The wolf-yell of the Vikings split the skies and in an instant all was a red chaos. The grappling hooks bit in, gripping keel to keel. Shields locked, the double line writhed and rocked as each crew sought to beat the other back from its bulwarks and gain the opposing deck. Marcus, thrusting and parrying with a wild-eyed giant across the rails, saw in a quick glance over his foe's shoulder Rudd Thorwald rushing from the sweep-head to the rail. Then his straight sword was through the Jute's throat and he flung one leg over the rail. But before he could leap into the other ship, another howling devil was hacking and hewing at him, and only a shield suddenly flung above his head saved his life. It was Donal the minstrel who had come to his aid.
Toward the waist of the ship, Wulfhere surged on through the fray and one mighty sweep of his axe cleared a space for him for an instant. In that instant he was over the rail on the deck of the Fire-Woman and Cormac, Thorfinn, Edric and Snorri were close behind him. Snorri died the moment his feet touched the Fire-Woman's deck and a second later a Juttish axe split Edric's skull, but already the Danes were pouring through the breach made in the lines of the defenders and in a moment the Jutes were fighting with their backs to the wall.
On the blood-slippery deck the two Viking chieftains met. Wulfhere's axe hewed the shaft of Rudd Thorwald's spear in twain, but before the Dane could strike again, the Jute snatched a sword from a dying hand and the edge bit through Wulfhere's corselet over his ribs. In an instant the Skull-splitter's mail was dyed red, but with a mad roar he swung his axe in a two-handed stroke that rent Rudd Thorwald's armor like paper and cleft through shoulder bone and spine. The Juttish chief fell dead in a red welter of blood and the Juttish warriors, disheartened, fell back, fighting desperately.
The Danes yelled with fierce delight. But the battle was not over. The Jutes, knowing there was no mercy for the losers of a sea-fight, battled stubbornly. Marcus was in the thick of it, with Donal close at his side. A strange madness had gripped the young Briton. To his mind, distorted momentarily by the fury of the fray, it seemed that these Jutes were holding him back from Helen. They stood in his way and while he and his comrades wasted time with them, Helen might be in desperate need of rescue. A red haze burned before Marcus' eyes and his sword wove a web of death in front of him. A huge Jute dented his shield with a sweeping axe-head and Marcus flung his shield away, ripping the warrior open with the other hand.
"By the blood of the gods," Cormac rasped, "I never heard before that Romans went berserk, but-"
Marcus had forced his way over the corpse-littered benches to the poop. A sword battered down on his helm as he leaped upward, but he paid no heed; even as he thrust mechanically, his eyes fell on a strangely incongruous ornament suspended by a slender, golden chain from the Jute's bull neck. On the end of that chain, glittering against his broad, mailed chest, hung a tiny jewel-a single ruby carved in the symbol of the acanthus. Marcus cried out like a man with a death wound under his heart and like a madman plunged in blindly, scarcely knowing what he did. He felt his blade sink deep and the force of his charge hurled him to the poop deck on top of his victim.
Struggling to his knees, oblivious to the hell of battle about him, Marcus tore the jewel from the pirate's neck and pressed it to his lips. Then he gripped the Jute's shoulders fiercely.
"Quick!" he cried in the tongue of the Angles, which the Jutes understood. "Tell me, before I rend the heart from your breast, whence you got this gem!"
The Jute's eyes were already glazing. He was past acting on his own initiative. He heard an insistent voice questioning him, and answered dully, scarcely knowing that he did so: "From one of the girls we took… from the… Pictish boat."
Marcus shook him, frantic with a sudden agony. "What of them? Where are they?"
Cormac, seeing something was forward, had broken from the fight and now bent, with Donal, over the dying pirate.
"We… sold… them," muttered the Jute in a fading-whisper, "to… Thorleif Hordi's son… at.."
His head fell back; the voice ceased.
Marcus looked up at Donal with pain-haunted eyes.
"Look, Donal," he cried, holding up the chain with the ruby pendant. "See? It is Helen's! I myself gave it to her-she and Marcia were on this very ship-but now-who is this Thorleif Hordi's son?"
"Easy to say," broke in Cormac. "He is a Norse reiver who has established himself in the Hebrides. Be of good cheer, young sir; Helen is better off in the hands of the Vikings than in those of the Pictish savages of the Hjaltlands."
"But surely we must waste no time now!" cried Marcus. "The gods have cast this knowledge into our hands; if we tarry we may again be put upon a false scent!"
Wulfhere and his Danes had cleared the poop and waist, but on the after deck the survivors still stubbornly contended with their conquerors. There was scant mercy shown in a sea-fight of that age. Had the Jutes been victorious they would have spared none; nor did they expect or ask for mercy.
Cormac made his way through the waist of the ship where dead and dying lay heaped, and struggled his way through the yelling Danes to where Wulfhere stood plying his dripping axe. By main force he tore the Skull-splitter from his prey and jerked him about.
"Have done, old wolf," he growled. "The fight is won; Rudd Thorwald is dead. Would you waste steel on these miserable carles?"
"I leave this ship when no Jute remains alive!" thundered the battle-maddened Dane. Cormac laughed grimly.
"Have done! Bigger game is afoot! These Jutes will drink blood before you slaughter them all and we will need every man before the faring is over. From the lips of a dying Jute we have heard it-the princess is in the steading of Thorleif Hordi's son, in the Hebrides."
Wulfhere's beard bristled with ferocious joy. So many were his foes that it was hard to name a Viking farer with whom he had no feud.
"Is it so? Then, ho, wolves-leave the rest of these sea-rats to drown or swim as they will! We go to burn Thorleif Hordi's son's skalli over his head!"
Slowly, by words and blows, he beat his raging Danes off and, marshalling them together, drove them over the gunwales into their own ship. The bleeding, battle-weary Jutes watched them go, leaning on their reddened weapons in sullen silence. The toll taken had been terrific, but by far the greater loss aboard the Fire-Woman. From stem to stern dead men wallowed among the broken benches in a welter of crimson.
"Ho, rats!" Wulfhere shouted, as his Vikings cast off and the oars of the Raven began to ply, "I leave you your blood-gutted craft and the carrion that was Rudd Thorwald. Make the best you can of them and thank the gods that I spared your lives!"
The losers harkened in sullen silence, answering only with black scowls, all save one-a lean, wolfish figure of a warrior, who brandished a notched and bloody axe and shouted: "Mayhap you will curse the gods some day, Skull-splitter, because you spared Halfgar Wolf's-tooth!"
It was a name, in sooth, that Wulfhere had cause to remember well in later days. But now the chief merely roared in laughter, though Cork mac frowned.
"It is a foolish thing to taunt beaten men, Wulfhere," said he. "But you have a nasty cut across your ribs. Let me see to it."
Marcus turned away with the gem that Helen had worn. The flood of savagery during the last few hours left him dazed and weary. But he had discovered strange, dark deeps in his own soul. A few minutes of fierce sword-play on the gunwales of a sea-rover had sufficed to bridge the gap of three centuries. Coolness in action, a characteristic drilled into his forebears by countless Roman officers, and inherited by him, had been swept away in an instant before the wild, old Celtic fury before which Caesar had staggered on the Ceanntish beaches. For a few mad moments he had been one with the wild men about him. The shadows of Rome were fading; was he, too, like all the world, reverting to the nature of his British ancestors, bloodbrothers in: savagery to Wulfhere Skull-splitter?