God of Vengeance (45 page)

‘Goat-fucker!’ Svein spat at Thengil, straining to be let off his leash, to drown the grey day in red.

‘You are proud men,’ Sigurd continued, ‘but you dishonour yourselves doing this man’s bidding. You know full well what your jarl would think of his son. He would have wished he had drowned the nithing at birth.’

This time a hilt in his lower back that put him on his knees by the curds which Thengil’s thrall had spilled. He tried to speak but could not find the breath.

‘Another word and I’ll cut you, Haraldarson,’ Thengil barked, the bridle slipping off his fury now at being insulted before his men. Before his father’s men. Before some of the women too, for they had gathered in the shadow of the hall’s doorway. This was doubtless the most exciting thing that had happened in this place for years.

Sigurd could feel the bruise blooming in his flesh like a burn. He dragged a halting breath into his lungs and climbed to his feet, a spearman either side of him, their blades poised to plunge into him.

‘Hakon’s men, I give you this last chance,’ he said through a grimace of pain. ‘Back away now or die.’

‘Hold your tongue, Sigurd,’ Olaf said.

‘Bring him to me!’ Thengil barked. ‘I will cut that tongue from its root! Jarl Randver will not mind that.’

‘Lord!’ one of his hirðmen said, lifting his spear, pointing it west towards the pine-swathed hill.

Another man spat a curse.

‘Shieldwall!’ Hauk roared, and he only needed to give that command once, as his men broke their blade ring around Sigurd’s companions, backing off with shields raised, and spread into a line facing west. Even the two warriors guarding Sigurd hurried to join the others, at which Thengil bolted before Sigurd could take hold of him. Hakon’s son slammed the hall’s door shut and Sigurd heard the bar being dropped into place behind it. Then he looked west himself and the pain in his side and head was consumed by a wave of savage joy.

His men were coming. They must have seen Fjölnir take to the grey sky, the feather-tied string distinguishing her from any other bird, and now they came like wolves to the kill. Having broken from the tree line, warriors with shields, spears, axes and swords were running across the meadow, as eager for the blood-fray as Thór himself. Floki led, his hair, black as Fjölnir, flying behind him, and with him were Aslak and Hendil, Bjarni and Bjorn and the rest.

‘Shieldwall!’ Olaf yelled, throwing Sigurd his sword, which he caught, pulling Troll-Tickler from its scabbard. But Svein could be held back no more. He strode towards Hauk’s shieldwall swinging his long-hafted axe in great diagonal circles before him, and those men braced themselves.

‘Brains of an ox,’ Olaf said, but Sigurd was already moving. Valgerd was fast too, at Svein’s left shoulder now.

‘Hold, Hakon’s men!’ Hauk roared. ‘Hold!’ As the head of Svein’s axe smashed into a shield, cleaving it down the middle and lopping off the man’s arm. The warrior staggered backwards, waving his half arm, the stump spraying gore over his companions. Then Valgerd plunged into the breach, knocking a spear aside and shrieking as she plunged her own through a man’s neck. Sigurd was on Svein’s right but he did not have a shield or spear and so he had either to keep his distance or get in close. He swung Troll-Tickler at a spear haft, forcing the blade wide, but the man behind it was strong for all his years and he strode forward ramming his shield’s boss into Sigurd’s face, breaking his nose. Sigurd pulled his scramasax from the sheath on his arm and stepped back, looking for the next spear thrust through blurred eyes as blood spewed from his nose onto his lips and beard.

A blade streaked from the shieldwall and he swiped it away with the scramasax, knowing he had to get in close again, then Olaf slammed his shield into the line and a heartbeat later Floki plunged into the fray, ducking low, getting beneath a shield to hack into a man’s leg with his short axe. Svein was roaring like a maddened beast and Valgerd was shrieking like an eagle and then the others hit like a storm-lashed wave crashing against the rocks. Blood flew and blades sang and men began to die.

Ubba rammed his spear straight through a grey-beard’s old shield and used his strength to push the shield down and this was all Karsten Ríkr needed. He thrust his sword into the man’s mouth and the blade punched through his skull in a spray of blood and bone. Somehow Floki had cut his way through Hauk’s shieldwall and was behind them now, dealing death with his axe and long knife, and this was enough to break the wall, for men will not hold if they have an enemy at their backs.

Sigurd saw an old warrior knock Hendil’s spear aside with his shield and sink his own spear into Hendil’s shoulder, but then Agnar Hunter was there with his two scramasaxes, slicing off the man’s leading hand with one and plunging the other into his eye. And even a proud old warrior like that one was not above screaming in fear and pain.

‘End it, Sigurd!’ Olaf snarled in his ear. ‘You hear me, lad? It’s not worth the blood.’

Even in the grip of his blood-lust Sigurd felt the weight of this thing like a stone in his gut. He knew that Olaf was right and he bent to pick up a discarded shield. ‘Back! Shieldwall!’ he yelled, raising the shield to deflect another spear blade. ‘Back!’ For he could not afford to lose men in some meaningless skirmish. Besides which, he admired the warriors he was killing. They deserved better than dying for Thengil White-Liver.

‘You heard him, Sigurd’s men. Back!’ Olaf roared in a voice that had carried above more battle dins than he could remember.

Solveig was bent double and panting. Bjarni was screaming insults at the white-beards and his brother Bjorn was stepping back swiping blood and spit from his torn lip. But Hauk’s men, those who were still able, were striding back from the fray, back from their dead hearth companions and those they had rowed with and sung with and fought with. And there was no panic in these five men, nor any sign that they yielded.

Valgerd was on her knees opening a man’s throat with her knife, his white beard blooming red in an instant. Svein brought his axe onto a fallen warrior’s head, chopping it in half and burying the axe blade in the earth.

‘Enough!’ Sigurd roared. Blood was leaking into his throat and dripping from his beard and from the gash in his head. His lower back screamed in pain from where Thengil had punched him with his sword’s hilt but all he cared about was that there were none of his warriors amongst the dead and dying. Seven of Jarl Hakon’s hearthmen lay dead and two more would join their fellows soon enough by the look of the blood leaking from their wounds.

Sigurd looked up to see Asgot coming, sword- and spear-armed, his grey, bone-tied braids hanging either side of his fierce face.

The rest of his men were panting for breath from the run and the fight but they had formed into a passable shieldwall and even amidst the butchery, the stink of death and shit cloying the air, and his eyes streaming because of his broken nose, he felt prouder than if he had been wearing his father’s great torc of twisted silver.

‘Come, Sigurd Haraldarson, we will finish it now,’ Hauk said, beckoning Sigurd with a lift of his shield, showing that the arm behind it was still strong. ‘Our brothers wait for us in the Spear-God’s hall. We will join them.’ A grin appeared in his white beard. ‘Or we will beat you and return to our mead.’

Sigurd looked the man in the eyes, feeling nothing but respect for him and those shoulder to shoulder with him.

‘Jarl Hakon was lucky to have hearthmen such as you, Hauk of Osøyro,’ Sigurd said, then turned his head to spit a wad of congealing blood. He dragged a hand across his mouth and beard, smearing the palm red. ‘But Hakon is gone. There is nothing of the man in that near-corpse in there,’ he said, thumbing back towards the hall. ‘The man you serve now is a coward. He would not even stand with you for this fight but would rather hide amongst women’s skirts. I say again that being oath-tied to such a man is a dishonour and you would do well to be free of such a binding.’

‘We will be free soon enough, I would wager,’ Hauk said.

‘Aye, we can help you with that,’ Svein the Red said, lifting his gore-slick axe.

‘Join us,’ Sigurd said. ‘You have seen what kind of men I have at my side.’

‘Not only men, hey!’ Bjarni said, grinning.

Sigurd nodded. ‘I even had a valkyrie fighting for me.’

Hauk and his men might have laughed at that, had they not seen Valgerd fight. Had they not watched her slaughter their friends.

Sigurd swept his scramasax towards his crew. His own hirðmen, he thought. Not that he had a hearth. ‘We are weaving a tale that skalds will tell long after we are gone from this world. I am Óðin-favoured. Would we have beaten you so easily if I were not?’

This had Hauk thinking. The others too. It was in their faces like runes carved in old tree trunks.

‘Come with us and fight Jarl Randver. Fill your old sea chests with plunder.’

Hauk laughed. ‘What need have we of silver at our age?’ he asked. ‘We want food, mead and a roaring hearth to warm our bones. You can keep your arm rings. We rarely bother to wear ours these days.’

Sigurd nodded, accepting this. ‘You must have sons somewhere,’ he said. ‘Daughters too and others you have known. Let them hear of you in skalds’ tales and in song. Let them hear how you stood in the steel-storm one last time and earned the fame that no man can ever take from you.’

‘I would have you beside me against Jarl Randver’s men,’ Olaf said. ‘I have seen none braver than you.’

Hauk and his exhausted men stood a little straighter at that, for they were strong words coming from a warrior such as Olaf. They were mead to a proud man’s spirit.

Sigurd nodded. ‘Take back the honour you are owed,’ he said.

Hauk wrestled with all this for a while, as Sigurd swallowed blood and the first of the two men lying with the corpses gave a death rattle and became one himself.

‘You will fight a man as powerful as Jarl Randver with just those I see before me?’ Hauk asked.

Sigurd nodded. ‘And when I have killed Randver I will kill the oath-breaker King Gorm.’

Hauk’s white brows lifted and he turned the spear in his hand, plunging it blade first into the earth.

‘Then we are your men, Haraldarson,’ he said.

‘IT DID NOT
go as we hoped then,’ Asgot said when we had come up to them outside Jarl Hakon’s hall, his eyes picking over the corpses like crows. Then he had put a claw-like hand on Sigurd’s arm and looked him in the eye. ‘But it seems we have some killers amongst us at least.’

‘You should have seen them,’ Sigurd said in a low voice, watching the others wipe bloodied blades on the hems of dead men’s tunics – which Hauk did not like though he said nothing – and talking quietly among themselves. Men were often full of thunder after a fight, half of it the thrill of being alive, half of it the wild blood-lusting beast that can take its time in skulking away. But these were quiet and Sigurd knew it was a shit bucket of a victory.

He looked at the dead lying in their own filth, their skin as grey as their beards. ‘These men deserved better than this, Asgot,’ he said.

‘Which one is Jarl Hakon?’ the godi asked.

Sigurd shook his head. ‘Brandingi is a living corpse on a bed by his hearth. His nithing son Thengil had it in his mind to give me over to Jarl Randver as a wedding gift.’

Asgot’s lip curled beneath his grey moustaches. ‘A cunning scheme, though it did not work out so well for him.’

Sigurd pointed his scramasax at the hall behind them. ‘He’s in there, too. He runs fast for a fat man.’ Then he saw the look in Asgot’s eye. That wicked sharp knife, the one that slit animal’s throats and, sometimes, men’s, was whispering to the godi. ‘No, Asgot,’ Sigurd said, ‘the Allfather would not thank you for him.’

‘Aye, Sigurd’s right, Asgot. I’ve come across turds with more honour in them,’ Olaf said. ‘He’s not worth getting your knife wet for.’

Asgot hoisted a brow. ‘And these old bones died for him?’

‘I doubt it,’ Olaf said.

‘They still fought for their jarl,’ Sigurd explained. ‘And because they were too proud to do otherwise lest it look as though they lacked courage.’

‘And now that lot will fight for Sigurd,’ Olaf said, nodding at Hauk and his four men, who had laid down their shields but were not quite ready to put aside their spears. They stood in a knot talking heatedly amongst themselves and Sigurd guessed they were arguing about what to do with Thengil.

‘They are old but I am glad to have them,’ Sigurd said.

‘Well it is not as though this crew can get any stranger,’ Olaf said, which was true enough.

Hauk looked over and caught Sigurd’s eye and Sigurd nodded because he knew what the old warrior was telling him in that look. Hauk and his men would deal with Thengil in their own way.

Hauk hammered a fist against the hall’s door but the women within were too afraid to open it, until he called to them by name and assured them it was he on the other side of it. The enormous door, the hero of its own saga tale, opened and Sigurd caught a glimpse of several pale faces before Hauk and the others went inside. He waited for what seemed an age, watching the snow-peaked mountains fade from sight as night’s cloak fell slowly over them. And then Solveig called to him, saying that Hauk wanted him in the hall.