But from the edge of the forest, the singing of bow-strings warned Kern that the battle would not be as one-sided as the earlier skirmish. He barely had time to yell for “Shields” when the first of a dozen long-shafted arrows fell over their position. Thrusting his shield up, canted slightly overhead, he felt a broadhead shaft slam into the bronzed facing like a hammer stroke. Two more knocked on the door Reave had propped ahead of him. Most stuck into the mud-walled huts to either side.
Atop the hut, Daol cursed and shifted around.
The Vanir war host had not rushed blindly forward this time. A dozen warriors, most of them with shields, all of them wearing the banded cuirasses and long, leather-pleated skirts common among the northerners, charged forward as a group. Behind them, advancing in step, came another twelve men, bows raised, loosing one flight of arrows after another, providing cover for their brethren.
And from a second point in the forest, circled around to the west, another small band of a half dozen men raced in to try and flank Kern’s position, close to a lean-to and another couple of small huts.
“Trouble!” Daol again. Then a scuffling sound and a sharp, piercing hawk’s cry. “Crom-cursed bird! Away!”
But he’d already seen it. And more. The Ymirish was fighting his men as a team, not allowing them to get out of hand. Normally, the raiders attacked as a maddened host, worked into a frenzy, with no northerner thinking about the man standing next to him. And a Ymirish leader was so often right out front, living on the rage and bloodlust of battle.
Not here. This one knew how to get it done. Kern had a better position, but not the numbers it would take to hold off the raiders. Not without losing some of his own.
Not without help.
The first of which he received after fending off the next flight of arrows. Two more heavy hammer strokes into his shield. A third arrow nicked by the edge and cut into the side of his neck in passing, then shattered against Desa’s upraised buckler. More shouts. More warnings from his warriors. He could feel them straining against his control, wanting to rush forward to meet the enemy. By Crom, Kern wanted it badly as well. To stand under an archer’s sight, unable to answer, was hard, hard.
But leaving the cover of the buildings would be the end of them. He knew it. Beneath the rage and bloodlust, he knew.
Two dozen strides short of the advancing warriors, Kern risked a glance around the edge of his shield. At the small band running in at his left, making for the cover of a small hut with an attached lean-to. No door left to the dwelling. And the mounds of hay outside were damp and muddy.
Suddenly, as the first warrior sprinted up toward the lean-to, the hay erupted in a storm of straw and dirt and wicked steel. Ossian and Old Finn had dug themselves down into the soiled fodder, waiting. Coming up on their guard and swords already stabbing out together, Ossian sliced his blade off a leather-faced buckler, while Finn managed to stab the man in the thigh.
The next closest raider veered for the front of the hut, mayhap thinking to run around from the other side. But Gard’s large frame suddenly filled the open doorway, and his pike stabbed out nearly its full length to jab beneath the man’s cuirass into an unprotected belly. Like a striking snake, Gard twisted the pike and hooked it back, cutting through soft leathers and opening up the raider’s belly so that his intestines fell out in a tangle around his feet.
“West, west, WEST!”
It was all Kern had time for, calling up Danon and Wallach Graybeard from behind. He had placed them at his back to reinforce any direction. Now he slid them around toward the sideline battle, where Ossian and Finn joined Gard just outside the small hut. Mogh charged out next, making it an even match.
Even matches were a good way to lose lives.
Uneven matches were worse, though, as the raider charge hammered in at the narrow gap, forcing back Reave and threatening to bury Garret and himself beneath a fast pile of bodies and steel. Kern gave back a stutter step, then another. Then set himself and shoved back with his shield, slamming the spiked boss into the face of a full-bearded warrior, tearing through hair and slicing the man’s cheek open to show the teeth behind.
Two quick jabs punched through the banded cuirass and dropped the man to the ground. Kern stomped on the raider’s sword arm, pinning it while he bled out, pink froth bubbling on his lips.
Garret had fallen back two paces and was set on by two raiders. Reave had used the door in his hands to swat aside the first warrior who had charged their line, then threw it at a second man rushing Kern, to foul his approach. Then, yanking his greatsword from the ground where he’d rammed it in, came overhead with a brutal, axe-chopping swing to cleave the next man from shoulder to hip.