they may.” How desperately he wanted to believe it.
“The main thing,” I said, “is that the Pechenegs are eating through the countryside like a plague of locusts, and what they don’t eat they burn. Unless we drive them off soon, Kiev will be a city of corpses.”
“Then there’s nothing more to say,” said Harald, “we attack at once.”
“As Mstislav did?” Eilif laughed harshly. “We all see what that came to. Yaroslav Vladimirovich, don’t listen to these two crack-brained children. Take the advice of seasoned men. It’s plain that we can do nothing until Sudislav and the other princes arrive.”
Harald turned on them hotly, “Prince, give no ear to cowards! Sudislav might be as much as ten days behind us. As for the other two, we don’t know if the couriers we sent even got through. Meanwhile our rations are nearly gone. In another day we’ll all be starving. No. We must raise the siege now, and do it in a way that will put the fear of God into these savages for years to come.”
“Of course,” sneered Eilif, “you’ll tell us how you plan to do that.”
“With pleasure, Eilif. With the help of certain allies of ours, seven hundred brave druzhiniks will be as good as seven thousand. Now, attend all of you to my plan—” (Not for the last time did Harald lay claim to a stratagem of mine.) When he was done, and his words had been translated for those Rus and Slavs who spoke no Norse, there were grunts of satisfaction around the room. The idea pleased them.
Eilif, shamed and desperate, swore, by Christ, that neither he nor a single one of his Swedes would waste their lives in this folly!
“In that case Eilif Ragnvaldsson,” cried Yaroslav in a fury, “I strip you of your rank, in God’s name I do, and—and I order you from my sight!”
Shocked silence.
What an effect this bracing military air was having on our prince. At home, under his wife’s withering glance, he would never have dared.
Eilif knew that too. “You what? Strip me of my rank? Why you pathetic, weak-minded, old cripple, the princess will have the balls off you for this—I mean if you’ve got any …”
Harald sent him staggering across the aisle with a single blow to the jaw. As he rose on wobbly legs and drew his sword, two of his own men pinioned his arms and dragged him, choking with rage, from the church.
Of course, it was easy to say later that we should have killed him then, when we had the chance. The next morning he was nowhere to be found within the walls of Vyshgorod.
Now there followed an anxious time of waiting.
Regularly each morning a band of Pechenegs came screaming over the plain, to ride round and round our walls until they tired of launching arrows and insults. During these assaults only Eustaxi’s men were allowed to show themselves on the ramparts, while the rest of us, by Harald’s order, crouched out of sight.
We were hungry all the time now. Water from a well within the fort was the only thing we had in abundance. We were reduced to eating the last of the cats and dogs and all but two of the remaining horses. Inside Kiev, I kept reminding myself, it must be even worse.
A day, a night, another day crept by, while we stewed and fretted. Harald and Yaroslav began to give me searching looks. Had I led them into making fools of themselves? I put on a bold face, but doubt gnawed at me. Had Feodosy and his crew of lunatics sunk back into their pious torpor as soon as I departed?
But the next night—our fifth in Vyshgorod—brought a messenger to say that all was in readiness. Yaroslav ordered us all on our knees while he thanked Christ and a host of saints for near an hour. Kuchug and I slipped away unnoticed and spent the time more profitably readying our gear.
Finally, our little army, with a surge of battle joy that made us forget our empty bellies, moved to attack.
Harald and Yaroslav set out together at the head of the Norwegians and the bravest of the Rus warriors. They would be the spearhead, aimed straight at Tyrakh Khan’s silken tent.
The Swedes, Eilif’s former men, were now commanded by a certain Helgi Whale-Belly, a druzhinik they’d elected from among themselves. He was ordered to lead his men around to the west of the city and, as soon as he heard the sound of battle on his left, to attack the camp at its farther end, free the prisoners who were penned up there, scatter the horses, and fight his way to us. The Swedes received these orders in silence.
Harald had pleaded with Yaroslav to stay back, but the prince would not be dissuaded from leading the main thrust. He would leave to no other’s hands, he swore, the sacred duty of cutting his poor brother’s bonds. Among his motives was no doubt an element of sweet revenge—that brawny, boastful Mstislav, who had bullied him since childhood, should have to owe his life to his despised and crippled brother.
Wrapping our weapons in our cloaks for silence, we advanced along the river bank and through the ruins of the podol to that point where the ground begins to rise. We saw no Pecheneg pickets anywhere; weeks of drinking and gorging had taken its toll of discipline.
The prince, in spite of his age and his club foot, drove himself to keep pace with Harald’s long strides. But what Yaroslav could do, Einar Tree-Foot could not. The hardships of the past few days had been too great for his already failing strength; it was impossible that he could hobble on his crutch from Vyshgorod to Kiev.
“We leave this place in the hands of a true and tested warrior, Tree-Foot,” I had told him, trying not to let pity show in my voice. “If we fail, you’ll organize the defense of Vyshgorod.”
“Aye,” he answered. There was so much desolation in that single word.
It was near dawn by the time we were in position—time for me, Kuchug, and the monk who had brought us Feodosy’s message to slip into the river. Wading armpit deep through the icy water, we watched for the glimmer of a candle flame on the shadowy face of the bluff. Feodosy had said there was a cave mouth there, about half the way up, from which the monks were accustomed to lower a bucket to haul up their drinking water.
The signal light winked on and off. We reached the spot and found a knotted rope waiting for us. Hand over hand, with all our paraphernalia tied to our backs, we climbed the bluff.
Feodosy, who met us at the top, betrayed momentary alarm at the sight of Kuchug in his barbarous costume. Then, with unmistakable pride, the abbot showed us what his people had accomplished in this short time—a prodigy of digging—incredible, considering the frailty of their undernourished bodies, and the fact that they only dared work during the daytime when sounds underfoot would go unnoticed amid the bustle of the camp. These monks had the instincts of moles. Apart from psalm-singing, excavation was their chief joy. Now they had pushed their tunnels still farther and in dozens of places dug narrow shafts upwards to within a foot of the surface.
Undoing our packs, we distributed amongst them the pots and pans that we’d collected from all the kitchens of Vyshgorod, the hunting horns, the tubes of birch bark, and lastly Yaroslav’s own brazen war trumpet, freshly blessed and sprinkled with holy water. With just such an instrument (I now knew from inquiring of the prince) had that Hebrew viking Joshua brought down the walls of Jericho. The camp of Tyrakh Khan had no stone walls to fall, yet we hoped to rival his feat nonetheless.
“By the way, Feodosy,” I asked, “has a man been to visit you anytime in the past three days—a Swede, about thirty, thick featured, with his hair in his eyes?”
“We have seen no such person.”
Where in Hel’s Hall could he be? My greatest fear was that, knowing our plan, Eilif would find some way to make it fail.
The monks, with all their noise-making gear, went to their stations. Kuchug crept out of the cave at the bottom of the little ravine, scrambled noiselessly up the side, and strolled as slow and easy as you please toward the khan’s tent. I climbed up behind him just far enough to see him go. This was his own idea—to stand beside his master from the first moment of the attack and defend him with his life until we reached them.
The starry sky was fading into grey. Somewhere a horse snorted and shook its head. Here and there a sleeping body stirred. Drawing my head down, I waited the few moments it would take Kuchug to reach his destination; then I put Yaroslav’s trumpet to my lips.
Picture a field of slumbering men flying straight into the air—for that is what happened when the trumpet’s bray shattered the silence and was followed next moment by the clashing of pots, the squeal of hunting horns, and the most frightful hooing and wooing beneath their feet. Ghosts, trolls—whatever it is that a Pecheneg fears—by this they thought themselves assailed. There was instantaneous panic.
“God and Saint George!” rang Yaroslav’s voice in the distance. The sun, just rising, picked out his trident and Harald’s raven as they gained the high ground and soared above the heads of the terrified Pechenegs. On the heels of their standard-bearers came the two leaders themselves and all their Rus and Norwegian fighters deployed in the ‘swine array’—the wedge-shaped semblance of a pig, with overlapping shields for the hide and spears for the bristles.
Slinging the trumpet over my back, I boosted myself out of the ravine and dashed after Kuchug. All around me was indescribable confusion. Men ran and stumbled this way and that, not knowing where to turn, while their frightened animals reared and plunged.
I found Kuchug, true to his word, standing guard over his master—all alone, for the khan’s guards had fled. A moment later Harald and Yaroslav came pounding up. While the druzhiniks formed a wall of spears around the tent, Harald and I slashed through the white silk and stepped inside.
We found the great khan, abandoned even by his women, crouching naked on the floor and moaning with terror. By pure good luck one of the underground shafts from which the ghostly sounds issued was exactly beneath his feet.
Now, part of my plan was to take Tyrakh prisoner, if we were lucky enough to catch him, for he would be more useful to us alive than dead. I imagined it would be a simple matter to truss up a ninety year old scarecrow and throw him over my shoulder. No one had bothered to tell me that Tyrakh Khan weighed close to three hundred pounds. His belly was huge, his breasts pendulous like a woman’s, his hairless chins quivered.
As soon as he saw us, I think he realized that he was the victim of some kind of trick and that it was only the Rus, after all, that he had to deal with. For he lumbered to his feet and, unarmed as he was, flung himself at us.
Ramming his bald head into the pit of Harald’s stomach, he tossed him as a bull tosses a terrier. This to Harald the giant! As he charged through the tent flap I leapt on his back, locked my arms around his fat neck and held on for dear life. It took five of us, finally, to bring him down. Meanwhile some of our men caught two loose ponies by their bridles, threw saddles on them, and, with lassos tied the Khan’s bulbous ankles to the two inside stirrups; thus he lay on his back with his legs in the air between the horses.
By now, Mstislav was on his feet, supported by Kuchug and Yaroslav, each under one of his stiffened arms. The Wild Bison of Chernigov gazed dumbly at his brother as though at an angel just flown down from the sky. All along the parapet of Kiev’s citadel figures appeared, pointing to us and cheering.
But our victory was still far from sure. We had gotten in—now we must get out. The ghostly noises were growing fainter as the monks, for whom trumpeting and screaming were not regular pastimes, began to tire. At the same time, the Pechenegs were already somewhat recovered from the first shock. Even worse, those at the western end of camp, who, being beyond reach of the monks’ tunnels, had heard no ghostly sounds at all, were streaming in our direction to see what all the commotion was about.
And the Swedes who should have taken them in the flank and scattered them? We listened in vain for their war-cries.
“Close ranks around the prince!” shouted Harald. “Fall back to the podol.”
But it was a steep drop down to the level of the riverside and the enemy was pressing us hard. By this time, some of them had gotten mounted and were putting their bows to use. Their volleys rained down on us, splintering our shields and rattling on our helmets. It was only because I’d had the foresight to put on three mail shirts that I was not killed half a dozen times.
Brave Kuchug was not so lucky. An arrow drove through his teeth and came out at the base of his skull with a gush of blood. As he fell, Mstislav sagged and Yaroslav had to support his brother’s whole weight alone. With one arm around his thick waist he struggled to keep him on his feet while he held his shield over both their heads. Doggedly he went on, asking no help of anyone, until a Rus druzhinik, seeing him stumble, ran to help him.
By now, we had jumped, slid, and tumbled down to the riverbank, but in the process our solid shield-wall was broken up, leaving gaps where the enemy could rush in. Where I was, a band of them, desperate to rescue their khan, charged into us swinging sabers and maces. At the cost of many brave men’s lives we beat them back. But another band, mounted on their sure-footed ponies, had taken a different way down, slipped around our right flank, and now barred our way to the citadel. We were hemmed in right, left, and front, with our backs to the river. Where were the shit-eating Swedes!
Then, hearing a rasping cry behind me, I looked around to see Einar Tree-Foot galloping towards us along the river’s edge on a nag that was as thin and mangy as himself. His sword was in his hand, the reins were in his mouth, on his legless side the empty stirrup danced on the end of its leather.
He came on as in a dream, slowly—and slowly a Pecheneg archer marked him and drew back the feathered arrow to his jaw. Einar toppled from the saddle, the arrow deep in his side. But as he fell, his foot caught in the stirrup and the terrified horse plunged into our midst, dragging him with it. As he came within reach of my sword, I slashed at the leather and cut him loose.
I knelt down, covering him with my shield, as the roar and rush of battle, suspended for that frozen moment, broke in on me again.
“Tree-Foot!”
“Aye,” he croaked. “Tree-Foot’s not—not the man to lie low when a mate’s in trouble. Eilif’s turned the Swedes around, heading back to Vyshgorod. I seen ’em from the wall. He’s left you to die.”
“Then, we’ll die together, Jomsviking—take my hand!”
I hauled him to his feet and got his arm around my shoulder. I wasn’t far from Harald and shouted to him that we were betrayed. I doubt he heard me, though, for just then a great shout went up from the walls of the city.
Hundreds of paces behind and above us, the great gate swung open and a lone figure on a white horse came flying down the slope that descends from the citadel to the riverbank. For a few breathless moments he was all alone, heading at a dead run straight for the Pecheneg band that blocked our retreat. And something that he held cradled in his arm—I thought at first it was a shield—flashed golden in the rising sun. The white horse, struck in the chest with an arrow, fell to its knees and the rider pitched forward—surely to his death—in a swirl of flashing sabers. But now behind him the Kievans, screaming like berserkers, poured through the gate after him. Seeing this, our courage rose and our strength redoubled. We and the Kievans struggled towards each other, trampling the Pechenegs down between us. The blood lust rose in my chest. I screamed my father’s battle cry and swung my ax right and left and felt the crunch of bone under its blade.
As we linked hands, I glimpsed again, above the sea of bodies, that heroic rider; realized, that it was the boy Volodya! He had mounted a Pecheneg pony and still clutched to his chest his golden ‘shield, which was, I saw now, a great gilded icon of Saint George.
Led by Volodya and backed by the Kievans, we made a fighting retreat up the slope. As the last of us passed within, the gate swung shut in the faces of the Pechenegs, who howled with fury and sent flight after flight of arrows against it. I leaned against a wall, my legs trembling, chest heaving. With an edge of my tunic I wiped sweat and Pecheneg blood from my eyes.
The folk of Kiev mobbed us. Men and women, young and old; some fell on their knees before Yaroslav while others stretched out their hands to touch him, and all of them cried his name, hailing him, as they had once hailed his father, ‘Velikiy Knyaz—Grand Prince’.
Mstislav—naked, filthy, and bloody—was not even recognized.
Young Volodya, wearing a mail shirt several sizes too big for him and dragging a man’s sword from his belt, pushed through the crowd toward his father. Like everyone here, he was pinch-faced and haggard, but otherwise unhurt. Looking at him, it was easy to see the lineaments of the warrior he would one day be—the high forehead and piercing gray eyes, the strong jaw, which owed more to Ingigerd than to Yaroslav. The meeting of father and son amidst the wild cheering of the crowd was wonderfully moving. Tears streamed down both their faces as they embraced.
“My eagle, my young falcon,” cried Yaroslav, breathlessly, “what madness seized you? You could have been—he’s only a child—who permitted this?” He didn’t know whether to be glad that his son was alive or furious with the guards who had obeyed the boy’s command to open the gate. “Ah, but God himself held his hand over you, didn’t he, and Saint George shielded your breast!”
That much was certainly true; the heavy oaken board was shaggy with arrows.
“We found your messages,” answered his son. “I did the only thing I could think of. I knew that our people would fight like madmen to rescue both me and the icon. Father, I return your city of Kiev to you, undefiled by even one pagan foot.”
The crowd went mad, seeing in this brave and serious boy the image of his grandfather.
But I could not give myself completely to joy. A victory that cost the life of Einar Tree-Foot seemed almost too dearly bought for me. He was still breathing as I laid him down beside the gate and wondered if I dared cut out the arrow head, which was so deep. But he reached around with his left hand and wrenched the barbed shaft straight out. “You feed your hirdmen well, Jarl,” he cackled aloud, “see how much fat clings to the tip.”
Where were his wits wandering? Was he young again on some battlefield of long ago? One of those vanished warriors who made grim, laconic jokes at the moment of their death?
“Einar, it’s me, Odd.”
“Odd? Young Odd—?” Letting the arrow slip from his fingers, he gripped my shoulder and drew himself up till his face was close to mine. “Einar Tree-Foot’s done what he longed to do—die with steel in him. Won’t the Valkyries carry me to Valhalla now?” It was his one fear, that he would die a peaceful death and be nothing but a squeaking ghost in Hel’s gloomy hall.
“But Tree-Foot,” I said, “these bastards have made us into Christmen, and now they say we can’t go to Christ’s mansion and Odin’s mead-hall both.”
“Eh? Rubbish! Didn’t that scrawny priest tell how Christ was pierced in his side with a spear?
“He did.”
“Well, by the Raven, then he’s earned his right to sup at Odin’s table too! Ha, ha …”
The laugh became a rattle in his throat; a shudder ran along his limbs; his grip on me loosened. So died my friend. An Age, I do believe, died with him.
“Tangle-Hair!” came Harald’s voice from the parapet. “My fine fiery poet! Get you up here at once and stand beside me as a skald should. Hah! What a day! What a victory! What glorious poetry you’ll make of it!”
With a bitter taste in my mouth, I left Einar for a while to go up on the wall. There I found Harald, Yaroslav and his son, and Mstislav, looking more dead than alive.
The fat khan, his back in shreds from the dragging he’d suffered, was slumped like a flour sack over the edge of the parapet. His groans were like music to us. A slave-woman of the town who had lived with the Pechenegs and knew their language was fetched to act as interpreter. Harald spoke in Norse to me, I translated his words into Slavonic for her, and she, in turn, shouted them in Pecheneg to the khan’s warriors, who were gathered in their hundreds at the foot of the wall. In this cumbersome fashion Harald harangued the enemy.
He demanded first that the lesser khans come forward to parlay with him. When they appeared, he told them he would return their master in exchange for all the prisoners they held. At this Yaroslav looked up in surprise. Harald, in typical fashion, had not thought it worth his while to confer with his own prince before parlaying with the enemy.
Below, after a brief conference, the khans agreed to his terms, and pretty soon the surviving captives from Chernigov, Smolensk, and Pereyaslavl were shepherded up the slope, those who could walk carrying those who couldn’t. The gate opened to admit them but the Kievans watched them enter in stony silence. How could they be fed in a city already starving?
When he saw that the survivors were safely inside, Harald spoke again through the interpreter, saying that we would give them back their khan only in exchange for a hundred of their nobles, to be handed over at once.
The Pechenegs spat on the ground and glowered at us but eventually the hundred ‘nobles’ appeared marching up the slope. They lay down their weapons as they entered the gate. Our druzhiniks had all they could do to keep the townsfolk from tearing them to pieces.
(In my opinion they were not really nobles at all, but rather the poorest of the Pechenegs dressed up in fine clothes and costly armor, and ordered to sacrifice themselves for their betters. How would we know the difference?)
Then Harald laughed at the khans and mocked them: “You fools! It’s true what all the world says, that the Pechenegs are the stupidest of men! Did you imagine that Grand Prince Yaroslav of Kiev would ever consent to give back the murderer of his grandfather? Now, watch and you will see how we deal with him. Kraki, the loan of your axe.”
Kraki, one of his bodyguards, handed him the weapon.
I had never before seen done what Harald did then, although my father had described it to me once, on one of our wild nighttime rambles: the ancient ritual slaughter of the ‘blood eagle’.
Tyrakh screamed just once as Harald, standing behind him, brought the axe head whistling down and split his spine lengthwise. Wrenching the axe out he struck twice again until the body was opened all down the back from the base of the neck to the tail bone. We were all spattered with his blood.
Then, tossing the axe aside, he put his hands into the crevice, grasped the ribs, and, with a cracking of bone, wrenched the two halves wide apart. Into the cavity he thrust his arms and pulled out the lungs, which he spread across the dead man’s shoulders so as to resemble the wings of a bird. Gouts of blood dripped from his fingers.
Volodya turned away and was sick, while Yaroslav and many another looked pale around the gills. But in Mstislav’s dull eye there flickered a gleam of satisfaction.
Taking up the axe again, Harald lopped off the Khan’s head and tossed it casually to me, telling me to keep it safe for he had a use for it.
“And now,” cried Harald, “let us see if this headless bird can fly to its roost.” And lifting the mangled carcass up by its legs, he tipped it over the edge. It hit the ground with a sound like wet slops tossed from a window. The Pechenegs drew back and gazed in horror at the bloody mess. Harald had given these cruel men a lesson in savagery that surpassed anything they knew. They were more than beaten; they were shaken down to the soles of their feet.
“This,” he shouted at them, “is how Northmen deal with the Pechenegs and always will!” And he spat at them.
Throughout the Pecheneg camp now arose a shrill keening, growing louder as more and more took up the cry. The great khan was dead.
Nothing could be done now until he was wailed over for many days and finally buried with his horses and his women, in a mound by the bank of the Dnieper far to the south. Meanwhile a murderous struggle over the succession would begin at once among the lesser khans, who were all his sons or grandsons by various wives and concubines. Much blood would flow before one of them emerged victorious.
“Grand Prince, look there—” said a Rus warrior to Yaroslav, pointing toward the west. We all looked and saw a dust cloud, which soon grew into a line of horsemen, hundreds of them, racing over the plain. The Pechenegs ran in terror, leaving behind everything but the remains of their khan. And this time it was not the wily feigned retreat for which they were so famous, but the genuine thing.
Within minutes not a live Pecheneg could be seen from the walls of Kiev.
“Our cursed luck!” said Bryacheslav, Prince of Volhynsk, to Pozvizd, Prince of Izyaslavl, as they reined in their sweating mounts. “To have come all this way and missed the fun!”