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With their ill-fated raid on the monastery at Glendalough torn apart by betrayal and defeat, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his handful of survivors from the crew of Sea Hammer find themselves in desperate and tenuous straights. Stranded far from the safety of Vík-ló, surrounded by enemies, and with barely enough men to work the longship’s oars, the Norsemen must make their way back through a dangerous and uncertain country. Thorgrim, however, is not interested in mere survival. His one thought, his one desire, is to take revenge on those whose treachery led to the slaughter of so many of his men. Assembling an ad hoc army of unlikely allies, Thorgrim leads his warriors to a final showdown that can end only in his enemies’ death or his own.
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Night Wolf sample chapter
Chapter One
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I, maker of the sword’s voice
Heard two loon birds fighting And I knew that soon the dew Of bows would be descending – Gisli Sursson’s Saga |
Six miles downstream from Glendalough, Thorgrim Night Wolf found the place on the river where he intended to beach Sea Hammer, his longship. He had noticed the spot on their voyage up, had tucked the location away in his mind. That was a week before.
He had had no notion then that he and his men might find themselves in need of a place where they could hide their ship and make repairs so that they might carry out a desperate and unlikely escape. That thought had not occurred to him, and yet he had seen the place and noted it and remembered it. The gods, perhaps, whispering in his ear. Thor wishing to come to his aid. Loki, playing a trick to prolong his misery.
The spot was on the south bank, which meant little on a river that was fordable in so many places, but still it put them on the shore opposite the monastery and the encampment from which the horse soldiers would come. The riverbank was heavily wooded on both sides, so the Northmen could not be seen from a distance, could only be discovered if someone hacked their way through the forest to the water’s edge. There was a gravel sandbar that reached out into the stream, perfect for beaching a ship. The wide curve in the river that had deposited the gravel there also helped hide the ship from anyone upstream or down.
“There,” Thorgrim said, loud but not very loud. The gravel bar was two hundred feet down current, and Thorgrim spoke to let the handful of men at the sweeps know that their labor would soon be over. He held the tiller himself, keeping the ship midstream as best he could.
Forward he saw heads turning to look, not many, as there were not that many heads aboard to turn. Harald, his son. The massive Godi, pulling the oar opposite Harald. A warrior named Olaf Thordarson, who had been with them since leaving Dubh-linn, and another named Ulf. Ten men in all, including Starri Deathless, wounded in the first fight with the Irish and left aboard Sea Hammer when they had launched the attack on Glendalough. Ten men out of more than two hundred who had sailed from Vík-ló on this raid.
“Harald, get some lines ready to run to the trees ashore,” Thorgrim called. Harald nodded and pulled his long oar inboard and laid it across the sea chests that the rowers used for benches. The loss of Harald’s oar did little to slow Sea Hammer’s progress downstream. It was the current that was driving the ship, not the rowers. The men at the oars were concerned mostly with keeping the vessel in the middle of the river, keeping her from turning sideways, and making a bit of headway when needed to give the steering board some bite.
And that was fortunate, because ten men, ten wounded, exhausted, dispirited men, and two prisoners, one a woman, were not about to move sixty-five feet of oak and pine longship through their own strength of arm.
“Give a pull! Unship your oars!” Thorgrim called next and the men still at the oars, five to larboard and four to starboard, leaned back for one last pull, then slid their oars in and laid them out as Harald had done. Thorgrim gave a twist of the tiller and Sea Hammer slewed sideways, coming up onto the gravel not bow-first but with the round part of her bilge sliding up into the shallow water in a way that would allow the sandbar to most effectively support the injured vessel.
The ship gave a slight shudder as she touched and Harald leapt off the sheer strake and onto the sandbar, ropes in hand. The water that ran an inch deep over Sea Hammer’s deck boards rolled to the larboard side like a small tidal surge.
Another ten minutes and we would have been on the river bed, Thorgrim thought. Dead men’s tunics stuffed into a two-foot hole in the ship’s bottom would not stanch a leak in any meaningful way.
Sea Hammer was the only ship of nine left after Ottar, the lunatic, and his men had abandoned Thorgrim’s warriors to the Irish in the predawn hours before battle. Sea Hammer had been left behind only because Ottar’s brother, Kjartan, who had turned against him, had cut a hole in her to stop Ottar’s stealing her as well. Thorgrim and the handful of men who had escaped the butchery that the Irish had doled out found her run up on the riverbank and half sunk.
Then the Irish had found her, too. Twenty of them, mounted warriors, too many for the Northmen to take on. As Thorgrim and his men watched from the cover of the trees, the Irish made ready to burn her where she lay. That, for Thorgrim, was too much. He was willing to die, indeed he preferred to die, before suffering such a final humiliation.
In the end that sacrifice was not necessary. Thorgrim’s prisoner, his male prisoner, was an Irish warrior named Louis, and Thorgrim sent him to warn the soldiers off, to tell them there were sixty Norse warriors coming up river. Thorgrim then made a show of force with the few men he had, and that had been enough to make the Irish ride off. But he knew they would not be gone for long, and they would not come back alone.
With the sound of the horses’ hooves growing fainter, Thorgrim led his men back aboard Sea Hammer. She was badly holed, true, but she did not have to voyage far, just a ways beyond where they might expect the Irish to come looking for them.
“We need something to stop up that hole,” Thorgrim said after peering at the damage through the clear water that flooded the hull. He straightened and looked around. There were dead men all over the shore. Most were his own men, those who had been left behind to guard the ships. They had given their lives in that effort, but they had not been enough to stop the near three hundred men under Ottar’s command.
Not all of the dead, however, were Thorgrim’s men. “Find some of Ottar’s dead,” Thorgrim ordered, “strip off their tunics and bring them to me. Just cut them away.” Thorgrim was tormented by the memory of the men who had died because of his misjudgment. He was tormented by the fact that he had no time to give them a proper funereal. He could not stand the thought of leaving their corpses, naked and bloating, for the ravens and the wolves to feast on.
The others nodded their understanding and climbed back ashore to find the corpses from which to strip clothing. They shuffled, they limped, they moved with obvious pain. They had all been wounded in some manner during the fight: a slash from a sword, a wound from the spear of a mounted warrior, a hard kick from a horse. They were wounded, but they could still move and that was why they lived. Those too wounded to run had been hacked down on the field.
One by one the men returned with the bundles of cloth that just that morning had clothed living warriors, and Thorgrim knew he had another decision to make. A harder one. He took the tunics and once again ran his eyes over the shore. His men had died fighting. The Choosers of the Slain had been among them already—they must have been; it had been hours. What need had they of weapons? They were in the corpse hall now, or they never would be.
“I need four of you to find helmets to bail the ship,” Thorgrim said, gesturing toward the river water that had flooded into Sea Hammer, a foot high at its deepest. “The rest of you, gather up all the swords, shields, mail, any weapons you can find and get them on board.”
“From Ottar’s men, Lord Thorgrim?” Ulf asked. “Or from all the dead men?”
“From all the men. They have no use for weapons now,” Thorgrim said, and his tone did not welcome discussion. “And do not call me ‘Lord’,” he added. “I’m not the lord of anything. Not a dung heap, nothing.”
I am not a lord because I am a fool, he thought.
Once again the men climbed over the side and spread out along the shore. Starri Deathless limped after them, his wound graver than the others, and greatly aggravated by the day’s events. He had been there when Ottar’s men arrived, had taken up arms despite his agony, and fought until he had collapsed. But for Starri, the torment of having to stay still was worse than the torment of having to move.
“Starri,” Thorgrim said as Starri was swinging a leg painfully over the ship’s side. “Stay aboard, listen for the riders coming back. None of the others will hear them before you do.”
Starri nodded. His hearing was legendary. He brought his leg back inboard and climbed up onto the foredeck, leaning against the tall stem. The elegant, sweeping post terminated ten feet above with a carving of an angry, vengeful Thor looking out past the bow. Now Thor and Starri together faced the land beyond the riverbank, alert for any sound of danger.
Thorgrim draped the cut tunics over the sheer strake and kneeled down into the water in the ship’s bottom. He took up one of the tunics and shoved it into the hole, jamming it as tightly into the corner as he could, then reached for another.
He heard the sound of someone climbing aboard and then the splash of water. He looked over his shoulder. Harald was there with a leather helmet in hand, already scooping water from the bilge and throwing it back into the river. Thorgrim had guessed that he would opt for that job. As much as Harald liked to play the man, Thorgrim did not think he would relish the idea of stripping mail from the corpses of the dead.
“Harald,” Thorgrim said. “Wait until I’ve plugged the hole before you start bailing.”
Harald flushed. “Oh…yes…of course,” was all he managed to say. Harald was always eager to be foremost in everything, and sometimes he got ahead of himself.
Two more tunics, and the hole was as filled as it was going to get. Thorgrim had no doubt water would stream though it, but not as fast as they could bail, not for a while, anyway.
“All right,” Thorgrim said. “Start bailing.”
Harald went right at it, filling the helmet and flinging the water over the side. He had been voyaging for several years now. The Norse longships were the finest seagoing vessels on earth—fast, nimble, flexible and seaworthy—but they were still essentially just big open boats, and Harald, like the other mariners from the North countries, had considerable experience with bailing.
Harald was joined in his efforts by Thorodd Bollason, who flung water with great vigor despite the deep gash on his upper arm, left in the wake of a stroke from an Irish sword and bound with a blood-soaked bandage. Two others, Vali and Armod, joined in, and it was not long before Thorgrim could see the level of the water dropping against the ship’s side.
He looked up river and down, judging the strength of the current. He heard the sound of something falling on the deck, felt the shudder in his feet, and looked up to see Godi dropping a great armload of mail shirts and swords and axes over the sheer strake forward. More men were behind him, similarly laden. Their faces were grim and Thorgrim guessed that they, like himself, understood the need to do what they were doing, but were not happy about doing it.
Thorgrim looked out at the beach. The men were back scouring the dead for weapons, but the two prisoners just stood watching, arms folded. They were enigmas, a man and a woman, both clad in mail and wearing swords, of which they had been relieved. They had come walking down the riverbank and stumbled into Thorgrim and his men. They were Irish, as far as Thorgrim could tell, but he had the sense that they were trying to escape from something, or someone.
The man carried a sack over his shoulder, which Thorgrim had correctly guessed carried a small chest with a hoard of silver, gold and jewels inside.
Thieves? Thorgrim wondered. Perhaps, but they were dressed and armed better than any itinerant bandits that Thorgrim had ever seen. Nor did it matter at that moment. Whatever they were, they would not be idle.
“Harald!” Thorgrim called. “Tell our new friends there to find some helmets and get to bailing.”
Harald nodded and called to the two ashore, addressing them in the Irish tongue. He had picked up much of the language during their time in that country, motivated by a desire to speak with the various Irish women he had met, for better or worse.
Grudgingly, the prisoners found helmets and climbed aboard and soon they added their efforts to the bailing. Thorgrim felt the vessel shifting underfoot as the water level dropped and the keel came up off the bottom. More water went over the side. Sea Hammer rolled more upright.
“Night Wolf,” Starri called from forward. “Riders.”
Thorgrim nodded. “That’s all we get,” he called. These horsemen might have been the Irishmen coming back with more men, or they might not have been, but either way Thorgrim knew they could not risk waiting to find out. He looked over the side. The ship seemed to be floating, and high enough that they could get her off the shore. “Shove her out, let’s be gone!” he said. The men gleaning weapons ashore left off and put their shoulders to the side of the ship, and Harald leapt overboard and did likewise.
With a minimum of grunting and cursing, Sea Hammer’s bow slid off the gravel beach and, before climbing aboard, the men who had pushed her off turned her so she was pointing downstream. The current took her and swirled her away and Thorgrim steered as best he could until the oars were out and the ship was making way. They were around the bend and lost from sight before any of the mounted warriors appeared on the shore astern.
For two hours they worked their way downstream, rowing and bailing, until at last Sea Hammer came to rest on the sandbar that had stuck in Thorgrim’s memory.
Harald crossed the gravel to the trees beyond, uncoiling the rope as he went, and soon had the ship tied fore and aft. On Thorgrim’s orders the yard was lowered to the deck, the parrel binding it to the mast untied, and the heavy spar was set to rest on the larboard side.
That done, the vantnales were cast off to free the lower ends of the shrouds and the mast was unstepped and set beside the yard. This was no easy task with so few men, and those few in such bad shape, but it would greatly help in hiding the ship. More importantly, the weight of the spars on the larboard side lifted the hole to starboard out of the water, and so the ship was no longer in danger of filling.
Thorgrim pulled the soaked tunics from the rent in the side and was finally able to examine the hole more closely. He knelt on the deck and leaned into the damage. In his mind he saw the shattered planks cut back to where they were still solid, the holes drilled in the new pieces, the clench nails set in place. His thoughts traveled to the space beneath the deck boards where the spare strakes were stored away. In his mind he sorted through them just as he had with his eyes when they had first come aboard.
Sea Hammer was Thorgrim’s ship in every way. He built her, he and Aghen Ormsson, the skilled old shipwright who made his home at Vík-ló. All through the winter months Thorgrim and Aghen had worked side by side, shaping Sea Hammer and the other ships, Dragon and Blood Hawk. They had discussed every step, argued about some things, readily agreed on others. They had selected wood, shaped the strakes, laid out the keel and the frames and the mast steps. While every man in the longphort had had a hand in the building, the creating was done by Thorgrim and Aghen alone.
And so Thorgrim had no doubt that he could make his ship strong and whole again. Not just strong enough to live on the Irish river, but strong enough to survive the open sea. And he knew it would not be a simple task.
He also knew that it would not start that day. The sun was sinking in the west, and even as he looked at the damaged strakes, Thorgrim felt exhaustion wash over him. He recalled, with some surprise, that it was only that morning he and his men had been fighting for their lives against the mounted Irish warriors, that it had been just after dawn that he had seen his men, his shipmates, hacked down around him. It seemed like half a lifetime’s worth of horror and rage and grief had been shoved into those dozen hours of daylight.
He gathered his men and set a watch, and despite his exhaustion he took the first shift himself. The others crawled off to sleep and Thorgrim took his place on the afterdeck, his eyes turned out toward the darkening shore, his ears sharp for any sounds that were not the normal sounds of the night.
The details of the shoreline faded with the setting sun, and as they did the ghosts appeared, the images of the men he had lost that day: Agnarr, Skidi Battleax, Bersi, Sutare Thorvaldsson, all those men who had put themselves under his command, all those men who had followed him, and he had led them only to their deaths. In his mind he could see them all still alive, and some he could see at the moment their lives had ended, cut down by the Irish swords and spears.
He had led men before. And he had seen slaughter before. But he had never seen his own men butchered in that way. And he had never felt so entirely responsible for having led men to a bloody end.
In the younger days, and even when they had first come back to Ireland, the men he commanded were Ornolf’s men, not his. He might have been leading them, but the ultimate responsibility had rested with Ornolf, not him.
He reminded himself that the other chief men, Skidi and Bersi and Kjartan, had also agreed to take part in this raid. They had wanted to, and so had their men. And that thought did nothing to lift his burden.
“Never again,” he said, softly to himself. The men under his command might still meet with bloody and violent death, but not because he had been played for a fool.
The hours passed, and somewhere beyond the thick clouds Thorgrim knew the stars were wheeling in place, and at last he woke Godi to take the watch. With a grunt Godi hefted himself up, stood and stretched. Thorgrim gave one last look around. All was quiet. Some of the men were snoring. He lay down on a fur on the deck and closed his eyes. He was not sure sleep would come to him, and if it did he was wary of what dreams it might bring, but in the end exhaustion won the night and he slept, deep and dreamless.
And then he awoke and he knew something was wrong. He opened his eyes to the gray light of rismál, the hour of rising. It was quiet, no sound of alarm, but he knew something was wrong. He sat up just in time to see Godi stepping toward him, moving sideways, his eyes never leaving the riverbank.
Thorgrim stood. There were men coming out of the trees, armed men. Twenty at least, probably more. They were Irish, but they were not men-at-arms. They were something much worse than that.
He had had no notion then that he and his men might find themselves in need of a place where they could hide their ship and make repairs so that they might carry out a desperate and unlikely escape. That thought had not occurred to him, and yet he had seen the place and noted it and remembered it. The gods, perhaps, whispering in his ear. Thor wishing to come to his aid. Loki, playing a trick to prolong his misery.
The spot was on the south bank, which meant little on a river that was fordable in so many places, but still it put them on the shore opposite the monastery and the encampment from which the horse soldiers would come. The riverbank was heavily wooded on both sides, so the Northmen could not be seen from a distance, could only be discovered if someone hacked their way through the forest to the water’s edge. There was a gravel sandbar that reached out into the stream, perfect for beaching a ship. The wide curve in the river that had deposited the gravel there also helped hide the ship from anyone upstream or down.
“There,” Thorgrim said, loud but not very loud. The gravel bar was two hundred feet down current, and Thorgrim spoke to let the handful of men at the sweeps know that their labor would soon be over. He held the tiller himself, keeping the ship midstream as best he could.
Forward he saw heads turning to look, not many, as there were not that many heads aboard to turn. Harald, his son. The massive Godi, pulling the oar opposite Harald. A warrior named Olaf Thordarson, who had been with them since leaving Dubh-linn, and another named Ulf. Ten men in all, including Starri Deathless, wounded in the first fight with the Irish and left aboard Sea Hammer when they had launched the attack on Glendalough. Ten men out of more than two hundred who had sailed from Vík-ló on this raid.
“Harald, get some lines ready to run to the trees ashore,” Thorgrim called. Harald nodded and pulled his long oar inboard and laid it across the sea chests that the rowers used for benches. The loss of Harald’s oar did little to slow Sea Hammer’s progress downstream. It was the current that was driving the ship, not the rowers. The men at the oars were concerned mostly with keeping the vessel in the middle of the river, keeping her from turning sideways, and making a bit of headway when needed to give the steering board some bite.
And that was fortunate, because ten men, ten wounded, exhausted, dispirited men, and two prisoners, one a woman, were not about to move sixty-five feet of oak and pine longship through their own strength of arm.
“Give a pull! Unship your oars!” Thorgrim called next and the men still at the oars, five to larboard and four to starboard, leaned back for one last pull, then slid their oars in and laid them out as Harald had done. Thorgrim gave a twist of the tiller and Sea Hammer slewed sideways, coming up onto the gravel not bow-first but with the round part of her bilge sliding up into the shallow water in a way that would allow the sandbar to most effectively support the injured vessel.
The ship gave a slight shudder as she touched and Harald leapt off the sheer strake and onto the sandbar, ropes in hand. The water that ran an inch deep over Sea Hammer’s deck boards rolled to the larboard side like a small tidal surge.
Another ten minutes and we would have been on the river bed, Thorgrim thought. Dead men’s tunics stuffed into a two-foot hole in the ship’s bottom would not stanch a leak in any meaningful way.
Sea Hammer was the only ship of nine left after Ottar, the lunatic, and his men had abandoned Thorgrim’s warriors to the Irish in the predawn hours before battle. Sea Hammer had been left behind only because Ottar’s brother, Kjartan, who had turned against him, had cut a hole in her to stop Ottar’s stealing her as well. Thorgrim and the handful of men who had escaped the butchery that the Irish had doled out found her run up on the riverbank and half sunk.
Then the Irish had found her, too. Twenty of them, mounted warriors, too many for the Northmen to take on. As Thorgrim and his men watched from the cover of the trees, the Irish made ready to burn her where she lay. That, for Thorgrim, was too much. He was willing to die, indeed he preferred to die, before suffering such a final humiliation.
In the end that sacrifice was not necessary. Thorgrim’s prisoner, his male prisoner, was an Irish warrior named Louis, and Thorgrim sent him to warn the soldiers off, to tell them there were sixty Norse warriors coming up river. Thorgrim then made a show of force with the few men he had, and that had been enough to make the Irish ride off. But he knew they would not be gone for long, and they would not come back alone.
With the sound of the horses’ hooves growing fainter, Thorgrim led his men back aboard Sea Hammer. She was badly holed, true, but she did not have to voyage far, just a ways beyond where they might expect the Irish to come looking for them.
“We need something to stop up that hole,” Thorgrim said after peering at the damage through the clear water that flooded the hull. He straightened and looked around. There were dead men all over the shore. Most were his own men, those who had been left behind to guard the ships. They had given their lives in that effort, but they had not been enough to stop the near three hundred men under Ottar’s command.
Not all of the dead, however, were Thorgrim’s men. “Find some of Ottar’s dead,” Thorgrim ordered, “strip off their tunics and bring them to me. Just cut them away.” Thorgrim was tormented by the memory of the men who had died because of his misjudgment. He was tormented by the fact that he had no time to give them a proper funereal. He could not stand the thought of leaving their corpses, naked and bloating, for the ravens and the wolves to feast on.
The others nodded their understanding and climbed back ashore to find the corpses from which to strip clothing. They shuffled, they limped, they moved with obvious pain. They had all been wounded in some manner during the fight: a slash from a sword, a wound from the spear of a mounted warrior, a hard kick from a horse. They were wounded, but they could still move and that was why they lived. Those too wounded to run had been hacked down on the field.
One by one the men returned with the bundles of cloth that just that morning had clothed living warriors, and Thorgrim knew he had another decision to make. A harder one. He took the tunics and once again ran his eyes over the shore. His men had died fighting. The Choosers of the Slain had been among them already—they must have been; it had been hours. What need had they of weapons? They were in the corpse hall now, or they never would be.
“I need four of you to find helmets to bail the ship,” Thorgrim said, gesturing toward the river water that had flooded into Sea Hammer, a foot high at its deepest. “The rest of you, gather up all the swords, shields, mail, any weapons you can find and get them on board.”
“From Ottar’s men, Lord Thorgrim?” Ulf asked. “Or from all the dead men?”
“From all the men. They have no use for weapons now,” Thorgrim said, and his tone did not welcome discussion. “And do not call me ‘Lord’,” he added. “I’m not the lord of anything. Not a dung heap, nothing.”
I am not a lord because I am a fool, he thought.
Once again the men climbed over the side and spread out along the shore. Starri Deathless limped after them, his wound graver than the others, and greatly aggravated by the day’s events. He had been there when Ottar’s men arrived, had taken up arms despite his agony, and fought until he had collapsed. But for Starri, the torment of having to stay still was worse than the torment of having to move.
“Starri,” Thorgrim said as Starri was swinging a leg painfully over the ship’s side. “Stay aboard, listen for the riders coming back. None of the others will hear them before you do.”
Starri nodded. His hearing was legendary. He brought his leg back inboard and climbed up onto the foredeck, leaning against the tall stem. The elegant, sweeping post terminated ten feet above with a carving of an angry, vengeful Thor looking out past the bow. Now Thor and Starri together faced the land beyond the riverbank, alert for any sound of danger.
Thorgrim draped the cut tunics over the sheer strake and kneeled down into the water in the ship’s bottom. He took up one of the tunics and shoved it into the hole, jamming it as tightly into the corner as he could, then reached for another.
He heard the sound of someone climbing aboard and then the splash of water. He looked over his shoulder. Harald was there with a leather helmet in hand, already scooping water from the bilge and throwing it back into the river. Thorgrim had guessed that he would opt for that job. As much as Harald liked to play the man, Thorgrim did not think he would relish the idea of stripping mail from the corpses of the dead.
“Harald,” Thorgrim said. “Wait until I’ve plugged the hole before you start bailing.”
Harald flushed. “Oh…yes…of course,” was all he managed to say. Harald was always eager to be foremost in everything, and sometimes he got ahead of himself.
Two more tunics, and the hole was as filled as it was going to get. Thorgrim had no doubt water would stream though it, but not as fast as they could bail, not for a while, anyway.
“All right,” Thorgrim said. “Start bailing.”
Harald went right at it, filling the helmet and flinging the water over the side. He had been voyaging for several years now. The Norse longships were the finest seagoing vessels on earth—fast, nimble, flexible and seaworthy—but they were still essentially just big open boats, and Harald, like the other mariners from the North countries, had considerable experience with bailing.
Harald was joined in his efforts by Thorodd Bollason, who flung water with great vigor despite the deep gash on his upper arm, left in the wake of a stroke from an Irish sword and bound with a blood-soaked bandage. Two others, Vali and Armod, joined in, and it was not long before Thorgrim could see the level of the water dropping against the ship’s side.
He looked up river and down, judging the strength of the current. He heard the sound of something falling on the deck, felt the shudder in his feet, and looked up to see Godi dropping a great armload of mail shirts and swords and axes over the sheer strake forward. More men were behind him, similarly laden. Their faces were grim and Thorgrim guessed that they, like himself, understood the need to do what they were doing, but were not happy about doing it.
Thorgrim looked out at the beach. The men were back scouring the dead for weapons, but the two prisoners just stood watching, arms folded. They were enigmas, a man and a woman, both clad in mail and wearing swords, of which they had been relieved. They had come walking down the riverbank and stumbled into Thorgrim and his men. They were Irish, as far as Thorgrim could tell, but he had the sense that they were trying to escape from something, or someone.
The man carried a sack over his shoulder, which Thorgrim had correctly guessed carried a small chest with a hoard of silver, gold and jewels inside.
Thieves? Thorgrim wondered. Perhaps, but they were dressed and armed better than any itinerant bandits that Thorgrim had ever seen. Nor did it matter at that moment. Whatever they were, they would not be idle.
“Harald!” Thorgrim called. “Tell our new friends there to find some helmets and get to bailing.”
Harald nodded and called to the two ashore, addressing them in the Irish tongue. He had picked up much of the language during their time in that country, motivated by a desire to speak with the various Irish women he had met, for better or worse.
Grudgingly, the prisoners found helmets and climbed aboard and soon they added their efforts to the bailing. Thorgrim felt the vessel shifting underfoot as the water level dropped and the keel came up off the bottom. More water went over the side. Sea Hammer rolled more upright.
“Night Wolf,” Starri called from forward. “Riders.”
Thorgrim nodded. “That’s all we get,” he called. These horsemen might have been the Irishmen coming back with more men, or they might not have been, but either way Thorgrim knew they could not risk waiting to find out. He looked over the side. The ship seemed to be floating, and high enough that they could get her off the shore. “Shove her out, let’s be gone!” he said. The men gleaning weapons ashore left off and put their shoulders to the side of the ship, and Harald leapt overboard and did likewise.
With a minimum of grunting and cursing, Sea Hammer’s bow slid off the gravel beach and, before climbing aboard, the men who had pushed her off turned her so she was pointing downstream. The current took her and swirled her away and Thorgrim steered as best he could until the oars were out and the ship was making way. They were around the bend and lost from sight before any of the mounted warriors appeared on the shore astern.
For two hours they worked their way downstream, rowing and bailing, until at last Sea Hammer came to rest on the sandbar that had stuck in Thorgrim’s memory.
Harald crossed the gravel to the trees beyond, uncoiling the rope as he went, and soon had the ship tied fore and aft. On Thorgrim’s orders the yard was lowered to the deck, the parrel binding it to the mast untied, and the heavy spar was set to rest on the larboard side.
That done, the vantnales were cast off to free the lower ends of the shrouds and the mast was unstepped and set beside the yard. This was no easy task with so few men, and those few in such bad shape, but it would greatly help in hiding the ship. More importantly, the weight of the spars on the larboard side lifted the hole to starboard out of the water, and so the ship was no longer in danger of filling.
Thorgrim pulled the soaked tunics from the rent in the side and was finally able to examine the hole more closely. He knelt on the deck and leaned into the damage. In his mind he saw the shattered planks cut back to where they were still solid, the holes drilled in the new pieces, the clench nails set in place. His thoughts traveled to the space beneath the deck boards where the spare strakes were stored away. In his mind he sorted through them just as he had with his eyes when they had first come aboard.
Sea Hammer was Thorgrim’s ship in every way. He built her, he and Aghen Ormsson, the skilled old shipwright who made his home at Vík-ló. All through the winter months Thorgrim and Aghen had worked side by side, shaping Sea Hammer and the other ships, Dragon and Blood Hawk. They had discussed every step, argued about some things, readily agreed on others. They had selected wood, shaped the strakes, laid out the keel and the frames and the mast steps. While every man in the longphort had had a hand in the building, the creating was done by Thorgrim and Aghen alone.
And so Thorgrim had no doubt that he could make his ship strong and whole again. Not just strong enough to live on the Irish river, but strong enough to survive the open sea. And he knew it would not be a simple task.
He also knew that it would not start that day. The sun was sinking in the west, and even as he looked at the damaged strakes, Thorgrim felt exhaustion wash over him. He recalled, with some surprise, that it was only that morning he and his men had been fighting for their lives against the mounted Irish warriors, that it had been just after dawn that he had seen his men, his shipmates, hacked down around him. It seemed like half a lifetime’s worth of horror and rage and grief had been shoved into those dozen hours of daylight.
He gathered his men and set a watch, and despite his exhaustion he took the first shift himself. The others crawled off to sleep and Thorgrim took his place on the afterdeck, his eyes turned out toward the darkening shore, his ears sharp for any sounds that were not the normal sounds of the night.
The details of the shoreline faded with the setting sun, and as they did the ghosts appeared, the images of the men he had lost that day: Agnarr, Skidi Battleax, Bersi, Sutare Thorvaldsson, all those men who had put themselves under his command, all those men who had followed him, and he had led them only to their deaths. In his mind he could see them all still alive, and some he could see at the moment their lives had ended, cut down by the Irish swords and spears.
He had led men before. And he had seen slaughter before. But he had never seen his own men butchered in that way. And he had never felt so entirely responsible for having led men to a bloody end.
In the younger days, and even when they had first come back to Ireland, the men he commanded were Ornolf’s men, not his. He might have been leading them, but the ultimate responsibility had rested with Ornolf, not him.
He reminded himself that the other chief men, Skidi and Bersi and Kjartan, had also agreed to take part in this raid. They had wanted to, and so had their men. And that thought did nothing to lift his burden.
“Never again,” he said, softly to himself. The men under his command might still meet with bloody and violent death, but not because he had been played for a fool.
The hours passed, and somewhere beyond the thick clouds Thorgrim knew the stars were wheeling in place, and at last he woke Godi to take the watch. With a grunt Godi hefted himself up, stood and stretched. Thorgrim gave one last look around. All was quiet. Some of the men were snoring. He lay down on a fur on the deck and closed his eyes. He was not sure sleep would come to him, and if it did he was wary of what dreams it might bring, but in the end exhaustion won the night and he slept, deep and dreamless.
And then he awoke and he knew something was wrong. He opened his eyes to the gray light of rismál, the hour of rising. It was quiet, no sound of alarm, but he knew something was wrong. He sat up just in time to see Godi stepping toward him, moving sideways, his eyes never leaving the riverbank.
Thorgrim stood. There were men coming out of the trees, armed men. Twenty at least, probably more. They were Irish, but they were not men-at-arms. They were something much worse than that.
