Fin Gall Read Online Free Page A

know.”
                  The crown, it seemed, was the only cargo, and twenty well-armed noblemen the crew. There was a tale here, and not a man left alive to tell it.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Three
     
     
     
     
     
    Only fools
    hope to live forever
    by escaping enemies.
                          Hávamál
     
     
     
     
     
                  T
    he longphort of Dubh-Linn, squalid and ugly, sat huddled on the banks of the River Liffy. It was not much to look at. A small wooden palisade fort, a hundred feet along each wall, stood a quarter mile up the rise from the marshy banks of the river. The palisade wall on the landward side of the fort extended out east and west, slowly curving down to the river, forming a great, half-moon shaped wo oden shield that cupped the town and kept the rest of Ireland beyond at bay.
                  A plank road, largely obscured by the ubiquitous mud, ran from the fortress down to a series of docks that thrust out over the shallows into the deeper water.
                  Clustered around the plank road were thirty or so buildings, most small, most one story, wattle and daub built with thatched roofs. These did double duty as homes and as woodshops, and blacksmith shops, and goldsmiths and merchants’ offices. There were only two buildings that might be called large and substantial, plank built; a temple to Thor to the south, and nearest the docks, a mead hall.
                  Dubh-Linn was not much to look at on the best of days, but on that day, with the low clouds rendering everything into shades of gray and brown and muted green, and the cold rain blowing in nearly sideways, it was even less lovely.
                  Orm Ulfsson did not care.
                  He stood at the gates of the fortress and looked down the slope toward the river, and he knew that the bedraggled appearance belied the town’s growing import.
                  Certainly, Dubh-lin was no rival to such great trading centers as Kaupang in the Vestfold district of Norway, or the Danish Hedeby. Not yet. But Dubh-Linn would rise to take its place among the great ports of the world. Orm was certain of it. That was why, in a bloody purge, he had driven out the Norwegians who had founded the town and claimed the place as his own.
                  It was happening already, Dubh-Linn’s ascendency. Crowds of men stamped along the muddy road, huddled under furs, heads bent into the wind, and they understood, as Orm did, what Dubh-Linn’s future would be. They were artisans and merchants and warriors who had come to Dubh-Linn to stay. And they brought their women, Irish women and Norse women who had accompanied their men as wives or slaves.
                  Now, looking past the crowded road and alleyways, busy even in the face of the storm, past the docks where longships and curraghs, knarrs and merchant ships from the Norse countries and warmer climes were rolling in the incoming swell, Orm might well have been pleased. But he was not.
                  His eyes were fixed on one longship, mauled by the storm, pulling hard against the current. He could see the yard was snapped a little outboard to the starboard slings, hanging like a broken wing from its halyard. The tall sternpost was also snapped off, and most of the shields which had lined the sides were gone. Part of the upper edge of the gunnels just aft of the starboard bow was smashed in.
                  Asbjorn Gudrodarson, known properly enough as Asbjorn the Fat, was standing just behind Orm. He let out a low whistle. “Magnus was hard pressed by the storm, so it would seem,” he said.
                  Orm grunted. He was quite indifferent to Magnus’s difficulties, he