Dubh-Linn: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 2) (29 page)

“[F]ain would I see that feast;

brawls and bickering I bring the gods,

their ale I shall mix with evil.”

                                         
                  The Flyting of Loki

It was one of the oddest feasts that Thorgrim had ever attended, perhaps the oddest ever. Everything was laid out for a grand banquet; suckling pig and lamb, bread and heaping bowls of butter, spring vegetables, dried fruits, porridge and honey. The mead was flowing, as was the beer and the wine. There were the hosts and the guests, and between them, mutual loathing and distrust.

  For all Morrigan’s high talk about Irishmen and Norsemen occupying that island in peace, it was pretty clear that the Irish regarded their guests with undisguised hatred. The Norse, in turn, looked on their hosts as pathetic and weak. For a successful party, the circumstances were not ideal.

  It played out as Morrigan had promised it would, no tricks, no betrayal. But Thorgrim had some experience with the depth of Morrigan’s cunning, and he kept his eyes open, his guard up. The Irishmen who joined them at the feast were the ones whom they would have met in combat if things had gone differently. By their expressions, the way they held themselves, Thorgrim guessed that they would have preferred combat, even a greatly uneven fight, to the humiliation they were suffering, feeding their enemies while others gathered up tribute to pay them to leave.

  Thorgrim watched the Irish as they talked among themselves, even as he feigned a lack of interest. He was looking for some sign of treachery, but saw instead impotent anger. He could not understand the words that they muttered to one another, but he did not need to understand them to know their nature.

  Even the one who Morrigan introduced as her brother, the one called Flann, did not look happy about this arrangement. At first Thorgrim had dismissed him as some effete pretender to the throne, but a closer look told him that was wrong. Flann had the look of strength about him, strength of arm, strength of leadership. Not the strength of ultimate command, like one who wears a crown easily, but the strength of one used to leading men, and that included leading them in battle. Thorgrim recalled seeing this Flann on the field when they had last fought the warriors of Tara. Such a man would not be happy about the capitulation Morrigan had arranged, and indeed Flann did not look happy.

  The rest of the Northmen seemed oblivious to the angry looks and muttering directed at them. The food was good and plentiful and they tore into it with gusto. The berserkers in particular, denied the climax of battle, vented their frustration on the food, as if they could sate their blood lust with gluttony and intoxication. Which, Thorgrim realized, they just might be able to do.

  He moved among the men, skirted the tables, whispered in their ears. “Don’t drink yourself to insensibility,” he warned. “Keep your wits about you.” It occurred to him that Morrigan might intend to let the Norsemen drink themselves into oblivion and then fall on them. It was the only treachery he could envision.

  But if that was her plan, it was not a very good one. It was damned hard to get a Viking so drunk he could not fight, and if he were only partially insensible with drink, then he would fight harder still. Morrigan had been many years among them, she had to have known as much.

  So the men of Arinbjorn’s hird, and Hrolleif’s and Ingolf’s, drank deep but they did not drink until they fell to the ground, and they ate well of all that was put in front of them, and they largely ignored their Irish hosts whom they had already dismissed as weaklings. Thorgrim ate little. Between his suspicion-driven vigilance, his worries over Harald, his concern that his men not drink themselves to unconsciousness, he all but forgot about eating, save for a half a loaf of bread which he snatched up and gnawed at as he patrolled.

  Night fell and the feast wound down and the Irish retreated back into the walls of Tara, leaving only a dozen slaves behind to clean up the mess and pack away that which had not been consumed. Morrigan called to the men in command, waved her arm toward the tents. There were a dozen or so, and blankets and furs, though the night was not cold.

  “These tents are for your use,” she said to Arinbjorn and the others. “I fear we do not have enough for all your men, but we have blankets and such for them to make their beds where they will.”

  “Arinbjorn,” Hrolleif said, louder than necessary. “My men will take the first watch. I have posted a dozen near to the gate of this place, and have more watching the north side, and still others encircling the camp.”

 
Good man
, Thorgrim thought. Hrolleif did not want to inform Arinbjorn of what he had done so much as he wanted Morrigan and Flann to know that they would not be taken by surprise.

  “A wise move, Hrolleif,” Morrigan said. “But not necessary. You shall see. Flann and I bid you good night. We will talk more in the morning.” With that, she and Flann made shallow bows, and with their small, lightly armed bodyguard, they turned and strolled back to the gate of Tara.

  It was later that evening, after the rest had gone off to sleep, after he had fended off Harald’s questions about what would become of Brigit, that Thorgrim replayed the night in his mind.
So very odd…
The Irish on one side of the tables, the Norsemen on the other. Eating together, with all that hatred hanging like smoke between them. Each to his own preferences. The Irish drank mostly beer, the Northmen mead. Even the meat; the lamb was on the Irish side, the suckling pigs, so loved by the Norse, on their side, and the Irish showed no interest in it at all.

  Thorgrim opened his eyes in the dark. He pictured the feast in his mind. The Irish did not touch the suckling pig. He could recall a few instances when one of his men had reached over the table and cut off a chunk of lamb, as much to provoke the Irish as from a love of that meat, but the Irish did not touch the pigs.

  “Harald?” Thorgrim said. He waited. Silence. “Harald?”

  At last he heard a grunt in reply.

  “Harald, do the Irish not eat pig?” he asked. Harald was as close to an authority on the ways of the Irish as he was going to find in Arinbjorn’s hird.

  There was another pause, long enough that Thorgrim thought Harald had fallen back asleep, but at length he answered. “They eat it like anyone does, I think.” The tone of his voice was not right, and it was not sleep affecting it.

  “What’s wrong?” Thorgrim asked. He sat up.

  “I don’t know… It’s my stomach.”

  “Did you eat too much?” Thorgrim asked, and then thought,
stupid question…there is not enough food in Ireland for Harald to eat too much
.

  “No…” Harald replied, sounding more miserable than Thorgrim had heard him sound since he was a child. “But what I did eat, I think I’m about to lose….”

  And as he said that, another sound reached Thorgrim’s ears, from beyond the tent, from out in the dark. Retching. Groaning. Those sounds were not foreign to a Viking encampment, but not like this. Not so many.

  Thorgrim was out of his bed, Iron-tooth in hand, and out through the flaps of the tent. The night was cool and there was a dampness in the air, and the thick smell of earth and grass such as he had come to associate with Ireland. The sky was unusually clear, the pinpoint fire of stars casting a soft light over the camp.

  It was light enough to see by, and Thorgrim did not like what he saw. Men were staggering out of their tents, crawling from under piles of furs. Men were doubled over and vomiting up the prodigious meal they had eaten. Men were laying curled on the ground, hands clamped on their stomachs, groaning in agony.

  Starri Deathless had dragged a heap of furs over by Thorgrim’s tent and Thorgrim could just make out his head jutting out from under the pile. He knelt down beside him. “Starri? Starri, how goes it with you?”

  Starri looked up at him, his eyes half closed, his mouth hanging open. “I am run through the gut, Night Wolf,” he whispered. “Run through from within…”

  Thorgrim stood. “Oh, you damnable bitch!” he cried out into the night, but his real fury was directed not at Morrigan but himself. “Idiot, idiot!” he shouted next. If Starri Deathless met his end in this manner, lying helpless as a baby, and not with a sword in his hand, Thorgrim swore he would have her head on a pike. But how he would ever live with himself, for the part he played in this, he did not know.

  He headed off though the line of tents, calling out as he did, “Turn out! Turn out! To arms!” He was met with a chorus of groans. No one moved, save for those staggering aimlessly, bent nearly double.

  There was a candle burning in Arinbjorn’s tent, as Thorgrim had come to expect, and a guard outside, as was also Arinbjorn’s custom. The guard, however, was down on one knee, swaying and trying to stay upright as Thorgrim approached, sword in hand. Such a thing would surely have warranted a challenge, but now the guard did no more than raise one hand, make a sound that might have been a word, and fall sideways onto the ground. Thorgrim pushed the tent flap aside and stepped inside.

  Arinbjorn had his camp bed with him and he was sitting on the edge, bent over, his weight supported by one arm. He looked up as Thorgrim burst in. His eyes were wide, his face white and waxy in the light of the single candle. Thorgrim could see beads of sweat on his forehead, a sheen on his cheeks.

  “You…” was all that Arinbjorn managed to say. Only his eyes moved, shifting from Thorgrim’s face to his sword and back.

  “We are betrayed,” Thorgrim said. “Morrigan. I told you she was not to be trusted.”

  But Arinbjorn just stared at him, as if he had not heard. At last he spoke, and his voice was weak. “What have you done? Are you here to kill me now?”

  “What?” Thorgrim said. “Kill you?” He followed Arinbjorn’s eyes down to Iron-tooth. “No! Not me. Morrigan. You are poisoned. If that doesn’t kill you, her men will.”

  “How are you…how are you not sick?” Arinbjorn asked. Fear and suspicion seemed to be giving him strength.

  “The food was poisoned, but I didn’t eat. See here, we must rally those who can still fight. Maybe we can get back to the ships…”

  Arinbjorn forced himself up until he was no longer leaning on his arm. “Who told you not to eat? How did you know?”

  Thorgrim looked into Arinbjorn’s wide, watery eyes, and through the man’s pain and the waves of nausea he saw only hatred and suspicion. Arinbjorn was lost to him. Even if Arinbjorn had been in his right mind, in full health, Thorgrim understood there was no trust there, and never would be again. Something had happened. Arinbjorn may not have ever been a friend, but he had never been an enemy. Until now.

  “I will do what I can,” Thorgrim said. “I’ll see if there are men enough to fight, if it comes to that.” He turned and ducked out of the tent. The guard was lying in a pool of vomit. He was not moving.

  Thorgrim strode quickly down the row of tents, hoping to find even a knot of men who could make a stand when the killers came from Tara, but he could see no one left standing.

 
Hrolleif
, he thought.
Maybe Hrolleif still stands
. It was hard to imagine any poison, or anything else, that could fell that human oak. But which tent was his? As he looked left and right his eye caught a flare of light, off beyond the camp, a dull glow rising up from the ground. And with it a sound, a jingling sound, like a series of tiny bells. It was a sound that Thorgrim could not mistake. It was the sound of mail shirts on marching men. Men holding torches that lit up the dark. Men coming for a stricken enemy.

  Thorgrim shook his head. Any idea of organizing a resistance was

dismissed; futile, pointless and it probably always was.

Let the gods banish the king,

pay him for stealing my wealth,

let him incur the wrath

of Odin and the gods.

                                     Egil’s Saga

“This is a damned business,” Flann said. “A damned, dishonorable business.” His mail shirt was making the particular sound that mail shirts made, like small surf on a shingle beach. The two of them, Flann and Morrigan, were on top of the earthen wall that surrounded Tara. The evening breeze was lifting his long, fine hair and flicking it off to leeward.

  Morrigan sighed.
Again? We discuss this again?

  The night was quiet, and by her orders there was no sound coming from within the ringfort, despite the seventy armed men standing ready to do their business once the gates were thrown open. The breeze carried on it a sound she longed to hear, a sound that would not generally have held so musical a quality to her; one hundred and fifty or so Norsemen retching and puking and falling groaning to the earth. One hundred and fifty filthy rapists, murderers and thieves feeling the full effect of dining on suckling pig, spit roasted and spiced with cowbane. It was a recipe she saved for very special guests.

  “You practice your arts,” Flann continued when Morrigan did not respond, “because you do not concern yourself with honor. Not the way a man thinks of honor. Honor on the field of battle, which is how we should have met them.”

  Morrigan pulled her eyes from the Norsemen’s camp and regarded her brother in the light of the torches that flickered up from the ground below, hidden from the enemy by the walls of Tara.

 
Honor?
  she thought. 
The honor of having your head on a fin gall pike? The honor of having all the women of Tara raped, the men butchered, me a thrall again, to be used like a dog by these Godless bastards?
But she did not say it, because she had said it all before and she was sick of saying it.

  “Maybe you value your honor above the lives of everyone in Tara,” she said instead, “but I do not. In any event, we’ve not murdered them. They’ll live. Most of them, I should think.” The cowbane, a short, hollow root that could easily be mistaken for parsley, would have been fatal if given in a sufficient dose. But that was not the intent. Instead, Morrigan had added just enough to the other spices in the rub to see their guests debilitated with nausea. Once that happened, they could be gathered up like fish in a weir, but they would not die.

  It was mostly for Flann’s sake that she agreed to let them live. Her brother was not at all happy about their present treachery, the false good will, the tainted food, and had agreed, in the end, because truly the only other choice was to see the Northmen visit their particular brand of horror on Tara. But Flann would not allow Morrigan to simply murder the Norsemen. His honor, absurd by Morrigan’s way of thinking, could not tolerate such a thing. It was why Morrigan worried that Flann would never make a decent high king. Máel Sechnaill mac Ruanaid, she was certain, would have had no qualms about poisoning them all and watching with delight as they died in agony.

  So they would make prisoners of the fin gall, and not carrion. And Morrigan knew that in some small way she was relieved by Flann’s intransigence on that point. The fin gall were pagans; they were killers, cursed by God, but still the thought of simply murdering them all made Morrigan uneasy.

  Despite all the wicked things that she had done, and often done and not confessed, things for which she had not been absolved, she still held out hope that she might reach heaven. It was a hope that was growing more remote as she struggled to hold onto the throne. If she caused all these men – God’s creatures, supposedly - to die in agony, it would put salvation that much further out of reach. So she agreed to sicken them instead, and once sick, they would be taken prisoner. Some would be ransomed, some would be sold as slaves, but they would live, mostly.

  Morrigan turned her eyes back to the fin gall camp spread out on the ground beyond the walls. It was dark and she could not see anything of the men in the camp, but the chorus of retching and groans and wails of agony had grown appreciably in the past few minutes. The timing on this had to be just right. If her men sallied forth too soon, the fin gall might still have some fight in them. If she waited too long, the Northmen might find the strength of stagger off into hiding. And then she would have to call up the hounds.

  “It’s time, brother,” she said, softly.

  Flann made a grunting noise. “Very well,” he said. He turned and found the crude ladder that led down to the ground, and Morrigan followed behind. By the time she stepped off, Flann had taken his place at the head of the column of men-at-arms who stood ready to advance. These were not the lightly-armed guard that had accompanied them, just for show, when they went out to meet the invaders. These were men ready to fight, armed with swords, spears, shields, mail, helmets.

  Behind them, teams of horses stood in their traces, nervously shaking their heads and stomping the earth. They were not accustomed to work at that late hour and they knew something was amiss. Hitched behind them were empty hay wagons, which would be used to haul men who could not walk. Leg irons, and leather thongs for binding wrists, were piled on the wagons’ floors.

  “Go!” Flann shouted, and his voice had the ring of authority that Morrigan liked to hear. This was what Flann loved, Morrigan knew, the field on which he excelled. The plotting, the maneuvering, the manipulating one against another, that was what he could not do. Between them, Flann and Morrigan, they made a fully competent ruler.

  On Flann’s command the big oak doors at Tara’s main gate are swung open and the column moved forward, seventy pairs of feet making a dull sound on the soft ground, and with it the creak and groan of the crude wagons, the jingle of horses in their tack. Morrigan wanted to walk at the head of the column, side by side with Flann, but she knew that would never do, so she stayed back, walking beside the first of the empty wagons. It might not be her place to lead, but neither would she be left out of this affair. She knew the fin gall better than anyone at Tara, and she knew what had to be done to secure this lot.

  Donnel and Patrick were waiting for her, back at the end of the column, and they fell in on either side and a few paces back as the men advanced. They, too, were armed with swords and knives and mail shirts, but they were not a part of Flann’s column, not men-at-arms. They had spent most of their brief lives as sheep herders and their skill with weapons was rudimentary at best. They were Morrigan’s men, and she knew well how to exploit their God-given talents.

  They covered the ground quickly. The guards whom the fat, bearded one had so ostentatiously posted near the gates of the ringfort were lying on the ground, doubled over. Some had managed to crawl a little distance, but most were right where they had fallen. On Morrigan’s order, their wrists were bound and they were tossed into the rearmost wagon, the first of the catch.

  There was no alarm, not shouts, no sound of men taking up arms to meet them. Even the groaning and retching had dropped off, so there was little to be heard over the sound of the wagons and marching Irishmen. The smell of vomit was in the air.

  Flann brought the column to a halt. “Very well, you men,” he called back to the troops. “Round them up. Drag them here if need be and we’ll manacle them and bind them.” There was a tinge of disgust in his voice.

  Morrigan hurried to the front of the column, Donnel and Patrick keeping pace. “Flann! Thorgrim must be secured quickly, he is a danger. Please, may I have four of the men-at-arms with me?”

  Flann looked around, which is what he did, she knew, when he required a second to make a decision. He looked at Donnel and Patrick as if to say,
you have men, are they not enough?
But he did not say it, because he knew the two young brothers were not fighting men. “Very well. You four,” he gestured to the four men directly behind them, one of whom carried a gutting torch. “You go with Morrigan. Follow her orders.”

  Morrigan stepped off without looking back, but she was gratified to hear the sound of the men following. Donnel moved past her and she followed him down the row of tents. He and Patrick had been among the slaves cleaning after the feast, but their work had involved watching and taking note and only pretending to clean.

  Donnel stopped outside the tent that Thorgrim and Harald had occupied. Morrigan turned to the four men-at-arms behind her. “Go in here and secure any you find within,” she ordered. If Thorgrim or Harald had any strength left, then taking them prisoner was a task for real soldiers.

  Four swords scraped out of four sheathes and the first of the men-at-arms threw the tent flap back and plunged in, followed by the man holding the torch and then the others. Morrigan waited and listened. She heard bedding being rifled, saw the weird shadows of the men inside cast by the torch against the tent walls. Half a minute and they were out again.

  “No one in there,” the man with the torch reported.

 
Damn it
, Morrigan thought. “Very well. Follow me.” The seven of them, the four men-at-arms, Donnel and Patrick and Morrigan, began a sweep of the camp. They looked in each of the tents, rolled over the groaning figures of the fin gall strewn around the field and held the torches close to their faces. No Thorgrim. No Harald.

  As they searched, Flann and his men-at-arms methodically rounded up the rest of the fin gall, dragging those who could not walk to the place where the banquet tables had been set up earlier, clapping leg irons on them, binding their wrists with leather cords. There was no resistance from the Northmen, not so much as a half-hearted slash with a knife, or the feeble swing of a fist. Cowbane was proving to be the most effective warrior Morrigan had ever known.

  Midnight was an hour gone when Flann called for one last sweep of the camp, but no more of the fin gall were found. Any who had been in camp were now bound in the back of the wagons. The victory was bloodless, and it was complete. Or nearly so.

  Morrigan grabbed up a torch and went from wagon to wagon. She looked in the face of every man there. No Thorgrim. No Harald.

  “Flann,” she said, her voice low, her tone urgent. “Thorgrim is not here. He’s escaped somehow.”

  Flann shrugged. “He’s one man. One more or less will make no difference.”

  “His son is with him. And the Lord knows how many others.”

  “Even if he has a dozen it makes no difference. We have all but the entire fin gall army. The other
rí túaithe
will rally to us now, now that they see we’ve prevailed.”

  Morrigan shook her head. “We cannot allow Thorgrim to remain free. He is too dangerous.”

  Flann looked at her, and Morrigan did not like his expression. “What is it about Thorgrim?” he asked. “Why are you worried so about one man?”

  Morrigan felt her face flush at the question, and hoped the dark would hide it. She had, in a moment of weakness, given herself to Thorgrim, back aboard his ship.  He had a strength that she found comforting, and she sensed a decency about him, something she would never have thought to find in a Norseman, but there it was. Thorgrim loved his son very much, she could see that he cared far more for Harald’s life than he did for his own, and that told her a great deal about what sort of man he was.

  And there was no denying that he was attractive. Very attractive. She remembered the thrill that had run through her when he pulled his helmet off that afternoon and she saw him again after all that time. She remembered it, and she was embarrassed.

  But those things, she assured herself, were not influencing her thinking now. “I know Thorgrim well enough to know he’s a danger if he’s loose,” she said, a new hardness in her voice. “We must find him. We must call out

the hounds.”