Kol’s death gave us thought on what to do next and Finn came up with a sound plan. With Kvasir and Short Eldgrim, I formed a shieldwall of three, all that would fit abreast in the space, and we lunged forward, knowing what would happen.
The arrows whirred from somewhere unseen, for the step from light to dark lost us our eyesight and, until we gained it back, we simply had to stand and brace. The first flight smacked the shields and we huddled, grunting and sweating, with Finn, Arnor and others sheltering behind, shieldless and double-armed with axes and spears.
The next thrumming sound brought arrows lower, aiming for feet and legs, but we saw them now, seven men behind a barricade of a thick table. Kvasir yelped as an arrow stung his ankle, but the angle was awkward and they bounced and skittered everywhere.
We waited, sweating and breathing in jagged rasps. I could see nothing behind the shield, but Finn, hefting a spear, watched and calculated and, suddenly, yelled, ‘Now!’
A slew of axes and spears smashed across the space, just as the archers popped up for another salvo. At the same time, we three hurled forward, roaring out our challenge.
Finn’s spear took one full in the chest and hurled him backwards. An axe took another in the shoulder, blade on, a second axe slammed into the head of a third, shaft first.
Then we were on them and Black Robe, spitting curses, hurled himself at me.
We fought across the upturned table and he had clearly done sword-work before, for he knew the moves. He stabbed out, that serpent’s tongue curve of blade darting swiftly, so that my axe swings looked even more clumsy by comparison. I shield-parried, axe-parried, swung, roared and nothing made any difference while, around me, men panted and grunted and shrieked and died.
He had battled shielded men before, but ones of his own sort, with metalled shields, which was his undoing. His breath was ragged and he knew he was done for anyway, but he fought with the savage-grinned panic of a rat in a barrel – and stabbed at the lower half of my shield, which would force it forward and expose my neck.
That tactic worked only on a wooden shield like mine if the point of the sword was rounded and almost blunt, like a good Norse sword. When his sharp point stuck in mine, the alarm showed briefly in those olive-dark eyes and he made another mistake – he tried to pull it out instead of letting go at once and finding another weapon.
When I back-cut, under his outstretched sword-arm, the axe blade went in on the upstroke under his armpit and only the shoulder blade stopped it. He screeched, high and thin like a woman in childbirth, and jerked away, freeing the axe for a downstroke that, because I was clumsy and hasty with panic, did not take him neatly between neck and shoulder, but carved away his bearded jaw on the left side.
Blood and teeth sprayed. One hit me in the eye, making me duck and turn away, which would have been fatal save that he was already gone, backwards and keening, on to the blood-slick flagstones.
Then there was that moment of rasp-breathing, broken by moans of those who hurt so much they wished they were dead, the gurgles of those so near death they can no longer feel the pain. This time, there was also a deal of cursing from Arnor, who had had his nose split by a cut and was bleeding badly. Others moved purposefully among the whimpering Arabs, cutting throats and not being kind about it – the treatment of Starkad’s men saw to that.
Finn rolled his shoulders, as if he had just done some gentle exercise, and strolled over to look at the fallen leader, who was still gasping and gurgling, drowning in his own blood. ‘Messy,’ he declared, shaking his head. ‘I must show you some points of axe fighting, Orm Trader, for you seem to think you are chopping wood with it.’
‘You might be better with a good sword,’ Brother John said and indicated the area beyond the litter of bodies. Finn’s eyes grew as wide as his grin. Plunder.
It was, too. I had expected the weapons and battle-gear of Starkad’s men, perhaps some of the provisions from their vessel, and that would have been worth the death of Kol, even by his reckoning. I had not thought, of course, that these were seasoned pirates, who had been taking easy pickings for some time from merchants unlucky enough not to sail wider around Patmos.
There were ells of cloth, from fine linen to wadmal, barrels and boxes packed with little packets of what appeared to be dust and earth.
There was the yellow one called turmeric and the fine crimson crescents of the fire-plants that could raise blisters on the mouth of the unwary but, if cooked properly with meat, made dishes the Oathsworn could not get enough of.
There were golden mountains of almonds, black, pungent spikes of cloves, great heaps of brown dust which we knew to be cumin and coriander and barrels of instantly recognis-able chickpeas.
We stared at it all open-mouthed for, in one moment, we had all become as rich as we had previously been poor, such a change as to leave us stunned – until the realisation of it struck home and we delighted in each fresh discovery.
We laughed when Short Eldgrim unwrapped a packet from a barrel of them and sneezed so that it flew everywhere, filling the room with a golden dust that made everyone sneeze and weep.
Cinnamon, Brother John told us sternly and Short Eldgrim had just sneezed away a fortune of it.
That sobered us, so that we took more care and uncovered carefully packed and almost fresh produce – capsicums and the like and small golden-yellow fruits which made your jaws ache, and Brother John said were called limon.
The treasures went on and on: barrels filled with all different kinds of olives, when we had never seen more than one sort in our lives and only since we had come to Miklagard. And pepper both light and dark, as well as leather from the Nile lands.
There were weapons, too – a consignment of spearheads and knives and Greek blades needing hilt-finishing – and three beautiful swords, all clearly made in our homeland so that it made you almost weep to see them.
They were worth more than everything else put together and those blades I took, for they were well smithed and had their story written there, like water, just below the surface of the metal. Vaegir, they were called – wave swords – and that marked them as superior, even though they had little or no decoration on hilt or handle, just good leather grips.
One I took for myself, the other two I gave to Finn and Kvasir, marking them as chosen men, and that pair could not have been happier if I had been handing them out from a gifthrone in a huge hall, like a proper jarl. My first raid had brought them all riches and I felt the power of the jarl torc then.
So we spent the whole day moving all this to the Volchok, pausing only to give Kol a proper burial, with some of the spearheads and his weapons, in a decent boat-grave marked with white stones. Brother John said his chants and I, as godi, spoke some words of praise to Odin for Kol.
Later, Brother John showed Finn how to cook with the golden limon-fruits, so that we had minted lamb meat soaked in that juice, chopped and rolled with lentils and barley. We put it in a communal bowl – the same one the Arabs had been using – and ate it with some fresh-made flatbread. It was, by far, better than the ship’s provisions – coarse bran bread, pickled mutton, salt fish, and some dried fruit – but I still ate last, after I made sure men were on watch.
We chewed, grinning greasily at each other, fat-cheeked as winter squirrels and our bellies were full of that limon-flavoured lamb when we lolled by a fire near the slow-rolling Volchok, watching the Arabs’ ship burn to the waterline; we could not crew it and did not want any we had missed coming after us, full of revenge.
The men were admiring the helms and mail and swords they had, swapping mail shirts that did not fit for ones that did, when Sighvat came up, clutching a leather bag. Men stared; he had his two ravens free of their cages, one perched