Wings of the Storm: (The Rise of Sigurd 3)

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Sigurd!’

  Sigurd turned and saw Floki and Valgerd, Runa, Olaf and Svein coming down the sea path, Valgerd gripping Svein’s long axe as well as her spear because the red-bearded giant carried old Solmund in his arms like a bairn. They looked like Hel’s own warriors, all wild-eyed and gore-spattered and full of the battle thrill.

  ‘Óðin’s arse, Sigurd! Wait!’ Olaf yelled, his voice carrying to Sigurd on the wind, but Sigurd’s vengeance would not wait and he was crossing the strand which was all that separated him from the oath-breaker.

  Then one of King Gorm’s warriors broke off from the others who were climbing aboard Storm-Bison.

  ‘Haraldarson!’ this warrior shouted, holding his sword and shield out wide to let everybody see – to let Sigurd see – how big he was and how fine his war gear.

  ‘Hreidar Herdísarson,’ Sigurd called back, beyond caring that he was about to fight the king’s champion, the man who stood at Storm-Bison’s prow and hewed down the oath-breaker’s enemies. The man who now believed he would cast his reputation in gold by killing Sigurd on that beach.

  Behind Hreidar, the king himself was aboard his ship now. He was clinging to the stem post and glaring at Sigurd as Storm-Bison pranced and jerked on the spume-crested rollers which threw themselves on to the strand.

  ‘Is this how you saw your death, Hreidar?’ Sigurd asked him, stalking towards him with his sword and scramasax, ignoring a voice in his head which warned him that he was bleeding badly from the cut Moldof had given him.

  ‘My wyrd is not to die by your sword, Haraldarson,’ the champion said with a smile. Along the beach some of those who had been guarding the boats were summoning the courage to go and stand with Hreidar, but most were unsure because up on the rise were Jarl Hrani and his Sword-Norse and they brought with them the Óðin spear with Sigurd’s wolf banner thrashing beneath its blade.

  Even Sigurd shuddered to see the jarl up there, his helmet brighter than the day, because had Hrani been Sigurd’s enemy, as he was until recently, then Sigurd would surely have lost this battle and the oath-breaker would have pissed on his corpse.

  Then Valgerd flew past Sigurd and Hreidar banged his sword against his shield because he knew the shieldmaiden meant to kill him and he respected her for the ambition.

  ‘He’s mine!’ Sigurd yelled after her, but she was already on Hreidar, probing his defences with her spear and measuring his speed as he swung, trying to shorten that spear by a foot or two.

  Olaf and Floki ran towards a handful of greybeards and boys who turned and hared back to their knörr, thinking better of their former plan to continue their king’s fight. And more king’s men were flying down the sea path to escape Jarl Hrani. They scattered like rooks from the roost, fleeing across the shingle towards their respective boats, screaming at friends and kinsmen to make a shieldwall or to put out into the storm-tossed sea, which showed that the king’s great war host was a shattered thing now, that his men would risk a drowning death rather than stay and fight.

  ‘Go, Sigurd!’ Valgerd yelled over her shoulder while jabbing her spear at Hreidar’s face but striking his helmet. ‘That færing with the new strakes. Go!’

  Sigurd ran to the high-tide line on to which the sea had spewed its green wrack, and to the abandoned boat lying there in danger of being claimed by the fjord. No more than sixteen feet in length it had a small mast and yard as well as two pairs of oars and Sigurd set his shoulder to it and pushed but it would not move.

  ‘Come on!’ he growled, and then Sigurd thought the gods had heard him, for the little boat was moving, its belly crunching on the stony sand.

  ‘You think I’d let you butcher that oath-breaking bollock of a king without me, lad?’

  Sigurd looked up and saw Olaf at the other end of the boat, leaning back, hauling the thing towards the sea. Floki and Runa were beside Sigurd too now and the hull kissed the breakers and they jumped aboard but for Olaf who stood in the surf fighting to hold on to the little færing while Svein waded in with Solmund still in his arms.

  Sigurd took the skipper from him and put him on the bench at the tiller, earning the old man’s thanks and a pained grin but a grin nonetheless. Like all of them Solmund was daubed with blood but in his case too much of it was his own.

  ‘Don’t you die yet, old man,’ Olaf growled as Svein pushed the boat into deeper water and Floki hauled the yard up the mast and spread her sail to the storm. Sigurd looked back to the beach and saw Valgerd duck Hreidar’s wild swing and put her spear in his thigh, heard the champion bellow in fury before swinging again, but this time the shieldmaiden leapt back and sprang forward, supple as a slender yew, jumping for height and thrusting the spear down over Hreidar’s shield into his shoulder. The champion cast his shield aside to better see his enemy and Valgerd seized on his stupidity because she had him for both reach and speed and he did not even have a shield now.

  ‘Take him, Valgerd,’ Floki growled into the gusts, seeing Hreidar’s mistake as he worked the yard and wrestled with it to catch the wind.

  Valgerd feinted high and the champion swept his sword up to block, only the spear blade was no longer there. It was in his belly, and Hreidar had been right when he had said it was not his wyrd to die by Sigurd’s sword. He was dead by Valgerd’s spear. Or would be.

  The shieldmaiden’s next strike took him in the groin and her last opened his throat and Hreidar kept his feet but Valgerd must have known she had given him his death wound because she turned and ran down the beach and plunged into the waves and Sigurd pulled her aboard, so that the little boat now showed only a sliver of freeboard above the waterline.

  ‘They made it, then,’ Svein said, pointing, and they all looked back to see Bram and Aslak, Asgot, Thorbiorn, Bjarni and Bjorn all spilling on to the beach, their splintered shields and gore-stained mail and blades telling their story better than any skald could.

  ‘Here!’ Olaf yelled to them, and somehow Asgot heard him through the storm din and lifted his spear high.

  But Storm-Bison was bearing the oath-breaker westward, her mast bending to the wind even with her sail more than half reefed and her crew fighting as hard as they had fought all day.

  There was no time to wait for the others.

  ‘Go!’ Sigurd called, turning his back on those on the beach, the wind whipping his hair across his eyes and crusting the blood caught in the rings of his brynja. Floki grinned and nodded, catching that storm in the square sail so that it cracked with the joy of it and the reefing ropes danced.

  ‘Don’t lose them, Solmund!’ Sigurd called over his shoulder as he peered into the gusting grey veils of rain after Storm-Bison, growling at Rán Mother of the Waves that she could not have the oath-breaker because his death belonged to Sigurd.

  ‘Don’t need you to tell me how to breathe, lad,’ Solmund called back, gripping the tiller as the rest of them clung on to the benches and sides and planted their feet in the waterlogged thwarts and the færing flew into the Boknafjord.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AMID THE RAGING storm, swaths of even heavier rain raced across the fjord like the shadows of gods, so that the glimpses they got of Storm-Bison were few and fleeting. Yet from what they could see, whoever was at her helm was earning his silver, as were those men breaking their backs with the bailers and those who had managed to lower the yard and roll up another few feet of sail before hauling it back up the mast. For Storm-Bison had somehow managed to avoid being wrecked on the rocks in the channel between east and west Bokn, and to do that she must have slanted her stem into the wind which is a good way of sinking a boat because it will ship water the way Thór ships mead.

  ‘How can they be afraid of a little færing like us?’ Svein called into the wind, wondering why the Avaldsnes men would take such risks in flying from them.

  ‘It’s not us he’s afraid of, though he should be,’ Olaf shouted above the hiss and roar. ‘The oath-breaker knows his men have flown. He means to get back up to his hall on his hill.’<
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  ‘He’ll try to raise more spears,’ Runa said. She had unstrung her bow and buried the string inside her clothes to try to dry it.

  Olaf nodded, rain dripping from his beard. ‘Whoreson’ll bury his silver too, for he knows that Sigurd and Jarl Hrani will be standing by his hearth soon enough.’

  A rush of wind caught the sail wrong and the little boat heeled into a wave so that water spilled over the sheer strake before she righted again, and Sigurd swung his gaze back to Solmund to make sure he was still with them and not already drinking Óðin’s mead.

  ‘She’s not Reinen but she’s brave enough for me,’ Solmund called to let them all know he was still their helmsman and they should not get any other ideas about it.

  Svein was doing his best to fling the bilge water back into the fjord where it belonged.

  ‘There!’ Valgerd said, pointing across the white-haired furrows which rolled past Bokn’s headland, on towards Karmøy’s craggy shore.

  There she was, Storm-Bison. And she was running wild.

  ‘She’s keel-loose,’ Olaf said, and Sigurd and Svein cursed to hear it. Storm-Bison was planing so swiftly on the surface of the water that she and her rudder had lost their grip on the fjord, meaning neither the king nor his helmsman nor anyone else aboard had control of Hríð-visundr now.

  This time Sigurd appealed to the Spear-God himself, growling at old One-Eye to let the oath-breaker live a little longer yet. ‘He’s mine, Allfather,’ he gnarred, swiping the rain and salt spray from his eyes, willing Storm-Bison to ride out this horror of wind and fjord. ‘Do not take him from me.’

  Because the king’s ship was like a leaf on the wind now. Without its keel and steerboard gripping the water there was a very real chance that Storm-Bison could plunge sideways from a wave-top down into the valley in front and then be swamped by the wave from which it fell. If that happened there were not enough bailers aboard to stop her sinking down and down to lie in the grass of the fjord bed.

  ‘Get that sail down, you fools,’ Olaf growled at the distant ship, as he and the others clung to that brave little færing and Sigurd all but threatened the gods themselves, and Solmund bled at the tiller.

  And then Storm-Bison’s sail came down and she continued bare-masted and storm-driven, scudding across the Karmsund Strait, and beyond her prow Sigurd could make out the heather-furred rocks and scrub-covered islands, the shallow coves and the pine-bristled hills of a coastline which he knew better than any other. Though the sight of Karmøy brought him no comfort now, and he almost laughed to think of his wyrd, the threads of which led him back home again after the blood-soaked saga of it all.

  A hand clutched at his arm and he turned to look into Runa’s eyes. She was still golden, his sister, even on a grey and red day such as this. ‘What will happen, brother?’ she asked.

  ‘They cannot stop her now for risk of turning into the wind and being tipped out like bad ale,’ he told her. ‘So her helmsman will look for the best place to beach her.’ He grimaced. ‘Not that he will have much choice in it.’

  And neither did he, whoever was at Storm-Bison’s tiller. Not that Sigurd saw much after that because a skein of rain seethed across the wind-flattened water a long arrow-shot off the færing’s bow, hiding his prey and the coast beyond.

  ‘He’ll be a feast for the crabs,’ Svein said, still bailing.

  But Sigurd refused to believe that. He clung on to the boat as he clung on to hope, his eyes thirsting for each glimpse of the oath-breaker’s ship, as Solmund somehow rode their own little færing through the storm fury which should have swallowed them. Which would have swallowed them had any man but Solmund gripped the tiller. And Sigurd thought that this was what it would feel like to ride Óðin’s own grey, eight-legged horse Sleipnir through the sky in the wild hunt.

  ‘Hear that?’ Olaf said, flinging another helmet-full of water over the side.

  ‘That’s no beaching,’ Svein said, for they had all heard it, even above the wind’s howl: the terrible snapping of a ship’s keel and the splintering of its hull strakes. The screams of doomed men and, dangerously close now, the suck and plunge of the rock-smashed waves, which could have been the eager breath of Rán as she welcomes each corpse into her cold embrace.

  Sigurd saw Runa clutch the Freyja amulet at her neck and Svein grip the long haft of his axe now as if an axe would be of any use in Rán’s dark kingdom beneath the waves. Storm-Bison was no more. Her back broken, she was being dismembered against the rocks, her skipper having missed, if only just, the sandy cove a good spit off her larboard. And the king’s men were spilling into the churning swells, screaming as their mail dragged them down. Not all of them, however, and Sigurd caught sight of the oath-breaker amongst a knot of men scrambling from the wreck of his best ship, casting themselves up on to the shore like sodden wrack.

  But then the færing bucked and heeled and Sigurd was thrown against the side and blinded by a slap of salt water and he reached out to grip Runa’s hand because she had fallen against him and he thought the boat would roll over and that they would sink to the bottom together.

  But then the boat righted itself and they were thrown back on to the benches and there was a deafening rasp and scrape of sand and stones against the hull as the færing rode up the beach and stopped suddenly, the water in her bilge flying over the prow and slopping back over her half-drowned crew.

  ‘They are watching, brother,’ Runa told Sigurd, the two of them finding their feet as the others gathered their weapons and helmets and stumbled out of the boat. And Sigurd did not know if his sister was talking about their kin up in Óðin’s hall, or the gods themselves.

  ‘Well that’s going in the tale, you old goat!’ Olaf called, he and Sigurd turning back to help Solmund out of the færing which was cast like driftwood up on the strand. ‘Bollocks,’ Olaf muttered. Sigurd cursed too and felt as though he had been kicked in the stomach, because Solmund lay slumped over the tiller, still gripping it though he had let go of his own life now. His tunic was blood-soaked and so was the bench upon which he still sat, and his face was white as old hearth ash. Somehow the old skipper had held on just long enough to win that last fight against wind and fjord and drive that little boat up on to the shore.

  Olaf took the old man’s head in both hands and pressed his mouth against the sodden hair. ‘Thank you, old friend,’ he said.

  Sigurd clenched his face against the pain of the wound which Moldof had given him, Moldof who would have killed him if not for Crow-Song. Alive because of a skald, he thought, then gripped the dead skipper’s shoulder. ‘Tell my brothers they will have to wait a little longer for me, old man,’ he said, thinking that the gods were surely laughing into their mead horns.

  ‘He is getting away,’ Floki said, pointing his short axe up the beach where the king and his surviving hearthmen were making for the birch trees, Moldof himself turning to take one last look at their pursuers before lumbering after his king.

  ‘Oath-breaker!’ Sigurd bellowed. And then he was running across the sand, a spear in his hand, and Floki was beside him, they two like predators on the scent of prey, their limbs young and strong and their blood thrumming with the arrogance that made them believe that they were invulnerable, that their wyrds were golden while other men’s were only red. Behind them came Runa and Valgerd, Svein and Olaf, and together they were a wolfpack as they loped amongst the trees.

  Deeper into the woodland they went, keeping the heaving of the storm-tossed sea in their right ears because that way they knew they were going north towards Avaldsnes and the king’s hall. That was where Gorm was bound, of that there was no doubt, for he would have men there, and weapons too, and so Sigurd pressed on, his lungs burning and his heavy brynja rusting on him as he ran, because he would get his claws into the oath-breaker before the worm wriggled back to his hole up on the hill.

  Then Floki lifted a hand and slowed, turning his right ear to the north, and the others stopped with him because they knew that his instin
ct was gods-given. No one spoke, each of them catching their breath as best they could and doing it quietly too as they peered into the dark pine forest around them, wondering what they had missed which Floki had not.

  ‘Be ready,’ Floki told them.

  The higher boughs of the trees around them were filled with wind so that the tall trunks creaked like ships’ masts, and now and then a brittle branch would snap off and fall to the pine litter. Yet for the most part the woods protected those within from the storm and there was a strange stillness which had enough seiðr in it to make the hairs on the back of Sigurd’s neck stand.

  ‘The gods are here, Uncle,’ he said in a low voice, feeling them in the very air around them.

  ‘The Valkyries too,’ Runa said, stringing her bow, and Sigurd shuddered at that because perhaps Runa was right and the strange breezes searching in the trees were draughts from the maidens of death, the choosers of the slain, who swooped and glided unseen amongst them.

  Neither was it lost on Sigurd that these were the same woods in which he and his father had hunted with King Gorm those many years ago. Hunted a far nobler creature than the one which Sigurd hunted now.

  It was in these same woods too that Harald, and Sigurd’s brother Sorli, and so many other good hearthmen fought their last battle and fell never to rise again. Where Harald had taken Moldof’s arm in single combat.

  Yes, the gods are in this up to their necks, Sigurd thought, watching Floki, who was watching the shadows, and just then men burst from the forest around them.

  They came fast and hard and screaming, three big-bearded growlers of many fights, and the first dropped like a quern-stone ten feet from Sigurd with Floki’s axe in his skull. Another man’s spear would have spilled Sigurd’s guts had he not swiped at the blade with his sword, turning it aside, but the warrior behind the thrust came on, bone, flesh and mail hitting Sigurd with enough force to send him flying. He looked up from the ground to see that spear coming again, the blade streaking down, then Svein stepped in, swinging his long axe double-handed to take the king’s man in his side, cutting him clean in half and spraying Runa with blood.