The Lord of Vik-Lo: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 3) (20 page)

  He burst from the back of the cart, burst from the last of the cover of the hay and leapt on the nearest man. He saw a sword raised in feeble defense but the man was too late and far too shocked to fight and Thorgrim ripping into him, his screams loud in Thorgrim’s ears.

  He sensed another man behind him. He whirled as a sword came whistling down, jerked to one side and the sword slashed into the first man and the man screamed again. Thorgrim leapt at the sword wielder, and in a flash he was down, too.

  The dark was broken by only a sliver of a moon, but it was enough for Thorgrim to see with absolute clarity. Three more men, two with swords drawn, one with an ax. But they were not attacking. They were frozen, though one at least was backing away with small, hesitant steps. The smell of fear was strong. One of them had pissed himself.

  Thorgrim made a move for the man on the right, and as the man took a wild swing with his sword Thorgrim abruptly changed direction and leapt for the one on the left and took him completely by surprise. He went down and the smell of blood was so heavy in the air that it threatened to overwhelm Thorgrim’s other senses. He heard the ax coming at him, a clumsy panicked stroke, and he dodged aside with ease. The blade of the ax buried itself in the ground beside him and Thorgrim turned on the man who had swung it, killing him before he even had time to straighten.

  The fifth man did not even try to fight. The one with the ax was still screaming out his last when the other turned and ran, racing off into the night, back down the way they had come. Thorgrim was up and after him, but already he could feel his strength waning. If he did not catch him in the first minute or so of pursuit he would not catch him at all.

  But catch him he did. The man, in a panic, was stumbling, sword in hand, craning his neck to look over his shoulder as he ran. Three, four, five strides and Thorgrim was on him. At the last second the man turned and slashed with his sword and found only air as Thorgrim launched himself at the cowering form. They went down together, but the struggle did not last long.

  Then it was quiet again. Thorgrim remained motionless, letting the night lap around him. A light breeze was moving through the nearby trees, and slowly the insects began to take up their calls again, and then the nightjars and far off in the distance an owl. The smell of blood and feces was in the air and it blotted out nearly every other odor that the wind carried with it. He could see things moving in the dark: bats and foxes and their tiny prey.

  Suddenly the pain was on him again, and the crushing exhaustion, and this time he felt like he was indeed buried in the earth, many fathoms deep. He felt like the power to move was quite beyond him, like he could do nothing but lay down right there, wherever he was, just lay down and lay motionless and either he would heal or he would die.

  But he could not do that, he knew he could not. He could not lie there, exposed, because he had some ill-formed notion that there was work still to do, business left unfinished.

  He stood and staggered back toward the cart, weaving and stumbling. The dead men lay like heaps of sea wrack cast up on a beach but Thorgrim ignored them. Pain shot through his chest and his head and his limbs as he crawled up into the back of the cart. He reached through the mounds of hay and pulled the dried stuff over him until he could tell by the pressure pushing down over his entire body that he was well-covered.

  And then he lay still, to sleep, to heal, or to die.

I’m ready to tread the isle

where combat is tried

- God grant the poet victory –

a drawn sword in my hand.

                                      The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue

A fog like some sort of malignant spirit lay over the mouth of the River Leitrim and nearly two hundred men stood in a loose semi-circle on the bank. Starri Deathless stood near the center of that shallow arc and he was not happy about it. In most circumstances, but particularly when there was a crowd of people, Starri preferred to be up high, looking down, like a hawk in a tree. Given a choice he probably would have been watching from
Far Voyager
’s masthead, not standing with all those men at his back.

  But now something was happening, and Starri had a profoundly bad feeling about it and for once he wanted to be at the forefront.

  Starri needed no sign from the gods to know something was wrong. When last he had seen Thorgrim, the dark mood had been setting down on him and now he was nowhere to be found. That had never happened before. Every time such a mood had come over Thorgrim, and Starri had remained near at hand, the morning found them both right where they had been when darkness fell. There was no knowing, at such times, what Thorgrim had been about during the hours of the night. But dawn always found him in the same spot as the night before, seemingly having never moved.

  Work that morning had started early. Despite a late night of revelry and the sort of debauch with which the Northmen often celebrated the start of a new voyage, the first of them were stirring before dawn, stoking up the fires, getting water boiling for porridge, rolling up bedding to bring aboard
Far Voyager.
High water would occur just a few hours after dawn, and the longships would ride it out to sea.

  The Far Voyagers were not alone. Grimarr’s crew, the men of
Eagle’s Wing
, made their way down to the waterfront, a ghost army emerging from the mist. Like Thorgrim’s men, they had spent the day before preparing their ship to go to sea. With them were the crews of the other two ships that had been saved from the Irish raid; Bersi Jorundarson’s ship
Water Stallion
, nearly sixty feet in length, nearly as large as
Eagle’s Wing
, with a crew of fifty men, and Hilder’s smaller
Fox
with thirty-five warriors aboard.

  Starri, who had been sleeping aboard
Far Voyager
, woke with the first men and headed off into the mist to find Thorgrim. Even as he did he was aware of an uneasy feeling in his gut, and he chided himself for not having spent the night at Thorgrim’s side, as was his custom.

 
You are getting soft, Starri, this life ashore…no fighting…it is making you soft
, he thought. He came at last to the place where he had left Thorgrim the previous night, but Thorgrim was not there. In the weak light of dawn and the fog that lay over the land he could not see more than a hundred feet in any direction; the river was lost in the mist, the men at the Norwegians’ camp were just shadow figures. He headed that way, looking around for Thorgrim, and then asking after him, but no man there had seen him yet that morning.

  Nor was Starri the only one looking for him. Thorgrim was the master of the ship, he was the man to whom the crew had sworn oaths, for that voyage, at least, and there were decisions that needed to be made. Agnarr wished to know if Thorgrim intended to tow the curach astern. Godi needed permission to accept an offer of two dozen spears from
Fox
. Ornolf wished to know how Thorgrim could think five barrels of mead would be enough for the entire two weeks. But Thorgrim was not to be found.

  With mounting panic Starri went back to the place where he had last seen Thorgrim and began searching around. He was no great hand at tracking, but he thought he could see where Thorgrim had walked off down river. He found another place where it appeared a cart had been pulled through the high grass – there were wheel ruts in a few places where the ground was soft – but that meant nothing. There was no sign of a struggle that Starri could see, no blood.

  He wandered back toward the encampment. He was no longer chiding himself, but rather he was angrily cursing his stupidity. He knew better than to leave Thorgrim alone in such a mood. The fact that Thorgrim had managed to live four decades without Starri’s help never occurred to him. He was with the Night Wolf now, the man favored by the gods, and it was Starri’s self-appointed task to look out for him.

  As he walked he rubbed the split arrowhead amulet.
Perhaps Night Wolf is off conferring with Grimarr, or the other masters
, he thought, but the warning in his head was screaming louder and louder. Then, as he arrived back at the camp, he found Bersi Jorundarson there, come from Grimarr’s hall with news, and huddled in quiet conversation with Ornolf.

  Bersi finished saying whatever it was he had to say, clapped Ornolf on the shoulder and walked off. Ornolf summoned Starri and Agnarr and Godi and a few others. “Get the men together,” he said, “and let us gather by the river. Bersi will get the men from the other ships. Grimarr is on his way and he would speak to them all.” There was none of the usual bombast and levity in the old man’s voice.

  “What is it? What’s happening?” Starri asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ornolf said. “Truly I don’t.” He paused a second, and then added, “But I reckon it’s not good.”

  So Starri helped gather the rest, and stood with them, silently shifting from one foot to the other as they watched Grimarr emerge from the fog one hundred paces away and make his slow way toward them. He was limping, and that so retarded his movement that Starri thought he might scream with impatience. But Grimarr had a determined look on his face, his mouth set as if he was in great pain, and he struggled on toward the waiting men.

  Ten paces away he stopped and ran his eyes from one end of the crowd to the other, taking them all in, a dramatic gesture. Starri could see there was an ugly wound on his cheek and his face was smeared with blood, which for some reason he had not washed off. Under his arm he held a bundle of something, and in his left hand a sword, and it all made Starri more uncomfortable still.

  A murmur ran through the men like a surf breaking on a beach and then Grimarr raised his arm and the men fell silent. Grimarr, too, was silent for a moment, and when at last he spoke his voice betrayed none of the pain or weariness that his hobbling gait suggested.

  “Last night,” he said, his voice ringing out through the wet air, “Lorcan and his bastard Irish raided us again!” He paused once more as the men’s talk rose and fell, then continued on. “They want the girl, the Irish girl, the one who can lead us to the Fearna hoard. But they did not get her. They will not get her!”

  Someone among
Eagle’s Wing’s
men shouted, “Tell us what happened, Lord Grimarr!” and this was met with shouts of approval. Grimarr nodded and held up his arm again.

  “Last night I was speaking with Hilder and Bersi and Thorgrim of
Far Voyager
,” Grimarr said. “We were speaking of our plans to retrieve the hoard, when the Irish came over the wall. They found some unguarded place…came over unseen. There were not many of them, twenty, perhaps, but we were few in my hall. When they came in, by Thor’s hammer Mjölnir I swear to you, they met more of a fight than they ever thought to get!”

  Grimarr paused again, as if collecting himself. “We met them with our swords, me and Hilder, Bersi and Thorgrim and the few other men with us in the hall. A dozen of us, all told. It was a bloody fight, as desperate as any I have been in. I was wounded in the face, as you can see, and in the leg. Most of the others were wounded as well, three killed.”

  Again Grimarr paused, and he seemed to be steeling himself for what he had to say next. “It was dark, there was fighting throughout the hall. We managed to drive them off before they could lay hands on the girl. But when we gathered again, Thorgrim and Hilder were gone.”

  At that a murmur ran through the men, and groans of dismay from Thorgrim’s men and from the crew of
Fox
. Someone shouted, “What of them?”

  “We went after them, when we realized what had happened,” Grimarr said. “We did not go far, it’s true, as we figured there might be more of them, lying in wait. But they were gone. They may have had horses. We found this…” He took the bundle in his hand, grabbed an edge and shook it out. It was a cloak. The men of
Far Voyager
recognized it immediately. Thorgrim’s cloak. It was rent in several places, and in the gathering light of morning they could see it was soaked with blood.

  Starri stared with eyes wide, and he could hear Harald muttering, “No, no, no, no…” like some kind of chant.

  “And we found this!” Grimarr said, and held up Iron-tooth, still in its scabbard.

  “No!” Ornolf roared. “Bastards!” No one was sure what he meant by that, to whom he referred, until he shouted, “Bastard Irish! Whelps of dogs and whores!”

  “Yes!” Grimarr shouted, matching Ornolf’s rage and volume. “Yes! The Irish dogs, they have done this! Killed Thorgrim, killed Hilder, and others, trying to take our silver from us! But we will not let that happen! We won’t! Let us take to our ships, let us sail down the coast of this country, forsaken by the gods, and let us get the hoard from Fearna. Let us kill as many Irish as ever we can lay sword on and avenge the deaths of these good men!”

  The response Grimarr received was probably not the one he had hoped for. The men of
Eagle’s Wing
cheered, as did those of
Water Stallion
, though not with any great gusto. The men from
Fox
cheered as well, but news of the loss of their captain dampened their enthusiasm. The Far Voyagers were stunned, as if they had each been hit on the head with an iron spit. Most were silent. Some made noises like they were in pain. None cheered.

  Harald stopped muttering “no” and turned slowly until he was facing Starri. His eyes were wide, and his usually pink cheeks were white. His mouth was hanging open.

  Ornolf stepped over to his grandson and put a massive arm around him. “Your father died fighting,” he said softly. “He died with a sword in his hand. The Valkyrie have taken him to Odin’s hall, where a man such as that should go.”

  Harald said nothing, just slowly shook his head. The men of
Far Voyager
began to move off, some toward the camp, some toward the ship. They would go to sea. They would avenge Thorgrim. But for the moment there was little enthusiasm for any of it.

  Now it was Starri who was shaking his head. “No, no, this is not right, not right,” he said when he finally found his voice. “Not right.”

  Ornolf and Harald looked at him, and then Ornolf said, “No, it’s not. It’s not right that a man like Thorgrim should die in some stupid raid. Die without us at his side.”

  “No, I mean it truly is not right,” Starri said. “Night Wolf is not dead. He cannot be dead.” Harald looked confused at that, Ornolf looked annoyed.

  “See here, Starri,” Ornolf said, “You saw the cloak, Iron-tooth. Don’t start getting the boy thinking…”

  “The cloak, the cloak…” Starri said. Something was not right about the cloak and it was poking at him like a sharp blade of grass. And then he realized. “The cloak! The cloak is rent and bloody, but where do you wear a cloak? Over your back. Could Thorgrim Night Wolf have had his back to an enemy? What, running away? Of course not! There is something else going on.”

  Ornolf dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “The rents, they mean nothing. He might have been fighting one, and another snuck up behind. That makes sense, makes the most sense. How else could Thorgrim Ulfsson be killed in a fight, except by a man sneaking up behind him?”