Mauger’s face and beard were all gore as he swung blindly with a fist, his left arm dangling uselessly. Sigurd grimaced and with awesome, unimaginable strength climbed back to his feet. Mauger was striking at him but the jarl took no heed as he stepped up and cradled the Wessexman’s head in his arms.
‘Óðin!’ he cried, then he wrenched Mauger’s head almost full circle. Another crack split the night. Mauger’s right hand flapped like a bird’s broken wing, then went still. Sigurd pushed his knee into the man’s shoulder and the corpse pitched on to its side without a sound. It was over. And Sigurd had won.
CHAPTER EIGHT
OLAF AND BLACK FLOKI RAN TO THEIR JARL, WEDGING THEIR shoulders beneath his arms just as his knees buckled. Sigurd’s face and brynja were blood-soaked and glistening. His beard and hair were dark, matted clumps, and he sagged between his men like an animal carcass. They bore him out of the arena as Ealdred and his Wessexmen crowded round Mauger, unable to accept that their champion was dead. Asgot barked at a knot of Norsemen, demanding that they prevent the English from disturbing Mauger’s corpse, then he shuffled after Sigurd, wringing his hands and chanting to the gods as he went. I stood stunned. Despite all I had seen and done, the brutality of the fight both appalled and excited me. I was awestruck by the warriors who had fought, by their strength and skill and their refusal to yield, and yet it was a terrible thing to see a warrior of Mauger’s stature ruined so, carved up like soulless meat. Before the fight both men had looked like gods of battle, lords of war. Now one was food for the worms and the other was a broken bloody mess. My lord and jarl was now so many splintered timbers from a storm-wrecked ship and we would have to wait and see whither the tides of his wyrd carried him.
Some of the Norsemen used their spear staves to push the Wessexmen back from Mauger’s tortured corpse whilst others began to dismantle the stakes and ropes of the arena. Sigurd’s sword still pinned the cloaks to the ground like some final judgement. Part of me, the part within which the blood yet bubbled, causing my muscles to tremble and twitch, wanted desperately to grip that sword’s hilt, as though by touching the thing I could somehow imbibe more deeply of the event’s terrible glory.
‘You’d better pray that he lives, lad,’ Bram Bear growled beside me. He gestured to the stained cloaks. Bjorn and Bjarni were pulling the wooden pegs from their edges. ‘A skin full of that blood down there would still be warming Sigurd’s innards if not for you. What in Óðin’s hairy arse were you thinking? Mauger . . .’ he spat, ‘that treacherous dog was done for, lad. Sigurd had him beaten. But when you took that blow? You could have smacked my face with a fucking fish. I thought I was dreaming.’ He stared at me, a deep crease across his brow, then shook his head and walked away. I saw that other Norsemen were looking at me too, their eyes questioning, and why wouldn’t they? After all, Bram was right. I had played no small part in the hólmgang. The fight would have been over much sooner had I not thrown a shield between Mauger and Sigurd’s blade. Because of that one inexplicable act, our jarl had taken several wounds, some serious enough to see him a corpse, and if he died from them there was every chance that I would be blamed. And yet it was not the vengeance of some Norsemen that chilled my heart. Rather I was terrified that by saving Mauger with that shield I had unpicked some thread from Sigurd’s wyrd, undone what the Norns had woven. If I had done that, a blade in the gut would be a small thing, because those who dwelt in Asgard loved Sigurd – I still believed that, even if others had begun to doubt – and so I would have to face the wrath of the gods.
The camp that night was quiet and lead heavy. It was as though the air itself pressed down on us with the weight of issues and decisions being fought over in a realm unseen yet real enough. Asgot and Olaf were with Sigurd, though Olaf soon came to Cynethryth, asking if she had any experience of treating battle wounds. When she said she had some knowledge of healing herbs and of the binding of cuts, Olaf bade her help in any way she could, and so it was a strange party that fought for Sigurd’s life that night. Asgot implored Eir, a healing goddess and handmaiden of Frigg, and of course Óðin himself, to save the jarl, to close his wounds and restore his strength. Every now and then I caught a whiff of some or other herb which the godi had taken from his stash to either apply directly to Sigurd’s torn flesh or else burn to drown the jarl in bitter smoke. Olaf soothed him with soft words that I could not hear. He mopped his friend’s brow with wet linen, washed the blood from his wounds and cut other cloth into strips for Cynethryth to use as bindings.
The rest of us left them to their work, though occasionally one of us would be called to bring more hot water and sometimes mead, which they would force through Sigurd’s grimacing lips to fog his agony.
More men than normal took up sentry duties on the high ground and I envied them being away from the gloomy mood of the beach. At first I wished someone would sing or wrestle or do anything so that we would not have to hear Sigurd’s moans. But then I understood. The Norsemen, most of them anyway, wanted to know what road their jarl travelled now. By hearing each gasp of anguish, each miserable, suffering groan, we were in some small way sharing Sigurd’s journey, and that was the least we could do and also the most.
The strange yellow smoke from Asgot’s fire seemed intent on finding my eyes, which stung and watered, blurring my view of our Wessex prisoners, who sat in a wretched knot around their ealdorman. They were silent as the grave and perhaps they were practising, for their champion had lost, which meant Sigurd could do with them what he wanted. If he lived he was not likely to be in a generous mood. If he died his men might well tear the Englishmen limb from limb for the honey-sweet revenge of it. From where I sat Ealdred and his five men were lost souls. They were draugr, the walking dead.
‘This should be good,’ said a Norseman beside me. Hours had passed and the first glow of dawn was a fragile flush in the east. I looked up to see Asgot crossing the beach, leaving the huddled figures of Olaf and Cynethryth with Jarl Sigurd. The godi walked purposefully, though he must have been exhausted, towards the corpse of Mauger, which had been dragged from the hólmgang square, stripped of its brynja, and left face down in the sand. I could see that the body was stiff, for one arm bent backwards unnaturally, raised off the sand, the hand like an eagle’s talon. Asgot raised his arms to the sky, then, without taking his eyes from the corpse, called for Svein to bring himself and his axe and be quick about it.
‘And it had better be sharp as an old crone’s tongue, you brain-addled, red-haired son of an ox,’ the godi added for good measure. Without a word, Svein stood, grasped his great axe and made his way across the sand, a giant hulking shape against the weak dawn light.
I remembered the blood-chilling promise the godi had made to Mauger before the fight against Sigurd. The snake hiss of Asgot’s voice, each word dripping venom, slithered through my mind.
I will cut your limbs from your corpse. I will peel the skin from your flesh . . . no other soul shall ever recognize you for a man.
A low moan came from the English with the first blow of Svein’s axe, which took off Mauger’s arm like a branch hacked from a tree. The red-haired giant’s face was grim set as he swung again, taking the other arm off at the shoulder with a loud crack. It was too much for Father Egfrith, who stood shakily, crossed himself, then slunk off towards the shore. Asgot was grinning like a fiend as he bent and gathered up the limbs and I could tell that those limbs were heavy by the way the old godi leant back as he hefted them a short distance off. The legs were great hunks of meat, the sinew and muscle as tough as knotted oak, and even mighty Svein had to take several swings to sever them. When he had finished, Mauger’s groin was a grotesque dark mess of flesh. I glanced at Ealdred but the ealdorman had his back to the butchering of his champion and I could tell nothing of his thoughts. We Norse watched it all. We murmured prayers to Óðin Lord of War, beseeching him not to take our jarl to his corpse hall in Valhöll but accept the offering of a great enemy instead. It was not a sacrifice as such, becaus
e Mauger was already dead, but we assumed Asgot still believed, or hoped, at least, that he could placate the god with the Wessexman’s pared flesh. Now I think Asgot did what he did simply because he enjoyed it. The man’s cruelty and contempt for his enemies ran deeper than the nethermost fjord. And yet we watched.
When Mauger’s butchered corpse lay like joints of meat in the sand, Asgot set about spearing them, two spears thrust into each limb, and he and Svein hoisted the limbs above the fire to burn off the clothes that were stuck to the skin with clotted blood. When this was done, Asgot took his knife and began to strip the blackened skin from the arms and legs, his old face contorted in concentration, and that skin came off in crisp curls. Svein left him to it and came and sat by me, bringing with him the charcoal smell of burnt skin and the acrid stink of singed hair, which can stick in the nostrils for days.
‘A bad end for a warrior,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘A bad end for anyone,’ I muttered, and he pursed his lips and nodded, conceding the point.
Arnvid and Bothvar pressed a group into searching for mushrooms and roots amongst the trees beyond the beach, as well as birds’ eggs from the grassy bluffs, to complement the stew they were nursing above the meal-fire. But what was gathered would not feed a gaggle of old women, much less a fellowship of warriors, and I guessed that the men’s hearts were not in the searching, just as our stomachs would not be in the eating. Sure enough, men picked at their food so that you would have thought it tasted bad. Neither Arnvid nor Bothvar fished for compliments for their cooking, as they were wont to do, and not one was tossed their way.
‘Ah, he’s the strongest of us all,’ Bram rumbled after a silence that had rolled itself out like a fur to smother the camp. ‘He’ll be back on his feet and Loki-scheming before you know it.’
There were a few murmurs of agreement and several hands touched amulets and sword hilts for luck. Black Floki suggested we kill the prisoners, slowly, to steer our minds from the dark thought of losing our jarl, and some of the men voiced their ideas about how the Wessexmen should die and every one of those methods was grisly enough to curl your spine. But Bjarni argued that it was Sigurd’s right and his alone to decide the fates of Ealdred and his men. Our jarl had earned that right, had he not? Earned it with the spilling of blood and the ripping of flesh. And no man around that fire, not even Floki, could argue with that.
Óðin save him. Please do not take him yet. Give him strength. Stop the blood. Thicken it, Óðin. Make it stiffen and clot like cream in the churn. Close his wounds, mighty jarl of the gods. We need him. I need him.
What had I done? I looked at the silver ring on my arm, which had been a gift from Sigurd. It felt heavy now, sitting tight and constricting over the muscle, and I wanted to take it off but I did not, for fear of others seeing me do it. A jarl must be a ring-giver, a bestower of silver and other treasure, for this is what you get in return for pledging your sword and your life to him and to the Fellowship. What had I done? I had hefted a good shield to protect my enemy and because of that my jarl’s blood was spilling like water from a willow trap.
Cynethryth carried a bundle of red soaking rags and dropped them into the largest fire, where they hissed, hurting the flames and filling the morning air with the smell of iron. I looked down the beach at the robed figure of Father Egfrith staring out to sea, his bald white pate catching the first glow of the new day. We disgusted him, I knew, and his will must have been iron-strong to keep him here amongst us.
‘You should ask him to put a word in for Sigurd,’ Penda said, thumbing back towards Egfrith. ‘Your jarl is going to need all the help he can get, lad.’
‘You think I should ask that weasel-faced goat dropping to pray to the Christian god?’ I asked, exaggerating my disgust.
Penda shrugged as though to ask what harm it could do.
‘I’d sooner chew a handful of nails,’ I said and Penda shrugged again, scratching the long scar down his face. In truth, I was half tempted to run down the beach, take the monk by his scrawny neck and wring a dozen good prayers from the ever-flapping hole in his face. And perhaps I might have done just that. But that might have angered Óðin even more and the way I saw it I was already walking on thin ice with him. My hopes hung with the All-Father like so many banners tied to a pole, and by beseeching the Christian god too I might stir enough wind to blow that pole over. So I left Egfrith and his nailed god alone and whispered and prayed and begged Óðin Far-Wanderer until my throat was as dry as an old weed-cracked well.
Sigurd’s life thread twisted and stretched but it did not break. Olaf, Asgot and Cynethryth treated him with every care, using all their combined lore. They washed his wounds, applied poultices of rat’s tail plantain and other leaves I did not recognize, then bound each gash tightly in clean dressings. They fed him meat for strength and herbs to smother his pain. They poured honeyed water and mead down his throat and all the while Asgot wafted a resinous smoke over him which had some strange power, for it made him sleep in spite of the pain. Even Egfrith helped, having disappeared and returned with fistfuls of fennel which, he said, the Emperor Karolus himself declared should be present in every imperial garden because of its healing properties. Asgot had curled his lip at this, but Olaf persuaded him that the medicine was worth a try, arguing that a man who worships a god said to have risen from death is likely to know something of restorative herbs.
We waited, unable amongst ourselves to decide what to do. Some were for taking the ships north. In other words, cutting our losses and going home. But still more would not hear of it, for to turn north now would be admitting defeat and a sword-Norse who does that is setting himself adrift, no longer deserving of the gods’ attention, and as likely as not to sink unseen to the seabed. Better to spit in the Weavers’ eyes, come what may, these men said.
Our prisoners grew wretched and stinking. We fed them next to nothing and every now and then a frustrated Norseman would punch or kick an English face. They just had to look at us wrong to earn a clout, because we blamed those men for all the trouble that had befallen us and for the empty row benches aboard Serpent and Fjord-Elk. No one touched Ealdred, though. Sigurd would deal with that son of a shit slithering snake. Still, Asgot itched to sacrifice at least one of the Wessexmen to Óðin and on several occasions the godi drew a crowd, convincing whoever would listen why he should soak his blade in English blood. The only good thing about his speeches was that whenever he talked of sacrifice, Cynethryth would come and sit by me. She did not understand his words, of course, but the godi’s savage appetite fattened his eyes in a way that disgusted her. She would take my hand and say little and her eyes would settle on her father across the camp. Sometimes I would catch an exchange between those two, a questioning glance or heartsick look, which I would pretend not to have seen.
On the fourth day it seemed Asgot would get what he wanted. One of the Englishmen, a broad, strong-looking warrior with a dense black beard and long thinning hair, was dragged away from the rest and made to stand by a stake which Svein the Red had driven into the ground. I kept my distance, keeping the woodpile stocked and making a covering of skins to keep it dry though there was not a cloud in the sky. I had already had too big a hand in the weave of the last days and whatever the others decided was fine by me.
‘The gods love the old ways.’ Asgot’s voice crackled like burning sticks as he pointed a lean, knotty finger at the stake. ‘So we will do this the old way.’ Some of the men nodded and murmured approval. Others frowned, less familiar with these old ways. Asgot drew an invisible blade across the man’s abdomen. ‘I will open this man’s belly, take the end of his gut string and nail it to the stake. Then he will walk round the pole,’ he said, drawing a circle in the air, ‘like the serpent Jörmungand biting his own tail to girdle the world. Aye, he’ll walk until the guts unwind and the meat pulls taut. He looks strong.’ The godi grinned, considering Ealdred’s warrior. The man’s jaw was clenched but his eyes were terror-filled voids, for he di
d not need to know Norse to get the bones of what lay in store for him. ‘He should manage it until the end,’ Asgot went on. ‘If not, I’ll make him wish he had shrivelled and died in his whore mother’s rancid womb.’
I almost smiled at that. What could be worse than unravelling your guts round a pole and watching yourself do it?
‘Poor bastard,’ Penda mumbled, needing no Norse to fathom what was coming.
‘This was the way of our grandfathers,’ the godi went on, gesturing to Black Floki to haul the prisoner to his feet; ‘this will be our way.’ The only men not gathered now were the six or seven posted as lookouts, and the air seemed to shiver with the anticipation of the blood rite. Floki shoved the Englishman against the stake and two more Norsemen took hold of the man’s arms, for any man will wriggle like a mackerel when he sees a blade aimed at his stomach.
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