Chapter Twenty-Four: Orka

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

ORKA

“There,” Orka said, pointing at a bank of tall reeds growing thick on the riverbank, little more than a collection of different shadows in the first grey of dawn.

Mord and Lif bent their backs, changing course on the river and rowing their fisher boat towards the reeds. The two brothers were soaked with sweat, exhaustion heavy upon them, though Orka was just as sweat-soaked. She had taken shifts on the oar through the long dark before dawn.

The boat’s prow cut into the reeds and ground on silt, Orka jumping from the prow on to the bank with a splash. She searched a few moments, then saw what she was looking for, her spear shaft pale and grey and straight among the wind-bent reads. She pulled it from the ground and hefted her hemp sack, tied around the shaft, then clambered back into the boat.

Lif looked at her with dark, wide eyes. He was crow-haired and as tall as Virk, his father, but slim and lithe where Virk had been thickset and solid. His beard was patchy, pale skin showing his youth. He could not have seen more than seventeen or eighteen winters.

“What?” Orka grunted.

“Are you hurt?” he said. “You are covered in blood.”

Orka looked over the boat’s side and saw her reflection in the river. Her face and hair were thick with crusted blood. Sweat had carved grooves through it, looking like some runic knotwork. She reached up and pulled a fragment of bone from her hair.

“It is not mine,” she said, remembering her axe and the woman she had slain at the riverbank less than a day ago. It felt like much longer.

“Oh,” Lif breathed. He chose not to give voice to the questions in his eyes.

Mord was slumped across his oar, fresh blood seeping through the bandage around his head. He was more like his father, fair-haired, broad-faced and solid, a thick hedge of beard on his chin. Orka stepped over their stowed mast and touched his shoulder.

He looked up at her. “We need to talk,” he mumbled. “Why have we rowed in one big circle around the fjord?”

“We will talk later,” Orka said. “No time, now. Move,” she grunted, helping him to stand and guiding him on to a pile of rope and net at the stern of the boat. She pushed them out of the reed-bank with her spear, then sat at the bench and hefted Mord’s oar, looking at Lif.

“How much longer? Where are we going?” Lif muttered.

“A little further, then we can look for somewhere safe to camp,” Orka said.

He looked at her with black-rimmed eyes, but only nodded. Together they dipped their oars into the river and pulled.

The boat grated as Orka and Lif dragged it up on to the riverbank, pausing to help Mord clamber out and collapse beneath a willow, then the two of them hauled the boat higher up the riverbank, into a stand of bog myrtle and juniper, almost covering it from sight. Mist curled sluggishly across the river, the morning sun slowly burning it away. Orka stood and looked back the way they had come, the river wide, curling like a serpent through a steep-sided valley before it spilled into the fjord where Fellur village squatted. Beyond the river she saw hills rising towards cliffs; she could still see the spot where her steading lay.

It is a barrow, now, not a home.

A flare of grief and anger bubbled up inside her. It had been kept at bay by the confrontation with Sigrún and the thrall, then the escape, hard rowing and burning muscles and exhaustion suppressing all else for a while.

Orka carried her bag and dropped it beside Mord, then sat with her back to the wide tree and began to rummage through it.

Lif kneeled beside his brother, undid the blood-soaked bandage around Mord’s head and took it to the riverbank to clean.

Mord sat and stared at Orka.

“Here,” she said, handing him a strip of salted pork. He reached out and took it, and chewed.

“Why have we rowed a circle around the fjord?” Mord asked Orka.

Lif joined them, wringing out the bandage.

“To deceive that niðing Guðvarr?” Lif said, looking to Orka.

“Aye,” she grunted, chewing on a strip of pork. She passed some to Lif. “He watched us row away south, towards the sea,” she said.

“So, when dawn came that is the way he would go to search for us,” Lif said, a smile creasing his face.

“I hope so,” Orka said. “He is idiot enough.”

“Jarl Sigrún is no idiot, though,” Mord said. “She would send boats and scouts in all directions, out on the fjord and along the fjord bank.”

“Aye,” Orka nodded, “maybe. Though Jarl Sigrún may be too busy having her face stitched back together to think on anything else.”

Lif raised an eyebrow. He cleaned Mord’s wound, which looked like it had come from some kind of blunt weapon, a club, a spear butt or sword hilt, and re-tied the linen bandage around it.

“Why are you helping us?” Lif asked Orka as he worked. “What grievance has caused Jarl Sigrún’s face to need stitching? And where are Thorkel and Breca?”

Orka said nothing, just chewed her meat. She drew the three seaxes at her belt, two that she had taken from Thorkel’s body and one from Sigrún’s thrall. She had left her own seax buried in the timber doorpost of Jarl Sigrún’s sleeping chamber. She turned the thrall’s seax in her hand, looking at the knotwork carved into the horn hilt. Wolf heads, jaws gaping.

Fitting, for an Úlfhéðnar.

Two of the seaxes had blood on them, dried to black stains now. She opened her pouch, took out a cloth and some oil and set about cleaning them.

“Thorkel is dead. Slain,” she said flatly as she worked, “and Breca has been taken. I went to Jarl Sigrún to talk to her about it.”

“And opened her face with a blade?” Lif said.

Orka ignored him.

A silence settled between them as Orka cleaned her blades, then she set them down and went back to her sack, where she pulled out the loaf of bread and the round of hard cheese and sawed off slices for the three of them.

“What now?” Lif said as he chewed on black bread.

“We sneak back to Fellur and kill that niðing Guðvarr,” Mord said.

Orka looked at him.

“Orka?” Lif said.

“Do as you wish,” she said with a shrug.

“Where are you going?” Lif asked her.

“Not back to Fellur village,” she grunted.

“Where, then?” Lif pressed.

Orka gave him a flat look. “I am going to find my son.”

“And we are going to kill Guðvarr,” Mord repeated.

Lif looked at his brother with sorrow. “How?” he asked.

Mord opened his mouth, but no words followed.

“Help us,” Lif asked Orka.

“No,” Orka said.

“We do not need anyone’s help,” Mord said angrily. “Guðvarr is for us to kill. It is our father who is a corpse because of him, us who owe him blood feud, and that filthy thrall of Jarl Sigrún’s.”

“You only need to kill Guðvarr,” Orka told them.

“No, Guðvarr and the thrall,” Mord said. “Our father’s death is Guðvarr’s fault, but the thrall dealt him his death wounds.”

“Sigrún’s thrall has a hole in her belly. She may already be dead,” Orka said, chewing on some cheese.

Mord and Lif both stared at Orka, eyes wide, mouths flapping like fish.

“She may yet live, but most die of a gut-wound,” Orka added.

A silence settled between them, Lif staring at Orka with a mixture of fear and awe.

“Guðvarr, then,” Mord said eventually.

“But, we tried to kill him, and ended up tied to a post,” Lif pointed out.

Lif looked at Orka. “You have some clever about you, and some stones,” he said, “to sneak into Jarl Sigrún’s bedchamber. And some weapons craft, to cut her up and put a hole in her thrall’s belly. How would you advise us to go about our revenge?”

Orka sighed, a long exhalation.

“Wait,” she said. “No point rushing back with all of Fellur seething like a kicked wasp nest. Wait until things are quiet, when they have given up searching and are getting on with planting their fields, or reaping the harvest. That is the time to strike.”

“I like it,” Lif said, nodding. “See, Mord, now that is some deep-cunning.”

“Too long,” Mord snarled. “I want Guðvarr dead today. Or on the morrow at the latest.”

Orka turned her flat stare on him. “Have you not learned already, what you want has little to do with it?” She shrugged again. “You asked for my advice. You don’t have to take it.”

“I think we should listen to her,” Lif said. He chewed his bread slowly. Clearly his thought-cage was turning over in his head. “And we need to learn some weapons craft.”

Mord’s face twisted. “I know weapons craft,” he said.

“Aye, as that lump on your head declares,” Lif said.

“I was outnumbered,” Mord muttered.

“You could teach us,” Lif said to Orka.

Orka blinked.

“No,” she said.

“You fought Jarl Sigrún and her warrior-thrall, defeated them both. We are not good enough to do this, and our father’s bones cry out for vengeance,” Lif said. “I would not let him down.”

“I am about my own vengeance. I have no time for yours,” Orka grated.

“We could help you,” Lif said.

“No,” said Orka and Mord together.

“Why not?” Lif said.

Orka looked at them both. “I do not want your help. I do not need it. Come with me and you will most likely get yourselves killed. Or me.”

“We could help you,” Lif said stubbornly. “Where are you going, on this vengeance of yours?”

“North, and west,” Orka muttered, looking to the north, towards the fortress and town of Darl, where the snow-tipped peaks of the Boneback Mountains glittered.

“Wherever it is you are going, you would get there faster if we were rowing you,” Lif said. “If you leave us, then you are walking, as that is our boat.”

Orka stared at him. “I could take your boat,” she said.

Lif’s face twitched at that, a flicker of fear and hurt. Mord growled a curse, his hand reaching for the axe loop at his belt. It was empty, their hastily gathered weapons slung in the boat.

“I will not take your boat,” Orka told them. “I will walk.”

“Those who took Breca, do you think they are walking?” Lif asked.

A twist of pain, like a knife in Orka’s belly, at the mention of her son’s name.

“No,” she said. “I followed their tracks to the river. They took him from there by boat.”

There was a long silence as she chewed that over in her thought-cage.

“Fine. Row me to Darl,” she said into the silence, “and I will teach you what I can.”