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

  ‘He is the son of a king and cannot swear loyalty to another man,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘Not even you?’ Svein said, grinning.

  ‘Not even me,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘Well, King Thorir owes us for making a man out of his son. That I do know,’ Svein said.

  Looking at Thorbiorn now Sigurd agreed with Svein about that. There was little sign of the preening, cunny-chasing young Dane they had met in the king’s hall at Skíringssalr. In his place was a warrior who had earned himself one or two boasts. It was Thorbiorn’s fleetness of foot when grabbing Jarl Hrani’s son Randver which had delivered the jarl and his men into Sigurd’s hands.

  ‘He might be pretty enough to be your sister but he deserves his place in the skjaldborg, I’ll give him that,’ Olaf put in, turning his face away from Thorbiorn so that his beard all but swallowed the words, ‘but don’t be telling him that yet. Praise can go to a young man’s head faster than ripe mead, and we all know that fighting with a skin full of mead can get a man killed.’

  ‘Aye, but you die happy,’ Bram put in, drinking ale from Guthrum’s men’s stash. The warriors around those cook fires might be mixing like fish oil and water but at least they were sharing what food and ale they had.

  And that is a start, Sigurd thought. Soon enough they would make the spear din together. They would soak their shoes with the slaughter’s dew. For Óðin was the Wild Huntsman tearing through the sky on his fearsome steed. And the raging winds from his passing were the wings of the storm.

  They came to Fornsigtuna on a grey day with their banners hoisted above their heads: Guthrum’s white battle axe in a sea of black, and Jarl Hrani’s black boar’s head on a yellow cloth, trembling in the gusts which brought spits of rain from the west.

  ‘I want a banner, Uncle,’ Sigurd said. They were moving not abreast like a loose shieldwall or in a spear-like column, but rather in one great mass, sweeping amongst the trees like the shadow of a wind-blown cloud, war gear clumping and fittings jingling and men’s voices merged in a low continuous hum.

  ‘You can have Guthrum’s after today,’ Olaf said and meant it. ‘He has no use for it now, for the worms or the flames won’t care who he is.’

  But Sigurd shook his head. ‘I want my own banner.’

  ‘I would have an axe,’ Svein said.

  ‘And have the same banner as Jarl Guthrum?’ Solmund asked him.

  Svein shrugged though he must have known that was not one of his better ideas.

  ‘A ship,’ Solmund said, puffing as they trudged up a slope whose long grass shared its dampness with their breeks, ‘for it shows you are a raiding man and someone who gets off his arse to go and see the world.’

  Sigurd liked the sound of that and said so, moving the Óðin spear on to his other shoulder as he did now and then to share the weight of it. His shield was slung over his back and it felt good being in his brynja again, Troll-Tickler at his hip. He had his helmet back too.

  ‘A ship?’ Moldof said, unimpressed. ‘Well that will make your enemies shiver with fear and shit in their breeks, won’t it?’ He shook his head.

  ‘Well then maybe we should put your head on a pole instead of a banner,’ Valgerd told Moldof, ‘for that would scare the birds out of the sky and have grown men crying for their mothers.’ For what King Gorm’s former prow man lacked in his right arm he made up for in his monstrous size and troll’s face.

  Olaf ordered tongues to be still now. The wood was thinning. Soon they would emerge from the trees on to the meadow upon whose hill Jarl Guthrum had built his borg, and they did not want to announce their arrival just yet.

  ‘A wolf,’ Floki said, breaking the new silence. ‘Just the head but make sure the teeth can be seen.’ He did not say more because he did not have to. A wolf’s head banner needed no explanation.

  ‘A wolf,’ Sigurd said with a nod, seeing the banner in the eye of his mind. It was perfect, and even Svein, who would still have preferred an axe, could not disagree.

  And soon they came to the edge of the woods, where their noses filled with the tang of a war host’s encampment, with woodsmoke, thyme and onions, the sweet scent of butchered meat, the stink of burning iron from the forge, the melted beeswax with which the smith coated the finished blades, and the reek of shit from the pits and from the pigs and sheep pens. Sigurd halted the war band there, telling Asgrim to be ready just in case, then went closer with Olaf and Hrani, the three of them keeping to cover as best they could.

  Beyond the animal pens and the men’s tents, looming over the camp on a hill not much bigger than the largest of the kings’ mounds at Ubsola, stood the borg. Alrik’s borg these days, anyone would have to admit, and it looked as unobtainable as an aerie, its timbers scorched black in places, repaired here and there, but solid enough and as defiant as when Sigurd had last seen the place.

  Olaf pointed out Knut who was standing on the ramparts above the main gate, watchful as ever even though Sigurd doubted Guthrum’s men would have risked their lives in another assault without their jarl. Warriors such as those whom Guthrum had left behind were more inclined towards brave or reckless acts when their lord was watching because he might reward their efforts.

  ‘Like pigs in a bloody sty,’ Jarl Hrani said, taking it all in.

  ‘Aye, but rich pigs,’ Olaf reminded him and Hrani nodded, because for all that he was unimpressed with Alrik for allowing himself to be trapped, his eyes had lit at the talk of all that silver and iron stashed inside the borg.

  ‘Not so rich soon,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘So we’re going to take this place?’ Jarl Hrani said, not seeming against the idea even though he knew Guthrum himself had tried and failed.

  ‘No,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘We’d break too many teeth trying to get the marrow out of that bone,’ Olaf said. ‘Seen it happen.’

  ‘There is an easier way to relieve Alrik of some of his hoard,’ Sigurd told them, looking to the west to see how long it would be before the sun boiled the distant sea. He smiled because it would be night soon. ‘A much easier way,’ he said.

  And there was.

  The nights now were more like proper nights. It was as dark as it was going to get, and still, barely a breeze to stir an old man’s beard, so that the smoke from the fires inside and outside the borg hung in the sky like low cloud. And again Sigurd could not help but wonder if the Allfather’s hand was in the game, because he had made it to the walls unnoticed. He had walked between the fires of Guthrum’s men and climbed the hill and no shouts of alarm had punctured the still night. He was invisible. He was a ghost, passing through the night as a draugr can pass even through solid rock or the timbers of the hall in which it once drank and feasted with the living.

  He waited a while at the foot of the wall, cloaked and crouching, the scent of charred timbers in his nose as he hissed like a cat until one of Alrik’s men above peered over the edge and saw him. For a heartbeat the man’s eyes bulged and his mouth opened as if to yell that the borg was under attack, but his mind was quicker than his mouth and he realized that Sigurd was alone and one man did not an attack make.

  ‘It’s the Norseman, the one Jarl Guthrum took off to Ubsola,’ another man said, leaning out over the palisade beside his companion.

  ‘What are you doing back here?’ the first man hissed down at Sigurd.

  ‘Throw me a rope,’ Sigurd said, looking over his shoulder to make sure none of Guthrum’s men were coming up that hill to kill him. For some reason Alrik’s men seemed reluctant to haul him over the wall. No doubt they were surprised to see him again, for they would have expected him to be a rotting corpse by now. But still. ‘Do it now,’ he growled up at them, ‘unless you want to spend the rest of your days trapped here like rats in the rain barrel.’

  The two men looked at each other and shrugged, then one of them disappeared and Sigurd decided that if Alrik’s man had not gone off to fetch a rope he would burn the place down himself.

  ‘Up you come then,’
the Svearman said as a rope thumped against the timbers and more faces, one of them Knut’s, appeared in the gloom above. Sigurd climbed.

  ‘I never thought to see your face again, Byrnjolf,’ Knut said, scratching the nub of gristle which was all that remained of his left ear. ‘Or should I call you Sigurd these days?’ He had been wolf-lean before but now he was sunken-cheeked and looked ten years older than when Sigurd had seen him last, and looking at the others too it was clear that Alrik’s men were starving. ‘Better go and see Alrik then,’ Knut said. So they did.

  ‘My name is Sigurd Haraldarson. I killed Jarl Randver of Hinderå. I vow to kill King Gorm of Avaldsnes whom men call oath-breaker.’ They stood by the gates, Sigurd, Knut and Alrik himself, along with some forty of his men who had come from their beds to see Sigurd for themselves and hear what news he had of Jarl Guthrum.

  ‘Even when you were Byrnjolf Hálfdanarson it was clear to me that you were an ambitious man,’ Alrik said, ‘and indeed you must be to have made enemies of jarls and kings.’ You could say one thing for Alrik, and that was that he had not pecked away at some secret store by the looks but had hungered with the rest of his men. The skin of his face was taut and the veins beneath his eyes showed like mould in cheese. ‘But it is also clear that you are a difficult man to kill, Sigurd Haraldarson, so whoever this Norse king is I would advise him to make friends with you even if it costs him a sea chest of silver or a pretty daughter.’ Still, there was suspicion in the warlord’s sunken eyes for all that he was trying to be patient and let Sigurd unfurl this story in his own time.

  ‘So are you going to tell us how you escaped from that turd Guthrum?’ Knut asked so that his lord would not have to appear too eager. ‘And why if you were a free man and could go anywhere in the world, you would climb back into this trap again, for it is not as though you are oath-sworn to my lord.’

  Sigurd nodded. ‘I will come to all of that later, Knut,’ he said. ‘First I want to agree a price with Lord Alrik.’

  ‘A price for what?’ Alrik asked, his eyes all but disappearing in a suspicious squint.

  Sigurd let a smile come to his lips, not that he could have stopped it. ‘What will you pay me to make those men out there vanish?’ he asked, then turned to Knut and fluttered fingers at him. ‘Vanish like smoke in a strong wind.’

  Alrik laughed but there was no mirth in it. ‘And how would you do that, Norseman?’ he asked, a hint of scorn in Norseman.

  ‘What would you pay me?’ Sigurd said again, ignoring the man’s question. ‘How much of your silver and iron hoard?’

  ‘Who does this Norseman think he is?’ one of Alrik’s men rumbled, stirring a few insults and complaints, which Sigurd did not mind for he knew he was coming close to treading on their pride with his talk of saving them, like Beowulf saying he would save Hroðgar and his Danes from the monster which was preying on them.

  ‘I don’t know what has happened to you since we saw you last, but we in this borg are not so fond of riddles these days,’ Knut said, and there was an edge of threat in it, but Alrik nodded, having decided to play Sigurd’s game if only to see how it ended.

  He gestured to the unseen enemy beyond the walls. ‘If you took this noose from my neck I would give you half of it,’ he told Sigurd.

  Sigurd looked at the lean faces of those gathered there in the firebrands’ copper glow. ‘You will give me half of your silver and iron hoard if I make Jarl Guthrum’s men disappear so that you may fill your bellies again and come and go as you please.’ He said it loud enough for all of them to hear, for he needed witnesses, for all that Alrik looked angry now because he suspected Sigurd was somehow making a fool of him.

  The warlord nodded. ‘You did not tell me you were a famous godi, Sigurd Haraldarson, for this will have to be some powerful seiðr,’ he said, forcing a smile.

  ‘Powerful and fast-working too,’ Sigurd said, ‘as you will see tomorrow at dusk when you look out from the ramparts and see only smoking ashes and sheep droppings where there was a war host before.’

  Knut and Alrik looked at each other, two hungry men, tired from this feud with Jarl Guthrum, spirit-weary from keeping their constant vigil from the walls lest their enemies come to steal their silver and iron. They did not like this game Sigurd was playing but if there was any chance at all that he could do what he promised, then these Svearmen would raise their hopes to the wind and see where they blew.

  ‘So your friends found you then? In Ubsola?’ Alrik said, seeking to draw more from Sigurd with this other approach.

  Sigurd looked at the night beyond the flickering bloom of the flamelight. The sooner he got back the better. He turned to the two men who had helped haul him over the palisade.

  ‘Come with me. You are going to lower me back over the wall.’ They did not even look to their lord, but nodded without a word. Sigurd turned to Alrik. ‘Tomorrow then, Lord Alrik,’ he said. ‘And as well as ridding you of Guthrum’s men I will have six pigs brought to the gate. You look hungry.’

  Now it was Alrik’s turn to nod, the warlord not knowing what to say to this young Norseman who promised to do the impossible. Then Sigurd left them standing there and climbed the bank up to the ramparts, and the two men followed with the rope.

  Guthrum’s war host surrounding the borg barely had the chance to shrug themselves into brynjur, tie helmet thongs and pick up their shields before it became clear to them that there would be no clash of shieldwalls to greet the dawn. They recognized their jarl’s champion Asgrim and Halvdan and their other sword-brothers coming across the meadow under their lord’s axe banner. Doubtless they were surprised to see those men walking beside the Norsemen who had shown up at the borg those few weeks previously, their own boar’s head banner rippling in the wind which had begun to stir when Sigurd had returned from his talk with Alrik.

  ‘I cannot say I will miss the stink,’ Svein said through a grimace as Sigurd walked out ahead of his war host with the sack containing Guthrum’s head. Asgot had covered the dead face with honey, smearing it across the eyes and the gory, gristly mess of the severed neck, saying that it would slow the rot, but Sigurd had not set eyes on the head for a few days now and he hoped it did not look as bad as it smelt. Asgrim went with him and Sigurd could tell from his silence and the set of his jaw that the champion was at the least uneasy and perhaps even afraid. Sigurd liked him all the more for it, too, because it was no small thing for a man to murder his own jarl and it was good that Asgrim knew that. But the big man did not know how Guthrum’s war host would take the news. A man’s reputation could rot quicker than a severed head if his sword-brothers turned against him.

  Asgrim might not know what was going to happen, but Sigurd did. He had spun the whole thing of it in his mind and he approached these Svearmen as if he had already spoken the words and they the reply.

  But it was Asgrim who would speak first.

  ‘Brothers!’ he called, as the Svearmen came to gather round. They were surprised to see Sigurd, but more interested to know where their jarl was. ‘You all know that Jarl Guthrum lost the favour of the Æsir,’ Asgrim said. ‘It had run from him like water down a rock face.’ He was no skald, Asgrim, which was just as well. Who would want to watch that face as a good story and pretty word pictures poured out of it?

  ‘He was lucky once,’ one of the older warriors said; ‘he could be lucky again. Men lose the gods’ favour and then earn it back.’

  Asgrim shook his head. ‘Not Guthrum,’ he said.

  ‘So where is he?’ another warrior asked, lifting his spear in agitation. ‘He has left us here like we are shepherds watching the sheep.’

  ‘He did not have much choice,’ Sigurd said, thrusting the Óðin spear’s shaft into the earth and opening the sack, trying not to screw up his face at the stench that hit him. He plunged his hand in and took hold of the hair that was sticky with honey, then hoisted it up so that all could see. A murmur rose from the warriors, punctuated by curses and mutterings and the hum of men spreading t
he news to those at the back who could not crane their necks quite enough to see the head for themselves. ‘When one of your own men cuts your head off, well then you know that your luck is never coming back,’ Sigurd said and Asgrim glared at him because that was not how the champion had planned on putting it.

  ‘I killed Jarl Guthrum because if I had not, we would all have followed him to a bad death. He would have led us to it because he was cursed and you all knew it.’ Asgrim stood tall and strong. Little things like the way a man stood mattered at such times and Asgrim knew it.

  ‘So what has the Norseman to do with it?’ a voice called from somewhere amongst the throng. Men were staring at the head in Sigurd’s hand and though his arm was beginning to shake with the weight of it, for a man’s head is a heavy thing, Sigurd kept it up there because he needed them all to know, to be sure that it was in fact their jarl’s for all that it was green now and somewhat shrivelled and of course half burnt.

  ‘This is Sigurd Haraldarson, the son of a famous Norse jarl,’ Asgrim announced, ‘and he will lead us towards fame and reputations which will shine long after we have met our deaths in the sword-song and the red war.’

  ‘You’d have us follow a Norseman?’ a warrior asked, turning to spit but finding there was no room to do it.

  Sigurd pulled the spear from the ground; the spear upon which men would swear loyalty to him. ‘I will be your ring-giver in exchange for your oath,’ he said, keeping it simple because he did not think he needed to oversell it, for what else were these warriors going to do? Go back to their homes with nothing to show for their time with Jarl Guthrum? Sell their swords and their helmets and become farmers to be ruled by the soil and the seasons?