Legend of the Mist (6 page)

Five

For hours Torsten wandered the devastated remains of Bjarmaland. Many of the houses
and buildings had been burned, their thatch and wood construction an easy target for the invaders’ torches. Of those structures which still stood, a number still held the bodies of victims, their silent forms lying where they’d fallen.

He counted another three women among the dead. Three elderly women who had not been able to run and save themselves when the alarm was raised.

He should have known Einarr’s orders would not be obeyed.

But then, he was fooling himself. He
had
known; of course he had. He knew the men that followed Einarr’s command. They were battle hungry devils, eager for carnage and bloodshed. They lived to kill, and it mattered not which victim met the sharp end of their blades. There was nothing Einarr could say that would stop them. Not completely.

Torsten had known all this. And yet he had gone anyway.

The vision of the dead woman and her child had burned itself into his mind, was vivid in his reflection as he wandered. In that time Torsten had come to a conclusion. An unwavering one. He would no longer be a part of this senseless killing and plundering. No longer would he let his brother and his father push him into action he neither sought nor agreed with.

This war was not his to fight, nor was it Einarr’s. His brother
made
it his war. Their family had not been threatened by Harald Fairhair. Not yet, not directly. It was wealth that Einarr was after, for there was much wealth to be gained in this pursuit of his. War was only his excuse to raid, his justification to pillage.

Even
the small, inconsequential island in Orkney that he’d annexed for himself and on which he planned to settle—what had he called it ... Rysa Beag?—it was more than a tactical stronghold, it would bring a profit during the farming months. And he’d secured himself a bride in the process, a well connected bride by the way he told it. Wealth, power, land, prestige. That’s what this war was about. Though Einarr professed differently, Torsten saw it clearly now.

Let
them do what they would. If he could not stop his brother from carrying on, then he would leave. Perhaps he would take up merchanting of ... something. Wine. Silk. Gemstones. He was fair in his ability with numbers, and could barter as well as the next man.

Yes, he could spend his days quite happily
travelling the world, procuring goods for trade in exotic lands like Hispania and Ravenna, Marrakech and Damascus.

It was dark by the time
he finally returned to the harbour. There the men had set up quarters for the night, in a group of undamaged buildings along the street that ran parallel to the docks. Lanterns flickered quietly, casting a dim glow over the town which, only hours before, had been ablaze with uncontrolled flame. Happy chatter, punctuated occasionally by rounds of laughter, echoed through the empty streets. It was an unsettling sound: the celebration of barbarians in the blackness of a dead town.

Milling about at the entrance to what used to be one of the harbour taverns was a group of men. Torsten approached them.

“Which one’s he in?” he said flatly, nodding towards the occupied buildings.

“Einarr?” responded
one. “This one here. But I wouldn’t disturb him if I were you. He’s busy just now.”

The man’s companions snickered amongst themselves.
Ignoring them, Torsten pushed his way through the group to the open door.

The scene inside was
a chaotic mix of depravity and drunkenness; he had expected nothing less. Raiders occupied every table and chair that was available. Those that did not occupy a seat leaned against the yellowed, plaster walls, and helped themselves to whatever was stored behind the bar.

The whores had already descended upon the town, pecking at the spoils to be
gained. These men certainly had the loot to pay for their charms now. Their sloppy, leering faces foretold that many a wench would leave here black and blue in her
professional
areas, but with her pockets heavy with plundered coin for her troubles.

Torsten observed the group with a bitter taste in his mouth.
Beasts, all of them. Vultures.

“Einarr?” he
repeated to the men at the table closest to the door. A rail-thin whore who had been busy entertaining one of them glanced up. Seeing Torsten, with his tall, lean form and handsome face, she batted her eyelashes invitingly, pressing her pale bosom and skeletal sternum upwards at him.

Recognizing a threat to his claim, the man pulled his wench closer to him roughly.
“Upstairs,” he growled.

Torsten declined to offer thanks, and
strode the length of the room to a set of stairs at the back of the tavern. There was a crash when he passed as one man behind the bar thumped another across the face over a rare bottle of Cyprian nectar. The force of the assault sent the latter into the middle of an occupied table which shattered to pieces beneath the man’s weight.

Torsten did not
look back to see what the occupants of the former table had to say of their drinks being spilled. He mounted the worm-eaten staircase, taking the steps two at a time.

A narrow passageway dissected the second floor down its centre
. Eight doors, four on each side, lined the crumbling plastered walls. They, too, were narrow, and suggested that the rooms behind them were intended for neither comfort nor slumber.

At the end of the hall, standing guard at the last door on the right, was a large man, heavily muscled even for a Viking. His left cheek was scarred from temple to jaw and he was missing three digits from his right hand. This was Einarr’s personal guard
, Bjurr. Torsten had never liked the man and his particularly insatiable bloodlust.

“You’ll have to wait your turn,”
Bjurr warned. “There are a good fifty men downstairs lined up for their go, and I’m next as soon as Einarr’s done with his wench in here.”

“I’m not here for a room, I need to see him,” Torsten
said evenly.

Bjurr
shook his head. “No one disturbs him tonight.”

“No one but me,” Torsten bit back and made to push past him.

With a malicious grin which betrayed that his desire had been to fight all along, Bjurr swiped his great paw at Torsten’s arm.

Torsten anticipated
his adversary’s move, for he knew the brute relied exclusively on his strength. He whirled sideways and danced out of his reach, and with a speed and fluidity which Bjurr could never hope to match, Torsten unsheathed the dagger that he kept tucked into his belt. Stepping forward into the man, he let Bjurr’s momentum carry his own unbalanced weight onto the point of the blade. It sunk into the soft pocket of fat at his belly just as he regained his balance. Any greater pressure from Torsten and it would pierce the skin.

Bjurr
grunted, and his shoulders slowly sagged in defeat. He’d been bested and he knew it. One ill advised move and Torsten would drive the blade home to the hilt. Narrowing his eyes, the man straightened himself and stepped back to let Torsten pass, which he did with backwards steps. Only when he’d crossed the threshold of the room and shut the door behind himself did he turn around.

And
groaned.

Lying
prostrate on a pillared oak bed, naked as the day he came into the world, was Einarr. His head was where his feet should have been and his feet where braced against the headboard, which was furiously knocking against the warped, wooden wall behind it. His head was thrown back in a most uncomfortable position, and his eyes were clenched shut with the ferocity of his pleasure.

Straddled atop him and riding him as if her life depended upon it was a young, buxom whore. Einarr certainly had saved the best for himself, Torsten thought snidely as he studied the bucking pair. Her face was down, but Torsten could see the promise of a fine bone structure. Her hair was a river of gold which spilled over bare, supple breasts peaked with neat, pink nipples.
They undulated and bounced as the wench rhythmically rocked her curved hips. Her dress, a simpler garment than those worn by her companions below stairs, was torn to her narrow waist and lay puddled atop her skirts which, mercifully for Torsten, hid the place where she admitted his brother’s staff.

From his increasingly breathless moans, Torsten judged that Einarr was about to loose his seed. He waited.

“Oh ...”

And
waited.

“
Ja, oh ...”

And waited.

“There it is; there it is—”

Torsten cleared his throat.
Loudly.

Startled, the wench yelped and scuttled backwards off her mount.

“Damn you to the fires of
Muspelheim
,” Einarr roared, his face flushing scarlet as the evidence of his thwarted pleasure pulsed pathetically onto the bare flesh of his belly. “I’ll kill whatever
strodinn
cur dares to disturb me!”

Frightened by his outburst, the wench scrambled from the bed and threw her half-naked body into the corner where she pulled her shredded dress back into place.
For a brief second Torsten watched her with furrowed brows.

What curious behaviour for a whore
.

“It is your brother,”
he answered calmly as Einarr turned to fix a deadly glare upon his intruder. “And though I may be a cur at times, I am no
strodinn
. I prefer the company of
women
as much as you clearly do—not
men
.”

A snivel from the corner drew his gaze once more, and Torsten examined the face that stared at him more closely. The wench’s eyes were
an enchanting blue, and were wide as trenchers with fright. She’d been crying. Tear tracks were visible on her rosy cheeks, and her entire frame trembled visibly.

“
Mighty Thor,” he swore under his breath. This young woman was no whore; she was one of the captured Bjarmalander survivors.

“Einarr,”
he breathed, deeply disappointed in his brother. “I did not think you would be one to rape a maid in the heat of a raid.”

“I’ll have you know I have never, nor will I ever, rape a
maid,” Einarr barked angrily, covering himself with the bear skin blanket which lay rumpled beneath him. “You misunderstand what you have seen.”

Tossing his brother a reproachful
look, he approached the woman cautiously. Bending down to her level, he brushed a golden lock from her face, and tisked at the sight of a fresh welt across her forehead.

“Did he do this?”
he demanded.

“No, sir, he did not,” the maid answered, her lips quivering. “The one outside this door did.
He said that I could bargain for my life with ... w-with my charms, and then he struck me and said that if I did not then I would have more of the same to look forward to before I died.”

“You offered yourself in exchange for your life,” Torsten repeated,
turning to glare at his brother.

“Don’t look at
me like that, I did not know,” Einarr protested, surprisingly genuine. “I was led to this room and here she was.”

“You did not notice that she was terrified and injured?”

“Well ... ja, perhaps. But who am I to turn away a gift when offered?”

Torsten
clenched his fists and cursed himself for not skewering Bjurr when he’d had the chance.

“You are safe,” he assured
the maid. “He would not see you killed.”

“But he would see me sold,” she
argued, her voice barely above a whisper.

Torsten did not answer. He could not, for she was right. Instead he stood and approached Einarr, who was now sitting up and leaning comfortably against the headboard of the bed.

“I’m finished with this,” he said solemnly. “I will do this no more.”

Einarr regarded his brother,
judging the sincerity in his face and his voice. “Something tells me it was not this bit with the wench that has caused this.”

“No,” Torsten
said. “It is because you promised me that no women or children would be harmed. But I have see proof that your words went unheeded by the men. A young woman and her child lie dead on the shore this day.”

“That is regrettable,” Einarr agreed, “but is it just the one woman and one child? That is really not so bad when you consider how many women and children
are normally killed in raids.”

“It is not good enough for me
.”

Einarr’s brows
drew together and he huffed sharply. “Truly, brother, I do not understand where this soft streak in you comes from. Raiding is a part of what we do, of who we are.
Why
can you not see that? All your life you have been this way: a warrior with no heart for war. You shy away from death in a way I’ve never seen before from any other man. Why?”

It was a question his brother had asked him more than once over the years and still Torsten could not answer it.