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

  ‘What can you tell me about the men who raided you?’ Fionn said. The hammer struck once more and went still. ‘Not the ones who died,’ Fionn added. ‘The ones that did the killing.’

  ‘Why?’ the farmer asked. ‘They friends of yours?’

  Fionn said nothing.

  The farmer shrugged. ‘You’re from somewhere off across the sea. These men were Norse.’

  The hammer came down once, twice, three times.

  ‘What are they to you?’

  ‘The leader of these men is called Sigurd Haraldarson,’ Fionn said. ‘I am going to kill him, which should please you seeing as he stole from you that which you can ill afford to lose.’

  The farmer grunted. ‘Butchered my best cow. Took some cheeses and most of my ale.’

  There were tracks all over the place, which did not help. But some jarl called Ebbi had come with a war party the previous day, having seen the smoke from this farmer’s signal fire up on the hill. There were other footprints too, because men from the nearest four or five farms had also come to show their support. None had helped this man fix his gate though.

  ‘I’ll say this for ’em, they never laid a finger on my family, which I’m thankful for. Whereas you should have seen what they did to the other crew. The ones as showed up just after them. Those shits who broke in my gate. Killed my dog too.’

  ‘Dangerous men, then?’ Fionn said, realizing that it might not be a straightforward thing this fishing for clues, because it seemed that, far from wanting his vengeance against Haraldarson and his crew, the farmer was grateful to them for dealing with the other raiders.

  ‘So how is it you’re out to kill the man?’ the farmer asked. He had sunk the last nail into that supporting plank and now stood back to see how straight it was.

  ‘He has a powerful enemy in the north.’

  ‘Namely?’

  ‘Namely King Gorm of Avaldsnes, whom men call Shield-Shaker.’

  The farmer hoomed in the back of his throat. ‘Explains why they’re on the run I suppose. But you’re a brave man if you mean to fight them alone. Never seen blade skill like it. Carved that other crew up as easily as they butchered my cow.’

  A murder of crows was making a clamour at the far tree line and the farmer looked up. Nervous these days no doubt. ‘Hands are getting cold,’ he said, huffing warm air into them. ‘You’re a young man but just you wait. Skin gets thin. Blood too. The cold sinks right in and once it’s in the only thing for it is hot broth and a seat by the fire.’ He picked a spare plank out of the snow and leant it against the fence. ‘Come on, let’s eat. We’ll finish this later.’

  They trudged up to the longhouse and were joined by the farmer’s boy who had been into the byre to feed Fionn’s horses. A handsome young lad, his eyes were drawn to Fionn’s sword and knives the way crows are drawn to the dead. Only normal for a lad that age, and yet there was something about young Roe that told Fionn he had no intention of following the furrow which his father ploughed. He’ll join a crew soon as he’s strong enough to pull an oar, Fionn thought to himself as they stamped the snow off their shoes and went inside the smoky house. The farmer’s fat wife was clucking over the broth she was preparing. An old woman was squatting over a bucket with the help of an old man who was himself bent as a bow. Another old woman lay snoring in her bed by the hearth.

  The farmer told his boy to fetch them some water and cheese to nibble on while they waited for the meat in the broth to soften.

  ‘Did Sigurd Haraldarson tell you where he was going?’ Fionn asked the man. No point in delaying it.

  The man shook his head. ‘Why would he tell me that?’ he asked, watching his boy disappear behind the woollen hangings.

  He’s lying, Fionn thought. That is a shame. ‘None of them mentioned where they might be headed?’ he said, looking from the man to his wife, who kept her eyes on the broth she was stirring.

  ‘Not that I heard,’ the farmer said.

  Roe came back with two cups and a jug. When he had poured the water he went off again for the cheese.

  Fionn smiled. ‘You are not protecting him, are you, Rognvald? This is not some misplaced loyalty because he killed that other crew?’ His eyes were into the farmer’s face like grit from the quern stone in the loaf.

  ‘I told you, they killed my cow. My best milker.’

  Fionn shrugged. ‘They likely saved your lives. Who can say what that other crew would have done to your family? To your wife,’ he added, nodding towards the woman.

  The farmer squirmed in his own skin.

  ‘Like to see the whoresons try it on with me,’ the farmer’s wife said, all belly and breasts behind the steam rising from the cauldron. ‘As you can see, friend, I am no wisp of a girl.’

  Roe returned with a wedge of cheese on a plate and set it on the table in front of his father and their guest.

  ‘Wake your mormor, boy, and tell her the stew is nearly ready,’ Rognvald said.

  ‘Would you like to see my knife, boy?’ Fionn asked before the boy turned back towards the hearth and the beds round it.

  The boy nodded, glancing at his father who gave a slight shake of his head, but the boy came closer anyway and Fionn drew the long knife and flipped it over to offer him the stag-antler handle. ‘Careful now, it’s wicked sharp.’

  Roe closed his fingers round the grip, relishing the feel of the ridged antler, looking from Fionn to the blade, eyes wide with the grim curiosity that comes from having seen what such blades can do to a man’s flesh.

  ‘Back where I come from we call it a scían. Two sharp edges here, see,’ Fionn said, ‘leading to a point which’ll slide right into a man’s eye and out the back of his head before he even knows you’re there. Not like the long knives your people use, which are good for slashing a throat or hacking off a hand. I’ve heard it called a thrusting sax.’

  ‘Wake your mormor, boy,’ the farmer said again, his face darkening, rubbing the fingers of his right hand together as he stood there.

  ‘Ah, let the boy look awhile longer,’ Fionn said, ruffling Roe’s golden head. ‘He’ll be able to tell his friends he’s held a real scían all the way from Alba across the sea to the west.’ He grinned at the boy. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’

  The boy nodded and grinned back.

  ‘So you are sure Haraldarson and his men said nothing, gave nothing away of their intentions?’

  The farmer looked at his wife, who gave him a look that would melt snow. Her fat neck trembled but still her husband kept his teeth together. He was afraid that to speak up now was to admit the earlier lie.

  ‘Have you killed men with it?’ Roe asked, looking right into Fionn’s eyes. No games with this young lad. As straight as an arrow, and so Fionn would be straight back.

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve killed many men with this blade. More than I can remember.’ He held out his hand and the boy gave the knife back to him, hilt first. Good boy. Fionn turned the long blade in the firelight. ‘She is a soul stealer. A lean, hungry bitch.’ Roe was under the knife’s spell and he seemed to have forgotten his task of waking the old crone whose every snore ended in a wheeze and crackle.

  ‘I can’t be sure,’ the farmer’s wife said, glancing from her husband to Fionn, ‘for I was seeing to the old ones, you see, and fetching some of my skyr for the girl. Must be this Sigurd’s sister from the looks of ’em both. Pretty things the pair of ’em. Not what you expect from raiders. Anyway . . . when this Haraldarson was talking to his friends he might have mentioned Birka.’ She looked at Rognvald. ‘What do you say, husband? Did you catch mention of Birka?’

  Rognvald muttered that it was possible, though why anyone would want to go to that shit hole was a mystery to him.

  Haraldarson being Birka-bound made perfect sense to Fionn, though, for it was a place famed for attracting the dispossessed and men on the make, outlaws, traders and warriors looking for a ring giver. Perhaps Sigurd had the silver to buy himself a proper crew. Or perhaps he would offer his sword to some ja
rl, thinking he could escape King Gorm’s wrath that way. Hiding behind new oaths in some faraway mead hall. Starting again like a damaged sword which is reforged.

  Fionn nodded. He would find Haraldarson in Birka then.

  His scían had split brynja rings before, with intent behind it. The blade had passed through the rings and the tough leather and wool beneath to kill men who were all sinew and muscle and fat.

  It slipped into the boy like a whisper into an ear. Between the ribs, brushing the bones then into his eager heart which fluttered through the blade. His eyes flared, would never close again, and piss ran down his leg on to the floor. Not enough of it to puddle.

  It was the woman, not the man, who moved first. Shrieking, she ran through the smoke and threw herself on the long knife, flailing with the ladle and foaming at the mouth as she died. While Rognvald came at him with a hand axe. Bravely enough, though is it courage when a man has already lost everything? Fionn wondered as he twisted out of the axe’s path and put the scían through Rognvald’s neck, letting the farmer’s dead weight pull him off the blade to land in a heap across his wife’s huge body.

  The old man was half out of his bed and cursing when he died, and as with the two skeletal women there was no pleasure in it, but they would die anyway soon enough without the hand that fed them. No pleasure in killing the boy either. He had not lied as his parents had. But the boy had spirit and might have grown into a killer. A hunter like Fionn. Only a fool would wound a young boar then turn his back on it and walk away. So it was done.

  He left the dead where they lay and went over to the broth. It smelt good.

  It tasted even better.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE KAUPANG AT Skíringssalr sat in a protected bay in Viksfjord by the main sailing route along the coast. Not that there were any trading vessels or fighting ships out there now. The only boats out on the dark water were the odd færing in which brave or hungry men sat swathed in pelts and hunched into themselves, their weighted lines running down and down into the deep.

  ‘That sod deserves whatever he can pull up,’ Olaf had said about one such man they had passed. When they had first seen him he was still in the lee of a gull-crowned island, but now he was drifting with the waves towards the rocks. He would need to wind in his line – never a pleasant thing for the hands in this cold – and row back out before he risked holing his boat.

  As Reinen passed within an arrow-shot the fisherman waved in greeting. No doubt he was surprised to see a ship like Reinen, even lightly crewed as she was, coming into Skíringssalr at this time of year and he was testing to see whether he ought to drop his block and line and row for his life. To save him the trouble, Olaf raised a hand and nodded back, putting the man at ease so that he smiled and called across, asking Njörd to give Olaf fair winds and kind seas.

  ‘This is good farming country,’ Solmund said at the tiller, looking out across the land as the others took the oars from their trees and threaded them through the ports. There was little wind anyway and they had already lowered the yard and furled the sail on it in readiness to manoeuvre Reinen into her berth. ‘But more important is the mouth of the river to the west of here. Crews sail inland for the iron. Whetstone and soapstone too.’

  ‘Maybe we should raid inland then?’ Svein suggested, leaning back in the stroke.

  ‘You want to row upriver with not even half a crew?’ Olaf asked him, those words pissing out the flame of Svein’s idea before it could take hold amongst them, for rowing against the current was not something which anyone enjoyed, for all that there were few better ways to stay warm.

  ‘Besides which, we are not here to raid at all,’ Sigurd reminded them, his eyes running along the rows of small houses and workshops strung out along the water’s edge, his nose full of the sweet scent of the birch smoke rising into the sky. Around the bay several wharves and smaller jetties jutted out into the water, some with færings or knörrs snugged up against them, but most bare but for the odd gull, and on one a group of children standing on the edge with lines in the water.

  Sigurd tried to imagine what Skíringssalr looked like in high summer, thronged with all manner of boats and buzzing like a beehive with craftsmen, traders and seafarers from all over. As it was now, the place was a ghost of itself, blanketed with snow and as quiet as the burial mounds which could be seen beyond the settlement, on promontories and on the low heights along the fjord’s edges.

  Then Solmund pointed to the north and the ridge of high land overlooking the bay and Sigurd did not need the old steersman to explain what they were looking at.

  ‘Skíringssalr itself,’ Sigurd said, though there was no clue as to how it had got the name shining hall, what with it looking like any other jarl or king’s mead hall, albeit the place was easily as big as Eik-hjálmr, Sigurd’s father’s old hall, had been. Before Sigurd himself had placed the Skudeneshavn dead inside it and burnt it to the ground.

  ‘And you’re sure it’s a good idea, paying your respects to some Danish king?’ Solmund asked him, pushing the tiller to turn Reinen towards the shore as Olaf ordered the steerboard side rowers to lift their oars. Those on the larboard made several more strokes and the ship turned neatly, the steerboard blades biting the water again before she had swung fully round. Then, the oars dipping and lifting in perfect unison again, Reinen glided like a swan towards the berth Olaf had chosen, her bows pointing back out into the fjord in case they should have to leave in haste.

  Sigurd had not answered Solmund and now he took a mooring rope and jumped up on to the sheer strake as some of the others lined the sides ready to grab hold of the jetty and see to it that they landed as smoothly as a sword sliding into its scabbard.

  ‘Here they come,’ Aslak said, taking another rope, from the stern now, and lashing it to the mooring rail as Sigurd tied his off.

  Men in mail and helmets and carrying shields were trudging down the hill from the king’s hall, the fog around their beards and heads no doubt full of the curses they were uttering at having to leave a cosy warm hall to growl at some crew that had arrived unannounced. With Reinen’s prow beast safely stowed in the hold and the oar strokes unhurried, even languid, they had not come into Skíringssalr looking like some raiding party of eager young men seeking to attack the place with the surprise of a lightning strike. Nevertheless, the Danes would have been watching them like a hawk from its roost, wondering who they were and why they were out in the Viksfjord in winter, and now they were coming, a great wave of Spear-Danes rolling down the hill.

  ‘Whoresons are trying to scare us,’ Svein said, standing on the wharf leaning on the head of his long-hafted axe.

  ‘Then they should have sent at least three times as many,’ Bram Bear said, which raised a laugh because there must have been forty Danes spilling down that ridge from their king’s hall.

  ‘Still, that’s a lot of hearthmen to keep in your hall over winter,’ Olaf observed. ‘This Danish king must have plenty of mead.’

  ‘And a decent skald,’ Svein said, meaning to irk Hagal, who was hardly earning his keep as a skald these days, if he ever had.

  Sigurd had them all in their war gear, in brynjur and helmets, their furs left in the thwarts so that their mail and arms were on display, for it was important to make the right impression. But he did not have them make a shieldwall across that wharf, and that again was deliberately done. Instead his warriors stood in a loose pack in all their war glory, so that each looked like the hero of their own saga. Svein loomed. Bram glowered. Black Floki stood at Sigurd’s right shoulder, as silent as the fjord, his shield in one hand and a short axe in the other.

  When they had come almost to the shore, a spear’s throw from Sigurd, the Danes stopped and formed a skjaldborg, catching their breath and glaring from beneath the rims of their helmets. One of them came forward and planted the butt of his spear into the snow. He was not a tall man, nor a young man, but Sigurd had never seen a broader man. His shoulders, under his fine-looking brynja, were as
square as a sailcloth. His beard was a silver rope which fell to his chest and his eyes were small and grey as the sky.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I am Sigurd Haraldarson,’ Sigurd said, ‘who killed Jarl Randver of Hinderå and who will kill King Gorm of Avaldsnes when I decide that the worms need a good feast.’

  The man laughed at that. ‘A Norseman who kills other Norsemen. That is a good start. And a jarl-killer no less.’ Then the smile was gone and those small eyes sharpened to spear tips. ‘You are an ambitious young man it seems to me. Have you come here to kill the king who lives in that hall?’ he asked, thumbing back the way they had come. He lifted the spear then thrust it back into the crisp mantle. ‘There must be some hungry worms under here somewhere.’ The man’s eyes flicked across to Valgerd and lingered there a moment, though Sigurd could not blame him for that, and not just because she was a woman dressed for war.

  ‘I have no quarrel with your king,’ Sigurd said. ‘To tell you the truth I do not even know his name.’ He looked up and down the shoreline. ‘I would have asked someone but . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Everyone must be sitting by a warm fire indoors.’

  ‘Everyone except us,’ the man said, his accent as thick as the snow they stood in. He gestured at the boarded-up store houses and workshops along the beachfront. ‘You must have noticed that there is little in the way of trading being done at this time of year. But then a man who has not heard of King Thorir Gapthrosnir is clearly a man who knows as much as a herring about what goes on in this world.’

  ‘We live to the west, many weeks’ sailing from here,’ Sigurd said, wondering how the king on that hill had got the byname the one in gaping frenzy. ‘And as you well know, there are more men who call themselves king than there are pretty girls in all of Denmark.’

  The man did not know how to take that. Was Sigurd saying that the man’s king was nothing special? Or that Danish girls were ugly? Or both?

  ‘Well, at least there will be one less king when you kill this Gorm of Avaldsnes,’ the man said, his tone a hair’s breadth from open mockery. ‘Why are you here if not to trade?’ He nodded at Reinen. ‘She is a handsome ship. Perhaps a gift for King Thorir?’