As the army marched away from the walls of York, snowflakes started to drift out of the windless sky. Not the Great Army. The Great Army would never exist again. That part of the once-great army which now refused the command of the Ragnarssons and could no longer live in fellowship with them—perhaps twenty long hundreds of men, two thousand four hundred by the Roman count. With them were a host of horses, pack-horses, pack-mules and fifty wooden carts creaking along with their burden of heavy loot: bronze and iron, smith-tools and grindstones—along with the chests of poor coinage and a meager handful of true silver from the division. Their burden, too, of wounded men not fit to march or straddle a pony.
From the city walls, the rest of the army watched them go. Some of the younger and wilder members had whooped and jeered, even launched a few arrows at the ground behind their former messmates. But the silence of the marching column, and of their own leaders on the wall, cast down their spirits. They pulled their cloaks tighter about them, and looked up at the sky, the lowering horizon, the frostbitten grass on the slopes outside the city. Grateful for their own billets, stored firewood, shuttered windows and draftless walls.
"It will snow harder before tomorrow's dawn," muttered Brand from his position at the rear of the column, the main point of danger till they were well past the Ragnarssons' reach.
"You are Norsemen," replied Shef. "I thought snow would not bother you."
"All right while the frost stays hard," said Brand. "If it snows and then thaws, like it does in this country, we'll be marching through mud. Tires the men out, tires the beasts out, slows the carts even more. And when you're marching in those conditions, you need food. You know how long it takes an ox-team to eat its own weight? But we must put some distance between us and those behind. No telling what they'll do now."
"Where are we making for?" asked Shef.
"I don't know. Who's leading this army anyway? Everybody else thinks you are."
Shef fell silent, in consternation.
As the last bundled figures of the rear-guard disappeared from view among the ruined houses of outer York, the Ragnarssons on the wall turned and looked at each other.
"Good riddance," said Ubbi. "Fewer mouths to feed, fewer hands to share. What are a few hundred Way-folk anyway? Soft hands, weak stomachs."
"No one ever called Viga-Brand soft-handed," replied Halvdan. Since the holmgang he had been slow to join in his brothers' attacks on Shef and his faction. "They're not all Way-folk, either."
"It doesn't matter what they are," said Sigurth. "They're enemies now. That's all you ever need to know about anyone. But we can't afford to fight them just yet. We have to keep our hold on..."
He jerked his thumb at the little cluster a few yards away from them on the wall: Wulfhere the archbishop with a knot of black monks, among them the scrawny pallor of Erkenbert the deacon, now master of the mint.
Ivar laughed, suddenly. His three brothers looked at him with unease.
"We don't need to fight them," he said. "Their own bane marches with them. For some it does."
Wulfhere too scowled at the retreating column. "Some of the blood-wolves gone," he said. "If they had gone earlier we might never have needed to treat with the rest. But now they are within our gates." He spoke in Latin, to make sure hostile ears did not overhear.
"We must, in these days of strife, live by the wisdom of the serpent," replied Erkenbert in the same language, "and by the cunning of the dove. But both our foes without the gates and those within may yet be overcome."
"Those within I understand. There are fewer of them now, and they may be fought again. Not by us in Northumbria. But by the kinds of the South—Burgred of Mercia, Ethelred of Wessex. That is why we sent south the crippled thane of East Anglia, slung between his ponies. He will show the southern kings the nature of the Vikings and wake their drowsy spirits to war.
"But what, Erkenbert, is your plan for those now marching away? What can we do in dead of winter?"
The little deacon smiled. "Those marching in winter need food, and the ravagers of the North are accustomed to take it. But every mouthful they steal now is one less for a man's children before spring comes. Even churls will fight with that incentive.
"I have seen to it that the word of their coming will run before them."
The attacks began as the short winter daylight seeped from the sky. At first they were little more than scuffles: a churl appearing from behind a tree, launching a stone or an arrow downwind, and then fleeing hastily, not even waiting to see if he hit the mark. Then a little knot of them coming in closer. The marching Vikings unslung bows if they had them, tried to keep the bowstrings dry, shot back. Otherwise they ducked heads behind shields, let the missiles bounce off, shouted derisively to their foes to stand and fight. Then one, irritated, launched a spear at a darting figure who seemed to come too close, missed and plunged off the track with a curse to recover it. For an instant a snow-flurry hid him. When it cleared he was nowhere to be seen. With difficulty his crewmates halted the column, plodding, head-down, and set off grimly to rescue him, a group thirty strong. As they lurched back with the body, already stripped and mutilated, the arrows came whipping from behind them again, out of the murk of the dying day.
The column was now spread over almost a mile of road. Skippers and helmsmen pushed and cursed the men into a thicker, shorter line, bowmen on both flanks, carts in the center. "They can't hurt you," Brand bellowed repeatedly. "Not with hunting bows. Just shout and bang your shields; they'll wet themselves and run. Anyone gets hit in the leg, sling him on a packhorse. Dump some of that junk in the carts if you have to. But keep moving forward."
Soon the English churls began to recognize what they could do. Their enemies were laden with gear, heavily wrapped and muffled. They did not know the country. The churls knew every tree, bush, path and patch of mud. They could strip to tunics and hose, rush in light-footed, strike and slash and be away before an arm was free of its cloak. No Viking would pursue more than a few feet into the gloom.
After a while some village war-leader organized the growing number of men. Forty or fifty of the churls came in together on the west flank of the column, beat down the few men they faced with clubs and billhooks, started to drag off the bodies like wolves with their prey. Furious, the Vikings rallied and charged after them, shields up, axes raised. As they straggled back, snarling, having caught no one, they saw the halted carts, the ox-teams poleaxed where they stood. The wagon tilts pulled open, their cargo of wounded men a burden no longer, the snow already blotting out the stains.
Prowling up and down the column like an ice-troll, Brand turned to Shef at his side. "They think they've got us now," he snarled. "But come daylight I'll teach them a lesson for this if it's the last thing I ever do."
Shef stared at him, blinking the snow from his eyes. "No," he said. "You are thinking like a carl, a carl of the Army. There is no Army anymore. So now we must forget to think like carls. Instead we must think as you say I do, like a follower of Othin, orderer of battle."
"And what are your orders, little man? Little man who has never stood in the battle-line?"
"Call over the skippers, as many as are within earshot." Shef began to draw swiftly in the snow.
"We marched through Eskrick, here, before the snow got bad. We must be a short mile north of Riccall." Nods, understanding. The area around York was well known from much foraging.
"I want one hundred picked men, young men, quick on their feet, not yet tired, to push ahead now and secure Riccall. Take some prisoners—we'll need them—chase the others out. We will stay there the night. Not much, fifty huts and a church of wattles. But they will shelter a lot of us if we pack in close.
"Another long hundred in four small groups to keep moving up and down on our flanks. The English won't rush in if they even think there might be someone out there to cut them off. Without their cloaks they'll keep warm running. Everyone else, just keep going and keep the carts going. As soon as we reach Riccall, use the carts to block all the gaps between the huts. Oxen and all of us on the inside of the ring. We'll make fires and rig up shelters. Brand, pick the men, get everyone moving."
Two crowded hours later, Shef sat on a stool in the thane's longhouse of Riccall, staring at a grizzled elderly Englishman. The house was packed with Vikings, stretched out or squatting on their heels, already steaming as massed body heat dried the sodden clothes on their backs. As ordered, none paid any attention to what was going on.
Between the two men, on the rough table, stood a leather mug of beer. Shef took a pull at it, looked closely at the man facing him; he seemed to still have his wits about him. There was an iron collar round his neck.
Shef pushed the mug toward him. "You saw me drink, you know there is no poison. Go on, drink. If I wanted to harm you there are easier ways."
The thrall's eyes widened at the fluent English. He took the mug, drank deeply.
"Who is the lord you pay your rents to?"
The man finished the beer before he spoke. "Thane Ednoth holds much of the land, from King Ella. Killed in the battle. The rest belongs to the black monks."
"Did you pay your rents last Michaelmas? If you did not, I hope you hid the money. The monks are severe with defaulters."
A flash of fear when Shef spoke of the monks and their retribution.
"If you wear a collar, you know what the monks do with runaways. Hund, show him your neck."
Silently Hund unslung his Ithun pendant and handed it to Shef, pulled back his tunic to reveal the calluses and weals worn into his neck by years of the collar.
"Have any runaways been here? Men who spoke to you of these." Shef bounced the Ithun pendant in his hand, passed it back to Hund. "Or those." He pointed to Thorvin, Vestmund, Farman and the other priest, clustered nearby. Following the gesture, they too silently displayed their insignia.
"If they did, maybe they told you such men might be trusted."
The slave lowered his eyes, trembled. "I'm a good Christian. I don't know about no pagan things...."
"I'm talking about trust—not pagan or Christian."
"You Vikings are men who take slaves, not men who set them free."
Shef reached forward and tapped the iron collar. "It was not the Vikings who put that on you. Anyway, I am an Englishman. Can you not tell from my speech? Now listen closely. I am going to let you go. Tell those out there in the night to stop the attacks, because we are not their enemies—they are still in York. If your fellows let us pass, no one will get hurt. Then tell your friends about this banner."
Shef pointed across the smoky, steaming room to a clutch of the army's drabs, who rose from the floor and stretched out the great banner at which they had been frantically stitching. There, on a background of red silk, taken from the carts of plunder, a double-headed smith's hammer in white linen was picked out with silver thread.
"The other army, the one we have left, marches behind the black raven, the carrion bird. I say that the sign of the Christians is for torture and death. Our sign is the sign of a maker. Tell them that. And I will give you an earnest of what the hammer can do for you. We're taking off your collar."
The slave was shaking with fear. "No, the black monks, when they return..."
"They will kill you most horribly. Remember this and tell the others. We offered to free you, we pagans. But fear of the Christians is keeping you a slave. Now go."
"One thing I ask. In fear. Do not kill me for speaking of it but—your men are emptying the meal-bins, taking our winter store. There'll be empty bellies and dead bairns before spring comes if you do that."
Shef sighed. This was going to be the hard bit. "Brand. Pay the thrall. Pay him something. Pay him in good silver, mind, not the archbishop's dross."
"Me pay him! He should pay me. What about the wergild for the men we have lost? And since when did the Army pay for its supplies?"
"There is no Army now. And he owes you no wergild. You trespassed on his land. Pay him. I'll see you don't lose by it."
Brand muttered under his breath as he untied his purse and began to count out six silver Wessex pennies.
The slave could scarcely believe what was happening, staring at the shining coins as though he had never seen money like this before; perhaps he hadn't.
"I will tell them," he said, almost shouting the words. "About the banner too."
"If you do that, and return here tonight, I will pay you six more—for you alone, not to share."
Brand, Thorvin and the others looked doubtfully at Shef as the slave went out, with an escort to see him outside the sentry-fires.
"You'll never see money nor slave again," Brand said.
"We'll see. Now I want two long hundreds of men, with our best horses, all with a good meal inside them, ready to move as soon as the slave returns."
Brand pushed a shutter open a crack and looked at the night and the whirling snow. "What for?" he grunted.
"I need to get your twelve pennies back. And I have another idea." Slowly, intense concentration furrowing his brow, Shef began to scratch lines into the table in front of him with the point of his knife.
The black monks of St. John's Minster at Beverley, unlike those of St. Peter's at York, did not have the safe walls of a legionary fortress round them. Instead, their tenants and the men of the flatlands east of the Yorkshire Wolds could easily put two thousand stout warriors into the field, with many more half-armed spearmen and bowmen to back them. All through the autumn of raids of York, they had known themselves safe against anything but a move by a major detachment of the Great Army. They had known it must come. The sacristan had disappeared months since with all the minster's most precious relics, reappearing days later with word only for the abbot himself. They had kept half their fighting force mobilized, the rest dispersed among their holdings to oversee the harvest and the preparations for winter. Tonight they felt secure. Their watchers had seen the Great Army split, one detachment even marching away to the South.
But a midwinter night in England is sixteen hours long between sunset and dawn: more than time enough for determined men to ride forty miles. Guided on their way through muddy, meandering farm-tracks for the first few miles, then picking up speed as they walked or trotted their horses along the better roads of the Wolds. They had lost a little time circumventing each village they came to. The slave, Tida, had guided them well, abandoning them only as the first paling sky had shown them the steeple of Beverley Minster itself. The guard-huts just beginning to disgorge sleepy female quern-slaves, to light the fires and grind the grain for the breakfast porridge. At the sight of the Vikings they ran shrieking and wailing, to drag incredulous warriors from their blankets. To be called fools for their pains and to become part of the utter confusion which was the English way of taking surprise.
Shef pushed open the great wooden doors of the minster and walked in, his companions jostling behind.
From inside the minster came the antiphonal song of the choirmonks, facing each other across the nave and singing sweetly the anthems which called the Christ-child to be born. There were no other worshippers, though the doors were unbolted for them. The monks sang lauds every day, whether they were joined or not. At dawn on a winter morning they would not expect to be.
As the Vikings paced down the aisle which led to the high altar—still wrapped in sodden cloaks, no weapons showing except for the halberd over Shef's shoulder—the abbot looked at them in shocked horror from his great seat in the choir. For a moment Shef's nerve and wit faltered in the face of the majesty of the Church he had grown up in, worshipped in.
He cleared his throat, unsure how to begin.
Guthmund behind him, a skipper from the Swedish shore of the Kattegat, had no such doubts or scruples. All his life he had wanted to be at the sack of a really first-class church or abbey, and he had no intention of letting a beginner's nerves spoil it. Courteously he picked his young leader up and put him to one side, seized the nearest choir-monk by his black robe and hurled him into the aisle, dragged his axe from under his cloak and embedded it with a thunk into the altar-rail.
"Grab the blackrobes," he bellowed. "Search 'em, put 'em in that corner there. Tofi, get those candlesticks. Frani, I want all that plate. Snok and Uggi, you're lightweights, see that statue there..." He waved at the great crucifix, high above the altar, looking down at them with sorrowing eyes. "Shin up it and see if you can get that crown off, looks genuine from here. The rest of you, turn everything over and shake it, grab everything that looks as if it might gleam. I want this place clear before those bastards behind us have got their boots on. Now, you..." He advanced on the abbot shrinking back in his throne.
Shef forced his way between them. "Now, father," he began, speaking again in English. The familiar language drew a basilisk stare from the abbot, terrified but at the same time mortally offended. Shef wavered a moment—then remembered the inside of the minster door, covered, like many, with skin on the inside. Human skin, flayed from a living body for the sin of sacrilege, of laying hands on Church property. He hardened his heart.
"Your guards will be here soon. If you want to stay alive you will have to keep your men off."
"No!"
"Then you die now." The point of his halberd pushed at the priest's throat.
"For how long?" The abbot's shaking hands were on the halberd, could not move it back.
"Not long. Then you may hunt us, recover your stolen goods. So do as I say..."
Crashes of destruction behind, a monk being dragged forward by Guthmund. "I think this is the sacristan. He says the hoard is empty."
"True," the abbot admitted. "All was hidden months ago."
"What's hidden can be found again," said Guthmund. "I'll start on the youngest, just to show I mean it. One, two dead, the hoard-keeper will speak."
"You will not," Shef ordered. "We'll take them with us. There will be no torture among those who follow the Way. The Asa-gods forbid it. And we have taken a fair haul. Now get them out where the minster-guards can see them. We still have a long ride ahead."
In the growing light, Shef noticed something hanging on the wall: a flattened roll of vellum with no image on it that he could recognize.
"What's that?" he asked the abbot.
"It has no value to one like you. No gold, no silver on the frame. It is a mappamundi. A map of the world."
Shef tore it down, rolled it, thrust it deep inside his tunic as they hustled the abbot and the choirmonks out to face the ragged battle-line of Englishmen at last roused from bed.
"We'll never make it back," muttered Guthmund again as he clutched a clanking sack.
"Not going back," answered Shef. "You'll see."
Burgred, king of Mercia, one of the two great kingdoms of England still unconquered by the Vikings, paused at the entrance to his private chambers, dismissed the crowd of attendants and hangers-on, doffed his mantle of martenfur, allowed his snow-soaked boots to be removed and replaced by slippers of soft whittawed leather, and prepared to enjoy the moment. By command, the young man and his father were waiting for him, as was the atheling Alfred, there to represent his brother Ethelred, king of Wessex—the other surviving great English kingdom.
The issue before them was the fate of East Anglia. Its king dead with no successor, its people demoralized and uncertain. Yet Burgred knew well that if he marched an army to take it over, to add it to Mercia by force, the East Angles might well fight, Englishmen against Englishmen, as they had so often before. But if he sent them a man of their own, he calculated—one of noble blood, one who nevertheless owed absolutely everything, including the army he led with him, to King Burgred—well, that they might swallow.
Especially as this particular noble and grateful young man had such a very useful father. One who, so to speak—Burgred allowed himself a grim smile—carried his anti-Viking credentials with him. Who could fail to rally to such a figurehead? A figure-head and -trunk, indeed. Burgred blessed, silently, the day the two ponies with their leaders and their slung stretcher had brought him in from York.
And the beautiful young woman too. How affecting it had been. The young man, fair hair swept back, kneeling at his father's feet before ever they had unstrapped him from his litter, and begging forgiveness for having married without his father's consent. The pair might have been forgiven for more than that after all they had been through, but no, young Alfgar had been the essence of propriety all through. It was the spirit that would one day make the English the greatest of all nations. Decency, mused Burgred: gedafenlicnis.
What Alfgar had really muttered as he knelt at his father's feet had been: "I married Godive, father. I know she's my half sister, but don't say anything of it, or I'll tell everyone you're mad. And then an accident could happen to you. Men with no arms smother easily. And don't forget, we're both your children. If we succeed, your grandsons could still be princes. Or better."
And after the first shock, it had seemed well enough to Wulfgar. True, they had committed incest, "sibb-laying," as the English called it. But what did a trifle like that matter? Thryth, his own lady, had committed fornication with a heathen Viking, and who had done anything about that? If Alfgar and Godive had an incest child like Sigemund and his sister in the legends, it could be no worse than that gadderling brat he, Wulfgar, had been fool enough to rear.
As the king of the Mercians strode into the room, the men in it rose and bowed. The one woman, the East Anglian beauty with the sad face and the brilliant eyes, rose and made her courtesy in the new style of the Franks. Two attendants—they had been arguing quietly about the right thing to do—lifted Wulfgar's padded box to the vertical before leaning it back against the wall. At a gesture they resumed their seats: stools for all but the king and the heimnar. Wulfgar too was lifted into a highseat with wooden arms. He could not have balanced himself to sit on a stool.
"I have news from Eoforwich," began the king. "Later news than you brought," with a nod to Wulfgar. "And better news. Still, it has decided me to act.
"It seems that after the surrender by the Church of the town and of King Ella—"
"Say, rather," cut in the young atheling from Wessex, "the disgraceful betrayal of King Ella by those he had protected."
Burgred frowned. The young man, he had noticed, had little sense of respect to kings, and none at all for senior members of the Church.
"After the surrender of King Ella, he was unhappily put to death in vile manner by the heathen Ragnarssons, and especially the one called the Boneless. Just as happened to your master, the noble Edmund," he added, nodding again to Wulfgar.
"But it seems that this caused dissension among the heathens. Indeed there is a strange story that the execution was put to an end by a machine of some kind. Everything at Eoforwich seems to have something about machines attached to it.
"Yet the important news is the dissension. For after it the Viking army split."
Mutters of surprise and pleasure.
"Some of them have now left Eoforwich and are marching south. A lesser part of the Army, but still formidable. Where, I must ask myself, are they heading? And I say, they are heading back to East Anglia, from where they came."
"Back to their ships," snapped Alfgar.
"That could well be. Now, I do not think the East Anglians will fight them again. They lost their king and too many leaders, thanes and warriors in the battle by the Stour, from which you, young man, so valiantly fought your way. Yet, as you have all been telling me," Burgred glanced sarcastically at Alfred, "the Vikings must be fought.
"So I shall send East Anglia a war-leader, with a strong force of my men to support him till he can rally his own.
"You, young man. Alfgar, son of Wulfgar. You are of the North-folk. Your father was a thane of King Edmund. Your family has lost more, suffered more and dared more than any other. You will put the kingdom back on its feet.
"Only it can no longer be a kingdom."
Burgred locked eyes with the young atheling, Alfred of Wessex: eyes as blue and hair as blond as Alfgar's, a true prince of a royal line. But something queer, cross-grained about him. A clever look. They both knew that this was the sticking point. Burgred of Mercia had no more claim to East Anglia than Ethelred of Wessex. Yet the one who filled the gap would clearly become the mightier of the two.
"What would my title be?" asked Alfgar carefully.
"Alderman. Of the North-folk and the South-folk."
"Those are two shires," objected Alfred. "A man cannot be alderman of two shires at once."
"New times, new things," replied Burgred. "But what you say is true. In time, Alfgar, you may win a new title. You may be what the priests call subregulus. You may be my under-king. Say, will you be loyal to me and to Mercia? to the Mark?"
Alfgar knelt silently at the king's feet and put his hands between the king's knees in token of subjection. The king patted his shoulder and lifted him up.
"We will do this more formally by and by. I just wanted to know we are all agreed." He turned to Alfred. "And yes, young atheling, I know you have not agreed. But tell your king and brother the way of it is now this. Let him stay his side of the Thames and I'll stay mine. But north of the Thames and south of the Humber: that belongs to me. All of it."
Burgred let the tense silence hang a moment and then thought to disperse it. "One strange piece of news they told me. The Ragnarssons have always led the Great Army, but they have all stayed in Eoforwich. Those who marched away are said to have no leaders, or many. But one report is that among their leaders, or their main leader, is an Englishman. A man of the East Angles by his speech, the messenger said. But he could only give me what the Vikings call him, and they speak English so badly I could not make it out as a man's name at all. They call him Skjef Sigvarthsson. Now what could that be in English? Even in East Anglian?"
"Shef!" It was the silent woman who had spoken. Or gasped. Her eyes, her brilliant liquid eyes, blazed with life. Her husband stared at her like one who measures a back for the birch, while her father-in-law goggled and reddened.
"I thought you saw him dead," snarled the heimnar accusingly at his son.
"I will yet," muttered Alfgar. "Just give me the men."
Nearly two hundred miles to the north, Shef turned once again in his saddle to see if the rear-guard was keeping up. Important to have everyone well closed up, all within earshot of each other. Shef knew that four times his own number were pounding the filthy road behind him, unable to attack while Shef held his thirty hostages, the choirmonks of St. John's and their abbot Saxwulf. It was important too to keep up the pace, even after their long night's ride, to outrun the news of their coming and prevent any arrangement being made for their reception.
The smell of the sea led them on—and there, as they came trampling over a slight rise, there as an unmistakable landmark was Flamborough Head itself. Shef urged the vanguard on with a yell and a wave.
Guthmund dropped back a yard or two, hand still clutching the bridle of the abbot's horse. Shef waved him over. "Keep up—and keep the abbot close to me."
With a whoop he spurred his tiring gelding forward, catching up just as the whole cavalcade, a hundred and twenty raiders and thirty hostages, stormed down the long slope into the squalid huddle of Bridlington.
Instant confusion. Women running, snatching up blue-legged ragged children, men seizing spears, dropping them again, some racing for shelter down to the beach and the boats drawn up on the dirty snow-covered sand. Shef wheeled his horse and thrust the abbot forward like a trophy, instantly recognizable in his black robes.
"Peace," he shouted, "Peace. I want Ordlaf."
But Ordlaf was already there, the reeve of Bridlington, the capturer—though no one had ever credited him with it—of Ragnar. He stepped forward from his people, eyeing the Vikings and the monks with amazement, reluctantly taking responsibility.
"Show them the abbot," Shef snapped to Guthmund. "Make those behind keep their distance." He pointed at Ordlaf the reeve. "You and I have met before. The day you netted Ragnar."
Dismounting, he drove his halberd-spike deep into the sandy soil. Putting his hand on the reeve's shoulder, he drew him a little away, out of earshot of the wrathfully glaring abbot, began to speak in urgent tones.
"It's impossible," said Ordlaf a minute later. "Can't be done."
"Why not? It's a high sea, and cold, but the wind is from the west."
"Southwest a point west," corrected Ordlaf automatically.
"You can run downcoast with it on your beam. To the Spurn. Twenty-five miles, no more. Be there by dark. Never out of sight of land. I'm not asking for a sea-crossing. If the weather changes we can drop sea-anchor and ride it out."
"We'd be pulling into the teeth of it once we got to the Spurn."
Shef jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Best rowers in the world, right with you. You can set them to it and stand back at the steering oar like lords."
"Well... What happens when I get back and the abbot sends his men down to burn me out?"
"You did it to save the abbot's life."
"I doubt he'll be grateful."
"You can take your time coming back. Time enough to hide what we'll pay you. Silver from the minster. Your silver. Your rents for many a year. Hide it, melt it down. They'll never trace it."
"Well... How do I know you won't just cut my throat? And my men's?"
"You don't—but you have little choice. Decide."
The reeve hesitated a moment longer. Remembered Merla, his wife's cousin, whom the abbot behind him had enslaved for debt. Thought of Merla's own wife and bairns, living still on charity with their man fled in terror.
"All right. But make it look as if you're treating me rough."
Shef exploded with feigned rage, swung a blow at the reeve's head, whipped a dirk from its scabbard. The reeve turned away, shouting orders at the little knot of men who had collected at a few yards' distance. Slowly men began to push beached fishing boats towards the tide, to step masts, haul sailcloth from sheds. In a tight huddle the Vikings pressed down to the water's edge, hustling their captives. Fifty yards away, five hundred English riders pressed forward, ready to charge sooner than see the hostages taken off, held back by the bright weapons waving over tonsured heads.
"Keep them back," snapped Shef to the abbot. "I'll let half your men go when we board. You and the rest go in a dinghy once we're afloat."
"I suppose you realize this means we lose the horses," said Guthmund gloomily.
"You stole them in the first place. You can steal some more."
"So we pulled into the mouth of the Humber under oars just at dusk, beached for the night when we were sure no one could see us, then rowed upriver in the morning to meet the rest of you. With the take."
"How much is it?" asked Brand, sitting with the other members of the impromptu council.
"I've weighed it out," said Thorvin. "Altar-plate, candlesticks, those little boxes the Christians keep saints' finger-bones in, box for the holy wafers, those things for burning incense, some coins—a lot of coins. I thought monks weren't supposed to have property of their own, but Guthmund says they all had purses if you shook them hard enough. Well, after what he gave the fishermen we still have ninety-two pounds weight of silver.
"Better than that is the gold. The crown you took off the Christ-image was pure gold, and heavy. So was some of the plate. That's another fourteen pounds. And we reckon gold as outvaluing silver eight for one. So that counts as eight stone of silver: a hundredweight to add to your ninety-two pounds."
"Two hundred pounds, all told," said Brand thoughtfully. "We will have to divide it all between crews and let the crews make their own division."
"No," said Shef.
"You say that a lot these days," Brand said.
"That is because I know what to do—others don't. The money is not to be divided. It is the war chest of the army. That was why I went for it. If we divide it up everyone will be a little richer. I want to use it so that everyone becomes a lot richer."
"If it's put like that," said Thorvin, "I think the army will accept it. You got it. You have a right to say how you think it should be used. But how are we all going to get a lot richer?"
Shef pulled from the front of his tunic the mappamundi he had taken from the minster wall. "Look at this," he said. A dozen heads bent over the vast vellum sheet, faces wearing different degrees of puzzlement at the scrawled, inked marks.
"Can you read the writing?" asked Shef.
"In the middle there," said Skaldfinn the Heimdall-priest. "Where the little picture is. It says 'Hierusalem.' That is the holy city of the Christians."
"Lies, as usual," commented Thorvin. "That black border is supposed to be Ocean, the great sea that runs round Mithgarth, the world. They are saying their holy city is the center of everything, just as you would expect."
"Look round the edges," rumbled Brand. "See what it has to tell us of places we know. If it lying about them, then we can guess it is all lies, as Thorvin says."
" 'Dacia et Gothis'," read Skaldfinn. " 'Gothia.' That must be the land of the Gautar, south of the Swedes. Unless they mean Gotland. But Gotland is an island, and this is marked as being mainland. Next to it—next to it they have 'Bulgaria.' "
The council broke into laughter. "The Bulgars are the enemies of the emperor of the Greeks, in Miklagarth," said Brand. "It is two months' travel from the nearest of the Gautar to the Bulgars."
"On the other side of Gothia they have 'Slesvic.' Well, at least that is clear enough. We all know Slesvik of the Danes. There is some more writing by it. 'Hic abundant leones.' That means 'There are many lions here.' "
Again a roar of laughter. "I have been to Slesvik market a dozen times," said Brand. "And I have met men who have spoken of lions. They are like very large cats, and they live in the hot country south of Sarkland. But there has never been one lion in Slesvik, let alone many. You wasted your time bringing back this—what do you call it?—this mappa. It is just nonsense, like everything the Christians count as wisdom."
Shef's finger continued to trace lettering, while he muttered to himself the letters that Father Andreas had half-successfully taught him.
"There is some English writing here," he said. "In a different hand from the rest. It says 'Suth-Bryttas,' that is, 'South British.' "
"He means the Bretons," Brand said. "They live on a large peninsula the other side of the English Sea."
"So that is not so far wrong. You can find truth on a mappa. If you put it there."
"I still don't see how it is going to make us rich," replied Brand. "That is what you said it was going to do."
"This won't." Shef rolled the vellum up, thrust it aside. "But the idea of it may. We need to know more important things. Remember—if we had not known where Riccall was, that day in the snow, we might have been cut off and destroyed in the end by the churls. When I set off for Beverley, I knew the direction, but I would never have found the minster if we had not had a guide who knew the roads. The only way I found Bridlington and the man who could sail us out of a trap was because I had traveled the road already.
"You see what I mean? We have plenty of knowledge, but it all depends on people. But no one person knows enough for all the things we need. What a mappa should be is a store of knowledge from many people. Now if we had that we could find our way to places we had not been before. We could tell directions, work out distances."
"So we make a knowledge mappa," said Brand firmly. "Now tell me about rich."
"We have one other precious possession," said Shef. "And this we did not get from the Christians. Thorvin will tell you. I bought it myself. From Munin, the raven of Othin. I bought it with pain. Show them, Thorvin."
From inside his tunic Thorvin pulled a thin square board. On it were lines of small runic letters, each one scratched with a knife and then marked out with red dye.
"It is a riddle. The one who solves the riddle will find the hoard of Raedwald, king of the East Angles. That is what Ivar was searching for last autumn. But the secret died with King Edmund."
"A royal hoard," said Brand. "Now that could be worth something, all right. But first we have to solve the riddle."
"That is what a mappa can do," said Shef firmly. "If we write down every piece of knowledge we can find, in the end we will have the right number of pieces to solve the riddle. But if we do not write them down, by the time we come on the last piece we need we will have forgotten the first.
"And there is another thing." Shef struggled with an image in his mind, a trace of memory from somewhere, of looking down—down on the land in a way no man could ever in reality see it. "Even this mappa. It has one idea. It is as if we were looking down on the world from above. Seeing it all spread out below us Like an eagle would see it. Now that is the way to find things."
Guthmund the skipper broke the considering silence. "But before we see or find anything, we have to decide where we go now."
"More important even than that," said Brand, "we must decide how this army is led, and under what law it shall live. While we were men of the Great Army we lived under the old hermanna lög of our ancestors—the warriors' law. But Ivar the Boneless broke that and I have no wish to return to it. Now I know that not everyone in this army wears the pendant." He looked significantly at Shef and Guthmund in the group around the table. "But it is in my mind that we should now agree to live under a new law. Vegmanna lög, I would call it. The law of the Way-folk. The first stage to that, though, is for the army to agree in open assembly to whom it will give the powers to make the laws."
While they worked it out, Shef's mind drifted away, as it often did, from the wrangling debate that immediately broke out. He knew what the army would now have to do. March out of Northumbria to get away from the Ragnarssons, cross the shires of Burgred, the powerful king of the Mark, as fast as possible. Establish themselves in the kingless realm of the East Angles, and take toll of the population in return for protection. Protection from kings, protection from abbots and bishops. In a short while, toll on that scale would make even Brand feel contented.
Meanwhile he would work on the mappa. And on the riddle. And most important of all, if the Army of the Way was to protect its shires from other predators, he would have to give them new weapons. New machines.
As he began to draw, in his mind's eye, the lines of the new catapult, a voice broke through to his half-attention, arguing violently for a place in the council for all hereditary jarls.
That would include Sigvarth, his father, whose crews had joined the column leaving York almost at the last moment. He wished Sigvarth had remained behind. And his horse-toothed son, Hjörvarth. Still, maybe they need not meet. Maybe the Army would not make the rule about jarls.
Shef went back to wondering how he could replace the power of the slow and clumsy counterweight. His fingers itched again to hold a hammer.
Four weeks later the itch in Shef's fingers had been eased. Outside the makeshift camp where the Wayman army had halted for the winter, he stood on the catapult range. But the machine he stood behind was not one the Rome-folk would have recognized.
"Lower away," he shouted to his eight-man team.
The long boom creaked down towards his waiting hands, the ten-pound rock in its leather sling dangling from two hooks, one fixed, one free.
"Take the strain." The eight brawny Vikings on the other end of the catapult's arm put their weight on the ropes and braced themselves for a pull. Shef felt the arm—it was the top sixteen feet of a longship's mast, sawn off a little above deck level—flex between their weight and his, felt himself beginning to lift off the sodden ground.
"Pull!" The Vikings heaved as one, each man putting his full body-weight and back strength into it, as beautifully coordinated as if they had been heaving up a longship's yard in an Atlantic swell. The short arm of the catapult jerked down. The long arm whipped up. The sling, whirling round with sudden, vicious force, reached the point where the free hook was pulled off its ring, and swung loose.
Up into the murky sky soared the boulder. For a long moment it seemed to pause at the top of its arc, then began the long descent to splash into the Fenland soil two hundred and fifty paces off. Already a half-score of ragged figures were racing forward at the other end of the practice range, jealously competing to seize the ball and run back with it.
"Lower away!" bellowed Shef at the top of his lungs. His crew, as always, took not the slightest notice. They whooped and cheered, beating each other on the back, watching for the fall of the shot.
"A furlong if it's an inch!" shouted Steinulf, Brand's helmsman.
"Lower away! This is a speed test!" bellowed Shef again. His team slowly remembered his existence. One of them, Ulf the cook, ambled round and patted Shef tenderly on the back.
"Speed test be buggered," he said companionably. "If we ever have to shoot it fast, we will. Now—it's time to get the food on."
His mates nodded agreement, picked up their jackets from where they had draped them over the catapult's gallowslike frame.
"Good fun, good shooting," said Kolbein the Hebridean, newly sporting his Wayman pendant, the phallus of Frey. "We'll come down again tomorrow. Time to eat."
Shef watched them trail back toward the palisade, the cluster of tents and roughly roofed booths which were the winter camp of the Wayman army, wrath and frustration at his heart.
He had got the idea for this new-model catapult while watching Ordlaf's fishermen hauling on their mast-ropes. The giant boulder-thrower of the monks at York, the machine that had destroyed the Ragnarssons' ram three months before, had got its power from a counterweight. The counterweight itself was hauled into the air by men heaving at a windlass. All the counterweight really did was to store up the power the men had put into heaving on the windlass handles.
So why store the power? he had asked himself. Why not just have men attach ropes to the short arm and heave down on it directly? For small stones, like those they had roughly chipped into spheres, the new machine, the "pull-thrower" as the Vikings called it, was magnificent.
It threw in a perfectly straight line and could be aimed for direction within a couple of feet. The effect of the missile it hurled was literally pulverizing, turning rock to powder and smashing through shields like paper. As they learned how to shoot the weapon with maximum efficiency, its range steadily increased out to an eighth of a mile. And he was sure, if only they would do as they were told, that he could launch ten rocks while a man counted to a hundred.
But his team had no notion of the catapult as a weapon. To them, it was just a toy. Maybe useful one day against a stockade or a wall. Otherwise, a diversion during the tedium of a winter camp in the Fens, with even the traditional Viking amusements of raiding the surrounding countryside for girls and money severely forbidden.
But these throwers would work against anything, Shef thought. Ships. Armies. How would a drawn-up battle-line fare against a rain of boulders from men well out of bowshot, each one sure to kill or cripple?
He became aware that a cluster of excited, grinning faces was staring at him. The slaves. Runaways from the North-folk or from the lands of the king of the Mark, drawn to the camp here in the flat, soggy borderland between the streams of Nene and Welland by the astonishing rumor that here their collars would be removed. That food was to be had in return for services. They had been told, though they didn't believe it yet, that they would not be re-enslaved once their masters moved on.
Each of the ragged figures was clutching one of the ten-pound stones, which they had spent the last day or so chipping into shape with a couple of Thorvin's least-valued chisels.
"All right," said Shef. "Take the pegs out, dismantle the machine, take the beams back and wrap them in their tarpaulins."
The men shuffled and looked at each other. One of them, nudged forward by the rest, spoke haltingly, eyes on the ground.
"We was thinking, master. You being from Emneth and that. And talking like us and all. So..."
"Get on with it."
"We was wondering, you being one of us and all, if you would let us have a shot."
"We know how to do it!" cried one of his supporters. "We watched. We ain't got the beef they got, but we can pull."
Shef stared at the excited faces. The scrawny, underfed physiques. Why not? he thought. He had always assumed that what you needed most for this task was raw strength and weight. But coordination was even more important. Maybe twelve lightweight Englishmen would be as good as eight heavyweight Vikings. It would never have been true with swords or axes. But at least these ex-slaves would do what they were told.
"All right," he said. "We'll shoot five for practice. Then we'll see how many you can loose while I count fivescore."
The freedmen cheered and capered, pushing for the ropes.
"Hold on. This is going to be a speed test. So, first thing. Put the stones close there in a pile so you won't have to move more than a step to get them. Now, pay attention..."
An hour later, his new team dismissed to store what they now called their machine, Shef walked thoughtfully towards the booth of Hund and Ingulf, where the sick and injured lay. Hund met him coming out of the booth, wiping bloody hands. "How are they?" Shef asked. He meant the casualties from his other machine, the torsion-catapult or "twist-shooter" as the Vikings called it, the dart-machine which had released King Ella into death.
"They'll live. One lost three fingers. Could as easily have been his hand, or arm for that matter. The other has most of his rib cage stove in. Ingulf had to cut him to get a piece out of his lung. But it's healing well. I've just smelt his stitches. No sign of the flesh-rot. That's two men badly hurt by that machine in four days. What's the matter with it?"
"Nothing wrong with the machine. It's these Norsemen. Strong men, proud of their strength. They twist the cogwheels tight—then one of them will throw his weight on the lever just to wring an extra turn out of it. The bow-arm snaps—and someone gets hurt."
"Then it's not the machine at fault, but the men who use it?"
"Exactly. What I need are men who will take so many counted turns and no more, who will do what they're told."
"Not many of those in this camp."
Shef stared at his friend. "Not speaking Norse, certainly." The seed of an idea had been planted.
The winter dark upon them now, he would take a candle and continue to work on the new mappa—the map of England as it really was.
"Nothing left to eat, I suppose, but the rye porridge?"
Silently Hund passed him his bowl.
Sigvarth looked round with a trace of uncertainty. The priests of the Way had formed the holy circle, within the rowan-hung cords, spear planted and fire burning. Once again the laymen of the Way were excluded: no one was present in the dim, sail-roofed shed except the six white-clad priests and Sigvarth Jarl of the Small Isles.
"It is time we came to a clear understanding, Sigvarth," said Farman the priest, "and that is, how sure are you that you are the father of the boy Shef?"
"He says so," replied Sigvarth. "Everyone thinks he is. And his mother claims him—and she should know. Of course she might have done anything once she escaped from me—a girl on the loose for the first time. She might have enjoyed herself." Yellow teeth flashed. "But I don't think so. She was a lady."
"I think I know the main story," said Farman. "You took her from her husband. But a thing I cannot understand is this: She escaped from you, or so we hear. Are you usually as careless as that with your captives? How did she escape? And how could she have got back to her husband?"
Sigvarth rubbed his jaw reflectively. "This is twenty years back now. Still, it was funny. I remember pretty well.
"What happened was this: We were coming back from a trip down South. Hadn't gone very well. As we came back I decided, just for luck, to look into the Wash and see what we could find. Usual stuff. Pushed ashore. English all over the place, as always. Came down on this little village, Emneth, grabbed everyone we could. One of them was the thane's lady—I forget her name now.
"But I don't forget her. She was good. I took her for myself. I was thirty then, she was maybe twenty. That's often a good combination. She'd had a child, she was broken in all right. But I got the impression she had not had much joy from her husband. She fought me fiercely to start with, but I'm used to that—they have to do it to show they aren't whores. Once she knew there was no choice, though, she buckled down to it. Had a trick, a way to her—she used to lift herself right off the ground, me too, when she reached her moment."
Thorvin grunted disapprovingly. Farman, one hand clutching the dried stallion-penis that was his badge of office, as the hammer was Thorvin's, hushed him with a gesture.
"But it's not so much fun in a rolling longship. After we pushed up the coast a bit, I looked out for a good place. Bit of strandhögg, I thought. Light fires, warm up, roast some beef, get out a couple of barrels of ale, have some sport for an evening. Put the boys in good heart for the ocean crossing. But not take any risks, mind, not even with the English.
"So, I picked a spot. Stretch of beach backed by good, high cliffs. One stream leading down to it through a gully.
I put half a dozen men there just to make sure none of the girls we'd caught escaped. I put one man on each of the cliffs to either side, with a horn to blow if he saw any sign of a rescue party turning up. And because of the cliffs, I gave each of them a rope tied to a stake. If we were surprised, they blew the horns, the party in the gully ran back, and the ones on the cliffs slid down the ropes. We had the boats, three of them, tethered bow and stem—bow to the beach, stern to an anchor well out to sea. In a hurry all we had to do was pile in, loose the bow-ropes, haul ourselves off on the stern-rope and set sail. But the main thing is, I had the beach sealed off tight as a nun."
"You would know," said Thorvin.
Sigvarth's teeth flashed again. "None better, unless he's a bishop."
"But she got away," Farman prompted.
"Right. We had our fun. I did it with her, on the sand, twice. It got dark. Now, I wasn't passing her round, but the men had a dozen girls they were sharing, and I felt like joining in—hah, I was thirty then! So I hauled in my boat, I left my clothes on the sand and got in it with her. I pulled out on the stern-rope, maybe thirty yards out, and made fast. I left her there, dived in the sea and swam back. Fine, big blonde girl there I fancied. She'd been making a lot of noise.
"But after a while—I'd got a roast rib in one hand and a mug of ale in the other—the men started shouting. Just outside the light of our fires there was a shape on the sand, a big shape. Beached whale, we thought, but when we ran over, it wheezed and came at the first man there. He backed off, we looked for our weapons. I thought it might be a hrosswhale. Whaleross, some say.
"And right that moment there was a lot of shouting from the top of one cliff. The lad up there, Stig was his name, shouting for help. Not blowing his horn, mind, but wanting help. Sounded as if he was fighting something. So I climbed up the rope to see what it was."
"And what was it?"
"Nothing, when I got there. But he said, near in tears, he'd been attacked by a skoffin."
"A skoffin?" said Vigleik. "What's that?"
Skaldfinn laughed. "You must talk more to old wives, Vigleik. A skoffin is the opposite of a skuggabaldur. The one is the get of a male fox and a she-cat, the other of a tom and a vixen."
"Well," Sigvarth concluded, "by this time everyone was getting unsettled. So I left Stig up there, told him not to be a fool, slid back down the rope and told everyone to get back on board.
"But when we hauled the boat in, the woman was gone. We searched the beach. I checked the party in the gully—they hadn't moved an inch while we were getting ready, swore no one had passed. I went up both ropes to both cliffs. No one had seen anything. In the end I was so angry, what with one thing and another, that I threw Stig down the cliff for sniveling. He broke his neck and died. I had to pay wergild for him when I got home. But I never saw the woman again till last year. And then I was too busy to ask for her story."
"Aye. We know what you were busy with," said Thorvin. "The business of the Boneless One."
"Are you a Christian to whine about it?"
"What it comes to," said Farman, "is that she could have swum away in the confusion. You swam to shore."
"She would have had to do it fully dressed, for her clothes were gone too. And not just to shore. A long way, in the dark sea, to get round the cliffs. For she was not on the beach, I am sure of that."
"A whaleross. A skoffin. A woman who vanishes and reappears carrying a child," mused Farman. "All this could be explained. Yet there are more ways than one of explaining it."
"You think he is not my son," challenged Sigvarth. "You think he is the son of one of your gods. Well, I tell you: I honor no god save Ran the goddess who lives in the deep, whom drowned sailors go to. And the other world you talk of, the visions you boast of—I have heard them speak of it in camp about this Way of yours—I think them all born of drink and sour food, and one man's blather infecting another, till everyone must tell his tale of visions to keep in with the rest. There is no more sense in it than there is in skoffins. The boy is my son. He looks like me. He acts like me—like I did when I was young."
"He acts like a man," snarled Thorvin. "You act like a rutting beast. I tell you that though you have gone many years without regret and without punishment; still there is fate for such as you. Our poet said it when he saw the Hel-world:
" 'Many men I saw moan in pain,
Walk in woe the ways of Hel.
Streaming red their wretched faces,
Punishment for the pain of women.' "
Sigvarth rose to his feet, left hand on sword. "And I will tell you a better poem. The Boneless One's skald made it last year, of the death of Ragnar:
'We struck with the sword. I say it is good
For swain to meet swain in the sway of brands.
Not flinch from fighting. The friend of warriors
Shall earn women by war, by the way of the drengir.'
"That is poetry for a warrior. For one who knows how to live and how to die. There will be a place for such a one among the halls of Othin, no matter how many women he has made weep. Poetry for a Viking. Not a milksop."
In the silence Farman said mildly, "Well, Sigvarth. We thank you for your tale. We will remember you are a jarl and one of our council. You will remember you live by the law of the Waymen now, no matter what you think of our beliefs."
He pulled open the ropes of the precinct, to let Sigvarth out. As the jarl left, the priests began to talk in low tones.
Shef-who-was-not-Shef knew that the darkness round him had not been breached by light for twice a hundred years. For a while the stone chamber and the earth round it had glowed with the phosphorescence of corruption, lighting up the silent, heaving struggle of the maggots as they consumed the bodies, the eyes and livers and flesh and marrow of all that had been placed there. But the maggots were gone now, the many corpses reduced to white bone, as hard and inert as the whetstone lying under his own fleshless hand. They were nothing but possessions now, without life of their own, as unchallengeably his as the chests and coffers round his feet and under his chair, as the chair itself—the massive wooden high seat in which he had settled himself seven generations ago, for eternity. The chair had rotted underground with the owner—the two had grown into one another. Yet still the figure sat unmoving, the empty eye-sockets staring out into the earth and beyond.
He, the figure in the chair, remembered how they had placed him there. The men had dug the great trench, slid into it the longship on its rollers, placed the high seat as he had directed on the poop, by the steering oar. He had settled himself in it, placed the whetstone with its carved savage faces on one armrest, laid his long broadsword on the other. He had nodded to the men to continue. First they brought in his war-stallion, held it facing him, and poleaxed it where it stood. Then his four best hounds, each one pierced to the heart. He watched carefully to see that each one was quite dead. He had no mind to share his everlasting tomb with a trapped meat-eater. Then the hawks, each one quickly strangled. Then the women, a pair of beauties, weeping and calling out in spite of the poppy forced upon them; the men strangled them quickly.
Then they brought in the chests, two men to each one, grunting with the weight of them. He watched carefully again to see there was no delay, no reluctance. They would have kept his wealth if they dared. They would dig it up again it they dared. They would not dare. For a year to come the barrow would glow blue with the light of corruption beneath it; a man with a torch would ignite the balefires of the reek coming out of the ground. Tales would spread, till all feared and dreaded the grave-mound of Kar the Old. If grave it was for Kar.
The chests stacked, the men began to deck over the belly of the longship with its freight of corpses. Others piled stones around and behind him till they reached the height of the top of his seat with its silken canopy. Over them they laid stout beams, and over them in turn a sheet of lead. Around his feet and over his chests they tucked tarred canvas. In time the wood would rot, the earth fall in on the longship's hold, the dead women and beasts would lie mingled in confusion. Still he would sit here, looking out over them, the earth held at bay. They had been buried dead. He would not be.
When all was done a man came to stand in front of the seat: Kol the Niggard, men would call him, son of Kar the Old. "It is done, Father," he said, face twisting between fear and hate.
Kar nodded, eyes unblinking. He would not wish his son luck or farewell. If he had had the black blood of his ancestors, he would have joined his father in the mound, preferring to sit with his treasures for eternity than to hand them over to the new king pushing up from the South, to enjoy life with dishonor, to be an under-king.
The trusted warriors, six of them, began to slaughter the slave-laborers and stack them round the ship. Then they and his son scrambled out. A few moments later the loose earth of the digging began to fall in clods on the deck, covering it quickly, mounting up over the planks and the canvas and the sheet of lead. Slowly he saw it rise, to his knees, to his chest. He sat unmoving, even when earth began to trickle into the stone chamber itself, to cover his hand on the whetstone.
Still a glimmer of light. More earth raining down. The glimmer gone, the dark deepening. Kar settled back finally, sighing with relief and contentment. Now he had things as they should be. And so they would stay forever. His.
He wondered if he would die down here. What could kill him? It did not matter. Whether he died or lived he would always be the same. The hogboy, the haugbui. The dweller in the mound.
Shef woke with a start and a gasp. Underneath the coarse blankets his body streamed sweat. Reluctantly he pulled them back, rolled with a grunt from the string-bed to the wet, tramped-earth floor. He seized his hemp shirt as the freezing air hit him, pulled it on, groped for the heavy wool tunic and trousers.
Thorvin says these visions are sent by the gods for my instruction. But what did that tell me? There was no machine in it this time.
The canvas flap over the booth-door pulled back and Padda the freedman shuffled in. Outside, the late January dawn showed only thick mist rising from the waterlogged ground. The Army would frowst late in its blankets today.
The names of the men in the dream: Kar and Kol. They did not sound English. Nor Norse, altogether. But then the Norsemen were great ones for shortening names. Guthmund was Gummi to his friends, Thormoth became Tommi. The English did it too. Those names in King Edmund's riddle: "...Wuffa, Wehha's offspring..."
"What's your long name, Padda?" he asked.
"Paldriht, master. Haven't been called that since my mother died."
"What would Wuffa be short for?"
"Don't know. Wulfstan, maybe. Could be anything. I knew a man once called Wiglaf. Very noble name. We called him Wuffa."
Shef pondered as Padda began to blow carefully on the embers of last night's fire.
Wuffa, son of Wehha. Wulfstan or Wiglaf, son of—Weohstan, it might be, or Weohward. He did not know those names—he must find out more.
As Padda fiddled with wood and water, his pans and the everlasting porridge, Shef unrolled the vellum mappamundi from its waxcloth wrapping, spread it out, corners weighted, on his trestle table. He no longer looked at the completed side, the side with the map of Christian learning. On the reverse he had begun to draw a different map. A map of England, putting down all the information he could uncover. He would sketch in rough outlines, names, distances, on birchbark. Only after information had been checked and proved consistent with what he knew already would he ink it in on the vellum itself. Yet the map still grew with every day, dense and accurate for Norfolk and the Fens, doubtful and patchy for Northumbria away from York, completely blank down in the South, apart from London on the Thames and the vague mention of Wessex to the west of it.
Padda had found a Suffolk man among the freedmen, though. In return for his breakfast he would tell Shef all he knew about the shire.
"Call him in," said Shef, unrolling fresh birchbark and testing the point of his scratching-tool as the man entered.
"I want you to tell me all you can about places in your shire. Begin with the rivers. I know already of the Yare and the Waverly."
"Ah," said the Suffolk man reflectively. "Well, below that you've got the Alde, which reaches the coast at Aldeburgh. The Deben next. That comes into the coast ten mile south of Aldeburgh at Woodbridge, near where they say the old kings lie. We had our own kings in Suffolk once, you know, before the Christians came...."
Minutes later Shef pounded into the forge where Thorvin was preparing for another day of forging iron cogwheels for the twist-shooters.
"I want you to call the army council together," he demanded.
"Why?"
"I think I know how to make Brand rich."
The expedition set out a week later, under a lowering sky, an hour after dawn. The council of the Wayman army had refused to sanction abandoning the base and marching out in full force. There were still the ships to be guarded, hauled up on the banks of the Welland. The camp held not only warmth for the remaining weeks and months of the winter but also a laboriously gathered food supply. And it could not be denied that many of the councillors were reluctant to believe Shef's passionate conviction that his mappa held the secret of generations of wealth.
Yet it was obvious that more than a few crews were needed. The kingdom of the East Angles was a kingdom no more, and all its mightiest warriors and noblest thanes were dead. Still, there was the chance that they might rally if provoked. A small party of Vikings could be cut off and massacred by overwhelming numbers. Brand had rumbled that foolish as he thought the whole expedition might be, he had no wish to be woken one morning by the heads of his messmates being thrown into the camp. In the end Shef had been allowed to call for volunteers. In the tedium of winter encampment, there had been no trouble in finding them.
A thousand Vikings rode out on their ponies, eight long hundreds and forty, riding crew by crew as was their custom. Hundreds of pack-ponies carried tents and bedding, food and ale, led in strings by English thralls. At the center of the column, though, was something new: a string of carts, carrying ropes and beams, wheels and levers—all the beams carefully notched and marked for reassembly. A dozen pull-throwers, eight twist-shooters. Every machine Shef and Thorvin had been able to construct in their weeks at the base was here. If he had left them behind they would have been forgotten, dispersed, used for firewood. Too much work had gone into them for that to happen.
Round the carts there clustered a mob of thralls, the runaways of the region, each catapult crew stepping by its cart and its machine, each crew captained by one of Shef's original dozen. The Vikings did not like this. Yes, every army needed a gang of thralls to dig latrines, light fires, groom horses. But gangs this size? All eating their share of the supplies? And starting to think they might not be thralls after all? Even the followers of the Way had never considered admitting men who did not speak Norse to full fellowship. Nor did Shef dare to suggest it.
He had made clear to Padda and the rest of the machine-captains that they had better tell their men to keep their heads down. "If someone wants you to grind his meal or pitch his tent, just do it," he had told them. "Otherwise keep out of the way."
Yet he wanted his recruits to feel different. To take pride in the speed and dexterity with which they leapt to their places, turned the levers or whirled the beams.
To mark them out, every catapult-man now wore an identical jerkin, made only of rough sackcloth, hodden gray, over the rags they had been wearing when they arrived. On it each man had carefully stitched a white linen double-headed hammer, front and back. Each man, too, had a belt or at least a rope round his middle, and all those who owned them bore knives.
Maybe it would work, thought Shef, watching the carts creak forward, Vikings in front and behind, jerkined freedmen in the middle. Certainly they were much better already with the catapults than the Vikings they had replaced. And even on a winter day in the raw cold, they looked cheerful.
A strange noise split the sky. At the front of the train of carts, Cwicca, a thrall who had come in a few days before, escaped from the shrine of St. Guthlac at Crowland, had brought with him his treasured bagpipe. Now he led the carts along, cheeks puffed, fingers skipping briskly on the bone pipe. His mates cheered and stepped out harder, some of them whistling in unison.
A Viking from the vanguard turned his horse, scowling angrily, front teeth sticking out. It was Hjörvarth Sigvarthsson, Shef saw. His half brother. Sigvarth had volunteered instantly to join the expedition with all his crews, too quickly to be turned down, quicker even than Thorvin or the Hebrideans or the still-doubting Brand. Now Hjörvarth trotted back menacingly towards the piper, sword half-drawn. The music wailed discordantly and died.
Shef turned his pony between them, slipped off it and handed the reins to Padda.
"Walking keeps you warm," he said to Hjörvarth, staring up at the angry face. "Music makes the miles go faster. Let him play."
Hjörvarth hesitated, jerked his pony's head round. "Suit yourself," he flung over one shoulder. "But harps are for warriors. Only a hornung would listen to a pipe."
Hornung, gadderling, thought Shef. How many words there are for bastard. It doesn't stop men putting them in women's bellies. Maybe Godive has one by now.
"Keep playing," he shouted to the bagpiper. "Play 'The Quickbeam Dance.' Play it for Thunor, son of Woden, and to Hell with the monks."
The piper started again to play the jerky quickstep tune, louder this time, backed by united defiant whistling. The carts rolled forward behind the patient oxen.
"You're sure King Burgred means to take over the East Angles?" King Ethelred asked. His question ended in a fit of coughing—sharp, high-pitched, going on again after it had seemed to stop.
Ethelred's younger brother, Alfred the atheling, looked at him with concern. Also, a reluctant calculation. Alfred's father, Ethelwulf—king of Wessex, conqueror of the Vikings at Oakley—had had four strong sons: Ethelstan, Ethelbald, Ethelbert, Ethelred. By the time the fifth came along it had seemed so unlikely that he would ever be called upon to rule that the royal mark of the house of Wessex, the Ethel-name, had seemed unnecessary. He had been called Alfred after his mother's people.
By now the father and three of the strong sons were dead. None killed in battle, but all killed by the Vikings. For years they had marched in all weathers, lain in damp cloaks, drunk water from streams that flowed through the camps of armies careless of where they dumped their waste or relieved themselves. They died of the bowel-cramps, of the lung-sickness. Now Ethelred had contracted the wasting-cough. How long might it be, Alfred thought, till he was the last atheling of the royal house of Wessex? Till then, though, he must serve.
"Quite sure," he replied. "He said so openly. He was mustering his men when I left. But he's not making it too obvious. He has an under-king, an East Angle, to put in charge. That will make it easier for the East Angles to accept his rule. Especially as he has a totem. The man with no limbs, the one I told you of."
"Does it matter?" Ethelred dabbed wearily at spittle-slimed lips.
"The East Angles have twenty thousand hides. That, added to what Burgred has already, will make him stronger than us, far stronger than the Northumbrians. If we could trust him to fight the heathens only... But he may prefer easier prey. He could say it was his duty to unite all the kingdoms of the English. Ours included."
"So?"
"We must put in a claim. See, Essex is ours already. Now the border of Essex and the South-folk runs..."
The two men, the king and the prince, began slowly to thrash out a claim to territory, a likely dividing line. They had no image of the territory they were discussing, only knowledge that this river was north of that one, this town in this or that shire. The debate took even more toll of Ethelred's waning strength.
"You're sure they've split?" said Ivar Ragnarsson sharply.
The messenger nodded. "Almost half of them marched south. Maybe twelve long hundreds left behind."
"But no quarrel?"
"No. The word in the camp was they had some scheme for getting the wealth of King Jatmund, whom you killed with the blood-eagle."
"Nonsense," snarled Ivar.
"You heard what they got from the raid on the minster at Beverley?" asked Halvdan Ragnarsson. "A hundred pounds of silver and the same again in gold. That's more than we've taken anywhere. The boy is good at new schemes. You should have settled with him after the holmgang. He is a better friend than enemy."
Ivar turned on his brother, eyes pale, face whitening in one of his celebrated rages. Halvdan stared back at him placidly. The Ragnarssons never fought each other. This was the secret of their power, even Ivar in his madness knew it. He would take his rage out on someone else in some other way. Another matter to keep secret. But they had done it before.
"Only now he is an enemy," said Sigurth decisively. "We have to decide if he is our main one at this moment. And if he is... Messenger, you can go."
The brothers put their heads together in the little room off the drafty hall of King Ella in Eoforwich, and began to reckon numbers, rations, distances, possibilities.
"The wisdom of the serpent, the cunning of the dove," said Erkenbert the archdeacon with satisfaction. "Already our enemies destroy themselves and each other."
"Indeed," agreed Wulfhere. "The heathen make much ado and the kingdoms are moved. But God hath showed his voice and the earth shall melt away."
They spoke over the clanging of the dies, as each of the lay brothers in the monastic mint put his silver blank in place, struck it firmly with his hammer to drive the embossed design into one side. Moved it to the other die, struck again. First the spread-winged raven for the Ragnarssons. Then the letters S.P.M.—Sancti Petri Moneta. Collared slaves shuffled by, carrying man-loads of charcoal, rolling out carts of rejected lead, copper, slag. Only choirmonks touched the silver. They shared in the wealth of the minster. And any who thought for a moment of his own advantage could reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict and the archbishop's power of chastisement written into it. It was long since a choirmonk had been flogged to death in chapter, or bricked alive into the vaults. But such cases had been known.
"They are in God's hand," concluded the archbishop. "Surely a divine vengeance will fall upon those who stole the goods of St. John's at Beverley."
"But God's hand shows itself through the hands of others," said Erkenbert. "And we must call for help from those."
"The kings of the Mark and of Wessex?"
"A mightier power than they."
Wulfhere looked down with surprise, doubt, comprehension. Erkenbert nodded.
"I have drafted a letter, for your seal. To Rome."
Pleasure showed on Wulfhere's face, perhaps anticipation of the much-rumored pleasures of the Holy City. "A vital matter," he announced. "I shall take the letter to Rome myself. In person."
Shef stared thoughtfully at the reverse side of his mappa, the map of England. Halfway through his work he had discovered the concept of scale, too late to apply consistently. Suffolk now bulked incongruously large, taking up a whole quadrant of the vellum. At one edge was his detailed drawing of all the information he had been able to wring out about the north bank of the Deben.
It fits, he thought. There is the town Woodbridge. That is in the first line of the poem, and the line must mean the town, because otherwise it would make no sense: all bridges are wood bridges. But more important is what the thrall says about the place, with no name, downstream of the bridge and the ford. That is where the barrows are, the resting place of the old kings. And who are the old kings? The slave knew no names, but the thane of Helmingham, who sold us mead, listed the ancestors of Raedwald the Great, and among them were Wiglaf and his father Weohstan: Wuffa, then, Wehha's offspring.
If the slave had remembered well, then there were four barrows together in a line running roughly south to north. The northmost of those. That was the place of the hoard.
Why had it not been plundered? If King Edmund had known it was the secret hiding place of the treasures of his realm, why was it not guarded?
Or maybe it was guarded. But not by men. That was what the slave had thought. When he had realized what Shef intended to do he had grown silent. Now no one could find him. He had preferred to take his chances of recapture than go to rob the grave.
Shef turned his attention to practicalities. Diggers, guards. Spades, robes, boxes and slings for hauling up earth from deep down. Lights—he had no intention of digging in daylight with an interested county watching.
"Tell me, Thorvin," he said. "What do you think we might find inside this barrow? Other than gold, we hope."
"A ship," said Thorvin briefly.
"Close on a mile from the water?"
"See on your map. You could carry it up the slope there. The barrows are ship-shaped. And the thane told us Wiglaf was a sea-king, from the shores of Sweden, if he told us true. In my country even rich farmers, if they can afford it, will have themselves buried sitting upright in their boats. They think that this way they can sail over the seas to Odainsakr—to the Undying Shore—where they will join their ancestors and the Asa-gods. I do not say they are wrong."
"Well, we will soon know." Shef looked at the setting sun, glanced through the tent flap at the picked men—fifty Viking guards, a score of English diggers—quietly making ready. They would move only after dark.
As he rose to make his own preparations, Thorvin caught his arm. "Do not take this too lightly, young man. I do not believe—much—in draugr or in hogboys, the living dead or dragons made from corpses' backbones. Yet you are going to rob the dead. There are many tales of that, and all say the same. The dead will give up their goods, but only after a struggle. And only for a price. You should let a priest come with you. Or Brand."
Shef shook his head. They had argued this out before. He had made excuses, given reasons. None of them true. In his heart Shef felt he alone had the right to the hoard, bequeathed him by the dying king. He went out into the falling dusk.
Many, many hours later, Shef heard a mattock strike on wood. He straightened from his crouch over the black hole. It had been a night to forget so far. They had found the site without trouble, guided by the map. They had encountered no one. But where to begin digging? The guards and the diggers had clustered together in silence, waiting for orders. He had had torches lit, to see if he could discover signs of soil disturbance. But the moment the first resinous bundle had crackled to life a sudden blue flare of flame had run up the barrow and into the sky. Shef had lost half his diggers in that moment; they had simply bolted into the night. The Viking escort had held together much better, instantly drawing weapons and facing about them as if expecting to be attacked any moment by the vengeful dead. Yet even Guthmund the Greedy, keenest treasure-hunter of all, had suddenly lost enthusiasm. "We'll spread out a bit," he had muttered. "Not let anyone get too close." Since then no Viking had been seen. They must be out there in the dark somewhere, in little knots, backs together. Shef had been left with ten English freedmen, teeth chattering with fear. Lacking knowledge or plan he had simply taken them all to the top of the barrow and told them to dig straight down, as near to the center as he could measure.
At last they had hit something. "Is it a box?" he called hopefully down the shaft.
The only response was frantic tugs on the ropes that led down into the eight-foot-deep hole. "They want to come up," muttered one of the men standing round it.
"Haul away, then."
Slowly the mud-stained men were dragged up out of the earth. Shef waited with what patience he could for a report.
"Not a box, master. It's a boat. The bottom of a boat. They must have buried 'un upside down."
"So break through it."
Heads shook. Silently, one of the ex-slaves held out his mattock. Another passed a faintly glowing fir-brand. Shef took both. There was no point now, he realized, in asking for further volunteers. He drove the halberd in his hand deep into the ground by its spike, took a rope, tested its anchor-stake, glanced round at the dark figures, only their eyeballs showing in the night.
"Stay by the rope." Heads nodded. He lowered himself awkwardly, torch and mattock in one hand, into the dark.
At the bottom he found himself standing on gently sloping wood, obviously near the keel. He ran his hand over the planks in the faint torchlight. Overlapping, clinker-built. And, he could feel, heavily tarred. How long might that have lasted in this dry, sandy soil? He lifted the mattock and struck—struck again more firmly, heard the sound of splintering wood.
A rush of air and a foul stench enveloped him. His torch glowed with sudden force. Cries of alarm and scamperings from above. Yet this was not a stench of corruption. More, he felt, like the smell of a cow-byre at winter's end. He struck again and again, widening the hole. Beneath it, he realized, there was vacancy, not earth. The barrow-builders had succeeded in creating a chamber for the dead, and for the hoard, had not merely left it buried in the ground for him to sift through a shovel at a time.
Shef dropped the rope through the hole he had made and swung himself after it, torch in hand.
His feet crunched on bones. Human bones. He looked down, and felt a wave of pity. The ribs he had snapped were not those of the master of the hoard. They were a woman's bones. He could see her cloak-brooch glinting below the skull. But she lay facedown, one of a pair, stretched out lengthwise along the floor of the burial chamber. Both women's spines, he could see now, were snapped, by the great quernstones that must have been hurled down upon them. Their hands had been tied, they had been lowered into the tomb, their backs had been broken and then they had been left to die in the dark. The quernstones showed what they had been and what they were there for: they were the master's grinding slaves. Here to grind his meal and prepare his porridge into eternity.
Where the slaves were, there the master would be. He lifted his torch and turned toward the stern of the ship.
There, on his high seat, sat the king. Gazing out over hounds and horse and women. His teeth grinning out through shriveled skin. A gold circlet still lay on the bald skull. Stepping closer, Shef stared into the half-preserved face, as if looking for the secret of majesty. He remembered the urge of Kar the Old, to keep things his, to have them under his hand forever rather than live without them. Beneath this king's hand there was a regal whetstone, the ensign of the warrior-king who lived by sharpened weapons alone. Shef's torch suddenly went out.
Shef stood stock-still, skin crawling. In front of him there was a creak, a shifting of weight. The old king lifting himself out of his chair to settle with the invader who had come to take what he had hoarded. Shef braced for the touch of bony fingers, the awful teeth in the dried leather face.
He turned from his place and in the pitch-black walked back four, five, six paces, hopefully to the point where he had first descended. Was the blackness just perceptibly reduced? Why was he shaking like a common slave? He had faced death above—he would face death here in the darkness.
"You have no right to the gold now," he said into the blackness, groping his way back to the high seat. "Your children's children's child gave it to me. For a purpose."
He groped till his fingers found the torch, then bent over while he worked his flint and steel and tinder out of their pouch, strove to catch a spark.
"Anyway, Old Bones, you should be glad to give your wealth to an Englishman. There are worse than me who would take it from you."
Torch alight again, he propped it against a rotting timber, stepped up to the seat with its grisly occupant, put his arms round the body and lifted it carefully, hoping the remains of flesh and skin and cloth would hold the crumbling bones together. Turning, he laid it down to face the women's bodies in the well of the boat.
"Now you three must fight your own battles down here."
He took the gold circlet from the skull and pressed it down on his own head. Turning back to the empty chair, he picked up the whetstone, the scepter that had lain under the king's right hand and tapped its solid two-foot weight meditatively into one palm.
"One thing I will give you for your gold," he added. "And that is vengeance for your descendant. Vengeance on the Boneless One."
As he spoke, something rustled in the dim darkness behind him. For the first time Shef recoiled with shock. Had the Boneless One heard his name and come? Was he trapped in the tomb with some monstrous serpent?
Mastering himself, Shef stepped towards the noise, torch high. It was the rope by which he had climbed down. The end of it had been cut.
From above, dimly, he heard grunts of effort. Earth began, as it had done in his dream of Kar the Old, to patter down through the hole.
It took all his effort of will to reason this out. It was not a nightmare, not something to destroy one's wits. Call it a puzzle, something to work out and solve.
There are enemies up there. Padda and his men might have become frightened and run off, but they would not have cut the rope or thrown earth down on me. Nor would Guthmund. So someone has driven them off while I was down here, maybe the English, come to defend their king's mound. But they do not seem to want to come down after me. Still, I will never get out this way.
But is there another way? King Edmund had spoken of this as Raedwald's hoard, but this is the mound of Wuffa. Could he and his ancestors have been using this as a hiding place for wealth? If so, there might be a way to add to it—or to withdraw it. But the mound was solid above. Is there another way? If there is, it will be close to the gold. And the gold will be as close as it can be to the guardian. Stepping over the bodies he walked to the chair and pulled it to one side to reveal four stout wooden boxes with leather handles. Sound leather handles, he noted, fingering one. Behind them, cut neatly out of the planking where the bow of the boat curved down, a square black hole, hardly bigger than a man's shoulders.
That is the tunnel! He felt immense relief, an invisible weight lifted from him. It was possible. A man from outside could crawl along that, open a box, close a box, do what he needed. He would not even have to face the old king he knew was there.
The tunnel must be faced. He pushed the circlet down on his head again, gripped the torch, now burned almost to its end. Should he take whetstone or mattock? I could dig myself out with the mattock, he thought. But now I have taken his scepter from the old king, I have no right to put it down. Torch in one hand, whetstone in the other, he stooped and crawled into the blackness.
As he inched forward the tunnel narrowed. He had to thrust first with one shoulder, then with the other. The torch burned down, scorching his hand. He crushed it out against the earth wall and crawled on, trying to believe that the walls were not closing on him. Sweat sprang out on his head and ran into his eyes; he could not free a hand to wipe them. Nor could he crawl back now; the tunnel was too low for him to raise his hips and edge backward.
His hand before him met not earth floor but vacancy. A push and his head and shoulders were over a gap. Cautiously, he reached forward again. Solid earth, two feet ahead, leading only downward. The builders did not want to make this too easy, he thought.
But I know what must be there. I know this is not a trap, but an entrance. So I must crawl down, round the bend. My face will be in the soil for a foot or two, but I can hold my breath for long enough.
If I am wrong, I will die smothered, face down. The worst thing will be if I struggle. That I will not do. If I cannot get through I will push my face in the earth and die.
Shef crawled over the edge and twisted his body down. For a moment he could not make his muscles force him on, as his legs retained a lingering grip on the level floor he had left. Then he pushed himself down, slid a foot or two, and stuck. He was jammed upside down in the tunnel in the pitch-black.
Not a nightmare, no panic. I must think of this as a puzzle. This cannot be a blind alley, no sense to it. Thorvin always said that no man bears a better burden than sense.
Shef groped round him. A gap. Behind his neck. Like a snake he slid into it. And there was level floor again, with this time a gap leading upward. He heaved himself into it, and for the first time in what seemed an age, stood upright. Beneath his fingers he found a wooden ladder.
He climbed unsteadily upward. His head bumped against a trapdoor. But a door designed to be approached from outside would not open so readily from within. There could be feet of earth heaped on top of it.
Pulling the whetstone from his belt he braced himself against the shaft-wall and stabbed upward with the sharpened end. The wood splintered, creaked. He struck again and again. When he could get a hand through broken wood he wrenched more free. Sandy soil began to patter down into the tunnel, rushing faster and faster as the hole widened and the pale sky of dawn appeared above.
Shef hauled himself exhaustedly from the tunnel, emerging inside a copse of dense hawthorns, no more than a hundred paces from the barrow he had entered so long ago. On the barrow-top stood a knot of figures, staring down. He would not hide nor crawl away from them. He straightened up, settled the circlet, hefted the whetstone and walked quietly over toward them.
It was Hjörvarth, his half brother, as he had almost expected. Someone saw him in the growing light, cried out, fell back. The clump of men drew away from him, leaving Hjörvarth in the middle, by the still-unfilled hole. Shef stepped over the body of one of his English diggers, cut from shoulder to chest by a broadsword. He was aware now that Guthmund had a group of men drawn up fifty yards off, weapons drawn but unready to interfere.
Shef looked wearily at the horse-toothed face of his half brother.
"Well, brother," he said. "It seems you want more than your share. Or are you maybe doing this for someone who is not here?"
The face in front of him tightened. Hjörvarth pulled his broadsword free, thrust his shield forward and paced down the slope of the barrow.
"You are no son to my father," he snarled, and swung his broadsword.
Shef lifted the wrist-thick whetstone into its path. "Stone blunts scissors," he said as the sword snapped. "And stone crushes skull." He whipped the stone round backhand and felt the crunch as one of the carved, savage faces at one end sank into Hjörvarth's temple.
The Viking staggered, fell on one knee, propping himself for a moment with his broken sword. Shef stepped sideways, measured the blow and swung with all his strength. Another crunch of bone, and his brother toppled forward, blood streaming from mouth and ears. Slowly, Shef wiped the gray matter from the stone and looked round at the gaping men from Hjörvarth's crew.
"Family business," he said. "None of you need be concerned."
His appeal to the Viking council was not going Sigvarth's way. His face, white and strained, stared across the table.
"He killed my son—and for that I demand compensation."
Brand lifted a great hand to silence him. "We will hear Guthmund out. Continue."
"My men were spread out in the darkness around the mound. Hjörvarth's men came on us suddenly. We heard their voices, knew they weren't Englishmen, but were not sure what to do. They pushed aside those who challenged them. No lives lost. Then Hjörvarth tried to kill his brother Skjef, first by burying him alive in the barrow, then by attacking him with a sword. We all saw it. Skjef was armed only with a stone rod."
"He killed Padda and five of my diggers," said Shef. The council ignored him.
Brand's voice rumbled gently but decisively. "As I see it there can be no claim for compensation, Sigvarth. Not even for a son. He tried to kill a fellow member of the Army, protected under our Wayman-law. If he had succeeded I would have hanged him. He tried, too, to bury his brother in the barrow. And if he had succeeded in that, think what we would have lost!" He shook his head with disbelieving wonder.
At least two hundred pounds' weight of gold. Much of it of workmanship far exceeding the value of the raw metal. Carved bowls from the Rome-folk. Great torques of pale gold from the land of the Irish. Coins with the heads of unknown Rome-folk rulers. Work of Cordoba and Miklagarth, of Rome and Germany. And added to it, sackloads of silver wedged into the tunnel mouth where the kings' depositors had put them over the generations. Enough there, all told, for every man of the whole Wayman army to be rich for life. If they lived to spend it. Secrecy had vanished with the dawn.
Sigvarth shook his head, his expression unchanging. "They were brothers," he muttered. "One man's sons."
"So there must be no question of vengeance," Brand said. "You cannot avenge one son on another, Sigvarth. You must swear to that." He paused. "It was the doom of the Norns. An ill doom, maybe. But not to be averted by mortals."
Sigvarth nodded this time. "Aye. The Norns. I will swear, Brand. Hjörvarth will lie unavenged. For me."
"Good. Because I tell you all," Brand looked round the table, "with all this wealth in hand I have grown nervous as a virgin at an orgy. The countryside must be buzzing with tales of what we have found. Shef's freedmen talk to the churls and the thralls. News goes both ways. They have heard that a new army has marched into this kingdom. An English army, from the Mark, come to reestablish the kingdom. You can be sure they have already heard of us. If they have any sense they will be marching already to cut us off from our ships, or to pursue us there if they are too late.
"I want camp struck and the men marching before the sun sets. March through the night and the next day. No halt before sunset tomorrow. Tell the skippers, get the beasts fed and the men in ranks."
As the group broke up and Shef moved to see to his carts, Brand caught him by the shoulder.
"Not you," he said. "If I had polished steel I would make you look in it. Do you know you have white hairs on your temples? Guthmund will take care of the carts. You travel in the back of a cart, with my cloak over you as well as your own." He passed over a flask.
"Drink this. I saved it. Call it a gift from Othin, for the man who found the greatest hoard since Gunnar hid the gold of the Niflungs." Shef caught the odor of fermented honey: Othin's mead.
Brand looked down at the ghastly, ruined face—one eye sunk and shriveled, cheekbones standing out over tight-drawn muscles. I wonder, he thought. What price did the draugr in the mound take for his treasure? He clapped Shef again on the shoulder and hurried away, shouting for Steinulf and his skippers.
They marched with Shef in the back of a cart, flask drained now, lulled to half-sleep by the rocking motion. Wedged in between two treasure-chests and a catapult-beam. Close beside each treasure-cart marched a dozen men of Brand's own crews, now detailed as close escort. Round them clustered the freedmen catapulteers, spurred on by the rumor that they too might earn a small share, hold money for the first time in their lives. To front and rear and on the flanks rode strong squads of Vikings, alert for ambush or pursuit. Brand rode the length of the column, changing horses as often as one flagged beneath his weight, continually cursing all to greater effort Someone else's job now, thought Shef. He slid again into a deeper slumber.
He was riding across a plain. More than riding—spurring frantically. His horse groaned under him as he raked the rowels again across its bleeding ribs, fought against the bit, was mastered and driven on. Shef rose in his saddle and looked behind. Over the brow of a low hill, a horde of riders pouring after him, one well out in front on a mighty gray. Athils, king of Sweden.
And who was he, the rider? The Shef-mind could not tell what body it occupied. But it was a man strikingly tall, so tall that even from the great horse he rode his long legs brushed the ground. The tall man had companions, the Shef-mind noted. Strange ones too. Nearest him was a man so broad in the shoulder that it seemed he had a milkmaid's yoke under his leather jacket. His face was broad also, his nose snub, his expression one of animal resource. His horse, too, was laboring, unable to bear the weight at the speed they were traveling. By him was a man unusually handsome—tall, fair, eyelashes like a girl's. Nine or ten other riders pounded along at the same killing pace in front of the tall man and his two nearest companions.
"They will catch us!" called the broad man. He detached a short axe from his saddle-bow and shook it cheerfully.
"Not yet, Böthvar," said the tall one. He halted his horse, pulled a sack from his own saddlebag, reached inside, pulled out handfuls of gold. He scattered them on the ground, wheeled the horse again, rode on. Minutes later, turning on the brow of a hill again, he saw the pursuing horde check, fragment, break into a cluster of men pushing and thrusting their horses against each other while they groped on the ground. The gray horse detached itself, came on, other riders spurring to catch up in its wake.
Twice more the tall man did the same thing as the pursuit continued, each time losing more of the pursuers. But the spurs were having no effect now, the ridden horses moving at hardly a walk. Yet there was not far to go, to reach safety—what the safety was the Shef-mind did not know. A ship? A boundary? It did not matter. All that had to be done was reach it.
Böthvar's horse collapsed suddenly, rolling over in a flurry of foam and blood from its nostrils. The broad man leapt nimbly free, clutched his axe, turned eagerly to face the riders now a bare hundred yards off. Still too many riders, and the king in front—Athils of Sweden on the gray horse Hrafn.
"Drag him, Hjalti," said the tall man. He reached in the sack once again. Nothing there for his fingers to draw out. Except one thing. The ring Sviagris. Even as death rode toward him, with safety a final spurt away, the tall man hesitated. Then, with an effort, he raised it and flung it far back down the muddy trail toward Athils, slipping instantly from his horse and running with all his might towards the safe haven across the ridge.
At the ridge, he turned. Athils had reached the ring. He slowed his horse, reached down with a spear, trying to pick the ring off the ground with its point and ride on without check. Failure. He wheeled his horse, confusing the men behind him, tried again. Again a miss.
In hatred and indecision Athils looked at his enemy there on the brink of escape, looked down again at the ring sinking in the muck. Suddenly he lunged from his horse, bent down, groped for his treasure. Lost his chance.
The tall man cawed with laughter, ran on after his fellows. As the broad one, Böthvar, turned questioningly towards him, he cried out in triumph: "Now I have made he who is greatest among the Swedes root like a swine!"
Shef sat up violently in the cart, mouthing the word svinbeygt. He found himself staring into Thorvin's face.
" 'Swine-bowed,' is it? That is the word that King Hrolf spoke on Fyrisvellir Plain. I am glad to see you rested. But now I think it is time you stepped out like all of us."
He helped Shef scramble over the side of the cart, jumped down beside him. Spoke in a low whisper. "There is an army behind us. At every hamlet your thralls manage to get more news. They say there are three thousand men behind us, the army of the Mark. They left Ipswich as we left Woodbridge, and they have heard now about the gold. Brand has sent riders ahead to the camp at Crowland and told the rest of our army to meet us ready for battle—at March. If we join with them we are safe. Twenty long hundreds of Vikings, twenty-five of Englishmen. But they will break as usual. If they catch us before March it will be another story.
"They say a strange thing, too. The army, they say, is led by a heimnar. A heimnar and his son."
Shef felt a chill sweep through him. A volley of shouted orders rang out from ahead, with carts pulling aside and men suddenly unslinging packs.
"Brand halts the column every two hours to water the beasts and feed the men," said Thorvin. "Even in haste he says it saves time."
An army behind us, thought Shef. And us marching in haste for safety. That is what I saw in my dream. I was meant to learn from the ring, the ring Sviagris.
But who meant it? One of the gods, but not Thor, not Othin. Thor is against me, and Othin only watches. How many gods are there? I wish I could ask Thorvin. But I do not think my protector—the one who sends the warnings—I do not think he likes inquiries.
As Shef strode toward the head of the column, brooding on Sviagris, he saw Sigvarth by the side of the road, slumped on a folding canvas stool his men had placed for him. His father's eyes followed him as he passed.
It was just dawn when Shef's weary eyes picked out through the February murk the bulk of Ely Minster, to the right of their line of march. It had been gutted already by the Great Army, but the spire was still there.
"Are we safe now?" he asked Thorvin.
"The thralls seem to think so. Look at them laughing. But why? It is a day's tramp yet to March, and the Mark-men are close behind."
"It is the fens beyond Ely," said Shef. "This time of year, the road to March is a causeway for many miles, built up above the mud and water. If we needed to, we could turn and block the road with a few men and a barricade. There is no way round. Not for strangers."
There was a stillness spreading down the column, a stillness in the wake of Brand. He suddenly stood before Shef and Thorvin, his cloak black with mud, face white and shocked.
"Halt!" he yelled. "All of you. Feed, water, loosen girths." In a much lower voice he muttered to the two councillors, "Bad trouble. Meeting up ahead. Don't let it show on your face."
Shef and Thorvin looked at each other. Silently they followed him.
A dozen men, the Viking leaders, stood to one side of the track, boots already sinking in the mire. Unspeaking in the midst of them, left hand always on sword-pommel, was Sigvarth Jarl.
"It's Ivar," said Brand without preamble. "He hit the main camp at Crowland last night. Killed some, scattered the rest. Certainly caught some of our people. They must have talked by now. He'll know where we're supposed to meet. He'll know about the gold.
"We have to figure that he's already marching to intercept us. So we've got him to the north and the English a couple of miles to the south."
"How many men?" asked Guthmund.
"They thought—the ones who escaped and rode to meet us—about two thousand. Not the whole York army. None of the other Ragnarssons there. Only Ivar and his lot."
"We could take them if we were at full strength," said Guthmund. "Bunch of criminals. Gaddgedlar. Broken men." He spat.
"We aren't at full strength."
"But we will be soon," went on Guthmund. "If Ivar knows about the gold, I bet everyone in that camp knew about it first. They were probably all pissed drunk celebrating when he turned up. As soon as their heads clear, the ones who got away will head straight for the meeting ground at March. We meet them there, we're at full strength, or damn near. Then we'll settle Ivar's lot. You can have Ivar yourself, Brand. You have a score to pay."
Brand grinned. It was hard, Shef reflected, to scare these people. They had to be killed, one at a time, till they were all dead, to defeat them. Unfortunately that was what was likely to happen.
"What about the English behind us?" he asked.
Brand sobered again, drawn from his dream of single combat.
"They should be a lot less of a problem. We've always beaten them. But if they come up on us from behind while we're engaged with Ivar... We need time. Time to pick up the rest of the army at March. Time to settle Ivar's hash."
Shef thought of his vision. We have to throw them something they want, he reflected. Not treasure. Brand would never let go of it.
The old king's whetstone from the barrow was still in his belt. He pulled it out, stared at the bearded, crowned faces carved on each end. Savage faces, full of the awareness of power. Kings have to do things other men would not. So do leaders. So do jarls. They had said there would be a price to be paid for the hoard. Maybe this was it. When he looked up he saw Sigvarth was staring round-eyed at the weapon that had beaten out the brains of his son.
"The causeway," said Shef hoarsely. "A few men can block it against the English for a long time."
"They could," Brand agreed. "But they will have to be led by one of us. A leader. One who is used to independent command. One who can rely on his own men. Maybe a long hundred of them."
For long moments the silence was unbroken. Whoever stayed behind was as good as dead. This was asking a lot—even of these Vikings.
Sigvarth stared at Shef coldly, waiting for him to speak. But it was Brand's voice that broke the silence.
"There is one here who has a full crew to back him. One who made the heimnar that now is carried toward us by the English...."
"Do you speak of me, Brand? Do you ask me to set my feet and those of my men on the path to Hell?"
"Yes, Sigvarth, I speak of you."
Sigvarth started to answer, then turned and looked towards Shef. "Yes, I will do it. I feel that the runes are already cut that tell of this. You said my son's death was the will of the Norns. I think the Norns are weaving fates together on this causeway too. And not the Norns alone."
He raised his eyes to meet his son's.
The front ranks of the army of the Mark, hurrying on through the night in pursuit of their fleeing enemies, fell into Sigvarth's trap an hour after sunset. In twenty heartbeats of slaughter the Englishmen, packed ten abreast on the narrow causeway through the marsh, lost half a hundred picked champions. The rest—weary, wet, hungry, furious with their leaders—fell back in confusion, not even coming on again to recover the bodies and their armor. For an hour Sigvarth's men, standing tensely ready, heard them shouting and haranguing each other. Then, slowly, the noise of men retreating. Not frightened. Unsure. Wondering if there was a way round. Waiting for orders. Leaving it to the next man. Ready for a night's sleep, even in a sodden blanket on the ground, before risking precious life against something unknown.
Twelve hours gained already, thought Sigvarth, standing his men down. Though not for me. I may as well watch as anything else. I shall not sleep again after the death of my son. My one son. I wonder if the other is my son. If he is, he is his father's bane.
With dawn, the English returned, three thousand men, to see the nature of the barrier that blocked their way.
The Vikings had dug into the sodden February soil on both sides of the track through the fens. A foot down they had reached water. Two feet down and only mud came up. Instead of their normal earthwork they had dug a water-filled ditch ten feet broad. On their side of it they had jammed into the ground such bits of timber as they could break up from the cart Shef had left behind. A flimsy obstacle to be cleared in a few moments by a gang of churls. If there had been no men behind it.
There was room on the causeway for only ten to stand. For only five to wield weapons. The warriors of the Mark, coming forward cautiously, shields raised, found themselves floundering thigh-deep in freezing water before they were in sword-range of an enemy. Their leather shoes skidded on the bottom. As they edged on, bearded faces glared at them, two-handed axes resting on shoulders. Strike at the men? A man had to struggle up a muddy slope to get in a blow. While he did, the axemen could pick their spot.
Strike at the timbers then, at the breastwork. But take your eyes off the man above you and he would cut arm from shoulder or head from neck.
Gingerly, striving desperately for balance, the Mercian champions probed crabwise into battle, urged on by cries of encouragement from those not yet engaged.
As the short day drew on, the fighting gathered momentum. Cwichelm, the Mercian captain, deputed by his king to advise and support the new alderman, lost patience with the tentative assaults, pulled his men back, ordered forward a score of bowmen with unlimited arrows to line the track. "Shoot at head level," he told them. "Doesn't matter if you miss. Just keep them down."
Other men kept up a barrage with javelins, just over the heads of their fighting fellows. Cwichelm's best swordsmen, spurred on with appeals to their pride, were told to go forward and fence—to not rush forward. Tire them out for a while, then change places with the next rank. Meanwhile a thousand men had been sent miles to the rear, to cut brushwood, bring it forward, throw it under the feet of the fighters, let them trample it under to make, in time, a solid platform.
Alfgar, watching from twenty paces back, pulled his fair beard with vexation.
"How many men do you need?" he asked. "It's only a ditch and a fence. One good push and we'll be through it. It doesn't matter if we lose a few."
The captain eyed his master-by-title sardonically. "Try telling that to the few," he said. "Or maybe you'd care to try it yourself? Just take out that big fellow in the middle. The one laughing. With the yellow teeth."
In the dim light, Alfgar stared across the cold water and the struggling men at Sigvarth, padding from side to side as he beat aside sword-strokes, sparred to get in a blow. Alfgar thrust his hand into his belt as it began to tremble.
"Bring my father forward," he muttered to his attendants. "There is something for him to see."
"The English are bringing up a coffin," observed one of the Viking front-rankers to Sigvarth. "I would have thought they needed more than just one by now."
Sigvarth stared at the padded box, held almost upright by its bearers, its occupant held in place by chest- and waist-straps. Across the water, his eyes met those of the man he had maimed. After a moment, he threw his head back in a wild cry of laughter, raised his shield, shook his axe, called out in Norse.
"What does he say?" muttered Alfgar.
"He is calling to your father," translated Cwichelm. "Does he recognize the axe? Does he think it forgot something? Drop his breeches and he will do his best to remember."
Wulfgar's mouth moved. His son bent to hear the hoarse mumble.
"He says he will give his whole estate to the man who takes that one alive."
Cwichelm pursed his lips. "Easier said than done. One thing about these devils. You can beat them, sometimes. But it's never easy. Never, never easy."
From the sky above them came a shrill whistling, dropping closer.
"Lower away!" barked the leader of catapult team one. The twelve freed thralls on the ropes thrust right hand over left hand over right hand, shouting hoarsely as they did so. "One—two—three." The sling dropped into the leader's hands. As it came down, the loader sprang from his kneeling position, shoved a ten-pound rock into position, leapt instantly back into his place, reaching for the next one.
"Take the strain!" Backs bent, the machine's arm flexed, the leader felt himself pulled up on to his toes.
"Pull!" A simultaneous grunt, the lash of the sling, a rock whirling into the air. As it went, it spun, the chipped grooves on its surface setting up an ominous whistling. In the same moment, the crew heard the cry from behind them of the leader of catapult two.
"Take the strain!"
Traction-catapults were strange beasts in that they had most power at maximum range. They lobbed their missiles up in the sky. The higher they went, the harder they hit. The two teams of ex-slaves Shef had left behind with their cart and their machines had accordingly set up their pull-throwers a carefully paced two hundred yards behind Sigvarth's breastwork on the causeway; their missiles would strike twenty-five yards further on.
The narrow causeway was the ideal killing-ground for the machines. They threw perfectly straight, never deviating more than a few feet either side of the center. The English freedmen had perfected a drill designed to ensure that everyone did everything exactly the same way every time, and as fast as possible. For three minutes they shot. Then stood easy, panting.
The boulders dropped death from the sky on the Mercian column. The first one struck a tall warrior on the head as he stood unmoving, beating his skull almost into his shoulders. The second hit an automatically raised shield, shattering the arm behind it, caroming off to smash in a rib cage. The third hit a turned back, crushing the spine. In instants the causeway was jammed with struggling men, attempting to get back and away from a death they still could not see or understand. On the packed mass the stones continued to fall, varying a few yards forward or back as the launchers' heaves fluctuated, but never missing the causeway itself. Only those who crowded forward into the ditch closest to the Vikings remained safe.
At the end of the three minutes the warriors leading the attack saw only chaos and ruin behind them. Those who fled to the rear saw now that at a certain distance they were safe.
Cwichelm, in the fore, waved his broadsword, yelled out in rage to Sigvarth, "Come out! Come out from your ditch and fight like men. With swords, not stones."
Sigvarth's yellow teeth showed again in a grin. "Come and make me," he called, in an approximation of English. "You so brave. How many of you you need?"
More hours gained, he thought. How long does it take an Englishman to learn sense?
Not quite long enough, he reflected as the short February day drew toward its end in rain and sleet. The ditch and the stone-throwers had shocked them. But very, very slowly, maybe not quite slowly enough, they had got over their shock and worked out what they should have done in the first place.
Which was everything—and all at once. Frontal assault to keep Sigvarth busy. Spears and arrows launched overhead, to harass. Brushwood under the feet of the fighters, to build up a platform. Men coming up in thin lines, eyes alert, to give poor targets for the stone-throwers. Others floundering through the marsh in small bodies, to try to climb the causeway behind his block, splitting his meager force. Commandeered boats poling along to get behind him and threaten to cut off his retreat. Sigvarth's men were looking behind them now. One solid push by the English, regardless of casualties, and they really would be through.
One of the slaves from the stone-throwers was tugging at Sigvarth's sleeve, talking in broken Norse.
"We go now," he said. "No more rocks. Master Shef, he said, shoot till rocks gone, then go. Cut ropes, throw machines in swamp. Go now!"
Sigvarth nodded, watching the puny figure scamper away. Now he had his own honor to think of. His own destiny to fulfill. He walked forward toward the front line of the fighters, clapping men on the shoulder. "Move," he said to each one. "Get your horse. Get out of this now. Ride straight for March and they won't catch you."
His helmsman Vestlithi hesitated as Sigvarth tapped him, "Who's bringing your horse, jarl? You'll have to move quick."
"I have something to do yet. Go, Vestlithi. This is my fate, not yours."
As the feet splashed away behind him, Sigvarth faced the five leading champions of the Mark, probing suspiciously forward, made wary of every opportunity by a long day of slaughter.
"Come on," he called to them. "Only me!"
As the foot of the center man slipped, he leapt forward with appalling speed, slashed, countered, thrust sword through beard, leapt back again, feinting from one side to the other as the enraged Englishmen closed in.
"Come on!" he shouted, yelling again the words of Ragnar's death-song, which Ivar Ragnarsson's skald had made:
" 'We struck with the sword. Sixty times and one
I have fought in the front when foemen clashed.
Never yet have I met—young though I started
To mar the mailcoats—my match in battle.
The gods will greet me. I grieve not for death.' "
Over the clash of combat, one man against an army, Wulfgar's deep tones carried.
"Take him alive! Pin him with shields! Take him alive!"
I must let them do it, thought Sigvarth as he whirled and slashed. I have not bought my son quite enough time. But there is a way to buy him yet one more night.
It will be a long one for me.
Shef and Brand, standing close together, watched the battleline, two-hundred-men wide, tramping slowly to ward them across the level meadowland turf. Over the advancing line battle-standards waved, the personal flags of jarls and champions. Not the Raven Banner of the Ragnarssons, which flew only when all four brothers consented to it. But above the central reserve a gust puffed out one long ensign: the Coiling Worm of Ivar Ragnarsson himself. Even at this distance Shef thought he could catch the glint of the silver helmet, the scarlet cloak.
"Going to be a killing-ground today. We're too evenly matched," Brand muttered. "Even the side that wins is going to take very heavy losses. Takes guts to walk forward in the front rank, knowing that. Ivar's not in the front, pity. I was hoping he would be; I could have a go at him myself. The only cheap way for us to win this will be to kill a leader and take the heart out of the rest."
"Is there a cheap way for them?"
"I doubt it. Our lads have seen the money. They've only heard about it."
"But you still think we're going to lose?"
Brand patted Shef reassuringly. "Heroes never think things like that. But everybody loses some time. And we're outnumbered."
"You haven't counted my thralls."
"I've never known thralls to win battles."
"Wait and see."
Shef ran back a few paces from where he and Brand had been standing, beneath the Flag of the Hammer, at the rear center of their own—the Wayman line. It was drawn up in exactly the same style as Ivar's force, but only five-deep, with fewer reserves. Shef had placed his wheeled torsion-catapults—the dart-shooters—in the line, screened only by a single rank of men and shields. Well back behind the line stood the traction-catapults—the stone-throwers—all of them except for the pair he had left with Sigvarth, their half-crews clutching the flapping ropes.
But it was the twist-shooters that would do the work now. Using his halberd, Shef vaulted onto the central cart of the nine he had left, still drawn up, oxen still hitched. He looked up and down the line of men, seeing the faces of his catapult-crews turned toward him.
"Clear your line!"
The Vikings masking the line of fire shuffled sideways. The ropes were wound tight; loader stood ready with bundles of javelins; they were aimed and ready. The slowly advancing line of men was a target impossible to miss. Over the turf came the hoarse chanting of the Ragnarsson army: "Ver thik," they shouted again and again. "Ver thik, her ek kom."—"Guard yourself, here I come."
Shef dropped the head of his halberd forward as he shouted, "Shoot!"
Black streaks, rising at the launch, falling as they flashed through the air. Plunging into the lines of advancing men.
The lever-men were rewinding furiously, javelins dropped into place. Shef waited until the last one was reloaded, the last hand up to signal readiness.
"Shoot!"
Again the thrums, the streaks, the swirls. A hum of excitement rose from the Wayman army. And there was something happening with the Ragnarsson line as well. They had abandoned their steady walk, their chanting wavered and died. Now they were trotting forward, anxious to close before they were impaled like roast pigs—without a blow struck. Running half a mile in armor would tire them nicely. The shooters had done one job already.
But they could not shoot much longer. Shef calculated that he could shoot twice more before the attackers reached the line. Kill a few more men, unsettle the rest.
As the machines leapt back on their wheels for the last time he ordered them back.
The crews lifted the trails, ran their machines back out of the line toward the carts, calling out with triumph. "Shut up! Man the throwers."
In seconds the ex-thralls were loading and aiming the machines. Vikings would never have done that, thought Shef. They would have needed time to tell each other what deed they had done. He raised his halberd up and ten boulders were hurled simultaneously into the air.
They reloaded as quickly as they could, inched the clumsy frames round as the captains lined them up. A rain of boulders whistled out of the sky, no longer in volleys, each machine shooting as fast as its crew could lower and load.
Harassed and shaken, the Ragnarsson line broke into all-out charge. Already stones were flying high, landing behind the charging men. Still Shef saw with satisfaction a long trail of smashed bodies and writhing injured, like a snailtrack behind the oncoming army.
The two battle-lines met with a roar and a crash of metal, instantly swaying back and then forward as the impetus of the Ragnarsson rush was felt, held, returned. In moments the battle had become a line of single combats, men beating swords and axes on shields, trying to drag an arm down, stab under a guard, crush face or rib with shield-boss.
In unison the white-clad priests of the Way, grouped behind their men round the sacred silver spear of Othin, god of battles, began a deep chant.
Shef hefted his halberd in indecision. He had done the job he meant to do. Should he now thrust forward to stand amid the fighters? One man amid four thousand?
No. There was still a way to bring his machines to bear. He ran to the thralls round their throwers, shouting and gesturing. Slowly, they took his meaning, ran back to the dart-shooters, began to run the wheeled machines up onto the waiting carts.
"Around their flank—follow me! They battle face-to-face. We can get behind them."
As the ox-carts creaked with agonizing slowness round behind the Wayman position, Shef saw faces turning. Wondering whether he was fleeing from battle. Fleeing in oxcarts? Some of them he recognized: Magnus, Kolbein and other Hebrideans, clustered at the rear in reserve. Brand had put them there, saying their weapons would be difficult to fence with in a packed mass.
"Magnus! I want six of your men with each cart for close defense."
"If we do that there'll be no reserve left."
"Do it and we won't need a reserve."
Halberdiers closed round the carts as Shef led them in a long sweep round the flanks of both battling armies, first the Waymen, then the Ragnarsson troops gaping in surprise. But with battle joined, unable to see the lumbering carts as anything but a distraction. At last they were in a position well to the rear right flank of the Ragnarsson army.
"Stop. Wheel the carts left. Chock the wheels. No! Don't unload the machines. We'll shoot from inside the carts.
"Now. Drop the tilts." Halberdiers whipped out the pins, let the wagon tilts fall forward. The wound and loaded catapults trained round.
Shef stared carefully at the scene in front of him. The two battle-lines were locked along a two-hundred-yard front, making no attempt to outmaneuver each other. But at the center of the Ragnarsson line Ivar had bunched a mass of men, twenty-deep, pushing steadily forward, aiming to break their outnumbered enemy by sheer weight. Above the central mass flew his standard. There was the place to aim—not at the front, where Shef might hit his own men.
"Aim for the center. Aim for the Coiling Worm. Shoot!"
The catapults leapt in the air as they shot, their recoil on hard planks instead of soft ground sending them skidding.
The thralls seized them and ran them back again, lever-men struggling to fit the winders back in place.
Round the Worm Standard of Ivar there was chaos. In the throng of milling men Shef saw for an instant a long spike with two bodies threaded on it like larks on a spit. There was another man threshing desperately to free a snapped javelin-head from his arm. Faces were turning, and not just faces. He could see shields as well, as men realized the attack had come somehow from their rear and turned bodily to meet it. The Worm Standard still waved, its bearer still protected by the ranks of bodies that had been behind it. Reloading complete, Shef screamed the command. "Shoot!"
This time the Worm went down, to a roar of delight from the Wayman center. Someone seized it, heaved it defiantly up once more, but the Ragnarsson center had yielded five blood-soaked yards, the men in it trying to keep their footing as they stumbled back over wet soil and their own dead. But there were men running now toward the carts.
"Change target?" shouted a captain, pointing at the advancing men.
"No! The Worm again! Shoot."
Another hail of darts into the tight-packed throng, and again the Worm went down. No time to see if it would come up again, or if Brand would now finish the job. The lever-men were still winding desperately but they would not get in another shot.
Shef reached down with his armored gloves, seized "Thrall's-wreak" and the helmet he had never yet worn in battle.
"Halberdiers in the carts," he shouted. "Just fend them off. Catapulteers, use your levers, use your mattocks."
"What about us, master?" Fifty unarmed freedmen still clustered behind the carts, hammer-emblems on their jerkins. "Shall us run?"
"Get under the carts. Use your knives."
Moments later the Ragnarsson wave reached them in a turmoil of glaring faces and slashing blades. Shef felt a weight roll from him. There was no need for thought now. No responsibility for others. The battle would be won or lost elsewhere. All he had to do now was swing his halberd as if he were still beating out metal at the forge: ward and cut, lunge overhand and stab downward.
On level ground the Ragnarsson followers would have rolled over Shef's outnumbered and half-armed force in instants. But they had no idea of how to fight men in farm wagons. Their enemies were feet higher than themselves, behind oak planks. The halberds Shef had made for them gave Magnus and his Hebrideans extra feet of reach. Vikings lunging under the halberds and trying to haul themselves into the carts were simple targets for the clubs and mattocks of the English thralls. Knives in skinny hands ripped upward at thigh and groin from behind sheltering wheels.
After a few desperate trials the Vikings fell back. Orders barked from the more level-headed among them. Men slashed the oxen free, seized the drag-poles, prepared to haul the carts off the thralls underneath. Javelins poised, ready for a united volley against the exposed halberdiers.
Shef found himself staring suddenly into the eyes of Muirtach. The big man paced forward, his own ranks parting for him, like a great wolf. He wore no mail, only the saffron plaid which left his right arm and torso bare. He had thrown away his targe, and carried only the dagger-pointed longsword of the Gaddgedlar in two hands.
"You and me now, boy," he said. "I'm going to keep yer scalp and use it for a bum-wipe."
In answer Shef jerked the pin free and kicked the wagon tilt down once more.
Muirtach charged before he could straighten up, faster than Shef had ever seen a human being move. Reflex alone hurled Shef backward, stumbling on the wheel of the machine behind him. But Muirtach was already in the cart, swordpoint down for the thrust. Shef leapt back again, cannoning off Magnus, unable to drop his halberd enough to stab or guard.
Muirtach was swinging already. A lunging lever from Cwicca deflected his stroke, guided it onto the bowstring of the fully wound but unloosed catapult.
A deep twang, a thwack louder than a whale-fluke on water.
"Son of the Virgin," said Muirtach, staring down.
One arm of the catapult, released, had slammed forward the six inches which were all that it could travel. In those six inches it had expended all the stored energy that could drive a barb a mile. The whole side of Muirtach's bare chest was crushed in as if from the hammer-blow of a giant. Blood ran from the Irishman's mouth. He stepped back, sat down, slumped back against the wagon wall.
"I see you have turned Christian again," said Shef. "So you will remember, 'an eye for an eye.' " Reversing his halberd, he drove its butt-spike deep through Muirtach's eye and into the brain.
In the brief seconds of the confrontation everything had changed. Shef looked up and saw only backs. The Ragnarsson attackers had turned away, were throwing down their weapons, unbuckling their shields. "Brother," they shouted, "fellow, messmate." One, incongruously, was pulling open his tunic, hauling out a silver emblem. A Wayman, maybe, who had decided to stay with a father or a chief rather than march out of York. Behind them hundreds of men were moving forward in a bristling wedge, the giant figure of Brand at its apex. In front of the wedge the plain was covered only with men running, men limping, men standing in knots with their hands raised. The Ragnarsson army had broken. Its survivors had the choice only of running for their lives in heavy mail or hoping for immediate mercy.
Shef lowered "Thrall's-wreak," suddenly weary. As he started to clamber from the wagon a flash of movement caught his eye. Two horses, one a rider with a scarlet cloak, grass-green trousers.
For an instant Ivar Ragnarsson stared from his saddle across the lost battlefield at Shef standing on the cart. Then he and his horse-swain were away, clods flying in the air from the trampling hooves.
Brand strode over, clasped Shef's hand.
"You had me worried there, thought you were running away. But toward battle, not from it. A good day's work done."
"The day's not done yet. There is still an army behind us," said Shef. "And Sigvarth. The Mercians should have been at our backs this dawn. He has held them twelve hours longer than I thought possible."
"But maybe not long enough," said Magnus Gaptooth from his place on the wagon. He stretched out an arm, pointed. Far away across the level plain, a stray shaft of winter sunlight sent up a prickle of darting reflections: the spear-points of an army, deployed and advancing.
"I need more time," said Brand gruffly in Shef's ear. "Go talk, bargain, buy me some."
He had no choice. Thorvin and Guthmund joined him as he walked toward the advancing Mercian battle-line, different from the one they had just broken, only—to outward appearance—by the three great crosses towering above it.
Behind them the Wayman army struggled to regroup. Perhaps a third of them were dead or gravely injured. Now even the walking wounded were furiously busy: stripping the surrendered Ragnarsson warriors of weapons and armor, scavenging the battlefield for whatever was usable or valuable—with the enthusiastic assistance of Shef's freedmen—herding the enemy wounded off in the direction of their ships still under guard by the Wash, carrying such few as had survived the attentions of the body-strippers off to the leeches.
The "army" was a mere front. A few hundreds of the fittest men in line to make a show. Behind them, rank on rank of captives, hands loosely roped, told to stand there and be counted in return for their lives. Half a mile behind them, thralls and warriors were hastily digging a ditch, setting up the machines—and rounding up horses and wagons ready for the next retreat. The Wayman army was not yet fit to fight—the heart had not gone out of it, not yet. But all tradition dictated a pause for celebration and relief after surviving a pitched battle against superior forces. Being asked to do the same again immediately was too much.
The next few minutes, Shef thought, would be very dangerous. Men were coming to meet him and his small party: three men walking together, one a priest. Two more pushing a strange, upright box on wheels. The thing in it, he realized an instant later, could only be his stepfather Wulfgar.
The two groups halted ten paces apart, surveyed each other. Shef broke the deep, hating silence.
"Well, Alfgar," he said to his half brother, "I see you have risen in the world. Is our mother pleased?"
"Our mother never recovered from what your father did. Your late father. He told us much about you before he died. He had plenty of time."
"Did you capture him, then? Or did you stand back as you did in the fight by the Stour?"
Alfgar stepped forward, hand reaching for his sword. The grim-faced man beside him, the one who was not a priest, caught his arm quickly.
"I am Cwichelm, marshal of King Burgred of the Mark," he said, "charged to restore the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk to their new alderman and to make them subject to my kind. And who are you?"
Slowly, mindful of the frantic preparations still going on behind, Shef introduced the others on his side, let Cwichelm do the same. Disclaimed hostile intention. Declared intention to withdraw. Hinted at compensation for damage.
"You're fencing with me, young man," broke in Cwichelm. "If you were strong enough to fight, you wouldn't be talking. So I'll tell you what you have to do if you want to see tomorrow's dawn. First, we know you took treasure from the mound by Woodbridge. I must have it all, for my king. It comes from his realm."
"Second," cut in the black-robed priest, staring fixedly at Thorvin, "there are Christians among you who have deserted their faith and betrayed their masters. They must be handed over for punishment."
"You included," said Alfgar. "Whatever happens to the others, my father and I will not see you march away. I will put the collar on you with my own hands. Think yourself lucky we do not treat you as we did your father."
Shef did not bother to translate for Guthmund.
"What did you to my father?"
Wulfgar had not spoken till then. He sprawled in his box, held by the straps. Shef remembered the yellow, pain-racked face he had last seen in the trough. Now Wulfgar's face was ruddy, his lips showing red in the white-streaked beard.
"What he did to me," he said, "I did to him. Only more skillfully. First we took the fingers, then the toes. Ears, lips. Not his eyes, so he could see what we did, nor his tongue, so he could still call out. Hands, feet. Knees and elbows. And never allowed to bleed. I whittled him like a boy whittling a stick. In the end there was nothing left but the core.
"Here, boy. A memorial of your father."
He nodded and a servant threw a leather pouch in Shef's direction. Shef loosed the strings, glanced inside, hurled it at Cwichelm's feet.
"You are in poor company, warrior," he remarked.
"Time to go," said Guthmund.
The two sides backed away from each other, turned at safe distance. As they stepped briskly toward their own lines, Shef heard the Mercian warhorns bellow, heard a roar and a clash of mail as the English army came on.
Instantly, as prearranged, the Wayman line turned tail and ran. The first stage of its long, planned retreat.
Hours later, as the long winter twilight faded into dark, Brand muttered dry-throated to Shef, "I think we may have done it."
"For the day," Shef agreed. "I see no hope for the morning."
Brand shrugged massively, called the orders to stand down, light fires, heat water, make food.
All day the Waymen had fallen back, screening Shef's machines, shooting as the Mercians deployed, making them check, loading the carts and pack-horses hastily and then falling back in sections to another line. The Mercians had followed them like men anxious to tether a savage dog, closing in, drawing back from the snarls and snaps, pressing forward again. At least three times the two armies had clashed hand to hand, each time when the Waymen had had some obstacle to defend: the ditch they had cut, a dyke along the edge of the fen, the shallow muddy stream of the Nene. Each time, after half an hour's slashing and hewing, the Mercians had fallen sullenly back, unable to force the crossing—and in doing so, exposed themselves again to the lash of the boulders and the barbs.
The Waymen had fought better as their spirits rose, thought Shef. The trouble was, the Mercians were learning too. At the start they had flinched from the first whistle in the sky, the first displayed twist-shooter in a battle-line. Each ditch in the boggy soil made them hesitate. Sigvarth must have taught them a bitter lesson in the fen.
But as the day wore on they grew bolder, seeing the true weakness of the Wayman numbers.
Still holding a half-eaten bowl of porridge, Shef sank back on a pack-saddle and fell into instant sleep.
He woke, stiff, clammy and bitterly cold, as the horns blew for first light. All round him men clambered to their feet, drank water or the last hoarded remains of ale or mead. They shuffled to the crude breastwork they had made in the hamlet Brand had selected for their last stand.
As the light grew they looked out on a sight to daunt the boldest. The army they had fought the day before, like themselves, had grown steadily more ragged—clothes sodden, shields defaced with muck, its men grimed up to their eyebrows, weakened by a steady trickle of casualties and deserters—down to the point where it was barely half again their own size.
It had gone. In its place, drawn up in front of them, rank on rank, horns blasting a continual challenge, stood a new army, as fresh as if it had never marched a mile. Shields blazed with new paint, mail and weapons glinted red in the dawn. Crosses towered over the ranks, but the banners—the banners were different. Next to the crosses, a golden dragon.
From the line in front of them trotted a rider on a gray horse, his saddle and trappings bright scarlet, shield turned outward in sign of truce.
"He wants a parley," Shef said.
Silently the Waymen shifted an upturned cart to one side, allowed their leaders to edge out: Brand, Shef, Thorvin and Farman, Guthmund and Steinulf. Still silent, they tramped behind the horsemen to a long trestle-table, set up incongruously in the midst of the standing men.
To one side of it sat Cwichelm and Alfgar, faces set. Wulfgar in his vertical box a pace behind them. The herald waved the six councillors of the Way to stools opposite.
Between the two groups sat one man—young, fair-haired, blue-eyed, a golden circle on his head like the old king in the mound. He had a strange, intense look, thought Shef. As he sat down, their eyes met. The young man smiled.
"I am Alfred, atheling of Wessex, brother of King Ethelred," he said. "I understand that my brother's fellow-king, Burgred of the Mark, has appointed an alderman for the shires once belonging to the king of the East Angles." He paused. "That cannot be allowed." Sour looks, silence from Alfgar and Cwichelm. They must have heard this already.
"At the same time I will not allow any Viking army from the North to base itself within any English shire, to rob and kill as has been your custom. Rather than do that I will destroy you all."
Another pause. "But I do not know what to do with you. From what I hear, you fought and beat Ivar Ragnarsson yesterday. Him, I will have no peace with, for he killed my brother's fellow-king Edmund. Who killed King Ella?"
"I did," said Shef. "But he would have thanked me for it if he could. I told Ivar that what he did to the king was nithingsverk."
"On so much we agree, then. The thing is, can I have peace with you? Or must we fight?"
"Have you asked your priests?" said Thorvin in his slow, careful English.
The young man smiled. "My brother and I have found that whenever we ask them anything, they demand money. Nor will they aid us even to keep off the likes of Ivar. But I am a Christian still. I believe in the faith of my fathers. I hope one day even you warriors of the North will take baptism and submit to our law. But I am not a Churchman."
"Some of us are Christians," said Shef. "Some of us are English."
"Are they full fellows of your army? With full rights to share?"
Brand, Guthmund and Steinulf looked at each other as they grasped the sense of the question. "If you say they must be, then they are," said Shef.
"So. You are English and Norse. You are Christian and heathen."
"Not heathen," said Thorvin. "Wayman."
"But you can get along together. Maybe that is a model for us all. Listen, all of you. We can work out a treaty: shares and taxation, rights and duties, rules about wergilds and freedmen. All details. But the center of it must be this:
"I will give you Norfolk, to rule under your own law. But you must rule fairly. Never let in invaders. And the one who becomes alderman, he must swear on my relics and on your holy things to be the good friend of King Ethelred and his brother. Now, if that is to happen, who shall the alderman be?"
Brand's scarred hand reached out, tapped Shef. "He it must be, king's brother. He speaks two languages. He lives in two worlds. See, he has not the mark of the Way on him. He has been baptized. But he is our friend. Choose him."
"He is a runaway," yelled Alfgar suddenly. "He is a thrall. He has the marks of the whip on his back!"
"And of the torturer on his face," said Alfred. "Maybe he will see to it there is less of both in England. But console yourself, young man. I shall not send you back to King Burgred alone."
He waved a hand. From somewhere behind them came a flutter of skirts. A group of women were led into view.
"I found this party left behind and wandering, so I brought them along lest worse befall. I hear one of them is your wife, young noble. Take her back to King Burgred and be grateful."
His wife, thought Shef, staring deeply into Godive's gray eyes. She looked more beautiful than ever. What could she possibly think of him, covered in mire, stinking of sweat and worse, eye sunk in its socket? Her face showed utter horror. He felt a cold fist close round his heart.
Then she was in his arms, weeping. He held her tight with one hand, looked round. Alfgar was on his feet, struggling in the grip of two guards, Wulfgar bellowing from his box, Alfred rising with alarm on his face.
As the tumult ceased, Shef spoke. "She is mine."
"She is my wife," shouted Alfgar.
She is his half sister too, thought Shef. If I said that the Church would intervene, take her away from him. But then I would be letting the rule of the Church shape me and the law of the Way. The land of the Way.
This is the price the old draugr demands for his gold. Last time it was an eye. This time it is a heart.
He stood still as the attendants pulled Godive from him, drew her back to incest—her husband—and the bloodstained birch.
To be a king, to be a leader, demands things that cannot be asked of an ordinary man.
"If you are prepared to return the woman as a sign of good faith," said Alfred clearly, "I will take Suffolk into my brother's realm, but recognize you, Shef Sigwardsson, as alderman of Norfolk. What do you say?"
"Do not say 'alderman'," said Brand, cutting in. "Use our word. Say he will be our jarl."
Shef sat facing the crowd of supplicants on a plain, three-legged stool. He still wore a hemp tunic and woolen breeches, with no signs of rank. But in the crook of his left arm rested the whetstone-scepter taken from the mound of the old king. From time to time Shef ran a thumb gently over one of its cruel carved, bearded faces as he listened to the witnesses.
"...and so we took the case to King Edmund at Norwich. And he judged it in his private chamber—he had just returned from hunting and was washing his hands, God strike me blind if I lie—and he decided that the land should come to me for ten years and then be returned."
The speaker, a middle-aged thane of Norfolk, years of good living swelling his gold-mounted belt, hesitated for a moment in his tirade, unsure whether the mention of God might not count against him in a Wayman court of doom.
"Have you any witnesses to this agreement?" Shef asked.
The thane, Leofwin, puffed out his cheeks with grotesque pomposity. Not used to being questioned, or contradicted, evidently.
"Yes, certainly. Many men were in the king's chamber then. Wulfhun and Wihthelm. And Edrich the king's thane. But Edrich was killed by the pagan—was killed in the great battle, and so was Wulfhun. And Wihthelm has since died of the lung-sickness. Nevertheless, things are as I say!" Leofwin ended defiantly, glaring round him at the others in the court: guards, attendants, his accuser, others waiting for their cases to be heard and decided.
Shef closed his one eye for a moment, remembering a far-off evening of peace in the fen with Edrich, not so very far from here in space. So that was what had happened to him. It might have been guessed.
He opened it again and stared fixedly at Leofwin's accuser. "Why," he said gently, "why does what King Edmund decided seem to you unjust in this case? Or do you deny that what this man says is what the king decided?"
The accuser, another middle-aged thane of the same stamp as his opponent, blanched visibly as the jarl's piercing gaze fell on him. This was the man, all Norfolk knew, who had begun as a thrall in Emneth. Who had been the last Englishman ever to speak to the martyred king. Who had appeared—God only knew how—as leader of the pagans. Had dug up the hoard of Raedwald. Defeated the Boneless One himself. And somehow had gained the friendship and support of Wessex as well. Who could tell how all that had come about? Dog's name or no, he was a man too strange to lie to.
"No," said the second thane. "I do not deny that was what the king decided, and I agreed to it as well. But when it was agreed, the understanding behind the decision was this: That after ten years' time the land in question should revert from Leofwin to my grandson, whose father was also killed by the pagans. That is to say, by the—by the men from the North. In the state in which it was in the beginning! But what this man has done"—indignation replaced caution in his voice—"what Leofwin has done ever since is to ruin it! He has cut the timber and planted no more, he has let the dykes and the drains go to ruin, he has turned ploughland into a watermeadow for hay. The land will be worth nothing at the end of his lease."
"Nothing?"
The complainant hesitated. "Not as much as before, lord jarl."
Somewhere outside a bell rang, a sign that the dooms-giving was over for the day. But this case must be decided. It was a hard one, as the court had heard already at tedious length, with debts and evasions of them going back for generations, and all the parties in the case related to each other. Neither of the men present today was of much consequence. Neither had seemed of special note to King Edmund, which was why they had been allowed to live on their estates when better men, like Edrich, had been called to service and to death. Still, they were Englishmen of rank, whose families had lived in Norfolk for generations: the sort of people who had to be won over. It was a good sign that they had come to the new jarl's court for judgement.
"This is my doom," said Shef. "The land shall remain with Leofwin for the rest of his ten-year lease." Leofwin's red face brightened into a beam of triumph.
"But he shall render an account of his gains each year to my thane at Lynn, whose name is—"
"Bald," said a black-robed figure standing by a writing-desk to Shef's right.
"Whose name is Bald. At the end of the ten years, if the gain on the property seems more than is reasonable to Bald, Leofwin shall either pay the extra gain for the whole ten years to the grandson in this case, or else he shall pay a sum to be fixed by Bald, equal in value to the worth the land has lost during his stewardship. And the choice shall be made by the grandfather, here present today."
One face lost its beam, the other brightened. Then both faces took on an identical expression of anxious calculation. Good, thought Shef. Neither is altogether happy. So they will respect my decision.
He rose. "The bell has struck. The dooms-giving is over for today." A babble of protest, men and women pushing forward from the waiting ranks.
"It will begin again tomorrow. You have your tally-sticks? Show them as you enter and cases will be heard in proper order." Shef's voice rose strongly above the babble.
"And all mark this! In the court of the Way there is neither Christian nor pagan, neither Wayman nor Englishman. See—I bear no pendant. And Father Boniface here"—he pointed to the black-robed scribe—"priest though he is, he bears no cross. Justice here does not depend on faith. Mark it and tell it. Now go. The hearing is over."
The doors at the back of the room swung open. Attendants began to urge the disappointed litigants outside into the spring sunshine. Another, the hammer-sign stitched neatly onto his gray tunic, waved the two disputants of the last case over toward Father Boniface, to see the jarl's doom written out twice and witnessed, one copy to remain in the jarl's scriptorium, the other to be torn carefully in two and divided between the litigants, so that neither could present a forgery at some future court.
Through the rear doors there stalked a massive figure, head and shoulders above the people pushing out, in mail and cloak, but unarmed. Shef felt the lonely gloom of judgement suddenly lighten.
"Brand! You are back! You come just at the right moment, when I am free to talk."
Shef felt his hand gripped in one the size of a quart tankard, saw his own beaming smile answered.
"Not quite, lord jarl. I came two good hours ago. Your guards would not let me through, and with all those halberds waving and never a word of Norse among the lot of them I had not the heart to argue."
"Hah! They should—No. My orders are to let no one interrupt court of doom except for news of war. They did right. But I am sorry I did not think to make an exception for you. I would have liked you to attend the court and say what you thought of it."
"I heard." Brand jerked a thumb behind him. "The head of your guards there was a catapulteer and knew me, though I did not know him. He brought me good ale—excellent ale, after a sea-voyage, to wash out the salt—and told me to listen through the door."
"And what did you think?" Shef turned Brand about and strolled with him through the now-cleared doorway into the courtyard outside. "What did you think of the jarl's assembly?"
"I am impressed. When I think of what this place was like four months ago—mud everywhere, warriors snoring on the floor for lack of beds, never a kitchen in sight and no food to cook in it. And now. Guards. Chamberlains. Bakeries and brewhouses. Woodwrights fixing shutters and gangs painting everything that doesn't move. Men to ask your name and business. And writing it down when you tell them."
Then Brand frowned and looked about, lowered his enormous voice to an unpracticed whisper. "Shef—lord jarl, I should say. One thing. Why all these blackrobes? Can you trust them? And what in the name of Thor is a jarl doing, a lord of warriors, listening to a couple of muttonheads arguing about drains? You'd be better off shooting catapults. Or in the forge even."
Shef laughed, looking across at the massive silver buckle holding together his friend's cloak, the bulging purse on his sword-belt, the ornamental waist-chain of linked silver coins.
"Tell me, Brand, how did your trip home go? Were you able to buy all you meant to?"
Brand's face took on a hucksterish look of caution. "I put some money in safe hands. Prices are high in Halogaland, and folk are mean. Still, when I hang up my axe for good, it may be there is some small farm for me to retire to in my old age."
Shef laughed again. "With your share of all our winnings, in good silver, you must have bought up half the county for your relatives to look after."
This time Brand grinned too. "I did pretty well, I admit. Better than ever in my life before."
"Well, let me tell you about the blackrobes. What none of us has ever realized is the money the stay-at-homes have. The wealth in a whole county, a rich county of England, not a poor stony one in Norway where you come from. Tens of thousands of men, all tilling the soil and raising sheep and trimming wool and keeping bees and cutting timber and smelting iron and raising horses. More than a thousand square miles. Maybe a thousand thousand acres. All those acres must pay something to me, to the jarl, if it is only the war-tax, or bridge-and-road money.
"Some of them pay everything. I took all Church land into my own possession. Some of it I gave at once to the freed slaves who fought for us, twenty acres a man. Wealth to them—but a fleabite compared to the whole. Much I leased out straightaway, to the rich men of Norfolk, at low rates, for ready money. Those who got it will not want to see the Church come back. Much I kept in my own hand, for the jarldom. In future it will make money for me, to hire workers and warriors.
"But I could not have done it without the blackrobes, as you call them. Who could keep all this land, all these goods, all these leases, in his head? Thorvin knows how to write in our letters, but few others. Suddenly there were many lettered men, men of the Church, with no land and no income all of a sudden. Some now work for me."
"But can you trust them, Shef?"
"The ones who hate me and will never forgive me, or you, or the Way—they have gone off to King Burgred, or to Wulfhere the Archbishop, to stir up war."
"You should have just killed them all."
Shef hefted his stone scepter. "They say, the Christians, that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. I believe them. I make no martyrs. But I made sure that the angriest of those who left knew the names of those who stayed. The ones who work for me will never be forgiven. Like the rich thanes, their fate now depends on mine."
They had come to a low building within the stockade that ran round the jarl's burg, its shutters open to the sun. Shef pointed inside to the writing-desks, the men conferring quietly, writing on parchment. On one wall Brand could see hung a great mappa: a newly made one, devoid of ornament, full of detail.
"By the winter I shall have a book of every piece of land in Norfolk, and a picture of the whole shire on my wall. By next summer not a penny will be paid for land without my knowledge. And then there will be wealth such as even the Church has never seen. We can do things with it that have never been done before."
"If the silver is good," said Brand dubiously. "It is better than up North. I have been thinking this: It seems to me that there is only so much silver in this country, in all the kingdoms of the English put together. And there is always the same amount of work for it to do—land to buy, things to trade. Now, the more that there is locked up in the coffers of the Church, or traded for gold, or made into precious things that do not move, the more the less that is left—No, the harder the less that is left..."
Shef floundered to a halt, neither English nor Norse adequate to explain what he meant.
"What I mean is, the Church took too much out of the Northern kingdom and put nothing back. That is why their coins were so bad. King Edmund was less kind to the Church, and so money here was better. Soon it will be the best.
"And not only the money will be the best, Brand." The young man turned to face his massive colleague, his one eye glittering. "I mean this shire of Norfolk to be the best and the happiest land in the whole of the Northern world. A place where everyone can grow from child to graybeard in safety. Where we can live like people, not like animals scratching for a living. Where we can help each other.
"Because I have learned another thing, Brand, from Ordlaf the reeve of Bridlington, from the slaves who made my mappa and led us to the riddle of Edmund. It is something the Way needs to know. What is the most precious thing to the Way, the Way of Asgarth?"
"New knowledge," said Brand, automatically clutching his hammer-pendant.
"New knowledge is good. Not everyone has it. But this is just as good, and it can come from anywhere: old knowledge that no one has recognized. It is something I have seen more clearly since I became the jarl. There is always someone who knows the answer to your question, the cure for your need. But usually no one has asked him. Or her. It may be a slave, a poor miner. An old woman, a fisher-reeve, a priest.
"When I have all the knowledge in the county written down, as well as all the land and the silver, then we shall show the world a new thing!"
Brand, on Shef's blind side, glanced down at the taut tendons in the neck, the young man's trimmed beard now sprinkled with gray.
What he needs, he thought, is a fine, active woman to keep him busy. But even I, Brand the Champion, even I dare not offer to buy him one.
That evening, as the woodsmoke from the chimneys began to mix with the gray twilight, the priests of the Way met within their corded circle. They sat in the wort-yard, the garden of a cottage outside the jarl's stockade, in a pleasant smell of apple-sap and green growth. Thrushes and blackbirds trilled vigorously about them.
"He has no idea of the real purpose of your sea-trip?" asked Thorvin.
Brand shook his head. "None."
"But you passed the news?"
"I passed the news and I got the news. The word of what has happened here has gone to every Way-priest in the Northern lands, and they will tell their followers. It has gone to Birko and to Kaupang, to Skiringssal and to the Tronds."
"So, we can expect reinforcements," said Geirulf, Tyr's priest.
"With the money that has been taken home, and the tales every skald is telling, you can be sure that every warrior of the Way who can raise a ship will be here looking for work. And every priest who can free himself as well. There will be many who take the pendant in hope, also. Liars, some of them. Not believers. But they can be dealt with. There is more important matter."
Brand paused, looking round the circle of intent faces. "In Kaupang, as I came home, I met the priest Vigleik."
"Vigleik of the many visions?" asked Farman tensely.
"Even so. He had called a conclave of priests from Norway and from the South Swedes. He told them—and me—that he was disturbed."
"What about?"
"Many things. He is sure now, as we are, that the boy Shef is the center of the change. He has even thought, as we have, that he may be what he said he was when first he met you, Thorvin: the one who will come from the North."
Brand looked round the table to meet the eyes fixed on him. "And yet, if that is true, the story is not what any of us expected, not even the wisest. Vigleik says, for one thing, he is not a Norseman. He has an English mother."
Shrugs. "Who hasn't?" asked Vestmund. "English, Irish. My grandmother was a Lapp."
"He was brought up a Christian, too. He has been baptized."
This time, grunts of amusement. "We've all seen the scars on his back," said Thorvin. "He hates the Christians, just as we do. No. He doesn't even hate them. He thinks they are fools."
"All right. But this is the sticking point: He has not taken the pendant. He has no belief in us. He sees the visions, Thorvin, or so he has told you. But he does not think they are visions of another world. He is not a believer."
This time the men sat silent, eyes turning slowly to Thorvin. The Thor-priest rubbed his beard.
"Well. He is not an unbeliever, either. If we asked him, he would say that a man with a pendant of a heathen god, as the Christians call them, could not rule Christians, not even for as long as it will take for them to stop being Christians. He would say that wearing a pendant is not a matter of belief, it would just be a mistake, like starting to hammer before the iron was hot. And he does not know which pendant he should wear."
"I do," said Brand. "I saw it and said it last year, when he killed his first man."
"I think so too," agreed Thorvin. "He should wear the spear of Othin, God of the Hanged, Betrayer of Warriors. Only such a one would have sent his own father to death. But he would say, if he were here, that it was the only thing to do at that time."
"Is Vigleik only talking of probabilities?" asked Farman suddenly. "Or did he have some particular message? Some message a god sent him?"
Silently Brand pulled a packet of thin boards wrapped round with sealskin from inside his tunic and passed it over. Runes were cut on the wood, and inked in. Slowly Thorvin scanned them, Geirulf and Skaldfinn leaning close to look also. The faces of all three darkened as they read on.
"Vigleik has seen something," said Thorvin at length. "Brand, do you know the tale of Frodi's mill?"
The champion shook his head.
"Three hundred years ago there was a king in Denmark called Frodi. He had, they say, a magic mill, which did not grind corn, but instead ground out peace and wealth and fertility. We believe it was the mill of new knowledge. To grind the mill he had two slaves, two giant-maidens called Fenja and Menja. But so anxious was Frodi to have continuing peace and wealth for his people that no matter how much the giantesses begged for rest, he denied it to them."
Thorvin's deep voice broke into sonorous chant:
" 'You shall not sleep,' said Frodi the king,
'Longer than the time it takes a cuckoo
To answer another, or an errand-lad
To sing a song as he steps on his way.'
"So the slaves grew angry and remembered their giant-blood, and instead of grinding peace and wealth and fertility, they began to grind out flame and blood and warriors. And his enemies came on Frodi in the night and destroyed him and his kingdom, and the magic mill was lost forever.
"That is what Vigleik has seen. He means one can go too far, even in hunting new knowledge, if the world is not ready for it. One must strike while the iron is hot. But one can also blow the bellows too long and too furiously."
A long pause. Reluctantly, Brand got ready to reply. "I had better tell you," he said, "what the jarl, what Skjef Sigvarthsson told me this morning of his intentions. Then you must decide how this fits Vigleik's visions."
A few days later, Brand stood staring at the great stone now sunk into the meadow, near the spot where the muddy causeway from Ely debouched into the fields outside March.
On it was carved a curling ribbon of runes, their edges still sharp from the chisel. Shef touched them lightly with his fingertips.
"What they say is this. I composed it myself, in verse in your language as Geirulf taught me. The runes read:
" 'Well he left life, though ill he lived it.
All scores are settled by death.'
At the top is his name: 'Sigvarth Jarl.' "
Brand grunted doubtfully. He had not liked Sigvarth. And yet the man had taken the death of his one son well. And there was no doubt he had saved his other son, and the Army of the Way, by enduring his last night of torture.
"Well," he said at last. "He has his bautasteinn, right enough. It is an old saying: 'Few stones would stand by the way, if sons did not set them up.' But this is not where he was killed?"
"No," said Shef. "They killed him back in the mire. It seems my other father, Wulfgar, could not wait even till he reached firm ground." His mouth twisted, and he spat on the grass. "But if we had set it up there it would have been out of sight in the marsh in six weeks.
"Besides, I wanted you here to see this."
He grinned, turned, and waved an arm in the direction of the almost imperceptible rise that led toward March. From somewhere out of sight there came a noise like the squealing of a dozen pigs being butchered simultaneously. Brand's axe flicked from the ground as his eyes darted round for a lurking enemy, an attacker.
Into sight, from down the deeply rutted track, came a column of bagpipers, four abreast, cheeks puffed. As his alarm receded Brand recognized the familiar face of Cwicca, the former slave of St. Guthlac's at Crowland, in the front rank.
"They are all playing the same tune," he bellowed over the din. "Was that your idea?"
Shef shook his head and jerked a thumb at the pipers. "Theirs. It's a tune they made up. They call it 'The Boneless Boned.' "
Brand shook his head in disbelief. English slaves mocking the champion of the North himself. He had never thought...
Behind the pipers, a score of them, stepped a longer column of men clutching halberds, their heads hidden in shining, sharp-rimmed helmets, each man wearing a leather coat with metal plates stitched onto it, and a small round targe strapped to his left forearm. They must be English too, Brand thought as they marched on. How could he tell? Mainly, it was their size—not a man much above five and a half feet. And yet many of the English ran to size and strength as well, to look at the hulks whom Brand had seen fighting to the last round their lord King Edmund. No, these were not only Englishmen, but poor Englishmen. Not thanes of the English, not carls of the Army, but churls. Or slaves. Slaves with arms and armor.
Brand looked at them in skepticism and disbelief. All his life he had known the weight of mail, known the effort needed to swing an axe or a broadsword. A fully armed warrior might need to carry—and not just to carry, to wield—forty of fifty pounds' weight of metal. How long could a man do that? For the first man whose arm weakened in a battle-line would be dead. In Brand's language, to call a man "the stout" was a valued compliment. He knew seventeen words for "man of small size," and all of them were insults.
He watched the pygmies tramp by, two hundred of them. All held their halberds the same way, he noticed, straight up above the right shoulder. Men marching close together could not afford the luxury of individual decision. But a Viking army would have straggled and held its weapons any way that seemed good, to show proper independence of spirit.
Behind the halberdiers came team after team of horses, he noticed with surprise. Not the slow, dogged ox-teams that had dragged Shef's catapults round the flank of Ivar's army. The first ten pairs of horses dragged the carts with the disassembled beams he had seen before, the pull-throwers, the traction-catapults that lobbed stones. By each cart walked its crew, a dozen men with the same gray jerkins and white hammer-insignia as the pipers and halberdiers. In each crew, a familiar face. Shef's paid-off veterans of the winter campaign had seen their land, had left men to till it, and had returned to their master, the wealth-giver. Each one now captained a crew of his own, recruited from the slaves of the vanished Church.
The next ten pairs were something new again. Behind the horses came a thing on broad cart-wheels, a long trail on each lifted high so that the other end bowed like a chicken scratching for worms in the mud. A twist-shooter, the torsion-catapults that shot the great darts. Not disassembled, but ready for action, the high wheels marking the only difference from the one that had killed King Ella: the ones that had brought down the Coiling Worm standard of Ivar. Again, a dozen men crewed each, marching with their winding-levers sloped and bundles of darts over their shoulders.
As they too tramped by, Brand realized that the bagpipe music, though changed, had not moved into the distance. The five hundred men he had seen already were filing past and then turning back on themselves, lining up in ranks behind him.
But here at last was something like an army approaching, scores and scores of men, not in ranks, not marching, but slouched on ponies and flooding forward down the track like a gray tide. Mail-shirts, broadswords, helmets, familiar faces. Brand waved cheerfully as he recognized Guthmund—still known as the Greedy—in front of his ship's crew. Others waved back, calling out as the English had not done: Magnus Gaptooth and his friend Kolbein, clutching halberds as well as the rest of their armament, Vestlithi, who had been the helmsman of Sigvarth Jarl; and a dozen others he knew for followers of the Way.
"Some went off to spend their winnings, like you," said Shef in Brand's ear. "Others sent the money off or kept it, and stayed on here. Many have bought land. It is their own country they are defending now."
The pipers ceased their din simultaneously, and Brand realized he was surrounded by a ring of men. He stared round, counting, calculating.
"Ten long hundreds?" he said at last. "Half English, half Norse?"
Shef nodded. "What do you think of them?"
Brand shook his head. "The horses to pull the teams," he said. "Twice the speed of ox-teams. But I did not know the English knew how to harness them properly. I have seen them try, and they harness them as if they were oxen, pushing against a pole. Cuts their wind off and they cannot use their strength. How did you realize that?"
"I told you," said Shef. "There is always someone who knows better. This time it was one of your men, one of your own crew—Gauti, who walks with a limp. The first time I tried to harness horses he walked by and told me what a fool I was. Then he showed me how you do it in Halogaland, where you always plough with horses. Not new knowledge—old knowledge. Old knowledge not everyone knows. But we worked out how to hitch up the catapults ourselves."
"Well and good," said Brand. "But answer me this: Catapults or no catapults, horse-teams or no horse-teams: how many of your English are fit to stand in a battle-line against trained warriors? Warriors half their weight again and twice their strength? You cannot make front-fighters out of kitchen boys. Better to recruit some of those well-fed thanes we saw. Or their sons."
Shef crooked a finger and two halberdiers hustled a prisoner forward. A Norseman—bearded, pale-faced beneath windburn, a head taller than his two escorts. He held his left wrist awkwardly in his right hand, like a man whose collarbone is broken. The face was half-familiar: a man whom Brand had seen once at some forgotten campfire when the Viking army had still been as one.
"His three crews tried their luck raiding our lands near the Yare two weeks ago," Shef remarked. "Tell them how you got on."
The man stared at Brand with a kind of plea. "Cowards. Wouldn't fight us fair," he snarled. "They caught us coming out of our first village. A dozen of my men down with great darts through them before we could see where they were coming from. When we charged the machines they held us off with the big axes. Then more of them came round from behind. After they had dealt with us they took me along—my arm was broken so I could not lift shield—to see them attack the ships we had left offshore. They sank one with the stone-throwers. Two got away."
He grimaced. "My name is Snaekolf, from Raumariki. I did not know you men of the Way had taught the English so much, or I would not have raided here. Will you speak for me?"
Shef shook his head before Brand could reply. "His men behaved like beasts in that village," he said. "We will have no more of it. I kept him to say his piece and he has said it. Hang him when you can find a tree."
Hoofbeats came from behind them as the halberdiers hustled the silent Viking away. Shef turned without haste or alarm to meet the rider cantering down the muddy track. The man reached them, dismounted, bowed briefly and spoke. The men of the Wayland army, English and Norse together, stretched their ears to listen.
"News from your burg, lord jarl. A rider came in yesterday, from Winchester. King Ethelred of the West Saxons is dead, of the coughing-sickness. His brother, your friend Alfred the atheling, is expected to succeed him and take power."
"Good news," said Brand thoughtfully. "A friend in power is always good."
"You said 'expected'?" said Shef. "Who could oppose him? There is no other of that royal house left."
The young man stared out from a narrow window in the stone. Behind him, very faintly, he could hear the sound of the monks of the Old Minster singing yet another of the many masses he had paid for, masses for the soul of his last brother, King Ethelred. In front of him, all was activity. The wide street that ran east to west through Winchester was crowded with traders, stalls, customers. Through them pushed carts laden with timber. Three separate gangs of men were working on houses either side of the street, digging foundations, driving beams into the soil, fitting planks over timber frames. If he lifted his eyes he could see, round the edge of the town, many more men strengthening the rampart his brother had ordered, driving in the logs and fitting the fighting-platforms. From all directions came the sound of saws and hammers.
The young man, Alfred the atheling, felt a fierce satisfaction. This was his town: Winchester. The town of his family for centuries, for as long as the English had been on their island, and longer even than that, for he could number ancestors among the British and the Romans too. This Minster was his. His many greats-grandfather King Cenwalh had given the land on which it was to be built to the Church two hundred years before, as well as the land to support it and provide its revenues. Not only his brother Ethelred was buried here, but his father Ethelwulf as well, and his other brothers, and uncles and great-uncles in number more than a man could count. They had lived, they had died, they had gone back to the earth. But it was the same earth. Last of his line, the young atheling did not feel alone.
Strengthened, he turned to face the saw-edged voice that had been grating away behind him in competition with the sounds from outside. The voice of the bishop of Winchester, Bishop Daniel.
"What was that you said?" demanded the atheling. "If I come to be king? I am the king. I am the last of the house of Cerdic, whose line goes back to Woden. The witenagemot, the meeting of the councillors, elected me without debate. The warriors raised me on my shield. I am the king."
The bishop's face set mulishly. "What is this talk of Woden, the god of the pagans? That is no qualification for a Christian king. And what the witan do—what the warriors do—that has no meaning in the eyes of God.
"You cannot be king till you have been anointed with the holy oil, like Saul or David. Only I and the other bishops of the realm can do that. And I tell you—we will not. Not unless you satisfy us you are a true king for a Christian land. To prove this you must cease your alliance with the Church-despoilers. Remove your protection from the one they call the Sheaf. Make war on the pagans. The pagans of the Way!"
Alfred sighed. Slowly he walked across the room. He rubbed with his fingers at a dark stain on the wall, a mark of burning.
"Father," he said patiently. "You were here two years ago. It was the pagans then who sacked this town. Burned every house in it, stripped this minster itself of all the gifts my ancestors had put in it, drove off all the town-folk and priests they could catch to their slave-marts.
"Those were true pagans. And it was not even the Great Army that did it, the army of the sons of Ragnar, of Sigurth the Snakeeye and Ivar Boneless. It was just a troop of marauders.
"That is how weak we are. Or were. What I mean to do"—his voice rose suddenly and challengingly—"is see to it that bane never comes on Winchester again, so that my long fathers can rest in peace in their graves. To do that I must have strength. And support. The men of the Way will not challenge us, they will live in fellowship, pagans or no pagans. They are not our enemies. A true Christian king cares for his people. That is what I am doing. Why will you not consecrate me?"
"A true Christian king," said the bishop, slowly, carefully, "A true Christian king cares first and above all for the Church. The pagans may have burned the roof from this minster. But they did not take its land and revenues forever. No pagan, not the Boneless One himself, has taken all the Church land for his own, and given it to slaves and hirelings."
That was the reality, thought Alfred. Gangs of marauders, the Great Army itself, might come down on minster or monastery and strip it of its goods, its treasures and relics. Bishop Daniel would resent it bitterly, torture to death every last stray Viking he caught. But it was not yet to him a matter of survival. The Church could re-roof its minsters, restock its lands, breed new parishioners and even ransom back its books and holy bones. Pillage was survivable.
Taking away the land that was the basis of permanent wealth, land the Church had booked to itself from death-bed donations over many centuries, that was more dangerous. That was what the new alderman, no, the jarl of the Way-folk had done. That had taught Bishop Daniel a new fear. Daniel feared for the Church. He himself, Alfred realized: he feared for Winchester. Rebuilding or no, ransoms or no, long view or short view—he would never see it ravaged and burned again. Church was less important than city.
"I do not need your holy oil," he said peremptorily. "I can rule without you. The aldermen and the reeves, the thanes and the councillors and the warriors. They will follow me as king whether I am consecrated or not."
The bishop stared unwinkingly at the set young face before him, shook his head with cold anger. "It will not be. The scribes, the priests, the men who write your royal writs and book your leases: they will not aid you. They will do as I tell them. In all your kingdom—if king you call yourself—there is not one man who can read and write who is not a member of the Church. What is more—you cannot read yourself! Much though your holy and pious mother wished you to learn the craft!"
The young atheling's cheeks flushed with rage and shame as he remembered the day he had deceived his mother. Had had the priest read one of her much-loved English poems over and over until he had learned it by heart. Then had stood in front of her reciting it and pretending to read from the book he had coveted. Where was the book now? Some priest had taken it. Probably had scraped the writing from it so he could inscribe on it some saintly text.
The bishop's voice rasped on. "So, young man, you do need me. And not only for the power of my subordinates, the power I lend you. For I have allies, too, yes, and superiors. You are not the only Christian king in England. The pious Burgred of Mercia, he knows his duty. The young man you dispossessed of Norfolk, Alfgar the alderman, and his worthy father Wulfgar, whom the pagans mutilated—they know their duty too. Tell me, are there none of your thanes and aldermen who might not follow one of them? As king?"
"The thanes of Wessex will only follow a man of Wessex."
"Even if they are told different? If the order comes—from Rome?"
The name hung in the air. Alfred paused, contemptuous reply checked on his lips. Once before in his lifetime Wessex had challenged Rome: when his brother Ethelbald had married his father's widow against all the rules of the Church. The word had come, the threats had been made. Ethelbald had died soon after—no one knew what of—the bride had been returned to her father, king of the Franks. They had not let Ethelbald's body lie in Winchester.
The bishop smiled, knowing his words struck home. "You see, lord king, you have no choice. And what you do does not matter in any case. It is only a test of your loyalty. The man you supported—Sheaf the son of the heathen jarl, the Englishman who was brought up as a Christian and then turned his back on it, the apostate, worse than any pagan, worse than the Boneless One himself—he has no more than weeks to live. His enemies ring him round. Believe me! I hear news that you do not.
"Sever your bond with him at once. Show your obedience to the Church your Mother."
The bishop leaned back in his new-carved chair, sure of his power, anxious to mark an ascendancy which would last as long as the young man in front of him might live.
"King though you may yet be," he said, "you are in our minster now. You have our leave to go. Go. And issue the orders I demand."
The poem he had learned for his mother years ago came back suddenly to the young atheling's mind. It had been a poem of wise advice for warriors, a poem from before Christian times.
"Answer lie with lie," it had said, "and let your enemy, the man who mocks you, miss your thought. He will be unaware, when your wrath shall fall." Good advice, thought Alfred. Maybe my mother sent it.
"I will obey your words," he said, rising humbly. "And I must beg you to forgive the errors of my youth, while I thank you for your prudent direction."
Weakling! thought the bishop.
He hears news that I do not? wondered the king.
To anyone who knew him—and to the many who did not—the marks of defeat and shame and ignominious flight in the depths of winter, all were visible on Ivar Ragnarsson's face.
The terrible eyes were still there, the eyes under frozen lashes that never blinked. But there was something in them that had not been there before: an absence, a withdrawal. Ivar walked like a man with something forever on his mind, slowly, absently, almost painfully, shorn of the lithe grace that had once marked him out.
It was still there when needed. The long flight from the fields of Norfolk across England to his brothers' base at York had not been an easy one. Men who had slipped out of sight when the Great Army passed that way before now emerged from every lane and byroad as a mere pair of exhausted men cantered back. Ivar and the faithful horse-swain Hamal, who had ridden to save him from the Way. At least six times the pair had been ambushed by angry peasants, local thanes, and the border-guards of king Burgred.
Ivar had dealt contemptuously with them all. Before the pair were out of Norfolk he had slashed the heads from two churls driving a farm-cart, taken their leather jackets and blanket coats, handed them to Hamal without a word. By the time they reached York his kills had been beyond count.
Three trained warriors at once could not stand against him, reported Hamal to a curious, fascinated audience. He means to prove he is still the Champion of the North.
Takes a lot of proving now, his audience muttered, the carls of the Army talking freely as was their right. Go with twenty long hundreds, come back with one man. He can be beaten.
That was what Ivar could not forget. His brothers, plying him with hot mead in front of the fire in their quarters by the minster, they had seen it. Seen too that their brother, never safe, now could not be trusted at all in any matter that required calculation. It had not broken their famous unity—nothing ever would—but now, whenever they talked among themselves, there were three and one, where once there had been four.
They had seen the change the first night. Silently, their eyes had met, silently they did what they had done before, telling none of their men, not admitting it even to each other. They had chosen a slave-girl from the Dales, wrapped her in a sail, gagged and bound her, thrust her into Ivar's quarters at dead of night while he lay, unsleeping and expectant.
In the morning they had come and taken away, in the wooden chest they had used before, what remained. Ivar would not run mad for a while, not fall into the berserk mood. Yet no sensible man felt anything but fear in his presence.
"He's coming," called a monk, poised at the entrance to the great workshop where the minster-men of York toiled for their allies-turned-masters. The slaves sweating at forge, vice or rope-walk redoubled their efforts. Ivar would kill the man he saw standing still.
The scarlet cloak and silver helmet stalked through the doorway, stood glaring round. Erkenbert the deacon, the only man whose behavior did not change, turned to meet him.
Ivar jerked a thumb at the workmen. "All ready? Ready now?" He spoke the jargon mixed of English and Norse that the Army and the churchmen had learned that winter.
"Enough of both to try."
"The dart-throwers? The stone-throwers?"
"See."
Erkenbert clapped his hands. Immediately the monks shouted orders, their slaves began to wheel and tug at a line of machines. Ivar watched them, his face blank. After his brothers had taken the chest away, he had lain without moving for a day and a night, his cloak over his face. Then, as every man in the army knew, he had stood up, walked to the door of his room, and screamed to the sky: "Sigvarthsson did not beat me! It was the machines!"
Since then, since he had called for Erkenbert and the learned ones of York to obey his wishes, the forge-din had not ceased.
Outside the workshop, the slaves set up the dart-thrower, identical to the one that had broken the first assault on York, inside the minster-precinct itself, training across a furlong of open space to the far wall. There a dozen churls hung a great straw target. Others wound feverishly on the new-forged cogs.
"Enough!" Erkenbert himself stepped across, checked the alignment of the barbed javelin, fixed Ivar with his eye, handed him the thong attached to its iron toggle.
Ivar jerked it. The toggle flew sideways, clanging unnoticed from his helmet, the line rising and falling in the air, a monstrous thump. Before the eye could follow it, the dart was buried deep—quivering in its straw bed.
Ivar dropped the string, turned. "The other."
This time the slaves tugged forward a strange machine. Like the twist-shooter, it had a wooden frame of stout beams. This time the cogwheels were not on top but at the side. They twisted a single rope, embedded in its strands, a wooden rod. At the end of the rod, a heavy sling, its pouch just clearing the ground. The rod quivered against its retaining-bolt as the slaves turned the levers.
"This is the stone-thrower," declared Erkenbert.
"Not like the one that broke my ram?"
The deacon smiled with satisfaction. "No. That was a great machine that threw a boulder. But many men were needed to move it, and it could shoot only once. This throws smaller stones. No man has made such a machine since the days of the Romans. But I, Erkenbert, the humble servant of God, I have read the words in our Vegetius. And have built this machine. The onager it is named: that is, in your tongue, 'the wild ass.' "
A slave placed a ten-pound rock in the sling, signed to Erkenbert.
Again the deacon passed a thong to Ivar. "Pull the bolt," he said.
Ivar jerked the string. Faster than sight the great rod leapt forward like a great swinging arm.
Stopping with a crash against a padded beam, the entire weighted frame jumped from the ground. The sling whirled round far faster than Shef's self-designed stone-throwers. Like a streak the rock flashed across the minster-yard, never rising—not lobbed but hurled. The straw target billowed into the air, slowly collapsed on its slings. The slaves cheered once in triumph.
Slowly Ivar turned to Erkenbert. "That is not it," he said. "The machines that rained death on my army, they threw high in the sky." He lobbed a pebble upward. "Not like this." He hurled another at a pecking sparrow.
"You have made the wrong machine."
"Impossible," said Erkenbert. "There is the great machine for sieges. And this one for men. None other is described in Vegetius."
"Then those bastards of the Way have made a new thing. One not described in—in your book."
Erkenbert shrugged his shoulders, unconvinced. Who cared what this pirate said? He could not even read, still less read Latin.
"And how fast does it shoot?" Ivar glared at the slaves twirling their levers. "I tell you, I saw the stone-throwers hurl another while the first was still in the air. This one is too slow."
"But it strikes hard. No man can resist it."
Ivar stared thoughtfully at the fallen target. Suddenly he whirled, yelled orders in Norse. Hamal and a handful of companions sprang forward, pushed the slaves out of the way, and heaved the cumbrous, tense-wound machine round.
"No," shouted Erkenbert, pushing forward. Ivar's arm clamped irresistibly round his throat, a wire-muscled hand forced his mouth shut.
Ivar's men pushed the machine round another foot, hauled it back a trifle as their leader ordered. One hand still effortlessly holding the limp deacon off the ground, Ivar jerked the string a third time.
The giant door of the minster—oak beams nailed across each other in double-ply, held fast over all with iron bands—exploded in all directions, splinters flying in slow arcs across the yard. From inside came a chorus of wails, monks leaping out, darting back, shrieking in terror.
They all stared in fascination at the great hole the boulder had smashed.
"You see," said Erkenbert. "This is the true stone-thrower. It strikes hard. No man can resist it."
Ivar turned, eyes fixed on the little monk in contempt. "It is not the true stone-thrower. There is another kind in the world of which you know nothing. But strike hard it does. You must make me many."
Across the narrow sea to the land of the Franks beyond, a thousand miles away in the land of the Romans, there within the gates of a minster greater than Winchester, greater even than York, deep silence lay. Popes had had many troubles, many failures, since the time of their great founder. Some had met martyrdom, some been forced to flee for their lives. Not thirty years before, Saracen pirates had made their way to the very gates of Rome, and had sacked the holy basilica of St. Peter himself which was then outside the wall.
It would not happen again. He who was now the equal of the Apostles, the successor of Peter, the holder of the keys of Heaven, he had set his face above all toward power. Virtue was great: humility, chastity, poverty. But without power none of those could survive. It was his duty to the humble, the chaste and the poor, to seek power. In pursuit of it he had put down many mighty ones from their high seats on their thrones—he, Nicholas I, Pope of Rome, Servant of the servants of God.
Slowly the hawk-faced old man stroked his cat, his secretaries and attendants sitting round him in silence. The foolish archbishop from the town in England, the town with the strange outlandish name—Eboracum, evidently, though hard to tell with his barbarous pronunciation—he had been dismissed with courtesy, and a cardinal deputed to show him all honor and provide him with amusement. What he had said had been nonsense: a new religion, a challenge to the authority of the Church, the barbarians of the North developing intellect. Panic and terror-stories.
Yet it corroborated his other information from England: Robbery of the Church. Alienation of land. Willing apostasy. There was a word for it. Dispossession. That was striking at the base of power itself. If that were to become known, there might be too many ready to imitate, yes, even in the lands of the Empire. Even here in Italy. Something would have to be done.
And yet the Pope and the Church had other problems, many more pressing ones, more immediate than this matter of English barbarians and Northern barbarians fighting over land and silver in a country he would never see. At their heart lay the partition of the Empire, the great Empire founded by Charlemagne, king of the Franks, crowned emperor in this very cathedral on Christmas Day 800, a lifetime before. For twenty years now, that Empire had been in pieces, and its enemies ever encouraged. First the grandsons of Charlemagne had fought against each other, till they had hacked out peace and partition. Germany to one, France to another, the great, long, ungovernable strip from Italy to the Rhine to a third. And now that third was dead and his third of the Empire divided once again among three, the emperor himself, eldest son of the eldest son, holding a bare ninth of what his grandfather had ruled. And what did that emperor, Louis II, care about it? Nothing. He could not even drive back the Saracens. What about his brother Lothar? Whose only interest in life was to divorce his barren wife and marry his fertile mistress—a thing he, Nicholas, would never permit.
Lothar, Louis, Charles. The Saracens and the Norsemen. Land, power, dispossession. The Pope stroked his cat and considered them all. Something told him that here, here in this trivial, far-off squabble brought by a foolish archbishop running from his duty, might be the solution to all his problems at once.
Or was the prickle he felt one of fear? An alert to the tiny black cloud that would grow and grow?
The Pope cleared his dry old throat with a noise like a cricket creaking. The first of his secretaries dipped his pen instantly.
" 'To our servants Charles the Bald, king of the Franks. To Louis, king of the Germans. Louis, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Lothar, king of Lotharingia. Charles, king of Provence'—you know their titles, Theophanus. To all these Christian kings, then, we write in the same way... " 'Know, beloved, that we, Pope Nicholas, have taken thought for the greater security and the greater prosperity of all our Christian people. And therefore we direct you, as you will have our love in the future, to work together with your brothers and your kinsmen the Christian kings of this Empire, to this effect...' "
Slowly the Pope outlined his plans. Plans for common action. For unity. For a distraction from civil war and the tearing apart of the Empire. For the salvation of the Church and the destruction of its enemies, even—if what Archbishop Wulfhere had said were true—its rivals.
" '...and it is our wish,' " the dry, creaky voice concluded, " 'that in recognition of their service to Mother Church, each man of your armies who shall join this blessed and sanctified expedition shall wear the sign of the Cross upon his clothing over his armor.
"Finish the letters in proper form, Theophanus. I'll sign and seal them tomorrow. Pick appropriate messengers."
The old man rose, clutching his cat, and left the office without haste for his private quarters.
"Nice touch about the cross," remarked one of the secretaries busily drafting copies in the Pope's own purple ink.
"Yes. He got it from what the Englishman said, about the pagans wearing a hammer in mockery of the cross."
"The touch they'll really like," said the senior secretary, sanding vigorously, "is the bit about prosperity. He's telling them if they do what they're told they can loot all Anglia. Or Britannia. Whatever it's called."
"Alfred wants missionaries?" said Shef incredulously.
"His very word. Missionarii." In his excitement Thorvin betrayed what Shef had come to suspect, that for all his scorn of Christian learning he knew something of their sacred tongue, the Latin. "It is the word they have long used for the men they send to us, to turn us to the worship of their God. I have never before heard of a Christian king asking for men to be sent to his country, to turn them to the worship of our gods."
"And that is what Alfred wants now?"
Shef was dubious. Thorvin, he could see, for all his belief in calm and self-control, was carried away by the thoughts of the glory this would bring him and his friends among the followers of the Way.
Yet it did mean something, he was sure, and not what it seemed. The atheling Alfred whom he had met took no interest in pagan gods, and had, as far as he could tell, a deep belief in the Christian one. If he was calling now for missionaries of the Way to be sent into Wessex it was for a deeper reason. A move against the Church, that was certain. You could believe in the Christian God and hate the Church that His followers had set up. But what did Alfred think he had to gain? And how would that Church react?
"My fellow priests and I must decide which of us, which of our friends are to go on this mission."
"No," said Shef.
"His favorite word again," observed Brand from his chair.
"Do not send any of your own college. Do not send Norsemen. There are Englishmen now who know well enough what you believe. Give them pendants. Instruct them in what must be said. Send them into Wessex. They will speak the language better and will be more easily believed."
As Shef spoke he stroked the carved faces on his scepter.
Brand had noted this before—that Shef did this now when he was lying. Shall I tell Thorvin? he thought. Or shall I tell Shef, so that he can lie better when need be?
Thorvin rose from his stool, too excited to sit. "There is a holy song," he said, "that the Christians sing. It is called the nunc dimittis, a song that says 'Lord, You may let Your servant die, for he has seen his purpose fulfilled.' I have a mind to sing it myself. For more hundreds of years than I can count this Church of theirs has spread, has spread, across first the Southern and then the Northern lands. They think they can conquer all of us. Never before have I heard of the Church giving up what once it won."
"They have not given up yet," said Shef. "The king asks you to send missionaries. He cannot say they will get a hearing, or make the folk believe."
"They have their Book, we have our visions!" cried Thorvin. "We shall see which is the stronger."
From his chair, Brand's bass joined in. "The jarl is right, Thorvin. Send freed slaves of the English to do this task."
"They do not know the legends," protested Thorvin. "What do they know of Thor or Njörth, of the legends of Frey and Loki? They do not know the sacred stories or the hidden meanings within them."
"They don't need to," said Brand. "We're sending them to talk about money."
That fine Sunday morning, as every Sunday morning, the villagers of Sutton in the county of Berkshire in the kingdom of the West Saxons drew together, as directed, before the hall of Hereswith their lord, thane of King Ethelred-that-was. Thane now, so they said, of King Alfred. Or was he still only atheling? They would be told. Their eyes roved as they counted each other, assessing who was present, whether any had dared to test the orders of Hereswith that all should be present, to attend the church three miles off and learn the law of God which stood behind the laws of men.
Slowly the eyes turned the same way. There were strangers in the little cleared space before the lord's timber house. Not foreigners, or not obvious foreigners. They looked exactly like the forty or fifty other men present, churls and slaves and churls' sons: short, ill-dressed in grubby wool tunics, unspeaking—six of them together. Yet these were men who had never been seen in or near Sutton before—something unprecedented in the heart of the untraveled English countryside. Each leaned on a long stout stave of wood guarded with strips of iron, like the handle of a war-axe, but twice the length.
Without seeming to, the villagers drew away from them. They did not know what this novelty meant, but long years had taught them that what was new was dangerous—till their lord had seen and approved, or disapproved.
The door of the timber house opened and Hereswith marched out, followed by his wife and their gaggle of sons and daughters. As he saw the lowered eyes, the cleared space, the strangers, Hereswith stopped short, left hand dropping automatically to the handle of his broadsword.
"Why are you going to the church?" called out one of the strangers suddenly, his voice sending the pigeons pecking in the dirt into flight. "It's a fine day. Wouldn't you rather sit in the sun? Or work in the fields if you need to? Why walk three miles to Drayton and three miles back? And listen to a man tell you you must pay your tithes in between?"
"Who the hell are you?" snarled Hereswith, striding forward.
The stranger stood his ground, called out loudly so all could hear. His accent was strange, the villagers noticed. English, sure enough. But not from here, not from Berkshire. Not from Wessex?
"We are Alfred's men. We have the king's word and leave to speak here. Whose men are you? The bishop's?"
"The hell you're Alfred's men," grunted Hereswith, freeing his sword. "You're foreigners. I can hear it."
The strangers remained braced on their staves, unmoving.
"Foreigners we are. But we have come with leave, to bring a gift. The gift we bring is freedom: from the Church, from slavery."
"You'll not free my slaves without my leave," said Hereswith, his mind made up. He swung his sword backhand in a horizontal cut at the nearer stranger's neck.
The stranger moved instantly, hurling his strange metal-ribbed staff straight up. The sword clanged on the metal, rebounded out of Hereswith's unpracticed hands. The thane crouched, groping for the hilt, eyes darting from one stranger to the other.
"Easy, lord," said the man. "We mean you no harm either. If you'll listen, we'll tell you why your king has asked us to come here, and how we can be his men and foreigners at once."
Nothing in Hereswith's makeup urged him to listen or to compromise. He straightened, the sword again in his hand, and lashed out forehand at the knee. Again the staff blocked it, blocked it easily. As the thane recovered his blade, the man he had attacked stepped forward and pushed him back with the staff across his chest.
"Help me, you men," bellowed Hereswith at the silent watchers, and charged forward, shoulder dropped and sword ready this time for a disemboweling thrust.
"Enough," said one of the other men he faced, thrusting a staff between his legs. The thane crashed down, started to scramble again to his feet. From his sleeve the first man jerked a short, limp canvas cylinder: the slave-taker's sandbag. He swung once, to the temple, crouched, ready to swing again. As Hereswith fell forward on his face, to lie unmoving, he nodded, straightened, tucked the sandbag away, beckoned to the thane's wife to come and treat him.
"Now," said the stranger, turning to his fascinated but still unmoving audience. "Let me tell you who we are, and who we were.
"We are men of the Way, from the North-folk. But this time last year we were slaves of the Church. Slaves to the great minster of Ely. Let me tell you how we became free."
The slaves in the crowd, maybe a dozen of the fifty men there and the same proportion of women, exchanged frightened glances.
"And to the freemen here," went on Sibba, once slave of the minster of Ely, then catapulteer in the Army of the Way, veteran of the victory over Ivar the Boneless himself, "to the freemen here we will say how we were given our own land. Twenty acres each," he added. "Free of toll to any lord, except the service we owe to Shef Jarl. And the service we give freely—freely, mark you—to the Way. Twenty acres. Unburdened. Is there any freeman here who can claim as much?"
This time the freemen in the crowd looked at each other, a low growl of interest rising. As Hereswith was dragged away, head lolling, his tenants edged closer to the new arrivals, ignoring the broadsword left forgotten in the dirt.
"How much does it cost you to follow Christ?" began Sibba. "Cost you in money? Listen and I will tell you..."
"They're everywhere," the bishop's bailiff reported. "Thick as fleas on an old dog."
Bishop Daniel's brows knitted at his servant's levity, but he held his tongue: he needed the information.
"Yes," the bailiff went on, "all men from Norfolk, it seems, and all claiming to be freed slaves. It makes sense. See, your grace, we have a thousand slaves just on our own estates here round Winchester and in the minsters and shires. The man you speak of, the new jarl as the heathens call him—he could have sent three thousand slaves in here to spread his word from Norfolk alone, if he sent them all."
"They must be caught," Daniel grated. "Rooted out like corn-cockle from amid the wheat."
"Not so easy. The slaves won't hand them over, nor the churls, from what I hear. The thanes can't catch 'em. If they do, they defend themselves. They never travel in less than pairs. Sometimes they group together to be a dozen, or a score, no light matter for a small village to deal with. And besides..."
"Besides what?"
The bailiff picked his words with care. "What these incomers say—lies it may be, but what they say—is that they have been summoned in by the King Alfred..."
"The atheling Alfred! He has never been crowned."
"Your pardon, lord. By the atheling Alfred. But even some of the thanes would be loath to hand over men sent by the king to the Church. They say—they say this is a quarrel among the great ones and they will not interfere." And many would side with the atheling, last of the great line of Cerdic, against the Church anyway, thought the bailiff. But he knew better than to say it.
Liar and deceiver, thought the bishop. Not a month ago and the young prince had sat in that very room, eyes down like a maiden, apologizing and begging for direction. And he had left the room to call instantly for help from the unbelievers! And now he was gone, no one knew where, except that rumors came of his appearance in this part or that of Wessex, appealing to his thanes to deny the Church: to follow the example of the North-folk and the creed they called the Way. It did not help that he continued to protest that he remained a believer in Christ. How long would belief last without the land and the money to support it? And if things continued as they were, how long would it be before some messenger, or some army appeared at the very gates of the minster, ordering the bishop to surrender his rights and his leases?
"So," Daniel said at last, half to himself. "We cannot cope with this thing in Wessex. We must send outside. And indeed there is force coming from outside which will cure this evil so that it never raises its head again.
"Yet I cannot afford to wait. It is my Christian duty to act." And also, he added silently, my duty to myself. A bishop who sits quiet and does nothing—how will he seem to the Holy Father in Rome, when the moment comes to decide who shall bear rule for the Church in England?
"No," the bishop went on, "the heart of the trouble comes from the North-folk. Well, what the North-folk caused, the North-folk must cure. There are some who still know their Christian duty."
"In Norfolk, lord?" asked the bailiff doubtfully.
"No. In exile. Wulfgar the cripple, and his son. The one lost his limbs to the Vikings. The other lost his shire. And King Burgred too, of Mercia. It was nothing to me, I thought, who should rule East Anglia, Mercia or Wessex. But I see now. Better that the pious Burgred should have the kingdom of Edmund the Martyr than it should go to Alfred. Alfred the Ingrate, I name him.
"Send in my secretaries. I will write to them all, and to my brothers of Lichfield and Worcester. What the Church has lost, the Church will win back."
"Will they come, lord?" asked the bailiff. "Will they not fear to invade Wessex?"
"It is I who speaks for Wessex now. And there are greater forces than either Wessex or Mercia astir. All I offer Burgred and the others is the chance to join the winning side before it has won. And to punish insolence: the insolence of the heathens and the slaves. We must make an example of them."
The bishop's fist clenched convulsively. "I will not root out this rot, like a weed. I shall burn it out, like a canker."
"Sibba. I think we've got trouble." The whisper ran across the dark room where a dozen missionaries lay sleeping, wrapped in their blankets.
Silently Sibba jointed his companion at the tiny, glassless window. Outside, the village of Stanford-in-the-Vale, ten miles and as many preachings from Sutton, lay silent, lit by a strong moon. Clouds scudding before the wind cast shadows round the low wattle-and-daub houses that clustered round the thane's timber one, in which the missionaries of the Way now slept.
"What did you see?"
"Something flashing."
"A fire not dowsed?"
"I don't think so."
Sibba moved without speaking towards the little room that opened off the main central hall. In there the thane Elfstan, their host, a man who protested his loyalty to King Alfred, should be sleeping with his wife and family. After a few moments he drifted back. "They're still there. I can hear them breathing."
"So they're not in on it. Doesn't mean I didn't see anything. Look! There it is again."
Outside, a shadow slipped from one patch of darkness to another, coming closer. In the moonlight something flashed: something metal.
Sibba turned to the men still sleeping. "On your feet, boys. Get your stuff together."
"Run for it?" asked the watchman.
Sibba shook his head. "They must know how many of us there are. They wouldn't attack if they weren't confident they could deal with us. Easier to do that outside than dig us out of here. We must try to break their teeth first."
Men were scrambling to their feet behind him, groping for their breeches, buckling belts. One man undid a pack, began to haul from it strange, metallic shapes. The others queued in front of him, clutching the long pilgrim-staves all had carried openly.
"Force them down hard," grunted the packman, struggling to push the first halberd-head on its socket over the carefully designed shaft.
"Move fast," said Sibba. "Then, Berti, you take two men to face the door, one either side of it. Wilfi, you at the other door. The rest, stay with me, see where we're needed."
The movement and the clanking of metal had brought the thane, Elfstan, from his bed. He stared, wonderingly.
"Men outside," said Sibba. "Not friendly."
"Nothing to do with me."
"We know. Look, lord, they'll let you out. If you go now."
The thane hesitated. He called to his wife and children, dressing hastily, spoke to them in a low voice.
"Can I open the door?"
Sibba looked round. His men were ready, weapons prepared. "Yes."
The thane lifted the heavy bar that held closed the main double doors, and pushed them both open together. As he did so a groan came from outside, almost a sigh. There were many men out there, poised for a rush. But now they knew they had been seen.
"My wife and children—coming out!" shouted Elfstan. Quickly the children slipped through the door, his wife scurrying after them. A few feet beyond she turned, beckoned frantically to him. Her husband shook his head.
"They are my guests," he said. His voice rose to a shout, addressing the ambushers outside. "My guests and the guests of King Alfred. I do not know who are these thieves in the night, within the bounds of Wessex, but they will hang when the king's reeve catches them."
"There is no king in Wessex," shouted a voice from outside. "And we are men of King Burgred. Burgred and the Church. Your guests are vagabonds and heretics. Slaves from outside! We have come to collar and brand them."
Suddenly the moonlight shone on dark shapes, moving together out of the cover of houses and fences.
They did not hesitate. It would have been easier to catch their enemies sleeping, but they had been told what their enemies were: released slaves, lowest of the low. Men who had never been taught swordplay, who had not been conditioned from birth to war. Who had not felt the bite of edges over the linden-shield. A dozen Mercian warriors swarmed together at the dark doors of the hall. Behind them, now that concealment was gone, horns blew for the assault.
The double doors of the hall were six feet across, a man's full arm-span. Room only for two armed men to enter at once. Two champions rushed in together, shields up, faces glaring.
Neither saw the blows that killed them. As they peered into the gloom for men to face them, faces to hack at, the halberds swept from both sides, at thigh level, below shield and mail-shirt. The halberd-heads, axe one side, spike the other, were twice the weight of a broadsword. One shore through a warrior's leg and deep into the facing thigh. The other sliced upward from the bone, deep into the pelvis. As one man lay in the flow of blood that would kill him in seconds, the other flapped and twisted, shrieking, trying to tear free the great blade lodged in bone.
More men pushed over them. This time spearpoints met them from in front, driving through wooden shields and metal rings, hurling men back into the confusion of the doorway, groaning from belly wounds. Now the long blades, sweeping in six-foot arcs, chopped down the mailed warriors like cattle before the poleaxe. For a few seconds it seemed as if the sheer weight and numbers of the first rush would break through the defenders.
But against the dim-seen menace, nerves failed. The Mercians scrambled back, those in front weaving desperately behind their shields, trying to drag their dead and wounded with them.
"So far so good," muttered one of the Waymen.
"They'll come again," said Sibba.
Four more times the Mercians came on, each time more warily, trying now, as they realized the tactics and the weapons against them, to draw the blow and evade it, to leap forward before the halberdiers could recover their cumbrous weapons. The Norfolk freedmen used their advantage of numbers, two men to face each door, a man striking from each side. Slowly the casualties on both sides grew.
"They're trying to cut through the walls," muttered Elfstan to Sibba, still on his feet as the sky began to pale.
"Makes no difference," replied Sibba. "They still have to climb in. As long as there's enough of us to block each gap."
Outside, a fair angry face stared at a bleeding exhausted one. Alfgar had come with the attackers to watch the destruction of the Waymen. He was not pleased.
"You can't break in?" he shouted. "Against a handful of slaves?"
"We've lost too many good men to this handful of slaves. Eight dead, a dozen hurt and all of them badly. I'm going to do what we should have done first."
Turning to his men, he waved a group forward to the undamaged gable end of the hall. With them they carried thorn fencing. They piled it against the wall, stamped it into a pile of thick brush. Steel struck flint, sparks dropping onto dried straw. The fire flared up.
"I want prisoners," Alfgar said.
"If we can get them," said the Mercian. "Anyway, now they have to come to us."
As the smoke began to pour into the drafty hall, Sibba and Elfstan exchanged glances. They could see each other now in the growing dawn. "They might still take you prisoner, if you went out," said Sibba. "Hand you over to your own king. You being a thane, who knows?"
"I doubt that strongly."
"What are we going to do?"
"What is always done. We will wait in here for every breath we can draw, until the smoke is thickest. Then we will run out and hope one or two of us may get away in the confusion."
The smoke poured in more thickly, followed by the red gleams of fire eating at planking. Elfstan moved to draw a wounded man lying on the floor out of the smoke, but Sibba waved him back.
"Breathing smoke is the easy death," he said. "Better than feeling the fire in your flesh."
One by one, as their endurance waned, the halberdiers ran out in the smoke, trying to run downwind for a few yards of screen. Gleefully their enemies pounced, blocking their path, making them strike or lunge, leaping in behind with sword and dagger, and a long night of loss and frustration to avenge. Last and unluckiest ran Sibba. As he came out two Mercians, realizing by now which way their prey would go, stretched a rawhide rope across the path. Before he could rise or draw his short knife, there was a knee on his back, brawny arms on his wrists.
The last man left in the shell of his home, Elfstan stepped slowly forward, not running downwind like the others, but taking three long strides out of the smoke, shield raised, broadsword drawn. The Mercians running in hesitated. Here at last was a man like themselves. At a safe distance Elfstan's serfs and tenants watched, to see how their lord faced death.
Huskily Elfstan snarled a challenge, gesturing to the Mercians to come on. One detached himself, stepped forward, swinging backhand, forehand, clubbing upward with his iron shield-boss. Elfstan parried, edge to edge with the skill of a lifetime's practice, chopping with his own shield, circling one way then the other as he tried to detect a weakness in his enemy's wrist or balance or technique. For minutes the grave ballet of the sword-duel, the thing thanes were bred for, went on. Then the Mercian sensed the Wessex thane's exhaustion. As the shield-arm facing him drooped, he feinted a low cut, turned it into sudden short thrust. The blade drove in below the ear. As he fell, Elfstan stuck one last failing blow. His enemy staggered, looked unbelievingly at the arterial blood spouting from his thigh, and fell also, struggling to cover the flow with his hands.
A groan rose from the men of Stanford-in-the-Vale. Elfstan had been a hard master, and many had felt the weight of his fist if slaves, or the power of his wealth if free. Yet he had been their neighbor. He had fought the invaders of the village.
"Good death," the Mercian captain said professionally. "He lost, but maybe he took his man with him."
Alfgar moaned with disgust. Behind him, men rolled the traveling can of his father forward. Through the shattered palisade of the village, a further cortege advanced, black-robed priests in the van. In the midst of it the rising sun glittered on the bishop's gilded crozier.
"At least we have some prisoners," he said.
"Two?" asked Bishop Daniel disbelievingly. "You killed nine and caught two?"
No one bothered to answer him.
"We must make the best of it," said Wulfgar. "Now, how are you going to deal with them? 'Make an example,' you said."
The two freedmen stood in front of them, each held by two warriors. Daniel paced forward, stretched his hand out, pulled a thong from round one captive's neck, broke it with a jerk. He stared at what lay in his hand, did the same to the other prisoner. A silver hammer, for Thor, a silver sword, for Tyr. He tucked them into his pouch. For the archbishop, he thought. No, Ceolnoth is too much a weakling, feeble as the weathercock Wulfhere of York.
These are for Pope Nicholas. With this silver in his hand he may reflect that the Church in England cannot afford weakling archbishops any longer.
"I swore to burn the canker out," he said. "And so I will."
An hour later Wilfi of Ely stood tethered to the stake, legs tightly bound to prevent him kicking out. The brushwood burned brightly, caught at his woolen breeches. As the fire blistered his skin he began to twist in his bonds, gasps of agony forced from him despite his efforts. The Mercian warriors stared at him judgementally, interested to see how a slave-born bore pain. The villagers watched more fearfully. Many had seen executions. But even the wickedest, secret murderers and housebreakers, faced no more than the noose. To kill a man slowly was outside English law. Though not outside Church law.
"Breathe the smoke," yelled Sibba suddenly. "Breathe the smoke!"
Through the pain Wilfi heard him, ducked his head, breathed in great gasps. As his tormentors hesitated to approach, he began to fall forward in his bonds. As unconsciousness came on him, he rallied for an instant, looked upward.
"Tyr," he called, "Tyr aid me!" The smoke billowed up round him as if in reply. When it cleared he hung limp. A rumble of talk rose from the watchers.
"Not much of an example there," observed Wulfgar to the bishop. "Why don't you let me show you how to do it?"
As they dragged Sibba forward to the second stake, men went running at Wulfgar's word to the nearest house, came out moments later trundling the beer-barrel which even the meanest home could boast. At a gesture they stove in one end, tipped the barrel over, stove in the other to create a short stout cylinder. The barrel's owner watched unspeaking as his summer ale ran into the dirt.
"I've thought about this," said Wulfgar. "What else have I to do? What you need for this is draft. Like a clay chimney in a fireplace.
They tied Sibba, pale and glaring, next to the stake where his comrade had died. As they piled the brushwood deeply round him, Daniel stepped forward.
"Abjure your pagan gods," he said. "Return to Christ. I will shrive and absolve you myself, and you will be stabbed mercifully before you burn."
Sibba shook his head.
"Apostate," yelled the bishop. "What you feel now will only be the start of everlasting burning. Mark this!" He turned and shook a fist at the villagers. "His pain is what you will all suffer forever. What all men must suffer forever, if not for Christ. Christ and the Church that keeps the keys of heaven and hell!"
At Wulfgar's direction, they lowered the barrel over stake and condemned man together, struck sparks to the brush and fanned the blaze. The tongues of flame reached in, were sucked upward as the air burned out above them, leapt savagely at the body and face of the man inside. After a few moments the shrieking began. Continued, growing louder. A slow smile began to spread across the face of the limbless trunk that watched from its padded upright box.
"He's saying something," snapped Daniel suddenly. "He's saying something. He wants to recant. Put the fire out! Pull the brush away."
Slowly the burners raked back the blaze. Approaching cautiously, they wrapped cloths round their hands and lifted the smoldering barrel high over the stake.
Beneath it lay charred flesh, teeth showing white against blackened face and scorched lips. Flame had shriveled Sibba's eyeballs and was forced deep into his lungs as his body gasped for breath. He was still conscious.
His face lifted as the bishop approached, aware through its blindness that it was again in open air.
"Recant now," shouted Daniel for all to hear. "Make a sign, any sign, and I will cross you and send your soul without pain to Doomsday."
He bent forward under his miter to catch any word that burned lungs could pronounce.
Sibba coughed twice and spat the charred lining of his throat into the bishop's face.
Daniel stepped back, wiping the black mucus with disgust onto his embroidered robe, shaking involuntarily.
"Back," he gasped. "Put it back. Put it over him again. Restart the fire. And this time," he shouted, "he can call on his pagan gods till the devil has him."
But Sibba did not call out again. As Daniel raved and Wulfgar grinned at his confusion, as the warriors slowly moved in to pull the fire in on the bodies and spare the need for burial pit, two men slipped away from the back of the crowd, unseen by any except their silent neighbors. One was Elfstan's sister's son. The other had seen his home destroyed in a battle not of his concern. The rumor of the shire had told them where to take their news.