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

  Randver turned to the crowd, his face blood-slathered and his teeth white amongst the gore of it, and men, women and children alike cheered.

  But no cheer came from the boy.

  Then King Gorm handed his axe to a retainer and came over to Harald, throwing an arm over his shoulder. ‘And now we drink!’ he said, and Harald grinned as the two of them, the king and the jarl, led the way back up the slope towards the open door of the great hall: the hall which loomed above the Karmsund Strait and because of that was more like a giant’s sea chest, filled with hacksilver from every ship which sailed past. That hall was a hoard-chest upon which King Gorm sat, and around which other rich and powerful men gathered in the hope that its silver-lustre would shine on them too.

  ‘You have some tales to take back to Skudeneshavn now, hey, boy,’ Olaf said. He and the boy had both been seated at the king’s own table, around which only his closest and longest-serving hirðmen sat. Harald himself was shoulder to shoulder with the king. ‘Tell me why the king just beheaded his finest beast, lad,’ Olaf said, holding out his horn to a serving girl who filled it from a jug which was so heavy she could barely lift it.

  ‘He wants everyone to see how generous he is,’ the boy answered. He knew he should be wide-eyed and open-mouthed at all the food on the table in front of him, the trenchers of boar, goat, horse, goose and hare. The loaves of hot bread and the boiled gulls’ eggs, the piles of ripe red berries and plums and the cheeses and the bowls of skyr and honeycomb. But something about how that proud bull had died had soured his stomach.

  ‘That’s part of it,’ Olaf said with a nod, drinking and dragging a hand across his moustaches. ‘But why did he do it himself?’ Olaf nodded at the kingsmen across the table from them. ‘He could have had any one of these men cut the bull’s throat and be done with it. Nice and neat.’ A big man across the way caught Olaf’s eye and the two warriors raised their drinking horns to each other and nodded before rinsing their insides with mead.

  The boy shrugged. Olaf leant in close enough that the boy could smell the mead’s honey’s sweetness on his breath. ‘The blood was part of it, of course,’ Olaf said. ‘The way it flew like that and soaked our shoes. That was for the gods. But it takes skill and great strength to take off a bull’s head like that, even with such a sharp and pretty axe.’ Olaf smiled. ‘Had to get the swing just right too, or the beast might have dropped from Randver’s dint on his thought box and the king would have buried that shiny blade in nothing but mud. Not the same kind of reputation to be earned cutting worms in half.’ The boy could not help but grin at the idea of that while Olaf drank again. ‘King Gorm wanted us all to see how he can handle an axe, for it takes more than silver, more than a feast or three to show men such as your father that you deserve their loyalty. Wants Harald to kiss his sword, he does. Wants everyone here to see it too, for he knows your father is a warrior.’ He swept his drinking horn through the smoky air. ‘Everyone in this hall knows it. So now and then the king needs to remind us all that he is a warrior too. Understand, lad?’

  The boy nodded, thinking. ‘Could you do it, Olaf? Take off the bull’s head with one swing?’

  Olaf considered that for a moment, dragging an arm across his glistening bristles. ‘Even with the haft end, lad,’ he said, grinning, ‘and with only half a swing.’ He laughed and the boy laughed too and then the king leant forward and called down the board to Olaf, asking him to share what had him and Harald’s boy giggling like a pair of young bed thralls under the furs.

  ‘At this end of the table we are talking about ship taxes and what to do about the island karls who are late bringing in the cows, pigs and grain which they owe me,’ Gorm said, smiling. ‘We will enjoy a funny tale if you have one.’

  All eyes turned their way and the boy felt them like heat on his skin.

  ‘Lord king,’ Olaf said with a respectful nod, ‘I was just telling the boy of the time his father and I were put on our arses more than once by a ram. Now, that bull of yours was a giant, no one can say otherwise. But that ram was another Grendel, hey Harald?’

  ‘I still shudder to think of it,’ Harald said, ‘but there is a story with a good ending,’ he added, raising his drinking horn at Olaf, though King Gorm did not seem to like being left out of that. Or else perhaps he knew full well that Olaf and the boy had not been talking about a ram and did not like being lied to. Either way he was a king and had enough wile in him to pick up the thread and spin it his way.

  ‘It is a good lesson to teach the boy, Olaf,’ he said, pointing a thick, silver-ringed finger. ‘Harald’s boy would do well to remember that size and strength alone are not always a warrior’s greatest weapons.’ The hall had fallen silent now, but for the flap and crackle of the hearth flames and the sound of one of the king’s hounds gnawing a fleshy knuckle of bone beneath the table. ‘Brawn will get a man only so far,’ King Gorm said, then tapped his skull and the boy heard it from where he sat. ‘The wits in his head are his greatest possession.’ If the feast that was spread across that table had been for Harald’s eyes, this now was for the jarl’s ears and everyone knew it. ‘I did not become king by raging round the place making enemies. A man must have patience if he hopes to rise.’

  Everyone knew how Gorm had become king, how he had raided in the south and the east along the Svealand coast, filling his sea chests with plunder but sitting on most of it, biding his time until he had enough silver to persuade the jarls and warlords and the wealthy karls within a week’s sailing of Karmøy to support his bid for Jarl Grubbi’s high seat. And then once he had it, having put a spear in Grubbi’s belly himself, how he had gone about narrowing the channel in the strait below with boats lashed securely to the rocks. No crew could hope to slip through without either paying Gorm for the privilege or making a fight of it which they would almost certainly lose.

  He made himself king not long after that, and none of the jarls had disputed it. They might as well tell the rain it could not fall on their roofs.

  ‘Patience is what separates the great hunter from the hungry one, lad,’ Gorm said, ‘as you yourself know, for did we give up on the great elk when he vanished into the woods four days ago?’ The king’s eyes bored into him until he could no longer hold on to his silence.

  ‘No, lord king,’ he said.

  ‘No, we did not,’ Gorm said. ‘You cast your spear like a little god, like a young Thór, and you bled that mighty bull elk. Then you bided your time, never doubting the outcome, until in the end we caught up with him and your father finished the job.’ With that he banged his mead horn against Harald’s. ‘Your boy knows how to bide his time, Jarl Harald,’ Gorm said. ‘But so do I. Which is why we have been friends for a long time now and I have never once asked you to swear an oath to me. Not once. I have never asked you to kiss my sword, even though other jarls have kissed it and so has every man at my table.’

  Harald nodded, acknowledging that this was true. He knew that his time at Avaldsnes drinking the king’s mead had all been about this moment, and that while his friend had indeed bided his time, showing himself to be a patient and skilled hunter, that time had drawn to an end.

  The boy tried to grasp all this, but it was too much to fit in a young boy’s head, even with Olaf beside him steering him through it all. Besides which, he had a boy’s drifting mind and was already thinking of other things, like the maggots in the elk’s flesh. Like the way the soon-to-be-jarl Randver and the king had slaughtered the bull and how the blood had flown, painting the day with a crimson arc, like a gory, shimmering Bifröst linking the worlds of gods and men. His shoes were stained with it. It had been a day of blood, but now it was a night of feasting and drinking, of skald-song and friendship.

  And later, when the oil lamps were starting to gutter and the hearthflames were low, and some men and women were falling asleep at their benches still clutching their horns, Jarl Harald gave the king his oath.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE HILL FORT at Fornsigtuna belonged to Alri
k now, and Sigurd was Alrik’s man. At least, he had won the place for the Svear warlord, tricking his way through the gates to sow death amongst the defenders, who were sworn to Alrik’s enemy, a Svear jarl named Guthrum. Sigurd and his half crew, along with some of Alrik’s men, had come to the borg under Guthrum’s own banner of the white axe, and Guthrum’s men, seeing that banner and thinking their lord had returned, had opened the gates. Only, that banner was not Guthrum’s own. Nor could the jarl have ever laid eyes on it, seeing as it had been nothing but a scrap of sail cloth and a boar spear before Sigurd had Solmund get to work with his needle and thread.

  With Loki-cunning and war-craft and in a welter of blood, Sigurd and his wolves had won Alrik the borg. But Sigurd would not swear an oath to the warlord, and if Alrik was sour about that he did a good job of hiding it. Mostly.

  ‘He’s had enough out of us without needing our oaths on top of it,’ Olaf had told Knut, Alrik’s most trusted man, when Knut had suggested that Sigurd and his men could do worse than pledging their swords to the warlord and helping him defeat Jarl Guthrum himself, who was bound to turn up at the fort sooner or later.

  Knut had looked from Olaf to Sigurd, wanting to hear the refusal from Sigurd’s own mouth.

  ‘We’ve made Alrik a rich man, Knut,’ Sigurd said, which was understating it, as Knut well knew. Calling Alrik rich was like calling the sea damp, and Knut had nodded and raised a hand as if to say he would not press the matter further for now.

  For the borg was full of silver and iron: sea chests crammed with hacksilver and stacks of iron already smelted and beaten into bars, enough to make the rivets for twenty ships, which was more iron than most people saw in their whole lives. And it had all been Guthrum’s. The jarl had sat on this hoard while he built a war host large enough to take on King Erik, who was the real power in that part of Svealand, controlling the trading port of Birka and lands as far south as Götaland.

  But Alrik, whilst he was not even a jarl, was an ambitious man and a hardened fighter, and he had grown powerful enough to challenge Guthrum, for all that he and his war host had then been stuck outside the borg as their beards grew long with the grass. Alrik had craved the place like a man who lusts after another man’s woman, until Sigurd and his Sword-Norse had come and Sigurd had delivered the borg and its treasures to him. And so the warlord could make do without Sigurd’s oath.

  Not that Alrik was ungenerous. In the aftermath of the bloodletting he had given Sigurd a sea chest carved with ravens and eagles, and heavy it was too because it was stuffed with silver and iron: finger rings, sword and scabbard fittings, Thór’s hammers, brooches, lengths of fine wire and solid ingots, iron bars, axe heads and even some gold, and in that one chest was a hoard as big as Sigurd’s father Jarl Harald had ever owned. There would be more of the same, too, Alrik promised, if the Norsemen stayed and fought for him until Guthrum was carrion for the crows and his war host was scattered to the winds.

  With such riches Sigurd could buy spearmen and maybe even ships. He could build his own war host and return to Norway to take on the oath-breaker King Gorm, and maybe he could have his revenge and so balance the scales which had been tipped against him and his kin since this whole thing began. That was the dream. And it was the gleam of all that plunder which blinded Sigurd and his crew to the presence of a man in Alrik’s war band by the name of Kjartan Auðunarson, whom the skald Hagal Crow-Song – not that Crow-Song did much skalding these days – had recognized. Though it had taken him a while to pull that memory out of his thought box.

  ‘He was Jarl Randver’s man before he was Alrik’s,’ Crow-Song had said, turning all their thoughts back to that bloody fight in the fjord by Hinderå. Sigurd himself had killed Jarl Randver but now Hrani Randversson wore the torc and he wanted his revenge on Sigurd.

  ‘What is to stop this Kjartan going home and making himself rich by telling Hrani Randversson where we are?’ Olaf asked Sigurd when they had been thinking what to do about Kjartan.

  ‘We kill him,’ Svein had said with a shrug of his great shoulders, combing the fiery red beard of which he was so proud.

  ‘He has to go,’ Solmund agreed. The old skipper who had bound his wyrd to Sigurd’s would rather hold a tiller than a sword, but even so he knew when someone needed killing.

  ‘Of course he has to go,’ Bram said. ‘But the how of it. That’s the question. We can’t just go up to the man’s bench and spear him when he’s asleep.’

  Sigurd and Olaf agreed it would take some thinking about, but then Alrik’s men had brought that heavy sea chest in and all of them forgot about Kjartan Auðunarson.

  Next morning, when they spread throughout the borg looking for the Hinderå man, there was no sign of him.

  ‘What now then?’ Olaf said when it was clear that Kjartan had gone, vanished ‘like a fart in the breeze’, as Bjarni put it.

  ‘You are rich now, Sigurd,’ Olaf went on. ‘You’ve enough silver to put a proper crew together.’

  ‘Not rich enough to take on the oath-breaker,’ Solmund pointed out, which was true enough. Not that anyone liked hearing it.

  ‘Seems to me we can stay here on this hill and earn more silver fighting for Alrik,’ Bjarni said, lifting an eyebrow. ‘There are worse places to live.’

  ‘Even if Kjartan has slithered off back west to sell word of us to Hrani Randversson, it will be a long time before we have to concern ourselves about it,’ Aslak said.

  ‘True,’ Olaf agreed, ‘and weaving more reputation around here won’t do us any harm.’ For their war gear and the way they had won Alrik the borg had made the other men inside that ring of timber treat Sigurd’s little crew warily and with the same respect as they did Alrik and Knut.

  ‘Why get bogged down in a blood feud between two Svearmen when we have our own feud, which has a king in it?’ Moldof put in, sweeping his one arm through the smoke-hung air. And this got some murmurs of agreement. They had avenged themselves on Jarl Randver by sending him to the sea bed and many of his men to the afterlife sooner than they had thought to go. But Randver had only been a sword wielded by King Gorm. Gorm was the poison which tainted the very air for Sigurd. A nithing king who had shared mead and the feast table with Sigurd’s father Harald. Who had laughed and hunted with the jarl and called him friend, but had in the end betrayed him, first in the ship battle in the Karmsund Strait, by not coming to Harald’s aid when Harald was fighting Jarl Randver’s ships, and then in the woods near Avaldsnes, by greeting Harald with swords and spears instead of with the mead he had promised.

  ‘Moldof has a point there,’ Bram admitted. ‘Much as I am enjoying killing these Svearmen, we could end up stuck here. Going down with Alrik like the ballast stones in a sinking ship. And the oath-breaker king will be free to keep being the rancid goat’s turd that he is for many years yet.’

  That was not a happy picture in anyone’s mind and so Sigurd told them he would think about it over the next days and decide what he would do.

  But three days later the choice was taken away from him because Jarl Guthrum came. He brought with him the rest of his war host and it made for an impressive sight, spilling out of the tree line to the west of the borg, men’s spear blades, axe heads and shield bosses glinting in the pink dawn light. Some of them owned helmets, fewer had mail, but it was the size of Guthrum’s army which had Alrik’s men cursing, fingering the Thór’s hammers hanging at their necks and looking to their war gear. They checked that blades were sharp and shields were strong. They piled more spears and rocks against the palisade up on the earthen ramparts. They carried more pails of rainwater up the bank, setting them down around the perimeter twenty paces apart, ready to be flung at any fires should Guthrum try to burn the fence stakes.

  ‘Silver or no, I am beginning to think we should have joined Guthrum instead of Alrik,’ Solmund said, as still more warriors came out of the trees. Alrik had ordered Sigurd to man the rampart above the gates as this was the most vulnerable part of the fort, where he wanted his best
warriors.

  ‘You won’t be saying that when Guthrum strolls through those gates and gets a gut full of spear,’ Olaf said as a horn sounded, formally announcing Guthrum’s arrival.

  Sigurd looked at the axe banner hanging on its long boar spear above the palisade, the wind stirring the cloth so that the white axe flickered, and in truth he did not think it would be as easy as Olaf said. The trick had worked once. Seeing that banner, which was the same as their jarl’s, Guthrum’s men in the borg had assumed their lord had come and they had opened the gates, inviting death into the borg. And now it was possible that Guthrum, having come at last, would see that banner and think that his men still held the fort. There was a chance, a hope at least, that Jarl Guthrum would walk into their trap and die easily.

  But something told Sigurd that they would not be so lucky a second time.

  Alrik had one of his men sound a horn in reply and those of his warriors not manning the ramparts thronged either side of the gates, shield and spear ready, waiting to spring their ambush.

  It was worth trying, this ruse, but it was not without risk, as Bram pointed out. ‘If enough of them get inside before we can shut the gates on the rest, their numbers will end up getting the better of us.’

  ‘Not if we kill Guthrum,’ Sigurd said. ‘I have seen a hen run around after its head has been pulled off, but it does not know where it is going and soon falls down.’ He shrugged. ‘With Guthrum and his best men dead, the others will not know what to do.’

  ‘I would like to see them all running around like your hen,’ Bjarni said, grinning.

  And perhaps they might have done, had Guthrum been fooled by that axe banner and walked into the borg to his death. But that did not happen and there was no steel-edged death for the jarl that day. He skirted the hill fort and came within an arrow-shot of the gate, close enough for Sigurd to see that he was a very big man, long-legged and broad in his brynja that reached almost to his knees. His silver jarl’s torc glinted at his neck. His helmet had eye guards like Sigurd’s own, so that they could not make out much of his face but for the big fair beard, and yet there was something about the man which told Sigurd that here was no fool. And sure enough Guthrum raised a hand and ordered his men to come no nearer to the borg. They waited, some two hundred Svearmen with their shields before them because they smelt the fox in the coop.