Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

Brodir was pressed back slowly by his enemies. It seemed that the men-at-arms wanted to take the killer of the High King alive. They held their shields in front of them as they advanced deliberately and cautiously, forcing Brodir back towards the thicket in which I lay. More than ever Brodir seemed like a great wounded bear, but now it was a beast that has been cornered at the end of a forest hunt. Finally he could back away no farther. His retreat was blocked by the thicket and as he took one more step backwards, still facing his enemies, he caught his heel and fell. The hunters leapt forward, literally throwing themselves on their quarry, smothering Brodir in a crackling smash of branches and twigs. Overcome in the confusion, I lost consciousness once again and the final image in front of my eyes was of the iron-beaked ravens swarming in until the entire sky went black.

SIXTEEN

I AWOKE TO a jolt of excruciating pain in my arm. I thought at first that the source was my injured hand. But the pain was now coming from the other side. I opened my eyes to find a cliathaire leaning over me, clumsily hammering a rivet to close a fetter on my right wrist. He had missed his stroke and struck my arm with the hilt of his sword, which he was using as a makeshift mallet. I twisted my head to look around. I was lying on the muddy ground not far from the bush, out of which I had been dragged unconscious. About a dozen Irish and Norse soldiers were standing with their backs to me, staring at something which lay at the foot of one of the oak trees. It was Brodir's corpse. I recognised it from the lustrous long black hair. He had been disembowelled. Later I was told that this had been done at the request of the mercenaries in the High King's bodyguard. They claimed that Brodir's murderous ambush of the unarmed High King had been the mark of a coward and should be punished in the traditional way — his stomach slit and his guts pulled out while he was still alive. So his entrails had been nailed up to the oak tree. The truth, I suspected, was that the mercenaries were trying to divert attention from their own deficiency. They should never have left the High King unguarded.

The Irishman hoisted me to my feet, then tugged the fetter's chain to lead me away from the scene of Brian Boruma's death.

'Name?' he asked in dansk tong. He was a short, wiry man of about forty, dressed in the usual Irish costume of leggings bound with gaiters and a loose shirt, over which he wore a short brown and black cloak. He slung his small round shield onto his back by its strap so that he had one hand free to hold my leading chain. In his other hand he still held his sword.

'Thorgils Leifsson,' I replied. 'Where are you taking me?'

He looked up in surprise. I had spoken in Irish. 'Are you one of Sigtryggr's people, from Dublin?' he demanded.

'No, I came here with the ships from Man, but I didn't belong to Brodir's contingent.'

For some reason, the Irishman looked rather pleased with this news. 'Why were you fighting alongside them, then?' he asked.

It was too complicated to explain how I had come to be with Brodir's men, so I replied only, 'I was looking after a pair of wolf hounds for him, as their keeper.' And, unwittingly, with those words I sealed my fate.

After a short walk we reached the area where the remnants of the High King's army were gathering together the plunder of battle. The simple rule was that the first person to lay hands on a corpse got to keep his spoil provided he stripped the victim quickly and made it clear that he had established his claim to the booty. Many victors were already dressed in several layers of garments, a motley collection of captured finery worn one on top of another, with many of the outer layers blood-stained. Others were carrying four or five swords in their arms as if collecting sticks of firewood in the forest, while their colleagues were busy stuffing looted shoes into their sacks, together with belts and shirts, which they had stripped from the slain, including the dead from their own side. One Irish fighter had assembled a gruesome collection of three severed heads, which he had thrown on the ground, their hair knotted together. Clusters of men were disputing the more valuable items — chain-mail shirts or body jewellery. These arguments were frequently between Malachi's fresh troops and Boruma's battle-stained soldiers, who had done most of the fighting. The latter usually won the argument because they had an ugly, tired gleam in their eyes which indicated that after so much slaughter they were fully prepared to keep their rewards even if it meant taking arms against their own side.

My captor led me to a small group of his colleagues who were clustered around a campfire, preparing a meal. A jumble of their booty lay on the ground beside them. It was rather meagre, mosdy weaponry, a few helmets and some Ostman clothes. They looked up as he approached. 'Here,' he said, jerking on my chain, 'I've got the Man leader's aurchogad.' They looked impressed. An aurchogad, I was to learn, was a keeper of hounds. This is an official post among the Irish and found only in the retinue of a senior chief. By the Irish custom of war it meant that, as far as my captors were concerned, I had been a member of Brodir's personal retinue. Therefore I was a legitimate captive, an item of war booty, and thus I was now my captor's slave.

Our little group did not linger on the battlefield. Word quickly spread that Malachi, who was now effectively the leader of the victorious army, was already in negotiations with King Sigtryggr, still safe behind his city walls with Gormlaith, and that there would be no attack on the city, so no booty there. With Brian Boruma dead, Malachi had lost no time in laying claim to the title of High King, and Sigtryggr was promising to support his claim on condition that Malachi spared Dublin from being plundered. So the real victors of our momentous battle were the two leaders who had taken the least part in the fighting and, of course, Gormlaith. As matters turned out, she was to spend the next fifteen years in Dublin as the undisputed power behind the throne, telling King Sigtryggr what to do.

The losses among the real combatants had been horrific. Nearly every member of Boruma's family who took part in the battle had been killed, including two of his grandsons, and Murchad's reckless courage had finally brought about his own death. He had knocked one of Brodir's men to the ground and was leaning over him, about to finish him off when the Norseman thrust upward with his own dagger and gutted the Irish leader. One-third of the High King's fighters lay dead on the battlefield, and they had inflicted a similar level of damage on their opponents. Mael Morda's Leinstermen had been annihilated, and only a handful of the Norse troops from overseas survived the desperate scramble through the tidal shallows to get back to their ships. Earl Sigurd's Orkneymen suffered worst of all. Fewer than one man in ten managed to escape with his life, and Earl Sigurd's entire personal retinue had fallen, including fifteen of the Burners, though, for me, that was little consolation.

My owner, I learned as we marched into the interior of Ireland, went by the name of Donnachad Ua Dalaigh, and he was what the Irish call a ri or king. This does not mean a king as others might know it. Donnachad was no more than the leader of a small tuath or petty kingdom located somewhere in the centre of the country. By foreign standards he would have been considered little more than a sub-chieftain. But the Irish are a proud and fractious people and they cling to any level or mark of distinction, however modest. So they have several grades of kingship and Donnachad was of the lowest rank, being merely a ri tuathe, the headman of a small group who claim descent from a single ancestor of whose semi-legendary exploits they are, of course, extremely proud. Certainly Donnachad was much too unimportant to have rated an aurchogad of his own. Indeed, he was fortunate even to have the services of the single elderly attendant, who helped to carry his weapons and a dented cooking pot, as we travelled west with his war band of no more than twenty warriors. Donnachad himself proudly held the chain attached to his one and only slave.