by M. K. Hume
A stray horse almost knocked Arthur over, but he avoided it by changing direction, thereby avoiding an axe that was swung to remove his head. A warrior sprang up before him, seemingly out of the raw earth. He must have been more acute than most of his fellows and expected an attack would have to come from the woods. For his intelligence, the Geat died quickly, his throat severed to the spine by a slash from the Dragon Knife while Arthur tried to regroup his attack towards Olaus Healfdene’s headquarters once again.
Arthur was almost at the barracks before most of the Geat warriors realized the space between the lakefront and Mirk Wood was crawling with Dene enemy. Because the attack had been conducted in silence, aided by the use of fire and the loosened horses, the Geats had awoken to scenes of chaos. Nothing had prepared them for a surprise attack from out of nowhere. Arthur was upon them with his crew at his heels before the Geats even realized the danger they were in.
“For Stormbringer!” For Leif, the Sword of Skandia! For honor!”
Arthur continued to roar out his challenge as he engaged a huge, bearlike man wrapped in sleeping furs to cover his nakedness, despite wielding a huge sword that matched his impressive height. Behind him, Arthur heard the cry repeated again and again, as other crews took it up. The night that had been so silent was now reverberating with the constant sounds of mortal combat.
Somewhere nearby, a voice began to sing of death. Other voices joined it, so the sound added to the chaos of fire, blood, and confusion. Arthur found that he was dancing and killing to the song’s rhythm. All too soon, he was awash with blood so that he blessed the long-dead craftsman who had made the Dragon Knife so exactingly. A man struck out at Arthur and would have killed him, but his bloody fingers slipped on the sodden pommel of his sword and the blow glanced off Arthur’s helmet.
Arthur shook his head to clear out any cobwebs, and then killed his foe with the Dragon Knife firmly gripped in his left hand. Bedwyr had ordered that shagreen and rope should cover the pommel of his son’s sword, and now Arthur could see the wisdom of that choice in the charnel house of the lake’s foreshore. The coarse sharkskin gave his sweating, blood-soaked fingers some purchase, and the rope absorbed the blood.
The rope will never be white again, his inner voice chuckled.
“Shut up!” Arthur roared, and swung his weapons like scythes so that men avoided the crazed giant who was covered in blood from head to toe, except for his maniacal grey eyes.
The first light struck the horizon behind him, and the rational part of Arthur’s brain blessed the luck that Stormbringer possessed, whereby the rays of the early-morning dawn would dazzle the eyes of the Geat warriors. But there were more men to kill, so Arthur continued to scour the surrounds of the collapsing barracks, while killing all who stood in his path.
Suddenly, the sounds of singing were cut short, so Arthur turned to see that Rolf Sea-Shaper had fallen, his arm pouring blood. Above him, a giant Geat was poised to bury his axe into Rolf’s skull.
Arthur shouted to deflect the Geat’s attention, so when the axeman wavered in his stroke sufficiently for Rolf to roll away from the downwards blow, the axehead was buried in the bloody mud of the barracks’ forecourt.
“Never take your eyes off the enemy,” Arthur instructed the man kindly, just as he removed the warrior’s head.
“He’ll remember now,” Rolf chuckled weakly from the ground as he accepted Arthur’s left arm, with the hand still holding the Dragon Knife, to haul him to his feet. “Go, Arthur! Keep killing the bastards. I’ll survive!”
“Be sure you do, helmsman,” Arthur growled. “There’ll be no songs without you, and I’ve grown accustomed to them.”
Arthur continued to kill Geat warriors until his arms were almost too tired to lift his sword. As the yellow and green phalanxes demolished the wings to the right and the left of the Geat headquarters, the survivors had bolstered the forces around the collapsing barracks at the center of the Geat camp. The red phalanx took terrible losses, but Denes from the green and the yellow phalanxes joined them in a contracting circle of death. For most of the engagement, the Geat warriors could have escaped at any time, because the Dene lines were stretched so thin that they could not have stopped any organized breakout or retreat. But the Geat warriors refused to run, and there was no organizing brain to mitigate their appalling loss of life.
In the end, the battle of Lake Wener was an exercise in sheer butchery, as the element of surprise and a superior strategy gave the Dene an edge which they never lost. The sun rose on a scene from Hell, with piled bodies of dead Geat around a shrinking perimeter where the defenders were reverting to the use of the shield wall as their final line of defense. The Geat warriors were being mercilessly picked off by the sheer number of survivors in the Dene force.
Arthur felt a slap cross his face and raised his knife to gut the misty figure in front of him.
“I’m Stormbringer, you fool! Snap out of it, Arthur! I need you!”
“Lord . . .” Arthur gasped. The reek of fresh blood and entrails washed over him and, for the first time that morning, he became aware of the filth. The young man almost vomited at his master’s feet.
“Better now? Good, because I need a man I can trust to persuade these Geat fools to stop fighting. There are fewer than a hundred of them left alive. I’ll permit them to leave in peace, but they must take a message back to their king from me.”
The Sae Dene paused. “I can parlay with the remnants of Olaus’s army myself, but I’ll lose prestige with those same survivors if I do. Besides, with your appearance, you’ll scare the last Geat warriors into submission.”
Stormbringer was only half joking, which made his language and mien even more effective. The commander rapidly outlined what he wanted, although he was hard put not to twitch away from the stink surrounding his friend.
“Are you hurt, Arthur?” Stormbringer asked, his forehead furrowed with concern.
“My lord, I truly cannot tell! If these brave Geat are prepared to listen, I’ll try to force them to lay down their arms, although I can understand why they would be prepared to die here on the spot where they were defeated, rather than accept an abject surrender.”
“Yes! I understand their need, my Dragon, but I must send a message to their king, so I want them to live.”
And so Arthur made a pact with the last officer of the Geats, a lad of Arthur’s age who was completely unsure of what he should do. Arthur convinced the young officer that the Geat warriors would be doing their last duty to Olaus by informing their king of the death of his general, and by granting mercy to the remaining warriors. After an hour of truce, the Geats capitulated.
Within another hour, the last survivors of Olaus’s vast horde had left their encampment to undertake the journey back to their king on foot. They were unarmed except for knives and had been supplied with enough food and drink for two days’ travel. If they needed more, their countrymen would have to supply it.
The young officer repeated Stormbringer’s message regularly as he ran, determinedly placing one foot in front of the other while he learned the taste and smell of defeat. When he eventually stood at the foot of Heardred’s throne, the message was imprinted in the young man’s brain.
“ ‘I, Arthur Dragonsen, tell you that the Stormbringer, Valdar Bjornsen, is come from the land of the Dene. He will take reparation for the cowardly murders of the Geat allies, his kinsmen who have been foully murdered, and he will kill all those Geat thieves who have taken Dene lands.
“ ‘The Last Dragon swears to you in the Stormbringer’s name that this will be, so ask for parlay or you will perish.’ ”
Chapter XXIV
THE DOLOROUS DAY
Be happy, drink, and think each day your own as you live it and leave the rest to fortune.
—EURIPIDES, Alcestis
The battle of Mirk Wood would become the stuff of legends, while Arthur
would become the red dragon who flew out of a burnished sky to destroy the enemies of the Dene. Arthur would laugh when he heard the sagas woven by Rolf Sea-Shaper, who would never again have a right arm strong enough to fight the rudder or carry a sword. He would become a singer, a chronicler of Stormbringer, the Last Dragon and those golden days of blood, death, and triumph that made some sense of the horrors of life.
But that was all in the future. On that grim morning, Arthur faced up to what battle had made of him. He was a creature of death!
As he strode towards the water’s edge at Lake Wener, the Dene warriors lowered their eyes respectfully and stepped aside for him so that even his shadow shouldn’t touch them. Many of them had seen the Briton in action and they had been awestruck by his power, his coldness, and his mastery of his weapons. “He isn’t human,” one warrior decided. “You only have to look in his eyes to see that the dragon in him is alive.”
“Aye! When he’s angry, the master’s eyes change from golden to grey, but by all the gods of Asgaad, he’s a wonder with those blades of his. I never knew a man who didn’t need a shield until I met Arthur,” his companion added. “But he’s also a good leader—and he cares about his men.” In fact, Rolf had defended Arthur so successfully that the Dene warriors gradually ceased to treat him as if he was a man monster.
As he scrubbed his body with coarse sand from the lake, Arthur believed that nothing could possibly peel or scour away the blood that tainted his skin. Fully clothed, he sat in the wavelets and ignored the water on his armor and his weapons. At this moment, all he wanted was to feel clean again.
Suddenly, Arthur remembered. His foster father had once described how he had sat in the ocean and attempted to scrub away the blood of Saxons he had killed at Moridunum. Bedwyr had learned much about himself from the carnage of those war experiences, so the wise old man had counseled his son in preparation for the time when the boy would suffer from the same pangs of guilt. Arthur immediately felt a warm sense of camaraderie with Bedwyr, which mitigated his disgust at the number of men he had killed in this battle.
“Blessed Bedwyr, you always seem to be here when I need to think straight. I have been a man who was so crazed by killing that he doesn’t even feel a blow that strikes him. Well, I can feel every blow now!”
Arthur made it to his feet with a deep sigh. Now that he was almost clean, he could feel the pains from a dozen small cuts, slashes, and contusions caused by deflected swords or the hilts of weapons used to batter his face and body. None of the wounds were serious—but they hurt!
Once his muscles had cooled, Arthur allowed his unbraided hair to stream down his back while he carried his helmet by the cheek strap. His fellow Dene seemed to meet his eyes more easily now that he wasn’t covered in blood.
“Where’s Stormbringer?” he asked Rufus, who was wrapping a superficial wound on his arm with a strip of cloth torn from his shirt. Laconic as ever, Rufus nodded in the direction of the partly burned headquarters, which had already been co-opted as a makeshift hospital.
Arthur thanked Rufus, who remained dour and glum, then ambled off in the direction the warrior had indicated.
As he entered the building, he noticed that the doorway had been built for tall men, a relief after some of the structures he had been forced to use. He remembered the cramped quarters at World’s End with an affection that was marred by the pain he had felt every time he hit his head on a doorway.
Inside, the once-spacious building was pungent with the smell of woodsmoke, fallen rafters, and illness, but part of the roof had survived in the capricious ways of fires. Without any way to care for them, Stormbringer had decided that any Geat warrior who couldn’t walk in the retreat should be put to death rather than die from starvation or be savaged by scavengers after the Dene army had departed.
The gloom was thick in the building, but Arthur could see that there were surprisingly few wounded men here. All told, there were fewer than a hundred.
“Yes! We fight—or we die!” Stormbringer exclaimed at Arthur’s shoulder. “The north is a testing place, as you have seen. We have no surgeons like the ones you have described to me. We even lack camp followers who can help us to care for the sick, as is the case today. Here, the wounded must fight until they die in the full knowledge that they will suffer that fate anyway. In death, my friend, there can still be glory.”
“My father would say that while there’s life, there’s hope, and a warrior must try to stay alive to strike further blows against his enemies.” Arthur grinned ruefully. “My teacher, Father Lorcan, often told me that it was better to be a live mouse than a dead lion—or a dragon in my case! I’m still wondering if he’s correct in that assertion.”
“I suppose it depends on the reasons for the battle,” Stormbringer said.
“Aye!” Arthur replied. He was too tired to make moral judgments on the ambivalent nature of warfare. “Have you seen Eamonn?” he asked the Sae Dene, but then felt his stomach drop to his boots at the flicker of regret in Stormbringer’s eyes. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Arthur anticipated the answer before Stormbringer gave him the confirmation, but the young man needed to hear the words to actually believe it. He could still see Eamonn laughing with devilry when he looked back at Arthur before dropping to the ground to begin the long, dangerous crawl to the Geat lines. Even more poignant, Arthur remembered the short, plump boy who’d been so mercilessly bullied by Mareddyd, the British prince, who’d believed he was the strongest and most royal of all the noble youth assembled by Taliesin to build a protective dyke in the marshland close to Glastonbury. In reality, the true purpose of the building project had been to bond together the next generation of the lords of Britain. Arthur had been thirteen at the time, so he had known Eamonn for nearly ten years, but adversity had caused them to become closer than brothers. Arthur had enough muscle for the two of them, but it was Eamonn who possessed the true joy of living.
“It’s unfair that Eamonn is dead. He took so much pleasure from living when less-worthy men have survived him.” Arthur was afraid that he would burst into tears. With some difficulty, he pursed his lips and squared his jaw.
“Eamonn and I were friends as boys,” he explained to Stormbringer, who was feeling helpless in the face of Arthur’s naked grief.
The young man wanted to scream at God for killing Eamonn and for taking his parents, whom he still hungered for, just as every child will in those times when their world is shattered.
“They’ve laid his body out under the sky with the other dead officers. We’ll burn the bodies of our warriors, but our jarls and Eamonn will go to the gods on a ship. There are some small rivercraft at the village where the Vagus meets Lake Wener. I’ve sent some of our scouts to bring back one of the largest boats, which will be used as a gift to our noble dead. Unmanned, the vessel will sail out over the lake where it will be set alight, burned, and allowed to sink in the deeper waters.”
Arthur sighed deeply. He must honor his friend in this rite so he could bear witness to King Bors and Queen Valda of Eamonn’s fate. Then he snorted with laughter, for he was presupposing that there would be a time when he actually returned to his native country. But in his heart of hearts, he knew that Eamonn’s untimely death had helped to sever the bonds that tied him to his homeland.
Stormbringer called to a young warrior who was still proudly wearing a thread of the yellow phalanx tied into his hair. Then, with a serious expression on his face, the Sae Dene instructed the warrior to conduct Arthur to the site where the Dene dead had been laid out in readiness for the flames.
Outside, in the cleaner air where sickness had no place, Dene working parties were laboring to strip the enemy bodies of their valuables. Once naked, the corpses were dragged to a long, eroded fissure in the earth where their remains would be burned and their ashes left to dissipate in the elements. Everything of use, including a number of fine horses, had already been co
llected and stored. Surprisingly, as the Dene warriors continued to search the bivouac for wagons and harness to transport the captured spoils, they found further caches of supplies that Olaus Healfdene had stockpiled for a long campaign.
“Would the Geat have stayed here for the winter?” Arthur asked the young warrior, Ole Skuldesen, who was awed at being in such close contact with a man already spoken of as a living legend, a new Thor who had come to save the Dene.
“The lake is too big to freeze in the winter, so there’s a constant source of food here. Also, my lord, the large body of water creates warmer air along the coast, so this place is a perfect spot in which to spend the winter. Olaus stored plenty of ale, and he kept a goodly supply of dried meat, fish, and game. He even had barrels of apples! By the gods, Olaus thought of everything when it came to his creature comforts.”
The young man grinned and looked at Arthur with the glow of hero-worship clearly visible in his eyes. “Everything but the best warriors!”
“The credit for our victory belongs to Stormbringer’s strategies, my friend. I merely tagged along in our commander’s wake,” Arthur replied gruffly.
“But you killed Olaus Healfdene, Lord Arthur. Don’t you remember?”
Arthur looked as thunderstruck as he felt. “I killed a number of men, Ole, but they didn’t pause to introduce themselves. Where is Olaus Healfdene?”
Arthur was led to a line of Geat dead who had, by their dress, been more important than the ordinary warriors. Ole pointed to the corpse of the large man wrapped in bear furs whom Arthur had killed at the very beginning of the battle. The long and slightly portly body was thick with muscle and was still decked with heavy, golden arm rings that were clamped around his biceps and wrists. Arthur realized the man’s importance when he saw that a blood-spattered torc of three strands of plaited gold was still lying on his chest and his valuables hadn’t, as yet, been pillaged. The head of the Geat commander had been cut through at the neck with amazing precision, and placed next to the body.
