Blood Eye(38)

'Stand, lads! Hold it here!'





'Let's follow them, Sigurd,' Bram said. 'We've got them on the tide.'





Sigurd shook his head, sweat and blood flying from it. 'Out there they'd surround us, Bram. Their archers would tear us apart.'





'I'm not getting an arse full of arrows now,' Knut said with a grimace, 'not after all this.' Bram clenched his lumpy, swollen jaw and nodded, accepting the decision. Outside, the night teemed with vengeful, shouting men. Olaf was right and it sounded as though every Englishman from near and far had come to destroy us. There were women out there too.





'I'm not getting killed by a woman's arrow,' Svein said. 'The skalds won't say that of Svein the Red.'





'There's more chance of Asgot kneeling to the White Christ,' Bram said with a grin, slapping the giant's back and checking his own sword's edge.





'Bar it,' Sigurd commanded. Bjorn and Bjarni barred the rear door and leant benches against it, and though we could still hear shouts outside, it was eerily quiet in Ealdred's hall. Now we were alone with the dead.





'Asgot, see to the wounded. Eric, help him.'





'This is the blood-eye's doing,' Asgot croaked, pointing at me. 'He has curdled your luck, Sigurd, and turned it sour.'





Sigurd glanced at me, then pointed his spear at Asgot. 'You're still breathing aren't you, godi?' he said.





'The gods keep me alive because I honour them,' Asgot said. The inference that Sigurd did not honour the gods was clear and for a moment jarl and godi stared at each other and the stifling air itself seemed to shudder.





'You heard your jarl, lad,' Olaf cut through the heavy air, nodding at his son. 'See to the wounded.' Then Olaf caught my eye and I nodded in thanks. He dipped his head before turning back to Eric who set about his task with a grim set face. Olaf's son no longer looked like a callow young man. He was an equal now. He had shared and shed blood with these men and they would never forget it. We laid out the dead, Sigtrygg, Njal, Oleg, Eyjolf, Gunnlaug, Northri and Thorkel, straightening their limbs and leaving them uncovered so that their white faces gleamed waxy in the flickering candlelight. Asgot performed a death rite over them whilst the others saw to their own wounds and weapons or kept watch at the door.





'Our friends drink in Valhöll this night,' Sigurd said. Though he held his back straight, his eyes betrayed his exhaustion. 'They sit at Óðin's table with their fathers.' He glowered at each man. 'None of us living can ask for more than this.' His men grunted in agreement and it seemed to me they were jealous of their friends lying cold and stiff in the bloodstained rushes of Ealdred's hall. For those men's souls would soon enter the hall of the slain. Óðin's hall.





'Break the table,' Olaf snapped, palming sweat from his face. 'We'll use some to bar this door and the rest for the hearth. We could be here all night and I don't want you ladies catching cold.' We piled the English in the corner where I had hidden earlier, and covered them with their own bloodied cloaks. There were ten in all, not counting the ones at Olaf's door who were being dragged away into the flame-filled night.





'So much for English hospitality,' Black Floki said, taking off his helmet to reveal a tangle of dark, matted hair. He kicked an overturned bowl, leaving food scraps amongst the rushes, then looked towards the hearth cauldron. 'Is there any stew left, Bjarni? Nothing makes me so hungry as killing.' I did not understand how he could think of food in the midst of all that shit and death.





'You should have gutted that dog Ealdred the moment you laid eyes on him, Olaf,' Gunnar said, checking the edge of his sword for damage. He cursed at a deep nick near the silver and bone cross guard. It would take hours of work with the whetstone to repair. 'If we get out of this, I'll be back on the next tide to burn this shithole to the ground.'





Olaf suddenly blanched and grabbed Sigurd's shoulder. 'They could burn it, Sigurd! They could burn the hall and us with it.'





Sigurd shook his head. 'Ealdred won't do that. He's a slithering snake, but this is his mead hall, Olaf.' He grimaced. 'He'll pay in blood for it.'





But Olaf looked unconvinced.





'Would you burn your own hall?' Sigurd asked him.





Olaf considered it, then shook his head. 'No,' he said.





'Ealdred might be dead,' the bear-like Bram countered, the eyes in his battered face shining with violence. 'Young Eric caught him with the axe. Squealing like a sow he was.' Olaf gripped his son's shoulder proudly and white-haired Eric straightened at the touch, but admitted he had only struck a glancing blow, not a lethal one.





Sigurd shook his head. 'Whatever he's thinking, he'll have sons out there and each of them with one eye on such a hall as this. No, they won't burn it,' he said, turning to Asgot who was kneeling by the dead, finishing the death rites with a flourish of his bony arms. 'What say you, godi?'