text: Tósti was doing well, his skjaldborg toe to toe with Haraldarson's, whilst to the left and right, all along the ridge, the battle raged like the storm. Men shrieked and wailed with pain. They bellowed like bulls to the slaughter. Now and then Gorm caught the reek of blood and shit but mostly it was borne off on the wind, thank the gods. Arrows flew and shields thumped and blades scraped other blades or mail or struck flesh. And there was no doubt the skjaldborg on the ridge was weakening as men in the front ranks fell and there were fewer and fewer to take their place.
  
  Gorm saw a spear almost rip into Haraldarson's neck. Saw an arrow glance off the young man's helmet, so that if it hadn't been for the eye guards Sigurd would have had a skullful of shaft. But the golden-haired young shit was still standing before the Óðin spear, that flaming-haired, flame-bearded giant planted beside him like a damned oak tree.
  
  So much for that nithing pole, Gorm thought, watching the seething mass of killing, dying men, waiting patiently for his moment to wade into the fray. No one else had dared cut the thing down, its horse head staring down the slope in echo of the curse which Haraldarson's godi had hurled at them. Asgot who men said had turned himself into a fox and chewed off his own leg to escape the drowning death which Gorm had tried to give him. So much for his seiðr now though. Perhaps the others had been afraid of that níðstang, but not Gorm. He had taken Otkel's axe and, his hearthmen hoisting their shields to shelter him from a rain of arrows, had chopped that pole down like an old birch for the fire. He'd spat on the beast's head as it lay there in the long grass. And that was that.
  
  Gorm saw the man on Jarl Tósti's right fall, his skull split by Olaf's sword. The man on Tósti's left, big, square-shouldered, fur-clad, was bent double, the shieldmaiden's spear in his belly, so said Hreidar, spitting in disgust. Then the jarl himself fell to Sigurd's own sword and Gorm almost cried out for joy because the time had come for him to lead his hearthmen to fame and reputation.
  
  'I am coming for you, Haraldarson!' he roared, knowing that his king's voice drowned out even the wind and the shield din. 'You're a dead man, Sigurd!' He wished he could see the fear in the eyes within that pretty helmet. No matter. Perhaps there would be a moment. Before he gave the upstart his death wound.
  
  Then he felt something. Like a change in the wind. Something most men would miss, but he had fought many battles on land and on sea. His war-craft was honed like an eagle's talons and he felt it.
  
  'Lord!' someone yelled. 'Lord!'
  
  Gorm turned to look down the slope which should have been empty but for the corpses and the dying and the arrows sprouting like summer wheat. Except it was not empty. It was full of half-naked, spear-and axe-armed warriors, painted men in wolf and bear pelts, some bollock-naked, with spittle-flecked beards and wild eyes and all of them screaming.
  
  'Fuck,' Gorm growled, for he had seen berserkers before, though never more than three or four in one fight. Never thirty. And berserkers were killers. They had no fear, felt no pain. The animals barely knew when they were killed. 'Turn!' he bellowed. 'Shields!' he yelled, sensing the fear run through even his hearthmen, his best, as they saw what was coming, those rune-marked warriors who had somehow got down behind them, come down from the right side of Haraldarson's line, shielded from sight by his wing and then the rocks over on that side of the slope.
  
  'Hold!' Gorm cried, lifting his shield, wondering what in the world could stop so many screaming, potion-maddened, ale-soaked, cock-flying warriors.
  
  Not all of them were wolf-or bearskin-clad or bollock-naked, he noticed. Two wore mail. One had hair black as crow's feathers and a wolf-lean face. The other was golden-haired and handsome enough to be considered god-favoured. He was young and full of fury and even in his mail he somehow kept pace with the berserkers.
  
  Gorm did not need to look over his shoulder. No point in staring back up the slope to confirm what he already knew, that the man beneath that wolf-head banner was not his hated enemy after all. He was a standin, a young, fair-haired Loki trick. A slice of low cunning that would have the gods themselves laughing into their mead horns.
  
  For Sigurd Haraldarson was coming for him now and he brought death with him.
  
  The Sandnes men flew across that uneven hillock-strewn ground, ravenous for blood, the first two or three of them impaling themselves on the king's hearthmen's spears while others slammed into shields and one or two somehow scrambled over the skjaldborg to be stabbed to death by those behind. Then Sigurd, sword in his right hand, scramasax in his left, was amongst it all, and he slammed his shoulder into a shield, the impact of it rattling his brain in his skull as he threw his right arm up, turning his wrist over to let Troll-Tickler bite what it could. Then a berserker slammed into him from behind, screaming as he hauled the hirðman's shield down with one hand and buried his hand axe in the man's face. On his knees, Sigurd lashed out with his scramasax, slicing across a shin deep enough to score the bone, and all around him berserkers clawed at shields and wriggled between them and clambered over them, shrieking in wild rage.
  
  Floki was already through the skjaldborg, amongst the second rank, his two axes cleaving skulls and splitting breastbones, and Sigurd scrambled up, turning aside a spear blade with his sword then thrusting the scramasax into a neck.
  
  'Hold them! Hold them!' someone was bellowing in a king's voice, as the tide of blood-crazed berserkers overran the mail-clad hirðmen, hacking and carving and screaming. Sigurd saw a big Sandnes man with three spear wounds drive through the enemy like a wedge splitting timber, killing two men before they brought him down. He saw a wolf-skinned berserker clamp his teeth round a man's neck and tear out his throat in a spray of blood. He saw two skin-and-bone Sandnes men pull down a big-bellied king's man and heard his scream as they plunged knives into his groin and face.
  
  A spear blade struck Sigurd's shoulder and slewed off the mail. Another slammed into his side, cracking a rib though it didn't break the rings, and he flailed with his own blades, no skill, just savagery. Just seeking white flesh amongst grey iron. Sometimes sinking his scramasax into meat, sometimes feeling a bone break beneath his sword, lost in his own blood-lust now, consumed by the vicious joy of killing and an animal's need to survive.
  
  'Hold them, you swines!' someone roared, that king's voice edged with fear like an iron blade edged with steel.
  
  'Oath-breaker!' Sigurd yelled. 'Fight me, oath-breaker!' A shield boss cracked into his head and he fell again, blackness coming for him, flooding him, and he thought he would die then without even knowing it as they plunged spears into his body.
  
  No, my son. Not yet. Not yet, boy. Kill them.
  
  'Oath-breaker!' Sigurd screamed, defying the black wave that sought to drown him, forcing it back as he rose, his vision clearing to reveal Floki standing by him, cutting men, killing them, spilling guts amongst the long grass where they steamed and stank, lopping hands which fell and lay there like dead crabs. 'Fight me!' Sigurd roared his challenge as the Sandnes men killed and died in the blade-chaos around him. And there was King Gorm, just a few spear-lengths from him now, peering over the rim of his painted shield, feet planted, sword ready.
  
  Sigurd threw his left arm up, catching a sword on his scramasax, the blow shaking the marrow in his bone as he brought Troll-Tickler round, driving it into a man's belly with enough muscle to pierce the brynja and the leather and the wool, thrusting the long blade through the fat and meat, its edge scraping the bones of the man's spine before erupting from his back. A king's man saw his chance and scythed his sword down at Sigurd but a bear-skinned Sandnes man barrelled into the hirðman and the two disappeared amongst the throng.
  
  Hauling Troll-Tickler free, Sigurd turned, seeking the king, but now there were two warriors in front of him, shields overlapping. One of them fell with Floki's thrown axe in his face but another man took his place and Sigurd knew then that it was over.
  
  Because almost all the berserkers were down. Of the seven or eight still fighting, at least six were wounded and the oath-breaker's men were rallying. Those king's men had been savaged and were reeling with the shock of it, but they were his household men, experienced killers bound by oath and honour, and they knew that with the attack broken all they need do was lock their shields and take the last berserkers apart piece by piece.
  
  Half falling over a tangle of limbs and shield and wolf-skin, Sigurd threw himself at a hirðman who was trying to stand. He thrust his knife into the man's throat and sawed through the gristle of his windpipe and climbed to his feet, blinking hot blood from his eyes and looking east up to where Hrani and his men were fighting for their lives. Where Olaf and Svein, Bram, Valgerd, Solmund and the others were holding their ground.
  
  Then he looked to the west.
  
  Gods but don't come now. Not now.
  
  A king's man took a berserker's head off with one swing of his long axe. Another Sandnes man died on his feet with four spear blades in him. Sigurd looked behind him again and this time saw Thokk Far-Flyer standing there with his arms raised to the storm, calling on the Spear-God while his men were being butchered.
  
  But it wasn't Óðin who waded into the fray then, it was Erp and his thirty from Mekjarvik. They came across from the south, following the ground which Sigurd and the Sandnes men had taken to get round the flank of the oath-breaker's host now it had moved up to the ridge. They came in an ugly skjaldborg, daylight showing between shields and not even three together making a straight line. But they came, just as the last of the berserkers was dismembered and King Gorm's champion finished building his own skjaldborg which, if it had been built on the strand, would prove watertight enough to turn back the sea.
  
  'Olaf sent us,' Erp called above the thunderous beat of king's swords on king's shields.
  
  Sigurd nodded. Locked in the fight on the ridge Olaf had done what he could, but the loss of Erp and his men must have weakened his own position considerably.
  
  'We can't win this,' Erp said. He spat, expecting no answer from Sigurd, his one eye blinking at the sight of the mail-coated horde facing them.
  
  Sigurd glanced over his shoulder to see that Thokk Far-Flyer was down now, on his back in the grass, arms spread either side like wings, an arrow sprouting from his forehead. Where are you flying to now, godi? he thought, swinging his gaze back on to the sea of iron beneath that ship-prow banner.
  
  'We can if we take the king,' Floki said, as if it were a simple game of tafl. He dragged an arm across his face but all that did was smear the gore over his skin, making the whites of his eyes glow against the dark blood.
  
  Had night come already? Sigurd wondered. Surely not. Just the storm then. He looked up to see that the sky was almost black, the roof of the world veiled in swaths of fast-moving bruise-coloured cloud. There was water in the wind now too.
  
  'There is no way to get to him,' Sigurd said, glaring at the oath-breaker, his breathing raspy and ragged. Each breath scalded him inside his chest. At least one broken rib, likely two. 'Too many between us and him.'
  
  Don't come now. Allfather, whatever happens, don't let her come now.
  
  'We just have to kill them all,' Floki said. 'Then we will have him.'
  
  'Simple as that eh?' Erp said, as they edged closer to the king's shieldwall, the hersir using his sword pommel to hammer his helmet down so that its rim covered his bushy brows. He grimaced. 'Why didn't I think of it?'
  
  'Close up! No gaps!' Sigurd bellowed at the Mekjarvik men. 'On me!' If there was going to be another clash of shields then they might as well look the part.
  
  'Forward!' King Gorm cried, his sword threatening the shifting black sky. 'Forward!' he roared, and his men were coming, stepping over the mangled, shit-and blood-slick corpses that had been left on the slope like sea wrack above the tideline.
  
  Sigurd took hold of a spear shaft that was sticking up like an offering, its blade lodged between a berserker's ribs, and yanked it free. He was good with a spear. Svein could throw further but further was not what was needed now. Accuracy was, and only Floki could match Sigurd for that. Floki who was god-favoured too, at least when it came to war. Though who could say which dark, blood-lusting lord favoured him?
  
  Sigurd tested the spear's weight as he picked out the oath-breaker, imagining that spear entering the king's open, roaring mouth. Then he hauled his arm back and launched the spear and it flew.
  
  He saw the shaft shudder at the height of its arc, then it fell fast as a swooping hawk towards the king. But another man had watched it too and he shouldered his king aside, throwing up his shield just in time to meet the spear, which went straight through the limewood and impaled him. Sigurd watched the hirðman fall, cursing as the others closed ranks before the king like the sea over a thrown pebble and the oath-breaker was lost from sight.
  
  Sigurd looked beyond the king's hirð to his own wolf banner which was still whipping at the top of Gungnir, though the maelstrom was raging beneath it now and he could hear the clash and roar of it on the swirling, beating wind. Hastin and his Jæren men were shoulder to shoulder, shield on shield with Olaf and the others, each of them knowing that to lose the banner and the ridge was to be crushed against the rocks or driven into the sea.
  
  Over on the right, the Jarls Leiknir and Hrani were still holding firm on the ridge, though they would be outflanked if Olaf's centre was pushed any further back. Sigurd could see Hog-Head smiting men, as full of fury as the berserkers, only that fury was matched with skill. Hrani stood there like a king himself in his war glory, his rich, silver-chased helmet the brightest thing up there on the ridge in the raging grey day.
  
  On the left, though, Asgrim's Svearmen were dying. Asgrim won't break, Moldof had said. But Moldof was wrong. Jarl Otrygg had seized his chance to come round the side and now red rune-painted shields were driving into the line of Asgrim's wing, spilling through the gaps and tearing into the Svearmen's rear, so that Asgrim was fighting on two fronts.
  
  But Sigurd did not have the chance to watch any more of it because the oath-breaker's shieldwall was on him, almost within spitting distance. He could smell the iron and leather, the sweat of unfamiliar men and the grease which coated their woollen clothes and their war gear. He could smell the oil on their shields and the ale on their breath, the sweet juniper and bog-myrtle and the sourness coming up from the stomachs of men who were fearful that this might be their last day.
  
  'You're going to need this, lord,' Erp said, handing Sigurd a shield he had picked up. It was scarred and splintered but still solid enough and Sigurd took it with a nod, sheathing Troll-Tickler and wrapping his fist round the shield's wood and metal grip, feeling the coolness of the iron boss against his knuckles. His scramasax would be more useful than Troll-Tickler in this fight because the shorter blade had its own instinct for finding gaps in the press, holes between shields and opportunities to slide beneath them, to seek the flesh which was never safe. Men's groins. Necks. Shins. Ankles.
  
  'What about you, lad?' Erp asked Floki who had found a spear to replace the axe he had thrown, though he still gripped the other axe in his left hand. But Floki shook his head and Sigurd knew what he had in mind. Floki would do the killing while Sigurd put his shoulder into his shield and held the ground.
  
  This is it, then.
  
  'We hold them as long as we can!' Sigurd called, looking left and right at the men in his pitifully thin skjaldborg, knowing that they could not stop what was coming. Those king's men were grinning because they knew it too. They knew that Sigurd had gambled everything by attacking their rear with those wild, howling Sandnes men, and he had lost.
  
  'They're going to carve us up like the prize bullock,' a man said somewhere to his right.
  
  'Carve us up! Ha! Snot-sucking shits are going to walk right over us, pricking us full of holes on the way back to their bloody boats,' another man answered. And yet they stood their ground, all of them, when they could have turned and run. Not that they would likely get off the island even if they did run, for the king would have men guarding his ships.
  
  'If we can hold, I'll kill them,' Floki said, as if it were as easy as that. And yet it gave Sigurd an idea.
  
  'Men of Mekjarvik, can you make a skjaldhus?' he asked them. 'A shieldhouse that will stand up to a storm?' Not enough time for that now, lad, Sigurd could almost hear Olaf saying. Too late for tricks now.
  
  Some ayes even so.
  
  'How many in the walls?' Erp asked like the good warrior he was, never resigning his men to their blade deaths when there was yet something useful to try.
  
  'Five in each,' Sigurd said, and with that the Mekjarvik men swarmed in towards him, the smaller, weaker men giving their shields to the biggest and broadest so that these men would have two shields each. Sigurd gave his to a bull-necked, big-bearded warrior who held out his hand expectantly, knowing his wyrd had led him to this moment. In return the man gave Sigurd his spear.
  
  Not enough time. They are on you, lad!
  
  'I don't even want the rain getting in,' Sigurd yelled as they formed around him, building that shieldhouse, the sixteen men in the outer walls holding one shield low to cover shins and legs, the other shield high to protect chests and faces. Those eight men on the inside square braced their bodies against the outside wall to add weight to it, whilst holding shields as high as they could, slanting them up like a shingled roof. This left just eight men within this breath-and sweat-stinking skjaldhus, waiting in the dark, their spears poking out through the gaps.
  
  The king's men struck like a rockslide, almost breaking the shieldhouse apart so that the grey day flooded in through the widening cracks. It seemed they would be swept away in a welter of blood. But then the Mekjarvik men roared their defiance, bellowed their war cries, braced muscle and bone and will and held their ground, drawing their shields back together so that they clumped and rattled and the whole thing held.
  
  'Good lads!' Erp yelled in the reeking gloom, proud of his men and rightly so. 'Now hold so we can kill the whoresons,' he told them, thrusting his spear out and getting a shriek as his reward.
  
  'That's it, Erp,' Sigurd said, feeling the wolf's grin on his face as he jabbed his own spear through a hole. The blade hit mail. 'Nowhere you'd rather be, hey?'
  
  It grew dimmer still inside the skjaldhus and someone cursed because the oath-breaker's men were all around them, on every side so that the only light coming in now was at the centre where the smoke hole in a longhouse would be.
  
  Swords and axes hammered on the walls and the roof in a deafening clamour and men grunted under the impact, growling at those who had spears to gut the swines who were battering them.
  
  Between strikes, Floki pulled his spear back inside the shieldwall so that no one could lop it or grab hold of it, and Sigurd saw that the blade was slick with blood.
  
  'Don't come now,' Sigurd whispered, burying his spear in a man's thigh. 'Stay away.' Stay alive. You are the last of us.
  
  Then the Mekjarvik man whose spear Sigurd gripped grunted and fell to his knees like a throat-cut bull, blood sheeting his face because the great crescent blade of a long axe had cut through shield, arm, helmet and skull to kill him. So much for wyrd.
  
  Another man went down under a flurry of axe blows, and yet another big man collapsed with a beard full of bubbles and blood and a spear in his lungs, and the skjaldhus shrank as the Mekjarvik men closed the gaps, clinging to each other the way men will hold to an overturned boat.
  
  A spear came in through a crack and took the young man beside Sigurd in the cheek, knocking out his teeth on the way through. The spear pulled back leaving the man on his knees in the dark, gurgling and choking and clutching his ruined face.
  
  'No way to die, this,' Floki spat, his spear blade snaking out and back again, seeking, hungry as a crow.
  
  And it wasn't, Sigurd knew, but at least they were lasting longer than they would have spread out in one flimsy shieldwall. Still, this was not the way his father would ever have died, hiding in the dark like this, killing men – hurting them, anyway – without seeing their faces. And he realized, whilst putting his spear straight through a helmet's eye guard and pulling it back before it got stuck, that his need to kill the oath-breaker was stronger even than the need to die with honour.
  
  For there could be no honour in death, even a saga-worthy one, if that goat-swiving worm of a king got to spit on his corpse when it was done. When Sigurd met his brothers again in the Allfather's hall, would he say to them, 'I tried, brothers, but I could not avenge you. I could not spill the blood which the oath-breaker's crimes against our family demanded'?
  
  No. He would not.
  
  Another of Erp's men died, his high shield cleaved and his arm lopped off at the shoulder, likely by the same king's man with his long-hafted axe.
  
  'That whoreson's got to go,' Erp growled, but no one volunteered to oblige him.
  
  'Where are you, Haraldarson?' the king bellowed, his voice matching the thunder of blades on shields and the roar of the wind itself. 'Come out and die like a man! This is no way to fight!'
  
  'Says him who's been fart-blown by his own men all day,' Erp gnarred.
  
  The man in front of Sigurd screeched, his leading foot chopped in half, then he toppled like a felled tree and was gored with three spears before his head hit the ground, and Sigurd snatched up his shield even as a spear gouged into his back, breaking brynja rings, perhaps half a dozen by the fish-scale glitter of them flying in the grey day. But the leather beneath the rings held and he stood tall, taking an axe on the shield before putting his spear blade through the man's neck.
  
  'I have him!' a king's man bellowed, grinning, lifting his long-hafted axe, and Sigurd would have wagered a silver arm ring on it being the same man who had been taking the skjaldhus down piece by piece.
  
  'Come then, troll,' Sigurd challenged him, wondering how he was going to fight the man let alone beat him without being able to leave the shieldhouse. He knew what that axe would do to him. Had seen Svein sunder men with his own axe, split them from head to groin, shield or no.
  
  'Finish him, Gerbiorn!' a warrior with a scarred face and two beard ropes said, fingering the silver Thór's hammer hanging on his chest because he knew this was a big moment, one for winter nights to come.
  
  'Aye, get your name in a song, Gerbiorn,' another man said through his teeth, and big Gerbiorn lumbered forward, looping that smiting axe so that Sigurd heard the slap of its haft against his palms, once, twice, then up soared the great blade and Sigurd was about to throw his spear even if it meant losing it, when an arrow suddenly appeared in Gerbiorn's shoulder followed by another in his neck. The big troll stood there frowning, as if he could not understand what was happening, and then more arrows, dozens of them, were streaking into the king's men, like starlings flocking to their roosts.
  
  'Shields!' the oath-breaker's champion shouted, raising his own so that it covered more of his lord than himself, which was just as well for Gorm judging by the two shafts it already sprouted.
  
  'Hold here!' Sigurd told the Mekjarvik men in the ruins of their shieldhouse. Not so much a house now as a tumbledown shepherd's hut. But they kept their shields up, rims kissing as best they could because those arrows were whipping in amongst the king's men, tunking into shields and thooting into mail and flesh. One flitted past Sigurd's face so close that he felt the fletchings brush his cheek.
  
  'Who is here, then?' Floki said, hardly caring about those terror-sowing shafts, taking advantage of this new chaos and sinking his spear one-handed into a greybeard's leg. Sigurd knew full well who it was. She had come! She was here to give herself to the slaughter. Just as she had told the blacksmith Ingel to tell Sigurd that she would.
  
  Runa!
  
  Sigurd twisted and turned, trying to see what he already knew. There, through the gaps left by Erp's dead and dying men, he saw them. And he had never felt the gods closer than in that moment.
  
  'Runa?' Floki said. 'Can it be Runa?' He was looking south too, as were many of the Mekjarvik men now because the oath-breaker's warriors had drawn together again like fingers into a fist and were trying to make sense of what was happening whilst also being flayed by arrows.
  
  'Fuck, it's a host of Valkyries!' Erp said, looking more terrified than he had all day. His men were muttering oaths and touching their Thór's hammers, peering over their shields with bulging eyes, for there, sweeping across the slope, all shining mail and long braided hair beneath that low black sky, was a host of warrior women. Well, perhaps not a host, but a war band anyway, more than thirty and all of them nocking, drawing, loosing as they came, sending flocks of deadly shafts into the oath-breaker's hirð.
  
  'Are we dead?' a man asked his companions and not one of them seemed sure that they weren't.
  
  And there amongst these shieldmaidens, these terrifying brynja-clad, arrow-shooting women, was Runa, her golden hair bright in the dark day, a shield slung over her back.
  
  Sigurd had told no one what Ingel had told him, because he did not want it to be true, did not want Runa to come to Rennisøy to stand beneath his banner in the storm of swords. There had been no time to send someone to the island of Fugløy to tell her not to come, but at least by not speaking of it, not sharing Ingel's message, he could pretend that there was no more to it than breath on the breeze.
  
  'Tell my brother I am coming,' Ingel had said, careful to use the exact words that Runa had. 'And that I will bring the Maidens of Freyja to fight with him against the oath-breaker king.' The young smith had frowned and half choked over the next part, as if he feared to intrude on things that were between a brother and sister. 'For are we not of the same mother? The same father? Are we not beloved of the gods? Then let us stand together. We are the last but we are enough. Look for me, brother. I am coming to you.'
  
  Sigurd had not wanted her to come. Now he was grinning like a moon-mad fiend.
  
  They drew and loosed, drew and loosed, sending arrow after arrow and gods they were good, because those shafts had been finding the parts which even the king's hearthmen in all their fine war gear had trouble protecting: eyes, faces, hands, the lower legs. And most of the women were making these shots on the move, too.
  
  But those Sword-Norse who had halted their attack on Sigurd's skjaldhus had built their own shieldwall again, so that the Freyja Maidens' arrows were hitting shields now and bouncing off helmets. Not that this was much fun for the men beneath them, as Erp pointed out happily.
  
  Sigurd saw and heard one of Runa's arrows tonk off the oath-breaker's own helmet and he began to wonder if one of the lords of Asgard was watching over the king.
  
  'Shieldwall!' he yelled and Erp's men moved well, getting into line beside him and overlapping their shields, some of them even hammering hilts and shafts against the limewood to let the Avaldsnes men know that death was coming for them. They knew as well as Sigurd that they must seize this moment, when the king was wrong-footed, while the arrows were raining and his men were cowering behind their shields. From the look of it the warrior women each had two quivers of arrows on their belts, which meant some eighty arrows each, but they would run out fast at this rate, desperate as they were to slay the king and end the battle.
  
  'Ready!' Sigurd called, an order not a question. 'Now!' He strode forward and what was left of Erp's crew, some twenty men, went with him. 'Runa! Behind me!' he bellowed, and Runa heard him above the wind's roar and the battle's din, screaming at her companions to follow her, sweeping around Sigurd's rear. Over the dead they went, across the blood-slick long grass, the lopped limbs and the broken spears and the splintered shields, and then the skjaldborgar struck and Sigurd thought he heard a peal of thunder rend the sky at that same moment as he put his shoulder into his shield and dipped his head.
  
  The Freyja Maidens were with him now and he sensed the battle thrill in them. The warrior behind him was a tall, fierce-eyed, red-haired woman who nodded at him before loosing an arrow at the man whose shield he heaved against. From that distance and with a draw like that, mail was useless, and suddenly the weight was gone and the shield fell and Sigurd was moving forward, as was his whole skjaldborg. 'Just hold the line!' he roared.
  
  'No gaps, you bastards!' Erp shouted, his one eye glaring ferociously, and they knew that their job now was to maintain the bulwark from behind which the women could do the killing, from less than five feet away sinking their arrows deep, every shaft a kill or maiming. And yet they also knew that they could not hold against those sixty hearthmen who yet fought beneath that ship banner. 'Kill them!' Erp bellowed at the Freyja Maidens. 'Put your arrows into the shits! Murder the reeking, pus-filled maggots!'
  
  The bow strings hummed. The arrows whipped and thunked and the warrior women shrieked with savage joy for every man they killed or put down, and Sigurd knew that their god then was not Óðin or Freyja or some reasoning Asgard-dweller but the fiend of battle which can consume a warrior when the blood is flying.
  
  And then a war horn sounded, thin and plaintive enough to cut through the steel-storm and the wind's howl. And Sigurd looked up at the ridge because he knew that horn meant that Asgrim and his Svearmen had been overrun.
  
  'Olaf can't hold now,' Floki said from behind his own shield, 'not with them coming into his side.'
  
  'He'll hold,' Sigurd said, face against the limewood, still moving forward as the red-haired woman, who was quite beautiful he realized even in the maw of it all, loosed shaft after shaft into the enemy, all the while snarling like some wild creature.
  
  'Erp's down!' someone yelled. Someone else cursed and as the line pushed on, somehow driving the king's men back, Sigurd saw Erp on his knees, clutching his side where a tear in his mail revealed a purple bulge which was his guts trying to spring out. Erp riveted his one eye on Sigurd, who held his stare for a heartbeat or two before looking back to his own shield. His shield which had struck rock then, or at least it felt like it. Then the rock pushed back against Sigurd and Sigurd could not hold it, and from the size of the feet which he glimpsed beneath their shields he knew he was in trouble.
  
  'Take him!' he yelled at the red-head, who pulled another arrow from her quiver, nocked it to the bow string, drew and loosed, and cursed because the arrow missed, bouncing off the warrior's helmet from the sound of it.
  
  Then Sigurd's shoulder turned as the man broke through the wall, punching his sword hilt into Sigurd's face and roaring as he came. Sigurd spun, reeling, but saw the big man, the oath-breaker's champion it was, hack the bow from the red-head's hands, and she drew her sword but the warrior's next swing sent that flying with her severed hand still clutching the grip. He was fast, as fast as a man with half as much bulk, and he put his sword straight through the Freyja Maiden and had it out again before you could blink. She fell and suddenly mailed men were pouring through the breach, hacking at the warrior women and spearing them.
  
  'Runa!' Sigurd screamed, spitting blood, scything a hirðman's leg off at the knee then cutting into the spine of another, trying to reach his sister through that tide of the enemy. The Freyja Maidens were dying but not yet beaten, many of them having unslung shields and drawn swords to stab and slash in shrieking fury, almost dancing around their bigger, heavier opponents rather than trading blows with them.
  
  King's men were dying too, because the Maidens knew their sword-craft, but those king's men were hirðmen of many battles and furthermore they now knew that these women could die, that they were not in fact Valkyries riding the wind.
  
  Floki split a skull and hacked off another man's jaw, and Sigurd blocked a wild swing that would have lopped off his head, then scythed his shield into the man's temple, dropping him like a rock, and he could see Runa fighting shoulder to shoulder with two other women but he could not get to her.
  
  'Can you reach her?' he asked Floki, slipping on the wet grass even as he caught a sword on his shield, and twisted, plunging Troll-Tickler into a man's belly. He must have wished he owned a brynja, that man, if he could think of such things with his body ruined and death flooding in. And when Sigurd looked up Floki was gone, carving his way through the oath-breaker's finest warriors like a man scything barley.
  
  There was a roar and a moaning of big war horns and through the chaos Sigurd caught sight of his own wolf-head banner, the green cloth thrashing in the wind, and for a terrible, heart-freezing moment he thought all was lost. That the enemy had captured the banner and the Óðin spear and were bringing it back down the slope to their lord. But then he saw the rearmost of the oath-breaker's men turning to face back up the hill, bringing their shields together and bracing. Screaming at each other to hold. Spitting curses and insults at what was coming. Promising pain and death.
  
  And what was coming was fury. Olaf and Svein and Aslak and the others were walking down the slope, having abandoned the ridge. Having lost the ridge. They came in a swine-head formation, Svein and Olaf at the tip of the snout, Moldof, Bram and Bjarni behind them. Five in the rank behind, seven behind that, Sigurd's crew and Hastin and his Jæren men making up the rest of the svinfylkja.
  
  It was like a ship's prow through the fjord, Crow-Song might have said, Gorm's men rolling off Olaf's like waves before the bow, but really it was nothing so beautiful as that. In truth it was a crude nail driven into a splintering beam. They came at pace, not stopping to trade blows but battering men aside with shields and trampling them under foot, Olaf roaring into the wind, screaming at them to keep going, to not stop even if they were dead. Because Olaf knew he must strike the king's hirð and break them before those king's men they had left on the ridge arrayed themselves into a shieldwall and trapped them like the grain between the quern-stones.
  
  A warrior with a red beard rope came at Sigurd then, thinking to make his fame. He thrust his spear high and Sigurd caught it on his shield and pushed it out wide as he swung his sword across, scything off the spear blade and a foot of ash with it. The king's man jumped back, pulled his sword from its scabbard, then came again and maybe he was very fast or maybe Sigurd was slowing, but he rained down blow after blow, howling in savage joy with each piece of Sigurd's shield which flew.
  
  Sigurd thrust Troll-Tickler but Gorm's man parried it and rammed his own shield into the shivered wreck of Sigurd's and swung his sword backhanded, lopping off all the splintered limewood that was left above the iron boss. But Sigurd still gripped that boss and he stepped forward and hammered it across the man's face, cracking bone, and then as Gorm's man reeled and threw his sword up to meet Troll-Tickler, Sigurd turned the boss and drove a scramasax-sized splinter of limewood into his neck and only then did Sigurd let go of the thing.
  
  The king's man fell to his knees, clutching at the shield boss and the sliver of wood sticking in his neck, his hands fumbling and slipping in his own blood.
  
  'Wait for me in Valhöll,' Sigurd told him, then swung his gaze left and right, looking for Runa. Most of the king's hearthmen had turned to face Olaf's svinfylkja, so the remaining Mekjarvik men who had built the shieldhouse with Sigurd were now bunching together with the twenty or so warrior women who had survived Gorm's counter attack.
  
  'Kill them!' Sigurd roared, striding forward.
  
  'For Freyja!' a woman yelled, and Sigurd recognized that voice if not the fury in it. He glanced over his shoulder to see Runa haul a spear from a corpse and hurl it like a lightning bolt to take an Avaldsnes man in his shoulder where it stuck, making him scream in pain and shock. Then she and Floki were at his shoulder and Floki was grinning through a veil of blood which was not his own.
  
  'They're breaking!' one of Erp's men shouted. 'Whoresons are breaking!' And they were. Olaf and his swine-head had driven deep into King Gorm's horde and in the grey day Sigurd could see the blood misting the air as Olaf and Svein and Bram laid about them with shield and blade, cutting and hacking as they plunged deeper still towards the oath-breaker himself. And the Avaldsnes men could not stop them, not with Sigurd at their backs. Not with Erp's brave Mekjarvik men and a band of shrieking Freyja Maidens spearing them like fish in a barrel because many of them were caught in the press and unable to wield their own spears and swords effectively.
  
  'Stay with me, Runa,' Sigurd said.
  
  'And you with me, brother,' Runa said, grinning savagely, and Sigurd wondered when his little sister had become a goddess of battle.
  
  Then the king's hirð was splintering the way Sigurd's shield had, and it was not because those men were cowards. Sigurd knew they would die on the field for their lord and revel in it too, mouths watering at the thought of the mead they would soon be drinking in the Allfather's hall. But there was no glory in a bad death, perhaps no Valhöll either, and bad deaths were what most of them were looking at now, if they did not escape the crush which Olaf's charge had started like an avalanche down a mountainside.
  
  Floki cut men as they fled, his axe biting necks and shoulders and even cutting hamstrings so that men fell in heaps and lay screaming until Runa's Freyja Maidens filled them with spears or cut their throats.
  
  'The gods are watching now, Haraldarson!' Olaf was yelling, though Sigurd could not see his friend in the bloody heart of the fray. Now and then he caught sight of Svein, though, who looked like his father Styrbiorn as he cleaved shields and hammered helmets, breaking anyone who dared stand and face him.
  
  'Gorm!' Sigurd called. 'Oath-breaker! I have claimed you for Óðin!' He pushed through a knot of Mekjarvik men in the direction of the king, who was on the move surrounded by a dozen hearth warriors. 'Fight me, oath-breaker! Fight me, you nithing pile of troll shit!'
  
  But even if the king could hear Sigurd's challenge above the sword din and the howling roar of the wind which whipped men's hair across their eyes and hurled stinging rain into their faces, he showed no intention of doing anything other than flee the fight.
  
  It was chaos. Olaf's swine array was no more, the formation having fractured now that its momentum was lost, and men broke off to give themselves to the slaughter, to the maelstrom of steel, flesh and blood. Valgerd was there, twisting and turning, lunging with her spear and retreating behind her shield. Bram was insulting men even as he cleaved their shields and split their skulls, and even Thorbiorn Thorirsson looked like a proper warrior in the steel-storm, matching a big hirðman blow for blow, the splinters flying from their shields.
  
  Up on the ridge the fight still raged, with Jarl Hrani, his champion Hadd Hog-Head and Asgrim's surviving Svearmen up to their arses in it with Jarl Otrygg, who had once been Bram's jarl.
  
  But Sigurd did not see much more. He was moving, forcing his way through the throng towards his hated enemy, putting down anyone who stood in his way, and Floki and Runa and a handful of Mekjarvik men went with him.
  
  'He's making for the ships,' Floki at Sigurd's shoulder said. 'The maggot thinks he can wriggle his way out of this.'
  
  'Not today he can't,' Sigurd spat, putting Troll-Tickler through a neck and blocking a sword with his scramasax before Runa's spear streaked out to open the swordsman's belly. Olaf and Crow-Song and some of the others were cutting a swath across the field to get to the king and Sigurd knew that he was not the only man beneath that storm-tossed sky who burnt to kill King Gorm, to send him to the afterlife where Harald and Thorvard and Sigmund and Sorli waited for him.
  
  Then Floki stepped in front of Sigurd and butchered two warriors with axe and scramasax, and it was as if the king felt Sigurd on him like a change in the wind, because he suddenly turned and lowered his shield so that the thick gold torc at his neck gleamed dully against the grey rings of his brynja. He glared at Sigurd through his helmet's eye guards and then he shoved the warrior next to him aside and lifted his sword, pointing it at Sigurd like an accusation, and Sigurd felt himself grinning like a fiend because every warrior on that field, and every lord of Asgard too, knew then that the oath-breaker meant to fight Sigurd man to man.
  
  'Come then, Haraldarson,' Gorm bellowed, his voice as impressive as the thunder rolling across the sky. Rain dripped from his helmet's rim and ran down his sword, and his silver-threaded beard bristled in the wind.
  
  'I am your death, Gorm snake-in-the-grass!' Sigurd yelled. 'My father waits for you in Valhöll!'
  
  'Your father was an ill-wyrded nithing fool, boy! And your brothers were turds that fell from between your whore mother's legs!'
  
  Troll-Tickler in his right hand, his scramasax in his left, Sigurd was already moving, the gusts thrashing rain into his face and against his teeth, and the king's hearthmen stood aside to let him through. And Gorm was coming for him, too, striding across the ground as if his very bones and blood screamed at him to kill Sigurd.
  
  Then up came Gorm's shield and Sigurd met it with Troll-Tickler, the thump of it lost in the clamour of shouting, cheering men, then the king's sword flashed and the steel and iron sang on the wind.
  
  'He's mine!' Sigurd roared at Moldof who was suddenly beside him, but then Moldof's sword scythed down and Sigurd felt it coming and twisted but the blade caught him below his shoulder, cutting brynja and flesh, and Sigurd staggered away from that blow, as Crow-Song flew at Moldof, enraged by this betrayal.
  
  Moldof took the skald's sword on the remains of the shield strapped to the stump of his arm then swiped his sword across, taking the skald in his side, and Sigurd could not have been the only one who heard the snap of ribs, but then Moldof rammed his sword into Crow-Song's mouth and that was Hagal's death blow.
  
  'Go, my king!' Moldof roared, turning to fend off Olaf and Svein, but others spilled into the moment then from both sides and Sigurd could only watch as bodies and shields swarmed between him and his enemy. Watch and bleed, for Moldof's sword had carved into him, not that there was any pain yet. There was just rage at Moldof and at himself for having let the wolf-jointed troll play him like a bukkehorn this whole time when really he was still Gorm's man. Moldof had bided his time, even saved Sigurd's life before now, and all so that he could at last kill Sigurd in front of the man who still had his oath. And he had nearly succeeded too. Gods, but Sigurd almost respected the man for his patience, for holding on to his ambition all this time, even one-armed as he was.
  
  Then the king's battle horns sounded and with it a surging roar rose from his men into the wind and rain, and for a moment it seemed they had broken because many of them turned and ran, whilst others who could not turn their backs on their enemies lifted their shields and strode backwards across the blood-slick grass.
  
  A shoulder slammed into Sigurd, almost knocking him down. 'What kind of a king runs from a fight?' Olaf spat, his face a mask of savage horror as he hauled breath into himself and flicked a gobbet of meat off his sword where it had caught on a notch in the steel.
  
  'Told you we should have gutted that one-armed swine-humping shit,' Solmund growled, and even in the midst of his rage Sigurd was pleased to see the old skipper still breathing.
  
  'Thought he was going to gut the oath-breaker,' Olaf gnarred, as close as he would come to admitting that he should have stopped Moldof before the man cut Sigurd.
  
  'The gods want their game to last a little longer,' Asgot said, his face gore-spattered so that the little bones knotted into his beard looked as if they had been freshly pulled from some carcass. The godi speared a man in the back and spat at him as he died.
  
  'Aye but these goat-swivers are on the run,' Bram said. 'You can hear their arse cheeks clapping.'
  
  Up on the ridge Jarl Hrani had somehow won and now Jarl Otrygg's men were scattering like rats before the hounds. The king's men at the foot of the slope had seen this too and they knew that Jarl Hrani would sweep down that hill to join his men with Sigurd's and so some of them were backing away from the bloody snarl of it all.
  
  'Nithings!' Svein yelled at these, hoisting his long axe above his head. 'Fight us, you cowards!'
  
  'Why should they die while their king runs like a river?' Valgerd said, standing shoulder to shoulder with Runa who had picked up a bow and replenished her own quiver with arrows now. The shieldmaiden's question was a good one, because Sigurd caught a glimpse of the king and Moldof and a small knot of men beyond the skjaldborg which those loyal hearthmen were building now so that their king could escape the slaughter.
  
  But there could be no escape for Gorm, and Sigurd snatched up a discarded shield and ran at the skjaldborg, and before he could cleave the shield of the nearest man, an arrow suddenly jutted from the warrior's face and he fell. Then Sigurd crashed into the gap before the Avaldsnes men could lock shields, and plunged Troll-Tickler into a man's thigh and another arrow found its mark and then he was through that wall of men and wood and running still.
  
  He ran down the slope, the wind howling in his ears, past boulders and humps of tufted grass and then joined the path which led down to the bay, above which no gulls soared in this wrathful storm. And when he came round a bend past a stone-built shepherd's shelter he saw all the ships and boats which had brought the king's war host to Rennisøy. They were being tossed in the shallows, those nineteen ships and all the smaller boats, heaving at their mooring lines and bucking wildly. Even Gorm's favourite ship Storm-Bison was being savaged now that they had pushed her back into the sea. As if Hríð-visundr was the creature after which she was named and she was being beset by wolves which were the white breakers, and no skipper in his right mind would put out into a sea like that.
  
  Unless his king was commanding him to. Or Moldof was. The one-armed giant was bawling orders at the others, even at Hreidar the warrior who had replaced him as Gorm's prow man, and though Moldof's words were lost on the wind, Sigurd could see men taking their oars from the stands and threading them through the ports. He could see others cutting the ropes and still others preparing to haul the sail up the mast and give at least some of the cloth to the wind once they were off the shallows.
  
  Behind him the clamour of battle, the shouts and screams of warriors and the ring and scrape of the sword-song. In front of him the roar of the sea, the grey squall of fjord and rain, and the promise of revenge.
  
  He ran and stumbled, slipping on the scree path and tripping on rocks and roots, and he knew others came after him but he did not stop to see if they were his warriors or the king's. Then he came down to the beach where old men and beardless boys waited with the boats, watching them like hawks because they were the ones who would be blamed if their kinsmen and companions returned from the battle to find their knörrs and longships rolling on the shingle and springing strakes or being carried off across the fjord having been plucked from their moorings.
  
  'Sigurd!'
  
  Sigurd turned and saw Floki and Valgerd, Runa, Olaf and Svein coming down the sea path, Valgerd gripping Svein's long axe as well as her spear because the red-bearded giant carried old Solmund in his arms like a bairn. They looked like Hel's own warriors, all wild-eyed and gore-spattered and full of the battle thrill.
  
  'Óðin's arse, Sigurd! Wait!' Olaf yelled, his voice carrying to Sigurd on the wind, but Sigurd's vengeance would not wait and he was crossing the strand which was all that separated him from the oath-breaker.
  
  Then one of King Gorm's warriors broke off from the others who were climbing aboard Storm-Bison.
  
  'Haraldarson!' this warrior shouted, holding his sword and shield out wide to let everybody see – to let Sigurd see – how big he was and how fine his war gear.
  
  'Hreidar Herdísarson,' Sigurd called back, beyond caring that he was about to fight the king's champion, the man who stood at Storm-Bison's prow and hewed down the oath-breaker's enemies. The man who now believed he would cast his reputation in gold by killing Sigurd on that beach.
  
  Behind Hreidar, the king himself was aboard his ship now. He was clinging to the stem post and glaring at Sigurd as Storm-Bison pranced and jerked on the spume-crested rollers which threw themselves on to the strand.
  
  'Is this how you saw your death, Hreidar?' Sigurd asked him, stalking towards him with his sword and scramasax, ignoring a voice in his head which warned him that he was bleeding badly from the cut Moldof had given him.
  
  'My wyrd is not to die by your sword, Haraldarson,' the champion said with a smile. Along the beach some of those who had been guarding the boats were summoning the courage to go and stand with Hreidar, but most were unsure because up on the rise were Jarl Hrani and his Sword-Norse and they brought with them the Óðin spear with Sigurd's wolf banner thrashing beneath its blade.
  
  Even Sigurd shuddered to see the jarl up there, his helmet brighter than the day, because had Hrani been Sigurd's enemy, as he was until recently, then Sigurd would surely have lost this battle and the oath-breaker would have pissed on his corpse.
  
  Then Valgerd flew past Sigurd and Hreidar banged his sword against his shield because he knew the shieldmaiden meant to kill him and he respected her for the ambition.
  
  'He's mine!' Sigurd yelled after her, but she was already on Hreidar, probing his defences with her spear and measuring his speed as he swung, trying to shorten that spear by a foot or two.
  
  Olaf and Floki ran towards a handful of greybeards and boys who turned and hared back to their knörr, thinking better of their former plan to continue their king's fight. And more king's men were flying down the sea path to escape Jarl Hrani. They scattered like rooks from the roost, fleeing across the shingle towards their respective boats, screaming at friends and kinsmen to make a shieldwall or to put out into the storm-tossed sea, which showed that the king's great war host was a shattered thing now, that his men would risk a drowning death rather than stay and fight.
  
  'Go, Sigurd!' Valgerd yelled over her shoulder while jabbing her spear at Hreidar's face but striking his helmet. 'That færing with the new strakes. Go!'
  
  Sigurd ran to the high-tide line on to which the sea had spewed its green wrack, and to the abandoned boat lying there in danger of being claimed by the fjord. No more than sixteen feet in length it had a small mast and yard as well as two pairs of oars and Sigurd set his shoulder to it and pushed but it would not move.
  
  'Come on!' he growled, and then Sigurd thought the gods had heard him, for the little boat was moving, its belly crunching on the stony sand.
  
  'You think I'd let you butcher that oath-breaking bollock of a king without me, lad?'
  
  Sigurd looked up and saw Olaf at the other end of the boat, leaning back, hauling the thing towards the sea. Floki and Runa were beside Sigurd too now and the hull kissed the breakers and they jumped aboard but for Olaf who stood in the surf fighting to hold on to the little færing while Svein waded in with Solmund still in his arms.
  
  Sigurd took the skipper from him and put him on the bench at the tiller, earning the old man's thanks and a pained grin but a grin nonetheless. Like all of them Solmund was daubed with blood but in his case too much of it was his own.
  
  'Don't you die yet, old man,' Olaf growled as Svein pushed the boat into deeper water and Floki hauled the yard up the mast and spread her sail to the storm. Sigurd looked back to the beach and saw Valgerd duck Hreidar's wild swing and put her spear in his thigh, heard the champion bellow in fury before swinging again, but this time the shieldmaiden leapt back and sprang forward, supple as a slender yew, jumping for height and thrusting the spear down over Hreidar's shield into his shoulder. The champion cast his shield aside to better see his enemy and Valgerd seized on his stupidity because she had him for both reach and speed and he did not even have a shield now.
  
  'Take him, Valgerd,' Floki growled into the gusts, seeing Hreidar's mistake as he worked the yard and wrestled with it to catch the wind.
  
  Valgerd feinted high and the champion swept his sword up to block, only the spear blade was no longer there. It was in his belly, and Hreidar had been right when he had said it was not his wyrd to die by Sigurd's sword. He was dead by Valgerd's spear. Or would be.
  
  The shieldmaiden's next strike took him in the groin and her last opened his throat and Hreidar kept his feet but Valgerd must have known she had given him his death wound because she turned and ran down the beach and plunged into the waves and Sigurd pulled her aboard, so that the little boat now showed only a sliver of freeboard above the waterline.
  
  'They made it, then,' Svein said, pointing, and they all looked back to see Bram and Aslak, Asgot, Thorbiorn, Bjarni and Bjorn all spilling on to the beach, their splintered shields and gore-stained mail and blades telling their story better than any skald could.
  
  'Here!' Olaf yelled to them, and somehow Asgot heard him through the storm din and lifted his spear high.
  
  But Storm-Bison was bearing the oath-breaker westward, her mast bending to the wind even with her sail more than half reefed and her crew fighting as hard as they had fought all day.
  
  There was no time to wait for the others.
  
  'Go!' Sigurd called, turning his back on those on the beach, the wind whipping his hair across his eyes and crusting the blood caught in the rings of his brynja. Floki grinned and nodded, catching that storm in the square sail so that it cracked with the joy of it and the reefing ropes danced.
  
  'Don't lose them, Solmund!' Sigurd called over his shoulder as he peered into the gusting grey veils of rain after Storm-Bison, growling at Rán Mother of the Waves that she could not have the oath-breaker because his death belonged to Sigurd.
  
  'Don't need you to tell me how to breathe, lad,' Solmund called back, gripping the tiller as the rest of them clung on to the benches and sides and planted their feet in the waterlogged thwarts and the færing flew into the Boknafjord.