13: THE BATTLE OF THE BEACON
After eight days of travelling and training, Halfdan's army moved down a frost-dusted mountain, about a half-day's march away from Eid. They stalked in a single line through the chilly wild-land, following two scouts (the most skilled hunters in the group) who searched the ground ahead with skills earned from years of seeking deer, boar-pigs, wolves, rabbits and other wary game.
The scouts never looked straight forward as they slipped through the trees and mountain-rocks and grass-clumps, but always moved their heads and eyes from one side to another in search of hidden foes. Halfdan had insisted that all of the travelling fighters often turn to look behind themselves. This was not necessary when hunting beasts but, as mentioned earlier, King Lambi had taught Halfdan the importance of looking behind when hunting intelligent, armed foes.
Everybody's weapons were wrapped in cloth to keep them from clinking or reflecting sunlight. Halfdan had traded his ax to Haki for a thick-bladed, two-handed sword.
Haki had known the berserker from Sogn who had owned the ax before Halfdan. They had fought against each other once at a drinking-fest up north, then had travelled together. Haki was sad to hear that his friend and fellow-berserker was dead, "as he was one of the toughest men I've ever had the joy of swinging iron at." Haki was impressed with Halfdan's luck in killing the berserk Sogn-man, and now fully accepted Halfdan's right to be war-chief.
Everybody's helmet and shield and clothing were camouflaged with hanging bits of dry moss or spruce-branches or tufts of dry grass.
The skin of almost everybody's face and hands was smeared with mud, to cover the eye-catching whiteness. Halfdan did not really need to do this, for the obvious reason, but he covered his skin with mud anyway. He would give his fighters no reason to complain that he asked them to do things he would not do himself.
Soon before noon, a scout ran back to the main group and told Halfdan, "There are fighters ahead, on a little outcrop of rock. They seem to be guarding slaves, who are building something."
"Building what?"
"Seems to be a fort. Making it out of pieces of rock."
"Show me."
Halfdan always marched at the front of the main group of fighters, followed by Atli, the second-in-command. Halfdan told Atli to get the men to rest and eat, "while I go take a look."
Atli passed the order back along the column, all the way back to Haki, the rear-guard. The men quietly put down their bags and weapons and rested, sitting on rocks or stretching out on the hard, bumpy ground. Some drank water from their clay bottles or picked the tiny blueberries growing all around or leaned on their lumpy bags with closed eyes, trying for a nap.
The scout led Halfdan forward through a patch of spruce-forest to the edge of a sharp ridge that overlooked a deep and narrow valley; this scar in the mountain's face looked like it was from an avalanche. The other scout was waiting there. On the far side of the avalanche-valley, the mountain-side rose steeply to the left, towards a bare peak of grey rock.
The thirty or so men over there were too far away to see clearly. When Halfdan held out a hand to judge distance, each of the men was as long as his thumb-nail. Too far to see faces. More than half of them had shaven heads and faces, wearing ragged clothes. These men looked like slaves. Some of them were piling square pieces of rock onto a low wall. Other men carried rocks on shoulder-packs up to the construction site from a place where a third group of slaves was using sledgehammers and spikes to break the mountain into building-bricks.
The slaves were under guard by a smaller number of men with helmets, carrying shields and spears. Their clothes looked like those popular with fighters -- bright colours, puffy sleeves -- and their hair and beards were long.
One of the guards was sitting on a horse.
"What are they doing up there?" whispered one of the scouts.
"Looks like they are building a fort," said the other.
"But why up here?" asked the first scout.
Halfdan said, "Can you see something inside the fort?"
The scouts looked closely.
One said, "Yes, there is something inside it, sticking over the wall. Hard to tell what it is."
"A pile of wood?" the other said.
Halfdan said, "It looks like a pile of wood to me too."
"What for?"
"It must be a signal-beacon," Halfdan said. "This fort is placed where it blocks the easiest way down from the mountains to Eid. They are probably building other forts like this on the other routes down."
"What is a beacon?"
"The fighters in the fort can light the wood to send a signal. If the beacon is lit, folk in Eid will see smoke -- the wood will have been soaked in a special oil, to make a thick black smoke -- or at night, they'll see the fire. That will tell them that trouble is on the way, and give them time to get ready."
"So if we attack them, they'll light the beacon and warn Njal that we're coming."
"Right."
The other scout said, "But if we go around the fort and try to get down to Eid a different route, you said that there might be other forts with beacons in other places."
Halfdan said, "They probably have arranged the beacon-forts so that it's hard to get past them all without being seen by the eyes in one of them."
"Then what do we do?"
Halfdan said, "To get to Eid with surprise, we have to destroy one of these forts, without giving the foe a chance to light the beacon-fire. This one might be the easiest to take; for all we know, the others are completely built. Look at the walls on this one -- still low enough to jump over. Let's go back to the others and make a plan."
Early the next morning, Halfdan and his cousin Fisk and two other Os-men were hiding in the broken and rocky ground just beneath the construction-site, on a part of the slope away from the tents. Their bodies and clothes and swords were sprinkled with rock-dust to blend in with the grey mountainside. They were each armed with swords, and wearing dusty helmets; no shields or body-armour. They had spent the long, cold night slow-sneaking towards the beacon-fort, just as Halfdan had approached his uncle's house. The guards and slaves had set up tents to sleep near the work-place. Some of the guards had taken shifts to watch from the fort and make patrols, and both the slaves and the guards had sometimes left their tents to piss or shit on the rocks, but nobody had noticed the four almost-motionless men inching closer and closer all night.
The rest of Halfdan's war-band had spent the night approaching the foe from a different direction. If all had gone according to Halfdan's orders, they would now be hiding a distance down-hill from the half-built fort. They would be watching uphill and, at the first sign of action near the beacon, would burst out of hiding and charge up the open slope. Their first job was to kill the horseman if he tried to ride away to bring a warning to Eid. Their next job was to charge uphill to the beacon-fort, hopefully in time to rescue Halfdan's group.
Halfdan's advance group's task was to stop the beacon from being lit. To stop a warning-signal reaching Eid.
At sunrise, Halfdan and his three hidden companions watched the guards and slaves crawl out of their tents. After a breakfast of cold oatmeal for the slaves, and meat and beer for the guards, the same sort of construction work as yesterday began. Slaves cut stone into blocks and other slaves lifted the blocks to the half-built beacon-fort, others putting the blocks into place. From his hiding-place, Halfdan could hear some of the men talking. The slaves mostly worked in silence, with an occasional comment to another slave about the work; the guards with shields and spears often joked or gossiped to each other, or shouted threats at slaves.
Listening, Halfdan learned that the slaves were to stay up here until the job was done, but that the guards would be going back to Eid tomorrow, being replaced by other fighters. These guards were all from Førde; they had switched allegiance to King Njal recently, after their King Gunvald was killed. They complained about how the Førde-men had to work up in the mountain with slaves, sleeping in fart-filled tents while the Sogn-fighters got better jobs near the town.
Halfdan could not see inside the circular fort from his hiding-place. The half-built walls were high enough to block any view of the inside. He thought that he had heard the voices of guards from there, but was not sure. It made sense to have guards by the beacon to light it in an emergency -- but how many?
Halfdan slowly moved his head around to check that the others were in position. They were. Covered with rock-dust, lying still in the shadows of avalanche-chunks, they looked like natural parts of the mountain.
Halfdan made eye-contact with each one of them in turn -- good, none was asleep -- then nodded and jumped to his feet and yanked out his sword. The other three young men also jumped to their feet and unsheathed their sharp iron. All of them ran, as quietly as they could, uphill towards the half-built fort.
Overhead, two ravens flapped by, and a pale, low sun stared down.
Nobody noticed them at first.
The four Os-men were running uphill in a group when Halfdan stepped into a pile of horse-shit and slipped. He fell back and landed on his ass. He quickly scrambled back to his feet and sprinted after the others. But the younger men were faster and reached the low wall at the tip of the peak before him.
Still, nobody had noticed them.
Fisk was the first one to grab the top of the low wall and vault himself over. A moment later, there was a loud clash of metal hitting metal inside.
A shaven-headed slave carrying rock on his back, standing just outside the fort, heard the noise and looked around. He saw the next two Os-fighters reach the fort-wall and vault over it after Fisk. This slave stared at Halfdan running after them. But he did not yell or do anything. Halfdan reached the wall and jumped up. Unlike the others, he did not go right over it and inside; Halfdan hopped onto the half-built wall, crouching on top for a moment, looking inside.
He saw the beacon -- a man-high pile of oil-soaked wood, stuffed with bundles of birch-bark -- in the middle of the round room. A guard wearing body-armour and a helmet, not carrying a weapon, was standing by the beacon with his back to Halfdan, banging a piece of iron onto a piece of flint. Orange sparks rained onto the pile of wood and birch-bark.
Halfdan next saw, closer to where he was crouching on the wall, two guards standing over three dust-grey men lying on the ground; the guards were stabbing down with spears.
"Fisk!"
Halfdan ducked his head just as a guard inside, whom Halfdan had not until then noticed, stabbed a spear at Halfdan's face. The iron tip scraped the top of his helmet. Halfdan whipped forward his free hand and grabbed the shaft of the foe's spear to yank the foe closer. In one motion, Halfdan dropped from the wall down into the fort and swung his sword. The good iron chopped through both the spear-shaft and the guard's arm. The spear-shaft and part of an arm fell to the ground; the guard took one swaying step backwards, eyes wide at the sight of the stump of his arm and its bright-red fountain.
From the side of his eye, Halfdan saw a weak smudge of smoke twisting up.
Was the beacon lit?
Halfdan hit the ground inside the fort rolling, bouncing fast up to his feet. Warm blood from the collapsing, stump-clutching guard showered Halfdan's face, half-blinding him. Wiping the wetness away with his free hand, he moved fast towards the two guards with shields and spears standing over Halfdan's fighters.
Two of them were dead. The other, Fisk, was lying on his side, his body punctured by spear-stabs, but still alive. When he saw Halfdan approaching, Fisk twisted his bleeding body around and grabbed the foot of the distracted guard standing over him. Fisk yanked the man's foot towards his own face and bit onto the pant-cloth over the guard's ankle. Shouting in pain, the guard looked away from Halfdan and lifted his spear, its tip pointing down at Halfdan's cousin. The guard plunged the spear down into Fisk's neck. Even in death, Fisk's jaws stayed clamped tight on the ankle, and the guard had to spend a few moments kicking his leg free.
The other guard standing by the three dead Os-men lunged at Halfdan. Halfdan's sword blocked the spear. The guard pulled it back to stab at Halfdan again.
Halfdan turned and ran.
Ran towards the beacon and the unarmed guard standing there with flint and iron, his back to Halfdan, spraying sparks and blowing air onto it. Some of the birch-bark smouldered; orange lines of burning formed and grew on the dry, white bark. Faint grey smoke rose. The fire-starting guard was so intent on his work that he did not notice Halfdan running at him, until Halfdan's sword chopped into the side of his neck. The guard's head, still in a helmet, spun into the air, blood splashing underneath; the body crumpled to the ground, pumping blood onto Halfdan's boots.
Halfdan jumped over the head and the body and swung his sword at the barely-lit pile of tinder. The blade knocked the beacon apart; bits of wood and birch-bark flew in the air. The new-born fire was gone. Looking up, Halfdan saw a few wisps of grey smoke swirling up in the clear morning sky.
Would anyone in Eid notice that?
As he paused, distracted, the foe Halfdan had fled now moved to him -- grunting as he shoved the spear into Halfdan's back.
The iron tip poked through Halfdan's shirt and skin and muscles, pushing Halfdan sprawling forward. Halfdan tripped and fell to the rocky, bark-strewn ground, scraping his face on some gravel, terrible pain biting into his back.
The guard jerked his spear-tip out of Halfdan's flesh, raising the weapon over his head to stab down.
Move!
Halfdan rolled fast to his right -- so the iron missed his torso. But it hit his left hand, chopping off most of the smallest finger.
Halfdan rolled onto his feet. Sword in his right hand -- blood pouring down from his four-fingered left hand -- he charged at the man who had hurt him. His first sword-swipe was blocked by the guard's shield-edge, with a clash of iron hitting iron.
Halfdan saw this foe-man look to Halfdan's right.
Without thinking, Halfdan jumped to his left.
The killer of Fisk had moved up behind Halfdan, and almost succeeded in stabbing Halfdan's back with another spear-tip. But he missed and, unable to stop his lunge, ended up sticking his spear into the other guard's shield.
Halfdan tried to attack both of them then, while they were tangled together, but he slipped on some blood and stumbled past them both, his sword-swipe not hitting either of them.
The guards yanked the shield and the spear apart. They turned together on Halfdan. Behind raised shields and spears, the two Førde-fighters moved on Halfdan with hard, scowling faces.
Halfdan waited, feeling suddenly weak from blood-loss.
Intense, dizzying pain blazed from his back and left hand.
Confusion. Fear.
He saw shadowy shapes, fluttering everywhere he looked.
Birds?
No: hallucinations.
Weak from bleeding, his legs went soft and crumpled under him. He dropped his sword as he fell back to sit hard on the ground, the impact jarring his spine and making his vision turn all-black for a moment.
The end?
But his sight cleared in a moment.
To show the two foes moving together at him.
Halfdan grabbed his sword-grip, lifted it from the ground. But it fell from his trembling hand. Its blade landed on a rock and the bang! echoed in the rock walls.
There were other noises, Halfdan noticed, coming from outside the fort.
What was going on out there?
The two foes now stood directly over Halfdan, who was dazed and unarmed. The one who had stabbed Halfdan's back and the one who had killed Fisk lifted their dripping weapons, about to stab down together at him.
The end.
Time to die.
Fine.
Halfdan had no hope -- until one of the guards dropped his shield and dropped his spear -- clutching his hands onto an arrow in his chest.
The guard's eyes widened, then emptied of life; he fell.
How?
A second mysterious arrow poppe