God of Vengeance Page 10

  ‘Sigurd. Boy.’ The old man’s voice was like the gush of air leaving a fish as you slit its belly, but his eyes still had life in them. Sigurd crouched down beside him, glad to delay finding what else must be found.

  ‘They came from the east,’ Solveig said, his eyes flicking down to Harald’s brooch on Sigurd’s belt. ‘Hopped like fucking fleas across from Bokn before we had a proper chance to see them coming. Whoresons must have been camped out there these last days.’ He winced at the pain in his chest but did not seem to want to look at the wound now.

  ‘Who?’ Sigurd asked, though he did not need to.

  ‘Randver, who else?’ Solveig spat. ‘Him and his spawn.’ His eyes widened then but with hope, not pain. ‘Your father? Is the jarl here?’

  Sigurd thought about lying to him then but something told him Solveig had too much life in him yet to be worth the lie. Besides, the old man had seen the brooch on Sigurd’s belt and that told the story of it. ‘My father is dead,’ he said. ‘My brother too and all those who went to Avaldsnes. They were waiting for us, Biflindi and his húskarlar.’

  ‘The king had no weregeld for us then,’ Solveig managed through a bitter grin.

  Sigurd shook his head. ‘Just iron and steel,’ he muttered, sweeping his sweat-matted hair back from his face.

  ‘Looks like you let them know your feelings about that, lad,’ Solveig said. Sigurd wiped a hand across his face, the sweat smearing his palm bloody. He realized that his face was caked in gore.

  ‘I ran,’ he said, the shame of it heavy as a rock in his belly.

  ‘Your sister will be glad of it,’ the old skipper said.

  ‘My sister?’

  ‘They took her. They took the youngens. The ones they hadn’t murdered. Runa was among them. Others ran and might be running still, but they’ll be back when they think it’s safe. Runa didn’t run.’

  Sigurd’s head spun with the whirlpool of that. Runa was alive!

  ‘My mother?’ he asked.

  Solveig shook his head. ‘I can’t say, lad. I must have lost myself for a while when they cut me up. But the goat turd who cut me will be struggling with his mead horn about now.’ He grinned then and for the first time Sigurd realized the old man was clutching something in one bony fist. The hand opened and inside it were three severed fingers the colour of bread before the baking. ‘Took ’em with my scramasax before he opened me up. He’ll be wiping his arse with his eating hand now.’ The grin died on his face. ‘Did the lads die well?’

  Sigurd locked eyes with the old skipper then nodded down at the long wound in Solveig’s chest. ‘Are you going to meet them now?’

  Solveig looked at the ripped flesh. Sigurd could see the gleam of bone deep in the cut. ‘Not if you can stitch me up while I’ve still got some blood in me,’ Solveig said.

  Sigurd nodded. ‘I’ll fetch a needle.’ He stood and saw an infant’s crib upturned in the thoroughfare between two livestock pens. The pigs had gone, been carried off back to Hinderå. There was no sign of the infant, though Sigurd did not check amongst the filth of the pig pen for his mind had already spun the sorry tale of that. Then he approached the east end of his father’s hall which was too damp still to burn and, with an arm that had never felt so weak in his life, he pushed open the door. Inside it was much darker than the summer’s evening and he stood for a long while letting his eyes soak up the gloom. There were bodies in here too, those of his parents’ thralls and even Harald’s hounds Var and Vogg. The stink of death, of blood and piss and opened bowels thickened the fug of hearth smoke and the acrid reek of the smouldering thatch above. And beyond the hanging tapestries that separated his parents’ chamber from the rest of the hall Sigurd found his mother.

  Grimhild had not been raped, or if she had there was no tale of it in what Sigurd saw there by the dim, sooty light of the two oil lamps still burning as though it was just another evening. But she had fought. He knew this because the scramasax lodged in her chest, its reindeer antler crown handle as familiar to Sigurd as his mother’s hand, had been a gift to her from his father. Sigurd knew his mother could handle the scramasax, knew that she would have fought like a she-wolf and he would not be surprised if one of Jarl Randver’s men had gone home light between the legs, gelded like a beast and screaming. Or worse.

  He knelt beside her and closed her staring eyes. With a shaking hand he pushed the spilled gold of her hair off her forehead and kissed her there, the skin as cold as a stone against his lips. Her left arm had almost been cleaved through just below the elbow from where she had raised it to defend herself from a sword or scramasax. He was ashamed to look at that, to see her severed flesh and the milky gleam of her bone; things no one should see, and so he tore some linen from her skirt and used it to bind the arm up, giving it the look of being whole again.

  He put his mouth to her ear and told her that he was sorry, that he would give anything, do anything, to have the chance to fight for her. ‘I should have protected you, Mother,’ he said, as if those words poured in her ear might yet seep into her spirit somehow though her body was cold and dead.

  Then, arming tears, snot and other men’s blood from his face he took hold of the reindeer antler handle, murmured to Týr to give him courage, took a fjord-deep breath and hauled the blade from his mother’s body. It drew easily enough, which was a small mercy at least, and when he saw the blood-glistened blade his breath caught in his chest like a hook catching in weed on the sea bed.

  There were notches along the cutting edge that had not been there before, four of them and all as deep as a fingernail. These marks might as well have been runes carved in a rock telling of brave Grimhild’s last stand and Sigurd’s heart threatened to burst with bitter pride at the sight of them. Then he saw something else, a thing so small that it was only luck that he had caught sight of it at all in the gloom, but a thing more valuable to him then than a sea chest brimming with silver. A thread had snagged in the second cleft from the hilt. Sigurd took it between finger and thumb and spat on it, then wiped it across his tunic’s sleeve and saw that beneath the blood the wool was the green of a full-grown holly leaf. His mother’s under-dress was of undyed linen and her woollen apron-skirt was blue. The green thread had not come from her. Sigurd saw the fight in his mind, his mother’s blade snagging on her attacker’s green tunic as she pulled it from his sucking flesh, that fool who had underestimated a jarl’s wife with a long knife in her hand.

  ‘I will kill those who did this,’ he said, and this was more for the gods’ ears than for his mother’s. ‘May I never see Valhöll if I do not.’ He thought of the Allfather and let the weight of those words sink in for a while and then he went over to Grimhild’s chest and took out a fine bone needle and some thread, which were hairs from a horse’s tail, and then he went outside, sucking in the air for all its tang of smoke, because it was sweet as mead after the stench of his father’s hall.

  He boiled some water and washed Solveig’s wound clean and would have dulled the skipper’s pain by getting him drunk on mead or ale, but Jarl Randver’s men had drunk every drop they could find.

  ‘Killing bairns is thirsty work,’ Solveig had muttered, managing to spit in disgust and having to grin and bear it, growling curses and frothing at the mouth as Sigurd sewed the torn flesh back together. ‘A blind woman with one hand and a grudge would have done a neater job than that,’ the skipper complained when it was all done, looking down at Sigurd’s handiwork, his face greasy with pain sweat, eyes sharp as rivet points.

  ‘Next time you can do it yourself, old man,’ Sigurd said and meant it.

  ‘Ha! Next time? If I ever lay eyes on the horse-faced cunny who did this I’ll blister him for his sloppy blade work then pay him to finish the job.’ He grimaced. ‘I’ve been alone since you were a boy, Sigurd,’ he said. ‘Now what have I got to live for? Without a tiller in my hand I’m not worth the hide on my own back.’ For Jarl Randver had taken Little-Elk, which Solveig loved more than mead, silver or fame. ‘Besides,
your father will be waiting for me,’ he said.

  ‘He’ll have to wait longer yet, old man,’ Sigurd said. ‘I’m going to need a man of your sea-craft.’

  Solveig curled his lip into his white beard and closed his eyes and Sigurd left him to rest because he had work to do.

  By the time he had carried most of the dead into Eik-hjálmr the first survivors were drifting back into the village. They came in twos and threes, stumbling like draugar, corpses which have dug their way out of their burial mounds to walk amongst the living. Their eyes bulged and the women clutched each other’s arms and the children cried. Some found their kin amongst the slaughtered. Others found their loved ones vanished like smoke on the breeze and in some ways this was worse for they knew these were bound for the slave market. It can be better knowing a sister or son to be dead than knowing they are alive somewhere beneath another’s yoke and cruelly used and you will never set eyes on them again.

  Sigurd had been glad to see Ragnhild making her way over the rocks down into the village, her white-haired bairn cradled in her arms and her hair flying loose in the breeze. She had smiled through her tears to Sigurd but then before he could get the words out she had untangled the riddle of it for herself and knew that Jarl Harald and Sorli and all the rest of them were dead. At this horror she pulled little Eric so tight into her bosom that it was a miracle that the boy was not suffocated.

  ‘My Olaf will know what to do,’ she said with stone-cold certainty that her husband would be coming back, and Sigurd thumbed the little carving of one-eyed Óðin that hung against his chest, hoping for a measure of good luck where this was concerned.

  It was as dark as it was going to get when the last of them returned clutching tools or jewellery or cloaks or their best furs; whatever possessions they had got their hands on before fleeing from Jarl Randver’s men. There were some thirty-six in all, eight of them men, though these, three of them greybeards, would not look Sigurd in the eye, ashamed as they were to still draw breath when so many did not.

  They gathered round, hands over mouths or cuffing at tears or fingering weapons, listening as Sigurd and Solveig gave them both edges of the heart-rending thing. It turned out that five young women and six young men had been carried off by the raiders. These would be bound for the slave markets if they could be broken, the scramasax if not.

  ‘They will come back to kill us,’ a woman said when Sigurd and Solveig had finished, which had others looking south down to the bay and the sea which was flecked with foam as the wind picked up.

  Sigurd shook his head. ‘They want this land and they have taken what they could carry. But when Randver comes again it will be to declare himself your new jarl. He will want you fishing again, planting crops and rearing pigs.’ The dark thought of the infant’s crib came to him then and he was glad he had thrown that thing into the fire of Asgot’s house before the fugitives had returned. It was perhaps just as well that Unn, the child’s mother, was dead.

  ‘I saw Randver with his bollocks in a twist when his men tried to fire your father’s hall,’ Solveig said, his face as pale as his snowy hair as he nodded towards the hall. The flames had not taken at the western end though the thatch still smouldered, dirtying the dusk with yellow smoke. ‘He wanted it for himself and why wouldn’t he?’ He looked back at the frightened faces around them and shook his head. ‘His crew were blood-drunk. They weren’t meant to kill so many. Randver was not happy about it.’

  That was cold comfort to the survivors but it was probably the truth. Along with slaves, plunder and three ships Jarl Randver would get Skudeneshavn with its enviable position looking south across Boknafjorden. As for King Gorm, he now had in Randver a powerful ally instead of an enemy and an alliance that would bring him more silver than being oath-tied with Jarl Harald had.

  When the anchor-heavy truth of this settled in their minds the survivors of the raid at least stopped looking over their shoulders long enough to take stock of their losses and look to their dead. Some boys without a whisker between them helped Sigurd bring the last of the bodies into Eik-hjálmr and when they had finished there were the corpses of thirteen men, women and weans and three hounds laid out around the central hearth. Aslak was not among them, which meant that they had likely taken him for the slave market along with Runa. Although Jarl Randver might have other plans for her if he had discovered that she was Harald’s daughter.

  What they had not discovered was the smallest of Jarl Harald’s silver hoards. They had dug up the one buried beneath his and Grimhild’s bed and they had taken the jarl’s sea chest in which lay Harald’s most precious possessions: scramasaxes with silver and bone handles, silver finger rings, Thór’s hammers and arm rings taken from men he had killed in battle. And all this, though it was far from a Fáfnir’s hoard, would have etched a grin in Jarl Randver’s beard. But they had not found the nestbaggin, that leather haversack full of hacksilver which Jarl Harald hid out of sight up on one of the roof beams above where he slept off the mead or ale every night. Sigurd knocked it down with a well-aimed hand axe, his hand shaking as he undid the thong and reached inside, fingers touching the cool treasure that had belonged to his father. Tribute and plunder which Jarl Harald had won through trade, cunning and the sword. Even by the copper glow of the oil lamps Sigurd could see that the ingots and broken rings were dull, grey and black, tarnished and neglected and put away for lean times.

  But silver was silver. And Sigurd was rich.

  He had seasoned timbers and dry fuel brought in and piled around the dead and the whole lot smeared with cod liver oil from a stash which Randver’s men had not found in one of the nausts, the boathouses down by the mooring.

  ‘Any jarl would rather be food for the worms than see his folk spun this poor end,’ a greybeard called Gylfi mumbled into his beard as he cast his eye over the scene by the light of a lamp hung from a chain.

  Their wounds covered by linens now, Sigurd imagined they could have been sleeping off some great feast as they had all done so many times before, sharing this hearth, their jarl’s meat and mead and each other’s stories. But come the morning, when the summer sun warmed the air and scattered jewels across the fjord, these luckless few would still be cold and stiff. Sigurd’s mother, whom he had laid separately in her own bed surrounded by the things she would need in the afterlife, would never see another day nor her son’s face.

  ‘We’ll give it another day or two to dry,’ he told Gylfi, for though Eik-hjálmr’s resin-coated planks would burn like Völund’s own forge once Sigurd’s fire took, for now they were yet laced with rain and the sea water which Olaf had had folk bring up in pails and fling against the hall in case Randver came in the night to burn it.

  ‘Aye, well this lot will still be here,’ Gylfi agreed, kicking out at a rat that had wasted no time and was gnawing at a woman’s stiff white finger. It scurried off into the floor reeds. ‘When it burns it’ll burn high enough to scorch the Allfather’s feet.’

  None had objected to Sigurd’s plan of burning the hall with their dead inside it. ‘Let Jarl Randver see the smoke from Hinderå and know he will never sit in your father’s high seat,’ a fierce-looking woman called Thorlaug had said. Sigurd had last seen her husband Asbjorn running with Sorli to kill King Gorm. To give Sigurd a chance of living. Asbjorn’s claw hand had not stopped him surviving until the end and Sigurd would make sure the skalds knew it. For now, though, the news had made Thorlaug stand a little taller.

  ‘We should wait till Randver is in there before we burn it,’ a girl called Ingun said. She was pretty enough that Randver’s thegns might have killed each other to be either the first to rape her or the one to carry her back to Hinderå to marry, regardless of whether the man already had a wife back there. But Ingun was as fast on her feet as she was beautiful and none had caught her.

  ‘I’ll not have that man share their flames,’ Thorlaug said.

  Sigurd knew the real reason they did not mind his burning Eik-hjálmr. It was not because they wou
ld never again find joy in that place, crammed to the roof beams with ghosts and gilded memories of happier times. It was because a roaring, leaping flame will carry the dead to the afterlife as fast as the smoke rises into the sky and almost as fast as a valkyrie riding to Asgard with a hero cradled in her arms.

  And so when it was dry enough Eik-hjálmr would burn.

  Sigurd was not their jarl. Yet it seemed that in their eyes he gripped the end of an invisible rope whose other end rested in Jarl Harald’s hand, for all that Harald even now feasted with the gods in Valhöll. They looked to Sigurd to lead them and he felt the heaviness of it like a torc around his neck.

  ‘You can’t stay here, lad,’ Solveig said as Sigurd held a tallow candle to the old man’s face. Sigurd had been on his way to the high ground overlooking the bay when he had thought to make sure the skipper hadn’t died in his bed. ‘Randver won’t bother about me or the rest of them but one sniff of you and he’ll set his hounds loose. The oath-breaker king too, for he surely knows you gave him the slip.’ He grinned then despite everything. ‘He’ll be scratching like a flea-bitten thrall to think of you out there somewhere when by rights you should be a corpse.’

  That was a warm thought on the ice-sheathed serpent that sat coiled in Sigurd’s gut, though in truth he doubted the king would lose any sleep over a boy barely into his first beard.

  ‘Don’t doubt old One-Eye,’ Solveig said, warning Sigurd with a bloodstained finger. ‘There’s a reason you walked away from that steel-storm.’

  ‘Ran away,’ Sigurd muttered, but the skipper ignored this.

  ‘And it wasn’t so as you could do a shit-hole job of stitching me up, I know that much.’ The old skipper’s eyes searched Sigurd’s. ‘The gods love chaos. Don’t they just.’