Had night come already? Sigurd wondered. Surely not. Just the storm then. He looked up to see that the sky was almost black, the roof of the world veiled in swaths of fast-moving bruise-coloured cloud. There was water in the wind now too.
‘There is no way to get to him,’ Sigurd said, glaring at the oath-breaker, his breathing raspy and ragged. Each breath scalded him inside his chest. At least one broken rib, likely two. ‘Too many between us and him.’
Don’t come now. Allfather, whatever happens, don’t let her come now.
‘We just have to kill them all,’ Floki said. ‘Then we will have him.’
‘Simple as that eh?’ Erp said, as they edged closer to the king’s shieldwall, the hersir using his sword pommel to hammer his helmet down so that its rim covered his bushy brows. He grimaced. ‘Why didn’t I think of it?’
‘Close up! No gaps!’ Sigurd bellowed at the Mekjarvik men. ‘On me!’ If there was going to be another clash of shields then they might as well look the part.
‘Forward!’ King Gorm cried, his sword threatening the shifting black sky. ‘Forward!’ he roared, and his men were coming, stepping over the mangled, shit-and blood-slick corpses that had been left on the slope like sea wrack above the tideline.
Sigurd took hold of a spear shaft that was sticking up like an offering, its blade lodged between a berserker’s ribs, and yanked it free. He was good with a spear. Svein could throw further but further was not what was needed now. Accuracy was, and only Floki could match Sigurd for that. Floki who was god-favoured too, at least when it came to war. Though who could say which dark, blood-lusting lord favoured him?
Sigurd tested the spear’s weight as he picked out the oath-breaker, imagining that spear entering the king’s open, roaring mouth. Then he hauled his arm back and launched the spear and it flew.
He saw the shaft shudder at the height of its arc, then it fell fast as a swooping hawk towards the king. But another man had watched it too and he shouldered his king aside, throwing up his shield just in time to meet the spear, which went straight through the limewood and impaled him. Sigurd watched the hirðman fall, cursing as the others closed ranks before the king like the sea over a thrown pebble and the oath-breaker was lost from sight.
Sigurd looked beyond the king’s hirð to his own wolf banner which was still whipping at the top of Gungnir, though the maelstrom was raging beneath it now and he could hear the clash and roar of it on the swirling, beating wind. Hastin and his Jæren men were shoulder to shoulder, shield on shield with Olaf and the others, each of them knowing that to lose the banner and the ridge was to be crushed against the rocks or driven into the sea.
Over on the right, the Jarls Leiknir and Hrani were still holding firm on the ridge, though they would be outflanked if Olaf’s centre was pushed any further back. Sigurd could see Hog-Head smiting men, as full of fury as the berserkers, only that fury was matched with skill. Hrani stood there like a king himself in his war glory, his rich, silver-chased helmet the brightest thing up there on the ridge in the raging grey day.
On the left, though, Asgrim’s Svearmen were dying. Asgrim won’t break, Moldof had said. But Moldof was wrong. Jarl Otrygg had seized his chance to come round the side and now red rune-painted shields were driving into the line of Asgrim’s wing, spilling through the gaps and tearing into the Svearmen’s rear, so that Asgrim was fighting on two fronts.
But Sigurd did not have the chance to watch any more of it because the oath-breaker’s shieldwall was on him, almost within spitting distance. He could smell the iron and leather, the sweat of unfamiliar men and the grease which coated their woollen clothes and their war gear. He could smell the oil on their shields and the ale on their breath, the sweet juniper and bog-myrtle and the sourness coming up from the stomachs of men who were fearful that this might be their last day.
‘You’re going to need this, lord,’ Erp said, handing Sigurd a shield he had picked up. It was scarred and splintered but still solid enough and Sigurd took it with a nod, sheathing Troll-Tickler and wrapping his fist round the shield’s wood and metal grip, feeling the coolness of the iron boss against his knuckles. His scramasax would be more useful than Troll-Tickler in this fight because the shorter blade had its own instinct for finding gaps in the press, holes between shields and opportunities to slide beneath them, to seek the flesh which was never safe. Men’s groins. Necks. Shins. Ankles.
‘What about you, lad?’ Erp asked Floki who had found a spear to replace the axe he had thrown, though he still gripped the other axe in his left hand. But Floki shook his head and Sigurd knew what he had in mind. Floki would do the killing while Sigurd put his shoulder into his shield and held the ground.
This is it, then.
‘We hold them as long as we can!’ Sigurd called, looking left and right at the men in his pitifully thin skjaldborg, knowing that they could not stop what was coming. Those king’s men were grinning because they knew it too. They knew that Sigurd had gambled everything by attacking their rear with those wild, howling Sandnes men, and he had lost.
‘They’re going to carve us up like the prize bullock,’ a man said somewhere to his right.
‘Carve us up! Ha! Snot-sucking shits are going to walk right over us, pricking us full of holes on the way back to their bloody boats,’ another man answered. And yet they stood their ground, all of them, when they could have turned and run. Not that they would likely get off the island even if they did run, for the king would have men guarding his ships.
‘If we can hold, I’ll kill them,’ Floki said, as if it were as easy as that. And yet it gave Sigurd an idea.
‘Men of Mekjarvik, can you make a skjaldhus?’ he asked them. ‘A shieldhouse that will stand up to a storm?’ Not enough time for that now, lad, Sigurd could almost hear Olaf saying. Too late for tricks now.
Some ayes even so.
‘How many in the walls?’ Erp asked like the good warrior he was, never resigning his men to their blade deaths when there was yet something useful to try.
‘Five in each,’ Sigurd said, and with that the Mekjarvik men swarmed in towards him, the smaller, weaker men giving their shields to the biggest and broadest so that these men would have two shields each. Sigurd gave his to a bull-necked, big-bearded warrior who held out his hand expectantly, knowing his wyrd had led him to this moment. In return the man gave Sigurd his spear.
Not enough time. They are on you, lad!
‘I don’t even want the rain getting in,’ Sigurd yelled as they formed around him, building that shieldhouse, the sixteen men in the outer walls holding one shield low to cover shins and legs, the other shield high to protect chests and faces. Those eight men on the inside square braced their bodies against the outside wall to add weight to it, whilst holding shields as high as they could, slanting them up like a shingled roof. This left just eight men within this breath-and sweat-stinking skjaldhus, waiting in the dark, their spears poking out through the gaps.
The king’s men struck like a rockslide, almost breaking the shieldhouse apart so that the grey day flooded in through the widening cracks. It seemed they would be swept away in a welter of blood. But then the Mekjarvik men roared their defiance, bellowed their war cries, braced muscle and bone and will and held their ground, drawing their shields back together so that they clumped and rattled and the whole thing held.
‘Good lads!’ Erp yelled in the reeking gloom, proud of his men and rightly so. ‘Now hold so we can kill the whoresons,’ he told them, thrusting his spear out and getting a shriek as his reward.
‘That’s it, Erp,’ Sigurd said, feeling the wolf’s grin on his face as he jabbed his own spear through a hole. The blade hit mail. ‘Nowhere you’d rather be, hey?’
It grew dimmer still inside the skjaldhus and someone cursed because the oath-breaker’s men were all around them, on every side so that the only light coming in now was at the centre where the smoke hole in a longhouse would be.
Swords and axes hammered on the walls and the roo
f in a deafening clamour and men grunted under the impact, growling at those who had spears to gut the swines who were battering them.
Between strikes, Floki pulled his spear back inside the shieldwall so that no one could lop it or grab hold of it, and Sigurd saw that the blade was slick with blood.
‘Don’t come now,’ Sigurd whispered, burying his spear in a man’s thigh. ‘Stay away.’ Stay alive. You are the last of us.
Then the Mekjarvik man whose spear Sigurd gripped grunted and fell to his knees like a throat-cut bull, blood sheeting his face because the great crescent blade of a long axe had cut through shield, arm, helmet and skull to kill him. So much for wyrd.
Another man went down under a flurry of axe blows, and yet another big man collapsed with a beard full of bubbles and blood and a spear in his lungs, and the skjaldhus shrank as the Mekjarvik men closed the gaps, clinging to each other the way men will hold to an overturned boat.
A spear came in through a crack and took the young man beside Sigurd in the cheek, knocking out his teeth on the way through. The spear pulled back leaving the man on his knees in the dark, gurgling and choking and clutching his ruined face.
‘No way to die, this,’ Floki spat, his spear blade snaking out and back again, seeking, hungry as a crow.
And it wasn’t, Sigurd knew, but at least they were lasting longer than they would have spread out in one flimsy shieldwall. Still, this was not the way his father would ever have died, hiding in the dark like this, killing men – hurting them, anyway – without seeing their faces. And he realized, whilst putting his spear straight through a helmet’s eye guard and pulling it back before it got stuck, that his need to kill the oath-breaker was stronger even than the need to die with honour.
For there could be no honour in death, even a saga-worthy one, if that goat-swiving worm of a king got to spit on his corpse when it was done. When Sigurd met his brothers again in the Allfather’s hall, would he say to them, ‘I tried, brothers, but I could not avenge you. I could not spill the blood which the oath-breaker’s crimes against our family demanded’?
No. He would not.
Another of Erp’s men died, his high shield cleaved and his arm lopped off at the shoulder, likely by the same king’s man with his long-hafted axe.
‘That whoreson’s got to go,’ Erp growled, but no one volunteered to oblige him.
‘Where are you, Haraldarson?’ the king bellowed, his voice matching the thunder of blades on shields and the roar of the wind itself. ‘Come out and die like a man! This is no way to fight!’
‘Says him who’s been fart-blown by his own men all day,’ Erp gnarred.
The man in front of Sigurd screeched, his leading foot chopped in half, then he toppled like a felled tree and was gored with three spears before his head hit the ground, and Sigurd snatched up his shield even as a spear gouged into his back, breaking brynja rings, perhaps half a dozen by the fish-scale glitter of them flying in the grey day. But the leather beneath the rings held and he stood tall, taking an axe on the shield before putting his spear blade through the man’s neck.
‘I have him!’ a king’s man bellowed, grinning, lifting his long-hafted axe, and Sigurd would have wagered a silver arm ring on it being the same man who had been taking the skjaldhus down piece by piece.
‘Come then, troll,’ Sigurd challenged him, wondering how he was going to fight the man let alone beat him without being able to leave the shieldhouse. He knew what that axe would do to him. Had seen Svein sunder men with his own axe, split them from head to groin, shield or no.
‘Finish him, Gerbiorn!’ a warrior with a scarred face and two beard ropes said, fingering the silver Thór’s hammer hanging on his chest because he knew this was a big moment, one for winter nights to come.
‘Aye, get your name in a song, Gerbiorn,’ another man said through his teeth, and big Gerbiorn lumbered forward, looping that smiting axe so that Sigurd heard the slap of its haft against his palms, once, twice, then up soared the great blade and Sigurd was about to throw his spear even if it meant losing it, when an arrow suddenly appeared in Gerbiorn’s shoulder followed by another in his neck. The big troll stood there frowning, as if he could not understand what was happening, and then more arrows, dozens of them, were streaking into the king’s men, like starlings flocking to their roosts.
‘Shields!’ the oath-breaker’s champion shouted, raising his own so that it covered more of his lord than himself, which was just as well for Gorm judging by the two shafts it already sprouted.
‘Hold here!’ Sigurd told the Mekjarvik men in the ruins of their shieldhouse. Not so much a house now as a tumbledown shepherd’s hut. But they kept their shields up, rims kissing as best they could because those arrows were whipping in amongst the king’s men, tunking into shields and thooting into mail and flesh. One flitted past Sigurd’s face so close that he felt the fletchings brush his cheek.
‘Who is here, then?’ Floki said, hardly caring about those terror-sowing shafts, taking advantage of this new chaos and sinking his spear one-handed into a greybeard’s leg. Sigurd knew full well who it was. She had come! She was here to give herself to the slaughter. Just as she had told the blacksmith Ingel to tell Sigurd that she would.
Runa!
Sigurd twisted and turned, trying to see what he already knew. There, through the gaps left by Erp’s dead and dying men, he saw them. And he had never felt the gods closer than in that moment.
‘Runa?’ Floki said. ‘Can it be Runa?’ He was looking south too, as were many of the Mekjarvik men now because the oath-breaker’s warriors had drawn together again like fingers into a fist and were trying to make sense of what was happening whilst also being flayed by arrows.
‘Fuck, it’s a host of Valkyries!’ Erp said, looking more terrified than he had all day. His men were muttering oaths and touching their Thór’s hammers, peering over their shields with bulging eyes, for there, sweeping across the slope, all shining mail and long braided hair beneath that low black sky, was a host of warrior women. Well, perhaps not a host, but a war band anyway, more than thirty and all of them nocking, drawing, loosing as they came, sending flocks of deadly shafts into the oath-breaker’s hirð.
‘Are we dead?’ a man asked his companions and not one of them seemed sure that they weren’t.
And there amongst these shieldmaidens, these terrifying brynja-clad, arrow-shooting women, was Runa, her golden hair bright in the dark day, a shield slung over her back.
Sigurd had told no one what Ingel had told him, because he did not want it to be true, did not want Runa to come to Rennisøy to stand beneath his banner in the storm of swords. There had been no time to send someone to the island of Fugløy to tell her not to come, but at least by not speaking of it, not sharing Ingel’s message, he could pretend that there was no more to it than breath on the breeze.
‘Tell my brother I am coming,’ Ingel had said, careful to use the exact words that Runa had. ‘And that I will bring the Maidens of Freyja to fight with him against the oath-breaker king.’ The young smith had frowned and half choked over the next part, as if he feared to intrude on things that were between a brother and sister. ‘For are we not of the same mother? The same father? Are we not beloved of the gods? Then let us stand together. We are the last but we are enough. Look for me, brother. I am coming to you.’
Sigurd had not wanted her to come. Now he was grinning like a moon-mad fiend.
They drew and loosed, drew and loosed, sending arrow after arrow and gods they were good, because those shafts had been finding the parts which even the king’s hearthmen in all their fine war gear had trouble protecting: eyes, faces, hands, the lower legs. And most of the women were making these shots on the move, too.
But those Sword-Norse who had halted their attack on Sigurd’s skjaldhus had built their own shieldwall again, so that the Freyja Maidens’ arrows were hitting shields now and bouncing off helmets. Not that this was much fun for the men beneath them, as Erp pointed out happily.
‘Shieldwall!’ he yelled and Erp’s men moved well, getting into line beside him and overlapping their shields, some of them even hammering hilts and shafts against the limewood to let the Avaldsnes men know that death was coming for them. They knew as well as Sigurd that they must seize this moment, when the king was wrong-footed, while the arrows were raining and his men were cowering behind their shields. From the look of it the warrior women each had two quivers of arrows on their belts, which meant some eighty arrows each, but they would run out fast at this rate, desperate as they were to slay the king and end the battle.
‘Ready!’ Sigurd called, an order not a question. ‘Now!’ He strode forward and what was left of Erp’s crew, some twenty men, went with him. ‘Runa! Behind me!’ he bellowed, and Runa heard him above the wind’s roar and the battle’s din, screaming at her companions to follow her, sweeping around Sigurd’s rear. Over the dead they went, across the blood-slick long grass, the lopped limbs and the broken spears and the splintered shields, and then the skjaldborgar struck and Sigurd thought he heard a peal of thunder rend the sky at that same moment as he put his shoulder into his shield and dipped his head.
The Freyja Maidens were with him now and he sensed the battle thrill in them. The warrior behind him was a tall, fierce-eyed, red-haired woman who nodded at him before loosing an arrow at the man whose shield he heaved against. From that distance and with a draw like that, mail was useless, and suddenly the weight was gone and the shield fell and Sigurd was moving forward, as was his whole skjaldborg. ‘Just hold the line!’ he roared.
‘No gaps, you bastards!’ Erp shouted, his one eye glaring ferociously, and they knew that their job now was to maintain the bulwark from behind which the women could do the killing, from less than five feet away sinking their arrows deep, every shaft a kill or maiming. And yet they also knew that they could not hold against those sixty hearthmen who yet fought beneath that ship banner. ‘Kill them!’ Erp bellowed at the Freyja Maidens. ‘Put your arrows into the shits! Murder the reeking, pus-filled maggots!’
Wings of the Storm: (The Rise of Sigurd 3) Page 29
