After an unknown amount of time, the guests fell asleep one by one on the tables. The banquet gradually came to an end, and the only sound in the lord's hall was the soft crackle of the fire.
...
"Drink, keep drinking,"
Ragnar rubbed his dizzy and aching head and found a ray of gray dawn light filtering through a crack in the door. Several noisy ravens stood on the rafters of the roof, fighting over a piece of dirty pork.
Dawn?
He stretched contentedly and found an unfamiliar woman standing somewhere nearby. He casually ordered: "Servant, help me pour a glass of mead."
Soon the servant brought a full glass of dark yellow wine. Ragnar complained, "Have you really tricked me with this poor quality stuff? Is there no stock in King Eric's wine cellar?"
He waved his hand to shoo the maid away. Ragnar was about to drink a glass of wine, but his wife, who had just woken up, reached out, grabbed it, and drank the wine in one gulp.
"Hey, why don't you save some for me? I can't do anything with you."
Ragnar walked along the long table with dirty cups and plates and finally found a pot of mead with most of it left. He picked it up and showed it to his wife,
"This is first-class drink for a banquet. Do you want to drink it?"
He looked triumphantly at Lagertha. Just as she was about to say something, she suddenly vomited a pool of dark red blood and her slender body collapsed to the ground.
...
Soon, news of the murder of a guest spread throughout Oslo. King Eric ordered his soldiers to seal off the entire settlement and vowed to find the murderer.
According to Scandinavian tradition, the host is obliged to protect the safety of the guests during a banquet. Now that the guests had been poisoned in the lord's hall, if Eric did not give an explanation as soon as possible, who would dare come to Oslo for a banquet in the future?
After searching for some time, soldiers from different squads came to report that the woman suspected of poisoning had escaped. According to eyewitnesses, shortly after she escaped, Lord Borg also fled with his men.
Ivar's roar echoed throughout the lord's longhouse upon hearing the news:
"I will kill him and break every bone in his body while he is still alive!"
"I will go with you!" Eric stopped talking nonsense and gathered all the soldiers and guests, including the bored civilians who had been watching the festivities, 800 people in all, and set out for Lord Borg's territory.
Lord Borg's settlement is called Tashby, located northeast of Oslo, more than 100 kilometers apart. The group walked for four days and found the locals building a fence when they arrived at their destination.
"We did not prepare in peacetime, and now it is too late."
As far as Vig was concerned, there was no tower for shooting in this fortification, and no trenches had been dug outside. At best, it was just a fence to keep out wild animals.
When they discovered that a large number of warriors had arrived, Tashbi instantly descended into chaos. The slaves who had been working threw down their tools and ran in all directions. Their masters had no time to pursue them, but they hurriedly fled into the settlement before the wooden door closed.
A few minutes later, Borg ordered his men to wheel out a cart with four bodies, two large and two small, and five sheepskin scrolls piled on top of it. "I have nothing to do with the assassin hired by the widow of the former lord of Gothenburg! These are the bodies of the assassin and the lord's family. I swear by Odin that everything I have said is true!"
However, at this point the truth no longer mattered.
First, Eric had to appease Ragnar's anger and force the man to go ahead. Second, he had led 800 men through mountains and rivers, eating a lot of food. He should not have run in vain, and he had to grab something as compensation.
"Charge!"
With a dull sound of the horn, hundreds of archers lined up in a loose horizontal line, drew their bows and fired a round of feather arrows into the village, followed by a second round, a third round...
At the same time, more than 20 warriors rushed forward with round shields, and the villagers shot arrows at them through the shooting holes reserved in the wooden fence, but the effect was not good, only one man was shot in the shin.
When they reached ten meters, the soldiers threw iron hooks at the wall in front of them, tied the ropes at the tail of the iron hooks to the backs of thirteen pack horses and lashed their buttocks with whips.
Ha ha ha.
Under the influence of intense pain, the pack horses pulled back desperately, sweat dripping from their thick manes onto the ground, and their heavy breathing sounded like old, worn-out bellows.
Soon, accompanied by a loud "click", the pack horses used brute force to tear apart a section of the fence, creating a gap about ten meters wide.
Without Eric's prodding, the soldiers, who had not been able to hold back for a long time, poured into the breach like a tide. Under the leadership of Ragnar and his sons, the enemy's hastily erected shield wall was more fragile than a thin wooden plank. At this point, the entire siege was no longer tense.
...
"Why did they all rush? No reserve troops?"
As he charged into the village with the crowd, Vig realized a serious problem. If the enemy were to set up an ambush in the forest behind the village and suddenly rush to block the exit of the village and then set the village on fire, more than a thousand people would die, including himself!
The organization was chaotic, and he would suffer sooner or later.
While he was thinking about how to change the status quo, a black shadow attacked from the left. Vig subconsciously raised his shield to block the blow and stabbed the iron sword into the enemy's instep. Then he drew his sword and retreated half a step. When the man was unstable, the tip of the sword pierced the enemy's throat straight.
"No!"
The next moment, the woman rushed in with a shield. Due to the large difference in size, Vig knocked her down with the round shield and then killed her with a finishing blow.
To be honest, it's a shameful thing to stab someone in the instep, but Vig can't handle it yet. He has no combat experience and can only use some relatively cunning tactics.
"According to later archaeological research, the average height of adult males in Northern Europe during the Viking Age was 170 cm. I'm not yet sixteen, and my height is about the same as the average adult male. If I grow a few more years, I'll probably reach 180-190 cm, which will be enough to deal with most enemies.
In contrast, the British region is largely based on agriculture, and the lower classes have no meat. The average height of men is only 165 cm, which puts them at a distinct disadvantage in small-scale conflicts."
After thinking for a while, he came to the conclusion that he should eat more meat and exercise more. In any case, Ragnar provided him with food, so he simply ate and drank as much as he wanted. The stronger the body, the higher the chance of survival in this era.
...
A few minutes later, Vig followed the crowd to the lord's longhouse, and was suddenly stopped by Ivar, covered in blood: "Have you seen Borg?"
"No, I only killed two soldiers and did not find a single warrior in iron armor." Seeing this fierce look, Vig did not want to provoke him, so he came up with an excuse to get rid of him: "Can this guy pretend to be a civilian and run away?"
Hearing this, Ivar rushed to the stable with an iron sword full of cracks. Only a trembling slave remained there. The latter confessed that Borg escaped at the beginning of the war, and he deliberately put on a cloak and changed into civilian clothes.