Dragons and Mages: A Limited Edition Anthology

by Pauline Creeden

  There was only the narrowest crossing point for each ship, so the King’s Vikings had to come over one at time. This made it easier for Dyrfinna’s forces to hold them off. “We need warriors with lances!” she called again. “Step up and keep these bastards at arm’s length!”

  Most of the King’s fighters were forced to be spectators further back on the ship. The odds were about equal at first, but fresh fighters would keep pouring in against her weary crew, and her fighters would be thinned while theirs would not.

  Nauma, led by her strongest warriors, shrilled battle-cries and tried to fight their way aboard Dyrfinna’s ship, and Dyrfinna herself raced over to fight. “No quarter!” she cried, and with the help of her brave fighters, pushed them back.

  “You can’t keep us back forever!” Nauma shouted, and she placed a foot on the edge of her ship, fighting. Her sword cut through the shoulder of one of Dyrfinna’s fighters, who crumpled to the deck. “Come on!” she shouted, and she leapt through the gap onto Dyrfinna’s ship, followed by two of her fighters.

  A cry of victory rose from the king’s Vikings. The battle was as good as over!

  Except a stone suddenly smashed into Nauma’s shield, slamming into her helmet and driving her to her knees.

  The old captain had seized that rock from out of the ballast. Roaring like a bull, Hakr followed his stone on the attack, slashing at Nauma as she fought to rise. Dyrfinna smashed into the group of Nauma’s warriors and buried her sword into another man’s shoulder between the plates of armor. Skeggi lopped another one’s head nearly off, and down the enemy fell.

  Nauma’s last warrior seized her, and carried back aboard her ship, reeling.

  “After them! After them, captain!” shouted Dyrfinna,

  “Forward!” roared the captain, clearly heard over the clash of arms and groans of men. “Forward, for the queen! Hack down every one of these foul creatures.”

  Twenty fighters of Skala followed Dyrfinna onto Nauma’s ship in the wake of her retreat. Nauma’s fighters fell back on the right and left before their fury. Dyrfinna hacked and slashed. Nauma was on the other end of her ship, trying to get to her feet, trying to rally her fighters, who were springing off of her ship onto the ship behind theirs to escape the fighters.

  “Come back here, Nauma!” Dyrfinna shouted, charging with her shield before her. “A little baby is coming to get you!”

  But Skeggi seized her arm.

  “Our fighters are giving way on our ship behind us,” he said. “If we don’t return, then we’ve lost our ship.”

  Dyrfinna spun. Sure enough, the fighters that she’d left on her ship were hard-pressed, and a band of King’s fighters, led by a woman in braids, were preparing to board her ship.

  Dyrfinna groaned in despair, on fire to kill Nauma while she had the advantage—but if she didn’t get back to her ship and support her fighters, all the advantage she had would have been lost. She simply did not have enough warriors to do both.

  “Go back!” she said. “Fighters, go back, before we lose our ship.”

  Her fighters turned and left Nauma’s ship, clambering back aboard their home ship and helping their friends fight off the attack from the other side.

  Dyrfinna and Skeggi followed, with the captain next to her shouting taunts back at Nauma’s fighters.

  “We can’t win against these odds,” Skeggi said quietly as they climbed back into Dyrfinna’s ship.

  She shrugged. “One does not fight only to win,” she said.

  A New Strategy

  Already the king’s fighters who had fled Nauma’s ship were climbing back on board from the other ships behind hers. Dyrfinna knew that her fighters, stretched thin, were not going to hold their one ship against so many.

  But morale had risen from the rush on board Nauma’s ship, and a few warriors had scrounged extra weapons from those that the fleeing fighters had dropped. “Look at my new lance,” one of her women said as Dyrfinna returned to the ship, and she demonstrated her new weapon by poking a few holes in one of Nauma’s fighters as he came rushing up—too fast, as it turned out.

  “Dammit!” he shouted as he fell on the deck to die.

  “Nice,” Dyrfinna said, turning on the attacking horde with her sword.

  Dyrfinna smacked one Viking on the rump—a stupid move, done on the spur of the moment, because that Viking spun and brought his sword down and cut at her before she had a chance to parry. The sword hit her in the wolf-wounded shoulder, and a burst of awful pain followed.

  The world went red and her sword flew as it went to work on this man, and though he parried, her sword kept getting past his as her fury worked through her and her sword fairly caught fire. She was faintly aware of people getting back but her white-hot focus was on that man and killing him.

  He hit the side of the boat, still trying to defend himself. Several other of the king’s men ran to his rescue, but she whirled and cut through them, then whirled back and buried her sword in the man’s neck.

  He collapsed before she could pull her sword free, and she ducked as the other two men came on. She yanked the sword out with a spurt of blood and charged the other two with a scream, lunging for their legs. With one fast swing, she cut through their leg armor; with a second swing, she struck their swords away, and she pushed to her feet.

  She sliced up into one man’s groin and he fell, blood spurting with the rhythm of his heart.

  The man next to him turned a florid face on her, almost as if he were about to explode. “You killed my brother!” he shouted, and then his mouth opened in a battle cry as he raised his sword and lunged.

  She blocked his attack, their swords clashing. While his furious eyes were full on hers, she stabbed him deep in the side with her long dagger and yanked it upward before she pulled loose and shoved him away to die.

  Then she turned back to the next attackers—more attackers, an eternal series of attackers.

  It’s only a question of time, Dyrfinna knew as she deflected swords with her shield and worked her sword out from behind the shield’s protection. Her arm on fire, her body exhausted, longing for rest, longing for water, she knew that she and her soldiers faced only one fate. But the whole time she held Aesa in mind and knew that she was going to fight until the last extremity, because she would die before any of these bastards was going to hurt her little sister. And if she was to die, she was going to take as many of these people as she could with her.

  “We need to retreat,” Hakr suddenly said to her as he hewed an attacker with his battle axe.

  “Where? Into the ocean?” Dyrfinna said, dodging an attack.

  “No, in the mountains behind us.” He brought the battle axe down through an attacker and yanked it out of the falling body, and pointed at the mountains behind them with a hand covered with blood. “If we pull out of the fight now, they will follow us, thinking us excellent sport.” He swung his axe at an attacker trying to board. “Set some of the men at the oars and pull us away.”

  “Are you sure the enemy will follow us?” Because all that Dyrfinna could think about were the ships of the child-killers immediately rushing off to Skala as soon as they’d left the battle.

  “They will! They certainly will. The spirit of the fight is upon them now,” said wise old Hakr. He paused to take out another attacker. “What happens,” he asked between axe strokes, “what happens when a wolf attacks a rabbit, and the rabbit flees?”

  Dyrfinna nodded. “The wolf gives chase.”

  “So it will be with these.”

  “Crew one!” she shouted to her crew. “To oars! To oars!”

  There was a cry of disbelief and dismay from her crew.

  “We must retreat to land!” she cried.

  “No!” Skeggi shouted, turning his bloody face to her. Head wound.

  “Do it!” Dyrfinna cried, shoving back a suddenly jubilant enemy.

  A command was a command, and the first crew swiftly sat down at the oars, shipped them out, and pulled hard in the water.
The ship leapt away from the battle, bringing two of the child-killers with them in their ship. Dyrfinna’s remaining crew shoved both of them over the side, letting them sink in their heavy armor.

  Confusion and jubilation broke from the enemy’s ships behind them. One of Nauma’s ships tried to block their passage, but they didn’t make it in time, and Dyrfinna’s ship easily pushed free.

  Her fighters were furious. “Why’d you take us from the fight!” they shouted, throwing down their arms in frustration.

  The captain called them close. “Do you see that pass in the mountains? It guards a land approach from King Varinn’s place to the queen’s. We are outmanned here in the waters, but those fools are following us, yes, even now.”

  Dyrfinna looked back. Nauma shouted and her ships pulled around to give chase. Her heart leapt.

  “I know their kind,” the old captain said. “No sense of strategy, and all they want to do is kill. We’ll lead them on a merry chase, as we have got the start of them. Drive this ship into the stream yonder. The draft of this ship is shallow enough to let us travel well upstream, but we won’t go far. We’ll land and head up to that peak yonder.”

  “Why are we going on land, though?” Ostryg asked.

  “We’ll have a better chance of winning on that high ground,” the captain said. “We can defend that ground with fewer men, and settle the odds in our favor. Instead of dying on a ship, we can defend ourselves until the queen’s troops, or her dragons, find us,” he added with satisfaction.

  “What of the wounded?” Gefjun said from where she was swiftly wrapping a badly sliced arm. “We have nine fighters who are in bad shape.”

  “Bind the wounds up, and sing them along if you can. Have we anybody gravely wounded?”

  “Aye,” said Dyrfinna, looking down at two men who lay on the bottom of the ship.

  One of them half-opened an eye. “Leave us behind, here in this ship,” he said. “I am near to meeting the All-Father, and walking with the great warriors in Valhalla. There is nothing more that the enemy can do to me.”

  Dyrfinna prayed over him. “I will tell your family that you have brought them great honor in battle.”

  “Hold those heights against those sons of hogs,” he said, “and you will have done all of us a great service.”

  All ten ships were starting to increase their speed in their chase, Dyrfinna noted. Exhaustion enveloped her, but she knew that all the rest of her crew felt the same. She could put the rowers in the back of the battle until they had recovered their strength, at least. She looked over her fighters with the captain, picking those who could hold ten ships of Vikings at bay for the first attack.

  Dyrfinna held on to the side of her ship as it shot into the stream, and great trees towered over her for a moment, giving way suddenly to rocks that rose above the ship.

  “Drive her aground here!” the captain called, pointing to a fair spit of sand. They did, and as soon as the ship stopped well out of the water, Dyrfinna and her captain swung over the side of the ship and onto the ground below. Dyrfinna staggered a little due to her sea-legs, but stayed a moment to help some of the wounded over the side. Nauma’s ships were about two miles back and closing in, their oars churning the water.

  “Come on, then,” she said quietly, and followed the captain up into the rocks. The fighters followed, some of the wounded leaning on their friends as they walked.

  “Ah, just look at this ground,” said Captain Hakr, greatly satisfied, as she and the other fighters joined him. “And here we are to hold it.”

  Dyrfinna began placing her fighters among the rocks, very well-pleased at the captain’s choice. This place was a small mountaintop with a flat surface, easily defended from most all sides.

  She squinted. But there was a glittering on toward Skala, somewhere on a distant mountain range. She pointed it out to Hakr. “Is that an army?”

  He squinted. “Sure enough. Ours, I’d wager.”

  She thought of Rjupa standing guard there, close to home.

  “We’re going to help you,” Dyrfinna promised as she watched the faraway glimmer of the sun on mail armor, on swords, on battle axes. “I’m going to stop these child-killers and save all the fighters I can doing it. Then we’ll find a way to support your forces.”

  Dyrfinna believed in fighting for honor, but she didn’t believe in dying for honor. She considered it infinitely more honorable to keep as many of her troops alive as possible when she could. This was one of those times.

  The first of Nauma’s ships landed on the sand, and her fighters began to tumble out. Hakr leaned on his battle axe and calmly surveyed the foe as they began to clamber up the side of the mountain, slipping on the loose rocks.

  “I’ll take that gargantuan fellow with the black beard,” he said, raising the axe to his shoulder.

  Dyrfinna drew her sword and glanced along its bright blade as she zeroed in on a man with a red beard clambering up through the rocks to her. As tired as she was, she felt her heart leap. The man was heavyset and muscular, but he struggled with the rocks as he climbed toward her, already out of breath. She set her shield at the ready, and with a battle cry she met the man with a clash of steel.

  Nauma’s fighters gave a loud shout as they came up—the yells of maddened men, the shrieks of warrior women. A swarm of her fighters came running uphill toward them.

  One small problem, Dyrfinna realized. Now that Nauma’s forces were out of their ships, they could all fight—all five hundred of them.

  “Fear not!” cried the captain. “We will win the day. Skeggi! Avalanche!”

  An odd command. Dyrfinna frowned, continuing the fight until she heard the groan of stone upon stone.

  A huge boulder went tumbling from the heights of the rocky pass. Faster and faster it went, springing down the slope, breaking many more rocks loose, which sprung many more rocks loose … and the roar of rocks swallowed all the battle noise.

  The wily captain had set several fighters here and there among the rocks, Dyrfinna realized. And now the rocks roared down the mountainside at the big groups of attackers. There was no time for them to get out of the way—just a sudden, panicked pushing into the crowd, and the rocks churned over them, gigantic boulders spinning in the air as they crashed into the crowd.

  The thunder of the rocks slowly died away, and the groans and heartrending cries from the rubble began.

  Dyrfinna set her heart against the sound. Just one rockfall had wiped out what looked like a hundred fighters. The redbeard she was fighting turned on her, furious, and got past her shield to slice her good arm. She bullied his sword aside with her shield and cut at him. He lost his footing and slid down the scree of the mountain, his arms windmilling, his sword flying into Nauma’s fighters, where somebody screamed.

  “Careless of him,” Dyrfinna murmured.

  Captain Hakr called for a second avalanche, and this one wiped out another hundred fighters. Now Dyrfinna could see, far below, Nauma and her henchman looking concerned—or whatever expression child-killers got on their face when they lost nearly two-fifths of their company without having made a dent in their objective.

  Nauma blew the horn to draw her fighters back, and they started retreating.

  “Look at them run! Let’s chase them,” Skeggi said, drawing his sword.

  “Don’t. It’s a trap,” she said. “Back to the pass, all of you. She wants to lure us away from our stronghold, but we won’t do it. If she wants to fight so badly, she can come to us.”

  Some of Nauma’s fighters were heading toward Dyrfinna’s ship, probably to burn it to the waterline, but Skeggi sent down another avalanche of stones, and that was the end of those fighters.

  Nauma blew the horn again and gathered her chiefs.

  “Looks like a council of war,” Dyrfinna said to Skeggi, who had joined her again. “We’ve got them over a barrel, I think.”

  “Works for me,” Skeggi said. “I’m going to help Gefjun. Let me know if you need any more avalanches.
”

  “Gladly.”

  She joined Hakr. “I’m going to set lookouts for Queen Saehildr’s fleet,” she said. “I thought we would have seen them by now.”

  “I did too,” the old captain said, looking out over what could be seen of the sea, though a series of mountains and cliffs hid a lot of it from their view. “I pray that they haven’t been whirled to the bottom of the sea, but I expect they simply were blown off course. It’s odd, though, that I have not seen a single dragon, other than the black dragon of King Varinn … and where did that one go, anyway?”

  Dyrfinna could only shrug. “The problem with being up here in the open is that the dragon might spot us. Tell the company that if they want to eat, they should make their fires now. They need to put them out before the sun sets, so they can’t be spotted in the dark by dragons.”

  “At least the nights are very short,” Hakr said.

  “Problem is, the nights are still not very warm,” Dyrfinna replied.

  Dyrfinna set a series of fighters as watchmen over the mountain, setting them behind the rocks to watch, promising relief a little after sunset by fresh watchmen.

  She went to check on Gefjun and the wounded, but her mind was whirling. She wanted to figure out the battle-strategy for the next morning. But with the rest of the queen’s fleet missing, she wasn’t quite sure on how to carry them out. She wanted to know for certain that her plans would fit in with the overall plans of the rest of the fleet, and of the queen.

  What if the rest of the fleet had been lost? What then?

  That would have to be a problem she’d have to consider, one of many contingencies.

  She shook her head. “It’s incredible that they haven’t found us yet,” she muttered. “But if we don’t get reinforcements, we’re going to have the mother of all battles on our hands.”