The High-King (Isolde Saga Book 5)

by Robert Jones

  They heard screaming from within the fire and the smith’s door burst open as he and his family tumbled out. They were alive, all of them alive, and Isolde thanked the gods as she watched them turn down the road and run toward the Jarl’s hold.

  “This way,” Isolde cried, breaking Harald’s horrified shock. She dragged him through the tear in the inn’s side and they stumbled over the broken wood and debris that lay strewn about its floor. The place was abandoned, and together they pushed through into the kitchen and out the back door into one of the tighter alleys in Harkham.

  “We have to get back to the Jarl’s hall,” Harald cried over the screams of dying men and the clash of steel only streets away.

  A pot of oil crashed against the roof of the inn behind them and flames spat out across the sky above their heads like dragon’s breath. Isolde flinched as a droplet of the liquid death splashed down and burned up before it could touch them. The catapults were working over time, the great stones and burning oil were reigning down on the city and as they pushed through the alley out into another main street, they could see that half of Harkham was already ablaze.

  Another stone smashed across the face of the second story of some other home, bearing for all to see the poor family huddled together. Their wild eyes met Isolde and she tried screaming at them to make for the Jarl’s hall, but over the sounds of the raging battle, there was no hope for them to hear. Isolde looked north up the street, yellow tunics and strong arms were a welcome sight as a group of Harkham spearmen formed up by the wall. Isolde made to run for them but Harald held her back.

  “Let them hold the line,” he said to her. “We need time, we need men to block up the streets. We need to choke their numbers out!”

  Isolde looked at Harald and then back to the spearmen, but they were gone, passed out of sight as they moved toward the main fighting by the gates. She looked up on top of the walls and saw the archers firing back into the town.

  “The rest of Hrothgar’s army hasn't reached the third mark,” she said.

  “Good, we need the time!”

  They turned back and started to run down the main street back into the heart of the city. The shadow of a boulder flew across the cobbled road and disappeared out to their left before they heard the dull thump of its landing. The distraction nearly had them run right into the fleeing troops that burst out from an alley.

  “They’ve broken through,” one cried before he ran off in the opposite direction.

  Isolde looked the other two men up and down, wet blood soaked into their yellow shirts and their iron axes were chinked and chipped. She looked them in the eyes and saw the fear, they must have been in the thick of it. A growl and shout broke her thought and she looked over their shoulders to see a flood of mountain-men pouring through the alley at them.

  “Form up!” she cried, and the two soldiers and Harald braced for the fight.

  Shoulder to shoulder they could hold the alley but as the full weight of the northerners crashed into them, Isolde felt herself thrown back into the main street. The fighting was rough and dirty, she slashed and swiped and grabbed and bit her way through as a meteorite burst across the mouth of the alley throwing oily flames up and over the invaders trying to pour through. She never heard the screams and scarcely smelt the roasting flesh, all focus was on Harald as he cut down the last of the raiders that had come through.

  “Make for the hall!” she ordered the soldiers, and before her words had left her mouth, she was running with them and Harald back down the road.

  CHAPTER V

  Two boys ran screaming from an alley and disappeared into the maze across the street. They were like rabbits running from one warren to the next and Isolde heard the sharp cry of a girl from where they had come.

  “Come on, Isolde,” Harald cried.

  But it was no use, the wails were a siren call and Isolde had been captured. He cursed her out loud but she didn’t hear him.

  “We need to form the line!” he yelled but as she slipped into the back lane, he felt the tug of pity in his own heart. In a city full of death, he knew they could save more by moving on, but he still couldn’t turn away from the helpless whimpering.

  “Come on,” he cried as he shouldered past Isolde into the alley.

  The girl was but ten steps in, sitting with her back up against a wall, her dark hair a birds nest of mess with red eyes and tears underneath. Harald could feel his heart beating hard under his chest. With his grip tight on his war-axe, he tore his eyes away from the child as Isolde knelt down beside her. Here in the alley, they were rats in a maze. He looked around as passageways broke in and out of their lane and quickly noted that they only had one safe way out. He looked back at Isolde, she was pushing the hair out the girl's eyes.

  “Come on!” he cried, but his words were cut short as a mountain-man burst out from the shadows and dived at him with a blade.

  Harald’s axe went straight up by instinct and he caught the beast under his chin so that his head flung back in an arc and the man was dead before he hit the ground. Harald turned back with raging eyes at Isolde.

  “Carry her!” he ordered and led them both back into the main street.

  He looked up the road from where they had come and saw a great boulder smash into a line of their own men. Some of them crawled back to stand, but most didn’t move again. He shook his head, so much destruction, so much death. He was shaking and he didn’t even know it until Isolde put her spare hand on him. She was holding the weeping girl in her other arm and looked at Harald with eyes that shone like he had never seen before.

  “We don’t have far to go,” she said calmly and she was right.

  She pulled Harald by the shirt softly and he could see the Jarl’s hall before them, rising up with its light wooden palisade and ornate walls. The rest of the run seemed like a dream, he was following Isolde, yet she had a new light about her, something he couldn’t quite see, but an aura he could feel. He felt safe, even as the catapults kept up their ghastly work and more and more rocks fell around them.

  “It’s alright… it’s alright…” said the soft voice of an angel.

  Harald knew it was Isolde, she was whispering to the girl, but after each sentence, her eyes would flicker back and meet Harald’s.

  They made it to the hold and Isolde disappeared up the short stone steps as he stopped to breathe. Men were around him doing the same, some doubled over as they gasped for breath while others stared out into nothing as if dazed. He looked to those that held gaping wounds, and some that were motionless on the ground.

  “Form up!” the words came from his mouth without thought and the startled soldiers looked at him confused.

  He met their eyes, maybe there were thirty men.

  “Form up!” he said again.

  But the men didn’t move, they were like broken statues, hollow-eyed and hopeless.

  “We have not lost this city!” he yelled at them and saw some of the life come back to their eyes. “Form up on me! We can cut their number in the roads and alleys. We will hold them back like a cliff in the sea. Help is coming, brothers!”

  Movement crept through the soldiers as some of them hesitantly picked up their weapons again and began to step closer.

  “FORM UP!” he bellowed and began to march toward the road from which he’d come.

  He wouldn’t let himself turn back to see if they followed, and he felt the doubt come to him like worms in his stomach, yet still, he moved to where the road was tightest. He stood there, facing out toward the north, teeth clenched, fists tight around the shaft of his axe. Then the first of the soldiers shouldered up beside him, cracked shield in one arm, chipped sword in the other. Then another and another until they had a line, four men deep and eight across.

  He watched as the mountain-men flooded out from the backways and alleys like pack rats. They were bloodied and frenzied, and the barks of orders had them form their own line only a stone throw away. Harald tasted the bitter hate in the back of his
tongue as more and more of the northern beasts spilt out into the street and swelled their ranks. Harald’s line seemed less a cliff and more a pebble against the raging sea that was about to surge at them. He spat at the ground in front of him and growled like a demon.

  “Shieldwall!”

  ***

  The girl seemed to weigh nothing at all in Isolde’s arms. She vaulted up the steps toward the Jarl’s hold and thrust the great oaken doors open. The gloom of the halls shuddered away as the full winter moon streamed in from the sky and Isolde lowered the girl to her feet and watched her run into the shadows beyond the colonnades. All was quiet and solemn here, the room was full to spilling with women, men, and children, and sitting high above them all was Jarl Aba, watching all within his room like a greedy hawk.

  Isolde shifted her way between dark wooden pillars and past flickering candles, she walked among the people and tried to catch their downcast eyes. It broke her heart, it was as if they had already surrendered the city, as though they were greeting defeat as one who returns to a lost lover begrudgingly.

  “How does it go?” Aba asked slowly, his eyes pinning on her every movement.

  “The walls have fallen, Jarl,” she said as she put her hand on a woman who looked as though she might have fainted at the words.

  “Then it is over…” his eyes searched her for signs of weakness.

  “No, not yet. Not until we are dead in the ground, Jarl,” she spat his title out as though the very sound of it in her mouth was poison. “Harald holds the road outside, Halvar is not far away, you can hear them fighting in the streets while you hide away… just listen…”

  She let the words come to a silence and she knew everyone in the room was straining their ears. The sound of the distant cries and fighting were faint through the hall’s walls, but you could hear it. The bark of orders, the screams of the fighting men.

  “They will tear through that door before long,” she said nodding back to the entrance. “Unless you fight now.”

  Aba shook his head, his fat lips puckered together as though he were fighting to keep them sealed in silence. Isolde turned her back on him and knelt down to a group of girls she had been standing over.

  “Will they really come?” one blonde girl asked.

  Her face was smeared with mud and it looked like she had split her lip though there was no blood.

  “I don’t know,” Isolde said, meeting each of the girl's eyes in turn. “If they do, then I want you to run. Go south, do you understand?”

  The girls nodded and she saw the tears welling up in their wide eyes. Isolde stood back up and moved toward the door, she made her steps slowly, purposefully, knowing that the eyes of the fearful, the cowards, and the men ordered to remain were all on her. She turned back at the threshold and gave the room a hard look, meeting the gaze of any who had the courage to look at her.

  “There will be no tomorrow,” she said. “There is only now, and your city needs you now.”

  She saw some of the faces look away, but some of Aba’s guard kept their gaze, though their eyes were full of shame. She left them there like that and walked back into the open street of the city. Full night had reached them now, the clouds had fled and the full moon streamed down like liquid silver as it shimmered over the wet cobbled roads. It was challenged only by the yellow flames of the burning buildings and the streaming comets that arched high above the city walls before plunging back down to deal death upon the city.

  She took in everything before her with a glance. Harald was in the thick of the fighting. His men had locked their shields together but there were so few of them holding against the tide of Hrothgar’s troops. They looked like the last thin tree defying the storm by grasping its little roots into the earth. Before her, more men had come streaming from the inner city. They looked beaten and haggard, bloodied and hollow but she needed them and they needed her.

  “Rise up!” she cried as she took the steps back down to their level. “Harkham needs you now! I need you now!”

  She marvelled at the discipline of soldiers as they stood upright, shields in hand and fists clutching weapons.

  “Form up!” came a cry from behind her and Isolde wheeled to see Arvid coming down the steps, Aba’s guard on his heels.

  He gave her a look with disgraced eyes that burned with the desire to reprove himself. She nodded to him and he scooped up a well-dented helm of old iron. The soldiers heeded his command and formed rough lines in front of Isolde.

  “Hold the street!” she cried and turned to see Harald’s shieldwall giving ground to the hordes in front of him.

  In the moment of shock, she lost her nerve and Arvid led the charge with the soldiers roaring behind them. She ripped her sword out and bellowed a war cry as she surged toward the fighting. The fresh troops gave the line the weight it needed and with a sudden burst, they forced forward a step to the agonized screams of the mountain-men and raiders. She couldn’t get close enough to the front to swing her blade, so she put her shoulder into the man in front and pushed forward with the rest of them. The cries and shattering of blades and bone filled the air. The rich smell of fresh blood and the waves of hot sweat beat at her. Another push forward and they moved the great mass back another step.

  “Come on!” came a cry and it took her a moment to recognize Harald’s voice. “One, two, three, push!”

  And they forced another step, but it was no use. Hrothgar’s men held stubbornly and the men at the front hacked and stabbed like wild men.

  “Harald!” Isolde cried, and she squeezed her arm through the press of men to grab his fur collar.

  She pulled it back and cried his name out again, but the fighting was too thick to get him. He glanced back and met her eyes.

  “Hold the line!” she said, “I will be back!”

  ***

  Harald grasped for Isolde’s hand but she slipped away too quickly. With a last glance, he saw her fall back to the hall before he felt the great thrust of weight from the enemy. His shieldwall shuddered and he turned to face the enemy. All around him was the spray of sweat and he could feel how soaked his own furs were. His fists gripped the great shaft of his battle-axe to keep them from slipping on the soaked wood and he raised the great thing above the front line and brought it down over their heads. He felt the shock rattle through his hands, he hit something, but gods knew what, and he ripped it back to swing again. His arms burned and he cried out to push again, but it was no use. For every time they grouped in to thrust at the raiders, they seemed only too happy to hold with the weight of a mountain. A man fell in front of him, and Harald slipped on his broken body.

  For only a moment he glanced down to see the pleading eyes of Arvid, but the man was swallowed by the mass of feet as Hrothgar’s forces pushed forward and swelled through the chink in their wall. All was chaos, steel flashed and Harald fought like an untamed beast. His great-axe spinning in great arcs of death as he brought it up and down again and again. The wall had collapsed, the men drew back under the assault, they fought like rabid dogs, cutting their attackers to ribbons. But for every northerner who fell, another two took his place until they were vaulting over the bodies of their own dead.

  “To the hall!” Harald roared and the men stepped back with him, never turning from the fight as they held their slow retreat.

  The bodies of his comrades fell to the left and right, crying out as their bodies hit the cobbled street.

  “To the hall, to the hall!” he cried and his men finally broke and ran for the Jarl’s last hold.

  CHAPTER VI

  She ran from the battle line with a heavy heart, but Isolde knew what she needed to do. The city was all but fallen, Hrothgar had pushed in too fast and with too many men, even if the elves came now, they would be forced to lay siege to a taken town. She needed to open the eastern gates, she had to let any help that came into the city.

  She ran away from the Jarl’s hall and made for the main street that led out toward Unster. Ahead of her were bar
ren streets save for the light skirmish of a handful of soldiers. She ran to them, her sword tight in her grip. White shirts, spattered in sweat and blood- she didn’t know where they had come from, but they were doing well against the blue armoured Skalloway raiders. The first raider never saw her coming, nor did he feel the cold blade slide deep into his bare skin below his snake-faced helm. He simply fell to his knees and gurgled in his own blood as Isolde worked her way onto the next raider and then the next. By the time the bloody work was done, the men looked at her with wide eyes.

  “I need your help,” she said through panting breath. “The eastern gate, we need it open for the elves.”

  One of the men laughed and she scowled him with the coldest eyes she had.

  “Go back to the hold if you can’t help me,” she ordered. “Hold the line with Harald.”

  “Elves?” the man said with a smile.

  She thought he had gone mad from the fight but another laughed as well.

  “Go!” she hissed, and they took off down the way she had come.

  An older warrior stepped up to her. His greying hair was slick with sweat and he looked at her with dark eyes.

  “You’re Sigurd’s daughter,” he said, but it was no question.

  “Will you help me?” she asked him and noticed two other younger boys in white that stood behind him, shifting their weight awkwardly.

  “Who is coming?” he asked.

  She sighed and dared not repeat the name of the elves. “Help is coming, is that enough?”