Raven (9 page)

OUR PLAN WAS PLAYING OUT LIKE GOOD FLAX ON A DROP SPINDLE
. The blaumen were encamped an arrow-shot south-east of us, foot soldiers and mounted men together now, sharing fires and food whose strange smells carried up to us on the balcony of Gerd’s Tit. I watched from those heights as they performed their strange ritual again, the day’s light rolling westward, relinquishing the dry land to the shadows, as the ululating song wove a braid of sound. I had two fears. One that they would vanish, choosing not to fight us at all, and the other that they would press their attack on the door and break through. For we would eventually run out of heavy things to drop from the balustrade and few of us had decent weapons. But our lack of good war gear was all part of the plan and no doubt much of the reason why the blaumen were still there. We had baited the hook and they had all but swallowed it, though I wanted to draw them in one last time.

A roar of pain filled the Tit as two Danes put Penda’s shoulder back in its place.

‘We need them closer,’ I said to Rolf beside me. ‘If they decide we’re not worth the spilt blood it has all been for nothing.’

‘Attack them?’ he suggested, though there was no heart in the words.

‘No. Out there they would ride us down. Trample us to dust and horse piss.’ I shook my head, biting a succulent hunk of meat off a chicken’s leg. ‘Just keep your eyes turned to the sea,’ I said, ‘and I will think of something.’

Inside Gerd’s Tit candles illuminated the darkness and the taut faces of men who now looked to me to keep them alive. The one who had fallen to an arrow outside lay choking on his own blood. Bubbles frothed over his beard and his friends sat with him, talking in low voices of all the swiving he would soon be doing in Valhöll. They were good men those Danes, tough and loyal, if a little wild in a fight, and as I sat in that hollow stone place, watching them sharpen their poor blades and throw insults back and forth, my mind summoned the new oath we had forged on that windswept island off the Frankish coast.

Each man had begun by proclaiming his ancestors and boasting of their deeds, if any was worth mentioning. I had dreaded my turn, for I did not even know my father’s name, let alone whether he had been a farmer or a warrior or had done any deed worthy of a hearth-side tale. Not that I believed half of what blew through the beards around me that day. Had Svein the Red’s grandfather really slain a family of giants? Could we believe that with the giants’ blood still wet on his sword he had plunged into the breaking waves to slaughter a great sea monster? To my nose that had more than a whiff of Beowulf about it and I wasn’t alone in smelling it. But when the man next to me had spent his words, filling the world with a silence heavier than a mountain, and all eyes turned to me, I had swallowed my fear and spoken as best I could.

I swear this oath before my sword-brothers. That I Raven, foster-son of Ealhstan of Wessex, am Jarl Sigurd’s man and that my sword is his
. We had said the words with our right hands on the hilt of Sigurd’s sword, which had belonged to
his father before him.
I will not flee from any man who is my equal in bravery and arms. I will avenge any of my oath-bound brothers as though we are brothers by blood. I will not utter words of fear or be afraid of anything, no matter how hard things look. I will bring all booty to my jarl and he will reward me as a ring-giver should
. Men nodded and murmured and I folded my fingers around the sword’s grip to stop my hand from trembling, because an oath is the heaviest thing a man can give and an oath-breaker is no better than a murderer or a man who steals from his friend.
I will slaughter my enemies and they shall know the name of Raven of the Wolfpack, who fights for Jarl Sigurd
. I felt Sigurd’s eyes boring into me and I could not meet them so I caught Olaf’s eye instead. He grinned and winked at me as though he had just caught me sneaking from the warm furs of my first whore.
If I break this oath I betray my jarl and my fellowship and I am a pus-filled nithing and may the All-Father riddle my eyes with maggots though I yet live
. And then it was done and I had barely taken my hand from Sigurd’s sword when another man’s hand was on it, his words ringing out amongst the rocks.

When it was all done and every man but for Father Egfrith had sworn the oath, it was as though a sodden blanket weighed on our spirits. It is always said that a wise man gives few oaths and breaks none, and all of us knew then that we bore fetters stronger than those which had bound some of us in that rotting Frankish hall, stronger even than Gleipnir which holds Fenrir Wolf. But soon I felt that burden lift and I knew it was because there is also strength in an oath because you know you are a part of something enduring and true.

In Gerd’s Tit a shout brought me back to the present. A man up on the balcony was seeing a thin twist of smoke rising from the south-east beyond the enemy camp and the hillocks that concealed the seashore. I nodded, satisfied with the company I kept. Each man was oath-bound, each warrior like a branch of Yggdrasil, the great World-Tree, and together we would stand
tall enough that the gods in Asgard would see our great deeds, no matter if my real father had never done a brave thing in his life. The gods would see me. They would mark me as a man worthy to be taken into Valhöll in preparation for the last battle.

‘How is your shoulder?’ I asked Penda. He was grimacing as he rolled his elbow in cautious circles, testing the fit of bone and joint.

‘It’s not my sword arm,’ he said with a pained grin, ‘and I don’t have a shield anyway.’ But the pain had sharpened his eyes to points and so I looked to big Beiner instead, thinking he deserved some recognition after the word-lashing he had got from me.

‘I could use a man who is good with an axe,’ I said. ‘Know anyone, Beiner?’

He grinned through his matted black beard, which was streaked with silver thread. His face was broad and long and his grey eyes narrowed as though his mind sought to unravel whatever knots I was throwing at him.

‘As it happens I know just the man,’ he announced, tossing a half-chewed chicken bone behind him, and some of his friends began to chant his name as he pursed his greasy lips and touched them to his axe’s cheek. I would not have been surprised if Beiner had been married to that axe and had a brood of little axes causing havoc back home in Denmark.

‘Come with me,’ I said, getting to my feet and loosening my muscles, ‘and drag a comb through that bear’s arse beard of yours.’ I smiled. ‘You’re our champion, Beiner. And you’re going to challenge those blaumen out there to come and spill your guts across the ground.’

Beiner’s eyebrows arched like the Midgard-Serpent’s back.

‘I’m beginning to think you don’t much like me, lad,’ he said, following me to the barricaded door.

After checking with the men up on the lookout platform that there were no blaumen within a hundred strides of the door,
we cleared away the obstacles and I stepped out with Beiner behind me. Dusk was approaching, the sun a red clot far away in the western sky. I could smell strange spices and horse sweat and the oiled leather of harnesses and bridles. In the distance the blaumen seemed at their ease, though they got to their feet when they saw us. Above, the rich blue of the sky was streaked red, as though the sun had bled on its retreat west, and I did not like the look of that but decided as it was the blaumen’s land it was an omen for them and not us.

‘Now what?’ Beiner said, seeming a little anxious now that it was just us, and his friends were safely barricaded in Gerd’s Tit.

‘Now you start swinging that axe around like you mean it,’ I said, ‘and walk at the same time if you can manage that. And keep the bloody thing away from me.’ I did not turn round, but I knew the Dane was doing as I had asked, because I could hear the hard slap every time the weapon’s wooden haft struck his palm at the end of each pattern the axe wove through the air. I also knew that before long Beiner’s shoulders would be screaming in pain as the muscles burnt, but I counted on the big man’s having too much pride to stop until I told him to.

We were now a Svein the Red spear’s throw from the building and out in the open, and I admit that my skin was clammy with cold sweat because I felt like a mouse leaving his hole when he knows the owls are watching from the trees. It was all I could do to leave my sword in its scabbard when my hand ached to clasp it the way I had seen Egfrith hold his cross before him as though the very sight of it would flay the skin from a heathen.

‘You’re slowing down, Beiner, I can hear it,’ I accused him, licking a drop of salty sweat from my top lip.

‘Screw you, whelp,’ he growled, breathing like a pair of forge bellows.

‘Not long now,’ I said, ‘we’ve got their attention. Now we need to keep it.’ The blaumen were coming. Those with horses had mounted and those without trudged towards us, and all
of them seemed to be cheering one man who strode lightly at their front and centre. ‘Looks like they have chosen their own champion, Beiner,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think a big Dane like you needs to worry about him. I’ve seen more meat on a fart.’

‘Aye, the dark whoreson walks like a woman,’ Beiner said, still looping his big axe through the air.

‘You’ll cut that sheep’s dick in half without even realizing it,’ I said, trying to bolster Beiner’s spirits. In truth I had not meant for this fight to happen. The smoke that the Danes up on the platform of Gerd’s Tit had seen rising from the shore had been the sign from Sigurd that the others had moored and were in position. I had taken Beiner out into the open to tempt the blaumen closer, to draw them deeper into the trap and keep their eyes turned from the beach, but now they were so close I could smell them and it looked as if Beiner would now have to use that axe he had been swinging.

‘Thór’s balls, you can stop now, Beiner!’ I said, stepping out of his axe’s reach. ‘You’re making me dizzy.’

‘Am I going to fight him?’ he asked. His face was sheened with sweat, which was dripping from his newly combed beard.

‘What did you think was going to happen?’ I asked. He shrugged, chewing his bottom lip, then put the head of his axe on the ground, leaning its shaft against his leg so that he could wipe his sweaty palms on his breeches.

‘Just don’t kill the scrawny whoreson too quickly,’ I said, ‘because if you do we’ll both be too dead to see Sigurd tear them apart.’ I eyed the blaumen’s champion and did not like what I saw. He moved with considered poise, like a cat, and he was thin and lithe-looking. Champions are usually big as trolls, men like Svein the Red and the Frank who had jumped aboard
Serpent
when we had fled from Frankia, but this one was slight, which told me he was fast. A curved sword was scabbarded at his hip and beneath long yellow robes which were embroidered with red flowers and drawn in at the waist with a red sash, I could see rows of small iron plates that looked like
fish scales. Beneath those scales ring mail protected his throat and the lower half of his face, and unlike most of the other blaumen his head was not covered in white cloth but instead he wore a pointed helmet.

‘Skinny slash of piss is done up like a crab,’ Beiner muttered. ‘I’ll have to crack the damn shell to get to the meat.’

‘Your axe will cut through that lot like a hot knife through honey,’ I said. ‘Tell me you put a good edge on it.’

‘Good enough,’ he said as the blaumen stopped before us, their horses neighing and pissing steaming nerves into the dusty ground.

My heart was thumping like a man buried alive in his coffin. I thought they would simply kill us both right there and I clenched my jaw to keep the fear off my face. After what I had done to the last man that had come to talk I could not have blamed them for slicing me up where I stood. But, luckily for me if not for Beiner, it seemed they wanted us all to see their champion at work, and one of the mounted men, whose saddle was draped in purple silk, and whose head cloth was ringed with a fine band of gold, nodded to me in acknowledgement of the challenge. I supposed he was the local lord who commanded these new men and as such it was his job to see raiders like us killed. He had brought these men to fight us and I was glad to see they owned decent war gear: strange curved swords and some single-edged straight ones, too; spears, some with blades as long as a man’s forearm, brynjas made of iron or tough leather scales, short hand axes, maces, and bows which, unstrung as they were now, had ears that curved away from the archer. Any other day I would have cursed our luck in facing an enemy who were so well armed. Not today.

The warlord spoke but it might as well have been the clucking of a hen for all the meaning I could get from it, though I did recognize the word ‘Al-majus’ somewhere midstream, which was something the last man had said before I skewered him.

The dark-skinned lord was still talking when I turned to Beiner. ‘Are you ready?’ He nodded but there was doubt in his iron-grey eyes, because he knew as well as I did that a small champion was likely to be a fast champion.

‘All that iron will slow him down,’ I said.

‘I hope so,’ he said through a grimace. ‘I can’t kill him if I can’t catch him.’

In contrast to the warrior before us, who was now half crouched in a stretch that would have split my groin had I tried it, Beiner had only a few scraps of mail, taken from old brynjas, which he had sewn on to a sweat-stained leather gambeson that had seen better days. He wore no helmet nor did he own a shield, but the axe which was his only weapon looked sharp enough to cut a shadow.

The blaumen’s black banner snapped, caught by a sudden gust from the east, and the man holding its shaft looked up as if to check that the thing hadn’t been carried off. Then the mounted leader shouted a command and all fifty of them shuffled backwards, so I did the same, leaving their champion and ours facing each other across two spear-lengths of dry ground.

‘Forget what I said about making it last, Beiner,’ I said, suddenly fearful for the Dane, for their man looked as arrogant as a cat with a vole beneath its paw. ‘If you get the chance, gut the greasy bastard.’

Then the blauman’s sword rasped up the scabbard’s throat and snaked at Beiner fast as lightning, slicing the Dane’s shoulder before he could even raise the axe.