Erinsong (9 page)

“Keep bailing,” he yelled
back to Kolgrim. “You’ve
overloaded her.
Toss some of the cargo. We have to
lighten
the ship.”

The
Sea Wolf
held a dragon’s hoard of
silver and
fine pilfered goods. Kolgrim
wasn’t about to start dumping it. The longship shuddered, bowing
and flexing with each swell.

“Unless you want to swim
back to Dublin, it’s time
to cut our
losses!” Jorand shipped the steering oar
and struggled to his feet. He clambered over the rest
of the crew to the shallow cargo hold near the
base of
the mast. He drew out his knife
and sliced the ropes
that bound a stack of
ale kegs. They rolled one after
another
into the dark sea. The
Sea
Wolf lifted, riding
lighter, but Jorand didn’t stop. He bent down to grapple with
a heavy, locked chest.

“I’ll lighten the ship,”
Kolgrim growled. He grabbed an oar and swung toward his onetime
partner. The flat blade connected with Jorand’s skull at
the temple. Jorand reeled, lost his balance, and
tumbled into the sea after the ale kegs, never to be seen
again.

The worst of it was that
Jorand had been right. In the end, they’d dumped
all
the cargo and barely
managed to ride out the storm without further loss among the crew.
But since then, the men had been sullen and spiritless.

It was all Jorand’s fault, really.

“There’s a monastery on the
island down the coast. You all saw it as we sailed by last night.
Inishmurray,
they call it.” Kolgrim’s lip
curled in derision. “Chris
tians! Their
coffers are always filled with silver and
fineries and they trust naked hope to defend them. All we’re
likely to meet on that piece of rock are toothless old monks and
ball-less young ones. From
what I’ve
heard, Inishmurray is ripe for the plucking.”

“
Ja,
so you say.” The other sailor spat into
the
waves. “But a man can’t be at his
fighting best when his stomach’s knocking on his
backbone.”

“You’ve the right of it,
Einar,” Kolgrim agreed,
narrowing his eyes
at the lone figure ambling along
the rocky
beach. The wind was at their backs and the
Sea Wolf
closed the distance with
the same silence
and stealth as the
predator for which she was named.

The person on the beach
meandered along, pausing here and there to pick up oddly shaped
driftwood that made its way to the coast, obviously unaware of the
raiders’ approach. The captain of the
longship recognized the sway of a skirt.

A woman.

“By Loki’s hairy arse, it
looks like there’ll be plenty
of sport at
this stop.” Kolgrim’s voice sank to a rasp
ing grunt. The woman’s golden-red hair flashed in a shaft of
sunlight that split the heavens and bathed her in its
glow.

Kolgrim felt himself fully
engorge. He favored red
heads. “These
little Irish wenches always put up a grand tussle.”

Kolgrim guided the craft in
close, no farther than the length of two longships away from her.
The
woman didn’t hear them coming until
the
Sea Wolf’s
hull scraped into the gritty sand.

She turned at the sound.
The girl was younger
than he’d expected,
and pretty, her heart-shaped face white as moonstone. Kolgrim
could’ve sworn it went whiter still when she saw them. She was
afraid.

Good.

He leaped over the gunwale
into the shallow surf, leaving Einar
and
the others to tie up the craft. The woman hoisted her skirt,
showing a nicely turned pair of calves.

The promise of more to
follow,
he thought. She wheeled
and ran, screaming at the top of her
lungs.

“Keefe!” she yelled. Her
piercing wail echoed
off the rocky cliffs
that rose from the shore. “Keefe
Murphy!”

“So much for not raising an alarm,” Kolgrim
grumbled under this breath.

He didn’t mind when a woman
fought back. In
fact, he preferred it that
way. But he’d hoped to loot a
farmstead or
two without attracting any of the local rabble. If the girl kept
caterwauling she’d bring the whole countryside down on them. Once
roused, the Irish were fair fighters.

“The little skirt better be
worth the trouble,” Einar
called after
him.

Kolgrim caught up with her
in a few long strides
and threw her to the
ground. Not too hard, of course.
If he
knocked her out and she lay there unconscious,
it would take all the fun out of it. He didn’t fancy rutting
a corpse.

But this quarry was far from docile. Her arms
and legs windmilled at him. She hissed and spat like a cornered
lynx. When her nails raked his cheek, he roared with laughter.

“Einar, hurry up and come hold her for me,”
Kolgrim said. “The little hussy wants to play, but I don’t want her
messing up my pretty face.”

Einar sprinted to them. Then he dropped to
his knees in the sand and forced a length of cloth between the
girl’s teeth. He jerked it tight and knotted it behind her slender
neck.

“That should shut her up,” Einar said. Then
he caught her flailing hands and pinned them above her head.

Two other crewmen grabbed her legs, spreading
them wide, and straddled her ankles. The other sailors crowded
around, leering down at the girl wolfishly.

“Hurry up, Cap’n,” one of them said. “There’s
an even dozen of us waiting.”

Kolgrim rucked up the girl’s tunic, exposing
her delicate pale flesh and a neat triangle of coppery curls. He
smiled in satisfaction. She was definitely worth the trouble. The
terror in her wide green eyes was an added treat.

He fumbled with the drawstring at the waist
of his trews.

“A damned knot.”

He drew out his long knife and sliced the
string. But before he could lower his leggings, a sound split the
air around them.

It was an enraged bellow,
too full of wrath to be an
animal, too
feral to be fully human. The roar bounded off the cliff face and
repeated itself in a ghostly echo.

Kolgrim looked up to see a warrior rounding
the point, charging toward them. The man’s fair hair streamed
behind him, his face distorted with fury, and in his upraised fist,
he brandished the tool of a shipwright, a sharp-edged adze.

“It’s Jorand!” one of the sailors cried.

“Or his shade,” another
voice quavered. “He’s
come up from Hel to
drag us back down with him.”

“Captain never should have
tossed him over
board,” said the first.
“Bad luck, said I.”

“I’ll not fight a ghost!”
More than half of Kolgrim’s
crew turned
and fled back to the longship.

Jorand roared again as he
closed the distance.
Einar was slow to
scrabble to his feet and never quite
managed it. The phantom warrior buried his adze in
the base of Einar’s skull, nearly decapitating
him with one stroke.

Then Jorand’s shade
wrenched the weapon free
and sliced its
wicked edge across another crewman’s
gut.
The sailor screamed, clutching at his vitals as
they spilled from his body in stinking gore.

“Jorand,” Kolgrim said
woodenly, his feet frozen
to the
spot.

It couldn’t be. The
shipbuilder had drowned. By now, Jorand’s body must surely have
been picked clean by the denizens of the deep and his soul
con
signed to icy Niflheim, the bleakest
corner of Hel.

Yet Jorand’s ghost stood
before him, furious and
quivering in a
black
berserkr
rage. The phantom’s
heavily muscled
right arm swung the adze again. This time one of Kolgrim’s crew
took the killing stroke right across his throat. Blood spurted like
a fountain, painting a red streak across Jorand’s face and heaving
chest.

Kolgrim’s erection
shriveled and his bowels threat
ened to
loosen on the spot. There was no sense in
fighting a ghost. The dead had nothing to lose.

He held tightly to the waist of his trews and
fled, terror giving him wings.

Before he shoved his vessel
into the surf and bounded over the side, he turned to see
another
wounded raider sinking with
finality onto the beach.

The ghost of Jorand stood
over the splayed body of
the girl,
defending her against all comers. It roared at
Kolgrim, slashing the deadly adze over its head.

“Row!” Kolgrim bellowed to
what was left of his
crew. “Row, damn you,
or I’ll kill you myself!”

He bellowed once more at
the retreating raiders. The unholy sound poured from him as he
expelled all the
air in his lungs. It
released both a power and
a rage he’d
never suspected was there. If only he
could have laid his hands on that leader with the russet
beard. He’d have squeezed the life out of the man with such joy, he
trembled at the mere thought.

Blood pounded in his ears,
roaring louder than the
dash of surf
against the rocky beach. He felt as though
he might burst out of his own skin.

He took a shuddering
breath. The red haze cloud
ing his vision
began to recede and he suddenly recognized what had happened to
him. Battle lust. It
was the power
of
berserkr,
the
trancelike state that
came upon warriors.
It made them cut themselves
and feel no
pain. A man who worked himself into the
darkness of
berserkr
might gnash his own shield in
his frenzy to fight. A warrior in the throes of the
mad
ness could charge naked into a melee
and survive un
scathed. A
berserkr
ceased to be
human. He became a killing machine.

He looked around at the carnage on the beach.
Had he actually slain four men? All he could remember were
snatches of color and the screams of the dying. He stared at the
adze in his hand. Ribbons of red snaked down the length of the
handle and over his wrist. The smell of blood was eerily familiar
to him.

He’d puzzled so hard these
past weeks over
who
he was. Now, with a sickening lurch in his stomach, he
wondered
what
he
was.

A soft whimper pulled him out of himself.

“Moira.” He turned and knelt beside her.
“Have they done you hurt?”

She had pulled her tunic down over her bare
legs and wrenched the gag out of her mouth. But when he reached to
help her up, she sidled away from him, wild eyed. With shock, he
realized she was afraid of him.

Perhaps she was right to be.

Brenna’s sister made several attempts to
rise, but yelped in pain and sank back onto the sand. One of her
ankles was visibly swollen.

“Be easy, now,” he said, forcing himself to
breathe slowly. “I’ll not harm you.”

Moira looked at the bodies of the dead
raiders. All the color drained from her face. She rose to her knees
and was promptly sick. When she finished emptying her stomach on
the sand, she plopped down heavily and eyed him with suspicion.

“Keefe?” she said uncertainly.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said as he
suddenly remembered the raiders seemed to know him and had used a
name for him that rang true in his ears. “I’m called something
else. It seems my real name is Jorand.”

How did those men know him?
Were they his
comrades in his former life?
That might explain why
they hadn’t fought
back with any vigor. And if the gang of men who nearly ravished
Moira were his
companions, what did that
say about him?

He felt as heavy and worn
as a dull ax. He dropped
the adze and sank
to the sand.

“Jorand, is it?” Moira had
stopped trembling and
made an effort to
smile at him. The color was return
ing to
her face. “Then I’m after thanking ye, Jorand.
God alone knows what would have happened if ye
hadn’t come when ye did.” She turned her gaze
away
from the mangled bodies. “And did
what ye did.”

“We’d better get you back to the keep,”
Jorand said. “Can you stand?”

She tried to put weight on
her foot and cried out in
pain. “I don’t
think so. My ankle hurts like the very
Devil himself is jabbing hot needles into it.”

“Then I’ll carry you.”

“First, ye’d best be
cleaning up.” She waved a pale
hand toward
his face and chest. “Give yourself a good plunge in the sea.
Otherwise, me Da will think
I’m being
fetched home by a monster.”