Winter's Fire: (The Rise of Sigurd 2)

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Gods but I miss ’em,’ Olaf said now, coming to stand at Sigurd’s shoulder.

  ‘If my brothers were with us now I would almost pity the king,’ Sigurd said.

  Olaf nodded. ‘Thorvard had the makings of a saga hero. Even Slagfid admitted that Thorvard was going to be a great warrior. Said the lad was one of the best he’d seen.’ Slagfid had been Jarl Harald’s champion and as fierce a warrior as Sigurd had ever known.

  ‘And Sigmund had enough clever in him for two men,’ Olaf went on. ‘Your father envied the lad that, you know. Sigmund could put a rock and raven’s feather in the scales and find a way to make them balance.’

  This talk of the past was like a fist around Sigurd’s heart, clenching it so that he could barely breathe. But he did not stop Olaf talking.

  ‘As for Sorli, he was trouble that boy . . .’

  Sigurd’s eyes were still grasping at the shore but he could hear the smile on Olaf’s lips.

  ‘Lad had balls like boulders. I remember when you were youngens and Thorvard, who was built like a man even then, got carried away with the training spears one day. Gave you an eye as black as Hel’s arsehole.’ Sigurd remembered it well, as if it had been yesterday. ‘When Sorli laid eyes on you he strode right up to Thorvard and put a fist in his mouth.’ Olaf chuckled. ‘Blood everywhere. Knocked out a tooth as I recall, which was something seeing as he’d been balancing on his tiptoes to give the blow. Ah, Sorli. He’d march across the rainbow-bridge and kick Óðin in the bollocks if the gods upset you or your brothers.’ Olaf shook his head. ‘I miss ’em.’

  Sigurd could not have spoken then even if he had wanted to.

  Olaf’s big hand gripped his shoulder. ‘They’re drinking Óðin’s mead now, lad, and they’re proud of you. All of them, your mother and Harald too,’ he said, then he turned and gazed towards the land sliding by on Reinen’s larboard. ‘But they’re no prouder than I am,’ he said. ‘Let’s get that straight here and now.’

  Sigurd stared through the sea mist at the shore. But he could see even less now than before.

  It had made it worse that the wind had died away, making progress past Skudeneshavn so slow that it had been impossible not to dwell on the village’s fate. Even though the place meant nothing to Bjarni and Bjorn, Valgerd, Black Floki and the rest, the Skudeneshavn men’s mood had got into them too, like seep water in the bilge.

  ‘Are you sure you do not want to put in, Uncle?’ Sigurd had asked, for Olaf had family still living there, his wife Ragnhild and his sons Harek and the white-haired bairn Eric.

  Olaf shook his head. ‘Skudeneshavn is Randver’s son’s pissing post now,’ he said. ‘If the lad has any brains in his skull he’ll have men here flashing silver around the place and feeding our womenfolk,’ he spat, ‘bedding them too likely as not, but mainly waiting for us to show our faces.’

  ‘Hrani Randversson is jarl in all but name now,’ Svein said.

  The thought that Hrani’s men would be sniffing round the daughters and wives of Jarl Harald’s dead hirðmen sickened Sigurd. But he knew that was the way of things. If you kill a man you can take what is his. Maybe you hold on to it. Maybe not.

  Olaf shook his head again, as if trying to convince himself. ‘No, we can’t risk it. As much as I’d give every bit of silver I owned to see my kin again, even have Ragnhild chew my ear off, for a while at least.’ He grinned but it was a sad grin. ‘It’s the kind of bone-headed thing you’d do, Sigurd, but those of us with a few years on our backs are supposed to know better.’

  And so they had sailed past Sigurd’s old home on into the Skude Fjord, into the gloomy damp day, and when the wind finally died altogether they took the oars down from their trees and rowed. Sigurd rowed too because Reinen needed every available blade in the water to move her, and even Moldof managed well enough with one arm and one oar.

  ‘If a woman can row . . .’ he had growled, snatching the oar that Aslak had been handing to Bjorn, for Valgerd had already taken hers and passed it through an oar port by her sea chest on the steerboard side midships. The only ones not bending their backs at the benches were Solmund, because he was at the tiller, and Runa, whose young eyes were watching over the bows for rocks because it was low tide. She made a strange sight standing there at the prow man’s place: a young golden-haired woman treading the boards where Slagfid, her father’s champion, had stood and smote men with his great axe. Where Svein himself had stood in the gore-stained chaos of the blood-fray. And now and then Sigurd looked over his shoulder at her as he rowed, thinking how precious she was and how he would never let harm befall her.

  ‘And what if you get an itch on your nose or have to scratch your arse?’ Bjarni asked Moldof. ‘Then what will you do, one-arm?’

  Sigurd suspected Bjarni had chosen the bench behind the giant just so that he could nettle him, from here to the world’s edge if his wyrd allowed.

  ‘Or a gull craps on your ugly head?’ Bjarni added.

  ‘Then you can wipe it off for me, little man,’ Moldof said, his one huge hand gripping the stave as he heaved it back, leaning so far that his lank hair dripped sweat on to Bjarni’s breeks.

  The moon was still near full that night and enough of its cold glow bled through the cloud that, with the Skudeneshavn men’s knowledge of the sea around those parts, they were confident rowing. Sigurd lost himself in the cadence of it, every stroke the same as the last, each like a stitch in some god’s tunic, or a ring in a giant’s brynja. He was sure he heard Bram snoring for a while, and there were times when he himself was more asleep than awake, though the rhythm of the oars beat on.

  There was some magic about rowing at night, about sharing the silence, when the dark-dwellers are abroad and you wonder what beasts writhe beneath your feet, beneath the thin strakes which are all that separates you from the depths. When the only sound is the clump of the oars in their ports and the strike and hiss of the blades hitting the water.

  Yet rowing at night was not without risks and Sigurd had them take turns at the watch, two at a time even though that meant two less at the oars. The coast and the islands and the small rocks standing proud of the sea with which they were so familiar in the daylight looked completely different at night, so that there was a constant fear that simply mistaking one marker for another could see them run aground and drowned. Even so, Sigurd had decided it was better to row under night’s veil when they could. Because they were heading south-east to Rennisøy and could only have been in more dangerous waters had they been heading up the Karmsund Strait beneath King Gorm’s hall on the hill at Avaldsnes. This fjord was now Hrani Randversson’s hunting ground and the young would-be jarl was bound to have crews out looking for the man who killed his father, just as King Gorm had ships waiting like owls in the high boughs.

  ‘What better way to show that his arse is the best fit for his father’s seat perched up there in Örn-garð than to catch the men who fed Randver to the crabs,’ Olaf had suggested when they had laid out the dangers of sailing south.

  ‘And yet we do not know what kind of man this Hrani is,’ Asgot had said. ‘Perhaps he is a careful man, one who would rather stay in his hall and rut with his father’s bed thralls than be drawn deeper into the mire of a feud with a god-favoured killer.’

  But Runa had shaken her head and Sigurd had invited her to speak even though she was a girl barely on the cusp of womanhood and amongst warriors.

  ‘Hrani is cruel,’ she said, ‘and whilst I think he lacks his father’s wisdom—’

  ‘Ha! Look what good his wisdom did him,’ Bram put in, but Sigurd gestured for his sister to continue.

  ‘The men respect Hrani as a warrior,’ Runa said, and she should know. When Hrani had raided Skudeneshavn, knowing Jarl Harald was walking up to his death at Avaldsnes, he had taken Runa hostage. The idea was that she would marry Amleth, Hrani’s younger brother, thus turning the ground over the whole bloody affair so that new seeds could grow from the alliance between Randver’s people and Harald’s. Sigu
rd had made sure that the marriage between Runa and Amleth never happened, of course, though not before Runa had lived awhile under Jarl Randver’s roof and come to know a thing or two about Hrani.

  ‘He will be thirsting to prove himself and will give little thought to whom the gods favour and whom they do not,’ she said now.

  ‘He will think of it when he comes face to face with me,’ Sigurd said.

  Hrani had led the war band that had brought steel and death to Skudeneshavn. One of his warriors had killed Sigurd’s mother, though not before Grimhild had given a man named Andvett his death-wound. She had opened his guts with a scramasax, and Runa, who had been taken prisoner, had watched Andvett bleed to death, writhing in the thwarts of Randver’s ship.

  And now Sigurd wanted to kill Hrani as much as he had wanted to kill the man’s father.

  Örn-garð, the Eagle’s Dwelling-place. That was the name of Hrani’s hall and Sigurd thought about that now as he leant back in the stroke, pulling the black sea past Reinen’s hull. Like his father, Hrani doubtless considered himself a lord of land and sea. And like an eagle he would be hunting.

  Sigurd did not have enough men to win if it came to a fight. There would be a time, but that time was not now.

  So they rowed at night.

  The next morning they found a quiet cove on the south side of Mosterøy, the island south of Rennisøy, where they dropped the anchor and moored to get some rest. It was damp but not so cold and they hunkered up in the thwarts between Reinen’s ribs, most of them asleep and snoring before the first watch was set. They slept on a sleeping sea, the sound of it caressing the shore like a lover breathing nearby, only broken by the occasional coarse call of a cormorant, that bark travelling far across the still water.

  When they woke they ate some smoked meat and cheese, washed it down with weak ale and went once more to their benches to thread the oars back through their ports. And then came rain. Not the soft drizzle which you did not even notice, though your clothes were soaked through, but a fierce, cruel, driving rain. It hammered the fjord, dimpling the surface at first and then seeming to come in long shafts which arrowed through so that Aslak remarked that the next fish they caught would be full of holes.

  ‘This is good for us,’ Olaf said, rain dripping from his beard.

  ‘How so?’ Svein asked. He had braided his beard into a thick red rope and water streamed from the end of it.

  ‘Because anyone out looking for us will not look so hard with the rain pissing down their necks,’ Bram answered for Olaf as the oars plunged and rose, the blades dripping before they fell again.

  ‘Well, I would rather fight and be dry than sit here as wet as an otter’s cunny,’ Bjarni said, which got some grunts of agreement from the benches around him, and Sigurd glanced at Valgerd and saw her lips constrict with the ghost of a smile. She caught his eye and he looked away.

  And they had been wrong when they thought the rain would help them pass unnoticed through Hrani Randversson’s fjord.

  There were two ships and they came from the south, their oar banks beating like eagle’s wings, swooping up past the pine-bristled coast. There was no doubting that they were coming for Reinen.

  ‘Randver’s?’ Solmund asked, his brow more furrowed than the fjord as his old eyes tried to pick any identifying details from the craft.

  ‘Hrani’s now,’ Sigurd reminded him and Crow-Song confirmed it, for as a skald he had sold his craft to kings and jarls and anyone with silver and mead, before he had joined Sigurd’s crew. Before Sigurd had told Hagal that he would either crew-up with them or else Sigurd would cut open his back, pull out his lungs and nail them to the wall of a barn belonging to a farmer named Roldar, whose guests they were.

  ‘You see the prow beast on the lead ship?’ the skald asked, having pulled in his oar to stand with Sigurd at the prow.

  ‘A yellow dragon?’ Sigurd said.

  Crow-Song nodded. ‘You’re meant to think it’s gold,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps I would if it looked like gold,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘Golden-Fire,’ Olaf said, recalling the vessel’s name, then curled his lips and scratched his great beard. ‘Sigurd’s right. Ought to be called Dragon’s-Piss.’

  ‘Want me to fit our beast, Sigurd?’ Svein offered from his row bench. Reinen’s prow beast was a snarling creature with fierce eyes and it was the prow man’s honour to fit the massive reindeer antlers either side of its head. Not that anyone thought it looked like a reindeer, but that only added to the terror of it. Or so Jarl Harald had explained it.

  ‘Not yet, Svein,’ Sigurd replied. ‘Solmund, hold this course.’

  ‘Well, we can’t out-row them,’ Olaf said.

  Runa looked at her brother, teeth worrying her bottom lip which glistened with rain. ‘We could make landfall before they reach us,’ she said, eyes wide and hopeful.

  Olaf seemed to consider this, then nodded. ‘See that beach there, Sigurd?’ He pointed to a break in the rocks where the surf rolled up, depositing masses of scummy foam on the pebbles and grit. ‘We could run her up the shingle and leg it.’

  ‘And give them Reinen? No, Uncle.’ Sigurd shook his head. ‘I won’t do that.’

  ‘Well, we can’t fight two crews,’ Olaf said. ‘They’ll come up nice and cosy, one on either side of us, and that will be that. We’d last longer by jumping overboard in our brynjur.’ Sigurd had seen men go overboard in their brynjur. They thrashed for maybe two or three heartbeats and then they were gone.

  He looked at his crew, all of them rowing towards the enemy, and he knew they would keep up that rhythm until he told them otherwise. They had given him their oath but what could he give them in return? There would be no glory in this fight. It would barely even be a fight. Murder would be a more fitting word.

  ‘Well, lad?’ Olaf said. ‘At least let them die with their war gear on.’

  Sigurd’s heart was beating five times for every oar stroke. His stomach felt as if it were full of snakes, the creatures writhing and rolling over each other. Above him gulls shrieked in the rain. He breathed in the scent of the pines on the shore and wondered if these were his last moments. If he would soon be with his father and brothers again. His mother too, for she had been as brave and proud as any warrior and would not be refused entry to Valhöll.

  ‘Moldof, come here,’ he said.

  With his one massive arm the giant lifted the wooden blade from the water and worked the oar stave out of the port. Bjarni pulled his own oar in as far as it would go and Bram put his foot on the end, pressing it against the deck while Bjarni helped Moldof bring his oar back over the top strake into the ship. Then King Gorm’s former champion came to Sigurd, rolled his huge shoulders and nodded.

  ‘I have an idea, Moldof,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘You want to share it with me?’ Olaf said. ‘Or shall I have them get their mail on and prepare to drink mead with their grandfathers?’

  Sigurd ignored Olaf’s question, his gaze riveted to Moldof. ‘You will do exactly what I tell you,’ he said, ‘because if you do not, Olaf will take off your other arm and throw you over the side and I doubt even Rán will want you in her cold kingdom. You will wander Niflheim and Hel’s beasts will feed on what’s left of you.’

  Moldof looked from Sigurd to Olaf, who nodded as though what Sigurd had suggested would be no more trouble than drawing his sword.

  The vein in Moldof’s neck seemed to throb and a deep growl rolled in his throat but never made it past his lips. ‘Talk quickly then, Haraldarson,’ he said.

  With so few oars in the fjord they would never outrun Golden-Fire and the other ship, which Hagal now recognized as Storm-Steed. Both of Hrani’s ships were full-crewed and sleeker than Reinen, and as Solmund pointed out, you did not name a ship Storm-Steed if it was slow.

  ‘We’ve got both feet in this snare and there’s no slipping out of it now,’ Bram said, leaning right back in the stroke. ‘I would rather fight with a sword than an oar, if it’s all the same to you, O
laf.’

  This got some ayes from those who did not have much confidence in Sigurd’s plan.

  ‘Killing a man with an oar cannot be so difficult,’ Floki suggested.

  ‘And doing it from a distance means you won’t get his shit on your shoes,’ Svein put in, having given it some thought.

  ‘In the last fight I am sure we killed some men with their own oars, which is hardly a good death if you ask me,’ Aslak said.

  ‘If you ladies could row as well as you talk we would not be in this mess to begin with,’ Olaf said, hauling his own spruce blade through the water. ‘Now keep this pace and try to look like you know what you are doing, hey!’

  Bjorn was the stroke man and it was his shoulders they all watched to ensure they kept the rhythm and that their oars bit the fjord together.

  ‘Almost there. Put us between them, Solmund,’ Moldof said.

  ‘You don’t tell me my business,’ the helmsman gnarred, aiming to thread Reinen through the gap between Hrani’s ships in order to show that they had no intention of trying to skirt around the trap those skippers had set.

  A man at Golden-Fire’s prow was lifting his arm up and down in a gesture that told Reinen to slow, and there were other men along her sides ready with oars to make sure the ships did not come together too aggressively. Moldof had taken up the biggest spear he could find, a ten-foot-long boar-killer, and now stood in all his war gear by Solmund on the steering platform gripping the thick ash shaft and looking like a champion but for his being an arm short.

  ‘Oars in!’ he bellowed, rain dripping from his helmet’s nasal, and Reinen’s crew obeyed, pulling the staves into the ship so that they would not break against Golden-Fire’s hull as Reinen came alongside. Rope ends were hurled across and Bjarni, Aslak and Floki passed them through the oar ports to lash both ships together.

  The other ship, Storm-Steed, held water off Reinen’s larboard side but close enough that her crew could rain spears and arrows into Reinen’s thwarts should her skipper give the order. Both Golden-Fire and Storm-Steed’s sides were lined with warriors whose shields made brightly painted ramparts, the iron blades of their spears dull against the rain-flayed murk. Thunder rumbled across the eastern sky and men touched the hammers at their necks because somewhere Thór was slaying his enemies, and Sigurd feared it was a bad omen, a warning that he should have been fighting now. And yet he did not have so much as an eating knife within reach.