The Midgard Serpent

by James L. Nelson

  He leaned over in the saddle and spat on the ground. “Like a plague,” he said. “Like a plague swept through here.”

  “It did. It still does,” said Halfdan Gudrødson. Halfdan the Black. King Halfdan the Black. He did not bother to elaborate. Skorri knew what he was referring to.

  They had been riding north from Halfdan’s great hall at Grømstad, roughly following the coastline. That is to say, Halfdan and Skorri and the thirty other mounted warriors, the elite of Halfdan’s hird, were riding. The others, the bulk of the fighting men, the three hundred armed with spears and axes and clad in leather armor, not the mail and shining helmets of the hird, were making their way on foot. Behind them rolled the massive carts loaded with food and ale and great iron caldrons and tripods and tents and all the trappings of an army in the field. Their progress across the countryside was like that of a big ship with sail set to a light breeze. Slow. Inexorable, but slow.

  Halfdan heard a buzzing behind him, some word passing through the mounted men. He was just turning in his saddle to see what it was about when he heard Onund Jonsson, captain of the hird, call out, “Rider coming, Lord Halfdan! From the east, lord.”

  Halfdan turned the other way. He could just make the man out, a dark point on the green of the field, moving fast. On his own he would not have noticed the rider until he was much closer than that.

  You have some good eyes, Onund Jonsson, Halfdan thought. That, or I am growing blind.

  Halfdan considered the latter more likely, much as he did not like to think on it. He was forty-seven years old, not young by any means. He had been king of Vestfold for more than two decades, and had steadily expanded his holdings in that time. The years had not left him worn and broken, as they would a man who had worked the soil his whole life, or sailed the seas or tended cattle. The labor of a king was different, and it took its toll in a different way. But he felt it, felt the burden he carried, the burden that pressed him down. It had become heavier, much heavier of late.

  Halfdan kept his eyes on the rider as he raised his hand and called back over his shoulder. “Onund! We’ll halt here, give the men a rest!” Then more to himself than to any other he added, “We’ll see what this bastard has to say.”

  Halfdan swung himself out of the saddle and handed the reins to the boy who ran up to take the horse. He felt the muscles in his thighs and back protest and he made himself stand straight and let no discomfort show on his face.

  “This looks like Thorstein coming,” Skorri said. “He’s come from that farm just south by the sea, farm owned by that fellow…what was his name, lord?”

  “Vifil,” Halfdan said. Skorri was one of Halfdan’s sœslumadr, the men who collected the taxes and duties on things imported over the sea and saw to the king’s holdings. Until recently Skorri had looked after some of the smaller holdings south of Grømstad, but Halfdan had moved him up to Vik to oversee the lands here.

  The last sœslumadr, Einar Sigurdsson, had disappeared after the disastrous raid on the farm of Odd Thorgrimson, a raid in which Halfdan and his men had been taken by surprise and driven off in humiliation.

  What happened to Einar, Halfdan did not know. Word came back that he had lived through the fighting, had been taken prisoner. It was possible that Odd killed him after he had been captured, but no one seemed to know for certain. If Einar had returned to Grømstad, Halfdan would have certainly have killed him. He blamed much of the debacle on Einar’s incompetence. And Einar was the only man of note who had witnessed Halfdan’s panicked flight from the battlefield. It gave Einar a certain leverage over Halfdan, and that was intolerable.

  But neither Einar nor the rest of the men who had been captured ever returned to Grømstad. Maybe they had been killed, or sent off to the slave markets. They could at that moment be halfway to Constantinople where they would sweat out the rest of their brief lives in brutal servitude. Halfdan did not know and did not care, as long as they never showed up in Grømstad again.

  He watched and waited as Thorstein approached, with Skorri and Onund standing nearby but keeping a respectful distance. Every muscle in Halfdan’s legs and back cried for him to sit down, but he resisted, standing patiently, hands on his hips. It was not a long wait. Thorstein was riding hard, because he knew that Halfdan did not care to wait for long.

  Thorstein reined to a halt and dropped to the ground, stepping quickly over to Halfdan and giving a shallow bow. “Rode to Vifil’s farm,” he said, struggling to speak in a normal tone while still gasping for breath. “Like the other farms, lord. Not a man, woman or child there. No livestock. Storehouses empty.”

  Halfdan nodded and frowned. He could see Thorstein was bracing for an explosion of anger and he let him remain that way, but he did not feel any rage at this news. It was what he had expected. It was what they had met with since riding out in force.

  Rather than rage, Halfdan felt disconnected, slightly confused, as if he was not entirely certain where he was. It had been his intention to take the land that belonged to Thorgrim Night Wolf, a man who had not been seen in years and most certainly must be dead. But Thorgrim’s eldest son Odd had organized a surprisingly successful resistance, and it had thrown Halfdan off balance. Halfdan was not a particularly benevolent king, and he was not accustomed to resistance of any kind.

  He had tried to make Odd and his family prisoners and take Odd’s farm, along with Thorgrim’s, for himself. He led an attack on the long hall, set it on fire, prepared to capture or kill the people as they came racing out. But it had not worked that way. Odd was not alone: all of his neighbors were there, some rich and powerful men, and they had their warriors with them. Worse, Odd had some means of getting out of the hall undetected. Halfdan still did not know how. But they had launched an attack against Halfdan and his men which seemed to come out of nowhere, and the surprise alone was enough for them to carry the day.

  So, after an ignominious retreat back to Grømstad, Halfdan found himself in a state of wild rage, but along with the rage were feelings of uncertainty, confusion, strange and unaccustomed emotions. He had to react, and quickly, that much he knew. Such an act of treachery could not go unanswered. Ignoring it would be a greater threat to his rule than all the swords and spears in Norway.

  He assembled his men, his elite warriors, his hird, and his foot soldiers as well, and they marched. Halfdan meant to punish those who had dared defy him, but his thinking had not really moved much beyond that. He had no plan for just who he would punish, or what he would do to them, or to what end. He was just letting the rage drive him now.

  They had come first to the farm of Amundi Thorsteinsson, probably the wealthiest man in the region after Thorgrim Night Wolf. Odd Thorgrimson might be the leader of the rebellion, but Amundi was certainly a big part of it. Amundi could have stopped the people from joining in with Odd if he had wished to do so. But he did not, and in fact it was Amundi who had first refused to join Halfdan in his raid on Odd’s farm. Amundi needed punishment, and Halfdan was ready to dole it out.

  But Amundi’s farm had been abandoned, stripped of people, livestock and stores. Halfdan considered burning the long hall and the outbuildings to the ground, and the thought pleased him, but before he gave the order he forced himself to think it through.

  If Amundi was a traitor, then he would forfeit all this property. If it came into Halfdan’s possession it would be far more valuable as it was, rather than as a heap of charred wreckage. So he and his men spent the night, and left the farm undisturbed as they headed out the next day.

  They had continued their sweep through the country north of Grømstad, the bulk of the army moving from farm to farm while riders were sent to the more far-flung places. But they did not find any of those whom they sought to punish, nor anything else such as food or drink that might be of help to the army. Each farm they marched on was deserted.

  Of course, Halfdan realized, the freemen who had stood up to his rule would have anticipated their king’s vengeance. Of course they would have had peo
ple watching for the army on the march. Of course they would have retreated in the face of such a threat. They were not going to wait in their homes to be slaughtered.

  At the same time he realized that he, the king of Vestfold, had better start thinking things through rather than raging like a chained bear set upon by dogs.

  The anger was subsiding, and in its place he found only his own confusion, his own uncertainty.

  “Just a few miles to Odd’s farm, lord,” Onund ventured. Unlike Skorri, Onund knew this part of the country well, having been born and raised in Fevik. It was exactly the reason Halfdan did not make Onund sœslumadr after Einar Sigurdsson’s disappearance. Onund was too close to the people there. Halfdan could not be certain to whom Onund, in the deepest recesses of his heart, was most loyal.

  “Right,” Halfdan said. He thought Odd’s farm was nearby but he was not certain, and he was not going to let that uncertainty show. “Let’s ride.”

  He climbed back up into his saddle and the others did the same, and the air was filled with the noise of hundreds of armed men regaining their feet. It was a sound of weary protest that emanated from the group, a collective sound, such as no single individual would have dared utter. Halfdan ignored it.

  They rode on and soon they crested a hill, and spread out below him was Odd’s farm. Halfdan reined his horse to a halt and moved his eyes over the place, and behind him the rest stopped as well. Halfdan had led his earlier attack at night, so he had seen none of this, but he had visited Odd several times before that, during annual tours of his kingdom, and he recognized the land and the buildings. Mostly. It was changed in many ways. There were more outbuildings than he could recall, and the gardens beyond the yard had been much expanded. The beautiful hall, expanded to twice its original size, was now a blackened heap of debris, burned to the ground on Halfdan’s orders.

  There were no people. Halfdan pressed his lips together. It was frustrating, infuriating, even though he had never really hoped to find anyone there.

  Think, think, you miserable, pathetic beast, Halfdan lashed himself. His heels were poised to kick his horse’s flanks and ride down the hill toward the farm when another possibility occurred to him.

  All these people had fled their farms, but what was to say they had not banded together? What was to say they had not organized an army that was ready to spring a trap? If you set a trap, you set it where you know your target will appear, and they would certainly know that Halfdan was going to ride to Odd’s farm.

  “Skorri, Onund,” Halfdan said, and the two men rode up beside him. “Skorri, take fifty men, spearmen, and lead them down to the farm there. Search the place, and keep your eyes out for any sign of a trap.”

  “Yes, lord,” Skorri said and wheeled his horse around, shouting orders as he did.

  “How many men can Odd raise, do you think?” Halfdan asked Onund.

  “From all of the freemen hereabouts? Well, two hundred, maybe. Good fighting men. Not the same sort of warriors as your hird, lord, but good men.”

  Halfdan nodded. That was about what he had figured. There had been roughly two hundred men on Odd’s side during the fight at the long hall. So even if all those men had elected to stand by Odd, Halfdan still had warriors enough to crush them. Surprise had won the day for Odd the last time, and that would not happen again.

  “Take fifty of the mounted men and send them out, east and west, make a big sweep of the lands here, say, half a mile in every direction,” Halfdan said. “Let’s be certain these bastards are not lying in wait.”

  “Yes, lord,” Onund said and he, too, whirled his horse and began to shout orders. A moment later the riders streamed off in two directions, riding hard. Halfdan imagined that the rest of the men, those still at his back, were anticipating an order to take their ease as they waited. Hoping for that order. But that was not an order Halfdan would give. He wanted the men ready.

  Skorri and the spearmen reached the farmyard, and there was still no sign of anyone or anything moving. They spread out and searched the buildings and even looked though the few stands of trees and down the trail toward the sea, and found nothing. Not a person, not an animal, nothing.

  Soon after that Onund was back with his fifty riders. They had made a wide sweep as Halfdan had ordered and they, too, found nothing.

  “Very well,” Halfdan said, and finally he nudged his horse to a walk, moving down the hill toward the farm, the rest following behind. He reached the level ground and continued on toward the burnt wreckage of the hall. In his thoughts he could see once again the wild fight next to the building’s burning walls, Odd bursting out of the door, his shield engulfed in flames, a vision so surprising and frightening that it had changed the course of the battle. He remembered his own shock, how he wheeled his horse around and raced off, with never a thought as to what he was doing.

  The memory had once made him flush with shame, but it stirred no feelings in him now. He had flailed himself for his cowardice so often that he had grown numb.

  He moved past the charred heap and past the outbuildings, but there was nothing there of interest, nothing out of place. He continued on toward the head of a trail that disappeared into a stand of pines. He had seen the spearmen search through there, so he knew there would be no surprises waiting, and he wondered where the trail led.

  Thirty feet through the trees the trail opened onto a wide meadow that rolled gently down toward the sea, and though it was silent now, it had clearly been the scene of some activity. There were stacks of wood, some split into boards, some still in the form of logs, oak and pine. There were more logs laid out on the ground parallel to one another, rollers for moving a ship. There was a shed that must have once housed tools. Halfdan doubted there was anything of value left.

  He stopped and climbed down from his horse. The ground was a great litter of wood chips, the detritus of shipbuilding. The chips were not grayed from having been long in the weather, but yellow and fresh-looking. They had been cut not so very long ago.

  Halfdan squatted down and picked up one of the chips and examined it. Pine. He sniffed it. He could still smell the sap and the odor of green wood. He stood. Onund and Skorri were standing near, close enough to be on hand, not so close as to be obtrusive.

  “Fresh chips,” Halfdan said. “Was Odd building a ship?”

  The two men looked uncomfortable. They obviously did not know, but did not care to admit ignorance, either.

  “I think he was,” Onund said at last, an easy statement to make given the evidence at their feet. “He had a shipwright. Fellow named Ari. Good shipwright.”

  Halfdan nodded. This at least was new information. Clearly Odd had a ship, built and launched recently. Some or all of his people and his goods must have gone off that way. But where? Had he left the country? What about the other freemen, Odd’s compatriots? Were they also waterborne now?

  Halfdan began to get an uncomfortable feeling in his gut. An army on land could not move very fast and could not remain unseen, but an army carried aboard a fleet of ships could move very quickly indeed, and appear suddenly over the horizon. It was a lesson the Northmen had been teaching all of the western world for the past sixty years.

  Ships…

  “So, he had a ship, a new-built ship,” Halfdan said at last. “And now he and everyone else are gone. Did they all go by ship? Where did they go?”

  That was met with more uncomfortable silence. Then, once again, Onund, who knew Odd and knew the people of Fevik, was the one to speak up.

  “Odd might have gone to where his sister lives, lord. To hide out. Or maybe as a gathering place, to figure what he would do next.”

  Halfdan frowned. “His sister?” Thorgrim Night Wolf and Ornolf the Restless were prominent enough in that region that Halfdan knew of their family, of their comings and goings. “I thought his sister married and moved off to the north country.”

  “The older sister, lord. Hild. She married a few years back. I mean his younger sister. Hallbera. The on
e named after Odd’s mother, Thorgrim’s wife, who died in childbirth.”

  Halfdan said nothing as he thought about that. Of course there was a younger sister. She must be three or four years old, Halfdan figured. As he understood it, it was Thorgrim’s grief at the death of his wife that had led him to agree to go a’viking again with Ornolf. He was about to ask more when some bustling behind him, some disturbance, broke into his train of thought. He and Onund turned to the sound.

  A cluster of warriors stood in something like a circle, spears lowered. There must have been someone in the center of the circle, someone who presented some threat, but Halfdan could not see him through the press of men. But he heard him, heard him say in a loud voice, touched with panic, “I came to speak with King Halfdan!”

  A few of the warriors turned to look toward Halfdan. Halfdan gave a nod of his head and the man was led over to him.

  “My lord,” the man began, “My name is Vandrad…I’m…I was a sheepherd on the farm of Odd Thorgrimson. This farm, lord…”

  “Yes?” Halfdan prompted.

  “I was sent by Odd, lord. Not to speak with you, but to watch you. But I would not betray my king, lord, and if you’ll give promise that I won’t suffer the fate of the others then I’ll tell you of his plans, lord.”

  You’ll tell me whether I pardon you or not, you silly worm, Halfdan thought. He knew these sorts of men and despised them, though he knew that this one might be of use. But first he wished to hear more about the business that had so intrigued him, before this Vandrad’s arrival.

  “Hold a moment,” Halfdan said. He turned back to Onund. “You were telling me of a younger sister? Where is she now? The girl Hallbera?”

  “She lives part of the year with Odd and his wife, Signy, lord,” Onund said, “and part of the year with Signy’s mother and father to the west of here.”