The Empty Throne (The Warrior Chronicles, Book 8) Read Free Page A

shield, we turned again and Raven-Beak sliced once and I saw the blood bright. I was shouting, exhilarated, screaming my name so that the dead would know who had sent them to their doom.
    I spurred on, sword low, looking for the white horse called Gast and saw him fifty or sixty paces away. His rider, sword in hand, was spurring towards Haki’s shield-guarded remnant, but three other horses swerved into Gast’s path to check his rider. Then I had to forget Gast because a man swung a sword at me with an overhead slash. The man had lost his helmet, and half his face was smothered with blood. I could see more blood seeping at his waist, but he was grim-faced, hard-eyed, battle-forged, and he bellowed death at me as he swung, and I met the sword with Raven-Beak and she split his blade in two so that the upper half speared into my saddle’s pommel and stayed there. The lower half tore a gash in my right boot and I felt the blood welling as the man stumbled. I thrust Raven-Beak down to shatter his skull and rode on to see Gerbruht had dismounted and was thrashing an axe at a dead or nearly dead man. Gerbruht had already disembowelled his victim, now he seemed intent on separating flesh from bone and was screaming in rage as he slashed the heavy blade down to spatter gobbets of flesh, blood, shattered mail and splintered bone onto the grass.
    ‘What are you doing?’ I shouted at him.
    ‘He called me fat!’ Gerbruht, a Frisian who had joined our war-band during the winter, shouted back. ‘The bastard called me fat!’
    ‘You are fat,’ I pointed out and that was true. Gerbruht had a belly like a pig and legs like tree trunks and three chins under his beard, but he was also hugely strong. A fearful man to face in a fight and a good friend to have beside you in the shield wall.
    ‘He won’t call me fat again,’ Gerbruht snarled and drove the axe into the dead man’s skull, splitting the face and opening up the brain. ‘Skinny bastard.’
    ‘You eat too much,’ I said.
    ‘I’m always hungry, that’s why.’
    I turned my horse to see that the fight was over. Haki and his shield companions still lived, but they were outnumbered and surrounded. Our Saxons were dismounting to kill the wounded and strip the corpses of mail, weapons, silver and gold. Like all the Northmen, these warriors liked arm rings to boast of their prowess in battle, and we piled the rings, along with brooches, scabbard decorations and neck chains onto a sword-ripped, blood-soaked cloak. I took one arm ring from the corpse of the black-bearded man. It was a chunk of gold, incised with the angular letters the Norsemen use, and I slipped it over my left wrist to join my other rings. Sihtric was grinning. He had a prisoner, a scared boy who was almost a man. ‘Our one survivor, lord,’ Sihtric said.
    ‘He’ll do,’ I said. ‘Cut off his sword hand and give him a horse. Then he can go.’
    Haki watched us. I rode close to the remaining Norsemen and stopped to stare at him. He was a squat, scar-faced man with a brown beard. His helmet had come off in the fight and his straggly hair was dark with blood. His ears stood out like jug handles. He stared back, defiant. Thor’s hammer, shaped in gold, hung at his mail-clad chest. I counted twenty-seven men around him. They made a tight circle, shields outwards. ‘Become a Christian,’ I called to him in Danish, ‘and you might live.’
    He understood me, though I doubted Danish was his language. He laughed at my suggestion, then spat. I was not even sure I had told him the truth, though many defeated enemies were spared if they agreed to conversion and baptism. The decision was not mine to make, it belonged to the rider mounted on the tall white horse called Gast. I turned towards the ring of horsemen who now surrounded Haki and his survivors, and the rider of the white horse looked past me. ‘Take Haki alive, kill the rest.’
    It did not take long. Most of the bravest Norsemen were already dead and