Unlike the Christian temples and monasteries, the Wanating fastness had strong defences, with arrow slits, peepholes, and a narrow, sloped opening above the gate through which defenders could attack enemies on the bridge. Geirmund heard footsteps coming up the wooden stairs from the yard and turned as Skjalgi climbed onto the wall to join him. Together, they leaned against the wood, which was still damp from the rain, and folded their arms across the tops of the timbers. The rich, golden dawn filled Skjalgi’s blue eyes, and Geirmund could see by the boy’s frown that he had a weighty matter on his mind.
“We’ll be marching soon,” he said. “It may be some time before you can ask what you wish to ask.”
Skjalgi chuckled and rubbed at the scar over his eye. “You know me well.”
Geirmund waited for him to gather his words.
“Back in the wood,” the boy said, “you told me that no warrior answers for the deeds of another.”
Geirmund nodded. “I did.”
“But what of oaths? If a warrior is sworn to a king, and that king asks the warrior to do something without honour, what is the warrior to do? Is it worse to break an oath, or to do the dishonourable thing?”
Geirmund turned his gaze again towards the southern ridge, unsure of how to answer. “If you are worried about your place in Valhalla,” he said, “I do not know how Óðinn would look upon the matter. Only a seer can tell you that. But for myself, I know what kind of shame I can live with. To break an oath is no small thing, but I think it is worse to do something dishonourable and blame another for it.”
“Even a king?”
“Especially a king. If every warrior chose honour, there would be no dishonourable kings.”
“I think that is true. I think Guthrum–” Skjalgi stopped and pointed to the south-east. “What is that?”
Geirmund looked, squinted, and stepped back from the wall. A dark line had appeared on the ridge, and it grew thicker and longer with each passing moment. “That is an army,” he said.
“Ælfred?”
“Keep watch!”
Geirmund turned and thundered down the stairs, leaping several at a time, and then marched across the yard towards the hall. Inside, he rushed the length of the floor to rouse his sleeping Hel-hides, bellowing and kicking when they struggled to climb out of their stupor.
“Ælfred comes!” he shouted. “Gather your weapons! To the yard, all of you!”
“Ælfred?” Thorgrim sat up, bleary-eyed, and pushed away a basket of apple cores that someone had dumped over him as he’d slept. “I thought he was two days away.”
“As did I,” Geirmund said. “He must have marched through the night.”
“Or that Saxon had a stronger will than I thought,” Rafn said from across the room, wincing as he belted on his swords.
That had also occurred to Geirmund. “It matters little now,” he said. Then he turned and left the hall, and out in the yard he called up to Skjalgi. “What do you see?”
“No end to their line!” the boy yelled back.
Geirmund cursed himself for a fool. He had entered Wanating looking only for hidden enemies, but he wondered now if the food left behind by the Saxons had been the true bait, meant to keep the Danes there until Ælfred came to slay them. If so, then Esmond’s warning had spread even quicker and further than Geirmund had planned. Some might now question the wisdom of letting the boy live, but Geirmund would have made a different choice had his task been other than it was. He and his Hel-hides had been sent to draw Ælfred’s gaze, a task they had done well, and the dangers of which they had known well.
The sun had not yet risen above the walls, and his warriors blew clouds into their fists as they emerged from the hall into the blue shadow of the cold morning. When the Hel-hides had all gathered, Geirmund climbed halfway up the stairs and turned to face them and speak honestly.
“We will make our stand here!” he said. “To the last warrior! If we try to flee, Ælfred will see us easily from the ridge, and he will know our true tally. He may then give chase to slay us, but that is not what I fear. When Ælfred sees we are no army, I fear the cunning Saxon king will know that he has been tricked.” Geirmund pointed south. “Guthrum needs only two days more to take Wareham! For those who had fallen, and for those who still fight, we must hold Ælfred’s army here!” He pointed at the ground beneath him, which was still sodden from the rain. “You may think we are few, but the Saxons do not know how many warriors stand behind these walls. They do not know what manner of Danes they are about to fight!” He drew his sword, Bróðirgjöfr, and held it high. “After today, they will know us! After today, all of England will quake at our name, for we are Hel-hides!”
His warriors let out a roar in reply, and many of them shook their weapons above their heads. Geirmund descended the stairs and ordered the gate shored up and braced with the heaviest beams that could be found within the hold. He then ordered the fires in the hall built up with any and all wood, down to the tables and benches, and had every stone thrown into the flames to heat.
Steinólfur soon found Geirmund, nodding his approval at the preparations, and pointed at a large kettle. “We don’t have much fat to boil, but we could fill that with water.”
“Stir in some horseshit and mud,” Geirmund said. “Something to cling to their Saxon flesh. But melt what fat we have also.”
The older warrior nodded again and went to see it done, while Geirmund returned to the yard, where he found the gate had been strengthened well enough to withstand a great deal of battering. He didn’t know if it would hold up against two days of attack, or even one, but he knew that fate would decide it. With little food and few warriors, only the Three Spinners knew who among the Hel-hides would live through the coming battle.
Geirmund called for the few bowmen in his company and ordered them into place before the arrow slits on the walls. Then he went up to look out over the enemy and saw the mounted leaders of Ælfred’s army now lay but a rest from Wanating, having turned north and come down from the trackway towards the hold. The line of Saxons behind them marched shoulder to shoulder, five or six warriors in width, and stretched nearly a rest in length, almost to the ridge from which they had come.
“How many?” Skjalgi asked.
“At least three thousand,” Geirmund said.
“By the hand of Týr,” the boy whispered. “I think there can be little doubt Ælfred has turned his gaze on us.”
“Word of a Dane army must have reached him, so he brought an army of Saxons.” He looked over his shoulder, down into the yard. “We are no army, but we must do our best to give the king of Wessex what he came for.”
Skjalgi smirked. “We would not want to disappoint a king. Even a Saxon king.”
Geirmund chuckled, and together they watched the enemy draw nearer, until the riders halted their horses a quarter-rest from the walls of the hold. The warriors marching up behind them spread out to either side, forming a line at least a hundred fathoms wide and six warriors deep, followed by a second rear line of the same size and strength.
“They can’t think we’ll ride out to fight them, can they?” Skjalgi said.
“They would welcome us gladly if we did,” Geirmund said. “But I think they simply want us to know we cannot flee.”
“Do you think Ælfred is with them?”
“I do,” Geirmund said. “He is no coward.”
Not long after that, several of the Saxons on horseback led a group of warriors away from the body of the army towards a copse of elm, where Geirmund knew they would cut down a tree to make a battering ram, and it galled him to do nothing but watch and wait for his enemy to act against him. He listened to the distant bite of their axes, and when the riders eventually returned, they dragged the trunk of a tree behind their horses, and Geirmund knew the battle would soon begin.
“To the wall!” he shouted. “Bring fire! B
ring stones!”
His Hel-hides came forth from the hall carrying dampened, steaming buckets filled with glowing embers and rocks, followed by two warriors who lumbered under the weight of the bubbling, stinking kettle, which hung between them from a sagging pole upon their shoulders. When they reached the gate, they tied a cradle of rope around the heavy pot, and as they raised it up to the top of the wall, a large force of Saxons marched on the gate with their ram, each step slow and hard won.
Before the enemy came within reach of any Hel-hide arrows, they raised their shields over their heads, but Geirmund’s bowmen drew their weapons and took aim, ready to fire through any weakness or opening the Saxons offered them.
“Steady!” Geirmund shouted.
A shield-wall a dozen warriors wide followed behind the battering ram, guarding enemy archers and a second wave of Saxons, who stood ready to take the place of any fallen. The bridge before the gate groaned as the heavy ram crossed it, and then the shield-wall split apart, just wide enough to allow the bowmen behind them to loose their arrows.
“Take cover!” Geirmund shouted.
He and his Hel-hides dived behind their defences as the enemy’s arrows whistled around them, and then the whole fastness seemed to shudder with the first thunderous charge of the ram.
“Arrows!” Geirmund shouted.
His bowmen stepped before slits in the wall and released their arrows, taking aim at the shield-wall to force those Saxons into hiding for the next moment or two. In that gap Geirmund held up his hand to signal the boiling kettle, and just as the ram came again, he gave the order, and three Hel-hides tipped its scalding contents down the sloped hole above the gate.
Men screamed below as the hissing sludge poured between their shields and armour. Many of them fell into the ditch, where they writhed in the water, and without their strength the front end of the ram tipped forward into the ground. Saxons rushed up from behind the shield-wall to right it, and Geirmund knew he had to push them back.
“Rain fire!” he shouted.
His Hel-hides tipped their buckets of hot coals and rocks over the walls and tumbled their burning rubble down the hole above the gate, pounding flesh and bone and striking shields aside. His bowmen shot arrow after arrow into the warriors on the bridge, sending more of them into the ditch, but Ælfred’s bowmen returned in kind.
Geirmund knew he had lost warriors. He could hear their cries, and at the edge of his eyes he had seen some of them fall from the wall into the yard below, but he could not yet stop to name them or mourn them.
When the Saxons on the bridge had finally lost too many warriors to bear the weight of the battering ram, the rear end of the tree trunk fell with a loud thud and a crack, and those enemies still standing quickly retreated from the bridge, back behind the shield-wall, leaving the ram where it lay.
“The oil!” Geirmund shouted. “Pour it on the battering ram!”
The warriors nearby looked confused, no doubt thinking the hot fat would be wasted without an enemy to burn below, but that was not why Geirmund had ordered it done. The oil would make the ram slick and harder to carry for the second wave that Ælfred would surely send to take it up, though Geirmund knew that would not save his Hel-hides for long.
The king of Wessex had just lost perhaps thirty or forty Saxons, almost the whole tally of Geirmund’s war-band, but still led an army of three thousand. Ælfred’s first attack had likely been but a test of the hold’s defences. His second attack would be in earnest.
“More fire and stone!” Geirmund shouted. “Fill the kettle!”
His warriors sprang down from the wall with their buckets, and they lowered the heavy pot to the yard, but Geirmund feared it would not be enough. The little wood they had for coals would soon be spent, and his bowmen would run out of arrows. It seemed likely the Saxons would breach the gate before the sun set, and Geirmund needed a plan for the bloody fight that would surely follow. Until then, he looked for a way to slow down the enemy, perhaps by destroying the bridge.
Geirmund strode along the wall to the gate and looked down, where he saw the bodies of Saxons piled in the ditch on either side of the bridge, blistered and stuck with arrows, some of them still moving. He decided the battering ram should stay in place on the bridge. It was too green to burn, and even if his Hel-hides could roll it off the bridge into the ditch, the Saxons would simply cut down another. But if Geirmund could burn the bridge beneath the ram, it would not matter how many trees Ælfred felled.
“The Saxons flee!” one of his warriors shouted.
Geirmund looked to the south, where Ælfred’s army did seem to be in sudden retreat, falling back towards the ridge in a quick march, but Geirmund doubted the truth of it even as a wild cheer went up among his Hel-hides.
Steinólfur joined him on the wall, his chest covered in blood, but before Geirmund could ask about it, the older warrior shook his head and said, “It’s not mine.”
“Skjalgi?” Geirmund asked.
“He is unharmed.”
“Then who–”
“Thorgrim,” the older warrior said. “He isn’t likely to live. But I am not sure any of us are. What is Ælfred doing?”
Geirmund shook his head. “It seems he is leaving.”
“Leaving? After a few pebbles and some horseshit soup? He can’t frighten that easily.”
“Perhaps he hopes to draw us out.”
“I doubt it.” Steinólfur gazed at the ridge through narrowed eyes. “Ælfred knows these walls can hold no more than a thousand warriors, and such a tally would stretch it at the seams. That means he also knows his army is at least three times larger than ours. He would have to be a fool, or think us fools, to hope that we would pursue him.”
“Perhaps word of Guthrum has reached him.”
“Perhaps,” Steinólfur said. “But he seems to be marching west, not south.”
“I must know where he goes,” Geirmund said as he watched the Saxon line withdraw. “I do not like this.”
“I like that I’m alive,” the older warrior said. “It seems that luck and the gods are still with you.”
Geirmund wanted to agree with him, but he did not feel the presence of the gods or luck in his war-band’s twist of fate. Instead, the dread that lingered in his chest seemed to whisper in his ear that his warriors should all have died, but had somehow swindled death, and for that Geirmund feared there would be a heavy price.
28
The Hel-hides had lost three of their warriors to bowmen during the Saxon attack, and several more had been wounded, two of them so badly that Geirmund feared they would not live much longer, especially Thorgrim. The stout Dane had taken an arrow between two lower ribs on his right side, deep into his liver, but in his battle-rage he had snapped off the arrow’s shaft to keep fighting, leaving the barbed head lodged within him. Steinólfur’s attempts to pull it out had covered him in Thorgrim’s blood, and after speaking with every Hel-hide skilled in the least bit at healing, the older warrior had decided to risk no more effort until Thorgrim lay with his sword in his hand, ready to die, for that would likely be the outcome.
Birna had stayed with the wounded warrior every moment of the day since the end of the attack and Ælfred’s retreat, and that evening Geirmund sat with them both in one of the rooms behind the high seat in the hall. Thorgrim lay upon the ground in a bed of furs and blankets, his skin pallid and his breathing short and quick. A basin of red water sat nearby him, with bloody rags and metal tools beside it. The warrior held himself still against the pain caused by the slightest shift, and he kept his eyes closed, but he had not yet fallen into the sleep of blood loss.
“Do one thing for me, Hel-hide,” he said, grinding his teeth.
“Name it,” Geirmund said.
“Make Guthrum give my ten pounds of silver to my bed-bear.”
Geirmund glanced at Birna, who reached out and t
ook Thorgrim’s hand in hers. “I do not care about that,” she said to him. “I do not want it.”
“But I want you to have it.” Thorgrim opened his eyes and looked at Geirmund. “Will you do that for me, Hel-hide?”
Geirmund hadn’t been aware of how close the two warriors had grown, nor even that they shared a bed. As their commander and friend, he felt that as a shortcoming, but he gave a nod. “I will do my best to see it done.”
At that Thorgrim seemed to slacken and settle deeper into his bedding, and he closed his eyes again. “Any word of Ælfred?”
“Rafn and Vetr have not returned,” Geirmund said. “We know only that he marched his army west.”
“What lies west of here?” Birna asked.
“Saxons,” Thorgrim said. “And more Saxons west of those Saxons. Then Britons, then the sea.” A low growl rumbled in his throat and chest. “I wish I could have lived to see Wessex and England fall. But fate had another plan.”
“They will fall,” Birna said. “But you may yet live to see it–”
“I am a dead man.” Thorgrim opened his eyes to look at her. “You know I am.”
She seemed about to argue, but she stopped herself and nodded. “If you are, then I will shout your name at the last battle so you can hear it in Valhalla.”
“You are the only woman who has ever frightened me,” Thorgrim said. “I think that is why you are the only woman I have loved. My bed-bear.”
Birna squeezed her eyes shut and bowed her head.
“I am ready, Hel-hide,” Thorgrim said. “You will need to march soon, and I gain nothing by lingering.”
Geirmund moved to rise. “I will fetch Steinólfur–”
“No,” Thorgrim said. “Give me the tongs. I’ll do it myself.”
Birna glanced up at Geirmund, and he hesitated, then reached for the tool.
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