Dusk had fallen by the time they reached a stone wall, muting the forest’s bright hues. In the last of the day’s light, Olav saw another stone structure, this one as tall as a man and much wider than the rest. Using the staff to touch its walls, the old man led Olav to a small open space behind the rocks. A flat round stone lay in the center.
“Sit,” his guide commanded, and banged his staff on the boulder as if Olav hadn’t understood his meaning.
Tryggvason stepped onto it and sat down, his feet curled beneath him. He lifted his head. A great silver moon was ascending over the stone wall and the forest around him.
The man stood in front of Olav, leaning on the staff with both hands, his gaze boring into him. He nodded, as if to say, “good.” They remained like this until the moon had covered a third of its journey. There was a moment when Olav thought the old man had gone, and that a white dog was running along the wall toward them. When he blinked the man was before him as he had been. A trick of the light, Olav told himself, and the result of not moving for so long. That’s when the old man spoke:
“They call you ‘Silver Ole.’ They call me ‘Hundrr.’”
Hundrr. Hound.
“Why have you brought me here, Hundrr?” he asked.
The old man cocked his head, first one way, then the other. He sucked his lips.
“You need a hound, heir of kings,” he finally murmured.
“Will you give it to me?”
Hundrr chuckled hollowly, and his mockery echoed off the rocks so that it seemed that many people were laughing at him.
“The hound is within you, little Ole. Wake it up. No, no, not now, no need, boy. Not here. Later, later.”
The old man took a few small steps toward him, still moving his lips. He suddenly lifted his staff, as quickly as a young man. He moved as if he wanted to strike the moon, and the disc in the sky seemed to jump as if it were feeling the old man’s touch.
“Well, well,” he squawked somberly. “The first full moon. It’s the time of death, and the resurrection of the new god, Ole. Christ, the son of the Almighty God. Has anyone seen such wonders as a single God in a Trinity?” He chuckled, then fell silent. “Blessed are those who didn’t see but believed, do you understand, Ole? This God doesn’t need to give signs. He gives them anyway, but he doesn’t have to. He’s the Lord of the Word. Anyone who hasn’t seen but has believed His words will be redeemed. Do you know what redemption is? You know nothing, Ole, I’ll tell you quickly. It’s the gift of life after death, more interesting than the one here, today. The miracle of the light which disperses darkness. No terrible goddess of hell, or Odin’s feast in Valhalla, where the Three-eyed keeps the heroes to give them up to be slaughtered in the great war. No, no. It’s life for life’s sake, when man and God join into one. Who understands this shall be redeemed, and who doesn’t is condemned to darkness. The path to the house of the Lord is neither straight nor wide. It is a stony and steep road on which everyone who doubts will twist an ankle, falling into the abyss.” He chuckled again. “An abyss for all eternity. Only the chosen ones set out down this road, and He chose you, boy.”
“Baptism?” he asked, remembering Astrid reading the runes.
“Yes, yes. But not at my hands. I’m so old that I can remember every one of Odin and Thor’s adventures in this world. I only read the future, which hangs between the worlds like a spiderweb in the winds of a long dawn.”
“Are you a seer?” Olav recalled the words the priest at Poznań’s palatium had sung.
“No.” The old man looked offended by the question. “My name is Hundrr. If you want something from the old gods, you can ask for it today.” He pierced the air above his head with the staff. “The moon hangs above you, silver boy. If you want something, ask for it. The runes will sing their old song for you one last time.”
Olav didn’t hesitate.
“The woman I love. The throne I want to regain. The kingdom I wish to rebuild.”
The old man searched the pouch of blue-gray leather at his belt. He blinked eyelids with no eyelashes and whispered, concerned:
“Three questions, and three thorns in reply, Silver Ole.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, feeling as if the moon’s shine was a blanket of frost falling over him.
“Longing, desire, dissatisfaction, my boy.” Hundrr sighed. “The terribly ancient curse. The old gods cast it on you, though they say this curse will bring you great fame.”
Owls called to one another, hooting in the depths of the forest.
“Yes, yes.” Hundrr nodded his head. “The old gods are giving you a miserable gift. Your hope lies in the new. Perhaps He will want to change it? You’ve been marked, that’s certain. I’ve seen your arrival a hundred times in my dreams. But have you been chosen? Let the new God tell you.”
* * *
When morning came, in the dark hour after the moon had set and before the sunrise, Olav reached the boat Rafn was guarding, with Ingvar and the bard. Rafn was fast asleep, curled into a ball under a cloak. Before Omold had a chance to yell to his friend, they heard the crow of a rooster from the old man’s hut. Once, twice, thrice, startling Rafn awake.
“No,” he shouted, “I’m not…”
“It’s just us, friend,” the bard reassured him.
“I had a horrible dream.” Rafn shook himself. “Forgive me, King. I was dreaming that you’d been crowned with thorns.”
Rafn gazed at him, rubbing his sleepy eyes. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from Olav.
Three thorns, Tryggvason recalled the old healer’s words.
The tide was high as they pushed the small boat out, jumping over its sides as they left the shore. The restless swish of water against its sides seemed to Olav the sweetest sound.
“Bersi and Duri are two good men,” Ingvar said, speaking of the strange twins they’d met on the island. He grabbed the oars. “It would be good to have them in our crews. And Halvard, too, if he recovers,” he added, looking at Olav.
Dawn had risen. The pink smudge hovered over the dark water, like an unhealed wound on a neck. The ocean’s slit throat.
So, the southern lord Erling would help; his family’s connection to Olav’s family, though forged in the past, carried his loyalty even today. And though Lade’s jarls would fight for Jarl Haakon, their hearts wouldn’t be in it. And if Halvard’s information was reliable, Haakon’s sons, Eric and Sven, wouldn’t have enough of a following to be a threat to Olav, if Jarl Haakon had humiliated them enough. These rumors suggested Olav had a fighting chance. And a chance was all he needed.
“East,” Olav said, and looked over his shoulder at the island’s high shores.
His small crew all turned their heads, as if following his command. A great white dog stood on a rock by the bank.
“An empty shore,” Omold the bard sang quietly, searching for the right tone. “An empty, rocky shore bade the men goodbye.”
Olav asked them afterward, and all three denied it. None of the others had seen a white dog on Scilla, not once.
31
ENGLAND
Sven summoned the bard every time he sailed into the wide currents of the Thames, telling him to recount the legend of the Romans who had come here to conquer the British Isles from the far south hundreds of years earlier. He didn’t like the city, which was squeezed behind a stone fortification. He, a man of the seas, couldn’t imagine how one might willingly be enclosed by a wall, though that didn’t mean he didn’t want to conquer it. Sven didn’t believe in the power of ramparts or walls. Harald Bluetooth, his father, had put much effort into renewing and strengthening old ramparts intended to protect Denmark from the Slavs, Saxons, and eventually, the empire. What use was it, though? All it took was Emperor Otto gathering an army large enough, and he broke through the ramparts with ease. The upkeep of such fortifications cost more than it gave, yet people still believed that they could protect themselves behind them.
This autumn, he and Olav, leading the Two Kings,
wanted to prove that the walls of London could hide no treasures from them. They headed a fleet of ninety-four ships. Three thousand battle-scarred men, experienced in fighting on the English shores of Northumbria, through Kent, Cornwall, as far as Ireland and the Isle of Man. Three thousand sea robbers divided into eager and obedient crews. These weren’t bloodthirsty men, but men who hungered for English silver.
Ethelred’s subjects did their best to stop the Two Kings’ arrival, sinking the wrecks of ships in the Thames, as if these could act as barriers to the invading fleet. Sven and Olav’s sailors avoided them as if they were but twigs in a wide river. And then, at Sven’s command, all the drakkars raised their sails and, one after another, like a never-ending sea snake, they approached the city. He could almost smell the fear from beyond London’s walls, and he breathed it in as though it was the most beautiful scent in the world.
They tried first to attack from the river and its banks, but they quickly abandoned that approach; you can’t vanquish a wall with an axe. They returned to their ships.
On the other side of the Thames lay Southwark, a city market where the defenders had raised a provisional fort that guarded the entrance to the bridge. It was this great stone wall which was the main line of defense for the city. There were guard towers along it, and the defenders hid behind their wall and fired hailstorms of arrows at the invaders every time they approached.
The Two Kings tried to conquer the Southwark stronghold to open a way onto the bridge for themselves. They gave up after the fifth unsuccessful attack.
“We’re losing too many men,” Sven announced as their forces regained their strength on deck, a safe distance from the bridge. “We’re opening ourselves up to their arrows, and even if we can eventually hack away at the stronghold, there will be a mere handful of us left. Who will conquer the city then?”
“And who will take pleasure in the looted treasure?” Olav agreed.
“Let’s burn it.” Jorun pointed at the huts decorating the city walls. “It’s weak wood and straw. The houses of the poor, workshops, henhouses, pigstys all stand empty. The people hid themselves behind the walls, and these buildings continue all along the ramparts. If we set fire to them at the same time, the defenders won’t be able to put all the fires out, and they will spread to the walls.”
“London in a ring of fire,” Olav smiled. “I like this plan.”
They positioned some of the ships away from the shore so the people on the walls wouldn’t guess what they were planning. Crews armed with barrels of tar went on land under the cover of night. They needed time to surround the city and prepare it, until it was a torch ready to be lit. Sven and Olav watched everything from the deck of the Bloody Fox, while Jorun led the operation. The first flames appeared long before dawn, followed by more and more of them.
“And so the lightning and thunder came, and a great earthquake, and the enormous city fell into three pieces,” Olav said, looking at the fire surrounding London.
“What?” Sven bellowed. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing.” Olav shook his head, then suddenly grabbed Sven’s arm, pointing at the sails, which lurched in that moment, making the mast groan.
“The wind will spread the fire,” Sven said, “but…”
“This wind might bring rain with it.”
They weren’t wrong. After a few strong gusts, the fire started by their men leapt upward, lively and quick, trapping nearly the full length of the ramparts within a ring of flames. But right after the fortunate winds, rain poured from the sky. Fat, sharply angled droplets. Streams of water from the heavens. The flames faded, smothered by the rain; the sun came out and revealed the burnt cinders around the walls. Cinders which could not be set on fire a second time.
That was the moment they knew they wouldn’t conquer London. Sven sent ten men to clear the shipwrecks from the Thames so they could make a quick retreat.
“Summer has passed,” Olav said to him that evening, when they met on board Kanugård. “But the beautiful autumn continues. Let’s not waste it.”
“Kent and Essex?” Sven asked with a smile.
“And Hampshire, and Sussex,” Olav added. “Perfect for ninety crews. I don’t think we’ve wasted our time. We didn’t set fire to London, we haven’t conquered the city, but we’ve sown fear in its dwellers. Fear grows faster than grain.”
“Let us collect the harvest swiftly.” Sven raised a toast. “The wine from Bamburgh is running out.”
The crews and helmsmen were ready. They hoisted their sails after midnight, by the weak, but bright enough, moonlight. There was still movement on the Thames before dawn, though the crews moved as quietly as possible. Sven on the Bloody Fox sailed last. He didn’t want the Londoners to see them leave. He wanted them to see an empty river in the morning. He sensed this would bring them euphoria, after which fear would return faster than a heartbeat. The sight of an enemy’s retreating backs is encouraging, but its disappearance creates uncertainty. When the Bloody Fox entered a bend in the river, Sven turned around and looked at London as it disappeared from view behind a hill.
“I’ll return, and I will cross those walls,” he told Jorun.
He raised an arm and made a gesture as if he were catching the city in a fist. And then he laughed, as the wind blew from the side and tangled his long red hair.
* * *
They divided into four groups and attacked Essex and Kent almost simultaneously, areas also known as the Saxon shores, defended by a band of small fortresses. Next, they sailed on Sussex and Hampshire. Their plan of attack was the same every time: appear unexpectedly, sow terror, shout that they were taking no prisoners, set fire to the straw-roofed huts to create fire and dark smoke quickly. It was enough that as the tales of their conquests spread, the people began to offer gifts the moment they saw the Two Kings’ sails. Sometimes, there was a hard lord who preferred to fight and die rather than pay, but these were few and far between. The Two Kings always ensured that a few witnesses escaped safely to “warn the king.” As if that king hadn’t seen their long sea snake on the waters of the Thames for himself.
“Why do they think that we kill for the sake of it? They’re making monsters of us, beasts in human skins,” Jorun complained one day, arranging their plunder.
They camped in Hampshire, in one of their conquered villages, moving into the huts to regain their strength after a month of hard fighting. Jorun was tearing silver decorations from books and separating chalices for mass from ordinary cups. He scratched blood off one of them with his fingernail. Sven’s only response was laughter. His red-haired Mary had remained on the Isle of Wight, so he found solace in the fair-haired Alice with freckled cheeks.
“So, little Alice, tell me, why do you make monsters of us?” He pinched her chin and kissed her.
“That’s what the priests say, my lord. That you’re the punishment that has befallen us for the sins of the entire country. That you’re the devil’s bastards, hellish fire. That you howl like demons, sowing death and destruction. I don’t know why they see beasts in you,” she lied, looking in his eyes. “Perhaps it’s because you are?”
“Wrong answer,” he said. “Do I look like a beast to you?”
“No, my lord. Not you.”
“And Jorun, my friend?”
“Not him, either. But the one who walks with the other king, the one whose teeth are…” She shook herself and made the sign of the cross.
“Varin is my comrade,” Jorun warned Alice. “He’s a great warrior and a gentle man.”
“Does a gentle man paint and file his teeth? Why does he do it if not to drink human blood?” She rose from Sven’s lap. “Gentle people farm the land, breed sheep, bake bread; they don’t attack others.”
“You see, Alice, if we hadn’t invaded you, others would have done it,” Sven explained. “That’s what the world is; gentle men breed sheep, and brave men want to eat them. If your king were a good ruler, he wouldn’t let us eat your sheep.”
�
�They call him Ethelred the Helpless,” she sniffed. “He abandoned us … Who’ll protect us?”
“Don’t cry, girl. I’ve conquered you and now I will guard you. You’re a sheep I will watch over, and I won’t let any wolves come near you.”
“You don’t look like a sheepdog.”
“And you don’t look like a sheep.” Sven was tiring of this conversation. “Go, bring us something to eat.”
When she walked out, Jorun said, “Don’t be angry with her, Sven. She does resemble a sheep. She’s as foolish as one, and she baas like…”
They heard a terrified scream from outside the hut then, and Varin entered.
“Why does that pretty girl scream like that?” he asked. “I smiled at her, and she…”
“She sees a beast in you,” Jorun replied. “I’ll explain tonight, friend.”
“I don’t know if we’ll have time for that.” Varin nodded. “King Olav sends me, asking that you set off for his camp in Southampton immediately. Archbishop Sigeric is on his way. The English want to negotiate danegeld.”
32
SWEDEN
Świętosława was struggling for breath. She was running through the snow, alongside a stretcher that two men carried. The body lying on it was Thora’s, Jarl Birger’s wife. Sweet Thora, Świętosława thought, a sob in her throat. Sweet, kind Thora. Who welcomed me warmly when I was but a young foreign queen. Who brought my son safely into the world. Świętosława looked at the drowned woman’s face again. Can it really be her? Świętosława allowed herself for a moment to imagine that the swollen face was not her friend’s but a stranger’s. Another poor soul that had been taken from the earth, water now dripping from her hair, cloak, and dress, leaving melted marks on the snow.
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