by Ken Hagan
Gil-Phatric won’t let anyone retrieve her body from the river. No one dares approach — not even his clansmen, the last warriors called into battle with whom the young chieftain repelled the spearmen’s attack. His men have gathered the bodies of their dead warriors from the stones; only they have seen fit to carry corpses ashore, and they tried to reason with Gil-Phatric that Tioc’s daughter was owed the proper customs of Christian burial.
They said that the body of Leasha— a maiden pledged but unmarried — should be returned to her father. Tioc Cahaun, stricken with a broken leg, was calling for his daughter, time was short, the old man wanted to see her buried before the Ostmen came, it was unseemly for the young woman’s death-blood to leak into the river. When her spirit was called from the grave to take her rightful place in glory, her body, robbed of blood, would have no shape or form with which to rise from the dead.
Gil-Phatric was unmoved by their simple faith. He smiled gently and returned to his prayers.
*
Glun’s war-hounds howl beyond the willows. Glun and his force of warriors cannot be far behind.
Women of the Rath have covered their brazen nakedness, in which they attacked Finn’s men with fire on the river. They wade in pairs, separating kin from foe, not to move their menfolk ashore — or with any thought of their burial — but to utter a brief blessing, a sigh of farewell to husband, father or brother; or to a cousin or neighbour, and move on. Our dead, though fewer than feared, cannot be retrieved from the river. There is no one to carry them ashore and no time to bury them. Baldr and Fjak have looked for the body of Hrut. They upturned spearmen’s bodies in the water, where they thought the young man might have fallen, but found no trace.
Glun’s war-hounds howl beyond the willows. River-waters echo the howling and add to the sound.
The ironsmith and I wade back to the isle from the bed of reeds on the far shore. Stony shallows that were knee-deep during combat have risen to our chests. Debris of battle has been washed ashore by the current of an-Uir on both sides of the river. Hayforks, cudgels, wood-axes and swords; spears and staves; burned-out broom-heads litter the water and swill against us.
When we come to the shore of the isle, around us, at every turn, within sight of the cross — Gil-Phatric’s stretch of hallowed water, his site of victory — is strewn with Ostmen’s fallen bodies, limbs blood-broken and battered, faces with stony eyes gaping, bodies heaped, entangled in merciful embrace of death; and elsewhere, a whimpering residue of Finn’s men languishing in misery, those of our foe to whom a quick death was denied.
The ironsmith and I slay the wounded and dying, our would-be pillagers and invaders. We do it, not as an act of mercy to release them from pain and end their suffering, though to them it is an unintended kindness. We do it in cold defiance of what is to come — so certain are we that the same fate awaits us.
Untouched by the bubbling underflow— trapped in the afternoon heat by shallow, sluggish high-water tide — the river is clogged with men’s vomit, skull-spill and bowel run, churning, foaming filth and gore. The ironsmith hears a groan. He drags a lifeless body off a heap of grey flesh and hauls out a wounded Ostman from underneath the corpses. He jerks up the man’s chin by the beard, and slits the throat.
Another Ostman rises from the water, spearman without a spear, able enough to stumble to his feet, and to hazard a wild look, with thoughts only of escape. The ironsmith lets him pass. The fleeing man wades through waters curdled with blood, and runs off across the gravel beds. He ignores the pitiful cries from a fellow Ostmen lying injured and dying, and leaves him for us to despatch.
*
Ostmen’s war-hounds are in the willows. We hear them among the reeds — or we imagine we hear the fall of hounds’ paws on sedge-water and reed, as the sound carries across the river. Glun’s warriors have crossed the water-meadows. They must have done by now. What happens next will not be a battle of man striving against man, of axe against blade, but a simple act of slaughter.
Running away is unthinkable. Too late to run. And we are too few to defend the Rath.
Only those in great pain or close to death are attended to, while we wait. The walking wounded have been shouldered out of the sun and taken as far as the oak. Those like Tioc, unable to walk, were borne by Fjak and Baldr on fish-traps, hastily fashioned by axe into crude, chair-like carriers.
Beyveen, Derdriu and Kru attend to the badly injured, cleaning their wounds and binding them with strips of smock and skirt. Others less in need are made comfortable, given water, but left unaided. Thanks to the foresight of Derdriu, a pulp of dock leaves mixed with wet hay from the horse-paddock — an Erse salve for burns — was prepared in advance. Women whose arms are scorched raw from dripping tar, among them Beyveen and her mother, help themselves from the tub.
Shaynat, strapped at the shoulder, arm in a sling, sees to those she calls ‘her wounded boys’. Above all others, the youngsters have her praise. Her lauding of the boys brings a kind of giddy cheer under the oak. Everyone agrees. It is a fine thing to see pluck and savvy in ones so young. It brings cheer to everyone except her husband. Tioc Cahaun has a broken thigh and has lost blood. Derdriu will soon have the break splinted, if he can sit still long enough for her to strap his leg to a broom-shaft.
The chieftain calls for water and moans for his dead daughter to be brought from the river.
His wife was heard to mutter under her breath.
‘Stop your whingeing, husband! If we can see out the day, you will live a long time yet!’
I didn’t hear the words myself, nor did the ironsmith, but Fjak has just passed on the gossip and, whether true or false, we have to agree, it is not unlike Tioc’s wife to have said it.
Dantzk is alive. He is out cold. Halp hasn’t moved from his friend’s side. The big jib-man is bandaged tight, but his skull-wound bleeds through the binding. Derdriu casts a glance at every turn, watching for a flicker from his eye-lids, and returns to binding up the splint on the chieftain’s thigh.
The children have not come out of hiding.
Someone said they heard pigs.
There are dead shad-fish belly up in the water, and fish-eggs floating, laced with a scum of tar.
Ostmen’s war-hounds are in the willows. We hear the padding of their paws among the reeds.
Baldr joins us on the shore and looks across the river. He mumbles a prayer.
*
Bleat-bleat-bleat of hunting horns, their woody sound carried in clear summer air, and an insistent regular drumbeat — unmistakeably the story-telling rumble of a bodhrán drum.
From the far bank of the river, cattle-herders from the Rath — the young men justly blamed for having deserted their kin — take to the ford and wade chest-deep towards us. It might have been their tramping feet we heard among the reeds.
‘Thor’s shit, I will be damned,’ shouts Fjak. ‘It’s our young friends the quoits-lads — they have come back! Too late, my lads, the fun is over and now the shit begins.’
‘Wood-horns,’ shouts the iron-smith. ‘Do you hear horns? Wilderlings — I’d stake my life on it! Wilderlings, I tell you, by Jesus, or I am a fecking Ostman!’
A young man, unbearded, stumbles soaking wet towards us. He chokes on the swill of blood.
‘Hrut!’ Baldr hollers in amazement. ‘Where the hell have you been? We thought you were dead!’
Chapter 50
Wilderlings cross the flooded leet-ditch. Some swim across. Others wade over floodwaters that flow as deep as their chins. The first across are horn-bleaters and bodhrán-beaters. Once on the lower side of the leet, they come to a stubble-field, recently scythed of summer hay by folk of the Rath, but sodden with river-flood from the opened sluicegates. The horns bleat, the drums beat as soon as the first wilderlings set foot on the stubble. In response, at their backs, high-pitched shrieking cries from more wilderlings; some who have just crossed the leet; others already running at the Ostmen’s dogs.
Glun’s war-hounds, safe
off the water-meadows ahead of his warriors, had stretched on the wet stubble, tongues out, blinking in the sun, cooling their huge shaggy bodies after a muddy trek in the mid-day heat. Each hound had beat a crooked trail in meandering paths through marsh and swamp, sniffing his way past sink-holes and water-pits, to lead Glun Amlavson and his kirtle-men across the uncertain ground. Hearing horn and drum, and shrieking cries, and seeing wild folk running at them from above, the hounds are up and howling. But they are slow to form into a pack. Ostmen on the final stretch of the meadows — though not yet on firm ground — yell orders for the dogs to attack. No one more than Iron-knee, who is at their head. The hounds howl, where they stand, and don’t budge.
Wilderlings seem to seep from the leet-ditch like birth-spawn from muddy ooze. The out-spewing of young men and women, boys and girls, thickens from dozens to scores, from scores to hundreds, and soon swells to a horde thousands strong, spilling thickly into the stubble-field, a descent of bodies, running naked forms, frantic feet and faces, a menacing rush of camáns held aloft. As they run more swiftly, horde becomes herd. Wilderlings leap like deer. Their toes skim over sodden stubble, barely touching the ground. They descend as a herd of deer descends, wild, hot and hectic, from the fells, as when mountain deer hasten into the dales at winter-fall from snow on the tops to pasture below.
The wilderlings run into the stubble-field, light of burden. None of their number has axe or buckler. None has spear or blade of iron. A few of the horde — mainly young girls and boys — bear no weapon at all. Young men have hurling-sticks of ash-wood, with the curved ends sharpened to a cutting edge. Young women carry cattle-ropes and spancel-rings crudely carved from thorn-wood: sturdy spancels used to hobble bulls by locking the beast’s hind legs, shin to shin. The wilderlings are bare-skinned. Scant skirts of doe-hide cover their nakedness, cling wet between their supple loins. Lad or lass alike, there is no telling if skirt is worn or not, so similar in hue is their naked skin and naked hide.
Floodwater in the leet hasn’t soaked the wilderlings’ faces or cleaned off the warlike smudge of charred wood rubbed on to make them look fierce. A thick layer of wood-soot still darkens their faces from chin to brow. Nor has the short dip, while they waded or swam the leet, rinsed from their feet the stain of peat-mould, which comes from their treading barefoot in the mountains. Their feet, like the feet of beasts, are bog-blackened to the ankles.
The wilderlings run at Glun’s war-hounds to master them. A score of naked youths set upon each hound. With their weight on his back, their gangly, hairy victim is unbalanced. The hound topples, writhing to the ground, and is shoved over like a sack of oats. One youth clasps a hound by his belly hair, one by the ear, another by the tail. Some grab his fore-legs, others snatch the hind-legs. A young girl, no bigger than M’lym, forces a rope between his jaws. She and another girl muzzle him with a cattle-rope. Two girls more. A second and third rope is collared and pulled stiff at the neck until a hound is choked in a stranglehold. The tall dogs are too valuable to kill: their hind legs are hobbled with spancels. They are abandoned, left captive on the stubble, to be recovered by their new masters at leisure. The dog-tamers quickly gather up ropes and spancels, and shriek after their ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ in the fray.
Ostmen have watched their hounds tamed and tied. Now they rush forward in front of Iron-knee, not in his defence, but to prove that their mettle is better than that of the hounds. Three score men — perhaps closer to four — form with a row of shields, like a sturdy wall, buckler-sealed, man to man. The kirtle-men stand their ground and wait. A rush from the wilderlings — a hurling rush of camáns and the weight of three hundred bodies. Ostmen land axe-blows to head and limb, and spill blood at their feet, but too few, and too slow, on so many assailants. The warriors are thrown on their backs, pinned to the ground. Their bucklers, moments before, had been a rigid wall. But the wall of shields, once collapsed, becomes a bridge for the wilderlings to stand on and trap their victims underneath. Glun’s men are choked with ropes, their helmets ripped off. Ostmen are not prized by the Erse as trophy-dead. They are worthless as live hostages or slaves. Their naked heads are beaten to a pulp with a dozen sharp-edged camáns.
*
Fatigue has left me. I am no longer footsore from having battled in the stony shallows of the ford. I run with the wilderlings, run at their heels, run among their naked shapes. I run with the same innocence as, when a small child at Thwartdale, awakened at the morning hearth and revived with a baby sop of honeyed meal, I wanted to run in an endless game of hop and skip. Then, I wanted to be chased by brothers and sisters, chased over benches, chased under Da’s legs, and past Ma’s arms reaching to catch me, until the excitement made me drop.
*
Baldr and I run with the wilderlings. Young Hrut has caught up with us. He runs ahead where he can be seen. Fjak runs with his friends, the young cattle-herders: the quoits-lads. Our shipmate is twice their age, but he is no less swift on his feet than they — and, unlike them, he has done a morning’s work, battling on the river at reed-ford.
*
We chase Glun and his Ostmen back towards Cluddy woodlands. Several hundred brave, witless kirtle-men turn to make a stand against the wilderlings. To us, their hundreds seem a pitiful resistance against our assault, but they smash through camáns, scythe down bare bodies in a spattering harvest. In final moments of defiance, their battle glory is well-earned, their entry into the nether-world assured. But on this boggy earth, bloodied and littered with flesh, they pay the same price as fellow warriors who fled and didn’t pause in flight.
*
The clash of battle, the maddening muddle of massacre, thudding, scraping, searing — a hungry snap of ash-wood on bone and flesh, a rasp of iron on wood, a splurge of axe to bowel. Oaths of fear and fury escape from gaping mouths, but amidst the battle-din no words sworn to any god, old or new, can reach our ears. Only an unending roar from slayers and slain, a strange searing harmony of beast-like sounds in the killing meadows, pitiless grunts of wilderlings, gasping deaths of Ostmen.
Axe falls and ash-wood takes its toll.
*
Within a tangle of bodies and camáns, I sight Fjak’s bald head with the young cattle-herders not far behind on my right, and Baldr’s pigtail to the front with Hrut. Ahead of me are Fergal and Reenoch. I recognise the young man, a bodhrán drum on his back, but I am not sure if it’s the same girl. The runaways from Criadain strand, if that’s who they are, lead the onslaught. They haven’t seen me, but I see them: a thousand Fergals, a thousand Reenochs racing naked through the water-meadows.
In our path fleeing Ostmen. The wilderlings cluster like ants over a hapless warrior who falls into their clutches. They show no mercy, nor does Hrut, nor I — but we are not ants, we don’t swarm to a kill. Our chance comes if a lone kirtle-man, passed by and missed by wanton wilderlings, staggers unwittingly into the swing of Hrut’s axe or mine. A joyful rout. Ostmen, making haste to escape, lose foothold, skid off their feet, are sucked into sinkholes. We are not from the sinkholes nor are the wilderlings. For us, the water-meadows are safe to tread. We tread, not on open quagmire, sodden and flooded, but on discarded bucklers and shields, on sunken helmets and bared skulls, on the kirtled bodies of the dead.
Lively we hop and skip, treading thoughtlessly on death.
*
Iron-knee and a handful of warriors escape as far as the river and into a thicket of water-willows. Fergal and the whole horde of wilderlings in pursuit. I have lost sight of Hrut. He may have followed Fergal down to the river. From Fjak, moments ago, a whoop of delight, joyous and proud, almost heard above the battle-din. I have never seen Fjak so happy. From Baldr, solemn and weeping, a prayer unheard, barely on his lips. His sword is dry. He has run with us, but not once have I witnessed him raise his blade except in defence. While I have these thoughts of him, I see what Baldr has seen.
Reenoch — or a body as white, as slender as hers — lies naked, bowels-spilled on the mud.
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br /> Chapter 51
At Cluddy woodlands our dead are gathered in, the fallen foe ignored. The dead Ostmen will be left as a feast for ravens, magpies and crows. Thrandt, ever anxious to do things right, has had the corpses of our men arranged into two separate piles. Firewood is being assembled for a pyre to burn the men of Thor. A burial hole is being dug for the men of Christ — for our dead crewmen and warriors who have taken Erse brides and vows.
Young Hrut and Cully, the killer of Brennan, are among the grave-diggers.
‘We saw them off,’ says Thrandt, ‘but at what a cost!’ The master shipbuilder tearfully clasps Hrut’s shoulder. His son has his back to him, digging the burial hole. Thrandt taps his son’s shoulder with a blood-stained hand, as if testing a joint of wood. ‘You did well, lad. No father could be more proud of his son. Let us hope your ma and brothers have come through unscathed.’
Fjak murmurs something under his breath.
Hrut stops digging. In annoyance, or shame, or with thoughts of his mother, he throws down the broken spear-head used as a makeshift spade. He steals a guilty glance at me.
I turn away. I have just felt Hakon’s cold hand tighten on mine.