God of Vengeance (37 page)

Olaf turned back to Loker. ‘Here, lad, get your teeth round this.’ He put the sheath of his eating knife between Loker’s teeth and Loker bit down on the leather so that he looked like a snarling dog, his eyes wide with terror and pain.

‘We don’t have mead, Loker,’ Sigurd told him.

Not that Loker needed warning about the horrendous agony that was coming. He garbled and growled around the sheath something about there being mead in the Allfather’s hall, which was where he thought he would be soon enough. Sigurd nodded. In Valhöll someone was already filling a horn for Loker, he thought.

‘Is it ready?’ Olaf asked the shieldmaiden, pushing Loker’s tunic sleeve out of the way, revealing old scars and the soot-stained lines engraved in the skin, all blood-slathered.

She lifted the axe head from the fire. The iron was beginning to glow and the wood inside the eye, along with the haft’s heel and shoulder, was smouldering from the heat.

‘It’ll have to do,’ Olaf said. It was not yet red hot but if they waited any longer Loker would be as dead as the woman in the bed. ‘Give it here.’

The woman shook her head and gestured for Olaf to hold the stump out, and with this Sigurd put his weight into Loker, making sure the other arm was pinned by his side, and then it came: that scalding axe head onto the raw flesh. Foul smoke bloomed. Blood bubbled and seethed. And Loker screamed.

His eyes bulged in his head and he bucked against the wall and against Sigurd who held him the way a man would hold a boar he knew would turn and gore him if he let it go. The scream was a strangled, throat-clenched thing that raised the hairs on Sigurd’s arms and the back of his neck and Black Floki suggested hitting Loker hard on the head so that it might knock him unconscious but Olaf would not risk it because he had seen someone kill a wounded man trying that.

‘Enough!’ Olaf said and the woman pulled the axe with its new sheath of charred flesh from the wound, and Loker’s eyes rolled back in his head and his body went still.

‘Tell my father and brothers I will join them when I have avenged us,’ Sigurd said, grimacing against the stench that filled the place like poison in a boil.

But Loker did not take that message to Sigurd’s kin in Valhöll.

Because he was still alive.

They knew this because when he next opened his eyes he looked at his shortened left arm, the blackened end of which they had smeared with a poultice of mashed leeks and honey and bound tight, and cursed the gods in a foul-mouthed torrent. The sight of the woman who had cleaved off his hand almost gave him the strength to stand, but Olaf pressed him back down, Loker bawling about how he was going to open her from cunny to neck. Then he fell back against the wall and passed out again.

‘Who are you?’ Sigurd asked the woman, who had so far said more with her weapons, one way or another, than she had with her tongue. But Sigurd had never seen a woman in such a fine brynja – in any brynja – nor had he ever known a woman so skilled with sharp steel.

‘She’s a corpse goddess,’ Olaf said. ‘A valkyrie. What else can she be?’ He was half serious.

‘My name is Valgerd,’ the woman said. ‘I am sworn to protect the völva of the spring. As was my mother sworn to protect the last völva.’

‘She’s the völva?’ Sigurd asked, nodding to the bed in the flame-played shadows and its dead cargo.

Valgerd did not need to answer that.

‘I failed,’ she said, those two words like stone anchors dropped into still water. She looked back at the bed and her next words were for the dead woman in it, not the men standing by her hearth. ‘I could not hold to my oath. It is broken.’ When she turned back to Sigurd he saw in her piercing eyes not sorrow but anger. ‘The gods are cruel,’ she said, a flash of teeth in the gloom. ‘Their greatest pleasure is to torment us.’

‘Aye, I’ll not argue with that,’ Olaf agreed. ‘They’ll show you a sleeping sea and watch you cast off, laughing into their ale as a storm comes out of nowhere and you’re bailing for your life.’

‘You live up here alone, Valgerd?’ Sigurd said. There was only one bed in the cabin and Sigurd wondered if Valgerd had been sleeping next to the dead völva these last days or whether the woman had died in the last night. His nose might have told him the answer to that if not for the pungent herb and hearth smoke filling the place.

‘For five years now,’ she said.

They had seen no other dwellings in the forest. Valgerd and the völva had been lovers, Sigurd knew then, living alone by the sacred spring, each bound to the other in their way. You are alone now, he thought but did not say. Instead he asked why she had attacked them, wondering if he was doing a better job of hiding his thoughts than Olaf was. Because, gods but this woman was beautiful! She was Freyja herself. The gold ropes of her hair hung beside a face that was fiercely proud, eyes the blue of glacial ice and sharp as rivets. Hunter’s eyes. Hawk’s eyes. That thought struck Sigurd like a forge hammer to his chest, as the mist from his hanging visions swirled in his mind.

She shrugged. ‘Men come sometimes. They come and I kill them.’

‘Why?’ Sigurd asked, tearing himself from the spell of her face and wondering where she had got such a brynja, its many hundreds of interlinked rings swathing her like iron skin and worth a decent hoard. He supposed a smith – and a skilled one at that – must have made it specially for her.

‘Why do I kill them?’

‘Why do they come?’ Sigurd asked.

She hesitated then. With Loker unconscious on the floor, all attention had turned to her now and she looked at those standing around her, at Floki, Olaf and Sigurd, who got the impression Valgerd was wondering if she could kill them all there and then.

‘Some come demanding that the völva tell them their future,’ she said. ‘Some come for the spring and the silver which folk have offered it since the beginning of the world.’ She sharpened those eyes on Sigurd now. ‘They come to take and so I kill them.’

‘Do you know the men in your pit?’ Olaf asked her.

‘I might have seen one of them before, if he is one of those who live on the shore. They don’t bother us and we don’t bother them.’ She flinched slightly at the
we
of that. ‘I have no quarrel with them if they stay down there.’

‘Well our friend here has a quarrel with you,’ Olaf said, thumbing at Loker who was slumped and milk-white where the skin was not bloody. ‘You owe him. Tell me you have the silver to pay for the hand you took and the soreness of it.’

Soreness. That fell a little short, but Olaf was being proud on Loker’s behalf.

Valgerd stared but said nothing.

‘What about that brynja?’ Black Floki suggested. ‘Some jarl with more booty than brains would buy that off him for his wife, I’d wager.’

‘You will have to kill me to take it,’ she said.

Now it was Olaf’s turn to shrug. ‘Your life for his hand. That should cover it,’ he said.

‘What about the silver in the spring?’ Floki said, but there was little weight in it and no one answered. Not that Floki could have expected much from that suggestion, for none of them was of a mind to steal from a sacred spring. You might as well poke a spear in Óðin’s one eye.

‘You could come with us.’ Sigurd heard the words before he knew he had said them. Olaf laughed and Black Floki swore.

‘This smoke’s withered your wits, lad!’ Olaf said, but Sigurd did not take his eyes from those hawk’s eyes before him.

‘It seems to me that you have no reason to stay here now.’

‘Fuck, but I must need to clean my ears out for I could have sworn you just offered this valkyrie a sea chest and a nest in the thwarts.’

‘She is a good fighter,’ Sigurd said. ‘Loker would attest to that.’

For a while Olaf just stood there wide-eyed, mouth gaping, then he gave a short bark of a laugh. ‘Loker will want to put a spear in her! And I won’t blame him!’

That was like water off a gull’s wing to Valgerd. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked Sigurd.

‘I am going to kill Jarl Randver of Hinderå,’ he replied, as though it were no more of a thing than taking a plunge in a river.

‘Why?’ Valgerd asked.

‘Because he has taken from me,’ Sigurd said, knowing that after what Valgerd had told them about men coming to steal from the spring she would understand. ‘If you join us I will treat you as I would any of those who follow me. There will be silver. And there will be blood.’

‘I have no need of silver,’ she said distastefully, though Sigurd knew the hook was in her mouth all the same. ‘There will be sword fame too,’ he added, ‘for we are few and Jarl Randver is a powerful man. When we beat him word of it will spread quickly.’

‘Like fire in dry thatch,’ Black Floki said through a grin.

The four of them stood looking at each other in the flame-played gloom which they shared with a dead seeress and a wolf-jointed warrior who looked dead but wasn’t.

‘Well
you
can tell Loker,’ Olaf said, shaking his head and scratching his great bird’s nest beard.

And Sigurd nodded.

Because Valgerd, his hawk, was joining the crew.

THE BROTHERS BJARNI
and Bjorn were prickly and pride-strong when Sigurd and Aslak pulled them out of Valgerd’s pit trap, but they had enough sense to be glad that Sigurd and his men were not oath-tied to their enemy Jarl Randver.

‘You came all the way up Lysefjorden to find us?’ Bjorn said, not quite able to get the suspicion out of his eyes. They were walking back through the woods now towards the beach, though the brothers had said they wanted to speak to their friends – the ones who had run off and left them – before they set sail with Sigurd.

‘A man called Ofeig Grettir told me you were good men in a fight,’ Sigurd said, ‘and that you were no friends of Jarl Randver.’

Bjarni spat. ‘That festering weasel’s turd demanded weregeld for a man who wasn’t worth three drips from a giant’s cock,’ he said.

‘We wouldn’t pay it,’ his brother put in, ‘and so Randver murdered our father.’

‘Threw him off a cliff, eh?’ Olaf said, which got two scowls as the brothers recalled the sour thing.

‘He declared us outlaws and after that it seemed there were more men that wanted to kill us than there are bristles on a boar’s back,’ Bjorn said then shrugged. ‘We had no choice but to lie low.’

‘Not that low,’ Olaf said. ‘As I recall you couldn’t resist trying to steal from us while we slept last night. Though that did not go so well for you.’ He had not been able to hold back, and Sigurd gave him a hard look.

Not that the brothers seemed worried. ‘We are outlaws,’ Bjarni said, as though that were explanation enough, as though Olaf had accused a dog of barking.

‘But we are good fighters,’ he added.

‘Hmm, I hope you are better at fighting than you are at avoiding holes in the ground,’ Olaf said.

Bjarni turned and glared at Valgerd who was walking a dozen paces behind them, more interested, it seemed, in the trees and rocks around her than in the men’s conversation. She was saying goodbye to the place, Sigurd knew.

‘You will not lack for opportunity to show us your courage and your blade-craft when we fight Jarl Randver,’ Sigurd said, steering the conversation back towards the common enemy.

‘Just put us within a spear-throw of that snot worm and you will see what kind of men have joined your crew,’ Bjorn said.

‘Aye, well Loker lost his hand finding you,’ Olaf said, still sore-headed about the whole thing and doubting the gain was worth the loss. Loker was awake but did not have the strength to walk so Aslak and Black Floki had him slung between them, his shoes’ toe-ends scuffing through the leaf mould and his chin more often on his chest than off it.

‘
She
gave him that wolf-joint not us,’ Bjorn said, thumbing over his shoulder towards the shieldmaiden, who was mailed and armed like a champion and had a nestbaggin containing her worldly possessions slung over her back beneath the shield.

A gust blew from the west bringing the scent of smoke to their noses, for Valgerd had refused to leave her dwelling until they had hacked apart enough of its driest timbers to make a pyre and doused the wood with fish oil. Upon this platform she had laid the völva and set the whole lot ablaze, and now, unseen because of the trees, a massive pillar of smoke sped the seeress to the afterlife. As the fire roared and the seeress’s skeletal body, bound in her blue cloak, charred and burnt, her spirit drum, feathered cushion and other belongings relating to her seiðr-craft burning around her, Valgerd had prepared to set off. Sigurd had told her that they would wait if she wished to stay until the flames had devoured it all, but she had shaken her head. ‘I am ready to leave this place,’ she said.

‘Will you not cast the ashes into the sea?’ Sigurd had asked.

‘The wind will do that well enough,’ she had replied, hefting her shield and slinging it across her back.

Sigurd had wanted to ask her what would happen to the sacred spring now. Did Valgerd not have a duty to find and protect a new völva? But he said nothing. She was more useful to him aboard
Sea-Sow
than she would be stuck at the arse end of the Lysefjord tending to a witch and her water. Besides, it seemed to him that the shieldmaiden believed the gods had betrayed her, as they had betrayed Sigurd’s own kin. The woman owed them nothing now. Let men pillage silver from the spring if they dared, and let the Æsir deal with that.