God of Vengeance (14 page)

But silver was silver. And Sigurd was rich.

He had seasoned timbers and dry fuel brought in and piled around the dead and the whole lot smeared with cod liver oil from a stash which Randver’s men had not found in one of the nausts, the boathouses down by the mooring.

‘Any jarl would rather be food for the worms than see his folk spun this poor end,’ a greybeard called Gylfi mumbled into his beard as he cast his eye over the scene by the light of a lamp hung from a chain.

Their wounds covered by linens now, Sigurd imagined they could have been sleeping off some great feast as they had all done so many times before, sharing this hearth, their jarl’s meat and mead and each other’s stories. But come the morning, when the summer sun warmed the air and scattered jewels across the fjord, these luckless few would still be cold and stiff. Sigurd’s mother, whom he had laid separately in her own bed surrounded by the things she would need in the afterlife, would never see another day nor her son’s face.

‘We’ll give it another day or two to dry,’ he told Gylfi, for though Eik-hjálmr’s resin-coated planks would burn like Völund’s own forge once Sigurd’s fire took, for now they were yet laced with rain and the sea water which Olaf had had folk bring up in pails and fling against the hall in case Randver came in the night to burn it.

‘Aye, well this lot will still be here,’ Gylfi agreed, kicking out at a rat that had wasted no time and was gnawing at a woman’s stiff white finger. It scurried off into the floor reeds. ‘When it burns it’ll burn high enough to scorch the Allfather’s feet.’

None had objected to Sigurd’s plan of burning the hall with their dead inside it. ‘Let Jarl Randver see the smoke from Hinderå and know he will never sit in your father’s high seat,’ a fierce-looking woman called Thorlaug had said. Sigurd had last seen her husband Asbjorn running with Sorli to kill King Gorm. To give Sigurd a chance of living. Asbjorn’s claw hand had not stopped him surviving until the end and Sigurd would make sure the skalds knew it. For now, though, the news had made Thorlaug stand a little taller.

‘We should wait till Randver is in there before we burn it,’ a girl called Ingun said. She was pretty enough that Randver’s thegns might have killed each other to be either the first to rape her or the one to carry her back to Hinderå to marry, regardless of whether the man already had a wife back there. But Ingun was as fast on her feet as she was beautiful and none had caught her.

‘I’ll not have that man share their flames,’ Thorlaug said.

Sigurd knew the real reason they did not mind his burning Eik-hjálmr. It was not because they would never again find joy in that place, crammed to the roof beams with ghosts and gilded memories of happier times. It was because a roaring, leaping flame will carry the dead to the afterlife as fast as the smoke rises into the sky and almost as fast as a valkyrie riding to Asgard with a hero cradled in her arms.

And so when it was dry enough Eik-hjálmr would burn.

Sigurd was not their jarl. Yet it seemed that in their eyes he gripped the end of an invisible rope whose other end rested in Jarl Harald’s hand, for all that Harald even now feasted with the gods in Valhöll. They looked to Sigurd to lead them and he felt the heaviness of it like a torc around his neck.

‘You can’t stay here, lad,’ Solveig said as Sigurd held a tallow candle to the old man’s face. Sigurd had been on his way to the high ground overlooking the bay when he had thought to make sure the skipper hadn’t died in his bed. ‘Randver won’t bother about me or the rest of them but one sniff of you and he’ll set his hounds loose. The oath-breaker king too, for he surely knows you gave him the slip.’ He grinned then despite everything. ‘He’ll be scratching like a flea-bitten thrall to think of you out there somewhere when by rights you should be a corpse.’

That was a warm thought on the ice-sheathed serpent that sat coiled in Sigurd’s gut, though in truth he doubted the king would lose any sleep over a boy barely into his first beard.

‘Don’t doubt old One-Eye,’ Solveig said, warning Sigurd with a bloodstained finger. ‘There’s a reason you walked away from that steel-storm.’

‘Ran away,’ Sigurd muttered, but the skipper ignored this.

‘And it wasn’t so as you could do a shit-hole job of stitching me up, I know that much.’ The old skipper’s eyes searched Sigurd’s. ‘The gods love chaos. Don’t they just.’

Sigurd knew that was true. He had learnt that in the pine forest when the battle-sweat had flowed and he had laid men low with spear and sword. He had known then that he had a talent for chaos himself. Which was just as well.

‘When Olaf returns we will leave,’ he said. ‘You too, Solveig. Jarl Randver will come back to lay claim to Skudeneshavn in the name of King Gorm but we will not be here.’

‘Where will we go?’ the old skipper asked, pale as death, his chest wound only just drawn together like lips over a grimace, and yet he was as good as pledging himself to go wherever Sigurd’s wind would blow them.

Which made Sigurd wish he had a better answer.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

There was no wind to speak of and the flames soared, tall as oaks, fierce and flapping and spewing bronze sparks that seemed alive, as though they had been set loose to search the world taking with them the news of what had befallen the folk of Skudeneshavn. The smoke billowed into the sky like a black sail from some god’s longship and the old worm-riddled beams cracked and spat furiously. And Eik-hjálmr burnt.

Three days had passed since the raid, two of them dry, and Olaf, Svein and the others had returned to the bane of it all with no good news of their own to round the sharp edges.

‘Our reception at Jarl Leiknir’s hall was cold as a frost giant’s tit,’ Olaf said, ‘but Leiknir made it ice clear that he wants nothing to do with this, him being sat between us and Jarl Randver. That should have been no surprise, I suppose, but then he said that with Randver being so silver-rich these days, if the people of Tysvær were going to come in on any side it would be his.’ Olaf grimaced. ‘I thought about putting my spear in his belly there and then to save us the trouble later.’

‘And Twigbelly?’ Sigurd asked, meaning Jarl Arnstein Arngrimsson at Bokn.

Svein rumbled a curse and Olaf shook his head. ‘I’ve met rocks with more sense than that fool. He gave us meat full of gristle and ale that tasted like piss and told me that your father was a fool if he could not see that Biflindi and Randver were up to their necks in scheming.’

‘They will not help us then,’ Sigurd said.

Olaf scratched his bearded cheek. ‘Not even were your father still alive. Now?’ He shook his head again. ‘They are happy on their island and will only rouse themselves from their beds if King Gorm needs spears for some raid. Goat-fuckers to a man. As for the bóndi and lendermen we visited, they said that their oath to Jarl Harald is worth nothing now that Jarl Harald has broken his oath to the king by raiding villages under Gorm’s protection.’

Sigurd fumed at this, for they were the same lies King Gorm had levelled at his father in the pine wood.

Olaf raised a palm. ‘They know it’s got no truth in it but the fact that they all dribbled the same shit tells me that they’ve all been fed the same tripe.’

‘The king’s men have been busy then,’ Sigurd said.

Olaf nodded. ‘I should have saved my breath.’ He glanced at Svein who was talking with Hendil, Loker and Gerth, those three being the others whom Olaf had taken with him. ‘Five more spears would have been useful here. Things might have turned out differently.’

From what Solveig had said Sigurd doubted it and said so. He told Olaf and the others of the ambush in the pine wood and of his father’s last stand, and Hendil said it was as honourable a death as any warrior could hope for.

‘Given the damned treachery that wove it,’ Loker said through gritted teeth.

Sigurd related what he had learnt from Solveig about Jarl Randver’s raid and he even told Olaf what he had read in the warp and weft of his mother’s own last stand, and Olaf had listened to this with tears streaming into his beard and not an ounce of shame for it.

‘The gods are crueller than fang and claw and starvation put together,’ Olaf said. ‘Not that I need to tell you that, lad.’

He’d looked away then at a cormorant heading south towards Boknafjorden and Sigurd had been glad of it.

Now, everyone had gathered beneath the waxing moon to watch their jarl’s hall become a pyre and their faces were sweat-sheened and tear-soaked as they raised hands before them to shield against the ferocious heat.

‘Why did they burn Asgot’s house?’ Svein asked. He had bristled at Sigurd’s telling of it and cursed himself for not having been there to fight the raiders. Solveig had called him an overgrown fool, telling Svein that had Olaf not taken him to visit the outlying jarls he would have been as dead as the others, but the words were like spit on flames to Svein.

‘I’d wager he was working some spell on the whoresons and they didn’t much care for it,’ Olaf suggested. Sigurd could picture the godi foaming his beard with curses, damning Jarl Randver’s men to the depths of Helheim. He imagined Randver’s men’s bluster as they set light to the godi’s house, and the terrible shrieks of the birds and bats, polecats, rats and other small creatures Asgot had kept in boxes or tied to pegs stuck in the ground. For all their swagger in front of each other, the jarl’s thegns would have felt fear squirming in their guts because it was no small thing to make an enemy of a godi.

‘Randver didn’t know what to do with him,’ Solveig said. ‘It was like they had caught hold of a wolf by the tail.’

‘Aye, well I’d rather have hold of a wolf than Asgot,’ Olaf said.

Jarl Randver’s men had not killed the godi – that would be foolish by anyone’s standards – but Sigurd wondered what they would do with him now, for neither would anyone in their right mind buy a godi for a slave.

Blackened timbers held dragon’s eyes of glowing coals. Others collapsed sending waves of sparks rolling towards the onlookers to mottle tunics and breeks with little black scorch marks. The flames stretched up into the sky, the fire seeming to create its own wind that sounded like the whisper of a sad saga, and Sigurd watched the smoke ascend knowing that the gods would see it.

By now the heat inside Eik-hjálmr would have raised fat blisters on his mother’s white skin. Her golden hair streaked with silver would have flared bright as a hero’s helmet fresh from the forge and disappeared. Everyone gathered there knew that soon the smell of burning flesh would fill their nostrils but no one would raise an arm to their face or cringe at the stink. For they were all joined in this bitter thing from this day until the day of their own deaths, and they would imbibe every last drop of it out of respect for their dead.

And when it was done and only the main roof-supporting columns of oak stood flame-licked yet still strong, those who would go with Sigurd gathered what belongings they would need, said goodbye to kin if they had any, and prepared to leave.

Olaf told those staying in Skudeneshavn to give their new jarl no trouble and, more than this, to make Randver welcome as much as they could.

‘Do what you can to make life easier for yourselves,’ he said. ‘Jarl Harald and the others are gone and you will never see their faces again in this life.’ There were no tears in his eyes now. ‘Swear an oath to Randver if he asks it of you, for there is nothing else to be done. And tell him that the hall burnt because of the fire his men put in the thatch,’ he warned, ‘for he’ll be angry to see it gone.’ He left his elder son Harek to look after his wife and little Eric and kissed each in turn, vowing to come back when he could. He did not draw the thing out for that was not his way. But more than this, Sigurd knew Olaf was conscious that Sigurd had no one to say his goodbyes to, had no kin but for Runa who was a prisoner at Hinderå, and Olaf wanted to spare him the sting of seeing others sheathed in loving arms.

There were seven of them who left Skudeneshavn next morning, turning their backs on the smoke that still rose lazily from the pyre that had been Jarl Harald’s hall. Eik-hjálmr. Oak helmet. There had been humour in the naming of it but there was no mirth in its end and now its ashes were mixed with those of the dead. At the last there had been no protection to be found under Eik-hjálmr’s great roof. Perhaps the gods found humour in this.

Well then, do not take your eyes from me, Allfather, Sigurd thought as he climbed into the boat and turned his face to the sea, his eyes following a gull as it screeched down at them asking if they were going fishing. ‘Not fishing, bird,’ Sigurd muttered into his beard, placing Troll-Tickler on the bench beside him. ‘Hunting.’

THE BOAT WAS
called
Otter
. It was built of oak in the same way as Jarl Harald’s ships, but at just under thirty-two feet long and six feet wide it could have been
Reinen
or
Sea-Eagle
’s offspring. It comprised six lengths of planking, the first two strakes curving sharply upwards, almost to the top of the stem and stern. It had five pairs of oars, oarlocks, floorboards, thwarts and rudder, and it was a handsome, well-built, reliable boat. But it was too small.