God of Vengeance (38 page)

The brothers showed them an easier way down to the cove in which
Sea-Sow
was beached and after Sigurd had introduced them and Valgerd to the others – their eyes barely lighting on Bjarni and Bjorn or even Loker with his new stump once they saw the warrior woman – Bjorn set about calling up to the cave and the high ground to get the attention of those he knew would be watching.

Eventually, as Solveig was muttering about the bad luck having a woman aboard would bring them and Hagal was arguing that she would make a wonderful addition to the saga tale, and Svein was murmuring to Hendil that she was the most beautiful – if also the most dangerous-looking – woman he had ever seen, a knot of folk appeared at the cave’s entrance, peering down, armed with bows and spears. They seemed confused by the sight of the brothers unhurt and, furthermore, armed still, amongst the knörr’s crew, and it was the bald-headed, broad-shouldered man with the three-braid beard who called down to them.

‘Are they friends of yours then?’ he asked the brothers.

‘This man is the son of Jarl Harald of Skudeneshavn who was betrayed by King Gorm and Jarl Randver,’ Bjorn shouted back.

‘Then he has more enemies than we do,’ Three Braids called.

Bjorn was about to answer when Sigurd stopped him with a raised hand.

‘While that is true, I also have a ship, silver and good weapons,’ he shouted. He gestured to the brothers. ‘These men tell me you are a good fighter, that you have fed the crows with plenty of enemies.’ He gave a shrug that was big enough to be seen from the bluff above. ‘All I have seen is how well you can run.’

Three Braids did not like this and nor should he for it was a sharp insult. Sigurd knew it demanded a response and he hoped that a man who had been forced to hide like a runaway thrall might still have enough pride in him to want to prove himself.

‘Are you a jarl then?’ the bald man asked.

‘Not yet,’ Sigurd called.

‘So I would not have to swear an oath to you?’

Sigurd half smiled. ‘Not yet,’ he said again and this had the man scratching his chin.

‘Sigurd has promised us an equal share in the booty we take,’ Bjarni yelled up, which was, Sigurd thought after, what brought Three Braids and two other men down from the heights onto the beach like wolves to a carcass. Three Braids’ name was Ubba and the other two, one as thin as an iron rod, the other broad and deep-chested, introduced themselves as Agnar Bjarnason whom men called the Hunter and Karsten, bynamed Ríkr – according to himself – which had lifted a few eyebrows. Whether Karsten, who it turned out was a Dane, was indeed as mighty as he thought he was would perhaps be known in time, but what Ubba would say was that he was a great helmsman who had more sea-craft than a whale. Which did not go down well with Solveig of course.

‘I wouldn’t put a Dane at the tiller,’ he rumbled to anyone in earshot, ‘not unless you want a closer look at the rocks.’

But Sigurd was glad to have them aboard. The new crewmen waved farewell to the other men and women, who had not dared to come down from the rocks, and they set to work tacking
Sea-Sow
into the wind back up Lysefjorden. Valgerd sat by herself at the bow and not once did Sigurd see her turn to look back at the smoke from her lover’s pyre which still stained the sky a darker grey above the woods atop the sheer rock walls. And it seemed that the others were content for the shieldmaiden to keep to herself, for as Olaf had said as they cast off, it was one thing to have a woman aboard, quite another to have a corpse maiden in the crew.

‘A jarl should have a hawk,’ Asgot had said, glancing at Sigurd to judge his reaction to that, for the godi knew all too well of the vision Sigurd had had as he’d hung from the alder, caught in a maelstrom of pain and strange, potion-induced dreams.

But Sigurd did not give the godi the satisfaction, instead keeping his thoughts about that to himself.

‘Look around you, Uncle,’ he said to Olaf who was watching Solveig drive the tiller hard over, turning the knörr into the wind so that the wind against the face of the sail halted her progress and soon began to blow
Sea-Sow
backwards. Olaf ran his eyes over the crew, over Black Floki, Bjarni and Bjorn, Asgot, Hagal Crow-Song and the red-haired giant Svein, men who had been thralls and outlaws and retainers of a dead jarl.

‘Aye, we are a strange crew,’ Olaf admitted, as he and Hendil released one corner of the sail while others released lines on the bow, beside the mast in midship and in the stern. Aslak and Svein pulled hard on the yard ropes, drawing the sail to the other side of the boat and catching the wind well enough to move the knörr forward again. Those at the bow worked with the bietas, that great heavy pole, and other men secured a rope to the opposite corner of the sail before the bow men pulled hard and strong, and Solveig waited for them to do their work so that he could turn on to course, at which point Olaf and Hendil would pull in to trim and tighten the sail. ‘I suppose having a valkyrie with us can only add feathers to our fame’s flight,’ Olaf said, spitting onto his palms and rubbing them together. ‘For we are going to need more of a crew than this.’

And Sigurd looked over at Hagal, who had not got his byname from hunting for outlaws or hauling on ropes sticky with resin. Because Olaf had given him an idea.

Sigurd knew he was not the only man aboard who felt as though there were loom weights tied to his guts and needles piercing his heart when they rounded the southern tip of Karmøy. And yet like him, Olaf and Solveig, Aslak, Svein, Hendil and Loker Wolf-Joint let their eyes drink in the sight of Skudeneshavn, their home, like a bitter draught. For each of them knew he could never go back there. That thread of their lives had been cut, though no one spoke of it, each chasing fleeting memories amidst a dizzying swirl of them, like trying to keep your eye on one fish amongst a shoal of darting silver.

Some of them had, like Olaf, family still living there and Sigurd thought that in some ways that must be worse than having just ghosts, as he did. For those men knew they could never hold their wives and comfort their children, not without putting those loved ones’ lives at risk. Perhaps, when this was all over and if they lived through what was coming, they could take their families and start new lives somewhere, on some island that was out of reach of kings and jarls or beyond their care. But first there would be blood and so Sigurd stood silently at the stern as they passed the familiar skerries and the wave-lashed shore and even glimpsed, through the sheltered inlet, the wharf against which Jarl Harald’s great ships
Reinen
,
Sea-Eagle
and
Little-Elk
had once berthed.

Let it burn them like a hot stone in the hand, Sigurd thought, looking from his crew to the shore and thinking how strange it was that Eik-hjálmr his father’s hall stood no more beyond the moss-dappled rocks, the birch and pine and the sheep-flecked mounds. Let them feast on what they have lost, like crows picking scraps from bones. Let them know what they are fighting for.

As for those new to the crew, some like the brothers Bjorn and Bjarni were here for revenge, which Sigurd understood better than any man. Others, men like Ubba, Agnar Hunter and Karsten Ríkr, would wade into the blood-fray for silver and Sigurd would make sure they got it. He glanced at Valgerd then who sat on the stern deck, running a whetstone along her sword’s edge, her legs hanging over the edge into
Sea-Sow
’s open hold. He could not say why she had joined him, but he knew the shieldmaiden was the hawk from his hanging vision and he believed that their wyrds had always been spun into one another’s. And even if that was just a weaving of his own mind, she was a great fighter, as skilled with a blade as any man aboard perhaps, and that made it worth having her along in spite of how Loker and some of the others creaked like loose boards about it.

And then there was Crow-Song. It was true that Sigurd had threatened to blood-eagle the skald unless he went with them, but there was more to it than that. Hagal was in the mire of this thing for the story. He was a man who fed on the gasps and cheers, on the round eyes, the horror-stricken eager faces, the beard-nestled smirks and the raised eyebrows of those who gathered to hear his tales. He had no home, was a man not oath-tied to any other, and spent his life going from hearth to hearth and cup to cup.

And they had put him ashore at Rennisøy that dawn as the sun had spilled red light across Boknafjorden like blood from a wound. There he would visit the market and learn what he could about Jarl Randver’s pursuit of Sigurd and what folk were thinking about their king up at Avaldsnes. He would sidle up to important men, perhaps winning himself an invitation to some jarl’s hall, and ask them what they thought of the oath-breaker King Gorm’s treachery. Weighing these men and their ambitions carefully Hagal would, if the moment arose – or if he could fashion it himself – bring up Sigurd, the wrong done to him and his intent to repay the offence in kind. From Rennisøy Hagal would go to Mekjarvik, Jæren or Sandnes, or even further south or east into Rogaland, calling on old friends and those who had shared their halls and hearths with him. And though Sigurd knew it was unlikely that any jarl or rich man would be prepared to risk all that he had by siding with some revenge-hungry son of a dead jarl with no reputation to speak of, there was more to it than that. For many of these men would be invited to Hinderå for the Haust Blót feast and celebration of the jarl’s son’s marriage, and when they first laid eyes on Sigurd he wanted them to know who he was and what he had come for. Such men might then have to make a choice.

‘So what do you know of the man?’ Bjorn asked him then, gripping a mast shroud and swinging around it into Sigurd’s line of sight. It took Sigurd a moment to emerge from the fog of his thoughts but then he realized Bjorn was asking about Jarl Hakon Brandingi, which means burner, who was the reason why they were sailing north.

‘All I can tell you is that he got that byname because in his time he burnt more halls than any other jarl,’ Sigurd said, wondering just how many halls that was. ‘But it is Olaf who has met him,’ he added with a nod towards the big man.

‘Aye, though I was a wean at the time,’ Olaf said from the stern where he stood gripping the tiller, taking a turn there to give old Solveig’s eyes a rest. They were lucky to have Karsten now too. But with sixteen crew and all their war gear
Sea-Sow
had become cramped, even with some of the big hold decked over to give more sleeping room, and Sigurd knew they would soon need another ship.

‘Sigurd has it right about the man’s fire-fame though,’ Olaf said, nodding to Solveig who came and resumed his place at the tiller, for in truth he did not much like being away from it. ‘There was one hall belonging to some jarl up in Kvinnherad that every skald and story-teller used to bring up when we were beardless boys,’ Olaf went on, his beard ruffling in the breeze, his eyes full of sea and sky. ‘I can’t recall what the argument was about but I remember the interesting bits. One night Jarl Hakon had the door of his own hall pulled off its hinges—’ He frowned. ‘There was something about this other jarl saying his hall was bigger than Hakon’s. Anyway, one night Hakon and his crew carried this door down to his ship, took it across the Bjørnafjord and down across the Hardangerfjord, lugged it across hill and dale and came to his enemy’s steading. It was pitch dark, which tells you what kind of man this Hakon is, to cross two fjords at night, and while this other jarl and his people slept Hakon nailed his door across the threshold of the man’s hall.’

‘They must have been woken by the hammering,’ Ubba said, having like others been drawn into the story now – not that there was much room on
Sea-Sow
to escape it.

‘Maybe they were too drunk to wake up,’ Olaf suggested. ‘Or maybe they were all deaf. I don’t bloody know, Ubba!’

‘I think someone would have heard it. One of this jarl’s hounds even,’ Ubba said.

‘Whose story is this?’ Olaf asked the man, glaring.

Ubba frowned, unappeased, but nodded for Olaf to continue the tale.

‘Well when Hakon’s lot had set fire to the place and the flames were stretching high enough to singe the Allfather’s beard up in Asgard, this other jarl’s people opened the door thinking they ought to escape.’

‘As you would, hey,’ Svein put in, a smile nestled in his red beard.

‘Only they found another door more than covering the hole,’ Olaf said, stretching his arms out wide. ‘So this other jarl burnt to a pile of ashes knowing that he had been wrong about his hall being bigger.’

‘Maybe his hall
was
bigger, but Hakon just happened to have a bigger door,’ Hendil suggested not unreasonably.

‘I still do not see how they could hammer their door across the other without someone hearing it,’ Ubba said, shaking his head.

‘Fuck!’ Olaf exclaimed. ‘Now I know how Crow-Song feels! That is the last time I tell you lot a good story.’

The others laughed and Olaf muttered. And Sigurd wondered what kind of man Hakon Burner was nowadays and whether he would help him fight Jarl Randver. There had been a time, before Sigurd was born, when it looked as though Brandingi would call himself a king and accept oaths of loyalty from the other jarls, or else force oaths upon them. He had been a fierce warrior, but more than that he had become the kind of jarl to whom other men are drawn like cold hands to a bright hearth.

‘He promised men plunder,’ Olaf had told Sigurd when Asgot had first pulled the man’s name from his memory, for no one spoke of Hakon much any more. ‘And he gave it them too. They used to say his hearth warriors dripped with silver. And the more men that flocked to him the more raiding he did to keep them all in arm rings, mead and meat.’

‘With awe and fear the gods observed the growing size and strength of the young Fenrir Wolf,’ Asgot said, ‘so it was that other jarls watched Hakon’s power grow.’ He had grinned then. ‘But unlike Loki’s monstrous offspring no one dared try to bind Hakon.’

‘Aye, he made a name for himself. The kind that mothers used to frighten their children into going to bed,’ Olaf said. ‘But then one day a younger man with some blade-fame and low cunning – and the cunning was the important thing – changed things as surely as the tide. He got his hands on the old farm up at Avaldsnes, which as you know had once been King Ogvaldr’s perch, and persuaded some karls, none of them silver-light themselves, to help him put a stranglehold on Karmsundet.’ He shrugged. ‘This young man’s sea chest brimmed with tolls from any skipper going north up there and in time he grew far richer than Hakon Brandingi and mostly for sitting on his arse.’