Winter's Fire: (The Rise of Sigurd 2) Read online

  This other raiding party had not begun their day expecting anything like this and had probably thought they would just need to growl a little to leave this farmstead with everything they had it in mind to steal. Now they were being butchered where they stood and the hard truth of it must have been a blow as savage as any from Svein’s axe.

  ‘Fall back! Regroup!’ one of them yelled, and that was a good plan, but it is hard to put plans into practice when you are busy being killed. Still, five of them closed together like a fist, trudging back through the snow to join the bowman who had kept his distance all along. Panting and wide-eyed, their shields raised but no longer overlapping, they backed away, and even if it had not yet sunk into their skulls that six of their friends would never drink with them again, they must nevertheless have seen the mess of those butchered men lying there before them.

  The one other raider still standing chose instead to run and Bjorn made a grab for him but fell in the snow, and Aslak hurled his spear, missing by a finger length, and the man’s fear carried him like wings over the snow. Bjorn got to his feet, cursing.

  ‘Any luck and the others’ll get him,’ Svein said.

  ‘We have had enough,’ another of those thunderstruck men told Sigurd. ‘Let us walk away. Let us go and you can keep whatever plunder you find on our dead.’

  ‘Let you go?’ Sigurd said. ‘If I did that, my friends would not be happy.’ He pointed his sword beyond them to the ruined gate. ‘They have trudged up here through the snow to fight you and now you are done with fighting?’ He shook his head. ‘That is no way to behave.’

  Olaf, Bram and Moldof picked their way through the broken timbers, and Sigurd was glad that it was only those who had come, for as it had turned out this band of doomed men was not worth leaving Reinen unguarded for.

  ‘I see you did not wait for us,’ Olaf yelled, his chest rising and falling heavily beneath his furs and ringmail. ‘But at least we have not come all the way up here for nothing.’ His breath fogged the air above his head and he rolled his shoulders, hefting his shield and spear as he walked towards the six men, Bram on his right and Moldof on his left.

  ‘Did you get the runner?’ Aslak called to Olaf.

  ‘Did we bollocks! Ran like a scalded dog that one,’ Olaf replied.

  ‘We yield!’ a man from the other crew called, thrusting his spear into the snow.

  ‘That’s up to you, lad,’ Olaf said, not breaking stride. ‘But if it were me I’d rather die with a weapon in my hands than on my knees in the ice.’

  The man knew beyond doubt then that the Norns, those three spinners who weave men’s past, present and future, had cut the threads of his wyrd and all that was left to him now was to choose the manner of his death. He chose well, pulling the spear from the snow and thrusting it at Olaf who parried with his own spear and threw his weight behind his shield, slamming it into his opponent’s and knocking him on to his arse in the snow.

  ‘Up you get,’ Olaf said, as Moldof hammered his sword into another man’s shield, splintering it with one blow before twisting to his left and lopping the man’s spear in two. Then he thrust his sword into the man’s chest and hauled it out, already turning to seek his next kill. ‘Now’s the time to pull that scramasax,’ Olaf told his man, who was scrambling to his feet, puffing like forge bellows so that he had half disappeared in his own cloud. And perhaps he did not even see the blade that killed him, though he bled out with a good-looking long knife in his hand.

  Bram squared up to a man with a long loose beard who was a full head taller than him and perhaps as broad in the shoulder, but before they could fight each other the tall man grunted and fell face down in the snow, one of Floki’s short axes lodged between his shoulder blades.

  ‘You selfish little runt,’ Bram growled at Floki, who stood twenty paces away grinning like a wolf.

  Then the bowman ran. He plunged off through the crisp mantle and Bram remarked that it was not worth the effort of chasing him seeing as to be haring off like that he could not possibly be wearing a brynja or any silver worth getting out of breath for.

  Aslak, Bjorn and Svein made light work of the last two and set to pilfering the dead for rings, blades and anything of worth, while Sigurd surveyed the slaughteryard that had been made of the steading. Around each of the dead the snow was stained crimson. Pools of blood were melting the ice and spatters could be seen as far as ten paces from the body, prompting Aslak to observe that it was only in such conditions that you realized how far the battle-sweat could fly in a fight.

  ‘Who are you?’ The farmer stood behind them in the open doorway of his longhouse, grey hearth smoke leaking out into the day around him. He stared at Sigurd as he might at a god who had come down from Asgard to Midgard.

  ‘We are the men who have killed one of your beasts and left you with eleven corpses to deal with,’ he said.

  ‘But at least we did not smash your gate in,’ Svein said, plunging his axe blade into the snow to clean it.

  ‘Who were this lot?’ Olaf asked, coming to join Sigurd and Runa.

  Sigurd shrugged. ‘Raiders,’ he said, ‘who would have been better off staying by their hearth this morning.’

  ‘Aye, well there’s no sign of a ship out there so they must have come the hard way,’ Olaf said, nodding inland towards the higher ground. And that was when they saw the plume of black smoke rising from the stone tower which stood on the ridge to the north of the farmstead.

  ‘You let this farmer send someone to light his beacon?’ Olaf asked, for the stone tower clearly belonged to this steading.

  ‘I did not see anyone leave the place,’ Runa said. ‘Those old folk could not have done it, surely.’

  But Sigurd could see the small figure with the shock of yellow hair standing up there on the skyline beside the smoke-belching fire. It was the boy he had spotted up in the loft. The lad must have snuck out and run up the hill and perhaps the farmer had sent him or perhaps the man had not known he had gone, but none of that mattered now.

  ‘How long will it be before your neighbours put a war party together?’ he asked the farmer, who looked more frightened now than he had before, perhaps expecting Sigurd to kill his family for lighting the beacon to summon help.

  ‘I hope they don’t come, lord,’ the man said, using that title as a sign of respect, and what he meant was that he knew that his fellow farmers would die unless they came in great numbers.

  ‘How long?’ Sigurd asked again. It would be getting dark soon and Sigurd had it in mind to roast a share of that meat on the shore before sailing from this place.

  ‘They will gather before nightfall but they will want to wait for Jarl Ebbi and his men before they attack. He can bring thirty or more warriors if he chooses. As for the karls around here who are sworn to come to each other’s aid,’ he scratched his short beard, ‘I would say there’ll be forty men if they manage to drag all their sons along. But I will tell them you came here in peace. That I gave you a good hearth welcome and in return you killed these other men.’

  The man’s wife pushed past him now, coming outside to get a look at the mess, but the farmer grabbed hold of her arm, warning her that the issue was not yet fully resolved. Whatever he said was enough to get her back inside and the door shut, leaving her husband standing there shivering beside his own log pile.

  Sigurd smiled. ‘Your boy did well to get all the way up there so quickly.’

  For a moment the man seemed unsure how to answer that. Then he nodded. ‘He’s fast as the wind, lord,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve lingered here long enough,’ Olaf called. Svein told the farmer to find him some sacks for all the cuts of meat, and the others having pilfered what they could from the dead gathered their spears and shields and set off out of the steading. Sigurd stood for a moment, watching them go.

  ‘It is sad, don’t you think?’ Runa said, looking at the red-bearded man Sigurd had killed. Sigurd had retrieved his spear and Svein had stripped the man of his furs and tunic,
looking for silver stashed against his skin, so that now the pale corpse made for a pathetic sight lying there half naked. He did not look handsome now. Just dead. ‘These eleven men will not be returning to their wives and children. If they are from far away perhaps their kin will never know what became of them.’

  ‘They had the chance to walk away,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘They would have taken it if they’d known who they were facing,’ Runa said. And she was right. Sigurd might not have many warriors at his command, certainly not enough to take on a jarl let alone a king. But those warriors he had were killers. Each was worthy of his or her own saga for their skill and courage and for their arrogance too, for they seemed to think they were unbeatable. But together they were savage as winter. They were a wolfpack.

  ‘These men are dead but that family still lives,’ Sigurd said, looking up at the boy who was still up there by the pillar of smoke which rose straight in the still air, tall as a roof beam in Valhöll. ‘Come, sister, or they will feast on that meat without us.’

  Together they walked through the ruined gateway and followed the others back down the slope across the rolling snow-covered meadows. And neither of them saw the arrow until it had streaked past their heads.

  Sigurd spun, cursing himself for not having killed that bowman when he’d had the chance. And there he was, standing by the rock behind which he had hidden from the rest, nocking another arrow to his bow string. Clearly it was Sigurd he wanted.

  ‘Go, Runa,’ Sigurd said, as the next arrow thumped into his shield which he had lifted to protect his face.

  ‘No,’ she said, and Sigurd cursed again, striding towards the man to put distance between himself and Runa.

  ‘You’re a dead man,’ Sigurd told the archer, watching him over the rim of his shield, close enough to see the grimace of hatred on his face. The man took another arrow from the quiver on his belt, turned his head to spit into the snow, put the arrow to the string, drew, held, then loosed. Sigurd did not see this arrow fly but he felt it glance off his helmet with a tonk. A finger’s breadth lower and he would have seen the arrow very well for it would have passed through his helmet’s left eye guard on its way into his skull.

  He heard one of his men yell Runa’s name and he looked over his shoulder to see them lumbering back through the snow towards Runa who was on her knees, clutching her face.

  ‘Runa!’ he screamed, then shook the shield off his arm and cast his spear aside, turned back to the archer and ran at him. The man stood rooted to the spot for another three heartbeats; long enough to shoot another arrow, this one thumping into Sigurd’s shoulder, but seeing that it did not even slow Sigurd, he turned and fled and Sigurd flew after him.

  Plunging through the deep snow, Sigurd threw off his helmet then fumbled at his belt until that too fell away with his scabbarded sword and was left behind. Still, the archer was even less cumbered, having no brynja, and he had a spear-throw’s worth of head start. Moreover he ran with a swiftness born of fear, clutching his bow in one hand and his arrows in the other lest they fly out of the quiver with his plunging stride.

  It was true that fear could make a man fast on his feet. But so could rage, and Sigurd burnt with rage. It pumped blood into his limbs and pounded in his ears. It rasped in his throat like a hateful beast and it shut out the world so that all he could see was his prey in front of him, a desperate and pathetic creature that was too dim-witted to know there was no escape from death.

  The bowman ran for the trees, hoping he could lose his pursuer amongst them. He never made it. With six feet of ground between them, Sigurd threw himself at the man, grabbing hold of his furs and bringing him down with a grunt as the air was forced from their lungs. Then Sigurd was on him, clawing at the man’s face, forcing his thumbs into the eye sockets so that the archer screamed. Then the thin bone at the back of the man’s eyes gave way and Sigurd’s thumbs plunged into the hot mush of his brain. The body jerked and convulsed beneath him and finally went still and Sigurd wiped his thumbs on the dead man’s furs before standing, gasping for each scalding breath, his pulse in his ears like the beating of a sword on the inside of a shield.

  He did not bother to see if the dead man had anything worth taking.

  ‘Wander the afterlife blind, you nithing piece of troll shit,’ he growled at the dead man, whose eyes were little wells of blood from which the crows would drink before nightfall. Then he turned and ran back along his own tracks.

  To Runa.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘SHE’S SLEEPING,’ VALGERD said, placing blood-soaked rags into the fire which burnt on the muddy sand of the shore. ‘I was careful but there will be no missing the scar.’

  Sigurd looked over her shoulder at Runa who was lying amongst a pile of skins and furs above the tideline. He was relieved to see her asleep though not surprised, for he had poured a bucket full of mead down her throat to numb the pain. The arrow which had glanced off Sigurd’s helmet had slashed open her face from just below her left eye to her ear. It had bled and it had hurt, but Valgerd had washed the wound with sea water and stitched it closed, and so long as there was no wound rot Runa would come out of it well enough. And yet Sigurd was in a foul mood and had hardly touched the plate of succulent beef which Olaf had put in front of him.

  ‘We go to the trouble of killing a dozen men and you can’t bring yourself to eat?’ Olaf had growled, sitting down beside Sigurd who had left Valgerd to dress the wound with linens. They had decided to spend the night on the shore beside Reinen, with lookouts posted in case Jarl Ebbi came looking for them. They would weigh anchor and be gone at first light, but first they would eat.

  ‘It is my fault she is lying there with her face torn open. I should have killed that whoreson back at that farm.’

  Olaf nodded. ‘Yes, we should never have let him run off like that. But we had already made the mistake before that.’

  Sigurd looked up into his friend’s eyes.

  ‘Runa shouldn’t have been there, Sigurd,’ Olaf said. ‘Even had those turds not shown up at the same steading at the same time, you might have expected a fight of some sort. Or else why go armed like Týr himself?’ He shrugged. ‘There were blades and arrows flying around. People get hurt on days like today. There are twelve poker-stiff bodies up there that are proof of that, lad. Runa shouldn’t have been there.’

  ‘I know that,’ Sigurd said. What made it worse was that the others had known it before the first blood was spilled, which was why Svein was barely talking to Sigurd now. He was angry with Sigurd and it came off him like a stink.

  ‘What man takes his little sister raiding?’ was all he had said, which had been more than enough as far as Sigurd was concerned.

  ‘What if there is more to it than that?’ Sigurd had asked Olaf, who had frowned, not understanding where he was going with that. ‘The arrow was meant for me. It hit my helmet, which changed its flight.’

  ‘You think the gods want to punish you?’ Olaf asked. ‘That they would hurt Runa to hurt you?’

  Sigurd thought about that. ‘Perhaps they cannot let me die,’ he said. ‘I am Óðin-favoured. So maybe they go after my family instead. Maybe they want me to watch everyone I love suffer. Until I am the last.’

  ‘Has he been filling your head with this?’ Olaf asked, nodding towards Asgot who sat cross-legged on a flat rock nearby, savaging a hunk of meat whose bloody juice was dripping into his beard.

  ‘I have not spoken to him about it,’ Sigurd said.

  Olaf nodded. ‘Good. Keep it that way.’ He picked up the plate of meat and offered it to Sigurd, who took it and put it down beside him. ‘Look, Sigurd, what happened out there with that arrow was an accident. Bad luck at worst.’

  ‘But I shouldn’t have put Runa at risk,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘We shouldn’t have put Runa at risk,’ Olaf corrected him. ‘And seeing as there’s bound to be plenty more fighting before this is all over, we ought to think about what we can do with the girl to keep her safe.’ He
shook his head and scratched his thickly bearded cheek. Ideas were not exactly bursting from him. After a little while he got up and walked up the strand to check on those men who were coming to the end of their watch.

  ‘Well, I won’t abandon her,’ Sigurd said. Not that anyone was listening. Then he went over to Runa and sat down beside her, leaning against the rock and looking out across the still black water. Holding her hand as she slept.

  Hrani had to admit that for all King Gorm’s taste for chaining his enemies to the rocks and watching them drown, he was a generous host in his own hall. There were trenchers of pork and beef and whale meat and rabbit. There were plates of fish and cheese and freshly baked bread and pots of honey, all of it washed down with buckets of mead flavoured with apple, juniper berries, dried fruit blossoms and warmed by hot stones.

  ‘If this is how you celebrate drowning a nithing skipper, I hope Jarl Hrani and I are fortunate enough to be here when you kill Sigurd Haraldarson, my lord,’ Herkja said to the king beside her, flashing him a smile and eyes which must have had his old snake stirring in his breeks.

  The king nodded, lifting his cup towards Herkja and Hrani beside her. ‘That will be a feast to tempt the gods down from Asgard,’ he said, ‘which brings me to the question of what we should do to bring such a night to pass. Your husband and I must discuss how we are going to pay young Sigurd in kind for his treatment of my hirðman Freystein, and for his many other offences.’

  Being perched on the hill as it was, the royal farmstead was subject to the winds which blew up and down the Karmsund Strait. But the walls of the king’s longhall were hung with thick tapestries which kept out all but the most determined gusts.

  ‘Is it true that Sigurd sent your man’s corpse back to you wearing his father’s jarl torc?’ Herkja asked, knowing it was true but savouring the gore of the story, as she had when Hrani had first told it to her.