Authors: Giles Kristian
‘Fame, silver, mead,’ Bram said. ‘Give me those and I will cut your enemies down like barley before the scythe.’
He was a boaster this one, and yet there was something about him that made Sigurd believe it was more than just bluster. There was a bristling violence about him, not as dark as that which welled in Floki, but no less dangerous for that, Sigurd suspected. And then Sigurd recalled his ordeal and the visions that had come to him as he hung between worlds in that stinking fen. He had met a proud bear and that king of the beasts had gone for some honey even though it sat within a black cloud of angry bees.
Perhaps they will kill you
, Sigurd had told the bear. And the bear had laughed.
‘And you, Kætil Kartr?’ Sigurd said, turning to the other man. ‘Do you want fame, silver and mead?’
The blacksmith scratched his fair beard, frowning. ‘When I am dead my name will live on in the blades I have forged. That is enough fame for me. As for silver, I am tired of going from place to place and would put my roots down before I am too old to swing my hammer.’
‘Kætil happened to be passing through Tysvær,’ Hagal said. ‘You would be impressed with his work.’
‘I will find a good anvil stone and set up a proper smithy,’ Kætil said. ‘Hagal tells me there is bog iron around here running down in the streams.’
Sigurd glanced at Hagal who gave a slight shrug and Sigurd nodded, deciding it was Kætil’s own fault if he believed what a skald told him.
‘I will need silver,’ Kætil said. ‘And forging blades is thirsty work, so I will never turn down ale and mead.’
‘And are you a good fighter?’ Sigurd asked. ‘For those big arms of yours make you slow, I’d wager.’
‘I have had my share of fights,’ the blacksmith said. ‘Why else do you think I move from place to place?’ He shook his head. ‘There is usually some argument about payment for a knife or spear head.’ His lip curled in his fair beard. ‘It is funny how men easily forget what they agreed to pay.’
‘And you’ll swear an oath to me, Kætil Kartr?’ Sigurd said.
The man nodded. ‘I will,’ he said.
‘Who else have you brought me, Crow-Song?’ Sigurd asked, making a show of looking around and up towards where his father’s hall used to stand.
The skald flushed red. ‘I tried, Sigurd,’ he said. ‘But—’
‘But you could not find a jarl drunk enough to join me in this fight,’ Sigurd finished for him.
‘It is hard to find raven-feeders these days,’ Bram muttered.
But Sigurd was still coming to terms with the hard truth that he had just twenty men and no time to find more, for in two days Runa would marry Jarl Randver’s son Amleth.
‘It will make a better tale, anyhow,’ Hagal said, ‘the fewer of us there are.’
‘I will not deny it,’ Sigurd said. ‘Let us just hope one of us is left at the end to tell it.’
Bram Bear was grinning, his cracked lips spread within the great mass of his beard, which Sigurd thought was strange given what he had just said.
‘I think I am going to like you, Sigurd Haraldarson,’ Bram said.
‘We’ll see about that,’ Sigurd said.
Then he drew Troll-Tickler and laid it hilt first across his left forearm.
‘My father would have paid your brother the mundr,’ Amleth said, ‘and twice as much as the usual bride-price. Twenty-four aurar, the worth of ten cows. As well as oxen and a horse and bridle, or a good sword and a shield if that was what he preferred, which I suspect he would.’ A thin veil of rain was falling and Runa clenched the cloak tighter at her neck as they watched two of Jarl Randver’s men untying the small boat. ‘Sigurd was a fool to turn this down.’
Across the fjord from the tree-thronged island upon which they waited she could see Jarl Randver’s guests lining the stony beach and gathered on the wharf against which three of the jarl’s longships, including
Reinen
and
Sea-Eagle
, her father’s ships, sat at their moorings. In accordance with local tradition Amleth would row her across the water in an act symbolizing their journey as husband and wife from this day forward. She knew those guests across the water were eagerly awaiting them so that the ceremony could begin and the festivities could follow in a wash of mead and feasting. Perhaps they did not know that their host had planned another spectacle for their enjoyment, though this one would be drenched not in mead but in blood.
‘As for your morning-gift, you will find me very generous,’ Amleth said, looking west across the sound and then towards the bigger of the two islands between them and the mainland, behind which four more of his father’s warships waited hidden from the sound. ‘Beautiful clothes, jewellery, slaves. Whatever you want, I will give it if I can.’ He smiled but it was stiff as a new scabbard.
Runa tried to swallow but felt as if she had something caught in her throat. Talk of the morning-gift filled her with dread, for what was it if not the price of her maidenhood? All too soon the night would come, her brother would be dead and she would be lying beneath the man standing with her now. Perhaps he would put his seed in her belly and she would be trapped, doomed to spend her life amongst those who had killed her mother and her brother. Those who had their hands bloody up to the elbow in the ruin of her former life and all that her father had built.
Her other brothers would not bear it were they alive. Sigurd would not bear it, which was why he would come for her this very day, as Hagal had betrayed to Jarl Randver. And when he came, those ships waiting behind yonder island would swoop like an owl from a branch and Sigurd would die.
I could throw myself into the fjord, she thought. I could end it now. But Sigurd would still come, she knew. Even if Amleth did not row them across the water, Sigurd would come. Crow-Song had told the jarl that Runa’s brother meant to have his revenge that day, a feast of blood before the dark months. And though Runa knew her brother could not win against so many and with them expecting him, perhaps he might see her jump into the cold water and know that she died still holding her honour. Perhaps he would see this before they cut him down.
‘It is time, Amleth,’ one of the men called up from the slick rocks that bristled with mussels and slippery red weed. He was on his haunches holding the boat which was rocking gently on the calm sea.
Amleth nodded, offering Runa his arm so that they might walk down to the boat together, but Runa did not take it and so he began to walk down alone.
Runa did not move. She looked up at the dark clouds, letting the rain fall softly on her face. This was not the wedding day she had talked about with her mother. As a jarl’s daughter she had always known she would be a peace-weaver, but even her father, ever with one eye on strengthening alliances, had promised her that she would not marry any man she did not think she could come to love.
She clenched her teeth together at these memories of her parents. Their words had been of no more substance than the misty air. They had left her alone. All of her kin had abandoned her. All except for Sigurd.
‘Come, Runa,’ Amleth called up to her, an edge to his voice now. He was nervous, too. It was all over him. His father had set him up as the bait on the trap, for all that he was getting a bride out of it, and his eyes were up and down that rain-murked sound like shearwaters across the waves.
‘My brother will kill you, Amleth,’ Runa said, wanting to twist the knife in his fear. Wanting him to know that it was not over yet.
He looked past her up towards the rocks and trees of the deserted island, as if he expected Sigurd to suddenly appear there, as if the last of Jarl Harald’s sons had moored unseen on the other side of the island and was coming to kill him.
‘Sigurd is Óðin-favoured,’ she said. ‘Your father was a fool to make an enemy of him. He is coming and he will not be stopped.’
She watched him fiddling with the silver mjöllnir at his neck, the little hammer glinting between finger and thumb. Perhaps he would not dare climb into that boat with her and row them to the shore where some two hundred guests waited, no doubt slick-mouthed at the thought of the beasts their host had slaughtered for the celebration.
‘I will pick you up and put you in that boat if you do not come now,’ he said, a flash of tooth in his beard that reminded her of his father the jarl and his brother Hrani. Hrani who was waiting now in his ship
Hildiríðr
–
War-Rider
– for Sigurd to appear from behind one of those islands, and that thought sent a shiver through Runa because Hrani was a killer and wore it like a cloak.
‘Come,’ Amleth said, ‘let us be done with it,’ and with that he walked back up the rock, grabbed Runa’s arm and hauled her down to the boat.
‘The wind and current will take you that way,’ the man not holding the boat said, nodding south-westward, ‘so you’ll want to aim at that naust.’ He was pointing at a boathouse on the water’s edge a good arrow-shot along the shore from Jarl Randver’s wharf.
Amleth nodded. ‘I will be happy to get to the other side, Thorgest,’ he said.
Thorgest grinned. ‘But tonight will be a feast to shake your father’s hall, hey.’
Amleth pushed Runa into the boat and she stumbled over the row bench, falling down into the forward thwart at the bow. Amleth sat himself down with his back to her, and picked up the oars, putting them into the rowlocks. Then the man holding the stern pushed off and Amleth began the stroke, his broad shoulders and back swelling with the effort.
Herring gulls shrieked and tumbled through the misty grey above them. A guttural croak drew Runa’s eye to a cormorant flying eastward, low across the water and black as a shadow. She lifted the thin leather thong with its silver pendant of Freyja over her head and held the precious thing in her hand, her fist closed so tightly around it that it would take more than death to wrest it from her. And she invoked the goddess.
But whereas most women on their wedding day would seek Freyja’s help in the begetting of a child, for one of the goddess’s names is Gefn which means Giver, it was to Freyja’s darker side that Runa now appealed. For Freyja was also called Skjálf: Shaker. She was a goddess of battle and Runa asked her to ride into this fight beside her brother. But if the gods abandoned them now as they had abandoned her father and her mother and her brothers, then Runa would throw herself over the side and drown in the sound. Let Rán Mother of the Waves have her. Rather that than live here amongst these men, with the furs and jewels of a jarl’s daughter but the honour of a slave.
Amleth looked over his shoulder and growled a curse. Thorgest had been right about the current. The little boat was being borne west into Sandsundet, which was not where Amleth wanted to be, Runa knew. Because if Sigurd was coming, that was the direction he would be coming from, having put himself behind an island or one of the bluffs or promontories along the mainland’s ragged coast.
‘The gods do not want this marriage,’ Runa said. ‘Oðin has commanded Njörd to stop us reaching the other side. You cannot deny that we have barely made any progress at all, even with your strength.’
‘Hold your tongue, girl,’ Amleth snapped over his shoulder, putting more effort into the pull, his oar blades plunging and dragging the sea past.
‘You will have to row harder, Amleth!’ Thorgest called from the shore, which was advice that Amleth needed like a sprung strake.
He was puffing with the effort but at last it was paying off and they seemed to be getting somewhere, though Amleth was still having to put more muscle into the left oar to counter the tide.
A peal of thunder rolled across the northern sky and Runa chose not to say anything about that because Amleth could hear it for himself and had enough fear in him to take some bad omen from it. Instead she looked out across the channel, cinching the cloak tighter around her shoulders and pulling it across her legs to keep the rain off. Then she smiled bitterly in spite of herself for worrying about staying warm and dry when she had already decided to drown herself in the cold dark if things went as they surely must.
And then she drew a sharp breath and Amleth muttered some invocation to his gods. Runa felt her stomach sink like a rock to the sea bed. It was as though a cold hand squeezed her throat, choking her, starving her of breath. The hairs on her neck were raised and her bowels had turned to water.
Because Sigurd was coming.
She wanted to stand up and wave her arms. To warn her brother that Hagal had betrayed him to Jarl Randver and that they would be upon him like war hounds on a lone wolf. But Sigurd must already know that because
War-Rider
and the other three ships had already slipped their moorings and were edging around the big island off the mainland.
She could see Hrani standing up at the prow, could tell it was him by his beautiful silver-panelled helmet which seemed to shine, catching what little light there was on that grey, rain-veiled day. All four ships had the wind in their favour and their sails were round-bellied, their sides lined with painted shields.
‘Go back, Sigurd,’ she said under her breath, willing him to save himself, and in that moment the love she felt for him rose in her chest and had tears spilling from her eyes. ‘Go back.’
‘He must want to die,’ Amleth said, still pulling the oars, his eyes riveted to the swan-breasted knörr.
‘Please, Sigurd. Please live,’ Runa said, the words lost amongst the rolling waves of fear and sadness that swamped her. She was on her knees now, one hand clutching the little boat’s top strake, the other fist clenched round the Freyja amulet, staring at her brother’s ship as though she could make it turn around. It
was
turning, but only to make the most of the wind and cut across the sound towards them, and Runa knew with freezing dread that even though Jarl Randver’s ships were released to the kill, her brother refused to give up and save himself.
Amleth was leaning right back in the stroke, close enough to Runa that she could smell the mead sweat on him and the juniper and camomile with which he had washed his hair. ‘No man will say he lacked courage,’ he said, grunting with the effort of rowing. They were over halfway across the channel now and
War-Rider
and the other three ships had already crossed before their bow. Runa could see their thwarts bristling with men and spears, and perhaps the sight of these men in their war gear hauled a memory into her mind of her father and brothers going off to fight King Gorm in Karmsundet. Suddenly she was flooded by another feeling and she knew it to be pride. Sigurd had seen his enemy coming for him and had known it was a trap. But he came on anyway because he was his father’s son. Runa knew then that he would be drinking with their father and brothers in the Allfather’s hall that night and she would have him tell them that she was brave, too. That her honour was no less a thing than theirs.