‘Hold! Hold, Haraldarson’s men!’ Olaf bellowed, for it was not time to force that breach. Not yet, with the king’s men as thick on that hill as flies on a gory corpse.
Another crash, this time to the left, distant as the crack of mountain ice in spring. Jarl Hrani was in the fight, then. Good. Let the oath-breaker bleed his men on Hrani’s Sword-Norse, on Hadd Hog-Head and those proud Hinderå men. Perhaps Sigurd should have put himself at the rear so that he could watch the ebb and flow of the thing. From the rocks he would see it all. He could throw reinforcements into the fray where they were needed.
It floods his guts with sourness, this sudden doubt, and he wonders if his pride will cost him. Will cost them all.
But they are holding. He doesn’t need to see it to know it. It is as certain and tangible as the sweat-soaked leather sword grip in his hand.
‘Oath-breaker!’ Sigurd called. ‘You cannot win!’ He did not know if the king could hear him. Doubtful in that clamour of cursing, straining men, but it felt good to say it anyway.
‘Come, maggots! Are you so afraid?’ This was King Thorir’s voice, carrying over the shield din from the far right of the line near the wing which sloped back to the rocks. ‘Fight me, you whore spawn! What are you waiting for, a roast pig and mead bench? Here I am! Fight me!’
His Danes were the only ones not in the pushing match now and King Thorir did not like that at all, not when others were in the thick of it. Perhaps King Gorm’s jarls had purposefully avoided these strangers under their unfamiliar banner, not having their measure and preferring to make their fame against better-known men, but Thorir was inviting them to come at him, almost begging them to.
‘Danes are mad,’ Solmund gnarred, jabbing his sword over his shield to tonk against a man’s helmet.
‘He’d wrestle them one by one if he could, that mead-soaked little growler,’ Moldof said, not caring that Thorbiorn Thorirsson was beside him.
‘He would,’ Thorbiorn agreed, grinning behind his shield. Thorbiorn who had become a warrior himself and deserved his place beneath that wolf-head banner flapping on the spear which Óðin himself had once wielded.
A spear blade streaked over Sigurd’s head to take a young man in the shoulder, making him curse as well as a man who had seen twice as much life. To Sigurd’s left, Floki somehow managed to reach over and plant his hand axe in a man’s skull, his eyes wild with the thrill of it, and to Floki’s left Valgerd, who had been holding her own against a growling bear of a man, suddenly gave way so that the bear all but fell forward, impaling himself on her scramasax which she then hauled across to open his belly. His gut string sprang free, fast as rope after an anchor into the depths.
‘Fight me, you Norse shits!’ King Thorir bellowed at Gorm’s shieldwalls, which still held back or else took the fight to those either side of the Danes and their banner, which was a triangular piece of the same golden fabric that hung from his roof in Skíringssalr.
An arrow streaked by Sigurd’s cheek and he heard the thump of it embedding in flesh followed by the shriek of the man whose life thread it had severed. And yet still there was not much proper killing being done by either side, not in that stinking press of bodies, in that battle din which was being swirled about by the wind and carried up to Asgard to the gods’ ears.
‘Bollocks!’ Olaf exclaimed, and Sigurd looked over to see that King Thorir, sick of waiting now, had broken from the line. He was taking the fight to the Norsemen and his Danes were following him. ‘Somebody bring him back!’ Olaf roared, but King Thorir’s advance was already reverberating through the great skjaldborg he had left behind, like wind in the rigging.
‘Hold!’ Asgrim yelled at his Svearmen, for some of them had taken a few steps down the slope, eager to follow King Thorir and get their taste of the fight.
‘The fool will drag us all down with him,’ Sigurd growled, working with his sword through the gaps, quick thrusts to keep his enemies on the defensive. King Thorir’s sally had scattered a loose horde of men who were in his path, but now a well-formed shieldwall was advancing to meet him, slanting across the hill to take the Danes in the side like a wave slamming a ship abeam.
‘Twigbelly,’ someone said. Hagal probably, for few men were as good at recognizing jarls and crews as Crow-Song, if only because he had drunk their mead and put them in his mediocre saga tales to pay for it.
‘The Danes’ll carve that fat hog up,’ Svein said, but Sigurd was not so sure. He knew that the oath-breaker, wherever he was, would be watching, would know that Sigurd’s skjaldborg was, if not broken, then vulnerable, and he had not become a powerful king without having his share of war-craft.
‘He’ll send more than Twigbelly against them,’ Olaf said, as if he had heard Sigurd’s thoughts. ‘I would if I were him.’
‘I’ll go,’ Thorbiorn said, leaning to lock eyes with Sigurd from behind his shield. ‘Please, lord, let me go. I’ll bring him back.’
Sigurd nodded. Thorbiorn arranged it with Moldof and the man behind, who slipped neatly into the space which the young Dane had occupied a heartbeat before. Then he was gone.
‘Think the king will listen to the lad?’ Olaf said.
Sigurd did not. But at least Asgrim had stemmed the flood, holding his Svearmen in check and bringing the right wing across, closing the gap where Thorir’s Danes had stood before.
I need to see, Sigurd thought. I need to know what is going on. ‘We’re blind,’ Olaf said, again seeming to fish Sigurd’s thoughts from his head. ‘Go, lad,’ he told Sigurd. ‘Floki, go with him.’
Floki nodded and he and Sigurd prepared the men around them, then stepped out of the line and Sigurd felt suddenly unbalanced, his arm feather-light because the weight was gone. He strode back through the knots of men waiting in reserve, shaking some life back into the limb, then clambered up on to the rocks to stand beside the bowmen. And he cursed when he looked over to the right to see King Thorir up to his wide neck in the blood-fray, laying about himself with his heavy sword, cleaving shields and earning his byname Gapthrosnir, one gaping in fury. No shieldwalls there, just chaos now, and the Danes were making a slaughter, no doubt, but Gorm was throwing more men into that maelstrom and the tide would have no choice but to turn.
‘Bring him back, Thorbiorn,’ Sigurd said, hoping it was not already too late.
‘Danes,’ a silver-haired bowman beside Sigurd said. As if that explained the whole thing. And perhaps it did.
‘Should we send Far-Flyer’s men?’ Floki asked, nodding down towards the godi and his Sandnes men, who were purple-faced, ale-soaked and working themselves up, growling and snarling and slamming their shields together, roaring curses and frenzying. Many were bare-chested, having stripped down to their breeks, even discarding shoes and boots, whilst others were putting on wolf pelts or bear skins, tying them round their necks, channelling those creatures’ fierce spirits, and they looked as though they were about to kill each other where they stood.
Sigurd turned back to the fight. King Thorir and his sons Thidrek and Thorberg were shoulder to shoulder, the king’s hearthmen around them, holding the enemy swarm off. More than holding them off, they were carving a path through them, smashing shields, staving skulls and lopping limbs. Those Danes were in the grip of the blood madness. They were making a name for themselves, carving their fame in wood and flesh the way a skald or a godi etches runes in a rock.
But the brave fools were dying too.
‘They should have stayed,’ Sigurd said. Pouring more men into that storm of swords to help the Danes would weaken the shieldwall. Even if they drove those Norse jarls back they would be making the right wing vulnerable to a counter attack. Too early in the day for that throw of the dice, when they still held that spine of land and King Gorm had yet to expose himself.
King Thorir took a man in the neck then broke another man’s shield so that Thorberg’s axe could find its mark and they were almost through to Jarl Arnstein himself, who was screaming at his Bokn men to put these D
anemen down.
Thorbiorn had wriggled and squirmed and shoved his way through the press to get to his father and Sigurd could see him yelling at Thorir to retreat back up the slope, to have his men lock shields and withdraw. But the king was deaf to his son’s advice and Sigurd saw Thorbiorn spitting fury.
‘If they stay they die,’ Floki said, pointing his blood-slick axe across the slope. A wave of death was coming for the Danes. At least two jarls judging by the banners, and as many as two hundred spears. Not a shieldwall as such, they were moving too fast across uneven ground to have their shields locked rim to boss, but a flood of blades with fresh arms behind them.
Asgrim had seen the danger too and he turned and looked at Sigurd and Sigurd shook his head.
‘Hold!’ Asgrim bellowed at his Svearmen who were leaning into their shields, stabbing at King Gorm’s men from behind their rampart. ‘We stay here!’
‘You are lost now,’ Sigurd told King Thorir under his breath, watching those new jarls slam into the Danes. A spear took the king’s son Thidrek in the shoulder but Thorir cut the spearman down. Then a massive warrior planted an axe in Thorberg Thorirsson’s head, for Thorberg had lost his helmet, and he went down like a stone even as the king thrust his sword through the huge warrior’s side. And then the Danes were swallowed by the tide and Sigurd lost sight of Thorir and his sons.
And Asgrim held his Svearmen on the ridge.
The horns called King Gorm’s host back and they went in good order, shields up, heads down, leaving a tideline of dead and dying, broken and torn men before Sigurd’s skjaldborg. And yet perhaps only a third of the oath-breaker’s men had fought so far that day, whereas almost every one of Sigurd’s men, other than his small reserve, had wet their blades or at least blunted them.
‘Whoreson has weighed us in the scales and now knows what it’ll cost him to beat us,’ Bram said, which they all knew was the truth of it as they watched the king’s men regrouping beneath their respective banners. Everywhere men were examining the damage done to their shields and fetching spares if they thought they were too far gone to take another battering. Norseman, Svearman and Dane looked to their blades, cursing at the nicks in the edges, working with whetstones to restore their bite. Some were out looting the dead, stripping corpses of good war gear, taking keepsakes from fallen friends. Bowmen were out scavenging for arrows. Some young men were puking after their first taste of the shieldwall. Some were buzzing with the thrill of it. Others were silent and pale and still, like the living dead.
Unseen, the Valkyries were already swooping.
‘It is bad about the Danes,’ Svein said.
King Thorir lay down there. Somewhere amongst that corpse pile. Thorir Gapthrosnir of Skíringssalr, who had fought Sigurd’s enemies for silver and gold and won only death for himself and his sons. Perhaps he had already been borne to the afterlife, was even now with his daughter Hallveig in Sessrymnir, Freyja’s hall, challenging other heroes to wrestle with him.
‘He was a fool,’ Olaf growled, even given the company. For not all of Thorir’s sons had died in that welter of blood. Somehow, Thorbiorn had survived the final slaughter. He and a handful of Danes, most of them the untested young men who had not yet lived long enough to know they should have died in piles round their king as Gapthrosnir’s hirðmen had done. Instead they had put their shields together and ploughed a furrow back to the ridge.
‘A brave fool but a fool,’ Olaf said, and Thorbiorn, spattered with gore and wild-eyed, did not disagree. He was angry with his dead father and brothers for ignoring his pleas to resume their position beside Asgrim on the higher ground. Even at the end they had not taken Thorbiorn seriously. And yet who was wearing the bull-necked king’s silver torc now? Who had pulled it from his dead father with men being butchered all around? Thorbiorn had and it gleamed at his neck now and no one questioned it.
‘What now then?’ Valgerd said. She was running a whetstone along the edge of a broad-bladed Svear-looking spear she had found. Sigurd thought that spear suited her as well as the torc suited Thorbiorn.
‘They’ll come again. And again,’ Sigurd said. ‘And the oath-breaker won’t care how many of his men die on our spears.’
‘Aye, he’ll keep sending them and eventually they’ll break through,’ Olaf said.
Svein shook his head. ‘We’ll hold, Uncle,’ he said, his fierce red bristles being buffeted by the wind. ‘Shits won’t break us.’
‘Asgrim won’t break,’ Moldof said. ‘Or if he does I’ll be surprised.’
‘Neither will Jarl Hrani, the arrogant swine,’ Solmund put in, hating Hrani as much as ever.
‘At least that fat snot Twigbelly is dead,’ Olaf said. ‘Shame to have missed that for it would’ve been worth seeing.’
Sigurd had not seen Jarl Arnstein die either, but Thorbiorn said his brother Thidrek had given the man his death wound. Said Thidrek had hacked into the jarl’s belly and men had been amazed by the foul gush which had come out, appalled by the yellow fat flapping everywhere in the spray of silver brynja rings.
‘Must have been some muscle behind the blow to get through all that blubber,’ Olaf said, thinking deeply about it.
‘I wonder if Jarl Otrygg knows I am up here,’ Bram said. ‘And I wonder who his new champion is. Probably some walking beard who hasn’t wet his sword for the last five summers.’
‘I can guess what happened to his last champion,’ Olaf said, raising an eyebrow at Bram.
Bram scratched amongst his beard. ‘Aye, well I’m not proud of that,’ he said, getting Olaf’s meaning. ‘Brak was a brave man and good in his day. I blame bloody Otrygg for letting Brak and the rest go to seed. That’s them down there, see?’
But Sigurd wasn’t interested in this Jarl Otrygg and he let the others’ voices fade in the distance like the murmur of the sea. He was watching the oath-breaker’s banner, that black prow beast on red cloth, chosen because King Gorm held the keys to the north and grew rich on taxes from the crews of all manner of craft who sailed up the Karmsund Strait in the shadow of his hall perched on that hill.
The oath-breaker wants me and I want him, Sigurd told himself now, ignoring every other warrior on Rennisøy, every man who would kill or die trying to grant Sigurd or Gorm their burning wish.
‘Where are you?’ Sigurd whispered, searching for the king amongst those beneath his banner.
‘They’re getting ready to come again!’ someone over on the left of the line called. The archers scuttled back up on to the rocks clutching their shafts. More archers would be good, Sigurd thought, more shafts to rain upon those king’s men who lacked helmets and mail or good leather armour. He looked north, then east over his shoulder, telling himself that he would make do with what he had.
Somewhere over to the right, near Asgrim, a group of Svearmen were passing the time by singing a song about Óðin’s nights on Yggdrasil. Those brave warriors would be fighting again before they got to the Allfather’s ninth and last night hanging on that mighty ash.
Behind him Thokk Far-Flyer’s men were sharing cups of only the gods knew what, while Thokk decorated them with painted runes and symbols, charms against the enemy’s blades. Or perhaps he was dedicating that ale-drowned crew to the Spear-God. Who could say?
Solmund was watching those strange warriors too and he shook his head. ‘Sandnes men,’ he muttered, knowing no more needed saying.
Sigurd looked back down the slope. He had yet to lay eyes on the oath-breaker but he knew he was down there. Surrounded by big men with big beards dressed in good mail. How many on both sides would have to die before Sigurd could get his hands on that treacherous piece of troll shit?
‘So, they’ll come again and we’ll beat them off again. And then we’ll cross the next fjord when we come to it, hey,’ Olaf said. There were mumbles of agreement. What else was there to do?
Unless, Sigurd thought. Unless …
‘Thorbiorn!’ he called.
‘He’s off with the Danes, what’s left of
them. Fetching his dead kin,’ Bjarni said.
‘I want him here now,’ Sigurd said, and Bjarni nodded, stalking off to find the young man.
‘What’s on your mind?’ Olaf asked, keeping his gaze fixed on the king’s skjaldborgar, some of which were on the move, the men in them thumping hilts and blades against shields. The sound of it was like thunder on the wind.
‘Well, lad?’ Olaf all but growled it, not liking being in the dark where Sigurd’s ideas were concerned. He still hadn’t quite got over the whole thing of Sigurd hanging himself from some tree in that stinking swamp, as he was keen on reminding everyone.
Sigurd let him wait, kept his lips sealed as his own mind chewed the idea for a bit.
Hrani Randversson stood there showing no fear of the king he had betrayed, even though he must have feared for his boy at least and what would happen to young Randver if they lost this fight. Randver who stood there at the rear of his father’s shieldwall looking like a little god of war, all four feet and a knife hilt of him, in his own brynja and a helmet that was too big.
‘What’s he doing bringing a boy to a fight like this?’ Olaf had said, unimpressed, perhaps thinking of his own boys Harek and little Eric who were both safe with their mother in Skudeneshavn.
Sigurd had shrugged. Not his problem, for all that he quite liked the lad for some reason.
Other things to think about now though.
The Svearmen sang. The Sandnesmen drank. The oath-breaker’s host came up that rock-strewn slope. And Sigurd told Olaf what he planned.
Gorm wanted Sigurd dead. He needed it. He hungered for it like he had never hungered for anything, not even power. Well perhaps that, for a great man cannot ignore his appetite for power.
That lust, that hunger is a beast which writhes barely below the surface, shaping every waking thought and shading dreams too. It spawns such ravenous ambition that it makes a man want to be more than a man, yet in reality it makes him less of one because he cannot enjoy the simple pleasures of life. A row to a deserted island. Skating on an iced lake. Good ale with good friends. A woman’s love.
Wings of the Storm: (The Rise of Sigurd 3) Page 27