text: 'Strange being back here like this,' Olaf said.
  
  And it was strange. Sigurd looked over at Jarl Hrani's high seat, the seat in which Sigurd himself had sat when it had belonged to Jarl Randver and Sigurd had come to Örn-garð to kill him. Now Hrani was the power in Hinderå and he and Sigurd were allies, which was the Norns spinning men's wyrds after too much mead in Solmund's opinion. And he wasn't the only one.
  
  'This man killed your father, Hrani,' one of the hall's white-beards reminded everyone, as if they needed reminding. He had forgone the jarl or lord or any other term of respect in order to press the point that until very recently it had been a better man's backside polishing that beechwood seat which sat halfway along the east side where the wall bowed outwards. 'And now you would have us feast him? Share our meat and mead … with him? This … shit from Skudeneshavn who sent our lord to the crabs and denied him a jarl's pyre.'
  
  There were plenty of low mumbles at that from those who thought the old warrior had spoken boldly and well, albeit the sound was deadened by the pelts and skins that covered the wall's dark timbers.
  
  But Hrani was their jarl now and it seemed to Sigurd he knew how to be one too, for he held his anger out of sight like a blade in a sheath, his eyes doing all the steel-work instead.
  
  'If you are going on a long sea journey, Athulf, do you eat all the food in the first day or two just because it feels good having a full belly? Or do you ration it so that it will last until you reach your destination or else can raid for more?'
  
  This did not of course need an answer and Athulf swallowed whatever it was he had been about to say then.
  
  'I am thinking about more than just the sweet pleasure there is to be had from revenge,' Hrani added, turning to all his people who had gathered in that old hall which was as chokingly smoky as Sigurd remembered it. 'I am thinking about the whole journey, not just the first crossing from shore to shore, because that is what a jarl must do. A jarl owes his people more than blood. More than a few arm rings and slaves. For those can be snatched away by some other raiding band and we can all be left grinding acorns for bread and watching our children go hungry. We can be called away from our crops to fight for a king who will not risk his own hearthmen because he has others to do the dying for him.' Hrani had steered that so that every man and woman there was thinking of King Gorm without their jarl having spoken the king's name aloud. 'I have put aside my right to vengeance, my blood-duty to my father, in order to raise us all,' Hrani said. 'Would you rather wheel like gulls behind a fishing boat, waiting for fish heads and guts, or soar like eagles, choosing your prey?'
  
  'Speaks well when he needs to, I'll give him that,' Olaf muttered beside Sigurd as a hum rose from the people of Hinderå. Still, it was on a knife-edge this thing, and Sigurd doubted even the Norns knew which way it was going to go. As for King Thorir, he looked bored already, standing there waiting for someone to refill his cup, clearly underwhelmed by the hall which, compared with his golden, Freyja-lit hall, was like a smoky cave. 'Black as Hel's arsehole,' he had growled when they had first been led inside.
  
  'How? How will wading into a hard fight against our king raise us?' a knörr-breasted woman called out, hands on hips, her elbows creating space around her even in that crowded place, 'because I never feel like some soaring eagle when I am burning one of my sons or stitching their flesh back together.' Her large silver brooches and the keys hanging from her belt marked her as a rich karl's wife and Hrani paid her the respect she was owed by nodding and holding up a hand to hush the crowd so that he might answer.
  
  'In return for helping Sigurd Haraldarson have his revenge on King Gorm,' the jarl said, cleverly hinting that Sigurd was, unlike him, a short-sighted man, 'I will become king.' There was a gasp at that, followed by the beating of cups on tables by those of Hrani's warriors who were already invested in their jarl's ambition. 'Together, Sigurd Haraldarson, King Thorir of Skíringssalr and I will roll King Gorm down his hill at Avaldsnes. I will be king and we will live there and grow rich on the taxes from all the ships going up the Karmsund Strait.'
  
  'And the hall we are building at Skudeneshavn?' a man asked. A carpenter probably, who had downed his adze and his augers to return to Örn-garð to hear for himself the news of this strange new alliance between his jarl and his enemy. 'We are at head height with the walls already and the turf for the roof is due to be cut by the next moon.'
  
  'We will finish the hall at Skudeneshavn but I will not live there,' Jarl Hrani said. 'It will belong to Sigurd Haraldarson and his people, as did Eik-hjálmr before it.' Some did not like that by the sound of it, but Hrani took no notice. 'Those of our people who wish to stay here may do so, but those who wish to come with me to Avaldsnes will be given farmland so that they might start again. We will all be rich after this fight, and that is before all the ship taxes that will come to us,' he held out his cupped hands, 'pouring in like rain.'
  
  'And the gods are with us!' Hadd Hog-Head said, lifting his cup high towards his jarl. The champion then waved his ale in Sigurd's direction so that Sigurd, who had been quiet until now, knew that it would soon be up to him to tip the scales in their favour. 'We have Gungnir, Óðin's own spear, to poke those Avaldsnes men with,' Hog-Head called, grinning from ear to ear. 'How can we lose?'
  
  All eyes turned to Sigurd, not that there hadn't been plenty of eyes on him from the very beginning because of his fame amongst these folk. Hrani's younger brother Amleth was staring at him from behind the jarl's right shoulder and Sigurd wondered what was in that young man's mind, for Amleth had once been set to marry Runa and celebrate in this very hall. But Sigurd was never going to let that marriage take place and rather than bringing his sister's dowry to the wedding he had brought mayhem and slaughter. Instead of moaning with the pleasure of the rut on what should have been his wedding night, Amleth had moaned with pain because Floki's axe had cut into his shoulder deeply enough that bone had gleamed in the wound.
  
  But now the wind had changed and Sigurd must set the sail accordingly. Now an alliance, not war, was what was needed with Hrani's people, and it was up to Sigurd to convince them of it.
  
  'Some of the men in this hall, some of you standing before me now, came to my village with fire and the sword,' he said. A fact rather than an accusation. 'Some of you killed my friends. My kin. One of you, a man named Andvett, tried to dishonour my mother, though he is dead now because Grimhild had no patience for a drawn-out feud and gave Andvett his death wound there and then, before she herself was slain by another Hinderå man.'
  
  'You were our enemy!' someone shouted from the throng.
  
  Ayes at this, but Sigurd continued. 'Even now some of you wear my father's knives, or his arm rings, or the silver hammers which Jarl Harald had pulled from the necks of men he had slain in battle. You have the balls to stand here in front of me owning things which were taken from my father's sea chests and from the corpses of his people. I am sure the women here are wearing brooches your husbands pulled from the Skudeneshavn women after they forced themselves upon them like beasts, spilling their seed in anything that moved.'
  
  'Who does he think he is?' a man gnarred.
  
  'Aye, enough of his talk,' Athulf put in, for no men liked hearing this sort of dark thing by the light of the hearth, even if they had been up to their balls in it on some or other raid.
  
  'But I answered these offences,' Sigurd said. 'I came to Hinderå and I fed the raven. I killed Jarl Randver and many of your best men lay dead at the end, even your champion Skarth, who was no match for Olaf here.'
  
  They looked at Olaf then but with respect not hatred in their eyes, for no one could argue with the way Olaf had taken Skarth down, like an experienced man felling timber.
  
  'Our blood-worms drank deeply,' Sigurd said, touching the hilt of Troll-Tickler, which Hrani had allowed him to wear even under Örn-garð's soot-stained roof, a sign of the new trust between them, 'and the scales between us were balanced.' He took a step forward and lifted the great spear high. 'Now that we are friends, your people and mine, you have the chance to make Hrani Randversson king. And with Gorm's power broken and no other jarl strong enough to challenge the new king at Avaldsnes, you will have years of peace if you want it. You can sit on your arses getting rich off the taxes from those crews passing through the North Way. You will sell those same crews your crops and your meat, for they are always in need of supplies. Pick and choose a raid or two each summer if you wish, for new slaves and the adventure of it.'
  
  'And what'll you get out of it, Haraldarson?' the knörr-breasted woman asked, those silver brooches gleaming fierce as dragon's eyes.
  
  Sigurd felt the grimace come to his face before he had the time to put it there himself. 'I will have my revenge on the oath-breaker,' he said, the words themselves sweet as mead in his mouth. 'Seeing that goat-shit Gorm's bloodless corpse lying at my feet is enough for me.' He would have Sea-Eagle back too, his father's second-best ship, which King Gorm had stolen after his men had cleared Jarl Harald's warriors from its blood-soaked deck in the Karmsund Strait. But no point in bringing that up now. 'I swear I shall see him dead.'
  
  Some of them nodded. A few touched the Thór's hammers at their necks because they knew a solemn and self-binding oath when they heard it.
  
  That would have been a good end to it all, and only a skald would put a better shine on it by having Hrani's people cheering and clamouring for the fight. As it was, there was no cheering but they seemed content. Perhaps in their minds some of them were already spending the silver paid by skippers who as yet had not even provisioned their ships for a sail up the Karmsund Strait. Others were no doubt imagining how else their lives might be improved by their being the king's own people.
  
  But this was real, not some skald's tale. And that big-mouthed, big-breasted karl's wife had no flair for the poetic. They were not done yet.
  
  'So what has he to do with any of it?' she asked, pointing at King Thorir, which was not really the thing to do even though the man was a Dane in a Norseman's hall. 'This is not his fight. Who is to say he will not want Gorm's high seat for himself when Sigurd Haraldarson stands crowing on Gorm's corpse?'
  
  For a heartbeat or two King Thorir looked as if he might challenge the woman to a wrestle, and that might have been something to see, but then he lifted his chin with its long silver beard rope and threw back those massive shoulders of his. 'I have come to my own arrangement with Sigurd,' he said, 'and am in this up to the hilt.' He grinned at his sons, who were all there with him, and they all grinned back. 'My Spear-Danes will win this little fight for you and then we will be gone before the crows have had their fill. No offence meant, Jarl Hrani,' he said, glancing at his host, 'but as you well know, my own hall makes this place look like a dung heap.' Hrani did not like this, but he wasn't about to make a thing of it. 'So you can all be sure that we will not be staying around here, or in this Avaldsnes place, any longer than need be.'
  
  'Still,' Sigurd said, picking up the thread from where he had left off, 'it will not be a little skirmish.' He let his eyes roam across the faces of those gathered in the acrid flame-chased dark. 'As you all know, King Gorm has many warriors. He knows we are coming and even now will be calling in the levies and bringing other jarls to his banner. But as word spreads, more fighters will flock to my own banner too. To this spear,' he said, lifting the thing again. 'For this will be a fight to tell your grandchildren about. A fight for warriors and skalds.' He grinned and Svein beside him grinned too. 'The gods are watching,' he said, 'so let us make sure we are worthy of it.'
  
  'Óðin!' Olaf roared.
  
  'Óðin!' Svein echoed. And then the other warriors in that hall, Sigurd's crew, Hinderå men and Danes alike, took up the chant, their blood coming to the boil with the thought of war and booty, the sword-song and fame.
  
  'Óðin! Óðin! Óðin!' they called, hammering the boards, caught up in the moment.
  
  'This is how you will tell it, skald,' Sigurd said to Hagal Crow-Song, who was grinning like a fiend.
  
  'Óðin! Óðin! Óðin!' Like the beat of oars. Like swords on shields.
  
  'This is how I will tell it,' Crow-Song agreed. 'But I think I will add some thunder and lightning.'
  
  They came to Rennisøy on a sleeping sea, sails furled on the yards and oars chopping the still water as neatly as a jackdaw's wings in flight. Reinen, Crow, War-Rider, Sea-Eagle and King Thorir's two most impressive ships, Sea-Shaker and War-Pig, which was a strange name for a boat in anyone's ears but they were both named after Freyja and her battle swine Hildsvini. And by a Dane, as Solmund had said, as if that explained it all. They came more or less together, crews bantering at each other across the smooth water, insulting each other for their ships, their rowing, their beards and anything else they could come up with, such as how busy the men in other boats were in the bilge with the bailing buckets. Always a well-spring for taunts, that.
  
  'Ha! She leaks like a cracked egg!' one of the Svearmen in Crow called over to Sea-Shaker which was being skippered by King Thorir's son Thidrek. Brine was being flung over Sea-Shaker's side so often that Moldof muttered he would be surprised if the sea level did not rise around Rennisøy with water from the Svealand coast.
  
  'At least she is a real ship and not a fishing boat,' one of the Danes yelled back, as another man, who was not needed at the oars, jumped nimbly on to the sheer strake, pulled his breeks down and showed the Svearmen his arse. Lucky he didn't get it slapped by an oar, with how close they were, like a skein of geese across the sky.
  
  And all of this was good to see because insults were better than silence. 'A bit of banter does no harm. Can be the glue that binds men before the slaughter,' Olaf said as Reinen slid up to her mooring and men jumped off with ropes while the others shipped oars, the staves clumping as they stowed them across the oar trees.
  
  'So long as we save some good 'uns for that goat's turd king and his haughty buggers,' Solmund said, and in his life he must have heard every insult a man could weave, though he'd likely forgotten plenty of them.
  
  Rennisøy had been Jarl Hrani's idea. 'Neutral ground,' he had said simply, looking from Sigurd to Olaf. Olaf and Hagal nodded, seeing the sense in choosing the island, which lay due east as the crow flies from the southern tip of Skudeneshavn. Long ago the strongest jarls of Haugalandet, Rogaland and Ryfylke had agreed that Rennisøy would belong to no man and that pact stood to this day.
  
  'If we go to Avaldsnes, we'll be fighting on the king's ground,' Olaf said. 'To other men we'll look like dogs turning on our master.'
  
  'And it will seem that Sigurd is only after the king's high seat on that hill overlooking the Strait,' Crow-Song added.
  
  'We could fight him at home,' Svein had suggested, meaning Skudeneshavn. Not many left who would call it home any more, Olaf's eyes said to Sigurd. 'Why go to an effort?' Svein went on. 'Let the mighty king march his arse down to us and die tired.'
  
  Sigurd shook his head and not just because he did not like the idea of fighting in the ashes of his childhood home, with all those ghosts watching. With those memories of defeat hanging there like heavy black clouds. Like swarms of midges, biting him every which way he turned. 'Let the king come to us at Skudeneshavn and he'll trap us,' he said. 'His shieldwalls in front of us, his ships at our backs. No, Svein.' He looked at Hrani. 'Jarl Hrani's idea is a good one.'
  
  This being most of the Svearmen and the Danes' first time this far into the north-west, they had no opinions one way or the other and were content to let the others decide how they would play this game.
  
  'We go to Rennisøy,' Sigurd confirmed for them all. 'We find a good place to raise our banners and we let him come to us there, but in the meantime we spread the word so that others may join us if they too want to see the oath-breaker laid low.'
  
  'Aye, there must be others who would feed that rancid piece of gristle to the wolves and the ravens if they could,' Solmund said.
  
  And so here they were, unloading spears and shields, tents and food, barrels of ale and sheaves of arrows, and all of them thrumming with the thrill of being part of something. For this was an army now, a great rebellious horde. Certainly a big enough affair, this thing, to draw skalds like crows to carrion.
  
  'You see this, Sigurd?' Asgot asked him now, his head on one side as he watched him, making Sigurd uncomfortable with the weight of it. 'Do you see what you have done?'
  
  'I have done what I must if we are to pay the oath-breaker back for his treachery,' Sigurd snapped. He felt judged. Felt the burden of so many men's lives about to be weighed in the scales of his ambition.
  
  'You have called the storm down from the skies,' Asgot said. He lifted his staff as if half expecting Thór to strike it with a bolt of lightning. 'I hope you are ready.'
  
  Sigurd did not answer this. He turned his back on the godi and watched the men coming ashore, spilling over the rocks in a tide of leather and iron. Sword-Norse, Svearmen and Spear-Danes. It was, he thought, like forging a sword. Like taking iron bars and twisting them together, making them into a single blade which he would wield against the hated enemy. All those he had lost, his kin – they were the pattern in the iron, the ghost in the blade. And they would drink of Gorm's blood too.
  
  'So this is a sight, hey!' Svein said, stopping beside Sigurd and Asgot and resting a brawny arm on the head of his long smiting axe.
  
  'Our fathers would have liked to be a part of this, Svein,' Sigurd said. They had climbed up to the higher ground from where they could look out across the Boknafjord for King Gorm's ships, though they knew it would be some days yet before he was ready to set sail. Below, Jarl Hrani was bellowing at two of his men who had dropped a barrel which they had been unloading from Sea-Eagle. It had sprung a stave so that ale was spraying out across the rocks. The jarl was furious.
  
  'If my father were here now he would take their heads off for wasting good ale,' Svein said with a smile. 'And then he'd be on his knees lapping it up.'
  
  That was a little too close to the truth to be funny, but Sigurd smiled anyway, wondering where he would be without Svein at his side. Without Solmund and Olaf and the others too. Perhaps Harald had felt the same way about Svein's father Styrbiorn, until the drinking ruined him.
  
  A loud croak had them turning to see a raven, all black gloss and bill, on the rock behind them.
  
  'So the Allfather is here, anyway,' Svein said. Which was just what Sigurd himself was thinking. Svein knew him well enough to know it too, which was probably why he'd said it. Doesn't make it any less true, Sigurd thought, watching the bird pick up a mussel in that heavy beak and smash it against the rock to get to the meat.
  
  Hugin or Munin? Sigurd wondered which of his ravens Óðin had sent to keep an eye on him. Thought or Memory? For himself memories lay heavy on him now. Weighty as his brynja. Memories of his brothers and of a simpler life in Skudeneshavn.
  
  Simpler? Back then? Hah! What could be simpler than now, living only to wreak vengeance against your enemies?
  
  He was struck then with another memory. It came unbidden to his mind, bursting through his thoughts like a drowned corpse rising to break the surface, all bloated and refusing to be ignored. It was a memory from his boyhood, of the elk hunt he had gone on with his father and King Gorm in the woods near Avaldsnes. They had tracked the magnificent beast for days, a lifetime for a boy gripping his first man-sized spear. But in the end, when they had caught up with their prey there had been no glory in the killing. The once noble beast had been rotting alive, writhing with maggots, and the sight had sickened Sigurd and tainted the summer. And now he wondered at this blood feud and his hunger for it. Gorm the oath-breaker needed killing. Nothing could change that. But then what? The whole thing was already tainted, as the boy's summer had been, by the faces of those he had lost. The friends and sword-brothers and the kinsmen who were no more. What awaited him now at the end of this hunt? Despair? Maggots squirming in his flesh? Death?
  
  'Not before the debt is settled,' he muttered, remembering how, at the feast after the hunt, the king had praised him for his patience. In front of his father and all the honoured guests in his hall. If only the oath-breaker had known then that of all his enemies, even those who were not enemies yet, the seven-year-old boy at his feast table would be the one he should have made sure to kill.
  
  Well it would be over soon. One way or another. If all went to plan, King Gorm would come to meet Sigurd's challenge. He would have no choice. Pride would force his hand and oars would drive his ships towards Rennisøy and there would be such a fight as the islands had not seen for a generation.
  
  'Shame it won't be today,' Svein said, intruding into the spell which the bird had woven around Sigurd.
  
  Sigurd looked up. Blue sky. Not many clouds and those that there were drifted lazily, no rain in them, like hulls out for a raid, their holds empty.
  
  Thought or Memory?
  
  Thought would be more useful now, for King Gorm would come at him with every spear he could muster. Every jarl, hersir and powerful karl who owed him fealty would be sharpening their swords and rounding up their own young men. But it would not be about the numbers alone. The oath-breaker had fought wars before and knew the art of it. The craft. And in the thick of the fight there would be decisions to be made. Sigurd would need to think hard and think well, because the lives of these men spilling ashore would depend on it.
  
  'Ah, there is his mate,' Svein said as another raven landed beside the first with an agility that belied its size. It began a loud rhythmic call, a toc-toc-toc which had Svein touching the silver hammer that he wore on the chest of his brynja.
  
  Thought and Memory both, then.
  
  For years beyond counting, men had come to Rennisøy for the first three days after each full moon to buy and sell slaves. Now they would come for the sword-song. For the spear din.
  
  'Come then, oath-breaker,' Sigurd said, looking out to the north-west towards Bokn and beyond, where the king's estate at Avaldsnes sat above the Karmsund Strait which carried ships north the way a big vein carried blood to the heart.
  
  Let us finish this.
  
  Sigurd looked up to the top of the hill as he had done a dozen times since the dawn had begun to rise in the east like a tideline, wicking into night's hem inch by inch. The man up there was moving and for a moment Sigurd's stomach rolled over itself and his breath caught in his throat and he watched to see if the sentry would light the beacon fire. But the man got halfway to the pile of wood, stopped and went still.
  
  'Just pissing,' Olaf said in a low voice because most of the men were still asleep.
  
  Let them rest. This may be their last sleep. Or wake them because this might be their last sunrise?
  
  'He'll come when he comes,' Olaf said, spitting on his helmet and rubbing it. Not that his war gear could shine any more than it did already.
  
  'What about them?' Bram said, nodding over at a group of newcomers as he poured himself a cup of ale. 'Think they're any good?'
  
  They looked across at the thirty men who had come from Mekjarvik, some of whom were sitting round a fire as their companions snored and farted in their nests of fleeces and skins.
  
  Olaf shrugged. 'I think they all have spears and axes,' he said, 'which makes them welcome here if you ask me.'
  
  Their leader was a one-eyed, bushy-browed hersir called Erp who had sailed for Rennisøy the day after hearing from a fisherman that there was going to be a fight. Some years ago King Gorm had killed Erp's brother over a disagreement about taxes.
  
  'The sheep-swiving fuck invited my brother up to Avaldsnes to air his grievance,' Erp had told Sigurd as his men disembarked from a flotilla of færings and row boats, as excited as women going to a wedding. 'We never saw Enar again. Mother dreamt that Enar had a drowning death.' Erp's big brows had knitted together with those terrible words. 'Perhaps he did. Perhaps he didn't. But she has a way with dreams,' he said.
  
  Erp had been waiting ever since for a chance to repay the king. Now that chance had come.
  
  Others had come too. Twenty-nine men had rowed over from Sandnes, fierce-eyed warriors all, who looked to a godi called Thokk as their leader. It was the Óðin spear which had lured them in, and they watched Sigurd as if half expecting him to transform into a wolf or an eagle or even the Allfather himself. There were whispers that these Sandnes men were berserkers and whether or not that was true, the others avoided them. Avoided Thokk too, but that was nothing unusual. The godi, who went by the name of Far-Flyer, had raven or crow feathers tied into his black hair and a stare that could turn water to ice.
  
  Sixteen spearmen, young and old, had come from Jæren with their lord, a tall, silver-haired karl called Hastin. No one knew what Hastin's grievance was with King Gorm, or why he had come, but he looked a steady man and all of his warriors had tough leather armour and seemed eager for the fray.
  
  There were some forty others who had sailed or rowed to the island, some in small groups, others alone, and each for his own reasons. Sigurd welcomed them all with ale and food. He let them touch the sacred spear and he asked each man his name, telling him that he would earn a fair share of the plunder when the fight was won. When these new men were added to Asgrim's one hundred and thirty-three Svearmen, Jarl Hrani's ninety Sword-Norse, and King Thorir's seventy Danes it made a total of four hundred and twenty-eight men.
  
  And it would not be enough.
  
  'I expected more,' Sigurd said on the fourth day, when it seemed no one else was coming no matter how hard he looked out to sea. There was still no sign of King Gorm and his ships, which was in itself disheartening because it meant the king was still gathering his war host. Sigurd all but shivered to think of it.
  
  'Gorm has bought off or threatened every jarl within a hundred rôsts of his high seat,' Olaf said. 'He's been getting fat in every bugger's hall within fifty. What else has the prick been doing while we were off fighting and you were getting yourself half sacrificed in some Svear temple?'
  
  It was true of course, and everyone knew it. Only Olaf would say it.
  
  They were watching Hastin and his Jæren men practising for war. The karl had got them into two shieldwalls and these two skjaldborgar faced each other, the men for now throwing insults, not spears, across the gap between.
  
  'We've got a war host here,' Olaf said. 'Gorm will have a bigger one. That's kings for you.'
  
  And it was.
  
  There was a cheer and Hastin's skjaldborgar slammed together, men leaning into their shields, digging their feet in, trying to push their opponents back to the marks scraped in the ground behind them. It was a simple pushing match – no blades – to see which wall was the stronger. Nothing to lose but pride. Nothing to gain but bragging rights.
  
  Folavika. Named for the inlet in which Reinen, War-Rider and all the other boats sat rocking gently at their moorings. So this will be known as the battle of Folavika then, Sigurd thought, looking down at the ships now, hoping he had done the right thing in choosing to fight a land battle rather than inviting the oath-breaker to a ship fight.
  
  'When we leave our ships what is to stop this king blocking them in at their moorings and burning them all?' King Thorir had asked, and everyone agreed it was a fair question.
  
  But that was before they saw where Sigurd had chosen to plant his banner. From here at the northern tip of the island they would see Gorm's ships coming from the west. Those ships would put into the first, smaller bay to the west of Folavika because Sigurd had men waiting there with horns to signal the king and tell him to do just that. Sigurd's messengers would assure the king that he would not suffer a single arrow or thrown stone while his men disembarked.
  
  No reason a fight shouldn't begin honourably, even if it ended in blood and screams and piss-drenched breeks.
  
  'And if he has his own ideas?' King Thorir's son Thidrek had asked.
  
  'We will be ready,' Sigurd replied. For if King Gorm's ships sailed past that first bay and on past Sigurd's position, intent on destroying his boats in the water, Sigurd would know about it. He would send crews hurtling over the rocks down to the bay and those crews would take the ships out into the fjord before the king had a chance to swoop down upon them. 'But it will not come to that, Thidrek,' he said.
  
  He had laid his challenge out to the oath-breaker for all to see, like a fur trader showing his last pelt to the crowd. King Gorm was coming. Of that there was no doubt, and Sigurd bargained on him seeking to end this feud with one clean strike, rather than going for Sigurd's ships and risking some of them flying the coop with his enemies aboard. No. Gorm needed one battle, shieldwall against shieldwall. He needed to kill Jarl Harald's last living son and put out the fire he had started.
  
  'He'll have the spears but we'll have the ground,' Sigurd said to Olaf now, looking at his banner planted a stone's throw away at the crest of a rise amongst a sea of long grass. Half an arrow-shot in length, this ridge fell away to bumpy uneven ground upon which a large body of men would find it difficult to hold a tight formation. And where there were gaps in a skjaldborg there was death, because men would force a way through like an arrow or the slenderest spear point piercing a ring in a brynja.
  
  At their backs would be rocks: big, high, awkward rocks, a formidable enough obstacle to prevent anyone coming at them from behind even if they got down the flanks. And behind those steep rocks it was a careful climb down or a leg-breaking drop to the shore. A good place to set up for a fight. A good place to plant your first banner.
  
  There was a light rain blowing in from the west but it had not yet soaked the half-circle of cloth enough to stop it bristling below the blade of the Óðin spear, whose butt Svein had thrust into the ground until it hit rock. A black wolf's head on a green field, the beast snarling at the sky. A wolf because Sigurd was a wolf. Hunted, homeless, the last of the litter but the most dangerous of them all. Embroidered by King Thorir's wife, Queen Halla of Skíringssalr, and drenched in Asgot's magic. A powerful thing then, his new banner, with enough seiðr of its own perhaps to keep it stirring even if rain lashed down in a hissing fury.
  
  The next day the rain came properly, sweeping east across the bluff in grey swirling clouds which slapped their shelters and drummed on helmets and shields and had men squinting their eyes against it as they looked west, ever west. It was that very same wind which would bring the king to Rennisøy.
  
  But first it brought two men.
  
  'Blacksmiths the pair of 'em,' Solmund said the moment he saw them coming over the bluff, and to be fair that was before he laid eyes on the tools, the hammers, tongs and bellows, which they later brought up to the camp. A man had come to Sigurd to say that a small boat had beached on the shingle and two Danes, with war gear which frankly deserved a much better boat, had come ashore to fight for him. Big men both, heavily muscled, with big hands and coal-blackened breeks. Father and son clearly, the younger man, Ingel, still boasting good looks which age had tempered in Ibor, though neither sported forelocks or much in the way of eyebrows, those having been singed away by the forge.
  
  'We cannot swear the oath for we are already King Thorir's men,' Ibor told Sigurd. 'But we'll set up hereabouts and make ourselves useful.'
  
  'We're glad to have you, Ibor,' Sigurd said, shaking both men's hands. And he was glad too. The smiths would be busy day and night, fixing or replacing broken brynja rings, hammering dents out of helmets, straightening swords and making arrow heads.
  
  'I've heard a rumour that you've a little iron around here,' Ibor said, lifting one of his non brows. His son Ingel looked sheepish for all his shoulders and brawny arms. But then Sigurd had a famous name these days, as well as a war host, and all this while not even being jarl. And then there was the Óðin spear. It was no surprise that men could act flea-bitten around him.
  
  'I found some iron on my travels. One or two bars,' he told the smiths, watching their eyes light up at that, the way Svein and Bram's did when mead was mentioned. 'You will earn a share of it if you work hard for me.'
  
  Ibor nodded, then exchanged a look with his son before setting off back to the bay to fetch his tools. 'Make it quick, lad, we've work to do,' he called over his shoulder to Ingel who lingered, pulling at his short beard so that it was clear to everyone that he had something he needed to say.
  
  'Well, lad?' Olaf said. 'Spit it out or swallow it.'
  
  Ibor looked from Olaf to Sigurd. 'I have news from your sister Runa, lord,' he said.
  
  Sigurd's heart leapt like a salmon but he kept his face spear-straight as Olaf nodded at Solmund and Svein and the others that they should busy themselves elsewhere.
  
  'You've seen her?' Sigurd asked Ingel when they were alone on the bluff but for the wheeling gulls above and a colony of gannets at the cliff's edge, their incessant rab-rab-rab calls cluttering the day.
  
  'Yes, I've seen her,' Ingel said, colour flushing cheeks already chafed by the heat of the forge. 'My father and I have been living on the island of the Maidens. Working,' he added a little too hastily.
  
  'I thought no men were allowed there,' Sigurd said.
  
  Ingel cleared his throat. 'King Thorir sends us, lord.' He shrugged. 'To help where we can.'
  
  Sigurd imagined what it must be like for two handsome, capable men on an island teeming with women. Then he cleared his mind of that thought, afraid of where it led. 'Runa is well?'
  
  he asked and to his great relief Ingel nodded, almost smiling for the first time.
  
  'Your sister is well, lord,' the young blacksmith said. 'King Thorir sent news to Fugløy of your uprising. He wanted Skuld the High Mother to know that he was coming west to fight, bringing young men to blood them against some Norse king.' Now came the grin and it made Ingel instantly likeable. 'When my father heard that you had come into possession of the Allfather's spear, I knew we would come. He is curious to see how the blade is forged, for Ívaldi's sons who made Gungnir were the greatest smiths to ever pick up a hammer.'
  
  'Then tell your father you may both handle the spear and learn its secrets when there is no more work to be done,' Sigurd said, at which the young smith smiled again, resigning himself to never laying hands on the sacred weapon.
  
  'So are you going to let your father unload your boat all by himself?' Sigurd asked, glad to have news of Runa but thinking that there were other tasks which needed his attention, such as telling four hundred warriors one more time where they could and could not shit.
  
  Ingel looked itchy again. 'There is something else, lord,' he said. 'Something which Runa told me to tell you and you alone.'
  
  This man loves my sister, Sigurd realized then with sudden, breath-catching certainty. Realized actually that he had known it from the first time those forge-cracked lips had spoken Runa's name.
  
  He took a breath, wondering what he had done by letting Runa out of his sight. His beautiful, golden, Freyja-kissed sister.
  
  'I am listening,' he said.
  
  The oath-breaker King Gorm, whom men still called Biflindi, Shield-Shaker, though not in Sigurd's hearing, came in nineteen ships. A great fleet led by Storm-Bison, the king's own ship, sweeping past the north-west tip of the island, riding Rán's white-haired daughters which beat past the rocky coast, driven eastward, wind-whipped and relentless. It was a fleet buoyed by its own importance, revelling in the strength of the pack, each ship rejoicing in the wind which filled its sails and sang on its stays like the promise of fame.
  
  That wind whipped the spume off the rolling grey furrows and Sigurd imagined the king standing by Hríð-visundr's prow beast, the salt spray soaking his face, beading in his beard, crusting his lips which were pulled back from his teeth in a wolf's grin. Because Gorm had assembled a great war host, the greatest of all his days, and he was coming to crush his enemies the way a man takes a spade to a nest of rats.
  
  'It's not too late, Sigurd,' Olaf said, the first words either of them had spoken for a long time as they stood together on the grassy bluff, looking out to sea. Watching.
  
  Sigurd had never seen so many sails spread to the wind, so many hulls ploughing the grey fjord, and from Olaf's long silence he knew his friend had not either. Now, with those words Olaf was offering him a way out of this. Though not really, of course. It was too late and they both knew it. Every man on Rennisøy knew it. Even if they hared down to the big bay now and got aboard their boats they would have to row them out before they could catch the wind in their sails and by that time Gorm's fleet would be upon them.
  
  'Some of us would get away,' Olaf said.
  
  'Perhaps,' Sigurd said. But neither of them moved. Nor did any of the others who had come up to the bluff to watch, their beards bristling in the gusts, their eyes round as oar holes at the sight. So many carved beast heads chasing across the fjord, all snarl and stare. So many tallow-stinking sails swollen with the gathering wind, the strakes trembling beneath men's feet, whispering into their limbs like the thrill which comes before the blood-fray.
  
  Perhaps it was worth fighting a battle you could not win, to have seen nineteen proper ships, plus a dozen smaller craft, given to the wind, offered up to Njörd, Lord of the Sea and god of wind and flame.
  
  The crews of the lead ships were working hard now, reefing, robbing the wind of wool so that they could drive their tillers over and turn into the first bay, to take Sigurd up on his invitation to moor there. Those not working the ship would be gripping the sides, clutching spear shafts and shields and the little hammers at their necks. They would be trying to ignore the rumbles and gurgles in their guts and their dry mouths and the creeping fear. They would be telling themselves that this was not their death day. Others will bleed. Others will be ripped open by sharp blades. Others will die screaming in pain, drowning in fear, shitting themselves, suddenly stripped of the honour and courage which they had worn like a cloak since they had first wanted to be like their fathers. A thin garb, that, when the end comes.
  
  'Well if we're staying, we should probably go and get ready,' Olaf said, turning his back on the scene and walking off.
  
  'Aye, it's not every day you get a visit from the king,' Solmund said. He was braiding his grey hair so that it would not blind him in the fight. Gods be with him, that old man who was never happier than when out in the fjord at the helm of a good ship. That skipper who had never rejoiced in battle but who would stand beside Sigurd no matter what.
  
  'Thought you said we couldn't lose,' King Thorir said, coming to watch the first of Gorm's ships beach on the strand or drop anchors into the shallows. As for the other vessels, now that they were coming closer, bows turning across the rolling furrows, everyone up on that crag could see that each was crammed with spear-armed men. Warriors from scores of villages, islands and farmsteads, who owed allegiance to the king at Avaldsnes and had been reminded of that.
  
  'You must have wrestled with men who were bigger than you, King Thorir,' Sigurd said, watching Storm-Bison for sign of the king himself.
  
  'Careful, lad,' Thorir said, for he was short, a head and a half shorter than Sigurd. 'What of it?'
  
  'Yet you have never lost,' Sigurd said. 'Even though these bigger men must have thought they had the beating of you.'
  
  'True enough, lad,' King Thorir said, knowing where Sigurd was going with this. King Gorm had ridden Storm-Bison up on to the shingle now and men were spilling over her sides and forming a shieldwall on the beach in case Sigurd had planned an ambush. But Sigurd would not fight him there. 'It'll be a rare fight all the same,' King Thorir said. 'And I'm glad my boys are here to see this. Might not see its like again in their lifetime. A fleet like that. A bloody swarm like that.'
  
  Other ships were slewing on to the beach, using the wind's momentum and their oars for the final push, sinew and muscle driving them up the foreshore which had been made smooth by countless hulls before them. They disgorged their spear-and axe-armed cargo and those men came with yells and banter and the thumping of blades and staves on shields because they were already rousing themselves to the coming violence, like water coming to the boil. The wind carried the din of it up the craggy rocks to where Sigurd waited, and for a while he let it wash over him, let it feed his own war beast which was stirring inside him now.
  
  Then he turned and went to make his stand beneath his snarling wolf banner.