Authors: Giles Kristian
‘But your ale tastes like horse piss,’ Olaf said.
Fastvi’s mouth fell open. A shadow fell across Guthorm’s face and his men began to rumble. But then the karl burst into a deep belly laugh and flung the contents of his horn across the floor rushes.
‘I can see you are men who appreciate good drink and straight talk,’ he said, ‘and that is good for I am such a man myself. Geirny! Bring the good ale for our guests!’ This had the men around Guthorm’s table cheering and all of them upending their horns or cups, either into their mouths to be done with it or onto the floor which must have pleased Guthorm’s hounds who took to licking it up. ‘They can stay on the horse piss though,’ he added cheerfully, thumbing towards those folk around the longhouse’s edges. ‘Bleed me drier than a corpse’s fart they do.’
Sigurd shot a look at Olaf, who shrugged. ‘What? We’re getting the good ale now and you can thank me for it.’ Which was true enough, Sigurd had to admit, though if Guthorm had intentionally served them his worst ale it seemed unlikely he would have butchered a pig just for them. More likely was that the animal had died a straw death that morning, from old age perhaps, which was why the eating of it was like chewing a shoe.
‘You are here for the Weeping Stone then,’ Guthorm said.
Sigurd had never heard of the Weeping Stone. ‘What is that?’ he asked. He glanced at Asgot and Olaf. The first shook his head, the second shrugged his mail-clad shoulders.
‘Ah, that is not the reason for your coming to my hall?’ the karl said, frowning for a heartbeat. Then he flapped a hand through the smoke. ‘No matter, there must be another even more fortuitous reason. Trade perhaps.’
‘So what have you brought?’ a man named Eid called. Guthorm had introduced each man round the table when Sigurd’s party had taken their benches. ‘There is nothing in that little boat you came in. So my boys tell me.’ He was a big man and had that look in his eye that was meant to prick Olaf’s pride like a needle in the thumb. But it was a look that Sigurd had seen get men killed, and only a man who did not know Olaf would get it out for him.
Asgot turned to Eid, the bones in his braids rattling. ‘Do we look like traders?’ he sneered, which had some of Guthorm’s men touching the blades of their eating knives to ward off evil.
‘We have not come to trade,’ Sigurd said, holding out his cup so that Guthorm’s thrall could fill it from a jug. He took a drink and took his time, wiping his beard with the back of his hand as their hosts murmured amongst themselves, brows wrinkled and eyes narrowed.
‘You come here armed like Týr himself but with nothing to sell and in a turd of a boat,’ Eid said. ‘Then you must be outlawed.’ Teeth split his beard.
‘Perhaps they are all skalds like Crow-Song here,’ a bald, sweating man suggested.
‘Then I will tie a rock to my leg and jump into the fjord,’ another man said and this got some laughter, even from Hendil, Aslak and Svein.
‘Which one of you pissed up Biflindi’s leg, then?’ Eid asked. His dark eyes nailed themselves to Olaf who simply raised his brows and scratched his bird’s nest beard.
‘Shut your ale hole, Eid. This is no way to speak to our guests,’ Guthorm said, though even he must have been wondering by now who he was wasting his meat and ale on. His teeth pulled some greying bristles onto his fat bottom lip. ‘Still, if I was to lay a wager on it I’d say it was young Harek here who had fallen out with the king. Only, your name is not Harek. Is it?’ He was looking right at Sigurd, a half smile on his face, and Sigurd mused that his plan of using Olaf’s son’s name had unravelled sooner than he had expected.
‘My name is Sigurd,’ he said.
‘Sigurd,’ Fastvi repeated under her breath, dredging her mind for a memory. ‘Haraldarson?’
Guthorm nodded before Sigurd could reply. ‘The same Sigurd who rowed out to the ship battle in Karmsundet and saved Jarl Harald, the great warrior having jumped from his dragon to avoid a steel-death.’
Sigurd glared at Hagal, who blanched. ‘That is not how it goes in my telling of it!’ the skald exclaimed.
Sigurd turned back to Guthorm and poured an icy look on him. ‘My father did not jump,’ he said.
‘I meant no offence,’ Guthorm said with a flash of palm. ‘We have all heard the tale of it. And of how your father led a war band to attack the king at Avaldsnes. That was bravely . . . if unwisely done.’
Sigurd would not waste the breath putting him right on it. ‘That is all water off the stern now,’ he said. ‘I have heard it said that you are an ambitious man, Guthorm.’
‘You must not believe everything Crow-Song tells you,’ Guthorm replied, then he pursed his lips. ‘Though I do not deny that when I see a stripling barely grown into his beard wearing such a cloak pin as that—’ he gestured at Sigurd’s right shoulder, ‘—the silver lust stirs in my breast and I wonder if I should put a crew together. I wonder if I should pack my old sea chest and go raiding again.’
This was why Sigurd had worn the rich brooch and why Olaf sat there straight-backed like an iron-barked tree in his brynja. These were things to make any man envious, to give him that pulling feeling in his gut.
‘What kind of a crew could you put together, Guthorm?’ Olaf asked, just enough scorn in the words to draw out a reply that might otherwise never get past the teeth without greater acquaintance.
‘I can bring forty spears to an argument,’ Guthorm said. Which meant thirty if he were lucky. He looked at Eid and the scar-faced man beside him whose name was Alver. ‘Though I would perhaps only need one,’ he said, which got chuckles, nods and some
ayes
from his men. Then he looked back at his guests. ‘I may not be a jarl, but then being a jarl can be a tricky thing if you are the kind of man who enjoys being alive.’ Sigurd felt Olaf beside him bristle at that but he said nothing and Sigurd was glad of it, for this whole thing was in the scales and needed careful handling.
There were shields hanging from the walls and spears standing in the corners, but all of these had the look of things that were as much part of the furniture as Guthorm’s fur-clad seat and his great table. That war gear was a home for spiders who knew they would not be bothered often. Guthorm loved his own hearth too much.
‘Are you on good terms with Jarl Randver?’ Sigurd asked.
‘Subtle as a dog’s balls,’ Olaf muttered under his breath, which Sigurd thought was a fine thing coming from Olaf.
Guthorm tilted his head to one side. ‘I have the honour of being invited to his son’s wedding,’ he said, letting the weight of those words uncoil and watching Sigurd like a hawk.
The revelation struck Sigurd’s gut like an anchor clumping onto the sea bed, though he tried not to show it.
‘Ah, I see that you have not been invited?’ Guthorm said. ‘And yet is it not your sister who will marry Jarl Randver’s boy?’
Sigurd did not need to look at Olaf to know what he was thinking. He would be as shocked and sickened as Sigurd was himself to learn what the jarl had in store for Runa. And yet at least she was safe.
‘When is this marriage to take place?’ Sigurd asked, the word ‘marriage’ like a foul taste in his mouth.
‘At the Haust Blót feast,’ Guthorm said, belching into a fist. ‘Which tells me that Randver is not so eager for the match as I am sure his boy is.’
This was almost an insult but Sigurd let it go. Besides which, there was probably some truth in it, for though the in-gathering, as the last harvest of the year and a time to prepare for the long winter months, was a time of some celebration, it was a pale shadow compared with the Midwinter feast, when folk drank enough ale and mead to float a longship.
‘Perhaps the eldest lad, Rathi—’ Guthorm frowned. ‘Or is it Hrani?’ He looked at Eid who shrugged as though he could not give a fart either way and Guthorm fluttered fat fingers as though it were unimportant anyway. ‘Whatever the young man is called, I’d wager he will have
his
wedding celebration at the Jól feast and I will take my own horn to that.’ He glanced at the horn in his hand and turned it slightly, making sure Sigurd could see the silver-gilt rim and the pattern etched in it. ‘I have one much bigger than this for such occasions,’ he said.
Two young thralls, a boy and a girl, were clearing the food scraps from the table and Alver was eyeing the girl as though he were still hungry. Guthorm belched again and gestured for the boy to take some ale to the young man chained in the darkness.
‘It is a dark thing, what has happened to you and your kin, Sigurd Haraldarson,’ Guthorm said, ‘and a young man like you must be cursing the Norns for the wyrd they have spun you.’ For a heartbeat or two there seemed to be pity in the karl’s eyes but it did not last and Sigurd was glad for that. ‘But I can see that you are all proud men and have not come for my sympathy.’
‘What have they come for, is what I am asking myself,’ Eid put in.
The hoods of Guthorm’s eyelids rolled slowly over the eyes, which then fixed on Sigurd’s own. ‘You wanted to hear me say that Jarl Randver and I are enemies, hey? That I hope the jarl falls off his ship and drowns under the weight of all his silver, yes? But the truth is I bear him little ill-will. He did not promise me anything for turning a blind eye to his scheming with King Gorm where your father was concerned. I swear to you I knew nothing of all that until after.’
Which told Sigurd that other powerful men
had
profited by his father’s death.
‘But neither did Jarl Randver ask me for spears to help put his arse in your father’s chair, for which I am grateful for it would have been a hard thing to refuse, us being but pissing distance from Hinderå.’ He shook his head and pinched his bulbous nose. ‘If you have come here seeking an alliance against your enemies you will be disappointed, young Sigurd.’ He smiled, though it did not reach his eyes. ‘I mean no offence, but no one would side with a new beard against a jarl and a king, not even a new beard with the steel in his eyes that I see in yours.’ He gave Hagal a cold look. ‘If Crow-Song here led you to believe I would help you get your father’s jarl torc back then you should sink him in the fjord for wasting your time.’
‘And wasting our ale,’ Eid said.
‘Now now, Eid, we can still be good hosts here. Hey? I will not have this young man and his friends sail off saying different.’
‘I can make you rich, Guthorm,’ Sigurd said. Short. Simple.
‘You can make me dead, boy!’ Guthorm growled, the veil slipping off his good humour now.
‘You can fuck off back the way you came,’ Eid said and suddenly Olaf and Svein had pushed their end of the bench back and stood with their hackles raised up to the roof beams. Eid and Alver and several others stood too and the men and women around the room’s edges fell silent as they anticipated violence. But the only men in Guthorm’s longhouse with edged blades – killing blades – were Guthorm’s men, and Solveig, still seated, swore because he thought they were all about to become dead men and for what?
‘May I have words with you, Guthorm?’ It was Crow-Song and he had his hands raised and open to show that he did not have an eating knife in them.
‘That’s it, Crow-Song, you flap your wings out of this,’ Loker said, shooing him off with a hand. But one of Guthorm’s men was standing between Hagal and Guthorm, his hand on the sword hilt at his hip.
‘It’s all right, Ingel,’ Guthorm said to the man with the sword. ‘Just because he has never put you in one of his stories there’s no need to look for an excuse to gut him. Crow-Song has always been welcome here.’
Hagal nodded in thanks as Ingel stepped aside, and Guthorm stood and beckoned the skald to join him behind the tapestry partition at the back of the longhouse. ‘The rest of you put your pricks away before someone is hurt. I will not have blood spilled in my hall.’
‘Hall? Ha,’ old Solveig muttered into his ale.
Sigurd gestured at his friends to sit and they did, albeit Olaf was unable to resist pointing a finger at Eid that spoke of business yet to be settled.
Alver barked at the serving girl to fill their guests’ cups, which was as good a peace offering as any, and Sigurd raised his own cup to Alver to show his appreciation, whilst around them those on the outer benches resumed their blathering as if nothing had happened.
When Guthorm and Hagal came back to their seats Sigurd knew straight away that the skald had told the karl about what had happened in the fen at Tau. It was all over Guthorm’s face and in his eyes which were now on Asgot as much as they were on Sigurd. It was not every day a man like Guthorm had a godi, a man who communed with the gods, in his longhouse, and from the look of him he did not much care for it.
Still, at least he would know now that Sigurd had thought as deeply as any man could about this idea of taking revenge on those who had betrayed his father. Furthermore, his having hung himself on that tree and survived showed that he was either Óðin-favoured or had an iron will, which were both good things to know about a man. It would make Guthorm at least wonder if the Allfather really was turning his one eye towards Sigurd and his blood feud.
‘Our friend Crow-Song vouches for you, Sigurd. He has told me of your sacrifice, though it is a hard thing for a man to swallow. Yet I can see now that you have recently suffered.’
Sigurd knew that his eyes were sunken pools. That his face was lean as a wolf’s. At least Guthorm now knew there was a reason for it, that he was not sickly or beset by some illness.
‘It is a wonder you survived,’ Guthorm said. ‘Nine days hanging in a tree? It is the stuff of fireside tales. I am sure Hagal has already begun the weave of it.’
Sigurd struggled not to glare at Hagal then for adding his own lustre to it. Nine days? Was six days not enough then, skald? Mind you, Crow-Song had once boasted of reciting an old story for two days and nights straight and remembering every piece of it. Hagal felt the same way about stretching the truth of a thing as a woman felt about stretching the dough to make more bread.
‘The gods are with me, Guthorm, and I will have my reckoning,’ Sigurd said. ‘Those who help me will find me generous.’ Truly he did not know if the gods were with him, though he was sure they were watching, which was not quite the same thing. But neither Guthorm, nor anybody else, needed to see the inside of his thought chest. Let them just know what would be.