Raven

by Giles Kristian

  When it was all done and every man but for Father Egfrith had sworn the oath, it was as though a sodden blanket weighed on our spirits. It is always said that a wise man gives few oaths and breaks none, and all of us knew then that we bore fetters stronger than those which had bound some of us in that rotting Frankish hall, stronger even than Gleipnir which holds Fenrir Wolf. But soon I felt that burden lift and I knew it was because there is also strength in an oath because you know you are a part of something enduring and true.

  In Gerd’s Tit a shout brought me back to the present. A man up on the balcony was seeing a thin twist of smoke rising from the south-east beyond the enemy camp and the hillocks that concealed the seashore. I nodded, satisfied with the company I kept. Each man was oath-bound, each warrior like a branch of Yggdrasil, the great World-Tree, and together we would stand tall enough that the gods in Asgard would see our great deeds, no matter if my real father had never done a brave thing in his life. The gods would see me. They would mark me as a man worthy to be taken into Valhöll in preparation for the last battle.

  ‘How is your shoulder?’ I asked Penda. He was grimacing as he rolled his elbow in cautious circles, testing the fit of bone and joint.

  ‘It’s not my sword arm,’ he said with a pained grin, ‘and I don’t have a shield anyway.’ But the pain had sharpened his eyes to points and so I looked to big Beiner instead, thinking he deserved some recognition after the word-lashing he had got from me.

  ‘I could use a man who is good with an axe,’ I said. ‘Know anyone, Beiner?’

  He grinned through his matted black beard, which was streaked with silver thread. His face was broad and long and his grey eyes narrowed as though his mind sought to unravel whatever knots I was throwing at him.

  ‘As it happens I know just the man,’ he announced, tossing a half-chewed chicken bone behind him, and some of his friends began to chant his name as he pursed his greasy lips and touched them to his axe’s cheek. I would not have been surprised if Beiner had been married to that axe and had a brood of little axes causing havoc back home in Denmark.

  ‘Come with me,’ I said, getting to my feet and loosening my muscles, ‘and drag a comb through that bear’s arse beard of yours.’ I smiled. ‘You’re our champion, Beiner. And you’re going to challenge those blaumen out there to come and spill your guts across the ground.’

  Beiner’s eyebrows arched like the Midgard-Serpent’s back.

  ‘I’m beginning to think you don’t much like me, lad,’ he said, following me to the barricaded door.

  After checking with the men up on the lookout platform that there were no blaumen within a hundred strides of the door, we cleared away the obstacles and I stepped out with Beiner behind me. Dusk was approaching, the sun a red clot far away in the western sky. I could smell strange spices and horse sweat and the oiled leather of harnesses and bridles. In the distance the blaumen seemed at their ease, though they got to their feet when they saw us. Above, the rich blue of the sky was streaked red, as though the sun had bled on its retreat west, and I did not like the look of that but decided as it was the blaumen’s land it was an omen for them and not us.

  ‘Now what?’ Beiner said, seeming a little anxious now that it was just us, and his friends were safely barricaded in Gerd’s Tit.

  ‘Now you start swinging that axe around like you mean it,’ I said, ‘and walk at the same time if you can manage that. And keep the bloody thing away from me.’ I did not turn round, but I knew the Dane was doing as I had asked, because I could hear the hard slap every time the weapon’s wooden haft struck his palm at the end of each pattern the axe wove through the air. I also knew that before long Beiner’s shoulders would be screaming in pain as the muscles burnt, but I counted on the big man’s having too much pride to stop until I told him to.

  We were now a Svein the Red spear’s throw from the building and out in the open, and I admit that my skin was clammy with cold sweat because I felt like a mouse leaving his hole when he knows the owls are watching from the trees. It was all I could do to leave my sword in its scabbard when my hand ached to clasp it the way I had seen Egfrith hold his cross before him as though the very sight of it would flay the skin from a heathen.

  ‘You’re slowing down, Beiner, I can hear it,’ I accused him, licking a drop of salty sweat from my top lip.

  ‘Screw you, whelp,’ he growled, breathing like a pair of forge bellows.

  ‘Not long now,’ I said, ‘we’ve got their attention. Now we need to keep it.’ The blaumen were coming. Those with horses had mounted and those without trudged towards us, and all of them seemed to be cheering one man who strode lightly at their front and centre. ‘Looks like they have chosen their own champion, Beiner,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think a big Dane like you needs to worry about him. I’ve seen more meat on a fart.’

  ‘Aye, the dark whoreson walks like a woman,’ Beiner said, still looping his big axe through the air.

  ‘You’ll cut that sheep’s dick in half without even realizing it,’ I said, trying to bolster Beiner’s spirits. In truth I had not meant for this fight to happen. The smoke that the Danes up on the platform of Gerd’s Tit had seen rising from the shore had been the sign from Sigurd that the others had moored and were in position. I had taken Beiner out into the open to tempt the blaumen closer, to draw them deeper into the trap and keep their eyes turned from the beach, but now they were so close I could smell them and it looked as if Beiner would now have to use that axe he had been swinging.

  ‘Thór’s balls, you can stop now, Beiner!’ I said, stepping out of his axe’s reach. ‘You’re making me dizzy.’

  ‘Am I going to fight him?’ he asked. His face was sheened with sweat, which was dripping from his newly combed beard.

  ‘What did you think was going to happen?’ I asked. He shrugged, chewing his bottom lip, then put the head of his axe on the ground, leaning its shaft against his leg so that he could wipe his sweaty palms on his breeches.

  ‘Just don’t kill the scrawny whoreson too quickly,’ I said, ‘because if you do we’ll both be too dead to see Sigurd tear them apart.’ I eyed the blaumen’s champion and did not like what I saw. He moved with considered poise, like a cat, and he was thin and lithe-looking. Champions are usually big as trolls, men like Svein the Red and the Frank who had jumped aboard Serpent when we had fled from Frankia, but this one was slight, which told me he was fast. A curved sword was scabbarded at his hip and beneath long yellow robes which were embroidered with red flowers and drawn in at the waist with a red sash, I could see rows of small iron plates that looked like fish scales. Beneath those scales ring mail protected his throat and the lower half of his face, and unlike most of the other blaumen his head was not covered in white cloth but instead he wore a pointed helmet.

  ‘Skinny slash of piss is done up like a crab,’ Beiner muttered. ‘I’ll have to crack the damn shell to get to the meat.’

  ‘Your axe will cut through that lot like a hot knife through honey,’ I said. ‘Tell me you put a good edge on it.’

  ‘Good enough,’ he said as the blaumen stopped before us, their horses neighing and pissing steaming nerves into the dusty ground.

  My heart was thumping like a man buried alive in his coffin. I thought they would simply kill us both right there and I clenched my jaw to keep the fear off my face. After what I had done to the last man that had come to talk I could not have blamed them for slicing me up where I stood. But, luckily for me if not for Beiner, it seemed they wanted us all to see their champion at work, and one of the mounted men, whose saddle was draped in purple silk, and whose head cloth was ringed with a fine band of gold, nodded to me in acknowledgement of the challenge. I supposed he was the local lord who commanded these new men and as such it was his job to see raiders like us killed. He had brought these men to fight us and I was glad to see they owned decent war gear: strange curved swords and some single-edged straight ones, too; spears, some with blades as long as a man’s forearm, brynjas made of i
ron or tough leather scales, short hand axes, maces, and bows which, unstrung as they were now, had ears that curved away from the archer. Any other day I would have cursed our luck in facing an enemy who were so well armed. Not today.

  The warlord spoke but it might as well have been the clucking of a hen for all the meaning I could get from it, though I did recognize the word ‘Al-majus’ somewhere midstream, which was something the last man had said before I skewered him.

  The dark-skinned lord was still talking when I turned to Beiner. ‘Are you ready?’ He nodded but there was doubt in his iron-grey eyes, because he knew as well as I did that a small champion was likely to be a fast champion.

  ‘All that iron will slow him down,’ I said.

  ‘I hope so,’ he said through a grimace. ‘I can’t kill him if I can’t catch him.’

  In contrast to the warrior before us, who was now half crouched in a stretch that would have split my groin had I tried it, Beiner had only a few scraps of mail, taken from old brynjas, which he had sewn on to a sweat-stained leather gambeson that had seen better days. He wore no helmet nor did he own a shield, but the axe which was his only weapon looked sharp enough to cut a shadow.

  The blaumen’s black banner snapped, caught by a sudden gust from the east, and the man holding its shaft looked up as if to check that the thing hadn’t been carried off. Then the mounted leader shouted a command and all fifty of them shuffled backwards, so I did the same, leaving their champion and ours facing each other across two spear-lengths of dry ground.

  ‘Forget what I said about making it last, Beiner,’ I said, suddenly fearful for the Dane, for their man looked as arrogant as a cat with a vole beneath its paw. ‘If you get the chance, gut the greasy bastard.’

  Then the blauman’s sword rasped up the scabbard’s throat and snaked at Beiner fast as lightning, slicing the Dane’s shoulder before he could even raise the axe.

  Beiner stepped back without looking at the wound, for he knew it was nothing serious. ‘That was a low thing to do,’ he said, spitting on the ground between them. ‘I wasn’t ready.’

  The dark warrior jumped high into the air, his knees almost striking his chest, then landed in a crouch and leapt back up, spinning round, his sword slicing the air, and I wondered how it was possible to move like that in mail. His friends cheered his skill, then looked to Beiner for his response. But Beiner just stood there rooted to the ground like an ash.

  ‘Heimdall’s hairy ball sack!’ he said, ‘he’s a giant flea.’ The man darted in again, this time cutting low and gashing Beiner’s right leg just above the knee. Beiner swung his axe but his enemy was already out of range. ‘I felt that one,’ Beiner muttered, and I was about to tell him to make his axe dance, but the big Dane had already thought of that and the axe began to carve great rings through the air above his head. And Beiner began to roar.

  I looked beyond the warriors but could see no sign of the Wolfpack. What are you waiting for, Sigurd? ‘Just keep that axe dancing,’ I said.

  ‘It’s easy for you to say!’ Beiner spat, puffing like an ox at the yoke, as our enemy’s champion began to circle him with neat sideways steps, each foot crossing over the other in deft turns. Beiner shuffled his own booted feet, his eyes wide as he sought to keep the lethal, heavy axe head between him and his opponent. And he was doing well. The man knew one end of an axe from the other and every warrior there, including the Danes watching from Gerd’s Tit, knew that all Beiner had to do was hit the little man once and the chances were it would be over. But no one knew that better than the blauman, who moved as nimbly as a new bed-slave, and must have been much stronger than he looked.

  I heard the next strike slice into Beiner’s flesh along the ribs beneath his right arm. He yelled in pain and fury, spittle flying from his beard, and strode towards the smaller man, looping the axe as though his intent was to sever the Midgard-Serpent’s head from its monstrous, coiled body. The other man was grinning and I ached to see those white teeth fly through the back of his skull, because he was going to slice Beiner up piece by living piece and the Dane would die a death of red agony and it would be my fault. Then, from Gerd’s Tit, I heard men howling like wolves. The door was open and the Danes were running towards us, yelping wildly.

  ‘Beiner, to me!’ I shouted, and the big Dane stopped his axe mid-swing and hitched backwards as I drew my sword. I thought the Danes had killed us all then, for against fifty we stood no chance. But then some of the blaumen turned their backs on us and others scrambled to mount their horses as Sigurd and the Wolfpack ran down the crest, their painted shields a chaos of colour and their blades gleaming dully in the reddish dusk.

  ‘I was just about to gut that whelp,’ Beiner gasped, his chest heaving and his breath rattling like a sword in an ill-fitting scabbard.

  ‘I could see that,’ I said, planting my feet for the coming fight. Then the Danes were around me and we made a wall even without shields, and a heartbeat later nearly fifty well-armed warriors beneath a wolf’s head banner crashed into the panicked press of robed men.

  ‘Hold!’ I yelled. ‘Hold, you Danish dogs!’ Not because we were poorly armed and without brynjas, but because if the enemy had any sense at all they would break through us and run for Gerd’s Tit, which would then protect them as it had us.

  ‘Wait!’ Penda bawled, grabbing a blood-hungry young Dane by one thick braid and yanking him back, and that made me think of Griffin of Abbotsend and his dog Arsebiter. ‘Stay here, you witless bastard!’ Penda snarled and the Dane suddenly understood though he did not look happy about it. Horses screamed as Sigurd’s men hamstrung them whilst their riders tried desperately to kick their way clear. The iron stink of blood bloomed in the air and swords rang against metal and chopped into wet meat. Black Floki rammed his spear straight through a man’s head and had drawn his sword before the man even knew he was dead. Bram Bear hacked off a horse’s foreleg with his short axe and blood sprayed across the nearest men, so that they all broke off for a moment to wipe it from their eyes. Sigurd gripped a spear in each hand and launched them both together, the first time I had seen that done, and each one plunged into its mark and Sigurd was laughing at the battle joy of it all.

  ‘Now!’ I yelled, striding forward into the fray. My first swing took a man’s head clean off his shoulders as Penda and the Danes howled, released to the slaughter. Some of the dark men fought, and fought well too, but others we killed easily because they were too blinded by fear and their panic to escape the butchery.

  ‘Kill the bloodless things!’ Tufi yelled, throwing an arm round a man’s neck and plunging a short blade into his spine. The man screamed like an icy wind through Hel as Tufi twisted the knife, grinning viciously and mocking his victim’s wailing.

  The fight eddied around the dark-skinned champion who was keeping Bram and Bjarni at bay, his sword streaking at them to bite their shields. The two Norsemen seemed unsure how to deal with the man, reminding me of two bears trying to paw a fish from a stream, when Beiner limped up behind the blauman, looping his big axe through the air, then hammered the blade down, through the man’s left shoulder and out above his right hip, cutting him into two halves. Beiner roared in savage triumph and Bram and Bjarni looked at each other’s blood-spattered face, their eyes sharing an appreciation of Beiner’s axe-work. That man’s death bought the others their lives, for when our enemy’s lord saw his champion slaughtered he threw his curved sword on to the ground and Aslak would have hacked him down if Sigurd had not bellowed for him to stay his hand.

  ‘Enough!’ the jarl yelled and his men raised their shields and stepped backwards into space, instinctively finding the shoulder of a comrade. The blaumen followed their lord’s lead and cast their weapons down; though some of them must have thought that was a stupid thing to do, they did it anyway. The Wessexman Ulfbert lay dead, a hand axe wedged into the gristle and bone of his neck. Baldred, Wiglaf and Gytha stood round him, shaking their heads and scratching their beards. Nearby lay the bodies of Geit
ir and another Dane whose name I didn’t know, and several other men were clasping gashes or bruised limbs, awaiting their jarl’s orders.

  The sun fell behind the western horizon, retreating from the enormous swath of shadow that swept from the east across the land and vanquished the warmth of the day, so that the sweat on my back felt suddenly cold and clammy. Ignoring Aslak, the lord of the blaumen turned to the east and raised his hands to the sky and his men did the same.

  ‘Allahu akbar!’ he called, and the other men repeated the same words and then another man began the wailing we had heard from them before. Black Floki glanced at Sigurd, who nodded, then Floki strode over to the wailing man and cracked a fist into his mouth, dropping him like a rock. But this didn’t stop his companions raising their arms and bowing. We looked at each other in disbelief and some of us touched amulets or sword hilts to ward off this ill-seidr. Meanwhile, old Asgot muttered counter spells, invoking Óðin to shield us from the blaumen’s sorcery.

  ‘Should have just killed them,’ Bothvar moaned, holding his spear out towards one of them, his shield raised as though it could protect him from their strange words.

  ‘You all know what to do,’ Sigurd said. ‘If any of the dogs resists, kill him.’ Aslak was the first. Grinning, he yanked the gold ring from the dark-skinned warlord’s cloth-covered helmet and tossed it to Sigurd. Then he grabbed the man’s scale brynja at his neck and tugged viciously so that the man understood what was required of him. We all did the same with the men nearest to us and reluctantly the blaumen began to pull off their war gear bit by bit, and I suddenly realized why Sigurd had stopped the killing. For it is much easier if a man gives you his mail voluntarily than it is to strip him of it when his corpse is stinking of blood and piss and shit and starting to stiffen. When we had gathered everything worth taking we left the blaumen shivering in their underclothes and still they seemed more concerned with their strange rites, so that we were happy to leave them be and be gone. Penda had believed they were praying to their god and I for one hoped that was the truth of it. Rather that than they had been weaving some powerful seidr against us. But I wondered what kind of god made his followers fall on their knees and touch their faces to the filthy ground to show their fealty. Such a god as that was either a hard and cruel god or else his followers were not proud men like the Norse.