Meadowland Tom Holt

by Meadowland (lit)

  Bits had put Sigurd Eyes up in the top hayloft, with two others to relay what he said back to the rest of us inside the house. Sigurd had been up there the best part of two days, so you'd have had to forgive him if he'd let his attention wander. But he saw the leather-boaters as they started walking out of the woods, and he called down how many of them he could see as they came: first five, then a round dozen, then a gap and then another fifteen. We were all sitting on the benches in the hall as the relay called out the numbers, all of us frantically adding up the total in our heads. All told, it came to eighty-one; so we were outnumbered, but not badly Actually, Bits had assumed that there'd be more of them than there were of us, which was why he'd picked a tight place for the battlefield: a small area turns a large force of men into a hindrance rather than an advantage.

  They had bows and arrows, the relay told us; also spears and axes with stone heads, and small round shields made of leather stretched on a birchwood frame. None of them had what we'd call armour, needless to say since they didn't use iron or steel, but quite a few of them were wearing three or four layers of fur coats, which would quite likely cushion a half-hearted cut or turn a long-range arrow All in all, it sounded like they knew what they were doing, which was more than could be said for most of us. Oh, we weren't complete virgins when it came to fighting; half a dozen of the older men in Bits's crew had fought vikings once, in the Norway fjords, and nearly all of us had played at sparring with sticks against our fathers and brothers, back when we were kids. Where I come from, you don't really tend to learn fighting; it's assumed that you know how, by light of nature. Earls and rich farmers' sons may spend an hour or so with an old farmhand who was a viking in his youth, learning a few guards and passes and maybe a bit of footwork, but most of us have better things to do with our time.

  Still, we were ready for them, or as ready as we'd ever be; and we listened as the relay told us that they'd seen the bull and didn't like the look of it - they were following the path up beside the lake, exactly as we wanted them to. When Bits heard that, he nodded to Mord and Hrut and Grim; they were in charge of the archery detail, a dozen or so men who had some idea of which end of the arrow you're supposed to pull on. The archers got up and filed out; they were to get up onto the roof of the cowshed, which was hard up by the palisade on the lake side, and shoot arrows into the leather-boaters as they passed. With luck they'd drop one or two, and then skip out of the way before the enemy could shoot back; that was supposed to stop them in their tracks and give the rest of us time to assemble at the side gate, ready for our glorious charge.

  So the archers went out; the rest of us sat very still, giving them time to get in position. Kari was next to me; for some reason I couldn't fathom, Bits had entrusted him with a long-handled Danish axe, though Kari's never been able to split a cord of logs without missing his mark and knocking the axe-head off. I had my hand-axe, of course, and my knife; and I was trying to make up my mind what I was going to do. Sensible thing, of course, would be to find some big, tall, broad bugger and stay close in behind him for as long as possible; but a part of me was saying that the right thing to do was to get up front and engage the enemy And then there was Kari to consider; someone was going to have to look out for him, since he wasn't to be trusted to take care of himself, and it seemed unlikely that anybody else'd be inclined to bother. Mostly I was thinking, how much will it hurt, to have a chunk of sharp stone forced through my skin and inside me? What if I'm not killed dead, but they cut off my arm or my hand or my leg? Or I could get bashed over the head, and you can go blind from that. Back home, you see men who've been in baffles and had bits of themselves chopped off, and some of them learn to cope pretty well with just one hand or one leg, and some of them would've been far better off dead, for all the good being alive does them. Which would be worst, crippled or blinded? Or what if we lost, and all of us were killed except me, and I was left lying in a messy heap of dead bodies with both legs busted? Before a battle, it's really really hard to think about anything except pain. If you've never been in one before, you think back to all the horrible accidents you've seen - men who've fallen off roofs or been crushed by falling trees or gored by bulls. You think of the terrible damage that can happen to a body, the splintered bones and the raw flesh, fouled with mud or dust and small bits of stone and twig. You think of needles of smashed rib poking up through skin, and how much it hurts when you bash your head on a branch or a rock, hard enough to break the scalp. I suppose there's men in this world brave enough or vicious enough to think of other things before a battle, but there's not many of them. You don't actually dwell much on the possibility of dying, or what that'd actually mean. Most everybody just thinks about how much it's going to hurt.

  When Bits told us it was time, I stayed close to a man called Bjari Grimolfson, who was one of the men who'd fought the vikings; he was with his best mate, Thorbrand Snorrason, and Olitar joined us just as we were leaving the house. I looked round for Kari, but he'd lagged behind and I couldn't get back to him through the crowd in the doorway I worried about that all the way across the yard to the side gate.

  We were about two-thirds of the way across the yard when I heard yelling from outside the palisade; the archers had let loose too early, before we were where we were meant to be. Some of the men started to run, and for a while we were bumping into each other, shoving and stumbling and getting in a tangle, not a good idea when you're all pressed up together and every one of you is carrying something sharp in his hands. I was sort of swept out of the gate along with the rest; I was holding my axe down by my right knee, so nobody'd cut himself on it, and I couldn't draw my knife for fear of injuring somebody so it had to stay on my belt. Bjari'd got behind me somehow and he was trying to get past me but he couldn't; his shoulder was wedged in behind mine and he was shoving me along, so fast that I couldn't find my feet or my balance. Then for some reason we stopped short, and I was pushed forward. I ran into the back of Thorbrand Snorrason and trod on the calf of his left leg; he tried to turn round but he was wedged in too tight, so he swore at me instead, and I was more scared of him smashing my face in for being clumsy than I was of the enemy just for a moment or so. Then we were moving again; and an arrow dropped down out of absolutely nowhere. It came down almost vertical, grazed the side of Ohtar's head, skidded off his collar and fell feathers-down right in front of me. I heard it snap under my foot. I could feel Ohtar's blood on my nose and cheeks and I told myself, it's all right, even tiny scratches on the scalp bleed like shit; Olitar didn't seem to have noticed he'd been cut. Then something else came down out of the sky, whirred over my head and landed with a very solid, chunky sort of noise, and I heard someone behind me yell. Again I was thinking, it's not when people yell that you ought to worry, it's when they're hurt and they're quiet; that's when it's serious. Someone told me that once, I can't remember who; I'm not sure whether it's true or not, but it's the sort of thing that goes through your mind at times like that.

  Then I heard a voice up ahead shouting, 'Fuck it, they're slinging rocks!' Of course, I couldn't see anything much, apart from the back of Thorbrand's head, but we all came to another sudden sharp halt, like when you walk into something solid in the dark. You can tell when the men in front of you are scared; it's a lot of little things, like the silence when they all go very quiet, the way they stand dead still for a moment, the smell when some poor bugger in the line shits himself in terror. It's bad enough when you can see what's going on, or you know what the sudden new danger's likely to be. When you haven't got a clue, other than someone up ahead yelling about flying rocks, it's bloody terrifying. You don't know if it's an ambush, or enemy reinforcements have turned up, or a sudden attack on the flank, or there's some brilliant tactical ploy your commander hadn't been expecting; or it could be cavalry or catapults or Greek fire, or even bloody elephants for all you know What filters back to you is, it's very bad and it's happening far too close, and you're jammed in the middle and can't get out. That's when men start
trying to turn round and push their way to the rear, and pretty soon everything's fucked up and a hundred times worse than it need be.

  I wasn't the first man to lose it and start shoving, and I wasn't the last either. Not that it made much odds; these things happen so quick, it doesn't really matter. I got myself turned round; at one point I was nose to nose with Bjarni Grimolfson who was staring at me from a few inches away like he couldn't figure out what in hell was going on. Then I managed to slip past him, and Thorbrand shoved past me; I slipped and went down on one knee, landed hard, felt my kneecap go crunch on a stone or something. Just what I needed, I thought, to be caught up in this mess and be hobbling along, not able to run. So many people were pushing and shoving past that it took me a while to get up and back on my feet again, and even then I couldn't keep up, they just slipped and squirmed past me and I was still struggling for my balance. I got both feet planted and found out, to my great joy that I could actually put some weight on my bashed knee, when I noticed that the man pushing past on my left-hand side wasn't anybody I recognised. He was one of the enemy

  That was a very bad moment. I remember thinking, I could just reach over, right now, and run the edge of my axe across the back of his knee, and that'd be him sorted; but if I did that, and somebody noticed, the rest of them'd tear me to pieces. Screw that. So I stopped looking round, fixed my stare dead ahead, saw that the man in front of me was Thorbrand, and kept going, fast as I could. Someone or something clouted me a horrible great scat in the small of the back but I pretended it hadn't happened, and my guess is it was just an accident. If it was one of the leather-boat people trying to harm me, he was pretty half-hearted about it and didn't try again.

  So there we were, in full retreat, with the enemy at our heels; not so good, really I hadn't got a clue what'd gone wrong, or how I was supposed to get out of it; but then we stopped dead again. I crashed into Thorbrand's back and my knee crumpled; I went down hard on my face, and I felt someone's feet on my back, then on my neck - the bastard was walking over me to get to wherever he wanted to go. I lifted my head just a bit, and all I could see was a heel, in a cured-hide shoe sewn up with sinew thread, standing still about six inches from my nose. What happened in the next few moments after that, I'm rather foggy about. There was a yell, a bit of foot-shuffling, and then something big and heavy fell across my shoulders and didn't move at all. My head was pressed sideways, and I saw a hand reach down and pick up an axe off the ground. Then I think someone's foot must've bashed into the back of my head, and I was completely out of it.

  CHAPTER

  T W E LV E

  'Did he tell you,' Kari asked, 'how I saved his life?' I paused before answering. 'Maybe he was going to,' I replied, 'but then Harald called him away to take his turn on watch. So you saved him, then?'

  Kari nodded. 'Well,' he amended, 'as good as. It was me pulled him out from under the pile of dead bodies, and realised he was still alive. That counts, wouldn't you say?'

  'I should think so,' I replied. 'Was he grateful?'

  'Oh, you know how it is,' said Kari, with a shrug. 'You wake up after taking an almighty scat on the head, you don't really know who you are or where, or what's been going on; and people say all sorts of dumb things without really knowing it.'

  'So I gather,' I said. 'So what did Eyvind say?'

  Kari frowned. 'He was lying there on the ground,' he said, 'eyes shut, head all sticky with blood; and he opens his eyes and looks at me for a bit like he'd really been expecting to see someone else, and he says, "Oh fuck, don't say you're here too."'

  'Strange,' I said.

  'I thought so. But apparently, he was pretty well convinced that he'd been killed in the fighting, which meant he was either in Heaven or Valhalla; and seeing me, I guess he assumed I'd been killed as well, which obviously upset him. I mean, we've been friends a long time. It was sort of touching.'

  'That explains it,' I said. 'Obviously But he was all right, was he, apart from the bang on the head?'

  'More or less. He was a bit giddy for a while, threw up a couple of times. I reckon he was lucky to get off so lightly being right in the thick of it like that when it all started to go so badly wrong. All thanks to that fuckwit Thorfinn, of course.

  Kari yawned, and wriggled a bit so that his back was resting against the tomb gatepost. The afternoon sun was pleasantly warm, and I could smell the dust. 'Were there many killed in the fighting?' I asked. 'You said something about a pile of bodies.'

  Actually (Kari said), bearing in mind what a screw-up Thorfinn made of it, we were bloody lucky Two dead, one broken leg and a dozen or so with cuts and bruises. The worst of it happened where Eyvind was. The man next to him, Thorbrand, was killed by an arrow; we found him lying on his back with half a flint arrowhead sticking out from right between his eyes, and he had a weird sort of stunned look on his face, like he hadn't believed a bit of stone tied to a stick could be so dangerous.

  When he went down, the leather-boaters thought they'd won; they started crowding forward, shoving us back, and that was when Bjarni Grimolfson got killed. Stabbed in the guts with a flint spear; and the man who'd killed him grabbed his axe out of his hands and swung it round his head with a horrible yell and lashed out at the nearest target -

  Ohtar, I think it was; he was off-balance and looking the other way but luckily for him the leather-boater missed him completely and drove the axe into the ground. It hit a stone and the back horn of the blade snapped off like an icicle and nearly put his eye out. Bloody fool dropped it like it was on fire - I suppose he thought it was bewitched or accursed or something - and turned and ran like a hare.

  That put a bit of a check on their advance, and maybe they'd have buggered off and left us in peace if it hadn't been for Thorfinn's brilliant plan of turning the bull loose in their rear. Stunning piece of thinking, that; because, of course, what happened was that they were far more scared of the bull than they were of us, and the men at the back of the mob just wanted to get as far away from it as they could. Last thing they wanted to do was go towards the bull, so their only way out was through us, or over us, whatever it took. So there was the bull driving them along, and they were pushing us back just as fast, and we had nowhere to go because our backs were to the palisade. We'd have been really screwed.

  'Just a moment,' I interrupted. 'It sounds to me like you had a much better view of what was happening than Eyvind did.'

  'That's right,' Kari replied. 'I was up on the cowshed roof, with the archery detail.'

  'I didn't know you were an archer.'

  He grinned. 'I'm not. But it was a damn sight safer up there; and when they started chucking those rocks at us out of their catapult-'

  'Catapult?' I queried.

  'Didn't Eyvind tell you? Oh yes, they had a sort of siege engine thing - a bit rough and ready compared to your wonderful Greek machines, but it did the job. Basically it was like a giant spoon with a very long handle, powered by ropes of twisted hide. It threw a rock as big as your head, very scary. Could've done a lot of harm if they'd been able to aim it any sense.

  'Good heavens,' I said.

  'I know what you mean; them not having any kind of metal, but being smart enough to make a siege engine. That was the thing about them, see: they weren't dumber or smarter than us, just a bit different, and there were more things we had in common with them than there were differences. I mean, we were wearing the same sort of clothes, ate a lot of the same sorts of food, which is a way of saying we were living off the same land. Main difference was, we stayed put in houses and they wandered around living in tents. But that's beside the point. Yes, I was up on the roof there; I doubled back as soon as our boys started to give way - I didn't fancy getting caught up in a crush where I couldn't move my arms and legs, and the roof seemed a good place to go. I was still doing my bit in the battle, mind, because I sat up on the roof and threw down several of the rocks their siege engine'd slung up there. I hit one of the bastards, I think I may've smashed his arm, or his co
llarbone. Anyhow, it looked like it hurt, and served him right. Can't blame me for getting out of harm's way, can you?'

  'I guess it's what I'd have done,' I said. 'Of course, I'm only a clerk.'

  Like I was saying (Kari went on), it was looking pretty bad for our side: two dead, and we hadn't killed any of them by that stage. They were pushing us right back, and our lot were trapped up against the palisade, nowhere to go.

  Remember, we hadn't got any armour, no helmets or shields. I was really worried, I can tell you.

  But you'll never guess how it ended, or who saved us. Of all people, it was Gudrid, Thorfinn's wife. To this day I don't know what prompted her to do it. My guess is, she got so pissed off watching from the house while her idiot husband was trying his best to get us all killed that she finally couldn't stand it any longer. She came running out of the side gate, up the side of the battle; hair all down on her shoulders, waving her arms and yelling bloody murder. Then she sees where Thorbrand Snorrason was lying dead, and that seemed to be the last straw She grabs the sword out of his hand and waves it in the air, shrieking at the leather-boat people, really ferocious. They don't know what to make of it: are they supposed to fight her, or what? One of them comes up to her, all wary, like when you see two cats fighting; he's got a spear, and he makes a couple of feeble pokes in her direction, like he's trying to shoo a contrary old sow back into the pighouse. Gudrid yells all sorts of stuff at him -he can't understand a word, but he gets the general idea -and he takes a step back, waggles his spear-point at her like he's getting ready to feint. What does she do? She rips open her bodice, pulls out her right tit and slaps it with the flat of the sword. I could hear the smacking noise right up where I was; it was like hands clapping.