Half a King Read online

  Then Mother Sun showed her blinding face and put fire upon the water. The tide would soon be draining, carrying with it the many ships drawn up upon the sand, sharp-tailed so they could slip away as swiftly as they arrived, ready to sweep the warriors to Vansterland to rip their vengeance from Grom-gil-Gorm.

  Uncle Odem climbed the hill with fist firm on sword’s hilt and his easy smile traded for a warrior’s frown.

  “It is time,” he said.

  So Yarvi stood, and stepped past his uncle, and held high his borrowed sword, swallowing his fears and roaring into the wind as loud as he could. “I, Yarvi, son of Uthrik and Laithlin, King of Gettland, swear an oath! I swear a sun-oath and a moon-oath. I swear it before She Who Judges, and He Who Remembers, and She Who Makes Fast the Knot. Let my brother and my father and my ancestors buried here bear witness. Let He Who Watches and She Who Writes bear witness. Let all of you bear witness. Let it be a chain upon me and a goad within me. I will be revenged upon the killers of my father and my brother. This I swear!”

  The gathered warriors clashed the bearded heads of their axes against their helms, and their fists against their painted shields, and their boots against Father Earth in grim approval.

  Yarvi’s uncle frowned. “That is a heavy oath, my king.”

  “I may be half a man,” said Yarvi, struggling to get his sword back into its sheepskin-lined sheath. “But I can swear a whole oath. The men appreciated it, at least.”

  “These are men of Gettland,” said Hurik. “They appreciate deeds.”

  “I thought it was a fine oath.” Isriun stood near, yellow hair streaming in the wind. “A kingly oath.”

  Yarvi found he was very glad to see her there. He wished no one else had been, then he could have kissed her again, and probably made a better effort at it. But all he could do was smile, and half-raise his half-hand in an awkward farewell.

  There would be time for kisses when they next met.

  “My king.” It seemed even Mother Gundring’s eyes, forever dry in any smoke or dust or weather, held tears. “May the gods send you fine weatherluck, and even better weaponluck.”

  “Don’t worry, my minister,” he said, “there’s always the chance I’ll survive.”

  His true mother shed no tears. All she did was fasten his twisted cloak-buckle yet again and say, “Stand like a king, Yarvi. Speak like a king. Fight like a king.”

  “I am a king,” he said, however much of a lie it felt, and he forced through his tightened throat, “I’ll make you proud,” even though he had never known how.

  But he looked back, as he walked with his uncle’s gently steering hand upon his shoulder, the soldiers forming snakes of glimmering steel as they filed towards the water, and he saw his mother clutch Hurik by his mail and drag him close, strong man though he was.

  “Watch over my son, Hurik,” he heard her say in a choking voice. “He is all I have.”

  Then the Golden Queen was gone with her guards and attendants and her many slaves towards the city, and Yarvi was striding through the colourless dawn towards the ships, their masts a swaying forest against the bruising sky. Trying to walk the way his father used to, eager for the fight, even though he was weak-kneed, and sore-throated, and red-eyed, and his heart was crowded with doubts. He could still smell the smoke.

  He left Father Peace to weep among the ashes, and hastened to the iron embrace of Mother War.

  7.

  MAN’S WORK

  Each wave born of Mother Sea would lift him, roll him, tug his sodden clothes, make him twitch and stir as if struggling to rise. Each wave hissed back out would drag the body down the beach and leave it grounded, tangled hair stuck with froth and sand, limp as the knots of seaweed on the shingle.

  Yarvi stared at him, wondering who he was. Or had been. Boy or man? Had he died running or fought bravely?

  What was the difference now?

  The keel ground against sand, the deck shuddered, Yarvi stumbled and had to clutch at Hurik’s arm to steady himself. With a clunk and clatter the men shipped their oars, unhooked their shields, and sprang over the ship’s sides into the surf, sullen at being last to land, too late for any glory or plunder worth the taking. Crewing the king’s ship would have been a high honor in King Uthrik’s reign.

  No honor at all in King Yarvi’s.

  Some men took the prow-rope and hauled the ship past the floating corpse and higher up the beach, others unslung their weapons and hurried towards the town of Amwend. It was already burning.

  Yarvi chewed at his lip as he made ready to clamber over the side with some shred of kingly composure, but the handle of his gilded shield twisted in his weakling’s grip, tangled with his cloak and nearly dumped him face-first in the brine.

  “Gods damn this thing!” Yarvi tugged the straps loose, dragged the shield from his withered arm and flung it away among the sea-chests the men sat on while they rowed.

  “My king,” said Keimdal. “You should keep your shield. It’s not safe—”

  “You’ve fought me. You know what my shield’s worth. If someone comes at me I can’t stop with sword alone I’m better off running. I’ll run faster without my shield.”

  “But, my king—”

  “He is king,” rumbled Hurik, pushing his thick fingers through his white-streaked beard. “If he says we all put aside our shields, it must be so.”

  “Those with two good hands are welcome to theirs,” said Yarvi, slithering into the surf, cursing as another cold wave soaked him to the waist.

  Where sand gave way to grass some new-made slaves were roped together, waiting to be herded aboard one of the ships. They were hunched and soot-smeared, wide eyes full of fear or pain or disbelief at what had surged from the sea and stolen their lives. Beside them, a group of Yarvi’s warriors diced for their clothes.

  “Your Uncle Odem asks for you, my king,” said one, then got up frowning and kicked a sobbing old man onto his face.

  “Where?” asked Yarvi, his tongue sticking in his mouth, it was suddenly so dry.

  “On top of the holdfast.” The man pointed up towards a drystone tower on a sheer rock above the town, waves angry about its base on one side, a frothing inlet on the other.

  “They didn’t close the gates?” asked Keimdal.

  “They did, but three of the headman’s sons were left in the town, and Odem slit one’s throat and said he’d kill the next if the gate wasn’t opened.”

  “It was,” said one of the other warriors, then chuckled as his number came up. “New socks!”

  Yarvi blinked. He had never thought of his smiling uncle as a ruthless man. But Odem had sprouted from the same seed as Yarvi’s father, whose rages he still carried the marks of, and their drowned brother Uthil, at the memory of whose peerless swordsmanship old warriors in the training square still came over dewy-eyed. Sometimes calm waters hide fierce currents, after all.

  “A curse on you!”

  A woman had tottered from the line of slaves as far as the ropes would allow, bloody hair plastered against one side of her face.

  “Bastard king of a bastard country, may Mother Sea swallow—”

  One of the warriors cuffed her to the ground.

  “Cut her tongue out,” said another, jerking her back by her hair while a third drew a knife.

  “No!” shouted Yarvi. The men frowned at him. If their king’s honor was questioned so was theirs, and mercy would not do as an explanation. “She’ll fetch a better price with her tongue.” And Yarvi turned away, shoulders chafing under the weight of his mail, and struggled on towards the holdfast.

  “You are your mother’s son, my king,” said Hurik.

  “Who else’s would I be?”

  His father’s eyes and his brother’s used to glow as they told tales of past raids, of great deeds done and grand prizes taken, while Yarvi lurked in the shadows at the foot of the table and wished he could have taken a man’s part in the man’s work. But here was the truth of it, and a place on a raid did not seem en
viable now.

  The fighting was over, if there had been any worthy of the name, but still it seemed Yarvi laboured through a nightmare, sweating in his mail and chewing at the inside of his mouth and startling at sounds. Screams and laughter, figures darting through the wriggling haze of fires, smoke scratching at his throat. Crows pecked and circled and cawed their triumph. Theirs was the victory, most of all. Mother War, Mother of Crows, who gathers the dead and makes the open hand a fist, would dance today, while Father Peace hid his face and wept. Here, near the shiftless border between Vansterland and Gettland, Father Peace wept often.

  The tower of the holdfast loomed black above them, the noise of waves crashing on both sides of its foundations loud below.

  “Stop,” said Yarvi, breathing hard, head spinning, face tickling with sweat. “Help me out of my mail.”

  “My king,” frothed Keimdal, “I must object!”

  “Object if you please. Then do as I tell you.”

  “It’s my duty to keep you safe—”

  “Then imagine your dishonour when I die of too much sweating halfway up this tower! Undo the buckles, Hurik.”

  “My king.” They stripped his mail shirt off and Hurik threw it over one great shoulder.

  “Lead on,” Yarvi snapped at Keimdal, struggling to fasten his father’s clumsy golden cloak-buckle with his useless lump of a hand, too big and too heavy for him by far and the hinge all stiff as—

  He was stopped dead by the sight that greeted them beyond the open gates.

  “Here is a harvest,” said Hurik.

  The narrow space in front of the tower was scattered with bodies. So many that Yarvi had to search for patches of ground between to put his feet. There were women there, and children. Flies buzzed, and he felt the sickness rising, and fought it down.

  He was a king, after all, and a king rejoices in the corpses of his enemies.

  One of his uncle’s warriors sat beside the entrance to the tower, cleaning his ax as calmly as he might have beside the training square at home.

  “Where is Odem?” Yarvi muttered at him.

  The man gave a squint-eyed grin and pointed upwards. “Above, my king.”

  Yarvi ducked past, breath echoing in the stairway, feet scraping on the stones, swallowing his surging spit.

  On the battlefield, his father used to say, there are no rules.

  Up, and up in the fizzing darkness, Hurik and Keimdal toiling behind him. He paused at a narrow window to feel the wind on his burning face, saw water crash on rock at the bottom of a sheer drop and pushed down his fear.

  Stand like a king, his mother had told him. Speak like a king. Fight like a king.

  There was a platform at the top, propped on timbers, a wooden parapet about the edge no taller than Yarvi’s thigh. Low enough to bring the giddy sickness flooding back when he saw how high they had climbed, Father Earth and Mother Sea spread out small around them, the forests of Vansterland stretching off into the haze of distance.

  Yarvi’s Uncle Odem stood calmly watching Amwend burn, columns of smoke smudging the slate-gray sky, the tiny warriors bent to the business of destruction, the little ships lined up where surf met shingle to collect the bloody harvest. A dozen of his most seasoned men were around him, and kneeling in their midst a prisoner in a fine yellow robe, bound and gagged, his face swollen with bruises and his long hair clotted with blood.

  “A good day’s work!” called Odem, smiling at Yarvi over his shoulder. “We have taken two hundred slaves, and livestock, and plunder, and burned one of Grom-gil-Gorm’s towns.”

  “What of Gorm himself?” asked Yarvi, trying to catch his breath after the climb and—since standing and fighting had never been his strengths—at least speak like a king.

  Odem sucked sourly at his teeth. “The Breaker of Swords will be on his way, eh, Hurik?”

  “Doubtless.” Hurik stepped from the stairway and straightened to all his considerable height. “Battle draws that old bear surely as it draws the flies.”

  “We must round up the men and be back at sea within the hour,” said Odem.

  “We’re leaving?” asked Keimdal. “Already?”

  Yarvi found he was angry. Tired, and sick, and angry at his own weakness and his uncle’s ruthlessness and the world that was this way. “Is this our vengeance, Odem?” He waved his good hand towards the burning town. “On women and children and old farmers?”

  His uncle’s voice was gentle, as it always was. Gentle as spring rain. “Vengeance is taken piece by piece. But you need not worry about that now.”

  “Did I not swear an oath?” growled Yarvi. For the last two days he had been prickling whenever someone used the words my king. Now he found he prickled even more when they did not.

  “You swore. I heard it, and thought it too heavy an oath for you to carry.” Odem gestured at the kneeling prisoner, grunting into his gag. “But he will free you of its weight.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The headman of Amwend. He is the one who killed you.”

  Yarvi blinked. “What?”

  “I tried to stop him. But the coward had a hidden blade.” Odem held up his hand and there was a dagger in it. A long dagger with a pommel of black jet. In spite of the heat of the climb Yarvi felt suddenly very cold, from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair.

  “It shall be my greatest regret that I moved too late to save my much-loved nephew.” And carelessly as cutting a joint of meat Odem stabbed the headman between his neck and his shoulder and kicked him onto his face, blood welling across the rooftop.

  “What do you mean?” Yarvi’s words came shrill and broken and he was suddenly aware how many of his uncle’s men were about him, all armed, all armoured.

  As Odem stepped calmly, so calmly towards him he stepped back, stepped back on shaky knees to nowhere but the low parapet and the high drop beyond.

  “I remember the night you were born.” His uncle’s voice was cold and level as ice on a winter lake. “Your father raged at the gods over that thing you have for a hand. You’ve always made me, smile, though. You would have been a fine jester.” Odem raised his brows, and sighed. “But is my daughter really to have a one-handed weakling for a husband? Is Gettland really to have half a king? A crippled puppet dangling on his mother’s string? No, nephew, I … think … not.”

  Keimdal snatched Yarvi’s arm and dragged him back, metal scraping as he drew his sword. “Get behind me, my—”

  Blood spattered in Yarvi’s face and half-blinded him. Keimdal fell to his knees, spitting and gurgling, clutching at his throat, black leaking between his fingers. Yarvi stared sideways and saw Hurik frowning back, a drawn knife in his hand, the blade slick with Keimdal’s blood. He let Yarvi’s mail drop jingling to the floor.

  “We must do what is best for Gettland,” said Odem. “Kill him.”

  Yarvi tottered away, his jaw dropping wide, and Hurik snatched a fistful of his cloak.

  With a ping his father’s heavy golden buckle sprang open. Suddenly released, Yarvi reeled back.

  The parapet caught him hard in the knees and, breath whooping, he tumbled over it.

  Rock and water and sky spun about him, and down plummeted the King of Gettland, and down, and the water struck him as a hammer strikes iron.

  And Mother Sea took him in her cold embrace.

  8.

  THE ENEMY

  Yarvi came to himself in the darkness, smothered by rushing bubbles, and he writhed and thrashed and twisted with the simple need to stay alive.

  The gods must yet have had some use for him, for when it seemed his ribs would burst and he must breathe in whether it was sea or sky, his head broke from the water. Spray blinded him, and he coughed and kicked, was sucked under, tossed and tumbled by the current.

  A surging wave flung him onto rock, and he clutched at shredding barnacle and green-slick weed, just long enough to find another breath. He fought with the buckle, freed himself of the drowning embrace of his sword-belt, legs burning as h
e struggled at the merciless sea, kicking free of his leaden boots.

  He gathered all his strength and as the swell lifted him he hauled himself up, trembling with effort, onto a narrow ledge of stone washed by the salt spray, speckled with jellies and sharp-shelled limpets.

  No doubt he was lucky still to be alive, but Yarvi did not feel lucky.

  He was in the inlet on the north side of the holdfast, a narrow space walled in by jagged rocks into which the foaming waves angrily surged, chewing at the stone, slopping and clapping and flinging glittering spray. He scraped the wet hair from his eyes, spat salt, his throat raw, good hand and bad grazed and stinging.

  His foolhardy decision to strip off his mail had saved his life, but the padded jacket underneath was bloated with seawater and he pawed at the straps, finally shrugged it free and hunched shivering.

  “D’you see him?” he heard, the voice coming from so close above that he shrank against the slick rock, biting his tongue.

  “Got to be dead.” Another voice. “Dashed on the rocks. Mother Sea has him for sure.”

  “Odem wants his body.”

  “Odem can fish for it, then.”

  A third voice now. “Or Hurik can. He let the cripple fall.”

  “And which’ll you be telling first to swim, Odem or Hurik?”

  Laughter at that. “Gorm’s on his way. We’ve no time to dredge for one-handed corpses.”

  “Back to the ships, and tell King Odem his nephew adorns the deep …” And the voices faded towards the beach.