Yarvi chewed at his lip as he made ready to clamber over the side with some shred of kingly composure, but the handle of his gilded shield twisted in his weakling’s grip, tangled with his cloak and nearly dumped him face-first in the brine.
‘Gods damn this thing!’ Yarvi tugged the straps loose, dragged the shield from his withered arm and flung it away among the sea-chests the men sat on while they rowed.
‘My king,’ said Keimdal. ‘You should keep your shield. It’s not safe—’
‘You’ve fought me. You know what my shield’s worth. If someone comes at me I can’t stop with sword alone I’m better off running. I’ll run faster without my shield.’
‘But, my king—’
‘He is king,’ rumbled Hurik, pushing his thick fingers through his white-streaked beard. ‘If he says we all put aside our shields, it must be so.’
‘Those with two good hands are welcome to theirs,’ said Yarvi, slithering into the surf, cursing as another cold wave soaked him to the waist.
Where sand gave way to grass some new-made slaves were roped together, waiting to be herded aboard one of the ships. They were hunched and soot-smeared, wide eyes full of fear or pain or disbelief at what had surged from the sea and stolen their lives. Beside them, a group of Yarvi’s warriors diced for their clothes.
‘Your Uncle Odem asks for you, my king,’ said one, then got up frowning and kicked a sobbing old man onto his face.
‘Where?’ asked Yarvi, his tongue sticking in his mouth, it was suddenly so dry.
‘On top of the holdfast.’ The man pointed up towards a drystone tower on a sheer rock above the town, waves angry about its base on one side, a frothing inlet on the other.
‘They didn’t close the gates?’ asked Keimdal.
‘They did, but three of the headman’s sons were left in the town, and Odem slit one’s throat and said he’d kill the next if the gate wasn’t opened.’
‘It was,’ said one of the other warriors, then chuckled as his number came up. ‘New socks!’
Yarvi blinked. He had never thought of his smiling uncle as a ruthless man. But Odem had sprouted from the same seed as Yarvi’s father, whose rages he still carried the marks of, and their drowned brother Uthil, at the memory of whose peerless swordsmanship old warriors in the training square still came over dewy-eyed. Sometimes calm waters hide fierce currents, after all.
‘A curse on you!’
A woman had tottered from the line of slaves as far as the ropes would allow, bloody hair plastered against one side of her face.
‘Bastard king of a bastard country, may Mother Sea swallow—’
One of the warriors cuffed her to the ground.
‘Cut her tongue out,’ said another, jerking her back by her hair while a third drew a knife.
‘No!’ shouted Yarvi. The men frowned at him. If their king’s honour was questioned so was theirs, and mercy would not do as an explanation. ‘She’ll fetch a better price with her tongue.’ And Yarvi turned away, shoulders chafing under the weight of his mail, and struggled on towards the holdfast.
‘You are your mother’s son, my king,’ said Hurik.
‘Who else’s would I be?’
His father’s eyes and his brother’s used to glow as they told tales of past raids, of great deeds done and grand prizes taken, while Yarvi lurked in the shadows at the foot of the table and wished he could have taken a man’s part in the man’s work. But here was the truth of it, and a place on a raid did not seem enviable now.
The fighting was over, if there had been any worthy of the name, but still it seemed Yarvi laboured through a nightmare, sweating in his mail and chewing at the inside of his mouth and startling at sounds. Screams and laughter, figures darting through the wriggling haze of fires, smoke scratching at his throat. Crows pecked and circled and cawed their triumph. Theirs was the victory, most of all. Mother War, Mother of Crows, who gathers the dead and makes the open hand a fist, would dance today, while Father Peace hid his face and wept. Here, near the shiftless border between Vansterland and Gettland, Father Peace wept often.
The tower of the holdfast loomed black above them, the noise of waves crashing on both sides of its foundations loud below.
‘Stop,’ said Yarvi, breathing hard, head spinning, face tickling with sweat. ‘Help me out of my mail.’
‘My king,’ frothed Keimdal, ‘I must object!’
‘Object if you please. Then do as I tell you.’
‘It’s my duty to keep you safe—’
‘Then imagine your dishonour when I die of too much sweating halfway up this tower! Undo the buckles, Hurik.’
‘My king.’ They stripped his mail shirt off and Hurik threw it over one great shoulder.
‘Lead on,’ Yarvi snapped at Keimdal, struggling to fasten his father’s clumsy golden cloak-buckle with his useless lump of a hand, too big and too heavy for him by far and the hinge all stiff as—
He was stopped dead by the sight that greeted them beyond the open gates.
‘Here is a harvest,’ said Hurik.
The narrow space in front of the tower was scattered with bodies. So many that Yarvi had to search for patches of ground between to put his feet. There were women there, and children. Flies buzzed, and he felt the sickness rising, and fought it down.
He was a king, after all, and a king rejoices in the corpses of his enemies.
One of his uncle’s warriors sat beside the entrance to the tower, cleaning his axe as calmly as he might have beside the training square at home.
‘Where is Odem?’ Yarvi muttered at him.
The man gave a squint-eyed grin and pointed upwards. ‘Above, my king.’
Yarvi ducked past, breath echoing in the stairway, feet scraping on the stones, swallowing his surging spit.
On the battlefield, his father used to say, there are no rules.
Up, and up in the fizzing darkness, Hurik and Keimdal toiling behind him. He paused at a narrow window to feel the wind on his burning face, saw water crash on rock at the bottom of a sheer drop and pushed down his fear.
Stand like a king, his mother had told him. Speak like a king. Fight like a king.
There was a platform at the top, propped on timbers, a wooden parapet about the edge no taller than Yarvi’s thigh. Low enough to bring the giddy sickness flooding back when he saw how high they had climbed, Father Earth and Mother Sea spread out small around them, the forests of Vansterland stretching off into the haze of distance.
Yarvi’s Uncle Odem stood calmly watching Amwend burn, columns of smoke smudging the slate-grey sky, the tiny warriors bent to the business of destruction, the little ships lined up where surf met shingle to collect the bloody harvest. A dozen of his most seasoned men were around him, and kneeling in their midst a prisoner in a fine yellow robe, bound and gagged, his face swollen with bruises and his long hair clotted with blood.
‘A good day’s work!’ called Odem, smiling at Yarvi over his shoulder. ‘We have taken two hundred slaves, and livestock, and plunder, and burned one of Grom-gil-Gorm’s towns.’
‘What of Gorm himself?’ asked Yarvi, trying to catch his breath after the climb and – since standing and fighting had never been his strengths – at least speak like a king.
Odem sucked sourly at his teeth. ‘The Breaker of Swords will be on his way, eh, Hurik?’
‘Doubtless.’ Hurik stepped from the stairway