However, there were one or two adventurous spirits from the North who made it that far, and further, during this period. The earliest reference I found was a short tale entitled Eireks Saga Ví∂förla, the text of which dates from around AD 1300 but refers to the journey of two men who travelled from Scandinavia via Constantinople and onward as far as the Yemen (or perhaps India) at some point in the mid-eighth century. Their names were Eirek the Traveller (a Norwegian) and Eirek the Dane. The fact that the two protagonists shared a forename lends the story a ring of truth, at least to my mind. They paid court to the emperor at the time – possibly Leo the Isaurian himself given the dates of his reign, or else his son. There the Northmen heard all about the Christian faith, picked up the Greek tongue, and impressed the emperor with their intelligence and manly bearing, before continuing onwards on their quest to find Údáinsakr – the Deathless Acre. This was a mystical place said to lie beyond the limits of Mi∂gard, the world of men, and appears to be a conflation of a Norse pagan concept with the Christian conception of heaven. Be that as it may, Eirek the Traveller’s quest to find the Deathless Acre was the result of a bet made during a particularly heavy drinking session with his Norwegian mates.

Plus ça change. . .

The route that Erlan and then Lilla and her companions take south is more or less the same route that came to be favoured by traders between the Baltic and the Black Seas. From the Gulf of Estonia, this followed the Dvina river (which I call by its older name, the Dagava), then branched into a tributary of this called the Kasplya leading to an overland portage that linked up with the larger Dnieper river roughly where the city of Smolensk is situated today. The route would still have been relatively uncharted at this point and was probably known only to the most enterprising and pioneering of northern skippers. It was only with the establishment of a Viking settlement at the site of Kiev and the draw of the slave market (and silver) of Baghdad in the ninth century that the trade route began to flourish.

The episode of the couple caught in adultery, while rather grisly, was not entirely my own invention but was adapted from an account in Ibn Fadlan’s adventures two centuries later in a region a little further to the east. He describes witnessing the summary judgement of a couple condemned for adultery. The wretched transgressors were despatched in turn by bending two young saplings to the ground and tying their limbs to each, then cutting the restraints so that the trees sprang upright. The end result was much the same.

Cometh the hour; cometh the man.