God of Vengeance

by Giles Kristian

  Sigurd swept his scramasax towards his crew. His own hirðmen, he thought. Not that he had a hearth. ‘We are weaving a tale that skalds will tell long after we are gone from this world. I am Óðin-favoured. Would we have beaten you so easily if I were not?’

  This had Hauk thinking. The others too. It was in their faces like runes carved in old tree trunks.

  ‘Come with us and fight Jarl Randver. Fill your old sea chests with plunder.’

  Hauk laughed. ‘What need have we of silver at our age?’ he asked. ‘We want food, mead and a roaring hearth to warm our bones. You can keep your arm rings. We rarely bother to wear ours these days.’

  Sigurd nodded, accepting this. ‘You must have sons somewhere,’ he said. ‘Daughters too and others you have known. Let them hear of you in skalds’ tales and in song. Let them hear how you stood in the steel-storm one last time and earned the fame that no man can ever take from you.’

  ‘I would have you beside me against Jarl Randver’s men,’ Olaf said. ‘I have seen none braver than you.’

  Hauk and his exhausted men stood a little straighter at that, for they were strong words coming from a warrior such as Olaf. They were mead to a proud man’s spirit.

  Sigurd nodded. ‘Take back the honour you are owed,’ he said.

  Hauk wrestled with all this for a while, as Sigurd swallowed blood and the first of the two men lying with the corpses gave a death rattle and became one himself.

  ‘You will fight a man as powerful as Jarl Randver with just those I see before me?’ Hauk asked.

  Sigurd nodded. ‘And when I have killed Randver I will kill the oath-breaker King Gorm.’

  Hauk’s white brows lifted and he turned the spear in his hand, plunging it blade first into the earth.

  ‘Then we are your men, Haraldarson,’ he said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘IT DID NOT go as we hoped then,’ Asgot said when we had come up to them outside Jarl Hakon’s hall, his eyes picking over the corpses like crows. Then he had put a claw-like hand on Sigurd’s arm and looked him in the eye. ‘But it seems we have some killers amongst us at least.’

  ‘You should have seen them,’ Sigurd said in a low voice, watching the others wipe bloodied blades on the hems of dead men’s tunics – which Hauk did not like though he said nothing – and talking quietly among themselves. Men were often full of thunder after a fight, half of it the thrill of being alive, half of it the wild blood-lusting beast that can take its time in skulking away. But these were quiet and Sigurd knew it was a shit bucket of a victory.

  He looked at the dead lying in their own filth, their skin as grey as their beards. ‘These men deserved better than this, Asgot,’ he said.

  ‘Which one is Jarl Hakon?’ the godi asked.

  Sigurd shook his head. ‘Brandingi is a living corpse on a bed by his hearth. His nithing son Thengil had it in his mind to give me over to Jarl Randver as a wedding gift.’

  Asgot’s lip curled beneath his grey moustaches. ‘A cunning scheme, though it did not work out so well for him.’

  Sigurd pointed his scramasax at the hall behind them. ‘He’s in there, too. He runs fast for a fat man.’ Then he saw the look in Asgot’s eye. That wicked sharp knife, the one that slit animal’s throats and, sometimes, men’s, was whispering to the godi. ‘No, Asgot,’ Sigurd said, ‘the Allfather would not thank you for him.’

  ‘Aye, Sigurd’s right, Asgot. I’ve come across turds with more honour in them,’ Olaf said. ‘He’s not worth getting your knife wet for.’

  Asgot hoisted a brow. ‘And these old bones died for him?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Olaf said.

  ‘They still fought for their jarl,’ Sigurd explained. ‘And because they were too proud to do otherwise lest it look as though they lacked courage.’

  ‘And now that lot will fight for Sigurd,’ Olaf said, nodding at Hauk and his four men, who had laid down their shields but were not quite ready to put aside their spears. They stood in a knot talking heatedly amongst themselves and Sigurd guessed they were arguing about what to do with Thengil.

  ‘They are old but I am glad to have them,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘Well it is not as though this crew can get any stranger,’ Olaf said, which was true enough.

  Hauk looked over and caught Sigurd’s eye and Sigurd nodded because he knew what the old warrior was telling him in that look. Hauk and his men would deal with Thengil in their own way.

  Hauk hammered a fist against the hall’s door but the women within were too afraid to open it, until he called to them by name and assured them it was he on the other side of it. The enormous door, the hero of its own saga tale, opened and Sigurd caught a glimpse of several pale faces before Hauk and the others went inside. He waited for what seemed an age, watching the snow-peaked mountains fade from sight as night’s cloak fell slowly over them. And then Solveig called to him, saying that Hauk wanted him in the hall.

  ‘I thought we’d hear him squealing for his worthless life,’ Olaf said as he and Sigurd made their way across the ground which was pooled here and there with congealing blood. The dead still lay where they had fallen, because Sigurd’s crew guessed that the Osøyro men would want to deal with their own. ‘You think he found some backbone at the last?’

  ‘No,’ Sigurd said, as they entered the huge place which was fully formed in his eyes straight away this time because it was darker outside. He sensed Olaf’s wonder at the high beams and the huge central aisle and the two stone-lined hearth pits, the roof posts like oak trees and, more than anything, the emptiness and misery of a hall that must once had been the envy of men.

  ‘Thór’s bristling bollocks but this must have been something once,’ Olaf murmured. ‘I am remembering some of it now.’

  Sigurd did not need to reply. There would be even more ghosts amongst the benches tonight, he thought.

  And then they saw Thengil Hakonarson.

  His piss-dripping calf-skin shoes were three feet off the floor and he was turning slowly on the creaking rope, the bulging eyes in the purpling face coming round to accuse the men who had just entered his father’s hall. For a sickening moment and by the flicker of the hearth flames Sigurd thought Thengil was still alive. But then he saw that he must have clambered up onto the headboard of his father’s deathbed and that was high enough that coupled with his own weight his neck, which had never known the row bench or the shieldwall, had snapped. Though whether Thengil had chosen this rope death, or had been persuaded to it by the grey-beards, they could not say.

  So the old hall-burning warrior has outlived his son, Sigurd thought. Until he saw the silver-inlaid hilt sticking out of Jarl Hakon’s chest, the skins and furs carelessly thrown on the ground beside the bed. Or had Hauk done it? Had the faithful old warrior plunged Thengil’s sword into the jarl’s heart to send him on his way to Valhöll where he should have gone many years before now? Sigurd imagined one of Hauk’s men putting his own sword in the jarl’s hand and holding it there while Hauk did the rest.

  But Sigurd did not ask about that, either. For it did not matter. Father and son, as different as sun and moon, were dead, and in that they were the same. The women had taken themselves off to the benches at the sides where they sat weeping and consoling each other. Hauk and his four men looked tired enough to lie down dead beside their jarl but Sigurd knew they would be fine after a meal and a good night’s sleep undisturbed by Thengil’s greasy fumblings with his bed slaves.

  Not that the last of Jarl Brandingi’s hearthmen would rest yet. Sigurd watched as two of them took the hanged son’s sopping weight while another stood on Hakon’s bed to cut the rope. Why they did not simply let the troll’s turd drop in a heap on the floor was beyond Sigurd, but perhaps one of those sobbing women was kin to Thengil and it was out of respect for her.

  ‘What do you suppose they will do with him?’ Olaf said.

  Sigurd shrugged. ‘Feed him to the crabs. That is what I would do.’

  They hefted Thengil out of the
hall and Sigurd caught the stench of piss as he passed, which surprised him given that his nose was clotted with drying blood.

  ‘We will see to our dead now,’ Hauk said to them, following on.

  Sigurd nodded. ‘We will help you.’

  ‘No, Haraldarson, we will do it ourselves,’ Hauk said.

  The man with more brown than grey in his beard, who had earlier stood behind Thengil’s shoulder, gave Sigurd a sour look. ‘We will drink with them again soon enough and do not want them chewing our ears off for not seeing to their corpses in our way.’

  Then Hauk had second thoughts and scratched amongst the long white hairs that covered his cheeks. ‘You can help with the rocks,’ he said. ‘There are plenty under the sod on the north side of the hall by the apple trees there.’

  Sigurd nodded, understanding. A pyre to burn nine men would need half the wood that had gone into Hakon’s hall and even then the corpses would spill so much liquid that they would likely not burn well enough. So Hauk would dig up a swath of earth and lay out a ship with big stones. The nine dead would be laid in that ship and borne to the afterlife that way, for they had all died good deaths in the end, which was all a man could hope for from the wyrd spun him.

  ‘Hauk!’ Sigurd called after them as they got Thengil to the door. ‘I claim their war gear,’ he said. ‘My men will have their brynjur.’

  Even at that distance it was clear that Hauk did not like that. He would have laid his hearth companions in their stone ship with their swords, mail and helmets, for such things are needed in the hereafter. But he nodded curtly, for what choice did he have? He was lucky that Sigurd had left him and the others with their honour and he knew it.

  ‘Well the stones can wait,’ Olaf said, holding his hands over the hearthfire, making fists of them. The evenings were getting colder now and the hall was draughty. ‘It’s too late to go off digging about out there. Besides which, our lot fought well and deserve to drink it off like a proper war band.’

  ‘Then we had better find out where Thengil keeps his mead,’ Sigurd said. He was picking bits of blood from his beard and wondering what the gash in his head looked like. He was also thinking mead would be good to rinse his mouth and throat of the iron tang of blood. But most of all he was thinking that Olaf was right in that they were a proper war band now. They had fought together and fought well. Better still they had won. His odd crew of outlaws and dispossessed, of men – and a woman – from different hearths had shed blood and shared the sword song and there was no stronger bond than that, as his father had said many times. Gods they were good fighters! His father would have admitted that much, even if he would have made them form a skjaldborg rather than throwing themselves at the enemy like berserkers. And now they would have war gear to make the battle god Týr sit up on his bench and take notice. Perhaps only King Gorm himself could put so many mail-clad men into a fight.

  ‘Nevertheless, he was a wolf in his time, that one,’ Olaf said, the words barely loud enough to ruffle his beard. Sigurd knew he was talking about the corpse behind them with Thengil’s sword pinning him to his bed. ‘It is a shame we found him like this.’

  A mouse scampered across the ash-strewn floor and Sigurd mused that the creatures need no longer worry about Thengil hurling his mead horns at them.

  ‘Maybe it is not a shame at all,’ he said, ‘for if Hakon still had his wits then he might have done properly what Thengil tried and failed to do. I might have ended up a wedding gift at Jarl Randver’s Haust Blót feast.’

  Olaf pursed his lips. ‘That’s true enough,’ he said. ‘And a man like that might have known you were up to some Loki-mischief with that bird.’

  Sigurd felt himself grinning. ‘For a moment I thought Fjölnir was going to perch up there and dig the old wood for worms,’ he said, nodding up at one of the stout roof beams. And with that they laughed, as Olaf threw an arm around Sigurd’s shoulder and pulled him in to his broad chest, just stopping short of ruffling Sigurd’s long hair with his other hand, as he had done countless times before when Sigurd was a boy.

  ‘Be careful, old man,’ Sigurd baited him, when Olaf broke the grip to scrape some dried blood off his brynja with a thumbnail. ‘Remember the last time we wrestled? You ended up on the floor wailing like a woman in childbirth.’

  ‘Wrestled? You distracted me and kicked me in the bollocks, lad!’ He batted the smoky air with a big hand. ‘Though you’ll no doubt pay the skalds to weave it into some tall tale about a fight that went on all night but which you won through skill and courage and because you’re fucking Óðin-favoured.’

  Sigurd made a pretence of thinking about it, scratching his bearded chin as a proper jarl would do over some dispute between his lendermen which he was settling at the ting. ‘No,’ he said after a while. ‘Kicking you in the bollocks and you shrieking like a woman . . .’ he nodded, ‘that will do for me.’

  They spent the night in Hakon’s hall, snugged up with furs on the benches and more comfortable than any of them – other than Hauk and his men – had been for a long time. There were nine women sharing that hearth and lamp-flickered dark, as the wind gathered outside and forced itself through the gaps in the old staves, swirling woodsmoke and sharing out the acrid stink of the fish oil burning in the iron dishes. These women included Thengil’s two bed slaves, who had also performed household tasks because Thengil had long since spent his father’s hard-won silver and could not afford to live as a wealthy karl let alone a jarl. But neither had he dared to go raiding to refill his father’s sea chests and so he had no thralls to speak of, for the younger warriors of Osøyro who had left long ago to make their fortunes had taken their women and Hakon’s thralls with them. It was not as though the jarl needed them any more, lying there as still as a warrior corpse in his burial mound, and Thengil had lacked the spine to hold on to them.

  Of those eight women, from what Sigurd could piece together two were wives of Hauk’s remaining men and four were now widows, and though none of them was friendly to the strangers in their hall who had killed their brave men, they seemed to have laid most of their hatred on Thengil Hakonarson. Sigurd had seen two of them spit on his hanged corpse when Hauk’s men had laid it on the ground outside, for which Hauk had growled at them out of respect for the hanged man’s father. Nevertheless, even with night coming they had carried Thengil down to the rocks and, with the tide on the turn, dumped him where the frothing suck and plunge would break his bones and soften him up for the crabs. They tossed his sword in with him too because beautiful as it was, no man wanted that thing for the bad luck it might bring them.

  ‘That is that then,’ Svein had said when they had watched the Osøyro men return.

  ‘Can you think of a worse end?’ Aslak had asked, which had got all of them thinking as they passed round some horns full of the mead they had found in barrels behind a hanging partition at the back of the hall.

  ‘An arrow in the arse followed by a festering wound?’ Agnar Hunter suggested, which got some murmurs of agreement.

  ‘A knife in the groin from some cowering nithing?’ Ubba offered, getting them wincing. ‘With that big vein cut you will bleed white in the time it takes to curse your ill wyrd.’

  ‘A lingering, bloodless death is worse,’ Valgerd said, and perhaps many of them thought she was talking about Jarl Hakon, but Sigurd knew her mind had flown back to a cabin in the Lysefjord and a dead seeress who had been her lover. ‘To be eaten by sickness from the inside. To try desperately to hold on to your life like water in your hands.’ She grimaced. ‘That is worse than any blade death.’

  Even with the pain of that loss in her face she was beautiful, perhaps more so because of it, and so Sigurd watched the hearth flames instead. He had never known the seeress but to his mind it was Valgerd who had all the seiðr, and he had the feeling that when his eyes were on her, other men’s eyes were on him, which was why he looked away now.

  ‘None of us can say what the Norns have spun for us,’ Asgot put in, and this ha
d more or less soured the ale in their horns as each of them wondered what the Spinners had done with the threads of their lives. But they had drunk anyway, washing away the pain from cuts and bruises and the foul taste that can linger in the mouth after the killing of other men, even those that would have killed you.

  And the next day they had laid Jarl Hakon on a different bed, one of seasoned timbers taken from a boathouse down by the sea, and put a torch to it, which was fitting, everyone agreed, for a man bynamed Burner. There were no tears for him either from the women or even from his hearthmen who had shared blood and mead with him over the years, for the lord they knew had been gone from them a long time already. But it was all done with honour and straight backs and Hauk and his men had dressed as though for war, their blades and helmets scrubbed until they were the brightest things, other than the jarl’s pyre, on a dull day.

  The wind had whipped the great, roaring flames up and northward, so that old Solveig had observed that no man could ever have been borne to Valhöll any faster, to which Floki replied that at Hakon’s age he could ill afford to be slow about it if he wanted to enjoy what was on offer in the Hall of the Dead. But Sigurd had simmered during the whole thing because all he could think about was that he had not been able to give his father and brothers the hero pyres they should have had. Who knew what King Gorm had done with their bodies.

  ‘The Death Maidens took them before their blood was cold,’ Olaf said, coming to stand beside him, knowing full well what was gnawing at Sigurd as Hakon’s corpse blackened in the fire, the limbs twisting into gnarled shapes and the blood bubbling and spurting, boiling up from the hole in his chest. ‘There’s not a chance that men like that would be passed over, hey?’

  Sigurd said nothing and Olaf did not push it, for he too felt the shame of it like a wound, that he had not sent his jarl off in the proper way.

  When the pyre died down and all that remained of Hakon Brandingi was a few charred bones, they made a ship of stones for the dead. Sigurd let Hauk give each fallen warrior a spear but no other weapons, these being too valuable to the living to give to the slain. Yet their old comrades did what they could, placing the dead men’s other possessions in the grave, things such as combs, Thór’s hammer amulets, eating knives and drinking horns. The warrior with more brown than grey in his beard, whose name was Grundar, even put a tafl board and all the pieces in there, which all agreed was a very good thing to do. No one could say how long a stone ship would take to make the journey to the afterlife were it the case that the Valkyries had not carried off every one of the fallen, being old men and long past their prime. For only the strongest warriors were assured a place amongst the chosen. But a tafl board would help make the time pass until they found their places amongst old Flaming Eye’s mead benches.