Norseman Raider (The Norseman Chronicles Book 4) (7 page)

He stepped forward again so that he was nearly on top of me.  Without uttering a word, he pointed to the earthen floor.  I and my comrades followed his command
, unquestioningly.  The entire hall obeyed and a few moments of rustling, crouching, and sitting went by.  Gudruna had moved from the foot of her husband and now sat next to Leif, holding him as if they were longtime lovers.  She stroked his wispy red beard.  Leif wore a satisfied grin.  The king had moved with the English thrall to sit next to another one of his housemaids.  He grasped his ale mug with one hand and the maid’s midriff with the other.  Killian, too, had found a place to sit among the crowd.  All grew quiet.

Eyvind let the moments linger.  Surprisingly, though the night was long and I was beaten and exhausted, I did not find myse
lf getting irritated from the wait.  My ale mug found my lips and I sipped at it gently.  My broken fingers throbbed.  The room and my head became mellow.  I could feel the warmth of the hearth on my back.  It soothed my aches and bruises.

Eyvind began
his first song at a whisper.  The low volume forced me to hold my breath just to hear his words.  “What follows comes from the mighty Odin, giver of the poetic arts, blameless and without blemish.”

You must climb up on to the keel,

Cold is the sea-spray’s feel;

Let not your courage bend:

Here your life must end.

Old man, keep your upper lip firm

Though your head be bowed by the storm.

You have had girls’ love in the past;

Death comes to all at last.

That had always been a favorite of mine.  It was especially popular when I lived on Iceland.  After Eyvind finished the last line I heard a few guttural grunts of agreement from the crowd.  All knew that poetry could grant or deny immortality.  In that way, Odin’s gift to man was even more powerful than the war axe, which could only kill.

Eyvind told three more well-known tales of honor and glory.  With each passing moment, the hall grew quieter.

“A love poem,” called Gudruna as she nestled her head to Leif’s chest and her hand elsewhere.  She seemed to have forgotten, or at least she no longer cared, about her original reason for calling a skald forward.

Eyvind cleared his throat.  “Kormakr meets Steingerdr.”
  I knew this one, too, for it hailed from Iceland as well.

The bright lights of both

Her cheeks burned onto me

O’er the fire-hall’s felled wood;

It’s no laughing matter.

By the threshold I gained a glance

At the ankles of this woman

Of glorious shape; yet while I live

That longing will never leave me.

The moon of her eyelash – that Valkyrie

Adorned with linen, server of herb-surf –

Shone hawk-sharp upon me

Beneath her brows’ bright sky;

But that beam from the eyelid-moon

Of the goddess of the golden torque

Will later bring
ill to me

And to the ring goddess, Eir.

To my
left, Gudruna was kissing Leif.  Leif did not stop her.  Nor did her husband make the attempt, for he was occupied with his housemaid and the thrall, performing much the same actions with them as his wife was on Leif.  Throughout the hall, men who had had the sense to bring their wives, found Eyvind’s words as an aphrodisiac.  Men who did not have a woman beside them curled under their cloaks and began to fall asleep.  The Tynwald ended without ceremony.  It ended without the king building an army.  Eyvind and I were left staring at one another, the only two in the hall not thinking of amorous passion or peaceful sleep.

So i
t seemed that the recitations of Eyvind the Troublesome did not have the patriotic effect Gudruna had hoped.  I looked again at Leif and the queen.  Perhaps the effect was working out for them.  I blocked out those lusty thoughts, having been rebuffed twice in a year’s time by Leif’s sister, Freydis.  One of those times was a vast, public humiliation.  I wanted nothing to do with women, even though for the first twenty-one winters of my life they are all I had longed for.

“Why do they call you the Troublesome?” I asked the skald.

He peered around the room and saw that no one was paying him any attention.  He gave a knowing smile.  “No one has ever asked me that before.  I suppose they assume that to do so would bring trouble.”

“I guess I’m foolish that way.”

“I killed my mother.  It wasn’t intentional, you see.  I was birthed, she died.  Friggas saw that she was fertile, but not hardy.”  Eyvind sighed at that heavy thought, but quickly smiled as he pointed to where Leif’s young hand groped its way onto Gudruna’s rump.  “My father called me Troublesome ever since.”

I thought it time to change the subject.  “Do you know any tales of mys
tery or adventure?  I’m your only audience member now and I’ve got no woman on whom to use your love words.”

Eyvind offered me a hand up.  I took it and the two of us walked to one of the hall’s long mead tables.  I pushed a drunken man off the end of a bench.  H
e crumpled to the earthen floor.  Not once was his snoring interrupted.  Eyvind sidled onto the bench opposite, between two snoozing free women.  He grabbed a nearly empty pitcher of warm ale and topped off our mugs.  “To Odin,” he said, raising the cup.

“To poetry and tales and love and battle,” I answered, though at the time I had failed at all my attempts at the first three and had never truly engaged in a full-scale battle.

“Have you ever heard of Wales?” asked Eyvind.  Still at his place on the floor, Edana’s drunkard for a husband farted behind me, interrupting the settling peace.  He finally seemed truly asleep to me, pleased with himself for dashing Godfrey’s hopes.

I shrugged
at Eyvind’s question.  I had heard of it.  I had even spoken out against the stinking Welsh when I was at the mead hall.  In truth, I wasn’t sure why I didn’t like them or where their putrid land must be.  My travels had taken me over what seemed the entire Midgard realm.  It just so happened that until we had arrived on Man, most of the regions in which I had lived had very few men of any kind, let alone Welsh.

“You’re an enigma, my Norse brother – a Norseman who doesn’t know where some of the easiest pillaging
in the Irish Sea is to be had.”  Eyvind shook his head.  “With fair winds, the northernmost point of Wales can be reached from Man in just a morning of sail.”

I didn’t like being called an enigma, whatever that was.  I also didn’t like being told I didn’t know where things were.  Ha!  As I now sit, old, feeble, and shivering in a smoky room
writing these yarns on parchment I made last week, I laugh at my young self!  Of course, I knew nothing.  That night, I curled my lip, baring my teeth like a wolf to show Eyvind I was displeased.

Eyvind took what was left in his ale mug and dumped it in mine.  “There,” he said
, “a peace offering for your wounded pride.  Now there’s no need to thump me.  I’m a poet.  You’d have me whimpering on the floor in an eye’s blink.  Then you’d have to explain to the king over there why you attacked his favorite skald.”  Eyvind appeared ready for whatever came, a beating or conversation.  I rightfully laughed at myself and drank his ale.

“I travel from court to court in these Isles.  I’ve been to Kvaran and his son, Sitric, in Dyflin.  I’ve been to Aethelred in England.  I’ve even told tales to the Irish kings from the north, the Ui Neill, and from the south, the Leinster.”  I listened, happy I had more ale, because I understood nothing of what Eyvind said.  “
I’ve even spoken to the local ruler; he thinks himself a king, but he is under Aethelred’s thumb, in northern Wales.  He’s called Maredubb.”

“This is a boring story.  Can you go back to telling me poetry?”  I thought myself funny, using words rather than my fist to get Eyvind back.  He kept on going
.  Far away, near the walls at the edge of the village, the first cock of the morning called his warning.

“Maredubb talks incessantly,
” said Eyvind.  Horse Ketil was stirring again.  He was the most restless passed-out man I’d ever seen.  “He certainly talks more than what a king ought.  He says this and he says that.  A king ought to make his will happen without constant blabbering.  At any rate, the man talks even more when he is drunk on ale and on my last visit, he was drunk on both mead and ale.  His head, the next morning, must have felt like it was the size of well-laden knarr.”

“This King Maredubb sounds like half the men I know.  He sounds like almost all the men in this hall, mostly unremarkable.”  I brought the cup back up and found myself tipping it higher and higher, my head back further and further.  It was empty.  Just to make sure, I brought it in front of my eyes and stared down at the dry bottom.  I had trouble focusing.  Gudruna, the king’s wife, moaned in pleasure
at something Leif did with her under his cloak.

“The men in this hall, if they get toppling drunk, can say nothin
g of value.  But a king just might say something worth noting.  Maredubb told me of a great treasure.”

My eyes
rapidly came into focus.  My head cleared.  The cup went to the table and I studied Eyvind’s face.  “Treasure?”

Horse Ketil cleared his throat.  It was
apparent that he was sobering up as much as me at the talk of money.  It might mean more ale for him, I suppose.  Or, if he ever quit the drink, his eavesdropping could prove to be a real danger to the king and his court.

“Suddenly my tale is not so boring?  Suddenly you are sober?”  Eyvind yawned and stretched his arms wide.  “Well, it has been a long night.  I’m going to find a lightweight man to drag away from the hearth so that I can take his place by the fire.”  Eyvind stood, but I clasped my hand on his mail shirt and tugged him back down.  He sank without a fight.

“Talk.”  I was desperate for money.  Mine was gone, pissed away in a few weeks time as I tried to forget my banishment and console myself with merry.  If Godfrey’s army would be a failure and no invasion of this Dal Riata would occur, I meant to find myself some treasure.  I’d make my own glory rather than following an erstwhile king.

Eyvind dove into his story quite willingly.  “There was a great king who lived in Wales, on an island called Anglesey.  He lived there long ago
, long ago.  He reined before the Jutes and Saxons came to England.  This king reigned in the wilds of Wales before the Roman Claudius came, even before the Roman Julius came.”  There was another reference to those Romans.  “Before even steel was invented, this king ruled.”

“
By Hel,” I barked.  “I understand that it was long ago.  Tell me about this treasure.”

“It’s important that you know just how ancient is this treasure.  When this king died
– Maredubb wasn’t able to share his name for he didn’t know it, it was so long ago – he was buried in a great mound.  Inside with him went his riches, bejeweled weapons and metals like copper, silver, and gold formed into magnificent works.”

“If Maredubb knows all this, I’m sure he or his people have rummaged through it by now,” I said with a wave of my hand at the preposterous story.
  I thought that I should be sleeping.

“That’s just it.  No one has touched it, though it stands in the open and a blind child could stumble across the mound by accident.”

“I don’t believe it.  Why would someone not dig up the mound at night and become the new and richest king?”

Eyvind frowned.  “Because the king also had one thousand of his best soldiers sacrificed and buried with him.  This ancient king
humps forty of his wives so that they plow their way through eternity behind the able guard of a regiment of the dead.  The mound is cursed.  It requires no human sentinels.  No one has touched it for thousands of years.  No one will touch it now.”

Gudruna yelped
.  Eyvind and I both looked over to where Leif was climbing out from under the queen.  Her dress was bunched up around her waist so I could see her naked legs and bare chest.  She wore a surprised and disappointed look on her face as if Leif had cut off their union prematurely.  He was young, I thought with a shrug.  The woman couldn’t expect him to last very long.

The queen moved to gather up her clothes and leave, but Leif gently set a hand on her side
to hold her in place.  “An unguarded treasure?” Leif asked Eyvind.  Gudruna looked confused.  Clearly, she had been attuned to the desires of her loins more than my conversation.

“That’s not what I said,” answered Eyvind.  “No
man
guards it.”

Leif looked at me.  His eyes flashed as his terrific and thoughtful mind worked its sorcery.  Leif pulled Gudruna to him so their naked torsos barely touched.  “And our King Godfrey needs wealth to rebuild an army to exact his revenge on Dal Riata.  What better way to obtain money, than to steal it
from a useless corpse?”

Eyvind and I were both shaking our heads.  “Leif, you know the power of the dead,” I scolded.  “Think of your night on the barrow mound.  Think of our encounter with the skraelings and all that brought.  Death brings death.  It is as sure as a man and woman, living, bring more life.”