Authors: Giles Kristian
‘I couldn’t run now, not even if I was going to get my guts spilled by a beardless meyla like that,’ he said, raising a few eyebrows, for calling Floki a little girl was not a clever idea to anyone’s mind. But Floki simply grinned and the old man stared at him for a moment before returning his gaze to Sigurd and Olaf. ‘But I do not know of these brothers,’ he said. ‘How do you know that they came up the Lysefjord?’
‘A man named Ofeig Grettir told me,’ Sigurd said. By the old man’s face he did not know of Ofeig Grettir either and why should he? ‘Are there many people living up here?’
‘Not many. But some.’ The old man took his wife’s hand in his own then and nodded as if to tell her there was nothing to worry about. ‘And not all of them are as good as us at keeping to themselves.’ He nodded towards
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. ‘So you really have nothing in that good-looking boat of yours?’
He dangled that like a hook and had more luck than Svein had enjoyed all morning, for Sigurd told Aslak to fetch Ofeig Scowler’s drinking horn from the chest by the tiller while they asked the old man more questions about the folk living up at the arse end of the Lysefjord.
When Aslak came back with the drinking horn he gave it to Sigurd who gave it to the old man. It was not the finest thing any of them had ever seen but it was well polished and mounted with silver at the rim. The terminal fitting had perhaps been silver once too but now it was pewter, and the old man made a show of noticing the replacement.
‘I’m up to my eyeballs in goat horns,’ he said.
‘You can get more mead in that than in a goat horn,’ Svein pointed out.
‘And which jarl might you be?’ the old man asked him. ‘We do not get to drink much mead here.’ But he tucked the horn into his belt anyway and told them where they might find other folk to ask about the brothers Bjarni and Bjorn. ‘I’d wager they won’t be as welcoming as us,’ he warned, to which Olaf said if this had been a warm welcome then he must have closed his eyes for a while as the ale was passed round. The old man ignored this. ‘The folk up there do not like outsiders,’ he said, turning his watery eyes east along the fjord. Then he touched the woollen skull cap on his head. ‘If you’ve got something to put on your thought box then I would keep it to hand when you get to the hole.’
‘The hole?’ Sigurd said.
The old man grinned. ‘You’ll know it when you see it.’
With that they bid the old man and his wife farewell and cast off once again into the calm water and the cold shadow of the rock walls, each of them with their eyes looking up the Lysefjord towards the cloud-shrouded granite looming before them like a gateway to Valhöll itself.
Except for Svein, who was fishing.
They spent the night moored in a sheltered place where the cliff sloped down into the water. Finding somewhere shallow enough to drop the anchor had not been easy but they had done it at last, dropping the great iron hook over the steerboard side and tying
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bow and stern to stop her being pushed against the cliff face. As luck would have it they were moored less than a spear-throw from several streams which cascaded down the rock into the sea, and in the morning they used the stern rope to haul the knörr close enough to fill three barrels and their own leather flasks with fresh water. Though they needn’t have taken the time or risked
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’s hull against the rock, for by midday it was raining so hard that the bilge would have filled had Svein and Aslak not soaked their shoes and breeks bailing.
The rain was still seething into the fjord at dusk when they came to the hole. They had seen no fishing boats. No houses. No smoke. No people. But that meant nothing for as Olaf put it
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would have stood out like the balls on a dog coming up that fjord to anyone on the water or the cliffs. ‘Whoever lives here will have their rocks which they crawl under at the first snap of sail or slap of oars,’ he said. Which was why Sigurd had made them stow their war gear, but for their spears, out of sight in the hold.
‘She is a trader not a fighting ship,’ Sigurd had said, running a hand along the knörr’s sheer strake. ‘So let us look like traders, hey.’ He had grinned at them, amused by their reluctance to hide the axes and helmets and swords of which warriors are so proud. ‘With any luck they will come to see what we have to trade, for it must be a rare thing for them to get a ship full of furs and antler, silver and leather this far up the fjord. For that is what they will think when they see us.’
‘Aye, they might come to see what we have to trade, but they might come to see what they can steal,’ Solveig grumbled.
Sigurd nodded. ‘Either way they come,’ he said.
‘Which is all well and good so long as there is not a bloody great horde of them,’ Olaf put in, ‘for it does not make sense to lose three or four of us whilst looking for just two brothers.’
‘Two brothers who may not want to join us anyway,’ Loker reminded them.
‘They will want to join us,’ Sigurd said, throwing an arm out towards the ancient sleeping rock, ‘for who can make their fame in a place like this?’
‘Men do not hide like mice in little holes,’ Svein said. ‘And if this Bjorn and Bjarni would rather stay tucked up here in Frigg’s cunny then we do not want them anyway for they must be white-livered nithings.’
No one could disagree with that and so now they came into a small cove that would have been shadow-shrouded even on a sunny day, but on a day like this, with the rain hammering down, was a gloom-filled hole.
‘Only a troll would live in a place like this,’ Aslak moaned, wrapping his cloak around him for it was suddenly cold as
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slipped between two towering cliffs into the sheltered hollow where the water looked black.
Neither was there any breeze to be found in the cove and so they had to get the oars out at bow and stern and give
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enough encouragement to beach up on the shingle, which was only twice as wide as the knörr was long.
The sound of her keel crunching the stones was made unnaturally loud by the cavernous rock all around and Solveig could not resist singing some words of an old sailing song, his voice as loud as a god’s in that dark little bay. The song was about a skipper who unknowingly sailed his ship into a giant’s mead horn thinking it was a cove such as this one, and ended up being drunk by the giant but sailing out of his cock the next day to return to a hero’s welcome.
‘Well if they didn’t know we were here before, they know now,’ Olaf told Sigurd, who did not begrudge Solveig his nerves, because no skipper likes to beach his ship in an unknown place. ‘What now?’ Olaf asked, and his were not the only eyes on Sigurd, so that in that moment Sigurd was struck by the thought that they really did look to him to lead them. And yet what if some idea of his got them all killed? Some idea such as coming more or less unarmed into a cove where brigands and renegades, men who had offended jarls and kings, were said to dwell.
‘Now we wait,’ Sigurd said, his eyes searching the rain-lashed heights and the dark crevices and the cave high up in the rocks before them which the old man the day before had called the hole.
They did not have to wait long.
Aslak speared the first one, gashing open his face the very moment it appeared above
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’s sheer strake, and the man shrieked as he fell away.
‘Here they come!’ Olaf roared, as his crewmates jumped up from their skins and furs in the thwarts, spears ready, and lined the knörr’s sides. But for Solveig and Hagal who were pulling up the planks that covered the hold and laying their hands on the war gear stowed there.
Black Floki slashed a man’s neck and Sigurd felt a slap of hot blood across his face as he turned to take the shield which Hagal offered him. An arrow thumped into the deck behind him closely followed by another.
‘Archers!’ he called, the salty iron tang of another man’s blood on his lips. ‘Shields!’
‘Sigurd!’ someone yelled and he spun to see a wild-eyed man with an axe coming for his head but got his shield across just in time, the axe head splitting the limewood just above his arm. Sigurd threw the shield arm wide and rammed his spear into the man’s gut even as Svein roared and swung his long-hafted axe, whose blade scythed straight through the man’s back, all but cutting him in half before embedding in
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’s deck planks.
‘It’s good to make sure, eh?’ Hendil said, slapping Svein’s shoulder, as another outlaw turned tail and jumped back over the ship’s side to join his companions who were fleeing for their lives up the shingle.
‘You don’t like our hospitality?’ Olaf called after them from
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’s bow, not even flinching as an arrow thunked into the stem post beside him. But Svein, Black Floki and Aslak leapt over the side and gave chase, and Olaf glanced at Sigurd, who shrugged and jumped after them.
Sigurd heard Olaf yell at the others to stay with the ship as he ran up the strand after the fleeing shapes, slipping and stumbling on the slick weed and loose stones as men’s shouts echoed off the high rock walls around him. And his blood simmered with the thrill of it as his eyes sought an enemy into whom to plunge his spear.
‘They’ve gone!’ Svein said as Sigurd caught up with him and the others at the end of the beach, the four of them panting for breath, heads turning this way and that. ‘No sign of the slippery eels.’
Before them was a tower of jagged, night-cloaked granite, and whilst they could not see any crevices into which the outlaws might have disappeared like surf amongst the shingle, they surely existed.
‘Up there. In that nest,’ Black Floki said, pointing his spear at the cave high up in the rock. ‘That’s where they are. And all around,’ he added, gesturing at the surrounding cliffs. Olaf came up, his face like thunder by the thin silvery light that seeped into that cove.
‘Well I’m not climbing—’ A rock thunked off Svein’s helmet and he stumbled, cursing, as Sigurd raised his already split shield above his head. The next rock sheared off the top half of his shield leaving only four planks of it on his arm, and suddenly missiles were striking the stones around them in a deadly hail that would smash skulls and break bones.
‘Back to the ship,’ Sigurd called, though they did not need telling, and in a heartbeat they were the ones fleeing, Sigurd hauling Svein along by his tunic sleeve because the big man was dazed and lurching on unsteady legs.
‘Well that was about as clever as swimming in a brynja,’ Solveig said to them as they climbed back into the knörr.
‘Don’t look at me,’ Olaf said, his chest heaving. ‘I only went after them to tell them not to be so bloody witless.’ He nodded at Svein. ‘Svein Half-Troll there nearly got his brains spewed across the beach. Not that that would be much of a loss.’
Svein managed a grimace but no more and slumped down against the ship’s side while the others stood looking out into the damp night, shields above
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’s sheer strake like a rampart.
‘They won’t come again,’ Asgot said, prodding a body with his spear to make sure the man was dead. The only reason the godi wasn’t on his knees was because it was clear that the only thing the man had worth taking had been his life.
‘Aye, not now they know we’re stupid enough to run off into the murk after them,’ Olaf said. Still, Olaf was shrugging himself into his brynja anyway and the others would have done the same had they owned one.
‘Maybe they will want their friends back,’ Hagal suggested. ‘Perhaps there will be a negotiation worth having.’ They had killed five outlaws that they knew of and no doubt there were others out there somewhere regretting their decision to attack the strangers who had come to their cove.
‘How are you enjoying this raiding life, Crow-Song?’ Solveig asked the skald. For all he was a man more used to weaving words than wielding a spear no one could say Hagal was a man to shirk the blood-fray.
‘I am just hoping to live long enough to put you all in my saga tales,’ he said, which was some low cunning, Sigurd thought, for knowing the men around him they would be more likely to try to keep Hagal alive if they thought they might make an appearance in one of his fireside tales. Not that he had done much skalding in these last weeks.
‘It is all going in here,’ Crow-Song had said, tapping his head when Sigurd had said as much some days before. ‘A mail coat is not made in a day, Sigurd. Each ring must be forged and riveted to the others and then the whole thing must be polished. Perhaps I will let you hear it when you are sitting in Jarl Randver’s high seat.’ And Sigurd had felt a smile on his lips then.
‘Let us see what dawn brings,’ Sigurd said now, for what else was there to do? They could not launch
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in the dark for fear of ripping her hull on a rock. Besides which they had not yet got what they came for. So they set a three-man watch, bow, amidships, and steerboard, while the others tried to sleep, though this time with their blades to hand and their shields wedged to protect their faces in case arrows streaked down from the cliffs again.
No more arrows rained down that night and when the first grey light touched the world beyond the narrow entrance of the cove, showing rainclouds as smudges against the lightening sky, they woke to find the place as quiet as the inside of a burial mound. But for the sounds of the waves lapping at the shingle. And the farting. And men hawking up phlegm, and yawning and pissing over the side.
The first thing Svein did when he opened his eyes was throw his guts up over the shingle, which Olaf said was often the way of it when a man takes a good blow to his thought box. There was an egg-sized dent on his father’s old helmet and a matching swelling on Svein’s head judging by how gingerly he ran his fingers through his thick red hair.
‘If I ever find the man who dropped that rock on me I will take him far out to sea and drop him over the edge of the world,’ he said.
‘I’ll wager it was a child,’ Hendil teased, ‘maybe a little girl.’ He grinned. ‘Yes, I like the idea that it was a snot-nosed brat that brought the giant Svein the Red to his knees.’
‘You should put that in your tale,’ Loker said to Hagal. ‘No one will see it coming.’ And Hagal’s brows arched as though he was considering it.