Odin’s Child (27 page)

Out of the tail of my eye I saw a scythe blade flash up and down, sending a head spinning into the air—a farmer mowing us down like wheat-stalks. I drew my sword and when he swung his arms back for another stroke, darted round behind him and severed his backbone.

“Up and follow me!” yelled someone ahead, hewing a hole with his axe in the enemy's line. Shouting Olaf's name, we poured in after him. But we were five ranks deep and they were twelve. To the cry of “On farmers!” they pressed us back over the blood-slick grass. Ogmund had been beside me a moment before; I couldn't see him now.

Those were the first few minutes.

We had not joined battle until the sun was high in the sky, and it was hours since we had last eaten or drunk. Now, toiling under a fierce July sun, hunger and thirst began to tell on us. We charged, fell back, charged again—but fewer each time and weaker—while our arms ached and our sweat blinded us.

My new shield was soon hacked to splinters. I threw it away and fought with my sword, two-handed. Putting myself at the front of every charge, I rushed to wherever the fighting was fiercest, reckless of my life, meaning to spite Kalf by dying. But though I faced man after man, death eluded me that day.

When the sun was well past his zenith and our dead lay upon the ground in heaps, the king's horn sounded behind us. I glanced over my shoulder to see Olaf himself, with his standard bearer and his skalds all around him, pushing through our ragged line to fight at last in the van and give us heart for one last effort. From where I stood in the crush of battle, the banners of the jarls that fluttered in different parts of the field seemed to turn, swoop, and dive on Olaf's white banner like falcons on a swan.

By this time, the battle was already lost. The Swedish freebooters on our left, who'd had no stomach for the fight to begin with, were in full retreat, while on our right the contingent of Norwegians that served under Dag Hringsson, the king's kinsman, had been outflanked and was being cut to pieces. With both flanks gone, the shield-wall was surrounded. Though we fought for every foot of ground, the farmers drove us steadily back.

A red-faced, sweating farmer charged at me, swinging a gnarled tree root, his only weapon. My shield was gone, my sword somehow entangled with another man's axe.

If he had hit me square on the head, he would have brained me. As it was, the cudgel glanced off my helmet but landed hard on my right shoulder. I sank down, dizzy with pain. I expected my deathblow in the next moment, but when I raised my eyes, the fellow had vanished in the swirling swordstorm.

I discovered that I wanted to live after all, and began to drag myself along the ground through a forest of legs. Choking and blinded by the dust, I had no notion which way I was headed. I broke through the leg-forest into a momentary clearing, where Olaf's white banner stood. Just as I wiped the dust and sweat from my eyes, the young standard-bearer who held it went down with a sword cut across his face, and Olaf himself reached out to keep his banner from falling.

At the same instant, an axe-man ran up and chopped off the king's left leg at the knee. He groaned and fell on his side. Two of his skalds—one of them that Thormod who had sung so beautifully in the morning—flung themselves on his body, but rough hands dragged them off and slew them.

The jarls and their men ringed Olaf now. He lifted his arms and called the name of Christ just as Thorir (of the magic shirt) rammed him through the belly with his spear so hard that the ring mail burst apart. Kalv Arnesson, for good measure, hewed halfway through this neck. A geyser of blood shot out, and the square, brown head fell over on his shoulder. The face, I thought, looked surprised.

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then, with a howl, both sides flung themselves on the king, desperate to possess his bleeding carcass. Thorir tried to drag it off by one foot, while the king's men hauled the other way. Harald, the ‘unnatural weed', as Olaf had called him that morning, yelling mightily and swinging his long sword in humming circles around his head, drove Thorir back on his heels and stood astride his brother's body—but not for long. The enemy drove at him from every side.

The young giant fought like a boar cornered by a pack of dogs. One man he opened from breastbone to groin. He hewed the arm from another and shook a third man off his back with a twitch of his broad shoulders. But even so, he was soon overwhelmed. With the others who chose to die beside their king, he went down in a tangle of bloody arms and legs, battered shields, and broken spears.

Now the battle became a rout. With their king dead, there was no army left at all, but only a mob of beaten men desperate to save their lives.

“Into the trees!” yelled someone beside me. I needed no urging. I raced with the others back the way we had come—to the palisade, to the muddy stream, to the wooded ridge. Hundreds died with spears between their shoulder blades. The worst killing in a battle always happens that way.

The young giant fought like a boar cornered by a pack of dogs
.

As I neared the tree line, I caught sight of a warrior racing before me—and here's a thing you won't find recounted in The
Lay of Bjarki
, or any heroic poem: He was going so fast that as he ran between a pair of trees his long kite-shield, which was slung cross-wise on his back, caught between the trunks and stuck fast, and there he hung, flailing his arms and crying for someone to save him. No one stopped. It is such little incidents as these that we skalds neglect to mention. As I passed the man, I saw it was Bodolf the Noisy. I don't know what became of him, nor do I care.

The farmers at our heels were shouting fit to split their lungs, but then, over the uproar, rose a scream that came from no human throat.

“Christ!” panted a man running beside me, “they're setting wolves on us!”

I looked wildly round to see what pursued us. It was a thing hardly human, a figure, naked but for a wolf pelt wrapped around its blood-smeared body, that howled and bared its teeth as it ran along.

And standing in its path, too petrified to move, was Kalf Slender-Leg! How we found ourselves together among all those fleeing men I cannot say. You Christmen will doubtless give the credit to God. I say only that the Norns love to play such tricks.

Kalf had an arrow fitted to his bowstring. At the last possible second he loosed it, but it flew high—the first time I'd ever seen him miss. An instant later, the monster swung its broadax in a flat arc, catching him in the hip with a crunch of bone, as when a butcher hacks off the leg of a steer. Kalf spun and fell on his face, his left leg splayed outward at a crazy angle to his body.

The berserker—for it must be that—staring straight ahead out of white eyes and swinging his axe from side to side, bounded forward, passing within a pace of where I cowered on the ground.

Numb with shock, I crawled to Kalf's side while fleeing men stumbled over me, got his limp body across my shoulders, and staggered up the ridge. Ahead of us, the berserker's scream rang out again. I stumbled deep into the underbrush before I finally sank down exhausted under Kalf's weight.

He lay without moving on a mat of pine needles, whey-faced, his heart fluttering in his breast like a bird's. The mail shirt he wore was buried three fingers deep in his hipbone. That was all that had kept the leg from being severed completely. I pulled the steel links away, slit open his tunic and the leg of his breeches, and laid bare a gaping bloody mouth
of a wound with slivers of white bone showing through where the hip socket had been.

I wadded up his tunic and pressed it against the wound. He came to, gasping and clawing up the earth with his fingers, and crying aloud to Sancta Maria to save him. I struggled against his frantic strength while holding my hand over his mouth for fear the enemy would hear him. They were around us everywhere.

He fell into unconsciousness again after a time. I tore my cloak into strips to bind him up—over the hip, between the legs, around the waist, and over again—and twisted the knot tight with a stick.

Having done what I could, I fell back, nearly fainting myself. Only now was I conscious, again, of the pain in my right shoulder where the cudgel had struck me. I could scarcely lift my arm.

My only hope of saving us was to reach the dinghy. But it was impossible to skirt the battlefield all the way round under cover of the trees to where we had hidden it. I could never carry Kalf that far, even with two good shoulders. No. We must wait for dusk and go straight across the field in the open.

The sun inched across the lattice of pine boughs overhead for four, maybe five hours until it stopped just above the horizon. It would sink no lower. All around me the woods echoed with the shouts of farmers hunting us down and with the cries of the wounded. Gradually, these sounds grew less as the survivors crawled away or died, and the farmers gave up the chase. Finally, a deep silence covered all.

Blood still oozed from Kalf's wound, and bubbles of saliva gathered at the corners of his mouth. His skin was as cold as stone.

Why burden yourself with him? said a small voice inside me. You tried already to save his life, and for thanks, he threw Gunnar's death in your face and called you a coward. And if he dies now—as he surely will—he has only himself to blame. Save yourself while you can.

I shook my head wearily. I hadn't the strength to calculate all these rights and wrongs. I looked at him with bitterness in my heart and knew, at the same time, that I would not leave him there to die alone.

Of such contradictions are we made.

†

Kalf groaned once as I picked him up and started with him, half walking, half sliding down the ridge onto the bloody killing ground of Stiklestad. No amount of carnage that I have witnessed since dims the memory of that sight. Everywhere were bodies—some still living, though covered by heaps of dead—and blood-reek hung heavy in the air. In place of the jarls' great host, a different army now held the field: dark figures scuttling through the violet dusk, bent low among the corpses, fingering them.

Some ancient crone came at me out of the shadows, loose-haired like a troll hag, with a knife in one bony hand and a bloodstained sack in the other in which to put finger-rings, arm-rings, ear-rings—and the flesh, too, if the rings couldn't be gotten off otherwise.

The merchants of Nidaros would have new wares to show in a few days' time! I spat at her, and she darted away.

At the stream, I flung Kalf down and plunged my head into the filthy water and drank. Cupping my hands, I tried to pour a little between his parted lips but it all ran out at the corners of his mouth.
He was dead
! No, not yet. Pressing my ear to his lips, I could still feel the faint stirring of his breath.

Here at the stream the slaughter had been fiercest. Bodies clogged the narrow channel and lay heaped two and three deep on its banks. Slippery pools of blood made the ground a quagmire where feet had churned it. More than human scavengers were busy here. The crows, with raucous conversation, had already settled to their dinner, and far off, I heard the cough of wild dogs and the distant interest of wolves.

With Kalf in my arms, I waded down into the blood-warm water, the mud sucking at my shoes, and pushed him up onto the farther bank. And there I noticed a certain body on its back, mouth gaping and dead eyes staring. His big axe lay beside him on the ground, and his soft hands clutched the broken shaft of a spear that protruded from his round potbelly—his
belly
, not his back. Ogmund
was
a fighter, after all.

The crow that perched on his chin looked up at me and spread its sable wings. Then deciding that I was nothing to be feared, it sank its beak again into his eye. How often in verses have I sung of crows and vultures feasting off some dead hero's corpse. Believe me, there is nothing heroic about it. I lay with my cheek on the sticky grass until I could swallow again.

We reached the trees, at last.

I felt my way among them, step by step on trembling legs, following the sound of the water lapping the shore.

When I thought that I must be near the spot, I leaned Kalf against a tree and began the search for our dinghy. We had pushed it down in a muddy little hollow and covered it with pine boughs. What a clever fellow I was to have thought of that! I could be standing a hand's breadth away from the cursed thing now and not know it.

In fact, I found it after some anxious minutes by stumbling over it and nearly breaking my shin.

I lay Kalf beside it, put my good shoulder against the bow and pushed. Then braced myself and shoved again with both arms, holding my breath against the pain. Panting and dizzy, I sank to my knees and lay my head against the gunnel.
I'll just rest a little
, I thought.
I'm strong enough … I can do it
. But I couldn't do it. I hadn't moved the boat an inch.

No wonder then, that in my desperate state I heard nothing until I felt the prick of a blade on my neck and heard a hoarse voice behind me say, “In the king's name, we'll have this boat of yours.”