Sword of vengeance, p.1
Sword of Vengeance, page 1
SWORD OF VENGEANCE
BOOK 4 IN THE SAXON WARRIOR SERIES
PETER GIBBONS
For my family. Love and support is everything.
Ūs Godriċ hæfð,
earh Oddan bearn, ealle beswicene.
Wēnde þæs formoni man, þā hē on mēare rād
lancan þām wicge, þæt wǣre hit ūre hlāford;
forþan wearð hēr on felda folc totwǣmed,
scyldburh tōbrocen. Ābrēoðe his anġin,
þæt hē hēr swā maniġne man āflȳmde!
Godric, cowardly son of Odda, has betrayed us all.
Many men supposed, when he rode off on the horse,
On the proud steed, that it was our prince who fled,
And so the people in the field were divided
And the shield wall was broken. May all his enterprises fail,
That he caused so many men to flee.
AN EXCERPT FROM ‘THE BATTLE OF MALDON’, AN ANGLO-SAXON POEM WRITTEN TO CELEBRATE THE BATTLE FOUGHT AT MALDON IN 991 AD
CONTENTS
Glossary
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Historical Note
More From Peter Gibbons
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Peter Gibbons
Warrior Chronicles
About Boldwood Books
GLOSSARY
Aesc spear – A large, two-handed, long-bladed spear.
Burh – A fortification designed by Alfred the Great to protect against Viking incursions.
Byrnie – Saxon word for a coat of chain mail.
Danelaw – The part of England ruled by the Vikings from 865 ad.
Drakkar – A type of Viking warship.
Ealdorman – The leader of a shire of the English kingdom, second in rank only to the king.
Einherjar – Vikings who have died in battle and have ascended to Valhalla.
Euton – A supernatural being, like a troll or a giant.
Gafol – The Danegeld, or tax raised to pay tribute to Viking raiders to save a land from being ravaged.
Heriot – The weapons, land and trappings of a thegn or other noble person, granted to him by his lord and which becomes his will or inheritance.
Hide – An area of land large enough to support one family. A measure used for assessing areas of land.
Holmgang – A ritualised duel common amongst Viking peoples.
Jomsvikings – Viking mercenaries based at their stronghold at Jomsburg who followed a strict warriors’ code.
Njorth – The Viking sea god.
Norns – Norse goddesses of fate. Three sisters who live beneath the world tree Yggdrasil and weave the tapestry of fate.
Odin – The father of the Viking gods.
Ragnarök – The end-of-days battle where the Viking gods will battle Loki and his monster brood.
Reeve – Administer of justice ranking below a thegn.
Seax – A short, single-edged sword with the blade angled towards the point.
Thegn – Owner of five hides of land, a church and kitchen, a bell house and a castle gate, who is obligated to fight for his lord when called upon.
Thor – The Viking thunder god.
Týr – The Viking war god.
Valhalla – Odin’s great hall where he gathers dead warriors to fight for him at Ragnarök.
Vik – Part of Viking Age Norway.
Whale Road – The sea.
Wyrd – Anglo-Saxon concept of fate or destiny.
Yggdrasil – A giant ash tree which supports the universe, the nine worlds including our world Midgard.
1
Beornoth clung to life, although many had tried to rip it from him with sharp blades, treachery and bloodthirsty malice. He was a Saxon warrior, a thegn, and all his friends, his brothers of the sword, were dead. Beornoth stared up at a shifting sky the blue-grey colour of rotten meat, and a spiteful rain spat across the war-torn land. Tiny droplets whipped and twisted by the wind soaked his face, washing away rivulets of blood from his bruised, tattered flesh.
He lay beneath a sycamore tree, staring up through the dark green leaves and veined seeds at the broiling clouds. The tree curled from the top of a hunchbacked hillside a half-day’s ride from the battlefield at Maldon. The battle had been fought and lost that day and Beornoth saw faces in the shifting clouds, the faces of brave men he had loved like brothers, and who had died on a blood-soaked riverbank. A stab of pain took his breath away and Beornoth coughed up another gout of dark bloody ooze, the iron taste of it thick on his tongue. His stomach burned like fire where a Viking blade had stabbed and ripped at his insides. It was as though a serpent twisted and gnawed at Beornoth’s guts, devouring him from the inside out. His hip throbbed where a spear had stabbed through the meat above his hip bone. Cuts and gashes littered his face and arms so that there was barely a handbreadth of flesh free from wounds.
‘Steady now,’ said Brand Thorkilsson as his face appeared above Beornoth. The raven tattoo on his neck shifted as Brand worked at Beornoth’s clothing, cutting away his jerkin and peeling the blood-soaked cloth away from his torso. Brand grimaced and tossed the cloth onto the coiled chain-mail byrnie, which lay on the grass like the shed skin of a war-monster from legend. It was Beornoth’s coat of mail and Brand unhooked the smashed links from the flaps of Beornoth’s wounds. It was slow, grim work as Brand painstakingly peeled the armour from Beornoth’s body. Beornoth bit down on a sycamore twig, gnashing at the foul, bitter wood as Brand prised the tiny hooks of metal from the lips of his wounds. Both Brand and the byrnie had saved Beornoth’s life. The small, interlocked links of iron had deflected more blows than Beornoth could remember, and its strength had lessened the wounds which penetrated beneath it. A byrnie was the symbol of a thegn and a warrior. The mail coat, sword, horse, spear and lands granted in return for a thegn’s oath to fight for his lord whenever required, that was Beornoth’s heriot, his inheritance, the thing that defined him as a thegn: the weapons and land granted to him by the ealdorman, which would pass to the next thegn upon Beornoth’s death.
Beornoth sucked in a gasp as Brand wrapped a strip of clean cloth around his stomach wound and tied it off with his teeth. Brand Thorkilsson shook his head and wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.
‘You should be dead,’ Brand said, and smiled. ‘But you are too stubborn for death, even Fenris Wolf and the rest of the Loki brood fear taking you beyond the gates of hell.’ Brand spoke Norse, and Beornoth understood. Beornoth was from north of Watling Street, born to a Saxon thegn of the Danelaw, where they spoke Norse as widely as the Saxon tongue.
Brand ran a hand through his golden hair to wipe rain-soaked strands away from his face and Beornoth was too exhausted to speak, too horrified from defeat in battle to form words. The Viking warlord Olaf Tryggvason had brought his fleet of dragon ships, his drakkar warships, as sleek and deadly as the blade of a seax, to the shores of the River Blackwater at Maldon in the shire of Essex. Olaf and the Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard had crossed the tidal causeway at Northey Island and laid waste to the army of Ealdorman Byrhtnoth in a great slaughter. Byrhtnoth. The greatest man Beornoth had ever known, imperious warrior, noble lord, the dux bellorum of King Æthelred of England. Byrhtnoth had been the king’s chief warlord tasked with holding back the Viking advance and protecting the East Saxon people from Viking slavery, brutality and murder.
A memory scythed into Beornoth’s consciousness, unwanted and unwelcome. The great ealdorman’s golden-hilted sword crashing into the churned foulness, the mud, blood, piss and shit-soaked earth beneath the shield wall. Olaf and his Jomsviking drengrs had come for the ealdorman. Olaf’s picked champions had formed a swine-head wedge and encircled Ealdorman Byrhtnoth and cut him down in a welter of blades and fury. Beornoth cursed the foul vision and cast it back to the depths of his mind.
‘Warriors, lord,’ said Brand. He did Beornoth a courtesy referring to him as his lord. Beornoth was not even sure he could call himself a thegn any more. Olaf and his warriors had laid waste and burned Beornoth’s lands at Branoc’s Tree. The Vikings had put Beornoth’s people to the sword and hung their corpses from the great oak tree, which gave the place its name. Beornoth’s heriot was gone, sword, spear, helmet and horse all lost in the battle. All that made Beornoth who he was, and what he was, lay crushed, stabbed and trampled on the field at the Battle of Maldon.
Beornoth tilted his head, and three Saxon warriors emerged from the treeline. They strode towards where Beornoth and Brand sat at the top of a small rise beneath the sycamore tree. The three men must have followed their trail away from the battle and through the forest. Beornoth coughed, but his pain-wracked body now exuded hate instead of self-pity. The three warriors were his own people, Saxon warriors of King Æthelred’s realm. But they shamed Beornoth and the king, for they came unscathed in hard-baked leather breastplates and carried spears with shining leaf-shaped tips. They had not seen battle that day. Their armour was clean and the spear points unsullied by the blood of the dead.
‘Traitors,’ Beornoth wheezed through gritted teeth. He wriggled and shuffled, trying desperately to rise from his supine position and strike at the three men. He raged and spat and bled and sank back, too injured and exhausted to rise. Ealdorman Byrhtnoth had lost the Battle of Maldon because the core of his army, the fyrd, or levy of common men duty-bound to fight in time of need, had run from the fight. The cowardly Godric and a handful of Byrhtnoth’s thegns, terrified by the sight of Olaf, Sweyn and their feared Viking horde, had led the fyrd away from the battle. Those thegns turned from the fight and took the fyrd men with them, leaving Byrhtnoth with only his hearth troop of East Saxon warriors, and a handful of brave men from Wessex and Cheshire, to stand alone, outnumbered against the heathen.
The three men levelled their spears and spread out, wolfish grins on their bearded faces. They saw two men spattered in blood, one on death’s threshold, and the other surely unable to stand against three. Beornoth despised them, cowards and turncloaks, men who had left Beornoth and his friends to die. He wanted to rise and strike at them, to cut them down and scream his defiance in their dying faces. Brand understood. He laid a calloused hand on Beornoth’s forearm and squeezed. Brand stood and slid his axe from its belt loop. It was a Viking bearded axe, still crusted with blood from the battle. With his left hand, Brand pulled his long knife free of its sheath and rolled his shoulders to loosen the stiffness which had settled in from a day of hard fighting.
Brand Thorkilsson was a Viking. Born and raised on the shores of a fjord in Hålogaland, Norway. His parents had raised him to follow the ways of Odin, Thor, Týr and Frey. His father had taught Brand to fight from the time he could first walk. He was a professional Viking warrior, a raider, and he was Beornoth’s friend. Brand had dragged Beornoth away from the horror at Maldon just as death’s terrible embrace tried to smother him in darkness. He had pulled Beornoth away from the clutches of Ragnar the Heimnar and had forsaken his own people to drag Beornoth to freedom. Brand owed Beornoth a debt of honour, for Beornoth had once saved Brand’s life, and now the mighty Viking had repaid that debt, for had Ragnar and Olaf captured Beornoth they would have subjected him to the worst tortures imaginable.
‘Kill them, kill them, kill them,’ Beornoth hissed through clenched teeth stained with his own blood. He rocked back and forth, lying on his back and desperate for Brand to send the three shirkers to hell.
The warrior on the left-hand side paused. He was young, with chestnut hair scraped back from his thin face by a strip of leather. He glanced at the bigger, older man at the centre. That man came on confidently, with a round face and heavy paunch pushing at his breastplate. The man on the right faltered, his large eyes fixed on Brand’s weapons, and his tongue darted out between missing front teeth.
‘He looks dangerous,’ said missing teeth.
‘Let’s go,’ said the man with the chestnut hair. ‘There are easier prey, wounded men in the forest like the bastard we just robbed.’
‘Shut up,’ barked the big man in the middle. ‘This one’s a Northman and the other is dying. There’s three of us. Look at his byrnie and his axe. If we kill this bastard, we’ll be rich. Enough ale and whores to last us a lifetime.’
Beornoth raged inside the cage of his battered body. He longed to charge into the three Saxons, to make them pay for leaving the battlefield. He seethed with impotent rage, wanting them to understand what they had done by running from battle, of the suffering of his most honourable friends. Beornoth wanted them to feel what Byrhtnoth had felt as Viking axes hacked into his body. The cowards must feel the brutal, icy bite of steel just like Beornoth’s oathman, Wulfhere, who had died holding a causeway beneath the ebb-tide as swords and spears carved his body to ruin. Aelfwine of Foxfield, Leofsunu of Sturmer, all noble warriors, and Beornoth’s blood brothers hacked to bloody pieces by the victorious heathens. Even worse, Saxon cowards now preyed on the few survivors who limped from the field of battle, setting upon those who had fought bravely for their ealdorman and king. Beornoth was ashamed to call those three men his countrymen.
Brand advanced on the big man, axe in his right hand and knife in his left. Brand wore a byrnie chain-mail coat which protected him from neck to thigh, his long blonde hair was tied in two thick braids, and his beard neatly trimmed and threaded with small iron trinkets, symbols which honoured his gods. The big man paused as he noticed that his two friends hung back. They saw a Norseman with blood-crusted weapons. A brave man who strode into a fight against three armed warriors. Brand showed no fear because he relished the prospect of combat. That separated Vikings from Saxons and other folk who worshipped the one true God. For a Viking warrior, death in battle was the ultimate honour. He lived his life to please Odin All-Father; he fought to burnish his reputation as bright as the shiniest blade; and on the day of his death, he longed to die in combat with his weapon in hand. A Viking yearned for that day, when upon being slain by his enemies, Valkyrie shield maidens descended from Asgard to carry his soul to Valhalla and join the ranks of Odin’s einherjar. In Valhalla, the warrior spent an eternity fighting and dying each day, then rising again to feast and swive by night until the day of Ragnarök, when the einherjar, Odin’s army, would do battle at the end of days against Loki and his monster brood.
So, Brand advanced on the three men with fearless Viking confidence, and Beornoth felt no guilt as the Northman set about the Saxons with savagery and war skill. Brand feinted with his knife, and the big man braced his spear shaft to deflect the blow. He moved slowly and clumsily, and Beornoth snarled with contempt at the coward’s lack of skill. Brand’s axe blade whipped around like a darting serpent. Its bearded blade cracked the big man’s knee like an egg and he stumbled, kneeling on the other leg and staring at Brand with open-mouthed terror. Without hesitation, Brand stepped forward and plunged the length of his knife into the man’s eye and twisted the wicked blade. He yanked it free, and with it came a slop of grey, gluttonous filth.
The big man’s body quivered in its death throes, and Brand kicked him contemptuously down the hill. The Saxon with the missing teeth held up his hands as if to say he surrendered, as though that would spare him from a Viking warrior’s wrath. Brand spat at his feet and plunged his axe blade into where the man’s shoulder met his neck. The gap-toothed man held up a hand and turned away from the blow, but Brand’s axe sliced through two fingers and chopped into his shoulder with the sound of a cleaver slapping into a side of beef. The gap-toothed man howled in agony and terror. His fingers dangled from his hand by tendrils of skin and Brand yanked his blade free to send the man sprawling to the grass.
