‘What do I have to do, Uncle?’ he asked.
‘Nothing, lad,’ Olaf said. Some of the men were making their own invocations of the gods, touching amulets at their necks and mumbling into their beards. Others were relieving themselves over the side of the jetty, whilst still others were climbing aboard Sea-Sow or Sea-Urchin, making their last preparations before setting off. ‘Just stand there looking like your father and leave it to me,’ Olaf said.
‘And if they refuse?’ Sigurd asked again. Despite all that had happened, he felt in that moment like the young man who had pleaded to join his father’s crew and been denied in front of everyone.
Olaf shrugged. ‘If they refuse, I’ll throw them to the crabs after that fat hog Thengil.’
Sigurd felt himself smile. ‘Then it’ll just be us taking on Jarl Randver and his whole war band.’
Olaf grinned, his eyes catching fire. ‘Then may the gods help them,’ he said. He turned and told the crews to gather round for there was one last thing that must be tied up neatly before leaving Osøyro. There were frowns and murmured questions as they came over, for with the sacrifice done and the wind in their favour they could not see what should keep them from heading out into the Bjørnafjord, which lay before them like iron burnished by the dawn sun.
‘Would you step aboard these magnificent ships,’ he asked, getting some chuckles for that, ‘before giving Sigurd what you owe him?’
Some frowns then. But some knowing looks too from Svein and Aslak and old Solveig, men who had been in this with Sigurd from the beginning when their eyes had been full of the sting of smoke from Eik-hjálmr his father’s hall.
‘Would you accept such shining war gear, these well-made brynjur, from the man who gave them, from him whose low cunning and war-craft gave us the victory here when we needed it, and yet not give him the very least that you owe?’ This was hard on Hauk and his men but it was true all the same.
‘I know what is coming here,’ Bjarni mumbled.
‘You might fight for a jarl for twenty summers and grow white-haired by his hearth and yet never win such plunder.’ Olaf pointed at Bjarni and Bjorn and at the other men who had just weeks before been living as outlaws at the arse end of the Lysefjord. ‘You must have thought your honour was long gone, like a fart in the wind. You must have thought you would never have the chance to be worthy of your ancestors and make a name for yourselves.’ He folded his brawny scarred arms across his chest and his face became granite. ‘You must have thought you would never see Valhöll.’
He let this sink in, let them taste the bitter draught of it.
‘This man, this Óðin-favoured son of the best man I have ever known . . .’ Sigurd saw a sheen in Olaf’s eye and looked away ‘. . . has put this crew together as a good shipwright chooses the best and strongest timbers for a ship, or the way a skald weaves a story using the best kennings. I have seen enough fighters in my time to know them when I see them, and I see them standing before me now. You are all wolves. But wolves cannot bring down an elk alone. They must hunt and fight as a pack.’ He glanced at Sigurd and then nodded at those before him. ‘Swear an oath to Sigurd Haraldarson. Swear upon your honour to fight for him, so that we will know that our pack is strong and cannot be driven apart.’
The warriors looked at each other then, trying to measure their own thoughts on the thing against the thoughts of their companions.
‘I mean no affront, Sigurd,’ Grundar said, heavy-browed. He was scratching his grey-flecked brown beard. His other hand rested on the pommel of the sword at his hip. ‘But you are barely into your first full beard.’
Sigurd accepted this with a careful nod, for Grundar was on the edge of an insult with that. ‘And yet I beat you and your nithing lord, Grundar,’ he said, and the man was sensible enough to clasp his lips on whatever reply had come to his mind.
Bodvar cleared his throat, drawing Sigurd’s eye. ‘Things might have turned out differently if I had speared that bird of yours,’ he said, still sore about that.
‘Perhaps,’ Sigurd said. ‘But none of you had the wits in your skulls to see why I stood amongst you with a bird on my arm. I am amazed, Bodvar, that any of you has lived long enough to see his beard reach his briar patch.’
Some of the others laughed at this and Bodvar looked at Hauk as though he expected him to speak up for them.
Hauk frowned, chewed his lip and took a step forward so that everyone knew he had something to say, for all the look on his face said he had not yet decided what that was.
Sigurd nodded to acknowledge him. ‘I would hear your thoughts on it, Hauk Langbarðr,’ he said, which had Hauk frowning even more because he was not sure what to make of Long-Beard as a byname given the talking so far.
‘It is true our lord behaved dishonourably. Instead of welcoming you as a host should with food, drink and hearth, he schemed to make a prisoner of you and deliver you to your enemy.’ Svein spat in disgust and other men cursed Thengil’s name. But Hauk had not finished yet and raised a hand to show it. ‘But you were also underhand and full of Loki-tricks by hiding your men in the woods when they should have been in plain sight.’
‘That raven trick was crafty,’ Bodvar put in, shaking his head.
‘With all your years I tricked you easily, Hauk,’ Sigurd said. ‘And yet you would still judge me on the length of my beard?’
‘An oath is a heavy thing,’ Hauk said.
‘Heavier for these others who will carry it all their lives,’ Sigurd said, gesturing at Aslak, Floki and Svein. He let a half smile creep onto his lips. ‘I will release you from your oath in ten years if you wish to be free of it.’
Even Hauk smiled wryly at that.
The others were standing there feeling like gods of war in the booty that Sigurd had given them, so that even if they had some doubts about being oath-tied they held their tongues. Besides which, young men with fewer years on their backs will give an oath more easily than those who have seen something of the world. Olaf had told Sigurd that. ‘If you have a pretty girl beneath you, you don’t waste time imagining her as an old woman. You get on with the task in hand,’ he had said.
Hauk turned to his friends and they talked in low voices until Olaf said that if they took any longer to make up their minds the wind would have changed and they would be going nowhere. But Hauk ignored him and turned back to Sigurd. ‘It is no secret that we Osøyro men are in our winter years.’
‘Winter years? I have seen younger mountains!’ Bjarni said, at which Solveig called him a loose-lipped pig-swiver, because Solveig was almost as old as Hauk’s lot.
‘Every man of worth knows that of all his possessions his reputation is the most valuable thing that he leaves behind when he breathes his last breath. Olaf is right. Whatever reputations we once had as Jarl Hakon’s húskarlar are as faint as the moon when the sun is in the sky.’ He tapped his white head. ‘We keep them in our own thought chests but who else will hear of them?’ He nodded at Sigurd. ‘We may not live to see you become a great jarl, Sigurd Haraldarson, but we would be a part of your story. We will swear an oath . . . if you swear to put us in the heart of the fray so that men will know of us. So that skalds will sing of us when we are gone.’
That was all Sigurd needed to hear as he drew Troll-Tickler and turned it round so that it rested across his left arm, the hilt pointing towards Hauk.
And so it was that Hauk Long-Beard of Osøyro, a man who had fought for Jarl Hakon Burner in the olden days, became the first man to swear an oath to Sigurd.
They kept the words of it simple because, as Solveig was keen to remind them, the day was running away from them and the wind could change at any moment. But each man named his ancestors, if he had any worth naming, and announced their deeds as well as his own, so that to listen you would have thought every one of those outlaws and dispossessed was descended from Óðin himself. When it was Karsten Ríkr’s turn he kissed Troll-Tickler’s pommel, as they all must, then went on to boast that he had once sailed to the
end of the sea and pissed over the edge. Then he claimed to have seen a great sea monster with arms as long as the ship he was steering.
Bjarni also unleashed a few boasts, the others’ favourite being the one in which he claimed to have bedded six women in one night.
‘From what I remember that night was black as pitch,’ Bjorn said, scratching his cheek and frowning, ‘and there was talk that at least five of our father’s pigs had escaped from their pen.’
The only one who did not find this funny was his brother.
When it was Valgerd’s turn the others stood there even more seiðr-struck than they had been watching Asgot sacrifice the bull, for none of them had ever seen a shieldmaiden give an oath to fight for her lord. She listed the men she had killed, if not by name then by their appearance; men who had come to plunder the spring, the seeress, or both, and Sigurd could see looks that passed between the others, because this naming unravelled like an anchor rope.
‘Remind me not to get on her bad side,’ Bjorn murmured.
Yet she would now fight for Sigurd and protect him with her life, which was a hard thing for Sigurd to hear coming from a woman. Even stranger coming from Valgerd, because he had the feeling he would fight the monster Grendel and his mother too, to protect her.
Olaf himself was the last of them to do it. He put his lips to the pommel of Sigurd’s sword and he, who likely had the most to boast of in terms of hard fights won and ancestors who sat in the Allfather’s hall, said nothing about any of that. He kept the oath short, scowling through it, and yet Sigurd knew that even though it had been Olaf’s idea, the words were the hardest on him. For before Sigurd had been born, Olaf must have sworn a similar oath to Jarl Harald with whom he had been as close as a brother. But Sigurd’s father was dead now, killed in battle by the traitor king, and Sigurd knew that Olaf felt his own failure to protect the jarl like a knife in his guts. Speaking a new oath to his friend’s son must have put a bitter taste in his mouth.
‘I will fight for you, lord, and not flee one step from the battle,’ he said, his face hard as a granite cliff. ‘If you fall I will avenge you and send as many of your enemies to the afterlife as I can before I am cut down beside you. I will never forget the silver and booty which you give me, or the mead and meat that we share. Sword and shield, flesh and bone, I am your man, Sigurd Haraldarson. As long as the sun shines and the world endures, henceforth and for evermore.’
When Olaf nodded to show that there was no more to come from his mouth, Sigurd told him what he had told the others, having recalled his father’s words to those who had knelt before him in Eik-hjálmr. For an oath between a war leader and his húskarlar is like a sword with two cutting edges. An oath sits in the scales and must be balanced.
‘I will lead you in the blood-fray and be at the forefront of the fighting,’ he said, feeling their eyes on him like the weight of a brynja. ‘You will find me open-handed with the spoils of war. Gjöf sér æ til gjalda.’ A gift always looks for a return. ‘I will be a ring-giver and a raven-feeder. As long as the sun shines and the world endures, henceforth and for evermore.’
And that was it. Gleipnir, the fetter with which the Æsir bound the wolf Fenrir, could not have held them all tighter to each other than the words they had just spoken to the lap of the fjord on the shore, the creak of the ships at their moorings and the cry of gulls in the dawn sky.
‘So I have hearthmen but no hearth,’ Sigurd said to Svein who came up and clapped a great hand on his shoulder, the smile on his face reaching from ear to ear.
‘Who needs a hearth when you have two fine ships?’ the red-haired giant said.
Sigurd laughed, relieved to shed the weight of the moment. ‘And what fine dragon ships they are,’ he said. ‘Jarls and kings will be trembling to their bones.’
‘Ships or no ships you have come a long way in no time at all, Sigurd,’ Aslak said and Sigurd nodded because this was true enough. ‘Your father would be proud,’ his friend went on, looking at the oath-sworn rather than at Sigurd, who felt a rush of pride at having such friends as these.
‘My father would be halfway to Hinderå to put his sword in Jarl Randver’s belly,’ Sigurd said loud enough for the others to hear.
Olaf looked over at him and nodded. ‘Right then, you wolf-feeding, widow-making sons of whores, what are you waiting for? We have a wedding feast to go to.’ Although first they would meet Hagal at Skudeneshavn, along with whichever jarls or warriors Crow-Song had persuaded to join their cause.
‘I hope this Jarl Randver serves good mead in his hall,’ Ubba said.
‘We will need something strong to celebrate getting to Skudeneshavn first without drowning,’ Agnar Hunter said, for he was one of those who would be rowing Sea-Urchin, which they had not tested properly in the open sea since making the repairs on her.
‘Trust me, Agnar,’ Karsten Ríkr said, standing at the karvi’s tiller and stroking the sheer strake beside him as though it were a lover’s leg, ‘she is happy to have men aboard her—’
‘Like your woman back at Lysefjorden, hey!’ Ubba said, earning himself a coarse hand gesture from Karsten.
‘Even now she is remembering the old times,’ Karsten went on, unwilling to let Ubba ruin the moment, ‘and she is grateful to us for giving her another chance. She will not let us down.’
‘She had better not,’ Olaf rumbled, taking the oar which Svein offered him, as Sigurd went aboard, calling farewell to Solveig who stood by the tiller at Sea-Sow’s stern.
‘It is not my wyrd to have ships sink under me, Uncle,’ Sigurd said.
And neither was it. For there were men that needed killing.
And the gods were watching.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
WHEN KARSTEN AT the tiller called out that the northern tip of Karmøy was coming up off Sea-Urchin’s port side Sigurd felt a wave of relief roll across the men at the benches. The rowing had been hard and the muscles in Sigurd’s lower back and stomach thrummed with hot pain. It would have been hard going even with a full crew of twenty-four at the oars, but with only twelve rowing and one bailing – the other five being needed aboard Sea-Sow – it had been slow and exhausting and recklessly dangerous. For they had taken this old, patched-up ship into the open sea and the water had spilled in between the strakes and sloshed about in the thwarts as they took turns to break their backs bending with a bailer to fling sea back to sea. But Karsten had proved his sea-craft, hugging the coast and the sheltered waters but avoiding the rocks and using the currents where he could to make the rowing easier.
His own back to the whale’s road and blind to the skerries submerged by the high tide, which could have ripped the karvi apart, spilling them into the brine like guts tumbling from a belly-wound, Sigurd had watched the helmsman like a hawk. And he had been impressed by what he saw, for Karsten had never once looked unsure of himself or Sea-Urchin. He stood up there on the stern platform with the pride of a jarl in his high seat, which was hardly surprising given the strange twists of his wyrd. For he had been steering a ship full of raiding Danes when Jarl Arnstein Twigbelly from Bokn had swept upon them with sword and slaughter. Twigbelly had taken Karsten prisoner and in revenge for the raid on his lands would have taken Karsten’s eyes so that he might never again look upon the fjords. But Karsten had jumped overboard and, in his own words, swum like an otter, the Norsemen’s arrows plunging into the waves around him. Once ashore he had stolen a little boat and rowed east to Jørpeland, there learning that if you wanted to disappear and yet stay within spitting distance of the sea, then the Lysefjord was for you. He had hidden there with other hunted men and might have ended his days there if Sigurd had not sailed up that fjord looking for the brothers whose sword-fame had reached his ears. But now here was Karsten with a tiller in his hand and the sea air in his nose, and who could ask for more?
They had caught up with Sea-Sow the previous dusk and spent the night in a sheltered cove, which gave them the time to properly bail out and plug the worst of the l
eaks with twists of resin-soaked horsehair. Then another hard day’s rowing had brought them to Karmøy and this was when Olaf barked at them to pull harder and longer because the sea was turning rough and they could not risk pulling in close to the shore to moor for the night so near to Avaldsnes and the lair of their enemy King Gorm.
‘Why don’t we kill that lump of troll snot while we are passing?’ Svein called from his row bench as though it would be as easy as that.
‘Because I do not want to be seen in this worm-gnawed ship when we come face to face with that toad-fucking traitor,’ Olaf said, earning himself a mutter and frown from Karsten who, like Solveig, believed a ship could hear such an insult and take offence. ‘And also I do not mind rowing here and there like our ancestors did,’ Olaf went on, ‘but coming to a fight tired and aching is not a far-sighted thing to do if the man you are fighting is a king and has more spearmen than a dog has fleas.’
It would have taken weeks to find a tall, straight oak and fashion it into a new mast to replace the rotting one, and they had not had the time. Instead they had left the rotting one stepped, with the yard and furled sail cradled in the oar trees, because it would be better if any other crews they came across did not know that Sea-Urchin could not be sailed. For all that, they might wonder why the crew-light ship was struggling under oars when the wind was whipping spume off the waves.
‘Biflindi will still be sitting there on his pile of toll-silver when we are ready to pay him in steel,’ Sigurd said, ‘but first he will hear what has befallen his friend Jarl Randver. It will worm into his head and he will begin to wonder if the gods have turned their backs on him because he is an oath-breaker.’
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