The Wolf and the Raven

by H A CULLEY

  ‘What will you do?’ Lagertha called across from her drekar.

  ‘Wait,’ he called back, annoyed at being pressed for a plan, especially by his former wife, before he had time to think.

  It was Eirik who came up with the solution. The two outside ships in the Frankish line were moored to the bank by stout cables tied around tree trunks. He suggested that all they had to do was to cut one of them.

  An hour later the majority of the Viking ships advanced slowly towards Edmund’s barrier. The longships had reefed sails and they closed slowly on the barrier as the light breeze gave them just enough momentum to overcome the current.

  Hidden back around the bend several others made for the two banks. Esbjörn led one group and Lagertha the other. Eirik had begged to be allowed to go with them and so Ragnar had sent him across to Esbjörn’s ship. It was a decision that he was to regret.

  Now that the object of his enmity was aboard his longship, Esbjörn was tempted to kill him out of hand, but that would only bring Ragnar’s wrath down on his head. He needed to make it look as if the Franks had slain him.

  Eirik wasn’t a sensitive man and he completely missed the hostility of the Swedish jarl. He was so wrapped up in the excitement of what they were about to do that he even forgot that Esbjörn was the Jarl of Gotland. He was a man who always looked to the future and forgot about the past.

  The task of both groups was to chop through the cables so that the Franks were carried downstream out of control. As soon as their enemy were on the move, the longships would then turn and row ahead of them until they reached a wider part of the river where they could get past the Franks and continue on their way to Paris. Ragnar realised that the Franks could cut themselves free of each other once they were cast adrift, but that didn’t matter. As individual ships they were no match for a longship and the towers would make them unstable and unwieldy in any case.

  It didn’t quite work like that. Edmund had foreseen the move and had hidden several hundred men in the woods that lined the river. Half of these men were equipped with a crossbow, a weapon that didn’t require the strength or skill needed for a normal bow. The four longships beached on the north bank and, as their crew -, including Eirik and a few of his friends - leapt ashore they were met with a hail of bolts. At short range a crossbow bolt could penetrate even the most expensive chain mail and, if close enough, they would go straight through all but the best made shields.

  The hail of bolts from the edge of the trees was completely unexpected and almost fifty Swedes died in the first volley. The rest stood there stunned for a moment and then, screaming their rage, they hurled themselves towards the trees. A second volley sent another thirty odd tumbling to the earth, but most of the first group of crossbowmen hadn’t had time to finish re-loading.

  ‘Those who are loaded, fire at will,’ their commander yelled, drawing his sword and hefting his shield. ‘The rest of you forget your crossbows and pick up your spears and shields.’

  A few more bolts struck down a few more Vikings but then the remainder reached the line of Franks. By then there were only a hundred and twenty of them left whereas Edmund had allocated four hundred men to each bank.

  The Vikings had lost all semblance of order in their maddened bloodlust. Outnumbered by more than three to one they found their desire for vengeance soon changed to panic as their enemies engulfed them and forced them back. They were now fighting for survival. Esbjörn hacked the point from the spear of the man facing him and grinned in triumph as the man realised that all he now held was a useless lump of wood.

  Just at that moment he realised that Eirik was fighting alongside him. He forgot about the Frank and, using his sword overarm, Esbjörn forced the point into Eirik’s neck. He yelled in triumph as blood spurted out all over the two of them. He had managed to kill Eirik so that it would seem that he had died in battle, but he forgotten about the Frank with the useless spear.

  Seizing the moment’s respite, the man threw down the useless spear haft and drew his dagger. He knelt down and thrust it up under the jarl’s byrnie and into his groin. Blood poured down Esbjörn’s legs but he managed to slay his killer before he fell to his knees and lost consciousness. His men dragged him to the rear, but in vain. Within minutes he died from loss of blood.

  All they could do now was to make a fighting withdrawal to the longships. As they did so the Franks slowly disengaged and then made a mad dash back to where they’d left their crossbows. The Swedes only had enough warriors left to man two of their longships, so they were forced to abandon the other two. As they made their escape Edmund’s men sent a parting volley of bolts their way and killed several more.

  On the other bank Lagertha had been quicker to realise that she had walked into a trap. She had taken the precaution of putting out a rear anchor from each of her drekars so that they could haul their ships back out into the river quickly, should it prove necessary, and she sent twenty men ashore first.

  The Franks should have melted back into the trees and waited until the rest had disembarked before springing their trap. As it was, as soon as the crossbow bolts started to fly and the scouts were cut down, she ordered a swift retreat. Apart from the loss of the scouts, the only casualties were minor wounds to two of the rowers.

  Ragnar was distraught at the death of a third son and blamed the Swedes. However, he had other problems. He had a choice: a direct assault on the floating barrier, which would cost a lot of men to break, or disembark a large enough force to defeat the Franks guarding the mooring ropes.

  The trouble was the shingle beaches on either bank were too small to allow more than a few longships to beach at a time. He eventually decided to sail back to where it would be possible to disembark without facing opposition.

  The next day he set off on foot along the right bank with a thousand men to cut the mooring ropes on that side of the river. His original army of over two thousand five hundred had been reduced by casualties in battle and, more worryingly, by dysentery. Cases were increasing daily and a number had died from the disease.

  However, the Franks guarding the mooring ropes stood no chance against so many Vikings, especially as they had been caught unawares watching the river, not the land. When the ropes apparently mooring the barrier to the right bank had been cut, Ragnar had been puzzled, then his puzzlement turned to fury. He’d been outwitted. He had expected the rafted ships, which were still tethered to the left bank, to swing around in an arc, pushed by the current, until they ran aground. Instead they had stubbornly remained in place. It was only then that he noticed the anchor cables running fore and aft from each ship. The mooring lines had either been a ruse to lure his men into an ambush, or had merely been a second method of securing the raft of ships in place.

  He decided that the only sensible course of action was to push on to Paris on foot. His men grumbled and quite a few asked how they were meant to carry away all the plunder and thralls that they anticipated collecting without their ships. By the time that they camped for the night quite a few were feeling mutinous; none more so than the Uppsalan Swedes.

  ‘We’ve had enough, King Ragnar,’ their senior jarl, a man named Villner, told him.

  This was greeted by a muttering of agreement from the rest of the Swedes, who had followed their jarls to see Ragnar and who now crowded around him.

  ‘We have lost the prince, one of our jarls and too many men, and for what?’ Villner continued. ‘The Norns have tricked you into making this ill-fated voyage. No doubt they think that you have grown too mighty and self-important and need cutting down to size.’

  Ragnar was stunned. Paris was all but within his grasp and the words of the Swede were not to be borne. He reached for his sword, intent on chopping the insolent man’s head off, but Olaf put a restraining hand on his right arm.

  ‘There are too many of them and they are between us and the rest of our men. They’ll kill you if you raise a hand against them,’ Olaf whispered urgently in his ear.

  Ragna
r still attempted to draw his sword, hissing at Olaf to unhand him, until he heard some of the Swedes draw theirs. He looked around him; Olaf was right. He was surrounded by Swedes with only a few of his own men nearby. However, they had become alarmed at seeing Ragnar surrounded by angry Swedes and started to push their way through their ranks to the king’s side.

  Ragnar had the sense to see that the situation was growing ugly and there were still enough Uppsala Swedes left to further weaken the number of his followers to no good purpose if fighting broke out. He nodded and threw off Olaf’s hand, letting his own hand fall to his side.

  ‘Very well. Scuttle back to Uppsala if you must. When we sack Paris the skálds will sing of our heroic deeds and call you craven.’

  There was angry muttering at this sally and the Swedes began to argue amongst themselves. Several of Ragnar’s own Swedish warriors from Alfheim tried to dissuade their fellow Swedes from leaving, but to no avail. As they headed back to where they had left the fleet Ragnar was left with less than fifteen hundred warriors, and many of those had dysentery.

  -℣-

  Edmund smiled in satisfaction when he saw that his plan had worked. He had captured the two longships abandoned by the Swedes during their abortive attempt to capture one of the windlasses, and now he planned to destroy the rest of the fleet. The Vikings were afoot. If they could be defeated in the next land battle they would be left with no means of escape.

  Once the enemy had departed, heading south east along the river bank, he set off with five hundred men to find the rest of their ships. However, when he and his men reached them he found that they were moored in the middle of the river. He turned round and made his way back towards his own fleet intending to sail downstream to capture them now that they had so few defenders. However, one of the Franks at the rear of his column came running forward before he got very far to say that a large party of Vikings were coming up behind them.

  ‘How many,’ he barked at the man, then regretted taking out his frustration on the hapless messenger. It wasn’t his fault that Edmund had been wrong footed.

  ‘Difficult to say, lord. Several hundred anyway.’

  ‘Not the whole Viking army then?’

  ‘No, lord. Hundreds not thousands.’

  ‘How far off are they? How long before they get here?’

  The Frank thought for a moment before replying.

  ‘Not long; perhaps a quarter of an hour, maybe less.’

  Edmund’s first thought was that they were going to increase the guard on the ships.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Cynefrith asked quietly.

  ‘If I let them reach their ships it will make it more difficult to capture them. I’d like to destroy them before they get there, but the problem is not knowing their strength.’

  ‘If we take up ambush positions we can catch them unawares or, if there are too many of them, let them pass.’

  Edmund nodded in agreement and quickly briefed his captains.

  -℣-

  Villner was in a foul mood. He had lost nearly half his own men and he knew that, of the three longships he had personally brought, he would be lucky if he had enough warriors left to man two of them. Furthermore they would return home with nothing to show for the summer, and that made him personally vulnerable. Men wouldn’t follow a jarl they considered unlucky or incompetent and the fact that he was merely answering the king’s summons to join Osten wouldn’t matter one iota. Any bondi could challenge him at the Thingstead. All they had to do was tell the lagman that they contested Villner’s position as jarl. Of course, he could decide to fight his challenger but usually it was just a matter of a vote amongst all the bondis.

  He had to find somewhere on the voyage home where he could raid and gain sufficient plunder to make them forget about the disastrous attempt to capture Paris. He was sunk in thought, and his men were plodding along dejectedly under a sullen sky that matched their mood when the first crossbow bolts tore into them. It was an elementary precaution to put scouts out ahead and on the flanks but Villner hadn’t bothered. Now he would pay dearly for his oversight.

  Edmund had a hundred Frankish crossbowmen with him in addition to the twenty in his own warband who were trained archers. There was only time to get one bolt away but the archers managed to release three arrows apiece before it was time to charge into the stunned column of Swedes.

  A tenth of their number had been badly wounded or killed within that first minute. However, the Swedes were all experienced warriors. They quickly recovered and reacted swiftly to Villner’s command to form a shield wall. Their problem was that the dead and wounded lay in their way, preventing them from forming into one line three or four deep. Instead they organised themselves into four separate groups.

  Edmund realised that it would be easier to attack the smaller groups even as he led his men forward.

  ‘Cynefrith, lead your men into the gap over there and cut the end group off.’

  The captain of his warband nodded and headed towards a pile of the dead and dying that Edmund had indicated. He found it difficult to make his way through the Swedish casualties and, when one of them found the strength to slash at the legs of one of his men as he stepped over him, he gave the order to stab each corpse, just to make sure.

  The Swedes at the other side of the piles of casualties tried to get to grips with Cynefrith’s Northumbrians, but they could only do so by breaking formation. Once they did that they would lose the advantage they had and it would become a wild melee where the superior numbers of their enemies would tell.

  Meanwhile Edmund led the Franks in his troop around the Swedish flank. When the Swedes moved to intercept him, his banner man waved it to signal his men to change direction and they managed to insert themselves between two groups of Swedes. As each was about eighty strong and Edmund had nearly three hundred men with him, he had no fears about fighting on two fronts. His men slowly encircled both of the Swedish groups and started to crowd them so that they had no room to manoeuvre.

  By this time Cynefrith had found himself in some difficulty. He had managed to split the remaining group in two, but now he risked being enveloped as the Vikings tried to encircle his group. However, the Swedes didn’t have enough men to contain the Northumbrians effectively and the latter broke through the encircling Viking line in several places.

  Cynefrith found himself facing a large Viking with a long-handled axe. The man was several inches taller than he was and his bare head revealed a face with a scar from his left ear to his mouth which gave him a permanent leer. The Swede hefted his axe ready to chop the blade down onto Cynefrith’s head but this was far from the old Northumbrian’s first fight. As the blade descended he stepped to the left so that the descending axe missed him completely and left the over-confident Viking unbalanced.

  Cynefrith stepped in close to his opponent so that he had no room to swing his axe and he jabbed at the distended belly with his seax. The first attempt broke a few of the chain mail links of the Viking’s byrnie but didn’t penetrate his flesh. He jabbed again, panic lending strength to his arm as the taller man grabbed Cynefrith by the throat, cutting off his air supply.

  The tip of his seax forced the links to break and, just as he felt himself blacking out, Cynefrith thrust the blade home, expecting it to cut through the leather under-jerkin and into flesh. But the Viking was quick for such a large man. He let go of his throat, leaving Cynefrith sucking in a great lungful of air. The man then kicked him in the right knee, causing Cynefrith to stumble. Before he could recover, the axeman swung his weapon again, chopping deeply into the shield, which Cynefrith had only just managed to raise in time.

  He felt his left arm go numb so that he had little or no control over it. His shield had split but, thankfully, the axe had stuck fast. The Viking tried to yank it out, but to no avail. Cynefrith tried to strike his adversary again, but his shield arm was jerked this way and that. So violent were the Viking’s attempt’s to free his axe that Cynefrith had trouble i
n keeping his balance and he lost his grip on his seax.

  Just as the Swede managed to free his axe fate stepped in and another Northumbrian stepped up beside Cynefrith and thrust his spear into the Swede’s neck. Blood spurted everywhere and the man dropped to his knees. The wound was fatal and with a muttered word of thanks, Cynefrith stepped back to gauge how the melee was going.

  About half of the Swedes were dead or wounded and his men had surrounded a hundred or so who were making a desperate last stand. The remainder, who had been at the front of the column, decided to cut their losses and fought their way clear before making off in the direction of the longships.

  Cynefrith and a few of his men made after them but he gave up after a while. If the Swedes decided to turn and fight they would outnumber their pursuers. By the time they returned to re-join Edmund it was all over. The former ealdorman was sitting on a fallen tree whilst Laughlin sewed up several minor wounds to his arms and legs with catgut.

  The next morning a few mounted Frankish scouts arrived to report that the Viking Army was some twelve miles away and still heading for Paris. Edmund therefore ordered his captains to untie their ships from one another and sail downriver to where the enemy fleet was moored. The Swedes who’d escaped had apparently left, but the ships’ boys and the wounded who had been left to guard the other longships put up a stiff resistance before Edmund’s men overcame them. A few managed to up anchor and escape under sail but the majority of the ships were captured.

  Edmund toyed with the idea of keeping them and giving them - or perhaps selling them - to Charles the Bald, but he didn’t have the crews to man both the Frankish ships he’d borrowed and the two Swedish longships he’d already captured. On the other hand he daren’t leave them there in case the Vikings returned. If they got their ships back they could raid elsewhere; without them they’d be stranded. Edmund therefore beached the longships and left them burning before heading upriver to Paris, taking just the Viking’s knarrs with him, intending to use them as trading vessels once peace was restored.