God of Vengeance (32 page)

Sigurd could have tried to deny this but there was no point and so he just nodded.

‘Well if he’s coming with us then we’ll chain him again,’ Olaf said, ‘at least until we know he is not mad.’

‘No,’ Sigurd said. ‘This man will not be chained again.’ He walked over to the former thrall and stood square to him, his spear’s butt planted in the reeds. ‘What is your name?’

‘Floki,’ the young man said.

‘Well then, Black Floki, will you help me avenge my kin and swear an oath to be my man if I balance that oath with food and silver and the favour you would expect from a good jarl?’ Sigurd felt the eyes on his back then for he had yet to ask any of them to swear an oath to him though he had always had it in his mind to.

‘Take me with you and I will kill whoever needs killing,’ the young man said, which was good enough for now, until Sigurd came up with the warp and weft of whatever oath by which he would bind them to him and him to them. Better not to get into it now seeing as it was the first any of them had heard of it and it was not as though Sigurd were a jarl. Not yet.

‘We should leave now,’ Asgot said, his first words since waking Sigurd during the killing. The night beyond the pine walls was quiet now, which was to be expected with many of the able-bodied men lying dead and the women and children and old ones having fled the place.

‘Was Ofeig Grettir in on it?’ Sigurd asked Floki, pointing his spear at Scowler who lay throat-cut on the floor. Unlike some of the others he was not armed other than with the longsax which lay by the claw of his white hand.

‘I did not ask him,’ Floki said. ‘But neither did he ever ask if I wanted to be chained to that rune stone up there and set upon by his turd-stinking boasters.’

That was fair enough, Sigurd thought, for all that he had liked Scowler. Still, he would have his greaves back now and that was something to be happy about.

He turned to Aslak, Solveig, Loker and Hendil. ‘You four arm yourselves with what you can find and go down to the sea. Judging by how many folk came with Ofeig Scowler he must have come in a good-sized boat.’

‘He won’t be needing it now,’ Olaf put in.

‘No, but his folk might be climbing into it now,’ Hagal suggested.

‘Perhaps,’ Solveig said, ‘but they won’t dare take it into the fjord now. They’ll wait till morning.’

The four of them nodded to Sigurd and began to gather up what weapons they could find amongst the corpses, which was too many for men who had not had murder on their minds, as Solveig pointed out.

Meanwhile, Sigurd and Floki and the others left Fastvi with the dead and went out into the night and filled their lungs with the clean, spruce-scented air, and in the barn beside Guthorm’s longhouse they found their war gear. Svein also found a brynja worth a small hoard. It was still on the giant whom Black Floki had killed with an axe to the skull up at the Weeping Stone but it did not take Svein and Hagal long to pull it off the stiffening body, and it had to be Svein’s for it would have drowned any of the others but for Olaf and he had a fine brynja already.

And when he was in it Svein looked like the Thunder God himself. Olaf nodded and growled deep in his throat which they all took as a sign that he thought Svein looked as fine as a man could look in a brynja. Though Sigurd knew there was more to it than that and that Olaf was seeing in Svein the young man’s father, his old friend Styrbiorn, who was dead and gone now like so many of Olaf’s sword-brothers.

No brynja for Sigurd yet. That war gear which had belonged to his father and brothers and should have come to Sigurd in turn had gone as spoils to King Gorm in the pine wood near Avaldsnes. War Song, his father’s great sword, now sat silent in its scabbard in the oath-breaker’s hall, along with Harald’s helmet with its panels of polished silver plate and its high crest of bronze that came down to a raven’s face between the brows. Such things alone were worth facing death for and they would be Sigurd’s in time. Or he would be a corpse himself.

‘I have left something,’ Black Floki said, stalking off back towards Guthorm’s hall. Sigurd glanced at Olaf who shrugged and said there was nothing else for them to do but get down to the shore.

But Svein suggested they might as well see what food there was for the taking, seeing as Guthorm would no longer be getting fat on it. ‘And all his guests have gone,’ Svein added, sweeping an arm across the rolling moonlit pasture across which folk had fled in terror like shadows at sunrise, back to their own farms and steads.

‘I’d have said the same thing had I not still been half asleep,’ Olaf said through a yawn.

‘What about Guthorm’s woman? There would be no honour in taking all her food,’ Hagal said. ‘She has always been kind to me.’ The words were barely off his tongue before a shriek like that of a vixen in heat tore the night. They looked across the yard towards the longhouse.

‘Well that is that then,’ Olaf said.

Some moments later the door creaked open and Black Floki came out holding Fastvi’s bead and amber necklace in one hand and the two brass brooches which had fastened her dress in the other. On his right arm he wore Guthorm’s warrior rings, one silver, one brass, which Sigurd thought might have caused some muttering being on the arm of a man not yet into his first beard. But had they not all just watched Floki beat five men?

‘No one can say he has not earned them,’ Sigurd said. ‘Who knows how many others he’s made corpses of up at that rune stone since Guthorm put that chain around his neck.’

‘True enough,’ Olaf admitted, ‘but if we’re going to let him pilfer from the dead, and he’s with us now, we might as well see if any of the others have got anything worth having.’

‘What’s done is done,’ Svein agreed.

So they went back into the longhouse and they took brooches, knives, belts and buckles, rings and bone combs, and Asgot found a dozen pieces of hacksilver which Ofeig Grettir had sewn into the hem of his tunic.

‘Keep it,’ Sigurd said when the godi offered him the silver. ‘Use it to buy the gods’ favour when we need it.’

‘Or mead,’ Svein suggested, shrugging at Sigurd when Asgot hissed something nasty at him.

And when they had plundered as thoroughly as any raiding party they left Guthorm’s farm to the dead and their ghosts and made their way down to the sea upon which the moon spilled its glow like molten silver from a die.

Where Solveig and the others were waiting aboard a fine-looking knörr, their beards split by smiles almost as broad as the boat they stood in.

Bjarni’s foot caught the big man square between his legs and the big man doubled over and probably would have roared in agony had Bjarni not brought the two-foot length of smooth ash down onto the back of his head, breaking the stick in two and doing who knew what to the man’s skull.

The crowd bellowed and cheered, gasped and winced and Bjorn swore at his brother who shrugged as if to ask what the matter was. Not that Bjorn had the time to explain. He caught a blow on his own stick and forced his opponent’s length of ash wide and stepped in to hammer a fist into the man’s bearded chin. The man staggered backwards, raising his shield as he fell to one knee, but Bjorn was on him and grabbed the shield’s rim with his left hand, pushed its bottom edge into the ground and leant over the thing to smash his stick down onto the shield arm just above the elbow joint. On both knees now, his shield dropped, the man looked wide-eyed at the two brothers coming for him.

‘Yield! I yield!’ he screamed, as the crowd hurled insults at him and waved their arms in disgust and disappointment. And Bjarni stepped up, lashing him across the temple with what was left of his stick. He sprawled onto the ground and lay still as a corpse.

The crowd roared even louder now, their fury carving a smile on Bjarni’s face, like a moulding iron cutting a handsome groove on a ship’s prow.

‘He had yielded,’ Bjorn snarled, hoisting a hand to placate the crowd. ‘He was screeching it like a fucking cat.’

Bjarni looked down at the man whose head was leaking blood onto the flattened grass, and shrugged. ‘I did not hear him,’ he said, all beard and teeth.

His brother shook his head, bewildered. ‘If we kill them we cannot beat them again next time, you half-wit,’ he said, then cursed under his breath and went to collect their winnings.

THE KNÖRR WAS
a good vessel, forty-five feet long, eleven feet wide and with a draught of a little under three feet. She had half decks both fore and aft, each with a few oar-holes for manoeuvring in harbour, and between these decks an open cargo hold lined with brushwood mats to protect the hull strakes. She could easily be run right up onto a beach for unloading and when she was in the sea she was as watertight as you could hope for, though still needed one man bailing on and off in a rough sea.

‘Ofeig Scowler was a lucky man to own such a vessel,’ Solveig said a little after dawn when they had the sail up to catch a fresh wind that blew them south along the pine-bristled coast.

‘He was not so lucky to get himself killed by being friends with that worm Guthorm,’ Sigurd said, and this got some
ayes
. For they were sure now that Guthorm and Æskil In-Halti had intended to murder them in their sleep for their silver and perhaps for whatever reward they would get from the oath-breaker King Gorm or Jarl Randver. For why else had Guthorm’s other guests had their weapons to hand in the dead of the night when the previous evening they had left them in the racks outside with those of the Skudeneshavn men?

In all likelihood Scowler had woken when the killing began, saw his host being attacked by the thrall and drew his own knife as any man would do, for all the good it did him.

‘I would sooner believe he was in on it too,’ Hagal said, ‘seeing as we have robbed him and made off with his ship, when he likely has kin somewhere looking out to sea for his return.’

‘You can believe whatever you like, for all the difference it makes now, Crow-Song,’ Olaf said, standing at the bow, eyes closed, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his left cheek.

And now and again Sigurd saw one or other of them staring at their new crew member as though there was some seiðr about him as dark as his long crow-black braids, or as if they were waiting for him to talk about that slaughter-filled night. Not that Black Floki had much to say about it, or about anything come to that. Solveig observed that clearly the lad did his talking with sharp edges, which was fine by him seeing as with Loker and Hendil aboard there was already too much talking for his ears.

‘What shall we call her then?’ Olaf asked, glancing from Sigurd to Solveig who stood at the stern like a king because he had a tiller in his hand again and that was all Solveig wanted from his life.

‘She’s wide, Olaf, so how about
Ragnhild
?’ Solveig said.

Olaf grinned at that, stroking his hand along the knörr’s sheer strake. ‘She’s too easy to handle to be named after my wife,’ he said, which got some laughter. A good sound on an unfamiliar ship.

‘How about
Sea-Sow
?’ Aslak suggested.

‘Frigg’s white arse, Aslak,’ Hagal blurted, ‘that is not a name that fits well in any saga tale I can think of. Can you imagine Jarl Randver trembling with fear at mention of the
Sea-Sow
?’

‘Well I like it,’ Sigurd said, for the knörr’s hull was round and deep like a sow’s belly, and so unlike his father’s dragon ships
Reinen
and
Sea-Eagle
that to give her a saga-worthy name might cause her offence. At least
Sea-Sow
was an honest name, as Olaf observed, and as soon as Solveig nodded his assent it was done.

‘We will name her properly when we find some good mead to throw across her bow,’ Sigurd said.

She was no fighting ship, and if a crew of raiding men, or even worse one of Jarl Randver’s crews, saw the knörr as prey and came after her,
Sea-Sow
would have no chance of outrunning them. So Solveig would keep them snugged up to the coast, giving them the option to make landfall rather than being caught at sea. But with her high sides she was as seaworthy as you could want and certainly more comfortable for living on than
Otter
, which they had left up on the beach below Guthorm’s longhouse and which was likely being rowed off somewhere even now as the wind played across
Sea-Sow
’s woollen sail. For there had been folk around
Sea-Sow
– or whatever she had been called while she had belonged to Ofeig Grettir – readying to push her back into the sea, when Aslak, Solveig, Loker and Hendil had come onto the shingle, swords and spear blades glinting in the moonlight. But at the sight of them those wide-eyed folk had scarpered like mice before an owl.

‘Did you see the lads who were looking after her?’ Olaf had asked Loker, nodding towards
Otter
as they put their shoulders into the knörr, shoving her back into the surf.

‘Not a hair of them,’ Loker had said, which was hardly surprising given that it was the third day now since the Skudeneshavn men had arrived at that place. Still, Olaf seemed disappointed about it for as far as he was concerned an agreement was an agreement.