text: King eysteinn's hall was not like any other hall sigurd had ever seen. There were no long tables around which warriors could feast and drown themselves in mead. There was no high seat for the king himself, nor benches for men and women to sleep in, nor high lofts at either end where the children could hide or a man and woman could go if they did not want everyone else's eyes on them. No flames flapped in the hearth, no dogs lay in the straw which was spread thickly upon the earthen floor, and nor was the place crammed with folk, as such halls almost always are. It was a huge hall, as big as Jarl Hakon Brandingi's up in Osøyro, where they had hidden from the winter and their enemies who were looking for them. But it was silent, this hall, and would have been empty but for they three, Guthrum and the ten hirðmen he had brought in to the place, the jarl having left his other Spear-Svear waiting with the horses by the ting mound outside.
  
  No one else moved through the scented smoke, which rose from several dishes of smouldering herbs to hang thick as a winter pelt just above their heads. This fragrant emptiness would have been the strangest thing of all, if not for the gods.
  
  They sat there, those gods, at the northern end of Eysteinn's hall, silent and watchful. Each was the height of two men and old, older than the hall itself, for they had been carved from three oaks, perhaps in the time of the first Yngling kings, and the hall had been built around them. Their roots were still deep in the earth, the lumps and bumps of them making the floor uneven in places.
  
  Óðin, with a cavernous, empty right eye socket worn smooth by folks' fingers over the years, sat there gripping a spear in one hand and a cup in the other. Beside him sat Thór, all beard and drooping moustaches carved as sleek as the curling sternpost you might see on a fine ship. His hands rested on the haft of his great hammer Mjöllnir, the head of which sat between his feet. But the third god was Frey and even were he not the god which it seemed most of the Svearmen loved best, he would have drawn any man or woman's eye because of the huge cock standing proud between his legs. It was long enough that there was only a finger's width of a gap between it and the point of his beard, and his eyes bulged as if even he was shocked by the eagerness of his own member.
  
  Sigurd could not help but glance at Valgerd to see what she thought of it, but the shieldmaiden seemed more interested in something else, something which Sigurd could not see for Guthrum's men who were in the way. They stood there unarmed and in awe, as though a horde of Valkyries might swoop down at any moment and sweep them all up to Valhöll the way an angry gust will pick up leaves and swirl them into the sky.
  
  Sigurd's eye was drawn in a different direction. Where the hearth would normally be there was a table, just not the sort around which men would sit drinking and boasting and hurling insults at each other. It was six feet long and so dark as to be almost black, so that who could say what kind of wood it had been carved from with such skill? Its wide apron was adorned with scenes of Ragnarök, depicting the fates of these temple gods. Thór was wrestling with the Midgard Serpent whose jaws were wide, gaping and inevitable. There was Fenrir Wolf about to swallow Óðin, and Surt the mighty giant with his sword raised about to strike down Frey beloved of the Svearmen. Upon each stout leg was carved a writhing, twisting, knotted serpent, but strangely the legs at one end were slightly shorter than those at the other, so that the table sloped, which struck Sigurd as odd.
  
  'Welcome back, Jarl Guthrum.'
  
  It was a voice which sounded like it would do better for a cup of warm milk and honey, but when the body it belonged to emerged from the smoke Sigurd was surprised the man could speak at all.
  
  'Solmund would have liked to be here now,' Floki said, 'to see someone even older than he is.'
  
  That earned him a knuckle hammer to the back of the head, from Asgrim himself this time, as well as an ice-cold look from the crook-backed, cowled old man, who then turned his glare on Guthrum as if to say he expected the jarl to keep his prisoners on a tighter leash.
  
  'Mead for the jarl and his men,' the old man called, wheezing with the effort of it, and in the flame-flickered dark behind him another figure moved through the smoke leaving a swirling grey wake. 'And make sure it is the strongest and best.' Inside that cowl the man's eyes were like boring awls in Guthrum's own. 'I think Jarl Guthrum is in need of it,' he added, touching the little carving of Frey that he wore round his neck, for he was a Freysgodi, a priest of Frey.
  
  Perhaps there was some seiðr behind the priest's last words, and Sigurd wondered if he had peered inside Guthrum's thought box and seen the jarl's doubts gnawing at him. Could the old man know that the jarl believed his wyrd had soured like milk left in the sun?
  
  Or perhaps there was no seiðr in it at all, for this was not the great mid-winter Dísablót which all kings and jarls and the most powerful of the hersirs were expected to attend, and if a jarl like Guthrum was here now, in high summer, it was because he needed a favour from the gods. And a man did not need the gods' help if his wyrd was stretching out before him like a golden hair from some young beauty's head.
  
  'You want them watered too?' the priest asked Guthrum, running those watery eyes across the three prisoners standing there bound and unkempt amongst the rest. And yet the old priest was not so old that he did not fill his eyes with Valgerd when they latched on to her through the herb fog. The tip of his tongue slid like a slug on to his cracked lip and Sigurd could almost hear the creak of his old trouser snake stiffening. There was no doubt that Frey, and not Óðin, held sway in this place.
  
  'I am sure they are thirsty,' Guthrum said and the priest nodded, calling to make sure enough mead was brought out, and that was when Sigurd caught sight of what had held Valgerd's attention before. To their right, mounted on pegs that stuck out of the wall timbers, was a spear. A massive boar-hunter by the looks, but bigger than any spear Sigurd had ever seen. Its ash staff was three feet longer than the spears most men carried these days, certainly over eleven feet all told, and much of its length was bound in iron for protection in the chaos of the blood-fray. The blade itself was typical of the sort which most of the Svearmen favoured, being a broad leaf shape, and by the flickering light of a nearby lamp he could see the intricate runic inscriptions which gave such weapons power.
  
  'Gungnir,' Asgrim rumbled in Sigurd's ear. 'The Swaying One. Óðin's own spear. A gift from the dwarfs whom men call the sons of Ívaldi.' Sigurd nodded, all but open-mouthed, for such a thing could not belong to anyone else but the Allfather whom men called the Spear-God.
  
  'You have come to make an offering, Jarl Guthrum,' the priest said. A statement rather than a question.
  
  The jarl nodded. 'Two offerings.'
  
  This confused the old man but he nodded. 'Not thralls though,' he said.
  
  'Enemies,' Guthrum said without looking at his prisoners. 'Worthy of the god.'
  
  'And yet this is not the time for a blót,' the priest rasped, throwing an arm wide. 'You would need King Eysteinn's blessing and he is not here.'
  
  Guthrum said nothing to that and so the old man took it up again. 'Assuming they have not offered themselves to Frey's knife,' he said, not looking at Sigurd and Floki, 'we would need to know who they are and the nature of their offence or crime.'
  
  'They are Norse,' Guthrum said, and the old man's face twitched. 'They have wet their spears in Svear blood. They have made many widows. They tried to kill me in my sleep,' he added, making them sound like nithing would-be thieves and murderers. 'But it is not my wyrd to die in my bed.' The jarl glanced at the three gods sitting there, as if hoping they might give a sign to confirm his own prophecy.
  
  'Will you allow me to honour the god and this temple?' he asked, turning back to the priest.
  
  The priest looked at Valgerd and it was hard to tell if he was relieved or disappointed that she was not one of those on Jarl Guthrum's platter to be served up to the god. But the shieldmaiden was looking at Sigurd, her eyes cold and flint-sharp with this confirmation that Guthrum had come to Ubsola to make sacrifice. Not that any of it came as a surprise now.
  
  'Young blood for the god. Hmm …' The Freysgodi pushed back his cowl in a cloud of dry skin which showed in the dusk light arrowing through the door. Like flour blown off a quern-stone. His white hair was cropped short and there was not much of it, so that the runes and whorls etched into his scalp and filled with greenish blue pigment were clearly visible, though their meaning was to Sigurd as unfathomable as the voices of the fish in the sea. 'I will ask the god if he is willing to accept your offering, Jarl Guthrum,' the old man said at last. Then he frowned. 'You have silver for the temple?'
  
  'Of course,' Guthrum said. There was plenty of silver just in that torc round his neck.
  
  'And for King Eysteinn?'
  
  'Yes.'
  
  'Then we will see,' the old man said with a nod.
  
  'I left a fight to come here, priest,' Guthrum said, 'and I have not brought the god a bull or a ram, but men who are in the prime strength of their lives. I hope Frey will allow me to make the offering.'
  
  The old man did not like that. It was not a threat but it uncloaked the issue about how decisions might be made in this temple, and as if to push the point Guthrum took a thick silver ring off his arm and handed it to the priest.
  
  'For the mead,' the jarl said, and the old man kept his face straight as a spear but nodded again, accepting the payment. He had been a Freysgodi long enough to act as if that beautiful twisted silver ring was fair payment for fourteen cups of mead.
  
  And neither was that mead anything special when it at last arrived, though that did not stop any of them from drinking it as if it had come from the Allfather's own barrel. Asgrim held a cup to Sigurd's lips and then did the same for Valgerd and Floki because of their hands being tied.
  
  'Take Jarl Guthrum to the grove,' the priest told a boy whose hairless head was adorned with symbols and raised scars similar to the old man's. 'He can wait there until I have the god's answer.'
  
  Guthrum seemed happy enough with this and they were being led to the place when Halvdan pushed his way through the other men to get close to Sigurd.
  
  'Not the death you foresaw, hey?' he gnarred into Sigurd's ear with a grin that screamed to be knocked through the back of his skull. 'Thought you were special, didn't you? Strutting around up on that hill, safe behind a wall.' His breath smelt like rancid meat. 'Now look at you.'
  
  'I'm not dead yet, Halvdan,' Sigurd said. 'It might be that the god does not want anything from your lord. Frey knows that Jarl Guthrum is too deep in the mire of his own fetid curse now and any favour will be as a drop of clean water in a lake of piss.'
  
  Halvdan grinned. 'You saw what the jarl just paid for that ball-sweat mead,' he said. 'So we both know the old man will give Guthrum the right answer.'
  
  A warrior called Hrok jutted his chin at Sigurd. 'At least he will find himself in Asgard with the Æsir,' he said, 'for that is where priest-killed men end up. Which of us can be sure of the same?'
  
  'Hrok is right,' Asgrim said. 'Whereas I am certain to carve a reputation killing Jarl Guthrum's enemies, it would not surprise me if you fell off a cliff or shat yourself to death, Halvdan.' His warped mouth twisted into what was as close to a smile as he could manage. 'Ha! It would not even surprise me if you fell off your mead bench and cracked your skull open so that your brains leaked out in the floor rushes.'
  
  'Well, I'd make sure they soaked your shoes, you ugly arse,' Halvdan said.
  
  'And what about her?' another man put in, gesturing at Valgerd.
  
  'Seems our jarl is keeping her for himself, which is a shame if you ask me,' Hrok answered as they came round the far side of the ting mound where meetings were held. 'I am thinking we should have earned more than piss-tasting ale fighting Alrik.'
  
  'Tell Jarl Guthrum that,' Asgrim said, but of course Hrok was not going to do that and so that was the end of it as they followed a track down towards an enormous and ancient yew tree which filled their eyes. Its girth was more than fifty feet and its gnarled and twisted branches writhed off from the great contorted trunk in all directions, so that no one said another word as that yew tree, this place's very own Yggdrasil, filled the world and the sky before them.
  
  'This is the sacred tree of Ubsola,' the boy said when they came under its reaching boughs and all of them turned their faces up to the dark green canopy. Even the boy seemed to be looking at the tree as if for the first time, and his pride and awe reminded Sigurd of himself one day many years ago, when his father had taken the great silver jarl torc from his own neck and put it around Sigurd's to let him feel its weight.
  
  'It is not so heavy, Father,' Sigurd had said with all the swagger he had learnt from his father's warriors in the seven summers he had been alive.
  
  'Then you will be a better jarl than I, for I find it heavier than a mountain,' his father had said, and Sigurd had not understood that then. He understood it now. Or at least he was closer to understanding, because warriors had sworn themselves to him and what had he given them in return? And now it seemed he would never wear the torc as his father had done.
  
  'Have you ever seen a tree like it, Jarl Guthrum?' the boy asked, and Guthrum said he had not. 'If you had been here for the last blót you would have been greeted with a sight you would never forget,' the boy went on. 'All the jarls and chiefs of the Svear were here for the great Dísating, the Assembly of the Goddesses, and for nine days we celebrated with feasts and much drinking.'
  
  'Ha!' one of Guthrum's men blurted, 'you must have been drinking your mother's milk the last time the Dísablót was held, lad!' But the boy took no notice for he was in spate now, gushing with it all.
  
  'Each of the nine days a man was sacrificed, his blood given to the gods, along with many other male animals, until by the end of it seventy-two offerings were made.' He pointed a stick-like arm at the sprawling yew, some of whose boughs were still ringed with old frayed rope. 'In these branches and in the grove yonder were hung men, horses, dogs, rams and even a bull.'
  
  By the mutterings they made it seemed some of Guthrum's men did not believe that about the bull, but the boy pushed on.
  
  'This old tree creaked with her cargo while songs were sung and skalds told stories of the old times and men said they could hear the gods breathing because those lords of Asgard were here among us.'
  
  'I have already hung in a tree for the gods and will not do it again,' Sigurd growled to Valgerd beside him, as the boy led them off towards the sacred grove. Once amongst those trees Jarl Guthrum fell to his knees, along with some of his hirðmen. Seven or eight other men could not stay there more than a few heartbeats and retreated in a way that would have been shameful had it been in the face of an enemy.
  
  Sigurd might have left too if he could, for the grove was like no other place he had ever been. If a place could feel heavy, that grove did. It was silent and strange, the air still as clotted blood, and the trees, spruce and birch mostly, were undoubtedly imbued with the spirits of those beings which had been left hanging from their branches. Rotting a little more day by day.
  
  For who could say how many years those trees' roots had fed on soil rich in human flesh, had drunk the rancid fluids of the dead? And they owned some power because of it.
  
  Bones lay everywhere, too. They carpeted the ground, fragments of human skulls mixed with those of horses and a dozen other types of creature, and now the boy said nothing at all because there was no need.
  
  Asgrim lifted his chin to Sigurd. 'If I ever see your friend again, the one who killed Beigarth, I will tell him where your bones lie,' he said in a voice that was a low rumble. 'So that he can come here to honour you and your young friend.'
  
  Sigurd did not want to speak in that sacred place but words came to his lips anyway. 'I cannot say what the Norns have spun with the threads of Jarl Guthrum's wyrd, or even yours, Asgrim,' he said, 'but this I know, that if you meet Olaf again he will kill you. Guthrum too. So if I were you I would not waste my time telling him about bones or Ubsola or anything else.'
  
  Guthrum hissed over his shoulder at them to be quiet and then they stood – or knelt – amongst the strangely divine trees and shades of the men who had hung in that darkening grove. And eventually the old Freysgodi himself came to deliver the god's verdict to Jarl Guthrum.
  
  They slept in tents or under furs beneath the stars by the ting mound east of the kings' mounds. Not that Sigurd slept much. Nor did Valgerd or Floki, who watched Guthrum's men like a hawk, waiting for one of them to stray from his spear or axe. But there were always two men watching the prisoners and Sigurd began to think it would take the intervention of the gods themselves to stop their deaths come the next full moon. For that was when they would be sacrificed and their blood given to appease the gods and turn Guthrum's luck from sour to sweet.
  
  'Frey will grant you his favour in return for the blood of these young warriors,' the Freysgodi had said, his old wet eyes slipping from the jarl to Sigurd and Floki, and Guthrum had let out a sigh of relief, his shoulders softening as though he had shrugged off a great burden.
  
  There had been tears in the jarl's eyes when he arranged to deliver his gifts of silver to the temple and to King Eysteinn, and for his part the priest sent more skins bulging with mead to Guthrum's men who took their ease, sensing their lord's lightened mood and happy at the prospect of a few days lying around in the summer sun not having to fight anyone.
  
  That day, traders from the village beyond the ridge to the south of the mounds arrived in dribs and drabs to hawk their wares to the strangers camped by the ting mound. They brought amber and leather, bone, cloth, glassware, sacks of wool and a hundred other types of thing which were of no use to a war band who were mostly travelling on foot and would have to carry whatever they bought. But they also brought food: cheeses and meats and fresh fish and strong-flavoured spices, and in this produce they did a brisk trade, Guthrum's men gorging themselves and making the most of their jarl's generosity.
  
  Two days later another new face appeared in Guthrum's camp. Sigurd might not have noticed the young man had his ears not pricked up when the man introduced himself to Jarl Guthrum, saying he was a horse trader come to Ubsola to do business with King Eysteinn. It was not the man's trade which caught Sigurd's attention but that he was clearly Norse, though he said he had been in Svealand now four summers. The man's thrall waited nearby, struggling to hold the reins of eight sturdy-looking ponies, and Jarl Guthrum told the Norseman that whilst the beasts did him credit he would be better off waiting for the king to return because Guthrum would not pay him what the ponies were surely worth.
  
  'Besides, you do not have enough animals for all my men,' the jarl said. 'Even if I bought all eight from you, I would have to put up with plenty of moaning from those who still had to walk.'
  
  The Norseman, whose name was Storvek, accepted this graciously but admitted that there was another reason why he had sought Jarl Guthrum out. 'I heard that you have some prisoners with you,' he said, fighting the urge to glance over to where Sigurd, Floki and Valgerd sat in the grass.
  
  'Here we go,' Sigurd said under his breath.
  
  'What of it?' Guthrum asked, his suspicions aroused now.
  
  This young Storvek seemed embarrassed, scratching his thin beard as if having second thoughts about having brought the thing up at all.
  
  'The truth is they are not my ponies but my father's,' he said. 'He is up in Vaksala, no doubt selling more than me, which he will be sure to crow about when we next meet.'
  
  'Ah, so you're off proving yourself,' Guthrum said with a smile. He was already a different man since the news that he would be allowed to make his offerings to Frey.
  
  Storvek nodded. 'I had two thralls until recently,' he said, thumbing over his shoulder. That would make more sense, Sigurd thought, glancing at the thrall who was being all but pulled off his feet by all those ponies. 'Well, they also belong to my father,' the young man admitted. 'And that is the problem.'
  
  With a look Asgrim asked his jarl if he should throw this Storvek out of their camp but Guthrum shook his head at the champion and gestured for the Norseman to continue with his little saga.
  
  'The thrall that you do not see was a wretched creature,' Storvek said, 'and one night I woke to find him having his pleasure with one of the mares.' He nodded towards the ponies. 'That chestnut one at the end.'
  
  'Well who can blame him, for she is prettier than some women I have known,' Hrok said, grinning at Asgrim and Halvdan and some of the others who had one ear turned towards the conversation between their jarl and this Norseman.
  
  'I was angry of course, as any man would be,' Storvek told Guthrum. 'I hit the thrall. I hit him hard.' He glanced at the others, bringing them in to his tale, and some of them nodded, agreeing that hitting the man was the right thing to do. Storvek shrugged. 'Next morning he was gone.'
  
  'It sounds like you are better off without this horse-swiving thrall,' Jarl Guthrum said, which got some ayes.
  
  'Else one day you might wake up to find he is riding you,' Asgrim put in, raising a laugh or two, though Storvek did not find it funny.
  
  'My father will not be happy to be a thrall short. He will blame me,' he said, 'which is why I was hoping to come to some arrangement with the king. But he is not here and nor is there to be a slave market hereabouts for some weeks yet.' Now the young man's eyes flicked across to where Sigurd, Valgerd and Floki sat in the long grass. 'When I heard that you were travelling with prisoners I thought you might be willing to spare one of them, for a fair price.'
  
  'That pretty chestnut mare perhaps,' Halvdan called, bringing upon himself a flurry of good-natured insults.
  
  Storvek pointed at Sigurd. 'The one with the fair hair looks strong and capable,' he ventured. 'I am certain that my father would approve of him as a replacement for the thrall I lost. I dare say he would be an improvement, so long as he kept his snake in his breeks and not in our stock.'
  
  Jarl Guthrum shook his head. 'They are dangerous, Storvek,' he said, 'even the woman. That fair-haired one would cut your throat while you slept. Don't ask me how I know this.'
  
  'But—'
  
  Guthrum had raised a hand to stop the man. 'I will not sell him to you,' he said. 'He and the black-haired one will be swinging from the branches of that tree soon enough. So you see I cannot help you.'
  
  Storvek accepted this and thanked the jarl for hearing what he had to say, then turned and walked back to his ponies and his one thrall and that was that.
  
  'Just think, you could have been a horse trader like him,' Black Floki said to Sigurd.
  
  'And you could have been a king,' Sigurd replied. They both grinned then despite the ropes binding their hands, and the threads of their wyrds which led towards that great ancient yew tree whose evergreen branches had borne so much corpse-fruit since before the time of the first Svear kings.
  
  And four days later Guthrum himself came to his prisoners with bread and cheese and a sense of the occasion which fitted him like that long brynja of his. Asgrim came too and crouched by the crackling fire, leering from that ugly face of his though there was no malice there. Not even Halvdan had any insults or blows for them this morning and it seemed all of Jarl Guthrum's warriors respected Sigurd and Floki for what they would soon endure. Even men such as they, who would put a spear in Sigurd's belly without a thought in a fight or just because their jarl ordered them to, saw it altogether differently if a man was to be lashed to a bench and slaughtered like a beast. And if furthermore all that was to be done in the sight of the gods and with ceremony and in cold blood.
  
  'Will you face it like men?' Guthrum asked, warming his hands above the flames for the sun had yet to rise above the rim of the world in the east. Perhaps he was worried that they would ruffle the waters and embarrass him in front of the old priest and Thór, Óðin and Frey. In front of his own men too, who were bound to have their doubts about following Guthrum these days, after how things were going at the borg against Alrik.
  
  'I have told you, Jarl Guthrum, I will not die today,' Sigurd said.
  
  'Which means I will not die today either,' Floki said, nodding at Sigurd, 'for I will die when he does.' This might have been funny had Sigurd's guts not felt like water, were his thoughts not being tossed like small boats on an angry sea. And even in the midst of that fear he could not get his mind fully off the spear mounted on the temple wall. Óðin's own spear from the time when he walked amongst men. Gungnir.
  
  'You both spend too much time wondering what the gods have in store for you,' Valgerd told Sigurd and Guthrum. She was already eating the food Guthrum had put down before them, dipping the bread into a cup of ale to soften it. 'But the gods do not care. We are nothing to them.'
  
  Not for the first time Sigurd wondered if Loki the trickster had had a hand in his falling in love with this woman who despised the gods. Who was as intent on ignoring them as Sigurd himself was on getting their attention. 'You are wrong,' he said. 'They watch us. They watch to see if we are worthy of our ancestors. The Allfather and Freyja, who is also the Lady of Battle, watch to see which of us will join their hirð in the afterlife to fight beside them at Ragnarök.'
  
  Valgerd smiled but it was cold as a blade. 'If they watch us it is because they enjoy seeing us suffer. They sing when we are in pain. They laugh when we mourn.'
  
  Guthrum visibly shuddered at her words and he was not alone. It was one thing to speak of the gods that way in a crowded meadhall, the words drowned in the drunken clamour of folk, but to say such things at an assembly place beside a Svear temple of such reputation? Sigurd wondered if Valgerd had just doomed him right then and there. If he were not doomed already.
  
  'Well you are the lucky one, Valgerd,' Jarl Guthrum said after a moment's consideration, 'for let us be plain, you have seen how things have not gone well for me recently, what with that brigand Alrik proving to be like a wound that will not heal. But when this is done, and the god is appeased, you will be at my side to see my fortunes rise like an eagle into the sky.' Sigurd remembered the eagle he had seen in the sky above the kings' mounds and wondered if Guthrum had seen it too. The jarl used his knife to flick a charred stick back into the fire. 'Perhaps then you will swear an oath and become my hearthwoman,' he said without even looking at Valgerd.
  
  'Do you want me in your shieldwall, Jarl Guthrum, or in your bed?' Valgerd asked him, and even a big jarl like Guthrum did not have the power to stop his cheeks flooding red. Asgrim grimaced, keeping his eyes on the flames. 'I am already sworn,' the shieldmaiden went on, 'and will not lay one oath upon another as if the words are no more than floor rushes, the new laid upon the old.'
  
  'To whom are you sworn?' Guthrum asked, looking at her then.
  
  'Does it matter?'
  
  'No,' the jarl admitted, then he stood and tightened his sword belt. 'Though you may think differently about it by the end of the day.' When your friends are corpses and their blood is pooled on the altar is what he left unsaid.
  
  'Funny how folk can smell blood even before it's spilled,' Asgrim said, changing tack for everyone's benefit, his ugly great head turned towards a knot of men and women who were trudging along the well-worn path towards the temple.
  
  'The word is out then,' another of Guthrum's men called from the other fire around which most were gathered.
  
  'Why wouldn't they come? It's not every day you get to see two men butchered for the Lords of Asgard,' another warrior said.
  
  Sigurd looked back towards the eastern mound, his eyes searching the dawn sky which was thick with cloud the colour of unwashed wool. He was looking for the golden eagle, hoping for one more glimpse of it that would tell him that Óðin was still watching him. So Sigurd would know that he had not been forgotten.
  
  But all he could see was cloud.
  
  The temple was not full by any means but it was more than halfway to being so. As well as Guthrum and his thirty hirðmen there were two dozen local folk from the village beyond the ridge to the south of the mounds. They came in to the place wide-eyed and buzzing like swarming bees and almost trembling with the prospect of the sacrifice they had heard was to take place.
  
  'We should kill them all if we get the chance,' Floki muttered when a fleshy-faced man and his wife proved brave enough to step up and press hands on him, wanting perhaps to touch what would soon be with the gods. 'Deal with Guthrum first of course, then every one of these other shits. We'll see how they stare then.'
  
  The air was even thicker now than before, herbs and leaves smouldering in soapstone dishes all around the place, the scented smoke stinging Sigurd's eyes and clotting the room but at least masking the stench that always haunts a hall with so many bodies in it. Perhaps it was also meant to hide the copper tang of blood and the foul reek of the sludge which sometimes oozed from a man's bowels in death. The only light came from three lamps: iron bowls mounted on three legs and filled with fish liver oil from the smell of it, each of them with three wicks of twisted moss and all of them burning well. Three gods. Three priests. Three golden glows in the sweet-smelling murk.
  
  Three sacrifices.
  
  Sigurd did not know who the other victim was or what was his offence, but he looked as though he did not fully grasp what was going to happen to him. He was small and weak-looking and his beard was full of spittle but his eyes were not bright and sharp with terror as Sigurd would have expected. Instead they looked dull, dark and swollen as ripe bilberries, and Sigurd would have wagered that he had recently eaten those mushrooms which give men visions, and he remembered his own spirit journey when he had given himself to Óðin in the fetid swamp and Asgot had poured potions down his throat.
  
  For the hundredth time Sigurd pulled, fighting the bonds which held his wrists tightly together, and for the hundredth time the rope proved too strong.
  
  'Jarl Guthrum, you have come to the sacred temple at Ubsola to make an offering,' the old priest began in a voice stronger than he looked. No talk of Eysteinn's hall now, then. Perhaps the king had another place, a brighter hall where things lived rather than died.
  
  'We have heard the will of Frey and you are welcome to make your offering,' the Freysgodi said, 'though only the god can say whether he will deem it worthy.' He frowned at Jarl Guthrum, who stood in his fine war gear, that brynja and that helmet with the eye guards which was so like Sigurd's own, wherever that was now. Guthrum and his men were unarmed, though, because the only blades allowed in the temple belonged to the men who looked least able to use them. For another cowled priest, a man thinner than mist, stood before the great statue of Frey, running a rune-bladed scramasax across a whetstone and muttering to the god while he worked. A third squatted in the corner, casting rune stones across an earthen floor scraped clear of straw.
  
  'At least the knife will be sharp, hey Norseman,' Halvdan said, nodding towards the thin priest, to which Sigurd had a reply on the edge of his tongue, but then the boy-priest began a tune on a bukkehorn. Played it well too, the sound pure as spring water and sad as a hero's pyre in the rain.
  
  'You understand this? That the god may yet refuse your offering, Jarl Guthrum?' the priest asked him.
  
  Guthrum appeared to consider this for a while, and it seemed to Sigurd that the colour had drained from the jarl's face. Perhaps he was suddenly fearful of what might happen if, once given, the offering was rejected. Deemed unworthy. If that happened Guthrum might as well run and jump from a cliff's edge, his luck being what it was these days.
  
  Eventually he nodded at the priest. 'I understand,' he said, lifting his voice above the horn music.
  
  The priest spoke to the villagers then, some speech about Frey and the harvest and those folks' duties to their king who was off fighting to make peace as Frey would want it. Sigurd missed most of it because he was more concerned with his own wyrd and the very real, very sharp-looking knife which would soon cut it shorter than he had thought the Norns had in mind. He thought of his brothers Thorvard, Sigmund and Sorli waiting for him in Valhöll. He could see them in the eye of his mind, gathered round in the heroes' mead benches, laughing and boasting and filling a horn to overflowing for their little brother who would soon be with them. He thought of his father and hoped the jarl would not be disappointed with him, and he saw his mother's face too, and perhaps it would not be such a bad thing to be with them all again. To taste the afterlife for himself.
  
  But then he thought of Runa who would soon be alone in the world, the last of their blood. He had promised he would not leave her. She would be so angry with him. And he thought of the oath-breaker King Gorm and how he would grin when he learnt that Sigurd was dead. That was the sourest of all the thoughts that swirled in his head like rotten brine amongst the ballast stones. If that priest's knife cut Sigurd's life thread now, he would never have his revenge.
  
  The smoke wreathed round the roof support posts and billowed up in the rafters. It clogged dark corners and it filled Sigurd's lungs as he drew it deep inside with each long breath, trying to calm the trembling which had already announced itself in his knees and the big muscles of his thighs. He would not scream when the knife went in. Not because he feared to shame himself in front of these Svear priests and the nobodies who had come up from the village to watch him bleed, but because he knew that his father and brothers and all the other great warriors who used to drink beneath Eik-hjálmr's smoke-blackened beams would be watching too. Men such as Slagfid, his father's champion, and Svein's father Styrbiorn who had been an awe-inspiring warrior, as good as Slagfid on his day and when he was not too drunk to stand.
  
  His mother, who had been the equal of any man alive and the better of most, would be watching too.
  
  'Priest,' Floki called and the old man turned and scowled, for Floki had shouted over the man's incantations to the god, which he did not like at all, and neither did the other men and women in that hall judging by the intake of breath which sucked half the smoke from the place. 'You are old and feeble,' Floki said. 'Do you think the Allfather has need of a half-rotten worm like you?' Floki was grinning, which was strange given what was about to happen to him. 'Well you will find out this very night if there is a place for you in Óðin's hall,' he added as a murmur spread through the hall, and Guthrum nodded at Asgrim who twisted Floki's crow-black hair around his fist, yanked his head back and growled at him to hold his tongue.
  
  'Do no damage,' the Freysgodi warned Asgrim, 'it would insult Frey if the offering was bleeding before the rites have properly begun.' Asgrim gnarred something else in Floki's ear, then stepped back, holding up a big hand to show he had not laid it on the young man.
  
  'You already insult the Spear-God, priest!' Sigurd announced. 'You old fool. I am Óðin-favoured.'
  
  That struck the godi like a stone to the forehead, but he recovered and looked at Jarl Guthrum, who had removed his helmet which he now held under his left arm. 'We do not have these problems at the Dísablót, Jarl Guthrum,' the priest said, 'though now and then men will throw an insult or two around. They think it hides their fear.'
  
  'I am not afraid, priest,' Sigurd lied. He was very afraid but he hoped it did not show. 'I am not afraid because I am Óðin-favoured and this is not the night of my death.' The small prisoner whom Sigurd did not know gave a snickering laugh then, his neck twisting as those bilberry eyes followed an invisible bird's flight through the hall. He was off somewhere with the fairies that one.
  
  Sigurd glared at the old man through the smoke, then turned his eyes on all the Svear folk gathered there and at the boy-priest who stood round-mouthed as a fish in the thwarts. The other priest, the one who had been sharpening the knife in front of the wooden gods, had stopped his work and was watching Sigurd now, but the godi on the floor with the runes was casting and gathering up, over and over again, his face the colour of cold hearth ash.
  
  'No more from you, Norseman,' Jarl Guthrum shouted. 'Hold your tongue and face your death like a man. For your own reputation and that of your people.'
  
  Sigurd laughed and people shrank back from it. 'Guthrum, you are like a ship whose sail has been blown out and whose steering oar has broken off,' he said. 'Every decision you make is wrong and your men die because of it.' Sigurd shook his head. 'And yet it is not your fault. Perhaps you were a great jarl once, but the gods have turned their backs on you. No, it is worse than that, they want to see you destroyed.'
  
  'Enough!' the Freysgodi rasped, but Guthrum raised a hand to silence him and you would have thought that the old man had been slapped around the face with a cod fish, such was his expression at being told to hush in his own temple.
  
  'Look around you, Norseman,' the jarl said, 'and tell me again which of us is doomed.'
  
  It was a fair comment but Sigurd knew he must answer it.
  
  'I am Sigurd Haraldarson. My father was a great jarl and my mother killed the man who tried to carry her from her home. I have killed more men than stand in this hall. One of them was a jarl himself. A man as powerful if not more so than you, Jarl Guthrum. I fought him and I killed him.' Sigurd glanced over at Valgerd, holding her eye for a moment, and she gave a slight nod, understanding that Sigurd was asking her to remember this moment in order to give an account of it to Olaf and the others and to Hagal Crow-Song who would make sure to put it in Sigurd's saga.
  
  Then Sigurd turned back to Guthrum, who to his credit was all ears, when Sigurd supposed the jarl could have ordered someone to stuff a cloth in his mouth to hush him. 'Near a place called Tau I gave myself to the Allfather. I hung in a twisted tree for nine nights, starved and half dead.' In truth it had been six nights and it was not a sacred yew tree or a mighty ash such as in the stories of Óðin's own self-sacrifice, but rather a stunted and half-rotten alder. But as Hagal Crow-Song would say, if you're going to tell a good story, the last thing you should ruin it with is the truth.
  
  'I live because the Hanged God wanted it so,' Sigurd told them all. 'Sometimes the gods walk amongst us, for they enjoy being close to death because their own lives are so long and almost never-ending.' He raked his eyes across them all, warrior, farmer and priest alike. 'Believe me when I say that the gods would rather spend a day with one wolf on the hunt than with fifty grazing sheep. And if you believe that I am a killer then let me tell you that my friend here is death itself.' He nodded at Floki, who grinned at them all, which was more effective than saying a word by the look of the hands clutching Thór's hammers and the other amulets which folk wore round their necks. And with that Sigurd dipped his head at Guthrum and then at the priest, as if to say there would be no further interruptions as far as he was concerned.
  
  Jarl Guthrum pulled his fair beard through his fist and cocked an eyebrow. 'I told you my offerings were worthy of the god,' he told the priest, getting some chuckles from his men, as well he might for that was as good a counterstroke as any champion ever made with a sword.
  
  The old man blinked his yellowed eyes and creaked an order at which two thralls came forward and grabbed hold of the small man who, it seemed, would be the first to feel the knife. They were big men these thralls, their thick necks straining against the iron collars, cropped hair like birds' nests, and surely they were more used to building walls, digging peat, spreading manure and herding pigs and goats than hauling men across that hall under the gaze of the gods towards the priest's knife. And yet they did it as if it were the only work they knew, laying the man upon that beautifully carved table which sloped because the legs at one end were shorter by a thumb than those at the other.
  
  They did not use ropes. Didn't need to. The little man lay there gentle as a lamb as the old Freysgodi communed with the Æsir. No doubt men went to their deaths more easily when their spirits were soaring beyond the confines of the flesh, and the priest spoke his words and the Svear looked on in silence because the gods were amongst them. Then the reed-thin godi moved through the billowing smoke and came to stand beside the man's head at the high end of the table, and Sigurd suddenly understood why the table sloped.
  
  Gods that knife was sharp. As it should have been after the time spent on its edge. It went in easily and sliced outwards, cutting open the man's throat just like that. The boy-godi stood at the foot end with a silver-lipped drinking horn and he did not have to wait long, the blood running along unseen channels in the table's surface and out of a hole carved to look like a raven's beak.
  
  They will have to turn him the other way round if they want to fill that horn, Sigurd thought. But he was wrong, which showed what he knew about it. And when it was done the thralls lifted the body off the table and carried it out of the hall where they must have dumped it on a cart because they were straight back in.
  
  We will all be strung up from that old tree together then, Sigurd thought as the thralls went over to Floki.
  
  But the old priest shook his head. 'That one,' he told them, pointing a finger at Sigurd, who lifted his chin and glared at them with all the defiance he could muster.
  
  You would think I was waist-deep in some fjord for how my legs are trembling, he thought, hoping that Valgerd had not noticed them. He would pay a silver hoard for some of Asgot's bitter draught now, or some of the mushrooms the other man had eaten, but then he forced such shameful thoughts from his mind. Let them all see him face the blade like a warrior, for he was no less than his brothers who waited for him in the hereafter. Let these Svearmen watch and drink their fill of it. Fuck them. And if Óðin had forsaken him after everything, fuck him too.
  
  The big thralls took an arm each and Sigurd's feet barely stirred the straw as they carried him over to the table upon which the last man's blood was already beginning to thicken in the smoky warmth. He wanted to tell Floki that he was sorry. He wanted to tell Valgerd other things, things that she might laugh to hear. But he said nothing.
  
  The old priest gestured to Jarl Guthrum for help and the jarl sent Asgrim forward, and the big man took hold of Sigurd's ankles with a grip like Fenrir's fetters. It seemed the Freysgodi had his doubts that Sigurd would accept the knife in his throat as calmly as the last man had.
  
  'Lord Frey, who governs the sun and the rain and all the fruitfulness of the earth. Who brings about the prosperity of men. Lord of peace and plenty, accept this offering given by Guthrum son of Guthfrith, who is a generous lord and a renowned warrior amongst your people.' The old man nodded and hissed at the boy at the foot of the table but he needn't have, because the boy was ready, standing there with another drinking horn. 'Frey, grant Jarl Guthrum your favour in return for this young warrior's blood.' His voce was all rasp, dry as the smoke which had folk coughing and muttering, though no one dared to open the hall's door for fear of breaking the spell which the Freysgodi wove.
  
  Sigurd turned his head to look at Valgerd. If he was about to make the long journey to the afterlife then he would do it with her face in his mind. Yet in his peripheral vision he saw the thin godi come close. Saw that wickedly sharp knife in his hand, sensed the blade coming closer to the bare skin of his neck. His throat.
  
  'Óðin!' he roared and at that moment through the blur of smoke he saw Valgerd kick the iron legs of the lamp stand, saw the air glisten wetly from the impact, then saw the whole thing falling. Shrieks ripped through the smoke as the great iron dish flung its oil and flaming moss wicks across the crowd and then a great flash lit the hall as the oil itself burst into liquid fire.
  
  Sigurd twisted and grabbed hold of the hand gripping the knife, then rammed the whole lot up into the priest's face and pulled it back. Screaming, the man let go the knife and Sigurd slashed it across the nearest thrall's neck, then plunged it into the old Freysgodi's chest and it went in and came out quick as a bird in flight sipping from a lake.
  
  The other thrall threw himself out of reach and then Sigurd's arms were free. So were his legs, for Asgrim had run to help his jarl whose cloak was on fire, and the place was chaos because the men and women were burning and the dry straw was burning and fire was the new god in that temple.
  
  Sigurd was standing now and before him was the boy-priest, still holding the empty drinking horn, rooted to the spot like those old wooden statues, his mouth hanging open.
  
  'Cut the rope, boy,' Sigurd told him, handing him the knife by its pretty bone hilt. More hot light flared. More screams because Valgerd had knocked over another oil lamp and fire hurtled along the straw-strewn ground as far as the Frey statue with its enormous prick which would be a firebrand before long. 'Told you I was Óðin-favoured,' Sigurd said to the boy.
  
  The boy took the knife and a heartbeat later Sigurd's hands were free and he took the knife back and yelled at Floki who turned to him, his face sheeted in blood. On the floor beside him knelt a man grasping at his own neck, trying to stop the blood which was spewing everywhere because Floki had ripped the man's throat open with his teeth. 'Kill them,' Sigurd called, throwing the knife to Floki who caught it easily.
  
  Then Floki was killing.
  
  Sigurd stumbled through the smoke, not towards the door at which folk thronged, shoving and fighting each other to get out, but towards Gungnir, Óðin's own spear, which drew him to it. He reached up and lifted the spear from its mounts, its massively thick ash staff filling his hands like a man's spear in the grip of a small boy. And he turned to face two of Guthrum's hirðmen who had kept their heads in the shrieking, flaming, smoke-filled madness, and perhaps they thought they were heroes.
  
  The first died because Sigurd swept the spear across and its long blade tore open his throat. The other man leapt forward but Sigurd brought the shaft up fast as thought, cracking it into the warrior's chin with a splintering of bones. The man fell and that was him done, and Sigurd turned because the other temple thrall was there like a troll from the mist and he got his big hands on the spear before Sigurd could use the blade against him. He was strong as an ox, this one, and Sigurd knew he could not hold on to the thing. The thrall was grinning because he knew it too, but suddenly Valgerd was there and she threw her bound hands over the thrall's head and hauled back so that the rope caught round his neck and his eyes bulged with the surprise of it. The thrall's hands let go of the spear to reach for the rope, and Sigurd stepped back and thrust the blade into his belly, twisting it before pulling it free of the sucking flesh.
  
  As the thrall fell to his knees clutching his death wound, Sigurd peered through the smoke to see Asgrim beating men aside, ploughing his way through the press to get Guthrum out of that fiery maelstrom. Others were trying to escape Floki who was more dangerous than the flames, stabbing and slashing at anything that moved, plunging that knife into flesh again and again.
  
  'Show me the other way out of here, boy,' Sigurd called, sawing the spear blade through Valgerd's bonds. The boy nodded and led them through the choking gloom past the three statues to the north wall where, in the corner, there was another door. The boy opened the door and it drew the smoke and flame so that for a moment they were caught in a cloud of breathless heat.
  
  'Floki!' Sigurd yelled, then he saw that Floki was beside him, grinning like a blood-fed fiend, and together they followed the boy-priest out into the night.