Blood Feud, page 19
‘You are?’
‘I am. Gather your things. The fleet sails in the morning.’
Halfdan stepped back, surprised. ‘So suddenly? What about supplies? When will the jarl talk to the skippers?’
Valdimar gave him a shrug in reply. ‘Yngvar has secured a week’s supplies, all the queen was willing to spare. Their last meeting was short, and guards escorted us from her palace. What has been decided I cannot say, but the jarl is filled with purpose. Come, friend. We sail at last.’
Nodding, Halfdan’s gaze strayed to the tent doorway and the distant figure of Hjalmvigi marching angrily away. The sun was at an impressively low angle and the man’s shadow reached back for the tent, long and narrow. Halfdan shivered. His gaze snapped to Gunnhild and he was unsurprised to find her looking at him.
The shadow…
Part Four
The Dragon and the Wraith
Chapter 15
‘I wonder whether the shadow the Völva saw in our future is not the queen, but Hjalmvigi,’ Halfdan said.
Bjorn scratched his head uncertainly. ‘Not sure how you see that. He’s tied to the jarl so tight you couldn’t squeeze a fart between them. How is he likely to hurt Yngvar? The queen might be a threat, yes, but his own priest?’
Ketil shook his head. ‘There was no certainty to that, Bjorn. The shadow stopped the woman seeing the end. She said, if I remember right: “It may be that this other is to bring the end about. It may be that this shadow foretells your own end.” What the shadow means is uncertain, but almost certainly something bad, and it is tied to Yngvar.’ He turned to Halfdan. ‘I agree, though I do not think we can rule out the queen. What do you intend to do?’
‘I don’t know. Gunnhild says that since we’ve left the queen now, her interference may be at an end, while Hjalmvigi travels with us. She advises I do nothing yet, until we know more.’
Bjorn snorted. ‘If he’s the shadow, kill him the moment you get the chance. Shit, but I’d kill him just for the fun of it. The man annoys me.’
‘Just… keep an eye on him whenever we’re near. We need to be alert.’
The other two nodded and went back to their chest-seats while Halfdan stood at the prow of the Sea Wolf, drumming his fingers on the carved figurehead as he watched the steep hills slide by to either side and wishing he had a better understanding of geography.
His thoughts circled back to Yngvar. Valdimar had been right. Something in the jarl’s manner had changed during their sojourn at Kutaisi, though the majority of the fleet noticed nothing for they were simply glad to no longer be confined in the camp outside the city. The relief at moving on, the freedom of the open river and the knowledge that their quest was underway once more, was a relief to all, and spirits had been high even as the ships slid into the waters of the wide and impressive river to begin their journey once more.
‘You told them?’ Gunnhild said, seemingly arriving out of nowhere.
‘I had to. The jarl’s doom is bigger than me now. It affects all of us.’
She nodded. ‘You are beginning to display the wisdom of a leader of men, Halfdan.’
‘Do you think his path has changed somehow? Is it still possible the queen is the shadow and that she does not need to come with us to the edge of the world? That she has already done her work in some way, obscuring his end?’
The shield-maiden frowned. ‘How so?’
‘The Völva said that Yngvar pulled at his weaving, trying to unstitch it. And after Kutaisi, he is different. I can feel it. Damn, but I can even see it. His manner has changed.’
He couldn’t say exactly what it was that was nagging at him about Yngvar, but that it was something in the jarl’s attitude. Until their stop at Kutaisi and the man’s time with the queen, Yngvar had moved forwards each day with a sense of distant focus, of destiny at work, his sight upon that future time when he would find a wild and untamed land beyond the river’s source and would settle there, founding a kingdom.
‘On the surface nothing has changed,’ Gunnhild pointed out.
‘But what is happening beneath the surface?’
Still they moved along their intended course, towards the source of the great river, but the supplies they had taken on that last day in the white city had been meagre. The queen had been less than generous in that regard, though in fairness the ongoing war had rather diminished her own supplies, and she still had a city to feed. Their food would last little more than a week, but rumour in Kutaisi had said they were no more than a week’s hard sailing from the source of the river. It fit. It worked. The jarl had managed to wheedle from the queen sufficient supplies to see them to their destination, where they would be able to forage while they planned it all out. Everything seemed perfectly normal on the surface. But one look at Yngvar’s eyes told a different tale.
‘I sang the song,’ Gunnhild told him. ‘Last night, while men slept, quietly I sang the song and I cast the bones. I do not have the clarity of sight of old Mother, but I see things. With Yngvar all I see now is shadow.’
Halfdan began drumming his fingers again. The jarl no longer radiated that vague distant determination. Now, he was all purpose and immediacy, as Valdimar had noted, and it had showed in their departure from the white city. Leaving Kiev had taken a week of planning, gathering supplies and general activity. Leaving Kutaisi had taken just hours. The fleet was alerted that they would be moving on in the late afternoon, and by the time the sun was above the mountaintops the next morning they were in the water. Something Yngvar had learned or decided in the city had changed his plan, though he had yet to inform anyone else what it was.
‘Can you send Leif to me?’ Halfdan murmured. ‘I am lost in this land.’
They had followed the river north from the great city, ever moving against its current in the limp breezes and blue-grey mornings of early spring. Halfdan had understood that they would be following the river east, yet their northerly course could not be denied. If he remembered what he’d been told correctly, to the north lay the lands of the Alani, including that dragon warrior and his warband. North seemed a bad direction to be heading for a number of reasons.
The day wore on, with effort from the men, slight illumination from the knowledge of Leif, and continued fretting over their journey. For a time, the river continued as a wide and lazy flow, though by the end of that day it had narrowed and the current had picked up in both pace and strength, becoming a tumble of powerful black water. By the end of the next day, as the course gradually swung eastwards to Halfdan’s great relief, it became a struggle to make headway against the strong flow.
‘We have to be nearing the headwaters now,’ Ulfr said as they put in to the bank in the late afternoon, the light already waning due to the high hills all around.
‘I told Bjorn we would cross mountains,’ Halfdan said.
‘I don’t know about that, but if the shape of the river holds true then two days, maybe three, it will become unnavigable.’
‘The Völva told us the path woven by the Norns would take us to the edge of the world, and we would meet wraiths there. The edge of the world cannot be here, in Georgia, or even in the Alani lands, I think. It must be beyond, and that means beyond the mountains.’
‘So where are these wild lands the jarl intends to claim for his own? If the fleet is in Georgia and making for the kingdom of the Alani, any lands here will be troublesome to settle.’
Halfdan nodded absently. How would they reach the edge of the world across the mountains? Where would Yngvar seek his new realm? Yet the jarl continued to move with fresh purpose. What had he learned in Kutaisi that now drove him, and to where was it driving him?
Three more days of tough sailing, using the oars almost exclusively for the wind, such as it was, was rarely favourable, and matters only intensified. The river continued to narrow and in places split into channels so that they were forced to choose a path, sometimes with advantageous results, sometimes obliging a retreat and the selection of a new channel.
At the end of the third day of heaving slowly eastwards the river once more began to turn north, springing fresh doubt into the young warrior. They were approaching Alani lands now, a fact confirmed by Leif and Ulfr, working together to determine their position. Camp was made for the night, and the ships’ owners were all called to a meeting with the jarl away from the main gathering.
Halfdan took a seat on the ground close to Valdimar in the circle as the shroud of night closed in on them, bringing its chill. He could feel the tension and interest rising in tandem as he took his place. Perhaps they would now finally discover what had changed. He caught the acidic glare of Hjalmvigi opposite, beside the jarl, who somehow seemed to have secured a place meant only for ship owners, and returned the hateful look.
‘We are close to the source of the great river,’ Yngvar announced. There was something else there, Halfdan could sense, something unspoken. A ‘but’ waiting to be revealed.
‘As close as we’ll get,’ grunted Nænnir, tugging on his braided beard. ‘My ship will go no further. Her draft is sufficient, but we’ll start to break oars soon. Unless you intend us to walk our ships with oars as legs, this is our limit.’
‘An unprofitable limit,’ added Æskil in a dangerous tone. ‘Promises of treasure were made in Kiev – of silver and slaves – yet so far we have found only hunger and boredom.’
Halfdan nodded. He’d made similar promises of his own to Ketil and the men. If the other skippers were beginning to doubt, how long before trouble sought out the Sea Wolf?
Yngvar flashed Æskil an irritated look. ‘Treasure will be yours yet. I have a plan, my friends, though not the one to which we have been working thus far. I had left home to seek a throne, for one was denied me there, as you all know, and you came with me to found a new world. Since Kiev, where I learned of these places, I had sought to create a kingdom for myself in the wild lands at the source of the river, for until then we would be in the lands of other kings. Our sojourn in Kutaisi changed things, though. I discovered much there. There is a kingdom to be had, but it does not need to be carved out of the unknown after all.’
Now all eyes slid towards the jarl, suddenly interested.
‘You no longer wish to find the end of the river?’ Valdimar asked quietly.
‘The end of the river is no longer relevant. I learned from the queen in Kutaisi many things that opened my eyes,’ the jarl said, and a few barked laughs arose among the skippers, earning them sharp looks. ‘I learned of this kingdom above all,’ he continued. ‘It is rich, this Georgia, rich and ancient as Miklagarðr itself, and the throne here is already contested. Two men seek to be king here, and both fight for the crown, both with allies from beyond their borders, yet the queen has no love for either of them. She is the king’s second wife, a wife of political convenience and no more. The king’s brother is distantly related to her, but she dislikes him too, for they are of opposing clans. A wily man in such a world could play one would-be king off against another until there are no kings left.’
Halfdan nodded to himself. There it was. The distant future Yngvar had sought with an uncertain world had gone, to be replaced by the desire to usurp a kingdom already rich and subjected to the nailed god. That was what had changed, and that was the purpose and urgency that now drove the jarl. And despite himself, he found that he was nodding. The jarl was planning like a Viking of old, not some Christ-driven lunatic. Best of all, such a straightforward decision suggested no interference from any shadow. Indeed, his path seemed clearer now, rather than obscured.
‘The queen wishes us to join her husband’s war,’ Yngvar said, shattering in an instant Halfdan’s relief. It seemed the queen was not yet done meddling, even at this distance.
‘She may not love her husband,’ Yngvar said, ‘but she supports him. I have agreed to lend our steel to her cause.’ He held up restraining hands at the shouts of indignation around the gathering. That he should speak for them without any consultation was unacceptable. That he should allow them to labour on along their way under a misapprehension was worse.
‘I am your jarl,’ he said in cold, steely tones, a quiet voice yet one that brooked no opposition. He sat back for a moment to let them digest that and then, easing the veiled threat, he continued in more conciliatory tones. ‘The founding of our new kingdom was never going to be an easy task. There would be blood spilled and hardship for all, and it would take time. As your jarl, I am conscious of my duty to do what is best for us all, and so Kutaisi and its queen have changed things. As any jarl worth his salt would do when he spied such an opportunity, I seized upon it, and I have kept nothing from you by intention. I have been working through the plan before presenting it to you all.’
The gathered skippers settled into a low grumble of dissatisfaction, a few faces, such as the outspoken Æskil and the powerful Valdimar, still radiating disapproval. Yet all were listening now, interested.
‘We will join the king, Bagrat, in his war, but we will play the game with care and make sure that we reach the edge of the ’tafl board before we are trapped. We are not here to help other lords, after all, but to become lords ourselves. It would be to our advantage to defeat the king’s opponent and secure the support of the queen, but it would be even more so if the king himself were to fall in the war. Accidents happen in the heat of battle, after all, and with all claimants to the throne gone, Georgia itself can be ours. You saw the gold almost dripping from the queen, my friends. Think of the treasure that awaits us when we control this kingdom.’
‘Heresy will be stamped out,’ Hjalmvigi interrupted, earning a glare from the jarl. The priest seemed not to notice, driven by his inner monologue. ‘Their misshapen cross can be torn down, their dissenting rites rewritten. This can be made a true Christian land.’
Valdimar cleared his throat meaningfully, and Yngvar looked back and forth between the prince and the priest. The Rus was of the Greek faith which, apparently, was considerably closer to the Georgian one than to that of Hjalmvigi. The jarl waved his hands, casting the entire matter aside.
‘The future of the kingdom is ours to write, friends, but first we must claim it.’
Halfdan’s eyes, though, were on the priest. A lifetime ago, it may have been Yngvar’s order that tore down the Odin stone in a far-off northern village, but it had been Hjalmvigi’s will behind it. Now, the zealot had set his eyes on an entire country. Even children of the nailed god were not to escape his zealotry. Yngvar was not driven by his faith, though, at least not currently. Other forces guided the jarl…
‘You want their queen.’ Halfdan bit down on the words as they left his mouth. He’d been thinking them, but had certainly not intended to utter them out loud. Such things said openly were dangerous. Indeed, Yngvar’s gaze shot his way and the colour rose in the jarl’s face.
‘I have no recollection of seeking your approval, heathen, nor your advice. I seem to remember trying to divest myself of your presence, only to find that you manage to cling on like the remnant of a lost world that you are. Hjalmvigi is perhaps correct that we should have left you in Kiev. You saved me from an arrow, and for that you remain a skipper in this fleet, but do not seek to judge me.’
With that he turned his attention from Halfdan, ignoring him further.
‘We do not seek the end of this river now,’ he reiterated. ‘A little further east, according to maps I have seen in Kutaisi, a valley leads off and connects to another with a total of just over ten miles, leading from this river to a second navigable waterway. That in turn pours into a great river that marches east through the rest of the kingdom.’
‘A portage of ten miles, across mountains?’
Halfdan nodded to himself. He’d seen as much from their first oarstroke in this land.
‘Along a valley,’ Yngvar corrected. ‘We have each done more in our time. Ten miles of portage is within reason.’
‘And at the far end?’ Æskil prompted. ‘On this new river there is silver? There are supplies? Your people need payment for their service, Yngvar, and we have enough food to see us to your new river, but no more.’
‘Somewhere beyond that portage,’ the jarl replied, ‘the king fights his brother-in-law. Since we have come from his queen to his aid, King Bagrat can hardly refuse us supplies and silver, and until we can find him, we will have to manage with ekeing out our supplies and on forage. I made every effort to secure us greater provender, but what could be spared has already been sent to the war. There was no more to be had. Unless we wish to eat earth and stone, there is nothing for us at the end of this river, but the king has abundant food for us all, especially when we fight with him.’
The jarl moved in his seat. The others seemed not to notice the change, but Halfdan saw that he had shifted uncomfortably. There was another unspoken ‘but’ coming here. He waited patiently as murmuring among the gathering died down and Yngvar steeled himself.
‘There is more. I made a further agreement with the queen, though it pains me to have done so, and I pray that the good Lord will forgive me. The king’s cause is dire and even with our aid, the weight of strength will come down upon the side of the enemy, and so the queen wishes me to secure further allies in this war. At the mouth of that great river, at the edge of the world in the east, lies a tribe of dangerous pagans called the Kipchak. The king will not seek their support for he and his Serk allies detest the pagans as much as we—’ a quick look shot at Halfdan and then Hjalmvigi ‘—but the queen believes that the war cannot be won without them.’
‘What does this queen know about making war?’ spat Nænnir. ‘We need no pagan animals, and I find myself surprised that you would consider it.’
Yngvar nodded. ‘Such creatures make dangerous allies, yet Valdimar was right about them. Sometimes their support is too important to ignore. The king faces the dragon warriors, and this tribe at the river mouth are known to have fought the dragon’s fire and won. Their lands surround the Alani to the north and the east, and if they cause trouble on those borders it will prevent the Alani from sending too many warriors to the aid of the enemy. Any tribe that can face the dragon and walk away are worth seeking out.’
