Sidroc was still splashing though the water when she screamed, a gasping cry of alarm. He was moving forward, his shield on his left arm, his spear in his right, his new sword on his hip. Now it begins, he told himself. I am on a raid. He blinked his eyes at the buildings ahead of him, aware that more than one woman was screaming now, aware too of movement coming from around the back of the houses. He was pounding down the pathway, passing the placid cows, running in a group of heavily armed men towards these farmer folk. Jari was back at the captured ship, not at his shoulder. Yrling was ahead of him, flanked by Une, and Toki was near too. He heard their breathing as he heard his own.
One of the women had lifted her hoe as weapon. The other two had vanished. Only now having gained the forecourt of the first house did Yrling’s men give voice, led by he himself. They bayed like hounds, fanning out to face the men who came running out at them from kitchen yard and barn. Some had the tools they had been using in their hands, rakes and spades and pikes; but not a few had had time to run for and grab a spear where they must be kept ready by a door. They were of all ages, some mere youths, others aged, but most were men hardened by farm-work. Now their faces were contorted in rage as they braced themselves against the onslaught. It was hard to gauge how many they were; perhaps twelve or fourteen.
It was complete slaughter. If any owned them, none of the men of the farm had time to take a shield upon their arms; they used both hands to thrust their weapons at the invaders, whether spear or pike. They were cut down by the threes and fours with swords and spears, the remaining men surrounded and speared like cornered pigs. They were so outnumbered that it was mostly over before all Yrling’s men had even reached the pounded dirt where now the Saxons lay heaped and dying. Anguished cries came from some of them, cries stopped by the quick thrust of spear-points driven into bodies already rent and bleeding.
A stillness followed, broken only by the hard breathing of Yrling’s men. Sidroc’s spear had been extended, but it had not found home in any flesh. He had made a few thrusts, driving the defenders closer together, but the more experienced around him had leapt to the point of vantage and delivered the killing blows. He stood with the rest of them, staring down at the bloodied mass at their feet. None moved.
All the men of the farmstead were dead. The realisation seemed to flow through Yrling’s warriors.
On the other side of the nearest buildings, women and children could be seen fleeing, running for their lives through the work yards. They headed towards the back fields to the woods. More than one had a child in her arms.
“The women – get them!” cried one of the men.
A group of them dropped shields and spears and gave chase. Sidroc stood unmoving, to watch two men tackle the nearest woman, knock her to the ground, watch as one of them held her down by her arms as the second covered her body with his own. Shrieks and screams forced his eyes to a second woman, caught by a lone man, saw him yank her to him, heard the sharp slap across her face which stilled her cries. A moment later two more men were there, pushing her down between them. Toki was one of them, and before he dropped down he saw two females run past.
He looked to Sidroc. “Get yourself one,” he yelled.
Sidroc found himself running after the women, brandishing his spear. They were not screaming, but silent as they ran. By their form and height they might be mother and daughter. The elder turned her head to look where a cluster of warriors surrounded one of the women on the ground. She saw Sidroc, almost on her heels.
“Go, go,” he ordered, in their own tongue. “Go into the trees, as far as you can. Run.”
She saw his step had slowed. He was driving them off, driving them away from where their female kin were being raped, and mayhap murdered.
He stood a moment at the edge of the trees, seeing the blue gown of the elder vanish in the shrubby growth; she had been pushing the younger ahead of her. He turned then. At least five women were down on the ground, pinned in the stubbly growth of the newly-mown hay field. Three times that number of men crawled about them. Children running with them, or who had been in the women’s arms sat crying. A few toddling young stood nearby in gaping and blank-eyed silence.
Sidroc saw Yrling and a few others come out of one of the houses, sacks in their hands; other men had been ransacking the bodies of the dead, seeing if any carried things of value. Knives and shoes were pulled off, and every spear the defenders had used was collected, but other than this the yield was slim.
Yrling scanned the farm yard, put his fingers to his teeth and whistled. The men in the hay field came straggling back. One woman was seen to rise, and walk haltingly toward the trees, before falling again to the ground. The rest lay still, though muffled moans told they still lived.
One of the men led a young fair-haired girl, sobbing, her hands tied with a leathern thong, blood upon her face, her gown half ripped off her white shoulders. Her shortened, awkward steps made clear the pain inflicted on her tender and torn body. They stopped before Yrling, and she trembled so it was hard to know how she kept her feet. Toki was trailing behind them, and Sidroc wondered if this was the girl he had helped fell.
Yrling said, “Leave her.” The man who captured her was one new to him, from Yellow-sail. Yrling knew no more than his name, Bue.
“But she is so pretty. The best of the lot,” came the answer. “You said we would win women.”
“And you have had your fill, now.” Yrling cast a quick eye on the girl, her mouth bleeding and swollen from having been slapped into submission. He looked to the man Bue who held her. “We are not slaving, not yet,” Yrling went on. He did not want any extra mouths to feed before he had a proper camp. “Food and plunder is what we seek.”
The crying girl had gone mute at the sight of the dead men she had been led past.
Bue was loud in his demand. “I caught her first, and she is mine.”
This time Yrling’s hand was on his knife hilt as he answered. “Leave her.”
To decide this he himself took his knife and cut the thong binding the girl’s hands. She took a step back, then another, before she turned to the field and ran to a figure still lying there.
Bue’s own hand raised slightly in protest, then lowered. He did not do more than spit on the ground in response.
Another of the men looked about, then touched a torch into the cooking-fire, and flung it with a whoop onto the roof of the nearest building. Almost at once the thatch began to smoulder.
“No more!” Yrling yelled. “Smoke will be smelled a long way off. Food now, and what treasure they have.” He let his eyes sweep over the men nearest him.
“Get the fowl and sheep, as many as you can,” he ordered. “There are pigs too.” They must leave the cows, but sheep and pigs were both thrifty keepers and quick to slaughter.
“Meal. Grain. Gather what you can from the store-houses,” he told others.
This was a farm not unlike those Sidroc had been raised on, larger and more prosperous to be sure. To range about its sheds and store rooms, hastily plucking hams from the smoke house, filling baskets and buckets with barley and rye from the grain bins, catching up the ewes in the milking pen, felt almost like despoiling his own home. Yet he did it, with a quickness and decision that belied the fact that he had killed no man, taken no woman.
The shared spring house held crocks of butter and soft ewe’s cheese, and they found two casks of ale. Root cellars were rifled for cabbages and apples. The fowl houses were full of eggs, and a few geese had been snagged as well.
They took all they could carry. They found a hand wain, and in the growing smoke of the burning house stacked it with these things, while others led and pulled what pigs and sheep they could corner to their ship.
Then they were off, oaring down the river, moving with speed. The trip back to the sandy beach where the others awaited felt half as long as that setting out. Handing down the sacks of grain, struggling geese and bulky sheep, they all were laughing. E
ven Sidroc felt a flush of triumph; they would eat soon, and well.
Bjarne and two other men set to work, slitting the throats of two of the ewes, collecting the blood to stir into a huge pot of barley, cutting up turnips and onions carried from the root cellars. Slabs of the sheep flesh were roasted over the fire, the rest cut into chunks and set to boil with the grain and vegetables. Neither ship had salt, both stores having been wetted through in the storm, but chips of the salt cod lent savour to the whole.
They huddled, cross-legged, about this feast, draining both casks of ale in short order. Spooning the mess into his mouth, chewing on the roasted meat, still running with juices, Sidroc ate as one famished, as indeed he was. The dwindling supplies on the ships had been parcelled out in equal measure, leaving the largest men the hungriest. Watching how Jari, Une, and Gap devoured their food, with an almost savage intensity, told him how he himself looked. He had never been as hungry as he had been during the length of the long voyage. He had worked to master the pangs, and when that was not possible, to ignore them. Now he could give free rein to this most basic of bodily needs.
Almost no man spoke during this riot of consumption. Bjarne, stationed closest to the fire, wielded both ladle and fork, and any man coming forward a second, third, or fourth time saw him ministering to their wooden bowls as if it were their first taste.
Sidroc was sitting across from the man Bue from Yellow-sail who had tried to bring along the girl. Toki was at his side. As Toki scraped his bowl clean with his forefinger he turned to the man.
“Almost as good as that woman,” he said, with a grin of doubled satisfaction.
Bue gave a hoot, then cast a rueful glance to where Yrling now stood at the cook fire. He was still angry about the loss of her.
Toki saw Sidroc looking at him, and grinned the broader. Sidroc stood up from where he sat and took his bowl to the rippling water at the edge of the beach. He swirled a handful of sand within to scrub it, then dipped it full of sea water to rinse. Other men were there as well, doing much the same. As he bent over the water a series of images filled Sidroc’s mind.
He thought, for the first time of the whole voyage, of Toki’s wife, Ginnlaug. The plainness of her good-natured face was followed in his inner eye by that of the old woman, Åfrid, who had told him he would one day seek Freyja’s favour. The indistinct countenance of this Goddess of love and lust flickered in his mind. A new image came to him, that of the smiling and dark-haired whore, Alvild of Haithabu. She gave her body so willingly, had been so generous in bringing him into manhood. There had been other women too, since her; some he had not needed to pay, women he had coupled with at festivals; all of whom he had enjoyed. Their faces were followed by a far earlier memory, of the thrall-woman Berthe, captured from this great island, and how as a boy he had seen her lying motionless beneath Yrling and Ful.
The final impress was no image at all, but the jarring echo of the women of the farmstead screaming as they were being held down, shrieks only silenced by the blows of those who overpowered and ravished them.
Disgust and wonder both filled him, just as the rich food and strong ale of the dead filled his belly.
Chapter the Twentieth: The First Warrior
THE Moon had waxed full, and waned. They had spent the better part of a month in Angle-land. Before Yrling killed him, they had learnt from a terrified goatherd that they landed in the Kingdom of Anglia. This news fixed them on their course. Since then they had been on the move, working a northerly way up the coast, never camping more than two nights in a single place.
Now that they scoured the coasts they were always ready for battle. War gear which had been packed away on the long North Sea voyage was kept at hand. Only while rowing or sleeping did those who owned swords remove them, and the spears which had been tightly tethered for safety were now held in open wooden brackets along the inside of the gunwale. The round and brightly coloured shields hung in easy reach on the outside of that same rail, giving cover under sail. They steadily coasted, tracing the contours of the new land. Silently oaring up inlets at dusk, they hid the ships overnight amongst standing sedge-grass or the hanging boughs of over-arching branches. At dawn they were again off.
The hilliness of the place surprised Sidroc the most, steep cliffs, rolling knolls and downs as he had never seen on the flat expanses of Jutland. Even at the edge of the North Sea the land could rise, looming to impressive heights. And the forests were as Yrling, and then Asberg had told him: dark with trees, hardwoods towering until they blocked the Sun. This was a new part of Midgard to his eyes, wild and empty. Even the ground itself looked different to Sidroc, soils red with clay or black with richness, not the thin and sandy stuff that covered so much of southern Jutland. The fruitfulness of it was ever before him, even in the waste lands. Marshes ran with deer, and flocks of water fowl blanketed the waters and nested in the waving reeds.
Provender was ever their main concern. They had come for treasure, but food stores needed constant replenishment; few war-chiefs could keep their men if they went hungry. Their initial raids were all on farms, and all played out in similar fashion to the first. At times they could gain what they sought without rousing any within timber hut. In the gloom of dusk Gizur or another of the better archers would drop cattle where they stood. They would haul the beast out by a line tied about the hooves of its hind legs, an effort taking several men. Once pulled to the shelter of trees, the carcass was hacked to manageable size, and carried back to whatever camp they had made that night. There it was flayed into thin slices and imperfectly smoked over a fire of smouldering oak branches, upon which their large cauldrons were overturned. Later when the meat was dropped into boiling broth it would truly cook, but this quick smoking would keep it from going green until then.
Their raids on farms filled their bellies but gave them scant silver. They could pick up spears from downed men, and some amongst them pilfered the angle-edged knife, the seax, as well. This was the everyday knife and weapon of all men, that which had given its name to the Saxons. Unlike the straight knives of the Danes, the men here wore their blades hanging across their bellies, and not from one hip, as did most Danes. The blades were good, but these were the weapon-tools of farmers, serviceable but plain. Only the trained warriors of these kingdoms would carry seaxes with silver wire cut into the grip, or have a gemstone crown the tip of the pommel. They had as yet met no such men. Yrling knew they must soon engage with real defenders, but until he felt his men solidly united behind him, was not eager to speed that day. And treasure in weapons was ever the hardest fought to win. What Yrling truly sought was a temple, in which the Christian God was worshipped. There the men and women dedicated to that worship kept their silver and gemstone treasure. He knew one lay at Beardan, up a broad and marshy river he headed for in Lindisse, which they made steady progress towards.
The farmsteads they struck at were all small, sometimes lonely huts, never more than the holdings of three or four intertwined families. Every farm had at least two cows, a handful of sheep, and a stoutly-fenced pen with dusky-coloured pigs rooting within. On occasion they saw the long-legged horses that graced this new land, but with their ship to return to, they had no need for them.
Raids in the dim light of dusk proved best; nearly all folk were within doors, or working about the kitchen yard. Most were thus grouped closely together, the easier to surround and overcome. Firing a house when all were within made it easy to pick off the men as they ran out. But weapons were also close to the defenders’ reaching grasp, spears kept ready by their doors, cooking pokers and butchery knives at hand in the kitchen yard. Two of the raiders died the first half-month. One of the men from Yellow-sail was knocked senseless by an iron pot hurled by an old woman, then stuck through by a youth wielding a long-tined roasting fork. Another of Yrling’s men, from Death-day, took a deep gash in the calf of the leg, given by a farmer as he lay dying. The farmer had force of life enough to lift his knife and hack as the invader passe
d near him. They were able to carry him back to the ship, but the wound went hot and the man died, writhing in pain, within days.
And Sidroc killed a man, his first. He felled him at his uncle’s side, Yrling downing the man, and then with a jerk of his chin telling Sidroc to deliver the death-blow with his spear. No farmers had swords, and spears with their long reach were the best offence against men swinging plough-bats or hoes.
It was at a single small holding on the banks of a river they had sailed up. That these were fishing-folk was proclaimed by the flayed bodies of salted fish, hanging ghost-like on their drying racks by owl-light. The man Sidroc would kill came running from a shed with a long and lethal scythe, summoned by the shouts of his family. The razor’s edge of the scythe swung perilously close to Yrling’s spear-arm, but using his shield as cover Yrling twisted and dropped, driving the point of his spear head into the man’s left thigh.
Sidroc was just at his side for cover, but did not expect his uncle to yield the kill to him as he did. It was a heart-beat’s pause before he sprang forward with his own spear, thrusting the struggling man fully back and onto the hard ground, then ramming with all the might in his spear arm. The arms of the man flailed, that holding the scythe opening as the worn wooden shaft of it dropped from his grasp.
Sidroc was looking down his spear shaft as he drove it, seeing his own hand, large, strong, unscarred, and more than capable. Whatever that hand had done in the past or might do in the future, this was what it did now, take this life. It felt an action solely from his hand, far from his head, far from his own beating heart. He watched his spear point still the heart of this man on the ground before him.
Such a hit in the breast would kill a man quickly. What Sidroc did not expect was the man’s eyes locking with his own as he leaned in on the spear. He did not expect that he would feel the forceful expelling of the man’s dying breath on his face, nor read both fear and fury in the man’s lined visage and outstretched hand. That hand reached towards where a woman screamed, before dropping lifelessly into the dust.
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