God of Vengeance (10 page)

Sigurd was aware of a gentle trembling in his blood, like water passing the overlapping strakes on a ship’s hull when the sail is up and the wind is good, yet the trembling was not from fear. It was because despite King Gorm’s insistence that he was a loyal king and his promise to Jarl Harald of silver to pay for each of the jarl’s warriors killed, the twenty men from Skudeneshavn had come dressed for war. Each had spear and shield and whatever head protection he could find, be it a leather skull cap or, in the case of a few, a steel helmet. Each wore his thickest woollen coat, normally only worn in winter, so that they were rain-soaked outside and sweat-soaked inside, but content that these would provide some protection against the blade’s bite.

Some carried bows and quivers of wicked-bladed arrows. Some had hand axes tucked in their belts, these weapons as useful for cleaving logs or breaking down a man’s door as they were in the tight press of the shieldwall where they were often more effective than swords. A few carried the long-hafted, two-handed battle axes that could split shield, helm, limb or torso. It was with such axes that Harald’s champion Slagfid and Svein’s father Styrbiorn had woven their fame, killing men outright with a single blow and giving other men to foul themselves through fear. But there was no Slagfid or Styrbiorn amongst them today. Sigurd wished Svein was there too, but his friend had gone with Olaf and three others, taken the boat across to Tysvær.

Only two men had brynjur, their countless woven iron rings glistening with rain which was as much their enemy as the arrow, for the first would rot it and the second could pierce it. And yet to own a brynja was every warrior’s ambition for it meant you were rich and powerful or that you had killed a rich and powerful man and taken his mail. It also meant you were a hard man to kill, for a good brynja will turn aside a sword or a hand axe, and Jarl Harald and Sorli looked like gods of war now with their iron coats and their polished helmets, the gold and silver metalwork on their sword pommels, belt buckles and brooches, and their arm rings of twisted silver.

They walked in single file so that to the Æsir in Asgard they must have looked like a vicious little serpent slithering north across Karmøy, Jarl Harald, Sorli and Sigurd at the head.

Sigurd felt like Týr, Lord of Battle, which was fitting, he thought, because Týr had placed his right hand in the jaws of the wolf Fenrir, just as they would now put themselves between the teeth of a king they no longer trusted. Týr had been tricked and earned himself a wolf-joint for his bravery, for ever after one-handed yet still associated with victory. What would they earn from King Gorm, Sigurd wondered.

Over his woollen tunic he had a leather coat which had belonged to Sigmund, his brother having worn it before earning his own brynja, and on his shins were his own greaves, the iron strips polished to a lustre against the dark leather onto which they were fixed. Like most of them he bore a scramasax, the single-edged knife that was so useful for finishing a felled opponent, but unlike most of them he wore a sword at his left hip. It was not an ornate weapon. It had no silver wire wound round the grip, no decoration in the pommel or cross guard, but it was straight, double-edged and had taken a moon’s cycle to make. And though it was not a thing to turn heads it was certainly capable of taking them. The smith who had forged it had incised the name Troll-Tickler in runes on the blade where it met the guard, and Sigurd thought that such a name was worth more than gilt and silver wire.

The scabbard was a good wooden one covered with leather and with the mouth and tip protected by iron, and the inside was lined with sheep’s wool whose lay was upwards to enable an easy draw. The grease in the wool prevented the blade from rusting and the curl in it held the sword firm in the scabbard, and the weight of it all at Sigurd’s hip made him feel a foot taller.

‘You are my second son now and must appear like a warrior who has done his share of killing for me,’ his father had said that morning when he had given Sigurd the sword from his own great chest of war gear. ‘But do not forget that you will be amongst better men today. Men who have stood their ground in the skjaldborg and traded blow for blow with our enemies. Many of them do not own such a sword even as this one and may begrudge you having something you have not earned.’

‘Let anyone who does say it to my face,’ Sigurd had replied, expecting his father’s wrath at that. But Harald had half smiled and Sigurd had seen his eldest brother Thorvard in that smile.

‘Let us show Biflindi that we still have teeth,’ the jarl said, gripping Sigurd’s shoulder as Sigurd drew the blade to fill his eyes with the strange pattern that swirled up its length like dragon’s breath, markings as unique to that blade as Sigurd’s dreams were to him.

‘If the king betrays you, Father, I will kill him,’ Sigurd said, thrusting the sword back into its scabbard.

Now it was a wolf’s grin that broke the jarl’s golden beard. ‘If he betrays me he will already be dead,’ Harald said.

‘Ah, so there is a sun up there,’ Orn Beak-Nose said now, looking up at the pale yolk of light that was trying to spill through the grey.

‘It is warm enough already,’ Frothi said, puffing out his cheeks and perhaps wishing he had brought only a spear instead of his long-axe with its huge crescent-shaped smiting blade and steel edge.

‘At the least we are owed mead and women,’ Finn Yngvarsson said, limping from an old wound. They were tramping up Sålefjell, the highest point on the island of Karmøy, which no one enjoyed doing in full war gear. But Harald would not risk the easier option of hugging the coast in
Little-Elk
and letting the wind do the work, for if Jarl Randver’s ships caught them out in the strait they would be dead men in the time it takes to curse the Norns and the bad wyrd they had woven.

‘After how he served us in the fight I would be afraid that any woman the king gave us was really a troll in disguise, her eating knife aimed at our bollocks,’ Asbjorn said, which got some chuckles.

‘I should think you’d be happy with a troll, Asbjorn, compared with what waits for you back home,’ Orn Beak-Nose dared, which had the men laughing as Asbjorn thumped the butt of his spear against the shield slung on Orn’s back.

‘Mead will do for me,’ Agnar said, getting some
ayes
all round, ‘and the silver he owes us for our sword-brothers,’ he added, which silenced them then as each man’s mind filled with memories of friends they would never see alive again, like brackish water flooding a bilge.

Gulls shrieked overhead and the sun threatened to break through the cloud and Sigurd’s hand kept falling to the hilt at his hip because after the years of training with the tools of death he was now one of a band of Sword-Norse. He had at last been given the chance to prove himself, to show his father and brother that he was worthy of the blood in his veins.

And then, as they entered the pine wood spilling from Sålefjell’s heights like a dark green cloak off a giant’s shoulder, a peal of thunder rumbled across the sky and with it came a seething, wind-making rain.

‘Piss!’ Frothi growled, he and the others holding their shields above their heads as the rain turned to hailstones that bounced off the limewood and the steel bosses.

‘Just in time,’ a thick-necked man called Ulfar said as they moved into the pines whose thick upper branches protected them from the deluge. Normally they would have taken the coastal path all the way to Avaldsnes, but no one questioned their jarl’s decision to take this part of the journey through the trees. There was not a man there who wanted to see the Karmsund Strait at that point, to let their minds fashion again the image of their terrible defeat or let their ears hear again the shrieks of their butchered friends. The wound of that was still too raw and the sea there yet mixed with their brothers’ blood.

Now Sigurd’s mind wandered to his childhood and some ten summers ago when his father had brought him into these woods to hunt for elk at King Gorm’s invitation. The two men, as close as sword-brothers in those days, had laughed and exchanged silver rings and fine blades. They had talked of building ships and of raiding to the north and west and Sigurd had all but burst with pride to see the esteem in which his father was held by the king. They had killed no elk that day but it had not mattered and at the end of it they had feasted in Biflindi’s hall and Sigurd had watched his father swear an oath declaring before all that his sword belonged to the king. The jarl and his men would fight for Avaldsnes whenever King Gorm needed them. In return the king would safeguard Harald’s lands and allow the jarl to keep any plunder he took from his own raids on their common enemies. He would also give Jarl Harald a ship and that ship was
Reinen
. The oath was sealed by a great silver torc which Shield-Shaker placed around Harald’s neck though Harald rarely wore it these days.

‘Ha, it is not the weight of the silver that your father has trouble with but the weight of its meaning,’ Olaf had slurred in Sigurd’s ear one night in Eik-hjálmr when the mead had greased his tongue. ‘No man likes being under the foot of another, even if that other is a king.’

‘Then why doesn’t my father become a king?’ Sigurd had said with a boy’s unfogged view of the world.

Olaf had chuckled at that. ‘Perhaps he will,’ he said. ‘And then he’ll have some jarl wriggling under his foot, eh?’

And now they were heading to Avaldsnes to learn what had become of that oath sworn ten years ago and whether the king’s hand was open in friendship or clenched round a sword’s hilt.

The floor of the wood was covered in needles and dry underfoot and the pungent resinous smell of the trees filled Sigurd’s nose just as the sudden silence of the place filled his ears. Most of the lower branches were stunted and bare, brown and brittle enough to snap if caught by a shield rim or spear shaft. But from those branches higher up green and silver lichens hung in the shapes of antlers and bones, sea wrack and old rags, and Sigurd felt the old magic of the place raise the hairs on his arms.

They followed an ancient path through the trees and soon the canopy above them defied the grey day utterly so that it was darker than the midsummer nights out amongst the pastures. The only sounds were of their own passing, feet stirring the forest litter and the occasional drip from rain that had seeped through the thick needled branches above.

‘It is strange that there are no birds to be seen,’ Sigurd said to his brother and this caused Sorli to frown as he glanced around to confirm Sigurd’s observation.

‘So, little brother, you see omens in the birds and now you see omens in the birds you do not see?’ He smiled then. ‘You are as bad as Asgot.’

‘Still, there are no birds,’ Sigurd said.

Sorli turned his head up to the heavy branches and after a few paces he lifted his spear and pointed its blade off into the distance. ‘I see one,’ he said. ‘What is that, brother, if it is not a bird?’

Sigurd caught sight of a hooded crow up in the boughs, its breast the colour of cold hearth ash against the darker green of the pines.

Sigurd nodded, a weight suddenly lifting off his chest, though he could not resist telling his brother that perhaps only one bird was even worse than none at all. And the words were still in the air, like ripples from a stone dropped into water, when the first arrow whipped through the trees.

It
tonked
off Finn Yngvarsson’s helmet and he yelped with the shock of it, no doubt blushing afterwards.

‘Shields!’ Jarl Harald roared and the column shuddered as each man unslung his shield and planted himself left foot forward, hefting his spear up by his right ear ready for the cast. Two more arrows streaked from the shadows, one of them thunking into a man’s shield. ‘Close up!’ Harald yelled and the column drew in like a knotted rope until they made a square with five men in each of its walls, shields overlapping.

‘Show yourself!’ Jarl Harald demanded as men muttered behind their shields of treachery and what a piece of shit this king had turned out to be. ‘I am Jarl Harald of Skudeneshavn and am bound for Avaldsnes at the king’s invitation.’

There was a silence, then the cracking of twigs.

‘I know who you are, Jarl Harald!’ a voice boomed up ahead.

‘Swiving goat’s prick,’ Sorli growled, for it had been a king’s voice, one bloated with the arrogance of power.

‘Show yourself, oath-breaker!’ Jarl Harald shouted, lowering his shield and planting the butt of his spear on the ground. It was a defiant act and worthy of a jarl, though Sigurd and the rest kept their shields up and their spears ready. ‘I would see with my own eyes the man who betrays me.’

Another arrow streaked from the trees and clunked off a shield boss.

‘There he is!’ Agnar called.

‘I see him,’ Asbjorn growled.

King Gorm did not answer and the forest was still, but for the heavy breathing of Harald’s men and a few mumbled words to Óðin or Thór. Sigurd felt a stream of sweat trickle between his shoulder blades, the thump of his heart against the shield of his breastbone. He thought of his dead brothers Thorvard and Sigmund and he willed King Gorm’s men to come for them so that he might kill them.

Someone let out a great fart to split the silence and this got some chuckles.

‘What are they waiting for?’ Orn Beak-Nose said. ‘The sooner they come the sooner we can kill them and get home. I am as thirsty as Styrbiorn used to get after a roll in the straw with that little dark-haired beauty he picked up in Førdesfjorden.’

‘They are waiting for the men they had watching the coast road,’ Jarl Harald said, and Sigurd realized the truth of that. King Gorm had split his force because he had not known which route Harald would take.

‘Then we should run at them now,’ Beak-Nose said, spitting into the forest litter.

‘After you then, Orn,’ Harald said, but Orn stayed as still as a rock.

‘Fucking idiot,’ someone growled at Orn who muttered a curse back in their direction.

Even if Shield-Shaker was waiting for the rest of his men he would still have more than enough to deal with the twenty Skudeneshavn men and all of them knew it. Nevertheless, Harald was reluctant to break up the defence of shields they had created, particularly as they could not yet see the men who had come to kill them.