‘I am insulted,’ Harald said, drawing his great sword whose blade shone with its dragon breath pattern in the forest’s strange half light like a mackerel’s back ten feet down. ‘Any one of my sons could beat this lump of cow shit.’ The jarl was straight-faced but he must have been hoping his words would sting Moldof into foolishness, that in his rage the giant would present him with a killing opportunity. But Moldof was not so stupid as he looked and now he rolled those huge shoulders again and grinned, for he was the one with the spear whilst the jarl only had his sword and the scramasax.
In came the spear, striking like lightning, thundering off wooden shield and metal boss as Harald kept his feet moving, turning the giant round in slow circles to disorientate him, which was all he could do because of his disadvantage in reach. That spear blade glanced off his helmet, then off his left shoulder and then Moldof roared, bringing the spear over his head and striding forward to put his weight behind the thrust and the blade split the planks of Harald’s shield and caught fast. Harald hauled the shield back, yanking the spear from Moldof’s grasp, then slammed the whole lot into the ground so that the spear snapped, a foot of shaft jutting from the shield as Harald stood tall again.
To pierce a shield with a one-handed thrust was saga-worthy and every man knew it, which sent a shiver spidering up Sigurd’s spine because he knew it was the kind of feat that the gods loved. And as if to drive this nail deeper Moldof took his shield in both hands and turned, then twisted back and launched the thing and it spun through the air, slamming into Finn Yngvarsson and knocking him to the ground. The king’s thegns went wild at this, hooting and bellowing as Finn clambered to his feet and must have been glad for the beard hiding his red cheeks.
‘Arse, Finn! But it would have been better if you had stayed on your feet,’ Asbjorn growled, to which Finn asked Asbjorn what he would have done seeing as he had no shield.
‘It would have cut you in half,’ Finn answered for him, ‘so shut your mouth, claw-hand!’
‘Now now, girls,’ Sorli said, as Moldof came at Harald with a huge sword, grunting with each strike, sending splinters flying from the jarl’s shield which already had some spear shaft sticking from it.
Harald had no choice but to back off, then a downward strike cleaved into Harald’s shield and stuck, which was the idea and Moldof hauled the shield towards him pulling Harald off balance, then leant in and hammered his right fist into the jarl’s cheek and Sigurd heard the crack of bone. But somehow his father held on to the shield and staggered back with it still on his arm as Moldof strode forward and slashed his sword across, lopping off the bottom third of Harald’s shield. His next blow took another chunk and when Harald tossed it aside Sigurd saw that Moldof’s blade had bitten into the flesh of his father’s arm too, for blood was blooming on the jarl’s tunic where the brynja’s sleeve ended.
‘Bleed him, Father!’ Sorli called. Sigurd saw the curl of their father’s lip and knew he was in pain. Moldof sensed it too, like a wolf that knows its rival is wounded, and he came at Harald striking down onto the jarl’s raised sword over and over like a blacksmith, clearly convinced that if either sword broke it would be Harald’s. All the jarl could do was take shelter from the steel-storm under his own blade, his arm absorbing the impact and the ringing of it filling men’s ears and maybe the gods’ ears too.
Suddenly Moldof brought the blade down and in from the side and Harald was not quick enough, so that it struck him in the ribs and would have cut him in half if not for his mail coat, and the jarl roared with the pain of that.
Sorli cursed and every man there knew that such a blow must have broken ribs, though you would not know it to look at Harald, who straightened and drew his scramasax with his left hand, slashing it at Moldof’s face if only to buy the time to get some air into his lungs.
Moldof thrust his sword and Harald deflected it with the shorter blade then stepped in smashing his sword’s pommel into Moldof’s face, but Moldof yelled and grabbed Harald’s baldric and hauled him forward, ramming his helmet into Harald’s face and when they stepped away from each other both men’s faces were sheeted in blood, their beards dripping with it.
Harald threw his scramasax and Sigurd had seen him strike true with it before but perhaps there was blood in his eyes for the blade flew harmlessly past Moldof who came like a bull and slashed low, opening Harald’s thigh, dropping him to one knee.
A groan went up around Sigurd and Harald’s head dropped, his gory beard dripping blood onto his brynja as Moldof grinned through the mess of his own face and raised his sword to give the jarl his death blow.
Sigurd lowered his shield arm to touch his father’s heavy silver brooch which he had fixed to his belt.
‘He’s going to cleave Harald like a log,’ Agnar murmured. Moldof’s sword came down and somehow Harald twisted out of its path so that it struck the ground beside him, then he bellowed in fury and brought his own sword up and over and onto Moldof’s forearm, cutting it clean off.
The giant screamed and stepped backwards leaving his forearm and its hand still gripping the sword lying in the pine needle litter, waving the bloody stump before him.
‘Kill them!’ King Gorm yelled.
‘Two shieldwalls!’ Jarl Harald growled, up on his feet, backing away towards his men who formed two skjaldborgar in an arrow-head shape with the jarl at its tip and Sorli and Sigurd at each shoulder. ‘Óðin!’ Jarl Harald roared, full of the battle-fury. ‘Óðin!’
But the gods were already watching. Sigurd could feel them in that place. And the Valkyries were there too, riding unseen amongst them all, already choosing the soon-to-be-slain.
The arrow-head shieldwall was a good tactic for stopping the enemy from outflanking you, but here Sigurd knew it mattered little either way. Even allowing that the king still had men watching the coast and others guarding Avaldsnes there were enough spears in his two shieldwalls here to see the day won and his old friend a corpse.
‘Soon we drink with Sigmund and Thorvard, little brother,’ Sorli said, giving Sigurd a smile. ‘But not yet. Not before we’ve killed half of these traitorous whoresons, hey!’
An arrow thunked into Sigurd’s shield and he saw the bowman off to his right grinning, enjoying himself.
‘I’m proud of you, my boys,’ their father gnarred through bloodied teeth, his broken jaw bones warping the words. ‘No man had finer sons.’
Sorli nodded to Sigurd and Sigurd nodded back knowing that he would never look into his brother’s eyes again in this life. ‘Now then, men of Skudeneshavn,’ their father said over his shoulder, ‘make them think we’ve taken root, that we have growled an oath to the Allfather himself to hold this patch of ground until Ragnarök.’
‘And then?’ a sweat-sheened man named Hopp asked, quickly sweeping off his leather skull cap to swipe grease from his bald head with his forearm.
‘And then wait for the jarl’s word, you bone-head,’ Sorli said.
‘And then we kill the shits,’ Asbjorn clarified.
Sigurd watched the two shieldwalls closing in, thirty men in each, and he felt as though his guts brimmed with ice water. Then here it is, he thought, glancing up at the dark boughs. This is where I make my name. Not the whale’s road but the wound sea.
‘I have told you all, I will not die here,’ Orlyg said, hammering his spear shaft against his shield. ‘So whoever wants to can drink himself stupid with me tonight once we have dealt with this crew of goat-fuckers.’
The others cheered this, no one disputing his foretelling now, and Orlyg stepped forward from the line, rolled his brawny shoulder in its socket, hauled his spear arm back and let the thing fly. It streaked through the trees and went straight through a man’s shield, pinning his arm to his chest. Harald’s men howled at this and it was worth losing a spear to see King Gorm’s man fall out of his skjaldborg shrieking and clutching the whole assemblage without the first idea what to do about it.
‘Heya, Shield-Shaker, meet Shield-Breaker!’ Froth
i yelled and someone began a shield beating that Harald’s other hirðmen joined, rousing themselves to the coming slaughter.
Over his shield’s rim Sigurd eyed those coming to kill them, could see the silver rings knotted into beards and hair, could read the thoughts in their minds the way some men could read the runes. They are afraid, he thought. Even with their numbers and for all their growling they are afraid of what a sword will do to a man’s flesh. They are afraid of me. And so they should be, he thought, for I am spear-armed and have the blood of a jarl in my veins.
‘Ready,’ his father growled over his shoulder. ‘Hold! Hold them, men of Skudeneshavn.’
Sigurd’s muscles thrummed. His blood bubbled in his limbs and the rune-carved spear in his hand whispered to be unleashed to the blood-fray.
Then King Gorm gave the command that Harald had known he would and his two long skjaldborgar stopped like a wave against a rocky shore. Each line would double up becoming two men deep, shields and swords or axes in the front line, spears behind to plunge over heads and through gaps. But, for a few heartbeats they would not be solid skjaldborgar with shields overlapping and feet planted. For those heartbeats they would be a snarl of men moving apart and coalescing and Jarl Harald knew it.
‘Now!’ he yelled, and his men roared and ran at their enemies, who had not even considered that they might be the ones attacked.
‘Kill them!’ Harald screamed, his sword cleaving a man’s shield and the reverse stroke taking his head.
A man raised his shield to block Sigurd’s spear thrust but Sigurd dropped low to the man’s left and thrust the spear in from the side, ripping into groin and genitals and releasing a scream from the man that was like that of a vixen. Sorli slammed his shield into an enemy shield with such force that the man behind it fell into his companions and Sorli gut-speared him before he could right himself, and it was bloody chaos.
‘Hold! Hold!’ someone was bellowing, perhaps the king himself, and though they did not run, the men from Avaldsnes were like a crew whose boat has struck a rock, and in those first moments of the fight they died in a hacking frenzy of blades.
A warrior swung his sword at Sigurd but it glanced off the leather and Sigurd repaid him by ramming his spear through the man’s neck and hauling it free in a spray of glistening meat. Then he saw a spear blade burst from Agnar’s chest and knew then that the king’s men had rallied. The din filled the world and yet all Sigurd could hear was the blood in his ears as he caught blow after blow on his shield and jabbed or slashed with his spear. In his peripheral vision he saw Sorli plunge his sword into a man’s mouth and twist the blade free in a mess of teeth and bone before turning to parry a sword blow that would have taken his arm off at the shoulder. Orn went down, his face cleaved off below his beaked nose, his eyes round with the shock of what had been done to him. Hopp took two spears in his back and another in his chest and bull-necked Orlyg bellowed defiance of his wyrd even as two swords hacked him to pieces and in that eye-blink Sigurd imagined Orlyg seeking out that old soothsayer in Valhöll and wringing his neck. All around Sigurd men of Skudeneshavn were dying and yet others had locked shields and fought in desperate knots, experience and fury braided together to keep them alive a little while longer.
‘The jarl!’ a man bellowed and Sigurd glanced round to see his father open a man’s belly even as three more surrounded him, jabbing him repeatedly with their spears so that his fine brynja streamed with blood.
‘You have to go, brother!’ Sorli clattered into him, shoulder to shoulder, turning a blade away with his shield and scything a man down. ‘You must run now.’
‘No!’ Sigurd had lost his spear now and Troll-Tickler was bloody yet thirsty still.
‘Who will avenge us if not you?’ his brother snarled. ‘Go!’
‘No, brother!’ Sigurd’s shield was battered and useless so he threw it down and caught a blade on his sword, turning it aside before hacking into a bearded face which spattered him with hot blood.
Beside them Frothi went down, a hand axe planted in his skull.
‘Run, brother. Avenge us.’ A spear streaked for Sigurd but Sorli hacked it out of the air a hand’s breadth from Sigurd’s chest. ‘I will see you in Óðin’s hall.’ He grinned. ‘Oath-Breaker!’ he roared, and through the chaos Sigurd saw King Gorm sitting his pony, his spear across his lap. Saw him look up and lock eyes with Sorli, and with that Sorli and Asbjorn ran towards the king and Finn ran with them. The Avaldsnes men drew towards their king like a fist around a sword hilt and Sorli took a sword blow to the neck and stumbled but ran on, screaming death to the traitor.
Sigurd turned and dropped to one knee and Troll-Tickler lopped off a man’s leg at the thigh so that the man toppled over, screeching. Then Sigurd was up and with a two-handed swing he cut a man clean in half, bellowing with all the fury in the world. And then there were no more of Gorm’s men before him but only trees and the gloom-filled pine forest.
And he ran.
CHAPTER FIVE
HE FLED SOUTH through the trees, his wool- and leather-clad bulk snapping brittle branches, his heart threatening to burst and the big muscles in his thighs burning though he would not stop to unburden himself. The leather coat had kept him alive and might do so still if any of King Gorm’s men caught up with him. Besides which, they had taken enough from him already and he would give them nothing more.
He rejoined the old path and slowed a little then stopped, bent double and dragged the dry air into his scalding lungs, an ear turned back towards the scene of carnage. For five hammering heartbeats he held his breath and was sure he could hear the dim thunder of men striking their weapons against their shields and cheering. His mind wove the scene of the oath-breaker king standing over his father’s torn and bloody body. Of Gorm’s men stripping his brother Sorli of his mail and arms and dishonouring him in fouler ways.
They were all gone. All butchered.
Suddenly his stomach clenched and he was spewing hot sour fluid onto the ground and somewhere in the back of his mind he heard his brother Sorli laughing, saw the smile on his handsome face as he said: They never told you about this part in the old saga stories, hey, brother!
He straightened, dragging a hand across his mouth, then took his scabbard off his belt and thrust Troll-Tickler home still bloody. It would be easier to run holding the thing than having it catch against his leg. Then he thought of his mother and Runa and the blood in his heart froze as he turned and looked back the way he had come. There was no sign of the king’s men yet but they would come. Gorm would know that Skudeneshavn was now spear-light and ripe for the taking and he would come.
So Sigurd ran. Even if his heart burst in his chest he would not stop until he had warned his people and seen them ready to fight, for what would be the point in them hiding now? We will all drown in the slaughter’s dew, he thought, but not his mother and Runa. They would escape somehow. They would be safe.
But when he came within a mile of the village he knew he was already too late.
Smoke plumed against the heavy sky, the black of it darker than the cloud, so that Sigurd knew it was spewing from burning thatch or pitch-stained timbers even though the fire itself was obscured by the rising ground north of the village. A sudden brrrrrruk alerted him to a moorhen fleeing the tall grass in front of him, flying towards Sigurd rather than away from him, so that if he still had his spear he could have impaled its bluish black underbelly as it took to the sky. Then he saw what had put more fear into the bird than the breathless, blood-fouled man coming towards it had. An adder turned its face towards him, its forked tongue stabbing, head poised, sleek grey body coiled like a knot on a jetty. The creature’s lidless, unblinking eyes looked as cold as bronze in the wedge of its face and Sigurd found himself impaled on the menace of it.
The snake is more dangerous than the warrior, he thought. The moorhen had known that and fled, just as Sigurd had run from the slithering oath-breaking king. And this thought filled Sigurd with shame as he ran past
the adder towards his burning village.
What he found was more terrible in its way than what he had left behind and yet his eyes drank it in. They glutted themselves with it even as he retched but could bring up nothing, spitting only foul strings of saliva because he had already voided his stomach. The only buildings they had torched were the smithy, which had gone up like a hero’s pyre igniting the dwelling beside it; Asgot’s house, perhaps because they feared its seiðr; and Harald’s hall, Eik-hjálmr, which was as yet merely scorched black for the most part because its timbers were damp. Though the western end had taken the flame and was burning feebly and the whole of the thatch was gushing steam and yellow-brown smoke.
The dead lay where they had been butchered, their faces frozen in aspects of surprise, as though even now they could not understand or would not accept that they were dead. Some of the men had fought by the looks, their corpses covered in wounds, and some of them must have fought well for there were patches of blood here and there, even puddles of it on the rain-slick earth, presumably spilled from the men who had brought death to Skudeneshavn.
The smoke from Asgot’s house was fragrant with the dried herbs and spices and other nameless things that the godi used in his seiðr. As smoke will, it seemed to follow Sigurd, stinging his eyes and throat as it writhed between the houses of the slaughtered.
Women lay with their skirts hitched up and their white legs and private parts exposed and bloody. Their faces were the worst of all the dead because of what they had endured before the men had cut their throats and Sigurd dared not even think his sister’s name as he saw them.
Then he saw a corpse move. The man was slumped on the ground, his chin on his chest and his white hair loose about his face and Sigurd knew it was Solveig. He called out and Little-Elk’s skipper slowly looked up and it was then that Sigurd saw the gash in the flesh across his chest like a fiend’s grin.
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