text: Sigurd did not let his enemies have it all their own way. When Gorm was arraying his host on the uneven ground to the west of their position, Sigurd sent Erp and Hastin down the slope with those of their Mekjarvik and Jæren men who had bows and slingshots. Shieldless and light as shepherd lads they went down in loose order, half running over the bumps and tussocks to harass the king's men, to sting them with arrows and smooth stones. Some arrows came back, darting over the king's skjaldborgar like swifts, but none of his Sword-Norse wanted to waste their muscle and breath running up the hill to chase those fleet-footed men off. Instead, the king's men kept their shields up and their heads down. Even so, one or two of them died who did not see death flying towards them. More were hurt badly enough that they were put out of the fight before it began. It was nothing in the scheme of things but, as Asgrim said, it can never be a bad thing to blood the enemy before he bloods you.
  
  'Just another seven or eight hundred and things will start to look good for us,' Moldof rumbled, attaching a shield to the stump of his half arm.
  
  'Perhaps you are beginning to regret joining me, Moldof,' Sigurd said, remembering that freezing day when Moldof had come to kill him but had ended up joining them instead. How King Gorm's former champion had even saved Sigurd's life at the borg when a man from Alba, perhaps sent by King Gorm, had tried to murder Sigurd in the stinking dark of a cattle byre. Moldof had proved himself in a dozen fights since then. Gorm's loss had been their gain.
  
  'Aye, you could be down there combing your beard with the king,' Svein told the one-armed warrior, watching the hordes below order themselves into smaller groups and crews, cousins and kinsmen drawing together because a man always likes to know the man either side of him in the skjaldborg.
  
  'I would rather fight the fettered wolf,' Moldof said, perhaps bringing up Fenrir because all men knew that Týr had lost an arm too, Fenrir having bitten off the limb when he realized that the Æsir had deceived him. Or because Týr was the Lord of Battle and Moldof had a high opinion of his own sword-craft even being an arm short of a whole man as he was.
  
  'It cannot be easy being a king's former champion,' Floki said, which was bound to sting Moldof's pride like a wasp's barb in some tender part of the flesh. Floki grinned at Svein and Sigurd knew Floki well enough to be sure that he would still take Moldof's other arm for the fun of it.
  
  'What is he like, the oath-breaker's new champion?' Olaf asked. Sigurd's crew stood together in the front row of a shieldwall three men deep and fifty men across, along the spine of high ground running north-south. Behind them the rocks and then the sea. In front, uneven, sloping ground more suited to goats and sheep than men, for which the king was no doubt cursing Sigurd now. Not steep or rocky enough to make Gorm refuse the fight, but difficult enough to cause his men problems when it began.
  
  'His name is Hreidar and he is a brainless ox,' Moldof said.
  
  'Big then?' Svein said.
  
  'They're always big,' Bjorn said, half glancing at Svein who was Sigurd's champion in as much as he was his prow man and put the fear of the gods into his enemies with his fiery red hair and beard and his massive smiting axe.
  
  'Always brainless too,' Bjarni put in. 'Big and brainless.' He shrugged. 'Big so that they catch the arrows and blades meant for their lord, and brainless so they don't notice when they're dead but keep on fighting.'
  
  'Turd,' Svein muttered.
  
  'Hreidar will notice when I put my sword in his belly,' Moldof said.
  
  'I would like to see a king or jarl have a normal-sized man as his champion, just for once,' Bjarni said.
  
  'You hear that, Sigurd?' Svein said. 'Bjarni wants to win this fight by making King Gorm laugh himself to death.'
  
  This had Sigurd's crew chuckling amongst themselves so that the others in the shieldwall around them must have wondered what could be so amusing given the number of men coming to kill them.
  
  King Gorm's main shieldwall was four men deep and half as long again as Sigurd's, albeit a little ragged by comparison because of the hummocks and rocks breaking out of the ground. His best-armoured men were in the front. They were not his own hearthmen but those of other oath-sworn lords, men like Jarl Baugr, Jarl Vragi, Jarl Tósti and Jarl Arnstein Twigbelly. And Jarl Otrygg, whom Bram had recognized by his men's shields which were all painted red with the black rune Laguz because Otrygg thought of himself as a great sea jarl, which was a joke as far as Bram was concerned.
  
  'That fat toad hasn't gone raiding for years,' he told them all, 'unless you call fishing raiding for silver.'
  
  Behind these well-armed men, about a third of whom wore mail, were those with good leather armour and skull caps and shields, axes and spears, and behind those were the men who lacked good war gear: men who wore several layers of wool and who must have been drowning in sweat and stinking but who hoped those layers would prevent a blade from biting, though it might still break the bones.
  
  The king's own hirðmen were at the rear with their lord, a mass of grey and bright painted shields, each boasting brynja and helmet and burdened with the tools of death. And it was not cowardice on Gorm's part, him being back there behind a bulwark of flesh and iron and oath. Just good sense, for if he took a wound early on his jarls might take the decision to withdraw, even under the pretence of getting their king safely away, and Gorm knew it would take weeks if not another season to assemble such a host again.
  
  'You know that's where you should be too,' Olaf said to Sigurd. 'At the back. Out of the way.'
  
  Sigurd did not answer that. For his part in the oath which bound him to his men, Sigurd had sworn to lead them into battle, but that was not the reason why he stood at the front now. Even the warriors who had received his promise would understand the need to keep him alive. Simple good sense which stood clear of any oath like a rock breaking the sea's surface. No, he stood at the fore because he wanted the oath-breaker to see him there. Simple as that. Sigurd wanted that worm to see that he was hungry for the fray, for the revenge which he owed to his family.
  
  Sigurd looked left and right now, drawing strength and courage from the wall he had built. If hatred was a blade the oath-breaker would be dead already, he thought, looking at Svein and Solmund and Olaf, at Hastin and his Jæren men and those other men whom he did not know but who had come to stand with him because of some feud they had with the king.
  
  'You've done what you can, Sigurd,' Olaf said, mistaking Sigurd's neck-twisting for misgivings about the way he had set his own host up, or about the ground he had chosen.
  
  At either end of the main shieldwall were two smaller skjaldborgar, wings comprising three rows of twenty-five men each, which sloped back right up to the rocks so that the king's men would not be able to wrap all the way round their position and come at them from the rear. Not that they would need to. With their numbers they could just keep hammering away at Sigurd's wall, replacing their front rank over and over until they punched a hole through. Then it would be a savage melee, a chaos of blades and blood, but in the end there could only be one winner.
  
  Behind Sigurd's main shieldwall was his reserve, some ninety men including Thokk Far-Flyer and his twenty-nine from Sandnes. Most of those with bows who were now ranging down the slope stinging the king's men would join the reserve when the fight properly began. They would clamber up on to the high rocks behind and from there nock and loose into the enemy masses until their arrows were gone. Then they would take their places in the wall of flesh and iron as other men fell, like new caulking thumbed between strakes to keep the sea from sinking the ship.
  
  A murmur travelled through the line and Sigurd turned to see men touching amulets or rune-carved blades. He heard them whispering to the gods and he knew the reason for it. Asgot. The godi was coming and Sigurd welcomed the chill which ran like ice water down his spine.
  
  'Let's see how the oath-breaker likes this,' Olaf gnarred, a grim smile nestled in his beard, as the men shuffled aside, shouldered into their neighbours to make a channel through which the godi could pass, hefting the gift he had prepared for King Gorm. It was a níðstang, which men called a nithing pole, if they spoke of such things at all. The staff was of hazel and the head mounted upon it was that of a horse, freshly killed so that its blood was running down the shaft to redden Asgot's hands and arms and clot in the rings of his brynja as he carried it forward. It was heavy by the looks, but the godi was well aware of the seiðr he was weaving and he carried the thing high for all to see, its neck skin flapping in the wind, its dead eyes staring and its bottom lip hanging down revealing its teeth, as if the dead head was giving one final and everlasting nicker against its fate.
  
  And Asgot carried the cursing pole to a clump of rocks a little way down the hill, where all the king's men could see it.
  
  'Here I put up this níðstang!' he called, for those in front and behind. And above. 'And this curse I turn on King Gorm the oath-breaker.' He turned the horse head to the left and the right. 'I lay this curse also on those of you who fight for the oath-breaker this day, for you follow an unworthy man and this makes you less than men yourselves.' He turned the grim head to the centre of the enemy line again, where the king's banner flapped wildly. 'Gorm son of Grimar, I curse you and promise you a bad death. No fame in the wake of your life. It will be as though you never drew breath. Not for you the Allfather's hall. Just everlasting torment.' With that he thrust the pole down into a cleft in the rocks and he must have already tested it earlier in the day because it stood straight and solid even in that wind which had the dead beast's mane flying. Sigurd could see that the godi had carved the bones of that curse into the hazel pole, which made it as real and enduring as the rock behind and the sea beyond. It was a terrible, horrible curse and down there at the foot of that slope King Gorm must have felt as sick as if he had eaten a plate of rotten meat.
  
  Without wiping his bloody hands on the grass Asgot turned and walked back to take his place amongst his crew, and Sigurd nodded to him to say it was a job well done, for all that the nithing pole seemed to have cast an even darker cloud over the day for everyone.
  
  'Here it is then,' Sigurd said to himself. He could see now what Gorm intended. Not one single shieldwall, for that would soon be broken up by the ground over which it moved, but many separate skjaldborgar, groups of fifty to eighty which would hit Sigurd's line at different times, like separate hammer blows or storm-tossed waves in the suck and plunge of a rocky outcrop. And one of those smaller shieldwalls was on the move now, marching up the slope to the beat of their own spear staves against their shields.
  
  'They're either all mad or they've been at the ale all night,' Olaf said, watching as Erp and Hastin yelled at their bowmen and slingshot men to retreat back up the slope in the face of this oncoming wall of wood and spear blades, albeit this shieldwall came alone. The other shieldwalls remained rooted to their positions, awaiting their king's order to attack.
  
  'I am thinking that they would rather die good and quickly than drag it out,' Svein said, leaning on his long-hafted axe as if he were on a jetty on a summer's day, watching the tide creep up the piles.
  
  A gust whipped the enemy's shield din up the slope and some of the men to Sigurd's left yelled insults back into the wind.
  
  Jarl Hrani came over and stood beside Sigurd, a half grin on his face. 'You know who that is?' he said, nodding down the slope. 'Jarl Leiknir from Tysvær.' At that moment the men trudging towards them lifted their shields and held them above their heads, which was their way of telling Sigurd that they came in peace.
  
  'Ha!' Solmund blurted. 'Maybe Asgot's cursing pole has them pissing in their breeks already.'
  
  'Jarl Leiknir and I have an understanding,' Hrani said, which was doubtless the real reason why those men were holding their shields above their heads and why Sigurd's grin matched Hrani's own. For Tysvær sat within a day's sailing of Jarl Hrani's own hall, and Hrani being the more powerful jarl, Leiknir could not afford him as an enemy. It was still a risk of course, choosing the rebels over the king, but who could say what other factors had tipped the scales in Jarl Leiknir's mind?
  
  Jarl Hrani strode forward and Jarl Leiknir broke from his men to grip his hand, the two of them binding their fates in a handshake while those king's men left at the foot of the hill bellowed insults and called them traitors.
  
  'Put them in the reserve?' Olaf suggested.
  
  Sigurd shook his head. 'Rather not have them behind us,' he said, thinking that he did not know or trust Jarl Leiknir enough to have him out of sight. 'Put them on the left. Thicken the line there. Let Hrani keep an eye on his friends.'
  
  Olaf nodded and went to speak to the Tysvær jarl as Hrani's men greeted Leiknir's men, telling them they had made the right decision and that today they would make their fame. But all this was cut short by the clamour from a dozen or more horns on the wind, riding the gathering gale, some sounding deep as a bull's bellow, others thin as grass blown between pressed palms.
  
  'Here we go then,' Bram said. Behind them the wolf-head banner flapped beneath that great, rune-bitten blade. It sounded like a wind-whipped fire.
  
  'We'll sleep well tonight,' Aslak said.
  
  Sigurd looked at Olaf and Svein. They nodded. Grim now. Ready to do what must be done. Sigurd looked at Floki. The young man's lips pulled back from his teeth. Not a smile. Something else.
  
  Below, the king's host was on the move, washing slowly across the rough ground like a dark tide.
  
  'Svein, have you a saga-worthy throw for me?' Sigurd asked.
  
  Svein nodded, lifting the spear in his hand. Testing its weight and balance. 'You will want to see this, Crow-Song,' he said, walking forward, 'and stay alive today so that you can put what you see into a song,' he called over his shoulder.
  
  'Make it count, lad,' Olaf growled into his beard, watching Svein walk down the slope as far as the nithing pole which stood there cursing King Gorm with its dark seiðr. Sigurd expected Svein to roll his left shoulder in its socket, make great circles with his arm to loosen the sinew and muscle, to make ready.
  
  He did none of these things.
  
  'Sigurd Haraldarson claims you for Óðin!' he roared down at the men coming towards him now, some of whom were loosing arrows which Svein ignored as if they were flies as he pulled his brawny arm back and launched the spear. It flew in a great arc, as if over Bifröst the shimmering bridge which joins the worlds of men and gods, and passed over the heads of their enemies, whose faces were upturned as they watched it soar. Right over the whole host it flew, landing blade first in the ground far behind the king's banner.
  
  And up came the king's men, beating their shields, summoning the courage they would need. The fury. The animal which lives inside all men. And the battle began.
  
  Shieldwall. War-hedge. Slaughter-bed? Left foot forward, shoulder turned slightly towards the enemy so that your shield overlaps the man to your right. A rampart of limewood, each shield braced by two men. Leather-rimmed edges kissing dented metal bosses. Swords and spears beating in rhythm against the planks, a din meant to bolster their own courage as much as sap their enemies'. A living thing. A bulwark only as strong as the will and the fear-soaked strength of the men behind it. A shivered wreck when it breaks, a shield-ship with its belly ripped open and destined for the sea bed.
  
  'Hold!' Olaf bellowed. 'Hold them, you whoresons!'
  
  Thunder as the shields clash. Screams too, thin as cold fjord water. Pathetic and shocking from those big grizzled men.
  
  'Hold!'
  
  'Fucking kill them!'
  
  'Keep tight! Tight as a good cunny.'
  
  The weight of the enemy as a whole. The stink of them. The breath of the man leaning into his shield, leaning on you, doing his bit, trying not to die. No room to swing sword or axe. Just rooting yourself to that small patch of ground. A statement of intent. I shall not be the one to move backwards. I shall not yield, not with my brothers around me. They might not see but they would know.
  
  'Hold!'
  
  Olaf roars and men drink in his voice like mead, for they know he is a god of war.
  
  'You fucking give them the ground and I'll kill you myself! Hold!'
  
  Spears jab over men's heads, thrust from those in the second row, seeking anything soft, looking to slake a thirst. One scrapes off Sigurd's helmet. It will come again, he knows, but what can he do about it?
  
  'Heads down!' Olaf calls, and Sigurd thinks they are for him, those words. 'The rancid shits will tire before us. Lazy-arsed fucks.'
  
  Not everyone in Sigurd's shieldwall was fighting. Or pushing. Only some of the enemy skjaldborgar had struck, those jarls and crews most eager for the fame of breaking their king's enemy perhaps. Fools if they thought it would be over so quickly, that they would start the route that begins when a shieldwall is breached.
  
  Sigurd glanced to his left. A spear-throw along the line he could see Jarls Hrani and Leiknir, braced for the attack, striking their sword pommels against their shields, roaring insults into the teeth of the wind. I would not like to attack Jarl Hrani up this hill, Sigurd thought. He's a fighter. Like his father was.
  
  Arrows hissed over their heads, shot by men on the rocks who were trying to put a shaft in King Gorm's face or neck. Worth a try, that, to end this thing before it began. But then, Sigurd hoped the king's shield men were about their business because he did not want a lucky arrow to rob him of his right. Gorm's death belonged to Sigurd and he would have it.
  
  A thunder of shields and yells, made distant because of his helmet, announced that another of Gorm's skjaldborgar had struck the line, somewhere to the right, near where Asgrim and his Svearmen were. That clash might as well have been another battle for all that Sigurd could influence it, yet he knew that Asgrim was granite-hard and that those coming up against Jarl Guthrum's former champion were dead men sooner or later.
  
  That spear blade again, hitting his helmet square this time, thrusting his head back on his neck so that his brain rattled in his skull. Some ambitious turd, that one with the spear, wherever he was. Sigurd locked eyes with those peering over the shield rim opposite. Greying brows above those calm eyes. Not a young man but someone who had done all this before, more than once too. He was biding his time, this front-ranker, taking no risks, keeping his shield locked on his neighbour's and trusting to the spearman behind to prise the enemy wall open like a knife tip into a clam.
  
  'Svein,' Sigurd called, nodding towards the grey-browed man.
  
  'Aye,' Svein on his left said, knowing exactly what Sigurd wanted of him. Taking his own opponent's weight on his shield and gripping his long-hafted axe one-handed, Svein lowered the axe head so that it was between his own hip and Sigurd's. Then he thrust it beneath their overlapping shields, hooked the bottom rim of the shield pressed against Sigurd's and pulled, and Sigurd let his own shield go with it.
  
  Grey brows got a face full of his own shield and then those eyes, which knew death when they saw it, widened as Sigurd brought Troll-Tickler up and rammed it forward, its point finding the recess of the eye socket, its edges splitting the bone as Sigurd pushed a foot of steel-edged iron into the man's face, into the brain until it erupted from the back of the skull.
  
  Sigurd hauled Troll-Tickler back and the man fell, revealing that whoreson with the spear, who had not expected to be forced into the front line so soon, and he died with Troll-Tickler ripping out his guts in a reek of blood and shit.
  
  'Hold! Hold, Haraldarson's men!' Olaf bellowed, for it was not time to force that breach. Not yet, with the king's men as thick on that hill as flies on a gory corpse.
  
  Another crash, this time to the left, distant as the crack of mountain ice in spring. Jarl Hrani was in the fight, then. Good. Let the oath-breaker bleed his men on Hrani's Sword-Norse, on Hadd Hog-Head and those proud Hinderå men. Perhaps Sigurd should have put himself at the rear so that he could watch the ebb and flow of the thing. From the rocks he would see it all. He could throw reinforcements into the fray where they were needed.
  
  It floods his guts with sourness, this sudden doubt, and he wonders if his pride will cost him. Will cost them all.
  
  But they are holding. He doesn't need to see it to know it. It is as certain and tangible as the sweat-soaked leather sword grip in his hand.
  
  'Oath-breaker!' Sigurd called. 'You cannot win!' He did not know if the king could hear him. Doubtful in that clamour of cursing, straining men, but it felt good to say it anyway.
  
  'Come, maggots! Are you so afraid?' This was King Thorir's voice, carrying over the shield din from the far right of the line near the wing which sloped back to the rocks. 'Fight me, you whore spawn! What are you waiting for, a roast pig and mead bench? Here I am! Fight me!'
  
  His Danes were the only ones not in the pushing match now and King Thorir did not like that at all, not when others were in the thick of it. Perhaps King Gorm's jarls had purposefully avoided these strangers under their unfamiliar banner, not having their measure and preferring to make their fame against better-known men, but Thorir was inviting them to come at him, almost begging them to.
  
  'Danes are mad,' Solmund gnarred, jabbing his sword over his shield to tonk against a man's helmet.
  
  'He'd wrestle them one by one if he could, that mead-soaked little growler,' Moldof said, not caring that Thorbiorn Thorirsson was beside him.
  
  'He would,' Thorbiorn agreed, grinning behind his shield. Thorbiorn who had become a warrior himself and deserved his place beneath that wolf-head banner flapping on the spear which Óðin himself had once wielded.
  
  A spear blade streaked over Sigurd's head to take a young man in the shoulder, making him curse as well as a man who had seen twice as much life. To Sigurd's left, Floki somehow managed to reach over and plant his hand axe in a man's skull, his eyes wild with the thrill of it, and to Floki's left Valgerd, who had been holding her own against a growling bear of a man, suddenly gave way so that the bear all but fell forward, impaling himself on her scramasax which she then hauled across to open his belly. His gut string sprang free, fast as rope after an anchor into the depths.
  
  'Fight me, you Norse shits!' King Thorir bellowed at Gorm's shieldwalls, which still held back or else took the fight to those either side of the Danes and their banner, which was a triangular piece of the same golden fabric that hung from his roof in Skíringssalr.
  
  An arrow streaked by Sigurd's cheek and he heard the thump of it embedding in flesh followed by the shriek of the man whose life thread it had severed. And yet still there was not much proper killing being done by either side, not in that stinking press of bodies, in that battle din which was being swirled about by the wind and carried up to Asgard to the gods' ears.
  
  'Bollocks!' Olaf exclaimed, and Sigurd looked over to see that King Thorir, sick of waiting now, had broken from the line. He was taking the fight to the Norsemen and his Danes were following him. 'Somebody bring him back!' Olaf roared, but King Thorir's advance was already reverberating through the great skjaldborg he had left behind, like wind in the rigging.
  
  'Hold!' Asgrim yelled at his Svearmen, for some of them had taken a few steps down the slope, eager to follow King Thorir and get their taste of the fight.
  
  'The fool will drag us all down with him,' Sigurd growled, working with his sword through the gaps, quick thrusts to keep his enemies on the defensive. King Thorir's sally had scattered a loose horde of men who were in his path, but now a well-formed shieldwall was advancing to meet him, slanting across the hill to take the Danes in the side like a wave slamming a ship abeam.
  
  'Twigbelly,' someone said. Hagal probably, for few men were as good at recognizing jarls and crews as Crow-Song, if only because he had drunk their mead and put them in his mediocre saga tales to pay for it.
  
  'The Danes'll carve that fat hog up,' Svein said, but Sigurd was not so sure. He knew that the oath-breaker, wherever he was, would be watching, would know that Sigurd's skjaldborg was, if not broken, then vulnerable, and he had not become a powerful king without having his share of war-craft.
  
  'He'll send more than Twigbelly against them,' Olaf said, as if he had heard Sigurd's thoughts. 'I would if I were him.'
  
  'I'll go,' Thorbiorn said, leaning to lock eyes with Sigurd from behind his shield. 'Please, lord, let me go. I'll bring him back.'
  
  Sigurd nodded. Thorbiorn arranged it with Moldof and the man behind, who slipped neatly into the space which the young Dane had occupied a heartbeat before. Then he was gone.
  
  'Think the king will listen to the lad?' Olaf said.
  
  Sigurd did not. But at least Asgrim had stemmed the flood, holding his Svearmen in check and bringing the right wing across, closing the gap where Thorir's Danes had stood before.
  
  I need to see, Sigurd thought. I need to know what is going on. 'We're blind,' Olaf said, again seeming to fish Sigurd's thoughts from his head. 'Go, lad,' he told Sigurd. 'Floki, go with him.'
  
  Floki nodded and he and Sigurd prepared the men around them, then stepped out of the line and Sigurd felt suddenly unbalanced, his arm feather-light because the weight was gone. He strode back through the knots of men waiting in reserve, shaking some life back into the limb, then clambered up on to the rocks to stand beside the bowmen. And he cursed when he looked over to the right to see King Thorir up to his wide neck in the blood-fray, laying about himself with his heavy sword, cleaving shields and earning his byname Gapthrosnir, one gaping in fury. No shieldwalls there, just chaos now, and the Danes were making a slaughter, no doubt, but Gorm was throwing more men into that maelstrom and the tide would have no choice but to turn.
  
  'Bring him back, Thorbiorn,' Sigurd said, hoping it was not already too late.
  
  'Danes,' a silver-haired bowman beside Sigurd said. As if that explained the whole thing. And perhaps it did.
  
  'Should we send Far-Flyer's men?' Floki asked, nodding down towards the godi and his Sandnes men, who were purple-faced, ale-soaked and working themselves up, growling and snarling and slamming their shields together, roaring curses and frenzying. Many were bare-chested, having stripped down to their breeks, even discarding shoes and boots, whilst others were putting on wolf pelts or bear skins, tying them round their necks, channelling those creatures' fierce spirits, and they looked as though they were about to kill each other where they stood.
  
  Sigurd turned back to the fight. King Thorir and his sons Thidrek and Thorberg were shoulder to shoulder, the king's hearthmen around them, holding the enemy swarm off. More than holding them off, they were carving a path through them, smashing shields, staving skulls and lopping limbs. Those Danes were in the grip of the blood madness. They were making a name for themselves, carving their fame in wood and flesh the way a skald or a godi etches runes in a rock.
  
  But the brave fools were dying too.
  
  'They should have stayed,' Sigurd said. Pouring more men into that storm of swords to help the Danes would weaken the shieldwall. Even if they drove those Norse jarls back they would be making the right wing vulnerable to a counter attack. Too early in the day for that throw of the dice, when they still held that spine of land and King Gorm had yet to expose himself.
  
  King Thorir took a man in the neck then broke another man's shield so that Thorberg's axe could find its mark and they were almost through to Jarl Arnstein himself, who was screaming at his Bokn men to put these Danemen down.
  
  Thorbiorn had wriggled and squirmed and shoved his way through the press to get to his father and Sigurd could see him yelling at Thorir to retreat back up the slope, to have his men lock shields and withdraw. But the king was deaf to his son's advice and Sigurd saw Thorbiorn spitting fury.
  
  'If they stay they die,' Floki said, pointing his blood-slick axe across the slope. A wave of death was coming for the Danes. At least two jarls judging by the banners, and as many as two hundred spears. Not a shieldwall as such, they were moving too fast across uneven ground to have their shields locked rim to boss, but a flood of blades with fresh arms behind them.
  
  Asgrim had seen the danger too and he turned and looked at Sigurd and Sigurd shook his head.
  
  'Hold!' Asgrim bellowed at his Svearmen who were leaning into their shields, stabbing at King Gorm's men from behind their rampart. 'We stay here!'
  
  'You are lost now,' Sigurd told King Thorir under his breath, watching those new jarls slam into the Danes. A spear took the king's son Thidrek in the shoulder but Thorir cut the spearman down. Then a massive warrior planted an axe in Thorberg Thorirsson's head, for Thorberg had lost his helmet, and he went down like a stone even as the king thrust his sword through the huge warrior's side. And then the Danes were swallowed by the tide and Sigurd lost sight of Thorir and his sons.
  
  And Asgrim held his Svearmen on the ridge.
  
  The horns called King Gorm's host back and they went in good order, shields up, heads down, leaving a tideline of dead and dying, broken and torn men before Sigurd's skjaldborg. And yet perhaps only a third of the oath-breaker's men had fought so far that day, whereas almost every one of Sigurd's men, other than his small reserve, had wet their blades or at least blunted them.
  
  'Whoreson has weighed us in the scales and now knows what it'll cost him to beat us,' Bram said, which they all knew was the truth of it as they watched the king's men regrouping beneath their respective banners. Everywhere men were examining the damage done to their shields and fetching spares if they thought they were too far gone to take another battering. Norseman, Svearman and Dane looked to their blades, cursing at the nicks in the edges, working with whetstones to restore their bite. Some were out looting the dead, stripping corpses of good war gear, taking keepsakes from fallen friends. Bowmen were out scavenging for arrows. Some young men were puking after their first taste of the shieldwall. Some were buzzing with the thrill of it. Others were silent and pale and still, like the living dead.
  
  Unseen, the Valkyries were already swooping.
  
  'It is bad about the Danes,' Svein said.
  
  King Thorir lay down there. Somewhere amongst that corpse pile. Thorir Gapthrosnir of Skíringssalr, who had fought Sigurd's enemies for silver and gold and won only death for himself and his sons. Perhaps he had already been borne to the afterlife, was even now with his daughter Hallveig in Sessrymnir, Freyja's hall, challenging other heroes to wrestle with him.
  
  'He was a fool,' Olaf growled, even given the company. For not all of Thorir's sons had died in that welter of blood. Somehow, Thorbiorn had survived the final slaughter. He and a handful of Danes, most of them the untested young men who had not yet lived long enough to know they should have died in piles round their king as Gapthrosnir's hirðmen had done. Instead they had put their shields together and ploughed a furrow back to the ridge.
  
  'A brave fool but a fool,' Olaf said, and Thorbiorn, spattered with gore and wild-eyed, did not disagree. He was angry with his dead father and brothers for ignoring his pleas to resume their position beside Asgrim on the higher ground. Even at the end they had not taken Thorbiorn seriously. And yet who was wearing the bull-necked king's silver torc now? Who had pulled it from his dead father with men being butchered all around? Thorbiorn had and it gleamed at his neck now and no one questioned it.
  
  'What now then?' Valgerd said. She was running a whetstone along the edge of a broad-bladed Svear-looking spear she had found. Sigurd thought that spear suited her as well as the torc suited Thorbiorn.
  
  'They'll come again. And again,' Sigurd said. 'And the oath-breaker won't care how many of his men die on our spears.'
  
  'Aye, he'll keep sending them and eventually they'll break through,' Olaf said.
  
  Svein shook his head. 'We'll hold, Uncle,' he said, his fierce red bristles being buffeted by the wind. 'Shits won't break us.'
  
  'Asgrim won't break,' Moldof said. 'Or if he does I'll be surprised.'
  
  'Neither will Jarl Hrani, the arrogant swine,' Solmund put in, hating Hrani as much as ever.
  
  'At least that fat snot Twigbelly is dead,' Olaf said. 'Shame to have missed that for it would've been worth seeing.'
  
  Sigurd had not seen Jarl Arnstein die either, but Thorbiorn said his brother Thidrek had given the man his death wound. Said Thidrek had hacked into the jarl's belly and men had been amazed by the foul gush which had come out, appalled by the yellow fat flapping everywhere in the spray of silver brynja rings.
  
  'Must have been some muscle behind the blow to get through all that blubber,' Olaf said, thinking deeply about it.
  
  'I wonder if Jarl Otrygg knows I am up here,' Bram said. 'And I wonder who his new champion is. Probably some walking beard who hasn't wet his sword for the last five summers.'
  
  'I can guess what happened to his last champion,' Olaf said, raising an eyebrow at Bram.
  
  Bram scratched amongst his beard. 'Aye, well I'm not proud of that,' he said, getting Olaf's meaning. 'Brak was a brave man and good in his day. I blame bloody Otrygg for letting Brak and the rest go to seed. That's them down there, see?'
  
  But Sigurd wasn't interested in this Jarl Otrygg and he let the others' voices fade in the distance like the murmur of the sea. He was watching the oath-breaker's banner, that black prow beast on red cloth, chosen because King Gorm held the keys to the north and grew rich on taxes from the crews of all manner of craft who sailed up the Karmsund Strait in the shadow of his hall perched on that hill.
  
  The oath-breaker wants me and I want him, Sigurd told himself now, ignoring every other warrior on Rennisøy, every man who would kill or die trying to grant Sigurd or Gorm their burning wish.
  
  'Where are you?' Sigurd whispered, searching for the king amongst those beneath his banner.
  
  'They're getting ready to come again!' someone over on the left of the line called. The archers scuttled back up on to the rocks clutching their shafts. More archers would be good, Sigurd thought, more shafts to rain upon those king's men who lacked helmets and mail or good leather armour. He looked north, then east over his shoulder, telling himself that he would make do with what he had.
  
  Somewhere over to the right, near Asgrim, a group of Svearmen were passing the time by singing a song about Óðin's nights on Yggdrasil. Those brave warriors would be fighting again before they got to the Allfather's ninth and last night hanging on that mighty ash.
  
  Behind him Thokk Far-Flyer's men were sharing cups of only the gods knew what, while Thokk decorated them with painted runes and symbols, charms against the enemy's blades. Or perhaps he was dedicating that ale-drowned crew to the Spear-God. Who could say?
  
  Solmund was watching those strange warriors too and he shook his head. 'Sandnes men,' he muttered, knowing no more needed saying.
  
  Sigurd looked back down the slope. He had yet to lay eyes on the oath-breaker but he knew he was down there. Surrounded by big men with big beards dressed in good mail. How many on both sides would have to die before Sigurd could get his hands on that treacherous piece of troll shit?
  
  'So, they'll come again and we'll beat them off again. And then we'll cross the next fjord when we come to it, hey,' Olaf said. There were mumbles of agreement. What else was there to do?
  
  Unless, Sigurd thought. Unless …
  
  'Thorbiorn!' he called.
  
  'He's off with the Danes, what's left of them. Fetching his dead kin,' Bjarni said.
  
  'I want him here now,' Sigurd said, and Bjarni nodded, stalking off to find the young man.
  
  'What's on your mind?' Olaf asked, keeping his gaze fixed on the king's skjaldborgar, some of which were on the move, the men in them thumping hilts and blades against shields. The sound of it was like thunder on the wind.
  
  'Well, lad?' Olaf all but growled it, not liking being in the dark where Sigurd's ideas were concerned. He still hadn't quite got over the whole thing of Sigurd hanging himself from some tree in that stinking swamp, as he was keen on reminding everyone.
  
  Sigurd let him wait, kept his lips sealed as his own mind chewed the idea for a bit.
  
  Hrani Randversson stood there showing no fear of the king he had betrayed, even though he must have feared for his boy at least and what would happen to young Randver if they lost this fight. Randver who stood there at the rear of his father's shieldwall looking like a little god of war, all four feet and a knife hilt of him, in his own brynja and a helmet that was too big.
  
  'What's he doing bringing a boy to a fight like this?' Olaf had said, unimpressed, perhaps thinking of his own boys Harek and little Eric who were both safe with their mother in Skudeneshavn.
  
  Sigurd had shrugged. Not his problem, for all that he quite liked the lad for some reason.
  
  Other things to think about now though.
  
  The Svearmen sang. The Sandnesmen drank. The oath-breaker's host came up that rock-strewn slope. And Sigurd told Olaf what he planned.
  
  Gorm wanted Sigurd dead. He needed it. He hungered for it like he had never hungered for anything, not even power. Well perhaps that, for a great man cannot ignore his appetite for power.
  
  That lust, that hunger is a beast which writhes barely below the surface, shaping every waking thought and shading dreams too. It spawns such ravenous ambition that it makes a man want to be more than a man, yet in reality it makes him less of one because he cannot enjoy the simple pleasures of life. A row to a deserted island. Skating on an iced lake. Good ale with good friends. A woman's love.
  
  He looked up at that banner. A wolf, said one of his men who had been up there twice already, and twice come back down again because the skjaldborg on that ridge was stubborn. Gods flay them!
  
  A banner? When did Sigurd Haraldarson decide he was worthy of his own banner? Arrogant turd. A pain like a toothache, this golden lad, for the son of a dead nithing jarl, Gorm thought to himself as he watched that wind-whipped wolf and the grim-faced men below it. Men such as Olaf Ollersson, as good a warrior as had ever come out of the fjords. And that red-haired giant with his smiting axe, who if he was anything like as good as his father Styrbiorn had been, would take a fistful of Gorm's hearthmen with him to the Spear-God's hall by the end of the day. And Moldof.
  
  'Moldof.' Gorm said the name under his breath, tasting the rot in it. That was a betrayal which hurt, seeing his old champion and prow man up there, even if the man was an arm short of the warrior he had once been.
  
  'You must think you have done well, Haraldarson,' he muttered into his beard, ignoring the askance looks he got from Hreidar, who had taken Moldof's place at Storm-Bison's prow. A good fighter, Hreidar, as good as a two-armed Moldof perhaps, but carrying too much unearned swagger.
  
  He supposed young Haraldarson had some right to feel pleased with himself. After all, not so long ago he had been able to boast of nothing but a half crew of nobodies and a child's lust for vengeance. Did the fool not know that life is more complicated than that? Than the need to poke out someone's eye because they poked out yours. Not even yours! Someone you share kinship with. Bloodfeuds were for petty men.
  
  'Power is not about friendship, boy,' he growled.
  
  Does the tide seek the shore's friendship before it submerges it?
  
  Look at him up there. Thinking he can challenge me. Even if he has somehow got himself a war host. Taken strakes from here and there and riveted a skiff together. A skiff to take on a sleek-prowed, snarling beast of a dragon ship. Ha!
  
  That Jarl Hrani was up there with the young fool was almost impossible to believe, and yet there he was, his own banner flapping like a fish in the bilge. Gorm could not imagine how that arrangement had come about, though he'd heard it had something to do with Hrani's boy. The boy's life for an oath. Randver, like his grandfather, wasn't it?
  
  Gorm expected better from Hrani. A man can make new boys but he only betrays his king once. Well, young Randver would be dead by the end of the day. They all would.
  
  'Shall we go again, lord?' some jarl called. Was it Baugr? Or Jarl Vragi? No matter.
  
  'Of course, man!' Gorm yelled back. 'We are not here for the market!'
  
  Baugr or Vragi or whoever in Heimdall's hairy arse it was grimaced and turned back to his men and gave the order to advance. Three times they had attacked that wall of limewood, iron and flesh, and three times they had failed to break it. But this time would be different because that fool Haraldarson had moved men over to the right of his line to fill the gaps left by that even bigger fool of a Danish king who had thrown his life away. Though they had killed too many before they fell, those Danes. Not that Gorm would miss that fat hog Jarl Twigbelly, for all that he had died well, better than Gorm expected.
  
  'It takes time to learn war-craft, Haraldarson,' Gorm said, feeling a grin come to his lips. 'What could you possibly know of war, other than how to lose like your father and brothers?'
  
  'Lord?' Hreidar said, thinking the king had meant the words for him.
  
  'You'll enjoy killing Moldof, won't you?' Gorm said, tightening the helmet strap beneath his chin and loosening his sword in its scabbard in case he got carried away and ran to join his men for the final slaughter. He hadn't swung his sword in the blood-fray for some years now. Nothing like this anyway, but he would be ready just in case.
  
  Hreidar grinned. 'I will take his other arm before I do him the honour,' he said, sharing a predatory look with Otkel, Ham and Alfgeir, all of them in helmets and mail and feeling like war gods, knowing that today was a day which skalds would sing of. Wanting their names and deeds to be in those songs.
  
  Fine warriors, Gorm thought, enjoying the glow of confidence which was spreading through his veins like wine in the blood. Wine would be good now, he thought, but called for mead because that's what he had. It wasn't nearly often enough that a skipper came through the Karmsund Strait with good Frankish wine in his hold. He would get hold of some for the victory feast. Rich deep Frankish wine the colour of his enemies' blood-stained tunics and breeks.
  
  'Óðin! Óðin!' he bellowed now, lifting his sword into the grey day, its point threatening the low-slung cloud which raced on the wind. The wind which was gathering in ferocity, lashing banners and hair and ruffling beards and swirling across that island. Gorm hoped his ships were protected in the bay. They would have to wait for the fjord to calm before heading back to Avaldsnes. 'Óðin!' he called again and his men took up the chant. For why should young Haraldarson claim the Allfather for himself? Óðin is a king's god! Stealing some spear from the Svearmen in the east did not buy Sigurd the god's favour. Only a wet-behind-the-ears boy would think it did.
  
  He was trudging up that rocky slope now beneath his own banner. Haraldarson must see his own death coming. Gods but I hope he doesn't run, Gorm thought. Up and over those rocks behind him and scrambling down to the bay with piss-soaked breeks. No, Haraldarson wouldn't run. It was not in his blood. Good. I am getting too old to be chasing men to kill them. Like a man haring after a deer running with an arrow in it.
  
  This attack was different from the previous two. Every man under the king's rule was going up that hill to kill those who mistakenly thought they were not beholden to him. Every spear which the king could summon was turned on Sigurd and the oath-breaker Jarl Hrani. It was a great killing wave that would first batter the thin skjaldborg on that ridge, then sweep it into the sea.
  
  Unlike in the previous two assaults, when crews and war bands had struck the rebels' line at different times, giving Haraldarson and his men time to bolster the skjaldborg in places which looked vulnerable, this time they would hit together. As one hammer.
  
  There would be no stopping it.
  
  All across the war host in front, banners were tugged ragged by the wind. Men's voices were carried the distance of an arrow-shot one moment and lost in the gale the next. But orders were unnecessary now anyway. His jarls and his warlords knew what was expected of them. His own hearthmen, one hundred warriors and most in mail, knew their business and were salivating like hounds on the boar's trail. In front of the king, a place of honour, was Jarl Tósti and his fifty. No small thing to fight in plain sight of the man to whom you owe your jarl torc. Tósti was a solid sort, brave and thankful for his position, and he would fight well, Gorm was sure. He would likely die attacking Haraldarson himself beneath that wolf-head banner, and his men would be mauled by Sigurd's best. But they would soften the rebel centre, already weakened to bolster the right where the Danes should have been. They would bleed Haraldarson's best men. They would tire their shield arms and their sword arms. They would soak up arrows and spears and then, when Tósti broke, Gorm himself would lead his best men in to the carnage to finish this thing.
  
  Gods how he hungered to finish it!