Wings of the Storm: (The Rise of Sigurd 3) Page 15

  ‘I have told you, Jarl Guthrum, I will not die today,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘Which means I will not die today either,’ Floki said, nodding at Sigurd, ‘for I will die when he does.’ This might have been funny had Sigurd’s guts not felt like water, were his thoughts not being tossed like small boats on an angry sea. And even in the midst of that fear he could not get his mind fully off the spear mounted on the temple wall. Óðin’s own spear from the time when he walked amongst men. Gungnir.

  ‘You both spend too much time wondering what the gods have in store for you,’ Valgerd told Sigurd and Guthrum. She was already eating the food Guthrum had put down before them, dipping the bread into a cup of ale to soften it. ‘But the gods do not care. We are nothing to them.’

  Not for the first time Sigurd wondered if Loki the trickster had had a hand in his falling in love with this woman who despised the gods. Who was as intent on ignoring them as Sigurd himself was on getting their attention. ‘You are wrong,’ he said. ‘They watch us. They watch to see if we are worthy of our ancestors. The Allfather and Freyja, who is also the Lady of Battle, watch to see which of us will join their hirð in the afterlife to fight beside them at Ragnarök.’

  Valgerd smiled but it was cold as a blade. ‘If they watch us it is because they enjoy seeing us suffer. They sing when we are in pain. They laugh when we mourn.’

  Guthrum visibly shuddered at her words and he was not alone. It was one thing to speak of the gods that way in a crowded meadhall, the words drowned in the drunken clamour of folk, but to say such things at an assembly place beside a Svear temple of such reputation? Sigurd wondered if Valgerd had just doomed him right then and there. If he were not doomed already.

  ‘Well you are the lucky one, Valgerd,’ Jarl Guthrum said after a moment’s consideration, ‘for let us be plain, you have seen how things have not gone well for me recently, what with that brigand Alrik proving to be like a wound that will not heal. But when this is done, and the god is appeased, you will be at my side to see my fortunes rise like an eagle into the sky.’ Sigurd remembered the eagle he had seen in the sky above the kings’ mounds and wondered if Guthrum had seen it too. The jarl used his knife to flick a charred stick back into the fire. ‘Perhaps then you will swear an oath and become my hearthwoman,’ he said without even looking at Valgerd.

  ‘Do you want me in your shieldwall, Jarl Guthrum, or in your bed?’ Valgerd asked him, and even a big jarl like Guthrum did not have the power to stop his cheeks flooding red. Asgrim grimaced, keeping his eyes on the flames. ‘I am already sworn,’ the shieldmaiden went on, ‘and will not lay one oath upon another as if the words are no more than floor rushes, the new laid upon the old.’

  ‘To whom are you sworn?’ Guthrum asked, looking at her then.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘No,’ the jarl admitted, then he stood and tightened his sword belt. ‘Though you may think differently about it by the end of the day.’ When your friends are corpses and their blood is pooled on the altar is what he left unsaid.

  ‘Funny how folk can smell blood even before it’s spilled,’ Asgrim said, changing tack for everyone’s benefit, his ugly great head turned towards a knot of men and women who were trudging along the well-worn path towards the temple.

  ‘The word is out then,’ another of Guthrum’s men called from the other fire around which most were gathered.

  ‘Why wouldn’t they come? It’s not every day you get to see two men butchered for the Lords of Asgard,’ another warrior said.

  Sigurd looked back towards the eastern mound, his eyes searching the dawn sky which was thick with cloud the colour of unwashed wool. He was looking for the golden eagle, hoping for one more glimpse of it that would tell him that Óðin was still watching him. So Sigurd would know that he had not been forgotten.

  But all he could see was cloud.

  The temple was not full by any means but it was more than halfway to being so. As well as Guthrum and his thirty hirðmen there were two dozen local folk from the village beyond the ridge to the south of the mounds. They came in to the place wide-eyed and buzzing like swarming bees and almost trembling with the prospect of the sacrifice they had heard was to take place.

  ‘We should kill them all if we get the chance,’ Floki muttered when a fleshy-faced man and his wife proved brave enough to step up and press hands on him, wanting perhaps to touch what would soon be with the gods. ‘Deal with Guthrum first of course, then every one of these other shits. We’ll see how they stare then.’

  The air was even thicker now than before, herbs and leaves smouldering in soapstone dishes all around the place, the scented smoke stinging Sigurd’s eyes and clotting the room but at least masking the stench that always haunts a hall with so many bodies in it. Perhaps it was also meant to hide the copper tang of blood and the foul reek of the sludge which sometimes oozed from a man’s bowels in death. The only light came from three lamps: iron bowls mounted on three legs and filled with fish liver oil from the smell of it, each of them with three wicks of twisted moss and all of them burning well. Three gods. Three priests. Three golden glows in the sweet-smelling murk.

  Three sacrifices.

  Sigurd did not know who the other victim was or what was his offence, but he looked as though he did not fully grasp what was going to happen to him. He was small and weak-looking and his beard was full of spittle but his eyes were not bright and sharp with terror as Sigurd would have expected. Instead they looked dull, dark and swollen as ripe bilberries, and Sigurd would have wagered that he had recently eaten those mushrooms which give men visions, and he remembered his own spirit journey when he had given himself to Óðin in the fetid swamp and Asgot had poured potions down his throat.

  For the hundredth time Sigurd pulled, fighting the bonds which held his wrists tightly together, and for the hundredth time the rope proved too strong.

  ‘Jarl Guthrum, you have come to the sacred temple at Ubsola to make an offering,’ the old priest began in a voice stronger than he looked. No talk of Eysteinn’s hall now, then. Perhaps the king had another place, a brighter hall where things lived rather than died.

  ‘We have heard the will of Frey and you are welcome to make your offering,’ the Freysgodi said, ‘though only the god can say whether he will deem it worthy.’ He frowned at Jarl Guthrum, who stood in his fine war gear, that brynja and that helmet with the eye guards which was so like Sigurd’s own, wherever that was now. Guthrum and his men were unarmed, though, because the only blades allowed in the temple belonged to the men who looked least able to use them. For another cowled priest, a man thinner than mist, stood before the great statue of Frey, running a rune-bladed scramasax across a whetstone and muttering to the god while he worked. A third squatted in the corner, casting rune stones across an earthen floor scraped clear of straw.

  ‘At least the knife will be sharp, hey Norseman,’ Halvdan said, nodding towards the thin priest, to which Sigurd had a reply on the edge of his tongue, but then the boy-priest began a tune on a bukkehorn. Played it well too, the sound pure as spring water and sad as a hero’s pyre in the rain.

  ‘You understand this? That the god may yet refuse your offering, Jarl Guthrum?’ the priest asked him.

  Guthrum appeared to consider this for a while, and it seemed to Sigurd that the colour had drained from the jarl’s face. Perhaps he was suddenly fearful of what might happen if, once given, the offering was rejected. Deemed unworthy. If that happened Guthrum might as well run and jump from a cliff’s edge, his luck being what it was these days.

  Eventually he nodded at the priest. ‘I understand,’ he said, lifting his voice above the horn music.

  The priest spoke to the villagers then, some speech about Frey and the harvest and those folks’ duties to their king who was off fighting to make peace as Frey would want it. Sigurd missed most of it because he was more concerned with his own wyrd and the very real, very sharp-looking knife which would soon cut it shorter than he had thought the Norns had in
mind. He thought of his brothers Thorvard, Sigmund and Sorli waiting for him in Valhöll. He could see them in the eye of his mind, gathered round in the heroes’ mead benches, laughing and boasting and filling a horn to overflowing for their little brother who would soon be with them. He thought of his father and hoped the jarl would not be disappointed with him, and he saw his mother’s face too, and perhaps it would not be such a bad thing to be with them all again. To taste the afterlife for himself.

  But then he thought of Runa who would soon be alone in the world, the last of their blood. He had promised he would not leave her. She would be so angry with him. And he thought of the oath-breaker King Gorm and how he would grin when he learnt that Sigurd was dead. That was the sourest of all the thoughts that swirled in his head like rotten brine amongst the ballast stones. If that priest’s knife cut Sigurd’s life thread now, he would never have his revenge.

  The smoke wreathed round the roof support posts and billowed up in the rafters. It clogged dark corners and it filled Sigurd’s lungs as he drew it deep inside with each long breath, trying to calm the trembling which had already announced itself in his knees and the big muscles of his thighs. He would not scream when the knife went in. Not because he feared to shame himself in front of these Svear priests and the nobodies who had come up from the village to watch him bleed, but because he knew that his father and brothers and all the other great warriors who used to drink beneath Eik-hjálmr’s smoke-blackened beams would be watching too. Men such as Slagfid, his father’s champion, and Svein’s father Styrbiorn who had been an awe-inspiring warrior, as good as Slagfid on his day and when he was not too drunk to stand.

  His mother, who had been the equal of any man alive and the better of most, would be watching too.

  ‘Priest,’ Floki called and the old man turned and scowled, for Floki had shouted over the man’s incantations to the god, which he did not like at all, and neither did the other men and women in that hall judging by the intake of breath which sucked half the smoke from the place. ‘You are old and feeble,’ Floki said. ‘Do you think the Allfather has need of a half-rotten worm like you?’ Floki was grinning, which was strange given what was about to happen to him. ‘Well you will find out this very night if there is a place for you in Óðin’s hall,’ he added as a murmur spread through the hall, and Guthrum nodded at Asgrim who twisted Floki’s crow-black hair around his fist, yanked his head back and growled at him to hold his tongue.

  ‘Do no damage,’ the Freysgodi warned Asgrim, ‘it would insult Frey if the offering was bleeding before the rites have properly begun.’ Asgrim gnarred something else in Floki’s ear, then stepped back, holding up a big hand to show he had not laid it on the young man.

  ‘You already insult the Spear-God, priest!’ Sigurd announced. ‘You old fool. I am Óðin-favoured.’

  That struck the godi like a stone to the forehead, but he recovered and looked at Jarl Guthrum, who had removed his helmet which he now held under his left arm. ‘We do not have these problems at the Dísablót, Jarl Guthrum,’ the priest said, ‘though now and then men will throw an insult or two around. They think it hides their fear.’

  ‘I am not afraid, priest,’ Sigurd lied. He was very afraid but he hoped it did not show. ‘I am not afraid because I am Óðin-favoured and this is not the night of my death.’ The small prisoner whom Sigurd did not know gave a snickering laugh then, his neck twisting as those bilberry eyes followed an invisible bird’s flight through the hall. He was off somewhere with the fairies that one.

  Sigurd glared at the old man through the smoke, then turned his eyes on all the Svear folk gathered there and at the boy-priest who stood round-mouthed as a fish in the thwarts. The other priest, the one who had been sharpening the knife in front of the wooden gods, had stopped his work and was watching Sigurd now, but the godi on the floor with the runes was casting and gathering up, over and over again, his face the colour of cold hearth ash.

  ‘No more from you, Norseman,’ Jarl Guthrum shouted. ‘Hold your tongue and face your death like a man. For your own reputation and that of your people.’

  Sigurd laughed and people shrank back from it. ‘Guthrum, you are like a ship whose sail has been blown out and whose steering oar has broken off,’ he said. ‘Every decision you make is wrong and your men die because of it.’ Sigurd shook his head. ‘And yet it is not your fault. Perhaps you were a great jarl once, but the gods have turned their backs on you. No, it is worse than that, they want to see you destroyed.’

  ‘Enough!’ the Freysgodi rasped, but Guthrum raised a hand to silence him and you would have thought that the old man had been slapped around the face with a cod fish, such was his expression at being told to hush in his own temple.

  ‘Look around you, Norseman,’ the jarl said, ‘and tell me again which of us is doomed.’

  It was a fair comment but Sigurd knew he must answer it.

  ‘I am Sigurd Haraldarson. My father was a great jarl and my mother killed the man who tried to carry her from her home. I have killed more men than stand in this hall. One of them was a jarl himself. A man as powerful if not more so than you, Jarl Guthrum. I fought him and I killed him.’ Sigurd glanced over at Valgerd, holding her eye for a moment, and she gave a slight nod, understanding that Sigurd was asking her to remember this moment in order to give an account of it to Olaf and the others and to Hagal Crow-Song who would make sure to put it in Sigurd’s saga.

  Then Sigurd turned back to Guthrum, who to his credit was all ears, when Sigurd supposed the jarl could have ordered someone to stuff a cloth in his mouth to hush him. ‘Near a place called Tau I gave myself to the Allfather. I hung in a twisted tree for nine nights, starved and half dead.’ In truth it had been six nights and it was not a sacred yew tree or a mighty ash such as in the stories of Óðin’s own self-sacrifice, but rather a stunted and half-rotten alder. But as Hagal Crow-Song would say, if you’re going to tell a good story, the last thing you should ruin it with is the truth.

  ‘I live because the Hanged God wanted it so,’ Sigurd told them all. ‘Sometimes the gods walk amongst us, for they enjoy being close to death because their own lives are so long and almost never-ending.’ He raked his eyes across them all, warrior, farmer and priest alike. ‘Believe me when I say that the gods would rather spend a day with one wolf on the hunt than with fifty grazing sheep. And if you believe that I am a killer then let me tell you that my friend here is death itself.’ He nodded at Floki, who grinned at them all, which was more effective than saying a word by the look of the hands clutching Thór’s hammers and the other amulets which folk wore round their necks. And with that Sigurd dipped his head at Guthrum and then at the priest, as if to say there would be no further interruptions as far as he was concerned.

  Jarl Guthrum pulled his fair beard through his fist and cocked an eyebrow. ‘I told you my offerings were worthy of the god,’ he told the priest, getting some chuckles from his men, as well he might for that was as good a counterstroke as any champion ever made with a sword.

  The old man blinked his yellowed eyes and creaked an order at which two thralls came forward and grabbed hold of the small man who, it seemed, would be the first to feel the knife. They were big men these thralls, their thick necks straining against the iron collars, cropped hair like birds’ nests, and surely they were more used to building walls, digging peat, spreading manure and herding pigs and goats than hauling men across that hall under the gaze of the gods towards the priest’s knife. And yet they did it as if it were the only work they knew, laying the man upon that beautifully carved table which sloped because the legs at one end were shorter by a thumb than those at the other.

  They did not use ropes. Didn’t need to. The little man lay there gentle as a lamb as the old Freysgodi communed with the Æsir. No doubt men went to their deaths more easily when their spirits were soaring beyond the confines of the flesh, and the priest spoke his words and the Svear looked on in silence because the gods were amongst them. Then the reed-thin godi mo
ved through the billowing smoke and came to stand beside the man’s head at the high end of the table, and Sigurd suddenly understood why the table sloped.

  Gods that knife was sharp. As it should have been after the time spent on its edge. It went in easily and sliced outwards, cutting open the man’s throat just like that. The boy-godi stood at the foot end with a silver-lipped drinking horn and he did not have to wait long, the blood running along unseen channels in the table’s surface and out of a hole carved to look like a raven’s beak.

  They will have to turn him the other way round if they want to fill that horn, Sigurd thought. But he was wrong, which showed what he knew about it. And when it was done the thralls lifted the body off the table and carried it out of the hall where they must have dumped it on a cart because they were straight back in.

  We will all be strung up from that old tree together then, Sigurd thought as the thralls went over to Floki.

  But the old priest shook his head. ‘That one,’ he told them, pointing a finger at Sigurd, who lifted his chin and glared at them with all the defiance he could muster.

  You would think I was waist-deep in some fjord for how my legs are trembling, he thought, hoping that Valgerd had not noticed them. He would pay a silver hoard for some of Asgot’s bitter draught now, or some of the mushrooms the other man had eaten, but then he forced such shameful thoughts from his mind. Let them all see him face the blade like a warrior, for he was no less than his brothers who waited for him in the hereafter. Let these Svearmen watch and drink their fill of it. Fuck them. And if Óðin had forsaken him after everything, fuck him too.

  The big thralls took an arm each and Sigurd’s feet barely stirred the straw as they carried him over to the table upon which the last man’s blood was already beginning to thicken in the smoky warmth. He wanted to tell Floki that he was sorry. He wanted to tell Valgerd other things, things that she might laugh to hear. But he said nothing.