The Lord of Vik-Lo: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 3)

The Lord of Vík-ló

A Novel of Viking Age Ireland

Book Three of The Norsemen Saga

James L. Nelson

Copyright © 2015 James L. Nelson

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1508699445

ISBN-13 978-1508699446

To Jonathan Bonaventure Nelson,

my artist, my dreamer, my beloved son

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Epilogue

Glossary

Vík-ló
- Viking place name meaning  “grassy meadow by the bay”. It is now the modern Irish town of Wicklow.

(For other terms see Glossary at the end of the book)

The Saga of Thorgrim Ulfsson

There was a man named Thorgrim, the son of Ulf Haraldson, who owned a farm in East Agder in Vik in the country of Norway. Though he was no bigger than most men, Thorgrim possessed great strength and was a skilled warrior. This he proved many times while going a’viking with the jarl Ornolf Hrafnsson, known as Ornolf the Restless, for whom he served as a hirdman.

  After Thorgrim had gained much wealth over many summers of raiding with Ornolf, he bought more land and livestock and slaves and was wed to Ornolf’s daughter, Hallbera, with the jarl’s blessings. Thorgrim presented Ornolf with fifty silver coins as a bride-price, and Ornolf gave Thorgrim a farm north of East Agder which some years later Thorgrim gave to his first son, Odd. Thorgrim and Hallbera had three children, Odd, Harald and Hild.

  Though he had a reputation as a warrior, Thorgrim was also known as a clever farmer and a man skilled in working with wood. His advice was often sought, and though Thorgrim was not given to lengthy speeches he was always happy to help when he could, and his words were greeted with much respect. There was only one thing about Thorgrim that made his neighbors uneasy. On certain days, when the sun went down, he become so irritable and so short-tempered that none dared approach him. Some believed that he was a shape-shifter and took the form of a wolf during the night. That is why he came to be known as Thorgrim Night Wolf.

  When Thorgrim’s daughter Hild was ten years old, Hallbera found herself once again with child. She gave birth to a daughter whom Thorgrim named Hallbera, after his wife, who died giving birth. After that Thorgrim did not want to remain on his farm so he followed his father-in-law Ornolf west to go a’viking. This time he brought his second son Harald who was fifteen and powerfully built, so much so that he soon earned the name Broadarm.

  Ornolf’s ship was called
Red Dragon
and he sailed it to a longphort on the coast of Ireland which the Irish people called Dubh-linn. Ornolf had such a great fondness for food and drink that Thorgrim usually took charge of the ship and men when they went a’viking. On their way to Dubh-linn they plundered an Irish ship and stole from it a wonderful crown, which the Irish called the Crown of the Three Kingdoms and which they esteemed and coveted very much. This led to many adventures among the Irish people, as there were many who wished to possess the crown for the king who wore it would wield great authority in that land.

  While the Irish were fighting amongst themselves, Thorgrim and his men plundered the church in a place called Tara, which was considered the seat of the King of Ireland, though few in Ireland recognized a single king of that country, but rather each part recognized its own king. The Vikings found great riches at Tara, but Thorgrim was gravely wounded through the treachery of one of the jarls in their company, whom Thorgrim had helped free from the Irish. This was in the year 852 by the Christian calendar, fifty-nine years after the first Northmen sailed west and plundered the monastery at Lindisfarne.

  By that time, Thorgrim Night Wolf was tired of raiding and wished only to return to his farm in East Agder. His son, Harald, was not eager to go home, but he was a good son and did as he was commanded by his father. During his adventures in Ireland, Thorgrim had come into possession of a ship, which he named
Far Voyager
. After Thorgrim had mostly recovered from his wound he determined to sail back to Norway, so he found a crew of more than fifty men and loaded
Far Voyager
with provisions and goods to trade and the plunder he had accumulated in Ireland. Then he put to sea, bound home to Vik.

  Here is what happened.

The first prey was taken by the heathens from southern Brega…and they carried off many prisoners, and killed many and led away very many captive.

                      The Annals of Ulster

They could hear the battle before they could see it.

  The longship
Eagle’s Wing
was sailing fitfully, north and east, with the coast of Ireland less than a mile off her larboard side. The wind was coming in puffs. Sometimes it heeled the long, sharp vessel over and drove her along, and sometimes it dropped off to a mere breath, until the ship stood upright on her keel, her forward motion barely discernable, the sail and rigging flogging and banging as she rolled in the swell.

  Aft, half leaning on the tiller, stood the Dane, Grimarr Knutson of Hedeby. He was known as Grimarr Giant, and with good reason, for even though he was not strictly speaking a giant, it was not hard to imagine that his father had been of that race, even if his mother was human. Grimarr stood more than a head above any of the sixty warriors who manned
Eagle’s Wing
and was as broad as any two of them standing side by side. No one knew the limit of his strength because no one had the courage to test it.

  Just forward of where Grimarr stood, on the starboard side, his son Sandarr was sitting on a small chest. Sandarr’s leg, injured in a fight the year before and never quite healed, was thrust out straight. Sandarr was his eldest son, his only son now, and while he had inherited some of his father’s size he had not inherited the strength that went with it. Not that Sandarr was a weakling or had not proved himself in battle, but he was not the man his father was. It was a fact that everyone knew, but no one dared say.

  Sandarr was also more clever than his father, more clever by far. That was another thing that went unsaid, at least in Grimarr’s presence.

  A gust came, a puff of wind that pushed
Eagle’s Wing
down on her larboard side and drove her along with a pulse of speed. Grimarr shifted the tiller a bit, turned the ship harder into the wind. Beyond the larboard bow a great headland rose up out of the sea, the water breaking white around its base, an impressive promontory that put Grimarr in mind of the stunning fjords of his homeland. They would have to drive
Eagle’s Wing
around that headland and then stand north some distance before they could fetch their home port. Their Irish homeport. The longphort of Vík-ló.

  The sail and the rigging grew taut under the pressure of the breeze and the banging and slating stopped. Despite the light wind, the sail was reefed to ease the pressure on the cracked and hastily repaired plank aft of the mast, but Grimarr could still hear the gurgling sound of water running the length of her hull, the soft creak of the mast and the shrouds as they took up the strain. He saw men glancing out to windward, hoping, he was sure, that this breeze would hold.

 
Eagle’s Wing
would likely have made better time under oar than sailing in that fluky wind, but they were in no great hurry and Grimarr reckoned he should give the men a rest rather than trying to wring every bit of speed out of his ship. This was a calculation, one in which the men’s comfort played little part.

  Grimarr was thinking instead about how much effort he might expect from his exhausted men, of what might happen if they found themselves suddenly plunged into a bloody fight. It was a possibility he needed always to keep in mind. Like troops held in reserve during a battle some bit of the men’s strength had to be preserved whenever
Eagle’s Wing
was in the near presence of danger - which was every moment she was not safe in the longphort of Vík-ló.

  A raid on a monastery in a town the Irish called Fearna, a hard two weeks, had worn the men down. Fearna was not a coastal town, but one miles inland, up a river called Slaney and then another called the Bann.
Eagle’s Wing
and another longship,
Sea Rider
, had crawled for miles upstream, the rivers more difficult to maneuver than Grimarr or Fasti Magnisson, who commanded
Sea Rider
, had anticipated. The current was swift. The sand bars rose up from the river bottom in places they did not suspect and grabbed the bows of the longships, shallow draft though they were, until sometimes the hundred or so men in the raiding party had to clamber over the sides into the cold river and drag the vessels free. It had rained, a near constant deluge, but that was hardly unusual in that country, or so Grimarr had come to understand.

  The voyage had been hellish. The raid, however, had been a great success. For two generations now the monasteries and centers of wealth along the Irish coast had been plundered and picked clean, but only now were the longships moving inland, the Northmen using the great rivers of Ireland as a means to raid far from the sea. The people of Fearna had been unaware of the coming threat. The monastery there had yielded up a great trove of silver, some gold, some jewels. They had taken all the slaves they could carry aboard the two ships, which in truth were not many, given that they had just two ships.

  The return voyage to the sea, however, had been worse than the hard pull inland. The rushing water carried them along, but it also jammed them hard into the islands of mud, pinned them against the high banks. Skilled oarsmen though the Northmen were, it was exhausting work to keep the ships in the deep water of the stream, a nightmare to free them from the bottom when they could not.

  The ships were deeper in the water after the raid on Fearna, burdened with treasure and slaves, and that only compounded the difficulty. At last they had made it to the mouth of the river, the banks spread wide as if to release them, the sea a great arc of blue beyond the bows, open arms beckoning.

  Now, free of the river, the rugged coast passing down the ship’s side, Grimarr Giant wanted only to return to Vík-ló, unimpressive as the longphort was, and be done with
Eagle’s Wing
for a time. The gust that heeled them over carried the longship ahead for fifty boat lengths, made the wake foam in a long white path astern, gave every man aboard a spark of hope that it would hold steady and drive them right around the towering, rocky cliffs to larboard.

  And just as it seemed the breeze might hold the wind puffed and settled and died away. Grimarr could sense the frustration that rippled through the crew. And then, through the flogging rigging and the gentle flap of the oiled wool cloth of the sail, Grimarr heard another noise, distant but familiar, a noise that his mind picked out from all the others, barely audible, but with all the urgency of someone shouting in alarm.

  The clang of steel on steel. Weapon on weapon.

  From his slumped position over the tiller Grimarr stood straight upright and cocked his ear in the direction from which the sound had come. No one else aboard seemed the have heard it; there was no pause in the low, muttered conversations that were taking place fore and aft.

  “Silence!” Grimarr roared and the men fell quiet with the abrupt finality of candle’s flame snuffed out.
Eagle’s Wing
was barely making way in the failing breeze, the water along her side just the merest hint of sound, the sail flapping gently. With her men sitting in absolute silence, every ear straining now, the sound Grimarr heard was repeated, augmented, joined by the muted sounds of shouting. It was a battle. There was no mistaking it. Every man on board had heard those sounds time and again and every one of them recognized it immediately for what it was.

  “Oh, by Odin’s sweet ass!” Grimarr shouted. Whoever was fighting was doing so on the far side of the headland and the massive cliffs all but blotted out the sound that they would otherwise have heard well before then. And if there was fighting on the north side of the headland Grimarr knew who was doing that fighting, on one side at least. One of the combatants was most certainly Fasti Magnisson
aboard
Sea Rider
. Grimarr had a fair idea of who the other might be.

  “You sons of whores!” he shouted to his men still seated at the rowing benches. “Get that sail down! Get the oars out! Move, damn you all, or I’ll rip the lungs out of every one of you!”

  Grimarr had not completed the threat before every man aboard was in motion, casting off the halyard, casting off the braces, swinging the yard fore and aft as it came down the mast and bundling the sail against it, grabbing the oars up from the gallows on which they were stored and passing them along the length of the deck. Sandarr pushed himself to his feet, limped over to the starboard brace, cast it free. They were not motivated by fear of Grimarr this time, and he knew it. Like him, they stood to lose a fortune if the worst of their suspicions proved true.

  The ship’s upper strake was pierced with holes through which the oars could pass, and each hole was fitted with a small shutter to keep the water from pouring through when the ship heeled enough to put the sheer strake in the sea. Now these shutters were deftly swung aside and the oars thrust through the holes – oars of varying length to accommodate the width of the ship at every station.

  Complicated, potentially chaotic as that evolution might be, it took the men of
Eagle’s Wing
less than a minute to transform the ship from a wallowing vessel under the indifferent power of its sail into a swift, oar-powered craft shooting ahead like an arrow. They were well practiced at this, and well-motivated.

  The bad luck that had plagued their raiding voyage had not left them even after
Eagle’s Wing
and
Sea Rider
had cleared the river Slaney. For the remainder of the day they had made the best of their way up the coast, then beached for the night on a shingle strand. The following morning they had heaved the longships back out into the sea, set sail to a favorable and steady breeze, and continued to claw their way north.

  It was near noon when Grimarr noticed the water coming in over the deck boards. There was only a narrow space between the planks fastened down to the frames and the bottom of the ship beneath. Water usually sloshed around there from the low-sided ship dipping her gunnel when healing to a gust or a cloudburst filling the open vessel like a trough. The men were accustomed to bailing out what was within reach, and they were doing so now, but only Grimarr seemed to notice they were having to bail with considerably greater frequency.

  “Where by the gods is all this cursed water coming from?” he demanded. A few of the deck boards were left loose for bailing, storage, and access to the hull. These were pulled up and the planks below inspected but no problems could be found. Then more deck boards were pried free, and just aft of the mast step, right where the base of the mast exerted a great levering force on the hull, they found a plank cracked clean through. It was an ugly gash that ran for several feet and gushed water every time the ship rolled in the seas.

  For a moment Grimarr and the others stood looking at the lacerated strake that bled seawater at a prodigious rate. Then
Eagle’s Wing
rolled again, and the wood made an audible cracking noise, and the water came spouting in faster still.

  “Oh, may Odin take this damned, rotten pig trough!” Grimarr shouted in frustration. He looked to the west, found a spot where it seemed the generally rocky and inhospitable Irish coast tapered down to a beach and where they might ground the ship. They would have to try. If some sort of repair was not made to the strake
Eagle’s Wing
would not stay afloat much longer. She certainly would not make the voyage to Vík-ló in such condition.

  “Get the sail down. Get out the oars. We’ll ground her yonder,” Grimarr grumbled to the men. In a louder voice he hailed
Sea Rider
, sailing a couple hundred ells further out to sea, and conveyed to them the message that he was heading for shore. He did not bother trying to explain why.

  An hour before sunset both ships were hauled up and guards were posted in a wide arc around the camp to defend against any surprises. By Grimarr and Fasti’s reckoning they were well within the land ruled by the Irishman
Lorcan
mac Fáeláin. The Northmen might call this place Vík-ló but to the Irish it was Cill Mhantáin and it was Lorcan’s country. Grimarr had come to understand that every pathetic cow pasture or squalid cluster of huts in Ireland had a king, what the Irish called a
rí túaithe
, and most of them were no more kings or warriors than the peasants over whom they lorded their authority.