Raven (6 page)

‘You greedy snot hogs better have saved me something to eat,’ he said to no one in particular, scrubbing his face with the linen. Arnvid blanched, suddenly realizing he had already shared out the last of the smoked meat and cheese. He would now have to tell Floki that all there was was dried fish and some stale mead. Which was another reason the pall of smoke had tempted Sigurd into that cove – we needed food.

‘You rancid goat turd, Arnvid!’ Floki said, fathoming the dread in the man’s face. ‘I’m freezing my balls off out there while you’re tucked up tighter than a hedgehog’s arsehole and when I get back some putrid prick has eaten my share.’ The scars criss-crossing Floki’s torso and arms were puckered and white from the cold water and he shivered, grimacing at Arnvid before turning to bring his report to Sigurd who was waiting, arms folded, his beard hanging in a single thick braid and his golden hair loose.

‘You can send someone else next time, Sigurd,’ Floki moaned as he leant against the hull to pull on his boots.

‘If I sent someone else you would whine even more,’ Sigurd said, sharing a knowing look with Olaf.

Floki accepted that with a grunt. ‘Well, you can at least save
me something to eat for the love of Eir. My belly thinks my throat’s been cut.’

‘A wise man does not overfeed his best hunting dog,’ Sigurd said, winking at Olaf who stifled a grin. ‘But if you have good news for me we shall all have full bellies soon enough.’

Now it was Floki’s turn to grin, his head appearing from a new, dry tunic.

‘We’ll soon be as fat as you, Uncle,’ he said.

Twenty Danes would be the bait and I suppose that made the others the hook. Sigurd had not used that word ‘bait’ – he had said ‘anvil’. The Danes were the anvil and the rest of the Fellowship was to be the hammer. But I saw them as bait, which was probably because I was amongst them and that is what it felt like to me as we rowed
Sea-Arrow
out of the gathering dark right up to the jetty, thumping her hull against it. At least Penda was with me, for he relished the chance to wet his sword and had asked to come, and I was glad to have him. We and the twenty Danes had sailed
Sea-Arrow
round the promontory, leaving the Wolfpack in the quiet cove, and it had not been long before we had come to a wide bay in which a dozen or so fishing skiffs bobbed peacefully. The low shore threw out several wharves along which more boats were berthed, betraying a decent-sized settlement beyond the barren low rise.

‘It’s not good fishing around here by the looks,’ Penda had said with a wicked grin as the fishing skiffs scattered from us like fleas from a flame, and now we climbed on to the jetty with what poor weapons we had: spears mostly, though there were some axes and a couple of hunting bows. None wore brynjas but Penda and I had insisted on bringing our swords at least, though our helmets were still aboard
Serpent
.

‘What sort of men are they?’ a Dane named Agnar asked, touching the amulet at his neck and spitting. The locals, who had been waiting to see who we might be, were now pounding away up the wharves and they were like no men we had ever
seen. Their skin was bluish black like that of a man who has been a week in his grave. Their beards were black or grey, and they wore what appeared to be piles of linen on their heads.

‘I have never seen their like before,’ Rolf, the Danes’ leader, said, hurling a spear after one of them and missing. ‘They look like dead men!’

‘Draugar!’ another Dane agreed, ‘risen from the grave.’

‘They run well for dead men,’ I said, breaking into a run myself, and we pounded up the wharf after those strange blue men – blaumen – leaving four of the Danes to guard
Sea-Arrow
under the command of a man named Ogn.

‘Bloody legs feel like they belong to someone else!’ Penda shouted as we ran, but he was grinning like me because we were loosed to the hunt and our prey was terrified and we felt the thrill of it coursing in our veins. We were fast, too, even on sand and sea legs. Without brynjas and shields we ate up the ground and I surged with a rare joy from the freedom of not being aboard
Serpent
.

A Dane howled in delight as he dragged an old grey-beard to the white sand and I saw a bloom of red amongst undyed robes. We ran on through the deepening night, past discarded fishing nets and baskets of catch and upturned skiffs, up on to a hard-baked scrubland of stunted trees. The ululating cries of the dark men carried into the growing darkness and it was a strange, animal sound. But like hunted animals they were making the fatal mistake of leading us to their lair, which was a great clutter of white stone houses and brushwood lean-tos, patchily lit by torches and bowls of flame.

An arrow streaked towards us from an unseen archer. Then another shaft whipped through the air an arm’s length from my right cheek and I was tempted to yell ‘Shieldwall’ and seek the safety of cohesion. But we were a raiding party, not a war band, and we had come without our heavy shields. If we made the skjaldborg we would just present a large soft target for arrows and spears.

In a narrow torch-lit alley a Dane crouched over a dead man, unwinding the linen from his victim’s head and cawing in bewilderment as the shroud kept coming, seemingly endless. The Danes were now amongst the dwellings, their stuttering, misshapen shadows playing monstrously on the white walls as they kicked down doors and dragged dark-skinned women, blauvifs, out into the night.

‘Raven!’ Penda yelled, pointing his spear at the north-east. ‘Looks like we might have a fight!’ The Wessexman’s eyes glinted and the scar on his face glistened white in the glow of an enormous moon.

‘Here they come!’ I roared and some of the Danes let go of the women they had caught and ran to me, eager for a real fight, which was just as well because among the dark-skinned men gathering some held shields which must have been covered in metal, for I could see flame reflected in them. There were already seven or eight but more were coming and some of these were stringing bows to join the two archers already loosing shafts.

‘How can a man be that colour and still breathing?’ one of the Danes asked, shaking his head.

‘They want us to come to them,’ Penda said.

‘Makes sense,’ I said, for their number was growing and the blaumen must have known that the longer we waited the more of them we would have to fight. ‘We’ll have to go to them,’ I said in Norse to Rolf, ‘and the sooner the better.’

Rolf pursed his thin lips and scratched a hollow, bearded cheek.

‘Makes me wonder what’s inside Gerd’s Tit,’ he said, nodding towards a strange building. Some chuckled at that because Gerd is a beautiful giantess whom Frey the god of rain and sunshine humped to the cost of his self-wielding sword. It was a good name, I thought, given the building’s shape.

‘That’s what they’re protecting,’ he went on, ‘not their women.’ And Rolf was right, for the robed men seemed reluctant
to stray from this stone building that was the size of three or four dwellings put together and whose roof was as round and smooth as Bragi’s head. A wooden walkway encircled the swell of the roof and that was lit by torches, so that you could see the place from far and wide, even at night.

‘I’ll wager there’s silver in there, lad. Maybe even gold.’

‘Call your men, Rolf,’ I said, eyeing the enemy, trying to weigh up their willingness to take us on. Some of them had decent war gear by the looks of it, but we still outnumbered them overall. ‘We need every Danish spear we’ve got,’ I said. ‘If we don’t strike now they will grow brave.’

‘We’ve got to hit the whoresons now,’ Penda hissed, ‘before they find their balls.’

‘I know,’ I growled, but a handful of the Danes were still looting the dwellings and from the sound of the screams some of them were getting to know the local women. One of the dark men was encouraging the others, waving his arms towards us and screaming like a madman.
It’s got to be now
, I thought. So I gnarred at Óðin Spear-Shaker to flood me with the battle frenzy and then I turned to Penda. ‘Are you coming or not, you Christ-loving sheep-swiver?’ I said, a spear in one hand, my sword in the other, and then I yelled as though I wanted to wake the dead and I ran towards my enemies.

There is a joy in battle: a voracious, reckless, savage joy, which strips us of dignity and care and all of the things that raise us above beasts. There is fear, too, but when the blood starts flying that fear is swallowed by the hunger to kill, because whatever you kill cannot kill you.

My spear clattered against a metal-skinned shield but a Danish axe hooked that shield’s rim and the Dane yanked it down and I swung my sword into a dark-bearded face, cleaving the skull with a wet
crack
. That corpse crumpled and I roared and barged through, knocking it aside and opening the enemy’s shieldwall before they could close up. I spun and thrust the spear into a man’s back between his shoulder blades and Penda
went low, hacking into legs, and the Danes were as feral as a pack of starving dogs, slashing wildly and howling, with no care for their own skins. The dark-skins were yelling too and it was a wild, rampageous fight in which men went from living to dead in the flash of a blade in the moonlight.

‘Your Danes are wild bastards!’ Penda yelled, hurling his spear and bringing down a dark-skin who had made a run for it. I feinted with my own spear but my enemy read the bluff and knocked the shaft from my grip with his heavy curved sword. I bent my arm and stepped up, cracking my elbow into his chin, then threw a leg back and scythed my blade into his neck. His eyes rolled in his head and his knees buckled and I yanked my blade out, so that dark blood sprayed up the white moon-washed wall beside me. Then a Dane leapt on the man, growling and plunging a knife into his face and chest, and I put my back against the wall, gulping breath and watching the last of the killing.

‘Didn’t get them all,’ Penda said, pointing at three fleeing dark-skins who had dropped their weapons and bolted, leaving their brothers to be butchered.

‘Good,’ I said, kneeling to wipe my blade clean on a dead man’s robes. The Danes were laughing as they stripped the gore-slathered dead looking for loot. Two of their own lay amongst the corpses and several others were hurt, but they had done well and they knew it as they revelled in the other joy that comes when you see that you are still alive when others are not.

‘They don’t fight like Sigurd’s lads,’ Penda said, sheathing his sword. He had barely broken a sweat, whereas I was slick with it and my limbs trembled with the battle thrill. ‘There’s not much skill in them, though I don’t suppose it makes much difference to this lot,’ he said, nodding at the white-robed carrion. ‘Dead is dead however it comes along.’

‘Dead is dead,’ I agreed, sheathing my own blade and turning to piss up the blood-spattered wall. When I swung back round
Rolf was standing there, a grin etched on his crimson-smeared face.

‘Now you know how Danemen can fight,’ he said proudly, ‘even with a few poor spears and axes.’ He glanced down at the bodies, which to the Danes’ disappointment were not giving up much in the way of loot. ‘These blaumen have never faced Danes before.’

‘They never will again,’ a man named Byrnjolf added, revealing rotten teeth in his grin. Nearby, a Dane was straddling a bleating goat, slitting its neck.

‘The others will hear of your men’s bravery, Rolf,’ I said. ‘Sigurd will be pleased to know that the Danes are fierce fighters.’ Rolf nodded at that, satisfied with the night’s work. ‘Now we might as well see what we can find around here,’ I said, turning and looking up at the impressive building before us, suddenly hoping there were not more men up there on the wooden walkway readying to drop something heavy on us.

‘There must be something here that those men thought was worth dying for,’ I said, peering up into the flame-licked darkness. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this place?’

Penda scratched his head, saying that he hadn’t and eyeing the iron-studded dark oak door that was almost twice my height. The planks of that door could have come from a longship’s deck; could even have been hull strakes it seemed to me, though I did not say it. They were speckled with sea-worm holes and there were even some worn scratchings that looked to me like runework.

‘That’s going to take some kicking-in by its looks,’ Penda said.

The door needed no kicking at all because it was not locked. We were looking around us for something to use as a ram, when Rolf simply turned the iron ring and the door yawned open, exhaling a sweet smoke.

Rolf’s brows hitched up in surprise and Penda rolled his eyes
at our bone-headedness. We might well have smashed that door to splinters without ever trying it.

Some of the Danes stood watch, peering north into the night for signs of more blaumen, whilst the rest of us entered the strange stone building, our eyes hungry for silver.

‘What is this place?’ Penda asked, grimacing at the potent smell as he turned, trying to take in that hollow, candle-lit chamber. ‘No benches. No beds. Not even a bucket to piss in! Looks like the poor bastards have been pilfered already. There’s more in big Svein’s head than in this piss-poor place.’

‘Is it a church, Raven?’ Rolf asked, for he had heard that I had lived for a time in Wessex amongst Christ worshippers.

‘If it is it’s not like any church I’ve seen,’ I said, pressing a palm against the smooth wall, which was made of countless blue stones each not much larger than a brynja ring. Some were dark like the sea and others were the blue of a summer sky. Still others, on the east wall where they lined a doorway, were the bright yellow of cowslips. Only there was no door, just the outline of one, and it led nowhere but was instead an alcove two feet deep, on which strange, sharp symbols twisted and twined with no sense of a pattern so far as I could see. ‘There would be a Christ cross somewhere if it were a church,’ I said, moving over to a stone trough of running water and splashing some on my face to wash off the drying blood.

‘This damn smoke is making me dizzy,’ Penda said, pointing to the north-east corner, where stone steps twisted upwards, stopping just below the bulging, beamless roof. ‘Up you go then, lad,’ he said. ‘Maybe they hide their treasures in the clouds.’