Sword Song

by Bernard Cornwell

  Haesten’s men screamed a great howl of victory. Their mouths were distended, their eyes were bright with light reflected from the east and they knew they had won, and we just ran away. There is no other way to describe that moment just before the full dawn. Sixty or seventy men were trying to kill us, and they had already killed some of the crewmen from the moored guard-ship, and the rest of us ran back onto the foreshore where the mud was thick and I thought again that I must die there where the sea ran in slithering ripples across the slick flats, but our attackers, content that they had driven us off, turned back to the post and chain. Some watched us, daring us to go back to the firmer ground and challenge them, while the others slashed at the chain with axes. Beyond them, dark against the darkest part of the sky where the last stars faded, I could see Haesten’s ships waiting to slide out to sea.

  The axes rang and chopped, and then a cheer sounded and I saw the heavy chain slither snakelike across the mud. The tide had turned now and the new flood was running strong, and the blocking ship was being swung westward, carried into the creek by that surge of water, and I could do nothing but watch as Haesten’s escape was made possible.

  Our attackers were running back to their own ship. The chain had vanished into the low water as the blocking ship slowly dragged it away. I remember stumbling forward through the mud, one hand on Rypere’s shoulder and my left foot squelching the blood in my boot. I held Serpent-Breath and knew I was powerless to stop Æthelflaed being carried away to a worse captivity.

  The ransom, I thought, would be doubled now, and Haesten would become a lord of warriors, a man wealthy beyond even his inordinate greed. He would assemble an army. He would come to destroy Wessex. He would be king, and all because that chain had been severed and the Hothlege at last was being unblocked.

  I saw Haesten then. He was standing in the bows of his ship, which I knew was named the Dragon-Voyager, and she was the first ship waiting for the creek mouth to be fully clear. Haesten stood in cloak and armor, stood proud beneath the raven’s head that crowned his ship’s prow, and his helmet glinted with the new dawn, and his drawn blade was shining, and he was smiling. He had won. Æthelflaed, I was certain, was in that ship, and behind him were twenty other ships; his fleet, his men.

  Sigefrid and Erik’s men had reached the creek and had launched some of the boats that had been spared the fire. They had begun to fight Haesten’s rearward ships and in the glare of the burning ships I saw the glint of weapons and knew that more men were dying, but it was all too late. The creek was opening.

  The blocking ship, held now by its bow chain alone, swung faster and faster. In a few heartbeats, I knew, the narrow channel would be wide open. I watched Haesten’s oars dip to keep the Dragon-Voyager steady against the flooding tide and knew that at any moment the oars would pull hard instead and I would see his lean vessel speed past the stranded guard-ship. He would row away eastward, away to a new encampment, away to a future that would bring him a kingdom that had once been called Wessex.

  None of us spoke. I did not know the men beside whom I had fought, and they did not know me, and we just stood there, disconsolate strangers, watching the channel widen and the sky brighten. The sun had almost touched the world’s rim and the east was ablaze with red, gold and silver light. And that sunlight flashed off Haesten’s wet oar-blades as his men brought them far forward. For a moment the sun slashed into my eyes from all those reflections, then Haesten shouted a command and the blades vanished in the water and his longship surged forward.

  And it was then I realized that there had been panic in Haesten’s voice. “Row!” he was shouting, “pull!”

  I did not understand his panic. None of Sigefrid’s hastily manned ships were anywhere near him and the open sea lay before him, yet his voice sounded desperate. “Row!” he screamed, “row!” and the Dragon-Voyager slid still faster toward the gold-bright east. Her dragon’s head, snout raised and teeth bared, defied the rising sun.

  And then I saw why Haesten panicked.

  The Sea-Eagle was coming.

  Finan had made the decision. Later he explained it to me, but even days afterward he found it hard to justify the choice he had made. It was instinct as much as anything. He knew I wanted the channel open, yet by bringing Sea-Eagle into the Hothlege he would bar the passage again, yet still he decided to come. “I saw your cloak,” he explained.

  “My cloak?”

  “The bolt of lightning, lord. And you were defending the chain-post, not attacking it.”

  “Suppose I’d been killed?” I suggested. “Suppose an enemy had taken my cloak?”

  “And I recognized Rypere, too,” Finan said, “you can’t mistake that ugly little man, can you?” And so Finan had told Ralla to bring the Sea-Eagle into the channel. They had been lurking at the eastern end of Two-Tree Island, the patch of marsh and mud that formed the northern bank of the channel’s entrance, and Ralla had ridden the incoming tide into the Hothlege. Just before they entered the channel he ordered the oars to be shipped inboard, then he had steered the Sea-Eagle so that she struck one bank of the Dragon-Voyager’s oars.

  I watched. The Sea-Eagle was in the channel’s center while Haesten’s ship was nearer to me so I did not see the long oar looms snap, though I heard them shatter. I heard the splintering sound as shaft after shaft broke, and I heard the screams from Haesten’s men as the oar handles were driven back to crush their chests, and that is a horrible injury. Those screams were still sounding as the Dragon-Voyager jarred to a sudden stop. Ralla had thrust on the steering-oar to push Haesten’s ship onto Caninga’s mud shelving bank, and then the Sea-Eagle also stopped abruptly as she was trapped between the stranded blocking ship and the newly beached Dragon-Voyager. The channel was closed again, plugged now by three ships.

  And the sun rose full above the sea, brilliant as gold, flooding the earth with a dazzling new light.

  And Beamfleot’s creek became the killing place.

  Haesten ordered his men to board the mastless Sea-Eagle and kill its crew. I doubt he knew whose ship it was, only that it had thwarted him, and his men screamed as they leaped aboard to find Finan leading my household warriors to meet them, and the two shield walls met on the forward rowing benches. Ax and spear, sword and shield. For a moment I could only watch. I heard the crack of shields slamming together, saw that new light flicker from raised blades, and saw more of Haesten’s men crowding onto Sea-Eagle’s bows.

  That fight filled the creek’s entrance. Behind those three ships the flooding tide was drifting the rest of Haesten’s fleet back toward the burning boats on the shore, but not all of Sigefrid’s boats were burning, and more and more were being manned and rowed toward Haesten’s rearward vessels. The fighting had started there too. Above me, on Beamfleot’s looming green hill, the hall still burned, and on Hothlege’s shore the ships burned too, and so the new golden light was veiled with palls of smoke beneath which men died while wisps of black ash, fluttering like moths, drifted from the sky.

  Haesten’s men ashore, the ones who had driven us onto the mud and released the guard-ship’s chain, splashed through the shallow water to haul themselves onto Dragon-Voyager so they could join the fight aboard Sea-Eagle. “Follow them,” I shouted.

  There was no reason for Sigefrid’s men to obey me. They did not know who I was, only that I had fought beside them, but they understood what I wanted and they were infused with a fighting-man’s rage. Haesten had betrayed his agreement with Sigefrid, and these were Sigefrid’s men, and so Haesten’s men must die.

  Those men, the ones who had driven us to ignominious flight, had forgotten us. They were on board Dragon-Voyager now and scrambled toward the Sea-Eagle, intent on killing the crew that had frustrated Haesten’s escape, and we were unopposed as we climbed aboard their ship. The men I led were my enemies, but they did not know that and they followed me willingly, eager to serve their lord, and we struck Haesten’s men from the rear and, for an instant, we were the lords of killing. Our blades
took men in the spine, they died without knowing they were under attack, and then the survivors turned and we were nothing but a handful of men facing a hundred.

  There were far too many men aboard Haesten’s ship, and there was not nearly room enough in the Sea-Eagle’s bows for all of them to join that fight. But the men on Dragon-Voyager now had their own enemy. They had us.

  But a ship is narrow. Our shield wall, that had easily been outflanked on land, here stretched from side to side of the Dragon-Voyager, and the rowing benches made obstacles that stopped a man charging home. They had to come slowly or else risk tripping on the knee-high benches, but they still came eagerly. They had Æthelflaed, and every man was fighting for a dream of riches, and all they needed to do to become wealthy was kill us. I had picked up a shield from one of the men I had struck down in our first sudden assault, and now I stood, Rypere on my right and a stranger on my left, and let them come.

  I used Serpent-Breath. My short-sword, Wasp-Sting, was usually better in a shield wall fight, but here the enemy could not close on us because we stood behind a rowing bench. At the ship’s centerline, where I stood, there was no bench, but a mast crutch served as an obstacle, and I had to keep looking left and right, past the high crutch, to see where the worst danger threatened. A wild-bearded man climbed onto the bench in front of Rypere, meaning to hack an ax down onto his head, but the man held his shield too high and Serpent-Breath pierced his belly from beneath and I turned her, ripped her sideways, and his ax fell behind Rypere as the Northman screamed and twisted on my blade. Something, ax or sword, was beating on my shield, then the stomach-ripped man fell sideways across that weapon, and blood ran down Serpent-Breath’s blade to warm my hand.

  A spear slashed beside me, the lunge deflected by my shield. The blade vanished, pulled back, and I overlapped my shield on Rypere’s just before the spear struck again. Let it, I remember thinking. They could thrust spears at shields all morning and get nowhere. To break us they had to cross the obstructing bench and fight us face to face, and I looked over the shield’s rim to see the bearded faces. They were shouting, I have no idea what insults they hurled at us, I only knew that they would come again, and they did, and I thrust the shield up at a man on the bench to my left and stabbed Serpent-Breath at his leg, a puny stroke, but my shield boss caught his belly and hurled him backward, and a blade rammed my lower belly, but the mail did not break. They were crowding down the ship now, the men behind forcing the men in front onto our blades, but the sheer weight of the attack was driving us backward, and I was dimly aware that some of our men were defending our spines against a counterattack from those of Haesten’s men who had boarded Sea-Eagle and now tried to get back on board Dragon-Voyager. Two men managed to get past the crutch and shield-charged me, their slamming impact staggering me sideways and back and I tripped on something and sat heavily on the edge of a rower’s bench and, in blind panic, stabbed Serpent-Breath past the edge of my shield and felt her puncture mail, leather, skin, muscle, and flesh. Things crashed on my shield and I heaved forward, sword still trapped in an enemy’s flesh, and miraculously there was no enemy to keep me down and I touched shields right and left and roared a challenge as I ripped and twisted Serpent-Breath free. An ax hooked on my shield’s upper rim and tried to haul it down, but I dropped the shield, lost the ax, and raised the shield and my sword was free again and I could lunge her at the axman. All instinct, all rage, all screaming hate, all a blur in my mind now.

  How long did that fight last?

  It might have been a moment or an hour. To this day I do not know. I listen to my poets sing of age-old fights and I think no, it was not like that, and certainly that fight aboard Haesten’s ship was nothing like the version my poets warble. It was not heroic and grand, and it was not a lord of war giving out death with unstoppable sword-skill. It was panic. It was abject fear. It was men shitting themselves with fright, men pissing, men bleeding, men grimacing and men crying as pathetically as whipped children. It was a chaos of flying blades, of shields breaking, of half-caught glimpses, of despairing parries and blind lunges. Feet slipped on blood and the dead lay with curling hands and the injured clutched awful wounds that would kill them and they cried for their mothers and the gulls cried, and all that the poets celebrate, because that is their job. They make it sound marvelous. And the wind blew soft across the flooding tide that filled Beamfleot’s creek with swirling water in which the new-shed blood twisted and faded, faded and twisted, until the cold green sea diluted it.

  There had been two battles at the beginning. My crew aboard Sea-Eagle, led by Finan and helped by the remnants of Sigefrid’s warriors who had been manning the stranded blocking ship, fought a desperate defense against Haesten’s household troops. We helped them by boarding Dragon-Voyager while, at the creek’s far end, where the ships burned bright, Sigefrid and Erik’s men attacked the rearward boats of Haesten’s fleet.

  But now it changed. Erik had seen what happened at the creek’s mouth and, instead of boarding a ship, he led his men up the southern bank, splashed through the small channel that led to Two-Tree Island, and then swarmed onto the beached blocking ship. From there they jumped onto Sea-Eagle and so added their weight to Finan’s shield wall. And they were needed, for Haesten’s leading ships had at last rowed to their lord’s rescue and still more men were trying to board the Sea-Eagle, while others were climbing aboard the Dragon-Voyager. It was chaos. And when Sigefrid’s men saw what Erik did, many followed, and Sigefrid himself, aboard a smaller longship, found water enough to row against the tide and was bringing that ship toward the fight at the channel’s mouth where the three boats were locked together, and men fought in ignorance of who they fought. Everyone, it seemed, was against everyone. This, I remember thinking, was like the battles that wait for us in Odin’s corpse-hall, that eternity of joy in which warriors will fight all day and are resurrected to drink and eat and to love their women all night.

  Erik’s men, flooding aboard the Sea-Eagle, helped Finan drive Haesten’s boarders back. Some jumped into the creek, which was just deep enough to drown a man, others escaped onto the newly arrived ships of Haesten’s fleet, while a stubborn rearguard made a defiant shield wall in the Sea-Eagle’s bows. Finan, helped by Erik, had won his battle, and that meant many of his men could come aboard Dragon-Voyager to stiffen our beleaguered shield wall, and the fight on Haesten’s ship lessened in intensity as his men saw nothing but death. They backed away, stepping over benches and leaving their dead, and snarled at us from a safe distance. Now they waited for us to attack.

  And it was then, in that small pause as men on both sides balanced the probabilities of life and death, that I saw Æthelflaed.

  She was crouched beneath the steering platform of Dragon-Voyager from where she stared at the tangle of death and blades in front of her, but there was no fear on her face. She had her arms around two of her maidservants and she watched, wide-eyed, but with no apparent fear. She had to have been terrified, for the last few hours had been nothing but fire, death, and panic. Haesten, we later learned, had ordered the fire set to Sigefrid’s thatch and, in the ensuing chaos, his men had rushed the guards Erik had placed on Æthelflaed’s hall. Those guards had died, and Æthelflaed had been snatched from her chamber and dragged precipitately down the hill to the waiting Dragon-Voyager. It had been well done; a clever, simple, and brutal plan, and it might have worked except that Sea-Eagle had been waiting just beyond the creek’s mouth, and now hundreds of men hacked and stabbed at each other in a wild fight where no man knew exactly who his enemy was, and men just fought because fighting was their joy.

  “Kill them! Kill them!” That was Haesten, urging his men back to the slaughter. He only had to kill our men and Erik’s men and he would be free of the creek, but behind him, coming fast, Sigefrid’s ship surged past Haesten’s other vessels. Her steersman aimed her at the three ships blocking the channel, and there was room enough for the oars to get three hard strokes so that the smaller ship crashed har
d into the fight. She rammed Sea-Eagle’s bows, just where the last of Haesten’s boarders had their shield wall, and I saw those warriors stagger sideways under the shock of the impact, and I also saw Sea-Eagle’s planks driven inward as Sigefrid’s stem-post drove hard into my ship. Sigefrid was almost thrown from his chair by the impact, but he struggled back upright, bear-cloaked, sword in hand, and bellowed at his enemies to come and be killed by his sword, Fear-Giver.

  Sigefrid’s men leaped into the battle, while Erik, tousle-haired and sword in hand, had already crossed the Sea-Eagle’s stern to board Dragon-Voyager and was hacking his wild way toward Æthelflaed. The fight was turning. The arrival of Erik and his men and the impact of Sigefrid’s ship had put Haesten’s warriors on the defensive. The remnant on board Sea-Eagle gave up first. I saw them struggling to board Dragon-Voyager and thought Sigefrid’s men must have attacked with a howling intensity to put them to flight so quickly, but then I saw that my ship was sinking. Sigefrid’s ship had splintered her side and the sea was flooding through the broken planks.