God of Vengeance Read Online Free PDF Page A

no easy thing to take the edge off Svein’s eagerness, especially when he was talking of fighting, and now he turned his smile on all three of them. ‘You will know sure enough when I have stood in the skjaldborg, Runa,’ he said, dreaming of the shieldwall, ‘for the skalds will be singing of it for a year after.’ He tugged his fledgling beard. ‘And the women will blush redder than these hairs whenever I am near.’
    ‘Talking of skalds, I thought Hagal would be here,’ Aslak said. ‘It’s not like him to miss a fight.’
    Svein nodded. ‘The gods know he needs some new threads to weave into his tales,’ he said.
    ‘Why would he need to see the thing with his own eyes when he can make it all up from the comfort of some wench’s lap?’ Sigurd put in. Still, Aslak had hit the nail square. It was unlike the skald to miss with his own eyes the makings of a saga tale which he could sell in a hundred mead halls throughout the land.
    They had ridden the fifteen or so rôsts as fast as they could and, far from anyone whose land they rode across questioning them, some offered them ale or food and one karl brought out a bucket of water for the horses, because men knew who Sigurd was, especially when Svein reminded them. And they respected Jarl Harald enough to do whatever they could to help his son watch him and King Gorm put Jarl Randver back in his place. Which would be in a haugr, a dark burial mound, covered in earth and worms if he were lucky, but at the bottom of the fjord, draped in cold sea wrack and picked at by crabs if he were not.
    ‘I hope all this lot are here to cheer for Biflindi,’ Aslak said, for they four from Skudeneshavn were not the only folk who had come from all over Karmøy to watch the fight.
    ‘They had better be,’ Svein rumbled loud enough for a group of five lads near by to hear. ‘For anyone cheering that sheep’s dropping Jarl Randver will find himself ten feet that way wishing he were a bird,’ he said, hurling a pebble over the bluff. ‘Or maybe a fish.’
    Groups had come north from Kopervik, south from King Gorm’s fortress at Avaldsnes and east from Åkra, Ferkingstad and from several other villages, all of them eager to glut their eyes with the spectacle of a ship battle. And what a sight met them now as they gathered at the edge of the pine and birch wood on the bluff overlooking the Karmsund Strait which divided Karmøy from the mainland. Since Sigurd was a boy he had heard men say that the thunder god Thór waded those straits every morning on his way to Yggdrasil, the tree of life.
    He will be wading through blood tomorrow morning, Sigurd thought.
    Their bows pointing east towards the mainland,
Reinen
,
Sea-Eagle
and
Little-Elk
had their sails up now, their thwarts bristling with warriors and blades as their skippers, helmsmen and the skeleton crews manning the sails sought to bring them into line with King Gorm’s seven other dragon-prowed ships. It was slow, laborious work because there was very little wind to speak of and what there was had to be caught on the sails and used wisely and patiently. But this, along with the calm sheltered waters of the strait, made conditions perfect for a ship fight, which was why the two sides had agreed to meet at the place.
    ‘Even a fart’s worth of wind can make a ship fight all but impossible,’ Harald had told Sigurd once. ‘You have as much chance of lashing boats together in a wind or current as you have of getting your wife to sit arse beside arse with a pretty young thrall and be happy about it.’
    Yet, Shield-Shaker and Jarl Harald would need more than a still day and a sleeping sea to be sure of a victory here and Sigurd looked for signs amongst the rebel ships that Randver was an unfit overreaching jarl, but found none. The man’s ships looked neat and clean and his crews looked able.
    ‘Now I see why Jarl Randver was happy enough to fight in the shadow of Avaldsnes,’ Sigurd said, for all men knew that it was