Viking Raiders (7 page)

The longship sailed into shallower waters, and Erik gave the order to drop anchor. Men scrambled to untie the little landing boats, which were lashed to the sides of the longship with thick ropes.

Tom peered up into the grassy hills that hugged the bay. Dotted in small clusters were little stone cottages with thatched roofs. He could see smoke curling upwards from the chimneys. They were so different from the simple wooden roundhouses he and Isis had seen in King Arthur's England, just four hundred years earlier.

“Into the boats!” Erik ordered the men, thrusting an iron broadsword, a round shield and a sheathed dagger at each of the crew.

“Kill five for Valhalla, remember?” he said, patting each man on the shoulder.

Tom, Isis, Cleo and Magnus were the last to leave the longship. Magnus looked as deathly pale as his white-blond hair. He hopped into one of the little boats and grabbed two sets of oars.

“We'll row together, Tom,” Magnus said, offering Tom a pair of oars. “Cat-girl can sit and give orders. I think she'll prefer that.”

Isis flung herself on to the bench at the back and sat regally, with Cleo on her lap.

As Tom pulled on the oars, struggling to keep up with Magnus's pace, Isis had a jolly time doing the thing she loved most: being bossy.

“Left a bit! No! Right a bit!” she ordered. “Faster! The others have already landed.”

Tom slumped over his oars and groaned. “Would you like a go? Because you obviously you think you can do better.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Isis scoffed. “I'm the brains of this operation.”

“Funny, that,” Tom whispered. “Because I could have sworn you'd had your brains pulled out through your nostrils five thousand years ago.”

Isis's face crumpled up in outrage. But before she could reply, a voice called, “Get off our island!”

At the water's edge, some ragged-looking villagers waved sticks and knives at the Vikings. The men wore dark blue and green kilts, with animal-skin cloaks draped round their shoulders. Like the Vikings, the Scots' hair was long but it wasn't nicely braided. It was a shaggy mess, as were their beards. The women wore simple, long dresses and scarves on their heads. They looked almost as fierce as the men.

Erik was standing on the beach, directing his men up towards the village. He shouted to them, “You have nothing to fear from these Scots!”

The Vikings answered with a noisy cheer. They waved their swords in the air. Tom's arms and legs seemed to have turned to mush.

One of the Scots threw a spear at the invaders, as his fellow islanders let out a battle cry.

Erik bashed his sword hilt on his helmet. “Take no notice, lads!” he cried. “They can't scare us – we're Viking warriors, the toughest in the world!” He beckoned the stragglers, who were still rowing their boats towards the shore. “Come out of your boats fighting! I want everyone in this village dead by the end of the day.”

“AAARGH! Feel Thor's hammer coming down on your heads!” Bjørn the Bone-crusher yelled, as he sprinted at the villagers.

Five or six Vikings followed behind him, waving their axes and swords in the air with big, hairy arms.

“Death to the Scots!” they cried.

Even from a distance, Tom could see how the villagers' faces had paled. They still prodded their sticks and pitchforks at the Viking invaders, but he noticed they were stepping backwards up the path.

Isis covered her eyes. “I can't bear to watch,” she said. She covered Cleo's eyes with the edge of her cloak. “Don't look, Fluffpot. You'll get nightmares.”

Tom looked over at Magnus. He seemed to be rowing along the shore, rather than towards the land. His eyes were fixed nervously on the struggle between the Scots and the Viking crew. The clang of clashing metal was carried all the way down to the sea.

“What's the matter?” Tom asked gently.

Magnus shook his head and trailed his oar in the shallow water.

“I don't want to fight,” he said. “I'm so ashamed. I thought I'd be able to, but I suppose I'm just not that kind of a Viking.”

Tom sighed heavily. “Me, neither. The last thing I want to do is kill a bunch of poor Scottish villagers. They've done nothing wrong.”

“Well, we can't just hang about here!” Isis said, grabbing an oar off Tom. “Even if we're not a bunch of bloodthirsty lunatics, Erik and his men are. And they'll kill us if they think we're cowards. So we have to get on that island and see this thing through. DON'T WE?”

She mouthed the word, ‘amulet' at Tom and jabbed her finger towards the shore. Then she started to row so haphazardly, that the boat and its occupants were soon dripping wet.

Realising she was right, Tom grabbed back the oar and started to row the boat to shore in earnest.

“Come on, Magnus. We'll find a way to stay out of the battle,” he promised, as the boat pulled up on the beach.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tom could see that the villagers were fleeing into the hills in earnest. Their screams carried on the wind. Even the very young and the very old were running away from the Vikings as fast as they could.

“Get after them, men!” Erik cried, waving his axe. “Give them a Viking lesson they won't forget.” His eyes were wild and his red hair looked like it was on fire. He seemed to be in some kind of battle frenzy.

No wonder the Vikings stomped all over Britain,
Tom thought
. I bet people died from heart attacks before these guys had even drawn blood.

Erik noticed Tom, Isis, Cleo and Magnus lagging behind.

“Get up to the village,” he shouted. “You can start looting!” He started issuing more orders. “Search every house. Be on the lookout for jewellery and gold. What you can carry, steal. Anything else, BURN!”

Erik punched the air and growled. Then he sprinted off after his other men, shouting, “Forward! Forward! Men of Thor!”

“We have to look as if we're doing something,” Tom said to Magnus. “But no burning, OK?”

They trudged through the hillside to the village.

Magnus nodded. “Agreed. We'll be OK if we stick together,” he said, mustering a half-smile.

The first house they came to was a wooden hut, rather than one of the stone cottages they had seen from the sea. The walls were buckled outwards and the roof was covered in chunks of grass and mud. The door hung crookedly on its hinges. Tom held his breath, hoping that a Scottish peasant wasn't going to jump out and attack them with a pitchfork.

Luckily, the hut seemed to be empty. “I think we've walked into some kind of store cupboard,” Isis said, poking at a pile of nets and hooks. She held her nose. “It smells like the time I shoved a sardine into the High Priest's headdress on a hot summer's day.”

Tom could see nothing in the shadows but simple furniture and fishing equipment. In a corner was a thick pile of straw, half-covered with a dirty sheepskin.

“This is a poor fisherman's home,” he said. “There's nothing of value in here. Let's go.”

Magnus nodded, turned on his heel and left the hut, ready to move on to the next house. But Isis carried on pushing things aside with her toes, or with her hand wrapped in her cloak.

“No, Tom. We should definitely still look. You never know, DO YOU?” She grabbed him and whispered loudly in his ear. “The amulet could be anywhere. So we have to look EVERYWHERE.”

Suddenly, there was a loud rustle, followed by a crackling noise.

“What was that?” Tom said, looking round the hut in fear and holding his sword out in front of him.

“Over there!” Isis said.

In a corner of the hut was a pile of ragged clothes, stacked high against the wall. The clothes twitched.

Tom reached forward and flicked the top layer of clothing on to the floor.

“AAAAAARRRGGGH!” shrieked two heads, popping out suddenly from underneath the pile of rags.

“AAAAARRRGGGH!” shouted Tom and Isis, scuttling several steps back towards the door.

Tom took a closer look at the heads, and realised they belonged to children.

He clapped a hand over Isis's mouth. “Shh! We're frightening them,” he said. Tom thought the boy looked about four, and the girl about two. The children suddenly burst into tears.

Oh no!
thought Tom. He had no idea what to do. Thinking fast, he started singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'.

The children stopped crying and giggled.

“Look, the kiddies are cute,” said Isis impatiently. “But we're not here to baby sit. We need to find that amulet.”

“I've got an idea!” Tom said brightly. “Let's just pretend to loot this house. We'll look for the amulet while we're doing it.”

For the next ten minutes, Tom and Isis stayed in the safety of the fisherman's hut, searching through everything. They made as much noise as possible, throwing things about, so that anybody passing would think they were happily looting.

The children seemed to think it was a game, and ran round the hut kicking the furniture and knocking things down. Tom didn't have the heart to tell them that their village was actually under siege.