God of Vengeance Read Online Free PDF Page B

them within a pebble’s throw was a shingle beach upon which a knot of fishermen stood, their faces seaward but doubtless as wide-eyed as everyone else. Sigurd guessed they had been out in the strait when they had noticed two fleets bearing down on them. He imagined the curses that must have flown around those skiffs like shrieking gulls, so that the boats were now hauled up on the stones and the men’s fishing was interrupted.
    Five of King Gorm’s longships, including Shield-Shaker’s own ship
Hríð-visundr
–
Storm-Bison
– were strung out in a line now off Jarl Harald’s port side, but two other ships were coming round
Reinen
’s stern to protect Harald’s steerboard side.
    ‘You were right, Sigurd. Your father means to draw them in and start the fight,’ Aslak said, ‘and hopefully it will be Jarl Randver himself who will take the bait.’ He made hooks of his hands, the fingers clutching each other, to make his point. ‘When they are grappled with Gorm’s ships and the fighting is thick, those other two coming round will come together like stones and crush the traitor like a louse.’
    Sigurd nodded, for Aslak had it right. ‘It is a good plan,’ he said.
    His father would have the honour of being the first to blood the enemy and King Gorm would no doubt reward him for it afterwards. Loyal men earned silver on such days as this.
    ‘Here they come!’ one of the other young men on the bluff yelled. Perhaps his own father was aboard one of the king’s ships, too. If so his stomach was no doubt twisting over itself now like Sigurd’s was.
    ‘It’s
Fjord-Wolf
, Jarl Randver’s ship!’ someone else called. ‘I have seen it before. That is the jarl standing there at the sternpost.’
    ‘Aye, where it is safest,’ an old man put in, spitting in disgust.
    Sigurd did not know if the man standing at the sternpost of the breakaway ship was Randver, but he was dressed in mail and wearing a rich helmet and so it was entirely possible. And if so Sigurd did not blame the jarl for starting the fight at the stern, for all that it was not saga-worthy, because were Randver to die in the first spear and arrow exchange, not much would come of his ambition.
    ‘It does not matter where he is standing,’ Svein said, ‘for my father can throw a spear twice the length of that ship. Jarl Randver would be better off back at Hinderå hiding under his mead table if he wanted to stay where it is safest!’ He grinned. ‘Though if the wind was right he would not be safe even there.’
    ‘Which ship is your father on, lad?’ the greybeard asked, rheumy eyes all squint and water as he willed them to be young and far-seeing again.
    ‘He’s the prow man on
Sea-Eagle
, that longship off
Reinen
’s steerboard,’ Svein announced.
    ‘Aah, then he must be a big ’un like you,’ the greybeard said. ‘I was a prow man once.’
    Svein and Aslak shared a look that the old man’s old eyes did not miss and he batted the air with a hand as if to say what did young men know anyway? And Sigurd was glad that the greybeard had not asked on which ship Aslak’s father was. Olvir Quick-Spear had been killed in the last fight Jarl Harald had been obliged into because of his oath to King Gorm, and no one likes being reminded that their father rots in an earth mound outside the village. Not even if they live again in the next world, drinking and feasting in the Allfather’s hall, as Olvir Quick-Spear surely did.
    Sigurd’s muscles had begun to thrum now, the blood in his veins seeming to bubble, the fame-thirst in his heart demanding to be slaked. The ash shaft of the spear in his right hand whispered to him, pleaded to be taken down into the fray where it could rip and rend and fulfil its purpose. But Sigurd must deny the spear as he himself had been denied, the pain of that still smouldering somewhere in him.
    A hand clapped him on the back. ‘There they go,’ Svein said, as down in the strait the arrows streaked from ship to