Chapter Fifty-Four
The Norse fleet of four ships—for Quarrie no longer doubted they were the same boats that Hulda and her crew had helped chase away—had decided to play games with him.
Late in the season as it was, and vile as the weather looked to turn, they set up a game of hide-and-seek among the offshore islands, allowing the watchers in the settlement to get glimpses of them and then moving off again.
They might show but one sail, or two. The four of them might sail past at a distance and away again, only to circle back around. Like wolves around a wounded hart, or sharks in the water scenting blood.
He was angry, the Norse commander, or so Quarrie decided.
At the very least, frustrated at being turned away by Hulda and her crew.
He had wanted revenge, had the man called Ivor.
Remembering his own encounter with Ivor while being held captive, Quarrie knew him for a man with little mercy.
Here at the end of the year, he meant to have the revenge he’d been denied.
Did Ivor know that the Freya had gone home to the north? Did the first few passes seek to draw her out, if yet she lingered?
Quarrie did not know. But the presence of the Norse ships out among the islands played havoc with the settlement.
Men who watched from the walls and the shore were continually at fever pitch.
And the women waited by the day for orders to take their children off and away to the wild hills.
Not hospitable places at this time of year.
All Quarrie knew was that if this group of four longboats attacked, it would be a battle for the ages. The kind of which bards would sing in the halls, someday.
If they survived.
The strain began to show on everyone. Men were grim and silent and women wept if anyone looked at them the wrong way. Quarrie barely slept. When he was not on the walls keeping watch, he was organizing weapons or in hastily called, panic-filled meetings with his advisors.
His longing for Hulda became a wound at his heart, and that, even though he could spare less heed to it, refused to heal.
“It would almost be better,” Borald said to him once, “if they would just attack and get it over.”
“Do no’ say that.” Quarrie had seen such battles. It sometimes seemed he’d been born with the dread of them. The clash of weapons. Dead strewn upon the shore. The smell of burning in the air. The separate, individual battles on which such an attack could turn.
It could go either way. He could not be sure they would prove victorious.
“Aye, but,” Borald told him, “the waiting is killing us all. What are they waiting for?”
The weather, mayhap. For aye, it had been wicked with cold winds and snarling rains in which a man would be fortunate to see his opponent. Quarrie figured if they got a bonny day…
Blood would flow.
So, must he be grateful for the bad weather? Not easy to be glad of the things that hurt. Even if they were intended to provide protection.
One morning when the sun refused to rise and clouds raked the sky just as dark combers raked the shore, Quarrie’s ma came up on the walls—something she had not done of late, seeming prepared to leave that to her men.
Now she stared out at a world that, if one believed in such things, looked like end times, and said, “Son, I ha’ a bad feeling in my bones.”
Borald stood close by—Quarrie had just been speaking with him—as did other members of the guard, the walls always being crowded these days despite the weather.
They all gazed at her.
“Wha’ sort o’ feeling, Ma?” Quarrie asked. Foolishly, for he knew.
She frowned at the scene before her. Rain danced on the far ocean and the wind blew her hair out in a banner. She looked fey and almost like the girl she must once have been.
“I think I should send the women awa’. And the bairns.” For she had been in charge of preparing them. “I think, despite the weather, the attackers will come.”
“Tired o’ the waiting?” Borald suggested, and all Quarrie’s uncertainty hardened to iron.
“Aye, Ma. Send them awa’. Borald, circulate word to the men—”
Quarrie stopped because a sail had appeared out beyond Oileán Iur, black against the deep gray sky.
“Go,” he shouted. “Go.”
*
There would be no talking, no negotiating. This, Quarrie knew. No discussion with the men on those four longboats that sailed so inexorably around the island and headed for shore. There would be only raised swords and axes. Death.
He had to trust that Ma would get the women away. Already she ran down the stairs at a pace that terrified him. He had no time to spare a thought for her falling.
“A line on the shore,” he told Borald as they also ran, even though they had talked over a defense more times than he could count. “Another at the gate. The last here, on the walls.” He turned in flight and engaged his captain’s eye. “I want ye at the gate. Do no’ let them in.”
“But ye—”
“I will be on the shore.”
“Aye.” Borald reached out and clasped Quarrie’s arm. “Promise me ye will fall back to the gate, if hard pressed.”
“Aye, so.” If that happened, they would be at least half beaten.
Hastily, in the guards’ room just inside the main gate, Quarrie donned armor and took up his weapons. A knife in his boot. A long knife in the loop at his belt. His sword.
Men streamed in from everywhere, a fair tide of them, and they gathered on the rocks of the shore in a ragged line to watch the Norse boats come in.
Come in they did. They made a fantastical sight under that lowering sky, like four dragons sailing out from eternity. Almost serene, they looked. And strong, so strong.
Quarrie should have known their commander would have grown tired of waiting. If waiting had been difficult for those in the settlement, only imagine fighting men confined to narrow ships in bad weather. This attack had come born of the impatience that was mankind.
If he died here—
He tried to close his mind to that, though it was a thought that tended to press in at such a time. He could hear the men murmuring all around him.
How many would survive?
The Norse flowed over the sides of the longboats and onto the shore as if they were part of the dark water itself, seething in. Men, and men, and men, more than Quarrie could count. Indeed, his mind stuttered, and he set himself to meet what must come with a single thought.
Let none pass to harm what I love.
With the first sword he met—belonging to a tall warrior in good armor with a sneer on his face—an old knowledge flooded up through him. From whence it came he could not say, but it instantly became part of his bone and sinew, not bidden by any conscious intention.
He was a warrior. Had always been.
They fought. The Norse came in bellowing and the Scots screamed back at them. Wild, indistinguishable cries, they were, that made no sense but nevertheless spoke of courage. Of defiance. Of death.
He had committed the bulk of his men to this stand upon the shore. Though he was aware of little beyond the battle with the man who faced him and the man after him, and the next, he thought others of his defenders had disobeyed him. They—and Borald—had run down from the gate to join this fight.
If they could not win it here…
There were too many attackers. That truth came to him inevitably even as he and his fellows beat back the onslaught. As he killed, wounded, and maimed. His companions fell also—both of those on either side of him did. And as the Norse fell back, others came through the water to replace them.
A few got past the line of defenders. As men fell, there were gaps in the line. Quarrie himself whirled to take a couple of those attackers down. Others were cut down by the men who remained at the gate.
The air vibrated with the crash of metal against metal. With screams and cries. His ears full, Quarrie could not think, only react.
It rained.
But nay, that was not an apt enough word for what came. The dark skies parted and water crashed down. He could scarce see his opponents.
The Norse withdrew. They went much as they had come, pulling back like an evil tide, taking their wounded but not their dead. It came to Quarrie that he might live a while longer.
Someone shouted at him, words he could not hear. He turned to see Borald, wet to the skin. On some level, he was glad to see his man still alive.
“Do ye think they are done?” Borald bellowed at him.
“Nay.” Quarrie did not.
Like rats disappearing into a hole in a stone wall, the Norse had gone. The Scots moved about through the rain to gather their own wounded, putting to the dirk what Norse lingerers had been missed.
All but one man, who stared up at Quarrie with fierce blue eyes.
“Bring him,” he told his men.
“Are ye hurt?” Borald yelled at Quarrie when they reached the gate.
Quarrie did not know. The rain had washed away any blood.
No doubt, though, that he was.
*
They were wounded, all of them. In the great hall where they gathered, the healers scrambled trying to determine the worst of them to be tended first. Two men died under the healers’ hands.
Quarrie was dismayed to discover his ma had not gone off with the other women, as planned.
“I sent them,” she told him while she herself tended his wounds—numerous cuts to his arms, his knuckles laid open.
A slice to one leg that he hoped would not hamper him if they had to fight again.
When they had to fight again. A long slash to his chest, right through his armor, that hurt when he breathed.
An axe had done that. If not for his chest plate, he would be dead.
Do ye think they will pull off? It was the question on every side. Do ye think they have had enough?
Quarrie doubted it. He kept an ear peeled over the rain for a cry from the walls where the men still kept watch.
When he met up with Borald, the hall being filled only with groans, he said, “Let us ask the prisoner.”
The man was being held in a stone shed, well-guarded by some of the older men, and had not had his grievous wounds tended. He sneered up at Quarrie and Borald when they went in, looking more a maddened beast than a man.
“What is your name?” Quarrie asked.
“Loki take you,” the man replied in broken Gaelic.
“Wha’ is your commander’s name?”
The man—large, fair-haired, and covered in blood—spat at him.
Borald bent and laid the blade of his dirk to the prisoner’s throat. “Ye will answer the chief.”
“Chief?” The man’s half-crazed eyes focused on Quarrie. “Are you the one who killed Jute?”
Ah, so Ivor’s men had returned to avenge Hulda’s brother. Och, but he must have been as well liked by the men as by his sister. All at once, Quarrie could almost feel Hulda beside him.
“Is that what this is about?” he asked the man. “Your commander wants vengeance?”
The man bared his teeth. “You do not deserve to live.”
“Will the attack resume?”
The man did not answer, but Quarrie already knew.
It would resume. And battered as they were, they would need to stand and defend.