Meadowland (34 page)

Everybody was a bit quiet and thoughtful while we were handing out the weapons, and nobody really wanted to be given one, like they weren’t too happy about touching them. Bits called out who was to have what; I didn’t get anything, not that I minded. We’d both got our hand-axes, of course, and when things get nasty it’s always best to keep it simple and stick with what you know Bits had one of the swords, and he folded his cloak over his left arm like a shield, very professional; that was Bits for you - everything he did, he made it look like he knew what he was about.

Bits told me to give a spear to Olitar; and while I was over there I said to him, quiet so people wouldn’t hear: ‘So that was your fetch, then.’

He looked up at me. ‘It’s not over yet,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘Was he really going to grab the kid?’ I asked him, but he didn’t answer, and I didn’t want to make a big thing about it. For what it’s worth, though, I don’t believe in fetches, apart from the ones you carry round with you all the time. I still can’t make up my mind whether Ohtar was under the tree when it fell or whether he was the tree himself. There comes a point, I guess, where the difference is too slight to be worth bothering with. Anyhow, Ohtar took the spear from me and pricked his thumb on the point to see if it was sharp. That surprised me; it’d been lying in the crate all that time and it’d got all fogged up with rust. It was always damp in that corner of the long barn, where we’d stored them.

Since then, of course, I’ve been a proper soldier, here down south where you’re always fighting some war somewhere; and I’ve learned that battles are one part sheer muscle-snapping effort and ninety-nine parts standing or sitting around waiting for something to happen, and the one part is probably the best of it, even though that’s when people get themselves killed. Maybe that’s why we Northerners make such good soldiers: we can handle the useless waiting better than you people. After all, we sit around all winter waiting for the spring; we sit in our ships while the sea-spray smacks us around; we know how to bide quiet and save our energy, the way dogs and other animals do. But I for one don’t like it - I can feel the time pressing on me, like toothache. I have to make an effort to find something to think about, and even that doesn’t always work. When we fought the Bulgars and the Saracens, back in the old emperor’s time, the officers always said I was a terror for fidgeting. Seems to me that every place I’ve been and everything I’ve done has been more waiting than doing; and I’ve wasted all that time by chafing against it, instead of finding a use for it. Not that it matters a lot. These days, of course, the emperor pays me for my time, whether I do anything useful or not. I tell you, if I’d come down here when I was young Harald’s age, I’d be running the empire by now

Anyhow, we didn’t have long to wait. Two days later - it seemed longer, because we couldn’t do anything while we were waiting, couldn’t go out to see to the stock, couldn’t even walk round the yard collecting the eggs - two days later they came back.

It was early morning, about the time you’d be looking to drive the cows back to the sheds for milking. There was a thin grey mist hanging low, the sort that starts about four feet off the ground and collects round trees and buildings like wisps of wool snagged in the thorns. By mid-morning it’d all have burned away; but it was good cover for the leather-boat people, coming up through the woods. We had the bull in the pen directly facing the point where the woods were nearest to the palisade, on purpose to force them to come between it and the lake. It was a good strategy, based on what we knew about the way they liked to fight, which wasn’t much. They’d killed Thorvald Eirikson with a volley of arrows, and that was about the limit of what we knew; so Bits’s idea was to cramp them up so that only the ones on the outsides could shoot at us. We’d meet them head on at the narrowest place, hold them there if we could, while a couple of us would sneak round, open the pen and drive the bull into their rear.

Good strategy. After all, we had nothing to gain from killing them: what we wanted to do was persuade them that they didn’t want to fight us, now or in the future; and up till then at least they’d been mortal afraid of the bull. If it suddenly turned up out of nowhere, right up their arses while their attention was on the fighting in front, there was a fair chance they’d panic and run for it, maybe even be scared enough to leave us alone for ever. For good measure, Bits decided, we’d drive up the young bullocks as well. You and I know that a dozen young bullocks may act tough, but the worst they’d ever do to you is try and lick you to death; the leather-boat people didn’t know that, though. Anyhow, we reckoned that it might work, and we couldn’t think of anything better in the time available.

Bits had put Sigurd Eyes up in the top hayloft, with two others to relay what he said back to the rest of us inside the house. Sigurd had been up there the best part of two days, so you’d have had to forgive him if he’d let his attention wander. But he saw the leather-boaters as they started walking out of the woods, and he called down how many of them he could see as they came: first five, then a round dozen, then a gap and then another fifteen. We were all sitting on the benches in the hall as the relay called out the numbers, all of us frantically adding up the total in our heads. All told, it came to eighty-one; so we were outnumbered, but not badly Actually, Bits had assumed that there’d be more of them than there were of us, which was why he’d picked a tight place for the battlefield: a small area turns a large force of men into a hindrance rather than an advantage.

They had bows and arrows, the relay told us; also spears and axes with stone heads, and small round shields made of leather stretched on a birchwood frame. None of them had what we’d call armour, needless to say since they didn’t use iron or steel, but quite a few of them were wearing three or four layers of fur coats, which would quite likely cushion a half-hearted cut or turn a long-range arrow All in all, it sounded like they knew what they were doing, which was more than could be said for most of us. Oh, we weren’t complete virgins when it came to fighting; half a dozen of the older men in Bits’s crew had fought vikings once, in the Norway fjords, and nearly all of us had played at sparring with sticks against our fathers and brothers, back when we were kids. Where I come from, you don’t really tend to learn fighting; it’s assumed that you know how, by light of nature. Earls and rich farmers’ sons may spend an hour or so with an old farmhand who was a viking in his youth, learning a few guards and passes and maybe a bit of footwork, but most of us have better things to do with our time.

Still, we were ready for them, or as ready as we’d ever be; and we listened as the relay told us that they’d seen the bull and didn’t like the look of it - they were following the path up beside the lake, exactly as we wanted them to. When Bits heard that, he nodded to Mord and Hrut and Grim; they were in charge of the archery detail, a dozen or so men who had some idea of which end of the arrow you’re supposed to pull on. The archers got up and filed out; they were to get up onto the roof of the cowshed, which was hard up by the palisade on the lake side, and shoot arrows into the leather-boaters as they passed. With luck they’d drop one or two, and then skip out of the way before the enemy could shoot back; that was supposed to stop them in their tracks and give the rest of us time to assemble at the side gate, ready for our glorious charge.

So the archers went out; the rest of us sat very still, giving them time to get in position. Kari was next to me; for some reason I couldn’t fathom, Bits had entrusted him with a long-handled Danish axe, though Kari’s never been able to split a cord of logs without missing his mark and knocking the axe-head off. I had my hand-axe, of course, and my knife; and I was trying to make up my mind what I was going to do. Sensible thing, of course, would be to find some big, tall, broad bugger and stay close in behind him for as long as possible; but a part of me was saying that the right thing to do was to get up front and engage the enemy And then there was Kari to consider; someone was going to have to look out for him, since he wasn’t to be trusted to take care of himself, and it seemed unlikely that anybody else’d be inclined to bother. Mostly I was thinking, how much will it hurt, to have a chunk of sharp stone forced through my skin and inside me? What if I’m not killed dead, but they cut off my arm or my hand or my leg? Or I could get bashed over the head, and you can go blind from that. Back home, you see men who’ve been in baffles and had bits of themselves chopped off, and some of them learn to cope pretty well with just one hand or one leg, and some of them would’ve been far better off dead, for all the good being alive does them. Which would be worst, crippled or blinded? Or what if we lost, and all of us were killed except me, and I was left lying in a messy heap of dead bodies with both legs busted? Before a battle, it’s really really hard to think about anything except pain. If you’ve never been in one before, you think back to all the horrible accidents you’ve seen - men who’ve fallen off roofs or been crushed by falling trees or gored by bulls. You think of the terrible damage that can happen to a body, the splintered bones and the raw flesh, fouled with mud or dust and small bits of stone and twig. You think of needles of smashed rib poking up through skin, and how much it hurts when you bash your head on a branch or a rock, hard enough to break the scalp. I suppose there’s men in this world brave enough or vicious enough to think of other things before a battle, but there’s not many of them. You don’t actually dwell much on the possibility of dying, or what that’d actually mean. Most everybody just thinks about how much it’s going to hurt.

When Bits told us it was time, I stayed close to a man called Bjari Grimolfson, who was one of the men who’d fought the vikings; he was with his best mate, Thorbrand Snorrason, and Olitar joined us just as we were leaving the house. I looked round for Kari, but he’d lagged behind and I couldn’t get back to him through the crowd in the doorway I worried about that all the way across the yard to the side gate.

We were about two-thirds of the way across the yard when I heard yelling from outside the palisade; the archers had let loose too early, before we were where we were meant to be. Some of the men started to run, and for a while we were bumping into each other, shoving and stumbling and getting in a tangle, not a good idea when you’re all pressed up together and every one of you is carrying something sharp in his hands. I was sort of swept out of the gate along with the rest; I was holding my axe down by my right knee, so nobody’d cut himself on it, and I couldn’t draw my knife for fear of injuring somebody so it had to stay on my belt. Bjari’d got behind me somehow and he was trying to get past me but he couldn’t; his shoulder was wedged in behind mine and he was shoving me along, so fast that I couldn’t find my feet or my balance. Then for some reason we stopped short, and I was pushed forward. I ran into the back of Thorbrand Snorrason and trod on the calf of his left leg; he tried to turn round but he was wedged in too tight, so he swore at me instead, and I was more scared of him smashing my face in for being clumsy than I was of the enemy just for a moment or so. Then we were moving again; and an arrow dropped down out of absolutely nowhere. It came down almost vertical, grazed the side of Ohtar’s head, skidded off his collar and fell feathers-down right in front of me. I heard it snap under my foot. I could feel Ohtar’s blood on my nose and cheeks and I told myself, it’s all right, even tiny scratches on the scalp bleed like shit; Olitar didn’t seem to have noticed he’d been cut. Then something else came down out of the sky, whirred over my head and landed with a very solid, chunky sort of noise, and I heard someone behind me yell. Again I was thinking, it’s not when people yell that you ought to worry, it’s when they’re hurt and they’re quiet; that’s when it’s serious. Someone told me that once, I can’t remember who; I’m not sure whether it’s true or not, but it’s the sort of thing that goes through your mind at times like that.

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