Murdo was on his feet in an instant, straining for a glimpse of King Magnus' fleet. He scanned the shoreline to the right and left, but saw nothing. 'Where?' he demanded of Hallvard, the sailor beside him on the rail.
'There! The king's ships! I see them!' cried Nial, his arm around the throat of the dragon. He stood on the rail, stabbing a finger at a small cluster of gleaming white buildings clinging to the hillside above a small, rock-sided bay. Murdo squinted his eyes and saw what appeared to be a dark mass on the shining water of the little bay below the town. Rising from this dark mass, like so many headless spears, were the masts of the longships. At long last, they had caught the ever-elusive fleet. Where there were longships, Norsemen could not be far away.
By the time Skidbladnir slid into the cove, Murdo was more than ready to face the entire Saracen warhost all by himself. He did not wait for the keel to bump the small stone quay at the end of the village, but jumped into the shallow water and waded to shore.
'There is no one here,' he called to the others splashing up onto the strand behind him. Jon Wing and the three monks came ashore at the quay, and Murdo ran to where they stood. 'The place is deserted.'
The seaman scanned the quiet village's empty footpaths and byways and replied, 'We shall see.'
Proceeding on, they paused at the place where the town's single street met the harbour path. Putting two fingers into his mouth, Jon gave a long, shrill whistle. He whistled twice more, and on the third, a door opened at one of the nearby houses and a tall, fair-haired Norseman staggered out. He took one look at the newcomers and shouted something over his shoulder to someone inside the house, then came running down to the shore to meet them.
'Olvar Three-Toes!' shouted Jon Wing. 'We find you at last.'
'Hey-hey,' replied the Norseman, rubbing sleep from his eyes. 'You have found us, Jon Wing. What has taken you so long?'
'We can only sail as fast as the wind allows,' replied Jon.
'No doubt you have stopped for plunder in every town you passed,' replied the sailor named Olvar with a smile. 'This is what has taken you so long, I think.'
'Nay,' answered Jon Wing happily. 'We have these monks with us,' he. indicated Ronan, Fionn, and Emlyn coming up behind him, 'so we could not plunder a single town.'
Three more Norsemen emerged from the house and made their way down to the shore, calling noisy greetings to the crewmen they knew. 'Is it just the four of you, then?' asked Jon.
'Hey-hey,' replied Olvar. 'Us four, and six others. We drew lots, and the losers had to stay behind to guard the ships. All the rest have gone to join the siege.'
'Is the city far?' asked Ronan.
'Three leagues-maybe a little more.' Olvar shrugged. 'That is what I heard.'
'What of the villagers here?' asked Emlyn. 'Are they friendly?'
'I think so. Most of them have gone to tend the fields up in the hills. Only a few old ones are left behind, and they keep to themselves mostly, but they give us eggs and cheese.'
'Have you seen any Saracens?' wondered Fionn, staring at the dry, brush-covered hills rising behind the village.
'Nay,' replied Olvar. 'They have all run to the mountains to hide. They are Greeks here anyway.' Turning back to Jon, he said, 'Did you bring any ol? They have only wine in this place, and we are thirsty.'
Jon expressed his regrets, and said that he did not have any ale, either. He then called to some of his crewmen to bring the arms and armour ashore, secure the boat, and prepare to set off.
'You are not staying?' Olvar said, disappointment darkening his sunny features.
'We must hurry to Antioch before the city is taken,' replied Jon, 'otherwise we will get no plunder. Also, the king is waiting for his counsellors.'
As the weapons were unloaded and carried ashore, the six other guardsmen emerged from another house and came to greet their comrades. Weapons were then distributed among the men. Unaccustomed to carrying a heavy shield, Murdo took only a spear for himself; the blade was somewhat rusty from the voyage, but the edge and point were sharp still, and the ashwood shaft was sound. When they were ready, the Norsemen walked with them past the fields beyond the village and showed them which road to follow. Jon and his seafarers, now transformed into a warrior band, bade their comrades farewell, promising to send them ale from Antioch as soon as the city fell.
Murdo, eager to be reunited with his father and brothers, took his place just behind Jon and Ronan, leading the party, and settled into his stride. After so many months at sea, the solid ground felt strange under his feet; he kept expecting the earth to arch and plunge, and continually braced himself for the swell that never came. As they climbed the first low hills beyond the village, he began to notice the smell of the air-heavy and dense as the earth itself, and filled with a hundred heady scents of sun-baked rock and clay and brush and summer flowers.
The morning, already warm, grew steadily warmer the further into the hills they travelled, and Murdo, regretting the times he had complained of the cramped space on deck, began to long for the cooling sea breeze always present aboard the ship. Upon reaching the crest of the highest hill, he turned to look back briefly at the sea glittering flat and calm, and the tiny bay and village already disappearing behind them. Then, shouldering his spear, Murdo turned his face towards the east, and did not look back again.
The sun was directly overhead when they reached the hills above the river plain. Murdo, eyes downcast and squinting against the white-hot light, could feel the skin on the back of his brown neck beginning to sizzle; where the sun struck the top of his head, it felt as if his hair was on fire; the soles of his feet were burning through -his leather boots; his heavy siarc, wet through with sweat, stuck to his skin and chafed as he trudged along. Even the monks, who ordinarily made no concession to the weather, gathered up their long robes and tucked the hems into their belts.
The long walk had been hot and tiring, but wholly uneventful. The fierce Syrian sun was beginning its long slow slide into the west when the forerunners sang out that their destination had been sighted. Along with the rest of the war band, Murdo picked up his feet and hastened the last few paces up the long slope to the top of the hill, and the city came into view, rising before them across the Orontes valley like the immense cloudbank of a storm looming on the horizon.
The sight halted the company in their tracks.
The monks had said it was a large city, an important city, a great city-but nothing they said had prepared any of them for the towering magnitude of the place: walls eighty feet high and two leagues long were guarded by three hundred towers, some of which protected the citadel occupying the highest promontory on the eastern wall. The walls on the lower section rose sheer from the slow-flowing river, while those of the upper section were carved out of the mountain itself, allowing the high citadel a commanding view of the valley all the way to the sea on one hand, and the Tarsus mountains on the other.
Murdo gaped in awe. Not only was Antioch the largest, most strongly fortified city he had ever seen, it was also the most beautiful. Looking at it rising across the valley, the straight high walls and towers adazzle in the blinding light, it seemed less a city than an enormous jeweclass="underline" a monstrous ornament carved of whitest ivory and nestled against the black surrounding mountains, or a colossal milk-coloured moonstone set upon the dusty green of the valley to shimmer gently in the heat haze of a blistering summer day.
Crops and grazing land spread in irregular blotches over the river plain; here and there, Murdo could see men working with teams of oxen. Two roads, passing either way along the river, met at a bridge below the main gate, and there were a few people straggling on the roads, some with ox-carts bearing goods into the city. White birds soared in the air over the fields and above the towering walls.