God of Vengeance

by Giles Kristian

  ‘And why would I want two trouble-makers in my crew?’ Sigurd asked, though the truth was he already liked these two brothers from the sound of them.

  ‘Because when Jarl Randver sent six men to their stead to bring them to trial those men came back dead. Stiff-limbed and corpse-pale as my fighters in Guthorm’s barn.’ He shook his head. ‘Óðin’s arse but you took your time killing that proud fool today.’ Then his eyes lit. ‘Bjarni and Bjorn. Yes, that’s the lads, if memory serves.’ He barked at Guthorm’s serving girl to bring more ale. ‘The brothers have gone to ground now of course, like a couple of foxes, what with the jarl’s men sniffing all over for them.’ The man tapped his nose with a thick finger, looking from Asgot to Sigurd. ‘But I know where they can be found.’

  ‘I am listening,’ Sigurd said.

  Scowler held out his cup and the girl filled it to the brim. ‘First let me have another look at those greaves of yours, lad,’ he said.

  The last thing Sigurd remembered before he fell asleep amongst the reeds of Guthorm’s floor was a sad tune worming from the bone flute into his ear and wondering if he had just been a fool to give Ofeig Grettir his greaves in exchange for the whereabouts of two brothers who hated Jarl Randver. A greave per brother. He hoped they would be worth it. If they could be found.

  The first thing he heard when he woke in the heart of the night was the shrieks of the dying.

  ‘Get up, Sigurd,’ Asgot rasped, his face much too close, ‘the wolf is in the sheep pen.’ Sigurd blinked his eyes, trying to make sense of the shapes whirling in the gloom around them. Women were screaming and men were roaring to each other to arm themselves and get more lamps lit. The door was flung open onto the night and folk were spilling out of Guthorm’s longhouse.

  ‘Here,’ Svein said, offering Sigurd a spear which he had got from somewhere. Sigurd took it, standing and kicking off the furs he’d slept in.

  ‘What’s happening?’ It was Olaf beside them in the murk, long knife in one hand, the other rubbing the sleep from the bags of his eyes. ‘Who is attacking us?’ Somewhere a man was dying, the life gurgling from his throat as a blade ripped up into the precious meat behind his ribs.

  ‘Jarl Randver?’ Loker suggested, handing a shield to Hendil who was only just climbing to his feet. Aslak and Hagal were there too, meaning they were all accounted for which was a relief, for the stench of open bowels had hit Sigurd’s nose now and death was tainting the thick fug.

  ‘Doubt it,’ Solveig said, coming up behind them. ‘We’d be halfway to Valhöll on a plume of smoke if it were Randver. Jarls like a good hall-burning.’

  And suddenly Sigurd knew who this death in the darkness was.

  He muscled his way through the chaos to Guthorm’s hearth, Svein at his shoulder, and there threw two handfuls of kindling into the glowing, flame-licked ashes. After a moment light bloomed and they looked across the hall and saw the thrall with the crow-black hair cut a man’s throat with a scramasax. The scream died on the man’s lips and Guthorm’s thrall leapt back from a sword swing that would have cut him in half at the waist. It was Æskil In-Halti and he all but tripped over his lame leg as he tried to regain his balance, but the thrall stepped in and clasped Æskil round the throat then drove him back against the wall, punching the scramasax up into his belly.

  The thrall turned, snarling in the flamelight that chased the shadows from the place, as Lame-Leg slid down the wall behind him, hands pressed to his death wound.

  ‘I’ll put a spear through him,’ Svein said.

  ‘No, Svein.’ Sigurd clutched his friend’s shoulder. ‘Not yet.’

  Fastvi was wailing and Sigurd saw that she cradled her husband in her arms, the two of them down in the ale-soaked rushes. Guthorm had been skewered through the stomach with his own sword, so that over a foot of bloody blade stuck from his back. That had taken muscle, to get through so much fat.

  ‘We’ll get no more horse piss ale from Guthorm then,’ Svein said.

  Most of those who had been sleeping in that place had vanished into the night by now, though a knot of armed men were closing in on Guthorm’s thrall, Eid, Alver and Ingel amongst them.

  ‘How did the lad get free?’ Olaf asked but no one could answer that and then the thrall’s blade streaked out, cutting the arm that was scything an axe towards his face and he caught the axe before it hit the ground, sweeping it up to hack into the man’s groin. The man shrieked and fell away, scrambling off and leaving a wake of blood in the rushes. Then the thrall caught Ingel’s blade between the axe’s beard and haft, twisted the sword out of Ingel’s hand and slashed open his neck with the scramasax and turned to face the last two.

  Alver backed away, his own hand axe raised, then turned and fled leaving his friend Eid to his inevitable death.

  ‘Well, Sigurd,’ Eid called over his shoulder. ‘Are you going to help me send this Hel-spawn back into the freezing fog?’ His eyes were locked on the thrall’s and he seemed reluctant to make the first move for he might have known it would also be his last, and it seemed the young man was content to spin the thing out a little longer. ‘There are nine of you standing there. Do you not owe it to your host Guthorm to kill this animal?’ There was an edge of fear in his voice but his sword arm was steady enough.

  Sigurd lifted his spear in an overarm grip.

  ‘Kill him, Sigurd!’ Eid called. ‘I will pay you with Guthorm’s silver. Kill him now!’

  Sigurd looked at Asgot and noticed that there was a small key hanging from a thong around his neck. It was the kind of key that fit a set of slave irons. Asgot’s lip curled and Sigurd pulled back his arm. The spear cut through the smoke of Guthorm’s hall and plunged into Eid’s back between his shoulder blades and he staggered forward with the impact of it, right into the thrall who sank the scramasax up into his gut then shoved him off.

  ‘I never liked him,’ Olaf muttered.

  ‘He’s more dangerous than winter that one,’ Solveig said as they stood staring at the thrall, who stood with his own eyes riveted to Sigurd. There were shouts outside in the night and you didn’t need too much clever in you to know that whoever came in now might think that Sigurd and his Skudeneshavn men had had some hand in this slaughter. Eight men lay dead or dying amongst the floor rushes and the only other living person was Fastvi, who was insensible now anyhow, rocking over Guthorm’s body like some moon-mad crone.

  ‘What now then?’ Sigurd said to the thrall.

  The beardless lad grinned. ‘Now we leave,’ he said.

  ‘It talks,’ Hagal muttered.

  ‘How do we know you’re not going to put that axe in our heads the first chance you get?’ Sigurd asked him.

  ‘There’ll be no chance of that if we gut the lad here and now,’ Olaf suggested. ‘Wouldn’t want him on the row bench behind me.’

  ‘This young man is good for your saga, Sigurd,’ Hagal said.

  ‘It’s all gone!’ Aslak said, having gone outside to fetch their own weapons from the racks outside the hall. ‘Someone’s pilfered it all.’

  ‘This is turning into a strange night,’ Olaf said.

  ‘You can blame that horse piss ale we’ve been rinsing our guts with,’ Solveig said, ‘for nothing good comes of drinking bad ale.’

  ‘Why would they take our gear?’ Olaf growled.

  ‘Because they were going to murder you for all that silver you won up at the Weeping Stone,’ Guthorm’s thrall said, ‘and for whatever else they might find on you.’ He shrugged. ‘They are not used to good swords but they like the idea of them.’ He gestured to Olaf with the hand axe. ‘Mail too.’

  ‘Guthorm was going to murder us in our sleep?’ Olaf asked. ‘Pah! He didn’t have the balls, that one.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ Sigurd asked the blood-spattered, black-haired thrall.

  ‘I saw him spinning it with Æskil In-Halti,’ he said, then turned those wolf eyes on Olaf. ‘They chained me. They did not poke out my eyes or cut off my ears.’

  ‘Aye, wel
l I’m thinking they wish they had now,’ Olaf said, still bristling with the promise of violence, which was hardly surprising given what they had just seen. They had gone from sleep to slaughter in the blink of an ale-blurred eye and were all sharp with the shock of it.

  ‘But this is not our mess,’ Solveig said.

  Loker nodded. ‘We should be gone before daybreak for they are bound to fetch some loudmouth and his crew to deal with it.’

  ‘Aye, this place is one of Jarl Randver’s piss posts,’ Olaf said, ‘and he’s sure to send men to find out how Guthorm and all these nithings got themselves cut up.’ He turned to Sigurd and gestured to Guthorm’s thrall. ‘If it’s true about them planning to kill us in our sleep then this lad has done us a favour.’ He scratched his bearded cheek. ‘Maybe it would be ungrateful to spear him.’

  ‘Don’t let that stop you trying, Olaf,’ the thrall said, throwing out his arms as an invitation to them all to go and kill him. Or to try at least.

  But Sigurd remembered seeing Guthorm and Lame-Leg in each other’s ear holes earlier like maggots in old flesh. Recalled the look of Fastvi’s face too, when their eyes had met through the smoke. And given what kind of man her husband was, Sigurd was beginning to get a grip on it all. He considered walking over to Fastvi, who still sat in the reeds with her skewered husband, and putting a knife to her throat to make her spill the truth. But what difference would it make? He was not going to kill this thrall now. Not even if the lad’s story about Guthorm and Lame-Leg’s intended treachery had all the truth of one of Hagal Crow-Song’s taller tales.

  ‘I’d like to know how he slipped out of those irons,’ Svein said, nodding towards the dark corner in which the young man had been chained. Sigurd glanced at Asgot but the godi seemed to have his lips sewn on that matter and so Sigurd did not mention the key around his neck.

  ‘It seems to me you could have killed Guthorm and his friends any time you wanted,’ he said to the thrall, who was no longer a thrall really. ‘Why did you wait until now?’

  The young man tucked the axe into his belt then bent and pulled his scramasax’s blade through a fistful of Æskil In-Halti’s tunic. As for Lame-Leg he was as dead as a man could be though his eyes and mouth were open. ‘It seemed like a good night to do it, Sigurd son of Harald,’ he said. ‘Besides, if Guthorm had cut your throat I would have nothing better to do than stay under this roof eating his food and killing the fools who come to the Weeping Stone.’ He sheathed the knife and swept the black hair back from his face to reveal hollow cheeks and bones as sharp as the scramasax. His eyes bored into Sigurd’s. ‘You knew I would leave this farm with you one way or another,’ he said. ‘We both knew it up at the stone.’

  Sigurd could have tried to deny this but there was no point and so he just nodded.

  ‘Well if he’s coming with us then we’ll chain him again,’ Olaf said, ‘at least until we know he is not mad.’

  ‘No,’ Sigurd said. ‘This man will not be chained again.’ He walked over to the former thrall and stood square to him, his spear’s butt planted in the reeds. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Floki,’ the young man said.

  ‘Well then, Black Floki, will you help me avenge my kin and swear an oath to be my man if I balance that oath with food and silver and the favour you would expect from a good jarl?’ Sigurd felt the eyes on his back then for he had yet to ask any of them to swear an oath to him though he had always had it in his mind to.

  ‘Take me with you and I will kill whoever needs killing,’ the young man said, which was good enough for now, until Sigurd came up with the warp and weft of whatever oath by which he would bind them to him and him to them. Better not to get into it now seeing as it was the first any of them had heard of it and it was not as though Sigurd were a jarl. Not yet.

  ‘We should leave now,’ Asgot said, his first words since waking Sigurd during the killing. The night beyond the pine walls was quiet now, which was to be expected with many of the able-bodied men lying dead and the women and children and old ones having fled the place.

  ‘Was Ofeig Grettir in on it?’ Sigurd asked Floki, pointing his spear at Scowler who lay throat-cut on the floor. Unlike some of the others he was not armed other than with the longsax which lay by the claw of his white hand.

  ‘I did not ask him,’ Floki said. ‘But neither did he ever ask if I wanted to be chained to that rune stone up there and set upon by his turd-stinking boasters.’

  That was fair enough, Sigurd thought, for all that he had liked Scowler. Still, he would have his greaves back now and that was something to be happy about.

  He turned to Aslak, Solveig, Loker and Hendil. ‘You four arm yourselves with what you can find and go down to the sea. Judging by how many folk came with Ofeig Scowler he must have come in a good-sized boat.’

  ‘He won’t be needing it now,’ Olaf put in.

  ‘No, but his folk might be climbing into it now,’ Hagal suggested.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Solveig said, ‘but they won’t dare take it into the fjord now. They’ll wait till morning.’

  The four of them nodded to Sigurd and began to gather up what weapons they could find amongst the corpses, which was too many for men who had not had murder on their minds, as Solveig pointed out.

  Meanwhile, Sigurd and Floki and the others left Fastvi with the dead and went out into the night and filled their lungs with the clean, spruce-scented air, and in the barn beside Guthorm’s longhouse they found their war gear. Svein also found a brynja worth a small hoard. It was still on the giant whom Black Floki had killed with an axe to the skull up at the Weeping Stone but it did not take Svein and Hagal long to pull it off the stiffening body, and it had to be Svein’s for it would have drowned any of the others but for Olaf and he had a fine brynja already.

  And when he was in it Svein looked like the Thunder God himself. Olaf nodded and growled deep in his throat which they all took as a sign that he thought Svein looked as fine as a man could look in a brynja. Though Sigurd knew there was more to it than that and that Olaf was seeing in Svein the young man’s father, his old friend Styrbiorn, who was dead and gone now like so many of Olaf’s sword-brothers.

  No brynja for Sigurd yet. That war gear which had belonged to his father and brothers and should have come to Sigurd in turn had gone as spoils to King Gorm in the pine wood near Avaldsnes. War Song, his father’s great sword, now sat silent in its scabbard in the oath-breaker’s hall, along with Harald’s helmet with its panels of polished silver plate and its high crest of bronze that came down to a raven’s face between the brows. Such things alone were worth facing death for and they would be Sigurd’s in time. Or he would be a corpse himself.

  ‘I have left something,’ Black Floki said, stalking off back towards Guthorm’s hall. Sigurd glanced at Olaf who shrugged and said there was nothing else for them to do but get down to the shore.

  But Svein suggested they might as well see what food there was for the taking, seeing as Guthorm would no longer be getting fat on it. ‘And all his guests have gone,’ Svein added, sweeping an arm across the rolling moonlit pasture across which folk had fled in terror like shadows at sunrise, back to their own farms and steads.

  ‘I’d have said the same thing had I not still been half asleep,’ Olaf said through a yawn.

  ‘What about Guthorm’s woman? There would be no honour in taking all her food,’ Hagal said. ‘She has always been kind to me.’ The words were barely off his tongue before a shriek like that of a vixen in heat tore the night. They looked across the yard towards the longhouse.

  ‘Well that is that then,’ Olaf said.

  Some moments later the door creaked open and Black Floki came out holding Fastvi’s bead and amber necklace in one hand and the two brass brooches which had fastened her dress in the other. On his right arm he wore Guthorm’s warrior rings, one silver, one brass, which Sigurd thought might have caused some muttering being on the arm of a man not yet into his first beard. But had they not all just watched Floki
beat five men?

  ‘No one can say he has not earned them,’ Sigurd said. ‘Who knows how many others he’s made corpses of up at that rune stone since Guthorm put that chain around his neck.’

  ‘True enough,’ Olaf admitted, ‘but if we’re going to let him pilfer from the dead, and he’s with us now, we might as well see if any of the others have got anything worth having.’

  ‘What’s done is done,’ Svein agreed.

  So they went back into the longhouse and they took brooches, knives, belts and buckles, rings and bone combs, and Asgot found a dozen pieces of hacksilver which Ofeig Grettir had sewn into the hem of his tunic.

  ‘Keep it,’ Sigurd said when the godi offered him the silver. ‘Use it to buy the gods’ favour when we need it.’

  ‘Or mead,’ Svein suggested, shrugging at Sigurd when Asgot hissed something nasty at him.

  And when they had plundered as thoroughly as any raiding party they left Guthorm’s farm to the dead and their ghosts and made their way down to the sea upon which the moon spilled its glow like molten silver from a die.

  Where Solveig and the others were waiting aboard a fine-looking knörr, their beards split by smiles almost as broad as the boat they stood in.

  Bjarni’s foot caught the big man square between his legs and the big man doubled over and probably would have roared in agony had Bjarni not brought the two-foot length of smooth ash down onto the back of his head, breaking the stick in two and doing who knew what to the man’s skull.

  The crowd bellowed and cheered, gasped and winced and Bjorn swore at his brother who shrugged as if to ask what the matter was. Not that Bjorn had the time to explain. He caught a blow on his own stick and forced his opponent’s length of ash wide and stepped in to hammer a fist into the man’s bearded chin. The man staggered backwards, raising his shield as he fell to one knee, but Bjorn was on him and grabbed the shield’s rim with his left hand, pushed its bottom edge into the ground and leant over the thing to smash his stick down onto the shield arm just above the elbow joint. On both knees now, his shield dropped, the man looked wide-eyed at the two brothers coming for him.