I remembered Edwulf, skinned alive in his church, but I said nothing of that as I watched Skirnir’s ship come still closer. The creek became too narrow to allow his oar- banks to dip in the water, so now his ship was being poled forward. The tide was rising slowly. As it neared its height it would rise more swiftly, and then Skirnir would know he had run out of water, but the creek, though narrow, was proving to have more than enough depth for his ships. “It’s time to dress,” I said.
I went down the dune’s far side, hidden now from Skirnir, and Oswi, my servant, helped me into my mail. The leather lining stank in my nostrils as I pulled it over my head, but it felt good to have that familiar weight on my shoulders. Oswi put the sword belt around my waist and buckled it. “You stand behind me,” I told him.
“Yes, lord.”
“If it all goes wrong, boy,” I said, “you run like a hare. You go inland, find the monastery and ask for shelter.”
“Yes, lord.”
“But it won’t go wrong,” I told him.
“I know it won’t, lord,” he said stoutly. He was eleven years old, an orphan who had been found scavenging in the mud beneath the terrace of my Lundene house. One of my men had accused him of theft and brought him to me so I could order a whipping, but I had liked the fire in the boy’s eyes and so I had made him my servant and was now teaching him sword- craft. One day, like my previous servant, Sihtric, Oswi would become a warrior.
I went to the dune’s edge and saw that Skirnir’s ship was passing our beached and abandoned fishing craft. He was near enough to shout insults and he was bellowing at Skade, who now stood alone at the dune’s summit. He was calling her a whore, a turd of the devil, and promising that she would scream her way into hell.
“Time to show ourselves,” I said to Rollo, and picked up my linden shield, which had Bebbanburg’s wolf’s head painted around its iron boss.
Rollo carried a war ax and he kissed the wide blade. “I’ll feed you soon, my darling,” he promised the ax.
“They’re close!” Skade called from the dune.
The island we had chosen was shaped like a crescent moon with the dune making the moon’s high belly. The horns of the crescent touched the creek, and cradled in its belly was marshland. So the dune could be approached from either horn, while the marsh, about a hundred paces wide and fifty paces at its deepest, was an obstacle. Men could cross that marshland, but it would have been slow work. The horn nearest to the sea was the wider of the two, a natural causeway leading to the sandy island, but ten men could bar that causeway easily, and I led twenty, leaving the remainder under Rollo’s command. Their task was to protect the farther horn, but they were not to show themselves until Skirnir sent men to use that second causeway.
And what did Skirnir see? He saw a shield wall. He saw men in helmets and mail, men with bright weapons, men who were not the desperate fugitives he expected, but warriors dressed for battle, and he must have known that Finan and Osferth had lied to him, but he must have thought it was a small lie, a lie about weapons and mail, and his desperate hopes to regain Skade still persuaded him to believe the larger lie. Maybe he thought they had simply been mistaken? And still he was confident, because we were so few and he had so many, though the sight of a shield wall gave him pause.
Skirnir’s helmsman was nosing the foremost ship into the bank when we appeared, and Skirnir immediately held up his hand to stop the men poling with the long oars. Skirnir had thought he would have little to do on that overcast morning, merely storm ashore and capture a small band of dispirited men, but our shields, weapons, and close- linked wall made him reconsider. I saw him turn and shout at the men poling his ship. He pointed up the creek and it was obvious he wanted the ship taken to the farther horn so that he could surround us. But then, to my surprise, he leaped off the bows. He and fifteen men splashed into the creek and waded ashore as the ship poled on. Skirnir and his small band were now about fifty paces away, but they would be swiftly reinforced by the crew of his second ship that was approaching fast. I stayed where I was.
Skirnir did not look back to see Seolferwulf, and would he have been alarmed if he had? She was the last of the three ships and her bows were filled with mailed and helmeted men. I could see Finan’s black shield.
“Uhtred?” Skirnir shouted.
“I am Uhtred!”
“Give me the whore!” he bellowed. He was a heavy man with a face as flat as a flounder, small eyes, and a long black beard that half covered his mail. “Give her to me and I’ll go away! You can live out your miserable life. Just give me the whore!”
“I haven’t finished with her!” I called. I glanced left and saw that Skirnir’s own ship had almost reached the second causeway. That crew would start landing in a moment. Meanwhile his second ship had grounded just behind Skirnir and the crew were tumbling over the side. There was not sufficient room on the small beach for more than thirty of them, so the rest, maybe another thirty men, waited on the ship. Seolferwulf crept closer.
“Oswi?” I said softly.
“Lord?”
“Fetch Rollo now.”
I felt the exultation of victory. I had seventy men, including those on Seolferwulf, and Skirnir had done what I wanted, he had divided his forces. Sixty or seventy of his men were facing us at the first causeway, some still aboard their ship, while the rest had gone to the other landing place and though, once they were ashore, they would be able to attack us from behind, I expected to be master of the island by then. I heard Seolferwulf thump her bows on the grounded boat, then I gave the command. “Forward!”
We went as warriors, confident and disciplined. We could have charged as we had at Fearnhamme, but I wanted fear to work its wicked decay on Skirnir’s men, and so we went slowly, the shields of our front rank overlapping, while the men behind beat blades against their shields in time to our steps. “Kill the scum!” I shouted and my men took up the shout. “Kill the scum, kill the scum!” We went step by step, slow and inexorable, and the blades between our shields promised death.
We were just eight men broad, but, as the causeway widened, Rollo brought his men onto our right. Most of the front rank carried spears, while I had Serpent- Breath. She was not the best blade for the close work of shield wall fighting, but I reckoned Skirnir’s men would not stand long because they were not used to this kind of warfare. Their skill was the sudden rush onto a half- defended boat, the wild killing of frightened men, but now they faced sword- warriors and spearmen and behind them was Finan. And Finan now attacked.
He left just two boys on Seolferwulf. The tide was still flooding, so the current was holding Seolferwulf against the second of Skirnir’s skull- prowed ships and Finan led his men over her bows and up between the rowing benches, and they were yelling a high- pitched scream of killing, and maybe for a moment, just for a moment, Skirnir believed they had come to help him. But then Finan began the slaughter.
And we struck at the same moment. “Now!” I shouted, and my shield wall lunged forward, spears seeking foemen, blades driving into flesh, and I slammed Serpent- Breath under a Frisian shield and twisted her long blade in the man’s soft belly. “Kill them!” I bellowed, and Finan echoed the cry.
Spear- blades buried themselves in Frisian flesh. Men then dropped the spears’ long ash shafts and drew swords or took axes from the men behind. Skirnir’s men had not broken because they could not break. They were confined in a small space and my attack pushed them back against their dark ship’s bows, while Finan’s assault on the ship drove the remaining crew toward the prow platform. We pushed forward, giving them no room to fight, and we did the grim work of shield fighting. Cerdic was on my right and he used the blade of his ax like a hook to pull down the rim of the man to his front and, as soon as the shield was down, I lunged Serpent- Breath into the enemy’s throat, and Cerdic drove the ax blade against the man’s face, crushing it, then reached to hook down another shield. Rollo was screaming in Danish. He had dropped his shield and wielded his ax two- h
anded as he chanted a hymn to Thor. Rorik, one of the Danes who served me, was on his knees behind me, using a spear to rip open the legs of the Frisian pirates, and when they fell we killed them.
It was slaughter in a small space. We had given hours, days, weeks, and months to practicing this kind of fight. It does not matter how often a man stands in a shield wall, he will only live if he has rehearsed it, drilled it, and practiced it, and Skirnir’s men had never trained as we did. They were seamen, and some did not even have shields because a great round slab of iron- bossed wood is a cumbersome thing to carry in a fight aboard a ship where the footing is uncertain and the rowing benches are obstacles. They were untrained and ill- equipped and so we killed them. They were in terror. They did not see our faces. Most of our helmets have cheek- pieces and so the enemy saw men of metal, metal- masked, metal- clad, and the steel of our weapons lanced at them, and we went relentlessly forward, metal- clad warriors behind overlapping shields, our blades remorseless until, on that gray morning, blood spread bright in the salt tide creek.
Finan had the harder job, but Finan was a warrior of renown who took joy in hard fighting, and he led his men up the dark boat and screamed as he killed. He sang the song of the sword, keening as he fed his blade, and Rollo, standing thigh- deep in the creek, ax swinging in murderous blows, blocked the enemy’s escape. The Frisians, transported from confidence to bowel- loosening fear, began to drop their weapons. They knelt, they shouted for mercy, and I shouted at my rear rank to turn and be ready to face the men who had taken Skirnir’s own ship higher up the creek to come around our rear.
Those men appeared about the dune just in time to see that the fighting was over. A few had sensibly jumped over the ship’s farther side and struggled into the swamp beyond, but most of Skirnir’s force were dead or prisoners. One of those prisoners was Skirnir himself, who was backed against the grounded strakes of his second ship with a spear- blade held at his beard. Cerdic was pressing the blade just enough to keep the big man still. “Shall I kill him, lord?”
“Not yet,” I said, distracted. I was watching the newly arrived enemy. “Rollo? Keep them at a distance.”
Rollo formed his men into a shield wall. He shouted at the uncertain Frisians, inviting them to come and taste the blood already on his blades, but they did not move.
A man screamed. He was a Frisian lying at the sand’s edge and his legs were thrashing in the shallow, blood- tinged water. He had been wounded, and Skade now knelt beside him and was driving a dagger slowly into one eye and so through to his brain. “Stop that!” I shouted. The man was mewing in a high, pitiable voice, the ooze of his punctured eye spilling down his blood- laced cheek.
She turned to look at me and there was a wildness in her face like the savagery of a cornered beast. “I hate them,” she said, and edged the dagger in again so that the man screamed and lost control of his bowels.
“Sihtric!” I snarled, and Sihtric stepped to the man and drove his sword hard into his throat to end his misery.
“I want to kill them all,” Skade hissed at me. She was shuddering. “And him!” She pointed to Skirnir. “Especially him!”
“She’s crazed,” Finan said softly. He had jumped down to the beach beside me and now dipped his blade in the water to wash the blood away. “Sweet Jesus Christ,” he said, “she’s as crazy as a bitch in heat.”
My men were staring at Skade in horror. It is one thing to kill in battle, but an enemy is a warrior too, and in defeat he deserves respect. I have killed often, and the killing can go on long after the fighting has finished, but that is the blood lust and battle fear that frenzies men who endure the shield wall, and when the lust dies then mercy takes its place. “You’re not going to let them live!” Skade spat at me.
“Cerdic,” I said, not turning around to look at him, “make it quick!”
I heard, but did not see, Skirnir die. The spear- blade was thrust so hard that it pierced his throat and then drove into the planks of the ship. “I wanted to kill him!” Skade shrieked.
I ignored her. Instead I walked past Rollo to approach the undefeated Frisians. These men were Skirnir’s own crew, maybe sixty in all, who watched me come in silence. I had dropped my shield so they could see the blood spattered on my mail and see the blood streaked across my helmet’s mask and see the blood congealing on Serpent- Breath’s blade. My helmet was surmounted by a silver wolf, my belt had plates of gold, and my arm rings shone through their gloss of blood. They saw a warlord and I walked to within ten paces of them to show that I had no fear of pirates.
“I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I said, “and I give you a choice. You can live or you can die.”
Rollo, behind me, had started the shield music. His men were beating blades against linden wood in the dark rhythm of death’s promise.
“We are Danes,” I told the Frisians, “and we are Saxons, and we are warriors who love to fight. In our halls at night we chant the tales of the men we have killed, of the women we have widowed, and of the children we have orphaned. So make your choice! Either give me a new song to sing or else lay down your weapons.”
They laid down their weapons. I made them take off their mail, those that possessed it, or else their leather tunics. I took their boots, their belts, their armor, and their weapons and we piled that plunder in Seolferwulf, and then we burned both of Skirnir’s long ships. They burned well, great plumes of flame climbing the masts beneath churning black smoke that drifted up into the low clouds.
Skirnir had come with one hundred and thirty- one men. We had killed twenty- three of those, while another sixteen were grievously wounded. One of Rollo’s men had lost an eye to a spear thrust, and AElric, a Saxon in my service, lay dying. He had fought beside Finan and had tripped on a rower’s bench and had taken an ax blow in the back, and I knelt beside him on the sand and held his hand firm around his sword’s hilt and promised I would give his widow gold and raise his children as though they were my own. He heard me, though he could not speak back, and I held his hand until the noise rattled in his throat and his body quivered as his soul went to the long darkness. We took his corpse away with us and buried him at sea. He was a Christian, and Osferth said a prayer over the dead AElric before we tipped him into eternity. We took another corpse with us, Skirnir’s, that we stripped naked and hung from our wolf’s- head prow to show that we had conquered.
We poled Seolferwulf back down the creek on the ebbing tide. When the creek widened we turned and rowed her, towing the small fishing craft that I abandoned beside the village. Then we went out to sea and Seolferwulf shuddered to the first small waves. The gray clouds that had covered the place of slaughter were at last shredding, letting a watery sunlight beat down on the choppy sea. “You shouldn’t have let them live,” Skade told me.
“Skirnir’s men?” I asked. “Why kill them? They were beaten.”
“They should all be dead,” she said vengefully, then turned a gaze of utter fury on me. “You left two of his brothers alive! They should be dead!”
“I let them live,” I said. Without Skirnir and his large boats they were harmless, though Skade did not see it that way.
“Milksop!” she spat at me.
I stared at her. “Careful, woman,” I said, and she went sulkily silent.
We had brought just one prisoner with us, the shipmaster from Skirnir’s own vessel. He was an old man, over forty, and years of squinting at the sun- reflecting sea had made his eyes mere crinkled slits in a face beaten dark by salt and weather. He would be our guide. “If my ship so much as touches a sandbank,” I told him, “I’ll let Skade kill you in her own way.”
Seolferwulf touched no sandbank as we rowed to Zegge. The channel was intricate, and misleading marks had been planted to lure attackers onto shoals, but the prisoner’s pure terror of Skade made him careful. We arrived in the early evening, feeling our way gently, and led by the corpse hanging at the bows. Spray had washed Skirnir’s carcass clean and gulls, smelling him, screamed as they wh
eeled in hungry frustration around our prow.
Men and women watched us pass through the crooked channel that twisted between two of the inner islands, and then we glided across sheltered water that reflected the settling sun in shivering gold. The watchers were Skirnir’s followers, but these men had not sailed with their lord in the dawn, and now they saw our proud shields that we had hung from Seolferwulf ‘s topmost strakes, and they saw the corpse dangling white from the rope, and none wanted to challenge us.
There were fewer people on Zegge than on the outer islands, because it was from Zegge that the two defeated crews had sailed, and where most of the dead, wounded, or stranded men had lived. A crowd of women came to the gray wooden pier that jutted out be neath the mound which supported Skirnir’s hall. The women watched our boat approach, then some recognized the body that was our trophy and they all fled, dragging their children by the hands. Eight men, dressed in mail and carrying weapons, came from the hall, but when they saw my crew disembarking they ostentatiously put their weapons down. They knew now their lord was dead, and not one of them was minded to fight for his reputation.
And so, in the twilight of that day, we came to the hall on the mound of Zegge, and I stared up at its black bulk and thought of the dragon sleeping on his hoard of silver and gold. The high- roofed hall had great wooden horns at its eaves, horns that reared into the darkening sky where the first stars pricked the dusk.
I left fifteen men to guard the ship, then climbed the hill, seeing how the mound was made from great baulks of timber planted in a long rectangle that had been filled with sand, and on that first layer another smaller rectangle had been built, and then a third, and at the summit a final layer where a palisade stood, though it offered no defiance now, for its heavy wooden gate stood wide open. There was no fight left in Skirnir’s men. Their lord was dead.
The hall’s door was framed by a pair of vast curved bones that had come from some sea monster. I passed beneath them with a drawn sword with Rollo and Finan flanking me. A fire burned in the central hearth, spitting like a cat as salt- caked driftwood does. Skade came behind us and the waiting servants shivered at the sight of her. Skirnir’s steward, a plump man, bowed low to me. “Where’s the treasure?” I asked harshly.