LITMIR.BIZ

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axe lay a little further down the slope. I shuffled toward it and with considerable difficulty positioned myself so I could start to saw at the hide strip around my wrists, watching all the while for other Hardassa men or Edris himself to come running into view.

      Even a sharp axe takes a god-awful long time to cut through tough hide. Sitting there by Knui’s corpse it felt like forever. Every few seconds I let my gaze slip from lookout duty to check he hadn’t moved. I had a poor record with killing men on mountainsides. They tended to get up again and prove more trouble dead than alive.

      At last the hide parted and I rubbed my wrists. Looking up, Aslaug’s second lie became apparent. She had said if I head butted Alrik where she pointed that he wouldn’t be getting up again. Yet there he was, standing at the top of the four-foot ‘cliff’ that Knui and I sat at the bottom of. He didn’t seem pleased. More importantly, he had his hatchet in one hand and a wide-bladed knife with a serrated back in the other.

      ‘Edris will want me alive!’ I considered running but didn’t want to bet against how well Alrik could throw that hatchet. Also he could probably catch me. I thought about the axe lying on the rocks behind me. But I’d never swung one. Not even for splitting logs.

      The Viking’s glance flitted to Knui, lying there with the rocks painted a dark scarlet all around him. ‘Fuck Edris.’

      Two words told me all I needed to know. Alrik was going to murder me. He tensed, readying himself to jump down. And an axe hit him in the side of his head. The blade sheared through his left eye, across the bridge of his nose, and stopped midway along the eyebrow on the other side. Alrik fell to the ground and Snorri stepped into view. He put one large foot on the side of Alrik’s face and levered his axe free with an awful cracking sound that made me retch.

      ‘How’s the Sea-Troll?’ Snorri asked.

      ‘I’m fine! Thank you very much.’ I remained seated and patted myself down. ‘No, not fine. Bruised and damn near murdered!’ Seeing Snorri suddenly made it all seem much more real and the horror of it all settled on me. ‘Edris Dean was going to gut me with a knife and—’

      ‘Edris?’ Snorri interrupted. ‘So he’s behind this?’ He rolled Alrik’s corpse off the drop with his foot.

      Tuttugu came into view, glancing nervously over his shoulder. ‘The southerner? I thought it might just be the Hardassa…’ He caught sight of me. ‘Jal! How’s the boat.’

      ‘What is it with northmen and their damn boats? A prince of Red March nearly died on this—’

      ‘Can you carry us away from the Red Vikings?’ Snorri asked.

      ‘Well no, but—’

      ‘How’s the damn boat then?’

      I took the point. ‘It’s fine … but it’s about a spear’s length from the longboat that these two came in.’ I nodded to the corpses at my outstretched feet. ‘And there are over a dozen more with it, and two dozen on the mountain.’

      ‘Good that Snorri found you then!’ Tuttugu rubbed his sides like he always did when upset. ‘We were hoping they’d come ashore somewhere else…’

      ‘How—’ I stood up, thinking to ask how it was that Snorri did find me. Then I saw her. A little further back from the edge from where Snorri and Tuttugu looked down on me. A Norse woman, fair hair divided into a score of tight braids, each set with an iron rune tablet, a style I’d seen among older women in Trond, though none ever sported more than a handful of such runes.

      Snorri saw my surprise and gestured at the woman. ‘Kara ver Huran, Jal.’ And at me. ‘Jal, Kara.’ She spared me a brief nod. I guessed her to be about halfway between me and Snorri in age, tall, her figure hidden beneath a long black cape of tooled leather. I wouldn’t call her pretty … too weak a word. Striking. Bold-featured.

      I bowed as she drew closer. ‘Prince Jalan Kendeth of Red March at your ser—’

      ‘My boat is in the next cove. Come, I’ll lead you there.’ She pinned me with remarkably blue eyes as if taking an uncomfortably accurate measure of me, then turned to go. Snorri and Tuttugu made to follow.

      ‘Wait!’ I stumbled about, trying to gather my wits. ‘Snorri!’

      ‘What?’ Glancing back over his shoulder.

      ‘The necromancer. She’s here too!’

      Snorri turned back after Kara, shaking his head. ‘Better hurry then!’

      I set both hands to the top of the ‘cliff’ and prepared to heft myself up onto the slope above when I saw my sword hilt jutting over Alrik’s shoulder. He lay on his side, not far from Knui. Above the nose his head was little more than skull fragments, hair and brain. I hesitated. I’d killed my first man with that sword, albeit mostly by accident – at least he was the first one I remembered. I’d notched that sword battling against the odds in the Black Fort, wedged it hilt-deep in a Fenris wolf. If I’d ever done anything that might truly count as manly, honourable or brave it was done holding that blade.

      I took a step toward Alrik. Another. The fingers of his right hand twitched. And I ran like hell.

       9

      Deep gullies, rain-carved through ancient lava flows, brought us down to the cove where Kara’s boat lay at anchor.

      ‘It’s a long way out,’ I said, peering through the gloom. The footing in the gullies would have been dangerous in full day. Coming down in deep shadow had been practically begging for a broken ankle. And now with the night thick about us Kara expected me to swim toward a distant and slightly darker clot of sea that was allegedly a boat. I could see the gentle phosphorescence of the waves as the foam surged over the jagged rocks where the beach should be, and beyond them … nothing else. ‘A very long way out!’

      Snorri laughed as if I’d made a joke and started to strap his weapons onto the little raft Kara had towed ashore when she arrived. I hugged myself, shivering. The rain had returned. I had expected snow – the night felt cold enough for it. And somewhere out there the necromancer hunted us … or had already found us and now watched from the rocks. Out there, Knui and Alrik would be stumbling along our trail, oozing, broken, filled with that dreadful hunger that invades men when they return from death.

      While the others prepared themselves I watched the sea with my usual silent loathing. The moon broke from behind a cloudbank, lighting the ocean swell with glimmers and making white bands of the breaking waves.

      Tuttugu appeared to share some of my reservations but at least like a walrus he had his bulk to keep him warm and to add buoyancy. My swimming might accurately be described as drowning sideways.

      ‘I’m not good in the water.’

      ‘You’re not good on land,’ Snorri retorted.

      ‘We’ll come in closer.’ Kara glanced my way. ‘I can bring her closer now the tide’s in.’

      So one by one, with their bulkier clothing on the raft in tight-folded bundles, the three of them waded into the surf and struck out for the boat. Tuttugu went last and at least acknowledged how icy the sea was with some most un-Viking like squeals and gasps.

      I stood on the beach alone with the sound of the waves, the wind, and the rain. Freezing water trickled down my neck, my hair hung in my eyes, and the bits of me that weren’t numb with cold variously hurt, ached, throbbed, and stung. Moonlight painted the rocky slopes behind the shingle in black and silver, rendering a confused mosaic into which my fears could construct the slow advance of undead horrors. Perhaps the necromancer watched from those dark hollows even now, or Edris urged the Hardassa toward me with silent gestures… Clouds swallowed the moon, leaving me blind.

      Eventually, after far longer than I felt it reasonable for them to take, I heard Snorri calling.

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