‘Thormund,’ Mouthpiece said, and watched until the old man on his right turned his head ever so slightly to indicate he was listening. ‘Where is he leading us?’
‘Towards the coast, I imagine,’ Thormund said.
Mouthpiece walked on in silence for a while. A hundred yards or so to their left marched Sweyn Forkbeard’s column. Jolawer’s army looked small by comparison, but for the moment that didn’t matter; they were on the same side. For now.
The snow fell silently, soft and white, all around them: not yet heavy but insistent and unstoppable. Their shoulders were soggy with it and lamb’s wool caps glistened with a mix of new-fallen flakes and freshly melted drops.
‘It snows a lot,’ Mouthpiece tried.
‘It’s winter,’ Thormund snapped.
‘All right,’ Mouthpiece said. ‘It’s not my fault.’
But Thormund simply huffed, sank his scrawny neck further into his furs and marched on, ignoring him.
‘Thormund,’ Mouthpiece said.
‘What?’ he snarled.
Mouthpiece shot him a glance. ‘Did a mink bite your arse this morning? You’re spikier than Sigrid’s underskirt.’
Thormund snorted. ‘I just don’t like where this is headed. Should’ve stayed with Sigurd and Sven.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s taking us to the sea, you idiot. Fucking hate the sea.’ Thormund kicked at the snow and Mouthpiece took an involuntary half-step away to his right. ‘Boats. Always boats, near the sea.’
‘Move it,’ the man behind him grunted.
Mouthpiece hunched his shoulders and bent his head, but as he put one foot in front of the other and tried his best to stop his mind and his mouth, he couldn’t help but think of lambs in slaughtering season.
*
When the sun started its fall towards the horizon, Forkbeard signalled for the halt. Tents were raised quickly and the camp set up as the sky above them turned from the dirty white of sheep’s wool to sword-grey, speckled with fat snowflakes.
‘I cannot think of anything finer than a horse right now,’ Thormund said, rubbing at the outside of his leather shoes. ‘My feet feel like they’re my father’s, and he’s been dead for twenty years. I’d give anything for a horse to ride.’
‘Even if you were Forkbeard?’ Mouthpiece said.
‘All his treasures and his lands aren’t making his arse any less cold and wet, are they?’ Thormund said.
Mouthpiece made a face at him. ‘So you’re saying you’d give a kingdom for a horse?’
‘Yes,’ Thormund said.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Mouthpiece said. ‘I—’
‘Shut up,’ Thormund said.
‘What? I—’ Mouthpiece began.
‘I said be quiet,’ the old horse thief hissed, urgency in his voice. ‘Listen,’ he whispered. Around them the low murmur of tired men ebbed and flowed, the occasional burst of laughter or shouted insult rising then sinking back down into muttered conversation.
Mouthpiece glanced at Thormund, whose face was carved in stone, a picture of concentration. ‘What—?’
A bony hand shot up to silence him.
‘It’s gone now,’ the old man whispered after a moment, but his hand was still raised. His eyes suddenly sparkled. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Listen!’
Mouthpiece strained to sift out the sounds of the camp: there was something else, just on the edge of hearing . . . When he realised what it was, he sighed. ‘It’s a cow,’ he said. ‘Or, you know, one or two cows.’
Thormund turned to look at him. ‘I know it’s a cow,’ he said slowly. ‘I am, in fact, fully aware that it is a cow.’
‘Then why are you so scared?’ Mouthpiece blurted out.
The horse thief smiled then, and suddenly he looked less like a helpless old man and more like Sigurd and Sven. ‘Because I’m alive,’ he said, ‘and because I like you, despite your face and your constant yapping, I’ll tell you something: if you hear a cow in pain and it’s calving season, that’s a good thing. But if you hear that same noise in the middle of winter, far away from any farms, in the snow—?’
Mouthpiece fumbled for the truth, but didn’t find it. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said plaintively.
His eyes and ears trained on something in the shadows, Thormund pulled the knife from his belt, cleaned it, ran a finger along it to test its edge and, satisfied, stuck it back in its sheath. ‘Neither do I,’ he said, scanning the camp, ‘but something’s about to happen, and when it does, I want to be in the right place.’ Then he produced another three knives of different sizes from various places, including his sleeve, cleaned them and slid them back into their hiding places.
Mouthpiece clutched the battered club he’d been given. The wood felt comfortably worn in his hands and he cursed himself for feeling scared. He was travelling with possibly the biggest army the North had ever seen and he was allowing a jumpy old horse thief to unsettle him. No, Mouthpiece thought, I’m safe here, safe as I can be. The realisation made him relax some, enough to get comfortable under his furs and get to work pushing the cold away. There would be another day tomorrow and maybe whatever was bothering Thormund would leave with the rising sun.
As he felt dull, cold sleep crawl over him, Mouthpiece’s thoughts were of life by the blade and how it wasn’t at all like he’d imagined.
*
‘RISE! RISE, YOU BASTARDS!’ Alfgeir Bjorne’s voice was followed by thundering, stomping footsteps. ‘WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!’
Mouthpiece woke up with a start, his heart in his mouth and his stomach in his feet. He crawled out from under his shelter and into the night and immediately had to throw himself to the side to save his face from a collision with the knees of a group of running men. ‘Thormund!’ he shouted, but there was no answer; glancing across, he saw that the old horse thief’s tent was already empty. Mouthpiece pushed himself onto his feet.
The camp was a sea of flickering shadows under the torches moving swiftly, all heading towards the southern edge of their newly formed tent town. Shouts bounced from one side to the other as the chieftains exhorted their men to get on their feet and get to arms on pain of death and worse. In the distance Alfgeir was bellowing commands. Prince Karle’s white cloak flitted into, then out of a pool of light in the distance.
Mouthpiece looked around for someone to ask what was happening, but no one volunteered any information – and then his head finally woke up and he understood what he was hearing.
Underneath and behind the panic, the shouting and the clanking of thousands of men getting up and ready to fight in a hurry was a river of sounds; Mouthpiece, still dazed by the abrupt awakening, staggered towards it, trying to figure out exactly what he was hearing.
There were animals there, somewhere – but there was more, too.
‘THEY’RE COMING!’ someone screamed up ahead. The closer he got to the south end the steadier the light was. In front of Mouthpiece, Jolawer’s warriors were hastily establishing shield-walls, facing south. Mouthpiece noted that they’d tied torches to the longest pikes and stuck them in the ground, enveloping them in a pool of light that created a big half-circle in front of them.
The sounds were coming from the darkness beyond, but Mouthpiece still couldn’t quite place it; it sounded like trees breaking, like the sea at night like one continuous wave of dull, dark misery.
There was no warning, no official declaration, no command given to stand firm. One moment the flickering flame-lit circle was empty and then, they were there: a herd of white-eyed cows staggering at them out of the darkness. Swords rose and fell, but it all took too long; the big beasts didn’t go down quickly enough and the shield-wall, after holding for a heartbeat, collapsed under the sheer weight of the animals blundering forward. Time slowed down for Mouthpiece; he saw the breach in the shield-wall ahead of him and felt the push as men stagger
ed backwards, pushed by the onslaught. He took two steps back – and was almost shouldered to the ground.
‘Get back!’ Alfgeir Bjorne roared as he charged past, yanked up a pike with a torch on it and thrust it at a dying cow. Steam rose up from its flanks as the flames melted snow and consumed flesh, but the animal didn’t flinch. Mouthpiece heard Alfgeir’s muttered curses mixed in with the screams of men suddenly plunged into darkness.
‘More light!’ the old warrior screamed. ‘More fire! And get back!’ But it was too late: ahead of them men were trying in vain to stem the tide of mindless animals lowing their disquiet at the world. ‘More fire! Quickly!’ he kept repeating as disembodied noises drifted on the air, the unnerving pain-sounds of the cattle weaving and twining with the dull thud of blades hacking into flesh and the sharp screams of fighters being trampled, breaking under the weight of the animals.
And now there were other sounds in the night as well: dogs barking, bleating sheep and human voices: a discordant, broken chorus of them.
‘He has risen.’
The words, repeated over and over in dull voices, made Mouthpiece’s skin crawl. He turned to run – and saw a wave of torches, sweeping over towards them from the other camp.
Forkbeard.
The words were out of his mouth before he could close it. ‘FORKBEARD’S COMING! GET BACK!’
A heartbeat later Alfgeir Bjorne’s voice boomed, battlefield-loud: ‘STEP BACK – NOW! SHIELD-WALL!’
Mouthpiece watched as if in a dream as the line of torches coming towards them broke into three sections and flowed smoothly away from each other like water down a hill. The middle slowed down as the other two groups curved around the dots of light surrounding Alfgeir Bjorne.
A bony hand closed on Mouthpiece’s shoulder and yanked him away from the flickering flames. Before he could turn, Thormund hissed into his ear. ‘Shut up, boy, and stick with me.’
‘But—’ Mouthpiece began.
‘No. This is about to get messy,’ Thormund said, pulling the younger man deeper into the dark, away from Alfgeir and the heart of the battle.
‘Let me go! I’m not going to run and hide from—’ A hard elbow to the chest silenced him and he sank to the ground, coughing and struggling for breath. Stars danced in his eyes. He buried his hands in the snow and pushed until he’d managed to stagger to his feet. It took him a few moments to regain his night sight, but by the time he could make anything out in the darkness again, Thormund had disappeared.
The torches moved in clusters, the distance between them closing up, and a vision of his father’s farm came completely unbidden to Mouthpiece. He remembered the hired hand they’d got one summer, a short, stocky man with a scythe who’d swept through the grass like water, leaving no blade uncut.
The soldiers of the Danish king fell on the attackers head-on like a pack of wolves, bodies surging past Alfgeir’s men, and suddenly the surge of half-lit hell-beasts was held at the line. Mouthpiece stared as the other two companies fell on the flanks of the remaining attackers, and the flickering torches threw shadows of men, horses and even a stag dancing in the night as they all pushed mindlessly towards the same goal.
Forkbeard’s men set about them with a will, hewing down man and beast where they stood.
Mouthpiece, frozen to the spot, couldn’t see it in the dark, but very soon the whole camp could feel it: the quality of the sounds had changed. The mindless murmur was dying down, step by step, throat by cut throat.
The three lines of torches met in the middle, and it was done.
‘Give us some light!’ Alfgeir Bjorne shouted, but the edge was gone from his voice. Torches flared up around him, revealing the dead and dying.
‘Drag the bastards away,’ the big warrior commanded, and slowly, moving as if they were waking up from a particularly bad dream, work teams started forming. Mouthpiece blinked at the light and the bodies being dragged away into the dark, the sudden change in the atmosphere.
‘There’s nothing here for me to do,’ he muttered. ‘Nothing. I missed it. He made me miss it.’ With a host of thoughts he could not properly voice swirling in his head, Mouthpiece turned and headed for his tent, picking his way past smashed shelters and hobbling soldiers. When he got back to his own lean-to on the north side of the camp he saw Thormund was already in his shelter, sleeping.
When he was safely under his own furs, Mouthpiece looked at the old man across from him. ‘Coward,’ he muttered as sleep took him.
*
It was the smell that woke him up: that pervasive, sickly smell of spoiled meat. The sky was no longer black but the light hadn’t quite pushed the dark away. As he blinked and tried to get his eyes used to the half-light, voices drifted in on the breeze: short commands, quiet but insistent. The events of the night before crept into Mouthpiece’s consciousness along with the snatched words: blood gushing from a warrior’s snapped leg; axes cleaving a bullock’s neck, with precious little blood flowing out; the shield-wall breaking; Forkbeard’s torches in the dark, sweeping in.
He rose, glanced over at Thormund and grimaced. The old man lay on his side, still as a statue, sharp angles not softened by the blanket of sleep. Disgusted, Mouthpiece walked off. The old man should have let him fight instead of knocking him down and running away. It was all Thormund’s fault that he hadn’t been able to get stuck in.
Coward.
Caught up in his thoughts, Mouthpiece didn’t see the damage until he was almost standing in it. The south end of the camp was one gaping wound.
In the dark it had felt like they were being attacked by thousands of enemies, but in the cold and creeping morning light the truth was revealed: trampled tents and packed snow stained with reddish stripes led the eye to a pile of carcases. Mouthpiece, trying to estimate, guessed that the herd might have been about fifty strong. Scattered randomly amongst them were a handful of sickly-looking dogs and a couple of unhealthy sheep. Gaping wounds stared back at him from anywhere he looked, challenging him to look at the uncomfortably blue-tinged flesh within. Mouthpiece could see the crowns of two separate stags and the horns of a bull moose as well.
Something felt odd, though. There weren’t nearly as many animals as he’d thought. Then he looked to the side and bile rose in his throat.
The corpses were laid out in ordered rows. He counted fifteen men before he stopped, and that wasn’t even half of them. He felt disgusted, but curiosity pulled him in. Numb with horror, he staggered towards the corpses, one thought echoing over and over in his head: could have been me. Over and over. Could have been me. Even though their eyes were closed, every face was judging him.
‘They’re gone,’ Alfgeir Bjorne said behind him.
‘Yes,’ Mouthpiece mumbled, heart thumping in his chest.
‘They are no longer cold or hungry and none of them misses home. Fair trade for a bit of fear and a bit of pain, wouldn’t you say?’
Mouthpiece turned and looked at Alfgeir. The big warrior looked frightfully old all of a sudden: old and grey, like a piece of cloth that had been bashed on the washing stones too many times. He must have been awake all night, making sure the dead were where the dead should be, but his voice still sounded strong.
‘I’ll take the cold and the hunger, I think,’ he said.
The big man smiled at that. ‘Good. I prefer soldiers who want to stay alive. The other kind don’t last too long.’
The shame and the guilt from the night before broke free inside Mouthpiece and smashed against his ribs, a beast in a bony cage. He had to bite his back teeth not to lose control of his emotions, but there was no judgment to be felt from Alfgeir; he just stood there, quietly looming, looking at the night’s work.
As the feelings faded away, Mouthpiece stood a little straighter. He glanced over at the bodies. ‘We’ve lost good men,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Alfgeir said.
‘More of
ours than Forkbeard’s.’
‘Yes,’ Alfgeir said.
Something caught Mouthpiece’s eye. ‘Are they – theirs? Or ours?’ The corpses he’d noticed looked distinctly different. Jolawer’s men were discernible by their rag-tag battle gear, while Forkbeard’s men all had good weapons and battered clothes. But four of them were different: dressed from head to toe in black, with neither shields nor armour, though all of them had knife-belts.
Mouthpiece realised he’d been waiting for an answer for a while. He turned and looked up at Alfgeir Bjorne.
‘Where’s Thormund?’ the big man said.
The taste of relief was suddenly sour. ‘Still sleeping,’ Mouthpiece muttered.
‘When he wakes up, tell him to come see me,’ Alfgeir said.
The temptation to tell Alfgeir Bjorne everything was strong: how Thormund had knocked him down, how he’d fight in the shield-wall next time, how it hadn’t been his fault and the old man was a coward who ran and hid – but he didn’t. Thormund was perhaps his only friend in the world and it wouldn’t be honourable to throw him at Alfgeir’s mercy.
Mouthpiece forced the words out with all the conviction he could manage. ‘Thormund fought bravely last night.’
‘I know,’ Alfgeir said with a wink, gesturing at the four men in black, ‘and so do they. Bastards snuck up on me in the dark – they had me, too. Knocked the axe out of my hand. Then they dropped, one by one, and fast.’
Mouthpiece stared. ‘Did— Did—?’
Alfgeir smiled. ‘I know his handiwork. He’s older now, but they used to tell some proper stories about Thormund the Cutter back in the day. Ask him to come see me when he wakes up. I want to thank him, and tell the king.’
Nodding mutely, Mouthpiece turned and walked away. The events of last night started replaying, but this time in a different order. Had Thormund known? So why hadn’t he told him? They could have gone together! But Alfgeir Bjorne had spoken to him like an equal, like someone who was at least as dangerous as Thormund. ‘The Cutter’. Mouthpiece snorted. What a stupid name. Maybe he could learn to work the cudgel and earn a name? Skullsplitter, maybe? The Cutter and the Skullsplitter: you’d write songs about them, wouldn’t you?
The Valhalla Saga Page 75