Warriors [Anthology] by George R. R. & Dozois Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

back to the spar.
     
    Raef said, breathless, “There’s a skerry—”
     
    “Go,” Conn said.
     
    The skerry was only a bare rock rising just above the surface of the bay. They hauled and kicked and dragged the raft into the low waves lapping it. The rock was slippery, and it took all Conn’s strength to haul Finn up off the raft. Raef dragged Aslak after them, and above the waterline they lay down on the rock, and instantly Conn was asleep.
     
    * * * *
     
    Hail fell again in the night. Conn woke and crawled over to Finn to protect him from the worst of it. After the brief crash abruptly stopped, he realized that the body under him was as cold as the rock.
     
    He thought of the other dead—of pop-eyed Gorm; and Odd, whose sister he had loved once; and Skeggi and Orm; Sigurd and Rugr—he remembered how only the night before, they were all alive, speaking of the battle to come, how its fame and theirs would ring around the world until the end of time—now who would even remember their names, when all those who knew them were dead with them? The battle might be a long-told story, but the men were already forgotten.
     
    He would remember. But he would be dead soon himself. Hakon had beaten him. He put his face against the cold stone and shut his eyes.
     
    * * * *
     
    In the morning, Raef woke up, battered and stiff, starving and thirsty. All around him on the rock, the other men lay slumped asleep, or dead. Between him and Conn, Finn was dead. Raef crawled up higher on the skerry and found a hollow where some hail had fallen and mostly melted. He plunged his face into the ice-studded water and drank. When he lifted his head, he saw, on the bay, the dragons coming for them.
     
    He slid back to Conn, yelling, the men stirring awake, all but the dead, but then the dragons reached them, and Hakon’s men swarmed over them.
     
    * * * *
     
    VIII
     
    Raef had never heard exactly how the Jomsvikings had offended Thorkel Leira, but clearly the wergild was going to be very high. The big Tronder had killed three men already, all nearly dead anyway, and he was lining up the rest of the prisoners for the same. Now another wounded man stumbled exhausted between two slaves, who made him kneel down, and twisted a stick in his hair.
     
    Raef had already counted; there were nine men in the line between him and Conn. The Tronders had tied their hands behind their backs and strung them along the beach, here, and bound their feet together, like trussed lambs. Down the shore, on the pebbles between them and the beached dragons, stood several men, passing a drinking horn and watching Thorkel Leira at his work. One was the man in the gold-rimmed helmet, captain of the iron ship, who was Eirik the Jarl; another was his father, Hakon the Jarl himself.
     
    Thorkel Leira took a long pull on a drinking horn and gave it to one of the slaves. As he took hold of his sword again, Hakon said, “You, there, what do you think about dying?”
     
    The Jomsviking, kneeling there, his hands bound, his head stretched out for the killing stroke, said, “I don’t care. My father did it. Tonight I’ll drink Odin’s ale, Thorkel, but you will be despised for this forever. Slash away.”
     
    Thorkel raised the sword and struck off his head. The slave took the head by the hair and carried it off to the heap by the shore.
     
    Conn said, “You know, I don’t like how this is going.”
     
    Raef thought the Jomsvikings were too ready for dying. He was not; he rubbed his bound wrists frantically back and forth, and up and down, trying to get some play in the rope. The sun was hot on his shoulders. Another man went up before Thorkel Leira.
     
    “I don’t mind dying, but I will do it the way I have lived, facing everything. So I ask you to kill me straight ahead, and not bent over, and not from behind.”
     
    “So be it,” said Thorkel, and stepping forward raised his sword over his shoulder and struck the man straight down the face, cleaving