Winter's Fire: (The Rise of Sigurd 2)

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Flea-ridden whoresons are just standing there scratching their arses!’ he called.

  ‘That’s because the turds have no fight in them,’ a black-bearded warrior shouted up at him, as those manning the ramparts jeered and hurled insults and waved the spears which they would have cast down on their enemies had the ‘sheep-fuckers’ and ‘pale-livered nithings’ the courage to come closer.

  ‘Who are you?’ one of Guthrum’s men asked Floki, his eyes jumping from man to man and from their shields to the banner which Thorbiorn still gripped. Those eyes bulged when they took in Valgerd standing there like something from a legend, her braids like golden ropes lying on the grey rings of her brynja. ‘Where is Jarl Guthrum?’ the man asked. A tall, grey-bearded warrior with rings up his arms, he was one of the only borg men wearing a helmet, which likely meant he was in charge. ‘I do not recognize any of you,’ he said, his hand on the hilt of his sword, and it was clear he was beginning to have very bad thoughts. ‘Well?’ he demanded of Olaf. ‘Who in Hel’s cunny are you?’

  Olaf looked at Sigurd, which was his way of giving Sigurd the great pleasure of dispelling Grey Beard’s confusion. So, Sigurd stepped up to the man and grinned, dragging his right forearm across his head to wipe away the sweat. ‘We are the men who you should not have opened your gate to,’ he said, and then he cut the man down with one blow and brought the steel-chaos to Guthrum’s borg.

  Black Floki planted one of his short axes in a man’s forehead, and Valgerd ran her spear through a warrior’s chest before he had his sword half out of its scabbard. Asgot opened a big man’s throat with his spear blade and Svein ran at Guthrum’s men, giving himself room to swing that big axe and sowing panic amongst his enemies. Olaf slammed his shield against another man’s, then hurled his spear which went into a man’s open mouth and punched out the back of his skull, and Bram was cleaving shields and lopping off the arms behind them. Even Thorbiorn gave himself to the iron-storm, thrusting the boar spear banner into a man who came at him with an axe and driving him backwards into the press of his companions.

  But Guthrum’s men vastly outnumbered them, and once the initial shock had passed they were rallying, flooding from all over the borg towards the maelstrom at the gate. A rock struck Sigurd’s shoulder and another smashed one of the Birka men’s skulls, killing him instantly, and Sigurd lifted his shield up, looking round its rim to see that those up on the earthen rampart were trying to rain death on them from above. ‘Shields!’ he yelled, seeing Floki duck a sword swing and hack into a warrior’s groin. His shield before him, Aslak forced a warrior back against the palisade, punching his scramasax into the man’s neck over and over, so that blood sprayed across the timbers. ‘Uncle! The gate!’ Sigurd bellowed. Olaf nodded, wincing as a boulder the size of a man’s head thumped into his shield which he held above him, causing him to stagger and go down on one knee in the mud.

  Blood slapped Sigurd’s face and he knew it was from another of Knut’s recruits, whose head burst apart in a welter of blood, skull and grey brains. Svein, Bram, Moldof, and ten of the others had already formed a skjaldborg to defend the gate, and were holding off three times their number because since Findar was gone, Guthrum’s men had no leader roaring orders at them and their own shieldwall was not properly built. And yet other borg men, in their desperation to retake the gate, were trying to come round the edges of Svein’s wall, which lacked the bodies to bend back on itself and prevent them.

  A thrown spear struck Bjorn’s chest, knocking him down. A sword blow cleaved Valgerd’s shield and then the borg man stepped up and rammed the hilt into the shieldmaiden’s head, sending her reeling, but Bram strode forward and swung his long axe, hacking off both of the borg man’s legs at the knee.

  ‘Help them,’ Sigurd ordered the men standing with him.

  ‘Not you, Thorbiorn. You stay where I can see you, lad,’ Olaf growled as Bjarni, Asgot, Crow-Song and Solmund ran to protect the skjaldborg’s flanks. Still others of Sigurd’s raiders were fighting to add their own shields to Svein’s bulwark, and it was with grim pride that Sigurd saw the young adventurers who had marched north through the forests with them holding their own, trading blow for blow.

  A spear streaked down but Sigurd got his shield to it and it glanced off to land in the mud, as Valgerd launched her spear up at the man on the ramparts who had thrown it, taking him in the belly so that he clutched the shaft and toppled down the bank into the borg, landing at Sigurd’s feet. Then one of the other men up there yelled down at his companions that they must retake the gate and hold it, because Alrik was coming, at which all the men on the ramparts turned and began hurling their spears and rocks at those outside the borg. For they knew that if Alrik’s men came through those gates the fort would be his before dusk.

  Floki threw his shield aside, thrust his hand axe into his belt and scrambled up the earthen slope, pulling his scramasax free as he got to the top and punching it through the neck of a man whose back was to him as he loosed an arrow. Alert to the threat, another man turned and thrust his spear at Floki, which the former slave parried downwards with his knife, sending the spear blade into the earth and sweeping the scramasax back up along the shaft slicing off the man’s hands at the wrists. The warrior staggered backwards, glaring at his spurting stumps, and Floki left him to it, pulling his axe free and planting it in another man’s back a heartbeat before slicing his throat.

  ‘Here we go,’ Olaf said as he and Sigurd lifted the heavy beam from its brackets and dropped it on the earthen bank. The gates swung inwards and Alrik himself stalked in with his hearthmen around him. The eyes behind the helmet’s guards were wild as he took in the scene: the dismembered bodies of his enemies strewn in the mud around the big gates, the butchered limbs and the bloody puddles. The intestines lying in the filth.

  He grinned at Sigurd. ‘Kill them!’ he yelled to his warriors, hurling himself into the fray, running a man through with Sleep-Maker as his men poured into the borg, some of them throwing themselves into Svein and Bram’s skjaldborg to bolster it. Others scrambled up the bank either side of the gate to deal death to those defenders on the ramparts, turning the borg into a slaughteryard.

  ‘This won’t last long,’ Olaf said to Sigurd as they picked up their shields, hefted their weapons and strode forward to join the others. And neither did it, although no one could say that Jarl Guthrum’s men did not fight bravely and as well as anyone might hope to who was in a battle they could not win. Knut’s sixty men followed on the heels of Alrik’s band, flooding through the gate like wolves to the scent of blood, eager to wreak their vengeance on those defenders who had until now held them at bay. And it was Knut’s arrival which proved to be the weight that tipped the scales.

  The fight went out of the enemy then; not individually – men still hacked and stabbed and struggled – but it was now a desperate instinct to survive which drove them, rather than a belief that they might hold out against Alrik and turn back the tide. Many broke and ran, haring off amongst the timber buildings, the byres and pens and workshops, the grain stores and reed-screened latrine pits, seeking to hide or hoping to regroup perhaps.

  ‘Byrnjolf!’ Alrik yelled, and it took Sigurd a heartbeat to realize that the warlord was shouting at him. ‘Run them down! Kill them all!’ Alrik said.

  ‘We’ve not done enough?’ Olaf said, spitting into the mud.

  But Sigurd nodded at Alrik, then turned and ran after those fleeing men.

  It was a common thing that the hunter admired his prey. How could he not respect the magnificence of the great bull elk? The ferocity of the bristling boar? The strength of the bear and the cunning of the fox? So Fionn was not surprised to find that he admired Haraldarson now. The young man’s ruse had worked, much to Fionn and other men’s surprise, and his band had got into the borg almost easily, something which Alrik had tried and failed to do so many times. If anything, Fionn had wished Haraldarson well as he saw him enter the place and heard the clamour of the ensuing fight. For
he did not want Sigurd to die then. Had not followed his prey this far and into the maw of another man’s war just to see him killed by another man’s blade or arrow.

  And as much as Fionn hated the idea of being meat in the blood-fray, relying on the man either side to keep him alive, he had watched with rising panic as he waited on the slope with the sixty warriors in Knut’s band.

  ‘We should go now,’ he said, unable to rein in his frustration any longer as they watched Alrik lead his men through the gates.

  ‘Aye, those arseholes will get all the plunder,’ another warrior said, thinking that same fear was what had motivated the Alba man to speak up.

  ‘We go when I say,’ Knut had growled.

  But eventually Knut did say and they hurried up the hill in loose order, confident that the fight inside the borg was almost won and hoping to get their hands on what they could before all the silver and copper, bronze and ivory, blades, brooches and amber had found their way into other men’s purses and nestbaggins. Before the best of the dead men’s shoes were on new feet and the dead men’s cloaks were on new backs. Though Fionn was not interested in any of that. He wanted one thing and one thing only. Haraldarson.

  And now he saw him. Haraldarson’s crew had broken away from the main body of Alrik’s force and were hunting amongst the borg’s outbuildings, cutting men down in twos and threes. Knut’s band had thrown themselves into the fight and this had broken Guthrum’s men so that chaos was lord there now and it was hard to know who was who in the steel-storm. Fionn had put his sword in a man’s side, hoping it was one of Guthrum’s men, then some of Knut’s men splintered off from the thickest fighting – the slaughter really, for that’s what it was now – and Fionn took his chance. He rounded the grain store, his back brushing the planks as he moved across the thoroughfare to the side of a carpenter’s workshop where he stopped for a moment, the sweet scent of pine shavings in his nose. Then he was moving again, following Sigurd from a distance, skirting the huge red-bearded warrior and the shieldmaiden who had cornered a broad-shouldered, big-bearded man who was growling insults at them as they closed in to kill him.

  He saw one of Guthrum’s men hiding in the pig pen, crouching against the woven hazel fence. Fionn ignored him, moving on past a great pile of felled timber: pine trunks stripped and smoothed ready to be used for building; and there he saw Olaf and Haraldarson’s godi and the one they called Bear, along with two other men facing down a knot of borg men who had locked shields. For all the good it would do them, Fionn thought.

  Then he caught sight of his prey again. It looked as though Haraldarson was making for the cattle byre and he only had one of his crewmen with him now. But that was the young man with the crow-black hair and he was dangerous, and so Fionn would have to be careful. And yet he might never get a better chance than this.

  He drew his scían, thrilling as always to the feel of the stag-antler grip in his palm, and went to claim his kill.

  Sigurd had long since lost his shield but he had picked up a discarded spear, so he held Troll-Tickler in his right hand and the spear in his left as he closed in on the bigger of the two men who had fled into the cattle byre. Floki was in there with him too, in that dark stinking barn, but he had gone down the opposite side after his man who was somewhere in amongst the cows themselves which were lowing in fear and panic. The beasts were thin and sorry-looking and perhaps starving, because since Alrik had come they had been moved inside the winter byre when they should have been outside on the hillsides feeding on the spring grass. Now their eyes shone in the dark and they emptied their bowels where they stood, terrified of the men with blades amongst them.

  Coming into this dark place had stripped Sigurd of some of the battle thrill which had carried him up that hill, through the gate and into the maelstrom of the struggle for the borg. Now, the clamour of the fight muted and far away, alone but for Floki, the beasts and the men they were trying to kill, Sigurd felt the gnawing of doubt in his gut. What were these last borg men to him? Had he not played his part? He did not need some desperate man jumping out of the shadows to put a blade in his neck. Not now.

  But then, he could not abandon Floki. Nor could he call out to tell him to leave these men with the cows without risking giving away Floki in the dark. So he walked deeper into that byre, which was longer than some rich karl’s houses he had seen, and he told himself that this would be his last kill of the day.

  No fame to be had here, boy, a voice growled in his head.

  Then he felt it, almost like a change in the air behind him. Or eyes on his back, perhaps. He turned, lifting his spear, and peered through the stench-filled dark. But it was just one of Alrik’s men, the Alba man who had joined up in Birka at the same time they had. The man put a finger to his lips and Sigurd nodded. No bad thing having another ally now, he thought, and gestured to the man that there were two enemies in there with them, hiding somewhere in all that dung and straw and lowing livestock. The Alba man nodded and peered off past Sigurd, lifting his long knife as he crouched and set off.

  So Sigurd turned back round and began to move forward again, steeling himself against any sudden blade-swinging borg man rushing at him out of the dark.

  Something made him glance behind him again, but too late to stop the blade which streaked through murk, slicing into the skin and following the line of his jawbone as he twisted and threw himself back. He fell against a cow which bellowed and skittered sidewards so that Sigurd fell into the filth. Then the man was on him and, having dropped his own weapons, Sigurd threw up his forearms to block, as the wicked long blade sliced again, across both arms, and the pain was searing. Yet somehow he got a grip of the hands which held the long knife’s hilt, which were driving the blade down towards the hollow at the base of his neck.

  Gods but he was strong for a man with barely the flesh to cloak his bones and it was all Sigurd could do to hold that knife at bay, as his own blood dripped on to his face, the coppery iron tang of it in his nose.

  I’m losing, he thought. This little man will kill me.

  The Alba man’s face was two hand spans from his own, close enough to smell his breath through his teeth as he strained, forcing that strange knife of his down so that its point was against Sigurd’s flesh. He could hear Floki fighting somewhere in the dark, but even if he wasted his strength calling out to him, Floki would never get to him in time. So Sigurd glared into the Alba man’s wide eyes and put all his strength into trying to deny that thirsty blade the blood which it craved. But the Alba man all but lay upon the knife’s hilt, bearing down with knotty strength and iron will, and Sigurd felt the skin of his throat give way to the blade’s point.

  Not like this, he thought. Not in the dark like this with only the cows to see it. Killed by a man I did not even know was my enemy.

  He wrenched at those hands but they would not yield. If only he could push the knife to the side, just by an inch, he would have a chance. But this man wanted his death. He needed it.

  ‘Shhh,’ the Alba man hissed. ‘It’s over. Shhh, Haraldarson.’

  Sigurd could not speak but his eyes spoke for him. You’re a dead man, they said, because all Sigurd knew was defiance. This is your end, not mine, he silently promised the man. But he was losing and somewhere deep in the mire of his own mind he knew it.

  ‘Shhh . . .’

  Then a sword scythed in the dark and there was a wet chop and the Alba man’s head toppled off the stem of his neck and rolled into the straw and cow shit. Sigurd gasped for breath, pain flooding him. There, looming like a one-armed giant in the dark, was Moldof, his teeth set in a wolf’s grin, the faint light of the half-open byre door at his back.

  Sigurd pushed the headless body off himself and took another breath, coughing from the straw dust clouding the air, then reached for the hand which Moldof offered him, letting the big man pull him to his feet. They both turned back to the dark interior to see another figure approaching. Moldof snatched up his gory sword and stepped forward, but then the
y saw that it was Floki emerging from the dusty gloom, his axes back in his belt because his hands were full.

  ‘Who is that?’ Floki asked, looking down at the head in the filth. It lay in a pool of cow piss. He had two heads himself, one in either hand, their hair snarled round his fists. Both bearded and staring with dead eyes. Both dripping.

  ‘The Alba man,’ Sigurd said, a hand clamped to his neck which was spilling hot blood as he bent to recover his sword and spear.

  Moldof crouched and rolled the severed head over to get a better look at the face, grimacing at the stink of piss.

  ‘Why would that piece of goat shit try to kill you?’ Floki asked, tossing both his heads towards the door.

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ Sigurd said. His head was swimming now and his legs were weakening. He had two long cuts on his forearms, the one between his jaw and his neck and another small one in the hollow of his throat, and he was losing enough blood now that his body was beginning to shiver.

  ‘His blade is sharp and clean, I’ll give him that,’ Moldof said, thrusting the Alba man’s long knife into its scabbard and handing it to Sigurd. He nodded at Sigurd’s wounds. ‘So long as we wash those out and thread them good and tight you’ll live.’

  Sigurd tucked the strange long knife, which had come so close to sending him to the afterlife, into his belt and took one last look at the head of the man who had wielded it.

  Who was he? Why had he wanted Sigurd dead? Those questions would have to wait. For now Sigurd needed to get out into the light, was desperate to escape that reeking barn before his legs gave up on him and they had to carry him out.