The Broken Sword

XXVIII

At sundown Skafloc let sound the battle horns. His elves came forth from their tents, into the dusk, with a clashing of metal and a great revengeful shout. Horses tramped and whinnied, chariots rolled brazen over the frosty ground, and a forest of spears lifted behind the flying banners and the head of Illrede.

Skafloc mounted his Jotun stallion. The sword called Tyrfing seemed almost to stir of itself at his hip. Beneath the helmet his face might have been the mask of a forgotten war-god, worn thin in everything but ruthlessness.

Of Firespear he asked, “Do you also hear a racket behind the walls?”

“Aye,” grinned the elf. “The trolls have just found out how it was that the other castles fell so easily. However, they will not catch the women, with the hiding places there are in that burh, ere we have caught them.”

Skafloc gave him a key off the ring at his belt. “Do you lead the attack on the rear, with a ram,” he reminded needlessly. “When we open the front gate, it should draw enough defenders for you to get at the hind one. Flam and Rucca will lead diversionary assaults to right and left, which will swing to help us when we enter. I will go with the Sidhe and those guardsmen the Elfking sent, against the forward portal.”

The full moon rose enormous out of the eastern sea. Its light fell glittery on metal and eyes, ghostly on banners and white horses. The lurs dunted and the host raised another shout that rang between crags and cliffs, up toward the stars. Then elves and allies moved to do battle.

A twanging sounded through the night. Shaken the trolls might be, with a third of their number murdered in sleep and the killers loose somewhere in that maze of a castle; yet they were doughty warriors and Valgard roared them on to their tasks. From the walls their archers sent a steady rain of arrows down on the elves.

Shafts rattled off shields and mail; but some struck deep. Man after man toppled, horses screamed and bolted, dead and wounded littered the uphill way.

That was a rugged tor, and only one narrow road led to the main gate. Elves needed no path, they sprang over rattling talus and frost-slippery rocks, from crag to next higher crag, war-cries ringing from their throats. They threw hooks that caught the tops of cliffs and swarmed up ropes tied to these, they rode their horses where no goat would have dared to go, they stormed to the flat ground under the walls and sped their own arrows aloft.

Skafloc took the road, so that he could lead the chariots of the Tuatha De Danaan. Frightfully they rumbled behind him, wheels sparking and crashing on stones, bodies glowing as if the bronze were still molten. Though arrows rattled off helms, hauberks, and shields, neither warriors nor drivers suffered hurt. Nor did he, thundering on his dark horse along a path of shadow and tricky moonlight.

Thus the elves won to the walls. Boiling water and blazing oil and ice-slick vitriol gushed down at them, spears and stones and the lurid fire of the Greeks. Elves shrieked when the flesh peeled from their bones, and their comrades drew snarling back.

Skafloc shouted, wild to draw his sword. To him the elves dragged a testudo, a shed on wheels, and covered by this he rode to the gate.

On the battlement above, Valgard signed to his men at the war engines. Long before those brazen-bound doors gave way to a battering ram, the shelter would be crushed under huge hurled stones.

Skafloc put the first key in place and turned it, calling out the rune words. A second key, a third—Valgard helped load a ballista with a boulder beneath whose weight it groaned. Trolls wound it up.

Seven keys, eight—Valgard grasped the lever. Nine keys, and the gate was unbarred!

Skafloc reared back his horse. The pawing forefeet dashed on the doors. They swung open, and Skafloc galloped the tunnel thickness of the wall and burst out into the moon-silvery courtyard. Behind him, the passage echoed to the wheels of the chariots of Lugh, Dove Berg, Angus Og, Eochy, Coll, Cecht, Mac Greina, Mananaan, the whole host of the Sidhe, to hoofs of horses and running feet. The gateway was taken!

Guards beyond struck out with their weapons. An axe smote the leg of the Jotun horse. The stallion neighed and kicked, trampled, trod warriors into bloody smears.

Skafloc’s sword wailed forth. The blade flamed icy blue in the half-light, sang its killing-song, rose and fell, striking like an adder. Clamour and clangour of metal belled at the stars, shouts, whistle of blades, earthquake rumble of wheels.

Back and back went the trolls. Valgard howled, his eyes glowing wolf-green, and led a rush down from the wall to the courtyard. Mightily he smote at the flank of the invaders. An elf fell to his axe, he twisted the edge loose and struck at another, smashed the face of a third with its beak-hewing, hewing, he waded into battle.

At the rear gate rose the drumbeat of Firespear’s ram. The trolls cast stones at it, pots of burning oil, spears and arrows and darts—until from behind them leaped a crew gaunt and bloody and tattered, but with weapons hungry in their hands—Imric’s gang of freed prisoners. The trolls turned to fight them, and Firespear opened the gate.

“To the keep!” Valgard trumpeted. “To the keep, and hold it!”

Trolls carved a way to where he loomed. They made a shield-wall against which elf swords clattered, and brought it by sheer weight and force to the front door of the keep.

It was locked.

Valgard hurled himself at it. The door cast him back. He chopped out the lock and swung the door open.

Bowstrings sang in the darkness behind. Trolls fell. Valgard lurched back with an arrow through his left hand. Leea’s voice jeered at him: “The elf women hold this house for their lovers—better lovers than they have lately had, O you ape of Skafloc!” Valgard turned away, wrenching the arrow from his hand. He howled and frothed. Back into the courtyard he went, axe whirring and belling, striking at anything that was before it. The berserkergang was on him.

Skafloc fought in that colder glory which the rune sword lent him. It was fire in his hand. Blood and brains spurted, heads rolled on flagstones, guts were slippery under his horse’s hoofs—he fought, he fought, icily aware and thinking, yet whirled high out of himself so that he and the killing were one. He scattered death as a sower strews grain, and where ever he went the troll lines broke.

The moon climbed from the waters whereon it had built a bridge—strange they should be so quiet—and over the castle walls. Its light fell upon ghastliness. Swords flew, spears thrust, axes and clubs beat, metal and men cried their pain. Horses reared, trampling, whinnying, manes clotted with blood. The struggle swayed back and forth over its own corpses and stamped them into meaningless meat.

The moon rose further, until from the courtyard it was as if an eastern watchtower pierced its heart. Then the trolls broke.

Few of them were left. The elves harried them about the like animals.

Few of them were left. The elves harried them about the castle grounds and out onto the white hillside, hunting them like animals.

“To me, to me!” Valgard’s voice boomed over the waning battle. “Hither, trolls, and fight!”

Skafloc heard and wheeled his horse around. He saw the changeling stand huge in the gateway, smeared with blood from helm to shoon, a ring of elven dead before him. A dozen or so trolls were trying to reach him and make a death-stand.

And he was the worker of every harm—It might have been the sword Tyrfing that laughed with Skafloc’s lips. Valgard, Valgard, your weird is upon you! And Skafloc spurred his horse forward.

Riding, he thought for an eyeblink that he saw a hawk lift from somewhere seawards and wing toward the moon. A chill struck into his bones, and he knew with a part of him that he was fey.

Valgard saw him coming and grinned. The changeling braced back against wall and raised his axe. The black stallion bore down on him. He swung as never before. The weapon clove the horse’s skull.

That weight could not be stopped by anything less than the wall itself. When the stallion crashed, the stones shook.

Skafloc flew from the saddle. Elf-lithe, he twisted in midair to land on his feet. But he could not keep from striking the wall and rebounding into the gate passage.

Valgard wrenched his axe loose and ran to make an end of his foe. Skafloc had crawled away, out of the tunnel to the moonlit hillside beyond, at the foot of which were bay and sea. His right arm hung broken. He had cast aside his shield and gripped the sword left-handed. Blood dripped from his torn face and flowed down the blade.

Valgard stalked close. “Many things end tonight,” said he, “and your life is one of them.”

“We were born nigh the same night,” answered Skafloc. Blood ran from his mouth with the words. “There will not be long between our deaths.” He sneered. “When I go out, how can you, my shadow, stay?”

Valgard screamed and struck at him. Skafloc brought up the sword. The axe Brotherslayer hit that blade, and in a clang and crash and sheeting of sparks burst asunder.

Skafloc staggered back, caught himself, and lifted the sword anew. Valgard stalked empty-handed toward him, growling deep in his throat.

“Skafloc! Skafloc!”

At that cry Imric’s fosterling turned about. Up the road came Freda, stumbling, worn, bloody, in rags, but his Freda coming back to him. “Skafloc,” she called. “My dearest—”

Valgard rushed in and wrenched the sword from the hand of his unseeing foe. He swung the blade aloft and brought it down.

Howling, he raised the sword anew. Beneath the blood, it ran with unearthly blue fires. “I have won!” he shouted. “I am lord of the world and I tread it under my feet! Come, darkness!”

He hewed at the air. His hand, slippery with what it had been shedding, lost its grip. The sword twisted around and fell point foremost on him. That great weight knocked him from his feet, drove through his neck and into the earth. There he lay pinned with the blade gleaming before his eyes and his life rivering from his throat. He tried to haul it loose, and the edges opened the veins in his wrists. And that was the end of Valgard the Changeling.

Skafloc lay with cloven shoulder and breast. His face was wan in the moonlight. But when Freda bent over him, he could smile.

“I am sped, my darling,” he whispered. “You are too good for a dead man. You are too lovely to weep. Forget me—”

“Never, never.” Her tears fell on him like the rain of a morning in spring.

“Will you kiss me farewell?” he asked.

His lips were already cold, but she sought them hungrily. And when she had opened her eyes again, Skafloc was dead in her arms.

The first cold streaks of light were in the eastern sky when Imric and Leea came out. “Why heal the girl and take her home?” No joy of victory was in the elf woman’s tones. “Better send her in torment to hell. It was she who slew Skafloc.”

“It was his weird,” answered Imric. “And helping her is the last thing we can do for him. If we elves do not know the thing called love, still, we can do that which would have gladdened a friend.”

“Not know love?” murmured Leea, too softly for him to hear. “You are wise, Imric, but your wisdom has its bounds.”

Her gaze went to Freda, who sat on the rime-white earth with Skafloc cradled in her arms. She was singing him to sleep with the lullaby she had thought to sing to their child.

“Happier was her fate than mine,” said Leea.

Imric misunderstood her, wittingly or otherwise. He nodded. “Happier are all men than the dwellers in Faerie—or the gods, for that matter,” he said. “Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness which can see naught above or beyond itself.” He looked to the sword, still flashing in the throat of its prey. “And I feel a doom creeping upon me,” he breathed. “I feel that the day draws nigh when Faerie shall fade, the Elfking himself shrink to a woodland sprite and then to nothing, and the gods go under. And the worst of it is, I cannot believe it wrong that the immortals will not live forever.”

He trod over to the blade. “As for this,” he told the dwarf thralls who followed him, “we will take it and cast it from us, well put to sea. I do not think that will do much good, though. The will of the Norns stands not to be altered, and the sword has not wreaked its last harm.”

He went with them in a boat to see that they did their work aright. Meanwhile Mananaan Mac Lir took away Freda and the body of Skafloc, that he might himself see to the welfare of the one and the honouring of the other. When Imric came back, he and Leea walked slowly into Elfheugh, for the winter dawn was about to break.