Raven

by Giles Kristian

  Among the men pressing in from the passage I saw Gunnar, Halfdan, Ingolf and Osten. Other sweat-, blood- and spittle-soaked faces were turned towards Sigurd, the terror-filled men behind those growling bear masks hoping that their jarl knew of a way to jerk us off this hook; Yngvar and Arngrim were amongst them, and the blauman Völund, who was bare-chested and glistening, his gritted teeth white against his black beard and pitch-dark skin. Many bled from wounds they’d had no time to bind. Others grimaced at unseen hurts.

  And then I saw Cynethryth and my stomach twisted like a warp hung with too light a loom-weight. She was sheathed in tough leather, gripped a slender spear and wore the helmet I had given her, which she had lined with thick felt to make the fit snug. Father Egfrith stood protectively at her shoulder and even he carried a spear, though what he would do with it I could not imagine. That damned beast Sköll was there too, a rolling snarl coming from its throat, its yellow teeth bared. I reckoned it would do a better job of protecting Cynethryth than Father Egfrith or any of us could, and I noticed that men were keeping their distance, which was wise given that this was no longer the seasick, cringing creature of the last weeks. It was a bristling, golden-eyed, sharp-toothed beast and Cynethryth seemed to own its soul. She owned mine, too, which made me curse as I hefted my shield, shrugging some life back into my arm, and turned to follow Sigurd.

  We tramped across the silks and cushions, making a clatter of the cups and dishes lying amongst them, and got to the golden door which Bardanes had said led to the emperor’s chambers.

  ‘Wait for me!’ Aslak shoved his way through the press, his face a sweat-soaked twist of pain because of the shaft lodged in his right calf. Bjarni, too, was limping, though at least Ingolf had managed to cut the blade off the spear that had skewered his leg and together they must have pulled the shaft out. The bright green cloth with which they had bound the hole was blood-drenched and Bjarni’s face had gone the colour of cold hearth ash. Yet both he and Aslak wore good brynjas and stone-grim scowls and wanted to finish what we had started.

  ‘This is some fight, hey, little brother!’ Svein the Red boomed, slapping Bjarni’s back with a chink of brynja rings.

  ‘Aye.’ Bjarni managed a sour smile. ‘Bjorn would have enjoyed this, I think,’ he said, which had men nodding sombrely. Bothvar was not there and neither was Beiner or Ogn or several others, but it was too soon to talk about who was gone. Because the Greeks were battering the door. By now every soldier in Miklagard would be coming. Asgot said as much, the old bones snarled up in his braids blood-red and glistening again now as though fresh from whatever creatures he had pulled them from.

  Sigurd’s thought chest must have writhed with twining serpents then and I would not have liked to be the one to decide what we should do. The Greeks would soon be through that door – axe heads were appearing now amongst the cracks and flying wood slivers – and so we knew we had a hard fight on there. Which made me think we ought to press on and get to Arsaber now. But, if Arsaber was through that other, golden door, he would most likely have armed men with him, which would mean we would be starting another fight and so planting ourselves between hammer and anvil.

  ‘Skjaldborg! Shieldwall!’ Sigurd yelled in a voice that whipped us all like the lash of an icy wave across the deck in a storm. Men jostled together, kicking silk bolsters away from their feet and hefting mauled and splintered shields. ‘Tighter, Boe! Raise that shield, Yngvar!’ Men encouraged each other and spat disdain towards the door, which was being hacked to ruins, so that we could glimpse scale armour and men’s faces.

  Some of the Danes were growling themselves into a fury. Other men were silent as rocks, white knuckles around sword grips and feet planted, and all of us must have suspected that we had come to the end of our life’s thread. The spin of our wyrds had led us to Miklagard, the Great City, and here, far from our homes, we would kill and be killed.

  ‘Floki, Svein, Raven, Penda, to me!’ Sigurd hollered and we four pushed our way through the sweat-stinking press to the front, past comrades who were pleased to see mailed men come between them and the warriors beyond the splintering door. Aslak limped up, too, refusing to stand behind men who were less well armed. ‘Olaf, take Bjarni and five others and watch the gold door.’ Uncle nodded and hauled men from the skjaldborg before striding across the fragrant, tapestry-lined room.

  ‘We are sword-brothers from the north,’ Sigurd roared, beating his sword’s hilt against his shield. ‘We have come to feed the wolf and the raven. Our blades are sharp and thirsty. We will give them blood to drink.’

  Others took up the chant:

  ‘We are sword-brothers from the north.

  We have come to feed the wolf and the raven.

  Our blades are sharp and thirsty.

  We will give them blood to drink.’

  We beat out the rhythm as we bawled the words, spit flying and the blood rising like spring sap, hot in our veins. Our voices and the hammering of shields filled the chamber, hard as the marble pillars holding up the roof, the words holding us up and driving away the fear. The Greeks were almost through the wreckage of the door but they must have feared stepping into that place, for they would find no pleasure amongst plump bolsters and swaths of coloured silk. They would find only agony and despair and death. Some of our men waited either side of the threshold, blades held ready to chop and maim.

  The last part of the door was kicked away and the Greeks hesitated for a long heartbeat, during which my bladder clenched, like a fist around a gold coin, as we raised our hoarse voices. Then, with a desperate roar they gushed into the chamber and some were hacked to death before they were fully through the doorway. I heard Cynethryth shrieking at us to kill them all and then they crashed against our skjaldborg. But we held, our feet like the deep-delving, entwined roots of Yggdrasil, thigh muscles bunched and straining. Men grunted and jostled, their blades searching, and the stink of so many fear-filled warriors thickened the air to a reeking fug. We had bent our shieldwall like a strung bow so that the Greeks could not get down our flanks, and from that rampart of limewood we hacked at their shields and spears and sun-browned, black-bearded faces.

  ‘You just hold them, lad, and I’ll kill them,’ Penda gnarred between the hammer blows of his sword among the Greeks. Blood was flying from the blade but I could not see the damage the Wessexman was doing, because I had my head down and my shoulder into my shield and was shoving for all I was worth, leaving the killing to those who were craftsmen at it, men like Penda, Floki and Aslak. Svein was pushing too, a great lump of flesh, sinew and muscle behind his shield, because there was no room for his axe work yet. That would come later, when our shieldwall thinned like a blighted crop and men died.

  ‘Gut the toad-fucking dogs!’ Gytha yelled. ‘Bleed the bastards out!’ Eager to get into the heart of the maelstrom the Wessexman was straining at my left shoulder, jabbing a Greek spear over our skjaldborg, so that even in that battle-din I could hear his blade ringing against iron helms. Something whomped against the upper half of my shield, smashing the wood into my nose, so that I heard the crunch. My eyes streamed with the torture of it as the iron-tang of my own blood, fresh and untainted by sweat and shit, filled my nose and beard.

  ‘Óðin! Óðin!’ screamed someone in a voice as raw as flayed bear meat. What often happens in a shieldwall fight after the first mad shove and hack is that one side begins to move back, and it is usually the side that thinks it should be winning but cannot understand why it is not. It was the Greeks who withdrew now, shields up, chins down and shoulders bouncing with the pant of it.

  ‘Hold!’ Sigurd yelled. ‘Stay where you are, men!’ We held, gasping and dragging sweat from our eyes, checking cuts and pains to see if any were serious, for we had all seen men gut-speared who thought they had only been winded. There were corpses lying in bloody twists amongst the silks and cushions, and we should have put our swords through all of them just to make sure. But we were too worried about Greek arrows to leave the relative
safety of our skjaldborg, for a good shieldwall will stand as long as the walls of Asgard if it is built of sword-brothers who are further bound by oaths and pride, as we were.

  But we should have put swords in those ‘dead’ men.

  Sigurd roared at us to step forward, to drive the Greeks back through the doorway while they were still frozen by uncertainty and Svein took the opportunity to step ahead of the rest with his long axe, looping it through the clotted air, a savage grin splitting his beard.

  ‘Carve the maggot-arsed goat-humpers up, Svein!’ someone yelled.

  I saw the ‘corpse’ beneath Svein twitch and it seemed to happen in a dream where time slows to a trickle then runs fast as sand from a fist. The blood-drenched Greek thrust upwards, plunging his hand into the dark beneath Svein’s brynja. Svein jerked viciously, then looked down as though he didn’t believe what was happening to him. Bright blood bloomed down his breeks, dripping through the wool like heavy rain through old thatch, then Svein staggered back and with a roar swung the great axe down, splitting the Greek’s head into two gory halves each with its own staring eye. An arrow thudded into Svein’s chest and I heard him growl a curse as the Greeks cheered and came on again.

  ‘Forward!’ Sigurd yelled as the red-bearded giant lurched sideways. But somehow Svein straightened his blood-steeped oak legs and, bellowing like the thunder god, began looping the long axe again in a weave of death, so that we had to stop and keep our distance or else be hewn by it. Arrows were tonking off our shields and helms and chinking into Svein’s brynja and then the giant stumbled again, crashing down on to his knees, still gripping the axe.

  ‘Óðin!’ Sigurd cried, then ran at the enemy, breaking his own skjaldborg, which was a red-madness thing to do, but Sigurd was my jarl and so I ran after him, yelling to the war god, and arrows thudded into me but I kept my feet and hammered my sword against a Greek shield, spitting bloody phlegm into a bearded face as Black Floki thrust his long knife into another man’s neck. Then Aslak spun away from the fray, the bottom half of his face lopped off, so that his lower jaw and chin dangled in a bloody mess against his chest, held on by a flap of skin. There were no shieldwalls now, just a screaming frenzy of butchering, of blades scything and limbs being hacked off. I killed a young man by ramming my shield’s rim into his throat so that it crushed his windpipe and he died gasping like a caught fish. I killed another with my long knife after I had shaken the ruined shield off my arm and fought on two-bladed, sinking that wicked knife under the Greek’s armpit and skewering his heart. But the Greeks kept on coming and for every one we killed two more seemed to take his place. I saw Gap-toothed Ingolf go down beneath three hacking blades and the Wessexman Baldred arrow-shot through the neck. Olaf was screaming at us to re-form, to make another shieldwall, but he might as well have been trying to put a bridle on the Midgard-Serpent, or catch thunder in a pail.

  Black Floki was slaughtering men as a fox kills chickens, his black braids dancing as he twisted and turned and cut. Penda was at my side and we worked together, pushing deeper into the mass of Greeks that was swelling as more pressed into that chamber of death. But we were dying.

  Then a peregrine’s shriek cut through the grunts like an iced arrow in my guts, for it was Cynethryth. I turned, Penda instinctively stepping in front to shield me, and I saw a brazier crash to the floor, spilling pulsing amber coals in a spray of sparks and flame amongst the Greeks near the doorway. Men leapt out of the way and Cynethryth pointed her spear at the Greeks, howling spells at them, her eyes wild and spittle flying from her lips as the silks and bolsters across the floor burst into flame.

  In a heartbeat the flames were raging. Black smoke as thick as tar plumed upwards towards the bowl of the ceiling, making men gasp and cough and choke, and I crouched, raising my sword as a shield but not swinging any more for fear of hitting one of our own. But some of the Danes could not be stopped even by flame and smoke, and these wild men slashed about them like demons, so that the Greeks were forced back the way they had come.

  ‘Bring more cushions!’ Olaf spluttered, soot-blackened, blood-crusted and coughing. Those who could summon the sense and take a grip of themselves ran about the room gathering bolsters and women’s discarded robes and even yanking the great tapestries from the walls, along with anything else that would burn. They cast it all into the roaring inferno by the door and the blaze fed savagely, so that in no time there was such a wall of flame that not even a bucket’s fling of water could have passed through it.

  ‘Shieldwall just here!’ Black Floki yelled. ‘Now, you motherless turds!’ And hearing that from Floki, the ragged-arsed, wretched remains of the Wolfpack tramped together and raised their shields, overlapping them and building the skjaldborg again.

  I stumbled over to Cynethryth, who was staring into the thundering fire, her bony face sweat-gleaming, the flames reflected in her green eyes and her helmet.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ I rasped, which was a stupid question for I could see that she was not.

  Then her eyes flicked to me and she bared her teeth.

  ‘The emperor,’ she hissed, pointing across the room towards the gold door. ‘Get him, you fool.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  WE LEFT THE BATTERED REMNANTS OF THE WOLFPACK IN THEIR shieldwall, facing the flames and wreathed in tendrils of black smoke. Men had thrown damaged shields and broken spears into the flames. They’d even stripped corpses and thrown them in, too, but there was not enough to keep that fire raging and soon the Greeks would come again to kill those on the other side, if the smoke did not do for them first.

  Sigurd was still wild-eyed and bristling like an arrow-shot bear and snarled that he would be first through the gold door to face whatever waited beyond it. Only Floki dared to argue, saying that he would lead the way instead, but the jarl barked that the only way Floki would go first was if he killed Sigurd and became our jarl, at which Floki glowered, hefted his scarred shield and pushed his dented helmet firmly on. I just stood back and stayed quiet, swallowing blood from my broken nose and breathing through my mouth, which was drier than a mead horn after a Yule feast. That I was still alive at all was lost on me in that red battle fog with my veins still trembling from the madness of it all. But if I had thought about it I would have smelt our end in the acrid air.

  ‘At least take this, Sigurd, you stubborn son of a she-wolf,’ Olaf grumbled, handing his jarl a shield that was rare in that chamber because it actually looked as though it might stop an arrow or a sword with a bit of muscle behind it. Sigurd nodded, clutching the shield’s grip, then stepped up to the gold door.

  It was locked, of course, and Sigurd glanced round, perhaps about to call on Svein and his long axe. But Svein was dead, groin-cut by a stripling boy with a nothing knife. But Olaf now gripped Svein’s axe and he growled at everyone to stand back, then rammed the eye end of the thick head against the lock over and over, sweaty blood flying from his beard as the golden door quivered under the onslaught. Only the door’s skin was gold; beneath it was wood which splintered and cracked, the lock within breaking easily enough so that all it needed was a kick from Sigurd and it flung wide.

  A spear thunked into the doorframe a finger’s length from Sigurd’s face and the jarl rumbled a curse as he edged into the room behind his shield. Then Floki was in and I followed him, Olaf, Penda, Bardanes, Hastein and Yrsa behind me.

  ‘I am wondering if Miklagard would have been better left just a whisper on men’s lips,’ Yrsa Pig-nose grumbled as we laid eyes on more Greek spearmen. They stood in a line protecting the worm Arsaber who sat in a throne raised up on a silk-strewn platform. Silk curtains billowed in the breeze blowing through three great windholes carved in the western wall and on that breeze rode the clamour of an angry mob outside.

  ‘I am the emperor!’ Arsaber shrieked. ‘The equal of the Apostles! How dare you attack me?’ He was swathed in purple robes and stiff gold cloth that lay over both shoulders and wound round his waist, its ends dripping with pearls. His ha
nds glinted with jewels of every colour and his beard was curled and oiled, so that any fleas in it would have long drowned. His head was bare though and there was nothing he could do about that, because the crown of Miklagard’s emperors was safely stowed out of his reach in Fjord-Elk’s hold.

  ‘You are a traitor and a worm,’ Sigurd accused him, spitting the words as though they were poison. Two fierce-looking golden beasts crouched either side of the throne, seeming alive in the flicker of candelabra. ‘He is the emperor of the Great City,’ the jarl snarled, pointing at Nikephoros who was standing bound and bloody at the end of a soldier’s spear. There were only six Greeks between us and Arsaber, and they might have been sweat-soaked and twitching like snare-caught hares, but they were scale-armoured and helmed and gripped spears and swords. ‘Tell them to throw down their weapons if they want to live,’ Sigurd said, as the ring of swords and the chaos din of battle swirled up through the windholes, which I knew must mean that Nikephoros’s Long Shields were fighting for their lives.

  Arsaber glared at Sigurd, worrying at his glossy beard and twisting a curl into it.

  ‘What about me?’ he asked, maggoting for a way out of the hole he now found himself in.

  Sigurd barked a laugh. ‘You are a dead man,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for you but the cold grave.’

  Arsaber’s eyes flared and he screamed something at his men and they hesitated for a heartbeat. Then came for us.

  Sigurd knocked a spear blade aside with his shield and swung his sword, shattering scales and biting into a man’s ribs. I caught a sword blow on my own blade, the clash jarring my arm in its socket, but I lashed out with the long knife and my enemy leapt back out of reach. At the edges of my vision I saw Penda duck a spear swipe and chop into a man’s knee, and Floki cross two blades to catch a sword that would have cleft his head apart. Yrsa swung a sword at my Greek but the man was already turning and he caught Yrsa’s blow on his shield and scythed his blade across Pig-nose’s face in a spatter of blood and skull. I flung myself at the Greek, getting my right arm round his neck and holding on with everything I had, trying to wring the life from him like water from a pelt because I was too close to use a long blade. I unlocked my knees, letting my weight bring him down, and his fear stink clogged my throat as I squeezed him until I heard parts inside him crack like sticks underfoot. I held on, my arms almost bursting with the strain of it, for it is harder than you think to crush a man to death. But the Greek died eventually, piss-soaked and with tears on his cheeks, and I rolled on to the cold stone floor, gasping for breath and cursing because no one had gutted the Greek to spare me the trouble of it all.