Perhaps he believed I would not come. Or perhaps he had realized that he could open the channel without attacking his brother’s men. Perhaps the six men were Erik’s warriors.
Or perhaps they were not.
“Kill them,” I said, hardly aware that I spoke, hardly aware of the decision I had made.
“Lord?” Clapa asked.
“Now!” I was already moving. “Fast, come on!”
The guard-ship’s crew were hurling spears at the six men, but none struck home as the three of us raced toward the post. Rypere, lithe and quick, ran ahead of me and I hauled him back with my left hand before drawing Serpent-Breath.
And so death came in the wolf-light before dawn. Death on a muddy bank. The six men reached the post before we did and one of them, a tall man, swung a war ax at the looped chain, but a spear flung from the ship thudded into his thigh and he staggered back, cursing, as his five companions turned in astonishment to face us. We had surprised them.
I screamed a huge challenge, an incoherent challenge, and leaped at the five men. It was a mad attack. A sword could have pierced my belly and left me writhing in blood, but the gods were with me. Serpent-Breath struck a shield plumb center and the man went backward, knocked off his feet and I followed him, trusting that Rypere and Clapa would keep his four comrades busy. Clapa was swinging his huge ax, while Rypere danced the sword-dance Finan had taught him. I slashed Serpent-Breath at the fallen man and her blade crashed on his helmet so that he fell back again and then I twisted to lunge Serpent-Breath at the tall man who had been trying to sever the chain.
He turned, his ax swinging, and there was enough light in the sky to let me see the bright red hair under his helmet’s rim and the bright red beard jutting beneath the helmet’s cheek-plates. He was Eilaf the Red, Haesten’s oath-man, and I knew then what must have happened in this treacherous morning.
Haesten had set the fire.
And Haesten must have taken ?thelflaed.
And now he wanted the channel opened so that his ships could escape.
So now we had to keep the channel closed. We had come to open it, and now we would fight on Sigefrid’s side to keep it shut up, and I rammed the sword at Eilaf who somehow sidestepped the blade, and his ax struck me at the waist, but there was no power in his blow and I scarce felt the blade’s impact through my cloak and mail. A spear hissed past me, thrown from the ship, then another thudded hard into the post and stayed there, quivering. I had stumbled past Eilaf, my footing uncertain in the marshy ground.
He was quick and I had no shield. The ax swung and I ducked as I turned back to him, then thrust Serpent- Breath two-handed at his belly, but his shield took the lunge. I heard splashing behind me and I guessed the guard-ship’s crew were coming to our aid. A man screamed where Clapa and Rypere fought, but I had no time to discover what happened there. I thrust again, and a sword is a faster weapon than an ax and Eilaf the Red was still drawing his right arm back and had to move the shield to deflect my blade and I flicked it up and slid it scraping and ringing across his shield’s iron rim and banged her tip into his skull beneath his helmet’s edge.
I felt bone break. The ax was coming, but slowly, and I caught the haft with my left hand and hauled on it as Eilaf staggered, his eyes glazed from the wound I had given him. I kicked his spear-pierced leg, wrenched Serpent- Breath free, then stabbed her down. She punctured his mail to make him jerk like an eel on a spear, then he thumped into the mud and tried to pull his ax free of my grasp. He was snarling at me, his forehead a mass of blood. I swore at him, kicked his hand free of the ax’s handle, slashed Serpent-Breath down on his neck and watched him quiver. Men from the guard-ship’s crew ran past me to kill Eilaf’s men and I snatched Eilaf’s helmet off his bloody head. It dripped with gore, but I rammed it over my leather headgear and hoped the cheek-plates would conceal my face.
The men who had come from the ship might well have seen me at Sigefrid’s feast, and if they recognized me they would turn their swords on me. There were ten or eleven of the crewmen and they had killed Eilaf the Red’s five companions, but not before Clapa had been given his last wound. Poor Clapa, so slow in thought, so gentle in manner, so strong in war, and now he lay, mouth open, blood spilling down his beard, and I saw a tremor in his body and jumped to him and found a fallen sword that I put into his empty right hand and closed his fingers about the hilt. His chest had been mangled by an ax blow so that ribs and lung and mail were tangled in a bloody, bubbling mess.
“Who are you?” a man shouted.
“Ragnar Olafson,” I invented a name.
“Why are you here?”
“Our ship stranded on the coast,” I said, “we were coming to find help.”
Rypere was in tears. He was holding Clapa’s left hand, saying his friend’s name over and over.
We make friends in battle. We tease each other, jeer at each other and insult each other, yet we also love each other. In battle you become closer than brothers, and Clapa and Rypere were friends who had known that closeness, and now Clapa, who was Danish, was dying and Rypere, who was Saxon, was weeping. Yet his tears were not from weakness, but from rage, and as I held Clapa’s dying hand tight on the sword hilt I watched Rypere turn and lift his own sword. “Lord,” he said, and I swiveled to see still more men coming down the bank.
Haesten had sent a whole crew to open the channel. Their ship had been beached fifty paces down the bank and, beyond it, I could see a mass of other ships waiting to row out to sea when the channel was cleared. Haesten and all his men were fleeing Beamfleot, and they were taking ?thelflaed with them, and beyond the creek, on the steep hill beneath the burning hall, I could see Sigefrid and Erik’s men running recklessly down the precipitous slope to assault the treacherous Haesten.
Whose men now came at us in overwhelming numbers.
“Shield wall!” a voice roared. I have no idea who shouted and only remember that I thought we must die here on this muddy bank and I patted Clapa’s bloody cheek and saw his ax lying in the mud and I felt the same rage that Rypere felt. I sheathed Serpent-Breath and snatched up the huge, wide-bladed, long-bearded war ax.
Haesten’s crew came screaming, driven by an urgency to escape the creek before Sigefrid’s men came to slaughter them. Haesten was doing his best to slow that pursuit by burning Sigefrid’s ships where they were beached on the far side of the creek. I was only dimly aware of those new fires, of flames rippling quick up tarred rigging, of smoke blowing across the incoming tide, but I had no time to watch, only to brace myself as the screaming men came closer.
And then they charged the last few paces, and we should have died there, but whoever had shouted at us to form a shield wall had chosen his place well, for one of Caninga’s many ditches snaked across our front. It was not much of a ditch, scarce a muddy rivulet, but our attackers stumbled on its slippery sides and we went forward, our turn to scream, and the fury in me became the red rage of battle. I swung the huge ax at a man recovering from his stumble and my war shout rose to a scream of triumph as my blade slashed through a helmet, chopped into a skull, and sliced a brain in two. Blood sluiced black into the air as I still screamed and jerked the ax free and swung it again. I knew nothing but madness, anger, and desperation. Battle-joy. Blood-mad. Warriors to the slaughter, and our whole shield wall had moved to the ditch’s edge where our enemy was floundering and we had a moment’s furious slaughter, blades in the moonlight, blood black as pitch, and men’s screams as wild as the wild birds’ screams in the darkness.
Yet we were outnumbered and we were outflanked. We should have died there about the post that held the guard-ship’s chain, except that more men dropped overboard from that tethered ship and came running through the shallows to assail our attackers’ left flank. But Haesten’s men still outnumbered us, and the men in the ranks behind pushed past their dying comrades to attack us. We were forced slowly back, as much by their weight as by their weapons. I had no shield. I was swinging the ax two-handed, snarling, keeping men at bay with the heavy blade, though a spearman, out of reach of my ax blade, jabbed repeatedly at me. Rypere, beside me, had found a fallen shield and did his best to cover me, but the spearman managed to dodge the shield and stabbed low to slice open my left calf. I hurled the ax and the heavy blade smashed into his face as I slid Serpent-Breath from her scabbard and let her scream her war song. My wound was trivial, the wounds Serpent-Breath gave were not. A demented man, mouth agape to reveal toothless gums, flailed an ax at me and Serpent-Breath took his soul with elegant ease, so elegant that I laughed in triumph as I wrenched the blade from his upper belly. “We’re holding them!” I bellowed, and no one noticed I shouted in English, but though our small shield wall was indeed holding firm just in front of the great post, our attackers had outflanked the left of our line and the men there, attacked from two sides,
