‘Gevar and Iarl with me,’ Varin said, taking one of the torches from a man with a harelip who could not have been much older than Runa. ‘The rest of you know what to do.’
They ayed and grunted and hefted their spears and shields, grim-faced in the golden flamelight of those hissing brands.
‘This way,’ Runa said, the blood in her legs and arms seeming to tremble as she led the three men away from the longhouses, past the grain store and the smoke house and into the woods on the south-east side of the settlement.
At first there was enough light to see by, what with Varin’s flame and the birch trunks which seemed to glow in the moonlight that spilled through their flickering leaves. But soon they left the birch and scrub behind and came among the tall pines, whose lower branches were sparse and brittle but whose upper reaches were thick and black as soot. Here was a darkness which might be pushed back by the firebrand’s golden bloom but never vanquished, and no sooner had Varin and his torch passed a place than would the night flood in again.
‘How much further?’ Varin asked after a while, passing Runa so that he could better light their way. He cursed as a branch caught on his tunic sleeve, ripping the wool.
‘A little way yet,’ Runa replied. ‘A little island walk never hurt anyone, Varin,’ Iarl said, using his shield to fend off more branches. ‘Not unless it was to settle a matter of honour between the hazel staves,’ he added thoughtfully, and Runa knew Iarl was alluding to the hólmganga, when two men would go on to an empty island and fight a duel to settle a dispute.
‘I still don’t see the point in burying a sea chest full of silver,’ Gevar said. ‘Strange enough that these women all live here together, never letting a man between their legs, without them going around putting silver in the ground for the worms.’
‘Or for the gods,’ Iarl said. ‘You heard the old woman. King Thorir meant his silver for Freyja. An offering, like a bull or a good ram, only without all the blood and bleating.’
‘Without the blood, Iarl?’ Gevar said. ‘Tell that to the old crone who Varin gave a new ale hole for the afterlife.’
Varin muttered something foul. Perhaps he did not like the thought of having sent the Wise Mother to the afterlife. Perhaps he feared meeting her there when he met his own end. Still, he intended to go there a rich man and he picked up the pace, the flame of his torch whipping and flapping, guttering almost as he strode on.
There was no track and Runa wove them in and out of the pines, having only a vague sense of where she was going. It was dark and she was afraid and she had only been to the place once before. But she pushed on and hoped that the Goddess was with her, and when the going became steep she was sure that one way or the other they would get there.
‘So, Runa Haraldsdóttir,’ Varin said, stepping over a chiming stream and holding the brand up for the others to see their way, ‘who are you and why did King Thorir Gapthrosnir put you on Kuntøy with these Freyja thralls? You are Norse, that much is clear whenever you open your mouth.’
‘A long way from home, aren’t you, girl?’ Gevar said. ‘Sick for your kinfolk eh?’ Runa saw his teeth in the gloom and despised him. These were desperate men. Outlaws and fugitives, perhaps even escaped thralls. None of them worthy of a sword or a name or a row bench on a good ship. Nithings who did not know what they were getting themselves into.
‘You can come home with me. I’m a wealthy man,’ Gevar told her.
‘Ha!’ Iarl blurted. ‘Will be soon enough,’ Gevar said, ‘after this night’s work is done.’
‘If we ever come to the place where they buried our hoard,’ Iarl said.
‘Runa would not deceive us, would you, girl?’ Varin said, casting his light on some deadfall so that he could see his way over it.
Runa thought about making a run for it, haring off into the dark. She was sure she could escape before they could make a grab for her or put a spear in her, and once she was clear into the mire of the night they would never catch her. But then what? Varin and his companions would make their way back to the settlement and the other women would pay for Runa’s actions.
‘My father was a jarl,’ she said. ‘Far from here. He was betrayed by a Norse king. A worm named Gorm.’
‘That’s kings for you,’ Iarl said.
‘My father and mother and three of my brothers were killed fighting our enemies,’ Runa said, a stick snapping beneath her foot, ‘but I have one brother who is very much alive. Sigurd is a great warrior, cunning and skilled and fearless. But what should worry his enemies most is that he is a favourite of Óðin Allfather.’
Runa felt their eyes on her then and she put a little more straightness in her spine. She was being a fool telling them all this. Giving them a reason to take more than just the silver from Fugløy perhaps, for they would surely guess that she was hiding from her brother’s enemies here on this island. And Varin was clearly not a man to turn his back on an opportunity, nor was he the kind to let the risk of an undertaking put him off, and so now he might think he could sell Runa to Sigurd’s enemies. It would be easy enough to track down King Gorm, not least because the silver Varin was about to own would buy him information and passage on the journey north. He could have his own longship built for the journey if the weight of that sea chest was anything to go by, Runa thought, recalling how King Thorir’s men had struggled to get the thing off Storm-Elk.
Foolish to tell them so much, and yet the telling had filled Runa like the warm glow of strong mead. It had sluiced the fear from her belly and cooled the simmering of her blood. She was Runa Haraldsdóttir and would not pretend otherwise. Not to men such as these.
‘And just as my brother is Óðin-favoured, so I am Freyja-kissed,’ she said. ‘So do not think to lay your filthy hands on me again, Gevar.’
Something rustled in the pine litter nearby and they all stopped, holding their breath, eyes scouring the darkness which Varin tried to chase off with his torch, and even Runa’s heart tripped in her chest after all her talk of the gods.
Then Varin shook his head and walked on, and a hand shoved Runa’s shoulder. ‘Move, girl,’ Gevar growled, ‘for I do not want to be on this island any longer than I need to be.’
‘Aye, and from now on keep your pretty mouth shut too,’ Iarl said. ‘No more talk of gods if you want to keep that tongue of yours.’
Runa kept her mouth shut and they climbed, forcing a path through brambles and bracken and bilberry bushes, past upended pines whose soil-snarled roots dangled like filthy beards, and past rocks that glistened with moisture and were fragrant with moss.
And they were all puffing like a pair of Ingel’s bellows when at last they reached the top of a hill, the highest point on the whole of Fugløy, and Runa stopped because this was it. The sacred place.
‘You dragged a chest full of silver all the way up here?’ Varin said, arming sweat from his forehead and glancing around.
‘Well I am not looking forward to dragging it all the way back to the beach,’ Iarl said, leaning his spear against a tree and pulling a hand axe from his belt.
‘Why do you think I am here, little man?’ Gevar said. Gevar was not Svein-big, but he was a head taller than his friends and his arms were like oak boughs.
‘Well, girl? Where do I dig?’ Iarl asked, waving that hand axe.
But Runa did not answer. She was looking at something which none of the men had seen yet, a spear-throw ahead of them, standing silent and more still even than the pines all around it.
‘What in Óðin’s arse is that?’ Gevar said, his own eyes having sifted the object of Runa’s gaze from the dark, which was more silvered up here on this hilltop without the same dense mass of trees to soak up what moonlight there was.
‘That is our sacred tree,’ Runa said, aware of the weight of that word our. Then I am one of them now, she thought, looking at the post which had once been a tree like any of those around it, but which had been stripped of branches and bark and carved with modest skill into the likeness of Freyja
Giver.
‘Not the post, girl!’ Gevar said, pointing, the whites of his eyes glowing. ‘That! What’s that?’
Varin lifted his firebrand, which was half its original length now, so that he must have been starting to worry for his hand.
Runa’s blood suddenly iced in her veins. There, on the ground a few feet from the base of the Freyja tree, was a figure, hunched beneath a simple shelter made of sticks and animal skins. It would have been easy not to see it at all, and yet at the same time Runa wondered how she had missed it. But then anything was possible where Freyja the seiðr goddess was concerned.
Varin started forward, the flame from his torch flapping.
‘No, Varin,’ Runa hissed.
He stopped. Slowly, he twisted his neck to look back at Runa. ‘Why?’ he asked, his voice low, his pitted, pocked face clenched and his hand on the hilt of the scramasax sheathed at his waist. He was nervous. They all were.
‘You must not disturb her,’ Runa hissed. ‘She is with the gods.’
‘Fuck this place,’ Gevar muttered.
‘Who is she?’ Varin asked. He had not taken another step towards the figure, whose back faced them, though there was a glimpse of long red braids in the glow of Varin’s fire.
‘The High Mother,’ Runa said. A tendril of white smoke curled up from a ring of stones beside Skuld, who was as still as a stone herself, so that it was not impossible to imagine that she must have died up there on that hill, or frozen solid even though it was summer.
Varin seemed torn as to what he should do, his hand still clutching the grip of his long knife.
‘Leave her be, Varin,’ Iarl rasped. ‘Bad enough what we did to the old crone back at the house. Leave her be. I don’t need some god’s curse hanging round my neck for the rest of my days.’
Gevar said nothing, which Varin took to mean that he agreed with Iarl, and he nodded, sweeping the firebrand back towards them to let the darkness claim the High Mother once again.
‘Where is it, girl?’ Varin asked, his voice still low, as though he feared waking Skuld from her sleep or drawing the eye of whichever of the Æsir she was communing with.
Runa pointed to the ground by her feet, which was soft with the rotting remains of an old tree. Iarl grunted and shoved her aside, then knelt and began to hack at the earth with his hand axe. No sooner had he broken the ground than his axe thunked into the wooden lid of the chest which the Freyja Maidens had buried as best they could given what little soil there was up there.
‘It’s here,’ Iarl said, grinning at Varin and Gevar.
‘Of course it’s here,’ Gevar said, but Varin, it seemed, needed to see the chest with his own eyes and he came and dropped to his knees across from Iarl, his grinning face cast in the copper glow of his flame.
‘How will we see our way back?’ Gevar asked, nodding at Varin’s torch. The flame was faltering now, guttering as it crept down the two staves, the tar-soaked rags and rope having all but burnt away.
‘If I had known it was this far I would have brought another torch,’ Varin said, cursing as another scrap of burning cloth fell from the brand.
‘Who needs fire?’ Iarl said, grinning. ‘We will see our way by the silver glow.’
‘What about her?’ Gevar said, pointing his spear at Skuld who still had not moved a muscle, so deep was she in the weave of the utiseta.
Varin looked back towards the crude shelter and the woman beneath it in body if not in mind. He laid a hand on the sea chest. ‘First we get this out,’ he said. And as his face turned back towards Runa, she struck, throwing herself at the firebrand and pushing it into Varin’s face. She heard the crackle as his hair, eyebrows and moustaches caught, and he screeched and threw himself back, dropping the torch, which Runa snatched up, spinning and sweeping it at the other two men.
‘You’re dead!’ Gevar yelled, coming for her with his spear, and Runa threw the guttering brand at him and it struck his forearm with a spray of flame and sparks and he yelled again. But Runa was moving. She ran to retrieve Iarl’s spear from the tree against which it still leant, then turned and held her ground, relishing the feel of the solid ash shaft in her hands.
Varin was writhing on the ground, clutching his burnt face so that his screaming was muffled.
‘Come then, Gevar Corpse-Breath,’ Runa said, beckoning him to her with a jerk of the spear. She was more than aware of her disadvantage in terms of reach and strength, and in the fact that she faced two full-grown men. But she found that she was not afraid. Had she not worked with spear, sword, shield and bow every day since coming ashore with that sea chest full of silver?
‘You are dead,’ Gevar said again, as Iarl drew his knife so that he had that in his left, the axe in his right, side-stepping to put some distance between himself and Gevar.
‘I am Runa Haraldsdóttir,’ she said, ‘and I am your death.’ She pointed the spear blade at the other man. ‘Yours too, Iarl Weasel-Prick.’
Iarl did not like that and he ran at her, screaming, and what he thought he would do with that little axe against a seven-foot-long spear she would never find out, for she threw her right foot forward to meet his charge and thrust the spear straight into his belly, then twisted the blade and hauled it out again before it could get snarled in his ribs or spine. Then she turned, neat as a stitch, sweeping that blade up to face Gevar.
Who had yet to move.
The big man stood there like a witless troll, his mouth hanging so wide that a passing owl might think it was a tree hollow and roost in it.
‘What are you waiting for, Corpse-Breath?’ Runa asked him, giving him her best wolf’s grin, recognizing her brother by the feel of it. ‘I think your spear-work will be slow like your wits. You move like a rat in the cesspit. You are as slow as a fat fly that is stuck in the honey,’ she said, hoping that he could see the gore on the moon-licked blade between them.
‘Little bitch,’ Gevar spat, and Runa nodded because she knew that her insults were stinging him, which was the idea, for anger was rarely a better weapon than skill. ‘If you’ve still got your eyes, Varin, you will want to see this,’ he told his friend. And as Varin looked up, Runa saw the horror of his scorched face, as if he wasn’t ugly enough already.
Then Gevar came and their spears clashed, and Runa blocked once, twice, three times, and jumped back, her hands stinging and her arms shaking from the impact. And she swallowed a curse because Gevar was not slow. Not slow at all.
He strode at her and thrust for her chest, and she knocked the point aside using its own momentum rather than her own strength, then struck at him but he blocked and punched the butt end into Runa’s head, sending her reeling against a pine, whose branch stubs tore open her shoulder. She rolled round the tree and the blade of Gevar’s spear struck the trunk, the big man grunting with a blow that would have taken Runa’s head from her shoulders.
‘Ready to meet your goddess, girl?’ Gevar asked, lunging but missing Runa by a whisper of steel. She stumbled back, almost tripping amongst the forest litter, half blinded by the blood spilling into her eyes from the gash in her head. She feinted one way then moved in the opposite direction, her legs carrying her to another tree, against which she pressed herself so that she could not fall. No insults on her lips now. Just blood. Just the copper taste of it filling her mouth.
Gevar came again and she blocked as she had been taught, and the ash spears sang their muted song, wood on wood, steel on steel, the rasp of it loud in the dark woods as Runa fended the man off, the bones in her body rattling under the impact of his attacks. And then, when she had turned aside five more of Gevar’s thrusts, she laid her trap and the big man walked straight into it, expecting her block which never came, as Runa twisted the trunk of her body and his blade ripped open the flesh of her waist then went past her. He was open and she struck with everything she had, screeching as she scythed her spear up and across his right cheek, savaging his face with the blade, ripping it open in a spray of hot gore. Then, screeching still, she
threw her foot forward and plunged the spear into his shoulder and the blade passed all the way through him, the resistance of muscle and flesh vanishing suddenly as it burst from his back.
‘Bitch!’ Gevar spat, spittle lacing his beard, and Runa let go the shaft and stepped back on unsteady legs as her enemy stood there not knowing what to do now that he was skewered on that spear. Not that he could do much with half his face flapping around like a fish in the bilge, and while he stood there Runa picked up Iarl’s hand axe and placed herself in front of Gevar so that he could see her, with one eye at least.
‘I told you I was your death, Gevar Corpse-Breath,’ she said, and he muttered some filthy curse which was cut short as Runa planted the axe in his forehead with a crack that echoed off the surrounding pines. Gevar’s legs gave way and he dropped, but before he hit the ground something barrelled into Runa almost snapping her neck and she flew and struck the earth and the weight landed on her, driving the air from her lungs.
Varin’s face was like some monster’s from a story. The fire had crisped his skin and even burnt away his eyelashes and their lids, so that his eyes were bulging and hideous as he screamed at her, his drool falling on her face and in her mouth as she gasped for breath. But she could not breathe because Varin’s hands were around her throat and Runa knew she was going to die.
‘I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!’ Varin screamed, his raw, bloody and blackened face warped in pain and savage fury, and Runa wanted to scream her defiance back at him, wanted to tell him that she would not die here on this hill and that he was a cursed nithing. But Runa could not breathe. The night was getting even darker and then she saw her mother Grimhild standing before her, tall and proud and beautiful.
I’m coming, Mother.
Then the weight was gone.
Runa heard herself gasp. She hauled the night air into her lungs, the night which was brightening as if dawn was already here, and she felt another’s hands gripping hers.
She was being lifted, pulled up from the cold ground. She could breathe again and so she drank deeply of the sweet night air. Then the fog cleared and her sight sharpened and there standing before her, holding Runa’s hands in her own, was Skuld Snorradóttir. The High Mother’s eyes looked like black pools and it seemed to Runa that the woman was looking through her; that part of Skuld was still with the gods, wherever that was.
Wings of the Storm: (The Rise of Sigurd 3) Page 9
