by Tom Holt
Then I heard a voice up ahead shouting, ‘Fuck it, they’re slinging rocks!’ Of course, I couldn’t see anything much, apart from the back of Thorbrand’s head, but we all came to another sudden sharp halt, like when you walk into something solid in the dark. You can tell when the men in front of you are scared; it’s a lot of little things, like the silence when they all go very quiet, the way they stand dead still for a moment, the smell when some poor bugger in the line shits himself in terror. It’s bad enough when you can see what’s going on, or you know what the sudden new danger’s likely to be. When you haven’t got a clue, other than someone up ahead yelling about flying rocks, it’s bloody terrifying. You don’t know if it’s an ambush, or enemy reinforcements have turned up, or a sudden attack on the flank, or there’s some brilliant tactical ploy your commander hadn’t been expecting; or it could be cavalry or catapults or Greek fire, or even bloody elephants for all you know What filters back to you is, it’s very bad and it’s happening far too close, and you’re jammed in the middle and can’t get out. That’s when men start trying to turn round and push their way to the rear, and pretty soon everything’s fucked up and a hundred times worse than it need be.
I wasn’t the first man to lose it and start shoving, and I wasn’t the last either. Not that it made much odds; these things happen so quick, it doesn’t really matter. I got myself turned round; at one point I was nose to nose with Bjarni Grimolfson who was staring at me from a few inches away like he couldn’t figure out what in hell was going on. Then I managed to slip past him, and Thorbrand shoved past me; I slipped and went down on one knee, landed hard, felt my kneecap go crunch on a stone or something. Just what I needed, I thought, to be caught up in this mess and be hobbling along, not able to run. So many people were pushing and shoving past that it took me a while to get up and back on my feet again, and even then I couldn’t keep up, they just slipped and squirmed past me and I was still struggling for my balance. I got both feet planted and found out, to my great joy that I could actually put some weight on my bashed knee, when I noticed that the man pushing past on my left-hand side wasn’t anybody I recognised. He was one of the enemy
That was a very bad moment. I remember thinking, I could just reach over, right now, and run the edge of my axe across the back of his knee, and that’d be him sorted; but if I did that, and somebody noticed, the rest of them’d tear me to pieces. Screw that. So I stopped looking round, fixed my stare dead ahead, saw that the man in front of me was Thorbrand, and kept going, fast as I could. Someone or something clouted me a horrible great scat in the small of the back but I pretended it hadn’t happened, and my guess is it was just an accident. If it was one of the leather-boat people trying to harm me, he was pretty half-hearted about it and didn’t try again.
So there we were, in full retreat, with the enemy at our heels; not so good, really I hadn’t got a clue what’d gone wrong, or how I was supposed to get out of it; but then we stopped dead again. I crashed into Thorbrand’s back and my knee crumpled; I went down hard on my face, and I felt someone’s feet on my back, then on my neck - the bastard was walking over me to get to wherever he wanted to go. I lifted my head just a bit, and all I could see was a heel, in a cured-hide shoe sewn up with sinew thread, standing still about six inches from my nose. What happened in the next few moments after that, I’m rather foggy about. There was a yell, a bit of foot-shuffling, and then something big and heavy fell across my shoulders and didn’t move at all. My head was pressed sideways, and I saw a hand reach down and pick up an axe off the ground. Then I think someone’s foot must’ve bashed into the back of my head, and I was completely out of it.
CHAPTER
T W E LV E
‘Did he tell you,’ Kari asked, ‘how I saved his life?’ I paused before answering. ‘Maybe he was going to,’ I replied, ‘but then Harald called him away to take his turn on watch. So you saved him, then?’
Kari nodded. ‘Well,’ he amended, ‘as good as. It was me pulled him out from under the pile of dead bodies, and realised he was still alive. That counts, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I should think so,’ I replied. ‘Was he grateful?’
‘Oh, you know how it is,’ said Kari, with a shrug. ‘You wake up after taking an almighty scat on the head, you don’t really know who you are or where, or what’s been going on; and people say all sorts of dumb things without really knowing it.’
‘So I gather,’ I said. ‘So what did Eyvind say?’
Kari frowned. ‘He was lying there on the ground,’ he said, ‘eyes shut, head all sticky with blood; and he opens his eyes and looks at me for a bit like he’d really been expecting to see someone else, and he says, “Oh fuck, don’t say you’re here too.”’
‘Strange,’ I said.
‘I thought so. But apparently, he was pretty well convinced that he’d been killed in the fighting, which meant he was either in Heaven or Valhalla; and seeing me, I guess he assumed I’d been killed as well, which obviously upset him. I mean, we’ve been friends a long time. It was sort of touching.’
‘That explains it,’ I said. ‘Obviously But he was all right, was he, apart from the bang on the head?’
‘More or less. He was a bit giddy for a while, threw up a couple of times. I reckon he was lucky to get off so lightly being right in the thick of it like that when it all started to go so badly wrong. All thanks to that fuckwit Thorfinn, of course.
Kari yawned, and wriggled a bit so that his back was resting against the tomb gatepost. The afternoon sun was pleasantly warm, and I could smell the dust. ‘Were there many killed in the fighting?’ I asked. ‘You said something about a pile of bodies.’
Actually (Kari said), bearing in mind what a screw-up Thorfinn made of it, we were bloody lucky Two dead, one broken leg and a dozen or so with cuts and bruises. The worst of it happened where Eyvind was. The man next to him, Thorbrand, was killed by an arrow; we found him lying on his back with half a flint arrowhead sticking out from right between his eyes, and he had a weird sort of stunned look on his face, like he hadn’t believed a bit of stone tied to a stick could be so dangerous.
When he went down, the leather-boaters thought they’d won; they started crowding forward, shoving us back, and that was when Bjarni Grimolfson got killed. Stabbed in the guts with a flint spear; and the man who’d killed him grabbed his axe out of his hands and swung it round his head with a horrible yell and lashed out at the nearest target -
Ohtar, I think it was; he was off-balance and looking the other way but luckily for him the leather-boater missed him completely and drove the axe into the ground. It hit a stone and the back horn of the blade snapped off like an icicle and nearly put his eye out. Bloody fool dropped it like it was on fire - I suppose he thought it was bewitched or accursed or something - and turned and ran like a hare.
That put a bit of a check on their advance, and maybe they’d have buggered off and left us in peace if it hadn’t been for Thorfinn’s brilliant plan of turning the bull loose in their rear. Stunning piece of thinking, that; because, of course, what happened was that they were far more scared of the bull than they were of us, and the men at the back of the mob just wanted to get as far away from it as they could. Last thing they wanted to do was go towards the bull, so their only way out was through us, or over us, whatever it took. So there was the bull driving them along, and they were pushing us back just as fast, and we had nowhere to go because our backs were to the palisade. We’d have been really screwed.
‘Just a moment,’ I interrupted. ‘It sounds to me like you had a much better view of what was happening than Eyvind did.’
‘That’s right,’ Kari replied. ‘I was up on the cowshed roof, with the archery detail.’
‘I didn’t know you were an archer.’
He grinned. ‘I’m not. But it was a damn sight safer up there; and when they started chucking those rocks at us out of their catapult-‘
‘Catapult?’ I queried.
‘Didn’t Eyvind tell
you? Oh yes, they had a sort of siege engine thing - a bit rough and ready compared to your wonderful Greek machines, but it did the job. Basically it was like a giant spoon with a very long handle, powered by ropes of twisted hide. It threw a rock as big as your head, very scary. Could’ve done a lot of harm if they’d been able to aim it any sense.
‘Good heavens,’ I said.
‘I know what you mean; them not having any kind of metal, but being smart enough to make a siege engine. That was the thing about them, see: they weren’t dumber or smarter than us, just a bit different, and there were more things we had in common with them than there were differences. I mean, we were wearing the same sort of clothes, ate a lot of the same sorts of food, which is a way of saying we were living off the same land. Main difference was, we stayed put in houses and they wandered around living in tents. But that’s beside the point. Yes, I was up on the roof there; I doubled back as soon as our boys started to give way - I didn’t fancy getting caught up in a crush where I couldn’t move my arms and legs, and the roof seemed a good place to go. I was still doing my bit in the battle, mind, because I sat up on the roof and threw down several of the rocks their siege engine’d slung up there. I hit one of the bastards, I think I may’ve smashed his arm, or his collarbone. Anyhow, it looked like it hurt, and served him right. Can’t blame me for getting out of harm’s way, can you?’
‘I guess it’s what I’d have done,’ I said. ‘Of course, I’m only a clerk.’
Like I was saying (Kari went on), it was looking pretty bad for our side: two dead, and we hadn’t killed any of them by that stage. They were pushing us right back, and our lot were trapped up against the palisade, nowhere to go.
Remember, we hadn’t got any armour, no helmets or shields. I was really worried, I can tell you.
But you’ll never guess how it ended, or who saved us. Of all people, it was Gudrid, Thorfinn’s wife. To this day I don’t know what prompted her to do it. My guess is, she got so pissed off watching from the house while her idiot husband was trying his best to get us all killed that she finally couldn’t stand it any longer. She came running out of the side gate, up the side of the battle; hair all down on her shoulders, waving her arms and yelling bloody murder. Then she sees where Thorbrand Snorrason was lying dead, and that seemed to be the last straw She grabs the sword out of his hand and waves it in the air, shrieking at the leather-boat people, really ferocious. They don’t know what to make of it: are they supposed to fight her, or what? One of them comes up to her, all wary, like when you see two cats fighting; he’s got a spear, and he makes a couple of feeble pokes in her direction, like he’s trying to shoo a contrary old sow back into the pighouse. Gudrid yells all sorts of stuff at him -he can’t understand a word, but he gets the general idea -and he takes a step back, waggles his spear-point at her like he’s getting ready to feint. What does she do? She rips open her bodice, pulls out her right tit and slaps it with the flat of the sword. I could hear the smacking noise right up where I was; it was like hands clapping.
That was enough for the leather-boat man; he drops his spear, swings round on his heels and runs for his life. Gudrid lets out a whoop they could probably have heard back in the Eastern Settlement; she’s jiggling the sword with one hand and her tit with the other, and the rear end of the enemy column starts backing away; meanwhile the bull’s roaring like hell behind them, kicking and prancing about, and between Gudrid and the bull it’s all too much for them. They start to break and run. The front end, who can’t see what’s going on behind them but know that their mates have just turned and run away - they stop pushing forward against our men, and we push back at them. Ohtar sticks his spear into one of them as he’s trying to look back over his shoulder - goes in one ear, comes out the other, you never saw the like - and then it’s more or less over. They’re all running like mad for the wood. Someone up on the roof manages to drop one of them with an arrow; the shot doesn’t kill him, it’s being trampled on by his mates that does that. I clock one of them with my lump of rock as they go by, but not enough to stop him; our boys catch another two of them who trip over as they run, and pretty well tear them to bits. And that’s the end of the battle.
I can picture Gudrid in my mind, standing there like she’s just woken up out of a really strange dream. She drops the sword on the ground, does her bodice up really quick, scampers back in the house and slams the door. Some of our men - the ones at the back, mostly - are jumping up and down and yelling, because we’ve won. The ones up front are more stunned-like, can’t figure out what the hell just happened. Thorfinn - he’s at the back, been there all the time -he’s shouting orders but nobody’s paying him a blind bit of notice. I hop down off the roof, I’m worried sick because I lost sight of Eyvind when our lot started giving ground and falling back, and I reckon he must’ve been killed. There s a ring of men round Thorbrand’s body, but nobody seems to want to do anything, they’re standing there gawping like they’d never seen a dead man before. I pull Eyvind out from under him, and that’s when he says, ‘Oh fuck, don’t say you’re here too.’ And that was our great and glorious war against the leather-boat people; nearly lost by a moron and a bull, but saved by the same bull and by Gudrid’s knockers. I tell you, when your officer cadets read up on their great battles of the past when they’re learning how to be generals, they ought to study the Battle of Leif’s Booths. It’d make war a lot more interesting if they did.
As victories go, it was pretty sour. It’d been far too close; and two of us had been killed. Made no odds that we’d killed twice that number of the enemy; it wasn’t as though we could eat them or cure their hides for shoe-uppers or anything, so it wasn’t like when you stand around after a hunt looking at the bag, thinking about how well you’ve done. About the best that could be said for it was, we were still alive, and we weren’t going to have to waste too much time getting rid of bodies. Actually that’s a real issue sometimes, after a battle. Sometimes you can just let ‘em lie, once you’ve buried your own; but if you’re in your own territory, you’ve got to tidy up. Last thing you want to do after fighting a battle is spend a day digging ditches.
But we made the effort; we buried Thorbrand and Bjarni where they fell and heaped up mounds over them, and we dug a trench out back for the leather-boat people. Just pitched them in; one of you grabs an ankle, someone else grabs a wrist, a little swing and a heave, and down they go. Anything else is a waste of energy.
Eyvind was still pretty banged up, so we took him and a couple of others who’d been hurt into the back room, Thorfinn and Gudrid’s bedroom, and laid them on the bed where they’d be nice and comfortable: wounded heroes, see. The rest of us flopped out on the benches. I don’t think most of us slept that night - I got the feeling of lying there in the dark surrounded by sixty-odd people all awake and thinking. Weird, that is.
Next morning, we tried to go to work same as usual, like nothing had happened. Felt all wrong. For one thing, all of us kept glancing up from what we were doing towards the woods, just in case a bunch of enemies had appeared out of it since we last looked. Normal work around the place didn’t seem important any more. Milking or scraping down the yard or splitting logs or mending fence rails; there didn’t seem any immediate need to get it done, because where was the point? We all knew we’d be leaving, sooner or later.
All of us realised that, I think, pretty much as soon as the fighting stopped; but it was two or three days before anybody actually said anything, and even then it was just a hint here and there. I remember I was out in the marsh with a man called Sigurd Eyes; we were picking up chunks of bog-iron for the forge. Nasty job, that: you had to stand or plod about, over your ankles in greasy grey mud, bent over all the time, looking down for the right size and shade of black. Each of us had a big fat oak bucket, and we knew better than to go back till both buckets were full.
We’d been at it quite a while before either of us said anything; then Sigurd came straight out with it, which surprised me; I knew him quite
well by then, of course, because all of us knew everybody else inside out, after being cooped up tight there for so long. But I’d always figured him for the type that gets on with it without thinking: gets up in the morning, does his work, eats and goes to sleep with never a thought beyond the job in hand. He was a Greenlander, Eastern Settlement; I’d known him slightly from Brattahlid, though he was from one of the outer farms.
‘How long do you think it’ll be?’ he said to me.
‘What?’ I replied.
He frowned, like I was being dumb on purpose. ‘How long before we pack it in and go home,’ he said.
‘You think it’ll come to that?’ I asked him.
‘Bound to,’ he replied, all matter-of-fact. ‘We can’t stay here, not now
I guess I knew exactly what was in his mind, but just for my own sake, for devilment, I played dumb; suppose it was easier arguing with him than with myself, inside my own head. ‘Because of the battle, you mean?’
‘Of course.’ He stooped, and a bit more iron clinked in the bucket. ‘We couldn’t ever settle. It’d always be at the back of our minds - will it be today when they come back.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We beat them once, didn’t we?’
Sigurd laughed. ‘More by luck than judgement. You know that. If it hadn’t been for Gudrid-‘
‘Yes, well,’ I said. ‘Maybe she spooked them so badly they won’t ever set foot round here again. Her and the bull,’ I added.
He shrugged, like it was a non-issue. ‘Even if they never come back, we’ll spend the rest of our lives waiting for them,’ he said. ‘It’s, I don’t know, trust. We can’t trust this place any more. Any day it could suddenly turn on us again and attack us. It’s like a marriage, living somewhere: got to have trust, or it’s nothing but trouble. It’d be like living on the lip of a volcano, like the poor people do back in the old country.’
