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

by Giles Kristian

  The bow strings hummed. The arrows whipped and thunked and the warrior women shrieked with savage joy for every man they killed or put down, and Sigurd knew that their god then was not Óðin or Freyja or some reasoning Asgard-dweller but the fiend of battle which can consume a warrior when the blood is flying.

  And then a war horn sounded, thin and plaintive enough to cut through the steel-storm and the wind’s howl. And Sigurd looked up at the ridge because he knew that horn meant that Asgrim and his Svearmen had been overrun.

  ‘Olaf can’t hold now,’ Floki said from behind his own shield, ‘not with them coming into his side.’

  ‘He’ll hold,’ Sigurd said, face against the limewood, still moving forward as the red-haired woman, who was quite beautiful he realized even in the maw of it all, loosed shaft after shaft into the enemy, all the while snarling like some wild creature.

  ‘Erp’s down!’ someone yelled. Someone else cursed and as the line pushed on, somehow driving the king’s men back, Sigurd saw Erp on his knees, clutching his side where a tear in his mail revealed a purple bulge which was his guts trying to spring out. Erp riveted his one eye on Sigurd, who held his stare for a heartbeat or two before looking back to his own shield. His shield which had struck rock then, or at least it felt like it. Then the rock pushed back against Sigurd and Sigurd could not hold it, and from the size of the feet which he glimpsed beneath their shields he knew he was in trouble.

  ‘Take him!’ he yelled at the red-head, who pulled another arrow from her quiver, nocked it to the bow string, drew and loosed, and cursed because the arrow missed, bouncing off the warrior’s helmet from the sound of it.

  Then Sigurd’s shoulder turned as the man broke through the wall, punching his sword hilt into Sigurd’s face and roaring as he came. Sigurd spun, reeling, but saw the big man, the oath-breaker’s champion it was, hack the bow from the red-head’s hands, and she drew her sword but the warrior’s next swing sent that flying with her severed hand still clutching the grip. He was fast, as fast as a man with half as much bulk, and he put his sword straight through the Freyja Maiden and had it out again before you could blink. She fell and suddenly mailed men were pouring through the breach, hacking at the warrior women and spearing them.

  ‘Runa!’ Sigurd screamed, spitting blood, scything a hirðman’s leg off at the knee then cutting into the spine of another, trying to reach his sister through that tide of the enemy. The Freyja Maidens were dying but not yet beaten, many of them having unslung shields and drawn swords to stab and slash in shrieking fury, almost dancing around their bigger, heavier opponents rather than trading blows with them.

  King’s men were dying too, because the Maidens knew their sword-craft, but those king’s men were hirðmen of many battles and furthermore they now knew that these women could die, that they were not in fact Valkyries riding the wind.

  Floki split a skull and hacked off another man’s jaw, and Sigurd blocked a wild swing that would have lopped off his head, then scythed his shield into the man’s temple, dropping him like a rock, and he could see Runa fighting shoulder to shoulder with two other women but he could not get to her.

  ‘Can you reach her?’ he asked Floki, slipping on the wet grass even as he caught a sword on his shield, and twisted, plunging Troll-Tickler into a man’s belly. He must have wished he owned a brynja, that man, if he could think of such things with his body ruined and death flooding in. And when Sigurd looked up Floki was gone, carving his way through the oath-breaker’s finest warriors like a man scything barley.

  There was a roar and a moaning of big war horns and through the chaos Sigurd caught sight of his own wolf-head banner, the green cloth thrashing in the wind, and for a terrible, heart-freezing moment he thought all was lost. That the enemy had captured the banner and the Óðin spear and were bringing it back down the slope to their lord. But then he saw the rearmost of the oath-breaker’s men turning to face back up the hill, bringing their shields together and bracing. Screaming at each other to hold. Spitting curses and insults at what was coming. Promising pain and death.

  And what was coming was fury. Olaf and Svein and Aslak and the others were walking down the slope, having abandoned the ridge. Having lost the ridge. They came in a swine-head formation, Svein and Olaf at the tip of the snout, Moldof, Bram and Bjarni behind them. Five in the rank behind, seven behind that, Sigurd’s crew and Hastin and his Jæren men making up the rest of the svinfylkja.

  It was like a ship’s prow through the fjord, Crow-Song might have said, Gorm’s men rolling off Olaf’s like waves before the bow, but really it was nothing so beautiful as that. In truth it was a crude nail driven into a splintering beam. They came at pace, not stopping to trade blows but battering men aside with shields and trampling them under foot, Olaf roaring into the wind, screaming at them to keep going, to not stop even if they were dead. Because Olaf knew he must strike the king’s hirð and break them before those king’s men they had left on the ridge arrayed themselves into a shieldwall and trapped them like the grain between the quern-stones.

  A warrior with a red beard rope came at Sigurd then, thinking to make his fame. He thrust his spear high and Sigurd caught it on his shield and pushed it out wide as he swung his sword across, scything off the spear blade and a foot of ash with it. The king’s man jumped back, pulled his sword from its scabbard, then came again and maybe he was very fast or maybe Sigurd was slowing, but he rained down blow after blow, howling in savage joy with each piece of Sigurd’s shield which flew.

  Sigurd thrust Troll-Tickler but Gorm’s man parried it and rammed his own shield into the shivered wreck of Sigurd’s and swung his sword backhanded, lopping off all the splintered limewood that was left above the iron boss. But Sigurd still gripped that boss and he stepped forward and hammered it across the man’s face, cracking bone, and then as Gorm’s man reeled and threw his sword up to meet Troll-Tickler, Sigurd turned the boss and drove a scramasax-sized splinter of limewood into his neck and only then did Sigurd let go of the thing.

  The king’s man fell to his knees, clutching at the shield boss and the sliver of wood sticking in his neck, his hands fumbling and slipping in his own blood.

  ‘Wait for me in Valhöll,’ Sigurd told him, then swung his gaze left and right, looking for Runa. Most of the king’s hearthmen had turned to face Olaf’s svinfylkja, so the remaining Mekjarvik men who had built the shieldhouse with Sigurd were now bunching together with the twenty or so warrior women who had survived Gorm’s counter attack.

  ‘Kill them!’ Sigurd roared, striding forward.

  ‘For Freyja!’ a woman yelled, and Sigurd recognized that voice if not the fury in it. He glanced over his shoulder to see Runa haul a spear from a corpse and hurl it like a lightning bolt to take an Avaldsnes man in his shoulder where it stuck, making him scream in pain and shock. Then she and Floki were at his shoulder and Floki was grinning through a veil of blood which was not his own.

  ‘They’re breaking!’ one of Erp’s men shouted. ‘Whoresons are breaking!’ And they were. Olaf and his swine-head had driven deep into King Gorm’s horde and in the grey day Sigurd could see the blood misting the air as Olaf and Svein and Bram laid about them with shield and blade, cutting and hacking as they plunged deeper still towards the oath-breaker himself. And the Avaldsnes men could not stop them, not with Sigurd at their backs. Not with Erp’s brave Mekjarvik men and a band of shrieking Freyja Maidens spearing them like fish in a barrel because many of them were caught in the press and unable to wield their own spears and swords effectively.

  ‘Stay with me, Runa,’ Sigurd said.

  ‘And you with me, brother,’ Runa said, grinning savagely, and Sigurd wondered when his little sister had become a goddess of battle.

  Then the king’s hirð was splintering the way Sigurd’s shield had, and it was not because those men were cowards. Sigurd knew they would die on the field for their lord and revel in it too, mouths watering at the thought of the mead they would soon be drinking in the Allfat
her’s hall. But there was no glory in a bad death, perhaps no Valhöll either, and bad deaths were what most of them were looking at now, if they did not escape the crush which Olaf’s charge had started like an avalanche down a mountainside.

  Floki cut men as they fled, his axe biting necks and shoulders and even cutting hamstrings so that men fell in heaps and lay screaming until Runa’s Freyja Maidens filled them with spears or cut their throats.

  ‘The gods are watching now, Haraldarson!’ Olaf was yelling, though Sigurd could not see his friend in the bloody heart of the fray. Now and then he caught sight of Svein, though, who looked like his father Styrbiorn as he cleaved shields and hammered helmets, breaking anyone who dared stand and face him.

  ‘Gorm!’ Sigurd called. ‘Oath-breaker! I have claimed you for Óðin!’ He pushed through a knot of Mekjarvik men in the direction of the king, who was on the move surrounded by a dozen hearth warriors. ‘Fight me, oath-breaker! Fight me, you nithing pile of troll shit!’

  But even if the king could hear Sigurd’s challenge above the sword din and the howling roar of the wind which whipped men’s hair across their eyes and hurled stinging rain into their faces, he showed no intention of doing anything other than flee the fight.

  It was chaos. Olaf’s swine array was no more, the formation having fractured now that its momentum was lost, and men broke off to give themselves to the slaughter, to the maelstrom of steel, flesh and blood. Valgerd was there, twisting and turning, lunging with her spear and retreating behind her shield. Bram was insulting men even as he cleaved their shields and split their skulls, and even Thorbiorn Thorirsson looked like a proper warrior in the steel-storm, matching a big hirðman blow for blow, the splinters flying from their shields.

  Up on the ridge the fight still raged, with Jarl Hrani, his champion Hadd Hog-Head and Asgrim’s surviving Svearmen up to their arses in it with Jarl Otrygg, who had once been Bram’s jarl.

  But Sigurd did not see much more. He was moving, forcing his way through the throng towards his hated enemy, putting down anyone who stood in his way, and Floki and Runa and a handful of Mekjarvik men went with him.

  ‘He’s making for the ships,’ Floki at Sigurd’s shoulder said. ‘The maggot thinks he can wriggle his way out of this.’

  ‘Not today he can’t,’ Sigurd spat, putting Troll-Tickler through a neck and blocking a sword with his scramasax before Runa’s spear streaked out to open the swordsman’s belly. Olaf and Crow-Song and some of the others were cutting a swath across the field to get to the king and Sigurd knew that he was not the only man beneath that storm-tossed sky who burnt to kill King Gorm, to send him to the afterlife where Harald and Thorvard and Sigmund and Sorli waited for him.

  Then Floki stepped in front of Sigurd and butchered two warriors with axe and scramasax, and it was as if the king felt Sigurd on him like a change in the wind, because he suddenly turned and lowered his shield so that the thick gold torc at his neck gleamed dully against the grey rings of his brynja. He glared at Sigurd through his helmet’s eye guards and then he shoved the warrior next to him aside and lifted his sword, pointing it at Sigurd like an accusation, and Sigurd felt himself grinning like a fiend because every warrior on that field, and every lord of Asgard too, knew then that the oath-breaker meant to fight Sigurd man to man.

  ‘Come then, Haraldarson,’ Gorm bellowed, his voice as impressive as the thunder rolling across the sky. Rain dripped from his helmet’s rim and ran down his sword, and his silver-threaded beard bristled in the wind.

  ‘I am your death, Gorm snake-in-the-grass!’ Sigurd yelled. ‘My father waits for you in Valhöll!’

  ‘Your father was an ill-wyrded nithing fool, boy! And your brothers were turds that fell from between your whore mother’s legs!’

  Troll-Tickler in his right hand, his scramasax in his left, Sigurd was already moving, the gusts thrashing rain into his face and against his teeth, and the king’s hearthmen stood aside to let him through. And Gorm was coming for him, too, striding across the ground as if his very bones and blood screamed at him to kill Sigurd.

  Then up came Gorm’s shield and Sigurd met it with Troll-Tickler, the thump of it lost in the clamour of shouting, cheering men, then the king’s sword flashed and the steel and iron sang on the wind.

  ‘He’s mine!’ Sigurd roared at Moldof who was suddenly beside him, but then Moldof’s sword scythed down and Sigurd felt it coming and twisted but the blade caught him below his shoulder, cutting brynja and flesh, and Sigurd staggered away from that blow, as Crow-Song flew at Moldof, enraged by this betrayal.

  Moldof took the skald’s sword on the remains of the shield strapped to the stump of his arm then swiped his sword across, taking the skald in his side, and Sigurd could not have been the only one who heard the snap of ribs, but then Moldof rammed his sword into Crow-Song’s mouth and that was Hagal’s death blow.

  ‘Go, my king!’ Moldof roared, turning to fend off Olaf and Svein, but others spilled into the moment then from both sides and Sigurd could only watch as bodies and shields swarmed between him and his enemy. Watch and bleed, for Moldof’s sword had carved into him, not that there was any pain yet. There was just rage at Moldof and at himself for having let the wolf-jointed troll play him like a bukkehorn this whole time when really he was still Gorm’s man. Moldof had bided his time, even saved Sigurd’s life before now, and all so that he could at last kill Sigurd in front of the man who still had his oath. And he had nearly succeeded too. Gods, but Sigurd almost respected the man for his patience, for holding on to his ambition all this time, even one-armed as he was.

  Then the king’s battle horns sounded and with it a surging roar rose from his men into the wind and rain, and for a moment it seemed they had broken because many of them turned and ran, whilst others who could not turn their backs on their enemies lifted their shields and strode backwards across the blood-slick grass.

  A shoulder slammed into Sigurd, almost knocking him down. ‘What kind of a king runs from a fight?’ Olaf spat, his face a mask of savage horror as he hauled breath into himself and flicked a gobbet of meat off his sword where it had caught on a notch in the steel.

  ‘Told you we should have gutted that one-armed swine-humping shit,’ Solmund growled, and even in the midst of his rage Sigurd was pleased to see the old skipper still breathing.

  ‘Thought he was going to gut the oath-breaker,’ Olaf gnarred, as close as he would come to admitting that he should have stopped Moldof before the man cut Sigurd.

  ‘The gods want their game to last a little longer,’ Asgot said, his face gore-spattered so that the little bones knotted into his beard looked as if they had been freshly pulled from some carcass. The godi speared a man in the back and spat at him as he died.

  ‘Aye but these goat-swivers are on the run,’ Bram said. ‘You can hear their arse cheeks clapping.’

  Up on the ridge Jarl Hrani had somehow won and now Jarl Otrygg’s men were scattering like rats before the hounds. The king’s men at the foot of the slope had seen this too and they knew that Jarl Hrani would sweep down that hill to join his men with Sigurd’s and so some of them were backing away from the bloody snarl of it all.

  ‘Nithings!’ Svein yelled at these, hoisting his long axe above his head. ‘Fight us, you cowards!’

  ‘Why should they die while their king runs like a river?’ Valgerd said, standing shoulder to shoulder with Runa who had picked up a bow and replenished her own quiver with arrows now. The shieldmaiden’s question was a good one, because Sigurd caught a glimpse of the king and Moldof and a small knot of men beyond the skjaldborg which those loyal hearthmen were building now so that their king could escape the slaughter.

  But there could be no escape for Gorm, and Sigurd snatched up a discarded shield and ran at the skjaldborg, and before he could cleave the shield of the nearest man, an arrow suddenly jutted from the warrior’s face and he fell. Then Sigurd crashed into the gap before the Avaldsnes men could lock shields, and plunged Troll-Tickler into a m
an’s thigh and another arrow found its mark and then he was through that wall of men and wood and running still.

  He ran down the slope, the wind howling in his ears, past boulders and humps of tufted grass and then joined the path which led down to the bay, above which no gulls soared in this wrathful storm. And when he came round a bend past a stone-built shepherd’s shelter he saw all the ships and boats which had brought the king’s war host to Rennisøy. They were being tossed in the shallows, those nineteen ships and all the smaller boats, heaving at their mooring lines and bucking wildly. Even Gorm’s favourite ship Storm-Bison was being savaged now that they had pushed her back into the sea. As if Hríð-visundr was the creature after which she was named and she was being beset by wolves which were the white breakers, and no skipper in his right mind would put out into a sea like that.

  Unless his king was commanding him to. Or Moldof was. The one-armed giant was bawling orders at the others, even at Hreidar the warrior who had replaced him as Gorm’s prow man, and though Moldof’s words were lost on the wind, Sigurd could see men taking their oars from the stands and threading them through the ports. He could see others cutting the ropes and still others preparing to haul the sail up the mast and give at least some of the cloth to the wind once they were off the shallows.

  Behind him the clamour of battle, the shouts and screams of warriors and the ring and scrape of the sword-song. In front of him the roar of the sea, the grey squall of fjord and rain, and the promise of revenge.

  He ran and stumbled, slipping on the scree path and tripping on rocks and roots, and he knew others came after him but he did not stop to see if they were his warriors or the king’s. Then he came down to the beach where old men and beardless boys waited with the boats, watching them like hawks because they were the ones who would be blamed if their kinsmen and companions returned from the battle to find their knörrs and longships rolling on the shingle and springing strakes or being carried off across the fjord having been plucked from their moorings.