God of Vengeance

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Asgot will have the Allfather’s ears ringing with curses and spells aimed at Gorm and Randver,’ Svein had said when they’d learnt of the godi’s fate, and Sigurd had not doubted it. Saving the godi because he had been his father’s friend and a Skudeneshavn man was one thing, but perhaps not worth dying for. Saving the man from a drowning death because he was a priest and therefore the gods were ever likely to be watching him? That was worth any risk, because Sigurd had lost everything, including the gods’ favour, and perhaps some act of courage and daring would turn back that ill-lucked tide. And these thoughts hung like loom weights in his mind now as he looked at the distant shoreline which gleamed as though the stones upon it yet held an ember of the day’s light.

  ‘It may not be tonight,’ Olaf said, threading his arms through his brynja’s sleeves, then throwing them up above his head so that the weight of those iron rings pulled the whole thing down and over his head and torso like water from a pail. ‘Or they may have done it already and there are crabs down there puking their guts up,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders to help the rings settle and find their place. He strapped on his sword belt and tucked an axe into it but left his helmet and shield in the boat.

  ‘It is tonight, Uncle,’ Sigurd said, taking off his tunic and leaving it with his weapons by the row bench. He did not know how he knew that but he did. Hendil and Loker lifted the pine trunk from Otter’s thwarts and passed it to Svein who laid it across his muscled shoulders and waited for Sigurd who was tying the haversack of essentials over his own shoulder so that it hung across his back.

  Hendil stepped ashore to join them, buckling his own sword belt and gripping an ash spear in his left hand.

  ‘Wait for us as long as you can,’ Sigurd said to Solveig and Loker whose eyes he could just see, by the glow coming off the water. ‘But don’t be here when it starts getting light.’

  ‘With just the two of us rowing we’d need to set off yesterday,’ Solveig grumbled, which was not far off the truth, but Sigurd could not concern himself with that now.

  ‘Are you ready, Svein?’ he asked, making sure the scramasax at his waist was secure in its sheath. Other than that blade he was unarmed and Olaf grimaced to see it, though he knew why it had to be so. Svein’s answer was a flash of white amongst his beard and with that they turned, Sigurd, Svein, Olaf and Hendil, and set off across the rock like shadows chasing after bodies which had cast them off.

  They splashed through shallow pools, slipping now and then on slick weed thrown up by the last high tide, then came up onto higher ground and pushed north over the skerry’s spine, Olaf leading the way, a dark, looming, upright shape against the barren rockscape. Sigurd came next with Hendil behind him and Svein at the rear lumbering like some mountain troll with the pine log across his shoulders. The air was cool against Sigurd’s skin. The whisper of the sea against the skerry’s sinking edge seeped into his ears beneath his own hot breath and his beating pulse, and he felt like a boy again, up to mischief on a summer’s night. He hoped that the tide had not already risen high enough to seep into Asgot’s mouth and lungs, choking his curses and drowning him. And he hoped that the gods were watching.

  Soon Olaf threw a hand back and hissed, crouching, and the others bent low or went down onto their haunches as Sigurd saw the glow from a fire up ahead beyond a swell of rock. A man’s voice drifted over the skerry followed by laughter as flat as a stone skimmed across the bay and Sigurd licked dry lips and clutched the Óðin amulet hanging round his neck. His stomach felt like it was full of startled moths as he watched Olaf signal to Hendil to take off his sword belt and move up to get a better look. For Olaf’s mail would scrape noisily on the rock, whereas Hendil, in nothing more than leather and wool, could crawl as quietly as a fox to a hen coop.

  Even so, Sigurd held his breath as Hendil, his spear left behind, skulked past him and bellied up the swell until the top of his head stuck out against the iron grey and darker charcoal sky. Another voice carried over to them, the sense of the words shredded by the breeze, but loud enough so that Sigurd wondered how they had not heard them before, how they had almost blundered into a camp and burnt their feet on their fire.

  In the time it takes to put an edge back on a sharp knife Hendil returned, the white of his palm bright as he spread the fingers wide. Sigurd and Olaf nodded. Five men and no doubt well armed was not something to be taken lightly. But then from the slur of their voices it seemed the sentries were making the best of being stuck out there on that barren rock while their friends flattened the straw with women or slept off the mead in their lord’s hall.

  Svein laid the pine log down and hauled his big scramasax out of its scabbard. Hendil gave Sigurd his spear and drew his sword and Olaf gripped his sword in one hand and his short axe in the other. No one said a word but each man knew they would have to be fast. They would have to hit the men together, like a wave against the strand, and kill fast before any of the sentries had a chance to run or signal to the far shore.

  They will not be expecting us, Sigurd told himself, the blood-thrill announcing itself in his trembling hands. That strange feeling was in the big muscles of his thighs too and he did not try to fight it but rather let the sensation course through his body, filling bone and flesh, warming him from the inside out like spiced mead.

  Olaf gestured for Svein to work his way round the left of the mound before them and Sigurd nodded at the low cunning in this, for any boat the king’s men had would be down at the water’s edge and so that was the way they would flee.

  Svein moved off and for twenty heartbeats Sigurd and the others watched him go. Then Olaf was up and Sigurd and Hendil rose beside him and together they ran up the swell, tight-lipped as the dead, and as they came over to fall upon King Gorm’s men Olaf threw his axe which thunked into a man’s chest before the man could have known what was coming. Another hauled at his sword’s hilt but drew not a foot of it before Sigurd’s spear struck him in the chest and he dropped to his knees clutching at the shaft. Another warrior raised his spear, growling, and thrust it at Olaf who twisted his torso and scythed down with strength and edge enough to sever the shaft. Then he swung the blade back up, lopping off the man’s left arm and taking him under the chin to cleave his face in two before he could scream.

  Another man fled. Straight into Svein. Not fancying his chances against Svein’s scramasax, even armed with a good spear as he was, the sentry turned and got a belly full of Hendil’s sword. Hendil clutched the man’s beard braid and hauled him further onto his blade which he rammed home up to the cross guard, spitting curses into the man’s face.

  The last of them knew better than to waste his breath begging for his life. He threw down his spear in disgust, turned towards Olaf and dropped to his knees. For a moment he looked up at Sigurd, a spark of recognition perhaps flashing in his eyes, then he nodded at Olaf, trusting the sharpness of the mailed warrior’s sword, and tilted his head forward.

  ‘Give him your blade, Hendil,’ Olaf growled, and so Hendil did. The warrior wrapped his fingers around the hilt and smiled. Then Olaf’s sword flashed in the gloom and took off his head.

  They were on the island’s edge and Olaf pointed his gore-slick blade out across the water to another rock a good arrow-shot away. ‘If he’s not drowned yet he’ll be somewhere out there,’ he said.

  But Sigurd could see no sign of Asgot. Taking off his shoes he turned to look at the far shore which sat below the king’s hall, his eyes searching for movement there, his ears sifting the breeze for any commotion that would tell him that someone had seen the fight on the island, which was not impossible due to the glow from the fire crackling beside them.

  All quiet it seemed.

  ‘We’ll tie rocks to them and sink them,’ Olaf said, gesturing at the nearest of King Gorm’s dead men. ‘It will look as though they vanished like sea mist.’ Sigurd nodded as Svein came back over the swell with the pine log across his shoulders and a few moments later he and Sigurd eased themselves down into t
he water, their breath catching in their chests with the coldness of it. There were little lights in the water, fishes’ eyes glowing in the dark, and Sigurd could feel slimy weed beneath his feet and sharper things, mussels and limpets stuck to the rocks.

  ‘Don’t you go and bloody drown,’ Olaf said over his shoulder, retrieving his axe from a dead man’s chest. ‘I don’t want to be coming down there to pull you from Rán’s cold embrace. That would rot this brynja and you don’t have the silver to buy me another.’

  Sigurd did not reply. He and Svein had their arms over the pine trunk and their chins all but resting on the rough, scaly bark whilst their bodies found their own buoyancy. Without a word they kicked their legs beneath the water to push themselves off, keeping their bellies full of air and trying not to break the surface with their feet. Then out into deeper water, legs stirring the cold depths, the sound of the sea against the rocks fading with the fire’s copper behind them as they kicked into the darkness, pushing the pine log before them.

  It was dark and cold and the breeze was pushing low waves against the left side of Sigurd’s face, but before they had slipped into the water he had fixed the moon’s place in the sky, the cloud-veiled glow of it anyway, and by glancing up now and then, or turning to see where they were in relation to the fire on the island behind them, he was able to keep them on the right course. At least, the course which Olaf had shown them.

  They swam and they shivered and in the darkness it was hard to know how far they had gone. Sigurd was about to say as much to Svein when he heard oars in the water.

  They stopped kicking and held their breath, ears straining to weigh up the sound, Svein’s eyes glowing in the murk. But within no time they were drifting on the current like sea wrack and so they kicked again lest they undo the hard work they had put in so far. But the dipping of oars was getting louder. They stopped again, holding their position as best they could by flailing their legs directly below them and gripping the log as though their lives depended on it. Which more than likely they did.

  Then Svein hissed and Sigurd followed his line of sight and saw the boat they had known was out there somewhere. Saw the black shape of it and knew it was smaller than Otter by a foot, perhaps two, not that that was any comfort as it came straight for them, four pairs of oars pulling it against the current.

  ‘They’ll see us,’ Svein hissed, and they would too, because Sigurd and Svein’s pale arms would show against the darker bark as they clung on. They could not grip the log any other way because Svein had lopped off the little stumps and knobs where branches had been, and to take their arms off the log risked being carried off with the current.

  The boat was getting closer now, so that they could hear the voices of those rowing.

  ‘Your belt,’ Sigurd hissed, fumbling with one hand to undo the buckle beside the hilt of his scramasax. Svein did the same as Sigurd pulled the belt off and threw one end over the trunk then reached underneath to gather it up. When Svein had done likewise they turned the log to shield them from the view of those in the boat and held on to their belts with two hands, their heads all but submerged so that the waves washed over their faces, the salt stinging Sigurd’s eyes as he shivered and stayed corpse-still, waiting for the shout to go up from the little boat’s crew.

  At one point the king’s men were no more than four spear-lengths away and Sigurd had thought they would hear his teeth chattering for he was getting very cold now. And it seemed as if the boat was taking an age to pass, so that Sigurd was glad that his ears were waterlogged for he could not hear the gods laughing at him half drowning to avoid a spearing. But the eight oars dipped and rose, dipped and rose, and the boat headed back to the king’s shore leaving Sigurd and Svein freezing but alive. Better still, they knew it must have come from the rock upon which Asgot had been left to drown and so they turned their tree trunk north-east and kicked some warmth into their freezing flesh.

  Ahead of them Sigurd saw a flash of white and for a moment he could not say what it was but then his eyes made sense of it. Two swans were gliding side by side across the water, their feathers raised like sails to catch the breeze, and Sigurd wondered if Asgot had sent the birds to show him the way. They followed the swans and after what seemed a long time they began to feel weed-slick rock beneath their feet. Then they clambered up, bringing the pine log with them, stumbling and falling now and then because the water was up to their thighs and they could not see where they were putting their feet. Sigurd turned to look for the swans but the creatures had vanished. Yet, this was the place. Surely.

  They waded on, numb-legged, the pine log back on Svein’s shoulders, scramasaxes belted at their waists and the wet skin of their arms raised into bumps by the breeze. And they did not need the swans to tell them that the pale, knotty figure a stone’s throw off to their left was Asgot.

  The godi was on his knees, the water up to his gnarly collar bones and soaking his beard which had been stripped of any silver, though the little white bones were knotted there still. He twisted at their approach and with his neck stretched above the brine seemed to be sniffing the air like some beast, lips hitched back from his teeth.

  ‘Rán will not have you tonight, Asgot,’ Sigurd said, the words slurred through frozen, trembling lips.

  ‘That greedy bitch was never going to have me,’ Asgot gnarred, lifting his chained right arm out of the water and spitting into the waves, which had Svein touching the iron hammer at his neck – and Sigurd did not blame him for they would still have to swim all the way back and Rán was not the kind of goddess you wanted for an enemy.

  Sigurd took the nestbaggin off his back and with a shaking hand reached inside, pulling from it a hammer and chisel. Svein squatted in the water beside Asgot holding the pine trunk so that Sigurd could use it as a work bench.

  ‘Harald’s whelp and Styrbiorn’s troll,’ Asgot said through the twist of his white lips. ‘King Gorm will be pissing in his boots.’ And yet for all that the godi seemed unimpressed, he nevertheless put his iron-ringed wrist on Svein’s log so that Sigurd could place the chisel on the join and take his hammer to it.

  ‘We can leave you here, godi,’ Sigurd offered before striking the first blow.

  But Asgot chuckled at that. ‘I think I’ll come with you, young Sigurd,’ he said, ‘for all that I’d like to see Biflindi’s face when he sees this ring empty in the morning.’ Svein winced at the sharp chink of steel against steel but after five strikes the iron split and Asgot took his arm away, rubbing his wrist with the other hand.

  ‘Not empty,’ Sigurd said, opening the haversack again. This time he fetched out a fox’s leg, the dark fur soaked and slick and the flesh of the severed end white and bloodless after being in the water so long. He grabbed hold of the dark paw, squeezing it to bring the claws together, then pushed it through the iron manacle as far as it would go before the leg became too thick near the thigh. Hopefully the leg would remain wedged in there even at high tide with the currents playing with it.

  Svein was grinning like a fiend and Asgot, who understood the trick of it, muttered to the Allfather and Loki the Mischief God that he hoped they were watching this.

  For next day, when the tide went out, King Gorm and his people would return expecting to see a crab-picked, wave-licked corpse lying on that flat rock. Instead they would find a fox’s leg and perhaps none would even dare go near enough to see that the iron ring was broken. The story would jump around Avaldsnes like fleas that Jarl Harald’s godi had shape-shifted into a creature with teeth sharp enough to gnaw through its own leg and escape the tide-death coming for it.

  ‘That is some powerful seiðr,’ Asgot said.

  But for now there was a blush of dawn light in the east and they needed to be gone. Asgot was corpse-white and bone-stiff, the strange swirls and patterns all over his body seeming alive with his shivering. But he was alive.

  And the gods were watching.

  Runa could still feel the trembling deep in her bones, though she told herse
lf that no one else would notice it. Not by the light of the cod-oil lamps chain-hung from the great beams of the jarl’s mead hall.

  She would never have imagined that the slave trader’s blood could fly so far as to slap her face when Gerth had cleaved the man apart, but she thought she could still taste the iron tang of it in her mouth. She could still hear her friend Svanild’s scream deep in her ears, as though it had burrowed in there like a maggot and could not find its way out. When she closed her eyes she could still see Gerth’s face, like a stain behind her eyelids, as Randver’s men plunged their spears into his back and sides. Gerth’s expression had been one of fury and shame because he knew he had failed to save his cousin. Or was the fury for his sword-brothers, who had not burst from the crowd to fight beside him?

  For Runa had seen Olaf and Svein and Hendil, despite their attempts to blend in with the merchants, craftsmen and farmers. She had seen Sigurd too, and the sight of him had stopped her breath like a bung in a flask. Randver’s thegns had told her that her father and brothers were dead, killed in a fight up near King Gorm’s hall at Avaldsnes, and when she had heard this Runa had wanted to die too, for it meant all was lost.

  But seeing Sigurd alive at the slave market on Rennisøy, close enough that she could have called out to him, had hauled her spirits out of that dark mire and set her heart pounding in her chest like a hammer on an anvil.

  And Runa suspected that the trembling in her bones now was not because she had been as close to blood and death that day as a warrior in the third row of the shieldwall, or even because of the horror of seeing her friend sold to some greasy-bearded karl – for that had been Svanild’s wyrd when the chaos had passed and Randver’s men had dragged the gory bodies away. No, Runa was shaking because Sigurd was somehow alive! He had escaped the death that had taken the rest of their family, even their mother, whom Runa had last seen being cut down by one of Randver’s warriors though not before she had opened another man’s belly with her scramasax.