They don’t know that Grimarr is our enemy, he thought, so they don’t see how they are being played like pawns.
Ornolf was standing with the others. In one hand he held his sword, a fine Frankish blade, an Ulfberht sword he called Oak Cleaver. In his other hand he held a shield. His mail had been polished so it gleamed dully in the muted sunlight. He did not seem to notice the arrangement, or if he did he did not care.
What does Starri think of all this, I wonder?
If Ornolf was unconcerned about meeting the full force of any attack, Harald imagined Starri would be delighted. Harald ran his eyes along the ranks of men forming a loose wall. He expected to see Starri’s wiry frame among them, arms out, twirling around as he so often did when battle was imminent. But the berserker was nowhere to be seen. Odd. Yet another question for his overtaxed mind.
Behind him, the shovels continued to grind into the small stones that made up the beach, making a rasping sound, then there was a grunt as the heavy earth was lifted, then the sound of the stones clicking on the others like hail as the men cast their shovelfuls aside.
And then the sound of Grimarr’s heavy footfalls, coming up behind. Harald turned and, with thoughts of violence still surging through his mind, his hand moved toward Vengeance Seeker’s hilt. Then he caught himself, realizing Grimarr’s sword was still in its scabbard and they were still ringed by Grimarr’s men. Nothing had changed.
“Ask this Irish bitch if she’s certain this is the spot,” Grimarr demanded. Harald looked over at the hole the men had dug. It was ten feet wide and already a couple of feet deep, and yet they had found nothing but dirt. He looked over at Conandil. She was chewing on a stray lock of her hair. She looked worried and uncertain.
“Conandil,” Harald began and then his question was cut short by an undulating yell, long and piercing. A battle cry, there could be no doubt. Every man on the beach jerked his head in the direction of the sound as Ornolf roared out something unintelligible.
Harald had Vengeance Seeker half way out of the scabbard and was heading off at a run for Ornolf’s line when he felt a hand grab a fistful of his mail and jerk him back like a dog at the end of its leash. He spun around and there was Grimarr, scowling down at him, and as much as Harald liked to think of himself as a grown man he suddenly felt very much like a little boy looking up at Grimarr’s scowling face.
“You stay here. With me,” Grimarr said, low, rage barely held in check.
“Damn you,” Harald said, his own rage matching the big man’s. “I fight with my people.”
“You stay here and you tell me what this Irish bitch thinks she’s doing,” Grimarr said.
Harald stepped back and drew Vengeance Seeker with the speed and heedlessness of a striking snake. He looked at Grimarr, who showed not the least flicker of fear. “I fight with my people,” Harald said again.
Engulfed as he was with rage, his eyes fixed on Grimarr, Harald saw nothing else, not Conandil, not the beach or the cliff, not Grimarr’s men behind him. He raised Vengeance Seeker and in the same instant felt a blow to the back of his legs, right at the knees, and he dropped like a sack of grain. Vengeance Seeker clattered out of his hand and he saw Grimarr’s fist coming around, felt it connect with the side of his head and he tumbled sideways onto the beach.
He lay still. His eyes were open and he saw a watery version of the world around him, but sideways, as if the earth had been tilted at an odd angle. He could make no sense of it. He heard the sounds of shouting, and he could make no sense of that, either. He wanted to close his eyes but something in his head told him not to. So he kept them open, and he saw the legs moving around in their strange sideways angle, and he heard the shouting build in volume like thunder coming closer, and he tried to understand what it all meant, but try as he might, it all remained nothing more than noise and confusion to him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I felt the edge slice
my helmet-stump and split it.
Thread-goddess, weapons wielded
gaped above my head.
Gisli Sursson’s Saga
Harald Broadarm felt as if he had been laying in that one place for a very long time.
By inches his vision cleared, like water wiped from his eyes, and the sounds of the fight sharpened from a dull and confused melding of noise into the distinct ring of steel on steel, men shouting, shields banging against shields. He blinked hard, opened his eyes wide, and found the world once again sharply defined. He felt as if he had just burst through the surface of the water, the way he felt kicking his way up from the depths while swimming in the fjords back home.
He pushed himself up on his elbow and looked around. His mind was clear but he was still confused. He was certain he had been lying on the gravel for an hour at least, though nothing seemed to have changed much in that time, as if he had been down for a minute or two, no more.
Grimarr was just a few feet away, but his back was toward Harald as he surveyed the fighting along the beach and bellowed orders to his men. Those with shovels were still digging, though Harald could sense a waning of enthusiasm for the task. No one seemed to pay much attention to him.
He started pushing himself to his feet. He felt hands on his arm, and when he looked Conandil was there, helping him up, but with their disparity in size and weight her help was more in the nature of encouragement. He grunted, got his feet under him and stood, and now he found Conandil’s hands were a genuine help in maintaining his balance as his head righted itself.
When at last he felt he could remain vertical on his own accord he reached down and snatched up Vengeance Seeker. Grimarr was still raving like a madman and still had not seen him. Harald considered running the man through, but he was not sure if his strength had returned enough that he could drive his sword through mail. Nor could he stab his enemy in the back. And there was still the problem of Grimarr’s men. He wanted to enjoy his revenge for more than the thirty seconds it would take for them to cut him down.
He looked to the north. Ornolf’s men had formed a shield wall and they were standing firm against an avalanche of Irish warriors pouring down the trail from the cliff above. Harald, always at the forefront of the fight, had never seen a shield wall from behind. He watched with a mix of frustration, anger and helplessness as the warriors wielded swords and axes, hacking at men he could not see beyond the line of their interlocking shields.
He adjusted the grip on his sword and stepped off again to join his grandfather and his shipmates, and again he made it no more than a few feet before he was brought to a halt. Not by Grimarr’s massive hand, but by one of Grimarr’s men who stepped up quick and thrust a spear toward him, the wicked point stopping an inch from his stomach. Harald halted just before he would have run himself onto the iron spearhead, and then another spear and another came at him, spear warriors on three sides, and he realized he had not been so ignored as he thought.
“Ah, you whore’s son!” Grimarr shouted, pushing one of the spearmen aside, grabbing Harald’s arm and pulling him back toward the digging like he was a disobedient child, manhandling him in a way no one had done in many years.
“See here,” Grimarr was leaning close to Harald’s face, “These Irish swine will butcher us all, and your shipmates first, if we don’t get off this beach! But I’ll not leave until I have the treasure, so you ask this Irish bitch, and you ask her right, if this is where it’s buried. Because by the gods I do not see any damned hoard here!”
Harald clenched his teeth and met Grimarr’s gaze, but for all the determination on his face he was not sure what to do. Grimarr was not lying about the fact that they would all be butchered. The Irish were streaming down from the high ground to the west and there did not seem to be an end to them, and Ornolf’s men, no doubt by design, were getting the worst of it. Harald had no wish to help Grimarr in any way, save to usher him into the bleak afterlife of Hel, but finding the hoard soon could save the lives of his shipmates.
Then Grimarr whirled part
way around and grabbed Conandil with his left hand, and with his right whipped a dagger from the sheath on his belt. He held Conandil up by the arm - she looked as if her feet might have come clear of the ground - and he held the knife to her throat.
“If she doesn’t tell me where the hoard is she is of no use to me,” Grimarr said. “So I give her this last chance, and if we do not find the silver in the next few moments I’ll slit her damned Irish throat. Tell her that.”
Harald felt his hands trembling with pent rage and an unrequited need to strike out at this man. His eyes never left Grimarr’s, but he spoke, slowly and clearly. “Conandil, I need you to…”
He got no further. Once again the wild battle cry of the Irish cut off his words. But the cry came from a different quarter now, from the south, not from the north end of the beach where up until that moment the fighting had been taking place. Grimarr half turned in that new direction and Harald looked past him to see more Irish warriors racing down a steep path the Norsemen had not even known existed.
Ornolf’s men were fighting an overwhelming force, or so Harald had thought, but he saw now that those were only a fraction of the men the Irish had arrayed against them. The first attack, the one from the north, had been a distraction to get the Norsemen to defend that end of the beach, while the chief of the Irish warriors swept in from the south.
And it had worked. Grimarr had set Ornolf’s men up as the first line of defense, and had kept his own men back to pick up the pieces, not thinking that the Irish might come in from behind. Now seventy or more Irishmen, armed with swords, shields, axes, and mail, real fighting men, were coming from a direction which Grimarr had not even bothered to defend.
How did so many men get here so fast? Harald wondered.
Most of those at the south end of the beach were the men of Water Stallion, Bersi Jorundarson’s men, kept well away from where Grimarr though the fighting would be. Grimarr’s own men, those who made up Eagle’s Wing’s crew, were either digging, widening and deepening the hole in a desperate effort to recover the hoard before they fell under Irish blades, or forming the defensive ring around the diggers. The thirty-five men of Fox, now under the command of a man called Kveldulf, formed a line on Ornolf’s right flank, keeping the Irish from turning the shield wall.
“Bastards!” Grimarr roared and he shoved Conandil into Harald as if she was refuse to be discarded. She hit him hard and the two of them staggered back as Grimarr drew his big sword and charged toward Bersi’s men, who had been thrown into compete confusion by this unexpected attack from behind.
“Make a line! Make a line, you miserable, pathetic sons of whores!” Grimarr was shouting as he lumbered toward the attacking Irish. Bersi’s men heard him and they obeyed, gathering themselves as if the force of Grimarr’s voice alone was shaking them into order.
They were still getting into place when the first of the Irish hit the line. Happily for Bersi’s men, the narrow trail down from the cliffs meant that the Irish could only come on in single file, and apparently they were too eager for the fight to stop and form a line. Or the first few were, at least. They raced at Grimarr’s ad hoc wall with their wild, undulating yells, and were hacked down at the Norsemen’s feet.
That gave pause to the others. Some stopped in mid-rush and fell back to their comrades while the rest halted in their advance. More and more Irishmen came racing down the path. They spread out across the beach, assembled into a line, shields ready, and then together they advanced.
“This is done,” Harald said to Conandil, and when he was met with a confused look, added, “The Irish, they are too much for us. They will kill us if we cannot take to our ships first. Look for your chance, then run to their lines.”
Conandil nodded. Harald turned toward Ornolf’s shield wall. He wanted to be with them like he had never wanted anything else, but Grimarr’s men were still watching him, their spears still held ready. Ornolf and his men were being pushed back, foot by foot. Harald did not think they would break, but if they did not, if they did not turn and run, they would be cut down one by one until their shield wall collapsed and they were butchered. Already he could see men thrashing on the shingle, or lying motionless, Irish and Northmen.
“Ornolf!” Harald shouted, hoping his voice would carry over the twenty paces or so that separated them, over the din and chaos of the fighting. “Ornolf, your line is turned! Go back to the ship! We’re finished!”
He had the satisfaction of seeing Ornolf turn and look at him, see his head turn again toward the new wave of Irish warriors coming in from the south. If Bersi’s men did not hold them, then Ornolf would be caught between the forces behind him and the Irish already in his front.
The butt of a spear swung round and hit Harald hard on the side of the head, not nearly as hard as Grimarr had hit him, but enough to make him stagger, and Grimarr’s man shouted, “None of that! You keep your mouth shut!”
And Harald kept his mouth shut, because Ornolf had heard him, and already he was bringing his men back, step by step, fighting as they retreated. It was slow going; they could not turn their backs on the Irish but had to hold them at bay as they moved down the beach and toward the ship. On their right, the men of the Fox were moving as well, keeping on Ornolf’s flank, no doubt happy to be making their way toward the edge of the water, their waiting ships, and the safety they represented.
Harald turned in the other direction, toward Grimarr and Bersi and their men. Like Ornolf’s, Bersi’s men were moving back, but they were moving back quick, faster with each step. Harald turned to Conandil. “This is all going to fall apart, and soon,” he said loud, speaking Irish so the guards would not understand. “Grimarr’s men will be running any second now, and when they do, you run the other way, toward the Irish, you understand?”
Conandil nodded. And then it all fell apart just as Harald had predicted, but even quicker than he thought it would.
There was more shouting from the water’s edge, a third assault that came out of nowhere. Where the sea met the land under the bow of Bersi’s ship Water Stallion men were fighting in the surf, and it was not an even fight. On the one side was the handful of ships’ guards who had been left behind, and they were being overwhelmed by a force of sixty or seventy men. Irishmen. Where those men could have come from, Harald had no idea. Perhaps from down yet another trail, further to the north, or maybe they had worked their way around the headland that formed the northern terminus of the beach.
“These Irish have played us for fools,” Harald said.
“That’s Lorcan,” Conandil said. She was standing at his side, pressed close to him. He could hear the fear in her voice.
“Where?”
“There, the big man in the middle of the fighting.”
She was right. Harald had never seen Lorcan, save for their brief fight in the dark, but he had seen enough of him to recognize the man now, the great bulking size, as big as Grimarr, the massive beard. He was swinging his battle ax, clearing a way around him, and the ships’ guards were falling under it, or struggling in vain against the others, or running or dying in the shallows.
One of Grimarr’s men shouted from behind with a volume and urgency that cut through the sounds of the battle. “They’ve come for the ships! They’ve come for the ships!”
With that, an odd sort of confusion and pandemonium swept through the fighting men, shouts, curses, a note of panic. The ships were their only way off the beach; if the ships were taken then they would be trapped between the Irish army and the sea. All along the line, the Norsemen broke ranks and turned and raced for the water’s edge. But the strength of a shield wall lay in its unbroken integrity, and once gaps opened in the line, then the enemy could pour through and surround the isolated pockets of men.
And so it went with the Norsemen. As warriors abandoned the wall, the Irish swept into the gaps, and more men turned and fled. In no time – less than a minute, certainly – the well organized resistance dissolved into chaotic flight as the men f
rom Vík-ló ran to defend their ships and their only means of escape.
Grimarr was roaring and flailing with his sword. “Stand and fight, you cowardly bastards!” he shouted but Harald could hear the lack of conviction in his words. He was no more sure of the right course of action than were his men, and a moment later he too abandoned any pretense of holding the line.
But Grimarr did not run to the ships. He raced over to where the diggers were working, or had been working, and where his men were standing guard. “Come on, come on, down to the ships! Follow me!” he shouted and his men, who had been spread out in a defensive semicircle, now moved in closer. The Irish, however, having put their enemy to flight, seemed in no great hurry to follow. They advanced, their shield wall more or less intact, but they did so slowly, a methodical approach, not a mad rush.
There was another swirl of noise from behind, shouts building in volume. Harald turned and saw that Bersi’s men had reached their ship and were already getting underway. He could see that Water Stallion was floating free, fifteen feet from shore, the rowers awkwardly thrusting oars through the oar holes, but he could not understand how they had reached the ship and climbed aboard in so short a time.
“They’re taking the ship, they are taking the god-forsaken ship!” he heard someone shout and then Harald realized it was not Bersi’s men who had boarded Water Stallion. It was Lorcan and his men. Lorcan had stolen the ship and already he was beyond the reach of those ashore. The men pulling the oars were not accustomed to the work, that was clear. Still, awkward as they might be, they were gathering way, pulling away from the beach, leaving a widening gap of water between themselves and the shingle.
The Lord of Vik-lo: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 3) Page 23
