by Tom Holt
I really wish we’d thought of that earlier, but we hadn’t. As it was, we were ten yards or something like that away from the door when a leather-boater came flying out, running so fast that his feet hardly seemed to be touching the ground. A moment later, out came Ohtar. He had his axe in his hand, and the blade was all smeared. Then, inside the house, Gudrid started screaming her head off.
Everybody froze and spun round; except Bits. He grabbed the man standing next to him - just so happened it was Kari. ‘Get that gate shut,’ he yelled in his ear, ‘and someone get that bastard.’ He meant the leather-boater who’d just come out of the house, and he didn’t need to explain - we were way ahead of him. A couple of men made grabs for the runner but he swerved round them; and then Thorhall Eyes stuck out a foot and tripped him, and he went sprawling on the ground, all flying arms and legs.
I’d stopped to watch; but Ketil Mordsson was in the house already pushing past Ohtar, who’d stopped dead and was standing there, his axe hanging from his hand, like he’d just -been woken up while sleepwalking. Gudrid stopped yelling; and Ketil came back out, just as Thorfinn shoved past him, going in.
‘It’s all right,’ Ketil told him. ‘She’s all right, so’s the kid. There’s one of them in there dead, though.’
So then we were all looking at Olitar. ‘That’s right, he said, rather awkwardly ‘I killed him.’ He paused, then went on: ‘They came in snooping around.’ He hesitated again, then added: ‘One of them was creeping up behind Gudrid, where she wasn’t looking. He was going to snatch the kid, so I chopped him.’
The rest of the leather-boaters had realised that something wasn’t right; they were edging back together into a circle, looking at each other, one or two of them talking softly I could see them feeling for their axes in their belts without looking down, and I had a really bad feeling about what was going to happen next. It was like when you’ve cut three parts of the way through a tree on a windy day and as it sways you look up and you can see it’s almost ready to go but not quite. Do you step back clear, in case it comes down, or do you nip back in under it for the couple of good cuts it’ll take to finish it off? That’s what it felt like: one more misunderstanding, or a movement getting taken the wrong way, and we’d have a battle on our hands; we’d kill all of them, and they’d kill two, maybe three of us while we were at it. It was all very ugly, so it was just as well we had Bits in charge. He came out of the house, saw where we’d got to and clapped his hands together hard to get our attention.
‘Open the gate,’ he said, loud and firm but not shouting, ‘and let them go, all of them. Just let them go,’ he repeated. ‘There’s been no harm done, far as we’re concerned.’
As the gate swung open, the leather-boaters edged towards it, not taking their stares off us for a moment. ‘They were trying to steal an axe,’ I heard Ohtar call out. Bits must’ve heard him but he didn’t react.
‘What about the dead man?’ Ketil asked.
‘Soon as they’ve gone, take him outside about a hundred yards and dump him. If they want the body they can come back and take it without having to come in too close.’
One of the leather-boaters wasn’t budging. He was standing his ground and saying something loudly asking a question. Then the man who’d run out of the house said something back, and it struck me that quite likely the rest of them, the ones who’d already gone outside, didn’t know yet about their man getting killed. My guess is that that was why Bits was in such a hurry to get them outside the palisade, before they realised what’d happened.
Anyway the last few of the leather-boaters left; two of his mates had to come back and drag off the man who’d been shouting. We got the gate shut, and then Ketil and a man called Mord Fish brought the dead man outside. Ohtar must’ve given him one hell of a scat, because the top and back of his head were split right open, like a knotty log where you have to drive in wedges to free up the axe. I’m no expert, but I don’t see how you could’ve done that except from behind.
‘What a bloody fuck-up,’ Bits said when he saw the body I have to say I turned my head away It was only the second time I’d seen a man killed with an axe, and it’s not something you get used to easily
We waited a bit; then Bits had them open the gates and drag out the body The men who did it said they hadn’t seen any sign of the leather-boat people; I guessed they’d run for it, and only found out later that they were one short.
After that we all stood round for a while, and nobody said much. Ohtar sat down on a pile of logs and put his face in his hands. I think Bits went indoors to see how Gudrid and the baby were getting on. A couple of the women started collecting up the plates and jugs; I saw one of them brushing mud off a big hunk of cheese that’d been dropped. It was a strange atmosphere, like we were all kids who’d been caught doing something naughty and we were waiting to be yelled at.
Bits came out, and straight away he said, ‘Right, things are going to get difficult from now on. You can bet what you like that they’ll be back, and next time there’s going to be a lot of them, and they won’t be coming to trade. Now we should be all right behind the palisade, but what I’m worried about is the cattle.’ He paused, like he was waiting for someone to argue; then he went on: ‘I want a dozen of you to go up in the woods and make a clearing, where we can hide the cows. Mord, you and Helgi take the bull and let him loose in the small pen - that’ll stop them coming up the track to the gate. We want to make sure we fight them where we want to, and the best place for that’s going to be out back of the barns, between the lake and the woods. If they want to come at the gate without coming past the bull, that’s where they’ll have to go. Any questions?’
Nobody else had anything to say so Bits had us pick up all the bundles and take them inside; no point in all those valuable furs getting trampled underfoot, he said. Meanwhile, he had Olitar and Ketil and me fetch out the weapons that he’d brought in the ship: the spears and swords, and the bows. The lids had warped up tight on the crates, so we had to bash them in with the backs of our axes. We also pulled out the barrels full of mail shirts; but when we’d stove in the lids and tried to turn them out, they wouldn’t budge. See, nobody’d given them any thought since we got there, and I think the sea water had got into them during the voyage; anyhow, they were all rusted up together into a huge brown lump. Soaking them for a week in salt and vinegar might’ve done something for them, but we didn’t have time for that, so we let them bide where they were. I think Bits’d forgotten all about them, because he didn’t mention them at all.
Everybody was a bit quiet and thoughtful while we were handing out the weapons, and nobody really wanted to be given one, like they weren’t too happy about touching them. Bits called out who was to have what; I didn’t get anything, not that I minded. We’d both got our hand-axes, of course, and when things get nasty it’s always best to keep it simple and stick with what you know Bits had one of the swords, and he folded his cloak over his left arm like a shield, very professional; that was Bits for you - everything he did, he made it look like he knew what he was about.
Bits told me to give a spear to Olitar; and while I was over there I said to him, quiet so people wouldn’t hear: ‘So that was your fetch, then.’
He looked up at me. ‘It’s not over yet,’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘Was he really going to grab the kid?’ I asked him, but he didn’t answer, and I didn’t want to make a big thing about it. For what it’s worth, though, I don’t believe in fetches, apart from the ones you carry round with you all the time. I still can’t make up my mind whether Ohtar was under the tree when it fell or whether he was the tree himself. There comes a point, I guess, where the difference is too slight to be worth bothering with. Anyhow, Ohtar took the spear from me and pricked his thumb on the point to see if it was sharp. That surprised me; it’d been lying in the crate all that time and it’d got all fogged up with rust. It was always damp in that corner of the long barn, where we’d stored them.
Since then, of course,
I’ve been a proper soldier, here down south where you’re always fighting some war somewhere; and I’ve learned that battles are one part sheer muscle-snapping effort and ninety-nine parts standing or sitting around waiting for something to happen, and the one part is probably the best of it, even though that’s when people get themselves killed. Maybe that’s why we Northerners make such good soldiers: we can handle the useless waiting better than you people. After all, we sit around all winter waiting for the spring; we sit in our ships while the sea-spray smacks us around; we know how to bide quiet and save our energy, the way dogs and other animals do. But I for one don’t like it - I can feel the time pressing on me, like toothache. I have to make an effort to find something to think about, and even that doesn’t always work. When we fought the Bulgars and the Saracens, back in the old emperor’s time, the officers always said I was a terror for fidgeting. Seems to me that every place I’ve been and everything I’ve done has been more waiting than doing; and I’ve wasted all that time by chafing against it, instead of finding a use for it. Not that it matters a lot. These days, of course, the emperor pays me for my time, whether I do anything useful or not. I tell you, if I’d come down here when I was young Harald’s age, I’d be running the empire by now
Anyhow, we didn’t have long to wait. Two days later - it seemed longer, because we couldn’t do anything while we were waiting, couldn’t go out to see to the stock, couldn’t even walk round the yard collecting the eggs - two days later they came back.
It was early morning, about the time you’d be looking to drive the cows back to the sheds for milking. There was a thin grey mist hanging low, the sort that starts about four feet off the ground and collects round trees and buildings like wisps of wool snagged in the thorns. By mid-morning it’d all have burned away; but it was good cover for the leather-boat people, coming up through the woods. We had the bull in the pen directly facing the point where the woods were nearest to the palisade, on purpose to force them to come between it and the lake. It was a good strategy, based on what we knew about the way they liked to fight, which wasn’t much. They’d killed Thorvald Eirikson with a volley of arrows, and that was about the limit of what we knew; so Bits’s idea was to cramp them up so that only the ones on the outsides could shoot at us. We’d meet them head on at the narrowest place, hold them there if we could, while a couple of us would sneak round, open the pen and drive the bull into their rear.
Good strategy. After all, we had nothing to gain from killing them: what we wanted to do was persuade them that they didn’t want to fight us, now or in the future; and up till then at least they’d been mortal afraid of the bull. If it suddenly turned up out of nowhere, right up their arses while their attention was on the fighting in front, there was a fair chance they’d panic and run for it, maybe even be scared enough to leave us alone for ever. For good measure, Bits decided, we’d drive up the young bullocks as well. You and I know that a dozen young bullocks may act tough, but the worst they’d ever do to you is try and lick you to death; the leather-boat people didn’t know that, though. Anyhow, we reckoned that it might work, and we couldn’t think of anything better in the time available.
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 sta
yed 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.