Night Wolf: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 5)

by James L. Nelson

  Aghen did not respond, his mind too choked with thoughts. Oddi seemed not to notice as he tore into his food with the appetite of a young man who had walked many miles since breakfast.

  Kevin betrayed both Thorgrim and Ottar, Aghen thought. What does all this mean? How can I make use of this? He had no idea. He turned back to Oddi.

  “What you say, that’s very interesting,” Aghen said.

  “What?” Oddi asked.

  “About Thorgrim Night Wolf wanting to get revenge on Kevin as well as Ottar.”

  “Did I say that?” Oddi asked, genuinely confused.

  “Not exactly,” Aghen said. “But it stands to reason. If Kevin betrayed Ottar, he betrayed Thorgrim as well. Of course Thorgrim Night Wolf would want revenge as much as Ottar.”

  “But I don’t know that Thorgrim is still alive,” Oddi protested. “All I ever said was that I didn’t see him get killed.”

  “True,” Aghen said. “But Thorgrim Night Wolf’s a hard man to kill. He’s not like other men. That might explain a lot of the strange things that are happening.”

  At that Oddi’s eyes went a little wider, but he did not ask questions and Aghen did not elaborate. He had been watching Oddi. Oddi was a talkative fellow, often conversing with the other men. And it would do Aghen no harm to have them all believe they were dealing with more than just a wolf made of flesh, bone and blood.

  They were moving again soon after, continuing their odd meandering march across the countryside, the increasingly unappetizing pig haunch dragging behind the cart. Their track was tending more to the west now, Einar making it clear they would go no farther in the direction of Kevin’s stronghold.

  “Very well,” Aghen said when Einar finally insisted on a change of course. “If we don’t find this wolf because you won’t go where I think we should, let it be on your head.” But Einar did not seem in the least intimidated by that threat.

  They stopped and made camp with an hour or so of daylight remaining. Aghen had no idea how far they had come from Vík-ló. Four or five miles, he guessed, though they had walked twice that distance at least, weaving back and forth as they had.

  Once again Einar came over to talk as Aghen was eating. Once again he squatted down, unwilling to sit with the shipwright—a friend of Thorgrim Night Wolf and disliked by Ottar Bloodax—any longer than he had to.

  “Now what?” Einar asked.

  “Well,” Aghen said, “every time the wolf has appeared, it’s been at night. We dragged the haunch to get the beast on our trail. With any luck it’s followed us. Now we set the bait out, somewhere out in the dark, and we position men around it. Hidden. With spears. If the wolf shows up, they kill it.”

  “Out in the dark?” Einar asked.

  “Yes, out in the dark. The beast won’t come near the fire. Don’t be a fool.”

  Einar frowned and looked around the camp. Aghen could well imagine what things he was wrestling with. None of these men would be very eager to go hunker down in the dark and wait for the wolf to arrive. Einar, as their leader, should take it on himself to join them, but he was probably not too eager for that, either.

  “Very well,” Einar said at last. He stood and walked off, calling to the men as he did.

  Aghen remained seated where he was and enjoyed watching the little drama play out. The men spoke in low voices, but even though he could not hear the words, Aghen had a good idea of what was being said. Einar pointed toward a place about a hundred yards from the camp. He pointed to a handful of men. He saw the men’s faces turn angry, saw heads shaking. He saw, in fact, much more resistance than he thought he would, even considering how undesirable the duty was that the men were being ordered to perform.

  Not one of them, Aghen was sure, would have hesitated for an instant to take their place in a shieldwall and plunge into combat against a vastly superior enemy. Yet the thought of sitting in the dark waiting for a wolf, or worse, the spirit of a wolf, to come out of the night made their courage falter.

  But not for long. Soon their fear of Ottar, made manifest by Einar, overcame their reluctance and the first watch moved out and took up their places.

  Oddi came lumbering over and sat down beside Aghen. “Looks like I get the second watch tonight,” he said. He did not sound happy.

  “The men,” Aghen said, “they argued more with Einar than I would have thought they would.”

  “They don’t like him very much,” Oddi said.

  “No? But he’s Ottar’s man,” Aghen said. “Aren’t they loyal to Ottar?”

  “Not much,” Oddi said. “No more than me. And that’s not much.”

  “I thought Ottar would have sent his most trusted men on this hunt,” Aghen said and Oddi smiled at that.

  “No,” he said. “The opposite. I don’t think Ottar expects anyone to come back from this alive. So of course he didn’t send the men who’ve been with him a long time. He sent the ones who joined just before Glendalough, the ones who aren’t as loyal to him as the rest. Like me.”

  Interesting… Aghen thought.

  “So…Ottar really thinks this wolf will kill us all? One wolf?” Aghen asked.

  Oddi shrugged. “Ottar doesn’t talk much to me. But I’ve been watching him, when I can. There’s something about this whole wolf business. He doesn’t act like someone would act if there was just a wolf running around. It seems like there’s something else, some reason he’s more afraid of the whole thing than you would expect someone to be. Ottar’s a real son of a bitch, no question, but he’s not a coward. Yet this seems to have really scared him.”

  Interesting… Aghen stared out into the gathering dark for a bit, then turned to Oddi to ask another question, but the man was already on his side, mouth hanging open as sleep approached, and Aghen did not have the heart to disturb him.

  Instead he looked off toward the mountains and let the disjointed thoughts swirl around in his head. He was a shipbuilder, and his mind worked like a shipbuilder’s mind. He liked things to move in an orderly progression, one task, then the next task, until the whole was complete. He liked to know what would come next; he preferred to do the job at hand with an eye toward what would follow. He liked to have his world ordered in that way.

  But his situation, this business with the wolf, there was nothing orderly about it. The appearance of the beast by the river was a mystery he had never solved. The part he had played, the killing of Ottar’s men, making it seem as if their deaths had been wolf attacks, he had done with no plan in mind, with no thought as to what would come next, what he might achieve.

  Now this. Kevin, Thorgrim. Einar, whom the men hated. What could he make of all this? He had no idea. It was as if he was looking at a pile of seasoned wood, a well-stocked tool chest, coils of rope, everything he needed to build something great, right there in front of him. But he did not know what to build.

  And then he realized something else, realized it with startling clarity: he was certain that Thorgrim Night Wolf was alive.

  He had never really thought about it in anything but the vaguest way. But now he realized that ever since the moment Oddi had told him that he had not seen Thorgrim killed, Aghen had believed that Thorgrim still lived. Everything he had done he had done because of that belief.

  That was the reason Aghen had wanted to knock Ottar off balance with the wolf attacks, to give Thorgrim a greater chance at the vengeance Aghen knew he would seek. But now he realized that Thorgrim was probably just as eager to get revenge on Kevin. Maybe even more so, since Kevin had been the one to start all this business about Glendalough and then had turned on him.

  Thorgrim Night Wolf is alive, Aghen thought, and whether he’s coming for Ottar or coming for Kevin, he’s coming this way.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A better burden can no man bear

  on the way than his mother wit

  Hávamál

  The horsemen were lined up on the crest of a hill a little more than half a mile distant. Thorgrim Night Wolf, kneeling behind an o
utcropping of rock, the damp seeping through his leggings, tried counting them as best he could.

  Twenty-six, twenty-seven…is that one horse or two? It seemed to him that his eyesight was not as keen as it once had been.

  Cónán, kneeling beside him, was the first to speak. “I can’t count them all,” he said in a low voice, which, at that distance, was not entirely necessary. “Forty or more, that’s certain.”

  The others who were with Thorgrim and Cónán behind the rock—Harald, Godi, and Cónán’s man, Fothaid—nodded in agreement. Thorgrim abandoned his effort. Cónán’s estimate was close enough. It didn’t matter how many there were. There were a lot of the bastards, that was all he needed to know.

  “These are the men from the river?” Thorgrim asked.

  “It seems it,” Cónán said. “Hard to say for certain from this distance, but I’d wager my life they are.” He paused to consider those words. “No, not my life,” he said. “But I’d wager Blathmac’s life.”

  “You must not be so sure,” Thorgrim said. “I don’t think you put any more value on Blathmac’s life than I do.”

  “All right, then, I’d wager all my plunder from Glendalough.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Thorgrim said. They looked back at the mounted warriors. Thorgrim had to agree that some of the riders at least appeared to be the same men who had attacked them aboard Sea Hammer.

  “There’re a lot more men on that hill than there were at the river,” Thorgrim observed.

  Cónán nodded. “Their numbers do seem to be growing,” he said. The enemy they were looking at now was at least twice the size of the force they had engaged earlier.

  Thorgrim, of course, also had nearly twice the number of men under his command than he had had at the river, but he found little comfort in that fact. It had been two days since Blathmac and his band of men and women had joined with Thorgrim and Cónán. For two days they had dragged this unwieldy force overland, following the shallow river that Cónán said would lead to a place he called Ráth Naoi, the ringfort that was Kevin mac Lugaed’s stronghold.

  Despite Cónán’s continued assurance to the contrary, Thorgrim did not consider Blathmac’s men as some great addition to their company. The Northmen, his own men, were trained, experienced, tested and loyal, but they were few. Cónán’s men seemed to have some degree of order and discipline, more than one might expect from Irish outlaws. At Thorgrim’s insistence they had trained every day with sword, ax, and shield. In a stand-up fight they would do an enemy some genuine harm, but they were not what Thorgrim or any Northman, or any Irish man-at-arms for that matter, would consider proper fighting men.

  Blathmac’s men were worse, far worse. They were as tattered and ugly a rabble as Thorgrim had ever seen, half-starved mongrels who looked as if they were more accustomed to a good whipping than a good meal. Their weapons, such as they were, were sorry things, and the men seemed to hardly know the use of them. The only real spirit that Thorgrim had seen among them, the only thing for which Blathmac’s men had shown any enthusiasm was the chance to eat and drink.

  “Sure, they’re a poor, dirty lot,” Cónán said when Thorgrim first expressed his disgust with the newcomers. “But in a fight they’ll be right with us, you’ll see. Good fighting men.”

  “They’ll stand in a shieldwall?” Thorgrim asked. “They’ll stand fast with mounted warriors coming down on them?”

  “Well, no, they won’t do that,” Cónán admitted. “But they’ll have other uses, you’ll see.”

  “Once the fighting’s begun we can use their corpses to build a rampart,” Thorgrim suggested.

  “There you go, now you’re thinking,” Cónán said.

  “I don’t know if Blathmac will live long enough to be part of that wall,” Thorgrim said. “I’m not sure he’ll live to see another sunrise.”

  Blathmac alone seemed not to notice how miserable and useless his men were, what a pack of feral dogs he was leading. He seemed to think he commanded an elite unit of royal foot soldiers, chosen men, trained and outfitted to be the finest in the land, and he their lord and master.

  From the start, Blathmac set about making himself intolerable, ordered the women in camp, both his and Cónán’s, to attend to him, keeping himself apart like the nobleman he seemed to think himself to be, insisting on telling Thorgrim what they might achieve and how.

  Thorgrim could endure arrogance from men whose achievements warranted arrogance—he saw enough of that among the Northmen—but such an attitude from a cur like Blathmac made him desperate to wring the man’s neck, if he could find it through his beard. Thorgrim could not recall any man he had wanted to kill as much as Blathmac whom he had not simply challenged to a hólmganga, a formal duel, and killed. But somehow Cónán had managed thus far to dissuade him.

  “Have you ever seen a child playing at man-at-arms?” Cónán asked. “Going about ordering adults here and there for fun?”

  “Yes,” Thorgrim said. His own boys had loved playing that way.

  “Well, that’s Blathmac, do you see? Think of him like that. And like any child, we’ll see he gets a whipping when the time is right.”

  Thorgrim only grunted in reply, but for the time being, with greater things on his mind, he was willing to take Cónán’s suggestion in that matter. He did not want to drive Blathmac’s men away. His talk of using their corpses to build a wall was mostly a joke, but not entirely. In a fight, those sorry men could at least serve as fodder for the mounted spearmen, armed and flung in the riders’ path to slow them down so the real warriors could do their work.

  And now it seemed as if that time had come. The riders on the far hill were in a loose line, most sitting in their saddles and letting their mounts graze. A few, the leaders, Thorgrim imagined, were gathered in a small group, no doubt discussing their next move. They were not aware of the five men watching them from behind the rock, or the rest of Thorgrim’s ad hoc army a mile back, down by the riverbank.

  The column of Northmen and outlaws was well hidden just then, but generally there was nothing stealthy about it. All told they were about fifty-five men and a dozen women and they tended to spread out over quite a stretch of country as they marched. They carried bundles of food and small casks of ale and a boar that someone had killed slung from poles resting on the men’s shoulders. They stopped frequently to rest, or at least more frequently than Thorgrim would have liked.

  Blathmac could not resist shouting orders and chastisements at his men and at anyone else who fell under his eye. Save for the Northmen. He had sense enough not to yell at the Northmen. They would not have understood the words, and the tone would have put his life in serious jeopardy.

  Thorgrim and Cónán both knew the dangers of having their people spread out that way, particularly in open country with mounted warriors hunting for them. Trying to keep them together was pointless, so they had sent scouts out well ahead and off in several directions, the younger, fleeter, smarter men who would make certain they did not blunder into a trap or get taken by surprise by a sudden charge at their flanks.

  Fothaid had come running back to camp an hour earlier with a report of horsemen in the distance. He had led the others to the hiding place behind the rock.

  “I don’t think they know we’re here,” Cónán said, nodding toward the mounted men. “I don’t mean just us. They don’t know about the others back at the river. They don’t look as if they’re getting ready for any sort of attack.”

  “I agree,” Thorgrim said. “But they’re between us and Kevin’s ringfort, so unless they move soon, go further west, we’ll have to fight our way through them.” He stood, still crouching out of sight from the riders on the hill. “Let’s get back to the others. We have a battle to make ready for.”

  Twenty minutes later they were back with the rest. Blathmac’s men had lit into the dried meat and ale as soon as Thorgrim and the others had gone off, and they were still at it when they returned. Just the sight of them, dirty and stupid-looki
ng, wide-eyed, their clothes in rags, desperately gnawing at beef bones, made Thorgrim despair of defeating the mounted warriors they were facing. He had been unsure of their chances when he thought there were just twenty riders arrayed against them. Now he was looking at forty or fifty horsemen at least.

  “I don’t know what use we’ll make of Blathmac’s dogs,” Thorgrim said to Cónán as the two surveyed the fighting men at their disposal. “They’d be useless in a shieldwall, and we don’t have shields enough for them in any case.”

  “They would be useless,” Cónán agreed. He turned to Thorgrim. “See here…you Northmen, you have your way of fighting. Shieldwalls and all that. It’s not how we fight. I don’t mean Irishmen, Irish men-at-arms. They do all that shield and sword nonsense. But those who live by their wits, like me and my men, even Blathmac’s men, we have our ways. It’s how we keep alive. We have to fight these bastards on the horses. Let’s fight them my way.”

  Thorgrim frowned. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking we use our brains, and not just our strength of arm,” Cónán said. “This might be a new thing for you Norsemen, but hear me out.”

  They spoke. Thorgrim called Harald and Godi to him, and, reluctantly, Blathmac, who added little but seemed at least willing to take part, no doubt because the plan that Cónán laid out put him in little personal danger.

  “We’ll need four or five men to go out after the riders, no more,” Cónán said. “A few quick, clever men can do worlds more than dozens of dull ones.”

  The others nodded. “I’ll go,” Cónán continued. “How about you, Thorgrim?” he asked. He was grinning, enjoying this. “We’ll have to move fast. Can you keep up, old man?”

  Thorgrim had no idea if he could keep up or not, but he had no choice now but to agree, and Cónán, he was sure, knew it. “I’m with you,” he said. “I’ll try to not make you look a fool in front of your men.”