by Chris Page
In the meantime Olaf Tryggvason’s force was approaching landfall further down the coast at Lyme Bay. Their progress had become nonexistent. Twilight had turned the winds, tides, and currents against them, and their oars threshed the water just to stay in the same place.
After the Wessex astounder’s accomplishments at Lyme Regis with the first raiding party, the Viking twins had not transported that far for fear of running into him. Tryggvason had been left to his own devices as the twins concentrated on Guthrum and Thorsten’s groups. The twins knew, however, especially having sensed Twilight and Desmond’s presence over them at sea, that the time had come for some serious veneficus-to-venefici negotiation. They needed to find out just who and what they were up against before the real fighting began.
So they sent Twilight a mind message.
We, Go-ian and Go-uan, the venefical twins of the Viking, wish to meet with you at a place of mutual safety.
Twilight smiled to himself as the message came through and replied immediately.
The Tor at Glastonbury, daybreak.
The Viking gemini would know where that was since Glastonbury was one of their attack targets, and there was only one Tor there rising high above the town and surrounding countryside. More, it was the place Merlin had met Elelendise the wolf woman when she had thrown her thunderbolts and destroyed the hamlet below in a vain effort to impress the old alpha spellbinder.
Having sent the cryptic return message, Twilight left Desmond with the animals and went for a walk around the Avebury stones. When he got to the Obelisk stone, he pressed his cheek to it and explained his next plan of action. As he walked away, he thought he heard a faint, low chuckle emanating from the depths of the mighty sarsen.
As dawn broke over Glastonbury, Twilight took up his position on the Tor in readiness for the arrival of the twins. Suddenly they were there standing side by side, two shorthaired blonds dressed in battle armor with chain mail lining. Small of stature for Viking, the only thing that belied their age was the careworn, lined faces staring levelly at Twilight through very clear, pale blue eyes above their breastplates. Had he not been blessed with all-seeing abilities, the Wessex astounder would not have been able to distinguish the male from the female.
But then they had the same problem, for Twilight had also twinned himself, and an exact replica stood alongside him.
With surprise registering on their faces they spoke.
‘I am Go-uan,’ said the female with a short bow.
‘And I am Go-ian,’ said the male with the same bow.
They both giggled.
‘We speak as one,’ they said together, ‘think as one, and act as one. We are as one.’
‘And only have the power of one,’ replied both Twilights together, nodding a greeting.
Go-ian shrugged. ‘Since we are never apart it does not matter. However, I see that the twin you have made of yourself has full power as you do.’ He addressed his remark to both images. The Twilights smiled. ‘As would any other clones we make.’ ‘You also do not leave an aura trail,’ they said together. ‘And you do,’ replied both Twilights, ‘so we will always know
where you are.’
‘You have an advanced form of the enchantments. Who was your mentor?’ asked Go-uan. ‘His name was Merlin.’ ‘Ah yes. Even we have heard of this famous veneficus.’
They both giggled again. ‘And yours?’ asked one of the Twilights. ‘Our mother. She was called Freyja after the Norse goddess of love.’ They bowed their heads respectfully in her memory for a moment.
‘You didn’t bring much love with you,’ said the other Twilight quietly. ‘Especially in the matter of forty of my dead pica.’ Go-ian nodded. ‘That was my Boma taking out your warning system. He did not come back from the second trip so we assumed he met the same fate?’
‘I had another forty of my pica peck his brains out.’
‘There are other eagles,’ they said together dismissively. ‘And we have Go-uan’s bears. We have also noticed that Wessex is full of fierce bears. Such animals will be very useful in the coming battles alongside Guthrum’s warriors.’
‘How do you know they will join with you?’ asked both Twilights.
‘Because, if they are not in ligamen to a local veneficus they cannot refuse. As you know, it is the way of the enchantments.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that.’
‘Oh, but we are,’ they chorused. ‘As we are in the Viking victories that will be ours in the days to come. Our noble Norsemen are already at the gates of Winchester where your King Alfred skulks in his rooms like a shadow. And we acknowledge your prowess in killing two hundred of our warriors at Lyme Regis in exchange for the two hundred dead villagers, but that, double person Twilight, special veneficus of Wessex, was before we came to play.’
Leaving behind a spate of giggles hanging in the empty air, they were gone.
Guthrum’s warriors arrived at Winchester after an overland rush from Salisbury and now had the town and castle surrounded. Preferring the counsel of Septimus Godleman, King Alfred had
not taken Twilight’s advice and kept all his soldiers in Winchester. Six thousand Viking now laid siege to ten thousand Celtic soldiers plus the inhabitants of the town. The Viking were licking their hairy lips at the prospect of the battle and spoils to come.
Convincing his king that Christianity offered a peaceful solution to the siege and he and his brand of unction was the one to deliver it, not to mention the universal acclaim that would come with it, Septimus Godleman appeared at the gates of Winchester castle early that morning with five of his priests in close attendance. Dressed in pale silk vestments heavily embroidered with yellow and blue trim and wearing tall hats, the small band of priests walked piously out toward the surrounding Viking with the white flag of parley held high and their hands together in an attitude of prayer.
King Alfred’s soldiers craned from every vantage point of the overhanging ramparts of the castle, including the king and de Gaini.
The priests were lucky. Viking don’t normally do parley, but Guthrum, who had just joined Ove Thorsten, decided to listen in the hope that he could learn something about his foe that would stand him in good stead in the coming battle. They might even be offering surrender terms, which would be a huge disappointment to his men, who were thirsting for the blood of revenge, but a saver of manpower for the other battles to come.
Moving toward the priests Guthrum motioned Ove Thorsten and his twin venefici, Go-uan and Go-ian, just back from their meeting on the Glastonbury Tor with Twilight, to join him with their animals. Go-ian had Ran, the sea eagle partner of the dead Boma, on his wrist, and Go-uan had the glossy brown coat of a huge female bear, which even on all fours almost reached her shoulders, locked to her side.
When the priests got to within three horse lengths of Guthrum’s party, the Viking king held his hand up to indicate that was close enough.
Shaking his silver curls, Septimus Godleman stepped forward with a big smile on his face and hands open in a gesture of welcome. The other five priests dropped to their knees and copied Godleman’s open hands of welcome.
‘My Viking brothers, I welcome you in the name of the House of Wessex and Alfred our king, and the Christian fellowship of the Almighty God who rules our lives.’
Go-uan translated rapidly in a low voice to Guthrum, who did not understand Latin, the tongue Godleman was using.
The priest continued.
‘We would like to introduce and share with you the delights of He who created from nothing our heaven and earth and the sea and all that is therein, and made the sun shine and lit the sky with stars and put beasts upon the earth and flying creatures in the skies and upon whose will made the fields fill with fruit and plants. I ask you now to adore that which you have burned and burn that which you have once adored and in doing so . . . ‘
With his eyes on
Godleman and his ear bent to hear Go-uan’s translation, Guthrum had heard enough. He issued a short command to Ove Thorsten, who, in one fluid movement, reached behind his back, produced his short throwing axe, and hurled it. The spinning axe head arrived at Godleman’s shoulder just as it was arcing downward and, slashing through the pale silk embroidery, buried itself to the wooden handle in the priest’s shoulder.
Letting out a piercing scream, the tall hat flew from Septimus Godleman’s head as he collapsed to his knees, clutching at the axe handle protruding from his body.
Guthrum muttered something to Go-uan, who bent to the bear’s ear and spoke a short command. It took five ambling steps and arrived at the side of the screaming priest, who, still on his knees, was pumping great spurts of carmine-coloured blood from his wound with every sound. With the white, yellow, and blue silk vestment now completely saturated with Godleman’s blood, the sight of the bear seemed to shake the other five priests from their frozen terror, and they began to scramble to their feet. With a casualness belied by the act, the huge brown bear bit clean through Godleman’s neck in one powerful lunge, picked up the head in its teeth by the blood-soaked silver curls from where it fell to the ground, and ambled back to its master with the prize. As the twitching body of the headless priest slowly sank to the earth in a pool of its own blood, everything around it erupted.
Chapter 4
When the twelve young men who made up an infantry cohort under the command of Nathaniel Stubbs had answered King Alfred’s call for soldiers and left their Wessex hamlets, none had ever, in their wildest nightmares, expected to be facing the sight that now confronted them.
They formed the outer defense on the Northern side of Winchester on the town’s edge, fifteen hundred men, two deep with archers behind them. Streaming toward them with heavily tattooed faces contorted by malevolent hatred and brandishing huge double-headed axes and man-length broadswords were hundreds and hundreds of howling, berserker Viking.
The concerted twang of longbow fusillades sending arrows over their heads and into the attackers from the Celtic bowmen behind seemed to make little difference. The howling hordes were now leaping the old earthen defense mounds and dodging between the makeshift pointed timber fortification staves.
Samuel Southee swallowed hard, then looked to his right at his lifelong friend Clem Fossey standing next to him; the long, wooden-handled, metal-tipped spears they clutched in one hand behind the slim wooden shields, and the short sword in the other felt very puny against the mighty cleaving weapons coming toward them.
‘Hold firm now,’ came Stubbs’s calm voice over the stridency of the attackers. ‘They’re flesh and blood just like us.’
Out of the corner of his eye Samuel Southee saw the Wessex line buckle in several places as some of the defenders further down lost their nerve and turned and ran before the Viking reached them. Their places were immediately taken by the row behind.
‘Spears at repel position,’ Stubbs shouted.
Then, in a clash of splintering shields and screaming oaths the Vikings were upon them.
Jack Mills on Southee’s left went down from a swinging blow to the head from a bright blue and white circular shield wielded by a huge, bearded raider wearing a horned helmet with a metal nose protector. As the Viking raised his double-headed axe to finish Mills, Southee drove his spear upward through the underside of the Viking’s throat. Kicking and screaming, the raider dropped on top of Mills’ shield, wrenching Southee’s spear from his hand as he fell. On Southee’s right Clem Fossey was rolling around on the ground with another Viking, each trying to free their weapons for a telling blow. As the raider came to the top, Southee thrust his short sword deep into his back and he slumped forward over Fossey, a long death gurgle issuing from his tattooed mouth. Gilbert Pitt, who had been standing in the line on Fossey’s right, screamed in agony as another heavily bearded raider chopped his left arm clean off at the elbow and then raised his double-handled broadsword over his head. As he was about to release the blade down on the screaming Pitt’s unprotected head, a longbow arrow thudded into his breast. Pausing only momentarily to see what it was, the Viking continued with the blow, cleaving Pitt’s head to the neck like chopping a log in two for the fire. With both his weapons impaled in dead Viking, Southee grabbed the double-headed axe from the first raider. He could hardly lift it.
It was soon obvious that the Vikings were winning.
‘Fall back, men,’ Nathaniel Stubbs shouted. ‘Back to the castle.’
Including Samuel Southee and Clem Fossey, he had four of his original cohort of twelve men left alive, and two of them were wounded.
All along the broken and beaten Celtic line the same command was being issued.
That would mean only one thing.
The town would be completely unprotected from the raiders.
The third Viking group under the command of Olaf Tryggvason, having reached the approaches to Lyme Bay, were now going backward. The winds, tides, and currents that Twilight had placed in their path had gradually sapped their rowing strength until fatigue forced Tryggvason to use them in shifts. This only served to hasten their retreat. With his rowers exhausted and slumped over their oars and the coast of Lyme Bay slipping inexorably over the horizon behind his fleet of thirty long boats, Tryggvason looked to the heavens from the platform of his command ship and implored the Norse gods to help him.
‘It’s no good, invader, they’re not listening.’
Twilight appeared on the front platform beside him, speaking in the man’s own tongue.
‘You again,’ spat the red-bearded commander. ‘I might have known it.’
As before he showed no outward signs of fear.
‘I obviously didn’t make a deep enough impression upon you the first time. Either that or you were deaf to my words.’
‘I heard your words, veneficus, and understood them. I am a Viking; the words of a treacherous sorcerer mean nothing to me or my people.’
‘We’ll see what your people think when I blow these ships all the way back to your home harbour and they understand how you and your men didn’t have the stomach for the fight and returned unscathed.’
Tryggvason looked at Twilight for a long time through narrowed eyes. His purple and blue tattoos worked across his neck and lower face as he considered this.
‘Honour has it that we would be hacked to death on the spot for cowardice,’ he said quietly. ‘Even the women would join in.’ He waved his arm around to encompass the fleet. ‘And all our families banished in shame from their villages. Children, wives, sisters, and grandparents. Our houses would be burned to the ground and all signs of our existence erased from the sagas. For a Viking dying is not the problem, but the manner of it is.’ He gripped his sword handle in defiance.
‘You don’t have many choices, do you? You either return home and die without honour, or stay here and die by my hand.’ Twilight’s voice was deliberately cold and hard. ‘And if you attempt to draw that,’ he motioned toward the hand gripping the sheathed sword at Tryggvason’s hip, ‘I will use it to cut off the right hand of every commander in this fleet, including yours.’
Tryggvason took his tattooed right hand from the sword handle.
‘You are a man of some knowledge and courage. You speak understandable Latin and are a leader of men, yet you seem determined to occupy a world doomed to annihilation and mindless slaughter. Can you not find it in your heart to stand outside your civilization’s savage history and revoke this continuous violence?’
‘I am first and foremost a Viking. Once the bloodlust starts, I give in to it, embrace it, live it. Then there is nothing else. Any knowledge I have gained has come from raiding and trell trading. I have bartered slaves in many places—the Rhinelands, Danube Valley, Gaul, and Ravenna. Latin was the universal language, and in order not to be cheated by those whore-mothers I had to understand what they were saying. Yo
ur lands are green and fertile, sorcerer. Ours are cold and snow covered. Is there a better reason for invasion?’
By now his exhausted warriors had begun to look up at the two of them. Some of Tryggvason’s own crew had been with him the first time and recognized the figure standing on the platform next to their commander. They began to look in trepidation at the oar in their calloused hands; would it turn on them as it had with their two hundred dead comrades from the first trip?
‘I told you that I would take ten Viking lives for every Celtic life you took if you came back. The reason I have not blown every one of these long boats from the water is, due to the obstacles I have placed in your way, you have not been able to ply your murderous trade. And I will see that continues to be the case.’
The red-haired Viking said nothing. All the advantages were held by Twilight and he knew it. Three thousand Viking in thirty long ships. Sharply honed weaponry and strong, experienced arms to wield it. Impotent and useless against this tall, slim young man with the black piercing eyes and his all-seeing magic.
Again.
This veneficus was a curse sent from a place Tryggvason knew nothing about to bedevil his every move. Where were his own twin astounders? Why were they not here to break this demon with their own wizardry?
‘Because,’ said Twilight, reading his mind, ‘they are too busy attending your king and his forces in the attack on Winchester, and to where I am about to go to confront them.’
‘Then our victory will come from there and will make my suffering worthwhile. Mind your every move, sorcerer. I, Olaf Tryggvason, may be finished, but your magic cannot always protect you. There’s a Viking hammer waiting for your head out there, and Thor will see that it finds its mark . . . one day soon.’
He lowered his red head to indicate that he had nothing more to say.
What was left of Winchester was quiet at last. At a safe distance from the Celtic bowmen who lined the ramparts of this solid old Roman castle, the early evening campfires of the surrounding raiders began to glow as food was prepared.