with its new brilliance. The reflected image of the enemy was long on the light-flickering, slow-moving water.
“Steorbord oars!” I called, “back water. Clumsy now!”
The oarsmen grinned as they deliberately churned the water with clumsy strokes that slowly turned our prow upriver so that it appeared as though we were trying to escape. The sensible thing for us to have done, had we been as innocent and vulnerable as we looked, would have been to row to the southern shore, ground the boat, and run for our lives, but instead we turned and started rowing against tide and current. Our oars clashed, making us look like incompetent, scared fools.
“He’s taken the bait,” I said to our rowers, though, because our bows now pointed westward, they could see for themselves that the enemy had started rowing hard. The Viking was coming straight for us, her oar banks rising and falling like wings and the white water swelling and shrinking at her stem as each blade-beat surged the ship.
We kept feigning panic. Our oars banged into each other so that we did little except stir the water around our clumsy hull. Two gulls circled our stubby mast, their cries sad in the limpid morning. Far to the west, where the sky was darkened by the smoke of Lundene that lay beyond the horizon, I could just see a tiny dark streak, which I knew to be the mast of another ship. She was coming toward us, and I knew the enemy ship would have seen her too and would be wondering whether she was friend or foe.
Not that it mattered, for it would take the enemy only five minutes to capture our small, undermanned cargo ship and it would be the best part of an hour before the ebbing tide and steady rowing could bring that western ship to where we struggled. The Viking boat came on fast, her oars working in lovely unison, but the ship’s speed meant that her oarsmen would be tired as well as unprepared by the time she reached us. Her beast-head, proud on her high stem, was an eagle with an open beak painted red as if the bird had just ripped bloody flesh from a victim, while beneath the carved head a dozen armed men were crowded on the bow platform. They were the men supposed to board and kill us.
Twenty oars a side made forty men. The boarding party added a dozen, though it was hard to count the men who were crowded so close together, and two men stood beside the steering-oar. “Between fifty and sixty,” I called aloud. The enemy rowers were not in mail. They did not expect to fight, and most would have their swords at their feet and their shields stacked in the bilge.
“Stop oars!” I called. “Rowers, get up!”
The eagle-prowed ship was close now. I could hear the creak of her oar tholes, the splash of her blades, and the hiss of the sea at her cutwater. I could see bright ax blades, the helmeted faces of the men who thought they would kill us, and the anxiety on the steersman’s face as he attempted to lay his bows directly on ours. My rowers were milling about, feigning panic. The Viking oarsmen gave a last heave and I heard their shipmaster order them to cease rowing and ship oars. She ran on toward us, water sliding away from her stem and she was very close now, close enough to smell, and the men on her bow platform hefted their shields as the steersman aimed her bows to slide along our flank. Her oars were drawn inboard as she swooped to her kill.
I waited a heartbeat, waited until the enemy could no longer avoid us, then sprang our ambush. “Now!” I shouted.
The sail was dragged away and suddenly our little ship bristled with armed men. I threw off my cloak and Sihtric brought me my helmet and shield. A man shouted a warning on the enemy ship and the steersman threw his weight on his long oar and his vessel turned slightly, but she had turned away too late, and there was a splintering sound as her bows cracked through our oar shafts. “Now!” I shouted again.
Clapa was my man in our bows and he hurled a grapnel to haul the enemy into our embrace. The grapnel slammed over her sheer-strake, Clapa heaved, and the impetus of the enemy ship made her swing on the line to crash against our flank. My men immediately swarmed over her side. These were my household troops, trained warriors, dressed in mail and hungry for slaughter, and they leaped among unarmored oarsmen who were utterly unprepared for a fight. The enemy boarders, the only men armed and keyed for a battle, hesitated as the two ships crashed together. They could have attacked my men who were already killing, but instead their leader shouted at them to jump across onto our ship. He hoped to take my men in the rear, and it was a shrewd enough tactic, but we still had enough men left aboard to thwart them. “Kill them all!” I shouted.
One Dane, I assume he was a Dane, tried to jump onto my platform and I simply banged my shield into him and he disappeared between the ships where his mail took him instantly to the sea’s bed. The other Viking boarders had reached the stern rowers’ benches where they hacked and cursed at my men. I was behind and above them, and only had Sihtric for company, and the two of us could have stayed safe by remaining on the steering platform, but a man does not lead by staying out of a fight. “Stay where you are,” I told Sihtric, and jumped.
I shouted a challenge as I jumped and a tall man turned to face me. He had an eagle’s wing on his helmet, and his mail was fine, and his arms were bright with rings, and his shield was painted with an eagle, and I knew he must be the owner of the enemy ship. He was a Viking lord, fair-bearded and brown-eyed, and he carried a long- handled ax, its blade already reddened, and he swept it at me and I parried with the shield and his ax dropped at the last moment to cut at my ankles and, by the gift of Thor, the ship lurched and the ax lost its force in a rib of the trading ship. He kept my sword lunge away with his shield as he raised the ax again and I shield-charged him, throwing him back with my weight.
He should have fallen, but he staggered back into his own men and so stayed on his feet. I cut at his ankle and Serpent-Breath rasped on metal. His boots were protected as mine were by metal strips. The ax hurtled around and thumped into my shield, and his shield crashed into my sword and I was hurled back by the double blow. I hit the edge of the steering platform with my shoulderblades and he charged me again, trying to drive me down, and I was half aware of Sihtric still standing on the small stern platform and beating a sword at my enemy, but the blade glanced off the Dane’s helmet and wasted itself on the man’s mailed shoulders. He kicked at my feet, knowing I was unbalanced, and I fell.
“Turd,” he snarled, then took one backward step. Behind him his men were dying, but he had time to kill me before he died himself. “I am Olaf Eagleclaw,” he told me proudly, “and I will meet you in the corpse-hall.”
“Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I said, and I was still on the deck as he lifted his ax high.
And Olaf Eagleclaw screamed.
I had fallen on purpose. He was heavier than me, and he had me cornered, and I knew he would go on beating at me and I would be helpless to push him away, and so I had fallen. Sword blades were wasted on his fine mail and on his shining helmet, but now I thrust Serpent-Breath upward, under the skirt of his mail, up into his unarmored groin, and I followed her up, ripping the blade into him and through him as the blood drenched the deck between us. He was staring at me, wide-eyed and mouth open, as the ax fell from his hand. I was standing now, still hauling on Serpent-Breath, and he fell away, twitching, and I yanked her out of his body and saw his right hand scrabbling for his ax handle, and I kicked it toward him and watched his fingers curl around the haft before I killed him with a quick thrust into the throat. More blood spilled across the ship’s timbers.
I make that small fight sound easy. It was not. It is true I fell on purpose, but Olaf made me fall, and instead of resisting, I let myself drop. Sometimes, in my old age, I wake shivering in the night as I remember the moments I should have died and did not. That is one of those moments. Perhaps I remember it wrong? Age clouds old things. There must have been the sound of feet scraping on the deck, the grunt of men making a blow, the stench of the filthy bilge, the gasps of wounded men. I remember the fear as I fell, the gut-souring, mind-screaming panic of imminent death. It was but a moment of life, soon gone, a flurry of blows and panic, a fight hardly worth remembering, yet still Olaf Eagleclaw can wake me in the darkness and I lie, listening to the sea beat on the sand, and I know he will be waiting for me in the corpse-hall where he will want to know whether I killed him by pure luck or whether I planned that fatal thrust. He will also remember that I kicked the ax back into his grasp so that he could die with a weapon in his hand, and for that he will thank me.
I look forward to seeing him.
By the time Olaf was dead his ship was taken and his crew slaughtered. Finan had led the charge onto the
“I told you,” I said.
“A few of the rowers found weapons,” he said, dismissing their effort with a shrug. Then he pointed down into the
The five men were fishermen who told me they lived at a place called Fughelness. I hardly understood them.
