‘When I find what I am looking for, Olaf, then you will know why we are here,’ Asgot said.
‘We should have left you chained to Gorm’s rock,’ Olaf growled.
Asgot grinned sourly. ‘Did you really think my wyrd was to drown out there in the dark, swept out of sight by some ormstunga king?’ Serpent tongue, a good name for King Gorm that, Sigurd thought.
‘Well you would have if not for us,’ Olaf said.
‘You see, Olaf, the gods have uses even for you,’ Asgot said, which had Olaf muttering into his beard as the godi turned his back on them all and trudged on. Perhaps it was because no one wanted to turn and go back alone or be the first to say they wanted to, or maybe they were too far on the hook of whatever Asgot and Sigurd had in mind not to see it through now, but they all followed the godi, squelching through the sucking plunge, sweating with the effort of it and getting bitten out of their minds by unseen creatures.
And then, after the time it would take eight men to unload the ballast from Little-Elk, Asgot found what he was looking for. At first it had just been a dark shape in the hanging fog, but Sigurd had felt the dread rising in him as they drew nearer, so that even before the shape revealed itself he knew this would be the place.
‘It is no Yggdrasil,’ Asgot said, ‘but it must have deep roots to find clean water in this reeking place.’ They had stopped before another alder, this one still living, though stunted, standing alone on a peat mound, proud of the sedge and twig rush, the bog arrow grass and the stinking water. And when Sigurd saw it a shiver ran from his arse up to the back of his head, like a rat escaping the mud.
‘We’ve come all this way for a tree?’ Svein said.
‘Ygg’s horse,’ Asgot murmured. ‘Óðin’s steed.’
‘Not from where I am standing,’ Olaf said. ‘It’s a gnarly old tree in a reeking fen.’ He looked at Solveig. ‘Albeit a fen that is richer than I am,’ he said.
Asgot looked at Sigurd and Sigurd took a breath, planted his spear in the sucking earth and turned to the others.
‘You had better make it quick, lad, for it doesn’t do to stand still too long. Not when you’re a short-arse like me,’ Solveig said. This got some ayes from the others who were already beginning to sink into the mire and were continually pulling their feet free as though they feared the fen was trying to claim them for the silver rings on fingers and tied in beards, the scramasaxes and knives on their belts, and the iron or silver amulets at their necks.
‘You have all seen that the gods have turned their backs on my family,’ Sigurd said, and some of them would not meet his eye at that. ‘It is no secret. My father, who was beloved of the Æsir, was betrayed by an oath-breaker. My brothers were butchered. My mother, who ever respected Freyja the Giver and was favoured by the goddess, was murdered by her own hearth.’ Every word was like a loom weight caught in his throat and yet every one needed to be said. ‘My sister Runa was taken from her home and is even now that worm Jarl Randver’s prisoner.’
They looked at the mud or at their shoes, or anywhere but at him and at first Sigurd thought it was because they were embarrassed for him because the gods had deserted his family. But then he realized that was not it. He was certain it was shame that they felt, shame because they had let all this happen. That they had not protected their jarl and their people.
‘Look at me, Svein,’ he said. His friend looked up, fixing his blue eyes on Sigurd’s and Sigurd nodded. ‘Like a fish that is small enough to slip through the holes in a net I alone of my father and brothers escaped this treachery. Perhaps this was good luck. Or perhaps the Allfather spared me for some reason he alone knows.’
‘Who cares, lad?’ Olaf blurted. ‘You’re alive and at your age that’s better than being dead.’
‘No, Uncle,’ Sigurd said. ‘It is not so simple.’
‘Never bloody is,’ Olaf muttered.
‘You all knew my father. If he were alive what would he do?’ Sigurd watched them look to each other and then to Olaf, expecting him to answer.
But it was Solveig who spoke. ‘Even had he been a damned pig farmer instead of a jarl, Harald would take his revenge on those who had betrayed him. That is what any man worthy of his ancestors would do.’
Sigurd looked at Olaf. ‘Then would you expect me to do less? Should I hide under rocks for the rest of my life, happy just to have survived?’
Svein turned his head and spat into the mire. That was his answer to that.
‘We wouldn’t be here with you if we thought you were a coward, Sigurd,’ Olaf said. ‘We could pledge ourselves to another jarl. Maybe Randver himself or even Biflindi would have use for us if we kissed their steel and muttered the right oaths.’
‘And yet instead of drinking another lord’s mead you are standing up to your knees in fen mud waiting for me to win back my family’s honour,’ Sigurd said and no one denied it. ‘But I do not know how to do that. I am no jarl. I have neither thegns to command nor the silver to buy good fighters.’
‘And neither will you if he keeps chucking it into the mire,’ Olaf said, thumbing towards Asgot.
‘Tell me that tonight, Olaf,’ Asgot sneered, ‘when you feel the fetid breath of spirits on your neck and see corpse candles flickering out there in the dark.’
That was enough to still Olaf’s tongue for a while and have Loker looking over his shoulder.
Sigurd turned back to the alder. ‘This is why we are here. I have come seeking answers.’ He glanced at Asgot. ‘I have come to show the gods that regardless of them turning their backs on my father I am Harald’s son and I will not skulk off and find a fire to sit by. Let the Lord of the Spear torment me with betrayal like he did my father. Let him throw me into the wolf pit if that is his wish. But he will notice me. And if he is true to his name, that all men know means frenzy, then let him guide me while I hang from this tree. Afterwards I will know what to do. The Allfather will show me.’
Hendil looked at Loker who looked at Olaf, whose face was all protruding eyes, flaring nostrils and teeth.
‘You think I came out here to watch you hang yourself from this tree?’ Olaf said.
‘You don’t have to watch, Uncle,’ Sigurd said.
‘For nine full nights Óðin hung on the windswept tree Yggdrasil,’ Asgot said. ‘You all know the story well enough. He hung there without food, without water, slashed with a spear. He sacrificed himself to himself until, screaming, he was able to reach down and take up the runes. The mysteries of death were borne up to him from the depths below the World Tree’s roots and the Nídhögg’s den.’
‘You’ll die, you damned fool,’ Olaf blurted to Sigurd, ignoring Asgot entirely.
Sigurd nodded. ‘I might,’ he said.
‘Well you’ll get old One-Eye’s attention, I’d wager my arm ring on that,’ Solveig said.
‘Aye, we’ll hear him laughing at the lad’s bone-headed stupidity,’ Olaf bawled, waving his spear and spraying his beard with spittle. ‘Alvi, take us back, lad, before we bloody sink.’
‘I’m staying, Uncle,’ Sigurd said.
‘If Sigurd’s staying I’m staying,’ Svein said, making a show of it by standing still and letting his feet sink. His point made, he pulled one free and then the other with two great farting squelches that halfway ruined his heroic gesture.
‘Well I haven’t got it in me to walk all the way back now anyway,’ Solveig said, ‘and neither do I much feel like getting lost in the dark.’ He gestured to the peat mound on which the alder stood. ‘To my eyes that’s the only dry bit of ground within an arrow’s flight. What do you say, Olaf? Might as well try to make ourselves comfortable, hey? While the lad does what he needs to do.’
Olaf shook his head, bewildered, then glared at Sigurd. ‘Tell me you’re not going to let him cut you while you’re at it,’ he said, gesturing at Asgot.
Sigurd looked at Asgot.
‘Just a small cut,’ the godi said, taking the rope off his shoulders and rubbing the flesh where its weight had sat
all day.
Olaf huffed and growled a curse. ‘This bog stink has addled the whole lot of you up here,’ he said, looking round them all and tapping a finger against his skull.
And maybe it had, Sigurd thought. For they stood there staring at him, all of them but for Olaf, as though they half expected him to take his knife and prise out his own eye to use as payment for a drink from Mímir’s Well of Wisdom.
So I have my war band, Sigurd thought to himself, feeling a smile tug at the corner of his lip, even if they are only here because there is nowhere else to go. But he would need more than that and he knew it.
And so he would take Asgot’s rope and they would tie him to that tree. And after nine days, if he was still alive, he would know what to do.
And the gods would know his name.
CHAPTER NINE
GODS, BUT LOKER and Hendil had done a good job with the tying. He had a rope around his hips and his chest, lashing him to the alder’s trunk so that he suspected he would hang there even without the branch below his feet which he could just reach. But he was glad of that branch for it meant he could share the burden between the ropes and his legs. Either side of him his arms were tied to smaller boughs with reeds which they had braided because they had not enough rope.
He was cut, too. Asgot had taken his wicked sharp knife to Sigurd’s right side, to the soft flesh beneath the twelfth rib. He had not cut deeply, the wound no longer than Sigurd’s thumb, but the sting of it felt twice as long and Olaf had cursed and smouldered like a day-old pyre when it was done because even a small cut like that can get the wound rot and kill a man as surely as an axe to the head, if only more slowly.
‘I don’t even want to think about what your father and brothers would say if they could see you now, lad,’ Olaf had growled at Sigurd as Hendil, who claimed to be a champion tree climber, had straddled the boughs checking the knots.
‘The boy’s father and brothers are dead because Jarl Harald let the Spear-God’s favour slip through his fingers like ale from a cracked horn,’ Asgot had said and they were hard words but perhaps not untrue.
‘I will win that favour back,’ Sigurd had said, wincing as Hendil yanked one of the reed ropes.
‘And a lot of good it’ll do you half dead on that tree in the middle of this shit hole,’ Olaf said, then batted a hand up at him. ‘If you think I’m going to sit on my arse and watch you kill yourself . . .’ He shook his head, scratching his sweat-beaded beard. ‘Thór’s bollocks, Sigurd, but you’re just doing King Gorm’s job for him. He’d be raising his mead horn to the sky for this piece of good luck.’
‘I’m not going to die, Uncle,’ Sigurd had said.
And neither was he.
But that first night was hard. The flesh in his arms prickled and numbed and all he could do was clench his fists over and over to try to keep some life in them. The rope over his chest made breathing difficult and knowing that he couldn’t move made him desperate to. But the worst thing that first night was the insects that fed on him wherever his skin was exposed and especially on his wrists and neck. The canopy around him seemed alive with tiny creatures who must have thought some god had laid on a feast for them, if they thought at all.
The others slept on the peat mound around him albeit fitfully because any sound at all out there in the fen had them touching spears or sword hilts or Thór’s hammer amulets and mumbling invocations to the gods to guard them from fen spirits or some bloody-minded draugr venturing from his grave. Though none of them, other than Sigurd himself, slept less than Alvi. If the lad’s eyes were not scouring the gloom they were riveted on Sigurd and wide as oar ports, so that Sigurd thought that maybe he had never heard the story of Óðin hanging on the great ash where the Æsir hold their daily courts. Perhaps the young man thought the men he had led into the fen were moon mad. Or perhaps Alvi knew the story well enough and was waiting for the Allfather himself to appear spear in hand, his one eye blazing beneath his broad-brimmed hat.
Despite his discomfort Sigurd felt a grim smile on his lips at that thought. What would Olaf say then, he wondered.
In the morning Alvi led the others back to the farmstead, but for Asgot who said he would stay until the end. Svein had wanted to stay too but Sigurd told him there was nothing he could do and that he would be better off making himself useful to Roldar and Sigyn around the farm.
Olaf had needed no such encouragement to leave, though he muttered something about his time being better spent keeping an eye on Alvi’s kin to make sure none of them went off anywhere running their mouths about the men who had come to Tau. Sigurd had rarely seen the man in such a black mood, not even when he had returned from a hunting trip to find that Svein’s father Styrbiorn, Slagfid and Harald had drunk Eik-hjálmr dry of mead and Styrbiorn had even used Olaf’s horn doing it.
‘I’ll bring you some ale tomorrow, Sigurd,’ Aslak promised, rubbing his ear, barely able to meet Sigurd’s eye because he felt guilty leaving his friend there.
‘No ale,’ Asgot said. ‘Nothing must pass his lips but that which I give him.’
‘Then he really is a dead man,’ Olaf had barked, already trudging off, for the godi was not known as a good man to have in charge of the cook pot.
Sigurd watched them until they had disappeared from view and then began to feel more uneasy than he had since setting off from Roldar’s farm the previous dawn.
‘Do you fear me, Sigurd?’ Asgot asked. The godi had been collecting plants from the fen before sunrise and now he sat on the mound below Sigurd, sniffing them, crushing and rolling leaves between finger and thumb or slicing them into small pieces with his eating knife.
‘Why would I fear you?’ Sigurd managed, his tongue feeling like a sliver of dried cracked leather in his mouth. But the truth was he did fear Asgot. The godi was like the sinkholes out there in the fen, part of neither this world nor the next. Asgot was a doorway between men and the gods and though he had always been loyal to Sigurd’s father, how could you fully trust a man you believed would slit his own mother’s throat – if he had a mother – if some capricious god had laid out the runes telling him to.
‘Your father had feared hirðmen around him. Men like Slagfid and Olaf and even your brother Thorvard who had the makings of a great champion. But they could not save him in the end.’
Sigurd felt himself bristle at this, or perhaps it was the needles pricking his flesh because he could barely move his limbs. ‘You did not save him either,’ he said, fixing his eyes on the godi which sometimes was like looking at any man but sometimes like staring into the heart of a flame. Now it was the latter.
‘No, I did not save him,’ Asgot admitted. ‘Though I had warned him not to take his ships out to fight Jarl Randver. For I had dreamt that Karmsundet was a sea of blood and I told Harald of it. He would not listen.’
‘He was oath-tied to King Gorm and would not stay at home because of a dream,’ Sigurd said. ‘Besides, you always talk of blood.’
‘Still, Sigurd, he is a fool who does not try to untangle the knot of his dreams.’ He sniffed at a leaf which he had rolled into a ball and stretched out his other hand as though grabbing at the air. ‘Dreams are nothing. And everything.’ Then he glared back at Sigurd. ‘I could not save your father but I will see that he has his revenge. You, Sigurd, will be Harald’s sword from beyond the grave. You will be the fire that consumes our enemies.’ He grinned then and it was a grim sight on his wolf-thin face. ‘If you do not die up there on that tree,’ he said.
Sigurd did not give that a reply. His mouth was so dry that he would not waste the spit. And he did not speak to Asgot again until the long dusk began to stretch out before them and the biting flies came out in hateful clouds again. And then he only spoke because he needed the godi to climb up with the shit bowl.
The next day Alvi, Svein and Aslak returned. He did not see them arrive but by now he was slipping in and out of consciousness and his vision was as blurry as if he had his eyes open underwater, so that it had taken
him a long while to work out who was there and who wasn’t.
He heard one of them telling Asgot that he thought Sigurd had died for his face had turned the colour of a dead man’s, but Asgot had told whoever it was that it was none of their concern now. There had been more conversation but to Sigurd it was like the murmur of the sea and his ears could not fish the words out of it. Perhaps Svein and Aslak slept on the peat mound with Asgot that night, but perhaps not. At one point Sigurd thought he saw tongues of flame out there among the sedges and spike rushes and his guts twisted like Jörmungand because he thought it must be King Gorm’s men or even Jarl Randver’s. That somehow they had found him and now he would die without lifting a finger because he was a fool, weak and starving and lashed to a tree as helpless as a hen strung up by its legs. But no blades pierced his flesh and the flames came no closer, so that in his stupor Sigurd realized they must be corpse candles held by unseen spirits.
He tried to ask Asgot about these flames but the words left his mouth in a slew of sound, like snow sliding off a roof, and nor could he be sure which bleary shape below him was the godi and so he closed his eyes again. He did not fear the fen spirits, because they must surely have thought he was dead, if they saw him at all. For Sigurd felt as though he were becoming part of the tree now, as though the alder’s limbs were folding him into its embrace.
Besides which, what could the dead do to him that was worse than what he was doing to himself? He felt himself laugh at that thought. Then pain flooded back in and for a heartbeat he knew one of the hateful draugar had put a flame to his side to punish him. Until he remembered the cut in his side, felt the sting of it and knew it was done by steel not fire, and with that thought panic rose in him again. How could he have been so stupid? Had he not seen Asgot’s knife at work a thousand times before? Had he not watched that blood-hungry blade reap lives for the gods ever since he could walk on his own legs?
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