Raven (46 page)

A spear blade and some of its shaft burst through the inside of Bjarni’s thigh and he roared, unable to move or do anything other than grip his shield and take blows. I saw Ingolf trying to hack the blade off that spear and heard Bjarni bellow with the red agony of it as I brought my sword inside my shield and sawed the fingers from a hand which was trying to pull the shield away. They fell like rune stones and were lost, the ruined hand smearing blood across my shield’s rim as I punched it forward, crunching the man’s face bones and dropping him. I stamped my left foot down on to his head, keeping the Greek still as I thrust my sword through the iron scales into his stomach, releasing a gush of foul stinking air. Then the Greeks broke and ran and we ran after them, leaving those behind to fight the new men who were pouring through
the south door and forcing their way up the marble steps as we had done.

The passageway passed in a blur of colour, the walls adorned with painted men fighting – those silent scenes of long-dead men as much like real battle as a gilded pleasure karvi is like a raiding ship, it seemed to me. For there was no mad fear in them, no din to fill your head and no stink to get up amongst your nose hairs. Then we came to another vast chamber, whose domed roof was held up by sixteen marble pillars. Soft chairs and silk-covered cushions were scattered everywhere, so that you could have dropped a fresh-laid egg almost anywhere in that room and it would not have broken. From the walls hung bright silks and enormous tapestries woven with golden thread. Gold cups brimming with wine and plates piled with half-eaten fruits lay discarded amongst the chaos of colours. The musk smell of women hung thick as fog and mouth-watering, stirring the animal part of me that was already roused to flame by the blood-lust of battle. Here and there braziers crackled and spat and candles spilled tallow down their sides and women’s robes lay in gaudy crumples where they had been cast off. Svein the Red snatched one up, put it to his nose and made that deep hum in his throat.

‘I’d rather drink mead if this is to be my last drop,’ Olaf complained, clutching a golden cup and throwing the contents down his throat, ‘but sometimes a man must take what he is given.’ He winced and burped and spat the dark, bitter residue across a yellow pillow. I found my own cup and drank, spilling most of the wine into my beard because of the battle-shakes in my hand, but it was enough to rinse my tongue of the salt and iron taste of other men’s blood.

‘We’re not finished yet, Uncle,’ Sigurd said, the two golden ropes of his braided beard hanging stiffly from a face crusted in dark gore, so that his eyes shone white as cuckoo spit. Above us the domed ceiling was painted to look like the night sky, a thousand flecks of gold twinkling in the flamelight like stars.
‘These Greek warriors die easily enough,’ Sigurd gnarred. ‘They are not the heroes we have heard about in your tales of the Trojan War, Bardanes. Warming the emperor’s feet has made them soft, like hounds kept inside too long.’

But Bardanes turned his back on the jarl, his shield and sword raised towards the passage we had come through, because a clamour was building like a wave about to crash on to the shingle. We all tensed as men spewed from the corridor into the chamber, their eyes wild and their shields sprouting shafts.

‘We couldn’t hold them, Sigurd,’ Wiglaf panted, as Osk and ugly Hedin yelled at the others to hurry so that they could close the door. ‘There are hundreds of them!’

Sigurd glowered like red-hot iron, so that I did not know whether he was angry at Wiglaf and the others for not buying him more time, or if he was raging at the gods for stirring his scheme into bloody chaos.

‘That leads to the emperor’s private chambers,’ Bardanes said, pointing towards the gilded middle door of three in the room’s north wall. I had seen the general kill two men, one with a neat sword thrust to the neck and the other with a squall of slashes that carved a man up where he stood, showing that Bardanes had fury to match his skill. ‘If the traitor is still here that door will lead us to him,’ he said, knuckling sweat from his brow.

Among the men pressing in from the passage I saw Gunnar, Halfdan, Ingolf and Osten. Other sweat-, blood- and spittle-soaked faces were turned towards Sigurd, the terror-filled men behind those growling bear masks hoping that their jarl knew of a way to jerk us off this hook; Yngvar and Arngrim were amongst them, and the blauman Völund, who was bare-chested and glistening, his gritted teeth white against his black beard and pitch-dark skin. Many bled from wounds they’d had no time to bind. Others grimaced at unseen hurts.

And then I saw Cynethryth and my stomach twisted like a warp hung with too light a loom-weight. She was sheathed in tough leather, gripped a slender spear and wore the helmet
I had given her, which she had lined with thick felt to make the fit snug. Father Egfrith stood protectively at her shoulder and even he carried a spear, though what he would do with it I could not imagine. That damned beast Sköll was there too, a rolling snarl coming from its throat, its yellow teeth bared. I reckoned it would do a better job of protecting Cynethryth than Father Egfrith or any of us could, and I noticed that men were keeping their distance, which was wise given that this was no longer the seasick, cringing creature of the last weeks. It was a bristling, golden-eyed, sharp-toothed beast and Cynethryth seemed to own its soul. She owned mine, too, which made me curse as I hefted my shield, shrugging some life back into my arm, and turned to follow Sigurd.

We tramped across the silks and cushions, making a clatter of the cups and dishes lying amongst them, and got to the golden door which Bardanes had said led to the emperor’s chambers.

‘Wait for me!’ Aslak shoved his way through the press, his face a sweat-soaked twist of pain because of the shaft lodged in his right calf. Bjarni, too, was limping, though at least Ingolf had managed to cut the blade off the spear that had skewered his leg and together they must have pulled the shaft out. The bright green cloth with which they had bound the hole was blood-drenched and Bjarni’s face had gone the colour of cold hearth ash. Yet both he and Aslak wore good brynjas and stone-grim scowls and wanted to finish what we had started.

‘This is some fight, hey, little brother!’ Svein the Red boomed, slapping Bjarni’s back with a chink of brynja rings.

‘Aye.’ Bjarni managed a sour smile. ‘Bjorn would have enjoyed this, I think,’ he said, which had men nodding sombrely. Bothvar was not there and neither was Beiner or Ogn or several others, but it was too soon to talk about who was gone. Because the Greeks were battering the door. By now every soldier in Miklagard would be coming. Asgot said as much, the old bones snarled up in his braids blood-red and
glistening again now as though fresh from whatever creatures he had pulled them from.

Sigurd’s thought chest must have writhed with twining serpents then and I would not have liked to be the one to decide what we should do. The Greeks would soon be through that door – axe heads were appearing now amongst the cracks and flying wood slivers – and so we knew we had a hard fight on there. Which made me think we ought to press on and get to Arsaber now. But, if Arsaber
was
through that other, golden door, he would most likely have armed men with him, which would mean we would be starting another fight and so planting ourselves between hammer and anvil.

‘Skjaldborg! Shieldwall!’ Sigurd yelled in a voice that whipped us all like the lash of an icy wave across the deck in a storm. Men jostled together, kicking silk bolsters away from their feet and hefting mauled and splintered shields. ‘Tighter, Boe! Raise that shield, Yngvar!’ Men encouraged each other and spat disdain towards the door, which was being hacked to ruins, so that we could glimpse scale armour and men’s faces.

Some of the Danes were growling themselves into a fury. Other men were silent as rocks, white knuckles around sword grips and feet planted, and all of us must have suspected that we had come to the end of our life’s thread. The spin of our wyrds had led us to Miklagard, the Great City, and here, far from our homes, we would kill and be killed.

‘Floki, Svein, Raven, Penda, to me!’ Sigurd hollered and we four pushed our way through the sweat-stinking press to the front, past comrades who were pleased to see mailed men come between them and the warriors beyond the splintering door. Aslak limped up, too, refusing to stand behind men who were less well armed. ‘Olaf, take Bjarni and five others and watch the gold door.’ Uncle nodded and hauled men from the skjaldborg before striding across the fragrant, tapestry-lined room.

‘We are sword-brothers from the north,’ Sigurd roared, beating his sword’s hilt against his shield. ‘We have come to feed
the wolf and the raven. Our blades are sharp and thirsty. We will give them blood to drink.’

Others took up the chant:

‘We are sword-brothers from the north.

We have come to feed the wolf and the raven.

Our blades are sharp and thirsty.

We will give them blood to drink.’

We beat out the rhythm as we bawled the words, spit flying and the blood rising like spring sap, hot in our veins. Our voices and the hammering of shields filled the chamber, hard as the marble pillars holding up the roof, the words holding us up and driving away the fear. The Greeks were almost through the wreckage of the door but they must have feared stepping into that place, for they would find no pleasure amongst plump bolsters and swaths of coloured silk. They would find only agony and despair and death. Some of our men waited either side of the threshold, blades held ready to chop and maim.

The last part of the door was kicked away and the Greeks hesitated for a long heartbeat, during which my bladder clenched, like a fist around a gold coin, as we raised our hoarse voices. Then, with a desperate roar they gushed into the chamber and some were hacked to death before they were fully through the doorway. I heard Cynethryth shrieking at us to kill them all and then they crashed against our skjaldborg. But we held, our feet like the deep-delving, entwined roots of Yggdrasil, thigh muscles bunched and straining. Men grunted and jostled, their blades searching, and the stink of so many fear-filled warriors thickened the air to a reeking fug. We had bent our shieldwall like a strung bow so that the Greeks could not get down our flanks, and from that rampart of limewood we hacked at their shields and spears and sun-browned, black-bearded faces.

‘You just hold them, lad, and I’ll kill them,’ Penda gnarred
between the hammer blows of his sword among the Greeks. Blood was flying from the blade but I could not see the damage the Wessexman was doing, because I had my head down and my shoulder into my shield and was shoving for all I was worth, leaving the killing to those who were craftsmen at it, men like Penda, Floki and Aslak. Svein was pushing too, a great lump of flesh, sinew and muscle behind his shield, because there was no room for his axe work yet. That would come later, when our shieldwall thinned like a blighted crop and men died.

‘Gut the toad-fucking dogs!’ Gytha yelled. ‘Bleed the bastards out!’ Eager to get into the heart of the maelstrom the Wessexman was straining at my left shoulder, jabbing a Greek spear over our skjaldborg, so that even in that battle-din I could hear his blade ringing against iron helms. Something whomped against the upper half of my shield, smashing the wood into my nose, so that I heard the crunch. My eyes streamed with the torture of it as the iron-tang of my own blood, fresh and untainted by sweat and shit, filled my nose and beard.

‘Óðin! Óðin!’ screamed someone in a voice as raw as flayed bear meat. What often happens in a shieldwall fight after the first mad shove and hack is that one side begins to move back, and it is usually the side that thinks it should be winning but cannot understand why it is not. It was the Greeks who withdrew now, shields up, chins down and shoulders bouncing with the pant of it.

‘Hold!’ Sigurd yelled. ‘Stay where you are, men!’ We held, gasping and dragging sweat from our eyes, checking cuts and pains to see if any were serious, for we had all seen men gut-speared who thought they had only been winded. There were corpses lying in bloody twists amongst the silks and cushions, and we should have put our swords through all of them just to make sure. But we were too worried about Greek arrows to leave the relative safety of our skjaldborg, for a good shieldwall will stand as long as the walls of Asgard if it is built of sword-brothers
who are further bound by oaths and pride, as we were.

But we should have put swords in those ‘dead’ men.

Sigurd roared at us to step forward, to drive the Greeks back through the doorway while they were still frozen by uncertainty and Svein took the opportunity to step ahead of the rest with his long axe, looping it through the clotted air, a savage grin splitting his beard.

‘Carve the maggot-arsed goat-humpers up, Svein!’ someone yelled.

I saw the ‘corpse’ beneath Svein twitch and it seemed to happen in a dream where time slows to a trickle then runs fast as sand from a fist. The blood-drenched Greek thrust upwards, plunging his hand into the dark beneath Svein’s brynja. Svein jerked viciously, then looked down as though he didn’t believe what was happening to him. Bright blood bloomed down his breeks, dripping through the wool like heavy rain through old thatch, then Svein staggered back and with a roar swung the great axe down, splitting the Greek’s head into two gory halves each with its own staring eye. An arrow thudded into Svein’s chest and I heard him growl a curse as the Greeks cheered and came on again.

‘Forward!’ Sigurd yelled as the red-bearded giant lurched sideways. But somehow Svein straightened his blood-steeped oak legs and, bellowing like the thunder god, began looping the long axe again in a weave of death, so that we had to stop and keep our distance or else be hewn by it. Arrows were tonking off our shields and helms and chinking into Svein’s brynja and then the giant stumbled again, crashing down on to his knees, still gripping the axe.

‘Óðin!’ Sigurd cried, then ran at the enemy, breaking his own skjaldborg, which was a red-madness thing to do, but Sigurd was my jarl and so I ran after him, yelling to the war god, and arrows thudded into me but I kept my feet and hammered my sword against a Greek shield, spitting bloody phlegm into a
bearded face as Black Floki thrust his long knife into another man’s neck. Then Aslak spun away from the fray, the bottom half of his face lopped off, so that his lower jaw and chin dangled in a bloody mess against his chest, held on by a flap of skin. There were no shieldwalls now, just a screaming frenzy of butchering, of blades scything and limbs being hacked off. I killed a young man by ramming my shield’s rim into his throat so that it crushed his windpipe and he died gasping like a caught fish. I killed another with my long knife after I had shaken the ruined shield off my arm and fought on two-bladed, sinking that wicked knife under the Greek’s armpit and skewering his heart. But the Greeks kept on coming and for every one we killed two more seemed to take his place. I saw Gap-toothed Ingolf go down beneath three hacking blades and the Wessexman Baldred arrow-shot through the neck. Olaf was screaming at us to re-form, to make another shieldwall, but he might as well have been trying to put a bridle on the Midgard-Serpent, or catch thunder in a pail.