Authors: Giles Kristian
He saw Aslak leap a fallen trunk and pull ahead off to the left, a fleeting shape in the gloom.
‘Leave one for me!’ Olaf called, falling behind in his brynja and helmet, his voice almost lost in the rain’s seething.
Up they went, leaping brooks where they could, splashing through the shallow water where it was too wide, being drawn deeper into a land that they did not know. A crow clattered from its roost, croaking bitterly, and Sigurd caught a glimpse of a fox slinking off into the ferns, and he did not slow because Black Floki was off his right shoulder and Sigurd wanted to kill the brothers himself.
The brother with the shield cast it aside now and the two of them scrambled up a steep bank, hauling themselves up using roots and rocks and brambles, and so Sigurd sheathed his own blades and climbed after them. And when he got to the top he stood dragging breath into his scalding lungs, his face running with rain, blinking it away as he watched the brothers charging off towards another rocky mound. And like an arrow to the gut Sigurd was struck by the senselessness of what he was doing, chasing two men in the arse end of Lysefjorden when he should have been avenging his murdered kin. The muscles in his thighs felt as though they were on fire and his forearms were scored bloody from raising them to shield his face from bare branches and scourging fronds.
Then he cursed and took off after them.
‘What now?’ Loker asked, arming rain and sweat from his face, his chest heaving. He and Sigurd stood on the bank of a stream, eyes scouring the forest into which the outlaws had vanished. Sigurd did not know where Black Floki, Aslak or Olaf were. They had taken different routes through the trees and had become separated.
‘They cannot run for ever,’ Sigurd said.
‘And we can?’ Loker asked, spitting a wad of thick saliva into the singing stream. ‘Who knows if these brothers can fight, but I would vouch for their running. If Jarl Randver has not managed to get hold of them then maybe we should give it up.’
Sigurd eye-riveted him. ‘You will learn that I am not a man who gives up so easily, Loker,’ he said, sweeping his long wet hair from his face, and just then they heard a shout, the voice cut off in half a heartbeat.
Loker pointed north and Sigurd nodded. ‘Listen,’ he said. Loker stilled his heaving chest and they both held their breath, ears turned towards the direction from which the shout had come, sifting the low roar of the falls from the higher pitched hiss of the rain and the drips finding their way through the forest canopy. ‘A waterfall,’ Sigurd said.
Then he was running north, loping like a wolf because he knew they were close to whoever had called out and he did not want to blunder onto the edge of a blade. Loker ran with him, matching him stride for stride, a short axe in his right hand.
And neither of them could have foreseen what they would find.
They climbed a steep narrow track up onto a ridge and followed a grassy trail which snaked between several rocky mounds and led them to an ancient maiden ash, whose vast canopy spread far and wide above them and whose roots had somehow found purchase enough in this rocky place to support it. As he passed the ash Sigurd reached out and placed a hand on the trunk, whose old bark was grey as iron and etched like a rune stone that only the gods could read.
‘Over here, Sigurd,’ Loker barked, raising his axe and striding towards a hole in the ground partially covered by sticks and leaves. It looked to Sigurd like a trapping pit for wolves or boar, or even elk perhaps. But when they peered into the pit, which was a crevice in the rock rather than a hole dug in soil, the eyes looking back at them belonged to a man. ‘Óðin’s eye!’ Loker said.
‘Óðin had nothing to do with it,’ the man growled back at them, cradling his left arm which he had clearly hurt in the fall. His cheek was cut too and blood was working its way through his fair beard. Lucky for him he had not broken his neck for the pit was near twelve feet deep, its rock bottom and walls crisscrossed with the giant ash’s roots.
‘Where is your brother?’ Sigurd asked the man, whom he recognized as the one who had thrown the spear at him.
The outlaw winced with pain and took up the scramasax he had dropped amongst the old roots and the debris which had fallen with him into the pit. Then he looked up at Sigurd, smearing blood across his cheek with the back of the hand gripping the long knife’s bone handle. ‘It is not my brother who you should be worried about,’ he said.
And then Sigurd looked up and saw her, a spear-throw ahead of him amongst a stand of white-skinned birches. A woman in a brynja of polished rings, hefting shield and spear, a sword scabbarded at her left hip and the hilt of a longsax sticking out behind her, nestled in the small of her back in easy reach of her right hand. She wore a helmet almost as fine as his father’s, with eye guards and at its crown a spike from which hung a crest of white horsehair. Her own hair lay on either shoulder in two thick golden braids.
And Sigurd could have stared at her until Ragnarök, had she not come at him shrieking like a hawk. He got his sword up in time to turn the spear blade wide, then slashed with the scramasax, but the shieldmaiden blocked with the spear shaft and hammered her shield into Sigurd’s face, sending him reeling. Then Loker was there and his axe blow gouged a sliver of limewood from her shield but she swept her spear low and Loker had to leap back or get his shins ripped open.
But Loker was a good fighter and knew that if he got past the spear blade his axe would make short work of the woman, even in her brynja. He leant back and that blade cut the air a finger’s length from his face, then he threw himself forward but the shieldmaiden got her shield up and Loker’s axe smashed into it, the head sticking in the wood, then she hauled the shield back, ripping the axe from Loker’s grip, and cast the ill-weighted thing aside.
And Sigurd saw his chance.
‘Move and I’ll gut you,’ a voice snarled in his ear, and he felt an axe blade pressing against the small of his back and he cursed because he had found the other brother. Or rather the brother had found him.
The shieldmaiden shrieked again and jabbed with the spear but Loker turned side on and grabbed hold of it, wrenching it from her hands, yet even as he turned it over to bring the blade to bear she whipped the longsax from its sheath behind her back and brought it down with a grunt, hacking off Loker’s leading hand.
Loker bellowed in shock and pain and Sigurd twisted, knocking the axe head wide, then ran at the shieldmaiden and put everything he had behind a sword swing that would have cleaved her in half had she not got her own sword and longsax up to meet the blow, though it drove her to her knees.
‘Sigurd!’ Aslak yelled, rushing from the trees to stand between him and the outlaw. Then Black Floki was there and he threw an arm round the shieldmaiden’s neck, putting the edge of his long knife against her pale throat.
‘Hold,’ Sigurd called out, ‘don’t kill her!’
‘Fuck! Kill her!’ Loker screamed, spittle flying or hanging in his beard. He was on his knees, right hand gripping the spurting stump of his severed wrist, blood welling through his fingers and running down both arms.
‘No, Floki!’ Sigurd roared, turning back to face the outlaw who seemed unsure what to do now that he could hear his brother calling to him from the trapping pit. ‘Drop the axe,’ Sigurd said, as Aslak edged round to the outlaw’s left, giving the man something to think about.
‘Better do what he says, lad, unless you want me to spit your brother here and turn him over a good fire.’ Sigurd glanced round to see Olaf bent double and panting like a hound over the pit, the shieldmaiden’s spear in his hands.
The outlaw growled a curse, turned and hurled the hand axe and it turned end over end before thunking into a birch tree some twenty paces away. Sigurd nodded, as much at the skill in that throw as with the relief of not having to kill either brother. ‘If he does anything other than sit on his arse, kill him,’ he told Aslak, who nodded and moved in with his sword.
‘I need fire,’ Olaf said, going over to Loker whose face was bone-white now and clenched in agony.
‘Asgot will know what to do,’ Aslak called.
‘Loker will be dead long before we get him back to the ship,’ Olaf said. ‘Gods, it’s wetter than a fish’s fart, but I need fire and quickly.’
Sigurd went over to the birch trees to see if he could find some dry bark to use as kindling. Even the litter beneath the maiden ash’s huge canopy was slick with rain. ‘Everything is wet,’ he said.
‘Who are you? Why are you here?’ the shieldmaiden asked.
‘Hold your tongue or I’ll cut it out,’ Black Floki hissed at her, hauling off her helmet and throwing it aside.
Sigurd went over to her while Olaf tied Loker’s belt off around the bloody stump. ‘We came to find these men,’ he told her, pointing to the pit and back towards the man on his arse by Aslak. ‘I have a blood-debt to settle with Jarl Randver of Hinderå and heard that these brothers might like to help me collect it.’
‘You are not here for the spring?’ she said, her blue eyes sharp as arrow heads and shining like the rings of her brynja, which looked more like silver than iron or steel, Sigurd thought.
‘We know of no spring,’ Sigurd said. ‘We came only for these men. They ran. We followed them.’
The shieldmaiden held his gaze for a while then, during which Olaf was muttering that Loker did not have long and they should at least put a sword in his other hand. ‘I have fire,’ she said. ‘I will take you.’
Sigurd turned and strode over to the brother Aslak was guarding and took his tunic in one hand, putting the scramasax in the other to the man’s neck. Then he hauled him to his feet and dragged him through the clearing to the pit in which his brother stood looking up, helpless as a trapped beast. Then Sigurd threw the man into the pit and he fell to all fours, spitting a foul insult up at Sigurd, who turned back to the shieldmaiden, gesturing at Floki to get her on her feet.
‘Show us the way,’ he said.
Smoke had billowed out of the dwelling when the shieldmaiden opened the door, wreathing them and making them cough, splutter and curse. But it had been Black Floki who said there was more to it than the dried herbs smouldering on the hearth stone and the scent of the birchwood cracking and popping in the flames beside them.
‘There is seiðr here,’ he had muttered, ‘thick as a bear fur.’ Sigurd had known he was right and the others had touched iron hilts or axe heads as they ducked under the rune-carved lintel and entered the flame-licked dark.
They had not waited for their eyes to adjust to the gloom but had carried Loker straight in despite their own misgivings, for the man was already more than halfway to Valhöll, as Olaf had pointed out when he had put a scramasax in Loker’s hand, clutching both with his own as he and Sigurd had lugged him through the forest. They had left Aslak guarding the pit trap with orders to spear the brothers if they tried to get out of it, and Aslak had taken up the woman’s shield in case they hurled a blade at him, for they had refused to give up their weapons.
Now Sigurd had one eye on Loker and the other on the woman who had cut off his hand, because it was not impossible that she had brought them to that place to murder them with steel or with seiðr. Though if so she would have to be quick about it, quicker than Floki’s long knife, which never strayed far from that pale throat of hers.
‘Ale?’ Olaf asked the woman. She shook her head and Olaf spat a curse because ale would have numbed Loker’s pain at least a little. ‘Get it hot,’ he told her, nodding at the fire. ‘Very hot.’ She was feeding it the driest logs she had found in the pile under the eaves outside and when the last of them was in place she took a pair of bellows and pumped them so that the flames roared angrily, lying flat with each gust but leaping hot and ever more furious after. Then the woman pulled another bunch of herbs down from amongst those hanging from the rafters and threw it into the fire, where the dry leaves crackled and flared. The pungent smoke stung Sigurd’s eyes and got inside his skull, and Olaf growled that he knew now how the mackerel felt when they were strung up through the gills in the smoke house and left to dry.
‘It will help with the pain,’ she said, nodding towards Loker.
‘Aye, by choking him to death,’ Olaf murmured, looking around the pine-log cabin for the tools he would need.
‘Maybe that’s what happened to her,’ Black Floki said, pointing to the bed against the far wall. A chain-hung oil lamp flickered near the head end and by its sooty light Sigurd saw a braid of black hair against pale skin. Then he made out the face, white as an owl’s egg, the eyes closed and still as a waveless sea, which told him the woman was dead. Even in the smoke and the dark Sigurd was surprised they had not seen her before now. But then, there was not much to see. The silver and brown pelts lay neatly over the figure as they would over nothing more than a bolster or two. Or over a corpse from which the flesh had wasted, leaving skin taut as a spirit drum over bone.
‘Frigg’s arse!’ Loker suddenly roared, spitting saliva and fury, the torment of that terrible wound bringing him back from death’s darkness for a moment and drawing all eyes to him again. Squirming, his eyes sharpened with pain, he tried to look at the belt-tied stump, but Olaf told him there was nothing much to see and he was better off thinking about some pretty girl. Not that he would ever hold one properly again.
‘Hold him still,’ Olaf growled at Sigurd, who was slathered in Loker’s blood now as he tried to force the man’s shoulders back against the cabin’s wall whilst holding out the ruined arm for Olaf to work on.
Without a word the shieldmaiden went over to a dark corner and when she turned around she was holding a hafted axe. Black Floki’s sword whispered out of its scabbard and Sigurd’s hand fell to his scramasax, but the woman paid them no heed as she went over to the fire and burrowed the head of the axe into the fire’s heart where the birch was burning fast and hot.
‘Aye, that will do,’ Olaf said. ‘And if it kills him then it’s better he dies by axe than by griddle.’ Sigurd’s eye went to the two pans sitting on the hearth stones, thinking that their flat bottoms would have been better but knowing that if it was him dribbling blood from a handless stump he would prefer men said it was an axe, rather than a griddle, that finished him off.