truly alive to me, no longer a collection of names, and stories, and complicated prayers. At first, I could get no further than an understanding of how much it was that I had failed tounderstand. But even this, Halfdan said, was a necessary step towards the changes that would come. After many stages of transformation lay a voyage beyond the bone cage of the body, when people lay as if dead while their spirits ranged across the earth, sometimes inhabiting the forms of animals, sometimes disguised as breaths of wind.
Slowly, I began to see. New instincts appeared inside me, as if awakened from a hibernating sleep. When I walked through the forests to choose the ground on which we prayed, I felt the sharpening of those nameless senses which drew me to the sacred sites. Soon I could lead us to them as easily as Halfdan had done.
Just as this gift refused to be held within the flimsy clutches of our sight or touch or hearing, it also lay beyond the grasp of words, defying all who tried to measure it with speech. And yet it was there. When I prayed at Halfdan’s side, the world around me seemed to shimmer with this life, reducing it to the grainy dream of an illusion, which my life back in Altvik, and the family and friends I left behind, had already begun to resemble.
Halfdan had come to Miklagard
Halfdan had come to Miklagard in order to offer his services to the Emperor Basil II who, at the age of eighteen, had just begun his rule over Byzantium.
Miklagard, its capital city, was a place so vast and crowded, steeped in the smell of unnameable spices and filth, that in all the time I spent there, I never felt truly at ease.
There were already a number of Norsemen working for the Emperor. In time, they became known as the Varangian Guard. They came from every corner of the Norseman’s world, and in their meshing of the Eastern and the Western languages, as well as of words borrowed on their way across the Mediterranean or down the crooked path of the Dnieper, they had emerged with a language of their own. This suited them, because they were separated now, by much more than distance, from what they were before they left their pine-forested homes and the jade-coloured water of the fjords.
Any Norseman who could survive the voyage to Miklagard had already achieved a great deal, and if he passed the tests of swordsmanship and horseback riding, he would be welcome. Still, in those first weeks of their initiation, the sun often rose on empty beds, whose recent occupants had fled in the night for reasons they never gave or were expected to explain.
Among the ranks of the Varangian, I met the most hardheaded, sharp-instincted and pain-denying people that ever walked the earth. They had been drawn to this place like a migrating beast is drawn to its ancestral hunting ground.
The Varangian lived in a complex within the Emperor’s palace walls. They were extravagantly paid, both for their loyalty and for their viciousness, the likes of which the Emperor could not find among his own people. They saw themselves as a kind of shifting brotherhood, with their own laws and traditions. It was in the torch-lit Varangian halls, that people like Halfdan found the first place they had ever thought of as home. These men took more pride in carrying the red-painted shield, which was the mark of the Varangian, than in anything they’d ever done before.
Like Halfdan, many Norsemen kept servants, who followed them everywhere, even into the fighting. I spent twelve years in Halfdan’s shadow and lay each night like a dog at the foot of his bed.
The Varangian slept in long, stone rooms. There were thirteen beds in each, six against either wall and one in the centre at the back, reserved for whoever held the highest rank. Carpets were hung on the walls, and shuttered windows opened out onto walkways shaded by olive trees, reserved for the Varangian alone.
Training was carried out daily in high-walled gravel courtyards, where as Halfdan’s
Slowly, I began to see. New instincts appeared inside me, as if awakened from a hibernating sleep. When I walked through the forests to choose the ground on which we prayed, I felt the sharpening of those nameless senses which drew me to the sacred sites. Soon I could lead us to them as easily as Halfdan had done.
Just as this gift refused to be held within the flimsy clutches of our sight or touch or hearing, it also lay beyond the grasp of words, defying all who tried to measure it with speech. And yet it was there. When I prayed at Halfdan’s side, the world around me seemed to shimmer with this life, reducing it to the grainy dream of an illusion, which my life back in Altvik, and the family and friends I left behind, had already begun to resemble.
Halfdan had come to Miklagard
Halfdan had come to Miklagard in order to offer his services to the Emperor Basil II who, at the age of eighteen, had just begun his rule over Byzantium.
Miklagard, its capital city, was a place so vast and crowded, steeped in the smell of unnameable spices and filth, that in all the time I spent there, I never felt truly at ease.
There were already a number of Norsemen working for the Emperor. In time, they became known as the Varangian Guard. They came from every corner of the Norseman’s world, and in their meshing of the Eastern and the Western languages, as well as of words borrowed on their way across the Mediterranean or down the crooked path of the Dnieper, they had emerged with a language of their own. This suited them, because they were separated now, by much more than distance, from what they were before they left their pine-forested homes and the jade-coloured water of the fjords.
Any Norseman who could survive the voyage to Miklagard had already achieved a great deal, and if he passed the tests of swordsmanship and horseback riding, he would be welcome. Still, in those first weeks of their initiation, the sun often rose on empty beds, whose recent occupants had fled in the night for reasons they never gave or were expected to explain.
Among the ranks of the Varangian, I met the most hardheaded, sharp-instincted and pain-denying people that ever walked the earth. They had been drawn to this place like a migrating beast is drawn to its ancestral hunting ground.
The Varangian lived in a complex within the Emperor’s palace walls. They were extravagantly paid, both for their loyalty and for their viciousness, the likes of which the Emperor could not find among his own people. They saw themselves as a kind of shifting brotherhood, with their own laws and traditions. It was in the torch-lit Varangian halls, that people like Halfdan found the first place they had ever thought of as home. These men took more pride in carrying the red-painted shield, which was the mark of the Varangian, than in anything they’d ever done before.
Like Halfdan, many Norsemen kept servants, who followed them everywhere, even into the fighting. I spent twelve years in Halfdan’s shadow and lay each night like a dog at the foot of his bed.
The Varangian slept in long, stone rooms. There were thirteen beds in each, six against either wall and one in the centre at the back, reserved for whoever held the highest rank. Carpets were hung on the walls, and shuttered windows opened out onto walkways shaded by olive trees, reserved for the Varangian alone.
Training was carried out daily in high-walled gravel courtyards, where as Halfdan’s
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