One King's Way

Chapter Seven

Shef stepped back a pace, his feet sinking into the soft mire. He twirled the peeled branch in his hand and eyed Karli carefully. The short man had lost his grin and gained a look of anxious determination. At least he had learnt to hold his sword right: edge and guard absolutely parallel with the line of his forearm, so that cut or parry would not be deflected. Shef moved in, swung forehand, backhand, thrust and sidestep, as Brand had taught him months before in the camps outside York. Karli parried easily, not quite managing to catch the light wood with his heavier blade, but well into line every time—the speed of his reactions was excellent. Still the same old problem, though.

Shef accelerated slightly, feinted low and rapped Karli briskly over the sword-arm. He stepped back and lowered his stick.

“You've got to remember, Karli,” he said. “You aren't cutting brushwood. What you've got there is a two-edged sword, not a one-edged billhook. What do you think the second edge is for? It's not for your main stroke, because you always slash with the same edge, to get your full force into it.”

“It's for the back-flick,” said Karli, repeating his lesson. “I know, I know. I just can't make my muscles do it unless I think about it, and if I think about it, it's too late. So tell me, what would happen if I tried to face a real swordsman, a Viking from the ships?”

Shef stretched out a hand for the sword he had reforged, looked at its edges critically. It was not a bad weapon, not now. But with what he had had by him at the forge in the Ditmarsh village, he had not dared to do too much. The weapon was still all of one metal, without the blends of soft and hard that gave a superior sword its flexibility and strength. Nor had he been able to weld on the hardened steel edges that were the sign of a master-weapon—no good metal, and a forge that would not get iron to more than red heat. So, now that they had left the village, every time he had fenced with Karli using his ‘Gungnir’ spear like a halberd, the iron edges of the cheap sword showed notches, to be taken out with hammer and file. Yet you could learn from the notches. If they were at right angles to the blade, Karli was fencing properly. A bungled parry showed cuts and shirrs of metal at odd angles. None this time.

Shef passed it back. “If you faced a real champion, like the man who taught me, you'd be dead,” he said. “So would I. But there are plenty of farmers' sons in Viking armies. You might meet one of those. And don't forget,” he added, “if you're facing a real champion, you don't have to fight fair.”

“You've done that,” guessed Karli.

Shef nodded.

“You've done a lot you don't tell me about, Shef.”

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you.” Karli pushed his sword back into the wooden, wool-lined scabbard they had made for it, the only thing that would keep out the rust in the everlasting damp of the Ditmarsh. The two men turned and started back to the makeshift camp in the clearing thirty yards away, smoke trailing sullenly from the cooking fires into the misty air.

“And you don't tell me what you're going to do, either,” Karli went on. “Are you just going to walk into the slave-ring and let Nikko sell you, like you say?”

“I'll walk into the slave-ring at Hedeby right enough,” said Shef. “After that, things will go as they will. But I don't reckon to end up as a slave. Tell me, Karli, how am I coming along?”

He referred to the hours Karli had spent, in exchange for the fencing lessons, teaching him how to make a fist, how to strike straight forward instead of with the usual round-arm swing, how to step forward and put the weight of the body into a hooked punch, how to block with the hands and weave the head.

Karli's habitual grin spread across his face once more. “Just like me, I guess. If you met a real champion, a fist-fighter from the marsh, he'd be all over you. But you can knock a man down well enough, if he stands still.”

Shef nodded thoughtfully. That at least was a skill worth knowing. Strange that they should have so specialized in one fighting art, here in this unvisited corner of the world. Perhaps it was because they did so little trade and had so little metal that they fought by choice empty-handed.

Only Nikko bothered to look up as they rejoined the campsite, giving the pair of them an angry glare.

“We reach Hedeby tomorrow,” he said. “Then your prancing will have to stop. I say, your prancing will have to stop,” he repeated, voice rising to a shout as Shef ignored him. “The master you'll find in Hedeby won't let you fool around pretending to be a swordmaster. It'll be work all day and the leather across your back if you shirk! You've felt it before, I've seen you stripped! You're no warrior out of luck, just a runaway!”

Karli lobbed a handful of mud neatly into Nikko's campfire and the shouting died into exasperated mutters.

“It is our last night,” said Karli in a low voice. “I've got an idea. See, we're coming out of the Ditmarsh. Be on the high road tomorrow, and the dry land, where the Danes live. You can talk to them then, but I'm not so good at it. But there's a village half a mile off, where the girls still speak good marsh-talk, like me—and you too, you still talk like a Frisian, but they'll understand you. So why don't we just slip off and see if there isn't anyone in the village who feels like a bit of a change from whichever mudfoot she's attached to?”

Shef looked at Karli with a mixture of irritation and affection. During the week he had stayed in the Ditmarsh village by the sea, he had realized that Karli, cheerful, open and thoughtless, was one of those men whom women invariably liked. They responded to his humor, his lack of care. He seemed to have tried his luck with every woman in his home village, and usually successfully. Some husbands and fathers knew, some turned a blind eye, all were careful about giving Karli an excuse to use his fists. But there had been general approval of Karli going off with Nikko and the others on their trading trip to Hedeby, whether they managed to include Shef as merchandise or not. Their last night in the hut Karli shared with his parents had been broken by continual scratching on the shutters and stealthy disappearances into the bushes outside.

They were not Shef's women, so he had no cause for complaint. Yet Karli made him anxious at some deeper level. In his youth, working at the forge at Emneth in the fen, and traveling round the neighboring villages on work-errands, Shef had several lusty encounters with girls—churls' daughters, even thralls' daughters, not young ladies whose virginity was prized and guarded, but ready enough to educate his ignorance. It was true they had never sought him out as they did Karli, perhaps put off by his unsmiling concern for the future, perhaps sensing his inner obsessions, but at least he had had no need to think he was lacking, or abnormal.

Then had come the sack of Emneth by the Vikings, the crippling of his foster-father, the capture and then the rescue of Godive. The moment in the little hut in the copse that summer morning, when he had become Godive's “first-man,” and thought he had reached the summit of his ambition. And since then Shef had had no dealings with any woman, not even Godive after he had won her back, not even after they had put the gold circle of kingship on his head and half the trulls in England had been his for the taking. Shef wondered sometimes whether the threat of Ivar to castrate him had worked on his mind. He knew he was still a whole man—but then so had Ivar been, or so Hund had insisted, and he had been called “the Boneless,” just the same. Could he have caught impotence from the man he had killed? Had his half-brother, Godive's husband, put a curse on him before he was hanged?

It was something in the mind, Shef knew, not in the body. Something to do with the way he had used the woman he loved as bait and as bribe, an inner agreement with her rejection of him and her marriage to Alfred, the most truthful man Shef had ever met. Whatever the case, he did not know the cure. Going with Karli might lead only to humiliation. Tomorrow he would be in the slavering, and the day after he could be facing the gelders.

“Do you think I stand a chance?” he asked, patting his ruined eye and face.

Karli's face creased with delight. “Of course! Great tall fellow like you, muscles like a blacksmith. Foreign accent, air of mystery. What you got to remember, these girls out here, they're bored. Nothing ever happens. They aren't allowed out near the road where anyone could grab them. No-one ever comes into the marsh. They see the same faces from the day they're born till the day they die. I tell you…” Karli expanded in fancies as to how the girls of the Ditmarsh had to amuse themselves for want of handsome strangers—or ugly strangers for that matter—while Shef stirred the stewpot and twisted strips of dough round twigs to toast in the fire. He did not think Karli's plan would work, or not for him at any rate. But he had gone on the naval expedition in the first place for one reason only: to shake off the black mood of Alfred and Godive's marriage. He would take any opportunity to break the spell upon him. But without any expectations. It would take more than a marshwife to remove his memories.

Hours later, walking back to camp through the marsh in the black night, Shef wondered again at his own lack of concern. Things had gone much as he had foreseen: the arrival in the village at the hour when folk left their doors and strolled round, the casual conversation with the menfolk to pass on news, Karli's meaningful looks and quick words with one listening girl and then another, while Shef held the attention of their male protectors. Then the ostentatious leaving at dusk, followed by the stealthy circuit back to a willow copse hanging over stagnant water. The arrival of the girls, panting, fearful and excited.

Shef's had been a pleasant plump girl with a pouting face. At first she had been flirtatious. Then scornful. Then, finally, as she realized that Shef himself had no hope or anxiety concerning his own failure, worried. She had stroked his ruined face, felt the scars on his back beneath the tunic. “You have had hard times?” she had said, half-questioning. “Harder than those scars show,” he had replied. “Things are hard for us women too, you know,” she had told him. Shef thought of what he had seen at the sack of York and in the ruin of Emneth, thought of his mother and her life story, of Godive and Alfgar and the bloody birch, of the stories of Ivar the Boneless and his dealings with women: remembered finally the slave-girls' bones, buried alive with their backs broken, which he had stumbled over in the old king's howe, and said nothing. Then for a while they had lain without speaking till the urgent noises coming from Karli and his mate had ceased once and then again. “I won't tell anyone,” she had whispered as the other pair finally emerged damp and muddy from their hollow. He would never see her again.

It ought to worry him, Shef reflected, not to be a whole man. Somehow it did not. He paused, tested the footing of the stretch ahead with the butt-spike of his spear. In the darkness of the marsh something gurgled and plopped, and Karli drew his sword with a gasp.

“It was just an otter,” Shef remarked.

“Maybe. Don't you know there are other things in the marsh?”

“Like what?”

Karli hesitated. “We call them thurses.”

“Yes, so do we. Great big things that live in the mud and catch children who play too close. Giant women with green teeth. Arms covered in long gray hair that reach up and turn over a fowler's boat,” Shef added, embroidering on one of the stories he had heard from Brand. “Merlings that sit and feast on the…”

Karli grabbed his arm. “Enough! Don't say it. They might hear themselves called and come.”

“There are no such things,” said Shef, confident again of his bearings and moving off on the slightly firmer ground between two sloughs. “People just make up the stories to explain why people don't come back. In marshes like this you don't need a thurs to make you vanish. Look, there's the camp through these alders.”

Karli looked up at him as they reached the edge of the camp clearing, men already wrapped motionless in their blankets. “I don't understand you,” he said. “You're always sure you know best. But you act like a sleepwalker. Are you sent by the gods?”

Shef noticed Nikko, awake and seated silently observing from the shadows. “If I am,” he said, “I hope they have some help for me tomorrow.”

In his dream that night he felt as if the nape of his neck were gripped in steely fingers, forcing him to look this way and then that.

The first sight he saw was somewhere on a desolate plain. A young warrior stood, holding himself upright with difficulty. Black blood covered his armor, and more ran down his legs from under the mail shirt. He clutched a broken sword in his hand and another warrior lay at his feet. From somewhere far off Shef heard a voice chanting:

You can't harden swords in poison, thought Shef. Hardening is a matter of great heat and sudden cooling. Why is water not sudden enough? Maybe it is the steam that comes from it. What is steam anyway?

The fingers at his neck tweaked him suddenly, as if to make him pay attention. Across the plain Shef saw birds of prey flying, and the chanting voice said again:

Behind the birds Shef thought for a moment he could see women, female shapes riding on the wind, and behind even them the dim sight of great doors opening: doors he had seen before, the doors of Valhalla.

So the heroes die, said another voice, not the chanting one. Even in the paralysis of his dream Shef felt a chill as he recognized the grim ironic tones of his protector, the god Rig, whose ladder-sign he wore round his neck. That is the death of Hjalmar the Magnanimous, the voice went on. Picked a fight with a Swedish berserk, provided two recruits for my father Othin.

The scene vanished, Shef felt his eyes twisted supernaturally elsewhere. A moment, and then another vision came into focus. Shef was looking down at a narrow pallet laid on an earth floor. It was somewhere aside from main rooms, maybe a blind passageway somewhere out of the way of passing feet, but cold and comfortless. On it an old woman was stretching herself out, carefully and painfully. Shef knew that she had just been told that she was bound to die, by a leech or a cunning man or a beast-doctor. Not from the lung-sickness that usually carried off the old folk in the winter, but from some growth or evil inside her. It hurt her terribly, but she dared not speak of it. She had no relatives left, if she had had a man or sons of her own, they were dead or gone, she lived now on the doubtful tolerance of those not her blood. If she gave trouble of any kind even her pallet and her bread would be withdrawn. She was a person of no importance.

She was the girl he had left in the marsh, come to the end of her life. Or she could be. There were others she could be: Shef thought of Godive's mother, the Irish slave whom Wulfgar his foster father had taken as a lemman and then sold away from her child when his wife grew jealous. But there were others, many many others. The world was full of desperate old women, and old men too, trying with the last of their strength to die quietly and not attract attention. Then they could creep into their graves and vanish from mind. They had been young once.

From the scene Shef felt such a wave of hopelessness as he had never imagined before. And yet there was something strange about it. This slow dying might be years in the future, as he had first thought when he seemed to recognize the woman. Or it might be years in the past. But for a moment Shef seemed to know one thing: the old woman praying for an unnoticed death on the pallet bed was him. Or had he been her?

Shef snapped awake with a jerk and a sense of relief. Round him the camp lay quiet in its blankets. He let his inhaled breath out slowly and relaxed his tensed muscles one at a time.

They came out of the marsh the next morning almost in a stride. One moment they were plodding forward through the black pools and across the shallow streams that seemed to flow in no direction, in a thin cold mist. Then the ground was rising beneath their feet, the mist cleared away, and barely a mile off across bare turf, Shef could see the Army Road marching along the skyline, with on it a continual to-and-fro of travelers. He looked back and saw that the Ditmarsh was invisible beneath a blanket of fog. It would clear in the sun and reform again at nightfall. No wonder that the Ditmarshers lived hand to mouth, and knew no invaders.

Shef was amused also to see how his companions changed as they came out on to the road. In the marsh they had been secure, confident, ready to sneer at the outside world and their neighbors. Here they seemed to put their heads down and hope to escape without attention. Shef found himself standing straight and looking round him, while the others stooped and closed up together.

Shortly a party on horseback caught up with them, ten or a dozen men riding together with pack animals, a salt-train heading north up the Jutland peninsula. As they rode past the Ditmarshers they called to each other in Norse.

“Here, see the mudfeet out of the fen. What have they come out for? Look, there's a tall one, must have been mother's little adventure. Hey, marshman, what are you looking for? Is it a cure for your spotted bellies?”

Shef grinned at the loudest laugher, and called back, in the fluent Norse he had learnt from Thorvin and then from Brand and his crew.

“What would you know about it, Jutlander?” He exaggerated the hoarse gutturals of the Ribe dialect they spoke. “Is that Norse you are speaking, or is it a disease of the throat? Try stirring honey in your beer and maybe you can cough it up.”

The traders checked their horses and stared at him. “You are no Ditmarsher,” said one of them. “You do not sound like a Dane either. Where are you from?”

“Enzkr em,” said Shef firmly. “I am an Englishman.”

“You sound like a Norwegian, and one from the back end of nowhere at that. I have heard voices like yours trading furs.”

“I am an Englishman,” Shef repeated. “And it is not furs I am trading. These folk and I are going to the slavering at Hedeby, where they hope to sell me.” He pulled his ladder pendant into view, turned his face full on to the Danes, and winked his one eye solemnly. “No need to keep it a secret. After all, I have to find a buyer.”

The Danes looked at each other and rode on, leaving Shef well content. An Englishman, with one eye, and a silver pole-ladder round his neck. It only needed one friend of Brand, or of the Way, or even one of his skippers from last year's campaign gone home to retire to hear that, and Shef should at least have enough credit to get passage back to England: though he did not want to take ship from Hedeby on the Baltic shore.

Nikko scowled at him, feeling that the situation was slipping beyond his grasp. “I'll have that spear of yours before we reach the market.”

Shef used it to point to the wooden stockade round Hedeby coming into view.

As he shuffled slowly forward in the line of merchandise for sale the next day, Shef felt his heart beating faster. He still had the inner calm—or was it indifference?—which had never left him since he woke up, king no more, in Karli's hut. Yet though he knew what he planned to do, he could not know how it would be taken. It depended on what a man's rights were. In the slave-market at Hedeby, what he and his friends could enforce, likely enough.

The market itself was no more than a cleared space on the shore, with a central knoll a few feet high to display the goods to the buyers. Behind it the tideless Baltic lapped gently on a thin strip of sand. To one side wooden piers ran out far into the shallow water, to enable the broad-hulled knorrs to come in and out with cargo. Around the whole ran a stout stockade of logs, flimsy enough in comparison with the Roman walls of York far away, but in good repair and heavily manned. Shef had heard little of the deeds of King Hrorik, who ruled in Hedeby and from it to the Dane-dyke thirty miles to the south. But his revenues depended entirely on the tolls he took from traders in the port, and he both guarded it and ruled it with a prompt and heavy hand. Shef glanced from time to time at the gallows erected in plain sight on the outermost jetty, a half-dozen bearded corpses dangling from it. Hrorik was anxious to show traders their rights would be protected. One of the many things Shef could not know was whether his plan might be taken as a discouragement to trade. But in any case, as the morning drew on and the line moved forward, his mood grew grimmer.

The lot being put up this time consisted only of women: six of them, pushed forward by a group of grinning Vikings. His man held each of them by the arm while their leader walked round the knoll shouting their merits out. All young girls, Shef could see. At a word, their mantles were pulled away and each stood in a short tunic, bare-legged to above the knee, the white skin drawing all eyes in the sunlight. Whoops filled the air, lewd suggestions shouted across the crowd.

“Where are they from?” Shef asked the armed guard standing near the slave-line. The man eyed Shef's build and bearing curiously, grunted a reply.

“Wends. See the white skin and the red hair. They catch them on the south shore of the Baltic.”

“And who are the buyers?” Shef could see, now, a group of dark men in strange clothing pressing forward to inspect the women more closely. They wore head-cloths instead of standing helmeted or bare-headed, and the curved daggers in their belts glittered with precious metal. Some of them at all times faced outward, as if expecting surprise attack.

“Men from the Southlands. They worship some god who is a rival to the Christ-god. Great buyers of women, and they pay in gold. Have to pay high this year.”

“Why is that?”

The guard looked at him curiously again. “You speak Norse, but don't you know anything? The woman-price went up as soon as the English market turned nasty. Used to get good girls from England.”

The Cordovan Arabs were asking questions now, through an interpreter. A bystander relayed them to the crowd.

“He wants to know if they're all virgins.” Roars of laughter and a great bull voice crying, “I know the tall one isn't, Alfr, I saw you trying her out yesterday outside your booth.”

The leader of the sellers looked round angrily, trying to scowl the barrackers into silence. The Arabs called to their interpreter, huddled together. Finally, a bid. Expostulation, rejection. But no counter-bids. A deal struck—Shef saw the flash of money as it was paid out, and drew in his breath at the sight, not of silver, but of gold dinars. A toll paid to the auctioneer, another to the jarl of King Hrorik, watching with careful eye, and the women were wrapped and hustled away.

Next to go forward was a strange figure, a middle-aged man in the remains of a black robe. He appeared to be bald, but a slight black fuzz grew on his scalp. A Christian priest, Shef realized, with a tonsure that had not been shaved recently. As he came out, another man pushed his way out of the crowd and seemed to go to embrace him: another priest, another black robe, but this time with fresh tonsure. A guard thrust him back, another called for bids.

Instant response, from a party of tall men, heavily-built and swathed in furs even in the spring sunlight. Swedes, Shef thought, remembering the accent of Guthmund the Greedy and some of the others he had met in the ranks of the Ragnarssons' Great Army. They were offering eight ounces of silver. One of them pulled a purse from his belt and threw it on the ground to back the offer up.

The priest who had been pushed away was back again, dodging the guards, spreading out his arms and shouting passionately.

“What's he say?” muttered the guard by Shef.

“He's trying to forbid the sale,” Shef answered, catching some part of the gabble of Norse and Low German that the priest was using. “Says they have no right to sell a priest of the true God.”

“They'll sell him too if he doesn't shut up,” said the guard.

Indeed, the Swedes had thrown another purse on the ground, exchanged words with the auctioneer, were walking forward towards both men, satisfaction on their faces.

Another man stepped from the crowd and the satisfaction faded, replaced by looks of wary calculation. Shef, used to judging warriors, could see immediately why.

The newcomer was not a tall man, shorter than the shortest of the Swedes. But he was immensely broad across the shoulders. More, he moved with an easy confidence that set men back. He wore a padded leather jacket, worn and with different strips let into it here and there. His left hand rested on the pommel of a long horseman's sword. His hair stood up like a stiff, blond brush, over a face tight-drawn, clean-shaven, as hard as stone. But it was smiling.

The blond man put a toe under one of the purses, flicked it back to the Swedes, flicked back the other.

“You can't have him,” he said in stilted Norse, his voice carrying in the sudden silence. “Neither of them. They are priests of Christ, and they are under my protection. The protection of the Lanzenorden.” He called suddenly in a louder voice, and swept his arm around. Shef realized there were a dozen men mailed and armed close to the ring. They outnumbered the Swedes. But there were two hundred Norsemen watching, all armed as well. If they made common cause against the Christians… Or if King Hrorik's men decided to protect their trade and market…

“We'll pay for one of them,” called the blond man conciliatingly. “Eight ounces. Christian money is as good as heathen.”

“Ten ounces,” said the leader of the Swedes.

The auctioneer looked questioningly at the blond man.

“Twelve ounces,” he said in a slow, deliberate voice. “Twelve ounces and I will forget to ask how one of you comes to have a Christian priest—and what you others want Christian priests for. Twelve ounces and think you are lucky.”

The Swede slipped his hand further down the handle of his axe, spat on the ground.

“Twelve ounces,” he said. “And the money of Othin rings better than the money of any smoothface gelding of a Christian.”

Shef felt the guard beside him start to move, saw Hrorik's jarl also begin to step forward. As he finished speaking the Swede threw his axe up to grip it in striking position. But before any of them had completed his movement there was a streak in the air, a thud, a gasp. The Swede was gaping down at a brass hilt protruding from the center of his body. Shef realized that the blond man had never attempted to draw sword, but had instead flicked a heavy knife from his belt and thrown it underhand. Before the thought had formed, the blond man had already taken three steps forward, drawn, and was standing with the point of his long sword resting exactly on the throat-ball of the seller.

“Do we have a sale?” he called, looking for an instant sideways at the hesitating jarl.

The seller, slowly and cautiously, nodded.

The blond man flicked the sword away. “Just a private disagreement,” he remarked to the jarl. “Doesn't affect the market. Happy to settle with his friends anywhere outside the town.”

The jarl hesitated, then nodded too, ignoring the shouts of the Swedes bent over the body of their leader.

“Pay the money and take your man away. And hold that noise, the rest of you. If you call men names you'd better learn to be quicker. If you have a grudge you're welcome to fight it out. But not here. Bad for business. Come on, somebody, get the next lot up here.”

As the Christian priests embraced and the blond man rejoined his knot of mailed supporters, bristling with weapons, Shef found himself thrust forward on to the knoll. For a moment panic seized him, like an actor forgetting his lines on an unexpected cue. Then as Nikko bustled forward, and he saw the worried face of Karli just behind him, he remembered what he had to do.

Slowly he started to pull off his grubby woolen tunic.

“What's this?” said the auctioneer. “Strong young man, able to do simple smith-work, offered for sale by—some webfoot, who cares.”

Shef threw the tunic to the ground, adjusted the silver pendant of Rig in the center of his chest, flexed his muscles in a parody of the behavior of farmhands at a hiring fair. The sunlight showed the old scars of flogging across his back, flogging he had received from the hands of his stepfather years before.

“Is he tractable?” shouted a voice. “He sure doesn't look it.”

“You can make a slave tractable,” shouted Nikko, standing next to the auctioneer.

Shef nodded thoughtfully, stepped over to the pair of them. As he did so he carefully spread the fingers of his left hand and then curled them into a tight fist, thumb outside the second joint, as Karli had shown him. He had to make this dramatic. Not a shove, not a scuffle.

Stepping forward on to the left foot according to Karli's demonstrations, he swung his left arm in a short arc, putting all the weight of his body behind it, and aiming as if to end with his fist behind his right shoulder. The left hook connected not with Nikko's jaw—Karli had advised against that for beginners—but with his right temple. The burly man, completely unprepared, dropped instantly to his knees.

Instantly Shef had him by the collar, jerked him to his feet, turned to face the crowd.

“One webfoot,” he shouted in Norse. “Talks a lot. No good at anything. What am I bid?”

“I thought he was selling you,” shouted a voice.

Shef shrugged. “I changed my mind.” He stared round at the crowd, trying to overbear them with his one eye. What made a thrall? In the end, there must be consent. A thrall who simply disobeyed, simply fought back, could be killed, but was worth nothing. On the edge of the ring he realized there was a minor fracas going on, as Nikko's son and nephew came forward to his assistance, only to find Karli barring their path, fists raised.

“All right, all right,” snarled the jarl almost in Shef's ear. “I can see the pair of you are unsaleable. But I'll tell you this—you still owe an auction fee, and if you can't pay it I'll take it out of both of you.”

Shef looked round. A dangerous moment. He had hoped to see a friendly face before this, if the Danes met on the road had spread the word. Now he would have to settle with the toll-jarl on his own. He had only two possessions left. One hand closed round the silver pendant—that was his last resort. The other?

The ‘Gungnir’ spear thumped into the turf at his feet. Karli, beaming and rubbing his knuckles, waved cheerfully at him. Shef started to pull the spear out, to show the rune-marks on it to the contemptuous jarl, to try to strike a deal.

“If he's for sale, the one-eye,” called a voice, “I'll buy him. I know someone who wants him bad.”

With a feeling of doom at his heart, Shef turned to face the voice. He had hoped a friend would recognize him. He had not forgotten the chance that it would be an enemy, but had gambled that all the followers of the Ragnarssons, the survivors of the men he had known in the Great Army, would be with the Ragnarsson fleet at sea on the other side of Denmark. He had reckoned without the loose alliances, the continuous joinings and defections, of the Viking world.

It was Skuli the Bald, who had commanded a tower in Shef's scaling of the York walls the year before, but had then thrown in his lot with the Ragnarssons who had betrayed them. He was coming forward now, his ship's crew closed up behind him in a disciplined formation.

At the same moment some inner warning told Shef another face was staring at him fixedly. He turned, met a pair of black, implacable eyes. Recognized them instantly. Erkenbert the black deacon, whom he had seen first at the death of Ragnar in the snake-pit, and seen last being loaded aboard the transport-ships after the defeat of the Christian Crusade at Hastings. He was standing next to the rescued black-robe priest, talking rapidly to the blond German, and pointing.

“Skjef Sigvarthsson Ivarsbane,” said Skuli, grinning, now only a few feet away. “I'm ready to pay more than market price for you. I reckon Ivar's brothers will pay me a man's weight in silver in return.”

“If you can collect,” snarled Shef, backing away and looking swiftly over his shoulder for a wall to set his back against. Karli was with him, he realized. He had drawn his sword, was shouting defiance in a growing hubbub. Shef saw instantly that he had forgotten everything he had been told, was holding the weapon like a thatcher cutting reeds. If the tension snapped, Karli would be dead within five heartbeats.

The blond German was within Shef's line of vision now as well, sword also drawn, his men trying to make a line between Shef and Skuli. He too was shouting something about a price. In the background traders and slaves were scattering, some trying to get well away, others drawing, seeming to align themselves with one faction or another. The guards of King Hrorik, taken off guard by this sudden outbreak among the customers, were trying to form a wedge to drive into the midst of the likely battle.

Shef drew a deep breath, hefted his spear. He would go straight for Skuli and take his chance with Erkenbert and the Christians. One act of charity first. He turned, meaning to club the unsuspecting Karli with the spear-shaft. If the little man was on the ground, maybe no-one would kill him, as they would if he tried to fight.

Something clung to the spear-point, weighing it down, hampering him. Something else over his face, blinding him. As he tore frantically at the blanket, trying to wrestle free, a soft concussion caught him on the side of the skull, and he found himself on one knee, struggling to rise, struggling to see. If he lost consciousness the next thing he might know was a Ragnarsson face intent on cutting the blood-eagle through his ribs.

Someone kicked Shef's feet from under him, and his head met the ground.