Legend of the Mist (21 page)

Seventeen

It
was not long before word of the attack reached the northern islands surrounding Scotland.

Only a few nights later a
messenger was sent to Fara by Anrothan, chief of the MacNeils of Barra, an island in the Hebrides. The messenger, a young man and obvious warrior for his powerful size and heavily scarred body, found the mighty Einarr Alfradsson outside the alehouse. Half drunk and lounging against the outer wall with a handful of his men, he greeted the newcomer with a rare smile—that was, of course, until the man began to speak.

“What do you mean, attacked?”
Einarr demanded. Springing to his feet he grabbed a fistful of the messenger’s plaid at his shoulder.

“Einarr,
stop,” barked one of his men in Norse. He needn’t have bothered, for when the Viking had reached for the messenger, the messenger had deftly unsheathed his concealed sgian-dubh, and now pressed it to Einarr’s wind pipe.

Einarr appeared hardly to notice the blade against his flesh. “Who is responsible for the attack? Who lives?”

“D’ye wish me to tell ye before or after I slit yer bloody throat?” the messenger snarled.

Glaring down at the man from his nearly head-taller height, he let go of the
fabric bunched in his hand, shoving the man at the same time.

Still holding his sgian-dubh ready, the messenger straightened himself out before answering. “I dinna ken who lives, and I am sorry I canna tell ye. But we’ve had word that a man by the name of Gunnarsson is responsible. Does the name mean anything to ye?”

Einarr’s brow furrowed as he struggled to consider the possibilities through the ale-induced haze that clouded his head. Beside him, one of his men repeated in Norse what the messenger had said for the benefit of those that did not understand Gaelic.

“
Olaf
Gunnarsson? Of Joldusteinn?” suggested another Norseman.

“Might be,” Einarr agreed, his eyes darkening. Then to the messenger he
translated, “We have an idea of who it might be.”

“Well then,
ye’d best be sailing if ye wish to return the favour. The attack didna happen too long ago as we understand it. Days only.”

With the help of Fearchar, Einarr’s men were ready to depart for Norway by morning.
The Viking fleet of longships had been stocked with provisions and whatever Celt weapons were needed.

“Ye’ll take my men, too, aye?” the chief offered.

“Fearchar,” Iobhar cautioned, raising his brows. “Ye dinna wish to leave us unprotected here, d’ye?”

“Hush
brother, ‘tis only a short journey.”

“I thank you,” Einarr responded. “I shall need a man to command them, though. Is your son fit?”

“He is.”

Overhearing this, Garrett, who was helping to bring the last of the weapons to the harbour, s
trode directly to them. “Father—” he began. But Fearchar cut him off.

“Ye’ll hold yer tongue, lad, and do as I say
. I’ll have no argument from ye.”

Glaring at his father, Garrett clenched his teeth furiously. “I were
only about to say that I dinna ken how to command a longship, and our men dinna ken how to row one.”

“
That should not be a problem,” Einarr put in. “You shall take one of my two lighter snekkjas. I shall fill half of the places in your ship with my men, and you will follow at the rear. My men should not need commanding thus situated, and as long as your men can row, they should not need any skill. You will have the other half of your men returned to your command when we land, ja?”

The two men stared at one another, each reading the other for any
underlying deception or malice. Beside them, Fearchar and Iobhar observed the stand-off tensely, anticipating an insult from Garrett in response. They both released an audible sigh when instead he nodded, a gesture to which Einarr responded in kind.

It may not have been
the making of peace, but it was at least a truce, and it was as close to an understanding as the two rivals would come under the circumstances.

Not lo
ng after, the longships were off. The two red-and-gold snekkjas followed the two larger drekars of Einarr’s fleet, rowed out to sea from Fara’s harbour by the powerful men within. The winds were with them, and once they reached the open water they were able to sail most of the way to the Norwegian mainland.

Less than two days later,
Einarr’s fleet was within sight of Hvaleyrr’s shores.

“It is
quiet,” Freyr noted to the men in his drekar. Unnecessarily, for each man was as worried as the one next to him by the eerie calm which they encountered.

From his post at the head of the
last snekkja, Garrett watched Einarr’s drekar longship dock. The Viking leader’s golden hair, braided on both sides and tied with a leather thong at the nape, glinted in the afternoon sun as he stepped onto the wooden planks and waved the rest of the ships into shore. The second drekar commanded by Freyr docked beside Einarr. The two snekkja longships, being lighter and more versatile, slid up onto the rocky beach adjacent the docks.

Einarr had been right: his men did not require Garrett’s command.
With an expertise that could only come from being raised on the seas, they manoeuvred the longship easily between the first beached snekkja and a jutting section of rock, a space which was only marginally larger than the ship’s width.

The Gallach warriors
worked alongside their Norse counterparts, helping them to drag the vessel further onto shore so that it would not slip back out to sea. No one said a word. They knew all too well what the Norse were feeling: that unbearable fear of finding that the worst had come to pass, tainted with the even more unbearable sliver of hope that it had not.

They wore peculiar expressions, the Fara men. Not quite of sympathy; they could not forget, after all, that
most of these Vikings were the same ones who had raided their island and murdered their people. But neither did they take satisfaction in what might be considered divine justice ... though they would have been well within their rights to do so.

In truth, none of the Gallachs knew
how
to feel just then.

The carnage
that had been delivered upon Hvaleyrr was evidenced by the dead who littered the town. The bodies which Einarr’s men first encountered were of those men who had met their attackers to repel them upon landing. Though many of their faces were recognized, their loss was, to some degree, bearable to their Viking kin and friends. These men had fought to protect their own; theirs was an honourable death.

The mood
swiftly changed when Einarr’s forces began making their way farther inland through the streets of the town.

The first anguished cry to
shatter the silence came from a younger Viking from Garrett’s ship. He stopped abruptly when he spied a small, still figure in a blue woollen tunic, lying in the middle of a narrow road. A wail of despair curled from the man’s chest, and he rushed to the little girl’s side. Sinking to his knees, he gathered his daughter into his arms and howled at the sky.

None offered him comfort. W
hat comfort could they possibly hope to give?

More howls
and cries erupted as more of the dead were found to be helpless citizens, among them women and children.

The Gallach warriors glanced u
neasily at one another, shaken by what they saw. By God, the children had been murdered, too?

“Check
the houses,” Einarr bellowed, his own panic poorly disguised. “Every last structure. If any of the
dyrjar
are still here, we’ll find them and kill them.”

Torsten followed closely on Einarr’s heels, the brothers
frantically checking the dead for three faces in particular: Ingrid; Siri; their young nephew.

Ignoring Einarr’s order,
Freyr charged through the streets, making straight for his own two-room home. Reaching it, he burst through the door, which had been torn from its frame and lay askew across the entrance.

“Ergrid,” he
roared into the silence. “Children, Ergrid, are you here?”

Passing through the first empty room which the family used, he peered into the second, rear room where the animals were kept. They had been slaughtered. Freyr hardly reacted to the unfortunate beasts’ demise. Tearing back out he began calling into the air.

“Ergrid, where are you
vif
?”

“Freyr,”
shrieked a voice from the distance.

Panting like an excited pup
, Freyr scampered after the voice. Though he passed more bodies as he went, he did not stop to look at them; oblivious was he to anything but his target. Einarr and Torsten followed, with Garrett and the others at their heels.

Reaching a plateau
in the middle of the town where it merged with the surrounding forest, they came upon the first survivors. The wretched group was led by Freyr’s wife, Ergrid, whose eight children followed close on her skirts.

“By the mercy of Tree, you are alive,” Freyr
exalted. He nearly knocked his wife to the ground when he bound for her, enveloping her in one arm and encircling as many of his children as he could with his other.

Behind Ergrid streamed a handful of townspeople from the trees. The looks on their faces ranged from bewilderment to
devastation. Upon seeing them, several of the Viking men rushed to their loved ones, overjoyed that they were safe. Several more peered anxiously at the faces, growing distraught when they did not find who they were looking for.

“Ergrid, do you know where
my mother is? And Siri—are they with you?” Einarr demanded.

Ergrid shook her head
, her wide eyes brimming with tears. “No, Einarr, they are not with us. I know nothing of Ingrid. And Siri ... ”

“
You can’t mean—” Torsten uttered when she paused for the strength to tell what she knew.

“I am sorry, Torsten,”
she responded, openly crying now. “She was trying to fetch Alfie from the castle when last I saw her. I know nothing more than that.”

“Einarr,”
interrupted one of his men, trotting towards the gathering in the plateau. “We’ve found something.”

Proceeding at a run, Einarr, Torsten
and some of the others followed the man back into the town to a laneway outside what had been the tavern. There, scattered in front of the entrance, were more bodies.

“Rulfudd,” Torsten muttered. “And his man, Ulfr.”

The men had been killed in battle. Their weapons were still clutched in their hands and their wounds marred the front of their bodies, taken while facing their adversaries rather than running from them.

The one in the middle, the one whom Torsten had identified as Rulfudd, had received the worst of it.
His body had been sliced and stabbed far more than was necessary to kill him. Whether these wounds had actually caused his death or not was unclear, for his head had also been hacked from his neck, and lay a short distance away.

“Who is he?” Garrett
inquired, staring down at the headless body at Einarr’s feet.

“Rulfudd Martinsson,” Torsten answered. “Our sister’s husband. He has been ruling Hvaleyrr in Einarr’s stead since our father died.”

Einarr did not remove his eyes from the dead man. He stared down at the bloody stump of Rulfudd Martinsson’s neck, his face granite, his eyes shards of ice.

“This is a message,”
he declared. “Hvaleyrr was not raided for riches, nor strategy. Whoever did this was making a statement.”

“
Hadn’t we better check the castle before we declare this a statement?” one of the Norse said warily.

Both Einarr and Torsten’s eyes snapped to one another’s.

“Mother,” Einarr uttered.

“Siri,” Torsten whispered.

They took off together, hurtling towards the castle as fast as they could go. Garrett and a few of the Norse followed, and when they passed a handful of his own men, Garrett ordered them along.

“Siri,” Einarr shouted as he
tore through the empty town. “Mother, where are you?”

Rounding the
last of the structures, they came into view of the main gate of the castle—and got their first glimpse of one of the attackers.

B
y the size of him it was obvious that he was no warrior; he was hardly a grown man. His axe was raised, prepared to defend himself, but he handled the weapon awkwardly. And though he tried to maintain a ferocious scowl, his arms began to quake at the sight of the enraged Viking that closed in on him.

“I would move if I were you,
boy,” Torsten warned before his brother had reached him. “You’ll not win a fight with Einarr Alfradsson.”

“Do me the favour,” the boy replied,
finding a hint of a sneer despite his trembling. “I long for the warrior’s death that will take me to
Valhalla
. But before I go, perhaps the
mighty
Einarr Alfradsson wants to hear the message I’ve been left here to deliv—”