Wings of the Storm: (The Rise of Sigurd 3) Page 11

  ‘Now fuck off while you still can,’ Beigarth said, unable to resist one more little poke.

  Olaf turned to the bigger man. ‘What did I tell you about making threats?’ he asked. He was scowling now, and Sigurd knew Olaf well enough to be sure that his hackles were raised. ‘Are you slow-witted, Beigarth? Did your mother drop you on your head when you were a mewling, tit-clamped bairn?’

  Beigarth grimaced.

  ‘Go, Olaf,’ Guthrum said, flicking a hand towards the borg.

  But Olaf did not go.

  He stood there.

  ‘Do you want to fight me, Beigarth?’ Olaf asked.

  ‘It has been a while since I killed a Norseman,’ Beigarth said. ‘I have missed the way you people squeal when the blade goes in.’

  ‘It is easy to throw threats at an unarmed man who comes under truce, you big sack of horse shit,’ Sigurd told Beigarth. The man yanked the rope again but Sigurd was ready for it this time and had set his feet so that he did not get pulled anywhere. Annoyed, Beigarth strode up to him and hammered a fist into the side of his head, sending white-hot light shooting through Sigurd’s skull like a lightning strike. He staggered but did not fall, then straightened and squared his shoulders to the man.

  ‘These men you boast of killing, Beigarth,’ Olaf said, pointing at Sigurd, ‘were they all tied up like him?’

  That was quite the insult and Beigarth dropped his end of Sigurd’s leash and strode towards Olaf, drawing his sword as he went, and Guthrum said nothing, perhaps because he thought one dead Norseman here was one less to fight in the days to come.

  ‘Pick it up,’ Beigarth demanded of Olaf, pointing his own sword at Olaf’s which lay in the grass beside his shield.

  ‘If I do that I break my own oath,’ Olaf said.

  ‘If you don’t you’ll die without a blade in your hand,’ Beigarth threatened and with that he moved faster than Sigurd would have thought possible for his size, slamming his sword’s hilt into Olaf’s temple. Olaf reeled, blood spilling from his head on to the grass, and when he pulled his hand from his head it was red.

  ‘Kill him, Uncle,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘Pick it up,’ Beigarth said again, nodding at the sword on the ground.

  Olaf glared at him but did not move. So Beigarth stepped up again and threw his left fist into Olaf’s cheek, and there was enough weight behind that punch to make Olaf stagger to his left though he did not fall.

  ‘Enough!’ Guthrum told his champion, his own sense of honour threatened now by Beigarth’s shameful behaviour.

  But Beigarth could smell blood and would not be stopped now, not by words. ‘I expected better, Norseman,’ he spat, coming again, but this time his fist did not connect with Olaf’s face because Olaf blocked with his right forearm then hammered his own fist into Beigarth’s nose. Beigarth must have had a thick skull for that punch should have come out the back of his head, yet he was rocked back on his heels, blood flowing from both nostrils down his black beard.

  When Guthrum’s champion came at Olaf again he did so with his sword, scything it so that Olaf had to twist out of its reach or else get dizzy from his head rolling down the slope.

  The men up at the borg were clamouring at Olaf now, telling him to pick up his sword and fight, and Beigarth’s next swing saw his sword’s point scrape along the rings of Olaf’s brynja because the Norseman had jumped back just beyond its killing range. Then there was a flash in the sunlight and Beigarth stood still for a moment.

  In Olaf’s hand was his scramasax, which he had pulled from its sheath behind his back, and even at that distance Sigurd saw the blood on the blade. Beigarth’s sword fell from his hand and a heartbeat later he was on his knees, still facing Olaf. A low hum came from the borg as people began to realize what was happening.

  ‘Get up, man!’ Guthrum yelled at his champion.

  Beigarth couldn’t have answered even if he had wanted to. Not with a gash like that in his throat. Olaf walked up to him, grabbed a handful of Beigarth’s thick black beard and ran his scramasax through it to clean the blood off.

  Down the hill, some of Guthrum’s men wanted to come up and kill Olaf for his humiliation of their champion. But most looked as if they thought Beigarth had brought that bad end upon himself.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Guthrum called down at them all, thinking it would be unwise to heap humiliation on humiliation. Besides which, it was not as though Olaf had broken his own oath. His shield, spear and sword, which would have turned against him if he had used them under truce, still lay in the grass where he had left them. As for the long knife with which he had cut Beigarth’s throat, Olaf looked at that now for the last time, then threw it and it turned end over end before landing near Guthrum. It would have been better if it had landed blade down, stuck in the earth so that its bone handle offered itself to the hand, but it landed flat. You cannot have everything, Sigurd thought.

  ‘You wanted iron, Jarl Guthrum? There is your iron,’ Olaf called, and the men of the borg must have heard that for they cheered. Beigarth did not hear it though, which was a shame. He was still kneeling in the grass, back straight, arms by his side, but his head was slumped over now and he was as dead as it was possible to be.

  Olaf had killed that mouthy fool without raising a single bead of sweat. Now he turned his back on Jarl Guthrum and gathered up his shield and weapons, taking his time as he slid the four silver rings back up his arms and closed them until they were a snug fit again. Then he strode back up the hill and if he was worried about one of Guthrum’s men sending an arrow arcing into his back he did not show it.

  Only when Olaf had passed back through the gates did Guthrum send his men to collect Beigarth from where he knelt in the grass as if waiting for some god to breathe life back into his body so that he might resume his quest for a reputation. When two big men took Beigarth under his arms and dragged him back down the slope, Sigurd got a good look at the mess. Beigarth’s face was white as chalk but his brynja was sheeted in blood, so that you would have thought its rings were made of some red steel. Sigurd grimaced when he caught a whiff of the mess Guthrum’s champion had made in his breeks, but a dead man could not help such things. A cruel truth that, that the body gives up and has no care for honour even when the spirit yet lingers.

  ‘He stinks like a rotting cow,’ Sigurd told Guthrum anyway, but the jarl ignored him. It seemed Guthrum had other things on his mind as he glared for a long moment at the men, or rather at Alrik, up there in the borg. Then he tossed his cloak over his sword’s hilt and walked back to his camp, muttering to the gods as he went.

  Jarl Guthrum burnt Beigarth on a hero’s pyre, which was a generous thing to do given the way the man had got himself killed. Sigurd had to assume that the way Beigarth had died was not in keeping with the way he had lived, and that he must have been telling the truth about those men of reputation he had killed. He must have earned that pyre long before he had ever laid eyes on Olaf. Or else perhaps Jarl Guthrum honoured him in that way so as to keep up his men’s spirits, which were lower than a snake’s belly what with this siege business dragging on as long as it had and all their assaults having come to nothing. A hero’s pyre told men that reputation was still important. It reminded them that they could win their jarl’s favour through courage and sword and spear-work.

  Or perhaps Jarl Guthrum simply wanted the smoke from the pyre to hide him from Alrik’s sight as he turned his back on the borg and left, heading north even as the hungry flames consumed Beigarth’s body and those left behind complained that it was not proper, saying farewell to a brother-in-arms without ale or mead enough to get blind drunk.

  The jarl took Sigurd, Black Floki and Valgerd with him. He and ten of his hirðmen were mounted on ponies whilst another twenty spear-armed Svearmen trudged behind, keeping the prisoners at the heart of the column, almost protectively, which Valgerd noted with a grim expression, saying that such a thing did not bode well for them.

  ‘She’s right,’ Floki said. ‘You
might even think we were worth something to him.’

  Having been stripped of their war gear they walked unburdened while Guthrum’s men sweated, but that hardly made them feel better about their situation. Nor could they expect help from Olaf and the others or even from Alrik, for it was likely they were not yet missed. And even if the borg men had seen them go, Jarl Guthrum had left more than enough warriors surrounding the fort to deter Alrik from letting any of his men trade the safety of the borg for a fight out in the open.

  They made camp only when it became too dark to see where they were walking, and slept in the open under skins and fleeces. Then they set off dew-damp and shivering, when dawn was little more than a silver glow at night’s hem in the east. Guthrum led them at a pace which had the horseless men grumbling and slung shields thumping against backs hard enough to leave bruises. He drew them northward as if his life depended on it, as if the gods themselves were beckoning him.

  And perhaps they were.

  It was on the third day that they realized where they were bound. And it was Valgerd who laid it in front of them, like a wind which comes out of nowhere, dispersing the sea fog and revealing the rocks poking out of the dark water before the bow. Sigurd had woken to a kick in the ribs from one of Guthrum’s men, which was far less painful than the cramping in his shoulders and arms brought about by sleeping with bound ankles and wrists. Though at least their hands were tied in front of them now and not behind their backs as before.

  The camp was stirring awake, men pissing and hawking phlegm, drinking water from a nearby brook and pulling combs through hair made damp by a night sleeping on the forest floor.

  The first shafts of dawn light were threading into the glade, the red glow sliding slowly up the coarse trunks of the pines and the wool-clad bodies of Guthrum’s men who for the most part lacked mail and steel helmets. Valgerd and Floki were already awake, talking in low voices which was good to see. Rolling on to his side, Sigurd dug his elbows into the forest litter and pulled himself over to them, thinking that his near-bursting bladder could wait until he had learnt what had the shieldmaiden and the former slave scheming like a couple of jealous wives.

  ‘If you have come up with an escape plan I would like to hear it,’ he said, levering himself upright so that he was between them. Unlike him they had had their ankle bonds removed, though their hands were still tied.

  ‘I know where we are going,’ Valgerd said.

  Sigurd glanced at Floki. ‘Not as good as an escape plan but worth knowing in any case,’ he said, looking back to Valgerd.

  For long enough to increase Sigurd’s discomfort, she said nothing, her gaze riveted to his, and there was something in the shieldmaiden’s eyes that Sigurd had never seen before.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Are you going to make me wait until we get there?’

  ‘Ubsola,’ Valgerd said, shivering with the word.

  The shieldmaiden had turned her back on the gods when they blighted and withered and eventually took the völva from her. And yet she had spoken that name in awe, and no sooner was it in Sigurd’s ear than he knew she had the right of it. Ubsola.

  Even in faraway Skudeneshavn, where Sigurd had spent his childhood listening to fireside tales in Eik-hjálmr, his father’s hall, they had heard of Ubsola. It had ever been a place where the Svear kings ruled, but it was for three great kings in particular that Ubsola was known: Aun, Egil and Adils of the Yngling line who had claimed kinship with Frey, God of Fertility, whom men also call Yngve-Frey. And these kings were buried at Ubsola, which all men knew to be a sacred place of mysterious rites, blood seiðr and the gods.

  Sigurd gestured at Jarl Guthrum now, who was holding a gourd full of water for his pony to drink from. ‘When he went to meet Olaf, Guthrum said the gods had told him what he should do.’

  Valgerd nodded. ‘I have seen him talking to the gods,’ she said. The dawn painted her face with crimson and pale yellow and Sigurd could only wonder at her own dealings with the gods when she had lived as the guardian of the seeress and the sacred spring up in the Lysefjord. All gone now, her old life, just as his old life was gone. And yet he still strove to please the gods, while Valgerd despised them.

  ‘Guthrum thinks the gods have turned against him,’ she said. But it was not the light across her face which held Sigurd spellbound. It was that look in her eyes. Not fear exactly, but close, and it made Sigurd feel uneasy. He wanted to hold her but knew he could not, even had his hands not been bound.

  ‘He is right,’ Floki said. ‘The gods have turned against him. How else can you explain how he has failed to kick Alrik out of that place with four times the number of spears to call on? He has made a bad job of the whole thing and now he runs off to the gods like a slapped child running to his secret hiding hole.’

  If Guthrum has lost the gods’ favour he is not the only one for so have I, Sigurd thought. Still, what Valgerd and Floki said made sense and he told them so. Guthrum had lost his borg, his silver and iron and far too many men in this fight with Alrik. He had even lost his champion in what no one could call a real fight, so it was not as though he lacked reasons to suspect his luck was out.

  ‘At this time of year there is probably a market at Ubsola,’ Sigurd said. They had all seen the two nestbaggins stuffed with hacksilver which the jarl had slung over his pony’s back when they left the camp below the borg. Perhaps he simply had not dared leave so much silver behind with his men, in case they should steal it, or, unlikely as it might seem, Alrik got his hands on it. Or perhaps he intended to bring supplies back from Ubsola; food and ale enough to keep his men happy.

  ‘Or it could be that he means to hire new men, more meat to put in his shieldwall,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘More heroes to burn,’ Floki spat through his teeth.

  ‘Legs,’ a Svearman said to Sigurd, coming over and dropping to his knees to untie the rope, during which Sigurd and the other two held their tongues. The man yanked the rope out, burning the skin on Sigurd’s ankles, then moved away.

  ‘You are missing the point,’ Valgerd said, her eyes on Sigurd’s. ‘Why do you think he is taking us with him? Why do you think we are still alive at all?’

  For a moment Sigurd just stared back at her. Then the answer hit him square in the chest, like an anvil stone dropped from a height. His blood ran cold in his veins as he looked into Valgerd’s eyes, the shieldmaiden waiting as he wove the picture in his mind. For as well as being the seat of the Svear kings for the past four hundred years, Ubsola was a place of bloodletting, of strange rites and sacrifice, where the gods were ever present and men bought their goodwill with the flesh and blood of the dead.

  ‘When I was twelve or thirteen summers old some men came to pay their respects to my father,’ Sigurd said, glancing from Valgerd to Floki. ‘They had travelled from the north and were bound for Ubsola and my father hosted them well because they brought him seal skins and walrus ivory. They were going to Ubsola for the great blót.’

  ‘The Dísablót,’ Valgerd said, for unlike other sacrifices, which are made so that the gods may grant a good harvest or victory in battle, this one at the beginning of winter was dedicated to the Dísir, those goddesses who guide a man’s seed and help life to quicken in the womb.

  Sigurd nodded as the childhood memory flooded him. ‘They were full of the seiðr of it all, these northerners, and it spread amongst our people. When they left us, my father sent them on their way with a very fine sword and scramasax. His offering to the temple at Ubsola, for he said he would likely never go there himself.’ Valgerd raised an eyebrow. ‘He had done so much raiding amongst the Danes and the Geats,’ Sigurd explained, ‘and knew that he would likely never make it to Ubsola in one piece.’

  ‘Well I have never heard of the place,’ Floki said. ‘What was so special about this Dísablót?’

  ‘On your feet, scum!’ one of Jarl Guthrum’s men growled, kicking Floki, who looked up at him as though making a thing of remembering his face.

  ‘I need to p
iss,’ Sigurd told the man, who nodded and gestured to the trees.

  ‘Be quick,’ the Svearman said. ‘We need to get where we’re going.’

  But Sigurd took his time because he could already feel the gods nearby, which meant they would soon be at Ubsola. Yes, the gods were close.

  And they were thirsty for blood.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  OLAF DID NOT like the way men looked at him these days. Not his own crew mates but Alrik’s men. It was as though they expected him to get them all out of this mess with Jarl Guthrum, or else challenge Alrik for the leadership of the borg men. Alrik did not help matters in this regard, for as much as the man needed every able warrior he could get – and the Norsemen in particular, the way Olaf saw it – he nevertheless did a bad job of trying to hide his suspicions. Envy too, though Olaf couldn’t say what the man was envious of.

  He knew that Alrik had not liked it when he had walked out of the place to talk with Jarl Guthrum. But that was the Svearman’s problem not Olaf’s. The trouble was that nearly every man in the borg had watched Olaf kill Guthrum’s champion, Beigarth, and with such apparent ease too. They had been in awe of him ever since. They straightened their backs and squared their shoulders when they thought Olaf was looking, and perhaps they grew bigger balls in the fighting when he was beside them. No harm in that. Apart from when one young man, trying to impress him, had pulled down his breeks and bared his arse at Guthrum’s men. That young fool was dying in agony because although they had pulled the arrow from his arse, the wound rot had come.

  Still, Olaf had no intention of challenging Alrik, not least because then the responsibility for the survival of every man in that fort would rest on his shoulders, and truth be told he did not have any schemes or strategies at all that might help them beat Jarl Guthrum’s army or see them vanish one morning like dawn mist. All Olaf cared about was that Sigurd was Jarl Guthrum’s prisoner. It gnawed at him like rats on a rope and every day that he and the rest of Sigurd’s oath-sworn crew did nothing about it, his frustration grew.