Wings of the Storm: (The Rise of Sigurd 3) Page 19

  ‘Not my doing, Bram,’ Sigurd said, looking at Valgerd. ‘She is the bravest of us all for she thinks nothing of burning down a temple even if it belongs to a king or the gods themselves.’

  Bram grinned at Valgerd who denied none of it. They were standing in the pre-dawn gloom at the top of the hill, waiting for Guthrum’s men to notice them, which they just had by the look and sound of it. Down in the camp amongst the shelters and the cook fires men were shouting and pointing and others were running towards Guthrum’s own tent in which he was still sleeping.

  ‘I wonder if the statues burnt,’ Floki said.

  ‘They didn’t,’ Valgerd answered.

  ‘How do you know?’ Floki asked.

  The shieldmaiden smiled. ‘Because if that Frey statue had caught fire it would be burning still, what with the size of his cock.’

  That raised a few laughs as Sigurd watched Jarl Guthrum emerge from his tent, shrugging himself into his brynja as he looked up to see the army gathered in a wall of flesh, iron and wood upon the crest of the ting mound.

  ‘So what is he like, this Guthrum?’ Jarl Hrani asked. Sigurd had to admit that Hrani looked formidable in his war gear. If he was anything like his father Randver he possessed war-craft and courage and a combination of those two was something you would sooner have in an ally than an enemy.

  ‘He is brave enough,’ Sigurd said, ‘and he hates to lose men, though he has been doing a lot of that recently.’

  ‘His weakness?’ Hrani asked, which was a good question because one weakness in an otherwise impressive warlord could be enough to sink him, like one sprung strake in a ship which lets the water gush in.

  ‘He is certain that the gods have abandoned him,’ Sigurd said. ‘He feared it before but after what happened at the temple he must be sure of it.’

  Hrani nodded because he heard the sweet music in those words. ‘Then he is as good as dead,’ he said.

  Which was not quite true, Sigurd knew, for a healthy man did not die until someone put a cold blade in his flesh and tore his heart or lungs or caused him to bleed out like a slaughtered beast. There was also the question of Jarl Guthrum’s men. They were his best warriors, his hearthmen, and Sigurd did not want to see his new war band whittled away in a fight which had nothing to do with him having his revenge on the oath-breaker king.

  Below, Jarl Guthrum’s champion Asgrim was bellowing orders, setting up his own skjaldborg and calling for someone to bring him his jarl’s axe banner from where it stood near Guthrum’s tent.

  ‘Want me to claim them?’ Svein asked Sigurd, lifting his spear. He meant he would walk down that hill and hurl the spear over Guthrum’s shieldwall and by doing so claim those warriors for the Allfather. Guthrum himself had done that at the borg and his spear-throw had been good enough to have men talking about it for days after. Which was no doubt why Svein wanted to throw his spear now. To prove he could throw further.

  Sigurd shook his head. ‘I don’t want them dead if I can help it.’

  ‘So you’ve some other Loki trick to make Jarl Guthrum swear the oath to you as I have done,’ Jarl Hrani said through a grimace. Standing side by side with Sigurd still felt like an ill-fitting brynja to him, as it did to Sigurd.

  ‘No tricks,’ Sigurd said. ‘I’m just going to kill Guthrum and see what happens then.’ Floki stepped forward but Sigurd shook his head before Floki had the chance to ask. ‘I’ll do it myself, Floki,’ he said, ‘but you can come. You too, Valgerd.’ The shieldmaiden nodded and grinned and together they walked down the hill, none of them in mail or helmets but each armed with sword, shield and spear, Sigurd’s being Gungnir which he turned so that the rune-marked blade caught the first pink light of the rising sun.

  Floki also had a hand axe tucked into his belt and Valgerd had a long scramasax sheathed against the small of her back, and Sigurd hoped that seeing the three of them again would anger Guthrum enough that he would accept Sigurd’s challenge to single combat.

  They all carried their shields above their heads to show the Svearmen that Sigurd wanted to talk, and Jarl Guthrum and Asgrim came forward to meet them at the foot of the hill.

  Sigurd had wondered why Guthrum was not wearing a helmet. Now he knew. The jarl’s face was a mass of raw, weeping flesh, glistening with pus and red as a wound. His golden beard was gone and in its place was a shiny wet-looking scar upon which no bristles would ever grow again. Much of his fair hair had been burnt away too so that his scalp was one horrible sore, and it would have been further agony to wear that helmet of his with the eye guards. Nor was he wearing his silver torc, for the skin on his neck was oozing yellowy liquid.

  Sigurd lowered his shield and the others did the same. ‘I am Sigurd Haraldarson whom men call Óðin-Favoured,’ he announced loud enough for Guthrum’s warriors to hear as they stood there looking grim as granite cliffs.

  ‘You know who I am,’ Guthrum said, ‘albeit I have lost some of my good looks.’

  If Guthrum was in pain, which he must have been with that fire-eaten face, he did not show it.

  ‘I know you, Guthrum the cursed,’ Sigurd said, and the jarl could not hide the pain at hearing that. He nodded up towards the top of the hill.

  ‘They are your men?’

  ‘They are,’ Sigurd said. ‘But there does not have to be a fight here today. Your men do not have to die.’

  ‘You want to fight me yourself?’ Guthrum asked.

  ‘You would have watched some Freysgodi cut my throat,’ Sigurd said. ‘Then you would have hung my corpse in that tree over there.’

  ‘That is true,’ Guthrum admitted.

  Sigurd nodded. ‘I want to fight you,’ he said, taking in the pitiful sight before him. ‘Can you fight?’ He looked at the jarl’s right hand which he noticed was also red raw, and should still have been bound in clean cloth, but perhaps Guthrum had not wanted to appear hurt in front of his men.

  ‘I can fight,’ the jarl said, putting all of his considerable height into his legs and spine then. Beside him Asgrim’s ugly face twitched. What a sight those two made together. The troll and the burnt jarl. It would make a good children’s story.

  ‘I can fight well enough to kill you, Sigurd Haraldarson,’ Guthrum said, and there was a spark in the eyes of that flame-ravaged face. ‘And when you are dead I will kill him,’ he said, glaring at Floki, ‘and you too,’ he added to Valgerd and there was real hate there then because she had tipped the burning oil on to him which had stripped him of those Baldr good looks.

  Sigurd nodded. ‘So we will fight and either your death or mine will settle things between us. There will be no more blood spilled after.’

  Jarl Guthrum thought about this, as well he might knowing as he did that not only were the gods against him but they favoured Sigurd. Still, he was a brave man for all that because he knew that if he did not accept Sigurd’s challenge it would come to a fight between the two skjaldborgar which his own men would certainly lose.

  ‘I will fight you, Sigurd Haraldarson,’ Guthrum announced, ‘but only on equal terms. Halvdan, fetch this man’s brynja. His sword too. When he is dead and I meet him again in Óðin’s hall I do not want him saying that I only won because he was not using his own familiar war gear.’

  That was well said and got growls of approval from those grim-faced men at his back, and even Floki, who would as soon bury that hand axe of his in Guthrum’s head as listen to him any more, nodded because the man was acting like a proper jarl. And the battle thrill was beginning to announce itself in Sigurd’s marrow and muscle. For now it was the flutter of moths’ wings in his blood. Soon it would become a trembling in his thighs and in his hands, and the saliva in his mouth would sour.

  Then Asgrim pulled his scramasax from its sheath, took a step and ripped out his jarl’s throat with it, spraying blood into the rings of Guthrum’s brynja and across the grass at Sigurd’s feet, some of it spattering Sigurd’s boots.

  For his last few heartbeats Jarl Guthrum stood there staring at Sigur
d as his lifeblood gushed away, then his great body toppled like a felled tree and his hand flapped like a fish then went still on the grass and he never moved again.

  Asgrim bent and wiped the blade of his scramasax on the hem of the dead jarl’s tunic, then straightened and pushed the blade back into the sheath at his waist.

  ‘That’s that then,’ he said to Sigurd, who was still staring at Jarl Guthrum, unbalanced by what he had just seen, like a boat heeling in a sudden gust.

  ‘Why?’ he asked Asgrim.

  The champion, who was in fact no one’s champion now, shrugged his shoulders, put a thumb to one nostril of that nose which was spread across his face and shot a wad of snot on to the grass. ‘What was the point in you two fighting?’ he asked. ‘The fire ruined his hand so he could not grip a sword properly. Not well enough anyway,’ he said. ‘None of us who have fought with him a long time needed to see him humiliated today.’

  ‘He might have won,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘And if he had, then what?’ Asgrim said. ‘We would still be following a man whom the gods have forsaken.’ That warped mouth of his twisted though it could not be called a smile. ‘Whereas you, Sigurd Haraldarson, have the look of a man who is weaving his own saga.’ He swept a big arm back towards his Svear brothers who stood behind their shields waiting for other men to decide their futures. ‘If you will treat us with the respect due to those who have stood up to our knees in the wound-sea and never run from our lord’s enemies—’

  ‘We saw you run from us when you fucked up that attack on Alrik’s walls,’ Floki interrupted him.

  Sigurd expected Asgrim to be furious at that, but the big warrior simply shrugged again. ‘Sigurd was atop that wall,’ he said, eyes boring into Sigurd’s own, ‘so we were fighting the gods too. A man needn’t feel ashamed for running from the gods’ fury once in a while.’ He pointed at the great sacred spear in Sigurd’s hand, whose butt rested on the ground so that its massive blade accused the crimson sky. ‘You have the Allfather’s favour and now you have his spear. So as I was saying, if you treat us as you would your own hirðmen we will follow you and swear an oath.’

  ‘I am no jarl,’ Sigurd said.

  Asgrim’s thick lips spread to reveal the cave where his front teeth should have been. ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  ‘Then it will be as you say, Asgrim,’ Sigurd said, laying his shield down on the grass then striding forward to grip the warrior’s outstretched arm. ‘I will be honoured to fight with you and your Svearmen.’ He glanced down at the dead jarl and wondered what Guthrum had done to earn himself the gods’ displeasure. But then Asgot always said that the gods are fickle.

  ‘An ale horn in one hand and a scramasax in the other, lad, that’s what you can expect from the Lords of Asgard,’ the godi had told Sigurd after King Gorm’s betrayal of Jarl Harald.

  ‘So what are we going to do with him?’ Valgerd said, gesturing at the jarl’s corpse.

  ‘We will honour him with a hero’s pyre,’ Asgrim said.

  ‘That will have to wait,’ Sigurd said, pulling his sword from its scabbard. ‘I want his head.’

  Asgrim pulled his own head back as if he’d been hit with an oar blade. ‘Why?’

  Sigurd bent and moved one of Guthrum’s arms, placing it under his neck so that the dead man’s head was off the ground. Then he lifted the sword and brought it down with enough muscle behind it to all but sever Guthrum’s head from his neck. ‘We are going back to the borg and I want Alrik to see that the jarl is dead,’ Sigurd told Asgrim, using the blade to saw through the last bit of gristle and skin until the head came away. ‘I want Guthrum’s men to see it too.’

  ‘If they recognize that burnt face,’ Floki pointed out.

  ‘You could have just shown them his jarl torc,’ Asgrim said unhappily. ‘It is in his tent with his other things.’ He did not like seeing his jarl’s head separated from its body, which was understandable. A man should go to Valhöll in one piece if he can. Not that the Allfather would want Guthrum drinking in his hall all the days till Ragnarök, Sigurd thought, or he would not have let the jarl’s luck piss away like that.

  ‘I could have shown them his torc,’ Sigurd agreed, grabbing what was left of Guthrum’s hair to lift the head. The eyes were open, which was probably a good thing for the sake of folk recognizing whose head it was. Sigurd looked into those eyes and could not help but think it was a bad end even for a man who would have sacrificed him in the Svearfolk’s temple. Yes he could have just taken the torc and let Asgrim burn the jarl as was befitting for such a man. But nothing convinced people that a man was dead quite so much as his head being somewhere other than on the end of his neck.

  ‘Have your men ready to leave by midday, Asgrim,’ Sigurd said. ‘I will have their oaths on the way but we should be gone before King Eysteinn returns to Ubsola.’

  ‘We’ll be ready,’ Asgrim said, then turned to walk back to those warriors who had just watched him murder their jarl yet seemed not to have a word to say about it.

  And Sigurd, Floki and Valgerd climbed back up the hill to Jarl Hrani and the men waiting up there.

  ‘If you go on like this, Sigurd, we will die of old age without ever having to fight at all,’ Olaf said when Sigurd had told him and Hrani and the rest what had happened and that the Svearmen were joining them. Olaf was grinning and Hrani was getting a good look at Guthrum’s head because jarls are always interested in other jarls, even dead ones.

  ‘Let us see if we can give you one more good fight then, Uncle,’ Sigurd said as Solmund came forward with a sack for Guthrum’s head, ‘before you hang your sword in some hall and spend the rest of your days watching your boys grow and telling stories to anyone who will listen.’ The head went in and Solmund tied the sack and Sigurd was glad not to have to look at that burnt face any more.

  ‘Whose hall will that be then?’ Olaf asked, smiling, ‘for you have already given away King Gorm’s to Jarl Hrani, which is generous of you and a little bold seeing as that oath-breaking weasel shit is still living in it.’

  Sigurd thought about this for a moment, not that Olaf, a warrior in his prime, would be sheathing his sword for the last time any day soon. But still it was a good question.

  ‘Well I will need my own hall,’ Sigurd said, ‘and you can live there wherever it happens to be.’ Sigurd did not know where he would live when this feud was over, but he did not think it would be Skudeneshavn where his father’s hall had stood. There would be too many ghosts there. Too many ghosts and too many memories to drown in.

  Then again, perhaps this blood feud with King Gorm would never be over and Sigurd would never have the chance to lay roots into the earth and raise his own hall. Or maybe he would be killed in the blood-fray, sword-hacked, spear-gutted or arrow-shot. A whitening corpse amongst a pile of corpses, dead and never to be avenged.

  ‘We will follow the threads of our wyrds and see where they lead, then, Sigurd,’ Olaf said and Sigurd nodded, slinging the sack with its heavy contents over his shoulder, the Óðin spear in his other hand.

  For they were going south back to Fornsigtuna and Alrik’s hill fort, then back across Løgrinn and west to Norway and to the reckoning that would decide it all.

  On the third day, when they had put plenty of thick forest between themselves and Ubsola, Guthrum’s men swore the oath in front of the rest. Asgrim was the first to do it and the others followed and even Halvdan, who had made a nuisance of himself when Sigurd, Floki and Valgerd had been Guthrum’s prisoners, spoke the words as though he meant them and was proud to do it. Though this clearly nettled Floki who had been looking for even half a reason to kill the Svearman.

  ‘Sword and shield, flesh and bone, I am your man, Sigurd Haraldarson. As long as the sun shines and the world endures, henceforth and forevermore,’ he said as the others had done.

  ‘Gjöf sér æ til gjalda,’ Sigurd said to each of them. A gift always looks for a return. ‘I will be a ring-giver and a raven-feeder. As long as the sun shines and th
e world endures, henceforth and forevermore.’

  When it was done, Sigurd shared a look with those who had been with him since the beginning. Olaf, Svein, Solmund, Asgot, Aslak and even Hagal Crow-Song stared back at him, each with the same look in his eyes. It was enough to unnerve Sigurd because he knew what they were thinking, even though none would say it aloud. He was thinking the same. They had come a long way in a short time, grown from a half crew to a very powerful war band of ninety men, and not farmers who do a little raiding here and there either, but hearthmen, warriors who live to feed the wolf and the raven. Men with good blades and mail or tough leather armour. Men with pride in their war prowess and who lust after reputation.

  Sigurd recalled the words the witch had spoken to him the previous winter before they had left Jarl Burner’s hall at Osøyro.

  ‘Who are the two who ride to the ting?’ the witch had asked him. ‘Three eyes have they together, ten feet, and one tail: and thus they travel through the lands.’

  ‘Óðin and Sleipnir his eight-legged steed,’ Sigurd had answered.

  ‘His passing raises such a rush and roar of the wind as will waft away the souls of the dead. And with it Haraldarson,’ the witch had said, pointing at him, aiming her warning like an arrow nocked to a bowstring. She had said he could not escape the wings of the storm and yet he did not want to, whatever the risk. He had a war band of oath-tied men and their expectations lay heavy on him, yet he thrilled to the burden like the palm to the touch of the hilt. He was soaring despite it. He was the eagle which sails on the draughts high above the world tree Yggdrasil, and his talons were now sharp enough to rip flesh.

  ‘The lad is not sworn,’ Svein reminded Sigurd, nodding at Thorbiorn Thorirsson who was sitting on the other side of the fire. There were three fires in that camp by a moss-fringed stream above which clouds of gnats swarmed. One for Hrani’s men, one for Guthrum’s, and one for Sigurd’s original crew. It was to be expected that they would keep to themselves for a while at least, for men who have fought together are bonded by blood. Besides which, for all that they could understand each other well enough, the Norse tongue sounded strange to the Svearmen’s ears and it was the same the other way round. ‘We should make him swear it,’ Svein said, teasing a comb through his red beard which he had freed from its braids so that he could hunt for lice.