Raven: Sons of Thunder (14 page)

Asgot’s knife hissed from the sheath. Cynethryth tensed beside me.

‘Sheathe your blade, godi!’ We turned. Sigurd. His face was ash grey and so gaunt that it seemed the cheekbones would split the skin. He stood unsteadily, dressed only in filthy breeks and wound dressings, which bore dark stains. ‘There will be no sacrifice today.’ The men turned to Asgot.

‘But the All-Father is waiting, my jarl,’ Asgot said, appealing with two hands, one of which still gripped the wicked blade. From the godi’s expression I could tell he was as surprised as the rest of us to see Sigurd on his feet. I thought the jarl would fall on his face. He looked like a haugbui, a mound-dweller, some dead body just emerged from its tomb to torment the living.

‘It was a good fight between me and Mauger,’ he said. ‘He was a tough old boar to kill.’ A sickly smile touched Sigurd’s green lips. ‘And because of that these men of Wessex will live.’ The Norsemen rumbled, their faces etched and dark.

‘What is he saying?’ Cynethryth asked, clutching my hand.

‘He’s saving them,’ I replied, ‘I think.’

Sigurd pointed at the pitiful clutch of Wessexmen who sat beside a sea-worn boulder half buried in the sand. ‘The warriors will live, but Ealdred will die.’

Again Cynethryth asked what the jarl had said, but this time I lied, telling her that I had not understood some of the Norse.

The men grunted their approval. A heartbeat ago they would have happily watched their godi disembowel the prisoners one by one. Yet, as warriors, the Norsemen understood and shared Sigurd’s respect for a worthy enemy. No one could deny that Mauger had fought like a champion, which added lustre to Sigurd’s victory. However, in their eyes Ealdred was a pale-livered mare, a coward, and deserved no such mercy.

Still, I expected Asgot to churn like a resentful sea, but he did not. He simply nodded and sheathed his knife, flicking a hand to the Norsemen to release the big Wessexman. Black Floki shoved him back towards his countrymen and he went gladly.

‘You’re just going to let them go?’ Olaf asked, staring incredulously at Sigurd. ‘They’re Christians! They’ll scuttle off to some settlement inland, perhaps to the door of Karolus himself, and they’ll bring an army of White Christ lunatics down on our heads.’

Sigurd shook his head wearily. ‘No, Uncle, they won’t. They have no lord now and we have row benches to fill.’

Olaf’s face boiled red beneath the bushy beard. ‘You’d have them aboard our dragons? You’d have them grip our oars?’

‘They can still choose death, Uncle. I leave them that choice.’ We all looked at each other like half-wit trolls. It seemed abhorrent that these men, who had been our enemies, would now be given the honour of a place at
Serpent
’s or
Fjord-Elk
’s oars. And yet Sigurd was right, we needed strong arms. Even five pairs was not really enough.

Grimacing, Sigurd walked over to the prisoners, the linen dressing on his left leg below the knee blooming bright red as he moved, until he was standing before the English.

‘You can row for me, or you can die for him,’ he said, nodding towards Asgot. ‘Choose now.’ His voice was pain-tired but hard as stone. Instinctively, the warriors looked to Ealdred, but Sigurd shook his head, the lank hair falling across his face.
‘Do not ask him. He is nothing now. He decides less than a whipped mongrel and soon he will be worm food. The choice is yours alone. Row or die.’

The big straggle-haired warrior who had come so close to knowing himself inside and out glanced at the rest of us, then nodded, fixing eyes with Sigurd.

‘We can still pray to the Lord?’ he dared.

‘The White Christ?’ Sigurd asked, wincing because of some pain. The man nodded again, cringing slightly. Sigurd shrugged. ‘It means nothing to me,’ he said.

‘Then we’ll row,’ the Wessexman stated without consulting any of the others, and Ealdred stared at his daughter like a man who feels the breeze from the oak tree about to land on his head but knows it is too late to move.

So, with Penda, there would now be six Englishmen at our oars – men who had been our enemies and who had sought our deaths.

And soon those six men would save our lives.

sigurd took to his bed of skins and furs for another two days and we were lucky that there seemed to be no living souls within an eagle’s view of our beach, though it did begin to rain and Olaf was hard pressed to keep Sigurd’s wounds dry and free from rot. Cynethryth and Asgot would go off into the woods together, foraging for healing herbs, which I did not like one bit, but for the sake of Sigurd I swallowed that bad taste.

‘Between them,’ Olaf had said with raised eyebrows, nodding at Asgot and Cynethryth who were preparing some foul-looking poultice, ‘they could bring a corpse back to life. I’d wager my nose on it.’ He must have noticed my resentment at seeing Cynethryth and the godi together and he half grinned. ‘Make a strange pair, don’t they, lad? Like a dog and a cat sharing a fur by the hearth.’

‘Warming by the same fire doesn’t make the dog and the cat friends, Uncle,’ I said glumly, at which Olaf chuckled and went off to see what was bubbling above the cookfire, leaving me to my brooding. I did not know then that the old godi was sinking his claws into Cynethryth and even if I had, what could I do whilst Sigurd needed them?

I used the time to train with the axe under Svein and Bram’s guidance. Not the single-handed axe which many of us carried in our belts – a handy weapon in a shieldwall and equally useful for cutting firewood or breaking through your enemy’s front door – but the two-handed, long-handled axe. It is a weapon ill-suited to the shieldwall because of the space you need to wield it and because it leaves your belly open to stabs. But if you reach your enemy with it he is a dead man. When you work with the great axe you soon gain a deeper respect for those who have mastered it. Fortunately, as a carpenter’s apprentice, I was no stranger to gripping a good axe haft. Nevertheless, I was glad of all the rowing because it had piled muscles on my back and shoulders which you need for good axe work. I could not yet weave the thing through the air like Svein or Bram Bear or Olaf, but I had it across me that I would in time. I would make it dance and whisper, its polished head glinting in the sunlight. For now though it was enough that the training worked like a steerboard, turning my mind from Sigurd’s wyrd and my hand in it.

On the third day Jarl Sigurd rose again and this time he rolled up the skins of his sickbed himself as though to put an end to the thing. He still looked weak and the wounds were far from healed, but Olaf said they were knitting well and Asgot admitted that Sigurd must still stand on the All-Father’s good side to be walking so soon after such injuries, though he also added that he was a fool who bit into that coin and yelled silver, for Óðin was a shape-changer, which meant that his favour was a capricious, vaporous thing. ‘It’s easier to nail a fart to the door than to know the Spear-Shaker’s mind,’ he grumbled.

I was looping Bram’s axe through the air, sweat coursing down my face, when from the corner of my eye I saw Sigurd watching me. So I tried to make the movement smoother, each circle flowing into the other like some skilled craftsman’s design
on a brooch or ship’s prow, though I’d wager it looked more like a drunkard pissing patterns against a wall.

‘Come here, Raven,’ he said, and those three words laid a coil of iced rope in my belly.

‘Here it comes,’ I heard a Norseman mutter under his breath.

‘It’s been good knowing you, lad,’ growled another.

‘Tell him he still looks pretty,’ Bram Bear rumbled behind his hand. ‘It’s your only chance.’ For Mauger’s shield rim had bitten into Sigurd’s temple and the wound was pus-filled, puckered and sore-looking. Also, a shard of steel had sliced his cheek and Mauger’s fingers had clawed the gash like an eagle’s talon tearing into a fish and now there would be a large scar.

I gathered my courage, then walked the ten paces to my jarl. It felt like ten miles.

‘Just the sight of the axe can turn your enemy argr,’ he said, that word itself as terrible as an axe blow because it means unmanly. ‘Here.’ He held out a hand, the knuckles of which were scabbed with dark knots of blood. I gave him the axe and he nodded, gripping its throat in one hand and its shoulder in the other. Then he stepped back and, before I could advise him against it, looped the weapon through the air in twin circles, one flowing beautifully into the other, his face a grimace of concentration. He was barely off his deathbed and yet his skill made my attempts look like the flailing of a drowning man. I supposed that was why he was a jarl, I consoled myself, as he stopped the whirling axe head dead and handed it back to me, sickly sweat streaming through his dirty beard.

‘It is a worthy weapon, the war axe.’ He was breathing hard and I knew it had hurt him. Fresh pus yellow as cream leaked from the wound in his head. ‘A magnificent thing. It will melt your enemy’s guts and make him spray his own shoes with stinking fear. Train hard with it, Raven. Though if I were you I’d find a better teacher.’

Bram then made a gesture that you could not have mistaken even from the top of a mountain, and now it was Sigurd’s turn to wink at me. The Bear rumbled like a distant rock fall and the jarl smiled wanly. There was a heartbeat’s silence, which Bram heard loud and clear, and he walked off, leaving Sigurd and me alone by the tree line. Out to sea the sky was black. A storm was building somewhere beyond the horizon.

‘Perhaps if I had used it against Mauger I would be nursing nothing more than a blister or two on my palms, hey.’ Suddenly the silver ring on my arm was digging into my flesh. I yanked on it, trying to pull it off, but then Sigurd’s hand was on mine and I looked into his fierce blue eyes and I could have cried.

‘You did well, Raven,’ he said.

‘Lord?’

‘Mauger was lucky to have you as his shield man.’

‘But lord . . . I . . .’

‘You did what I asked you to do,’ he said, ‘and you did it well.’ He winced, a hand touching the gash in his temple. ‘A little too well, I admit. But I cannot blame you for that, can I?’

‘I thought you were going to cut off my balls,’ I said, half smiling with the relief of it.

‘If one of these wounds turns green, I still might,’ he said, grimacing. ‘Why do you think I asked you to bear Mauger’s shields?’

I shrugged. ‘The Norns themselves would struggle to make sense of your patterns, lord.’ He raised an eyebrow at that.

‘I asked you because I knew you would do it,’ he said. ‘I could have asked Floki or Bjorn or Bjarni. Any of them,’ he said, nodding to the Norsemen, ‘but do you think their hearts would have been in it? Do you think they would put themselves between my blade and a lump of cow shit like Mauger? Oh,
Floki . . . Floki would have waved the shield here and there, made it look good for a while, but he’d have let me kill Mauger the first real chance I got.’ He ran a flat hand like a knife across the inside of his thigh. ‘I wouldn’t put it past him to have opened Mauger’s vein when no one was looking.’

‘That’s what I should have done,’ I said, remembering Mauger for the rotten toadspawn half-troll he was.

‘No, Raven, you would not have done that. I knew you would not. Well, I hoped, anyway.’ He took a step back, running his hands the length of his torso. ‘Look at me, lad. I’m fine. A few new scratches to keep the others company and remind me why I should not play with my enemies like a cat with a mouse but be done with them swiftly.’ Did he really believe he had controlled the fight with Mauger? To me it had seemed a desperate, terrible contest, fate seeming to favour each in turn like the shifting of the tide.

‘The men saw me win the fight. And what a fight, hey! Worthy of a skald song, and a good skald too. The saga telling of it will warm our children’s bones on freezing nights when they are old.’ A cloud darted across his eyes then because he had had a son once but a horse’s hoof had broken the little boy’s head.

‘I have never seen anything to match it,’ I said. ‘It was a fight to leave even the gods’ jaws unhinged.’

Sigurd smiled proudly. ‘But I won, Raven. I put their champion down, made him worm food, despite your best efforts. Who can now say Sigurd son of Harald the Hard has lost his luck?’ He laughed then and I laughed with him.

Because not only was Sigurd as fierce as Thór, he was as cunning as Loki, too.

Later that morning, thunder rolled out of the west, bringing with it that musty-smelling air that always comes before heavy rain. We wrapped ourselves in skins newly greased with seal
fat so that when the rain came it rolled in glistening beads off those skins like water from an otter’s pelt. Torches were lit because thick, sullen, iron-grey cloud formed the roof of the world, turning the day unnaturally dark. One of the men complained that it was just like being back in the fjords and all he needed now was a woman barking in his ear and he would have believed he was home.