Kings and Pawns

by James L. Nelson

  Still, he was pleased when word came a few years back that Thorgrim and Ornolf had gone off raiding once more. Halfdan was happy to have the two of them out of the country, and Thorgrim’s son Harald as well. Harald was just a boy, but then every wolf started out as a playful cub.

  It was a good thing, having them gone. Even better if they never returned, but Halfdan dared not hope that. Yet, it seemed that that was exactly what had happened.

  The other son, the older one, remained. Odd was married and settled peacefully on his farm. He seemed more like Ornolf than Thorgrim, less threatening, but without Ornolf’s loud, raucous and undisciplined ways. Odd was well liked, but men were not drawn to him. He did not seem like a man to be worried about.

  Halfdan looked up. “Thorgrim Night Wolf is dead,” he said out loud and the men seated around him nodded, though neither they nor Halfdan knew if that was actually true. “And taxes are owed. Thorgrim owes us taxes, and if he is not here to pay them, then they must come out of his estate.”

  The others nodded again, though, in this too, none of them knew for certain that Halfdan’s words were true. No one but Einar, who knew for certain that they were not. But that did not matter in the least.

  “We’ve underestimated Odd Thorgrimson, I’ll be the first to say so,” Halfdan continued. “But we can do so no longer. Decisive action, that’s what we need.” Around him heads nodded more vigorously still.

  “We’ll assemble the hird, and all the warriors here, and we’ll…” Halfdan began and then he stopped. The image of a ship popped into his mind. A ship hauled up on rollers and him poking around where the strakes met the keelson.

  Sometimes you found a bit of rot in the wood there. Usually it did not look like much, and sometimes it wasn’t. Easily cut out and replaced. But sometimes when you started to poke at it you found that the rot ran much deeper than you thought. Keep poking, and soon you find that the whole thing is rotten, through and through, and there is nothing to do but burn it all down to the keel.

  “Hold…” Halfdan said. “First fetch riders. I would send word out, around the countryside. Arrangements must be made before we move on Odd Thorgrimson.”

  First, he thought, we see how deep the rot runs in this.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Bloody he was

  on his breast before,

  at the father of magic

  he howled from afar…

  The Poetic Edda

  From the top of the makeshift wall, Leofric watched the disaster, the beautiful, beautiful disaster, play out on the water just a few hundred feet away.

  “The boy was right,” he said out loud. Ailmar, the captain of his guard, was standing next to him, but he did not hear, and Leofric wasn’t really talking to him in any case.

  “Damn my eyes, but the boy was right.”

  Leofric had not been so sure. Not sure that Nothwulf’s idea would work, not sure it was even a good idea in the first place, trapping the Northmen there rather than just letting them sail away. They had discussed it, Leofric taking care to not let the discussion devolve into an argument. And of course, Nothwulf did not need to argue. He was the ealdorman, even if only half of Dorset agreed that he was. He could do as he wished.

  On the other hand, Nothwulf needed all the friends he could muster, and Leofric was an important and powerful one, and they both knew it. For that reason, Nothwulf too kept things civil. And in the end he prevailed.

  Because Cynewise was winning. It could not be denied. The majority of the thegns were with her, and she had the backing of her father, who secured the backing of the bishop, which could well mean the backing of King Æthelwulf. If she received the credit for driving the Northmen off, then it would further secure her position. Even if paying danegeld was not the most admirable way of ridding the shire of the heathens, still it did the trick. They would be gone, and it would be her doing.

  But stopping them, slaughtering them, reclaiming the stolen riches, that would make Nothwulf a hero indeed. It would be hard for Cynewise to claim the title of ealdorman after that.

  Leofric smiled and shook his head as he watched the chaos unfold. They had sunk three old wrecks in the channel, and the first of the Northmen’s ships had hit them and they stopped the Northmen dead. Now the flaming arrows had set the heathens’ ship on fire in a dozen places. The crew looked like lunatics running back and forth, dousing the flames.

  Those ships… Leofric thought. The sunken wrecks had come from Lymington to the east, the only ships in that port town, at least the only ones with which the owners would part. And little wonder: they were pretty much rotten even before his men had sunk them in the channel. It seemed a miracle to Leofric that they had survived the voyage to Christchurch, which was all of ten miles over calm seas.

  The ships had served one last purpose above water before being sent to their final rest. They had been used to convey Leofric’s men across the channel, so that they could fortify the southern shore just as Nothwulf had fortified the northern.

  Leofric had pointed out as forcefully as he dared that the army was thus divided, and the only means of reuniting them was about to be scuttled and lost. Nothwulf had acknowledged the problem but did not consider it worth the worry. Leofric’s men could march around and join Nothwulf’s again before Cynewise even knew what had happened.

  Dubious as he was, Leofric had to admit that judging by what he was seeing just then, playing out on the water, Nothwulf had been right about all of it. Thus far.

  In the channel below, the next ship in line had come to the aid of the first, pulling it free from the wrecks. But now the third was coming down the channel and it seemed to be out of control, turning sideways and drifting. Even a landsman like Leofric could see something was terribly wrong.

  He turned to Ailmar and spoke louder. “What say you, captain? What’s happening there?” He nodded toward the channel below them, the three ships.

  “Looks to me like the one in the middle, they anchored and they’re pulling the other off. The one sideways in the channel? I think they’re in some sort of trouble.”

  Leofric nodded. It did look that way. He had seen many things in his years, but he had never seen anything like that: three ships struggling in the narrow water, great flights of arrows whipping in from either shore, fires burning on board the vessels, his men cheering, the Northmen shouting and screaming.

  The third ship, the one sideways in the channel, struck the second. For a moment they remained motionless, hanging on the one anchor. Then the anchor line broke, apparently, and the two ships drifted down onto the first, and the lot of them were swept along, stuck together, until the first fetched up on the sunken wrecks once again.

  “Oh, that’s done for them,” Ailmar said and Leofric could hear the mirth in his tone. And he was probably right. Leofric looked to the west. The fourth of the heathens’ ships was just coming into the mouth of the channel, but he could not imagine they would be stupid enough to follow the first three into that killing field.

  As to those first three, Leofric did not see how they could get themselves out of this trap. The arrows were coming in faster than the men could put out the flames. They were almost beyond the range of Nothwulf’s archers on the far shore, but they were an easy target for Leofric’s, and his bowmen were taking full advantage. Soon, surely, the ships would be overwhelmed, the fires too numerous to be extinguished.

  “See here, lord!” Ailmar said, pointing. The first ship was hard up against the submerged wreck, but the other two were still being driven by the current, pivoting around the first ship like a huge gate on hinges, swinging toward the south bank where Leofric’s fortifications were built. His men were enjoying every moment, watching their target come closer, as if God were laying the heathens in front of them like a sacrifice.

  Leofric watched in silent fascination. Amazing… he thought. The ships were massive, and they moved in utter silence. Even with all the shouting and the twang of bow strings and crackling of fires i
t seemed as if there was a noise missing, the sound that should have come with something so huge as those ships moving so swiftly.

  The middle ship was caught partway on the first ship and partway on the wrecks and it stopped there. The third kept swinging but stopped before it came against the wrecks. Its stern was hung on the second ship, its bow seemingly fixed in place.

  “Run aground!” Ailmar shouted.

  “What?”

  “That last ship! The bow’s run up on the mud. See, there’s a mud bank there, coming off the shore. That ship’s hung up on the mud!”

  “Ah,” Leofric said. That explained why it had stopped where it was. And it also presented an opportunity.

  The downside of Nothwulf’s plan had always been twofold. The first problem was that half of the army was stranded on the south shore with only the few fishing boats they had to move them. Leofric was mortally certain that Cynewise’s men were watching the goings-on, and would attack Nothwulf’s weakened forces once the Northmen were dealt with, leaving Leofric to march as quickly as he could around the harbor, which would not be quick enough.

  The other concern was that if Nothwulf’s plan worked out right the heathens’ ships would burn and sink in the channel. Bad for the Northmen, but not ideal for Nothwulf or Leofric either, who would lose most if not all of the plunder. Sure, some of it might be retrieved when the tide went out, but only some, and likely not much.

  But now the Northmen’s ships were stuck on the mud and within reach. Now Leofric could lead his men forward, capture them intact so they could be used to move the army back across the channel. Capture them without Nothwulf there, which was better still, since Leofric was quite certain Nothwulf would try to find some way of keeping the plunder for himself. That was not a harsh reflection on Nothwulf; it was just how men were.

  “Ailmar, I have a thought that we might…” Leofric began when his words were cut short by a cry from the ships below. There had been plenty of noise from that quarter already, the shouts of panicked men, the shrieks of the wounded. But this was not that. This was something new. A man shouting, or screaming, or some mix of both, with a sharp keening thrown in. A frightening sound.

  Leofric’s and Ailmar’s heads snapped up, their attention drawn to the strange cry. The swirl of frantic activity aboard the ships had not diminished: men running here and there, fighting the fires, throwing burning material overboard, dragging the wounded clear, trying to lever the ships apart. Chaotic and disorganized. And one man doing something that none of the others was doing.

  One man. His movements stood out because they were so in contrast with the rest: this one Northman seemed oblivious to all that was going on around him. He raced down the center of the first ship, running in a near straight line, stern to bow. He seemed to be the one who was screaming that weird, beastly sound. He reached the front end of the first ship and clambered onto the middle ship, dropped to the deck and raced down the length of that one as well. He moved with astounding agility, dodging and weaving through the crowd of struggling men.

  Leofric and Ailmar and the men near them, indeed most of the men on the wall, were watching him run, their bows forgotten. He reached the bow of the middle ship and flung himself over onto the last, the one closest to Leofric’s defenses, the one run up on the mud. Once again he made his mad run down the length of the ship, and when he reached the bow he stepped up onto the side of the ship and hurled himself off, coming down in water up to his waist, but never breaking stride.

  “What is this lunatic doing?” Ailmar said, but if he hoped for an answer he was disappointed because no one had any idea.

  By the look of him he was a Northman like most Northmen: long hair, beard, though not so impressive a beard. Savage looking. Most Northmen, however, went into battle with shield and spear, or ax or sword. Many wore helmets, the fortunate ones wore mail. But this one had none of those things. Not even a tunic. He was bare-chested, wearing only leggings, and he carried two of those fearsome battle axes the Northmen used, one in each hand.

  He ran though the water, lifting his legs high in an almost comical way. He reached the shore and ran up the sand beach halfway to the wall on which Leofric stood. There he stopped, maybe seventy feet away, and raised his axes over his head. The screaming changed from the demonic shriek to something else, and it took Leofric a moment to realize they were words. This thing was speaking. Leofric had heard Northmen speak before, and their language did not sound too different from English, but this man’s words sounded very savage indeed.

  “Something’s not right with this one,” Leofric heard one of his men say.

  Leofric shook his head. He seemed to be transfixed by this odd sight, but there was no time for that. If they were going to attack the Northmen, board their ships, then it had to be done soon.

  “Shoot him!” Leofric shouted. “Someone shoot that lunatic bastard.”

  This was sport the archers would truly enjoy, and he knew it. Two dozen bows came up almost at once, as the crazy Northman began to twist and turn in some sort of manic dance. Two dozen arrows flew free of their bowstrings. The Northman hopped side to side and spun in circles, axes held at arm’s length, and two dozen arrows flew right past him. Not one found its mark.

  “You stupid, blind bastards!” Ailmar shouted. “Shoot him, he’s right bloody there!” But the archers did not need Ailmar’s encouragement. Furious now, they nocked arrows, fired as fast as they could as the madman with the axes raced side to side, leapt up and down, even turned a summersault, screaming and shouting all the while. Taunting. The arrows whipped past, embedding themselves in the sand. The Northman seemed untouchable.

  “Very well, damn this madman!” Leofric shouted. The man seemed imperviousness to the arrows and it was unnerving him. Time to move.

  “Take up your shields and your weapons! We’re going to capture those ships! We’ll kill them all!” Leofric shouted and the rest shouted with him and he guessed they were as eager to be done with the specter in front of them as he was. All along the wall the archers climbed down to the ground behind them where their shields and armor and other weapons sat ready for them to grab up. The other men-at-arms, a hundred or more, those who were not archers as well, were already set and ready, equipped and awaiting their orders. They were all eager to be at it. The frustration of not being able to kill the madman was driving them.

  “Go! Go!” Leofric shouted from the top of the wall. They had worked this out well before the longships had come into the channel, prepared for the possibility of actual combat on the shore. Half the men would charge around the east end of the defenses, half around the west, then they would meet in two columns and advance on the ships. They had thought it unlikely they would get the chance—neither Leofric nor Nothwulf imagined the vessels would be within reach—but here it was working out better than they had hoped.

  From his vantage point, Leofric watched the columns of men sweeping around either end of the wall. “Very well, Ailmar, let’s get on with it,” he said. He crouched and reached down with his toe and found a foothold in the front of the wall, then scrambled down the fifteen feet to the sandy ground. He turned and swung the shield off his back and drew his sword just as the men from either end of the wall were meeting in the middle, falling in behind him, where he could lead them into the fight. Leofric might have been twenty years older than the next man there, but he would be second to no one when going into battle.

  Ailmar was at his side now, and the rest of the men-at-arms arrayed behind. The lunatic Northman was still there, still doing his odd dance on the sand.

  “We’ll see how long this one keeps dancing his jig with two hundred armed men ready to drive spears up his arse,” Ailmar said.

  Leofric smiled and stepped off, leading the men forward. The madman saw them coming and he stopped and stood motionless on the sand, watching, seemingly transfixed.

  That’s right, you mad bastard, Leofric thought. Here we come. Time for you to run.

  And the
madman did run. He went from standing motionless to a full-on sprint in just a heartbeat’s time. But he did not run back to the ships, as Leofric had expected. Rather, he charged, screaming, axes raised, straight at the English line.

  Starri Deathless had reached the bow of Sea Hammer before Thorgrim even knew he was in motion. He heard Starri’s scream through all the noise aboard his ship and the other two ships, but he was so caught up in the unfolding disaster in front of him that it hardly registered.

  And then it did. “Oh, by the gods…” Thorgrim said, looking up, his eyes following the sound of Starri’s war cry. Starri had just reached the bow and Thorgrim watched him swing around the stem and leap over to Blood Hawk’s stern and then race the length of that ship as well.

  Thorgrim was not in the least bit surprised by this. He had been waiting for it. He knew Starri would not be able to remain in the presence of an enemy such as this without fighting them, hand to hand, even if he had to do it alone. But despite knowing it, Thorgrim had not considered trying to stop him, because he knew that would be impossible, and he had not considered what he would do when it happened.

  He looked back at Sea Hammer’s deck. The flaming arrows were still coming in, but not so many now. He turned and looked to the north and the other defensive wall, but the archers there were too far away to have much hope of reaching the stranded ships. That was half the problem solved. The men on board his ship had the fires in hand, and the sail seemed safe for now. Harald had knocked the gallows out of the way and lowered the yard nearly down to the deck, where it was more protected and easier to dowse with water.

  “I guess we had better go get Starri,” Thorgrim said out loud, though he was talking to himself. He grabbed up his shield and slung it over his back and made his way forward. “Louis!” he shouted to the Frank who, alone among the men, was not doing much of anything. He was not lazy, Thorgrim knew, or a shirker. He simply had no idea what to do in virtually any situation on shipboard.