Odin's Game Read online

  ‘Once they deliver the gold we’ll kill you anyway,’ the king said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Twenty

  Einar was hauled, kicked and shoved off the island and inland. He found himself surrounded on all sides by hate-filled eyes and jeering people. They spat on him, pushed him, kicked him and threw stones. A little way from the shore he saw a settlement ahead: a rampart and palisade surrounding clusters of round houses. As they got closer, women and children joined the mob. He found himself in the centre of a maelstrom of anger. Some threw clods of muck at him. All of them screamed and shouted abuse. They spoke in Irish which he did not understand but their expressions and the vitriolic sound of the words were enough for him to know they loathed him. Einar wondered what his people could have done to provoke such hatred. Several times the champion and other warriors of the king had to step in to prevent one of the howling mob from causing him a serious injury.

  They kept him with the pigs. There was a pen, which held twenty swine, right beside the chieftain’s big, round house. The champion pulled the mail shirt off Einar and his mother’s amulet was torn from his throat. Some of the Irish expressed surprise when they saw it but this time it did him no good. In fact the sight of the silver pendant seemed to provoke those around him into an even greater rage. An iron slave collar was fastened around his neck. The chain that led from the collar was fastened to a big rock in the middle of the pig pen, then Einar was pushed forward, shoved hard enough to send him sprawling face first into the reeking filth that covered the ground. The crowd laughed.

  Einar pulled himself up out of the mire and staggered over to the rock the chain was fastened to. He sat down and looked around. The pig pen was round and made of a wattle fence but the chain was not long enough to allow him to reach the perimeter. The fence of the pen was lined with hostile, jeering faces. Some threw vegetables or a few more stones at him but with a bit of distance now he was at least able to dodge the missiles. There was little for him to do but sit there and eventually the crowd became bored and drifted off.

  Einar had never felt so alone. He was cold, wet and caked with mud and shit. The pigs, curious, snuffled around him, then they too wandered off and left him to himself. He sighed and looked up at the heavens above. The sky was sheeted with grey cloud but blue shone through in places.

  What would become of him?

  It was a question that remained unanswered for the next few days, which proved to be constant misery. Chained in the pen, Einar lived in filth with the swine. Like the animals he was exposed to the elements and forced to eat the same left-over scraps they did, and all he had to drink was the tepid dirty water in their trough. The seemingly incessant rain churned the ground to mire that stank of the pigs’ shit. The rock in the middle of the pen that his chain was fastened to was the only island of dry in the lake of mud. At night he lay, shivering on it, able to snatch only a few moments of sleep before cold, discomfort or the probing snout of a pig woke him again. Outside the pen the busy life of the settlement went on, the Irish going about their daily tasks and paying scant attention to him. At least the adults did anyway. The children found him a new source of entertainment. They came whenever they could to spit at him or throw stones. Once they caught him dozing near the fence of the pen and they poked him with sharpened sticks. They jeered taunts in their language, the meaning of which was clear by the way they usually accompanied the words by drawing their forefingers across their throats.

  At first Einar had thought their parents might dissuade them from tormenting him. That idea quickly dissolved when a mother appeared at the fence and joined in throwing stones. She ruffled the hair of her son to demonstrate her approval of what he was doing.

  Einar came to loathe her son more than the rest. He was a little, ginger-haired, freckled runt of a child, perhaps eight or nine winters old. He came several times a day, screaming abuse in his language, his face constantly twisted in a snarl of hatred. His accuracy with stone throwing was particularly irritating and Einar often found himself skipping around the pen to avoid getting more painful welts and bruises on his body. In the beginning he had reasoned with himself that it was not the child’s fault he was so nasty, it was what his parents had taught him, but after several days he longed to break the chain that bound him, leap over the fence and wring the little bastard’s neck.

  Einar’s misery was increased by the smells of cooking that drifted from the chieftain’s house. While he starved, the greasy aroma of lamb, the mouth-watering smell of roasting pork or baking bread drifted through the air to torture his empty, roaring belly.

  He endured this hardship for ten days and nights. All the while he could feel himself get weaker. The rage that boiled within him kept him going but as the time wore on the shame he felt at his failure, both in the eyes of his mother and his uncle, began to overwhelm him. The cold and the tiredness seeped into his very bones. Hunger gnawed at his guts as though he was trying to eat himself from the inside out.

  Finally, one evening when for once the children left him alone, Einar lay on his back on the flat rock, gazing up at the empty heavens above as the sun began to set on the horizon. His heart felt like an aching void of desolation.

  ‘Gall.’

  An Irish voice disturbed him. Frowning, Einar turned his head and saw that the king was standing near the fence. Einar struggled to his feet and lurched through the mud towards him until he reached the limit of the chain which pulled him up a few tantalising steps away from the waist-high, wattle fence.

  The king was grinning, but the look was one of pure malice rather than mirth.

  ‘Not so haughty now, are you, Gall?’ He chuckled. ‘Sitting there, covered in pig shit. Well, news has arrived that your uncle the jarl seems to think enough of you to pay up.’

  Einar’s felt his heart leap. Both surprise and relief flooding into his guts.

  The king shook his head.

  ‘It won’t do you any good, you heathen bastard,’ he said. ‘Once we’ve used you as bait to land that gold we’ll cut your throat anyway and kill the men who bring the ransom. I’m going to make it clear to the jarl that if he tries to interfere here again it will cost him dear. You and your friends will join the others outside my door.’

  He cocked his head towards the main entrance to the big, round house. Einar was confused, but then noticed for the first time the dark balls lined up along the lintel above the doorway. Some were black, some brown and some pale grey. Then he saw that one still had wispy strands of hair clinging to the top of it. White teeth shone through a rent in the dry, leathery cheek of another. They were severed human heads, left to rot in the open air.

  ‘Those are all my most illustrious enemies,’ the king continued. ‘In a way you will win fame, Gall. On cold, dark winter nights I’ll point to yours and tell my grandchildren all about how I killed the big, scary Viking. The truth won’t be much of a tale so I’ll have to make some things up to make it more exciting.’

  Chuckling to himself, he walked away.

  Cold, weary, starving and alone, Einar lay on the flat rock as the sun set. The sky darkened and the clouds cleared away, revealing the bright stars winking away above. Once the night sky had been a wonder to him. Back home in Iceland they had said it was the realm of the Gods and he drew some comfort that in this strange, foreign land the sky was the same as at home and the same stars looked down from above. He knew the stars and the patterns they made. Looking up into the speckled blackness he could see the three stars in a slanted row that made up the Goddess Frigg’s distaff. To the north was the big star that they said was the home of the white God, Heimdall, who guarded the way to the realm of the Aesir. Not far away was the V-shaped collection of stars that made ‘The Wolf’s Maw’, with one reddish star that represented the terror-wolf’s baleful eye. One day, it was said, that the wolf would eat up the sun and the moon. The world would fall into darkness and it would be the end of everything. At least that was something Einar no longer had to worry about. Tomorrow he wou
ld likely be dead.

  He could also make out the strange, milky-white band that crossed the sky in a long curve. They said that this was the path the dead took at the end of their lives as they made their way to wherever it was they went to when it was all over. Einar felt a shiver that for once had nothing to do with the cold. Was that where he would be this time tomorrow night? A lost soul, wandering across the sky, perhaps bound for the kingdom ruled by the Ice Queen, Hel. Or was that just all tales told to children? Were the Gods really up there? Even if they were, did they even care what was going on here in the Middle Earth?

  The king was right. His was not much of a tale to tell. He heaved a deep sigh as he thought about his Saga. What would they say about him when he was gone? When he had first embarked on this adventure, mere weeks before, his heart had been afire with the thought of the generations to come who would tell stories around firesides of the heroic exploits Einar accomplished, the enemies he vanquished and the gold he won. Now that would never be. His Saga would in fact be a rather short story. There was a man called Einar. He grew up on his mother’s farm in Iceland. He never knew his father. His mother sent him to the court of his uncle, Thorfinn, Jarl of Orkney. On his first voyage to Ireland he was killed. The End.

  He grunted. That would not keep many entertained in the hall of the jarl. They would, most probably, have a good laugh though. Hrolf certainly would. Further bitterness filled him at the thought of his sneering bully of a cousin. No doubt they would chuckle for a few years every time his name was mentioned, then eventually he would be forgotten. And as all those who knew him died, with no stories to tell of him the memory of the Einar who had once lived would fade into obscurity as if he had never existed. That was to be his fate. He clenched his teeth and silently cursed the Norns, the weird sisters who sat at the roots of the world and spun the tapestry that determined the fates of all men. What had he done to deserve this fate?

  With another sigh he laid his head back on the stone. To him, the splendour of the night sky had suddenly lost its beauty. To his eyes it now looked like isolated, pin-pricks of light, scattered and lost in a vast, endlessly deep, empty, black desolation.

  Twenty-One

  If nothing else, it was a beautiful day to die.

  The next morning dawned crisp and clear. There was a chill of early winter frost in the air but it was not enough to raise a shiver. Einar was unchained, his hands were bound before him and then he was prodded at spear point back down the path to the island where he had first been captured. The Irish were all ready for war, armed to the teeth and chattering in an excited way as they made their way to the shore. Coming over the humped top of the island Einar saw that a dragon-prowed Norse warship rested at anchor a little offshore like a falcon hovering above its prey. A black-headed seabird swooped in an effortless arc across the azure sky, its call plaintive on the soft air. The early morning sun glittered across the water like countless diamonds, scintillating before the low, gently rolling hills on the lough shore.

  Einar, who had been lost in his own thoughts of his coming end, was briefly roused at the sight of the ship. It was not the ship that had brought him here. Instead this was a smaller, sleek vessel, built for speed and hit-then-run raiding. He frowned, trying to recall where he had seen it before then remembered it was the snekkja that had been anchored in the harbour in Orkney when he arrived there, what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  He could see figures on the deck of the ship but it was too far away to make out who they were. He felt a sharp blow on the back of his knees, forcing him to collapse into a kneeling position. He sucked in air through his teeth at the pain as his kneecaps struck the stones and heard a guffaw of amusement from the king’s champion behind him, the man who had administered the blow.

  Looking out to the ship again, Einar could see that a little Irish currach, a small rowing boat made from leather hide stretched over a wicker frame, was alongside the warship. He could tell from the clothing being worn that an Irishman was at the oars but two Norsemen were climbing gingerly into the currach. Once they were seated the boat pushed off and began heading for the shore.

  The champion appeared before Einar with a long strip of cloth in his hands. He slid it over Einar’s head and for a moment Einar felt panic as he thought he was about to be strangled, but instead the champion pulled it tight when it was about mouth height. The material cut into his cheeks and filled his mouth. Einar gagged as it bit against the back of his jaws and he felt like he was going to be sick. He knew he had to fight the urge at all costs. With the material in his mouth he would choke on his own vomit, which would surely be the final level of humiliation in what was already going to be a shameful end. The champion completed the task by tying the cloth in a knot at the back of Einar’s head.

  ‘That’s just in case you think of trying to warn your friends,’ the king said.

  Einar looked around and saw that the scrawny bishop had joined them as well. He had a blissful look of triumph on his face that suggested witnessing the death of heathens was something he especially enjoyed.

  Regret and anger surged through Einar’s chest like stabs from a Saxon knife. It was so unfair. The emotions quelled his nausea and he turned his attention back to the sea. A soft breeze tugged at his long blond hair as he watched the currach bobbling over the slightly choppy waters towards the shore. The remainder of his life was now just the time it would take for the little boat to cover the distance from the warship to the little island.

  The memory of his mother’s face on the day he had left home came to his mind. His anguish was enhanced by the shame that the amulet she had given him now hung around the neck of the Irish king who stood over him, its leather thong straining against the thickness of his neck.

  With a heavy heart he reflected that he had failed spectacularly on his very first mission and his mother’s high hopes for him would come to nothing. He gave a sardonic grunt as the thought occurred to him that at least death would spare him the humiliation that would have awaited him on his return to his uncle’s court, particularly that of his sneering cousin Hrolf. As the clouds drifted overhead, he yet again wondered what he had done to deserve such a miserable fate.

  The little boat had almost reached the shore. The king leaned over and growled into his ear: ‘Time to die.’

  Einar narrowed his eyes against the glare of the low morning sun. He straightened his back, trying as best he could to steel himself for what was coming.

  The currach crunched onto the gravel of the shore and came to a halt. The little boat tilted to one side as the three men it carried got out and splashed through the shallows onto the island.

  One of the them was the Irish warrior who had rowed the boat out to the longship. The other two, the Norsemen, Einar recognised. The first one was very tall and slightly skinny, his legs seeming too long for his body. His companion was much shorter than him and his short-shorn hair receded from his forehead. Both were clad in chainmail byrnjas, and round their shoulders were heavy fur cloaks. They were the Norwegians he had seen in his uncle’s hall in Orkney.

  Einar frowned. Why had they been sent to ransom him? He had expected perhaps Ivar or even Hrolf, but not these two who were not even liegemen of his uncle. To his further dismay neither of them bore any weapons. This must have been a condition that the Irish had insisted on. They wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Between them the Norsemen lifted a large wooden chest from the boat and carried it onto the island. From its evident weight and the metallic clanking it made, Einar surmised that contained within was the ransom for his head.

  ‘Not long now, Gall,’ the king said out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Keep quiet and we’ll make it painless. Make one sound and I’ll make sure it takes days for you to die.’

  Then he strode forward to meet the newcomers, his feet crunching on the stones of the shore. The Norsemen put the chest down on the rocks and straightened up. The little one looked at the Irish warriors who surrounded them with a scowl that qu
ickly, inexplicably, turned to a smile. The tall one stood with his arms folded. The nonchalance of both betrayed the fact that they clearly had no idea what was about to happen to them. Einar noted the Irishmen surreptitiously drawing weapons that they held behind their backs.

  ‘Have you brought the ransom?’ the king demanded. He towered above the little dark-haired Norseman, glaring down at him in a way meant to intimidate, his chest puffed out and an unsheathed knife grasped in a meaty fist behind him.

  ‘We’ve got your reward, if that’s what you mean,’ the little man said. He turned away, bent down and unclasped the chest, then stood up again and smiled at the king in a manner that could only be described as insolent. With a backwards flick of his heel he kicked the lid of the chest open.

  Einar caught sight of a look of angry confusion crossing the face of the king. At the same time the smile disappeared from the little Norseman’s face. In an instant his expression turned utterly feral. A fierce snarl erupted from his lips like the snort of an animal. He leapt at the king. His arms and legs fastened around the man’s body as he sunk his teeth deep into his neck. The Irishman’s cry of consternation suddenly changed key to an unmanly high-pitched shriek as the Norseman pulled his head back, ripping open his throat and unleashing a torrent of bright crimson from the ruptured blood vessels.

  The king toppled backwards, his hands grasping at his throat in a vain attempt to stem the blood that gushed from it. His assailant was left standing, his face a blood-soaked mask of rage. Behind him the tall Viking bent down and pulled a double-headed axe from the chest on the ground. His movements were a blur as he hefted it behind him then launched it. Einar heard the whooping noise at it flew through the air, rotating as it went. He felt the disturbed air as it passed by, mere inches from his head. There was a startled cry, a wet crunch and a spray of warm liquid splattered across the side of Einar’s head. Turning to look, he saw that the axe had struck the king’s champion deep in the chest. As the man collapsed Einar winced, realising that it was the champion’s blood that had splashed over him.