novelraw Chapter 304: The Crossroads
Chapter 304: The Crossroads
On June 5th, Carloman and Charles the Fat once again crossed the Danevirke defense line. Back in the previous month, when Gunnar passed through here, he had ordered these fence-like low walls to be burned down. Now, the defense line consisted of nothing more than a low earthen slope, completely stripped of its defensive function.
Pressed for time, the two brothers no longer bothered with besieging towns, focusing solely on pushing toward Aalborg in Northern Denmark.
At this moment, the main force of the Northern European Allied Forces was stationed in Vejle. Over the recent period, a steady stream of Vikings had arrived as reinforcements, swelling the ranks of the Allied Forces to over ten thousand men. Excluding the regional garrisons, they had more than seven thousand combat-ready troops at their disposal.
Upon receiving intelligence on the enemy, Farvel proposed an attack. "The opposing side has fewer than five thousand men. This is a battle we can fight."
Weighing the strength of both sides, the nobles grew increasingly eager. While most of them feared a ruthless commander like Gunnar, they held no such dread for Carloman and Charles the Fat.
Rumors claimed that even with equal numbers, the two brothers had lasted less than an hour before being effortlessly routed by Wigg, proving them to be absolute deadweights.
"An hour? That claim is far too exaggerated. I never heard Wigg mention anything of the sort."
Erik Jr. urged the crowd to remain calm, with Halfdan Whiteshirt and Rekker echoing his caution. The three of them were keenly aware of the vast gap in skill between themselves and Wigg. Given the overall capabilities of the Allied Forces, they simply could not replicate Wigg's past victories. A single misstep could lead to ruin; it was far wiser to remain hunkered down in Vejle and wait for an opening.
After a few minutes of bickering, a voice abruptly rang out from the crowd. "With a distinct advantage in numbers, Ragnar's offspring still cower in fear. Have you forgotten the glory of your fathers?"
At the mention of his father's name, Halfdan Whiteshirt's eyes turned bloodshot. His hand reflexively dropped to the iron axe at his waist, but unable to pinpoint the source of the voice, a sudden wave of profound powerlessness washed over him."Fine. Since you are so hell-bent on fighting, count me in."
Riding on the coattails of his father's legendary reputation, Halfdan Whiteshirt was elected as the commander of the Allied Forces. Scanning the nobles who were toasting and drinking around the long table, he felt no thrill of leadership—only a deep, lingering sorrow.
He recalled the golden days when his father commanded the likes of his eldest brother, his second brother, Wigg, Gunnar, Niels, Om, and "White Hair" Oleg, forging an empire of massive proportions. What did he have now?
Surrounded by this pack of brainless fools, an epic victory was completely out of the question. Even with Odin's blessing, the absolute best he could hope for was a minor triumph.
Two days later, the Allied Forces marched out of Vejle and deployed their formations at a crossroads ten miles to the west, awaiting the arrival of the Franks.
At ten o'clock in the morning, scattered Frankish cavalry appeared in the south. They circled the Viking formation to scout, prompting Erik Jr. to dispatch his own cavalry to drive them off.
It was not long before clouds of dust blotted out the sky at the end of the road, and the main body of the Frankish army entered Halfdan Whiteshirt's field of vision. He made a rough estimate; the enemy numbers matched the scouts' reports. They brought a massive train of supply wagons, and excluding the drivers and camp followers, their combat troops numbered between four thousand to forty-three hundred.
Once arrayed for battle, the Frankish shield wall began a slow, grinding advance. The Viking archers loosed five consecutive volleys of feathered arrows using high-angle fire, but failing to inflict significant casualties, they temporarily ceased their barrage.
"Pass down the order. Have Farvel and his men engage, and also..."
Halfdan Whiteshirt sent out a squad of messenger riders. The Allied Forces were so disorganized that flag signals were utterly useless. Furthermore, since the vast majority of the nobles were illiterate, verbal commands were the only reliable method of communication.
Soon, the shield walls of both armies crashed together. The Frankish army had committed a mere two thousand men, leaving their formation relatively thin, but their armor rate exceeded fifty percent. Because of this heavy protection, they fought evenly against a Viking force twice their size.
After the brutal melee raged for some time, Charles the Fat noticed the Viking battle line on the eastern flank beginning to loosen. He wanted to unleash the cavalry, but Carloman stopped him.
"There is no rush. Let the archers soften them up first."
The Frankish feathered arrows rained down like a sudden squall over the Viking shield wall. Halfdan Whiteshirt ordered his archers to return fire. This deadly exchange lasted for two to three minutes before the Viking volley abruptly stopped.
"Who ordered them to stop?" Halfdan Whiteshirt demanded.
"I did," Erik Jr. spoke up. "We have already burned through roughly twenty-five thousand feathered arrows, leaving us with only half our supply. If you exhaust them all now, what will we do for the rest of the battle?"
Halfdan Whiteshirt's furious scowl melted into astonishment. "How did we burn through them so quickly?"
In the Northern European markets, an average feathered arrow usually cost a penny. Twenty-five thousand arrows were worth roughly one hundred pounds of silver—equivalent to his entire fiscal surplus for the year.
The Allied Forces' total arrow reserves amounted to eighty thousand. Forty thousand were a generous contribution from Wigg, while the remaining forty thousand had been cobbled together by the various nobles.
The arrows supplied by the nobles were of abysmal quality. From the iron arrowheads to the shafts and the fletching, every aspect—from materials to craftsmanship—was severely flawed. Erik Jr. had painstakingly sifted through them to find ten thousand barely acceptable feathered arrows, tossing the remaining thirty thousand to the local garrisons.
Observing the stark contrast in the quality of the two armies, Erik Jr. felt utterly despondent. "Cavalry, armor, arrow stockpiles—we are outclassed on every front. I truly do not know where these nobles get their confidence."
Battered relentlessly by both archers and infantry, the Viking shield wall on the left flank (the eastern side of the battlefield) steadily lost ground, slowly detaching from the friendly forces holding the center. Catching this glaring flaw in the enemy's line, Carloman let out a long breath and turned to Charles the Fat. "Your cavalry can move in now."
Moments later, a massive gap opened in the Frankish shield wall. The Swabian knights, who had been chomping at the bit, launched a thunderous charge, crashing directly into the fragile seam between the Viking left flank and the center.
Unsurprisingly, the five hundred-plus cavalrymen effortlessly shattered the enemies before them. Whipped into a frenzy by the scent of blood, they screamed various war cries and plunged recklessly deeper into the enemy formation.
However, the men blocking their path were no longer ordinary foot soldiers, but elite heavy infantry fully clad in iron armor. At the exact same time, Viking troops from the left and right flanks pinched inward—and they too were completely outfitted in iron armor. It was a meticulously sprung trap. Halfdan Whiteshirt had deliberately left a weakness to lure the Frankish cavalry into a killing box.
"Deus adjuva!"
The Frankish knights were at the absolute peak of their bloodlust. Unlike cowardly, feeble peasant levies, encountering a formidable foe only stoked the fires of their aggression.
The Frankish knights maintained their relentless assault. Even when their warhorses were impaled and brought down by spears, the knights merely clambered up from the dirt, gripped their longswords or iron flails, and hurled themselves back into the Viking ranks. Relying on this death-defying ferocity, they smashed right through Halfdan Whiteshirt's carefully laid ambush through sheer brute force, continuing their mad dash toward the banner bearing the emblem of the charred oak tree.
In the center, Halfdan Whiteshirt stared in stunned disbelief.
"This... this is complete madness!"
These Viking armored veterans were comprised of Halfdan Whiteshirt's personal guard (the bear-pelt berserkers), Erik Jr.'s Royal Guard, and the heavy shield-bearers belonging to the other Viking nobles. They were the absolute cream of the crop of the entire Allied Forces.
Snapping out of his stupor, he frantically dispatched messenger riders to rush the nearest few hundred infantrymen forward to plug the gap. By throwing bodies at the problem, they finally managed to bog down the exhausted Frankish madmen.
"The time has come!"
With the Viking formation thrown into absolute disarray, Carloman deployed his own cavalry force. In their previous clash with Wigg, many veteran Bavarian knights had perished, their saddles now filled by their younger brothers or sons. While these reserve knights lacked the martial prowess of their predecessors, they were more than sufficient for the task at hand.
Rallying behind their commander's banner, the four hundred-plus cavalrymen swept around the main frontline, swiftly crashing into the vulnerable Viking right flank (the western side of the battlefield).
By this point, Halfdan Whiteshirt's reserves were reduced to barely over a thousand militiamen and two hundred cavalrymen. Knowing the militia would buckle under the pressure, he cast a desperate look at Erik Jr. beside him. The younger man let out a heavy sigh. "Fine. I will have them tie the enemy down."
Having scrimped and saved for years, Erik Jr. had purchased warhorses through every conceivable channel and gifted away numerous fertile manors to knight his retainers, painstakingly scraping together this tiny two-hundred-man cavalry unit.
Under his despairing gaze, his Norwegian knights charged unflinchingly toward the thundering horde of Bavarian cavalry. The instant the two forces collided, dozens were killed outright. Some were impaled by heavy lances, while others were thrown from the saddle, only to be trampled to mush beneath a flurry of iron-shod hooves.
Tangled in the vicious melee, the enemy cavalry's momentum ground to a halt. Halfdan Whiteshirt urgently ordered the remaining militiamen forward to reinforce the line, desperately trying to drown the attackers in a sea of bodies.
They barely managed to weather two successive waves of cavalry charges. Yet, before Halfdan Whiteshirt could even draw breath, Carloman committed his final reserve of over six hundred heavy infantry, laser-focused on hammering the Viking right flank until it completely shattered.
"Phew. It took some doing, but we finally crushed these barbarians. A far simpler task than last time."
With his right flank collapsing in ruins, Halfdan Whiteshirt desperately tightened his formation. He felt like the captain of a rotting ship taking on water from every side; no matter how frantically he bailed, nothing could stop the vessel from inevitably slipping beneath the waves.
Before they realized it, a thousand archers loosed their very last arrows, shaking out their aching, exhausted arms. Barely five minutes into their rest, Halfdan Whiteshirt's messenger galloped up, barking orders for them to grab their shields and iron axes to plug the bleeding wound on the right flank.
"Idiots!"
"Halfdan Whiteshirt does not know the first thing about fighting a war!"
Dropping their wooden bows and empty quivers, the archers cursed viciously as they swapped to shields and axes, trailing behind their commanders into the brutal, close-quarters meat grinder.
The bitter slog dragged on until one o'clock in the afternoon. The Northern European Allied Forces were forced to collapse their broad linear formation into a tight circular formation. Once their morale plunged past a fatal threshold, a sudden, catastrophic chain rout swept through the ranks.
Halfdan Whiteshirt seemed to have seen this coming. He, Erik Jr., Rekker, and the battered remnants of their core forces bunched together and bolted eastward toward Vejle. Utterly spent, the Frankish cavalry lacked the stamina to chase down an organized unit still capable of fighting back, forcing them to turn their bloody attentions to hunting down smaller, scattered bands of stragglers instead.
By four o'clock, the broken survivors began trickling back into Vejle. That evening, as Halfdan Whiteshirt tallied the grim butchers' bill, he found that over three thousand men had been left bleeding out on the field. Having absorbed such a crippling blow, the Allied Forces completely lost their capacity for open-field warfare, rendering them entirely powerless to stop the enemy from advancing to rescue the besieged remnants at Aalborg.