The Valhalla Saga

by Snorri Kristjansson

  Backed up against a support beam, Ulfar twisted away from a vicious right hook and face-first into Greta’s redoubled efforts. She was snotty and crimson-cheeked with fury and her words made no sense. She wrapped her arms around him in a fierce grip, shouting incoherently into his chest.

  ‘Please, I— Mph!’ The air exploded out of Ulfar’s lungs as one of Ivar’s blows finally connected and he staggered, lost his footing and tumbled over on top of Greta.

  ‘Look – they’re at it again!’ someone shouted drunkenly from the crowd. The laughter was mean.

  Ivar roared again, completely incensed, and Ulfar felt pressure on his head, then a sharp pain as he was pulled off Greta by his hair. The woman on the floor didn’t move. Ivar shrieked, ‘What have you done to her, you bastard?’ and twisted Ulfar’s hair even more tightly.

  A knee smashed into Ulfar’s spine, hard, and the tingling sensation in the fingertips of his left hand was made worse when it disappeared and was replaced with nothing. ‘She’s just knocked out,’ Ulfar hissed through gritted teeth. ‘And now’ – he swung his right hand in a big arc and hit Ivar’s wrist with his clenched fist, making him scream and let go of Ulfar’s hair – ‘I’ve had just about enough’ – Ulfar clambered to his feet and faced off against the man holding his wrist and shooting anguished glances at his sister on the floor – ‘of this.’ He swung his left arm at Ivar; it didn’t feel right yet, still mostly numb, but it worked just fine as a club.

  Ivar raised his arms on reflex to ward against the blow and Ulfar used his own momentum to drive his right fist hard into Ivar’s stomach.

  The blond man doubled over, coughing, and without missing a beat Ulfar kicked the back of Ivar’s knee. As he went down, gasping, Ulfar growled, ‘Stay down if you know what’s good for you.’

  Fucking locals, everywhere the same. He looked around at the red, sweaty faces hoping for more violence. Part of him wanted them to come and have a go – three of them maybe, a handful, enough to keep him busy.

  No one came forward.

  He looked at them, one by one. ‘I didn’t ask for this,’ he said. ‘You saw them. It was years ago.’

  A couple of grim nods in the room.

  One face registered alarm. The eyes were fixed on Ulfar’s knees.

  A flash of pain in his leg turned Ulfar’s vision bluish-white.

  He looked down.

  A skinning knife was buried almost to the hilt in his leg. Blood bubbled up out of the wound. Ivar was lying on the floor at his feet, looking up at him, a maniacal grin on his face.

  Before he could think, Ulfar let himself fall down. His aim was true: his kneecaps crashed onto Ivar’s chest and he felt the ribs crack. After a moment he rolled off, drew a deep breath and screamed. All he could hear was the rattle of Ivar’s breathing and the throbbing in his own ears. No one moved to help him, so he dug his fingers into his tunic, clutching the material near the shoulder. The sleeve came off, though not easily, and Ulfar bound his leg tight just above the wound, just like he’d seen Sven and Valgard do.

  Breathing quickly, he reached for the knife and pulled it out. The blade slid free smoothly, coated with his own blood.

  ‘Fucking bastard bitch,’ he muttered.

  The bubbling slowed down to a trickle as he tightened the knot, cut off some extra material from the bindings and stuffed it into the wound. It’d hurt like a bastard to remove, but he wouldn’t bleed to death. Not today.

  After a while on the floor, he levered himself up.

  ‘Thank you for helping,’ he snarled at the nearest man, then caught himself. The faces in the king’s hall were all studiously not looking in the direction of the dais.

  Ulfar turned around.

  ‘Welcome home, cousin,’ Prince Karle said. Dressed in his white sable and linen shirt, he looked like a shard of winter. He stood at one end of the room, flanked by three young men Ulfar thought he recognised. The names eluded him. The prince stepped towards him. ‘You’re causing trouble again,’ he said.

  ‘Was him,’ Ulfar said. A cold chill went through him. ‘Was him started …’ he tried again, but the words didn’t come out right. A spasm racked him and he had to reach for a table to steady himself.

  ‘Of course it was,’ Karle said. ‘Our very own Ivar tried to kill a foreigner’ – he spat the word out – ‘for no reason. Of course, you’re guilty of attacking a man of Uppsala in the king’s hall,’ the prince shouted. ‘And of beating a woman! You should be ashamed of yourself,’ he added. ‘There’s only one way this will go.’ The prince walked slowly towards Ulfar. ‘As the king is not here, nor our beloved friend Alfgeir Bjorne, it is I who will decide your fate.’

  Ulfar reached for the words again, but he couldn’t speak. There was something wrong.

  ‘What? I don’t understand you,’ Prince Karle snarled.

  Ulfar’s stomach turned and pearls of sticky, cold sweat glistened on his forehead.

  ‘Speak up if you want—’

  ‘Guest’s rights,’ the voice boomed. Arnar stepped forward, placing himself between Ulfar and the prince’s men. Up close, he was truly a substantial man. ‘We claim the right of guests as spoken of in Havamal, as ordained in the Voluspa, which any good host gives freely. We have shared your food. We have drunk your mead. And fine mead it is, too!’ he exclaimed to the gathered men, to scattered but growing cheers. ‘We have toasted the health of the men of Uppsala, and we ask nothing in return but to be tried as true and free men.’

  Ulfar wanted to shout, to scream and jump at the same time, but his body wouldn’t obey him. A strong and bitter taste was the only thing emerging in his mouth.

  Poison.

  Prince Karle’s face soured. ‘Take this bag of road-shit with you from the hall and do not plant his shadow on our lands again. The king forbids it!’ With that, the prince and his men turned and walked away.

  ‘Don’t run forward and back at the same time, Ulfar Thor-modsson,’ Arnar rumbled, looking at the grey-faced man currently clutching a table for balance. ‘You’re going to need some fresh air.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a woman’s soft voice behind them. ‘Would you help me bring him to my quarters?’ Ulfar tried to turn, but couldn’t. A cold claw of fear scraped his bones.

  ‘Are you going to look after him, slip of a thing like yourself?’ Arnar said.

  ‘I will,’ the woman said.

  ‘Of course I’ll help. He’s a lucky lad, our boy!’ The bearded man stepped in, put his arm around Ulfar’s chest and took his weight. Ulfar tried to speak, but his mouth was woolly and dry. The colours of the hall were starting to fade. ‘Is he a friend of yours?’

  ‘A bit more than that,’ the voice said. There was a note of mirth in it.

  ‘Oh?’ Arnar said, walking Ulfar towards the front door.

  A woman’s face appeared at the edge of Ulfar’s vision: blonde, tiny. There was something achingly familiar about it. Something painful.

  The woman looked at him, concerned. ‘He’s my husband.’

  Ulfar lost consciousness.

  OUTSIDE STENVIK EARLY NOVEMBER, AD 996

  The ships rounded Muninsfjell, and dark clouds crept over Stenvik Forest to meet them. Finn stood in the bow, straight-backed and still, like he’d seen King Olav do. The men had accepted his command, but he kept thinking he heard them speak behind his back. He did not need to turn and check; he knew the other ten ships were trailing in his wake.

  A half-hearted cheer went up from the rowers behind him as Stenvik came into view. No one wanted to admit it, but the morning they set out the ground had been covered with a thin glaze of frost and Finn suspected that the men felt they had not so much left as escaped the freezing cold of Trondheim. There were no ships in the harbour. Finn gave commands; half of his fleet veered to the left and aimed for the soft beach to the west of the town.

  ‘Sail!’

  Behind Finn, ten sails furled in unison. Taking his lead, the following ships slowed down.

  ‘Oars!’
>
  Behind him, wood scraped on wood as the sailors mounted their oars and fell into an easy rhythm with each other.

  The greyish-brownish mass on the pier turned into the worn and much-mended houses of Old Town, but no voices carried out to sea.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ the boatsman asked at his shoulder. Finn did not reply but instead looked at the walkways, the shadows and the spaces in between. Sunlight flashed off something above Stenvik’s walls and in three oar-strokes he’d made up his mind.

  ‘Weapons!’ he shouted.

  Mail-clad spearmen emerged from the shadows of Old Town and marched silently to the pier, where they took up defensive positions. Bowmen stepped out from behind the old longhouse and crouched down, ready to fire.

  Finn raised his hand and signalled for his fleet to stop. The command spread out behind him.

  ‘We return from Trondheim with tales of King Olav’s great victories and demand that you step back from the pier!’ he called.

  None of the fighters moved, but one or two cast glances behind them.

  ‘In the name of Jesus, our Christ and Saviour! Step – back!’ Finn shouted.

  ‘Back off,’ someone echoed from the beach, and the spearmen on the pier relaxed visibly. The bowmen turned their arrows to the ground and a space cleared around the pier. A heavyset man with grey hair stepped up and stood in front of the assembled men: Gunnar Hovde. He had been a reliable chieftain, but no one of particular note.

  As soon as Finn’s ship docked he leapt ashore and closed the gap in big strides. ‘What is this supposed to mean, Gunnar?’ he snarled. ‘Do we need to have’ – he gripped the hilt of his sword – ‘a talk?’

  ‘Calm down,’ Gunnar said. ‘We just wanted to be safe.’

  ‘Safe?’ Finn looked around at the grim faces of King Olav’s soldiers. There were hundreds of them. ‘Safe from what?’

  ‘You better follow me,’ Gunnar said.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Finn said, but the chieftain had already turned around and was heading towards New Town.

  They were soon met with cries of ‘Gates! Open the gates!’, followed by the rough, grating sounds of heavy wood on stone.

  ‘You closed the gates?’ Finn burst out. ‘What in Hel’s name has been going on here?’ But Gunnar did not reply; instead he stopped in the middle of the tunnel, under Stenvik’s walls.

  ‘Smell,’ he snapped.

  And when Finn breathed in, he did indeed smell it: fresh blood.

  *

  ‘We don’t know what it is,’ Gunnar said, shifting uncomfortably on the bench. ‘The day after you lot left, three of the locals went into the north end of the woods, but only one came back. He said he’d lost them others somewhere, and they never returned. The day after, ten men went out to search for them – only two of those came back. I had to stop everyone else from charging out, armed to the teeth. Since then … well, strange things have been happening.’

  The shadows in the longhouse suddenly looked a little darker.

  ‘Like what?’ Finn said.

  ‘Like the tunnel,’ Gunnar said. ‘That fucking tunnel. Do you remember Hildimar?’

  Finn winced. ‘Big bastard from the south coast?’

  Gunnar’s expression was grim. ‘The very same. You know how some men enjoy soldiering a little too much?’ This time it was his turn to flinch. ‘It was a badly kept secret that accidents happened around him. Boys’ arms would break, girls would get … hurt, you know? He was always the picture of innocence, of course, and he was a good man in a fight so King Olav either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  ‘But not long after those men disappeared …’ He paused and took a breath, before continuing, ‘We found him in the tunnel one morning, all sliced up. They’d cut off his fucking—’

  ‘How many men did it?’

  Gunnar slammed the table and leaned forward, his eyes blazing. ‘Listen to what I’m saying, Finn! He was butchered inside – inside – the fucking tunnel, Finn. Both gates were closed. I think you might want to ask yourself how the actual fuck he got there, who got in there with him and how they got out.’

  Finn met Gunnar’s anger impassively. ‘Did anyone see him enter the passageway?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did anyone hear the gates?’

  ‘We’re not sure. We’ve kept them closed since the murder except for those men I know I can trust.’

  ‘And the gates are operated from—?’

  ‘—ropes on the ground, or up top.’

  ‘Watch?’

  ‘Three men on each gate.’

  ‘Bring them.’

  Gunnar barked an order; the door behind him opened and closed. Finn ignored the others in the longhouse and focused his mind on the puzzle at hand. How would he approach it?

  He looked at the answer, smiled and dumped it in an imaginary barrel of shit. Next he tried to figure out how King Olav would go about such a thing. The solution was fairly obvious and effective.

  ‘Do you know when it happened?’ he asked.

  ‘Long after the raven’s time,’ Gunnar replied curtly. ‘A bit before dawn.’

  So King Olav’s solution was also wrong.

  The door swung open and three men entered. Finn vaguely remembered them; they were from somewhere in the Upper Dales. He rose and watched as they stopped, recognised him and bowed their heads. He made the sign of the cross and told them to sit.

  ‘Did you hear anything the night Hildimar was found?’ he asked, as gently as he could.

  ‘No,’ came the muttered reply, all three answering in concert.

  ‘Did you see anything?’

  ‘No,’ they all said.

  He looked at the one on the left. ‘What was the weather like?’

  ‘Moonlight, mostly. Some clouds.’

  He turned to the man on the right and asked, ‘Where was your mead barrel?’

  ‘By the wall—’ he said and then collapsed as the middle man elbowed him fiercely in the ribs.

  Finn allowed the silence to settle. He’d found the third solution.

  *

  ‘And you saw him on that night?’ Finn asked.

  The man had been dragged off some shrieking wench by Gunnar and now he stood shivering in his undershirt on the walkway. ‘Yeah, him and two of the locals,’ he muttered. ‘Them two who came back from the forest.’

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘One of ’em I’d seen before, but I didn’t recognise the other. Scrawny bastard, older, looked like he’d had his beard hacked off in a fight or something. Wore a hood.’

  Finn smiled and hoped it would hide the sinking feeling of dread. He gestured to Gunnar, who pushed the man roughly back towards the hut he’d been dragged from.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Gunnar asked. ‘What’s with all the questions?’

  ‘You’d better follow me,’ Finn said and walked towards the steps to the south gate. ‘And be quick. The light is going.’

  When he was up on the wall, he immediately started looking for the telltale scuffmarks of the mead barrel and sure enough, he found them. ‘Idiots,’ he muttered. Then he turned to Gunnar. ‘Come here,’ he snapped. ‘Look: barrel.’ He pointed to the planks resting against the outer wall. Then he leaned over. ‘Handhold.’ Tufts of grass had been pulled loose exactly where someone might have hidden up against the edge. ‘Powdered nightshade over the edge, straight into the barrel and your guards are out like babies.’

  ‘And then what?’ Gunnar snapped.

  Finn pointed towards the longhouse. ‘Three men come walking out of there. One is drunk, the other two are pretending. One of them says he knows of some pussy in Old Town; she likes it rough, he says. Hildimar is all for it, probably getting hard just at the mention. The gates open on one side, letting them in, then stay closed at the other end, leaving Hildimar stuck in the tunnel. They cut out his tongue first, then they pay back the pain.’

  Even in the fading light, Gunnar looked pale. ‘But – but – how’d they—?
’

  Finn walked over to a circular shield set into the walkway on the wall. ‘Busted murder-hole from the siege. When you were in the tunnel, you should have looked up,’ he said.

  ‘But hold on,’ Gunnar said, ‘you’re saying one man drugged my guards, then the murderers took Hildimar into the tunnel – so who pulled up the gates?’

  And Finn knew. He did the old man the courtesy of looking around first and making sure no one was going to overhear before he asked, ‘How many of the old Stenvik locals would you want no part of in a fight?’

  Gunnar smirked. ‘I’d have no part of anyone in this hole – but of the fighters left, the ones who haven’t disappeared into the forest? I’d say maybe fifty, give or take.’

  ‘That enough to open the gates?’

  The truth hung in the air between them. Neither was smiling any more.

  ‘And where are they now?’

  ‘They were—’ As the grey turned to black in the east, the colour drained out of Gunnar’s face. ‘They all volunteered to come out and meet you.’

  The first red-yellow tendrils stretched to the sky from the roof of the old longhouse by the harbour as the fire reached upwards, ever upwards. In the spreading night it was an explosion of light and colour. Within moments the whole roof was aflame, first backlighting and then biting into the huge wooden cross that someone had fastened to the front of the longhouse. Someone had stuck a horse’s head on top of it, facing New Town.

  Finn and Gunnar watched the conflagration in silence. They saw the shadowy figures move like ghosts in the flickering light, drifting towards the forest.

  The last one to leave the pool of fire was nothing more than a streak of moving darkness, but Finn thought he could feel the man’s gaze. Something in his bearing had a black promise.

  Beside him, Gunnar snapped out of the flame trance and shouted, ‘I’ll rouse the men! We’ll go after them! They’re going to—’

  ‘No,’ Finn said, his voice flat. ‘This is their land, and they will cut you down. You will double the watch at all times and send no one out of the town without armed guards.’