Robert Low - The Prow Beast

Yan Alf went crazed then and leaped up on top of the wolffang cradle and its smother of hanging bodies, then hurled himself, screaming, into the middle of the pack; I never saw him alive again. Finnlaith, screaming ‘Ui Neill’ and spittle, followed him, leaping off the top of the watchtower and I saw him once after that, rising through a frothing sea of enemy like a breaching whale; then he disappeared.

That broke them. One minute I was slashing and stabbing, my breathing high and shrill, my arm aching, seeing the blood curve off the end of the axe blade in fat, greasy spray — then I was slumped against the scarred, gouged cradle where bodies writhed and groaned. The Pols backed off through their own arrows and Finn yelled out a warning as the full weight of shafts fell on us.

Shields up, we stood there until men brought up some thick timber doors torn off the houses and used them as shelter. In the end, the arrows stopped and men went out to heave corpses aside and shut the gates again, though they were so badly splintered that they could not be barred.

I know I shouted instructions for some of this, for Finn told me. I know I helped carry Alyosha away and consoled a weeping Crowbone, while the crew of Short Serpent — what was left of them — stood, covered in gore and grim silence while Alyosha was shield-carried to a pyre. Ospak and Murrough, the last Irishers left, stood like dumb posts, unable to go out and find Finnlaith; in the end, Onund whacked their shoulders and gave them work to keep their minds off the loss.

I know all this, but was aware of none of it. I only came back to life later, when Bjaelfi was binding up my ankle — the old injury, which burned like fire. I had gone over on it, according to folk who saw, and limped about for a long time until Bjaelfi and others managed to pin me down and tend my wounds.

I had a scratch down one cheek, my ribs ached from a blow I did not even know I had come by and my nose thundered with pain and trickled new blood, so that Finn, unharmed and grinning through the stains on his face, shook his head.

‘That neb of yours will not last much longer if you persist in getting it dunted,’ he noted and Ospak, staggering past with an armful of timber to be spiked with spear and arrow points, stopped long enough to look and tilt his head almost onto his shoulder.

‘Every time I look at it,’ he said, ‘I have to stand at more of a list to steerboard than before, just to keep it straight on your face.’

Then he laughed, a shrill, high sound. They all laughed, those that were left, hair stiff with clotted filth, armour red-rusted and weapons stained with gore. They moved as though their legs were wood — yet they moved, getting ready for the next attack.

Finnlaith was dead, Yan Alf was dead. Thorbrand was dead. Hjalti Svalr had the Red Pest, had lost most of his right hand and was groaning and babbling of home. Others were stacked like winter wood, their weapons bound to cold hands. And those who were left mourned with laughter, like wolves.

I had no belly left for laughing. As the shadows lengthened and weary fires sprang up, Bjaelfi came to me, his face scored with misery, carrying a limp little bundle which he laid at my feet like an offering. It was so small, that bundle, yet it broke us all like a falling tree and men groaned and bowed their heads; some even wept, leaving wet white streaks through the filth of their cheeks.

Koll. He was wrapped warmly and his face was so swollen his father would not have known him but for the bone-white of his hair. One hand rested on his chest under the warm wrap, but one had flopped free and the blue veins on it stood proudly out, so proud it was hard to believe that blood did not pump through them. The rest of the hand was pale, the shrinking flesh spatterered with white pustules.

Bjaelfi looked at me, waiting to take the small body to the burning; men stopped and made Hammer signs for mourning and not just because Koll was dead. He was what we had struggled all this way to get, had fought for, had watched oarmates die for — and we had failed.

I tied his little hands round the hilt of his father’s sword and gave him to the Odin-fire. It was like the death of hope itself, watching that small, wrapped body smoke up into the dark.

That night, Dark Eye came to me, silent as a summer breeze, yet when I reached for her she was limp and slick-sheened with sweat, hot as embers in my arms. To the question in my eyes, she simply slithered from her shapeless tunic-dress and raised her arms; even in the dark, where her silver shape glowed, the red spots on her thighs and under her arms were clear, almost as big as the tender tips of her hard breasts.

She shivered and sweated.

‘In the morning,’ she said, ‘I will go to them.’

I argued. I swore. I ranted. I babbled. In the end she pressed hot, cracked lips on mine to silence me.

‘This is my wyrd,’ she said, her breath fetid on my cheek. ‘This is best. I am what they want — let them take me, for it will be their own doom. This is what the Sea-Finn’s drum saw.’

I saw it, then, hot in her eyes, with a coldness deep in my bowels. It was her wyrd — at one stroke she saved us, saved her people and would spread the red, ruinous pest through Czcibor’s army.

‘It must be done in the morning,’ she said, ‘before I am too weak to pretend.’

I nodded then, still frantic with the loss of her, with the sight of those great, liquid seal eyes already filming blue-white with sickness. I held her most of that night, leaving her only long enough to take a stained, unbleached linen scrap and wrap it round a shield.

There was not enough dark in all the world that would keep back the creeping dawn.

When it spilled up, staining the rampart, making it like the jaw of some snarling prow beast, men stood, shaking and weary, beards and hair stiff with filth, eyes bright with the knowledge that today they would stand before their gods — and were amazed to see me walk Dark Eye to the gate.

I handed my axe to Finn and left Dark Eye with him while I shoved through the splintered ruin, stepping over the bodies and through the bloody crust of mud. I held the linen-wrapped shield high, hoping it was white enough to be noticed as a truce-sign. I paused only once to look Randr Sterki in his red-rimmed eyes. His grin was a curve of snarl.

Picking my way through the festering dead, I stumbled out to where Czcibor sat on his horse; he looked more gaunt now, I was thinking and I wondered if the Red Pest had already reached his army.

‘Be quick,’ he said harsh and haughty, so I was.

‘Is she trade enough for our lives?’ I asked and he looked over my shoulder to the small figure in the broken gateway, having to look across the heaped bundles of his own dead men, having to see the spears and blades still defending the rampart, the cradle of wolf-teeth gleaming just inside the gate.

When he looked back at me, his eyes were hard and cold and bleak, which did not bother me much — I knew he would agree, for he could not stay here longer. He ached to stake us out, but the cost was high and he was too much of a good commander to let his hate ruin his army and his ambition.

What stabbed me to the bone was the rest of his look, the bit just behind his eyes which curled a sneer at me for giving up this slip of a woman to save our lives.

Perhaps it choked him, perhaps he was too tired to do more — but he nodded, which was enough.

I walked back to the gate and took my axe back from Finn. Dark Eye, impassive as a carving, wrapped the tattered cloak round her and walked out, the way she had always walked, as if she had gold between her legs, into the maw of the Pols. She did not look back.

I came back into the faces of those who knew the business was finished and that they would not die today. Yet there remained, hovering like a waiting hawk, the knowledge that it had been the girl the Pols had wanted all along — but no-one who saw my face wanted to bare their teeth on that, all the same.