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Coming in the wake of Fin Gall, Dubh-Linn continues the story of Thorgrim Night Wolf and his band of Viking warriors as they plunder the Irish coast. Eager to return to his native Norway, Thorgrim agrees to participate in one last raid under the command of a man he does not trust. But the Northmen, he finds, are no longer simply invaders on foreign soil. They have become a part of the Irish kings’ ongoing struggle for power, and far from securing a means to return home, Thorgrim and his men are plunged into a battle for the throne of Tara, a battle that will test their strength and loyalty as none has before.
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Dubh-Linn sample chapter
Chapter One
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Words could not fell me,
by the fullest means I, battle-oak, have brought death’s end to many a man, making my sword’s mouth speak. – Gisli Sursson’s Saga |
The birds of prey lay waiting in the predawn dark, quiet, wings folded.
Half a dozen longships, lifting and sinking in the swells coming in from the sea, motionless beyond that, their sails furled and their long yards swung fore and aft. Each held a row of round shields mounted on its rails. A mile beyond their bows, beyond the gracefully curved stems, with dragons and birds working into the hard oak, was the south coast of Ireland, the cut that opened into the closest water approach to the monastery at a place known as Cloyne. The land was just visible, a dark, looming presence in the light of the half-moon directly overhead.
The fleet had come from Dubh-linn, sailing and rowing south then west along the coast. The night before, they had hauled out on a sandy beach a few miles away. In the hours before dawn the men, roused grumbling from sleep, pushed the ships back out into the sea. The night was still, so they used the long oars to drive them down that last stretch of coast until they had reached this place, this spot where they would come ashore and roll through the ringfort, the town and the monastery there. In an hour they would own every man, woman and child within three miles, a population who, they hoped, did not yet even know they were there.
The ships ranged in size. The smaller vessels carried twenty or thirty men crammed aboard, while the great, sweeping longships, with rowing stations for forty men, easily held twice that number in their low, sleek, beamy hulls. All told, nearly three hundred Vikings sat waiting nervously in the chill of the early morning hours.
It was not the coming fight that made them nervous. Quite the opposite. The thought of bloody battle lifted their spirits, it was the reason they were there. Many of the men, as they brooded on the darkness, turned their thoughts to sheildwalls and sword thrusts and the feel of a battle ax hitting home, and those thoughts provided some comfort to them.
It was the darkness they did not like. The Norsemen hated the dark. If they feared no man alive, they did fear those things that lurked in deep shadow, those things that were not of the world of men, that hunkered down in the hidden places ashore or, worse yet, in the black water beneath their keels. So they sat at their rowing stations and they adjusted their mail and their weapons, and the men from the north waited for the coming of the sun, and the order to take up their oars and pull for the distant shore.
Well aft on the longship known as Black Raven, Thorgrim Night Wolf stood looking toward the land, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword. With the other he tugged on the broach that held the fur cloak clasped around his neck, freeing the metal filigree from his beard. The facial hair was not charcoal black anymore, as it had been in the younger days. A few weeks before he had caught his reflection in a silver chalice, had seen that his beard was now shot through with white, like the last bits of winter snow that cling to the shady places and refuse to melt.
Underfoot he could feel the ship slewing a bit in the swells and he turned to give the man at the steering board an order to shift his helm, but he stopped as he recalled, again, that this was not his ship, and though he had been given an honored place aft, he had no authority aboard her.
The man who did own the ship, the man who commanded those Northmen who sat at the rowing benches, was Arinbjorn Thoruson, whose fine smile had earned him the name Arinbjorn White-tooth, and he was just visible to Thorgrim at the opposite rail. Thorgrim considered saying something about the way the ship was twisting in the seas, but they did not appear to be in danger of hitting any of the other vessels so Thorgrim kept his own council. He was not one to speak when it was not his business, and often didn’t even when it was.
As if sensing that Thorgrim was looking in his direction, Arinbjorn crossed the narrow deck and stood beside him, nodding toward the shore. “What think you, Thorgrim?” he asked, and there was a lightness to his tone, a casual quality that put Thorgrim on edge. “These Irish, will we get a fight out of them?”
“Hard to say, with the Irish,” Thorgrim replied, choosing his words with care. He had been in Ireland for nearly half a year now, had learned much about the country and the people, and largely despised both. Most of the men who had come from Norway with him and Ornolf the Restless had died in the violence that seemed to trail behind the Crown of the Three Kingdoms like a swarm of bees. Those who survived had been left adrift in an Irish boat made of wood and hide, then were swept up in the great fleet of Olaf the White on his way to take Dubh-linn from the Danes.
“Hard to say,” Thorgrim said again. Arinbjorn was just a few feet away, all dark shadow and gray in the moonlight, bulky looking under his fur cape. His teeth seemed to glow. Thorgrim looked away, toward the shoreline. He thought the dawn was coming up, the land more visible now. “Sometimes they will run at the sight of a longship,” he elaborated, “sometimes they’ll stand and fight. Often it will depend on what their neighbors are doing. Every third Irishman is a king of something, lord of some cow pasture. If they are at war with one another they’ll have no men or stomach for a fight with us. If they decide to band together they can field a decent army, put up a real fight.”
Arinbjorn was quiet for a moment. “I see,” he said at last. “Well, we’ll see how things lay soon enough.”
Thorgrim’s mind went back to the last time he was in that place, standing on the deck of a longship, anticipating a fight. That had been the taking of Dubh-linn and it had involved no great effort in the end. Olaf’s force was overwhelming, and Dubh-linn was no longer some outpost barely clinging to the Irish coast, but a genuine settlement, with shopkeepers and brewers and blacksmiths and carpenters and all manner of tradesmen and artisans who did not care a whit for who ran the town as long as they were left alone to earn their living. Those few Danes willing to die to defend Dubh-linn did so quickly, and the rest welcomed the newcomers with a shrug.
Ornolf the Restless and Olaf the White, who had known each other for many years and were great friends, shared a passion for food, drink and women, all of which could be found in abundance in the thriving longphort. Soon Ornolf was proclaiming that the new Dubh-linn was as fine a place as Valhalla was likely to be, without the bother of having to take to the field and spend each day hacking and killing your fellow revelers. Ornolf swore by Odin that he intended to return to Norway as soon as he could. But those claims grew more infrequent with each night spent at the mead hall, until finally, having failed to convince anyone of his sincerity, Ornolf stopped trying to convince himself.
Thorgrim was certain now that it was growing light, and fore and aft men were beginning to move, as if animated by the gray dawn. Thorgrim could make out his son Harald on the fourth oar from the stern, larboard side. The boy had grown since they had sailed from Vik with Ornolf, Harald’s grandfather. Grown in many ways. Physically he was twice the young man he had been then. He was certainly as tall as Thorgrim now, perhaps taller. Thorgrim did not like to think on it.
Harald had filled out in the arms and chest as well. He was the kind who could never stand to be idle. If there was work to do, he was the first hand in, and if there was no work to do, he would find some.
In Dubh-linn they had secured lodging with a blacksmith from Trondheim named Jokul and his lovely Irish wife. Of all the craftsmen who had come to Dubh-linn and stayed, the woodworkers and comb makers and leather workers and goldsmiths, it was the blacksmiths who were most in demand, and of them, Jokul was looked on as the best. His home and his shop were larger than most, more accommodating.
Still, the smith had been grudging at first about renting a space to the two men from Vik. Indeed, it was only his wife, Almaith, insisting that they be allowed to stay that swayed him in the end. And that in turn had worried Thorgrim, because he was not sure why she was so eager to have them there, and feared her motives might not be the most pure. That could mean trouble to windward, as he knew all too well, having seen in his lifetime nearly every version of the story of men and women played out before him, and often with himself in a leading role.
In the end, none of those concerns were realized. Thorgrim guessed that it was Almaith’s desire for the rent money, or some diversion from the often unpleasant Jokul, that accounted for her insistence that they stay. Harald, for some unfathomable reason, was eager to learn the Irish tongue, and Almaith, a pleasant and patient tutor, set in to teach him the basics of the language. Harald was by nature eager and curious. He began following the smith around, looking for tasks to perform, and soon found Jokul eager to dole them out.
After months of the young man splitting and stacking wood, making repairs to the wattle and timber frame home, pumping bellows at the forge and even learning some crude ironworking, the smith had grown more welcoming in his attitude, and Thorgrim knew he would be loath to see them go. He had tried, in fact, to dissuade them from joining the raiding party of which they were now a part.
Along with Harald’s weed-like growth and the near constant work came an appetite that would make most bears shake their heads in wonder. But that, too, was well sated in Dubh-linn. As much as the Irish might loath the fin gall, and the dubh gall before them, the longphort was a ready market, a market flowing with plundered gold and silver. Every day, farmers pushed their carts of produce through the high wooden palisade gates, every day sheep herds and swine herds and cow herds drove their beasts along the muddy plank roads to the market. It all seemed to flow into Harald’s stomach, and added pounds of muscle to his frame. One of Ornolf’s men had recently dubbed him Harald Broad Arm, and that name seemed to have stuck.
Thorgrim watched his son work the kinks out of his arms, ready to take up the loom of the oar. He wondered, ideally, if the two of them were to come to blows, who might win. Not that such a thing would happen. Thorgrim loved Harald above all things, and would lay down his life for the boy before he would ever raise a hand against him. Still, he wondered.
I have experience and wile on my side, he thought, even if youth and speed are with Harald. But of course Thorgrim had been training Harald since he was five, training with shield and sword and battle ax and pike. He had passed on to his son much of his considerable skill with weapons.
A dull light to the east seemed to part the horizon, water and sky, as the sun, with no great enthusiasm, came up at last. A voice came rolling over the swells. “Take up your oars!” It was the voice of Hoskuld Feilan, who was known as Hoskuld Iron-skull, the jarl who owned the longship Thunder God, largest of the present fleet, the man commanding the raid on the Irish coast. With those words the long row of sweeps along Thunder God’s side rose as one and swept forward in perfect symmetry. With the rowers hidden from view behind the line of bright painted shields, there was, to Thorgrim’s eye, something unworldly about it, as if the ship itself had sprung to life.
“To oars! Take up your oars!” Arinbjorn White-tooth shouted. On Black Raven’s rowing benches, larboard and starboard, fore and aft, the men pushed down and aft on the thick looms. “Pull together!” Arinbjorn called next and as one the oars came down, the men leaned back, Black Raven gathered way. From a sleeping, lethargic thing, the ship came alive, the water swished down her side. Her fabric groaned with the leverage of sweep against oar port, and her motion changed from a dull roll to a determined, forward thrust. Thorgrim felt his spirit surge with the ship under his feet.
He looked out to the east and west as in rapid succession the rest of the fleet gathered way and pulled for shore, spreading out astern of Thunder God like men at arms in a swine array. As he shifted his glaze he took a glance at Harald, hoping Harald would not see, not wanting the boy to think he was keeping an eye on him. But Harald was focused on his work, his eyes moving from the man astern of him to the sea and the rig overhead. A good seaman, a sailor’s eye. Thorgrim looked toward the shore. To starboard and larboard the rugged country ran down to the water, but right ahead the land seemed to open up in welcome. It was through that gap they would pull, then a few miles up the mouth of a river to their landing place. There was no movement along the shoreline that Thorgrim could see. No one there.
It had been near the end of summer when they first pulled Red Dragon up the Liffey River to the longphort of Dubh-linn, late fall then they had returned as part of Olaf the White’s fleet. Even if Ornolf had actively tried to secure a ship to return his men to Norway it is likely the winter weather would have closed in before they could have put to sea. But of course Ornolf made virtually no effort at all, and so he and the men with him had spent the winter months in Dubh-linn, the miserable gray, wet winter in the crowded, fetid, mud-choked town of Dubh-linn.
Once it became clear to Thorgrim that Ornolf had little interest in getting himself or his men home, Thorgrim asked and received permission to make other arrangements. Ornolf did not want to see him go, and even less did he want to see his grandson go, but for all his drunken raving Ornolf was not one who was oblivious to the way other men saw the world. He, Ornolf, had talked Thorgrim into going a-viking, mostly against Thorgrim’s will. He knew that Thorgrim had come in hopes of dulling the pain of Hallbera’s death. When he thought about it, which he did as infrequently as possible, Ornolf suspected that he might have come for the same reason. And Ornolf knew that Thorgrim was ready to go home.
But getting home was another matter. As Thorgrim prowled the quays and the mead hall, came to know the other Vikings and jarls, he soon realized that none would be returning to Norway until their holds were crammed with the legendary wealth of Ireland. There would be more raiding and more plunder before there was a hope of sailing east again. Thorgrim had nothing against raiding and plunder. He had done more of it than any three men were likely to do over a lifetime. But it was not the young man he had been, and he longed for home.
By that time, Thorgrim Night Wolf was well known in Dubh-linn, his reputation as a fighting man set. Stories of past deeds had swirled around the mead hall, the tale of how he had led his men to escape the Danes in Dubh-linn, and fought the armies of the Irish king at Tara. Talk of shape-shifting was passed around quietly when Thorgrim was not about.
One night, a month or so after his return to Dubh-linn, three large, drunk and well-armed men had set upon Thorgrim as he left the mead hall. They were looking to make a name for themselves, and were full up with tales of the Night Wolf. The fight had been brief, and had ended very badly for the three men. Had ended, indeed, with each one face down in the mud in various states of dismemberment. Thorgrim met with nothing but polite respect after that.
Thorgrim was aware of these things, and he thought that his reputation would help him secure a place among a ship’s company, but he found just the opposite to be true. He was well treated to be sure, men were eager to buy him food and drink, his company, when he was in the proper frame of mind, was sought after, but when it came to joining a ship, there never seemed to be room for another man. It took a month of that before Thorgrim finally understood that no ship’s master wanted another man who was also accustom to command, who might question orders, who might become the focal point for unrest. It was pointless to try to convince anyone that he wanted no more than to take his place in the shieldwall, to do his work, to go home.
In all fairness, Thorgrim had to admit that he would not want a man like himself aboard, either.
He had begun contemplating the idea of building a boat that could take him and Harald back to Vik when Arinbjorn White-tooth had sought him out on the quay. “Thorgrim Ulfsson, I hear that you are in hopes of joining a ship,” he said.
Thorgrim looked him up and down. Good clothes, silver inlaid on the hilt of his sword, silver and gold broach holding a cape of bear fur. He was a well-made man, and had more the look of a jarl than a farmer or fishermen about him. No, not a jarl. The son of a jarl.
“You hear right,” Thorgrim said. His mood, never particularly buoyant, was now all but awash from the constant frustration, disappointment and Ireland’s ceaseless, tormenting rain. If it had been later in the day, he would have been unapproachable. But then, if it had been later in the day, he would have secured himself in a place that could not be found.
“I am in need of a man such as you,” Arinbjorn said.
“Really? It seems no others are.”
“Maybe the others are afraid of the Night Wolf. I am not. I’ll welcome any man who can use a sword or a battle ax aboard my ship.”
Thorgrim had only one condition, and that was that Harald be welcome aboard as well, and Arinbjorn agreed to that with enthusiasm. And so, two weeks later, Thorgrim Night Wolf found himself closing with the Irish coastline, ready to vault over the side of a longship into the shallow water, ready to push up a narrow path and fall on the unsuspecting people of the ringfort and the monastery supposed to be just beyond the high banks of the shoreline.
Black Raven’s stern rose up, just a bit, as the swell from the sea passed under the keel, then down it went as the bow came up in turn. There was land on either side of them now as they entered the wide estuary, and the ocean rollers gave way to flatter water. The sun was up, the sky gray but without rain, the shore a muted stretch of green and brown, the longships things of beauty as they swept forward with gathering momentum.
“Look, there!” Arinbjorn said. He was pointing beyond the starboard bow. Thorgrim followed his arm. There were men standing on the low ridge of land that bordered the water. They were just visible against the gray sky, four or five of them.
“Sheep herds, you think?” Arinbjorn asked. “Fisherman, perhaps?”
“Perhaps…” Thorgrim said, with no conviction. And just as the word left his mouth, three more appeared, mounted on the pathetic little beasts that the Irish called horses. They seemed to be watching the approaching ships – indeed, what else would they be looking at? Then they whirled around and disappeared from sight.
“Well,” Thorgrim said, “we still have plenty of advantages on our side. Surprise is just not one of them.”
Half a dozen longships, lifting and sinking in the swells coming in from the sea, motionless beyond that, their sails furled and their long yards swung fore and aft. Each held a row of round shields mounted on its rails. A mile beyond their bows, beyond the gracefully curved stems, with dragons and birds working into the hard oak, was the south coast of Ireland, the cut that opened into the closest water approach to the monastery at a place known as Cloyne. The land was just visible, a dark, looming presence in the light of the half-moon directly overhead.
The fleet had come from Dubh-linn, sailing and rowing south then west along the coast. The night before, they had hauled out on a sandy beach a few miles away. In the hours before dawn the men, roused grumbling from sleep, pushed the ships back out into the sea. The night was still, so they used the long oars to drive them down that last stretch of coast until they had reached this place, this spot where they would come ashore and roll through the ringfort, the town and the monastery there. In an hour they would own every man, woman and child within three miles, a population who, they hoped, did not yet even know they were there.
The ships ranged in size. The smaller vessels carried twenty or thirty men crammed aboard, while the great, sweeping longships, with rowing stations for forty men, easily held twice that number in their low, sleek, beamy hulls. All told, nearly three hundred Vikings sat waiting nervously in the chill of the early morning hours.
It was not the coming fight that made them nervous. Quite the opposite. The thought of bloody battle lifted their spirits, it was the reason they were there. Many of the men, as they brooded on the darkness, turned their thoughts to sheildwalls and sword thrusts and the feel of a battle ax hitting home, and those thoughts provided some comfort to them.
It was the darkness they did not like. The Norsemen hated the dark. If they feared no man alive, they did fear those things that lurked in deep shadow, those things that were not of the world of men, that hunkered down in the hidden places ashore or, worse yet, in the black water beneath their keels. So they sat at their rowing stations and they adjusted their mail and their weapons, and the men from the north waited for the coming of the sun, and the order to take up their oars and pull for the distant shore.
Well aft on the longship known as Black Raven, Thorgrim Night Wolf stood looking toward the land, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword. With the other he tugged on the broach that held the fur cloak clasped around his neck, freeing the metal filigree from his beard. The facial hair was not charcoal black anymore, as it had been in the younger days. A few weeks before he had caught his reflection in a silver chalice, had seen that his beard was now shot through with white, like the last bits of winter snow that cling to the shady places and refuse to melt.
Underfoot he could feel the ship slewing a bit in the swells and he turned to give the man at the steering board an order to shift his helm, but he stopped as he recalled, again, that this was not his ship, and though he had been given an honored place aft, he had no authority aboard her.
The man who did own the ship, the man who commanded those Northmen who sat at the rowing benches, was Arinbjorn Thoruson, whose fine smile had earned him the name Arinbjorn White-tooth, and he was just visible to Thorgrim at the opposite rail. Thorgrim considered saying something about the way the ship was twisting in the seas, but they did not appear to be in danger of hitting any of the other vessels so Thorgrim kept his own council. He was not one to speak when it was not his business, and often didn’t even when it was.
As if sensing that Thorgrim was looking in his direction, Arinbjorn crossed the narrow deck and stood beside him, nodding toward the shore. “What think you, Thorgrim?” he asked, and there was a lightness to his tone, a casual quality that put Thorgrim on edge. “These Irish, will we get a fight out of them?”
“Hard to say, with the Irish,” Thorgrim replied, choosing his words with care. He had been in Ireland for nearly half a year now, had learned much about the country and the people, and largely despised both. Most of the men who had come from Norway with him and Ornolf the Restless had died in the violence that seemed to trail behind the Crown of the Three Kingdoms like a swarm of bees. Those who survived had been left adrift in an Irish boat made of wood and hide, then were swept up in the great fleet of Olaf the White on his way to take Dubh-linn from the Danes.
“Hard to say,” Thorgrim said again. Arinbjorn was just a few feet away, all dark shadow and gray in the moonlight, bulky looking under his fur cape. His teeth seemed to glow. Thorgrim looked away, toward the shoreline. He thought the dawn was coming up, the land more visible now. “Sometimes they will run at the sight of a longship,” he elaborated, “sometimes they’ll stand and fight. Often it will depend on what their neighbors are doing. Every third Irishman is a king of something, lord of some cow pasture. If they are at war with one another they’ll have no men or stomach for a fight with us. If they decide to band together they can field a decent army, put up a real fight.”
Arinbjorn was quiet for a moment. “I see,” he said at last. “Well, we’ll see how things lay soon enough.”
Thorgrim’s mind went back to the last time he was in that place, standing on the deck of a longship, anticipating a fight. That had been the taking of Dubh-linn and it had involved no great effort in the end. Olaf’s force was overwhelming, and Dubh-linn was no longer some outpost barely clinging to the Irish coast, but a genuine settlement, with shopkeepers and brewers and blacksmiths and carpenters and all manner of tradesmen and artisans who did not care a whit for who ran the town as long as they were left alone to earn their living. Those few Danes willing to die to defend Dubh-linn did so quickly, and the rest welcomed the newcomers with a shrug.
Ornolf the Restless and Olaf the White, who had known each other for many years and were great friends, shared a passion for food, drink and women, all of which could be found in abundance in the thriving longphort. Soon Ornolf was proclaiming that the new Dubh-linn was as fine a place as Valhalla was likely to be, without the bother of having to take to the field and spend each day hacking and killing your fellow revelers. Ornolf swore by Odin that he intended to return to Norway as soon as he could. But those claims grew more infrequent with each night spent at the mead hall, until finally, having failed to convince anyone of his sincerity, Ornolf stopped trying to convince himself.
Thorgrim was certain now that it was growing light, and fore and aft men were beginning to move, as if animated by the gray dawn. Thorgrim could make out his son Harald on the fourth oar from the stern, larboard side. The boy had grown since they had sailed from Vik with Ornolf, Harald’s grandfather. Grown in many ways. Physically he was twice the young man he had been then. He was certainly as tall as Thorgrim now, perhaps taller. Thorgrim did not like to think on it.
Harald had filled out in the arms and chest as well. He was the kind who could never stand to be idle. If there was work to do, he was the first hand in, and if there was no work to do, he would find some.
In Dubh-linn they had secured lodging with a blacksmith from Trondheim named Jokul and his lovely Irish wife. Of all the craftsmen who had come to Dubh-linn and stayed, the woodworkers and comb makers and leather workers and goldsmiths, it was the blacksmiths who were most in demand, and of them, Jokul was looked on as the best. His home and his shop were larger than most, more accommodating.
Still, the smith had been grudging at first about renting a space to the two men from Vik. Indeed, it was only his wife, Almaith, insisting that they be allowed to stay that swayed him in the end. And that in turn had worried Thorgrim, because he was not sure why she was so eager to have them there, and feared her motives might not be the most pure. That could mean trouble to windward, as he knew all too well, having seen in his lifetime nearly every version of the story of men and women played out before him, and often with himself in a leading role.
In the end, none of those concerns were realized. Thorgrim guessed that it was Almaith’s desire for the rent money, or some diversion from the often unpleasant Jokul, that accounted for her insistence that they stay. Harald, for some unfathomable reason, was eager to learn the Irish tongue, and Almaith, a pleasant and patient tutor, set in to teach him the basics of the language. Harald was by nature eager and curious. He began following the smith around, looking for tasks to perform, and soon found Jokul eager to dole them out.
After months of the young man splitting and stacking wood, making repairs to the wattle and timber frame home, pumping bellows at the forge and even learning some crude ironworking, the smith had grown more welcoming in his attitude, and Thorgrim knew he would be loath to see them go. He had tried, in fact, to dissuade them from joining the raiding party of which they were now a part.
Along with Harald’s weed-like growth and the near constant work came an appetite that would make most bears shake their heads in wonder. But that, too, was well sated in Dubh-linn. As much as the Irish might loath the fin gall, and the dubh gall before them, the longphort was a ready market, a market flowing with plundered gold and silver. Every day, farmers pushed their carts of produce through the high wooden palisade gates, every day sheep herds and swine herds and cow herds drove their beasts along the muddy plank roads to the market. It all seemed to flow into Harald’s stomach, and added pounds of muscle to his frame. One of Ornolf’s men had recently dubbed him Harald Broad Arm, and that name seemed to have stuck.
Thorgrim watched his son work the kinks out of his arms, ready to take up the loom of the oar. He wondered, ideally, if the two of them were to come to blows, who might win. Not that such a thing would happen. Thorgrim loved Harald above all things, and would lay down his life for the boy before he would ever raise a hand against him. Still, he wondered.
I have experience and wile on my side, he thought, even if youth and speed are with Harald. But of course Thorgrim had been training Harald since he was five, training with shield and sword and battle ax and pike. He had passed on to his son much of his considerable skill with weapons.
A dull light to the east seemed to part the horizon, water and sky, as the sun, with no great enthusiasm, came up at last. A voice came rolling over the swells. “Take up your oars!” It was the voice of Hoskuld Feilan, who was known as Hoskuld Iron-skull, the jarl who owned the longship Thunder God, largest of the present fleet, the man commanding the raid on the Irish coast. With those words the long row of sweeps along Thunder God’s side rose as one and swept forward in perfect symmetry. With the rowers hidden from view behind the line of bright painted shields, there was, to Thorgrim’s eye, something unworldly about it, as if the ship itself had sprung to life.
“To oars! Take up your oars!” Arinbjorn White-tooth shouted. On Black Raven’s rowing benches, larboard and starboard, fore and aft, the men pushed down and aft on the thick looms. “Pull together!” Arinbjorn called next and as one the oars came down, the men leaned back, Black Raven gathered way. From a sleeping, lethargic thing, the ship came alive, the water swished down her side. Her fabric groaned with the leverage of sweep against oar port, and her motion changed from a dull roll to a determined, forward thrust. Thorgrim felt his spirit surge with the ship under his feet.
He looked out to the east and west as in rapid succession the rest of the fleet gathered way and pulled for shore, spreading out astern of Thunder God like men at arms in a swine array. As he shifted his glaze he took a glance at Harald, hoping Harald would not see, not wanting the boy to think he was keeping an eye on him. But Harald was focused on his work, his eyes moving from the man astern of him to the sea and the rig overhead. A good seaman, a sailor’s eye. Thorgrim looked toward the shore. To starboard and larboard the rugged country ran down to the water, but right ahead the land seemed to open up in welcome. It was through that gap they would pull, then a few miles up the mouth of a river to their landing place. There was no movement along the shoreline that Thorgrim could see. No one there.
It had been near the end of summer when they first pulled Red Dragon up the Liffey River to the longphort of Dubh-linn, late fall then they had returned as part of Olaf the White’s fleet. Even if Ornolf had actively tried to secure a ship to return his men to Norway it is likely the winter weather would have closed in before they could have put to sea. But of course Ornolf made virtually no effort at all, and so he and the men with him had spent the winter months in Dubh-linn, the miserable gray, wet winter in the crowded, fetid, mud-choked town of Dubh-linn.
Once it became clear to Thorgrim that Ornolf had little interest in getting himself or his men home, Thorgrim asked and received permission to make other arrangements. Ornolf did not want to see him go, and even less did he want to see his grandson go, but for all his drunken raving Ornolf was not one who was oblivious to the way other men saw the world. He, Ornolf, had talked Thorgrim into going a-viking, mostly against Thorgrim’s will. He knew that Thorgrim had come in hopes of dulling the pain of Hallbera’s death. When he thought about it, which he did as infrequently as possible, Ornolf suspected that he might have come for the same reason. And Ornolf knew that Thorgrim was ready to go home.
But getting home was another matter. As Thorgrim prowled the quays and the mead hall, came to know the other Vikings and jarls, he soon realized that none would be returning to Norway until their holds were crammed with the legendary wealth of Ireland. There would be more raiding and more plunder before there was a hope of sailing east again. Thorgrim had nothing against raiding and plunder. He had done more of it than any three men were likely to do over a lifetime. But it was not the young man he had been, and he longed for home.
By that time, Thorgrim Night Wolf was well known in Dubh-linn, his reputation as a fighting man set. Stories of past deeds had swirled around the mead hall, the tale of how he had led his men to escape the Danes in Dubh-linn, and fought the armies of the Irish king at Tara. Talk of shape-shifting was passed around quietly when Thorgrim was not about.
One night, a month or so after his return to Dubh-linn, three large, drunk and well-armed men had set upon Thorgrim as he left the mead hall. They were looking to make a name for themselves, and were full up with tales of the Night Wolf. The fight had been brief, and had ended very badly for the three men. Had ended, indeed, with each one face down in the mud in various states of dismemberment. Thorgrim met with nothing but polite respect after that.
Thorgrim was aware of these things, and he thought that his reputation would help him secure a place among a ship’s company, but he found just the opposite to be true. He was well treated to be sure, men were eager to buy him food and drink, his company, when he was in the proper frame of mind, was sought after, but when it came to joining a ship, there never seemed to be room for another man. It took a month of that before Thorgrim finally understood that no ship’s master wanted another man who was also accustom to command, who might question orders, who might become the focal point for unrest. It was pointless to try to convince anyone that he wanted no more than to take his place in the shieldwall, to do his work, to go home.
In all fairness, Thorgrim had to admit that he would not want a man like himself aboard, either.
He had begun contemplating the idea of building a boat that could take him and Harald back to Vik when Arinbjorn White-tooth had sought him out on the quay. “Thorgrim Ulfsson, I hear that you are in hopes of joining a ship,” he said.
Thorgrim looked him up and down. Good clothes, silver inlaid on the hilt of his sword, silver and gold broach holding a cape of bear fur. He was a well-made man, and had more the look of a jarl than a farmer or fishermen about him. No, not a jarl. The son of a jarl.
“You hear right,” Thorgrim said. His mood, never particularly buoyant, was now all but awash from the constant frustration, disappointment and Ireland’s ceaseless, tormenting rain. If it had been later in the day, he would have been unapproachable. But then, if it had been later in the day, he would have secured himself in a place that could not be found.
“I am in need of a man such as you,” Arinbjorn said.
“Really? It seems no others are.”
“Maybe the others are afraid of the Night Wolf. I am not. I’ll welcome any man who can use a sword or a battle ax aboard my ship.”
Thorgrim had only one condition, and that was that Harald be welcome aboard as well, and Arinbjorn agreed to that with enthusiasm. And so, two weeks later, Thorgrim Night Wolf found himself closing with the Irish coastline, ready to vault over the side of a longship into the shallow water, ready to push up a narrow path and fall on the unsuspecting people of the ringfort and the monastery supposed to be just beyond the high banks of the shoreline.
Black Raven’s stern rose up, just a bit, as the swell from the sea passed under the keel, then down it went as the bow came up in turn. There was land on either side of them now as they entered the wide estuary, and the ocean rollers gave way to flatter water. The sun was up, the sky gray but without rain, the shore a muted stretch of green and brown, the longships things of beauty as they swept forward with gathering momentum.
“Look, there!” Arinbjorn said. He was pointing beyond the starboard bow. Thorgrim followed his arm. There were men standing on the low ridge of land that bordered the water. They were just visible against the gray sky, four or five of them.
“Sheep herds, you think?” Arinbjorn asked. “Fisherman, perhaps?”
“Perhaps…” Thorgrim said, with no conviction. And just as the word left his mouth, three more appeared, mounted on the pathetic little beasts that the Irish called horses. They seemed to be watching the approaching ships – indeed, what else would they be looking at? Then they whirled around and disappeared from sight.
“Well,” Thorgrim said, “we still have plenty of advantages on our side. Surprise is just not one of them.”
