The Gathering Storm (67 page)

“There they are,” said Tenth Son on the seventh day out of Hefenfelthe, as the sun neared the zenith.

Stronghand moved up to the front with Hakonin’s chief, Papa Otto, and the young Hessi interpreter beside him. The scouts approached at a gallop along the road. Eight had been sent out. Only five were returning.

Outriders cantered forward to meet them and soon a dozen soldiers pulled up in front of the vanguard. The five scouts dismounted. Their mounts went eagerly to the human grooms who would walk and cool down the blown horses. Only horses bred on the fjords ever really became used to the smell of the RockChildren.

One of the scouts stepped forward to give his report; the gripping beast pattern decorating his torso marked him as a Hakonin son.

“A substantial force moves northeast off to the west of us. They fly the banner of the queen’s stag and one of a white boar. They’ll soon cross this road. If they get ahead of us we’ve worse to face ahead. There are fortifications lying across our path, a line of ditches and embankments. The land narrows. There are steep wooded hills to one side and marsh to the other, but a corridor down the middle. That’s where the fortifications lie.”

“Are they newly built?” asked Stronghand.

“They’re old.”

Stronghand gestured. Word was passed down to the thirtieth rank, where Alban volunteers marched.

“You trust these turncoats?” asked the Hakonin scout. By the markings on the scout’s shoulder, Stronghand identified him as First Son of a Thirteenth Litter.

“These are not turncoats, First Son. They had no coats to
turn. They were slaves. Now they seek honor and position in my army because they had none before nor any chance to try.”

“Yet they are soft.” First Son bared his teeth to show the flash of jewels, earned in Stronghand’s battles. He was sharp, and bold, and independent. Worth watching, for good or for ill.

“They may be,” agreed Stronghand. “They have yet to prove themselves.”

A pair of men, one young and one gray, trotted up. Both had knowledge of this country, so they claimed.

“What are you called?” asked Stronghand, because he knew that with humankind, names give power and knowing the name of another brings power to the one who names.

The older man spoke with an odd accent. “I am named Ediki. That is my true name, though my master called me Wulf in the manner of his people. I was born in the fen country. When I was a lad, the Alban lord of Weorod captured me and sold me as a slave into the great city. We’re close by the manor and lands of Weorod now. This lad goes by the name Erling. His mother was my kinswoman. She was taken away even before I was, but he was born and raised in the city. From her, he knows a bit of lore.”

“I will call you the name you were born with, Ediki. Tell him of the fortifications.”

Ediki listened intently, nodding all the while, as First Son spoke and Yeshu translated. “Yes, that’s right where the lord of Weorod makes his home. The earthworks are called Grim’s Dike and the Imps. Built in my grandmother’s grandmother’s time by the winter queen of Lindale, called Aelfroth. Her brothers warred against her out of the western highlands. She built earth walls to hold them back.”

Erling scratched the slave brand that scarred his cheek, whether because it itched or because he was nervous, Stronghand could not tell. Unlike Ediki, he wasn’t small and dark but had the height and fairness common among the tall, blond Albans. “My mam said that Grim’s Dike was built by the old southerns, the iron soldiers, them who called themselves Dariyans and once ruled this land before the Albans came. She said it was built to stop the Albans who was then invading.”

Ediki shrugged. “If it were, it didn’t hold them back, did it? Maybe the lad’s right. Maybe I am.”

“When the Albans invaded? You are not an Alban?”

“The fair ones? No. They are latecomers, those. We are the true people. This is our land from the first days. The Albans are no friends of ours.” He looked up at Stronghand. With his broad chest and burly shoulders and coal black hair, tied back with a strip of leather, Ediki looked more like a bog spirit than a man, but his gaze was keen and his hands steady. If he feared the RockChildren, he knew how to hide it. “Lord, only the queen’s uncle has the right to fly the sigil of the boar. If this high lord and his army reach Grim and the Imps first, we’ll fight hard and ugly to get past them, I’m thinking. The lord of Weorod will have fighting men as well, to support him. If the high lord reinforces the queen—then she’ll be as strong as she can be.”

Stronghand nodded. “Therefore we must reach the fortifications first and set our own positions.”

“There’s a small force holding them already,” added First Son. “This lord of Weorod the slave speaks of.”

Stronghand grinned, baring his teeth in a challenge. “‘The slave’ is a slave no more but a soldier in my army. Speed is what matters now. We’ll march at double time, hit them in force front on while First Son leads his Hakonin brothers around through the forest to flank them. If he can.”

First Son grinned in response, accepting the challenge.

The two Imps were smaller ramparts placed to hold the low ground between the forest, their angle and position buttressed by the tangle of streams that interlaced this country, but whatever band was holding Grim’s Dike hadn’t the manpower to hold these westerly ramparts as well, so it was an easy task to swarm over them and march east as the afternoon progressed.

“Will we leave men to hold the lesser dikes?” asked Tenth Brother. Stronghand shook his head. “No. We’ll see the Worth of our Alban allies proved today. Let everyone advance.”

The sun lay behind them. Their shadows drew long and longer as they spread into battle order and advanced at a trot on the last great rampart. Grim’s Dike was grim indeed, the ramparts cunningly positioned to stretch across grassy heath
with, according to Ediki, one end thrust into thick oak and ash woods and the other dabbling its toes in lowland marsh. From the vantage afforded by their approach, however, Grim’s Dike stretched out to either side far beyond what a man could see, a formidable obstacle with the great ditch gaping before them and the embankment rising high above. Ediki reckoned it at least two leagues in length. Behind it lay Weorod, where Ediki had been captured as a young man and sold into slavery in the distant city. Threads of smoke curled up from fires in that manor—hearth fires, perhaps, or forges as the Albans prepared for war.

First Son and his strike troop had already vanished into the forest as Stronghand raised his standard to signal the attack, nothing more complicated than a straightforward assault against massively inferior forces. He allowed Vitningsey to lead the charge and placed himself in the second rank. In silence they bent low and ran with the dogs loping beside them. These soldiers were limber and strong, so it was easy for them to leap down into the ditch and no difficult feat to scramble up the steep-sided embankment; they raised their shields to cover their heads as arrows and javelins rained down on them, but even such weapons as got through did little damage to their tough skin. The Albans guarding the rampart boasted bronze and stone weapons but evidently no steel, and while steel or iron could cleave the hide of one of his warriors, not much else would.

The defenders were few enough that it was hopeless in any case. He clambered up the embankment and kicked aside a bloody body as the first wave went over the top and, in silence, did their work. Only the screams of hapless men and the battering of spear and ax against shields and flesh accompanied the keening of the wind. As he reached the top, troubled by nothing more than a single arrow rolling down the slope past him, he saw both the battle unfolding and the landscape beyond. Within the haze made by the sun’s slanting rays casting gold across the heath he glimpsed a distant cluster of buildings, ringed by a low stockade and surrounded by fields and pasture. Tiny figures fled the estate with nothing more than what they could carry. Below, the remaining Alban defenders, not more than three score, formed into tight groups,
shields held firm as those who had survived the initial assault attempted to regroup and retreat. They were determined, but they could not last long.

Far behind, he heard a horn blast.

The Alban lord and his army were approaching quickly. For his plan to work, he needed control of the dike at once.

First Son’s force burst out of the trees and hit the Alban defenders from the rear, just as he had intended. The Alban shield wall collapsed and the dogs went to work finishing off the wounded. Around him, his army flowed over the rampart and down like floodwaters breaching an embankment. Ten hundreds, as Alain would say, in the way that the Wendish ordered men. He needed no exact count to understand that while he had a large army, he had been forced to leave a second group as large to garrison Hefenfelthe and the surrounding countryside. Forty ships had sailed north so that he might have reinforcements massed to come in off the sea—if he could reach the sea. From the embankment he had a better view of the countryside to the northeast where the land sank into a flat marshy ground that seemed to go on forever, treeless, open, and utterly bleak. He saw no shelter for his army, no way to approach with stealth, no cover at all.

Yet out there in those trackless fens, the queen of Alba sheltered.

“My lord, we are ready.” Out of breath, Ediki stopped beside him with the two-score volunteers, First Son’s turncoats, the men who had once been slaves. They were tough, but the run and the climb had winded them. Were they strong enough to do what he needed?

“You know what risk you run,” he said. “You know what will happen if you fail?”

“We know, my lord. We know what you have promised us. It is worth the risk. We have no love for those who ground us down.” Ediki spat on the corpse that lay next to Stronghand’s feet, a blond youth not so very old; his chin had been smashed in by an ax-blow, but it was the spear thrust that had disemboweled him that had killed him. “They are not even my kinfolk—these ones. They came from over the sea.”

“Just as we did,” said Stronghand.

“No offense meant, my lord,” said Ediki as the other
Albans murmured. A few of them, like Ediki, were short and stocky, with dark hair and brown eyes, but the rest had the height and pale coloring of the Albans. “But it was the Albans who drove my ancestors into the hills and the marsh in the long ago days.”

“They raped my mother,” Erling said suddenly in the way of a man meaning to prove himself by displaying his anger. “I’m a bastard, and a slave woman’s son. You are the only
man
—” He hesitated as if seeing Stronghand for the first time. After so much time spent among humankind, Stronghand knew what disturbed them most about his appearance: the claws thrust out from the backs of his bony hands; the scaled copper of his flesh; his black slit eyes, the braid of coarse white hair, and the jewels that flashed when he bared his teeth. So like a man and yet not a man. Erling recovered himself and floundered onward. “—the only
lord
who has offered me anything but chains and the bite of his whip.”

“So I am,” Stronghand agreed. “And so I promised. Let the slave become the master, and the master become the slave.”

Half a dozen of his soldiers hurried up from below, carrying mail and bloody tunics and open-faced helms taken off the dead men. “Put on what you can,” said Stronghand, “and take your places. We haven’t much time.”

His army had all crossed over the dike and arrayed themselves according to his plan, a third kneeling in staggered ranks just below the crest, a third running back to invest the palisade and manor house, and the others split onto either flank. An entire hundred crept back into the forest under First Son’s command, backtracking.

He knelt beside Ediki, letting the old man conceal him with one of the rectangular Alban shields. His Alban volunteers now wore the outward garb of the men who had once defended the dike.

Two banners bobbed into view, fluttering with the sun’s light streaming across them: the queen’s stag and its attendant boar. No wolf’s head glittered among the host, but a man rode at the forefront wearing a helm ornamented with the tusks and snout of a boar. His army came in good order, well disciplined and confident. He estimated there were five or six hundreds of them, enough to inflict real damage if it came to a pitched
fight. They could see from the dirt churned up by the passage of the Eika army that a large force had moved across this ground ahead of them.

Erling stepped forward and waved his arms. “Make haste!” he shouted. “Brothers, move quickly! My lord, I pray you, beware! A small pack of the beasts are hiding in the forest the better to ambush you, to scare you off and make you think they’ve taken the dike. The rest have swung up along the dike toward the fens. We held them off, but we haven’t long before they attack again.”

The other Alban volunteers moved up alongside him, an easy target for arrows if the Alban host distrusted their tale. It took courage to place themselves so nakedly in the line of fire.

“Make haste!” they cried. “Make haste! We need reinforcements!” For an instant, for a year, for the space of ten breaths, Stronghand wondered if the Alban lord with his boar’s head helmet would take the bait.

Then First Son played his hand—axes and spears clattered against shields to create a host of noise rising out of the woodland. These Albans didn’t yet understand that the RockChildren attacked in silence.

The lord shouted a command; his banner dipped and rose to signal the advance, and the host broke forward at a run, making haste, and their tight formation came undone as one man outpaced another, as they raced for the safety of the ramparts.

Stronghand bared his teeth. Behind, he felt as much as heard the murmur of his army tightening their grips on their weapons.

When the first of the Albans came over the top, awkward as they climbed and winded and thinking that their brothers awaited them, they hadn’t a chance.

In the end, after the slaughter and with the sun sliding down beneath the western horizon, they took the boar’s head alive. He was a man of indeterminate years, lean, hard, and cunning by the look of him, not easy to subdue. He was too proud to curse at his fate and too clever to waste his breath begging for mercy or modesty when Stronghand’s soldiers stripped him. He
wore luxurious garb under his chain mail, a padded tunic chased with gold thread, the gold armbands worn by Alban lords, a pair of gold necklaces, and silver rings and bracelets, a rich haul by any measure. In his time he had survived three wounds, long since healed, but on this day only his right hand was bleeding from a stroke that had knocked his gauntlet off. His shield was almost hacked in two, but it had fared better than the four young men who had died in a last attempt to break him out of the battle and escape toward the fens.