The Broken Sword (29 page)

The teeth gleamed in his beard. “But I think we will carry them before us. We are more than they, and man for man stronger. Skafloc and I will seek each other out; there is no love between us twain. And I will kill him and get his victorious sword.”

He stopped. The lord from Scotland asked: “And what of the Sidhe?”

“They are not all-powerful,” snapped Valgard. “Once we have mowed enough elves to make it plain their cause is doomed, the Sidhe will handsel peace. Then England will be a troll realm, guarding the homeland from attack until we have gathered might to fare afresh against the Elfking.”

His darkling gaze slanted down to meet Illrede’s. “And I,” he muttered, “will sit on your throne. But what use is that? What use is anything?”

Some time after the noise in the night had ended, a housecarle plucked up the heart to leave his bed, light a lamp from the hearth-coals, and search out how it stood in Thorkel Erlendsson’s home. He found the outer door open in the room of Freda Ormsdaughter, her child gone, and she lying swooned and bleeding on the threshold. He carried her back. Thereafter she tossed in a fever, crying out things which caused the priest, when he came, to shake his head and cross himself.

None could get sense out of her. Twice in the following days she tried to slip away, and each time someone saw her and led her back. She had no strength to fight them.

But there came the night when she awoke alone, her mind clear-or so she believed-and a little health returned to her. She lay for a while making plans. Then she crept from her bed, clenching her jaws lest teeth clatter in the cold, and found the chest where her clothes lay. Fumbling in the dark, she put on a woolen gown and long, hooded cloak; she carried shoes in hand and went in stockinged feet to the kitchen for bread and cheese to take with her.

On the way back through her room, she stopped to kiss the crucifix above the bed. “Forgive me if You can,” she whispered, “that I love him more than You. Evil am I, but the sin is mine, not his.”

She went out beneath the stars. They were very many, unwinking and sharp. The night was quiet, save where frost crackled under her feet. The cold bit at her. She walked toward the stable.

***

The castle remained dusky and still while day waned toward sunset. Leea put her hands about Valgard’s arm, where it was thrown across her bosom. Slowly, carefully, she lifted it and laid it on the mattress, and slid herself out on to the floor.

He turned, mumbling in his sleep. The vigour of his wakefulness was gone, leaving a skull over which a scarred hide was drawn tight, save that it sagged at eyes and chin. Leea looked down upon him. A dagger from off a table sheened in her grasp.

Easy to slash his throat-No, too much depended on her. If she should make a slip-and he had a werewolf’s alertness, even when asleep-everything might yet be lost. She turned away, no louder than a questing shadow, drew gown and girdle over her nakedness, and left the earl’s chambers. In her right hand she held the knife, in her left the castle keys, lifted from the hiding place she had suggested to Valgard.

She passed another elf woman on the stair. This one carried swords from the armory. Neither spoke.

The trolls tossed in uneasy slumber. Now and again Leea flitted by a watchman, who paid her no heed beyond a lickerish glance. Elf women were often sent on errands by their masters.

Down into the dungeons she went. She came to the cell door behind which was Imric, and undid the triple lock.

The imp stared at her through the restlessly reddened dark. Leea was on him in a single pounce. His wings rattled, but ere he could cry out he was flopping with his gullet slit across.

Leea scattered the fire. Reaching up, she cut the ropes that bound Imric. He fell heavily into her arms and lay corpse-like when she had lowered him to the floor.

She carved healing runes on bits of the charred woods and put them under his tongue, on his eyes and burnt feet, on his lame hands. She whispered spells. The flesh writhed as it grew back. Imric gasped with pain but made no other sound.

Leea put certain keys off the ring beside him. “When you have recovered,” she said low, “free the elf captives. They have been placed in the dungeons for safety’s sake. Weapons will be hidden in the old wellhouse behind the keep. Do not go after them until the fighting is at a peak.”

“Good,” he muttered out of his parched throat. “Also I will get water and wine and a haunch of meat … and everything else the trolls owe to me.” The gleam in his eyes came near to frightening Leea herself.

On soundless bare feet, she followed an underground passage to a tower for astrologers, now unused, which overlooked the outer walls on the east side. Up the stairs she wound until she stood among the great brass and crystal instruments. From there she stepped forth onto the encircling balcony. Though she was shaded, the sinking sun well-nigh blinded her with glare and stabbed her with rays of a more terrible, invisible light. She barely saw one who stood tall and brightly byrnied outside the wall, as had been asked in the message which a bat carried for her through the last dusk.

She could not tell who it was. A warrior of the Sidhe, belike, though maybe-her heart stumbled-maybe Skafloc himself.

She leaned over the rail and flung the ring of keys upward and outward in a glittering arc. It looped on his spear; and those were the keys to unlock and unbolt the castle gates.

Leea hurried back into grateful dimness. Like a skimming bird she raced for the earl’s chambers. Hardly had she doffed her clothes and gotten back into bed than Valgard blinked awake.

He clambered to his feet and peered out the dusking window. “Almost sundown,” he said. “Time to arm for battle.”

Taking a horn off the wall, he opened the door to the stairs and blew a long-blast. Watchmen who heard it passed the signal on, down and down the reaches of the castle … not knowing it was the call for every elf woman who was able to plunge a knife into the heart of the troll who had her.

***

Freda kept fainting, and rousing in a whirl of red-spattered darkness just as she was about to fall off her horse. It was pain, swordlike through her half-healed body, that brought her back to awareness, and she thanked it with dry lips.

She had taken mount and remount, and flogged them on unmercifully. Hills and trees wavered past, like stones seen through a swiftly running river. Often they struck her as unreal, things of dream; nothing was real except the tumult that filled her head.

She remembered her horse stumbling once and throwing her into a brook. When she rode on, the water froze in her dress and hair.

Many eternities later, when the sun was again sinking as red as the blood in her trail, her second horse fell. The first had already died; nor did this one get up. She took to her feet, crashing into trees because her eyes could not place them, pushing through bushes whose twigs clawed at her.

Ever more high and loud rose the clamour within her. She could not think who she was, nor care. Nothing mattered save that she keep moving north toward Elfheugh.

At sundown Skafloc let sound the battle horns. His elves came forth from their tents, into the dusk, with a clashing of metal and a great revengeful shout. Horses tramped and whinnied, chariots rolled brazen over the frosty ground, and a forest of spears lifted behind the flying banners and the head of Illrede.

Skafloc mounted his Jotun stallion. The sword called Tyrfing seemed almost to stir of itself at his hip. Beneath the helmet his face might have been the mask of a forgotten war-god, worn thin in everything but ruthlessness.

Of Firespear he asked, “Do you also hear a racket behind the walls?”

“Aye,” grinned the elf. “The trolls have just found out how it was that the other castles fell so easily. However, they will not catch the women, with the hiding places there are in that burh, ere we have caught them.”

Skafloc gave him a key off the ring at his belt. “Do you lead the attack on the rear, with a ram,” he reminded needlessly. “When we open the front gate, it should draw enough defenders for you to get at the hind one. Flam and Rucca will lead diversionary assaults to right and left, which will swing to help us when we enter. I will go with the Sidhe and those guardsmen the Elfking sent, against the forward portal.”

The full moon rose enormous out of the eastern sea. Its light fell glittery on metal and eyes, ghostly on banners and white horses. The lurs dunted and the host raised another shout that rang between crags and cliffs, up toward the stars. Then elves and allies moved to do battle.

A twanging sounded through the night. Shaken the trolls might be, with a third of their number murdered in sleep and the killers loose somewhere in that maze of a castle; yet they were doughty warriors and Valgard roared them on to their tasks. From the walls their archers sent a steady rain of arrows down on the elves.

Shafts rattled off shields and mail; but some struck deep. Man after man toppled, horses screamed and bolted, dead and wounded littered the uphill way.

That was a rugged tor, and only one narrow road led to the main gate. Elves needed no path, they sprang over rattling talus and frost-slippery rocks, from crag to next higher crag, warcries ringing from their throats. They threw hooks that caught the tops of cliffs and swarmed up ropes tied to these, they rode their horses where no goat would have dared to go, they stormed to the flat ground under the walls and sped their own arrows aloft.

Skafloc took the road, so that he could lead the chariots of the Tuatha De Danaan. Frightfully they rumbled behind him, wheels sparking and crashing on stones, bodies glowing as if the bronze were still molten. Though arrows rattled off helms, hauberks, and shields, neither warriors nor drivers suffered hurt. Nor did he, thundering on his dark horse along a path of shadow and tricky moonlight.

Thus the elves won to the walls. Boiling water and blazing oil and ice-slick vitriol gushed down at them, spears and stones and the lurid fire of the Greeks. Elves shrieked when the flesh peeled from their bones, and their comrades drew snarling back.

Skafloc shouted, wild to draw his sword. To him the elves dragged a testudo, a shed on wheels, and covered by this he rode to the gate.

On the battlement above, Valgard signed to his men at the war engines. Long before those brazen-bound doors gave way to a battering ram, the shelter would be crushed under huge hurled stones.

Skafloc put the first key in place and turned it, calling out the rune words. A second key, a third-Valgard helped load a ballista with a boulder beneath whose weight it groaned. Trolls wound it up.

Seven keys, eight-Valgard grasped the lever. Nine keys, and the gate was unbarred!

Skafloc reared back his horse. The pawing forefeet dashed on the doors. They swung open, and Skafloc galloped the tunnel thickness of the wall and burst out into the moon-silvery courtyard. Behind him, the passage echoed to the wheels of the chariots of Lugh, Dove Berg, Angus Og, Eochy, Coll, Cecht, Mac Greina, Mananaan, the whole host of the Sidhe, to hoofs of horses and running feet. The gateway was taken!

Guards beyond struck out with their weapons. An axe smote the leg of the Jotun horse. The stallion neighed and kicked, trampled, trod warriors into bloody smears.

Skafloc’s sword wailed forth. The blade flamed icy blue in the half-light, sang its killing-song, rose and fell, striking like an adder. Clamour and clangour of metal belled at the stars, shouts, whistle of blades, earthquake rumble of wheels.

Back and back went the trolls. Valgard howled, his eyes glowing wolf-green, and led a rush down from the wall to the courtyard. Mightily he smote at the flank of the invaders. An elf fell to his axe, he twisted the edge loose and struck at another, smashed the face of a third with its beak-hewing, hewing, he waded into battle.

At the rear gate rose the drumbeat of Firespear’s ram. The trolls cast stones at it, pots of burning oil, spears and arrows and darts-until from behind them leaped a crew gaunt and bloody and tattered, but with weapons hungry in their hands-Imric’s gang of freed prisoners. The trolls turned to fight them, and Firespear opened the gate.

“To the keep!” Valgard trumpeted. “To the keep, and hold it!”

Trolls carved a way to where he loomed. They made a shield-wall against which elf swords clattered, and brought it by sheer weight and force to the front door of the keep.

It was locked.

Valgard hurled himself at it. The door cast him back. He chopped out the lock and swung the door open.

Bowstrings sang in the darkness behind. Trolls fell. Valgard lurched back with an arrow through his left hand. Leea’s voice jeered at him: “The elf women hold this house for their lovers-better lovers than they have lately had, O you ape of Skafloc!”

Valgard turned away, wrenching the arrow from his hand. He howled and frothed. Back into the courtyard he went, axe whirring and belling, striking at anything that was before it. The berserkergang was on him.

***

Skafloc fought in that colder glory which the rune sword lent him. It was fire in his hand. Blood and brains spurted, heads rolled on flagstones, guts were slippery under his horse’s hoofs-he fought, he fought, icily aware and thinking, yet whirled high out of himself so that he and the killing were one. He scattered death as a sower strews grain, and where ever he went the troll lines broke.

The moon climbed from the waters whereon it had built a bridge-strange they should be so quiet-and over the castle walls. Its light fell upon ghastliness. Swords flew, spears thrust, axes and clubs beat, metal and men cried their pain. Horses reared, trampling, whinnying, manes clotted with blood. The struggle swayed back and forth over its own corpses and stamped them into meaningless meat.

The moon rose further, until from the courtyard it was as if an eastern watchtower pierced its heart. Then the trolls broke.

Few of them were left. The elves harried them about the like animals.

Few of them were left. The elves harried them about the castle grounds and out onto the white hillside, hunting them like animals.