Later, as the sun kissed the western lands, the mouth of the Great Bay fell further behind and the little knarr began to rise and fall on the first rollers of the East Sea.
A breeze blew fresh from the north-west. He pulled the tiller and the bows swung south. The sail cracked as the following wind surged the hull forward. He shuffled his feet wider, bracing against the roll of the waves, the tiller steady under his arm. The air tasted sharp with salt. To the west, the sea was shimmering, reflecting myriad shards of amber light across his bows.
A lord worth serving. A love that can heal.
Could the steps of a wandering cripple ever lead to these?
He hooked his hand into his belt, rubbing at the dark hide. And suddenly a sharp stab of hope rose in his heart and ran his doubts right through.
A lord and a love.
He felt like screaming the words, hurling them like a spear at the dying furnace of the sun. He closed his eyes, enjoying the warmth on his face, remembering the lightness of Lilla’s kiss. His tongue ran over dry lips. He could still taste her, still smell the last trace of her on him.
‘A lord and a love,’ he murmured.
And opening his eyes, he looked to the south and smiled.
HISTORICAL NOTE
If A Mighty Dawn was set in the realm of myth, A Sacred Storm has progressed us into the realm of legend.
Is there a difference? Well, I think there is.
Although we don’t have any contemporaneous written records of the events fictionalised in this novel, we do have several written sources that refer to some of its characters, and at least four separate accounts that identify and describe in varying detail a large battle that took place in what is now Sweden at some point in the middle of the 8th century.
The Wartooth:
Harald Wartooth, King of the Danes, was almost certainly a real person – Haraldr Hildito˛nn in Old Norse – so named either because he lost a couple of teeth in a battle which then miraculously grew back, or (as I have it) because of the rather odd setting of his front teeth.
One of the more striking characters of the Old Norse sagas, he is identified in all the sources that refer to him as the son of Autha (or Auðr) the Deep-Minded, who herself was the daughter of Ívar Vidfamne (which roughly translates as “Wide-Realm”), the king who ruled over a territory that stretched from Eastern Scandinavia (modern-day Finland and Estonia) as far west as Northumberland in northern England.
Several of the sources – though not all – agree that Harald’s father was Rorik Ring-Slinger (Hrærekr slöngvanbaugi in Old Norse). The treachery of Ívar Vidfamne against Autha (his own daughter and Harald’s mother) and her husband King Rorik is recounted in some detail in one surviving fragmentary piece of a saga, known as the Sögubrot. (Just as Earl Bodvar explains to Erlan in Chapter 3.) King Ívar’s scheming to gain direct control over the kingdom of Denmark seems to have been the main cause of the feud between himself and his daughter Queen Autha, which I have taken as the premise for this novel.
The many stories and escapades spanning the entire life of Harald Wartooth were eventually compiled into one place as part of a much larger work called the Gesta Danorum (the Deeds of the Danes) by a 12th century Danish theologian and historian called Saxo Grammaticus. (Incidentally this work is also where Shakespeare found the original version of the story about a Jutlandish prince called Amleth – better known as Hamlet.) In order to steer clear of all the contradictory accounts of who Harald was and what he did, I have taken this and the Sögubrot as the two main sources to plunder.
The episodes about Harald in the Gesta Danorum are many and colourful. Even from his birth, the Wartooth was special, his mother only conceiving him after a visit to an oracle of Odin and dedicating the life of any resulting child in service to that god. (Remarkably similar to the story of Hannah and Samuel in the Bible, in fact.) As Harald became a man, he enjoyed confounding his enemies with a good disguise, which he did on more than one occasion, and apparently the strength of his glare alone was enough to overwhelm some of them.
Saxo Grammaticus recounts that, because of the favour that he enjoyed from the war-god Odin, Harald Wartooth never wore armour in battle – suggesting perhaps that he was also a “berserker”. But according to Saxo, Harald survived as king over Denmark and several other lands and vassal kingdoms until the ripe old age of 127 (which, of course, stretches the bounds of credulity). This being the case, with the infirmities of age, as I described in this novel, he really did seem to develop an acute paranoia that his more ambitious and unscrupulous underlings were trying to dispose of him. Indeed, there were several attempts to murder him, one of them in his bath. His resulting determination not to die such an ignominious death, but rather to see out his days with one last, “glorious” battle, becomes the main driver – again according to these sources – for “arranging” a battle with a man called Sigurd Hring, the king of Sweden (or Sveäland, as I call it) and a younger kinsman of Harald.
This battle, probably the earliest described in such detail in the canon of Old Norse literature, became the stuff of legend.
The Battle of Brávellir:
This great clash of arms between the Danish king, Harald Wartooth, on the one hand, and his vassal – the Swedish king, Sigurd Hring – on the other, is described in both the sources mentioned, as well as The Saga of Hervör and Heidrek, and The Saga of Bósi and Herraud.
Saxo Grammaticus describes the set-up of the battle rather in the manner of one king organising a football match against the other. A time and place were arranged, and it was agreed that each side should have seven years in which to assemble the largest host that they possibly could. One of the saga accounts puts a bit more weight on the fact that the Wartooth spent those seven years continually goading his kinsman Sigurd with provocations that the Swedish king couldn’t ignore – which rings a little truer than the idea of a sort of glorified prize fight, convened as a handy and high-profile means of despatching this long-lived Danish king once and for all.
Be that as it may, the battle is alleged to have involved all the greatest champions of the age, and my account of the multitude of different tribes and people-groups from lands as diverse as Russia to Ireland, is no exaggeration. Several of the champions, but by no means all, mentioned in the various sources appear in this novel: Starkad the Old, Ubbi the Frisian, Einar the Fat-Bellied, Grim and Geir of Hedmark, the shieldmaiden Visma, Arwakki, Kekli-Karl to name just a few. Perhaps most notable, the Wartooth’s own banner-bearer, named Bruni (which literally means “bushy-brows” in Old Norse) was reported to be the man who struck the death-blow to the old and blind King Harald – at last giving him the glorious death-in-combat that he was seeking, setting him on his road to Valhalla and, incidentally, thereby bringing the battle to a close. I have changed Bruni’s name to Branni, for obvious reasons. But there is a footnote to the account concerning him: that Bruni was never seen again, and thus the legend grew that he was in fact Odin himself – the Wanderer – walking amid Skogul’s Storm.
The location of the battle is not known for certain. Brávellir is the Old Norse name for the central plain of Östergötland (Eastern Gotarland) – which is a large area, and consequently this name for the battle is vague, at best. But Saxo Grammaticus places the battle more specifically, at a site just south of Kolmården – the large forest that separates the old Swedish provinces of Södermanland and Östergötland, which I call the Kolmark – and nearby the fjord of Bråvik. I was content to go with his conclusion.
I must confess to having taken a couple of liberties with some of the details of the battle. I’m afraid that historical (or at least textual) accuracy has been sacrificed at the altar of fictional expediency, for which I apologise to the sticklers amongst my readers. I have brought the battle forward in time several decades from the mid-to-late 8th century into the early 8th century, in order to fit with the chronology of the rest of the Wanderer Chronicles and Erlan’s story. Although it is true to say that pinning the b
attle to any one particular year is now impossible.
Perhaps more reprehensible, I have slightly altered the outcome of the battle, slewing the victory in favour of the Danish army when the saga accounts hold that the field was won by the Swedish king Sigurd Hring – or at least that he called the battle to an end when it was known that King Harald had fallen.
In my defence, my Sigurd, although sharing one of his names, is not supposed to be Sigurd Hring. Indeed, there is some suggestion from various other sources that Sigurd Hring is a mistaken conflation of two separate men: one called Sigurd; the other, Ring. Hence my invention of Ringast, son of Harald, who in my retelling is the last king standing, as it were, and thus takes the crowns of both Denmark and Sweden: King Over Them All, at least for the time being.
With the cast-iron truth about the lives and deaths of these ancient kings and warriors now lost in the mists of time and legend, I can at least justify these contortions to myself, if not to you. But I hope you will nevertheless indulge me in the small licences I have afforded myself with the accepted facts.
The Burial of King Sviggar:
A final word about the burial ritual played out in the despatch of King Sviggar to the afterlife. Viking and Old Norse enthusiasts will probably recognise this as a re-working of a well-known account, by an Arab traveller named Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, of a king’s burial that he witnessed in a land far to the south and east of Sweden, on the banks of the Volga river in what is now Russia.
Those familiar with his description may, quite justifiably, jump on the fact that his account dates from some two centuries later than the setting of this story. However, I’ve made the assumption that, since the people whom Ibn Fadlan encountered were Rus, formerly settlers from the north and probably having their origins in Sweden, it is not unreasonable to suppose that their rituals and burial practices might reflect those enacted by their ancestors in their distant homeland. I have added no details of my own to the rather shocking ritual that he describes. In fact, I have left some of the stranger details out.
Yet even these are not as strange, nor indeed as wonderful, as many things that Erlan Aurvandil will encounter as his adventures continue…
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A bit like Monty Python’s song about Eric the Half-a-Bee, A Sacred Storm began life as half-a-book – the second half, in fact, of the very lengthy first draft of A Mighty Dawn. One swift chop to that beast and it became the raw material for the sequel, which then lurked in a drawer for, I think, just over two years before I was ready to renew work on it.
The old adage that writing is rewriting has never been more true. And, it being a long book, I had created for myself a fairly hefty editing job. So hefty, indeed, that there were considerably more ‘Oh-what-the-Hell’s-the-point!’ moments than I had experienced in writing A Mighty Dawn. There are several people I need to thank for seeing me through those and for keeping me on track right to the very end.
First and foremost (at least in a literary sense) is my editor at Corvus Atlantic, Sara O’Keeffe. She has been and is the rock on which I have had to lean a good deal harder this time round. Her sage advice has made this book so much better than I could have hoped and I am very grateful to her for her expertise and enthusiasm and friendship.
My thanks, also, to the team at Corvus. In particular, to Kate Straker and Jamie Forrest, and to the rest of the marketing peeps. Also to Will Atkinson and to Clive Kintoff and his sales team for spreading the book far and wide.
Thank you to Sophie Hutton-Squire, my copy-editor, whose eye for detail and nuance in the text is quite bewildering. Not to mention her speed at turning around a document.
I am also very grateful to Charlie Campbell, my agent at Kingsford Campbell, for his encouragement along the way. I never fail to feel a thrill when I see his name flashing on my mobile screen. (For all the right reasons, of course.) His clearheaded counsel continues to be invaluable.
Once again, I am indebted to Neil Price for his insight and scholarship, in particular his vision of what battle must have been like in those early days of the Viking age, which appears in his wonderful book, The Viking Way, and which was so helpful for writing the climax to my own book.
Mark Twain said that he could live for six months on a good compliment. I would like to thank all those friends and strangers who have got in touch to say nice things about A Mighty Dawn. It’s pathetic how good it makes me feel, but no less welcome for that.
My family, as always, have been a great support. My parents, Olaf and Dibby, my brothers, Christian and Alexis, and their wives, Christina and Abbie. Their love and encouragement is unwavering.
My two daughters – the Teen and the Tot – thank you for keeping my feet firmly on the ground.
Lastly, and most importantly, I must thank my beloved wife, Natasha. You are wise, thoughtful, gracious, long-suffering (through the tough bits) and altogether generous of heart and spirit. I would not have been able to bring this book in for such a happy landing without your love and support. On to the next one, my boo...
T.H.R.B.
January 2018
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