Wings of the Storm: (The Rise of Sigurd 3) Page 13

  ‘They won’t follow now. Not in here,’ Olaf said. ‘Not worth the risk.’

  So they waited a while, catching their breath and listening, but for Moldof who was panting like a netted fox and telling the others that they should try running with only one arm and see for themselves how much harder that was.

  ‘So that’s that then,’ Solmund said when he had got his own breath back and they were walking north through the woods, satisfied that Guthrum’s men had given up and gone back to their fires and the easier task of surrounding men who had no intention of going anywhere.

  ‘That’s that,’ Olaf agreed. ‘Alrik will have to manage without us.’

  It wasn’t as though they had jumped over the wall and buggered off without telling Alrik or Knut. They would have done if it came to it, but in the event Alrik had asked to speak with Olaf shortly after Jarl Hrani had led his men off through these same woods.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to go after your friend then, now you know where Guthrum has taken him,’ Alrik said.

  Olaf had nodded. ‘I will.’

  ‘I’d rather not lose you and your Norsemen,’ Alrik said, ‘for it will be much harder to hold this place without you. I am not too proud to admit it.’ He glanced at Knut, who nodded, then he fixed his eyes on Olaf again. ‘We would give you another silver hoard in return for your swords. And your oaths.’

  Olaf shook his head. ‘Not going to happen,’ he said.

  Alrik could not hide his disappointment, but he nodded. ‘I understand these things. These bonds. What are we without them?’

  ‘Sigurd is kin,’ Olaf said. ‘Or as good as. And I am sworn to him. We all are.’ All but for Moldof and Thorbiorn Thorirsson, that was, but there was no need to get into all of that.

  Knut raised an eyebrow. ‘If you catch up with Jarl Guthrum, do us a favour and put a spear in his belly, hey. That would be helpful.’

  And perhaps that was why Alrik gave Olaf his blessing even though he was losing eleven of his best warriors. If the Norsemen killed Guthrum, the jarl’s men who ringed Alrik’s borg would most likely give up and go home, or else seek service with another warlord.

  Or perhaps Alrik was letting Olaf go because really he did not have a choice in it. It did not matter now anyway because they were out. The woods were empty. Or at least, wolf, bear, fox, boar and elk were keeping out of sight, and Olaf and the others could see their way well enough in the gloomy half-light.

  ‘Should make four or five rôsts before dawn,’ Olaf said as a vole scampered across his path and into the shadow beneath a fallen old pine.

  ‘Well I am glad to be out of that place,’ Svein said. ‘Not for me, feeling trapped like a fish in a pool when the tide has gone out.’

  ‘You see,’ Solmund said to Crow-Song, ‘even Svein is more of a skald than you these days.’

  That got some chuckles, even from Hagal, which was a good sound in an unfamiliar forest at night. And they glimpsed enough of the stars through the pine canopy above to know that they were going north.

  To Ubsola.

  ‘That one is Thór’s. That one is Óðin’s,’ a warrior named Asgrim said, pointing with his spear at two of the three great mounds which rose some thirty feet above them, dominating a landscape which was fairly flat, albeit that flatness was interrupted here and there by some hills and rocky outcrops. Good land, Olaf would have said. Rich soil, lush grazing for horses, cows, sheep and goats, and even a lake full of fish, and all of it looking as inviting as it ever would, cast in the warm evening sunlight. ‘And in that one with all the yellow flowers lie the bones of Frey,’ Asgrim went on, thrusting his spear towards the third and last mound. ‘Frey who is the lord of rain and sunshine and peace, and who decides if a man will be rich or poor.’

  He had said the last bit more quietly, shooting a glance at Jarl Guthrum, who everybody knew was a poor jarl these days what with Alrik sitting on his silver and iron and having taken Guthrum’s hill fort too. But Guthrum was busy combing his beard and checking the comb’s fine bone teeth for lice and seemed to be somewhere else in his mind.

  There were countless other grass-covered humps all across the site, perhaps as many as three thousand in one massive grave meadow, but it was these three which had the hairs standing stiff on Sigurd’s arms and on the back of his neck. It was as if the warm breeze was the breath of the gods. As if the faint scent of woodsmoke was a memory of their hero pyres which yet lingered after all those years.

  ‘See how they dug the earth out between the mounds to make them look even bigger,’ Valgerd said, and even she, who had turned her back on the gods, seemed as much in awe of the place as Sigurd himself was.

  Jarl Guthrum had led them through a forest of fir and pine, then amongst sun-dappled woodland of birch, alder and the occasional oak, and it had been clear that every man felt the seiðr of Ubsola even before he had laid eyes on the parts of it those who have been to the place talk of.

  They touched amulets and rings and the pommels of their swords, muttering greetings to the gods and being less in love with the sound of their own voices than they had been previously.

  ‘If I did not fear to dishonour them,’ Asgrim went on, meaning the gods buried in those mounds, ‘I would like to come in the night and dig into the east grave to see what weapons lie there in the cold earth. Perhaps Thór’s hammer Mjöllnir is just lying there waiting for a great warrior to come and claim it.’

  Asgrim was Jarl Guthrum’s new champion and he made Beigarth look like Baldr the Beautiful. His mouth was warped like an old timber, his nose was all twisted gristle and his eyes bulged in their sockets, and all this did nothing to improve a head which was too big even for his muscle-bound body. It seemed to swell here and there, that head, so that there were bald patches amongst long strands of lank hair, and his two front teeth had been knocked out by someone, which never helps a man’s appearance, as Valgerd pointed out.

  Floki had suggested that the reason Asgrim had not been Guthrum’s champion before was because the jarl would not like to have to look at him all the time, for Guthrum was handsome and vain enough to baulk at a sight like Asgrim. And yet his new champion kept his brynja free of iron rot, his sword sharp and his helmet – which he had inherited from Guthrum’s former champion – burnished so that it could blind a man when the sunlight was on it. Besides which, apart from his strong limbs, broad shoulders and bull’s neck, anyone could see that Asgrim was a killer born and a warrior made.

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ Jarl Guthrum said, coming to stand beside Sigurd while one of his men readied his banner and the others made sure they were looking their finest. ‘Asgrim is a man who would believe that the sea is Freyja’s tears and the clouds in the sky are the Æsir’s sheep wandering in search of good grazing.’ Guthrum shook his head at Asgrim, who may have been angry or may have cared not at all; it was hard to tell with that face of his.

  ‘There are no gods buried in those haugar,’ Guthrum said, ‘but there are kings. The first kings of the Svear.’ He looked at Sigurd and it was clear that the jarl did not think these mounds any less important for their not holding the bones of the gods.

  ‘Kings Aun, Egil and Adils,’ Sigurd said, not to impress Guthrum with his knowledge of the Yngling rulers, but because those ancient kings’ names came unbidden to his lips with the bronze and copper-glow memories of fireside tales.

  Even so, Guthrum was impressed. He smiled, for a brief moment shrugging off the misery he had worn since deciding that the gods had forsaken him, and he turned back to his new champion whilst thumbing at Sigurd.

  ‘You see, Asgrim, even this Norseman knows more about the line of our kings than you do.’

  Asgrim made a deep hoom in his throat. ‘If you’d wanted a know-it-all skald for your prow man you should have said so,’ he rumbled, which had Guthrum’s men chuckling into their beards and the jarl himself nodding in appreciation of the man’s point.

  ‘It will be a shame killing him,’ Floki murmured. About Asgrim not Guthru
m. For the jarl’s new champion had treated them well so far. He had even knocked a man called Halvdan on to his backside when Halvdan had cracked his spear’s butt across Sigurd’s head for no reason other than because he could.

  ‘They are Jarl Guthrum’s prisoners not yours, Halvdan, you sheep’s prick,’ Asgrim had snarled down at the man who sat in the grass rubbing his chin. And Halvdan had not laid a finger or stave on Sigurd or the others since.

  It could have been his sense of honour which made Asgrim treat them fairly, but Sigurd suspected it was more likely that the man associated him and his Norse companions with his own rise. If Olaf had not killed Beigarth, Asgrim would still be a nobody, just another bone-sack in Jarl Guthrum’s shieldwall. Now he would earn silver and fame as an ambitious lord’s champion, and he owed that, in a roundabout way, to Sigurd.

  Not that Sigurd, unlike Floki it seemed, could see how they were going to get the chance to kill the man. Ever since they had learnt they were bound for Ubsola Sigurd had looked for the opportunity either to escape or to get a blade to Jarl Guthrum’s throat and force the issue, but Asgrim knew his business and Guthrum had not become the warlord he was by being a fool. And if he was a fool, then what did that make Sigurd for getting himself caught by Guthrum like a wolf in a snare?

  ‘Being a prisoner gives a man too much thinking time,’ Sigurd muttered to Valgerd while they waited in the gathering twilight. Because it was dusk and because Ubsola was even these days under the control of some or other Svear king, Guthrum had sent a man ahead to announce his arrival and ask permission to bring his thirty warriors along the processional way which led north-east past the three huge burial mounds to the hall beyond. That hall’s shingle roof could be seen between the second and third hill, as could the plumes of several cook fires, the slate-grey smoke darker than the sky would get all that summer night. And the relief on the jarl’s face was clear for all to see when the man returned, grinning from ear to ear, to say that Jarl Guthrum was welcome in Ubsola and would be met with honour in King Eysteinn’s hall.

  ‘The king himself is not there. He’s off fighting some karls in the north,’ the man told his jarl, who was disappointed to hear that, though he pretended not to be.

  ‘What do I care whether King Eysteinn is at his hall, fighting farmers or fishing in some lake?’ he announced after a moment. ‘I have come to honour the gods.’ He threw his arms wide in recognition of the place’s spiritual richness, which none there could deny, and Halvdan felt brave enough to punch Floki in the back with his shield’s boss as Guthrum ordered the party to walk on.

  The well-trodden path, its grass matted here and there with flattened sheep droppings, took them past the kings’ burial mounds, and when they were almost past the first of them Floki hissed at Sigurd to look up. High above its summit, in a sky which was purple and dark blue but hemmed in the west with a band of rust, a golden eagle soared. Its wings outstretched, the magnificent bird searched for prey down amongst the long grass, and Sigurd knew what Floki was thinking, that perhaps Asgrim was right and Jarl Guthrum was wrong. That the Allfather’s bones, nothing but ashes now, were buried in that mound from the time when he walked amongst men, for another of Óðin’s names is Arnhöfði which means Eagle-Head.

  ‘So you are still watching me, Allfather,’ Sigurd whispered to the eagle as it made its great sweeping circle in the dusky sky. And then the creature called back to him, a thin, high yelp which had Sigurd’s guts rolling over themselves. Valgerd and Black Floki looked at him. He felt the weight of their gaze but did not take his eyes from the path ahead, and the hog-backed shingled roof of the hall that waited for them beyond the great mounds.

  CHAPTER SIX

  KING EYSTEINN’S HALL was not like any other hall sigurd had ever seen. There were no long tables around which warriors could feast and drown themselves in mead. There was no high seat for the king himself, nor benches for men and women to sleep in, nor high lofts at either end where the children could hide or a man and woman could go if they did not want everyone else’s eyes on them. No flames flapped in the hearth, no dogs lay in the straw which was spread thickly upon the earthen floor, and nor was the place crammed with folk, as such halls almost always are. It was a huge hall, as big as Jarl Hakon Brandingi’s up in Osøyro, where they had hidden from the winter and their enemies who were looking for them. But it was silent, this hall, and would have been empty but for they three, Guthrum and the ten hirðmen he had brought in to the place, the jarl having left his other Spear-Svear waiting with the horses by the ting mound outside.

  No one else moved through the scented smoke, which rose from several dishes of smouldering herbs to hang thick as a winter pelt just above their heads. This fragrant emptiness would have been the strangest thing of all, if not for the gods.

  They sat there, those gods, at the northern end of Eysteinn’s hall, silent and watchful. Each was the height of two men and old, older than the hall itself, for they had been carved from three oaks, perhaps in the time of the first Yngling kings, and the hall had been built around them. Their roots were still deep in the earth, the lumps and bumps of them making the floor uneven in places.

  Óðin, with a cavernous, empty right eye socket worn smooth by folks’ fingers over the years, sat there gripping a spear in one hand and a cup in the other. Beside him sat Thór, all beard and drooping moustaches carved as sleek as the curling sternpost you might see on a fine ship. His hands rested on the haft of his great hammer Mjöllnir, the head of which sat between his feet. But the third god was Frey and even were he not the god which it seemed most of the Svearmen loved best, he would have drawn any man or woman’s eye because of the huge cock standing proud between his legs. It was long enough that there was only a finger’s width of a gap between it and the point of his beard, and his eyes bulged as if even he was shocked by the eagerness of his own member.

  Sigurd could not help but glance at Valgerd to see what she thought of it, but the shieldmaiden seemed more interested in something else, something which Sigurd could not see for Guthrum’s men who were in the way. They stood there unarmed and in awe, as though a horde of Valkyries might swoop down at any moment and sweep them all up to Valhöll the way an angry gust will pick up leaves and swirl them into the sky.

  Sigurd’s eye was drawn in a different direction. Where the hearth would normally be there was a table, just not the sort around which men would sit drinking and boasting and hurling insults at each other. It was six feet long and so dark as to be almost black, so that who could say what kind of wood it had been carved from with such skill? Its wide apron was adorned with scenes of Ragnarök, depicting the fates of these temple gods. Thór was wrestling with the Midgard Serpent whose jaws were wide, gaping and inevitable. There was Fenrir Wolf about to swallow Óðin, and Surt the mighty giant with his sword raised about to strike down Frey beloved of the Svearmen. Upon each stout leg was carved a writhing, twisting, knotted serpent, but strangely the legs at one end were slightly shorter than those at the other, so that the table sloped, which struck Sigurd as odd.

  ‘Welcome back, Jarl Guthrum.’

  It was a voice which sounded like it would do better for a cup of warm milk and honey, but when the body it belonged to emerged from the smoke Sigurd was surprised the man could speak at all.

  ‘Solmund would have liked to be here now,’ Floki said, ‘to see someone even older than he is.’

  That earned him a knuckle hammer to the back of the head, from Asgrim himself this time, as well as an ice-cold look from the crook-backed, cowled old man, who then turned his glare on Guthrum as if to say he expected the jarl to keep his prisoners on a tighter leash.

  ‘Mead for the jarl and his men,’ the old man called, wheezing with the effort of it, and in the flame-flickered dark behind him another figure moved through the smoke leaving a swirling grey wake. ‘And make sure it is the strongest and best.’ Inside that cowl the man’s eyes were like boring awls in Guthrum’s own. ‘I think Jarl Guthrum is in need of
it,’ he added, touching the little carving of Frey that he wore round his neck, for he was a Freysgodi, a priest of Frey.

  Perhaps there was some seiðr behind the priest’s last words, and Sigurd wondered if he had peered inside Guthrum’s thought box and seen the jarl’s doubts gnawing at him. Could the old man know that the jarl believed his wyrd had soured like milk left in the sun?

  Or perhaps there was no seiðr in it at all, for this was not the great mid-winter Dísablót which all kings and jarls and the most powerful of the hersirs were expected to attend, and if a jarl like Guthrum was here now, in high summer, it was because he needed a favour from the gods. And a man did not need the gods’ help if his wyrd was stretching out before him like a golden hair from some young beauty’s head.

  ‘You want them watered too?’ the priest asked Guthrum, running those watery eyes across the three prisoners standing there bound and unkempt amongst the rest. And yet the old priest was not so old that he did not fill his eyes with Valgerd when they latched on to her through the herb fog. The tip of his tongue slid like a slug on to his cracked lip and Sigurd could almost hear the creak of his old trouser snake stiffening. There was no doubt that Frey, and not Óðin, held sway in this place.

  ‘I am sure they are thirsty,’ Guthrum said and the priest nodded, calling to make sure enough mead was brought out, and that was when Sigurd caught sight of what had held Valgerd’s attention before. To their right, mounted on pegs that stuck out of the wall timbers, was a spear. A massive boar-hunter by the looks, but bigger than any spear Sigurd had ever seen. Its ash staff was three feet longer than the spears most men carried these days, certainly over eleven feet all told, and much of its length was bound in iron for protection in the chaos of the blood-fray. The blade itself was typical of the sort which most of the Svearmen favoured, being a broad leaf shape, and by the flickering light of a nearby lamp he could see the intricate runic inscriptions which gave such weapons power.