The low timber building was one of the few in the castle that remained entirely unharmed by either thrown stone or blazing arrow. Nestled up against the north wall atop that cliff, it was far enough from the other side of the castle to be out of the reach of the archers, but the angle below the walls also meant that all missiles hurled from this side went clean over the top.
Still, they could hear and feel the barrage continuing, as the castle wall reverberated to the blows of the catapults, every one sending a shower of dust down from the building’s thatched roof.
The place had been a tanner’s workshop, which was clear from the racks for stretching pelts, the bloodstained table and the runnels cut into everything, all leading to another stained drain that ran under the building’s wall and through a small pipe in the ramparts out to the cliff side. Halfdan’s gaze followed the drain, and he rolled his eyes as they met the hole in the wall to find Bjorn standing there, trousers open, pissing into the channel while humming a happy melody.
Everyone else stood around the room’s edge, watching intently. The building’s eleven occupants were silent, barring the spattering stream and gentle humming from Bjorn.
The Wolves – Halfdan, Bjorn, Ketil, Leif and Gunnhild, the five of them who had been together since the day they left Hedeby and sailed for Kiev. Rurik – for now, Halfdan had committed his name to memory – a man who had joined them on the beach in Italy during the revolt of Maniakes, a former Rus Varangian, but unquestionably one of the Wolves. Solid Thurstan, who had left the uncertainty of Apulia with his Normans and had travelled alongside Halfdan and his friends for so long that when they had become part of the Wolves, it had seemed only natural. And, of course, two of those very same Apulian warriors – Abbe and Robert, he believed. And then, of course, Anna and Cassandra.
The Wolves of Odin.
They were only missing Ulfr and Farlof, and the six who had left with them.
How things had changed since Kiev, he mused to the eerie melody at the heart of the room. Of the eleven in this place, more than half prayed to the nailed god, yet here they were, part of Halfdan’s hirð. Here they were, in fact, witnessing one of the most sacred moments of a believer in the old gods. In truth, Abbe and Robert looked more than a little uncomfortable, for they had never see this before, yet they were here, and they did not look away.
Halfdan had managed to persuade one of the units who ran around the bailey, extinguishing fires and fetching and carrying, to take their place on the wall for an hour while they ostensibly got a little indoor rest and warmth. In truth, they needed somewhere sheltered and hidden so that Gunnhild could walk with the Vanir.
Her song rose as it always had, like the lapping of waves against rocks in an incredibly swiftly rising tide, ever higher, always cresting, new, glorious and bleak, sad and eternal. But these days it had become so much more, with Cassandra and Anna joining their melodic tones to that of the völva, a rite as old as mankind, invoking the Seiðr and the companionship of Freyja, given heart and power by women who kissed the cross. It was truly a strange world.
As the völva slowly rose, her staff turning and whirling, Halfdan found himself thinking back over their time together, and over what their collective faiths meant. His youth had been steeped in the old ways, on an island that staunchly resisted the encroachment of the White Christ who had claimed most of the North. He had sworn a blood oath against Jarl Yngvar for killing his father and pulling down the Odin stone of their village in an attempt to stamp out the old ways for the king Olof.
But for all Yngvar’s crimes, it had been the priest Hjalmvigi who had been behind them all, urging his master. And it had been Hjalmvigi, to the end of that year in the east, who had dominated Halfdan’s life, his hated face becoming the face of all the nailed god men everywhere. Even though he had sailed in companionship with Leif, who had always been a Christian, Halfdan had not only clung to the old ways, but he had carried in his heart a burning hatred for the White Christ and his priests, who could not let the world live without them, who tore down sacred stones, and who killed good men because they remembered the power of Odin.
When, he wondered, had that begun to change? On arriving at Miklagarðr, the Wolves had hidden their true faiths and played the Christian for simple expediency. There, and beyond, all the way to that beach in Italy, he had met men who prayed to the nailed god, yet who were good men, still with the ice and rock of the North in their blood, who bonded together in brotherhood. And even though he had met another rabid priest, desperate to burn the ‘heathen’ in Acerenza, he had also met more good men in Apulia, Normans this time, who prayed to the nailed Christ yet joined that same brotherhood.
He’d not really thought about how comfortable he’d become around Christians until he’d met this archbishop, Ælfric, apparently one of the world’s most important priests, yet a man who seemed content to accept Halfdan and his Wolves as a picturesque aberration in his world, something that he did not like or approve of, but could watch with fascination, like a scorpion.
The ritual’s crescendo came at the same time as one of the most powerful strikes of boulder against wall. The whole building shook wildly as the three women reached the heights of their song and Gunnhild dropped like a hammer blow from the heavens, sinking into a crouch, her handful of bones and beads, coins and feathers and silver fragments scattering across the dirt before her.
‘Tell me,’ he breathed.
‘The golden threads are gone from our weaving,’ she said quietly. ‘Gone before this night, even, gone their own way, in their own tapestries.’
‘Harðráði,’ Halfdan said, crestfallen.
He had been so hopeful. It had felt so close. That the duke and the thief might be connected had given him hope that they would soon find the man and the ship he had stolen. Yet it seemed things had changed. He did wonder, for one guilty little moment, how Gunnhild felt, given her own feelings for Harðráði. She had almost left the Wolves for him, and had defied even fate to stay with her jarl, after all.
‘He is not gone forever,’ she said, as though reading his thoughts, and with a certainty that at least reassured him a little. ‘But that is in days to come. Your connection to the golden thread of the Byzantine Bear himself is not severed, just separated for a while longer. But the other golden thread that is William… I see it with us no more. Whatever our connection to the Lion of Nordmandi has been, we have done what we came to do. He is no longer your concern, my jarl.’
Halfdan thought back over the past few weeks. Things had changed. He had learned of Harðráði’s new place at the court in Kiev, as heir to several kingdoms, all to the west, where he must surely be bound in the coming days. He knew where the man was, then, and he had an idea of the man’s plans. And he knew of Hjalmvigi’s role as chief priest to the new king of Swedes, Onund. And he had saved the life of the duke, an assassination attempt that could very well have changed everything in this land. Though the Bastard was outnumbered and besieged, William was confident that this siege was but the opening move in a war he felt he could win. Halfdan did not doubt for a moment that the duke would be triumphant. There was something about the Bastard Duke that spoke of great destiny. Had he been born two hundred years earlier, he would have been a great jarl himself – possibly the greatest.
Perhaps that was all they had needed, after all, to learn of Harðráði and Hjalmvigi, and to stop the duke dying before he could win his war. Was that what they had been waiting for? Could they leave?
He became aware that Gunnhild had been talking while he had gone off on his mental tangent, and was silent again, watching him with an irritated arched eyebrow.
‘Sorry.’
‘I still see the dragon,’ she repeated patiently, ‘but I think our time here is done. Watch for signs, for the white thread has bound to yours, my jarl. The priest will lead you to great things, and only through him can the Wolves ever hope to face Hjalmvigi and Harðráði and regain what was lost. We are besieged, but the path will become open, and the priest will lead the way.’
There was something more in her eyes that she didn’t like. He could sense it. Something unsaid.
‘What else?’ Halfdan said.
She took a long, slow breath. ‘Loki’s chains weaken.’
Skies red as blood, shaking and booming, as though being torn apart. A black crack looming above him as he stood, sword in hand, watching his enemy emerge from the doorway of the stone hall. A tall man, in a glittering shirt of silver eyes shining almost gold in the reflected light of the dreadful sky; in his hands a sword that was the death of men and a beautiful and terrible horn.
Ragnarok…
Halfdan had to clench his fists to stop the trembling that began in his fingertips and threatened to engulf his body.
‘We should return to the wall,’ he said.
There were nods all round, some rather relieved ones from the Apulians, who’d not witnessed such a spectacle as this before. Halfdan sighed. Gunnhild had not been as clear as he’d hoped, with the exception of the part about Loki that he could have done without. He’d wanted to see a path laid out before him by the völva, a simple road he could follow that would take him to the Sea Wolf and its thief, and then to Hjalmvigi and vengeance. Instead, she had produced only nebulous notions, although at least they could move on.
Or they could have if they weren’t trapped in a castle under siege…
At a nod from his jarl, Bjorn, who had finished his business and fastened his trousers once more, stepped across and opened the door, an arctic chill sweeping in with fresh flakes of snow in the air. Halfdan led the way, stepping out into the open, pulling up his cloak’s hood against the light dusting of snow. With luck, the fresh fall would silence the siege engines once more, for they had been pounding the walls of Falaise for four solid days since the Wolves had fought off the assault on the northern approach.
As they left the room, he placed a hand on Gunnhild’s arm.
‘How are we to leave Falaise? And when?’
‘When the signs tell us to.’
‘But you said we could leave.’
‘Could and should are not the same thing, Halfdan. We wait for Ulfr.’
Halfdan sighed with sagging shoulders. This was not the first time she had said that, but there were problems with such a thing. Even if Ulfr and the other seven men they had left at Pirou were free and healthy, even if they’d built a ship the likes of which Ran’s daughters had never before witnessed, what use would they be at Falaise?
‘Gunnhild, we’re thirty miles or more from the sea and the duke’s port at Diva. And have you seen the river here? It couldn’t carry a toy boat. It’s just a stream most of the way to the coast. How is Ulfr supposed to come to us? It makes no sense. He can only come as far as Diva, and we can’t even guarantee that’s not in rebel hands now. We have to make a break for it somehow ourselves and make for the coast.’
‘No,’ was her simple answer as she pulled free of his grip and walked on into the cold. Halfdan sighed yet again, and followed.
Ælfric of Jorvik stood beneath a half-ruined veranda outside a damaged smithy opposite, a small group of his attendants gathered around him, mostly lesser priest-people. The archbishop had refused to stay away, remaining with the Wolves throughout the siege, ready to leave at any moment, though he had drawn the line at actually attending a pagan ceremony, and had waited patiently in the cold.
‘You can’t bring them with you,’ Halfdan said to the archbishop as the man emerged from the veranda with his entourage, to fall in beside them. He was taking out on them the irritability he felt after his conversation with Gunnhild, and he knew it.
‘Oh?’
Halfdan bit his lip. In truth, that was just down to him. He didn’t mind giving a lift to Ælfric, with whom he’d struck up an odd and very unlikely friendship over their time at Falaise, but he definitely drew the line at becoming a ferry service for nailed god priests in general.
He had no idea how they were going to leave. Gunnhild seemed insistent that Ulfr would come, and if so then it seemed undeniable that Ulfr had managed to build their new ship. There were so many unanswerable questions, though. He’d left eight of them in Pirou. Even with the best will in the world, it would be a struggle indeed for eight men to row even the smallest longship. Of course, perhaps he would be waiting for the rest of the Wolves, before starting to use the oars and relying on the sail. But where he would dock, and how they would meet up with him, were questions to which he really could find no answer. He was aware that the archbishop was patiently waiting for an explanation.
‘Our ships… They are not merchant ships, with lots of hold space, or beds for guests. They are raiders and warships. There is only room for those who sail her.’ He eyed the motley bunch following Ælfric, entirely composed of gangly youths, pale and thin-limbed, or small, wizened monks with their shaved heads and wrinkled parchment skin. ‘Your people cannot row. They cannot come. That is all.’
The archbishop frowned. ‘It is unseemly for a man in my position to travel so rudely. And you are asking me to place my personal safety in the hands of pagans on their warship.’
‘Swap the ship for a castle wall, and you’ve been in that position for at least a week already,’ Halfdan countered.
Ælfric’s frown deepened. ‘This we will discuss when the time comes. I can be quite generous, although I will concede that if left behind, a man of God will not be harmed by the other side when the fighting concludes.’
They were approaching the wall, and climbed the stairs, Halfdan leading the way and arriving at the top. The stones had stopped striking the walls at some point between house and wall, for the snow had become heavier once more. The soldier in charge of the unit that had been watching in their stead gave him a nervous look as they met.
‘Anything happened?’
‘They’re pulling back,’ the man said, though his voice did not carry confidence, ‘and the artillery is being covered because of the snow.’
‘Pulling back?’ Halfdan said, crossing to the parapet and peering down.
It was true, though only marginally so. The enemy were still massed down there below the slope, gathered in their units around the castle, but the front lines had been withdrawn perhaps twenty paces. He drummed his fingers on the snow-encrusted battlements. Why? What did it mean?
If they had pulled back, then they were afraid of something from the walls, but neither the Wolves nor any of the duke’s men had done anything new that might warrant such fear. And if they had not, then it could only be something of the enemy’s doing.
His heart started to pound, and with a sense of impending dread he leaned out over the wall. He could see nothing down at the base. It was late afternoon in a snowstorm, the natural light already failing without being hidden behind huge, thick, boiling clouds and sheets of white. He could just about see the slope as a vaguely grey tableau, and could occasionally, between gusts, make out the patches of rocky cliff here and there. But just because he couldn’t see something didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
‘Shhh,’ he called to the others on the wall.
Each of them was making a noise, from Bjorn’s humming to Leif’s foot-tapping keeping him moving and helping warm him, to Cassandra, Anna and Gunnhild’s ongoing discussion, to Robert, rhythmically sliding his sword in and out of its scabbard an inch or so, to work out some tightness in the leather.
Piece by piece, the whole symphony of boredom ceased, leaving that rare, true silence, a stillness so complete that you can heard snowflakes landing.
Then Halfdan could hear it.
‘Listen,’ he hissed.
The others crossed to the wall carefully, cupping hands to ears.
The blows were being carefully struck so that they were truly arrhythmic, so that they did not leap to one’s attention as a pattern, a man-made thing. They could almost be the sounds of wild animals. But they were not. They were the sounds of tools against mortar, dampened and almost hidden beneath the blanket of snow. Halfdan leaned back. Someone was chipping away the mortar at the base of the wall above the slope. And if the enemy lines had pulled back, that meant they anticipated the wall falling, which meant they hadn’t just started it. They’d been doing it for some time.
He thought back over the past few hours. When he considered it, he realised that the siege machines had been hurling their stones to the left and right of this position, but not directly at it. Of course not, for they hardly wished to kill their own engineers who’d been working to collapse the wall. And the continual barrage of stones all around would have perfectly hidden the work of their picks until the snow had silenced the artillery. Then they had slowed and started to work in that arrhythmic way, without the cover of the smashing rocks.
He sucked on his teeth, drumming fingers on the snowy stonework. If they were allowed to continue, and the wall went, then only a rocky slope protected this approach. The castle would fall swiftly. Though on the surface it might not appear to be Halfdan’s problem, even if the Wolves were planning to leave as soon as possible they had to deal with this.
‘They’re going to collapse the wall,’ he hissed to the others. ‘Get a rope.’
As silence fell again, he listened carefully. He could hear what appeared to be two picks at work, and only two, which made sense. Any more than two, and they would be hard to hide in the shadowy rocks at the base of the wall. He waited, still listening, until Leif and Thurstan reappeared with two coils of rope.
‘Can’t find one long enough,’ the Rus explained, as Thurstan busied himself knotting the ends of the two coils together, then testing them for strength. Satisfied, he handed his coil to Halfdan, who waved to Bjorn and Ketil, by far the two largest men among the Wolves.
‘Take the other end and brace yourselves,’ he said as he looped the rope around his chest, making sure to leave sufficient breathing room, and then tied it as tight as he could. ‘I need you to lower me, steadily, but fast. All right?’
The two men nodded. Ketil took the other coil from Leif, while Bjorn spat on his hands and then took the rope some eight feet from the knot at Halfdan’s chest.
‘Go with Loki’s own luck,’ Ketil said.
Bjorn simply farted and grinned.
Halfdan took a deep breath and climbed up onto the battlements. He’d never had a trouble with heights, and that had been tested more than once, on the high walls of Miklagarðr and on the abandoned roofs of Ginosa more recently, but somehow, standing in a howling gale, with icy snow slapping him in the face repeatedly, looking down into the monochrome world below that consisted of twenty feet of fortress wall and then perhaps sixty feet of steep slope with rocky cliffs, his stomach began to churn. Forcing down the queasiness, he turned, dropping to his knees on the battlements, arms gripping snow-covered merlons, and then lay down, belly cold on the stone as his legs slid out over the drop.
He pushed off.
For a moment, he felt a touch of panic that Bjorn had somehow forgotten what he was supposed to be doing, as he seemed to plummet without any kind of support. He managed not to yell, and then couldn’t anyway as the rope snapped tight, anchored by the two great Northmen, and the breath was slammed out of his chest. Gasping, he swung this way and that for a few moments, recovering and trying to regain control. He managed to get a little swing going and pushed out away from the wall, then back, landing against the stone with the balls of his feet. His breath returned, and with it, his confidence.
He kicked again and swung away from the wall. To his relief, Bjorn and Ketil had got their act together, for as he swung out, the rope slowly extended and he slid almost his own height down the wall, reaching over halfway before his feet hit and he bounced once more. His confidence growing all the time as he worked, he reached down with his right hand and pulled his sax free, using only his left on the rope to steady himself. He had fretted for just the briefest moment over whether to use his sax or sword, but if he dropped a weapon he would probably lose it forever and, whereas he could easily replace the sax, the sword was truly one of a kind.
As he bounced out again he was still descending, and he could see the two men just below, working hard, hacking at the mortar between the stone blocks of the wall. Half a dozen blocks were missing already, and they were digging inwards. Fortunately, between the falling snow, and their own labour and the noise it made, they remained unaware of the danger descending from above.
Halfdan was, conversely, aware of everything, and so timed his next jump. He kicked out from the wall harder than before, swinging back some distance, just as Ketil and Bjorn dropped him the last six feet, but instead of landing, he swung back inwards with both feet out in front of him, spaced wide. He was rewarded, as planned, with a well-placed boot heel hard in the back of each of the two men hacking at the mortar. One yelped and fell forward, gripping his pick as he slammed against the stone and dropped to one side, trying to recover himself from the sudden, unexpected attack. The other folded up in an instant without a sound and toppled to the rough, stony ground, the tool falling from opening fingers. Even in that heartbeat, as he swung back again and dropped his feet to the ground, Halfdan realised that the impact had broken the second man’s back. All well and good; that left only one. The other man pulled himself up and turned to face Halfdan, pickaxe in hand, face a grimaced mix of pain and anger. He bellowed something unintelligible in the blizzard, lost to the elements as the cloud of steam from his breath barely made it out.
Halfdan thanked Odin and Thor and Loki all for their part in his success. It was never a bad thing to acknowledge all the Æsir when great things happened, even if you weren’t sure they had all played a part, for the gods could be both jealous and petty. He didn’t bother with the Vanir, though. Freyja and her siblings were the province of Gunnhild, and he would assume that they were always happy as long as the völva seemed to be.
The man swung his pick with the expertise of a miner, not a warrior. Halfdan simply stepped closer, threw his arm in the way of the haft, taking a blow that would leave a bruise, and grabbed it with that hand, while the other came round, gleaming sax jutting from the fist. The blade slammed into the man’s chest. Halfdan would normally, faced with such a situation, assume there was a chain shirt and strike for an area unlikely to be covered with protective armour. A man who had climbed this hill, though, and who worked as they did, had to be wearing only warm clothes. He’d been correct, for the sax slid easily between ribs, robbing the man of his next heartbeat, and then his life. The miner gave a horrified gasp and collapsed into Halfdan’s arms. The jarl smiled a grimly victorious smile, and then heaved the man out and away across the slope, where he fell and rolled a way before coming to a halt beside a rock, black blood pumping out into the white world.
The sax was easy to clean, wiped in the snow three times and then on his trousers before being sheathed again. Then Halfdan paused. He looked up. The enemy might, possibly, have seen all this, though the odds were against it. And the moment the snow stopped, he’d be willing to bet that in a single minute the covers would be off the machines of war and rocks would start to fly again. Whatever the case, staying here was asking for trouble, and he realistically should try and climb back up, or jerk the rope and hope that Bjorn and Ketil realised that was the signal to pull him back in. But he also looked at the hole the men had already carved out in the short time they’d been working. It probably wouldn’t be enough to put any strain on the wall as it was, without extra work, but then one well-placed rock from a catapult and they might just be able to capitalise on their damage.
He sighed. He didn’t relish the idea of such hard and gruelling physical work, especially on a freezing exposed slope in a blizzard, watched by the enemy and within range of their archers and artillery. But he figured he didn’t really have a choice. He couldn’t do much about the mortar, of course, but even the stones on their own would both help support the courses above and make the location of their work very hard for catapults to find at a distance.
Consequently, singing an old song his father had sung when working at his lathe, Halfdan began looking around the slope nearby, finding the stones that had been cut out and pulled away, dusting them off of the coating of snow, and then hauling them with curses and sweat back to the wall. In a short time he had managed to locate what he believed to be all the missing blocks, and then set about the puzzle of fitting them back into place so that they were relatively snug, despite the lack of mortar. It was long and troublesome work, and more than once he had to remove several of the blocks and begin again to get it right.
Finally, he had only two blocks left to replace, though they were almost identical. He tried one in the lower of the two courses, but it did not fit. He then turned it end-on and tried again, still with no luck. Swapping it for the other block, he did the same, and then began to curse, realising that if neither block fitted, he’d gone wrong somewhere else, and would need to remove quite an area to test the other blocks. He was holding the last failure, sweating under the weight and the effort of building, when the voice spoke up just behind him.
‘The furthest one on the left, I think. Two courses down.’
Halfdan turned sharply, sax leaping back out of its scabbard into his hand.
The barrel-chested man grinned at him as he pulled his pale grey cloak tighter, the material just the right colour to make the big shipwright barely visible in the blizzard.
‘Ulfr?’
‘I approve of men trying to learn a trade. Even kings and warriors should know how to build a ship, or shape a table leg, or skin a reindeer, or thatch a hut. But you did pick an odd time to learn your new skill.’
Halfdan looked down at the stone and laughed.
‘I think the Lion of Nordmandi can take care of his own castle wall for now.’
Without another word, he dropped the stone, took three steps, and embraced the stoic, red-headed Wolf as though he’d thought to never see him again.
His eyes rose over Ulfr’s shoulder, and it was with no small surprise that he recognised Geoffroi, the Norman from Valognes, and the man’s friend.
Geoffroi gave him a fierce smile.
‘Let me take it from here.’