God of Vengeance (7 page)

The rebels’ shieldwall stretched right across
Reinen
’s deck and must have been five men deep, a tide of steel and flesh that would drive Sigurd’s father and his brave men into the sea or see them butchered in a sea of their own blood on the oak boards. Both sides roared as the skjaldborgs struck and the sword song played for the amusement of the Æsir. But Jarl Harald’s men were pushed back foot by foot until they were level with the tiller and crammed beneath the great sternpost where the resin-sheened sheer strakes were carved with runes and gripping beasts.

Slagfid beat a man’s shield down and Thorvard plunged his sword into the man’s face, the blade erupting from the skull in a gleam of bone shards and blood. The man fell and Sorli burst forward into the gap, hacking his hand axe into a warrior’s face and cleaving off his jaw before jumping back into his own shieldwall as quick as a lightning strike. But now some of Randver’s men aboard the ship lashed to
Reinen
’s port side were loosing arrows and these shafts streaked into Harald’s men who could not have their shields in two places at once, though three or four turned and tried to raise a rampart against this new threat.
Reinen
’s helmsman Thorald took an arrow in his neck and clutching at the thing dropped over the side and vanished. Then Harald staggered forward and Sigurd saw a feathered shaft jutting from his shoulder, though the rings of his brynja had taken the force and he made a show of standing tall again and rolling his shoulders.

‘What do we do?’ Aslak called, his face ashen, wide eyes appalled by what they were witnessing. ‘They’ll come for us soon enough.’

Sigurd did not answer. He stood swaying with the fishing boat, watching his father’s and his brothers’ last moments, and he could not tear his eyes away. A spear blade plunged into Aud’s eye and he screamed, his shield arm falling so that the same spear struck again, opening his great belly, and Sigurd saw the glistening rope of his guts spring loose to thump on the deck. Olaf was barking commands, encouraging men to keep their shields overlapping and their heads down. Slagfid was growling at the enemy to come and die on his sword and Sigurd’s brothers were shoulder to shoulder now, defiance coming off them like the stink of blood. But they were trapped and had barely the room to use their swords and it seemed that they would be tipped into the sea like discarded fish guts and would all get drowning deaths, which was something a man feared more than almost anything.

Perhaps that thought was too sour for Sorli, who surged forward, slamming his shield into the enemy rampart and throwing up his arm, reversing the blade to hack into the back of a man who was too tightly pressed to do anything about it. And with this the rest of Harald’s men came spitting fury and contempt, throwing themselves at the enemy with their last strength. They were cut down, savaged by sword, spear and axe, and Sigurd yelled at Svein to row them even closer to
Reinen
’s stern. Svein said nothing but the oars plunged and the boat moved and Aslak sat in the stern keeping his protests behind a barricade of gritted teeth.

‘The jarl! Protect the jarl!’ someone yelled and Sigurd knew his father had been cut down though he had not seen the act.

‘Vigdis!’ Sigurd called, recognizing the warrior for the bear skin he wore, and Vigdis turned to look over the side, the eyes beneath his helmet’s rim bulging when they saw Sigurd and his friends.

‘Fuck off, boy!’ Vigdis shouted. ‘Get back to the village!’ Vigdis, who had told Sigurd there was no honour in how he had beaten Olaf the night before, possessed enough honour now to hurl himself at the enemy lest they notice Sigurd, and Sigurd cursed as the man disappeared from sight.

Then Sigurd saw Alfdis where Vigdis had been and he called to him and Alfdis was similarly shocked to see him but Sigurd gave the man no time to speak.

‘The jarl!’ Sigurd yelled, pointing back into the fishing boat, and Alfdis understood without a moment’s hesitation and nodded. Sigurd’s heart hammered against his chest and he feared he was too late but then Alfdis and a man named Jorund came to the side and slung in between them was the jarl, wounded but alive. But then Alfdis was cut down and a big man raised his axe to finish the jarl, when Olaf appeared, thrusting his sword into the man’s armpit to cleave his heart. He hauled the sword free in a gout of bright blood and turned his own gore-stained face to Sigurd, teeth white against the mess.

‘No!’ Harald yelled, his wits returning as Olaf took a hold of his other arm and pushed him to the side. Even wounded, his own blood slathered across his brynja, the jarl was strong enough to fight Olaf and Jorund while the rest of his men hacked and slashed and were being slaughtered behind him. Then Sigurd heard a splash and looked over to see Sorli in the water, flailing in his mail, and up on
Reinen
Thorvard looking down long enough to see that Sigurd had sight of their brother whom he had knocked into the water. Then Thorvard turned and stormed into the blood-fray and Sigurd saw a spear take him in the side as another man hacked into his neck with a hand axe. Two arrows took Jorund, one in the neck, the other in his thigh, and he fell over the side to sink in the dark sea. Aslak took a rope from the bilge and cast one end out to Sorli who grabbed it and pulled himself towards the boat.

‘Olaf!’ Sigurd yelled, but Olaf was doing what he could and somehow he managed to muscle his jarl to the side and with a great effort lifted him over, the jarl fighting in vain, and now with Svein’s help Sigurd reached up and took hold of his father and the three of them fell back into the thwarts in a tangle of limbs. Olaf turned back to the fight, snatching up his sword, resolved to die with the others, when a spear struck his shoulder and he staggered backwards, his legs hitting
Reinen
’s side so that he toppled over the sheer strake and hit with a great splash.

Sigurd scrambled back to the bow and held out his spear and Olaf had enough sense left in him to take hold of it so that Sigurd could pull him in.

‘Row!’ Sigurd screamed and Svein was up and had the oars in the water, his broad shoulders and thickly muscled arms pulling the boat away from the slaughter even as Olaf clung on to the side and Sigurd clung on to Olaf and Aslak did what he could to keep Harald down lest the jarl try to jump back aboard
Reinen
to be cut down with his hearthmen.

‘Hold on, Olaf,’ Sigurd said, as he saw Slagfid still hewing men down and two or three other men fighting to the last.

One of whom was Sigmund his brother.

SVEIN ROWED, THE
oars all but snapping with the force of it as their blades pulled against the sea. Sigurd and Aslak managed to pull Olaf into the boat and he lay half drowned in the bilge, beard and brynja glistening with brine, his chest puffing like bellows. Similarly waterlogged but standing up in the boat, Sorli was spitting fury, his beard flecked with curses hurled back at Thorvard whose last act had been to throw his brother overboard. His eyes full of tears or salt water, Sorli railed at his brother for denying him his place in that last stand. He kicked the boat’s strakes and yanked his blond braids and screamed at Thorvard who was past hearing now, and Sigurd did not try to calm him for Sorli was lost to the here and now and the best thing was to leave him alone.

Jarl Harald looked like a man dragged from his burial mound with the smell of Sæhrímnir the best of meats in his nose and the voices of his ancestors in his ears. His eyes were rivets fixed on the murder which was now two good spear-throws off their stern. His hands gripped the side of the boat like white claws. He had not laid eyes on Sigurd yet and Sigurd was glad for it, though he knew the moment must come.

A cheer went up from Jarl Randver’s men, which could only mean that the last of Harald’s warriors was dead, cut down on his lord’s ship, his blood running across the oak planks with that of his sword-brothers, and Sigurd felt as though he was at sea in a storm, his head spinning and his thoughts in the whirlpool of it.

‘My sons,’ Harald muttered, the words barely strong enough to ruffle his blood-specked golden beard. ‘My sons.’

‘The king betrayed us,’ Olaf growled. There was blood in his hair and in the rings of his brynja but he paid it no heed. ‘That putrid swine’s bladder left us to be mauled.’

Sigurd realized he was still clutching the spear, knuckles white against the rune-carved ash. His guts felt as heavy as a quern stone and yet his heart was thumping like the hare that has seen the hawk. His brothers Sigmund and Thorvard were dead. Slagfid who was unbeatable, a warrior who had put fear in his enemy’s bellies and whose boasts had seeped into Eik-hjálmr’s beams like hearth smoke, was slaughtered. Svein’s father Styrbiorn was gone, and Haki and Gudrod and so many more. Harald’s finest warriors and retainers were corpses now, their weapons and warrior rings, their brynjur and helmets being pulled from their ripped bodies, while the ragged survivors drifted off like feathers from a fox-killed bird.

‘
Little-Elk
!’ Aslak called and Sigurd followed the line of his outstretched arm and saw the karvi off their bow. She was being rowed southwards, Solveig her helmsman and skipper wisely hugging the coast where Jarl Randver’s ships might not dare to follow for fear of their plunder-heavy hulls striking the rocks now that the tide was slackening.

Olaf bellowed over to the karvi and Solveig had his oarsmen hold water until Svein could row them up to the ship and the men could climb aboard. Sigurd saw the relief in the men of
Little-Elk
’s faces when they saw their jarl alive, and Asgot the godi, his beard braids sticky with blood, gnarred his thanks to the Allfather for giving them this one floating timber in the wreck of that day.

They left the fishing boat to drift where it would and the survivors, some twenty-nine men all told, rowed or watched the ships out in the Karmsund Strait or kept a lookout for rocks and skerries just below the surface as old Solveig carried his beaten jarl south, bound for Skudeneshavn. Sigurd remembered Runa but when he looked up he saw no sign of her amongst the few folk still gathered on the bluff and Aslak suggested that she was already riding home to bring news of the events to the village.

‘We should not have left her,’ Sigurd said.

‘What choice did we have?’ Aslak said, which was true enough. Still, Sigurd hoped that Runa knew that their father and Sorli were alive and that at least some of Skudeneshavn’s menfolk had survived Jarl Randver and King Gorm’s treachery and were even now coming home.

‘They are not interested in us,’ Olaf announced when he was certain that their enemies were not coming after them. He was looking back out into the strait the way a man looks at his family on the rocks when he is going off raiding, as though he wanted to go back as much as go on.

‘Why would they be?’ Jarl Harald said. ‘They have my ships. They have killed my sons and my champion.’ There was an arrow wound in his shoulder but he seemed unaware of it. ‘They have broken me,’ he murmured.

‘Biflindi will pay in blood for this,’ Sorli said, pushing his tunic sleeve up to examine the vicious-looking purple stain spreading on his left forearm. ‘We will flay the skin from his back and cut off his balls.’

‘And how will we do that, boy?’ Harald asked, the words seeping from the twist of his lips. ‘My sword-brothers are corpses. I am left with dregs, old men and boys.’ Sigurd felt the sting of this, knew the barb of it bit into the pride of those at the oars now who kept their eyes down rather than meet their jarl’s and see the anguish there. Harald stood on the steerboard side looking out at the ships he no longer owned. Farther off, King Gorm’s longships were heading north again back to his base at Avaldsnes, his part in the thing over, the king content it seemed to let Randver keep the spoils. ‘Óðin has washed his hands of me,’ Harald said. He looked at Asgot who was on his knees scattering runes across the deck. ‘You told me not to fight today. I should have listened.’

Asgot studied the stones before him and pursed his lips, then looked up at his jarl, his eyes as sharp and black as flint. ‘One-Eye’s hand is still in this, Harald. You would not be standing here otherwise. This blood is as the first drop in a pail before a storm. Óðin has set up the pieces on the tafl board and now rubs his hands at the thought of the game.’

‘If old One-Eye wanted me to play this game he should have left me with more men,’ Harald snarled and Asgot raised an eyebrow at that as he gathered up the rune stones to cast them again.

The sun was in the west and cloud-sheathed by the time they had rowed the protected waters east of Karmøy south and round the peninsula back to Skudeneshavn’s safe harbour. The quayside bustled with folk come to see if their men were living or lost and Sigurd called to a friend of his mother to ask if Runa had beaten
Little-Elk
home. She had, at which news he sighed with relief and muttered thanks to the goddess Freyja.

As they moored up, Sigurd saw relief flood his mother’s eyes when she caught sight of Harald, though she tempered that joy in respect for those women who could not see their husbands and lovers in
Little-Elk
’s thwarts. Neither did the jarl seem in the least happy to be alive. He was a brooding, sour presence amongst his milling people and they kept out of his way. But what Sigurd saw on his father, heavier than his fine brynja and his blood-slick helmet, was shame. It clung to the jarl, rounding his square shoulders and hooding eyes that would not fix on Grimhild’s. Then she hammered her fists into his mail-clad chest, tears springing from her eyes now, and Sigurd knew his father must have whispered to her of their loss, given hard words to what her eyes had already told her. Harald stood there like a rock as Grimhild beat his chest and tore her nails on the bloodied rings of his brynja and moaned with such sorrow that others looked away. Then Harald pulled her against him, so that her iron-muffled cries were all but lost amongst the dark tide of woe rolling across the folk of Skudeneshavn.