Wings of the Storm: (The Rise of Sigurd 3) Read online

  The old priest gestured to Jarl Guthrum for help and the jarl sent Asgrim forward, and the big man took hold of Sigurd’s ankles with a grip like Fenrir’s fetters. It seemed the Freysgodi had his doubts that Sigurd would accept the knife in his throat as calmly as the last man had.

  ‘Lord Frey, who governs the sun and the rain and all the fruitfulness of the earth. Who brings about the prosperity of men. Lord of peace and plenty, accept this offering given by Guthrum son of Guthfrith, who is a generous lord and a renowned warrior amongst your people.’ The old man nodded and hissed at the boy at the foot of the table but he needn’t have, because the boy was ready, standing there with another drinking horn. ‘Frey, grant Jarl Guthrum your favour in return for this young warrior’s blood.’ His voce was all rasp, dry as the smoke which had folk coughing and muttering, though no one dared to open the hall’s door for fear of breaking the spell which the Freysgodi wove.

  Sigurd turned his head to look at Valgerd. If he was about to make the long journey to the afterlife then he would do it with her face in his mind. Yet in his peripheral vision he saw the thin godi come close. Saw that wickedly sharp knife in his hand, sensed the blade coming closer to the bare skin of his neck. His throat.

  ‘Óðin!’ he roared and at that moment through the blur of smoke he saw Valgerd kick the iron legs of the lamp stand, saw the air glisten wetly from the impact, then saw the whole thing falling. Shrieks ripped through the smoke as the great iron dish flung its oil and flaming moss wicks across the crowd and then a great flash lit the hall as the oil itself burst into liquid fire.

  Sigurd twisted and grabbed hold of the hand gripping the knife, then rammed the whole lot up into the priest’s face and pulled it back. Screaming, the man let go the knife and Sigurd slashed it across the nearest thrall’s neck, then plunged it into the old Freysgodi’s chest and it went in and came out quick as a bird in flight sipping from a lake.

  The other thrall threw himself out of reach and then Sigurd’s arms were free. So were his legs, for Asgrim had run to help his jarl whose cloak was on fire, and the place was chaos because the men and women were burning and the dry straw was burning and fire was the new god in that temple.

  Sigurd was standing now and before him was the boy-priest, still holding the empty drinking horn, rooted to the spot like those old wooden statues, his mouth hanging open.

  ‘Cut the rope, boy,’ Sigurd told him, handing him the knife by its pretty bone hilt. More hot light flared. More screams because Valgerd had knocked over another oil lamp and fire hurtled along the straw-strewn ground as far as the Frey statue with its enormous prick which would be a firebrand before long. ‘Told you I was Óðin-favoured,’ Sigurd said to the boy.

  The boy took the knife and a heartbeat later Sigurd’s hands were free and he took the knife back and yelled at Floki who turned to him, his face sheeted in blood. On the floor beside him knelt a man grasping at his own neck, trying to stop the blood which was spewing everywhere because Floki had ripped the man’s throat open with his teeth. ‘Kill them,’ Sigurd called, throwing the knife to Floki who caught it easily.

  Then Floki was killing.

  Sigurd stumbled through the smoke, not towards the door at which folk thronged, shoving and fighting each other to get out, but towards Gungnir, Óðin’s own spear, which drew him to it. He reached up and lifted the spear from its mounts, its massively thick ash staff filling his hands like a man’s spear in the grip of a small boy. And he turned to face two of Guthrum’s hirðmen who had kept their heads in the shrieking, flaming, smoke-filled madness, and perhaps they thought they were heroes.

  The first died because Sigurd swept the spear across and its long blade tore open his throat. The other man leapt forward but Sigurd brought the shaft up fast as thought, cracking it into the warrior’s chin with a splintering of bones. The man fell and that was him done, and Sigurd turned because the other temple thrall was there like a troll from the mist and he got his big hands on the spear before Sigurd could use the blade against him. He was strong as an ox, this one, and Sigurd knew he could not hold on to the thing. The thrall was grinning because he knew it too, but suddenly Valgerd was there and she threw her bound hands over the thrall’s head and hauled back so that the rope caught round his neck and his eyes bulged with the surprise of it. The thrall’s hands let go of the spear to reach for the rope, and Sigurd stepped back and thrust the blade into his belly, twisting it before pulling it free of the sucking flesh.

  As the thrall fell to his knees clutching his death wound, Sigurd peered through the smoke to see Asgrim beating men aside, ploughing his way through the press to get Guthrum out of that fiery maelstrom. Others were trying to escape Floki who was more dangerous than the flames, stabbing and slashing at anything that moved, plunging that knife into flesh again and again.

  ‘Show me the other way out of here, boy,’ Sigurd called, sawing the spear blade through Valgerd’s bonds. The boy nodded and led them through the choking gloom past the three statues to the north wall where, in the corner, there was another door. The boy opened the door and it drew the smoke and flame so that for a moment they were caught in a cloud of breathless heat.

  ‘Floki!’ Sigurd yelled, then he saw that Floki was beside him, grinning like a blood-fed fiend, and together they followed the boy-priest out into the night.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE MOON WAS a flood of silver in the night, making it brighter than it had been inside the temple, at least before Valgerd’s fire had bloomed in the darkness. Valgerd and Floki looked to Sigurd who gripped Gungnir as if he would fight the whole world with it if needs be. But they could hear Jarl Guthrum’s men shouting on the other side of the hall, gathering their weapons and looking for those who had turned this night on its head. The village folk were running off into the night, terrified of men and gods and fire.

  ‘You!’ someone shouted. They turned to the voice and saw a man sitting on his pony beneath the eaves at the southern end of the hall.

  ‘That horse trader,’ Floki said, as the man trotted up to them followed by his thrall, who hurried behind on foot, leading the other ponies.

  ‘Mount and follow me,’ this Storvek said.

  Just then two of Guthrum’s warriors came round the side of the hall, one of them yelling back to the rest that he had found the prisoners.

  ‘The knife?’ Sigurd asked Floki.

  ‘In someone’s head,’ Floki replied, looking at the two men who were striding towards them, spears levelled.

  Storvek pulled a sword from the rolled-up furs behind his saddle, slipped from the pony’s back and ran at Guthrum’s men. The nearer one lunged and Storvek twisted, beating the spear wide before bringing his sword up in an underarm cut which hacked the man open from his left hip to his right shoulder. Before Guthrum’s man had fallen Storvek turned and parried the other man’s spear, then plunged his sword into the man’s belly, doubling him over before hauling the blade out.

  ‘We should go now,’ he said to Sigurd, breathing heavily. Sigurd glanced at the boy-priest who stood there staring at him as if Sigurd had just dug his way out of one of those burial mounds nearby.

  ‘Tell Jarl Guthrum that Sigurd Haraldarson is Óðin-favoured,’ he said to the boy, who nodded, unblinking. Then all of them, including the thrall, mounted and rode off along the moon-washed path past the kings’ mounds, the shouts and bellows of their enemies following them on the breeze.

  Storvek led them east along a track beside which some Svear king, many years ago by the looks, had stuck posts in the ground, each eighteen feet from the next. Huge pine trunks they were, like ships’ masts, twenty-five feet high or more so that they towered above the riders, dark against the silvery sky. Foreboding too, like giants keeping watch over the land.

  ‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’ Valgerd asked, looking up at each one they passed. They seemed to go on for ever, those posts, and Sigurd had lost count somewhere after one hundred.

  ‘Whoever put them in th
e ground wanted everyone to know his name,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘And yet we do not know his name,’ Floki pointed out, ‘which just goes to show that you can make a better-lasting reputation with the blade than by digging holes and putting tree trunks in them.’ No one could argue with that and when eventually they came to the last post they turned off the track towards a pine wood.

  There was no sign that they were being followed, which did not come as a surprise because Guthrum’s men had not been prepared, their horses being back in the camp, and the five rode on amongst the trees, talking little so that they could listen out.

  ‘Why are you helping us?’ Sigurd asked Storvek after a while. It was a good time to ask the question as they had slowed to let their mounts pick their way across a shallow stream. The three spare ponies had followed dutifully, so at least the young man would not get into trouble with his father for losing their stock. If the man really was a horse trader. From the way he had handled himself against Guthrum’s men, Sigurd suspected there was more to this Storvek than he had let on to the jarl.

  ‘You looked like you needed a friend,’ Storvek said, ‘since it seems even the gods do not want you. What happened in there?’

  Sigurd had no answer to that. Not yet, not until he had given it some thought and unravelled the chaos of it. For Óðin’s hand must have been in it, meaning Sigurd had not lost the god’s favour after all. And now here I am carrying your spear, Allfather, he thought, a sudden shiver running up the back of his neck. He had killed men with that sacred spear which he held couched beneath his right arm, the shaft crossing over the pony’s back, so that the animal could see the long blade out of its left eye.

  ‘Besides,’ Storvek went on, seeing that he wasn’t going to get an answer to his last question, ‘if I help you then perhaps it will help me.’ He tugged the reins, turning his mount on to what looked to be nothing more than an animal track through the drifts of old bark and pine needles. There were many dead pines scattered amongst the green trees; barkless and pale they gleamed in the silvered dark, like the ghosts of ancestors watching over the living. Something made Sigurd look over his shoulder and from the deeper shadows of the pines a pair of animal eyes glowed orange and green. A bear perhaps, watching these intruders to make sure they did not linger in his part of the forest.

  ‘So where are we going?’ Valgerd asked their guide just as Sigurd opened his mouth to ask the same thing.

  ‘I know of a place where we can rest,’ Storvek said, ‘then …’ he shrugged, ‘then we will see what tomorrow brings.’

  Valgerd glanced at Sigurd and he saw suspicion in her eyes. She wore breeks and a long green tunic belted at her waist and her hair was mostly loose but for two golden braids which fell either side of her face. It was no wonder that Jarl Guthrum hoped she would swear his oath and join his war band, that he had wanted to keep her close to him. Not that you would have known she was a warrior at first glance now, and Sigurd knew her well enough to imagine how vulnerable she felt without her war gear: her brynja and helmet, her bow, scramasax, shield and sword. Floki must have felt all but naked too, without the tools of his trade. Without the blades with which he was a master, god-touched himself perhaps and if so by Týr, Lord of Battle, or even some darker, more vicious god.

  ‘Did you see Jarl Guthrum’s cloak catch fire?’ Floki asked, his face full of awe. ‘Must have been newly greased for it went up like the flames from Völund’s forge. Now there is a man whose luck has gone. I would not like to be one of his hearthmen now.’

  ‘The ones with ambition will desert him,’ Sigurd said. ‘He is cursed if you ask me.’

  ‘Unlike you, hey?’ Valgerd said. ‘Sigurd Haraldarson! The man over whom the Allfather holds his own shield! Ha!’ She was teasing him and he did not like it much.

  ‘Say what you like but you do not see me hanging from that old tree the Svear love so much,’ he said.

  Valgerd snorted. ‘The reason you and Floki are not bloodless corpses swinging from that tree has nothing to do with the gods and everything to do with me,’ she said. ‘Who was it that set Jarl Guthrum on fire?’

  ‘You could have set him on fire sooner,’ Sigurd said, ‘instead of leaving it until I could feel the cold edge of that priest’s knife on my skin.’

  ‘Perhaps I was waiting to see if the Spear-God would come down from his hall and kill that old priest for you,’ Valgerd said through a curl of lips. She was still teasing him but it got Sigurd thinking. He had certainly killed the old godi and most probably the thin one too, and he wondered at the wisdom of that, for men did not kill priests if it could be avoided.

  ‘Or perhaps it was Óðin who put the idea into your head to knock over that lamp,’ Sigurd replied with a smile of his own.

  ‘Ah, so that is what happened,’ Storvek said. ‘I wish I had been inside that temple to see it. I’d wager Jarl Guthrum did not look so haughty with his cloak on fire.’

  ‘It is a shame in a way for I was looking forward to killing him,’ Floki said.

  Sigurd knew that if he said they should turn and go back to kill Guthrum and fight his men, Floki would pull his horse round with a grin on his face.

  ‘Not far now,’ Storvek said.

  Neither was it. Sigurd smelt the smoke before he saw the steading. It stood in a clearing on the edge of the forest with a steep meadow behind leading up to rocks and more trees. The longhouse itself was modest but well kept, the sort of place where you would find a clever karl who knows his husbandry, and his hard-working family along with four or five thralls. There were outbuildings too, all pine-log-built like the house itself and thatched with turf, including a byre for the animals, a grain store and a smokehouse whose hanging treasures had Sigurd’s mouth watering from a spear-throw away. With the place smelling as sweetly as that it was no surprise there was a bear living nearby, he remarked to Floki as they rode up to the farmstead, and Storvek told them to wait while he went to speak with the farmer.

  ‘It is only fair to warn the man and his wife that they will be playing the hosts,’ the young man said.

  ‘You expect him to be less than happy about it, then?’ Floki said, for having dismounted Storvek had taken the sword from its sheath of rolled blankets.

  Storvek looked at the sword and smiled. ‘Habit,’ he said, walking off.

  ‘Still, they will not be happy being woken in the middle of the night and faced with three Norse strangers,’ Valgerd said. Sigurd could not disagree, but there would be some way he could repay these folk for the comfort of a bed of furs and a plate of whatever smoked meat he could get his teeth into.

  Storvek had barely knocked when someone opened the door, which Floki said was strange given that the husband and wife should have been snoring in their blankets.

  ‘Could have heard us coming,’ Sigurd suggested as the door closed behind the young Svearman, for one of the ponies had nickered and snorted softly as they had approached, which had in turn raised a few snorts from the pigs in the byre.

  They waited long enough for Valgerd to say she did not have a good feeling about this and that maybe they should ride off now even if it meant stealing Storvek’s ponies and repaying him so badly.

  Sigurd twisted in his saddle to look at Storvek’s thrall. The man’s face was white as the moon and he was shaking too by the look of it. Just a slight tremble in his thigh which, along with his white knuckles as he clutched his reins, did not bode well so far as Sigurd was concerned.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, then?’ he asked the thrall.

  The man shook his head.

  ‘Answer him before I rip your tongue out and make it flap without you,’ Floki said.

  ‘It … it is a trap,’ the thrall said, his voice barely more than a whisper. Just then a horn sounded and the door of the house opened and warriors were spilling out.

  ‘Fuck,’ Floki gnarred, and Sigurd looked round to see that men were coming out of the cattle byre too, clutching spears or axes but otherwise in their under clothes
, the horn blast having woken them.

  And in Valhöll the gods laughed.

  Spear and axe blades held the moonlight as men closed in on them like a knot being drawn tight, and in a matter of heartbeats they were surrounded by thirty or forty warriors.

  ‘Hold,’ Sigurd said, for unarmed as Valgerd and Floki were there was no point in trying to fight or even run, yet he gripped Gungnir as though he would sooner be cut down than let go of the thing.

  ‘Thought he’d be bigger,’ one of the warriors said, eyeballing Sigurd.

  ‘Don’t need to be big when you’ve got the gods on your side,’ another said in a mocking voice, and it was not what they said but the way they said it which made Sigurd growl the foulest of curses. These warriors had been watered by the same rain as he, had grown strong on fish pulled from the same fjords and boar hunted in the same forests.

  They were Norsemen.

  A big man came forward, parting the others like a dragon ship’s bow through the sea, and the silver-panelled helmet he wore told Sigurd everything he needed to know. A boy came with him, all fair hair and a face full of spite as he stared at Sigurd, who would have wagered a helmet of hacksilver on the boy being the man’s son.

  ‘Hrani Randversson,’ Sigurd said, the name itself tasting like poison in his mouth.

  ‘Sigurd Haraldarson,’ Hrani said, removing his helmet so that Sigurd could get a proper look at his moon-washed face. It was Hrani who had brought death to Skudeneshavn, Sigurd’s home on the southern tip of Karmøy. And it was on that raid that one of Hrani’s men had killed Sigurd’s mother. And yet anyone who knew Sigurd or Hrani knew that the hatred between them was mutual. Every man in that clearing could feel it hanging in the air like a cold fog. For Sigurd had killed Hrani’s father in a ship fight in the shadow of Jarl Randver’s own hall which men called Örn-garð, the Eagle’s Dwelling-Place.