Wings of the Storm: (The Rise of Sigurd 3)

by Giles Kristian

Erp had been waiting ever since for a chance to repay the king. Now that chance had come.

  Others had come too. Twenty-nine men had rowed over from Sandnes, fierce-eyed warriors all, who looked to a godi called Thokk as their leader. It was the Óðin spear which had lured them in, and they watched Sigurd as if half expecting him to transform into a wolf or an eagle or even the Allfather himself. There were whispers that these Sandnes men were berserkers and whether or not that was true, the others avoided them. Avoided Thokk too, but that was nothing unusual. The godi, who went by the name of Far-Flyer, had raven or crow feathers tied into his black hair and a stare that could turn water to ice.

  Sixteen spearmen, young and old, had come from Jæren with their lord, a tall, silver-haired karl called Hastin. No one knew what Hastin’s grievance was with King Gorm, or why he had come, but he looked a steady man and all of his warriors had tough leather armour and seemed eager for the fray.

  There were some forty others who had sailed or rowed to the island, some in small groups, others alone, and each for his own reasons. Sigurd welcomed them all with ale and food. He let them touch the sacred spear and he asked each man his name, telling him that he would earn a fair share of the plunder when the fight was won. When these new men were added to Asgrim’s one hundred and thirty-three Svearmen, Jarl Hrani’s ninety Sword-Norse, and King Thorir’s seventy Danes it made a total of four hundred and twenty-eight men.

  And it would not be enough.

  ‘I expected more,’ Sigurd said on the fourth day, when it seemed no one else was coming no matter how hard he looked out to sea. There was still no sign of King Gorm and his ships, which was in itself disheartening because it meant the king was still gathering his war host. Sigurd all but shivered to think of it.

  ‘Gorm has bought off or threatened every jarl within a hundred rôsts of his high seat,’ Olaf said. ‘He’s been getting fat in every bugger’s hall within fifty. What else has the prick been doing while we were off fighting and you were getting yourself half sacrificed in some Svear temple?’

  It was true of course, and everyone knew it. Only Olaf would say it.

  They were watching Hastin and his Jæren men practising for war. The karl had got them into two shieldwalls and these two skjaldborgar faced each other, the men for now throwing insults, not spears, across the gap between.

  ‘We’ve got a war host here,’ Olaf said. ‘Gorm will have a bigger one. That’s kings for you.’

  And it was.

  There was a cheer and Hastin’s skjaldborgar slammed together, men leaning into their shields, digging their feet in, trying to push their opponents back to the marks scraped in the ground behind them. It was a simple pushing match – no blades – to see which wall was the stronger. Nothing to lose but pride. Nothing to gain but bragging rights.

  Folavika. Named for the inlet in which Reinen, War-Rider and all the other boats sat rocking gently at their moorings. So this will be known as the battle of Folavika then, Sigurd thought, looking down at the ships now, hoping he had done the right thing in choosing to fight a land battle rather than inviting the oath-breaker to a ship fight.

  ‘When we leave our ships what is to stop this king blocking them in at their moorings and burning them all?’ King Thorir had asked, and everyone agreed it was a fair question.

  But that was before they saw where Sigurd had chosen to plant his banner. From here at the northern tip of the island they would see Gorm’s ships coming from the west. Those ships would put into the first, smaller bay to the west of Folavika because Sigurd had men waiting there with horns to signal the king and tell him to do just that. Sigurd’s messengers would assure the king that he would not suffer a single arrow or thrown stone while his men disembarked.

  No reason a fight shouldn’t begin honourably, even if it ended in blood and screams and piss-drenched breeks.

  ‘And if he has his own ideas?’ King Thorir’s son Thidrek had asked.

  ‘We will be ready,’ Sigurd replied. For if King Gorm’s ships sailed past that first bay and on past Sigurd’s position, intent on destroying his boats in the water, Sigurd would know about it. He would send crews hurtling over the rocks down to the bay and those crews would take the ships out into the fjord before the king had a chance to swoop down upon them. ‘But it will not come to that, Thidrek,’ he said.

  He had laid his challenge out to the oath-breaker for all to see, like a fur trader showing his last pelt to the crowd. King Gorm was coming. Of that there was no doubt, and Sigurd bargained on him seeking to end this feud with one clean strike, rather than going for Sigurd’s ships and risking some of them flying the coop with his enemies aboard. No. Gorm needed one battle, shieldwall against shieldwall. He needed to kill Jarl Harald’s last living son and put out the fire he had started.

  ‘He’ll have the spears but we’ll have the ground,’ Sigurd said to Olaf now, looking at his banner planted a stone’s throw away at the crest of a rise amongst a sea of long grass. Half an arrow-shot in length, this ridge fell away to bumpy uneven ground upon which a large body of men would find it difficult to hold a tight formation. And where there were gaps in a skjaldborg there was death, because men would force a way through like an arrow or the slenderest spear point piercing a ring in a brynja.

  At their backs would be rocks: big, high, awkward rocks, a formidable enough obstacle to prevent anyone coming at them from behind even if they got down the flanks. And behind those steep rocks it was a careful climb down or a leg-breaking drop to the shore. A good place to set up for a fight. A good place to plant your first banner.

  There was a light rain blowing in from the west but it had not yet soaked the half-circle of cloth enough to stop it bristling below the blade of the Óðin spear, whose butt Svein had thrust into the ground until it hit rock. A black wolf’s head on a green field, the beast snarling at the sky. A wolf because Sigurd was a wolf. Hunted, homeless, the last of the litter but the most dangerous of them all. Embroidered by King Thorir’s wife, Queen Halla of Skíringssalr, and drenched in Asgot’s magic. A powerful thing then, his new banner, with enough seiðr of its own perhaps to keep it stirring even if rain lashed down in a hissing fury.

  The next day the rain came properly, sweeping east across the bluff in grey swirling clouds which slapped their shelters and drummed on helmets and shields and had men squinting their eyes against it as they looked west, ever west. It was that very same wind which would bring the king to Rennisøy.

  But first it brought two men.

  ‘Blacksmiths the pair of ’em,’ Solmund said the moment he saw them coming over the bluff, and to be fair that was before he laid eyes on the tools, the hammers, tongs and bellows, which they later brought up to the camp. A man had come to Sigurd to say that a small boat had beached on the shingle and two Danes, with war gear which frankly deserved a much better boat, had come ashore to fight for him. Big men both, heavily muscled, with big hands and coal-blackened breeks. Father and son clearly, the younger man, Ingel, still boasting good looks which age had tempered in Ibor, though neither sported forelocks or much in the way of eyebrows, those having been singed away by the forge.

  ‘We cannot swear the oath for we are already King Thorir’s men,’ Ibor told Sigurd. ‘But we’ll set up hereabouts and make ourselves useful.’

  ‘We’re glad to have you, Ibor,’ Sigurd said, shaking both men’s hands. And he was glad too. The smiths would be busy day and night, fixing or replacing broken brynja rings, hammering dents out of helmets, straightening swords and making arrow heads.

  ‘I’ve heard a rumour that you’ve a little iron around here,’ Ibor said, lifting one of his non brows. His son Ingel looked sheepish for all his shoulders and brawny arms. But then Sigurd had a famous name these days, as well as a war host, and all this while not even being jarl. And then there was the Óðin spear. It was no surprise that men could act flea-bitten around him.

  ‘I found some iron on my travels. One or two bars,’ he told the smiths, watching their eyes
light up at that, the way Svein and Bram’s did when mead was mentioned. ‘You will earn a share of it if you work hard for me.’

  Ibor nodded, then exchanged a look with his son before setting off back to the bay to fetch his tools. ‘Make it quick, lad, we’ve work to do,’ he called over his shoulder to Ingel who lingered, pulling at his short beard so that it was clear to everyone that he had something he needed to say.

  ‘Well, lad?’ Olaf said. ‘Spit it out or swallow it.’

  Ibor looked from Olaf to Sigurd. ‘I have news from your sister Runa, lord,’ he said.

  Sigurd’s heart leapt like a salmon but he kept his face spear-straight as Olaf nodded at Solmund and Svein and the others that they should busy themselves elsewhere.

  ‘You’ve seen her?’ Sigurd asked Ingel when they were alone on the bluff but for the wheeling gulls above and a colony of gannets at the cliff’s edge, their incessant rab-rab-rab calls cluttering the day.

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen her,’ Ingel said, colour flushing cheeks already chafed by the heat of the forge. ‘My father and I have been living on the island of the Maidens. Working,’ he added a little too hastily.

  ‘I thought no men were allowed there,’ Sigurd said.

  Ingel cleared his throat. ‘King Thorir sends us, lord.’ He shrugged. ‘To help where we can.’

  Sigurd imagined what it must be like for two handsome, capable men on an island teeming with women. Then he cleared his mind of that thought, afraid of where it led. ‘Runa is well?’

  he asked and to his great relief Ingel nodded, almost smiling for the first time.

  ‘Your sister is well, lord,’ the young blacksmith said. ‘King Thorir sent news to Fugløy of your uprising. He wanted Skuld the High Mother to know that he was coming west to fight, bringing young men to blood them against some Norse king.’ Now came the grin and it made Ingel instantly likeable. ‘When my father heard that you had come into possession of the Allfather’s spear, I knew we would come. He is curious to see how the blade is forged, for Ívaldi’s sons who made Gungnir were the greatest smiths to ever pick up a hammer.’

  ‘Then tell your father you may both handle the spear and learn its secrets when there is no more work to be done,’ Sigurd said, at which the young smith smiled again, resigning himself to never laying hands on the sacred weapon.

  ‘So are you going to let your father unload your boat all by himself?’ Sigurd asked, glad to have news of Runa but thinking that there were other tasks which needed his attention, such as telling four hundred warriors one more time where they could and could not shit.

  Ingel looked itchy again. ‘There is something else, lord,’ he said. ‘Something which Runa told me to tell you and you alone.’

  This man loves my sister, Sigurd realized then with sudden, breath-catching certainty. Realized actually that he had known it from the first time those forge-cracked lips had spoken Runa’s name.

  He took a breath, wondering what he had done by letting Runa out of his sight. His beautiful, golden, Freyja-kissed sister.

  ‘I am listening,’ he said.

  The oath-breaker King Gorm, whom men still called Biflindi, Shield-Shaker, though not in Sigurd’s hearing, came in nineteen ships. A great fleet led by Storm-Bison, the king’s own ship, sweeping past the north-west tip of the island, riding Rán’s white-haired daughters which beat past the rocky coast, driven eastward, wind-whipped and relentless. It was a fleet buoyed by its own importance, revelling in the strength of the pack, each ship rejoicing in the wind which filled its sails and sang on its stays like the promise of fame.

  That wind whipped the spume off the rolling grey furrows and Sigurd imagined the king standing by Hríð-visundr’s prow beast, the salt spray soaking his face, beading in his beard, crusting his lips which were pulled back from his teeth in a wolf’s grin. Because Gorm had assembled a great war host, the greatest of all his days, and he was coming to crush his enemies the way a man takes a spade to a nest of rats.

  ‘It’s not too late, Sigurd,’ Olaf said, the first words either of them had spoken for a long time as they stood together on the grassy bluff, looking out to sea. Watching.

  Sigurd had never seen so many sails spread to the wind, so many hulls ploughing the grey fjord, and from Olaf’s long silence he knew his friend had not either. Now, with those words Olaf was offering him a way out of this. Though not really, of course. It was too late and they both knew it. Every man on Rennisøy knew it. Even if they hared down to the big bay now and got aboard their boats they would have to row them out before they could catch the wind in their sails and by that time Gorm’s fleet would be upon them.

  ‘Some of us would get away,’ Olaf said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Sigurd said. But neither of them moved. Nor did any of the others who had come up to the bluff to watch, their beards bristling in the gusts, their eyes round as oar holes at the sight. So many carved beast heads chasing across the fjord, all snarl and stare. So many tallow-stinking sails swollen with the gathering wind, the strakes trembling beneath men’s feet, whispering into their limbs like the thrill which comes before the blood-fray.

  Perhaps it was worth fighting a battle you could not win, to have seen nineteen proper ships, plus a dozen smaller craft, given to the wind, offered up to Njörd, Lord of the Sea and god of wind and flame.

  The crews of the lead ships were working hard now, reefing, robbing the wind of wool so that they could drive their tillers over and turn into the first bay, to take Sigurd up on his invitation to moor there. Those not working the ship would be gripping the sides, clutching spear shafts and shields and the little hammers at their necks. They would be trying to ignore the rumbles and gurgles in their guts and their dry mouths and the creeping fear. They would be telling themselves that this was not their death day. Others will bleed. Others will be ripped open by sharp blades. Others will die screaming in pain, drowning in fear, shitting themselves, suddenly stripped of the honour and courage which they had worn like a cloak since they had first wanted to be like their fathers. A thin garb, that, when the end comes.

  ‘Well if we’re staying, we should probably go and get ready,’ Olaf said, turning his back on the scene and walking off.

  ‘Aye, it’s not every day you get a visit from the king,’ Solmund said. He was braiding his grey hair so that it would not blind him in the fight. Gods be with him, that old man who was never happier than when out in the fjord at the helm of a good ship. That skipper who had never rejoiced in battle but who would stand beside Sigurd no matter what.

  ‘Thought you said we couldn’t lose,’ King Thorir said, coming to watch the first of Gorm’s ships beach on the strand or drop anchors into the shallows. As for the other vessels, now that they were coming closer, bows turning across the rolling furrows, everyone up on that crag could see that each was crammed with spear-armed men. Warriors from scores of villages, islands and farmsteads, who owed allegiance to the king at Avaldsnes and had been reminded of that.

  ‘You must have wrestled with men who were bigger than you, King Thorir,’ Sigurd said, watching Storm-Bison for sign of the king himself.

  ‘Careful, lad,’ Thorir said, for he was short, a head and a half shorter than Sigurd. ‘What of it?’

  ‘Yet you have never lost,’ Sigurd said. ‘Even though these bigger men must have thought they had the beating of you.’

  ‘True enough, lad,’ King Thorir said, knowing where Sigurd was going with this. King Gorm had ridden Storm-Bison up on to the shingle now and men were spilling over her sides and forming a shieldwall on the beach in case Sigurd had planned an ambush. But Sigurd would not fight him there. ‘It’ll be a rare fight all the same,’ King Thorir said. ‘And I’m glad my boys are here to see this. Might not see its like again in their lifetime. A fleet like that. A bloody swarm like that.’

  Other ships were slewing on to the beach, using the wind’s momentum and their oars for the final push, sinew and muscle driving them up the foreshore which had been made smooth by countles
s hulls before them. They disgorged their spear-and axe-armed cargo and those men came with yells and banter and the thumping of blades and staves on shields because they were already rousing themselves to the coming violence, like water coming to the boil. The wind carried the din of it up the craggy rocks to where Sigurd waited, and for a while he let it wash over him, let it feed his own war beast which was stirring inside him now.

  Then he turned and went to make his stand beneath his snarling wolf banner.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SIGURD DID NOT let his enemies have it all their own way. When Gorm was arraying his host on the uneven ground to the west of their position, Sigurd sent Erp and Hastin down the slope with those of their Mekjarvik and Jæren men who had bows and slingshots. Shieldless and light as shepherd lads they went down in loose order, half running over the bumps and tussocks to harass the king’s men, to sting them with arrows and smooth stones. Some arrows came back, darting over the king’s skjaldborgar like swifts, but none of his Sword-Norse wanted to waste their muscle and breath running up the hill to chase those fleet-footed men off. Instead, the king’s men kept their shields up and their heads down. Even so, one or two of them died who did not see death flying towards them. More were hurt badly enough that they were put out of the fight before it began. It was nothing in the scheme of things but, as Asgrim said, it can never be a bad thing to blood the enemy before he bloods you.

  ‘Just another seven or eight hundred and things will start to look good for us,’ Moldof rumbled, attaching a shield to the stump of his half arm.

  ‘Perhaps you are beginning to regret joining me, Moldof,’ Sigurd said, remembering that freezing day when Moldof had come to kill him but had ended up joining them instead. How King Gorm’s former champion had even saved Sigurd’s life at the borg when a man from Alba, perhaps sent by King Gorm, had tried to murder Sigurd in the stinking dark of a cattle byre. Moldof had proved himself in a dozen fights since then. Gorm’s loss had been their gain.