help, and help we are bringing,
Lift her! Lift her!
A long pull for Miklagard.
Our arms are strong and our sword-blades singing,
A strong pull for Miklagard.
First the fighting and then the pay,
Lift her! Lift her!
A long pull for Miklagard.
Gift-gold you promised at close of the day,
A strong pull for Miklagard.
Here on the wind we come, Northman and Rus,
Lift her! Lift her!
A long pull for Miklagard.
Nothing to fear now, Little Emperor,
A strong pull for Miklagard,
Nothing to fear now, excepting
us
!
It was really a very bad song, I suppose, it did not even rhyme properly, and after a while as we got further south, it seemed better to change it here and there; but it pleased us well enough at the time.
12 Battle for Abydos
I SUPPOSE NO man who has once seen Constantinople ever forgets that first sight. For me – for us – it came in the honey-coloured light of an early autumn evening, as we swarmed ashore from the Golden Horn, with half the city, as it seemed, turned out to greet us. I remember city walls that seemed to have been built for a fortress of giants, tall buildings set about with cypress trees and roofed with russet and purple, gold and green, vast arches upheld on marble columns that twisted as fantastically as bindweed stems, towers that seemed straining up to touch the sky and great aqueducts that strode across the city on legs of white stone. I remember little fretted balconies that clung like swallows’ nests high overhead to the walls of tall narrow houses; and wide streets that opened into gardens and open spaces where statues of marble heroes and golden saints and bronze horsemen stood tall and proud among shade-trees; and everywhere the domes of Christian churches catching the last of the run-honey light. I, who thought that I knew cities because I had seen Dublin and Kiev, had never imagined that there could be such a city in the world of men.
Later, it became a city in which real people lived and died, where one could buy melons or have one’s boots re-soled, with barracks and wine-shops as well as palaces, and children playing on doorsteps, and evil smells, and dark alleys where it was not wise to go without a friend so that you could cover each other’s backs if need be. But to this day, the city that I saw on that first evening remains in my memory a city in a crowded dream.
The camp outside the great walls of Theodosius, where weslept under tents of striped ship’s canvas in the months that followed, was much closer to the world I knew.
We had expected to be unleashed at once against the Emperor’s enemies, whose watch-fires flowered in the darkness every night, clear across the narrow waters of the Bosphorus; but instead, we spent the autumn months training with the Imperial Guards.
‘Patience, children,’ said Erland Silkbeard, when some of us grew restive, ‘no War Host can fight its best when its two halves have not learned to fight together and know nothing of each other’s ways of warfare.’
‘But meanwhile, time goes by,’ grumbled Hakon Ship-Chief.
‘Surely. But that’s no matter. The Emperor has one advantage – besides that he has our swords behind him – his Red Ships hold the seas, and so long as they do that, he can afford to wait, and choose his own fighting-time. Also’ – he was playing gently with his beard, much as a man gentling the neck-feathers of his falcon – ‘the Byzantines know that the men of the north seldom make war in the winter; so when the last leaves are off the almond trees, these rebel Byzantines will lower their guards, at least a little. That is when we strike.’
Aye, and on a winter’s night, with snow to aid us, we struck.
Led by Basil himself, the whole War Host – us, that is, and the Guards; the rest of the Emperor’s troops were still in Thrace – were ferried across the Bosphorus under cover of flurrying snow. And in the dark just before dawn we descended on Chrysopolis while the rebels were
Lift her! Lift her!
A long pull for Miklagard.
Our arms are strong and our sword-blades singing,
A strong pull for Miklagard.
First the fighting and then the pay,
Lift her! Lift her!
A long pull for Miklagard.
Gift-gold you promised at close of the day,
A strong pull for Miklagard.
Here on the wind we come, Northman and Rus,
Lift her! Lift her!
A long pull for Miklagard.
Nothing to fear now, Little Emperor,
A strong pull for Miklagard,
Nothing to fear now, excepting
us
!
It was really a very bad song, I suppose, it did not even rhyme properly, and after a while as we got further south, it seemed better to change it here and there; but it pleased us well enough at the time.
12 Battle for Abydos
I SUPPOSE NO man who has once seen Constantinople ever forgets that first sight. For me – for us – it came in the honey-coloured light of an early autumn evening, as we swarmed ashore from the Golden Horn, with half the city, as it seemed, turned out to greet us. I remember city walls that seemed to have been built for a fortress of giants, tall buildings set about with cypress trees and roofed with russet and purple, gold and green, vast arches upheld on marble columns that twisted as fantastically as bindweed stems, towers that seemed straining up to touch the sky and great aqueducts that strode across the city on legs of white stone. I remember little fretted balconies that clung like swallows’ nests high overhead to the walls of tall narrow houses; and wide streets that opened into gardens and open spaces where statues of marble heroes and golden saints and bronze horsemen stood tall and proud among shade-trees; and everywhere the domes of Christian churches catching the last of the run-honey light. I, who thought that I knew cities because I had seen Dublin and Kiev, had never imagined that there could be such a city in the world of men.
Later, it became a city in which real people lived and died, where one could buy melons or have one’s boots re-soled, with barracks and wine-shops as well as palaces, and children playing on doorsteps, and evil smells, and dark alleys where it was not wise to go without a friend so that you could cover each other’s backs if need be. But to this day, the city that I saw on that first evening remains in my memory a city in a crowded dream.
The camp outside the great walls of Theodosius, where weslept under tents of striped ship’s canvas in the months that followed, was much closer to the world I knew.
We had expected to be unleashed at once against the Emperor’s enemies, whose watch-fires flowered in the darkness every night, clear across the narrow waters of the Bosphorus; but instead, we spent the autumn months training with the Imperial Guards.
‘Patience, children,’ said Erland Silkbeard, when some of us grew restive, ‘no War Host can fight its best when its two halves have not learned to fight together and know nothing of each other’s ways of warfare.’
‘But meanwhile, time goes by,’ grumbled Hakon Ship-Chief.
‘Surely. But that’s no matter. The Emperor has one advantage – besides that he has our swords behind him – his Red Ships hold the seas, and so long as they do that, he can afford to wait, and choose his own fighting-time. Also’ – he was playing gently with his beard, much as a man gentling the neck-feathers of his falcon – ‘the Byzantines know that the men of the north seldom make war in the winter; so when the last leaves are off the almond trees, these rebel Byzantines will lower their guards, at least a little. That is when we strike.’
Aye, and on a winter’s night, with snow to aid us, we struck.
Led by Basil himself, the whole War Host – us, that is, and the Guards; the rest of the Emperor’s troops were still in Thrace – were ferried across the Bosphorus under cover of flurrying snow. And in the dark just before dawn we descended on Chrysopolis while the rebels were
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