Prince of Fools

  “Vikings don’t make war on children.” Snorri knew defeat. Better to have let the ice claim him than come here to fail his family.

  “The Undoreth leave orphans and widows untouched when they raid?” A snort of derision at that from the men around the hearth. “Snorri Red-Axe has adopted the sons and daughters of the many men he’s sent on their final voyage?”

  Snorri had no answers. “Why are they here? Why take captives? Why here?”

  The Broke-Oar only shook his head, looking older now, closer to fifty than to forty. “You’ll sleep better not knowing.”

  • • •

  “The dreams I’ve had.” Snorri raised his head at the end of the tavern table. Aslaug looked out at us from his eyes, now beads of jet glimmering and bloody with the last light of the setting sun. You could imagine them watching from the web and believe for a moment the tale of Loki, the god of lies, cleaving to a jötnar beauty with nothing but a spider’s shadow to betray her true nature. “Such dreams.” That gaze fell cold upon me. “Hard to imagine them darker still.”

  I felt Baraqel move beneath my skin and half-expected that glow to start, ready for light to fracture through the scars I still bore from the Gowfaugh, for radiance to bleed from beneath my nails. Across the length of the table, that crackling force we knew from brief contacts began to build. I knew it now for the energy between Aslaug and Baraqel, between avatars of darkness and light, ready for war.

  I wanted to ask why, to echo Snorri’s demand of the Broke-Oar: Why? I wanted to know how he came to be sold and to what end. Most of all, though, I wanted Aslaug to look away, and so I lowered my gaze and held my peace. The others around the table saw or sensed the strangeness that had come over their countryman and kept silent also—though perhaps their quiet held a touch of mourning in it for the Undoreth.

  “Einhaur was sacked too?” A quin, breaking the moment.

  “Before they came to Eight Quays?” Another.

  “What of Dark Falls?” Tuttugu.

  “It must be all of them.” Arne Dead-Eye kept his gaze on the table. “Or we would have heard the tale a dozen times by now.”

  Every man at the table, save Snorri, took their ale and drank until they had no more.

  “The enemy is there, past the Black Fort,” Snorri said. The night pooled around him, darker than it should be while the sun still sank in the west, not yet swallowed by the sea. “We will go there. Kill everyone. Raze their works. Show them a horror darker than death.”

  The northmen lowered their tankards, watching Snorri with uneasy fascination. I looked out to sea once more, west, along the coast to where the burning rim of the sun still beaded the horizon with red jewels. Fewer, fewer, gone.

  “I said, Undoreth, we will paint the snows with Hardanger blood!” Snorri surged to his feet, freed by the sunset, eyes clear, the table scraping back across the stones. “We will take back what we love and show these Red Vikings how to bleed.” He raised his axe above his head. “We are of the Undoreth, the Children of the Hammer. The blood of Odin runs in our veins. Storm-born we!”

  And where Aslaug left the northmen unmoved with her dark threats, Snorri ver Snagason had them on their feet in a moment, roaring their defiance at the evening sky, pounding the table until the wood splintered and the tankards leapt.

  “More ale!” Snorri sat at last, thumping the table one more time. “We drink for the dead.”

  “Will you come with us, Prince Jalan?” Tuttugu asked, taking a tall flagon from the server, the head of foam as white as the quins. “Snorri says they call you a hero in your homeland, and your foes named you ‘Devil.’”

  “Duty compels me to see Snorri to his homeland.” I nodded. When a course of action is forced upon you it’s best to accept it with grace and milk it for whatever you can get, right up to the moment the first opportunity to weasel out of the deal presents itself. “We’ll see what these Hardanger scavengers make of a man of the Red March.” Hopefully I’d find a way for it not to be a corpse.

  “What makes us think we’ll fare any better with nine than Snorri did with one?” Arne Dead-Eye wiped ale foam from his moustache, his voice morose rather than fearful. “The Broke-Oar had enough men to lay waste to Einhaur and every village along the Uulisk.”

  “Fair question.” Snorri reached out to point at Arne. “First understand that there were very few men at the Black Fort, and it’s not a place that could ever be garrisoned to its capacity. Every meal eaten there must be hauled across the ice. Every log or sack of coal must be carried there. And what is there to defend against? Slaves labouring beneath the Bitter Ice, digging tunnels in search of a myth?

  “Second, we will go better prepared, not dressed in what could be scavenged from ruins in the moment. We will go with clear heads, the murder in our hearts locked away until it is needed.

  “Third and finally. What else are we to do? We are the last of the free Undoreth. Anything that survives of our people is there, on the ice, in the hands of other men.” He paused and set his broad hands upon the table, staring at the spread of his fingers. “My wife. My son. All my life. Each good thing I have done.” Something twitched at his mouth and became a snarl as he stood, voice growing towards a roar once more.

  “So I’m not offering you victory, or a return to your old lives, or the promise that we will build again. Just pain, and blood, and red axes, and the chance to make war upon our enemies together, this last time. What do you say?”

  And of course the maniacs roared their approval, and I banged my fist halfheartedly against the table and wondered how I could get the hell out of this mess. If Sageous hadn’t been lying, or wrong, then perhaps if Snorri fell in the assault and I lurked near the back I could run off once the spell had broken. Of course, with nine men there aren’t exactly a lot of ranks to hide behind, and this Black Fort sounded inconveniently far from any safe haven that a man might run to.

  I decided the best policy for the now would be to drink myself insensible and hope the morrow had better to offer.

  “The most important message here,” I said into a gap where the Norsemen were all momentarily silenced by their tankards, “is not to act too hastily. Planning is the key. Strategy. Equipment. All those things that Snorri missed out on the first time in his impatience.”

  The longer we delayed, the more chance there was that this curse might wear off or some opportunity for escape would happen along. The important thing was for the Ikea not to sail before I’d exhausted all opportunities for me not to be onboard when it did. With a shrug I drained my ale and signalled for another.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Some hangovers are so horrific that it seems the whole world rocks and sways around you, the very walls creaking with the motion. Others are relatively mild and it just turns out that in your drunkenness a collection of Vikings have thrown you onto a heap of coiled ropes in their longship and set to sea.

  “Oh, you bastards.” I cracked open an eye to see a broad sail flapping overhead and gulls wheeling far above me beneath a mackerel sky.

  I sat up, threw up, stood up, tripped up, threw up, crawled to the side of the boat, vomited copiously, crawled to the other side and groaned at the thin dark line on the horizon, the only hint at the world I knew and might never see again.

  “Not a sailor, then?” Arne Dead-Eye, watching me from a bench, his oar locked before him, a pipe in his hand.

  “Vikings smoke?” It just looked wrong, as if his beard might catch light.

  “This one does. You don’t get handed a book of rules, you know.”

  “I suppose not.” I wiped my mouth and hung there on the boat’s side. The quins were doing complicated things with sail and rope. Tuttugu watched the waves from the prow and Snorri held the tiller at the stern. After a while I felt strong enough to lurch over and collapse on the bench beside Arne. Thankfully the wind carried his smoke the other way or we would have had
a chance to see whether any of last week’s meals might reappear if I tried really hard.

  “What other rules in this handbook that you don’t get have you broken?” I needed distraction from the heave and swell. We appeared to be weathering some kind of storm, despite the clearing skies and moderate winds.

  “Well.” Arne puffed on his pipe. “I’m not really one for the mead-hall and the singing of all those songs. I’d rather be out on the ice doing a spot of fishing.”

  “You’d think a man of your talents would want to be stalking prey that he could bring down with a shot rather than hook out of the water through a small hole in the ice.” I’d placed a fair measure of my hope for survival in Arne Dead-Eye. The great thing about a man who is deadly with a bow is that not much gets close enough to trouble him. Those are the sort of men I like to stand next to in a battle if events conspire to keep me from galloping off into the distance. “Hell! Where’s my damn horse?”

  “Bits of it are probably all over the lower slopes of Den Hagen.” Arne mimed chewing. “Stew, sausages, horse-bacon, roast horse, tongue soup, liver with onions, fried horse, mwah. All good.”

  “What? I—” My stomach had the last word of that sentence. A long word full of vowels and spoken mostly over the side at the rolling sea.

  “Snorri took her up to the stockyard this morning and sold her,” Arne called at my back. “Got more for the saddle than the mare.”

  “Hell.” I wiped more drool from my chin before the wind had a chance to decorate the rest of me with it. Back on the bench I rested a moment, head in hands. It seemed we were coming full circle. This nightmare had started with me being bundled into a boat full of Viking, and now here we were again. A bigger boat, more water, more Vikings, and the same number of horses.

  “Dead-Eye, heh?” I hoped to cheer myself with the idea that Arne might keep me safe. “How’d you earn that title?”

  Arne puffed out a cloud of vile smoke, which was quickly stripped away by the wind. “There’s two ways to hit a small target that’s a long way off. Skill or luck. Now I’m not a bad shot—I’m not saying that. Better’n average for sure. Especially now with all the practice I get. It’s ‘Let the Dead-Eye take the shot.’ ‘Give Arne the bow.’ But that day at Jarl Torsteff’s wedding celebrations . . .” Arne shrugged. “Had men from all over come to take part in the contests. Axe-throwing. Rock-lifting. Wrestling. All that. Archery, well, it’s never been our strong point, but there were plenty willing. The jarl set up this coin, far too far out, and nobody could hit the damn thing. It was getting dark before they let me have a go. Took it down first try. Never heard the last of it. And that’s how it is in this world, boy. Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die—take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.”

  I groaned and lay back across the bench, trying to find some angle that brought it past the halfway mark on the line dividing “torture device” and “bed.” I would have just lain down between the benches, but each lunge of the boat brought foul-smelling bilgewater sloshing along the aisle in miniature imitation of the vast waves on which we tossed.

  “Wake me when the storm’s passed.”

  “Storm?” A shadow fell across me.

  “You’re going to tell me that it’s always like this, aren’t you?” I squinted up at the figure, dark against the bright sky, sunlight fracturing around him to sting my eyes. A tall man, annoyingly athletic. One of the quins.

  “Oh no.” He sat on the bench opposite, his good cheer like acid on my hangover. “It’s rarely as good as this.”

  “Urrrg.” Actual words seemed insufficient to express my feelings on the matter. I wondered if Skilfar had seen that I was destined to fill a longship with vomit and drown in the resulting mess.

  “Snorri says you’re good with wounds.” He started tugging up his sleeve without invitation. “I’m Fjórir, by the way—we can be hard to tell apart.”

  “Jesus!” I winced as Fjórir unwrapped the soiled linen from around his forearm. The jagged tear went right down into the meat of him, with every shade from black to puce on show in the puffy flesh to either side. The stink of it told the story. When a man’s wound starts to smell wrong, you know he’s on a slow walk to the cemetery. Perhaps losing the arm might save him—I didn’t really know. Beyond adjusting the odds when betting on pit fights, my experience didn’t really concern such things. True, there had been similar unpleasantness on the Scorron borders, but I’d successfully discarded those memories. Or at least I had until a whiff of a Norseman’s putrid arm brought them all back in a flood. At least this time I made it to the side before retching into the dark swell of the waves. I spent a long time hanging there, holding a loud but wordless conversation with the sea.

  Fjórir was still sitting where I left him when I came back empty-stomached and trembling. The whole boat continued to threaten to capsize at each surge of the waves, but nobody else seemed concerned.

  “That’s . . . That’s a hell of a cut you’ve got there,” I said.

  “Ripped it on a loose spear in a storm off the Thurtans.” Fjórir nodded. “Nasty, though. Gives me no peace.”

  “I’m sorry.” And I was. I liked the quins. They were that sort. And soon they’d be quads.

  “Snorri says you’re good with wounds.” Fjórir returned to his theme. He seemed unaccountably cheerful about the whole business, though I wouldn’t bet on him lasting the week.

  “Well, I’m not.” I peered at the mess with morbid fascination. “You seem less worried about it than I am.”

  “The gods are taking us in order. Youngest first.” Again that grin. “Atta fell to ghouls in Ullaswater. Then a dead man pulled Sjau into the bog at Fenmire. Sex took an arrow from a Conaught bowman. So Fimm’s next, not me.”

  And all of a sudden I found myself scared as hell. Snorri I understood. I didn’t share his passions or bravery, but I could feel them as greater or lesser versions of my own emotions or thinking. The man before me looked like one of us on the outside, but inside? The gods had put the Torsteff octuplets together differently from other men. Or at least this one. Perhaps the parts he was missing were present twofold in one of his brothers. Or maybe when the eight started dying, each death left the survivors more broken. Fjórir still had the amiability, the immediate sense of dependability, but I couldn’t know what else might be missing behind that too-easy grin and those wide, ice-blue eyes.

  “I don’t know why Snorri said that—I’m no doctor. I don’t even—”

  “He said you’d try to weasel out of it. He said for you to do what you did in the mountains.” Fjórir held his arm out for me, no hint of trepidation on his face.

  “Go on!” Snorri shouted from the back of the boat. “Do it, Jal!”

  Pressing my lips tight against revulsion, I extended a hand without enthusiasm, holding it several inches above the injury. Almost immediately a warmth built in my palm. I snatched the hand back. My plan of faking it seemed unlikely to succeed now—the reaction had been far stronger and more immediate than with Meegan’s wound back in the Aups.

  “The last person I did this to, Snorri threw off a cliff a moment later.”

  “No cliffs at sea. That felt good. Do it again.” Fjórir had no guile in his eyes, like a child.

  “Ah, hell.” I stuck my hand back out, as close to the rotting flesh as I could without risk of being slimed. Within seconds I could see the glow from my hand, as if it were a white handprint through that blustery northern day into the desert blaze of the Indus. My bones buzzed with whatever ran through them and the heat built. The wind grew icy around me; the weakness from my vomiting became enfeebl
ement to the point that even holding my hand up was a labour of Hercules. And suddenly I wasn’t holding anything up. The boat revolved around me and I pitched into darkness.

  A bucket of cold and salty water hauled me back into the waking world.

  “Jal? Jal?”

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  A reply in their heathen tongue.

  “. . . soft, these southerners . . .”

  “. . . bury at sea—”

  More nonsense words in northern gibberish.

  Another bucket. “Jal? Talk to me.”

  “If I do, will you stop pouring seawater over me?” I kept my eyes shut. All I wanted to do was lie very still. Even moving my lips seemed too much effort.

  “Thank the gods.” Snorri paused. I heard a heavy bucket being put down.

  They left me alone to dry after that. I sprawled on the bench until a particularly big wave rolled me off. Then I lay against the hull. Occasionally I called on Jesu. It didn’t help much.

  The light was failing by the time I found the strength to haul myself up and sit on the spot where I’d fallen from. Fjórir brought me over some dry fish and cornmeal cake, but I couldn’t do much more than glance at it. My stomach still rolled with each wave and made no promise to keep anything I gave it.

  “My arm’s better!” Fjórir held it out by way of proof. The wound still looked ugly but free of infection now, and healing. “My thanks, Jal.”

  “Don’t mention it.” A weak murmur. I guessed he really was invulnerable until poor Fimm took his place in line. Hopefully he’d pay me back by putting his invulnerable self between me and harm’s way.

  • • •

  The sun set and Snorri spent that time in the Ikea’s prow, staring north, his black eyes no doubt hunting the Norsheim coast. My strength made no return; if anything, I grew weaker as the night fell. I tried some dry bread and water, donated them to the sea, and dropped into a dreamless slumber.