Night Wolf: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 5)

by James L. Nelson

As long as Thorgrim still lives, Aghen thought. They could build another ship, he and Thorgrim. A better ship, if such a thing was possible.

  One of the approaching fleet led the way in, but Aghen did not recognize the ship. She was longer than Sea Hammer, but not by much, driven by sixteen oars on each side. She had a great dragon’s head on her high prow, which her captain had not bothered to remove—or had left there on purpose to show that he did not come with peaceful intent.

  Whoever he was, the captain of this longship leading the others in, Aghen could see him now, standing on the foredeck, clad in mail, a cloak flapping at his shoulders. He was a big man—the carved dragonhead was only a few feet above his own—and he was broad as well, the size and shape of some great rune stone set as a monument at a crossroads. His ship was no more than twenty yards from the muddy shore, and still the man stood motionless, staring ahead as the rowers pulled hard.

  Somewhere aft an order was given. The men on the rowing benches gave one last pull, and then the oars disappeared like a turtle drawing its legs into its shell. The momentum from that last stroke carried the ship the final feet to the shore. Her bow ran up onto the muddy shallows and two men appeared as if by magic and set a gangplank over the bow and down to the riverbank. Only then did the huge man stir, stepping up onto the gangplank and down to the shore, the boards bending under his weight.

  Aghen studied him close. He had never seen the man before, of that he was certain. He was not the sort one might forget. He was as big as Grimarr Giant, bigger perhaps. His hair was yellow and long and hung in two braids down either side of his head. His beard was the same straw color as his hair and covered half his face and hung down to near his belly. A deep, ugly scar emerged from the beard and ran up to the corner of his right eye, like a snake slithering out of hiding.

  No one among the thirty or so residents of Vík-ló who had gathered on the shore spoke; no one moved. The big man stepped up the bank and his eyes swept the longphort, and behind him the crew of his ship came down the gangplank as well. Like their captain they were wearing mail. Unlike him they were carrying shields and had weapons drawn.

  The next two ships came gliding up to the shore and ran aground on either side of the first. One was Blood Hawk, the ship commanded by Bersi Jorundarson, but Aghen could not see Bersi anywhere aboard her. Indeed, as her crew stood and took up their shields Aghen realized that he did not recognize any of the men aboard her.

  This is not good, he thought. Not good.

  His eyes moved back to the big man and the forty or so others under his command who had formed up in a line behind him. They seemed a small crew for so large a ship, but they were more than all the population of Vík-ló, and they were warriors and they were armed.

  Finally the big man’s eyes moved from the longphort beyond the river to the knot of people who stood watching his arrival. His gaze swept along the crowd as if he was seeing them for the first time. For a moment his expression did not change. And then he did the one thing that Aghen would not have expected: he threw back his head and he laughed.

  His laugh was loud and ugly and had a barking quality to it. He laughed hard and when he was done he spit on the ground and wiped his mouth with his mail-clad sleeve. “This is it?” he roared. “This is all the people of Vík-ló? Old men and cripples and women?” Behind him some of his men laughed as well.

  “Who are you?” someone shouted from the crowd. The big man took a step forward, and there was surprising menace in that one small move.

  “I am Ottar Thorolfson and I am known as Ottar Bloodax. Of all the Northmen in Ireland, and all the Irishmen as well, none are more powerful than me!”

  “Where is Thorgrim Night Wolf?” Aghen demanded. This Ottar might indeed be the most powerful man in Ireland. It was not hard to believe. But Aghen, having seen more than fifty winters, was too old to be intimidated by such as him.

  Ottar Bloodax’s head jerked around and he stared at Aghen as if the name of Thorgrim had been an insult to him, or a threat.

  Aghen met his stare and returned it. “Why do you sail Thorgrim’s ships?” he added.

  “Thorgrim Night Wolf is dead,” Ottar said. He said it loud and with finality, not an answer to Aghen’s question but a pronouncement for all to hear. “Night Wolf is dead and I am the lord of Vík-ló.”

  Chapter Five

  Hail, ye Givers! a guest is come;

  say! where shall he sit within?

  Hávamál

  The sandbar in the bend of the Avonmore, that half acre or so of dry land, had been no more than an isolated and unseen stretch of sand and gravel on a forgotten part of the river at the time they ran Sea Hammer aground. That was why Thorgrim had picked it. Now, it seemed to Harald Broadarm, it was more like a town, a miniature longphort, Dubh-linn writ small.

  The Irish bandits had numbered twenty-six men in all, not including their dead leader, whose name Harald never did learn. When Thorgrim had objected to his corpse being left on the sandbar where he fell, a few of his former subjects hefted him up and waded out into the river with him and tossed him in. Harald watched as the dead man was tumbled and rolled by the current until he was out of sight downstream.

  The new leader, the sinewy, redheaded man, was named Cónán, or so they learned. With the former chieftain now bobbing away out of sight, Thorgrim and Cónán faced off over the ragged trail of blood drying on the sand. Harald, the translator, stood by Thorgrim’s side.

  “Your men will be willing to join with us?” Thorgrim asked by way of Harald. “They won’t resent me killing their leader?”

  Cónán glanced back at his men, but there was no uncertainty in his face. He turned back to Thorgrim and spoke.

  “He says he’s their leader now, and they’ll do as he says,” Harald translated. The man’s confidence only strengthened Harald’s earlier impression that Cónán had been leading all along, whatever the dead man had thought. Harald had the idea that the dead man’s challenge to Thorgrim had been more the result of Cónán’s goading than any desire of his own for such a fight. And he guessed that the fight had ended the way Cónán, at least, had hoped it would.

  Thorgrim nodded. He and Cónán were looking into each other’s eyes, each man taking the measure of the other, like combatants in the first few steps of a fight, sensing out one another before making any bold move.

  “Tell Cónán,” Thorgrim said, “that he should make no mistake about who leads here. There’ll be much advantage to him and his men if they join with us, but I command. No one else.”

  Harald nodded. He could hear the hardness in his father’s voice. He suspected that Thorgrim blamed much of the late disaster on his own willingness to consider the council of others. He would not be doing that again. Harald translated the words. At first Cónán did not reply, and when he did he spoke slowly and deliberately.

  “He says they will not be servants and they will not be slaves,” Harald said. “When we are raiding or fighting, you lead. When we are not, you do not command his men.”

  Now it was Thorgrim’s turn to consider the words. Finally he nodded. “Good,” he said. “It’s agreed.” He held out his hand and Cónán grasped it and they shook.

  Then Cónán was speaking again. “He says you mentioned weapons?” Harald translated. “And training?”

  At that Thorgrim had Cónán summon his men and explain to them what they had agreed upon, but to keep any talk of raiding Glendalough to himself. Harald listened as Cónán spoke, making certain he told it the way Thorgrim had instructed. There seemed to be little reaction among the bandits beyond nodding heads and some low murmuring that Harald could not catch. Cónán apparently had spoken the truth. They took Cónán as their new leader and would do as he told them.

  That done, Cónán looked past his men to the trees on the shore and called, “Come on out, then!” Harald frowned. He turned to his father, ready to warn him, ready to alert him to some trick, when he saw a dozen or so women come hesitantly out of the trees and down to
the sand. He heard a stir run through the watching Northmen.

  “They bring their women with them when they go raiding?” Thorgrim asked. Harald relayed the question.

  “Cónán says they have no home. They’re outlaws, always moving,” Harald said. “If their women did not come with them, they would have no women. And what good would that be?”

  Harald had to agree with that. Cónán spoke again. “He says,” Harald translated, “when the women are with child they find some farm where they can live, but otherwise the women stay with their men.”

  Cónán issued a few more orders and soon the women were making fires and bringing bundles of their few sorry belongings out of the woods. Cónán turned to Thorgrim again.

  “He says the road to Glendalough is about a half mile that way,” Harald said, pointing toward the north. “He says he thinks we are well hidden here, but he will send men to watch the road, and others to the south, to see we’re not caught by surprise.”

  Harald paused as Cónán added more. A smile played on the Irishman’s face. “He says he heard the heathens met with great slaughter at Glendalough and that there might be men-at-arms out looking for the last of them.”

  Thorgrim made a grunting noise which suggested that he was not amused. “Tell him to get his breakfast and we’ll get ours and then we’ll set to work.”

  And they did. The Northmen ate the dried fish and bread that was still in Sea Hammer’s hold. The Irishmen ate whatever they had found or killed the day before. Then, at Cónán’s command, they gathered at Sea Hammer’s side.

  “Tell Cónán we have chainmail. We have swords and axes and shields for them,” Thorgrim said. Which they did. In a pile by the mast step were all the weapons and armor they had managed to glean from the dead men left in the wake of the fighting, before the sound of riders in the distance had convinced them it was time to go.

  “Tell him to have his men sort through them,” Thorgrim continued, “take what they want, the mail that will fit them. Then we’ll start training.”

  Harald nodded. He would do as his father said, of course, but he did not think this was a good idea. Not at all. He knew what his father was thinking, and he thought he was wrong.

  Certainly the few Northmen in their band, the remnants of Sea Hammer’s crew, could do little by themselves. They could not even row the ship for very long. Without more warriors they could hope for nothing save getting away, and probably not even that. Vengeance, plunder were out of the question. But Harald did not think asking these half-wild men to join with them was a very reasonable solution.

  But he also knew, with absolute certainty, that arguing with his father’s decision would be a much worse idea.

  All of them, all the Norsemen, were still stunned by what had happened, staggered as if they had been hit on their heads. Harald felt a constant sickness in his gut; he felt like he was in a fever dream, coming in and out of reality.

  Two days before there had been hundreds of them, a powerful Norse army sweeping upriver to Glendalough. Brothers in arms, unstoppable as a tidal surge. And now they were all gone, all save for these few. Instead of three dozen shipmates, they had only the memory of the horrors they had witnessed, the butchery that would not leave them.

  Harald could feel it like it was heavy chainmail, pressing him down, and he was sure that the others could as well. And he knew that his father felt it in ways none of them could understand.

  Thorgrim took all the blame on himself. Harald was sure of that, even without asking, and of course he would never ask. But he knew. Despite the fact that Bersi and Skidi and the others had readily agreed to join the raid on Glendalough, despite their all having been betrayed by Kjartan and Ottar and Kevin, despite Thorgrim’s having done everything a man could do to keep his warriors alive, right up to the moment he was knocked to unconsciousness, Harald knew that he put the blame on himself. And he would be avenged. Even if vengeance did nothing to better their circumstance, he would be avenged.

  And Harald would not question his decisions.

  So the Irishmen poked through the pile of weapons, and those who could find mail shirts of their size slipped them awkwardly over their heads, regarding them as if they were kingly robes of finest fur and silk. And well they might have been.

  Mail was not something that ragged outlaws could ever hope to own. Even most Northmen made due with leather armor, and only those who enjoyed wealth or good luck could expect to wear mail. And so as the Irish sifted through the weapons, donning the mail and taking up swords—also luxuries for which they could never have hoped—Cónán made sure, in a dozen subtle ways, that his men understood that it was he who had put such gifts in their path.

  He is a clever one, Harald thought, not for the first time.

  With the weapons sorted out, the training began without delay, because Thorgrim knew, as did Harald, that their situation was precarious. Eventually they would be discovered. Eventually they would find themselves once again fighting their way to safety, and the sooner these undisciplined bandits could be turned into something resembling warriors, the better.

  It was awkward at first, with Godi drilling the men by giving instruction to Cónán by way of Harald. But then, to Harald’s surprise, the prisoner, Louis, had stepped forward.

  Failend had claimed Louis was her bodyguard, but Harald was fairly certain there was more to it than that. Louis was young and handsome and carried himself with a somewhat regal bearing, and did so naturally, as if he was born to it. He had nothing of the grizzled old campaigner about him, though he seemed comfortable enough with weapons and had shown no fear that Harald could see, despite all that had happened.

  He no longer stayed by Failend’s side like a she-wolf with her cubs. He seemed to have accepted that neither he nor Failend were in any immediate danger from the heathens who had captured them. He did not know about the plan to return to Glendalough. No one did, save for Thorgrim and Harald and Cónán. They had kept it that way.

  “Pardon me,” Louis said, interrupting Godi in mid-sentence. The Irishmen stood in a line and were armed with swords and shields, holding the weapons with the same sort of awkward unfamiliarity as they might hold an illuminated manuscript, while Godi tried to show them the proper way.

  Godi stopped and turned to Louis, his eyebrows raised in question.

  “Pardon me, but I have considerable experience in training such men as these,” Louis said, his eyes moving between Godi, whom he apparently thought was in charge, and Harald, the only one of the Northmen with whom he could speak. “Men who know nothing of the use of weapons. And I speak their language. Might I be of help?”

  Harald stepped closer and asked, “Why do you want to help? You are our prisoner.”

  Louis shrugged. “I have nothing else to do. Besides, even I, a lowly prisoner, can see we might need to fight soon. If that’s true, I would prefer we win.”

  “Even if we’re fighting the Irish? Fighting your people?”

  “I’m not Irish,” Louis said. “I’m Frankish. None here are my people.”

  Of course, Harald thought. Failend had told him that when they first met, but it had slipped his mind. Suddenly things came a bit clearer. All along he had felt that Louis’s accent was not quite right, but Harald was still enough of a stranger to the Irish language that he could not tell for certain. Louis had never seemed very loyal to the Irish anyway, or shown much desire to get back among them, and Harald had wondered why.

  “Very well,” Harald said. “If you think you can train these men, have a go.” He turned to Godi, who had been listening but not understanding. “Louis will be helping with the training,” Harald said. “He knows the use of weapons, it seems, and he speaks the Irish language.”

  Godi, whose frustration with his charges was evident and building, did not protest. Louis stepped up beside Godi and pulled his sword. He launched into a simple talk on how best to hold the weapon, so unfamiliar to the outlaw band. He showed them a thrust and a parry. He grabbed the m
ost likely looking of the outlaws and demonstrated the moves in faux combat.

  Harald watched for twenty minutes, and during that time he did not once feel the need to step in. This Frankish bastard knows his business, he admitted to himself. He was just starting to wonder if he was needed there at all when he heard his father calling to him.

  Thorgrim Night Wolf was concerned with making his ship whole again, nearly to the exclusion of any other worry. No sooner had the arrangements with Cónán and his men been made than Thorgrim turned to the gaping wound in Sea Hammer’s side. Harald found him now with a small saw in hand, carefully cutting away one of the damaged strakes back to a place where he could scarph in a new piece.

  As Harald approached, Thorgrim straightened and leaned back with his hands pressed to his waist, grimacing as he stretched. He nodded toward the Irishmen training on the sandbar.

  “That prisoner, Louis,” Thorgrim said, “he seems very helpful. More helpful than I would expect an Irishman to be with…what do they call us?”

  “Fin gall?” Harald offered.

  “No, the other thing.”

  “Heathens?”

  “Yes, heathens,” Thorgrim said. “More helpful than I’d expect him to be with heathens.”

  “He’s not Irish, actually,” Harald said.

  “No?”

  “No. He’s a Frank. I never did think he talked like an Irishman.”

  “Hmm,” Thorgrim said, looking over at Louis. He was trading practice blows with one of the outlaws, moving slow and deliberate. “That makes more sense.”

  “Still, I don’t know if we can trust him,” Harald said. “I think he’s playing a double game.”

  At that Thorgrim smiled, though there was little mirth in it. “We are all playing double games,” he said. “All of us. Some play in the open, some play in the shadows. Now, about that other one, the woman…”

  “Failend?”

  “Yes, Failend. You said she’s a healer?”

  “That was what she told me. A very experienced healer.” When Harald had first taken Failend prisoner, it had occurred to him she might be of use if she was skilled in the healing arts. He’d asked her then, and as good luck would have it, she’d assured him she was.