Chapter Thirteen

Shef sat on a broad wooden bench which almost filled the tiny dark room, lit only by a single wick burning in a dish of whale-oil. Beneath it a covered trough of hot stones radiated heat, scorching heat that shriveled the mouth-lining and stung the nose with the stink of pine-resin from the wooden walls. He luxuriated in it, feeling the deep chill thaw from his bones. Feeling also the need for instant decisions recede. He was in others' hands now. Even Karli was no longer his responsibility. He did not know where they had taken him.

At the queen's instructions, the slave-women had pulled him away, taken off his filthy, clammy clothes. One of them had rubbed his face furiously with handfuls of snow taken from the fast-shrinking drifts outside, to prevent the frostbite that had already attacked it. Others had poured warm water over him, rubbed him with lye, scrubbed off the dirt and blood and animal fat from his hands. Dimly he had realized that they had also taken his sword, that something or other of the same kind was happening to Karli, but the sudden entry into warmth had half-stupefied him. Then they had led him into the steam-room and left him.

For a while he sat, not even sweating in the fierce heat, just letting the warmth soak through to his half-frozen marrow. Then as weariness came over him he lay back, propping his head against a wooden billet, and fell into a light, uneasy sleep.

Somewhere in the dark above him, his fate was being discussed. He heard the now-familiar rumble of mighty voices. One spoke for him, he realized, one against.

"He should have died on the ice," said the hostile voice: cold, authoritative, unused to contradiction, the voice not only of the Father but the Ruler of gods and men.

"No-one should blame a man for saving himself," argued the second voice: Shef knew he had heard it many times, recognized it as the voice of his patron, perhaps his father, Rig the cunning.

"He threw away the spear, the spear with my own runes on it. He denied me sacrifice. He does not follow the heroes' road."

"The less reason, then, for taking him to you. He would not find a place in Valhalla, would not be an obedient recruit for your Einheriar."

The first voice seemed to hesitate. "And yet... There is a cunning there. Too few of my champions have that. Maybe it is a quality I will need on the day of Ragnarök."

"You do not need it yet. Leave him where he is, let us see where his luck takes him. He may do you service in his own fashion." The second voice was lying, Shef knew, he could tell it by the sweet reason that dripped from its tongue. It was buying him time.

"Luck!" said the first voice, suddenly amused. "Let us see that, then. If he has a luck, it will be his own, for mine he has thrown away. And he will need powerful luck to survive the dangers of Drottningsholm. We will watch."

The two voices drifted away in a rumble of agreement.

Shef came to himself with a start. How long had he slept? Not long, he thought. It was too hot for anyone to lie comfortably. He was sweating now, and the bench under him was damp. Time to get up and look about him. He remembered the lines of poetry he had heard from Thorvin:

Not evident to any, where un-friends sit

In every hall.

As he rose to his feet, the door of the tiny room creaked open. There was a fire lit in the room outside, and from the glow behind her, he realized that the figure standing in the doorway was the queen, Ragnhild. He could not see what she was wearing. As she came forward, closing the door, she pressed close to him.

"You have shed your jewelry, queen," he said with a roughness in his throat. He could feel himself stirring at the woman-smell that came from her, stronger even than the pines.

"No-one can wear gold in the room of hot stones," she replied. "It would burn. So I have shed my rings and armlets. See, even my brooch has gone."

She caught his hands, held them to her gown, ran them down its lapels. The gown fell open. Shef's hands cupped the heavy swell of her breasts, realized she wore nothing but the one open garment. His arms went round her, his hands stroked down the long muscular slope of her back, gripped her buttocks fiercely. She pressed forward, thrusting her pelvis into him, pushing him back. The bench caught him behind the knees and he sat back with a thud.

As the sweat poured suddenly from his body, the queen straddled over him, thrust herself down on his rigid erection. For the first time since he had entered Godive two years before in the Suffolk wood, Shef felt the inner warmth of a woman's body. It was as if a spell had been released. Half-amazed at his own ability, he tore the gown aside, seized the queen by her hips, began to thrust upwards violently, still sitting.

Ragnhild laughed, steadying herself on his shoulders. "I have never known a man so active in this room," she said. "Usually the heat makes them as slow as a gelded steer. I see that this time I shall not need the birch-twigs."

Unknown time later, Shef walked to the outer door of the hall, opened it, peeped cautiously out. In front of him, to the east, he could see a thin line of light over the Eastfold hills far on the other side of the fjord. Ragnhild looked over his shoulder.

"Dawn," she said. "Soon Stein and the guards will be here. You will have to hide away."

Shef pushed the door open, let the air in on his naked body. In the last few hours he had been first frozen, then all but roasted. Now the air felt only pleasantly cool and fresh. He took deep breaths of the clear air, thought he could scent in it the green smell of grass thrusting up through the vanishing snow. Spring came late to Norway, but then plants and animals and people all made up for lost time. He felt more alive and alert than he had since his boyhood. The danger threatened in his dream was forgotten.

He turned, seized Ragnhild once again, began to push her to the floor. She resisted, laughing. "The men will be here. You are very vigorous. Have you never had your fill before? Well, I promise you—you will have it again tonight. But now we must hide you away. The girls will not talk, and the men will not look. They know better. But we must not give Halvdan any excuse for trouble later."

She pulled Shef, still naked, away from the door.

Karli wondered where they had hidden his friend—he supposed he now had to call him, his master. He himself was lying on a straw mattress in a garret reached by a ladder through the slave-women's quarters. A small unshuttered window gave light, but he had been warned not to look out. His gashed wrist and head had been bandaged, and he was wrapped in a warm blanket.

The ladder creaked, and he reached for the sword which he had picked up when they separated him from Shef. But it was only two of the slave-women coming up together. He did not know their names: plain, brown-haired women, one his own age, one ten years older with a deep-lined face. They carried his clothes, washed clean and dried by a fire, a loaf of hard bread, a crock of ale and another of curds.

Karli sat up, grinned, reached appreciatively for the ale. "I would stand up and thank you properly, ladies," he said. "But all I have on is this blanket, and what I have behind it might shock you."

The young one smiled faintly, the older one shook her head. "There is not much that shocks those who live on this island," she said.

"How is that?"

"We have other things to worry about. The queens play their games, with men and the king and the boy Harald. In the end one of them will lose, and pay the forfeit, and be carried to the grave-mound. Queen Asa has already started to put aside the things that will go in it with her, the sledge and the cart and the jewels and the fine clothes. But neither she nor Ragnhild will go alone, when they go. They will take attendants—maybe one, maybe two. I am the least valuable of those here. Maybe Asa will take me, or Ragnhild send me. Edith here is the youngest. Maybe Ragnhild will be jealous and send her."

"Edith," said Karli, "that is no Norse name."

"I am English," said the younger girl. "Martha here is a Frisian. They took her from her island in a mist. I was caught by the slavers and sold in the market at Hedeby."

Karli stared at them. Up till then all three had spoken in Norse, the women quite fluently, Karli still uncertain. Now he changed his speech to the Ditmarsh language, related to Frisian and English, which he knew Shef could easily understand.

"Did you know that my friend and I are not Norsemen either? He is a king in England. But they say he was once a thrall, like you. And they tried to sell him in Hedeby only weeks ago."

"Tried?"

"He knocked the man who said he was his master down, and threatened to sell him instead. A good joke, and not a bad punch. But listen—I know my friend, and I know he has no love for slavers. When we get back to our friends, shall I ask him to buy you from the queens here? He would do it if he knew you were English, Edith, and he would take Martha too."

"You aren't going to get back to your friends," said Martha flatly. "We hear a lot. Queen Ragnhild fears your friend. She thinks he may take the place she means for her son. She meant to kill you both last night. Now she means to drain your friend's manhood, get a child from him, in case his blood is the one destined for rule. Once she has that child in her belly, your friend will find the henbane in his porridge. And you too."

Karli looked uncertainly at the loaf he had been gnawing.

"No," the woman went on, "you are safe yet. As safe as we are. Till she has got what she wants."

"And how long will that take?"

Martha laughed for the first time, a short and mirthless bark. "Putting a child in a woman's belly? You are a man, you should know. As long as it takes to walk a mile? Less, with most of you."

"More with me," muttered Karli. His hand had strayed automatically and unresisted to Edith's knee.

Valgrim the Wise looked carefully at the dripping spear, its steel head already showing rust. He spelled out the runes on its iron shaft.

"Where did you find this?" he asked.

"On the shore of Drottningsholm," said Stein, the guardsman. "When we went back on to the island this morning, as usual, I sent men to round up the dogs as we always do. They couldn't find them, and the queen Ragnhild told me she had been disturbed by their howling and sent her maids out to bring them in. When I asked more, she flew into a rage and told me to get out before she had my ears cut off. I guessed something was wrong and sent out a guard-boat to row along the shore, now the ice has gone. They found this."

"Floating?"

"No, the head's too heavy. They said it was close to the shore, in about three feet of water. The head was lodged on the bottom, but the shaft was still bobbing about."

"What do you think it means?"

"They could have drowned on the rotten ice," suggested Stein. "It all went quite suddenly early last night, when the rain came on."

"But you don't think so?"

"It's the dogs," said Stein. "There's something fishy there, and Ragnhild is hiding something."

"Maybe a man?"

"Probably a man."

Both heads turned to the third man in the room, the remote unbending figure of King Olaf.

"This seems to affect the good name of your family," said Valgrim, a trifle uncertainly.

The king smiled. "What you are thinking is that it is also a good test of luck. If King Shef was on the rotten ice last night, and survived, that was one test passed. If he got past the wolfhounds, that was another. You want me to set him a third?"

"Third time pays for all," said Stein.

"I agree. A third test it is, and then no more, from me or from you. Agreed."

Valgrim nodded, reluctantly, eyes full of calculation.

"Then I will send word to my brother that there is reason to think things amiss on Drottningsholm. I have never done that before, and he knows I would not do it lightly. So he will believe me and give permission for a thorough search of the island and every building in it, from end to end. You must think how you would make it, Stein. And if intruders are found there, hiding, then they must go to the king's justice. It will be heavy, when he thinks the good name of his son Harald is concerned.

"Till then, Stein, you had better double the guards on the bridges, both from Drottningsholm to the second island, and from that to the third and to the mainland. A bold man could swim between the islands too, so have your guard-boats out between them. I need not tell you to make sure there is no boat a man could steal.

"If this is to be a test, it is in your hands to make sure it is a strict one. Do not come to me afterwards and say, this was no fair test, any man might have escaped. You must make sure that the only escape is by Völund's path, through the air! Then if King Shef escapes, we will know that Völund he is, in whatever shape."

Stein and Valgrim nodded again.

"And no word to his friends," added Valgrim. Out of the window of the high room where they sat, he could see Thorvin walking across the college precinct, Brand at his side. Both men looked deeply anxious.

"No word to his friends," Olaf agreed. "I will play fair on this one, Valgrim. See you do too. Otherwise it is no test of king's luck."

As he turned and went out, Valgrim and Stein looked at each other.

"He said make it a strict test," said Stein. "I could make it a little stricter than he plans."

"Do that," said Valgrim, looking again at the 'Gungnir' runes on the spear he still held. "No strictness is too harsh for the man who pretends to come from All-father."

"And if his luck does prove stronger?"

Valgrim hefted the spear, shook it like a man about to strike. "I think it has left him already. I hated him for aping my master Othin. I hate him more now he has thrown away my master's token."

From the shadows of the great hall, Karli watched his friend-and-master musingly. All the signs, he thought. I should have realized earlier.

Almost from the moment of their first meeting—certainly from the first time they had talked together—Karli had unconsciously assumed that Shef was the elder of the two, the wiser, the more widely-traveled, the more weapon-skilled. It had given Karli no sense of inferiority. His own animal spirits were too strong for that, and he remained unshakably confident in his own ability to knock any man down with his fists, and bed, if not any woman, at least any woman reasonably good-humored. He did not feel inferior to Shef. But he had assumed that Shef knew as much as he did.

A mistake. He should have realized that where women were concerned, this tall warrior with the scars and the mighty friends was no more than a boy. He was behaving like a boy now. A boy who has met his first woman. What he had been doing with Queen Ragnhild all day, Karli did not know, but now night had fallen and the guards had been withdrawn he still could not take eye or hand off her. As he spooned the strong salt stew into his mouth, his left hand lay on the queen's bare arm, lightly stroking it. Every time she spoke he leaned close to her mouth, laughed, took every chance to touch her again. Karli had heard stories of witches who sucked away a man's manhood. In his experience there was no need of witchcraft. Sexual skill, consciously exercised, worked on any man—the first time anyway. Once you realized there were more fish in the sea than ever came out of it, you might be protected. But Shef did not know that yet. And there was no way of telling him. When Karli had approached him after being freed from the garret, Shef had been pleased to see him, but vague, reluctant to talk or plan or even think about what had happened. He was slit-struck.

It was up to him, then. Karli had no doubt that for all the warmth and the food and the careful attention, he and Shef were in greater danger than they had been on the ice. What Edith and Martha and their two friends had told him had chilled him deeply. Shef was against slavery because he had been threatened with being a slave. Karli was against it because he had no experience of it. In the uncivilized and poverty-stricken Ditmarsh there was neither room nor work for slaves. They might sell shipwrecked strangers to other strangers, but they kept no thralls themselves. The constant fear under which a thrall like Edith or Martha lived was a new thought to him.

And fear made people good listeners. Their lives depended on knowing what might happen and taking the few pitiful precautions open to them. So Martha not only bore with the contempt and bullying she received from the Norwegian female housekeeper who came in with the guards each morning and left with them each night. She encouraged it, making mistakes to provoke a beating and a flood of words. What the massive Vigdis had said after Martha dropped the pan was that a time was coming for idle sluts. Aye, and maybe not them alone. Why else the doubled guards? And don't think to swim off like the spineless eel your father. The men have brought up boats to the channel between each island. When the king comes we'll see who's useful enough to let live and who is fit only for howe-bridal.

Vigdis obviously did not know what the guards were for, and thought it some royal intrigue: maybe King Halvdan tired of his mother waiting to die, or of his wife and her independence. But the slave-women knew better. The dogs, they said. Men coming round to look in their pens, ask where the others were, why they had not all come home, why they could not be heard baying if they were still loose somewhere on the island. We cleared up the bodies before first light, Edith had said, and the rain washed away the blood, but in the soft ground it would not take a tracker to see that people had been doing something.

A night or two's grace, thought Karli, still watching Ragnhild and Shef, the sour queen Asa sitting glaring at both across the table. I know. The slave-women know.

Shef will not listen. And Vigdis has not told the queens. Well, one thing is for sure. They will not notice if I am not there. Quietly he went through the door to the little cramped room where the slave-attendants waited.

"Have you thought what to do?" whispered Edith.

Karli squeezed her hip. "I am a Ditmarsher," he said. "I know something about water. I need to build a"—he hesitated for the right word—"a boat?"

"There are no boats on the island. No planks, no tools. It would take weeks to fell trees. And anyway, they would hear you!"

"I don't mean a boat like that," said Karli. "I mean"—he turned to the Frisian woman Martha—"we call it a punt."

"For the duck-hunters," said Martha, nodding. "But what do you need to make that?"

Hours later Karli bent sweating over the contraption he had put together on the island's seaward shore, furthest removed from the guard-posts. Its flat bottom was simply a door. There had only been one whose absence would not be immediately noticed the next day—the one that led to the slave-women's stinking latrine. Probably neither the guards nor the queens knew such a place existed, let alone whether it had a door or not. Karli had lifted it bodily off its hinges and carried it out. He could have stood on that alone and poled himself along if he had been able to keep to shallow water. But he knew he would have to do better than that, make a seaward circle before he ran in to the shore. He needed a place to stand if he was not to be tipped off by every wave. And something like a bow to cut the water. Done with no tools and no noise.

Slowly and clumsily he had cut away one edge of the door with his sword, sharp but not serrated. Iron skewers from the kitchen had nailed down billets of firewood toward the stern, hammered in with a flat stone muffled by layers of cloth. On top of that he had fixed a flat wooden tray with four nails worked loose with his fingers and pulled stealthily out of the ornate wooden planking at the rear of the hall. Finally, growing impatient and trusting to luck that the damage would not be seen next morning, he had pulled away one strake of planking low down to the ground, snapped it over his knee. He was trying now to drive three more nails through the planking into the cut-away edge of the door, to make a bluff, square bow. Once it was done he would have a makeshift imitation of the craft the Ditmarsh fowlers steered through their everlasting bogs. He would neither row nor pole it, but scull it over the stern with a single oar—snapped planking again, wedged into a split fir-branch. It would do, if the water stayed calm. If no-one picked him out from a guard-boat close in, or one of the king's giant coastal patrol warships further out. If he met no creature of the deep.

At the last thought Karli's hair bristled. Deep within himself, he knew he was afraid. Not of water, not of men. He and the English catapult-men had idled away too many hours telling each other monster-stories, and passing on those they had heard from the Vikings. In his own land Karli feared the fen-thurses. The English feared boggarts, hags, and groundles. The Vikings told stories of all of them, and stranger creatures still, skoffins and nixes and marbendills and skerry-trolls. Who knew what might not be met, out at sea, in the dark? All it would take would be a gray-haired hand reaching up and seizing an ankle as he sculled six inches above the water. Then the things would feast at the sea-bottom.

Karli shook himself, drove home the last nail with a flat stone, straightened up.

The voice in his ear murmured, "Going fishing?"

Frightened already, Karli leapt straight over his punt, turned in the air, came down braced for flight, gaping to see what threat had crept up on him. Almost, he relaxed when he saw the amused, contemptuous face of Stein the guard-captain, standing there fully-armed but thumbs still hooked in his belt.

"Surprised to see me?" suggested Stein. "Thought I wouldn't be back till morning? Well, I thought a little extra care wouldn't hurt. After all, if men aren't allowed on Drottningsholm after dark, nor are you. Eh?

"Now tell me, short-legs, where's your taller friend? Stallioning away up at the hall? He'll lose more than an eye when we hand him over to King Halvdan. Do you want to go along with him?"

The sword Shef had retempered for Karli still lay on the ground where he had been using it. Karli lunged forward, seized its hilt, straightened up. The shock had worn off. No hag from the deep. Just a man. On his own, seemingly. With helmet and mail, but no shield.

Stein dropped a hand to his own sword-hilt, drew and stepped round the boat. Karli was no dwarf, but Stein out-topped him by head and shoulders, outweighed him by fifty pounds. How fast was he? Plenty of farmers' sons in Viking armies, Shef had said.

Karli cocked his elbow and threw his weight into a forehand slash, not at the head, too easy to duck, but at the point where neck met shoulder, as Shef had taught him.

Stein saw the beginnings of the movement, knew before the sword was drawn back where the blow was aimed, where it would fall. He had time to tap his foot once before his riposte. In one movement he turned his own sword in his hand, drove the base of his blade in a short chord to intersect the longer arc of Karli's blow. The blades clanged once. Karli's shot into the air, knocked from his grasp. A twist of the wrist, Stein's point rested in the hollow of Karli's throat.

Not one of the farmers' sons, then, Karli thought sickly. Stein's face creased with disgust. He dropped the point to the ground.

"It's not the skin that makes the bear," he remarked. "Nor the sword the warrior. All right, you little freckle-faced bastard, talk or I'll cut you up for bait."

He bent forward, thrusting his chin out and up. Karli's feet shuffled from the fencing position he had taken to the one that came naturally to him. He shrugged a left hand feint out of habit and swung instantly with the right hook to the side of the jaw.

This time Stein's decades-drilled reflexes failed him completely. The blow caught him standing flat and still. As he straightened his sword for the killing counter-stroke, another blow snapped his head back and a third from six inches' range crashed into his temple. As he slumped forward Karli side-stepped and swung a hand-edge chop at the back of his neck: illegal in the Ditmarsh ring, but not against husbands or rivals met at night. The veteran sprawled his six foot four full-length at Karli's feet.

Out of the shadows came Martha, the middle-aged slave-woman. Terror stood in her eyes as she saw the lying man.

"I came to see if you were gone. That is Stein the captain. It is the first time he has ever come spying at night. They must know you are here! Is he dead?"

Karli shook his head. "Help me to tie him before he comes round."

"Tie him? Are you mad? We cannot guard him for ever, or keep him silent."

"Well... What are we going to do with him?"

"Cut his throat, of course. Do it now, quickly. Put his body on your boat and roll it off in the water. It will be days before he is found."

Karli retrieved his sword, stared at the unconscious man. "But I've never killed anyone. He's... He's done me no harm."

Martha's face set, she stepped forward, bent over the man now starting to push himself up from the ground. She snatched the short knife from the sheath he carried on his belt, felt its edge for a moment, hurled the helmet aside and pulled his head back by the hair. Reached forward and round, drove the point in deep under the left ear. Dragged it round in a deep, slicing semi-circle. Blood spouted from the severed arteries, Stein cried out, his voice coming as an expiring whistle from the great hole in his windpipe.

Martha released his head, let the body fall forward, wiped the knife automatically on her filthy apron. "You men," she said. "It's just like killing a pig. Only pigs don't steal other pigs from their homes. Don't bury them alive. He'd done you no harm! How much have he and his like done me? Me and my kind?

"Don't just stand there, man! Be off with you. And take this carcass with you. If you are not back within two days we'll all go to join him. Wherever he's gone."

She turned and fled into the darkness once more. Karli, his throat dry, queasily began to drag his clumsy craft into the shallow water and then to load the dead weight on it.

Chapter Fourteen

An hour later, Karli tucked his single oar cautiously between his thighs, straightened up on his precariously rocking craft, and stretched his overworked shoulder muscles. As soon as he started he had realized how different the sea was, even the sea of a landlocked fjord, from the shallow muddy waterways of the marsh. The gentlest of waves made the door pitch and toss. To keep his balance at all he had to straddle as near as he could to the center, which meant that his sculling-platform was behind him, not where he needed it. By trial and error he had found a way to stand, one foot far forward, one braced against the edge of the wooden tray. Fortunately he had made the oar long enough to reach the water even so.

There were two ways for a Ditmarsh fowler to scull, an easy way and a hard way. The balance problem ruled out the easy way—standing upright on one leg with the oar in the crook of the other knee, swinging it with both hands. He had had to switch immediately to the hard way, oar under one arm, other arm swinging the oar up and down, left to right in a continuous figure-of-eight. Karli had unusual balance, unusual strength in the arms and shoulders for a man of his weight. He could manage. Only just, and only slowly.

Still, no-one had picked him out. At the beginning he had poled his way out into water deeper than the length of his oar, then with relief pushed the dead body off the front edge and felt his wooden plank rise. The mail took the body down. It would rise again soon, but by then Shef would be rescued or Karli gone to join Stein in the next world.

Then he had sculled away from the island in a straight line towards the black shape of the Eastfold hills across the fjord. Five hundred weary strokes, fighting to keep his balance all the way. Then he had turned, looked cautiously behind him to Drottningsholm and the islands. He could make them out, but with no detail. He did not think that in the clouded, moonless night anyone from the guard-posts could see a crouching man on an invisible raft against the black sea.

He had turned and started to make his way towards Kaupang harbor to the north. Wind and tide were behind him. He kept changing arms as the weariness grew. It was discouraging to be able to see nothing, no lights, no sign of progress. He could have been on a shoreless sea, paddling from nowhere to nowhere.

As long as there was nothing out here with him. Over the hiss of the wind and the surge of the sea, Karli realized he could pick out something else. A steady creaking, something rhythmic, something chopping the water. He looked behind him, full instantly of terror at some strange water-hag swimming behind him for its prey.

Worse than that. Against the black sea and the sky Karli made out a shape, a fierce head lifted high, like a monster questing for swimmers. The dragon prow of one of King Halvdan's giant warships, out rowing his endless summer blockade. Karli could see the white splash of the oar-thresh, hear the rhythmic creak of the rowlocks, the grunting of the rowers as they put their weight on the oars. They were rowing very slowly, not going anywhere special, conserving their strength. Lookouts stood at prow and stern, alert for skippers trying to evade King Halvdan's taxes, for pirates sneaking by to raid Eastfold or Westfold. Karli lay down immediately on the plank, careless of the water soaking him. He dropped his face, pulled his hands back into their sleeves, trapped the oar beneath his body. On a dark night, he knew from much avoidance of husbands and fathers, nothing showed up more than white skin. He tried to look like a piece of floating wreckage, skin crawling as he imagined the bowmen taking aim.

The oars thundered in his ear, the door pitched and heaved as the bow-wave of the great warship went by. No challenge, no shot. As the stern-tail crawled past the corner of his eye he heard the lookout call something, an indistinct reply. Still no challenge. Nothing to do with him.

Carefully and shakily he climbed back on to his feet, retrieved the oar, began to scull slowly after the warship's receding stern. As he began to count off his strokes once more he felt the door begin to rise again beneath his feet. Another bow-wave? No, something greater, something closer, the whole clumsy contraption tipping over almost on to its side. Karli dropped on to his knees, clutched the edge, as he did so heard a great snort in the water not six feet away.

A fin his own size cruised gently past, standing straight up almost at right angles to the water. Beneath it a huge body rolled black and gleaming. Ahead of him the fin turned, cruised back to intercept. A head came out of the water, broad enough to engulf the door in one snap. Karli caught the flash of brilliant white barring beneath the black upper body, saw an intelligent eye observing him.

The killer whale, a bull orca out foraging for seals ahead of the rest of its school, considered tipping the man-thing off its floe and snapping it to pieces in the water, but decided against. Men-things were hardly fair prey, a gentle, irresistible voice told it. There was no excitement in chasing them. Sometimes porpoises followed their ships, and porpoises were a good catch. Not tonight. It ceased to follow the warship, ignored the thing on the floe, swam inexorably off to find its companions. Karli straightened again, realized the warmth inside his breeches was his own piss. Shakily he took up the scull, began to count off his strokes. This country was not safe. Both the men and the animals were just too big.

In their hut, the English catapulteers were preparing their breakfast and at the same time checking their weapons. Light was just showing in the sky, but ex-slaves rose early, out of habit. Besides, in spite of the pendants they all wore, in spite of being at the heart of their adopted religion, they felt uneasy, isolated, unsafe. Their leader had vanished, no-one knew where. They were surrounded by men of alien speech and unpredictable temper. In their hearts they knew that most of the Norsemen they met thought all foreigners were just slave-material waiting to be seized. They had come to Kaupang as men of a conquering army. Slowly their status seemed to be slipping away. If they were disarmed they would be back to tilling fields and herding goats, working under the lash once more. Without saying it, every one of them had determined that that was not to happen. If need be, they would have to break out. But how?

In the army of the Way in England there had been three main divisions: crossbowmen, halberdiers, catapulteers. No-one had made any effort to train them as swordsmen, though each carried a broad, single-edged seax-knife in his belt, as useful for firewood as for enemies. But Udd had made sure that each man there, whatever his original trade, carried and knew how to use one of the latest model crossbows, no longer wound by belt-pulleys, the spring-steel bow cocked instead by a long, pronged lever. It fitted under the bowstring and latched onto inset bolts. With a single, heaving effort the bow was cocked as the pull was exerted against a foot stirrup on the front of the bow's wooden frame. Osmod and three of the others also carried their unwieldy halberds, the combination axe and spear that Shef had invented for himself to make up for his lack of weight and training.

But the group's main weapon stood outside the hut: the mule, the stone-hurling catapult they had unshipped from the Norfolk and loaded into Brand's Walrus. The Thor-priests had been busy ever since they arrived, observing it, watching them shoot it, getting them to build further models of the two other styles of catapult they knew, the twisted-rope dart-shooter and the simpler stone-lobbing pull-thrower that the Way had already deployed on three battlefields. It was said that King Halvdan had ordered experiments on fitting mules to bow and stern platforms on his coastal patrol craft, large enough to take them if maybe too weak in the keel to stand the repeated shock of recoil. But till then the mule outside was the only one in the North.

There was one further innovation that no-one as yet had tried. Udd's invention of case-hardened steel as yet seemed all but useless. The material, once hardened, was too hard to work with any tools they had. Udd had suggested hardened crossbow-bolts, but as the others pointed out, the ones they had would go through any known armor anyway, so why bother? In the end Udd had made one thin round plate of the new steel, two feet in diameter, and pegged it on to a standard round shield of linden wood. Few warriors if any carried iron shields. The weight was so great that the shield could not be wielded for more than a few moments. Soft linden wood was used instead, to catch and trap the enemy's point or edge, usually with an iron boss as hand-guard. The plate Udd had made was so thin that if it had been normal iron it would have added no protection. But the case-hardened steel would turn any ordinary sword, spear or arrow, and weighed no more than a second layer of wood. Udd and the others had not yet worked out what the utility of the new shield was—none at all to men who fought as they did. It was a case where a new technique had not yet found a use.

At first, in the early-morning hubbub, no-one heard the scratching at the door. Then, as it was repeated, Cwicca paused. The rest fell silent. Fritha and Hama snatched up crossbows, cocked them. Osmod stepped to one side of the door, poised his halberd. Cwicca jerked out a peg, lifted the latch, swung the door open.

Karli fell in on hands and knees, barely able to support himself. The seven men inside gaped at him, then slammed the door shut and sprang to help.

"Get him on the stool," snapped Osmod. "He's soaked. Hah, not all water either! Get his clothes off, one of you bring him a blanket. Rub his hands, Cwicca, he's half-frozen."

Karli, supported on the stool, was pointing towards a mug. Osmod passed him the strong warmed beer, watched it go down in a dozen gulps. Karli finished, breathed out, sat up straighter.

"All right. I'll be all right in no time. Just cold and wet and dead-tired. But I've got news.

"First, Shef is alive, on Drottningsholm. The message he got was a trap but we got there just the same. So he's on the island, he's alive but he won't be much longer if he stays there. Trouble is, that queen of theirs is screwing him senseless and he won't leave. We're going to have to go and get him. But he won't come of his own free will and they've reinforced the guards over the bridges. And he's not the only one there who needs rescuing..."

Karli poured out his story to a ring of faces that grew grimmer as he went on. At the end Osmod silently passed him a refilled mug, looked at Cwicca, who as catapult-captain shared the leadership with him in Shef's absence.

"We've got to get him off. We could do it ourselves, but we'd never get away afterwards. That's what we've got to think about. Now, who in this place can we trust?"

"How about Hund the leech?" asked Cwicca.

Osmod considered a moment. "Yes, I'd like to have him with us. He's English, and he's the lord's oldest friend, and he's a Way-priest besides."

"Thorvin the priest, then?" suggested one of the hammer-wearers. Faces round him twisted dubiously. Cwicca shook his head.

"He's more loyal to the Way than he is to King Shef. This is Way business, somehow. You can't tell which road he'd turn."

"Can we trust any of these Norskers?" asked one of the others.

"Maybe Brand."

A pause while they thought it over. Finally, Osmod nodded. "Maybe Brand."

"Well, if we got him on our side, it's easy. He's nigh seven foot tall and built like a stone wall. He's the Champion of wherever-it-is, isn't he? He's just going to walk through them guards like piss through snow."

"I'm not so sure about that," muttered Osmod. "He got a sword right through his belly last year. They've patched him up, right. But they didn't patch his head up, did they? I don't know that he'd be champion of anywhere any more."

"Are you saying he's gone yellow?" asked Fritha, incredulous.

"No. But I'm saying he's got a bit careful, like he never was before. In this country full of berserks, or whatever they call 'em, that's almost the same thing."

"But you still think he'll help?"

"As long as we don't ask too much." Osmod looked round, frowning. "Seven of us here, and Karli. Where's Udd?"

"Where do you think? Now the water's running he's up at the mills, seeing how they work. Took a hunk of bread up as soon as light showed."

"Well, go and get him back, someone. The rest of you, listen. Because here's what we'll do..."

"...So that's our plan," concluded Osmod, looking grimly across the table at Brand. "And that's what we're going to do. The only question we've got for you is, are you in or are you out?"

Brand stared down consideringly. Though both men were sitting, Brand's face was still a foot above the Englishman's. It was a real surprise, he reflected, how these men of Shef's had changed. Everything in Brand's make-up, culture and experience had told him all his life that a slave was a slave and a warrior was a warrior, and there was no way of making the one into the other. A warrior could not be enslaved—or only with massive precautions, like those King Nithhad had taken for Völund, and look where that had got him. And slaves could not be made into warriors. Not only did they not have the skills, they didn't have the heart either. During the battles in England the year before Brand had revised his opinion, a little. Ex-slaves were useful, he concluded, for war-with-machines, because they could be made into machines themselves: doing what they were told, heaving on ropes and pulling toggles to order. That was all.

But now here was one not just making up a plan of his own, not just telling him, Brand, that he was going to do it, but defying Brand to stop him. The giant Halogalander felt a mixture of irritation, amusement, and something like—anxiety? Fear was not something he would ever readily admit to.

"Yes, I'm in," he said. "But I don't want my crew mixed up with it. And I don't want to lose my ship."

"We want to use your ship to get away in," said Osmod. "Sail back to England and get out of here."

Brand shook his head. "Not a chance," he said. "King Halvdan's got this coast sewed up as tight as a frog's ass. And the Walrus can't fight off one of his patrol ships, they're twice our size."

"Use the mule."

"You know how long that would take to ship, not just to carry, but to mount it so it can shoot. Anyway, any ship not specially designed will just fall to pieces if you shoot that thing off in it."

"So how do we get away after we've got King Shef back off this queen? Are you saying it can't be done?"

Brand chewed his lip. "We can do it. Maybe. Not by sea. I think the best thing is this. I'm going to invent an errand and get off now—say I'm going out in the hills for some sport, they'll believe that after a winter cramped up indoors. I'll buy horses for the lot of you. When you've done your bit, meet me at a place I'll tell you. Then we all have to ride like smoke till we're out of Halvdan and Olaf's territory—they won't know right off which way we've gone. Then we all cut across country to the Gula Fjord. My helmsman Steinulf will take over here for me. I dare say with the Way behind him, or anyway with Thorvin and Skaldfinn and their friends, he'll be able to get the Walrus free and take it round the coast to meet us. Even if there's trouble, Guthmund should be able to get away with the Seamew. All meet up at the Gula and head back to England, like you said."

"You don't want to be in on the attack?"

Brand shook his head silently. Osmod in his turn stared across the table. He too had always believed that a slave and a warrior were two different breeds, as different as sheep and wolves. Then he had found that given a reason and a fighting chance, he had wolf in him. Now he wondered about the giant figure facing him. This was a man famous even among the fierce, quarrelsome, everlastingly competitive heroes of the North. Why was he now standing out? Leaving the dangerous work to others? Was it right that a man who recovered from a wound that took him to the gates of death was never the same man again? He had stood by the door and felt the cold wind come through...

"You can leave that to us, then," said Osmod. "Us Englishmen," he added, rubbing the point in. "Do you think we can do it?"

"I think you can do it the way you said," replied Brand. "You Englishmen. What worries me is getting you all across the mountains to the Gula Fjord. You've only met the civilized Norwegians so far. The ones who live up in the back hills, where we're going—they're different."

"If we can handle King Halvdan's guards, we can handle them. And what about you? You're the champion of the men of Halogaland, aren't you?"

"I think taking you midgets across Norway will need a champion. I shall feel like a dog taking a troop of mice through Catland. They're going to think you people are just so many free dinners."

Osmod's lips compressed. "Show me where we are to meet you with the horses then, Lord Dog. I and the other mice will be there. Maybe with a few catskins."

The little convoy moving down to the bridge and the islands beyond it looked as ragged and unthreatening as it could be made. In the lead an old farm-horse pulling a battered cart, with one man walking by its side chirruping encouragingly to it. The cart's load was invisible, but a dirty tarpaulin held it all down, one end flapping loose. On the other side of the horse walked Udd, the smallest of the men, gaping near-sightedly at the horse-collar: a Norwegian invention which few Englishmen outside the catapult-teams had ever seen. It enabled a horse to pull twice the weight of the ox-style straight pole, and Udd, characteristically, had forgotten about the point of their journey in fascination at the new artifact.

Round and behind the cart straggled eight more men, the six remaining English catapulteers, Hund the leech, his white priest-clothes hidden under a gray mantle, and Karli. None carried a weapon in sight other than their belt-knives. Halberds were stowed inconspicuously on nails along the sides of the cart. The crossbows, already cocked, lurked under the loose tarpaulin.

As the cart dipped down to the shore, two guards by the side of the bridge straightened up, retrieved their javelins from the ground.

"Bridge is closed," one of them shouted. "Everyone's off the island. Can't you see the sun, nearly down?"

Osmod pushed forward, shouting indistinctly in poor Norse. There were six men on this post, he knew. He wanted them all outside. The man leading the horse joined in, continuing to walk forward.

One of the guards had had enough. He jumped back, javelin poised, shouted at the top of his voice. Other men came suddenly out of the hut to one side, handling axes, picking up shields. Four more of them, Osmod silently counted. That was right. He turned and raised a thumb to the others clustered round the cart.

In an instant the crossbows were out and leveled, six of them, with Udd slipping back to seize his and join in.

"Show 'em," said Osmod briefly.

Fritha, the marksman of the group, sighted and released. A sharp twang and an instantaneous thud. One of the men with shields gasped, his face suddenly white, stared down at the iron quarrel which had driven through his shield and deep into his upper arm. Fritha dropped the bow forward, thrust his foot into the stirrup, jerked over the goat's foot lever, dropped a second quarrel into place.

"You're all marked," called Osmod. "These bows will go through any shield or armor. You can't fight us. Only die. Drop what you're holding and go into the hut."

The guards looked at each other, brave men, but unnerved by the lack of face-to-face challenge, the threat of being shot down from a distance.

"You can keep your swords," offered Osmod. "Just drop those javelins. Go in the hut."

Slowly they dropped spears, shuffled backwards, watching their enemies, trooped into the guard-hut. Two Englishmen ran forward with bars, hammers, nails, quickly and roughly nailed bars across the door and the one shuttered window.

"We learnt something from King Shef," remarked Cwicca. "Always work out what you're going to do before you do it."

"They'll soon bust out," said Karli.

"Then they'll reckon they've got us trapped. That'll give us a bit more time."

The cart rolled on to the bridge, in winter logs embedded in ice, in summer with planks laid over the logs now floating. The men were carrying crossbows and halberds openly now, easy to see in the long Northern twilight. But there should be no-one to see or challenge till the other side of the first island and the next bridge.

Hearing the cart roll towards them, and knowing there should be no-one there, the pair of guards manning the second bridge had more warning and more time to decide what to do. Facing a line of crossbows, one of them immediately and sensibly turned and ran, hoping to get away and call for help. Aiming carefully, Fritha put a bolt through his thigh that brought him instantly down. The second man carefully grounded his weapon, eyes glaring vengefully.

Hund walked from his place at the rear to glance at the wound the crossbow-bolt had made, clicking his tongue at the spreading blood, the bolt buried firmly in bone.

Osmod joined him. "Nasty job getting that out," he remarked. "Still, better alive than dead, and the best leeches in the world over at the college at Kaupang."

Hund nodded. "You, fellow, when you take him to master Ingulf to have his leg mended, give him the regards of Hund the priest and say the Englishmen spared this man's life, at my urging. Till then, pad the wound, check the blood-flow." He showed his silver apple-pendant, sign of Ithun goddess of healing, and turned away.

The cart rolled over the second bridge, over the second island, and on to the final span to Drottningsholm. Occasionally looking behind them for signs of pursuit, the freedmen closed up. This time, they knew, they would have to fight.

The third guard post was the main one, a dozen men. They had already spent the day in serious anxiety, following the disappearance of their captain Stein. They had searched every part of the island for him except the queens' quarters, found nothing. They waited now only for word from King Halvdan before they searched the queens' hall too, but even so they did not expect to find him. They knew enemies were nearby, whether human killers or monsters from the deep. Some had seen a school of orcas cruise by, their great fins showing, and wondered if Stein had been fool enough to enter the water. The faint shouts they had heard from the brief clashes to the north had alarmed them further. As the cart and its escort came into view they moved on to the bridge to block it, four men abreast, three deep. From the rear rank an arrow flew, aimed at the horse's head. Whatever the cart and its cargo, they meant to block it. Wilfi, leading the horse still, now carried the new case-hardened shield. He lifted it, caught the shaft square on. It leapt back, point blunted.

Cwicca, Osmod, Hama and Lulla walked forward, halberds ready, dropped on one knee to make a hedge of points facing the Norsemen forty feet away. Four cross-bowmen stood behind them.

"Drop your weapons," shouted Osmod. He had no hope that his order would be obeyed. A dozen veteran warriors surrender to less than their own number of strangers? Their mothers would disown them. Yet Osmod felt at least a flicker of compunction about shooting men down who were all but helpless, helpless against weapons they did not understand. He waited for the bows to be bent, the javelins to poise before he shouted again.

"Shoot!"

Four crossbows twanged together. At forty feet, against standing targets, no-one could miss. The Viking front line collapsed, one man lifted off his feet by the impact of the bolt, many foot-pounds of energy stored in sprung steel and delivered in a moment. A man in the second line gasped and flinched as a bolt passed through the man in front and plowed up his rib-cage.

Another man broke from the pile of fallen round his feet and hurled himself forward, sword circling back for one mighty slash. Foam splattered his moustache as he ran, desperate for glory and for one blow. He called hoarsely on Othin as he came. A crossbow bolt from the near-sighted Udd hissed past one ear, another from the inexpert Karli flew over his head.

As he came within three strides Osmod straightened from his kneeling position, gripped his long halberd close to the base, thrust forward in a long point from low down. The charging warrior ran straight on to it, splitting his own heart on the leaf-blade, running forward with the last strength in his body till the cross-fixed axe-blade and spike stopped him short. His last breath left him with a grunt, his eyes stared forward in shock.

The sword fell from his hand, the life left him. Osmod twisted the shaft once, cleared his blade, withdrew, dropped back to kneel. A series of clicks behind him as the crossbows cocked again.

The six men in front of him broke and ran, four sideways along the shore, two away along the bridge to Drottningsholm. Osmod gestured briefly. "Put those two down," he said. "Let the others go."

Bodies were dragged aside, and the cart rolled forward for the last time, the old horse now encouraged into a trot, some of the Englishmen behind it walking backwards, alert for pursuit. Osmod and Cwicca jogged in front of the others, eyes probing in the dim light for what they had been told to expect.

"There," said Cwicca, pointing. "Tell Udd and Hund to secure the boat, they're easily spared. They only have to push it off and row it round the point."

Osmod called directions, and the two men broke away. "The rest of you, put your shoulders to the cart and get it up this slope. The hall's on the other side, and we have to hurry now."

Heaved on by the horse and eight men, the cart rocked up a brief slope, came through a copse of firs, and broke out into a clearing. In the center of it stood the Hall of the Two Queens, steep-roofed, ornately gabled, stags' antlers nailed up above the doorways. No sign of life except a frightened face peeping from behind a low shutter, but smoke seeped into the air from its one chimney.

The men swung the cart round so that its rear pointed at the hall, whipped away the tarpaulin, dropped the tilt, clustered round the squat bulk of the mule in the wagon-bed.

"Not there," called Karli. "That's the slaves' room you're pointing at. They'll have him there, in the private chamber. Train round right, right another six feet."

The ton-and-a-quarter mule could not be lifted from its bed without immense effort. Instead the horse-holder slowly shuffled the horse round, inching the cart sideways on its solid axles.

"On!" grunted Cwicca hoarsely, raising his arm in the team's well-practiced drill. Fritha the loader lifted a twenty-pound water-smoothed rock from the bed of the cart, fitted it into the sling. The crew, all but Cwicca and Hama the launch-man, vaulted over the sides of the cart. They had not shot their weapon, with its monstrous kick, from inside a confined space before, and were not sure what effect it would have.

Cwicca checked his target again, dropped his arm in the signal to shoot.

Shef lay back in the great feather bed, in complete relaxation. In all his life he had never spent so much time lying down before, except when he was bedridden with the marsh-fever. A man who was awake should be working, or eating, or at rare intervals merry-making. That was what everyone he knew believed. The idea of rest did not enter their minds.

They were wrong. A day and a night now, he had hardly stirred from the great bed, except to eat his meals. Even those had been brought to him by the slave-women during the day. He had never felt better.

But then maybe that was the queen. She too had come to him at frequent intervals during the day, more frequent than he had ever imagined possible. In Shef's stern and gloomy home, dominated by the pious, angry Wulfgar his stepfather, all forms of sexuality were forbidden to all on Sundays, on the eve of Sunday, during Lent, in the Advent season, during the fasts of the Church. The servants had evaded his rules, of course, and even more the village folk, but sexuality had taken on an air of furtiveness, something to be snatched, got over in between bouts of work, or between sleep and wake. Someone like Queen Ragnhild had been the stuff of dreams, beyond the imagination or experience of any village-youth.

And what he had done had been beyond his imagination too. In amazement, considering what he had already performed, Shef felt his flesh beginning to rise again at the thought of what he had seen and felt. Yet the queen would not return for a while, gone out, she said, to walk along the shore. Better to save his strength. Better to sleep again, warm and well-fed. As he closed his eyes and lay back against the duck-down bolster, Shef thought vaguely of Karli. Better see what he was doing. One of the slave-women would know. He had never asked their names. Strange. Perhaps he was beginning to behave like a king at long last.

In his dream, Shef was standing by a forge, as he had before. It was not the great forge of the gods of Asgarth, which he had once visited, yet it was like that forge in that the whole working space was littered with boxes, logs, rough tables. There were hand-holds nailed here and there to the wall.

They were there, Shef remembered, because this smith was lame. In the body he now inhabited, he remembered the keen pain as they slit his sinews with the knife, the laughing face of his enemy Nithhad, the promise Nithhad had made him.

"You will not run far now, Völund, with your hamstrings cut, neither on feet nor on skis, hunter of the forest. And cut sinew never grows back. Yet your hands are unharmed, and you still have your eyes. So work, Völund, mighty smith! Work for me, Nithhad, make me precious things by day and by night. For there is no escape for you by land or by water. And I promise you, husband of the Valkyrie though you are: if you do not earn your bread every day, you will feel the lash like the lowest dog of a Finn among my thralls!"

And Nithhad had had him trussed up then and there and given him a taste of the leather for proof. Still Völund remembered the pain in his back, the shame of being beaten without reply, the glittering eyes of Nithhad's queen as she watched. His wife's ring had glinted on her finger as she did so, for they had robbed him as well as mutilated him.

Shef-who-was-now-Völund beat furiously on the red iron as he remembered, not trusting himself in this mood with copper or silver or the red gold that Nithhad demanded most.

As he limped and heaved himself from side to side he saw bright eyes watching him. Four of them. The two young sons of Nithhad, come to see the fire and the clangor and the sparkling jewels. Völund paused, looked at them. Nithhad let them come freely, sure that his slave could never escape, sure too that no matter how crazy he was for revenge, Völund would never take a revenge for which he could not escape retaliation. In the belief of the North, that would be exchanging one for two, neither sensible nor honorable. A revenge was no revenge unless it was complete.

High above, in the rafters to which his great smith's arms could swing him, lay the wings Völund had made: the magic wings to take him away. But first the revenge. The complete revenge.

"Come and see," called Völund to the watching faces. "See what I have in my chest here."

He reached inside it, pulled out a chain of gold links with a jewel between each one, red, blue and green in complex pattern. "Or see this." He showed for an instant a box of walrus ivory with carved scenes upon it, inlaid with silver. "See, in the chest, there is much besides. Come, look in the chest, just peep over the side if you dare."

Slowly the two boys came out into the light of the fire, holding each other's hands. One was six, the other four, the children of Nithhad and his second wife, the enchantress, far younger than their half-sister, the maiden. Böthvild who also came to eye him sometimes from the shadows. They were fine boys, shy but friendly, not yet spoilt by their father's greed, their mother's cunning. One of them had given him an apple the day before, saved from his own meal.

Völund waved them over, opened the chest, held its massive lid open with one hand. He was careful to hold it by the handle. Many an hour had he spent, in time stolen from sleep, welding on the edge to it, the sharpest edge he had ever made in his life. They were good children, and he did not wish them to feel pain.

"Come, see!" he said again. They peered over, squeaking like mice with excitement. Their necks were over the iron lip of the chest. Völund, cruel man that he was, averted his eyes as he prepared to slam down the lid...

I do not want to be in this body, thought Shef, fighting against the god's fingers that held him firmly, forced him to watch. Whatever lesson I am being taught, I do not want to learn it.

As he began in some unknown way to squirm free he saw another sight, far below the forge, somewhere in the deep rocky bowels, not of Middle-earth, but of the walls that surround the Nine Worlds of men and gods and giants together. A great figure, with the savage unpredictable face of a god, chained with monstrous fetters to the foundations of the universe. A great serpent hissing and spitting venom in its face, the face contorted with pain and yet still aware, still thinking, still looking beyond the pain.

The figure was the chained god Loki, Shef realized, whom the Way-priests believed had been bound and tormented by his father Othin for the murder of his brother Balder. Yet who would break free and return to revenge himself on gods and men, with his monster-children on the Last Day itself. The enormous staple on one wrist-fetter had been pulled almost free from the wall, Shef saw. When it came loose Loki would have one hand free to throttle the tormenting serpent sent by his father Othin. Already he seemed free enough to beckon, to be signaling to his allies, the monster-broods in the forests and in the depths of the sea. For an instant his furious eyes seemed to look from his prison up towards Shef.

As he tore himself away again Shef felt one more trickle of the thoughts of Völund.

Do the deed, they ran. Do it now. And then, then to scoop out the skulls and carve them like walrus ivory, then to polish the teeth till they shine like pearls, then to take the glistening eyeballs from their orbits...

Back in his own body again, Shef felt a monstrous slam, saw for an instant a sharpened lid swinging down.

The slam was real. He could feel the tremors of it still shaking the bed. Shef kicked his feet free of the linen sheet and woolen blanket, leapt from the bed, lunged for tunic, breeches and shoes. Was this the queen's husband come for him?

The door swung open and the boy Harald rushed in. "Mother! Mother!" He stopped as he saw only Shef sitting on his mother's bed. Without a pause he pulled his little eating-knife from his belt and lunged at Shef's throat.

Shef parried the blow, caught the thin wrist, twisted away the knife, ignored the furious kicks and punches from the free hand. "Easy, easy," he said. "I was just waiting here. What is happening outside?"

"I don't know. Men with a—with something that throws rocks. The wall is all smashed in."

Shef let the boy go, darted through the door from the bedchamber to the queens' parlor. As he did so a concerted charge smashed down the door from the main hall, and a wave of men poured in, knives drawn and crossbows pointed. Shef recognized Cwicca at the same moment that they recognized him, began to step forward waving his arms frantically for them to stop.

Karli sprang out of the ruck and came forward, shouting something inaudible in the din of voices.

"There's no need for it!" Shef bellowed back. "I'm all right. Tell them all to stop."

Karli laid a hand on his arm, trying to drag him towards the door. Furiously, Shef threw it off, realized at once that Karli meant to knock him unconscious once more. He dodged the left lead, got a hand up in time to block the right swing, ducked his head into Karli's already-broken nose and grappled his arms, trying to prevent him getting in a clear blow. As they struggled, Shef felt other hands on him, arms and legs, men trying to pick him up bodily and carry him off like a sack. He heard a voice gasp in his ear, "Hit him with the sandbag, Cwicca, he won't stop fighting."

Shef dropped Karli, swung the men holding his arms into each other, trampled his way free of the man clutching his leg, filled his lungs for another and more commanding bellow.

Behind him, the old queen Asa had also entered the room. One of the English raiders stood goggling at the struggle in front of him, unable to bring himself to join in and lay hands on his master. Seizing the iron stake by which she summoned her slaves, the old queen struck him smartly over the head, snatched the seax-knife from his belt as he slumped. Took three quick hobbling paces towards Shef, the cuckolder of her son and danger to her grandson, still standing unawares with his back to her.

At the same moment the little boy Harald, also standing staring at the struggle, felt the prompting of generations of warrior-ancestors. With a shrill cry he too raised his knife again and ran forward to attack the invaders of his hall. As he ran past Shef at a line of grown men, Shef scooped him up and hugged him to his own body, wrapping both arms round him to prevent his struggles. He tried to shout again, "Everybody just stand still!"

The faces confronting him turned to alarm, men started to spring forward. Shef turned with the speed he had learned in the wrestling ring, Harald still clutched to his body.

Queen Asa thrust savagely upwards with the broad-bladed knife. Shef felt a thud, a prick of pain over his ribs. Looked down at the boy in his arms. Saw him turn up his face, start to ask some disbelieving question. Saw the knife driven clean through the boy's heart and body. The knife in the hands of his grandmother.

Somewhere, again, Shef heard a lid slam. Slam again and again.

The room had gone completely still and silent. Shef released his grip, slowly straightened the small body out, laid it on the ground.

As he looked down, his eyes seemed for a moment to blur. He seemed to be looking not at the slight shape of a ten-year old, but at a grown man, tall and burly, with a mane of hair and beard.

This was Harald Fairhair, said a cold, amused, familiar voice. Harald Fairhair as he would have been. You are his inheritor now. You inherited his treasure from King Edmund, and paid with your youth. You inherited his luck from King Alfred, and paid with your love. Now you inherit destiny from King Harald. What will you pay with this time? And do not try to shirk my visions again.

The moment passed. Shef was once more in the parlor, staring down at a bloodstained shape. Harald was dead now. Shef had felt the life go. Arms were at his shoulders again, hustling him away, and this time he did not resist. Behind him Queen Asa took slow step after slow step towards the body of her grandson, reaching out a tentative, shaking hand. Shef lost sight of her as they ran him through the door into the hall, out through the main door shattered by the catapult-stone, into the open.

Outside the hubbub broke out again, someone shouting, "But she's still got my knife," other voices snarling at him, Osmod counting, "Seven, eight, nine, all right, that's the lot, get moving." Cwicca appeared from somewhere with a firebrand and the barrel of dry kindling the slaves used, hurled first one and then the other into the cart, watched the flame spread as he slashed the horse free of its traces.

"They won't get our mule," he shouted.

"What are you doing with those women?" Osmod shouted as Karli came into the light, a woman in each hand and two more running anxiously behind him.

"They've got to come with us."

"It's only a six-oar boat, there's no room."

"They have to come. Especially now the boy's dead. Their throats will be cut at his burial."

Osmod, ex-slave himself, argued no more. "All right, move it."

In an untidy stream nine men and four women ran down the path leading to the little beach where Martha had killed Stein only the evening before, Cwicca and Osmod bringing up the rear, crossbows raised. Half way down it, Shef heard a great shriek split the air behind him. Ragnhild returned from her walk along the shore. Behind it, men's voices shouting. The guardsmen they had left behind, rallied and anxious to avenge their defeats.

The run turned into a headlong dash, each person making for the beach and the boat they could see waiting, Udd and Hund with oars poised ready to shove off. Men and women poured over the thwarts, seized oars or were pushed out of the way. The overloaded boat jammed on the shingle, Shef and Karli leaped out again and heaved it bodily out six feet, ten, till the beach shelved away and they were dragged in over the sides, only inches above the water. Six men found their places, braced their feet, took one pull, another, as Osmod hoarsely called the time.

Framed by the light from the now fiercely-burning cart, Shef saw the figure of Queen Ragnhild walking down the beach, her arms stretched out. Arrows from the men behind her skipped over the water, but Shef ignored them, waved down the crossbows poised to answer.

"Luckstealer!" she cried. "Bane of my son. May you be the bane of all those around you. May you never know woman again. May no son succeed you."

"It wasn't his fault," muttered Wilfi from the bow, rubbing his head where the iron stake had split it. "It was that daft old woman who took my knife."

"Shut up about your knife," growled Fritha, "you should have held on to it."

As the bickering continued, the boat pulled steadily away into the black dark, waiting for concealment before bending round away from Halvdan's cruisers to the mainland no more than a short mile off.

Shef stared over the stern till he could see no longer, at the woman still raving and weeping by the shore.

Chapter Fifteen

Alfred, King of the West-Saxons, co-ruler with the absent King Shef of all the English counties south of the Trent, watched his young bride with slight nervousness as she walked the last few steps to the top of the hill overlooking Winchester. There was some chance—the leeches could not yet be sure—that she might be carrying his child already, and he feared she might overtax her strength. He knew though that she hated protection, held his tongue.

She reached the top, turned and looked out over the valley. It was already a mass of white blossom, where the Hampshire churls had planted the apple trees for their beloved cider. On the broad fields the other side of the stockaded town teams could be seen plowing, men following the slow oxen up and down the furrows; very long furrows because it took the eight-beast teams so long to make a turn. Alfred followed her gaze, pointed to a spot in the middle distance.

"Look," he said, "there is a team plowing with four horses, not eight oxen. It is on your own estate. Wonred the reeve saw the horse-collars the men of the Way used for their catapult-teams, and said he would try it for plowing. He says horses eat more than oxen, but if they are hitched properly they are stronger and faster and do much more work. He says he is going to start breeding horses for size and strength as well. And there is an advantage no-one thought of. It takes a good part of a churl's day to get out to the further fields and back if he is leading a yoke of oxen. With the horses they ride but and back, so they have more time in the fields."

"Or more time to rest, I hope," said Godive. "One reason poor churls live so little time is that they have no rest but Sunday, and the Church takes that."

"Used to take that," corrected Alfred. "Now it is up to the churl."

He hesitated a moment, patted her shoulder gently. "It is working, you know," he said. "I don't think any of us ever realized how rich a country can be if it is left at peace, with no masters. Or only a master who cares for the country. But the good news comes in every day. What King Shef, your brother, told me is perfectly correct. There is always someone who knows an answer, but nearly always it is someone whom no-one has ever asked before. I had a group of miners visit me yesterday, men from the lead mines in the hills. They used to be owned by the monks at Winchcombe. Now the monks have gone, they work the mines themselves, for my reeve and the alderman of Gloucester. They told me that the old Rome-folk used to mine silver in the same hills, and that they think they could do the same.

"Silver," he mused. "If the black monks had known that, they would have whipped their slaves till they died in search of it. So the slaves did not tell them. They tell me because they know I will give them a share. And with new silver—it is not long ago that every time we minted the money was worse, and soon Canterbury money would have been as bad as York. Now, with the silver I put back from the Church hoards, a Wessex penny is as good as any in Frankland or the German lands beyond. And the traders come in from everywhere, from Dorestad and Compostella, and the Franklands too if they can evade their own king's ban. They all pay harbor-dues, and I use it to pay my miners. The traders are happy, and the miners are happy, and I am happy too.

"So, Godive, you see that things are not as bad as they were, even for the churls. It may not seem much, but a horse to ride and a full belly even in Lent is happiness to many."

A bell began to chime from the Old Minster in the town below, its strokes ringing out over the steep valley. Ringing for a bridal, probably: the priests who remained in Wessex had found that if they were to keep any worshipers for the White Christ they had to use their assets of music and ritual, more impressive still than the strange tales of the Way-missionaries from the North.

"It still rests on war, though," she replied.

Alfred nodded. "It always did. I saw this valley a desolation of burnt fields when I was a boy. The Vikings took the town and burnt every house in it except the stone Minster. They would have pulled that down if they had had time. We fought them then and we fight them still. The difference is that now we fight them at sea, so the land is spared. And the more it is spared the stronger we are, and the weaker they grow."

He hesitated again. "Are you missing your—your brother? I know well that all this goes back to him. If it had not been for him I would have been dead, or a penniless exile, or at best a puppet-king with Bishop Daniel holding my strings. Or some Viking jarl, maybe. I owe him everything." He patted her hand. "Even you."

Godive dropped her eyes. Her husband always referred to Shef, now, as her brother, though she knew that he knew that there was no blood relationship between them, that they were stepbrother and stepsister only. Sometimes she thought that Alfred had realized the truth of their relationship, maybe the truth too that her first husband had really been her half-brother. But if he suspected, he was careful to ask no further. He did not know that she had miscarried twice, deliberately, while she had been first married, taking the dangerous birth-wort. If she had believed in any god, the Christian one or the strange pantheon of the Way, she would have prayed to him or them for a safe delivery for what might now be in her womb.

"I hope he is alive."

"At least no-one has seen him dead. All our traders know there is a reward for any news, and a greater one for the man who brings him back."

"Not many kings would pay to have a rival return," said Godive.

"He is no rival to me. My rivals are across the Channel there, or up in the North working mischief. It looks safe as we sit on this hill and look over the fields. I tell you, I would feel twenty times safer if Shef were back in England. He is our best hope. The churls call him sigesaelig, you know, the Victorious."

Godive squeezed her husband's arm. "They call you Alfred esteadig. The Gracious. That is a better name."

In the great tent of striped canvas many days' march and sail to the north, the conference was less happy. The tent had been pitched with its rear into the wind, and the front wall brailed up so the men inside it could also look out. They looked out over a drear landscape of moor and heather, marked here and there by columns of smoke rising, the marks of the harrying parties coming down on one clump of wretched bothies or another. The three Ragnarssons left alive sat on their camp stools, ale-horns in hand. Each had a weapon stuck into the ground beside him, spear or spiked axe, as well as their swords belted on. Twice already that spring, since the battle off the Elbe, one jarl or another had tried to challenge their authority. Sensitive as cats to the constant ebb and flow of reputation on which power rested, all three knew they had to offer their followers a scheme. A bribe. A proposition. Or there would be tents struck in the night, ships missing at the next rendezvous, men gone to try their fortune in the service of some sea-king better favored by luck.

"This is keeping the lads busy," said the grizzled Ubbi, nodding at the smoke-columns. "Good beef, good mutton, women to run down. No casualties to speak of."

"No money," completed Halvdan. "No glory either."

Sigurth the Snake-eye knew his brothers were just setting the problem up for him to deal with, not offering a criticism. The brothers never fought, hardly ever disagreed. Their relationship had survived even the psychotic Ivar. The other two waited for him to respond.

"If we go south again," he said, "we run into those rock-throwers again. We can sail rings round them, we know that. But they have the advantage now. They know we're up here in Scotland, because they kept us out of the Channel. All they have to do is harbor somewhere on the coast near their northern border, wherever they choose to draw it. If we sail down-coast, they hit us. If we go round them—and we don't know where they are—they get to hear about it, come down after us, and hit us in harbor, wherever we are. The risk is either meeting them at sea, or getting our ships battered to bits while we're on land. We might end up having to cut our way from coast to coast. And I don't think any of the lads, however big they talk, fancies meeting the rock-throwers at sea again. You can't fight standing on a bundle of planks."

"So we're beat," nudged Ubbi. All three men laughed.

"Maybe what we need is some rock-throwers of our own," suggested Halvdan. "That's what Ivar thought. He made that little black-robed bastard, what was his name? Erkinbjart? He made him make some. Pity the little bastard got away."

"That's for next year," said Sigurth. "Can't change horses in mid-stream, and for this year we have to go with what we have. This year we'll pass the word in the slave-markets that we pay high prices for men who can shoot these throwers. Someone will bring one in. And if they can shoot them they can build them. Put someone like that together with a real ship-builder, and we'll have something that can outsail those clumsy English tubs and outfight them too.

"But right now we need something to put heart into our lot and silver into their pouches. Or the hope of silver in their heads, anyway."

"Ireland," suggested Halvdan.

"We'd have to go north about round the tip of Scotland now, the place will be aswarm with Norwegians before we get there."

"Frisia?" offered Ubbi doubtfully.

"Poor as Scotland, only flatter."

"That's the islands. How about the mainland? Or we could try Hamburg again. Or Bremen."

"That hasn't been lucky water for us this year," said Sigurth. His brothers nodded, both of them showing their teeth in involuntary snarl. They remembered the humiliation on the sandbank, coming back from a fruitless hunt with no quarry and a man missing. The humiliation of being outmaneuvered, so that they had to stand back from a challenge from a single man.

"But I think that's the right idea," said Sigurth. "Or nearly the right idea. We'll keep the lads busy over here for a few weeks yet, give this whole country a complete shaking. Let them know they just have to enjoy themselves, there's something bigger coming. Then we'll go back across the North Sea, direct crossing, head for the granite isles."

His brothers nodded, knowing he meant the islands of the North Frisians, facing the Ditmarsh, Fohr and Amrum and Sylt, three islands of rock amid a waste of shifting sands.

"Then we go down the Eider and hit Hedeby."

Halvdan and Ubbi stared at each other, considered. "They're our own people," said Halvdan. "Sort of. Anyway, they're Danes."

"So what? Have they done us any favors? That fat trader-king Hrorik wouldn't even sell the man we want to Skuli. He let the Way-priests take him off to their bolt-hole."

"Maybe we ought to hit them instead."

"Right. What I'm thinking," said Sigurth, "is if England is ruled out for us right now, we'll find better returns in our own countries than foraging round these poor places. Riskier, I know. But if we take Hedeby and Hrorik's gold, then there'll be all the more to support us if we go for Halvdan and his idiot brother Olaf. Sure, there'll always be some who'll drop out, got a brother in Kaupang or a father in Hedeby. Plenty left. And the ones we beat in one place will join us for the next place."

"Roll up the North first," said Halvdan. "Set you in place as the One King of all the Northlands. Then come back to the South."

"With a thousand keels, and rock-throwers in the front of them," amplified Ubbi.

"To finish the Christians once and for all..."

"To fulfill our Bragi-boast long ago..."

"To get revenge for Ivar."

Halvdan got up, drained his horn, pulled his spiked beard-axe out of the ground. "I'll go round the tents," he said. "Drop a few hints. Say we've got a plan, and everyone will get a shock when they know it. Keep them quiet just a few weeks longer."

Erkenbert the deacon stood inside a great ring of ancient stones. It was the doom-ring of the Smaaland peoples, the Little Countries between Danish Skaane and the giant confederacy of the Swedes extending hundreds of miles to the north, a country with many kings striving always to establish one Sveariki, one empire of the Swedes. It was the Smaalanders' spring assembly, when men came out of their snowed-in cabins and began to prepare for the short but welcome summer.

Erkenbert had carefully dyed his worn black robe so that it shone even blacker, a violent contrast with the furs and homespuns that surrounded him. His attendant had also once more shaved every inch of his tonsure, so that the bald ring on his head stood out even more strongly. "We don't want to hide away," Bruno had said. "That's the old style. Trying to get by on sufferance. We want them to see us. Get Christianity in their faces." Erkenbert had meditated a sharp reply on the virtue of humility, but had withdrawn. For one thing few men any longer cared to answer back to the Master of the Lanzenorden, as men were already calling him. For another Erkenbert could see the sense in the policy.

The Smaalanders were selling off slaves, as usual. Mere bags of bones, most of them, ill-fed during the winter and now a doubtful speculation for the summer and the work-period. The emissaries of the Uppsala king Orm were buying the cheapest, as usual. Don't bother with most of them, Bruno had said. Funds are low. But this one he had to have.

A burly farmer pushed forward into the ring as his turn came, towing with him in one fist an emaciated figure. The slave was dressed in no more than tatters, and shook uncontrollably with cold. Through the rags his ribs showed. A cough racked his body every few seconds, and he stank of the midden where he had slept for warmth.

A chorus of jeers greeted the arrival, from the seller's neighbors. "What do you want for him, Ami? If he was a chicken you'd have to use him for soup. Even the Swedes won't take him. He won't live till the next sacrifice."

Ami glared round indignantly. His eye fell on Erkenbert advancing deliberately across the sale-ground. Erkenbert walked composedly up to the thin man, put his arms round him, held him closely.

"Don't worry, sirra, we have heard of you, we are here to rescue you."

The stink attacked Erkenbert's nostrils, but he bore it, remembering the Book of Job. The thin man began to weep, causing a fresh barrage of jeers and hooting from the crowd.

"How can you rescue me, they will take you too, they are animals, they care nothing for the rights of God..."

Gently Erkenbert disengaged himself, pointed behind him to the group from which he had come. Ten Ritter of the Lanzenorden stood in a double line, every man mailed, helmeted, with metal gauntlets shining. In each man's right hand was a short pike, butt on the ground, point forward at exactly the same angle. "These people are good warriors," Bruno had said. "But they have no discipline. We will show them some. It keeps them uncertain."

"What do you want for this man?" said Erkenbert, speaking loudly so the watchers could hear.

Ami, a devout disciple of Frey, spat on the ground. "To you, Christling, twenty ounces of silver."

Derision from the crowd. Eight ounces was a good price for a man in full vigor, twelve for a pretty girl.

"I will give you four," shouted Erkenbert, still playing to the crowd. "You have saved the other sixteen on food and clothes over the winter."

Ami did not see the joke. Face purpling, he strode forward towards the much smaller man.

"Shaveling! Four ounces! You have no rights here. By the law of the Smaalanders any man who catches a Christ-priest has the right to enslave him. What is to hinder me from taking you and your four ounces."

"You have the right to enslave a Christ-priest," replied Erkenbert unmoved. "Do you have the strength?"

At the psychological moment the uncanny shape of Bruno made its way out of the crowd, from the point opposite the watching ranks of the Ritters. He pushed gently through the watching men, edging them aside with his ape-like shoulders. He carried no pike, but wore the same armor as his men. His left hand rested on the pommel of his trailing, over-length sword.

Arni glared round him, observing the sudden silence, realizing that in an instant he had become the one under test. He tried to rally the crowd round him.

"Are we going to take this? Are we going to let these men come in here and steal our slaves away?"

"They're paying cash," observed a voice from the crowd.

"And what will they do with the men they take? Such as these—" Beside himself with fury, Arni turned and cuffed his slave violently across the side of the head, sending him sprawling and weeping to the ground. "Such as these should go to the groves of Uppsala, as a sacrifice to the true gods, not go back to preach more lies about sons of virgins and the dead risi—"

Ami's voice cut off in mid-syllable. Moving like the tufted lynx of the forests, Bruno had covered the four paces between them. His hand shot out faster than anyone could see. But they could all see now that his gauntleted fingers had closed on the throat-ball, the Adam's apple of the Smaalander, held it in steel pincers. He lifted slightly, and the farmer rose on struggling tiptoe.

"Filth," said Bruno. "You have laid hands on the servant of the living God. You have spoken blasphemy against our faith. I will not kill you in the doom-ring, where blood must not be shed, but do you care to meet me in the dueling-ground, with sword and buckler, or axe and spear, or any weapon you care to choose?"

Unable to move or speak, the farmer goggled helplessly.

"I thought not." Bruno released him, turned on his heel, barked a command. In one drilled movement the front rank of his Ritters stamped forward, paces one-two-three, stood at attention once more. "Continue with the sale."

"Four ounces," Erkenbert repeated. We mustn't rob them, Bruno had said, or they will fight. But we don't have to pay over the odds either. Still, we must rescue Sirra Eilif the priest. Only he knows anything of the kings in the back country behind Birka. We need him to help us with our search. I am anxious to hear more of this King Kjallak they speak of, from up on the borders of Iron-bearing Land.

Massaging his throat, the farmer wondered whether he dared hold out for more, met Erkenbert's black hostile eyes, decided he did not. He nodded.

Erkenbert threw a small purse at his feet, took Eilif the priest gently by one arm, withdrew with him to the ranks of the Ritter, now joined once more by Bruno. The priest and the deacon moved to the security of the central file, Bruno snapped commands, the armored men sloped their pikes and marched away, feet slamming down together like a single man.

The Swedes and Smaalanders watched them go, turned again to their business.

"What did you think of that?" said one tall Swede to another.

"Think of that? That's the bastard who killed King Orm's man at Hedeby. He must make a habit of this. I don't know what he wants, but I'll tell you this. We're seeing some new kind of Christian."

The other nodded thoughtfully, looked round to see if any might overhear. "If there's a new kind of Christian around, maybe we all need a new kind of king to deal with them."

Chapter Sixteen

Brand had protested briefly and furiously at the unexpected appearance of four women from the boat. Not enough horses. We'll have to leave them. When they told him what had happened on Drottningsholm his protests ceased. "We'd better get out of here," was all he said. "Now his son is dead Halvdan won't rest till everyone involved is dead as well. Or he is. I don't think he'll touch my crew, or not till he finds out that I left with you. But we have to be out of the Westfold faster than anyone has ever left before. You drop behind—you're left behind."

Shef said nothing to all this. Stumbled as he walked with his dark thoughts still on the island. And the dead boy. Some part of him was still trapped back there, sealed between the warm thighs, engulfed by large breasts.

They had set off along a path that led directly up into the mountains, twisting and winding through the everlasting dark pine- and fir-forest. Ten Englishmen, four women, Karli and Brand, with a dozen horses between them. And deadly pursuit sure to follow them in the morning.

Yet almost from the start it seemed that Brand's fears had less ground than he thought. One of the ex-slaves, Wilfi, had said immediately that in his life in England he had been a forerunner, the slave sent on ahead of his master when his master travelled, to see to his lodging and food at every halt. Running forty miles a day, Wilfi said, was as easy to him as walking twenty to another man. He needed no horse. The women rode double, or else one would ride while the men took turns trotting at their side with a hand on the saddle.

It was a long night's riding, dawn was slow in coming. At first light Brand called a halt to cook, water the horses at a stream, and give the mountain ponies a chance to forage in the new swift-growing grass. The slaves quickly built a fire, crushed grain and made their everlasting porridge. Then they were ready to start again while Brand was still groaning and massaging his stiff thigh-muscles. When he looked round in surprise at the column already forming up, Osmod told him with a certain relish: "You forget, master. A slave has to go on whether he wants to or not. It is free men who have to be persuaded, or think a blister, or hunger or thirst are good enough excuses to stop."

And Vikings, fast movers though they might be by the leisurely standards of the armies of the Christian West, were seamen or ski-runners rather than horsemen. For all his urgency it was Brand who held the party up. No horse the party had could carry his giant frame for long. During the long day that followed the long night, Osmod finally took charge, reorganized the mounts so that each man or woman in the party took a turn on foot as well as riding, and told Brand to take two horses, riding one and leading the other in turn, or else, on the flatter and broader stretches, running between the two with a great arm hooked over each saddle-pommel.

"Will we make it?" Cwicca asked finally when they stopped for a second time, to hobble the horses in a patch of thick new growth. The rest of the party listened anxiously for the answer. Brand looked round, tried to estimate where they were and how far they had come.

"I think so," he said. "We have come faster than I thought possible. And we must have had a start anyway, since Halvdan did not know which way we went."

"He'll find out, though?" queried Cwicca.

"There'll be riders out now to tell him who is moving through his territory. But they have to reach him, get his orders, come back and try to carry them out. All that time we're heading the other way. Three more stages like the two we've done and we're out of the Westfold. Won't stop Halvdan sending killers after us, but he can't order anyone to block the road."

"But we're not taking any risks," said Osmod. "As soon as the horses have eaten their fill, we move on."

"We have to sleep sometime," protested Brand.

"Not for days yet. When people start falling off their horses, then we can sleep. Or else tie them on."

The party pushed on again, wearily, with aching feet and grumbling bellies. But never a word of complaint. The women led the way, looked back sharply at the slightest sign of flagging.

Slowly, though, they began to realize that the real threat lay not behind them but in front. In mountainous and little-traveled Norway, all roads and paths went naturally through every farmstead on the route. A chance for the isolated farm-folk to hear news or to give it, a chance for the traveling peddlers to sell their clothes or wine or salt. To begin with, at every farmstead they came to, Brand had bargained for extra horses, buying one here and two there till the party were fully mounted with animals to spare. Yet though he paid immediately in good silver pennies, the farmers seemed loath to sell. "I'm being too quick," he explained. "They want me to hang around and bargain for half a day. Nothing much happens up here. They like to spin things out. Paying the price asked and moving on—it doesn't seem honest to them. Anyway, it's natural they're going to wonder who we are. Ten midgets who can't speak the language properly, four women in slave-gear, one man in a dream"—he pointed at the unspeaking Shef—"and me. They're bound to be uneasy. I told you, I'm taking a bunch of mice through Catland."

Trouble stirred first the day after Brand declared them free of the Westfold. They had crossed a watershed and were winding their way down through a steep valley, water rushing down on both sides of it, and animals newly-released from their indoor winter pens grazing gratefully wherever the new grass showed. The party came down, as they had a dozen times before, on a farmstead, a cluster of buildings arranged in a rough square. Work had stopped immediately as the men of the farm moved over to inspect the new arrivals, to exchange words with Brand, to call out the women and children. Slowly Shef, his mind still turning continually over the little boy who had died in his arms, realized that the mood at this farmstead was somehow different. The menfolk were not just uneasy or suspicious, they were amused. They had come to some kind of conclusion. Shef looked round more alertly. How many of them were there? Were there still as many as there had been at the start? How many in his own party?

A shriek came suddenly from behind the cow-byre. A voice calling out in English. Edith's voice, the youngest and prettiest of the women. Without words Cwicca, Osmod and the rest seized their crossbows and streamed towards it, Brand, Shef and the farm-folk following at a run.

As they came round the corner of the barn they saw two Norsemen holding Edith. One held her from behind, trying to clamp a hand over her mouth. The other had hold of one leg, was trying to grasp the other. As he heard feet behind him, the second man let go, turned.

"She's used to it," he said. "Look at her. Just a whore of a slave. Does it all the time. Why shouldn't we get a turn too?"

"She's no slave," snapped Osmod. "And she never was your slave."

"Who are you to say?" The other farm men, half a dozen of them, had come round now, were siding with him and the other man still clutching Edith. "She has no rights here. Nor have you. If I say you're a slave you'll soon be one."

Shef pushed his way forward, made the Norseman meet his eye. They were not in danger here, he knew, or at least no immediate danger. He had heard the crossbows click, and though the Norsemen had axes and knives to hand, they would be riddled before they had a chance to use them. But if they did that, even if they killed every man, even if they Skilled every woman and child as well, as Viking raiders would have done in England, still the news would go out and a hue and cry raised. These men had to be made to back down. But they had decided, in their unthinking way, that they were dealing with lesser beings.

"Just leave us this one," suggested the Norseman, "and the rest of you can ride on."

Edith screamed from behind the covering hand, thrashed violently. She thinks we might just do it, thought Shef.

Brand stepped from behind him, the axe he had taken from his saddle sliding through his massive palm. It was a mighty weapon, the haft a three-foot shaft of ash, the curved convex edge a foot long from horn to horn. The iron head was inlaid with serpent-patterns in silver, the welded steel blade flashing bright against the darker iron. A long spike jutted from the back of the head, for balance, and for the back-stroke. It was the weapon of a champion.

"Let her go," he said. "Unless you want to fight me. All of you, or one at a time. I don't care."

The Norseman who had spoken first looked up at him. He was not as big as Brand—no-one Shef had ever seen was—but once again Shef realized what giants the Norwegians were. The Norseman was a good four inches taller than Shef himself, far broader and heavier. He was considering the challenge, Shef realized. Was it worth it? What was the risk?

Brand flicked his axe into the air, let it twirl over and over, caught it without glancing up.

The Norwegian nodded slowly. "All right. Thorgeir, let her go. I don't think she's worth it. This time. But someone will catch you before you get out of the mountains, big man. Then we'll see why you're running slaves through the Buskerud. Slave-blood in you too, maybe."

Shef saw Brand's knuckles whiten on the axe-handle at the insult, but he made no move. Edith, released, ran instantly to the center of the group that faced her, crossbows cocked and leveled. Slowly, facing outwards, the women, the Englishmen and Brand retreated to their horses, silently gathered up their possessions. Two of the horses were missing, stolen during the brief confrontation.

"Don't fuss about it," muttered Brand. "Just get going and keep going." The column wound through the farm-buildings and middens. A child threw a clod of earth after them as they left, and then the rest joined in, mingling earth and stones with taunts and jeers that followed them half a mile on their way.

The party camped that night in more comfort than ever before, spreading out their meager supply of blankets and taking time to cook the salt meat and dried onions they had bought a day before. But they ate silently and anxiously. A sentry remained on his feet all the time, watching the trail before and behind them.

As the others rolled themselves up to sleep, Osmod and Cwicca came over to sit next to Shef and the still-silent Brand.

"We're not going to get very far like this," said Osmod. "The news will go ahead of us, along paths we don't know. We could have trouble at every farmstead. If there's a village or a town it could be worse."

"I told you," Brand replied. "Like taking a nest of mice through Catland."

"We were relying on our dog," said Cwicca.

Shef looked at Brand with instant alarm. He had seen Brand challenged or provoked several times during the campaigning winter, in the camps round York or East Anglia. Provoked a good deal more gently or carefully than this, and by men many times more formidable than Cwicca. The response every time had been the instant blow or grapple: a broken arm, a man knocked senseless. This time Brand sat motionless, seemingly deep within himself.

"Yes," said Brand finally. "You were relying on me. You still can rely on me. I gave my word to see you through to the Gula Fjord, and I will do my best to keep that word. But there's something you ought to know. I know it now, if I didn't before.

"I have been a warrior for twenty-five winters. If I were to count up the men I have killed or the battles I have seen—well, it would sound like a saga of one of King Hrolf's champions, or of old Ragnar Hairy-Breeks himself. In all that time no-one can say I ever turned tail, or held back when the spears crossed."

He looked round fiercely. "You have seen that! I should not need to boast here.

"But the fight with Ivar took something out of me. I have been wounded many times, and left for dead more than once. I never felt in my own heart that I was dead. When Ivar dodged my blow and got his sword through me I felt the blade in my guts, and I knew, I knew that even if I could get myself off it and live that day, then I would die within two more. I knew. It took less time than a heartbeat, but I could never forget it. Not even after Hund over there sewed up my torn guts and my belly and nursed me through the fever and the draining pus. I am as strong as ever I was now. But I cannot forget what I once knew."

He looked round again at the others. "And the trouble, is, you see, up here in the mountains, where every district has its champion, and mannjafnathr is what they do all the time, comparing men to see which they think is the deadliest, they can feel it. That man back there knew he wasn't my match—knew I had killed a dozen farmhands like him before my beard was fully grown. But he could tell as well that my heart wasn't in it. Just a little more time to think about it, and he might have taken the risk."

"You are as strong as ever," said Osmod. "You would have killed him. Better for all of us if you had."

"I expect I'd have killed him," Brand agreed. "He was only the cock of his own midden. But funny things happen when a man loses heart. I have known great warriors stand still with the piss running down their breeches till they were cut down. They freeze, and the Valkyries, Othin's daughters, the Choosers of the Slain, throw their fear-fetters over them."

The Englishmen sat in silence. Finally Osmod spoke again. "That's it, then. We'd better go through every place we come to all closed up and ready from now on. Halberds showing, crossbows cocked. I wish these silly bastards up here had seen crossbows work. Then they'd be more frightened. But we can't shoot somebody just to show them.

"One other thing," he added. "Edith didn't go off behind that barn just because she's dumb, you know. She was called over. By a woman. Woman speaking English, not Norse. She must have heard us talking among ourselves. A slave-woman. Been here twenty years."

Brand nodded heavily. "They have been running slaves out of England for fifty years now. I dare say every farmstead in the whole of the North has its English grinding-slave, or half-a-dozen of them, and men-thralls for the heavy work out in the fields as well. What did she want?"

"Wanted us to take her with us, of course. Spoke to Edith because she thought she'd be sympathetic. Then the men came round the corner, must have been watching."

"Did you speak to the slave-woman?" asked Shef, finally breaking out of his own internal struggles. "What did you tell her?"

"Told her she couldn't come. Too much trouble for us. I should have said the same to Edith and the others, even if they were down to have their throats cut over some dead prince-brat's tomb. The woman back there was from Norfolk," Osmod added. "They stole her out of Norwich twenty years ago, when she was a girl. Now she'll grow old and die up here."

He and Cwicca got to their feet, walked away, began to spread out their blankets.

Shef looked at Brand, did not venture to speak. What the big man had said must have cost him as much grief and inner shame as breaking down in public tears might have done to someone lesser. Shef wondered what sort of man he would be in the future. Could they ever nurse him back to health in his mind, as Hund had done with his body? Long after the rest of the camp was asleep, except for the patrolling sentry, Brand sat restless, moodily breaking sticks and feeding them into the fire.

The next day, as they jogged along through the mountain pinewoods, moving now without the frantic haste of the rush from Halvdan's kingdom, Shef found Udd riding by his side. He looked down with some surprise. Udd normally had little or nothing to say except when there was forge-work to be done. "I've been thinking about those millstones," said Udd. "They're not very much use up here, because the water only flows half the year. And when it does it's like that." He pointed to the mountain-stream ahead of them, pouring down in a thin deep channel over a succession of six-foot drops in the hillside.

"What they need here is something more the same all the time."

"Like what?"

Udd licked a finger, held it up in the air. "No shortage of wind up here, is there?"

Shef laughed. The thought of wind, a thing no-one could see or measure or weigh or even catch, driving the most massive thing that men ever used, the great weight of the millstone, was impossible.

"Wind can drive a ship, though, can't it?" said Udd, reading his leader's thought. "If it can drive a ship that weighs ten tons, why not a stone that only weighs one?"

"Wind's not like water," said Shef. "It comes from different directions."

"That doesn't stop the sailors, does it? No, what I was thinking was this..." As they rode on, Udd began to outline his idea of a sail-powered wind-mill, mounted on a rotating frame that could be turned to face the wind by a post like a ship's rudder. As he made objections, received answers, added his own notions, Shef found himself slowly drawn more and more into the deep incommunicable excitement of the inventor. Riding behind them, Cwicca nudged Karli.

"He's got him talking then. About time too. I was getting worried riding through this place with two leaders, both of them in some other world. I wish we could do the same for the other." He indicated the giant figure of Brand, slouching along at the head of the column with one arm over his over-burdened horse's saddle.

"He may be more of a problem," cut in Hund from behind them. "I wish we could just get him to his ship."

The challenge came not at any of the farmsteads they passed through that day, nor the next, though they rode through all of them greeted only by lowering faces and men standing silently by their barns and byres. Forewarned, Shef looked round keenly at every place they came to for signs of the others there, besides the men. Twice he caught sight of thin faces peeping from behind shutters: women hoping for a miracle, or maybe only for a friendly word in their own tongue. In his sleep he thought to hear the grinding noise of the querns, on and on for twenty years, thirty years, marking out a life of hopeless toil.

But at least the farmsteads spread only over a few yards, had in them never more than ten or a dozen men and boys, of all ages, not likely to test their strength against a well-armed body of their own number, even if the strangers came of slave-race and were headed by a doubtful champion. Where the road over the mountain passes finally dipped down into a dale, and the dale ran down to meet two more, the little cavalcade saw before them a cluster of houses spreading out where the streams intersected, and rising above them all a taller building, more than one story, its gables and side-posts fantastically carved into dragon shapes.

Brand reined in, turned to face the others. "That's Flaa," he said. "It's the main town of the Hallingdal district. They have a temple there. Just try to ride on through as if it was another farm-garth."

As they rode through the small square at the center of the settlement, the bulk of the timber church to their left, men emerged from between the houses, blocking the path forward and on all sides. They were fully armed, spears and shields ready, bows in the hands of the youths and boys behind the warriors. Shef heard the click of the crossbows being cocked yet again. They might kill or cripple their own number, he was sure. After that they stood little chance against the thirty or forty men that would be left. Pick one direction and break out?

A man was coming forward to greet them, no weapon drawn, right hand up for parley. He and Brand stared at each other.

"Well, Vigdjarf," said Brand. "We haven't met since Hamburg. Or was it the raid on the Orkneys?"

"The Orkneys it was," said the other man. He was shorter than Brand by some way, but heavily-built, thick-necked and balding. Squat arms bulged with muscle over gold bracelets: a bad sign in both ways. This man had made heavy profits out of something, and here in the poor mountain lands it would not be from rearing cattle.

Vigdjarf looked pointedly at the hammer pendant on Brand's chest, then past him at the clump of horses, men and women behind him. "You are in strange company," he remarked. "Or maybe not so strange. Once people start wearing things round their necks I always think it's the next thing to turning Christian. And then what? They start talking to the other slaves, start helping them to run off. Start being one yourself. Are you that bad yet, Viga-Brand? Or is there a bit of your old self yet?"

Brand slid off the pony he had been riding, walked forward, axe in hand. "You can cut the talk, Vigdjarf," he said. "When we last met I never heard a peep out of you. Now you think you're something. Well, what's it to be? Are you and your cousins just going to try to jump us? Because if you do we'll kill a lot of you, that's for sure."

Behind him Osmod raised a crossbow, sighted on the thick oak of the temple door, squeezed the trigger with its carefully-ground sear. A flash too fast for sight, a thump echoing round the silent square. Osmod reloaded without haste, four easy movements, a click, another square iron bolt dropped home.

"Try digging that out," Brand went on. "Or have you got some other deal? Just you and me, maybe, man to man."

"Just you and me," Vigdjarf confirmed.

"And if I win?"

"Free passage through, for all of you."

"And if you win, Vigdjarf?"

"We take the lot. Horses, slaves, men, women. We can find a place for the women. Not the men. Thralls who've been allowed to run around thinking they're people get funny ideas. They'll go to the sacred tree, to hang for Othin's ravens. Maybe we'll keep some of them, if we think they're safe. But you know how we deal with runaways up here. If we don't kill them we geld and brand them. Only safe thing to do.

"But you've got another way out Brand. You personal, I mean. Just walk away from them. They're not your folk. Join us, hand them over, no trouble for you or me, we'll even cut you in on the profits."

"No deal," said Brand. He flipped his axe up, to grip it in both hands. "Here and now?"

Vigdjarf shook his head. "Too many people want to watch. I told them you'd say that. Now they're coming down from all the garths in three dales. We've marked out a dueling-ground down by the river. Tomorrow morning. Me against you."

As Shef stood listening to the talk, the talk that might condemn him to the gelding-iron, the brand, and the iron collar, he felt the familiar pinch at the back of his neck which meant his vision was being directed. This time he did not struggle against the sight he was being shown. As had happened when he sat on the howe by Hedeby, his eye remained open, he still saw the small muddy square, the wooden temple, the armed men tensely waiting. But at the same time another picture swam across his vision, filling his brain, as if the eyeball they had taken from him were somewhere else, reporting on what it saw as well as the one still in his head.

He saw a great mill, like the one Udd had first shown him at the college in Kaupang, two horizontal stones, the one turning over the other, fed by a hopper from above. But no cog-wheels, no water running. Instead the mill-room was dry, like the middle of summer in a hot year, and the dust rose chokingly from the ground with never a drop of water to lay it.

Through the dust a man moved, a single figure thrusting slowly and steadily at a bar. The bar, thick as the steering-oar of a warship, was set into the upper millstone, and as the man pushed so the millstone moved round and round. And the man moved round and round, in the same weary circle, never resting, never coming to an end, never seeing anything but the same dusty room.

Yet in fact he could see nothing, Shef realized, for the man was blind, his eye-sockets empty. The man slacked his pace for a moment, trying to get better grip for his footing. Instantly a lash from somewhere, a red stripe springing up across the naked, filthy back. Though he was blind the man looked back, as if bothered by some fly he could not quite get to grips with. His hands were fettered to the bar he pushed with great gyves of iron. As he put his weight on the bar again, Shef saw the monstrous muscles stand out on arms and back and sides. There seemed to be nothing between them and the skin. The man was as strong as Brand, as tight-drawn muscularly as Shef himself. Long black hair curled down over his shoulders.

That is a way of milling Udd has not thought of, Shef reflected as the vision began to blur, he came to himself again. Use a man instead of an ox, or a horse, or a dozen grinding-slaves with hand-querns. But I do not think my protector in Asgarth has sent me this to tell me about milling, any more than he sent me the Völund-vision to warn me of open chests. Then he meant to tell me the boy had to die. And the slam of the chest closing was the crash of the catapult-stone, the mule-stone. Now the millstone... It means something more immediate than cogwheels or gearing.

"Tomorrow morning," said Brand, repeating Vigdjarf's words. "Me against you."

Shef pushed his horse forward till it drew level with Brand's side. "Tomorrow morning," he said, looking down from horseback at the burly Vigdjarf. "But not you against him. Our champion against yours."

As the warrior eyed the crossbows and opened his mouth to protest, Shef cut in quickly. "Your champion may have choice of weapons." Vigdjarf looked thoughtful, suspicious, eyed the group behind Brand, then nodded agreement.

From somewhere, not too far away—or was it in his own head?—Shef could hear the dreary, slow creak of a millwheel turning.