by Neil Clarke
The Tronders, caught in the middle, stood up and fought in place. Conn traded blows with the man opposite him, parrying and hitting; Conn flinched back, and when the man lunged after him chopped his sword through the Tronder’s shoulder and then hacked him in the back as he went down. He bounded into the open space this left on the iron ship and stood toe to toe with another man with an axe. Raef was coming behind him. Conn pushed in, so close he felt the Tronder’s hot breath on his face. The axe haft struck him a glancing blow on the elbow and his arm went dead and the sword clattered to the floor. He stooped and with his left hand gripped it and struck upward, and the odd angle caught the Tronder off balance and Conn’s sword bit his side and he slumped.
Bui was climbing on over the iron ship’s other gunwale. He saw Conn, and shouted, “Ho, the King of Norway! Come help me!”
Raef stood at Conn’s left shoulder; they fought their way along one line of benches, and Bui fought his way down the other. The Tronders gave way only by dying. Conn’s right arm started to tingle alive again, and he switched his sword into that hand. Now he got to using his sword well again, and he and Raef reached the mast a step ahead of Bui. The burly Jomsviking was red in the face, his bare chest slick with blood streaming from a cut on his neck.
“Eirik,” he shouted, his voice hoarse. “We’ve got you!”
In the stern stood a man who in spite of the heat wore a dark shirt and a long cloak. His helmet had a gold rim and he was yelling orders. He bellowed, “Somebody has somebody, Bui. Reverse! Reverse!”
Conn wheeled. “They’ll take us in with them!” The iron ship was already sliding backward on her sterncastle oars, rowing back in among the other Tronder ships. By the bow, Seabird, with six men at the oars, was staying near as she could but she dared not go into the midst of the Tronders. Conn shouted, and pushed Raef ahead of him, and Raef shoved the other men on up to the bow of the iron ship.
The first four men leapt easily enough into Seabird, and then Raef clambered up the gunwale and jumped across the widening water, but Conn threw off his helmet, and dove into the bay.
The iron ship was stroking steadily backward, into the thick of Hakon’s ships. A stretch of clear water opened between the Tronder fleet and the Jomsvikings. Conn swam hard through it toward his ship, her oars coming out, hanging in the air, ready to row. A spear sliced through the water just past his head. He reached the ship and Raef leaned down to haul him up. He went facefirst into the space between the front two benches, into several inches of water.
He rolled over and straightened, on his knees, looking back toward the iron ship. Raef pushed up beside him.
“We’re full of water.”
“Bail,” Conn yelled, and got his feet under him, to his ankles in water. Seabird was rowing backwards, sluggish; she was always stiff going stern first but this was more sluggish than usual. All around the ship the crew bent to slinging the water out.
The fighting everywhere had stopped. Between them and the Tronders now was a broad stretch of the bay. Hakon was pulling his whole fleet back toward shore. The water between was scummed with blood, filthy with broken gear, bits of ships and oars, bodies like unsteady islands bobbing in the little waves. Down past his own stempost, he could see an arm floating a few feet below the surface.
The water in his ship did not seem to be going down. He reached into the forecastle and found a bucket and began to throw water over the side. Raef vaulted over the gunwale into the bay, and went hand over hand around the outside of the ship.
“King of Norway!”
Conn straightened, looking around. Aslak’s big dragon was gliding up just off his bow. The big bald Jomsviking stood by the mast.
“You don’t look so good,” Aslak shouted. “Eirik’s claws ripped you.”
Conn pointed toward Hakon’s fleet. “Is he giving up?” He bent to bail; the water was coming in as fast as he and his crew threw it out again.
“No—He’s just gone for help,” Aslak bellowed.
Raef’s head appeared above the gunwale, near Conn’s knee; he boosted himself smoothly up onto the ship. His left side was all bruised, Conn saw, and he was bleeding from a cut on his arm, but he looked hale enough.
Raef said, “The ship is sinking. I think that damned toothed thing tore one of the strakes loose.”
Aslak bawled, “Come over here! Come on—half my crew’s gone anyway.” He turned, and gave orders, and his ship began to scull sideways toward Conn’s.
Conn shouted, “Seabird—everybody—go over!” He waved his arm. They were already scrambling over so fast the ship rocked, even wallowing half-full of water. Conn went back into the stern and got Finn.
The boy was only half-conscious. His leg had swollen fat enough to split his legging, the flesh black underneath. Conn lifted him up and he whined. Raef came and helped him carry Finn onto Aslak’s ship. They set him down in the hollow of the sterncastle, behind the steering bench. Raef went off immediately. Conn found some beer, but Finn choked on it. His eyes opened, wide and dark with pain. Conn left the beer by him and stood up.
Amidships he saw Raef standing also, his arms at his sides, watching Seabird go down. Conn went up beside him. For a while their dragonship seemed to float, still, even awash, but then suddenly it went down out of sight into the dark green deep. The last thing he saw was her little fierce-eyed dragon head. Raef said nothing, only stood there. Conn felt the heart in him crack like a rock in the fire.
He looked around, and found Aslak up by the bow. He went there, looking toward Hakon’s fleet against the far shore. Where they were, in the center of the bay, the Jomsvikings were drinking and eating and bailing their ships out. Conn could see three other ships sinking in a single glance.
He said, “What kind of help is Hakon looking for?”
Aslak had a little skin of beer and he took a pull on it. He nodded with his head toward the island in the middle of the bay.
“You see that island? It’s called the Blessed Place. There are altars there half as old as the Ash Tree. Hakon may have a problem. He switched sides once too often. I’ve heard his patron goddesses are still angry for when he turned Christian.”
He slung an arm around Conn’s shoulders. “I’m glad to have you on board, boy—you’re a damned good fighter.”
Conn flushed; to hide this pleasure he turned, and glanced around at his crew. That took the glow away. He had not realized how many were gone. He was losing everything— his ship, the crew that made her fly. He had to win now.
He turned back to Aslak. “This Christian thing seems common enough. Even Sweyn’s been primesigned.” He took the skin and drank, and leaned out to pass the skin to Raef.
Aslak was sitting on the front bench, his knees wide, and his arms bent across them. “Hakon didn’t stay a Christer very long—just until he got away from Bluetooth.”
“So he’s betrayed everybody,” Conn said.
“Oh, yes. At least once. And beaten everybody. German, Swede, Dane, and Norse. At least once.” With a grimace Aslak stretched one leg out and rubbed his calf. Blood squished from the top of his shoe.
Conn said, “But we are winning this one.”
Aslak said, “Yes, I think so. So far.”
VI.
In the blazing sun past noon Hakon’s ships gathered again, and the golden dragon was in the center. They came forward again across the bay, and the Jomsvikings swung into lines to meet them.
Even as they rowed up a cold wind began to blast. Conn, pulling an oar in the front of Aslak’s ship, felt the harsh slash of the air on his cheek and looked west and saw a cloud boiling up over the horizon, black and swelling like a bruise on the sky. His skin went all to gooseflesh and his dream came back to him. The line of the Jomsviking ships swept toward Hakon and the storm cloud climbed up over half the sky, heavy and dark, the wind ripping streamers away like hair. Under it the air flickered, thick and green.
Conn bent to his oar. Up the center of Aslak’s ship came four men with spears, wh
ich they cast, but the wind flung them off like splinters. A roll of thunder boomed across the sky. Inside the towering cloud lightning glowed. The first drops fell, and then all at once sheets of rain hammered down.
Aslak was screaming the oar-chant, because of the mixed crew. Conn threw all his strength into each stroke. The rain battered on his head, his bare shoulders, streamed cold down his chest. Hakon’s ships in their line loomed over them; he shipped the oar and drawing his sword wheeled toward the bow.
As he rose the wind met him so hard he had to stiffen himself against it, and then suddenly as if the sky broke into tiny pieces and fell on him, it began to hail.
He stooped, half-blinded in the white deluge, feeling the ship under him rub another ship, and saw through the haze of flying ice the shape before him of a man with an axe. He struck. Raef was beside him, hip to hip. The axe came at him and he slashed again, blind, into the white whirling storm. Somebody screamed, somewhere. There was hail all in his beard, his hair, his eyebrows. Abruptly the booming fall stopped. The rain pattered away and the sun broke through, glaring.
He staggered back a step. The ship was full of hailstones and water; Raef, beside him, slumped down on the bench, gasping for breath. Blood streamed down his face, his shoulders. Conn wheeled to look past the bow, toward Hakon’s men.
The Tronder fleet had backed off again, but they were not fleeing; they were letting Sigvaldi flee.
Conn let out a howl of rage. Off toward the west, at the end of the Jomsviking line, Sigvaldi’s big dragon suddenly had broken out of line, was stroking fast away up the bay, and behind it, the other Jomsviking ships were peeling out of their formation and following.
Conn leapt up onto the gunwale of Aslak’s ship, his hand on the dragon’s neck, and shouted, “Run! Run, Sigvaldi, you coward! Remember your vow? The Jomsviking way, is it—I’ll not run—not if I’m the last man here and he sends all the gods against me, I’ll not run!”
From behind him came a howl from Aslak’s ship and the ships beyond. Conn pivoted his head to see them—back there all the other men shouted, and shook their fists toward Sigvaldi, and waved their swords at Hakon. Bui in their midst bellowed like a bull, red-faced. There were ten ships, he thought. Ten left, from sixty. Aslak stood before him, and put his hand on Conn’s shoulder and met his eyes.
“If it’s my doom here, I’ll meet it like a man. Let’s show them how true Jomsvikings fight!”
Conn gripped his hand. “To the last man!”
“It will be that,” Raef said, behind him.
Bui shouted, from the next dragon, “Aslak! Aslak! King of Norway! Lash the ships together!”
Aslak’s head pivoted, looking toward Hakon. “He’s coming.”
“Hurry,” Conn said.
They drew all the ships together, gunwale to gunwale, and lashed them with the rigging through the oar holes; so all the men were free to fight, and the ships formed a sort of fighting floor. The Tronder fleet was spreading out to encircle them. Conn went back into the stern of Aslak’s dragon, where Finn lay, his eyes closed, still breathing, and pulled a shield across him. Then he went back up beside Raef.
VII.
Horns blew in the Tronder fleet, the sound rolling around the bay, and then the ships all at once closed on the Jomsvikings on their floating ship-island. The air darkened, the cold wind blasted. The rain began to fall, and like icy rocks the hail descended on them again. Conn could barely stand against the wind and the pelting hailstones. Through the driving white he saw a man with an axe heave up over the gunwale, another just behind, and he slashed out, and on the hailstrewn floor he slipped and fell on his back. Raef strode across him. Raef slashed wildly side to side with his sword, battling two men at once, until Conn staggered up again, and cut the first axeman across the knees and dropped him.
The hail stopped. In the rain they battered at a wall of axeblades trying to hack their way over the gunwale. Horns blew. The Tronders were falling back again. Conn stepped back, breathing hard, his hair in his eyes; his knee was swelling and hurt as if somebody was driving a knife into it. The sun came out again, blazing bright.
On the next ship Bui swayed back and forth, covered with blood. Both hands were gone. His face was hacked to the bone. He stooped, and looped his stumped arms through the handles of his chest of gold.
“All Bui’s men overboard,” he shouted, and leapt into the bay, the gold in his arms. He sank at once into the deep.
The sunlight slanted in under a roof of cloud. The long sundown had begun. Beneath the clouds the air was already turning dark. Hakon’s horns blew their long booming notes, pulling his fleet off.
Aslak sank down on a bench. The side of his face was mashed so that one eye was almost invisible. Raef sat next to him, slack with fatigue. Conn went down the ship, whose whole side had taken the Tronder attack. He was afraid if he sat down his knee would stiffen entirely. What he saw clenched his belly to a knot.
Arn lay dead on the floor, his head split to the red mush of his brain. The two men next to him were bleeding, but alive, were Jomsvikings, not his. Beyond them Rugr slumped, and Conn stooped beside him and tried to rouse him but he fell over, lifeless. Two other dead men lay on the floor of the ship and he had to climb across a bench to get around them. He went up to the stern, where Finn lay, still breathing, in the dark.
Conn laid one hand on him, as if he could hold the life in him. He looked back along the ship, at the living and wounded, and saw no other face that had rowed on Seabird with him save Raef’s. Along the length of Aslak’s ship, he met Raef’s eyes, and knew his cousin was thinking this too.
The ship-fortress was sinking. All over the cluster of lashed hulls, men were dipping and rising, bailing out the water and ice. Several other men came walking across the wooden island, stepping from gunwale to gunwale. They were gathering down by Aslak and Conn went back that way, wading through a soup of hail and rainwater that got deeper toward the bow. He sat down next to Raef, with the other men, slumped wearily around Aslak.
All save him and Raef were Jomsvikings. Havard had a skin of beer and held it out to Conn as he sat. Beside him another captain was looking around them. “How many of us are left?”
Aslak shrugged. “Maybe fifty. Half wounded. Some really bad wounded.” His voice was a little thick from the mess of his face.
Conn took a deep pull on the skin of beer. The drink hit his stomach like a fist. But a moment later the warmth spread through him. He handed the skin on to Raef, just behind him.
The Jomsviking across from Conn said, “Hakon will sit out the night on the shore, in comfort. Then they’ll finish us off tomorrow, unless we all just drown tonight.”
Conn said, “We have to swim for it.” He had a vague idea of reaching shore, and walking around and surprising Hakon from behind.
Havard leaned forward, his bloody hands in front of him. “That’s a good idea. We could probably make that side, there.” He pointed the other way from Hakon.
“That’s far,” Raef said. “Some of these men can’t swim two strokes.”
Aslak said, “We could lash some spars together. Make a raft.”
Havard leaned closer to Conn, his voice sinking. “Look. The ones who can make it, should. Leave the rest behind—they’re dying anyway.”
Conn thought of Finn, and the red rage drove to his feet. He hit Havard in the face as hard as he could. The Jomsviking pitched backwards head over heels into the half foot of water on the floor. Conn wheeled toward the others.
“We take everybody. All, or none.”
Aslak was grinning at him. The other men shifted a little, glaring down at Havard, who sat up.
“Look. I was just—”
“Shut up,” Aslak said. “Let’s get moving. This ship is sinking.”
In the slow-gathering dark they tied spars together into a square, and bound sails over it. The rain held off. On the raft they laid the ten wounded men who could not move by themselves, and the other men swam behind the raft to push
it.
The icy water gripped them. They left the sinking ships behind them. At first they moved steadily along but after a while men started to lag behind, to drag on the raft. Havard cried, “Keep up!” Across the way someone tried to climb onto the spars and the men beside him pulled him back.
Next to Conn, Aslak said, “We’ll never make it.” He was gasping; he laid his head down on the spar a moment. Conn knew it was true. He was exhausted, he could barely kick his legs. Aslak lost his grip, and Conn reached out and grabbed hold of him until the Jomsviking could get his hands back to the spar.
Raef said, breathless, “There’s a skerry—”
“Go,” Conn said.
The skerry was only a bare rock rising just above the surface of the bay. They hauled and kicked and dragged the raft into the low waves lapping it. The rock was slippery and it took all Conn’s strength to haul Finn up off the raft. Raef dragged Aslak after them and above the waterline they lay down on the rock, and instantly Conn was asleep.
Hail fell again in the night. Conn woke, and crawled over to Finn, to protect him from the worst of it. After the brief crash abruptly stopped he realized that the body under him was as cold as the rock.
He thought of the other dead—of pop-eyed Gorm, and Odd, whose sister he had loved once, and Skeggi and Bjorn, Sigurd and Rugr—he remembered how only the night before, they were all alive, speaking of the battle to come, how its fame and theirs would ring around the world until the end of time—now who would even remember their names, when all those who knew them were dead with them? The battle might be a long-told story but the men were already forgotten.
He would remember. But he would be dead soon himself. Hakon had beaten him. He put his face against the cold stone and shut his eyes.
In the morning Raef woke up, battered and stiff, starving and thirsty. All around him on the rock the other men lay slumped asleep, or dead. Between him and Conn, Finn was dead. Raef crawled up higher on the skerry and found a hollow where some hail had fallen and mostly melted. He plunged his face into the ice-studded water and drank. When he lifted his head, he saw, on the bay, the dragons coming for them.