Free Blood Feud by Rosemary Sutcliff

branch on the fire. Smoke was the only thing to keep off the stinging clouds of mosquitoes that made life a torment after sundown.
    ‘Some nerve, that must have taken,’ Orm whistled softly. ‘I doubt this Lord Vladimir is one who likes his thoughts being put to him, before he has had time to think them himself!’
    ‘Some nerve, yes. But behold, we are free and on our homeward way.’
    Thormod was looking intently at Hakon; I was watching Thormod; and above us the fir tops whispered together in the little wind that never reached the ground.
    Then Hakon said, ‘All this, you told to the
Serpent’s
crew, and still they held on for Kiev? How was it different, between them and you?’
    The other grinned. ‘They were heading south anyway. And did you know any of the Northern Kind to turn back from a fight when there was a fight brewing? All other things being equal. For us it
was
different; we’d made our trading trip, and a good one, too. We were heading north, and we’d been long away from home.’
    ‘We also are heading south anyway, and are not yet hungry for our homes. And it is in my mind that a man grows rusty like a sword-blade, if he holds too long to the ways of peace.’ Hakon’s one little bright eye was suddenly dancing in his battered face. ‘How say you, brothers?’
    The crew of the
Red Witch
gave tongue in agreement, to a man.
    Thormod and I looked at each other, and let our breaths go, gently.

9 Six Thousand Fighting Men
    NEXT MORNING HAKON paid off the ox drivers, and we ran the
Red Witch
down into the water and set off on our river-faring once again. The worst was behind us now. The flow of the river was with us instead of against; and sometimes we could just let it take us, with the steersman at the stern and a few men rowing.
    We passed high-piled beaver dams that choked the water here and there into dark spreading lagoons; and presently villages began to appear on the banks, and the fir trees that had hemmed us in so long began to give place to open woodlands of ash and elm and a kind of sycamore already touched with the first fires of autumn. Soon there were stretches of grassland too. It was so good to be able to see wide skies again, and let the eyes go free into a distance. And all the while, day by day, the river broadened, until at last we came into the great Dnieper.
    And on an evening of clear long lights, and a fresh north wind ruffling the water, and with our dragon-head at the prow, and every man on the oars, we brought the
Red Witch
swinging down the last stretch of the river, round a last bluff of the western shore, and saw, over our shoulders, the crowding roofs of a town rising from the boat-sheds and crowded jetties along the waterfront, to the high halls along the hillcrest that caught the westering light as though they were brushed with gold. The evening smoke of cooking-fires making a blue haze over all, and the shadows lying long across the water and the Kiev marshes.
    Kiev, the High City of the Rus, that had become so when the Northmen first pushed south from their earliest settlements round Novgorod. Kiev, spreading its power up anddown the great rivers and through the forests and across the empty steppe-lands, wherever the Viking breed had made their land-take, wherever they had bred their own blue eyes and fair hair into the darkness of the Tribes; wherever they held the trade and the weapons. But I knew little of that at the time, and my foremost thought, as we came down the last stretch towards the crowded wharves, and the shadow of the city fell across us, was that somewhere among the long dark shapes of the shipping must be the
Serpent
; and on board, or somewhere among the crowded ways of the town, Anders and Herulf, waiting for our coming.
    And a shadow that was more than the shadow of the city seemed to fall across me. I snatched a glance at Thormod swinging to and fro to the oar beside me; but his face, what I could see of it, was shut, and told me