Path of Gods Page 18

  ‘But—’ Mouthpiece began.

  ‘No. This is about to get messy,’ Thormund said, pulling the younger man deeper into the dark, away from Alfgeir and the heart of the battle.

  ‘Let me go! I’m not going to run and hide from—’ A hard elbow to the chest silenced him and he sank to the ground, coughing and struggling for breath. Stars danced in his eyes. He buried his hands in the snow and pushed until he’d managed to stagger to his feet. It took him a few moments to regain his night sight, but by the time he could make anything out in the darkness again, Thormund had disappeared.

  The torches moved in clusters, the distance between them closing up, and a vision of his father’s farm came completely unbidden to Mouthpiece. He remembered the hired hand they’d got one summer, a short, stocky man with a scythe who’d swept through the grass like water, leaving no blade uncut.

  The soldiers of the Danish king fell on the attackers head-on like a pack of wolves, bodies surging past Alfgeir’s men, and suddenly the surge of half-lit hell-beasts was held at the line. Mouthpiece stared as the other two companies fell on the flanks of the remaining attackers, and the flickering torches threw shadows of men, horses and even a stag dancing in the night as they all pushed mindlessly towards the same goal.

  Forkbeard’s men set about them with a will, hewing down man and beast where they stood.

  Mouthpiece, frozen to the spot, couldn’t see it in the dark, but very soon the whole camp could feel it: the quality of the sounds had changed. The mindless murmur was dying down, step by step, throat by cut throat.

  The three lines of torches met in the middle, and it was done.

  ‘Give us some light!’ Alfgeir Bjorne shouted, but the edge was gone from his voice. Torches flared up around him, revealing the dead and dying.

  ‘Drag the bastards away,’ the big warrior commanded, and slowly, moving as if they were waking up from a particularly bad dream, work teams started forming. Mouthpiece blinked at the light and the bodies being dragged away into the dark, the sudden change in the atmosphere.

  ‘There’s nothing here for me to do,’ he muttered. ‘Nothing. I missed it. He made me miss it.’ With a host of thoughts he could not properly voice swirling in his head, Mouthpiece turned and headed for his tent, picking his way past smashed shelters and hobbling soldiers. When he got back to his own lean-to on the north side of the camp he saw Thormund was already in his shelter, sleeping.

  When he was safely under his own furs, Mouthpiece looked at the old man across from him. ‘Coward,’ he muttered as sleep took him.

  *

  It was the smell that woke him up: that pervasive, sickly smell of spoiled meat. The sky was no longer black but the light hadn’t quite pushed the dark away. As he blinked and tried to get his eyes used to the half-light, voices drifted in on the breeze: short commands, quiet but insistent. The events of the night before crept into Mouthpiece’s consciousness along with the snatched words: blood gushing from a warrior’s snapped leg; axes cleaving a bullock’s neck, with precious little blood flowing out; the shield-wall breaking; Forkbeard’s torches in the dark, sweeping in.

  He rose, glanced over at Thormund and grimaced. The old man lay on his side, still as a statue, sharp angles not softened by the blanket of sleep. Disgusted, Mouthpiece walked off. The old man should have let him fight instead of knocking him down and running away. It was all Thormund’s fault that he hadn’t been able to get stuck in.

  Coward.

  Caught up in his thoughts, Mouthpiece didn’t see the damage until he was almost standing in it. The south end of the camp was one gaping wound.

  In the dark it had felt like they were being attacked by thousands of enemies, but in the cold and creeping morning light the truth was revealed: trampled tents and packed snow stained with reddish stripes led the eye to a pile of carcases. Mouthpiece, trying to estimate, guessed that the herd might have been about fifty strong. Scattered randomly amongst them were a handful of sickly-looking dogs and a couple of unhealthy sheep. Gaping wounds stared back at him from anywhere he looked, challenging him to look at the uncomfortably blue-tinged flesh within. Mouthpiece could see the crowns of two separate stags and the horns of a bull moose as well.

  Something felt odd, though. There weren’t nearly as many animals as he’d thought. Then he looked to the side and bile rose in his throat.

  The corpses were laid out in ordered rows. He counted fifteen men before he stopped, and that wasn’t even half of them. He felt disgusted, but curiosity pulled him in. Numb with horror, he staggered towards the corpses, one thought echoing over and over in his head: could have been me. Over and over. Could have been me. Even though their eyes were closed, every face was judging him.

  ‘They’re gone,’ Alfgeir Bjorne said behind him.

  ‘Yes,’ Mouthpiece mumbled, heart thumping in his chest.

  ‘They are no longer cold or hungry and none of them misses home. Fair trade for a bit of fear and a bit of pain, wouldn’t you say?’

  Mouthpiece turned and looked at Alfgeir. The big warrior looked frightfully old all of a sudden: old and grey, like a piece of cloth that had been bashed on the washing stones too many times. He must have been awake all night, making sure the dead were where the dead should be, but his voice still sounded strong.

  ‘I’ll take the cold and the hunger, I think,’ he said.

  The big man smiled at that. ‘Good. I prefer soldiers who want to stay alive. The other kind don’t last too long.’

  The shame and the guilt from the night before broke free inside Mouthpiece and smashed against his ribs, a beast in a bony cage. He had to bite his back teeth not to lose control of his emotions, but there was no judgment to be felt from Alfgeir; he just stood there, quietly looming, looking at the night’s work.

  As the feelings faded away, Mouthpiece stood a little straighter. He glanced over at the bodies. ‘We’ve lost good men,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Alfgeir said.

  ‘More of ours than Forkbeard’s.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alfgeir said.

  Something caught Mouthpiece’s eye. ‘Are they – theirs? Or ours?’ The corpses he’d noticed looked distinctly different. Jolawer’s men were discernible by their rag-tag battle gear, while Forkbeard’s men all had good weapons and battered clothes. But four of them were different: dressed from head to toe in black, with neither shields nor armour, though all of them had knife-belts.

  Mouthpiece realised he’d been waiting for an answer for a while. He turned and looked up at Alfgeir Bjorne.

  ‘Where’s Thormund?’ the big man said.

  The taste of relief was suddenly sour. ‘Still sleeping,’ Mouthpiece muttered.

  ‘When he wakes up, tell him to come see me,’ Alfgeir said.

  The temptation to tell Alfgeir Bjorne everything was strong: how Thormund had knocked him down, how he’d fight in the shield-wall next time, how it hadn’t been his fault and the old man was a coward who ran and hid – but he didn’t. Thormund was perhaps his only friend in the world and it wouldn’t be honourable to throw him at Alfgeir’s mercy.

  Mouthpiece forced the words out with all the conviction he could manage. ‘Thormund fought bravely last night.’

  ‘I know,’ Alfgeir said with a wink, gesturing at the four men in black, ‘and so do they. Bastards snuck up on me in the dark – they had me, too. Knocked the axe out of my hand. Then they dropped, one by one, and fast.’

  Mouthpiece stared. ‘Did— Did—?’

  Alfgeir smiled. ‘I know his handiwork. He’s older now, but they used to tell some proper stories about Thormund the Cutter back in the day. Ask him to come see me when he wakes up. I want to thank him, and tell the king.’

  Nodding mutely, Mouthpiece turned and walked away. The events of last night started replaying, but this time in a different order. Had Thormund known? So why hadn’t he told him? They could h
ave gone together! But Alfgeir Bjorne had spoken to him like an equal, like someone who was at least as dangerous as Thormund. ‘The Cutter’. Mouthpiece snorted. What a stupid name. Maybe he could learn to work the cudgel and earn a name? Skullsplitter, maybe? The Cutter and the Skullsplitter: you’d write songs about them, wouldn’t you?

  The morning light brought a spring in his step and this time Mouthpiece was more alert. He picked out the old man’s tent from a distance. The old horse thief hadn’t moved since this morning.

  ‘Thormund,’ Mouthpiece said softly, ‘wake up. Alfgeir Bjorne wants to talk to you.’ The old man didn’t budge and Mouthpiece rolled his eyes. It wasn’t that hard to get up, surely. ‘Thormund,’ he said again, this time more insistent, but the back remained turned and Thormund didn’t move. ‘The boot it is, then,’ Mouthpiece muttered. Closing the distance, he nudged the old man with his toe. ‘Wake up, hero,’ he said.

  Thormund’s body was stiff as a board and cold to the touch.

  Mouthpiece felt for the words but they wouldn’t come. Instead he sank down to his knees in the snow and put his hand slowly, gingerly, on Thormund’s shoulder. The old man’s face was grey and colourless. ‘Thormund – come on. Wake up.’ But he didn’t wake up. Mouthpiece really didn’t want to touch him; trying to pull the blanket off him didn’t work; it was stuck. Angry now, the young man pulled hard and Thormund’s body followed for a moment, but then it fell back, followed by the sound of wet cloth ripping, ripping again and then once more.

  Mouthpiece stood there, struck dumb, holding a blanket with three big holes in it. Only now did he notice the blood in the footsteps leading from the battlefield to the tent. Thormund’s body lay on the ground, the bloodstained blanket covering what looked like stab wounds. There was an odd look on the old man’s face, quietly noble in death. It was something resembling a smile.

  Distraught, Mouthpiece scrabbled to his feet and walked off in search of Alfgeir Bjorne to give him the news.

  *

  ‘We must reconsider,’ King Jolawer Scot said.

  Forkbeard looked bored. ‘Wait,’ he said, and when Jolawer looked like he was about to start speaking again, he added, ‘for the others. We need to talk about this.’

  ‘But we are talking!’ Jolawer said. ‘You and I decide – and I say we must go north.’

  ‘Wait for the others,’ Forkbeard repeated.

  Jolawer didn’t have to wait long. Sigrid appeared, striding through the snow, her long fur cloak swirling around her legs. Erik Hakonsson, the Earl of the North, followed her, two of his chieftains trailing behind him. Alfgeir Bjorne and Prince Karle came over from the direction of the Swedes’ camp, along with the messenger, Thorkell the Tall.

  ‘We were attacked last night,’ Forkbeard said, addressing the circle. ‘We lost good men. Have any of you seen anything like it before?’

  ‘Yes.’ Erik Hakonsson’s face betrayed no emotion. ‘This has been happening all over the North: farmers and their animals get twisted. More and more of them belong to Hel.’

  ‘So the North is the source of this?’ Jolawer said.

  Erik Hakonsson shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  Jolawer turned to Forkbeard. ‘We must go. There’s something going on up there; we have to follow Sven and Sigurd.’

  Face carefully composed, Forkbeard looked back at him, then at Erik. One by one, he scanned the faces of the circle of commanders. When he spoke, the answer was simple. ‘No.’

  ‘Bu—’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘When, then?’ Jolawer blurted out.

  Forkbeard nodded to the commanders to signal the end of the meeting. ‘Soon,’ he said as he walked off. Sigrid and Thorkell the Tall fell in line after him.

  ‘Believe me when I say there is little I would rather do than go back and retake my father’s home,’ Erik said. ‘But we have to stop Olav Tryggvason. He is the real danger.’ Erik and his men walked away without even glancing back at the three men left standing.

  ‘They’re wrong,’ Jolawer muttered. ‘This is all wrong. Sigurd and Sven were right.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Prince Karle said, ‘and maybe not. But we’re safe with the biggest army ever assembled. We’ll take on King Olav and then we can go and save the North.’

  Jolawer looked away from his advisors, over the two camps and to the line of sour, stinking smoke coming from the carcases. ‘If there’s anything left to save,’ he said to no one.

  *

  Mouthpiece walked alone in the trek line and a handful of days passed through him like wind through the trees. After finding Thormund he’d gone numb. He didn’t feel bored, happy, cold or hungry. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, and no one wanted to talk to him. He just wandered along, following the broad back of the man ahead of him, whoever he was, one foot in front of the other.

  ‘Look!’ someone behind him called out, and the noise that followed his call made it absolutely clear what the man had seen.

  A seagull – two, in fact, no, three, all circling and shrieking into the sky.

  The word travelled up and down the line with lightning speed: it’s the sea. The sea.

  Mouthpiece tried to shake himself out of his slumber. The trek was finally over! He turned to tell Thormund that he’d been right . . . but the old man wasn’t there. ‘Well, fuck you then,’ Mouthpiece hissed into his beard.

  The line moved a half-step faster now, the men reacting like horses on the home stretch. The ground below them rose gently, not enough to be a climb but enough to compact the snow and make it even more slippery. The leaders of the line reached the crest of the hill and stopped, but the momentum of the line didn’t, so the warriors spilled to the sides, lining the crest. A wordless cry of celebration went out as the first hundred men disappeared from view, and five hundred yards to the left, snatches of shouted voices and commands echoed across from Forkbeard’s side. Curiosity put a spring in the step of the men around Mouthpiece and he had to push himself to keep up. Higher and higher the ground rose, until all of a sudden he could almost see over the edge. Only a few steps more, then—

  Mouthpiece stopped at the crest of the hill and looked down.

  Row upon row of longships sat on the beach, snowed under, but still formidable in their shape and size – not to mention the sheer number of them. He counted quickly and estimated that there’d be about eighty ships. This must be Forkbeard’s landing place, where he’d ferried his army over. Jolawer Scot’s men ran towards the ones closest to them, and over on their side Forkbeard’s men did the same.

  Mouthpiece ignored the curses of the men behind him. He just stood still, staring at the beach. ‘Shit,’ he muttered. ‘It’s really happening.’ Below, men made small by the distance were already swarming over the ships, hard at work, preparing them for launch.

  Chapter 12

  TRONDHEIM, NORTH NORWAY

  LATE DECEMBER, AD 996

  The morning sun climbed cautiously over the horizon. Yeah, you watch out, Valgard thought as he yawned in response, levering himself out of the throne where he’d slept and wincing in anticipation – but the pain didn’t come. He looked down at his feet. Last night’s blood had sunk into the wood, painting it the colour of rusted swords. Parallel lines led out of the blotches where Ormar and Jori had dragged the two dead chieftains by the shoulders and thrown them on the pile with the useless, broken ones.

  He looked around appreciatively: Hakon Jarl’s hall was a husk. Everything that could be broken had been in last night’s orgy of violence. The heavy trolls had crashed through the sea of humanity, tossing men aside like a child’s discarded dolls, smashing skulls and snapping bones. He’d scolded them for that – he couldn’t reuse the ones with broken heads; experience had shown him they might not need brains, for once they’d changed they obeyed him without question, but apparently they did need their skulls intact to function. The blue-skinne
d giants had listened to his rebuke, but he had no sense that his words had meant anything to them.

  Still, a new dawn and a new day; things to do, people to see.

  Blinking, Valgard picked his way slowly through the rubble and towards the smashed doors where milky light was seeping through the gap.

  They stood in rows, silent and massive, marshalled by Botolf, Ormslev and Skeggi, easily filling the square in front of the longhouse and disappearing behind the huts. Everywhere he looked he saw blue-tinged skin, and men in the middle of a slow, agonising change. He’d counted them before he went to sleep last night, then he’d counted again.

  Nine hundred and twelve.

  ‘We have work to do,’ Valgard said. The trolls stared at him. ‘You’re not going to be needing big speeches, are you?’ he added. ‘Fine by me. We’re going to the pile.’

  The trolls shuffled out of the way as he walked past. Moving through the blue-skinned warriors he could sense in each a little bit of himself, a grain of strength. Every time he recited the words Loki had told him, every time a human being became a warrior carved from frost and belief in the old gods, he grew stronger. His body had more or less stopped bothering him, all the old aches and pains now just a fading memory, and he walked tall among his silent army.

  As he rounded the corner the stench of the pile hit him. The cold might have dulled the worst of it but there was no denying all those bodies gave a lot of death to the wind. When the trolls, led by Botolf and Skeggi, had hit the village outside the longhouse they’d caught a lot of men sleeping. Some had died hard; others had run, disappearing into the snow, but the smartest ones had sprinted down to the harbour and thrown themselves onto ships, launching without supplies or suitable clothes . . . they’d be cold and miserable and dying somewhere out at sea now. So not much of an escape.

  Valgard told the trolls to gather up all the bodies they could find, but they’d been too effective: the pile of corpses was at least a hundred feet high.