God of Vengeance

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Or more likely,’ Olaf muttered.

  Sigurd ignored this. ‘Furthermore, they will be more likely to want to join us, because they have seen that we are men who know our spear-craft and who fear nothing.’

  ‘Nothing except falling rocks,’ Solveig said.

  ‘I will go,’ Loker said.

  ‘And me,’ Aslak put in.

  ‘Well I am going of course,’ Svein said, still sitting against one of Sea-Sow’s ribs, eyes closed and ashen-faced.

  ‘You are hardly made for climbing,’ Black Floki told him.

  ‘And what do you know of it, little man?’ Svein said, turning groggy eyes on Black Floki.

  ‘No, Svein. You stay here and rest,’ Sigurd said. ‘Floki is right. You are more likely to pull the mountain down on top of us.’ This put the curl of a smile amongst the red bristles.

  ‘Don’t worry, Svein, if I find a piece of your brain out there I’ll make sure to bring it back for you,’ Aslak said with a grin, which got him a stinging insult in return.

  ‘I could climb to the top of Yggdrasil itself,’ Black Floki said, ‘and you have already seen that no man can kill me.’

  This got some grim looks from the others, for in truth no one quite knew what to make of the young man who had yet to grow a beard but could make a slaughter to turn Týr the Battle God green with envy.

  ‘We cannot all go. We must guard the ship or risk being stranded in this gloomy hole until Ragnarök,’ Hagal said, which was true enough even if it was just his way of wriggling out of it.

  ‘Well I’m not going, if that helps,’ Solveig put in.

  ‘Whatever I think of the scheme, you’re not going without me, lad,’ Olaf said.

  And so it was decided.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE CLIMB WAS treacherous, not least because a fine rain filled the air and made the rock slippery as snail snot, as Loker put it, cursing as his shoe slid from a foothold and his knee crunched against the stone. It would have been easier without having shields strapped to their backs, but they knew the outlaws had bows.

  ‘I’ll not get myself killed by an arrow shot by some cave-dwelling, dwarf-swiving nithing,’ Olaf had said, and now he had the hardest job of them all, with his brynja and his years. Not that he would have admitted to being less able to climb that rock than any other man.

  ‘This way,’ Sigurd said, pointing at a boulder- and scrub-strewn crevice leading up the cliff face. He led, followed by Olaf, Aslak, Loker and then Black Floki last, the young man seeming as undaunted by a perilous climb as he was by sharp steel aimed at his flesh.

  Sigurd nodded at a pile of glistening dung pebbles. ‘If goats come this way it must be possible,’ he said.

  ‘And see that gull there,’ Olaf said, pointing at the shrieking bird wheeling above the cove and the knörr beached on it. ‘He is flying, so how hard can it be?’ Sigurd’s reply to this was to climb.

  Rather than take the more direct route up to the cave’s mouth they had waded across the shallows back in the direction of the open fjord and there found another way up. After what had happened to Svein no one thought it a good idea to climb up to the cave from the beach below it.

  ‘These brothers had better be worth it,’ Olaf said, grunting as he took hold of the tufted grass and hauled himself over an outcrop. They had left their spears behind, bringing swords, scramasaxes and axes tucked in their belts because they had known they would need two hands to climb.

  ‘Ofeig Scowler told me that they were two of the best fighters he had ever seen,’ Sigurd said. ‘They killed six of Jarl Randver’s thegns who turned up at their farm.’

  ‘Pah! I have killed six men with a fart,’ Olaf said.

  ‘And it was only six because four others had left the hall,’ Aslak behind him put in, slipping on the scree and falling to his hands and knees.

  ‘Need some help there, youngen?’ Olaf asked him, enjoying seeing the younger man struggle.

  Sigurd watched from a ledge two or three spear-lengths higher up. ‘That is like a snake offering a fish advice on walking,’ he said.

  ‘Watch your tongue, lad,’ Olaf growled up at him. ‘I was climbing rocks like this when you were still sitting on a hill of your own shit.’

  Sigurd looked down at Sea-Sow and Solveig waved to show that all was quiet down there. Then they scrambled left and edged along a rain-slick lip until Sigurd found another route leading up towards the tree line, which was itself higher than the cave entrance. But he would rather come to its mouth from above than below and so it was worth the time it would take, even if his heart was forging a nightmare on the anvil of his chest. For to slip or miss a footing now was to fall one hundred feet to the rock or the black water, neither of which likely ends would make it into the kind of tale they hoped Hagal was weaving.

  When they got to the trees they sat for a while, getting their breath back and replenishing their nerve, then they made their way back round into the cove and down towards the black yawn of the cave’s mouth. But when they crept into that dark, dank place, shields raised before them, swords or axes in their hands, they found it empty.

  Black Floki toed a pile of charred sticks and ash. Here and there were animal bones and crab claws, some gourds and a pail of water.

  ‘Well would you sit here waiting for us?’ Sigurd said.

  ‘I would probably go that way,’ Aslak said, pointing to a well-trodden path that led back out of the cave and round to the left of it and up into the trees.

  Sigurd looked at Olaf, who nodded, so they took the path, which the spindly pine and wind-bent birch hid from sight of anyone on the beach or in the bay below, and followed it up to the cliff top.

  Where armed men were waiting.

  ‘They don’t look like much.’ Olaf loosened off his neck and shoulders and hefted his shield and sword.

  Black Floki’s grin was like a wolf’s as he took the short axe from his belt and swept it once through the rain-hazed air.

  ‘We’re not here to fight them,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘Try telling them that,’ Olaf said.

  There were eleven men and seven women and all armed with spears but for three of the women who had bows, arrows nocked and pointing their way. Sigurd spotted movement amongst the trees off to the side and for a moment thought the outlaws planned to ambush them.

  ‘Just children,’ Olaf murmured, nodding towards the trees. Children who were meant to be long gone but were staying to watch how things unfurled.

  ‘We do not want to fight you,’ Sigurd called to the armed folk, who were formed up in a shieldwall, albeit only ten of them had shields.

  In their centre was a bald-headed, broad-shouldered man whose black beard stuck from his chin in three stiff braids, and he said something at which the three bow women stepped forward, drew back their strings and loosed. But the distance was too great to do any damage and Sigurd stepped forward and swept his shield through the air, knocking one of the arrows out of its flight. Of the other shafts one fell short and the last flew wide.

  ‘The folk around here really don’t care much for visitors, do they?’ Olaf said.

  ‘We are looking for two brothers,’ Sigurd called, ‘but we mean them no harm.’

  ‘No harm?’ Three Braids yelled. ‘You come here in your fat-bellied ship, looking like trading men, then ambush and slaughter our brothers. You deceived us!’

  ‘You attacked us,’ Sigurd countered. ‘What would you have done in our place?’

  ‘I would have stayed away from here,’ Three Braids said. ‘Now our friends are killing those you left on the beach. You will all die.’

  ‘He’s bluffing,’ Olaf growled. Sigurd nodded. If Solveig and the others were in a fight now Hagal would have blown his horn, but there was no horn nor any battle din that they could hear coming from the cove.

  ‘You are lying,’ Sigurd accused. ‘Do you know the brothers Bjarni and Bjorn? I have an offer for them.’

  Now another man, ruddy-cheeked and fair-beard
ed, raised his spear and pointed it at Sigurd. ‘The last men that said the same thing ended up eaten by dogs and crows,’ he called.

  ‘So he is one of them,’ Loker said under his breath.

  ‘And that one with the curls and the spear is his brother,’ Sigurd said, glancing at the man who had just growled at the other for all but introducing himself as one of the sought-after pair.

  ‘At least we did not kill them last night,’ Loker said.

  ‘There is still time for that,’ Olaf put in, as the bow women nocked arrows and strode forward, aiming higher this time. ‘Shields,’ Olaf said matter-of-factly.

  This time Black Floki stepped forward and to the side, scything his sword at an arrow and cutting it in two, which was quite a thing to see, as Olaf admitted, after letting another shaft embed itself in his shield. ‘Ha. I was young and stupid once,’ he said to Floki.

  ‘We are enemies of Jarl Randver of Hinderå,’ Sigurd shouted along the stony path. He heard the rain hitting the leaves and branches around them and a moment later it was striking his own head and shoulders. ‘I have an offer for Bjarni and Bjorn.’

  ‘And here’s my offer to you,’ the man with the ruddy cheeks yelled, then ran towards them and hurled his spear, which streaked in a blur of bladed death and struck Sigurd’s shield like a hammer blow. Sigurd staggered back under the impact and now looked down at the blade which had punched right through the wood and might have planted itself in his ribs had he not held the shield away from his body.

  ‘Thór’s arse, that does it!’ Olaf gnarred.

  The spear had not cut Sigurd and yet it might as well have, for the fury flowed out of him like hot blood from a gash. He hurled the useless, spear-pierced shield aside, pulled the scramasax from its sheath and, this in his left hand, Troll-Tickler in his right, charged.

  ‘Hit them hard!’ Olaf coming after him roared, and Sigurd knew that he was pissing away all that they had come for but he did not care. He was in the beast’s maw now and the beast wanted blood.

  The outlaws did not. Like leaves before the wind they scattered, vanishing into the pines either side of the track. But for two of them, who stood there for a moment, one with a shield and an axe and the other with just a scramasax now. Then these two, who looked too similar not to be brothers, glanced at each other, turned and ran.

  And Sigurd ran after them.

  The outlaws ran uphill, which was clever of them seeing as they were not cumbered by war gear like their pursuers, then they left the path and tore off through the trees like a pair of boars. An arrow streaked past Sigurd’s right shoulder, whipping through leaves and branches, but he was not interested in the others now. He jumped deadfall and splashed through puddles, slipped on greasy roots and squelched through blankets of thick damp moss. He could hear his companions behind him, the snap and crack of the brittle branches they broke, the bellows hiss of their hard breathing as they wove between the rough pine trunks.

  He saw Aslak leap a fallen trunk and pull ahead off to the left, a fleeting shape in the gloom.

  ‘Leave one for me!’ Olaf called, falling behind in his brynja and helmet, his voice almost lost in the rain’s seething.

  Up they went, leaping brooks where they could, splashing through the shallow water where it was too wide, being drawn deeper into a land that they did not know. A crow clattered from its roost, croaking bitterly, and Sigurd caught a glimpse of a fox slinking off into the ferns, and he did not slow because Black Floki was off his right shoulder and Sigurd wanted to kill the brothers himself.

  The brother with the shield cast it aside now and the two of them scrambled up a steep bank, hauling themselves up using roots and rocks and brambles, and so Sigurd sheathed his own blades and climbed after them. And when he got to the top he stood dragging breath into his scalding lungs, his face running with rain, blinking it away as he watched the brothers charging off towards another rocky mound. And like an arrow to the gut Sigurd was struck by the senselessness of what he was doing, chasing two men in the arse end of Lysefjorden when he should have been avenging his murdered kin. The muscles in his thighs felt as though they were on fire and his forearms were scored bloody from raising them to shield his face from bare branches and scourging fronds.

  Then he cursed and took off after them.

  ‘What now?’ Loker asked, arming rain and sweat from his face, his chest heaving. He and Sigurd stood on the bank of a stream, eyes scouring the forest into which the outlaws had vanished. Sigurd did not know where Black Floki, Aslak or Olaf were. They had taken different routes through the trees and had become separated.

  ‘They cannot run for ever,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘And we can?’ Loker asked, spitting a wad of thick saliva into the singing stream. ‘Who knows if these brothers can fight, but I would vouch for their running. If Jarl Randver has not managed to get hold of them then maybe we should give it up.’

  Sigurd eye-riveted him. ‘You will learn that I am not a man who gives up so easily, Loker,’ he said, sweeping his long wet hair from his face, and just then they heard a shout, the voice cut off in half a heartbeat.

  Loker pointed north and Sigurd nodded. ‘Listen,’ he said. Loker stilled his heaving chest and they both held their breath, ears turned towards the direction from which the shout had come, sifting the low roar of the falls from the higher pitched hiss of the rain and the drips finding their way through the forest canopy. ‘A waterfall,’ Sigurd said.

  Then he was running north, loping like a wolf because he knew they were close to whoever had called out and he did not want to blunder onto the edge of a blade. Loker ran with him, matching him stride for stride, a short axe in his right hand.

  And neither of them could have foreseen what they would find.

  They climbed a steep narrow track up onto a ridge and followed a grassy trail which snaked between several rocky mounds and led them to an ancient maiden ash, whose vast canopy spread far and wide above them and whose roots had somehow found purchase enough in this rocky place to support it. As he passed the ash Sigurd reached out and placed a hand on the trunk, whose old bark was grey as iron and etched like a rune stone that only the gods could read.

  ‘Over here, Sigurd,’ Loker barked, raising his axe and striding towards a hole in the ground partially covered by sticks and leaves. It looked to Sigurd like a trapping pit for wolves or boar, or even elk perhaps. But when they peered into the pit, which was a crevice in the rock rather than a hole dug in soil, the eyes looking back at them belonged to a man. ‘Óðin’s eye!’ Loker said.

  ‘Óðin had nothing to do with it,’ the man growled back at them, cradling his left arm which he had clearly hurt in the fall. His cheek was cut too and blood was working its way through his fair beard. Lucky for him he had not broken his neck for the pit was near twelve feet deep, its rock bottom and walls crisscrossed with the giant ash’s roots.

  ‘Where is your brother?’ Sigurd asked the man, whom he recognized as the one who had thrown the spear at him.

  The outlaw winced with pain and took up the scramasax he had dropped amongst the old roots and the debris which had fallen with him into the pit. Then he looked up at Sigurd, smearing blood across his cheek with the back of the hand gripping the long knife’s bone handle. ‘It is not my brother who you should be worried about,’ he said.

  And then Sigurd looked up and saw her, a spear-throw ahead of him amongst a stand of white-skinned birches. A woman in a brynja of polished rings, hefting shield and spear, a sword scabbarded at her left hip and the hilt of a longsax sticking out behind her, nestled in the small of her back in easy reach of her right hand. She wore a helmet almost as fine as his father’s, with eye guards and at its crown a spike from which hung a crest of white horsehair. Her own hair lay on either shoulder in two thick golden braids.

  And Sigurd could have stared at her until Ragnarök, had she not come at him shrieking like a hawk. He got his sword up in time to turn the spear blade wide, then slashed with the scramasax, but
the shieldmaiden blocked with the spear shaft and hammered her shield into Sigurd’s face, sending him reeling. Then Loker was there and his axe blow gouged a sliver of limewood from her shield but she swept her spear low and Loker had to leap back or get his shins ripped open.

  But Loker was a good fighter and knew that if he got past the spear blade his axe would make short work of the woman, even in her brynja. He leant back and that blade cut the air a finger’s length from his face, then he threw himself forward but the shieldmaiden got her shield up and Loker’s axe smashed into it, the head sticking in the wood, then she hauled the shield back, ripping the axe from Loker’s grip, and cast the ill-weighted thing aside.

  And Sigurd saw his chance.

  ‘Move and I’ll gut you,’ a voice snarled in his ear, and he felt an axe blade pressing against the small of his back and he cursed because he had found the other brother. Or rather the brother had found him.

  The shieldmaiden shrieked again and jabbed with the spear but Loker turned side on and grabbed hold of it, wrenching it from her hands, yet even as he turned it over to bring the blade to bear she whipped the longsax from its sheath behind her back and brought it down with a grunt, hacking off Loker’s leading hand.

  Loker bellowed in shock and pain and Sigurd twisted, knocking the axe head wide, then ran at the shieldmaiden and put everything he had behind a sword swing that would have cleaved her in half had she not got her own sword and longsax up to meet the blow, though it drove her to her knees.

  ‘Sigurd!’ Aslak yelled, rushing from the trees to stand between him and the outlaw. Then Black Floki was there and he threw an arm round the shieldmaiden’s neck, putting the edge of his long knife against her pale throat.

  ‘Hold,’ Sigurd called out, ‘don’t kill her!’

  ‘Fuck! Kill her!’ Loker screamed, spittle flying or hanging in his beard. He was on his knees, right hand gripping the spurting stump of his severed wrist, blood welling through his fingers and running down both arms.