In the Wilderness (29 page)

The sun’s disk shone in splendour over the top of the ridge as he stood on the flat roof of the barbican and saw and heard the enemy breaking out of the brushwood beyond the fields. The long mail-clad ranks advancing with a faint jingling and a subdued glitter in the cold shadows upon the white ground, the bright patches of the banners, the scaling-ladders and battering-rams that they carried—and now a horn rang out, and short cries were heard—Olav felt his heart beat fast: it was a hostile troop, but no matter, his joy at the sight ran down him like a deep draught of cold, strong ale.

He cried the watchword, at the same moment raising his shield aslant without thinking—old habits revived of themselves in every joint of his body. Simultaneously with the whirring of the two
small catapults he had on his tower came the first shower of arrows and bolts from the western tower over their heads.

The men on the eastern barbican crouched down with their shields oyer their heads and looked out through the loopholes. Some horses had fallen, breaking the ranks and causing confusion.

“Have they only four ladders?” cried Olav to his neighbour, the boy from Oslo.

“They lost some under Akersnes.”

A volley from the hostile army came flying, striking the wall of the barbican, rattling on the bridge behind them, but only a few shots fell on the roof, and none took effect. With exultant jeers the Norwegians picked them up. Now the ground thundered with heavily armoured horses. A troop of them were trotting toward the gate; they bore an iron-shod pole among them.

“What kind of playthings are these they use—do they think to take Akershus with the like of that?”

“You know they cannot bring their great battering-rams by this road,” the Oslo boy roared back, “across the hill. They have reckoned on the frost—”

“Then they have been almost as bull-headed as our Ivar.”

They shot the Swedes’ own bolts back at the troop—they fell harmless on their defensive armour—set their shoulders to the pole, and raised the cauldron of boiling water up to the top of the parapet. As the first blow of the ram crashed against the gate, making the whole tower shake, the Norwegians emptied the cauldron upon the men below.

The shrieks of scalded men and horses, the thud of hoofs, and the jingling of armour were drowned almost at once in the din of a fresh troop that came up and thrust aside the sprawling mass of the first. “Go slow,” shouted Olav to his men; “reserve your stones—” They had not too many of them and had to try to shoot straight down so as to prevent the attackers as long as possible from taking up the ram their comrades had dropped when the water came down on them. Meanwhile bolts and arrows from the archers in front rained down on their shields, and from the rear the shots of the Raumrikings in the western tower flew over their heads.

Olav saw one horseman who had been pressed too far out to the right—his horse slipped under him. Brought down on its
haunches, it slid down the riverbank. Its shrill neighing rose above the din and the roar of the waterfall as it was carried into the dark, rushing water, with its rider hanging in the stirrup. The steep bank was covered with ice underneath the snow on both sides of the foot of the tower, and this was of great assistance to the Norwegians: the enemy could not send so many men at a time against the gate, and so far they had not succeeded in bringing up ladders. But it could not be long delayed.

A shout reached him from the bridge—eight or nine men were lifting baskets of stones over the breastwork and dragging them along. It had occurred to Ivar Jonsson that missiles might soon run short in the foremost barbican—thoughtless the young man was not. Olav’s heart laughed with joy within him. Ivar had withdrawn his men from the breastwork and stood waiting with them in the western barbican, and this was right: it could not be very long before the Swedes broke down the eastern gate and reached the bridge. Ivar had had the parapet of the bridge thrown down at each end of the obstacle.

They had just had time to hoist up the baskets of stones when the first scaling-ladder fell against the parapet. So now it was the turn of the axes. It was a good thing he had brought up the basket-bearers, thought Olav, otherwise he would have been short of men for this work. Man after man they hurled down as they swarmed up the ladders. One or two of his own lay low, and the boards of the floor were bloody—but so was the snow at the foot of the tower—what snow there was left.

They could not hold the tower for long. Olav glanced up at the sun—the fight had scarce lasted half an hour.

Now the gate gave way beneath them with a crash, and it felt as if the whole tower staggered. Olav ran to the other side and looked down to see how things were going. The yeomen had dashed forward and manned the breastwork, Ivar in the midst of them. The horsemen could only advance two-abreast. The blows of the yeomen’s maces and axes and the clash of swords rose above cries and the tramping of horses—for a while this might go well. More of the mounted troop, horse and man together, had gone down in the torrent; now the Swedes were sending footmen onto the bridge.

Sira Hallbjörn he saw on the top of the breastwork, slashing with his great two-handed sword; the priest fought like a devil.

Olav threw away the fragments of his shield; there were only splinters left between the iron bands. He grasped Kinfetch in both hands and turned to where the ladder had been, but now it was gone; it hung on a jutting rock in the hollow sheet of ice over the torrent, and they were bringing up another. Behind him his men thrust down the enemies who were trying to mount the inside ladder to the roof—they ought to have drawn it up.

Now Ivar and his men sprang over the breastwork and advanced over the bridge. They cleared it in a moment—for that time. And the Swedes drew back across the fields, out of bowshot.

Olav lifted off his helmet to cool himself a moment. There was refreshment too in the stillness, with the roar of the torrent, which had been drowned by the fighting. And now he found it was not only sweat that had made his clothes stick to him, for his elk’s-hide hauberk was slit just over the body-plate, and bloody, but the scratch he had got was not a deep one, by the feeling.

A morion appeared in the opening—Sira Hallbjörn was climbing up the ladder.

“How many of you are alive? Go back now, you, and we fresh men will receive the next shock.”

“There is not much here to receive a shock with, Sira Hallbjörn.”

They saw men coming across the fields from the houses of Fors; they were carrying something.

“They will try to set fire to the barbican,” said Olav. “We must hold out as long as we can.”

“Ivar has placed combustibles within the breastwork,” said the priest.

“Then it will end in the bridge being burned. After that they can stand on either bank and sing staves against each other,” laughed Olav. “And then the issue will be better than we had looked for.”

In the fields in front the horns sounded the assembly. Olav stooped and picked up the yellow Olav banner, which had been torn down, and set it up again—it was now stained with blood.

“Now we must show them what we can do with the crossbow, Sira Hallbjörn!”

The horsemen came on in close array, and in their rear followed men with fire-cauldrons, pots of pitch, and faggots. A bolt
from Sira Hallbjörn’s bow was so truly aimed that one of the fire-pots dropped on the ground and turned over.

Ivar Jonsson and his men had propped up the doors and wreckage in the gateway. They stood behind with long spears, clubs, and cudgels with scythe-blades, and in their rear the bridge was filled with men, waiting to go forward as those in the front rank fell.

The third attack thundered against the gate and the shaking walls of the barbican. Once more Ivar Jonsson and his yeomen succeeded in beating back the assault, and the sullen little fire that smouldered at the base of the tower was put out by the men on the roof with the cauldron of water from the cold fireplace in the tower—no one had managed to keep the fire in.

Again the Swedes withdrew a little way, and the noise died down. From the barbican they could see the leaders ride round the ranks and come together for a consultation. Then all at once the priest cried: “Look!”

Olav turned and looked where the other pointed.

“Ay, now we can make an end and sing
Nunc dimittis,”
said Sira Hallbjörn.

Teams of horses broke through the copsewood yonder—they drew the great catapults and heavy siege engines.

Ivar Jonsson ordered the horn to be blown. He stood on the bridge and called up to the men on the barbicans—his silken surcoat hung in strips outside his harness. They could do no more now but retire and see if they could break down the bridge after them.

Then came the sound of a horn from the hill behind them—in notes that answered Ivar’s. A bright, resonant ribbon unwound itself in the blue and white light of the winter day. Olav turned round—up behind the churchyard fence the morning sun flashed on a close array of spear-points.

The shouts of joy from the little force about the bridge were met by a fresh blast of the horns. This was an ancient call—folk named it the Andvaka strain or King Sverre’s dance. Little as Olav Audunsson was minded to praise old King Sverre, there was yet no tune he would so gladly have heard in this hour.

Sira Hallbjörn had laid hold of Olav’s arm—the priest’s hand was bloody. Olav saw with surprise that the other’s cheeks were ashy white, his face was distorted in a wild luxury of pain:

“That is
our
horn! My father’s, I mean—I should know it above all others. Then they must be here, my brothers—Finn or Eystein.”

And as the horn sounded anew the Andvaka strain, Sira Hallbjörn joined in, singing in his fine and powerful voice the ancient stave that went to that tune:

They took it up and sang with him, all those who knew the stave, while the Raumrikings tore down the obstacle before the first mounted troop—there were at any rate fifty men on horseback, armed after the fashion of the King’s men. They rode across the bridge, and after them swarmed the footmen, country folk, but most of them handsomely armed. Olav saw Sira Hallbjörn running out into the fields by the side of a high brown horse, holding on to the saddle-bow—the man who rode it wore a closed helm and a fluttering blue silken surcoat over his armour.

What the new-comers meant to do he could not rightly guess; it looked as if they would try to drive back the enemy in open fight out in the fields. They had already surrounded the body of Swedes who were on their way to the bridge, and with the knights who led them at their head, the men from the west were now advancing, far off, against the main body who stood by the siege engines at the brow of the wood.

Ivar Jonsson had mounted the barbican with Markus of Lautin, one of his captains.

“Can they do that—drive back German mercenaries with a rabble of peasants—then anything may happen!”

“There must be two thousand of them at least,” said Olav. They continued to pour down the hill below the church and across the bridge.

“And not one in twenty can get back over the bridge if they are beaten,” said Markus.

The attack of the Norwegian knights had already broken down—two of them were dragged from their horses and carried away as prisoners. But the Lidungs simply went on—if one body was thrown back, another troop dashed forward. Time after time the German mercenaries rode into the mass, trampled them down, and used their lances, but the Norwegians ran in upon them from the other side, hammering at men and horses with clubs and axes, cutting and thrusting with hafted scythe-blades and spears. They had pressed up to the edge of the wood in great numbers and managed to hold the enemy there, so that his catapults were of little use against them; but neither could the men in the barbicans support the Lidungs to any extent—they were fighting out of bowshot.

Before the bridge all was quiet. A few horses and men lay stretched in the brown and bloody slush, and one of the horses moved and struck out with its hoofs now and then. A young lad came walking toward the bridge, supporting his right arm, from which the blood dripped, in his left, and he jogged homeward with a curiously peaceful, solitary air, as though he were carrying something he had been out to buy.

But now the first groups of yeomen were being driven back over the lands of Fors. Olav grasped his crossbow; as he put his foot in the stirrup and drew it, he noticed for the first time that his body was stiff with tiredness.

Once more the flying Lidungs rallied in the fields, and once more the enemy rode forward. At that moment something struck Olav on the right cheek-piece of his helmet—there was a crash inside his head, and he fell backward into Ivar’s arms. For a moment everything went round. When he stood up again and took his bow, he felt his mouth full of blood and pulpy flesh; he spat out blood and splinters of teeth and shot again with his crossbow.

Now the Lidungs had retreated so far that the Swedes could reach them with their catapults; stones and other missiles fell among the knots of men, and the first fugitives began to make, some for the bridge, others for the forest to the northward. Olav had stopped using his bow; he stood gazing intently at the conclusion of the fight, while all the time, without thinking, he had to feel with his tongue the sharp edge of steel that had penetrated his cheek and the broken molar in his upper jaw. But soon his tongue grew stiff and swollen and the wound filled his whole
mouth like a bloody sponge. But he gave little attention to it as he watched the fight drawing to its end.

The horn of the Valdres knight sounded the assembly, untiringly, and once more the main body of the western men formed up just below the barbican. The Raumrikings in the towers had now been relieved by fresh men with bags and quivers full of bolts and stones. Olav tried to speak to those who had come up and stood around him, but it was no more than a blob-blob-blob and a croaking in the throat, with all the blood and spittle that filled his mouth. He could scarcely believe his eyes, but the Swedes were not advancing; it looked as if they were about to retire into the woods—had they had enough of the game?