Poul Anderson - The Broken Sword

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, war-cries 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.