Men checked shields and weapons. Ragnar chose groups to go right and left.
Ragnar's son Bragi, his foster son Haaken and his friend Bjorn conferred with him briefly. The boys bore clay pots containing carefully nurtured coals. And within them the boys nursed grudges. Their father had ordered them to stay out of the fighting.
Ragnar muttered words of caution and encouragement. "Haaken, you go with Bjorn and Sven. Bragi, stay with me."
The last half mile was the slowest. Bragi kept remembering friendlier visits. And, last summer, spirited, clandestine tumbles with the Thane's daughter Inger. But now the old King was dead. The succession was in contest.
Hjarlma had declared for the Pretender. His strength had overawed most of his neighbors. Only Ragnar, Mad Ragnar, had remained visibly loyal to the Old House.
The civil war was shredding the tapestry of Trolledyngjan society. Friend slew friend. Ragnar's own father served the Pretender. Families that had been at each other's throats for generations now stood shoulder to shoulder in the battle line.
Every spring in Bragi's memory his father had gone reeving with Hjarlma. Sailing gunwale to gunwale, their dragonships had scourged the southern coasts. They had saved one another's lives. They had celebrated shared wealth. And, in the same chains, they had shared the despair of imprisonment by the Itaskian King.
Now they sought to murder one another, driven by the bitter blood-thirst only politics can generate.
The news had come south on rumor's lightning wings: the Pretender had taken Tonderhofn. The Old House was collapsing.
Hjarlma's men would be celebrating. But the raiders moved carefully. Hjarlma's men had wives, children, and slaves who would be sober.
They penetrated the trenches and stockades. They passed the outbuildings. Fifty feet from the longhouse itself Bragi turned his back into the wind. He dropped dried moss and tree bark into his jar, blew gently. His father and several warriors held out their torches. Others quietly splashed the longhouse with oil.
A man would be stationed at each window. The best fighters would hold the doorway. They would slaughter the drunken rebels as they tried to escape. The Old House's cause, here beneath the brooding, glacier-clawed northern slopes of the Kratchnodian Mountains, would revive at the eleventh hour.
That was Mad Ragnar's plan. It was as bold and ferocious a stroke as ever plotted by the Wolf.
It should have worked.
But Hjarlma was expecting them.
It was a great slaughter anyway. Hjarlma had gotten his warning only seconds before the blow fell. His people were still confused, still trying to shake the mead and find their weapons.
Fire whipped through axed-in windows.
"Stay put!" Ragnar growled at Bragi. "To me!" he thundered at the others.
"Yai! It's Ragnar!" one of Hjarlma's men wailed.
The blond giant attacked with sword in one hand, axe in the other. Not for nothing was he called Mad Ragnar. He went into insane killing rages, became an unstoppable killing machine. It was whispered that his wife, the witch Helga, had spelled him invincible.
Three, four, five of the drunkards fell for each of Ragnar's men. And still he could not win. The odds were too terrible.
The fire had become a liability. Without it driving them to save their families, Hjarlma's men might have surrendered.
Bragi went looking for Haaken.
Haaken's thoughts paralleled his own. He had secured a sword already. They had not been allowed to bring their own. Ragnar had not wanted them getting dangerous ideas.
"What now?" Haaken asked.
"Father won't run. Not yet."
"How did they know?"
"A traitor. Hjarlma must have bought somebody from Draukenbring. Here!"
A rebel, nearly disemboweled, crawled toward them. "Cover me while I get his sword."
They did what had to be done. And felt ghastly afterward.
"Who sold out?"
"I don't know. Or how. But we'll find out."
Then they became too busy to speculate. Several rebels, who had crawled out a window no longer held against them, stumbled their way.
The longhouse burned briskly. Women, children and slaves screamed inside. Ragnar's men fell back before the weight of their panic.
In a brief exchange, from ambush, Bragi and Haaken slew three men and sent a fourth fleeing into the pines. They received their own first man-wounds.
"Half of us are down," Bragi observed, after studying the main action. "Bors. Rafnir. Tor. Tryggva. Both Haralds. Where's Bjorn?"
Ragnar, roaring and laughing, stood out of the fray like a cave bear beset by hounds. Bodies lay heaped around him.
"We've got to help."
"How?" Haaken was no thinker. He was a follower and doer. A strong-backed, stolid, steadfast lad.
Bragi had all of his mother's intellect and a little of his father's crazy courage. But the situation had rattled him. He did not know what to do. He wanted to run. He did not. With a bellow imitative of Ragnar's, he charged. Fate had made his decision for him.
He had discovered what had become of Bjorn. Ragnar's lieutenant was charging him from behind.
No warning could reach Ragnar's blood-drugged brain. All Bragi could do was race Bjorn to his prey.
He lost the footrace, but prevented the traitor's blow from being fatal. Bjorn's deflected blade entered Ragnar's back kidney high. Ragnar howled and whirled. A wild blow from the haft of his axe bowled Bjorn into a snowdrift.
Then the Wolf's knees buckled.
The rebels whooped, attacking with renewed ferocity. Bragi and Haaken became too busy to avenge their father.
Then twenty rebels wailed.
Ragnar surged to his feet. He roared like one of the great trolls of the high Kratchnodians.
There was a lull as the combatants eyed one another.
The pain had opened the veil across Ragnar's sanity. "A crown has been lost here tonight," he muttered. "Treason always begets more treason. There's nothing more we can do. Gather the wounded."
For a while the rebels licked their wounds and fought the fire. But the raiders, burdened with wounded, gained only a few miles head start.
Nils Stromberg went down and could not get up again. His sons, Thorkel and Olaf, refused to leave him behind. Ragnar bellowed at all three, and lost the argument. They stayed, their faces turned toward the glow of the burning longhouse. No man could deny another his choice of deaths.
Lank Lars Greyhame went next. Then Thake One Hand. Six miles south of Hjarlma's stead, Anders Miklasson slipped down an icy bank into the creek they were following. He went under the ice and drowned before the others could chop through.
He would have frozen anyway. It was that cold, and the others dared not pause to light a fire.
"One by one," Ragnar growled as they piled stones in a crude cairn. "Soon there won't be enough of us left to drive off the wolves."
He did not mean Hjarlma's men. A pack was trailing them. The leader already had made a sally at Jarl Kinson, who kept lagging.
Bragi was exhausted. His wounds, though minor, nagged him like the agonies of a flensing knife in the hand of a master executioner. But he kept silent. He could do no less than his father, whose injury was much greater.
Bragi, Haaken, Ragnar and five more lived to see the dawn. They evaded Hjarlma and drove the wolves off. Ragnar went to ground in a cave. He sent Bragi and Haaken to scout the nearby forest. The searchers passed near the boys, but without slowing.
Bragi watched them go, Bjorn, the Thane and fifteen healthy, angry warriors. They were not searching. They were talking about waiting for Ragnar at Draukenbring.
"Hjarlma's not stupid," Ragnar said when he received the news. "Why chase the Wolf all over the woods when you know he has to return to his lair?"
"Mother—"
"She'll be all right. Hjarlma's scared to death of her."
Bragi tried reading behind his father's beard. The man spoke softly, tautly, as if he were in great pain.