Dubh-linn: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 2)

by James L. Nelson

  Then the thing looked at him, their eyes met, and the thing screamed “Night Wolf!” and Thorgrim realized he was wrong, the thing was indeed of this world, it was Starri Deathless who had hacked his way through the line from behind. And had given the Vikings a way to victory. Because a shieldwall was a hard thing to break, but once broken was nearly impossible to put to right.

  “You men! Here! To me! To me!” Thorgrim shouted to the men at the far end of the shieldwall. He could pull men from the flanks, he knew, and not destroy the integrity of the defense. But he did not wait to see if they would follow. Rather he raised Iron-tooth and charged forward, charged for Starri, for the gap in the line. He burst through, found himself looking down the length of the Irish shieldwall, the man before him too occupied with the Norseman he was fighting to even see Thorgrim there, and with a vicious thrust Iron-tooth claimed his first victim of the fight.

  A short Irish sword came slashing down, the man wielding it lost in the press, but Thorgrim turned it easily, then cut sideways and felt his blade bite, felt the man he struck go down. The wicked point of a spear embedded itself in his shield and he jerked the shield to the left, pulling the man wielding it off balance. Thorgrim had a glimpse of wide eyes, a dark moustache, and then Iron-tooth slid through the man’s ribs and with a shriek he was down, the scream choking in a welter of blood.

  Someone backed into Thorgrim and Thorgrim started to wheel, to meet this threat, while keeping his eyes ahead as well. From the corner of his eye he could see Starri’s lanky arm, could see that his skin was not red, but rather it was bathed in blood. It was Starri who had backed into him, and so they stood, back to back, weapons flailing as the Irish struggled to kill them both, to patch up the rent in the shield wall, to push the Vikings back into the sea.

  They might have done so, too, but just then a great shouting came from Thorgrim’s left and he had a glimpse of the massive bulk of Hoskuld Iron-skull, more bear than man, racing toward the gap in the line, a trail of men behind him. They broke right and left, slammed into the ragged edge of the torn shieldwall, began rolling up the length of struggling men.

  Thorgrim took his eyes from the fight to watch Hoskuld plunge into the attack, and for that second’s lapse of attention received a sword thrust in the chest. The point pierced his mail and he felt the blade’s edge run along his flesh, but he swung his shield hard and caught the sword and knocked it away. He felt the blade slice him again as the edge of his shield slammed it aside. He counterthrust, plunging Iron-tooth through his attacker’s green tunic, twisting the blade, jerking it free.

  The Irish shieldwall was crumbling. Men who just moments before had been so sure of victory now saw their tight defense collapse as more and more of the Vikings poured into the gap that Starri Deathless had cut in the line and Thorgrim Night Wolf had stepped in to widen. The Irish began to fall back, one step, then two, then the men toward the back of the shield wall, those far enough from the fight that they could risk turning their back on the enemy did so, racing back across the ground they had won, racing for the dubious protection of the monastery at Cloyne.

  That was an end to it. Any man on that field who had seen combat before knew that once the running began it would not stop, and even to those who had not seen combat, that much was clear. The Irish fled down the road, tossing weapons aside. The wounded limped after them, only to be cut down by the Vikings if they were far gone in their wounds, or knocked on the head if they were still healthy enough for the slave market.

  The Viking army charged after them. They waved their weapons and shouted and beat their shields and raced after the fleeing Irish for a good quarter mile before they were all doubled over, heaving for breath, spent and beaten like borrowed mules. They had won, but the fight was out of them. The killing was done. For that day at least.

  Chapter Seven

  Once more I have told my dream

  to the makers of arrow-floods.

  They will surely feel

  my weapons bite their armor

  if rage comes upon me now.

  Gili Sursson’s Saga

  Harald’s tongue was hanging out of his mouth and his eyes were wide, but he seemed not to notice, so intense was his concentration. Thorgrim was sitting on the ground and leaning back on his hands and looking down at him. He might have laughed if the pain had not been so great and his mood so foul, and growing more so as the sun edged toward the horizon.

  In his right hand, Harald gripped a needle threaded with a sinew thread. With his left hand he tried to pinch together the edges of skin on Thorgrim’s lacerated chest. Harald’s fingers were slick with blood, and the skin was slick with blood, the edges lost in the red mess, and finally Harald simply gripped as hard as he could and drove the needle through the torn flesh. Thorgrim made no comment.

  The needle pierced the skin, adding a sharp pain as a counterpoint to the dull ache of the double wound, a laceration where the sword went in through Thorgrim’s mail, and another when it came out. As Harald pulled the sinew taut, Thorgrim dug into the sod with his fingers, but his face showed no reaction and he did not make a sound.

  “I’m sorry, father,” Harald said. “Did that hurt?”

  “No,” Thorgrim said, and at the same time Starri Deathless, sitting nearby, said, “Of course it hurt.” But it was just an observation, no more. By his tone Starri might have been commenting on the weather.

  To no one’s surprise, the berserkers had chased the Irish further than any of the other Vikings had, but they too were blown and exhausted and could only run so far. In truth, in the wake of a battle, when the fighting madness passed, the berserkers were often the most wasted of all the men. After the Irish had fled, Thorgrim found Starri sitting cross legged amid a heap of bodies, hunched over and crying bitterly.

  For a long moment Thorgrim had just stood there, not sure what to say, but understanding somehow that his presence was wanted and appreciated. At length Thorgrim said, “What is it that grieves you, Starri? Was one of your fellows killed?”

  “No, no,” Starri said, his words broken by his sobbing, “well, yes, some were. Damned sons of whores…”

  Starri looked up at Thorgrim. His tears had made white tracks through the brown, dried blood on his face, and Thorgrim thought, I would not have guessed this man could look more bizarre, and yet here he is…

  “Yes, some were killed,” Starri continued, “Hadd and Frodi. Alf was still here when last I saw him, but he will not be long. And here I am…here I am…still in this cursed world, even as the Valkyries lift my fellows from the field!”

  “You’re sobbing…” Thorgrim said, looking for the words, “because you were not killed?”

  “Of course, Night Wolf! What man could do anything but curse the fate that keeps him in this world and denies him the pleasures of Valhalla!”

  Thorgrim nodded. He was not sure what to say. There was not a man there, himself included, who did not believe with utter conviction that a glorious death on the field of battle would bring him to an even more glorious life in Odin’s Valhalla. And yet, how many of those held a belief so strong that they would weep to find themselves still alive? Many of those who lay strewn and bloody on the field, if given the choice, would likely have put off the journey to the afterlife for a few more years.

  And you, Thorgrim Night Wolf? Thorgrim asked himself. When his wife had died, most of the joy of this world had gone out with her. Thorgrim did not want to die, but he was indifferent about living. And that made him nearly as dangerous a man as Starri Deathless.

  Reflexively, Thorgrim glanced over to where one of his shipmates from the Black Raven was binding a cut on Harald’s arm. When the fighting had stopped, Thorgrim had immediately sought out his son. Harald was red faced, splattered with gore, jubilant from the fight. The cut on his arm, more of a tear from the point of spear, was an ugly, jagged wound, but not deep, and it had already stopped bleeding by the time Thorgrim had found the boy. Harald did not even know the wound was there until Th
orgrim had mentioned it.

  So what of Harald? Thorgrim loved all his children, but he and Harald had been a-viking for nearly a year now, and that changed things. Thorgrim might have been indifferent about his own life, indifferent about the lives of all the men with whom he sailed, but he was not indifferent about Harald. He was not ready to leave Harald alone in the world. The boy was growing up. But he was not grown.

  It was that attitude, the need to help Harald to manhood, which led to Thorgrim’s sitting on the grass and enduring his son’s painful ministrations. Stitching wounds was a skill that every warrior needed to possess, and practice was not so easily come by, because no one was going to ask a man to stitch him up who was unpracticed in the art. So Thorgrim insisted that Harald get some practice on the two wounds he had earned in the fight. Harald agreed, but with no enthusiasm. Indeed, he showed more trepidation, his hands literally trembling, than Thorgrim had ever seen him display before battle.

  “All right…there.” Harald pulled out his knife and cut the bitter end of the sinew. “Done.”

  “Good job, son,” Thorgrim said, with all the enthusiasm he could muster. Thorgrim could have done a better job if he had done it himself, and it likely would have been less painful, but he was nonetheless proud of his boy, even if he could not bring himself to say more. It was just the evening, and the foul mood was setting in on him. He called it the black mood, and men knew to keep clear of him when he was wrapped up in it. It did not come every night, but often enough, and generally in the wake of fighting. It did not always lead to wolf dreams, but it did that often enough as well. In the black mood, Thorgrim was not just unfit company, he was dangerous company. The black mood had earned him the name of Night Wolf.

  Starri glanced over. “That’s quite a scar you’ll get from that, Thorgrim,” he observed. Starri was looking better than he had after the battle. Once he had composed himself, choked down his grief at being still alive, he and his fellows had gone down to the water and plunged in, washing the blood and madness from them. They had combed their hair and pulled on tunics and looked as much like normal humans as they ever could.

  A few of the berserkers had died, as Starri said, but most had not. Nordwall the Short had come away with a few vicious wounds, but nothing likely to end his life. The rest were in much the same condition. It was a wonder to Thorgrim how anyone could go into battle with such utter disregard for their lives and come out with no more than a few scratches. Perhaps that was the trick.

  Thorgrim pushed himself to a sitting position and then stood. The pain in his wound was excruciating and he feared he had ripped it open again, but looking down he could see that, inelegant as Harald’s work was, it was at least sound. Thorgrim grabbed up his tunic, which was crumpled on the grass, and pulled it over his head, the loose garment happily not requiring a great range of motion to slip on. Harald stood as well, unsure whether or not to help. He offered an arm, withdrew it.

  “Forgive me, Harald, I think I’ll walk a pace,” Thorgrim said. Harald nodded. The boy knew what he meant. As the sun plunged beyond the horizon, it would come that time of the evening when Thorgrim would not be fit company for men.

  Soon the leaders of the various longships would gather again to discuss what was to be done next. They had encountered far more armed men than they had anticipated, and now those men were entrenched in the ringfort that encircled Cloyne. Did the Vikings have men enough to take the fort? Was it worth the effort and the carnage? Or should they just take to their ships and fall on another, less prepared town? All crucial questions, and Thorgrim did not care the worth of a rat’s ass about any of it.

  He moved off across the field with the evening dark spreading over the hills, past the clumps of men sparking cooking fires or collapsed in exhaustion or tending to their wounded or moaning their lives away. He walked clear of them all, toward the distant town of Cloyne where he could see a few fires already burning. He sat, cross-legged, staring out toward the town. He was not alone, he realized; he sensed a presence behind. He turned to see Starri Deathless sit in the grass as well, fifteen feet away. Starri did not speak, he did not look at Thorgrim. He just sat.

  Normally, Thorgrim would not tolerate the near presence of another when the black mood was on him. Sure, at times he might find himself on shipboard, or crowded in a small house in foul weather, and at those time there would be men near, but they would keep their distance, and that made it tolerable. Never, never had someone deliberately tried to keep company with Thorgrim at such a time.

  But somehow Starri, he found, was like a seamless piece of the whole thing, his presence neither an irritant nor a comfort, like an evening when the temperature is perfectly moderate, as if there was no temperature at all. Thorgrim turned away without a word and looked back into the distance and the fading light.

  The gray evening yielded slowly to dark night, and Thorgrim sat and stared out into the distance, and then into the blackness, which was punctuated by only a few bright and undulating spots of light, camp fires or torches in the far off town. He felt the blackness welling up in him. His thoughts were an incoherent jumble, there were no words in his head, at least none in any language known to man, no motion in his body; he was all mood and feeling and instinct.

  And then, sometime later, though he had no sense of time passing, he was running, moving swiftly along the grassy hills, keeping to the dark places. He felt strong and lithe. The wound in his chest gave him no pain. The monastery of Cloyne was ahead, and the little town that clustered around it. The air was rich with smells he had not noticed before; hearth fires, cooked meat, men and women (he could differentiate the smells now), fresh turned earth, moldering straw on the dirt floors of the home. Fear.

  He came in closer, not afraid, he had no fear, but wary of the places where men lived. The night was overcast, but not black. The dirt walls of the ring fort were near, blocking out the dull light overhead. The walls were crowned with a fringe of sharpened pikes shaped from small trees, making an overhang on which an attacking army would be caught up and slaughtered as they went over the wall. The dark tower rose up from the unseen monastery like some mythical giant, keeping its ceaseless watch over the countryside.

  There were voices coming from the ringfort now. The words made no sense, but he could feel the tones. There was anger, and more fear. There were men moving, a lot of men. He could smell horses and hear their hooves on the soft ground. He could hear weapons clattering. A worn, bare patch of ground that might have been construed as a road circled the walls. Thorgrim steered clear of that, and instead slipped into a shallow gully that paralleled the ringfort and there he moved silently through the shadows.

  At length he came to a place where he could see the regular walls of the ringfort broken by massive wooden doors, twenty feet wide, as high as the walls and just as impenetrable. On either side of the doors, standing atop the walls, were armed men with torches, and fires burning on the ground approaching the gate, so that no one, not even Thorgrim Night Wolf, could approach unseen.

  And as he watched, the gate swung open and a column of men emerged, moving in some semblance of regular order. Thorgrim tensed, moved farther back into the shadow. Voices called out and others replied and Thorgrim could sense the anger in the strange words. This meant something, this was important, these armed men sallying out from the ringfort, but he did not know what it signified.

  The marching men made no sound, and they carried no torches or light of any kind and they came through the gate to the road along the fort’s walls. Two men on horseback led the way. The horses shook their heads and one whinnied, sensing Thorgrim near, but its rider gave it a reassuring pat and Thorgrim remained motionless and horse and rider moved past.

  The riders swung off to the north and soon were lost in the dark and the rest of the men followed behind. It took some minutes for them all to make their way out, marching with shields on arms and spears held over shoulders. And then the big doors were swung closed behind, slamming shut wit
h a sound that suggested strength and finality. Thorgrim kept to the low place and followed behind the marching column. The sea was south of them, he could smell it, a constant backdrop behind all the other, more ephemeral smells, but these men were not going in the direction of the sea. They were going in another direction entirely.

  Thorgrim followed, hidden by shadow along his track. The men marched, some limping hard with wounds suffered from the day’s fighting. The smells were pungent. Sweat and wool, leather, iron, horses. Anxious eyes glanced out into the dark. But they did not break their stride.

  Beyond the gate the column swung off, following a wide, rutted track, the chief road connecting Cloyne to the lands to the north. Thorgrim crouched and watched and then something else caught his attention. Two figures were moving along the edge of the ringfort, also watching the column marching off. They were not hiding; one was even carrying a torch. They paused for a moment, then turned toward the wall of the fort, a seemingly unbroken expanse of earth,

  The two men stopped and one banged against the wall with the hilt of his sword, the sound of iron on wood, not earth. He banged twice in rapid succession, paused, then once again. A small door, all but invisible in the wall, opened and a weak light spilled out. The two men ducked through, the door closed, and Thorgrim Night Wolf awoke.

  Chapter Eight

  I’ve ended up the same way as the wolves –