Raven: Sons of Thunder

by Giles Kristian

  ‘It will make no difference,’ Bram Bear rumbled, chewing some dried seal blubber. ‘Sigurd is a wolf and will always be a wolf. Dunking his head in another man’s river won’t make a gnat’s arse of difference.’ He grinned, his lips smacking noisily. ‘But this emperor believes it will, and that’s why we’re going to be rich, lad.’

  There were some, including Asgot, Black Floki and Olaf, who did not like that idea at all. Still, we were alive and would soon be rich, so even they could live with it for now. Men were left with the boats and the rest of us made for the nearest town, which was called Vaals. I much preferred it to Aix-la-Chapelle, because it was made of wood, not cold stone, and it was full of normal people and not Christ slaves. It was the first time in a long while that the Norsemen had had the chance to spend some of their well-earned silver and it was not long before we were all roaring drunk. As for the Frankish whores, they came out at night and could not give a spit that we were heathens. Smelling money, they were over us like flies on raw meat. I could only think of Cynethryth, but the others had no such thoughts to belt their breeks up. I stood drinking with Asgot, who claimed he was too old for ploughing, whilst all around the Norsemen humped for all they were worth. I swear I could hear bones rattling. Svein the Red had two women, one in each arm, their bare breasts glistening in the torchlight, and Sigurd was sitting at the back of the tavern with a black-haired beauty’s head in his lap. Even Hedin, who with his long face was so ugly that men said even the tide wouldn’t bring him in, was at it. The sight of his white arse flying up and down like a washerwoman’s elbow was almost enough to sour the ale in my cup.

  ‘He’s watching us,’ Asgot creaked, his yellow eyes following a spider which was descending from a rafter on its invisible string.

  ‘The spider?’ I slurred.

  ‘The emperor, you brainless fool,’ Asgot hissed.

  ‘The emperor has gone to Paris, old man,’ I said, wishing I had not been left alone with the twisted old godi. It was hard to be near him and not remember how he had killed Ealhstan. I had killed one man, Ugly Einar, for his part, but I had not touched Asgot.

  ‘He has more eyes than a hound has fleas,’ he rasped. And I saw that the old cunny was right. There were men in the tavern who were clearly charged with keeping an eye on us. It seemed they did not even mind us knowing, for when I locked eyes with one of them, a young man with short black hair, I saw undisguised disgust in his face. But these spies seemed content to let us spend our money, and the Norsemen were too busy humping to care.

  Later that night Bjarni staggered over to me, spilling a river of mead as he dragged a small Frank behind him.

  ‘This man is going to tattoo us,’ Bjarni said, his head seeming too heavy for his neck and lolling in circles. ‘He assures me he is very good.’ The Frank nodded uncertainly, searching Norse faces for one that looked less like those strange see-through creatures that float in on the tide. He could not find one and so he looked back at me and I looked at Bjarni.

  ‘What tattoo?’ I asked, not liking the idea at all because I was not in the mood for pain.

  Bjarni’s eyes rolled and he staggered back, rocking on his heels. ‘Something that reminds us who we are.’ He frowned. ‘And what we are. We travel so far from home I don’t want to forget.’

  ‘I don’t think there is any fear of that, Bjarni,’ I said. ‘We are wolves.’ And with that his blue eyes blazed and his teeth flashed and I suddenly knew what mark this little Frank was going to carve into our skin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE FRANK DID A HANDSOME JOB WITH HIS SMALL, WICKED SHARP knife and a bowl of fine wood ash, so that when the others saw the blue-black wolf heads carved into our shoulders they sought him out and he must have been rich by the end of it. Sigurd was the last and we all stood round and watched the snarling wolf slowly appear in his white skin. When it was done there was a cheer to lift the rafters of the Blacksmith’s Dog alehouse and we all got so drunk that we slept the whole of the next day and only roused ourselves when it was time to start drinking again. Sigurd was still not himself, but it seemed he was getting stronger and he suffered less and less from the fevers that had left him soaking and weak. That he had survived so many wounds was proof to us all that the All-Father still favoured him, though he looked different. Once golden and shining, he was now battle-battered as a shield. There was a puckered scar in his temple from Mauger’s shield rim, which you could see when his hair was tied back, and there was an ugly scar in his right cheek. Beneath his eyes were dark rings and his cheekbones pressed sharply against the skin. These marks changed Sigurd in some deeper way, making him seem more like other men, men of flesh, blood and bone. And yet now he looked even more dangerous. To look at him you might think his byname, Sigurd the Lucky, was better left in the past. Now he looked more like Sigurd the Terrifying.

  The moon swelled and waned and there was no sign of Karolus’s silver. His spies watched us still, but we had grown used to them and made ourselves at home in Vaals. We drank and organized wrestling contests between us and the Wessexmen, and generally made a nuisance of ourselves, until it became clear that even the alehouse owners were growing tired of us, for their regular customers left any place we entered, the way cats slink off when hounds pad into a hall. Only the whores seemed to possess an endless patience for us, and if anything the Norsemen tired of them. There were so many other things to buy in that town when their peckers needed a rest, from brooches, buckles and tanned leather to cloaks and fine Frankish blades which proved irresistible to some. But I was miserable. All I could think about was Cynethryth. My stomach ached and my throat felt as though an invisible hand squeezed it from the moment I woke until the moment I fell asleep, and even then I dreamt of her.

  It was not until the moon curled like a sliver of shaved wood that the emperor made good on our arrangement. A man found Sigurd in the Blacksmith’s Dog and told him that the silver would be at the wharf in two days, along with some churchmen who would come to witness the jarl’s baptism. I was horrified, but Sigurd merely shrugged and poured himself some more ale.

  ‘I was getting fond of my own stink, Raven,’ he said with a resigned shrug, ‘but in two days’ time I will bathe and afterwards I will be rich enough to buy myself a kingdom in the north.’ He leant forward and filled my cup with ale from his own. ‘I know you are no trader, but even you must smell the ripeness of this deal.’

  ‘I don’t trust these Christians, lord,’ I said petulantly, glancing at Father Egfrith who had two of the Wessexmen on their knees praying forgiveness for ‘yielding to the temptations of the flesh’ as he put it, or crushing some Frankish fur as I saw it. Behind the monk two braided whores jiggled their tits at him and one of the Wessexmen closed his eyes, the other biting his lip as they desperately tried to appear contrite.

  ‘What if their spells work some hold on you?’ I asked. ‘What if becoming a Christian puts you in thrall to the Christ god?’

  ‘Pah!’ Sigurd batted the questions away and sat back in his fur-lined chair. ‘Words and water, Raven. That is what we shall get from these Christians two days from now. And silver,’ he added, smiling, ‘if their prattle does not bore us to death first. You worry too much for a young wolf.’ I scowled at him and he chuckled. ‘Sometimes the sword needs a little grease to pull free of the scabbard. You understand me? When we have the silver we will go. We will raise Serpent’s sail and leave these Franks to their old king, and they should pray to their god to keep him alive, for I am thinking that when he dies this land will itself become a ripe deal for whoever wants a slice of it. Too many rivers,’ he said almost to himself. ‘Too easy.’ Then he held my eye a moment and my thoughts tumbled out of my head and lay at his feet like rune stones, the way they always did under that canny blue gaze. ‘Monk!’ he called. ‘Come here!’ Father Egfrith hurriedly made the sign of the cross over the kneeling Wessexmen and scuttled over to us, his weasel face pinched.

  ‘You still intend to go through with the baptism
, Sigurd?’ he asked, shooting me a suspicious glance as though he feared I had talked Sigurd out of it.

  Sigurd nodded, scratching his chin. ‘I will stand in your river, Egfrith,’ he said, cocking one eyebrow, ‘but before I do, you will go to the place where they have taken Cynethryth.’ He pulled a ring of twisted silver from his finger and gave it to the monk. ‘You will give her this, from Raven, but you will not tell her that the boy whines after her like a puppy taken from its mother.’ Sigurd winked at me and I felt my cheeks flush. Egfrith smiled too and nodded, putting the ring into the scrip at his waist before disappearing into the noisy crowd. ‘Now, lad, have some fun for the love of Thór,’ Sigurd barked. ‘For days you’ve been wearing a face that would make blind bairns cry.’ I tried to smile. ‘Bram!’ he yelled at the hulking figure by the serving table, ‘find something pretty for Raven to play with.’

  Two days later at dawn the emperor’s silver arrived. It came with a hundred warriors in their fish scale armour and the blue cloaks of the imperial guard. The emperor’s adviser, Alcuin, came too, and with him a gaggle of churchmen, who I would later learn were Borgon, bishop of Aix-la-Chapelle, an archdeacon, an abbot and a prior. These men were grim-faced, though they could not hide their unease at seeing us battle-arrayed before our ships, mail polished, blades clean and sharp, and our wall of brightly painted shields with their dented bosses boasting of old fights. Egfrith was with them. The monk looked strangely uncomfortable among his own kind, making me wonder if he had spent too long in the company of heathens. I was desperate to hear of Cynethryth, but Egfrith was busy discussing Christian things with the churchmen and I could not catch his eye as Alcuin ordered the contents of five barrels to be tipped out on to a great sheet of linen laid on the grass. There was a gasp and then a murmur like the sea from Norse, English and Frank alike as more silver than you could ever imagine spilled noisily, glistening and fluid, on to the linen. The sight snatched your breath away and left you jaw-slack. There were solid silver bars, jarl torcs, arm rings, buckles, brooches, rings and cloak pins. There were silver cups and bowls, ingots, ornaments and hack silver, all impossibly bright and washed in the pink dawn light. It was a god’s hoard.

  At a word from Sigurd, Olaf walked forward with the gospel book of Saint Jerome, holding it at arm’s length, and gave it – gladly, it seemed to me – to Alcuin, who could not prevent a smile from creasing the corners of his old eyes. I for another was glad to see the back of that book over which so much blood had been spilt.

  ‘You looked like you were giving that old man a turd, Uncle,’ Bram chuckled when Olaf had come back and retaken his place in the shieldwall.

  ‘This emperor has won many fights to lay his hands on so much booty,’ Olaf said, ignoring him, and I suddenly imagined that the white buildings I had seen around Karolus’s palace were made from the ground-up bones of his defeated enemies.

  ‘How much more must he have if he is giving us this much for some good-for-nothing book?’ Bjarni asked, shaking his head behind the shieldwall.

  ‘Not just for a book, Bjarni,’ Olaf reminded him bitterly, ‘but for Sigurd’s bending his knee to the Christ,’ and as if in answer Bishop Borgon yelled a stream of Latin, a powerful voice bursting from his stick-thin body. As one, the entire Frankish army fell to their knees with a clatter of mail and arms, except for one warrior. This man stood at Borgon’s right shoulder, gripping a huge spear in one hand and a short axe in the other. He was clean-shaven but for the plaited beard that hung from his chin like a length of black rope. It seemed he was exempt from prayers so that he might keep his dark eyes on his master, and I thought that any man who spurned a shield in favour of an extra blade must be as dangerous as a two-headed bear with a hangover.

  ‘Here we go,’ Bram rumbled somewhere in the shieldwall. ‘Someone wake me up when it’s all over.’

  ‘The All-Father must be yanking his white beard off if he’s watching this,’ Hastein moaned, for Sigurd was apparently satisfied with the hoard which blanketed the ground in a thousand tales of glory and wanderlust, war, plunder and death. The jarl was standing before the churchmen like a wolf amongst sheep.

  ‘Raven, bring me a horn of Bram’s mead!’ Sigurd yelled in Norse, raising a few laughs from our line and a muttered curse from Bram, who came to me, pulling a mead skin from the inside of his tunic and pouring the liquid into the horn I held out for him.

  ‘It’s warm, Bram,’ I said with a grimace, wondering how long the skin had been secreted against Bram’s hairy belly.

  ‘It’s the only safe place around you thieving swine,’ he protested. I took the mead to Sigurd who drank it down in one go, dragging his hand across his mouth and eyeing Borgon’s bodyguard. I noticed beads of sweat along the scar in his temple and I realized he was more nervous than he would have us believe. For he knew it was no small thing to fold your knees to the White Christ. He must have wondered if Óðin All-Father was watching with his one eye and if so what was in the Far-Wanderer’s mind.

  The dawn sky was lightening to a cold bright blue in which rooks squabbled and several kestrels hovered against the wind, looking for voles in the long grass.

  ‘There, Sigurd, amongst the reeds, we shall be protected from the current,’ Father Egfrith chirped, pointing downriver of Serpent and Fjord-Elk. The churchmen’s robes whipped in a sudden gust and from a good bow-shot away, even above the river’s murmur, I heard the noise of the nearby beechwood in the wind: leaf striking leaf, branch grinding against branch.

  ‘So the heathen understands English, Father Egfrith?’ one of the churchmen said, looking at Sigurd the way a man looks at a horse he is considering buying. Egfrith nodded.

  ‘A savage tongue,’ a short, pockmarked priest said through a twisted smile because they were using that tongue themselves, ‘but the fact that it speaks at all,’ he went on, nodding towards Sigurd, ‘should mean that the beast will be easier to tame than that bitch the emperor gave Abbess Berta.’ Egfrith’s eyes flicked to me like a lizard’s tongue, then back to Sigurd. ‘I hear she has not uttered a word,’ the short Christ slave added, signing the cross.

  ‘Come, Sigurd,’ Egfrith said, ‘it is time you discovered the true path and the joy of joining the Shepherd’s flock.’ Was it really going to happen? Was Sigurd going to turn his back on his gods in favour of the White Christ? My stomach lurched at the prospect.

  ‘Will the others take the ablutions, Egfrith?’ the richest-looking Christ slave asked, eyeing the Fellowship, who watched with mistrustful eyes, their bearded faces hard as rocks.

  Egfrith seemed about to reply when Sigurd rumbled: ‘Some of them would rather grind your bones into porridge, priest,’ making the man wince. From somewhere I heard old Asgot mumbling his strange prayers to the Norse gods as though he sought to unpick whatever seidr spell the Christians were about to weave on his jarl. Perhaps Egfrith’s god was rubbing his hands together at the sight, knowing that where Sigurd led other Norsemen were bound to follow.

  ‘Clothes off, Sigurd,’ Egfrith said with a strained smile. Sigurd nodded to Olaf, who sent Bjorn from the shieldwall to take the jarl’s cloak and sword. I helped him wriggle out of his brynja, which Bjorn then rolled and slung over his shoulder. Then Sigurd pulled off his tunic, revealing chest and shoulders that were as taut as Serpent’s back-stay and carved with the deathly white scars that mark every warrior like so many runes etched in a living tree, each one telling its tale.

  ‘If he tries to drown me, Raven, kill him,’ Sigurd said with a smile, nodding at Egfrith, who had stripped down to his undergown and whose body looked like a child’s next to Sigurd. Another gust of wind blew Sigurd’s golden hair across his face and for a moment he looked up at the blue sky, which was white at the edges. A black smoke-twist of jackdaws stretched across the cold emptiness, the creatures revelling in the gusts, and their unruly jak-jak-jak-jak sounded to me like a warning. Then Sigurd strode into the soft, mossy earth at the river’s edge, sinking up to his knees amongst the reeds, and Egfrith fol
lowed him, shuddering as the dark water closed around his waist.

  ‘What of Cynethryth? I called to Egfrith through the gusts, but he seemed not to hear me as he took another unsteady step. ‘How is she, Egfrith?’

  ‘Later, Raven,’ the monk snapped, his breath short as the cold water squeezed his heart and lungs. ‘Do not interrupt the Lord’s work.’

  ‘Screw the lord’s work, tell me now,’ I barked.

  ‘Hold your tongue, heathen!’ the pockmarked priest blurted, and I turned to him, a terrible heat rising in my belly. ‘Do not obstruct the will of God!’ he yelped, his eyes little holes of malice.

  Bishop Borgon put a hand on the shorter man’s shoulder. ‘Peace, Arno,’ he soothed, then prattled to him in the Frankish tongue, but he pointed at me and I heard the name Cynethryth and then the word diabolus which I knew from Egfrith meant devil. The hollow-cheeked bishop pulled his silk-trimmed cloak around his thin frame as the pockmarked priest tilted his head and eyeballed me, so that my hackles were stiff as frozen grass.

  ‘Then it is no wonder Abbess Berta is struggling to unburden the bitch of Satan’s seed,’ he said in English just for me. ‘I shall take my own hazel switch to the girl. Beat the filth out of her myself, by the Lord’s grace.’

  I flew at him. In a heartbeat the priest’s throat was in my fist and I was squeezing so that only the gristle of his gullet stopped my fingers and thumb from touching.

  ‘No, Raven!’ I heard Father Egfrith yell amongst the clamour of other voices, but my belly was full of rage and I was snarling like a beast and shaking the priest like a hound with a hare. Then something struck the side of my head and I dropped to my knees, flashes of white light ripping through my head. The great hulking figure of Borgon’s bodyguard loomed over me. I fumbled for my knife and slashed into his thigh below the fish scale brynja. He roared and slammed the butt of his spear against my helmet, dropping me again. It felt as though the sky had caved in and all was swimming pain and swirling blue cloaks as the emperor’s men came. A blade scythed towards my face but another met it with a loud ring and Bjorn was there. He chopped a Frank’s face in half, spattering me with blood as I tried to rise. Another Frank hacked into Bjorn’s back and he yelled in fury and turned, taking his hilt in two hands and ramming his sword deep into the man’s chest. Hands gripped me and I could not break free but was forced back down to my knees. Through a blur as though I was underwater I saw Sigurd slipping and falling as he struggled out of the river. Behind him Egfrith thrashed madly.