My spear clattered against a metal-skinned shield but a Danish axe hooked that shield’s rim and the Dane yanked it down and I swung my sword into a dark-bearded face, cleaving the skull with a wet crack. That corpse crumpled and I roared and barged through, knocking it aside and opening the enemy’s shieldwall before they could close up. I spun and thrust the spear into a man’s back between his shoulder blades and Penda went low, hacking into legs, and the Danes were as feral as a pack of starving dogs, slashing wildly and howling, with no care for their own skins. The dark-skins were yelling too and it was a wild, rampageous fight in which men went from living to dead in the flash of a blade in the moonlight.
‘Your Danes are wild bastards!’ Penda yelled, hurling his spear and bringing down a dark-skin who had made a run for it. I feinted with my own spear but my enemy read the bluff and knocked the shaft from my grip with his heavy curved sword. I bent my arm and stepped up, cracking my elbow into his chin, then threw a leg back and scythed my blade into his neck. His eyes rolled in his head and his knees buckled and I yanked my blade out, so that dark blood sprayed up the white moon-washed wall beside me. Then a Dane leapt on the man, growling and plunging a knife into his face and chest, and I put my back against the wall, gulping breath and watching the last of the killing.
‘Didn’t get them all,’ Penda said, pointing at three fleeing dark-skins who had dropped their weapons and bolted, leaving their brothers to be butchered.
‘Good,’ I said, kneeling to wipe my blade clean on a dead man’s robes. The Danes were laughing as they stripped the gore-slathered dead looking for loot. Two of their own lay amongst the corpses and several others were hurt, but they had done well and they knew it as they revelled in the other joy that comes when you see that you are still alive when others are not.
‘They don’t fight like Sigurd’s lads,’ Penda said, sheathing his sword. He had barely broken a sweat, whereas I was slick with it and my limbs trembled with the battle thrill. ‘There’s not much skill in them, though I don’t suppose it makes much difference to this lot,’ he said, nodding at the white-robed carrion. ‘Dead is dead however it comes along.’
‘Dead is dead,’ I agreed, sheathing my own blade and turning to piss up the blood-spattered wall. When I swung back round Rolf was standing there, a grin etched on his crimson-smeared face.
‘Now you know how Danemen can fight,’ he said proudly, ‘even with a few poor spears and axes.’ He glanced down at the bodies, which to the Danes’ disappointment were not giving up much in the way of loot. ‘These blaumen have never faced Danes before.’
‘They never will again,’ a man named Byrnjolf added, revealing rotten teeth in his grin. Nearby, a Dane was straddling a bleating goat, slitting its neck.
‘The others will hear of your men’s bravery, Rolf,’ I said. ‘Sigurd will be pleased to know that the Danes are fierce fighters.’ Rolf nodded at that, satisfied with the night’s work. ‘Now we might as well see what we can find around here,’ I said, turning and looking up at the impressive building before us, suddenly hoping there were not more men up there on the wooden walkway readying to drop something heavy on us.
‘There must be something here that those men thought was worth dying for,’ I said, peering up into the flame-licked darkness. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this place?’
Penda scratched his head, saying that he hadn’t and eyeing the iron-studded dark oak door that was almost twice my height. The planks of that door could have come from a longship’s deck; could even have been hull strakes it seemed to me, though I did not say it. They were speckled with sea-worm holes and there were even some worn scratchings that looked to me like runework.
‘That’s going to take some kicking-in by its looks,’ Penda said.
The door needed no kicking at all because it was not locked. We were looking around us for something to use as a ram, when Rolf simply turned the iron ring and the door yawned open, exhaling a sweet smoke.
Rolf’s brows hitched up in surprise and Penda rolled his eyes at our bone-headedness. We might well have smashed that door to splinters without ever trying it.
Some of the Danes stood watch, peering north into the night for signs of more blaumen, whilst the rest of us entered the strange stone building, our eyes hungry for silver.
‘What is this place?’ Penda asked, grimacing at the potent smell as he turned, trying to take in that hollow, candle-lit chamber. ‘No benches. No beds. Not even a bucket to piss in! Looks like the poor bastards have been pilfered already. There’s more in big Svein’s head than in this piss-poor place.’
‘Is it a church, Raven?’ Rolf asked, for he had heard that I had lived for a time in Wessex amongst Christ worshippers.
‘If it is it’s not like any church I’ve seen,’ I said, pressing a palm against the smooth wall, which was made of countless blue stones each not much larger than a brynja ring. Some were dark like the sea and others were the blue of a summer sky. Still others, on the east wall where they lined a doorway, were the bright yellow of cowslips. Only there was no door, just the outline of one, and it led nowhere but was instead an alcove two feet deep, on which strange, sharp symbols twisted and twined with no sense of a pattern so far as I could see. ‘There would be a Christ cross somewhere if it were a church,’ I said, moving over to a stone trough of running water and splashing some on my face to wash off the drying blood.
‘This damn smoke is making me dizzy,’ Penda said, pointing to the north-east corner, where stone steps twisted upwards, stopping just below the bulging, beamless roof. ‘Up you go then, lad,’ he said. ‘Maybe they hide their treasures in the clouds.’
So I drew my sword again, just in case, and started up the narrow stairwell, wondering how long it must have taken to carve each step, and hoping there were no blades waiting for me at the top. I pushed open another door and, with Penda close behind me, gingerly stepped on to the wooden platform we had seen from below. I half expected the planks to snap and for me to fall to my death, but I soon realized the gangway, like the rest of the strange building, was well made. I would be safe so long as I didn’t lean out over the balustrade.
‘I’ve never been this high off the ground,’ I said to Penda, eyeing the surrounding dwellings and the shadowed alleys. A dog was barking incessantly but otherwise the place was quiet. Too quiet. If you really concentrated and turned your ears to the south you could just hear the low murmur of the sea, though you could not see it in the dark beyond the low hump of shadowed scrubland above the beach.
‘I feel closer to God up here,’ Penda said seriously.
‘Which god?’ I asked, trying not to grin. I was unused to hearing Penda talk of such things.
‘Fucking heathen,’ he growled. ‘Though I wouldn’t want to be up here after a skinful of Bram’s mead. My head is spinning as it is after breathing that weird stink down there.’ Up on the walkway the air was cool and clean after the pungent smoke inside. Penda gestured that I go one way round the platform while he went the other, so that all being well we would meet round the other side. I set off, peering into the night and thinking about what the Wessexman had said about feeling closer to his god.
‘Maybe it is a church,’ I suggested when we met on the swollen roof’s west side. ‘Maybe the folk here don’t worship the Christ cross? Frigg knows they don’t look like other Christians. But it could still be a church. Do you really feel that your god is near?’ I asked, a slight shiver crawling across my skin because Penda’s god and mine were enemies.
The Wessexman scratched the long scar on his cheek as we walked together back to the north-east side, and when we were back where we had started from Penda shook his head and turned to me. ‘A church would have something in it. Something worth protecting,’ he said. ‘This place is something else. For one thing it is a good place to watch out for raiders,’ he admitted, thumping the wooden balustrade appreciatively.
‘They didn’t see us coming,’ I said, sheathing my sword again.
‘Aye, but we
shall see them,’ he said, and now it was his turn to grin.
We set three of the Danes to watch from the platform whilst the rest of us paired up and went from house to house, kicking down doors and looking for anything of worth. The people of the place had fled while their warriors had fought us in the shadow of the great building, and Penda suggested that perhaps those warriors had wanted us to think they were protecting something inside so that their folk could escape. This seemed likely to me and in truth I was glad of it because I knew what the Danes would do to anyone they found.
‘Do you expect these godless bastards to lay out their loot for all to see?’ Penda asked, pulling a clinking leather pouch from a small box beneath a child’s crib. He pulled the string and poured a stream of silver coin into his palm. ‘That bony slash of piss Rolf and his bunch of berserkers will be stuffing coins into their arse cracks to keep them from Sigurd, you mark me, lad. They’ll be rattling like an old whore’s teeth.’
‘Are you going to share that little hoard, Penda?’ I asked, nodding at the dully gleaming pile in his hands.
Penda scowled. ‘You can wipe that grin off your face, lad,’ he said, tipping the coins back into the pouch. ‘This is mine by rights for being the bait in the trap.’ He stuffed the purse into his belt and rolled his shoulders with a crack. ‘Well, lad, let’s not stand here getting old.’ He tapped the pouch affectionately. ‘There’s more where this came from and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the bloody Danes get their filthy hands on it.’
Rolf suddenly appeared in the doorway and I did not miss how his eyes flicked down to the purse in Penda’s belt. ‘Gorm has found something you should see,’ he said, turning back into the night.
‘I hope it’s something we can eat,’ Penda grumbled. ‘A pig would go down well. Anything with legs would be good. I’ve eaten enough dried fish to last till Judgement Day.’
But what Gorm had found was not something even a mangy dog would chew on.
‘I thought it must be ale. Even wine,’ the Dane announced, hands on hips before a barrel whose lid he had prised off. Most of the others had gathered, eager to know what Gorm had found and each one moonstruck by the thought of swigging the rest of the night into oblivion. Gorm glanced at Rolf, who nodded, and Gorm grabbed the barrel’s rim and threw the thing over on to its side, so that liquid splashed across the hard ground. With it came heads. And stink. There were five of them and but for their ashen colour all looked as fresh as if they had been lopped from their necks that very morning.
‘Gods!’ a Dane exclaimed. Penda made the sign of the cross over his chest as Byrnjolf prodded one of the heads with his spear.
‘There must be some strange seidr in the water they were in,’ Rolf said, ‘for surely those men were not breathing the same air as us these last days.’ And I thought Rolf must be right because the wound beneath each head’s chin was the same dull grey as the rest of the skin, rather than being like butchered flesh.
‘We found something else, too,’ a Dane called Tufi said, hefting up a silver Christ cross and washing it in moonlight. Some of the Danes recoiled at this but Tufi seemed to care not at all about the thing’s power and if anything made a show of sweeping it through the air to unnerve his friends. ‘It was wrapped in a rotten skin and locked in a chest,’ he said. ‘It’s heavy, too. Imagine how many jarl torcs or arm rings you could make from this.’ Many, I thought, for it was as long as my arm.
‘And I’ll wager it belongs to one of those sorry-looking bastards,’ Penda said, pointing at one of the severed heads, whose brown beard looked neater than most of ours, which was an odd thing given the circumstances.
‘So these blaumen have no love for the White Christ either,’ Byrnjolf said, twisting a braid round a thick finger. ‘Maybe we should have traded with them instead of killing them. We could have given them Sigurd’s Christ men and they could have given us their women.’
The others laughed at this and I chose not to tell Penda what Byrnjolf had said. ‘Just be glad your head is not drowning in a blauman’s barrel, Byrnjolf,’ I said, to which he nodded solemnly. ‘Now get back to work. If our scheme is running straight we don’t have long. Gather what silver you can find and burn whatever will take a flame. Then rally by Gerd’s Tit,’ I said, pointing at the strange empty building. ‘Bring cooking pots too and fill them with earth.’
‘In Denmark we eat meat, Raven, not dirt,’ a tall man with an ash-flecked black beard said, his brows woven together.
‘The pots are for dropping, not eating,’ I said, ‘but we will need food so bring anything you can find. Two or three goats too. And bring your heads, Gorm,’ I said, glancing at the Dane, who grinned until he realized that I was serious. ‘They’re heavy aren’t they?’ I said.
‘As heavy as any other head I suppose,’ Gorm admitted with a shrug.
‘So bring them,’ I said, turning my back on him. Then I walked back to Gerd’s Tit, aiming a kick at the still barking dog and almost getting my foot bitten off for my trouble.
A cookfire was already crackling and popping and as the smell of roasting meat wafted over to slicken my mouth, I hoped we would have more luck than the Christians whose heads were now stuck on spears over Danish shoulders.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE BLAUMEN CAME OUT OF THE RED GLARE OF THE EAST. THE FIRST arrived on tall, lissom horses and lined the scrubby ridge above the beach, which suggested they were no fools. They must have ridden along the coast trying to find our ship, which would give them an idea of how many we were. I was sure Ogn and the men aboard Sea-Arrow would have been keen-eyed enough to see the riders coming. They would have sailed out of the blaumen’s reach and would be holding in the bay a short distance off shore. But we were now cut off from the sea and so the blaumen thought they could finish us.
‘Your eyes are younger than mine. How many do you see?’ Penda asked. We were up on the lookout platform of Gerd’s Tit, shielding our eyes against the rising sun. That dawn was dry and fine and the sky was a bowl of blue stretching beyond imagining. High up, higher than the black specks of birds, a few thin clouds skated east across the roof of the world on winds that did not reach us far below.
‘It’s hard to count them when they keep moving like that,’ I said. ‘Twenty-five? Thirty?’ The horses were tossing their heads and whinnying, excited perhaps by their riders’ nerves and the prospect of a fight. Beasts are like that, they can smell blood before it’s even spilled. Perhaps those are ravens up there, I thought, glancing up at the sky, patiently waiting because they know there will be flesh to feast on soon enough.
‘There’ll be more before long,’ Penda said. ‘The silver-light bastards who have to walk on their own two legs will turn up and then we’ll have a fight on our hands.’ He was right, for in the time it takes to put an edge on a sword, another war band had appeared from the north. Their spear blades, helmets and buckles glinted in the sun as they checked their weapons, stretched their limbs and practised spear thrusts. They wore the same white robes and bundles of linen on their heads as the men we had killed the day before and they had the same metal-skinned shields too. Some of them were probably the same men who had run from us when we attacked the place, but they were back now and they wanted revenge as any man would.
Our men were milling around the base of the building, checking their own poor weapons and nervous now in the cold light of day, their blood sluggish and their instincts telling them that they were outnumbered and in a poor position. I turned and saw Gorm carefully lining up a row of earth-filled pots along the balustrade.
‘Did you bring the heads?’ I asked, my stomach growling in complaint at the tough goat meat I had eaten last evening.
Gorm’s wind- and salt-cracked lips spread into a thin smile. ‘I brought them,’ he said, understanding now why I had asked for anything heavy. ‘They’re on the steps in there,’ he said, nodding towards the door which led back inside the building. ‘I thought it was best to keep them out of the sun. Don’t know how lon
g we’re likely to be up here.’ He frowned. ‘I could let them warm up a little,’ he suggested mischievously.
‘They’ll do fine as they are,’ I said. I smiled, trying to smother the fear whose icy fingers were beginning to caress my guts. ‘Hard and cold, or warm and stinking, it’s all the same. No one likes an old severed head dropped on them from a height.’ Gorm grinned and I thought him as ugly as Völund’s hairy scrotum, but yet a good man to have with you when you were in a strange land and outnumbered by men coming to kill you.
Rolf came over and leant on the rail, his jaw set and his eyes fixed on the mounted men, who had not moved from the ridge three bow-shots away to the south-east. He spat over the side. ‘How bold do you want to play this?’ he asked without turning his head. I had not known whether Rolf would look to me to lead, or Penda, or whether he might have his own ideas. My guts tightened like a fist gripping water.
‘Say something, lad,’ Penda muttered and I realized I had not answered Rolf. ‘Anything will do, but give him something,’ Penda growled.
‘We are the anvil, Rolf,’ I said, remembering my jarl’s words, ‘and the blaumen are the lump of iron that must be placed on the anvil.’
Rolf nodded, still staring at the riders. ‘And Sigurd?’ he asked.
‘Sigurd? Sigurd is the hammer,’ I said.
‘Even their damn banner is black,’ Penda said, jerking his chin towards the north, where the horseless warriors had planted their banner in the earth. Then a strange, plaintive sound carried to us, a keening voice rising and falling as quickly as water over pebbles, as nimble as a thin wind through a forest. As one, the dark men dropped to their knees and touched their foreheads to the ground. Then they climbed back to their feet, before dropping again as the voice melted away to silence. They repeated this action and the weird voice grew, twisting and writhing like a serpent made of smoke, and from the corner of my eye I saw Rolf touch the cheek of the short axe tucked into his belt, to ward off evil.
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