‘No, Floki!’ Sigurd roared, turning back to face the outlaw who seemed unsure what to do now that he could hear his brother calling to him from the trapping pit. ‘Drop the axe,’ Sigurd said, as Aslak edged round to the outlaw’s left, giving the man something to think about.
‘Better do what he says, lad, unless you want me to spit your brother here and turn him over a good fire.’ Sigurd glanced round to see Olaf bent double and panting like a hound over the pit, the shieldmaiden’s spear in his hands.
The outlaw growled a curse, turned and hurled the hand axe and it turned end over end before thunking into a birch tree some twenty paces away. Sigurd nodded, as much at the skill in that throw as with the relief of not having to kill either brother. ‘If he does anything other than sit on his arse, kill him,’ he told Aslak, who nodded and moved in with his sword.
‘I need fire,’ Olaf said, going over to Loker whose face was bone-white now and clenched in agony.
‘Asgot will know what to do,’ Aslak called.
‘Loker will be dead long before we get him back to the ship,’ Olaf said. ‘Gods, it’s wetter than a fish’s fart, but I need fire and quickly.’
Sigurd went over to the birch trees to see if he could find some dry bark to use as kindling. Even the litter beneath the maiden ash’s huge canopy was slick with rain. ‘Everything is wet,’ he said.
‘Who are you? Why are you here?’ the shieldmaiden asked.
‘Hold your tongue or I’ll cut it out,’ Black Floki hissed at her, hauling off her helmet and throwing it aside.
Sigurd went over to her while Olaf tied Loker’s belt off around the bloody stump. ‘We came to find these men,’ he told her, pointing to the pit and back towards the man on his arse by Aslak. ‘I have a blood-debt to settle with Jarl Randver of Hinderå and heard that these brothers might like to help me collect it.’
‘You are not here for the spring?’ she said, her blue eyes sharp as arrow heads and shining like the rings of her brynja, which looked more like silver than iron or steel, Sigurd thought.
‘We know of no spring,’ Sigurd said. ‘We came only for these men. They ran. We followed them.’
The shieldmaiden held his gaze for a while then, during which Olaf was muttering that Loker did not have long and they should at least put a sword in his other hand. ‘I have fire,’ she said. ‘I will take you.’
Sigurd turned and strode over to the brother Aslak was guarding and took his tunic in one hand, putting the scramasax in the other to the man’s neck. Then he hauled him to his feet and dragged him through the clearing to the pit in which his brother stood looking up, helpless as a trapped beast. Then Sigurd threw the man into the pit and he fell to all fours, spitting a foul insult up at Sigurd, who turned back to the shieldmaiden, gesturing at Floki to get her on her feet.
‘Show us the way,’ he said.
Smoke had billowed out of the dwelling when the shieldmaiden opened the door, wreathing them and making them cough, splutter and curse. But it had been Black Floki who said there was more to it than the dried herbs smouldering on the hearth stone and the scent of the birchwood cracking and popping in the flames beside them.
‘There is seiðr here,’ he had muttered, ‘thick as a bear fur.’ Sigurd had known he was right and the others had touched iron hilts or axe heads as they ducked under the rune-carved lintel and entered the flame-licked dark.
They had not waited for their eyes to adjust to the gloom but had carried Loker straight in despite their own misgivings, for the man was already more than halfway to Valhöll, as Olaf had pointed out when he had put a scramasax in Loker’s hand, clutching both with his own as he and Sigurd had lugged him through the forest. They had left Aslak guarding the pit trap with orders to spear the brothers if they tried to get out of it, and Aslak had taken up the woman’s shield in case they hurled a blade at him, for they had refused to give up their weapons.
Now Sigurd had one eye on Loker and the other on the woman who had cut off his hand, because it was not impossible that she had brought them to that place to murder them with steel or with seiðr. Though if so she would have to be quick about it, quicker than Floki’s long knife, which never strayed far from that pale throat of hers.
‘Ale?’ Olaf asked the woman. She shook her head and Olaf spat a curse because ale would have numbed Loker’s pain at least a little. ‘Get it hot,’ he told her, nodding at the fire. ‘Very hot.’ She was feeding it the driest logs she had found in the pile under the eaves outside and when the last of them was in place she took a pair of bellows and pumped them so that the flames roared angrily, lying flat with each gust but leaping hot and ever more furious after. Then the woman pulled another bunch of herbs down from amongst those hanging from the rafters and threw it into the fire, where the dry leaves crackled and flared. The pungent smoke stung Sigurd’s eyes and got inside his skull, and Olaf growled that he knew now how the mackerel felt when they were strung up through the gills in the smoke house and left to dry.
‘It will help with the pain,’ she said, nodding towards Loker.
‘Aye, by choking him to death,’ Olaf murmured, looking around the pine-log cabin for the tools he would need.
‘Maybe that’s what happened to her,’ Black Floki said, pointing to the bed against the far wall. A chain-hung oil lamp flickered near the head end and by its sooty light Sigurd saw a braid of black hair against pale skin. Then he made out the face, white as an owl’s egg, the eyes closed and still as a waveless sea, which told him the woman was dead. Even in the smoke and the dark Sigurd was surprised they had not seen her before now. But then, there was not much to see. The silver and brown pelts lay neatly over the figure as they would over nothing more than a bolster or two. Or over a corpse from which the flesh had wasted, leaving skin taut as a spirit drum over bone.
‘Frigg’s arse!’ Loker suddenly roared, spitting saliva and fury, the torment of that terrible wound bringing him back from death’s darkness for a moment and drawing all eyes to him again. Squirming, his eyes sharpened with pain, he tried to look at the belt-tied stump, but Olaf told him there was nothing much to see and he was better off thinking about some pretty girl. Not that he would ever hold one properly again.
‘Hold him still,’ Olaf growled at Sigurd, who was slathered in Loker’s blood now as he tried to force the man’s shoulders back against the cabin’s wall whilst holding out the ruined arm for Olaf to work on.
Without a word the shieldmaiden went over to a dark corner and when she turned around she was holding a hafted axe. Black Floki’s sword whispered out of its scabbard and Sigurd’s hand fell to his scramasax, but the woman paid them no heed as she went over to the fire and burrowed the head of the axe into the fire’s heart where the birch was burning fast and hot.
‘Aye, that will do,’ Olaf said. ‘And if it kills him then it’s better he dies by axe than by griddle.’ Sigurd’s eye went to the two pans sitting on the hearth stones, thinking that their flat bottoms would have been better but knowing that if it was him dribbling blood from a handless stump he would prefer men said it was an axe, rather than a griddle, that finished him off.
Olaf turned back to Loker. ‘Here, lad, get your teeth round this.’ He put the sheath of his eating knife between Loker’s teeth and Loker bit down on the leather so that he looked like a snarling dog, his eyes wide with terror and pain.
‘We don’t have mead, Loker,’ Sigurd told him.
Not that Loker needed warning about the horrendous agony that was coming. He garbled and growled around the sheath something about there being mead in the Allfather’s hall, which was where he thought he would be soon enough. Sigurd nodded. In Valhöll someone was already filling a horn for Loker, he thought.
‘Is it ready?’ Olaf asked the shieldmaiden, pushing Loker’s tunic sleeve out of the way, revealing old scars and the soot-stained lines engraved in the skin, all blood-slathered.
She lifted the axe head from the fire. The iron was beginning to glow and the wood inside
the eye, along with the haft’s heel and shoulder, was smouldering from the heat.
‘It’ll have to do,’ Olaf said. It was not yet red hot but if they waited any longer Loker would be as dead as the woman in the bed. ‘Give it here.’
The woman shook her head and gestured for Olaf to hold the stump out, and with this Sigurd put his weight into Loker, making sure the other arm was pinned by his side, and then it came: that scalding axe head onto the raw flesh. Foul smoke bloomed. Blood bubbled and seethed. And Loker screamed.
His eyes bulged in his head and he bucked against the wall and against Sigurd who held him the way a man would hold a boar he knew would turn and gore him if he let it go. The scream was a strangled, throat-clenched thing that raised the hairs on Sigurd’s arms and the back of his neck and Black Floki suggested hitting Loker hard on the head so that it might knock him unconscious but Olaf would not risk it because he had seen someone kill a wounded man trying that.
‘Enough!’ Olaf said and the woman pulled the axe with its new sheath of charred flesh from the wound, and Loker’s eyes rolled back in his head and his body went still.
‘Tell my father and brothers I will join them when I have avenged us,’ Sigurd said, grimacing against the stench that filled the place like poison in a boil.
But Loker did not take that message to Sigurd’s kin in Valhöll.
Because he was still alive.
They knew this because when he next opened his eyes he looked at his shortened left arm, the blackened end of which they had smeared with a poultice of mashed leeks and honey and bound tight, and cursed the gods in a foul-mouthed torrent. The sight of the woman who had cleaved off his hand almost gave him the strength to stand, but Olaf pressed him back down, Loker bawling about how he was going to open her from cunny to neck. Then he fell back against the wall and passed out again.
‘Who are you?’ Sigurd asked the woman, who had so far said more with her weapons, one way or another, than she had with her tongue. But Sigurd had never seen a woman in such a fine brynja – in any brynja – nor had he ever known a woman so skilled with sharp steel.
‘She’s a corpse goddess,’ Olaf said. ‘A valkyrie. What else can she be?’ He was half serious.
‘My name is Valgerd,’ the woman said. ‘I am sworn to protect the völva of the spring. As was my mother sworn to protect the last völva.’
‘She’s the völva?’ Sigurd asked, nodding to the bed in the flame-played shadows and its dead cargo.
Valgerd did not need to answer that.
‘I failed,’ she said, those two words like stone anchors dropped into still water. She looked back at the bed and her next words were for the dead woman in it, not the men standing by her hearth. ‘I could not hold to my oath. It is broken.’ When she turned back to Sigurd he saw in her piercing eyes not sorrow but anger. ‘The gods are cruel,’ she said, a flash of teeth in the gloom. ‘Their greatest pleasure is to torment us.’
‘Aye, I’ll not argue with that,’ Olaf agreed. ‘They’ll show you a sleeping sea and watch you cast off, laughing into their ale as a storm comes out of nowhere and you’re bailing for your life.’
‘You live up here alone, Valgerd?’ Sigurd said. There was only one bed in the cabin and Sigurd wondered if Valgerd had been sleeping next to the dead völva these last days or whether the woman had died in the last night. His nose might have told him the answer to that if not for the pungent herb and hearth smoke filling the place.
‘For five years now,’ she said.
They had seen no other dwellings in the forest. Valgerd and the völva had been lovers, Sigurd knew then, living alone by the sacred spring, each bound to the other in their way. You are alone now, he thought but did not say. Instead he asked why she had attacked them, wondering if he was doing a better job of hiding his thoughts than Olaf was. Because, gods but this woman was beautiful! She was Freyja herself. The gold ropes of her hair hung beside a face that was fiercely proud, eyes the blue of glacial ice and sharp as rivets. Hunter’s eyes. Hawk’s eyes. That thought struck Sigurd like a forge hammer to his chest, as the mist from his hanging visions swirled in his mind.
She shrugged. ‘Men come sometimes. They come and I kill them.’
‘Why?’ Sigurd asked, tearing himself from the spell of her face and wondering where she had got such a brynja, its many hundreds of interlinked rings swathing her like iron skin and worth a decent hoard. He supposed a smith – and a skilled one at that – must have made it specially for her.
‘Why do I kill them?’
‘Why do they come?’ Sigurd asked.
She hesitated then. With Loker unconscious on the floor, all attention had turned to her now and she looked at those standing around her, at Floki, Olaf and Sigurd, who got the impression Valgerd was wondering if she could kill them all there and then.
‘Some come demanding that the völva tell them their future,’ she said. ‘Some come for the spring and the silver which folk have offered it since the beginning of the world.’ She sharpened those eyes on Sigurd now. ‘They come to take and so I kill them.’
‘Do you know the men in your pit?’ Olaf asked her.
‘I might have seen one of them before, if he is one of those who live on the shore. They don’t bother us and we don’t bother them.’ She flinched slightly at the we of that. ‘I have no quarrel with them if they stay down there.’
‘Well our friend here has a quarrel with you,’ Olaf said, thumbing at Loker who was slumped and milk-white where the skin was not bloody. ‘You owe him. Tell me you have the silver to pay for the hand you took and the soreness of it.’
Soreness. That fell a little short, but Olaf was being proud on Loker’s behalf.
Valgerd stared but said nothing.
‘What about that brynja?’ Black Floki suggested. ‘Some jarl with more booty than brains would buy that off him for his wife, I’d wager.’
‘You will have to kill me to take it,’ she said.
Now it was Olaf’s turn to shrug. ‘Your life for his hand. That should cover it,’ he said.
‘What about the silver in the spring?’ Floki said, but there was little weight in it and no one answered. Not that Floki could have expected much from that suggestion, for none of them was of a mind to steal from a sacred spring. You might as well poke a spear in Óðin’s one eye.
‘You could come with us.’ Sigurd heard the words before he knew he had said them. Olaf laughed and Black Floki swore.
‘This smoke’s withered your wits, lad!’ Olaf said, but Sigurd did not take his eyes from those hawk’s eyes before him.
‘It seems to me that you have no reason to stay here now.’
‘Fuck, but I must need to clean my ears out for I could have sworn you just offered this valkyrie a sea chest and a nest in the thwarts.’
‘She is a good fighter,’ Sigurd said. ‘Loker would attest to that.’
For a while Olaf just stood there wide-eyed, mouth gaping, then he gave a short bark of a laugh. ‘Loker will want to put a spear in her! And I won’t blame him!’
That was like water off a gull’s wing to Valgerd. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked Sigurd.
‘I am going to kill Jarl Randver of Hinderå,’ he replied, as though it were no more of a thing than taking a plunge in a river.
‘Why?’ Valgerd asked.
‘Because he has taken from me,’ Sigurd said, knowing that after what Valgerd had told them about men coming to steal from the spring she would understand. ‘If you join us I will treat you as I would any of those who follow me. There will be silver. And there will be blood.’
‘I have no need of silver,’ she said distastefully, though Sigurd knew the hook was in her mouth all the same. ‘There will be sword fame too,’ he added, ‘for we are few and Jarl Randver is a powerful man. When we beat him word of it will spread quickly.’
‘Like fire in dry thatch,’ Black Floki said through a grin.
The four of them stood looking at each other in the flame-played
gloom which they shared with a dead seeress and a wolf-jointed warrior who looked dead but wasn’t.
‘Well you can tell Loker,’ Olaf said, shaking his head and scratching his great bird’s nest beard.
And Sigurd nodded.
Because Valgerd, his hawk, was joining the crew.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE BROTHERS BJARNI and Bjorn were prickly and pride-strong when Sigurd and Aslak pulled them out of Valgerd’s pit trap, but they had enough sense to be glad that Sigurd and his men were not oath-tied to their enemy Jarl Randver.
‘You came all the way up Lysefjorden to find us?’ Bjorn said, not quite able to get the suspicion out of his eyes. They were walking back through the woods now towards the beach, though the brothers had said they wanted to speak to their friends – the ones who had run off and left them – before they set sail with Sigurd.
‘A man called Ofeig Grettir told me you were good men in a fight,’ Sigurd said, ‘and that you were no friends of Jarl Randver.’
Bjarni spat. ‘That festering weasel’s turd demanded weregeld for a man who wasn’t worth three drips from a giant’s cock,’ he said.
‘We wouldn’t pay it,’ his brother put in, ‘and so Randver murdered our father.’
‘Threw him off a cliff, eh?’ Olaf said, which got two scowls as the brothers recalled the sour thing.
‘He declared us outlaws and after that it seemed there were more men that wanted to kill us than there are bristles on a boar’s back,’ Bjorn said then shrugged. ‘We had no choice but to lie low.’
‘Not that low,’ Olaf said. ‘As I recall you couldn’t resist trying to steal from us while we slept last night. Though that did not go so well for you.’ He had not been able to hold back, and Sigurd gave him a hard look.
Not that the brothers seemed worried. ‘We are outlaws,’ Bjarni said, as though that were explanation enough, as though Olaf had accused a dog of barking.
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