God of Vengeance by Giles Kristian

Author:Giles Kristian
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bantam Press

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘WELL I DON’T think we have made many friends here,’ Solveig said, looking around Guthorm’s dark, smoke-filled longhouse. Æskil Lame-Leg and Ofeig Scowler were there salving their wounded pride with Guthorm’s ale and so were many others who had brought silver to the Weeping Stone – and lost it in most cases – who had accepted the karl’s invitation to spend the night in his hall before setting off for their homes in the morning.

‘If anything I’d say you’ve got another enemy in Lame-Leg,’ Solveig went on, turning Sigurd’s eye towards Æskil who had his beard half stuffed in Guthorm’s ear and a scowl on his face worse than Ofeig Grettir’s.

‘That may be so, Solveig, but they know Sigurd now,’ Olaf said, ‘and that is worth something.’ He downed a great wash of the bad ale and dragged a hand across his mouth, frowning. ‘Still, I don’t think we will find many arms for our oars here as it turns out.’

‘Arms for our oars?’ Solveig’s grin was sour as the ale. ‘We don’t even have a ship.’

‘Yes, well that is another thing,’ Olaf said, drowning the words in his cup. ‘But these are not real fighting men anyway. They like their quiet lives and now and then watching the blood fly up at Guthorm’s rune stone, but they are no good to us.’ The mood in the hall was sombre. Men and women talked in low voices and drank steadily, and by the hearth, where Hagal said he had told many a saga over the years, an old man sat on a stool playing a bone whistle while his ancient friend sang in a voice as worn as an old shoe. The song was the one about a fisherman who swam down to Rán’s kingdom under the sea to steal an arm ring for his wife. But the man fell in love with the Mother of the Waves and drowned in her embrace, which, according to Olaf, was his own fault. And neither was this sort of song likely to lift the mood, he told the old man, who showed what he cared by launching into a song about a boy whose bad luck brought him to outlawry and a bad death.

‘A reputation is like a good sword,’ Hagal said, ‘or a good saga tale come to that. You cannot make it overnight. It takes time. Word of Sigurd’s time on the ash tree—’

‘Ash tree? It was an alder,’ Loker said.

Hagal shook his head. ‘Now it is a great ash, Loker, like the one from which Óðin One-Eye hung for nine days in his search for wisdom. That is the way of it in my stories and word of it, and of Sigurd’s fight against the giant at the Weeping Stone—’

‘Giant?’ Olaf said.

Hagal raised a hand to still any objections before they could come. ‘I think it sounds better that Sigurd beat the giant than that other little man,’ he said, which the others conceded with grunts and nods.

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