Blood Feud by Rosemary Sutcliff

Author:Rosemary Sutcliff [Sutcliff, Rosemary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448173013
Publisher: RHCP
Published: 1976-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

13 Faces by Firelight

THE EMPEROR DID not sleep in Abydos that night. He was always a man more at home in an armed camp than within city walls, and always a man to bide with his men. So while Constantine went off in search of city comforts, he spent the night after the battle as he had spent the night before it, in his great blue and purple tent pitched beside a few oleander trees in the midst of the camp.

And for our part in the day’s fighting, he ordered that we, the Northmen of Kiev, should furnish his guard for the night.

And how it came about, I’d not be knowing – maybe it was because Erland Silkbeard was the closest and most powerful of Khan Vladimir’s Hearth-Companions and Hakon One-Eye and old friend of Erland’s – the crew of the Red Witch were among the chosen Northmen. Which is how I, who seemed born to spend my life herding cattle in the west of England, stood my guard over the Emperor of Byzantium on the night that he was made safe on his throne.

Every detail of that night stands clear in my mind. Did I not say that I was very young? So young, even for my nineteen years, that it seemed to me a great and glorious thing to stand guard over an Emperor. I remember the sounds of the camp; passing footsteps, a voice upraised in a snatch of song. And beyond the camp sounds, I was aware of a great silence that was the silence of the spent battlefield, pricked now and again by the cry of some night-prowling beast that had smelt blood and come to the feasting. There were torches everywhere, down at the picket lines, before the tents of the generals; distant cressets flowering small and red above the ramparts of Abydos; and scattered through the camp, the watch-fires, and the darkness between, full of the shifting shadows of men lost and found and lost again as they came and went their ways. I was standing beside the entrance to the Royal Tent, leaning on my sword, and staring into the glow of the watch-fire where those of us not yet standing sentry sat or sprawled, talking low-voiced or already asleep.

Someone came crosswise out of the dark into the firelight, and glanced down in passing at the sleepers huddled in their cloaks. He checked the merest breath of time, his gaze caught by one in particular, and then was gone again into the dark, on his way to wherever it was that he was going. But it seemed to me that I could still see his face: Anders Herulfson’s face, firelit against the night; and I looked where he had looked in that brief, passing moment, knowing what – who – I should see.

Thormod was sleeping on his back with his face tipped to the sky, his cloak pulled close about him; and suddenly, piercingly, I remembered the one time that I had

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