Free Castellan by Peter Darman Page B

crew as they rested their hands on their knees. Each machine had a crew of three: two to lower and secure the throwing arm; one to load the basket and release the throwing arm. Sigurd was immensely proud of his fifty machines, which now ringed the Danish camp like a coiled snake.
    ‘If we lose any more men we are finished,’ muttered Olaf, his right arm bandaged. ‘We lost many men last night.’
    ‘But the enemy lost more, father,’ insisted Sigurd, ‘including all their horses. All that remains is to batter them into submission. Keep shooting.’
    Tired warriors, their leather and mail armour ripped and torn, sat on the damp ground and watched with listless eyes as the paterell crews continued to lob stones into the Danish camp. The morning air was filled with dull thuds as throwing arms slammed into crossbeams. Occasionally a Danish archer would appear next to parts of a wall that had been started by Valdemar’s engineers and built by the Estonians, loosing an arrow at the besieging army that sometimes found its target. Sigurd had given strict orders that no arrows were to be shot into the Danish camp, which would only be shot back. Early on it had become apparent that the Danes had no crossbowmen.
    He rubbed the stubble on his chin. ‘There will be no more attacks, father. There is no need. We will let hunger and low morale defeat the Danes.’
    Olaf grunted. He was tired, hungry and his arm hurt, a gift from an enemy spearman. But beneath his gruff countenance he was happy enough.
    He would be the first to admit that he had poured scorn on his son’s strategy, especially when Kalf and Stark had berated him that to allow an enemy to set foot on Oesel’s sacred soil would offend the gods. But they had been sent away with Bothvar and Swein, who commanded the longships that were blockading Matsalu Bay and Reval respectively. Sigurd had kept his nerve and now had his reward: the Danes were penned in and being ground down and soon the head of their king would be decorating the roof of Olaf’s hall in Kuressaare.
    On the fifth day the Danes attempted another sortie, flooding over their pitiful western wall to try to reach the paterells that were sited beyond that side of the camp. But it had rained steadily during the night and the ground around the camp had turned to mud. The Oeselians, tired, wet and cold, formed up in a shield wall four ranks deep and trudged through the mud to meet the Danish spearmen and axe men. The rainfall steadily increased until it became a downpour as the two sides closed and began hacking, thrusting and slashing with their weapons. The rain muffled the screams, shrieks and cries of men having their bellies ripped open, their jaws cleaved in two and their faces reduced to bloody pulps. More died when they lost their footing in the mud and fell face-first into the dirt, to be trampled underfoot and die horribly as water and mud were forced into their mouths and noses.
    After no more than ten minutes of a frantic close-quarter mêlée in which upwards of five hundred men hacked at each other in a downpour, both sides, mutually exhausted, withdraw a few paces, stared in silence with vacant, listless expressions, and then trudged back to their respective camps. The Danes left a hundred and twenty dead in the mud and helped a further sixty wounded back to their sodden, demoralised camp. The Oeselians lost fewer than fifty men and the same amount wounded. Sigurd was delighted.
    ‘With every venture they make the Danes weaken themselves further, father,’ he said to a soaked Olaf who had waited with a reserve, axe in hand, in case the Danes broke the shield wall.
    Olaf looked at the wounded warriors being helped on to two-wheeled carts for the journey back to Kuressaare where they would at least have their wounds attended to in a dry longhouse. Other carts were loaded with dead for cremation outside the town.
    ‘We are also weakened,’ said Olaf. ‘We do not have an inexhaustible supply of