15: The Tusks Beneath the Hill 15: The Tusks Beneath the Hill An army marched through the hilly terrain of the Westfjords.
Men dressed more in tunic, and gambeson than mail or lamellar.
Their shields were little more than pieced-together planks; no leather covering, no iron rim.
Crudely forged iron, more likely to crack than deflect.
They marched with spears in hand, singing as they went, some excited, others dreadful.
These were the men the Althing had gathered for war with Vetrulfr’s horde.
Farmers, fishermen, and the occasional smithy among them.
Whatever they could fit in during their spare hours.
And it showed in their lack of professionalism.
As they chatted with one another, focused entirely on themselves, in loose formation, if one could even call it that, they marched through a ravine between two hills.
Few had the attention or the wits to scan their surroundings.
A young man in particular spoke of the upcoming battle, not as if it were some terrifying meat grinder, but as if it were a sure victory for the Althing.
“All I’m saying is, what are a few backwards savages from the Westfjords going to do against us?
Look how many of us there are!” he grinned, emboldened by their silence.
The levies by the young man’s side nodded silently, listening further to his speech.
“And this is just the force sent to seize back control over the coastal villages!
More are further inland.
Let’s not forget that God is on our side, and an army which marches under the cross of Jesus Christ cannot be beaten!” The more the green villager spoke, the greater the spirits of the army improved with his words.
“Before you know it, I’ll be back home, with my beloved, raising a family on our farm with this little war of ours being a fond memory of the past, and something my woman fawns over as I tell her how brave I was!” There wasn’t much disagreement from the men by the green village boy’s side.
Few among the army had ever seen actual combat.
And those who did participated in small pitched skirmishes between villages based on petty rivalries.
They had no idea the force of nature they were dealing with.
And their reckoning was in the hills above.
There, hidden behind camouflaged timber braces and rubble piled like the wrath of the gods, crouched men not in wolf-skins, but in boar hide cloaks with the beast’s full head draped over their helms.
Tusks jutting like a challenge to the sky.
Where the Úlfhéðnar howled and charged, these men were silent, steady, and unstoppable.
The tusks of the gods made flesh.
Their enemies mocked them as beasts.
Beasts act on instinct.
Boars choose their kill.
Beneath the helm was recently crafted lamellar in the Varangian fashion, worn over a mail brynja.
These were the Svinfylking; the boar-warriors of old, revived by Vetrulfr from half-forgotten Germanic war cults, not as frenzied shock troops, but as engineers and masters of the siege and earth.
They did not howl like the Úlfhéðnar.
They did not need to.
They were the tusks beneath the hill; the ones who carved death into stone with calm, stubborn precision.
These were no savages.
They were Vetrulfr’s chosen.
Trained under the tactics learned while he served under the eagle banners of Constantinople, now wielding their ancient strength with eastern technique to make Iceland itself a weapon.
The rockslide was no accident.
For three nights, they had worked by moonlight, carving weak points into the hillside, stacking boulders with care, and wedging them in place with timber braces and buried anchors.
A single rope, disguised beneath moss and shale, ran through a pulley system to a ridge beyond.
It would not be the storm that brought the avalanche, but Vetrulfr’s command.
He crouched there now, wolf-skin draped over his helm, ice-pale eyes watching the ravine where the Christian levies marched in loose formation, singing hymns, spewing bravado.
Gorm stood beside him, one fist clenched around the rope that held the trigger brace.
Vetrulfr raised two fingers.
Then clenched them into a fist.
And then it happened.
— If not for the fact that the earth quaked, and brought with it the wrath and thunder of nature when it began to collapse upon him, the Althing’s host would have been sorely oblivious to their own ruin.
Yet there was nothing to mistake, Even a blind, deaf, witless thrall could feel the doom bearing down upon them.
Panic spread rapidly, as the army pushed, and shoved, and climbed over one another, hoping to get to safety beyond the rockslide tunneling towards them.
But like an avalanche on a snow covered mountain, there was no escape for those caught within the boundaries of its grasp.
No, the volcanic earth of Ísland itself swallowed the army whole.
Spitting out but a few souls in its hunger, yet their salvation was brief.
Immediately after the earth stilled, and the shrieking gave way to silence.
Vetrulfr waved his hand forward, a gesture that meant one thing.
Loose!” A rain of iron arrowheads fell from the sky, but not in an arc that depleted their energy, no, the volley came directly at the survivors from above.
Shields were splintered, bodies bruised, and bones were broken.
There was no escape from the final attack.
No defense could be mustered.
Any flesh not yet buried beneath fully beneath the earth of Ísland itself, was filled with arrows, looking more like a porcupine than a man.
And that was what Vetrulfr and his army would leave behind for the scouts of the Althing to find when they realized one of their warbands had gone missing.
Several hundred men marched into this ravine, and none had survived the ambush.
Not only had Vetrulfr taken care of a large section of his enemy’s total forces in one surgical strike, but he had also permanently closed off a path into the Westfjords, which was one of few that existed for an army to march through.
The way was sealed, and now, the Althing would have to fight to enter the lands which bowed to the Son of Ullr through more contested regions.
Vetrulfr turned his back to the scene of his most recent victory, and in the flash of thunder, he swore he saw a Valkyrie rise from the ravine—her wings black against the storm—as she bore a soul to the realm beyond.