Free Thunder God by Paul Watkins Page B

Already, our horses had returned of their own accord. They snorted and stamped among the still, dust-shrouded bodies.
    I heard a choking sigh and glanced up to see the Emperor, huddled in the shade of a boulder. Knowing that he was not badly hurt, and that it would be better for me not to see him this way, I turned and made my way down the slope until I reached the level ground.
    I set off to help Halfdan, but I was too late.
    He had been struck in the chest by one of the little toy arrows. When I found him, he was on his hands and knees, spitting bloody saliva at the ground. I knelt down next to him, and he patted his fingers against my face. ‘Is that you, Hakon?’ he asked. ‘I cannot see. Is there blood in my eyes?’ Halfdan dabbed his rough-padded fingertips against his cheeks, which showed no sign of any wound. ‘Why am I blind?’
    From the wheezy rattle in his voice, I knew Halfdan did not have long to live. But I could not imagine him dying. Only Halfdan could kill Halfdan, and even he did not know how.
    I tried to draw out the arrow, but it was too deep and sent him into a fit of coughing and wretching. His arms and legs trembled, fingers dug into the dirt.
    When I told him the arrow would not come out, he ordered me to push it through.
    I did what he asked and it killed him.
    Afterwards, seeing his lifeless body, I could not seem to get into my head the fact that his death had made me free. Now that freedom had arrived, I was afraid of it. In that moment, if I had been able, I would have returned to life the man who stole me from my home and would have given up my freedom once again.
    Instead, I began gathering stones for a grave.
    ‘You must not bury him like that,’ said a voice behind me.
    I turned to see Cabal. For the first time, I noticed that his eyes were the exact pale green of robin’s eggs.
    *
    Cabal was a strange man, even to the strangest among us. Tied to the metal ringlets of his chain-mail vest were old coins and beads and small animal bones, which he had collected for luck. As if to prove the worth of these talismans, he had never gotten sick or been hurt in all his years among the Varangian. There were many who believed he was untouchable.
    Cabal was said to be one of the last of a breed of Celts who had died out fighting the Romans. He seemed resigned to walk the earth as a shadow of his vanished tribe. He had left home to join the Varangian although in the five years it took him to reach Miklagard, he was not even certain they existed.
    Now Cabal belonged to the brotherhood, but in many ways he also stood apart. He earned himself a reputation for brutality in battle even among the Varangian, who were considered by the inhabitants of Miklagard to be savage almost beyond comprehension. I had followed in the bloody path of Cabal’s horse, as the heads he had taken in battle lolled wide-eyed and filmed with dust, tied by their hair to the pommel of his saddle. They said Cabal preserved these heads in pots of cedar oil, which he buried in a secret place.
    When the fighting ended, Cabal would return to his old, gentle self, so unlike his other side that he seemed to be not one, but two people trapped inside a cage of flesh and bone. When asked why this was so, Cabal spoke of a thing called the Ail Gysgod, the Second Shadow, which the Celts had known and used in battle since long before his ancestors fought soldiers of the Roman Emperor Augustus. Arrayed before their enemies, the Celts had transformed themselves into a trancelike rage. The Romans saw the bodies of these men begin to ripple and shimmer, as if the boundaries of their skin had come undone and they were changing now into vast and terrifying creatures, which lived inside them and could be summoned with this pounding wordless chant.
    The things Cabal knew about what horrors lurked inside him, the rest of us had never dared to dream of in ourselves.
    ‘You must not bury him,’ Cabal said again.
    I knew the body should be burned