‘Haakon!’ I roared.
With every heartbeat I was growing closer, while the clash of arms and the shouts of men were growing more distant. He couldn’t ignore me any longer. At the sound of his name this time he stopped and turned to face me. Even though the nasal-guard of my helmet obscured my face, he must have recognised me.
He must have seen, too, that there was no longer any use in running. Fixing his gaze upon me, he drew his bloodied sword and stood his ground as I charged towards him. He realised that his time had come, but he was proud. I’d heard long ago that amongst the heathens to die without a weapon in one’s hand was the worst dishonour, for it meant they would not be permitted to dine with their gods in whatever afterlife it was they believed in. Whether that was true or not, and whether that thought was in his mind, I don’t know. More probably, like any man whose life had been spent travelling the sword-path, he considered it nobler to go to his grave fighting, a warrior to the end, rather than suffer the coward’s death and be cut down from behind.
A howl left his lips as he ran, staggering, at me, his sword raised high, his golden arm-rings shining. His braid had come loose and his greying hair flew behind him. He realised, I think, that I was responsible for burning his hall, for destroying everything he had spent so many years fighting to gain. He knew now what I had felt that night at Dunholm, when so much had been taken from me, when my own world had crumbled about me.
Our blades clashed with a shriek of steel, and then I was past him, turning sharply before coming at him again. I parried the blow he aimed at my horse’s neck, and the one after that, and the one after that, trusting in the steel not to shear, all the while waiting for my opportunity to come, as I knew it must. Waiting for him to give me the opening I needed. Blood trickled from a gash at his hip, and each movement he made seemed unsteadier than the last. He was slow to turn, and slower still between each sword-stroke.
‘Die,’ he yelled in that coarse voice of his, and he was weeping now. Weeping because he knew that his end was near. Weeping because he knew that I was toying with him. ‘Die, you bastard, you Norman filth! Die!’
He swung at my thigh, but it was the swing of a desperate man. Again I met his blade with mine, and this time I was able to force his down, out of position, before backhanding my sword-point across the side of his head. He was only just within my reach and so I managed only a glancing blow, but it was enough to rob him of his balance and send him to the ground with limbs flailing and teeth flying. His sword slipped from his fingers, falling away uselessly into the grass. I slid from the saddle and stood over him. He gazed back up at me, rasping heavily, his eyes moist. A bright gash decorated his cheek, and a crimson stream ran from the corner of his mouth.
Some way off, Danish voices shouted out in despair. So desperate had they been to reach the sanctuary of the woods that his remaining huscarls hadn’t noticed that their lord was no longer with them. Not until it was too late. They turned, and began rushing back to try to save him, but they were too far away to do anything.
I pointed the tip of my blade at the pale skin at Haakon’s neck. ‘Aren’t you going to plead for mercy?’
He stared up at me, not in fear but in something more like resignation. ‘Would you grant it if I asked for it?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘But I want to hear you beg.’
He smiled that humourless smile I’d seen before. Of course he would not beg. Nor, had I been in his place, would I.
‘She moaned like a whore,’ he said instead.
‘What?’ I’d thought he might ask me to make his end quick, or say any number of other things, but I hadn’t been expecting that.
‘Night after night, she moaned when she was in my bed, when I was inside her. She was my favourite. Did you know that?’
‘Enough,’ I said. Tears welled in my eyes, and my throat stuck. ‘No more.’
‘I loved her,’ he murmured, a hint of sadness in his tone. He closed his eyes as if recalling some long- cherished memory. ‘Yes,’ he said with a heavy sigh, ‘I loved her.’
I couldn’t bear to listen any longer. Summoning all my strength, all my hatred, I plunged my sword into his throat, thrusting it hard so that it tore through flesh, sliced through bone, and I was roaring as I did so, roaring for all the world to hear, allowing the anguish that for so long had been buried within my heart to finally let itself be heard, until there was no more breath in my chest, and I had nothing left to give.
Gritting my teeth, I ripped the blade free. My heart was pounding, my whole body trembling and dripping with sweat. Falling to my knees, I wiped the moisture from my eyes and gazed down at Haakon’s bestilled, bloodied corpse. In that instant, all the grief and pain and doubt and despair that for three years had plagued and tortured me were at once dispelled.
It was done.
Twenty-nine
With Haakon dead, the rest of his retainers fled. Jarnborg was ablaze, sending up great plumes of smoke into the sky. A bitter wind gusted from the west, carrying those plumes across the water along with the cries of the injured and the dying. Sword-blades and spear-hafts clattered against iron shield-rims as our men raised the battle-thunder in triumph.
‘
I was still kneeling beside the Dane’s limp body, hardly daring to believe that it was true, that he was dead and that our struggle was at an end, when Magnus called my name. He hobbled towards me, wincing with every step, his horse having bolted. Luckily he’d managed to free himself from the stirrups before it did, and apart from the injury to his foot I was glad to see he was unharmed.
‘I only wish I could have killed him myself,’ he said as he stood beside me. Together we stared down at the Dane: at his face, strangely serene in death; at his unmoving chest.
I nodded but said nothing. Had it been the other way around and his been the hand that slew Haakon, no doubt I would have felt equally cheated. But I also knew that only one of us could have delivered the killing blow, and I was glad it had been me.
He must have guessed my thoughts. ‘You did the right thing, Tancred,’ he said, and clapped a hand on my shoulder as if to assure me that he did not bear any resentment. ‘If it had been your horse that had fallen, I wouldn’t have turned back to help you. So I don’t blame you. You did what had to be done, for both of us.’
His tone was not grudging, but sincere. He smiled, and it was a smile of relief as much as anything else. Relief at having survived this day. Relief that justice, at long last, had been done.
We ventured back towards the rest of our host. Some of the enemy still lived, but not many. Magnus’s huscarls remembered only too well how Haakon had betrayed their lord, and held anyone who had thrown in their lot with him in the lowest contempt, while the men that Wace and Eudo and Aubert had brought with them had been told of the Dane’s part in the massacre of near two thousand Normans at Dunholm, and were not inclined to show forgiveness. And so the slaughter still went on as our men set about pursuing the enemy, cutting them down from behind and decorating the backs of their skulls with bright gashes. A handful had fled on to the sands, perhaps hoping to reach their ships drawn up further along the shore and make an escape by water. When they realised how few they were in number, though, they abandoned their weapons and whatever armour they possessed, deciding instead to try to swim across the bay to safety. They waded out from the shore, crashing through the waves, but they didn’t get far before our men were upon them, staining the foaming sea-froth pink with Danish blood.
‘No mercy!’ I heard a familiar voice shout from across the field, and saw Eudo on a horse that he must have seized from one of Haakon’s hearth-troops. In one hand he held a bloodied spear, while his banner was in the other. Gradually those around him took up the cry, until a dozen Normans were chanting as if with a single voice: ‘No mercy!’
Wace was with him, albeit on foot, and Tor and the Gascon and Serlo too, all charging behind the tusked boar, filling the air with their battle-joy, delighting in the glory of the kill.
With those roars and chants ringing out, Magnus and I trudged across a meadow trampled flat by the
