I sent Town Dog and Hookeye to have a look,' growled Kvasir, tossing my ringmail at me. I caught it with fumbling fingers, then slid myself into the cold byrnie. My sword rasped from the wool-lined wooden sheath and sand grains dribbled. Finn made an annoyed noise in his throat at the sight of such neglect.
Fastening the stiff thongs of my helmet round my chin, I collected my shield and looked round at the men, faces red-brown, all snarling smiles and grim lips. There was that familiar smell of sweat-soaked leather and fear, the tang of iron and savage eagerness.
A better jarl would have come up with gold-browed words, calling them Widow Makers, Sword Breakers, Hewers of Men, promising them rivers of gold and silver and more glory than Thor. Instead, I could only turn to the Goat Boy and tell him to start a fire, for once we were finished we'd want our day-meal. At which they all hoomed and beat their shields and grinned those fox-in-the-coop grins.
Hookeye and Town Dog lurched back through the door, panting. 'A good hundred, I would say,' gasped Town Dog. `But armed with nothing much: a few bows, spears that are no better than sharpened sticks, clubs.
Hardly an axe or a sword to be seen.'
If it is the villagers of this place,' Brother John said, his unfastened helmet tilted ludicrously over one eye, 'then we should treat with them. Maybe-'
Not after what we have done to this mosque,' the Goat Boy piped and Brother John shot him a savage look, made harsher by his own anger at having ignored the boy's warnings.
Anyway, I was thinking, wide awake now, where had they all been to leave every home deserted?
Hookeye, too, was shaking his head and stringing his bow. `Not villagers, I am thinking,' he growled.
'And not from here. All men, no women or bairns. They dress like thrall scum, but they have weapons.'
He was right. They were as ragged-arsed a band of thieves as ever disgraced the ground they walked on, slouching their way through the streets into the square, clutching skin bags and clearly making for the water trough and the well. A cool breeze sifted last night's sand in skeins across the square and it lay in drifts against the trough, where the water was scummed with it.
When they saw us lope up, shieldwall stretching from wall to wall across the other side of the square, they stopped and milled about, confused. I heard some shouts of
They circled and looked at each other and I waited, for soon the one who led them would appear. Finn, though, was chewing on his Roman nail and slavering round it that we should hit them now, while they were thinking about things.
Then the leader appeared, a Greek or a Jew by the look of his oiled black curls and beard, waving a curved sword but wearing a Norse ring-coat — you could see the thick, riveted ringwork in the byrnie he wore from here and the Saracen ones were thinner, because they liked them light in the heat. That closed the door on these men as far as I was concerned, for there was only one way Black Beard could have got his paws on such an item.
`Now,' I said quietly and Finn bawled out for us to form the shieldwall while the raven banner snapped out in the cool early morning breeze, which hissed like a snake suddenly and raised dancing whorls of dust and grit, settling them into a new pattern. It looked like a face with one eye, I noticed, and wondered if it was an omen.
They should have run for it then, but the leader saw how few we were compared to the mob he had with him and that, with the fact that they needed the water, made him bold. He snarled, waved his little curved Saracen sword once or twice in the air, then thrust it towards us and charged. Howling, his men followed. Of course, by the time they reached us, Black Beard had managed to drop back a rank or two.
I didn't have time to think of much else before they were on us, a spear rushing at me, behind it a red- mouthed, mad-eyed face in a tangle of hair and beard, like a wild animal plunging from a forest. I knocked the spear-point away with the flat of my blade, then bulled in, slashing overhand. The man was scrawny, hesitant, and he jumped back. His movements seemed slow, though it was clear he knew something of spear-work.
A soldier once, I was thinking, even as I moved in, slapping the spear away with my shield, moving up the shaft before he could recover, then chopping hard at the knee. He tripped over someone else's foot and my edge slashed his thigh open in a red crescent that split apart even as he fell back with a high, wailing scream.
He was done for, so I left him. Our shieldwall had dragged apart, though the Oathsworn were still working in teams of two or three.
To my left, some of the brigands were hopping into buildings, shooting their little bows, and I saw Kvasir, with a handful of others, rush through the doorway. A figure loomed, screeching, and I blocked and struck, all in the one movement that was now second nature.
The watered blade blurred in the haze of dust and grit, took the man in the neck, cutting upwards so that his jaw flew off. He tried to cry out, but the sound was choked off in a gurgle and I kicked the body away with one flapping boot. Still sharp, I thought, for all I had neglected the blade.
There was a yell; I spun, blocking the snake-tongue strike of a spear with my shield. Another man rushed me, shouting wildly, but mad-eyed Town Dog skewered him, then swung the man furiously to one side to shake him off his spear.
They broke then, running wildly everywhere while the Oathsworn hunted them down. Arrows whicked and clicked on the stones and hard-packed bare earth, and at the point the houses slithered down to fields of melons and beans, I killed my last man of the fight, a series of desperate, weary strokes that carved out his ribs from his backbone as he stumbled and fell and scrabbled, wailing, away from me.
I had to follow it up by breaking his skull like an egg, for he was still alive, leaking blood and whimpering, trying to crawl to safety. Afterwards, I sat beside him while the flies droned greedily in, feeling sick and wondering who he had been, what he had thought that day would bring when he woke up and went with everyone else to fetch water.
When I came back to the square, the bodies were being dragged away and Finn, seeing me, blew out with relief.
`Thought you'd run into trouble, Trader,' he said. I shook my head, scooped water from the well and doused my head in it, surfacing with muddy runnels coursing down face and beard.
`Here's some fresh,' said the Goat Boy, hefting a bucket, and I drank. 'There is food cooking,' he added and the men cheered him. Those who could cheer, that is.
We had six wounded, none badly enough to have to drink from Brother John's onion-water flask. One was dead, though: Town Dog had taken an arrow in the armpit, having unpicked the rings of a too-tight byrnie so that it would fit better.
I told him to keep his arms by his sides,' mourned Kvasir moodily, shaking his head. 'But he waved that silly spear in the air and that's what happened.'
At least he
`Who were they, do we know?' demanded Brother John, standing hipshot like a man four times his size, spear held tall and proud in one hand. Sometimes I wondered if he really was marked by his Christ-god for a priest, for he was like no robed monk we had ever seen.
Who were they? I had no answer for Brother John, but had sat and looked at the man I'd killed for long enough to see that he was too thin, dirty and had the old sores of manacles at wrists and ankles.
When we had laid out Town Dog as best we could, I took a dozen men down the white road, between the irrigation ditches and the fields of plundered beans and herbs, past the abandoned olive presses and out on to the stony desert plain, back along the route the brigands had come.
As we came up the hill to the columns of the Hittite temple, dust marked where the remnants of the band were fleeing towards the hills, Black Beard with them.
I did not know what a Hittite was — another people turned to dust — but they built well, for this was a flat area flagged with great square stones and studded with the remains of pillars, some toppled like trees.
There was an altar and low, square buildings and several stairs that led down to underground places.
This was where the brigand band had been staying, that was clear, for it had been made into a fort, after a fashion, with dug-up flagstones and earth. They had been here a while, too, judging by the firepits and gear.
