Winter's Fire: (The Rise of Sigurd 2) Page 3

  And there he is, under my roof for some reason. Drinking my mead.

  At a gesture from Queen Kadlin, a birch-thin man named Galti took the bukkehorn from his belt and began playing the liveliest tune he knew. The queen nodded and swept an arm out to signal that everyone should fall back to their food and drink, which they did, rekindling conversations and leaving Gorm Shield-Shaker to steep in his own ire, as he had done for weeks now. The king felt the ill-mood on his face from the moment he awoke to the last drop of mead when he fell back into his bed skins and snored the night away or, more often, lay looking up at the beams, listening to the mice scratching away in the reeds. It was like an ache, like an old blade wound or mended bone that nagged whenever rain threatened. And there was nothing he could do to shake it off. Neither women nor mead could make him forget.

  Haraldarson.

  ‘Why would you bring that up now, Hreidar?’ he asked, dropping those words on to the hall’s thrum like a flat rock on to water.

  Hreidar frowned, recalling the last thing he had said. ‘About killing your enemies?’ He jutted his chin. ‘The boy Sigurd needs to die.’

  ‘That boy slaughtered Jarl Randver,’ Moldof growled, his ugly mouth and a bucket’s worth of ale warping the words.

  The king said nothing.

  Hreidar shrugged. ‘We know where he is hiding,’ he said, ‘and we know that he does not have even half a crew with him.’ He glanced at some of the other big-bearded, blade-scarred men sitting at their king’s mead bench. ‘It would be no more trouble than shaking out a fur to rid it of fleas. Let us sail up there and squash this Sigurd Haraldarson before we snug Storm-Bison up in her naust for the winter.’

  Fionn from Alba looked up at this, though his dark eyes revealed nothing.

  King Gorm eyeballed Hreidar, feeling the muscles beneath his beard – more iron than copper his beard these days, he knew – bouncing with the anger he fought to contain.

  ‘You are not my prow man for the wits in your skull, Hreidar, but because you are big and ugly and yet have two hands on the ends of your arms. I would sooner ask my hounds for advice than you.’

  This was no light insult but Hreidar was still flush with pride at being made Gorm’s champion and so his lord’s words slid off him like water off a gull’s wing.

  ‘Still, he is right if you ask me,’ Moldof put in, which had Hreidar’s brows bending because that was the last place from which he expected support. ‘If you leave a rats’ nest alone for any length of time, when you uncover it again you will be up to your knees in the creatures. So it may be with this young man, if we do not deal with him now while he is weak. While he has nothing but the skin on his own back and an ambition that might as well sit at the top of Yggdrasil for all the chance he has of getting his hands on it.’

  ‘His ambition is to see me dead,’ the king muttered into his beard, fingering the new torc of gold which he wore at his neck.

  ‘That it is,’ Moldof said, ‘and who can blame him for thirsting after it, given how things played out?’ The king would not answer that.

  ‘He has a fine ship, let us not forget,’ a man named Otkel said, ‘a fine ship and barely the men to sail it let alone wet the oars and get its wings beating. Reinen would look good in your berth, lord. It would make even Storm-Bison crave new paint and an arse scraping.’

  ‘We should spear the lad while he’s licking his wounds,’ a big-bellied, ruddy-faced warrior called Ham said. ‘With two crews we’ll pick the bones of Jarl Burner’s old hall clean.’

  ‘Aye, there must be plunder worth having up there, for unless I missed it, Burner’s son never came here to pay his silver dues,’ Hreidar said.

  ‘That’s because Thengil Hakonarson had nothing,’ Moldof said. ‘Never raided a day in his worthless life, that one. Which is the only reason we left him squirming up there in his father’s shadow like a worm in a dung heap.’

  ‘You are all full of advice sitting here in my hall with my food in your bellies and my mead on your breath,’ the king told them, ‘knowing that the only fight you will have tonight is to get your women’s legs open when you crawl to bed.’ He fluttered thick fingers at them, his rings glinting in the light of the newly lit lamp nearby. ‘You crow about fighting but you see only a part of the thing. Like mackerel swimming around the keel never knowing that there is a whole ship above them. Bilge and ballast and thwarts full of men.’

  ‘And those men full of thoughts and fears, hopes and doubts,’ someone said, but no one was interested in poetry now.

  ‘But it would not be a fight,’ Ham countered, sucking at a bone he had fished from his bowl, ‘more like slaughtering a few pigs for the Jól feast.’ He licked his fingers and wiped them in the bush of his beard. ‘Let me take some of the youngens up there. There are a few that could do with being blooded.’ He looked at Hreidar and shrugged, and the king’s champion nodded.

  ‘There will never be a better time to finish this and be done with the last of Jarl Harald’s litter,’ he said. Others nodded and growled their agreement and they were like men poking sticks into the embers to raise a flame.

  ‘The young man is Óðin-favoured!’ the king blurted, then grimaced as though wishing he could take the words back, as if by saying them it confirmed their truth. But then this thing had been gnawing at him for so long that maybe it was just as well to get it out there now. Maybe someone could put his mind at ease. Looking at the faces around him he doubted it.

  ‘It is true young Sigurd has been lucky,’ Otkel said. ‘He has kept his head afloat on a sea of blood that should have drowned him along with his father and brothers and all of Jarl Harald’s hirðmen.’ He scratched his cheek. ‘Perhaps it is more than luck.’

  ‘He has avoided death the way smoke avoids the fist which tries to grip it,’ Moldof said.

  ‘Aye, and then there is that business with the tree,’ King Gorm said, as if the words tasted rancid.

  No one spoke for a few moments then, for they all had heard the tale of how Sigurd had walked in the Allfather’s footsteps, sacrificing himself as the hanged god had, tied amongst the branches of a tree and left to starve. And yet the young man had not starved. He endured for nine days, men said, and in that time was shown visions of his own future. He earned himself the Hangaguð’s attention and with it his favour so that perhaps only a fool would try to fight him now. Even Jarl Randver, a powerful jarl who could call on hundreds of spears, had been unable to beat him in the end, had failed to turn aside the death which Sigurd had brazenly brought to the man’s own hall. There were always whispers stirring like dry floor rushes in the king’s hall, that the young warrior Sigurd Haraldarson was beloved of the Æsir. And King Gorm, who feared no man, did fear old One-Eye and had no wish to anger the gods.

  ‘It is no small thing to have an Óðin-favoured man for an enemy,’ King Gorm said and none of them could disagree with that. He stabbed a finger against his temple where a big vein throbbed beneath the skin. ‘It has been at me like Nídhögg at the roots of Yggdrasil that what we did to Jarl Harald has turned the lords of Asgard against us. That I have poisoned my own wyrd with that—’ he chewed his lip rather than say the word betrayal, though there was not a man there who did not know what he had bitten back.

  ‘If the gods had not wanted Jarl Harald dead they would not have made it so easy for us to kill him,’ Hreidar said, almost smiling.

  ‘Ha! Easy, you say?’ Moldof spat, sweeping his wolf-joint through the hearth smoke. ‘I do not recall you fighting the man, Hreidar. Nor do I recall it being so easy.’

  He spoke truly: Hreidar, Otkel, Ham and many other warriors in that hall remembered Moldof’s fight with Harald, just as Gorm himself did. How could they not? Even men who were not there on the day talked of it. It had been like the clash of two giant bull elks, neither man giving or asking for quarter, and it was already the stuff of skald songs. Not that that made up for losing half an arm and his place at his king’s prow as far as Moldof was concerned, which he made pl
ain by his constant sulking.

  ‘Still, Harald and all but one of his sons are dead,’ Hreidar said. ‘His wife is dead and his hall is ashes and we have got not even a scratch from this god-favoured runt.’ He raised his hands, their palms all callus, tough as boiled leather from the oar and sword and shield work. ‘Yes the boy somehow beat Jarl Randver,’ he went on, ‘but before his sword dried he flew the coop as though his feathers were on fire. Even now Randver’s son’s arse polishes his father’s high seat, the man waiting for your permission to wear the jarl torc.’ He gestured eastward with his mead horn. ‘The waters are smooth again over in Hinderå and what does Sigurd have to show for it?’

  ‘Hrani will fill Randver’s boots well enough,’ an older man called Alfgeir affirmed with a nod. Alfgeir had been quiet up to now but King Gorm nodded at him, acknowledging his opinion as one which was actually worth something.

  Ham gave a great belch then held up a fat finger. ‘Then why don’t we stay out of the mire of it all and let Hrani Randversson deal with young Sigurd? No one can say he does not have a debt to settle with the lad.’ He took a hunk of bread and ran it around the inside of his bowl. ‘Let the Hinderå men mop up the last of this mess while we drink the winter away.’

  ‘You would like that, hey, Ham?’ Hreidar said. ‘Sitting on your fat arse while other men do the work for you.’

  Ham shrugged. Why wouldn’t he like it?

  ‘Haraldarson’s attack on Jarl Randver was an attack on us all. He insults us,’ Moldof said. ‘He insults the king!’ The folk of Avaldsnes had not heard the former champion raise his voice above a growl since he had lost his sword arm, and so they looked up now and it just happened that the music stopped, Galti taking the bukkehorn from his lips and watching the king’s table like everyone else.

  ‘Let me go and finish it, lord,’ Moldof said. ‘I will find the young wolf and gut him. I will put rocks where his gut rope was and sink him in the fjord.’ He tapped his own temple where an old scar puckered the skin. ‘You will never need to have him in your thought box again.’

  ‘But you are needed here, Moldof, to protect the women and growl at children to help mothers get them into bed,’ Hreidar said, which got some grins though no one dared to laugh.

  ‘Watch your tongue, Hreidar,’ Moldof gnarred, ‘unless you want to dig your own burial mound with it.’

  Hreidar’s teeth flashed in his beard. ‘That might have had my mouth dry as one of old Hroald’s farts once.’ He shook his head. ‘But I have never seen a man with one arm scare anything other than the broth in the pot.’

  Moldof’s ill-favoured face twisted and he hauled his great bulk out from the mead bench, drawing up to his full height like a dragon ship’s sail hauled up the mast.

  With a word King Gorm might have smothered the flames of this before they grew. Instead he lifted the mead horn to his lips and sat back in his chair, relieved to see men’s attentions shift from his burdens regarding his wyrd and the son of the man he had betrayed, to the two warriors, who now drained their own horns and set them on the mead-stained boards.

  ‘Sit down, you hot-headed bulls,’ Alfgeir said, flapping his arm up and down like a cormorant’s wing. ‘Before someone gives offence that can only be repaid in blood.’

  ‘I will sit when Moldof admits that his glory days are wake ripples off the stern,’ Hreidar said, as the others around the table, but for the king himself, stood and pushed back the benches so that they could get out of the way. And perhaps Hreidar had been waiting for this moment to fully step out of the former champion’s shadow, which was still long these days one arm or no. For it would be easier for Moldof to sprout a new limb than to ignore this challenge. He threw himself at Hreidar, who twisted aside as Moldof’s left fist flew wide, the momentum carrying the bigger man forward so that he turned and fell hard on to the rush-strewn floor. A collective gasp rose to the rafters of King Gorm’s hall as folk who had always held Moldof in awe now beheld him lying at another man’s feet in the spilled mead and mouse turds.

  ‘Sigurd Haraldarson will piss his breeks with fear when he hears that you are coming for him,’ Hreidar said, shaking his head. He stepped back to give Moldof the space to rise and those standing behind him moved back as one, like a wave. Moldof swung again but Hreidar threw up both forearms to block the blow then lashed out with his right fist, hammering it against Moldof’s left cheek. Moldof instinctively swung his own right arm but it was just a stump and it looked pathetic waving about like that, not even nearly reaching the king’s champion. Then he strode forward and rammed his shoulder into Hreidar’s chest, his great mass irresistible so that Hreidar was thrown backwards, the breath driven from his lungs as Moldof brought his left fist up, the knuckles gouging the skin from Hreidar’s forehead. But the king’s champion grinned and threw himself forward, leading with his right elbow, and Moldof, who was like an ill-ballasted boat for he had yet to learn the new balance of his one-armed self, took the blow and stumbled, the back of his knees hitting a bench so that he tipped over it and landed in a heap.

  King Gorm shook his head, ashamed to see the once great warrior bested so easily. ‘Might have been a different matter if they’d used blades,’ he rumbled under his breath to the man beside him.

  ‘Stay down, man!’ Alfgeir told Moldof, ‘for you will piss on your own saga and be remembered as a wolf-jointed fool.’ But the one-armed warrior spat a curse and made to rise.

  ‘Enough of this,’ King Gorm said at last, giving Hreidar cold eyes. ‘I would expect this from new beards trying to impress my bed slaves, but not from you.’

  Hreidar looked from Moldof to his king, then nodded and showed Gorm his palm by way of an apology. He extended the same hand to Moldof, happy as he was to help him up now that he had filled every eye in that hall with the humiliation of the king’s former prow man.

  Moldof spat on to the floor rushes, eyeballing Hreidar who shrugged and climbed back on to the bench, swiping at the blood on his forehead and licking it from his hand before washing it down with more mead.

  ‘I will bring you Sigurd’s head and slaughter those who are loyal to him,’ Moldof told the king.

  ‘Ha! I would like to see you rowing round in circles trying to find him,’ Hreidar said, and this got some laughter from men who spun the picture of that in their minds, though not from the king who was half sorry for his former champion and half ashamed of him.

  ‘I stood at our king’s prow when you were still learning one end of a spear from the other,’ Moldof growled at Hreidar, turning those small boar’s eyes on the other men at the king’s table, men with whom he had not only endured the steel-storm often, but above whom his own legend had risen long ago. ‘I have killed more men than you have had fucks.’ This got some muttering but nothing out loud, for no one felt able to argue with Moldof on this point, which was saying something given the women of Avaldsnes. The king smiled, though, to show his appreciation of Moldof’s insult and, more importantly, to show that he knew the man could not possibly have aimed that barb about fucking in his direction.

  ‘Keep your feet by the fire this winter,’ Moldof told them, ‘and I will go and get this thing done with half the arms but twice the balls.’ With that he called for more mead and the hum of the hall flowed back over the whole thing like the sea over a blood offering. Talk at the benches turned to ship maintenance and the mead supply and the taxes which King Gorm could expect from skippers wanting to sail north up the narrow channel below their hilltop perch. Shield-Shaker himself went back to his brooding, the thread of this Sigurd problem too tangled for him to find the end of it. Should he leave the young man alone and hope the whole storm of it calmed in time, but risk Sigurd coming back to bite him? Or would it be better to go after him now and kill him, but in doing so risk angering the gods further, for surely all men could see that Haraldarson was Óðin-favoured?

  These dark thoughts were a mire from which King Gorm with all his silver and sharp steel could not free himself.

>   And whilst the king brooded, Moldof drank, getting used to holding the horn in his left hand, because it was always a good thing to fill your belly with mead before going hunting.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘DO YOU BELIEVE her, Asgot?’ Sigurd asked. He took the fur off his shoulders and leant over to put it around his sister, who had been doing a poor job of trying not to shiver, even near the fire as she was. Runa nestled into the fur and smiled at Sigurd, though his eyes were back on the godi who for once had undone his beard rope in order to pull his comb through it and strip it of its crew of lice. He might have the gods’ whispers in his ears with every other breeze, but the man looked older with his greying beard splayed out like that, Sigurd thought.

  ‘Do I believe that men are coming to kill you?’ Asgot asked, staring at the witch who sat alone by the other hearth staring into the flames as though they were tongues whose speech she could hear. ‘Or do I believe that this seiðr-wife learnt all about you from the Norns? That those spinners of men’s wyrds Urd, Verdandi and Skuld revealed you to this witch and told her to seek you out with this warning?’

  Sigurd frowned and shrugged. ‘Any of it,’ he said.

  Asgot’s thin lips twisted. ‘You do not need knowledge of seiðr-craft to know that you have made enemies and that those men want you dead.’

  ‘She knew my name.’

  ‘You have a reputation, Haraldarson,’ Asgot said.

  ‘Aye,’ Olaf put in, ‘yet we were out there up to our balls in snow, fur-clad and freezing our arses off, not lording it in silver torcs and skald song. The cold forest doesn’t give a toss about reputation.’

  Now it was Asgot who shrugged. ‘A cat does not care about the sea and yet it can smell it on the air.’