The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“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.

efenders 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.