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

  But the sea was the richest treasure in the hoard of that day. It shone like a dented old helmet after a good polishing and was almost too bright to look at. A sleeping sea this morning, after the wind-tossed rollers of the previous day. Good for rowing, fishing, or taking a skiff to the shallow places to snatch up crabs or tempt them with meat on the end of a string. Good for washing in too, Runa thought now, squinting against the silver glare of it.

  ‘I’m going to bathe,’ she said. ‘After that I must get back to milk the goats. A wash wouldn’t hurt you, you know,’ she told Ingel, raising an eyebrow at the man who lay back on his elbows in the grass beside her. The young smith was soot-stained and sweat-grimed, and yet from the way he grinned at Runa now anyone would think he was proud of his own stink. Not that Runa had minded it as she had straddled him in their nest of dewy grass, the two of them having sneaked away while the other women were beginning their daily tasks and Ingel’s father Ibor was bringing the forge up to heat with the bellows.

  But that was then. Now there was work to be done and, with the thrill of their coupling fading in Runa, receding like the tide, she was aware of the dirt on him, matted in his long hair and beard and ingrained in his skin so that the creases at the edges of his smiling eyes were as white as milk on the rare occasions he wore his serious face. Which he did now, though it took every effort by the looks.

  ‘I’ll bathe for you, Runa Haraldsdóttir,’ he said, ‘even though I do not see much point, for I will be covered in soot and grease again before midday.’ He raised a callused finger. ‘But only if we do it together. I swim like an anvil and will need to hang on to you so that I do not drown.’ Now the smile came to his lips and Runa struck his thigh with the back of her hand and tutted at his nonsense, for she had seen him swim like an otter more than once, the last time being when he and his father were off shore with the nets. She had watched Ingel jump over the side to cool down after rowing halfway round Fugløy and hauling in a bilge-load of mackerel.

  ‘You are a hopeless liar, blacksmith,’ she said now, pursing her own lips on a smile she did not want to give him. She almost resented Ingel for his arrogance. For his knowing that he could have her, even looking like a black elf from one of the stories Runa’s father Jarl Harald used to tell her when he wanted to frighten her.

  No, when I wanted him to frighten me, she thought, remembering. ‘Come then,’ she said, climbing to her feet and looking back towards the tree line to make sure none of the other women had come looking for her, however unlikely that was. With the High Mother Skuld Snorradóttir off seeking guidance from the gods, there was a slackness to island life, the Freyja Maidens working with only half the usual purpose and endeavour. Skuld’s absence was not the only reason for this. It was more than the mice playing while the cat was out of the way. Runa knew that the Prophetess’s words about the future of their fellowship, her questioning of their way of life in uncertain times, had been like the serpent Nídhögg gnawing at the roots of the World Tree, so that the Freyja Maidens of Fugløy truly believed their way of life might come tumbling down.

  And yet a good many of them were more than a little excited by the prospect of leaving the island and returning to the world. The idea of that had turned their heads and their thoughts from the everyday patterns which they had lived by up to now.

  Runa’s friend Drífa had been born on Fugløy and knew nothing else, no other life, but that only made her more eager to leave and she for one desperately hoped that the High Mother would return with the pronouncement that the Maidens were to leave this place and venture forth.

  ‘It is hard to worry about next winter’s hay when we may be living in King Thorir’s hall by then,’ Drífa had said when their friend Vebiorg announced that they should be cutting and drying what little grass grew on Fugløy while this good weather lasted.

  ‘What makes you think the king will have us under his roof and share his meat with us?’ Vebiorg had asked. ‘He is happy to send us his smoked mutton, his weak ale and his blacksmiths, because he thinks it will buy him a place in Freyja the Giver’s hall when he keels over, but he does not want a hall full of blade-wearing women.’

  Drífa had frowned at her, but knowing nothing of the world beyond Fugløy’s shores she could not put up an argument.

  Still, with Skuld away there was more sword, spear and shield work going on than mundane tasks such as spinning shorn wool into thread or searching for gulls’ eggs or scything grass to feed the animals next winter.

  ‘Wait for me!’ Ingel called after Runa, finally dragging himself to his feet now that Runa was up to her ankles in a rock pool a crab’s scuttle from the lapping tide.

  She shivered at the water’s touch and looked out across the sea which shone like the silver of a jarl torc. Later in the day the air would be warm enough to bathe and not shiver half to death after, but she was up to her knees now and would not let Ingel see that she was cold. He already knew too much about her. Knew her body as well as a man could, which was itself such a shock to Runa; she wondered what her brother Sigurd would make of it were he to find out.

  At least her thoughts and feelings were still her own. Ingel could not have that part of her. Not yet. Perhaps when they were married.

  ‘It’s cold,’ he said, coming to stand beside her, bending to bring handfuls of water up and on to his skin to prepare his body for the plunge. Runa laughed and took his hand, leading him deeper, her feet gripping the weed-slick rocks as Ingel cursed the chill water and huffed and puffed.

  Was she really thinking of marrying him? They had never brought it up, but neither had Ingel been with any of the other Freyja Maidens since he had lain with her. That must mean something. Certainly he did not seem to mind the scar which some nithing raider’s arrow had carved in her face from just below her left eye to her ear. A disfigurement which Runa had been ashamed of but which Skuld the High Mother had told her to be proud of. ‘Such battle runes speak for us, Runa,’ Skuld had said. ‘They tell our tales as well as any skald.’

  Runa felt the sea breeze on the scar now, as gently as Ingel’s lips had brushed against it earlier. A shiver ran through her and she tried not to think of what her brother would say if he could see her now, arse-naked and hand in hand with a filthy blacksmith who was cursing as the cold water shrivelled the snake between his legs.

  You should not have left me behind, Sigurd, she thought, setting her jaw as the water shocked the skin between her hips and waist. Wondering where her brother was now and resenting him for abandoning her. Wishing he could see how good she had become with sword and spear, as much as she dreaded him knowing about Ingel.

  ‘There,’ the smith said, ‘see there.’ He was pointing with his free hand to the north beyond the pine-covered sliver of the island which jutted out into the sea. ‘You see it? There! An arrow-shot off shore.’

  ‘Too small for Storm-Elk,’ Runa said, having been struck with the sudden fear that it was King Thorir’s ship come to take Ingel and his father back to Skíringssalr. The blacksmiths were the only men permitted to set foot on the island, tasked with repairing the Freyja Maidens’ weapons and forging what needed forging. But even they must return to Thorir’s hall when the king sent for them.

  No. Runa could see now that the boat being rowed towards the bay beyond that knife blade of land was just a færing. She sharpened her eyes upon it, which was no easy thing because of the glittering glare coming off the sea. Two pairs of oars, no more.

  ‘Sibbe and Guthrun?’ Ingel suggested, for those two had gone off fishing before sunrise. But Runa shook her head.

  ‘They will be on the west side,’ she said. She had lived on Fugløy long enough by now to know that if you wanted to make your arm ache from pulling in mackerel and, now and then, something bigger like a codfish, you took the boat out to a place which the women called Flea Rock because the water there was as thick with fish as fleas on a dog.

  ‘News from the king then,’ Ingel said, his gaze lingering a moment on the distant
craft before he turned to make his way back to dry land and his clothes and shoes which lay piled in the grass.

  But Runa was already splashing through the rock pools then throwing her own tunic over her wet skin and thrusting her legs into her breeks. Because perhaps whoever was in that færing had word of Sigurd. What if he were dead? What if King Gorm or Jarl Hrani had caught up with him? No. She would not believe that. He had left her on this island because he would not make her endure the outcast’s life he had chosen for himself after King Gorm betrayed their father and Jarl Randver had brought slaughter to their village. But he would not leave her alone in this world, would not make the journey to the afterlife without her.

  Runa thought all this as she ran across the rocks and long grass, scattering butterflies and bees before her and looking up to the bluff where one of the other women was on watch. That woman was standing on the rock at the edge of the bluff to get a better look at the boat and its crew, and Runa saw that it was her friend Vebiorg. She waved at Runa now to acknowledge that she had seen the craft, then turned and was gone, back to warn the others that they should expect visitors.

  So Runa ran, leaping a fallen tree and ducking a spider’s web which shimmered between two hazels. Then through the birch and thickets and up to the higher ground that would take her over the ridge and down into the bay where those in the rowboat meant to come ashore.

  And Ingel, despite not yet owning the brawn that his father had earned from a lifetime in the forge, could not keep up with her.

  Runa watched as the man pulled the little boat up the beach, the small stones crunching beneath its hull as he dragged it beyond the high-tide line with the woman still in it. Her brown hair had spilled from a white linen head-dress and her teeth worried her bottom lip as she sat on the bench, clinging on to the sides as the little færing jerked and bucked to a stop.

  And then Runa realized why the woman had not leapt out of the boat into the shallows and either helped the man pull the boat up or else at least lightened the load for him. She was enormous with child and grimacing as she stood in the thwarts, holding out her hand so that the man could help her out of the boat, which almost tipped with her weight as she hoisted a leg over and set a foot on the strand. Runa was reminded of a whale she had once seen on the east coast of Karmøy. The beast had washed up on the shore and her father had sent a score of men and women to butcher it on the beach and bring the meat and fat and even strips of its skin back to Eik-hjálmr. She stifled a grin and felt mean for thinking of it now.

  ‘You cannot come ashore here,’ she told the man, still breathing heavily after the run. ‘It is forbidden.’

  The man raised a hand to her to show he had heard, but did not say anything as he helped the woman walk across the loose stones up the beach towards her.

  ‘You must get back into your boat and row away from here. You cannot stay,’ she said, and again the man raised a hand but kept walking towards her and Runa felt a stab of irritation. Was he deaf? Or just arrogant?

  ‘She looks ready to drop it on the beach,’ Ingel said, coming to stand beside Runa, breathing hard, eyes wide at the sight of the man half pulling, half pushing the woman up the slope.

  ‘She can’t,’ Runa said. ‘They should not even be here.’

  Ingel shrugged. ‘Then you’d better put her back in the boat and hope the seep water in the bilge isn’t deep, for she will drop the bairn in there,’ he said and Runa frowned because he had a point.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked the couple, thinking that if the man raised his hand again she would draw her scramasax and cut it off, expectant wife or no.

  ‘My wife is fit to burst,’ the man said, letting go the woman’s hand to come closer to Runa. She could smell the boat tar and sweat on him. ‘She began the pains,’ he said, ‘the ones that come again and again like waves on the shore.’ He frowned. ‘But something is wrong. Or else the child is being stubborn, for it will not come.’ Fair-haired, his face pitted with little scars, he was a man in his middle years and not rich by the looks of his clothes and his lack of a sword or any war gear to speak of, though he might have left his belongings in the færing. He had no beard to speak of, either, but for a few mossy patches and the dark bristles on his neck.

  ‘I know little of such things,’ Runa said, thinking that she should perhaps start to learn more given what she got up to with Ingel.

  ‘My name is Varin and this is my wife Gudny,’ the man said, looking from Runa to Ingel, arming sweat from his forehead and pressing hands into the small of his back. ‘We have come far. Rowed through the night to get here.’

  ‘Why here?’ Ingel asked before Runa had the chance to.

  ‘You can see that she is in pain,’ Varin said, thumbing back towards his wife who stood there looking about as uncomfortable as a person could who was not suffering from either the runs or painful arse berries or serious over-eating. ‘My wife needs help or the child will die inside her and kill Gudny with it.’

  ‘But why come here? Surely there are women near your steading who can help her,’ Runa said.

  ‘I have heard about the old woman who lives here. The witch,’ he said in a softer voice. He touched the little iron Mjöllnir which hung at his throat and knew from Runa’s expression that she needed more explanation than that. ‘My brother is a shipwright. He worked on Storm-Elk, King Thorir’s ship, and he is a friend of her skipper, a man named Harthbren.’ He raised that hand of his again but this time it was lifted like a shield against Runa’s next question. ‘This Harthbren did not tell my brother where this island was … before you have King Thorir flay the skin from his flesh. But Biarbi was able to stitch the where of it together from what he learnt by talking to the man.’ He forced a smile. ‘My brother knows this sea better than he knows his own wife.’

  He turned and beckoned to his woman to come closer. Her face was tear-stained and miserable-looking as she waddled forward, hands cradling her huge belly. There was blood near the hem of her kyrtill, Runa saw, which did not bode well for either her or the life inside her. Runa knew that much.

  She looked at Ingel who shrugged as if to say he was just a blacksmith and who came and went was no business of his. She looked back at Varin and decided there was no point in telling him that men were not allowed on the island, not with Ingel standing there still flushed from their coupling in the grass.

  ‘They will likely send you away,’ she warned instead, this to Gudny, who was giving her such pathetic eyes that it was uncomfortable to look at her. ‘Certainly they will not allow you to be here,’ she said, turning back to Varin.

  He set his face, the little muscles tensing beneath the pockmarked skin. ‘I will not leave my wife,’ he said. ‘The bairn needs to come out of her. We need the old woman to weave her seiðr. She can help us. I know it. She will save Gudny and the child too, if the gods will it.’ Gudny groaned then and swayed as if she might fall, and it was Ingel who stepped forward to steady her, earning the woman’s mumbled thanks and a scowl from Varin, who took hold of his wife again though he did not refuse Ingel’s help.

  ‘Will you take us to her, girl?’ Varin asked. ‘Or will you stand there and watch my wife and bairn die?’

  There was an edge of threat in the man’s voice now, an air of violence about him, though it was not worth making a thing out of it, Runa thought, confident that she could handle him if she needed to; wondering why she had even thought about how she would take him down, this desperate and frightened man.

  And so she nodded, turned her back on the sea and the couple who had come across it, and walked over the rocks towards the long grass and the birch and scrub beyond which lay the grazing meadows and, beyond them, the settlement where the Freyja Maidens lived their lives undisturbed.

  ‘Come then,’ she called over her shoulder.

  Guthrum came three more times over the next six days. The last of those attacks brought terror to the borg, for as Sigurd knew only too well, few things frightened men more than fire in the nigh
t: ship-burning, hall-burning, man-burning fire.

  Guthrum had bided his time, letting one rainless day follow another until the palisade, as well as the fuel he had gathered, was as dry as they were likely to get. Then, in the gloom of night, his men ran forward with arms full of sticks and dried moss tinder which they piled against the wall in four places, setting light to it. Alrik’s men doused two of the four fires before they caught properly, but the other two, being fanned by a breeze coming out of the south-east, licked the stakes and then bit deep. It did not help that Guthrum, seeing the flames beginning to do their work, arranged all his archers before those two fires, so that they kept up a steady rain of arrows which, if they did not kill many, nevertheless kept Alrik’s men’s heads down when they should have been busy flinging water.

  ‘What are we going to do about this, then?’ Moldof asked Sigurd and Olaf, waving the stump of his right arm – all that was left of it since Sigurd’s father had cut it off in a fight which the skalds sang of. A more grievous wound still because it had lost Moldof his position as King Gorm’s champion and prow man, and this the warrior could not abide. Thinking he could reclaim his honour by killing his king’s enemy Sigurd Haraldarson, Moldof had journeyed north alone, intent on finding Sigurd in his lair up in Osøyro. But in the event it was Sigurd who had offered Moldof a chance to rekindle his fame. Fame and the sword-song, or a bad death, cut into a stump and rolled into the fjord: that was the choice Sigurd had given him that white, frozen day on the fjord’s edge. Moldof had chosen the first option and now the former champion fought for Sigurd, though Sigurd and the other Skudeneshavn men still felt the strange prickle of that like nettles on the skin, Moldof having been their enemy not so long ago.