Randr Sterki lay flat out, a great bruise on the side of his face and Onund looming over him like a scowling troll. He had made for Randr as soon as the fight started and slammed him in the face with the boss of his shield. Now Randr lay on his back, propped up on his elbows and spitting out teeth and blood.
‘I owe you that and more,’ Onund growled at him, touching his chest where, under his stained tunic, the glassy scars of Randr’s old burning still wept.
‘The severed hand seldom steals again,’ Red Njal pointed out, scowling. ‘And a head in a tree plots only with the wind.’
‘Your granny was never one for a boy to snuggle into,’ Crowbone muttered, hunching himself against the black glare Red Njal gave him in passing.
The rest of Randr’s men, cowed and gasping, sat sullenly, aware that they had leaped out of the skillet into the pitfire. As I came up, Onund handed me a sheathed sword, taken from Randr; it was mine, taken when he had me prisoner and the V-notch in it undammed a sudden, painful torrent of remembering – of my sword biting into the mast of the
Fjord Elk
, of being slammed into the water, of Nes Bjorn’s charred remains, of the loss of Gizur and Hauk and all the rest.
Randr must have seen that gallop across my face like chasing horses, for he stayed silent.
There was a survivor from the horsemen, a sallow-faced scowler with blood on his teeth and still snarling, for all that he had the stump of a hunting arrow in his thigh and his left arm at the ugly angle only a twisted break would allow.
I wanted answers, but his black eyes were sodden with anger and pain and defiance. Then Dark Eye came up and spoke to him, a string of coughing sibilants. He replied, showing bloody teeth in a snarl. She answered. They shot sounds like arrows, then were silent.
‘He is a Vislan,’ she said. ‘That tribe are all Christ worshippers.’
‘All that for so little?’ I answered and she sighed.
‘He called me names. He calls you all flax-heads, which is what they call the Saxlanders. Barbarians.’
There was more, I knew, but caught the warning spark from her and let Finn erupt instead.
‘Barbarian?’ he bellowed. ‘I am to be called this by a skin-wearing troll?’
‘
Quisque est barbarum alio
,’ said a weary voice and, turning, we saw Leo the monk, with Koll behind him and Thorbrand trailing after.
‘Everyone,’ Leo translated, with a wan smile at Finn, ‘is a barbarian to someone.’
I gave him no more than a glance, my attention on Koll, who came up and stood in front of me.
‘You have fared a fair way from home,’ I said, awkward and cursing myself for not having more tongue-wit than that.
‘I knew you would come,’ he answered, staring up into my face with the sure, clear certainty of innocence. He was thin and his bone-white colour made it hard to see if he was ill or not, but he seemed hale enough. Yet the pale blue eyes had seen things and it showed in them.
‘Well,’ drawled Finn, circling the monk like a dunghill cock does hens. ‘You have led us a long dance, monk.’
Leo acknowledged it with a wry smile. His hair was long and stuck out at odd angles and he had gathered the tattered ends of his black robe up under his belt, so that it looked like he wore baggy black breeks to the knee; beneath them, his legs were red and white, mud-splattered and bloody from old cuts and grazes. He reeked of grease and woodsmoke and did not look much, but I knew he had a needle of poisoned steel on him and said so.
He widened his eyes to look innocent and Finn growled at him.
‘Find a rope,’ Red Njal spat. ‘Make him dance a new dance. The breathless tongue never conspires.’
‘No.’
It came from two throats – Koll’s and Finn’s – and took everyone by surprise, even the pair who had hoiked it out.
‘Kill him another way,’ Finn growled, scrubbing his beard as he did when he was discomfited.
‘Do not kill him at all,’ Koll declared defiantly. ‘He helped me, saved me when the rest of these pigs wanted to sell me to the Magyars. Him and Randr Sterki stood against them.’
I knew why Randr would want to keep the boy, but not the monk and I said so to Leo, who shrugged.
‘I took him as a counter in a game,’ he said diffidently. ‘He still had value.’
Koll blinked a bit at that, but I had expected not much more. I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder, to show him he was safe once more – then Randr Sterki struggled weakly to his feet and growled to me across the trampled, bloody underbrush of the clearing.
‘Well? Will you finish it, Bear Slayer? What you started on Svartey?’
I wondered how many of the Svartey crew were left and wondered it aloud; the answer was straight enough – only him alone. All the others had died and the men of his crew who sat, shivering and sullen, had no connection with that old
strandhogg.
‘Kill him and be done with it,’ Styrbjorn said and Randr Sterki curled a lip at him.
‘So much for fighting shoulder to shoulder,’ he answered bitterly. ‘Well done is ill paid, as the saying goes. Here is the dog who fought, the chief who led and the ring-giver who paid – only the fighting dog dies, it seems.’
I looked from Styrbjorn to Leo and back to Randr. He had the right of it, for sure – all of those who had helped the Norns weave the wyrd of what happened were here, including the Oathsworn, who had scoured Svartey in one bloody thread of it.
‘Matters would have gone better for me,’ Randr Sterki went on morosely, ‘but for this bloody habit of slaughter you Oathsworn have. The death of that village you visited has called out an army of Pols, all bent on skewering Northmen – my bad war luck to run into them before you.’
‘Truly,’ agreed Onund coldly, ‘when you annoy the gods, you are fucked.’
Finn added his own bloody growl to that by cutting the throat out of the Vislan and, while he choked and kicked, Abjorn and Alyosha counted the cost of the fight and the heads left.
There were fourteen of Randr’s men left, including himself. We had two dead and four men wounded; the two dead were Eid and the Dyfflin man, whose name, I learned from Thorbrand, was Ranald. Finn could not understand what had made them charge out as they did and asking Thorbrand only brought a weary heave of his shoulders and the answer that he had followed the other two. I thought I knew, for I had felt it myself – little Koll, the prize for all that had been suffered, was in danger of being snapped up by someone else.
It had cost us, all the same and we would need Randr and his men, I was thinking and I said that to them and him. Red Njal cursed and one or two others made disapproving grunts, but I laid it out for them; we were alone and together made no more than sixty. Somewhere, hordes of Pols hunted us.
‘Turn Randr Sterki and his men loose, then,’ Kaelbjorn Rog offered truculently. ‘Let the Pols hunt them down while we get away.’
‘Tcha!’ spat Red Njal. ‘At least make it easy for the Pols – the foot removed cannot scurry far.’
‘I am now sure I dislike this granny of yours,’ Crowbone said, shaking his head, then stared his odd-eyes into the pig-squint glare Red Njal tried to burn him with.
‘If the wind changes, your face will stay like that,’ he added grimly. ‘My ma told me that one and she was a princess.’
‘It is too late for running,’ I said, before matters boiled. ‘The Pols will know where we all are in a few hours.’
‘Why so?’ demanded Crowbone, moody because he had been effectively kept out of the fight by his iron wet-nurse, Alyosha. ‘We have killed all these dog-riders.’
‘But not their horses,’ Alyosha told him, seeing it now. ‘They will track back and find us.’
It was then that folk realised some of the bow-nosed ponies had galloped off and those who knew their livestock knew what horses did when riderless. They went home. I knew it, as well as I knew we could not stay here to fight, nor run somewhere else out on the wet plain.
There was only one place we could go which would give us a chance of fighting at all and it was not one I wanted to visit. When I laid it out, the words fell into a silence as still as the inside of an old howe, which was answer enough.
Save for Leo, who always had something to say, even about stepping into a plague-ridden fortress.
‘
A fronte praeciptium, a tergo lupi
,’ he declared and turned to Finn, who stunned the monk even as he opened his mouth to translate it.
‘A cliff in front, wolves behind,’ Finn translated. ‘I have heard that one before, priest. It is the place the Oathsworn fight best.’
His breathing, as Bjaelfi took pains to tell us, was just a habit, for the fever had fired him so that his blood had boiled up into his thought-cage and destroyed his thinking entire. What was left sucked in air the way a deer kicks long after you have gralloched it.
It was a habit strong in him, for he took three days to be quit of it and, at the last, was open-mouthed and desperate as a fish. Ulf, his name was, called Amr by his oarmates, which meant Tub on account of his considerable belly. Well, it had been considerable, but in three days of vomit and leaching sweat he had melted like grease on a skillet, become a wraith, his face pocked red and white and pus yellow and his eyes gone white as boiled eggs.
Bjaelfi tied his mouth back up with a scrap of cloth and we sat back and stared; Ulf, the emptied Tub, first to die of the Red Plague and lying there with drooping hare-ears of cloth on top of his head, making him look as if he was being silly to amuse bairns.
‘They are coming again,’ roared a voice from outside the dim hut.
I heaved myself wearily up, took up the blood-gummed shaft of the bearded axe and looked at Bjaelfi.
‘Burn him,’ I said and he nodded. Then I lumbered out to war.
We first saw our enemy when they filtered out onto the soaked plain in front of the
grod
not long after we had panted our way into it and barred the gate; we made it easier for them to find us, for we burned the main hall, after tying bound cloths round our faces – for all the good it would do – and dragging all the scattered, half-chewed bodies there, where most of them already festered.
Their horsemen trotted up, spraying water up from the steaming ground, to be greeted by great black feathers of reeking smoke; close behind came foot soldiers in unbleached linen and only helmets and spears and round shields. Behind them came a knot of iron-clad horse soldiers, sporting lances with proud pennons and one huge banner with what appeared to be a wheel on it. Dark Eye said that was the mark of the Pol rulers, who had been wheelwrights until the favour of their god raised them up.
‘They will think we slaughtered all the folk of this place and burned some of it,’ Styrbjorn said bitterly. ‘Someone should tell them there is pest here and that we are doomed. That will send them running as far from this place as they can get.’
‘It would send you scampering,’ Alyosha replied, watching the enemy closely as they assembled – counting heads, as I was. ‘What they will do is keep a safe distance and shoot anyone who leaves with arrows. When we are all dead, they will burn it. The last thing these folk want is us running all over their land, spreading Red Plague.’
‘Better they do not know we have disease here,’ I said, loud enough for others to hear and spread the sense of it. ‘It will mean the reddest of red war and no-one will be able to throw down their weapons and be spared.’
Finn and I exchanged looks; we knew no-one would be spared anyway, once the talking had stopped.
‘I make it four hundreds, give or take a spear or two,’ Alyosha said, coming quietly to me. I had much the same; the rest of the men, grim and silent on the ramparts, knew only that the plain in front of the
grod
was thick with men who wanted to kill us.
‘Get them working,’ I said to Alyosha, ‘for busy hands mean less chance to think on matters. Send Abjorn to the river wall – there is a small gate in it, used by the fishermen, I am thinking. It may also be the only way to bring water in from the river unless you can find a well. We have small beer but not enough, so we will have to drink water in the end. Finn – since you can tally a little without having to take your boots off, find out what we have in stores. Slaughter the livestock if we cannot feed them, but leave the cows until last, for they at least provide milk.’
There was more – making arrows from what we could find, ripping out heavy balks of timber and finding all the heavy stones we could to drop on heads.
Hot oil, Crowbone told us with all the wisdom of his few years. Or heated gravel where there was no oil, he added and Finn patted him, as if he was a small dog, then went off, shaking his head and chuckling. It was left to Alyosha to patiently explain that flaming oil and red-hot stones were not the cleverest things to be dropping all over the wooden gate and walls of our fortress.
Randr Sterki came up to me then, badger-beard working as his jaw muscles clenched and unclenched.
‘Give us our weapons back and we will fight,’ he growled.
I looked at him and the men clustered behind him. They wanted their hands on hilt and haft, were eager – even desperate – to defend themselves, if no-one else.
‘We are in this leaking ship as one,’ I pointed out, more for the men behind than him. ‘Those dog-fuckers out there call us flax-heads, think we are all Saxlanders and will curl their lips at any man who crawls out to claim he can open the gate if only he is spared. They will kill him once he has served the purpose.’
Feet shifted at that and I knew I had them; Randr Sterki half-turned to his men, then turned back to me.
‘We will fight, until dead or victorious.’
It had been said in front of witnesses and was Oath enough, so I gave him my V-notched sword back, for I would not give him Jarl Brand’s own. He grinned, then drew it and stood, naked blade in hand and within striking distance of me, who had nothing in his hand but old filth and callouses.
‘If we survive, Bear Slayer,’ he said flatly, ‘there will be matters to discuss.’
I was sick of him and his matters, so I turned away, putting my back to him and the blade he held, though I felt the skin creep along my backbone as I did so.