God of Vengeance (27 page)

‘I admire your spirit, Sigurd,’ Guthorm said. ‘If I were a younger man I might be tempted to get involved with all this, just for the fun of it.’ By fun he meant silver, for there would be much of that if Sigurd won. ‘But you may as well try to change the tides, lad.’

‘There is more to all this than that, husband,’ Fastvi said, keeping her eyes on Sigurd. ‘You being here in my husband’s hall will count as a black mark against us when Jarl Randver and King Gorm come to hear of it.’ She curled her lip. ‘We would have been better off turning you away.’

‘Aye, your wife has the right of it, Guthorm,’ Eid said. ‘Knowing who they are, outlaws and enemies of the two richest men for as far as a bloody crow can fly, I am asking why they are still drinking our ale?’ This stirred some murmurs of agreement from the men on his side of the table.

A grin wormed onto Alver’s scarred face and Sigurd wondered who had done that to Alver. The scar not the smile. ‘I know why they are still here,’ he said. Had he earned those scars in the shieldwall, Sigurd wondered, or were they gifts from some fury of a woman who did not welcome his attentions? ‘They’re still here,’ Alver went on, ‘because Guthorm thinks they might enjoy the festivities tomorrow.’ He turned his grin on Guthorm, who arched a greying brow to show that Alver had hit the rivet square.

‘If you are the sort of men who enjoy a wager in between scheming your revenge and chasing your blood feuds, then you are welcome to join us at the Weeping Stone tomorrow,’ the karl said with a nod. Alver and some of the others grinned at this idea and not even Eid spoke out against it. ‘Seeing as that is why we thought you had come. Before we learnt the unfortunate story of it.’

‘What is the Weeping Stone?’ Sigurd asked, recalling Guthorm’s earlier mention of it.

‘Just bring your silver,’ Alver said before Guthorm could answer, nudging the man beside him who was all teeth and rubbing his hands together like a wool merchant who has just sold three bales for the price of five.

Olaf leant in close to Sigurd. ‘If there’re wagers to be made there’s silver to be won,’ he said in Sigurd’s ear. ‘Frigg knows we could do with some. The way this is all going we’ll need it to buy a ship and a crew of Danes to help us deal with Randver.’

‘I’d take two Danes over every man in this place,’ Solveig muttered under his breath and if any of Guthorm’s friends heard this they pretended not to.

‘More silver in the pot, more to be won, hey!’ a sallow-skinned, mostly toothless old man named Hrethric exclaimed, hoisting his cup into the smoky air.

So this was why they were still sitting in Guthorm’s longhouse, Sigurd mused. The farmer never had any intention of helping him throw Jarl Randver out of his high seat, but he would happily take their silver in whatever contests had been arranged for the following day.

‘Will there be fighting?’ Olaf asked. ‘Tell me it’s not some bloody foot race.’

‘I cannot swear to you that there will be fighting, but I can assure you there will be killing,’ Guthorm said, clearly thinking he was very clever.

Svein looked at Olaf and Olaf looked at Sigurd and in that moment Sigurd knew that they would be sleeping on the ale-soaked rushes of Guthorm’s longhouse that night.

‘You will meet some of my friends, young Sigurd,’ Guthorm said, ‘Æskil In-Halti and Ofeig Grettir being the richest of them.’

Lame-Leg and Scowler. ‘They sound like great company,’ Hendil said with a wink at Aslak.

‘You will also meet Grima Big Mouth and if you take some silver off him I will be happy about it,’ Guthorm added. ‘Perhaps you will persuade some of them to join your adventure, hey.’

‘The lad will need a bigger boat first,’ Eid said, which was true enough, Sigurd thought, as the young serving girl filled his cup.

And as he drank, he thought about Runa marrying the son of his enemy.

‘I know it is nothing to be happy about,’ Olaf said, and Sigurd did not need to ask what he was talking about. ‘But at least it means he must be treating her well. If she is going to marry his boy.’

‘She is not going to marry Amleth,’ Sigurd said, ‘or any other man of Randver’s choosing. There will be no marriage.’

Olaf dipped his head and raised a placating hand. ‘It means they have not touched her,’ Olaf went on, daring to say it because it was an important thing.

And by ‘touched’ Sigurd knew all too well what his friend had meant. He was right though. That was something to be glad about.

Still, Runa marrying that treacherous turd’s son?

‘I don’t want to talk about it, Uncle,’ Sigurd said.

‘Fine by me,’ Olaf replied.

Sigurd thought someone must have crept up to him in the night and sheathed an axe in his skull. The sun had been climbing above the snow-capped mountains in the east when they had eventually laid their heads on the floor rushes and closed their eyes. They had soon finished every drop of Guthorm’s good ale and had made do with the sour stuff then and Guthorm could not be faulted for his generosity, for all that it was clear he believed he would make it back again with a profit from Sigurd and his crew the next day.

They had drunk until their beards and tunics were soaked and none of them could walk along a spear shaft without falling off, which had been Olaf’s idea of an amusing game, and a cock had started crowing somewhere outside, which had Svein growling that he would go and eat it there and then if only his legs would obey him.

And then they had listened to Hagal telling the blood-drenched, revenge-brimmed tale of the hero Sigurd the dragon-slayer, who looted the dragon Fáfnir’s hoard. Sigurd still had just about enough sense left in him to be embarrassed at the skald’s choice of tale, especially when it came to the part about the hero being greater than any man in strength and talents and vigour and bravery. Still, it was no bad thing to let them all hear about how rich the hero Sigurd became through his daring and prowess, and at least Crow-Song stopped short of the doom-laden events of later in the tale. Or else Sigurd had passed out by then.

And now they were making their way, along with every living soul from the village it seemed, up an old flinty drover’s path to the high ground, everyone thrumming with the excitement of it, except for Sigurd’s lot who were squinty-eyed, sweaty-browed and foul-tempered.

‘I feel like some troll peeled off the top of my skull and did a shit inside it,’ Loker said, wiping grease from his forehead. They carried spears and wore all their war gear except for their shields which they had left at Guthorm’s hall.

‘That is nothing, Loker,’ Aslak said. ‘I am seeing two of you.’

‘A curse if ever there was,’ Hendil said.

‘Pah! You bairns cannot hold your ale!’ Olaf said, though in truth he did not look any less miserable than the others. ‘When I was your age the Boknafjord was not salty water, but sweet golden mead. I used to swim from Skudeneshavn to Kvitsøy every morning with my mouth open all the way.’

This got a laugh despite the sore heads. Asgot wafted Olaf’s boast away with his long fingers. ‘I remember you spewing your guts over Slagfid’s shoes the day Harald took the jarl torc from Ansgar Iron Beard,’ he said.

‘I was there,’ Solveig said. ‘Slagfid threw those shoes in the pit for he said he would rather go barefoot than live with the stink.’

‘Aye, well the fish we had was rotten! That was the cause of it,’ Olaf said, which got some crowing before they fell silent again, perhaps retreating back inside their ale-soaked misery. But more likely, Sigurd thought, because each of them was remembering old times, when friends and kin were full of life and Harald’s hall shook with feasting and drinking and boasting. All that was gone now.

‘Look, there’s Guthorm and his hound,’ Svein said, pointing further up the path.

‘Thrall or no, it’s a poor thing to see a man kept on a chain like that,’ Olaf said.

Guthorm and his friends were trudging up the hill, the karl leading the young dark-haired man on the end of his iron leash which attached to a neck ring. Eid was cradling an assortment of axes and swords and Alver behind him carried a stack of spears across his shoulders. Fastvi was there too, walking amongst a knot of women who were all laughs and smiles as though they were on the way to the market.

‘I am put in mind of Fenrir Wolf,’ Sigurd said, watching Guthorm’s thrall and noting how the other villagers were pointing at him and chattering like finches though keeping their distance by the looks.

‘Better to slit a troublesome thrall’s throat and offer him to Loki Mischief-Maker than have to sleep with one eye open,’ Asgot said. No one could disagree with that.

‘Maybe that’s what Guthorm is doing,’ Aslak suggested. ‘Why bring a thrall out here on the end of a chain otherwise?’

‘Maybe Guthorm likes the black-haired whoreson enough to give him a good walk on a fresh morning,’ Olaf said, filling his nose with a breeze that carried the scent of moss and dew-laced grass off the hills.

But Sigurd doubted that was it at all. Guthorm’s people were afraid of that young man with the crow-black hair and wolf eyes. The karl had said there was going to be killing done today and Sigurd would wager every last piece of silver in his purse that Guthorm’s thrall was going to play his part in it one way or another.

‘There it is then,’ Svein said as they came over a rocky brow to the Weeping Stone and the crowd that was already gathered around it. Standing as tall as Svein the stone was carved with Jörmungand the Midgard Serpent, its rune-filled body snaking over the rock’s surface in burnt ochre red, yellow from orpiment or saffron, green from copper salts and black from charcoal.

‘Hey, boy! Come here!’ Olaf called to an urchin racing up the hill with his friends and a barking mutt. The boy ran over to them, his eyes wide and ready to glut themselves on whatever lay in store up there on the crown. Olaf pointed his spear up to the standing stone. ‘Why is it called the Weeping Stone?’ he asked.

The boy had a wooden sword tucked into his belt and a comb hanging round his neck that he had forgotten was there by the looks of his straw-tufted head. ‘Some woman called Aesa put it up,’ he piped. ‘Her husband and their son went raiding to the west and never came back. The runes speak of it.’ He wrinkled his stubby nose. ‘To those who can read them,’ he said.

‘Well there is Lame-Leg,’ Loker said, pointing at Guthorm’s friend who was limping up to the gathering with an expression that could have been a smile or a grimace.

‘Aren’t you a clever one, hey?’ Solveig said, earning himself a growled insult from Loker.

In-Halti was richly dressed in a fine blue kyrtill, the hem of it lifted and tucked into his belt, as many of the other folk had done too because the day was getting warmer. There were others with him including two bristling warriors, one a bear of a man who lumbered under the weight of an enormous brynja and a long-axe over each shoulder, and the other a smaller man in leather armour hefting a shield and spear and with a sword scabbarded at his hip.

They came up to the stone and Sigurd watched Guthorm greeting the visitors in turn, some with smiles, others with a clasp of wrists and still others with little more than a nod. Ofeig, bynamed Scowler, was likewise easy enough to pick out of the throng for he had a face like a pail of thunder, though it said nothing of his mood. The expression was the result of a thick and gnarly scar that ran across his forehead and down through his right brow to below the eye, though the eye itself looked usable still. The flesh knitting together had twisted the skin giving the man the look of someone who had just found some young swaggerer in the hay with his daughter. And he had brought fighters too, four of them and all armed to the teeth and mean-looking. Three wore mail, short-sleeved brynjur that left their arms bare but for the patterns carved in them. The fourth man wore leather armour and carried a boar spear whose haft was as thick as his arm, but he had brawn enough to handle it, and Solveig observed that this one had the look of a farm thrall about him.

These were not the only fighters there. There were perhaps a dozen more, all come to this deserted place to stand amongst the wind-rippled grass to win silver.

‘I am looking forward to this but I wish I had brought some ale,’ Svein said, apparently ready to begin drinking again though that idea turned even Sigurd’s stomach.

‘We won’t know who to put our silver on,’ Hendil said, eyeing the fighting men among the gathering.

‘
Our
silver?’ Olaf said, cocking an eyebrow at Hendil who scratched his beard and looked at the floor. ‘You can get the feel of it just by looking at them,’ Olaf said. ‘I wouldn’t wager much against that lump of meat,’ he said with a nod towards the giant with the two great axes. ‘That’s a fine brynja from the looks and with those arms and a long-axe he’ll knock men into the next life before they’re even close enough to smell him.’

Silver was already changing hands and it was Guthorm’s wife Fastvi, a spear-armed bóndi at each shoulder, who was dealing with all that. Her land, her scales, Guthorm’s rules. Which as it turned out were not exactly unfathomable.

The men would fight until they were either killed or too injured to continue. Or until their masters – or lords in some cases by the looks, for not all were thralls – cast a spear into the ground to say that their man yielded, which was the same as being killed so far as the silver was concerned.

Olaf and Solveig and the others were just arguing about who they thought would or should be matched against who in the first bout, when Guthorm led his young thrall to the Weeping Stone and began to fasten the end of the chain to a ring that had been put into the rock where the serpent’s open mouth was. The black-haired young man went along with it and simply stood there eyeballing the crowd while tying his hair in two braids either side of his wolf’s face. Guthorm raised a hand to silence the assembly and as a hush fell across the place the thrall and Sigurd locked eyes for a long moment until Svein tugged on Sigurd’s sleeve, drawing his attention to the axe-wielding giant who was coming grinning into the circle of men, women, children and dogs.

‘I see that after what happened here last time you have returned with worthier opponents,’ Guthorm told the gathering, as Sigurd watched Aslak wander off. ‘Well, they look worthier at least. We shall soon see the truth of it.’ Some among the assembly hurled insults at one another or barked curses in Guthorm’s direction, but the karl could barely keep the smile off his face. ‘May bravery be rewarded and slowness punished. Make sure you have placed your wagers with my wife. The first fight will begin soon.’