‘True, merchants and travellers are prone to exaggeration. But you hear a name enough times and you begin to think maybe there’s a grain of truth to it.’

‘What name?’ said Lilla.

‘The Great City,’ said Valrik. ‘Miklagard.’

CHAPTER NINE

‘Byzantium,’ said the Goth beside him.

Erlan dipped his head, still pulling the oar, his curiosity outweighing the pain in his hands. But the flashes of white stone he glimpsed through the oar-hole were too fleeting to make much sense of. Only that there was a lot of it.

‘Where will they take us?’ he asked the Goth in Greek. He’d learned as much of the language as he could from the man to whom Ramedios had chained him, mostly in whispers in the dead of night. The Goth had taught him willingly, as much to keep his own sanity as to help the northern stranger. His name was Ildur. He had a hooked nose, a tuft of beard and a head completely shaven, but for a rat’s tail hanging off the back of his skull.

‘Straight to market,’ Ildur grunted. ‘Or else a lock-up till they can get rid of us.’

The whip crack came from nowhere and bit painfully across Erlan’s forearm, drawing blood.

‘Keep your mouth shut, you sack of sheep shit,’ snarled the overseer above them. Erlan kept rowing. He understood more of the crew’s language now, not that much of it was worth the hearing.

‘No more with the whip, you witless fool,’ Ramedios yelled. ‘We want them unmarked on the block.’

The air was stifling, and hot as a forge-fire under the decking of the ship. If Ramedios was concerned for their welfare now, he’d shown little enough over the last two weeks, sparing barely enough food and water on his human chattels to keep them alive.

When they weren’t called upon to row, the slaves were left to fester in the slop of bilge water and urine and vomit and worse which remained despite the token efforts every couple of days to flush it out.

Since Erlan had lost his freedom, they’d seen three other ports on their progress around the Black Sea – or Friendly Sea, as the Greeks called it – and the number of slaves in the hold had grown. Finally, their prow swung due south into a narrow strait that Ildur called the Bosporus. Here, the sea traffic increased, and the shores rose up into a narrow bottleneck of leafy hilltops and steep-backed bays.

In the straits, even the smaller towns were bigger than anything Erlan had ever seen, their tiled roofs spreading inland like blooms of pink moss. It was early summer now. The nights were shorter and a cool relief from the long, hot days of blazing sunshine. And all the while, the bitter irony that his quest for freedom had made him a slave chaffed as sore as the chains around his wrists.