The dead had never meant anything to Authun before. Their separation from the living seemed to him so slight that mourning or grief had never come to him. Death was just life in another place.
The manner of death was a different thing. Varrin needed to die but he should die like a warrior. The secret of Authun’s new heir must be absolute, and while anyone who was party to it lived there was the risk that the truth might seep out to whisper from the shadows of the feasting halls, hum through the markets, sing with the wind beneath the sails of raiding ships. Authun, though, would not kill his friend. The king had been raised to believe that a kinslayer is cursed eternally. It wasn’t that he thought of killing Varrin and then discounted the idea. It didn’t even occur to him.
Varrin’s death was a problem that he would solve the only way he knew how — in consultation. The Norsemen placed great faith in the power of talk.
The land was in sight and the ship laboured across a current. Progress would have been difficult with a full haul of oars. With only the sail and a partly co-operative wind the going was very hard. It was Authun’s last chance, though. Varrin had to die now so his body would be taken down the whale road out to the north or there was a risk it could wash up on friendly shores, raising difficult questions.
‘Varrin.’
‘Lord, I know I cannot return.’ The old warrior knew his king well and, even facing death, sought to lift the burden from his shoulders.
Authun lowered his head.
Varrin said, ‘What shall they say of me, lord?’
‘Your friends loved you and your enemies feared you. Of all men on the earth, you were raised the least cowardly. Who could hope for more?’
‘Will they sing songs?’
‘They already sing songs of you, Varrin. In death they will unlock a word hoard to your memory.’
Varrin stood and breathed the air like a man waking on a fine morning. He peered out to sea.
‘Lord, I see a sea serpent, a beast of venom and fury that could devour the world snake himself. Allow me the glory of testing my spear upon it.’ As death approached, it seemed Varrin was already writing himself into a saga: his language became finer, emulating the songs of the skalds. Authun joined in, to honour his friend.
‘You are right, brave Varrin. Fight and win honour. You will need strong armour against such a serpent. On you I bestow this byrnie, this sheltering roof of blows.’
Authun took his mail coat from its barrel and held it up. Varrin bowed, humbled by the honour, and allowed the king to dress him. When the byrnie was tight about him, the king took out the golden wolf helm, its ruby eyes part of a trove of plunder taken from the Franks of the south. He placed it on his friend’s head and knotted the straps. Then he tied on his rich cloak. Finally he put Varrin’s spear in his hand.
‘Tell my wife she was as fine a woman who ever kept a key,’ said Varrin. ‘Though she was given to me, I loved her. May my sons serve you as I have served you. Dispose of my daughters in marriage as if they were your own.’
By the prow, the woman slept with her boys in her arms.
‘You will dine at my right hand in Odin’s hall,’ said Authun.
‘We shall be drunk for all time,’ said Varrin.
Varrin turned to the side of the boat and put one foot on the rail. ‘Now, serpent!’ he said, his voice low with determination. Without a look left or right he dived from the longship, stabbing into the waves as he leaped. In Authun’s splendid byrnie and helmet there was no swimming, and in an instant he was gone. The king swallowed and turned away. Varrin’s death had been necessary; no more to think about it.
In the prow the woman and the babies stirred, though Authun was surprised to see she hadn’t woken. She had hardly closed her eyes during the voyage but it was as if she felt some comfort and security coming from the land and had finally given in to sleep.
Authun, in all his wars, had never killed a woman before. They were too valuable as slaves was the reason he gave himself. But there was something else.
He stood above her watching the two children sharing her sleep at her breast. He had his hand on his knife. Soon he would use it to kill her, he thought, perhaps when they met the witches, perhaps just before he returned to his wife. Whenever, it would be by the knife. The Moonsword had only ever killed warriors and he wouldn’t stain it with the blood of a woman. And yet he felt it wrong to finish her with the same implement he would use to gut a fish. She was a mother and, to him, that deserved some respect. He had seen his wife go through labour five times and had wondered how many of his men would stand such pain.
There seemed something precious and worth preserving in the bond between the mother and her children, a warmth that seemed to spread from her. Authun the Pitiless felt something stir in his breast that, had he known it, was the first faint flickering intimation of his doom.
The woman had a charm given to her by the boys’ father, a curious, wandering man in an age when lonely wanderers were rare. Few would dare to walk the land alone, at the prey of hostile villagers, offended lords, bandits, wild men, trolls, elves and wolf men. But the boys’ father had dared. The amulet — just a wolf’s head scratched on a pebble — would offer her protection, he had said, and left. So far it had offered her none at all but she clutched it to her in her sleep. When Authun the Wolf, slayer of the giant Geat, pillager of the east, feared lord of the white wastes, touched his knife and looked down at her he felt pity. It was a new emotion for him but who is to say it was the stranger’s charm? A man has to become tired of slaughter eventually. Only the gods have an endless appetite for that.
The ship, under no direction, had turned across the waves and made a sudden violent jar. Authun kept his balance but the woman and the babies were shaken and slid against a chest. They awoke in a confusion of screaming, and for an instant the woman stared at Authun with that penetrating bloody eye. The king, who could face down any enemy, turned quickly to steady the boat. Action, as always, kept reflection at bay.
The woman watched him tie the rudder and work the sail and thought him the second most terrible thing she had ever seen. She recognised him for what he was, a belligerent self-seeker who had taken all the fears he had in him and thrown them at his enemies, a snatcher, a killer and a hero.
The children’s father had said he was bored by heroes but Authun seemed anything but boring — terrible, murderous, almost divine. As he’d taken her from the church, the arrows flying, the fires blazing and the villagers screaming, he had seemed a point of unnatural calm, a rock in the eddying currents of violence. It was as if, for him, that situation was normal. If she ever met the god of war, she thought, Authun is how he would look.
The gods, however, had been much closer in her life.