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  The farmers were not quick enough to flee, but their instinct, to step back and lift their spears under the onslaught, was fatal. The king, transformed from the cold old man who had sat in the boat, knocked two men down with his shield charge. A third, who had dropped his spear in fright, had his leg taken off at the knee by a flash of the Moonsword. Varrin and Egil, in the raiders’ second rank, struck at two more with their spears. The men deflected the blows but the fight had left them and they fled. Fear is catching. Two heartbeats after the king had felled his first opponent, the West Men ran for it. Only one man had been cut down but panic had set in.

  ‘To the temple, before the warriors arrive,’ shouted Authun. Varrin quickly killed the fallen man with his knife and then swiped off his head with a couple of blows from his axe. He put the head on his spear and held it up as a warning to any others that might try their luck.

  The Norsemen drove on up the hill in their wedge formation. As they went they cut down two beacons and flung them onto the roofs of houses. This wasn’t wanton destruction. The more confusion and fear they could create the better. Ideally the villagers would flee and hamper the progress of any of their lord’s men who were rushing to meet the invaders. Authun knew that success depended on getting to the child before significant resistance could be mustered. West Men nobles were a different proposition to farmers. They were raised as warriors from their earliest years and he didn’t want to have to cut his way through such men to get what he wanted.

  Up the hill they rushed. Here and there farmers armed with clubs and spears would stand taunting them for a few breaths, screaming defiance, but they would always run before the raiders came through them.

  ‘You promised us death, lord!’ shouted Eyvind. ‘These cowards will keep me waiting for ever to begin my feasting!’

  ‘You will be drunk with your father and his father before the night is out!’ shouted Authun.

  The church - though the Norsemen didn’t know it by that name - was a squat wooden building like the rest in the village, though a solid one. Authun tried the door. It was shut fast. He nodded to the roof. Sigur and Egil crouched, their hands improvising a stirrup. Young Eyvind ran at the side of the building and the two bigger men thrust him up onto the thatch. In three bounds he was at the smoke vent, his formidable axe free from its strap.

  ‘Kill no children!’ shouted the king.

  Eyvind disappeared from view through the hole at the apex of the roof. Ten heartbeats later the door was open and the other raiders were inside.

  Authun looked around, his eyes almost blind from the transition between the blazing village and the dark of the church. He could see virtually nothing until Varrin came in with a brand.

  It was a large windowless space with the hearth that had allowed them access in the centre and an altar at the back. Behind the altar cowered two of the enemy holy men, trying to make magic by gesturing from their foreheads to their chests. One was clutching one of their precious books inlaid with jewels.

  ‘Find the boy,’ said Authun. ‘He will be here - it is foreseen. ’

  Varrin made a quick circuit of the room with his torch but found nothing. The only people in there were the cowering priests, who seemed determined to die like children rather than face their enemies as men.

  ‘He has to be here somewhere,’ said Authun. ‘Burn the place and see who comes out.’ He’d hoped to avoid this simply because it would take too long.

  Varrin walked to where the thatch met the wall. As he applied his brand there was the sound from above of a child crying. Authun looked up. Hanging from the rafters was a basket secured by a rope tied to a post.

  ‘Get it down,’ said Authun.

  The rope was untied and the basket was lowered to the floor.

  Authun looked inside the basket, expecting to see the destiny of his race. He was unprepared for what was within. There, pressed together, were two naked baby boys, each with a wisp of dark hair exactly as in the vision of the witches. But he had only seen one boy. This was something the king had not counted on. The boys were clearly twins - small, dark and wiry, almost identical. Which one was he supposed to take? Would it matter to the prophecy’s fulfilment if he was to take both? Still, Authun was a leader and knew that any decision is better than none.

  ‘Take them both,’ he said.

  Authun killed the holy men and took their book. He didn’t have time to prise the gems out of it right there so he tucked it under his shield arm. Then he had his second surprise. Close up, he could see the altar was just a table covered with a sheet. Authun lifted the cloth. He thought he heard a noise from inside, though he could see nothing without a light.

  ‘Varrin,’ said the king, gesturing for the big man to come forward. He did and passed the king the brand. Authun peered beneath the table. Shrinking away from him was a small woman. The king had seen her race before on raids. She was a Celt, from the furthest reaches of the West Men’s country. She was beautiful, pale and dark. He pulled her to her feet. Even though he wasn’t seeking slaves she would command a reasonable price, he thought, after he had tried the goods himself. But as she stood up, he took a step back. Only the left side of her face was pretty; the right had been burned terribly, and an awful scar ran from her brow to her chin. Authun, veteran of so many battles, was taken aback by her eye. It was terribly swollen with a pinprick pupil just visible in the torchlight, the rest blood red where it should have been white. It seemed to bore straight into him.

  He dropped her arm - she was valueless. He then registered her alarm as she saw the basket with the children in it. She wailed and dived towards Varrin. Authun in an instant realised - she was the children’s mother.

  ‘Catch her.’ Authun’s command had no explanation, as orders in battle do not. The huge Varrin dropped his left arm and lifted her off her feet to pin her squirming at his side.

  It hadn’t occurred to Authun how he would feed two newborns on the three-week voyage back, and he almost laughed as he saw how nearly his plans had come to failure from such an oversight. The fates had dropped the woman into his lap.

  ‘With us,’ said Authun, striding outside. The church was already burning but he pitched the torch onto the roof for good measure.

  Varrin shouldered the basket, the children crying and the tiny woman under his other arm still struggling. The raiders set off down the hill. The West Men were finally sorting out their defence and had managed to find some more skilful bowmen. Arrows flew past the Norsemen, one even glancing off Kol’s helmet as they retreated down the slope. They quickly moved their shields to their backs as they ran. Making the boat would be the most perilous part, as they had to cross the open beach. Authun had an answer to that.

  ‘Kol, Eyvind,’ he said, ‘harry our pursuers. Hide here and when they pass attack them from the rear. Take the bowmen first.’

  Both men discarded their spears and took out their axes. Then they were gone, inside a house to set their ambush. Against the burning church, Authun picked up a different pattern of movement. A rider. The lord’s bodyguard were arriving - trained fighters. Authun had heard traders call these men by many names - gesith, thegns and even, like his own retainers, housecarls. Authun was not a sentimental man and knew they were every bit as good as his own warriors. There couldn’t be many assembled so quickly but, squinting through the smoke and firelight, he could see at least three horses now. When more arrived, they would dismount to attack. The weapon of fear would be useless against them. It would be spear against spear, with the mob at the thegns’ backs. He had no time to waste.

  ‘The ship! The ship!’

  The remaining six raiders ran through the village. Authun left four to lie in wait in the shadows of the last houses before the beach and shouted to the two on the ship to come up and defend the gap in the staves. Only he and Varrin pressed on, his kinsman carrying the basket, the king now driving the mother.

  On the hill Eyvind and Kol died bravely. Kol split a bowman’s skull with his axe from behind
with his first blow and knocked a thegn unconscious through his helmet with his second. His third strike cleft a bowman from shoulder to chest. He never made a fourth - two spearmen came at his flank and struck him in the head and belly. He fell to the ground and a farmer cut off his head with a hand scythe. Eyvind broke a bowman’s arm with a poor stroke from his battleaxe. He made up for his slack work with his second blow, taking a spearman’s jaw clean off and managing to continue the arc of his axe so it embedded itself in another’s arm. Four thegns were on him then with axes, and though he landed a solid blow on the shoulder of one warrior it was at too great a cost. The axe jammed momentarily in the man’s collarbone, and another West Man had a free swipe at Eyvind’s arm. Eyvind saw his right hand come off at the wrist. He tried to draw his knife with his remaining hand but the enemy were too quick for him. An axe split his temple, another bit into his neck, a third sank into his thigh - the blows were rapid, tight as a drum roll. Eyvind was dead but he and Kol had done their job, and the West Men moved more warily through the remaining houses - until they saw the pair guarding the entrance to the beach. Brimming with their success in taking down two of the raiders, the farmers were deaf to the commands of the warriors to hold their position until archers could be brought to bear on the Norsemen. There was a scream from the villagers as they rushed the men at the gap. Stabbing wildly with their spears or slashing with their knives, they were no match for the discipline of Arngeir and Vigi, whose spears hardly seemed to move, yet two opponents were down. Then two more. The West Men screamed and jabbered and rattled their weapons but the raiders kept their movements tight, the economy of their thrusts taking a heavy toll.

  The five thegns cursed but felt duty bound to go to the aid of the peasants. Any one of them would have cut down a farmer for as much as a misplaced word, but faced with invaders it was their duty to defend the men that put food on their lord’s table. As they rushed in, the courage of the farmers broke and they ran out. The four raiders who had been hiding burst into this confusion. In the maelstrom of flailing limbs and weapons one thegn was felled by a peasant who mistook him for a raider. West Men stumbled and slipped and blocked their comrades’ blows as the Norsemen’s axes bit and spears stabbed. Some of the farmers managed to get away, but the warriors, beset on both sides, stood and died.

  Authun swung the basket with the boys in it onto the longship and Varrin heaved their mother after them. The big man ached to join the fight. He had his orders but still held himself a coward for minding children while his kinsmen fought for their lives. Varrin looked at the woman. She had one of the boys out of the basket and was comforting him. As he watched, a feeling of disquiet came over him. It was as if the woods around the village had begun to seethe. Somehow he could sense the forest coming alive, that the foxes, the birds and above all the wolves had caught the scent of slaughter on the breeze and were hurrying to the feast. From deep in the trees he heard their howling, the dissonant call of welcome for the dead. He turned back towards the village, itching to go to his kinsmen’s aid. From somewhere above him, even over the din of battle, he heard a call, a sound, he thought, like the sky cracking. He glanced up to see a pair of ravens circling.

  ‘My lord!’ he said. ‘An omen. Odin is with us - he sends his intelligencers. Our men have carried the day, they will make the ship.’ His voice was full of admiration. What other leader could hack a victory from such unpromising odds?

  Authun looked at him. ‘They will enter legend here.’

  ‘Leave them?’

  ‘Leave them.’

  Varrin was stunned but he did as he was told, helping the king shove the boat out into the river. The two men leaped aboard.

  On the river beach their kinsmen leaned on their axes. Hella bore a deep cut on his cheek, Arngeir a wound on his chest that stained his tunic red, but otherwise they were in good fighting shape.

  ‘He’s going,’ said Grani.

  ‘He has said we must die,’ said Vigi. ‘It’s foreseen.’

  ‘Varrin and the king are no poets,’ said Arngeir.

  ‘They will tell the tale to a poet,’ said Vigi. ‘The words will fit our glory.’

  Down the grassy hill behind the houses horsemen were pouring. It was nearly an hour since the lord had seen the village beacons and he and his bodyguard had ridden hard. There were around twenty of them, at least two armoured in byrnies, four carrying swords, the rest spears and axes. The thegns had come, and in numbers.

  ‘They can begin work on our saga very shortly, I think,’ said Arngeir.

  ‘We will be remembered for ever,’ said Vigi.

  A bowshot away from the raiders, the peasants had cut through the staves and five horses jumped down the small cliff onto the beach. The Norsemen’s advantage from holding the gap was gone and now they had enemies on two sides.

  King Authun hailed his men from the ship. ‘You have played your part in the destiny of the world. You die as heroes.’

  The raiders saluted him with their axes as three horsemen dismounted and drew their weapons. Two stayed in the saddle, charging into the river after the departing boat. One tried to jump onboard but lost his seat and crashed into the water, the other was forced to pull up by Authun’s flashing sword.

  Caught by the turning tide, the boat rounded a bend and the beach drifted out of sight. Then the king and Varrin heard the sound of the thegns’ charge.

  ‘There will be many widows in this country tonight,’ said Authun.

  ‘And eight more in our own,’ said Varrin.

  The king lowered his head. Before the end of the journey, he knew, there would be nine. Still, the fate of his entire race was in his hands. When he returned his wife would fall into a coma and the false pregnancy the witches had laid upon her would end. When she awoke she would have a son, the magic child, the wyrd child who would lead his people to conquer the earth. Authun would have a poet sing of the death of his warriors and then he could go into his next battle ready to die. He would face his kinsmen in Odin’s halls and they would know he had done the right thing. He had secured the futures of all their descendants. All he had to do was work out which child he needed to present to his wife.

  Authun turned his attention to the boys in the basket. Their mother was bending over them, fussing. He wanted to look at them again but couldn’t bring himself to pull her away. There would be time enough to examine them, he thought.

  He sat back in the boat and took off his byrnie as Varrin steered out to sea on the outgoing tide. Which child? The witches would know; they had always known so far. The witch queen would cast her magic and the true heir would be revealed. How much would that cost him? He took out the priests’ book and began to pick apart the jewels and precious metal with his knife. He had that and two ornate candlesticks. Would that be enough? The witch had an insatiable appetite for gold.

  Authun was not just a fighter; a successful king needs to be a politician too. His whole experience and upbringing as a man, a king and a warrior, however, made it impossible for him to recognise his blind spot. He considered only how to fight, persuade, cajole and manage men. He might be skilled and subtle in his schemes, practised at bending others to his will - but so were the women of the mountain.

  2 A Mercy

  The dead had never meant anything to Authun before. Their separation from the living seemed to him so slight that mourning or grief had never come to him. Death was just life in another place.

  The manner of death was a different thing. Varrin needed to die but he should die like a warrior. The secret of Authun’s new heir must be absolute, and while anyone who was party to it lived there was the risk that the truth might seep out to whisper from the shadows of the feasting halls, hum through the markets, sing with the wind beneath the sails of raiding ships. Authun, though, would not kill his friend. The king had been raised to believe that a kinslayer is cursed eternally. It wasn’t that he thought of killing Varrin and then discounted the idea. It didn’t even occur to him.

  Var
rin’s death was a problem that he would solve the only way he knew how - in consultation. The Norsemen placed great faith in the power of talk.

  The land was in sight and the ship laboured across a current. Progress would have been difficult with a full haul of oars. With only the sail and a partly co-operative wind the going was very hard. It was Authun’s last chance, though. Varrin had to die now so his body would be taken down the whale road out to the north or there was a risk it could wash up on friendly shores, raising difficult questions.