As far as protective gear, every man had his shield. About half of those riding with Hrald owned ring-shirts, and close to the same number of those had a steel helmet. The treasure room housed no additional ring-shirts, but its chests held several helmets captured in battle over the years, and these Hrald handed to the more senior of his men who lacked one. The others, every man of them, had a war-cap of hardened leather, over which bands of steel were strapped.
Ashild too would wear her war-cap, the one her uncle Asberg had selected for her before the fight for Oundle. She had kept all her kit from that day carefully together in her house. She had already donned the dark leggings she had sewn years ago to aid her spear-throwing practice, and the cut-down gown which served as tunic. Now, braiding her hair into one thick braid, she placed her war-cap on her head. Cerd was sitting up on his alcove bed, watching her, and when she dropped it over her hair he began to laugh at her changed visage. She laughed back at him, glad he was not alarmed at the transformation. Then she stood glancing about the small house. A linen pouch hanging on a peg near her bed caught her eye, and she went to it and took it down.
Two amulets of precious metals lay within. At her mother’s request she had worn her golden cross for the birth of her son, but not since. She had set the cross away in this pouch with her father’s silver hammer of Thor. Now she placed her hand in the pouch, and muttered aloud. “Which ever I touch first, I will wear.”
It was her father’s hammer her fingers touched, which seemed fitting, as she rode on behalf of the hall he had won. She placed it over her head, and dropped it under her tunic where it could not be seen.
The last things she needed were to buckle on the seax Hrald had given her, and to take up her shield and spear.
The spear. It was the same she had taken to Oundle, the same with which she had taken a man’s life. She would carry it, for she might have need to part her way through trouble.
Of all her horses, she had decided to ride the white stallion. He was by far the biggest and strongest of her mounts. He could carry her back to Four Stones at speed, so she could summon help if needed. And his bright coat would make it easy for Hrald to pick her out on the sidelines as she stood there, should he need send a man running to her with his call for aid.
Hrald had made private goodbye to his mother early in the treasure room, with only Burginde there. He had not been able to say much, and indeed Ælfwyn herself was largely silent. Her kiss, her hand clasped in his, and the tears she bit back had given voice to her love, and to her hope.
By late morning Asberg arrived with his sons, Ulf and Abi, two score and ten mounted warriors behind them. He had overseen the sheltering of the village folk behind the palisade of Turcesig before they left, confident in Styrbjörn’s ability to hold it. Hrald had thought hard of the danger to Four Stones’ horses, and told his uncle of the result. The fact that these invaders had arrived by ship meant they would be searching out every beast they could. He decided to send a full score of Turcesig’s men to the valley, to make up the complement of fifty guarding that most portable of his treasure. It was Four Stones that had been injured by this attack, and he wanted the greater body of the men he fronted to be his own, for they shared that affront with him.
The stable yard and forecourt was now a sea of men and horses. The crofters of the village, having spent their own sleepless night within the second hall, stood with open mouths at the edges of the gathering space, eyes roving over the warriors as they readied themselves. The animals brought with them added to the clangour of bawling calves, bleating sheep and goats, and crowing fowl resounding within the walls.
The excitement felt by Asberg’s sons showed on their faces. Ulf, the older boy, had now seventeen Summers, and would be at his father’s side in what might prove to be his first encounter with the enemy. As befitting his father’s wealth he was kitted out with ring-shirt, helmet with descending cheek-pieces and nose-guard, and a sword Hrald had presented him with. Asberg, helping the boy arm himself at dawn, had considered the result in sober reflection. There was a balance between needed protection and calling undue attention to an untried fighter. A good kit made you more of a target, and he hoped he would not rue the day he had so equipped his eldest. He must trust Ulf would be up to it. Abi was just turned fifteen, good with a spear for his age and size, but had yet to receive a sword. But Abi had a private plan to serve his older cousin, and stepped forward to name it.
“Hrald, let me hold your war-flag.”
Hrald gave his head a jerk. The raven banner Ashild had made him was still in the treasure room. He must ride with it. He was eager to proclaim himself of Anglia, and should they find the fight he sought, a man near him would need to hold the war-flag aloft so his warriors might know he lived, and be ready to rally about him. But the role was not without peril. Any battle standard was a prize piece of booty. A captured flag would be paraded and jeered at. Even if the leader whose battle-flag it was still lived, his own men might believe him to be dead, and lose heart.
He looked at Asberg. It was his son Abi who asked for the honour and potential danger of holding the war-flag.
Asberg nodded his approval.
“Já,’ Hrald allowed. “I will go and get it. But if the fighting gets thick around me, pass it to another man, and go to your father and Ulf. That is an order.”
A beaming Abi nodded his head with such vigour his war-cap went askew.
When Hrald returned with the raven banner, Bork was walking towards him, leading his bay stallion, saddled and bridled. He watched Hrald pass the banner to Abi, and his eyes widened as a grinning Abi stood there, both fists closed about the ash staff, waving it from side to side to make the raven fly above them.
Hrald saw Bork’s watching, and extended his hand to take the reins of his horse.
“Let me go with you,” Bork asked, a near-desperate plea.
“Nej, nej. You are still a boy.”
Bork was quick to refute this judgement. “I have been training, with Mul’s sons. I can sling a stone a long way.”
Hrald placed his hand on his shoulder. He thought of what to say to convince the boy. “Your work here is more important. You care for my horses. I may need one of them. Stay with them in case I do.”
Here the bay pushed his downy muzzle up against Bork’s back. The smile that crossed Hrald’s mouth was real. “He likes you as much as me. Maybe more.”
Bork nodded. Mul came forward to lead the boy back to the stable doorway where he and his sons, work complete, had been watching.
Wilgot was moving amongst the crowd, flinging holy water and chanting a blessing. The horsemen began to form up. Ashild and Byrgher would ride in the second to last rank, so that she could quickly bolt if needed if they faced attack while still on the road. She was not yet on the stallion; such was his height she needed the mounting block. As she led him there her mother, Cerd in her arms, made her way towards her from where she had been stationed at the gate. Burginde and Ealhswith were with her. Ashild had spent time with them in the treasure room, but another embrace, another touch of the hand or tender word was not to be resisted, nor refused.
Before she could pull herself into the saddle Ealhswith darted forward to give her sister a kiss. The kiss granted, Ashild put her foot in the stirrup and swung her leg over the animal’s saddle. She adjusted the shield on her back, then looked down at the loving faces filled with concern that were lifted to her. She did not trust herself to speak. Then Cerd laughed and reached his arms out to her. She bent low to take him from her mother, and held him a moment on the saddle before her, as she had done in the past.
“Horse,” he crowed, one of his favourite words. She ruffled his coppery curls with her hand, then pressed a final kiss on her son’s forehead.
“Yes, horse. I will come back to you, on this horse.”
She handed Cerd down to her mother.
They were moving now, a wave of men in full war-kit, astride horses eager for the road. Hrald was flanked by
Asberg and Jari, and led the way. They would close up around Hrald once they had left the near boundaries of the hall lands, but just now Hrald wanted to look upon the road stretching before them. Asberg was at his right, and Jari, Tyr-hand that he was, rode as always on his left. Just behind them came Asberg’s two sons, Abi holding the staff of the raven flag.
A cry of salute followed them as they passed the gates, led by Kjeld standing at the gate, and picked up by the men crowding the palisade ramparts. It faded from hearing as their horses broke into a canter.
They rode through the village, empty of all life.
Southward they drove, aiming for Saltfleet. There was little chance the invaders had remained there; the land about it was devoid of any hamlet or settlement with food or beasts.
At dusk they camped overnight, tentless, wrapped in their blankets and grateful for a dry night. Ashild lay on the ground between her brother and Byrgher. After she closed her eyes, Hrald spoke to her. He had pulled his blanket around him in the dark, and his left hand had touched the knot of tissue that marked one end of the scar on his right shoulder.
“Ashild,” he whispered. Her eyelids fluttered open.
“The day Ceric and I sparred, and I cut him…” His voice dropped even lower as his words trailed off. “When my own arm was bleeding, we stood side to side, pressing the wounds together.”
This was all he said, this simple admission of that long-ago action between the two of them.
She nodded in the dark, as if to herself. Ceric had twice named Hrald as brother in his letters. Men called each other this when they fought side by side, as well. A thought floated up, one she recognized as a truth. The bond forged by Hrald and Ceric was akin to that shared by their mothers. It would be a life-long linkage, which distance or time could not impair. And it included her. She was sister to Hrald and was, if not truly wife to Ceric, willing mother of the child they had together formed. She remembered Ceric telling her after their night of love that the three of them were together during the stitching of those arm wounds, and would always be thus. She recalled answering him in hushed agreement: And so we shall be…
She fell asleep thinking of her son, overtaken by a sense of his curly head nestled between her and his father as they all slept.
She awakened later in the night with an acute feeling of her aloneness, even though she was surrounded by men. She looked up into a darkly clouded sky. The horses were moving about where they had been staked, a sound that brought its own comfort. Soon they all would be up and afield, and none could know what this new day would bring.
Her hand reached for the tunic she wore, and she pressed it against the silver hammer between her breasts. The hammer of Yrling of Four Stones. Her father could not be with her, but neither could Hrald’s. Each must play their part, alone yet together, as well as they could. She knew Hrald would.
They rose before dawn and ate a hasty meal of bread, cheese, and the leavings from the browis they had boiled the night before. Saltfleet was reached not long after. Approaching it from the side path along the coast granted them a vantage point. Two drekars, grim and majestic, stood tied at the wooden pier, coiled prows bobbing slightly with the tide. No sound arose from the ships, nor the timber buildings on the shore.
“They will not use those to escape,” Hrald decided.
Emerging from the path, they untied the ships, and pulled them free of the pier and about to the shoreline. It took six men with axes almost no time to scuttle the ships. To stand within a costly ship and hack at its hull until the timbers burst and rivets popped was one of the most wasteful acts of war. Here it was one wholly needful. Landlocked Four Stones could not use these ships, and they had been the vessels carrying death and destruction to its men.
The tracks of the invaders, now five days old, could still be read in the soil near the road fronting the buildings. They showed the booted feet of many men, and the hoof prints of the few horses they had stolen from the paddock here. They told of a northwesterly route.
“Agmund,” posed Jari. “They were seeking Agmund.”
Guthrum’s eldest son ruled a broad sweep of land in the south of Anglia. If these invaders were followers of Haesten they might indeed be looking for that war-chief. Agmund had at first thrown in with Haesten, only to break the alliance. Yet he still held the greatest power keeping Haesten from his goal of total conquest of first Anglia, and then Wessex.
Hrald and his troop did not stop to search out bodies, but moved on. They took to the road, eighty strong.
A grey sky hung over their heads, one that seemed to rise from the soil over which they travelled. The mist of night had thickened to a cool and damp fog. It was as if Summer had abruptly decided it was over, and a chill was coming.
Chapter the Fourteenth: The Forest Duel
HRALD and his troop moved steadily onward. They kept as silent as any multitude of men on horseback can, not wanting to betray their approach. The tracks diverged from the road to a far smaller pathway. The Danes they followed had headed west a while, then turned north and east. Both Oundle and Four Stones lay there.
The path the Danes took went running close to a free-flowing stream. When the path brought them to its banks, fog rolled off the surface of the water as if it were steam rising from a roiling cauldron. All was damp with it, and the cloud-shrouded Sun, while rising in the grey sky, made little headway in warming the cool air. Their horses walked through mists that swirled about their fetlocks.
The footprints left the narrow trackway. It brought them to a much broader road, one of earth pounded hard by use. Both sides showed the same mixed growth they had travelled through, hickory and hornbeam and stands of young beeches. As they moved forward the light changed; a clearing must be near. They reached it, and found those they sought.
On the right was a large field, devoid of trees, from which the mist still rose. Gathered there, arising from the damp grass where they had stopped to rest, were some fourscore warriors on foot. Some were in the act of replacing their helmets upon their heads, others, taking a drink of water from their newly-filled leathern flasks. Ten saddled horses stood to one side, cropping at the grass.
For a moment both groups froze. Then Hrald urged his horse forward, Jari on his left, Asberg on his right. Behind them came Ulf and Abi. In Abi’s fist, the butt of the staff resting on his saddle leather, flew the raven flag Ashild had made.
Even in the little wind, one could see the outstretched wing of a raven upon it.
Hrald stopped a few horse lengths in and studied the men. They were Danes, well equipped, and one of them had at once stepped forward at their appearing. He looked to be near forty years, as hardened in his face as he was in body. He had long mud-brown hair, well streaked with grey, fastened in two plaits that reached past his shoulders. He sported a long beard of the same mixed shade, also plaited, which fell down his chest.
Hrald looked across to where the man stood, and announced himself.
“I am Hrald of Four Stones. Tell me who you are.”
The Dane’s tone matched the sneer on his face. “I will tell you nothing.”
Hrald countered with a firmness that kept his simmering anger in check.
“Then I will tell you something,” he said. He tilted his head to the horses. “Those are my horses. Where are my men?”
The Dane gave a snort of derision. “Ha! I sent them to Odin,” he scoffed. “They were easy enough to send.” Their killer had the broad accent of one born in Dane-mark.
His next words were delivered in the same mocking tone.
“I can hear you are no real Dane, but are tainted by the Saxons. If your men are like you, Odin will likely send them back, to languish in the land of shades with Hel and her ugly crones.” He laughed.
The Jarl of Four Stones did not. He delivered his next words with chill precision.
“You are on my lands, and have killed my men and stolen my horses.”
Hrald was about to issue a formal challenge, when he realized
he might learn something more.
“You look to join to your leader, Agmund,” he suggested. “You will not find him near.”
The Dane jerked his head. “Agmund,” he echoed, and spat on the ground. “We will spit on his grave. That is, if his men can find all the parts we will hack him into.”
So. This man fought for Haesten, and Haesten was the greater enemy. It gave Hrald a flush of satisfaction to know this. It was Haesten who had sailed in eighty ships to these shores, and then had rallied the crews of two hundred and fifty more, already come from Frankland.
“Thank you for telling me who you fight for, Three Plaits. You will soon be plaiting Hel’s hair of writhing snakes.”
Three Plaits was angered at falling for the ruse, and showed it.
“You are nothing but a thrall to Wessex,” he growled out, “and like Wessex will fall.”
At this Jari let loose a torrent of pungent oaths questioning the Dane’s parentage, spanning several generations back. The men of Four Stones behind Jari began hooting and jeering in agreement to his insults.
Hrald’s eyes had been shifting over the men massed behind Three Plaits. Every one had a helmet, and most wore ring-shirts as well. As his gaze made the circuit he spotted a big man with a broad face and brown hair.
“Onund.” Hrald said. “Agmund or Haesten, to you it would be the same. You are true to nothing, and no one.”
For Me Fate Wove This Page 27