God of Vengeance (22 page)

Asgot’s brow furrowed. ‘Perhaps not quite so modest,’ he said, and Sigurd did not need to look at Olaf to know the look that was on his face. He would be thinking this was silver they could use to buy food and weapons or even spearmen if it came to that. Nevertheless, Sigurd had not come here to show the gods and the spirits what a careful and thrifty man he was. He found another piece of silver, as long as his hand, curved slightly but thinner than his finger. He guessed it had been part of a beautiful stirrup once and he wondered after the man rich enough to own such a thing even as he handed it to Asgot.

‘Better,’ the godi said, weighing both pieces in his hands that were the scales by which he did his business with the gods. ‘Normally we would woo this fen like a chieftain’s favourite daughter,’ he said.

‘With mead then!’ Svein put in.

‘And a good saga tale,’ Aslak suggested.

But Asgot ignored them. ‘We would make several offerings and ask for nothing in return. Over time we would gain the spirit’s favour. We would not rush it.’ He put the silver to his nose as though smelling it, then tossed both pieces into a sinkhole and they vanished without so much as a glint into the blackness. Into the world beyond.

‘If I’m owed silver I prefer not to wait for it,’ Olaf said and no one could argue with that. Though perhaps they were too busy peering into the sinkhole, especially Alvi who had likely never seen so much silver, let alone so much silver thrown into a hole. Sigurd wondered if the young man might find the courage to come back to this place and jump in the hole himself to fish the plunder back out.

‘Now what?’ Solveig asked, clapping his hands before his face and wiping the squashed insect down the front of his breeks.

‘I’ve known Asgot long enough to wager my beard that we did not come all the way out here rotting our bollocks off to appease some fen spirit,’ Olaf said. All eyes turned not to Asgot but to Sigurd. ‘For one thing, that much silver can only mean that we’re staying out here tonight,’ Olaf went on, ‘which if you ask me is not even good enough to be a bad idea.’

Neither Sigurd nor Asgot denied this.

‘We are going to stay out here tonight?’ Loker said, wide-eyed.

‘Aye, and for that much silver this fen spirit ought to lay on meat, mead and women,’ Olaf said, then turned back to Asgot and Sigurd, planting his spear’s butt into the swamp. ‘So now you two have got us out here, far enough from food, ale and comfort to know that we’d likely sink up to our necks if we tried to go back alone, why don’t you put us out of our misery, hey? Poor Solveig here has never been so far from the sea.’ He cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Listen. You will hear Rán sobbing because she misses the old dog.’

‘When I find what I am looking for, Olaf, then you will know why we are here,’ Asgot said.

‘We should have left you chained to Gorm’s rock,’ Olaf growled.

Asgot grinned sourly. ‘Did you really think my wyrd was to drown out there in the dark, swept out of sight by some
ormstunga
king?’
Serpent tongue
, a good name for King Gorm that, Sigurd thought.

‘Well you would have if not for us,’ Olaf said.

‘You see, Olaf, the gods have uses even for you,’ Asgot said, which had Olaf muttering into his beard as the godi turned his back on them all and trudged on. Perhaps it was because no one wanted to turn and go back alone or be the first to say they wanted to, or maybe they were too far on the hook of whatever Asgot and Sigurd had in mind not to see it through now, but they all followed the godi, squelching through the sucking plunge, sweating with the effort of it and getting bitten out of their minds by unseen creatures.

And then, after the time it would take eight men to unload the ballast from
Little-Elk
, Asgot found what he was looking for. At first it had just been a dark shape in the hanging fog, but Sigurd had felt the dread rising in him as they drew nearer, so that even before the shape revealed itself he knew this would be the place.

‘It is no Yggdrasil,’ Asgot said, ‘but it must have deep roots to find clean water in this reeking place.’ They had stopped before another alder, this one still living, though stunted, standing alone on a peat mound, proud of the sedge and twig rush, the bog arrow grass and the stinking water. And when Sigurd saw it a shiver ran from his arse up to the back of his head, like a rat escaping the mud.

‘We’ve come all this way for a tree?’ Svein said.

‘Ygg’s horse,’ Asgot murmured. ‘Óðin’s steed.’

‘Not from where I am standing,’ Olaf said. ‘It’s a gnarly old tree in a reeking fen.’ He looked at Solveig. ‘Albeit a fen that is richer than I am,’ he said.

Asgot looked at Sigurd and Sigurd took a breath, planted his spear in the sucking earth and turned to the others.

‘You had better make it quick, lad, for it doesn’t do to stand still too long. Not when you’re a short-arse like me,’ Solveig said. This got some
ayes
from the others who were already beginning to sink into the mire and were continually pulling their feet free as though they feared the fen was trying to claim them for the silver rings on fingers and tied in beards, the scramasaxes and knives on their belts, and the iron or silver amulets at their necks.

‘You have all seen that the gods have turned their backs on my family,’ Sigurd said, and some of them would not meet his eye at that. ‘It is no secret. My father, who was beloved of the Æsir, was betrayed by an oath-breaker. My brothers were butchered. My mother, who ever respected Freyja the Giver and was favoured by the goddess, was murdered by her own hearth.’ Every word was like a loom weight caught in his throat and yet every one needed to be said. ‘My sister Runa was taken from her home and is even now that worm Jarl Randver’s prisoner.’

They looked at the mud or at their shoes, or anywhere but at him and at first Sigurd thought it was because they were embarrassed for him because the gods had deserted his family. But then he realized that was not it. He was certain it was shame that they felt, shame because they had let all this happen. That they had not protected their jarl and their people.

‘Look at me, Svein,’ he said. His friend looked up, fixing his blue eyes on Sigurd’s and Sigurd nodded. ‘Like a fish that is small enough to slip through the holes in a net I alone of my father and brothers escaped this treachery. Perhaps this was good luck. Or perhaps the Allfather spared me for some reason he alone knows.’

‘Who cares, lad?’ Olaf blurted. ‘You’re alive and at your age that’s better than being dead.’

‘No, Uncle,’ Sigurd said. ‘It is not so simple.’

‘Never bloody is,’ Olaf muttered.

‘You all knew my father. If he were alive what would he do?’ Sigurd watched them look to each other and then to Olaf, expecting him to answer.

But it was Solveig who spoke. ‘Even had he been a damned pig farmer instead of a jarl, Harald would take his revenge on those who had betrayed him. That is what any man worthy of his ancestors would do.’

Sigurd looked at Olaf. ‘Then would you expect me to do less? Should I hide under rocks for the rest of my life, happy just to have survived?’

Svein turned his head and spat into the mire. That was his answer to that.

‘We wouldn’t be here with you if we thought you were a coward, Sigurd,’ Olaf said. ‘We could pledge ourselves to another jarl. Maybe Randver himself or even Biflindi would have use for us if we kissed their steel and muttered the right oaths.’

‘And yet instead of drinking another lord’s mead you are standing up to your knees in fen mud waiting for me to win back my family’s honour,’ Sigurd said and no one denied it. ‘But I do not know how to do that. I am no jarl. I have neither thegns to command nor the silver to buy good fighters.’

‘And neither will you if he keeps chucking it into the mire,’ Olaf said, thumbing towards Asgot.

‘Tell me that tonight, Olaf,’ Asgot sneered, ‘when you feel the fetid breath of spirits on your neck and see corpse candles flickering out there in the dark.’

That was enough to still Olaf’s tongue for a while and have Loker looking over his shoulder.

Sigurd turned back to the alder. ‘This is why we are here. I have come seeking answers.’ He glanced at Asgot. ‘I have come to show the gods that regardless of them turning their backs on my father I am Harald’s son and I will not skulk off and find a fire to sit by. Let the Lord of the Spear torment me with betrayal like he did my father. Let him throw me into the wolf pit if that is his wish. But he
will
notice me. And if he is true to his name, that all men know means
frenzy
, then let him guide me while I hang from this tree. Afterwards I will know what to do. The Allfather will show me.’

Hendil looked at Loker who looked at Olaf, whose face was all protruding eyes, flaring nostrils and teeth.

‘You think I came out here to watch you hang yourself from this tree?’ Olaf said.

‘You don’t have to watch, Uncle,’ Sigurd said.

‘For nine full nights Óðin hung on the windswept tree Yggdrasil,’ Asgot said. ‘You all know the story well enough. He hung there without food, without water, slashed with a spear. He sacrificed himself to himself until, screaming, he was able to reach down and take up the runes. The mysteries of death were borne up to him from the depths below the World Tree’s roots and the Nídhögg’s den.’

‘You’ll die, you damned fool,’ Olaf blurted to Sigurd, ignoring Asgot entirely.

Sigurd nodded. ‘I might,’ he said.

‘Well you’ll get old One-Eye’s attention, I’d wager my arm ring on that,’ Solveig said.

‘Aye, we’ll hear him laughing at the lad’s bone-headed stupidity,’ Olaf bawled, waving his spear and spraying his beard with spittle. ‘Alvi, take us back, lad, before we bloody sink.’

‘I’m staying, Uncle,’ Sigurd said.

‘If Sigurd’s staying I’m staying,’ Svein said, making a show of it by standing still and letting his feet sink. His point made, he pulled one free and then the other with two great farting squelches that halfway ruined his heroic gesture.

‘Well I haven’t got it in me to walk all the way back now anyway,’ Solveig said, ‘and neither do I much feel like getting lost in the dark.’ He gestured to the peat mound on which the alder stood. ‘To my eyes that’s the only dry bit of ground within an arrow’s flight. What do you say, Olaf? Might as well try to make ourselves comfortable, hey? While the lad does what he needs to do.’

Olaf shook his head, bewildered, then glared at Sigurd. ‘Tell me you’re not going to let him cut you while you’re at it,’ he said, gesturing at Asgot.

Sigurd looked at Asgot.

‘Just a small cut,’ the godi said, taking the rope off his shoulders and rubbing the flesh where its weight had sat all day.

Olaf huffed and growled a curse. ‘This bog stink has addled the whole lot of you up here,’ he said, looking round them all and tapping a finger against his skull.

And maybe it had, Sigurd thought. For they stood there staring at him, all of them but for Olaf, as though they half expected him to take his knife and prise out his own eye to use as payment for a drink from Mímir’s Well of Wisdom.

So I have my war band, Sigurd thought to himself, feeling a smile tug at the corner of his lip, even if they are only here because there is nowhere else to go. But he would need more than that and he knew it.

And so he would take Asgot’s rope and they would tie him to that tree. And after nine days, if he was still alive, he would know what to do.

And the gods would know his name.

GODS, BUT LOKER
and Hendil had done a good job with the tying. He had a rope around his hips and his chest, lashing him to the alder’s trunk so that he suspected he would hang there even without the branch below his feet which he could just reach. But he was glad of that branch for it meant he could share the burden between the ropes and his legs. Either side of him his arms were tied to smaller boughs with reeds which they had braided because they had not enough rope.

He was cut, too. Asgot had taken his wicked sharp knife to Sigurd’s right side, to the soft flesh beneath the twelfth rib. He had not cut deeply, the wound no longer than Sigurd’s thumb, but the sting of it felt twice as long and Olaf had cursed and smouldered like a day-old pyre when it was done because even a small cut like that can get the wound rot and kill a man as surely as an axe to the head, if only more slowly.

‘I don’t even want to think about what your father and brothers would say if they could see you now, lad,’ Olaf had growled at Sigurd as Hendil, who claimed to be a champion tree climber, had straddled the boughs checking the knots.

‘The boy’s father and brothers are dead because Jarl Harald let the Spear-God’s favour slip through his fingers like ale from a cracked horn,’ Asgot had said and they were hard words but perhaps not untrue.

‘I will win that favour back,’ Sigurd had said, wincing as Hendil yanked one of the reed ropes.

‘And a lot of good it’ll do you half dead on that tree in the middle of this shit hole,’ Olaf said, then batted a hand up at him. ‘If you think I’m going to sit on my arse and watch you kill yourself . . .’ He shook his head, scratching his sweat-beaded beard. ‘Thór’s bollocks, Sigurd, but you’re just doing King Gorm’s job for him. He’d be raising his mead horn to the sky for this piece of good luck.’