Geirmund's Saga

by Matthew J. Kirby

  “He wanted you to think all is as it should be,” the Saxon said.

  “Where are your people?” Vetr asked.

  The man gave a slight nod towards the east. “Hiding in the marsh until you Danes have all gone.”

  “We could go to the marsh,” Steinólfur said.

  “Retreat?” Birna scoffed. “Aslef’s killer lies ahead. I will not–”

  “They outnumber us three to one,” Geirmund said. “And they control the ground. Vengeance can wait until we choose the battle.”

  “If you flee,” the Saxon said, “he will know I betrayed him. They will kill us and burn our village.”

  “Why should that concern us?” Rafn asked.

  The man paled. “You Danes are all–”

  “What is your name?” Geirmund asked.

  The Saxon hesitated. “Elwyn.”

  “Elwyn, where is the closest way into the marsh?”

  “Just ahead. There’s a road north of smithy. It leads to a path into the fens.”

  At the mention of the town’s blacksmith a plan formed in Geirmund’s mind. “Elwyn,” he said, “these Danes are sworn to Halfdan, who is brother to Ivarr and Ubba, who have a truce with your King Burgred. They will only plunder your town if you give them reason, but if you do as I say, you and your town will be spared.”

  The Saxon shifted on his feet. “I’m listening.”

  “We will go to the blacksmith’s shop and wait there. You will go to Krok, and he will ask what you and I have been talking about. You will tell him that we plan to stay in town for a day or two, and we’ve asked for the smith. That is your chance to convince Krok that you are still with him.”

  “What will you do?” Elwyn asked.

  “We will wait,” Geirmund said. “It is likely he will send one of his warriors here to act as the smith, and during that time he will move the rest of his war-band into position to attack us here, or his false smith will try to convince us to move where they can attack us. Either way, it is the false smith who Krok will blame when we make our escape, and Krok will likely leave your town to pursue us.”

  That seemed to reassure the Saxon enough that he gave a slow nod, then turned and gestured down the road. “I will lead you to the smith.”

  Geirmund glanced at his warriors, who nodded agreement, and they all moved down the quiet street. It remained possible that the enemy bowmen would try to shoot them, but it seemed more likely that Krok would want the honour of killing Geirmund with his blade, and would wait until the Hel-hides reached the place of ambush at the crossroads. Even so, Geirmund tried to walk without apparent alarm or concern, though he kept his ears alert to the twang of bowstrings.

  When they reached the blacksmith’s shop, they found it a bower, open to the roads running north and west, and walled with wooden planks to the south and east. A hot forge glowed in the middle, surrounded by several benches, and an anvil on which a pair of tongs gripped a heavy rod of iron hammered thin at one end. It seemed the smith had been at work when the Danes arrived, and had left in haste.

  Elwyn gave Geirmund a last nod, and then he and his warriors went up the street towards the alehouse.

  Vetr leaned against a bower post. “This is a good plan.”

  “Unless that Saxon swine betrays us to Krok,” Rafn said.

  “He might.” Geirmund watched the alehouse door and the surrounding street for signs of movement. “But his choice and his fate are his. Either way, he will draw Krok to us.”

  “We could make for the marsh now,” Steinólfur said. “Be done with it.”

  Geirmund turned to the older warrior. “Go. Take Skjalgi, Rafn, and Vetr. Scout the path to the marsh and keep watch down the town’s backside. Birna and I will remain here a bit longer.”

  Steinólfur’s frown said he didn’t care for that task, but he and the other three left down the byway just north of the blacksmith’s bower. Birna stepped up beside Geirmund to watch the alehouse with him, and for some time nothing happened.

  “Why are we waiting here?” she finally asked.

  “To keep my word to the Saxon.”

  “Even if the Saxon doesn’t keep his?”

  Geirmund smirked at her. “What was it you said about honour? Even when the gods alone will see it?”

  She laughed. “Then let us hope Krok is as clever as you think he is, and no more.”

  “He showed a bit of cunning in Lunden,” Geirmund said.

  “Enough to catch you unaware.”

  “That will never happen again.”

  “One day you will fight someone more cunning than you,” she said. “And you can be sure there–”

  “Look.”

  The door to the alehouse had opened, and a shield-maiden with brown hair ducked out into the street. She looked around, fixed her eyes on the blacksmith shop, and strode towards them at a slow and even pace.

  “She carries no weapons,” Birna said.

  “Nor does she wear armour.” The corner of Geirmund’s mouth turned up in a slight grin. “She’s supposed to be a blacksmith, remember?”

  “It seems Krok does have a bit of cunning. She almost looks like a Saxon.”

  As the approaching warrior drew up to the bower, Geirmund tried to match her calm air as he asked, “Are you the smith?”

  The woman stepped into the shade of the workshop. “I am.”

  “Truly?” Birna made a show of looking her over from hair to hoof. “I didn’t think Saxon men let their women do anything other than cook, pray, and whelp baby Saxons.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m a Briton.” The woman folded her arms, which looked strong enough for a smith. “Now, you need my work?”

  “Yes,” Geirmund said. “We have some armour and weapons that need mending.”

  She looked around the bower. “Where are the others?”

  “Others?”

  “There were six in your war-band. Or so Elwyn said.”

  “I don’t keep my warriors on a tether.”

  The Dane hesitated, as if trying to decide what to do, then nodded her head towards the alehouse. “Come, let’s talk over a drink.” She moved as if to leave.

  “We can talk here,” Geirmund said. “It seems you were at work.”

  “What?”

  He gestured at the tongs and iron left on the anvil.

  “We don’t want to keep you from it,” Birna added.

  “Oh,” the Dane said. “It’s no bother. Come, you–”

  “What were you forging?” Birna asked.

  Neither she nor Geirmund had moved, and a moment went by.

  The woman shrugged. “Pot hook.”

  “Seems a lot of iron for a pot hook,” Birna said.

  The warrior made no reply, but her hands tightened into fists.

  “You are no Briton.” Geirmund tipped his head to the side. “You are tall enough to be a Dane.”

  Nearby, Birna eased her axe free, and the other woman reached for a weapon at her waist that wasn’t there. She looked down, and, having revealed herself, she abandoned her lie and let her lips curl in rage at Geirmund.

  He drew his seax. “Tell me, what did Krok–”

  The woman’s head jerked sideways with a dull thud, bent at the neck by a thrown axe, which had split the top of her ear and lodged itself in her skull. Eyes open, the Dane slumped to the ground in a pile, her boots and fingers twitching as Birna marched over and wrenched her weapon free with a cracking and popping of bone. Blood and brain fell from the woman’s opened head onto the dark and oily dirt of the blacksmith’s shop.

  “For Aslef,” Birna said, wiping the edge of her axe clean with one of the smith’s rags. “None of them shall see Valhalla by my hand if I have a say, and now they are one less. We should–”

  “Geirmund!”

  The voice belonged to Stein
ólfur, calling from somewhere east of the shop.

  “They come!” the older warrior shouted.

  Up ahead, the alehouse door opened, and warriors roared out into the street. Geirmund and Birna exchanged a glance, then raced from the bower down the byway. They passed a few outbuildings, the sound of fighting ahead of them, and rushed out onto a small green bordered by a tangled wood to the east.

  Two Danes lay writhing and dying at Vetr’s feet, his spear red. A third fell with a strangled cry before Steinólfur’s sword as more enemies charged towards them from the north and west. Furious shouts went up throughout the town.

  “Go!” Steinólfur pointed towards a break in the forest. “The path is there! Rafn went ahead to scout with Skjalgi.”

  An arrow hissed and struck the ground near Vetr. He spun around and knocked another arrow out of the air with his spear, then darted for cover in the trees, followed by Birna, Geirmund, and then Steinólfur. The four of them sped along the path, and as they pushed deeper into the wood the ground around them gave way to marsh, and soon they splashed through water and muck where the track dipped below the waterline.

  Behind them, Geirmund heard the frantic sounds of pursuit, but knew the narrow trail and fen would keep Krok’s warriors behind them and away from their flanks, at least for a time. The land there reminded him of the marshes around Ancarig, with mires and watery pitfalls, and islands of tall grasses.

  “Where is Rafn?” he called, but his question was answered a moment later when the warrior stepped onto the path ahead of them, as if from nowhere, wielding his thin Miklagard sword.

  “All here?” he called.

  “All here,” Vetr said as Birna, Geirmund, and then Steinólfur caught up to them.

  “Can that sword give more than a scratch?” the older warrior asked.

  “You would be surprised,” Rafn said. “The eagle-eyed boy found a second trackway.”

  Then he turned and plunged into a wall of grass and bramble, and the rest of them followed, pressing and snapping through coarse reeds until they came out onto a much fainter trail made by animal hooves and paws. It wriggled off into dense marsh, where it seemed to vanish less than a hundred fathoms on.

  Skjalgi stood there, waiting for them. “I don’t know how far it goes,” he said.

  “It will do for now,” Geirmund said, and he led the way, thinking that at the very least the trees would offer them good cover from arrows if Krok’s warriors found them.

  They followed that path into a region of marsh where the willow and alder trees grew closer together, and the air felt heavy and still, thick with the scent of rotting leaves and grass. Their passage scared birds with long beaks and long legs up into the sky, and sent frogs splashing into the water. Each time they halted to listen for Krok’s warriors, the sounds of their enemies grew fainter, until Geirmund felt sure they had escaped, at least for the moment. When the trackway reached a small, dry island, he called for a rest and sat down upon the soft, worm-eaten trunk of a fallen tree to think.

  “Krok just lost four warriors,” he said. “If Elwyn spoke the truth, that means he is down to perhaps fifteen in his war-band.”

  “And you outwitted him.” Vetr crossed his legs beneath him on the ground and began to clean and hone Dauðavindur, his spear. “He can’t go back to Halfdan now. Not if he has any care for his reputation.”

  Geirmund agreed. “In Lunden he said killing me will earn him a jarldom.”

  “That is a rich reward.” Rafn chuckled as he pulled a piece of dried meat from his pack and began to gnaw at it. “You can be sure he will hunt us with hatred to match.”

  “And he still outnumbers us two to one,” Steinólfur added. “We had luck with us today, but that may not always be so.”

  “If it is my fate to die, I will die,” Geirmund said. “But it will not be at his hand.”

  “Then let him die by yours,” Birna said. “Or mine. They must all die.”

  Geirmund knew she spoke the truth, and that the only end to Krok’s pursuit of them would be the Dane’s death or his own. But he also knew he didn’t have the tally of warriors he needed for an open fight and would have to rely on cunning to defeat his enemy.

  “If we knew this marsh, we could make a stand here,” he said. “But it would hinder us as badly as it would hinder Krok. We need to seek a new field of battle, where we control the ground, and stay clear of the enemy until we have found it.”

  Skjalgi slapped his own cheek. “A place without myggs, I hope.”

  That marsh did have an evil, unhealthy air, so Geirmund ordered them to keep moving, but it was not until late afternoon that they came out of the fen onto dry heath. From there they travelled off the Roman roads and Saxon trackways, through the wild places, and for the next two days they wandered in and out of forests thick with bramble that had to be cut through with axe and seax, and they sloshed across more marsh and fen and waded through cold streams.

  At first they came by water easily enough, but food was more difficult to gather. Birna spied a few bushes of wild, sour berries, and they gathered some mushrooms Rafn recognized. They caught small fish in a stream using a cage Vetr weaved from willow branches, but the snares Geirmund laid for hare and squirrel lay empty. Then even water became scarce as they crossed longer stretches of bare heath, where there were few streams and no game above ground.

  Geirmund shivered through the long nights, huddled close together with his war-band around small, weak fires only when they could gather enough dry fuel and knew the light of it would not be seen.

  On the third day Geirmund’s hunger became more than a pain, slowing his feet and his thoughts. He felt a weakness he could not banish with sleep and rest, though sleep and rest were all he wanted, but in the deep-night he imagined them stalked by the land-vættr of that lonely place and followed by a shambling draugr of Aslef seeking revenge for leaving him to die. It was only his duty to his Hel-hides that kept him moving, and it seemed their duty to him kept them from complaining.

  On the fourth day they reached woodland again and smelled woodsmoke, after which they spread out and sneaked through the forest to discover the source, whether settlement or encampment. Geirmund peered through the trees, stepping as lightly as he could, until his war-band came upon a broad clearing in the wood, and in the middle of it stood a Saxon temple built of stone. It reminded him of the place he had seen at Medeshamstede, or what Medeshamstede might have been if it had escaped burning and destruction by the Danes.

  The long hall of the temple before him rose fifteen fathoms high and stretched at least thirty fathoms long, with a peaked roof and a round tower at one end. A wall reached out from its southern flank to enclose several large outbuildings, while many byres and workshops lay outside those defences. Robed men worked in the fields and gardens that surrounded that place, the kind of priests that John had named monks. They carried no weapons other than tools for tilling and planting, and Geirmund watched them with his Hel-hides from the shadows for some time.

  “If we can draw Krok here,” Rafn said, “we could make use of such a place.”

  “If we can take it,” Steinólfur said.

  Birna laughed. “We can take it. Priests are weak.”

  “Many priests are weak,” Geirmund said. “But I know at least one who fought and killed Danes at Ashdown.”

  “And there is a peace in Mercia,” Skjalgi said.

  The boy spoke up so rarely that they all turned to stare at him, including Geirmund and Steinólfur.

  Skjalgi met their surprise with a calm sureness. “That’s what the Saxon Elwyn said.”

  “Yes, it is.” Steinólfur glanced at Geirmund with a wry smile. “But must we keep that peace?”

  Geirmund considered that for a moment. “If we break the truce, we give Ubba and Halfdan more claim to hatred of us. That could put us in even greater danger.”

  �
�Then what do we do?” Rafn asked. “I doubt we’ll find a place more to our favour against Krok than inside those walls.”

  Geirmund looked again at the monks, recalling all he had learned about such men from the two priests he had met since coming to England, searching for some way to put their temple to use by his Hel-hides without breaking the peace. He thought back to the first time he’d met John, when the priest had offered him bread as hard as stone because his god commanded it, and then, as Geirmund looked into the faces of the monks there, he saw something that made him grin.

  “I have a plan,” he said.

  20

  A few fathoms apart from the walled temple and its buildings stood a large onion-shaped oven. Heat rippled the air above it, so Geirmund knew it to be in use, and his mouth watered at the thought of warm bread.

  “I do not understand this plan,” Steinólfur said.

  The older warrior and the other Hel-hides watched Geirmund as he removed his armour and weapons, frowning at him in confusion, and some worry.

  “You must trust me,” Geirmund said. “We cannot simply walk up to them. I have tried that before, and they have too much fear and hatred of Danes. There is but one way to get what we want and still keep the peace, but they must believe I am in true need. And you must all swear to me that you will remain hidden, no matter what you see, and wait until I call for you.”

  His Hel-hides looked at one other in doubt, and finally to Steinólfur, who shook his head at them all and shrugged. “We will trust in your cunning,” he said.

  Geirmund nodded, then crept away to the south around the edge of the clearing, keeping to the woods until he was as close to the oven as he could get while remaining hidden. Even so, at least fifteen fathoms of open ground lay between him and the baking bread.

  Just then, a broad-shouldered monk came out of a nearby building brushing flour from his robes. He went to the oven, opened it, and used a long wooden pole to pull dark loaves from inside it. These he bounced between his thick hands as he carried them to a bench and set them there to cool.