Wolfsangel by M. D. Lachlan Page B

hopelessly outnumbered, ready for death. With that dread lord I cut my way through twenty of the enemy and made the ocean red with sword sweat to reach our boats . . .’

    Disa was having to suppress a smile. Behind Bragi, Vali was miming the story. He’d heard it all a hundred times and in a hundred ways - boasted before the drinking hall, whispered around a campfire, shouted at him as an example to greater effort. He knew the words by heart.

    ‘I am a warrior, and I was honoured and delighted to be offered the post of bodyguard and tutor to this boy. I find, however, that it is increasingly a burden of loathsome proportions. Loathsome proportions. I feel like Loki, tied to the rock and my eyes filled with venom. He is ungovernable, madam, and your daughter is to blame.’

    ‘In what way?’

    ‘I curse the day he laid eyes on her. At first it was an innocent friendship of children, but in the last year he has had no time for hunting, none for weapons training. His father had the very unusual idea of allowing him work in the smithy, in order that he should know everything about weapons from their time as rocks of the earth to their effect on an enemy shield. He is absent from the forge. He is absent from the assembly meetings where Forkbeard was to teach him statecraft. He is absent when I call for him to test him with sword and spear. He is absent everywhere, madam, other than at your daughter’s side, where he is, very annoyingly, present.’

    Disa shrugged exactly the same shrug as her daughter had made earlier.

    ‘I can’t tell her who she can and can’t see. Nothing can come of it - he’s already spoken for, isn’t he?’

    ‘Not by me,’ said Vali.

    Bragi gave him a look very similar, thought Vali, to the one he must have given Geat number twenty on the way to the ships.

    ‘He is betrothed to Forkbeard’s daughter,’ said Disa, as if that ended all debate.

    ‘The fact that I don’t want to marry her seeming of very little consequence in the arrangement,’ said Vali.

    ‘Not very little,’ said Bragi. ‘None. Madam, Ma, this dalliance between your daughter and the prince must stop.’

    Disa just spread her arms out. ‘What do you expect me to do? He’s come here since he was a little boy.’

    ‘He is a little boy no longer. Have you any idea how the king would feel if any issue should emerge from this?’

    ‘He’s never touched me!’ said Adisla.

    ‘Not through want of trying,’ said Bragi. ‘Look, madam, forbid this association. If you do not, I could have the king command it.’

    Now Ma Disa frowned. ‘All I owe the king is a portion of my income and my sons in the wars. I’m not a member of his sworn bodyguard to be bossed and bullied. Who me and mine choose as our friends is none of his business.’

    ‘Everything is the king’s business.’

    Disa took the last of the herbs from the roof and wiped a hand on her pinafore.

    ‘Not so. The law supports no interference from him in the affairs of free people. He won’t tell me who my children can have as friends.’

    ‘These are not children, madam. Vali is a man of thirteen summers and is likely to become king in his own right soon.’

    ‘Then who can tell him what to do?’ said Disa.

    Bragi let out a growl, collected his weapons and headed back down the hill.

    The old man was a figure of fun to Vali, but the following week he would be glad Bragi was at his side when for the first time he went raiding.

8 Fury

    The ship had been in the great hall for repair and they’d had to pull it down to the water. Everything had seemed more intense than normal to him that morning - the creak of the cords, the rumbling of the keel on the logs, the acrid smell of the pitch on the hull, the heaving song of the warriors.

    Bend your backs, boys, don’t be slow

    Over and over the ocean we go

    Where our swords will dance on our enemies’ shields

    Like the glimmering fish on the sea’s blue fields

    So bend your backs, boys,