Authors: Giles Kristian
‘Give me a sail and I’ll get us there with my arse wind alone,’ Svein had said, taking one hand off his oar to wave at a knörr sailing south. Two of the knörr’s crew waved back which was a good sign for it meant that neither
Otter
nor her crew had any whiff of violence about them. Nor was
Otter
big enough to tempt other ships into attacking her for plunder, her thwarts being clearly full of flesh and bone and not silver or ivory or furs. Though this time they came armed, for all that none of it was on show. Olaf had even brought his brynja because he thought the scheme had such a poor chance of working and said that if it came to a fight, which it probably would, then he would fight in his brynja and kill as many men as he could.
Where they could they stayed within a stone’s throw of the shore as this way they were at least some of the time concealed by bluffs and skerries. Often, though, they were right out in the channel and at these times Sigurd’s heart hammered in his chest and his palms grew slick on the oar stave. They barely spoke, for all knew how well a man’s voice will carry across water, and yet only Svein seemed as calm as the fjord, a half grin nestled in his beard like a cat in straw, as though it was all a fine adventure. As for the others, their eyes shone in the gloom and Sigurd supposed he would have heard their hearts pounding too if not for the rhythmic
splosh
of the oar blades. Solveig worked the tiller and Loker, who claimed his eyesight was so good that he had once seen Rán, mother of the waves, casting her nets in the dark depths, hung over
Otter
’s bow, peering below the surface for rocks that might be their undoing.
Sigurd had brought sword, axe and shield, but they were safely stowed in the thwarts, as were Svein’s. In the leather nestbaggin at his feet were the things he would need, the items they had managed to lay hands on at such short notice. Lying across the thwarts behind him was just over five feet of new pine trunk and this was perhaps the most important thing they had brought, despite Olaf still having no confidence in the whole idea. Not least since they had passed the vik just south of Kopervik and so now had a foot firmly inside the bear’s cave.
Every now and then a fish jumped somewhere out there in the murk, each
plunk
yanking on taut nerves and turning heads, though it was not likely that any skipper would be sailing at night, which each of them knew, if only he stopped to think about it.
‘The last thing Biflindi or any of his arse welts will be expecting is for Harald’s last breathing son to come within sight of Karmsundet let alone within sniffing distance of the royal shit bucket,’ Olaf had said, ‘but it won’t matter who we are if we get up to the skerries where he collects his tolls. They’ll think we’re a crew of halfwits trying to slip through the net without paying and they’ll kill us just the same. Dead is dead, as my father used to say.’
So now Solveig was looking for the skerries that sat in the middle of that stretch of water which was the entrance to the fairway men called the north road, for these rocky islands were as far as
Otter
would go. Men on the sniff for taxes have noses like hounds, as Hendil had put it, which meant they dared not go beyond that point. And it was Loker’s eyes, as the only other pair looking the way they were going, that saw the skerries first. Which in the event came as a great relief after a day’s rowing, not least to Olaf’s backside which, he moaned, had died somewhere back near Blikshavn.
When they came to the rocks Solveig guided
Otter
into a sheltered inlet that was as dark as the inside of a sealskin purse and there the others pulled in their oars, rolling tired shoulders and shaking the pain from their arms while Loker tied them up to a tooth of rock jutting from the dark water. Somewhere close by a bird took off squawking from its nest, a flash of white in the murk, and something else plopped off a rock into the water.
Inland, towards the king’s hall up on the hill, a fire burning out of sight hazed the dark sky with burnished bronze, the tang of smoke brought to Sigurd’s nose on the westerly breeze that had wanted to push
Otter
out into the channel. It was a warm breeze, as sweet as Freyja’s breath, and Sigurd wondered if the goddess had come down from Asgard to watch them cheat the king.
‘Asgot will have the Allfather’s ears ringing with curses and spells aimed at Gorm and Randver,’ Svein had said when they’d learnt of the godi’s fate, and Sigurd had not doubted it. Saving the godi because he had been his father’s friend and a Skudeneshavn man was one thing, but perhaps not worth dying for. Saving the man from a drowning death because he was a priest and therefore the gods were ever likely to be watching him? That was worth any risk, because Sigurd had lost everything, including the gods’ favour, and perhaps some act of courage and daring would turn back that ill-lucked tide. And these thoughts hung like loom weights in his mind now as he looked at the distant shoreline which gleamed as though the stones upon it yet held an ember of the day’s light.
‘It may not be tonight,’ Olaf said, threading his arms through his brynja’s sleeves, then throwing them up above his head so that the weight of those iron rings pulled the whole thing down and over his head and torso like water from a pail. ‘Or they may have done it already and there are crabs down there puking their guts up,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders to help the rings settle and find their place. He strapped on his sword belt and tucked an axe into it but left his helmet and shield in the boat.
‘It is tonight, Uncle,’ Sigurd said, taking off his tunic and leaving it with his weapons by the row bench. He did not know how he knew that but he did. Hendil and Loker lifted the pine trunk from
Otter
’s thwarts and passed it to Svein who laid it across his muscled shoulders and waited for Sigurd who was tying the haversack of essentials over his own shoulder so that it hung across his back.
Hendil stepped ashore to join them, buckling his own sword belt and gripping an ash spear in his left hand.
‘Wait for us as long as you can,’ Sigurd said to Solveig and Loker whose eyes he could just see, by the glow coming off the water. ‘But don’t be here when it starts getting light.’
‘With just the two of us rowing we’d need to set off yesterday,’ Solveig grumbled, which was not far off the truth, but Sigurd could not concern himself with that now.
‘Are you ready, Svein?’ he asked, making sure the scramasax at his waist was secure in its sheath. Other than that blade he was unarmed and Olaf grimaced to see it, though he knew why it had to be so. Svein’s answer was a flash of white amongst his beard and with that they turned, Sigurd, Svein, Olaf and Hendil, and set off across the rock like shadows chasing after bodies which had cast them off.
They splashed through shallow pools, slipping now and then on slick weed thrown up by the last high tide, then came up onto higher ground and pushed north over the skerry’s spine, Olaf leading the way, a dark, looming, upright shape against the barren rockscape. Sigurd came next with Hendil behind him and Svein at the rear lumbering like some mountain troll with the pine log across his shoulders. The air was cool against Sigurd’s skin. The whisper of the sea against the skerry’s sinking edge seeped into his ears beneath his own hot breath and his beating pulse, and he felt like a boy again, up to mischief on a summer’s night. He hoped that the tide had not already risen high enough to seep into Asgot’s mouth and lungs, choking his curses and drowning him. And he hoped that the gods were watching.
Soon Olaf threw a hand back and hissed, crouching, and the others bent low or went down onto their haunches as Sigurd saw the glow from a fire up ahead beyond a swell of rock. A man’s voice drifted over the skerry followed by laughter as flat as a stone skimmed across the bay and Sigurd licked dry lips and clutched the Óðin amulet hanging round his neck. His stomach felt like it was full of startled moths as he watched Olaf signal to Hendil to take off his sword belt and move up to get a better look. For Olaf’s mail would scrape noisily on the rock, whereas Hendil, in nothing more than leather and wool, could crawl as quietly as a fox to a hen coop.
Even so, Sigurd held his breath as Hendil, his spear left behind, skulked past him and bellied up the swell until the top of his head stuck out against the iron grey and darker charcoal sky. Another voice carried over to them, the sense of the words shredded by the breeze, but loud enough so that Sigurd wondered how they had not heard them before, how they had almost blundered into a camp and burnt their feet on their fire.
In the time it takes to put an edge back on a sharp knife Hendil returned, the white of his palm bright as he spread the fingers wide. Sigurd and Olaf nodded. Five men and no doubt well armed was not something to be taken lightly. But then from the slur of their voices it seemed the sentries were making the best of being stuck out there on that barren rock while their friends flattened the straw with women or slept off the mead in their lord’s hall.
Svein laid the pine log down and hauled his big scramasax out of its scabbard. Hendil gave Sigurd his spear and drew his sword and Olaf gripped his sword in one hand and his short axe in the other. No one said a word but each man knew they would have to be fast. They would have to hit the men together, like a wave against the strand, and kill fast before any of the sentries had a chance to run or signal to the far shore.
They will not be expecting us, Sigurd told himself, the blood-thrill announcing itself in his trembling hands. That strange feeling was in the big muscles of his thighs too and he did not try to fight it but rather let the sensation course through his body, filling bone and flesh, warming him from the inside out like spiced mead.
Olaf gestured for Svein to work his way round the left of the mound before them and Sigurd nodded at the low cunning in this, for any boat the king’s men had would be down at the water’s edge and so that was the way they would flee.
Svein moved off and for twenty heartbeats Sigurd and the others watched him go. Then Olaf was up and Sigurd and Hendil rose beside him and together they ran up the swell, tight-lipped as the dead, and as they came over to fall upon King Gorm’s men Olaf threw his axe which thunked into a man’s chest before the man could have known what was coming. Another hauled at his sword’s hilt but drew not a foot of it before Sigurd’s spear struck him in the chest and he dropped to his knees clutching at the shaft. Another warrior raised his spear, growling, and thrust it at Olaf who twisted his torso and scythed down with strength and edge enough to sever the shaft. Then he swung the blade back up, lopping off the man’s left arm and taking him under the chin to cleave his face in two before he could scream.
Another man fled. Straight into Svein. Not fancying his chances against Svein’s scramasax, even armed with a good spear as he was, the sentry turned and got a belly full of Hendil’s sword. Hendil clutched the man’s beard braid and hauled him further onto his blade which he rammed home up to the cross guard, spitting curses into the man’s face.
The last of them knew better than to waste his breath begging for his life. He threw down his spear in disgust, turned towards Olaf and dropped to his knees. For a moment he looked up at Sigurd, a spark of recognition perhaps flashing in his eyes, then he nodded at Olaf, trusting the sharpness of the mailed warrior’s sword, and tilted his head forward.
‘Give him your blade, Hendil,’ Olaf growled, and so Hendil did. The warrior wrapped his fingers around the hilt and smiled. Then Olaf’s sword flashed in the gloom and took off his head.
They were on the island’s edge and Olaf pointed his gore-slick blade out across the water to another rock a good arrow-shot away. ‘If he’s not drowned yet he’ll be somewhere out there,’ he said.
But Sigurd could see no sign of Asgot. Taking off his shoes he turned to look at the far shore which sat below the king’s hall, his eyes searching for movement there, his ears sifting the breeze for any commotion that would tell him that someone had seen the fight on the island, which was not impossible due to the glow from the fire crackling beside them.
All quiet it seemed.
‘We’ll tie rocks to them and sink them,’ Olaf said, gesturing at the nearest of King Gorm’s dead men. ‘It will look as though they vanished like sea mist.’ Sigurd nodded as Svein came back over the swell with the pine log across his shoulders and a few moments later he and Sigurd eased themselves down into the water, their breath catching in their chests with the coldness of it. There were little lights in the water, fishes’ eyes glowing in the dark, and Sigurd could feel slimy weed beneath his feet and sharper things, mussels and limpets stuck to the rocks.
‘Don’t you go and bloody drown,’ Olaf said over his shoulder, retrieving his axe from a dead man’s chest. ‘I don’t want to be coming down there to pull you from Rán’s cold embrace. That would rot this brynja and you don’t have the silver to buy me another.’
Sigurd did not reply. He and Svein had their arms over the pine trunk and their chins all but resting on the rough, scaly bark whilst their bodies found their own buoyancy. Without a word they kicked their legs beneath the water to push themselves off, keeping their bellies full of air and trying not to break the surface with their feet. Then out into deeper water, legs stirring the cold depths, the sound of the sea against the rocks fading with the fire’s copper behind them as they kicked into the darkness, pushing the pine log before them.
It was dark and cold and the breeze was pushing low waves against the left side of Sigurd’s face, but before they had slipped into the water he had fixed the moon’s place in the sky, the cloud-veiled glow of it anyway, and by glancing up now and then, or turning to see where they were in relation to the fire on the island behind them, he was able to keep them on the right course. At least, the course which Olaf had shown them.
They swam and they shivered and in the darkness it was hard to know how far they had gone. Sigurd was about to say as much to Svein when he heard oars in the water.
They stopped kicking and held their breath, ears straining to weigh up the sound, Svein’s eyes glowing in the murk. But within no time they were drifting on the current like sea wrack and so they kicked again lest they undo the hard work they had put in so far. But the dipping of oars was getting louder. They stopped again, holding their position as best they could by flailing their legs directly below them and gripping the log as though their lives depended on it. Which more than likely they did.