Free The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson by Rosemary Sutcliff

like a rock swept by pounding seas, wielding his sword in great sweeping blows that kept open space before him.
    Bjarni, fighting grimly, well up among the champions, found the lurching deck growing slippery underfoot. A fresh wave of Vigibjord’s reivers came crashing in against them, swarming in over the sides, their dead and wounded made good by men pouring in from their reserves astern. At their forefront a huge man rose suddenly in their midst, war-cap wide-horned against the sky, the light glinting on the blade of his up-swung battle axe as he made for the place where Onund Treefoot stood to meet him – as though it were a meeting long arranged.
    The battle axe came swooping down. No sword could have turned the blow, but somehow, no one, not even Onund, knowing afterwards how it was done, the one-legged sea lord wrenched sideways without losing his balance on his one remaining leg, and the axe came whistling down to bed itself deep in the log of wood beside his knee.
    In the instant that the man was unarmed and struggling to drag the blade free, Onund brought Skull-Splitter crashing down in a great blow that took him between neck and shoulder, hacking his arm all butfree of his body so that it hung only by splintered bone and a strip of flesh above a great hollow pumping red. Vigibjord crumpled on to his face, making a horrible sound, oddly thin and pitiful to come from that great bull throat, but rising above the fighting-roar like the scream of a hare in a trap.
    Onund stood, leaning on his sword, looking down with cool satisfaction at the man twitching convulsively against his foot. ‘So you never saw a man come to battle that could not come there on his own two feet,’ he said in that hard, high, carrying voice of his. ‘Yet having come there he might do well enough.’ And he laughed, spuming the great body with his sword. ‘At least one leg makes a better showing in the killing time than one arm does, I’m thinking.’
    But the twitching and the high whistling cry had ceased.
    Their leader down, the men who followed him began to give back across decks grown slippery with blood, and the men of
Sea Witch
were pouring after them, yelling as they went. It was the same to right and left as the tide-turn spread along the lines of the opposing fleets; but Bjarni had no awareness to spare for them, the bows of
Sea Witch
and the enemy bumping and grinding against her was his whole world just then. Onund’s hand had come down on his shoulder and Onund’s voice was in his ear, ‘Now, my hero, time for the two-sworded beast!’ And he had come up, his shoulder into his lord’s armpit, his lord’s arm round his neck, and they went forward with the wave of men, the two-sworded beast. One leg might be well enough in battle, but not so good for pursuing a desperate and fleeing foe across planks covered with blood and battle filth. But, three legs and two swords biting deep, they did none so ill. The enemy turned in the stern and put up a desperatefight against them, and with the yelling wave of Barra men around and behind them, the two of them swept the pirate longship from stem to stern, their battle yells changed to singing; the splendid and terrible singing of the Viking kind in the moment of victory.
    When evening came, the five longships of the Barra fleet lay above high-tide mark on the beach below the elbow of Bute where last night Vigibjord’s pirate keels had lain, and with them three captured ships, all sluiced down with sea water to be freed of the worst of the battle-fouling. Two of the pirate fleet had been sunk in the fighting, and one they had sunk themselves, with its cargo of dead men lying tangled among its oar-shafts and broken spars, as being too sorely damaged to be any further use. Two enemy ships, both of the reserve, had escaped in the final stages of the fighting, bearing away Vestnor, his own ship sunk by Thrond and the men of
Wave Rider,
and as many of the enemy reivers as could reach them