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After the treachery and slaughter they met during the raid on Glendalough, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his small band of surviving Northmen have returned to Vík-ló where Thorgrim again sits as lord of the Viking longphort. But the Northmen are a restless lot, and soon they find themselves eager to put to sea. Loading weapons and supplies aboard the four longships under Thorgrim’s command, they set out in search of the rich merchant ships that now ply Irish waters. But not all cargoes are the same, nor all merchant captains easy targets for the Norse raiders. Crossing wakes with a Frisian shipmaster who could be Thorgrim’s equal in seamanship and cunning, the Northmen soon find themselves seeking vengeance even as they fight to keep from a watery grave.
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Raider's Wake sample chapter
Chapter One
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Not on necks of oxen or cows is my champion's sword blunted,
'tis on kings that the sword in Diarmait's hand today makes a whistling noise. – The Battle of Carnn Chonaill |
When the sun came up that morning, illuminating the thick blanket of gray, white and black cloud, making visible the deluge of rain that was falling and had been falling for more than a week, Bressal mac Muirchertach was still the king of a small túaithe to the south of Dubh-linn. And now, just past midday, he was dead.
He died in Conandil’s arms, the rain pelting his pale and frightened face, the sand under his body dark and wet. The bleeding had been considerable, and from several wounds. She had done what she could to stop it. If they had been in Bressal’s hall, where she might have stripped his clothing and got to the wounds in a proper way, where there would have been warmth from a great hearth fire, then she might have saved him. But that was not how it was.
They had been driven to this place by the sea, Bressal borne along by two of his men after being struck down in the first few minutes of the battle. It had been a panicked flight, and the manner in which the two bearers carried Bressal had not been gentle. That rough treatment and the cold and the wet and Conandil’s inability to properly treat the wounds had all led to the old man’s death on that bitter, surf-scarred stretch of shingle beach.
The attack had come just after first light and it had come from the west. The first indication that any of them inside Bressal’s ringfort had of trouble in the offing was the sound of shouts and screaming, muted and far-off, and the trample of horses. It was the music of some great catastrophe and it seemed to come out of the rain itself. The distant noise had brought men to the top of the walls, straining to hear or see, but the rain blotted out most sound and the country in the distance seemed to fade into a gray nothing.
“Raiders?” Broccáin mac Bressal asked, standing next to his father on the earthen wall of the ringfort. Conandil stood beside him. She was Broccáin’s wife of five months. They had both leapt from their bed to scale the walls as the sentries shouted their alarm. They had found Bressal already there.
“Raiders for certain,” Bressal said. “But who?”
“Fin gall?” Conandil asked. “The heathens?” It terrified her just to say the words. She had been taken by the heathens the past summer, bound away for the slave markets of Frisia, when God had sent her the means of salvation. She knew it had to be God, because her escape was so like a miracle. Even if she did bring it about by fornicating with one of the heathens and fleeing as he slept. But that was past, confessed and forgiven.
“Could be the heathens,” Bressal said. “But I would not expect them to come from the west. If they were going to raid they would come from the sea, I would think.” The túaithe that Bressal ruled was on the coast, and the ringfort not far from the beach from which the local fishermen put out to sea in leather-covered boats to cast their nets.
“That whore’s son Eochu, then?” Broccáin suggested. Eochu was the rí túaithe of the lands that neighbored Bressal’s, and like all good neighbors in Ireland they were forever raiding one another. But they were cattle raids, mainly, quick forays over the border to scoop up the other’s cows, the chief measure of wealth in Ireland. But what they were hearing was no cattle raid.
Through all this discussion, Conandil was desperate to point out what to her was obvious: it did not matter much who was attacking, only that the people out there needed help. But as a woman, and a woman new to the family and the rath, it was hardly her place to point that out.
Happily, Broccáin realized as much before Conandil could stand it no more. “Whoever this bastard is, we have to meet them,” he said and those words seemed to spur everyone to move. Bressal and then Broccáin and then the sentries flew down the ladder to the grounds below, the rí túaithe and his son bellowing for sword and shield, for the house guard to turn out, for horses to be brought.
The sound of distant shouting was louder, closer, by the time the gates to the rath were thrown open and the two dozen armed men sallied forth. Bressal and Broccáin were mounted, as were a few of their chief men, but most were on foot. Some were armed with swords and shields, some with axes, but most carried shields and spears, the easiest weapon to make, the easiest to wield, and one of the most effective.
They were still coming out of the gate when the first people came running out of the fog and the mist, maybe a quarter mile away. It was hard to see what was happening. Conandil, who was trailing behind, had to wipe rain from her eyes as she blinked into the distance. She could see people running: women, men, children. She could see them stumbling, crawling, getting to their feet again. Behind them, men with spears and swords, their round, bright painted shields looking dull in that light.
This is bad, she thought. This is very bad. Real defense of the túaithe required the men of those lands to arm and to gather and to put themselves under the leadership of Bressal. A minor king like him, a man of no great wealth, could not afford to keep men-at-arms. He had a small house guard, but for real numbers he had to rely on those who owed him military service, the poor farmers, the bóaire and fuidir. They were no great fighting men, but they could use a spear and that was often all that it took.
But whoever had launched this attack had come in the night, waited until it was light enough to see, and fell on the people before the men could be called to arms. And now the farmers were running, fleeing in terror, and there was little chance their leaders, Bressal and Broccáin, could organize them to fight back.
But Conandil knew they would die trying, and she cursed her bitter luck and this horrible fate. She had just escaped the hell of the fin gall, had found a husband, heir to this land, a fine home, and now these bastards had come in the night to take it all. But she would not be taken, not again. Like her husband, she would die making a stand.
“Onward! Onward!” Bressal shouted, sword over his head, pointing toward the people rushing for the illusionary safety of the ringfort. It had been years since the old man had been in battle, but he had lost none of the courage that made him so loved by the people he ruled.
Together, Bressal and Broccáin spurred their horses, leading the way forward, but keeping the animals to a slow trot so the others might keep up. They had swords held high, shields on their arms. They, alone among all the men there, wore mail shirts that gleamed dully and made a jingling sound as they rode.
Conandil walked behind the column of men and off to the side so her view of the action ahead was not blocked by the soldiers. She had no idea what she might do in the middle of a fight, had given no thought to why she was advancing more or less at her husband’s side. She just knew she could not stay behind in the ringfort, could not spend this time praying and worrying and wondering what was going on.
The shouting and screaming was louder now. Conandil looked off beyond the mounted figures of Bressal and Broccáin. The people were a couple hundred yards away, still running, stumbling, the women screaming in terror. Now and then one of the men would turn and raise whatever pathetic weapon he held—an ax or a pitchfork or a scythe—in an attempt to fight back. They might as well have been holding feathers for all the good it did them, the men-at-arms at their heels cutting them down with hardly a pause.
It’s like driving deer…Conandil thought. The people were like deer being driven by the men behind, the heathens or Eochu’s men or whoever it was. These men must have swept through the countryside and herded the people together and pushed them forward, the way servants will round up deer and drive them to be killed for the amusement of some great king.
And then the fleeing people of the túaithe ran headlong into the armed men who had gone out to defend them, and it was chaos. Bressal had come down from his horse and was trying to get his men to form a shield wall of some sort when the terrified people collided with his line, clawing and scrambling and fighting to get past, to put the armed men from the ringfort between themselves and their attackers.
Bressal’s line collapsed under that assault, what little order he had created torn apart, and he was just trying to get the men back under command when the attackers fell on them. They came with spears mostly, and swords and their round shields. Like Bressal’s men, they were not well organized, having been driving the people ahead of them, but they were not hampered by the panicked women and children, and they hit Bressal’s line like a massive, breaking wave.
Conandil saw Bressal go down in that first assault and she screamed in horror and panic. She loved the old man, her father-in-law, nearly as much as she loved her husband, but now as she watched, he disappeared under the swell of fighting men, spears and swords thrusting back and forth.
Broccáin roared, a great bear’s roar, a sound Conandil had never heard from him, and he charged forward, shield up, sword slashing back and forth, hacking and thrusting and clearing a swath of men away from his fallen father. His courage drove the men under his command and they, too, pushed forward, meeting the raiders shield for shield, spear for spear.
Not heathens, Conandil thought. These men, these raiders, they were not fin gall. They did not wear mail or leather armor, they did not have the pointed iron helmets and shields with their wicked pagan images painted on their faces. These were Irishmen.
“Why are you doing this?” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “You bastards, forsaken by God!” It was not as if she expected an answer, it was just that the whole nightmare was so unreal that she could not contain herself.
She reached down and picked up an ax that one of the fleeing men had dropped. Not a battle ax, but the sort used to chop kindling for the hearth or the heads off chickens. Still, it had an edge, it could kill, and that was all she wanted. She raced forward, ready to do anything, perfectly ready to die in defense of this life she had built, this fine life that she enjoyed for the first time in the twenty or so years she had been on this earth.
The nearest of the attackers was maybe ten yards away and Conandil charged for him, ax raised over her shoulder. She realized she was shrieking, but she could not really tell what shrieking was hers and what was coming from the others locked in the fight. Rain ran down her face and hair and her clothing was soaked through and heavy.
The man she was set on wore a dark green brat and carried a shield painted red. He held a spear over his head as if he was going to throw it, but instead he was darting it back and forth, stabbing when he saw his chance. The tip of the spear was shining bright red, and then the rain washed it clean.
He didn’t see Conandil coming until the last moment. He seemed to sense the movement to his left and turned to look. What he saw likely did not impress him; Conandil stood a little over five feet and weighed maybe seven stone. The first suggestion of a smile was forming on his lips when Conandil’s ax came down and split his skull, burying itself up to the handle in his head.
The man’s eyes crossed and blood erupted from around the ax blade and he went down fast, driven down by the force of the blow. Conandil tried to hang on to the ax, but it was lodged firmly in the dead man’s skull and the handle was wet and it pulled from her grip.
By the time the man had crumpled completely Conandil could see she had other problems. The raiders, who had been thrown back by the ferocity of Broccáin’s attack, had formed up again and now they were surging forward. Broccáin’s men were starting to waver and Conandil had the feeling they would break soon and start to run.
She was right. The men who were not then engaged in the fight began to fade back, and others around them began to fade back as well. Conandil saw her husband looking desperately around, looking for men to stand with him. She saw his mouth open as he shouted something—encouragement, orders, curses—but she could not hear the words.
Then everyone was running. Conandil was not aware of the moment it happened; it just seemed as if in one instant the men were fighting and in the next they were running and Conandil turned and ran as well, because there was nothing else to do. She ran with the house guard and with the few farmers who had stopped in their flight to join the battle line. She ran with the enemy at her heels and the ringfort gaping open a few hundred yards ahead.
But then there were riders. Mounted warriors with long spears sweeping in on the left, racing ahead of the running men, pushing for the ringfort, cutting off that avenue of retreat.
The rath…Conandil thought. Her only thought had been to get to the rath, the only place in all her life she had actually felt as if she was safe. And now, with the horsemen outpacing them, flanking them, driving them, the rath was beyond her reach and she felt the last bits of hope like rust flaking away.
She kept running. She ran with the others. She caught a glimpse of Broccáin, last of the men to flee, and she wished he would run faster. She caught a glimpse of Bressal, carried like some carcass by two of his men, but she had to guess he still lived or surely they would have left him on the field. But mostly she just ran.
The ringfort was half a mile from the shingle beach the fishermen used and the people were racing down the beaten road that ran to that place. Conandil had an idea that if they could get to the beach there might be boats enough for them to all get out to sea and escape. They did not have to get far, a few hundred yards would do it. Just beyond the distance of a spear throw, or a bow shot if these men had bows and arrows.
Suddenly she felt hope. She did not know if the others were thinking about the boats or if they were just in mindless flight, but it didn’t matter. Once they reached the shore, saw the boats, they would think of that, too. And even if there were not boats enough for all, there would certainly be a place for Bressal and his son, Broccáin, and that was all that Conandil was worried about. She would happily die at the end of one of these bastard’s spears if she could see her beloved husband safe off in a boat.
She stumbled, straightened, raced on. Her breath was coming harder, her chest burning, and she realized that Broccáin would never get in a boat if there were others still on the beach. He would be the last aboard; he would have it no other way. That was why she loved him, because that was the sort of man he was.
The land sloped away down to the water, not one of the ragged cliffs that marked much of the coast but an easy grade down to the shingle. She wanted to yell out, to tell them about the boats, to order them to get in the boats and hope they obeyed.
She crested the rise that ran down to the sea and saw the beach stretched out before her, as if it had been laid there for her inspection. A half a mile of sand and gravel from north to south, stretched out in a gentle curve and capped at either end by short, steep headlands that blocked the view of the coast beyond. The grassy meadows ended in a sharp brown line and after that there was only beach for fifty yards down to the breaking sea. There were a dozen boats there. They were floating free, three hundred feet from shore.
Conandil let out a cry of despair as she stumbled the last hundred yards down to the beach. It was as far as she could go, as far as her gasping lungs would move her. She collapsed in the sand, sucking in air, was conscious of the many people swarming around her, unsure what to do now. She heard her husband calling orders, getting men in line, setting up whatever defense he could.
She remembered Bressal, her father-in-law, their rí túaithe. She forced herself to her feet, staggered around the beach until she found where the men had deposited him in the sand. He was bloody for half a dozen wounds. His skin was very white, his eyes blinking slowly. Conandil grabbed the edges of the torn mail and pulled the tears wider to get to the wounds. She tore open his clothing underneath, pulled her knife and cut strips of cloth from Bressal’s cloak. She bound his wounds as best she could, but the mail shirt made it impossible to do so with much effect.
An odd quiet had come to the beach and Conandil wondered why they had not yet been attacked. She looked up from her work. The raiders were drawn up in a line near the crest of the hill that ran up from the beach. They had swung around so they could approach from the south, why, Conandil could not guess. It would mean crossing more beach to bring the fight home. They seemed to be taking their time, getting their men in order, forming a line of shields. In front of her, on the beach, Broccáin was doing the same.
She turned back to Bressal. The old man was shivering and his eyes were wide and his mouth partway open. Conandil put her arms behind him and lifted him, surprised she had the strength, and held him pressed to her. “I love you, Lord Bressal, and I thank you for your kindness and I commend your soul to God.” She heard the old man take a gasping breath, felt him shake one last time in her arms and then he was still.
Conandil laid him down gently and closed his eyes. She looked up again. The line of men on the hill was advancing now, slowly, methodically, marching in a line that hardly wavered as it came toward them, stretched out over a hundred feet.
“Stand ready!” she heard Broccáin shout. “Stand ready and murder these bastards when they come!”
The enemy came closer, and their numbers were not so much greater than those of her husband’s were, and that gave her hope. Sure, the fighting men advancing on them seemed better armed, better trained. They were not just a small house guard and a handful of frightened farmers. Nonetheless, while they might be superior men-at-arms, they were not greatly superior.
But whatever happened, Conandil would not be taken. That much she promised herself. She would not be a slave again. If the battle was lost to them, then Broccáin would certainly die fighting. And she would die with him.
Bressal’s sword was long gone, but he had a seax on his belt and Conandil bent over and pulled it free. She was willing to die with Broccáin, but like her husband she would make the bastards buy her life at the cost of some of their own. Maybe she and her short sword could make a difference in the fight. She had already reduced the enemy’s numbers by one.
She took a step forward, ready to take her place in the shield wall, even if she had no shield. And then she heard a sound behind her, an odd sound like a shovel thrust into gravel. She spun around. The sound was the bow of a ship, a heathen longship, running up on the beach.
It had come around the headland to the north. Conandil knew that because a second one was just now appearing around that spit of land. She opened her mouth to shout a warning, but her words were cut off by the sound of the fin gall warriors screaming their battle cry as they leapt over the sides of their ship, and the hellish cries of the raiders on the hill, who were now charging down on Broccáin and his men.
Conandil took a deep breath. She raised the seax high and with a warrior’s cry in her throat she charged at the Northmen leaping into the surf.
He died in Conandil’s arms, the rain pelting his pale and frightened face, the sand under his body dark and wet. The bleeding had been considerable, and from several wounds. She had done what she could to stop it. If they had been in Bressal’s hall, where she might have stripped his clothing and got to the wounds in a proper way, where there would have been warmth from a great hearth fire, then she might have saved him. But that was not how it was.
They had been driven to this place by the sea, Bressal borne along by two of his men after being struck down in the first few minutes of the battle. It had been a panicked flight, and the manner in which the two bearers carried Bressal had not been gentle. That rough treatment and the cold and the wet and Conandil’s inability to properly treat the wounds had all led to the old man’s death on that bitter, surf-scarred stretch of shingle beach.
The attack had come just after first light and it had come from the west. The first indication that any of them inside Bressal’s ringfort had of trouble in the offing was the sound of shouts and screaming, muted and far-off, and the trample of horses. It was the music of some great catastrophe and it seemed to come out of the rain itself. The distant noise had brought men to the top of the walls, straining to hear or see, but the rain blotted out most sound and the country in the distance seemed to fade into a gray nothing.
“Raiders?” Broccáin mac Bressal asked, standing next to his father on the earthen wall of the ringfort. Conandil stood beside him. She was Broccáin’s wife of five months. They had both leapt from their bed to scale the walls as the sentries shouted their alarm. They had found Bressal already there.
“Raiders for certain,” Bressal said. “But who?”
“Fin gall?” Conandil asked. “The heathens?” It terrified her just to say the words. She had been taken by the heathens the past summer, bound away for the slave markets of Frisia, when God had sent her the means of salvation. She knew it had to be God, because her escape was so like a miracle. Even if she did bring it about by fornicating with one of the heathens and fleeing as he slept. But that was past, confessed and forgiven.
“Could be the heathens,” Bressal said. “But I would not expect them to come from the west. If they were going to raid they would come from the sea, I would think.” The túaithe that Bressal ruled was on the coast, and the ringfort not far from the beach from which the local fishermen put out to sea in leather-covered boats to cast their nets.
“That whore’s son Eochu, then?” Broccáin suggested. Eochu was the rí túaithe of the lands that neighbored Bressal’s, and like all good neighbors in Ireland they were forever raiding one another. But they were cattle raids, mainly, quick forays over the border to scoop up the other’s cows, the chief measure of wealth in Ireland. But what they were hearing was no cattle raid.
Through all this discussion, Conandil was desperate to point out what to her was obvious: it did not matter much who was attacking, only that the people out there needed help. But as a woman, and a woman new to the family and the rath, it was hardly her place to point that out.
Happily, Broccáin realized as much before Conandil could stand it no more. “Whoever this bastard is, we have to meet them,” he said and those words seemed to spur everyone to move. Bressal and then Broccáin and then the sentries flew down the ladder to the grounds below, the rí túaithe and his son bellowing for sword and shield, for the house guard to turn out, for horses to be brought.
The sound of distant shouting was louder, closer, by the time the gates to the rath were thrown open and the two dozen armed men sallied forth. Bressal and Broccáin were mounted, as were a few of their chief men, but most were on foot. Some were armed with swords and shields, some with axes, but most carried shields and spears, the easiest weapon to make, the easiest to wield, and one of the most effective.
They were still coming out of the gate when the first people came running out of the fog and the mist, maybe a quarter mile away. It was hard to see what was happening. Conandil, who was trailing behind, had to wipe rain from her eyes as she blinked into the distance. She could see people running: women, men, children. She could see them stumbling, crawling, getting to their feet again. Behind them, men with spears and swords, their round, bright painted shields looking dull in that light.
This is bad, she thought. This is very bad. Real defense of the túaithe required the men of those lands to arm and to gather and to put themselves under the leadership of Bressal. A minor king like him, a man of no great wealth, could not afford to keep men-at-arms. He had a small house guard, but for real numbers he had to rely on those who owed him military service, the poor farmers, the bóaire and fuidir. They were no great fighting men, but they could use a spear and that was often all that it took.
But whoever had launched this attack had come in the night, waited until it was light enough to see, and fell on the people before the men could be called to arms. And now the farmers were running, fleeing in terror, and there was little chance their leaders, Bressal and Broccáin, could organize them to fight back.
But Conandil knew they would die trying, and she cursed her bitter luck and this horrible fate. She had just escaped the hell of the fin gall, had found a husband, heir to this land, a fine home, and now these bastards had come in the night to take it all. But she would not be taken, not again. Like her husband, she would die making a stand.
“Onward! Onward!” Bressal shouted, sword over his head, pointing toward the people rushing for the illusionary safety of the ringfort. It had been years since the old man had been in battle, but he had lost none of the courage that made him so loved by the people he ruled.
Together, Bressal and Broccáin spurred their horses, leading the way forward, but keeping the animals to a slow trot so the others might keep up. They had swords held high, shields on their arms. They, alone among all the men there, wore mail shirts that gleamed dully and made a jingling sound as they rode.
Conandil walked behind the column of men and off to the side so her view of the action ahead was not blocked by the soldiers. She had no idea what she might do in the middle of a fight, had given no thought to why she was advancing more or less at her husband’s side. She just knew she could not stay behind in the ringfort, could not spend this time praying and worrying and wondering what was going on.
The shouting and screaming was louder now. Conandil looked off beyond the mounted figures of Bressal and Broccáin. The people were a couple hundred yards away, still running, stumbling, the women screaming in terror. Now and then one of the men would turn and raise whatever pathetic weapon he held—an ax or a pitchfork or a scythe—in an attempt to fight back. They might as well have been holding feathers for all the good it did them, the men-at-arms at their heels cutting them down with hardly a pause.
It’s like driving deer…Conandil thought. The people were like deer being driven by the men behind, the heathens or Eochu’s men or whoever it was. These men must have swept through the countryside and herded the people together and pushed them forward, the way servants will round up deer and drive them to be killed for the amusement of some great king.
And then the fleeing people of the túaithe ran headlong into the armed men who had gone out to defend them, and it was chaos. Bressal had come down from his horse and was trying to get his men to form a shield wall of some sort when the terrified people collided with his line, clawing and scrambling and fighting to get past, to put the armed men from the ringfort between themselves and their attackers.
Bressal’s line collapsed under that assault, what little order he had created torn apart, and he was just trying to get the men back under command when the attackers fell on them. They came with spears mostly, and swords and their round shields. Like Bressal’s men, they were not well organized, having been driving the people ahead of them, but they were not hampered by the panicked women and children, and they hit Bressal’s line like a massive, breaking wave.
Conandil saw Bressal go down in that first assault and she screamed in horror and panic. She loved the old man, her father-in-law, nearly as much as she loved her husband, but now as she watched, he disappeared under the swell of fighting men, spears and swords thrusting back and forth.
Broccáin roared, a great bear’s roar, a sound Conandil had never heard from him, and he charged forward, shield up, sword slashing back and forth, hacking and thrusting and clearing a swath of men away from his fallen father. His courage drove the men under his command and they, too, pushed forward, meeting the raiders shield for shield, spear for spear.
Not heathens, Conandil thought. These men, these raiders, they were not fin gall. They did not wear mail or leather armor, they did not have the pointed iron helmets and shields with their wicked pagan images painted on their faces. These were Irishmen.
“Why are you doing this?” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “You bastards, forsaken by God!” It was not as if she expected an answer, it was just that the whole nightmare was so unreal that she could not contain herself.
She reached down and picked up an ax that one of the fleeing men had dropped. Not a battle ax, but the sort used to chop kindling for the hearth or the heads off chickens. Still, it had an edge, it could kill, and that was all she wanted. She raced forward, ready to do anything, perfectly ready to die in defense of this life she had built, this fine life that she enjoyed for the first time in the twenty or so years she had been on this earth.
The nearest of the attackers was maybe ten yards away and Conandil charged for him, ax raised over her shoulder. She realized she was shrieking, but she could not really tell what shrieking was hers and what was coming from the others locked in the fight. Rain ran down her face and hair and her clothing was soaked through and heavy.
The man she was set on wore a dark green brat and carried a shield painted red. He held a spear over his head as if he was going to throw it, but instead he was darting it back and forth, stabbing when he saw his chance. The tip of the spear was shining bright red, and then the rain washed it clean.
He didn’t see Conandil coming until the last moment. He seemed to sense the movement to his left and turned to look. What he saw likely did not impress him; Conandil stood a little over five feet and weighed maybe seven stone. The first suggestion of a smile was forming on his lips when Conandil’s ax came down and split his skull, burying itself up to the handle in his head.
The man’s eyes crossed and blood erupted from around the ax blade and he went down fast, driven down by the force of the blow. Conandil tried to hang on to the ax, but it was lodged firmly in the dead man’s skull and the handle was wet and it pulled from her grip.
By the time the man had crumpled completely Conandil could see she had other problems. The raiders, who had been thrown back by the ferocity of Broccáin’s attack, had formed up again and now they were surging forward. Broccáin’s men were starting to waver and Conandil had the feeling they would break soon and start to run.
She was right. The men who were not then engaged in the fight began to fade back, and others around them began to fade back as well. Conandil saw her husband looking desperately around, looking for men to stand with him. She saw his mouth open as he shouted something—encouragement, orders, curses—but she could not hear the words.
Then everyone was running. Conandil was not aware of the moment it happened; it just seemed as if in one instant the men were fighting and in the next they were running and Conandil turned and ran as well, because there was nothing else to do. She ran with the house guard and with the few farmers who had stopped in their flight to join the battle line. She ran with the enemy at her heels and the ringfort gaping open a few hundred yards ahead.
But then there were riders. Mounted warriors with long spears sweeping in on the left, racing ahead of the running men, pushing for the ringfort, cutting off that avenue of retreat.
The rath…Conandil thought. Her only thought had been to get to the rath, the only place in all her life she had actually felt as if she was safe. And now, with the horsemen outpacing them, flanking them, driving them, the rath was beyond her reach and she felt the last bits of hope like rust flaking away.
She kept running. She ran with the others. She caught a glimpse of Broccáin, last of the men to flee, and she wished he would run faster. She caught a glimpse of Bressal, carried like some carcass by two of his men, but she had to guess he still lived or surely they would have left him on the field. But mostly she just ran.
The ringfort was half a mile from the shingle beach the fishermen used and the people were racing down the beaten road that ran to that place. Conandil had an idea that if they could get to the beach there might be boats enough for them to all get out to sea and escape. They did not have to get far, a few hundred yards would do it. Just beyond the distance of a spear throw, or a bow shot if these men had bows and arrows.
Suddenly she felt hope. She did not know if the others were thinking about the boats or if they were just in mindless flight, but it didn’t matter. Once they reached the shore, saw the boats, they would think of that, too. And even if there were not boats enough for all, there would certainly be a place for Bressal and his son, Broccáin, and that was all that Conandil was worried about. She would happily die at the end of one of these bastard’s spears if she could see her beloved husband safe off in a boat.
She stumbled, straightened, raced on. Her breath was coming harder, her chest burning, and she realized that Broccáin would never get in a boat if there were others still on the beach. He would be the last aboard; he would have it no other way. That was why she loved him, because that was the sort of man he was.
The land sloped away down to the water, not one of the ragged cliffs that marked much of the coast but an easy grade down to the shingle. She wanted to yell out, to tell them about the boats, to order them to get in the boats and hope they obeyed.
She crested the rise that ran down to the sea and saw the beach stretched out before her, as if it had been laid there for her inspection. A half a mile of sand and gravel from north to south, stretched out in a gentle curve and capped at either end by short, steep headlands that blocked the view of the coast beyond. The grassy meadows ended in a sharp brown line and after that there was only beach for fifty yards down to the breaking sea. There were a dozen boats there. They were floating free, three hundred feet from shore.
Conandil let out a cry of despair as she stumbled the last hundred yards down to the beach. It was as far as she could go, as far as her gasping lungs would move her. She collapsed in the sand, sucking in air, was conscious of the many people swarming around her, unsure what to do now. She heard her husband calling orders, getting men in line, setting up whatever defense he could.
She remembered Bressal, her father-in-law, their rí túaithe. She forced herself to her feet, staggered around the beach until she found where the men had deposited him in the sand. He was bloody for half a dozen wounds. His skin was very white, his eyes blinking slowly. Conandil grabbed the edges of the torn mail and pulled the tears wider to get to the wounds. She tore open his clothing underneath, pulled her knife and cut strips of cloth from Bressal’s cloak. She bound his wounds as best she could, but the mail shirt made it impossible to do so with much effect.
An odd quiet had come to the beach and Conandil wondered why they had not yet been attacked. She looked up from her work. The raiders were drawn up in a line near the crest of the hill that ran up from the beach. They had swung around so they could approach from the south, why, Conandil could not guess. It would mean crossing more beach to bring the fight home. They seemed to be taking their time, getting their men in order, forming a line of shields. In front of her, on the beach, Broccáin was doing the same.
She turned back to Bressal. The old man was shivering and his eyes were wide and his mouth partway open. Conandil put her arms behind him and lifted him, surprised she had the strength, and held him pressed to her. “I love you, Lord Bressal, and I thank you for your kindness and I commend your soul to God.” She heard the old man take a gasping breath, felt him shake one last time in her arms and then he was still.
Conandil laid him down gently and closed his eyes. She looked up again. The line of men on the hill was advancing now, slowly, methodically, marching in a line that hardly wavered as it came toward them, stretched out over a hundred feet.
“Stand ready!” she heard Broccáin shout. “Stand ready and murder these bastards when they come!”
The enemy came closer, and their numbers were not so much greater than those of her husband’s were, and that gave her hope. Sure, the fighting men advancing on them seemed better armed, better trained. They were not just a small house guard and a handful of frightened farmers. Nonetheless, while they might be superior men-at-arms, they were not greatly superior.
But whatever happened, Conandil would not be taken. That much she promised herself. She would not be a slave again. If the battle was lost to them, then Broccáin would certainly die fighting. And she would die with him.
Bressal’s sword was long gone, but he had a seax on his belt and Conandil bent over and pulled it free. She was willing to die with Broccáin, but like her husband she would make the bastards buy her life at the cost of some of their own. Maybe she and her short sword could make a difference in the fight. She had already reduced the enemy’s numbers by one.
She took a step forward, ready to take her place in the shield wall, even if she had no shield. And then she heard a sound behind her, an odd sound like a shovel thrust into gravel. She spun around. The sound was the bow of a ship, a heathen longship, running up on the beach.
It had come around the headland to the north. Conandil knew that because a second one was just now appearing around that spit of land. She opened her mouth to shout a warning, but her words were cut off by the sound of the fin gall warriors screaming their battle cry as they leapt over the sides of their ship, and the hellish cries of the raiders on the hill, who were now charging down on Broccáin and his men.
Conandil took a deep breath. She raised the seax high and with a warrior’s cry in her throat she charged at the Northmen leaping into the surf.
