Free Gemini Thunder by Chris Page

hat flew from Septimus Godleman’s head as he collapsed to his knees, clutching at the axe handle protruding from his body.
    Guthrum muttered something to Go-uan, who bent to the bear’s ear and spoke a short command. It took five ambling steps and arrived at the side of the screaming priest, who, still on his knees, was pumping great spurts of carmine-coloured blood from his wound with every sound. With the white, yellow, and blue silk vestment now completely saturated with Godleman’s blood, the sight of the bear seemed to shake the other five priests from their frozen terror, and they began to scramble to their feet. With a casualness belied by the act, the huge brown bear bit clean through Godleman’s neck in one powerful lunge, picked up the head in its teeth by the blood-soaked silver curls from where it fell to the ground, and ambled back to its master with the prize. As the twitching body of the headless priest slowly sank to the earth in a pool of its own blood, everything around it erupted.
Chapter 4
    When the twelve young men who made up an infantry cohort under the command of Nathaniel Stubbs had answered King Alfred’s call for soldiers and left their Wessex hamlets, none had ever, in their wildest nightmares, expected to be facing the sight that now confronted them.
    They formed the outer defense on the Northern side of Winchester on the town’s edge, fifteen hundred men, two deep with archers behind them. Streaming toward them with heavily tattooed faces contorted by malevolent hatred and brandishing huge double-headed axes and man-length broadswords were hundreds and hundreds of howling, berserker Viking.
    The concerted twang of longbow fusillades sending arrows over their heads and into the attackers from the Celtic bowmen behind seemed to make little difference. The howling hordes were now leaping the old earthen defense mounds and dodging between the makeshift pointed timber fortification staves.
    Samuel Southee swallowed hard, then looked to his right at his lifelong friend Clem Fossey standing next to him; the long, wooden-handled, metal-tipped spears they clutched in one hand behind the slim wooden shields, and the short sword in the other felt very puny against the mighty cleaving weapons coming toward them.
    ‘Hold firm now,’ came Stubbs’s calm voice over the stridency of the attackers. ‘They’re flesh and blood just like us.’
    Out of the corner of his eye Samuel Southee saw the Wessex line buckle in several places as some of the defenders further down lost their nerve and turned and ran before the Viking reached them. Their places were immediately taken by the row behind.
    ‘Spears at repel position,’ Stubbs shouted.
    Then, in a clash of splintering shields and screaming oaths the Vikings were upon them.
    Jack Mills on Southee’s left went down from a swinging blow to the head from a bright blue and white circular shield wielded by a huge, bearded raider wearing a horned helmet with a metal nose protector. As the Viking raised his double-headed axe to finish Mills, Southee drove his spear upward through the underside of the Viking’s throat. Kicking and screaming, the raider dropped on top of Mills’ shield, wrenching Southee’s spear from his hand as he fell. On Southee’s right Clem Fossey was rolling around on the ground with another Viking, each trying to free their weapons for a telling blow. As the raider came to the top, Southee thrust his short sword deep into his back and he slumped forward over Fossey, a long death gurgle issuing from his tattooed mouth. Gilbert Pitt, who had been standing in the line on Fossey’s right, screamed in agony as another heavily bearded raider chopped his left arm clean off at the elbow and then raised his double-handled broadsword over his head. As he was about to release the blade down on the screaming Pitt’s unprotected head, a longbow arrow thudded into his breast. Pausing only momentarily to see what it was, the Viking continued