Fin Gall (23 page)

             
This is ridiculous,
Harald thought.
Why were they bothering with all this talk? Two guards, armed only with knives and those awkward spears, and not in the least prepared for a fight?
Harald had been bred to combat since he was a child, had already been in more fights than most professional soldiers, and he knew when a thing could be easily done.

             
Am I strong enough?
he wondered. He could feel the wasting effect of his sickness in his arms and legs.

             
Yes.
The walk and the food earlier had done him good. He might not be in shape to charge a shieldwall, but he could certainly best these two ill-prepared guards.

             
With that he flung out his arm and yanked the spear from the hands of the guard closest to him. The guard, surprised by the lighting move, made no effort to resist. He was just starting to make some noise, utter some protest, when Harald drove the butt of the spear into his stomach. He doubled over with the sound of air being driven from him and Harald caught the man’s head with his knee and snapped him back, flinging him to the dirt.

             
He whirled around just as the other guard was lunging with his spear, but Harald knew he would do that so he sidestepped the thrust and using his spear like a staff in those close quarters hit the man on the side of the head. The wooden shaft made a dull clanging sound on the guard’s helmet. The guard staggered sideways and Harald swung the spear the other way and slammed it into the other side of his head.

             
The guard went down on his knees. Harald drew the spear back and directed the wicked iron point at the place in the man’s chest where it would kill him quick and silent. He tensed for the thrust, then felt a hand on his arm, holding him back, and he heard Brigit say in a sharp whisper, “No!”

             
He turned his head to look at her. Brigit’s eyes were wide and she was shaking her head. For some reason she did not want him to kill the guard. In the intensity of the moment he had forgotten she was there. The dogs were bouncing around, panting and growling, but did not interfere.

             
He is one of her people,
Harald realized. She was Irish, just like the guard. She was not a Norseman. He would have to remember that, if they were going to spend their lives together.

             
Harald nodded and was rewarded with the look of relief on Brigit’s face. The guard was still on his knees, still partly stunned. With the tip of the spear, Harald flipped the man’s helmet off and then swung the shaft like a club, catching the guard on the side of the head and knocking him out cold. He would live, but he would raise no alarms for a while.

             
Harald dropped the spear and grabbed the guard’s legs and dragged him into the shadows of the gate, then did the same with the other. He pulled the knives from their sheaths and stuck them in his rope belt, then gathered up the spears. He was breathing hard and his legs felt wobbly.

             
Brigit hefted the heavy bar that held the gate shut and pushed it open, just enough for a person to squeeze through.

             
“Come along,” Harald said in a whisper, gesturing for Brigit to follow him through the gate, but Brigit hesitated, shaking her head. Harald gestured again and again Brigit shook her head, pointing at him and then pointing through the open gate, as if she wanted him to go on by himself.

             
Harald frowned in frustration. With the love that they shared, words had not been necessary, until now. How could he assure her that it would be all right, that he would protect her? He shook his head, beckoned, but still she would not follow.

             
“You...go...alone,” she said. Harald could make no sense of the words, but he guessed she was saying she was too frightened to carry out her plan of running off with him. But he was a man now, not a boy, and Thorgrim had taught him that being a man meant, among other things, being decisive, taking charge.

             
He shifted the spears to his left hand and took a quick step toward Brigit. Before she could react, before she could even move, he bent over, wrapped his right arm around her thighs and straightened, with Brigit draped over his shoulder.

             
“Oh!” she said, a little exclamation of surprise, with just a hint of outrage. In three steps Harald was out the gate, bearing his true love off to their new life together.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The morning sleeper

has much undone.

The quick will catch the prize.

                                  Hávamál

              T

he weather had been remarkable - five days of sunshine on the Irish coast. But with the coming of dawn came the end of that good fortune.

              During the dark hours, a light mist had begun that coated everything with wet. Then, soon after first light, the storm clouds rolled in low and the rain began to fall in earnest.

             
Magnus Magnusson, sitting his horse on the top of the rise and looking out over the ocean, felt the first rivulets of rain working their way through his cloak and between the links of his mail, making cold wet spots on his wool tunic beneath. He wiped the water from his eyes, ran his fingers through his beard, and stared at the place where the longship had disappeared into the rain and the mist.

             
“This was a mistake,” said Cormac Ua Ruairc, also mounted and standing beside Magnus. “We were fools to have not taken them when we had the chance. Now, who knows if we will ever see them again?”

             
Cormac was not talking to Magnus, but rather to the man mounted on his other side, Niall Cuarán, who was second in command of the Irish troops. Niall was what the Irish called a rí túaithe which, as Magnus understood it, meant he fancied himself king of some insignificant little shit-hole.

             
“It was not a mistake,” Magnus said. It was supremely irritating to him when Cormac spoke as if he was not there, which he found Cormac did quite often.

             
“If this rain does not lift,” Niall said to Cormac, “We’ll never know where they might come ashore.”

             
You would,
Magnus thought,
if you knew the first thing about ships, you ignorant, self-satisfied, sheep-buggering Irish fool.

             
“They have only their oars to move them. I saw to that,” Magnus said. “They can move no faster than a man on horse back, riding at a moderate pace. Nor can they come ashore just anywhere. There are only certain places one can beach a longship. If we follow on shore, with riders spaced a mile or so apart, and watch the beaches within a day’s ride, then, by the Hammer of Thor, we’ll find them.”

             
Cormac and Niall exchanged glances. Magnus was certain he saw a trace of a smirk on Niall’s face. “By the Hammer of Thor, indeed,” Cormac said, and he and Niall together made the Christian gesture, touching forehead, stomach and shoulders.

             
Magnus did not know what that charm was supposed to accomplish. He did know he had had a belly-full of their condescension.

             
Magnus wheeled his horse in front of Cormac, so he and the exiled ruiri of Gailenga were face to face. “Do not forget it, Cormac...”

             
“Lord Cormac,” Cormac corrected.

             
“Do not forget it, Cormac, that you cannot find the crown without me, and without the crown you will never be more than what you are right now, which is a minor king who does not even rule the pathetic little cow pasture he calls a kingdom. Crawl to your god if you will, and I will bargain with mine, but do not presume to mock me again, or by my gods we will cross swords.”

             
He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks, pounded off toward the soggy field where the servants were just starting to break camp. Even with the cold rain running down his face he could feel his skin burning with anger.

             
Magnus and Cormac, the leaders of the Danish and Irish alliance, already a shaky coalition, were not the only ones watching as the
Red Dragon
disappeared into the rain and fog. Huddled in the brush, his fur wrapped around his shoulders, Thorgrim Night Wolf watched as his ship was seemingly swallowed in the mist. An uneasy feeling - Thorgrim did not like to be separated from his ship - and the way the vessel slowly faded from view looked so much as if it was moving from this world into another that it made Thorgrim nervous.

             
Judging from the murmuring and shifting of the dozen men behind him, he was not the only one who felt that way.

             
He reached under his fur cape and fingered the two silver pieces hanging from a cord around his neck - a Hammer of Thor given to him by his father many years before, and a cross, give to him by Morrigan in the prison in Dubh-linn. Between the two he felt he was pretty well covered.

             
“Stop that muttering, you cowardly, superstitious old women,” Thorgrim scolded as he twisted around, still in his crouching stance. The rain was running though his hair and beard and down his face. He wiped the water away. Normally his helmet would have provided some protection, but that was long gone, taken by the Danes, and the few helmets they had plundered from the mead hall had gone to his men.

             
Morrigan was next to him, the cowl of her cape soaked through and plastered to her head. She had made it clear that she did not wish to stay aboard the longship without Thorgrim, particularly as Ornolf’s comments were growing more lewd and direct. Thorgrim agreed she should come ashore. Someone who knew the land and the language would be helpful.

             
There was a rustling in the brush and then Egil Lamb appeared through the bracken. “They left one man behind to watch the beach,” he reported. “Now they have one man less, and Egil Lamb has a shield.”

             
He swung the shield off his back. Round, with a protruding, pointed boss, the shield was covered in thick leather. It was unpainted.

             
“That’s no Danish shield,” Thorgrim said.

             
“No. This fellow was Irish, by the looks of him,” Egil Lamb agreed.

             
Thorgrim frowned. He met Morrigan’s eyes and she looked uncertain as well. If these were not Orm’s men following them, then who were they?

             
“Let us go,” Thorgrim said. He moved cautiously out of the brush and looked along the rolling fields in every direction. They were alone. He stood and stepped into the open, feeling very exposed, and his men followed.

             
They moved up the hill, walking in a loose swine array. The country was open, which would allow them to see an attack from a ways off, which was good, because they still had a dearth of weapons. Each man had a sword or a spear, at least, but there were only six shields, including Egil Lamb’s, and four helmets between the dozen of them. If they did not have surprise, they had practically nothing.

             
They crossed a half a mile of wet grass, skirting behind stands of brush and trees to keep out of sight. The country looked quite different to Thorgrim in the dim daylight than it had at night in his wolf dream, but still he recognized the land and knew without doubt where he was going.

             
“We’ll keep below the crest of this hill, work over to that stand of brush,” Thorgrim said, pointing toward the unruly thicket that stood near the high point of the hill they were climbing. Hunched over, moving fast, the fin gall worked their way along the ridge and shuffled into the brush. Thorgrim heard low curses, stifled shouts of pain as his men took twigs in the eyes and stumbled over twisted vines.

             
They came at last to a place where they could look out across the fields. Half a mile away, the enemy was breaking camp. The big tents came down in balloons of fabric as the center poles were removed. A dozen or so men swarmed around the camp. Two horse carts stood ready to accept their loads.

             
A dozen men,
Thorgrim thought,
and the rest are off hunting for us.
If he were looking out for a longship in this weather, Thorgrim imagined, he would have riders spread out along the coast, and racing ahead to find the beaches where the longship might land. He would leave just a handful of men, servants mostly, with a minimal guard to protect against bandits and to break camp.

             
He imagined that that was exactly what Orm’s man had done.

             
It took the Danes another hour to pack the tents and poles on the wagons and stow away the casks, crates, iron pots, spits, all the accouterments of a field campaign. Thorgrim wondered how these people, moving at that glacial pace, had ever made it out of Denmark, never mind taking Dubh-linn from the Norwegians.

             
Still, he was grateful for the lack of enthusiasm for their job, as it made his easier. He led his men further north along the muddy track - it could hardly be called a road - that ran across the fields, along which the baggage train would have to travel. They came to a place where the path split an oak grove before climbing up to higher ground. Thorgrim spread his men out on either side of the road, nestled deep into the undergrowth, and there they waited.

             
Thorgrim was just starting to think he had made a mistake, that the baggage train was heading off in some other direction, when he heard the first squeak of wooden axles and the muted thumps of horses’ hooves over the sound of rain on leaves. He glanced to his left. Skeggi Kalfsson and Svein the Short were crouched there with weapons drawn and faces intent on the path beyond. To his right, Thorgerd Brak, recovered from the wound he received escaping Dubh-linn, was ready as well, and two others that Thorgrim could not see through the brush. On the other side of the road, well hidden, waited Egil Lamb and the five men with him.

             
Thorgrim’s breathing became quick and shallow as he tensed for the fight. He felt his mind sharpen until nothing else existed save for the world of battle. And then the enemy was there.

             
A rider came first. He wore a mail shirt and cone-shaped helmet and carried a bright colored shield and there was no doubt that this fellow was a Dane. Thorgrim wished to Thor and Odin he had archers who could take these men down first, but that was not to be. Their bows and arrows had been taken in Dubh-linn, and there were none to be had in the mead hall.

             
And then the thought of archers and tactics and such went right out of Thorgrim’s head, like ripples in a pond that spread out and disappear. He felt the war cry in his throat and before he could even think about it he was on his feet, shouting like a madman, howling and charging out of the brush and right for the mounted Dane.

             
The surprise could not have been more complete, and it was clear from the look on the Dane’s face, in those last seconds before he died on Thorgrim’s sword, that he was not sure these creatures charging from the brush were men at all. Ireland was a haunted place. It was a fact well known to all Northmen.

             
The Dane was still slumped over in the saddle when Thorgrim pulled his sword free and whirled around to take on the next comer. Half the party with the baggage train were unarmed slaves, and they were running as hard as they could back down the road, and Thorgrim’s men let them go.

             
Skeggi Kalfsson and Hall Gudmundarson were locked in a fight with the man at the lead wagon, a huge man with thick beard and a great swath of hair that even in the rain refused to lie down on his head. He was lunging and parrying with his spear while the two Norsemen tried to get past the lethal point to put their swords to work. They looked like nothing so much as dogs baiting a furious bear.