Fin Gall (3 page)

Chapter Three

Only fools

hope to live forever

by
escaping enemies.

                     
Hávamál

              T

he longphort of Dubh-Linn, squalid and ugly, sat huddled on the banks of the River Liffy. It was not much to look at. A small wooden palisade fort, a hundred feet along each wall, stood a quarter mile up the rise from the marshy banks of the river. The palisade wall on the landward side of the fort extended out east and west, slowly curving down to the river, forming a great, half-moon shaped wo
oden shield that cupped the town and kept the rest of Ireland beyond at bay.

             
A plank road, largely obscured by the ubiquitous mud, ran from the fortress down to a series of docks that thrust out over the shallows into the deeper water.

             
Clustered around the plank road were thirty or so buildings, most small, most one story, wattle and daub built with thatched roofs. These did double duty as homes and as woodshops, and blacksmith shops, and goldsmiths and merchants’ offices. There were only two buildings that might be called large and substantial, plank built; a temple to Thor to the south, and nearest the docks, a mead hall.

             
Dubh-Linn was not much to look at on the best of days, but on that day, with the low clouds rendering everything into shades of gray and brown and muted green, and the cold rain blowing in nearly sideways, it was even less lovely.

             
Orm Ulfsson did not care.

             
He stood at the gates of the fortress and looked down the slope toward the river, and he knew that the bedraggled appearance belied the town’s growing import.

             
Certainly, Dubh-lin was no rival to such great trading centers as Kaupang in the Vestfold district of Norway, or the Danish Hedeby. Not yet. But Dubh-Linn would rise to take its place among the great ports of the world. Orm was certain of it. That was why, in a bloody purge, he had driven out the Norwegians who had founded the town and claimed the place as his own.

             
It was happening already, Dubh-Linn’s ascendency. Crowds of men stamped along the muddy road, huddled under furs, heads bent into the wind, and they understood, as Orm did, what Dubh-Linn’s future would be. They were artisans and merchants and warriors who had come to Dubh-Linn to stay. And they brought their women, Irish women and Norse women who had accompanied their men as wives or slaves.

             
Now, looking past the crowded road and alleyways, busy even in the face of the storm, past the docks where longships and curraghs, knarrs and merchant ships from the Norse countries and warmer climes were rolling in the incoming swell, Orm might well have been pleased. But he was not.

             
His eyes were fixed on one longship, mauled by the storm, pulling hard against the current. He could see the yard was snapped a little outboard to the starboard slings, hanging like a broken wing from its halyard. The tall sternpost was also snapped off, and most of the shields which had lined the sides were gone. Part of the upper edge of the gunnels just aft of the starboard bow was smashed in.

             
Asbjorn Gudrodarson, known properly enough as Asbjorn the Fat, was standing just behind Orm. He let out a low whistle. “Magnus was hard pressed by the storm, so it would seem,” he said.

             
Orm grunted. He was quite indifferent to Magnus’s difficulties, he cared only about Magnus’s success. If Magnus had met with no success, then Magnus would wish the storm had taken him. Orm would see to that.

             
The longship crawled toward the dock at a pace too agonizing to watch. Orm turned hard on his heel. “Send Magnus to me, when he lands. If he ever lands,” he said to Asbjorn. He pulled his heavy fur cape further up his shoulders and ran a hand through his thick beard to comb the water out. He pushed through the wind and rain back to his quarters.

             
It was another hour before Orm heard the knock on the door. He was seated then in his imposing wooden chair, one leg over the arm, a cup of warm cider in his hand. The house had a low, square fireplace, more a fire pit, in the center of the room, after the Norse style. The fire was roaring, casting a yellow glow over the dirt floor and the gloomy interior of the small house, built against the north corner of the fort’s interior wall. The smoke that was not able to escape through the windows piled up against the thatch ceiling overhead.

             
Orm’s impatience had turned to a smoldering fury, but when the knock came he took a long drink and waited for Magnus to knock a second time.

             
“Come!”

             
The door creaked open. Magnus Magnusson stood there. The wind ripped in around him, fluttering the papers on the table beside Orm’s chair but it could not move Magnus’s drenched fur cape or his long hair, plastered down by rain and spray. Asbjorn hovered behind Magnus and he seemed to be hopping from one foot to the other, though whether from eagerness or a need to urinate, Orm could not tell.

             
Magnus stepped into the house and Asbjorn followed, closing the door. Magnus gave a shallow bow. He was handsome, clean-shaven, with a reputation that was well earned. He was ambitious. He did not do subservience well.

             
“Yes?” Orm said.

             
Magnus shook his head.

             
“You failed?”

             
“They failed. Either they did not dare go out, or they were sunk in the storm. In any event, they did not enter the River Boyne.”

             
Orm pressed his lips together and stared off into the dark end of the house.
Damn this impertinent bastard...
he thought. Magnus did not fail often, and when he did, he had a genius for making it appear as if it was not really failure, or that the failure belonged to someone else.

             
He looked back at Magnus, who stood, stoic and expressionless. Orm had a notion that this was exactly how Magnus would look facing his own execution.
Perhaps we’ll find out
, he thought.

             
“How do you know they did not get into the river? How do you know they are not there now? While you stand here dripping on my floor.”

             
“We kept at the mouth of the river for as long as we could, until my ship could bear no more. We were nearly wrecked half a dozen times. If my longship could barely live, then no ship built by Irishmen could have survived.”

             
Orm grunted. Magnus could well be right. Orm had been a bit surprised to see Magnus’s ship come limping in - he had thought it would certainly be lost. If it had been anyone else living through that storm at sea, then he might have won Orm’s grudging respect. But Orm reckoned that Magnus had respect enough from every other quarter, and needed no more.

             
“I suppose,” Orm said at last, “we won’t know for certain if you’ve failed until these Celt whoresons are putting our heads on pikes as an offering to their Jesus. Very well. You may go.”

             
Magnus gave another quick bow, turned and left. Asbjorn remained, eager for some intrigue, but Orm had had enough of the corpulent, sycophantic advisor.

             
“You may go as well,” he snapped and Asbjorn wisely said nothing, just gave a hint of a crestfallen look before scurrying out the door.

             
Damn him...
Orm thought, not even certain who he was damning. All of them.

             
Magnus had done him no good at all. He had discovered nothing, resolved nothing, had left only more doubt behind. He had not even the decency to get himself drowned.

             
The Celts were a disorganized rabble with nearly as many kings as they had sheep, and as such they were no concern. But if they were able to unite against the Norsemen, that would be a different story.

             
Orm drained his cup. “Damn!” he said out loud. Morrigan, the Irish thrall he had taken when he took Dubh-linn, looked warily from the next room and Orm flung the cup at her. It was not enough that he should take and hold the town, build it up in a way that the idiot Norwegians could never hope to do. Now he had the Celts at his back and the threat of Norwegian vengeance from the sea. At times he wondered if it was worth the aggravation.

Chapter Four

Wake early

if you want

another
man’s life or land.

                        
Hávamál

              T

horgrim Ulfsson dreamed of wolves.

              He dreamed of wolves often. In his dreams he could not see himself, but he saw the other wolves, his eyes level with theirs, and he ran with them, swift and tireless.

             
He woke exhausted from these dreams. Sometimes there was blood, but he did not know where it came from.

             
Now he saw himself running with the wolves, and his eyes burned like the red eyes of the other beasts in the pack. They raced though thick forest, trees like giants barely seen in the dark. Thorgrim could smell the pack close by, could hear the snarls from canine throats, the muted padding of their feet on the forest floor.

             
There was something in his mouth. It was bloody and warm and the sensation of it excited him. Something freshly killed. And he alone had it.

             
Then suddenly he was no longer running. He was stopped, and there were other wolves around him, not his pack, but wolves he did not know and they were turning on him. He could see teeth flash in moonlight and heard the angry growls. The pack closed in, wary but deliberate, and Thorgrim backed away. He needed his teeth to fight, but he did not want to drop the thing in his mouth. He tried to make a noise but he could not.

             
Then they were on him, and he had a sensation of hot breath and matted fur, fangs snapping at him, a dozen angry mouths closing on him, and he kicked and shook and tried to fight, but still he would not drop the bloody thing in his mouth.

             
Then Thorgrim was awake. Sudden, like stepping through a door. One instant he was fighting the wolf pack, and in the next he was lying in his furs on the afterdeck of the longship. The night was cold, the rain falling as a light mist, but Thorgrim was coated in sweat. His breath was coming fast and hard, as if he had been running.

             
For some time he lay there, eyes wide, body motionless. The wolf dreams left him exhausted, and weak, as if he was coming out of a long illness.

             
Through the dark and the fog he could barely make out the loom of the mast overhead, the rigging hanging in long sweeping arcs. They had run the longship into a little bay just as the night came down on them, hauling the bow up on a shingle beach and securing the ship with a line ashore. They ate, drank to near insensibility, fell into thick sleep on the deck.

             
Thorgrim listened to the night. The bow of the ship made a grinding noise on the pebbles as the stern lifted and sank with the incoming waves. The wind was still strong, playing around the rigging and the furled sail. The water slapped at the hull.

             
He thought of the wolves.

             
After some time he roused himself and sat up. Harald was asleep beside him, flat on his back, his mouth open. The cut on his cheek made a dark line across his white skin. He was not a pretty boy, but handsome in his way, and broad and strong. Thorgrim loved him deeply. He worried about Harald more than he would ever let Harald know.

             
For a moment Thorgrim just sat and watched his son sleep, then he tossed the heavy fur off and crawled out from under it. He was wearing only his tunic and leggings and he shivered in the cold, wet air. The snoring and muttering of three score sleeping men sounded like a pack of rooting animals, but Thorgrim hardly heard it, it was so much a part of the night. He moved cautiously around the heaps of fur spread like little burial mounds around the deck, the warriors at sleep. He came at last to the largest mound - fittingly, the jarl, Ornolf the Restless.

             
Thorgrim shook Ornolf and got only a slight grunt for his effort. He had no illusions about how difficult it would be to stir his father-in-law. As usual, Ornolf had been foremost in the feasting and drinking. Some of the men who had tried to match him, drink for drink, were still sprawled out on the beach. Some might even be dead.

             
Thorgrim shook him again. “Ornolf...” he said, soft, then shook harder. Five minutes of shaking and whispering finally got Ornolf’s eyes open. A minute later he was sitting up.

             
“Thorgrim...what?”

             
“Come with me.”

             
With a fair amount of groaning, puffing and cursing, Ornolf extracted himself from his furs and followed Thorgrim aft. On the larboard side, right aft with the steering board, Thorgrim’s sea chest was lashed to the deck. He stopped there, kneeled beside it and Ornolf did the same. Thorgrim waited to see that none of the others were awake. He waited for Ornolf to catch his breath.

             
“There was something on the curragh,” Thorgrim said, speaking in just a whisper. “Something I did not think the others should see.”

             
He opened his sea chest slowly, reached under the wool cloaks and tunic until he felt the rough canvas. He pulled the bundle out slowly. He meant to unwrap it, to show it to Ornolf, but Ornolf took it from his hands and unwrapped it himself, which annoyed Thorgrim, though he did not know why.

             
There was little enough light, with the storm still blotting out the moon and stars, but there was light enough for Ornolf to appreciate what he held. The jarl was silent as he turned the crown over in his hands, ran his fingers over the delicate engraving. “I’ve never seen its like,” he said at last.

             
“Nor I.”

             
“This alone will give us a profit from our voyage. But what will we do with it? I doubt there is coin enough in all of Ireland to match the value of this crown.”

             
Thorgrim shook his head. “It wouldn’t be wise to try to sell it. I don’t think it would be wise to bring it into Dubh-Linn at all.”

             
Ornolf looked up from the crown for the first time since taking it in his hands. “Why not?”

             
“I think this is more than some king’s trinket. There is some meaning to it. There were twenty Irish noblemen on board the curragh, and they gave their lives to protect this crown. It was the only thing of value they carried.”

             
“Bah. Irishmen. Who knows why any of them do what they do?”

             
Thorgrim frowned. He had hoped he would not have to say what he now had to say. “I saw in a dream...that others would want to take this from us. They will kill us for it.”

             
In the dark, Thorgrim could see Ornolf’s eyes grow wide. “You saw the crown...in your dream?”

             
“No. But it was there, I could sense it.”

             
“Wolves?”

             
Thorgrim nodded.

             
“Very well,” Ornolf said. He needed no more convincing. “What would you have us do?”

             
“Let’s bury it ashore. You and me. Right now. Tell no one else. There it will be safe while we find its secret.”

             
Ornolf nodded his head, considering. “Very well,” he said.

             
Thorgrim went back to his bedding and retrieved his weapons. Like any good Norseman, he had been raised with the adage, “never walk away from home ahead of your ax and sword”. He would no more go anywhere without his weapons than he would without his clothes.

             
In the longship’s hold he found a shovel and lifted it slowly, careful to make no noise. This was good, what they were doing. He did not know why, exactly, but he knew it was good.