Gunnvald set his men in motion that same morning: he could read the river as well as any forest-dweller, and he too understood that almost no time remained. For one more day the ice might serve as a bridge. Then the spring water would wash away everything on which he had spent the winter: his hope of taking the stockade and the silver he had invested in it.
Everyone went to their place without fuss: over the winter, each had learned their task. The women and children took shelter in the far dugouts beyond the second palisade. Milava laid out herbs and linen in the bathhouse set aside for the wounded. The old folk heated water in cauldrons and baked stones in the fire. Jorunn kept the forge burning fiercely so thick smoke rose above the stockade. The enemy had to see that the settlement had not been abandoned and stood ready to defend itself. Kres walked the length of the palisade and looked over the people without a word. All were ready.
The tower watches saw them from afar: a dark column on the white ice, a hundred and fifty shields, sledges bearing ladders and hooks. The warriors came openly: there was no longer any reason to hide. In the middle of the river the column divided, just as Jorunn had predicted from her map. Half headed straight for the main gates, while the rest turned downstream towards the small gates and the causeway. They were following the false plan of the log road that Soroka had passed to Torop all winter.
But Kres had drawn the plan, and the timbers did not lie where it showed them. Nor did the small gates Soroka had promised to open lead into the yard.
Soroka himself had come to Kres on the night before the river broke. He stood beside the forge, grey-faced and awkward as Kres had never seen him, and told him everything: the sticks, the hollow tree and Torop's instructions.
"Do whatever you want with me," he finished. "Hang me if you want. Believe me if you want. Torop paid me in silver, but you fed me and never once humiliated me, though you could have. That is why I came."
Kres believed him. A man who means to deceive does not place himself in the hands of the one he betrayed.
The chain took the first blow.
They had laid it beneath the ice in winter, working at night through holes cut in the surface, three crews at once. Afterwards, they told their grandchildren of that work. Forty fathoms of forged links stretched along the riverbed from the stockade to the stony islet. They set winches at both ends so the chain could be raised on command. It lay on the bottom until the river broke, and no one on the far bank suspected it was there: Soroka had told Torop that the smith was forging "great tackle for the bridge".
The jarl's leading longships, dragged overland and launched into open water by the far bank, came rowing towards the stockade, their prows breaking the young ice. In the main channel they stopped dead: the Great Chain had risen a cubit and a half beneath the water and caught fast on their keels. The longships behind drove into those ahead, the leading ships slewed broadside to the current and the drifting ice struck their hulls.
The column advancing along the bank towards the main gates never attacked at all. The warriors halted within bowshot, saw the trapped longships and the flanking force dying on the causeway, then began to retreat. Gunnvald would not lose men against the wall while water and mire destroyed his second force. He knew when to abandon a losing venture.
A small force, two dozen picked warriors, broke away from the flanking column and headed for the small gates. For a whole year Soroka had reported that, when the day came, "their man" would open them. The gates did indeed stand open, but beyond them lay no yard. Instead there was a blind pen enclosed by oak walls, built back in autumn. When the last warrior had entered, the gates closed behind them and boat hooks came down from the platforms. The old red-haired whistler, by now settled at the mire, said a few words to his countrymen in their own tongue. None of the locals understood him, but the northerners exchanged looks and laid down their weapons without a fight. Soroka stood nearby, silently watching the men he himself had led into the trap. He turned pale, but did not look away.
The rest of the flanking column stepped onto the causeway, and the log road began to collapse.
Men had drowned here in autumn, and now spring water raced beneath the road. The timbers, laid elsewhere than the false plan showed, shifted away underfoot. The water churned up mud, the silt sucked and sank. The flanking force fell into confusion and recoiled, but behind them watchmen rose from pits hidden under the snow, boat hooks in hand. Those who threw down their shields and caught hold of the poles were pulled out. The rest went down into water and mud, and some sank before the hooks could reach them.
And on the bridge, Old Koren was dying.
That morning, before the column appeared, the old man had crossed the bridge from bank to bank and sounded every pile with the back of his axe. When he came down, he gave Vyun the sledgehammer to hold and listed all that would have to be done: "Tar the piers in spring. Tighten every brace after the river breaks; the ice will shake them loose. Do not spare the decking: we can lay another. Guard the piles. Those cannot be replaced." Vyun nodded, not yet understanding that the old man was leaving him his final instructions.
The middle span, the old man's pride, bore the main force. Floes struck the piles one after another, while the chain threaded through the bridge piers groaned beneath the weight of the longships. One link began to pull free of its brace on the middle pier. Koren was the first to see it: he saw the least weakness in his bridge.
He went out onto the span himself with sledgehammer and wedge, refusing to let the young men near. He stood over the brace and drove the link back into place with four blows. There was no fifth: a vast floe swung broadside across the main channel and, driven by the full force of the breaking ice, smashed into the span. The bridge held. The decking did not.
They searched the cold water for Koren until dark, but did not find him. Only the sledgehammer remained, caught by its head on a brace beside the rail.
That night, when the stream of ice briefly thinned, Kres stood on the surviving span beside the pile into which he himself had driven Nekras's ploughshare in autumn. He gripped the rail set there by the hands of the old man who had not believed at first that the bridge could be built, and then had built it after all.
"So long as it stands," Kres said quietly, looking at the black water and the wreckage of foreign longships among the crushed ice.
Fires burned until dawn in the camp on the far bank. Gunnvald was counting his losses and deciding what to do next.
Open in the reader