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

  ‘There’s not a spell I ever heard of that could fool a wolf’s nose,’ Olaf countered.

  ‘There,’ Sigurd said, pointing to a dim shape which his eyes had sifted from the earth-packed root ball of a fallen tree. Against the dark of it he had not seen the woman before but now he had picked her out, standing there with her back to the roots, facing the snarling beasts. Chanting.

  ‘Aye, I see her,’ Olaf said.

  ‘Have you thought that maybe she is speaking to them?’ Svein said. ‘That she is their master? For they have not eaten her yet.’

  ‘Keep watching, Red, and you’ll have your answer to that,’ Olaf told him, and Sigurd agreed with him, for though the witch’s galdr was keeping the beasts at bay, some of them were edging closer, their bellies touching the snow. One wolf, a huge male standing well over three foot high at the shoulder, was now a mere spear-length from the witch, close enough to leap and snarling his threats, making it clear to the pack that he would draw first blood. Then the pack would join the kill and it would be a frenzy of feeding, those wicked sharp teeth shearing flesh from bone which the beasts would swallow in bloody lumps.

  ‘Ready?’ Sigurd said and did not need to see them nod. Witch or no, none of them would crouch spear-armed in the dark and watch a woman ripped apart.

  ‘Don’t let them get behind you,’ Olaf said, as Sigurd stood, roaring, and the three of them lumbered through the snow towards the witch, and the wolves turned, their yellow eyes catching the moonlight, their lips hitched back to show those scramasax-sharp teeth.

  The pack leader bowed its body, throwing its great head over its left shoulder to growl at Sigurd who did not stop but tramped towards it and thrust his spear, but the blade missed its target as the big male twisted aside. Then it leapt and Sigurd brought the spear across though not fast enough and the beast’s jaws, twice as strong as the biggest hound’s, clamped round Sigurd’s forearm as the bristling mass of muscle and bone barrelled into his chest, knocking him backwards into the snow. It was as if Völund’s own anvil was crushing his arm. Those yellow eyes bored into his but Sigurd was roaring his own challenge into the beast’s hot acrid breath, the fog of it the only thing between him and the wolf’s muzzle. The weight of the creature pressed the spear shaft against Sigurd’s chest as he struggled now for every breath to scream defiance. Yet as the beast sought to crush the bone and get to the marrow in his arm Sigurd managed to slip his right hand beneath the thick belly fur and haul the scramasax from its scabbard.

  The wolf was snarling death, a berserking fury shaking its head now so that Sigurd thought it would rip his arm from its socket, but to think was to die and so he punched the blade into the beast’s side and felt the iron grate against a rib before tearing into the flesh. The wolf showed no sign of knowing it had a foot of blade inside it, gripped as it was by its own bloodlust, wrenching Sigurd’s arm this way and that as Sigurd twisted the scramasax, trying to force the blade deeper and do even more damage. He thought he could hear laughter. Some god, perhaps, amused to see him on his back in the snow, his own limb the only thing between him and having his throat torn out. Then Sigurd pulled the scramasax from its fleshy sheath between the wolf’s ribs and plunged it in again, screaming into that pointed muzzle, defying the wolf as Týr lord of battle must have done in the same heartbeat that the mighty Fenrir bit off his arm.

  Fast as an owl swooping from an oak bough, the thought crossed Sigurd’s mind that the others must be fighting, too, for why else were they not helping him? Then his right hand and arm felt somehow on fire but he realized it must be the beast’s blood, hot and sticky as pitch, and so he struck again and again, screaming death to the wolf, working the blade deep into its chest to slice into its thumping heart.

  The snarling stopped. Those great jaws weakened for all that the wolf tried to champ down still, was likely confused as to why it had not bitten through the bone. A shudder went through the beast, its muscles thrumming like a ship’s rigging in a storm, and Sigurd watched its eyes roll back in its head. Then the huge head fell sidewards and the life went out of it and somewhere another wolf howled as though it knew its leader was dead, while Sigurd lay there under the weight of it: all that bristle, muscle, sinew and bone that was now only lifeless carcass.

  Then Olaf was there at last and he heaved the dead wolf off Sigurd, his worry plain to see by the light reflecting off the snow.

  ‘Your arm,’ he said.

  ‘Is still mine,’ Sigurd said, ‘no thanks to you.’ Olaf offered his hand and Sigurd took it in his right, letting Olaf pull him to his feet, his chest heaving for breath, his head wreathed in his own warm fog. Olaf toed the huge beast to make sure it was dead, as Sigurd looked around. The other wolves had gone and Svein was standing guard, spear raised after them. Besides the one Sigurd had killed there were two more beasts lying in the snow, one of them dead and the other still panting, its legs twitching as though it thought it were running.

  ‘Your arm,’ Olaf said again, nodding at the limb. Sigurd lifted his left hand, clenching and unclenching his fist to make sure the tendons and muscles still did what they were supposed to, though his arm was full of pain. He bent and thrust his scramasax into the snow and when he pulled it out most of the blood was off the blade. Then he sheathed the thing and, gritting his teeth, shoved the sleeves of his tunics up to reveal the place around which the wolf’s jaws had been locked moments before.

  A grin spread in Olaf’s beard because there was no torn flesh, no sharp slivers of broken bone sticking out of a bloody mess. Instead there was the greave that Sigurd usually wore on his shin: the leather wrap with its iron splints and some of those splints with dents in them now, teeth marks that were better there than in Sigurd’s arm bones. A man called Ofeig Grettir had bought the greaves off Sigurd with information, but Black Floki had slaughtered Grettir along with the man who had kept him on the end of a chain and Sigurd had been glad to have the greaves back. Never more glad than now.

  ‘A raging dog will always go for your arm if you offer it,’ Sigurd said, wincing as he made a fist again. ‘I thought a wolf might do the same if it came to it.’

  ‘Loki’s own cunning,’ Olaf said, turning to the witch now who stood in the shadows against the uprooted tree, watching and silent. ‘And who are you, woman? That my young friend here nearly got himself on the inside of a wolf for.’

  The woman glanced at Olaf but then settled her eyes back on Sigurd where they had been before. Her right hand gripped the knob of a staff and she leant the thing towards Sigurd.

  ‘I am the then, the now and the may be,’ she said and even hooded as she was her voice betrayed her many years, though there was no stoop or crookedness in her so far as Sigurd could see.

  ‘You are a seiðr-kona,’ Sigurd said. More of an accusation than a question, and in his peripheral vision he saw both Svein and Olaf touch the Thór’s hammers at their necks because a seiðr-wife was not someone you wanted to meet out in the forest by the light of a sliver of moon.

  ‘Not much of one,’ Svein dared, ‘or you would have used some dark magic to hide yourself from those wolves.’

  The head inside that lambskin hood turned to Svein, the hood’s lining – catskin by the looks – as white as the snow they stood in.

  ‘I could make you vanish, giant,’ she said, which was as good an admission as they could have hoped, or not hoped for. Because a seiðr-wife was as dangerous as the knife you can’t see. They had all heard tales of such women hurling spells that addled their victim’s mind by illusion or madness. And yet Sigurd had just wrestled with a wolf and the fight-thrill of that was still in him so that he was not going to be afraid of an old woman, especially a crone who would have been wolf food if not for him.

  ‘I am not surprised they came for you,’ he said, nodding at the big wolf lying there on the snow, its mouth frozen in a snarl, those flesh-ripping teeth looking dangerous even now. ‘With all the skins you are wearing.’ Over a dark blue mantle the witch wore the fur of a f
orest cat and her legs were wrapped in fleece. She had on catskin gloves and shoes of shaggy calfskin, and the wolves must have reckoned they were in for an easy feast, for all that they would have thought her a strange creature.

  ‘And yet I am unharmed,’ she said, and though he could not see her face in the shadow of that hood Sigurd knew those words had come through a smile.

  ‘You did not summon us here by some spell, if that is what you want us to think,’ Olaf said, and that hooded head turned back towards him so that Olaf, who was braver than Týr himself, almost flinched. ‘We were hunting them,’ he said.

  ‘Because Sigurd does not like his new hall,’ Svein put in, tramping through the snow to get a look at Sigurd’s wolf because it was so much bigger than the ones he and Olaf had speared.

  ‘Which one of you heard the galdr?’ she asked. She was looking at Sigurd, or at least her head was turned towards him.

  ‘We heard the beasts,’ Olaf said, ‘howling like their tails were on fire. The dead would have heard it.’

  ‘None of you heard my galdr?’ she said.

  There was a silence, the kind that there can only be in a forest with deep snow on the ground and more swathing the boughs above. Then a bird flapped somewhere in the high branches and a stream of snow tumbled to the ground near the witch.

  So the raven would feed on the wolf, Sigurd thought, wondering at the strange omen in that.

  ‘I heard it, witch,’ he said.

  ‘Ah yes, Fenrir-killer,’ she said, and again Sigurd heard the smile in that.

  ‘It is good for you that he did kill the beast, old woman,’ Svein said, ‘or it would be snapping your bones like dry sticks by now.’

  ‘So you say.’ The seiðr-wife took two steps and slowly brought the staff across, at which Olaf and Svein both lifted their own spears as if to defend themselves. But instead of hurling some spell at them the witch prodded the big wolf with the staff and looked up at Sigurd, her head cocked. A shaft of moonlight cut across half of her face, giving Sigurd a glimpse of white skin and the dark glossed jet of an eye.

  ‘What is your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Ha!’ The fog of that utterance hung in the moonlight for a heartbeat. ‘You would more often hear a cat’s footfall or the breath of a fish,’ she said, then leant the staff towards Sigurd, who fought every impulse to put his own spear between them. ‘Does a fox need gills? Or a mouse horns?’ she asked. ‘Folk call me witch.’ Somewhere to the east the wolves were howling again and it sent a shiver scuttling up the back of Sigurd’s neck because it reminded him of the wailing of the womenfolk when he had set fire to his father’s hall, burning those of his village who had been slaughtered by Jarl Randver’s men. ‘But you have asked, wolf-killer,’ the witch said, ‘and so I will tell you. I was called Bergljot once. Aye, Bergljot,’ she repeated the name, barely loud enough for him to hear, as if she had intrigued herself by speaking it aloud.

  ‘What are you doing out here alone, Bergljot?’ Sigurd asked. He pointed his spear back along the tracks which they had made. ‘We have come far. But you have come further by my reckoning.’

  He knew there were no villages for ten rôsts in any direction and that even had there been, this woman had not come from one of them. Then again, such as she probably lived alone in some herb-crammed hovel with only mice, birds and spiders for company.

  ‘It is safer for me to travel at night,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes, you have shown how that is so,’ Olaf said, nodding at the dead beast nearest him, but Sigurd knew what the woman had meant and Olaf knew too, for some folk would sooner throw a sack over a seiðr-wife’s head and fill her with spears than risk her dark magic shrivelling their manhood or sending them mad.

  ‘Do you see a scratch on me, Olaf Ollersson?’

  Sigurd and Svein looked at Olaf who looked at them, heavy-browed beyond the fog of his own breath, though it was not impossible that a witch should possess enough seiðr craft to know his name and his father’s name.

  ‘Whereas these poor creatures are quite dead,’ she said, crouching and thrusting a gloved hand into the thick fur of the wolf’s ruff. ‘As dead as your brothers, young Sigurd.’

  ‘Where are you bound?’ Sigurd asked her, beginning to feel about as comfortable as a man whose breeks are running with fleas.

  ‘You know where, young Sigurd,’ she said, standing, her face in the shadows now but the eyes in him like a cat’s claws.

  ‘We came out here to hunt, woman,’ Olaf said, ‘not stand here freezing our bollocks off talking to some seiðr-wife, regretting robbing a wolf of his feast.’

  Even Svein, who was a mountain next to the old woman, tensed at those words. But the woman laughed. She laughed and you would have thought she had been rinsing her guts with mead all night, not tramping through knee-deep snow and being beset by beasts that would have ripped her to shreds had she not been saved by men’s spears.

  ‘What is so funny?’ Sigurd asked her, his own ire pricked to be laughed at by the crone.

  ‘Aye, share it with us, for nothing warms the belly like a good laugh,’ Olaf said.

  ‘Nothing but spiced mead,’ Svein rumbled. ‘Which we ought to be drinking now instead of standing here growing snot icicles.’

  The witch lifted her staff and pointed the knobbed end at each of them in turn. ‘You are out here hunting,’ she said, the laughter gone now, vanished like breath in the air. ‘You are hunting and yet you are the ones being hunted.’

  Sigurd felt dread’s ice blade slide into his heart then, yet he shrugged her warning off like snowflakes before they could seep into the wool. ‘I have enemies, old woman. What of it?’

  ‘Enemies,’ she said. Sigurd thought he heard the creak of her brow warping as she said the word. ‘You have enemies the way a herring has a whale.’ She lifted one fur-clad arm and pointed at him, the catskin gloves white as the snow. ‘I see you, Haraldarson. I see you well.’

  ‘What else do you see, woman?’ Sigurd asked.

  ‘I see a flaming hearth and a plate of hot food,’ she said.

  That got a laugh even from Olaf, but Sigurd was still snared by what some wandering seiðr-wife seemed to know about him. He stared at her and she stared back and no one spoke, so that the silence lay as heavy as the white mantle weighing down the spruce boughs above them.

  Then Sigurd thrust his spear into the snow and trudged over to the big wolf he had killed, squatting to get a hold of the beast, his face almost in the snow so as to heft the dead weight up and over and on to his shoulders. Gods, you are heavy, he thought. But the wolf was warm too and Sigurd welcomed the feel of that last shadow of its life on his shoulders and against the back of his neck, even as the copper tang of its blood and the pungent stink of the shit which had leaked from it in death filled his nose.

  Olaf and Svein hefted their own beasts and the three of them turned back to follow their boot-tracks home again.

  And the witch went with them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘DO I HAVE to eat in the dark now?’ The king yelled, backhanding his bowl across the bench, its hot contents flying everywhere and even striking one of his hirðmen in the face. The warrior let the pottage scald his skin rather than be seen to wipe it away.

  ‘You, get some oil into that,’ Moldof growled at a thrall standing nearby, pointing at the nearest iron dish on its three long legs. ‘Before I take a brand from the hearth and shove it up your arse to see my food by.’

  The thrall was already moving amongst the benches and the bodies crammed on them, for such threats from the king’s former champion were as good as promises these days. Perhaps they always had been, but ever since he had lost his sword hand, and with it his arm up to the elbow, fighting Jarl Harald of Skudeneshavn the previous summer, Moldof had become as sour in mood as his face was to look at. Even wolf-jointed and using a blade left-handed, the giant was still more than a match for most of the king’s hearthmen, but he was no longer Gorm’s champion, could no longer claim the honou
r of standing at the king’s prow, and the shame came off him like a stink.

  ‘I should chain one or two of them to the rock and let them drink the fucking tide!’ King Gorm yelled, like a pot simmering over after being left too long above the flame, and his people tensed at their benches, hirðmen glancing at each other while their women looked for their children in the corners to make sure they were not making a nuisance of themselves with the king being in such foul temper.

  A big man named Hreidar leant over and snatched up his king’s empty drinking horn, then stood and plunged it into a bucket at the end of the table. He passed it back to Gorm, licking what he had spilled from the back of his hand, then raised his own horn to the king.

  ‘Death to your enemies, lord.’ He grinned. ‘But not before their pricks shrivel and their women see them begging for a sharp blade and a good swing behind it.’

  This got a chorus of cheers but nothing from Moldof other than a muttered curse that escaped his lips like a weak fart, for he hated Hreidar and of course he would, Hreidar being the king’s new champion. But Moldof held his tongue because he was one arm short of being able to beat the man if an insult grew to a fight.

  As for the king himself, he could not find a smile to bend the steel line of his lips but nodded and raised his horn at Hreidar, putting the thing to his mouth and drinking as though he had just swum across the fjord and had a throat as salty as Óðin’s seed.

  Then he looked to the dark end of the hall at the figure sitting on the end of a bench, hunched over his cup, talking to no one. Looking at no one. The man had given his name as Fionn, a name which Gorm had never had in his ears before and so did not know what it meant, but the man had said he was from Alba in the west, and no doubt that explained his warped, jumbled Norse and the fact that no one knew him, his kin or how he had come to be in Avaldsnes. And yet he’d sought an audience with Gorm and perhaps out of curiosity Gorm had listened to what he had to say. Fionn had heard about the king’s . . . problem. Could solve it for a price, he said. The nerve! Did he not think the king could clean up his own mess? Should have thrown the arrogant little shit out on his arse. But he hadn’t.