Gemini Thunder (8 page)

When the twelve young men who made up an infantry cohort under the command of Nathaniel Stubbs had answered King Alfred’s call for soldiers and left their Wessex hamlets, none had ever, in their wildest nightmares, expected to be facing the sight that now confronted them.

They formed the outer defense on the Northern side of Winchester on the town’s edge, fifteen hundred men, two deep with archers behind them. Streaming toward them with heavily tattooed faces contorted by malevolent hatred and brandishing huge double-headed axes and man-length broadswords were hundreds and hundreds of howling, berserker Viking.

The concerted twang of longbow fusillades sending arrows over their heads and into the attackers from the Celtic bowmen behind seemed to make little difference. The howling hordes were now leaping the old earthen defense mounds and dodging between the makeshift pointed timber fortification staves.

Samuel Southee swallowed hard, then looked to his right at his lifelong friend Clem Fossey standing next to him; the long, wooden-handled, metal-tipped spears they clutched in one hand behind the slim wooden shields, and the short sword in the other felt very puny against the mighty cleaving weapons coming toward them.

‘Hold firm now,’ came Stubbs’s calm voice over the stridency of the attackers. ‘They’re flesh and blood just like us.’

Out of the corner of his eye Samuel Southee saw the Wessex line buckle in several places as some of the defenders further down lost their nerve and turned and ran before the Viking reached them. Their places were immediately taken by the row behind.

‘Spears at repel position,’ Stubbs shouted.

Then, in a clash of splintering shields and screaming oaths the Vikings were upon them.

Jack Mills on Southee’s left went down from a swinging blow to the head from a bright blue and white circular shield wielded by a huge, bearded raider wearing a horned helmet with a metal nose protector. As the Viking raised his double-headed axe to finish Mills, Southee drove his spear upward through the underside of the Viking’s throat. Kicking and screaming, the raider dropped on top of Mills’ shield, wrenching Southee’s spear from his hand as he fell. On Southee’s right Clem Fossey was rolling around on the ground with another Viking, each trying to free their weapons for a telling blow. As the raider came to the top, Southee thrust his short sword deep into his back and he slumped forward over Fossey, a long death gurgle issuing from his tattooed mouth. Gilbert Pitt, who had been standing in the line on Fossey’s right, screamed in agony as another heavily bearded raider chopped his left arm clean off at the elbow and then raised his double-handled broadsword over his head. As he was about to release the blade down on the screaming Pitt’s unprotected head, a longbow arrow thudded into his breast. Pausing only momentarily to see what it was, the Viking continued with the blow, cleaving Pitt’s head to the neck like chopping a log in two for the fire. With both his weapons impaled in dead Viking, Southee grabbed the double-headed axe from the first raider. He could hardly lift it.

It was soon obvious that the Vikings were winning.

‘Fall back, men,’ Nathaniel Stubbs shouted. ‘Back to the castle.’

Including Samuel Southee and Clem Fossey, he had four of his original cohort of twelve men left alive, and two of them were wounded.

All along the broken and beaten Celtic line the same command was being issued.

That would mean only one thing.

The town would be completely unprotected from the raiders.

The third Viking group under the command of Olaf Tryggvason, having reached the approaches to Lyme Bay, were now going backward. The winds, tides, and currents that Twilight had placed in their path had gradually sapped their rowing strength until fatigue forced Tryggvason to use them in shifts. This only served to hasten their retreat. With his rowers exhausted and slumped over their oars and the coast of Lyme Bay slipping inexorably over the horizon behind his fleet of thirty long boats, Tryggvason looked to the heavens from the platform of his command ship and implored the Norse gods to help him.

‘It’s no good, invader, they’re not listening.’

Twilight appeared on the front platform beside him, speaking in the man’s own tongue.

‘You again,’ spat the red-bearded commander. ‘I might have known it.’

As before he showed no outward signs of fear.

‘I obviously didn’t make a deep enough impression upon you the first time. Either that or you were deaf to my words.’

‘I heard your words, veneficus, and understood them. I am a Viking; the words of a treacherous sorcerer mean nothing to me or my people.’

‘We’ll see what your people think when I blow these ships all the way back to your home harbour and they understand how you and your men didn’t have the stomach for the fight and returned unscathed.’

Tryggvason looked at Twilight for a long time through narrowed eyes. His purple and blue tattoos worked across his neck and lower face as he considered this.

‘Honour has it that we would be hacked to death on the spot for cowardice,’ he said quietly. ‘Even the women would join in.’ He waved his arm around to encompass the fleet. ‘And all our families banished in shame from their villages. Children, wives, sisters, and grandparents. Our houses would be burned to the ground and all signs of our existence erased from the sagas. For a Viking dying is not the problem, but the manner of it is.’ He gripped his sword handle in defiance.

‘You don’t have many choices, do you? You either return home and die without honour, or stay here and die by my hand.’ Twilight’s voice was deliberately cold and hard. ‘And if you attempt to draw that,’ he motioned toward the hand gripping the sheathed sword at Tryggvason’s hip, ‘I will use it to cut off the right hand of every commander in this fleet, including yours.’

Tryggvason took his tattooed right hand from the sword handle.

‘You are a man of some knowledge and courage. You speak understandable Latin and are a leader of men, yet you seem determined to occupy a world doomed to annihilation and mindless slaughter. Can you not find it in your heart to stand outside your civilization’s savage history and revoke this continuous violence?’

‘I am first and foremost a Viking. Once the bloodlust starts, I give in to it, embrace it, live it. Then there is nothing else. Any knowledge I have gained has come from raiding and trell trading. I have bartered slaves in many places—the Rhinelands, Danube Valley, Gaul, and Ravenna. Latin was the universal language, and in order not to be cheated by those whore-mothers I had to understand what they were saying. Your lands are green and fertile, sorcerer. Ours are cold and snow covered. Is there a better reason for invasion?’

By now his exhausted warriors had begun to look up at the two of them. Some of Tryggvason’s own crew had been with him the first time and recognized the figure standing on the platform next to their commander. They began to look in trepidation at the oar in their calloused hands; would it turn on them as it had with their two hundred dead comrades from the first trip?

‘I told you that I would take ten Viking lives for every Celtic life you took if you came back. The reason I have not blown every one of these long boats from the water is, due to the obstacles I have placed in your way, you have not been able to ply your murderous trade. And I will see that continues to be the case.’

The red-haired Viking said nothing. All the advantages were held by Twilight and he knew it. Three thousand Viking in thirty long ships. Sharply honed weaponry and strong, experienced arms to wield it. Impotent and useless against this tall, slim young man with the black piercing eyes and his all-seeing magic.

Again.

This veneficus was a curse sent from a place Tryggvason knew nothing about to bedevil his every move. Where were his own twin astounders? Why were they not here to break this demon with their own wizardry?

‘Because,’ said Twilight, reading his mind, ‘they are too busy attending your king and his forces in the attack on Winchester, and to where I am about to go to confront them.’

‘Then our victory will come from there and will make my suffering worthwhile. Mind your every move, sorcerer. I, Olaf Tryggvason, may be finished, but your magic cannot always protect you. There’s a Viking hammer waiting for your head out there, and Thor will see that it finds its mark . . . one day soon.’

He lowered his red head to indicate that he had nothing more to say.

What was left of Winchester was quiet at last. At a safe distance from the Celtic bowmen who lined the ramparts of this solid old Roman castle, the early evening campfires of the surrounding raiders began to glow as food was prepared.

The smoke from their fires mingled with the smouldering smoke of the fires of the many buildings that had been set on fire by the rampaging raiders. Three hundred and fifty Viking dead had been collected, their eulogies prepared for the feasting halls of their homeland and their pyres lit out of sight of the Celts who had killed them. The shields, drinking horns, and clothing of the dead fuelled the pyres, their weapons shared out among the others who had lost theirs in the battle. Viking culture did not allow for the enemy to see the burial of those killed in battle, and so the pyres blazed behind the surrounding hills.

Most of the Viking dead came from the assault on the Northern side of the town, the others from the assault on the castle where they had vats of boiling oil poured on their heads.

The siege was complete; Winchester Castle was caught in a Viking ring.

Unable to collect their cooling dead, which lay everywhere and numbered nearly two thousand, the Celts could only watch in utter rage from behind their high castle walls as the exultant Viking rampaged through the town. Guthrum had let them off the leash, and the traditional pleasures of rapine and pillage had been taking place throughout the afternoon. Occasional forays by Alfred’s soldiers to alleviate the screaming of the abused women and mindless slaughter of children and the elderly were met with a riposte from the raiders that cut them down as quickly as their comrades earlier. In full sight of the Celtish soldiers in their castle refuge, drunken berserkers paraded naked women around whose genitals and hair had been painted with pitch, then set on fire. Trying to ignore the agonized screams, many in Alfred’s force blocked their ears and averted their eyes. Some were so enraged, they were all for throwing everything at the enemy in one desperate attempt to break the siege and save at least some of the inhabitants and the town, which was disappearing in a wattle, reed-thatch, and wooden-framed explosion of fires and smoke before their very eyes. After all, they still had an advantage in numbers. King Alfred, Edward de Gaini, and Hugh Easton cautioned against it. At killing odds of almost six to one, which had prevailed during the first attack, the Celtic forces could be wiped out. At least this way they could regroup. Winchester Castle was soundly built and could withstand a siege for a long time, providing they had plenty of food and water.

Which they didn’t. Edward de Gaini reckoned, with tight rationing they could last four days and that would be without water because the Viking had dammed the only stream that supplied the castle.

As Alfred said to de Gaini in an aside on the ramparts as they looked out over the carnage that was once Winchester. Religion hadn’t worked, fighting hadn’t worked, and that only left one thing . . . magic.

Oh, for the calm and gifted presence of that veneficus again.

Unseen, Twilight and Desmond walked among the celebrating campfires of the lowlanders. Boasting warriors bent their bodies in any number of attitudes, showing how they had repelled a thrust or delivered the death blow to an unfortunate Celt. While some drank the local mead, others ate the flesh of animals torn from the sizzling carcasses turning on the fires. Viking, it seemed, lived on a diet of pillaged ale and meat, a fighting and feasting society where, if they were not tearing the flesh from their opponents, they tore it from half-cooked animals and devoured it. Every one of them, whatever else they were doing, continuously sharpened their weapons. Twilight took care to keep away from Guthrum’s tent, which had the auras of Go-uan and Go-ian in it. Although he did not have an aura due to Merlin’s elimination of them in his final fight with the wolf woman, the twins had sensed the presence of him and Desmond in the clouds over their long ship.

We will move now to the inside of the castle.

Sitting high on the roof of the castle ramparts above all the guarding soldiers, Twilight and Desmond watched as a small group of priests emerged from the castle chapel. Gone were the silk vestments in favour of plain brown, floor-length robes with the cowls pulled down over the top half of their faces. Behind them, walking slowly to the accompaniment of a clear-voiced cantor, came Alfred, de Gaini, Easton, and a number of aides.

‘What are they doing?’ asked Desmond.

‘They have just had a burial ceremony for Septimus Godleman.’

‘He was killed in the battle?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Good.’

‘Now, now,’ chided Twilight.

‘He called you a ‘purveyor of black sorcery’ and me your ‘disreputable companion.’ He also accused you of ‘low shamanism and trickery.’ So much for the protection he got from ‘God’s words and precious unction,’ whatever that is.’

In the background the clear voice of the cantor faded around a corner.