Raven: Sons of Thunder (2 page)

Gjallarbrú, the bridge to the Underworld

Módgud, Giantess who guards the bridge over the river Gjöll

Gjallarhorn, ‘Yelling horn’ which Heimdall sounds to mark the beginning of Ragnarök

Urd, one of the Norns

Fimbulvetr, ‘Terrible winter’, heralding the beginning of Ragnarök

Bilskírnir, ‘Lightning Crack’, Thór’s own hall

Fáfnir, ‘Embracer’, a dragon that guards a great treasure hoard

Sleipnir, the eight-legged grey horse of Óðin

Tanngnjóst (Gnash-tooth) and Tanngrísnir (Snarl-tooth), the goats who pull Thór’s chariot

Gleipnir, the magic fetter forged of a mountain’s roots and bird’s spittle, which restrained the wolf Fenrir

Men with arms of iron
Drove the tired spruce oars
Through the snaking Frankish river.
Brothers now in slaughter,
Saxon, Dane and Sword-Norse,
Fled the Emperor’s anger.
Far from fjord and mountain,
Across the storm-tossed sea,
A hoard of fame was waiting.

Raven’s Saga

HAVE YOU EVER SAILED IN A LONGSHIP? NOT A STUBBY, ROBUST
knörr laden with trade goods and wallowing like a packhorse across the sea, but a sleek, deathly quick, terror-stirring thing – a dragon ship. Have you ever stood at the bow with the salt wind whipping your hair as Rán’s white-haired daughters cream beneath the beast’s strong, curving chest? Have you travelled the whale road with wind-burnt warriors whose rare skill with axe and sword is a gift from mighty Óðin, Lord of War? Men whose death work feeds the wolf and the eagle and the raven? I have done all this. It has been my life and though it would make those skirt-wearing White Christ followers sick with disgust (and fear, I shouldn’t wonder) I have been happy with my lot. For some men are born closer to the gods than others. By the well of Urd, beneath one of the roots of the great life tree Yggdrasil, the Norns, those sisters of fate, of present and future, take the threads of men’s lives and weave them into patterns full of pain and suffering, glory and riches, and death. And their ancient fingers must have tired at the spinning of my life. Ah, but wait. The ale has greased my tongue and it slides ahead of itself. Come in, Arnor! Come flatten some straw,
Gunnkel, we have all night ahead of us and very far to go. That is if my old head has not leaked memories like a rotten pail. Last night you heard just the beginning, slurped merely the froth from the mead horn. Now, together, we shall drink more. That’s it, Hallfred, stir some life back into the embers. Make the flames dance. Make them leap like the fires of Völund’s own forge. Yes, yes, there you go. Ingvar, give that threadbare hound of yours something to eat, for the love of Thór! He’s been chewing some poor clod’s shoe for the last hour! Is young Runa not here? That is a shame. There’s nothing like a plump pair of tits to make an old man add a little more gilt to his tale. I’m no skald, I admit. My only song has been the sword song, the whisper of the great bearded axe as I made it dance before my enemy’s shieldwall. But skalds venture so far up their own arseholes that a man cannot smell the flowers amongst the farts. In their tales they paint Sigurd as one of the Aesir, the gods of Asgard, his sword the slayer of mountain giants. Their Raven is a red-eyed monster, an ugly death-sowing beast. Pah! What do they know? Did they ride the whale road with Sigurd the Lucky? Whoresons. Sigurd was a man. His sword was like any other sword, a thing forged of iron and steel by another man who knew his business. As for myself, am I a monster? I was handsome . . . after a fashion. I was young, anyway, and that is good enough. I had grown from carpenter’s apprentice, from a boy skulking on the toe end of his village, to a wolf amongst a pack of wolves. I was part of a fellowship of warriors. I had become a rider of the waves and a killer of men.

So, haul up the anchor. Raise the old battered sail. Tomorrow’s labour is far away and the night stretches before us like the starlit ocean on a spring night. So . . . we are away . . .

YOU DO NOT BETRAY A FELLOWSHIP AND LIVE TO SEE YOUR HAIR
turn white. For a fellowship is an honour- and oath-forged thing, as strong as a bear, as fast as a dragon ship, and as vengeful as the sea. If you betray a fellowship you are a dead man, and Ealdorman Ealdred of Wessex had betrayed us.

With the sail up and the spruce oars stowed, the men looked to their gear. They took whetstones to sword edges, patiently working out the notches carved in battle, and the rhythmic scraping was to me a soothing sound above their murmured conversations and the wet whisper of
Serpent
’s bow through the sea. Men laid mail brynjas across their knees, checking for damaged rings which they replaced with ones taken from brynjas stripped from the dead. Two of the Norsemen were throwing a heavy-looking sack back and forth, grunting with the effort. The sack was filled with coarse sand and if you put your mail in it and threw it around the sand would clean the rust from the mail and make it as new again. Other men were smearing their brynjas with sheep grease, winding new leather and fine copper wire around sword grips, mending shield straps and stretching new hides across the limewood planks. Dents
were hammered out of helmets, spear blades were honed to wicked points slender enough to skewer a snail from its shell, and axe heads were checked to make sure they would not fly off at the first swing. Silver was weighed, furs were examined and men argued or grumbled or boasted about the booty they had piled in their journey chests. We combed fleas from our beards and hair, relived fights, exaggerating our deeds and prowess, played tafl, checked
Serpent
’s caulking, laid leather strips in boots to fix holes. We nursed wounds, exchanged stories about friends now sitting at Óðin’s mead bench in Valhöll, watched gulls soaring high above, and revelled in the creak of the ship and the low thrum of the rigging. And all the while we believed Njörd, god of the sea, who is kind to those who honour him, filled our sail and that we would soon spy our quarry,
Fjord-Elk
, as a speck on the sunlit horizon.

For we were blessed with a lusty following wind and were making good progress so that the land of the West Saxons was soon little more than a green ribbon on the horizon to the north. If Njörd’s favour held, Sigurd would sail
Serpent
through the night to try to shorten the distance between us and
Fjord-Elk
, and when we came across her and the treacherous men who sailed her, our swords and our axes would run red.

Asgot the godi produced a hare from an oiled sack. It was a mangy thing that must have been kicking and scratching furiously ever since we set off, for its fur was sweat-soaked, its mouth was bloodied and its eyes were wild with fear. The godi took its head in one old fist, drew his wicked knife and jabbed it into the animal’s chest. Its long feet ran hopelessly in the air. Then Asgot dragged the blade along the hare’s belly. Some of its guts fell across
Serpent
’s sheer strake and still it kicked as though it hoped to dash across a summer meadow. Then he wiped the bloody knife on the hare’s fur, sheathed it, and ripped out the rest of the guts, the throbbing heart and the dark twine of the creature’s intestines, and threw them into the
sea, followed by the carcass itself. We watched for a while as the waves bore the tiny offering away, and then
Serpent
carried us on and the hare was lost amongst Rán’s daughters. All the while Asgot spoke to the gods, asking them to bless us with fair seas and good weather. Father Egfrith made the sign of the cross to ward off Asgot’s old magic and I believed he was muttering counter-spells, though I stayed away, not wanting those Christ words to maggot into my ears.

It would be a blood-drenched fight, this one. A real gut-ripper. For Ealdorman Ealdred of Wessex and his champion Mauger were feckless, snot-swilling whoresons who had betrayed us all. Ealdred had the holy gospel book of Saint Jerome, which we had stolen from the king of Mercia, and the toad’s arsehole raced now to sell that Christian treasure to the emperor of the Franks, Charlemagne, or King Karolus as some called him then. The worm would become as rich as a king, having betrayed us and left us for dead. But Ealdred’s god and that god’s peace-loving son were not strong enough to make all this happen. They could not save him from us who held to the true gods, the old gods who still shake the sky with thunder and curse the ocean with waves as high as cliffs. And I believed that we would catch the half-cocked maggot the next day or the day after that, because the English did not know
Fjord-Elk
, did not know her ways. For ships are like women – you cannot touch one in the same places as another and hope to get the same ride. But Sigurd knew every inch of
Serpent
, and his steersman Knut knew every grain of salt in every rolling wave. We would catch the English and then we would kill them.

‘These Christians know how to puke, Raven!’ Bjorn called, the sunlight gleaming across his teeth. ‘The fish will eat well today, I think.’

‘And we shall eat the fish and therefore be eating Christian puke,’ I said in Norse so that Cynethryth would not understand.

She and Penda leant side by side over the sheer strake, emptying their guts into a sea so calm that Bjorn’s brother Bjarni was bailing
Serpent
’s bilge with all the urgency of a cow on its way to the slaughter. I had seen
Serpent
flex and writhe like a supple sea creature, so that water continuously seeped in through the seams of her clinkered hull. But not that day. On that day the sea was calm as a breeze-stirred lake, yet it was enough to curdle the Saxons’ stomachs. The Norsemen were grinning and laughing at the two new crewmen, and whilst I pitied Cynethryth I was happy it was not me they were laughing at this time, because I had done my share of puking in the early days.

As for Penda, the Wessexman was as vicious a man as I have ever known, and I had seen him slaughter the Welsh outside Caer Dyffryn so that the green pasture turned blood-slick. But Penda did not look vicious now, with his spew splashing on to the glass-like surface of the sea.

‘It’s not fucking natural to float across the sea on a piece of kindling,’ Penda said, turning from the ship’s side and dragging the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘It’s not civilized,’ he growled, and I smiled because Penda was as civilized as a pail full of thunder.

Sigurd grinned knowingly at me because he knew I had stood in Penda’s shoes not so long ago, but though this was true I would never have referred to
Serpent
as ‘kindling’. I had always appreciated her workmanship, because I had been apprenticed to old Ealhstan the carpenter and so I knew woodcraft when I saw it.
Serpent
was a beauty. Seventy-six feet in length, seventeen feet in the beam and made from more than two hundred oak trees, she could originally accommodate sixteen oarsmen on either side, but Sigurd had built raised fighting platforms at bow and stern, meaning now there was only space for thirteen rowers on each side. With our crew of thirty-two men and one woman it was to
my mind a little cramped, but not uncomfortable. Olaf told me that on one of Sigurd’s expeditions, when
Serpent
was newly built and before he had
Fjord-Elk
, she had carried a double crew of seventy warriors, one crew resting whilst the other rowed. This must surely have been a useful thing when it came to a fight, but I could not imagine sharing sleeping space with so many fart-stinking men. The ship had a small open hold for trade goods and supplies and a sturdy mast step and keel. She was fourteen strakes high, had a great square sail of wool which had been dyed red, and at her bow stood the head of Jörmungand, the Midgard-Serpent that encircles the earth. That beast’s faded red eyes stared out across the grey sea, into our futures. Every Norseman aboard, every warrior sitting on the sea chest containing his possessions, respected
Serpent
as they respected their mothers, loved her as they loved their wives, and relished her as they relished their whores.