Swords From the West (80 page)

Now, he thought, she sees nothing good in me. His steel mesh was ripped, his cloak a rag around one arm, and he could not move.

"Well," he said, "I tried to come back to the hut to show you, but I could not."

She shook her head, staring at him, trying to wipe the blood from his hand. Then Rorik remembered. He pulled the ring from his little finger and gave it to her. She held back from taking it, her eyes startled.

"Girl," said Rorik the Yngling, "even if I am not a soldier, and cannot hold my ground, I can make you a gift. Somehow," he went on, shamed, "I like you."

He could feel her hair brush against his face, and it was pleasant to have her bending over him, "What does it say?" she whispered, looking at the letters inscribed on the jewel. Gloria.

"That I do not know," said Rorik, who could not read. "That is for you to tell me."

Tight she gripped the gold ring, closing her eyes.

"My father says," she whispered, "there was no one like you, in the valley. So I am proud, and I will take your ring and be your wife."

Rorik looked up at the bell tower, to think about this. He had wanted to be first in the battle, to get his gold, and perhaps a girl. Maera had arranged matters in a way of her own, and he found that he liked it.

"They can ring their bells," he agreed. "For Rorik the Yngling will stay in these mountains."

The army of Jerusalem was retreating. For a month it had been fighting, without luck. It was a small army, and there was no other to defend Jerusalem against the advances of the Mohammedan powers in this Year of the Lord 1107.

Horses wearied by a forced march of twelve miles past the hills of Bethlehem, the column moved through a stifling defile of red rock, in a haze of dust. The men rode in sullen silence, aching under the weight of their chain armor-six thousand of them. Somewhere, back in the gorge, the caliph's host, thirty thousand strong, followed in pursuit.

Few lances rose through the dust. Most of them had been broken or thrown away, with the saddlebags and shields. The great banner of Baldwin, the king, was furled and carried between two Knights of the Hospital, and Baldwin himself lay gaunt and fever-wracked in a horse litter with a cloak hanging over him to keep the sun from his head. Only the gilt cross of the patriarch was still uplifted.

A hoarse voice chanted the words, and men turned their heads to stare or curse. Sweat-soaked saddles creaked, and the dull clank-clonk of sword sheath against iron shield kept time to the thudding trot of the heavy chargers.

Ahead of them-two leagues more of the dust and sun glare-stood the lofty wall and the great towers of Jerusalem. There they could dismount and throw themselves down in the shade and sleep. And some of them could forget their wounds. Two leagues more.

They had left their dead behind them, and the wounded who could not ride. They were thin and patient-these men of arms who had come overseas to defend the Sepulcher of Christ. They were the foreign legion, the host of Outre-mer. Tall Normans with a restless eye for plunder; redbearded Rhinelanders; heavy, drowsy Saxons; placid fighters from the clay marshes of Flanders; wanderers from England; and Vikings of the dragon ships, who followed the wars as gulls follow sails at sea. Slender youths in the once-white surcoats of the Hospital, who had once gazed longingly at the pennants of the older knights; gray-headed swordsmen who had managed somehow to live through the First Crusade. Iron men, they were called.

Then the rock walls opened out. The hills on either side sank to low swales. The head of the crusaders' column came out into a shallow valley and halted. Staring into a blinding sun, the leaders shouted hoarsely.

"Come up, ye men of the Cross!"

A low ridge on the left, a rambling mud village and orchard, was held by a mass of Moslems-fresh warriors they had not met before. They could not see clearly through sweat-smarting eyes, but the roar that came from the ridge was like the thunder of a long wave.

"Allah-akbar-Allah is greatest."

Now, the column had expected to dismount within Jerusalem's walls before sunset, and it was weary. Crowded in the gut of the defile, it began to be afraid-not of blows and the hurt of dying, but of being cut off. The men could not see what was happening, but whispered tidings ran back from the head of the column-whispers that ten thousand Arabs had come over from Damascus and cut them off. That a trap had been set for them and baited, and the army of the caliph was hastening after them to close the trap.

A Norman duke in the advance looked along the empty road through the quivering air of the valley bed, thought of the column taken in flank by the onset of these new, uncounted foes, reflected that the crusaders, themselves, could not form for a charge in the defile-and led the way at a gallop to the ridge on the right, opposite the Arabs, who shouted insults but made no attempt to charge.

Some of the desert swordsmen, splendidly mounted, galloped down to the road and taunted the crusaders to come down to single combat. But the six thousand had no heart for that. They dismounted and stood by their spent horses and looked around them. They saw a network of gullies behind them-rock ridges overgrown thinly with thorn and gray tamarisk. No way to get through there. They would have to go back to the road. They were out of the defile but not out of the trap, and they were weary men standing by spent horses.

"Look, ye men of Outre-mer," laughed the redheaded duke who had led them hither. "Here is the jousting ground and yonder are the lads who will break a few swords with us." And he whispered to himself, "By the life of God, the way out of the lists is narrow."

At the far end of the valley the road entered a gully again. To gain the road to Jerusalem, they would have to deal first with the mass of horsemen opposite, only a quarter-mile away. Evidently the Arabs were waiting for the pursuing host of the caliph to come up through the defile the crusaders had just left and close the trap.

Baldwin, the king, looked around him and slid from his litter, getting to his feet with an effort, for his right hip was stiff with dried blood.

"We will go together, messires!" He coughed, and then his voice rang out clear. "By God's aid we will mount and charge yonder men and drive them and so-fare forward again."

He staggered, as fresh blood rushed from the wound in his groin; his knees bent and his knights caught him and laid him back in the litter, unconscious. Baldwin had said the thing that must be done-to drive the Arabs away before the caliph's men came up. But Baldwin could not lead a charge.

The princes and captains gathered together where the standard had been lifted and argued in curt whispers. They could not rouse the men, who had seen Baldwin fall and felt sure that this was an omen of evil.

The red duke went to the bearded patriarch, who had girded a sword over his bishop's robe.

"Spur them on, my lord," quoth he, "or these, thy sheep, will be fanged by yonder wolves."

"Let them rest," the man of the church responded, "for they are weary, methinks. And I will pray that aid may be given us."

So he knelt by the uplifted cross, and the barons perforce knelt with him, while the sun dropped lower and the raucous shouting of the Arabs dinned into their ears. But the men in the ranks knew that no aid could reach them, and time was passing.

And then a miracle happened.

The summons to the crusade had not reached the far Northland, because no tidings came to that snowy country where the fire of the furnace of the gods filled the winter sky of nights. Beyond the Russian land it was, and beyond the last bishop's house of Finland. And this was the roving place of Skol, the pagan.

A manslayer and a troublemaker he was. Six feet and half a foot he stood, his heavy shoulders sagging forward. He had the corded arms of the forest dweller, and the broad and quiet face of a child. His blue eyes, half closed, seemed asleep when he was not fighting. Red was his skin from long ale drinking, and yellow as bright gold his curling beard and plaited hair.

On his skis he wandered from one lord's hall to another, in his leg wrappings of sable fur, and deerskin shirt studded thick with round iron knobs, and over that his white reindeer cloak. He carried a bundle slung to his ax.

Skol had one weapon and one skill. His battle-ax was four feet long, with a ball of iron at the butt of the shaft, to keep his hand from slipping when blood ran down it. The head of the ax had two parts to it: an iron hammer like a blacksmith's hammer, at the back, to smash armor, and a curving blade to hew through bone and flesh. In Skol's long arm, the sweep of that ax head could slice a man's body through. That was his skill, and he lived by it-by this power of manslaying.

His fathers had been Vikings, men of the dragon ships, but Skol followed the wars of the Northmen on land. Many were the gold arm rings given him by earls and princes, whom he had served as liege man. And no man said of him that he was a rear ranker, because he would take his stand where the blows fell hardest, his ax shearing a circle about him. When he passed his word, he held to his word.

But the women had ill to say of him, for his long ax had sent many a husbandman to the stone cairns, and he had left many a house with a burning roof. Skol the Manslayer, they called him. A rover, a wrongdoer. And they said that he would not find his own death.

Because he had no friends except the ale drinkers of a night-most men shunned him otherwise-and because he was alone in his wandering without talk to pass the hours, Skol brooded at times about one thing. He had no rightful liege lord of his own. No one who would sit by him and summon the neighbors to a high tide, if he should happen to be dying.

That was the one hour when a man ought not to be alone. To lie in darkness, without bright torches, or the chant of minstrels, or fellows to sit by with their ale and listen to what words he might care to say. True, Skol was no talker. But in the long silences of his wanderings, he fancied that he would like some little conversation in the hour of his faring forth from life. A bit of celebration that the ancient men and the minstrels would remember him by. That was his hankering, until the morning when he met Daimen the Finn on the forest path-a little man, a minstrel, with his fiddle in a sealskin bag on one shoulder and a broad scarlet cross upon the other.