Читать книгу The Rule - Jack Colman, Jack Colman - Страница 7

The outrider approached at a gallop, hair billowing, and reined to a skidding halt at Egil’s right hand. His horse’s mouth and nostrils were covered in strings of white mucus. Blood ran down its pasterns from kicking up the sharp mountain stones.

‘How many?’ Egil asked gravely, reaching up to take hold of the bridle.

The scout’s name was Torleik, a son of Egil’s cousin. He slid down from the steaming mount with a thud. ‘Enough for me to see that there was little use in counting them all.’ His mouth twitched briefly into a quivering smile, but he swallowed with uncertainty halfway through, and it did not return.

Egil tugged at the horse’s noseband as it snorted and threw its head. ‘Do they march?’

‘They make camp, just beyond the ridge. The rearguard is still arriving.’

Egil nodded brusquely, and turned away. Slowly, he let his eyes wander up the beaten highland path that wound into the mountains until it was lost, trying to take it all in. The horse shied again and he lost patience with it, thrusting control of it back to its rider with a growl of annoyance.

‘Father. Steingarth?’ he heard his second son, Fafrir, venture from behind him, and other voices murmured in concurrence.

‘Aye,’ Egil sighed, turning back to Torleik, ‘what of Steingarth and the other hill settlements?’

‘Fallen, I suppose,’ Torleik answered, still breathless from the ride. ‘Of prisoners I saw no sign, but there is smoke to the north-east, and I think I saw some to the west as well, where Blendal sits.’

Egil sucked on his lip and spat on the ground. Only a fool could have expected different. That black part of the night before dawn had brought wails and clangs and rumbling footsteps tumbling down off the slopes, as if all the barrows had opened and the ghouls were running riot in the darkness. Now he knew that something far more threatening awaited them beyond the horizon.

It was approaching mid-morning already, the sunlight still pale with immaturity. Egil stood just below the summit of the first of the foothills, at the elbow of a sharp twist in the road where a weary old hawthorn tree grew so stooped that the children would run up and down its trunk in summer. At his back were his most trusted men. They had dug out their shields and tough leather armour, the swords and spears of their fathers, and now they were waiting, tense and restless. In number, they were no more than ten: his sons, old friends, wise heads. As he turned around to face them they pressed inwards with anticipation, but Egil looked off beyond their eager eyes and instead gazed down at the paltry town some five hundred yards in the distance below.

Helvik. His town. He’d become an old man quickly during the years of his rule, and his sons were pushing for him to name a successor and step aside, but Helvik was still his town. She sat miserably on a scrap of bleak coastline, hunched around a wind-battered bay that bordered the green seas of the north. From a distance, her surrounding pasture looked bleached and poxed, her wooden stockade all sunken and damp and mouldy. So few buildings sat within her walls that outsiders might call her a village or an outpost rather than a town. To Egil, she resembled a tired old grandmother clutching a gaggle of children within her feeble arms. And as he looked down upon her, it was as if he could see her dying quietly before his eyes.

‘Father, we cannot just stand here. We must act!’

It was Hákon, eldest of Egil’s sons and growing more assertive by the day. He wore the rusted coat of ringmail that had belonged to Egil’s own father, though it looked to be too broad for his shoulders. The other men, Egil could see, were becoming just as restive, but he was now sufficiently old that his silence ought to have been able to hold an audience as well as his words could. He rolled an admonishing look in Hákon’s direction, and resumed his contemplation.

For years his town had been dogged by sickness. It was mid-autumn. The women should have been in the barn winnowing the barley, the boys and girls out in the fields pulling turnips amid the gentle warmth of a benevolent sun. Instead, the sky was choked with rain clouds, as it had been for the past three harvest seasons. Any crops that had scavenged enough sunlight to grow now lay rotting in the fields. Once, Egil’s people might have relied on the fruits of the sea to sustain them, but the fish that once had teemed in the cold clean waters were gone, hunted to exhaustion or tempted away by some enticing current, so that the longboat beached on their shore might as well have been driftwood. The scrawny beasts that sniffed around the fields did not have the meat on their bones to make them worth killing, though killed they would have to be once winter came, or else lost to the cold or starved out on the frozen grass. It was set to be the worst famine of all those that Egil could remember. And now this.

‘They could be here at any moment,’ Hákon pressed. ‘We must at least tell the men to arm themselves.’

Egil gave a weary smile. ‘Hákon, if they heard the sounds that you and I did last night and they still haven’t thought to arm themselves, then they’re not the sort of men we need.’ He sighed, and his feet crunched in the gravel as he turned once again to gaze up into the barren hills. ‘Bjọrn,’ he said, without turning around. ‘Go down and fetch Meili.’

Wordlessly, his youngest son detached himself from the group and started back down the rutted road towards town. Egil could hear the other men muttering under their breaths, and waited for Hákon to speak. In fact, it was Fafrir who responded.

‘Father,’ he queried gently, ‘one man against what some say is the largest army ever to have marched?’

Egil crunched around to face them, and opened his hands. ‘One man against thousands is a poor contest,’ he agreed. ‘But sending a hundred against the same number would gain us little, and lose us much.’

While they waited, Egil studied their faces. Uncertainty lingered in some of their eyes, but they were all loyal men who trusted his experience and remembered how he’d served them in the past. Yet in truth, he thought, what do I know? This was as new to him as to any of them. No invading force ever bothered with Helvik, even if they did find a waystone that acknowledged it. Theirs was a realm that had not needed to raise an army in living memory. And yet Helvik had seen no shortage of blood.

Egil ran his eyes along the group standing before him, remembering then that most of the good men, the truly good men who he would want by his side at a time such as this, were already dead. They may not have had food for their children, but the soldiers of Helvik had always had their pride. A history of feuding clans had savaged the population, until it became ingrained within the culture of the town. Year upon year, the slightest of insults against family honour were ruthlessly punished. Blood paid for blood. Brother avenged brother, cousin avenged cousin. There was always someone owed vengeance. Helvik had seemed intent on becoming a town of widows.

Thoughts of those days, of the decimation of his generation, brought the same memory they always did to Egil’s mind. He glanced to his right and found where Gunnarr Folkvarrsson stood nearby, keeping a respectful silence. So tall he was now, white-blond hair and a broad face of wind-weathered skin. Folkvarr’s sword was under his arm, and Egil looked at it and remembered the night when blood ties had forced him to watch his truest friend slain before the eyes of his wife and only son. It had been the last that Egil could tolerate; as soon as he was named ruler of Helvik, he made one desperate bid to preserve his people.

As an isolated realm, raging sea on one side and towering mountains the other, Helvik had developed a society far different from the other kingdoms occupying the same sprawling continent. Its inhabitants had always been free to live as they chose. If they wanted to steal from each other, they could steal. If they wanted to fight each other, they could fight. Men chose their own culprits and their own punishments, and any attempts by the people to live in harmony had no other basis than the unfortunate need for coexistence. Rulers like Egil were followed purely because they had proven themselves most fit to lead. There were no noblemen, no peasants, no slaves. No restraining principles determined by any power that claimed to have greater authority than that of the ordinary autonomous man. No rules. That was, until Egil imposed one upon them.

It was a single rule, known by the townsfolk simply as ‘the rule’, and every inhabitant had agreed to either leave or submit to its governance. It was simple, self-implementing, requiring no detail, no interpretation, no single enforcer. Its wording was plain: ‘No person of Helvik may kill another person of Helvik. Any person who breaks this rule is no longer a person of Helvik.’

From that day forward, a line was drawn under the events of the past. When old grievances surfaced and the call of the sword was too strong, the rule stopped the blight of vengeance from spreading. Those who broke the rule lost their place in society, and so became liable to be struck down in retribution by any person wishing to claim it; for the rule said nothing against taking the lives of those who were not persons of Helvik. Thus, such punishers were protected from recrimination, for in the eyes of the rule they had done nothing wrong, and any who wished to retaliate against them would have to break the rule themselves in order to do so.

It was Egil’s proudest achievement. The years that had passed since that day had not been enough to rebuild a broken population, especially when that time had seen only a handful of decent harvests, but nevertheless Egil had felt that, since the inception of the rule, Helvik had finally begun to pull together. It had started to fight back against the curse that had gripped it for so long.

Yet now it was faced with complete extinction.

The rumours had existed for many moons. Any tradesman who still saw reason to battle his way over the mountains to Helvik carried tales of vast armies sweeping across the northern lands. They were the soldiers of Hálfdanr Svarti, branded ‘the Black’ by virtue of a mane of hair so dark amongst the fair heads of the north that he resembled a rook among doves, though others claimed his name befit the colour of his heart. Ruler of the neighbouring kingdom of Agóir, he had set about growing his holdings to north and east, and his armies had sacked every stronghold they had come across in a relentless surge of slaughter. Those that resisted were butchered and thrown onto bonfires, their women wrenched to their feet and shackled into slavery. Already the kingdoms of Vestfold and Raumariki, along with great swathes of Vingulmörk and vast Heiómọrk, had been added to his dominion. Now his nose had sniffed something in the air to the west, and one of his armies had arrived at the doors of Helvik.

A familiar voice dragged Egil from his thoughts.

‘I say we strike at them now. They’re unprepared, weary from the march.’

Eiric. Egil’s second youngest, wilful as ever. Egil looked back down the slope to the gates of the town, and saw Bjọrn re-emerge with the tall figure of Meili at his side, donning his armour as he walked.

‘No,’ he murmured. ‘First let us see if words can do what iron cannot.’

When Meili arrived, Egil took him aside and held a brief whispered conference, before sending him alone into the hills on Torleik’s stumbling horse. Though he was old now, and had to drink more than was good for him to keep the chill from his bones, Meili was still the town’s most famous sword. As a youth, he had left Helvik to fight as a mercenary in all the greatest battles of the age, and soon word of his exploits had spread from the sea in the south to the ice-lands in the north. That he had managed to survive was a surprise; even more so was that, once it was over, he had chosen to return to his damp and miserable home, when all the world knew songs that mentioned his name. Whoever the invaders might be, they would surely have heard of Meili. And when faced with him, Egil was certain, they would either feel fear or respect.

He was out of sight beyond the ridge for only a short time. Then the horse carried him back down again with his throat hanging open and his blood drained over his chest. Sheep shit had been forced down his ears. His eyes they had cut out and stuffed into his cheeks like plums.

Egil’s arms were shaking as he lifted the old man’s body from the saddle. ‘To the walls,’ he ordered grimly, and his men rushed to obey.

As night fell, all the men of Helvik stood lined along the town’s spiked parapet, wrapped in thick felts, watching the northern horizon glow orange with the camp fires of the enemy. They had made a fire of their own too, on which they settled the body of Meili to sizzle and hiss by the water’s edge. Not one of them expected to see dawn. Yet the sun rose the following morning and the mountain road lay empty as the mist cleared. Egil sent some boys out to bring the rest of the livestock inside the walls, and then the gates were barred and bolstered.

They came that same morning, though not in the manner that Egil expected. One of the younger men gave a shout, and as Egil craned against the parapet he picked out a solitary figure ambling down the mountain track. The stranger took his time, stopping often as if to take in the sea view, until he came down off the heights and made his way right up to the gates. He drew to a halt well within the range of a spear, and called up at the walls, barely bothering to raise his voice.

‘I’ll see the leader of this place, please.’ Then he settled down on the damp earth to wait.

Many of Helvik’s men offered to gut the stranger and take his eyes, but Egil came down off the walltop and ordered the gates unbolstered. The man who paced easily through the entrance had the look of no stranger to battle. He had a barrel chest and sturdy gut, scarred forearms naked to the wind, a wild beard that almost buried his mouth. The only armour that he wore was a faded leather kirtle, but he must have had wealth, for it reached almost down to his knees.

Helvik’s soldiers gathered menacingly about him, but the man didn’t so much as glance at them. He nodded a greeting to Egil, thanked him for granting an audience, and then spoke plainly to all that could hear.

‘My name is Olaf Gudrødsson, ruler of that portion of Vestfold that men now call Geirstad. I share the same blood as Hálfdanr Svarti, and that is my army on your hilltop. Your settlement is the smallest I have faced on my journey, and I’ve enough men at my back to sack a place ten times the size. We are footsore from days of marching, but if you insist we will attack with all haste, and be clearing away your bodies before the tides change. Should you wish to avoid that fate, have every single thing of value, every scrap of precious stone or metal in this village, loaded up and delivered to me before midday tomorrow.’

Finished, he did not wait for a reply. He turned and walked himself out of the gates again, whistling a tune through his teeth.