doors. No one wanted to ask how a slip of a girl like Hild had managed to shut and bar the door on her own.
We started down the stairs, reached a landing which led to the left, then continued to where Vigfus’s torches lit the room beyond. Two steps further down, we stopped, amazed, afraid.
The room was lined with men, armoured in cobwebs and rotting leather and rusting metal lappets. They sat, cross-legged, spears upright and butted into round holes in the floor. A few elaborately helmeted heads had toppled, some skeletal hands had slipped from the spears, but Dengizik’s faithful sat on, in the same position they had once taken up on the day the tomb was sealed.
The enormity of that stunned me into sitting down on the lowest stair. They had marched in, sat down, butted their spears and died. Poison? Perhaps, though I would not have been surprised to learn that Dengizik’s faithful guard had simply stayed sitting until they died of starvation and thirst.
They sat in neat lines flanking a flagged approach running from the stair to where Dengizik sat, equally armoured, on a stone throne, a great cross on one side … no, not a cross. Cross-shaped, but from the arm of the T hung hair. Horsetails: the standard of a Hun chieftain, I learned later. A great, ornate helmet was set on the top of it and I realised this was because the withered thing on the throne had no head.
I got to know those standards well, for the Khazars, who would not have been out of place at Attila’s side, had them, too, as well as the strange disc-standards that marked them as Jewishmen – but I never again came across a howed-up steppe lord with no head.
Nor were the lines quite as neat now as they must have been for centuries. The tilting stones above opened on both sides and Boleslav had slipped down one on the left, straight on to the grounded spears of the long-dead.
His weight had snapped the old wood; he had crashed into the dusty corpses beyond and rolled out on to the flagged approach. Now he lay at Dengizik’s enthroned feet, pierced through chest and belly, finished off with a merciful throat-cut.
All that strength and skill, I marvelled, remembering him spinning the giant Dane axe, laid low by a slip of a girl. And I shivered at what he had done to her to deserve that impaled death. I knew well enough and half the shiver was for me.
Do not love me, she had said.
Vigfus stepped forward, splendid in gilded mail and a marvellous helmet that had been new for his great-grandfather, which covered the whole face save for the mouth and eyes and had gilded eyebrows and two huge raven feathers.
Behind and on either side were his men, desperate-grim and hefting their axes and swords and spears. There was only one sure way out of that room and that was to go through us and there were not nearly enough of them for that.
Someone flitted past me, back up the stairs and I almost followed, thinking we were well out of it – then I saw it was Bagnose, heading back to the opening, which lay above the room, nocking an arrow as he went. Steinthor, I presumed, was already there.
‘I suppose,’ Vigfus said, scowling, ‘there is no bargaining here.’
‘None,’ replied Einar with a twisted smile.
‘One to one to settle this, winner lets the others go?’
Einar shook his head, chuckling. ‘What – and let all this planning go to waste? How does it feel, Quite the Dandy, ladies’ man, to have been so trapped by my lady?’
Vigfus narrowed his eyes at the full import of what had been said. His men looked anxiously from one to the other.
‘If she is your lady,’ Vigfus snarled, ‘I wish you well of her. You pair are suited. Personally, I found her a poor, cold, dry hump – but she seemed to want more, so I let my lads have a go. Most preferred to find a goat.’
Some of his men chuckled. Most, realising that that poor, cold, dry hump was what had led them to this wyrd, were less amused.
‘Enough talk,’ said Einar coldly and snaked forward. An arrow hissed from the opening above and one of Vigfus’s men screeched and plucked at the shaft through both sides of his neck. Men closed, steel crashed, shields whumped under blows.
I was cautious, I ganged up with old Wryneck on one man and, between us, we cut him down in a flurry of blows, me hacking deep scores in his arms and one calf, Wryneck battering lumps off his head and swearing.
Another hurtled out of the darkness at us and I twisted to face him. Pain sprang from my ankle and I grunted and stopped. Wryneck clashed with his man and I barely managed to deflect a blow meant for him.
An axe whirred out of nowhere and clattered off Gunnar Raudi’s shield. My opponent, black-bearded, screaming, cut a vicious diagonal slash, which I sprang back from. His momentum carried the blow into one of the dead warriors, who exploded in a great eruption of dust and dead insects and toppled sideways. An arrow from above then smacked Black Beard between the shoulder blades, propelling him straight at me, so that he fell on his face and slid to my feet.
His shield smashed into my injured ankle and I went down, sick with the pain of it, dropping sword and shield to clutch the thing, howling. Wryneck, too busy with his own man, never spared me a glance.
Through the sparkling lights of pain in front of my eyes, I saw Einar cut his man down with a swift series of feints and strikes and vicious shield punches. He turned then, to where Gunnar Raudi was trading blows with Vigfus, who scorned a shield and had a boarding axe in one hand and a long seax in the other.
They cut and leaped and spun, elbowing Dengizik’s dead men aside with curses. The chamber filled with the dust of old death, the fear-stink and blood of new.
Vigfus was good, too, and I remembered him spidering across rooftops, swinging in and out of shuttered openings, leaping to grab a rope in mid-air. Fast and limber, for all that he had no sense of dress at all.
Twice Gunnar Raudi had almost lost his sword to the boarding axe, Vigfus swirling it round to trap the sword in the curve of its beard, flicking his wrist to lock it, then trying to wrench it out of Gunnar’s grasp.
But Vigfus’s magnificent helmet was a hindrance and you could see why sensible warriors had given that type up for one with a simple nasal: you couldn’t see anything out of the corner of your eye and, in a whirling fight like this, that was suicide.
Gunnar circled. Einar came up behind him and I thought he was moving to Gunnar’s sword side, to make it two on one. As he did, Gunnar Raudi stiffened, half turned – and Vigfus’s axe hurled round and took him between neck and shoulder, cleaving deep in a splinter of rings and bone and blood.
My scream was lost in the echoing shrieks and yells of the battle. Einar flung himself over Gunnar’s body at Vigfus, roaring his challenge, spittle flying. I half stumbled to where Gunnar lay, blood pooling thickly on the dusty floor.
He was gone, already white, barely able to speak. His lips moved in the frosted berry beard, now bright with new, vicious red spilling from his mouth. If he had something to say other than with those frantic eyes, I never heard it. When they glazed over, I closed them.
Vigfus, fingers curling on the wire-wrapped handle of his axe, crabbed sideways, elbowing aside another fighting pair, one of whom aimed a brief, speculative cut at Vigfus as he did so.
In that helmet, he almost missed it, was left off balance and clattered into another of the Oathsworn, who then stumbled into another of those dead warriors, impaling himself on an age-blackened spear.
I have been asked by bright-eyed youngsters who have never fought for their lives with shield and steel what it’s like. I never tell them that it is four or five minutes of mad fear and luck, of slashing cuts and savagery, of shit and blood and shrieking.
The sagas tell it better and the one about the battle between Einar and Vigfus would, no doubt, have been memorable for its superior, clever kennings and nobility. Reality was different and vicious.
Einar, snarling, his sword dripping blood, slashed at Vigfus in a flurry of steel and Vigfus danced sideways, raised himself