Free Lord of Slaughter by M. D. Lachlan Page B

spectacle.
    The horses of the outriders lurched forward and the Greeks filed into the city. They walked through the gates, the crowd howling and clapping, people pushing out of the city to greet the strange northerners, to touch their hair and beards, feel their muscles – kiss them, even, in the case of some of the more excitable women. The Vikings weren’t slow to respond, hugging the women and crying out to more to join them. The column halted, pressed in by the throng coming out of the town – merchants carrying silks, food and tents, doctors rushing out waving bandages to advertise their trade, men with great pots of what the wolfman thought must be beer.
    His cart jolted forwards and he really did start to feel a little afraid. The whiteness of the streets dazzled him and the noise of the great mass of people was almost unbearable. Giants looked down on him and a seething growl rose within him, but then he realised these were men of stone or metal – statues, though much bigger than any he had ever seen.
    Alongside the column merchants ran, tugging on the tunics of the Greek warriors, trying to get them to buy fish, bread, candles, gaming pieces, weapons and many things the wolfman just didn’t recognise. It was an uproar the equal of any battle. A man ran along with a table twice his height, poking a hand out from beneath it to tug at the warriors. It reminded him of a creature he had once seen in the possession of a southern merchant – a tortoise.
    The procession moved on, down the avenue of porches, through splendid squares, past huge and gaudy columns, beside what appeared to be an endless bridge following the route of the road. These things seemed monstrous to the wolfman, his head pounded and he was covered in sweat. The biggest town he had been in was Kiev – a village compared to this place.
    He had to endure. His first mission to be killed by the emperor had failed; the harder route now opened to him, the one that would require all his courage. There was a reason for the splendour of Constantinople, Miklagard, the world city. It lay below it, in the waters that flowed under its streets – in the flooded caves that had been made to serve as cisterns to hold water for the fountains, drinking troughs and baths, and beyond them, deeper, to where older waters lay.
    People spat at him and a few threw dung and stones. His guards warned them away, shouting that this was the emperor’s prisoner and whatever harm was to come to him was not for commoners to decide. The warnings proved useless and the crowd continued to curse and throw things. In the end two of the Hetaereia jumped up alongside him and protected him with their shields. They had been instructed by the emperor to deliver the prisoner to the Numera alive, and they knew Basileios’ tolerance for mistakes had evaporated at Abydos.
    The wolfman steeled himself. He’d put up with worse, much worse – with freezing mountain winters, with the hardships of the lone hunter, with weeks spent starving and chanting beneath the harsh sun and the cold moon, singing the song his wolf brother had put into his head.
    He once had a name: Elifr. He remembered it but it had no emotional connection to him now. He’d lived with a family in the north, by the great cliff of the Troll Wall. He’d never felt part of them. While his brothers were broad, tall and blond, he was smaller, thin, but with strong arms as spare and lean as the roots of a tree. Though his mother cared for him, she did not love him as she did her natural sons. He had been taken in as a child, as the return for a favour from a healer who had saved his father from a fever that looked set to kill him.
    So Elifr had grown up lonely, wandering the hills, volunteering to take the sheep to the furthest pastures.
    He remembered the night his wolf brother had come to him. It was summer and he slept only lightly. In the day he had found fresh wolf spoor and he knew the predators must be close by. He’d