Wild shouting sounded from the gate beyond the buildings. Another attack was being launched there, where the bridge provided footing. Niall recognized Cynric’s yelling. More men were stumbling to join him, but at that fresh uproar he saw them hesitate, still stupid with mead and unable to decide where they were most needed. Niall uttered a savage oath and plunged down from his place.
"Edric, hold on here!” he shouted. Jabbing with his javelins for emphasis, he sent men right and left to guard the other sides, realizing grimly that the stockade was too large a circuit to be held by their small force. He charged across to the gate. Outside the hall he saw Judith, still wearing only the sheet girded about her beneath her arms, herding women and children into its comparative safety. She held a spear, and lifted it in salute as he ran past. He flung up his own arm in greeting, and she grinned.
Axes were battering at the gate, helmed heads rising over the jaw-toothed stockade, the defenders striking at them fiercely amid a clang of steel, as he reached them. Cynric had caught up a scant half-dozen to aid him; he was clinging desperately to the bank’s edge, snarling as he beat at heads and hands in the moon-light.
“At them, at them! Will you die like swine?” Niall yelled. "Fight!” He hurled himself up the bank and at a Viking already swinging himself astride the stockade, axe on high. Niall's last javelin took him in the ribs and he folded forward with a grunt, legs kicking blackly against the sky. The axe barely missed Niall’s bare head. He clawed for it as it fell, tore the shield from a limp hand and seized the grip, and swung up axe and shield together just in time to ward off a descending spear. For this work the axe was a fitter tool than sword or spear. He crashed it home on a shining helmet, that dropped instantly back into the ditch. He raged back and forth to the left of the gate, smiting at heads as they appeared, until the onslaught slackened and he stood panting. He threw up his head to hear how the other fighting went. Then he was racing back to rejoin Edric.
The ditch had been bridged in two places about twenty yards apart, and the attackers were swarming across by the light of the dwindling torches, scrambling for foothold on the sliding brushwood and the soft wet earth of the rampart, clawing up at the pointed stakes. The wavering, fuddled tipplers rallied to Niall's example and the scalding insults he poured on them. He swung his axe grimly, leaning out over the palisade, his great height and length of arm a tremendous asset. Neither Danes nor Englishmen had any javelins left; it was hand to hand hacking now. A shrill screech behind him pierced his own shouting. He saw a spear jab neatly under a bearded chin and thrust a climber off and back in a spray of blood. Judith laughed at him, screeched again to the men, and bore her share in the mad dark struggle as handily as a lad. There were lads among the defenders, fleshing steel for the first time, and other women fighting like Judith beside their men.
They sweated out their drunkenness, and the attackers fell back again. Niall drew panting breath, wiped his brow with a bloody sleeve, and heard the yells and crashing increasing on their left. Their right, guarded by the rough steep bank of the river, was comparatively safe. Leofric was shouting, and Niall called off half a dozen men and ran to succour him. Without vanity, he knew he was the best man to command this fight, and he took command without thought. Again the attackers were hammered off. They rallied and came back and up, smashed up blows at those leaning over the stockade, were thrown down to scramble up again. All the dogs were barking madly, horses neighing, swine shrieking; the howls of “Thor aid!” met the grunt of “Out! Out! ” along the rampart, and a wailing of women and children lifted from the hall.
Niall looked for Leofric in the turmoil, but before he found him another noise broke through the din, a spaced and regular crashing. At its fourth repetition Niall, at first puzzled, yelled to his nearest comrades and leaped from the rampart. The raiders had brought up a log and were ramming down the gate. Cynric was shouting desperate defiance, and Niall ran. Before he could gain the gate he heard a rending fall of timber, an exultant roar, and the impact of two forces. He plunged into a raging press of bodies, a black confusion under the pale moon.
Farmers and fishermen, desperate as they were, could not match mailed Danes, and they were outnumbered more than two to one. Niall, swinging his axe like a flail, found support melting from his sides and back. Leofric came yelling at the head of a straggling handful, his slung arm jerking limply as he ran, and Niall groaned as he recognized that blunder.
“Guard your own flank! Leave it!” he roared, but Leofric charged home, and their fresh weight sent the turmoil lurching back. It was blind, savage hacking in the dark; sweating, grunting bloody labour. Hairy faces, black shouting mouths, dark arms and weapons thronged about him. Then the pressure from without broke the ranks, the Danes were flooding through the gate, spreading along the embankment, thrusting the defenders back. He hardly knew how he saved his skin, but as he broke free of the struggle he saw more Englishmen leaving the stockade and running to fight the Danes in the garth. He groaned and cursed together, and shouted, “Leofric! Leofric!” There was one way left them, now the Danes had won the stockade, and that was to cut through to the empty gateway and escape to the woods while they lived.
He was already cut off from his friends, retreating between the buildings. From behind huts and barns and sheds ran more helmed raiders who had won over the undefended stockade, shouting, “Thor aid!” as they came. Niall launched himself in a flying run at their backs, his dulled axe swinging in a wide arc. A head leaped from its shoulders and bounced away under churning feet. He shouldered another sideways, fetched up with a growl and a blow in a murky scuffle behind a haystack, heaved a grappling body off and ran, dodging from stack to weaving shed and shed to stack. He broke through the Danes’ line on the flank, just in time to tumble into the hall after Edric and Cynric. The door crashed shut, and the great bar dropped across it into its sockets.
“Well met, friend!” Judith greeted him, her teeth gleaming.
In the silence that followed the cessation of battle-clamour, Niall grounded his axe against his leg and smeared blood and sweat across his face with a bloody sleeve. His eyes went about the long, lofty room, over the panting men, the hushed and frightened women, the dying fire and the half-dozen high narrow slits of windows under the eaves. Outside was comparative quiet, a confusion of scuffling feet and many voices as the Danes gathered outside the door. In the smoky room sweating faces caught ruddy gleams from fire and torch-light. Someone threw more wood onto the coals. Women were binding wounds, or hushing children. Babies wailed. Elfwyn, ashen-faced, stood by Leofric, anxiously settling his sling. Old Hild tore screeching linen into bandages.
The three brothers instinctively turned their eyes on Niall, who was wondering whether he would have been wiser had he remained outside to provide distraction for the enemy. He forgot that when he saw their faces. Judith joined them. She had found time to drag on a gown instead of the precarious sheet, and now she leaned her spear against the wall and coolly began to plait her hair. Though her lips still smiled, her eyes were grave.
“We are fairly trapped,” said Edric grimly. “Next they will fire the roof over us.”
“A heathen pyre,” grunted Leofric.
“It has rained half the day,” Judith said.
The lame churl Eglaf was standing at Niall’s left elbow, his blood-smudged face twisted as he tied a rag round his left forearm with his right hand and his teeth. He looked up at Niall with a hard smile as he finished the task and took up a felling-axe again.
“Are we too late to break out, Niall?” asked Cynric.
Niall peered through the narrow crack beside the door jamb. A great dark throng made a half-circle before it. The moon touched hands and faces, a fair head here and there among the helmets, the white lengths of swords and the broad blades of axes. Shield-bosses and byrnies twinkled as they moved.
“Not too late, too early,” he said. The group at his back eyed him expectantly. He counted them quickly. Twenty-two men, including Leofr
ic who had done his left-handed utmost, seven or eight lads, a dozen or so women armed and resolute, as many more waiting with the children. None was wounded beyond fighting; those who had been had not reached this temporary safety. And outside were perhaps three-score triumphant Danes.
Feet rushed, and axes began to crash and batter at the door. The wood shook and groaned. They could hear the straining grunts and snarled threats, and a baby set up a determined yelling. A roar of brutal laughter answered. The stout planks were backed crosswise with a second layer of tough oak, and their foes might hack until their axes blunted without breaking through. A loud voice called for a log to ram it down, and the axe-men left their futile chopping.
“Once they break the door down we are done!” muttered Cynric in Niall's ear, his young face haggard. He set himself at the right of it, his sword lifted.
“Done? Not yet!” Niall said harshly, and peered out again.
Leofric and Cynric were issuing sharp orders, and their men dragged up benches and table-boards to barricade the door. Niall halted them with an imperative gesture, leaned over and noiselessly eased the heavy bar from its sockets. He handed it to Eglaf and thrust him to the hinge side of the inward-opening door.
“You—we are to break out?” demanded Leofric.
“Let them ram.”
As they stared, Judith first grasped what he intended and laughed grimly. “Heaven amend your wits! Either side of the door, and ready for them!”
A dozen men understood, closed their gaping mouths, and formed up in two lines. Niall glanced thoughtfully at the clutter of discarded benches beyond and nodded; they could not have disposed them better had they anticipated his wishes.
“Alive or dead? We could use a hostage or two,” Leofric suggested.
It was a tempting thought, and Niall toyed with it a moment before reluctantly shaking his head. “Dead. It would cost us too dearly to try it.” He set his eye to the chink again. “Ready with the bar behind them, Eglaf!”
There was a heart-shaking delay while the ram, a twelve-foot, roughly trimmed trunk, was hoisted up by six tall pirates, swung once or twice in their brawny arms, and then brought forward in a purposeful charge, while the rest bellowed encouragement and yielded them clear space. The butt crashed and the door swung inwards. The six Danes tumbled headlong through the gap with their ram. Eglaf slammed the door on their heels and dropped the bar into its sockets. The leading Dane entangled himself with an overturned bench and rolled among the rushes, bringing most of his fellows down in one complicated sprawl of arms and legs and ram. For a brief brisk moment dark figures leaped and struck, blades gleamed, and triumphant yells answered the howls of alarm and fury outside.
“Clear those carcases from the door,” Niall ordered. He had taken command by the same right that had made him captain of the Raven at the age of eighteen. “They will not try that again. Fire comes next.”
Fire would probably make an end of them. He saw no chance of their cutting a path through the massed Danes when it forced them to make a sally or roast. There was no way out but this one door; the high narrow windows would serve neither them nor the Danes. The solid log walls were even stronger than the door, and they could not hope to hack a way out in time. The enemy were somewhat hasty in their methods, since burned loot profits no man, but they were vengefully vicious now. When he peered out again a torch was already streaming sparks and pale coils of smoke along the wind. By its glare he glimpsed a little group who seemed to be leaders, and his heart jolted—a tall one with long light hair, a square bulk of a man in a ring-byrnie, a giant towering over both. Yet he could not be sure until he saw their faces.
The half-used haystack near the door smoked, spluttered and flared up with a crackle and a roar. Bright threads of scarlet fire stranded its black mass as the first blaze ebbed, and then the flame ate into the heart of it, the smoke rolled up orange and crimson, shot with dancing sparks, paled against the sky, and lifted in white cloud into the night.
“Ho, within there!” a great voice roared. “Within there! Will you yield or burn?”
“We will die fighting!” shouted Leofric.
The stocky captain came forward a couple of paces into the glare, swinging his axe. “Anyone who comes out and lays down his arms may have his life!” he shouted.
Niall straightened from stooping. “You may believe his word,” he said quietly. “He is my kinsman Rorik Cropear.”
Leofric gasped. “Niall, what will you do?” he whispered.
“Fight beside you, of course.”
They stared at him and at each other, and he smiled with a hardihood he did not feel. This was the bond beyond all claims of friendship or obligation, that all tradition and sentiment insisted that he honour, and the knowledge was a deadly cold weight in his breast. He must come to blows with his own blood-kin, and though Rorik counted as no more than a symbol, Eymund was his friend. So he smiled and swung up the axe before the Englishmen’s troubled faces, and as he met Judith’s steady eyes the cold weight dissolved. “Christian faith is the loyalty that binds me!” he declared.
“Englishmen! Send out your women and brats!” came Rorik Cropear’s great voice.
“To be slain before us?” demanded Leofric scornfully.
“We do not slay our profits!” shouted the Dane. “They will fetch their price in Dublin market! Come out if you will live!”
A ragged growl from the men indicated that they would fight to the end. They looked at each other bitterly. A baby shrieked. Other children joined the cry, caught up in the arms of sobbing mothers. Other women ran to their men and clung fiercely. Leofric’s desperate eyes sought Niall’s over his wife’s yellow head. "Rorik will spare their lives,” Niall said flatly.
“To rape and sell them!” snarled Cynric, his arm round a pretty lass whose brown head was on his shoulder.
The woman with the screaming infant pushed a couple of older children before her to the door, tears running down her face. Others joined her, and their cries mingled in a long wail of fear and sorrow and desolation that hushed the noise outside for a moment. They came over the red rushes, weeping for their men and their children and themselves, and Niall swallowed and turned his head away, peering out again. Behind him Leofric spoke softly to Elfwyn.
"God guard you and our child, my heart. Go now.”
The fair girl gulped and spoke clearly. "Bear your son to thralldom? We will all die together!”
Niall swung round at the resolute strength in her voice. She stood erect beside her husband, her tear-swollen face steadfast. The Thane made no attempt to dissuade her. He took her hand in his and drew her closer to him. Niall looked at Judith, who had not moved at all.
“You, Judith?”
“Be raped by all those heathen swine and sold big-bellied in Dublin? I will burn first!”
“Hild?”
“I am too old to be worth carrying to Dublin,” the old woman answered cheerfully.
“Oh, God! Can we not cut through them if we break out now?” Cynric burst forth.
"Not with women and children,” Niall answered. “If there were another door—but—”
He checked, a wild and desperate plan leaping like fire in his harried brain. He sprang from his post by the door. “Go out, all who cannot fight! Hild, grandmother, go out too! We will break out, and those who live will come back for you from Hell’s Gate! Take the bairns, go out, and do not despair!”
"I suckled my master’s father. I will not outlive his sons!”
Hild lifted her staff as though to strike him, and then her face changed. “Hey, my black whelp! You see a way?”
“A poor chance, but the last. Go out, and leave us free to fight!”
They were all gaping at the giant, the conviction in his voice and bearing hushing the women’s cries and drawing all eyes to his fierce face. The old woman laughed aloud, caught Niall by the hair and dragged down his high head to kiss him on the lips. “God hear our prayers, black lad, and grant you bring all off!�
�
“Elfwyn!” Niall said urgently.
“I stay by my husband,” she answered calmly, and he saw that only force would budge her.
A great bellow from outside interrupted them. Eglaf unbarred and swung open the door, and as the women and children passed out weeping, the throng broke rank to grab at them, hauling shrieking women from the screaming, clinging children. The Englishmen roared and surged forward, but Niall sprang between them and the door. As Hild passed last of all Eglaf slammed it and dropped the bar on the triumphant howling outside. Niall turned again to the gap. The three captains were calling off their men from their prey, and hustling their prisoners aside under guard. Time enough to take their sport when the fight was won.
“They are kindling torches,” Niall reported quietly. He looked round, but did not care to see the murderous eyes and wild faces of the Englishmen, and peered out again. “They will fire the thatch over the door first, but after all the rain it will burn ill. When it is well alight, Leofric, make a sally as though you would break out, and let them hold you in the doorway with your backs safe.” He straightened. “Seven or eight of you come with me—no, you and your brothers must be seen here, Cynric.”
Eglaf slouched to his side without a word. Judith deliberately joined him, her quick grin fierce and mirthless. Niall pointed to others, younger men and older lads; there was no time to wait for men to choose. Leofric was left the toughest fighters, but he had also five more women, young and childless, who like Judith preferred to die with fire rather than with Danes, and several untried boys. Feet trampled outside, bright light glared in through the chinks framing the door, oaths and the scent of burning reached them.
“When we hit them from behind break out to the right and back to the gate,” Niall directed quickly. He peered out for the last time. Rorik’s men were throwing brands and burning hay up onto the roof, and the damp thatch was beginning to smoulder with a foul stink of wet straw. He clapped Leofric on the shoulder, jerked his head at his own companions and ran for the bower behind the high table.
The Price of Blood Page 12
