The man sank to his knees shrieking, and Sweyn slashed at his throat. The blade penetrated halfway through the man’s neck and he fell to the ground, where he twitched, made a rattling sound, and then died.
“Sixteen!” he boasted to Åke who pulled his ax out of the other guard’s skull, his eyes gleaming with victory. This was going better than he expected.
“Ten,” Åke said petulantly. He knew he would never catch up now.
Ax-Wolf stepped over to the body of the guard Sweyn had just brought down, looked him over, and grunted.
“Not a clean chop,” Ax-Wolf commented.
“And yet dead all the same,” Sweyn said, wiping the sweat from his brow and looking wearily at his teacher.
“If he’d had any fighting skill, he’d have gone for your heart. You should have cut the leg like I told you. You also should have sliced his head off in one blow, considering your arm strength.”
Sweyn shot Åke a cross look. Ax-Wolf the giant never complained about Åke’s battle skills. All the same, Sweyn had to concede that Ax-Wolf was right. He could have fought better.
The gate their dead opponents had been guarding opened. Sigvard raised his hand to them and yelled, “Follow me!”
They ran through the gate, into a garden. On one side rose the wall and on the other side there was a colonnade running along a residential building where the Vikings had already started their slaughter. At the far end a fire raged, and death screams could be heard from the flames.
Ever vigilant, Sweyn walked past the stone benches, around a pond that was surrounded by bushes shaped like birds or crosses.
“Be on your guard for the priests,” Ax-Wolf warned. “Some are mighty gods who can cloud people’s minds and make them obey their words.” Then he set off toward the fire.
A fat monk was kneeling in front of a little stone house, half sunken into the ground. The roof was on fire. The flames had spread to the rafters. Singing could still be heard from inside the building, but soon it was interrupted by coughing and screaming.
Sweyn shook his head, baffled.
“They’re burning themselves?” he asked in genuine surprise.
Ax-Wolf pulled the monk to his feet. He was a fat, bald little man who struggled in terror, like a trapped animal in his fist, saying something in a foreign language. Then the monk started laughing like a fool and stretched his hands to the sky.
Someone was pounding on the door from inside the little stone building. Thicker smoke rose from the burning roof, and wails of the dying could be heard from inside. Sweyn squeezed the hilt of his sword and looked around.
“The monk must be sacrificing those people to his god,” Ax-Wolf said, watching the struggling man in surprise. “He should not be permitted the pleasure.”
Ax-Wolf nodded to Sigvard, who quickly unbolted the door and tried to open it. But people were pushing on it from inside, and he could only open it a crack.
Ax-Wolf heaved the portly monk out of the way and then put his shoulder to the door. Fingers found their way through the crack; death screams and crying could be heard from the fire. With a roar they managed to get it open far enough that a woman, burned black, managed to climb out, followed by others.
The screaming monk reached for them and bellowed deliriously, saliva pouring out of his mouth.
“Make that native shut up,” Sweyn told Åke, who promptly stabbed the monk in the face and the stomach so he sank to his knees, bleeding.
Then he was quiet.
Burned women climbed over the body of the bleeding monk to get out of the building. An old woman with half her face covered in blisters clutched a dead child in her arms. She stood outside the building, staring vacantly at nothing. Others rolled around on the ground to smother the fire on their bodies. An unrecognizable body, charred black as overcooked pork, dragged itself across the ground and then died.
The people in better shape stared confusedly at the praying monk as if they had no idea what to do. The ones who were charred black made Sweyn feel sick. The smell of burned flesh lay heavy over the courtyard. The whole building was on fire, and the flames rose high above the roof.
“Father is not going to be happy about this,” Sweyn said, without letting go of the monk. “It would have been better if Ax-Wolf had let them burn. Most of them are going to die anyway.”
Åke made a face and said, “Ax-Wolf may be good at finding fault, but he’s not so good at thinking clearly.”
Åke stopped talking, watching as Ax-Wolf strode over to them and spoke to the monk in monk language.
“He says we stopped them from getting to paradise, and that now instead they will burn in hell until the end of time,” Ax-Wolf reported scornfully.
“They have to be burned alive by a monk to get into their paradise?” asked Sigvard.
Ax-Wolf shrugged, unconcerned. “Christians,” he said, as if that explained everything. “What else would you expect of people who only have a single god, nailed up on a cross?”
Sweyn shook his head and watched Palna flanked by warriors approaching through the smoke. Palna looked like a terrible wolf, his chieftain’s cloak fluttering like eagle wings, as he surveyed the locals. This did not bode well.
“What by the stinking tooth of Balder is this?” Palna bellowed.
Even though Ax-Wolf was almost twice as big as Palna, he cowered before his chieftain.
“The monk was offering a sacrifice to his god, so I ruined his satisfaction,” Ax-Wolf mumbled.
Palna’s face contorted in rage. “Have you lost your senses? Do you even remember why we’re here?” He turned to Sweyn and Åke to reprimand them, but just then a girl with one arm covered in burns came gasping and stumbling toward Palna. The chieftain grabbed his sword and raised it to strike the girl.
“The gods sent you to save me,” she said in a recognizable Scandinavian lilt before her frail body was overcome by a violent fit of coughing.
Palna lowered his sword. The girl had curly blond hair under all the soot. Her light-blue eyes were wide open and shone with a craziness that was even more unhinged than the monk’s.
“You speak the Danes’ tongue,” Palna said.
“I was born in Jórvík. My father was a Viking,” she said, and spat on the ground.
“We could get a nice price for her,” Sweyn said, and Åke nodded his support.
“I will pay you generously for saving me,” the girl said.
Palna looked at her in puzzlement and said, “If you have silver, you hide it well.”
She touched her burned arm and grimaced in pain. People had already started dying on the grass around them. Only a few were still screaming loudly. Some who had survived the fire were trying to help the injured, but most of them had fled.
“I know where the monks hid their wealth,” the girl whispered. “And I can show you, on two conditions.”
Sweyn and the others exchanged glances. As Odin himself said, women’s words cannot be trusted.
Palna crossed his arms over his chest and said, “Let’s hear it.”
“I want you to take me home,” she said.
Palna looked at his brother. Gunnar shrugged his assent.
“And the second?”
“Let me kill the monk,” the girl said. “I would really like to repay him for the trip to paradise he tried to give me.”
Her smiling face was full of mania. But revenge and silver were both languages Palna understood. Without hesitating, he pulled a knife from his belt and handed it to her.
Sweyn still had a firm hold of the monk, and Ax-Wolf watched the monk expectantly.
“This is something we’re all sure to remember,” said Ax-Wolf.
Emma wrapped her fingers around the beautifully carved handle of the knife that the blood-spattered Viking leader placed in her hand. Pain tore and ripped through her arm where her skin was burned and blackened. But the fire had not left her; it still raged with its godliness bestowing a strength that was not of this world. The veils she’d had before
her eyes had been burned away, and for the first time she could see clearly. Everything around her was a lie. The church was of the devil’s making. It twisted people’s minds and made them forsake things and kill in the name of the false god.
Freya, her heavenly mother, had sent her back to this world—reborn from rage and filled with her holy spirit—to fight the evil the cross-worshipping heretics were spreading through the world. She understood that now.
The tall Vikings, strong-armed destroyers with their weapons in hand, were her weapons. They had come over the sea, raped her screaming mother, and begotten Emma in blood and shame. And now they had returned to pull her out of the fires of purgatory.
The fat monk whimpered and shook in Sweyn’s firm grip. The monk’s belly swayed under his cassock, a knotted rope tied as a belt below it. Sweat ran down his dirty face, and his bloated cheeks wobbled as he prayed to his imaginary god. Emma drank in the fear in his eyes as she approached him, enjoying the strength the knife in her hand seemed to give her.
Without hesitating she sliced open his urine-soaked cassock and took a firm hold of his prick and balls. He screamed like a pig, his forehead soaked in sweat, as he begged and prayed for mercy. But Emma had none to give. She cut for the stinking men who had driven their filth into her, for the innocent children who’d been killed in the flames, for the devil who lived in the false soul of this man of God.
The knife was sharp and it didn’t take much to carve off the hanging rags of skin. She held them up in front of the monk and laughed at his shrill shrieks as he pissed blood.
“Enjoy my revenge,” she said, stuffing the bloody skin into his screaming mouth.
Then she yanked the fat monk out of the warrior’s hands and dragged him with her. Her strength was unbounded as she dragged him over to the burning building.
“May you burn in hell,” she said, kicking him into the flames.
He fell face-first into the fire.
The clothes and skin burned off his belly immediately; even so, he was able to crawl, screaming, away from the fire as the heat made his skin bubble. Emma let him almost escape the flames before kicking him back in. His howling ceased, and he twitched and floundered a bit before he was completely still.
Emma inhaled the smell of burned fat as strength surged through her. Triumphant, she turned toward the Vikings, wiping off the blade of the knife on her dress.
The warriors watched her in silence, a few with disgust on their faces. A redheaded giant of a man with an ax as big as her arm was the only one who grinned cheerfully.
“Well, he must have really pissed you off,” he said, causing the others to burst out laughing.
The Vikings stood among the dead and wounded people at the monastery and laughed as if this was the most entertaining stuff they’d ever seen.
“May the powers protect us from Freya’s wrath,” the Viking’s leader said stiffly, his voice filled with respect.
Emma placed the knife back in his hand and tenderly wrapped his fingers around the bloody handle. She saw the desire in his eyes, felt it like a warm wave washing over her body.
“Come,” she whispered, walking toward the room where she’d seen the monks hide their things.
The building was built entirely of stone, with little windows. It was furnished only with small tables and benches. The monks had disappeared into one of the walls, but all that was visible there now was a set of shelves with papers on it. Emma pointed to the wall.
“I saw them going in there with their arms full,” she said. She had only caught a brief glimpse, so she wasn’t completely sure. The Vikings would not be merciful if she lied.
Two warriors grabbed the shelf and tried to tip it over, but it was secured to the wall. The redheaded giant pushed his way forward, and the warriors moved when he raised his ax. It took him two blows to open a hole in the wood. Then the others pulled chunks of wood away to enlarge it. Emma felt the leader’s eyes on her, expectant and hopeful.
“There’s a hole in the stone back here,” called one of the men, and more wood was chopped away.
Sure enough, there was an opening in the stone wall. Emma inhaled the smell of piss and fear that seeped out of the low opening.
Sweyn raised a torch and peered into the narrow passage. It was so low that he almost had to double over to enter it. The passage sloped steeply downward and after four spear lengths it ended behind some crouching monks, dressed in brown.
Sweyn took a couple of steps closer and raised the torch.
“By the eight legs of Sleipnir!” he said in amazement. “Their god is generous.”
Behind the monks who sat whimpering and trembling there was a pile of candlesticks, goblets, and crosses made of silver and gold, a fortune greater than he could ever have imagined. Palna would be able to pay the geld taxes to the Jómsvíkings for many years to come and build new ships.
“We’re richer than Skaði’s frost giants!” Sweyn cried out.
“Move,” Sigvard ordered.
Sweyn pressed against the wall, smiling, and Sigvard squeezed by with difficulty. Without much fuss, Sweyn grabbed the monks and forced them to crawl back up and out of the passage toward his companions’ waiting swords. When the last of the anguished monks had crawled past Sweyn, he was able to proceed. He raised his torch to survey their treasure.
Sigvard’s eyes gleamed as he held up an ornamental silver chalice on which hunters with bows in their hands were chasing a stag. The workmanship was so beautiful that the figures almost looked alive. There was a gold cross, inlaid with colorful stones in a curling pattern. There was a large dish with a Viking dragon pattern curling around its rim. And those were just the things lying atop the hoard.
“I thank their god for this!” Sigvard bellowed, and everyone roared with laughter as he began passing the items back up the passage.
Sweyn could hardly believe that the wealth he held in his hands existed. Never had he dreamt they would find anything like this. Sigvard pulled out a small wooden chest.
“Take this to Palna immediately,” he ordered.
The box was heavy in Sweyn’s hands as he stepped out of the tunnel into the stone room.
Several warriors had come to the room to see what was going on and were immediately stunned by the treasures and admired them with great interest. Palna stood by one of the small tables, watching the whole process with a contented look. The blond girl stood by his side and stared, her mouth hanging open.
Sweyn placed the chest on the table next to Palna, opened the lid, and saw coins, jewelry, and gemstones.
“We’re rich, Father,” Sweyn said, beaming.
Palna’s mouth twitched. He was having a hard time controlling himself and not showing his great pleasure; that much was clear. Instead he picked up a necklace made of joined silver plates and inspected it closely.
“The All-Father must have sent you to guide us,” Palna said and placed the chain around the neck of Emma the emasculatrix.
She didn’t even look at the valuable necklace, staring transfixed at Palna instead, her eyes burning with madness and lust.
“No, it wasn’t Odin. It was a goddess who led me,” she said in such a flat tone that Sweyn took a step back from her.
Palna picked up a little golden brooch that depicted Odin’s horse, Sleipnir, running on his eight legs. A ray of sun shining through one of the narrow windows made the gold sparkle.
“How many?” Palna asked.
Sweyn stretched his back and replied, “Sixteen, all told.”
“You’ve killed one enemy for each year you’ve lived,” Palna said, nodding contentedly. He placed Sleipnir in Sweyn’s hand. “I honor the glory you won in the field.”
The men who stood around them, Gunnar, Ax-Wolf, and a few others, agreed. Sweyn’s proud heart swelled and ached in his chest.
“Thank you, Father,” Sweyn said. “You trained me well.”
Sweyn looked down at Odin’s eight-legged horse and ran his finger over the gold. He ought to sa
y much more, to honor Palna and the Jómsvíkings, but eloquent words ebbed away and he stood silent. With relief he felt Åke’s hand on his shoulder.
“I couldn’t find myself a better brother and friend in this world or the next,” Åke said. “And as a warrior I would rather encounter Garm loosed from his chains at Gnipa Cave than you.”
“Well said,” cried Ax-Wolf.
Ingolf, one of the ship captains, pushed his way forward to Palna and nodded contentedly at the loot.
“The tide will be turning soon,” he said.
Palna looked at the four ship captains in the room.
“There’s nothing more to be gotten here. We have taken the vengeance we sought. Gather your men, load up your slaves, and set fire to their temple.”
“Is this slave yours or can I have her?” Ingolf asked, pointing to Emma.
The sticky-fingered Ingolf was widely known for his greed. He sometimes reached for possessions rightfully belonging to others.
“The one who led us to this treasure must not be repaid with slavery,” Gunnar said.
“An oath made to a stranger is worth nothing,” Ingolf said. “I want her. She’s not a free woman. Tell me your father’s name, wench.”
“My mother is Danish,” Emma said, stretching her back. “Her father died fighting Harald Crow. My mother never knew my father’s name, but he was a Viking in a raid. They were camping at Jórvík for the winter.”
Ingolf grinned and said, “Some unknown Viking driving his cock into your mother does not make you a free woman. Although perhaps our honorable chieftain wants to keep you as booty for himself and not share you with his brethren.”
“Watch what you say,” Sweyn roared, grasping his sword.
Ingolf laughed and said, “Oh, I forgot. Your father didn’t want to recognize you either.”
“All the same,” Sweyn retorted, “I have not one but two fathers, and at least I wasn’t begotten by a poor wretch who was so drunk and stupid he drowned himself.”
The Unbroken Line of the Moon Page 7