About A-Viking

by Kiernan Kelly
44 pages / 18000 words
ISBN-13: 978-1-60370-168-6
ISBN-10: 1-60370-168-0
Available file types - html. lit, pdf, prc

What's a Viking to do when he ends up on a beach in Florida with a hyperactive stock broker and no idea what year he's in? Go back to Chase's hotel, naturally. Chase thinks Bjorn is the real thing, a Viking from the days of yore, but he also figures he needs to clean the guy up a little.

While Chase is making a more modern Bjorn, a sworn enemy of Bjorn's is also in the modern age. Jorun wants to plunder this new land he's in and finish the job of killing Bjorn's family, all in one blow. Can Chase and Bjorn defeat Jorun and find a way to reconcile their very different worlds?

Sample

Great waves crashed over the sides of the longboat and sent frigid sheets of foam sluicing across the deck, that drenched the men who fought to keep her afloat. The storm had come up suddenly, nearly without warning, thick blue-black thunderheads moving in swiftly from over the horizon, pushing wild waves in front of them.

Bjorn stood at the helm, and squinted into the rain that pelted his skin with icy needles, as if the heat in his glare alone could pierce the gloom of the storm. Behind him, sixty-four men bent their backs to the oars, their voices raised not in prayer but in curses against the fickleness of luck, against their enemies, against the gods themselves for seeing fit to cast them headfirst into the maelstrom. Thunder boomed and the wind shrieked, the bellows of the storm drowning out the cries of the men.

The wind whipped the waves ever higher, and rocked the Dragonslayer from side to side like a fragile leaf caught in the whitewaters of the Sjoa River. The great watery hands of the sea lifted the boat up high, then dropped it to crash back with bone-jarring impacts. Jagged lightning breached the sky grown as black as night, Odin’s spears slicing through the darkness only long enough to illuminate the angry waves for a heartbeat.

How, Bjorn thought as a particularly violent crash brought him to his knees, has it come to this? By what curse of which god have I been branded outlaw? I flee from my homeland like the devil’s hounds are at my heels!

Bjorn knew, of course, that there was something snapping at his heels, or rather someone -- someone from whom the devil himself might very well run and hide.

He would have spat had he not known that the wind would only whip his spittle back into his face. The answer to his silently asked question came in the form of a name.

Jorund Blood-axe. Jorund the Vanquisher. Jorund the Mealy-Balled Horse-fucker, Bjorn thought, and bared his teeth to the gale.

Bjorn had been two years a-Viking, sailing his longboat from shore to shore, amassing wealth beyond imagining for the glory and coffers of his father, Erik Fairhair, Jarl of Lagarvík. Gold, silver, bronze, exotic spices, and bolts of brilliantly colored cloth had filled the hull of the longboat and the treasure boxes that served as seating for the men at the oars.

So proud he’d been as he’d docked the Dragonslayer within sight of the familiar daub-and-wattle longhouses of Lagarvík. Both his heart and chest had swelled with the warmth of homecoming as he stepped from the deck to the dock, pausing a moment to get his land legs. Long strides brought him across the dock to the outskirts of the village. Eager to speak with his father, Bjorn had stepped up his pace but when he reached his father’s keep, he soon realized that nothing was as he remembered it to be.