Fin Gall by James L. Nelson Page A

O
    rnolf the Restless lay in a great fat heap on the floor. After a moment he managed to push himself up on his arms and glare with the one eye that would still open at the Danes who surrounded him. He spit a glob of bloody mucus on the floor.
                  “You are all a lot of sons of whores... I’ll rip your lungs out, you bastards...” he gasped through split and bleeding lips. And then Orm kicked him in the side of the head and he went down again.
                  Magnus was impressed. The old man had taken hours of this abuse, alternately worked over by himself and Orm and the two guards. And for all that he had given away practically nothing, and his defiance had not wavered a bit.
                  That last kick knocked him out cold, and for a moment Orm stood panting and looking down at his motionless form.
                  “Is he dead?” Magnus asked.
                  Orm nudged him with his foot. Ornolf groaned a bit.
                  “Water, here,” Orm said and one of the guards stepped up with a bucket, dashed it in Ornolf’s face. The jarl opened his eyes. Orm crouched down and grabbed him by his long gray and red hair.
                  “Are you part of a Norwegian fleet? Olaf the White’s fleet?” Orm asked. He had asked it so often that Magnus had lost count. He was sick of hearing the question. Ornolf, apparently, was sick of denying it.
                  “Yes, we’re part of Olaf’s fleet! A thousand longships! We’re going to tie you down and take turns buggering you to death, you son of a whore!” He voice was surprisingly strong for someone in as much pain as he must be in.
                  Orm let go of the hair and Ornolf’s head hit the floor. Magnus folded his arms and regarded the old man. He had denied being a part of any fleet and Magnus, for one, believed him. Orm probably did too, but he was too afraid of Norwegian vengeance to let it go at that. Besides, he enjoyed this sort of questioning.
                  Orm kicked Ornolf in the stomach and elicited another groan. “By Thor, I’ll have you disemboweled and burned at the stake for piracy, raiding a Danish ship, if you don’t tell me the truth.”
                  It was not an idle threat, Magnus knew. He had seen Orm do it to more than a few men and he would probably do it to Ornolf. But the punishment would have nothing to do with their raiding the Danish trader. No one cared about that. It would be to make Ornolf, or his men, admit to being part of a Norwegian fleet, or, barring that, to make sure that they never would be.
                  Magnus had his own interest in the interrogation. The Crown of the Three Kingdoms. It had not occurred to Orm that these men might have found the curragh when Magnus could not, but it had occurred to Magnus, and Ornolf’s near slip of the tongue had all but confirmed it in Magnus’s mind.
                  Magnus had carried out a systematic search of the longship, in the early hours, while Asbjorn still slept and Orm was busy with other matters. Under the guise of searching for some evidence of treachery, he and his men all but tore the ship apart. Every deck plank was ripped up, every dark corner explored. They found discarded bones, a few coins, a little statue of Thor that had fallen down behind the afterdeck. But they found no crown.
                  Orm crouched down and looked closely at the bleeding Ornolf. He straightened. “This one is useless. We’ll get no more out of him.”
                  “Leave him for me,” Magus said. “I’ll let him rest a bit, and then try again.”
                  Orm turned his eyes from Ornolf to Magnus. Orm, Magnus knew, saw treachery everywhere. Hardly a surprise. There was treachery everywhere.
                  “What more do you think