palisade showed a way onto the rock’s summit.
That summit was a stretch of open stone, pitched like a shallow roof and about fifteen paces wide. The western end rose to the ramparts while the eastern edge ended in a sheer drop to the river, and all that I saw in a flicker of far-off lightning that ripped across the northern clouds. The center of the boulder’s top, where we would have to cross, was no more than twenty paces from Kjartan’s wall and there was a sentry there, his spear blade revealed by the lightning as a flash of white fire. We huddled beside the stone and I made every man untie the leather rope from his belt. We would retie the reins into one rope and I would crawl across first, letting the rope out behind me, and then each man must follow. “One at a time,” I said, “and wait till I tug the rope. I’ll tug it three times. That’s the signal for the next man to cross.” I had to half shout to make myself heard over the pounding rain and gusting wind. “Crawl on your bellies,” I told them. If lightning struck, then a prone man covered by a muddy cloak would be far less visible than a crouching warrior. “Rypere goes last,” I said, “and he brings the rope with him.”
It seemed to me that it took half the night just to cross that short stretch of open rock. I went first, and I crawled blind in the dark and had to grope with the spear to find a place where I could slither down the boulder’s far side. Then I tugged the rope and after an interminable wait I heard a man crawling on the stone. It was one of Ragnar’s Danes who followed the rope to join me. Then one by one the others came. I counted them in. We helped each man down, and I prayed there would be no lightning, but then, just as Steapa was halfway across, there was a crackling blue-white fork that slashed clear across the hilltop and lit us like worms trapped by the fire of the gods. In that moment of brightness I could see Steapa shaking, and then the thunder bellowed over us and the rain seemed to grow even more malevolent. “Steapa!” I called, “come on!” but he was so shaken that he could not move and I had to wriggle back onto the boulder, take his hand and coax him onward, and while doing that I somehow lost count of the number of men who had already crossed so that, when I thought the last had arrived I discovered Rypere was still on the far side. He scrambled over quickly, coiling the rope as he came, and then we untied the reins and again joined ourselves belt to belt. We were all chilled and wet, but fate had been with us and no challenging shout had come from the ramparts.
We slid and half fell back down the slope, seeking the riverbank. The hillside was much steeper here, but sycamores and hornbeams grew thick and they made the journey easier. We went on south, the ramparts high to our right and the river ominous and loud to our left. There were more boulders, none the size of the giant that had blocked us before, but all difficult to negotiate, and each one took time, so much time, and then, as we skirted the uphill side of one great rock, Clapa dropped his spear, and it clattered down the stone and banged on a tree.
It did not seem possible that the noise could have been heard up at the ramparts. The rain was seething onto the trees and the wind was loud at the palisade, but someone in the fort heard something or suspected something, for suddenly a burning log was thrown over the wall to crash through the wet branches. It was thrown twenty paces north of us, and we happened to be stopped at the time while I found a way past yet another rock, and the light of the flames was feeble. We were nothing but black shadows among the shadows of the trees. The flickering fire was swiftly extinguished by the rain and I hissed at my men to crouch. I expected more fire to be thrown, and it was, this time a big twisted brand of oil-soaked straw that burned much brighter than the log. Again it was thrown in the wrong place, but its light reached us, and I prayed to Surtur, the god of fire, that he extinguish the flames. We huddled, still as death, just above the river, and then I heard what I feared to hear.
Dogs.
Kjartan, or whoever guarded this stretch of the wall, had sent the war dogs out through the small gate which led to the well. I could hear the huntsmen calling to them with the sing-song voices that drove hounds into undergrowth, and I could hear the dogs baying and I knew there was no escape from this steep, slippery slope. We had no chance of scrambling back up the hill and across the big boulder before the dogs would be on us. I pulled the cloth off the spearhead, thinking that at least I could drive the blade into one beast before the rest trapped, mauled, and savaged us, and just then another splinter of lightning slithered across the night and the thunder cracked like the sound of the world’s ending. The noise pounded us and echoed like drumbeats in the river valley.
Hounds hate thunder, and thunder was Thor’s gift to us. A second peal boomed in the sky and the hounds were whimpering now. The rain became vicious, driving at the slope like arrows, its sound suddenly drowning the noise of the frightened dogs. “They won’t hunt,” Finan shouted into my ear.
“No?”
“Not in this rain.”
The huntsmen called again, more urgently, and as the rain slackened slightly I heard the dogs coming down the slope. They were not racing down, but slinking reluctantly. They were terrified by the thunder, dazzled by the lightning and bemused by the rain’s malevolence. They had no appetite for prey. One beast came close to us and I thought I saw the glint of its eyes, though how that was possible in that darkness, when the hound was only a shape in the sodden blackness, I do not know. The beast turned back toward the hilltop and the rain still slashed down. There was silence now from the huntsmen. None of the hounds had given tongue so the huntsmen must have assumed no quarry had been found and still we waited, crouching in the awful rain, waiting and waiting, until at last I decided the hounds were back in the fortress and we stumbled on.
Now we had to find the well, and that proved the most difficult task of all. First we remade the rope from the reins and Finan held one end while I prowled uphill. I groped through trees, slipped on the mud, and continually mistook tree trunks for the well’s palisade. The rope snagged on fallen branches, and twice I had to go back, move everyone some yards southward and start my search again. I was very close to despair when I tripped and my left hand slid down a lichen-covered timber. A splinter drove into my palm. I fell hard against the timber and discovered it was a wall, not some discarded branch, and then realized I had found the palisade protecting the well. I yanked on the rope so that the others could clamber up to join me.
Now we waited again. The thunder moved farther north and the rain subsided to a hard, steady fall. We crouched, shivering, waiting for the first gray hint of dawn, and I worried that Kjartan, in this rain, would not need to send anyone to the well, but could survive on the water collected in rain barrels. Yet everywhere, I assume in all the world, folk fetch water in the dawn. It is the way we greet the day. We need water to cook and shave and wash and brew, and in all the aching hours at Sverri’s oar I had often remembered Sihtric telling me that Dunholm’s wells were beyond its palisades, and that meant that Kjartan must open a gate every morning. And if he opened a gate then we could get into the impregnable fortress. That was my plan, the only plan I had, and if it failed we would be dead. “How many women fetch water?” I asked Sihtric softly.
“Ten, lord?” he guessed.
I peered around the palisade’s edge. I could just see the glow of fire-light above the ramparts and I guessed the well was twenty paces from the high wall. Not far, but twenty paces of steep uphill climbing. “There are guards on the gate?” I asked, knowing the answer because I had asked the question before, but in the dark and with the killing ahead, it was comforting to speak.
“There were only two or three guards when I was there, lord.”
And those guards would be dozy, I thought, yawning after a night of broken sleep. They would open the gate, watch the women go through, then lean on the wall and dream of other women. Yet only one of the guards had to be alert, and even if the gate guards were dreaming, then one alert sentinel on the wall would be sufficient to thwart us. I knew the wall on this eastern side had no fighting platform, but it did have smaller ledges where a man could stand and keep watch. And so I worried, imagining all that could go wrong, and beside me Clapa snored in a moment’s snatched sleep and I was amazed that he could sleep at all when he was so drenched and cold, and then he snored again and I nudged him awake.
It seemed as though dawn would never come, and if it did we would be so cold and wet that we would be unable to move, but at last, on the heights across the river, there was a hint of gray in the night. The gray spread like a stain. We huddled closer together so that the well’s palisade would hide us from any sentry on the wall. The gray became lighter and cocks crowed in the fortress. The rain was still steady. Beneath me I could see white flurries where the river foamed on rocks. The trees below us were visible now, though still shadowed. A badger walked ten paces from us, then turned and hurried clumsily downhill. A rent of red showed in a thinner patch of the eastern clouds and it was suddenly daylight, though a gloomy day-light that was shot through with the silver threads of rain. Ragnar would be making his shield wall now, lining men on the path to keep the defenders’ attention. If the women were to come for water, I thought, then it must be soon, and I eased my way down the slope so I could see all of my men. “When we go,” I hissed, “we go fast! Up to the gate, kill the guard, then stay close to me! And once we’re inside, we go slowly. Just walk! Look as if you belong there.”
