Raider's Wake: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 6) Read online

  He didn’t see Conandil coming until the last moment. He seemed to sense the movement to his left and turned to look. What he saw likely did not impress him; Conandil stood a little over five feet and weighed maybe seven stone. The first suggestion of a smile was forming on his lips when Conandil’s ax came down and split his skull, burying itself up to the handle in his head.

  The man’s eyes crossed and blood erupted from around the ax blade and he went down fast, driven down by the force of the blow. Conandil tried to hang on to the ax, but it was lodged firmly in the dead man’s skull and the handle was wet and it pulled from her grip.

  By the time the man had crumpled completely Conandil could see she had other problems. The raiders, who had been thrown back by the ferocity of Broccáin’s attack, had formed up again and now they were surging forward. Broccáin’s men were starting to waver and Conandil had the feeling they would break soon and start to run.

  She was right. The men who were not then engaged in the fight began to fade back, and others around them began to fade back as well. Conandil saw her husband looking desperately around, looking for men to stand with him. She saw his mouth open as he shouted something—encouragement, orders, curses—but she could not hear the words.

  Then everyone was running. Conandil was not aware of the moment it happened; it just seemed as if in one instant the men were fighting and in the next they were running and Conandil turned and ran as well, because there was nothing else to do. She ran with the house guard and with the few farmers who had stopped in their flight to join the battle line. She ran with the enemy at her heels and the ringfort gaping open a few hundred yards ahead.

  But then there were riders. Mounted warriors with long spears sweeping in on the left, racing ahead of the running men, pushing for the ringfort, cutting off that avenue of retreat.

  The rath…Conandil thought. Her only thought had been to get to the rath, the only place in all her life she had actually felt as if she was safe. And now, with the horsemen outpacing them, flanking them, driving them, the rath was beyond her reach and she felt the last bits of hope like rust flaking away.

  She kept running. She ran with the others. She caught a glimpse of Broccáin, last of the men to flee, and she wished he would run faster. She caught a glimpse of Bressal, carried like some carcass by two of his men, but she had to guess he still lived or surely they would have left him on the field. But mostly she just ran.

  The ringfort was half a mile from the shingle beach the fishermen used and the people were racing down the beaten road that ran to that place. Conandil had an idea that if they could get to the beach there might be boats enough for them to all get out to sea and escape. They did not have to get far, a few hundred yards would do it. Just beyond the distance of a spear throw, or a bow shot if these men had bows and arrows.

  Suddenly she felt hope. She did not know if the others were thinking about the boats or if they were just in mindless flight, but it didn’t matter. Once they reached the shore, saw the boats, they would think of that, too. And even if there were not boats enough for all, there would certainly be a place for Bressal and his son, Broccáin, and that was all that Conandil was worried about. She would happily die at the end of one of these bastard’s spears if she could see her beloved husband safe off in a boat.

  She stumbled, straightened, raced on. Her breath was coming harder, her chest burning, and she realized that Broccáin would never get in a boat if there were others still on the beach. He would be the last aboard; he would have it no other way. That was why she loved him, because that was the sort of man he was.

  The land sloped away down to the water, not one of the ragged cliffs that marked much of the coast but an easy grade down to the shingle. She wanted to yell out, to tell them about the boats, to order them to get in the boats and hope they obeyed.

  She crested the rise that ran down to the sea and saw the beach stretched out before her, as if it had been laid there for her inspection. A half a mile of sand and gravel from north to south, stretched out in a gentle curve and capped at either end by short, steep headlands that blocked the view of the coast beyond. The grassy meadows ended in a sharp brown line and after that there was only beach for fifty yards down to the breaking sea. There were a dozen boats there. They were floating free, three hundred feet from shore.

  Conandil let out a cry of despair as she stumbled the last hundred yards down to the beach. It was as far as she could go, as far as her gasping lungs would move her. She collapsed in the sand, sucking in air, was conscious of the many people swarming around her, unsure what to do now. She heard her husband calling orders, getting men in line, setting up whatever defense he could.

  She remembered Bressal, her father-in-law, their rí túaithe. She forced herself to her feet, staggered around the beach until she found where the men had deposited him in the sand. He was bloody for half a dozen wounds. His skin was very white, his eyes blinking slowly. Conandil grabbed the edges of the torn mail and pulled the tears wider to get to the wounds. She tore open his clothing underneath, pulled her knife and cut strips of cloth from Bressal’s cloak. She bound his wounds as best she could, but the mail shirt made it impossible to do so with much effect.

  An odd quiet had come to the beach and Conandil wondered why they had not yet been attacked. She looked up from her work. The raiders were drawn up in a line near the crest of the hill that ran up from the beach. They had swung around so they could approach from the south, why, Conandil could not guess. It would mean crossing more beach to bring the fight home. They seemed to be taking their time, getting their men in order, forming a line of shields. In front of her, on the beach, Broccáin was doing the same.

  She turned back to Bressal. The old man was shivering and his eyes were wide and his mouth partway open. Conandil put her arms behind him and lifted him, surprised she had the strength, and held him pressed to her. “I love you, Lord Bressal, and I thank you for your kindness and I commend your soul to God.” She heard the old man take a gasping breath, felt him shake one last time in her arms and then he was still.

  Conandil laid him down gently and closed his eyes. She looked up again. The line of men on the hill was advancing now, slowly, methodically, marching in a line that hardly wavered as it came toward them, stretched out over a hundred feet.

  “Stand ready!” she heard Broccáin shout. “Stand ready and murder these bastards when they come!”

  The enemy came closer, and their numbers were not so much greater than those of her husband’s were, and that gave her hope. Sure, the fighting men advancing on them seemed better armed, better trained. They were not just a small house guard and a handful of frightened farmers. Nonetheless, while they might be superior men-at-arms, they were not greatly superior.

  But whatever happened, Conandil would not be taken. That much she promised herself. She would not be a slave again. If the battle was lost to them, then Broccáin would certainly die fighting. And she would die with him.

  Bressal’s sword was long gone, but he had a seax on his belt and Conandil bent over and pulled it free. She was willing to die with Broccáin, but like her husband she would make the bastards buy her life at the cost of some of their own. Maybe she and her short sword could make a difference in the fight. She had already reduced the enemy’s numbers by one.

  She took a step forward, ready to take her place in the shield wall, even if she had no shield. And then she heard a sound behind her, an odd sound like a shovel thrust into gravel. She spun around. The sound was the bow of a ship, a heathen longship, running up on the beach.

  It had come around the headland to the north. Conandil knew that because a second one was just now appearing around that spit of land. She opened her mouth to shout a warning, but her words were cut off by the sound of the fin gall warriors screaming their battle cry as they leapt over the sides of their ship, and the hellish cries of the raiders on the hill, who were now charging down on Broccáin and his men.

  Conandil took a d
eep breath. She raised the seax high and with a warrior’s cry in her throat she charged at the Northmen leaping into the surf.

  Chapter Two

  He is "Simpleton" named who has naught to say,

  for such is the fashion of fools.

  Odin’s Quest after the Song Mead

  It had been raining nearly nonstop for a week. The various side roads that crisscrossed Vík-ló, and even the plank road that ran down the center of the longphort, were swamped with mud. It was early summer, yet everyone in the walled town felt the need to keep fires burning. And still the dampness pervaded everything: clothes, skin, blankets, food. The ale tasted watery, the bread was limp and soggy.

  But for all that, it was the fight over the pig that finally brought Thorgrim Night Wolf to enlightenment.

  He was sitting in the big chair with the carved arms and back that was set up in his hall. The fire in the hearth in the center of the room was built up high, the flames driving some of the gloom from the place. But the light could not reach everywhere, and the corners of the hall were still lost in deep shadow, despite it being early in the undorn, the midafternoon.

  Off in one of those dark corners he could hear his son, Harald, snoring where he slept on a pile of furs. It was unusual for Harald to be sleeping during the day. He was a young man of enormous energy and he usually channeled that energy into work.

  Since their return to Vík-ló following the disastrous raid on Glendalough, after their weeks in exile as they fought for vengeance and to reclaim their rightful place, Harald had hardly stopped. With a large gang of men under his command, he had repaired and expanded the plank road, built a pier out into the river that formed the shorefront of the longphort, repaired the damage that Thorgrim’s hall had suffered under Ottar’s brief rule, and strengthened the wall that separated Vík-ló from the Irish countryside.

  It had rained on and off since their return, but Harald and his men had pressed on through the downpours, despite the added difficulty and misery of working in the wet and the mud. But then one afternoon it had started in raining and it had not stopped, and it did not seem like it would ever stop. Harald and his men had accomplished everything of use they could think to do, and anything else seemed like just killing time, which no one had much interest in doing. So the days’ work came to an end, and now Harald slept.

  Thorgrim shifted uncomfortably in his chair as he kept his eyes on the man in front of him. The man was speaking and Thorgrim realized he had not been listening at all, had no idea what the man had said during the last few minutes of his rambling discourse. He felt a dull ache in his legs where Ottar’s sword had opened up two ugly lacerations. They were mostly healed, but they still gave him pain on occasion and he reckoned they always would. Just like the stab wound in his left shoulder. And all the other injuries he had suffered over the years.

  “And so I must have told him a dozen times, lord, a dozen at least,” the man was saying, “to keep the damned animal penned up.” Thorgrim straightened and forced himself to pay attention. “I thought he was just stupid at first, lord, but then I realized…”

  “Stupid, is it?” The second man turned on the first. “What you know…”

  A knife flew across the room and bounced off the wall opposite them, its trajectory posing no threat to any of the men in the hall, and from somewhere to Thorgrim’s left he heard Starri Deathless curse under his breath. It was Starri who had thrown the knife, apparently, and apparently he had intended for it to embed itself in the wall, or the man speaking, but in that he had utterly failed.

  Starri was drunk, and had been for two days now. It was as odd as Harald’s sleeping in midday. The Northmen, of course, were not generally adverse to drunkenness, which made Starri a great oddity, because he rarely let drink get the better of him. Thorgrim had always imagined that Starri lived naturally, every day, with the kind of liberating abandon that others found in ale and mead. Starri usually had no need for drink. But now it seemed he did.

  A drunk Starri was a frightening Starri. Starri Deathless was a berserker, one of those men who lapsed into a frenzy at the onset of battle, who fought with a madness that could only come from the gods. No helmet, no mail, just leggings and a battle ax in each hand; that was how Starri chose to go into a fight. He would not follow orders, and Thorgrim suspected he could not even hear them. But any warrior of the enemy within the reach of his weapons could reckon his lifespan in seconds.

  When Starri had started in on the mead he had turned predictably belligerent, challenging any who came in his way to a fight, a challenge that was quickly declined until Starri grew so frustrated he began to attack Thorgrim’s men indiscriminately. Harald and the massive Godi had managed to subdue him before he did anyone much damage, but Thorgrim could see this was not going to get better soon.

  As a short-term solution, and against the advice of the others, Thorgrim gave Starri even more mead, hoping that Starri would get drunk enough that he would become incapacitated. And it had worked, more or less. Soon he could hardly walk or speak, and any attempt to fight ended with him collapsing on the floor. Whenever he rallied he was given more mead. This approach was keeping everyone, including Starri, safe in the moment, but it was no solution. What the real solution was, Thorgrim did not know.

  “So, he says I let the pig out on purpose, lord, but it weren’t nothing like that….”

  The second man was talking now, Thorgrim realized. He shook his head to clear it and once again forced himself to listen. As Lord of Vík-ló it was Thorgrim Night Wolf’s duty to dispense justice. He was the ultimate arbiter, the final judge in all matters that took place in the longphort. It was a duty he took seriously. Or did. Until now.

  “I thought the pig was just getting out, lord, because they’re smart, as you know. But then I come to realize this one, Gellir here, he’s letting him out, lord, I swear by Odin himself he’s letting the pig out!”

  This was not the first time Thorgrim had heard this. Ulf was the baker in Vík-ló, Gellir was a woodcarver and Ulf’s neighbor. Gellir had a pig that kept getting free of its pen and rampaging through Ulf’s garden and even into his house.

  Or maybe the pig belonged to Ulf, and it was destroying Gellir’s property. Thorgrim could not recall.

  “Wait,” Thorgrim said, holding up a hand. “Did you witness this? Gellir setting the pig free? Or do you have any witnesses?” He was pleased that he had paid enough attention that he could ask a pertinent question. It might make these two believe he was giving their dispute some real thought.

  “No, lord, I didn’t see it, but the thing of it is, I saw to it the sty was secure, lord. There’s no way the beast got out on its own.”

  “Ah, damn the pig!” Starri cried from the corner of the hall. “I’ll…I swear by the gods, I’ll…” Thorgrim glanced over. Starri was trying to stand. He made it halfway to his feet, then collapsed again. Thorgrim nodded. No need to pour more drink into him yet.

  He turned back to Ulf and Gellir. “Continue,” he said, and the two men started in at the same time, talking over one another. Thorgrim raised a hand. “Ulf, continue,” he said.

  There was often a crowd of Thorgrim’s lead men there when he was listening to problems such as this, the few men Thorgrim trusted to offer opinions and judgment. But there was no one now, because everyone was so sick of hearing about Gellir and Ulf and the pig.

  How did we get here? Thorgrim wondered as Ulf’s words moved unheard past his ears. This whole situation had an uncomfortably familiar quality.

  It’s the rain, he thought. It never stopped raining long in that country of Ireland, a place clearly despised by the gods. Ireland and all their Christ-God worship, no wonder Odin poured water down on their heads without mercy. That was why this all seemed so familiar, like he had lived this all before.

  But that was not it, and he knew it. It was more than that. He thought back to the time just before they had headed off for the raid on Glendalough. Only a few months earlier, which was hard t
o believe, but there it was. They had spent the winter at Vík-ló, trapped in the longphort, working in the wet and the mud, miserable and confined. Tempers were short, fights breaking out.

  Ulf was still talking and Thorgrim heard the word “pig,” nothing more, but in that instant he realized three things with startling clarity. One was that the rain had stopped. The other was that he was done listening to these two men bicker over a pig.

  The third was that he now understood what the gods wanted him to do.

  He sat up suddenly from his slouched repose, a move so fast and surprising that Ulf stopped speaking in midsentence. Thorgrim cocked his ear toward the thatch roof overhead. He held up a hand for silence and the hall fell silent, save for the crackling and popping of the fire and Harald’s snoring.

  “Do you hear that?” Thorgrim asked. Silence. He answered his own question. “The rain has stopped.”

  There was a low murmur through the big room, but it did not reflect Thorgrim’s suddenly buoyant mood. It was not so unusual for the rain to stop for a while, as if teasing them, and then set in again twice as hard as before. But somehow Thorgrim knew this was different.

  “Godi, take a look at the sky,” Thorgrim said. Godi stood like a bear rising from sleep and crossed over to the oak door at the far end of the hall. He swung it open and looked outside. In the gray light they could see water streaming down off the edge of the roof, and beyond that the part of the longphort that was visible, all brown and gray and black.

  But there was a quality to the muted light coming in from the door that was unlike what they had seen over the past week.

  “Looks like the clouds are breaking, lord,” Godi reported. “Off to the east, they are breaking up.”

  Thorgrim nodded and he felt his sense of optimism growing now. He reminded himself that this was not the first time he had taken the end of the rain to be a sign from the gods. He had thought that just before they had sailed for Glendalough. But this was different. He felt it.