Winter's Fire: (The Rise of Sigurd 2) Page 4

  ‘It seems to me,’ Runa said, ‘that what is more important than how she knew my brother and that he was up here in this old hall, is that she knew at all.’ She looked at the other faces around the fire, at Svein, Bram and Valgerd the shieldmaiden, Black Floki, Bjarni, Bjorn and the others. ‘For if she knew it then there is every chance that others know it too.’

  ‘Knowing it and doing something about it are two different things,’ Bram said. ‘Men don’t go raiding in winter.’

  Black Floki looked at him. ‘Do you call it raiding when you slaughter a horse for the Jól feast?’ he asked.

  ‘Floki is right,’ Olaf said. ‘For a man like Biflindi, or even Jarl Randver’s son Hrani, coming up here to finish us would be more like a little hunting trip than going a-Viking.’

  ‘Well, I for one am happier at the thought of fighting King Gorm or Randver’s strutting son than living under the same roof as that witch,’ Bjarni said, nodding towards the seiðr-wife, who was whispering to herself now. Or perhaps she was answering the flames.

  ‘That is easy to say when old Shield-Shaker is not banging on our door with all his spears standing behind him like a fucking forest,’ Olaf told him before turning back to Sigurd. ‘Still, young Runa is right about this. If the old crone knew we were here then it is likely that others know it, be it the Norns told them or some other flapping tongue.’ A deep rumble came from his throat, as though he would rather swallow his next words down than say them. ‘We should leave,’ he said, looking from Svein to Sigurd. ‘Fill Reinen with what we can get together quickly and off we go. Like a bear we disappear into some hole for the winter and we hope the hunters forget about us.’

  Asgot glared at him. ‘You think Sigurd won himself the Allfather’s attention just to piss it away now? Once earned such a boon must not be allowed to run through one’s fingers,’ he said, making a fist of his bony hand. ‘Only bold action will keep Óðin’s one eye turned towards Sigurd and keep us in his favour.’

  ‘Favour?’ Olaf blurted. At the same moment some wood in the fire cracked fiercely as though to echo the bull-shouldered warrior. ‘Try telling that to those sword-brothers who fought beside us little more than two moons past, those we burnt or who lie rotting at Hinderå. Or even our kinsmen who were carried away on the blood-sea when this whole thing began.’

  These words were as a knife twisting in Sigurd’s guts, a blade that had been in him a while now, ever since they had come to Osøyro and Hakon Burner’s hall. For in the calm after the storm of swords Sigurd had faced another more insidious enemy, which was the guilt he felt at having led so many brave companions to their deaths. There was Hauk and his greybeards, men who had lived in this very hall when they were young and broad and drinking Jarl Hakon’s mead. There were the men from the Lysefjord: Agnar Hunter, big Ubba and Karsten Ríkr who had been as good at the helm as old Solmund. There was Kætil Kartr and Hendil and Sigurd’s friend Loker whom he had killed with his own hands to prove he was a man worth following and not some boy shivering in his father’s long shadow. A loom weight in Sigurd’s guts, that one. Loker had wanted to kill Valgerd for taking off his arm with her scramasax, had soured over it enough to challenge Sigurd himself, which was a thing Sigurd could not ignore what with everyone’s eyes on them. Not if he was to lead them all. And so he had fought and killed Loker and Svein had dropped Loker over Reinen’s side into the sea. Just like that.

  All those men had given Sigurd their oath and in return he had given them death.

  ‘They drink in the Spear God’s hall,’ Bram said, as though that was reward enough for any man worth the sword at his hip.

  Svein nodded. ‘There are none who deserved their benches in Valhöll more,’ he said. ‘While we shiver our arses off, they feast on Óðin’s meat and mead.’

  And while Sigurd nodded that this was so, he yet felt the weight of their loss and he could not imagine being able to unburden himself of it while he remained under Jarl Burner’s roof and lived amongst the benches upon which he suspected Hauk and his brave warriors’ ghosts still lingered.

  Bjorn looked at Olaf, all bristles and frown. ‘You want us to trade this roof for the snow and the ice without knowing where we are to go?’

  ‘I would rather be out there than in this place of ghosts,’ Valgerd put in.

  ‘Me too,’ Runa said bravely, though she was rubbing her hands together and spreading the fingers wide before the hearthfire.

  Bjorn’s brother Bjarni sniffed, dragging a hand across his red nose. ‘There is ice across some of the narrow channels and creeping around Reinen. This morning I watched a dog run across it and cock its leg to piss on her rudder.’

  ‘I hope you speared the mongrel, Bjarni,’ old Solmund said, horrified by the thought. He loved that ship more than anything in the world.

  ‘He would have answered to me if he had, seeing as it is my dog,’ Runa said, which had the helmsman mumbling into his white beard. Sigurd knew that his sister had been feeding the hound scraps ever since it had first come sniffing around the hall.

  ‘To stay here is to invite a fight we cannot win,’ Olaf said.

  ‘Aye, would you rather be cold or dead, youngen?’ Solmund asked Bjorn, who had no answer to that, or not one he wished to share.

  ‘We stay here,’ Sigurd said, surprising himself. Olaf was giving him the opportunity he had craved since the first snows, to leave this draughty hall, its cobweb-slung corners and its ghosts. And yet he was choosing to stay. Perhaps it had something to do with the seiðr-wife whom they had found in the snow. Who had found them, he reflected, somehow knowing that was the way of it. Or perhaps it was Asgot’s talk of showing the Allfather that he was worthy of his favour, which old One-Eye might begin to doubt were Sigurd to scarper at the first mention of his enemies searching for him. Besides, where would they go? However much he wanted to weigh anchor and leave this place of the dead there was no safe bay that he knew of. No jarl who would take him in and play the host. There was no wind either, had not been for weeks, the air hanging cold and heavy and still, meaning Reinen would have to be rowed and there were not enough of them to do that. Not for any distance anyway.

  ‘We stay here a little while longer,’ he said, still as if needing to convince himself. ‘We eat whatever meat we can hunt and we stay strong and warm.’

  Some of them nodded and others spoke softly to each other. Over by the other hearth the witch laughed and it sounded like a hen’s clucking, which had some of them touching the Thór’s hammers at their necks or the hilts of knives or swords, for they all kept their war gear in reach.

  ‘Well then, we’d better have a pair of eyes always watching the sea,’ Olaf said, ‘for I will not have some king or would-be jarl burning this hall with me sleeping in it.’

  ‘From tomorrow we will take turns keeping watch,’ Bram said and they all seemed content with this, because for all their talk the idea of setting out into the freezing world was not a comforting one. The snow lay thick beyond those old timbers, while the flames in both hearths crackled and spat, illuminating the darkness and chasing shadows.

  ‘And if anyone comes, we kill them,’ Valgerd said, as though it would be as easy as that, and Black Floki, who liked the shieldmaiden even less than he liked most people, grinned.

  Six days later somebody came.

  It had not snowed again since the night Sigurd had killed the wolf, but the white mantle lay heavy and thick and untouched by any thaw. A bright cold sun shone in a bright blue sky, which was in itself so rare that it more or less proved that the man cared not at all about being seen. It was that time of the year when daylight was fleeting as youth, but while it reigned the fjord glittered like a polished brynja and the untrodden snow sparkled like the silver inlay on a war god’s axe head. The air was crisp and there was no wind.

  And the man came.

  ‘He is making hard work of it,’ Olaf said.

  ‘Hard work? My mother could handle oars better than that when she had a beard longer than mi
ne,’ Solmund said.

  Having been fetched by Valgerd who had been on watch since dawn, they gathered on the rocks by the winding path which led from the shore up through the birch and tall spruce. All but for Asgot who was tending the fire up in the hall. They came shivering in furs, sword- and spear-armed but their helmets and shields left in the hall, blinking and coughing woodsmoke out of their lungs, their breath fogging around their faces. Below them sat the rotten old jetty against which Reinen was moored, sitting as still as the dead on that sleeping sea. But they were not looking at Reinen. Their eyes were riveted to the small craft being rowed badly towards the shore, and the figure in her thwarts, who looked more like a bear than a man from that distance in his furs and shaggy hat.

  ‘If he is aiming for our jetty then I am thinking he is either blind or drunk,’ Hagal Crow-Song said, huffing into the cup he had made of his hands.

  ‘Or both,’ Bram suggested.

  Which was not impossible, Sigurd thought, for the little boat was tending to larboard, so much so that for every fourth stroke the man pushed the opposite oar blade clear of the water, so letting his left arm work alone to point the bow back towards the jetty.

  ‘It is painful to watch,’ Bjorn said.

  ‘Who is he then, witch?’ Olaf asked the old woman, who did not look quite so strange in all her cat skins now, since Sigurd, Olaf and Svein wore their wolf pelts against the cold, the beasts’ heads upon their own, the eyes gone but the teeth locked in an everlasting snarl.

  ‘He is one of those hunting you,’ she said to Sigurd, two hands and chin resting on her long staff as she watched the skiff.

  Svein chuckled at this. ‘Well then, we had better make a shieldwall, hey, Uncle,’ he said.

  ‘Forget about our saga tale, Red,’ Bjarni said, holding out a hand and making it tremble, ‘we should jump on to Reinen and row for our lives.’ He grinned at Aslak who grinned back. But Sigurd was not smiling. This man rowing towards them was likely further proof that folk knew where he and his last few oathsworn warriors were holed up for the winter, which was what Olaf was thinking too judging by the frown.

  ‘It was only a matter of time,’ Olaf murmured, scratching amongst his beard.

  Like the wolves they had hunted, they all used the same tracks in the snow when they set off foraging or to collect firewood; there was a trail leading down to the shore as well as several others which spider-webbed off from the hall. But for Sigurd’s wolves it was about more than ease of passage: it was so that they would know if they had visitors by the new tracks they made. With Reinen snugged up under a thick layer of pine resin, her thwarts sheathed in greased animal skins underneath a blanket of snow, the only prints as yet on the jetty itself had been made by fox paws, Runa’s dog and the gulls. But now it seemed a stranger would be tramping across the ancient boards, and even if the man did not already know that Sigurd Haraldarson would be there to greet him, he would carry that news away with him when he left again.

  ‘Perhaps it is the king himself come to make amends for being a slimy lump of snail snot,’ Solmund said.

  ‘Aye, it’s Biflindi come to offer Sigurd Jarl Randver’s torc and his hall at Hinderå,’ Svein said, ‘so long as Sigurd agrees not to go down to Avaldsnes and bury an axe in his skull for being an oath-breaking piece of troll shit.’

  ‘Troll shit he may be, but he did not get the name Shield-Shaker for being afraid of a fight,’ Hagal pointed out, for the byname Biflindi suited King Gorm the way a ship suited Solmund.

  ‘Whoever it is he’ll be lucky to get here at all, even on a sleeping sea like that,’ Bjorn said as they watched the boat limp – if a boat could limp – towards the mooring.

  ‘All the luck a man can carry will not help him if we do not like him,’ Olaf gnarred, ‘for any man so bad at rowing cannot be good at swimming. Just give me the word, Sigurd, and I’ll sink him. Send the sod down into the cold wet dark and it’ll be one less thing to worry us.’

  But Sigurd had a sense of cold foreboding himself now because he suddenly saw the reason for the little boat’s wanderings and knew the man leaning back in the thwarts. ‘Moldof,’ he said.

  ‘You sure?’ Olaf said, but even he knew the truth of it now.

  ‘Isn’t Moldof the king’s prow man Father fought that day when the king betrayed him?’ Runa asked.

  ‘Aye, lass, and your father lopped the ugly turd’s sword arm off, which I wish I had seen with my own eyes,’ Olaf said. For Sigurd was the only one amongst them standing on that rock who had seen Jarl Harald fight King Gorm’s champion and still lived with the memory of it.

  The sour despair of that memory flooded over Sigurd now, making the breath snag in his chest like a fishhook amongst the weed. The blood in his veins seemed to slow and he felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck at the sight of the man rowing towards them. Towards him. Sigurd had watched his father slaughtered that day along with the last of Harald’s brave and loyal hirðmen. Sigurd would have been slaughtered himself had his brother Sorli and two other men, Asbjorn and Finn, not charged at the king, screaming death to the traitor and giving Sigurd the chance to run for his life. Not that Moldof had played any part in that red murder, what with Harald having cut off his arm in a bout of single combat which must have had the gods themselves wide-eyed.

  ‘I’ll wager he brings a message from the king,’ Crow-Song said, no doubt thinking this was all good stuff for the saga tale about Sigurd which he claimed he was weaving.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Olaf said. ‘Why would the king send half a man like Moldof? Doesn’t do his reputation much good.’

  ‘Skalds sing of Moldof,’ Crow-Song said. ‘He may lack an arm but he does not lack reputation.’

  ‘Let us take his other arm then,’ Valgerd said, her golden braids like Runa’s piled up beneath a fox-skin hat to help keep the warmth in her skull, ‘and Crow-Song can weave him a new reputation as a man who rows with his cock.’ This got some chuckles. No one doubted that the shieldmaiden would lop off Moldof’s good arm without so much as blinking. Just as she had lopped off Loker’s before joining Sigurd’s crew and swearing the oath to him.

  Moldof leant back in the stroke, clumsy but relentless, coming on, one oar stave lashed to the stump of his right arm, which could not have been an easy thing to do, as Svein pointed out.

  ‘Are we going to stand here freezing our arse hairs off, or shall we go and greet our guest?’ Olaf asked.

  ‘Don’t kill him until we have heard what he has to say,’ Sigurd said, and Olaf held up a hand as if to say Would I do such a thing? And with that they tramped through the snow, slipping on the ice which sheathed the rocks, down to the jetty, which was so slippery once their feet had sunk through the snow that Svein fell on his arse and cursed loud enough to send a cormorant croaking up towards the low sun. The others laughed, which did not help, and neither did Hagal by saying that you wouldn’t catch heroes like Moldof falling on their backsides at moments like this.

  ‘Hold your tongue, skald, unless you want to sing your tales to the fish,’ Svein growled, which had them laughing even more, until Sigurd stilled them with a hand. It was no laughing matter to meet Moldof again, this man who, before he had fought Harald, had tried to rouse the jarl’s anger with foul insults about Sigurd’s brothers who had died in the red slaughter of the ship battle in the Karmsund Strait.

  ‘Haraldarson.’ Moldof’s gruff voice carried across the flat water. Sigurd did not reply but took three paces forward by way of acknowledgement.

  There was a palpable silence then while Moldof brought the little boat up to the jetty and half held on to it while he sought to untie the rope which lashed the oar to his half arm. No one moved to help him, neither did they offer to tie off the skiff, and the whole thing seemed to take an age, but at last the king’s former champion unloaded his war gear – two spears and his shield – and clambered up on to the boards.

  ‘What do you want, Moldof?’ Sigurd said.

  In his bear skin and fur hat M
oldof looked massive, bigger than Svein, and Sigurd knew that the shoulders, chest and arms beneath all the fur were heavily muscled and battle-hardened. Gorm’s man was still puffing from the rowing and his face and wild beard were greasy with sweat.

  ‘I am here to kill you, Sigurd Haraldarson, and take your head back to my king.’

  For a moment no one said a word, but neither did anyone laugh. It took guts for a man to say such a thing in front of eleven armed warriors.

  ‘Did my jarl skewer your brain, Moldof?’ Olaf asked. ‘Did Harald prise it from your thought box like a mussel from a shell?’

  ‘Aye, Moldof, it is hard to take threats seriously from a man who can’t braid his own beard,’ Bram said.

  But Moldof had come for a fight. Sigurd caught a glimpse of the brynja rings at his neck as he bent to pick up the two big spears from the snow.

  ‘I will take your head too, Olaf,’ Moldof said, ‘though I might throw that to the crabs because it is worth nothing.’

  Svein stepped forward but Olaf grabbed a handful of the wolf pelt on his back and he stopped.

  ‘You did not lose your ambition then when you lost your arm,’ Olaf said, ‘but you will have to wait until you are full grown before you are ready to fight me, Moldof son of . . .’ he shrugged, ‘. . . nobody.’

  This was well said and Moldof didn’t much care for it. He rolled his great shoulders and hefted one of the spears in his left hand.

  ‘Careful now!’ Bram told his companions, gesturing that they should step away from Sigurd and Olaf. ‘If he throws a spear anything like he rows, he’s likely to skewer one of us by mistake.’

  There was more laughing at this but Sigurd cut it short. ‘You have come here to die then, Moldof?’ he asked, though there was more than enough statement in it. ‘For even in your two-armed days you would be killed here in the time it takes a crow to flap its wings twice.’ He forced a smile. ‘Are you so worthless to that oath-breaker that he would not care if you threw yourself on my sword here today?’