Land of the Silver Dragon Page 26

It was, he had been told, a big, bubbling stew pot of a city, where men and women from all over the world came to trade, to fight, to study, and to learn a little of one another’s ways. Peoples of different faiths lived there, apparently in harmony, each accepting that others had the right to view God in the way that their own priests told them they should.

  It was a place where adventurers went seeking their fortune. A place to which soldiers were drawn, in the hope that their talents would be hired by some lord spoiling for a fight. Vikings had gone there; later, following the Norman Conquest and the sea change in the nature of life in Britain, many of the defeated Anglo-Saxons had also fled south, offering their services to a new master and mixing their Norse and Saxon blood with the hot blood of the south.

  In a sudden clear memory, Rollo recalled that Lassair had once told him of her great-uncles, the younger brothers of her beloved grandmother. Three had fought at Hastings, she’d said; two died there on the field, and one, the youngest, disappeared and was never heard of again.

  Reflecting on it now, Rollo would have put money on that one having quietly slipped away and gone to join the Varangian Guard.

  Maybe the old man was still alive, he mused. It was less than thirty years since the Conquest, and the man would have been in his prime back then. Lassair’s Granny Cordeilla had only died a couple of years ago, after all, and the brother who had fled England – Harald, as far as Rollo remembered, the name seeming to float effortlessly up to the surface of his mind – would have been several years younger.

  I might even come across the old man, Rollo thought. I might be sitting in a tavern one sunny morning, next to a scarred old giant of a man with many a story to tell, and never know that he is the great-uncle of the woman I love.

  He sighed, turning away from the ship’s rail and the last sight of the land of his birth. He did not know how far he would venture eastwards: to Byzantium, certainly; maybe even as far as the Holy Land. Wherever he finished up, he would be a long, long way from England.

  Part of him still pined to turn round and set off northwards. Without actually knowing when it had happened, it seemed that Lassair had quietly taken up a place in his heart. He missed her; he longed to be with her.

  ‘But I cannot return yet,’ he said softly to himself.

  For one thing, he had a duty to the king. William was an exacting but generous employer; serving him as he did, Rollo was steadily becoming a wealthy man, for he had little time or opportunity to spend what he earned. Besides, he could scarcely envisage announcing to King William that he’d had enough of being his spy and wanted to quit, in order to settle down and become a ... a what? A farmer? A fenland fisherman? Rollo smiled.

  In a moment of total honesty, he forced himself to recognize that there was another reason why he did not follow his heart and turn for England.

  I am good at what I do, he thought. And, human nature being what it is, we tend to like doing the things we are good at.

  He wasn’t going to return to Lassair just yet because the thought of what lay ahead was more of a draw than what lay behind.

  The admission did not make him feel especially proud of himself. I am sorry, Lassair, he thought.

  He hoped that, when finally he returned, she would be waiting for him.

  But first, before he saw England’s shores again, he was going to Constantinople.

  Footnotes

  1 See Music of the Distant Stars