Hereward 02 - The Devil's Army Read Online Free PDF Page A

all-black, Harald Redteeth hauled himself out of the reeds and strode back up the slope. He gripped his axe, Grim, and allowed Death to fill his skin.
    On the higher ground, he looked across the night-cloaked marshes and ditches to where the three burning villages shimmered. The roar of the fire filled his ears. Out in the dark, something was stirring. He wondered briefly if he had left the doors to the otherworld open and the dead were marching through to reclaim the life they once knew. Apparitions rose from the watercourses and the bogs. Skull-faced they were, the shrieking hordes of Hel here to drag all men back down into eternal torment. The supernatural force swept out of the night, their death’s-heads glowing in the gloom.
    Beware , the alfar cried. Beware!

C HAPTER F IVE
    OUT OF THE woods, the deathly figures ghosted. From the ditches, and the marsh, and the still, silent pools where they had been waiting. Across a landscape that had seemed empty only moments before, the wraiths swarmed. Their features were smeared white with ash, their eyes dark-ringed, and the black mud of the fenlands caked their arms and legs and bare chests so that they bound the night around them. The Normans came to a lumbering halt. Gazes flickered across the apparitions. No mortal army, this. A Devil’s Army, that came with the night and the mists and left only bones in its wake.
    As they advanced, the English rebels were backlit by the flames leaping up through the trees, a hellish sight that no man there could ever forget.
    An axe-blade sang. A head leapt from its shoulders. A spear driven with ferocious force plunged through mail and squelched into the soft flesh beneath. Blood sprayed in a glistening arc.
    Hereward smeared wet ashes on his own face, grinning as he watched the horror etched into the Norman features. Their advance had stalled and now they milled in confusion. As he had long planned, the fires and the released captive had drawn his enemy to the place where he needed them to be. The Englishhad kept their hiding places well, settled deep into the ditches and the woods, silent and watchful, until the final ravaged village had gone up in flames.
    He unsheathed his sword. As he glanced at Alric, lit orange by the blaze, a smile flickered across his lips at the monk’s look of astonishment. He had revealed his plans to no one, not even his closest companion. Too many lives were at stake for even the faintest risk.
    Throwing back his head, he bellowed a battle-cry that would curdle the blood of his foes. Then he bounded away from the crackle and roar and heat into the marsh-reeking night.
    His eyes quickly grew accustomed to the dark. The king’s men were milling around among the reed-beds and willows. Some stumbled into the bogs, screaming as the mud sucked them down to their deaths. Others splashed into unseen flood-lakes or tumbled into ditches and watercourses, made easy targets for spears by their slow-witted response. Yet surprise would work its magic only for a short while. The Normans were too seasoned, too well trained, to be wrong-footed for long.
    He sprinted down a narrow track and threw himself from a bank with a cry. Beneath him, a Norman recoiled at this phantasm falling from the night. As the king’s man struggled to bring up his long shield, Hereward swung Brainbiter in an arc. It hacked into his foe’s exposed neck. The head flew.
    Sparks glittered as he clashed swords with the next warrior. When his enemy staggered back, his helm dislodged, Hereward smashed his forehead into the man’s face. The cheek shattered. With a snarl, he cleaved the man’s head in two.
    The thing inside him cried out in glee at the killing. He allowed that blood-lust to rise a little further.
    He raced along the track and out of the trees to where fingers of land probed the edges of lethal marsh. He knew every furrow, every bog, every pool, as did all his men. At his orders, they had spent the last days studying the lie of the