The Raven and the Nine (The Viking Blood and Blade Saga Book 6) by Gibbons Peter

Author:Gibbons, Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Einar weighed the heavy leather purse in his hand. It was as big as his fist, and four more were stashed away in the Vanylven men’s lodgings. Einar gnawed at his beard, mulling over the welcome problem of having too much silver. Dublin’s market throbbed around him. Shouting merchants barked above the constant rumble from the throng milling about the narrow tangle of streets and its wide square where men came to sell their wares and profit from the crowds who came from far and wide for the city’s famed slave markets. Dublin had grown since Einar’s last visit when he had arrived with axe and flame. This time he was an honoured guest of the King. The foul stench of the slave pens across the square rose above the finer smells of roasting meat and the smoke from a hundred cookfires which hung above the city like a second covering of cloud. The ever-present city malodour of shit and piss punched through it all, and Einar longed for the wind and the open sea.

“We should hide it all on the Fjord Bear,” suggested Torsten, staring at the pouch. The hard-bitten warrior sat on a stone wall outside a tavern. He spoke with a mouthful of blood sausage, his fair hair pulled back from his face in a long braid.

“Which is where anyone would expect us to hide it. We have more silver than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life,” said Einar.

Torsten shrugged. “If anyone wants to take our silver, let them try. We always have at least ten men on board.”

Einar nodded thoughtfully at that truth. The Fjord Bear sat idle in the protected harbour of Dublin, which curved off from the wide River Liffey and around the city to shield it from the worst of the Irish weather. He had sold the ships taken from Halvdan weeks ago to a Danish warlord from across the Irish Sea. The man had secured a foothold for himself on the northwest coast of King Alfred’s Saxon kingdom, in an estuary in what used to be western Northumbria. The warlord, a short man named Kraki, sold a boatload of Saxon slaves and returned across the sea with two drakkars and a snekke ship which he could boast had belonged to Halvdan Ragnarsson.

“Will there be a fight here, Lord Einar?” asked Ottar, a young warrior from Vanylven who was skilled with throwing axes, which he wore in a baldric across his shoulder. He drank ale from a jug hooked around the back of his hand, as did most of Einar’s crew. They lazed and drank daily in taverns, spending their new silver on ale and whores. Einar had sorted out the shares of silver after selling the ships and kept the amounts owed to both him and Hundr.

“There had better be,” Einar answered. “You lot are as soft and fat as Frankish lordlings.”

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