God of Vengeance (48 page)

Feeling that the animal was past causing them any harm now, Bjorn and Agnar let go of its horns and it slumped down to the ground with a last great snort, the lids no longer sweeping over its bulging eyes. Asgot and Valgerd fell to their knees in the crimson pools and the godi set about pumping one of the beast’s forelegs, which was a trick to getting more blood out of the slash in its neck, though Valgerd’s bowl was already overflowing and her hands were blood-drenched.

When it was done Asgot took the bowl from Valgerd and from his belt a bunch of birch twigs he had bound together, and went over to those watching wide-eyed and tight-mouthed. Dipping the birch twigs in the bowl he flicked the blood over their faces and even though it was warm they could not help flinching at its touch, each of them full of the seiðr of it because they knew the gods were watching. When he had finished with them he flicked the bull’s blood across the bows of
Sea-Sow
and
Sea-Urchin
, invoked Óðin Sigðir, the Victory-Bringer, and then another god whom Sigurd had asked him to summon so that he might ride into this blood-fray with them. And that god was Vidar, Óðin’s own son, who wise men said would slay the wolf Fenrir during the chaos of Ragnarök. And when Asgot called on this god he did so with gritted teeth and fury, so that he had more than a few men nervously touching iron.

But Sigurd was not afraid. He stood with his head high and his back straight, and he listened to Asgot telling the god that they were going to Hinderå, just they few against the jarl’s many. And the name Vidar would be on their lips, on their young warleader’s lips in the sword song and the shield din. Jarl Randver would pay in blood for what he had done. He would suffer and he would bleed and he would die. Because Sigurd had woken the gods. The reckoning was coming.

And Vidar was the God of Vengeance.

With the bull’s blood drying on their faces and Asgot’s invocations still in their ears, Olaf looked at Sigurd, who did not need to ask what his friend was thinking.

A cold hand clutched Sigurd’s heart. ‘Now?’ he said.

‘Can you think of a better time?’ Olaf said, one eyebrow rounded like Bifröst.

‘But if they refuse? We will undo all that we have done,’ Sigurd said.

‘The gods are amongst us,’ Olaf said, his eyes boring into Sigurd’s. ‘They will not refuse.’

Sigurd felt as stunned as the bull when Svein had introduced the beast to his great axe.

‘We are going into a hard fight, lad. Bind them to you now. Before the slaughter’s dew soaks their shoes. Before Jarl Randver’s neck-ring blinds them.’

This was clear thinking from Olaf, for if things went against Sigurd at Hinderå it was possible that Jarl Randver might offer to spare his hirð, reward them even, if they came over to him. Sigurd doubted those who stood with him now would betray him like that, but having them oath-sworn to him would be further protection against any such betrayal, like a ringmail coat over wool and leather.

‘What do I have to do, Uncle?’ he asked.

‘Nothing, lad,’ Olaf said. Some of the men were making their own invocations of the gods, touching amulets at their necks and mumbling into their beards. Others were relieving themselves over the side of the jetty, whilst still others were climbing aboard
Sea-Sow
or
Sea-Urchin
, making their last preparations before setting off. ‘Just stand there looking like your father and leave it to me,’ Olaf said.

‘And if they refuse?’ Sigurd asked again. Despite all that had happened, he felt in that moment like the young man who had pleaded to join his father’s crew and been denied in front of everyone.

Olaf shrugged. ‘If they refuse, I’ll throw them to the crabs after that fat hog Thengil.’

Sigurd felt himself smile. ‘Then it’ll just be us taking on Jarl Randver and his whole war band.’

Olaf grinned, his eyes catching fire. ‘Then may the gods help them,’ he said. He turned and told the crews to gather round for there was one last thing that must be tied up neatly before leaving Osøyro. There were frowns and murmured questions as they came over, for with the sacrifice done and the wind in their favour they could not see what should keep them from heading out into the Bjørnafjord, which lay before them like iron burnished by the dawn sun.

‘Would you step aboard these magnificent ships,’ he asked, getting some chuckles for that, ‘before giving Sigurd what you owe him?’

Some frowns then. But some knowing looks too from Svein and Aslak and old Solveig, men who had been in this with Sigurd from the beginning when their eyes had been full of the sting of smoke from Eik-hjálmr his father’s hall.

‘Would you accept such shining war gear, these well-made brynjur, from the man who gave them, from him whose low cunning and war-craft gave us the victory here when we needed it, and yet not give him the very least that you owe?’ This was hard on Hauk and his men but it was true all the same.

‘I know what is coming here,’ Bjarni mumbled.

‘You might fight for a jarl for twenty summers and grow white-haired by his hearth and yet never win such plunder.’ Olaf pointed at Bjarni and Bjorn and at the other men who had just weeks before been living as outlaws at the arse end of the Lysefjord. ‘You must have thought your honour was long gone, like a fart in the wind. You must have thought you would never have the chance to be worthy of your ancestors and make a name for yourselves.’ He folded his brawny scarred arms across his chest and his face became granite. ‘You must have thought you would never see Valhöll.’

He let this sink in, let them taste the bitter draught of it.

‘This man, this Óðin-favoured son of the best man I have ever known . . .’ Sigurd saw a sheen in Olaf’s eye and looked away ‘. . . has put this crew together as a good shipwright chooses the best and strongest timbers for a ship, or the way a skald weaves a story using the best kennings. I have seen enough fighters in my time to know them when I see them, and I see them standing before me now. You are all wolves. But wolves cannot bring down an elk alone. They must hunt and fight as a pack.’ He glanced at Sigurd and then nodded at those before him. ‘Swear an oath to Sigurd Haraldarson. Swear upon your honour to fight for him, so that we will know that our pack is strong and cannot be driven apart.’

The warriors looked at each other then, trying to measure their own thoughts on the thing against the thoughts of their companions.

‘I mean no affront, Sigurd,’ Grundar said, heavy-browed. He was scratching his grey-flecked brown beard. His other hand rested on the pommel of the sword at his hip. ‘But you are barely into your first full beard.’

Sigurd accepted this with a careful nod, for Grundar was on the edge of an insult with that. ‘And yet I beat you and your nithing lord, Grundar,’ he said, and the man was sensible enough to clasp his lips on whatever reply had come to his mind.

Bodvar cleared his throat, drawing Sigurd’s eye. ‘Things might have turned out differently if I had speared that bird of yours,’ he said, still sore about that.

‘Perhaps,’ Sigurd said. ‘But none of you had the wits in your skulls to see why I stood amongst you with a bird on my arm. I am amazed, Bodvar, that any of you has lived long enough to see his beard reach his briar patch.’

Some of the others laughed at this and Bodvar looked at Hauk as though he expected him to speak up for them.

Hauk frowned, chewed his lip and took a step forward so that everyone knew he had something to say, for all the look on his face said he had not yet decided what that was.

Sigurd nodded to acknowledge him. ‘I would hear your thoughts on it, Hauk Langbarðr,’ he said, which had Hauk frowning even more because he was not sure what to make of Long-Beard as a byname given the talking so far.

‘It is true our lord behaved dishonourably. Instead of welcoming you as a host should with food, drink and hearth, he schemed to make a prisoner of you and deliver you to your enemy.’ Svein spat in disgust and other men cursed Thengil’s name. But Hauk had not finished yet and raised a hand to show it. ‘But you were also underhand and full of Loki-tricks by hiding your men in the woods when they should have been in plain sight.’

‘That raven trick was crafty,’ Bodvar put in, shaking his head.

‘With all your years I tricked you easily, Hauk,’ Sigurd said. ‘And yet you would still judge me on the length of my beard?’

‘An oath is a heavy thing,’ Hauk said.

‘Heavier for these others who will carry it all their lives,’ Sigurd said, gesturing at Aslak, Floki and Svein. He let a half smile creep onto his lips. ‘I will release you from your oath in ten years if you wish to be free of it.’

Even Hauk smiled wryly at that.

The others were standing there feeling like gods of war in the booty that Sigurd had given them, so that even if they had some doubts about being oath-tied they held their tongues. Besides which, young men with fewer years on their backs will give an oath more easily than those who have seen something of the world. Olaf had told Sigurd that. ‘If you have a pretty girl beneath you, you don’t waste time imagining her as an old woman. You get on with the task in hand,’ he had said.

Hauk turned to his friends and they talked in low voices until Olaf said that if they took any longer to make up their minds the wind would have changed and they would be going nowhere. But Hauk ignored him and turned back to Sigurd. ‘It is no secret that we Osøyro men are in our winter years.’

‘Winter years? I have seen younger mountains!’ Bjarni said, at which Solveig called him a loose-lipped pig-swiver, because Solveig was almost as old as Hauk’s lot.

‘Every man of worth knows that of all his possessions his reputation is the most valuable thing that he leaves behind when he breathes his last breath. Olaf is right. Whatever reputations we once had as Jarl Hakon’s húskarlar are as faint as the moon when the sun is in the sky.’ He tapped his white head. ‘We keep them in our own thought chests but who else will hear of them?’ He nodded at Sigurd. ‘We may not live to see you become a great jarl, Sigurd Haraldarson, but we would be a part of your story. We will swear an oath . . . if you swear to put us in the heart of the fray so that men will know of us. So that skalds will sing of us when we are gone.’

That was all Sigurd needed to hear as he drew Troll-Tickler and turned it round so that it rested across his left arm, the hilt pointing towards Hauk.

And so it was that Hauk Long-Beard of Osøyro, a man who had fought for Jarl Hakon Burner in the olden days, became the first man to swear an oath to Sigurd.

They kept the words of it simple because, as Solveig was keen to remind them, the day was running away from them and the wind could change at any moment. But each man named his ancestors, if he had any worth naming, and announced their deeds as well as his own, so that to listen you would have thought every one of those outlaws and dispossessed was descended from Óðin himself. When it was Karsten Ríkr’s turn he kissed Troll-Tickler’s pommel, as they all must, then went on to boast that he had once sailed to the end of the sea and pissed over the edge. Then he claimed to have seen a great sea monster with arms as long as the ship he was steering.

Bjarni also unleashed a few boasts, the others’ favourite being the one in which he claimed to have bedded six women in one night.

‘From what I remember that night was black as pitch,’ Bjorn said, scratching his cheek and frowning, ‘and there was talk that at least five of our father’s pigs had escaped from their pen.’

The only one who did not find this funny was his brother.

When it was Valgerd’s turn the others stood there even more seiðr-struck than they had been watching Asgot sacrifice the bull, for none of them had ever seen a shieldmaiden give an oath to fight for her lord. She listed the men she had killed, if not by name then by their appearance; men who had come to plunder the spring, the seeress, or both, and Sigurd could see looks that passed between the others, because this naming unravelled like an anchor rope.

‘Remind me not to get on her bad side,’ Bjorn murmured.

Yet she would now fight for Sigurd and protect him with her life, which was a hard thing for Sigurd to hear coming from a woman. Even stranger coming from Valgerd, because he had the feeling he would fight the monster Grendel and his mother too, to protect her.

Olaf himself was the last of them to do it. He put his lips to the pommel of Sigurd’s sword and he, who likely had the most to boast of in terms of hard fights won and ancestors who sat in the Allfather’s hall, said nothing about any of that. He kept the oath short, scowling through it, and yet Sigurd knew that even though it had been Olaf’s idea, the words were the hardest on him. For before Sigurd had been born, Olaf must have sworn a similar oath to Jarl Harald with whom he had been as close as a brother. But Sigurd’s father was dead now, killed in battle by the traitor king, and Sigurd knew that Olaf felt his own failure to protect the jarl like a knife in his guts. Speaking a new oath to his friend’s son must have put a bitter taste in his mouth.

‘I will fight for you, lord, and not flee one step from the battle,’ he said, his face hard as a granite cliff. ‘If you fall I will avenge you and send as many of your enemies to the afterlife as I can before I am cut down beside you. I will never forget the silver and booty which you give me, or the mead and meat that we share. Sword and shield, flesh and bone, I am your man, Sigurd Haraldarson. As long as the sun shines and the world endures, henceforth and for evermore.’

When Olaf nodded to show that there was no more to come from his mouth, Sigurd told him what he had told the others, having recalled his father’s words to those who had knelt before him in Eik-hjálmr. For an oath between a war leader and his húskarlar is like a sword with two cutting edges. An oath sits in the scales and must be balanced.

‘I will lead you in the blood-fray and be at the forefront of the fighting,’ he said, feeling their eyes on him like the weight of a brynja. ‘You will find me open-handed with the spoils of war. Gjöf sér æ til gjalda.’ A gift always looks for a return. ‘I will be a ring-giver and a raven-feeder. As long as the sun shines and the world endures, henceforth and for evermore.’