Raven (47 page)

Black Floki was slaughtering men as a fox kills chickens, his black braids dancing as he twisted and turned and cut. Penda was at my side and we worked together, pushing deeper into the mass of Greeks that was swelling as more pressed into that chamber of death. But we were dying.

Then a peregrine’s shriek cut through the grunts like an iced arrow in my guts, for it was Cynethryth. I turned, Penda instinctively stepping in front to shield me, and I saw a brazier crash to the floor, spilling pulsing amber coals in a spray of sparks and flame amongst the Greeks near the doorway. Men leapt out of the way and Cynethryth pointed her spear at the Greeks, howling spells at them, her eyes wild and spittle flying from her lips as the silks and bolsters across the floor burst into flame.

In a heartbeat the flames were raging. Black smoke as thick as tar plumed upwards towards the bowl of the ceiling, making men gasp and cough and choke, and I crouched, raising my
sword as a shield but not swinging any more for fear of hitting one of our own. But some of the Danes could not be stopped even by flame and smoke, and these wild men slashed about them like demons, so that the Greeks were forced back the way they had come.

‘Bring more cushions!’ Olaf spluttered, soot-blackened, blood-crusted and coughing. Those who could summon the sense and take a grip of themselves ran about the room gathering bolsters and women’s discarded robes and even yanking the great tapestries from the walls, along with anything else that would burn. They cast it all into the roaring inferno by the door and the blaze fed savagely, so that in no time there was such a wall of flame that not even a bucket’s fling of water could have passed through it.

‘Shieldwall just here!’ Black Floki yelled. ‘Now, you motherless turds!’ And hearing that from Floki, the ragged-arsed, wretched remains of the Wolfpack tramped together and raised their shields, overlapping them and building the skjaldborg again.

I stumbled over to Cynethryth, who was staring into the thundering fire, her bony face sweat-gleaming, the flames reflected in her green eyes and her helmet.

‘Are you hurt?’ I rasped, which was a stupid question for I could see that she was not.

Then her eyes flicked to me and she bared her teeth.

‘The emperor,’ she hissed, pointing across the room towards the gold door. ‘Get him, you fool.’

WE LEFT THE BATTERED REMNANTS OF THE WOLFPACK IN THEIR
shieldwall, facing the flames and wreathed in tendrils of black smoke. Men had thrown damaged shields and broken spears into the flames. They’d even stripped corpses and thrown them in, too, but there was not enough to keep that fire raging and soon the Greeks would come again to kill those on the other side, if the smoke did not do for them first.

Sigurd was still wild-eyed and bristling like an arrow-shot bear and snarled that he would be first through the gold door to face whatever waited beyond it. Only Floki dared to argue, saying that he would lead the way instead, but the jarl barked that the only way Floki would go first was if he killed Sigurd and became our jarl, at which Floki glowered, hefted his scarred shield and pushed his dented helmet firmly on. I just stood back and stayed quiet, swallowing blood from my broken nose and breathing through my mouth, which was drier than a mead horn after a Yule feast. That I was still alive at all was lost on me in that red battle fog with my veins still trembling from the madness of it all. But if I had thought about it I would have smelt our end in the acrid air.

‘At least take this, Sigurd, you stubborn son of a she-wolf,’
Olaf grumbled, handing his jarl a shield that was rare in that chamber because it actually looked as though it might stop an arrow or a sword with a bit of muscle behind it. Sigurd nodded, clutching the shield’s grip, then stepped up to the gold door.

It was locked, of course, and Sigurd glanced round, perhaps about to call on Svein and his long axe. But Svein was dead, groin-cut by a stripling boy with a nothing knife. But Olaf now gripped Svein’s axe and he growled at everyone to stand back, then rammed the eye end of the thick head against the lock over and over, sweaty blood flying from his beard as the golden door quivered under the onslaught. Only the door’s skin was gold; beneath it was wood which splintered and cracked, the lock within breaking easily enough so that all it needed was a kick from Sigurd and it flung wide.

A spear thunked into the doorframe a finger’s length from Sigurd’s face and the jarl rumbled a curse as he edged into the room behind his shield. Then Floki was in and I followed him, Olaf, Penda, Bardanes, Hastein and Yrsa behind me.

‘I am wondering if Miklagard would have been better left just a whisper on men’s lips,’ Yrsa Pig-nose grumbled as we laid eyes on more Greek spearmen. They stood in a line protecting the worm Arsaber who sat in a throne raised up on a silk-strewn platform. Silk curtains billowed in the breeze blowing through three great windholes carved in the western wall and on that breeze rode the clamour of an angry mob outside.

‘I am the emperor!’ Arsaber shrieked. ‘The equal of the Apostles! How dare you attack me?’ He was swathed in purple robes and stiff gold cloth that lay over both shoulders and wound round his waist, its ends dripping with pearls. His hands glinted with jewels of every colour and his beard was curled and oiled, so that any fleas in it would have long drowned. His head was bare though and there was nothing he could do about that, because the crown of Miklagard’s emperors was safely stowed out of his reach in
Fjord-Elk
’s hold.

‘You are a traitor and a worm,’ Sigurd accused him, spitting
the words as though they were poison. Two fierce-looking golden beasts crouched either side of the throne, seeming alive in the flicker of candelabra. ‘He is the emperor of the Great City,’ the jarl snarled, pointing at Nikephoros who was standing bound and bloody at the end of a soldier’s spear. There were only six Greeks between us and Arsaber, and they might have been sweat-soaked and twitching like snare-caught hares, but they were scale-armoured and helmed and gripped spears and swords. ‘Tell them to throw down their weapons if they want to live,’ Sigurd said, as the ring of swords and the chaos din of battle swirled up through the windholes, which I knew must mean that Nikephoros’s Long Shields were fighting for their lives.

Arsaber glared at Sigurd, worrying at his glossy beard and twisting a curl into it.

‘What about me?’ he asked, maggoting for a way out of the hole he now found himself in.

Sigurd barked a laugh. ‘You are a dead man,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for you but the cold grave.’

Arsaber’s eyes flared and he screamed something at his men and they hesitated for a heartbeat. Then came for us.

Sigurd knocked a spear blade aside with his shield and swung his sword, shattering scales and biting into a man’s ribs. I caught a sword blow on my own blade, the clash jarring my arm in its socket, but I lashed out with the long knife and my enemy leapt back out of reach. At the edges of my vision I saw Penda duck a spear swipe and chop into a man’s knee, and Floki cross two blades to catch a sword that would have cleft his head apart. Yrsa swung a sword at my Greek but the man was already turning and he caught Yrsa’s blow on his shield and scythed his blade across Pig-nose’s face in a spatter of blood and skull. I flung myself at the Greek, getting my right arm round his neck and holding on with everything I had, trying to wring the life from him like water from a pelt because I was too close to use a long blade. I unlocked my knees, letting my weight bring
him down, and his fear stink clogged my throat as I squeezed him until I heard parts inside him crack like sticks underfoot. I held on, my arms almost bursting with the strain of it, for it is harder than you think to crush a man to death. But the Greek died eventually, piss-soaked and with tears on his cheeks, and I rolled on to the cold stone floor, gasping for breath and cursing because no one had gutted the Greek to spare me the trouble of it all.

My arms and hands were numb so I flapped them, trying to get the blood back into them, and looked up to see Floki with his long knife at Arsaber’s throat. The soldier who had been guarding Nikephoros threw his spear down and fell to his knees, squawking in Greek, but Bardanes didn’t break stride and slashed him to death anyway, which made a mess I would not have wanted to clean up. Then the general carefully pulled the gag from his master’s mouth and cut his bonds, so that Nikephoros stood there rubbing life back into his own hands and the two of us must have looked like men come inside to a hearth from the freezing cold.

‘Fetch the others, Raven,’ Sigurd said, nodding towards the ruined golden-skinned door and the chamber beyond, in which the rest of the Wolfpack waited in their shieldwall for the flames to die and the Greeks to crash against them like an iron wave. Taking a long shield from a dead Greek I picked my way round corpses, stumbling on legs that suddenly felt dead and heavy as two sacks of rocks, into the huge chamber where so many had died. Grey-black smoke was slung thick as sea-fog beneath the great bowl of the roof and scraps of singed silk floated down like black snow, tainting with bitterness air that was already thick with death’s stink. Here and there candelabra still burnt, though most of the candles had been thrown into the fire, so that the chamber was dim now. Darkness stalked the corners.

‘Rolf! Bjarni! We have Arsaber!’ I called, vaguely aware that I was standing on the massive picture of a man’s face made from thousands of little square stones. It had been hidden
before by the bolsters and silks which were now mostly piles of glowing ash before our skjaldborg. Several grim, soot-stained faces turned towards me, the eyes in them the only clean things in all that filth and gore.

‘Fall back to the next room and re-build the shieldwall there,’ I said to Rolf whose right eye was a closed, swollen red lump. He nodded, barking orders to the men around him, who grumbled because they knew that by backing off they would be making it easy for the Greeks to flood in. They would have to be quick to get into the emperor’s chamber too, for over Rolf’s shoulder I saw that the fire had all but gone out now. Half-burnt corpses crackled and popped, twisted and pulled into grotesque shapes by shrunken tendons and stinking like roasted pigs and molten copper. The Greeks swarmed beyond that threshold, a mass of scale armour, shields and bright red helmet plumes below a forest of swaying spears. Perhaps they were awaiting Karbeas’s command to attack – if Karbeas was still living – or perhaps despite their hundreds they were reluctant to attack men who had no choice now but to fight to the death. A boar that is surrounded by spears is more likely to rip out a man’s guts than the boar that sees a way out through the thickets and Bjarni said as much, leaning on a spear, his blood-soaked leg tied above the wound to keep what blood he still had in his body.

‘The emperor is safe?’ Father Egfrith asked, clutching my shoulder. He reeked of burnt hair and I saw that half of his beard was shrivelled and singed.

‘Which one?’ I asked petulantly, coughing on the putrid, sweet scent of burning flesh and looking over at Cynethryth who was standing behind Asgot and Arnvid. On the blade of her spear was skewered a severed hand, charred so that it looked more like the claw from some nightmare creature. ‘He’s alive,’ I gnarred at Egfrith. ‘We’ve got Arsaber too. Though I’d wager Floki has cut the bastard’s throat by now.’ The monk’s beady eyes blinked with the shock of that, then he turned and
tried to wriggle through the shieldwall, but no one would let him through and so he ran to the end of the line, spitting Greek across the smouldering dead.

Rolf scowled at me, his swollen, battered eye weeping, so that when he cuffed at it he smeared wet soot across his cheek.

‘He’s telling those fish-scaled Greek goat-humpers that Arsaber is dead and the real emperor is back on his throne,’ I explained. The Dane hoisted his brows, which I took to mean that he thought there was about as much chance of those plumed warriors believing Egfrith – if they could even understand him – as there was of Bjarni not bleeding to death from that fist-sized hole in his leg.

‘Back we go then, lads!’ Rolf yelled. ‘Steady now and keep it tight.’ And with that the skjaldborg edged backwards, retreating like the tide and giving up the ground we had fought tooth and nail for.

‘Don’t be shy, ladies!’ Wiglaf taunted the Greeks whose eyes we could see above their shield rims. ‘Come and see what we have waiting for you! I am Wiglaf son of Godwine and I have come to show you how Wessexmen fight!’ Those men of Miklagard must have heard the son of Godwine then, because the first of them edged forward into the room, shields raised and heads down as they stepped over dead men – theirs and ours.

‘Keep it tight!’ Bjarni shouted, dragging his ruined leg across the mosaic floor as the shieldwall moved backwards through the dark chamber that had earlier blazed like a sunlit sea, smothered with soft silks and colour, but which was now a dingy, stinking, fug-thick place where dead men lay leaking foul juices, reminding the still-living what lay in store for them.

We were halfway back to the emperor’s chamber, our shieldwall bowed to stop the Greeks getting behind us, by the time there were enough of them through the door to put their own shields edge to edge, spears poking through the gaps to make a bristling hedge. Then that hedge parted and men came
forward carrying water skins which they unstoppered and emptied into the smouldering remains of the fire. Steam hissed up in a thick grey curtain, weaving into the smoke that still swirled below the bowl ceiling and releasing a sweet, putrid smell that made men wince. And because I wasn’t locked into the skjaldborg I turned and loped back into the emperor’s chamber – where Sigurd and Floki were hanging Arsaber out of the great windhole by his feet. Nikephoros was beside them, swathed in the purple robes that reached to the floor and hung like a waterfall over his left arm, and wearing the stiff gold cloth and the jewels that had recently smothered Arsaber. The emperor was yelling into the warm night, bellowing at the crowds below like a man trying to calm the seething sea.