One whole side of it was missing - torn away, as if savaged by a wild animal. His left eye hung out, the flesh from forehead to chin scraped off, as if by a great claw. The hair was matted with blood, forming a stark contrast to the still neat coiffure on its opposite side. Below, the left arm was half missing, wrenched away at the elbow, from which clot-strewn shreds of flesh hung, trembling as the creature moved.
In a fleeting moment of incongruous recollection, Atli realised had seen something like it before. Once, the people of his village had found a stranger - they never knew who he was, nor from where he had come - who had blundered too close to one of the bears that lived on the mountain. Felled by a single blow which had ripped through his face and shoulder, he was hauled away by hunters who had warned the creature off its meal. But that man had been stone dead. This man, impossibly, stood before them, gesticulating weirdly with his remaining arm like an uncoordinated infant, a strange, hissing grunt escaping his half-mouth.
Bjólf allowed himself a split second of doubt before striking. Why had this man not drawn his weapon, or made to defend himself? He had never encountered so unflinching a foe. Was it the sickness that so disordered this creature's mind?
Seeing the ghastly half-grin of the face, he did not stop to question his advantage. Using all his momentum, he swung his sword in a steep arc, bringing it down on the base of the neck with such force that its bones snapped and sprang apart either side of its edge, leaving the body sliced across to the edge of the ribcage. He drew his blood-slicked blade from the cleaved flesh without pause, the nauseating sound of metal scraping bone echoing in the chest cavity. The momentum spun the hapless victim around as he did so. The man's head, right arm and shoulder teetered away from the rest of the body for a moment, revealing a sticky mess of black, half congealed gore, then its legs buckled and it collapsed in an ungainly heap with a horrid, sickening crunch.
Bjólf looked back at his men, sword extended, crumpled body at his feet. As if in response to the sound of the impact, a chorus of groans had come from the throats of the other staggering figures, and they had started dragging their half-dead limbs towards him, clawed hands outstretched, as if seeking revenge for their own lost brother. But Bjólf's men, seeing the fall of the first of them and their captain's expression of defiance, were suddenly spurred to greater boldness.
The night-stalkers were real, but they were not immortal. Nor were they immune to the bite of the sword's blade. With a great shout, swords and axes flying, the first rank of warriors hurled themselves at their expressionless opponents.
As his men engaged the enemy with a clash of steel and bone, something cold gripped Bjólf from behind, throwing him off balance. A putrid smell filled his nostrils. Staggering back, reeling at the sickening stench, he grasped at the thing about his throat, the grip of his fingers slipping against its cold and yielding surface. It was an arm, but so rotted as to resemble little more than bone dipped in oily grease. A horrid, hollow moan sounded in his ear like a cold wind blown through an empty skull. He could hear teeth gnashing and rattling together like a bag of shaken runestones. Tearing desperately at the ruined limb - astounded by the strength still in it - he felt the crack of bone and the snap of shrunken sinew as he heaved it away from him, nearly retching at the proximity of it. For an instant, as he struggled to regain his balance, its clawed hand twitched and grasped convulsively before his face. Another horrid groan assailed him. Then, feet planted firmly, he twisted hard and suddenly, flinging the half-dead thing off him. He whipped around, striking instinctively with his sword. The thrusting blade met little resistance, passing right through the ribs and skewering the man like a pig, through the heart.
For a moment, they regarded each other from either end of the weapon.
Man? Bjólf looked on in appalled disbelief. This was no man. Not any more. The bones - completely exposed where the rotted, colourless rags of his clothes no longer clung - were held together by shreds of gristle and sinew, withered like whipcords, the flesh so advanced in putrefaction that it was now no more than a covering of slimy, stinking jelly. The face grinned perpetually like a mask, its jaw clacking up and down. Within the ribs and body cavity, dark, glistening, shifting shapes lurked; in death this creature seemed to have given rise to whole new forms of writhing, wriggling life whose nature Bjólf had no desire to know. Finally he understood Gunnar's words. It was absolutely as he had described; a puppet of rotten flesh and bones.
The figure advanced towards him. It was not falling. Not collapsing. Not even flinching at the wound - a wound that should have been instantly fatal to the healthiest of men, let alone such a wretched, degraded body as this. As it came, it impaled itself further upon the blade, with no more care than a living man might show pushing through a thicket.
The undead thing before him shifted forward another staggering step, and he felt his blade scrape against its backbone. He was now, he realised, faced with an intriguing philosophical problem. How do you separate a soul from its body, when the body has no soul? There was no time for such conundrums. Drawing the sword rapidly, he swung around and aimed low, at the creature's left leg. Bone shattered. The creature fell at his feet. As it continued to grasp and crawl, as if the injury were no more than an irritation, he stood over it, then brought the blade crashing down upon the skull, its black, oily contents splattering the wet grass.
It did not move again.
"Get them in the head!" he called out. "Do not rely on anything else!"
Then he spat, in an attempt to rid his mouth of the all-pervading tang of festering death, and looked back up to the wooden rampart. Emerging from out of the right-hand bank of trees were another two dozen death-walkers, creeping towards them erratically like damaged beetles.
Elsewhere, the fighting had been no less chaotic. At first, it seemed all too easy. The foe was slow moving, and even the few who had weapons made no move to use them. Flailing both sword and axe before him - making up in sheer brute force what he lacked in style - Gunnar had cut a swathe through the rag-tag group of figures, knocking three of them flat with as many blows. Others around him had similar success. Only Atli was hesitant, stopping where Bjólf had felled the first of them and staring, horror-stricken, at what remained. But it wasn't so much the battle-carnage it had suffered that horrified him. It was the fact that the elegantly coiffured half-face was still swivelling its one good eye and snapping its jaws.
"Hurry up, little man!" called out Gunnar. "There'll be none left!"
Then came the slow realisation. Only gradually did they discover that, of those they had struck down and left for dead, more than half were regaining their feet. For some, that knowledge dawned late. Both Fjölvar and Jarl were attacked from behind by men who should not have survived their assault. One - a stocky peasant of a man, whose grey, shapeless face looked as if it had slid out of connection with his skull, and who Fjölvar had taken down with an arrow to the chest - grappled him to the floor, then fell on top of him, the fletched end of the arrow catching Fjölvar in the throat. Scrabbling for his knife, choking at the wound, Fjölvar stabbed the man in the neck, then hurled him off and fired another arrow point blank into his eye.
Jarl was not so fortunate. A horrid apparition of a woman - once beautiful, perhaps, but now a ragged, bony wraith with milky, staring eyes - grabbed from behind at his head, catching him around the face with the talons of her flesh-stripped fingers and driving her long, bared teeth into his exposed neck. He cried out, temporarily blinded and trailing blood, while another of the ghouls, utterly destroyed from the waist down, reached up and, biting to the bone, chewed noisily upon his hand. Crashing blows from Gunnar's axe saw both of them off before Jarl succumbed.
It was those with stabbing weapons and arrows who came off worst - and of those, many fell victim to their own shock at their fallen enemies' sudden resurrection. But then Bjólf's cry had gone up, and those with axes - and especially Úlf with his mace, which was rarely aimed at anything but a skull - made quick w
ork of those remaining. Atli, who had not struck a single blow, breathed a sigh of relief.
Then, with sinking heart, he saw the second, larger force of ghouls lumbering between them and the gates. The men drew together again, weapons readied.
"Gods! How many of them are there?" exclaimed Gunnar.
"How many have died here?" muttered Godwin.
"It's the noise," came a voice. It was Einarr. "The noise of battle draws them."
"There will be more of that before the night is out," said Bjólf grimly, staring through the rain at the broken line of silhouettes that swayed slowly, relentlessly towards them. He drew a whetstone from the bag on his belt and ran it along his sword blade, drawing sustenance from its sharp, clear sound. "Take down all in your way. Protect your fellows. Ignore the rest. We'll lose no more men tonight. And remember, aim for the head."
What followed was horribly confused and disjointed in Atli's mind - a nightmare of flickering shadows, teeming rain, roaring torch flames, groaning, leering faces and the sickening crack of steel against skull and jaw. And everywhere the stench of the grave.
At first, the men had formed into a tight group, in which Atli was more than happy to hide from harm. But as the mindless creatures clustered around like pigs at the trough, pressing in at them, surrounding them, the need to disperse became clear. The group broke, scattering the disordered ranks of the enemy as they drove forward, taking them down wherever they could. Here and there, torches were swung with a great roar of fire and a cascade of sparks as they struck their targets. Sometimes, the undead burned briefly in the downpour, flailing, blinded by flame. It did not kill them. But it did provide precious time and a clear target for the decisive blow.
Atli, meanwhile, had decided to skirt around the death-walkers where they were thinnest, far out on the right side. One of the few to have a shield as well as a sword, he was at least comforted by the knowledge that there was some solid linden wood between him and the gnashing teeth of these monstrous creatures. What he lacked, as soon became abundantly clear, was any fire to light his way. In the darkness, the uneven ground between the path and the edge of the trees rose up to meet his feet in every kind of unexpected way, jarring his knees and turning his feet as he stumbled across the rough grass. Cursing his lack of light, he clenched his teeth, held his weapon tight, and kept the torches upon the watchtowers fixed firmly in his sights - beacons he knew would see him back to safety.
As he went, he chanced to look to his left, across the ragged line of men, their torches dimly visible in the thrashing rain. Only then did he understand how fortunate he had been.
At first, he thought it an optical illusion - an exaggerated impression caused by the light thrown from the torches, making their surroundings more immediately visible. But no... there was something else. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, it became clear from this distant perspective that the crew's torches were actually serving as beacons for the corpse-creatures - that they drew the mindless foe to their intended victims as a candle flame draws a moth. He smiled to himself, then, as he pounded closer to his goal, suddenly thrilled with his own shrewd judgement, and thankful for the fortuitous lack of light which, just moments before, he had so ardently wished.
Suddenly, he barrelled straight into something large and solid. Losing his footing, he bowled over heavily, barking his shin on a rock and thudding onto the sodden ground, his front tooth cracking against his shield, his seax flying off into the dark. The fall, made worse by the weight of his mail coat, had knocked the wind clean out of him. For a moment he lay, crippled and wheezing, trying to get his bearings. There were no lights visible now, and only gradually did he realise that the sticky wetness on his face was not just from rain or mud. He put his hand to it. It was slick and viscous. Had he done himself some injury? Apart from his throbbing shin and chipped tooth he felt no pain. Then a foetid smell stang his nostrils. He felt sick, suddenly struck by the horrible feeling that he had fallen headlong into the rotting carcass of an animal, or worse.
Then the dark object let out a low, half-human groan, and took a faltering step towards him.
As Atli scrabbled to his knees the cloud cover began to break, and the watery light of the half-moon illuminated the scene.
To one side of him, and just a body's length away, towered a massive figure. Broad shouldered and thickly muscled, it was dressed in a simple, plain tunic - white in the moonlight - which the downpour had so completely soaked that it was plastered to its body. From its foot, a long length of muddy cloth dragged, while upon its chest was a great patch of congealed, blood - blood which, Atli now realised to his horror, had left the thick, stinking residue upon his face. He retched, frozen to the spot. Then the clouds cleared further to cast a less broken light upon the pale monster's shadowed visage, and a new kind of horror gripped him.
Long hair hung in lank shreds to the shoulders, a horrible vertical wound made the mangled neck gape open like badly butchered meat, the forked beard was stained with blood which had streamed from the mouth, and now hung from it in quivering clots. But it was the face itself that struck him through like a blade. Though handsome and well-proportioned, it had been rendered gaunt and ugly by death, its flesh as grey as ash, its lifeless, unblinking eyes expressing nothing. But Atli recognised it, nonetheless.
It was Gøtar.
Atli was struck by the insane thought that the man had returned to reclaim the helm that now sat upon his head, to mete out a horrible revenge on the foolish, arrogant boy imposter who dared to dress in the garb of a warrior. It was action that pulled him past that paralysing fear. The hulking mockery made a sudden lunge for him with its huge, muscular arms, a ghastly wheezing cry rising from its ruptured throat. With shock and alarm, Atli was awoken from his horrified trance to the reality of his surroundings. He dodged and looked about him, desperately aware that if others heard the sounds, they would be drawn to him too.
And then he realised he had no sword.
He did not even think about drawing his axe. Instead, some other instinct caught hold. As the creature lurched toward him again, he raised his battered shield and charged at it with every ounce of his strength. The iron shield boss crunched into the death walker's chest; with all the weight of body and mail behind him, Atli slammed his shoulder hard against its wooden boards. To his surprise, he did not stop dead against that great column of flesh, but kept on going. Stumbling clumsily as the obstacle gave way before him, he fell, rolled over in the dark, wet grass, righted himself and, unharmed, scrambled to his feet. The great figure crashed backwards onto the ground with all the crushing force of a felled tree, its limbs flailing and twitching like a freshly slaughtered ox. Panting with the effort, his head spinning, he tried to think what his next move should be. Dozens of disordered thoughts - incomplete or too fast to properly grasp - cascaded through his mind. Out of the chaos, one clear, urgent thought came. Run, said a voice in his head. Run, run, run!
He fought to stir his trembling, leaden limbs, unable to take his eyes off the stirring, groaning thing that he knew would be on its feet in moments, its head wobbling, turning toward him. He finally broke the paralysis, took a step backward, and his heel met something hard and sharp in the grass.
Steinarrsnautr.
Once again, something swifter than thought took him over. In the next moment he found himself poised over the great beast, sword raised high above his head, hardly knowing how he got there. He had one final, chilling look into the hollow, empty eyes of the man whose dying thoughts had been of generosity towards him. Then, with a force that left Atli shocked, as if it somehow came from outside of him, the heavy blade crashed down upon the creature's neck, chopped through the throat and jarred against breaking bones. Black blood spilled.
Such was the second passing of Gøtar, son of Svein.
When he thought back on it later, Atli could remember nothing of the journey to the gates of the stockade. His feet simply pounded the earth without thought, as if somehow independent of the fa
ct that his heart was bursting out of his chest, until the nightmare was far behind him and the huge pine logs that represented his salvation towered over him. The mindless rhythm was fuelled by a chant repeated over and over under his struggling breath, the words of which he was barely conscious: I'm sorry... I'm sorry... I'm sorry...
At the gates, the men had gathered - breathless, soaked from the storm, their weapons dark with the blood of their enemies. Bjólf beat upon the massive timbers with the pommel of his sword, then stood back and squinted up through the stinging flecks of rain at the watchtower.
"Open up!" he bellowed.
Behind Bjólf and his men, all was now silent. But before them, beyond the rampart, voices could once again be heard raised in argument. Among them, though almost drowned out by the chaotic bickering of numerous unidentifiable men and women, the familiar tones of the crewmen Bjólf had ordered to stay at the gate, now raised in anger.
Gunnar and several other of the men on the outside of the stockade looked anxiously at the dark line of trees, aware that there was fresh movement there. But before Bjólf could raise his voice again, a head appeared at the top of the watchtower. It was the old man, Klaufi.
"Open the gates, old man!" called Bjólf.
"I cannot," said Klaufi. Bjólf stared back up at him in disbelief.
Klaufi merely shrugged. "It is forbidden to open the gates without the express permission of..."
Bjólf's curt reply cut him off. "Whatever gods you follow, you'd better start praying to them, because unless you open these gates right now..."
Viking Dead Page 17