Giuki that his boat was being stolen or she would never get to Helgi. She grabbed at the back of the nearest Viking she saw. ‘Your ship is-’
She never finished the sentence. The man spun round and smashed his fist into her face. White light splintered her vision and she went spinning to the sand. It was Kylfa, whose brother she had killed.
‘There’s my weregild, whore.’
He drew his knife and jumped on top of her. She regained her vision, though it was a blur, the beach was cold on her back, the moon danced behind the man’s shoulder. The man raised his knife and stabbed it down, but then something happened that Aelis did not understand. The man’s arm disappeared, there was a flood of red, a scream and he fell away from her.
A big arm was round her, bundling her towards the drakkar.
‘You should choose your friends more carefully, lady,’ said Ofaeti. She looked back at the sand. The arm of the man who had attacked her was lying five paces from his body and the top of his skull was caved in at the front from a second axe blow.
‘They are stealing your ship! They are stealing you ship!’ screamed Aelis as she was bundled down the beach.
A couple of Giuki’s warriors heard her and came sprinting.
Ofaeti heaved her over the low side of the longship, where Fastarr took charge of her. Then he turned to face the men rushing towards him. The first ran into his shield as if into a wall and bounced back into the man behind. Ofaeti sunk his axe into the first man’s head, released it and drew his knife to stab the second through the belly.
Aelis got to her feet, her senses scrambled. She stared up at the monastery. A light was there but not like any light she had ever seen. It was as if the moon had plunged into the body of the building and was now shining from within it. Again she heard that howl. Where was it coming from? She found herself answering it.
‘I am here,’ she said, ‘and I am coming to you.’
Ofaeti had retrieved his axe and was in the boat as it slipped free of the sand, but four of Giuki’s Vikings had followed him in. One ran towards Aelis, his axe high, and she cringed, but he went straight past her, smashing the axe into the ropes that tied the rudder to the back of the ship. In a couple of blows he’d cut them and made the boat unsailable at anything above a crawl. Then he turned to face the berserkers.
Aelis curled up into a ball in the bottom of the ship. There was screaming, shouting, a smack next to her. The fat Viking had fallen and crashed to the boards beside her. The other berserkers were fighting fiercely but they were being overwhelmed. She saw Varn lose his axe and four of his fingers to a seax blow, but the berserker grabbed at his man and leaped over the rail of the ship into the sea with him, pushing his head under the water to drown him.
The battle on the beach was still raging, though Giuki’s men were outnumbered and giving ground towards the sea. Everywhere along the wide strand men lay, knelt or sat dying, some quietly rocking, nursing wounds to the stomach or the chest, others with no sign of damage unmoving on the sand. All around them the living fought, seax against spear, spear against sword against axe. Men staggered, screamed, hacked and were hacked. Shields were split, weapons broken, helmets were struck from heads to lie battered in the sand. Warriors were swinging at each other like drunks, some pausing to catch their breath halfway through an encounter; fighters on both sides wheezing and panting until they were strong enough to renew the fight or until someone cut them down from behind.
Giuki had two swords, parrying with one and attacking with the other in the Frankish style. Three men lay dead at his feet, though he was fighting a wearying encounter with a spearman — unable to get close enough to strike at him, always having to look to defence first, never getting the chance to attack. The battle’s rhythm had changed. Where it had been a frenzy, now it was a sporadic and fitful thing, each man thinking more of his own security than his enemy’s harm.
On the longship, though, the fight was still fierce. Two men crashed past Aelis down the length of the boat. Both had lost their weapons and were wrestling, kicking and biting. A spear stabbed into the deck by her thigh. A berserker ran through a man right in front of her, and she watched him fall and die at her feet, the berserker cursing as he struggled to free his sword from the corpse.
There was a judder and the boat tipped sideways. Aelis realised it was almost free of the beach. She forced herself to her feet — she needed to get to Giuki. She leaped for the side of the drakkar but a berserker caught her in one hand despite panting like a dog coming in from the hunt. The berserkers on the boat had finished off Giuki’s men but they had paid a high price. Only four of them were left. The fat Viking had got up from where he’d fallen but he was bent double. At first she thought he was hurt but she saw he was only panting with exhaustion, fighting to regain his breath.
How long had the fight been going on? It seemed for ever. The beach was strewn with the wounded and the dying. The sides had now parted and stood facing each other, almost too weary to even insult each other. One warrior actually sat down, eyes on his enemy twenty paces away but catching his breath while he had the chance. Then the fight was renewed as if the men were fresh to it. Aelis saw terrible sights: a man impaled by a spear, his legs pumping like a bug on a pin, a man crawling for his weapon despite his hand being cut off.
Then a voice: ‘Hold! I ask for peace!’ It was Giuki.
The sides were glad of the rest and backed away from each other. Giuki moved between the warriors. His shield had only one plank remaining on its boss and his remaining sword was bent almost into an L. Other warriors were in the same condition, trying to straighten their weapons with their feet but finding no purchase on the sand.
‘Brothers, we have fought a good scrap, but now it seems that the profit in it is over. There’ll be none of us left by morning. Surely this is the time to call a truce. Make peace even. You’re good foes, lads; you could become good friends. Freyr knows we could do with your numbers now.’
A man from the other side put up his hand, panting and shaking his head. ‘There is too much blood here to forget.’
‘On both sides. We have served each other amply.’
Ofaeti touched Aelis’s arm. ‘We are too few now to sail this boat. Come away. I offer you safety and a guarantee you will not be raped.’ His voice was low but insistent.
Aelis shook free of him. ‘I will not be sold by pirates,’ she said. ‘I will stay here in the ship.’
‘You will be sold, lady, one way or the other, as all women are, high-born or low. You are unusual, however, because you get to choose your seller.’
Giuki was addressing the warriors on the beach again: ‘We were many men when this battle began. Now we have a hundred men, sixty between us truly able. It’s time to act together brothers, though the blood we have spilled makes that difficult.’
Aelis spoke to Ofaeti: ‘You are in my grip. Each side thinks you belong to the other. While they do, you live. As soon as they discover you are interlopers you will die.’
Ofaeti smiled. ‘You would have been a power behind the Frankish throne, lady.’
‘I still intend to be,’ said Aelis.
‘You have been in my care once and come to no harm. Be in it again.’
‘I am going to Helgi.’
Ofaeti laughed. ‘As are we. Let us guard you. I promise you can choose the king I sell you to. We can even try to ransom you to your brother. Come on. These are wild men and will slit each other’s throats by morning. We can walk off this beach while they are busy with other things.’
Aelis saw the sense in what Ofaeti said. She looked at the men Giuki was negotiating with. Could he control them as he controlled he own? And Ofaeti had acted with decency in the past — and when he had no profit in so doing. He had thought her a slave and treated her kindly. How much more care would he take of her now her true identity was known to him?
She let Ofaeti take her hand. Creeping to the side of the boat furthest from the carnage on the beach, they climbed down, Fastarr, Egil and Astarth following, their eyes flicking back to their dead fellows on the boat.
All the time the two groups of warriors were talking. ‘We must think on this,’ said a tall Viking. ‘You are the aggressors here and owe us compensation. There can be no deal without it, for the sake of our honour.’
Giuki nodded. ‘We have a girl with us, a Frankish princess. She is worth many pounds of silver in ransom.’
