Blood Eye(99)

'It never hurts to watch the English die,' Bram growled in Norse.





I removed my own helmet, shook out my hair and wiped the sweat from my brow. 'My lord Sigurd . . .' I began, though my mouth was dry and my tongue swollen, 'how . . . where have you been?' He stepped up and touched the raven's wing still plaited into my hair, and he smiled, and I smiled too because my jarl had come for me. 'Glum took us, lord,' I said. 'That night in the forest . . .'





Sigurd raised a hand and with the other removed his own helmet, letting his sweat-matted golden hair fall to his shoulders. 'I know, Raven,' he said. 'I know that dog's treachery.' He spat in disgust, as though he could not say his old shipmaster's name, and then he snarled. 'And I confront Óðin Far-Wanderer in anger,' he said, pointing his spear at the blue sky, 'that I was not the one to open the coward's belly.'





'Careful, Sigurd,' old Asgot hissed, blood-smeared and terrifying and holding up a finger in warning. Sigurd seemed to accept the caution, though he rammed the butt of his spear into the ground.





'Bram is right, maybe I should be thanking these Welsh, not killing them,' Sigurd said. 'That night, when you and the English brats were taken . . . well, that was not so important,' he smiled, his hand sweeping the air, 'but to lose the White Christ book . . .' He scratched his thick beard. 'I was a fool. I did not see that greed had blackened Glum's heart. I am a proud man, Raven. I did not believe my shipmaster could betray me. I hope the All-Father remembers Glum's worthier deeds and grants him a place at the mead bench.' He spat a wad of blood, his mouth twisting into a grimace. 'I will enjoy beheading his shade.'





Then I noticed that one of the Norsemen was missing.





'Where's Black Floki?' I asked, looking around me for his grim, flinty face.





'You'll know it all soon enough, lad,' Olaf assured me with a nod towards the Englishmen, which I took as reluctance to say too much in case one of them should understand Norse. Penda and the remaining Wessexmen were climbing the hill to strip the dead before the Norsemen could get to them, and I hoped for their sakes that they were quick about it. 'We saw riders in the forest, lord,' I said. 'King Coenwulf's men. We thought they must have ambushed you.' Though now, having the Wolfpack before me in all their viciousness, it seemed impossible that the Mercians could have routed them. 'Was there a fight?' I asked, scanning the Norsemen's faces in case there were others absent.





Sigurd smiled wryly. 'Black Floki caught their stink before they were a hundred paces from our fires,' he said. 'Gave us time to arrange a decent welcome.' He shrugged. 'But it was darker than Hel's cunny and some of them got away. We lay low as a snake after that.' He laughed. 'Seemed every whoreson in Mercia wanted to nail a Norseman's skin to his door.'





'Ah, there was no real slaughtering done, lad,' Olaf said, batting Sigurd's words away with a hand and glancing down at my brynja whose rings were filled with dark, congealed blood. 'You would have hated it,' he said.





'It is good to see you, Uncle,' I said, stepping up to embrace him.





He slapped my back hard. 'It is good to see you, too, Raven.'





'I've been spending too much time with the English,' I said.





'So, have they made a Christian of you?' Bjorn asked, slapping his hands together as if in prayer and looking at me with a solemn expression that reminded me of poor Father Egfrith, if Father Egfrith had been a bearded, gore-spattered killer.





'Not yet, Bjorn,' I said, laughing at his impression. 'But you would be surprised, my friend. They are not all prayer-hungry priest-lovers.' I looked up the hill at Penda who was stripping Welsh corpses of buckles, beads, knives, and any other small objects of value. 'Some of them are more savage than you.' His look was one of scepticism, then suddenly the fortress door gave a loud clunk and the Norsemen turned, thumping down their helmets in readiness for a Welsh sally. But the gate opened only wide enough for something to be dumped on to the hard, bare-trodden earth.





'Seems they've spat Ealdorman Ealdred's brat back out,' Bram said in his gruff voice, rolling his shoulders with a loud crack.





'Help me, Bjarni,' I said, then called to Penda. We ran to the gate, shields above our heads, but no stones or arrows fell. It seemed the Welsh had lost their appetite for death. Perhaps they hoped we would take the Englishman and be on our way. But Weohstan could not stand, so we dragged him out of bow range and stood around him as Penda knelt and tipped water into his mouth and across his bruised face. He was barely conscious, but he was alive, and the blood across Penda's face could not hide his smile, which I had not expected to see, because so many Wessexmen had died buying Weohstan's freedom.