Sigurd felt Alrik’s eyes on him now as he sat watching the dróttin’s bear banner stirring in the wet wind. ‘Why do you ask?’ Alrik said, frowning, twisting the other tail of his long moustaches now as he stared at the borg’s walls, which he seemed to do a lot. ‘About Guthrum’s banner.’
Sigurd looked to the west from where the wind came. From where Jarl Guthrum would come. ‘I have an idea,’ he said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SIGURD AND HIS crew waited amongst the trees along with twenty of Alrik’s warriors, all of them young men who had come north with Sigurd from the camp on the shore of Løgrinn. They were restless and most likely afraid, some of them having little or no experience of battle other than the night raid by Findar and the borg men. But they would play their part, Sigurd was sure, whether they liked it or not.
‘Beardless buggers’ll have no choice but to fight when it comes to it,’ Olaf had remarked when Bjorn moaned that they looked as green as grass. ‘There’s no better way for a man to learn how to kill than by trying to stay alive.’
Furthermore, those twitchy young men with their shields, spears and axes must have taken heart from Sigurd’s crew, who were eager and hungry for the fight, their blades honed to a wicked sharpness and their brynjur scrubbed free of rust. Even Thorbiorn looked the part in his war gear, which his father King Thorir had given him, comprising a brynja, a helmet whose brow band and nasal was silvered and decorated with knotted beasts, and a silver-hilted sword and scabbard to match, with gold and silver fittings which gleamed. Not that any of it looked to have ever been used, as Svein had pointed out, so that it was not surprising that all eyes were drawn to it, ‘just like they are drawn to a pretty maiden who has never yet been swived,’ as he had put it.
‘Though underneath it all, the lad couldn’t look more like Sigurd if he tried,’ Sigurd overheard Bram mutter.
‘He knows it too,’ Svein said. ‘But you never met Sigurd’s brother Sorli,’ he said to Bram. ‘He was so pretty we called him Baldur.’
‘Good lads. All of them,’ Olaf put in, and Sigurd pretended not to hear because he did not want to start talking about his brothers now.
‘Do you think the Allfather wants us to win?’ a young man into his first proper beard asked Olaf, the knuckles of the hand gripping his spear bone-white as if he feared dropping the thing. ‘There’ll be many more of them than us,’ he added, blinking too often, licking dry lips.
‘What is your name, lad?’ Olaf asked him. Sigurd guessed the young man was about his own age. But he had not lived Sigurd’s life. He had not waded through blood to reach manhood.
‘Kveld Ottarsson,’ the young man said, standing a little taller at his mention of his father.
‘Well then, Kveld Ottarsson, you are right in that there will probably be more of the goat-fuckers than there are of us, and that can be a problem in a fight.’ Olaf pulled his scramasax from its sheath above his groin and pointed it at Kveld. ‘But that is the best kind of problem because we are able to do something about it. Every man you kill is a man who will not be killing you. Or me come to that. So be a good lad and kill as many of those pieces of arse moss as you can. Keep killing them and then you’ll find there are more of us than them. Simple as that.’
Kveld looked at Svein, who grinned and nodded, and then at Black Floki, who was showing nothing but contempt.
‘Just don’t get in our way, lad,’ Bram said, slapping the cold iron cheek of the long-hafted axe he was leaning on. ‘Because when this troll-shortening beauty is in full swing, she does not stop to ask whose side you are on.’
Kveld Ottarsson nodded, sharing a weak smile with some of the others who stood there sweating and invoking the gods, their arse cheeks flapping in their breeks.
‘And the other thing,’ Olaf went on, sheathing his long knife, ‘now is the time to empty your bladders. Go for a shit if you can. Better to do it now than when you are facing some growler who will think you have ruined your breeks on his account.’
That was all the invitation most of them needed and they walked off into the trees, unslinging shields and pulling at belts as if they feared they might not get them undone in time.
‘Make sure you don’t get lost, Thorbiorn Thorirsson,’ Olaf called after the king’s boy. ‘I wouldn’t want you to miss the whole thing.’
‘If you wanted to come and hold it for me, Olaf, you should’ve said,’ Thorbiorn called over his shoulder, and if the lad was afraid he was doing a good job of hiding it.
‘I remember my first fight,’ Solmund said, watching them go.
‘Ah yes, when Óðin still had two eyes and no beard to speak of,’ Bjarni said, which got some laughs, though not from Solmund who was in the deep of his memory.
‘My father took me on a raid. Some feud over sheep. Or was it goats? Anyway, the raid went bad as milk left in the sun. Our enemies had seen us coming across the fjord and prepared us a proper welcome. We’d lost three men in the time it takes to haul an anchor stone in, and that was three too many for a few sheep. Ended up haring back to our boat, braids flying in the wind. I had never seen my father run before.’ He still seemed amazed by the sight of it in his mind. ‘We never spoke again of our hurry that day.’
‘Thank you, Solmund,’ Sigurd said, jutting his chin at those men who had not gone off amongst the trees, ‘for that is just the kind of story we all wanted to hear.’
‘Enough stories,’ Moldof growled, waving his half-arm in the direction of the borg. ‘Let’s get on with the thing so that we don’t have to hear about the old goat’s second fight.’ Solmund shrugged and held his tongue and nor did any of the others have anything more to say but were content just to wait for the sound of the horn from the east, which was the signal Sigurd had agreed with Alrik.
For the three days since Sigurd had spun the plan in his head the warlord’s men had been busy, cutting birch trees and making ladders in full view of those warriors on the borg’s ramparts. To Guthrum’s men it would look as if Alrik was readying to launch an all-out attack. As if he would throw his men at the palisade in the hope that they would break over it like a wave over a rock on the shore. It was likely the defenders would assume that Alrik had received word that Guthrum was nearby and that the warlord knew he must win the hill fort for himself now or else risk being caught out in the open and fighting on two fronts.
‘There is every chance it will not work,’ Alrik had said when Sigurd had come up with the scheme. ‘But if it does, and we take the borg today, I will make you a rich man, Byrnjolf.’
If it didn’t work, Sigurd considered now, he, his crew, and all the men standing amongst the trees with him now might easily die. No, not easily. Never that, he thought, hoping that Óðin Geirtýr, the spear-god, was watching them, that Loki, too, was not far away, for surely that trickster would appreciate the low cunning in Sigurd’s scheme.
And then there was no more time to think or hope, only to act, as the thin note of a horn made heads turn to the east, where Alrik’s force would be taking up shields and drawing together, doing their best to look as if panic and fear were spreading amongst them.
‘Now, king’s son,’ Sigurd said with a nod, at which Thorbiorn snatched up the war banner from where it had leant against a tree. Being the banner man was a position of honour and only fitting for the son of a king. Not that that was why Sigurd had given Thorbiorn the responsibility. He had done it because it would be no easy thing, carrying that banner aloft over sloping, uneven ground, which would leave less room in the young man’s head for the fear which fills even experienced warriors at times like this. Being the merkismaðr might even stop Thorbiorn from doing something reckless. Not that he had given any impression of wanting to prove himself, other than when it came to women and ale.
‘Stay with me, lad,’ Olaf told him. ‘That way I won’t have to tell your father that you got yourself killed for some Svear warlord on some half-arsed hill in the middle of nowhere.’
Thorbiorn nodded, lifting the
banner which had been nothing but a boar spear and a scrap of tent cloth just two days before. Now, because they were sheltered amongst the trees and there was anyway little in the way of wind, the half-circle of black cloth below the blade hung limp, so that only a flash of the white shape embroidered on it could be seen. Nevertheless, Jarl Guthrum’s sign of the war axe on a sea of black was clear enough on the shields which Sigurd’s crew and four of the others carried now as they walked out of the tree line on to the open ground to the west of the borg. Alrik and Knut had confirmed that Guthrum’s hearthmen boasted shields painted like that because Guthrum had famously killed his uncle, a jarl named Blihar, with an axe. Guthrum wanted the torc for himself and one day, when Blihar was dealing with a dispute between two farmers in his own hall, Guthrum struck him down in front of everyone. Anyone would have thought that would be the end of Guthrum then, and yet instead of avenging their jarl, Blihar’s hirðmen swore an oath to Guthrum there and then, and he had taken the symbol of the axe as his own from then on.
‘The gods like a man to act boldly,’ Asgot had said, seeming to admire the Guthrum of that story, and Sigurd had spun the scheme in his mind. Those black-and-white-painted shields, along with the war banner and the fact that Sigurd’s crew were relatively unknown to Guthrum’s men, might be enough to fool those in the borg now. From a distance and in their mail and helmets, Sigurd’s crew might, if the gods were smiling on him, be taken for Guthrum’s hirðmen rather than for Alrik’s men, few of whom owned either.
‘Keep this pace,’ Sigurd said to those around him as they marched north-east across the bumpy ground, mail and fittings clinking, feet tramping, men puffing. Then he could hear shouting from the borg, as men on its ramparts spotted them. He could not hear what they were saying but he hoped it was not that they recognized him and his men from the other night when Sigurd had killed Findar on the hill below the gate. It was dark that night, he told himself. They saw nothing.
He growled at Thorbiorn to lift the banner so that what breeze there was might catch the cloth and make the axe on it dance. And he counted on the borg’s men believing that they were looking at the vanguard of Jarl Guthrum’s force, or even the jarl himself come out of the west to spin Alrik’s doom.
‘How will we know if they’ve swallowed the hook?’ Kveld asked, keeping his shield high to partly obscure his face as Sigurd had told him.
‘We’ll know,’ Sigurd assured him, looking to the southeast. Further down the slope, Alrik’s men were forming into two shieldwalls, Alrik at the centre of one, Knut in the other, both men yelling commands and working their warriors into a battle fever. Another horn blast and then those shieldwalls were moving, one of them towards the borg, the other towards Sigurd, which was exactly as they had planned it. To those in the borg it would look as if Alrik was rushing to intercept the newcomers before they could reach the gate in the palisade on the borg’s south side and safety. As for Knut’s shieldwall, which was facing that gate, Guthrum’s men would think that their enemies were trying to ensure that none from the borg came to the newcomers’ aid.
They’ll be hesitant. Unsure without Findar, Sigurd told himself as the sweat trickled down into his beard.
‘Now, Sigurd!’ Olaf hissed.
But the command was already on Sigurd’s lips. ‘Shieldwall!’ he roared, stopping and planting the butt of his spear on to the ground, and those warriors in loose order around him stopped too, and formed two lines, with him at the centre, their shields overlapping, their spears threatening Alrik’s men down the slope to their right. ‘Move,’ he yelled, and they were shuffling forward, trying to stay together over the uneven ground and through the long grass.
‘And watch out for those arrows,’ Olaf said, because two of Alrik’s men had run forward with bows and were making ready to loose, which was not so dangerous from that range but would help the whole thing look right as far as the borg men were concerned. ‘Here they come,’ Olaf said as they lifted their shields to make the wall a little higher. Five heartbeats later an arrow hit Bram’s shield and bounced off, and six heartbeats later Sigurd tramped on the other shaft, which was sprouting from the spring grass. Then Sigurd steered them to the right because he wanted to make it look as though he was willing to fight, that his skjaldborg and Alrik’s would collide in a great clash of wood and steel, flesh and bone. Another arrow hissed overhead and Asgot caught its twin on his shield.
Sigurd looked left up the slope. They were close enough to the borg now to smell the mossy damp wood of the palisade and the smoke of the cook fires within. They could make out the shouts of those spearmen on the ramparts, and Sigurd liked what he heard. Some of the borg men were telling him and his men to slaughter Alrik and shit on their corpses. Others, the wiser ones amongst them, were warning Sigurd’s war band that there were too many of the enemy for them to fight and that they should retreat back into the woods and wait for the rest of Guthrum’s army. Which was good advice seeing as Sigurd’s thirty-four faced a shieldwall sixty strong. Then there was Knut’s skjaldborg of about the same number, and still more besides, for Alrik had left a number of warriors behind to guard the camp.
‘Keep those shields up. Give the sods something to aim at,’ Olaf said, for the risk of one of Alrik’s bowmen putting an arrow in them was very real now that the men in the skjaldborg could not watch the shafts in flight and judge their arcing fall. From this range those arrows would be flying fast and almost straight. ‘Here comes another,’ Olaf warned, and two heartbeats later an arrow tonked off Sigurd’s shield boss. A moment after that another whipped over their heads and Bjarni said he had heard it whisper Kveld Ottarsson’s name, which was a cruel thing to say.
‘Nearly there,’ Sigurd said, as Alrik’s men began to strike their shields with the cheeks and polls of their axes, the hilts of their swords and their spear shafts, and if this hadn’t all been part of the ruse that thunderous beat might have had those young untested men behind Sigurd pissing down their legs. Perhaps it did even so.
‘Now there’s a face I have seen before,’ Olaf said, ‘six men to the right of Alrik as we look at them. See him?’
‘The one with two beard ropes?’ Sigurd asked, having picked out the warrior, who was hammering his shield with his sword’s hilt.
‘I’ve seen him around camp,’ Sigurd said.
‘Aye,’ Olaf said. ‘We know him.’
‘I don’t,’ Sigurd said. To his eyes there was nothing familiar about the man and he glanced up the hill at the borg, which was behind him over his left shoulder now so that only the top of the main gate and the heads of two sentries could be seen above the crest of the hill.
‘When we go, we go fast,’ Sigurd called.
‘As if Fenrir Wolf is snapping at our arses,’ Olaf added, and they came on to the flatter ground an arrow-shot from the fort but only a spear-throw from Alrik’s skjaldborg. Sigurd and Alrik locked eyes and the warlord roared a curse at him, calling him a dead man walking, which was the prearranged warning that chaos was about to slip its leash like Garm, the giant hound which guards the corpse-gate of Hel’s freezing wastes.
‘Kill them!’ Alrik bellowed, lifting his spear and pointing the blade at Sigurd. Sixty voices clamoured in response as Alrik’s shieldwall shattered and his men broke into a run.
‘Stand!’ Sigurd yelled, lifting his shield and bracing himself for the coming impact. ‘Stand!’ He sensed his own skjaldborg fragmenting around him, starting with the men at his rear. ‘Stand, you swines!’ he screamed, but they would not stand, because sixty warriors were running towards them, screaming death and butchery.
‘Now, Sigurd,’ Olaf growled, and Sigurd looked left and right, then over his shoulder, and saw that only six or so yet stood with him, grim-faced but steadfast. Thorbiorn was one of them, not bothering to lift the banner now as the cloth was as limp as an empty ale skin. The rest of them were running uphill towards the borg. Which was exactly what they were supposed to do.
‘Now,’ Sigurd agreed, then tur
ned, screaming at his remaining warriors to run, and they did not need to be told twice. They fled up the slope towards the borg, which was lung-scalding work cumbered by mail, helmets, shields and weapons, and Solmund, who had been one of the first to flee, was already bent double and suffering, his old lungs creaking, but Valgerd grabbed hold of him and hauled him on.
‘Thought you said it wasn’t much of a hill, Bear,’ Svein growled at Bram, huffing and puffing, the two of them gripping their big axes by their throats as they ran. Then a man beside Sigurd stumbled and fell, landing awkwardly because of the shield which he had foolishly strapped to his arm, but Sigurd ran on because he saw that the gates in the palisade were opening inwards.
‘Come on! Hurry!’ a man on the ramparts was yelling.
Sigurd looked behind him and saw that the man who had fallen was Kveld Ottarsson and he looked to have broken his arm by the way that his shield was lying in relation to the rest of him. On his knees and right elbow now, he had drawn his scramasax and was sawing at the shield straps. He must have known that Alrik’s men were almost on him.
‘Fool’s going to scupper us,’ Moldof said, looking over his shoulder as he leant on one leg dragging breath into his lungs because he was on the steepest part of the climb. Sigurd feared Moldof was right, but then Kveld hauled himself to his feet, pulled his sword from its scabbard and ran at those coming up the hill towards him, and it was Alrik himself who scythed the young man down with one swing of his massive sword, Sleep-Maker.
Sigurd turned and plunged up the slope, over the crest to see Valgerd and Floki leading the rest across the bridge over the ditch and through the gap in the bank. Then they were through the open gate and Sigurd knew it could all come to bloody ruin now if they did not get enough bodies inside the borg before Guthrum’s men fathomed their trick.
He overtook Svein and Bram, Asgot, Solmund and Moldof, and thundered across the short bridge into the fort, where Jarl Guthrum’s men were waiting. There were some twenty or thirty of them milling inside the gate, which some of them were already pulling closed so that Moldof and Svein had to turn sidewards to get in. And then those gates slammed shut and the locking beam was put in place and one of the men on the rampart above shouted down that Alrik’s men had stopped halfway up the slope.
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