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

by James L. Nelson

  “Hmm,” Thorgrim said again. “I don’t usually think that one so young would be a very experienced healer. But maybe she is. Ask her to take a look at Starri. See if she can help him.”

  Harald swallowed his frustration, nodded, and said he would do as Thorgrim asked. There was nothing else he could say. What’s more, Harald loved Starri. They had fought together in many fights, big and small. He would do anything to help Starri. But still it annoyed him to be sent on this task while there was real work, men’s work, ship work and training with sword and shield, to be done.

  If any of these other ignorant bastards bothered to learn the Irish tongue, Harald thought bitterly, then I would not be called on every time there’s need to speak to an Irishman.

  Harald left Thorgrim to his shipwright work and trudged across the sand to where Failend was sitting by herself on top of one of the sea chests that had been hoisted out of Sea Hammer. She was idly running a whetstone over the edge of her dagger, but in truth she seemed to be doing so more to look busy than through any pressing need to sharpen the weapon.

  “Failend,” Harald said as he approached. The girl looked up, tossing her long, brown hair behind her. She had stopped wearing her mail, apparently concluding as Louis had that the Northmen were no immediate threat. She was dressed now in a blue linen leine, a wool brat around her shoulders that was pinned in place with a silver brooch that glinted dull in the muted light. Even when she had been wearing mail, Harald had noticed how very lovely she was. Seeing her now in more feminine clothes reminded him that she was indeed a beauty, her skin smooth and white, her hair thick and luxurious.

  “Yes?” Failend said.

  “You told me, back when first we met, that you’re a healer. We have one of us who’s badly wounded and I would ask you tend to him.”

  “Ahh…yes,” Failend said, sounding not at all sure about that suggestion.

  “Is there a problem?” Harald asked. He guessed that this Irishwoman, this Christian, would not care to heal a heathen fin gall.

  “Well, it’s just that all my herbs, my tinctures and such, all those I left back in Glendalough,” Failend said. “I don’t have all I might need.”

  “You should look at him, all the same,” Harald said. “Maybe there’s something you can do. Maybe we can collect the herbs you need.”

  “Very well,” Failend said, standing and sheathing her knife. Harald led the way across the sand to where Starri lay on a pile of furs, his eyes closed, his back propped up against a sea chest.

  “Starri,” Harald said, softly so as not to startle him. “Failend here is a healer, and she’s come to look at you.” Starri opened his eyes and looked up at them, though he did not seem entirely aware of what was happening.

  Starri Deathless was a berserker. He wanted nothing from life but to die in battle and join Odin and the other fallen warriors in the corpse hall. But he was also a wild, reckless, brutal fighting man, and every battle seemed to end with Starri still alive amid a pile of men he had sent to the corpse hall ahead of him. Harald envied Starri’s complete lack of fear, even while recognizing that it was really a form of madness.

  On the voyage upriver, on the way to Glendalough, Starri’s luck had nearly changed. The Northmen had been surprised in their camp by Irish warriors and had beaten them back after a short, hard fight. Starri had launched himself into the fray with his usual lunacy, but this time an enemy spear had found him, the iron point tearing clear through his shoulder just inches from his heart. No one thought he would even live through that night, but he had, and since then he had been suffering agonies as he slowly recovered.

  While the rest of Thorgrim’s men and the others had fought their way upriver and launched the raid on Glendalough, Starri had remained in his sick bed, which for him was the worst agony of all. When Ottar Bloodax had come for the ships, Starri had stood and fought, battle axes in hand. In doing so he tore the half-mended wound open again, reversing what little gains he had made.

  Now Failend knelt by his side and gently lifted the blanket off Starri’s torso, exposing the bandage pressed against his wounded chest. The linen was soaked through with blood that was dried around the edges but still wet where it pressed against the torn flesh. She took the edge of the cloth between her fingers, using both hands, and pulled gently. The cloth peeled back and then stopped, plastered as it was to Starri’s skin.

  Failend made a little noise in her throat and tugged harder, but still the bandage would not come. Harald could see her press her lips together and then she gave the bandage a yank. Starri gasped and Harald gasped and the linen tore clear, revealing an ugly wound, ragged and bloody and covered in pus.

  A second later the smell of the rotting flesh hit them. Harald clenched his teeth and he saw Failend turn her head and make a choking sound. Starri groaned louder and shifted his head side to side, just once, then lay still.

  “Is it bad?” Harald asked when he had recovered his wits.

  “Let me look,” Failend said, sounding very much as if she did not want to look. She turned her head back toward Starri, leaned a little closer in, made another gagging sound. “I see,” she said at last. She stood and took a step back.

  “Yes?” Harald asked.

  “Well…” Failend said. “It’s a terrible wound, I can tell you that. The spear…it was a spear, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, a spear.”

  “Well, the spear went right through his genuflect, do you see?”

  “It did?” Harald asked.

  “Yes. Through the genuflect, and it seems to have done great hurt to the monstrance. The worst I’ve seen.”

  Harald nodded. This did not sound good. “We had a thought to bleed him,” he offered.

  “Bleed?” Failend said, as if considering this approach. “It seems like he’s been bleeding quite well on his own.”

  “Yes, but is it the right sort of bleeding?” Harald asked.

  “That’s difficult to say, at this point,” Failend said. “We’ll have to see what sort of humors are left in him. But I had another thought. Those women with the bandits, maybe one of them has the herbs and such that I need. To replace the ones I left back in Glendalough. Would you mind if I asked among them?”

  Harald shook his head. “No, not at all. Anything that might be of help to Starri.”

  Failend turned and hurried across the sandbar to where the Irish women were making their camp. She stopped and spoke with the first of the women she came to and was directed to another. A moment later Failend and the second woman were crossing back toward them, the other woman with a basket on her arm.

  “This is Cara,” Failend said. “She’s the healer to these…fellows.”

  Harald nodded his greeting. Cara was ten years Failend’s senior, he guessed, and she had a seriousness about her that spoke of the hard and precarious life that the outlaws lived.

  “This is my friend Starri Deathless,” Harald said, gesturing toward Starri, who seemed to have passed out. “He’s badly wounded,” he added, but Cara had stopped listening even before Harald got to Starri’s name. She knelt down at Starri’s side and looked close at the wound. She leaned in and sniffed it and made a soft noise like disgust, though her reaction was not nearly as violent as Harald’s and Failend’s had been.

  “We were thinking we might bleed him,” Harald said.

  “Bleed him?” Cara said, reaching for her basket. “Bleeding is to balance the humors, not for a wound such as this. He’s bled quite enough, I think.”

  “Yes,” Failend said, “that was what I thought as well.”

  “The flesh is rotting,” Cara continued. “The wound was not well tended. The dead flesh will have to be removed.”

  “Removed?” Harald said, suddenly afraid that Cara was suggesting he do it. “By…you? Or Failend?”

  “No, by my barber-surgeons,” Cara said. She reached into her basket and withdrew a clay pot with a cloth bound around the top. She removed the cloth and spilled the contents into her hand:
a tangle of white, squirming maggots in a clump the size of a small stone. Harald clenched his teeth together.

  “Yes, just so,” Failend said, and Harald could tell her teeth were clenched as well. “I have maggots of my own, of course. Back at Glendalough.”

  Carefully, two or three at a time, Cara placed the maggots in Starri’s wound. When they were all there, a writhing presence in the black, red and greenish rent in the flesh, she pulled a ball of spider webs from her basket and laid that across the wound, then laid a clean bit of linen over it. She stood and faced Failend and Harald.

  “That must stay on for a day at least, and then we’ll see how things fare. I’ll make up some broth and he should be made to eat. That would be your advice, would it not, m’lady?” she said, addressing the last to Failend.

  “Pray, call me Failend,” Failend said, “and yes…maggots and broth, just as I was thinking.”

  Thorgrim arrived before any more was said, crossing the sandbar and brushing wood chips from his tunic. “How does he do?” he asked.

  “Good,” Harald said, “or better, anyway. Failend and Cara…this is Cara…they’ve done good work by him. Set him up well. Cara used…she did good work.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Thorgrim said. Harald knew that his father was uncomfortable around the sick and wounded because he knew little of their treatment and it made him feel useless and ignorant. Thorgrim turned to the women. “I thank you for your help,” he said, nodding respectfully so they might understand his meaning, if not his words. He turned to Harald. “If you’re done here, get some of our men and set up a ridge pole, six feet high, no more. We’ll stretch the sail out over it and make a tent. I doubt it will go two full days without raining in this miserable land.”

  Harald nodded, pleased to have a task more befitting his station, not women’s work such as tending the wounded, even if it was Starri Deathless. He moved off, calling to some of Sea Hammer’s men who were not otherwise occupied. The shoreline rang with the sound of weapons on weapons as the Irish outlaws were trained to fight like Norsemen and the air was filled with the smoke of the fires and the smell of the náttmál, the night-meal, cooking.

  It made Harald happy. It gave him a sense of hope, of purpose, something he had not felt in some time. They were training. They were preparing. They were setting Sea Hammer to rights. Because soon they would return to Glendalough.

  Chapter Six

  Little heed to laws

  The loud-mouth paid

  Though money he has,

  More than enough.

  The Saga of the Confederates

  Ottar Bloodax and his men did not linger long at the river’s edge. After announcing himself as Lord of Vík-ló, Ottar seemed to feel that no more explanation was needed. Nor were the thirty or so men and women of the longphort in any position to demand that one be given. Ottar and his several hundred warriors were free to ignore them as they wished.

  And that was what they did. Ottar punctuated the end of his brief introduction with a loud grunt, then headed toward the plank road, pushing past the assembled people with no further word. Most of his men followed behind, shields still held on arms, swords in hand. The others busied themselves in hauling the ships as far up the mud bank as they could and running lines ashore.

  The people of Vík-ló stepped aside, making way for Ottar’s column. Aghen studied the newly arrived warriors as they shuffled past, and he could see that whatever fight they had just come from, they had not had an easy time of it. There were wounds on faces, heads and hands, dark stained bandages and smears of blood only half washed away. He could see rents in chainmail and gouges in shields and nicks in the blades of their swords, deep enough that they were visible even to his old eyes from half a rod away.

  “They’ve had some hard fighting,” Aghen said in a low voice and Mar nodded.

  “Plenty of work for me,” the blacksmith said, but he did not sound as enthusiastic as he had before. Ottar’s men did not wear the expressions of conquering warriors who had returned with their ships’ holds bulging with silver. They looked like men who had seen hard use, who had accomplished little more than escaping with their lives and now wished only to be done with it all.

  The last of the warriors passed by and the people of Vík-ló closed ranks again and watched them as they marched off. No one spoke. Aghen guessed that the others, like himself, were trying to make sense of this new order of things.

  Thorgrim is dead? Aghen thought, Ottar’s words coming back to him. It did not seem possible. He had not known Thorgrim long, it was true, but Thorgrim was one of those men who seemed to have always been there, the sort who always would. Somehow it had never occurred to Aghen that Thorgrim might not return from this raid and resume his rule over the longphort. Foolish, he knew. At his age he had seen countless men die in more ways than he could recall. But he had never considered that Thorgrim might go that way.

  How did Thorgrim die? Aghen wondered. Death, more often than not, came from something foolish: a minor wound turned rotten, a fever, falling drunk off the side of a ship and drowning. He hoped it was nothing of that sort that had felled Thorgrim Night Wolf. He hoped he had been holding Iron-tooth in his hand, the blade dripping with his enemy’s blood, when he had finally been cut down.

  Whatever the truth of the matter was, Aghen did not think he would learn it from Ottar or his men. Ottar’s reaction to the mention of Thorgrim’s name told the shipwright all he needed to know about that situation.

  Did Ottar kill Thorgrim? Aghen wondered next. Did he kill him so he might set himself up as Lord of Vík-ló?

  The last of Ottar’s men disappeared over the rise in the ground that led to the plank road. Aghen followed behind. He crossed the stretch of grass and dirt and mud where the longphort of Vík-ló ran along the southern shore of the River Leitrim. It was this open ground that he and Thorgrim had turned into the shipyard, where trees had been split into planks and hewn into keels and masts and yards, where the longships had risen on their keel blocks like new creations molded by the hands of the gods.

  He climbed up to the crest of the slope and stopped. From there he could take in all of the longphort: the thatched houses puffing smoke from their gable ends, the rough plank road that twisted slightly east then west as it ran from where he stood to the big oak gate in the earthen wall, flanked on either side by the twin halls. The whole was enclosed by the great half circle of earthen wall topped with a palisade. Under Thorgrim’s leadership that wall had been built up and repaired over the course of the previous winter. It was hard work, filthy and exhausting and often done in the cold, driving rain. But now the wall represented a real defense, and not the crumbling pretense that Grimarr had let it become.

  Vík-ló was not much to look at. It was not Dubh-linn; it certainly was not Hedeby or Birka. But it was well positioned just within the river’s mouth, sheltered, but open to the sea. It was secure and there were ample resources at hand. And there was wealth, considerable wealth. There was the plunder that Thorgrim had brought with him and the plunder that Grimarr had amassed and the silver and gold from Grimarr and Fasti’s last raid which Thorgrim had recovered. It was all there. The men who had sailed for Glendalough had left it behind because they had intended to return.

  Ottar knew that. Aghen had no doubt that he did, and that was why he had come.

  He watched the line of Ottar’s men move like a great serpent up the plank road, Ottar at its head, looming above the others. They reached the gate and the doors of the two halls that faced one another. They stopped there, and Aghen guessed Ottar was deciding which he would claim as his own. And then Ottar disappeared into the hall north of the gate. Thorgrim’s hall.

  “Making himself right at home, isn’t he?” Mar said, stepping up beside Aghen. The blacksmith was still wearing his soot-smeared leather apron. Aghen had often teased him about the number of cows that had to die to make an apron wide enough to cover his broad chest and ample belly, but the shipwright did not feel
particularly jovial at the moment.

  Aghen shook his head. “This is not good, not good at all,” he said. Aghen had lived under jarls who were benevolent and jarls who were cruel, and he could see right off what sort Ottar would be. Worse, there was no escape. In a place such as Dubh-linn one could always find passage on some ship bound somewhere. But in all of Vík-ló there were only eight ships to be found, and they were all the property of Ottar Bloodax.

  “Well, who knows what this Ottar will be?” Mar said. “There was Grimarr and Thorgrim, and now him. Lords come and lords go. But we go on, eh?” Mar was trying to sound like his usual optimistic self, but he was not succeeding. He was right about one thing, however: they would go on. There was nothing else to be done. So Aghen went back to the shipyard and continued to sift through the lumber that had been stacked for future use, sorting white oak from maple from pine. And he wondered what Ottar would do next to squeeze the wealth from the longphort he had so effortlessly taken.

  He did not have to wait long for an answer, as it turned out, an hour or two, no more. Aghen had worked nearly to exhaustion and was sitting on a pile of white oak boards and staring out toward the sea when he heard the man calling. Someone up at the far end of the longphort, someone with a substantial voice, though not substantial enough for Aghen to make out the words, just the tone of command. He stood with a groan and climbed up to the high point in the road.

  Ottar’s men were milling about near the gates by the two halls. The people of Vík-ló who had retreated in confusion and fear to their homes were now stepping out onto the plank road, summoned by the man calling to them as he walked toward the river.

  “Up to Lord Ottar’s hall, all of you, come along! Come along!” Aghen could make out the words now. “Lord Ottar would speak with you all! Come along!”