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

by Giles Kristian

  ‘We’ve done our work today,’ he said.

  Moldof nodded. ‘Let’s get you back.’

  Floki spat on the Alba man’s headless corpse and he and Sigurd held each other’s eye in silent acknowledgement of how close Sigurd had come to death in that nothing place.

  ‘I need a drink,’ Sigurd said, wincing at the pain, keeping his blood-slick hand pressed against the cut flesh of his neck.

  ‘You’ve earned one,’ Moldof said.

  And with that they left the cows and the corpses and walked through the byre back out into the day.

  The butchery was great, the kind that even the gods cannot ignore, and that dusk, when it was done and Alrik’s blood-thirst was sated, he called his war host to heel.

  They made a terrible sight, exhausted and gore-spattered, their teeth white against their crimson faces, their tunics and breeks blood-soaked as they knelt in the mud robbing the dead, searching for plunder like wolves, like crows and ravens stripping carcasses to the bone.

  As well as the wounded who had been unable to fight on, some twenty-three of Guthrum’s warriors were alive at the end of it. Most of those had made a last stand at the rear of the borg between two longhouses, shields overlapped and seemingly willing to fight to the death, which Sigurd said was brave of them.

  ‘Aye, it’s brave,’ Olaf agreed, ‘but it also says something about this Alrik who these men know much better than us.’ Which was true, for had Alrik been a man known for his restraint and generosity in victory, Guthrum’s men might have thrown down their swords and spears and pleaded for their lives. As it was, Alrik formed two shieldwalls, each three men deep, one in front and one at the borg men’s rear. He sent bowmen up on to the roofs of the longhouses either side of Guthrum’s men to rain their shafts on to those doomed warriors.

  Sigurd wanted no part in that final slaughter and led his crew away before the killing began, which Alrik himself did not seem to mind, not least when he saw Sigurd covered in his own blood and paling too.

  ‘Nor should he mind, for we have given him this borg,’ Sigurd said. He was sitting on a felled pine trunk while Valgerd stitched his wounds, glad that it was she and not Solmund doing it, for the old skipper might get his own back for the mess Sigurd once made of sewing him up. First, though, the shieldmaiden had cut his beard and shaved his chin so that she might see what she was doing, and the others laughed to see Sigurd looking like a much younger man again.

  ‘I am a young man,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, but you’ve already lived a handful of lives,’ Olaf said, and Sigurd could not disagree with that.

  Of the others, more than half had taken cuts and sprains, though the real pain would come later, they knew. They stood around slaking their thirst, watching men picking the dead for plunder, listening to the spear din and letting the aftermath of the fight course through their veins as Alrik finished the borg men off.

  When Valgerd’s work was done, and fine work it was too, Thorbiorn led them to a rain barrel and they washed off the worst of the gore. Then they walked through the place, stepping over the half-naked corpses and blood pools, and Bram threw a stone at a dog which was licking the gore from a young man’s face. Soon the crows and the rats would come to feed. The wolves, too, would come sniffing out of the forest, drawn by the scent of all that butchered meat, trying to work up the courage to sneak into the borg if they could.

  ‘They’ve earned their places in the Allfather’s hall,’ Olaf said of Guthrum’s one hundred and ten men, as the clash of arms and the screams of the dying followed them out of the gates.

  And so they had.

  They slept in a longhouse on dead men’s benches, warmed by a raging hearth as the rain hissed in the black night outside where other men kept watch from the ramparts. Alrik had moved his entire force inside the borg as darkness cloaked the world, leaving all the dead where they lay. No one liked sleeping in those houses with so many corpses scattered like chaff in the mud outside, for men feared the ghosts of the dead. But with night coming and the choice needing to be made between dealing with the slain or moving the camp inside, most men would rather put up with the ghosts if it meant they had a dry place to sleep.

  Sigurd’s crew took the benches nearest the hearth in the longhouse they were in, and no one seemed to mind. Or if they did mind no one said anything. If his crew had not got the respect of Alrik’s other warriors before the fight for looking like war gods in their fine gear, they had earned their respect now. Running into that borg had been a risky thing to do.

  ‘It was bloody mad now that I think about it,’ Olaf had said after. ‘If Guthrum’s men had held the gates shut behind us we would have been stuck like fish in a withy trap.’

  None disagreed. They would have been too tired to do so anyway, for after a fight like that their very bones craved rest. No one spoke much at all. Each was on a journey through his or her own thoughts, recalling moments of the fight, men they had killed, men who had nearly killed them, the sight of the mutilated and the screams of the doomed. After the mad confusion of the fray, warriors would try to make sense of what they had lived through, weaving the tale of it in their minds like scenes on a tapestry.

  I am getting used to it now, Sigurd thought with grim acceptance. It was always the same, he realized, looking into the fire whilst drinking the ale which Svein had given him. The muscle-trembling before a fight, the battle-rage and the blood-lust during it, and afterwards the flooding joy of knowing that you have survived. In the wake of all this came near-death exhaustion, a weariness of the body and soul which only a fjord-deep sleep could heal.

  And yet he would likely be dead now had a one-armed man not saved him. Even worse that it was Moldof, who had been his enemy and against whom his father had fought a battle fit for skald-song.

  ‘So who was he then, that shit from Alba who tried to slice you open at the gills?’ Olaf asked.

  Sigurd shook his head. ‘He knew my name though. Called me Haraldarson,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe we can get some answers out of Knut, for he picked the man up in Birka,’ Aslak suggested.

  ‘And have Knut and Alrik asking questions about us and why the turd would want Sigurd dead?’ Olaf said. ‘Better to let it lie for now.’

  Sigurd agreed with that. He drank again, then held a draught of ale in his mouth to sluice it clean of the bitter taste that lingers after so much death. He looked around. Svein was already asleep, leaning against a roof post, snoring like a troll. Olaf and Moldof were sitting on stools by an oil lamp playing tafl, which might have made for a strange sight even the previous day. But fighting shoulder to shoulder forges bonds between warriors, as does saving another man’s life. It could not be said that Moldof hadn’t proved himself, more so for being wolf-jointed and left-handed now.

  Sigurd’s gaze drifted over to Valgerd as it so often did. A green bruise staining her skin from her left temple down to her cheek, she sat on one of the benches, a pile of some fifty or more arrows on the fur beside her. She had gathered them from the mud and from Guthrum’s dead and was examining each one by flamelight, checking that the iron heads were securely fixed and sharp, and that the fletchings, goose or eagle feathers by the looks, were undamaged. She was putting the best ones into her quiver and leaving the others aside to repair later.

  Floki was working the edge of an axe against a whetstone, spitting on it now and then and holding it up to the light to inspect it. No surprise that it needed sharpening, after all the work it had been put to. The cleaving of shields, arm bones, necks, helmets, skulls.

  Crow-Song was humming a sad melody to himself and Bjarni, Aslak, Bjorn and Bram were trying to out-drink each other, for the borg was not short of ale, thank the gods. Asgot was casting the runes, though for once Sigurd was not interested in what they had to say. Too tired for it.

  Solmund had been sitting on the bench beside Sigurd, more asleep than awake, but now he stood, wincing and pressing a hand into the small of his back. The spear he had taken in t
he chest had ripped his brynja and bruised his flesh but the tough old helmsman was still in one piece. ‘Gods but I’m old,’ he said. ‘Stiffer than a day-old corpse.’ He swore. ‘I’m going to find a dark corner and I’m going to lie down and none of you will disturb me if you know what is good for you.’ He held a finger up to Sigurd. ‘But do not let me die in my sleep, Sigurd. I will see Reinen again before I go.’

  ‘I’ll have no one else at her helm, old man,’ Sigurd said, forcing a smile through the pain as his friend shambled off to find a good quiet place to get his head down. In truth only the gods and the Norns knew when they would see Reinen again. Sigurd looked at Thorbiorn who sat across from him staring into the crackling fire. ‘You did well today, Thorbiorn Thorirsson,’ he said. Sigurd had not heard the lad say a word since they had walked away from the slaughter of those last brave borg men by Alrik’s warriors.

  Thorbiorn looked up at him. There were tears in the young man’s eyes. Tears which Thorbiorn did not blink away as he fixed his eyes on Sigurd’s own. ‘I have never wanted to lie with a woman more than I do now,’ he said. But there were no women in Guthrum’s borg because it was a place for warriors. It had been the forge in which Guthrum made his army, half of which now lay ruined in the mud outside.

  ‘We will have to make do with ale,’ Sigurd said, drinking until his cup was empty. Thorbiorn did the same, then looked back into the flames.

  Sigurd did not want to think of the blood either, or the dead, or the Alba man or even the fight, which he had all but won for Alrik. Instead he thought of Runa, his brave, beautiful sister. He wondered where she was and what she was doing. And he wished she were with him now.

  They came for Runa in the night, Vebiorg and a young fox-faced Freyja Maiden called Drífa, who despite being just a couple of years older than Runa was the best archer on Fugløy. They woke her roughly and Runa sat up, shedding a dream of her mother in which she and Grimhild were sailing a small færing north up the Karmsund Strait, knives in their hands for the oath-breaker king.

  ‘Come, Runa!’ Drífa hissed, tugging at the sleeve of her nightdress. ‘She’s back!’

  ‘Who is back?’ Runa asked, scrubbing the sleep from her face. She was usually a light sleeper but she had been fjord-deep in that dream and parts of it still clung to her like sea wrack. Perhaps the others had forgotten about her, she being up there in the loft with the smoke.

  ‘The Prophetess!’ Drífa said, her slanted fox eyes wide and shining in the light of the soapstone lamp which Vebiorg held before her. Drífa had been brought to Fugløy as a bairn, the rumour being that her father was King Thorir, he having begotten her on a bed slave then sent her to the Maidens to keep her out of the way.

  ‘She has been gone since the winter before this one just past,’ Vebiorg said.

  ‘Come, Runa,’ Drífa said. ‘The others are there already.’

  Runa shuffled to the end of her bed and looked down over the ledge at the hall below, at the empty benches and furs, and the hearthfire which was already dying because no one was around to feed it. Two of the older women were still there but they were wrapping themselves in blankets and readying to brave the night outside, like warriors going to battle.

  By the time Runa had put on her over-dress, Vebiorg and Drífa were halfway down the ladder, and so she clambered on to it and followed them, their excitement having caught in her now so that she was almost trembling with it as she climbed down. At the foot of the ladder she stopped to tie her hair back, downed a wash of ale from an abandoned cup and ran through the hall out into the night.

  As eager as she was to see this Prophetess, she could not help but glance over at the smithy, hoping to catch sight of Ingel, hoping that the commotion had woken him from his slumber in the makeshift shelter at the back of the forge. For while the blacksmiths were no strangers to the women’s beds, they were forbidden to sleep anywhere else than in their furs with their tools for company and the constant heat from the furnace to keep them warm.

  Suddenly Runa was falling, sprawling on to the ground because someone had shoved and tripped her. ‘Climb back up to your nest, girl, and use your finger, for that is as close as you will get to a man’s breeks snake.’ It was Sibbe. She had come out of nowhere and Runa had not been ready. ‘You are not one of us and have no right to hear what the Prophetess has learnt on her travels.’

  ‘Leave her be, Sibbe,’ Drífa said, coming back through the throng like a salmon swimming against the current and placing herself between Runa and Sibbe.

  ‘Stay out of it, Drífa,’ Sibbe spat, pointing at Runa. ‘This jarl’s brat is not a Freyja Maiden. She should not even be here.’ Some of the other Maidens looked back but it was dark and they could not see what was happening and carried on into the tree line.

  ‘That is up to the High Mother to decide,’ Drífa countered, shouldering past the woman to help Runa up. Runa had cut her hand open on a stone but she clenched her fist on it because she did not want to give Sibbe the satisfaction.

  ‘If you want to stop me, Sibbe, you had better draw your sword,’ Runa said, squaring her shoulders to the woman and hoping Sibbe would not take her up on that challenge because she knew the Freyja Maiden would cut her down. Not least because the only blade Runa had on her was the scramasax she wore on her belt.

  Sibbe’s hand fell to her sword grip, her eyes boring into Runa’s, and even Drífa half drew her own sword because she thought a fight was coming. But then Sibbe curled her lip, turned, and spat onto the ground to show what she thought of Runa.

  ‘Not tonight,’ she said. ‘I want to hear the Prophetess. And after that I will rut with that man over there. I will ride that young buck until he cannot stand.’ She grinned at the thought of that, then turned her back on Runa and Drífa and followed the others into the woods, where the Prophetess was waiting.

  ‘It seems to me your family has a talent for making enemies,’ Drífa said as she and Runa walked on.

  Runa licked the blood from her cut palm. ‘That may be so, Drífa, but believe me when I say that we are not the kind of people you want for enemies.’

  Drífa grinned at her and Runa grinned back, the salty iron tang on her tongue, and then they came to where the others were assembled amongst the trees by a moon-flooded clearing. In that clearing, glimpsed now and then through the shifting tide of Freyja Maidens ahead, Runa caught sight of the Prophetess, short and slightly stooped, old certainly, her face cowled and a staff in her hand. The air was thick with seiðr, tainted by the stink of the filthy cat skins in which the silver-washed figure was cocooned, and it was that smell as much as the snatched sight of the woman which chilled Runa’s insides like a drink of melted snow. And then the galdr rose on a plume of hot breath, a song-like chanting which silenced every other voice on Fugløy. It grew, this reed-thin crowing, lifting into the cold night, raising the hairs on Runa’s arms and the back of her neck.

  The witch. It was the witch whom Sigurd had found whilst out hunting wolves in the forest beyond Jarl Hakon Burner’s old hall up in Osøyro. Runa had not seen the face beneath that cowl yet but she knew without a shred of doubt that it was the witch. She had lived in Burner’s hall with them awhile. Watching. A darker shadow in a dark corner. And then she had gone, which no one had been sorry about.

  Not a seiðr-kona now. The Prophetess spun her galdr like a yarn, drawing the listeners in like each new tuft of wool on a spindle, until they were all under her spell. Runa could not say how long they stood there bound by the strange enchantment, but by the time the galdr stopped, cut off suddenly like a shears-cut thread, she was shivering with cold and her feet were numb.

  ‘We thank the Goddess that you are safely returned to us,’ Skuld said, stepping forward to take the old woman’s hands in her own. ‘Let us all go back to the fire and hear your news.’

  The Prophetess nodded and at the High Mother’s command the Freyja Maidens, released from the spell now, it seemed, made their way back to the main longhouse, gathering by the hearth whi
ch was encouraged to roaring leaping life until every face was lit and Runa’s feet prickled with welcome warmth.

  Skuld the High Mother and the Prophetess talked for a while but being at the back Runa could not hear much of what they said. Yet she heard some of the others talking about her, caught their whispers in the smoke and more than one steely-eyed glance in her direction. It seemed Sibbe was not the only one amongst them who thought she should not be a part of this thing. They were right, she knew with sharp certainty. She was not a Freyja Maiden. She was an intruder. An interloper. Was it not bad enough that she had one enemy on that small island? Staying here to partake in this night, whatever it held in store, would earn her more, and that she did not need. And so she turned to sneak back to her own hall and her own bed, nevertheless hoping that Sibbe did not see her go because she would think it was Runa’s fear of her that had driven her away.

  But she had only taken three steps when a voice stopped her dead.

  ‘And where are you going, Runa Haraldsdóttir?’ Like an arrow in her back, that.

  She felt the air move as every head in that longhouse turned towards her, felt all those eyes on her as she stood there suddenly wishing she had snuck away sooner.

  ‘Creeping off like a forest cat when the hunter is around, hey?’

  Runa turned round and looked along the channel which the women had opened to give the Prophetess a line of sight to her.

  ‘Were you not going to say hei to your old friend?’

  Some fish mouths at that, Runa saw, and round eyes too.

  ‘I am not a Freyja Maiden,’ she said, unsure how she should address the old crone who was clearly more than she had seemed up in Osøyro. ‘This has nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Ha! So you say, do you?’ The Prophetess laughed then, a sound not dissimilar to the galdr and which turned Runa’s blood cold again. ‘It has everything to do with you, girl,’ she said, and Runa did not have to look at Skuld to know that the High Mother was watching her the way an eagle watches a vole shivering in the grass.