“A big fellow,” remarked Kormak to his nearest shield-companions. He raised his shield to guard and shouted a taunt, unheard in the roar of flame.
As Brand charged forward, the boatswain, crouched in shadow, raised the rope. Brand’s feet went from under him and he hurtled sprawling forward, full-length, his weight shaking the jetty. ‘Battle-troll’ skidded out of his hand. With a roar, Brand started to scramble to his feet, but at the same moment Kormak slammed him mercilessly, with every ounce of force he could summon, on the side of the head. Brand shook his head, continued to struggle upwards. Disbelievingly, Kormak swung his lead-shot loaded sandbag again. This time the giant went down on all fours.
The charging men behind him hesitated, some also brought down by the rope. Two ran on, were met by a concentrated volley of javelins, fell bristling. The rest wavered, then ran in ones and twos back into the blazing village.
“Tie him up,” said Kormak briefly. He waved his troop forward, aiming to drive out the stragglers, establish a perimeter, and take control of boats, food and weapons. Hunting down the fugitives would be the job after that. He wished the one-eyed man had charged with Brand. It would have kept Ragnhild off his back.
The English catapulteers being employed as unskilled labor down at the jetty had run at the first stone. They had no weapons, and no impulse to fight in defense of the settlement. In the dark beyond the firelight, they rallied, gasping, round Cwicca.
“Shouldn’t never have taken us away from the mule,” said a voice in the darkness. “We knew they were coming, we told him, but no, he would have…”
“Shut up,” said Cwicca. “Thing is, if we get up there now we can train round and shoot up that ship of theirs, no bother. That’ll get them back aboard her in a hurry.”
“No good,” said Osmod. “Look.”
He pointed to the Crane’s pinnace, loaded with armed men, now pulling across the harbor in the direction of the two untended catapults. Kormak had thought of that too.
Kormak had not thought of the whales. The orcas had been shadowing the Crane all the way in, eager to attack. Yet the bull leader had held off. He had an accurate sense of the Crane’s bulk, knew she was the biggest man-thing he had ever come across. Maybe if he rammed her head on, she would fill and sink. Maybe not. The scratch he had received from Cuthred irritated him, but at the same time gave him caution. The sport he wanted was to tip a boat like an ice-floe, to snap up the men inside like unwary seals. So he hesitated, and his school with him, cruising up and down at the harbor-mouth, half an eye on the Crane and the commotion, half an eye on the interesting but shore-sheltered whale-boats he had sensed lying under cover of the mainland a quarter of a mile away.
Then he heard the regular thumping oars of the pinnace, and hesitated no longer. Filled with the cruel urge, more than hunger, of the fox in the hen-roost, he swept down the harbor channel, with his school behind him.
“No good,” said Osmod again. “Great holy suffering Christ.” Driven back to childhood, he made instinctively the sign of the Cross to ward him from evil, over the hammer still slung round his neck. No-one corrected him. Staring at the pinnace, they saw all together the great fin that rose man-height behind the boat, the black-and-white body that reared beneath it.
Boat and men went over with hardly a cry. For an instant, bobbing heads. Then fin after fin cutting through the water as the killers went into their established ritual for striking at a great whale, a blue or a sperm or a finner, swinging in in turn, snapping with the great jaws and swinging out of the way of the next. But where a bite from a full-grown orca would merely wound a sixty-foot blue, it snapped a man in half. The flurry was over in seconds, the whales sounding again to hide their presence.
“I met one of those things out on the water,” muttered Karli, his face white. “I told you it could have turned me over as easy as winking. The fin’s as tall as I am. What are its teeth like?”