Dubh-Linn: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 2) (28 page)

  They continued on, and just as Brigit had said, the river widened out as it bent around, with the current carving a deep place along the western shore. There were pilings driven into the water and posts on the banks and Thorgrim guessed that the Irish made considerable use of the river. They had seen no vessels that day, but that was no surprise. On the appearance of the Norsemen, any Irish boats would have scattered like sheep before wolves.

  They tied the longships to the pilings and posts, rigged gangplanks to the shore. Arinbjorn stepped off first, followed by Hrolleif the Stout and Ingolf who commanded
Dragon Slayer
, and behind them their men, carrying the shields they had unshipped from the sides of the vessels, and swords and axes and spears. They assembled on shore and the men pulled on mail shirts or padded tunics, iron helmets, strapped sword belts around their waists.

  The leaders walked a dozen yards down the road, which was relatively wide and blessedly mud free, and conferred. Brigit joined them, and Harald as translator. Thorgrim was there as well, though he had no intention of adding anything beyond a nodded agreement to whatever the others came up with. Arinbjorn asked Bolli to join them, which he did, as grudgingly as he did everything else.

  Brigit spoke first. Harald translated. “Tara is about five miles down this road, the Princess says.”

  The others turned and looked down the road, as if they might see it from there. “What does she think we’ll meet for opposition?” Hrolleif asked. Harald translated, listened to Brigit’s reply, asked for clarification, apparently, received it, nodded and translated back.

  “She says…I didn’t follow all of it…but she says she does not believe any of the…I think she means the minor jarls who have land nearby, she does not think any of them will come to the aide of Tara. She doubts there are more than one hundred men-at-arms. The walls are tall and the gates strong, but they will not be able to stand long against us.”

  The others nodded at this. “I say we move out now, fast as we can,” said Ingolf. “Time is our enemy, not theirs.”

  The others nodded again, as did Thorgrim, who was coming to like Ingolf. They agreed to that plan, turned and headed back to where the rest of the men waited, now in fighting array. Arinbjorn explained the plan, if such it could be called, which was simply to march on Tara and take it by whatever means presented itself. And that was fine for the Northmen, who asked for nothing more complicated than a straight out fight.

  And that was doubly true for Starri Deathless and his band of berserkers, Nordwall the short and the others. While most of the men had donned more gear in preparation for the fight, the berserkers had stripped down, removing tunics, belts, in general everything but leggings. Some wore fur capes, some wore helmets. They were well armed, the long-handled battle ax being the most common weapon of choice. They huddled to one side and made peculiar noises as if they were taking part in the worship of some long-forgotten god.

  “Starri!” Thorgrim called out. “Starri!” At length Starri looked up from his huddle and Thorgrim waved him over. He jogged up, ax and short sword in hand. He was stripped to the waist and the arrowhead that had split itself on Thorgrim’s sword at Cloyne was hanging around his neck on a leather thong.

  “Yes, Night Wolf?” he said. There was a weird look in his eyes, a strange light Thorgrim had not seen before, and his gaze seemed to pass right through Thorgrim’s head. Starri was there on the Banks of the Boyne, and he was off at some other place that only the berserkers knew.

  “We move out. Some of Hrolleif’s men are scouting ahead. Arinbjorn’s men will take the lead on the march, and your berserkers follow. Stay behind them.”

  “Behind? Behind… Should we not lead?”

  “No. We march to Tara, and when we see what we’re up against we’ll know how best to array ourselves. Now, pray, keep you men in order and in line.”

  Starri nodded. Thorgrim hoped that he really did understand, and was not just making some involuntary head movement. It was never easy to tell with Starri, and even more difficult in these circumstances. The truth was, Arinbjorn wished to control the berserkers for as long as he could, to deploy them thoughtfully and not in a manic rush, and for once Thorgrim agreed.

  Half an hour after coming ashore they were moving again, tramping off down the brown earth road, moving as fast as they could without sapping their strength on the march. Their feet, either bare or shod in soft leather shoes, made a muted shuffling sound as they walked. Mail shirts jangled and weapons thumped against thighs. Sometimes men talked softly in the ranks, but mostly they were quiet. The berserkers did not speak, but occasionally one or another would make some kind of weird sound, a whimper or a growl, or he would bark like a dog.

  Brigit was not allowed to join them. She had protested, her voice rising at one point and Harald struggling to translate the angry words, but none of the men thought her presence at the battle was a good idea, and in the end they won. She was left aboard
Black Raven
with a guard of twenty men and the ship was warped out into the river. That was ostensibly for her own protection, but also to see that she did not slip away. Thorgrim watched Harald as he fought with indecision: should he remain with her or join his shipmates in the fighting? In the end, the lure of battle outweighed even the charms that Brigit had to offer.

  They walked for an hour. Thorgrim stayed mostly at the head of the column with Arinbjorn, though they had little enough to say to one another. Occasionally he would stop and let the men walk past in review, and his sharp eyes would search for any weakness, any man who looked afraid, any weapons not in fighting order, but he found nothing he could fault in that company. The country was mostly open, long green fields and stands of wood here and there. They could see smoke rising in the distance, and they guessed it came from Tara. Cooking fires, forges turning out spear and arrow heads.

  From up ahead they heard the sound of running. Arinbjorn held up a hand and the column stopped and Thorgrim drew his sword. Ottar Long-legs, who had been sent ahead with the scouts, appeared around the bend in the road and pulled huffing to a stop.

  “Tara lies but a mile ahead,” he reported while sucking air into his lungs. “Once past this stand of trees you can see it, on a high hill across open ground.”

  Arinbjorn and Thorgrim waited for him to catch his breath, and Hrolleif the Stout and Ingolf joined them. “What can you see of the defenses?” Arinbjorn asked. “Are there men on the walls?”

  Ottar shook his head. “None that I could see. It is a long way from the wood line to the ringfort. But it looks as if there are men on the open ground. Tents, it looked like.”

  Thorgrim and Arinbjorn exchanged glances, and Thorgrim wondered if Brigit had been wrong in her assumptions, or had been misleading them all along.

  “Tents?” Hrolleif asked. “Men-at-arms?”

  “No. They don’t look to be men-at-arms.”

  “What then?” Arinbjorn asked. “Who are they?”

  Ottar looked from Arinbjorn to the other leaders and he seemed unsure how to answer. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “It looked to me as if there were men, tents, banners…but no one seems to be in any formation for battle. It just…it does not look like an armed camp. And if it was, I don’t know why it would be there, when they could be within the walls of Tara, fifty rods away.”

  At that the others nodded and took on various expressions of confusion, until Ingolf said the only sensible thing, which was, “Why don’t we advance and see for ourselves?”

  They moved forward again, and as Ottar had told them, once around the stand of trees they found themselves looking out over a long stretch of open ground, a field of Ireland’s emerald grass broken here and there by a short hedge. The ground rose in a great, gently sloping hill and in the distance, perhaps a mile away, the great earthen ringfort of Tara, rising brown above the green. Between them and the walls of the fort, also as Ottar had described, tents, banners, men moving about. It looked more like a festival than preparations for battle.

  Arinbjorn stepped to the front, turned and addressed the men. “I don’t know what these Irish have in mind, but we have come to fight and we will go in fighting. We’ll cross the field, and when I give the word we form a shield wall and advance that way. Thorgrim and I will be in the center, Hrolleif with your men to the west, Ingolf to the east. The berserkers in the middle with my men. Form a line!”

  The men moved quickly, not a chaotic jumble but more like an elaborate dance, forming the line by their divisions, their leaders with them. It took less than two minutes, and then they were ready to go. Arinbjorn drew his sword, held it aloft and stepped off, and the Norsemen, eager for blood, ready to fight, rolled forward in his wake.

  Iron-tooth was in Thorgrim’s hand but he did not recall unsheathing it. He glanced to his side. Harald was there in mail shirt and helmet, his face set, determined but not frightened, and Thorgrim felt a wash of pride come over him. Harald seemed to sense that Thorgrim was looking at him and he looked back. Thorgrim smiled and to his pleasure Harald returned the smile. This was the beauty and simplicity of action. Whatever had happened before seemed meaningless when held up against the comradeship that came with facing danger together.

  They marched over the soft grass, closing with Tara and with whatever awaited them outside the walls. Thorgrim squinted, trying to get a better idea of what it might be, but he could not, or more to the point, he did not believe his eyes, because what his eyes told him made no sense.

  Fifty rods away, and still there was no sign of resistance or any indication that the enemy intended to fight. Thorgrim guessed there were forty or fifty men in the Irish camp, but none of them seemed even to have noticed that the Norsemen were coming. Thorgrim could hear muttering along the line and he called for quiet.

  They continued on, Thorgrim expecting Arinbjorn to form up the shieldwall, but he did not. Twenty rods and Thorgrim could see what appeared to be tables.

  Now a handful of people were advancing toward them. Not an armed band, no more than five or six, and they were not coming on as if they meant to fight. Thorgrim looked hard. His eyes were not what they once were, but he was all but certain that the one leading the group was a woman.

  Ten rods and Arinbjorn held up his hand and the line came to a stop and they waited as the small group approached. Now Thorgrim could see that it was a woman who was leading the group toward them. He looked past her, toward the camp. But it was not a camp. It was not a shieldwall of men-at-arms, or some kind of defense of the ringfort, or a funeral party. It was a banquet.

I hoodwinked those heroes,

hurling dust in their eyes.

                                                           The Saga of the Confederates

Thorgrim Night Wolf watched the small group advance toward them. He leaned toward Harald, just slightly, and said,
sotto voce
, “If they don’t speak our language, you’ll have to translate. If they do, then keep it a secret that you can speak theirs.”

  Harald nodded. Thorgrim kept his eyes on the woman. There was something familiar about her, but she was too far away yet to recognize. Arinbjorn took a step forward, and though he did not invite them to do so, Hrolleif and Ingolf left their men and joined him. Thorgrim turned to Harald and jerked his head in their direction, and he and Harald stepped up to join the other leaders. Thorgrim knew they might need Harald. More to the point, he wanted to know what was going on. He wanted to be an irritant to Arinbjorn.

  Now Thorgrim could better make out the people walking toward them. A man and a woman, dressed well. Not dressed like royalty, but close. There would be no mistaking them for the scullery help. Behind them marched four soldiers, but they were lightly armed with shields and spears, as if they were more for decoration than combat.

  They were just twenty feet away when the realization struck Thorgrim, struck him hard, like a slap to the face.

 
Morrigan!

  He looked again. It was she, for certain. When last he had seen her, she had been an escaped thrall from Dubh-linn, filthy and beaten down. She had made his own escape possible, and that of Ornolf, Harald and the rest. The Crown. Harald held hostage, that had been her doing. So much of Thorgrim’s brief time in Ireland was wrapped up in his memory of Morrigan.

  She stopped, five feet from Arinbjorn, and the man beside her stopped as did the soldiers. Thorgrim recognized the man as well, from the fighting they had done at Tara. A good man in a battle, he recalled, though he could not remember his name.

  Morrigan ran her eyes over the assembled men she was facing. There was no hint of recognition in her face, but Thorgrim and Harald were both wearing helmets, his with a nose guard and Harald’s with iron rims around the eyes, so it was no surprise she did not notice them.

  “Welcome,” she said. Her command of Norse was so complete that Thorgrim would on occasion forget that she was Irish. “Welcome to Tara.”

  It may have been the voice, it may have been the warm greeting - the last thing any of them had expected - but Thorgrim felt like he was reeling, he felt like he was intoxicated, like he was watching performers acting out some bizarre play.

 
That voice!
Soft, yet commanding, a lilting Irish tone to the Norse words, steel wrapped in velvet. Thorgrim was back in the room in Dubh-linn that had served as their prison. Harald near death from a fever that come on the heels of a battle wound, Morrigan there with her basket of herbs and medicines, the secret compartment at the bottom where she hid the daggers.

  He closed his eyes, opened them, forced himself to return to the present, unworldly as it might seem.

  Morrigan was gesturing to the man who stood beside her. Tall, well made, he had the air of a man in command. Or, perhaps, the air of a man trying to appear more in command than he was.

  “This is Flann mac Conaing, who rules Tara. I am his sister, Morrigan nic Conaing. My brother does not speak your language, and as you can see I do, so I will serve to translate, by your leave.”

  Arinbjorn looked at her, glanced side to side as if searching for an answer to this odd puzzle. Finally he waved his sword in the direction of the tents and the tables and the men loading them with food. “What’s the meaning of all this?” he demanded.

  Thorgrim smiled. It was quite involuntary, but he had to admire how Morrigan had created this absurd situation. He wondered if Arinbjorn was now going to start whining like a petulant child.
We came here to sack this place, and now you’re trying to feed us? It’s not fair!

  Morrigan turned to Flann and spoke softly. Flann replied and Morrigan turned back to Arinbjorn. “My master, Flann, says that he wishes to welcome you. You are more powerful than us, by far, and he does not wish to do battle with you.”

  Harald leaned close to Thorgrim and whispered in his ear. “I don’t think that’s what Flann said.”

  Thorgrim nodded slightly. It would not surprise him at all if Morrigan was making the decisions here, and the man she said was her brother was as purely ornamental as the soldiers behind them. He turned his attention back to Arinbjorn, who seemed just as flummoxed by Morrigan’s answer as he had been before she tried to enlighten him.

  “We have not come to feast with you,” he said. “We…we will not just turn and go simply because you have laid out food for us.”

  Morrigan pretended to confer with Flann on this. When they were done she spoke again, and her voice carried authority enough for both her and Flann. “My brother wishes for us to speak honestly. We are not children. We know why you’re here. You have come to plunder Tara. Well, the truth is, we probably can’t stop you. But if we can come to an agreement, we won’t try.”

  “Agreement?” Arinbjorn said. The confusion that Morrigan was sewing stripped the note of authority from his voice.

  “We’ll turn over the wealth of this place if you will take it and leave, without hurting our people, or taking any as slaves. If that’s acceptable to you, please join us in the feast we’ve set out. If not, we’ll fight to the last man. We’ll lose, I shouldn’t wonder, but you and your men will pay a high price for what might have been yours for free.”

  Arinbjorn had no answer for that. He turned to the others. “What say you?” he asked in a voice too low to be heard by Morrigan and the others.

  “It’s a damned trick,” Hrolleif growled. “I say we kill them all, now, and take what we damned well please.”

  Arinbjorn nodded, a gesture Thorgrim had come to recognize. “I don’t think we need be so hasty,” he said. “What she says has the sound of truth. They know they can’t hold us off, so it stands to reason they would want to spare their people. And by Odin, if I can achieve my ends without losing any of my men, I’ll be the happier for it.”

  Thorgrim said nothing. He scanned the faces of the others. Hrolleif looked angry, Ingolf looked skeptical. There seemed to be something vaguely dishonorable about accepting surrender in such a way, but no one could see clearly where the dishonor lay, and until they could, Morrigan’s offer made sense. No one spoke.

  Arinbjorn turned back to Morrigan. “How do we know this is no trick?”

  “My Lord,” she said, no longer pretending she was just translating Flann’s words, “you fin gall are a part of Ireland now. The days are gone when there can only be fighting between Irish and Northmen. We’ve laid this out,” she gestured toward the tables behind, “in that spirit. My people are gathering up the treasure you’ve come for. We can eat, and you can take what you claim. We can get more riches, but I will not see my people butchered.”

  Ingolf spoke up. “You still have not told us why we should trust you.”

  “My brother and I will join you at the feast. So will my men, unarmed. Consider us hostages, if you must. If you think you are betrayed, you may cut our throats.”

  She was winning them over. Thorgrim could see that. Her poise, the strength she projected, the unshakable logic of her argument, those things were working on the others. Nor could Thorgrim see the trap he was certain was there. But he knew Morrigan, and they did not. It was time to throw her off her stride and see what happened.

  Morrigan spoke again. “I have no doubt that your men…” she began and Thorgrim reached up and pulled the helmet off his head, and Harald, picking up the cue, did likewise. The movement caught Morrigan’s attention. Her eyes flicked over at them. Thorgrim saw her reaction in all its parts flash across her face, fast as a bolt of lightning; confusion, recognition, shock, fear, equilibrium.

  “Thorgrim,” she said. “Thorgrim Night Wolf. And Harald.” Her composure had returned so fast that most would have missed her initial shock. But Thorgrim had not, and he could hear that the note in her voice was a little changed now.

  “Morrigan,” Thorgrim said, nodding. “You have done well for yourself.”

              “I was a thrall to the dubh gall when we met,” she said, making it clear it was the Danes, not the Norwegians, whom she had reason to despise. “But my brother has always been heir to the throne of Tara.”

 
Really? Brigit might think differently,
Thorgrim thought.

  “You know this Irish bitch?” Hrolleif asked, pointing with his hedge-like beard at Morrigan. Morrigan’s expression did not change.

  “She helped us escape the Danes in Dubh-linn, when first we arrived there,” Thorgrim explained.

  “And I healed your jarl, Ornolf,” Morrigan added quickly. “And Harald, who nearly died of the fever.”

  “And you arranged for Harald to be taken hostage.”

  “I did what needed to be done, as any of you would have. And Harald, I see, is fine.”

  “He is. Not so Giant-Bjorn and Olvir Yellowbeard who were also taken hostage. They were beaten to death.”

  “That,” Morrigan said, “was the work of Máel Sechnaill mac Ruanaid, the last king of Tara. Not my brother Flann. Máel Sechnaill was an enemy of the fin gall. We are not.”

  Thorgrim smiled.
You are a smooth one, with your answers to everything
, he thought.

  “Very well,” Arinbjorn said in a loud voice, reasserting his authority. Most of the men there belonged to the
Black Raven
, and Hrolleif and Ingolf, in exchange for some largess, had sworn loyalty to Arinbjorn, so in the end, it was his decision alone. He turned back to the Thorgrim and the rest. “We cannot show indecision here,” he said in his emphatic whisper. “We must decide.”

  “I know this woman, Morrigan,” Thorgrim said. “She speaks well, as you can see, but she’s clever. Very clever. I don’t think she’s to be trusted.”

  The others made sounds of agreement, but even as the words left Thorgrim’s mouth he realized his mistake. Proof of that mistake came with the next words Arinbjorn spoke.

  “I hear truth in her words, and reckon myself to be a decent judge of such things. We’ll accept their offer, and if there are any tricks, then, Hrolleif, we will indeed kill them all.”

  “But what of Brigit?” Harald protested, though in that company he had no right to speak at all. “We came here to restore her to the throne, that was why she sought you out.”

  But Arinbjorn turned even before Harald had finished, and if he had heard Harald’s protests, he did not indicate as much. “Very well, Morrigan,” he said. “You make your case…your brother’s case…very well. If you and your men will set their arms aside and join us, then we will feast with you. On the morrow we will accept your…gifts, and if there are any tricks, or if you try to cheat us, it will go hard on you. Very hard on all of Tara.”

  Morrigan, recalling her role, translated this to Flann and Flann made reply, then Morrigan nodded and said, “You have made a wise choice.” Thorgrim watched her close for any sign of triumph or relief or amusement, but there was nothing. Her face was a river stone, featureless and unmoving.

  “Father,” Harald said in a tone that was more pleading than he had heard from the boy in some time. “What of Brigit, and the throne?”

  “Arinbjorn has made his decision,” Thorgrim said, his voice soft, his tone final. “All we can do is see how the gods will toy with us next.” Then, in a slightly more encouraging tone added, “But we will keep our eyes open, and keep a sharp lookout for chance.”

  “And what do we do until then? What do we do now?” Harald asked.

  “We do the very thing that comes most naturally to you, son,” Thorgrim

said. “We eat.”