Wolfsangel c-1 Read online

  ‘I think that highly likely,’ said Adisla.

  ‘You, young lady, can keep your mouth shut. Look at you, pale as a princess. A farm girl like you should show more signs of honest toil.’

  ‘This conversation could be regarded as toil enough for a lifetime,’ said Adisla.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Bragi. ‘I’m going to speak to your mother.’

  The girl shrugged in a do-what-you-like way.

  Bragi pointed his finger at her.

  ‘I make no bones about it,’ he said. ‘I blame you for what has happened to him. Before he started ignoring the court and spending his time with farmers’ daughters, he showed some promise at arms. Now his weapons lie neglected and he spends his days at your mother’s house, whittling away his time in games and talk. The son of Authun the White Wolf a cinder biter!’

  Vali laughed. He had always wondered about that particular expression. Did cinder biters really bite cinders? If so, he wasn’t one. But if it meant he was happiest at the hearth, sitting beside Adisla and listening to the stories of the farmers, then it was true, he was a cinder biter.

  ‘I haven’t cast a spell on him,’ said Adisla.

  ‘No,’ said Bragi, ‘but you may as well have. Come on, we’re going to see your ma.’

  It was a stiff walk up the valley to Adisla’s farm and hot work in the sun. Bragi made Vali carry both packs and all their weapons as punishment for running off while hunting, and when he saw the prince wasn’t encumbered enough added a few rocks to the bags for good measure.

  Adisla’s mother was Disa, a noted healer who lived in a house above the growing port of Eikund in Rogaland, home of the Rygir people. In Vali’s time there it had blossomed from eight to twelve houses and so was considered a large settlement. Vali had been sent to Eikund by his father Authun five years before to guarantee the treaty between the Horda and the Rygir that had ended a bloody war.

  Bragi had been sent with him to see to his training in hunting and swordsmanship but it had become apparent very quickly that the old retainer and the prince were temperamentally unsuited. The only time they seemed to get on was sailing Vali’s little skute around the coast, hunting for seals and fishing. Neither ever said much on these trips. Vali was too engrossed in the sun and the water, the feel of the small boat as it moved with the wind like an animal. Bragi didn’t speak because he had a superstition that it drove the fish away.

  Vali was sweating by the time he reached the house, which was no more than a large hut. He was glad that it was high summer, where time began to lose definition and night was just a sliver of darkness in the broad wash of the day. Even though it was late, the sun was still high and down in the river that skirted the farms people were still bathing, as they did every Saturday. As soon as he got the chance, he would join them.

  He laughed as he remembered the first time he’d met Adisla. He’d been at Eikund a week when he’d heard a commotion. She had gone to the bottom of the river and held her breath until her mother had plunged in after her on a mission of rescue only for Adisla to pop up behind her, giggling wildly. Even then, five summers before, no one could swim like Adisla. Her brothers called her ‘The Seal’, the first of a series of ever-evolving nicknames they had for her, not all of which were particularly flattering. Seals were known as ‘dogs of the sea’, so she had been called Garm for a while, after the hound that lives in Hel, and then — after Disa had objected to that — Woofy. Vali sometimes called her that himself when he was with her family, but he always used her real name when they were alone.

  Vali loved this place — the smoke with its promise of food issuing from the vent on the roof, chickens running around his feet and dogs coming out to bark at him in greeting, not warning.

  He had a place in the long hall of King Forkbeard in the port below but, since he’d come to Rogaland, this was where Vali had always felt most at home and he’d spent as much time at Ma Disa’s as he had at the court.

  ‘Hello, Ma!’ Vali shouted, and a woman taking drying herbs from the low roof of the hut turned to see them approach.

  ‘Been up to your usual tricks, I see,’ said Disa. Unlike her daughter, she was as brown as a baked barleycorn, having given up applying the lotions that kept her pretty and pale at about the same time she had ceased caring if she was attractive to men. Disa had divorced her husband and, since he was heavy with his fists, the assembly had voted that she be allowed to keep his farm. He’d died the next year on a raid that was intended to restore his fortune, and she hadn’t been sorry. Now she was queen of her house, which teemed with her own children and those of the surrounding small farms.

  On the summer evenings Vali would sit outside with Adisla and her family, playing the board game King’s Table, telling and listening to stories and eating the food from Disa’s incomparable hearth. He even managed something of an education there. Old man Barth, Disa’s only thrall, had been captured in a skirmish with the Danes. Vali was fascinated to learn his language and spent a long time talking to the slave about his homeland and customs. Barth had been a slave in Denmark and, it turned out, regarded Disa as a better mistress than the Danish jarl who had owned him before.

  In the winter everyone would cram into the tiny smoky hut, eating baked roots, salted fish and laughing until they couldn’t laugh any more. Her brothers, particularly Leikr and the youngest, Manni, were very dear to him and were his friends in hunting, play and conversation.

  ‘Ma,’ said Bragi, ‘I need to talk to you about your daughter.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I want you to forbid her from seeing the prince.’

  ‘I’m not in the habit of forbidding my children anything,’ said Disa, ‘but I’ll talk to her.’

  ‘You can’t call her a child — she’s thirteen years old at least. There are girls of her age a year married and all the better for it.’

  ‘What appears to be the problem?’

  Bragi threw his hands into the air and gave a sound like a hiss, as if the bubbling cauldron of complaint he kept inside himself had finally boiled over. Still, he tried to maintain a grip on his politeness, to temper his language and to use fine words to emphasise the difference between himself and the farmers around him.

  ‘The problem is this. I am an oath-sworn retainer of King Authun the White Wolf. I am a veteran of twenty-three raids. I stood side by side with the king as we faced the Geats at the Orestrond, hopelessly outnumbered, ready for death. With that dread lord I cut my way through twenty of the enemy and made the ocean red with sword sweat to reach our boats…’

  Disa was having to suppress a smile. Behind Bragi, Vali was miming the story. He’d heard it all a hundred times and in a hundred ways — boasted before the drinking hall, whispered around a campfire, shouted at him as an example to greater effort. He knew the words by heart.

  ‘I am a warrior, and I was honoured and delighted to be offered the post of bodyguard and tutor to this boy. I find, however, that it is increasingly a burden of loathsome proportions. Loathsome proportions. I feel like Loki, tied to the rock and my eyes filled with venom. He is ungovernable, madam, and your daughter is to blame.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I curse the day he laid eyes on her. At first it was an innocent friendship of children, but in the last year he has had no time for hunting, none for weapons training. His father had the very unusual idea of allowing him work in the smithy, in order that he should know everything about weapons from their time as rocks of the earth to their effect on an enemy shield. He is absent from the forge. He is absent from the assembly meetings where Forkbeard was to teach him statecraft. He is absent when I call for him to test him with sword and spear. He is absent everywhere, madam, other than at your daughter’s side, where he is, very annoyingly, present.’

  Disa shrugged exactly the same shrug as her daughter had made earlier.

  ‘I can’t tell her who she can and can’t see. Nothing can come of it — he’s already spoken for, isn’t he?�
�

  ‘Not by me,’ said Vali.

  Bragi gave him a look very similar, thought Vali, to the one he must have given Geat number twenty on the way to the ships.

  ‘He is betrothed to Forkbeard’s daughter,’ said Disa, as if that ended all debate.

  ‘The fact that I don’t want to marry her seeming of very little consequence in the arrangement,’ said Vali.

  ‘Not very little,’ said Bragi. ‘None. Madam, Ma, this dalliance between your daughter and the prince must stop.’

  Disa just spread her arms out. ‘What do you expect me to do? He’s come here since he was a little boy.’

  ‘He is a little boy no longer. Have you any idea how the king would feel if any issue should emerge from this?’

  ‘He’s never touched me!’ said Adisla.

  ‘Not through want of trying,’ said Bragi. ‘Look, madam, forbid this association. If you do not, I could have the king command it.’

  Now Ma Disa frowned. ‘All I owe the king is a portion of my income and my sons in the wars. I’m not a member of his sworn bodyguard to be bossed and bullied. Who me and mine choose as our friends is none of his business.’

  ‘Everything is the king’s business.’

  Disa took the last of the herbs from the roof and wiped a hand on her pinafore.

  ‘Not so. The law supports no interference from him in the affairs of free people. He won’t tell me who my children can have as friends.’

  ‘These are not children, madam. Vali is a man of thirteen summers and is likely to become king in his own right soon.’

  ‘Then who can tell him what to do?’ said Disa.

  Bragi let out a growl, collected his weapons and headed back down the hill.

  The old man was a figure of fun to Vali, but the following week he would be glad Bragi was at his side when for the first time he went raiding.

  8

  Fury

  The ship had been in the great hall for repair and they’d had to pull it down to the water. Everything had seemed more intense than normal to him that morning — the creak of the cords, the rumbling of the keel on the logs, the acrid smell of the pitch on the hull, the heaving song of the warriors. Bend your backs, boys, don’t be slow Over and over the ocean we go Where our swords will dance on our enemies’ shields Like the glimmering fish on the sea’s blue fields So bend your backs, boys, don’t be slow Over and over the ocean we go.

  He pulled as hard as he could. ‘Don’t leave all your strength on the shore,’ an old man said to him, and Vali had to smile to himself. He saw himself as he was, a young boy trying to show himself manly through his effort, frightened of the greater test of battle to come. The self-knowledge, though, did nothing to lessen the overwhelming nature of the experience.

  The morning cold was sharp, the blue of the ocean dazzling and the cries of the sea birds made an echoing cavern of his mind. She had been there then, and this time he hadn’t needed to steal a kiss from her.

  She fixed a bright purple sprig of betony to his cloak. ‘It fights evil,’ she said, ‘and it will keep you safe.’

  ‘I’ll still take my shield,’ he said.

  ‘It might be wise.’

  ‘Adisla.’

  ‘Yes, Vali.’

  ‘I…’

  She put her hand to his lips.

  ‘Don’t say it,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It brings bad luck. If you let the gods know you value something they will take it away from you. Come back to me. You don’t need to tell me how you feel.’

  King Forkbeard had not missed their intimacies but chose to pretend to. His daughter Ragna stood at his side, six years old and playing with a distaff. Vali looked at Forkbeard and then back to Adisla.

  ‘He’s hoping I’m killed,’ he said.

  ‘But in a nice way,’ said Adisla. ‘He’d prefer Authun had sent him a different sort of prince. Tougher, more manly, more bad-tempered, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Let’s hope I’m alive to disappoint him.’

  ‘If you’re not you’ll be in Odin’s halls, drunk for all time in the company of heroes.’

  Vali rolled his eyes.. ‘Listening to the likes of Bragi banging on about their exalted deeds of slaughter. Drunk for all time? You’d need to be to stand that.’

  ‘That’s sacrilege,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘Who cares? The gods are afraid of us — that’s what my father says.’

  ‘Everyone’s afraid of your father,’ she said.

  ‘Can you imagine it? Sozzled, with him glowering at me across the mead bench for ever. I’ll die a coward if it means I can be with you.’

  Adisla blushed. ‘Don’t go soppy on me just because you’re scared,’ she said. ‘I shall be your Valkyrie, urging you on. Win glory, my darling, win glory! Return in triumph or not at all!’

  She had put on an upper-class accent and pretended to dab at her eye with a cloth, just as the noblewomen did when their husbands went raiding. Vali knew her very well and understood that her light-hearted mood was for show. He smiled at her and touched her hair. The tears came into her eyes and he could not face them down.

  Now he turned to the boat, splashing out into the water, shouldering the small chest that would be his seat for the journey. He heaved it into the longship, then climbed on board and picked it up. His feet stumbled on the spars and ballast stones of the undecked vessel as he looked for his oar place, trying to look calm, trying to look as though he knew what he was doing. There was no one he knew on the boat, and no one he even recognised.

  He had a place on the drakkar, a sleek and slim warship with a carved bear’s head snarling from the prow, as befitted his status as one of the warrior class. Alongside were two fat-bellied knarrs, trading vessels that, empty, sat much higher in the water. They were for the plunder. On those boats were the farmers Vali knew. This made him slightly nervous. Normally, the way men recognised friend from enemy in battle was that they were put into groups from the same area who knew each other by sight. Among strangers and in the heat of a fight, he might be mistaken for a foe.

  He looked around him as he moved down the ship, determined that he at least would recognise the faces of the men he was fighting with. Each man at an oar was huge, his hair and beard unkempt and shaggy, his clothes dirty, with a stale smell coming off him. Many bore so many tattoos they seemed almost blue. Vali glanced at them and tried not to use their shoulders to balance as he went forward. There were mutterings. Vali couldn’t tell if they were directed at him, at each other or were just ravings. It was an under-breath babble — the words were half formed; he could only just make them out. When he did, he wished he hadn’t.

  ‘Unmanly… frightened… Kill the cowards. I kill, smite, shit and piss. Know they’ve been in a fight. Kill all. None alive. Burn the earth, burn the earth.’

  He glanced at their eyes. They seemed focused on nothing, red-rimmed like people who hadn’t slept for days, staring balefully ahead. Some of the men wore the pelts of animals about them or on their heads, and some were near naked, despite the dawn cold. Vali didn’t care for their company at all.

  At the back of the boat, being sealed into barrels or tied to the stern, were their weapons — axes and spears. He’d seen only one sword. These were not rich men. Unlike themselves, however, the weapons were well cared for, the axe heads honed to brilliant silver, the spears as sharp as bodkins.

  There was a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Here’s your oar, son.’ Bragi had come up behind him, and Vali was glad to see him.

  Vali put his chest down and sat on it. Bragi climbed in across from him, put down his chest too, sat on it sideways and lightly punched the prince’s arm.

  ‘Now you might wish you’d paid attention to what I had to say about sword, shield and spear.’

  Vali, his flippancy driven off by nerves, just smiled back.

  Bragi put his hand on Vali’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, prince, you’ll be fine. Though if you’d listened to me
more, you’d be finer. I got you a place on the best boat.’

  Vali, leaned away, resenting the intimacy.

  ‘None of my kinsmen are here.’

  ‘No, but you are among the best warriors in twenty kingdoms, ’ said Bragi.

  ‘These men?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Berserks?’

  ‘Yes, from the northern cult of Odin the Frenzied, working solely for transport.’

  ‘And the plunder they can take,’ said Vali.

  ‘Only up to a point. They’ll take plunder for sure, but it’s not their main aim,’ said Bragi. ‘It might be better if it was.’

  ‘What do they fight for?’

  ‘To fight. Look at them. Each man here has been on many raids but are they rich? No. Do they have many slaves? No. They aren’t concerned by such things.’

  ‘They want no plunder?’

  ‘Yes, a little, but this is why they’re useful to Forkbeard. Their reward is the scrap itself. He gets some good fighters and they don’t bother too much about the booty.’

  ‘They sound insane,’ said Vali.

  ‘Maybe they are, but you can learn from them nevertheless. You’ll see how a man conducts himself in war.’

  Vali said nothing. To him it was as important how a man conducted himself in peace. To sit muttering curses while bleary-eyed through who knew what concoctions of mushrooms and herbs was the act of an idiot, not a hero. They were three days from the fight, according to Bragi. The berserks were simmering before they had set off. What would they be like in sight of the enemy spears? Still, he was interested to see if they lived up to their reputation as invulnerable and fearless. Could it really be true that weapons didn’t injure them? Looking around the ship, he was glad he was fighting with them rather than against them.

  The wind was up, which was why they were sailing. The longship’s sail billowed and snapped as it was unfurled, as if impatient to get going. Its design had been chosen in his honour — black with a snarling wolf’s head picked out in white. Vali looked up at his father’s symbol — the symbol, of everything he was supposed to become, in fact everything he was supposed already to be. It made him shiver to think of the weight of responsibility he carried.