A Sacred Storm

by Theodore Brun

  Erlan’s eye caught another man standing motionless in all that movement, staring into the sky as though in a trance.

  Another who can see! Maybe he wasn’t losing his mind after all. The temptation to look up again was instantly unbearable but then a Kursland spearman slipped through and ran screaming at the seer. At the last moment, he glanced down, saw the danger, but the spear was through his chest before his shield had even moved.

  Erlan turned back to the Jotnunger line.

  Let gods and demons and witches and who knows what fell things fight their battles above. He could only fight like a man. Fight and kill. Or be killed.

  The Norns must choose which.

  Einar Fat-Belly saw it in their eyes first. The fear, and the flood of Sveär reserves pressing behind him reflected in their stricken gaze.

  Harling Snake had thrown in his hirds now, and the Finnish archers and short-spearmen were hard behind them, too. He was damned glad it was Sigurd’s side that had the numbers.

  It was the fog that tipped it, though. No one liked to fight in it. But the Wendish had a fear of it. Which was why, when they broke, they ran like Hela’s hounds.

  It was moments like this Einar was glad he was no runner. Besides, all manner of madness was occurring up ahead, most of it swathed in the mist.

  A sudden, eerie quiet had settled over his sector of the plain. Apart from the groans of the dying, of course. Even the arrows had thinned almost to nothing. To the left near the marshes, he could still hear the berserkers’ shrieks.

  His throat was dry as sand. He’d give his right arm for an ale-skin, he thought, then wished he hadn’t. You never knew when some vindictive god was within earshot.

  His eye happened on a Gotar spearman face down in the mud and there, across his back, was indeed a decent-sized skin. Einar had it off him in a second and found it wasn’t quite empty.

  ‘My thanks, old Aegir,’ he chuckled. The god of brewing had always been his favourite. They had an understanding, after all.

  ‘And thanks to you too, friend.’ He slapped the dead man’s rump and set to glugging down his ale like Thor on a hot day.

  There was a sudden zipp and shudder as an arrow punctured the skin, stopping a whisker from his chest. He stared stupidly at it, mouth agape, beer dribbling over his knuckles.

  He wasn’t a superstitious man by nature, but he was nevertheless captive to a strong feeling that the Spear-God was trying to tell him something. He let the skin drop and squashed his helm tight on his head. There was heroes’ work to be done. And wasn’t he just the man to do it?

  ‘Hold up, lads!’ he yelled. ‘I’m right behind you.’ And off he jogged after his blood-baying kinsmen.

  Where is my father? thought Ringast Haraldarsson for the hundredth time that day.

  They were losing. That much was obvious. Ubbi had fallen; his Frieslanders were scattered. To the right, Thrand must still be holding their flank, though Ringast couldn’t see a damned thing. As for his western wing, he prayed those murderous cousins, Grim and Geir, were good as their reputation.

  Then the Wendish hirds bolted out of the mist.

  ‘My lord – see there!’ screamed Visma. He saw all right, cursing them for cowards as they fled.

  ‘So much for your countrymen,’ he snarled at the shieldmaid. ‘We have to shore the hole. Now!’

  But what with? He had no reserve.

  ‘Let me go, my lord,’ Visma begged. ‘Let me salvage some honour for my kinsmen.’

  ‘Take half these men.’ He jabbed his sword at the Gotars holding the centre right. ‘Close the gap. If you fail, the day is lost!’

  ‘Give me the standard,’ cried Kari.

  Visma tossed the young warrior the raven banner and drew her sword. ‘Odin keep us all! For Wendland and Ringast!’ Then she ran along the line, yelling, ‘Who wants a hero’s death?’

  Men broke off to follow her but Ringast harboured little hope. He could see almost nothing through the fog. His flanks had held so far but what use was that if the centre crumbled?

  They must hold!

  Victory. He wanted victory, no less. No glory, no seat at Odin’s table, nothing but to crush these oath-breaking devils – for Lilla’s sake even more than his own.

  Is that love, then? Gods, what a place to find it!

  He lifted his voice and bellowed into the mist. ‘Ringast still stands, you hear? Your lord still stands with you!’

  His words might give his men some backbone to stand and fight, but only the weight of steel could force back the Sveär tide.

  Where is my father? he thought again. And then a voice roared out of the mist. ‘RINGAST!’ His own name rolled up to him like thunder. ‘RINGAST!’ In the swirling vapour a towering figure took shape, his hulking limbs slathered in blood.

  ‘Starkad,’ Ringast murmured, recognizing the champion who had turned coat from his father’s hearth into the ranks of King Sigurd Kin-Slayer.

  The Sea-King continued to bellow his name like a war-cry, hewing a path towards him. Men who had stood all day were thrown aside like rag-dolls. Ringast readied his shield and sword, thinking ruefully that his day may end quicker than he thought.

  Starkad roared at the other Sveär warriors to stay back.

  ‘A curse on you, traitor,’ yelled Ringast. ‘You betrayed my father.’

  The big víkingr grimaced. He was soaked in blood. A piece of his beard hung off his face, cut clean along the jawbone, which flapped crazily when he spoke.

  ‘I’m here for your head, boy.’

  ‘You’d better come get it then,’ Ringast snarled, bracing himself.

  ‘In the north, they know me as—’

  ‘Shut up and fight, you towering sack of shit!’

  The smile slid from Starkad’s face. His licked his ruined lip and hooked the grisly flap of beard between his teeth.

  The two men began circling each other like wolves. Suddenly Starkad’s point drove at Ringast’s face. He blocked it, slashing low with his sword, but Starkad was at full stretch and the tip swept by clean.

  In another eye-blink the massive blade crashed down. Ringast lurched under the falling arm, slamming into Starkad’s bloody torso. It was like tackling an oak tree. Their bodies jarred and he felt the wound in his chest rip open.

  He sucked back the stab of pain, but the old champion also groaned and fell back a step. A thrill rippled through Ringast as he realized the Sea-King’s strength was nearly spent.

  ‘You’ve found your last fight, Starkad.’

  But the turncoat was far from done. He whipped round his arms in another deadly blow. Ringast slewed the wrong way and too late. He could only wrench up his shield in desperation to cover his neck.

  There was a crack, a shower of splinters and blinding pain screamed up his arm. His shattered shield fell in pieces to the ground. Starkad’s blade was lodged in the mud. Ringast lurched backwards to get clear for a second’s respite. His hand was agony. He glanced down, seeing only his thumb, a finger and a bloody stub. Half his palm was cut away.

  Starkad laughed through teeth still clamped down on his beard, kicking away the broken shield. Ringast grimaced. His shield-hand was in spasm. All around them Sveär warriors were rushing past. But they knew better than to cheat Starkad of his prize. Ringast’s foot knocked something hard. He recognized the shape and weight of a spear.

  Starkad growled, unable to speak, great bulging arms whaling at Ringast’s exposed left side. But he too was fading. Ringast caught the blow above his head. There was a grinding of metal as Starkad crushed down the weight of his two arms against Ringast’s one. The prince sensed his last moment fast approaching. With one last desperate lunge, he released all resistance and flung himself forward, crossing the sword-line.

  He should have been a dead man. But Starkad’s strength worked for him, whipping his sword round his wrist and an instant later he felt it carve into sinew and muscle.

  Starkad gave a long, low sigh. His huge sword fell, his big hands pawing
at the steel buried in his neck. Ringast left it there and calmly picked up the spear at his feet, gripping its shaft in the crook of his ruined arm. Then he drove the point hard into the champion’s belly. The ring-mail burst and Ringast felt metal grind against Starkad’s spine.

  The Sea-King fell to his knees, eyes wide and confused. Ringast twisted the shaft deeper, turned it like a screw, then with a single, violent wrench ripped it clear... and Starkad the Old, champion of ten kings, fell on his face. Dead.

  Dazed and breathing hard, Ringast tugged his sword free of Starkad’s lifeless body. Blood was welling from his cloven hand.

  ‘I’m with you, lord,’ shouted Kari, his new bannerman.

  ‘Glad somebody is, boy,’ he gasped, clutching his arm to his chest.

  He looked right. The fighting there was thicker than ever. Visma seemed to have rallied a remnant of her Wendish swords and was fighting under her husband’s banner. Ringast glanced behind. Not fifty yards back, the ground rose sharply to the outcrop where they had stood before dawn.

  He swore. Had they really been pushed back that far?

  His men were fighting bravely but there were fewer of them every second. If his father didn’t come now then this day was lost. And in his ear, he felt the breath of Odin’s whisper... calling him.

  ‘Not yet,’ he growled through gritted teeth. ‘Not yet.’

  Lilla came to with a sensation like a red-hot comb raking her insides. She tried to close her mind to the pain, determined not to slip back into unconsciousness. How much time had passed, she had no idea. She sat up and looked across the plain.

  From her position, the mist lay in a blanket between her and the far ridge, obscuring all but the closest butchery. The fighting was close now. So close she could have tossed her staff and hit her husband’s banner. Someone to the right – the Wendish, maybe – had broken and were streaming past the outcrop. Forward of them others were trying to plug the gap, but the shieldwall was haemorrhaging like a breached river-dam.

  This was the moment, she realized. When everything hung by a thread. When her husband, if he had a second to spare her any thought at all, would be willing her to go, to flee, to find safety somewhere. Anywhere.

  But how could she leave now?

  Suddenly she heard the eagle’s cry. A shiver of dread shot through her. Her gaze turned east, seeking the dark shape against the steel-grey clouds. And then she saw the soaring shadow away over the marshland. As she watched, he fell like a black thunderbolt and swept along the bloody seam of slaughter, speeding up the plain towards her.

  Seized by a sudden impulse, she groped for her bow and quiver beside her in the dirt. For a second her hands floundered and then she had it. A second more and she had a shaft torn free. She nocked the fletching and drew back her arm, her eyes now sharp, tracking the dark wings up the battle-line. ‘Father, help me now,’ she murmured, taking aim, her eye boring down the length of birch past the needle-sharp arrow-tip.

  Except that Freki, as if sensing danger, pulled up suddenly, beating at the air with all the power in his wide-spread wings. Up and up he climbed. Lilla shut out everything but him. No sights, no sounds, no smells. No sensations – not even the pain that was rinsing her insides like a boiling kettle.

  She took a snatched breath, swung through her hips like her father had taught her, and loosed the arrow.

  For a frozen moment, there was nothing. Only the pinprick shaft speeding away into the grey above. Then there was a small, crumpled sound, so faint she could have imagined it... but that the huge bird jagged off its track.

  She watched, hardly daring to hope, as the eagle began to fall, one wing buckled out of shape. But the proud head was still up. She had winged him only. Still, that was enough to pluck him from the sky. He half-fell, half-dived in a black streak across the plain – one wing out strong, trying to grip the air, the other flapping uselessly. And then he disappeared with a crash into the tops of the trees in the far woods.

  She let out a strangled whoop of triumph, answered at once with a fresh wave of pain through her belly. She dropped the bow and fell to her knees. The pain seemed to know, seemed to sense its release, throwing her back like a tidal wave, breaking over her with all its force.

  Arms closed around her. Someone was with her. She recognized Gerutha’s voice. Her vision fading, she looked out one last time. The mist covered the whole plain now, east to west. Above it, the clouds still drifted. But something in the air had changed. Some presence had receded.

  ‘Saldas is broken,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’ exclaimed Gerutha, voice frantic. ‘What did you say?’

  But Lilla’s consciousness was slipping away. And then she felt it: a breath of air from the west. And the breath became a breeze, building, and then a wind whistling past her face, driving the mist before it.

  Saldas is broken...

  The air filled with a new sound then – the blast of a hundred horns. Lilla looked west. Men were spilling out of the trees – men of war, spearmen, shieldmen, archers, warriors in their hundreds. In their thousands!

  She sank back into Gerutha’s arms, surrendering to the sweet darkness of oblivion closing over her.

  Because the Wartooth had come at last.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  Shield-rim trees, the skalds called them. And the kenning never fit so well. The western wood had come alive.

  But these trees were deadly, bearing shields of every hue, steel of every shape, under banners blazoned with every kind of beast. And as the Danish horde fanned from the trees, a low-slung wagon emerged in its midst, drawn by snow-white horses. Above it, whipped by the westerly wind, rose a banner – a scarlet boar on a cloth of white: the mark of the Wartooth. Under it stood Harald, King of the Danes.

  ‘Behold the impudence of sons!’ the old war-king cried, his bristly face alight with mischief. ‘Where’s a father’s respect, I ask you?’ His old companion-in-arms, Branni, stood beside him listening, his grey hood pulled forward, one tufted eyebrow raised sardonically while he surveyed the plain. ‘They’re making a fine cowpat of the business, by the look of it. Brat – you Irish rogue!’ he called down to a loping killer with the slaughter-thirst in his eye. ‘Can you hear me – you deaf son of a whore?’

  ‘I hear you, Wartooth.’

  ‘Just look at ’em! To think the young whelps would start without me.’ He roared with mad laughter.

  The Irishman pressed a long thumb against one nostril and emptied the other into the grass. ‘Sure, they’ve barely got things going. Still plenty of them Sveär bastards left.’

  ‘Let’s see what mischief an old fool and his friends can make, eh? Onward, my children!’ he cried left and right, a maniac grin glazing his face. ‘There’s your feast by Odin’s eye!’ He drew his sword and shook it at the killing storm ahead. ‘To slaughter, my younglings! My most buxom wench to the first man who wets his boots in those far waters. On, my beauties! The Wartooth’s tusk will bleed those Sveär wolves white!’

  His wagon rolled onto the plain. Beside him, Branni stood tall and grim, while his bannerman Tyrfing the Skald whipped up the reins. Danish horns split the air anew and the Wartooth’s motley army surged forward in a flood of fury.

  Under the creak of the wagon wheels, Tyrfing heard his lord’s soft mutter: ‘Now, old friend, is this enough? Ah, my bones are weary. It’s time we meet, eye to eye.’ Then the Wartooth’s throat opened in a boundless laugh, fey and fierce. ‘Meet me in the storm, you Lord of War! Hahaah! I’m come to seek you out!’

  The horses’ hooves pounded onwards.

  At the horn-blasts, every man on the plain had stopped. For a heartbeat only, but long enough for those plaintive notes to pierce his mind.

  Around Erlan, the wall of Hedmark berserkers and Skanskar spearmen was buckling backwards. But the horns filled the air with new terror and new hope. Now Odin would have his full reaping and the day would be won and lost.

  ‘You hear that, brother?’ cried Alfarin, still near enou
gh for Erlan to hear. ‘Sweet as mead, that sound! Let’s see the last of these big bastards fall and then on to their king.’

  And suddenly a great crushing flood of Danes, Gotlanders and Irish was on them, sweeping everything before it. Grim and Geir, slick with the battle-slime, took their vengeance on the Jotnungers then, joined by Hedinn Slim and his men. On the Danish left, Veborg the war-queen and her Gotlanders swallowed up the Telemarker bowmen, who had rained down death all day.

  It was a massacre.

  Harald’s men surged on, mangling the Sveär right into a charnel house. At their head was the Wartooth himself with his father’s sword, the Flame of Danmark, swinging about him. The snow-white horses thundered down the corpse-strewn plain while Harald cut red swathes left and right, shieldless and seeking death, crying to the High One to accept him home.

  Then Sigurd’s right broke, fleeing eastwards to escape the closing jaws of the Danish onslaught. Erlan saw the wave come and he was ready. He had not forgotten his oath to Kai. And now he saw his chance revived. One man could never have cut his way through to Sigurd. Now, though, a thousand men were carving a path and he went with them. The writhing wave of slaughter rolled on, blood frothing like the foam of the deep.

  Time was as nothing. He knew only madness. Faces flashed and fell before him. Cut, hack, turn, scream... run on! Yet each face seemed more familiar, each aspect darker, each beard blacker, until all the flashing faces dissolved into one:

  The face of his first lord.

  His father.

  Again and again, it was his father’s face. Again and again, his sword struck the fleeing figures, but it was his father who fell. He wanted to shut his eyes, to shut out the horror. But it was no good, because the horror was inside him. The horror at what it made him feel.

  The horror of savage joy.

  Further east, one man’s voice rang over the tumult with laughter in his words.

  ‘Run on, my brothers!’ cried Ringast. ‘This day will be ours! Drive them into the mire – and give quarter to none!’ His face was ashen and his body a bloody wreck, but his words stirred the weary hearts of the Gotar hirds.