Dragons from the Sea by Judson Roberts

Author:Judson Roberts [Roberts, Judson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Northman Books
Published: 2008-10-25T13:00:00+00:00

9 : The War-King’s Ire

“Wake up! Men are outside again.”

Wulf was shaking me by the shoulders. I knocked his hands aside and staggered to my feet, struggling to remember where I was and what had happened.

Earlier, knowing that other looters would surely come, I had dragged the body outside and positioned it next to the door as a warning. With his legs splayed out in front of him on the ground, and his back against the wall of Wulf’s house, the dead man looked almost like someone who’d sat down to rest and had fallen asleep. Almost. The gaping socket of his ruined eye and the stream of blood that had run down his face and onto his chest told anyone who came close that this man was in the sleep from which no one awakens.

Whenever looters had approached, I’d stood in the doorway, an arrow ready on my bowstring, and warned them away. “This house is under the protection of Jarl Hastein,” I’d told them. “Pass it by.” Some looked at the body and muttered angrily, but no one had challenged me.

As dawn approached and the street gradually filled with gray light, men passed the house less and less frequently. Finally, as the first rays of the sun lit the rooftops, I could no longer see anyone, Frank or Dane, moving through the town. The sounds of shouting, laughter, and screaming had tapered off, too. Even looters must eventually tire, and when they do, their victims find some respite.

I’d found myself unable to stay awake. “Wake me if anyone comes,” I told Wulf, and curled myself in a ball in a corner of the front room of his house.

Wulf had taken me at my word. Three times earlier he’d shaken me awake, and I had resumed my position in the doorway. Each time it had been harder and harder to force myself out of my exhausted sleep. Fortunately, the men who’d passed had been stragglers, wandering aimlessly through the captured town, and had shown little interest in the house or the dead man.

This time was different. As I rubbed my eyes, trying to wipe the blurriness from them, I heard angry voices outside. I snatched my bow up from the floor and readied an arrow on it as I edged up to the open doorway and peered out.

“There he is! There is the man who murdered Sigvid!”

It was the brown-haired looter, the comrade of the man I’d killed. He was pointing at me and talking to a group of men standing in the street in front of Wulf’s house. They were all wearing helms and bearing shields and looked angry and eager for a fight.

“Stay back!” I shouted. “This house is under the protection of Jarl Hastein. He has sworn that all who live here will be safe. I will kill any man who acts to break the jarl’s oath.”

A stocky warrior with traces of gray in his beard, one of the few in the crowd who was wearing a mail brynie, stepped forward.

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