The Hammer and The Cross thatc-1

by Harry Harrison

  “Flugstrith?” said Brand, turning from the fire. “I do not understand.”

  “That is how we will fight our battle. We will make it the eldingflugstrith.”

  Brand looked disbelieving. “The lightning-battle? I know Thor is with us, but I doubt you can convince him to hurl his thunderbolts to clear our way to victory.”

  “It is not the thunderbolts I want. What I want is a battle fast as lightning. The thought is there, Brand; I feel I know what must be done. But I must make it clearer—as clear in my head as if it had already happened.”

  Now, waiting in the mist in the dark hour before dawn, Shef felt sure his battle-plan would work. The Vikings had approved it—so had his machine-tending Englishmen. And it had better work. Shef knew that after his rescue of Godive, and then his collapse as the army waited to attack, his credit with the council and the army too was almost exhausted. Things were being kept secret from him. He did not know where Thorvin had gone, nor why Godive had slipped away with him.

  As he had before the walls of York, he reflected that in this new style of battle the fighting was the easiest part. Or at least it promised to be so for him. Yet somewhere inside himself his flesh still crawled with a kind of fear: not of death or disgrace. Fear of the dragon he sensed in Ivar's skin. He fought the fear and repulsion down, glanced at the sky for the first pale streaks of dawn, strained his eyes through the mist to see if he could see the outline of Ivar's battlements.

  Ivar had made his fortified camp in exactly the same style as the one which King Edmund had stormed south of Bedricsward by the Stour: a low ditch and bank with stakes driven into it, forming three sides of a square with the river Ouse as the fourth side, his ships drawn up along the muddy bank. The sentry who paced the bank behind the stockade had been at that battle too, and lived. He needed no urging to keep alert. Yet to him the dark hours were the dangerous ones, short enough at this time of year. As he saw the sky beginning to pale, and felt the little wind that comes before the dawn, he relaxed and began to think of the day that might follow. He had no great desire to see Ivar Ragnarsson at his butcher's work again among his prisoners. Why, he wondered, did they not move on? If Ivar had been challenged to fight at Ely, he had met the challenge. It was Sigvarthsson and the Way-folk who must feel disgrace.

  The sentry halted, braced himself chest-high against the wall of the stockade, fighting to keep alert. He brooded on the sounds he had heard so often in the last few days, coming from under the bloody hands of Ivar. Out there two hundred corpses lay in fresh graves, the product of a week's sacrifice and slaughter of Mercian prisoners taken after the battle. An owl called, and the sentry started, thinking for an instant it was the shriek of a spirit come for vengeance.

  It was his last thought. Before he heard the thrum of the bowstring the quarrel drove through his throat. From the ditch, the figures who had crept up in the mist caught him, eased him to the ground, waited. Knowing the other sentries on the wall had been dispatched in the same instant, on the cry of the owl.

  Even the softest of shoes makes a sound moving through the grass. The hundreds of running feet sounded like small waves rushing down a pebbled strand. Dark bulks loomed, moving swiftly toward the western palisade of the camp, their moment carefully chosen. They were black shapes against a black sky behind them. But the lightening sky in the east would silhouette the defenders when they awoke and rushed to battle.

  Shef stood to the side, watching the attack, fists clenched: the success or failure of everything depended on the next few seconds. Taking the camp would be like taking York—only simpler and quicker. No clumsy, moving towers, no slow development of the attack in stages. This was being done in a way even the Ragnarssons would understand—in explosive attack, win or lose in the first minute.

  His eager men had shaped the bridges, stout planks pegged together. Twelve yards long and three wide. Iron bands clamped the oars beneath the structure, their handles projecting to either side. Each handle grasped by a Viking, secure in the feel of the familiar wood, proud of the strength needed to lift the structure and run forward with it at the stockade of the camp.

  The tallest warriors were in front. As they ran they grunted with the effort, not only from carrying the dead weight—but at the last moment they lifted it over their heads until the front was more than seven feet off the ground. Enough to clear the six-foot-high stakes of the camp.

  And clear it they did with a final explosive heave as they leaped over the ditch, slammed wood down on wood, the men in the front springing clear at the last second and rolling down into the ditch.

  But not those that ran behind. The instant the bridge was in place they thundered up it and leapt into the enclosure behind. Ten, twenty, a hundred, two hundred were over before the bridge-carriers could unsheathe their weapons and join in the attack.

  Shef smiled into the darkness. Six had been built, six had attacked—and only one had not succeeded in topping the wall. It lay half in, half out of the ditch, while cursing Vikings crawled out from under it and joined the rush to the other bridges.

  Screams of pain, roars of anger over there as the sleeping men realized that the enemy was in among them. First the thud of axes into flesh, then the clang of metal as men woke, seized arms, defended themselves. Shef took one last look in the growing light, saw that the warriors were following instructions and advancing in a steady line, slaughtering as they went. But keeping position even after they had cut down the man they faced. Keeping pace with the murderous advance. Then Shef ran.

  On the eastern side of the camp his English freedmen had waited in the darkness as they had been instructed, trotting forward to the attack only when they heard the first clash of battle. Shef hoped his timing had been correct. He had stationed them two hundred yards form the palisade. Estimated that if they ran forward when they heard the attack they would reach the camp when the armed struggle was joined and intense. All eyes should be on the Viking attack-force—all of Ivar's men rushing to the aid of their comrades. So he fervently hoped. He reached the corner of the camp just as the running men appeared.

  Halberdiers led the way, each weighted with a great bundle of brushwood as well as his weapon. To be hurled into the ditch before the sharp blades were wielded against the stakes and the leather thongs that bound the palisade together.

  The second wave of attackers approached, crossbowmen who pushed between the halberdiers, used knives to sever the last of the bindings, heaved stakes aside, climbed over and through them.

  Shef followed them, pushing forward through the jostling ranks. No need to shout orders. The crossbowmen were following their long-rehearsed instructions, pacing forward ten carefully counted steps, then stopping and forming a line. Others halted behind them to make a double line that stretched from wall to river-line. Swift runners dashed forward to cut the tent-ropes, fled back to safety as the archers fitted bolts to cocked strings.

  A few drabs and youths had seen them, had stood gape-mouthed and fled. But incredibly, none of Ivar's men seemed aware of their presence, totally taken up with the familiar clash of weapons coming from the other wall.

  Shef stepped a pace beyond the double line, saw the faces turning toward him for the prearranged signal. He raised his arm, dropped it. The heads turned to their front, sighted for an instant. Then the sharp snap of a hundred strings released together.

  The short, stout arrows shot across the camp, driving through leather and mail and flesh.

  Already the front rank had hooked onto their tackle to reload, while the second rank stepped forward between them, looked to Shef, caught his signal, loosed their second volley.

  Shouts of alarm and disbelief were now mingling with cries of pain as the warriors saw men falling, all to the rear of the battle. Heads turned, faces pale in the dawn's light, to see the silent death that was striking them from the rear, while the Vikings of the Way still kept up their violent pressure from the front, expending energy furiously in an assault they had been promised would
last only minutes.

  The first row of bowmen was ready again. As each man finished loading, he stepped through the line in front to resume rank. Some faster than others. Shef waited impassively till the last had formed up—the lines must be kept separate if this maneuver was to work—before he dropped his arm again.

  Four times the lines shot before the first of the defenders could turn, order themselves and race across the camp in a wavering line, hindered by collapsed tents and the embers of cooking fires. As they closed, the bowmen obeyed orders again. Shot if they had loaded, then turned and ran with the rest, through the ranks of halberdiers dressed behind them. The halberdiers shifted sideways to let their fellows pass, then closed ranks again in a solid line of points.

  “Don't advance, just stand!” shouted Shef as he followed the last of the crossbows through. Few could hear him over the growing din of war-cries. Yet he knew this was the moment Brand had said would not work: the puny slave-born taking the full weight of a Viking charge.

  The English obeyed their orders. Stood still, points leveled, second rank bracing the first. Even a man whose belly crawled with fear knew he had to do no more than he could. And the Viking charge did not come with full weight. Too many men shot down, and those the leaders; too many of the rest, uncertain, unprepared. The wave that came to hack at the wall of steel came piecemeal. Each man who ran in faced a point in front, blades chopping from either side. The blows they swung were caught by long shafts thrusting from the rear ranks. Slowly the Vikings drew back from the unshaken line, looking round for leadership.

  As they did so a cry of triumph rang from behind them. Viga-Brand, seeing the battle-line in front of him thin and shred, had thrown his picked men through the center of what remained, to wheel instantly and to start to roll up the Ragnarsson line.

  Beaten men began to throw their weapons down.

  From the riverbank Ivar Ragnarsson stood and watched his men fall, then surrender. Sleeping in his ship, the Lindormr, he had rolled from his blankets too late to be more than an observer. Now he knew that he had lost this battle.

  He knew why, too. The last few days of blood and slaughter had been a delight for him, a relief. The easing of some frenzy that had lain within him for many years, consoled only now and then and only for a time by the brief pleasures his brothers had arranged for him, or by the grand executions the Great Army had tolerated as appropriate. A delight for him; the army had slowly sickened of it. It had rotted their morale. Not much. Enough to make them put a little less than their best into the desperate defense they had needed.

  He did not regret what he had done. What he regretted was that this attack could only come from one man, from the Sigvarthsson. The attack in the night, the instant breaching of his defenses. Then, when his warriors rallied for battle, the cowardly attack from the rear. The engagement was truly lost. He had fled a lost battle before—must he flee again? The victors were close on him, and on the other side of the river—moved across on clumsy punts and rafts five miles downstream—waited the ten torsion dart-throwers, lined up wheel to wheel, guided to their position by willing local churls. As the light strengthened, the twist-shooter teams lowered their sights on to the Ragnarsson ships.

  On Ivar's ship, the Lindormr; the minster-slaves crouched round their machine. At the first noise of onset they had whipped the covers off it, wound and loaded. Now they hesitated, uncertain in which direction to shoot. Ivar stepped across and on to the gunwale.

  “Boom off,” he ordered. “Leave that. Push out from shore.”

  “Are you deserting your men already?” asked Dolgfinn, standing with a clutch of senior skippers a few feet away. “Without so much as a blow struck? That may sound bad when the story is told.”

  “Not deserting. Getting ready to fight. Come aboard if that's what you mean to do. If you mean to stand round like old whores waiting for trade, stay where you are.”

  Dolgfinn flushed at the insult, stepped forward with his hand on hilt. Feathers sprouted suddenly from his temple, and he fell. With the camp taken, the crossbowmen had fanned out again, shooting wherever they saw resistance. Ivar stepped behind the protecting bulk of the machine mounted on the prow of the ship. As the slaves clumsily poled the Lindormr out into the slow current, he pointed quickly to one man still on the bank.

  “You. Jump. Over here.”

  Reluctantly Erkenbert the archdeacon gathered up his black robe, leapt the widening gap of water, landed staggering in Ivar's arms.

  Ivar jerked a thumb at the crossbowmen growing ever more visible in the dawning light. “More machines you did not tell me of. I suppose you will tell me they cannot exist either. If I live past today I will cut your heart out and burn your minster to the ground.”

  To the slaves he shouted, “Stop pushing. Drop anchor. Drop the gangplank.”

  As the mystified slaves heaved the weighted, two-foot-wide plank from gunwale to shore, Ivar placed the stout protective beam of his machine behind him, took a firm grip on Erkenbert's right wrist, and leaned back to watch his army die. Unafraid, he had only one thought left: how to spoil his enemies' triumph, how to sour victory into failure.

  Firmly escorted, Shef walked forward through the chaos of the camp. His helmet was strapped on, his halberd was over his shoulder. He had not yet struck a blow or dodged one. Ivar's army was no more. The Waymen were rounding up prisoners while a few survivors ran toward the river, running in twos and threes both ways along the bank to get away. There were not many of them, surely not enough to be a threat.

  The battle was won, Shef told himself, and won easily, exactly according to plan. Yet something still chilled in his belly: too easy, he felt, too easy. The gods demand a price for favors. What was it to be? He began to run in earnest, heading for the helmet of Brand, now at the very tip of the Waymen's advance toward the river and the ships. As he did so, a flash of color came from the mast of one of the ships only a few yards ahead, gold catching the first direct rays of the rising sun. It was the Coiling Worm. Ivar had broken out his banner.

  Brand slowed to a walk as he saw Ivar standing, one foot on the gunwale of the Lindormr, with six feet of water between the ship and the bank. Ivar was fully dressed, wearing his grass-green breeches and tunic, his mail-coat and silver helmet. He had thrown his scarlet cloak aside, but the polished boss of his shield caught the red light of morning. By his side stood a small man in the black robe of a Christian cleric, a look of horror on his face.

  As men on both sides saw the confrontation, fighting finally stopped. The Vikings on both sides, Waymen and Ragnarssons, looked at each other, nodded, accepted that the battle was won and lost. As the English halberdiers, less businesslike in their attitudes, closed in, those Ragnarsson troops still resisting began hastily to throw their weapons down, put themselves under the protection of their former enemies. Then all, English and Norse, Waymen and pirates, faced inward, to see how their leaders would behave. At the rear of the watching ring, Shef struggled and cursed to get through.

  Brand checked for a moment, breathing hard with the exertion of ten minutes' desperate struggle. Then he strolled forward toward the gangplank. He raised his right hand, split between two fingers in King Edmund's battle the previous year. He moved the fingers to show how they had healed.

  “We had words a while back, Ivar,” he remarked. “I told you you should look after your women better. You did not take my advice. Maybe you don't know how to. But you said when your shoulder was whole you would remember what I said. And I said when my hand was whole I would remind you of it. Well, I have kept my word. Will you keep yours? You look as if you are thinking of sailing away.”

  Ivar grinned, showing his even teeth. Deliberately, he drew his sword and threw the decorated scabbard into the Ouse.

  “Come and try me,” he said.

  “Why don't you come to fight on firm ground? No one will help me. If you win, you will have free passage back to where you stand now.”

  Ivar shook his head. “If you are s
o bold, fight on my ground. Here”—Ivar leapt forward onto the gangplank, took two steps forward—“I will take no advantage. We will both stand on the same plank. Then all can see who gives way first.”

  A buzz of interested comment rose as the watching men grasped the situation. At first sight the outcome of the fight looked evident. Brand outweighed Ivar by seventy pounds at least, out-topped him by a head and more, was as skillful and experienced with his weapons. Yet everyone could see the plank flex with one man's weight on it. With two, and one as heavy as Brand, how would the footing feel? Would both men be awkward and clumsy? Or just one? Ivar stood braced, feet as far apart as the plank would allow, sword-arm forward like a fencer, not crouched behind his shield like a warrior in a battle-line.

  Slowly Brand walked forward to the end of the plank. He had his great axe in one hand, a small round shield buckled to his forearm. Meditatively he unstrapped it, threw it to the ground, took his axe in both hands. As Shef finally wormed his way gasping to the front, Brand leapt onto the plank, took two paces forward, and lashed suddenly backhand and upward at Ivar's face.

  Ivar swayed easily away, moving only the six inches necessary to avoid the blow. Instantly he was beneath the stroke, chopping at a thigh. The blow was beaten down with the metal-shod haft of Brand's axe, counterstroke slashing in the same movement at the wrist. For ten seconds the two men sent a rain of blows at each other, the cuts coming faster than the watchers could follow them: parrying, ducking, swaying their bodies to let thrust or slash go by. Neither man moved his feet.

  Then Brand struck. Beating a blow from Ivar upward, he took half a pace forward, leapt high in the air, and came down with his full weight on the very center of the plank. It flexed, bounced upward, hurling both men off their feet. In the air, Brand swung the iron-shod butt of his axe at Ivar's head, connecting with a furious clang on his helmet's cheek-piece. In the same instant Ivar recovered blade and thrust with fierce dexterity through mail and leather, deep into Brand's belly.