‘Pick it up,’ Olaf told the last king’s man, who was slumped on his knees bleeding through the broken brynja rings over his belly. His name was Otkel and Sigurd recognized him as one of the king’s closest hearthmen. ‘Last chance, lad,’ Olaf said, pointing his bloodied sword at the dying warrior’s own which lay in the pine litter in front of him. Lad, though Otkel was Olaf’s age if not older. ‘Pick it up now.’
His face all beard and teeth and pain-filled eyes, Otkel reached out and wrapped his fingers round the leather-bound bone hilt and looked up at Olaf who nodded, stepped up and held the point of his sword just inside the warrior’s collar bone. ‘Tell Jarl Harald it is nearly done,’ he said, then he drove the blade down and the man gurgled and shit himself and died.
‘We’d best get a move on,’ Olaf said, wiping his blade on the dead man’s breeches while Floki pulled his hand axe from the skull it was sheathed in.
Still winded, Sigurd nodded and set off, moving with less haste and more care now because he expected more Sword-Norse to burst from the trees looking to get their names in saga or song by putting their blades in him.
‘There,’ Valgerd said, pointing her spear at a warrior who sat with his back against a pine trunk. He was corpse-pale but still alive.
‘His name is Alfgeir,’ Olaf said, ‘and he’s been swinging an axe for Gorm for twenty summers or more.’ An arrow jutted from this Alfgeir’s neck, its goose feathers as white as his face.
‘He did well to make it this far,’ Svein said as they came up to the man, who managed to spit a decent insult at the red-bearded giant and at Runa and her bow too, and perhaps it had been Runa’s arrow before it was Alfgeir’s.
‘You deserved better than to be sworn to that spineless shit, Alfgeir,’ Olaf told him, meaning King Gorm.
‘Do it, goat turd,’ Alfgeir growled up at him, blood welling in his mouth and spilling through his lips into his beard. He already gripped his sword in readiness for the long journey and so Olaf gave him his death cleanly out of respect for a warrior who had served his oath-sworn lord well.
‘Good,’ Svein said, ‘I was getting tired of walking,’ and Sigurd looked up to see five men standing shoulder to shoulder a stone’s throw away. The oath-breaker himself stood at their centre and it seemed the hunt was over. Not one warrior amongst any in that forest carried a shield now and so it would be a quick and bloody butcher’s job this, and everyone knew it.
‘Stay behind me, Runa,’ Sigurd said, and Runa nodded, pulling an arrow from her quiver and nocking it to the string.
‘Tonight you drink with your father, boy!’ King Gorm bawled and Sigurd knew he was expected to answer this with insults and threats of his own but he would not waste the breath on them. The oath-breaker had already lived far longer than he should have, and so Sigurd strode forward, following the threads of his own wyrd, and his wolves matched him stride for stride.
Steel sang and men shrieked and in less time than it would take to tell it, three king’s men were down, but then Svein grunted and staggered forward, a spear in his back, and the king and Moldof were backing off, swords raised before them. Floki ran at the man who had thrown the spear but he turned and fled and Floki chased him.
‘Somebody pull it out,’ Svein growled, unable to reach the shaft himself.
‘Help him,’ Sigurd told Runa, as he, Olaf and Valgerd moved in on the king and the one-armed warrior who had come close to earning his sword-fame and a name that would fan the hearth flames for years to come. Close, but not close enough.
‘You chose wrong, Moldof Wolf-Joint,’ Olaf told him. The world outside was still roaring, howling fury, but amongst those trees the air was heavy and thick and laden with consequence, so that Sigurd found it difficult to breathe. It was all destiny. ‘Now I’m going to take your other arm,’ Olaf promised, ‘and you will have to find your mother in the afterlife so that she can wipe your arse for you.’
‘I am the king’s prow man, Olaf,’ Moldof said, lifting his chin, ‘and an oath is not given lightly.’
‘You’ve more honour than your king, I’ll give you that,’ Olaf told him, at which Gorm spat in Olaf’s direction.
‘Sigurd!’ Runa yelled, and he turned to see her loose an arrow at a man who was running at her with a spear, and the arrow hit him but he came on and Runa had no time. Valgerd made three strides and on the fourth she cast her spear and it flew as straight and true as a spear ever did, taking the warrior in his chest and hurling him back with the force of it. But then Moldof was on Valgerd and she turned back in time to see his face as he thrust his sword into her and pulled the gore-slick blade out and the shieldmaiden fell. Runa screamed and ran at Moldof but Olaf was already there and Gorm’s man did well to make three good blocks with his sword before Olaf lopped off his left arm at the shoulder just as he had said he would.
Moldof staggered back and then simply stood there, armless as a post, his new stump spurting and his face warped like an ancient roof beam with the horror of what had become of him.
‘Leave him like that,’ Olaf growled at Runa, but she was already on him, hacking at his neck with her scramasax and Moldof had the balls to stand still to make the thing more quickly done.
‘Crow-Song will be waiting for you in the hereafter, Moldof Stump,’ Svein said, still on his feet but now holding the spear which had been sticking in his back. His brynja had taken the worst of the sting out of that throw. His brynja and his pride.
‘If the Allfather even wants him now, the worthless pile of dung,’ Floki said, striding from the trees and throwing a severed head at Moldof. That head had belonged to the last of the king’s men and now there was just the oath-breaker himself, standing there with his sword in one hand, his long knife in the other, and the thick gold torc gleaming at his neck.
Sigurd looked at Valgerd who was lying there curled in on herself, clutching the terrible wound in her stomach but watching him still. Her eyes told Sigurd to finish it while she was still alive to see it.
‘Come then, Haraldarson,’ Gorm said, beckoning Sigurd with his scramasax. ‘Let us see if you are your father’s son.’
Sigurd could feel Floki’s hunger, his blood-craving, but this was Sigurd’s kill and Floki knew it. So did the others, and so they drew closer, just in case, but Sigurd knew that they would not interfere.
Gorm came at him not like a man who had fought countless fights but like a drunken mead-soaked growler who can barely see the man he is trying to hurt. Sigurd caught the king’s sword on his scramasax and punched his sword hilt into Gorm’s face, knocking out his teeth and sending the king reeling. Then Sigurd strode forward and feinted and Gorm scythed his sword across, hitting nothing because Sigurd was already moving, and he stepped outside and brought Troll-Tickler down on to Gorm’s right wrist, taking off his hand which fell still gripping his sword.
The king could smell Valhöll now. He could hear the whispers of his father and his father’s father and those of his line going right back to the beginning. Whoreson could almost taste the Allfather’s mead. He even swung his gaze left and right then, as though he could sense the Valkyries swirling amongst the trees, closing in on him.
And Sigurd would not give the oath-breaker that.
‘Olaf, Floki, we take him alive,’ he said, and the king’s eyes bulged with horror and he yelled and threw himself at Sigurd, who crossed his sword and scramasax, catching Gorm’s long knife between his own blades. Then he stepped forward and drove his forehead into the king’s face and heard the crunch of it and then Olaf and Floki had a hold of the king and Sigurd took the scramasax from him.
‘You are king of nothing now, oath-breaker,’ Olaf spat in Gorm’s ear, as the king stood there bleeding from his mouth and nose and from the stump where his right hand used to be.
Sigurd ran back to Valgerd, beside whom Runa knelt gripping the shieldmaiden’s hands in hers. Sigurd knelt too, seeing the blood and ruin that Valgerd was trying to hide by folding in on herself.
Runa let go one
of her hands and nodded at Sigurd, so he took the blood-slick hand in his and looked into eyes which did not seem to see him.
‘We did it, Valgerd,’ he said. His whole body was still brimming with the battle thrill, trembling with it. But there was something else too. It was as if one of those unseen maidens of death had reached into his chest and clenched his heart in her icy grip.
Valgerd blinked slowly and there, lasting no longer than the beat of a sparrow’s wing, was the glimpse of a smile in the snarl of grimace. And a muttered word.
‘What did she say?’ Runa asked and Sigurd could feel his sister’s eyes on him.
Sigurd swallowed and felt the tears drowning his eyes. The invisible hands squeezing his throat.
‘Ikorni,’ he said under his breath. ‘Squirrel.’
For that had been Valgerd’s name for Sygrutha, the völva with whom she had lived by the sacred spring in the Lysefjord. ‘Ikorni,’ he said again, smiling in spite of himself. Valgerd had loved Sygrutha. He had always known that. And perhaps the shieldmaiden could see Sygrutha now. Perhaps the völva was waiting for her beyond the veil which separates this life from the next.
Sigurd leant in and kissed her cheek which was cold on his lips. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
But she was gone.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THEY STOOD IN the cool dawn shadows because the sun had not yet risen above the mountains in the east to flood the hillside below the king’s hall with warmth. There was a hum in the air and fog rising from so many mouths as men grumbled and winced and complained about wounds that were still fresh and broken bones and bruised flesh. For all that they were still full of the ale and mead in which they had tried to drown themselves all night, seeking numbness.
‘I wish our fathers were here to see this,’ Svein said, looking down on to the channel where the rocks showed still above the rising tide.
‘The others too,’ Sigurd said, thinking of his mother and brothers and Solmund and Crow-Song, Hendil and Loker. And Valgerd.
‘Aye. Too many,’ Svein said, wincing at the thought of all those who had fallen along the way. The spear had not gone deep into him and Runa had washed and stitched the wound, but time would tell whether or not the wound rot would come.
‘They’re all here with us now, lad, on this hill,’ Olaf said. ‘Don’t you doubt it.’
And perhaps they were.
‘Not long now,’ Runa said. ‘I will be glad to see it finished properly.’
No one disagreed with that. The storm had passed and the day would be calm by the looks, and there was much to do including burning the dead.
Not that all the dead would be burnt.
Gorm, whom men once called Shield-Shaker, was chained to the flat rock out in the channel below what used to be his hall and his land. Sigurd himself had rowed him out there and put the chains on, and Runa had gone with him, scowling at Gorm who was half gone with fever or pain on account of that missing hand. Olaf had bound the stump good and tight because they had not wanted Gorm to spill all his blood and die before they were ready for him to die.
They were ready now though, and as Sigurd had bound him to that same rock upon which Gorm had drowned so many enemies, and even one of his wives, Runa had asked Gorm how it felt to know that he would never see Valhöll.
‘How does it feel to know you will spend the afterlife in the cold dark while better men and women feast at Óðin’s table? And at Freyja’s,’ she added, thinking of King Thorir and all those Freyja Maidens whose corpses were barely cold and stiff.
She got no answer from Gorm. He glared and shivered and said nothing, though the fear came off him like the stink off a wet dog, and Sigurd breathed it in.
‘We leave this rotting nithing for the crabs, Runa,’ Sigurd said, turning his back on the chained man and climbing back aboard the row boat to take up the oars. He had nothing to say to the oath-breaker. There was nothing he could say which spoke louder than the act of chaining Gorm to that rock and letting the tide have him.
But he did hold the oath-breaker’s eye as he rowed them back to the shore and all those waiting on the grassy hill upon whose heights the king’s hall – King Hrani Randversson’s now – sat wreathed in morning mist.
It wasn’t until they neared the shore and Sigurd could no longer see Gorm’s face that he had noticed the cloth which Runa clutched in her hand. Though he recognized the scene stitched into it.
‘The wild hunt,’ he said, and Runa had nodded, telling him that the old seiðr-kona had been pushing her threads into that cloth until the day she died at some outlaw’s hands.
There, stitched by skilled hands, was a host of gods and warriors sweeping across the sky, led by Óðin who gripped his spear Gungnir and rode Sleipnir his eight-legged steed.
‘I don’t think she would have minded my keeping it,’ Runa explained, running a finger along the stitches of the sacred spear.
‘“And his passing raises such a rush and roar of the wind as will waft away the souls of the dead”,’ Sigurd said, recalling the words the prophetess had spoken to him up in Jarl Burner’s hall.
Runa’s eyes were fixed on his like rivets in a ship’s strake. The old witch had been right about that.
Now there was a sudden gust which seemed to fly north up the Karmsund Strait and it pushed a ridge of water up the channel so that it swept over the rock and the man chained to it.
Not enough to drown him. Not yet.
‘Even the gods want to be done with this,’ Hrani Randversson said, his fingers going to the thick gold torc which he had taken from Gorm’s neck himself. Sigurd had not minded seeing him do it. He had promised Hrani Gorm’s high seat. Besides which, Hrani still had enough men left to be called a war host, so there was little Sigurd could have done even if he had changed his mind about putting the man up in that fine hall.
‘We all want done with it,’ Olaf said, sharing a look with Asgrim, Jarl Guthrum’s former champion who had somehow survived the previous day’s carnage. Perhaps Asgrim and his handful of Svearmen would stay on with Sigurd now. More likely they would become King Hrani’s men, for a gold torc draws warriors like carrion draws crows.
They shivered in their cloaks and were for the most part quiet, as men are who are exhausted and still have the claws of the blood-fray in them. When they are wondering how they are still breathing and full of pains while so many friends and kinsmen have left such things behind.
‘Are you going to put that on or just hold it all day?’ Olaf said, nodding down at the jarl torc in Sigurd’s right hand. Bram had found it in a sea chest up in Gorm’s hall, had got to it before Queen Kadlin had the chance to stash it and the rest of her husband’s silver too.
‘He is waiting for the sea to take the oath-breaker before he puts it on,’ Svein told Olaf and Sigurd thought that might have been it, at least in part.
But there was more.
He could not shake off the rest of what the old seiðr-kona had said. It clung to him like wet wool.
And his passing raises such a rush and roar of the wind as will waft away the souls of the dead. And with it Haraldarson too.
The old woman’s words tumbled round his head as he looked at the ring of twisted silver that had belonged to his father, which Gorm had taken from the dead jarl’s neck back when this whole thing began.
And with it Haraldarson too.
And yet I am alive. I am here while my enemy waits for the sea to spill into his lungs. I will live while he is a feast for crabs.
He lifted the heavy torc and pulled it open enough to get it round his neck and the cold of it on his skin was enough to send a shiver through him.
‘So, Jarl Sigurd!’ Hrani called. ‘When this is done and that whoreson is drowned, we will drown ourselves in his mead, hey!’
This got some ayes from Olaf and Svein, from Bram, Bjorn and Bjarni and from Thorbiorn Thorirsson who had surprised them all by turning out to be a proper warrior when the blood was flying. And as they talked of feasts and ale,
women and mead, Sigurd laughed.
Jarl Sigurd now, then, he thought. Haraldarson no more. That was what the witch had seen. Not his end but his beginning.
Somewhere up on the hill behind him a raven croaked and Sigurd turned to see the bird sitting on the thatch of King Hrani’s hall. It croaked again then took off into the brightening sky and for a while Sigurd watched it as it flew into the west.
And in the channel below them the tide rose.
GLOSSARY OF NORSE TERMS
the Alder Man: a spirit or elf of the forest
Asgard: home of the gods
aurar: ounces, usually of silver (singular: eyrir)
berserker: ‘bare-shirt’, or perhaps ‘bear-shirt’, a fierce warrior prone to a battle frenzy
bietas: a long pole used to stretch the weather leech when the ship is working to windward
Bifröst: the rainbow-bridge connecting the worlds of gods and men
Bilskírnir: ‘Lightning-crack’, Thór’s hall
blood eagle: a method of torture and execution, perhaps as a rite of human sacrifice to Óðin
blót: a sacrifice to the spirits and the land, often in the form of a feast
bóndi: ‘head of the household’, taken to mean a farmer or land owner
brynja: a coat of mail (plural: brynjur)
bukkehorn: a musical instrument made from the horn of a ram or goat
Dísablót: a sacrifice to the Dísir
draugr: the animated corpse that comes forth from its grave mound
Wings of the Storm: (The Rise of Sigurd 3) Page 32
