Sigurd’s
Swords
(Olaf’s Saga,
Book 2)
By Eric
Schumacher
From best-selling historical fiction novelist, Eric Schumacher, comes the second volume in Olaf's Saga: the adrenaline-charged story of Olaf Tryggvason and his adventures in the
kingdom of the Rus.
AD 968. It has been
ten summers since the noble sons of the North, Olaf and Torgil, were driven
from their homeland by the treachery of the Norse king, Harald Eriksson. Having
then escaped the horrors of slavery in Estland, they now fight among the Rus in
the company of Olaf’s uncle, Sigurd.
It will be some of the bloodiest years in Rus history. The Grand Prince, Sviatoslav, his hungry for land, riches and power, but his unending campaigns are leaving the corpses of thousands in their wakes. From the siege of Konugard to the battlefields of ancient Bulgaria, Olay and Torgil struggle to say alive in Siguard's Sword, the riveting sequel to Forged by Iron.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Konugard, Gardariki, Late Summer, AD 968
Fall was coming. I could feel it in the cold wind that whipped
down the Nepr River to the east of us. I could see it, too, in the clouds
forming in the north. Thick and gray they were, carrying rain that I welcomed.
Anything to slake my thirst and give the vile nomads who encircled our city —
the Pechenegs — something to make their siege a little less pleasant.
The Pechenegs had been our friends once, or so I was told. But
they had turned on us while our leader, Grand Prince Sviatoslav, was away to
the south, fighting the Bolgars. Now they camped by the thousands beyond our
walls. Of those nomadic people I can say little, save how much I despised them.
I hated their swarthy looks, their equine stench, and the damn drums they beat
each night. I hated their black felt hats and the food they cooked beneath our
noses as we starved on the walls of Konugard. But mostly I hated them for their
arrows and how they killed us from afar, like cowards.
The siege was entering its third month. In the first week of the
siege they had overrun the neighboring land, driving our army back to the ramparts
that stood inside the city’s moat. Those high wooden walls had been our home
ever since.
I looked at Olaf. My friend and charge stood next to me,
fiddling with his seax. We had been nobles once but had fled our homes when the
sons of Erik had killed Olaf’s father. Our flight had led to our capture by
Estland Vikings, who had sold us into slavery. For seven long summers, as
thralls, we prodded the Estland bogs for pebbles of iron that our master
smelted and sold in the market for profit. That had been a living version of
Hel. I had vowed upon my escape never to be captured again, and yet here I was,
caged in the city of Konugard and surrounded by death. At least here there was
a glimmer of hope. We had sent messages to Grand Prince Sviatoslav early in the
siege, begging him to return. If he did so before winter, we stood a chance. I
glanced at the clouds yet again, as if I could divine the answer in their gray
billows. They rolled on indifferently.
“Torgil!” called Lord Sigurd from his seat beneath the arrow-riddled
parapet. I turned to find him regarding me wearily, his cerulean eyes
dark-rimmed. He was a man in his prime — tall, muscular, his red hair unfaded —
but I could hear the fatigue in his voice. Strewn across the fighting platform
near him were the members of his household retinue, his hird. Roughly forty of
us remained, representing all manner of people. Most of us were Rus, which is
to say Swedes, Danes, and Northmen, though there were also many Slavs: Ilmen,
Chuds, Krivichi, and other tribes whose names I did not know. We differed
greatly from one another in looks, but we were all bound by one oath — to serve
Lord Sigurd — and one language, if you could call our jumble of Slavic and
Norse a language at all.
“Lord?” I replied.
“Mind your helmet,” he warned.
I reached up and straightened the conical helm on my head, then
swiped my black bangs from my eyes with my grimy hand and turned back to the
view.
Sigurd was the maternal uncle of Olaf and one of the lords of
General Dobrynya, a prominent officer in the army of Grand Prince Sviatoslav.
It had been Sigurd who had discovered Olaf in a marketplace when he was a
thrall and he also who had come to rescue me and my fellow thralls from the
Estland cesspit where we were being held. He had seen our sorry state and had
brought us back to his hall near Holmgard, offering us a roof and food and
rest, a kindness I promised to repay with my service to him. When I was
sufficiently healed of my external wounds, he allowed me to train with Olaf and
his men, for I had been taught in the way of weapons by my own father before my
enslavement. Under Sigurd’s steady and patient tutelage, my body mended and my
skills improved until that fateful day when he had offered me a place in his
hird alongside Olaf. My service was for five summers, and I accepted it gladly.
Not a week later we received news that we were going to the
great walled city the Slavs call Kyiv — Konugard to we Northmen — to protect
Grand Prince Sviatoslav’s mother, Queen Olga, and his sons Yaropolk, Oleg, and
Vladimir while he campaigned in the south. Sigurd had said it would be an easy
assignment — a summer in a beautiful city surrounded by beautiful women. I
bristled at the memory, for the Pechenegs had come not long after we arrived
and quickly overran the area. Since then we had known nothing but misery.
“How do you think Turid would like this?” I asked Olaf, thinking
of our mutual friend who served in Sigurd’s household. She had wanted to be a
warrior — indeed, she had the skill for it — but Sigurd had forbidden it. He
believed it would cause too much strife among his men. Mayhap he was right.
Turid was a striking redhead with glacial eyes and freckled skin whose beauty
had captivated me since we were children. It was not difficult to see how men
might fight for her attention.
Olaf smirked through his short amber beard. “Truth be told, I
think she would enjoy it. Not the suffering, but the fighting. That, she would
like.”
I smiled at the truth in Olaf’s words. She had been a fellow
thrall with us and had shown her fighting prowess during our escape. “Aye. She
would. We should bring it up again to Sigurd if we return from this place.”
“When we return,” Olaf corrected. Unlike me, he did not see the
dark side of reality. He still believed the rubbish his father had fed him when
we were small: that he was destined for greatness.
I rolled my eyes but knew there was no sense in arguing.
“You should marry her, you know,” he offered quietly. “Neither
of you is getting any younger and it would be good for you to have a son.”
I glanced at my friend, who was taller than me by half a head,
though he was four winters my junior. It was true what he said — I was in my
twentieth fall and Turid was older than me by a winter. I knew she was fond of
me, but our friendship had never gone past a peck on the cheek. Olaf’s comment
was not far off the mark, but I refused to let him know that. Any advantage
given him was an advantage he would take. If not now, then later. So instead I
furrowed my brows and gave him my most puzzled look. “What makes you think I
want to marry her? Or want a child?”
“Oh, come. You have always had feelings for her. Ever since we
were young whelps. And what man does not want a son to carry on his name and
his memory?”
“What about you?” I countered. “You could easily marry her.”
He snorted. “I could never marry her.” He moved closer to me and
his blue eyes swung to and fro as he checked for listeners. “I am a prince. If
I marry, it will be for gain and she cannot offer me that. Though,” he raised a
finger, “I would not mind discovering what other gifts she has to offer.”
When she had flowered, the son of our Estland slave master had
taken Turid as his concubine. It was a wound from which she would never heal,
and a wound on which Olaf had just trodden. My temper flared and I punched him
hard in the shoulder.
“What did you do that for?” His eyes flashed as he straightened
from the blow, genuinely shocked at my response.
“To remind you to watch your tongue,” I growled. “You know how
sensitive she is about that.”
“But she is not here, is she?” Olaf snarled at me and slid down
the wall to a spot near my feet. I did not care. His callous comment poked at
wounds he had no business poking.
I was about to say something more when a horn rang out from the
watchtower and turned my attention back to the enemy.
“What is happening out there?” Sigurd asked.
I peered more closely at the Pecheneg encampment. “There is some
movement.”
“My dead mother could give a better report than that,
Bog-Breath! Why is the watchman blowing a horn?” asked Sigurd’s
second-in-command, a brute named Ulrik, who lounged near Sigurd with his eyes
closed. He’d had the honor of serving as Sigurd’s second-in-command for
multiple summers and had the scars to prove it. At some point in our journey to
Konugard, he had decided I needed a byname and so had started calling me
Bog-Breath because of my time as a thrall in the Estland bogs. I hated the
name.
“What kind of movement?” Sigurd asked more patiently.
A small number of men had climbed onto their stocky steeds and
were heading off to the west. “Looks like a foraging party,” I surmised.
“That is what you said the last time they attacked,” mumbled
Olaf.
“Piss off,” I replied and kicked him.
“If you kick me again, Torgil, I will break your ankle,” Olaf
growled.
“Try it,” I hissed.
“Torgil!” Sigurd snapped. “The enemy is that way.” He
pointed over the wall. Near him, Ulrik snorted.
With a muffled curse, I turned my eyes back to the vast army
before me. It was, in truth, jaw-dropping. I was the son of a Northern noble
who had been a friend to Olaf’s father, a Northern king — men who could gather
hundreds of spearmen to their banners in mere days. As a youth, I had been so
impressed by that. And yet it paled in comparison to the thousands that had
gathered beyond our walls and now covered the plain like an undulating blanket
of humanity. Though I stood on the walls of the largest city I had ever known,
I felt like a pimple on the arse of their might.
“Where is Sviatoslav?” I wondered aloud, giving voice to my
unease.
“Probably screwing some Bolgar wench,” replied a bald, blue-eyed
Dane named Orm. His name meant worm and I thought it fit him well. He had a
long yellow beard, long limbs, and a long body capped by a round head that was
red with his latest sunburn, the skin peeling as if he were molting. Orm’s
sarcasm spilled from his mouth as surely as his skin flaked from his scalp.
The men chuckled at Orm’s words, for it was known that Grand
Prince Sviatoslav liked his women as much as he liked his campaigns.
“Worry not, Torgil,” added Sigurd as if reading my thoughts.
“His mother has sent messengers. If there is anyone he heeds, it is her.
Besides, we have been in worse binds before, as have you and Olaf, I think.”
And just as his words reached my ears, the Pecheneg arrows
struck.
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Eric Schumacher (1968 - ) is an American historical novelist who
currently resides in Santa Barbara, California, with his wife and two children.
He was born and raised in Los Angeles and attended college at the University of
San Diego.
At a very early age,
Schumacher discovered his love for writing and medieval European history, as
well as authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Those discoveries continue
to fuel his imagination and influence the stories he tells. His first novel,
God's Hammer, was published in 2005.Website • Twitter • Facebook • LinkedIn • BookBub • Amazon Author Page • Goodreads
Thank you to The Coffee Pot Book Club for giving me the opportunity to feature Sigurd's Swords.
