Raven: Sons of Thunder (39 page)

THE FRANK HAD A FACE THAT LOOKED AS THOUGH IT HAD BEEN
carved from a rock and I knew how Beowulf must have felt when he faced the monster Grendal. I remembered Black Floki telling me that when fighting a man much bigger than you you should go for his legs. ‘Cut the fucker’s legs,’ he had said, ‘and it’s as easy as chopping down a tree.’
But trees don’t fight back
, I thought to myself now, wondering how I could get to this Frank’s legs without being speared or chopped in half by his wicked-looking axe.

‘God be with you, lad,’ Father Egfrith called, making me grimace, for I wanted Óðin with me, or brave Týr Lord of Battle, not Egfrith’s puny god of peace.

‘Come, little man,’ the Frank said in English through black teeth. I stepped forward and his spear streaked for my face but I got my shield up in time and it struck with incredible force for a one-handed thrust. There was little room to manoeuvre, meaning I could not lead him around to leg-tire him. That spear came again and again but each time I managed to stop it with my shield, which was desperate work. But the Frank was smiling still as though it was no more than a game. His
arrogance bit deeper when he reversed the spear, using its butt to hammer my shield and even scything the shaft through the air like a harvester, slamming into me from the right and left, sweeping for my head and legs. I swung wildly, trying to hack into the shaft but hitting nothing but air. He struck my right shoulder a blow that numbed the whole of my sword arm and it was all I could do to keep my fingers curled round the weapon’s grip as I stepped back, watching for his next move.

The next strike put a dent in my shield boss and the one after that glanced my left eye, gouging the flesh and making it stream. A finger’s width to the right and the spear’s butt would have crushed my eye socket. Then the Frank was too slow pulling the shaft back and I scythed my sword into it, knocking it aside, but he stepped inside and swung the short axe. I flung my shield up to meet it. There was a terrible crack as it cleaved into the limewood and stuck fast, the blade jutting through a hair’s length from my forearm.

The Frank grunted and tried to yank the blade out, but my arm was in the straps and the axe head was stuck. With a roar the giant almost lifted me off
Serpent
’s deck, my bones rattling as he tried to wrench the axe free, then in frustration he hurled me, shield, axe and all, against
Serpent
’s hull. I landed with a clatter, the wind knocked out of me. The shield was too unwieldy with the axe in it, so I slipped my arm from the straps and clambered to my feet, aware that I had not so far given much of an account of myself in front of my jarl. My friends were still yelling encouragement, their faces red with fury and blood-hunger, for they bristled to tear into this huge Frank who was surely going to finish me now.

‘Kill him, Raven,’ Sigurd said, a steel-hard edge to his voice, his blue eyes burning into me. ‘Kill him now.’

I felt Cynethryth watching too and suddenly I knew I would rather die there and then on the end of the Frank’s spear than be beaten around the deck like a flea-bitten dog for all to see.

‘Your mother must have screwed a bull to spawn you,’ I said to the Frank, removing my helmet and laying it on the deck. My left eye was streaming, making it difficult to see, and blood ran into my beard. My hair was lank with sweat and my saliva as thick as frogspawn. ‘I have never seen such an ugly beast,’ I went on, grinning at the Frank. ‘I saw your father grazing in a field yesterday and he was even more ugly than you.’ I did not know if the Frank could understand me, but he knew I was insulting him all the same and his lip curled as his grip tightened on the spear. ‘My friend Svein will enjoy using your skull to drink from,’ I said, unpinning the brooch at my right shoulder and letting my cloak fall to the deck. Then I threw my sword at the Frank’s feet and the Norsemen groaned or yelled at me, but I just stood there, the breeze sending Cynethryth’s raven feather floating in front of my face as
Serpent
’s oarsmen pulled her down the river.

The Frank’s face twisted with disgust and loathing, his long moustache quivering and his eyes ripe with shock as he realized I had cheated him out of his saga story. The truth that he had made that jump, knowing he wove his own death, only to face not a warrior but a gutless worm who would not fight him was too much for such a man.

‘Fight him, lad!’ Olaf yelled.

‘This is shame, Raven,’ Svein growled in warning. ‘Fight him.’

I threw my arms wide, inviting that great spear, and I felt Sigurd’s eyes boring into me. Then the Frank screamed a curse and lunged and I twisted to the right and the blade scraped the mail along my ribs and I flew at him, smashing my right fist into the left side of his unprotected throat. He staggered back, then clubbed me with the spear, sending me reeling.

‘Hit him again!’ Olaf shouted. ‘Hurry!’

But I did not hit him again. I stood in front of Black Floki, watching the Frank and waiting.

‘Fight him!’ Svein bellowed.

Then the Frank’s eyes rolled and his huge body began to convulse. Spittle flew from his mouth. He raised a fluttering hand to his neck in confusion and disbelief and his fingers found something there.

‘Thór’s hairy arse,’ Svein said, shaking his red head.

‘A Loki trick if I ever saw one,’ Olaf agreed, seeing the brooch pin more than half buried in the Frank’s neck. The giant yanked the pin from his flesh and a fountain of dark blood came with it, pumping out then in a rhythm twice that of
Serpent
’s oars hitting the water. But still the Frank somehow kept his feet.

‘Finish him, Raven,’ Sigurd commanded.

‘Here,’ Floki said, handing me his wicked long knife. I nodded, taking the knife, then walked up to the Frank, who was now leaning against the sheer strake, still unaccepting of his end.

‘I am Raven,’ I said, and he spat in my face. Then I stuck the knife up into his guts, beneath the iron fish scales of his armour, and I sawed the deadly sharp blade across and heard a gush of escaping air from below. Hot guts poured over my hand and thumped on to the deck, and I smelled his shit and piss. ‘I am your death,’ I said, looking into the Frank’s eyes as the light in them faded. Then, even though it would mean losing his fine arms, I pushed him over the side. His glistening purple gut rope followed and he splashed into the river, his white face staring up at the sky.

‘I’ll clean it,’ I said to Floki, gesturing at his knife.

‘Do it well,’ he said with a grim nod, fetching down his oar from the oar tree and going to his bench. The rest of us took our oars and joined the others rowing, for the Franks were coming hard again now, lashed by Bishop Borgon’s tongue no doubt, and we had no wish to tangle with them again. Kalf was already rowing, even with the arrow still in his shoulder, but Halldor was lying by the mast step, his brynja sheeted in blood
and his face half hanging off. Cynric, one of the Wessexmen, lay trembling beside him, his throat ripped open by a Frankish spear, and others had gashed faces and wounds to their upper bodies; the sight of them all was a harsh reminder of the danger posed by the emperor’s high-sided ship.

It did not take us long to catch up with the three Dane ships and we looked across at their crews, their thin arms all bone and sinew at the oars, their straggly hair and unkempt beards giving them the desperate look of starved animals. But they were rowing well and I felt proud of them, for I had shared a little of their suffering and knew what they had been through in that rotten longhouse that was now smoke on some breeze and a pile of cooling ashes. I was rowing well too, the trembling that had filled me draining away with each stroke and being replaced by sheer exhilaration that filled my stomach like hot iron. For I had survived a fight that should have been my doom. I had faced a great and brave warrior and sent him to the afterlife and I silently thanked the All-Father and Loki, too, knowing that it must have been one of those gods who gave me the low cunning idea of using the brooch pin as a weapon.

‘I’m disappointed in you, Raven,’ Svein the Red called from the port side, his huge arms making light work of the rowing.

‘That overgrown troll would have squashed me if I’d fought him fairly,’ I said in my own defence, to some murmurs of agreement.

‘Ja, I know that,’ Svein replied, ‘but I thought you were going to give me his head so I could drink from his skull. Olaf said that’s what you told the Frank.’ The Norsemen laughed even with the Frank ships ploughing downriver after us.

‘I’m sorry, my friend. I’ll get you another one,’ I said. ‘Bigger.’

‘Any bigger and we could stick oars through the eye holes and row the thing,’ Olaf said. ‘Now shut your mead holes and row.’

The river narrowed and for a while its willow-lined banks were less than half a bow-shot apart as we pushed hard on
Fjord-Elk
’s stern, riding this breathless gush, our oars dragging the churning, spumy water past. Ulf and Gunnar behind him lifted their oars and began to wriggle out of their brynjas and I thought to do the same, for it was hard work rowing in mail. Besides, I did not think the Frank ships would catch us in this stretch of river even if we all stopped rowing. But Olaf, still rowing himself, yelled at them to get their blades back in the water.

‘No one takes off his brynja until I say he can,’ he added. ‘What do you think those riders were doing whilst we were butting heads with that tub back there? They were riding, weren’t they, Ulf, you witless wonder! And by now they’ll have told half the captains of Frankia to slip their moorings and prepare us a warm welcome.’

So we rowed, sweating in leather and heavy mail, and it was not long before Olaf was proved right. Hearth smoke, brown against the grey sky, told us we were nearing a large village or town, even before we saw the long jetty with its breakwater protecting twenty or more craft from the current. Three of those craft belonged to the emperor from the looks of their fighting platforms and near identical builds, and two of them were already brimming with spearmen as we approached. Olaf, Bram, Svein and Penda took their oars to
Serpent
’s bow in order to fend them off, though luckily this time we slipped past, a few arrows thumping against the hull. However, it was clear they saw
Serpent
and
Fjord-Elk
as the richest prizes for they turned their bows downriver and joined the chase, ignoring the three smaller Dane ships in their wake who were now stuck between them and the five Frank vessels behind them. Townsfolk lined the quay, cheering the emperor’s soldiers and clamouring for our doom.

We were getting tired. The third imperial ship had cast off
now and these three new enemies were fresh to their oars, which made up for their vessels’ being slower than ours, even with our holds crammed with heavy silver. None of us spoke, each man lost in his own pain, shoulders and arms burning, chest as tight as
Serpent
’s halyard. We ploughed the coils of the river, mindless of the occasional arrows shot from both banks, which clattered amongst us or lodged in the deck and hull, and I summoned Cynethryth’s face to my mind, because I had not seen her properly for days, now she stayed in the shelter by the hold.

‘Bastards are like dogs . . . that don’t know when to stop chasing their own tails,’ Penda muttered through gritted teeth some hours later. His was the bench in front of mine and the deck around that bench was dark with sweat.

‘Bishop Borgon knows . . . how much of his emperor’s silver . . . sits in our hold,’ I replied, gasping for breath. ‘He’ll chase us . . . off the edge of the world.’

By dusk it was clear that before chasing us off the edge of the world the Franks intended to drive us out to the open sea, which could not have been too far away by then, because gulls wailed somewhere above in the orange sky and the fields on either side had given way to marshland and mudflats where geese bickered and birds waded. The water had become brackish too and the rowing had become a little easier, as though the river here was tidal in our favour, being sucked out to the estuary.

The river curved round to the west and we passed a ruined, scorch-marked fortress on the south bank, which reminded us that we were not these Franks’ only enemies. Then to our surprise our pursuers fell back, even letting the Danes pass with only a flurry of arrows to sting them as they went. I was amazed that the Danes were still rowing and could only think that their sleek ships were even more well made than they appeared, cutting through the water like arrows through the air.

‘They’ve had enough!’ Gunnar shouted, raising coarse cheers from parched Norse and English throats. We eased off the oars, our rhythm slowing to half speed as we dared to hope that we had at last escaped Bishop Borgon and the blue cloaks. My screaming heart began to slow and I took the chance to drink from the water skin by my feet. Then we came round the next bend, where the river narrowed again, and saw two small fortifications facing each other from either bank. They were squat wooden buildings built atop foundations of worked stone sunk deep into the flood plain, and both were crowned with a rampart and palisade. Men with bows were scuttling up ladders on to these ramparts, their captains’ yells percussive across the water between the slap and plunge of our oars.

‘Get ready for rain, lads,’ Olaf warned, meaning that we could expect a shower of arrows. Then we heard a thunderous, bone-crushing sound, a grinding noise the like of which I had never heard before. Facing
Serpent
’s stern I could not twist round fully to see what was making it, but I could see Knut’s face, which was enough to sink my heart.