Authors: Giles Kristian
Then Svein hissed and Sigurd followed his line of sight and saw the boat they had known was out there somewhere. Saw the black shape of it and knew it was smaller than
Otter
by a foot, perhaps two, not that that was any comfort as it came straight for them, four pairs of oars pulling it against the current.
‘They’ll see us,’ Svein hissed, and they would too, because Sigurd and Svein’s pale arms would show against the darker bark as they clung on. They could not grip the log any other way because Svein had lopped off the little stumps and knobs where branches had been, and to take their arms off the log risked being carried off with the current.
The boat was getting closer now, so that they could hear the voices of those rowing.
‘Your belt,’ Sigurd hissed, fumbling with one hand to undo the buckle beside the hilt of his scramasax. Svein did the same as Sigurd pulled the belt off and threw one end over the trunk then reached underneath to gather it up. When Svein had done likewise they turned the log to shield them from the view of those in the boat and held on to their belts with two hands, their heads all but submerged so that the waves washed over their faces, the salt stinging Sigurd’s eyes as he shivered and stayed corpse-still, waiting for the shout to go up from the little boat’s crew.
At one point the king’s men were no more than four spear-lengths away and Sigurd had thought they would hear his teeth chattering for he was getting very cold now. And it seemed as if the boat was taking an age to pass, so that Sigurd was glad that his ears were waterlogged for he could not hear the gods laughing at him half drowning to avoid a spearing. But the eight oars dipped and rose, dipped and rose, and the boat headed back to the king’s shore leaving Sigurd and Svein freezing but alive. Better still, they knew it must have come from the rock upon which Asgot had been left to drown and so they turned their tree trunk north-east and kicked some warmth into their freezing flesh.
Ahead of them Sigurd saw a flash of white and for a moment he could not say what it was but then his eyes made sense of it. Two swans were gliding side by side across the water, their feathers raised like sails to catch the breeze, and Sigurd wondered if Asgot had sent the birds to show him the way. They followed the swans and after what seemed a long time they began to feel weed-slick rock beneath their feet. Then they clambered up, bringing the pine log with them, stumbling and falling now and then because the water was up to their thighs and they could not see where they were putting their feet. Sigurd turned to look for the swans but the creatures had vanished. Yet, this was the place. Surely.
They waded on, numb-legged, the pine log back on Svein’s shoulders, scramasaxes belted at their waists and the wet skin of their arms raised into bumps by the breeze. And they did not need the swans to tell them that the pale, knotty figure a stone’s throw off to their left was Asgot.
The godi was on his knees, the water up to his gnarly collar bones and soaking his beard which had been stripped of any silver, though the little white bones were knotted there still. He twisted at their approach and with his neck stretched above the brine seemed to be sniffing the air like some beast, lips hitched back from his teeth.
‘Rán will not have you tonight, Asgot,’ Sigurd said, the words slurred through frozen, trembling lips.
‘That greedy bitch was never going to have me,’ Asgot gnarred, lifting his chained right arm out of the water and spitting into the waves, which had Svein touching the iron hammer at his neck – and Sigurd did not blame him for they would still have to swim all the way back and Rán was not the kind of goddess you wanted for an enemy.
Sigurd took the nestbaggin off his back and with a shaking hand reached inside, pulling from it a hammer and chisel. Svein squatted in the water beside Asgot holding the pine trunk so that Sigurd could use it as a work bench.
‘Harald’s whelp and Styrbiorn’s troll,’ Asgot said through the twist of his white lips. ‘King Gorm will be pissing in his boots.’ And yet for all that the godi seemed unimpressed, he nevertheless put his iron-ringed wrist on Svein’s log so that Sigurd could place the chisel on the join and take his hammer to it.
‘We can leave you here, godi,’ Sigurd offered before striking the first blow.
But Asgot chuckled at that. ‘I think I’ll come with you, young Sigurd,’ he said, ‘for all that I’d like to see Biflindi’s face when he sees this ring empty in the morning.’ Svein winced at the sharp
chink
of steel against steel but after five strikes the iron split and Asgot took his arm away, rubbing his wrist with the other hand.
‘Not empty,’ Sigurd said, opening the haversack again. This time he fetched out a fox’s leg, the dark fur soaked and slick and the flesh of the severed end white and bloodless after being in the water so long. He grabbed hold of the dark paw, squeezing it to bring the claws together, then pushed it through the iron manacle as far as it would go before the leg became too thick near the thigh. Hopefully the leg would remain wedged in there even at high tide with the currents playing with it.
Svein was grinning like a fiend and Asgot, who understood the trick of it, muttered to the Allfather and Loki the Mischief God that he hoped they were watching this.
For next day, when the tide went out, King Gorm and his people would return expecting to see a crab-picked, wave-licked corpse lying on that flat rock. Instead they would find a fox’s leg and perhaps none would even dare go near enough to see that the iron ring was broken. The story would jump around Avaldsnes like fleas that Jarl Harald’s godi had shape-shifted into a creature with teeth sharp enough to gnaw through its own leg and escape the tide-death coming for it.
‘That is some powerful seiðr,’ Asgot said.
But for now there was a blush of dawn light in the east and they needed to be gone. Asgot was corpse-white and bone-stiff, the strange swirls and patterns all over his body seeming alive with his shivering. But he was alive.
And the gods were watching.
Runa could still feel the trembling deep in her bones, though she told herself that no one else would notice it. Not by the light of the cod-oil lamps chain-hung from the great beams of the jarl’s mead hall.
She would never have imagined that the slave trader’s blood could fly so far as to slap her face when Gerth had cleaved the man apart, but she thought she could still taste the iron tang of it in her mouth. She could still hear her friend Svanild’s scream deep in her ears, as though it had burrowed in there like a maggot and could not find its way out. When she closed her eyes she could still see Gerth’s face, like a stain behind her eyelids, as Randver’s men plunged their spears into his back and sides. Gerth’s expression had been one of fury and shame because he knew he had failed to save his cousin. Or was the fury for his sword-brothers, who had not burst from the crowd to fight beside him?
For Runa had seen Olaf and Svein and Hendil, despite their attempts to blend in with the merchants, craftsmen and farmers. She had seen Sigurd too, and the sight of him had stopped her breath like a bung in a flask. Randver’s thegns had told her that her father and brothers were dead, killed in a fight up near King Gorm’s hall at Avaldsnes, and when she had heard this Runa had wanted to die too, for it meant all was lost.
But seeing Sigurd alive at the slave market on Rennisøy, close enough that she could have called out to him, had hauled her spirits out of that dark mire and set her heart pounding in her chest like a hammer on an anvil.
And Runa suspected that the trembling in her bones now was not because she had been as close to blood and death that day as a warrior in the third row of the shieldwall, or even because of the horror of seeing her friend sold to some greasy-bearded karl – for that had been Svanild’s wyrd when the chaos had passed and Randver’s men had dragged the gory bodies away. No, Runa was shaking because Sigurd was somehow alive! He had escaped the death that had taken the rest of their family, even their mother, whom Runa had last seen being cut down by one of Randver’s warriors though not before she had opened another man’s belly with her scramasax.
Her brother, who men whispered was Óðin-favoured, was alive. And she knew he would come for her.
‘What’s the matter, girl? Not hungry?’
She glared at Jarl Randver, letting the hate in her eyes wrap around him like an ill-weather cloak, but the jarl simply shrugged and turned back to the man with whom he was talking and drinking.
She had been so desperate to lock eyes with Sigurd, to let him know that she had seen him, if only to stop him doing something stupid, for perhaps he did not know that Jarl Randver had seeded the crowd with his warriors. Yet though it had taken every ounce of will she possessed, she had avoided her brother’s eye, for she knew Amleth, Randver’s second son, was watching her. She could feel his eyes in her flesh like a hawk’s talons, and was sure Amleth would know the moment she looked at Sigurd.
Then Gerth had stormed from the crowd and the slave dealer had died by Gerth’s sword before Svanild’s kinsman had been slaughtered in his turn and Runa had willed Sigurd to stay hidden and not let his pride get him killed too. Perhaps the Allfather had guided her brother then which was why Sigurd had not drawn his sword and waded into the fray, though Runa doubted it. Did not Óðin’s very name mean ‘frenzy’ and if anything the Spear-God would have urged Sigurd on and laughed as the blood flew.
More likely was that her father’s sword-brother Olaf had guided Sigurd’s blade back into its scabbard. With Harald’s bloodline all but snuffed out by oath-breakers and ambitious men, Olaf would surely not let Sigurd throw his life away so cheaply. He had treated all of Harald and Grimhild’s children as his own and Runa knew he would protect Sigurd now, which was a comfort to her.
And yet, as she sat in their enemy’s hall eating his meat and drinking his mead, Runa could not salve the disappointment which smarted like a burn that her brother had not tried to rescue her. She was ashamed of herself for it but there it was. For she had seen the way Amleth and the jarl’s eldest son Hrani looked at her, like men wondering how they might steal a man’s sword from under his nose. Even their little half-brother Aki, who could not have been older than eleven, stared at her with undisguised hunger, which gave Runa the feeling of ants crawling up her arms and the back of her neck. But of the sons only Hrani had come with the jarl to Skudeneshavn that day, bringing death and despair, and she hated him for it.
‘Your mother was not to be harmed,’ Jarl Randver had told Runa when his ship had moored at the wharf at Hinderå and his blood-lust had receded like the tide. ‘But she opened Andvett’s guts and his friend did not stop to see if she would do the same to him.’
Runa had watched Andvett writhing in the thwarts of Randver’s ship, his glistening purple gut rope bulging from a hideous wound, the green wool of his tunic having wicked so much blood it looked black.
The other men had gathered round him grim-faced, assuring him of his place in Valhöll and giving him messages for their friends and fathers who were already there. Not that Andvett cared for all that, gnashing his teeth and mewling as he was.
He had died before Randver’s thegns had taken down
Fjord-Wolf
’s snarling prow, when the jarl’s hall was still but a dark imposing shape on the gull-wreathed heights, and Runa had seen Randver’s face pale when another man brought him the news. But for all her fear, Runa had brimmed with pride in her mother, in her courage and refusal to yield. And she had thought that Harald, if he still lived, would be proud of Grimhild too.
But now she knew that her father was dead. Her brother Sorli too. Murdered up in Avaldsnes by Biflindi, the traitor king.
‘Well she is pretty but for all we know she might have no teeth in that cat’s arse of a mouth of hers,’ the man beside Randver said now, leaning round the jarl to get a good look at her. ‘Perhaps she does not think much of your mead, Jarl Randver.’ Runa did not know who Randver’s guest was but she knew she would like to put a blade in his eye.
Randver wafted a hand in her direction. ‘Ah, she is brooding because her brother did not think her worth fighting for,’ he said. Then he held her eye, his lips curling in his fair beard. ‘But he
was
there, your brother, wasn’t he, girl? That fool whom my men skewered, he had gone there with young Sigurd, I’d wager an eyrir on it.’ Runa kept her face as changeless as a sleeping sea, giving nothing away. Randver shrugged. ‘Clearly your brother did not think much of his witless friend either, to stand there and watch him speared like an animal.’
‘King Gorm could not kill my brother and neither could you,’ Runa said, unable to hold her tongue any longer and letting her eyes sharpen themselves on the jarl’s face. A hush swept across Jarl Randver’s hall, warriors and women hungry to hear what Jarl Harald’s girl had to say to their lord. The weight of it was like an anchor on Runa’s chest but she held her chin high and kept her eyes on Randver’s. Was she not a jarl’s daughter? Only Randver’s hounds could see her legs trembling under the table. ‘My brother is Óðin-favoured,’ she said, loud enough for all to hear. ‘As anyone who knows him will attest. You—’ she turned, raking them all with her glare ‘—all of you will regret making an enemy of him.’
Jarl Randver’s eyes narrowed. Was that respect she saw in their flame-played depths? Or murder? ‘Your brother has barely grown into his beard,’ he said. ‘He is alone in this world and his future is not now what it once was. He is nothing.’
‘Then why are your men looking for him?’ Runa asked. There was some murmuring amongst the drinkers then.
‘Slap the insolent bitch!’ a man barked.
‘Give her to Skarth to play with,’ a woman called, Skarth being Jarl Randver’s new champion and prow man, and Runa’s courage wavered at that, for up until now no man there, or anywhere come to that, had touched her in that way. And in her gut she knew it was only a matter of time before one of them did.
‘My men are looking for your brother because I am a generous man and I have decided that I am willing to accept his oath of fealty, along with that of any who are foolish enough to follow him like hounds after scraps.’ The jarl smiled then. ‘And for all that your own value has . . . well . . . sunk, your dowry not now what it once might have been, still my second son Amleth has it on his mind to marry you.’