God of Vengeance (49 page)

And that was it. Gleipnir, the fetter with which the Æsir bound the wolf Fenrir, could not have held them all tighter to each other than the words they had just spoken to the lap of the fjord on the shore, the creak of the ships at their moorings and the cry of gulls in the dawn sky.

‘So I have hearthmen but no hearth,’ Sigurd said to Svein who came up and clapped a great hand on his shoulder, the smile on his face reaching from ear to ear.

‘Who needs a hearth when you have two fine ships?’ the red-haired giant said.

Sigurd laughed, relieved to shed the weight of the moment. ‘And what fine dragon ships they are,’ he said. ‘Jarls and kings will be trembling to their bones.’

‘Ships or no ships you have come a long way in no time at all, Sigurd,’ Aslak said and Sigurd nodded because this was true enough. ‘Your father would be proud,’ his friend went on, looking at the oath-sworn rather than at Sigurd, who felt a rush of pride at having such friends as these.

‘My father would be halfway to Hinderå to put his sword in Jarl Randver’s belly,’ Sigurd said loud enough for the others to hear.

Olaf looked over at him and nodded. ‘Right then, you wolf-feeding, widow-making sons of whores, what are you waiting for? We have a wedding feast to go to.’ Although first they would meet Hagal at Skudeneshavn, along with whichever jarls or warriors Crow-Song had persuaded to join their cause.

‘I hope this Jarl Randver serves good mead in his hall,’ Ubba said.

‘We will need something strong to celebrate getting to Skudeneshavn first without drowning,’ Agnar Hunter said, for he was one of those who would be rowing
Sea-Urchin
, which they had not tested properly in the open sea since making the repairs on her.

‘Trust me, Agnar,’ Karsten Ríkr said, standing at the karvi’s tiller and stroking the sheer strake beside him as though it were a lover’s leg, ‘she is happy to have men aboard her—’

‘Like your woman back at Lysefjorden, hey!’ Ubba said, earning himself a coarse hand gesture from Karsten.

‘Even now she is remembering the old times,’ Karsten went on, unwilling to let Ubba ruin the moment, ‘and she is grateful to us for giving her another chance. She will not let us down.’

‘She had better not,’ Olaf rumbled, taking the oar which Svein offered him, as Sigurd went aboard, calling farewell to Solveig who stood by the tiller at
Sea-Sow
’s stern.

‘It is not my wyrd to have ships sink under me, Uncle,’ Sigurd said.

And neither was it. For there were men that needed killing.

And the gods were watching.

WHEN KARSTEN AT
the tiller called out that the northern tip of Karmøy was coming up off
Sea-Urchin
’s port side Sigurd felt a wave of relief roll across the men at the benches. The rowing had been hard and the muscles in Sigurd’s lower back and stomach thrummed with hot pain. It would have been hard going even with a full crew of twenty-four at the oars, but with only twelve rowing and one bailing – the other five being needed aboard
Sea-Sow
– it had been slow and exhausting and recklessly dangerous. For they had taken this old, patched-up ship into the open sea and the water had spilled in between the strakes and sloshed about in the thwarts as they took turns to break their backs bending with a bailer to fling sea back to sea. But Karsten had proved his sea-craft, hugging the coast and the sheltered waters but avoiding the rocks and using the currents where he could to make the rowing easier.

His own back to the whale’s road and blind to the skerries submerged by the high tide, which could have ripped the karvi apart, spilling them into the brine like guts tumbling from a belly-wound, Sigurd had watched the helmsman like a hawk. And he had been impressed by what he saw, for Karsten had never once looked unsure of himself or
Sea-Urchin
. He stood up there on the stern platform with the pride of a jarl in his high seat, which was hardly surprising given the strange twists of his wyrd. For he had been steering a ship full of raiding Danes when Jarl Arnstein Twigbelly from Bokn had swept upon them with sword and slaughter. Twigbelly had taken Karsten prisoner and in revenge for the raid on his lands would have taken Karsten’s eyes so that he might never again look upon the fjords. But Karsten had jumped overboard and, in his own words, swum like an otter, the Norsemen’s arrows plunging into the waves around him. Once ashore he had stolen a little boat and rowed east to Jørpeland, there learning that if you wanted to disappear and yet stay within spitting distance of the sea, then the Lysefjord was for you. He had hidden there with other hunted men and might have ended his days there if Sigurd had not sailed up that fjord looking for the brothers whose sword-fame had reached his ears. But now here was Karsten with a tiller in his hand and the sea air in his nose, and who could ask for more?

They had caught up with
Sea-Sow
the previous dusk and spent the night in a sheltered cove, which gave them the time to properly bail out and plug the worst of the leaks with twists of resin-soaked horsehair. Then another hard day’s rowing had brought them to Karmøy and this was when Olaf barked at them to pull harder and longer because the sea was turning rough and they could not risk pulling in close to the shore to moor for the night so near to Avaldsnes and the lair of their enemy King Gorm.

‘Why don’t we kill that lump of troll snot while we are passing?’ Svein called from his row bench as though it would be as easy as that.

‘Because I do not want to be seen in this worm-gnawed ship when we come face to face with that toad-fucking traitor,’ Olaf said, earning himself a mutter and frown from Karsten who, like Solveig, believed a ship could hear such an insult and take offence. ‘And also I do not mind rowing here and there like our ancestors did,’ Olaf went on, ‘but coming to a fight tired and aching is not a far-sighted thing to do if the man you are fighting is a king and has more spearmen than a dog has fleas.’

It would have taken weeks to find a tall, straight oak and fashion it into a new mast to replace the rotting one, and they had not had the time. Instead they had left the rotting one stepped, with the yard and furled sail cradled in the oar trees, because it would be better if any other crews they came across did not know that
Sea-Urchin
could not be sailed. For all that, they might wonder why the crew-light ship was struggling under oars when the wind was whipping spume off the waves.

‘Biflindi will still be sitting there on his pile of toll-silver when we are ready to pay him in steel,’ Sigurd said, ‘but first he will hear what has befallen his friend Jarl Randver. It will worm into his head and he will begin to wonder if the gods have turned their backs on him because he is an oath-breaker.’

‘Well if he is at Hinderå for the wedding we will kill him then and be done with it,’ Svein said, and the others laughed at that despite their aching muscles and sore bones. But Sigurd shared a look with Olaf because they both hoped that King Gorm would not be at Hinderå. Dealing with Jarl Randver and all his thegns would be hard enough, but if the king was there with his retinue then Sigurd’s ambition would be sluiced away in his own blood and that of those now oath-tied to him.

‘He won’t be there,’ Olaf had assured him when they were weaving their plan and Sigurd had brought up the possibility of it, thinking that Randver would see the value of having the king there as a guest at his son’s wedding. ‘The king holds his own Haust Blót feast and you can imagine what a mead-soaked night that is.’ Olaf had shaken his head. ‘Biflindi will not sit in another man’s seat in another man’s hall when his own people expect to raise their horns to him and stuff themselves with the wealth of his table.’

Sigurd hoped now he was right, as they laboured with too few oars in the water, gulls wheeling and shrieking above them, and Karmøy slid slowly past.

Through sweat-stung eyes they watched the sun fall over the edge of the western sea and Olaf barked at them to row even harder until by the last of the light still clinging to the day Karsten threaded them between the islands off Karmøy’s ragged south coast and they came to Skudeneshavn.

Sigurd murmured a curse when he twisted round to see that there was only one ship tied up to the jetty and that was
Sea-Sow
.

‘Óðin’s arse!’ Olaf said, ‘where has that damned skald got to? He should have been here by now.’

‘Maybe he means to make a big thing of it by coming across the Boknafjord at the prow of some jarl’s longship so we can all see him and cheer,’ Aslak suggested through a wry smile.

‘Aye, he’d like that,’ Olaf agreed.

‘I would like it too,’ Sigurd said, ‘the jarl part of it anyway.’

In moments those on the port side had pulled in their oars, whilst on the other side they backed water and Karsten brought
Sea-Urchin
up to the mooring with the tenderness of a father’s kiss on his child’s cheek. Then Agnar Hunter and Bodvar were throwing ropes to Solveig and Valgerd as the others came down the hill to greet them.

Sigurd could not help but picture his mother standing there on the grass-tufted rocks and his stomach lurched at the memory, the pain of it drowning the ache in muscle and bone.

‘There is Crow-Song,’ Svein said, grimacing as he pushed his big hands into the small of his back trying to get his bones right after all that rowing. ‘And that is not the way you told it, Aslak.’

For Hagal was stumbling down the worn track in the least heroic way and there was no torc-wearing jarl with him. Though there were two men Sigurd had never seen before.

‘Who are they, I wonder,’ Olaf murmured, standing on the jetty and offering Sigurd his hand. Sigurd grabbed hold and Olaf hauled him up out of
Sea-Urchin
and put out his arm for the next man.

‘Hagal, I am glad to see you,’ Sigurd said as the skald came up and they clasped each other’s arms in greeting.

‘And I am relieved to see you, Sigurd,’ Hagal said, frowning as he looked over Sigurd’s shoulder at the men coming ashore. ‘But it is a shame what happened up there at Osøyro. I heard it some days ago.’

Sigurd pursed his lips. ‘Yes and no,’ he said. ‘Every man has a brynja now, which is like having twice as many men.’

‘Three times as many,’ Olaf put in.

Hagal nodded, unconvinced, then turned to the two men waiting behind him. Both were big men and fighters by the looks, and Hagal seemed wary of them the way a man is wary of another man’s hunting hounds.

‘This is Kætil Ivarsson whom men call Kartr,’ he said as the one with the thatch of fair hair and ruddy cheeks stepped forward and nodded at Sigurd respectfully.

‘Why are you called Kartr then?’ Sigurd asked.

‘I am a blacksmith but in my life I have moved around from place to place,’ he said, and the man’s trade did not surprise Sigurd because he had a smith’s brawny arms and big shoulders. He shrugged those big shoulders now. ‘I would push my tools before me in a cart,’ he said, which was answer enough.

‘And I am Bram whom men call Bear,’ the other said, keeping his feet rooted to the spot as though he expected Sigurd to come to him. He was a beast of a man, not as tall as Svein but broad and solid-looking with a face that was all beard and a nose that looked to have been broken a dozen times.

‘Hagal tells me you are a fighter, Sigurd Haraldarson,’ Bram said before Sigurd had the chance to ask him why he had come to Skudeneshavn with Hagal.

Sigurd looked at both men and nodded. ‘I am going to kill Jarl Randver of Hinderå. And then I am going to kill King Gorm,’ he said, seeing no point in watering the thing down. ‘I expect I’ll have to do some fighting to get these things done.’

Bram nodded. ‘I was up in Steinvik for the last three winters and the jarl whose mead I soaked my beard in had forgotten how to be a raiding man. Like an overfed hound he was happy to sit by his fire, farting the days away. I could stay amongst him and his sheep no more.’

‘He released you from your oath?’ Sigurd said.

‘I never swore to him. He was not worth my oath.’ He stared at Sigurd, his teeth dragging beard bristles over his bottom lip as he appraised the younger man.

‘I was at Tysvær in Jarl Leiknir’s hall when Bram came to the place asking if the jarl would raid again before winter,’ Hagal said, then grinned. ‘I told him to forget about Jarl Leiknir and that I knew a man who was weaving a great saga tale.’

‘You will swear an oath to me, Bram Bear,’ Sigurd said, then gestured at the mail-clad warriors around them. ‘All of them have done it.’

‘Three things,’ Bram said. ‘For three things I will oath-bind myself to you.’

‘Three things for one oath?’ Sigurd said. ‘To my ears that does not sound like a fair trade.’

The big man smiled at that. ‘If you had seen me fight you would be scratching your head wondering why I ask for only three things.’ He jerked his bushy beard in Svein’s direction. ‘Want me to turn that big ox inside out? What about him?’ he was pointing at Olaf who was making sure that
Sea-Urchin
was secure. ‘I’ll put him on his arse if you like.’

Sigurd batted the offer away with a hand. ‘Ha, that is easy, I have done it myself,’ he said. Bram cocked an eyebrow at that, for Olaf looked like a god of war in his brynja, its rings straining across those shoulders of his. ‘So what three things do you ask in return for your sword?’ Sigurd asked.