text: 'This is the furthest we have walked for as long as I can remember, and it does not help that I have to step over piles of horse shit reminding me that Knut and his friends are riding while we sprout blisters like toadstools,' Svein complained.
  
  'Aye,' Solmund agreed, 'if you ask me, by the time we get wherever we are going we will have already earned the silver which Knut gave that arse-crack Asvith, and that is before we even get our swords wet.'
  
  They had been walking for two days and it had been hard going because the pine forest was thick and in places still boggy from the meltwater running down from the hills. It would have been easier had they not been in all their war gear, the weight of their brynjur and helmets dragging them down with each plodding step, their shields and food-stuffed nestbaggins slung over their backs and each of them carrying two spears or a spear and a long-hafted axe.
  
  'Much more of this and we'll be too tired to do anything else after,' Bjarni said. '"Well then?" this Alrik's enemies will say, "are we not going to fight after all? When you have come all this way?" "No," we'll say, "for we've just walked our arses off and now we are here we don't have it in us to fight you."'
  
  Moldof muttered something foul, but whether it was aimed at Bjarni for his complaining, or whether the big man was expressing his own resentment at having to walk was impossible to say.
  
  'I don't see why we couldn't have horses,' Thorbiorn said. 'It is not right that we should be walking with the rest of these nobodies.'
  
  'Says the famous Thorbiorn at whose name men shake in their shoes,' Bram said.
  
  'My father is a king,' Thorbiorn said, 'which is more than I can say for any of you.'
  
  'A king he may be, but even a good fruit-rich tree can sprout a sour apple now and then,' Solmund said.
  
  'Still, the lad is right about the horses,' Hagal Crow-Song said. 'Sigurd is Óðin-kissed, and we all have a reputation.' There were forty-four men in this war band which Knut was leading north through the forest, and many of them were striplings and untested men whom he had rounded up in Birka. Yet most of them seemed cheerful enough, even now brimming with a combination of the thrill and fear which squirms in a man's belly when he knows he will soon be fighting. 'Furthermore, it is going to rain. I can feel it in the air.'
  
  'Knut said we will be there before midday tomorrow,' Olaf said, 'so in the meantime if you could stop whining like little girls I would be happier.' There were a few low grumbles but they soon died away and Olaf sighed with relief. 'That's better,' he said, lifting his helmet so that he could scratch his sweat-matted hair. 'Besides which, it is not going to rain, Crow-Song.'
  
  No sooner had he said it than a low peal of thunder rolled across a sky which, seen through the gaps in the spruce and birch canopy, was the colour of old hearth ash. A dozen heartbeats later the rain lashed down, as though a god had tipped over his fresh-water barrel. It found its way through the trees and bounced off helmets and the shields on their backs, and it filled the world with seething noise which drowned out Olaf's cursing.
  
  The men grumbled, the rain rushed down, and Sigurd immersed himself in the memory of that night with Valgerd, when they had given themselves to each other. But they had both taken, too, and afterwards Valgerd had shrugged her brynja back on, buckled her sword belt and braided her hair, barely looking at him in the dark of the log house loft. Like the water's surface closing over a dropped anchor stone, it was in some ways as if nothing at all had happened.
  
  'We should get back to the others before they smash some other crew's heads and steal their ale,' Valgerd had said.
  
  Sigurd had nodded, dazed, caught up in the seiðr which her scent on his skin wove around him.
  
  She had not cried out in joy at the end, like some women did. But she had arched her back, driving her hips forward to bring him deeper inside her and she had trembled and bitten her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. When they were finished, Sigurd had rolled on to his back feeling utterly spent, more tired than after most shieldwall fights he had been in.
  
  'Are you coming? It will be dawn soon,' she had said, and he had opened his eyes to see that she was already clothed again. She had her boots on and he was in his breeks and tunic when the shouting and screaming began and they peered over the ledge of the loft to see that men had drawn blades. A knot of them, armed with steel and oil lamps, had gathered where one of the hanging partitions had been pulled back.
  
  'Someone's been murdered,' Valgerd said, slinging a pair of ale skins over her shoulder and climbing on to the ladder.
  
  Sigurd caught the stench of it then, had been amongst the crows after enough fights to know that smell, of blood and shit. Of death. They climbed down and pushed their way through the throng to see Brodd-Helgi standing over the bodies of a man and a woman, both slaughtered whilst they were at it, by the looks, her throat cut out and him stabbed half a dozen times in the stomach, under the breastbone and into the heart. If the knife had been long enough.
  
  'What a fucking mess,' a man beside Sigurd growled.
  
  'Did no one see anything?' Brodd-Helgi was asking them all, his eyes wide with the shock of what had happened. The dead woman's hair was long and golden and braided like Valgerd's.
  
  'I'll wager Stækar's wife found out what he was up to,' one of Brodd-Helgi's henchmen said, at which Sigurd and Valgerd looked at each other, both recognizing the man who had been hauled out of the loft so that they might have it. 'She came in and caught them at it,' the man went on. 'That's what I reckon.'
  
  'And did this?' Brodd-Helgi asked him, gesturing at the gore-slathered lovers. 'You think Hildigunn came in here and carved Stækar up like this? Don't be an idiot.'
  
  'Aye, because if she did, then she's better with a blade than Stækar ever was,' another man put in, and this got a chuckle even in a blood-and shit-stinking moment like that.
  
  The henchman shrugged. 'Who else would want him dead?' he asked, not ready to abandon his suspicions yet. There was a rumbling from the gathering at that. Still, no one came out with a name. Brodd-Helgi growled at a couple of big men to help him wrap the bodies in skins and carry them outside.
  
  'Let's go,' Valgerd said to Sigurd, so they had, walking back through the rain, which was lighter now, neither of them talking about the murder or what had happened before it. When they came back to the camp most of the others were snoring in their tents. Most but not all.
  
  'Where did you go for that? Asgard?' Olaf asked, opening one eye and catching Sigurd by surprise as he put the ale skins down inside the canvas shelter and took off his wet cloak for the second time that night. Olaf was wrapped in furs and leaning against his sea chest. Clearly he had been waiting up for Sigurd, who felt like a beardless, wayward boy then, rather than the leader of a war band, albeit one as small as this.
  
  'There was a murder,' he said, making sure not to look at Valgerd as he spoke. But she was already heading off to her own tent. 'A man called Stækar and the woman he was tupping. Someone killed them in the log house.'
  
  'The woman's husband, I'll wager,' Olaf said, arching an eyebrow as he pulled the furs up to his neck and shifted his great frame to get more comfortable. Sigurd thought he had gone back to sleep when he said, 'What were you two doing in the log house?'
  
  Sigurd glanced at the massive pile of furs that was Svein, then across at Floki who lay along the other side of the tent, his two hand axes beside his head. They were both sleeping and yet Sigurd could not have felt more guilty if he'd been the one who had murdered Stækar and his pretty friend. 'We were drinking Alrik's ale,' he said, avoiding Olaf's eyes, wrapping the leather belt around Troll-Tickler which was sleeping in its scabbard. It was no lie, was it?
  
  'Must be good stuff. Been gone half the night,' Olaf mumbled, closing his eyes again.
  
  Better than you can imagine, Sigurd thought, though he said nothing as he sat on his own sea chest to pull off his mud-sheathed boots and get into his furs. Some sleep before the next day's journey would be no bad thing.
  
  But he had lain there looking up at the canvas, listening to the rain drumming against it until dawn.
  
  Now he was walking through the sopping woods on his way to meet Alrik. In body at least. In mind he was back in that loft. He would cloak himself in the memory of it, wrap it around him for as long as he could, for he had a feeling that it would never happen again.
  
  And the next day they came soaked, cold and squelching in their shoes to the hill fort at Fornsigtuna.
  
  Not that it was on much of a hill, as Bram observed when they came out of the forest on to the rolling, rock-strewn ground south of the palisade. All the way round the borg the trees had been felled to prevent enemies coming upon it unseen and to provide livestock with grazing. Now, the meadow before Knut's war band was a camp, with tents and men sitting round fires or perching on tree stumps. Horses cropped the new spring grass and sheep crowded in a pen, telling Sigurd that Alrik's enemies had not been expecting him for they had not taken the animals inside the borg.
  
  'At least we'll be eating well,' Olaf said, and as soon as the words were out Sigurd caught the smell of mutton stew on the breeze.
  
  'We'll have eaten those sheep and the horses too before we get in there,' Moldof said, taking in the borg. And there was probably some truth in that for the place looked formidable, even on that nothing hill.
  
  'Aye, I begin to see why this Alrik sent Knut off looking for more men,' Solmund said. 'It would be easier for an old sod like me to get inside a pretty young wench than it will be to get inside that.' While there were undoubtedly bigger hills thereabouts, the palisade topped a steep earthen bank made higher and steeper still by the deep ditch before it.
  
  Knut had explained how Alrik had a long-running feud with a jarl called Guthrum. It had started with the theft of a few sheep – Knut had not said who stole from whom – and grew from there, the way a snowball grows when you roll it in snow. Blood for blood. Murder for murder, as is the way with these things. Jarl Guthrum had risen high and fast, some saying he meant to raise enough spears to challenge King Erik Refilsson. He had taken this fort from another warlord and stuffed it with silver. 'He is raising an army,' Knut had said, 'but we mean to scupper his ambition and get back what he has taken from us over the years.'
  
  Still, it did not look like it was going well for Alrik so far.
  
  'You can see what has become of the men who have been knocking on that gate,' Asgot said, pointing his staff towards three mounds of newly turned earth over by the trees on the east side of the borg. Sigurd wondered how many men already lay in the ground for Alrik's ambition to take this place.
  
  'If it was me I'd burn it,' Sigurd said. 'I would pile a great heap of dry wood against that gate and set fire to it at night. Then, while Jarl Guthrum's people were busy throwing pails of water and pissing out the flames, I'd get most of my men arrayed in a skjaldborg facing the gate, lit up by the fire for all to see.' He shrugged. 'While all this was happening, some of us would hop over the wall on the other side and start killing.'
  
  'Good enough,' Olaf said with a nod.
  
  'We cannot burn it,' Knut said, coming over to where Sigurd and the others stood. He nodded towards the borg. 'Alrik has forbidden it.'
  
  'He might be one ear short of a pair but there's nothing wrong with the man's hearing,' Bram muttered to Svein.
  
  'Why can't we burn it?' Sigurd asked.
  
  'Because we might need that palisade,' Knut said. 'Only half of Guthrum's force is in there. The rest are with the jarl somewhere to the west, shaking taxes out of rich karls and raising spears.' He hawked and spat a wad of phlegm which was whipped away by the gathering breeze. 'The whoreson has promised his own arse King Erik's high seat.'
  
  That made sense of why, back in Birka, Asvith had told Knut that King Erik wanted Jarl Guthrum dead by the Jól feast, Sigurd thought. This feud between Guthrum and Alrik was being fuelled by the king's silver, then.
  
  'Gods but these things become tangled like yarn in a bairn's hands,' Olaf said.
  
  'If the fire catches and too much of the palisade burns, we might not have the time to rebuild the defences before Guthrum himself shows up,' Knut said. 'Even if we cut the timber and fashioned the stakes to have them ready, they would not be properly bedded into the earth.'
  
  'So we just sit here and wait for Guthrum's people to starve?' Olaf asked.
  
  'That will be the easiest silver I have ever made,' Bjarni put in, grinning at his brother Bjorn.
  
  'Is that Alrik's plan?' Sigurd asked. 'Because if Jarl Guthrum returns while we are sitting out here we will be caught between him and the borg, which does not strike me as a good thing.'
  
  Olaf agreed with that. 'A shieldwall with enemies in front and behind does not tend to last very long,' he said.
  
  'There is not much of Loki in this plan of Alrik's,' Sigurd said, turning back to Knut, 'and yet from the looks of those graves over there, perhaps starving them out will work better than whatever you have tried so far.'
  
  Knut's lip curled and he seemed about to answer that accusation when his attention was drawn to a group of four warriors who were walking towards them, wet cloaks hitched over fine-looking swords, mail gleaming dully and sopping hair pulled back from weather-worn, battle-scarred faces. 'Here is your chance to come up with a better scheme, Byrnjolf,' he said, raising a hand in greeting to the newcomers. 'My lord Alrik, this is Byrnjolf Hálfdanarson and his crew, who have come to win this battle for us.' There was more than a touch of mockery in that, but only Bram bothered rising to the bait and growling something unpleasant in Knut's direction.
  
  There was no contempt in Alrik's eyes though and neither would Sigurd expect there to be, what with them standing there in that camp looking like lords of war, albeit wet ones, in mail and helmets and the sort of gear you only normally saw on kings and the richest and highest of their hirðmen. Few of Alrik's warriors were even half as well equipped by the looks.
  
  'Welcome, Byrnjolf,' the warlord said, holding out his arm which Sigurd gripped, taking in the man before him. Alrik was a little shorter than himself but powerfully built. His hair was cropped close against his scalp on the sides but long enough on the top to be pulled back over his head and twisted into a rope, which hung down between his shoulder blades and was bound in leather thongs. 'I see Knut has brought me a crew who are no strangers to the blood-fray.' He glanced at Knut and nodded in appreciation. 'You've done well, Knut.'
  
  'They can fight,' the one-eared warrior said. 'Even after drinking ale from sunrise to sunset they can fight. I'll vouch for that.'
  
  'I do not doubt it,' Alrik said, looking from Sigurd to Olaf, his eyes widening as they moved on to Svein. It was not unusual for men, even battle-hardened warriors, to be impressed by Svein's size.
  
  'Knut offered us silver to fight and so here we are,' Sigurd said, 'and just as well for that Asvith Horsefly and his men too,' he added, 'for I had just been thinking that Asvith's brynja would suit me well.'
  
  'It's wasted on him, the soft sodding prick,' Alrik said. Clearly he was no friend of Asvith.
  
  'I'll admit it was a fine brynja,' Olaf said. 'No matter. Knut assures us there is plenty of plunder to be had here fighting for you.'
  
  'And he is right,' Alrik said. 'You and your men . . . and your woman will earn your fair share of the spoils.' He glanced at Valgerd who was sitting on a tree stump, her brynja laid across her knees as she polished the rings with a greasy cloth. 'Enough to make yourselves rich,' he said with a smile. 'Perhaps you will swear to me once we have killed Jarl Guthrum.'
  
  'Perhaps,' Sigurd said. There was no harm in letting Alrik think Sigurd and his crew were there to be bought with the spoils of war.
  
  Alrik held Sigurd's eyes, twisting one side of his moustaches, which were so long that they drooped past his chin. He seemed possessed of a war-leader's self-assurance, but Sigurd was the son of a jarl and he knew when a man's nerve was being tested, when his resolve had been damaged like a brynja which has shed rings. It was in the man's eyes, the strain of this long-running, root-deep feud of his with Jarl Guthrum.
  
  'Why would anyone build a borg so far from the sea?' Sigurd asked. He had grown up with the scent of the sea and of his father's ships in his nose, the smell of pine resin and tarred ropes and damp sailcloth. He had lived with the sound of gulls and the suck and plunge of the clear water against the rocks and he could not imagine why men would choose to live far from all this. It was bad enough that they had come so far from Reinen.
  
  'This borg is where Jarl Guthrum trains his warriors,' Alrik said. 'He has been building an army where he thinks no one can see him. He gathers spears from all over Svealand, demanding men's oaths and promising them silver and fame. The treacherous dog thinks he should be a king and have men from here to Uppland kiss his sword's hilt.'
  
  'That may be so, but I like the sound of this silver of his,' Olaf said.
  
  Alrik nodded at him. 'He has something else which is of great value to me. Something I crave even more than silver. And it's all in there,' he said, pointing at the borg.
  
  'Gold?' Sigurd asked.
  
  'Iron,' Olaf said.
  
  Alrik's teeth flashed beneath those moustaches. 'There's enough iron behind those walls to make the rings for a Jötunheim-dweller's brynja. Or rivets for twenty ships. From good rauði too. Red earth which Guthrum's smiths have smelted and beaten into bars. Those bars sit in there waiting for me.' He grinned. 'At night they whisper to me, Byrnjolf. They beg me to have them forged into blades and helmets. Into swords that will cut down my enemies and write my reputation in their blood.' He threw out his arms to encompass his camp with its warriors and tents. 'That is why we are here. I will have Guthrum's iron.'
  
  'First we have to get into the place,' Olaf said, 'and our beards will be white before that happens if you will not burn it. Or else we will be caught between the borg and Guthrum like the iron between the hammer and the anvil.'
  
  'The man who commands in Guthrum's absence is called Findar,' Alrik said. 'He does not seem particularly clever, but I do not think he is a fool either.'
  
  'He's still in there and you're still out here,' Olaf pointed out. It was not the most tactful thing he could have said and it got a frown out of Alrik.
  
  'You will always find him in the heart of the fray,' Knut put in. 'No one can say the man lacks courage, though if you ask me, Findar will get himself killed sooner or later because he does not know when to pull his head in. Stands there to make a show of it as our arrows slice the air by his head.'
  
  'So this Findar thinks he is something special,' Olaf said. 'That is good to know.'
  
  'In the last attack on the wall I lost sixteen men,' Alrik said, as if pointing out to Olaf that he need not think it would be an easy thing to take the place, just because he and his friends had arrived in all their war glory. 'Twelve dead and the rest wounded,' the warlord went on. 'We used hooks and ropes at night. We got right into the ditch without any of them seeing us.' Alrik touched the Thór's hammer at his neck as if to ward off ill luck. 'But their dogs heard us. Or smelt us. Damned barking alerted the sentries and we threw the hooks and climbed and some made it over, but not enough. Those brave men were cut down. Corpses hurled back over the wall.' It was a sore memory by the looks and Alrik shook his head to rid himself of it. 'Anyway, you have come a long way and will be ready for something decent to eat and drink.'
  
  'You are right about that,' Svein said, and so Knut led them off to find their patch of ground and some food to fill their bellies.
  
  Sigurd had not expected the attack that night and neither had Alrik. Afterwards, Olaf would say to Sigurd that it was good war craft by Findar, who led the borg men himself, to sally from the fort. Before Alrik's new men had properly flattened the grass out there beyond the walls. While they were still tired after the trek from the lake camp and likely to be sleeping like the dead that first night in the new place. And they nearly were dead that night, no thanks to Alrik's sentries who gave no warning and two of whom had their throats cut and died without knowing it. A third had yelped before the blade had finished killing him, but afterwards two men would tell Alrik they had thought it the squeal of a fox, a vixen luring a male to mate with. Those two men were digging a new latrine trench for days after.
  
  They came before the dawn, a raiding party of wraiths with spears. The night was not pitch black, winter showing its back now, but it did not need to be full dark, for once they had killed the two sentries nearest the borg, they were faced, if you can call it that, by men sleeping in their tents. It was an old warrior called Høther who raised the alarm eventually and it was his old bladder and his need to piss five times a night which saved a good number of lives.
  
  'Shields!' old Høther yelled, admitting after that he had pissed down his own leg to see the borg men not in the borg. 'Shields, Alrik's men! We are attacked!'
  
  Floki's hand gripping his shoulder roused Sigurd from a deep sleep and he got to his feet still foggy, watching through blurred eyes Floki trying to wake Olaf, which took him three or four good shakes, Olaf not being such a young man any more.
  
  'The borg has come to us,' Bram said, poking his head into their tent and grinning even though he must have been half asleep himself.
  
  Men were fighting now, dying too. The clamour of it had all of a sudden poured into the pre-dawn stillness, and Sigurd's first thought was of Valgerd. His second was that he would feel such a fool if they were killed now before ever throwing a spear or loosing an arrow at Guthrum's hill fort.
  
  Still, they took the extra time to throw on their brynjur and tie their helmet straps and arm properly.
  
  'No point rushing out there bare-arsed and still snoring,' Olaf said, making sure his helmet was a snug fit. 'Looking the part is half of it.' Then an arrow tore through the sailcloth and got fouled in the opposite wall, where it hung like an unanswered insult.
  
  'Now I'm ready to kill the buggers,' Olaf said, hefting his shield, and with that they went out to face whatever had come.
  
  Sigurd had barely drawn his first breath of night air when a throwing axe struck his shield like Thór's fist. It split the wood against the grain and jarred his arm in his shoulder joint, but from that moment he was wide awake.
  
  'There,' Valgerd said, pointing her spear at the man who had thrown the axe, little more than a shape in the dim light. An arrow thumped into Olaf's shield and another glanced off the cheek of Svein's long-hafted axe, which he did not like much.
  
  'On me,' Sigurd called, as the others closed round him. It was no shieldwall fight, this, with men fighting in loose order all around, but he did not want his crew off chasing kills in the dark. Besides which, it was no bad thing to show Alrik that they not only looked the part, but knew their business too. 'Forward,' Sigurd said, catching another arrow on his shield. 'Thorbiorn, you stay in the pack,' he growled. No one wanted King Thorir's boy getting sliced and tripping over his own guts in the dark. 'Move!' Sigurd shouted.
  
  'You heard him,' Olaf bellowed, 'let's put these bold buggers back in their box.'
  
  'Better still, kill them now and it'll save us a job later,' Bram said, which was true enough and with their shields up they strode into the fray, getting amongst the snarl of it all now that Alrik's men were fighting back. Those who were not dead in their tents, that was.
  
  Svein ran ahead and started swinging that long axe, roaring his challenge in the night, not that anyone seemed interested in fighting him.
  
  'Hard to know who's who,' Solmund said, his old eyes little more than slits as he peered at those fighting around them.
  
  'If they're facing downhill, stick them. If they're facing uphill, don't,' was Moldof's answer, which was not altogether stupid, and as if to make his point he buried his spear blade, one-handed, in the belly of a man who had just thrown his own spear and was pulling the axe from his belt.
  
  Bjarni and Bjorn speared a big warrior who died foaming at the mouth like a mad dog, and Valgerd stepped out of the loose formation to go up behind a man whom Knut was fighting and cut his hamstrings with her scramasax. The man fell in a heap and Knut hacked him to death, then glared at Valgerd before turning to find another enemy.
  
  'Larboard, Sigurd,' Olaf said, and Sigurd looked to his left to see a wild-looking man coming for him, drawn by his war gear no doubt and leading a knot of borg men.
  
  'Mine,' Bram said, discarding his shield and stepping in front of Sigurd to meet the attack. Coming fast, the borg man thrust his spear at Bram, who knocked it aside with his own spear and in the same movement drove it on into the man's belly, using the man's own momentum to lift him into the air. This got some roars of approval, for the strength it took as much as the spectacle of it, as Bram smashed the impaled man down into the ground so that bones must have broken in him like seashells under foot.
  
  Sigurd stepped up and smashed his shield against another man's, stopping him in his tracks. The borg man growled and swung an axe over his shield and the blade struck Sigurd's shoulder, scattering brynja rings, but at the same time Sigurd thrust his spear down into his enemy's foot, pinning him to the spot. Olaf took off his head mid-scream.
  
  'Alrik! Lord Alrik!' someone was yelling. But it was dark and men were still fighting all around them and it was hard putting voices to bodies.
  
  'Where is Alrik?' Sigurd called back to Knut, who was leaning over a wounded man to cut his throat. The dead man flopped forward and Knut stood up, sword in hand, and shook his head as if to say he did not know.
  
  'There!' another of Alrik's men yelled, pointing up the hill.
  
  'Aye, it's him,' Crow-Song said.
  
  A knot of five borg men had hold of Alrik and were dragging him up the hill towards the fort, though the warlord was not making it easy for them, kicking and flailing, frenzying against his captors.
  
  'Whoresons want him alive,' Olaf said. 'They'll trade him to get us to piss off.'
  
  'Or kill him on the wall for his men to see,' Sigurd said, for that was a more certain way of ending the siege, as without Alrik his army would disintegrate and scatter like chaff on the wind.
  
  'Knut's got a fight on,' Solmund said, for though the sally had faltered, the borg men had regrouped and overlapped their shields in order to retreat back up the slope to safety. They had built a skjaldborg on the edge of the camp and Knut was trying to rein in his men to fight them, but many were busy looting the dead.
  
  'Arse wipes would rather pick corpses for silver than fight,' Moldof said.
  
  'Who wouldn't?' Thorbiorn asked and didn't get an answer.
  
  Bram pointed up at Alrik, who'd had the fight knocked out of him now by the looks. 'Well, we need to get him back if we want paying,' he said, which was the truth of it.
  
  'Floki, Bram, Svein, with me. Rest of you help Knut,' Sigurd said, and before Olaf could argue with that he was running up the hill. They loped like wolves, passing one of the sentries who had failed to warn the camp and now lay pale and bloodless in the grass.
  
  'Findar!' Sigurd called, and hurled his spear as the borg man straightened at the challenge. Findar got his shield up in time but the spear's point punched through the limewood.
  
  'Get him inside now!' Findar roared at his men, hurling his useless, spear-burdened shield aside and turning to face Sigurd who drew Troll-Tickler without missing a step. There was a blur in the darkness and Sigurd saw one of the men dragging Alrik fall to his knees with Floki's axe between his shoulder blades. Then, when he was ten feet from Findar, Sigurd stopped on his leading foot and hurled his shield. It flew hard and fast and struck Findar edge on in his left upper arm as he tried to haul his sword from its scabbard. The blow turned him but he got his sword up in time to block Sigurd's first cut, then attempted to throw a punch but perhaps his arm was broken because it flailed uselessly and Sigurd drove forward and butted his helmet into Findar's face. He staggered back but kept his feet, raising his sword as blood flooded from his nose into his beard.
  
  'It took courage to leave the borg, Findar,' Sigurd said, 'but it was a mistake.' He pointed his sword up the hill to where Floki, Svein and Bram were slaughtering Findar's men, and when Findar had seen it he turned back to Sigurd and shrugged.
  
  'A man gets bored hiding behind walls,' he said, then spat a wad of blood and phlegm into the grass.
  
  Sigurd nodded. 'If you see my brother Sigmund Haraldarson in the Allfather's hall, tell him the shield throw worked. He laughed when I tried it on him once.'
  
  'Tell him yourself,' Findar said. He came at Sigurd and his first cut took a bite out of Troll-Tickler and his second ripped Sigurd's brynja as he twisted aside, but his third was too wild and he put himself off balance. Troll-Tickler wanted its own revenge then and the blade snaked out, its point opening Findar's cheek before Sigurd pulled it back out of the way of the borg man's scything sword. Then Sigurd sank Troll-Tickler deep in the flesh of Findar's leg between the thigh and the knee joint. Findar went down and Sigurd considered sparing his life for three marks of silver.
  
  'Finish it then,' Findar said, bleeding in the dark. Bleeding enough to know that he was a dead man one way or another.
  
  Sigurd nodded. 'Sigmund Haraldarson, remember,' he said, then stepped up and hacked into Findar's neck.
  
  'Gods you like to make a fight last, Sigurd!' Svein said, coming back down towards him. Floki and Bram were supporting Alrik between them, the warlord bleeding but shaking them off because he was too proud to be carried. Arrows were hissing down from the fort's ramparts now, thudding into the ground around them, so they moved back down the hill to avoid being killed by some lucky borg man.
  
  'Protect Alrik,' Sigurd said, because the last of the borg men who had attacked the camp were now fleeing from Knut, who had put together his own skjaldborg and was marching up the hill.
  
  Sigurd, Bram, Svein and Floki closed in around Alrik, nice and tight, blades raised just in case, but the borg men were no longer interested in them or Alrik. They ran past in the dark, yelling at their companions to let them back into the borg. And Sigurd let them go.
  
  Life on Fugløy had settled into a pattern as predictable as the yellow and black of a plaid sailcloth or the squares of a tafl board. Runa woke each morning before dawn and took two pails to the byre and did not come out again until they were full to the brim with warm milk. Then she went to the ewes which foraged freely and took a pail of their milk too and all of this she brought to the hall to help Signy and Vebiorg make cheese, butter and skyr. There was still hay to be harvested and so she scythed it and raked it and stacked it against the byre wall for drying so that it would feed the animals come next winter. She teased wool which had been shorn or plucked the previous spring, and combed it diligently as she had learnt to under her mother's watchful eye, so that the tog fibres lay parallel to each other, crucial if you were to spin a strong warp thread. She worked the spindle and the distaff, she gathered fuel for the fires and she carried slops to the pigs. She practised with the bow, for the Freyja Maidens prided themselves on their skill with that weapon and could put an arrow through an arm ring at thirty paces seven times out of ten. Runa could not even do it one time out of ten in those first weeks, and yet she drew and loosed, drew and loosed, until her arms trembled and her fingers bled.
  
  But mostly she fought. Sword, spear and shield work consumed her and all the other tasks were dreary by comparison, a means to an end which she rushed where she could in order to hold the shaft and the hilt again.
  
  She was good, too. She knew it. Not as good as the others, but then most of them had practised the art of war for years. And yet what she lacked in experience she almost made up for with talent. Whenever she struck Signy's shoulder or snuck a blunted spear past Skuld's shield, neither of which happened often, she imagined that her father and brothers had seen it and were cheering for her. She imagined her mother looking on with disapproving eyes but being secretly proud.
  
  'You are gifted, Runa,' Skuld had said one day, a compliment which Runa did not take very graciously because she was on her backside in the dirt trying to catch the blood which was pouring from her nose. She had been too slow in getting her shield in the way of Vebiorg's and had wrongly thought Skuld was mocking her.
  
  My family were warriors, she thought afterwards, when she had done well enough to claw back a little pride at least. My father was jarl. My brother is Óðin-kissed. Why shouldn't I be able to fight? Do we not share the same blood? The same will?
  
  It was a simple life stripped of the clutter of her past existence. Not on Fugløy the ale-fuelled fights of drunken men, the strutting and boasting of warriors chafing for a fight to prove themselves. Not on the island of the Freyja Maidens the poison that spreads when a woman swives another woman's man, or the serpent-toothed gossip or the bitter jealousy. Nor even the ever-present possibility of being raided, which hangs above most villages like a cloud which remains even if the sun is shining.
  
  Though for all that it was not a life without pain. The practice swords were wooden or blunted so that they would not cut the flesh, but they left bruises which bloomed green, yellow and black, and now and then one of the warrior women would break a finger or an arm, or chip off a piece of bone which could be felt floating under the skin. Many of them had had their noses broken by their opponent's shield. Two had lost eyes, perhaps from spear work. All of them were hardened and honed, seasoned and sinewy and skilled, though still Runa could not help but wonder how they would fare at the Twilight of the Gods, for they were masters in practice but had never killed big, fierce, battle-tested men who were trying to kill them.
  
  It was a half life in a way, spent in preparation for death, when each Maiden would be carried to Sessrymnir to fight for the Goddess. And yet Runa was almost happy. It was hard to think about your murdered mother and your slain father and brothers when you were taking hammer blows on your shield or trying to avoid some screeching woman's sword. It was hard to think of Sigurd and fret for him when you were slowing your heartbeat and drawing the bow, whispering to the arrow to fly true. When those fears came they came at night. Not every night. Sometimes she was too tired for them and would be asleep before they got their claws into her. Another reason to fight until she could hardly lift the shield to meet a high spear thrust. To shoot until she could no longer draw the bow string to her cheek.
  
  Yes, a half life, hidden from the world and from its men. Though not all of its men. And therein lay the violent meeting of currents in an otherwise sleeping sea. She had noticed Ingel looking at her from his forge when she was practising with sword or spear. At first she had thought it was perhaps mere curiosity because she was a new face on Fugløy. That was what Runa told herself, even though she knew the truth of it really. A woman knows when a man wants her. It is all over him and it is in his eyes and it is not as if men even know how to hide it or even want to try.
  
  It might not have been a problem had a woman called Sibbe not decided to be jealous about it. The first time Runa noticed this was when Sibbe, the cock-hunger upon her, had gone to the forge to pull the young blacksmith out of it and Ingel had abandoned his work and gone with her willingly enough, albeit his eyes had been on Runa from the moment he laid down his hammer to the moment he disappeared into the hall. And just as a woman knows when a man wants her, so she also knows when the man she is with wants someone else.
  
  Sibbe had hated Runa from that day on. When she was not scowling at her across the hearthfire with eyes like knives, she was trying to fix it so that she was Runa's opponent in the practice bouts. During those fights she would come at Runa like a berserker so that it was all Runa could do to escape with cuts and bruises and nothing worse.
  
  'You think because your father was a jarl you are better than the rest of us,' Sibbe growled at her during their first bout after Sibbe's roll in the hay with Ingel. 'But you are weak. A little girl sent away because your brother did not want the trouble of looking after you.' Perhaps she had heard this from the blacksmiths, for Runa had revealed almost nothing about her reasons for being there.
  
  Sibbe's first attack had comprised a hail of sword blows which had deadened Runa's arm behind the limewood planks of her shield. The second attack put Runa on the ground, a cut in her temple spilling crimson into her blonde braid.
  
  'A little girl who would not know what to do with a man,' Sibbe sneered down at her, stepping back to allow Runa to rise just so that she could knock her down again.
  
  Runa did not take the bait. She did nothing to let the bout spill over into a proper fight because she knew she would lose. But neither would she stay down amongst the twigs and the pine needles while she had the strength to rise, and this only infuriated the Freyja Maiden the more.
  
  'Do not let her get to you,' Vebiorg had said. 'She grows more bitter with each new crease in her face.' She had smiled at Runa then. 'You are young and golden and beautiful, Runa, and there is nothing like that to remind us that we are getting old.'
  
  'You are not old, Vebiorg!' Runa said, and neither was she. But then none of them was as young as Runa.
  
  As for Ingel, all muscle and soot that he was, he looked, he stared, but actually speaking to Runa seemed beyond him. Eventually Runa grew tired of his games and did something which made him flush red as the metal he worked, and made Sibbe hate her with the fierce heat of the forge.
  
  She stared back at him.
  
  Alrik would have a new scar on his temple and another on his arm from where the poll of a hand axe had torn the skin, but other than that he was none the worse for having been all but carried off like a sheep in a spring raid. Yet he was furious and wanted everyone to know it.
  
  He did not kill the sentries who had allowed Findar to come into his camp in the night and steal him from his tent, for he needed every man if he was going to beat Guthrum, but he raged and stormed about the camp, letting all know that if anyone should fall asleep on their watch again he would skin them and rub them with salt.
  
  'You would think he'd be more grateful to us,' Thorbiorn said, jutting his chin towards Alrik who was amongst some other crew's tents wanting to know which of them had been looting the dead when they should have been the meat in Knut's shieldwall.
  
  'What, for all the killing you did that night?' Solmund said to Thorbiorn, winking at Olaf, who tried not to grin.
  
  Thorbiorn glowered. 'I would have done my share had I not been corralled like a prize bloody bull.'
  
  'Bull, you say?' Svein's brow lifted.
  
  'Goat, more like,' Bjarni suggested with a wicked smile.
  
  'Still, the lad's on to something there,' Bjorn put in. 'We saved Alrik's arse and should see something for it.'
  
  'Something that shines in the night like Fáfnir's eye,' Crow-Song said.
  
  'Something drinkable at least,' Bram said, which had some murmurs of agreement.
  
  'He knows what happened that night,' Sigurd said, 'and he knows what would have happened had we not fetched him back.'
  
  'Within pissing distance of the gate, too,' Floki said.
  
  'He'd be hanging from that wall by his neck,' Moldof rumbled, nodding at the borg from whose ramparts Guthrum's men stared out. Those men must know how close Findar had come to delivering them, to scattering Alrik's host like gulls before the plough. No doubt they felt Findar's absence now. Missed him the way Moldof missed his right arm.
  
  'And the rest of us would be on our way back to our boats or else fighting each other for whatever silver Alrik keeps in his tent,' Solmund said, hands clasped, kneading the swollen flesh around his knuckles.
  
  'Or . . .' Olaf said, 'we'd still be here scratching our beards trying to come up with a way of taking the place, for we still need silver if we are going to raise our own war host.'
  
  'You don't have to remind me of that, Uncle,' Sigurd said and Olaf raised a hand to acknowledge it.
  
  'Well, we didn't walk all this way to sit around scratching our backsides waiting for the end of days,' Svein moaned.
  
  Olaf swept his arms wide. 'I'm all ears, Red,' he said. 'What is this Loki-worthy plan of yours to turf those shits out of their cosy borg? Don't be shy, lad, let's hear it.'
  
  But Svein had nothing more to say on the matter and neither did any of them, and so they would just have to wait until someone did.
  
  The next morning a gust of wind came out of the west. It was a wet wind laden with drizzle and it lifted the damp red cloth of one of Alrik's war banners which hung on a shaft stuck in the earth. It showed glimpses of some beast, that banner, a bear from what Sigurd had seen of it, standing tall on its hind legs, its forelegs stretched out. Reaching for something, Sigurd liked to think. Guthrum's silver probably.
  
  'Here he comes again,' Valgerd said, nodding towards Alrik who had stopped to talk to some men by a fire but was clearly heading their way. The warlord had been hanging round their tents, comparing war gear, admiring the craftsmanship that had gone into Sigurd's helmet and Valgerd's brynja, and showing off his own gear, particularly his sword Sváva, of which he was very proud. It was a fine blade, the ghost in it like a swirl of Týr's breath on a cold day. Sleep-Maker was a good name for a sword, too, good enough to get a smile out of most men, though Bjarni asked Alrik if he had hit himself with his own blade, not to have woken when Findar came into his tent.
  
  Alrik had told Bjarni to fuck himself. 'Leading a war host is tiring work,' he said. And it was, too, Sigurd thought, having watched Alrik striding around the camp checking supplies, sending men off to buy bread, ale and cheese from any farmsteads within ten rôsts. Sending others foraging for meat: deer, boar and fowl if they could get it, squirrel, hare, nettles and leafy docks if they could not. All the while he was busy, listening to complaints from men who wanted what they believed Alrik owed them for sitting outside that borg, be it plunder or decent ale. Settling disputes. Rewarding men for their bravery. Whetting their silver-lust and reminding them of all the fights he had won in the past so that they might believe he would win this one too. All these jobs fell to Alrik, and none could deny that he was good at it.
  
  'You could learn something from him,' Olaf had told Sigurd, who had dismissed that with a young man's arrogance, yet he had known Olaf was right. Which of them commanded a war host, after all? Being a dróttin, a warlord, was the same as being a jarl in some ways. Men wanted silver and loot in return for fighting. But it was different in that not all these men were oathsworn to Alrik, meaning they would pick up their nestbaggins and walk off if they thought they could do better fighting for someone else. And Alrik knew it, which was why he did his best to keep them fed and watered and was keen to remind them how much silver and iron was in Guthrum's borg if only they could get their hands on it.
  
  And here he was again, coming like a weaver to the loom, to draw the threads of his army even tighter together.
  
  'So you've finally come to reward us for saving your neck, Alrik,' Thorbiorn said. Being the son of a king, he thought he could speak to the man like that.
  
  'You'll get your silver when you earn it, lad,' Alrik said, which got some dark looks from those who remembered all too well how close he had been to being dragged inside the borg and some unpleasant end. Alrik knew men and knew when he risked offending, and so he raised a hand at Sigurd and Olaf and Bram. 'You know your business. That's clear to everyone. Win me that borg and you will find me generous.' He glanced round to make sure he would not be overheard by his other men, then he came closer to the fire around which Sigurd's crew were scattered on the long flattened grass. 'Look, some of these men are happy enough taking my meat and ale and doing not much else,' he said. 'Gods, they'd be happy waiting all summer.' He looked at Sigurd now. One warrior to another. No. One leader to another. 'But you get me in there,' he said, thumbing at the fort up on the hill, 'and I'll make you rich.' He turned to Crow-Song, having got his measure for all that Hagal was not much of a skald these days. 'I mean rich enough to be worth a song or two,' he said.
  
  Crow-Song nodded, happy to be noticed amongst men who were better with a blade than he.
  
  'Does Jarl Guthrum have a banner?' Sigurd asked Alrik, pulling Troll-Tickler through a greasy cloth to stop the rust getting into the blade.
  
  Alrik nodded. 'A white axe on a black cloth,' he said.
  
  'Everybody seems to want a banner these days,' Solmund said.
  
  'A banner can be a rag at the top of a stick,' Asgot said, retying a bone into his beard. 'Or it can be a powerful weapon.'
  
  'Aye, well, I've yet to see a banner break down a gate,' Olaf said.
  
  'Wiped my arse with a banner once,' Moldof said. 'I was not a proper warrior then. Don't think I'd even tupped a girl.' He grinned at the memory. 'Some jarl who refused to pay King Gorm what he owed came waving the thing about like he was somebody. We fed the crows that day and, after, my arse was squirting. Wiped it on that prick of a jarl's banner.' He looked at Hagal. 'That's in a song, now I think about it.'
  
  Hagal grimaced. 'I'm sure the skald was a gifted man,' he said.
  
  Sigurd felt Alrik's eyes on him now as he sat watching the dróttin's bear banner stirring in the wet wind. 'Why do you ask?' Alrik said, frowning, twisting the other tail of his long moustaches now as he stared at the borg's walls, which he seemed to do a lot. 'About Guthrum's banner.'
  
  Sigurd looked to the west from where the wind came. From where Jarl Guthrum would come. 'I have an idea,' he said.