FIVE
A decision was soon reached, and the trio returned to the host. Kjallak nodded to Halldor, a subtle signal that Sigrid did not follow, and with a few gestures, Halldor informed the other Shield-Brethren of the plan. They melted off the road, vanishing quickly into the shadows cast by the trees. He and Kjallak went last, and Halldor hesitated a moment longer to glance at her. He seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but he tapped the hand holding his spear against his chest instead. She replied in kind—two warriors wishing strength of heart and hand to the other.
“We stand here,” Pettir yelled, expressing his intention to the Sworn Men and the Holmgard. The gathered men answered with upthrust weapons and a mighty bellow. Hearing the sound, the Danes would know the hold was aware of their landing and that there was a force waiting for them. They would know they faced a fight; that they could not venture toward the hold until they had faced the Jarl’s men at the fishing village. Such was her father’s intent, of course.
“The Sworn Men will hold the center,” he shouted, “and the Holmgard will stand on either side.” The men sorted themselves quickly by family groups to either side of the Sworn Men; he did not need to tell them to bring the shields to the front, the spears behind. “Byrghir,” he called to the village leader. “Do not let them flank us. Throw whatever you can lay your hands on: spears, rocks, torches. Fish, even, if they are spoiled and rotten enough.” The villagers shouted their approval of his plan, and the men roared again, their voices rising with laughter. “When these Danish dogs beg for scraps at the feet of their betters in Valhalla,” Pettir continued when the cheering subsided, “let them tremble as they tell their fellows of the fierceness of our folk. As to the rest, let us send them back to their leaky boats like whipped curs!”
With that Pettir moved off, talking to a warrior here and there. Sigrid watched him with admiration even as she checked her own weapons. He appeared supremely confident, cheerful even, as he moved among the men. He seemed to have an instinct for which man needed steadying, who would respond to a jest or good-natured insult, when to share an anecdote about a past battle. He shaped them with words like a master potter at his wheel, turning them from a mob of armed men into a fighting force. He seemed completely relaxed, unconcerned that within the hour they would be facing several times their number of professional fighters.
A group of women and teenage boys well behind the shield wall that closed the gap in the berm caught her attention. The women were bringing up apron-loads of fist-sized rocks to leave in piles. The boys and some of the women were limbering up and sorting the rocks. One of the boys suddenly whirled something around his head and let fly. Moving almost too fast to see, the rock flickered over the heads of the fighters and vanished into the darkness.
A sling was a slow weapon and accuracy was difficult in the best of conditions, but a good slinger could hurl a fist-sized rock as far as a bow could shoot. While they would be little more than a nuisance to the Danes, even a lucky stone could stave in a helm or crack a shield. At the very least, being hit by a flung stone would be a distraction. Every little thing helped, she thought, unexpectedly moved by the dedication and bravery of these boys—not yet old enough to fight alongside the men, but still eager to defend their homes.
As the first light of dawn brightened the sky, women moved among the fighters, passing out cups of hot fish soup. This was their last act before most of the women would depart for the hold, but a few—too old or infirm to fight or run—would stay to do what they could for the fighters. They would be poor candidates for rape or enslavement, and at very least they could give the Jarl’s men water or bind wounds when or if chance allowed. They too sought to help.
An inarticulate roar of many voices rose in the distance, and the sound of horns echoed in the predawn twilight. The roaring grew until she could make out individual voices, mostly battle cries and invocations of the gods. Then she could make out a dark moving mass punctuated now and again by the dim flash of pale light on spearpoint or helm. At last the mass resolved into mailled men, spears or axes in hand, round shields slung at their backs, and long swords at their hips. At two hundred paces they stopped and began to form their lines. Sigrid wondered at the irony that their foes should invoke the same gods to attack and plunder that her folk did to defend.
Pettir, Grimhildr, and ?ke moved along their lines, steadying their men and making last-minute adjustments. Now they could do nothing but wait and see what their enemy would do. Sigrid wondered at it herself. The Danes could send a small force to engage the defenders and send the rest to try to flank them. They could send forces on up the hill to take the hold while the bulk of its defenders were engaged here, or even send a delegation to parlay and demand tribute. Or they could come straight into the teeth of the defenders to smash them by brute force. Sigrid thought that they had the numbers to try the latter tactic with good odds of success.
Apparently the Danish commanders agreed.
“From their battle order it looks like they are coming straight for us,” Thorbjorn commented. There was no emotion in his voice, as if he were speaking of a fact as simple and inconsequential as the sun rising.
“Good,” Sigrid said. “It will save us from having to chase them down across half the country.” For all her earlier apprehension and anticipation, she found herself bored and tired, and she understood Thorbjorn’s lack of enthusiasm.
Thorbjorn laughed at her comment, as did a few other men nearby. “Gods,” he sighed, “I just wish they would get on with it.”
At length it seemed that the Danes were ready, and at the sound of a horn those in the front ranks unslung their shields. It was a signal to the Jarl’s men, and each side began to yell at the other, pitching insults back and forth across the early morning air, striking their weapons against the metal bosses of their shields. The din rose to an unintelligible roaring in her ears that seemed to go on forever. Then a horn sounded again, and the Viking force began to advance. They did not march in time with locked shields; rather they seemed to flow forward, a group or individual leading now here, now there. At a hundred paces they raised their shields, bellowed their war cries, and charged.
At almost that exact moment, she heard stones whirring overhead. Gaps appeared momentarily in the mass of charging men, but they closed as fast as they opened. At a shouted command, the Jarl’s shield wall opened up and spearmen ran through to hurl their heavy throwing spears before retreating back behind the shieldmen. Wherever a spear struck, a gap opened and the line faltered as the ranks behind had to dodge their fallen comrade. For the most part the spears did not kill, she noted, but when they stuck in a man’s shield, it became unwieldy, and he had to stop to dislodge it or cut it off. As the Danes closed the distance between the two groups, she had but a moment to realize that this tactic would cause ripples in the shield wall of the approaching Danes. The wall would not be a solid mass.
What followed was chaos. The men that hit the wall first were cut down immediately, as several defenders struck at each Dane. Then the main mass of the attackers flowed up against them, and the shield wall was forced to give a step—then two—while it adjusted to the weight of the attack. Sigrid stood behind the shield wall with the other spearmen, thrusting her seven-foot spear past the men of the line whenever she saw an opening. She had only a brief moment to note what it felt like when the four-inch-wide blade of her spear sliced through a man’s face. She felt the impact ripple up her arm, transforming into a shiver that raced up the back of her neck. This is what it feels like…she started to think, but then another face flickered at her through the shield wall and she thrust her spear at it as well. And another.
And another.
Their attackers were packed against the wall so tightly they could hardly fight, but their mass was enough to force the Jarl’s shield wall back. Slowly, one step at a time, the shield wall retreated. The Sworn Man in front of her dropped, opening a hole in the line that she thrust through instantly, taking the man that had felled him in the belly before the other Sworn Men closed the gap. Another man fell—she dimly tried to recall his name, but her mind was no longer focused on such minutiae. All she could see was the gap in the shield wall he left behind.
She stepped forward, shifting her grip on the spear to one hand and holding it before her vertically like a shield as she snatched out her langsaex. Her focus collapsed even farther, even as her awareness expanded, and she felt like she was in the yard, fighting ?ke again. Knowing what was coming next without thinking.
The Danish attackers seemed to have fallen asleep on their feet. Their motions—the set of each foot, the way they held their weapons—were slow and exaggerated. She watched them coldly, aware on a level far below thought of their movements and knowing how little she had to move in return. A slight turn of the wrist and a blow that would have killed her missed by a hairbreadth; a small twist of her blade allowed it to scrape along the rim of a shield to its target instead of being deflected; the thin space between the helm and the armor where her blade could slip through and pierce flesh. Despite the uneven ground, the uncertain light, the bodies, and fallen weapons, she never doubted her footing. Everything around her was frozen, and she moved through the battlefield with infinite precision and grace.
Do you dance?
Yes, the thought came to her distantly, as if someone else were having the conversation—in another time and place. Yes, this dance I know.
At some point she left her langsaex jammed through the chest of a mailled warrior. At another she left her saex knife in a man’s groin. Wielding her hewing spear with both hands again, she danced through the battle like a wraith, omniscient and untouchable.
The shield wall crumpled, and she fought on. She felt a savage spike of joy when the wedge of Shield-Brethren scythed into the Danish flank. Sometimes she allowed weapons to slide past her guard to grate along her mail or pierce her flesh if it would not cripple her, but in turn gave an advantage. When she saw her aunt beleaguered and failing, she threw her spear without care of the fact that it was her only weapon. The spear took the man that would have killed Grimhildr through the throat and drove him into his companions. Grimhildr recovered her footing, and her blade flashed in the morning light as she took to the offensive against the Danes.
Sigrid stared at her empty hands, and she had barely begun to ponder what she should fill them with when a Dane came at her, lang ax raised over his head. She lunged under his blow, setting her hands on the haft of his weapon and twisting it free of his grip as she threw him heavily to the ground. She reversed the lang ax in her hands, striking the fallen Dane in the face—almost as an afterthought—before continuing her relentless and unstoppable dance of death…
She had been lost in the rhythm of the lang ax: striking with the head, haft, and butt; feeling the impact of each on metal, flesh, and wood; hearing the pounding drum of her heart. And then, without notice, the rhythm stopped, and her lang ax swung through empty air. There was no one left to fight.
The Danes had been broken. They were retreating under a hail of spears, rocks, and curses.
She stood still for a moment, listening intently to the fading rhythm that had been coursing through her. Her chest rose and fell in time with that martial music, and as she realized the sound was nothing more than her own heartbeat, she sank to her knees, her breath changing into quaking gasps. She leaned heavily on the butt of the lang ax, suddenly unable to keep herself upright. The morning sun shone down on a field covered in gore, and she was stained with blood as well, from head to boot. There were bodies—and pieces of bodies—scattered all around her. Ripping off her spangenhelm, she doubled over, spewing the contents of her stomach onto the already fouled earth.
At length, Sigrid became aware of another presence, and her body tensed, thinking it needed to fight again, but the person wrapped strong arms around her. A rough voice, feminine and familiar, spoke in her ear. “It’s all right now, child. Let it out,” Grimhildr said softly. “Let the battle go. It takes most like this the first time.”
Sigrid’s stomach stopped heaving, but the shakes would not leave the rest of her as quickly, and her aunt held her tight until the last quivering sigh fled from her aching chest. Grimhildr let go, and Sigrid struggled to her feet, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist.
?ke stood nearby, bloodied and helmetless, with a gash along the side of his head, and the upper half of his ear missing on the left side. He had a skin of mead in his hands, and he offered it to her. “Rinse your mouth out with this,” he said, “but mind you don’t swallow any or you’ll be right back at it.”
She did as he told her, rinsing her mouth and sloshing the honey wine through her teeth before spitting it out. He was right. As much as she wanted to swallow the sweet mead, her legs quaked at the thought, and her stomach flipped.
Grimhildr offered her a different skin, one filled with water. “Slowly,” she instructed. “Let each sip settle before you take the next.”
Sigrid returned the first skin to ?ke and took a tiny sip from the second. Her stomach rebelled at first, but the water was cool in her throat, and she could feel the tension in her lower body fading as the water fell into her stomach. She took another sip, slightly larger than the first, and her stomach received it gladly.
“Better now?” Grimhildr asked.
“Aye,” she said, looking about. “Moreso after I get out of this gods-damned muck.”
?ke shook his head in wonder. “By the All-Father,” he said. “You make quite a mess, don’t you?”