The Amber Road wor-6

by Harry Sidebottom

  They slowed to a walk as they reached the water, wading in gently. At first the beach shelved steeply. The water was very cold as it lapped over the top of Maximus’s boots, up to his knees. They went past the gangplank. The bottom levelled out as they went in the lee of the longship to their right. Shallow draught, clinker-built; each overlapping plank was underscored by a black shadow.

  Level with the mast, halfway to the prow, the water rose to their chests. Shield above his head, with exaggerated high steps, Maximus pushed against the resistance of the water. If the beach shelved more, the water would be over his head before they reached the prow.

  ‘Get up!’ A shout from the stern. ‘We are being attacked.’

  ‘Come on,’ Ballista said. No point in silence now.

  The thunder of boots on the gangplank. The first clash of steel.

  Half running, half swimming with his right hand, Maximus floundered through the sea. Muffled thumps and shouts from inside the hull.

  A splash as a body fell from the stern.

  Even before the prow swept up, they could not quite reach the gunnels. Ballista passed Maximus his shield, told Wada to lift him. Maximus handed both shields on to Rikiar. Hands gripped under his armpits hoisted him. He got a good grip on the top plank, but his sodden clothes and mail dragged him back. There was a huge shove from under his arse. Ivar Horse-Prick grinning up at him.

  Maximus slithered over the side. The quickest of glances showed the fight raging at the afterguard. Forward, the awnings were still drawn, no immediate threat. Maximus leaned over the side. Rikiar was passing the shields up to Ballista. Maximus reached down, and helped Wada aboard.

  ‘On me,’ Ballista said. He gave Maximus his shield. They stood shoulder to shoulder with Wada. Water sluiced off them, pooled around their boots. It was very cold. The sounds of the other four clambering up the side.

  The awning was pulled back. A man came out, blinking foolishly. Ballista stepped towards him, Battle-Sun in his hand. A backhand to the shoulder, a howling forehand to the head. The man crashed away to the far side.

  Maximus could see other faces, pale under the awning. They hung back.

  The fight at the rear was fierce. Men falling underfoot, another off into the water.

  Men swarmed over both sides. Their blades shimmered in the moonlight. They moved along the gunnels, swords sweeping in great arcs, ropes parting. Towards the stern, the awnings sagged and collapsed on to the crew. Yells of consternation and fury. The warriors on the sides were striking down at movements under the canvas, like men killing rodents in a sack. Maximus could see the bald pate of Heliodorus; the blacking must have washed off in the sea.

  Somewhere, women were screaming, and what sounded like a child.

  In front of the mast someone had taken charge of the disconcerted Brondings. The awnings were being hauled aside, before they could entrap the men there. The warriors wedged into a tight shield-burg, leather-bound boards facing in all directions. Maximus thought there must be about thirty of them.

  ‘Break them, and it’s over,’ Ballista said. ‘On three.’

  ‘One, two …’

  They shrieked down the deck. The warrior in front of Maximus tried to flinch. Close-packed, there was nowhere for him to go. He jabbed, with no real conviction. Maximus watched the blade, punched it aside with the boss of his shield, thrust down overhand. His sword plunged down over both shields, caught on the man’s chest, slid, slicing down his front.

  The wounded man dropped his weapons, stood tottering, impeding those behind. Maximus leapt high, bringing his sword down on a man in the second rank. The heavy edge cut down into his skull.

  ‘Rally!’ Ballista called.

  Maximus fell back to his friend’s right shoulder. Horse-Prick was to his own right, Rikiar the Vandal behind.

  ‘Surrender!’ Ballista shouted.

  The Brondings huddled, indecisive, almost overwhelmed by the magnitude of the surprise.

  Heliodorus loomed above and behind them on the rail; bald, streaked with blacking, like one of his bestial native deities. At the stern, the massacre continued.

  ‘Surrender!’ Ballista demanded again.

  ‘Never!’ A tall young warrior emerged from the Brondings. ‘Never.’ He was unarmoured, his arms bright with gold. His hair was long and black; a man from the south. He had a blade in each hand.

  ‘Widsith Travel-Quick, I will give you the lives of your men.’ Ballista spoke almost conversationally.

  ‘I will not take them from you, Oath-breaker.’ The son of Unferth spat, then yelled at his men. ‘Clear the prow. There are only seven of them, many more of us. Follow me.’

  Widsith leapt forward. Only one warrior, off to Maximus’s left, came with him. In a second the latter was dead, impaled on Wada’s sword.

  Ballista took the first blows on his shield, giving ground. Sharp fragments of wood spiralled through the air. Widsith drew back. As he went to pounce again, Wada’s sword bit into his right arm. The weapon in that hand clattered to the deck. Too late he brought up the blade in his left. Ballista, his whole frame twisting behind the blow, sheered Widsith’s left arm off below the elbow.

  The young son of the Amber Lord staggered sideways, until the side of the ship brought him up. He stared at the blood pumping from the stump.

  Ballista went after him, stepping carefully on the slippery deck. ‘No need to look, it’s just as you think, the arm is gone.’

  Battle-Sun blazed in the moonlight. It nearly severed Widsith’s neck. The young leader collapsed half over the gunnels. Ballista raised his blade. It took two more blows before Widsith’s head came away from his shoulders. Ballista rolled the body into the water. Gripping the long, black hair, Ballista held the grisly trophy aloft. ‘Surrender.’

  It had gone beyond that, beyond reason. The Brondings tried to throw themselves over the sides. There were men everywhere, hacking at them. There was no holding the bloodlust.

  Maximus went and stood by Ballista.

  The killing spilled over into the shallows. Perhaps some got away.

  Rikiar came back to Ballista and Maximus. The normally taciturn Vandal spoke:

  ‘The warrior’s revenge

  Is repaid to the King

  Wolf and eagle stalk

  Over the King’s son

  Widsith’s corpse flew

  In pieces into the sea

  The grey eagle tears

  At Travel-Quick’s wounds.’

  Maximus looked at Rikiar in surprise.

  Rikiar said nothing, then took the head from Ballista.

  When the killing was done, and the looting underway, the cost was counted. Two Romans and two Olbians were dead, one of the former and two of the latter badly injured. One Heathobard was missing, and could only be assumed lost in the sea. Given the odds, and the unaccounted slaughter among the Brondings, it had been a low price to pay.

  Maximus walked the length of the boat with Ballista. The dead still lay underfoot, grotesque in their attitudes. Six captive women sobbed near the stern. Two had bad cuts. Near them lay the bodies of two children: boys, no more than twelve winters.

  Ballista stared down at them.

  ‘Some things just happen,’ Maximus said.

  XXVII

  The Island of Hedinsey

  Ballista watched the men digging down into the largest barrow in Hlymdale. They had come well prepared with picks, shovels, buckets and barrows, ropes and ladders. The treasure-fire on top of the mound had been extinguished. The men had been working for some time. Only their heads and shoulders could be seen now. Already a path had been worn in the grass to where the pile of excavated earth was steadily growing. Soon they would need the ropes to draw the buckets of spoil to the surface. It would not be long before the tomb of Himling was disturbed. Suitable offerings to appease his shade were ready.

  The cyning Isangrim stood off to one side with his court, Ballista among them. Ballista had been uncertain if he would return to Hedinsey in time. After
the killing of Widsith, they had spent the following day burying the corpses that could be found, their own and those of the Brondings. Maximus had been evidently upset when it had come to interring the children. The Heathobard women they had released had said the boys were servants brought with Widsith. No one admitted to their killing. Most likely they had come by their death blows in the chaos of the slaughter under the fallen awning.

  Ballista had been in two minds about the burials. Loitering on the deserted strand had brought disaster to the son of Unferth and his followers. Ballista had no wish that the same fate should fall on himself and his men. There were said to be other Bronding longships in those waters. He had been tempted to honour their own fallen, bury the innocent and leave the enemy for scavengers. Yet to do that would have been only one step removed from what Widsith had done at Cold Crendon. Many men found it hard to fight unless they believed their behaviour better than that of their opponents.

  After a night on the beach, at first light they had heaped stones in the Bronding boat, until her sides were only a hand’s breadth above the water. They had taken her out into the deep. They had smashed holes in her hull. The coal-black water had poured in, and the longship had gone to the bottom. The rest of that day had been devoted to another act of decency. They had taken the Heathobard women back to the settlement to the east from which they had been abducted. The wind had shifted into the east, and it had involved hard rowing.

  The Warig had moored there for the night. In the morning the Heathobard who remained of the two that had come to Ballista on Hedinsey had asked to join the other two of his tribesmen who were already followers of Ballista. Four more warriors from that place had made the same request. Ballista had counselled them to remain and see to the safety of their village. Cruel war was coming to the Suebian Sea. Brondings or other sea raiders might return. The Heathobards had not been swayed. The northern code of blood vengeance was too strong in them. If he would lead them against Unferth and his followers, they would gladly die for him. Ballista’s hearth-troop needed men, and he had accepted their sword-oaths.

  The wind had stayed in the east. The Warig had raced across the whale road. They had made Hedinsey the previous night after two days’ fast passage. Their reception had been mixed. Isangrim had not been minded to forget his threat of outlawry. He had spoken terrible words from his high seat. His sons and their followers were as bound by his commands as any other of his eorls and warriors. As outlaws, Dernhelm and his men could be killed without recompense. From a leather bag, crusted with the salt in which it had been packed, Ballista had produced the head of Widsith Travel-Quick. The cyning had smiled. Glaum, son of Wulfmaer, had whispered in his ear. Isangrim had waved him away. Morcar and Oslac had glowered. In this one instance, the cyning had said, no penalty would be enacted. Let no other flout his words, but Dernhelm and his hearth-companions had done him a great service. They had earned their place back in his favour.

  Rikiar had taken it on himself to give thanks on behalf of all of them:

  ‘Ugly as my head may be,

  The cliff my helmet rests upon,

  I am not loath

  To accept it from the King.

  Where is the man who ever

  Received a finer gift

  From a noble-minded

  Son of a great ruler?’

  The Vandal had come to them as a thief. He was ill-favoured, and in many ways kept apart from their fellowship. He remained an object of suspicion. Yet no one could deny his skill with verse.

  And now a shout came from the top of the grave mound. The labourers had dug down to a row of timbers. It would not be long before they broke through these rafters.

  This would be the third time the Angles had turned to their long-dead hero in time of need. Starkad had first opened the tomb of Himling when the Heruli came. As a youth, Isangrim had been with Starkad the second time, before they led the alliance that drove the Goths from the north. Like war itself, it was not a thing to be entered into lightly.

  ‘Sure, it must be a fine sword your great-grandfather used, to go to this trouble, the digging and the disturbing the dead and all, to get it back,’ Maximus said.

  ‘Great-great-grandfather,’ Ballista said. ‘He never carried the sword. It was made after his death. Himling is the sword.’

  ‘Your dead man is the sword?’

  ‘When Himling was killed by the Wuffingas …’

  ‘I thought they were your greatest friends.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. Unlike you Hibernians, we are not terrible people for holding grudges.’

  ‘For a man who has been there, you maintain an incredible ignorance about my people. If the people of my homeland were not much given to reconciliation, would you think either of us would have left Tara alive — given all the killing and the like?’

  ‘Possibly not.’

  ‘Your grandfather’s sword?’

  ‘Great-great-grandfather. After Himling was cremated, the smith put some of his bones with the charcoal in the bellows pit when he forged the blade. A part of Himling’s strength, spirit and luck passed into the steel of Bile-Himling.’

  ‘What happened to the rest of him?’

  ‘The rest of his bones are in the barrow. Hopefully, as he died in battle, his shade is in Valhalla, not waiting in there with the sword and the other bones.’

  A hail from the summit of the mound told them the tomb was open. Looking up, Ballista saw the ladders against the sky, before they were lowered into the pit.

  Everyone waited on Isangrim. The cyning leaned on his staff, eyes focused on things the others could not see. Perhaps, Ballista thought, his father was remembering the previous times he had been here, half a century or more before. Bile-Himling had granted Starkad victory over the Goths. But, ignoring dire warnings, Starkad had not returned the blade to the tomb. Things had not gone well for him after that. He had carried Bile-Himling two years later against the Langobards. It had done him no good. It had fallen from Starkad’s hand when the Langobards had cut him down. Isangrim had returned Bile-Himling to the dark, before he had made peace with the killers of his father, taken one of their sisters as his first wife.

  ‘I will not go into the tomb,’ Isangrim said. ‘I am an old man, too old to wield Bile-Himling. My sons will make the descent. They will bring Bile-Himling to me, and I shall decide which of them will carry the blade.’

  With his brothers, Ballista took up the offerings and walked up to the top.

  Morcar stepped between him and the ladder. ‘A newcomer will not go first.’

  Ballista stood back to let them go down first.

  It was dark inside the pit, just the light from above, and not altogether sweet-smelling. The scattered bones of a horse lay underfoot. Gold and precious things glowed dully at the edges of the darkness. There was an urn on the seat of the throne, the receptacle of those remains of Himling that had not been used by the smith. Above it, resting across the arms of the high chair, was a heavy, single-edged sword.

  Ballista placed the silver bowl he carried on the floor. He went to the throne, put out his hand towards the sword.

  ‘No,’ Oslac said. ‘You will not carry Bile-Himling.’

  ‘I have done more since I returned than you did in all the years I was away,’ Ballista said.

  ‘You should have been outlawed.’

  Both had their hands on their hilts.

  Morcar stepped between them. He turned to Oslac. ‘Most of what you do will now turn against you, bringing bad luck and no joy.’

  Oslac recoiled as if struck.

  Ballista wondered what this was between the two of them.

  ‘As the eldest, Oslac will take the thing to our father.’ Morcar spoke smoothly.

  Oslac stood for a time, as if still shocked, then picked up the blade and went to the ladder.

  Back above ground, in the land of the living, Oslac had recovered. He held Bile-Himling aloft. The assembled eorls and warriors hoomed in awe. Oslac offered the weapon
to the cyning. Isangrim did not take it.

  With sudden insight, Ballista wondered if after all these years Isangrim blamed the sword for his father’s death, or perhaps himself.

  ‘A time of war.’ Isangrim raised his voice. It was cracked with age, perhaps emotion. ‘Unferth will come and seek revenge for his son Widsith. If he does not, his followers would count him a nithing. They would desert him, and he would leave the north as he arrived, an outcast. He will come, and we must be ready.’

  All there — the gold-bearing men of violence, the three or four shield-maidens — nodded.

  ‘It will happen like this,’ Isangrim said. ‘My son Dernhelm will defend our allies on the Cimbric peninsula. My son Oslac will hold Varinsey. I will take my stand here in our home of Hlymdale. My son Morcar will be here with me on Hedinsey. Latris and the islands of the south will be in the charge of Hrothgar of the Wrosns. Let all of you, all our allies, summon the fighting men. Let the war-arrow travel throughout our realm and summon men to cruel war.’

  Everyone waited.

  ‘Bile-Himling, the blade forged from our ancestor, has returned to the light. It will be wielded by my son Morcar.’

  With no expression on his face, Oslac passed the weapon to Morcar.

  Amantius put the stylus and writing block down on the ground next to him. He wiped his hands on his fleshy thighs. His back rested against the rough wall of a byre. Cattle regarded him from the other side of a fence. Gods, how low he had sunk. A eunuch of the imperial court sunk to the level of a banausic slave hiding among the beasts. But no other privacy was to be found in the sprawling barbarian settlement of Hlymdale.

  He picked up his writing things again.

  Publius Egnatius Amantius to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Censorinus, Praetorian Prefect, Vir Ementissimus.

  If you are well, Dominus, I can ask the gods for no more.

  Amantius could think of nothing else to write. There was nothing to report about the embassy. As secretary, four times he had accompanied Aulus Voconius Zeno into the presence of Isangrim, the senile, petty kinglet of this squalid and insignificant Hyperborean tribe. The ambassador had uttered a few courtly platitudes — his pleasure in standing before the ruler of the Angles, his prayers that the favour of the gods would continue to fall on such a noble father of a harmonious house — all of which Amantius presumed had been translated. Not once had the imperial envoy mentioned the amber which was the ostensible cause of this hideous odyssey. There had been not so much as a hint of their true purpose. Even such diplomatic gifts as had survived the journey had not been handed over. It was as if Zeno had reneged on the sacred duty laid on him by the Augustus Gallienus. The charitable might decide Zeno was exercising discretion, biding his time until the moment was auspicious. Amantius was not of that mind. He had observed Zeno during their tribulations. Zeno was weak, a coward. Amantius knew himself little better. But he was a eunuch, and everyone, including himself, knew eunuchs did not possess the constitution of other men.