by Angus Donald
The man’s eye ran over the trio sitting at the table at the back; stopped, came back to look at them again, and hurriedly moved on again. It was reasonably well done, but not well enough. Tor immediately knew this fellow had been looking for them, had found them and then tried to disguise his interest. The man did not order anything from the counter; he waited a few moments, then shoved off the bar and headed back out of the door.
Tor’s hand went to the handle of the seax she always wore across her lower belly. Bjarki had a decent blade, too. Otto had only an eating knife.
She slipped off her stool.
‘I’m just going to fetch something from the room,’ she murmured.
When she came back a few moments later she was carrying a heavy bundle wrapped in a blanket. She sat down at the table, putting the clanking cloth package on a stool beside her left knee. She saw that the man she had spotted before was back, sipping a small horn of ale at the counter and, so it seemed to her, deliberately not looking in their direction.
She looked about the room – there at the long communal table were two more of the men who had watched them on the quay. There were several dozen inns in Regensburg, Tor reasoned; this could not be a coincidence.
‘Captain Otto, I’d like your opinion, as an experienced military man, of this fine old sword,’ she said, passing a sheathed blade over the table to him.
‘And perhaps you, Bjarki, might like to give me your opinion of this bearded axe. I chose it from the Aachen armoury but I am not so sure it will serve. Would it be a suitable tool for tackling our monster, do you think?’
‘What are you doing?’ Bjarki said.
‘It’s a fine old blade,’ said Otto, who had unsheathed the long sword.
Tor watched the room, looking between the bodies of her companions, who had their backs to the common area. She saw the first man, the one with the dark hair, talking to the landlord. A purse was passed. She saw the innkeeper speak to the beefy girl who served the ale, who argued briefly and then began to angrily take off her ale-wet apron. He signalled the pot boy too, and the lad grinned and slipped into the back of the inn. The landlord then began moving along the counter to speak to his other customers. He spoke to an old man who quickly drained his horn and hurried for the door.
‘Looks like we’re going to have to sing for our supper, oaf,’ said Tor.
Bjarki turned around slowly and cast his eye over the tavern. Men and women were all leaving the common room. The space was rapidly emptying. He turned back and reached for the handle of the bearded axe.
‘I don’t understand why they can’t just leave us alone,’ he said.
‘Where would be the fun in that?’ said Tor.
‘I wanted to have a nice quiet evening and a good night’s sleep.’
‘Ah, well,’ said Tor, ‘you know what they say about Regensburg.’
‘What do they say?’
‘They say there’s never a dull moment in this town.’
‘Who says that? You’ve never met anyone from Regensburg before.’
‘Nobody says it,’ said Tor, ‘it’s just a… oh, never mind.’
‘I think this sword dates right back to the time of the mayors,’ said Captain Otto. ‘It’s a fascinating piece, you see this faint patterning here—’
Bjarki stood up, turned round and faced the room, the bearded axe held loosely, low in his right hand. There were only twelve customers in the room now – all fairly similar in appearance; fit young men, hair snipped short, good, solid boots. They looked like soldiers to Bjarki, but out of uniform. Experienced, confident men. A squad of Black Cloaks, maybe, incognito.
‘It would be a lot healthier for all of us if you just left now,’ Bjarki said loudly. ‘Whatever you boys are being paid, it’s not enough to die for. Why not go home, leave us be. Simply say you couldn’t find us. How about it?’
‘That’s not going to happen, Beast-man,’ said one of the older-looking men at the communal table. An officer, perhaps. He stood up, swept aside his short cloak and pulled a thick stabbing sword from the sheath on his belt.
Tor, still seated at the table, peered round Bjarki’s bulk at the standing man. She lifted a light throwing axe from the stool next to her and threw it hard, laterally. The axe spun across the room and thunked into the officer’s ribs.
Mayhem.
The gang rushed them, all at the same time. Bjarki swung and sank his bearded axe into the cropped head of the quickest man, as he leapt towards him, snarling, with a pair of daggers in his hands. The man gurgled, coughed, dropped his blades and folded at the knees. The axe, stuck vice-like in his skull, was tugged from Bjarki’s grip.
He saw another attacker coming at him, chopping with a long, curved sword. Bjarki ducked the blow at the very last moment, and the sword smashed into the table, dashing splinters everywhere. Captain Otto gave a wail of surprise and dived under the nearest bench, chased by a thin ginger fellow with a sword, who stabbed downward at the Auxilla commander through the wooden slats. Jabbing, jabbing, as Otto dodged and squealed.
Tor hurled another hand-axe, which whirred through the air and embedded itself into the shoulder of a charging man, knocking him to the side. She leapt over the table to join the melee; her seax in her right hand, another axe in her left. She buried the seax fist-deep in one man’s stomach, and knocked teeth out of another’s jaw with a backswing of the axe’s butt.
Someone barged heavily into Bjarki’s side just as he was trying to draw his seax, and the blade flew out of his hand and clattered across the floor.
He turned, saw a fellow behind him about to strike; blocked the knife stroke, his left forearm sweeping out and thumping against the man’s grip on the hilt. Then Bjarki punched him full in the face – with everything he had.
The man flew up, back and crashed down on to another table, smashing it to kindling. Bjarki looked around wildly for a weapon; someone swung a sword at his face, he ducked, seized the empty sword-sheath from their table, swung and crunched it into his attacker’s screaming mouth, mashing his lips, knocking him to the floor and snapping the wooden sheath in the process.
Tor was fighting like a whirlwind, laying out men left and right, her blades flying, blood droplets looping in the air and splattering on the ground. Captain Otto was dodging round a small table now, feinting left and running right, still being pursued by the same furious, flame-haired attacker, who was now ordering him to stand and fight.
Bjarki took two steps forward and seized the nine-foot-long bench that lay alongside the big communal table. He picked it up by one end, using both huge hands and all his considerable strength and, using it like a massive club, he whacked the angry redhead who was pursuing Otto across his chest, crushing his ribs. The ginger fellow was bowled two strides clear across the room before he crashed into a wall, and slumped in a heap.
Bjarki went on the attack then. He swung that bench like an enormous club, swatting his attackers this way and that, battering down men before they could get close enough to him to strike with their swords or daggers, swinging the heavy wooden seat in wide, lethal arcs, sweeping the room, left and right, and occasionally surging forward and lunging like a swordsman, and smashing the blunt end of the bench into this man’s face or that one’s body. In one fortuitous swing, he knocked three men over at the same time. One fellow, one of the few remaining attackers now on his feet, came howling at Bjarki, swinging a pair of long swords. The man ducked Bjarki’s first swipe, bobbed up and threw himself at the northerner. But Bjarki reversed the swing of the cumbersome bench; flicking it the other way, he smashed the fellow in the shoulder, breaking bone with a loud crack.
The attackers knew they had lost then. And some of them, battered, bruised, bleeding, but able to limp, were already heading for the inn door.
‘Kill them all!’ shrieked Captain Otto. He had found his antique sword again and, apparently, his courage. ‘Kill every mother-fucking one of them.’
A broken man, sitting on the filthy floor, his
half-crushed torso propped against a shattered table – one of the men crippled by Bjarki’s swinging bench – got the first taste of the good captain’s righteous wrath. Otto carved his sword down on his half-conscious head, burying the blade deep in his skull.
Tor hurled her last hand axe at a fellow, right in the doorway, the man in the very act of leaving, and buried the spinning blade in his side. With a yell of outrage, and a glare that would have curdled spring water, the man plucked the axe out from between his own ribs, tossed the gory item to the floor and, quick as an eel, slipped out the door, which banged behind him.
Bjarki dropped the bench with a long, reverberating clatter. He felt suddenly sick and weak. He had fought, yes, and he had won, but once again his gandr had not come into him. What Lord Grimoald had said to him in the street was undoubtedly true. He was no Rekkr. And he never would be.
‘Is everybody all right?’ he said at last. He could see that Captain Otto had blood streaking down his right leg. And then looked down at his own left arm, which had a bloody gash in the meat beneath the elbow. He had no recollection of receiving the wound at all. Now he saw it, it began to burn.
‘I killed him, Rekkr, did you see me? I killed this bastard here!’
Bjarki looked into the excited face of Otto, and then down at the split-open head of the man on the floor, his brains a bloody porridge in his lap.
‘Don’t call me that, Captain. Don’t ever call me that again,’ he said.
Chapter Twenty-one
The never-ending forest
They departed before dawn, leaving the landlord of the Hart in considerable pain and a state of abject terror. Tor had started crushing his knuckles with the steel pommel of her sword, one by one, till the man told them all he knew; Bjarki held the man still, and Tor asked her question. When he didn’t answer, she whacked down her heavy sword hilt on the offending digit. Sometimes she smashed his finger, then asked the question, just for variety.
When he had told all he knew, she crushed a few more of his fingers as a punishment for betraying his guests – an unforgiveable crime in her view. He was lucky. She had wanted to cut his throat, but Bjarki had restrained her.
The landlord had, in fact, known very little of use. The dozen men who had attacked them were off-duty Black Cloaks, as Bjarki suspected. They had been tasked with killing Bjarki and Tor under the fig-leaf excuse of a drunken tavern fight. The men were all part of the same elite Scholares unit – Third Scara (Austrasia), Fifth Cunei. One of the few surviving soldiers confirmed this intelligence before Captain Otto eagerly slashed his throat wide open. The fifty Black Cloaks of the Fifth Cunei, and another fifty men of the Sixth Cunei, were housed in the Regensburg fortress as part of the five-hundred-strong garrison there. The orders had come from on high, higher even than the Governor of Regensburg, but neither the wounded soldier nor the landlord knew where exactly. The Fifth Cunei had searched most of the town that evening before finally locating them in the Red Hart.
‘We made it harder for them by staying away from the fortress,’ said Bjarki. ‘If we’d stayed there we would have been murdered in our beds.’
He and Tor looked at Otto. ‘Do you think the king has taken against you now?’ the captain said. ‘You think Karolus ordered your deaths?’
‘Doesn’t make any sense,’ said Bjarki. ‘Why send us off to the edge of Francia only to dispatch us by assassins here. He could have ordered our deaths in Aachen. Or thrown us back into the cells under the amphitheatre.’
They did not tarry long in the Red Hart.
They dressed swiftly in their best war gear – Bjarki donning boots and greaves, and iron-reinforced leather vambraces on his brawny forearms. He wore a padded linen shirt and over that a long mail hauberk that covered his body to his elbows and knees. He chose a solid steel helmet with a nasal guard and cheek pieces, heavy leather gauntlets, a good round shield, and a long sword. Tor and Captain Otto also dressed for a full-pitched battle, then Tor slung a small bag of provisions over her shoulder, and a skin of ale, and they each took one heavy hunting spear. They reluctantly abandoned the rest of their gear. They locked the landlord, weeping over his ruined hands, in his own cellar and left the inn.
It was still pitch dark when they pulled the door shut behind them and cautiously emerged into the quiet, foul-smelling back streets of Regensburg. It was cold, too. An hour or so before the town’s curfew would end, Tor reckoned, and the city gate opened. As they trudged through the slush of the narrow street, heading north towards the river, feathery flakes began to fall.
They knew they would soon become hunted. They had killed half a dozen Black Cloaks and they would not be forgiven for that. Bjarki’s biggest fear, which he did not express aloud, was that the few men who had escaped the Red Hart, battered and bruised, would return to the fortress and rouse an army of their comrades to come and finish the job.
Their best plan, so it seemed to both Tor and Bjarki, was to complete their mission: go to Eggeldorf and slay this terrible monster. They would be heroes if they could accomplish that, acclaimed by all frightened civilians in Regensburg and the surrounding areas – in all Francia, in fact – and it would then be more difficult for whoever it was that wished them ill to arrest them or have them executed. Or murdered in their beds, for that matter.
They would kill the dread creature, then immediately seek out Master Bohemus for a speedy return back up the Donau and on to the route back to Aachen. Once back in the capital, the deaths of a handful of out-of-uniform soldiers in a faraway place could be denied; it would seem less important, anyway, compared with the victory of these heroes over a terrible monster.
There was no record of them being in Regensburg, after all. They had not registered at the fortress and, with a bit of luck, the landlord would be too scared to talk. It was the only thing to do. Kill the monster and go home. The alternative – to march up to the fortress and voice their indignation at the attack, seemed suicidal. And going back to Aachen without even seeing the beast they had come all this way to slay would make them ridiculous.
So, as the sky in the east turned grey, the three would-be monster-killers found themselves shivering in the shuttered front of a blacksmith’s forge – the wide door was bolted but there was some heat seeping out from the banked fires inside – stamping their feet, their breath pluming like smoke in the air, and watching the scales of snow fall in ever thickening veils.
Thirty yards from the blacksmith’s door, across the empty street, was the fortified gate in the Regensburg town walls, which led directly to the great stone bridge over the River Donau. Tor could make out a couple of steel-capped sentries on the wall beside the gatehouse, huddled in their heavy cloaks, around the cosy glow of a brazier. As far as she could tell, no hue and cry had been raised. There was no activity on the walls. No noise in the streets of the town. She craned her neck around and looked east for the hundredth time. Was it getting lighter?
After a dozen years, or so it felt to Tor, one of the sentries got slowly to his feet and disappeared from the wall. A year or two later, there was a terrible grinding and creaking noise and the huge wooden gate began to creep open. ‘About bloody time,’ muttered Tor, and, shouldering her spear and slinging her pack, she stepped out into the snow-crusted street.
* * *
They walked in a silent grey mist of fat whirling flakes and a cloud of their own dragon’s breath. On either side of the road the forest edge was a dull impenetrable wall. Somewhere in there, in the endless wilderness of black tree trunks and snow, was the monster of Eggeldorf. Was it prowling around, even now, seeking fresh man-flesh to gorge on?
Unlikely, thought Tor. If the creature had an ounce of common sense it would have found a snug hollow tree to bed down in, or a dry cave, where it could sleep through the storm, only waking when it was hungry. She wished now she hadn’t thought about sleep… or hunger for that matter.
Neither Bjarki nor Otto had yet made any complaint – and she had been initially pleased to get
out of Regensburg and across the bridge without being challenged, they were simply waved through the gate by the sleepy guards – but after walking for several hours in the freezing, blinding cold, their boots slipping and stumbling on the frozen ruts and ridges of the track through the thick woods, Tor was thinking more and more in terms of snug hollows and large hot meals. They had not slept the night before, of course, nor eaten very much. But she wouldn’t allow herself to be first to call a halt.
‘We should stop soon,’ said Bjarki, ‘and rest, and eat something. Do we know how far it is to Eggeldorf?’
He had to bellow his words through the whistle and howl of the wind, putting his hooded face right up close to his two companions.
‘According to the map, there is a fork in the road just a mile or so up ahead,’ yelled Captain Otto. ‘We take the left-hand fork and then it’s about three or four miles from there to Eggeldorf.’
‘Then let’s rest now and eat. And we will do the last part later.’
‘We should push on,’ said Tor. ‘The days are short and we need to be in Eggeldorf before it gets dark. It will be night in a few hours. I say we push on.’ Even as she said it, she regretted her words. Bjarki will insist we take a rest, she thought. Captain Otto will refuse to go on.
But they did not.
‘Makes sense,’ yelled Bjarki. ‘But chew on this as you walk. If we push it, we could be there in an hour or two.’ He handed his companions thin sticks of dried venison, tough as leather, but nourishing nonetheless.
‘Can you hear something?’ said Captain Otto, a little while later. ‘Sounds a bit like someone rattling a drum.’
Bjarki and Tor both pushed back the hoods of their cloaks and listened.
‘Horses?’ said Tor.
‘Get into the trees, now!’ bellowed Bjarki.
They raced towards the wood to the right of the track, sliding and slithering on the icy road, and dived into the cover of the trees, taking refuge behind a heavy fallen log about ten paces beyond the tree line.