by Kate Elliott
Breathing raggedly, Ivar looked desperately around for help. Ekkehard’s banner lay on the churned grass; like a shroud, it covered the man who had borne it, a silent corpse among so many others. But Prince Ekkehard still rode. Two of his men defended the prince against the attack of the metal-winged Quman rider, who cut them down like so many sheep and pressed for the kill. Ekkehard drove in wildly, cutting around to the man’s side, but the wings turned his sword and themselves cut his mail to ribbons. He fell back, wounded, and the winged rider pulled his horse around, ready to deliver the deathblow.
Ivar rose from his knees to run to Ekkehard’s aid, but he was too far away. His legs weighed like logs. He would never reach Ekkehard in time.
A roar like a lion bellowing rang from behind the Quman warrior. Wichman charged the rider. They clashed, Wichman raining blow after blow with his heavy sword. The Quman parried and struck in answer, and the two circled and traded blows, neither gaining the advantage. Ivar could hear Wichman’s half-crazed laughter, a true berserker’s fit.
“Watch out!”
Ivar dove to the shelter of the dead man he’d just killed as a sword cut over his head. Baldwin appeared, ax in hand. “Here.” Baldwin thrust a spear into his crippled hand.
“The Prince is down,” cried Ivar, but they couldn’t aid Ekkehard; they could only aid themselves. The rider who had just passed them wheeled and turned, coming back. Ivar thrust ineffectually at him as he dodged aside. Baldwin nicked the horse’s rump with the ax. The man pulled up some distance away from them and turned again, but as Baldwin and Ivar set for him, he calmly sheathed his sword and, without taking his eyes from them, reached behind his back and drew a strung bow. Another lightly armed rider drew up beside him and, seeing the sport at hand, nocked an arrow. Behind him, a third closed in to join his comrades.
“Run!”
Had he cried out, or had Baldwin? They bolted for the hill. He waited for arrows to pierce his back. Shot like a wounded boar! It wasn’t the way he had expected to die.
The sky exploded again with a blinding flash, and the air shook with thunder. Stinging rain lashed the ground. Horses reared in fright, although the soldiers focused on battle—those who weren’t thrown or already lying dead or wounded—continued on heedless of the weather. Ivar risked a backward glance, and of the men who had meant to shoot him, he saw one rider thrown and the other two struggling to control their mounts.
With a gasp of thanksgiving, he and Baldwin reached the hill and scrambled up onto a curling rampart of earth where two Lions stood, steadfast and still untouched by the battle. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
“Well done, young lords, you carried yourselves well out there,” said one of the Lions jovially as he helped Ivar up the muddied slope.
“But Prince Ekkehard has fallen.” Baldwin was weeping. “We left him out there!”
“Nay, nay, fear not, you’ve not broken your oaths. One of Lord Wichman’s men pulled the young prince from the battle. I think he yet lives.”
Their blithe words infuriated Ivar. He felt dizzy, and sick, and hopeless. “Why do you just stand here watching?” he cried. “Why haven’t you marched onto the field to bring us victory?”
The older of them snorted. “The battle will come to us soon enough, alas. But if we left this hill, we would be more like to wheat among a harvest of horsemen.”
“And where would fancy young nobles like you have to run when their horses are lost and their comrades dead, if not for our station here on this hill?” asked the other, and though the words were spoken in a merry tone, they stung as badly as did his wounded hand.
An arrow struck earth between the Lions. “Go on now, lads,” said the elder. “There’s a ford on the other side. If you hurry, you can get there in time.” Arrows peppered the ground around them as a group of Quman riders closed on the hill but held back, reluctant to attempt a mounted assault up those steep banks.
Halfway up the hill, shielding themselves behind yet another low rampart, Ivar and Baldwin stopped to look back. The mounted archers had closed to within a dozen paces of the slope and were shooting arrows at the two Lions, who slowly skidded up the hill on their behinds, covering their bodies with their large shields. Both seemed wounded in their legs; he hadn’t noticed that before. Arrows glanced off their helms and stuck in the woven front of their shields, dangling and bouncing with each movement.
A horseman urged his horse up the slope, but it slipped onto its side, and rider and horse washed down the slope in a slide of mud. Far over to the left, where the slope was less steep, a knot of Lions had formed into a square of shields that bristled with spears. In tight formation, they slowly retreated toward the top of the hill. Now and again a rash rider drove toward them to strike a blow, but always their spears drove the attacker off. As Ivar watched, a rider was hooked and dragged behind the shields. His corpse appeared a moment later, left behind as the wall of shields steadily backed up the hill.
Baldwin was panting, holding his side. “There’s too many of them,” he said hoarsely.
It was true enough. The Quman gathered at the base of the hill fort like a swelling tide. Only when the metal-winged Quman rode in among them did they begin to disperse, riding away toward the river.
“They’re going for the ford.” Baldwin had gone very pale, and he could barely speak through his labored breathing. “We’ll be cut off.”
“Then we’d better hurry if we want to escape.” Ivar’s hand throbbed, and he stared at it absently as Baldwin rose to a half crouch. Blood oozed from the severed flesh. He really should bind it, but he couldn’t think of what to use to stop the bleeding.
“Come on, Ivar!” Baldwin’s voice cracked with fear. “Let’s go that way.” They lost all sight of the battlefield as they moved around the west side of the hill where the cold, muddy ramparts made a maze of their path.
“God be praised! My friends!” Ermanrich slid out from a screen of brush, causing Baldwin to yelp. Ivar merely staggered. “What are you laggards doing hiding up here?”
“Ermanrich!” They pounded each other on the back, wept a few tears, and then started all around, looking for the enemy. The clash of arms still rang ominously, muted now and again by the rumble of distant thunder.
“What happened to you?” Baldwin demanded. “I never saw you again after the first charge.”
“My shield was cut in two. I lost my spear. When my horse was struck out from under me, I decided perhaps God hadn’t meant for me to be a warrior. So I ran.”
“Very brave, dear Ermanrich,” said Ivar.
“I see I called it quits two fingers ahead of you. Let me see that.” Ermanrich’s tunic was shredded and he easily ripped off a strip of wool and bound Ivar’s hand tightly. “It’s swelling. Does it hurt?”
Ivar shook his head, feeling more and more numb. “Yes. No. Little darts of pain up my fingers—I mean, where my fingers were. Nothing else. And it aches.”
They kept moving and as they came around the narrow end of the hill they saw a large force of Quman moving round just inside the river’s bend. About fifty heavy horse riding under Princess Sapientia’s banner moved south to meet them. The weight of her lead riders simply pressed the Quman toward the river as though they were herding cattle, and yet every one of those lightly armored Quman riders chose to face sword and shield rather than try to swim to safety.
The weight of the melee was all to Sapientia’s advantage. Killing as they went, the heavy cavalry drove the Quman back along the river’s bank until the metal-winged warrior appeared again, rallying his troops into a counter charge. The two massed lines of horse clashed on the narrow strip of flood plain, but already twilight dimmed the scene as sword and armor and shield clanged like the echo of some great smithy. A horn call rang, one short, one long. Then it repeated.
“That’s the call to retreat!” cried Baldwin. “Ai, God! We’re going to be abandoned here! The Quman will walk up this hill tonight and cut us down one by one!”
Ermanrich tugged him on, and they ran from rampart to rampart, those strange curling earthworks that wrapped the slope more like decoration than fortification. As dusk lowered, Ivar saw Sapientia escorted from the field by her husband as fully half her company fought on, screening her retreat.
“Young lords, give me a hand, I pray you.” The voice was low, almost lost under the din of battle and the growing peals of thunder. In the shadow of an earthen mound, the Lion who had shielded their first retreat lay with blood running from a dozen shallow wounds. He had a hand closed over the boiled-leather jacket of his comrade and was trying to tug him down from the exposed rim of the earthen dike—he and his comrade had evidently retreated by another route, only to intersect them here. A misting rain began to fall.
“We can’t wait!” whispered Baldwin, but Ermanrich had already surveyed the situation.
“Nay,” he said. “The princess’ forces have drawn off those who were climbing the fort before. They won’t pursue us right now.”
Baldwin was shaking. “But they might be swarming up the other side of the hill. They’ll drop down on us from above.”
“Then we’ll be dead,” said Ivar. “I thought you said you’d rather be dead than go to Margrave Judith’s bed again. You might just get your wish!”
“But I don’t want to die!” wailed Baldwin. Ermanrich slapped him, and he sniffled, wiping his nose, and then, as if nothing had happened, he jumped forward, grabbed the silent Lion’s leg, and helped tug him down from the rampart.
They moved on around the hill, sliding in wet ground until their knees and hands dropped mud. The mist turned to drizzle and steadied into rain as they by turns tugged and pushed the unconscious Lion through the moss and the mud while his wounded fellow staggered behind. As they rounded the southwestern turn of the hill fort, they saw the ford lying dim below them in the ragged glow of a full moon now and then veiled by cloud. Somehow, although it still rained where they crouched, the ford lay full in the moonlight, and Ivar could see that the front of rain quite simply ceased about twenty paces in front of a semicircle of Lions whose locked shields made a barrier behind which horsemen and infantry forded the river to the safety of the north shore. As though they were the gates of a refuge, the shields opened to admit stragglers who came pelting in alone or in small, beleaguered groups, and then closed again to meet the erratic charges of the furious Quman, who could not break the strong shield wall. Across the river, the army wound away into the woodland in remarkably good formation. The baggage train was long gone, but a single small wagon more like a little house on wheels sat beside the shore, and for an instant Ivar thought he saw its beaded window shiver and sway as someone pressed aside the hanging to look out.
At a stone’s toss from the wagon, he saw a pale-haired figure in an Eagle’s cloak standing beside her horse. Hanna was safe across the river.
Off to the east, thunder still rolled, distant now, as if the storm had passed them by. Below, they could see the Quman pressing Sapientia’s troops backward toward the ford.
“We’ll never make it,” said Ermanrich. “We’re cut off.”
“Nay, lads” said the old Lion. “Don’t wait for us. If you run for it—”
“Can’t run—” gasped Baldwin.
“Are you hurt?” demanded Ivar.
“No. Just—can’t run anymore.”
“Look there,” said Ermanrich. “There’s a bit of a fosse up ahead. We’ll hide there and then make a run for the ford in the middle of the night.”
“The Quman will post a guard,” said Baldwin. “They’ll kill anyone they find. We’ll never make it.”
“Now here’s a lad who believes in God’s grace,” said the old Lion with a rattling laugh.
“It’s true,” added Baldwin philosophically, “that death will free me from my wife.”
“At least Sigfrid and Hathumod are safe,” said Ermanrich. “And we might be as well, if we don’t despair. That’s a sin, you know.”
Ivar knew it was a sin, but his hand was really hurting now and he just wanted to lie down and rest. But he pressed on with the others toward a ditch lush with reeds and bushes, sheltered from the river by the steep, almost clifflike slope of the hill and by two stark ramparts, their faces slick with mud and, curiously, shale. Hauling the unconscious Lion gave him something to concentrate on as first Ermanrich and then the old Lion slid into the shelter of the ditch. Ivar and Baldwin shoved the unconscious man over the lip, and he tumbled down into a hand’s height of water. Ermanrich quickly got his face free of water, although even the rough jostling hadn’t woken him. Maybe he was already dead.
Behind them, up at the height of the hill, a thin light began to glow.
“Ai, God!” whispered Baldwin. “Look! It’s the Quman, coming with torches to search us out!” He flung himself down into the ditch, and Ivar slipped and slid in his wake, so utterly filthy by now that another layer of mud seemed to make no difference. The rain had slackened and the clouds on this side of the hill had pressed southward, leaving them with the waxy light of a full moon and that eerie, lambent glow from the crown of the hill.
Bounded on one side by the earthen dike, the ditch had become a pool because of the steep precipice on its other side where a stream of water coursed down the cliff face. The falling water had exposed two boulders capped by a lintel stone embedded in the hillside, which were mostly hidden by a thick layer of moss, now shredded and hanging in wet tendrils over the great stones as water trickled through.
Ivar cupped his hands and drank, and the cold water cleared his head for the first time since he had lost his fingers.
“This must have been the spring or cistern for the old fort,” he said as he traced an ornate carving still visible beneath the moss on one of the stones: a human figure wearing the antlers of a stag. He pushed away the hanging moss. “Look!” Baldwin slithered up beside him. A tunnel lanced away into darkness, into the hill. Without waiting, Ivar slipped behind the green curtain. It was narrowly cut, but he could squeeze through. Inside lay black as black, and water lapped at his knees, but it seemed safe enough. “Baldwin!”
Ripples stirred at his knees, and then Baldwin brushed up beside him. “Ivar? Is that you, Ivar?”
“Of course it’s me! I heard a rumor that the Quman fear water. Maybe we can hide here, unless it gets too deep.” He probed ahead with one foot but the unseen bed of the pool seemed solid enough, a few pebbles that rolled under his boots, nothing more. No chasms. He plunged his arm into the black water and found a stone to toss ahead. The plop rang hollowly, then faded. He heard a drip drip drip—and a sudden scuffling, like rats.
“What was that?” hissed Baldwin, grabbing Ivar’s arm at the elbow.
“Ow, you’re pinching me!”
Then they heard it, a wordless groan like the voice of the dead, an incomprehensible babble.
“Oh, God.” Ivar clutched Baldwin in turn. “It’s a barrow. We’ve walked into a burial pit and now we’ll be cursed!”
“Iss i-it you?” The voice was unfamiliar, high and light and oddly distorted by the stone and the dripping water. “Iss i-it Er-manrich-ch’ss friendss?”
“L-Lady Hathumod?” stammered Baldwin.
“Ai, t-thank the Lady!” They couldn’t see her, but her voice was clear, if faint, blurred by stone and echoes. “Poor Ssigfrid wass wounded in the arm and we got losst, and—and I prayed to God to show me a ssign. And then we fell in here. But it’ss dry here, and I think the tunnel goess farther into the hill, but I was too afraid to go o-on.”
“Now what do we do?” muttered Baldwin.
Because of the cold shock of the water, he could think again. His hand throbbed like fire, but he knew what they had to do, even if it meant the risk of awakening the ghost of some ancient, shrouded queen.
“Let’s get the others, and then we’ll go as deep as we can into the hill. The Quman will never dare follow us through this water. After a day or two they’ll go away, and we can come out.”
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“Just like that?” asked Baldwin, disbelieving or awestruck.
“Just like that,” promised Ivar.
2
THE fleet gathered north of Hakonin, in the bay known as Vashinga, and from there they sailed north around the promontory of Skagin and on past the Kefrey Islands, known also as the Goat Brothers. A few ships put in for provisions where various small villages of fisherfolk nestled in the inlets, and there they fetched up barrels of dried herring and slaughtered what goats they could catch.
But Stronghand kept his gaze on sterner prey. His scouts brought him news of Nokvi’s fleet, and when they sailed into the great bay of Kjalmarsfjord, they found their enemy anchored in the gray-green waters. A reef complicated their approach, and furthermore Nokvi had positioned his ships between two small rocky islands called Little Goat and Big Serpent.
No matter. Nokvi only had seventy-four ships in his fleet. He still believed that the magic of the Alban tree sorcerers would bring him victory.
From the afterdeck of his ship, Stronghand surveyed his own fleet spread like wings out to either side: fully ninety-eight longships and a score of attendant skiffs for fishing the wounded out of the water. In their wake ran the rippling currents that marked the host of the merfolk, come to feed. Their backs skimmed the surface, glittering, graceful curves that vanished into the deeps as they sounded. A wind had come up from the south, chopping the waters into white froth. It blew hot and damp, and in the south clouds rolled up over the headland.
All along the line of his fleet, sails were furled. Oars chopped at the sea as they formed into battle array: the ships of Hakonin and Jatharin on the northern wing, those of Vitningsey and the Ringarin in the southern wing. Stronghand placed himself with the Rikin ships in the center, with Namms Dale ships to his left and his newest allies, Skuma, Raufirit, and Isa to his right where he could keep an eye on them.