“At them!” His words echoed up and down the line and his warriors stepped forward. Such an order might well have brought confusion down on Thorgrim’s men, who were braced and ready to absorb an assault. But they were disciplined, accustomed to obeying without hesitation, and they, too, had seen this chance. They had seen the hesitation and the uncertainty and they were ready to push into that breach and start the killing.
“Hold your line! Hold your line!” Thorgrim shouted as Far Voyager’s crew moved forward. He did not want his men doing what Lorcan’s had, allowing the discipline of the shield wall to fall apart. And they did not. They kept their line intact as they rolled on, and when they hit Lorcan’s men it was as an unbroken line of shields and weapons at the ready.
There was an audible sound as the two lines came together, the impact of seventy shields hitting seventy more, the ring of steel on steel, the shouts of enraged warriors, and, within seconds, the shriek of the dying. Lorcan’s men had been thrown into disarray, but they were not new to this work, and by the time Thorgrim’s line hit theirs they had nearly recovered and were ready to fight.
Thorgrim stepped back and looked down the length of his shield wall. Men were braced, one leg behind the other as if they were shoving against some nearly immovable thing, which indeed they were; the line of Irish warriors. Swords thrust through the gap between shields, the long, wicked iron points of spears darted in and out. To Thorgrim’s right, a man named Gest who had joined them in Dubh-linn staggered back from the line. His mouth was open, blood was streaming from the place where his nose and right eye had been, but before Thorgrim could even move to take his place the men on either side had closed the gap.
Lorcan was still in the middle of the line, and unlike the rest of the Irish he was not hidden from Thorgrim’s view by the mass of fighting men. He loomed over the shields and helmeted heads. That part of his face that was visible was streaked with blood, his mouth was open as he shouted again and again, the words foreign and meaningless to Thorgrim’s ears.
Twenty feet down the line from Lorcan’s raging attack, Harald held his place in the wall, wielding his sword. Vengeance Seeker was gone, left on the beach to the south, but he had found another sword, a decent blade.
Thorgrim thanked the gods that his son was not face to face with Lorcan. Harald, he knew, would have been the first to do battle with that great Irish beast – already had, in fact – though Thorgrim suspected Harald had come closer to death that night than the boy let on. Someday, he knew, Harald would be able to stand against a man like Lorcan in a battle line, but not now. Not now.
Sutare Thorvaldsson, the Swede, was in front of Lorcan now, but there was little he could do beyond deflecting Lorcan’s furious assault. The battle ax went up and down, up and down, swinging at Sutare and the men to his left and right. The defenders in the shield wall held up their shields and lashed out with their weapons and made not the least impression on the huge Irishman.
This cannot last long, Thorgrim thought, and it did not. Two more blows from Lorcan’s ax and the man to Sutare’s left let his sword arm drop as if he was giving up, but Thorgrim could see that just below the shoulder it had been severed nearly in two. The weapon fell from his hand and the man staggered back. The blood ran bright down his arm and Lorcan, seeing the hole in the shield wall, grinned and swung his ax and charged.
And Thorgrim was there. It was for this very reason he had placed himself where he had, because if the mountainous Lorcan had worked himself behind the shield wall then all would be lost, the fight over in seconds, not minutes. Thorgrim took three quick steps and before Lorcan even knew he was there and he lashed out with Iron-tooth, driving the point at Lorcan’s throat.
The blade pierced the thick matt of Lorcan’s beard, and Lorcan, who had not even seen Thorgrim come at him, twisted in surprise, leaning back so the blade missed its mark. He knocked Thorgrim’s sword away with the iron rim of his shield and at the same time swung the battle ax with his right hand, an awkward move, not action but reaction, and Thorgrim sidestepped the stroke.
“Get back, you son of a whore!” Thorgrim shouted, aware that the words were meaningless to Lorcan, and he drove his shield into the man. He had not expected to push Lorcan back through the gap, but he had thought he might push him back a step or so. In fact he did nothing of the kind. It was like slamming his shield into the trunk of an oak that had stood a hundred years.
They were close, Thorgrim and Lorcan, their faces inches apart. Lorcan grinned and drew his ax back over his shoulder. Thorgrim, pressed against the man, was unable to raise Iron-tooth, so he stabbed down instead. He felt the blade hit something, something more soft and yielding than the plank road, and Lorcan bellowed in pain. He shoved Thorgrim with his shield and Thorgrim staggered back and Lorcan staggered back in the other direction. Thorgrim allowed himself to look down, a glance as fast as a heartbeat, but enough to see the rent in Lorcan’s leather shoe, the bright red gleam of blood.
I’ll have to kill this one like a pack of dogs on a bull, Thorgrim thought, wound after wound…
Fighting men pressed in on Lorcan’s side and he pushed them away, making room for himself. He was limping a bit as he moved, but not much. He was bloodied, and that only made him more angry, and that in turn made him more oblivious to the pain.
Thorgrim advanced because he still wanted to keep Lorcan back on the other side of the shield wall. Lorcan swung his ax, a wide, sideways sweep, and Thorgrim stopped it with his shield. He staggered under the blow and saw the wood on the backside of his shield shatter, the corner of the ax head driven clean through.
He feinted low with his sword and Lorcan, already wounded once in the foot, jerked his shield down to stop it happening again. Then Thorgrim went high, over the shield, once more going for Lorcan’s neck. But this time Iron-tooth’s edge hit mail and slipped off, and once again Lorcan knocked the blade away with the edge of his shield.
Lorcan’s ax was still buried deep in Thorgrim’s shield. Lorcan jerked it hard, breaking it free, tearing a rent in the planks of the shield and knocking Thorgrim off balance. The battle ax came around again. Thorgrim raised his shield in time for the shattered wood face to take most of the blow, but Lorcan’s ax glanced off and kept going.
Thorgrim twisted and took the blade on his shoulder. He felt the edge of the weapon sever the mail and dig into flesh, felt blood run warm beneath, but the shield and the mail shirt had slowed the ax enough that the wound was a minor thing.
More critically, Thorgrim was staggered by the blow, off balance, and Lorcan leapt forward to take advantage of that. He made a broad backhand swing with his shield, slamming it into Thorgrim’s fresh wound. The impact produced a wave of agony and sent Thorgrim reeling. He had an image of Lorcan grinning and the big ax rising up overhead. He tried to regain his balance, but before he could, something hit him hard, hit him from behind, and sent him sprawling onto the plank road.
He heard a deep animal sound, a frantic struggle behind him. He braced for the agony of Lorcan’s ax hacking into his spine even as he rolled over and brought the remains of his shield up to stop it.
But Lorcan was caught in a new fight now and was not about to cut Thorgrim down. Grimarr Knutson, come up from behind the shield wall, had launched himself at the Irish chieftain, roaring in fury and sweeping at him with sword and shield. And Lorcan was shouting as well, taking Grimarr’s blade with his own shield, flailing with his wide-headed ax. It was like some mythic battle of the old legends, these two, more giant than human, bellowing their fury and hacking at one another with a strength beyond that of mortal men.
Thorgrim scrambled to his feet. Grimarr, he realized, had saved his life, though certainly he had not meant to, had probably not even realized who it was he was knocking aside. Grimarr had intended only to clear a path to Lorcan, the one man in Ireland he might hate as much as he hated Thorgrim.
They were trading blows back and forth, Grimarr’s sword against Lorcan’s shield, Lorcan’s ax
against Grimarr’s shield. Splinters of wood flew from the faces of the shields, but Grimarr’s was getting the worst of it, the blade of Lorcan’s ax digging deep, ripping the guts from the wood bounded by the iron rim.
To his right, on the edge of his vision, Thorgrim caught a motion and he turned to see one of Lorcan’s warriors break through the line, sword held high, his leather armor hacked and bloody, his eyes wild. He came on quick and reckless and Thorgrim easily turned his blade aside with what remained of his shield and darted Iron-tooth in. The leather was no match for the well-honed blade and he died on Thorgrim’s sword-point.
Then Thorgrim remembered Bersi. Son of a bitch! Surely Bersi should have hit the flanks by then. He looked left and right. The shieldwall had all but broken down and the defense had devolved into a hundred individual fights. Men lay dead. Men dragged themselves from the field. Men lay thrashing and screaming. There was no sign of Bersi.
Son of a bitch!
Lorcan and Grimarr were standing five feet apart, eyes fixed on one another, heaving for breath. Grimarr’s back was to Thorgrim, but he could see Lorcan’s face was smeared with blood, a wound to his scalp, probably not deep but it would bleed like mad. Head wounds did.
The two men stood motionless for what seemed a long time in that frantic world. And then a growl built in Lorcan’s throat and he came at Grimarr again, any finesse quite forgotten. He came at Grimarr with ax raised and shield against his chest. He hacked down and Grimarr stopped the ax again with the last bits of wood left in his shield, which fell apart under the force of the blow.
Now Grimarr roared and slashed at Lorcan and his blade was turned aside. And then Bersi’s men hit Lorcan’s flanks.
Thorgrim was not sure at first what was happening, but there was some great change in the tenor of the struggle, some panic that seemed to rippled in from the edges of the fighting. Then he was aware of shouting, the battle cry of fresh men coming into the fight and the Irish seemed to stumble over one another as they pressed toward the remnants of the shield wall and away from this new onslaught.
Bersi, you bastard…Thorgrim thought, but in truth he had no sense for the time that had elapsed. They may have been fighting there for an hour or a minute for all he knew. Bersi might have been holding back, or he might have judged the moment perfectly.
But he was there now and the effect on the Irish was devastating. Their enemy was at their back, the nightmare of all fighting men. They turned, but that put Thorgrim’s men behind them, and that was no better. Thorgrim could hear shouts now that sounded more like panicked screams than the cries of warriors in battle.
Grimarr had thrown his shattered shield away and was treating Lorcan with considerably more caution, keeping just beyond the arc of his ax stroke, stepping sideways, looking for an opening. Lorcan had the upper hand but he was not foolish enough to think that Grimarr was any less dangerous for the loss of his shield. Five feet apart the two men faced one another, their faces red and soaked with sweat, the hate that had built up over years shining in their eyes.
Then from out in the chaos of the battle someone shouted, and it sounded like an order. The words were Irish; Thorgrim had no idea what was said. But Lorcan did and he jerked his head in that direction and he shouted an order of his own and in that instant of distraction, Grimarr lunged.
Lorcan had time enough to register his mistake, time enough to start turning his face back toward Grimarr when the tip of Grimarr’s big sword struck. It hit Lorcan right where his beard yielded to the bit of his face that was visible, just below his left eye. Grimarr, no doubt recognizing he would only get one such chance, put every bit of remaining strength into the thrust. The sword went through Lorcan’s face like it was a pile of straw, and without the least pause erupted from the back of his head in a great spray of blood and bits of skull.
The expression on Lorcan’s face could only be called surprise. His mouth hung open. His eyes went wide, and then they rolled back as the force of Grimarr’s thrust knocked the Irishman, who was doubtless dead already, right off his feet.
Grimarr maintained his grip on the sword and likely thought it would pull free of Lorcan’s skull as the man fell, but it did not. Like some last bit of defiance, the blade remained stuck in Lorcan’s lifeless head. Grimarr was jerked forward and with a shout of outrage he fell across his enemy’s corpse.
Kill him, kill him, kill him! Thorgrim heard the command in his head. Here was a chance that would not present itself again. Grimarr, lying at his feet, back to him. Two steps and he could drive Iron-tooth through the man’s neck.
He looked up. The Irish warriors close at hand had seen Lorcan die, a thing they might not have thought was possible, and it had taken the fight out of them. Some were fleeing now, those who could get away, and their flight was infectious. More and more men broke off and fled, some throwing their weapons aside. Here and there men kept up the fight. Others tried to surrender, some with success, others not.
“After them, after them! Drive them to the wall!” Thorgrim shouted. He leapt over Grimarr’s thrashing form and with a wave of his sword led him men forward, driving the defeated enemy toward the earthen wall, built to keep them out, which would now serve to pen them in, like sheep driven to the slaughter.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It’s ill for men
to endure old age;
it snatches from them
sight and sense.
The Saga of the Confederates
It was a rout. Thorgrim had seen them before, but he did not think he had ever seen one so complete. The death of Lorcan and the attack launched by Bersi’s men coming at almost the same moment marked the end of the Irish assault. Once the panic took hold it spread, building like flames in a thatch roof, and soon any Irishman who could run was running.
And they had reason to run, because Thorgrim’s men and Bersi’s men were not about to just let them go. Rather, they followed in pursuit, eager to cut the fleeing enemy down, to kill them to a man. The Irishmen had to be punished, taught the folly of attacking the longphort. Any living Irishman was one they might have to fight again.
And while that was true, few of the Northmen were actually thinking it. Most were not thinking at all. Just as the Irish were in a blind panic, so the men of Vík-ló were blinded by their blood lust.
Thorgrim ran after them, his mind still working somewhere above an animal level. He considered trying to stop his men, to form them up in some way, to restore order. There was little that was as dangerous as rushing undisciplined into a fight. If Lorcan had not known that before, he learned it in the last few moments of his life.
But this was not a fight. The Irish would not stage any sort of organized defense. Panic was like a rock rolling downhill. It moved faster with every second, its momentum becoming more and more unstoppable. And the same was true of blood lust. Thorgrim did not think he could stop his men if he wanted to.
He raced after them up the plank road. He had caught a glimpse of Harald just before the Irish ranks broke. The boy had been wielding sword and shield with the calm and determined quality of a seasoned warrior, a thing he was fast becoming. Thorgrim lost sight of him in the press of men, but that was alright because he knew the boy lived and the worst of the fighting was over.
They pushed on. Thorgrim felt himself falling behind, his legs tiring, the half-healed wounds across his chest throbbing, the blood that seeped from the gash left by Lorcan’s ax still running down his arm and dripping from his fingertips. He was breathing hard.
The retreating Irish charged up the plank road, flanked left and right by the low, ugly daub buildings that made up the town of Vík-ló, their trampled and muddy yards delineated by wattle fences that were themselves now trampled in the panicked flight. Behind them, the screaming, crazed Norsemen pushed them on.
The crowd was well ahead of Thorgrim by the time he caught sight of the end of the plank road and the tall oak gate in the wall, flanked by Grimarr’s hall and Fasti Magnisson’s. The Ir
ish had run out of places to flee. They were pushed up against the inside of the wall surrounding Vík-ló. Some had turned and were fighting to the last, others were boosting themselves up and over. The Norsemen were hacking at them and stabbing into the crowd of trapped men with their long spears. The air smelled of blood. The only noise was the shouts and screams of men, and it filled the longphort until Thorgrim thought he could stand it no more.
The big gate in Vík-ló’s defensive wall, thrown open by the Irish, was still open, and Lorcan’s men began to push their way toward it, fighting their way past the Norsemen for the chance at life that the open gate offered. The swords and the axes of the Norsemen rose and fell, but there was not the same enthusiasm now, not the same mindless, wild quality. They were tired. They were sated. They had won.
The gates hung open as the last of the Irish warriors fought their way through the crowd, clear of the longphort, and raced off for the hills. Some of the Northmen pursued, but none more than a dozen yards or so. Their fighting madness was ebbing and the land beyond the walls of Vík-ló was unknown and frightening. They had spent so long sequestered in the longphort, surrounded by a people who wished them gone or dead and whatever unearthly things inhabited that strange land, that none of them were eager to venture far beyond the gate.
Thorgrim stopped and let Iron-tooth’s tip rest on the ground. He had already discarded his shattered and useless shield, and he let his wounded shield arm hang limp. He could feel the sticky blood that coated his fingers and hand, but he could feel no more blood dripping off, so he counted that a good thing.
“Thorgrim!” He looked over and saw Bersi approaching. There was blood on his face and hands, his helmet was gone, and there was a great rent in his mail shirt. He was limping, just a bit. He looked like a man who had been in a fight.
The Lord of Vik-lo: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 3) Page 36
