01 - Heldenhammer

by Graham McNeill

  Alfgeir walked beside the king, clad head to toe in bronze armour and a helmet with a raised visor fashioned into the shape of a snarling wolf. Bjorn’s champion wore an identical cloak of white wolfskin, a gift from King Aloysis when the Unberogen army had crossed the Talabec and ridden into the land of the Cherusens.

  The two men were followed by ten warriors armed with heavy warhammers, their breastplates painted red, and their long beards woven in tight braids, in the fashion of the Taleutens. These men were so sure of their skills that they disdained the wearing of helmets and carried no shields. Bjorn knew that such confidence was not misplaced.

  At least three times on the field of battle, these men had saved his life, crushing Norsii skulls or felling great monsters with their mighty hammers as they closed on the king. Each of Bjorn’s retinue wore the white wolfskin cloak, and already it was whispered that these were warriors blessed with the strength of Ulric.

  The forces of the northmen had penetrated far inland, and the capital of King Wolfila of the Udoses was still besieged in his coastal fortress city. Much blood had yet to be spilled to force the Norsii back to the sea. Thus far, they had been driven back, but these encounters had been mere skirmishes, foreplay before the great battle that had been fought in the rocky foothills east of the Middle Mountains.

  The armies of the Norsii were wild and ferocious, but lacked the discipline of the southern tribes. The three kings had formed their armies into a great host and led by example, riding to where the battle was at its most fierce and exhorting their warriors to undreamed of valour.

  The seven thousand warriors of the southern kings gave battle against six thousand cold-eyed killers from the northern realms and the black-armoured marauders from across the seas. Hordes of berserk warriors caked in painted chalk and blood, with spiked hair and whirling chains, had begun the battle, charging from the ranks of the enemy, screaming terrible prayers to their dark gods.

  Volleys of arrows cut down these madmen, but the slavering hounds with blood-matted fur, and the howling beasts, had not fallen so easily, wreaking fearful havoc amongst the allied line with yellowed fangs that tore out throats, and bladed appendages that hacked a dozen men apart with every blow.

  Bjorn remembered the terrible moment when a charging wedge of dark horsemen atop snorting steeds of shimmering black had crashed into the gap opened by the hounds. Scores of men had died beneath their black lances or were crushed beneath the unstoppable fury of their charge, but Cherusen Wildmen had charged heedless into the mass of armoured horsemen, and had torn them from their saddles, while Unberogen warriors had grimly despatched the fallen warriors with brutally efficient axe blows.

  Back and forth the battle had waxed furiously, with each moment bringing a fresh horror from the enemy ranks. However, the courage of the men of the south had held firm. As the day wore on, the attacks from the Norsii became less severe, and Bjorn had sensed some give in the enemy line.

  The allies had advanced in a silent mass of axes and swords, Taleuten horsemen riding around the flanks of the enemy, harassing them with deadly accurate bow-fire from their saddles. Unberogen warriors hammered the Norsii line and bent it back like a strung bow, killing enemy warriors by the score. Realising the moment had come to make his presence felt, Bjorn had ordered his banner forward, and had charged in with his great axe raised high above his head for all his warriors to see.

  The kings of the Taleutens and Chemsens saw Bjorn’s charge, and the air filled with horn blasts and drum beats as the kings of the south rode to battle. Hundreds of horsemen crashed against the army of the northmen, killing them in droves and scattering them like chaff.

  A great cheer had filled the valley, and it seemed as though the fate of the Norsii was sealed, their warriors doomed. Then, a Norsii warlord in red armour with a horned helm had ridden through to the front lines of the battle beneath a blood-red banner. He sat atop a dark steed with eyes like undimmed furnaces, and had restored order to his army, which then fought a disciplined retreat from the valley.

  The allied army had not the strength or cohesion to pursue, and Bjorn had listened with a heavy heart as his scouts informed him that the Northmen had regrouped beyond the horizon and were falling back in good order to a thickly wooded ridgeline.

  That night, the armies of the three kings had rested and eaten well, for they all knew there was still fighting and dying to be done.

  For days the allies had harried the northmen, seeking to goad them into charging from their defensive bulwark, but fear of the great warlord had kept their natural ferocity in check, and not even the wild, challenging taunts of Taleuten horse archers could dislodge them from their position.

  The question of how to pursue the campaign against the northmen was one that vexed the commanders of the allied army greatly, and it was to a council of war arranged to answer this question that Bjorn now marched.

  “Krugar will want to attack with the dawn, as will Aloysis,” said Alfgeir as they approached the tent of the kings, ringed by armoured warriors and blazing torches.

  “I know,” said Bjorn, “and part of me wants to as well.”

  “Attacking up that slope will be costly,” said Alfgeir as they reached the tent of King Aloysis. “Many men will die.”

  “I know that too, Alfgeir, but what choice do we have?” asked Bjorn.

  Sigmar realised that time was not a constant thing, unbending and iron, but as flexible as heated gold. The weeks since his father had left Reikdorf had passed with aching slowness, whereas the hours he was able to snatch with Ravenna between his journeys around the Unberogen lands had flashed past like lightning.

  No sooner had he ridden back through the gates of Reikdorf and fallen into her arms than it seemed he was once again donning his hauberk and shield, ready to do battle. The raids against outlying settlements were continuing, but none had yet repeated the savagery of the attack on Ubersreik.

  Sigmar had sent wagonloads of swords and spears to every Unberogen village, along with warriors to help train the villagers. In addition to these weapons, the grain stores of Reikdorf had been depleted to feed the women and children, while their menfolk learned to be warriors as well as farmers.

  Eoforth had devised a rotational system where each farmer’s neighbours tended to a portion of his fields while he was training to defend their village. Thus each man would learn the ways of the warrior without the worry of his land going untilled or his crops ungathered.

  With the Unberogen lands looked to, Sigmar’s thoughts turned outwards to the lands beyond the borders of his father’s kingdom. As the summer months passed, orcs tribes were on the march in the mountains, with word coming from King Kurgan Ironbeard of great battles being fought before the walls of many of the dwarf holds. Sigmar had wanted to send warriors to aid the beleaguered dwarfs, but he could spare no men from his own lands.

  He paced the floor of the king’s longhouse, tired beyond measure as he awaited news of his father and the course of the war in the north. He drank from a mug of wine, the potency of the alcohol helping to dull the headache building behind his eyes.

  “That will not help you,” said Ravenna, watching him from the door to the longhouse. “You need rest, not wine.”

  “I need sleep,” said Sigmar, “and the wine helps me sleep.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Ravenna, coming into the long-house and taking the wine from his hand. “The sleep of the wine sodden is not true rest. You may fall asleep, but you are not refreshed come the morn.”

  “Maybe not,” replied Sigmar, leaning down to kiss her forehead, “but without it, my mind whirls with thought, and I lie awake through the long watches of the night.”

  “Then come to my bed, Sigmar,” said Ravenna. “I will help you sleep, and in the morning you will awake like a new man.”

  “Really?” asked Sigmar, taking her hand and following her towards the longhouse’s door. “And how will you work this miracle?”

  Ravenna smiled. “You’ll se
e.”

  Sigmar lay back on Ravenna’s bed, a light sweat forming a sheen over his body as she draped an arm over his chest and curled a leg over his thigh. Her dark hair spilled onto the furs of the bed, and Sigmar could smell the rose perfumed oils she had worked into her skin.

  The fire had burned low, but the room was pleasantly warm and comfortable, with the fragrance of two people who had just pleasurably exerted themselves hanging in the air.

  Sigmar smiled as he felt a delicious drowsiness stealing over him, a drink of wine and Ravenna’s company having eased his troubled brow and made the cares of the world seem like distant things indeed.

  Ravenna ran her hand across his chest, and he stroked her midnight hair as the events of the last few days washed through him, and in so doing, eased their weight upon him. He longed for news of his father and the men of the Unberogen who fought in the north, but as Eoforth was fond of saying, if wishes were horses then no one would walk.

  “What are you thinking?” whispered Ravenna dreamily.

  “About the fighting in the north,” he replied, and then flinched as Ravenna plucked a hair from his arm.

  She folded her arms across his chest and rested her chin on her forearms as she stared up at him with a playful smile.

  “What did you do that for?” he asked.

  “When a woman asks you what you are thinking, she doesn’t actually want to hear what you’re thinking.”

  “No? Then what does she want?”

  “She wants you to tell her that you are thinking of her and how beautiful she is, and of how much you love her.”

  “Oh, so why not ask for that?”

  “It’s not the same if you have to ask for it,” pointed out Ravenna.

  “But you are beautiful,” said Sigmar. “There is no one prettier between the Worlds Edge Mountains and the western ocean, and I do love you, you know that.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I love you,” said Sigmar, “with all my heart.”

  “Good,” smiled Ravenna. “Now I feel better, and when I feel better… you feel better.”

  “Then is it not selfish of me to simply tell you what I think you want to hear?” asked Sigmar. “Am I not then saying it to feel better myself?”

  “Does it matter?” asked Ravenna, her voice dropping as her eyelids fluttered with tiredness.

  “No,” replied Sigmar with a smile, “I suppose not. All I want to do is make you happy.”

  “Then tell me of the future.”

  “The future? I am no seer, my love.”

  “No, I mean what you hope for the future,” whispered Ravenna. “And no grand dreams of empire, just tell me of us.”

  Sigmar pulled Ravenna close and closed his eyes.

  “Very well,” said Sigmar. “I will be king of the Unberogen and you will be my queen, the most beloved woman in all the land.”

  “Will there be children in this golden future?” murmured Ravenna.

  “Undoubtedly,” said Sigmar. “A king needs an heir after all. Our sons will be strong and courageous, and our daughters will be dutiful and pretty.”

  “How many children will we have?”

  “As many as you like,” he promised. “Sigmar’s heirs will be numbered amongst the most handsome, proud and courageous of all the Unberogen.”

  “And us?” whispered Ravenna. “What becomes of us?”

  “Our future will be happy, and we will live long in peace,” said Sigmar.

  Tears streamed down Gerreon’s face as he all but fled into the darkness of the Brackenwalsch. His fine boots of softest kid were ruined, black mud and water spilling over the tops of them and soaking his feet. His woollen trews were splashed with tainted water as his footsteps carried him deeper and deeper into the bleak and cheerless fens.

  A low mist wreathed the ground, and the ghostly radiance of Morrslieb bathed the marshes in an emerald light. Glittering wisps of light, like distant candles, floated in the mist, but even in his distressed state Gerreon knew better than to follow them.

  The Brackenwalsch was full of the bodies of those who had been beguiled by the corpse lights and wandered to their doom in the peaty bogs around Reikdorf.

  His hand clutched his sword, and his anger grew as he pictured Sigmar rutting with his sister in his own home. The two of them had returned as Gerreon had been sharpening his blade, and it had been all he could do to smile and not cut the Unberogen prince down.

  Sigmar had placed a hand on Gerreon’s shoulder and he had all but flinched, the hatred in his eyes almost giving him away.

  He had read Sigmar and Ravenna’s lecherous intent in every word they spoke, and though they had asked him to join them for a meal, he had excused himself and fled into the darkness before the firelight would illuminate his true feelings.

  Geneon stumbled through the shallows of a sucking pool, dropping to his knees as the mud pulled at his boots. His hands splashed into the reeking liquid, and black tears dripped from his face as he stared into the water.

  His face rippled in the undulant surface of the pool, grotesquely twisted in the shifting water. The breath caught in his throat as he saw the reflected image of the moon over his shoulder, its face bright and constant, inexplicably unwavering in the water.

  Gerreon lifted his hands from the water, his fingers coated in a thin layer of oily, black liquid that dripped from his hands. In the dark of night it looked like blood, and he shook his hands clear of it in disgust.

  “No… please…” he whispered. “I won’t.”

  He looked up from the water as the moonlight shone upon a tall plant that grew at the edge of the pool, its stems dotted with many tiny, white flowers in flat-topped clusters. A sickly smell exuded from the plant, and with a heavy heart, Gerreon recognised it as water hemlock, one of the deadliest plants that grew in these lands.

  A whisper of wind shook the plant, and for the briefest instant, Gerreon felt it was beckoning him. As he watched, its stem sagged and broke, an oily liquid dribbling from the hollow interior.

  Gerreon looked into the darkened sky, seeking some escape from the future the fates seemed determined to force upon him.

  The moon glared down at him, its cold light unforgiving and hostile.

  Common belief held that it was ill-luck to stare into the depths of the rogue moon for any length of time, that the Dark Gods saw into the hearts of those who did so, and planted a seed of evil within them.

  As he looked into the shifting light, it seemed that he could see a pair of shimmering eyes, cunningly hidden within the ripples and contours of its surface, eyes of indescribable beauty and cruelty.

  “What are you?” he yelled into the darkness.

  The depthless pools of the eyes promised dark wonders and experience beyond measure, and Gerreon understood with sudden, awful clarity that the strands of his fate had been woven long before his birth and would continue long past his eventual death.

  He stood and waded across the pool towards the drooping hemlock plant.

  “Very well,” said Gerreon, “if I cannot escape my fate then I embrace it.”

  ——

  Red Dawn

  The sun rose through golden clouds, the rays of light striking the bronze armour of the Norsii and making it seem as though the tree-lined ridge was aflame. Defiantly gathered on the slopes of a wide, rocky ridge, the fearsome northmen battered their axes upon the bosses of their shields, and roared terrible war cries of blood and death.

  Bjorn sat upon his horse at the base of the ridge next to Alfgeir, surrounded by his personal guards, the White Wolves as they were now dubbed. His wolf banner fluttered in the icy wind that blew from the north, and he looked left and right to see the flags of his fellow kings held high along the line of the army.

  Of all the gathered warriors, Bjorn took pride in knowing that the Unberogen were, without doubt, the most fearsome and magnificent. Lines of spear-armed warriors awaited the order to advance, and tribal sword-brethren answered the Norsii’s battle-cri
es with no less fearsome roars of their own.

  Cherusen Wildmen bared their backsides to the Norsii, and Taleuten horsemen galloped with glorious abandon before the enemy army.

  Spirits were high, and the frozen wind was seen as a good omen by the priests of Ulric, a blessing of the god of winter and a portent of victory.

  Bjorn turned to Alfgeir, his champion’s bronze armour polished to a golden sheen. His visor was raised, and he sat motionless beside the king, though Bjorn saw a tension in his features that he had never seen in the moments before battle.

  “Something troubles you?” asked Bjorn.

  Alfgeir turned to face the king and shook his head. “No, I am calm.”

  “You seem unsettled.”

  “We are about to go into battle, and I must protect a king who rides into the heaviest fighting without thought for his own survival,” said Alfgeir. “That would unsettle anyone.”

  “Your only thought is for my life?” asked Bjorn.

  “Yes, my lord,” said Alfgeir.

  “The thought of your own death does not trouble you?”

  “Should it, my king?”

  “I imagine most men here are at least a little afraid of dying.”

  Alfgeir shrugged. “If Ulric wants me, he will take me, there is nothing I can do about it. All I can do is fight well and pray he finds me worthy to allow me entrance to his hall.”

  Bjorn smiled, for this was about the longest conversation he had ever had with his champion. “You are a remarkable man, Alfgeir. Life is so simple to you, is it not?”

  “I suppose,” agreed Alfgeir. “I have a duty to you, but beyond that…”

  “Beyond that, what?” asked Bjorn, suddenly curious. Alfgeir claimed not to be concerned about death, but the coming battle had loosened his tongue in a way nothing before had. Even as he formed the thought, he knew that it was not his champion’s tongue that was loosened, but his own.