The stars were paling in the eastern sky behind them as the young man and the girl stole carefully and cautiously through the depths of the wood. If he looked back Shef could see the topmost branches now silhouetted against the sky, moving slightly in the breeze, the little wind that comes before dawn. Down at ground level nothing of it could be felt. Where the two crossed the occasional clearing created by the fall of oak or ash, the dew soaked their feet. It would be a hot day, Shef thought, one of the last of the late, event-filled summer.
It could not come soon enough for him. Both were cold. Shef wore only the boots and woolen breeches which he had snatched up when the English attack came in. Godive had only her shift. She had stripped off her long dress before slipping into the water by the fired ships. She could swim like a fish, like an otter; and like otters they had swum out, underwater for as many strokes as they could, concentrating on noiselessness and cutting out both splash and gasp. A hundred slow strokes and ten breaths up the river, against the slow, weedy current; eyes alert every time they came up for watchers on the bank. Then a careful filling of the lungs while Shef warily eyed the stockade edge, where surely guards might still be posted. Then the deep dive and the long swim underwater, till it was time to come up and repeat the otter stroke, on, on, for another quarter mile before he decided it might be safe to creep ashore.
He had felt no chill while they were escaping, only a momentary prickle on his burned hands and body as he dashed into the water the first time. But now he was beginning to shiver uncontrollably, the great shudders wracking his body. Shef knew that he was close to collapse. He would have to let go soon, lie down, let his muscles relax. And let his mind come to terms with the events of the last twenty-four hours. He had killed a man; no, two men. He had seen the king, something he might have expected to do once or twice in a lifetime. But this time the king had seen him, had even spoken to him! And he had stood toe to toe with Ivar the Boneless, champion of the North. Shef knew he would have killed him if it had not been for Godive. He could have been the hero of all England, of all Christianity.
But she had stopped him. And then he had betrayed his king, delayed him, all but handed him over to the power of the pagans. If anyone were ever to know about that... But his mind shied away from the thought. They had escaped. He would ask Godive about her and Ivar when he could.
As the light strengthened, Shef's eye caught the faint trace of a trail. It was overgrown, had not been used for weeks. That was good. Used last to flee from the Viking landing. But at the end of the trail there might be something: a hut, a shed. Anything left behind would now be worth its weight in silver.
Now, the trees were thinning, there was something in front of him: not a hut, he realized, but a shelter, a lean-to made of branches. The coppicers must have made it to store their gear in as they worked through the forest cutting the poles that all farmers relied on for hurdles and fencing, for handles, and for the centerpieces for their flimsy wattle-and-daub walls.
There was no one there. Shef led Godive over. Turning her toward him, he held her hands in his own and looked down into her eyes.
"What we have here," he said, "is nothing. One day, I hope we will have a real house of our own, somewhere we can live together untroubled. That is why I came to take you back from the Vikings. It will not be safe to travel in the day. Let us rest as well as we can till evening."
The coppicers had rigged up a bark gutter beneath the roof of rough shingles. It led to a large broken crock, full to overflowing with clear rainwater: one more proof that no one had been there for weeks. The boughs inside were covered with old, torn strips of blanket. Stiffly the pair wrapped themselves, lay down huddled together, fell immediately into an exhausted slumber.
Shef woke as the sun began to pierce through the branches. He rose, careful not to disturb the still-sleeping girl, and crawled out of the shelter. Concealed beneath the boughs he found flint and steel. Should he risk a fire? he wondered. Better not. They had water and warmth, but there was no food to cook. He would take what he had found with them when they left. Slowly, Shef was beginning to think of the future. He owned nothing now, save his breeches, so every single possession he accumulated would be precious.
He did not think they would be disturbed, not this day. They were still well within range of the Viking fighting patrols he had seen on his way into the camp, but the Vikings would have other things to think about for a while. Everyone would be at the camp, counting casualties, deciding what to do—probably fighting among themselves for control of the Army. Had Sigurth the Snakeeye survived? Shef wondered. If he had, even he might have trouble in reimposing his authority on a shaken army.
As for the English, Shef knew that as he and Godive had left the river and started to make their way into the woods there had been other folk about. The refugees from King Edmund's army, the ones who had fled, or at any rate decided to retreat before the crisis of the battle. They were all making their way to their respective homes as fast as ever they could. Shef doubted if there would be an Englishman within five miles of the Viking encampment by now. They had guessed that their lord's attack had failed, and that he was dead.
Shef hoped so, remembering what his pirate guide had told him about Ivar's ways with defeated kings.
He lay in the sun on the blanket, feeling his body relax. A muscle jumped irregularly in his thigh. He waited for it to stop, looking at the puffed blisters on both hands.
"Will it be better if I prick them?" Godive was at his side, kneeling in her shift, holding up a long thorn. He nodded.
As she began to work on his left hand and he felt the slow tears rolling down his arm, he held her warm shoulder with his right.
"Tell me," he said. "Why did you stand between me and Ivar? How was it with you and him?"
Her eyes lowered, Godive seemed unsure what to say. "You know I was given to him? By—by Sigvarth."
"By my father. Yes. I know. What happened then?"
She kept her eyes down, studying his blisters attentively. "They gave me to him at a banquet, with everyone watching. I—I only had this to wear. Some of them do terrible things to their women, you know, like Ubbi. They say he takes them in front of his men, and if things do not go to his liking he hands them over to the men then and there, to be used by all. You know I was a virgin—I am a virgin. I was very frightened."
"You are virgin still?"
She nodded. "Ivar said nothing to me then, but he had me brought to him in his tent that night, and he talked to me. He told me—he told me that he was not like other men.
"He is not a gelding, you know. He has sired children, or so he says. But he told me where other men can feel desire just at the sight of flesh, he needs—something else."
"Do you know what that something is?" asked Shef sharply, remembering the hints Hund had given.
Godive shook her head. "I do not know. I do not understand. But he says that if men were to know how it is with him, they would mock him. In his youth the other young men called him the Boneless One because he could not do as they do. But, he says, he killed many men for mocking him and discovered it was a pleasure to him. Now all those who laughed are dead, and only the closest suspect how it is with him. If everyone had known, Sigvarth would not have dared to hand me over to him openly and publicly, as he did. Now, he says, men call him the Boneless because they fear him. They say that at night he turns—not into a wolf or a bear, like other skin-changers—but into a dragon, a great long-worm, that creeps out in the night for its prey. Anyway, that is what they think now."
"And what do you think?" asked Shef. "Do you remember what they did to your father? He is your father, not mine, but even I felt sorrow for him. And though Ivar did not do that, he gave the orders. That is the kind of thing he does. He may have spared you rape, but who knows what else he had in mind for you. You say he has children. Has anyone seen the mothers?"
Godive turned over Shef's palm and began to lance the blisters that covered it.
"I don't know. He is hateful and cruel to men, but that is because he fears them. He fears they are more manly than he is. But how do they show it, this manliness? By violating those who are too weak, by taking their pleasure from pain. Maybe Ivar has been sent by God—as a punishment for men's sins."
"Do you wish I had left you with him?" Hardness edged Shef's voice.
Slowly Godive bent over him, abandoning her thorn. He felt her cheek against his naked chest, her hands sliding along his sides. As he pulled her up next to him, her loose shift slid from one bare shoulder. Shef found himself staring at a naked breast, its nipple girlish pink. The only woman he had seen before like this was the slut Truda—heavy, sallow, coarse-fleshed. His roughened hands began to stroke Godive's skin with disbelieving tenderness. If he had thought of this happening—and he had, often, lying by himself in fisherman's hut or deserted forge—it was years in the future, after they had found a place, after he had deserved her and made a home where they could be safe. Now, in the wood, in the clearing, in the sunlight, without blessing of priest or consent from parents...
"You are a better man than Ivar or Sigvarth or any other man I have ever met," sobbed Godive, her face still buried in his shoulder. "I knew you would come for me. I only feared they would kill you for it."
He pulled at her shift, her legs squirming beneath him as she turned onto her back.
"We should both be dead by now. It is so good to be alive, with you—"
"There is no blood between us, we have different fathers, different mothers—"
In the sunlight he entered her. Eyes watched from a bush; breath drew in, in envy.
An hour later, Shef lay on the soft grass, in the sunshine where the rays of the now-hot sun came through the upper branches of the oak trees. He was torpid, completely relaxed. He was not asleep. Or he was, but at some dim level he remained awake, conscious that Godive had slipped away. He had been thinking of the future, of where they could go: into the marshes, he thought, remembering his night spent with the king's thane Edrich. He was still conscious of the sun on his skin, of the soft turf beneath his body, but they seemed further away. This had happened before—in the Viking camp. His mind was rising from the forest clearing, traveling out beyond the body, beyond the heart's confines....
A voice spoke to him—rough, gravelly, laden with authority. "Of mighty men," it said, "the maid you have taken." Shef knew he was somewhere else. He was at a forge. Everything was familiar: the hiss as he wound the wet rags round the scorching handles of the tongs, the heft in his back and shoulder muscles as he lifted the red-hot metal out of the heart of the fire, the scrape and scratch of the top of his leather apron across his chest, the automatic duck and shake of the head as the sparks flew up toward his hair. But it was not his forge, back in Emneth, nor Thorvin's forge within the enclosure of the rowan berries. He sensed round him an enormous space, a gigantic open hall so high he could not see the top, just mighty pillars and columns leading away to the top where the smoke clung.
He took the heavy hammer and began to beat out a shape from the formless mass glowing on his anvil. What that shape should be he did not know. Yet his hands knew, for they moved expertly and without hesitation, shifting the tongs, turning the bloom, striking from one direction and then another. It was no spear-blade or axe-head, no ploughshare or coulter. It seemed to be a wheel, but a wheel with many teeth, sharp-pointed ones, like a dog's. Shef watched with fascination as the thing came to life beneath his blows. He knew, in his heart, that what he was doing was impossible. No one could make a shape like that straight from a forge. And yet—he could see how it might be done, if you made the teeth separately and then fitted them all together on the wheel you had originally made. But what would the point of it all be? Maybe, if you had one wheel like that, turning one way, up and down like a wall, and another wheel, turning the other way, flat and level with the ground, then, if the teeth on the one wheel matched with the teeth on the other, the first could drive the second round.
But what would be the point of that? There was a point. It had something to do with the object, the giant construction, twice man-height over by one wall, just beyond his vision in the dimness.
Shef realized as his senses cleared that there were other figures looking at him, figures on the same enormous scale as the hall. He could not see them clearly, and he did not dare look up for more than moments from his work, but he caught their presence unmistakably. They were standing together and watching him, even discussing him, he thought. They were Thorvin's gods, the gods of the Way.
Nearest to him was a broad and powerful shape, an immensely scaled-up Viga-Brand, giant biceps muscles rolling beneath a short-sleeved tunic. That must be Thor, thought Shef. His expression was scornful, hostile, faintly anxious. Behind the shape was another god—keen-eyed, sharp-faced, thumbs stuck into a silver belt, eyeing Shef with a kind of concealed approval, as if he were a horse to be bought, a thoroughbred going at a bargain price from a foolish owner.
That one is on my side, thought Shef. Or maybe he thinks I am on his.
Others clustered behind the two: tallest of them, and furthest away, a god leaning on a mighty spear with a triangular head.
Shef became aware of two other things. He was hamstrung. As he moved around the forge, his legs trailed behind him uselessly, making him take the weight on his arms and pull himself from one place to another. High stools, stocks of wood and benches were littered around in seemingly random fashion, but actually, he realized, to support him as he went from one workplace to another. He could prop himself on his legs, stand, like a man balancing on two stout props, but there was no spring, no movement at all from the thigh muscles to the calf. A dull ache spread upward from his knees.
And there was someone else watching him, not one of the mighty figures, but a tiny one, down in the shadows of the smoke-filled hall, like an ant, or a mouse peering out from the wainscoting. It was Thorvin! No, it was not Thorvin, but a smaller and a slighter man with a long face and sharp expression, both accentuated by the thinning hair falling back from the high forehead. But it was someone dressed like Thorvin, all in white, with the rowan berries round his neck. He had something of the same expression too, thoughtful, intensely interested, but here also, cautious and fearful. The small figure was trying to speak to him.
"Who are you, boy? Are you a wanderer from the realms of men, set for a while in Völund's place? How have you come here, and by what fortune did you find the Way?"
Shef shook his head, pretending it was just a toss to keep the sparks out of his eyes. He tossed the wheel aside into a bucket of water and began to set to another piece of work. The three quick raps, the turn, the three raps again, and a glowing something flying through the air into the cold water, to be instantly replaced on the anvil by another. What he was doing Shef did not know, but it filled him with wild excitement and a furious impatient glee, like a man who would one day be free and did not want his jailer to know the joy inside him.
Shef realized that one of the giant figures was coming toward him—the tallest of them, the one with the spear. The mouse-man saw too and ducked back into the shadows, now visible only as the palest of blurs in the gloom.
A finger like the trunk of an ash turned Shef's chin upward. One eye looked down at him, from a face like the blade of an axe: straight nose, jutting chin, sharp gray beard, wide, wide cheekbones. It was a face that would have made Ivar's seem a relief, as something at least comprehensible, ravaged only by human passions like envy, hate and cruelty. This was far different: One touch of the thoughts behind that mask, Shef knew, and any human mind would go insane.
Yet it did not seem entirely hostile, more thoughtful, considering.
"You have far to go, mannikin," it said. "Yet you have begun well. Pray that I do not call you to me too soon."
"Why would you call me, High One?" said Shef, amazing himself with his own temerity.
The face smiled like a glacier calving. "Do not ask," it said. "The wise man does not pry or peek like a maiden searching for a lover. He looks even now, the gray fierce wolf, into Asgarth's doors."
The finger dropped, the great hand came sweeping across, over forge and anvil and tools, over benches and buckets and the smith all together, brushing them all away like a man sweeping nutshells from a blanket. Shef felt himself hurled into the air, spinning end over end, apron flying away from him, his last memory the little face-shaped blur in the shadows, watching and marking him.
In a heartbeat he was back on the grass, back beneath the open sky of England in the forest clearing. But the sun had moved off him, leaving him in shadow, cold and suddenly afraid.
Where was Godive? She had crept from his side for a moment, but then—
Shef was on his feet, wide awake, staring round for an enemy. Tumult in the bushes, thrashing and fighting and the sound of a woman trying to scream with a hand over her mouth and an arm round her throat.
As Shef sprang toward the struggle, men rose from their cover behind the tree-trunks, and closed on him like the fingers of doom. Leading them came Muirtach the Gaddgedil, a newly livid weal across his face and an expression of bitter, contained, contented fury twisting it.
"Nearly you got away, boy," he said. "You should have kept running, not stopped to try out Ivar's woman. But a hot prick knows no sense. It will be cold soon enough."
Hard hands closed on Shef's shoulders as he lunged towards the bushes, desperate to reach Godive. Had they seized her already? How had they found them? Had they left some trail?
A jeering laugh rose above the babble of Gaddgedlar voices. Shef recognized it, even as he writhed and fought, drawing all the Vikings to him. It was the laugh of an Englishman. Of his half brother. Alfgar.
When Muirtach and the others had dragged him back inside the stockade, Shef had been close to collapse. He had been exhausted in the first place. The shock of recapture had also bitten deep into him. The Vikings had been rough with him as well as they pulled him back, punching and cuffing him repeatedly as they hustled him through the woods, eyes alert all the time for any fringe of scattered Englishmen still lurking in the trees. Then, as they came out onto the meadows and sighted their comrades rounding up such horses as remained, jerking their captive off his feet again and again in rough triumph. They had been badly scared. Having one trophy to take back to Ivar was not much of a set off against all they had lost. Dimly, through weariness and horror, Shef realized that they were in the mood now to work out all their earlier fears on such little satisfaction as they could find. But before he could take in much of that thought, they dragged him to the pen, beat him unconscious.
He only wished he had not had to come round. They had thrown him inside the stockade at mid-morning. He had been unconscious the whole of the long, warm late-summer day. When he finally blinked his blood-sealed eyelids open he was sore, stiff, bruised—but no longer dizzy or bone weary. But he was also chilled to the bone, dry-mouthed with thirst, weak from hunger—in a state of deadly fear. At nightfall he looked round to try to see some prospect of escape or rescue. There was none. Iron anklets on his feet were lashed to stout pegs. His hands were bound in front of him. In time he might have worked the pegs out or chewed through the rawhide lashings on his wrists, but the slightest movement in either direction brought a growl and a kick from the nearby guard. They had, Shef realized, almost no prisoners to watch. In the confusion of the night attack almost all the accumulated slave-booty of the campaign had fought itself free and vanished, taking the Vikings' profits with them. Only a few other figures, newly captured prisoners secured like himself, dotted the floor space of the pen.
What they said brought Shef no comfort. They were the very few survivors of King Edmund's picked men, who had fought to the last in the final attempt to destroy the Ragnarssons and cripple the Viking army's leadership. All were wounded, usually badly. They expected to die, and talked quietly among themselves as they waited. Mostly, they regretted their failure to make a clean sweep of their enemies in the first few minutes of their attack. But then, they said, it could never have been expected that they could get to the heart of the Great Army without resistance. They had done well: burned the ships, killed the crews. "We have gained great glory," said one. "We stand like eagles on the bodies of the slain. Let us not repent, whether we die now or later."
"I wish they had not taken the king," said one of the warrior's comrades after a silence, speaking with difficulty through the wheezing of his pierced lung. At that they nodded soberly, and their eyes moved together toward a corner of the pen.
Shef shivered. He had no wish to face the aggrieved King Edmund. He remembered the moments when the king had come toward him, pleading with him—the gadderling, the thrall, the child of no father—to stand out of the way. If he had done so, the English would be counting the night still as a victory. And he would not have to face the wrath of Ivar. Dazed as he had been, Shef had heard the taunts of his captors about what their chief would do with him. He remembered the fool of a boy who had shown him round these selfsame pens only the evening before, and his stories of how Ivar dealt with those who crossed him. And he, Shef, had taken his woman. Taken her away, taken her carnally, taken her so that she would not be returned. What had happened to her? Shef wondered detachedly. She had not been dragged back with him. Someone had taken her off. But he could hardly worry about her anymore. His own fate was too all-encompassing. Above the fear of death, the shame of treachery, there loomed the fear of Ivar. If only, Shef thought again and again during the night, if only he could die now of cold. He did not wish to see the morning.
The thump of a boot in the back stirred him from torpor in the growing light of the next day. Shef sat up, conscious above all of the dry, swollen stick of his tongue. Round him the guards were cutting lashings, hauling bodies away; some had been granted Shef's wish in the night. But in front of him squatted a small, slight figure in a stained and dirty tunic, drawn lines of fatigue on the sallow face. It was Hund. He was holding a crock of water. For some minutes Shef thought of nothing else, while Hund carefully, and with many agonizing pauses, allowed him to drink a mouthful at a time. Only when he felt the blessed fullness under his breastbone, and knew the luxury of being able to roll an excess mouthful round his tongue and spit it onto the grass, did Shef realize that Hund was trying to speak to him.
"Shef, Shef, try to take this in. We have to know some things. Where is Godive?"
"I don't know. I got her away. Then I think someone else snatched her. But they had me before I could do anything about it."
"Who do you think took her?"
Shef remembered the laugh in the thickets, the sense he had had, and had dismissed, that there were other fugitives in the wood. "Alfgar. He was always a good tracker. He must have followed us."
Shef paused again for thought, dispelling the lethargy of cold and weariness. "I think he must have gone back, led Muirtach and the others to us. Maybe they did a deal. They got me, he got her. Or maybe he just snatched her while they were busy with me. There weren't enough of them to risk following very far. Not after the fright they'd had."
"So. Ivar is more concerned about you than about her. But he knows you got her away from the camp. That's bad." Hund passed a hand worriedly across his sparse, scanty beard. "Shef, think back. Did anyone see you actually kill any of the Vikings with your own hands?"
"I only killed one. That was in the dark and no one saw. It was no great deed. But someone may have seen me get into the pen and start freeing the prisoners—freeing Alfgar." Shef's mouth twisted. "And do you know, I broke the Viking shield-wall with a burning timber when all the king's comrades could not do it." Shef turned his palms and looked mutely at the pads of white skin, the tiny thorn holes where the blisters had been.
"Yes. Still, that might not be a cause for blood-vengeance. Ingulf and I have done a lot of favors during this last day and a night. There are many chieftains who would be dead or crippled for life if it had not been for us. You know, he will even stitch together entrails, and sometimes the man will live, if he is strong enough to stand the pain and there is no poison inside the body."
Shef looked more attentively at the stains on his friend's tunic.
"You are trying to beg me off? From Ivar?"
"Yes."
"You and Ingulf? But what do I matter to him?"
Hund dipped a lump of hard bread in the remaining water and passed it over.
"It's Thorvin. He says it is business of the Way. He says you have to be saved. I don't know why, but he is totally set on it. Someone spoke to him yesterday and he came running over to see us at once. Have you done something I don't know about?"
Shef lay back in his bonds. "A lot of things, Hund. But I'm sure of one thing. Nothing is going to get me away from Ivar. I took his woman. How can I pay boot for that?"
"When bale is highest, boot is nighest." Hund filled the crock with water once again from a skin, placed a handful of bread beside it on the ground, and passed over the length of dirty homespun he had been carrying over his arm. "Food is short in the camp, and half the blankets are being used for shrouds. That's all I can find for now. Make it last. If you want to pay boot—see what the king can do."
Hund jerked a chin toward the corner of the pen, beyond where the dying warriors had sat, called something to the watching guards, rose, and left. The king, thought Shef. What boot will Ivar take for him?
"Is there any hope?" hissed Thorvin across the table.
Killer-Brand looked at him with mild surprise. "What sort of language is that from a priest of the Way? Hope? Hope is the spittle that runs from the jaws of Fenris Wolf, chained till the day of Ragnarök. If we start only doing things because we think there may be some hope—why, we will end up no better than Christians, singing hymns to their God because they think he may give them a better bargain after death. You are forgetting yourself, Thorvin."
Brand looked with interest at his own right hand, spread out on the rough table next to Thorvin's forge. It had been split open by a sword-blade between second and third fingers, cut clean open almost down to the wrist. Ingulf the leech was bending over it, washing the wound with warm water from which a faint scent of herbs drifted. Then he slowly, carefully, pulled the lips of the gash apart. White bone showed for an instant before the oozing blood covered it in the track of Ingulf's fingers.
"This would have been easier if you had come to me straight away, instead of waiting a day and a half," said the leech. "Then I could have treated it while it was fresh. Now the wound has started to clot together, and I have to do this. I could take a chance and stitch it up as it is. But we do not know what was on the blade of the man who struck you."
A trickle of sweat broke out on Brand's eyebrow, but his voice remained mild, contemplative. "You go ahead, Ingulf. I have seen too many wounds go bad to take that risk. This is just pain. The flesh-rot is certain death."
"Still, you should have come earlier."
"I was lying among the corpses for half a day, till some clever warrior noticed they had all gone cold and I hadn't. And when I came round and decided that this was really the worst wound I had, you were busy with more difficult tasks. Is it true you pulled old Bjor's entrails out, stitched them together and pushed them back in again?"
Ingulf nodded, pulling with sudden decision at a bone splinter with a pair of tweezers. "They tell me he calls himself 'Grind-Bjor' now, because he swears he saw the gates of Hell itself."
Thorvin sighed gustily, and pushed a tankard closer to Brand's left hand. "Very well. You have punished me enough with your chatter. Tell me, then. Is there any chance?"
Brand's face was paling now, but he answered with the same even tone. "I don't think so. You know how it is with Ivar."
"I know," said Thorvin.
"That makes it hard for him to be sensible over some things. I do not say 'forgive'—we are none of us Christians to pass over an injury or an insult. But he will not even listen, or think about where his interest lies. The boy took his woman. Took a woman that Ivar—had plans for. If that fool Muirtach had brought her back, then maybe—But even then I don't think so. Because the girl went willingly. That means the boy did something Ivar could not. He must have blood."
"There has to be something that would make him change his mind, accept compensation."
Ingulf was stitching now, needle rising high over his right shoulder as he pierced and pulled, pierced and pulled again.
Thorvin placed his hand on the silver hammer that hung on his chest. "I swear, this may be the greatest service you or I may ever do for the Way, Brand. You know there are some among us who have the Sight?"
"I have heard you talk of it," admitted Brand.
"They travel into the realms of the Mighty, of the gods themselves, and return, to report what they saw. Some think these are just visions, no better than dreams, a kind of poetry only.
"But they see the same things. Or sometimes they do. More often it is as if they all saw different parts of the same thing, as there might be many reports of the battle the other night, and some would say the English had the best of it, and some would say we did, and yet all would be telling the truth and all would have been at the same place. If they confirm each other, that means it must be true."
Brand grunted. Perhaps in disbelief, perhaps in pain.
"We are sure that there is a world out there, and that people can go into it. Well, something very odd happened only yesterday. Farman came to see me, Farman who is priest of Frey in this Army as I am priest of Thor, or Ingulf of Ithun. He has been in the Otherworld many times, as I have not. He says—he says he was in the Great Hall itself, the place where the gods meet to decide the affairs of the nine worlds. He was down on the floor, a tiny creature, like a mouse in the wainscoting of one of our own halls. He saw the gods in conclave.
"And he saw my apprentice Shef. He is in no doubt. He had seen him at the forge; he saw him in the vision. He was dressed oddly, like a hunter in our own forests in Rogaland or Halogaland, and he stood badly, like one who has been—crippled. But there was no mistaking the face. And the Father of gods and men himself—he spoke to him. If Shef can remember what he said...
"It is rare," Thorvin concluded, "for any wanderer in the Otherworld to see another one. It is rare for the gods to speak to or notice a wanderer. For both to happen...
"And there is another thing. Whoever gave that boy a name did not know what he was doing. It is a dog's name now. But that was not always so. You have heard of Skiold?"
"Founder of the Skioldungs, the old Danish kings. The ones whom Ragnar and his sons would drive out if they could."
"The English call him Scyld Sceafing—Shield with the Sheaf—and they tell a foolish tale of how he drifted over the ocean on a shield with a sheaf beside him, and that was how he got his name. But anyone can tell that Sceafing means 'the son of Sheaf,' not 'with a sheaf.' So who, then, is Sheaf? Whoever he was, he was the one who sent the mightiest king of all over the waves, and taught him all that he knew to make the lives of men better and more glorious. It is a name of great good luck. Especially if given in ignorance. Shef is only the way the English in these parts say 'Sheaf.'
"We have to save that boy from Ivar. Ivar the Boneless. People have seen him on the other side too, you know. But he did not have the shape of a human being."
"He is not a man of one skin," agreed Brand.
"He is one of the brood of Loki, sent to bring destruction on the world. We have to get my apprentice away from him. How can we do it? If he will not do it on your urging, Brand, or on mine, can we bribe him? Is there something he wants more than vengeance?"
"I do not know how to take this talk of other worlds and wanderers," said Brand. "You know I am with the Way because of the skills it teaches, like Ingulf's here, and because I have no love for the Christians or for the madmen like Ivar. But the boy did a brave deed to come into this camp for a girl. It took guts to do that. I know. I went into the Braethraborg to bait the Ragnarssons into this venture, as your colleagues told me to, Thorvin.
"So I wish the boy well. Now I do not know what Ivar wants—who does? But I can tell you what he needs. Ivar may see that too, even if he is mad. But if he does not, then the Snakeeye will make him."
As he spoke on, the other two nodded, thoughtfully.
They were not Ivar's men who came for him, Shef noticed as soon as they appeared. Just from his few days in the Viking camp he had come to be able to discriminate at least in an elementary way between the various grades of heathen. These were not the Gaddgedlar, nor did they have the somehow non-Norse or half-Norse air of the Hebrideans and Manxmen whom Ivar recruited in such numbers, nor did they even have that vaguely footloose and less-than-respectable look that so many of even his Norse followers had. Younger sons and outlaws, the bulk of them, detached from their parent communities and with no homes to go to and no lives outside the camp. The men who came into the stockade now were heavily built, mature in years, almost middle-aged; their hair was grizzled. Their belts were silver, gold armlets and neck-rings shone on them, to prove years or decades of success. When the warden of the pen blocked their self-assured way, ordering them back, Shef could not hear the reply. It was given in a low voice, as if the speaker no longer expected to have to shout. The warden replied again, crying out and pointing down the ruined campsite, as if to the burned tents of Ivar. But before his sentence had ended there was a thud and a groan. The leader of the newcomers looked down for a moment, as if to see if there was any chance of further resistance, slid the sandbag back up his sleeve, and marched on without deigning to look round again.
In a moment Shef found the lashings on his ankles cut and himself jerked to his feet. His heart leapt suddenly and uncontrollably. Was this death? Were they dragging him out of the pen to a clear patch of ground, where in an instant they could force him to his knees and behead him? He bit his lip savagely for an instant. He would not speak or plead for mercy. Then the savages would have the chance to laugh, to mock the way an Englishman died. He stumbled along in grim silence.
Only a few yards. Outside the gate, along the fence-posts of the pen, and then, jerked to a stop in front of another gate. Shef realized that the leader of the newcomers was staring hard at him, deep into his eyes, as if trying to burn an understanding into the tough hide of Shef's face.
"You understand Norse?"
Shef nodded.
"Then understand this. If you talk—doesn't matter. But if he in there talks—maybe you live. Maybe. Lot to be answered for. But there's something in there that could mean life for you. Could mean more for me. Whether you live or die, you may need a friend pretty soon. Friend in court. Friend on the execution ground. There's more than one way to die. All right. Throw him in. Rivet him good."
Shef found himself hauled inside a shelter propped up against the side of the pen. An iron ring hung from a stout post; a chain from it to another ring. In an instant the collar was being fitted round his neck, a bolt of soft iron forced through its two holes. A couple of blows with a hammer, a quick inspection, another blow. The men turned and tramped out. Shef's legs were free, but his hands still bound. The collar and chain round his neck gave him only a few feet of space to walk.
There was another man in the shelter, Shef realized, secured as he was; he could see the chain running down from a post into the half-darkness. Something about the figure sprawled there on the ground filled him with unease, with shame and fear.
"Lord," he said doubtfully. "Lord. Are you the king?"
The figure stirred. "King Edmund I am, son of Edwold, king of the East Angles. But who are you, that talk like a Norfolk man? You are not one of my warriors. Did you come with the levies? Did they catch you in the woods? Move, so I can see your face."
Shef moved round. The sun, now westering, streamed in through the open door of the shelter and caught his face as he stood at the limit of his chain. He waited in dread for what the king would say.
"So. You are the one who stood between me and Ivar. I remember you. You had no armor and no weapon, but you stood before Wigga my champion, and held him for ten heartbeats. If it had not been for you those would have been the last heartbeats of the Boneless One's life. Why would an Englishman wish to save Ivar? You ran from your master? Were you a slave to the Church?"
"My master was your thane Wulfgar," Shef said. "When the pirates came—you know what they did to him?"
The king nodded. With his eyes adjusting to the light Shef could see the face that turned to him. It was pitiless, resolute.
"They took his daughter, my—my foster sister. I came to try to get her back. I was not trying to protect Ivar, but your men were going to kill both of them, all of them. I just wanted you to let me pull her aside! Then I would have joined you. I am no Viking, I killed two of them myself. And I did one thing for you, king, when you had need of it. I..."
"So you did. I called out for someone to break the ring, and you did it. You and a gang of churls from nowhere, with a ship's timber. If Wigga had thought of that, or Totta, or Eddi, or any of the others, I would have made him the richest man in the kingdom. What did I promise?"
He shook his head in silence, then looked up at Shef. "You know what they are going to do to me? They are building an altar now, to their heathen gods. Tomorrow sometime they will take me out and lay me on it. Then Ivar will get to work. Killing kings is his trade. One of the men who guarded me told me he was standing by when Ivar killed the Irish king of Munster, told me how he stood there while Ivar's men twisted the rope and twisted the rope and the veins stood out on the king's neck and he called out curses by all the saints on Ivar's name. And then the crack as his back broke over the stone. They all remember that.
"But tomorrow Ivar prepares a new fate. They tell me that he meant to save this for the man who killed their father, for Ella of Northumbria. But they have decided I merit it just as much.
"They will take me out, and lay me on their altar, face down. In the hollow of my back, Ivar will place a sword. Then—you have felt how your ribs make a house of bone, and how each of the ribs fits into its place on the backbone? Ivar will cut each of them away, working up from the lowest to the highest. They say he will use a sword only for the first cut. After that he will use hammer and chisel. When he has cut them all away, he will cut the flesh free, and then he will put his hands in and pull the ribs up and out.
"I expect I will die then. They say he can keep a man alive to that point, if he is careful not to cut deep. But when they pull the ribs out, your heart must burst. When it is done, they pull your lungs out of your back, and then turn the ribs out so they look like a raven's wings, or an eagle's. They call it 'cutting the blood-eagle.'
"I wonder what it will feel like when he first puts the sword in the hollow of my back. You know, young churl, I think that if I can hold my courage at that point, the rest will be easier. But the feel of the cold steel on skin, before the pain begins...
"I never thought that I would come to this. I have defended my people, kept all my oaths, been charitable to orphans.
"Do you know, churl, what the Christ said when he hung dying on the cross?"
Father Andreas's lessons had been confined usually to the merits of chastity or the importance of paying contributions duly to the Church. Shef shook his head dumbly.
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
The king paused for a long while.
"I know why he means to do it, though. After all, I am a king too. I know what his men need. These few months have been bad ones for the Army. They thought they would have an easy start here for their real march on York. And so they might have—if they had not done what they did to your foster father. But since then they have made no gains, caught few slaves, had to fight for every few beeves. And now—say what anyone wishes, there are many fewer of them than there were two nights ago. They have seen their friends die of wounds, and more of them are sitting waiting for the flesh-rot. If there is nothing grand for them to see, then they will lose heart. Ships will row off in the night.
"Ivar needs a display. A triumph. An execution. Or..."
Shef remembered the warning of the man who had pushed him into the pen.
"Do not speak too freely, lord. They want you to speak. And me to listen."
Edmund laughed, in one sharp bark. The light had almost gone by now, the sun well down, though the long English twilight lingered.
"Then listen. I promised you a half of Raedwald's hoard if you broke the Viking line, and break it you did. So I will give you the whole of it, and you may make your own bargain. The man who gives them this can have his life and more. If I gave it to them, I could be a Viking jarl. But Wigga and all the others died rather than speak. It would not be fitting for a king, one of the line of Wuffa, to give way out of fear.
"But you, boy. Who knows? You may gain something.
"Now listen and do not forget. I will tell you the secret of the hoard of the Wuffingas, and from that I swear by God a wise man can find the hoard.
"Listen and I will tell you."
The king's voice dropped to a hoarse murmur and Shef strained to hear.
"In willow-ford, by woody bridge,
The old kings lie, keels beneath them.
On down they sleep, deep home guarding.
Four fingers push in flattest line,
From underground, Grave the northmost.
There lies Wuffa, Wehha's offspring.
On secret hoard. Seek who dares it."
The voice trailed away. "My last night, young churl. Maybe yours too. You must think what you will do to save yourself tomorrow. But I do not think the riddle of an Englishman will prove easy to the Vikings.
"And, if churl you are, the riddle of the kings will do you no good either."
The king spoke no more, though after a while Shef tried faintly and despondently to rouse him. After an age Shef's battered body too began to drift off into uneasy dozing. In his sleep the king's words repeated themselves, twining round and round and running into each other like the dragon-shapes carved on a burning stem-post.
This time the Great Army was troubled and unsure. So much King Edmund had foreseen. It had been taken in its own base, by a small state and a petty kinglet of whom no one had ever heard, and while they knew the matter had ended well enough, too many also knew in their hearts that for a time they had been outfought. The dead had been buried, the irreparable ships dragged onshore, the wounded had been treated. Arrangements had been made between this chieftain and that to sell or trade ships, to transfer or exchange men to bring contingents up to the mark. But the warriors, the rank-and-file oar-pullers and axe-wielders, still needed reassurance. Something that would show their leaders still had confidence. Some ritual to demonstrate that they were still the Great Army, the terror of the Christians, the invincibles of the North.
From the early morning, men were crowding down to the marked-out space outside the camp, which would be the site of the wapentake: the meeting where men could show their assent by vapna takr, the clashing of weapons, of blade on shield. Or, on rare occasions, under careless leaders, their dissent. From even earlier in the morning, from well before day, the Viking leaders had been making their plan, and considering the balance of forces, the sentiments that might swing their dangerous and unpredictable followers one way or the other.
When they came for him, Shef was ready, at least physically. His hunger was a hole inside him, thirst once more drying his tongue and his lips, but he was awake, alert and fully conscious. Edmund too was awake, he knew, but made no sign. Shef was ashamed to disturb him.
The Snakeeye's men arrived with the same brisk certainty as the day before. In a moment one had Shef's iron collar in his tongs and was forcing the rivet out. It came free, the collar jerked off, and brawny hands were pulling Shef out into the cold murk of an early-autumn morning. Fog still clung to the river, condensed in drops on the bracken roof of the shelter. Shef stared at it for a moment, wondering if he might lick it off.
"You were talking yesterday. What did he tell you?"
Shef shook his head and gestured with bound hands to the leather bottle at a man's belt. Silently the man passed it over. It was full of beer—muddy, thick with barley husks, drawn all too obviously from the bottom of a cask; Shef drank it down in steady gulps, till he could tilt his head back and drain out the last drops. He finished, wiped his mouth, feeling as if the beer had swollen him out like an empty skin, handed the bottle back. There was a grunt of amusement as the pirates watched his face.
"Good, eh? Beer is good. Life is good. If you want more of both, you'd better tell us. Tell us everything he said."
Dolgfinn the Viking watched Shef's face with his usual, unblinking intensity. He saw on it doubt, but no fear. Also, stubbornness, knowledge. The lad would do a deal, he reflected. It would have to be the right one. He turned away and beckoned, a preconcerted signal. From a group a little way off, a large man came walking, gold round his neck, left hand resting on the silver pommel of a sword. Shef recognized him instantly. It was the big man he had fought in the skirmish on the causeway. Sigvarth, jarl of the Small Isles. His father.
As he strolled forward, the others drew back a few paces, leaving the two face-to-face. They studied one another for a few seconds, each staring the other up and down, the older man looking at the younger's physique, the younger staring intently into his father's face. He's looking at me the same way I'm looking at him, thought Shef. He's looking to see if he can recognize himself in me, just as I am at him. He knows.
"We've met before," remarked Sigvarth. "On the causeway in the marsh. Muirtach told me there was a young Englishman walking round claiming he'd fought me. Now they tell me you're my son. The leech's assistant, the boy who came with you. He says so. Is that true?"
Shef nodded.
"Good. You're a burly lad, and you fought well that day. See here, son"—Sigvarth stepped forward and put a broad hand round Shef's biceps, squeezing gently—"You're on the wrong side. I know your mother's English. That's true of half the men in the Army. English, or Irish, or Frankish, or Finnish or Lapp for that matter. But blood goes with the father. And I know you were brought up by the English—by that fool you were trying to rescue. But what have they ever done for you? If they knew you were my son I dare say you had a hard life of it. Eh?"
He looked into Shef's eyes, conscious that he had scored a point.
"Now, you may be thinking that I just ditched you, and that's true, I did. But then I didn't know you were there. I didn't know how you'd grown up. But now you're here, and I see how you've turned out, well, I reckon you'll be a credit to me. And to all our kin.
"So, say the word. I'm offering to recognize you as my true son. You'll have the same rights you'd have had if you'd been born on Falster. Leave the English. Leave the Christians. Forget your mother.
"And, as my son, I'll speak for you to Ivar. And what I say, the Snakeeye will back up. You're in trouble here. Let's get you out of it."
Shef looked over his father's shoulder, considering. He remembered the horse-trough and the beatings. He remembered the curse his stepfather had laid on him, and the accusation of cowardice. He remembered the incompetence, the dillydallying, the exasperation of Edrich at the way the English thanes preened and hesitated. How could anyone be victorious with people like that on one's side? Over his father's shoulder he could see, in the front of the group that Sigvarth had left, a young man gazing at them—a young man with decorated armor, a pale face, strong, projecting front teeth like a horse. He too is a son of Sigvarth, Shef thought. Another half brother for me. And he does not like what is going on.
Shef remembered the laugh of Alfgar from the thickets. "What do I have to do?" he asked.
"Say what the king Jatmund told you. Or find out from him what we need to know."
Deliberately, Shef took aim, blessing the draft of beer that had moistened his mouth, and spat on his father's leather shoe.
"You cut Wulfgar's arms and legs off while men held him. You let the men rape my mother, after she had borne you a son. You are no drengir. You are nothing. I curse the blood I had from you."
In an instant the Snakeeye's men were between them, hustling Sigvarth away, holding his arms down as he struggled to draw his sword. He did not struggle very hard, Shef thought. As they forced him back he was still staring at his son with a kind of baffled longing. He still thinks there is more to be said, thought Shef. The fool.
"You've done it now," remarked Dolgfinn, the Snake-eye's emissary, jerking his captive along by the rawhide round his wrists. "All right. Take him along to the wapentake. And get the kinglet out of there and let's see if he's decided to be reasonable before the assembly sees him."
"No chance," remarked one of his henchmen. "These English can't fight, but they haven't the sense to give in. He's for Ivar now, and Othin before nightfall."
The Viking army was drawn up outside the east stockade, not far from the place where Shef had vaulted over to intercept Godive and kill Flann the Gaddgedil barely three days before. It filled three sides of a hollow square; the fourth, nearest the stockade, occupied only by the jarls, the chieftains, the Ragnarssons and their immediate followers. Elsewhere, the men crowded together behind their skippers and helmsmen, talking to each other, calling out to men from other crews, offering advice and opinion without reproof and without control. The army was a democracy, in its way: Status and hierarchy were important, especially when it came to taking shares. But no man could be entirely silenced, if he cared to take the risk of giving offense.
As they shoved their way into the square with Shef, a great yell went up, and a simultaneous clash of metal. Vikings were hustling a tall man away toward a block in the corner of the square, the man's face standing out even from thirty yards away in a crowd. All the rest had the usual windburned faces of men who spend their time out-of-doors, even in an English summer. The tall one was deathly pale. Without ceremony they thrust him over the block, one Viking seizing his hair and pulling it forward over the nape of his neck. A flash, a thud, and the head rolling free. Shef stared at it for an instant. He had seen several corpses in Emneth, and many in the last few days. But hardly one in broad daylight, and with a moment to look. There will be no time once they give their decision, he thought. I must be ready as soon as they clash their weapons.
"What was that?" he asked, nodding towards the head being thrown into a pile.
"One of the English warriors. Someone said he had fought well and truly for his lord and we should take ransom. But the Ragnarssons say now is not the time for ransoms, it is time to give a lesson. Now you."
The warriors pushed him forward and left him standing ten feet in front of the chieftains.
"Who wishes to press this case?" called one of the chieftains, in a voice that could compete with a North Sea gale. Slowly, the hubbub faded to a buzz. Ivar Ragnarsson stepped forward from the ranks of the leaders. His right arm was bound in front of him in a sling. Broken collarbone, thought Shef, noting the angle at which the arm was slung. That's why he could not wield a weapon against Edmund's warriors.
"I present the case," said Ivar. "This is not an enemy, but a traitor, a truth-breaker. He was not one of Jatmund's men, he was one of my men. I took him into my band, I fed and lodged him. When the English came, he did not fight for me. He did not fight at all. He ran in while the warriors fought and took a girl from my quarters. He stole her away, and she had never been returned. She is lost to me, though she was lawfully mine, given to me by Sigvarth Jarl in the sight of all men.
"I claim ransom for the girl, and he cannot pay it. Even if he could pay it, I would still kill him for the insult done me. But even more than that, the whole Army has a claim against him for treachery. Who supports me?"
"I support you," called another voice: a burly, grizzled man standing close to Ivar. Ubbi, perhaps, or Halvdan? One of the Ragnarssons, at any rate, but not the leader, not Sigurth, who still stood aloof in the middle of the line of men. "I support you. He has had a chance to show his true loyalty, he has refused it. He came to our camp as a spy and a thief and a stealer of women."
"What penalty do you assess?" called the herald's voice again.
"Death is too easy," cried Ivar. "I claim his eyes for the insult put on me. I claim his balls as compensation for the woman. I claim his hands for the treachery against the Army. After that he may keep his life."
Shef felt the shudder running through him. His spine seemed to have turned to ice. In an instant, he thought, the cry would go up, and the clash of arms, and then in ten heartbeats he would be facing the block and the knife.
A figure strolled slowly forward from the ranks—a massive, bearded, leather-jacketed figure. His hand was in a great white bandage, with spots of dark blood showing through it.
"I am Brand. Many men know me." A yell of approval and agreement came from the men behind him.
"I have two things to say. First, Ivar, where did you get the girl? Or where did Sigvarth get her? If Sigvarth stole her, and the lad here stole her back, where is the wrong in that? You should have killed him when he tried it. But since you did not, it is too late to start calling for vengeance now.
"And there is a second thing, Ivar. I was coming to help you when the warriors of Jatmund advanced on you—I, Brand, champion of the men of Halogaland. I have stood in the front for twenty years. Who can say that I ever held back when the spearmen were fighting? I got this wound there, right by you, when you yourself were hurt. And I challenge you to tell me I lie; when the fight was nearly over, and the English king was breaking out, he came straight toward you with his men. You were hurt and could not raise a sword. Your men were dead, and I had only my left hand, and no other man stood by you. Who stood in front of you with his sword but this youth here? He held them off—till I and Arnketil came down with his band and trapped the king. Tell me, Arnketil, do I lie?"
A voice from the other side of the square. "As you say, Brand. I saw Ivar, I saw the Englishmen, I saw the boy. I thought they had killed him in the stir, and was sorry. He stood bravely."
"So, Ivar, the claim for the woman falls. The claim for treachery cannot be true. You owe him your life. I do not know what he has to do with Jatmund, but I say this: If he is good at stealing women, I have a place for him in my crew. We need some new ones. And if you cannot look after your women, Ivar—well, what is that to do with the Army?"
Shef saw Ivar stepping forward towards Brand, his eyes fixed on him, a pale tongue flickering on his lips like a snake. A hum of interest came from the crowd, not a hostile sound. The warriors of the Army liked entertainment, and here some was promised.
Brand did not move, but thrust his left hand into his broad sword-belt. As Ivar got to three paces of him, he held up his bandaged hand for the crowd to see.
"When your hand is mended, I will remember what you say, Brand," remarked Ivar.
"When your shoulder is whole, I will remind you of it." A voice called out behind them, cold as stone—the voice of Sigurth Ragnarsson, the Snakeeye.
"The Army has more important things to do than talk of boys. I say this: My brother Ivar must pursue his own claim for the stolen woman. In payment for his life, Ivar must give the boy his own life, and not cripple him so that he cannot live it. But the boy came into this camp as one of us. He did not behave as a true comrade when we were attacked, but thought first of his own advantage. If he is to join the crew of Killer-Brand we must teach him a lesson. Not a hand, or he cannot fight. Not a testicle, for no woman-theft is involved. But the Army will take an eye." With great effort Shef stood firm as he heard the beginnings of the cry of assent.
"Not both eyes. One. What does the Army say?" A roar of approval. A clash of weapons. Hands dragging him, not to the block, but to the opposite corner of the square. Men parting, pushing each other aside to reveal a brazier, coals glowing red, Thorvin pumping at a bellows. From a bench rose Hund, face pale with emotion.
"Hold still," he muttered in English, as the men kicked Shef's legs from beneath him and thrust his head back. Dimly, Shef realized that the brawny arms holding his head in a grip like a clamp were Thorvin's. He tried to struggle, to call out, to accuse them of treachery. A cloth thrust into his mouth, pushing the tongue back from his teeth. The white-hot needle coming closer, closer, a thumb pushing his eyelid back while he tried to scream, to twist his head, to clench his eyes tight shut.
Inexorable pressure. Only the searing point coming closer and closer to his right eye. Pain, agony, the white fire running from the eyeball into every corner of his brain, tears and blood streaming down his face. Through it all, dimly, the sound of sizzling, of steel being tempered in the tub.
He was hanging in the air. There was a spike through his eye, a continuous burning pain that made him twist his face and clench the muscles in his neck to try to reduce it. But the pain never went away or grew less; it was there all the time. Yet it did not seem to matter. His mind was unaffected, continuing to think and to ponder without distraction from the screaming pain.
Nor was his other eye affected. It remained open all the time, never even blinking. Through it, and from wherever in all the worlds he was, he could see out across a vast panorama. He was high up, very high up. Below him he could see mountains, plains, rivers, and here and there on the seas little collections of colored sails that were Viking fleets: On the plains scattered dust clouds that were giant armies marching, the Christian kings of Europe and the pagan nomads of the steppe permanently mustering for war. He felt that if he narrowed his eyes—his eye—a certain way, just so, he could focus in on anything he wanted to: read the lips of the commanders and the cavalrymen, see the words of the emperor of the Greeks or the khakhan of the Tartars even as they formed them.
Between himself and the world below, he realized, birds were floating—giant ones keeping station with never a flap or a flutter, just the little tremor along the trailing feathers of the wings. Close to him two passed by, staring at him with brilliant and intelligent yellow dots of eyes. Their feathers were glossy black, their beaks threatening, stained: ravens. The ravens that came to peck out the eyes of hanged men. He stared at them as unblinkingly as they at him; they slanted their wings hastily and swooped away.
The spike through his eye. Was that all that was holding him? So it seemed. But then he must be dead, no one could survive a spike through the brain and the skull, into the wood behind. Through the feel of the bark he could sense a bursting of sap, a steady pumping of fluid, up from roots unimaginably deep to branches far above him, so high that no man could ever climb them.
His eye stabbed him again and he twisted, his hands still hanging loose below him like a dead man's. There were the ravens again—curious, greedy, cowardly, clever, alert for any sign of weakness. They drifted in toward him, flapped their wings, came suddenly closer, landed heavily on his shoulders. Yet this time, he knew, he need not fear their beaks. They clung to him for reassurance. A king was coming.
The figure appeared in front of him, moving upward from a spot on Earth from which he had averted his eye. It was a terrible shape, naked, blood running from it down its ruined loins, an expression of ghastly pain on its face. Its back lifted up behind its shoulders in a parody of the ravens ' wings; its chest was shrunken and twisted in; gobbets of spongy matter hung over its nipples. It carried its own backbone in its hand.
For a moment the two figures hung there, eye to eye. The creature recognized him, the hanged one thought. It pitied him. But it was going beyond the nine worlds now, to some other destiny where few if any would follow. Its blackened mouth twisted.
"Remember," it said. "Remember the verse I taught you."
The pain in Shef's eye redoubled, and he shrieked out loud, shrieked and twisted against the spike that restrained him, the bonds that held him down, the soft, gentle, immovable hands. He opened his eye and stared out, not at the panorama of the nine worlds from the great ashtree, but into the face of Hund. Hund with the needle. He shrieked again and threw up a hand to fend him off, and the hand clutched Hund's arm with desperate force.
"Easy, easy," said Hund. "It's all over now. No one can touch you. You are a carl of the army, in the crew of Brand of Halogaland, and the past is forgotten."
"But I must remember," cried Shef.
"Remember what?"
Water filled both his eyes, the good one and the ruined socket. "I don't remember it," he whispered.
"I have forgotten the king's message."
For many miles the track had run over flat, well-drained land—the southern half of the great Vale of York, rolling up from the marshes of the Humber. Even so, it had been hard going for the Great Army: eight thousand men, as many horses, hundreds of camp-followers and bedfellows and slaves for the market, all trampling along together. Behind them even the great stone-laid roads built by the Rome-folk of old turned into muddy tracks splashing as high as the horses' bellies. Where the Army marched along English lanes or drover roads it left nothing but a morass behind.
Brand the Champion lifted his still-bandaged hand and the troop of men behind him—three ships' crews, a long hundred and five—eased their reins. The ones at the very rear, the last men in the Army, immediately faced about, peering at the gray, wet landscape behind them, from which the autumn light was already beginning to seep.
The two men at the very point of the troop stared closely at what lay in front of them: a deeply mudded track, four arm-spans wide, descending down and round a bend to what must be the bed of another small stream. A few hundred yards ahead the men could see the land rising again and the unhedged track running across it. But in between, along the bed of the stream, ran a belt of tangled forest, large oak and chestnut trees swaying their brown leaves in the rising wind, crowding up to the very edge of the road.
"What do you think, young marshal?" asked Brand, pulling at his beard with his left hand. "It may be that with your one eye you can see further than most men with two."
"I can see one thing with half an eye, old kay-handed one," replied Shef equably. "Which is that that horse-turd by the side of the road there has stopped steaming. The main body is getting further away from us. We're too slow. Plenty of time for the Yorkshiremen to get in behind them and in front of us."
"And how would you deal with that, young defier-of-Ivar?"
"I would get us all off the road and all go down the right-hand side. The right hand, because they might expect us to go down the left, with our shields toward the trees and the ambush. Get down to the stream. When we get to it, blow all our horns and charge it as if it were the gap in an enemy stockade. If there's no one there, we look stupid. If there's an ambush there we'll flush them out. But if we're going to do it—let's do it fast."
Brand shook his massive head with a kind of exasperation. "You are not a fool, young man. That is the right answer. But it is the answer of a follower of your one-eyed patron, Othin the Betrayer of Warriors. Not of a carl of the Great Army. What we are here for is to pick up the stragglers, to see that no one falls into the hands of the English. The Snakeeye does not care for heads thrown into the encampment every morning. It makes the men restless. They like to think every one of them is important, and that anyone who gets killed gets killed for a good reason, not just by accident. If we went off the road we might miss someone, and then his mates would come round asking for him sooner or later. We will take the risk and go down the track."
Shef nodded, and swung his shield off his back, pushing his arm through the elbow-strap to grip the handle behind the boss. Behind him there was a clanking and rustling as a hundred and twenty-five men moved their weapons to a ready position and urged their horses forward. Shef realized that Brand had these conversations in a way to train him, to teach him to think like a leader. He bore no grudge when his advice was overruled.
Yet deep down he struggled with the thought that these wise men, these great and experienced warriors—Brand the Champion, Ivar the Boneless, even the matchless Snakeeye himself—were wrong. They were doing things the wrong way. Their wrong way had smashed every kingdom they had ventured against, not just the tiny and petty kingdom of the East Anglians. Even so, he, Shef—once thrall, slayer of two men, a man who had never stood in a battle line for ten heartbeats together—he was sure that he knew better how to array an army than did they.
Had he seen it in his visions? Was the knowledge sent to him by his father-god in Valhalla—Othin the Traitor, God of the Hanged, Betrayer of Warriors—as Brand obliquely continued to suggest?
Whatever the cause, Shef thought, if I were the marshal of the Army, I would call a halt six times a day, and blow the trumpets, so the flank-guards and the rear-guard would know where I was. And I would move no further till I heard the trumpets in reply.
It would be better if everyone knew the time when the trumpets would blow. But how could that be, once we are all out of sight of each other? How do the black monks in the minsters know when it is time for their services? Shef chewed on the problem as his horse took him down between the trees and shadows began to fall across the path. Again and again these days his head swam with thoughts, with ideas, with difficulties to which there seemed to be no solution in the wisdom of his time. Shef's fingers itched to hold a hammer again, to work in the forge. He felt he could beat out a solution on an anvil instead of restlessly brooding in his own brain.
There was a figure on the road ahead of them. He spun about when he heard the horses—then let his sword slide back down when he recognized them.
"I am Stuf," the man said. "One of the band of Humli, out of Ribe."
Brand nodded. A small band, not very well organized. The sort of group that would let a man slip out of line and not think to inquire what had happened to him till too late.
"My horse went lame and I dropped behind. Then I decided to turn him loose and go on with just my own pack."
Brand nodded again. "We have spare horses here. I will let you have one. It will cost you a mark of silver."
Stuf opened his mouth to protest, to start the automatic haggling expected of any deal in horseflesh, but then closed it suddenly as Brand waved his men on. He grabbed the reins of the horse Brand was leading.
"Your price is high," he said. "But maybe now is not the time to be arguing. There are Englishmen around. I can smell them."
As he said the words Shef saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. A branch moving. No, the whole tree sweeping downward in a stately arc, the ropes tied to its top suddenly visible as they tightened into a straight line. An instant later, movement all along the left-hand edge of the track.
Shef threw his shield up. A thump, an arrow-point just protruding through the soft lindenwood an inch from his hand. Shouts and screams behind him, horses rearing and kicking. Already he had hurled himself off the horse and was crouching below its neck, its body between him and the ambush. His mind registered a dozen facts as if in one flash of lightning, far quicker than any words.
That tree had been cut through after the Great Army had passed through. The rear-guard was even further behind than they had thought. The attack would be coming from the left; they wanted to drive their enemies into the wood to the right. No escape forward over the felled tree, none back through the confusion of shot horses and startled men. Do what they least suspected!
Shef ran round the front of his horse, shield up, and hurled himself straight at the steep left bank of the track, his spear gripped underhand. One leap, two, three—not pausing lest the muddy bank give way. A makeshift barricade of branches and a face glaring over it at him, an Englishman fumbling an arrow out of his quiver. Shef drove the spear through the barricade at groin level and saw the face contort in agony. Twist, wrench backward, reach over and drag the man forward through his own barricade. Shef drove his spear-point into the ground and vaulted over body and branches, turning instantly and stabbing at the ambushers, first one side then the other.
He realized suddenly that his throat was raw with shouting. A much bigger voice was bellowing in unison: Brand down on the track, not fit to fight one-handed but directing the startled Vikings up the bank and into the breach he had made. One instant a dozen figures were closing on Shef, with him stabbing furiously in all directions to keep them off. The next there was an elbow in his back, he was stumbling forward, there were mailed men on either side, and the English were backing hastily, turning suddenly in open flight.
Churls, Shef realized. Leather jackets, hunting bows and bill-hooks. Used to driving boar, not to fighting men. If the Vikings had fled into the woods as they had been expected to, no doubt they would have been in a killing ground of nets and pits, where they would have wallowed helpless till speared. But these Englishmen were not warriors to stand and hew at each other over the war-linden.
No point, certainly, in trying to pursue them through their own woods. The Vikings looked down, stabbed or cut thoughtfully at the few men their charge had caught, making sure none would live to boast of the day. Shef felt a hard hand slap him on the back.
"You did right, boy. Never stand still in an ambush. Always run away—or else run straight toward it. But how do you know these things? Maybe Thorvin is right about you."
Brand clasped the hammer pendant round his neck, and then began once more to bellow orders, hustling his men off the track and round the felled tree-trunk, stripping gear off dead or crippled horses, looking briefly at the ten or twelve men wounded in the skirmish.
"At this range," he said, "these short bows will send an arrow through mail. But only just. Not enough punch in them to get through the ribs or into the belly. Bows and arrows never won a battle yet."
The cortege wound its way up the slope on the other side of the little stream, out of the woods and into the last of the autumn light.
Something lay on the track in front of them. No, some things. As the Vikings crowded forward again, Shef realized that they were warriors of the Army—two of them, stragglers like Stuf, dressed in the grubby wadmal of the long-service campaigner. But there was something else about them, something horrifying, something he had seen before....
With the same shock of recognition he had experienced in Emneth, Shef realized the men were too small. Their arms were hacked off at the elbow, their legs at the knee; a reek of seared flesh told how they had lived. For they were still alive. One of them lifted his head from the ground as the riders came toward him, saw the shocked and angry faces.
"Bersi," he called. "Skuli the Bald's crew. Fraendir, vinir, do what you must. Give us the warrior's death."
Brand swung from his horse, his face gray, drawing his dagger left-handed. Gently he patted the living corpse's face with his bandaged right hand, steadied it, drove the dagger home with one hard thrust behind the ear. Did the same for the other man, lying mercifully unconscious.
"Pull them out of the road," he said, "and let's get on. Heimnars," he added to Shef. "Now I wonder who has taught them to do that."
Shef made no reply. Far off, but caught in the last rays of the sun now streaming almost horizontally through a breach in the clouds, he could see yellow stone walls, a thicket of distant houses on a slight hill in front of them, smoke streaming away from a thousand chimneys. He had seen them before. Another moment of recognition.
"Eoforwich," he said.
"Yovrvik," repeated the Viking standing next to him, struggling with the unfamiliar consonants and diphthongs.
"To Hell with that," said Brand. "Just call it York."
After dark the men on the city walls looked down on the innumerable twinkling points of the Great Army's cooking fires. They were on the round bastion of the southeast corner of the old and impressive square Roman fortress, once home of the Sixth Legion, placed there to hold the North in awe. Behind them, inside the three-hundred-and-twenty-acre defended site, bulked St. Peter's Minster, once the most famous home of learning and scholarship in the whole northern world. Inside the walls, too, lay the king's quarters, the houses of a hundred noble families, the jammed-together barracks of their thanes and companions and hired swords. And the forges, the arsenals, the weapon-shops, the tanneries, the sinews of power. Outside there lay a sprawling town with its warehouses and jetties down on the Ouse. But this was dispensable. What mattered lay inside the walls: those of the old legionary fortress or its matching walled site across the river, centered on St. Mary's—once the Roman colonia where the time-expired legionaries had settled and had walled themselves in as was their custom, against the turmoil or resentment of the natives.
King Ella stared down grimly at the countless fires, the burly captain of his guard, Cuthred, at his side. Close by stood the archbishop of York, Wulfhere, still in his purple and white, and flanked by the black figure of Erkenbert the deacon.
"They have not been much delayed," said Ella. "I thought they might be held up by the Humber marshes, but they slipped across. I hoped they might run out of supplies, but they seem to have managed well enough."
He might have added that he hoped they might have been discouraged by the desperate assault of King Edmund and the East Anglians, of which so many tales already were told. But that thought sent a chill to his heart. All the tales that were told ended with a description of the death by torment of the king. And Ella knew—he had known ever since the Ragnarssons were identified in England—that they had the same or worse in store for him. The eight thousand men camped round the cooking fires out there had come for him. If he fled, they would come after him. If he hid, they would offer money for his body. Wulfhere, even Cuthred, could hope to survive a defeat. Ella knew he must beat the Army or die.
"They have lost many men!" Erkenbert the deacon said. "Even the churls are out, to delay them, to cut off their rearguards and their forage parties. They must have lost hundreds of men already, maybe thousands. All our people are rallying to the defense."
"That's true," agreed Cuthred. "But you know to whose credit that is."
The group turned together to look at the strange contrivance a few yards from them. It was like a shallow box, on long handles so that it could be carried like a stretcher. Between one pair of handles ran an axle with wheels on it, so that it could be trundled on level ground. Inside the box lay the trunk of a man, though now that the box was tipped forward he was upright, able to see over the battlements like the rest. Most of his weight was taken by a broad strap round his chest and under his armpits. His groin rested on a padded projection. He braced himself on the bandaged stumps of his knees.
"I serve as a warning," rumbled Wulfgar, his voice shockingly deep-toned coming from such a seemingly small man. "One day I will serve as vengeance. For this and all the heathens have done to me."
The other men did not reply. They knew the effect the mutilated East Anglian thane had had, the almost triumphal progress he had made from his home, ahead of the Army, halting in every village to tell the churls what lay in store for them and for their womenfolk.
"What good has all the rallying done?" King Ella asked bitterly.
Cuthred screwed up his face in calculation. "Not slowed them. Not lost them many. Made them keep together. May even have tightened them up. Still around eight thousand of them."
"We can put half as many again in the field," said Arch Deacon Erkenbert. "We are not the East Anglians. Two thousand men of military age live in Eoforwich itself. And we are strong in the strength of the Lord of Hosts."
"I don't think we've got enough," said Cuthred slowly. "Not even counting the Lord of Hosts. It sounds good to say you're three-to-two. But if it's a fight on level ground it's always one to one. We've got champions as good as theirs, but not enough of them. If we marched out to fight them we would lose."
"Then we will not march out against them?"
"We stay here. They have to come to us, try and climb the walls."
"They will destroy our properties," cried Erkenbert. "Kill the stock, carry off the young people, cut down the fruit trees. Burn the harvest. And there is worse. The rents on Church properties are not due till Michaelmas, none have yet been paid. The churls still have their money in their pouches, or hidden in the ground, but if they see their lands ravaged and their lords penned inside a wall, will they pay?"
He threw his hands up theatrically. "It would be a disaster! All over Northumbria the houses of God would fall into ruin, the servants of God would starve."
"They won't starve for loss of a year's rents," said Cuthred. "How much of last year's have you got set aside in the minster?"
"There is another solution," said Ella. "I have proposed it before. We could make peace with them. Offer them tribute—we could call it wergild for their father. It would need to be a mighty tribute to attract them. But there must be ten households in Northumbria for every man out there in the Army. Ten households of churls can buy off a carl. Ten households of thanes can buy off one of their nobles. Some of them will not want to accept, but if we make the offer publicly, the rest may argue them round. What we would ask for from them is a year's peace. And in that year—for they will come again—we will train every man of military age in the kingdom till he can stand against Ivar the Boneless or the devil himself. Then we can fight them three to two, eh, Cuthred? Or one to one if we have to."
The burly captain snorted in amusement. "Brave words, lord, and a good plan. I'd like to do it. Problem is..." He pulled the laces on the pouch at his belt and tipped the contents into his palm. "Look at this stuff. A few good silver pennies that I got from selling a horse when I was down South. The rest is imitations from the archbishop's mint here—mostly lead, if it's not copper. I don't know where all the silver's gone—we used to have plenty of it. But there's been less and less of it all over the North for twenty years now. We use the archbishop's money, but the Southerners won't take it; you have to have something to trade to deal with them. You can be damned sure the Army out there won't take it. And it's no good offering them grain or honeycombs."
"But they're here." said Ella. "We must have something they want. The Church must have reserves of gold and silver...."
"You mean to give Church treasures to the Vikings, to buy them off?" gasped Erkenbert. "Instead of marching out to fight them, as is your Christian duty? What you say is sacrilege, Church-breach! If a churl steals a silver plate from the least of God's houses, he is flayed and his hide nailed to the church door. What you suggest is a thousand times worse."
"You imperil your immortal soul even to think of it," cried the archbishop.
Erkenbert's voice hissed like an adder. "It was not for this that we made you king."
The heimnar Wulfgar's voice cut across them both. "And you forget, besides, who you are dealing with. These are not men. They are spawn from the pit—all of them. We cannot deal with them. We cannot have them out there for months—we must destroy them...." Spittle began to show round his pale lips, and he lifted an arm for an instant as if to wipe it away before the truncated limb fell back. "Lord king, heathens are not men. They have no souls."
Six months ago, Ella thought, I would have led the host of the Northumbrians out to fight. It's what they expect. If I order anything else there is the risk of being called a coward. No one will follow a coward. Erkenbert has as good as told me: If I do not fight they will bring that simpleton Osbert back. He is still hiding up there in the North somewhere. He would march out to fight like a gallant fool.
But Edmund has shown what happens if you fight on even ground, even when you catch them by surprise. If we march out in the old style, I know we will lose. I know we will lose, and I will die. I must do something else. Something Erkenbert will accept. But he will not accept an open payment of tribute.
Ella spoke with sudden decision, the weight of kingship in his voice.
"We will stand a siege and hope to weaken them. Cuthred, check defenses and provisioning, send away all useless mouths. Lord archbishop, men have told me that in your library there are learned books by the old Rome-folk who wrote on matters of war, especially of siegecraft. See what aid they can give us in destroying the Vikings."
He turned away, left the wall, Cuthred and a trail of lesser nobles following; Wulfgar was tipped back on his stretcher and carried off by two stout thralls down the stone steps.
"The East Anglian thane is right," whispered Erkenbert to his archbishop. "We must get these people away before they destroy our rents and seduce our thralls. Even our nobles. I can think of some who might be tempted into thinking they can do without us."
"Look it out—Vegetius," Wulfhere replied. "The book called De Re Militari. I had not known our lord was so learned."
"He has been in the forge four days now," observed Brand. He and Thorvin, with Hund and Hund's master Ingulf, stood in a little knot a few yards away from the glowing fire of a smithy. The Vikings had found it, still stocked with charcoal, in the village of Osbaldwich a few miles outside York. Shef had taken it over immediately, called urgently for men, iron and fuel. The four stared at him through the wide-flung doors of the smithy.
"Four days," repeated Brand. "He has hardly eaten. He would not have slept except the men told him if he did not sleep, they still had to, and made him cease the din of hammering a few hours a night."
"It doesn't seem to have done him much harm," said Hund.
Indeed his friend, who he still thought of as a boy, a youth, seemed to have changed totally in the course of the past summer. His frame was not massive by the demanding standards of the Army, full of giants. But there seemed to be no excess flesh on it. Shef had stripped to the waist in spite of the gusts of an English October. As he moved round the forge, pecking now at something small and delicate, shifting the red-hot metal with tongs, barking quickly at his iron-collared English assistant to pump harder at the bellows, his muscles moved under the skin as if they lay directly beneath it, without blurring fat or tissue. A quick jerk, metal sizzling into a tub, another piece snatched from the fire. Each time he moved, separate muscles slid smoothly over each other. In the red light of the forge he might have seemed a bronze statue of the ancient days.
Except that he had not their beauty. Even in the light of the forge the sunken right eye seemed a crater of decay. On his back the thrall-marks of flogging showed vividly. Few men in the Army would have been so careless as to display such shame.
"No harm in the body, maybe," replied Thorvin. "I cannot speak for the mind. You know what it says in the Völund-lay:
"He sat, he did not sleep, he struck with the hammer.
Always he beat out the baleful work for Nithhad."
"I do not know what cunning thing our friend is beating out in his mind. Or who he is doing it for. I hope he will be more successful than Völund—more successful at gaining the desire of his heart."
Ingulf turned the questioning. "What has he been making these four days?"
"This, to begin with." Thorvin held a helmet up for the others to scrutinize.
What Thorvin held up was like no helmet they had ever seen. It was too big, bulbous as the head of a giant insect. A rim had been welded round it, filed to bright razor-sharpness in the front. A nose-guard ran down in front, ending in bars running back to cheek-protectors. A flared skirt of solid metal covered the nape of the neck.
More surprising to the watchers was the inside. A leather lining had been fitted to the helmet, suspended by straps. Once the helmet was on, the lining would fit the head snugly but the metal would not touch it. A broad strap and a buckle fitted under the jaw, to hold all firm.
"Never seen the likes," said Brand. "A blow on the metal will not crash into the skull. Still, it's better not to get hit, I say."
As they talked, the racket at the forge had ceased, and Shef had been seen diligently fitting small pieces together. Now he walked over to them, smiling and sweating.
Brand raised his voice. "I say, young waker-of-warriors-untimely, if you avoid the blow you don't need the helmet. And what in the name of Thor is that you are holding?"
Shef grinned again, and held up the strange weapon from the forge. He held it out horizontally, balancing it after an instant on the edge of one hand, just where wood joined metal.
"And what do you call that?" asked Thorvin. "A hewing-spear? A haft-axe?"
"A beard-axe that's had bastards by a ploughshare?" suggested Brand. "I don't see the use of it."
Shef picked up Brand's still-bandaged hand and gently rolled back the sleeve. He put his own forearm next to his friend's.
"How good a swordsman am I?" he asked.
"Poor. No training. Some talent."
"If I had the training, would I ever be fit to stand against a man like you? Never. Look at our arms. Is yours twice as thick round as mine? Or just half as thick again? And I am not a weak man. But I am a different shape from you, and yours is the shape for a swordsman, even more, an axeman. You swing a weapon as if it were a stick for a boy to slash thistles. I cannot do that. So if I were ever to face a champion like you... And one day I will have to face a champion like you. Muirtach maybe. Or worse."
All five men nodded silently.
"So I have to even things up. With this, you see..." Shef began to twirl the weapon slowly. "I can thrust. I can cut forehand. I can strike backhand without reversing the weapon. I can change grip and strike with the butt. I can block a blow from any direction. I can use two hands. I need no shield. Most of all—a blow from this, even in my hands, is like a blow from Brand, which few survive."
"But your hands are exposed," said Brand.
Shef beckoned, and the Englishman in the forge nervously moved over. He held two more metal objects. Shef took them and passed them over.
They were gauntlets: leather-lined, leather-palmed, with long metal projections designed to fit halfway up the forearm. Yet the striking thing about them, the men saw as they peered more closely, was the way the metal moved. Each finger had five plates, each plate fitted to the next on small rivets. Larger plates fitted over the knuckles and the backs of the hands, but they too moved. Shef pulled them on, and slowly flexed his hands, opening and closing them round the shaft of his weapon.
"They are like the scales of Fafnir the dragon," said Thorvin.
"Fafnir was stabbed in the belly, from below. I hope to be harder to murder." Shef turned away. "I have another task to do. I could not have done all this in time without Halfi here. He is a good leather-worker, though he is slow with the bellows."
Motioning the Englishman to kneel before him he began to file at the iron collar. "You will say there is not much point in freeing him, since someone will enslave him again immediately. But I will see him outside the Army's watch fires in the night, and his master is shut up tight in York. If he has any sense or luck he will run away, run far away, and never be caught again."
The Englishman looked up as Shef began gently to pry the soft iron from his throat. "You are heathens," the slave said, not understanding. "Priest said you're men with no mercy. You cut the arms and legs from the thane—I saw him! How can it be that you set a man free where the Christ-priests hold him a slave?"
Shef lifted him to his feet. He replied in English, not in the Norse they had been using before. "The men who crippled the thane should not have done what they did. Yet I say nothing of Christians and heathens, except that there are evil men everywhere. I can give you only one rede. If you do not know who to trust, try a man who wears one of those." He gestured at the four men watching, who, following the speech, silently raised their silver pendants: hammers for Brand and Thorvin, the apples of Ithun for the two leeches, Hund and Ingulf.
"Or others like them. It may be a boat for Njörth, a hammer for Thor, a penis for Frey. I do not say they will help you. But they will treat you as a man, not as a horse or a heifer."
"You do not wear one," said Halfi.
"I do not know what to wear."
Around them, the normal noise of the camp was turning to hubbub as news spread; voices were raised, warriors shouted to each other. The men in the smithy looked up as one of Brand's men appeared, a broad grin splitting the tangle of his beard.
"We're off!" he cried. "The jarls and the Ragnarssons and the Snakeeye have all stopped riding round and round and pondering and scratching their arses. We take the wall tomorrow! Let the women and girls there beware!"
Shef looked darkly at the man, finding no humor in his words. "My girl was called Godive," he said. "That is, 'God's gift.' " He pulled on his gauntlets, swung his halberd thoughtfully. "I shall call this Thrall's-wreak'—the vengeance of the slave. One day it will do vengeance for Godive. And other girls as well."
In the gray morning light the Army began to filter through the narrow, hovel-lined streets of the outer town of York. All three main bridges over the Ouse were commanded by the walls of the old colonia, on the south bank of the river, but this had caused no difficulty for the skilled shipwrights and axemen who filled the Viking ranks. They had torn down a few houses and an outlying church for some bigger timbers, and had thrown a wide bridge over the Ouse close to their own encampment. The Army had crossed, and were now lapping their way up, like the tide, toward the yellow stone walls at the heart of the town. There was no sense of hurry, no shouting of commands, just eight thousand men, less the crews detailed to guard the camp, pressing forward toward their obvious goal.
As they tramped up through the narrow streets, men turned aside in small groups to kick down doors or break open shutters. Shef turned his head, stiff and clumsy with the unaccustomed weight of the helmet, and raised brows in silent inquiry at Brand, strolling peacefully by his side, flexing the scarred hand just unwrapped from its bandages.
"There are fools everywhere," remarked Brand. "The runaways say the king here ordered the place cleared days ago, the men inside the fortress, all the others off into the hills somewhere. But there's always someone who knows better, thinks it won't happen."
Commotion broke out ahead of them to lend force to his words: voices shouting, a woman shrieking, the sound of a sudden blow. Out from a shattered doorway squeezed four men, grins splitting their faces, a grubby, slatternly young woman writhing and twisting in their grip. The other men pushing up the hill stopped to exchange jokes.
"Make you too weak to fight, Tosti! You'd be better off with another pancake, keep your strength up."
One of the men pulled the girl's gown up over her head like a sack, pinning her arms and muffling her shrieks. Two others seized her bare legs and pulled them roughly apart. The mood of the crowd passing by changed. Men began to stop and watch.
"Room for more when you're finished, Skakul?"
Shef's gauntleted hands clenched on the shaft of "Thrall's-wreak," and he too turned toward the writhing, grunting group. Brand's enormous fist closed gently over Shef's biceps.
"Leave it, boy. If there's a fight she'll be killed for sure. Easy targets always are. Leave them to it, and maybe they'll let her go at the end. They've a battle to fight, so they can't take too long."
Reluctantly Shef turned his eyes and walked on, trying not to hear the sounds coming from behind—and, as they walked further, from other sides as well. The town, he realized, was like a cornfield in autumn. It seemed to be empty, but as the scythemen walked through it, cutting the wheat down into a smaller and smaller square, so its inhabitants became more and more visible, anxious, terrified, finally running anywhere to get away from the voices and the blades. They should have gone when they were told, he told himself. The king should have made sure. Why can no one see sense in this world?
The buildings ended and before them was a cleared zone of mud and rubble with the yellow stone wall some eighty yards off, the wall the Rome-folk had made. Brand and his crew emerged from the alley, looked up at the top of the wall where figures moved and called jeeringly. A zip in the air, and an arrow thumped into the wattle and daub of a house wall. Another, and a Viking swore in anger as he looked at the shaft sticking from his hip. Brand reached over and pulled it out, glanced at it, tossed it over his shoulder.
"Hurt, Arnthor?"
"Just got through the leather. Six inches higher and it would have bounced off my jacket."
"No punch," remarked Brand again. "Don't look at those fellows. Someone gets one in the eye now and then."
Shef plodded forward, trying to ignore the zips and thuds like the others. "Have you done this kind of thing before?" he asked.
Brand halted, called to his crews to halt as well, turned toward the wall and promptly hunkered down on his heels.
"Can't say I have. Not on this scale. But today we just do what we're told. The Ragnarssons say they've a plan and they will take the city if everybody stands by to lend their weight where needed. So we watch and wait.
"Mind you, if anyone knows what they're doing it should be them. Do you know, their old man, their father Ragnar, tried to take the city of the Franks—oh, it must be twenty years ago. Paris, it's called. So the Ragnarssons have thought a lot about stone walls and cities ever since. Though it's a far cry from some rath in Kilkenny or Meath to this. I'd like to see how they go about it."
Shef leaned on his halberd and stared around him. To his front ran the stone wall, topped with battlements, men loosely scattered along it, no longer wasting arrows on the mass of the Army drawn up on the fringe of the cleared zone facing them, but clearly ready to shoot at any forward movement. Surprising, Shef thought, how little range even a great stone wall could give you. The men on top of their walls thirty feet were impregnable, unreachable. Yet the archers on the wall could do virtually nothing to the men standing watching them. At fifty yards' range you were in danger, at ten you might well be dead. At eighty you could stand in the open and make your preparations at leisure.
He looked more closely at the wall. To the left, two hundred yards away, it ended in a round, jutting tower, from which men could shoot along the line of the wall, at least for as far as their bows would carry. Beyond the tower the ground dropped toward the brown and muddy Ouse, immediately beyond it on the other bank, the wooden stockade that guarded the river fringe of the colonia—Marystown, as the locals called it. It too carried a frieze of men, watching anxiously the preparations of the heathen so close, so out of range.
The Army waited, six- and eight-deep, facing the wall on a five-hundred-yard front; more packed into the mouths of the streets and alleyways, the steam of their breath rising into the air. Dull metal, grubby wool and leather were picked out only here and there by the bright paint on shields. The warriors looked calm, patient, like farmhands waiting for the owner.
There came a blare of horns from the center of the waiting ranks, maybe fifty or sixty yards to Shef's right. Shef realized suddenly that he should have been studying the gate in the center of the wall. A wide street ran out from it, no longer prominent in the waste of mud and trampled wattle where houses had been, but clearly the main road out to the east. The gate itself was new, not work of the Rome-folk, but massively formidable for that. Its timbers were seasoned oak tree-trunks, fully as high as the towers on either side of it. Its hinges were the heaviest iron that English smiths could make.
Yet it was weaker than stone. Opposite it now, the four Ragnarssons strode forward. Shef picked out the tallest of them, looking almost frail beside his mighty brothers. Ivar the Boneless. Clad for the occasion in flaring scarlet cloak, grass-green breeches beneath his long mail-coat, shield and helmet silver-painted. He paused and waved to his nearest supporters, to a roar of recognition. The horns blew again, and the English on the wall responded with a cloud of arrows, to hiss by, thud into shields, bounce away from mail.
This time the Snakeeye waved, and suddenly hundreds of men were trotting forward, the Ragnarssons' own picked followers. The first line of them carried shields, not the usual round ones for combat, but large rectangles, capable of covering the body from ankle to neck. They ran forward through the arrow-sleet and halted, forming a V aimed at the gate. The second and third line were bowmen. They too ran forward, crouched behind the shields and began to shoot up. Now men began to fall on both sides, shot through throat or brain. Shef could see others crouching, struggling with arrows this time deeply embedded through mail and flesh. A trickle of wounded men was already beginning to walk back from the Viking ranks.
But the job of these first attackers was only to sweep the battlements clear.
Crawling forward from the mouth of the street up which it had been towed came the Ragnarssons' pride. Shef, looking at it as it emerged from the ranks of men, saw it for a moment as a monstrous boar. The legs of the men who pushed it from inside could not be seen. Twenty feet long, it was armored on either side with heavy, overlapping shields, roofed over with more.
Inside was an oak-trunk ram which swung on iron chains from its frame. Fifty men picked for strength heaved it along, pushing it on eight double-size cartwheels. From its front poked the iron snout of the ram. As it rolled ponderously forward, the warriors on either side of it cheered and began to surge forward with it, ignoring the English arrows. The Ragnarssons were on either side of the ram, waving their men back and trying to get them into some sort of column. Shef looked grimly at the flurry of saffron plaids. Muirtach was there, his longsword still not drawn, also waving and cursing.
"Well, that's the plan," said Brand—he had still not bothered to stand up. "The ram bashes the door down and then we all walk in."
"Will it work?"
"That's what we're fighting the battle to find out." The ram was only twenty yards from the gate now, level with the foremost archers, accelerating to a rapid walk as the men pushing saw their goal through the frontal slit. On the battlement men appeared suddenly, drawing an instant hail of shot from the Viking archers. They leveled their bows, and fire-arrows shot down from wall to ram, thumping into the heavy timbers.
"Won't work," Brand said. "Somewhere else maybe, but in England? After harvest? You'd have to dry that wood for a day at your forge before you could get it to take light." The fires fizzled and guttered. The ram was at the gate, still accelerating till it stopped with a crash. A pause, as the champions left their drag-ropes and stepped across to the handles on the ram itself. The whole structure shifted as they swung it back on the iron chains hanging from the roof of the frame. Then a heave forward, propelled by a hundred arms and the massive weight of the tree-trunk itself. The gate shook.
Shef realized suddenly that the excitement of battle was beginning to take hold. Even Brand was on his feet now, and everyone was beginning to edge forward. He himself was ten yards further forward than he had been. No reply from the battlements, no harassing fire hoping to take its toll.
Now all attention on both sides was fixed on the gate. The ponderous frame of the boar was shifting again as the men heaved the trunk back. Another drive forward, a crash which carried even over the noise of thousands of voices, another tremor from the massive gate. What were the English doing? If they let the boar carry on its routing, their gate would soon be in splinters and the Army surging through.
Heads began to appear at the gate towers, bobbing up in spite of the waves of shafts directed at them. Each man—they must be strong men up there—held a boulder, heaved it over his head, hurled it over and down at the overlapped shields of the ram. It was a target that could not be missed. Shields cracked and broke. But they were nailed firmly in place, and sloping. The boulders fell, rolled to one side.
Something else was happening, He was closer now, just behind the line of the Ragnarsson archers, men behind him darting forward with bundles of retrieved arrows. What was it? Ropes. They had ropes in the gate towers, both of them, lots of ropes, and the men in the towers, still out of arrowshot, were heaving mightily at them. A Ragnarsson ran across his view—Ubbi, it seemed to be—shouting at the men pressing forward. He was telling them to throw javelins up over the battlements, to come down where the men seemed to be pulling. A few men ran forward to cast; not many. It was blind shooting, and a costly throwing spear was not something to waste idly. The ropes tightened.
Up over the edge of the gate came a round object, a great roller teetering slowly toward the edge. It was a pillar: a stone pillar from the Roman days, sawn off at both ends. Falling from thirty feet no frame could stop it.
Shef passed "Thrall's-wreak" to Brand and ran forward, yelling inarticulately. The men inside the boar could see nothing of what was happening above their heads, but others could. The trouble was, no one had a clear idea of what to do. As Shef reached the frame several men were clustered at its rear, urging its crew to drop the handles, turn back to the drag-ropes, and haul the whole contrivance back to safety. Others were calling to Muirtach and his stormers to come to the outside and add their weight to the withdrawal. As they did so, the English archers rallied again and the air was once more full of the zip and thud of missiles, this time coming at killing range.
Shef pushed a man aside, another, and ducked into the rear entrance of the ram. Inside there was an immediate reeking fog of sweat and steaming breath, fifty heroes gasping with exertion and confusion, some already at the drag-ropes, others turning away from the massive swinging trunk.
"No," Shef bellowed at the top of his lungs. "Get back to the handles."
Faces gaped at him, men began to throw their weight on the ropes.
"You don't need to push the whole thing back, just swing back the ram—"
An arm caught him in the back, he was hurled forward, other bodies charged past him, he found a rope thrust in his hand.
"Pull, ye useless bodach, or I'll cut yer liver out," screamed Muirtach in his ear.
Shef felt the frame tremble, the wheel behind him start to turn. He threw his weight on the rope—two feet would do it, maybe three—they couldn't throw that great thing right out from the gate....
A ground-trembling crash, another violent blow in the back, his head making contact with a timber, a sudden terrible shrieking like a woman's that this time went on and on...
Shef stumbled to his feet and looked around. The Vikings had been too slow. The stone pillar, finally hauled over the edge by a hundred arms, had come down squarely on the iron snout of the ram, driving it into the ground, snapping chains and tearing out their fixing bolts. It had also smashed the front of the frame, and come down finally across the hips of one of the crew. He was the one—a massive grizzled man in his forties—who was shrieking. His mates backed away—frightened, shamed, ignoring the three or four silent bodies caught by flailing chain or smashing timber. At least, apart from the one man, no one was making any noise. They would begin to babble in a moment, but for a moment, Shef knew, he could bend them to his will. He knew what must be done.
"Muirtach. Stop that noise." The cruel dark face gaped at him, seemingly without recognition, then stepped forward, pulling a dirk from his hose-top.
"The rest of you. Roll the ram back. Not far. Six feet. Stop. Now—" He was at the timbers at the front, examining the damage. "Ten of you, outside; take broken wood, spear-shafts, anything, roll that column right hard up against the gate. It's only a few feet wide—if we get the front wheel right up to it we can still swing the ram.
"Now, rerig these chains. I need a hammer, two hammers. Start pulling the ram back, right back on its slings..."
Time passed in a frenzy. Shef was aware of faces staring at him, of a silver helmet pushing in and out of the rear entrance, of Muirtach wiping a dirk. He paid no attention. For him, the chains and posts, the nails and broken timbers, were glowing lines in his head, shifting as he thought how they should be. He had no doubt what to do.
A roar of excitement outside as the Army tried a sudden escalade with makeshift ladders against a seemingly undefended wall. Only to be hurled back and off as the English rallied in defense.
Inside, gasps of effort, mutters: "It's the smith, the one-eyed smith. Do as he says."
Ready. Shuffling to the back, Shef waved the champions to their ropes again, saw the ram rumble forward till its wheels lay against the column and its head; the shattered iron snout, chopped off and discarded, was once again flush with the gate, oak against oak. The champion seized their handles once more, waited for the word, swung back all together, and forward. And forward. They were singing now, a rowing song, putting their bodies into the stroke, heaving mindlessly and without direction. Shef ducked out of the frame once more and into the daylight.
Round him the aimless muddy waste of the morning had taken on the look of a battlefield. Bodies on the ground, hurt men walking or being carried away, spent shafts littering the earth or being picked up by scavenging archers. Anxious faces turning first toward him. Then toward the gate.
It was beginning to split. Movement ran across it now as the ram struck; one post was slightly out of line with the other. The men inside were inching the ram forward, to get a better stroke. In fifty breaths, maybe a hundred, it would go. The champions of Northumbria would surge out, waving their gold-handled swords, to meet the champions of Denmark and the Vik and the apostates of Ireland. It was the turning point of the battle.
Shef found himself staring into the face of Ivar the Boneless, only a few feet away, the pale eyes fixed on him, full of hatred and suspicion. Then Ivar's attention changed. He too knew the battle had reached its crisis. Turning, he waved both arms in prearranged signal. From the houses down toward the Ouse a horde of figures trotted. They carried long ladders, not makeshifts like those of the last escalade, but carefully made and concealed ones. Fresh men, who knew what they were doing. If the champions were at the gate, Ivar would send a wave in at the corner tower, which all the bravest and the best of the English would have left, to join the climactic struggle at the gate.
The English are finished, Shef thought. Their defenses are down in two places. Now the Army will go through.
Why did I do this to them? Why have I helped Ivar and the Army—the ones who burned out my eye?
From the other side of the quaking gate there came a curious dull twang, like a harp-string snapping, but immensely louder, fit to be heard above the din of battle. Up into the air there rose a mass, a mighty mass, a boulder bigger than ten men could lift. That's impossible, Shef thought. Impossible.
But the boulder continued to rise, up and up till Shef had to tilt his head back to look at it. It appeared to hang for an instant.
Then down.
It landed square on the center of the ram, smashing through shields and frame and supports as if they were a child's house of bark. The ram's head kicked up in the air and jerked sideways like a dying fish. From inside, hoarse cries of pain.
The scaling parties now had ladders up against the wall; they were scrambling up; one ladder had been pushed away, the rest were standing firm. Two hundred yards further off, across the Ouse, something was happening on top of the wooden stockade of Marystown: men crouched round some kind of machine.
Not a boulder this time, a line, rising as it streaked across the river, then falling as it headed for the ladders. The hero on top of the one nearest them had his hand on the stone battlement, and was just reaching over to scramble across. The streak intersected with his body.
He smashed forward as if struck in the back by a giant, smashed so hard the ladder broke under him with the impact. As the ladder fell beneath him and he turned, arms flung wide, Shef saw the giant bolt projecting from the man's spine. He folded over backward as if in two pieces and fell slowly onto the heap of his mates scrambling beneath him.
An arrow. But not an arrow. No human being could have shot it, nor heaved the boulder. Yet these things had happened. Shef walked forward slowly and considered the rock lying amid the ruins of the ram, ignoring the pitiful struggles and cries for help beneath it.
These things had been done by machines. And such machines! Somewhere inside the fort, maybe among the black monks, there must be a machine-master such as he had never imagined. He must find out. But now, anyway, he knew why he had helped the Army. Because he could not bear to see a machine mishandled. But now there were machines on both sides.
Brand had seized him, thrust "Thrall's-wreak" into his hands, was hustling him away, snarling angrily at him.
"...standing there like a wittol, they'll have a war-band out any moment!"
Shef saw they were almost the last men left on the cleared ground, the place of slaughter. The rest had filtered back down the hill as they had filtered up.
The Ragnarssons' assault on York had failed.
Very carefully, tongue protruding between his teeth, Shef laid the keen blade of his meat-knife to the thread. It snapped. The weight on the end of the wooden arm dropped, the other end flew up. A pebble arced lazily across the forge.
Shef sat up with a sigh. "That is how it works," he said to Thorvin. "A short arm, a heavy weight; a long arm, a lighter weight. There it is."
"I am glad you are satisfied at last," replied Thorvin. "Two days you have been playing with bits of wood and string, while I do all the work. Now maybe you can bear a hand."
"I will, yes, but this is important too. This is the new knowledge that those of the Way must seek."
"It is. And important. But there is the day's work to be done as well."
Thorvin was as keenly interested as Shef in the experiments, but, after a few attempts to help, had realized that he was merely standing in the way of the excited imagination of his former apprentice, and had gone back to the enormous pile of work an army, in being, created for its armorers.
"But is it new knowledge?" Hund asked. "Ingulf can do things no Englishman has ever been able to. And he learns how to do them by trial, and by taking to pieces the bodies of the dead. You are learning by trial, but you are only trying to learn what the black monks already know. And they are not playing with models."
Shef nodded. "I know. I am wasting my time. I understand now how it can be done, but there are all kinds of things I do not understand. If I had a real weight here, like the one they really shot, then what kind of weight would I need to put in the other arm? It would be far greater than a dozen men could lift. And if it was as heavy as that, how could I wind down the long arm, the shooting arm? It would need some sort of a windlass. But I know now what the sound was that I heard just before the rock came over. It was the sound of someone cutting the rope, to release the rock.
"And there is another thing that bothers me even more. They shot one rock—that smashed the ram. If they had not hit with that one shot, the gate would have been down and all the machine-masters would be dead. They must have been very sure they could hit with the first shot."
He swept suddenly at the lines he had been drawing in the dirt. "It is a waste of time. Do you see what I mean, Thorvin? There must be some sort of skill, some sort of craft, which would tell men where it would go without me having to try again and again. When I first saw the stockade round your camp by the Stour, I was amazed. I thought, how do the leaders know how many logs to bring with them to build a stockade that will hold all their men? But now I know how even the Ragnarssons do it. They notch a stick for each ship, ten notches to a stick, and then they throw the sticks down in turn in separate piles, one pile for each one of the three walls, or the four walls, or however many there are, and when there are no more sticks they pick the piles up and count them. And that is the reckoning of the greatest leaders and captains in the world. A pile of sticks. But what they have over there in the city is the knowledge of the Rome-folk, who could write in numbers as easily as they could write in letters. If I could learn to write in Roman numbers, then I would build a machine!"
Thorvin laid down the tongs and looked thoughtfully at the silver hammer displayed on his chest.
"You should not think the Rome-folk had the answers to everything," he remarked. "If they had they would still be ruling England from York. And they were only Christians, when all is said and done."
Shef jumped impatiently to his feet. "Hah! How do you explain the other instrument then? The one that shot the great arrow. I have thought and thought about that. Nothing will do. You could not make a bow big enough. The wood would break. But what can shoot except a bow?"
"What you need," said Hund, "is a runaway from the city, or from Marystown. One who has seen the machines work."
"Maybe one will come," said Thorvin. A silence fell, broken only by the renewed pounding of Thorvin's hammer and the puffing of the bellows as Shef blew angrily at the forge. Runaways were a subject better avoided. After the failure of the assault the Ragnarssons, in rage, had turned on the countryside around the city of York—a defenseless countryside, since its armed men and nobles, its thanes and champions, were shut up with King Ella inside the city. "If we cannot take the town," Ivar had cried, "we will ravage the shire." Ravage it they had.
"I'm getting sick of it," Brand had confided to Shef after the last sweep of an already-gutted countryside, all crews taking their turn. "Don't think I'm a milksop, or a Christian. I want to get rich and there are few things I won't do for money. But there's no money in what we're doing. Not much sport either, to my eye, in what the Ragnarssons and the Gaddgedlar and the riffraff are doing. No fun going through a village after they've been through. They're only Christians, I know, and maybe they deserve what they get for cringing to the Christ-god and his priests.
"It still won't do. We're picking up slaves by the hundred, good quality stuff. But where to sell them. Down South? If you do that you need to go with a strong fleet and a sharp eye open. We aren't popular down there—and I blame Ragnar and his brood for that. Round in Ireland? A long way, and a long time before you get your cash. And slaves apart, there's nothing. The churches got their gold and silver into York before we arrived. What money the peasants have got, or the thanes—it's poor stuff. Very poor stuff. Strange. It's a rich land, anyone can see. Where's all their silver gone? We'll never get rich the way we're going. Sometimes I wish I had not taken the news of Ragnar's death to the Braethraborg, no matter what the priests of the Way said to me. It's little enough I have got out of it."
But Brand had taken the crews out again, probing up across the shire to the shrine of Strenshall, hoping for a haul of gold or silver. Shef had asked not to accompany him, sickened with the sights and sounds of a land crisscrossed by the Ragnarssons and their followers, each one intent on showing to the others his skill on racking secrets and information and buried treasure out of churls and thralls who had no information, and certainly no treasure, to yield. Brand had hesitated, scowling.
"We are all in the Army together," he had said. "What we decide together, all must do, even if some of us don't like it. If we don't like it we have to talk the others round, in open meeting. But I don't like the way you think you can take some bits of the Army and leave the others, young man. You are a carl now. Carls do what is best for each other. That is why we are all given a voice."
"I did what was best when the ram broke."
Brand had grunted, doubtfully, and had muttered, "For your own reasons." But he had left Shef behind, with Thorvin and a mountain of smith-work, in the guarded camp that watched York, ever alert for a sally. Shef had begun immediately to play with models, to imagine giant bows, sling-stones, mallets. One problem at least he had solved—if not in practice or even in theory.
Outside the smithy there was a pad of running feet, a gasping of exhaustion. The three men inside moved as one to the wide, open doors. A few feet beyond them Thorvin had set up a line of poles, connected with yarn, from which he had hung the rowan berries that indicated the limits of his precinct, the holy place. To one of the posts clung a panting figure, dressed in rough sacking. The iron collar round his neck indicated his status. Desperately his eyes moved from one to the other of the three faces staring at him, then brightened with relief as he saw, finally, the hammer round Thorvin's burly neck.
"Sanctuary," he gasped, "give me sanctuary." He spoke in English, but used the Latin word.
"What is 'sanctuarium'?" asked Thorvin.
"Safe-keeping. He wants to come under your protection. Among the Christians, a runaway may grasp a church door in some churches, and then he is under the protection of the bishop till his case is tried."
Thorvin shook his head slowly. He could see now the pursuers coming into view—half a dozen of them, Hebrideans by the look of them, among the most ardent of the slave-takers, not hurrying now that they could see their quarry.
"We don't have that custom here," he said.
The slave wailed with fear as he saw the gesture and felt the presences behind him, and clung tighter to the fragile poles. Shef remembered the moment when he too had walked forward to Thorvin inside his enclosure, not knowing if he was walking to his death or not. But he had been able to call himself a smith, a fellow of the craft. This man looked as if he was just extra labor, knowing nothing of any value.
"Come along, you." The leader of the Hebrideans said, clouting the cringing figure round one ear, and began to pry his fingers from the pole.
"How much do you want for him?" said Shef impulsively. "I'll buy him off you."
Guffaws of laughter. "What for, One-eye? You want a bum-boy? I've got better down in the pen."
"I said I'll buy him. Look, I've got money." Shef turned towards "Thrall's-wreak," stuck in the ground at the entrance to the precinct. From it he had hung his purse with the few coins in it that Brand had doled out as his share of the meager plunder so far.
"No chance. Come down to the pens if you want a slave, sell you one anytime. I've got to take this one back, make an example of him. Too many down there run from one master, think they might run from another. Got to show them it doesn't pay."
The slave had caught something of the dialogue, and wailed with fear again, this time more desperately. As the men gripped his arms and hands and began to pull him off, trying as they did so not to damage the precinct-markers, he thrashed and fought. "The pendants," he cried. "They said the pendant-men were safe."
"We cannot help you," Shef replied, speaking again in English. "You should have stayed with your English master."
"My masters were the black monks. You know what they are like to their slaves. And my master was the worst of all—Erkenbert the deacon, who makes the machines...."
An angry Hebridean lost patience with the man's struggles, whipped a sandbag from his belt, and struck out. He missed his blow, caught the slave along the jaw instead of on the temple. A crack, the jaw lolling forward, blood trickling from the corner of the mouth.
"Er'en'ert. He' a de'il. Ma' 'e de'il-'chines." Shef seized his gauntlets, pulled them on, ready to jerk his halberd out of the ground. The knot of struggling men swayed back a few paces.
"Hold on," he said. "The man's valuable. Don't hit him again." Ten words, he thought, ten words might be all I need. Then I will know the principle of the great bow.
The slave, fighting now with the frenzy of a tormented weasel, got a foot free, kicked out. A Hebridean grunted, bent forward cursing.
"That's enough," snapped the head of the gang. As Shef leapt forward in entreaty he whipped a knife from his belt, stepped forward and drove upward, backhand. The slave, still held, arched and contorted, went limp.
"You blockhead!" yelled Shef. "You killed one of the machine-men!"
The Hebridean turned back to him, mouth twisting with anger. As he started to speak, Shef punched him full in the face with his armored glove. He sprawled backward, landed on the ground. A dead silence fell.
The Hebridean climbed slowly to his feet, spat one tooth, then another, into his hand. He looked at his men, shrugged. They dropped the slave's corpse, turned, walked off together toward their camp.
"You've done it now, boy," said Thorvin.
"What do you mean?"
"Only one thing can happen now."
"What's that?"
"Holmgang."
Shef lay on the straw pallet close to the banked fire of the forge, moving uneasily in his sleep. Thorvin had forced a heavy dinner on him, which should have been welcome after days of increasingly short commons in a camp dependent entirely on foraging for its food. But the rye bread and fried bullock lay heavy on his stomach. Heavier still were his thoughts. They had explained the rules of holmgang to him, far different from the impromptu brawl in which he had killed the Irishman Flann months before. He knew he was at terrible disadvantage. But there was no getting out of this. The whole Army knew, looked forward to the morning's duel as a major distraction. He was trapped. And he still thought about the machines. How were they built? How could better ones be built? How could the walls of York be breached? Slowly, he slipped into heavier slumber.
He was on some distant plain. In front of him loomed monstrous walls. On a scale to dwarf the walls of York, or any other walls that had ever been built by mortal man. High above were the figures he had seen before in his dreams, his "visions" as Thorvin called them—the massive figures with the faces like axe-blades and the expressions of severe gravity. But now their expressions were also of concern, alarm. In the foreground, moving up to the walls, he saw there was a figure even more gigantic than those of the gods, so enormous that it towered up even to the height of the walls on which the gods were standing. But it did not have the proportions of a human being: stumpy-legged, fat-armed, swollen-bellied and gap-toothed, it looked like an immense clown. A wittol, one of the children born deformed, who, if Father Andreas were not on hand very swiftly, would quietly have found their way into the fen in Emneth. The giant was urging on an immense horse, fully built to his own scale, and drawing a cart, on it a block of stone large as a mountain.
Shef realized the block was to fill a gap in the great wall. The wall was not complete—but nearly so. The sun in this strange world was setting, and he knew that if the wall were finished before the sunset, something appalling, something incurably dreadful would take place. That was why the gods looked their alarm, and why the giant was urging on his horse—his stallion, Shef saw—with whoops of glee and anticipation.
A whicker from behind. Another horse, this time a more normally proportioned one. A mare, too, with chestnut hair and mane blowing around her eyes. She whickered again, then turned coyly as if unaware of the effect her call had had. But the stallion had heard. His head rose. He shook in his traces. His member started to slide out of its sheath.
The giant shouted, beat the stallion round the head, tried to cover its eyes. Its nostrils flared, a whinny of rage, yet another encouraging whicker from the mare, now close by, heels kicking skittishly. The stallion reared, lashed out with mighty hooves at the giant, at the traces. Over went the cart, out tipped the stone, the giant dancing with vexation. The stallion was free, lunging towards the mare to sheathe his erect, chain-long penis. But she was coy, prancing away, provoking him to follow, then darting sideways. The two horses gyrated, suddenly dashed off at full gallop, the stallion slowly gaining on the mare but both rapidly out of sight. Behind them, the giant cursed and leapt in comic pantomime. The sun set. One of the figures on the wall strode forward grimly, pulling on a pair of metal gloves.
There is a forfeit to be paid, thought Shef.
Again he was on a plain, facing a walled city. It too was mighty, the walls rising far above the heights of those at York, but this time it was at least on a human scale, as were the thousands of figures milling about within the walls and outside the walls. Outside the walls the figures were heaving at a monstrous image—not a boar, like the Ragnarssons' battering ram, but a giant horse. A wooden horse. What is the point of a wooden horse? thought Shef. Surely no one could be deceived by it.
Nor were they. Arrows and missiles flew out against the horse from the walls, or flew at the men heaving at its mighty wheels. They bounced away, scattered haulers, did not dislodge or discourage the hundreds of new hands rushing to take the place of the fallen. The horse edged up to the walls, overtopping them. What would take place now, Shef knew, was the crisis of something that had gone on for many years, that had swallowed thousands of lives and would yet swallow thousands more. Something told him also that what happened here would fascinate men for generation upon generation—but that few men would ever understand it, preferring instead to make up their own stories.
A voice Shef had heard before spoke suddenly in his mind. The voice that had warned him before the night battle by the Stour—still with the same note of deep, interested amusement.
"Now watch this," it said. "Watch this."
The horse's mouth opened, its tongue slid out to rest on the walls. From the mouth...
Thorvin was shaking him, dragging relentlessly at his shoulder. Shef sat up, still groping for the meaning of his dream.
"Time to rise," said Thorvin. "You have a hard day ahead of you. I only hope you live to see the end of it."
Erkenbert the archdeacon sat in his tower room high above the great hall of the minster and pulled the candlestick closer to him. There were three candles in it, each of best beeswax, not stinking tallow, and the light they gave was clear. He viewed them with satisfaction as he took the goose-feather from its inkpot. What he was about to do was difficult, was laborious, and its results might be sad.
In front of him lay a confusion of scraps of vellum, written on, crossed out, written on again. Now he took his quill and a fresh, large, handsome piece. On it he wrote:
De parochia quae dicitur Schirlam desunt nummi XLVIII
" " " " Fulford " " XXXVI
" " " " Haddinatunus " " LIX
The list crept on and on. At the end he drew a line beneath the record of the minster's unpaid rents, drew a deep breath, and began the mind-wrenching toil of adding the numbers up. "Octo et sex," he muttered to himself, "quattuordecim. Et novo, sunt... viginta tres. Et septem." To assist himself he began to draw little lines on a discarded sheet, hatching them through when he completed a ten. He began also, as his finger crawled down the list, to put a little mark between the XL and the VIII, the L and the IX, to remind himself which bits were to be added and which were to be left. Finally he came to the end of his first calculation, wrote down firmly CDXLIX, and began to work his way down again with the figures he had omitted before. "Quaranta et triginta sunt septuaginta. Et quinquaginta. Centum et viginta." The novice who decorously moved an eye round the doorway a few minutes later to see if anything was required returned in awe to his fellows.
"He is saying numbers of which I have never heard," he reported.
"He is a marvelous man," said one of the black monks. "God send there may be no harm in the learning of such black arts."
"Duo milia quattuor centa nonaginta," pronounced Erkenbert, writing it down: MMCDXC. The two figures now lay next to each other: MMCDXC and CDXLIX. After another interval of crossing and hatching, he had the answer: MMCMXXXIX. And now the real toil began. That was the sum of the failed rents for one quarter. What would this represent for a full year, if by divine punishment the scourges of God, the Vikings, were permitted to lie so long upon the backs of the suffering people of God? Many, even among arithmetici, would have taken the easier route and added the same figure up four times. But Erkenbert knew himself superior to such subterfuges. Painstakingly, he set up the complex procedure for the most difficult of all diabolic skills: multiplication in Roman numerals.
When all was done he stared at the figure, disbelievingly. Never in all his experience had he come upon such a sum. Slowly, with shaking fingers, he snuffed the candles in recognition of the growing gray light of dawn. After matins he would have to seek out the Archbishop.
It was too great. Such losses could not be borne.
Far away, a hundred and fifty miles to the south, the same growing light reached the eyes of a woman, snuggled deep in a nest of down mattress and woolen rugs piled high against the cold. She stirred, shifted. Her hand touched the warm, naked thigh of the man next to her. Recoiled as if it had touched the scales of a mighty adder.
He is my half brother, she thought for the thousandth time. Son of my own father. We are in mortal sin. But how could I tell them? I could not tell even the priest who married us. Alfgar told him we had sinned carnally while fleeing from the Vikings and now prayed God's forgiveness and blessing on our union. They think he is a saint. And the kings, the kings of Mercia and of Wessex, they listen to all he says of the menace of the Vikings, of what they did to his father, of how he fought at the Viking camp to set me free. They think he is a hero. They say they will make him an alderman and set him over a shire, they will bring his poor, tormented father home from York, where he is defying the heathens still.
But what will happen when our father sees us together? If only Shef had lived...
As she thought the name, Godive's tears started to leak slowly, as they did every morning, through closed eyelids onto the pillow.
Shef marched down the muddy street, between the lines of booths which the Vikings had set up to keep out the winter weather. His halberd rested on his shoulder, and he wore his metal gloves, but the helmet remained at Thorvin's forge. Mail and helmets may not be worn in holmgang, they had told him. The duel was fought as a matter of honor, so mere expediencies, like surviving and killing your enemy, were not the point.
That did not mean you would not be killed.
And a holmgang was a four-man affair. Each of the two principals took turns to strike at the other. But each principal was covered from the blows of the other by his second, the shieldbearer, who carried a shield for him and intercepted the strokes. Your life depended on the skill of your second.
Shef had no second. Brand and all his crews were still away. Thorvin had pulled his beard frantically, thumping his hammer again and again into the ground with frustration, but as a priest of the Way he could take no part. If he offered, his offer would be refused by the umpires. The same went for Ingulf, Hund's master. The only person he might have asked was Hund, and as soon as Shef framed the thought, he knew that Hund—once he realized the situation—would surely volunteer. But he had immediately told his friend he must not think of helping. All other considerations apart, he was sure that at the critical moment, with a sword-blow descending, Hund would stop to observe a heron in the marsh or a newt in the fen, and would probably kill them both.
"I will see it through myself," he told the priests of the Way, who had gathered together from the whole Army to advise him, much to Shef's surprise.
"This is not why we spoke for you to the Snakeeye, and saved you from the vengeance of Ivar," said Farman sharply—Farman the priest of Frey, famous for his wanderings in the other worlds.
"Are you then so sure of the ways of fate?" Shef had replied, and the priests had fallen silent.
But in truth, as he walked toward the place of the holmgang, it was not the duel itself which bothered him. What bothered him was whether the umpires would let him fight on his own. If they did not, then he would stand for the second time in his life at the mercy of the Army's collective judgement, the vapna takr. At the thought of the roar and the clash of weapons that accompanied a decision, his guts knotted within him.
He marched through the gates of the stockade and out onto the trampled meadow by the river where the Army was assembled. As he walked forward, a buzz of comment rose, and the watching crowd parted to let him through. At their center stood a ring of willow wands, only ten feet across. "The holmgang should strictly be fought on an island in a stream," Thorvin had told him, "but where there was no eyot suitable, a symbolic one was marked out instead. In a holmgang there was to be no maneuvering: The participants stood and cut at each other till one was dead. Or could fight no more, or ransomed himself off, or threw down his weapons, or stepped outside the marked area. To do either of the two last meant submitting yourself to the mercy of your opponent, who could demand death or mutilation. If a fighter showed cowardice, the judges would certainly order either, or both.
Shef saw his enemies already standing by the willows: the Hebridean whose teeth he had knocked out, whose name he now knew was Magnus. He held a naked broadsword in his hand, burnished so that the serpent-markings on its blade wriggled and crawled in the dull, gray light. By him stood his second: a tall, scarred, powerful-looking man of middle age. He held an oversized shield of painted wood, with metal rim and boss. Shef looked at them for a moment, and then looked deliberately round for the umpires.
His heart checked as he recognized instantly, in a little group of four, the unmistakable figure of the Boneless One. Still wearing scarlet and green, but the silver helmet put aside; the pale eyes with their invisible eyebrows and lashes stared straight into his own. But this time, instead of suspicion they held assurance, amusement, contempt, as they recognized Shef's uncontrollable start of fear and the immediate attempt to replace it with impassivity.
Ivar yawned, stretched, turned away. "I disqualify myself from judgement in this case," he said. "This barnyard cock and I have another score to settle. I will not have him say that I took advantage to judge unfairly. I leave his death to Magnus."
A rumble of agreement came from the nearest watchers, and a buzz as the information was passed to those further back. Everything in the Army, Shef realized again, was subject to public agreement. It was always best to have public opinion on your side.
Ivar's withdrawal left three men there, all obviously senior warriors, well armed, necks, belts and arms flashing with silver to show their status. The middle one, he recognized, was Halvdan Ragnarsson, the eldest of the brothers: a man with a reputation for ferocity, for fighting when there was no need—not as wise as his brother Sigurth nor as dreadful as his brother Ivar, but not a man to show mercy on the unwarlike.
"Where is your second?" said Halvdan, frowning.
"I do not need one," replied Shef.
"You must have one. You cannot fight a holmgang with no shield or shield-bearer. If you present yourself without one, then that is as good as surrendering to the mercy of your enemy. Magnus, what do you want to do with him?"
"I do not need one!" This time Shef shouted, stepped forward, jammed the butt of his halberd upright in the earth. "I have a shield." He raised his left forearm, on which he had strapped a square buckler, a foot across, fastened firmly at wrist and at elbow, made entirely of iron. "I do not fight with board and broadsword, but with this and this. I do not need a second. I am an Englishman, not a Dane!"
A growl rose from the audience as they heard him—a growl with a note of amusement in it. The Army liked a drama, Shef knew. They might bend the rules if there was something to bet on. They would support a man who was in the wrong, if he showed enough daring.
"We cannot accept this proposal," said Halvdan to the other two judges. "What do you say?"
A disturbance behind, someone forcing his way through the ring, stepping forward to join Shef as he stood before his judges. Another large and powerful figure, laden with silver. The Hebrideans stood frowning a little way apart. Shef saw with shock that it was his father Sigvarth. Sigvarth looked across at his son, then turned to the judges. He spread his burly arms with a cunning air of conciliation.
"I wish to act as this man's shield-bearer."
"Has he asked you to?"
"No."
"Then what standing do you have in this affair?"
"I am his father."
Another growl from the audience, with a rising note of excitement. Life in a winter camp was cold and boring. This was easily the best entertainment anyone had had since the failed assault. Like children, the warriors of the Army were anxious not to see the show end too early. They pressed closer, straining to hear and to pass on the news to those further back. Their presence affected the umpires: They had to judge correctly, but also gauge the mood of the crowd.
As they began to mutter quietly among themselves, Sigvarth turned quickly toward Shef. He stepped close, bent the inch or two needed to be on a level, and spoke with a note of entreaty.
"Look, boy, you turned me down once before when you were in a fix. That showed guts, I've got to say. Look what it cost you. Cost you an eye. Don't do it again. I'm sorry—what happened to your mother. If I'd known she'd had a son like you I wouldn't have done it. Many men have told me what you did at the siege, with the ram—the Army's full of it. I'm proud of you.
"Now, let me carry this shield for you. I've done it before. I'm better than Magnus, better than his mate Kolbein. With me as shield-bearer nothing will get through to you. And you—you've knocked that Hebridean fool as dizzy as a dog once already. Do it again! We'll finish the pair of them."
He gripped his son's shoulder hard. His eyes shone with emotion, a mixture of pride, embarrassment, and something else—it was the lust for glory, Shef decided. No one could be a successful warrior for twenty years, a jarl, the leader of warbands, without the urge to be at the front, to have all eyes fixed on one, to break down destiny by sheer violence. Shef felt suddenly calm, composed, even able to think of how to save his father's face while rejecting him. He knew now that his worst fear would not be realized. The umpires would let him fight on his own. It would be too much of an anticlimax to decide anything different.
Shef stepped clear of his father's near embrace.
"I thank Sigvarth Jarl for his offer to bear my shield in this holmgang. But there is blood between us—he knows whose it is. I believe that he would support me loyally in this affair, and his help would mean much to a young man like myself. But I would not show drengskapr in accepting the offer."
Shef used the word for warriorhood, for honor—the word one used to show that you were above trifles, that you did not care for your own advantage. The word was a challenge. If one man laid claim to drengskapr, his opponent would be ashamed to show less.
"I say again: I have a shield, I have a weapon. If this is less than I should have, so much the better for Magnus. I say it is more. If I am wrong, then that is what we are fighting to see."
Halvdan Ragnarsson looked at his two co-arbiters, saw their nods of assent, and added his own. The two Hebrideans walked immediately inside the round of withies and took up their stations one beside the other: they knew any hesitation or further argument would look ill to the Army, Shef walked over to face them, saw the two junior umpires taking their places to either hand, while Halvdan, in the middle, repeated the rules of the combat. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sigvarth still standing well to the front of the others, joined now by the young man he had seen before, the one with a horse's projecting teeth. Hjörvarth Jarlsson, he thought detachedly. His half brother. Just behind the pair of them stood a rank of men with Thorvin in their center. Even though he strove to keep his mind on Halvdan's exposition he saw that each was wearing a silver pendant, prominently displayed. Thorvin had at least mustered a body of opinion, in case it could have an effect.
"...combatants must strike alternately. If you try to strike twice, even if your enemy is off guard, you forfeit the holmgang and become liable to the judgement of the umpires. And it will not be light! So, begin. Magnus, as injured party, shall be the first to strike."
Halvdan stepped back, eyes wary, sword drawn to strike up any illegal blow. Shef found himself in the midst of a great silence, face-to-face with his two enemies.
He swung his halberd forward and trained the point on Magnus's face, left hand gripping the weapon just below its massive and complex head. His right hand down by his right side, ready to seize the haft to block or parry in any direction. Magnus frowned, realizing he must now step to one side or the other and Signal his direction. He stepped forward and right, to the very edge of the line Halvdan had drawn in the mud to separate the combatants. His sword swung down, forehand, aimed at the head, the most elementary stroke possible. He wants to get this over with, thought Shef. The blow was merciless and lightning-quick. He swung up his left arm to catch it squarely in the center of the iron buckler.
A clang, a recoil. The blow left a dull line and a dent the length of the buckler. What it had done to the edge of the sword-blade, Shef, as a smith, did not like to think.
Magnus was back behind his line now, Kolbein stepping forward with the shield to cover him. Shef raised the halberd with both hands over his right shoulder, stepped forward to the edge of the line and stabbed point-first straight forward at Magnus's heart, ignoring the covering of the shield. The triangular lance-head drove through the linden-wood as if it were cheese, but as it did so, Kolbein jerked it up, so that the point stabbed past Magnus's cheek. Shef jerked back, twisted, jerked again, freeing the weapon with a crunch of broken wood. Now there was a gaping hole in the gay blue paint of the shield, and Kolbein and Magnus looked at each other with grave expressions.
Magnus came forward again, and realized that he must not strike on the buckler side. He swung backhand, but still at the head, still thinking that a man without proper sword and shield must needs be at a disadvantage. Without shifting grip, Shef swung the head of his halberd eighteen inches sideways at the descending sword, catching it not with the axe-side but with the reverse, the thumb-wide iron spike.
The sword flew out of Magnus's grasp, to land well on Shef's side of the line. All eyes flew to the umpires. Shef stepped back a pace, two paces, looked firmly at the sky. A buzz as the audience realized what was happening, a low growl of approval—a growl that went on as the keenly intent audience began to realize the potentialities of Shef's weapon and the problem the two Hebrideans were facing. Stone-faced, Magnus stepped forward, recovered his blade, hesitated, then saluted briefly with it and returned to his side of the line.
This time Shef swung the weapon over his left shoulder, and struck like a woodsman felling a tree, left hand sliding down the weapon as it swung, concentrating all his force and all the weight of the seven feet of metal behind the slicing half-yard of blade. Kolbein leapt quickly and decisively to save his partner, and got the shield well up above head height. The axe slashed through its edge and swung on, turned only slightly by the resistance of the metal rim, shore through two feet of lindenwood, and embedded itself with a thunk in the muddy ground. Shef jerked it free and stood once more on guard.
Kolbein looked at the half-shield still strapped to his arm and muttered something to Magnus. Impassive, Halvdan Ragnarsson stepped forward, picked up the severed oval of wood and tossed it to one side.
"Shields may only be replaced at the agreement of both parties," he observed. "Strike."
Magnus stepped forward with something like desperation in his eyes now, and swung a wicked blow with no warning, just above knee height. A swordsman would have jumped it, or tried to—it was just above the height a man might be expected to manage. Shef moved his right hand slightly and stopped the blow dead with his weapon's metal-reinforced shaft. Almost before Magnus could regain the shelter of his partner's shield, he was stepping forward, this time swinging upward, with the spike side foremost. A thump as it met the remnants of the shield, a resistance which this time was not one of wood alone, Kolbein staring at the foot-long spike which had driven through shield and forearm, splitting ulna and humerus bones.
Stone-faced, Shef slid his hand high up the head of the halberd, gripping tight, and jerked back. Kolbein staggered forward, put a foot over the line, recovered himself and straightened up, face white with shock and pain. There was a simultaneous yell as his foot went down, and then a confusion of cries.
"Fight's over, past the mark!"
"He struck at the shield-bearer!"
"He struck at the man. If the shield-bearer puts his arm in the way..."
"First blood to the smith, settle all bets!"
"Stop it now, stop it now," Thorvin called out.
But over him an even louder voice, that of Sigvarth: "Let them fight it out! These are warriors, not girls to snivel at a scratch."
Shef looked sideways, saw Halvdan, grave but fascinated, wave the opponents on.
Kolbein was shaking, starting to fumble with the buckles of the useless shield, clearly unable to hold it up much longer. Magnus too had gone white. Each strike with the halberd had come close to killing him. Now he had no protection left. Yet there was no escape, no chance to run or surrender.
White-lipped, he stepped forward with the resolution of despair, raised the sword and swung straight down. It was a blow any active man could dodge without thinking; but in a holmgang you had to stand still. For the first time in the contest, Shef twisted his left hand and swung a parry, full force, with the axe edge of the halberd. It met the descending broadsword halfway down the blade and battered it aside, knocking Magnus off balance. As he recovered, he glanced at his weapon. It had not snapped off, but was cut halfway through, and bent out of line.
"Swords may only be replaced," intoned Halvdan, "by the agreement of both parties."
Magnus's face sagged with despair. He tried to pull himself together, to stand straight for the deathblow that must come. Kolbein shuffled a little forward and tried to pull his shield-arm up into place with his other hand.
Shef looked at the blade of his halberd, running a thumb over the nick that he had just put in it. Some careful work with a file, he reflected. The weapon was called "Thrall's-wreak." He was fighting because the man over there had murdered a thrall. Now was the time for vengeance, for that thrall and no doubt for many others.
But he had not knocked the Hebridean down because he had murdered a slave, but because he, Shef, had wanted the slave. Wanted to know about the machines the slave had made. Killing Magnus would not bring the knowledge back. Besides, he had more knowledge now.
In the utter silence Shef stepped back, drove his halberd point-first into the mud, unstrapped his buckler, threw it down. He turned to Halvdan and called out in a loud voice, making sure the whole Army could hear him.
"I give up this holmgang, and ask for the judgement of the umpires. I regret that I struck Magnus Ragnaldsson in anger, knocking out two of his front teeth, and if he will release me from the holmgang I offer him self-doom for that injury, and for the injury just inflicted on Kolbein his partner, and I ask for his friendship and support in the future." A groan of disappointment mingled with shouts of approval. Yelling and pushing in the crowd as the two points of view found expression. Halvdan and the umpires pushed together to confer, after a few moments calling over the two Hebrideans to join their discussion. Then an agreement, slow quietening as the crowd waited to hear the decision and to ratify it. Shef felt no fear, no memory of the last time he had stood to hear a Ragnarsson pronounce. He knew he had judged the mood of the crowd rightly, and that the umpires would not dare to go against that.
"It is the judgement of all us three umpires that this holmgang has been fought well and fairly, with no discredit to any participant, and that you, Shef..." He struggled with the English name, could not pronounce it. "...Skjef, son of Sigvarth, had the right to offer to submit to judgement while it was your turn to strike." Halvdan stared round and repeated the point. "While it was your turn to strike. Accordingly, since Magnus Ragnaldsson is also prepared to accept a judgement, we declare that this contest may be ceased without penalty to either side."
Magnus the Hebridean stepped forward. "And I declare that I accept the offer of Skjef Sigvarthsson to self-doom for the injuries inflicted on me and on Kolbein Kolbrandsson, and we value them at half a mark of silver for each of us..." Whistles and hoots at the low rate set by the proverbially grasping islanders. "...on one condition:
"That Skjef Sigvarthsson, in his smithy, makes weapons for both of us similar to the one he wields, at the price of half a mark of silver each. And with this we admit him to our full friendship and support."
Magnus walked forward, grinning, clasped hands with Shef as Kolbein too shambled forward. Hund was inside the ring as well, seizing Kolbein's bleeding and already-swollen arm, clucking over the filthy state of the sleeve. Sigvarth was there also, hovering behind the duellers, trying to say something. An icy voice cut through the babble.
"Well, you are all agreed on one thing and another. If you had meant to stop fighting as soon as two drops of blood were shed, you could have done it all behind the privy and not wasted the whole Army's time.
"But tell me this, little dunghill cock—" The Boneless One's voice fell now into a pool of silence as he stalked forward, eyes blazing. "What do you think you can do to get my full friendship and support? Eh? For there is blood between us too. What can you offer me in exchange for it?"
Shef turned and pitched his voice high, allowing once again the note of challenge and contempt to brazen it, so that the Army would know Ivar had been dared.
"I can give you something, Ivar Ragnarsson, that I already tried to get for you once, but that we know you cannot get for yourself. No, I do not mean a woman's skirts..." Ivar swayed back, eyes never leaving Shef's face, and Shef knew that now Ivar would never leave him, never forget him till one or the other was dead. "No. Give me five hundred men and I will give you something to share with all of us. I will give you machines stronger than the Christians'. Weapons greater than the one I used here. And when I have all those I will give you something else.
"I will give you York!"
He ended with a shout, and the Army shouted with him, clashing their weapons in tumult and approval.
"It is a good brag," replied Ivar, glaring round at Sigvarth, at the Hebrideans, at Thorvin and his group of pendant-wearers, all clustered in support of Shef. "But it will be a sad one for the boy if he fails to carry it out."
Hard to tell when dawn comes in an English winter, Shef thought. The clouds come down to the ground, the showers of rain or sleet come sweeping across—wherever the sun may be, it has to cut through layer after layer before the light gets through. He needed light for his own men, he needed light to see the English. Till he had it, they could all wait.
He moved his aching body beneath the layer of sweat-sodden wool that was his tunic and the layer of stiff boiled leather that was still the only armor he had had time to acquire. The sweat was chilling now, after the hours of gasping, whispering labor. More than anything he would like to strip everything off and rub himself dry on a cloak. The men in the darkness behind him must feel the same.
But each of them now had only one thing to think about, one duty to carry out, and that duty something painfully and repetitively drilled into them. Only Shef had the image in his mind of all the things that had to happen, all the parts that had to fit. Only he could see all the hundreds of things that could go wrong. Shef was not afraid of death or maiming, of pain or shame or disgrace—the usual terrors of the battlefield, to be dispersed by action and excitement and battle-fury. He was afraid of the unpredicted, the unexpected, the broken spoke, the slippery leaves, the unknown machine.
To an experienced jarl of the pirates, Shef would already have done everything wrong. His men were formed-up, but cold, tired, stiff and uncertain as to what was happening.
But this was going to be a new kind of battle. This one did not depend on how men felt or how well they fought. If everyone did as he was supposed to, nothing needed to be done well. It just needed to be done. This would be battle like ploughing a field, or tearing out tree-stumps. No valor, no heroic deeds.
Shef's eyes caught a spark of flame. Yes. More sparks, a growing brush of flame, more flames further away, all from separate sources. The shapes of buildings could be seen now, and smoke was beginning to pour from them, blown by the wind. The flames lit up the long line of wall with the gate that the Ragnarssons' ram had assaulted two weeks before. All along the line facing that eastern wall, men were setting fire to the houses. Long tails of smoke billowing out, men rushing forward through it with ladders raised—a sudden assault, arrows flying, the blast of warhorns, more men coming forward as the first ones withdrew. The noise and flames and rushes were harmless. Soon enough the English leaders would realize this was a feint attack, would turn their attention elsewhere. But Shef remembered the desperate slowness and confusion of the Emneth levies; with the English what the leaders thought hardly mattered much. By the time they persuaded their men not to believe the evidence of their eyes he sincerely hoped that he would have the battle won.
The flame, the smoke. Warhorns on the ramparts blowing an alarm, faint signs of activity on the walls he could now see in front of him. Time to start.
Shef turned to his right and began deliberately to walk along the long line of houses above the north wall, his halberd swinging easily. Four hundred double-paces to count. As he reached forty he saw the great square bulk of the first war-machine, its crew clustered round it in the mouth of the alleyway where they had heaved it up with such immense labor. He nodded to them, reaching out the butt of his halberd and tapped the man in front—Egil the hersir, from Skaane. Egil nodded solemnly and began to tramp his feet up and down, laboriously counting under his breath every time his left foot touched ground.
Nothing in the whole job had been harder than making them do that. It was not warlike. It was not the way drengir should behave. Their men might laugh at them. Anyway, how could a man keep count of so many? Five white pebbles Shef had given Egil, one for each hundred, and a black one for the final sixty. At five hundred and sixty paces Egil would move off—if he did not lose the count, if his men did not laugh. By then Shef would have reached the far end of his line, turned, and paced back to his own station in the middle. He did not think Egil's men would laugh. The ten counters he had picked were all famous warriors. Dignity was something they defined.
That was a leader's job in the new kind of battle, Shef thought as he paced on. Picking men the way a carpenter picked pieces of wood for a house-frame. He counted eighty, saw the second war-machine, tapped Skuli the Bald, saw him grip his pebbles and start his count, paced on. And fitting together the pieces of the plan the way a carpenter would.
There had to be an easier way to do it all, he told himself as he passed the third and fourth machines. This would be easy for the Rome-folk, with their numbercraft. But he knew no forge hot enough to beat out this skill for him.
Brand's three crews manned the next three machines in the line. The Hebrideans came next, half a dozen of them clutching their newly forged halberds.
Strange, the volunteers he had got. After the holmgang he had asked Sigurth Snakeeye for five hundred men. He had needed more like two thousand in the end, not only to man the machines and make up the diversion squads, but above all else to form the labor gangs to forage for wood, to cut it into shape, to find or forge the massive nails he needed, to manhandle the great contrivances up the muddy slope from the Foss. But the men who had done the work had not been provided by Sigurth, Ivar, or any of the Ragnarssons, who after a few days had held aloof. They had been the men from the small crews, the uncommitted, the fringes of the Army. A high proportion of them wore the pendants of the Way.
Shef was uneasily aware that Thorvin's and Brand's beliefs about him were beginning to leak out into the ranks. People were beginning to tell stories about him.
If all went well they would have another to tell soon enough.
He reached the last machine at the count of four hundred and twelve, turned on his heel, striding out more briskly now as he realized his count was over. The light was strengthening all the time; the din was at its peak over by the eastern wall, smoke still rising in the murky air.
Unbidden, a verse came into his mind, a little English verse from his childhood:
In willow-ford, by woody bridge,
The old kings lie, keels beneath them...
No, that was wrong! It was "Dust rose to heaven, dew fell to earth, night went forth"—that was the verse... So what was the other verse...?
He stopped, doubled over as if stricken by cramp. Something horrible, in his head, just when he had no time to deal with it. He struggled to rise. Saw Brand approaching, concern on his face.
"I lost my count."
"No matter. We can see forty paces now. We'll move when Gummi does. Just one thing..." Brand bent and muttered in Shef's ear. "A man's come up from the rear. He says the Ragnarssons aren't behind us. They're not following our lead."
"We'll do this ourselves, then. But I tell you: the Ragnarssons, anyone—those who don't fight, don't share!"
"They're moving."
Shef was back by his own machine, in the comforting smell of sawdust. He ducked inside its shell, hooked the axe-blade of his halberd over a broken nail he had hammered in himself last night, stepped to his appointed place at the rearmost push-bar, and hurled his weight forward. Slowly, the machine began to creak along the level ground toward the waiting wall.
To the English sentries, it seemed as if the houses moved. But not the little, squat wattle-and-daub houses they knew were there. Rather, it seemed to them as if thane's halls, church towers, belfries, were rolling toward them out of the rising mist. For weeks they had looked down from their wall at everything the eye could see. Now things were coming toward them at their own level. Were they rams? Disguised ladders? Screens for some other kind of devil-work? A hundred bows bent, loosed arrows. Useless. Anyone could see the constructions coming toward them would take no heed of bolts from a breast-bow.
But they had better weapons than that. Snarling, the thane of the northern gate hurled a white-faced fyrdman, a conscript in the service of some petty lord, back to his place on the battlements, seized one of his slave errand-runners, and barked at him.
"Go to the eastern tower! Tell the machine-folk there to shoot. You! Same tale, western tower. You! Back to the square, tell the men with the stone-hurler that there are machines coming up to the northern wall. Tell them machines! Definitely! Whatever is going on over there, this is not a feint attack. Go on, all of you, move!"
As they scattered he turned his attentions to his own troops, the ones off guard pounding up the ladders to their places, the ones who had seen already shouting and pointing at the shapes rolling closer.
"Keep your minds on what you're doing," he bellowed. "Look down, for God's sake! Whatever these things are, they can't come up to the wall. And once they get close enough the priests' weapons will destroy them!"
If the Rome-soldiers still had been in the fortress, Shef, had realized, there would have been a deep ditch at the base of the wall, which any stormer would have had to cross before trying any kind of escalade. Centuries of neglect and refuse-tipping had filled this in, had created a swelling, turf-grown mound five feet high and as many broad. A man who ran up it would still be a dozen feet below the often-patched battlements. It had not seemed dangerous to the defenders. Indeed, without their knowing it, it had become one more hindrance to the enemy.
As the siege-tower rolled up to the wall the man at the front raised a yell, the push-teams stepped up their pace to a half-trot. The machine rolled forward, met resistance from the swelling mound, shuddered to a halt. Immediately a dozen men ran forward from their positions behind the tower. Half of them held up heavy square shields to block the arrow-shower. The others carried picks and shovels. Without words they set instantly to cutting a track along the marks of the front wheels, throwing the earth aside like badgers.
Shef walked forward between the sweating push-teams and peered through the light planking across the machine's front. Weight, that had been the problem. In essence the tower was simply a square frame eight feet wide, twelve feet long, thirty feet high, running on six cartwheels. It was unstable and unwieldy, and the whole of both lower sides were made of the heaviest beams the houses and churches of Northumbria could provide. As defense against the English bolt-throwers. They had had to save weight somewhere, and Shef had decided to skimp at the front. The wood there was only shield-thickness. As he looked out, arrows thumped into it, driving their points through. Only inches away the diggers shoveled frantically to gain the extra two feet to advance the wheels.
That was it. As he turned to call to the push-teams there was a tumult of yells behind him, and a great crash. Shef spun round, heart leaping. A bolt? One of the giant boulders? No, not so bad. Some burly Englishman on the wall had hurled down a rock, weighing fifty pounds at least. It had crashed through the shielding and bounced into the front of the machine, splintering the planks. No matter. But there was a man down, too—Eystein, lying with his leg crooked right under the left-hand wheel, gaping up at the engine towering over him.
"Hold it!" The men checked as they gathered their muscles for the final heave that would have gone straight over Eystein's smashed leg.
"Hold it. Drag him clear, Stubbi. All right. Pick-and-shovel party back into cover. Heave now, boys, and make it a good one. There—she's home! Hammer in the piles, Brand, so she doesn't roll back. Drop the ladders. Archers to the top platform. Storming party, after me."
One pair of ladders took the heavily armed and armored men up twelve feet, all of them gasping now with exertion but swept along with excitement. More ladders, another twelve feet. A hand passed Shef his halberd, forgotten in the rush. He seized it, watched the men jamming close together on the top platform. Were they level with the wall?
Yes! He could see the battlements below him, not much more than knee height. There was an Englishman shooting upward. The point found a gap between the planks, whirred through till the shaft caught and snapped, ended an inch from his good eye. Shef broke it off and dropped it. The men were ready now, all waiting for the signal.
Shef laid the razor edge of his halberd to the rope and cut.
Immediately the drawbridge began to fall forward, slowly for a moment, then hurtling forward like a great hammer, its front edge weighted with sandbags. A thump, a cloud of sand blowing in the wind as a bag burst, bowstrings twanging just above him as the archer tried to keep the battlements clear.
Then a great grunt as Brand propelled his massive frame onto the drawbridge and hurled himself across, beard-axe raised. As Shef leapt to follow, arms closed round him from behind. He found himself staring over his shoulder at Ulf, the ship's cook, the biggest man in three crews, after Brand.
"Brand said not you. He said keep you out of trouble for a few minutes."
The men poured by, first the detailed storming party, then the rest of the machine's crew, flinging themselves up the ladders and across the drawbridge without a pause. Then the men from the pick-and-shovel teams followed the rest of Brand's crew. Shef struggled in Ulf's grip, feet off the ground, hearing the clash of weapons, the screaming and shouting of the battle.
As complete strangers from other crews began to haul themselves up the ladder, Ulf released his grip. Shef leapt out onto the drawbridge, out into the open air, and for the first time could see how his plan had worked.
In the gray light, the cleared ground between wall and outer city was dotted with immense bulks, giant animals of some unknown species that had crawled there to die. That one must have shed a wheel or broken an axle on a bit of uneven ground, maybe an old cesspit. The one beyond them, the Hebridean one, seemed to have reached the wall successfully. The drawbridge was still in place from tower to battlements, and as he watched, another group of men trotted over it. Another, not as successful. They had cut the rope and then the drawbridge had fallen just feet short of the wall. It hung limply, like an enormous tongue from an eyeless face. Mailed bodies lay at the base of the wall beneath it.
Shef stepped off the drawbridge to let another wave of stormers pass by, then began to count. Three towers had not reached the wall, two had failed to get their men over the wall once they had reached it. That meant at most, five successful breaches. That had been enough. But they would have lost more if they had been slower, Shef thought. Or if they had not all come at once.
There must be a rule there. How would you say it? Maybe, in Norse, "Höggva ekki hyggiask." Hit 'em, don't think about it. One heavy blow, not a string of little ones. Brand would think that a good rule, once it was explained to him.
He looked up and saw in the sky what for weeks he had seen in his dreams, in his nightmares: the gigantic boulder rising with superhuman ease, still rising after all sense demanded that it must stop, reaching a peak. Starting to come down. Not on him. On the tower.
Shef cringed in terror—not for his own skin but for the appalling crash that must come, the ripping and rending as all the timbers and wheels and axles he had sweated over sprang apart. The Viking on the bridge cringed too and threw up a useless shield.
A thud, a ripple of loose earth. Hardly believing, Shef gaped at the boulder now embedded in the earth twenty feet from the side of his tower, looking as if it had been there since the dawn of creation. They had missed. Missed by yards. He had not thought they could.
The man in front of him, a burly figure in mail, was hurled aside. Blood in the air, a thrum like the bottom note of a giant's harp, a line in the air that came too fast to be seen and drove in and through the warrior's body.
The bolt-machine as well as the boulder-machine. Shef stepped to the edge of the wall and looked down at the broken body now sprawled at its foot. Well, they might be in action now—but one had missed and both were too late. They must still be captured.
"Come on, don't stand there like young maidens who've just seen the bull!" Shef gestured angrily at the men clustered in the tower's exit. "It will take them an hour to wind their machines again. Follow me now and we'll see they don't get the chance."
He turned and loped along the walkway behind the battlements, Ulf striding like an enormous nursemaid a pace behind.
They found Brand just inside the now-opened gates, in an open space scattered with the familiar debris of battle: split shields, bent weapons, bodies, incongruously, a torn shoe somehow parted from its owner. Brand was breathing hard, and sucking a scratch on his bare arm above his gauntlets, but otherwise was unhurt. Men were still pushing through the gates, being hailed and directed by the skippers according to some plan already agreed upon, all done with an air of frantic haste. As they approached, Brand called two senior warriors over to him and gave brief instructions.
"Sumarrfugl, take six men, go round all the bodies here, strip all the Englishmen and pile what you find over by that house there. Mail, weapons, chains, jewelry, purses. Don't forget to check under their armpits. Thorstein, take another six and go do the same job up along the walls. Don't get cut off and don't take any risks. Bring back all the stuff you find and pile it with Sumarrfugl's. When you've done that you can sort out our own dead and wounded. Now—you there, Thorvin!"
The priest appeared through the gates, leading a laden pack-horse.
"You've got your gear? I want you to stay here till we've secured the Minster and then come right along as soon as I send a squad for you. Then you can set your forge up and start melting down the take.
"The take!" Brand's eyes gleamed with delight. "I can smell that farm in Halogaland already. Estate! County! All right, let's get going."
Shef stepped forward as he swung on his heel and grabbed an elbow.
"Brand, I need twenty men."
"What for?"
"To secure the shooting-machine up in the corner tower, and then go on to the throwing one."
The champion turned, still eying the confusion around him. He grasped Shef's shoulder in enormous metal fingers, squeezed gently.
"Young madman. Young snotnose. You have done great things today. But remember—men fight to rake together money. Money!" He used the Norse word fe, which meant every form of property together, money and metal and goods and livestock. "So forget your machines for a day, young hammerer, and let's all go get rich!"
"But if we have—"
Shef felt the fingers tighten crushingly on his collarbone. "Now I have told you. And remember, you are still a carl in the Army, like all of us. We fight together, we share together. And by the shining tits of Gerth the Maiden, we are going to loot together. Now get in the ranks!"
Moments later, five hundred men were tramping in dense column into the mouth of one of the streets of the inner city, heading firmly in the direction of the minster. Shef, at the rear, stared at a mail-clad back, hefted his halberd, looked longingly over his shoulder at the little groups left behind. "Come along," urged Ulf. "Don't worry, Brand left enough men there to guard the loot. It's share and share alike in the Army, and everyone knows it. They're only there to keep off any stragglers from the English."
The advancing column had speeded up almost to a trot and at the same time had shaken out into the familiar wedge-shape Shef remembered from his first skirmish. Twice it met resistance; makeshift barricades across the narrow street, desperate Northumbrian thanes hacking at their enemies across the war-linden while their churls and followers hurled javelins and stones from the houses above them. The Vikings stormed up, exchanged blows, poured into the houses, dislodged the archers and spear-throwers, broke down interior walls to take the English from flank and rear, acting all the time without orders and without pause, with a dreadful killing urgency. Each time there was a check, Shef seized his chance to struggle closer to the front, aiming for the broad back of Brand. He had to let them take the minster, he realized. But maybe once the loot had been secured, the precious relics of centuries, he could be spared some men to seize the machines. And above all, he must be near the leaders to save prisoners' lives—the lives of the skilled men, the number-workers.
The Vikings were up to a trot again, Brand only a couple of ranks in front of him. A turn in the narrow street, the men on the inside slowing fractionally to let their mates on the outside keep up—and there was the minster, looming suddenly above them like the work of giants, not sixty paces off, set back in its own precinct from the lesser buildings huddled round it.
And there too were the Northumbrians again, coming on one last time with the valor of desperation and the house of their God behind them.
The Vikings checked their rush, heaved shields high again. Shef, still thrusting forward, found himself suddenly level with Brand, saw a Northumbrian broadsword swinging like a meteor at his neck.
Without thought he parried, felt the familiar clang of a breaking blade, stabbed forward with the lance-head of the halberd, twisted and jerked to tear his enemy's shield aside. His back to Brand's, he lashed out blindly with a full-armed sweep. Space round him, enemies to all sides. He swung again, the axe-blade of the halberd hissing in the air, changed grip, and swept back as his enemies tried to dart in beneath the blows. A miss and another miss, but in those instants the Vikings had re-formed. Their wedge surged forward, the broadswords cutting from all angles, Brand leading them, swinging his axe with a joiner's precision.
As one wave the storming column broke over the English defenders, trampling them down. Shef found himself propelled forward at a run into open space, clear ground all around him, the minster in front, whoops of exultation in his ears.
Dazzled by the sudden gleam of sunshine he saw in front of him—saffron cloaks. Unbelievably, the familiar grinning face of Muirtach, driving a spike into the ground. A line of spikes, roped together, like the rowan-berry line that guarded Thorvin's forge. The whoops died uncertainly.
"Well-run, boys. But ye're off limits here. No one over the rope, d'ye hear?"
Muirtach backed away, spreading his arms, as Brand stepped forward. "Now take it easy, lads. Ye'll get yer share, I make no doubt. But it's all been fixed over yer heads. Ye'd have got yer share even if yer attack had failed, now."
"They came in the back," shouted Shef, "They never followed us this morning at all. They broke in the west gate while we attacked the north!"
"Broke in, nothing," snarled a furious voice. "They were let in. Look!"
Out from the minster door, as composed as ever, still dressed in scarlet and grass-green, strolled Ivar. By his side paced a figure in a garb Shef had not seen since the death of Ragnar a year before: a man in purple and white, a strange, tall hat on his head, a gold-decorated crook of ivory in his hand. As if automatically, he raised his other hand in benediction. The Archbishop of the Metropolitan Province of Eoforwich himself, Wulfhere Eboracensis.
"We've done a deal," said Ivar. "The Christ-folk offered to let us into the town on condition the minster itself was spared. I gave my word on it. We can have everything else: the town, the shire, the king's property, everything. But not the minster or the belongings of the Church. And the Christ-folk will be our friends and show us just how to wring this land dry."
"But you are a jarl of the Army," bellowed Brand. "You have no right to make deals for yourself and leave the rest of us out."
Theatrically, Ivar moved one shoulder, rotating it and grimacing with exaggerated pain.
"I see your hand is recovered, Brand. When I too am fit we will have several matters to talk over. But keep your side of the rope! And keep your men in hand or they'll suffer for it.
"Boys too," he added, his eyes falling on Shef.
From behind the minster men had been pouring, the Ragnarssons' personal followers in hundreds—fully armed, fresh, confident, eyeing their scattered and weary comrades coldly. The Snakeeye stepped out from among them, his two other brothers flanking him—Halvdan looking grim, Ubbi for once shamefaced, eyes on the ground as he spoke.
"You did well to get here. Sorry you got a surprise. It will all be explained in full meeting. But what Ivar says is right. Stay outside this rope. Keep away from the minster. Apart from that you can get as rich as you like."
"Small chance of that," shouted an anonymous voice. "What gold do the Christ-priests leave for anyone else?"
The Snakeeye made no reply. His brother Ivar turned, gestured. Behind the Ragnarssons a pole rose into the sky, was driven firmly into the packed earth in front of the minster doors. A jerk on a rope and from it spread—fluttering limply in the damp wind—the famous Raven Banner, the brothers' personal ensign, wings spread wide for victory.
Slowly, the once-united group who had stormed the wall and fought their way through the city lost cohesion, began to break up, mutter among themselves, count their losses.
"Well, they may have the minster," muttered Shef to himself. "But we can still get at the machines."
"Brand," he called. "Brand. Now can I have those twenty men?"
A group of men sat together in pale winter sunlight in a leafless copse outside the walls of York. Cords encircled them, rowan berries dangling scarlet between the spears. It was a conclave of priests, all the priests of the Asgarth Way who had accompanied the Army of the Ragnarssons: Thorvin for Thor, Ingulf for Ithun, but others too—Vestmund the navigator, charter of the stars, priest of Njörth the sea-god; Geirulf the chronicler of battles, priest of Tyr; Skaldfinn the interpreter, priest of Heimdall. Most respected of all for his visions and his travels in the other worlds, Farman, priest of Frey.
Within their circle was planted the silver spear of Othin, next to it the sacred fire of Loki. But no priest in the Army cared to take the great responsibility of the spear of Othin. There had never been a priest of Loki—though that he existed was never forgotten.
Inside the roped circle, but sitting apart and silent, were two laymen, Brand the champion and Hund the apprentice of Ithun. There to give evidence and, if asked, advice.
Farman spoke, looking round the group. "It is time to consider our position."
Silent nods of agreement. These were not men to talk without need.
"We all know that the history of the world, heimsins kringla, the circle of the earth, is not foreordained. But many of us have seen for many years a vision of the world as it seems it must be.
"A world where the Christ-god is supreme. Where for a thousand years and more men are subject to him alone and to his priests. Then, at the end of that thousand years—the burning and the famine. And all through the thousand years, the fight to keep men as they are, to tell them to forget this world and think only of the next. As if Ragnarök—the battle of gods and men and giants—were already decided and men were sure of victory." His face was as stern as stone as he looked at the circle of priests.
"It is against that world that we have set our faces, and it is that future which we mean to avert. You will remember that by chance I heard in London of the death of Ragnar Hairy-Breeks. Then it came to me in my sleep that this was one of those moments when the history of the world may take a different turn. And so I called on Brand"—he waved a hand at the massive figure hunkered down a few feet away—"to take the news to the sons of Ragnar, and to take it in such a way that they could not refuse the challenge. Few men might have survived that errand. Yet Brand did it, as a duty to us, in the name of the one who will come from the North. Come from the North, we believe, to set the world on its true path."
The men in the circle touched their pendants respectfully.
Farman went on. "It was in my mind that the sons of Ragnar, falling on the Christian kingdoms of England, might break their power and be a mighty force for us, for the Way. I was a fool to guess at the meaning of the gods. A fool, too, to think that good might come from the evil of the Ragnarssons. They are not Christians, but what they do gives the Christians strength. Torture. Violation. The making of heimnars."
Ingulf, Hund's master, cut in. "Ivar—he is of the brood of Loki, sent to afflict the earth. He has been seen on the other side—and not as man. He is not one to be used for any good purpose."
"As now we see," replied Farman. "For far from breaking the power of the Christ-god church, he has made alliance with it. For his own ends—and only that fool of an archbishop would trust him. Yet for the moment both are stronger."
"And we are poorer!" growled Brand, driven beyond respect.
"But is Ivar richer?" asked Vestmund. "I cannot see what Ivar and his brothers have from this deal they have made. Except entry into York."
"I can tell you that," said Thorvin. "For I have looked well into this matter. We have all seen how poor their money is here. Little silver, much lead, much copper. Where has all the silver gone? Even the English ask each other that. I can tell you. The Church has taken it.
"We do not understand—even Ivar cannot know—how rich the Church in Northumbria is. They have been here two hundred years and all that time they have taken gifts of silver, and of gold, and of land. And from the land they wring more silver, and from the land they do not own they wring yet more. To splash a child with water, to make her wedding holy, in the end to bury them in holy soil and take away the threat of eternal torment—not for their sins, but for failure to pay the toll."
"But what do they do with this silver?" Farman asked.
"They make ornaments for their god. It all lies now in the minster, as useless as when it was first in the soil. The silver and the gold in their chalices, in their great roods and rood-screens, in the plates for the altar and the boxes for the bodies of their saints—it comes out of the money. The richer the Church, the poorer the coinage." He shook his head in disgust.
"The Church will hand nothing over—and Ivar does not even know what lies in his hand. The priests have told him that they will call in all the coins of the realm and melt them down. Purge out the base metal and leave him only the silver. And then with that they will make him a new coinage. A coinage for Ivar the Victorious, king of York. And Dublin too.
"The Ragnarssons may not be richer. They will be more powerful."
"And Brand, son of Barn, will be poorer!" snarled an angry voice.
"So what we have done," summed up Skaldfinn, "is to bring the Ragnarssons and the Christ-priests together. How sure are you now of your dream, Farman? And what of the world's history and of its future?"
"There is one thing I did not dream then," replied Farman. "But I have dreamed him since. And that is the boy Skjef."
"His name is Shef," put in Hund.
Farman nodded agreement. "Think of it. He defied Ivar. He fought the holmgang. He broke the walls of York. And he walked up to Thorvin's meeting months ago and said he was one who came from the North."
"He only meant he came from the north part of the kingdom, from the Northfolk," protested Hund.
"What he meant is one thing, what the gods mean is another," said Farman. "Do not forget also: I saw him on the other side. In the home of the gods itself.
"And there is another strange thing about him. Who is his father? Sigvarth Jarl thinks he is. But for that we have only his mother's word. It comes to me that perhaps this boy is the beginning of the great change, the center of the circle, though no one could have guessed it. And so I have to ask his friends and those who know him a question:
"Is the boy mad?"
Slowly, eyes turned to Ingulf. He raised his eyebrows.
"Mad? That is not a word to be used by a leech. But since you put it to me in that way, I will tell you. Yes, of course the boy Shef is mad. Consider..."
Hund found his friend, as he had known he would, standing amid a litter of charred wood and iron at the northeast tower, above the Aldwark, surrounded by a knot of interested pendant-wearers. He slipped between them like an eel.
"Have you worked it out yet?" he asked.
Shef looked up. "I think I have the answer now. There was a monk with each machine, whose duty was to see it destroyed instead of captured. They started the job, then scuttled back to the Minster. The men they left behind had no great desire to see the burning finished. This slave was captured," he nodded at a collared Englishman inside the ring of Vikings. "He told me how it worked. I haven't tried to rebuild the machine, but I understand it now."
He indicated the pile of charred timbers and iron devices.
"This is the machine that fires the bolts."
Shef pointed. "See, the spring is not in the wood, it is in the rope. Twisted rope. This axle is turned and twists the rope which puts more and more force on each bow-arm and the bowstring. Then, at the right moment, you release the bowstring..."
"Wham," said one of the Vikings. "And there goes old Tonni."
A grunt of laughter. Shef pointed at the toothed wheels on the frame. "See the rust on them? They are as old as time. I do not know how long it is since the Rome-folk left, or if these things have been lying round in some armory ever since. But anyway, they were not made by the minster-folk. It is all they can do to use them."
"What of the great boulder-machine?"
"They burnt that better. But I already knew how they were made before we got over the wall. The minster-folk had all that in a book, and the parts of the machine also, left over from olden times, so the slave says. I am sorry they burnt it all, for that alone. And I should like to see the book that tells how to build machines. That and the book of numbercraft!"
"Erkenbert has the numbercraft," said the slave suddenly, catching the Norse word in Shef's still faintly English pronunciation. "He is the arithmeticus."
Several Vikings clutched their pendants protectively. Shef laughed.
"Arithmeticus or no arithmeticus, I can build a better machine than him. Many machines. The thrall says he heard a minster-man say once, of themselves and the Rome-folk, that the Christians now are as dwarves on the shoulders of giants. Well, they may have the giants to ride on, with their books and their old machines and old walls left over from time past. But they are dwarves just the same. And we, we are—"
"Do not say it," cut in a Viking, stepping forward. "Do not say the ill-luck word, Skjef Sigvarthsson. We are not giants, and the giants—the iötnar—are the foes of gods and men. I think you know that. Have you not seen them?"
Shef nodded slowly, thinking of his dream of the uncompleted walls and the gigantic, clumsy stallion-master. His audience stirred again, looking at each other.
Shef threw the iron parts he was holding onto the floor. "Let the slave go, Steinulf, in payment for what he has told us. Show him how to get well away from here, so the Ragnarssons do not catch him. We can make our own machine without him now."
"Have we time to do it?" asked a Viking.
"All we need is wood. And a little work in the forge. There are still two days till the Army meeting."
"It is new knowledge," added one of the listeners. "Thorvin would tell us to do it."
"Meet here tomorrow, in the morning," said Shef decisively.
As they turned away, one of the Vikings said, "They will be a long two days for King Ella. It was a dog's deed of the Christian archbishop to hand him over to Ivar. Ivar has much in store for him."
Shef stared at the departing backs and turned again to his friend.
"What is that you have there?"
"A potion from Ingulf. For you."
"I need no potion. What is it for?"
Hund hesitated. "He says it is to ease your mind. And—and to bring back your memory."
"What is wrong with my memory?"
"Shef, Ingulf and Thorvin say—they say you have forgotten even that we blinded your eye. That Thorvin held you and Ingulf heated the needle, and I, I held it in position. We only did it so it would not be done by some butcher of Ivar's. But they say that it is not natural for you never to speak of it. They believe you have forgotten your blinding. And forgotten Godive, for whom you went into the camp."
Shef stared down at the little leech with his silver apple pendant.
"You can tell them, I have never forgotten either for a moment.
"But still." He stretched out his hand. "I will take your potion."
"He took the potion," Ingulf said.
"Shef is like the bird in the old story," Thorvin said. "The one the Christians tell of how the English in the North became Christian. They say that when the king Edwin called a council to debate whether he and his kingdom should leave the faith of their fathers and take a new one, a priest of the Aesir had said they might as well, for following the old gods had brought him no profit. But then another councillor said, and this is a truer tale, that to him the world seemed like a king's hall on a winter evening—warm and brightly lit inside, but outside dark and cold, and a world no one could see. 'And into that hall,' said the councillor, 'flies a bird, and for a moment it is in the light and the warm, and then flies out into the dark and cold again. If the Christ-god can tell us more surely about what happens before man's life and after man's life,' said the councillor, 'we should seek to learn more of his teaching.' "
"A good story, with some truth," Ingulf said. "I see why you think Shef could be like that bird."
"He could—or he could be something else. When Farman saw him in his vision, in Asgarth, he says he had taken the place of the smith of the gods, Völund. You do not know that story, Hund. Völund was caught and enslaved by the wicked king Nithhad, and hamstrung so that he could work, but not run away. But Völund enticed the king's sons to his forge, killed them, made brooches of their eyeballs and necklaces of their teeth, gave them to their father, his master. Enticed the king's daughter to his forge, stupefied her with beer, raped her."
"Why would he do that if he was still a prisoner?" asked Hund. "If he was too lame to run away?"
"He was the master-smith," said Thorvin. "When the king's daughter awoke, and ran to her father and told him the tale, and he came to kill the slave-smith with torments—then Völund put on the wings he had made secretly in his forge. And flew away, laughing at those who thought him crippled."
"So why is Shef like Völund?"
"He can see up and down. In a direction other men cannot see. It is a great gift, but I fear it is the gift of Othin. Othin Allfather. Othin Bölverk, Othin Bale-worker. Your potion will make him dream, Ingulf. But what will be in those dreams?"
Shef's sinking mind was brooding on taste. The potion Ingulf had sent him had tasted of honey, which was a change from the foul brews he and Hund usually concocted. Yet beneath the sweetness there had been another taste: of mold? of fungus? He did not know, but something dry and rotten beneath the mask. He had known as soon as he drank it that there would be something to be endured.
And yet his dream started sweetly, like one he had had many times before any of his troubles began, before even he had known that they meant him for a thrall.
He was swimming, in the fen. But as he swam on and on the power of his strokes doubled and redoubled, so that the bank seemed to fall away behind him and he was swimming faster than a horse could run. Now his strokes took him clear from the water and he was lifting in the air, no longer striking with his arms, but first climbing, and then, as fear left him, sweeping forward again, rising higher and higher in the air, like a bird. The country beneath him was green and sunny, with the new leaves of spring breaking out everywhere, and meadow rolling higher and higher to sunlit uplands. Suddenly dark. In front of him now there was an immense column of darkness. He had, he knew, been there before. But then he had been in the column, or on the column, looking out: he did not want to see again what he had seen then. The king, the king Edmund, with his sad and tortured face and his backbone in his hand. If he flew in carefully, and did not look out or back, he might not see him this time.
Slowly, cautiously, the wandering soul closed on the enormous darkened tree-trunk. To it was nailed, as he had known there would be, a figure with a spike projecting from its eye. He looked at the face with care—was it his own?
It was not. Its one whole eye was closed. It appeared to take no interest in him.
By the figure's head there hovered two black birds, with black beaks: ravens. They turned bright eyes on him, cocking their heads curiously. The flight pinions of their wings ruffled and shifted slightly as they maintained their positions without strain or effort. The figure was Othin, or Woden, and the ravens were his constant companions.
What were their names? That was the important thing. He had heard them somewhere. In Norse they were—That was right, Hugin and Munin. In English that would be Hyge and Myne. Hugin/Hyge. That meant "mind." That was not the one he wanted. As if dismissed, the one raven spiraled down, perched on its master's shoulder.
Munin/Myne. That meant "memory." That was what he wanted. But he would have to pay for it. He had a friend, a protector among the gods, so much he realized already. But it was not Othin, whatever Brand might think. So a price must be paid. He knew what the price must be. Again unbidden, another scrap of verse came to him, again in English. It described the hanged man, on the gallows, who swayed there creaking for the birds, unable to raise a hand to protect himself, while the black ravens came...
Came for his eyes. For his eye. The bird was there suddenly, so close that it blocked out all other sight, its black beak like an arrow only an inch from his eye. Not his good eye, though. His bad eye. The one he had already lost. But this was memory, back in a time when he still had it. His hands were down, he could not move them. That was because Thorvin was holding them. No, he could move them this time, but he must not. He would not.
The bird realized he would not move. It came forward with a shriek of triumph, driving its nail of a beak deep through his eye and into his brain. As the white-hot pain stabbed through him, the words shot into his head: the words of the doomed king.
In willow ford, by woody bridge
The old kings lie, keels beneath them.
On down they sleep, deep home guarding.
Four fingers push in flattest line,
From underground. Grave the northmost.
There lies Wuffa, Wehha's offspring,
On secret hoard. Seek who dares it.
He had done his duty. The bird released him. He fell instantly from the tree-trunk, tumbling without control, hands still locked, toward the ground miles below. Plenty of time to think what to do. No need for hands. He could just turn his body whichever way was needed, turn and roll till he was heading out into the sun once more, turn and dip till he was spiraling down gently to the place where he should be, where his body lay on straw.
Strange to see the land from here, and the people and the armies and the merchants coming and going, many of them spurring furiously, but not moving at all beneath his enormous twenty-mile circuits. He could see the fen, he could see the sea, he could see the great tumuli, the barrows swelling up beneath green turf. He would remember that, think of it another time. Now he had only one duty, and he would carry it out as soon as his spirit was back in its right place, in the body he could now see on its mattress, in the body he was entering....
Shef jerked from sleep in one motion. "I must remember, but I cannot write," he called in dismay.
"I can," said Thorvin, on his stool six feet away, dimly visible by the banked fire.
"Can you? Write like a Christian?"
"I can write like a Christian. But I can write like a Norseman too, or a priest of the Way. I can write in runes. What do you want me to write?"
"Write it quickly," said Shef. "I bought this from Munin with pain."
Thorvin kept his eyes down as he took a beech board and a knife and prepared to cut.
" 'In willow ford, by woody bridge
The old kings lie, keels beneath them....' "
"It is hard to write English in runes," Thorvin muttered. But he muttered it beneath his breath.
The Army mustered—in distrust and ill humor, three weeks before the day the Christians celebrated the birth of their God—on the open space outside the city's east wall. Seven thousand men take up a good deal of space, especially when all are both fully armed and heavily wrapped against the wind and intermittent sleet. But since Shef had fired the remaining houses on that side there was room enough to spread everyone in a rough half-circle from wall to wall.
In the midst of the semicircle stood the Ragnarssons and their supporters, the Raven Banner behind them. A few paces away, gripped and encircled by a flutter of saffron plaids, waited the black-haired figure of the king—of the ex-king Ella. His face was as white, Shef reflected from his place in the semicircle thirty yards away, as white as the white of a cooked egg.
For Ella was doomed. The Army had not pronounced yet, but it was certain as fate. Soon Ella would hear the clash of weapons by which the Army signaled assent. And then they would start on him, as they had on Shef, as they had on King Edmund, on King Maelguala and all the other Irish kinglets on whom Ivar had sharpened his teeth and his techniques. There was no hope for Ella. He had put Ragnar in the orm-garth. Even Brand, even Thorvin accepted that a man's sons had a right to take revenge in kind. More than a right, a duty. The Army watched judiciously, to see that the job was done well and warriorlike.
But it sat, or rather stood, also in judgement on its own leaders. It was not only Ella who was at risk here. Not even Ivar Ragnarsson, not even Sigurth the Snakeeye himself, could this time be absolutely sure of walking from the meeting with a whole skin, or with an undamaged reputation. There was tension in the air.
As the sun reached what passed for midday in the English winter, Sigurth called the Army to business.
"We are the Great Army," he called out. "We are met to talk over what has been done and what should be done next. I have things to say. But first I heard that there are men in the Army who are not content with how this city was taken. Will one of them speak openly before us all?"
A man stepped forward from the ring, walked into the open space in the middle, and turned so that both his own supporters and the Ragnarssons could hear him. It was Skuli the Bald, who had led the second tower up to the wall, but had wrecked it without getting over.
"Put-up job," muttered Brand. "Been paid to speak, but not too hard."
"I am not content," called out Skuli. "I led my crews to attack the wall of this city. I lost a dozen men, including my brother-in-law, a good man. We got over the wall just the same and fought our way up to the minster. But then we were prevented from sacking the minster, as was our right. And we found that we did not need to lose the men, because the city was already taken. We got neither plunder nor compensation. Why did you let us attack the wall like fools, Sigurth, when you knew we had no need to?"
A rumble of agreement, some catcalls from Ragnarsson crews. Sigurth stepped forward in his turn, silencing the noise with a wave.
"I thank Skuli for saying this, and I admit that he has right on his side. But I want to say two things. First, I did not know he had no need to. We could not be sure that we would get in. The priests could have been lying to us. Or if the king had found it, he might have put his own men on the gate that was opened. If we had told the whole Army about it, some slave might have heard and passed the news. So we kept it to ourselves.
"The other thing I have to say is this: I did not think Skuli and his men would get over the wall. I did not think they would even get to the wall. These machines, these towers, they are something we have never seen before. I thought they were a toy, and that everything would be finished with just some arrowshot and wasted sweat. If I had known different I would have told Skuli not to risk his life and waste his men. I was wrong, and I am sorry."
Skuli nodded in a dignified way and walked back to his place.
"Not enough!" yelled a voice from the crowd. "What about compensation? Wergild for our losses!"
"How much did you get from the priests?" yelled another. "And why don't we all share?"
Sigurth raised a hand again. "That's more like it. I ask the Army: what are we here for?"
Brand stepped out, waving his axe, back of his neck purpling instantly with the effort in his shout. "Money!"
But even his voice was drowned in the chorus: "Money! Wealth! Gold and silver! Tribute!"
As the tumult died down, Sigurth shouted back. He had the meeting well in hand, Shef realized. All this was going according to a plan, and even Brand was going along with it.
"And what do you want the money for?" called Sigurth. Confusion, doubt, shouts of different answers—some ribald.
The Snakeeye drove on over them. "I'll tell you. You want to buy a place back home, with people to till it for you, and to never touch a plough again. Now I'm telling you this: there's not enough money here to get you what you want. Not good money." He threw a handful of coins derisively on the ground. The men recognized the useless low-alloy coinage they had found so often already.
"But that isn't to say we can't get it. Just that it's going to take time."
"Time for what, Sigurth? Time for you to hide your take?"
The Snakeeye stepped a little forward, his strange white-rimmed eyes searching the crowd for the man who had accused him. His hand reached for his sword-pommel.
"I know this is open meeting," he called, "where all may speak freely. But if anyone accuses me or my brothers of not acting like warriors, then we will call him to account for it outside the meeting!
"Now I tell you. We took a ransom from the minster, right enough. Those of you who stormed the wall took loot as well, from the dead and from the houses inside the wall. All of us profited from what was taken outside the minster."
"But all the gold was inside the minster!" That was Brand shouting, still incensed, and well forward so that he could not be mistaken.
A cold look from Sigurth, but no check. "I tell you. We will all pool all that we took—ransom, loot, whatever—and divide it up crew by crew as has always been the custom of the Army.
"And then we will lay a further tribute on this shire and this kingdom, to be delivered before the end of the winter. They will pay in bad metal, sure enough. But we will take that metal and melt the silver out of it and coin it again ourselves. And that we will divide up so that everyone gets his share.
"Only one thing. To do that we need the mint." A buzz as the unfamiliar word was repeated. "We need the men to make the coins and the tools to make them with. And they are in the minster. They are the Christian priests. I have never said this before, but I say it now.
"We have to make the priests work with us."
This time the dissension in the Army went on a long time, with many men stepping forward and speaking confusedly. Shef realized slowly that Sigurth's point was being carried, had a certain appeal to men tired of profitless harrying, yet there was determined resistance—from adherents of the Way, from men who simply disliked and distrusted Christians, from those whose still resented losing the sack of the minster.
And the resistance was not dying down. Violence at a meeting was almost unheard-of, for the penalties were so severe. Yet the crowd was fully armed, even to mail, shields and helmets, and every man in it used to striking out. There was always the chance of an outburst. The Snakeeye was going to have to do something, Shef thought, to get the crowd back under control. Just at the moment one man—it was Egil from Skaane, who had taken a tower to the wall—had got the attention of the Army with a furious diatribe about the treachery of the Christians.
"And one more thing," he shouted. "We know the Christians never keep their word to us, because they think that only the followers of their god will live after death. But I tell you what is more dangerous. They make other men start to forget their word as well. Start to think a man may say one thing one day and another another, and tell the priest and ask for forgiveness, and wipe away the past like a housewife wiping shit off a baby's bottom. And I say this for you! For you, the sons of Ragnar!"
He turned to face the cluster of brothers, stepping closer to them in defiance—a brave man, thought Shef, and an angry one. He threw back his cloak deliberately to reveal the silver horn of Heimdall gleaming on his tunic.
"How have you remembered your father, who went to his death in the orm-garth here, inside this city? How have you remembered the boasts you made in the hall at Roskilde, when you stood on the stock and made your vows to Bragi?
"What happens to the oath-breakers in the world we believe in? Have you forgotten?
A voice supported him from the throng: a deep voice, a solemn one. Thorvin's, Shef realized, quoting the holy poems.
"There men writhe in woe and anguish,
Murder-wolves and men forsworn.
Nithhögg sucks blood from naked bodies,
The wolf tears them. Do you wish more?"
"Men forsworn!" shouted Egil. He turned and walked to his place, showing the Ragnarssons his back. Yet they seemed pleased, almost relieved. They had known someone would say it.
"We have been challenged," called Halvdan Ragnarsson, speaking for the first time. "Let us reply. We know well what we said in the hall at Roskilde, and this was it: I swore that I would invade England in vengeance for my father..." All four brothers, bunching together, began to call out the words in unison.
"And so I have. And Sigurth, he swore..."
"...to defeat all the kings of the English and bring them into subjection to us."
"Two I have defeated, and the rest will follow."
Yells of approval from the Ragnarsson followers.
"And Ivar, he swore..."
"...to wreak vengeance on the black crows, the Christ-priests who counseled the orm-garth."
Dead silence, for Ivar to speak.
"And this I have not done. But it is unfinished, not forgotten. Remember: the black crows are now in my hand. I shall decide when to close it."
Still dead silence. Ivar went on. "But Ubbi, my brother, he swore..."
The brothers in unison again. "...to capture King Ella and kill him with torments for Ragnar's death."
"And this we shall do," called Ivar. "So two of our boasts will be completed, and two of us free before Bragi, the oath-god. And the other two we shall yet complete."
"Bring out the prisoner."
Muirtach and his gang were hustling him forward instantly. The Ragnarssons were counting on this, Shef realized, to alter the mood of the crowd. He remembered the youth who had shown him round the slave-pens back at the camp on the Stour, with his tales of the cruelty of Ivar. There were always some who would be impressed. Yet it was not clear that this crowd was.
They had Ella well out in front now, and were hammering a thick pole into the earth. The king was even whiter than before, the black hair and beard showing it even more clearly. He was not gagged, his mouth was open, but no sound came out. There was blood on the side of his neck.
"Ivar's cut his voice-cords," said Brand suddenly. "They do it with pigs so they can't squeal. What's the brazier for?"
The Gaddgedlar, hands padded, were lifting forward a brazier full of glowing coal. Irons projected from it ominously, already shining red-hot. The crowd surged and muttered, some pushing forward for a closer look, others' sensing, apparently, that this was a distraction from their real business, but unsure how to reject it.
Muirtach whisked the cloak suddenly from the doomed man so that he stood naked before them, not even a loincloth to cover him. Some laughter, some jeers, some groans of disapproval. Four Gaddgedlar gripped him and spread-eagled him upright between them. Ivar stepped in front, a knife glinting in his hand. He bent towards Ella's belly, between the king and Shef's horrified gaze, not a dozen yards off. A mighty contortion, a thrashing of limbs, held mercilessly by the four apostates.
Ivar stepped back, a coil of something blue-gray and slippery in his hand.
"He's opened his belly and pulled his gut out," commented Brand.
Ivar stepped over to the pole, pulling gently but remorselessly on the uncoiling intestine, watching the look of despair and agony on the king's face with a half-smile. He reached the pole, took a hammer, nailed in the free end he had extracted.
"Now," he called out. "King Ella will walk round the pole till he pulls his own heart out and dies. Come, Englishman. The quicker you walk, the quicker it will be over. But it may take a few turns before you reach that. You have ten yards to walk, by my count. Is that so much to ask? Start him, Muirtach."
The henchman stepped forward, brand glowing, thrust it against the doomed king's buttock. A convulsive start, a face turning gray, a slow shuffle.
This was the worst death a man could face, thought Shef. No pride, no dignity. The only way out, to do what your enemies wanted, and to be jeered for it. Knowing you must do it and come to an end, and yet not able to do it quickly. The hot irons behind so you could not even choose your own pace. Not even a voice to scream. And all the time your bowels pulling out from inside.
He passed his halberd silently to Brand, and slipped back through the shoving, craning crowd. There were faces looking down from the tower where he had left his helpers to keep an eye on their machine. A rope snaking down as they realized what he wanted. A scramble up the wall to the familiar clean smell of new-sawn wood and new-forged iron.
"He has walked round the pole three times," said one of the Vikings on the tower, a man with the phallus of Frey round his neck. "That is no way for any man to go."
Bolt in place, the machine swiveled round—they had thought, yesterday, to rest the bottom frame on a pair of stout wheels. Barb upright between the vanes, three hundred yards, it would still shoot a little high.
Shef aimed the tip of the barb on the wound at the base of the king's belly as he hobbled round to face the wall a fourth time, red-hot brands urging him on. Shef squeezed the release slowly.
The thump, the line rising and falling—clear through the center of Ella's chest and straining heart, and on into the ground behind him, almost between Muirtach's feet. As the king was hurled backward by the force of the blow, Shef saw his face change. Relax in peace.
Slowly the crowd rippled, every face in it turning to face the tower from which the shot had come. Ivar bent over the corpse, but then straightened, turning too, hands clenched.
Shef took one of the new halberds and went down the wall toward the throng, wanting to be recognized. At the edge of the semicircle he stopped, vaulted onto the battlement.
"I am only a carl," he called out, "not a jarl. But I have three things to say to the Army:
"First, the sons of Ragnar fulfilled this bit of their Bragi boast because they had no heart to fulfill the rest.
"And second, whatever the Snakeeye says, when he sneaked into York by the back door with the priest holding it open for him, he was not thinking of the Army's good, but of his own and of his brothers'. He had no mind to fight and no mind to share."
Shouts of anger, the Gaddgedlar whirling, looking for the gate into the city and the steps up to where Shef stood. Others obstructing them, grabbing at their plaids. Shef raised his voice even more above the din.
"And third: to treat a man and a warrior the way they treated King Ella has no drengskapr. I call it nithingsverk."
The work of a nithing, a man beneath honor, a man with no legal rights, worse than an outlaw. To be proclaimed nithing before the Army was the worst shame a carl—or a jarl—could endure. If the Army agreed.
Some people were shouting agreement. Shef could see Brand down there, axe raised now and ready to strike, his men clustering behind him, thrusting off Ragnarsson followers with their shields. A stream of men coming from the other side of the circle to join him—Egil the Heimdall-worshipper at their head. Who was that moving out? Sigvarth, face flushed as he shouted reply to some insult. Skuli the Bald wavering by Ella's corpse as Ubbi bellowed something at him.
The whole Army was moving. Dividing. After a hundred heartbeats there was space between the two groups and both were edging further away from each other. The Ragnarssons in front of the furthest group; in front of the nearer one, Brand, Thorvin, a handful of others.
"It is the Way against the rest," muttered the Frey-worshipper behind Shef. "And some of your friends thrown in. Two to one against us, I reckon."
"You have split the Army," said a Hebridean, one of Magnus's crew. "It is a great deed, but a rash one."
"The machine was wound," replied Shef. "All I had to do was shoot it.