When Gunnulf straightened up he looked over to where his older brother and Asberg stood jesting as they wiped their brows with their sleeves. His own face was dripping, and he did the same.
“Who would win, in a real fight,” posed Gunnulf, his eyes upon them.
“Ah,” thought Hrald aloud, and looked back at them. “They are almost matched in strength, and Asberg has faced Jari enough times so that he is not thrown off by the sword in the wrong hand.” He narrowed his eyes at the two as they stood together, laughing, and gesturing to each other the blows they had thrown and blocked. “Asberg is, I think, faster. Your brother, stronger.”
He kept on, considering the outcome. “If they did not know the other, Jari. He will always have the advantage over an ordinary warrior, with his Tyr-hand.”
Gunnulf nodded, and gave out with a grin. “I think so too. Jari.”
This was more than they had said to the other for long months. Hrald felt almost at ease again. Then he saw, across the field, Onund stoop to retrieve his dropped sword. Onund looked up and saw the two standing together. Hrald had never understood why Onund watched Gunnulf so carefully, but now he knew.
He turned his back on Onund, turned to face Gunnulf. He did not know how to say the next, but he had thought much on it, and it forced its way past his lips.
“Do you not fear for your soul?”
Gunnulf paused just a moment, then answered the question with one of his own.
“Would it matter, if I did?” His voice was light, almost jesting, the voice of Gunnulf which Hrald knew best.
Hrald did not know how to respond.
“It would matter to me,” Hrald told him.
He knew he was more Christian than his friend; it was to be accepted, as Gunnulf was wholly Dane, his aged mother baptised late in life, his older brother Jari fully a man when he received that sacrament. Gunnulf himself was a boy when he was sprinkled and blessed, but Hrald had been baptised soon after his birth, and had had much instruction from Wilgot and from Oundle. He knew his friend’s faith did not run as deeply as his own.
“I fear for you,” Hrald told him. “Not only after death, but here.” He turned his eyes to sweep the men before them in the field, at rest, or still at sparring. Hrald dreaded what might happen if Gunnulf and Onund were discovered.
Gunnulf turned his head, looked away at trees now coming into leaf, then back to Hrald’s searching face. “It is a form of brotherhood. Just a different form.”
There was no reckless daring in Gunnulf’s answer, and in his now-grave tone no challenge, no excuse. Hrald found himself looking at his friend’s face, found himself nodding.
The men of Four Stones were not alone in their training. A woman also spent hours at her spear-work, with her brother Hrald to guide her. Ashild’s two spears were kept in the hall, in the iron hoops filled with such weapons, flanking the great dragon banner on the wall. When they could break away from their other duties Hrald would pull those two short spears from the scores of larger shafts they stood amongst. They met at the same stand of elm trees at which Hrald had first discovered her, shoulder-sore and angry in her own attempts. Now Ashild could throw a spear a respectable distance, and with good aim. Hrald had had to replace her old target shield twice, so often had she struck it. She could do even better at a run, but her skirts often bound her legs, hampering her actions.
One morning when they worked there they heard the nicker of a third horse. They looked up to see their Uncle Asberg. Ashild had a spear in her hand, poised above her shoulder, and his surprise at seeing her so made his mouth open.
“Throw,” Hrald told her, and she did. Asberg watched the spear sail through the air, hitting solidly enough into the shield hung in the tree that she must go to it and pull it out.
He got off his horse. “A fair throw, my girl,” he praised. He was looking from her to Hrald, nodding his head, taking it in without question or explanation.
“Have you had her spar with you yet,” he asked his nephew.
Ashild’s surprise was as great as her brother’s. He shook his head. “Only to throw at a target, which she can now do.” He gestured to the many punctures in the face of the hanging shield.
Her uncle was looking her up and down. “You are not smaller than Abi,” he decided, naming his younger son, who had thirteen years. “And can therefore wield a spear with equal vigour,” he judged.
Asberg was known as one of the better spears-men at Four Stones, and he now stood assessing her as a spears-man in her own right. She would have kissed him, had he not been so intent about her efforts.
“You cannot always throw; at times you will be forced to hold your spear and thrust,” he began. “Two-handed is best; there is more than twice the strength behind your spear point, as you can use both arms and your whole body weight. A shield lends protection, já, but for those of lesser strength, use both hands on the spear.”
He took the shield from the tree and feinted before her, moving left and right, calling out instruction. Hrald, standing at the side, wore a grin so broad that Ashild had need to turn away from him, lest he break her focus. Asberg was not a small man, but he moved nimbly enough to tire her, and kept the shield before him in almost constant motion.
“The calf or foot; strike out there,” he told her. She jerked her spear at his booted left foot, making him jump back. “Even if you do not make a hit, you can force a man to lose balance, even fall.” They went on some little time, Hrald too joining in, serving as living target for her thrusts.
“And,” finished her uncle, mopping his brow, “remember a man has four sides to him. Strike where you can – foot, back of leg, the side at the waist, a high blow to the head. Do what is needful to make your hit.”
A week later Ashild, seated the women’s table, raised her eyes to where Hrald sat. The meal was drawing to a close, and she had already told him she wished to see him after, in the treasure room. There were but three keys to this room, that held by her mother, her uncle, and now by Hrald. As many times as she had been within that room, she knew she was but a visitor there. When Hrald took a wife he and his bride would sleep there, their babes be rocked in the cradle still within, the same in which she and Hrald had slept.
She looked at Hrald, gazing down with a thoughtful face into his plate. She did not think the dried, stewed pears warranted his expression. He was looking at one thing and seeing another, the way she remembered Sidroc often doing.
Her eyes lifted beyond Hrald’s head to the large round disc of Sidroc’s shield. The red and black spiral of its painted face issued from the iron boss in the centre of the shield, and flowed outward to the iron rim. She well recalled the day her brother was made to lift that shield over his head until all in the hall saw him, all acknowledged him. It was a man’s shield, that of a great warrior, and he was asked to hold it aloft and then place it aside.
Her eyes shifted next over Hrald’s left shoulder, and the broad banner of a raven in flight over distant fields. Her mother and Burginde had made that, while she and Hrald where still small children. She had memory of seeing her and Sidroc seated before it, just as she now looked at her mother, head lowered, in converse with Wilgot the priest. Ashild knew her mother had made the banner to replace an old charcoal drawing of a raven which one of Yrling’s men had scrawled upon the wall there. She had once lifted the heavy fabric of the banner, and thought she still could discern the raven on the time-darkened plank wall. Like much from the time of her real father, an echo remained.
When the hall began to break up she rose, bending first to take up the linen pouch under her bench. She met Hrald at the door; he had the iron key already in the box-lock. She had taken up a cresset in her other hand and followed him in. She laid the wavering cresset on the square table and pulled the contents out of the linen pouch.
He was watching her, with expectant curiosity. His mother and Burginde made all his clothes, and he thought Ashild resented every hour spent stand
ing with spindle or at a loom. Yet it was clear it was fabric she had brought.
He saw a splotch of dark against a light background. She unfurled it fully, holding it before her.
“A battle pennon,” she was saying. “A flag so that your men always know where you are.” She lifted it a bit higher against herself. “And that you live.”
He took it in. The raven on the large banner in the hall flew over grasslands, looking down. This one faced the viewer as a raptor would, wings outspread, talons reaching. The gape of the curved beak was as threatening as any eagle’s.
“You made this for me?”
There was more than a touch of wonder in his question. All war-chiefs of renown went with pennons into battle. The warriors of Angle-land especially used them, marked with that device that held meaning to the man or his family, as Ælfred of Wessex flew the golden dragon. It was a sign of state, yes, but served vital purpose during war. The battle-flag would always be kept near to the war-chief whose device it featured.
In the disarray of hand-to-hand combat there was dire need that his men always know where their chief was, not only to defend him if his immediate body-guard was faltering, but so all might know that he still lived. It heartened warriors to see the pennon fluttering against the sky, oftentimes held and waved by a man, who, unable to defend himself, might be cut down in this service. The flag would be snatched up by another, giving reassurance to those who battled on. The battle-flag was a source of identity and pride. Likewise, no disgrace was greater than having the pennon taken by the enemy.
Hrald had reached out and touched the raven figure as she held it. She could see his amaze, perhaps less for her handiwork than for the meaning of the thing itself. She felt a quiet sense of pride, watching his fingertip run over the wool body of the raven. It would have been far faster to cut the raven shape out of dark fabric and sew it upon the field of blue. But that had not been her goal. There was power in every stitch, every inch of dark wool that she herself had spun, piercing the blue linen cloth that she had woven, filling in her design, interweaving as she had sung her song. Her spell.
He was looking down into her eyes.
“I thank you.”
He felt unable to say more.
“There is a sleeve, here, to slip over the pole,” she told him, showing the narrow margin she had folded over and sewn.
He began to smile, went to one of the spears resting against the wall. He turned it in his hand, slipped the sleeve over the butt end of it, lifting the raven banner in the air over their heads. The shadow it cast on the wall from the cresset’s flicker was as large, and as full of life, as a real raven.
She took the flag from him, waved it over his head. They both laughed.
She lowered the spear shaft, and he pulled the pennon off, holding it before him a moment to admire it once more. Then he laid it upon the wooden chest that held the ring-tunic Ceric had brought him. Hung above it was the bow and quiver Tindr had fashioned, and the boy-sized round shield given by his father at Tyrsborg.
In the morning the Lady of Four Stones came into the treasure room. As she neared the table she saw something new upon the weapons chest by the wall. She looked down on the raven pennon, knew it for the battle-flag it was. Her hands went to it.
Ashild. She would know her daughter’s weaving anywhere. But she marvelled at the thread-work, the power of the great bird. As she held it tears crowded her eyes, thinking of she who had made it, and he who would stand, sword drawn, beneath it.
Chapter the Seventeenth: You Are The First
Wessex
NEAR the end of Spring, Ceric was back at Kilton. He and Worr and their twenty thegns had ridden with Eadward, both directly East through Wessex and also to the North. Ælfred had set his greatest force of men between both enemy camps at Middeltun and Apulder, preventing the Danes from mass attack of Wessex. His army lay encamped for months, informed by steady reports by his outriders, and where travel by horseback was made impossible by the thickness of forest, by swift runners. Even so, small bodies of Danes got through, striking at villages for supplies, driving off livestock, carrying off grain, and killing all folk who resisted, leaving a wake of misery and hunger behind them.
Eadward’s charge was to intercept these small raiding parties, and when that was not possible, to visit the despoiled villages. His father’s system of a fortified burh within a day’s walk of any larger settlement allowed for many to seek shelter if word of marauders was received in time. But it was now both planting and lambing time, and cottars were loath to leave their fields and flocks. The garrisons were built to shelter both folk and their beasts, but lambing ewes could not be forced to walk the day to reach them.
Beyond the forays into Wessex for supplies, Ælfred had learnt from his riders that Danes long-settled in Northumbria and parts of Anglia had agreed to throw in with those newly arrived. And Haesten had indeed emerged as the newcomers’ leader; his fame as a warrior in Frankland and his earlier exploits here in Angle-land and elsewhere assured that his authority and skill was acknowledged.
It was during this second tour with Eadward that Ceric saw action. He had before witnessed the aftermath of Danish attacks on the villages they rode through. Now he would be part of one. Half a day’s ride from the Wessex border a breathless runner on a pounded clay road had come upon Eadward and the forty men he led. He was a youth from a small trev of ten crofts, now seeking aid from a fortified burh still an hour or two away. A flurry of mounted Danes had appeared that morning at his small settlement, rushing into their midst brandishing spears, leaping from horses to grapple with terrified folk who tried to drive their pig or cow into the nearby fields where it would be harder to catch. The boy had fled, and no Dane had ridden after. Eadward listened, and they gave the boy drink and took him up upon one of their horses, so he might lead them back to the trev.
Arriving at the plundered village they found the wretchedness that all such attacks provoke: trampled wattle fences, upended fowl houses, stunned and grieving folk milling about the four that lay dead, wailing children sent after the few wandering hens or sheep that remained. The stammering survivors clustered around the still-mounted Prince and his men. Ceric and Worr were foremost, and had begun to swing down off their horses. Then, from the edge of the common pasturage, a second group of horseman appeared, come from a distant track leading to the wood.
A few of the folk shrieked, so that Ceric’s horse nearly bolted. He and Worr regained their saddles, and all warriors turned to face the new arrivals. These horseman betrayed themselves at once, yanking their horses’ heads back towards whence they had come as soon as they spotted the warriors led by Eadward.
Ceric was already urging his horse forward; it took Worr reaching for his reins and turning his own horse to block that of Ceric’s to awaken him to the need to await orders. All eyes were fastened on those who now were crowding the track into the forest, pressing their horses back into the trees. There were no more than six or seven of them; the folk had numbered no less than a score who had just been through. This was yet another group of Danes.
“My Lord,” called one of the village men. “That path opens up to the pasture further on. If you ride in the field you can catch them from there.”
Eadward made his decision, his horse wheeling beneath him. “Give chase,” he ordered, kicking at his horse’s barrel. The cowering villagers were left behind as they raced across the pasture, Eadward at their head.
A gallop across the field and along the tree line brought them to the opening the cottar had told of. Eadward dismounted, gathered his men about him. He and a few strode over, entered the trees at the opening, looking up and down the narrow track.
They hurried back to where the rest waited. Eadward’s eye roved over the faces before him.
“Twenty of you, stay with the horses. Keep them quiet and out of sight. There were seven of them; sixteen of us will enter the wood and wait for them. Eight of my own men, eight f
rom Kilton.
“The track is little more than a deer-path. There will be no room for shields; and you will need both hands. If they are riding, it will be single file; if they are pulling their horses, it will be the same. Pair off. Hide along the track, and an extra man at each second pair. At my signal, one man to go for the bridle, the second to pull the man down. Kill them all.”
His orders were as simple and decisive as this.
Ceric could feel the quickening of his own breath. His eyes, like those of all the men he stood with, were fixed on Eadward. The man who looked back was of three-and-twenty years, a taller and more robust version of his kingly father, and more than ready to act. Now he called out the names of those of his own men who would join him in the wood, and those who would stay with the horses.
He looked to Ceric, who cast his own eye over his pledged men, and called out the chosen seven, beginning with Worr. He was guided by the eagerness he read in each man’s face, that and by their age, choosing those with most experience amongst them. The timbre of his own voice surprised him; he sounded almost hoarse as he named his men. He was more than aware that he might be calling one or more to their deaths.
They donned ring-shirts and helmets, working as quickly as they could. “You take the bridle, Ceric,” Worr told him as he re-fastened his sword. “I take the man.”
Ceric began to protest, but Worr’s next words were an order. “Do as I say, this first time,” he countered. The set of Worr’s mouth was enough to still Ceric. He nodded agreement.
The chosen sixteen slipped into the wood, ranging themselves along the track, stepping behind trees or brushy growth. Eadward and his partner were the closest to the opening to the pasture, and thus the last the oncoming Danes would reach.
Ceric and Worr were at the mid-point of the range of men; the warriors of Kilton began there and would be at the end of the line of Danes. If the last Danes were straggling and Eadward gave the word before they were near, it would place them in additional danger. As Ceric gripped his unsheathed sword he thought on this. An ambush was nothing that was ever practiced, and in such tight quarters anything could happen. He could grab the bridle or reins with one hand if the horse was near enough. Worr would need both hands to seize the leg or body of the rider and pull him to the forest floor. Ceric could see none of the other men, but Worr was almost at his shoulder, and looked to him. Like his own, Worr’s helmet had eye-holes that descended almost like a mask, and a thin strip of steel as a nose-guard. Worr’s steady eyes looked back at him beneath that steel as they waited.
Silver Hammer, Golden Cross Page 30
