Geirmund's Saga

by Matthew J. Kirby

  “I’ll need you to take hold of it,” Thorgrim went on. “After that, leave it to me.”

  Geirmund nodded, then peeled the linen binding away from Thorgrim’s side to look at the wound. It appeared that in Steinólfur’s hunt for the arrowhead, the older warrior had made cuts to open the flesh wider. As gently as Geirmund could, he spread the skin, causing fresh bleeding, which Birna wiped away without the need to ask her.

  Thorgrim winced and grunted. “Do you see it?” he asked.

  Geirmund peered into the wound, and he glimpsed the ragged end of an arrow’s shaft just barely poking out between the white of two ribs. “I see it.”

  “Get a good grip on it with the tongs.”

  Sweat had gathered on Geirmund’s brow, and he held his breath as he pushed the tool into the warrior’s side. Thorgrim let out a gasp, then snarled with a grimace as Geirmund worked to get the teeth of the tongs around the thin piece of wood. When he had a tight hold of it, he leaned back a bit to allow Thorgrim to take the tool.

  “When you are ready,” he said.

  Thorgrim reached up and gripped the tongs. “I have been honoured to fight for you, Geirmund Hjörrsson.”

  “The honour has been mine,” Geirmund said.

  Thorgrim opened his other hand, and Birna placed his bearded axe in it. “I have been honoured to fight at your side, Birna Gormsdóttir.” A few tears leaked from his eyes and trickled down his temples. “I will hold a place for you on the bench beside me.”

  “I will join you,” she said, “when fate wills it.”

  Thorgrim looked up at the ceiling, took a deep breath, and then let out a roar as he wrenched the arrowhead from his chest. The barbs pulled out tatters of soft liver with their hooks, and then blood welled in the wound as if from a spring. Birna leaned forward and pressed a rag against the opening to stop the flow, which Thorgrim seemed not to notice. Instead, he held the arrowhead up before his eyes.

  “I wish I could return this gift to the Saxon who gave it to me,” he said.

  Birna whimpered, her hands soaked in blood, unable to dam the river.

  Thorgrim’s arm slowly went limp and dropped to his side, and the tongs clattered free of his grasp, but he held on to his axe as sight left his eyes and breath left his chest. It was some time after he had died before Birna leaned away, staring at the body, and it was longer still before she spoke.

  “You will not ask Guthrum for his silver,” she said.

  “I told him I would.”

  She looked down at her hands, and then she turned to dip them in the basin. She rubbed her palms and fingers together in the water, twisting and wringing them as if to clean them of more than blood. “He had a plan,” she said.

  “What plan?”

  “He wanted to use our silver, his and mine, to buy a big farmstead and build a hall, where we would live together as husband and wife.” She pulled her hands dripping from the basin. “He spoke of it often.”

  “Did you want that life?”

  Birna sighed and pressed the back of a wet hand against her forehead. “I had not decided. Perhaps I did.” Then she looked down at Thorgrim. “I let him think I wanted it.”

  “A skald at my father’s hall once told me that war and farming are much the same. But I must tell you, I cannot see you happy milking goats and cows, or gathering eggs.”

  She laughed, but it was half-sob. “I said almost those same words to him.”

  “We talked of farming back in Lunden, you and I, with Aslef. Do you remember?”

  “I do. I left you pups to go and find Thorgrim.” She smiled to herself. “That was when I first took up with him.”

  Geirmund had not known that, and he felt again his shortcoming. “Now I understand why he wanted you to have his silver.”

  “And that is why I will not take it, so do not ask Guthrum for it. Even if I had wanted that life, it is gone now, and I will have it with no one else but him.”

  Geirmund bowed his head. “So be it.”

  “I will ask you for another thing instead.”

  “Name it.”

  “Give me Saxons to kill. Many, many Saxons.”

  He nodded again. “That I can do. Perhaps we–”

  “Geirmund!” Steinólfur came into the room, but he halted just inside the doorway, and his gaze landed on Birna, the body of Thorgrim, the pooling blood, and the tongs. He let out a short, sharp sigh. “I am glad his pain is ended,” he said. “And better now than later.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Rafn and Vetr have returned.”

  Geirmund glanced at Birna, worried to leave her, but she gave him a nod, and he touched her shoulder before rising to his feet. Then he crossed the room and returned to the main hall with Steinólfur, where his two scouts waited.

  “What did you find?” he asked.

  “An army of Danes,” Vetr said.

  “What?” Geirmund thought he may have misheard. “Who leads them?”

  “Ubba,” Steinólfur said. “It can be no one else. He must have come back from Irland.”

  “We think it is Ubba, yes.” Rafn sounded short of breath, and his face looked pale. “Ælfred’s army had already attacked when we reached them, so we kept our distance.”

  “How far?” Steinólfur asked.

  “Six rests from here,” Rafn said.

  “How many Danes?” Geirmund asked.

  Vetr hesitated before answering. “Perhaps six hundred. No more than eight.”

  Silence followed, and then Steinólfur turned to Geirmund. “What will you do?”

  Geirmund took a few moments to think. “It will be a dark night for a march that far through unknown country, but ready every able Hel-hide to ride before dawn. The wounded can follow behind. If the outcome of the battle is still undecided when we reach the field, we will fight with Ubba against Ælfred.”

  “Is that wise?” the older warrior asked. “Ælfred has almost four Saxons for every Dane. Our small tally will do nothing to sway that fight.” He leaned in closer. “And do not forget, there is still the matter of your blood feud with Ubba.”

  “I have not forgotten it,” Geirmund said. “But only the coward believes he will live forever if he avoids the battle. They are Danes fighting Wessex, and it may even be that we brought Ælfred to them. Their battle is our battle.”

  Steinólfur frowned, but he accepted Geirmund’s decision with a bowed head. Then he went to spread word of the plan, and Geirmund turned to Rafn. “You do not look well, my friend.”

  “It is nothing,” he said. “A chill from the rain last night.”

  “His arm festers,” Vetr said.

  Geirmund looked at the linen wrappings. “Show me.”

  “Perhaps later,” Rafn said. “You have heavier matters to deal with before you worry about a scratch on my arm.”

  “Then see to it.” Geirmund glanced at Vetr. “Before it becomes a heavy matter.”

  The white-haired Dane nodded and glowered at Rafn as if they had already fought that same argument many times.

  Geirmund left them and went to tell Birna that she would soon have an army of Saxons to kill. He then helped her wrap Thorgrim’s body and bear it out into the main hall, where they laid it beside the corpses of the other dead warriors. For much of that night the Hel-hides honoured the fallen with stories and songs, after which they slaughtered the horses of the dead as offerings, and before they left the next morning, they set the Wanating fastness ablaze for a pyre.

  Instead of moving south to use the same ridgeway that Ælfred’s army had travelled, Geirmund marched his warriors west along a low-lying road that followed the course of the hills, and which offered them forests and groves for cover. Rafn and Vetr led the way, and the Hel-hides rode hard, reaching the field of battle before midday.

  Geirmund smelled the death before
he saw it, and he heard nothing but the flapping and cawing of gleeful ravens as his war-band came into a broad and shallow dell soaked in blood and strewn with the bodies of hundreds and hundreds of Danes. Heaps of smoking cinder and ash marked where the tents of an encampment had stood, not far from the banks of a narrow river, and it seemed the Saxons had already marched on, leaving the silent dead to rot in the sun where they had fallen.

  “The doors into Valhalla will be crowded this day,” Steinólfur said.

  Geirmund stared at the slashed, pierced, and sundered corpses, and the dread he had felt at Ælfred’s retreat came back with its cold touch across his neck and deep in his gut. He had known there would be a price for their luck, and the dead before him had paid it. “Ubba has fallen,” he said.

  “How can you know?” Skjalgi asked.

  Birna answered him. “No son of Ragnar would flee from a battle. He would fight to the last and die with his warriors.”

  Ubba’s death meant Geirmund’s blood feud with the Dane had come to an end, but its manner of end brought him no gladness or comfort. “Guthrum will take this loss hard.”

  “Will he?” Steinólfur asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was this his plan? Do you think he knew that Ubba would be here?”

  The other Hel-hides glanced at him with angry scowls, and the older warrior drew himself up in defence.

  “I cannot be the only one to think it,” he said. “Guthrum sent us here to bring Ælfred looking for a Dane army.” He nodded towards the battlefield. “Ælfred found a Dane army, and now Guthrum is one of the last Dane-kings left in England.”

  Geirmund hoped that Steinólfur was wrong, but as he thought about Guthrum, he remembered the doubt and mistrust he had felt at Grantabridge. The nearest Hel-hides shifted in their saddles, glancing at one another in discomfort, but said nothing.

  Then Birna spoke. “Guthrum is cunning, but he would never betray a son of Ragnar. He needed Ubba to take Wessex.”

  “Where is Ælfred now?” Vetr asked. “The Saxons must have marched from this place before the blood had dried.”

  Geirmund spurred Enbarr out into the field. The horse snorted at the sights and smells of death, and within a few paces they had passed many dozens of corpses stretching away to the north and south. Geirmund gazed over them, unsure what he was looking for, aside from the meaning or reason for such loss that he knew would never be found. If the Three Spinners had reasons that guided their fingers and shears, they did not share them.

  The Hel-hides followed Geirmund into the bloodbath, and as Enbarr plodded down the field, Skjalgi spoke up behind him.

  “What is that?” he asked. “Is that a horse?”

  Geirmund glanced back, then looked in the direction the boy pointed, where high on the slope of a hill above the dell, someone had carved a giant horse into the earth. It gleamed white against the green turf of the dun, at least fifty fathoms long from nose to tail, frozen in the act of galloping over the land. The size and beauty of it made Geirmund think of Óðinn’s horse, Sleipnir, and its great presence overlooking the field almost made him forget the corpses through which he trod.

  The white horse so distracted the Hel-hides that they almost failed to notice a gang of Saxon thieves and scavengers picking over the dead, but Birna ran them down and brought four of them to heel with help from Rafn and Vetr. Before Geirmund let her have the pleasure of killing them, he learned what they knew about the battle that had taken place there, and it seemed they knew quite a lot.

  The thieves knew the burnt encampment had been under the command of Ubba, for the Saxons had taken his raven banner. They also knew that Ubba had fallen, because the Saxons had afterwards spoken of how hard it had been to kill the Dane-king, and how many warriors Ubba had slain with his bare hands before he had finally died. The scavengers did not know where Ælfred marched, but they said his army had gone down the ridgeway in great haste to fight more Danes. When Skjalgi asked them who had carved the white horse into the hillside, they said it was the work of giants who dwelt in those lands long before the Romans came to England, and they said that up on the ridgeway lay a smithy that belonged to a giant named Wayland. Then Birna slit their throats and split their heads open with Thorgrim’s bearded axe, which she carried now to honour him.

  “Ælfred marches on Wareham,” Vetr said.

  “Whether he does or not,” Geirmund said, “we have fulfilled our task, and must now ride for the River Exe and the fleet. We will use the Saxon ridgeway.”

  “And halt at Wayland’s smithy?” Steinólfur asked, keeping his voice low enough the others would not overhear him.

  That name had struck Geirmund as well, thinking perhaps it was what the Saxons called Völund, and he glanced around before answering, “We will see what is there.”

  They waited for the wounded Hel-hides to catch them up, and then Geirmund led his war-band out of that dell of the dead and the white horse, up the ridge to the south, and onto the trackway, from which height they could see for several rests in every direction. The winds up there blew hard and strong as they followed the ridgeway south of west, until they came into a thin forest of scraggy beech wood that Geirmund knew from before.

  “I have seen this place,” he said to Steinólfur.

  “How?”

  “I dreamed it under the yew.”

  A short distance into that wood, they came to the same long barrow Geirmund had seen, and before which Völund had stood, though in his dream the standing stones had appeared more newly hewn. Under the waking light of day, with his warriors at his side, that place seemed older by far than any ruined Roman town or coliseum, and more lasting. Geirmund pulled Enbarr’s reins towards the mound, where the dark, low opening into the barrow led down into the earth, while most of the Hel-hides moved to the other side of the ridgeway from it as they passed, looking askance at it. None but Steinólfur and Skjalgi followed him closer, though Birna halted nearer to the barrow than the others.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Ride on,” Geirmund said, knowing that the wounded among them would slow their march. “We will catch you up later today.”

  She leaned and looked behind him at the mound and stones, frowning in confusion, but eventually nodded and moved on. Geirmund waited and watched until the Hel-hides had passed out of sight in the trees, and then he climbed down from Enbarr. Steinólfur and Skjalgi did the same, but Geirmund stopped them when they moved with him towards the barrow.

  “I will go alone,” he said.

  Steinólfur peered into the darkness of the barrow’s mouth. “Are you sure?”

  “I am sure.”

  The older warrior pointed at the nearest tree. “You’ll want a torch for–”

  “If this is truly another of Völund’s forges,” Geirmund said, “I won’t need it.”

  Steinólfur blinked and shook his head, then said, “Take this, at the least.” He drew his seax, flipped it in his hand, and offered its handle to Geirmund. “You might need something shorter than your sword for a tight fight, and your sheath has been empty since Ravensthorpe.”

  “Thank you.” Geirmund accepted the blade, not because he shared Steinólfur’s fear but to calm it.

  “That won’t help you against a draugr,” Skjalgi said.

  Geirmund grinned. “There is no draugr here.” Then he turned and strode towards the barrow opening, and he paused only a moment to check his footing before he took his first step down into the darkness.

  The step-way of stone did not sink far into the earth before it brought Geirmund into a narrow corridor in which the low rock ceiling forced him into a stoop. Down that passage, just beyond the reach of outside sunlight, he came into a cramped, empty chamber, and despite the darkness there, he could tell it looked nothing like Völund’s hall under the sea. Geirmund smelled the damp earth and felt the rough ston
e that had been shaped by Midgard hands, not the hands of Æsir, trolls, or elves, and he knew it was no smithy of the gods.

  He sat in the silence feeling thwarted, but also could not say what he had hoped for when he had entered, and he wondered at the meaning of his dream, for he knew he had seen that place.

  “Völund?” he whispered, and the stone walls spun his voice to make it louder. “Are you here?”

  The smith appeared before him, as sudden and bright as a flame in dry tinder, standing upright in the midst of the rock floor, as if he burned within it. He wore a different tunic to before, and had no helm or plates of armour, but Geirmund recognized his eyes and the shape of his long face.

  “It is you,” Geirmund said. “And you are also called Wayland.”

  “By some,” the smith said.

  Geirmund glanced around the small chamber. “And this is your forge?”

  “This is not my forge,” he said. “This mound of earth and stone is much too young, but it sits within the borders of my forge.”

  “Then where is your forge?”

  “It is here, but deep underground. The way is shut to you.” He moved closer, sliding through the stone. “How do you know me?”

  The smith’s question baffled Geirmund into a moment of silence. “I am Geirmund, son of Hjörr, whose father was Half, whose father was Hjörrleif. You brought me to your forge under the sea. Do you not remember me?”

  “No. I am not the Völund you met.”

  Geirmund struggled with the meaning of that. “You share the name with another?”

  “Yes. We are different memories of the same being, but I have not been able to hear the voices of the others for a very long time.”

  “Why?”

  “That is difficult to explain. I am… dying. But slowly. The children of your children will be dead long before I am utterly gone.”

  “I do not understand your kind,” Geirmund said.

  “It would be highly unexpected if you did.”

  “Do you know of the ring, Hnituðr?”

  “I know all the rings I crafted, but none by so new a name. Why do you ask?”