“I don’t like him,” Grend growled.
“You don’t like anyone who likes me,” Elvar replied.
Grend shrugged, not disputing that fact.
Agnar stopped before Elvar and Grend. He reached inside his cloak and pulled something out, opened his palm. It was one of the troll’s tusks, long as a knife, a hole bored in one end with a leather thong threaded through it. He lifted it over Elvar’s head and placed it about her neck.
“You did well,” Agnar said, then walked on. Sighvat followed, the Hundur-thrall walking with head bowed and shoulders slumped. Berak, the new prisoner, had his eyes fixed on his wife and child, who were being led towards the pier. The iron collars around his neck and wrists had rubbed his skin raw.
Elvar grinned at Grend, feeling her chest swell with pride as she lifted the tusk and looked at it. A troll’s tusk was worth more than its weight in gold, but Elvar did not care about that. It was the honour Agnar gave her, the battle-fame she had earned that set a fire in her chest. All around her the Battle-Grim were looking and nodding. They all wore some kind of trophy from a kill, a bone or tooth, a tusk, a nail, all gifted to them by Agnar when he thought they had earned it.
Little more than three years I have sailed with the Battle-Grim, and climbed high as any in that time.
“You struck the killing blow,” Grend said, a smile even touching the corners of his mouth, the glint of teeth within his grey-streaked beard. “It is only just.”
Elvar gave Grend her empty bowl and walked to the makeshift tent where the sail had already been rolled, retrieving her shield and spear. Grend strode past her, squatted in the foam and washed the bowls out. At the end of the pier warriors were boarding the Wave-Jarl, loading barrels and pelts. Elvar saw the captive woman and child sitting and waiting at the pier’s edge, the boy dangling his legs over the shingle and foam.
Biórr approached them with two bowls of steaming porridge and offered them to the woman and child. Cautiously the woman took a bowl and said something to her son. Biórr crouched and gave him his porridge.
Then Agnar was bellowing orders and everything became a whirl of activity, warriors boarding the Wave-Jarl, stepping from the pier’s boards over the top-rail and on to the ship’s decks. Elvar strode from the beach to the pier, past a rack where the butchered troll’s skin had been scraped of fat. Beside the rack sat a sack piled with the troll’s skeleton, its flesh boiled from its bones. There were barrels packed with the valued parts of the creature, its skin rolled, teeth in a clay jar, the testicles in brine, heart and liver in a barrel hard packed with ice. Toenails for grinding into powder. All of it would fetch a good price.
Elvar stepped lightly from the pier on to the ship’s deck, shuffled around the goats that were being herded to the rear of the ship and penned beneath an awning of spare sail. She stacked her spear in the racks amidships, exchanging them for her oar, and then made for her chest. In the curve of the bow, beneath the drakkar’s prow, Kráka the Tainted thrall was curled in sleep.
Elvar reached her chest and wedged her shield into the rack pinned along the top-rail’s rim, tugged off her mittens, unbuckled her weapons belt, wrapped it around her sword, axe and seax, then opened her chest and lay them inside. She took off her other belt, which held her pouch of kindling and medicine pouch and also helped to take the weight of her mail, and placed that in the chest too. Bending over she wriggled out of her brynja like a snake shedding its skin and wrapped the mail coat in sheepskin. Then she was closing the lid, pinning her sealskin cloak about her with an iron brooch and tugging her mittens back on.
All those around her were going through the same process, warriors stacking and storing provisions, loading their chests, storing their weapons and mail. Sighvat was at the rear of the deck, securing the two collared thralls with iron rings and pins hammered into the top-rail. The woman and child were pushed under the awning to sit with the goats.
Something drew Elvar’s eye, in the water off the starboard side of the drakkar. Lumps of ice moved there, and one lifted against the swell of the outgoing tide. A splash, a ripple and a wake of white foam.
“WARE THE WATER!” Elvar yelled.
A moment’s silence passed as heads turned to her, even as she was leaping from her sea-chest and running for her spear. Then there was an explosion of ice and sea spray as a shape burst from the water, a serpentine body, its scaled head as big as one of the huts on the beach, mouth gaping with rows of razored teeth, soft flesh inside its mouth a deep, blood-flushed red.