The Valhalla Saga 01 - Swords of Good Men (19 page)

Three people sat by the end of the long table.

A mountainous, muscle-bound, red-haired warrior, hair and beard braided in fine lines, hammer at his side. A woman unlike any he’d ever seen, her every curve a whispered challenge to his manhood, daring him to resist her. Blonde hair cascaded down to her ample chest, curls falling over curls, adding curves and more curves. Her simple white shift nearly hid and nearly showed, and Harald found it hard to keep his imagination in check.

It was only the third one that gave him pause. His eyes watered as he tried to get a good look at him. The slim, dark-haired man seemed to slip into and out of shadow, never quite … there. The wiry form reminded Harald of a killing knife. Fresh, sharp and just waiting to do some damage.

They all looked straight at him. Into him. Through him.

He wanted to speak, but no words came out. Instead the colours in the hall started to fade. He heard the faint echo of a chant, but caught only three words.

‘For the glory.’

He couldn’t be sure, but as the image in his head disappeared, Harald thought the woman might have winked.

A powerful sense of loss tore through him and he opened his eyes again. A single room, pot in the far corner, double bed. Spikes in the wooden wall, clothes hanging on them. A chest for valuables, baubles he’d brought back to her in moments of softness. Sword, axe, shield, spear. Tools. His home.

None of this registered.

In his head the people from the dream still looked into his soul.

Thor. Freya. Loki.

*

Ulfar sat in the corner of the patients’ hut, too tired to move. ‘Well, you’re not moving much either so you can’t argue,’ he said wearily to Geiri’s still, silent form. He could hear the sound of Stenvik through the walls, but there was a different quality to it, a current of tension and fear.

The incident by the well had taken more out of him than he’d care to admit. His head still pounded and the image of the old, grey raider with the skinning knife still lingered.

Ulfar shuddered as he remembered the night before and the hatred in Valgard’s eyes. There was something about the healer. Something that wasn’t right. Before he could think more about it he felt his skin tingle and his heartbeat quicken. Then the door flap moved. Daylight spilled in and hit his eyes, blinding him. Someone moved into the doorway and blocked out the light from the entrance.

‘… Ulfar?’ The voice was soft, searching.

In his mind the walls of the hut fell away. Nothing mattered but him and her, Lilia, stepping from the outside into his little world. She was just a silhouette in the blinding daylight. On reflex, he brought his hand up to shield his eyes.

‘Oh – forgive me.’ She stepped nimbly inside and drew the door flap shut.

A sudden, embarrassed silence filled the room.

Heart thumping, Ulfar looked at her. He almost laughed when he realized that moments ago, he’d been reflecting on moments of life or death – and now he was wondering whether his hair looked all right.

But then this was also a matter of life and death. He wanted to spend his life with her, and he’d die if he couldn’t. He would never touch another woman. The certainty of the realization struck him hard, and he looked at her almost in a daze.

Soft red curls framed her delicate features. She looked away and chewed her lip nervously. ‘Is … is this your friend?’ She moved to the middle of the hut and knelt over Geiri.

‘Yes,’ Ulfar half-whispered, breath caught in his throat as he followed her. ‘Yes,’ he repeated, regaining control of his voice and cursing himself. ‘He had a nasty fall. Hit his head. He should be all right, we hope. Valgard says he should be fine.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘There was a fight in the old longhouse. This man called Harald and two others beat that man over there’ – Ulfar pointed to the big pig farmer, snoring softly in the corner – ‘pretty bad. His cousins then went after the two others in the old longhouse and Geiri got caught in the middle.’

Lilia went very still.

‘So this all traces back to Harald, does it?’ Her voice was leaden.

‘I don’t know. Yes, maybe so. When Geiri comes to, we might ask for damages, but I don’t know. He got caught in the middle of something that this man Harald started.’ Ulfar looked at her, trying to figure out what she was thinking. ‘Why? Do you know … ?’ Ulfar’s voice trailed off.

Their eyes met and her smile broke his heart.

For the first time he could see the pain, the suffering. The lines and contours in her face, scars that belonged to someone a lot older.

He saw the stone woman.

She raised her hand slowly, gently. Without breaking eye contact she placed it on a bruise on his cheekbone.

Her touch felt searing hot on his skin. He winced and smiled, never looking away from her eyes. Words came to him and stopped short of emerging for fear of breaking the spell.

He watched a single teardrop run down her cheek, moving in synchrony with her hand on his face, meeting and merging with her smile, the smile that came from the whole of her.

Ulfar remembered to breathe, and a half-giggle escaped his lips. Her eyes twinkled like stars, like diamonds through the tears, and soon they were giggling incredulously at each other, blinking, crying, smiling, still touching.

A woman’s whispered voice at the doorway. Urgency and fear.

‘Lilia! We have to go!’

She recoiled from him, suddenly like a trapped animal, frantically searching the corners of the hut, peering into the shadows.

He reached for her arm and found her eyes. ‘Sshh …’ he whispered. The urge to soothe her, to protect her, was so powerful that he had to hold his breath to keep from fainting.

But he got through.

She blinked rapidly and seemed to come back into the room. As she saw him, saw his hand on her arm and the look in his eyes, her features softened and another tear escaped. She made to speak, then stopped herself and hurried to the door. In the doorway she cast a lingering glance at him, looking up at her.

Then she was gone.

Ulfar stood up and made to run after her, but something held him back. Something … He would have to think about this, regain his senses. ‘Did you see that?’ he asked Geiri out of habit. ‘Did you see that?’ He paced inside the hut, shook his head and tried in vain to make sense of what had just happened. His thoughts went unbidden to her hand, touching him. The feel of her skin on his skin.

And then he realized what he remembered, what he’d noticed.

The bandages on her stiff, broken fingers.

*

‘We’re being attacked! They’re coming from the forest!’

Shouts from the eastern wall echoed across Stenvik. Within moments Sigurd was at the foot of the inside of the wall, taking the steps to the top two at a time.

The caravan’s rout was complete. A huge group of savage-looking forest men chased farmers running for their lives to the eastern gateway. Arrows flew from the cover of the trees.

‘Open the gate!’ Sigurd shouted. The guards hesitated, transfixed by the sudden attack. ‘OPEN IT!’ he screamed, watching the guards snap to and begin hauling on cables to raise the big, wooden gate. He bounded down the steps towards ground level.

‘TO ARMS! MEN OF STENVIK, TO ME! WE CHARGE!’

In the chaos nobody noticed a solitary figure crawl from underneath an abandoned cart and slink into the cover of the trees, behind the onrushing force.

*

Peering out from a crack between the door and the jamb, Valgard’s lip curled up in an unconscious snarl as he watched Lilia hurry away with her little blonde friend.

He thought of Ulfar, of how that … that
boy
was going to start looking at him with a mixture of revulsion and pity after the near-seizure in the longhouse, like he was some kind of cripple. He knew that look well. It was the look reserved for the sick and the old, and he had faced it all his life. When he was young he’d seen strong men with grim faces lead the feeble ones up the path to Hnipisbjarg on Muninsfjell and come back alone. None of the others came back down. At least not by way of the path. Mouths to feed and all that.

So he had studied to become a master of herbs. Healing the sick. Curing illness. Saving lives. His own, mostly. He was not going to let them throw him off the cliff just for being frail.

Valgard snorted at the memories.

Some healer. Couldn’t even cure himself.

The fits came in his thirteenth summer. The first one was luckily in Sven’s hut. The second had been in the middle of the square, and it had taken all of Sven’s skills to keep Valgard alive. Some of the townsfolk – his people, he thought bitterly – had advocated sacrificing him to the gods and argued that he was clearly full of the spirits of Hel, the way he thrashed about on the ground and foamed at the mouth. One of them had drawn a dagger and tried to tear him away from Sven.

Sven had killed the man on the spot and challenged anyone in the square to single combat there and then. You’ll take the boy over my dead body, he’d said. Nobody had been tempted to try.

The matter was resolved quickly, but Valgard might as well have died for all the good it did. After that day in the square, no one would as much as nod to him in passing. People would stop talking when he walked by. He became invisible, a non-entity.

It had taken years to change that. Years of herb lore, apprenticing with Sven, washing filthy bandages, holding hands and talking calmly to sick, frightened people. In the end, they accepted him – but they never embraced him. He knew they thought him weak. Unreliable. And now that foreign boy would start pitying him as well.

‘We should really take care of each other,’ he mimicked with a sneer. In his mind, the pieces on the board lurched to life. Harald on the dais. Sigurd. Sven. The raiders of the
Westerdrake
. Valgard moved them around then reset the position. The game
was supposed to end with Harald challenging Sigurd for the chieftain’s chair, winning and installing him, Valgard, as his most trusted adviser. He moved the pieces again in his mind, but reset them with an annoyed frown. The plan was in place. Now he just needed the right move.

Maybe it was time to play harder.

Still frowning, Valgard went back into his hut. He would need to examine the contents of the box for this.

GRANDAL, HARDANGER HEATH

King Olav’s reputation seemed to have preceded him. To the best of Finn’s knowledge, there had never been more than a hundred people living in Grandal. Now they were all gone and it seemed they had left in a hurry.

Much like the others, the village consisted of a scattering of huts. There was a stream within walking distance and he’d seen enough game in the woods on the way here. Grandal also had a decent longhouse which had probably served as the chieftain’s home.

Not any more, Finn thought with a grin.

When it grew clear that there would be no fighting here the army had set up camp. Fires were being lit in a wide circle around the town, and men from all over the east sat down to enjoy a little rest after days of marching.

A small group of fighters had gathered by the longhouse. Walking planks had been laid out in front of the house, creating a square dominated by a large sacrificial stone set some eight feet from the entrance. The stone was half a man’s height, flat on top and spattered with coppery brown stains.

Standing by the stone were three wooden statues. Artful
carvings depicted Odin the All-knowing, Thor the God of Thunder and Freya the Goddess of Love. The men were gathered, however, around a clumsy effigy that lay on the altar. It was nothing more than a stick figure, but it clearly depicted a man wearing a white shift. He was adorned with pigtails, chicken feathers and a necklace of ram’s testicles.

The soldiers were amused.

‘Look at that!’

‘He’s wearing a dress!’

‘And feathers!’

One of them played a chicken running around in a panic, to the whooping encouragement of the others.

Finn was furious. How dare they? He rounded on the men and roared: ‘You! Back to your post! Or so help me by our lord God you will regret it!’

The men shuffled off, eyeing him with disdain. Finn scowled back, willing them to challenge his authority. None did.

When they were gone, he set about looking for somewhere to throw the effigy away. He gathered the sticks in his arms and turned around.

King Olav stood ten feet away and watched him calmly.

Finn faltered. ‘My King, I …’ He followed Olav’s gaze to the effigy he was holding, and dropped the sticks as if they were on fire. ‘I … they …’ Finn’s voice trailed off.

He thought King Olav would erupt. Shout. Curse. Maybe cut him open to set an example.

But nothing happened.

Instead, the king looked thoughtful. His eyes scanned the long-house, the nearby huts, tools leaning up against walls. After a while, he spoke.

‘Assemble the men here.’ He gestured in a wide semicircle in front of the longhouse. Finn furrowed his brow in question.

‘All of them. Now.’

Finn snapped to attention, turned and headed for the camp-fires. He moved quickly, singling out chieftains and men of note among the soldiers, relaying King Olav’s orders. Suddenly a soldier next to him pointed towards the middle of the town.

‘It’s the King!’

‘He’s on the roof!’ another echoed.

Finn could not help but stop what he was doing and gaze in wonder. More and more soldiers were looking and pointing at King Olav.

He had left behind his chain-mail jerkin and cloak, and was wearing only trousers, boots and a simple white shirt. Something that looked like a coil of rope was wrapped around his shoulder as well. His progress was swift and effective, and soon he was balanced on the top of the roof.

He took a moment and seemed to survey his troops, who had swelled from two to five thousand men in a matter of weeks. Then he invited them to do the same with a slow, sweeping hand gesture encompassing all the men that were gathering before him.

The army fell silent.

‘Northmen!’ King Olav’s voice boomed. ‘Look around you. Look at this.’ He pointed to the hut, and the men exchanged questioning looks. ‘You may see a village like any other. But I see hovels! I see people living in mud, feeding on mud, scrabbling in mud! Killing their own kin! Living lives of pain, squalor and death! And where has it brought us, Northmen? Have we won great glories in battle? Have we struck fear into the hearts of our enemies? No, we have not!’ Some men whispered to their fellow soldiers, but none took their eyes off Olav. His voice rang out again. ‘I say the old gods have grown weak! They are no longer
ready for battle!’ The silence was tense. King Olav continued, calm and certain. ‘We need a new god.’