The town was ready. Aelle cursed as he repeated the words to himself, listening to the rest of the scouts’ report. All the livestock had been driven into the stronghold in the village, a fortified hall with stout timber palisades, and the men of the levy had been called up, armed, and readied for battle. The magnate of the town, whose name escaped Aelle, had added his household troops to the town’s levy and these men, professional soldiers in mail and leather, were a real concern. It was easy to overrun a town of farmers and tanners with knives and wood axes, but a bloody engagement against trained warriors would be far more difficult. A more cynical part of Aelle reminded him that the more of the crew that were killed, the greater the shares of the plunder for the survivors. It was cruel but it was true and he shrugged the thought away and tried for form a plan.
“Alright. They know we are coming and they’ve come out to meet us. It’s nothing worse than we’ve seen before.” He did not know if that was entirely true as his crew was untested, but it was good to raise the men’s spirits. “We are killers and they are farmers with sickles and mattocks. They don’t stand a chance against proper Northmen. They have grown soft here, weak, and we will profit by their weakness.” The men growled in assent and Aelle smiled. “They are rich, their barns and storehouses are full to bursting, and their women will need to learn what it is to lie with a real man. You bastards are just the ones to teach them.” The growls got louder and the men knocked their spears and shields together in approbation. “Ready yourselves, men, keep your shields tight and you’ll be lords of this town by sundown.”
As the men shouted and clapped each other on the back, Aelle went ahead with Leofric to the crest of a hill just beyond the wooded area outside the village. He could see the battle line the defenders had drawn in a clearing astride the main trade road. “A hundred of them, wouldn’t you say,” Aelle said quietly as he tried to count the men. “Not to mention those buggers.” He pointed at men behind the main line’s flanks where foresters had gathered, bringing with them their heavy yew bows and long arrows. “They’ll be a right pain in the arse,” Aelle grumbled and sighed through his nose. The archers were a real threat, so they would have to close the ground quickly so they did not get torn apart. Aelle whistled for the men to join him on the hill and he arranged them into four smaller shield walls of about twenty men apiece. “We move as a diamond, my wall to the front, two behind me, then one behind that. Stay compact and the archers won’t have as much of a target. Then when we get close to their line, fan out.” He stepped into the center of his wall, tapping his shield against Leofric’s and shifting his grip on his axe. “We’re heading for the best men they’ve got straight on. Move quick, shields up, and kill the bastards!” The men of the first shield wall, only ten men across and two deep, shouted as they rushed down the hill, trying to speed through the clearing and avoid the archers’ shafts. Seconds later, the other lines joined them, keeping their formation as they charged awkwardly, encumbered by their armor.
When the first arrows thumped against the heavy linden shields, Aelle thanked the Maker that the archers were not trained soldiers but woodsmen and hunters. He had seen archers from one of the noble houses in Adeluna in battle once. They did not aim as hunters did, down the shaft of their arrows. Instead, they drew them all the way to the ear and loosed them in volleys to hammer like a steel rain into armored men. Their arrows’ points, shaped like lance heads, could punch through the links of a mail coat and slice through the leather beneath and they could loose ten or twelve of the long shafts in a minute. Instead, the hunters, more accustomed to taking deer and rabbits in the greenwood, aimed slowly and shot deliberately, not blanketing the attacking force with arrows. A few men fell when an arrow found a gap between shields or flew beneath the shield’s rim but it was not the butcher’s yard that Aelle had feared.
“Faster, lads!” Aelle increased his pace and risked a glance over the rim of his shield. The enemy line was only a hundred yards away and he grinned as he picked out his target. One of the men ahead of him held his shield lower than the men alongside him and Aelle planned on making him suffer for it. Most battles were a slow affair as men worked up the courage to charge home against a formed battle line but this was different. The archers would have picked apart Aelle’s crew if they stood and waited for mead and the taunts of the village’s defenders to goad them into action. Instead, they come as a howling mass, shields tight as they charged home, looking to break the village’s line with the sheer ferocity of their attack.
Some of the men in the village’s shield wall hurled spears over the heads of their first rank and the heavy iron heads punched into the wall of shields. There was little chance that a thrown spear would be able to kill a man in a well-formed wall but the weight of the eight foot shaft of ash sticking from the boards of a shield would make the shield useless and force a man to either abandon the shield and break the line of his wall or try and hack the spear away. Thankfully the men of Aelle’s first rank were experienced and angled their shields so the spears deflected harmlessly overhead with their energy spent.
As the lines collided, Aelle’s men pushing and snarling as the line of the household guards bent under the weight of the attack, Aelle hooked the head of his axe over his chosen opponent’s shield, dragging it lower. The man struggled to right the shield but a second later, Leofric jabbed his sword into the man’s face, sliding through his eye until the blade buried itself in the back of his skull. When the Northman wrenched the blade free, the man fell in a heap on the grass and Aelle took a step forward into the space his death created in the press of men. To the right and left of Aelle’s band, the other three groups struck the line, threatening the left flank of the village’s line. The men there were no true warriors and the difference told as swords, spears and war axes began to do their work against the farm tools arrayed against them. The archers fell back, away from the Northmen’s blades, and did their best to whip arrows into the flanks of the advancing lines rather than wasting their arrows against the Northmen’s shields.
Aelle’s line was stalled against the shields of the household troops and he cursed as he hammered his axe into the iron helmet of a thickly bearded man in rusted mail. The heavy blade split the man’s helmet and chopped into his skull as blood poured down his face and neck. Aelle yanked the blade out and backswung it into the dead man’s shieldmate who found himself suddenly undefended on his right. The man’s mail coat did not split when the axe struck it but the man let out a hissing curse because the impact of the strike had probably broken his rib beneath the mail. He did not have long to contemplate the pain as one of the Northmen took advantage of his weakness and thrust a spear into his throat. Aelle howled as his line ground forward, leaving a few of their own behind but killing more of the enemy than they lost. The guards had grown soft as well in the years of peace, not like the howling men they faced. They were hard men, swordsmen and spearmen who lived by their blades and now they showed by they were the terrors of the North and South alike.
Aelle’s men to his left turned the flank of the village’s line as the farmers began to withdraw in ones and twos, sprinting through the village to save their families rather than die in the carnage outside on the road. Arrows continued to slash at the sides and rear of the Northmen’s line, but many were stopped by shields and mail. Aelle pushed up the face plate of his helmet up with the back of his hand to get a better view of the battlefield. He could see his men on the left starting to strike the undefended flank of the village’s line and the townspeople fleeing to the supposed protection of their homes rather than continue to face the blades of the Northmen. His line was making slow and bloody progress and to his right, the small band of archers had retreated to northern stronghold in the village, preferring the shelter of the palisade to the thought of hand to hand fighting. When he turned to his left again, an arrow sped toward him and he cursed, trying to twist away. The steel sliced through his boiled leather cuirass and the padded gambeson beneath, burying itself in his left shoulder. Howling with pain, Aelle lashed out and beat down the guard of the man opposing him before hacking his axe into the man’s mouth. Blood spurted on the leather cover of his shield and Aelle roared a challenge for the next man to come and die. His men followed his example, shoving and stabbing in a savage rush, a desperate push to break the enemy’s wall. More men died and the trampled grass was slick with blood. Only a handful of the guard troops remained, their shield wall shrunken to a knot of men defending desperately against the blades of the Northmen. Aelle bellowed for his men to halt and then dropped his axe. Wincing, he gripped the shaft of the arrow and twisted it a little in the wound. Despite the pain, he was relieved that it was not a barbed arrowhead. Those flesh arrows would tear flesh to ruin if they were pulled out through the entrance wound and cut a painful track through the flesh as they were extracted through expulsion
“You can surrender,” Aelle shouted at the men at arms that still stood even as his men surrounded them. “If you do, you will be given your lives. Your arms will be yours but you will be alive. If not, you will die to a man. This is your only chance to avoid that fate.” He paused to let them confer in hushed tones behind their shields. While he waited, Aelle tightened his grip on the arrow and, in one, swift motion, yanked it out of his shoulder. Blood welled from the wound and the pain was nearly crippling. He gritted his teeth to stifle a whimper and packed a rag into the wound to staunch the bleeding. “I hope one of these buggers has a proper mail coat,” he muttered to himself as he pushed the rag deeper into the wound. “This cuirass will get me killed.” Retrieving his axe, he straightened and walked closer to the cluster of men. “What is your decision?”
Aelle knew that if they continued to fight, they could give heart to the folk that had fled the initial assault and the damned archers could pick off the men one by one until Aelle was the master of a crewless ship. He just hoped that the hope of surviving was enough for these men and decided to sweeten the deal. “Your families will also be spared. They can leave with you. But I need your answer now.” Wordlessly, one by one, the men threw down their blades and shields in surrender and Aelle breathed a sigh of relief. “Return to your families. Go. And leave to the east.” The men, disarmed, threw off any war gear they owned, knowing that if the Northmen changed their mind, their best protection would be speed. As they sprinted into the village, calling for their families, Aelle hefted his axe again and nodded to the men. “Burn it all. No prisoners.”
So the real killing began as the crew set off among the timber huts and thatched roofs with torches. Doors were shattered with axes and the men promptly slaughtered as the Northmen spread terror to every home. The women and children were herded like cattle to the bloody battleground and held under guard, destined for either the homes of the crew as thralls or sold in Vilpamolan and then only the Maker knew what would happen to them. Many of the prettier women had dirtied their faces and disheveled their hair to help them escape the notice of the rampaging men but soot or no soot, many would endure assaults on their virtue before the dawn came. The smartest among them picked men from their captors and offered themselves in exchange for protection from the worse depredations to come.
Aelle waited until the huts had been stripped of everything valuable to order them set alight so the men sheltered behind the palisade would see their homes in flames and their families held captive. The archers who escaped the carnage stood on fighting platforms on the northern palisade and a few loosed arrows at careless raiders but most stayed their hands for fear of hitting the women and children. “For every arrow that takes one of my men,” Aelle shouted toward the barricade, “one of your women dies. But not after every man in this crew has his way with her. Open the gates and spare your women the worst of what comes next. The longer you make us wait…” He left the rest of the threat unsaid as the women began to scream, begging their men to stop their pointless resistance so they would not be killed. Their screams carried over the crackling of flames as the village was put to fire and sword.
“If we yield, what promise do we have that you will not simply kill us all,” called a man from the largest palisade.
Aelle laughed and shook his head. “You have no promise but the simple truth that from those walls, you can either watch my men rape your women to death, or you can come out and maybe I will be inclined to mercy. Is some rich bastard’s storehouse worth watching that?”
“You utter bastard…” The man from the palisade turned to men at the gate and nodded. The heavy wooden gates swung open on creaking hinges and slowly the men filed out with the man from the palisade bringing up the rear. He was dressed in an expensive woolen tunic with finely embroidered sleeves under a mail coat fringed with silver links. “I am the rich bastard and those are my storehouses,” he said bitterly when he reached Aelle and threw down his sword in front of the Northman. “Now what will become of us?”
Aelle paused a moment, then jerked his head at the mail haubergon. “That too. Off. And as for you…” He gestured for his men to surround them and smiled at their discomfort. “What is your name, rich bastard?”
“Derfel ap Meriadoc,” the proud man spat as he tossed the mail coat at Aelle’s feet as well.
“Well, Derfel, I am just not sure what to do to you. Maybe kill you all. Maybe cut off your sword hands and let you live. Maybe…” He smiled as an idea dawned on him. “Maybe this.
“You lot fought well enough for soft bastards. You have a choice now. If you want to learn to fight like proper men, like real Northmen, you can here and now swear to me as your lord, and I will spare you and let you serve as a free man. If you chose not to, you will be chained to a rower’s bench and worked to death and your women will be our playthings. So what do you say? Live as warriors or slaves? I know the slavery comes more easily to you sniveling shits but a choice is a choice.” He turned for Leofric but noticed he was not close at hand. Shrugging, he called to the men guarding the women and children to herd them into the stronghold and for the captive men to follow. “So, Derfel,” he said, walking alongside the man and making him carry his surrendered arms like a servant, “what do you call this place?”
“Meriadoc’s Ford, on account of the river just the other side of the vill and Meriadoc being the man that first put a house on this side of it. My ancestor,” he said flatly as he weighed the choice Aelle had given him in his mind.
“So, your father was named for the grand ancestor. I see. Now, your hall… well, my hall now. Let’s see it.”
The hall was a grander one than Aelle’s own, with well carved timbers and a high, thatched roof. Inside was room for his entire crew and more, and even with the prisoners, there was space to spare. Aelle smiled. He would like it here. He sat heavily in a well-carved chair on the dais and cracked his neck with a satisfying pop. “Now, you men have had enough time. Come and swear your oath to me here or you’ll be taken outside and shackled. Derfel, I think we will begin with you.”
Before the ceremony could begin, Aelle heard a disturbance at the hall’s door. Leofric jostled his way in and up to Aelle’s seat with a woman over his shoulder. Aelle recognized the dress and growled, standing from the chair as Leofric deposited Saria at his feet. “Caught her trying to run off. One of the new lads was trying to swive her, so I split his head and trussed her up. I figured you didn’t want anyone screwing her silly except yourself.”
Aelle could scare contain his anger as he untied Saria’s bonds, but held the belt. “You insolent little bitch,” he said, his face mottled with rage. “I am going to give you a lesson you will never forget… But that will wait. The waiting will make it worse. And one last thing.” He wrenched her precious book from her pouch and threw it to Leofric. “Don’t let that out of your sight.” He glared down at Saria then yanked her roughly to her feet and slapped her across the face. “You have lost the book. And you are lucky I don’t nail you to the door of this hall as a runaway and an example to others. Later, oh later…” He grinned the same sort of vicious smile that came when he fought. “Later you will learn the true price of disobeying. I warned you. Now you will pay whatever price I choose.” He unfastened the brooch that held his cloak and threw the stinking garment to her to hide her nakedness. “Until then, sit here and be pretty. You can still do that, can’t you?” He pushed her roughly into a chair beside his and turned back to the hall, his eyes boring into Derfel.
“As you can see, I am a merciful man. This bitch tried to run after I took her. She still breathes but my mercy is not unending. Choose your fate and if you either turn against your oath or try and escape as a slave, I will flay the skin from your body while you yet live. So. Your choice?"
