God of Vengeance (9 page)

When the men had mounted their ponies and were making their way through the gates in the low palisade Olaf looked at Harald and the jarl raised one brow.

‘So we’re going to walk up into Avaldsnes and jump into whatever pot of piss Randver has bubbling over his hearth?’ Olaf said.

‘What choice do we have?’ Harald asked him. ‘Come, Uncle, I am all ears if you can see another way out of this.’

Beneath the bush of his beard Olaf’s face had the look of a skipper who sees grey rocks, a slack tide and a green crew. ‘The dog’s bollock was happy to watch us slaughtered while he sat on his arse out of harm’s way. Likely as not he sent those two ships to help finish us off. And now we’re to pull down our breeks and bend over for him?’

‘Better to go there armed and half expecting a fight than to sleep with one eye open for the next five years half expecting to be burnt alive with Eik-hjálmr’s beams crushing our wives and daughters. King Gorm or Randver, or both together, could bring their ships and enough spears to make short work of it even if we knew they were coming.’ This got some
ayes
, for no man wants a bad death, the one that sneaks up from behind.

‘I’ll not get my throat cut in my own bed,’ Asbjorn said.

‘And no man is going to murder my wife and children and swive my bed slaves while I draw breath,’ a man named Frothi said, his hand going to the Thór’s hammer at his neck.

‘Let us walk up to the king and look in his eyes, our backs straight and our sword arms ready,’ Jarl Harald said. ‘And we’ll soon enough know where the thread of this thing ends.’

‘In a pool of blood is where it ends, lord,’ Asgot sneered from where he sat atop a nearby mound pawing through the innards of a cat. He was completely naked, his knotty body a mass of scars and strange shapes that were stained into his skin, and his hands were bright with the creature’s blood.

Harald turned and looked up at the man, shielding his eyes against the sun’s glare. ‘Is this pool of blood in Avaldsnes?’ he asked. Sigurd knew his father did not always like what his godi had to say but he always listened. Everyone else listened too, faces turned up to the small hill, the women’s swollen, anguished eyes slitted now against a dawn that saw them widows.

Asgot held something purple and glistening between finger and thumb and put it to his lips then glared down at his jarl.

‘No, lord. I see fire at Avaldsnes but no blood.’

‘Funeral pyres for the dead perhaps,’ Sorli suggested. ‘We killed many of Jarl Randver’s men but some of the king’s too.’

Harald scratched his bearded chin, his brow furrowed like Skudeneshavn’s bay with the first northerly beginning to blow across it. ‘So you think we should go and hear what Biflindi has to say? Listen to him try to wriggle out of the carcass of this thing?’

‘It is wiser to stand up to a bear than to turn your back on it,’ Asgot said and even Olaf seemed to agree with this for he gave a curt nod.

‘Then we need to prepare,’ Olaf said. ‘Who stays, who goes. The last thing we want is to come back and find the thralls gone and our silver with them.’

‘Or Randver knocking on the gate,’ Frothi said.

Olaf looked to his jarl but Harald was looking out across the harbour, his thoughts spear-flung somewhere far off. Perhaps he was hoping to see
Reinen
and
Sea-Eagle
coming in, oars beating like wings, Slagfid, Thorvard and Sigmund at
Reinen
’s prow, shouting the tale of their miraculous victory across the water to those on the shore. Sigurd had never seen his father look like that before and he did not like it.

‘Come to the hall tonight,’ Olaf announced. ‘Jarl Harald will choose his war band.’

‘What shall we do now?’ Aud’s widow Geirhild asked, grim-faced, all her crying done beneath her own roof.

‘Fetch stones,’ Harald said, still looking across the bay. ‘And wood. My men will be buried in a stone ship. Together as they fell, so that they might enter the Allfather’s hall as one fellowship.’

‘And the wood?’ Asbjorn asked, pulling a louse from his beard and crushing it between finger and thumbnail.

There was a silence as all looked to their jarl whose face had all the expression of a granite cliff.

‘I will burn my sons,’ he said, looking for ships that were never coming.

There was no singing in Eik-hjálmr, no fighting or boasting or fumbling in dark corners. There was drinking though. The mead flowed and horns and cups ran over but there was no joy and Sigurd was reminded of Hrothgar’s hall Heorot burdened by grief from the havoc the monster Grendel had wrought.

But for those few men and boys at the beacon on the hill to the east and those at other lookout posts, it seemed that everyone in Skudeneshavn had crammed into Jarl Harald’s hall. There was barely a nostril of clean air to be had and the benches along the walls creaked under the strain of so many folk standing on them to get a better view. Sigurd had managed to shoulder his way through the throng until he was standing before his father and Olaf, both of them standing on their benches adorned with warrior rings and wearing their finest tunics, cloaks and brooches. Harald even wore his jarl torc round his neck, the twisted rope of silver the final part of the display meant to put confidence in his people’s bellies and remind them that they still had a great warrior watching over them.

And yet it was not lost on anyone that there were so many faces missing from Eik-hjálmr, so many great warriors whose bluster would never again carry up to the smoke-blackened beams. In one day Skudeneshavn had been stripped of fifty-two of its men and now their womenfolk and sons filled their places in Harald’s hall, looking to their jarl to salvage something from the wreck of it, to convince them that they would be kept safe.

And yet no matter how great a warrior Jarl Harald was he was now a wolf without a pack. He still had spears to call on, and good men too, but without his champion and his two eldest sons, his best warriors and his ships, his power was broken in Haugaland. No amount of silver lustre in that dark hall could paint its shine on that.

‘How many is that?’ Svein asked, all bristles and mead breath in Sigurd’s ear.

‘Fifteen,’ Sigurd said, having gathered up every name that his father had so far announced and stored them in his mind like hacksilver in a chest. He could have repeated the muster perfectly, though it was as yet imperfect for the lack of his own name in it.

‘Frothi. Agnar.’ Harald went on above the hum of voices. Each man chosen raised his hand in the air so that his jarl could look him in the eye, and this was enough to let each know what was expected of him and also what an honour it was to be chosen, for all that Sorli had muttered that owning a spear and shield was enough to see you picked.

‘Asbjorn. Where are you?’ Harald nodded when he caught sight of the man in the thick of the gathering. ‘You will also come.’

Sigurd saw the grin spread in Asbjorn’s beard as the man ruffled his boy’s hair. Saw the pride in the boy’s eyes, too, and the fear in the boy’s mother’s.

‘You would take a man with one good hand rather than me?’ Sigurd said, hearing his own voice cut through the place like a keel through the dark water.

There was an intake of breath and some rumbles at this, for no one had yet interrupted the jarl. Besides which it was no small insult to Asbjorn. Harald’s face, already dark as the mixing of two sea currents, now threatened a squall.

‘Asbjorn stood in the shieldwall with me when you were nothing but an itch in my crotch, boy,’ Harald said. Some chuckled at this but not many.

‘And yet it was I who saved your life in the fight with Jarl Randver,’ Sigurd announced. ‘All of your other men were too busy being killed.’

‘Hold your tongue, Sigurd,’ Svein beside him growled as Eik-hjálmr thrummed with the ill-breeze of that shameful strike.

Harald’s eyes were arrow points and Olaf beside him was shaking his head but Sigurd held his father’s stare and braced himself.

‘Leave, Sigurd, before you say something that cannot be unsaid,’ Olaf rumbled, nodding towards Eik-hjálmr’s door. ‘This is not the time.’

Then Sorli turned to his father and Olaf. ‘If now is not the time then tell me when is?’ he said, and Harald’s eyes bulged with the audacity of this two-pronged attack in his own hall in front of his own people. ‘Look around you, Father. What do you see? I see sheep waiting for the wolf. I see old men and boys where Sword-Norse stood but two days ago. The steel-storm thinned us and we would have joined our brothers in death if not for Sigurd.’ He could not help but acknowledge Olaf with a nod then. ‘Sigurd has given us the chance to see blood given for blood. But first we must show the king that we still have teeth. Let him see that you still have two strong sons at your back. We will walk into Avaldsnes like war gods and Biflindi will have no choice but to pay the weregeld he owes us or else face a hard fight of it.’

‘Sigurd is only just a man,’ Harald said.

‘True. But he is a warrior,’ Sorli said, holding Sigurd’s eye then. ‘It is all over him like a burnished brynja. If ever there was a man whose wyrd would make the gods sit up and take notice it is my brother. Even the birds speak to him.’

Sigurd glanced at Runa then and knew she had told Sorli about the raven whose warning Sigurd had heard as they watched the ship battle from the shore. Runa flushed and looked back to their father.

‘He did put me on my arse,’ Olaf admitted, a brow hitched and the twitch of a smile appearing in the bush of his beard. ‘And only a man favoured by the gods would manage that.’

Harald glanced over at Grimhild and Sigurd saw his mother give an almost imperceptible shake of her head, then Harald turned to his godi who had up until now held his tongue. ‘What do you say, Asgot?’

‘Sorli is not famous for his wisdom but he has it right where Sigurd is concerned.’ Asgot had some new bones tied in his hair, from the cat he had been up to the wrists in that morning perhaps. ‘The lad is Óðin-favoured. It was the Allfather who sent that raven to warn Sigurd that you were doomed out there in the strait. And Sigurd has enough of the Æsir in him to have untangled the bird’s voice and got sense out of it. I am not jarl and it is not my decision, but I would take him to Avaldsnes.’

The jarl grimaced but nodded and there was a murmur in Eik-hjálmr like that of the sea as folk discussed the rights and wrongs of it.

Eventually after much beard-scratching and lip-chewing Jarl Harald raised a hand to hush the gathering. ‘Sigurd will go,’ he said. ‘And so will Finn Yngvarsson and Orn Beak-Nose.’

Svein slapped Sigurd’s shoulder and Sigurd nodded to Sorli who shrugged as if to say it had only been sense that he’d been talking, for all that Sorli rarely talked sense.

Harald raised a hand to silence the hall again. ‘Olaf will not come for he will go to the outlying farms to muster spears and spread word amongst the bóndi and lendermen of what has happened. He will see how things lie with Jarl Leiknir at Tysvær and Jarl Arnstein Twigbelly at Bokn. He has already chosen the men for that trip and they will know who they are soon enough.’ Svein would be amongst those men though he did not know it yet.

‘Those who stay here will have no lesser task,’ Olaf said, ‘for while these men are off puffing up their feathers for King Gorm you will keep your spears pointed east in case Jarl Randver should grow the balls to attack us here. Keep your eyes peeled and the timbers damp,’ he added, slapping one of the thick oak posts which supported the hall’s roof. ‘And you youngens put the work in with spear and shield for we’re raising a new war band and there will be a place for any man who can prove he’s more useful in the shieldwall than he is in the pig pen.’

There was a buzz at this as young men, even those recently made fatherless, saw greased and golden their chance to grow to manhood and become one of Jarl Harald’s húskarlar, his household warriors. Sigurd’s own life blood was pulsing in his veins at how things had turned out, though he tasted the sour in it, for his own elevation all but stood on his brothers’ burial mound, not that they had one.

Even so, he would prove worthy of it. He would stand with Sorli and their father and show King Gorm that the men of Skudeneshavn were not beaten yet. They would avenge their dead and skalds such as Hagal Crow-Song would weave their tale for the ears of those yet in their cribs.

‘If the lad’s going with you he ought to look the part, Harald,’ Olaf said, scratching his cheek, lips pursed.

Harald almost smiled then. ‘The boy
did
put you on your arse, Uncle,’ he said, thick fingers prising open the silver ring on his arm which he had offered as a prize the night before the ship battle. ‘If you kick King Gorm in the bollocks too you can have another one,’ he said, pulling the ring off and flinging it at his youngest son. Sigurd caught it, appraising its weight in his hand for a moment before putting it on his own left arm.

And he was going to Avaldsnes.

THE DAY BEGAN
cloudy and as grey as the sleeping sea around Karmøy. A thin rain that could barely be felt against the skin had nevertheless soaked cloaks and breeks and greased spear shafts by the time they had walked the seven rôsts to Snørteland. Another four rôsts would take them to the village of Kopervik and from there it was just five rôsts to King Gorm’s stronghold at Avaldsnes, from whose vantage point on the hill kings had always sought to control trade and ships going north up the Karmsund Strait.