Ch 6: The Incident
After an unknown amount of time, the guests one after another slumped onto the table and fell asleep, the banquet gradually drawing to a close. In the Lord’s Hall, only the faint crackling of the bonfire remained.
“Drink, keep drinking,”
Ragnar rubbed his aching, throbbing head, noticing a ray of gray-white dawn filtering through a crevice in the gate. Several noisy ravens perched on the rafters, fighting over a dirty piece of pork.
Was it dawn?
He stretched contentedly, noticing a strange woman standing nearby. He casually instructed, “Servant girl, pour me a goblet of honey wine.”
Soon, the servant girl brought a full goblet of dark yellow wine. Ragnar complained, “You’re trying to fool me with this inferior stuff? King Eric’s wine cellar is out of stock?”
Waving away the servant girl, Ragnar was about to drink the wine when his wife, having just woken up, snatched the goblet and drank it in one go.
“Hey, why didn’t you leave some for me? I can’t do anything with you.”
“This is the high-quality stuff for the banquet. Want some?”
He looked triumphantly at Ragnheid. She was just about to say something when she suddenly vomited a pool of dark red blood and collapsed limply to the ground.
Soon, news of the guest’s assassination spread throughout Oslo. King Eric ordered soldiers to seal off the entire settlement, vowing to find the murderers.
According to Northern European tradition, the host has an obligation to ensure the safety of their guests during a banquet. Now that a guest has been poisoned in the Lord’s Hall, if Eric doesn’t give an explanation soon, who would dare to attend a banquet in Oslo in the future?
After searching for a while, various squads of soldiers reported that the woman suspected of poisoning had escaped. According to eyewitnesses, shortly after her escape, Lord Borg also fled with his men.
Upon hearing this news, Ivar’s roar echoed throughout the Lord’s Longhouse:
“I will kill him, and smash every bone in his body!”
“I will go with you!” Eric didn’t waste words. He gathered all the soldiers and guests, including the idle commoners who came to watch the excitement, totaling eight hundred people, and marched towards Lord Borg’s territory.
Lord Borg’s settlement was called Tushbi, located northeast of Oslo, more than one hundred kilometers away. The group traveled for four days, and upon arriving at their destination, they found the local residents building a fence.
“There was no preparation during peacetime; it’s too late now.”
From Vig’s perspective, this fortification lacked arrow towers and lacked a moat on the outside. It was, at best, a fence to defend against wild beasts.
Upon discovering the arrival of a large number of warriors, Tushbi was thrown into instant chaos. The slaves who were working dropped their tools and fled in all directions. Their master had no time to chase them and hurriedly fled into the settlement before the wooden gate closed.
A few minutes later, Borg had people push out a cart piled with four corpses—two large and two small—and five sheepskin scrolls. “The assassins were hired by the widow of the former Gothenburg Lord; it has nothing to do with me! These are the corpses of the assassins and the Lord’s family. I swear in the name of Odin that everything I have said is true!”
However, at this point, the truth was no longer important.
First, Eric had to appease Ragnar’s anger and get him to willingly lead the way. Second, he led eight hundred people over mountains and rivers, consuming a large amount of grain, and he couldn’t return empty-handed. He had to seize something as compensation.
“Attack!”
Amidst the dull sound of horns, hundreds of archers formed a loose line, nocked their arrows, and fired a volley at the settlement, followed immediately by a second and a third.
At the same time, more than twenty warriors, holding round shields, charged forward. Villagers shot arrows at them through the shooting holes reserved in the wooden fence, but to little effect; only one man was hit in the leg.
At a distance of ten meters, the warriors threw iron hooks at the forward wall, then tied the ropes at the end of the hooks to thirteen pack horses, and whipped their hindquarters desperately with leather whips.
Huff, huff.
Under the severe pain, the pack horses pulled desperately backward. Sweat dripped from their thick manes onto the mud, their heavy breathing like old, broken bellows.
Soon, with a loud “crack,” the pack horses, using brute force, tore open a section of the fence, creating a gap about ten meters wide.
Without Eric urging them, the warriors, who could no longer suppress themselves, flooded into the gap. Under the leading charge of Ragnar and his sons, the enemy’s hastily assembled shield wall was weaker than a thin wooden plank. The siege was now a foregone conclusion.
“Why did they all charge in? Didn’t they leave a reserve?”
Carried along by the crowd into the village, Vig realized a serious problem. If the enemy had set an ambush in the forest outside the village, and suddenly attacked, blocking the exit of the village, and then set fire to the village, more than a thousand people, including himself, would die!
The disorganized nature of their advance would lead to a loss sooner or later.
As he pondered how to change the situation, a dark shadow attacked from his left. Vig instinctively raised his shield to block, thrust his iron sword into the enemy’s foot, then pulled the sword back half a step. Taking advantage of the enemy’s unstable posture, he thrust the sword point directly into the enemy’s throat.
“No!”
The next moment, a woman charged forward with a shield. Due to the large difference in size, Vig knocked her to the ground with his round shield, and then finished her off with a final blow.
To be honest, stabbing someone in the foot was not very glorious, but Vig didn’t care about that at the moment. He lacked combat experience and could only resort to relatively underhanded tactics.
“According to later archaeological research, during the Viking period, the average height of an adult male in Northern Europe was 170 cm. I am not yet sixteen years old, but my height is similar to that of an ordinary adult male. If I grow a few more years, perhaps I can reach the range of 180 to 190 cm, which would be enough to deal with most enemies.
In contrast, Britain was primarily agricultural, and the lower classes lacked meat, resulting in an average male height of only 165 cm, putting them at a clear disadvantage in small-scale conflicts.”
After some thought, he concluded that he should eat more meat and exercise more. Since Ragnar provided the food, he could just eat and drink as much as he wanted. The stronger his body, the higher his chances of survival in this era.
A few minutes later, Vig followed the crowd to the Lord’s Longhouse and was suddenly stopped by the blood-soaked Ivar. “Have you seen Borg?”
“No, I only killed two common soldiers; I didn’t see any warriors wearing iron armor.” Seeing Ivar’s ferocious appearance, Vig didn’t want to provoke him and made an excuse to get rid of him. “Could he have disguised himself as a commoner and escaped?”
Hearing this, Ivar, holding a chipped iron sword, charged towards the stable. Only a shivering slave remained, who stated that Borg had escaped at the beginning of the battle, specifically putting on a cloak and changing into commoner’s clothing.