A Sacred Storm Read online

  A

  SACRED

  STORM

  Also by Theodore Brun

  A Mighty Dawn

  Theodore Brun studied Dark Age archaeology at Cambridge. In 2010, he quit his job as an arbitration lawyer in Hong Kong and cycled 10,000 miles across Asia and Europe to his home in Norfolk. A Sacred Storm is his second novel.

  A

  SACRED

  STORM

  Theodore Brun

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Theodore Brun, 2018

  The moral right of Theodore Brun to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 001 8

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 002 5

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 000 1

  Printed in Great Britain

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  This one’s for Tash.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  AT THE HALLS OF UPPSALA, SVEÄLAND:

  Sviggar Ívarsson – King of the Sveärs

  Lady Saldas – Queen of the Sveärs and Sviggar’s second wife

  Svein & Katla – their infant children

  Sigurd Sviggarsson – Prince of Sveäland and heir apparent

  Vargalf – his personal oathman

  Aslíf Sviggarsdottír, known as Lilla – Princess of Sveäland

  Erlan Aurvandil – the king’s bodyguard and member of the Council of Nine

  Kai Askarsson – his servant

  Huldir Hoskursson – Earl of Nairka and member of the Council of Nine

  Gettir Huldirsson – known as “the Black” – one of Huldir’s two surviving sons

  Gellir Huldirsson – known as “the White” – his twin brother

  Bodvar Beriksson – Earl of Vestmanland and member of the Council of Nine

  Bara Ballirsdottír – handmaiden to Queen Saldas

  Einar the Fat-Bellied – a king’s karl

  Jovard – a king’s karl

  Aleif Red-Cheeks – a king’s karl

  Vithar Lotharsson – a goði and member of the Council of Nine

  Rissa – a serving-thrall

  AT THE HALL OF DANNERBORG, EASTERN GOTARLAND:

  Ringast Haraldarsson – Lord of Eastern Gotarland, Prince of Danmark and eldest son to Harald Wartooth, King of the Danes

  Thrand Haraldarsson – Prince of Danmark and second son to King Harald

  Rorik Haraldarsson – Prince of Danmark and third son to King Harald

  Sletti – the steward of Dannerborg

  Ubbi the Hundred – a warrior mercenary from Friesland and Prince Ringast’s guest at Dannerborg

  Visma – a Wendish shieldmaiden

  Duk – her husband

  Gerutha – a servant-woman

  Grim & Geir of Hedmark – cousins and mercenaries

  AT THE HALL OF LEITHRA, DANMARK :

  Harald Roriksson – known as “the Wartooth” – King of the Danes

  Branni – his oathman, councillor and oldest friend

  PROLOGUE

  He is dying and he knows it.

  In the slanting rays of a falling sun his horse’s shoulder glistens with blood soaked through his breeches.

  His comrades are dead. But somehow he got away. Got this far.

  He feels cold, despite everything around him signalling a warm spring evening. Golden light, foliage erupting, mocking the numbness creeping through his bones. All the while he hears the whisper of Hel, her breath soft beside his ear. He will slide back into her embrace soon enough, but not before he has done this last service to his king.

  He glances down at his wound: an ugly gape in the left of his abdomen. The leather byrnie is torn and through the oozing blood he glimpses the slick greyness of his own entrails. The sweet scent of spring is soured with the reek of open viscera. He has smelled it before – many times in battle, amid the roil of Skogul’s Storm, when the Valkyries ride to carry off the fallen heroes – the einherjar – to Odin’s hearth in the Hall of the Slain.

  Valhöll.

  Is that to be his glorious reward?

  There was nothing glorious about that savage skirmish under the gloomy boughs of the Kolmark forest. Screams of terror, desperate pleas for mercy, bowel-emptying shrieks of pain. There was hardly time to snatch their weapons before half of them were butchered.

  How did I get away?

  The question haunts him. Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he died with the others and Odin has chosen him to deliver this message – has sent him back from the dead, a draugr. A harbinger of death to the living.

  There is a rustle in the undergrowth to his right. He looks and sees something moving. A shadow lurking beside him. Is it following him?

  He stops. The shadow stops. And then he sees. A wolf? No. A dog – a hound, staring at him with one wide, unblinking eye. The other is an empty socket. A doorway into darkness.

  The horse moves on, unbidden. Its sudden movement jars him. When the wave of pain has passed he looks back. But the hound is gone.

  Perhaps it was another draugr-spirit, sent by Odin to watch him to his doom.

  One eye.

  The eye that sees. The eye that calls...

  He lifts his own. Their lids are heavy. Through the last of the beech trees, he can see smoke-wreaths swirling into the purpling sky, risen from the hearths of the halls of Uppsala. One roof towers above the others: the Great Hall of Sviggar Ívarsson, the seat from which the old king has ruled over Sveäland for thirty years. The Bastard King, his enemies call him, although to him, Sviggar has been a faithful lord. Honest and generous.

  Yet now all his gifts will be paid for in full. Paid with the last drop of blood.

  The Great Hall looms like an oak mountain, propped by vast buttresses, each thick as a giant’s forearm. Through the foliage of the Sacred Grove he spies the carving that crowns the gable: a black eagle with a wolf’s head – symbol of Sviggar’s line and now the Sveär people also.

  How many feasts have I enjoyed under that roof? How many toasts have I drunk? How many songs have I sung? And the women...

  There will be no more of them. Not in this life.

  The sun is kissing the horizon. Looking west, he sees the three familiar domes of earth: the King Barrows. Under each is buried an ancient king of the Yngling line. The western half of each mound is bathed in copper light, their eastern halves swaddled in shadow. The first midges of the year dance on the air like sparks from the hearth of the sun. The sparks smear and he realizes his vision is blurring.

  A beautiful day to die.

  His breathing is a shallow rattle. His horse suddenly lurches into a trot, each rise a stab at the wound in his side. Perhaps the animal senses its home and hay are near; or that its master’s final breath is nearer still. But he mustn’t die yet. Not until he has reached the shadow of the Great Hall. No
t until he has found someone.

  Not until he has delivered his message.

  PART ONE

  DAUGHTER OF A KING

  CHAPTER ONE

  The apple was gone in a blink.

  The horse nuzzled his other hand, expecting another.

  ‘You’re not an easy girl to please, you know that,’ said Erlan Aurvandil, tickling her hoary chin. But Idun loved apples, just like the goddess she was named after.

  Gods, but she’s a grumpy-looking beast, he thought. Still, she looked a sight healthier than the bag of bones he’d ridden in on when he first arrived at the halls of the Sveär king. Good eating and rest had seen to that. And the odd apple.

  Erlan produced another from his pouch. Idun gobbled it down.

  ‘Off you go, you old mule,’ he said, thwacking her rump. The horse plodded off to a clump of grass nearby. Erlan, meanwhile, began limping back towards the halls and smaller dwellings, inhaling the sweet, green air. It was one of those evenings that seemed swollen with life, a foretaste of summer, when even the pain in his ankle felt not quite so sharp. As if, one day, it might heal.

  Of course, it never would.

  The limp was his father’s mistake. He hadn’t known the rock lay under the sand waiting to change his son’s destiny. ‘Jump. I’ll catch you,’ he had laughed. A test of trust: at least that was what Erlan thought it was. He had jumped. His father stepped aside. The rock did the rest. No test then, just a lesson: that you can’t trust anyone in this world, least of all the ones you love. Aye, he had learned that lesson well. That was why his father, his home, his inheritance – his very name – were all buried under an oath. Buried with her.

  Because of his father’s lie, she had had to die. Inga – his first love. Inga – the ghost in his soul. She had cut her own throat and with the same stroke cut him loose from all that he knew and loved. So he was here, and she was there, lying under some barrow in the land of his birth. A land he had sworn never to see again.

  He spat into the dust, as if that could expel the bitterness that rankled in his blood. Here, he was an exile. An outlander. Yet this was where he had found a new home and a new life after that other life had ended.

  A cuckoo’s call floated down out of the treetops of the Kingswood.

  He sighed, shaking off worn, old thoughts. Surely even a cripple couldn’t feel bitter on an evening like this? After the long winter the beech trees were in full garb, bulging in on the Uppland halls while the last of the sun splintered through their branches. His nostrils filled with the scent of the woods and meadows. Laughter and shrill voices tinkled on the twilit air as mothers called their children home. And with the dusk-dew, a kind of peace settled over the shingled roofs around Uppsala.

  Maybe this was enough. Maybe this was his reward after enduring that dark and savage winter. He had arrived no better than a beggar, but King Sviggar had accepted his oath in return for salt and hearth. And afterwards came those mysterious deaths. Sviggar’s daughter, Lilla, had disappeared. Erlan had stepped forward. He had followed the trail into a vast, cold wilderness until it led him down into the dark depths under the earth. He entered seeking death. Instead he found life, and her. And he was a different man when he restored her to her father. The grateful king had honoured him, given him gold and a place on his council, even given him a new name: Aurvandil. It meant ‘shining wanderer’. But for now he had no need to wander.

  Now? Why not for ever?

  He crossed the expansive yard of the Great Hall. All was quiet. Most folk would be settling down to supper around one of the many hearth-fires. His belly grumbled in anticipation, hoping Kai had cooked something good.

  Kai Askarsson was his servant, at least in name. Erlan had rescued Kai from a whipping post in a lonely corner of Gotarland, many leagues to the south. At the time it had been against his better judgement to let Kai tag along, but since then the Norns – those ancient spinners of fate – had woven together their paths tighter than the great wolf Fenrir’s leash.

  Kai was fearless, reckless, irreverent, irrepressible, mischievous, garrulous, sneaky and downright mad at times. In short, about as different from Erlan as a man could be. But Erlan liked him better than any other, too.

  He set off down the slope towards the scattered halls and houses that lay to the east of the Great Hall, eager to discover what Kai would conjure from their pot tonight.

  That was when he heard a strange noise.

  It stopped him at once.

  He turned and shaded his eyes against the sunset, judging the sound to have come from back towards the Sacred Grove. Seeing nothing, he was about to shrug it away, when out of the haze emerged the silhouette of a horse and its rider. Even from there, he could see the rider was slumped over the horse’s withers.

  There was another sound, halfway between a strangled salutation and a wail.

  ‘You all right there, friend?’ he called as the horseman drew closer.

  No answer. And the horse kept on, so that Erlan was forced to lurch aside. Before he had time to object, the rider had collapsed on top of him.

  They hit the ground hard, Erlan winded under the man’s full weight. The rider was groaning like a stuck boar. He was wounded, clearly, but only when Erlan slithered out from under him and saw his own tunic soaked with blood did he realize how badly.

  He rolled him onto his back. ‘We need help here, now!’ he yelled. A stable-thrall appeared from under a byre and came running. Then a woman in a head-cloth emerged from a smithy. When she saw the blood-soaked rider she screamed. That brought others.

  The man’s breath was grating like a saw. Erlan smelled the stink of punctured bowels and peered at his wound. It was an ugly gash caked black around its edges. Blood still welled from inside. His cheeks were deathly pale. Still, his face was familiar. Another of the king’s house-karls, Erlan thought, named Uttgar or Ottar, maybe? There were so many of the buggers it was impossible to remember all their names. ‘He needs water.’

  The stable-hand rose and pushed through the gathering crowd. Meanwhile the rider was gulping at the air, bleeding.

  Dying.

  More folk were arriving, crowding round. ‘Give him some room, damn you!’ Erlan shifted, trying to cradle the karl’s head in his lap.

  ‘That’s Ormarr,’ said a thrall-girl.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ said a smith. ‘Look, he’s trying to say something.’

  Certainly his lips were moving. Erlan put his ear to the tremulous breath.

  ‘The... Kolmark.’ Hardly a whisper.

  ‘The forest?’

  ‘Slain... all of us, slain.’

  ‘What’s he saying?’ the thrall-girl demanded, plucking at Erlan’s elbow.

  ‘If you shut up, I could tell you... Go on.’

  ‘War— tooth... War— tooth...’

  ‘Wartooth, he says. He must mean King Harald!’ declared the smith, who was leaning over Erlan’s shoulder. The name buzzed around the gathering. None was more hated or feared in all of Sveäland than Harald Wartooth, King of the Danes.

  ‘What’s the old bastard done now?’ growled someone further back.

  Ormarr groaned.

  ‘He’s dying,’ the smith said, prodding a bony finger in Erlan’s ribs. ‘Ask him again.’

  ‘Look at me.’ He tried to brush Ormarr’s sweat-slicked hair out of his eyes. ‘What about the Wartooth? Who is slain? Speak, man.’ But the karl only rolled his eyes. ‘Where’s that bloody water?’ Erlan yelled, looking round for the errant stable-thrall. The nearest water butt was not thirty yards away but there was no sign of the fool. Not that a gulp of water would do much good now.

  With a sudden surge of strength, Ormarr seized Erlan’s tunic and pulled him close. His eyes were burning with fever. He put his lips to Erlan’s ear and uttered his last words, so faint Erlan could barely hear them. Then his grip slackened, his eyelids drooped, his head fell back. Dead.

  Erlan slumped back on his heels.

  ‘What ’e say?’ asked the sm
ith.

  But Erlan was staring at Ormarr’s lifeless lips.

  ‘He whispered something. Was it about the Wartooth?’

  ‘What did he say, damn it?’ demanded another.

  Erlan rose to his feet, glaring right through the wall of eager faces, deaf to their questions, his mind fixed on one object and one alone. He had to see the king.

  Because war was coming.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sviggar Ívarsson, King of the Sveärs, sat on his oak-hewn throne tugging at his grey and white beard, glowering like a dwarf who’d lost his gold.

  Behind the old king hung dusty tapestries – some depicting great deeds of his war-mongering father, Ívar Wide-Realm; others, scenes from older sagas of heroes long dead or tales of the ancient gods who still haunted the reaches of the north. The hour was late, the air fragrant with the scent of pine resin burning in stone-dish lamps. Around the chamber shadows danced, leaping with each flicker of the torches on the walls.

  ‘Confused words from a dying man,’ said Sviggar at last. His voice, though hollowed by age, still carried the weight of authority. When he spoke, men listened, and obeyed. ‘A man says wild things at death’s threshold. His words tell us nothing.’

  ‘His words are clear enough,’ exclaimed his son Sigurd, rising from his seat. ‘And someone put a blade in his belly!’

  ‘Sit down!’ Sviggar hauled himself to his feet. He was tall still and once must have been an imposing figure. But age, ever the vanquisher of great men, had reduced his long limbs to brittle sticks.

  With a scowl, his son flung himself back in his chair and went back to tugging at the corner of a dark eyebrow. Erlan had witnessed this cavilling between father and son a dozen times at least since his appointment to the king’s council. More often the older, wiser head had the right of it, but this time Erlan wasn’t so sure.

  Upon hearing news of this strange death, Sviggar had summoned an immediate council. However, only five members of his Council of Nine could be found just then: his son Sigurd, the white-haired goði Vithar, a pair of earls – Bodvar and Huldir – and Erlan himself.