God of Vengeance

by Giles Kristian

  ‘So what now?’ Svein asked, coming to stand with Sigurd and arming sweat from his brow despite the chill breeze whipping across the open meadow with the whisper of winter.

  ‘Now we wait,’ Sigurd said. Men who had fought each other just days previously were now working together, digging earth and wheeling it in barrows to the stone ship of the dead and building a mound upon it. ‘We wait and we prepare.’ The scowl in Svein’s face said what he felt about that, but there was nothing else for it. The scheme was woven and he would follow the thread of it. ‘In seven days we will be in Skudeneshavn,’ Sigurd told him. He had not said home, for with his father’s hall gone and his kin dead, that place would never be his home again. ‘We will meet Hagal there and see if he has been able to tempt some jarl or ambitious karl to join us.’

  One of Svein’s red brows arched. ‘You trust Crow-Song not to have flown off to some warm hall where the lord there has him swimming in mead and singing songs about him?’

  ‘Hagal said he would be waiting for us,’ Sigurd said. ‘He’ll be there.’ In truth he was not so certain. His whole plan was built on the skald, like ship strakes lashed to the frame, and yet he could not be sure of Hagal’s loyalty because the man had never been oath-tied to any jarl and so did not know what it was to bind yourself to another no matter what. And this thought led Sigurd to the question of whether he should ask those who followed him now to swear an oath, for how could he know they would not drift away at any time if things got hard or if another man offered them more? The only thing Sigurd could promise them was blood. Without an oath holding them, what was to stop them turning their backs on him or even deserting him in the fray?

  He knew that Svein and Aslak, Solveig, Asgot and Olaf would stand with him and fall with him too if it came to it. Sigurd knew that in the very marrow of his bones. But these others? He needed to bind them to him. Olaf had said they owed Sigurd their oath for giving them such booty as they now owned, each having his own brynja now for they had the nine from Hakon’s dead hirðmen as well as Thengil’s own which was rusted but unused and which fitted Ubba well, and the jarl’s which Sigurd took for himself, wondering at the fights and adventures those iron rings had seen over the years. It was snug across Sigurd’s shoulders and longer than most mail coats, reaching to mid thigh, so that Svein had said it looked as if he was wearing a dress, and Olaf had suggested that either Jarl Hakon had been a much taller man before the years had bent him, or else he had killed a giant for the thing.

  ‘Jarls give their crewmen arm rings and blades, if they are the sort of jarls worth swearing to,’ Olaf had said as Hauk had laid out the brynjur and had Thengil’s bed slaves scrubbing the blood off them, ‘but you, who are not yet a jarl, have given them the sort of wealth they could only have dreamt of.’ He had hammered a fist into his open palm. ‘Strike now, Sigurd. Make them swear the oath with the weight of these rings still settling on their bones.’

  Sigurd had nodded, even though he was afraid in case they would refuse to bind themselves to him, a young man without authority, land, or a ship that would sail itself into any half-decent story. But he knew Olaf was right and that it needed to be done. So he would ask them to swear on his sword, though maybe not when they were digging earth and burying men, he thought now, as Svein swung the iron pick onto his shoulder and went back to work.

  The day after that they went to those folk living west of Hakon’s hall, the other side of the wooded hill, and there found two men with skill and tools enough to help them make repairs on the dead jarl’s karvi, which Hauk was shame-faced to admit they had let rot at its mooring because they were old men who knew their raiding days were long gone.

  ‘She’ll never survive an angry sea or even a proper journey,’ Solveig had said when Sigurd had taken him and Karsten Ríkr down to the wharf where the karvi and Sea-Sow were moored. His few remaining teeth had shown in his beard then. ‘You would have more chance of staying above the waves riding on the back of a seal,’ he said. At least the two experienced helmsmen agreed on that, not that Sigurd had liked hearing it.

  ‘Well, we have wood and we have time,’ he had replied, though he had more of the former than the latter, ‘and it will be in your interests to make it seaworthy as one of you will be at its helm soon enough.’

  Karsten had growled a curse and Solveig had said he’d always known a drowning death awaited him, and from that moment the two of them seemed to form an understanding that bordered on friendship, which was at least something.

  Between what they could get their hands on at the little village and what lay stored across the roof beams of the boathouse on the shore they had amassed some worked planks and enough seasoned wood, so they hauled the karvi, which Grundar said was called Skrukka – Sea-Urchin – out of the water and set to work. They replaced the worst of the barnacle-crusted strakes and the decking which was soft and worm-riddled, and scraped off the green slime and bird shit that cloaked the ship. They could not risk raising the yard with its mouldering sail because the mast looked as though it might snap if any strain were put on it.

  ‘She’ll have to be rowed,’ Olaf said, so those oars up in their trees which had been most exposed winter after winter were swapped with spare ones from Sea-Sow.

  ‘A little rowing will do them good,’ Solveig said, which was easy for him to say seeing as he would be standing at the tiller watching them sweat.

  ‘She just needs to get us to Hinderå,’ Sigurd said, scowling with Olaf at Sea-Urchin, to the relentless clinking rhythm of men driving rivets home. ‘After that she can end her days on the sea bed or split apart for firewood.’ This time Solveig scowled because it was not clever to say such things in front of a ship.

  ‘I think I’d rather swim to Hinderå, brynja and all,’ Olaf said, and from his face Sigurd knew he was half serious. Yet it was obvious enough they were too many now to cram into Sea-Sow’s thwarts even with the new decking over the knörr’s big hold.

  And so the repairs continued, and, while Solveig and Karsten oversaw the work being done by the craftsmen from the village and their friends who, lured by Sigurd’s promise of silver, had come to fetch and carry, Olaf gathered Sigurd’s crew together on the flat meadow to the east of Hakon’s hall.

  ‘You came at Hauk’s shieldwall that day like a pack of rabid wolves,’ Olaf said in a voice loud enough for all to hear as they milled with shields and spears. ‘I’ve seen rain hit the ground with more neatness than you hit Hauk’s lot. Old Solveig struck his first blow a day later than Floki there.’

  ‘We won didn’t we?’ Bjarni said. There were rumbles of agreement with that.

  ‘Aye, we tore them apart easily enough,’ Ubba said.

  Olaf turned to Sigurd, shaking his head. ‘Listen to the gods of war,’ he said, then glowered at Bjarni and Ubba. ‘They were old men!’ he said. ‘Men who had not had a good fight for who knows how many years!’ He raised a hand to Hauk and Grundar and the others to show he meant no offence. Hauk glowered anyway, but in truth he knew Olaf was right. ‘Do you think Jarl Randver’s war band will be made of white-beards and men who knew the Allfather when he still had two eyes?’ This got some chuckles, though not from the Osøyro men, Sigurd noted. ‘Fuck no! His hirð will stand behind a shieldwall that could turn back the tide.’ He thumped a fist into his own mailed chest. ‘I know, I’ve fought them.’

  No one denied that, for though only a few of them had watched the ship battle in the Karmsund Strait, they had all heard about it, heard how Jarl Harald had stood fighting to the last, his champions and two of Sigurd’s brothers cut down around him.

  ‘What’s this arm for?’ he asked, holding out his right arm and clenching his scarred hand.

  ‘If you have to ask, you’re doing it wrong, Uncle,’ Hendil called, raising some rough laughter.

  ‘This arm is for hacking, chopping, hewing and killing,’ Olaf said.

  ‘And drinking!’ Bjorn called, getting cheers of agreement.

  ‘This arm,’ Olaf said, ign
oring the interruptions and lifting his shield, ‘is for pushing, deflecting and covering.’ He pursed his lips and tilted his head to the side. ‘Now, I know this is all very hard to follow, but are you with me so far?’ No one came out with a clever answer to this and Olaf nodded. ‘Good,’ he said, then bared his teeth. ‘But you can’t smite a man if you’ve been knocked onto your backside, or if you are too busy letting some whoreson sheathe his sax in your ribs because the men on either side of you have broken and are halfway across some fjord, their arses flapping like a fish.’ He set his feet one behind the other and gestured to them. ‘You plant your feet and you stand. You stand with your brothers and you do not break.’

  He jerked a chin at Aslak and Svein who lifted their shields as they had clearly been told to at the given signal, Svein’s overlapping Aslak’s by almost half its width as they braced themselves. Olaf lifted his leg and slammed the underside of his booted foot into Svein’s shield but the two young men stood firm. Then Olaf took five paces back, hefted his own shield and charged, smashing it into theirs and leaning his shoulder into it, trying to drive forward. But against Svein’s great bulk and the added resistance provided by Aslak, he made no progress, despite his growls and reddening face, and given Olaf’s great brawn this was all he needed to do to prove his point.

  He stood tall and came back to face the crowd. ‘I want two skjaldborgar facing each other,’ he barked, and when they had formed their walls, their spear blades pointing to the sky, Olaf and Sigurd took their places, one at the centre of each line. On Sigurd’s right was Svein and on his left was Floki. The men either side of Olaf were Hendil and Bjorn. Two skjaldborgar of wood, iron and flesh.

  ‘A woman in a shieldwall?’ Torving said, shaking his head so that the white braids danced. ‘She’ll weaken the whole thing.’

  Valgerd glared at him. ‘The men we buried yesterday did not find me weak, old man,’ she said, and Aslak, Svein and a couple of the others cheered her, whilst Hauk and his men swore and growled.

  ‘The man who comes up against me in a real fight will be dead before he raises his shield,’ Valgerd said.

  Nevertheless, even the old Osøyro men had bulk left over from their raiding and rowing days, whereas Valgerd was slender and lithe as a birch and could not hope to hold back a man three times her weight. But Olaf had already thought of this.

  ‘Valgerd will fight behind the wall, if it comes to that. She will kill the men whose stinking breath is filling your nose and whose piss is soaking your feet, and you will be grateful to her for it. Asgot will fight there too, because I have long ago lost count of the men I have seen him kill with a spear in their eye or a blade in their groin.’ Men winced at this, but the godi grinned. ‘Now if you have finished wasting the day, let us get to work.’ With that men loosened off necks and shoulders, hefted their painted shields up before them, and waited for the command.

  ‘Whichever wall breaks first, those men will go hunting later and will not return without a boar for the spit tonight.’

  ‘But the boar are all up in the northern wood a half day’s walk from here,’ Grundar called across from Sigurd’s line.

  ‘Then you had better hope you do not lose, Grundar,’ Olaf said through a grin, as he started moving forward, the others with him, and the men yelling insults and bawling at each other.

  And the shieldwalls clashed like thunder.

  The next day Olaf had them practising the swine wedge, or svinfylkja, which was the best formation for driving through a mass of enemy warriors to kill their lord. As the biggest and most ferocious-looking men, Svein and Ubba made up the first rank, followed by three in the second rank, four in the third, and so on. Olaf or Sigurd would roar the command and they had to get into their positions as quickly as they could. At first it was a mess, with men crashing into each other and treading on each other’s feet, and the rain-filled day seethed with insults hurled between them. But by the end of the day each of them knew their business and the svinfylkja coalesced as neatly as a skein of geese heading south.

  They practised making a square of shields too, in case Sigurd should be wounded and they needed to protect him or get him away from the fray. But they must all have known there was little point in spending much time and sweat on that scheme. For being just nineteen warriors all told, they were still only half a crew and if they were being pressed on all sides so that their only recourse was to make a square, then they were almost certainly doomed. As Solveig wryly observed, that would be the sort of last stand that Hagal would love for one of his stories.

  On the sixth day after they had burnt Jarl Hakon and buried his hirðmen – the seventh after they had tossed his worthless son into the bone-snapping breakers – they packed their sea chests, gathered on the rotting jetty by Sea-Sow and Sea-Urchin and readied to leave for Skudeneshavn.

  The Osøyro men bid farewell to the women and said they would either be back with a tale to shake the great hall’s old beams or not at all, and the older women accepted this with quiet tears but admirable dignity. The same could not be said for Thengil’s two bed slaves, who clung to Svein and Bjarni like limpets to rocks, weeping and begging them not to go, which had the two men crimson-cheeked and wincing as their friends taunted them as jealous men will. For those two’s benches had done some creaking in the last few nights.

  Then Bjorn and Agnar Hunter hauled an old bull onto the rocks by its horns while Karsten pulled it by the halter and Hauk and Bodvar put their weight into it from behind, the beast lowing and arching its back to make itself look bigger and more threatening.

  Sigurd could see in their eyes that the men and women watching were impressed by the bull and thought it a worthy sacrifice, which made it worth the lump of hacksilver he had paid a farmer in the little village for it. It was a fierce, bristling animal, pawing and horning the rock, so that it was all Bjorn and Agnar could do to hold on as Svein went forward with his long-hafted axe and stood in front of the bull and the sweating men holding it. He turned the haft and swung, bringing the weapon’s thick poll smashing down onto the lowing beast’s skull. It dropped down onto its forelegs stunned and Asgot came up with his wicked sharp knife and thrust it into the bull’s throat and cut outwards through the thick veins there so that the blood could spill into the bowl Valgerd was holding. The bright gore spattered onto the rocks, fogging the cold morning air and filling Sigurd’s nose with its richness. In no time at all the bowl was full and Asgot and Valgerd were splashing though small pools of blood whilst some of it ran off in little streams, following crevices in the rocks that led down to the sea.

  Feeling that the animal was past causing them any harm now, Bjorn and Agnar let go of its horns and it slumped down to the ground with a last great snort, the lids no longer sweeping over its bulging eyes. Asgot and Valgerd fell to their knees in the crimson pools and the godi set about pumping one of the beast’s forelegs, which was a trick to getting more blood out of the slash in its neck, though Valgerd’s bowl was already overflowing and her hands were blood-drenched.

  When it was done Asgot took the bowl from Valgerd and from his belt a bunch of birch twigs he had bound together, and went over to those watching wide-eyed and tight-mouthed. Dipping the birch twigs in the bowl he flicked the blood over their faces and even though it was warm they could not help flinching at its touch, each of them full of the seiðr of it because they knew the gods were watching. When he had finished with them he flicked the bull’s blood across the bows of Sea-Sow and Sea-Urchin, invoked Óðin Sigðir, the Victory-Bringer, and then another god whom Sigurd had asked him to summon so that he might ride into this blood-fray with them. And that god was Vidar, Óðin’s own son, who wise men said would slay the wolf Fenrir during the chaos of Ragnarök. And when Asgot called on this god he did so with gritted teeth and fury, so that he had more than a few men nervously touching iron.

  But Sigurd was not afraid. He stood with his head high and his back straight, and he listened to Asgot telling the god that they were going to Hin
derå, just they few against the jarl’s many. And the name Vidar would be on their lips, on their young warleader’s lips in the sword song and the shield din. Jarl Randver would pay in blood for what he had done. He would suffer and he would bleed and he would die. Because Sigurd had woken the gods. The reckoning was coming.

  And Vidar was the God of Vengeance.

  With the bull’s blood drying on their faces and Asgot’s invocations still in their ears, Olaf looked at Sigurd, who did not need to ask what his friend was thinking.

  A cold hand clutched Sigurd’s heart. ‘Now?’ he said.

  ‘Can you think of a better time?’ Olaf said, one eyebrow rounded like Bifröst.

  ‘But if they refuse? We will undo all that we have done,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘The gods are amongst us,’ Olaf said, his eyes boring into Sigurd’s. ‘They will not refuse.’

  Sigurd felt as stunned as the bull when Svein had introduced the beast to his great axe.

  ‘We are going into a hard fight, lad. Bind them to you now. Before the slaughter’s dew soaks their shoes. Before Jarl Randver’s neck-ring blinds them.’

  This was clear thinking from Olaf, for if things went against Sigurd at Hinderå it was possible that Jarl Randver might offer to spare his hirð, reward them even, if they came over to him. Sigurd doubted those who stood with him now would betray him like that, but having them oath-sworn to him would be further protection against any such betrayal, like a ringmail coat over wool and leather.