God of Vengeance

by Giles Kristian

  Wives and daughters came onto the jetty now and called out their farewells, wishing their menfolk good luck and commanding them to be careful, and the men mumbled their replies or simply waved or nodded, reluctant to be singled out amongst their sword-brothers.

  In the time it takes to sharpen a knife all three ships were out in the deep water, heading east into the Skude Fjord towards the sun, their oars dipping and rising neatly for there was not much wind for sails, besides which Harald knew it was no bad thing to keep the men busy before a fight.

  For a while the folk of Skudeneshavn watched them go, many touching Thór’s hammers and other amulets and charms at their necks and muttering to the gods to bring their husbands, fathers and sons safely back from this day’s bloodletting.

  ‘I’m coming with you, Sigurd,’ Sigurd’s sister said, appearing beside him as he stared after Reinen as though strength of will alone would carry his body over the sea to land on the deck like a raven, would stand him beside his brothers Thorvard, Sorli and Sigmund.

  ‘Did you hear me, brother? I’m coming to watch it,’ Runa said.

  Sigurd nodded to her then turned to Svein. ‘We will have to hurry or it might be over before we get there.’

  Svein shook his head. ‘I told Thorvard not to kill any of the toad’s arseholes until we found a nice spot with a good view.’

  Someone whistled and they turned to see Aslak waiting up in the long grass of the bluff overlooking the harbour. He had brought the ponies, as Sigurd had asked. One extra by the looks.

  ‘I told him I was coming, too,’ Runa said before Sigurd could ask the question.

  ‘I knew you would,’ Svein said, smiling.

  Sigurd might have guessed it too, though he was not sure that his younger sister should watch the battle with them, being only fourteen and too young for such things. He was about to say as much when their mother, who was amongst the other women leaving the jetty, called for Runa to walk back up to the village with her.

  Even after five children, and four of them boys, Grimhild still owned a beauty that turned men’s heads, but now her face was drawn tight as a ship’s knot with the worry of seeing her husband and sons go off to fight for their king.

  ‘Runa!’ she called again. ‘Come, girl! We have much to prepare for the men’s return.’

  ‘I want to go with Sigurd,’ Runa called back. Her golden hair hung in two long braids and Sigurd knew that his sister was enjoying being able to show it off while she still could. In another year she would be of marriageable age and would have to cover her silken tresses. Yet her being too young for marriage did not stop men looking at Runa the way they looked at silver.

  ‘You are coming home with me, daughter!’ Grimhild said, her face flushing now at her daughter’s defiance.

  ‘Let her come, Mother,’ Sigurd said, suddenly determined that Runa should go with them. He had had his fill of being told how things would be. ‘She’ll be fine with us.’

  Grimhild frowned and Sigurd turned to Runa. ‘Just keep walking,’ he hissed. ‘She won’t want to make a big thing of it in front of her friends.’

  ‘There’s work to be done,’ their mother protested, but Sigurd, who blamed his mother for his not being aboard Reinen, saw a chance to challenge her now and took Runa’s hand in his own. And he did not need to look behind them to know the thunder that was on their mother’s face, though no peal rolled after them. It was a pathetic piece of impudence, the kind that would have earned him a backhander from his father had Harald been there, and he felt the shame of it as they climbed the shingle-strewn track up to Aslak and the waiting ponies.

  ‘Thank you,’ Runa said, but Sigurd said nothing. He had other things to think about now as he nodded to Aslak and the four of them turned their mounts north to take the coastal track up towards Kopervik and beyond that Avaldsnes. For somewhere in between the two settlements they would look out and see the fleets of King Gorm Shield-Shaker and the rebel Jarl Randver come together in the appointed place. The two fleets would bind themselves together with ropes and grappling hooks, men and shields crammed in the thwarts.

  So that the killing could begin.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BY THE TIME they came to the place they were sweat-sheened and the ponies were lathered. The sun had passed overhead and now sat high in the western sky like a golden shield hung below the gabled roof of Valhöll, Óðin’s hall of the slain, and Aslak said it was a good day for a fight.

  ‘Not when there are arrows in the sky,’ Sigurd replied, grimacing at the thought of a shaft streaking out of the sun’s glare to bury itself in a man’s eye socket.

  ‘Then a man just keeps his shield up and his head down,’ Svein suggested helpfully, at which Runa asked, a wry smile on her lips, if Svein had learnt all this from the many battles he had fought in.

  But it was no easy thing to take the edge off Svein’s eagerness, especially when he was talking of fighting, and now he turned his smile on all three of them. ‘You will know sure enough when I have stood in the skjaldborg, Runa,’ he said, dreaming of the shieldwall, ‘for the skalds will be singing of it for a year after.’ He tugged his fledgling beard. ‘And the women will blush redder than these hairs whenever I am near.’

  ‘Talking of skalds, I thought Hagal would be here,’ Aslak said. ‘It’s not like him to miss a fight.’

  Svein nodded. ‘The gods know he needs some new threads to weave into his tales,’ he said.

  ‘Why would he need to see the thing with his own eyes when he can make it all up from the comfort of some wench’s lap?’ Sigurd put in. Still, Aslak had hit the nail square. It was unlike the skald to miss with his own eyes the makings of a saga tale which he could sell in a hundred mead halls throughout the land.

  They had ridden the fifteen or so rôsts as fast as they could and, far from anyone whose land they rode across questioning them, some offered them ale or food and one karl brought out a bucket of water for the horses, because men knew who Sigurd was, especially when Svein reminded them. And they respected Jarl Harald enough to do whatever they could to help his son watch him and King Gorm put Jarl Randver back in his place. Which would be in a haugr, a dark burial mound, covered in earth and worms if he were lucky, but at the bottom of the fjord, draped in cold sea wrack and picked at by crabs if he were not.

  ‘I hope all this lot are here to cheer for Biflindi,’ Aslak said, for they four from Skudeneshavn were not the only folk who had come from all over Karmøy to watch the fight.

  ‘They had better be,’ Svein rumbled loud enough for a group of five lads near by to hear. ‘For anyone cheering that sheep’s dropping Jarl Randver will find himself ten feet that way wishing he were a bird,’ he said, hurling a pebble over the bluff. ‘Or maybe a fish.’

  Groups had come north from Kopervik, south from King Gorm’s fortress at Avaldsnes and east from Åkra, Ferkingstad and from several other villages, all of them eager to glut their eyes with the spectacle of a ship battle. And what a sight met them now as they gathered at the edge of the pine and birch wood on the bluff overlooking the Karmsund Strait which divided Karmøy from the mainland. Since Sigurd was a boy he had heard men say that the thunder god Thór waded those straits every morning on his way to Yggdrasil, the tree of life.

  He will be wading through blood tomorrow morning, Sigurd thought.

  Their bows pointing east towards the mainland, Reinen, Sea-Eagle and Little-Elk had their sails up now, their thwarts bristling with warriors and blades as their skippers, helmsmen and the skeleton crews manning the sails sought to bring them into line with King Gorm’s seven other dragon-prowed ships. It was slow, laborious work because there was very little wind to speak of and what there was had to be caught on the sails and used wisely and patiently. But this, along with the calm sheltered waters of the strait, made conditions perfect for a ship fight, which was why the two sides had agreed to meet at the place.

  ‘Even a fart’s worth of wind can make a ship fight all but impossible,’ Harald had
told Sigurd once. ‘You have as much chance of lashing boats together in a wind or current as you have of getting your wife to sit arse beside arse with a pretty young thrall and be happy about it.’

  Yet, Shield-Shaker and Jarl Harald would need more than a still day and a sleeping sea to be sure of a victory here and Sigurd looked for signs amongst the rebel ships that Randver was an unfit overreaching jarl, but found none. The man’s ships looked neat and clean and his crews looked able.

  ‘Now I see why Jarl Randver was happy enough to fight in the shadow of Avaldsnes,’ Sigurd said, for all men knew that it was those fighting nearer their home that most often had the victory. ‘He has a lot of ships for a piss-in-the-wind upstart jarl. Maybe there is more to the man.’

  ‘Aye, he has the ships but does he know how to use them?’ Svein asked, though not even he would deny that six ships, four of them easily as big as if not bigger than Reinen, was more than anyone expected to see turn out against the king.

  ‘The sheep turd has more money and men than your father,’ Aslak said, giving voice to what they were all thinking as he fingered the iron Thór’s hammer at his neck. ‘Last year’s raiding has filled his sea chests with silver and his head with ambition.’

  ‘Still, six ships will not be enough,’ Sigurd said, fixing on his sister’s eyes because she was beginning to look afraid. ‘Shield-Shaker has fought many ship battles. He would not be a king if he had not won most, if not all of them. And my father has sea-luck and the Allfather’s own talent for war.’

  The others mumbled their agreement at that and the white knot of Runa’s hand relaxed a little around the silver pendant of Freyja which Sigurd knew was inside it, hot and clammy against her palm.

  Outnumbered as he was, Jarl Randver was expected to lash his ships together side by side to form a great raft and wait to be attacked. Sigurd knew this tactic allowed a greater concentration of fighting power within a small space and enabled men to move from one boat to another as and when the advantage might be gained. And yet Jarl Randver’s ships, sails down and oars shipped now, were barely shouting distance from each other and it was Jarl Harald who had drawn his three vessels close, like a man reining in his hounds. It was his crews that were busy with hooks and ropes.

  ‘Your father is making a raft then,’ Svein said, and from his frown and Aslak’s face it was clear they thought this a strange scheme from Harald given how things stood.

  ‘Why is he doing that, Sigurd?’ Runa asked, unnerved by her friends’ dark expressions.

  For a while Sigurd watched his father’s ship but eventually he grinned. ‘Because he has done all this before and knows the ebb and flow of it,’ he said. Only by putting himself in Harald’s place had the answer come into Sigurd’s mind, bright as a hooked mackerel glittering to the surface. ‘With the king’s ships holding off over there, Sea-Eagle and Little-Elk are vulnerable,’ he said. ‘If they remained separate Randver’s ships would isolate them like wolves stalking a small deer, and take them. Lashing them together with Reinen gives my father a floating stronghold he can easily defend. He will draw the rebels in like crows on a fleshy bone and then the king will come.’ His blood ran hot with the thought of it. ‘Together they will smash that arse welt and be ship-rich for the trouble of it.’

  Svein and Aslak nodded at this, grinning at their jarl’s sea-craft. And yet Sigurd felt an unease gnawing at his guts like a rat on a coiled rope. Because once his father’s three craft were lashed together and surrounded, if things went badly it would be no easy thing in the fray to separate them and let them fly.

  Still, Shield-Shaker had seven other ships and by rights those ships should beat Randver’s six even if Jarl Harald had stayed in his hall that morning. Sigurd clung to this thought, watching the two fleets which had set themselves up like pieces on a tafl board.

  ‘Jarls are good at tafl,’ he said under his breath, ‘but kings are better.’ The day would go well and the rebels would either yield or they would die.

  King Gorm’s men were cheering now, rousing themselves to the coming butchery, the sound of it drifting up to those gathered on the bluff. Sigurd and the others were right at the edge overlooking the rocky shoreline and the skerries out there in the Karmsund Strait, their arms anchored round birch trees that had themselves made a precarious stand on the sloping edge. Below them within a pebble’s throw was a shingle beach upon which a knot of fishermen stood, their faces seaward but doubtless as wide-eyed as everyone else. Sigurd guessed they had been out in the strait when they had noticed two fleets bearing down on them. He imagined the curses that must have flown around those skiffs like shrieking gulls, so that the boats were now hauled up on the stones and the men’s fishing was interrupted.

  Five of King Gorm’s longships, including Shield-Shaker’s own ship Hríð-visundr – Storm-Bison – were strung out in a line now off Jarl Harald’s port side, but two other ships were coming round Reinen’s stern to protect Harald’s steerboard side.

  ‘You were right, Sigurd. Your father means to draw them in and start the fight,’ Aslak said, ‘and hopefully it will be Jarl Randver himself who will take the bait.’ He made hooks of his hands, the fingers clutching each other, to make his point. ‘When they are grappled with Gorm’s ships and the fighting is thick, those other two coming round will come together like stones and crush the traitor like a louse.’

  Sigurd nodded, for Aslak had it right. ‘It is a good plan,’ he said.

  His father would have the honour of being the first to blood the enemy and King Gorm would no doubt reward him for it afterwards. Loyal men earned silver on such days as this.

  ‘Here they come!’ one of the other young men on the bluff yelled. Perhaps his own father was aboard one of the king’s ships, too. If so his stomach was no doubt twisting over itself now like Sigurd’s was.

  ‘It’s Fjord-Wolf, Jarl Randver’s ship!’ someone else called. ‘I have seen it before. That is the jarl standing there at the sternpost.’

  ‘Aye, where it is safest,’ an old man put in, spitting in disgust.

  Sigurd did not know if the man standing at the sternpost of the breakaway ship was Randver, but he was dressed in mail and wearing a rich helmet and so it was entirely possible. And if so Sigurd did not blame the jarl for starting the fight at the stern, for all that it was not saga-worthy, because were Randver to die in the first spear and arrow exchange, not much would come of his ambition.

  ‘It does not matter where he is standing,’ Svein said, ‘for my father can throw a spear twice the length of that ship. Jarl Randver would be better off back at Hinderå hiding under his mead table if he wanted to stay where it is safest!’ He grinned. ‘Though if the wind was right he would not be safe even there.’

  ‘Which ship is your father on, lad?’ the greybeard asked, rheumy eyes all squint and water as he willed them to be young and far-seeing again.

  ‘He’s the prow man on Sea-Eagle, that longship off Reinen’s steerboard,’ Svein announced.

  ‘Aah, then he must be a big ’un like you,’ the greybeard said. ‘I was a prow man once.’

  Svein and Aslak shared a look that the old man’s old eyes did not miss and he batted the air with a hand as if to say what did young men know anyway? And Sigurd was glad that the greybeard had not asked on which ship Aslak’s father was. Olvir Quick-Spear had been killed in the last fight Jarl Harald had been obliged into because of his oath to King Gorm, and no one likes being reminded that their father rots in an earth mound outside the village. Not even if they live again in the next world, drinking and feasting in the Allfather’s hall, as Olvir Quick-Spear surely did.

  Sigurd’s muscles had begun to thrum now, the blood in his veins seeming to bubble, the fame-thirst in his heart demanding to be slaked. The ash shaft of the spear in his right hand whispered to him, pleaded to be taken down into the fray where it could rip and rend and fulfil its purpose. But Sigurd must deny the spear as he himself had been denied, the pain of that still smouldering somewhere in him
.

  A hand clapped him on the back. ‘There they go,’ Svein said, as down in the strait the arrows streaked from ship to ship now that Jarl Randver’s fleet had come within range of Jarl Harald’s. These arrows would cause little harm to either side, though, for men had their shields up and those limewood planks now began to sprout feathered shafts.

  Harald’s men were still lashing his vessels together as Jarl Randver’s ship came within range for the strongest men on either side to hurl their spears, which often had some good effect because a good spear with good muscle behind it could crack a shield and leave a man defenceless, at least until a new one could be taken up.

  Randver’s other ships were backing oars now, giving their jarl room to manoeuvre, to bring his prow, which bristled with his best warriors, up to Reinen’s prow where Slagfid stood with a spear in one hand, his great long-axe in the other and his helmet glinting in the sun. It was no easy thing, not even on a sleeping sea, to get those prows kissing, but Randver’s oarsmen knew their work and Sigurd’s hand clutched the spear tighter still as the thump of the bows carried up to them on the bluff and a great roar from both crews filled the still day.

  Randver’s prow man was too eager to make his fame and as he lowered his shield, pulling back his arm to hurl a hand axe, Slagfid cast his spear with the speed and fury of Thór’s lightning and it ripped through the prow man’s throat in a spray of gore, embedding in the shield of the man behind.

  ‘Slagfid!’ Svein roared as those on the bluff cheered and Jarl Harald’s men beat their swords, spears and axes against their shields with pride for their champion. The dead man was hauled away and the warrior who took his place was wise to keep his shield high, but Slagfid had killed more men than were on Randver’s ship and this would be simply one more. Gripping the huge axe in two hands he reared up like a bear, bringing the axe over his head in a great, death-promising arc, and the blade sliced into the warrior’s shield, the lower horn cleaving the shield in two, the upper horn cutting through the man’s collar bone and tearing down into his breast and trunk, splitting him like oak.