Then Ragnar killed Jarl Borg.
Then Ragnar killed King Horik.
But here, now on the rivers shore outside Paris, Ragnar faces a new challenge.
Credit: Jonathan Hession/History
His brother, a traitor again.
The men of Frankia, in two towers on two shores.
Ragnar has a plan.
He wont be expecting us to attack by land also, he tells his troops.
His boats will sail down the river; another force will attack Rollos tower.
Lagertha will lead the party on foot.
King Haralds boat shall sail first.
Why is Lagertha here?
Ragnar wants to know.
A violent man, an ambitious man, Ragnar has always been a family man.
He loves his children the dead one, perhaps, more than the living.
Lagertha is with child, is she not?
The seer prophesied I would never have another child, she says.
Youre certainly doing everything in your power to prove the seers prophecy right, Ragnar spits.
They row away, leaving Ragnars children behind to defend the camp.
Bjorn Ironside is resolute.
I hate my uncle, he says.
I want to kill him.
Good, says Ragnar.
Long ago, they were a family united.
Now, they are united only in their lust for battle, their grasping ambition for power.
And then there is Duke Rollo, who stands watching the ships arrive.
His wife, Princess Gisla, stands next to him.
They, at least, are united.
Lagertha and Erlendur approach Rollos tower from land.
The boats sail forward, assault by arrowmen.
Worse calamity awaits: The chain is lifted between towers.
King Haralds boat overturns completely.
Then the catapults, sending great piles of flammable material around the boats.
And then the flaming arrows.
The fire and the water claim some warriors; the arrows, the rest.
But Floki does not die.
He sinks beneath the surface.
On land, Lagertha and Erlendur are stopped up by mud.
Rollo sees Lagertha his brothers once-wife, his long-ago unrequited love and commands his archers to attack.
They are flanked on all sides.
The shield wall cannot defend them.
The attack is a failure.
A retreat is called.
Ragnar sees his brother astride his tower.
Everyone wanted you dead!
He does not hide behind shields, and the arrows cannot hurt him.
I kept you alive!
THISIS HOW YOU REPAY MY LOVE.
The Franks celebrate as the Northmen row away.
Rollo does not look happy.
Even such a victory can only be a defeat.
Once, he had a brother.
Now, he only has an enemy.
NEXT: Between the living and the dead
How is it that Harbard is once again here in Kattegat?
He tells Aslaug that he had no idea Ragnar had gone raiding in Paris.
I wondered, in fact, if he was still alive.
Since last they met, he has walked between worlds, between the living and the dead.
Aslaug has dreamed of him.
Her son Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye watches from afar.
Always watching, that little one.
At the Viking camp outside Paris, chaos reigns.
The Franks had attacked, led by Roland.
Ragnars sons are not injured.
But Helga, beloved of Floki, is unconscious and wounded.
The funeral pyres burn.
It is my fathers fault, he says.
Where does that leave Ragnar?
Give me some of that Chinese medicine!
the great King screams at Yidu.
It has been another bloody day; more deaths weigh on Ragnars conscience.
Meanwhile, in faraway Mercia, King Ecbert marches his army.
Rather, to a meeting.
They meet in a mausoleum full of royal bones.
Here lie my brother, uncles, and my sons, says the prince.
And here is my sainted mother.
The Prince scoffs at Ecberts notion that Kwenthrith could have stabilized this madhouse.
There is something rotten here in Mercia.
And this Prince knows how to fix it.
He seeks no ambitions of his own.
Instead, he proposes to ally with King Ecbert.
The two armies shall easily defeat the Mercian Royal Council.
And then I mean to renounce this world, says the Prince.
I shall quit Mercia and England and travel in pilgrimage to Rome as a common beggar.
He gives Ecbert the ancestral crown of Mercia.
Ecbert, the lord of Wessex, shall also be lord of the neighboring kingdom.
What next but all England?
In the camp outside Paris, the Northmen are done waiting.
It has been three days since the failed assault.
What does Ragnar command of them?
Tomorrow, we go back downriver, says the great King.
Tomorrow, we retreat.
His son leaves him, but still Ragnar speaks.
He speaks to the dead.
They cannot hear him.
Perhaps that amuses Ragnar.
Perhaps he can no longer tell the dead from the living.
