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Egil flashed his son a disappointed look. ‘I didn’t ask Gunnarr to join us. At this moment, his wife has far more need of him than I do.’
Eiric ruffled with mock offence. ‘Well, you could say the same thing about mine.’
‘Except Brynja, unlike Kelda, isn’t fit to burst with child.’
‘About bloody time too,’ Eiric muttered, and he and Bjọrn sniggered together. They were boys still in Egil’s eyes, but each had already succeeded in adding to his bloodline. Their children lay beside their mothers in the shadows to Egil’s right. Gunnarr and Kelda had been hoping for some time, Egil knew, but Kelda was a slight thing, and the lack of food went harder on her than most.
Without speaking, Egil walked a few paces to the gloom near the back of the room and bent down to lift something with a heave of exertion. When he returned to the light, he was carrying a large trunk made from pine wood and leather. He held it for a moment before the eyes of his sons, and then dropped it onto the table top with a bang.
‘There you have it,’ he said.
All of his sons came to their feet at once, and stared at the trunk as if they’d never before seen such an object. One of the women tossed in the bedding and muttered some complaint about the noise, but none of the men seemed to hear it. Their silence drew out for a few waiting breaths, and then Fafrir voiced what they all must have been thinking.
‘That’s it?’
Egil nodded. ‘I gathered it myself.’
Fafrir was shaking his head. ‘They will say it’s not enough.’
‘They can say what they like, that’s all that there is,’ Egil growled, his voice rising in volume. Helvik had never been a place of any magnitude. Its wealth was its freedom, nothing more. What meagre treasures it did possess were scattered around the dusty alcoves of the longhall, odd trinkets and relics from days gone by. Egil had spent the evening going around with the lamp and sweeping up every last one.
With a dubious expression, Hákon lifted the lid of the trunk and stared down at the shadows inside. ‘We should ask the men,’ he said after a moment. ‘Get them each to contribute whatever they have.’
Egil was shaking his head before his son had even finished the suggestion. ‘Life here for them is miserable enough. I won’t have them give up what small sources of joy they might have, only to buy more of the same.’
‘They wouldn’t agree to it anyway,’ Bjọrn stated, slinging himself back down onto the bench with a thump. ‘It’s a glorious fight they want. This paying off our enemies doesn’t sit well with them.’
‘Nor I,’ Egil responded, ‘but we have no need for such fancies. If all these invaders want is plunder, they are welcome to it. I will not seek out bloodshed for the sake of a few bits of metal.’
He sat back down heavily and glowered at the trunk as if it were the cause of his problems. One after the other, his sons did the same, apart from Hákon, who remained on his feet. He stared down at the contents for a moment longer, and then dropped the lid closed.
‘I will fetch someone to carry it to them,’ he said, and set off towards the door.
Egil let him go a few steps before he stopped him. ‘Hákon,’ he called reluctantly, and his son must have sensed something in his tone, for he drew up just as sharply as if he’d reached the end of a tether. He turned back around, his lips apart with query. Egil sighed, and leaned forward in his seat. ‘I have found someone to carry it,’ he said.
Hákon hesitated for a moment, and looked to his brothers. They were all watching their father, brows wrinkled with concern. In the gloom of the sleeping berths someone shifted beneath the blankets, as if rolling over so as to hear better. The hounds by the fire had lifted their heads, ears pricked in anticipation.
‘Father,’ Hákon sighed, coming back towards the table, ‘you cannot. If they capture you—’
‘I wasn’t speaking about myself, Hákon,’ Egil said, with heaviness. ‘I want you to be the one to take it to them.’
Hákon stopped in his tracks once again. ‘Me?’ He glanced towards his brothers, and released a breath of hesitant laughter. ‘And what might I have done to deserve such an honour above all others?’
Egil felt the familiar tug of sympathy, and did his utmost to suppress it. ‘Sometimes as a ruler,’ he explained, ‘you must demonstrate to your people that you serve them more than they serve you. I will not have any more mutterings that I stood back and sent Meili to his death. But, as you say, if I ride up there myself there is a risk that I may be offering our enemies a gift that they cannot resist. That is why I wish for you to go in my stead.’
Hákon was leaning one hand on the table, his face becoming slowly more drawn. ‘And is the risk not nearly as great if I go? I am your eldest son, the next in line to be ruler—’
‘I do not recall having named my favoured successor yet,’ Egil cut in, and his voice had an edge of reproach to it.
‘But still,’ Hákon spluttered, ‘surely someone else, like Gunnarr perhaps—’
‘For the love of the Gods,’ Eiric groaned, standing up from the bench, ‘I’ll bloody take it if you’re so scared of losing your eyeballs.’
‘No,’ Egil said firmly. ‘The rest of you have families. I won’t put your wives and children through that kind of torment. But that is not why I chose you, Hákon,’ he added quickly, seeing his son’s face become hurt. ‘As you say, you are my oldest son. You are an important figure in this town, and I know that I can trust you as much as any other person in it. Let our adversaries see that we are taking them seriously, but let them also see that no Egilsson is afraid to look his enemies in the eye. You are always asking me for greater responsibilities. Let this be your first of many.’
Hákon shifted his feet on the earth-and-ash floor, and fell silent. His face was downturned, but he was nodding very faintly, so that his tawny hair trembled about his ears. The other boys were watching their brother awkwardly. Behind their exteriors, Egil could see their worry, and as he ran his eyes across them he felt the creep of guilt returning. Their mother would have killed him if she’d seen what he’d just done. But she was long dead, taken by a sickness one morning when the boys were still children, without showing the slightest sign of ill-health. Before her there’d been another one, more children, but they were all gone too, and it seemed like more than a lifetime ago now. His sons were all that Egil had left. And now he was sending one of them into the very heart of danger.
‘Come,’ he said quietly, climbing to his feet. ‘Let us not keep them waiting.’
There were only a handful of horses in Helvik, most of which belonged to Egil’s household. They strapped the wooden trunk onto the old bay pony that the boys had learnt to ride on, and gave Hákon a separate mount to lead it up the hill. The sun had risen from behind the headland, and the higher it rose the quieter Hákon seemed to become, but he managed some swagger as he bade farewell to his brothers. As he came finally to his father, Egil slapped him on the back and boosted him up into the saddle.
‘Make sure that they know this is everything we have. Tell them that we require nothing in return other than that they move on from this place. And if they don’t appear willing to do that, then you remain calm but firm. Say that we have no wish for bloodshed, but at the same time, these are our lands and always have been. We will not sit idle while they’re taken from us.’
Hákon gathered his reins, and gave a stern nod from the saddle. ‘I’ll make you proud, Father,’ he promised.
‘You did that long ago,’ Egil told him. ‘Now off you go, and we’ll speak when you’re back.’
By the time he rode out from the town, all the men were awake and watching Hákon from the walls. Egil climbed up to the battlements to join them, and stood above the gates until his son had meandered up into the cloud and disappeared from sight.
When he returned to the longhall, the women were up and squatting around the fire, frying flat barley bread on battered old pans. Egil took his with one of his grandchildren on his lap, but he found he had scant appetite, and the child devoured most of it. Bjọrn was snoozing on one of the cots, sitting up against the wicker wall with his mouth hanging open. Egil thought to pass the time by doing the same, and retired to the walled-off section at the south end of the hut that was reserved for him and his woman, should he ever find another. It had its own fire pit, but it wasn’t yet cold enough to light it. For a time, Egil thrashed about upon the sheepskins in his berth, but the waves outside sounded almost deafening, and there was too much light coming in through the smoke-hole for him to properly close his eyes.
Midday came, and Hákon did not return. The women were busying themselves on the work benches that ran along the east wall of the room, rolling wicks for the lamps from cottongrass gathered earlier in the year. Fafrir, Eiric and Bjọrn sat murmuring in low voices around the table. Egil tried to join them, but their conversation felt trivial and forced. He went outside again and spent a while watching Fafrir’s son leading Eiric’s son and Bjọrn’s daughter, both still young enough to be tottering on their feet, from rock pool to rock pool. He hoped they were as oblivious as they looked.
For the second half of the afternoon, he returned to the wall above the gates and stood staring up into the hills. Come evening, he was still there. The wind had forced a chill into his bones. The wild sky was orange in the west and darkening to soot in the east, like iron lifted out from the coals, and still Hákon didn’t come home. Egil’s men seemed to sense his emotion, and left him to himself. Before long, he was standing alone in the dark.
He returned to the longhall, and found his sons standing anxiously by the doorway inside. Gunnarr had joined them. The women were sitting very still and quiet, and when the children spoke too loudly they shushed them.
‘Will you come with me?’ Egil asked.
‘Yes,’ Gunnarr answered for his brothers. ‘But Egil, fighting in this dark …’
‘I do not go to fight today,’ Egil said quietly. ‘I fear that the horse may have wandered off the path.’
They took no light, in case it was seen. Egil led them, almost running in his haste and intent on maintaining that pace all the way up the slope. But as soon as they pushed through the gates, Eiric gave a shout. Egil looked up, and saw a flame floating down the mountain in the blackness.
‘Hákon,’ he gasped.
Gunnarr clutched his arm. ‘We cannot know that,’ he warned, but Egil shook himself free and hastened up the road.
The going was difficult. He had to rely on his feet to distinguish between the hard stone of the path and the soft grass when he strayed. Unseen rocks rolled beneath his feet, and his old legs stumbled many times. He could hear his sons following behind, labouring to keep up.
When he was twenty yards away, he looked up and found that the flame had halted. It glowed from a ridge above his eye line, spitting sparks into the air. A horse gave a whicker, and shifted its feet nervously in the gravel. Egil squatted down and placed a hand over his mouth, his ragged breath racing through his fingers.
‘Who’s there?’ a halting voice called.
‘Hákon!’ Egil cried.
‘Father!’
They came together in the darkness, and Egil dragged Hákon from the saddle and wrapped him into an embrace. The other boys raced up to be alongside. Egil squeezed his son fiercely with relief, and then thrust him back to study him in the torchlight.
‘I did it, Father,’ Hákon said, and there was a glimmer of pride on his face. ‘I won us more time.’
Egil was so overjoyed that he hugged his son again before he really heard the words. He drew back suddenly. ‘More time? What do you mean, more time?’
Hákon’s cheeks fell slowly. He worked his throat as if swallowing a mouthful. ‘They want more payment, Father.’
‘More? Well they can go and find their own. They’ve had all that they’re getting.’
Hákon clutched his father’s hands. ‘You haven’t seen their army. Or heard the things they’ve done to other towns, and will do to us too. We cannot hope to withstand them.’
The joy was gone from Egil’s face. ‘But that was all there was. We have nothing left to give.’
‘Then we must find someone who does,’ Hákon said, and his eyes were wide with fear.
Chapter Three (#u689bde14-3e41-523e-8035-767e6748a265)
Bjọrn Egilsson came awake gradually, and for a moment didn’t remember where he was.
A cool drizzle finer than sand grains was tickling his cheeks. The sky he saw above him was a shroud of grey vapour, so dense that it swirled and mingled before his eyes like smoke drifting from a damp log smouldering on a low fire. His back ached. His left leg felt like it was lying in something wet, and the woollen cloak that covered him was heavy on the same side with damp. He sighed as his senses returned to him, and then freed an arm to elbow his brother.
Eiric was the deepest of the sleepers. It took three attempts to draw a response, and even then he did no more than throw an elbow back. Bjọrn rolled over and pressed a finger into his eye.
‘Wake up.’
Eiric grunted and slapped the hand away. ‘Not until there’s someone to kill.’
‘I heard a gull.’
‘Then tell it to bloody be quiet.’
Bjọrn shook his head with a helpless smile and clambered to his feet, twisting his cloak back behind his shoulders. He stumbled over to the prow of the ship and leaned against it for balance as he looked around. The great serpent carved into the stempost was glaring off into the distance, head erect, long tongue tasting the air, but at that moment there was nothing for it to see but fog. It had closed in on them from all sides during the black night, so that no more than a yard of ocean was visible in any direction. The water looked choppy and restless. It slapped against the hull, shunting the boat from side to side.
Bjọrn turned and waded towards the stern, stepping carefully through the clutter of stowed oars and sea-trunks and blanketed men in various states of repose. The mast and sail were down and packed away, but even if they hadn’t been Bjọrn might not have been able to see them through the brume. The men he skirted around were huddled together as closely as whelps piled against the teat. All of them were slumbering, apart from one. The man emerged last through the folds of vapour, seated by the steering-board at the rear, where Bjọrn had placed him with the task of keeping them on a straight course while the others stole some sleep.
‘Well?’ Bjọrn asked quietly, as he gained the man’s side. Toki was his name. He was a full-faced, hulking farm lad, too young to have ever been a sea-farer, but he’d been the loudest voice prattling away for most of the voyage, and Bjọrn had wanted to see whether weariness might finally shut him up.
Toki slapped the tiller. ‘I haven’t let this thing so much as twitch. Wind stayed down so we shouldn’t have done much drifting. Waves have only started getting up since first light.’
‘And did you hear that gull?’
‘Now and then since the dark started thinning. Can’t tell if there’s lots of them or the same one circling.’
Bjọrn cast a speculative glance up at the hidden sky above. ‘A gull is supposed to be a sign that there’s land, isn’t it?’
Toki shrugged. He knew as little about sailing, especially the long-distance kind, as Bjọrn did. The glory days of sea-raiding had missed them by a generation or more, Helvik’s sense of adventure having diminished along with her strength. Only a few men aboard the ship were old enough to remember how to read the signs out on the open water, how to chart a course through cloud, and they needed their rest more than most. Bjọrn decided he would probably have to wait until they roused themselves.
He returned to the bow of the ship, and found Eiric snoring gently with his mouth agape like a day-old corpse. A thin swill of water was running up and down the planks, and his brother had somehow managed to sleep through the night with his head in it, the slop lapping up around his ear every time the boat tipped to the steering-board side. If there was that much leakage up by the prow, then Bjọrn dreaded to think what it was like beneath the bodies in the low belly of the ship. Once, the vessel had been the pride of Helvik, but in recent years it had become more a resented reminder of better times passed. For almost as long as Bjọrn could remember it had lain up on the beach on wooden stilts, played on by the children like an old horse, and when the stilts had rotted away no one had bothered to replace them. Moss and slime had caked its hull when, in the half-light just before dawn, Bjọrn and his men came to drag it free from its berth. But it had floated, and there was no time to require anything more. Bjọrn just hoped that it continued to do so.
With the sole of his boot, he pressed down gently on Eiric’s throat until his brother’s mouth started working like that of a landed fish and he burst awake flailing his arms. ‘Get up,’ Bjọrn said. ‘I need your help.’
Eiric scowled and lay there rubbing his neck. ‘What do I know? Just keep going straight and try not to sail up Rán’s arse.’
Bjọrn sighed and kicked his brother in the shoulder. The plan had sounded like such a simple one when they’d volunteered to carry it out. Their father needed riches with which to mollify the invaders, but Helvik had none left, some would say none to begin with, and so it had been decided that a group of Egil’s soldiers would take their old boat and sail along the coast until they found somewhere that did have the wealth to spare, and take it from them instead. But by now, the start of the third day of their voyage, they had lost the coast, and a measure of their resolve. Bjọrn needed his father there, or Hákon at least. It had been his idea, after all. But Egil would not be seen to desert the town at such a time. And Hákon claimed that he had to stay where the invaders could find him, for he was the only one they trusted.
Eiric groaned and got up, wringing the seawater from his hair. ‘What happened to your gull?’ he asked.
Bjọrn rested his weary head against the serpent’s neck. ‘Gone. But Toki heard it too. I’ve heard it said that you can follow them to land.’
Eiric rubbed at his beard and nodded past his brother’s shoulder. ‘Why don’t we just follow that light?’
Bjọrn whipped his head around and glared into the fog. There was nothing there, only the cloud dancing slowly before his eyes, opening and closing like drapes in a breeze. He spun back around and aimed a punch at his brother’s head, but Eiric caught his fist, and pointed.
This time he saw it. He’d been looking too low before, scanning the tops of the waves, but now he realised with shock that the light was in fact high above him, shining bluntly through the haze like a star on a winter’s night. It could have been a great bonfire blazing a mile in the distance, or a tiny lantern hanging there just out of reach. But it was certainly land.
Bjọrn clamped a hand on his brother’s shoulder. ‘What make you of that, then?’
‘Settlement. Must be,’ Eiric replied, crowding closer to the rail. ‘A beacon to welcome lost travellers.’
Bjọrn sucked on his teeth for a moment. ‘We need to get out of this fog to see what defends it.’
‘Drift in at this speed and they’ll have the whole army roused before we’re even landed. Even a lonely crofter would turn us back.’
‘Aye, but if we rush in then there’s no rushing out again.’
Eiric shrugged, and his face came alive with excitement. Bjọrn studied the eager eyes of his brother and gnawed on his lip, hesitating. He glanced around at his men, still slumbering obliviously beneath their cloaks, and then back out at the light, twinkling there like a prize waiting to be snatched. ‘What would our illustrious brothers do at a time like this?’ he pondered.
Eiric grinned. ‘Hákon would be too busy throwing his guts up over the rail to do anything. Fafrir would doubtless propose we turn for home. And Gunnarr would probably suggest something sensible like mooring up the coast until the fog lifts. But we’re not as soft or as clever as them, are we Brother?’
Bjọrn smiled, but his lower lip was still clamped between his teeth, and his face made an expression like a cat baring its fangs. ‘I don’t particularly want to lose our father’s ship. Especially when we’re the only hope he has of saving our home.’
‘Courage, little brother,’ Eiric urged, slipping an arm around Bjọrn’s shoulders and worrying his cloak. ‘Let us take this chance to remind the old man that his young sons are worth every bit what his older ones are. Let us make a friend out of this fog.’
Still Bjọrn delayed. He gazed again at the light. It seemed to be growing clearer, as somewhere the morning sun rose ever further and burned away the vapour. High above them, a gull released a keening cry. Bjọrn looked across at his brother, and slapped him heartily between the shoulders. ‘Wake the men,’ he said, and Eiric whooped and ran to obey.
The raiders were up and seated on their trunks in the work of a moment. Those few that owned mail threw it on and then hurried to get their oars in the water with the others. Bjọrn bellowed at Toki to steer them straight at the beacon, and then found his sword and slung it over his shoulder and took up his shield from the rail. The men at the oars grunted in unison with each stroke, driving the sleep from their limbs. The head of the vessel lifted, as if the serpent was preparing to strike, and they flew over the water like an eagle skimming for fish.
As sudden as a ram splintering through a gateway, they burst out from the fog and found the whole landscape waiting before them. Two hundred yards ahead, great cliffs the colour of bonemeal reared up into the air. An empty beach, open and flat, lay at their feet. And at the top, framed against the streaked dawn sky, stood a solitary building, the largest and grandest that Bjọrn Egilsson had ever seen. The treacherous beacon burned in a stand at one end of it, twinkling innocently, guiding the raiders to their prize.
Eiric came to join his brother at the prow, and Bjọrn roared his rowers to even greater speed. A hundred yards out, as their keel began to smash through the rollers, he noticed a single figure scrambling down a cut in the cliffs towards the shore. The man’s feet reached the sand, and he began to labour along the beach to intercept the ship. Bjọrn gave a grunt of admiration, and drew his sword.
The figure was stumbling the last few paces as the ship ploughed its belly into the ash-grey sand. Bjọrn stood high against the masthead and looked down at him. He was some kind of old and wretched man, clothed in only a coarse brown robe with an old length of rope about his waist. The top of his head was as bald as a skull, but so symmetrically so that Bjọrn was tempted to think he had shaved it that way deliberately. He went without boots on his skinny grey legs. He was not even armed.
The man peered up at them and opened a nervous mouth as if to speak, but then he seemed to see something that made his neck gulp and the words crumble on his lips. Too late, he realised he had made a grave mistake. He babbled something in a tongue that Bjọrn did not understand, a beseeching look upon his face, and then turned and stumbled into a run. Before he had made it two paces, Eiric jumped down into the shallows, caught him by the robe, and hacked him into the sand.
‘See?’ Eiric roared, turning back to the ship. ‘Easy!’
Bjọrn and the others leapt down into the surf behind him, and he led them towards the cliffs at a run.
