Twelve of us could not hope to attack all Kjartan’s men. If we were to win this day we had to sneak into the fortress. Sihtric had told me that behind the well’s gate was a tangle of buildings. If we could kill the guards quickly, and if no one saw their deaths, then I hoped we could hide in that tangle and then, once we were certain that no one had discovered us, just walk toward the north wall. We were all in mail or leather, we all had helmets, and if the garrison was watching Ragnar approach then they might not notice us at all, and if they did, they would assume we were defenders. Once at the wall I wanted to capture a part of the fighting platform. If we could reach that platform and kill the men guarding it, then we could hold a stretch of the wall long enough for Ragnar to join us. His nimbler men would climb the palisade by driving axes into the timbers and using the embedded weapons as steps, and Rypere was carrying our leather rope to help them up. As more men came we could fight our way down the wall to the high gate and open it to the rest of Ragnar’s force.
It had seemed a good idea when I described it to Ragnar and Guthred, but in that cold wet dawn it seemed forlorn and desperate and I was suddenly struck by a sense of hopelessness. I touched my hammer amulet. “Pray to your gods,” I said, “pray no one sees us. Pray we can reach the wall.” It was the wrong thing to say. I should have sounded confident, but instead I had betrayed my fears and this was no time to pray to any gods. We were already in their hands and they would help us or hurt us according to how they liked what we did. I remember blind Ravn, Ragnar’s grandfather, telling me that the gods like bravery, and they love defiance, and they hate cowardice and loathe uncertainty. “We are here to amuse them,” Ravn had said, “that is all, and if we do it well then we feast with them till time ends.” Ravn had been a warrior before his sight went, and afterward he became a skald, a maker of poems, and the poems he made celebrated battle and bravery. And if we did this right, I thought, then we would keep a dozen skalds busy.
A voice sounded up the slope and I held up a hand to say we should all be silent. Then I heard women’s voices and the thump of a wooden pail against timber. The voices came closer. I could hear a woman complaining, but the words were indistinct, then another woman answered, much clearer. “They can’t get in, that’s all. They can’t.” They spoke English, so they were either slaves or the wives of Kjartan’s men. I heard a splash as a bucket fell down the well. I still held up my hand, cautioning the eleven men to stay still. It would take time to fill the buckets and the more time the better because it would allow the guards to become bored. I looked along the dirty faces, looking for any sign of uncertainty that would offend the gods, and I suddenly realized we were not twelve men, but thirteen. The thirteenth man had his head bowed so I could not see his face, so I poked his booted leg with my spear and he looked up at me.
She looked up at me. It was Gisela.
She looked defiant and pleading, and I was horrified. There is no number so unlucky as thirteen. Once, in Valhalla, there was a feast for twelve gods, but Loki, the trickster god, went uninvited and he played his evil games, persuading Hod the Blind to throw a sprig of mistletoe at his brother, Baldur. Baldur was the favorite god, the good one, but he could be killed by mistletoe and so his blind brother threw the sprig and Baldur died and Loki laughed, and ever since we have known that thirteen is the evil number. Thirteen birds in the sky are an omen of disaster, thirteen pebbles in a cooking pot will poison any food placed in the pot, while thirteen at a meal is an invitation to death. Thirteen spears against a fortress could only mean defeat. Even the Christians know thirteen is unlucky. Father Beocca told me that was because there were thirteen men at Christ’s last meal, and the thirteenth was Judas. So I just stared in horror at Gisela and, to show what she had done, I put down my spear and held up ten fingers, then two, then pointed at her and held up one more. She gave a shake of her head as if to deny what I was telling her, but I pointed at her a second time and then at the ground, telling her she must stay where she was. Twelve would go to Dunholm, not thirteen.
“If the babe won’t suck,” a woman was saying beyond the wall, “then rub its lips with cowslip juice. It always works.”
“Rub your tits with it, too,” another voice said.
“And put a mix of soot and honey on its back,” a third woman advised.
“Two more buckets,” the first voice said, “then we can get out of this rain.”
It was time to go. I pointed at Gisela again, gesturing angrily that she must stay where she was, then I picked up the spear in my left hand and drew Serpent-Breath. I kissed her blade and stood. It felt unnatural to stand and move again, to be in the daylight, to start walking around the well’s palisade. I felt naked under the ramparts and I waited for a shout from a watchful sentinel, but none came. Ahead, not far ahead, I could see the gate and there was no guard standing in the open doorway. Sihtric was on my left, hurrying. The path was made of rough stone, slick and wet. I heard a woman gasp behind us, but still no one shouted the alarm from the ramparts, then I was through the gate and I saw a man to my right and I swept Serpent-Breath and she bit into his throat and I sawed her backward so that the blood was bright in that gray morning. He fell back against the palisade and I drove the spear into his ruined throat. A second gate guard watched the killing from a dozen yards away. His armor was a blacksmith’s long leather apron and his weapon a woodcutter’s ax which he seemed unable to raise. He was standing with astonishment on his face and did not move as Finan approached him. His eyes grew wider, then he understood the danger and turned to run and Finan’s spear tangled his legs and then the Irishman was standing over him and the sword stabbed down into his spine. I held up my hand to keep everyone still and silent. We waited. No enemy shouted. Rain dripped from the thatch of the buildings. I counted my men and saw ten, then Steapa came through the gate, closing it behind him. We were twelve, not thirteen.
“The women will stay at the well,” Steapa told me.
“You’re sure?”
“They’ll stay at the well,” he growled. I had told Steapa to talk to the women drawing water, and doubtless his size alone had quelled any ideas they might have of sounding an alarm.
“And Gisela?”
“She’ll stay at the well too,” he said.
And thus we were inside Dunholm. We had come to a dark corner of the fortress, a place where two big dung-heaps lay beside a long, low building. “Stables,” Sihtric told me in a whisper, though no one alive was in sight to hear us. The rain fell hard and steady. I edged about the end of the stables and could see nothing except for more wooden walls, great heaps of firewood, and thatched roofs thick with moss. A woman drove a goat between two of the huts, beating the animal to make it hurry through the rain.
I wiped Serpent-Breath clean on the threadbare cloak of the man I had killed, then gave Clapa my spear and picked up the dead man’s shield. “Sheathe swords,” I told everyone. If we walked through the fortress with drawn swords we would attract attention. We must look like men newly woken who were reluctantly going to a wet, cold duty. “Which way?” I asked Sihtric.
He led us alongside the palisade. Once past the stables I could see three large halls that blocked our view of the northern ramparts. “Kjartan’s hall,” Sihtric whispered, pointing to the right-hand building.
“Talk naturally,” I told him.
He had pointed to the largest hall, the only one with smoke coming from the roof-hole. It was built with its long sides east and west, and one gable end was hard up against the ramparts so we would be forced to go deep into the fortress center to skirt the big hall. I could see folk now, and they could see us, but no one thought us strange. We were just armed men walking through the mud, and they were wet and cold and hurrying between the buildings, much too intent on reaching warmth and dryness to worry about a dozen bedraggled warriors. An ash tree grew in front of Kjartan’s hall and a lone sentry guarding the hall door crouched under the ash’s leafless branches in a vain effort to shelter from the wind and rain. I could hear shouting now. It was faint, but as we neared the gap between the halls I could see men on the ramparts. They were gazing north, some of them brandishing defiant spears. So Ragnar was coming. He would be visible even in the half-light for his men were carrying flaming torches. Ragnar had ordered his attackers to carry the fire so that the defenders would watch him instead of guarding Dunholm’s rear. So fire and steel were coming to Dunholm, but the defenders were jeering Ragnar’s men as they struggled up the slippery track. They jeered because they knew their walls were high and the attackers few, but the sceadugengan were already behind them and none of them had noticed us, and my fears of the cold dawn began to ebb away. I touched the hammer amulet and said a silent thank-you to Thor.
We were just yards from the ash tree that grew a few paces from the door to Kjartan’s hall. The sapling had been planted as a symbol of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life about which fate writhes, though this tree looked sickly, scarce more than a sapling that struggled to find space for its roots in Dunholm’s thin soil. The sentry glanced at us once, noticed nothing odd about our appearance, then turned and looked across Dunholm’s flat summit toward the gatehouse. Men were crowded on the gatehouse rampart, while other warriors stood on the wall’s fighting
