by M. K. Hume
Muttering an insult under his breath, Rufus turned to slash at Eamonn’s legs, giving an immediate indication of the speed of his reactions. Once again, Eamonn sidestepped the blow, while Rufus tapped his sword against his shield in the universal signal that the young man should be prepared to go onto the attack.
With minimal pressure being exerted on him by his young opponent, the Dene warrior decided to taunt the young Briton into making an inopportune move. Rufus hissed under his breath and spoke slowly and loudly so that the first ranks of the audience could clearly hear him.
“Come and fight me, little man! Or are you still such a boy that you can only use a child’s shield? I’ll have to tan your backside with the flat of my sword if you don’t stop dancing around like a girl.”
Eamonn gritted his teeth and closed his mind against the half-understood insult.
Fortunately, he had no real idea what Rufus had said. Even so, Rufus punctuated his insults with several rude gestures and swung his hips in a parody of a girl, an insult which any fool could interpret.
Arthur had warned him that Rufus would use offensive words and insults if Eamonn should prove difficult to catch, but the contempt in Rufus’s voice and his demeanor stung Eamonn’s personal pride.
Keep your head, Eamonn, Arthur prayed silently.
Blaise watched her brother square his shoulders and ignore a pointed insult aimed directly at her. For her part, she didn’t really care what the Dene called her. This clod could call her a slut all day and into the night, as long as her brother remained safe. Sometimes, it was useful to be ignorant of a language. She recalled her complaints on the roads leading into the north and felt a pang of shame for her whining.
Somehow, Eamonn had managed to keep his head under the barrage of invective, until shortness of breath eventually brought Rufus’s insults to a stop. The younger man continued to dance around his opponent, while Rufus attempted to find a gap in the defenses of the Briton. The Dene began to feel the heat of irritation rise like bitter curd in his mouth.
Although the sun lacked any sting in its brilliance, both men were soon sweating heavily from their exertions. Again and again, Eamonn circled his larger opponent in such a manner that Rufus had to look towards the light that dazzled off the boss of his shield and the metal plates of the young man’s armored vest. On at least three occasions, Eamonn noticed that Rufus’s eyes squinted from the reflected sunlight. Good! I might be able to capitalize on a brief moment of sun blindness, the Briton thought with savage pleasure.
“Stand still and fight like a man, you coward,” someone in the crowd shouted loudly.
Still others began the chant of “Fight! Fight! Stand and fight!” so that the air was thick with a cacophony of catcalls and abuse that Eamonn struggled to ignore.
Then, as Rufus managed to maneuver the Briton towards a corner, several arms snaked out from the crowd and around the guards to grasp at Eamonn. As Rufus charged in to take advantage of this new development, Eamonn managed to tear his body free and avoid the savage thrust designed to gut him. However, the blow was impossible to avoid entirely, so the British captives watched, aghast, as a fine line of blood began to seep from a cut along Eamonn’s breast. Although the sweep of the sword slice was almost spent by the time it split his skin, the cut was almost twelve inches long and would soon begin to weep profusely. As he danced away, a red stain began to widen along the edges of the protective leather tunic.
Eamonn had no time to staunch the flesh wound and control the dangerous flow of blood, so realized he was in dire straits. He must even the score now, or he would lose this bout! The Dene had been the first to cheat, or benefit from cheating, so Eamonn felt free to fight with every dirty trick he had ever learned.
For his part, Rufus was certain the contest was all but over, and Eamonn was at his mercy. Strutting like a cockerel on his dung heap while dragging out the moment of victory to savor it, the Dene swung his sword in a shining parabola for the delight of the crowd, all of whom stamped and cheered until the hard-packed earth and cobbles vibrated under their enthusiasm.
Flamboyant with confidence, Rufus stepped in close to finish Eamonn off but, carelessly, he lowered his guard for the first time. Using the reflection from his shield to dazzle the Dene’s eyes, Eamonn capitalized on the Dene’s error. As Rufus was momentarily blinded, the younger man used the sharpened edge of his shield to strike at Rufus’s face directly under the warrior’s noseguard. At the same time, Eamonn took the enormous risk of leaving the inviting target of his own body exposed to Rufus’s sword. His own blow caught the Dene squarely on the sinew under the nostrils, causing Rufus to squeal with pain. An immediate rush of tears further blocked off Rufus’s vision, and the warrior almost made the fundamental error of lowering his shield. Then, as the Dene castigated himself, Eamonn kicked Rufus in the balls before his opponent could regather his wits.
The low blow dropped Rufus like a stone, while every man in the crowd groaned as their hands inched towards their own groins.
With eyes reddened by bloodlust, Eamonn swung his sword in a precise sweeping motion that opened Rufus’s arm to the bone from shoulder to elbow. The razor-sharp blade clove through flesh, muscle, and sinews with ease, and only the discipline and precision of Eamonn’s swordplay saved Rufus’s arm from amputation.
As Rufus dropped his shield and gripped his suddenly nerveless and useless arm, pain and shock brought the Dene warrior to his knees. The crowd howled in fury and disappointment.
“Stand up and fight, you coward!” Hrolf Kraki shouted at his defeated and unresponsive champion, while Arthur watched with disgust as every word struck deeply into the heart of the king’s loyal retainer. Rufus Olaffsen was bereft as the strong rock of his honor crumbled under his shambling feet.
With a superhuman effort, Rufus used his shield to support his agonized body as he attempted to clamber painfully upright. Eamonn waited courteously, choosing to give Rufus a chance to continue the bout if he was capable of doing so. Staggering and weaving, but with his feet widespread to support his weight, Rufus tried manfully to overcome the agony of his arm and groin wounds. But Eamonn was now a misty, wavering figure that he couldn’t keep in focus.
Like a wounded bull, Rufus shook his head to clear his vision. Slowly, far too slowly, he forced himself to raise his sword. Arthur swore under his breath, for Eamonn would be guilt-ridden for the rest of his life if he had to kill this man who had shown such determination in this combat.
“Another good man who’s been ruined by a bad master,” Arthur exclaimed to himself.
Beside him, Stormbringer shot a surprised glance in the young man’s direction when he realized that Arthur was serious. It’s a pity that this fine young fellow must die at Thorketil’s hands, the Sae Dene thought. But, wisely, he kept his opinion to himself.
From a vantage point at the back of the crowd where he was perched on the roof of an outbuilding, Frodhi called Eamonn’s name. When both Eamonn and Arthur looked towards the sound, Frodhi raised his thumb in a gesture of approval. Unfortunately, Hrolf Kraki also saw the movement of Eamonn’s head. As quick as a snake strike, the Crow King turned to discover the object of Eamonn’s attention and watched Frodhi’s gesture.
Hrolf Kraki knew instinctively that he was being gulled; he realized instantly that his jokester cousin had been mocking him in some way; and he was angry and enraged by Rufus’s failure and his own loss of face in the crowd’s esteem. He would have acted precipitately if Aednetta hadn’t pinched the soft skin on the underside of his forearm to remind him that he was in open view of the population of Heorot. Her warm little hand burrowed into the arm of his robe, an intoxicating and deliciously wicked distraction.
“At least the Troll King will finish off the other Briton,” the Crow King insisted savagely, while savoring his pet name for his champion. “Thorketil will devour the British upstart, and then spit out the bones for my amusement.�
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Stormbringer turned in the king’s direction and inclined his head in deference, but Hrolf Kraki could see something closely akin to contempt in the action. “I’ll chew your bones as well before this year is done, you bastard,” the king vowed as he irritably shook off Aednetta’s restraining hand. Stormbringer seemed to sense the enmity as he glanced at his king before returning his gaze to what was happening in the arena.
Stormbringer was unaccountably excited by Rufus’s loss to Eamonn because there was now some hope that the Britons could win, but his innate common sense told him that the sheer strength in Thorketil’s bulk would favor him during Arthur’s bout. Even so, the Sae Dene was sure that the young Briton would be difficult to kill.
“What a fucking waste,” Stormbringer swore under his breath; Arthur, unable to tell whose fate was under consideration, would have been surprised to know that it was his own.
Predictably, Eamonn knocked Rufus off his feet with the same lack of triumph that had soured Arthur’s pleasure in the victory. The Dene fell to the ground but, like a true warrior, he tried desperately to roll over and hoist himself to his feet once again.
“Stay down, Rufus Olaffsen,” Eamonn hissed at the Dene. “No man will judge you to be a coward, for you’ve already proved your courage in this contest.”
The Briton had already forgotten the barely understood insults that Rufus had hurled at him. Such ploys were the way of all personal battles. But Rufus was unable to accept his loss. Once again, racked by pain and with blood streaming from his wounds, he forced himself to stagger to his feet and charge blindly towards Eamonn’s hazy form. Regretfully, Eamonn used his sword hilt to strike Rufus behind the ear as the pain-blinded man stumbled past him.
The contest was over and Rufus was dragged away with scant concern for his wounds. His bleeding head thudded sickeningly on the first step of the forecourt.
Without preamble and without waiting for any introduction to the crowd, Thorketil strode into the circle and rammed a plain helmet over his mane of hair. Staring implacably in Arthur’s general direction, the Hammer of Thor made the universal beckoning gesture that invited Arthur to join him in the center of the makeshift arena.
Arthur turned to see if there was any reaction on Hrolf Kraki’s intent face and noticed that the witchwoman had moved so that she was standing behind the king with one long-fingered hand resting in a proprietorial fashion on his shoulder. With the attention to detail of a man about to face death, Arthur noticed that her nails had been stained dark blue with woad, a strange affectation that suggested her fingers had once been frozen by terrible cold. The oddity registered strongly in Arthur’s consciousness.
“It’s time!” Arthur said to his friends. “Thorketil might be a troll, but he’s a great troll. So pray for me to prevail in this trial of strength!”
Maeve threw herself into her brother’s arms, and whispered a few brief words of advice into his ear before Stormbringer pulled her away, allowing Arthur to enter the circle with his Dragon Knife in one hand and his sword in the other.
“Briton! You! Briton! Where is your shield?” the king demanded.
“I don’t use a shield, Lord King, but I use my long knife as my second weapon. If your champion comes within my guard, one of us will die and no shield will change that truth! I will keep my knife, and your champion may use whatever protection he prefers.”
Arthur ignored Hrolf Kraki’s baffled face and knelt on the edge of the killing circle where he could compose himself by sinking down into that cavern in his mind where instinct lived within a cool and narrow focus. When he could no longer feel the cold of the earth through his knees, he rose to his feet. His eyes were now as calm and as grey as the empty seas.
“I’m glad you’ve prayed to your gods, Briton, for you’ll be joining them soon enough,” Thorketil sneered as he hefted his inhumanly large shield with its boss shaped like a bull’s head.
“May Mithras continue to protect you from harm,” Arthur replied. A bull was often sacrificed to this Roman deity, so Thorketil’s choice of emblem, whether conscious or not, was very appropriate. But Arthur’s salute thoroughly confused the giant warrior, for the Dene weren’t very familiar with Roman customs.
Thorketil responded to his embarrassment by snarling deep in his throat in the mistaken belief that Arthur was mocking him.
For one short moment, the giant was frozen in anger, but then he brought his red temper under control with a practiced discipline that Arthur recognized and admired as the mark of a gifted warrior.
The young man dropped into a fighting crouch then, and the twin blades began to weave patterns in the air that seemed like bands of silver light in the sunshine. The tips of the weapons circled like spools of thread, an effect which seemed to distract Thorketil’s eyes and hypnotize him with their steady, even tempo. Then, without further warning, Arthur moved forward at lightning speed and the tip of his knife tore its way through Thorketil’s leather tunic as if the sturdy armor was made of smoke. The suddenness of this attack was the only reason that Arthur managed to breach the Dene’s guard.
A faint line of blood was left in the Dragon Knife’s wake but, like all its victims, the great troll imagined that the blade had bucked in its master’s hand, as if it was hungry for blood. Thorketil shook his head to kill a sudden rush of superstition, while the crowd howled in mingled amazement and horror.
Then rage filled Thorketil’s vision with a red mist. No man had ever breached his guard so easily; Thorketil was humiliated and furious with his enemy and with himself. His pride could not permit another blow to drag his reputation for invincibility into the dust, so he slammed his naked blade upon his shield to show that his arm was unharmed.
An ugly, half-formed smile appeared on his face—one that few living men had ever seen.
“Well done, little man. You can boast in Hell that you managed to shed some of Thorketil’s blood before he killed you.”
“You talk too much,” Arthur answered from the coldest spaces of his brain.
Thorketil chose to make a dramatic charge to restore his status in the eyes of the crowd. Rushing at Arthur, he raised his shield like a battering ram to drive the younger man down into the dirt where the Briton could be dispatched with a simple stabbing blow from above.
The ploy had worked repeatedly in the past, for most enemies never expected such explosive speed from so huge a man.
The trick would have worked again, except for Maeve’s final message given to her brother at the commencement of the bout. “Watch his eyes,” she had warned Arthur before the bout commenced. “He’s never learned to disguise his thoughts, because he’s never had to learn how to use guile. His physical strength has always been enough to win.”
Clever Maeve! Arthur thought as he allowed his body to take over the tactical considerations of the bout that stretched out before him.
It was only Arthur’s exceptional speed that saved him from a crushing blow from the shield’s deadly boss as he threw himself to the right, and away from Thorketil’s monstrous sword. The many years of practicing swordplay with Germanus, who had seemed at the time to be a veritable giant, saved the young man from an ignominious death. On his feet in an instant, Arthur used his acrobatic grace to tumble behind the man-mountain while swinging his own sword to one side. As he fell, the tip of his sword touched Thorketil’s ankle. The strike was solid enough to raise blood, but not enough to cut directly through the tendon and bring the troll to his knees.
On his feet at once and on guard, Arthur and Thorketil struggled for mastery for a long time, far past the point of exhaustion for any normal warrior. Thorketil was slick with sweat, so the dampened curls along his hairline were the color of stained old bones. But Arthur was carrying bloodied injuries from a dozen small scrapes and cuts in places where the monster had almost caught him, so each small wound was draining him as they sucked away at his icy calm.
/> Now is the time for courage, the voice of his beloved Bedwyr whispered in his ear, and Arthur repeated the words aloud for comfort. For the very first time, the young man could taste the bitterness of defeat in his mouth, because he had tried every trick he knew against Thorketil and each attempt to gain the ascendancy had failed.
For his part, Thorketil had that same unpalatable taste in his mouth. Again and again, he had pitted his unnatural strength and speed against an elusive target and had failed to finish off this irritating opponent, one who should have been crushed with that very first blow. For the first time since he had been a tormented boy, teased and tortured because of his size, Thorketil began to consider the possibility of failure. Although he refused to show this fear of defeat by even a single slumped muscle, each attack was becoming a little more difficult to mount than the last. Thorketil longed to be done with this Briton and his dangerous little knife.
“Will you finish with this irritating Briton, Thorketil? I had hoped for better from you.”
For one moment, Hrolf Kraki’s unjust words clouded the giant’s brain. But his ire was clearly aimed at the Crow King, so the young prince readied himself for an inevitable attack.
“You’ve shamed me before my king, little man. I’ll crush your skull with my own two hands and feed on your liver for your sins,” Thorketil promised, and made a further rush at Arthur, his courage bolstered by his fear and humiliation.
For once, Arthur chose not to retreat but allowed his knife and sword to block the blow from Thorketil’s huge sword above his head. The metal in the crossed blades screamed, but the two craftsmen who forged the weapons were master metalsmiths and they had wrought each edge with love. The sword and the knife never wavered, while Arthur’s muscles cracked and strained with the effort of holding the troll’s huge weapon at bay.
