A Vengeful Wind: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 8)

by Nelson, James L.

  Thorgrim shrugged. “It seemed time to go. The gods told me it was time to go.”

  “And now the gods have told you it’s time to go back?” Jorund asked.

  Thorgrim considered the question. In fact, he had been considering it quite a bit as of late, though he kept his own council. And he had come to a conclusion: he was tired of trying to guess what the gods intended for him.

  There seemed to be only one thing that was certain, and that was that he would never leave Ireland. And so be it. If he was to stay, then he would make for himself in Ireland what he had lost in his home in Vik. Land and wealth and slaves and men to command. All those things, he realized, he could have as jarl of Vík-ló. And so he had decided.

  “Thorgrim Night Wolf is beloved by the gods,” Starri offered. “That’s why they test him so.”

  Thorgrim smiled to himself. I could do with a little less love of that sort , he thought.

  “Starri Deathless,” Jorund said. He said the name slowly, as if trying it out. “There are tales told of you, too, on this coast. They say you can’t be killed.”

  “Don’t know that I can’t be,” Starri said. “I know only that no one has killed me yet. But I stay close to Thorgrim Night Wolf, and I’m sure that means I’ll be killed by and by.”

  “Odin keeps Starri alive,” Godi said. “He likes him. Starri makes certain they have plenty of company in Valhalla.”

  Jorund smiled and nodded his head. “That’s how I understand it.” He turned back to Thorgrim. “And now you intend to return to Vík-ló? To hold the longphort and be lord over it? To launch raids from there? I don’t mean to pry into your business, Night Wolf, but it’s now my business as well, and that of these men.” He nodded toward Asmund, Halldor and Hrapp.

  “It is all of our business,” Thorgrim said. “So, we’ll return to Vík-ló and we’ll take the place back, and with any luck we won’t even have to fight for it. We’ll see to the defenses, rebuild the walls if we must. We’ll see that our ships are in the best condition. And from there we’ll go a’viking, wherever there’s good hunting to be had.”

  He looked from man to man and saw each nodding slowly. “That’s what I intend, anyway,” Thorgrim added. “But a man’s intentions are not always the gods’ intentions.”

  “We do the best we can,” Jorund said. “We try to make ourselves worthy of the gods’ respect.”

  They turned to their cups and drank in silence for some time, and then Jorund asked, “When do you reckon you’ll be ready to sail from here?”

  “We’ve been some time setting our ships to rights,” Thorgrim said. “But now we’re ready. A day or so, and we’ll be ready.”

  Jorund nodded. “I think my ships…the ships that are just joined with you, the other ships, they’ll be ready in a few days as well. It was hard to get men to work when Ketil was in command, but now I think they’ll work hard. They’re eager to get to Vík-ló and make that their home.”

  “Good,” Thorgrim said. And it was. He, too, was eager to get to Vík-ló, to take hold of it again, to build it back into the fine place it was when he left it.

  For two more days the men labored through all the daylight hours, finishing the last of the repairs. Thorgrim’s ships and Jorund’s ships were made seaworthy again, and then they were pushed back into the water, the great heaps of gear and supplies loaded back aboard, and Thorgrim remained eager to go.

  And then he saw the smoke.

  Just after dawn, two days after he and Jorund and the others had talked and drunk mead at the fire’s edge, they saw the dark streaks rising up from some unseen source. It was to the west, not too far from the walls that encircled the longphort. Columns of smoke. Not thick columns, just tendrils, but a lot of them.

  There was an ugly, threatening, unsettled quality to the morning, even before the smoke appeared. Sunrise, it seemed to Thorgrim, was late, as if the sun had overslept after a hard night of drinking. And when at last it came staggering over the horizon it was all but invisible, lost behind a solid dome of black cloud, made just a bit brighter by the sun on its far side. The wind was from the northwest and cold for that time of the year, and grew bolder as the sky grew lighter. Not light, just lighter.

  Thorgrim had slept aboard Sea Hammer , delighted that his ship was now floating. He reveled in the gentle motion of the ship in the small waves of the bay after so long feeling his beloved craft lifeless and immobile beneath his feet. He woke with the thought, barely formed, that something was wrong. He looked to the east, the black and foreboding dawn, felt the cold wind on his neck.

  Godi was there, lumbering aft. “What do you make of this, Thorgrim?” he asked. Some of the men, Thorgrim knew, thought he had a supernatural sense for the weather, but he didn’t. He just observed, and remembered what he observed, and that told him much about what was to come.

  “It’s not a pretty thing,” Thorgrim said. “It’ll get worse.” In his mind he was cursing the weather, and at the same time trying to figure what it meant. They had intended to sail that day, but if the growing storm went the way Thorgrim thought it might, then going to sea would be akin to asking the gods to crush them.

  Do the gods mean for us to stay here? Thorgrim thought. For how long?

  He turned slowly, as was his wont, carefully observing everything around him: the other ships, the men walking up in the longphort, the walls arcing around in a great half circle.

  That was when he saw the smoke. It was hard to discern against the dark sky, and the wind was pulling it apart, but by then the sun was providing sufficient light, even behind the clouds, to make it visible.

  “Look there, Godi. Failend. What do you see?” Thorgrim said, nodding to the west. The two were silent for a moment.

  “Looks like smoke,” Failend offered and Godi grunted his agreement.

  “Smoke, yes,” Thorgrim said. “Small fires. A lot of small fires.”

  Some farmer burning a field, or a raider burning his neighbor’s home, would have made for a single thick column of smoke. But this was many columns, thin columns.

  “Cooking fires,” Thorgrim said.

  “Could be,” Failend said. She sounded as if she was not certain, but Thorgrim was. Cooking fires. Men cooking their breakfast. A host of men who had appeared since the sun had gone down the night before.

  “Come,” Thorgrim said. He strode forward with Godi and Failend behind, and they were joined on the way by Harald and Starri. Thorgrim stopped before hopping over the bow, and said to Gudrid, who was looking at him though eyes bleary with sleep, “Go get Jorund and the other captains. Have them meet me on the wall.”

  Gudrid nodded and stood and Thorgrim jumped over the side into the shallow water under the bow and headed up the beach, the others following behind. They crossed to the center of the earthen wall and climbed up the ladder, spreading out so they could all look out to the west. Soon Jorund and the others joined them.

  “What is it, Thorgrim?” Jorund asked. He was looking in the direction that Thorgrim was, but his tone suggested he did not know what he was looking at. “Is it the storm coming?”

  “No,” Thorgrim said. “Look there. Smoke. Do you see it?”

  For a moment Jorund said nothing. The wind was rising and it was blowing the smoke away before it rose much above the tops of the trees. “Yes…I see it now,” Jorund said at last. “What of it?”

  “It’s an army,” Starri said with undisguised excitement. “It has to be. They must have arrived last night, made camp. They’re cooking their breakfast now.”

  “An army?” someone said, a voice Thorgrim did not recognize. He turned to see who had spoken. It was Hrapp, captain of Falcon . “What army?”

  “Bécc. The Irishman who attacked you a week past,” Thorgrim said. “I’ll wager anything it’s him.”

  Jorund made a grunting sound. “Don’t give up easy, does he?”

  “No,” Thorgrim said.

  They watched in silence for a moment longer. Then Halldor spoke. “Wel
l, he’s too late. Dumb bastard. We’re ready to sail this morning.”

  Thorgrim heard grunts of agreement. But not from everyone. Not from his people, and he wondered if they felt as he did, or if they just knew what he would say.

  “Storm coming,” Godi said. “And it looks bad. Not the time to go to sea.”

  “We don’t have to go to sea,” Jorund said. “All we have to do is cross back to the beach at Beggerin. That whore’s son Bécc won’t be able to get to us for a day or more. By then the storm has blown out and we’re off to Vík-ló.”

  It made sense. Perfect sense. Thorgrim shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “No. We don’t leave until we’ve fought him and beat him.”

  That statement was met with silence. Finally Jorund spoke.

  “We left them on the beach at Beggerin,” he said. “You thought there was no good to come in fighting him then, and you were right. There’s still no good in fighting him.”

  Jorund, of course, was right. There was no good reason to stay and fight. But Thorgrim did not care.

  “We can’t leave this. We can’t let Bécc drive us off, or think he’s driven us off. He’s done us enough hurt.”

  There was an uncomfortable murmuring now, and it was from Jorund and his people. Thorgrim’s men, and Failend, felt as he did. Or at least he thought they did. If they did not, they were not likely to say so.

  “You think it’s worth losing men for this?” Jorund asked.

  “There’s no worth to be weighed, like this was some sort of merchant’s trade,” Thorgrim said, patient as he could be. “This is a thing that must be done.”

  It was pride, and Thorgrim knew it. Pride would not let him leave if it meant letting Bécc think he won a victory. But pride was not a bad thing. The gods expected a man to have pride.

  As if reading his thoughts, Starri chimed in. “Look at the sky! Feel the wind! Do you think the gods want Night Wolf to slink away? Wouldn’t they have brought fair winds if they wanted that?”

  It was a hard thing to argue, and like all berserkers Starri was thought to have a special insight into the desires of the gods. Men listened to him, at least in that regard.

  Here is your test, Jorund, Thorgrim thought. He and his men and Ketil’s men had thrown in with Thorgrim. Would they stand with him still, if he was doing something they thought foolish? Or would they take to their newly repaired ships and leave their newfound allies on the beach?

  “When do you think these Irish might attack?” Jorund asked next. “Should we get the men under arms now, or do we have time for breakfast?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The wine-halls crumble; their wielders lie

  Bereft of bliss, the band all fallen

  Proud by the wall.

  The Wanderer

  True to his word, Bryning had Nothwulf’s hearth-guard mounted and ready to move. The horses, made skittish by this odd turn of events, this unorthodox activity at that dark hour, stamped and pawed restlessly at the courtyard ground and twisted nervously as their riders worked to control them.

  Bryning flung open the big door of the residence and stepped aside. Nothwulf shoved Aelfwyn ahead of him and as she stumbled into the courtyard he took that moment to pull his cape over his shoulders and fasten the brooch that held it in place. Aelfwyn was now half dressed: Nothwulf had given her just enough time to pull her gown over her head, no more, but that would have to do.

  He took two long strides and grabbed Aelfwyn by the arm just as she was recovering from the push, and continued to pull her protesting behind him. As far as he was concerned, the girl should consider herself lucky. Nothwulf’s first instinct had been to drag her naked into the courtyard.

  Second from the last in the line of riders was a big man named Tilmund, an unsympathetic brute and a good man in a scrape. Nothwulf paused there.

  “Tilmund,” he said. “We’re taking this whore with us. Bear her along, will you?”

  “Aye, lord,” Tilmund grunted, too disciplined or incurious to ask why. He leaned over and grabbed Aelfwyn’s arm and hoisted her up. Nothwulf’s use of the word “whore” would be enough to indicate to Tilmund that there was no need to treat the girl with much consideration. Aelfwyn gave a short cry of pain and protest, but said nothing more as Tilmund settled her in front of him.

  Nothwulf strode on. His own mount was beside Bryning’s at the head of the line. He could hear sounds now from beyond the walls of his home, an undercurrent of disturbance at an hour that was generally quiet as the grave. Something was happening, someone coming.

  Nothwulf swung himself into the saddle and Bryning did as well and the grooms handed them the reins.

  “Go,” Nothwulf said, just loud enough to be heard, and the men at the big gates swung them open. Nothwulf nudged his horse and the animal moved forward, Bryning at his side, a dozen men of his hearth-guard, all that were left, following behind. They had meant to ride off before the ealdorman’s guard arrived, but they were too late.

  “Hold up,” Nothwulf said, raising his hand and reining his horse to a stop.

  “Lord?” Bryning said, an anxious tone. The ealdorman’s guard, sent to arrest Nothwulf, were just one hundred yards distant and marching fast down the road, their armed parade lit by two torches held by the men at the front of the column. The captain of the guard led the way, backlit by the flickering light. Nothwulf sat calmly, watched them approach.

  “Lord, perhaps we best go,” Bryning said.

  “We won’t run off like we’re thieves caught in the barn,” Nothwulf said. His pride would not stand for that. What’s more, there seemed to be only ten men coming for him, and they were on foot.

  The guards’ steps made muffled footfalls on the soft earthen road, but no more sound than that. They wore no mail and carried no shields.

  Thought you’d catch me a’bed, didn’t you, you miserable bastards , Nothwulf thought. He was surprised that Oswin was not there, at the head of them.

  No , he thought, Oswin will want to keep clear of this dirty business. He waited as the guard approached and Bryning and the others fidgeted and the horses shuffled side to side. The torchbearers stopped ten feet short of Nothwulf’s horse, and the others drew to a halt behind them.

  “Lord Nothwulf,” the captain of the guard spoke. His name was Herelaf, and Nothwulf had known him for many years. “What business have you abroad at this late hour?”

  Nothwulf paused a moment before speaking, and when he replied his voice was quiet and even, but his tone carried the implied threat of a drawn sword. “What possible concern is that of yours, you miserable little whore-monger?”

  Herelaf’s mouth opened but nothing came out for what seemed an abnormally long time. “Well, lord, I…”

  “You what? You pathetic turd.”

  “I…” Herelaf stuttered, then found his footing again “I have orders to…to…the lady Cynewise asks you attend her.”

  “The lady Cynewise?” Nothwulf asked. “Surely she’s still too grieved by her husband’s death to speak with me. And at this hour, as you say. You may tell her no, I have other business to attend to.”

  “Well, lord…I…” Herelaf began again. “I have orders, lord, to bring you to the ealdorman’s house…”

  “And how do you propose to do that?” Nothwulf asked. He saw Herelaf’s eyes move down the line of mounted and well-armed men. Nothwulf’s men, unlike Herelaf’s, wore mail and carried shields and were considerably better-trained warriors.

  Then something else caught Herelaf’s eye. “Is that Aelfwyn? My lady’s handmaiden?”

  “Yes,” Nothwulf said. “She chooses to go with us. Is there a problem with that?”

  “Ahhh…” was all that Herelaf managed to get out in reply.

  “No, I thought not,” Nothwulf said. “Now see here. I have pressing business in Shaftesbury and I must be off. Pray tell my beloved sister-in-law that I’ll speak with her on my return. That is if she’s not still overcome with grief.”

 
; With that, Nothwulf was done with Herelaf. He kicked his horse into motion and led his men off in the direction opposite of the ealdorman’s house, leaving Herelaf and the guard to watch them go. And there was nothing Herelaf could do to stop them, short of using force, in which case he and his men would die, a thing they did not choose to do just then.

  Nothwulf led his guard down the wide road that cut like a river through Sherborne and ended at the big gates built into the walls around the town. There the guards pulled the gates back because Nothwulf still commanded considerable respect in Dorset and because word had apparently not been sent to them that Nothwulf was not to be allowed to leave.

  They rode through the gate, the dark countryside spread out before them. Nothwulf wondered if Aelfwyn would scream, her last desperate attempt to keep from being carried off, but he heard nothing. He wondered if Tilmund had his massive hand clamped over her mouth, but he did not take the trouble to turn and look.

  They rode south and west, which was not the way to Shaftesbury because they were not actually going to Shaftesbury. That had been a minor deception, which might or might not have won them a little time from pursuit.

  The air carried on it a strange smell, a damp and oppressive smell, that Nothwulf noticed once clear of the stink of the city. It made him uneasy. It was very dark, no moon or stars to be seen, but Bryning had had the forethought to bring a lantern, which he now lit and rested on his saddle. The light, feeble as it was, was enough to show their way along the road, an old Roman road, wide and level as the Romans had built them and the Saxons could not.

  They rode in silence. Once, they heard the sound of furtive movement ahead, a rustling of brush, soft voices, perhaps. Robbers most likely, lying in wait. But the thud of a dozen horses’ hooves, the jingle of mail, the scraping sound of half a dozen swords being drawn from scabbards seemed to dissuade anyone who might be inclined toward violence and theft, and the riders never saw who or what had made the sounds.

  They had ridden for some time when the morning light made an appearance, grudgingly, revealing an ugly sky. It was thick overcast to the east, and to the north the clouds were black and roiling, a portent not of rain but of something much more threatening. It looked Biblical, like something that might have prompted Noah to get a move on. The wind began to rise with the sun, a cold wind from the north. Nothwulf wrapped his cloak around him and cursed.