The Hammer and The Cross

Chapter One

NORTHEAST COAST OF ENGLAND, A.D. 865

Spring. A spring dawn on Flamborough Head, where the rock of the Yorkshire Wolds juts out into the North Sea like a gigantic fishhook, millions of tons in weight. Pointing out to sea, pointing to the ever-present threat of the Vikings. Now the kings of the little kingdoms were uneasily beginning to draw together against this threat from the North. Uneasy and jealous, remembering the long hostilities and the trail of murder that had marked the history of the Angles and the Saxons ever since they came here centuries ago. Proud warsmiths who overcame the Welsh, noble warriors who—as the poets say—obtained the land.

Godwin the Thane cursed to himself as he paced the wooden palisade of the little fort erected on the very tip of Flamborough Head itself. Spring! Maybe in more fortunate parts the lengthening days and the light evenings meant greenery and buttercups and heavy-uddered cows trooping to the byres to be milked. Here on the Head it meant wind. It meant the equinoctial gales and the nor'easter blowing. Behind him the low, gnarled trees stood in line, one behind the other like men with their backs turned, each successive one a few inches higher than the one to windward, so that they formed natural wind-arrows or weathercocks, pointing out to the tormented sea. On three sides all round him the gray water heaved slowly like an immense animal, the waves starting to curl and then flattening out again as the wind tore at them, beating them down and levelling out even the massive surges of the ocean. Gray sea, gray sky, squalls blotting the horizon, no color in the world at all except when the rollers finally crashed into the striated walls of the cliffs, shattering and sending up great plumes of spray. Godwin had been there so long that he no longer heard the roar of the collision, noticed it only when the spray reached so high up the cliff that the water which soaked his cloak and hood and dripped onto his face turned salt instead of fresh.

Not that it made any difference, he thought numbly. It was all just as cold. He could go back into the shelter, kick the slaves aside, warm his frozen hands and feet by the fire. There was no chance of raiders on a day like this. The Vikings were seamen, the greatest seamen in the world, or so they said. You didn't have to be a great seaman to know that there was no point in putting out on a day like this. The wind was due east—no, he reflected, due east a point north. Fine for blowing you across from Denmark, but how could you keep a longship from broaching to in this sea? And how could you steer for a safe landing once you arrived? No, no chance at all. He might as well be by the fire.

Godwin looked longingly at the shelter with its little trail of smoke instantly whipped away by the wind, but turned his pace and began to shuffle along the palisade again. His lord had trained him well. “Don't think, Godwin,” he had said. “Don't think maybe they'll come today and maybe they won't. Don't believe that it's worth keeping a lookout some of the time and it's not worth it the rest. While it's day, you stay on the Head. Look out all the time. Or one day you'll be thinking one thing and some Stein or Olaf'll think another and they'll be ashore and twenty miles inland before we can catch up with them—if we ever do. And that's a hundred lives lost and a hundred pounds in silver and cattle and burnt thatch. And the rents not paid for years after. So watch, Thane, or it's your estates that will suffer.”

So his lord Ella had said. And behind him the black crow, Erkenbert, had crouched over his parchment, his quill squeaking as he traced out the mysterious black lines that Godwin feared more than he feared the Vikings. “Two months' service on Flamborough Head to Godwin the thane,” he had pronounced. “He is to watch till the third Sunday after Ramis Palmarum.” The alien syllables had nailed the orders down.

Watch they had said and watch he would. But he didn't have to do it as dry as a reluctant virgin. Godwin bellowed downwind to the slaves, for the hot spiced ale he had commanded half an hour before. Instantly one of them came running out, the leather mug in his hand. Godwin eyed him with deep disfavor as he trotted over to the palisade and up the ladder to the watchkeeper's walkway. A damned fool, this one. Godwin kept him because he had sharp eyes, but that was all. Merla, his name. He had been a fisherman once. Then there had been a hard winter, little to catch, he had fallen behind with the dues he owed to his landlords, the black monks of St. John's Minister at Beverley, twenty miles off. First he had sold his boat to pay his dues and feed his wife and bairns. Then, when he had no money and could not feed them any longer, he had had to sell his family to a richer man, and in the end had sold himself to his former landlords. And they had lent Merla to Godwin. Damned fool. If the slave had been a man of honor he would have sold himself first and given the money to his wife's kin, so at least they would have taken her in. If he had been a man of sense he would have sold his wife and the bairns first and kept the boat. Then maybe he would have had a chance to buy them back. But he was a man of neither sense nor honor. Godwin turned his back on the wind and the sea and took a firm swallow from the brimming mug. At least the slave hadn't been sipping from it. He could learn from a thrashing if from nothing else.

Now what was the wittol staring at? Staring past his master's shoulder, mouth agape, pointing out to sea.

“Ships,” he yelled. “Viking ships, two mile out to sea. I see 'em again. Look, master, look!”

Godwin spun automatically, cursed as the hot liquid slopped over his sleeve, peered out into the cloud and rain along the pointing arm. Was there a dot there, out where the cloud met the waves? No, nothing. Or… maybe. He could see nothing steadily, but out there the waves would be running twenty feet high, high enough to shelter any ship trying to ride out a storm under bare poles.

“I see 'em,” yelled Merla again. “Two ships, a cable apart.”

“Longships?”

“No, master, knorrs.”

Godwin hurled the mug over his shoulder, seized the slave's thin arm in an iron grasp, and slashed him viciously across the face, forehand, backhand, with a sodden leather gauntlet. Merla gasped and ducked but did not dare to try to shield himself.

“Talk English, you whore's get. And talk sense.”

“A knorr, master. It's a merchant ship. Deep-bellied, for cargo.” He hesitated, afraid to show further knowledge, afraid to conceal it. “I can recognize 'un by… by the shape of the prow. They must be Vikings, master. We don't use 'em.”

Godwin stared out to sea again, anger fading, replaced by a cold, hard feeling at the base of his stomach. Doubt. Dread.

“Listen, Merla, to me,” he whispered. “Be very sure. If those are Vikings I must call out the entire coast-watch, every man from here to Bridlington. They are only churls and slaves, when all is said and done. No harm if they are dragged from their greasy wives.

“But I must do something else. As soon as the watch is called I must also send riders in to the minister at Beverley, to the monks of good St. John—your masters, remember?”

He paused to note the terror and the old memories in Merla's eyes.

“And they will call out the mounted levy, the thanes of Ella. No good keeping them here, where the pirates could feint at Flamborough and then be twenty miles off round Spurn Head before they could get their horses out of the marsh. So they stay back, so they can ride in any direction once the threat is seen. But if I call them out, and they ride over here in the wind and the rain on a fool's errand… And especially if some Viking sneaks in through the Humber while their backs are turned…

“Well, it would be bad for me, Merla.” His voice sharpened and he lifted the underfed slave off the ground. “But by almighty God in heaven I'll see you regret it till the last day you live. And after the thrashing you get that may not be long.

“But, Merla, if those are Viking ships out there and you let me not report them—I'll hand you back to the black monks and say I could do nothing with you.

“Now, what do you say? Viking ships, or no?”

The slave stared out again to sea, his face working. He would have been wiser, he thought, to say nothing. What was it to him if the Vikings sacked Flamborough, or Bridlington, or Beverley Minster itself? They could not enslave him any more than he was already. Maybe foreign heathens would be better masters than the people of Christ at home. Too late to think that now. The sky was clearing, momentarily. He could see, even if his weak-eyed landlubber of a master could not. He nodded.

“Two Viking ships, master. Two mile out to sea. Southeast.”

Godwin was away, bellowing instructions, calling to his other slaves, shouting for his horse, his horn, his small, reluctant force of conscripted freemen. Merla straightened, walked slowly to the southwest angle of the palisade, looked out thoughtfully and carefully. The weather cleared momentarily, and for a few heartbeats he could see plain. He looked at the run of the waves—the turbid yellow line a hundred yards offshore which marked the long, long expanse of tidal sandbanks which ran the full length of this barest and most harborless, wind- and current-swept stretch of English shore—tossed a handful of moss from the palisade into the air and studied the way it flew. Slowly a grim and humorless smile creased his careworn face.

Great sailors those Vikings might be. But they were in the wrong place, on a lee shore with a widow-maker blowing. Unless the wind dropped, or their heathen gods from Valhalla could help them, they stood no chance. They would never see Jutland or the Vik again.

Two hours later fivescore men stood clustered on the beach south of the Head, at the north end of the long, long, inlet-less stretch of coast that ran down to Spurn Head and the mouth of the Humber. They were armed: leather jackets and caps, spears, wooden shields, a scattering of the broadaxes they used to shape their boats and houses. Here and there a sax, the short chopping sword from which the Saxons to the south took their name. Only Godwin had a metal helmet and mail-shirt to pull on, a brass-hilted broadsword to buckle round his waist. In the normal way of things men like these, the coast-watch of Bridlington, would not hope or expect to stand on the shore and trade blows with the professional warriors of Denmark and Norway. Rather, they would fade away, taking as much as they could of their goods and wives with them. Waiting for the mounted levy, the thane-service of Northumbria, to come down and do the fighting for which they earned their estates and manor houses. Waiting hopefully for a chance to swarm forward and join in the harassing of a beaten enemy, the chance of taking loot. It was not a chance which had come to any Englishman since Oakley fourteen years before. And that had been in the south, in the foreign kingdom of Wessex, where all manner of strange things happened.

Nevertheless the mood of the men watching the knorrs out in the bay was unalarmed, even cheerful. Almost every man in the coast-watch was a fisherman, skilled in the ways of the North Sea. The worst water in the world, with its fogs and gales, its monstrous tides and unexpected currents. As the day strengthened and the Viking ships were blown remorselessly closer in, Merla's realization had come to everyone: The Vikings were doomed. It was just a matter of what they could try next. And whether they would try it, lose, and get the wreck over with before the mounted levy Godwin had summoned hours before could arrive, resplendent in its armor, colored cloaks and gold-mounted swords. After which, opinion among the fishermen felt, the chances of any worthwhile plunder for them were low. Unless they marked the spot and tried later, in secret, with grappling irons… Quiet conversations ran among the men at the rear, with an occasional low laugh.

“See,” the town reeve was explaining to Godwin at the front, “the wind's east a point north. If they put up a scrap of sail they can run west, north or south.” He drew briefly in the wet sand at their feet. “If he goes west he hits us. If he goes north he hits the Head. Mind you, if he could get past the Head he'd have a clear run northwest away up to Cleveland. That's why he was trying his sweeps an hour ago. A few hundred yards out to sea and he'd have been free. But what we knows, and what they doesn't, is there's a current. Hell of a current, rips down past the Head. They might as well stir the water with their…” He paused, not sure how far informality could go.

“Why doesn't he go south?” cut in Godwin.

“He will. He's tried the sweeps, tried the sea-anchor to check his drift. It's my guess the one in charge, the jarl what they call them, he knows his men are exhausted. A rare old night they must have had of it. And a shock in the morning when they saw where they were.” The reeve shook his head with a kind of professional sympathy.

“They are not such great sailors,” pronounced Godwin with satisfaction. “And God is against them, foul, heathen Church-defilers.”

A stir of excitement behind them cut off the reply the reeve might have been incautious enough to make. The two men turned.

On the path that ran along behind high-water mark, a dozen men were dismounting. The levy? thought Godwin. The thanes from Beverley? No, they could not possibly have arrived in this time. They must only now be saddling up. Yet the man in front was a nobleman. Big, burly, fair hair, bright blue eyes, with the upright stance of a man who had never had to plough or hoe for a living. Gold shone beneath his expensive scarlet cape, on buckles and sword-pommel. Behind him strode a smaller, younger version of himself, surely his son. And on the other side of him another youth, tall, straight-backed like a warrior. But dark in complexion, poorly dressed in tunic and wool breeches. Grooms held the horses for half a dozen more armed, competent-looking men—a retinue, surely, a rich thane's hearth-troop.

The leading stranger held his empty hand up. “You do not know me,” he said. “I am Wulfgar. I am a thane from King Edmund's country, from the East Angles.”

A stir of interest from the crowd, the dawnings his message might be of hostility.

“You wonder what I am doing here. I will tell you.” He gestured out at the shore. “I hate Vikings. I know more of them than most men. And, like most men, to my sorrow. In my own country, among the North-folk beyond the Wash, I am the coast-guard, set by King Edmund. But long ago I saw that we would never get rid of these vermin while we English fought only our own battles. I persuaded my king of this, and he sent messages to yours. They agreed that I should come north, to talk with the wise men in Beverley and in Eoforwich about what we might do. I took a wrong road last night, met your messengers riding to Beverley this morning. I have come to help.” He paused. “Have I your leave?”

Godwin nodded slowly. Never mind what the lowborn fish-churl of a reeve said. Some of the bastards might come ashore. And if they did, this lot might well scatter. A dozen armed men just might be useful.

“Come and welcome,” he said.

Wulfgar nodded with deliberate satisfaction. “I am only just in time,” he remarked.

Out to sea the penultimate act of the wreck was about to take place. One of the two knorrs was fifty yards farther in than the other; her men more tired or maybe less driven by their skipper. Now she was about to pay the price. Her wallowing rolls in the waves changed angle, the bare mast rocking crazily. Suddenly the watching men could see that the yellow line of underwater sandbanks was the other side of the hull. Crewmen exploded from the deck and the planks where they had been lying, ran furiously up and down, grabbing sweeps, thrusting them over the side, trying to pole their ship off and gain a few extra moments of life.

Too late. A cry of despair rang thinly across the water as the Vikings saw it, echoed by a hum of excitement from the Englishmen on the shore: the wave, the big wave, the seventh wave that always rolls farthest up the beach. Suddenly the knorr was up on it, lifted and tilted sideways in a cascade of boxes and barrels and men sliding from the windward into the leeward scuppers. Then the wave was gone and the knorr smashed down, landing with a thump on the hard sand and gravel of the bank. Planks flew, the mast was over the side in a tangle of cordage; for an instant a man could be seen grasping desperately to the ornamented dragon-prow. Then another wave covered everything, and when it passed there were only bobbing fragments.

The fishermen nodded. A few crossed themselves. If the good God spared them from the Vikings, that was the way they expected to go one day—like men, with the cold salt in their mouths, and rings in their ears to pay kindly strangers to bury them. Now, there was one more thing for a skillful captain to try.

The remaining Viking was going to try it, to scud south with the wind abeam and all the easting he could get, rather than wait passively for death like his consort had. A man appeared suddenly at the steering oar. Even from two furlongs' distance the watchers could see his red beard wagging as he bellowed orders, could hear the echo of his urgency rolling across the water. There were men at the ropes, waiting, heaving together. A scrap of sail leapt free from the yard, caught instantly by the wind and tugged out. As the ship shot urgently towards shore another volley of orders swung the yard round and the boat heeled downwind. Within seconds she was steady on a new course, picking up speed, throwing water wide from her bow-wave as she raced away from the Head down toward the Spurn.

“They're getting away!” yelled Godwin. “Get the horses!” He cuffed his groom out of the way, scrambled astride, and set off at a gallop in pursuit, Wulfgar, the stranger thane, only a pace or two behind, and the rest of their retinues following in strung-out, disorderly lines. Only the dark boy who had come with Wulfgar hesitated.

“You're not hurrying,” he said to the motionless reeve. “Why not? Don't you want to catch up with them?”

The reeve grinned, stooped, picked a pinch of sand from the beach and threw it in the air. “They've got to try it,” he remarked. “Nothing else to do. But they're not going to get far.”

Turning on his heel he indicated a score of men to stay where they were and watch the beach for wreckage or survivors. Another score of mounted men set off along the path behind the thanes. The rest, bunched together, began to trot purposefully but deliberately along the beach after the racing ship.

As the minutes passed even the landsmen realized what the reeve had seen straight away. The Viking skipper was not going to win his gamble. Twice already he had tried to force his ship's head out to sea, two men joining the red-bearded one as he strained at the steering oar, the rest of the crew bracing the yard round till the ropes sang iron-hand in the wind. Both times the waves had heaved, heaved remorselessly at the prow till it wavered, swung back, the ship's hull shuddering with the forces contending on it. And again the skipper had tried, turning back parallel with the coastline and building up speed for another dash to the safety of the open sea.

But was he parallel with the coastline this time? Even to the inexperienced eyes of Godwin and Wulfgar it looked this time as if something was different: stronger wind, heavier sea, the grip of the inshore current dragging at the bottom. The red-bearded man was still by the oar, still shouting orders for some other maneuver, the ship was still racing along, as the poets said, like a foamy-necked floater, but her prow was turning in inch by inch or foot by foot; the yellow line was perilously close to her bow-wave, it was clear she was going to—

Strike. One instant the ship was running full tilt, the next her prow had slammed into unyielding gravel. The mast snapped off instantly and hurled itself forward, taking half the crew with it. The planks of the clinker-built boat sprang outward from their settings, letting in the onrushing sea. In a heartbeat the whole ship had opened up like a flower. And then vanished, leaving only cordage streaming in the wind for a moment to show where she had been. And, once again, bobbing fragments in the water.

Bobbing fragments, the fishermen noticed interestedly as they panted up, this time rather closer to shore. One of them a head. A red head.

“Is he going to make it, do you think?” asked Wulfgar. They could see the man clearly now, fifty yards out in the water, hanging still and making no effort to swim farther as he eyed the great waves pounding in to destroy themselves on the shore.

“He's going to try,” replied Godwin, motioning men forward to the watermark. “If he does, we'll grab him.”

Redbeard had made his mind up and started to swim forward, hurling the water aside with great strokes of his arms. He had seen the great wave coming behind him. It lifted him, he was swept forward, straining to keep himself on top of the wave as if he could propel himself up the beach and land as weightlessly as the white foam that crawled almost to the soles of the thanes' leather shoes. For ten strokes he was there, the watchers turning their heads up to look at him as he swung to the crest of the wave. Then the wave in front, retreating, checked his progress in a great swirl of sand and stone, the crest broke, dissolved. Smashed him down with a grunt and a snap. Rolled him helplessly forward. Dragged him back with the undertow.

“Go in and get him,” yelled Godwin. “Move, you hare-hearts! He can't hurt you.”

Two of the fishermen darted forward between the waves, grabbed an arm each and hauled him back, for a moment waist-deep amid the smother but then out, the redbeard braced between them.

“He's still alive,” muttered Wulfgar in astonishment. “I thought that wave was enough to break his spine.”

The redbeard's feet touched the shore, he looked round at the eighty men confronting him, his teeth showed suddenly in a flashing grin.

“What welcome,” he remarked.

He turned in the grip of his two rescuers, placed the outside of his foot on one man's shin, raked it down with full weight onto the instep. The man howled and let go the brawny arm he was clutching. Instantly the arm swept across, two fingers extended, driving deep into the eyes of the man still holding on. He, too, shrieked and fell to his knees, blood starting from between his fingers. The Viking plucked the gutting-knife from his belt, stepped forward, seized the nearest Englishman with one hand and stabbed savagely upwards with the other. As the fisherman's mates leapt back, shouting in alarm, he snatched a spear, whipped the knife back and hurled it, grabbed a sax from the hand of the fallen man. Ten heartbeats after his feet touched the shore he was the center of a semicircle of men, all backing away from him, except the two still lying at his feet.

His teeth showed again as he threw his head back in a wild guffaw. “Come now,” he shouted gutturally. “I one, you many. Come to fight with Ragnar. Who is great one who comes first? You. Or you.” He flourished his spear at Godwin and Wulfgar, now isolated, mouths gaping, by the fishermen still drawing respectfully back.

“We'll have to take him,” muttered Godwin, drawing his broadsword with a wheep. “I wish I had my shield.”

Wulfgar followed suit, stepping sideways, pushing back the fair-haired boy who stood a pace behind him. “Go back, Alfgar. If we can disarm him the churls will finish it for us.”

The two Englishmen edged forward, swords drawn, facing the bearlike figure which stood grinning, waiting for them, the blood and water still surging round his feet.

Then he was in motion, heading straight for Wulfgar, moving with the speed and ferocity of a charging boar. Wulfgar sprang back in shock, landed awkwardly, a foot twisting under him. The Viking missed with a lefthand slash, poised the right arm for a downward killing thrust.

Something jerked the redbeard off his feet, hurled him backward, struggling helplessly to free an arm, twisted him round and threw him heavily into the wet sand. A net. A fisherman's net. The reeve and two more jumped forward, seized handfuls of tarry cordage, jerked the net tighter. One twitched the sax from an enmeshed hand, another stamped savagely on the fingers holding the spear, breaking shaft and bones in the same movement. They rolled the helpless man quickly, expertly, like a dangerous dogfish or herring-shark. They straightened, looking down, and waited for orders.

Wulfgar limped over, exchanging glances with Godwin. “What have we caught here?” he muttered. “Something tells me this is no two-ship chieftain out of luck.”

He eyed the garments of the netted man, reached down and felt them.

“Goatskin,” he said. “Goatskin with pitch on. He called himself Ragnar. We've caught Lothbrok himself. Ragnar Lothbrok. Ragnar Hairy-Breeks.”

“We can't deal with him,” said Godwin in the silence. “He'll have to go to King Ella.”

Another voice broke in, the voice of the dark boy who had questioned the reeve.

“King Ella?” he said. “I thought Osbert was king of the Northumbrians.”

Godwin turned to Wulfgar with weary politeness. “I don't know how you discipline your people in the North-folk,” he remarked. “But if he were mine and said something like that I'd have his tongue torn out. Unless he's your kin, of course.”

In the lightless stable no one could see him. The dark boy leaned his face on the saddle and let himself slump. His back was like fire, the wool tunic sticky with blood, rasping and pulling free at every movement. The beating had been the worst he had ever suffered, and he had suffered many, many thrashings from rope and leather, bent over the horse-trough in the yard of the place he called home.

It was that remark about kin that had done it, he knew. He hoped he had not cried out so that the strangers would hear him. Toward the end he hadn't been able to tell. Pained memories of dragging himself out into the daylight. Then the long ride across the Wolds, trying to hold himself straight. What would happen now they were in Eoforwich? Once upon a time the fabled city, home of the long-departed but mysterious Rome-folk and their legions, had stirred his fervent imagination more than the songs of glory of the minstrels. Now he was here, and he only wanted to escape.

When would he be free of his father's guilt? Of his stepfather's hate?

Shef pulled himself together and began to unbuckle the girth, dragging at the heavy leather. Wulfgar, he was sure, would soon formally enslave him, put the iron collar round his neck, ignore the faint protests of his mother, and sell him in the market at Thetford or Lincoln. He would get a good price. In childhood Shef had hung around the village forge, drawn by the fire, hiding from the abuse and the thrashings. Slowly he had come to help the smith, pumping the bellows, holding the tongs, beating out the iron blooms. Making his own tools. Making his own sword.

They would not let him keep it once he was a slave. Maybe he should run now. Slaves sometimes got away. Usually not.

He pulled off the saddle and groped round the unfamiliar stable for a place to stow it. The door opened, bringing in light, a candle, and the familiar cold, scornful voice of Alfgar.

“Not finished yet? Then drop it, I'll send a groom. My father is called to council with the king and the great ones. He must have a servant behind his chair to pour his ale. It is not fitting for me to do it and the companions are too proud. Go, now. The king's bower-thane waits to instruct you.”

Shef plodded out into the courtyard of the king's great wooden hall, new-built within the square of the old Roman ramparts, into the dim light of the spring evening, almost too tired to walk straight. And yet, inside him, something stirred, something hot and excited. Council? Great ones? They would decide the fate of the prisoner, the mighty warrior. It would be a story to tell Godive, one that none of the wiseacres of Emneth could match.

“And keep your mouth shut,” a voice hissed from inside the stable. “Or he will have your tongue torn out. And remember: Ella is king in Northumbria now. And you are no kin to my father.”

Chapter Two

“We think he's Ragnar Lothbrok,” King Ella asked his council. “How do we know?” He looked down a long table with a dozen men seated round it, all of them on low stools except for the king himself, who was on a great carven high seat. Most of them were dressed like the king, or like Wulfgar, who sat at Ella's left hand: in brightly colored cloaks, still pulled round them against the drafts that swirled in from every corner and closed shutter, making the tallow-dipped torches flare and eddy; gold and silver round wrists and brawny necks; clasps and buckles and heavy sword-belts. They were the military aristocracy of Northumbria, the petty rulers of great blocks of land in the south and east of the kingdom, the men who had put Ella on the throne and driven out his rival Osbert. They sat on their stools awkwardly, like men who spent their lives on foot or in the saddle.

Four other men stood out against them, grouped at the foot of the table as if in conscious isolation. Three wore the black gowns and cowls of the monks of St. Benedict, the fourth the purple and white of a bishop. They sat easily, bending forward over the table, wax tablets and styli ready to record what was said, or to pass their thoughts to one another in secret.

One man made ready to answer his king's question: Cuthred, captain of the bodyguard.

“We can't find anyone to recognize him,” he admitted. “Everyone who ever stood face-to-face with Ragnar in battle is dead—except,” he remarked courteously, “the gallant thane of King Edmund who has joined us. However, that doesn't prove this one is Ragnar Lothbrok.

“But I think he is. One, he won't talk. I reckon I'm good at getting people to talk, and anyone who won't is not a common pirate. This one for sure thinks he's somebody.

“Another, it fits. What were those ships doing? They were coming back from the south, they'd been blown off course, they hadn't seen sun nor stars for days. Otherwise skippers like that—and the Bridlington reeve says they were good—wouldn't have got into that state. And they were cargo ships. What cargo do you take south? Slaves. They don't want wool, they don't want furs, they don't want ale. Those were slavers on their way back from the countries down south. The man's a slaver who's a somebody, and that fits Ragnar. Doesn't prove it, though.”

Cuthred took a heavy pull at his ale-mug, exhausted by eloquence.

“But there's one thing that makes me sure. What do we know about Ragnar?” He looked round the table. “Right, he's a bastard.”

“Church-despoiler,” agreed Archbishop Wulfhere from the end of the table. “Ravisher of nuns. Thief of the brides of Christ. Assuredly his sins shall find him out.”

“I dare say,” agreed Cuthred. “One thing I have heard about him is this, and I've only heard it about him, not all the other Church-despoilers and ravishers there are in the world. Ragnar is very big on information. He's like me. He's good at getting people to talk. The way he does it, I hear, is this”—A note of professional interest crept into the captain's voice.—“If he catches someone, first thing he does—no talk, no argument—is gouge one eye out. Then he still doesn't talk, he reaches round and gets the man's head ready for the next one. If the man thinks of something Ragnar really wants to know while he's getting ready, all right, he's in business. If he doesn't, well, too bad. They say Ragnar wastes a lot of people, but then churls aren't worth a lot on the block. They say he reckons it saves him a lot of time and breath.”

“And our prisoner has told you this is his view too?” It was one of the black monks who spoke, his voice dripping condescension. “In the course of a friendly discussion on professional matters?”

“No.” Cuthred took another pull at his ale. “But I looked at his nails. All clipped short. Except the right thumbnail. It's been grown an inch long. Hard as steel. I got it here.” He tossed a bloody claw onto the table.

“So it's Ragnar,” said King Ella in the silence. “So what do we do with him?”

The warriors exchanged puzzled looks. “Like you mean beheading's too good for him?” ventured Cuthred. “We should hang him instead?”

“Or something worse?” put in one of the other nobles. “Like a runaway slave or something? Maybe the monks—what was that story about Holy Saint… Saint…? The one with the gridiron, or…” His imagination ran out; he fell into silence.

“I have another idea,” said Ella. “We could let him go.”

Consternation faced him. The king leaned forward from his high seat, his sharp, mobile face and keen eyes passing to each man in turn.

“Think. Why am I king? I'm king because Osbert”—the forbidden name sent a visible shudder through the listening men, and called an answering twinge from the lacerated back of the servant who stood listening behind Wulfgar's stool—“because Osbert could not defend this kingdom against the Viking raiders. He just did what we'd always done. Told everyone to keep a lookout and organize their own defense. So we had ten shiploads land on a town and do what they liked while the other towns and parishes pulled the blankets over their heads and thanked God it wasn't them. What did I do? You know what I did. I pulled everyone back except the lookout stations, I organized the rider teams, I set up the mounted levies at the vital places. Now, they come down on us, we have a chance of coming down on them before they get too far, of teaching them a lesson. New ideas.

“I think we need another new idea here. We can let him go. We can do a deal with him. He stays away from Northumbria, he gives us hostages, we treat him as an honored guest till the hostages come, we send him off with a pile of presents. Doesn't cost us too much. Could save us a lot. By the time he's exchanged he'll have got over Cuthred's conversation with him. All part of the game. What do you say?”

The warriors looked at each other, eyebrows rising, heads shaking in surprise.

“Might work,” muttered Cuthred.

Wulfgar cleared his throat to speak, a look of displeasure crossing his reddened face. He was cut off by a voice from the black monks at the end of the table.

“You may not do that, my lord.”

“May not?”

“Must not. You have other duties than those in this world. The archbishop, our reverend father and former brother, has reminded us of the foul deeds done by this Ragnar against Christ's Church. Deeds done against us as men and Christians—those we are commanded to forgive. But deeds done against Holy Church—those we must avenge with all our heart and all our strength. How many churches has this Ragnar burned? How many Christian men and women carried off to sell to the pagans and worse, to the followers of Mohammed? How many precious relics destroyed? And the gifts of the faithful stolen?

“It would be a sin against your soul to forgive these deeds. It would imperil the salvation of every man around this table. No, King, give him to us. Let us show you what we have made for you, for those who molest Mother Church. And when the news of that reaches back to the pagans, the robbers from the sea, let them know that Mother Church's arm is as heavy as her mercy is long. Let us give him to the serpent-pit. Let us make men talk of the worm-yard of King Ella.”

The king hesitated, fatally. Before he could speak, the sharp agreement of the other monks and of the archbishop was echoed by the rumble of surprise, curiosity, approval from his warriors.

“I have never seen a man given to the worms,” said Wulfgar, his face beaming with pleasure. “It is what every Viking in the world deserves. And so I shall say when I return to my own king, and I shall praise the wisdom and the cunning of King Ella.”

The black monk who had spoken rose to his feet: Erkenbert the dreaded archdeacon. “The worms are ready. Have the prisoner taken to them. And let all attend—councillors, warriors, servants—to see the wrake and the vengeance of King Ella and Mother Church.”

The council rose, Ella among them, his face still clouded by doubt, but swept along by the agreement of his men. The nobles began to jostle out, calling already for their servants, friends, wives, women to join them, to see the new thing. Shef, turning to follow his stepfather, looked back at the last moment to see the black monks still clustered in a little knot at the end of the table.

“Why did you say that?” muttered Archbishop Wulfhere to his archdeacon. “We could pay a toll to the Vikings and still save our immortal souls. Why did you force the king to send this Ragnar to the serpents?”

The monk reached in his pouch and, like Cuthred, threw an object on the table. Then another.

“What are those, my lord?”

“This is a coin. A gold coin. With the script of the abominable worshippers of Mohammed on it!”

“It was taken from the prisoner.”

“You mean—he is too evil to let live?”

“No, my lord. The other coin?”

“It is a penny. A penny from our own mint here in Eoforwich. It has my own name on it, see—Wulfhere. A silver penny.”

The archdeacon picked up both coins and stowed them back in his pouch. “A very bad penny, my lord. Little silver, much lead. All the Church can afford in these days. Our slaves run away, our churls cheat on their tithes. Even the nobles give as little as they dare. Meanwhile the heathens' pouches drip with gold, stolen from believers.

“The Church is in danger, my lord. Not that she may be defeated and pillaged by the heathen, grievous though that is, for from that we may recover. It is that the heathens and the Christians may make common cause. For then they will find that they have no need of us. We must not let them deal.”

Nods of agreement, even from the archbishop.

“So. To the serpents.”

The serpent-pit was an old stone cistern from the time of the Rome-folk, with a light roof hastily erected over it to keep off the drizzle. The monks of St. Peter's Minster in Eoforwich were tender of their pets, the shining worms. All last summer the word had gone out to their many tenants scattered across the Church lands of Northumbria: Find the adders, seek them out in their basking places on the high fells, bring them in. So much remission of rent, so much remission of tithes for a foot-long worm; more for a foot and a half; more, disproportionately more for the old, the grandfather worms. Not a week had passed without a squirming bag being delivered to the custos viperarum—the keeper of the snakes—its contents to be lovingly tended, fed on frogs and mice, and on each other to promote their growth: “Dragon does not become dragon till it has tasted worm,” the custos would say to his brothers. “Maybe the same is true of our adders.”

Now lay brothers racked torches round the walls of the stone court to augment the evening twilight, carried in sacks of warm sand and straw and spread it on the floor of the pit to make the serpents fiery and active. And now the custos too appeared, smiling with satisfaction, waving along a gang of novices, each the proud—if careful—bearer of a leather sack that hissed and bulged disconcertingly. The custos took each bag in turn, held it up to the crowd now pushing and jostling round the low walls of the cistern, undid the lashings, and slowly poured the struggling inhabitants down into the pit. He moved a few paces as he did each one, to distribute his serpents evenly. His task done, he stepped back to the edge of the lane kept open for the great ones by brawny companions—the king's own hearth-troop.

They came at last: the king, his council, their body-servants, the prisoner pushed along in the middle of them. There was a saying among the warriors of the North: “A man should not limp while both his legs are the same length.” And Ragnar did not limp now. Yet he found it hard to hold himself straight. Cuthred's ministrations had not been gentle.

The great ones fell back when they came to the edge of the pit, and let the prisoner see what he faced. He grinned through broken teeth, his hands tied behind him, a powerful guard holding each arm. He still wore the strange shaggy clothes of tarred goatskin which had brought him his name. Erkenbert the archdeacon pushed forward to face him.

“That is the worm-yard,” he said.

“Orm-garth,” corrected Ragnar.

The priest spoke again, in simple English, the trade-talk of the merchants. “Know this. You have a choice. If you become Christian, you live. As a slave. No orm-garth then for you. But you must become Christian.”

The Viking's mouth twisted in contempt. He spoke in reply, still in the trade-tongue. “You priests. I know your talk. You say I live. How? As a slave, you say. What you not say, but I know, is how. No eyes, no tongue. Cut legs, cut hough-sinews, no walk.”

His voice rose to a chant. “I fought in the front for thirty winters, always I struck with the sword. Four hundred men I killed, a thousand women I ravished, many minsters I burned, many men's bairns I sold. Many have wept for me, I never wept for them. Now I come to the orm-garth, like Gunnar the god-born. Do your worst, let the shining worm sting me to the heart. I shall not ask for mercy. Always I struck with the sword!”

“Get on with it,” snarled Ella from behind the Viking. The guards began to hustle him forward.

“Stop!” Erkenbert called. “First bind his legs.”

They tied the unresisting man roughly, pulled him to the edge, balanced him on the wall, then—he looking round at the pushing but silent crowd—shoved him over. He fell a few feet, landing with a thump on top of a pile of crawling snakes. Instantly they hissed, instantly they struck.

The man in the shaggy tunic and breeches laughed once from the ground.

“They cannot bite through,” called a voice in disappointment. “His clothes are too thick.”

“They may strike at his hands or face,” called the serpent-keeper, jealous for the honor of his pets.

One of the largest adders indeed lay a few inches from Ragnar's face, the two staring almost eye-to-eye, the forked tongue of the one almost touching the chin of the other. A long moment of pause.

Then, suddenly, the man's head moved, shooting sideways, teeth agape. A threshing of coils, a mouth spitting blood, the snake lay headless. Again the Viking laughed. Slowly he began to roll, humping his body despite the bound arms and legs, trying to fall on the snakes with the full weight of hip or shoulder.

“He's killing them,” cried the custos in mortal pain.

Ella moved forward in sudden disgust, clicking his fingers. “You and you. You've stout boots on. Go in and lift him out.

“I'll not forget this,” he added in an undertone to the disconcerted Erkenbert. “You've made a damned fool of all of us.

“Now, you men, free his arms, free his legs, cut his clothes off, bind him again. You and you, go fetch hot water. Serpents desire heat. If we warm his skin they will be drawn to it.

“One more thing. He will lie still this time, to thwart us. Bind one arm to his body and tie the left wrist to a rope. Then we can make him move.”

They lowered the prisoner again, still grinning, still un-speaking. This time the king himself steered the lowering to the spot where the snakes lay thickest. In a few moments they began to crawl to the warm body steaming in the chill air, writhing over it. Cries of disgust came from the women and servants in the crowd as they imagined the scales of the fat adders brushing over bare skin.

Then the king jerked his rope, again and again. The arm moved, the adders hissed, the disturbed ones struck, felt flesh, struck again and again, filling the man's body with their poison. Slowly, slowly, the awed watchers saw his face begin to change, to puff, to turn blue. As his eyes and tongue began to bulge, finally he called out once more.

“Gnythja mundu grisir ef galtar hag vissi,” he remarked.

“What did he say?” muttered the crowd. “What does that mean?”

I know no Norse, thought Shef from his vantage point. But I know that bodes no good.

“Gnythja mundu grisir ef galtar hag vissi.” The words still rang in the mind of the massive man, weeks later and hundreds of miles to the east, who was standing in the prow of the longship easing gently up toward the Sjaelland shore. It was sheer chance that he had ever come to hear them. Had Ragnar been talking to himself alone? he mused. Or had he known someone would hear, would understand and remember? It must have been very long odds against anyone in an English court knowing Norse, or anyway, enough Norse to understand what Ragnar had said. But dying men were supposed to have insight. Maybe they could tell the future. Maybe Ragnar had known, or had guessed, what his words would do.

But if those were the words of fate, which would always find someone to speak them, they had chosen a strange route to come to him! In the crowd pushing round the orm-garth there had been a woman, concubine to an English noble, a “lemman,” as the English called such girls. But before she had been bought for her master in the slave-mart of London, she had plied the same trade in the court of King Maelsechnaill in Ireland, where much Norse was spoken. She had heard, she had understood. She had had the wit not to tell her master—lemmans without wit did not live to see their beauty fade—but she had whispered it to her secret lover, a trader going south. He had passed it on to the other members of his caravan. And among them there had been another slave, a former fisherman on the run, one who had taken special interest in it because he had seen the actual capture of Ragnar on the shore. In London, thinking himself safe, the slave had made a story of it to earn himself mugs of ale and hunks of bacon in the waterfront booths where all men were welcome, English or Frankish, Frisian or Dane, as long as their silver was good. And so the tale had come in the end to Northern ears.

The slave had been a fool, a man of no honor. He had seen in the tale of the death of Ragnar only excitement, strangeness, humor.

The massive man in the longship—Brand—saw in it much more. That was why he brought the news.

The boat was gliding in now along a long fjord, reaching into the flat, rich countryside of Sjaelland, easternmost of the Danish islands. There was no wind; the sail was furled up against the yard, the thirty oarsmen rowing a steady, unhurried, practiced stroke, the ripples of their progress fanning out across the flat, pondlike sea to caress the shore. Cows moved gently in rich meadows, fields of thickly shooting grain stretched into the distance.

The air of peace was totally deceptive, Brand knew. He was at the still center of the greatest storm in the North, its peace guaranteed only by hundreds of miles of war-torn sea and burning coastline. As they rowed in he had been challenged three times by naval patrols—heavy coastal warships never designed for the open sea, filled with men. They had let him through with increasing amusement, always keen to see a man try his luck. Even now two ships twice the size of his were cruising behind him, just to make certain there was no escape. He knew, his men knew, that worse lay ahead.

Behind him the helmsman passed the steering-oar to a crewman and strolled forward to the prow. For a few moments he stood behind his skipper, his head barely reaching the huge man's shoulder blade, and then spoke. He spoke softly, taking care not to be overheard even by the foremost rowers.

“You know I'm not one to question decisions,” he murmured. “But since we're here, and we've all stuck our pizzles well and truly in the wasps' nest, maybe you won't mind me asking why?”

“Since you came so far without asking,” replied Brand in the same low tones, “I'll give you three reasons and charge you for none of them.

“One: This is our chance to gain lasting glory. This will be a scene for sagamakers and for poets until the Last Day, when the gods fight the giants and the brood of Loki is loosed on the world.”

The helmsman grinned. “You have enough glory already, champion of the men of Halogaland. And some men say the ones we are going to meet are the brood of Loki. Especially one of them.”

“Two, then: That English slave, the runaway who told us the tale, the fisherman running from the Christ-monks—did you see his back? His masters deserve all the woe in the world, and I can send it to them.”

This time the helmsman laughed aloud, but gently. “Did you ever see anyone after Ragnar had finished talking to him? And those we are going to visit are worse. Especially one of them. Maybe he and the Christ-monks deserve each other. But what of all the others?”

“So, then, Steinulf, it comes to three.” Brand lifted gently the silver pendant which hung round his neck and lay on his chest, outside the tunic: a short-hafted, double-headed hammer. “I was asked to do this, as a service.”

“By whom?”

“Someone we both know. In the name of the one who will come from the North.”

“Ah. Well. That is good enough for both of us. Maybe for all of us. But I am going to do one thing before we get too close to the shore.”

Deliberately, making certain his skipper saw what he was doing, the helmsman took the pendant which hung round his own neck and tucked it inside his tunic, pulling the collar so that no trace of the chain showed.

Slowly, Brand turned to face his crew and followed suit. At a word, the steady beat of the oars in the calm water checked. The oarsmen shuffled chains and pendants out of sight. Then the beat of oars resumed.

At the jetty ahead men could now be seen sitting or strolling, never looking at the approaching warboat, giving a perfect impression of total indifference. Behind them a vast dragon-hall lay like an upturned keel; behind it and round it, a vast confusion of sheds, bunkhouses, rollers, boatyards on the edge of the fjord, smithies, stores, rope-walks, corrals, barracoons. This was the heart of a naval empire, the power center of men intent on challenging kingdoms, the home of the homeless warriors.

The man sitting on the very end of the jetty ahead of him stood up, yawned, stretched elaborately and looked in the other direction. Danger. Brand turned to shout orders. Two of his men standing by the halliards ran a shield up to the masthead, its new-painted white face a sign of peace. Two others ran forward and eased the gaping dragon-head off its pegs on the prow, turning it carefully away from the shore and wrapping it in a cloth.

More men onshore suddenly became visible, now prepared to look directly at the boat. They gave no sign of welcome, but Brand knew that if he had not observed proper ceremonial his welcome would have been very different. At the thought of what might have happened—might still happen—he felt his belly give an unaccustomed twinge, as if his manhood was trying to crawl back within him. He turned his face out to the far shore, to ensure no expression betrayed him. He had been taught since he could crawl, Never show fear. Never show pain. He valued this more than life itself.

He knew also that in the gamble he was about to take, nothing could be less safe than a show of insecurity. He meant to bait his deadly hosts, draw them into his story: appear as a challenger, not a suppliant.

He meant to offer them a dare so shocking and so public that they would have no choice but to take it. It was not a plan that allowed half measures.

As the boat nosed into the jetty ropes were thrown, caught, snubbed round bollards, still with the same elaborate air of carelessness. A man was looking down into the boat. If this had been a trading port he might have asked the sailors what cargo, what name, where from? Here the man raised one eyebrow.

“Brand. From England.”

“There are many men called Brand.”

At a sign two of the ship's crewmen swung a gangplank from ship to jetty. Brand strolled across it, thumbs in belt, and stood facing the dockmaster. On the level boards he was looking down. Far down. He noted with inner pleasure the slight shift of the eyes as the dockmaster, no stripling himself, weighed up Brand's bulk, realized that man-to-man, at least, he was outmatched.

“Some men call me Viga-Brand. I come from Halogaland, in Norway, where men grow bigger than Danes.”

“Killer-Brand. I have heard of you. But there are many killers here. It needs more than a name to be welcome.”

“I have news. News for the kinsmen.”

“It had better be news worth hearing if you disturb the kinsmen, coming here without leave or passport.”

“News worth hearing it is.” Brand looked directly into the dockmaster's eyes. “Come to hear it yourself. Tell your men to come and hear it. Anyone who cannot be bothered to hear what I have to say will curse his laziness till the last day he lives. But of course if you all have an urgent appointment in the privy let me not ask you to keep your breeches up.”

Brand brushed past the other and strode wordlessly toward the plume of smoke rising from the great longhouse, the hall of the noble kinsmen, the place no enemy had seen and left alive and free to tell the tale—the Braethraborg itself. His men trooped off the ship and silently began to follow him.

The dockmaster's lips twitched, finally, with amusement. He made a sign and his men, picking their spears and bows from concealment, began to straggle inland. A flag dipped in acknowledgement from the still-vigilant outposts on the headland two miles off.

Light shone into the hall from many open shutters, but Brand halted when he got inside to let his eyes adjust, to look around, to get the feel of his audience. In later years, he knew, this scene would be famous in song and saga—if he played it right. In the next few minutes he would gain either imperishable glory or unthinkable death.

Inside the hall many men were sitting, standing, loitering, playing at one game or another. None looked at him as he came in, or at the other men silently filtering in behind him, but he knew they had registered his presence. As his eyes cleared he saw slowly that though there was no apparent order in the hall, indeed a careful avoidance of it—a pretense that all warriors, all true drengir, were equal—still the groupings of the men were all subtly poised on one center. At the end of the hall, there was a little space no one ventured into. There four men were grouped, all seeming intent on their own concerns.

He walked toward them, the padding of his soft seaman's shoes audible in what had indiscernibly become silence.

He reached the four men. “Greetings!” he said, pitching his voice loud for the audience clustered around and behind him. “I have news. News for the sons of Ragnar.”

One of the four glanced over his shoulder at him, went back to paring his fingernails with a knife. “Great news it must be, for a man to come to the Braethraborg without invitation or passport.”

“Great news it is.” Brand filled his lungs and controlled his breathing. “For it is news of the death of Ragnar.”

Utter silence now. The man who had spoken continued his paring, intent on his left index finger, the knife slicing, slicing. Blood sprang out, the knife cut on down, down to the quick and the bone. The man made no sound and no movement.

A second one of the four spoke, picking up a stone piece from the checkerboard to make his move, a powerful, thick-shouldered man with grizzled hair. “Tell us,” he remarked, his voice carefully unperturbed, deliberately refusing to show unmanly emotion. “How did our old father Ragnar die? For it is not to be surprised at, since he was getting on in years.”

“It all began on the coast of England, where he was wrecked. According to the story I heard, he was caught by the men of King Ella.” Brand changed his voice slightly, as if to match, or to mock, the second Ragnarsson's studied pretense of imperturbability. “I do not suppose they had much trouble, for, as you say, he was getting on in years. Maybe he offered no resistance.”

The grizzled man still held his draughtsman, his fingers closing on it tighter, tighter. Blood spurted out from under his fingernails, splashed on the board. The man put the piece down, moved it once, twice, lifted the captured draughtsman to the side. “I take, Ivar,” he remarked.

The man he was playing with spoke. He was a man with hair so fair it was almost white, swept back off his pale face and held with a linen headband. He looked at Brand with eyes as colorless as frozen water, under lashes that never blinked.

“What did they do once they had caught him?”

Brand looked carefully into the pale man's unblinking stare. He shrugged, still elaborately unconcerned.

“They took him to King Ella's court at Eoforwich. It was no great matter, for they thought him only a common pirate, of no importance. I believe they asked him some questions, had some little sport with him. But then, tiring of him, they decided they might as well put him to death.”

In the dead silence Brand studied his fingernails, conscious that his baiting of the Ragnarssons had almost reached its climax of danger. He shrugged again.

“Well. They gave him to the Christ-priests in the end. I expect he did not seem worthy of death from the warriors.”

A flush shot into the pale man's cheeks. He seemed to be holding his breath, almost choking. The flush deepened, deepened till his face was scarlet. He began to sway to and fro in his chair, a kind of coughing coming from deep in his throat. His eyes bulged, the scarlet deepened to purple—in the dim light of the hall, almost to black. Slowly the swaying stopped, the man seemed to win some deep internal battle within himself, the coughing died, the face ebbed back to a startling pallor.

The fourth man who stood by his three brothers, watching the draughts game, was leaning on a spear. He had not moved or spoken, had kept his eyes down. Slowly now he raised them to look at Brand. For the first time the tall messenger flinched. There was something in the eyes he had heard of but had never believed: the pupils astonishingly black, the iris around them as white as new-fallen snow—startlingly clear—and surrounding the black totally, like the paint around an iron shield-boss. The eyes glinted like moonlight on metal.

“How did King Ella and the Christ-priests decide to kill the old man, in the end?” asked the fourth of the Ragnarssons, his voice low, almost gentle. “I suppose you will be telling us it did not take much doing.”

Brand answered bluntly and truthfully, taking no more risks. “They put him in the serpent-pit, the worm-yard, the orm-garth. I understand there was some little trouble, as to begin with the snakes would not bite and then—from what I heard—Ragnar bit them first. But in the end they bit him and he died. It was a slow death, and no weapon-mark on him. Not one to be proud of in Valhalla.”

The man with the strange eyes did not move a muscle. There was a pause, a long pause, as the intently watching audience waited for him to make some sign that he had heard, for him to show some failure in self-control like his brothers. It did not come. The man straightened finally, tossed the spear he had been leaning on to a bystander, hooked his thumbs in his belt, prepared to speak.

A grunt front the bystander, a grunt of surprise, drawing all eyes to him. Silently he held up the tough ashwood spear he had been thrown. On it men could see indentations, marks where fingers had gripped. A slight hum of satisfaction ran round the hall.

Before the man with the strange eyes could speak, Brand interrupted, seizing the moment. Pulling his mustache thoughtfully, he remarked, “There was one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“After the snakes had bitten him, as he lay dying, Ragnar spoke. They did not understand him, of course, for he spoke in our tongue, in the norroent mal, but someone heard, someone passed it on; in the end I was fortunate enough to come by it. I have no invitation and no passport, as you said just now, but it occurred to me you might be interested enough to want to know.”

“What did he say, then, the old man dying?”

Brand lifted his voice loudly so that it filled the whole hall, like a herald issuing a challenge. “He said, ‘Gynthja mundu grisir ef galtar hag vissi.’ ”

This time there was no need to translate. The whole hall knew what Ragnar had said: “If they knew how the old boar died, how the little pigs would grunt.”

“So that is why I came uninvited,” called Brand, his voice still high and challenging. “Though some told me it might be dangerous. I am a man who likes to hear grunting. And so I came to tell the little pigs. And you must be the little pigs, from what men tell me. You, Halvdan Ragnarsson”—he nodded to the man with the knife. “You, Ubbi Ragnarsson”—the first draughts-player. “You, Ivar Ragnarsson, famous for your white hair. And you, Sigurth Ragnarsson. I see now why men call you Orm-i-auga, the Snake-eye.

“It is not likely that my news has pleased you. But I hope you will agree that it was news you should be told.”

The four men were on their feet now, all facing him, the pretense of indifference gone. As they took in his words, they nodded. Slowly, they were beginning to grin, their expressions all the same, looking for the first time as if they were all a family, all brothers, all sons of the same man. Their teeth showed.

It was the prayer of the monks and minister-men in those days: Domine, libera nos a furore normannorum—“Lord, deliver us from the fury of the Northmen.” If they had seen those faces, any sensible monk would have added immediately: Sed praesepe, Domine, a humore eorum—“But especially, Lord, from their mirth.”

“It was news we should be told,” said the Snake-eye, “and we thank you for bringing it. At the start we thought you might not be telling all the truth about this matter, and that was why we may have seemed displeased. But what you said at the end—ah, that was our father's voice. He knew someone would hear it. He knew someone would tell us. And he knew what we would do. Didn't he, boys?”

A gesture, and someone rolled forward a great round chopping block, an oak trunk sawn off. A heave from the four brothers together, and it crashed down firm on the floor. The sons of Ragnar clustered round it, facing their men, each raising one foot and placing it on the block. They spoke together, following the ritual:

“Now we stand on this block, and we make this boast, that we will—”

“…invade England in vengeance for our father”—so Halvdan said.

“…capture King Ella and kill him with torments for Ragnar's death”—so Ubbi.

“…defeat all the kings of the English and bring the land into subjection to us”—so Sigurth the Snake-eye.

“…wreak vengeance on the black crows, the Christ-priests who counseled the orm-garth”—so Ivar spoke. They ended again together:

“…and if we go back on our words let the gods of Asgarth despise us and reject us, and may we never join our father and our ancestors in their dwellings.”

As they ended, the smoke-blackened beams of the long-house were filled with a roar of approval from four hundred throats, the jarls, the nobles, the skippers, and the helmsmen of the whole pirate fleet in unison. Outside, the rank and file gathering from their booths and bunkhouses nudged each other with excitement and anticipation, knowing that a decision had been made.

“And now,” the Snake-eye yelled over the din, “pull out the tables, spread the boards. No man may inherit from his father till he has drunk the funeral ale. And so we shall drink the arval for Ragnar, drink like heroes. And in the morning we shall gather every man and every ship and take our way to England, so that they shall never forget us nor be quit of us!

“But now, drink. And, stranger, sit at our board and tell us more of our father. There will be a place for you in England once it is ours.”

Far away, Shef, the dark boy, the stepson of Wulfgar, lay on a straw pallet. The mist was still rising from the dank ground of Emneth, and only a thin old blanket covered him from it. Inside the stout-timbered wooden hall, his stepfather Wulfgar lay in comfort, if not in love, with the boy's mother, the lady Thryth. Alfgar lay in a warm bed in a room by his parents, and so too did Godive, the concubine's child, Wulfgar's daughter. At Wulfgar's homecoming they had all eaten lavishly of the roasted and the boiled, the baked and the brewed—duck and goose from the fens, pike and lamprey from the rivers.

Shef had eaten rye porridge and gone out to his solitary hut by the smithy where he worked, to have his only friend dress his new-got scars. Now he was tossing in the grip of a dream. If dream it was.

He saw a dark field somewhere on the edge of the world, lit only by a purple sky. On the field lay shapeless huddles of rags and bone and skin, white skulls and rib cages showing through the remains of gorgeous garments. Round the huddles, everywhere on the field, hopped and swarmed a great army of birds—huge black birds with black beaks, stabbing savagely into eye sockets and pecking bone-joints for a morsel of flesh or marrow. But the bodies had been picked over many times, the bones were dry; the birds began to croak loudly and peck at each other instead.

They ceased, they grew quiet, they clustered together to where four black birds were standing. They listened as the four croaked and croaked in ever louder and more menacing tones. Then the whole flock rose as one into the purple sky, circled and closed formation, then banked slowly like a single organism and flew directly toward him, toward Shef, to where he was standing. The leader flew straight at him, he could see the remorseless unblinking golden eye, the black beak pointed at his face. It did not pull back, he could not move; something was holding his head firm and rigid; he felt the black beak driving deep into the soft jelly of his eye.

Shef woke with a shout and a start, leaping straight off the pallet, clutching his thin blanket round him as he stared out of the hole in his hut's wall into a marshy dawn. His friend Hund called from the other pallet.

“What is it, Shef? What frightened you?”

For a moment he could not reply. Then it came out as a croak—he did not know what he was saying. “The ravens! The ravens are on the wing!”

Chapter Three

“Are you certain it is the Great Army itself which has landed?” Wulfgar's voice was angry but unsure. It was news he did not want to believe. But he did not dare to challenge the messenger openly.

“There is no doubt,” said Edrich, the king's thane, trusted servant of Edmund, king of the East Angles.

“And this army is led by the sons of Ragnar?”

Even more fearful news for Wulfgar, thought Shef as he listened to the debate from the back of the room. Every freeman in Emneth had crowded into their lord's hall, summoned by runners. For though a freeman in England could lose everything—land-right, folk-right, even kin-right—for failing to answer a lawful summons to arms, for that very reason it was also their right to hear all issues debated publicly before they answered any call.

Whether Shef had any right to join them was another matter. But he had not been collared as a slave yet, and the freeman standing by the door to verify presence and absence still owed Shef for his mended ploughshare. He had grunted doubtfully, looked at the sword and shabby scabbard at Shef's side, and decided not to press the point. Now Shef stood at the very back of the room among the poorest cottagers of Emneth, trying to hear without being seen.

“My men have spoken to many churls who have seen them,” said Edrich. “They say this army is led by four great warriors, the sons of Ragnar, all of equal status. Every day the warriors gather round a great banner with the sign of a black raven. It is the Raven Banner.”

Which the daughters of Ragnar wove all in one night, which spreads its wings for victory and droops them for defeat. It was a familiar story, and a fearful one. The deeds of the sons of Ragnar were famous all over Northern Europe, wherever their ships had sailed: England, Ireland, France, Spain, and even the lands beyond in the Middle Sea, from which they had returned years before laden with booty. So why had they now turned their fury on the poor and puny kingdom of the East Angles? Anxiety grew on Wulfgar's face as he pulled his long mustache.

“And where are they camped?”

“In the meadows by the Stour, south of Bedricsward.” Edrich the King's Thane was visibly beginning to lose his patience. He had been over this several times before, and in more than one place. It was the same with every petty landowner. They didn't want information, they wanted a way out of their duty. But he had expected better from this one, famous for his hatred of the Vikings, a man—so he told it—who had stood sword to sword with the famous Ragnar himself.

“So what are we to do?”

“The order of King Edmund is that every freeman of the East Angles capable of bearing arms is to muster at Norwich. Every man over fifteen winters and under fifty. We will match their host with ours.”

“How many of them are there?” called one of the richer tenants from the front.

“Three hundred ships.”

“How many men is that?”

“They row three dozen oars, mostly,” said the king's thane, briefly and reluctantly. This was the sticking point. Once the yokels realized what they were up against, they might be hard to move. But it was his duty to tell them the truth.

There was a silence while every mind confronted the same problem. Shef, faster than the others, spoke aloud.

“Three hundred ships, and three dozen oars. That's nine hundred dozen. Ten dozen is a long hundred. More than ten thousand men. All of them warriors,” he added, more in amazement than fear.

“We can't fight them,” said Wulfgar decisively, turning his glare away from his stepson. “We must pay tribute instead.”

Edrich's patience was at an end. “That is for King Edmund to decide. And he will pay less if the Great Army sees that it is matched by a host of equal size. But I am not here to listen to talk—I bring a summons to obey. You and the landholders of Upwell and Outwell and every village between Ely and Wisbech. The king's order is that we shall muster here and set out for Norwich tomorrow. Every man liable for military service from the village of Emneth must ride or be liable to penalty and punishment from the king. Those are my orders and they are your orders too.” He turned on his heel, facing the room full of stirring, unhappy men. “Freemen of Emneth, what do you say?”

“Aye,” said Shef compulsively.

“He's not a freeman,” snarled Alfgar from his place by his father.

“Then he damned well should be. Or he shouldn't be here. Can't you people make your minds up about anything? You've heard your king's commands.”

But Edrich's words were drowned by a slow, reluctant mutter of assent from sixty throats.

In the Viking camp by the Stour, things were very different. Here the four sons of Ragnar made the decisions. They knew each others' minds too well for more than the briefest discussion.

“They'll pay in the end,” said Ubbi. He and Halvdan were very much like the rest of their army, in both physique and temperament. Halvdan ruddy, the other already grizzled, both of them powerful and dangerous fighters. Not men to be trifled with.

“We must decide now,” grunted Halvdan.

“Who shall it be then?” asked Sigurth.

All four men considered for a few moments. Someone who could do the job, someone experienced. At the same time someone they could afford to lose.

“Sigvarth,” said Ivar finally. His pale face did not move; his colorless eyes remained fixed on the sky; he spoke only the one word. What he said was not a suggestion, but the answer. He who was called the Boneless One, though never in his presence, did not make suggestions. His brothers considered, approved.

“Sigvarth!” called out Sigurth Snake-eye.

A few yards away the jarl of the Small Isles bent over his game at knucklebones. He finished his cast, to show a proper spirit of independence, but then straightened and walked hopefully over to the little group of leaders.

“You called out my name, Sigurth.”

“You have five ships? Good. We think the English and their little King Edmund are trying to play stupid games with us. Resisting, trying to bargain. No good. We want you to go out and show them who they're dealing with. Take your ships up the coast, then round to the west. Push inland, do as much damage as you can, burn some villages. Show them what could happen if they provoke us. You know what to do.”

“Yes. Done it before.” He hesitated. “But what about spoils?”

“Anything you get, it's yours. But loot isn't what this is about. Do something that they will remember. Do it as Ivar would do it.”

The jarl grinned again, but more hesitantly, as most men did when the name of Ivar Ragnarsson the Boneless was mentioned.

“Where will you land?” asked Ubbi.

“Place called Emneth. I was there once before. Found me a nice little chicken.” The jarl's grin was cut off this time by a sudden movement from Ivar.

Sigvarth had given a stupid reason. He was not going on this mission to repeat the escapades of his youth. It was unwarriorlike. It was also the kind of thing Ivar did not discuss.

The moment passed. Ivar leaned back in his chair and turned his attention elsewhere. They knew Sigvarth was not the best in the Army—one of the reasons they were letting him go.

“Do the job and never mind chickens,” said Sigurth. He waved a hand in dismissal.

At least Sigvarth knew the mechanics of his profession. At dawn two days later his five ships were sweeping cautiously into the mouth of the river Ouse, with the tide still on the flow. An hour's rowing at high tide took them as far inland as the water would bear, until the boats' keels grated on the sand. The dragon-prows nuzzled in, the men poured ashore. Instantly the assigned ship-guards backed water, pulled their wave-coursers offshore to the mudbanks, and waited there for the ebb tide to ground them out of reach of any counterattack from the local levies.

The youngest and swiftest men of Sigvarth's command had already moved out. Finding a small stud of ponies they cut down the lad in charge and raced off to round up more. As they captured the horses they sent them back to the main body. By the time the sun struggled through the morning mists a hundred and twenty men were pounding along the twisted and muddy paths towards their goal.

They rode in a hard, disciplined group. Keeping together, without advance or flank guards, counting upon strength and surprise to drive through any resistance. When their path took them up to any inhabited place—farmhouse, garth, or hamlet—the main body halted for as long as it might take a man to piss. The lighter men on the better horses swept round to the flanks and rear and halted, to prevent any escapes that might raise the alarm. Then the main body attacked. Their orders were simple, so simple that Sigvarth had not even bothered to repeat them.

They killed every person they met—man, woman, child, or babe in cradle—immediately, without halting to ask questions or seek for entertainment. Then they remounted and drove on. No looting, not yet. And, on the strictest of instructions, no fire.

By midday a corridor of death was slashed through the peaceful English countryside. Not a single person was left alive. Far behind the attackers men were beginning to notice that their neighbors were not astir, were finding horses missing and corpses in fields, were ringing the church bells and lighting their alarm beacons. But ahead of the Vikings there was not the slightest suspicion of their deadly presence.

The party from Emneth had set out considerably later in the day than Sigvarth's men. They had had to wait for the reluctant contingents from Upwell, Outwell, and beyond. Then there was a long delay while the landholders of the area greeted each other and ponderously exchanged courtesies. Next Wulfgar decided that they could not start on empty bellies and generously called for mulled ale for the leaders and small beer for the men. It was hours after sunrise when the hundred and fifty armed men, the military service of four parishes, set off down the road through the marsh which would lead them across the Ouse and in the end to Norwich. Even at this early stage they were already trailed by stragglers whose girths had broken, or whose bowels had loosened, or who had slipped off to make their farewells to their own wives or to other men's. The troop rode without precautions and without suspicion. The first inkling they had of the Vikings' presence was as they came round a bend in the road and saw heading toward them a tight-packed column of armed men.

Shef was riding just behind the leaders, as close to Edrich the King's Thane as he dared to go. Speaking up at the council had got him Edrich's favor. No one would send him back while Edrich was watching. Yet he was still there, as Alfgar had taken pains to point out to him, as a smith, not as a freeman on military service. At least he still had his self-forged sword.

Shef saw them as soon as the others, and heard the startled cries of the leaders.

“Who are those men?”

“It's the Vikings!”

“No—it can't be! They're in Suffolk. We're still negotiating.”

“It's the Vikings, you porridge-brains! Get your fat arses off your horses and form up for battle. You there, dismount, dismount! Horse-holders to the rear. Get your shields off your backs and form up.”

Edrich the king's thane was by this time bellowing at the top of his voice, whirling his horse round and riding into the tangled confusion of the English column. Slowly men began to appreciate the situation, to drop from their saddles, to root desperately for weapons that they had stowed for comfortable riding. To edge toward the front or toward the rear, depending on personal inclination, boldness or cowardice.

Shef had few preparations to make—the poorest man in the column. He dropped the reins of his nag, a grudging loan from his stepfather, pulled the wooden shield from his back, and loosened his only weapon in its sheath. All the armor he had was a leather jacket with such studs as he had been able to collect sewn onto it. He took position immediately behind Edrich and stood ready, his heart beating fast and excitement clutching his throat—but all outweighed by a vast curiosity. How would the Vikings fight? What was the nature of battle?

On the Viking side, Sigvarth had grasped the situation as soon as he saw the first riders coming toward him. Dropping his heels from their tucked-up riding position, he rose in his saddle, turned, and bellowed a brief command to the men behind him. Instantly the Viking column dissolved in practiced disarray. In a moment they had all dismounted. One man in five, already told off for the task, seized horse-reins and led the mounts to the rear, bending down, as soon as they were clear of the throng, to drive pegs into the ground and knot the reins to them. As soon as this was done, the two dozen horse handlers clustered in the rear and formed a reserve.

Meanwhile the others halted for the space of twenty heartbeats. Some in grim silence, others swiftly reknotting their shoes, or gulping water or pissing as they stood. Then all simultaneously unslung shields, loosened swords, passed their axes to shield-hands, poised the long battle-spears in their casting-hands. Without further words they spread into a line two-deep, from edge to edge of the road, where it dissolved into swamp on either side. At a single shouted word from Sigvarth at they stepped forward at a brisk walk, the flanks falling back until the line formed a broad shallow arrow pointing directly at the English levies. At its apex was Sigvarth himself. Behind him his son Hjörvarth led a picked dozen—the men who, when the English line was broken, would sweep through and round to the rear, cutting men down from behind and turning setback into rout.

Facing them, the English had formed into a rough line three- or four-deep, also extending from edge to edge of the road. They had solved their problem with the horses by abandoning them, dropping reins and leaving the animals to stand or trot away. Among the mob of ponies there were also a few men who had slunk quietly to the rear. Not many. After three generations of raid and war many of the English had personal grudges to pay off—while none wished to be exposed to the derision of his neighbors. Shouts of encouragement rose from all the men who thought their rank entitled them to do so. But no orders. Glancing round, Shef saw that he was very much alone, immediately behind the group of armored nobles. As the Viking arrow drove toward the English line, men had unconsciously edged to left or right. Only the most determined were there to take the first blow, where the weight would fall if Wulfgar and his colleagues were to fail. The wedge formation was said to be the invention of the Viking war-god. What would happen when it struck?

Spears began to fly from the English line, some falling short, some batted aside by the shields of the leaders. Suddenly, simultaneously, the Vikings began to trot forward. One, two, three paces, and the throwing arms of the leaders drew back and a shower of javelins whirred at the English center. In front of him, Shef saw Edrich adroitly twist his shield-boss so that one spear flew over his head and far to the back of the line, and smash another with the edge so that it fell at his feet. A few paces to one side, a noble dropped his shield to block a spear aimed at his belly, choked, and fell sideways as another ripped through his beard and throat. Another landholder cursed as three spears found his shield at once, tried to knock them free with his sword, then frenziedly struggled to pull the strap from his elbow and drop the now-clumsy encumbrance dragging down his arm. Before he could succeed the Viking wedge was on them.

In front of him Shef saw the Viking leader swing a mighty blow at Wulfgar. The Englishman caught it on his shield, tried to stab in reply with his sword. But the Viking had already recovered and swung again with all his force, backhand. Once more Wulfgar parried, with a mighty clang as his own blade met the Viking's, but he was already off balance. With a sudden thrust the Viking clubbed him in the face with his sword-pommel, thrust a shield-boss into his ribs, and hurled him aside by main force. As he stepped forward to stab, Shef sprang at him.

For all his size the Viking leader was amazingly fast on his feet. He jumped back a pace and slashed at the boy's unarmed head. Shef had realized two things already from his three heartbeats' observation of real battle: One, in battle everything must be done with full force, with none of the unconscious restraint of training or practice. He put all his smithy-hardened muscle into the parry. Two, in battle there could be no interval or pause between blows. As the Viking swung again, Shef was already braced for him. This time his parry caught the blow higher up. He felt a clang and a snap and the fragment of a blade whirred over his head. Not mine, thought Shef. Not mine! He stepped forward and stabbed exultantly for the groin.

Something knocked him sideways and backwards. He staggered, caught his balance, and found himself shoved aside again by the figure of Edrich, bellowing something in his ear. As he glanced round Shef realized that while he exchanged blows with their leader, the tip of the Viking wedge had broken through. Half a dozen English nobles lay on the ground. Wulfgar, still on his feet, was backing dazedly toward Shef, but a dozen Vikings were facing him, pouring through the broken line. Shef found himself shouting, brandishing his sword, daring the foremost of the Vikings to come on. For a heartbeat the man and the boy stared into each other's eyes. Then the man wheeled left, following his orders, moving through the gap to roll up the English line and drive the flankers into the swamp in disorder and confusion.

“Run for it!” shouted Edrich. “We're beat. Nothing to do now. Run now and we can get away.”

“My father,” shouted Shef, lunging forward to try to grasp Wulfgar by the belt and haul him back.

“Too late, he's down.”

It was true. The dazed thane had taken another smashing blow on the helmet and staggered forward, to be enveloped by a wave of enemies. The Vikings were still fanning sideways, but at any moment some would press forward and overwhelm the few men left standing in the center. Shef found himself seized by the collar and hustled, half-choking to the rear.

“Damned fools. Half-trained levies. What can you expect? Grab a horse, boy.”

In seconds Shef was cantering down the track the way he had come. His first battle was over.

And he had run from it within seconds of the first blow being struck.

Chapter Four

The reeds at the marsh's edge moved slightly in the morning breeze. They moved again and Shef peered out at the empty countryside. The Viking raiders were gone.

He turned and waded back through the reeds to the path he had found the previous evening. The small island was hidden by low trees. Edrich the king's thane was eating the cold remains of their dinner from the night before. He wiped greasy fingers on the grass and raised his eyebrows.

“Nothing in sight,” Shef said. “Quiet. No smoke that I could see.”

They had fled the battle, knowing it was lost, seeking only to save their own lives. There had been no sign of pursuit when they abandoned their horses and fled on foot into the marsh where they had spent the night—an oddly comfortable and pleasant night for Shef. He thought about it with mixed feelings of both pleasure and guilt. It had been an island of peace in a sea of anxiety and trouble. Just for one evening there had been no work to do, no duty that could possibly be performed. All they had to do was hide, protect themselves, and stay as comfortable as possible. Shef had splashed off into the marsh and quickly found them a dry island in the midst of the pathless fen, where it was certain that no stranger would ever penetrate. It had been easy to put up a shelter made out of the reed which the marsh-folk used for thatching. Eels had been snared in the sluggish water, and Edrich, after brief consideration, had seen no harm in making a fire. The Vikings had other things to do and weren't going to come splashing all the way over here just because of a bit of smoke.

In any case, before darkness fell, they could see smoke rising all around them. “The raiders on their way back,” said Edrich. “They don't mind sending up signals when they're retreating.”

Had he ever run from a battle before? Shef asked cautiously, nagged by the worry that kept on surfacing every time memory brought back the picture of his stepfather going down, engulfed by a tide of enemies. “Many times,” Edrich replied, in the curious camaraderie of this day stolen out of time. “And don't think that was a battle. Just a skirmish. But I've run for it often. Too often. And if everybody did that we'd have a lot fewer dead men on our side. We never lose very many while we're standing and fighting, but once the Vikings break through it's just a slaughter. Just stop a moment and think of it—every man who gets off the field is saved for another stand-up fight on even terms another day.

“Trouble is,” he smiled grimly, “the more often it happens the less likely most people are to be willing to try again. They lose heart. And there's no need for it. We lost yesterday because nobody was ready, not physically, not in their minds either. If they'd spend a tenth of the time they spend in whining afterwards in getting ready beforehand, we'd have no need ever to lose a battle. As the proverb says: ‘Often the deed—late in doom diminishes, in all successes. Starves he later.’ Now show me your blade.”

Face unmoving, Shef drew it from its scuffed leather scabbard and passed it over. Edrich turned it thoughtfully in his hands.

“It looks like a hedger's tool,” he remarked. “Or a reed-cutter's bill. Not a real weapon. Yet I saw the Viking jarl's sword snap on it. How did that happen?”

“It is a good blade,” Shef replied. “Maybe the best in Emneth. I made it myself, forged in strips. Much of it is soft iron. I beat it out myself from the iron blooms they send us from the South. But there are layers too of hard steel. A thane from March gave me some good spearheads in payment for work I did for him. I melted and beat them out, and then I twisted the iron and steel strips round each other and forged the whole into a blade. The iron lets it bend, the steel gives it strength. In the end I welded on a cutting edge of the hardest steel I could find. Four man-loads of charcoal the whole work cost me.”

“And with all that work you made it short and single-edged, like a work-tool. Put on a plain ox-bone handle, with no guard. And then you left it out in the wet and let it get rusty.”

Shef shrugged. “If I swaggered round Emneth with a warrior's weapon on my hip and serpent-patterns glittering on the blade, how long would I have kept it? The rust is just enough to discolor the blade. I make sure it eats no further.”

“That was the other question I meant to ask you. The young thane said you were not a freeman. You behave as if you were in hiding. Yet in the fight you called Wulfgar ‘father.’ There is some mystery here. The world is full of thanes' bastards, God knows. But no one tries to enslave them.”

Shef had faced the same question many times, and in another time or place would not have answered. But in the island in the fen, speaking one to another, status forgotten, the words came.

“He is not my father, though I call him that. Eighteen summers ago the Vikings raided here. Wulfgar was away from Emneth then, but my mother, the lady Thryth, was here, with her baby son Alfgar—my half brother, her child and Wulfgar's. A servant got Alfgar away when the raiders came in the night, but my mother was taken.”

Edrich nodded slowly. All this was familiar enough. But still his question was not answered. There was a system in these matters, at least for those of rank. After a while, surely, the husband might have expected to hear from the slave-marts of Hedeby or Kaupang, to tell him such and such a lady was ransomable, at a price. If he did not, then he could have considered himself a widower, free to marry again, to set his fine silver bracelets on another woman who would rear his son. Sometimes, it was true, such arrangements were disturbed by the arrival, twenty years later, of some withered crone who had managed to outlive her usefulness in the North and bribe her way, God knew how, onto a ship that would take her home. But not often. Neither case explained the young man sitting before him.

“My mother returned, only a few weeks later. Pregnant with me. She swore that my father was the jarl of the Vikings himself. When I was born she wanted me named Halfden, because I am half a Dane. But Wulfgar cursed her. He said that was a hero's name, the name of the king who founded the race of the Shieldings, from whom the kings of England and Denmark both claim descent. Too good for me. And so I was given a dog's name instead. Shef.”

The young man dropped his eyes. “That is why my stepfather hates me and wants to make me a slave, why my half brother Alfgar has everything, and I nothing.”

He had not told the full story: How Wulfgar had pressed and pressed his pregnant wife to take birthwort, to kill the rapist's child in her womb. How he himself had only been saved by the intervention of Father Andreas, who had denounced fiercely the sin of child-murder, even of a Viking's child. How Wulfgar in his rage and jealousy had taken a concubine, and bred on her Godive the beautiful, so that in the end there had been three children growing up in Emneth: Alfgar the trueborn; Godive, child of Wulfgar and his slave-lemman; Shef, child of Thryth and the Viking.

The king's thane passed back the hand-forged blade in silence. Still a mystery, he thought. How had the woman escaped? Viking slavers were not usually so careless.

“What was the name of this jarl?” he asked. “Of your…”

“Of my father? My mother says his name was Sigvarth. The jarl of the Small Isles. Wherever they are.”

They sat for a while in silence, then stretched out for sleep.

It was late the next day when Shef and Edrich walked cautiously out of the reeds. Well-fed and unharmed, they approached what they could already see were the ruins of Emneth.

All the buildings were burnt, some mere heaps of ash, others with blackened timbers protruding. The thane's house and stockade were gone, the church, the smithy, the huddle of wattle-and-daub houses for the freemen, the lean-tos and sandpit-houses of the slaves. A few people still moved, stumbling haphazardly here and there, poking in the ashes or joining those already clustered round the well.

As they came into the village area, Shef called to one of the survivors, one of his mother's maids.

“Truda. Tell me what happened. Are there more…?”

She was shaking, gaping up at him with horror and amazement, looking at him unharmed, his shield, sword. “You better… come see your mother.”

“My mother's still here?” Shef felt a slight lift of hope at his heart. Maybe the others would be there too. Could Alfgar have got away? And Godive? What of Godive?

They followed the maid as she hobbled clumsily along.

“Why does she walk like that?” muttered Shef, looking at her painful limp.

“Been raped,” said Edrich briefly.

“But… But Truda's no virgin.”

Edrich answered the unspoken question. “Rape's different. If you have four men hauling at you while another does it, all of them excited, tear sinews, breaks bones sometimes. Even worse if the woman tries to fight them.”

Shef thought of Godive again, and his knuckles whitened as he gripped the inside of his shield-boss. It was not only the menfolk who paid for lost battles.

They followed Truda in silence as she limped before them to a makeshift shelter, a collection of planks propped on half-burnt timbers and leaning against a fragment of stockade saved from the flames. She reached the shelter, looked inside, muttered a few words, and waved them in.

The lady Thryth lay inside, on a heap of old sacking. From the grim look of pain on her face and the awkward way she sprawled, it was obvious that she too had been through Truda's experience. Shef knelt beside her and felt for her hand.

Her voice was just a whisper, weakened by terrible memory. “We had no warning, no time to prepare. No one seemed to know what to do. The men rode straight here after the battle. They couldn't make up their minds. Those pigs caught us while they were still arguing. They were all round us before anyone knew that they had come.”

She grew silent, writhed a bit in pain, looked up at her son with empty eyes.

“They are beasts. They killed everyone who showed fight. Then they gathered the rest of us together outside the church. It was beginning to rain by then. First they picked out the young girls and the pretty girls, and some of the boys. For the slave markets. And then… then they brought out their prisoners from the battle and then…”

Her voice began to quake and she pulled her stained apron up to her eyes.

“And then they made us watch…”

Her voice was drowned in tears. After a few moments she seemed to remember something and moved suddenly. She gripped Shef's hand and for the first time looked directly at him.

“But Shef. It was him. It was the same one as last time.”

“Sigvarth Jarl?” asked Shef, his mouth thick.

“Yes. Your… your…”

“What did he look like? Was he a big man, dark hair, white teeth?”

“Yes. With gold bracelets all up his arm.” Shef thought back to the moments of conflict, felt again the snap of the sword breaking and the moment of delight with which he had stepped forward to stab. Could it be that God had saved him from a terrible sin? But if that were the case—what had God been doing afterward?

“Couldn't he protect you, mother?”

“No. He didn't even try.” Thryth's voice had gone hard and controlled again. “When they broke ranks after… after the show, he told them to loot and enjoy themselves till the warhorns blew. They kept their slaves, tied them together; but the rest of us, Truda and the ones they weren't keeping… We were just handed over.

“He recognized me, Shef! And he remembered me. But when I begged him just to keep me for himself he laughed. He said… he said I was a hen now, not a chicken, and hens must look after themselves. Especially hens who flew away. So they used me like Truda. They used me more because I was the lady, and some of them thought that this was something very funny.” Her face twisted with anger and hatred, her pain forgotten for the moment.

“But I told him, Shef! I told him that he had a son. And that his son would one day seek him out and kill him!”

“I did my best, mother.” Shef hesitated, another question forming on his lips. But Edrich, behind him, spoke first.

“What did they make you watch, lady?”

Again Thryth's eyes filled with tears. Unable to speak, she waved vaguely at the outside of the shelter.

“Come,” said Truda. “I will show you the Vikings' mercy.”

The two men followed her out, across the ashy remains of the village green, to where another makeshift shelter had been set up near the ruin of the thane's house. A small huddle of people stood outside it. Occasionally one would break away and walk inside, look, and come out again. Their expressions were unreadable. Grief? Anger? Mostly, thought Shef, it was just plain fear.

Inside the shelter stood a horse-trough, half filled with straw. Shef recognized at once Wulfgar's blond hair and beard, but the face between them was that of a corpse: white, waxy, the nose pinched and the bones sticking through the flesh. Yet the man was not dead.

For a moment Shef could make no sense of what he saw. How could Wulfgar lie in a horse-trough? He was too big. He was six feet tall, and the horse-trough—Shef knew it well from the beatings of his youth—was barely five feet long…. There was something missing.

Wulfgar had something wrong with his legs. His knees reached the bottom of the trough, but then there were only clumsy bandages, wrapped round and round the stumps, with dark blood and foul matter clotted in them. A smell of corruption, and of burning, drifted up to Shef.

With growing horror he saw that Wulfgar appeared to have ho arms either. The bits that were left were crossed on his breast, the limbs ending in stumps and bandages just below the elbows.

A voice murmured behind them. “They brought him out in front of us all. Then they held him over a log and chopped off his arms and legs with an axe. Legs first. After each one they seared the stump with a red-hot iron, so that he would not die from loss of blood. First he cursed them and fought, but then he began to beg them to leave him just one hand, so that he could feed himself. They laughed. The big one, the jarl, said they would leave him everything else. Leave him his eyes so he could see fair women, and his balls, so he could desire them. But he would never be able to take down his own breeches, never again.”

Never do anything for himself again, Shef realized. He would depend on others for every action of life, from eating to pissing.

“They've made him a heimnar,” said Edrich, using the Norse word. “A living corpse. I've heard of this before. Never seen it. But don't trouble yourself, boy. Infection, pain, loss of blood. He won't live long.”

Incredibly, the wasted eyes in front of them opened. They shone with pure malevolence on Shef and Edrich. The lips parted and a dry snakelike whisper came forth.

“The runaways. You ran and left me, boy. I will remember. And you, king's thane. You came, exhorted us, would have us fight. But where were you when the fighting ended? Have no fear, I will live yet, to be avenged on you both. And on your father, boy. I should never have reared his get. Or taken back his whore either.”

The eyes closed, the voice was still. Shef and Edrich walked out into the thin drizzle that was beginning once again.

“I don't understand,” said Shef. “What did they do it for?”

“That I do not know. But I can tell you one thing. When King Edmund hears of this he will be in a fury. Raid and murder under truce, that's normal enough, but this, done to one of his men, a former companion… He will be of two minds, perhaps feeling that he must spare his people more of the same. But then again he may decide he is honor-bound to seek vengeance. It will be a difficult decision for him.” He turned to look at Shef.

“Will you come with me, lad, when I take him the news? You are not a freeman here, but it is plain to see that you are a fighter. There is nothing for you now in this place. Come with me and you will be my servant till we can get you proper equipment and armor. If you can fight well enough to stand up to a jarl of the heathens the king will make you his companion, no matter what you were here in Emneth.”

The lady Thryth was walking toward them, leaning heavily on a stick. Shef asked her the question that had been burning in his mind since first he saw the smoke from ravaged Emneth.

“Godive. What has happened to Godive?”

“Sigvarth took her. She has gone to the Vikings' camp.”

Shef turned to Edrich. He spoke firmly, without apology.

“They say I am a runaway and a slave. Now I will be both.” He unbuckled his shield and dropped it on the ground. “I shall make for the Viking camp down by the Stour. One more slave—they may take me in. I must do something to rescue Godive.”

“You won't last a week,” said Edrich, voice cold with anger. “And you will die a traitor. A traitor to your people and to King Edmund.” He turned on his heel and walked away.

“And to the blessed Christ Himself,” added Father Andreas, appearing from the shelter. “You have seen the pagans' deeds. Better to be a slave in Christendom than a king among such as they.”

Shef realized that he had made the decision quickly—perhaps too quickly, without thinking. But having done this he was now committed. Thoughts tumbled in his head: I have tried to kill my father. I have lost my foster father to a living death. My mother now hates me for what my father did. I have lost my chance to be free and have lost one who would have been my friend.

Such thoughts would not help him now. He had done this all for Godive. Now he must finish what he had begun.

Godive woke with a splitting pain in her head, smoke in her nostrils and someone struggling beneath her. Terrified, she struck out and pushed herself away. The girl on whom she had been lying began to whimper.

As her eyes cleared, Godive realized she was in a wagon, a moving wagon creaking along a puddled road. Through its thin canvas tilt, light shown on its cramped interior packed with humanity, half the girls of Emneth lying one on top of another. A steady chorus of moans and sobbing rose from them. The small square of light at the back of the wagon suddenly darkened and a bearded face showed at it. The sobbing dissolved into shrieks and the girls clutched at each other or tried to hide themselves behind their companions. But the face only grinned—its white teeth gleaming brilliantly—shook a finger in warning, and withdrew.

The Vikings! Godive remembered it all in one instant, everything that had happened: the wave of men, the panic, her dart for the marsh, the man rising in front of her to catch her by the skirt, the overmastering terror she had felt at being held by a grown man for the first time in her uneventful life…

Her hand flew suddenly to her thighs. What had they done while she was unconscious? But though the pain in her head grew and grew, there was no throb, no soreness in her body. She was a virgin. She had been a virgin. Surely they could not have raped her and left her feeling nothing?

The girl next to her, a cottager's daughter—one of Alfgar's playmates—saw the movement and said, not without malice, “Don't be afraid. They did nothing to any of us. They're keeping us for sale. And you a maiden too. You have nothing to fear till they find you a buyer. Then you will be like the rest of us.”

The memories kept arranging themselves. The square of people, with armed Vikings all round the outside. And inside the square her father being dragged forward, shouting and offering terms, to the log… The log. The horror when she realized what they were going to do as they had spread-eagled her father and the axeman had stepped forward. Yes. She had run forward, screaming and clawing at the big man. But the other, the one he had called “son,” had caught her. Then what? She felt her head gingerly. A lump. A splitting pain on the other side from the lump. But—she looked at her fingers—no blood.

She was not the only one treated like that; the Viking had hit her with a sandbag. The pirates had been in the trade a long time and were used to dealing with human cattle. At the start of a raid, charge in with axe and sword, spear and shield, to kill the menfolk or the warriors. But after that even the flat of a sword or the back of an axe were unhandy weapons for stunning. Too easy to slip, to fracture a skull or slice an ear from some valuable piece of merchandise. Even a clenched fist was unsafe, given the oar-pulling strength of the man behind it. Who would buy a girl with a broken jaw, or one with her cheekbone smashed and set awry? The skinflints of the outer isles, maybe, but never the buyers for Spain or the choosy kings of Dublin.

So, in Sigvarth's command and in many others, the men detailed for slave-taking carried in their belts or hooked inside their shields a “quietener”—a long sausage of canvas stoutly sewn and filled inside with dry sand collected carefully from the dunes of Jutland or of Skaane. A smart blow with that, and the merchandise lay still, and gave no further trouble. No risk of damage.

Slowly the girls began to whisper to each other, their voices trembling with fear. They told Godive what had happened to her father. Then what had happened to Truda, to Thryth, and to the rest. How they had finally been loaded into the wagon and pulled off down the track toward the coast. But what would happen next?

Late the next day, Sigvarth, jarl of the Small Isles, also felt an inner chill, though with far less apparent cause. He sat now at his ease in the great tent of the Army of the sons of Ragnar, at the jarls' table, comfortably full of best English beef, a horn of strong ale in his hand, listening to his son Hjörvarth tell the story of their raid. Though he was only a young warrior he spoke well. It was good also to let the other jarls, and the Ragnarssons, see that he had a strong young son who would, in the future, have to be taken account of.

What could be wrong? Sigvarth was not a man given to self-examination, but he had also lived a long time, and had learned not to ignore the prickles of oncoming danger.

There had been no trouble coming back from the raid. He had taken the column of wagons and booty, not back along the Ouse, but down the channel of the Nene. The ship-guards, meanwhile, had waited on their mudbank till an English force appeared, had traded jeers and stray arrows with them for a while, watched them slowly assemble a force of rowing-boats and fishercraft, and then at the appointed time had kedged themselves off on the tide and sailed gently up-coast to the rendezvous, leaving the English behind fuming.

And the march to the rendezvous had gone well. The most important thing was that Sigvarth had done exactly what the Snake-eye had said. Torches in every thatch and every field. Every well with a few corpses down it. Examples too, brutal ones. Nailed to trees or mutilated, not dead, to tell their tale to everyone they knew.

Do it like Ivar would do it, the Snake-eye had said. Well, Sigvarth had no illusions about being in the Boneless One's class when it came to brutality, but no one could say he hadn't tried. He had done well. That countryside would not recover for years.

No, it wasn't that disturbing him; that had been a good idea. If there was anything wrong it was further back. Reluctantly, Sigvarth realized that it was the memory of the skirmish that was troubling him. He had fought in the front for a quarter of a century, killed a hundred men, taken a score of battle-wounds. That skirmish should have been easy. It hadn't been. He had broken through the English front line like so many times before, brushed the fair-haired thane out of his way almost with contempt, and got through to the second line, as ragged and disorganized as ever.

And then that boy had come out of the ground. He hadn't even a helmet or a proper sword. Only a freedman, or the poorest of the cottagers' children. Yet two parries and Sigvarth's own sword was in pieces and he himself off balance with his guard too high. The fact was, Sigvarth concluded, if that had been single combat he would have been a dead man. It was the others coming up on each side who had saved him. He did not think anyone had noticed, but if they had—if they had, some one of the bolder heads, the frontmen or the duelers, might be thinking of calling him out even now.

Could he face them? Was his son Hjörvarth strong enough yet for his vengeance to be feared? Maybe he was getting too old for the business. If he couldn't settle a half-armed boy, and an English boy at that, then perhaps he was.

At least he was doing the right thing now. Getting the Ragnarssons on your side—that could never be a bad idea. Hjörvarth was coming to the end of his tale. Sigvarth turned in his chair and nodded at his two henchmen waiting near the entrance. They nodded back and hastened out.

“…so we burned the wagons on the shore, threw in a couple of churls that my father in his wisdom had kept back, as sacrifice to Aegir and to Ran, boarded ship, ran down the coast to the rivermouth—and here we are! The men of the Small Isles, under famous Sigvarth Jarl—and I his lawful son Hjörvarth—at your service, sons of Ragnar, and ready for more!”

The tent erupted in applause, horns banged on tables, feet stamped, knives clashed. The men were in a good temper at this fair start to the campaign.

The Snake-eye rose to his feet and spoke.

“Well, Sigvarth, we said you could keep your plunder, and you have earned it, so you need have no fear of telling us your good luck. Tell us, how much did you take? Enough to retire and buy yourself a summer home in Sjaelland?”

“Little enough, little enough,” called Sigvarth, to groans of disbelief. “Not enough to make me turn farmer. There are only poor pickings to be expected from country thanes. Wait till the great, the invincible Army sacks Norwich. Or York! Or London!” Cries of approval now, and a smile from the Snake-eye. “It is the ministers we must sack, full of gold which the Christ-priests have wrung from the fools of the South. No gold and little silver from the countryside.

“But some things we did take, and I am ready to share the best of it. Here, let me show you the finest thing that we found!”

He turned and waved his followers in. They pushed through the tables, leading with them a figure draped completely in sacking, a rope round its waist. The figure was pushed to the front of the center table, and then in two movements the rope was cut, the sacking whisked away.

Godive emerged blinking into the light, facing a horde of bearded faces, open mouths, clutching hands. She shrank back, tried to turn away, and found herself staring into the eyes of the tallest of the chieftains, a pale man, no expression on his face and eyes like ice, eyes that never blinked. She turned again, looking almost with relief at Sigvarth, the only face she could even recognize.

In this cruel company she was like a flower in a patch of dank undergrowth. Pale hair, fine skin, full lips more attractive now as they parted with fear. Sigvarth nodded again, and one of his men ripped down at the back of her gown. Tearing at it until the fabric tore, then stripping it from her despite screams and struggles until the young girl stood naked but for her shift, her youthful body clear for all to see. In an agony of fear and shame she crossed her hands over her breasts and hung her head, waiting for whatever they would do with her.

“I will not share her,” called out Sigvarth. “She is too precious for sharing. So I will give her away! I give her to the man who chose me for this expedition, in thanks and in hope. May he use her well, and long, and vigorously. I give her to the man who chose me out, wisest of all the Army. It is to you I give her. You, Ivar!”

Sigvarth ended with a shout, and a raise of his horn. Slowly he realized that there was no answering shout, only a confused murmur, and that from the men farthest away from the center, the ones who, like him, knew the Ragnarssons least and were the latest comers to the Army. No horns were raised. Faces seemed suddenly troubled, or blank. Men looked away.

The chill at Sigvarth's heart came back. Maybe he should have asked first, he thought to himself. Maybe something was going on that he didn't know about. But where could the harm be in this? He was giving away a piece of plunder, one that any man would be glad to own, doing it publicly and honorably. Where could be the harm in making a gift of this girl, a maiden—a beautiful maiden—to Ivar? Ivar Ragnarsson. Nicknamed—Oh, Thor aid him, why was he so nicknamed? A terrible thought possessed Sigvarth. Was there meaning in that nickname?

The Boneless.

Chapter Five

Five days later, Shef and his companion lay in the slight shelter of a copse, staring across flat watermeadows to the earthworks of the Viking camp a long mile away. For the moment, at least, their nerve had failed.

They had had no trouble getting away from ruined Emneth, which normally might have been the most difficult task for the runaway slave. But Emneth had had troubles of its own. No one in any case considered himself Shef's master, and Edrich, who might have thought it his duty to keep anyone from going over to the Vikings, seemed to have washed his hands of the whole business. Without opposition, Shef had gathered his few possessions, quietly lifted a small store of food which he kept in an outlying shelter, and had made his preparations to leave.

Still, someone had noticed. As he stood hesitating over whether to bid a farewell to his mother, he had become aware of a slight figure standing silently next to him. It was Hund, boyhood friend, child of slaves on both sides, perhaps the least important and lowest ranking person in the whole of Emneth. Yet Shef had learned to value him. There was no one who knew the marshes better, not even Shef. Hund could slide through the water and take moorhens on their nests. In the foul and crowded hut he shared with his parents and their litter of children there was often an otter cub playing. The very fish seemed to come to his hands to be caught without rod or line or net. As for the herbs of the countryside, Hund knew them all, their names, their uses. Already—though he was two winters younger than Shef—the humble folk were beginning to come to him for simples and for cures. In time to come he might be the cunning man of the district, respected and feared even by the mighty. Or action might be taken against him. Even the kindly Father Andreas, Shef's preserver, had several times been seen to look at him with doubt in his eyes. Mother Church had no love for competitors.

“I want to come,” Hund had said.

“It will be dangerous,” Shef had replied.

Hund had said nothing, as was his custom when he felt nothing more needed to be said. It was dangerous to stay in Emneth too. And Shef and Hund, in their different ways, increased each other's chances.

“If you are coming you will have to get that collar off,” Shef had said, glancing at the iron collar which had been fitted round Hund's neck at puberty. “Now is the time. No one is interested in us. I'll get some tools.”

They had sought shelter in the marsh, not wanting to draw attention. It had been a difficult business getting the collar off even so. Shef had filed through it, first putting rags inside the collar to save Hund's neck from rasps, but once broken through it had been hard to get the tongs inside the circlet to bend it open. In the end Shef had lost patience, wrapped the rags round his hands, and pulled the collar open by main strength.

Hund had rubbed the calluses and weals where the iron had worn his neck and stared at the U-shape of the bent collar. “Not many men could do that,” he had observed.

“Need will make the old wife trot,” Shef had answered dismissively. Yet secretly he was pleased. He was coming into his strength, he had faced a grown warrior in battle, he was free to go where he would. He did not yet know how he could do it, but there must be a way to free Godive, and then leave the disasters of his family behind.

They had set out without further words. But trouble had begun at once. Shef had expected to have to dodge a few inquisitive people, sentries, maybe levies heading for the muster. Yet from the first day of travel he had realized that the whole countryside was beginning to buzz like a wasps' nest stirred with a stick. Men cantered down every road. Outside every village groups waited, armed and hostile, suspicious of every stranger. After one such group had decided to hold them, ignoring their story of being sent to borrow cattle from a relative of Wulfgar's, they had had to break and run for it, dodging spears and outdistancing their pursuers. But clearly orders had gone out and the folk of East Anglia had for once decided to obey wholeheartedly. There was fury in the air.

For the last two days Shef and Hund had crept through the fields and hedges, going painfully slowly, often on their bellies in the mud. Even so, they had seen patrols out, some of them horsemen commanded by a thane or a king's companion, but others—and these the more dangerous ones—moved quietly on foot like themselves, armor and weapons padded to prevent jingle or clink; marshmen in the lead, carrying bows and hunters' slings for ambush or stalk. They meant, Shef realized, to keep the Vikings in, or at least to prevent them coming out in small parties for private plunder. But at the same time they would be only too happy to catch and hold, or kill, anyone they thought might have any intention of giving the Vikings aid, information, or reinforcement.

Only in the last couple of miles had the danger receded; and that, the pair soon understood, was only because they were now within the range of the Vikings' own patrols—these easier to avoid, but at the same time more menacing. They had spotted one group of men waiting silently within the borders of a small wood, maybe fifty of them, all mounted, all armored, great axes resting on shoulders, the man-killing battle-spears bristling above them like a gray-tipped thorn thicket. Easy to see, quite easy to avoid. But it would take a full-scale incursion by the English to drive them off or defeat them. The village patrols would stand no chance.

These were the men to whose mercy they now had to trust themselves. It did not seem as easy now as it had at Emneth. To begin with, Shef had had a vague idea of reaching the camp and declaring his relationship to Sigvarth. But there would be far too much chance of being recognized, even from the few seconds of contact they had had. It was terrible luck that had brought him into hand-to-hand combat with the one person in the camp who might—or might not—have accepted him. But now Sigvarth was one person they had to avoid at all costs.

Would the Vikings accept recruits? Shef had an uneasy feeling that much more would be needed than willingness and a hand-forged sword. But they could always use slaves. Again, Shef had an uneasy feeling that he himself might do for a laborer or galley-slave in some far-off country. But Hund had nothing visibly valuable about him. Might the Vikings just let him go, like a fish that was too small for the pan? Or would they take the easy way out of dealing with an encumbrance? The evening before, when they had first caught sight of the camp, the two youths' keen eyes saw a party come out of one of the gates and start digging a hole. A little later there had been no doubt about the contents of the cart that creaked out and emptied a dozen bodies unceremoniously down the pit. Pirates' camps had a high wastage rate.

Shef sighed. “It doesn't look any better than it did last night,” he said. “But we'll have to move sometime.”

Hund gripped is arm. “Wait. Listen. Can you hear something?”

The sound strengthened as the two youths turned their heads this way and that. Noise. Song. Many men singing together. The sound, they realized, was coming from the other side of a slight rise maybe a hundred yards to their left, where the watermeadows ran into a tangle of uncultivated common.

“It sounds like the monks singing at the great minster at Ely,” murmured Shef. A foolish thought. There would be neither monk nor priest left within twenty miles of this place.

“Shall we look?” whispered Hund. Shef made no reply, but began to crawl slowly and carefully toward the sound of deep-voiced singing. It could only be the pagans in this spot. But maybe a small group of them would be easier to approach than the whole army. Anything was better than simply walking out across that flat plain.

After they had covered half the distance on their bellies, Hund gripped Shef's wrist. Silently he pointed up a slight slope. Twenty yards away, beneath a huge old hawthorn, stood a man, motionless, his eyes scanning the ground. He leaned on an axe two-thirds his own weight. A burly man, thick-necked, broad across paunch and hip.

At least he did not seem built for speed, Shef reflected. And he was standing in the wrong place if he wanted to be a sentry. The two youths exchanged a glance. The Vikings might be great seamen. They had much to learn about the art of stealth.

Gently Shef snaked forward, angling away from the sentry, round a thicket of bracken, between and beneath a tangle of gorse, Hund crawling immediately behind him. Ahead, the noise of singing had ceased. Replaced by a single voice talking. Not talking. Exhorting. Preaching. Could there be secret Christians even among the heathen? Shef wondered.

A few yards on, he parted the bracken stems and peered silently down into a little dell, hidden from view. There, forty or fifty men sat on the ground in a rough circle. All carried swords or axes, but their spears and shields were propped up or planted in the ground. They sat within a corded-off enclosure made of a dozen spears with a thread running between them. From the thread, at intervals, dangled clumps of the bright red berry that the English called “quickbeam,” now in autumn brilliance. At the center of the enclosure, with the men seated round it, a fire burned. Next to it was planted a single spear, point up, its shaft gleaming silver.

One man stood by the fire and the spear, his back to the hidden watchers, speaking to the men round him in tones of persuasion, of command. Unlike the others, and unlike anyone else Shef had ever seen, his tunic and breeches were neither natural homespun in color nor dyed green or brown or blue, but a brilliant white, white as the inside of an egg.

From his right hand there dangled a hammer, short-hafted, double-headed—a blacksmith's hammer. Shef's keen sight locked on the front row of sitting men. Round every neck, a chain. On every chain, a pendant displayed on the chest. They were of different kinds: he could see a sword, a horn, a phallus, a boat. But at least half the men wore the sign of a hammer.

Shef rose abruptly from his concealment and walked forward into the dell. As they saw him, fifty men leap simultaneously to their feet, swords coming out, voices raised in warning. A grunt of amazement behind him, a crashing of feet through the bracken. The sentry was behind him now, Shef knew. He did not turn to look.

Slowly the man in white turned to meet him, the two facing each other across the berry-fringed thread, looking each other up and down.

“And where are you come from?” said the man in white. He spoke English with a strong, burring accent.

What shall I say? thought Shef. From Emneth? From Norfolk? That will mean nothing to them. “I come from the North,” he said aloud. The faces in front of him changed. Surprise? Recognition? Suspicion?

The man in white gestured his followers to hold still. “And what is your business with us, the followers of the Asgarthsvegr, the Asgarth Way?”

Shef pointed to the hammer in the other's hand, the hammer-pendant round his neck. “I am a smith, like you. My business is to learn.”

Someone was translating his words now to the others. Shef realized Hund had materialized at his left, and there was a threatening presence just behind them both. He kept his eyes fixed on those of the man in white. “Show me a sign of your craft.”

Shef pulled his sword from its sheath and passed it over, as he had to Edrich. The hammer-bearer turned it over and over, looked at it intently, flexed it gently, noting the surprising play in the thick, single-edged blade, scratched with his thumbnail at the surface discoloration of old rust. Carefully, he shaved a patch of hair from his forearm.

“Your forge was not hot enough,” he remarked. “Or you lost patience. Those steel strips were not even when you twisted them. But it is a good blade. It is not what it seems. And neither are you. Now tell me, young man—and remember, death is just behind you—what it is that you want? If you are just a runaway slave like your friend”—he gestured toward Hund's neck, with the telltale marks on it—“maybe we will let you go. If you are a coward who wants to join the winning side, maybe we will kill you. But maybe you are something else. Or someone else. Say then, what do you want?”

I want Godive back, thought Shef. He looked into the pagan priest's eyes and said, with all the sincerity he could muster, “You are a master-smith. The Christians will let me learn no more. I want to be your apprentice. Your learning-knave.”

The man in white grunted, handed back Shef's sword, bone hilt first. “Lower your axe, Kari,” he said to the man behind the pair. “There is more here than meets the eye.

“I will take you as a knave, young man. And if your friend has any skill, he may join us too. Sit, both of you, to one side, till we have finished what we were doing. My name is Thorvin, which is to say, ‘the friend of Thor,’ the god of the smiths. What are yours?”

Shef flushed with shame, dropped his eyes.

“My friend's name is Hund,” he said, “which is to say, ‘dog.’ And I too, I have only a dog's name. My father—No, I have no father. They call me Shef.”

For the first time Thorvin's face showed surprise, and more. “Fatherless?” he muttered. “And your name is Shef. But that is not only a dog's name. Truly you are uninstructed.”

Shef felt his spirits sinking as they moved toward the camp. He was not afraid for himself, but for Hund. Thorvin had told the pair of them to sit to one side while they finished their strange meeting: first him talking, then some kind of discussion in the burring Norse Shef could almost follow, and then a skin of some drink passed ceremoniously from hand to hand. At the end all the men had gathered in little groups and joined hands in silence on one object or another: Thorvin's hammer, a bow, a horn, a sword, what looked like a dried horse's penis. No one had touched the silver spear till Thorvin had gone over, pulled it briskly into two parts and rolled them up in a cloth bag. A few moments later the enclosure had been broken up, the fire put out, the spears reclaimed, the men of the group already drifting away in fours and fives, moving warily and taking different directions.

“We are followers of the Way,” Thorvin had said in partial explanation to the two youths, still speaking his careful English. “Not everyone wishes to be known as such—not in the camp of the Ragnarssons. Me they accept.” He tugged at the hammer pendant on his chest. “I have a skill. You have a skill, young smith-to-be. Maybe it will protect you.

“What of your friend? What can you do?”

“I can pull teeth,” replied Hund unexpectedly.

The half dozen men still standing round had grunted in amusement. “Tenn draga,” remarked one of them. “That er ithrott.”

“He says, ‘To draw teeth, that is an accomplishment,’ ” Thorvin translated. “Is it true?”

“It is true,” supplied Shef for his friend. “He says it is not strength you need. It is a twist of the wrist—that, and knowing how the teeth grow. He can cure fevers too.”

“Tooth-drawing, bone-setting, fever-curing,” said Thorvin. “There is always trade for a leech among women and warriors. He can go to my friend Ingulf. If we can get him there. See, you two, if we can get to our own places in the camp—my forge, Ingulf's booth—we may be safe. Till then—” He shook his head. “We have many ill-wishers. Some friends. Will you take the risk?”

They had followed him mutely. But wisely?

As they came toward it, the camp looked more and more formidable. It was enclosed by a high earth rampart, with a ditch outside it, each side at least a furlong in length. Lot of work in that, thought Shef. Lot of spadefuls. Did that mean they were going to stay a long time, that they thought it worth doing so much? Or was it a matter of course to the Vikings? A routine?

The rampart was crowned with a stockade of sharpened logs. A furlong. Two hundred and twenty yards. Four sides—No, from the lay of the land Shef realized suddenly that one side of the camp was bounded here by the river Stour. On that side he could even see prows projecting into the sluggish stream. He was puzzled—until he realized that the Vikings must have pulled their ships, their most precious possessions, up on the mudflats there, then grappled them together so that they themselves formed one wall of the enclosure. Big. How big? Three sides. Three times two hundred and twenty yards. Each log in the stockade maybe a foot wide. Three feet to a yard.

Shef's mind, as it so often did, tried to grapple with the problem of numbers. Three times three times two hundred and twenty. There must be a way to know the answer to that, but this time Shef could see no shortcut to finding it. It was a lot of logs, anyway, and big ones too, cut from trees hard to find down here on the flats. They must have brought the logs with them. Dimly, Shef began to discover an unfamiliar notion. He knew no word for it. Making plans, perhaps. Planning ahead. Thinking things out before they happened. No detail was too small for these men to trouble with. He suddenly realized that they did not think war was only a matter of the spirit, of glory and speeches and inherited swords. It was a trade, a matter of logs and spades, preparation and profit.

More and more men came into view as they trudged up to the ramparts, some of them simply lounging at ease, a group round a fire apparently cooking bacon, others throwing spears at a mark. They looked very much like Englishmen in their grubby woolens, Shef decided. But there was a difference. Every group of men Shef had ever seen before had had in it its proportion of casualties, men not fit to stand in the line of battle: men whose legs had broken and had been set awry; men undersized, deformed; men with bleared eyes from the marsh fever or with old head injuries that affected the way they talked. There were none like that here. Not all were of great stature, Shef was rather surprised to see, but all looked competent, hard-bitten, ready. Some adolescents, but no boys. Bald men and grizzled men, but no palsied elders.

Horses, too. The plain was covered with horses, all hobbled, all grazing. It must take a lot of horses for this army, Shef thought, and a lot of grazing for those horses. In a way that might be a weak point. Shef realized that he was thinking as an enemy, an enemy scouting for opportunities. He was not a king or a thane, but he knew from experience that there was no way to guard all those herds at night, whatever you did. A few true marshmen could reach them however many patrols you had out, could cut them loose and frighten them off. Maybe ambush the horse-guards in the night as well. Then how would the Vikings feel about going on guard duty—if the guards made a habit of never coming back?

Shef felt his spirits sink again as they came up to the entrance. There was no gate, and that was ominous in itself. The track led straight up to a gap in the rampart ten yards broad. It was as if the Vikings were saying, “Our walls protect our goods and keep in our slaves. But we don't need them to hide behind. If you want to fight, march up to us. See if you can get past our gate-guards. It is not these logs that protect us, but the axes that felled them.”

Forty or fifty men stood or sprawled by the gap. They had an air of permanence. Unlike those outside, they all wore mail or leather. Spears were propped against each other in clumps, and shields were in easy reach. These men would be ready for battle within seconds—wherever an enemy might erupt from. They had been scanning Shef, Hund, Thorvin, and party—eight men all told—for minutes as they came into sight. Would they be challenged?

At the gate itself a big man in mail strolled forward and stared at them thoughtfully, making it clear he had noted the two newcomers and everything about them. After a few moments he nodded and jerked a thumb towards the inside. As they passed into the camp itself he called a few words after them. “What does he say?” hissed Shef.

“He says, ‘On your own head be it.’ Something like that.” They walked on into the camp.

Inside, all appeared to be confusion; yet it was a confusion with an underlying regularity, a sense of overriding purpose. Men were everywhere—cooking, talking, playing at knucklebones or squatting over game boards. Canvas tents stretched in all directions, their guy-ropes an inextricable tangle. Yet the path in front of them was never obscured or encroached on. It stretched straight forward, ten paces broad, even its puddles neatly filled with loads or gravel, and the signs of passing carts barely visible on the beaten earth. These men work hard, Shef thought again.

The little group pressed forward. After a hundred yards, when by Shef's calculation they must have been almost in the middle of the camp, Thorvin stopped and beckoned the other two up close.

“I whisper, for there is great danger. Many in this camp speak many languages. We are going to cross the main track that runs north to south. To the right, to the south, down by the river with the ships, is the encampment of the Ragnarssons themselves and their personal followers. No wise man willingly goes there. We shall cross the track and go straight on to my forge near the gate opposite. We will walk straight forward, not even looking down to our right. When we reach the place we will go right into it. Now move. And take heart. Not far now.”

Shef kept his eyes rigidly down as they crossed the broad track, but he wished he could have ventured a moment's gaze. He had come here because of Godive—but where would she be? Did he dare ask for Sigvarth Jarl?

Slowly they moved through the crowds again, till they could see the east stockade almost in front of them. There, a little separated from the others, stood a roughly constructed shelter, open to the side facing them, inside it the familiar apparatus of the smithy: anvil, clay hearth, pipes and bellows. Round it all ran the threads, with the vivid scarlet splashes of quickbeam berries dangling from them. “We are here,” said Thorvin, turning with a sigh of relief. As he turned his eyes passed beyond Shef and the color drained suddenly from his face.

Shef turned with a sense of doom already on him. In front of him there stood a man, a tall man. Shef realized he was looking up at him—realized too how rarely he had done that in the last few months. But this was a man strange for reasons well beyond size.

He was wearing the same wide homespun breeches as everyone else, but no shirt or overtunic. Instead his upper body was wrapped in something like a wide blanket, of a plaid colored a startling yellow. It was pinned over his left shoulder, leaving his right arm bare. Projecting above his left shoulder was the handle of an enormous sword, so great it would have trailed along the ground if slung from a belt. In his left hand he carried a small round buckler with a central grip. An iron spike a foot long stuck out from the center of it. Behind him crowded a dozen others in the same garb. “Who are these?” he snarled. “Who let they in?” The words were strangely accented but Shef could understand him.

“The gate-wards let them in,” Thorvin replied. “They will do no harm.”

“These two. They are English. Enzkir.”

“The camp is full of English.”

“Aye. Wi' chains round their necks. Give them to me. I'll see they fettered.”

Thorvin paced forward, between Shef and Hund. His five friends spread out, facing the dozen half-naked men in yellow plaids. He gripped Shef's shoulder.

“I have taken this one into the forge, to be my learning-knave.”

The grim face, long-mustached, sneered. “A bonny weight. Maybe ye have other uses for him. The other?” He jerked a thumb at Hund.

“He goes to Ingulf.”

“He's no' there yet. He's had a collar on his neck. Give him to me. I'll see he does no spying.”

Shef felt himself taking a slow pace forward, stomach contracting with fear. He knew resistance was hopeless. There were a dozen of them, all fully armed. In a moment one of those mighty swords would be hacking the limbs from his body or the head from his neck. Yet he could not let his friend be taken. His hand crept to the hilt of his short sword.

The tall men leapt back, hand reaching over shoulder. Before Shef could draw, the longsword had wheeped free. All round, weapons flashed, men sprang on guard.

“Hold,” cried a voice. An immense voice.

While Thorvin and the plaid-wearer had been talking, their group had become the focus of total attention for yards around. Sixty or eighty men now stood in a ring, watching and listening. From the ring now stepped the biggest man Shef had ever seen, taller than Shef by head and shoulders, taller than the man in the plaid, and broader, heavier by far.

“Thorvin,” he said. “Muirtach,” nodding to the strangely dressed one. “What's the stir?”

“I'm taking that thrall there.”

“No.” Thorvin seized Hund suddenly and pushed him through the gap in the enclosure, clenching his hand round the berries. “He is under the protection of Thor.”

Muirtach strode forward, sword raised.

“Hold.” The immense voice again, threatening this time. “You have no right, Muirtach.”

“What's it to you?”

Slowly, reluctantly, the immense man reached inside his tunic, fumbled, brought out a silver emblem on a chain. A hammer.

Muirtach cursed, swept his sword back, spat on the ground “Take him then. But you, boy—” His eye turned to Shef. “You touched yer hilt to me. I catch you on yer own before long. Then ye're dead, boy.” He nodded to Thorvin. “And Thor is nothing to me. No more than Christ and his hoor of a mother. Ye'll not fool me like ye've done him.” He jerked a thumb at the immense man, turned, and walked away down the track, head high, swaggering like one who has met a defeat and will not show it, his fellows straggling after.

Shef realized he had been holding his breath and let it out with careful and affected ease.

“Who are those?” he asked, looking at the retreating men.

Thorvin replied not in English, but in the Norse they had been using, speaking slowly, with stress on the many words the languages had in common. “They are the Gaddgedlar. Christian Irishmen who have left their god and their people and turned Viking. Ivar Ragnarsson has many in his following and hopes to use them to become king of England and Ireland as well. Before he and his brother Sigurth turn their minds back to their own country, to Denmark, and Norway beyond.”

“And there may they never come,” added the immense man who had saved them. He bobbed his head to Thorvin with odd respect, even deference, looked Shef up and down. “That was bold, young swain. But you have irked a mighty man. I too. But for me it has been long in the coming. If you need me again, Thorvin, call. You know that since I took the news to the Braethraborg the Ragnarssons have kept me with them. How long that will last now that I have shown my hammer, I do not know. But in any case I am growing tired of Ivar's hounds.”

He strolled away.

“Who was that?” asked Shef.

“A great champion, from Halogaland in Norway. He is called Viga-Brand. Brand the Killer.”

“And he is a friend of yours?”

“A friend of the Way. A friend of Thor. And so of smiths.”

I do not know what I have got into, thought Shef to himself. But I must not forget why I am here. Unwillingly his eyes drifted away from the enclosure where Hund still stood, toward the danger-center, the southern river-wall of the Viking base, the encampment of the Ragnarssons. She must be there, he thought suddenly. Godive.

Chapter Six

For many days Shef had no time to think of his quest for Godive—or anything else for that matter. The work was too hard. Thorvin rose at dawn and worked on sometimes into the night, hammering, reforging, filing, tempering. In an army of this size there seemed to be innumerable men whose axe-heads had come loose, whose shields needed a rivet, who had decided that their spears needed reshafting. Sometimes there would be a line of men twenty-long, stretched from the forge to the edge of the precinct and on down the lane that led to it. There were also harder and more complex jobs. Several times men brought in mail shirts, torn and bloody, asking for them to be repaired, let out, altered for a new owner. One at a time each link of the mail had to be laboriously fitted into four others, and each of the four others into four others. “Mail is easy to wear, and it gives freedom to the arms,” Thorvin had remarked when Shef finally ventured to grumble. “But it does not give protection against a fierce stroke—and it is hell on earth for smiths.”

As time went by Thorvin handed over the routine jobs more and more to Shef, and concentrated on the difficult or special items. Yet he was rarely far away. He talked continually in Norse, repeating himself as often as was necessary. Sometimes, in the beginning, using mime until he was sure Shef understood. He spoke English well enough, Shef knew, but he would never use it. He insisted too that his apprentice spoke back to him in Norse, even if all he did was repeat what had been said to him. In fact the languages were close to each other in vocabulary and in basic style. After a while Shef caught the trick of repronunciation, and began to think of Norse as a bizarre and aberrant dialect of English, which had only to be imitated, not really learned from the beginning. After that matters went well.

Thorvin's conversation was also a good cure for boredom or frustration. From him, and from the men who stood waiting their turn, Shef learned a great many things that he had never heard before. The Vikings all seemed enormously well-informed about everything that had been decided or intended by their leaders, and had no scruples about discussing it or criticizing it. One thing that soon became clear was that the Great Army of the pagans, feared throughout Christendom, was by no means a unit. At its heart were the Ragnarssons and their followers, maybe half the total. But to these were attached any number of separate contingents, joined to share the loot, of any size from the twenty ships brought down by the Orkney jarl to single crews from villages in Jutland or Skaane. Many of these were already dissatisfied. The campaign had started well enough, they said, with the descent on East Anglia and the establishment of the fortress as a base. Yet the idea had always been not to stay too long, but to gather horses, acquire guides, and then move suddenly from a firm base in the East Anglian kingdom against the true enemy and target, the kingdom of Northumbria.

“Why not land with the ships in Northumbria in the first place?” Shef had asked once, wiping the sweat from his forehead and signaling to the next customer.

The stocky, balding Viking with the dented helmet had laughed, loudly but without malice. The really tricky part of a campaign, he had said, was always getting started. Getting the ships up the river. Finding a place to beach them. Getting horses for thousands of men. Contingents turning up late and going down the wrong river. “If the Christians had the sense they were born with,” he had said emphatically, spitting on the ground, “they would pick us off before we got started almost every time.”

“Not with the Snakeeye in charge,” another man had remarked.

“Maybe not,” the first Viking had agreed. “Maybe not with the Snakeeye. But lesser commanders. Do you remember Ulfketil down in Frankland?”

So, better to get your feet planted before you tried to hit, they had agreed. Good idea. But this time it had gone wrong. Their feet were planted too long. It was that there King Edmund, most of the customers agreed—or “Jatmund” as they pronounced it—and the only question was, what was making him act so stupid? Easy to ravage his country till he gave in. But they didn't want to ravage East Anglia, the customers complained. Takes too long. Too thin pickings. Why in Hell didn't the king just pay up and come to a sensible deal? He'd had a warning.

Maybe too much of a warning, Shef thought, remembering the wasted face of Wulfgar in the horse-trough, and that indefinable buzz of rage which he had felt in the fields and woods on their journey. When he asked why the Vikings were so determined to march on Northumbria, largest but not by any means richest of the English kingdoms, the laughter at that question took a long time to die down. Eventually, when he unraveled the tale of Ragnar Lothbrok and King Ella, of the old boar and the little pigs who would grunt, of Viga-Brand and his taunting of the Ragnarssons themselves in the Braethraborg, a chill fell on him. He remembered the strange words he had heard from the blue-swelling face in the snake-pit of the archbishop, the sense of foreboding he had known at the time.

Now he understood the need for revenge—but there were other things about which he remained curious.

“Why do you say ‘Hell’?” he asked Thorvin one night after they had put their gear away and were sitting mulling a tankard of ale on the cooling forge. “Do you believe there is a place where sins are punished after death? Christians believe in Hell—but you're no Christian.”

“What makes you think Hell is a Christian word?” answered Thorvin. “What does heaven mean?” For once he used the English word, heofon.

“Well—it's the sky,” answered Shef, startled.

“Also the Christian place of bliss after death. The word was there before the Christians came. They just borrowed it, gave it a new meaning. Same with Hell. What does hulda mean?” This time he used the Norse word.

“It means to cover, to hide something. Like helian in English.”

“So. Hell is what is covered. What's underground. Simple word, just like heaven. You can put what meaning you like to it after that.

“But your other question: Yes, we do believe there is a place of punishment for your sins after death. Some of us have seen it.”

Thorvin sat silent for a while, as if brooding, unsure how far to speak further. When he broke the silence it was in a half chant, slow and sonorous, like the monks of Ely Minster Shef had heard once, long ago, singing on the vigil of Christmas Eve.

Thorvin shook his head. “Yes, we believe in punishment for sins. Maybe we have a different idea from the Christians about what is a sin and what is not.”

“Who are ‘we’?”

“It is time I told you. It has come to me several times that you were meant to know.” As they sipped their warm, herb-scented ale in the glow of the dying fire, the camp quietening around them, Thorvin, fingering his amulet, spoke. “This is how it was.”

All this began, he said, many generations before, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago. At that time a great jarl of the Frisians—the people on the North Sea coast opposite England—had been a pagan. But because of the tales that had been told him by missionaries from Frankland and from England, and because of the old kinship felt between his people and the now-Christian English, he had decided to take baptism.

As was the custom, baptism was to take place publicly, in the open air, in a great tank that the missionaries had constructed for all to see. After the jarl Radbod had been immersed and baptized, the nobles of his court were to follow and soon after that the whole earldom, all the Frisians. Earldom, not kingdom, for the Frisians were too proud and independent to allow anyone the title of king.

So the jarl had stepped to the side of the tank, clad in his robes of ermine and scarlet over the white baptismal garment, and put one foot down onto the first step of the tank. He actually had his foot in the water, Thorvin asserted. But then he turned and asked the head of the missionaries—a Frank, whom the Franks called Wulfhramn, or Wolfraven—whether it was true that as soon as he, Radbod, accepted baptism, his ancestors, who now lurked in Hell along with the other damned, would be released and allowed to wait for their descendants' coming in the courts of heaven.

No, said the Wolfraven, they were pagans who had never been baptized, and they could not receive salvation. No salvation except in the Church, reinforcing what he said with the Latin words: Nulla salvatio extra ecclesiam. And for that matter no redemption once in hell. De infernis nulla est redemptio.

But my ancestors, said the jarl Radbod, never had anyone speak to them of baptism. They had not even the chance to refuse it. Why should they be tormented forever for something they knew nothing about?

Such is the will of God, said the Frankish missionary, perhaps shrugging his shoulders. At that Radbod took his foot out of the baptismal tank and declared with oaths that he would never become a Christian. If he had to choose, he said, he would rather live in Hell with his blameless ancestors than go to heaven with saints and bishops who had no sense of what was right. And he began a great persecution of Christians throughout all the jarldom of the Frisians, arousing the fury of the Frankish king.

Thorvin drank deep of the ale, then touched the small hammer that hung about his neck.

“Thus it began,” he said. “Radbod Jarl was a man of great vision. He foresaw that as long as the Christians were the only ones with priests and books and writing, then what they said would come in the end to be accepted. And that is the strength and at the same time the sin of the Christians. They will not accept that anyone else has so much as a splinter of the truth. They will not deal. They will not go halfway. So to defeat them, or even to hold them at arm's length, Radbod decided that the lands of the North must have their own priests and their own tales of what is the truth. That was the foundation of the Way.”

“The Way,” prompted Shef, when Thorvin seemed disinclined to continue.

“That is who we are. We are the priests of the Way. And our duties are threefold, and ever have been since first the Way came to the lands of the North. One is to preach the worship of the old gods, the Aesir: Thor and Othin, Frey and Ull, Tyr and Njörth and Heimdall and Balder. Those who put full faith in these gods carry an amulet like mine, made in the sign of whichever god they love the best: a sword for Tyr, a bow for Ull, a horn for Heimdall. Or a hammer for Thor, such as I wear. Many men carry that sign.

“Our second duty is to support ourselves by some trade, as I support myself by smithcraft. For we are not permitted to be like the priests of the Christ-god, who do no work themselves but take tithes and offerings from those who do, and enrich themselves and their minsters till the land groans beneath their exactions.

“But our third duty is hard to explain. We must take thought for what is coming, what will happen in this world—not the next. The Christian priests, you see, believe that this world is only a resting place on the way to eternity, and that the true duty of mankind is to get through it with as little harm to the soul as possible. They do not believe that this world is in any way important. They are not curious about it. They do not want to know any more about it.

“But we of the Way, we believe that in the end a battle will be joined, so great that no man can conceive of it. Yet it will be fought in this world, and it is the duty of us all to make our side, the side of gods and men, stronger when that day comes.

“So the duty laid on us all, besides practicing our skill or art, is to make that skill or art the better for what we learn. Always we must try to think what we can do that is different, that is new. And the most honored among us are those who can think of a skill or art that is entirely new in itself, that no man has ever heard of or thought of before. I am far from the heights of such men as those. Yet many new things have been learned in the North since the time of Radbod the Jarl.

“Even in the South they have heard of us. In the cities of the Moors, in Cordoba and Cairo and the lands of the blue men, there is talk of the Way and what is happening in the North among the majus, the ‘fire-worshippers’ as they call us. They have sent emissaries to watch and learn.

“But the Christians do not send to us. They are still confident in their single truth. They alone know what is salvation and what is sin.”

“Is it not a sin to make a man a heimnar?” asked Shef.

Thorvin looked up sharply. “That is not a word I have taught you. But I forgot—you know more of many things than I have thought fit to ask you.

“Yes, it is a sin to make a man a heimnar, whatever he has done. It is a work of Loki—the god in whose memory we burn the fire in our enclosures next to the spear of his father Othin. But few of us wear the sign of Othin, and none wear that of Loki.

“To make a man a heimnar. No. That has the mark of the Boneless One about it, whether he did it himself or not. There are more ways than one of defeating the Christians, and Ivar Ragnarsson's way is foolish. It would come to nothing in the end. But there—you have seen already for yourself that I have no love for the creatures and the hirelings of Ivar.

“Now. Go to sleep.” And with that Thorvin swilled down his mug, retired to the sleeping tent, and left Shef to follow him thoughtfully.

Working for Thorvin had given Shef no chance at all to pursue his quest. Hund had been taken off almost immediately to the booth of Ingulf the Leech, also a priest of the Way, but one dedicated to Ithun the Healer, some distance away. After that the two had not seen each other. Shef was left to the routine duties of a smith's assistant, made more trying by being confined to the enclosure of Thor: the forge itself, near it a small sleeping tent and an outhouse with a deep-dug latrine, the whole surrounded by the cords and the quickbeam berries, which Thorvin called rowan. “Don't step outside the cords,” Thorvin had told him. “Inside you are under the peace and protection of Thor, and killing you would bring down vengeance on the killers. Outside”—he shrugged—“Muirtach would think himself happy to find you wandering around on your own.” Inside the precinct Shef had stayed.

It was the following morning when Hund came.

“I have seen her. I saw her this morning,” he whispered as he slipped into place beside the squatting Shef. For once Shef was alone. Thorvin had gone off to see about their turn for baking bread in the communal ovens. He had left Shef grinding wheat kernels into flour in the hand quern.

Shef jumped to his feet, spilling flour and unground kernels all over the beaten earth. “Who? You mean—Godive! Where? How? Is she—”

“Sit down, I beg,” Hund started to scrape hurriedly at the spilt mess. “We must look normal. There are always people watching in this place. Please listen. The bad news is this: She is the woman of Ivar Ragnarsson, the one they call the Boneless. But she has not been harmed. She is alive and well. I know because as a leech, Ingulf gets everywhere. Now he has seen what I can do, he often takes me with him. A few days ago he was called to see the Boneless One. They would not let me enter—there is a strong guard round all their tents—but while I was waiting outside for him I saw her pass. There could be no mistake. She was not five yards off, though she did not see me.”

“How did she look?” asked Shef, painful memory of his mother and Truda forcing itself forward.

“She was laughing. She looked—happy.” Both youths fell silent. From all that both had heard there was something ominous in anyone feeling or seeming happy anywhere within the range of Ivar Ragnarsson's power.

“But listen, Shef. She is in terrible danger. She does not understand. She thinks that because Ivar is courteous and speaks well and does not use her immediately as a whore, then she is safe. But there is something wrong with Ivar, maybe in his body, maybe in his head. He has ways of easing it. Maybe, one day, Godive will be one of them.

“You have to get her out, Shef, and soon. And the first thing is to let her see you. What we do after that I cannot guess, but if she knows you are near at least she will maybe be thinking of a chance of passing a message. Now I have heard another thing. AH the women, of all the Ragnarssons and their highest chiefs, will be going out from the tents today. I have heard them complaining. They say they have not had a chance to wash anywhere except in the filthy river for weeks. They mean to go out this afternoon and wash their clothes and themselves. They are going out to a backwater maybe a mile off.”

“Could we get her away?”

“Don't even think about it. There are thousands of men in the army, all of them desperate for women. There will be so many trusted guards on that trip you won't be able to see between them. The best thing you can do is make sure she sees you. Now this is where they are going to go.” Hund began to explain the lay of the land hastily, pointing to add emphasis to his words.

“But how am I to get away from here? Thorvin—”

“I thought of that. As soon as the women start to leave I will come here and say to Thorvin that my master needs him to come and put a final edge on the tools he uses for opening men's bellies and heads. Ingulf can do marvelous things,” Hund added, shaking his head in admiration. “More than any church-leech I have ever heard of.

“When Thorvin hears that, he will come with me. Then you must leave here, slip over the wall, and get well ahead of the women and the guards so you can meet them accidentally on the path.”

Hund was right about Thorvin's reactions. As soon as Hund sidled up to him with the request, and explanation of why he was needed, Thorvin had agreed. “I will come,” he said, putting down his hammer and searching for whetstone, oilstone, sleekstone. He went off without further ado.

And then things went wrong. Two customers in line, and neither of them ready to be put off, both of them knowing full well that Shef never left the precinct. Those got rid of, a third wandered up full of inquiries and surprise and desire to talk. When he finally stepped over the rowan-festooned cords for the first time, Shef realized that he was now bound to do the most dangerous thing he could in this crowded campment full of eyes and bored intelligences: hurry.

Yet hurry he did, loping through the crowded lanes with never a look at the interested faces, cutting suddenly through the ropes of a few deserted tents, up to the wall with its stockade of logs, two hands on the sharp, man-high poles, and over them in one powerful vault. A shout from somewhere told him that he had been seen, but there was no hue and cry. He was going out, not in, and no one had reason to call “Thief.”

Now, he was out on the plain, still dotted with horses and exercising men, with the tree-line of the backwater a mile away. The women would make their way along the river, but it would be suicide to run up after them. He had to get there first and had to be walking innocently back, or better still, to be standing where they would pass. Nor could he go near the gateway where the guards stood noting all that went on. Heedless of the danger, Shef stretched his legs and began to run across the meadow.

Within ten minutes he had reached the backwater and was strolling along the muddy lane which led beside it. No one there yet. Now all he had to do was look like a member of the Army taking his ease. Difficult: There was one thing that set him off from the others. He was on his own. Outside the camp and even inside it, the Vikings went round in ship's crews, or at least with an oarmate to bear company.

He had no choice. Just walk by them. Hope that Godive had the eyes to see him and the wit to say nothing.

He could hear voices, ahead, women calling out and laughing, men's voices among them. Shef stepped round a bank of hawthorn and saw Godive in front of him. Their eyes met.

At the same moment he saw a blaze of saffron plaids all round her. He looked convulsively to either side, and there was Muirtach, not five yards away, striding towards him, a cry of triumph on his lips. Before he could move, hard hands had him by each arm. The rest were crowding up behind their leader, their female charges for the moment forgotten.

“The little cock-sparrow,” gloated Muirtach, thumbs in belt. “The one who showed his hilt to me. Come out for a look at the womenfolk, is it? And an expensive look it's bound to be. Here, boys, take him aside a few paces.” He unsheathed his longsword with a chilling wheep. “We don't want the ladies to be dashed by the sight of blood.”

“I'll fight you,” said Shef.

“That you won't. Am I a chieftain of the Gaddgedlar and to be matched with a runaway with the collar hardly off his neck?”

“There's never been collar on my neck,” snarled Shef. He could feel a heat rising within him from somewhere, driving out the chill of fear and panic. There was only one small chance here. If he could draw them into treating him as an equal he might live. Otherwise he would be a headless corpse in a bush within a minute. “My birth is as good as yours. And I speak the Danish tongue a deal better!”

“That is true,” said a chilly voice from somewhere behind the plaids. “Muirtach, your men are all watching you. They should be watching the womenfolk. Or does it need all of you to deal with this lad?”

The crowd in front of Shef melted away, and he found himself staring into the eyes of the speaker. Almost white eyes. They were as pale, Shef thought, as pale as ice in a dish—a dish of the thinnest maplewood, carved so thin it was almost transparent. They did not blink, and they waited for Shef's eyes to drop. Shef tore his own eyes away with an effort. Felt fear that instant, knew death was very close.

“You have a grudge, Muirtach?”

“Yes, lord.” The Irishman's eyes too were dropped.

“Then fight him.”

“Och, now, I said before—”

“Then if you won't—let one of your men fight him. Pick the youngest. Let a boy fight a boy. If your man wins I'll give him this.” Ivar plucked a silver ring from his arm, threw it in the air, replaced it. “Step back and give them room. Let the women watch as well. No rules, no surrender,” he added, teeth flashing in a chill and humorless smile. “To the death.”

Seconds later Shef found himself staring once more into Godive's eyes, round now with terror. She stood at the front of a ring, two-deep, women's clothes intermixed with bright saffron plaids, and scattered through them also the scarlet cloaks and gold armrings of jarls and champions, the aristocracy of the Viking army. In the midst of them Shef caught sight of a familiar figure, the giant frame of Killer-Brand. On impulse Shef stepped over to him as the others prepared his opponent for battle on the far side of the ring.

“Sir. Lend me your amulet. I will return it—if I can.”

Impassively the champion pulled it over his head and handed it over. “Kick your shoes off, lad. Ground's slippery.”

Shef took the advice. He was beginning, consciously, to breathe hard. He had been in many wrestling matches and had learned that it would prevent that momentary stillness, the unreadiness to fight that looked like fear. He peeled his shirt off too, donned the hammer amulet, drew his sword and threw the sheath and belt aside. It was a big ring, he thought. Speed would have to do it.

His enemy was coming out of his corner, plaid also thrown aside, stripped like Shef to his breeches. In one hand he held the longsword of the Gaddgedlar, thinner than the usual broadsword but a foot longer. In the other hand he had the same spiked targe as his fellows. A helmet was pulled down over his braided hair. He did not look much older than Shef, and in a wrestle Shef would not have feared him. But he had the longsword, the shield, a weapon in each hand. He was a warrior who had seen battle, fought in a dozen skirmishes.

From somewhere outside him, an image formed in Shef's mind. He heard again the solemn voice of Thorvin chanting. He stooped, picked a twig from the ground, threw it over his adversary's head like a javelin. “I give you to Hell,” he called. “I give you to Dead Man's Strand.”

A buzz of interest rose from the crowd, cries of encouragement: “Go on, Flann boy!” “Get him with your buckler!”

No voice encouraged Shef.

The Irish Norseman padded forward—then attacked swiftly. He feinted a thrust at Shef's face, turned it into a sideways backhand slash, aimed at the neck. Shef ducked under it, stepped away to his right, dodged the thrust with the spiked buckler. The Viking paced forward, swung again, backhand up, forehand down. Again Shef stepped back, feinted to step right, stepped left again. For an instant he was to his adversary's side, with a thrust possible at the bare right shoulder. He leapt back instead and moved rapidly to the center of the ring. He had already decided what to do, and he felt his body answering perfectly, light as a feather, buoyed up by a force that swelled his lungs and raced the blood through his veins. He remembered for an instant the way that Sigvarth's sword had broken and the fierce joy that had filled him.

Flann the Irishman came in again, swinging the sword faster and faster, trying to box Shef in against the bodies of the ring. He was quick. But he was used to men standing up to him to trade blows and catching them on blade or buckler. He did not know how to deal with an opponent who simply tried to avoid him. Shef jumped a wide sweep at knee level and saw that the Irishman was beginning to pant already. The Viking Army was made of sailors and horsemen, strong in the arm and shoulder, but men who walked little, and ran even less.

The shouting in the background was getting angry as the watchers grasped Shef's tactic. They might start to close in and narrow the ring. As Flann tried his favorite backhand sweep downward—a little slower now, a little too predictable—Shef stepped forward for the first time and parried fiercely, aiming the base of his thick blade at the tip of the longsword. No snap. But as the Irishman hesitated, Shef slashed out of the parry at the back of the other man's arm—a quick spurt of blood.

Shef was out of reach again, refusing to follow up his advantage, circling to his right, changing step as the other man advanced and then moving to his left again. He had seen the momentary shock in the warrior's eyes. Now there was blood running down over Flann's sword-hand, quite a lot of it, enough to weaken him in a few minutes if he did not finish things quickly.

For a hundred heartbeats they stood close to the center of the ring, Flann trying now to thrust as well as cut, stabbing out with his buckler; Shef parrying as well as dodging, trying to knock the sword from his enemy's blood-smeared hand.

Then Shef felt, suddenly, the confidence draining from his enemy's blows. Shef began to move again, springing on tireless feet, circling his opponent, moving always to the left, trying to get behind the other's sword-arm, careless of the energy he expended.

Flann's breath came almost as a sob. He hurled the buckler at Shef's face and followed it with a ripping upward stab. But Shef was in a crouch, knuckles of his sword-hand on the ground. His parry deflected the thrust far over his left shoulder. In an instant Shef straightened and drove his own sword deep beneath the naked, sweating ribs. As the stricken man shuddered and staggered away, Shef seized him in a wrestler's grip round the neck and poised his sword again.

Shef heard through the yelling the voice of Killer-Brand. “You gave him to Naströnd,” it shouted. “You must finish him.”

Shef looked down at the pallid, terror-stricken, still-living face in the crook of his arm, and felt a surge of fury. He drove the sword deeply home through the chest and felt the pain of death leap through Flann's body. Slowly, he dropped the corpse, retrieved his sword. Saw Muirtach's face, pale with rage. He stepped over to Ivar, where he stood with Godive now at his side.

“Most instructive,” said Ivar. “I like to see someone who can fight with his head as well as his sword-arm. You have saved me a silver ring too. But you have cost me a man. How are you going to pay me back?”

“I am a man as well, lord.”

“Join my ships, then. You will do as a rower. But not with Muirtach. Come to my tent this evening and my marshal will find you a place.”

Ivar looked down for a moment, considering. “There is a notch on your blade. I did not see Flann put it there. Whose blade was it?”

Shef hesitated an instant. But with these men the bold course was always wisest. He spoke loudly, challengingly. “It was the sword of Sigvarth Jarl!”

Ivar's face tightened. “Well,” he said, “this is no way to wash women or sheets. Let us be on our way.” He turned, pulling Godive with him, though for an instant her face remained fixed, looking agonizedly at Shef.

Shef found himself staring up at the bulk of Viga-Brand. He slowly pulled off the amulet.

Brand weighed it in his hand. “Normally I would say keep it, boy, you earned it. If you live you will be a champion one day; I say it, Brand, champion of the men of Halogaland.

“But something tells me the hammer of Thor is not the right sign for you, smith though you are. I think you are a man of Othin, who is called also Bileyg, and Baleyg, and Bölverk.”

“Bölverk?” said Shef. “And am I a doer of evil, a bale-worker?”

“Not yet. But you may be the instrument of one who is. Bale follows you.” The big man shook his head. “But you did well today, for a beginner. Your first kill, I believe, and I am talking like a spaewife. Look, they have taken his body, but they have left the sword and shield and helmet. They are yours. It is the custom.” He spoke like one setting a test.

Slowly Shef shook his head. “I cannot profit from one I gave to Naströnd, to Dead Man's Strand.” He picked up the helmet, threw it into the muddy water of the stream, hurled the buckler up into a bush, put his foot on the long thin sword, bent it once, twice, into unusability, left it lying.

“You see,” said Brand. “Thorvin never taught you to do that. That is the sign of Othin.”

Chapter Seven

Thorvin showed no surprise when Shef returned to the smithy and told him what had happened. He grunted a little wearily when Shef finally told him that he would be joining the contingent of Ivar, but said only, “Well, you'd better not go looking like that. The others would laugh at you—then you'll lose your temper and worse will happen.”

From the pile at the back of the smithy he dug out a spear, recently reshafted, and a leather-bound shield. “With these you'll look respectable.”

“Are they yours?”

“Sometimes people leave things in for repair, don't come back for them.”

Shef took the gifts and then stood awkwardly, his rolled blanket and few possessions on his shoulder.

“I must thank you for what you did for me.”

“I did it because it was my duty to the Way. Or so I thought. Maybe I was wrong. But I'm not a fool, boy. I am sure that you're after something I don't know about. I just hope it doesn't get you into trouble. Maybe our paths will run together again another day.”

They parted with no more words, Shef stepping for only the second time over the rowan-berry cords of the precinct and for the first time walking down the lane between the tents without fear, face forward, not looking furtively around him. He headed not for the encampment of Ivar and the other Ragnarssons, but for the tent of Ingulf the leech.

As usual there was a small crowd standing round it, watching something. It dispersed as Shef strolled up, the last few men to leave carrying a stretcher with a bandaged shape on it. Hund came to meet his friend, wiping his hands on a rag.

“What were you doing?” Shef asked.

“Helping Ingulf. It's amazing what he can do. That man there was wrestling, fell awkwardly—leg broken, just like that. What would you do with that if you were back at home?”

Shef shrugged. “Bandage it up. Nothing else you can do. In the end it would heal.”

“But the man would never walk straight again. The bones would just join each other wherever they happened to be. The leg would be all lumps and twists—like Crubba, who was rolled on by his horse. Well, what Ingulf does is pull the leg out straight before he starts bandaging, squeezes hard to feel if the broken ends of the bone are together. Then he bandages the leg between two stakes, so that the whole thing stays straight while it is healing. But what is even more marvelous is what he does in cases like this one, when it's broken so badly that the bones are sticking up through the skin. If he has to he even cuts back the bone, and opens the leg so that he can push the bone back straight! I didn't think that anyone would live through being opened and cut like that. But he is so quick—and he knows exactly what to do.”

“Could you learn to do it?” Shef asked, watching the glow of enthusiasm on his friend's normally sallow face.

“With enough practice. Enough instruction. And something else. Ingulf studies the bodies of the dead, you know, to see how bones fit together. What would Father Andreas say to that?”

“So you mean to stay with Ingulf?”

The runaway slave nodded slowly. He pulled from under his tunic a chain. On it was a small silver pendant, an apple.

“Ingulf gave it me. The apple of Ithun the Healer. I am a believer now. I believe in Ingulf and the Way. Maybe not in Ithun.” Hund looked at his friend's neck. “Thorvin has not converted you. You are not wearing a hammer.”

“I wore one for a bit.” Shef spoke briefly about what had happened. “I may have a chance now of rescuing Godive and getting away. Maybe if I watch for long enough God will be good to me.”

“God?”

“Or Thor. Or Othin. I'm beginning to think that it makes no difference to me. Maybe one of them is watching.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No.” Shef gripped his friend's arm. “We may not see each other again. But if you leave the Vikings I hope one day I will have a place for you. Even if it's just a hut in the fen.”

He turned and headed for the place he had not dared even to look at when they first entered the Viking camp days before: the Vikings' command tents.

The domain of the four Ragnarsson brothers ran from east wall to west wall, a full furlong along the riverfront. At its heart, in the center, were the great meeting tent—with room in it for tables for a hundred men—and the decorated tents of the brothers themselves. Round each of these four clustered the tents of women, dependents, the most trusted immediate bodyguards. Further away ran the lines of bivouac tents of the soldiers, usually three or four tents for every ship's crew, sometimes with smaller ones scattered through for the captains, helmsmen, and champions. The retinues of the brothers for the most part kept separate, if close together.

The Snakeeye's men were mostly Danes: It was common knowledge throughout the army that in time Sigurth would return to Denmark to challenge for the kingdom in Sjaelland and Skaane which his father had owned, and would go on one day to challenge for the rule of Denmark from the Baltic to the North Sea—a kingdom no man had possessed since the days of that King Guthfrith who fought Charlemagne. Ubbi and Halvdan, men with no stake and no claim to any throne other than that which their strength might bring them, recruited from anywhere: Swedes, Gauts, Norwegians, men from Gotland and Bornholm and all the islands.

Ivar's men were mostly exiles of one sort or another. Many no doubt were mere murderers escaping vengeance or the rule of one law or another. But the bulk of his following came from the floating population of Norsemen who for generations had been moving into the Outer Isles of the Celtic regions: the Orkneys and Shetlands, then the Hebrides, the Scottish mainland. For years these men had been tempered in the constant skirmishes of Ireland and Man, Strathclyde and Galloway and Cumbria. Among themselves they boasted—but the claim was fiercely rejected by many, especially the Norwegians, who viewed Ireland as their own property to keep or dispose of—that one day Ivar Ragnarsson would rule the whole of Ireland from his castle by the black pool, the Dubh Linn itself, and would then lead his victorious navies in triumph against the feeble kingdoms of the Christian West. The Ui Niall might still have a say in that, muttered the Gaddgedlar among themselves, speaking Irish as none of the Hebridean or Scottish Norsemen would deign to. But they said it quietly. For all their race pride they knew that they themselves were the most hated of all by their countrymen, apostates from Christ, accomplices of those who had brought fire and slaughter to every part of Ireland. Who had done it for pay and for power, not merely for joy and for glory, as had been the Irish custom since the days of Finn and Cuchulainn and the champions of Ulster.

Into this touchy and tinder-dry encampment, graded with differences and with excuses for quarrel, Shef walked as the cooking fires were lighting for the night meal.

He was met by a marshal who heard his name, listened to his story, ran a disapproving eye over his shabby equipment, and grunted. He called a young man from the throng to show Shef his tent, sleeping place and oar, and to introduce him to his duties. The man—Shef never caught his name, nor did he want to—told him that there were four jobs at which he would have to take his turn: ship-guard, gate-guard, pen-guard, and if necessary, guard on the tent of Ivar. Mostly they were assigned by crew.

“I thought the Gaddgedlar guarded Ivar,” Shef said.

The young man spat. “When he's here. When he's not they go with him. But the treasure and the womenfolk stay behind. Someone has to look after them. Anyway, if the Gaddgedlar got too far from Ivar someone would take a dislike to them—Ketil Flatnose and his men have a spite against them, and Thorvald the Deaf too. And a dozen more.”

“Would we be trusted to guard the tent of Ivar?”

The young man looked at him aslant. “Shouldn't we be? I tell you, Enzkr, if you are thinking of Ivar's treasure you had better cut your thoughts right out of your head. It will be less painful that way. Did you even hear what Ivar did to the Irish king at Knowth?”

As they walked round, he told him in detail what Ivar had done to kings and lesser men who had displeased him. Shef took little notice, looking with great interest at the camp. The tales were clearly meant to frighten him.

The ships, he thought, were the weak point of the camp. Space had to be left clear for them to be drawn up on the muddy banks, so there could be no fortifications there. The ships themselves represented a sort of obstacle, but they were also the Vikings' most precious possession. If anyone got past the riverbank-guards, they could be in among the ships with torch and axe, and they would be difficult to dislodge.

The gate-guards were a different matter. Surprising them would be hard. Any fight would be on level ground and on even terms, where the Vikings' great axes and iron-shafted javelins would have easy play. Anyone who did manage to get through them would in any case only find himself fighting his way through rank after rank of warriors, in a tangle of tents and ropes.

The pens, now… They occupied an area of their own near the east wall: a sorry strip of posts hammered into the ground, leather ropes binding them together. Inside, men huddled under makeshift coverings of canvas against the rain. Iron fetters on their feet, iron manacles on their hands. Held together, though, Shef noted, only by leather. Chain was too dear. But by the time a man had chewed through the leather bonds, even the least alert guard should have noticed—and penalty for any disobedience in the slave-pens was fierce. As Shef's guide pointed out, if you marked up a slave too much you couldn't sell him anyway, so you might as well go ahead and finish the job to frighten the others.

As he peered over the logs into the pen, Shef noticed a familiar-looking head lying on the ground, its owner sunk in a depth of despair: a blond head, curls matted with grime. His half brother, son of the same mother. Alfgar. Part of the prey of Emneth. The head stirred as if sensing the eyes upon it, and Shef dropped his gaze instantly, as he would have done had he been stalking a doe or a wild pig of the marshes.

“You haven't sold any slaves since you arrived?”

“Nay. Too much trouble getting them out to sea, with the English ambushing all the time. Sigvarth owns that lot.” The young man spat again, eloquently. “He's waiting for someone else to clear the road for him. Will, too.”

“Clear the road?”

“Ivar's taking half the army out in two days, to make the kinglet Jatmund—Edmund, you English call him—fight, or destroy his country for him. We'd rather have done it the easy way, but we wasted too much time already. Be bad news for Jatmund when Ivar catches up with him, I tell you….”

“Are we going out or staying here?”

“Our crew stays.” Again, the young man looked half curiously, half angrily at Shef. “Why you think I'm telling you all this? We'll be providing guards all the time. I wish I was going. I'd like to see what they'll do to that king when he's caught. I told you about Knowth. Well, I was there at the Boyne when Ivar robbed the tombs of the dead kings and this Christ-priest tried to stop us. What Ivar did, he…”

The subject occupied the young man and his mates all through the dinner of broth, salt pork and cabbage. There was a barrel of ale, someone had taken a hatchet or an axe to its top, and they all dipped into it liberally. Shef drank more than he realized, the day's events circling in his head. His mind was revolving what he had learned, trying to put together the rudiments of a plan. He lay down that night exhausted. The Irishman leaping in death in his arms was a detail, a matter of the past.

Then exhaustion seized him, drove him into sleep, into something more than sleep.

He was looking out from a building, through a half-shuttered window. It was night. A bright moonlit night, so bright that the racing clouds above threw dim shadows even in the dark. And out there something had flashed. Something had flashed.

There was a man standing next to him, gabbling out explanations of what the something might be. But he did not need them. He knew. A dull feeling of doom grew within him. Against it, a rising tide of fury. He cut the explanations short.

“That is not dawn from the east,” said the Shef-who-was-not-Shef. “Nor is it a dragon flying, nor the gables of this hall burning. That is the flashing of drawn weapons, of secret foes coming to take us in our sleep. For now war awakens, war that will bring about disaster for all the people. So rise now, my warriors, think of courage, guard the doors, fight heroically.”

In the dream, a stirring behind him as the warriors rose, gripped their shields, buckled their sword-belts.

But in the dream and over the dream, not in the hall, not part of the hero-tale that was unfolding before his eyes, he heard a mighty voice, too mighty to come from a human throat. It was a god's voice, Shef knew. But not the voice anyone would have imagined of a god. Not dignified, not honorable. An amused, chuckling, sardonic voice.

“Oh half-Dane who is not of the Half-Danes,” it said. “Do not listen to the warrior, the brave one. When trouble comes, do not rise to fight. Seek the ground. Seek the ground.”

Shef woke with a start, the smell of burning in his nostrils. For several seconds, half-drugged with fatigue, his mind circled around that: strange smell, something acrid, like tar—what could be burning tar? Then there was a confusion of movement all around him, a foot stamping on his guts jerked him into full wakefulness. The tent was abroil with men scrambling for breeches, boots, weapons, all in full darkness; there was a glare of fire on one side of the tent. Shef realized suddenly that there was a continuous roar in the background. Voices shouting, timber crackling, and over it all a deafening metallic clanging, the impact of blade on blade and blade on shield. The noise of full-scale battle.

The men in the tent were shouting, crowding past each other. Voices outside shouting, yelling in English, voices suddenly only yards away. Shef understood suddenly, the mighty voice still ringing in his ears. He hurled himself back to the ground again, fighting his way to the middle of the floor, away from the walls. As he did so the whole side of the tent caved in and through it there flashed a spear-blade. The young man who had guided him turned half toward it, his feet still trapped in folds of blanket, met the spear full in the chest. Shef grabbed the falling body and pulled it on top of him, feeling for the second time in a dozen hours the convulsive leap and start of a heart bursting.

As he did so, the whole tent collapsed and a wave of trampling feet ran over it, spears stabbing down into the trapped pile of struggling men. The body in his arms jerked again and again; in the darkness inches away there came screams of pain and fear; a blade plunged into the dirt, scraping against Shef's sprawling knee. Then suddenly the feet were gone, a rush of bodies and voices swarmed past in the lane outside, a new hubbub of clanging and shrieking broke out ten yards toward the center of the camp.

Shef knew what had happened. The English king had taken the Vikings' dare, had attacked their camp in the night, and by some miracle of organization and his enemies' overconfidence, had broken through or over the stockade, driving for the ships and the tents of the leaders, killing as many trapped in their blankets as they could. The English were pouring on, driving toward the center of the river-line. Shef seized his breeches, his boots and his sword-belt and wriggled past the corpses of his temporary fellows into the open. Pulled the gear on, ran, keeping low to the ground. There was no one standing within twenty yards. Between himself and the stockade was a swathe of leveled tents with bodies sprawled among them, some calling feebly for help or trying to struggle to their feet. The English raiders had charged through the camp hacking frenziedly at anything that moved. They had left few survivors.

Before the Vikings could recover, join together, the raiders would be deep in the heart of their enemies' fortress, the battle irrecoverably won or lost.

All along the river-line there was glare and smoke, leaping up as sails caught or the fire took hold of some new-tarred timber hull; against the blaze a frieze of capering demons, hurling spears, swinging swords and axes. The English must have met little resistance down by the ships in their first charge. But the Vikings closest to the ships had rallied swiftly and fiercely to defend their wave-stallions. What was going on by the tents of the Ragnarssons? Was this the moment? Shef thought with a calm and intent calculation which left no room for self-doubt. Was this the moment to try to get Godive out?

No. Clearly there was battle and fierce resistance on all sides. If the Vikings beat off the assault, then she would remain as she was: a slave, the bedslave of Ivar. But if the attack succeeded—and if he were there to save her…

He ran, heading not toward the fighting, where one more half-armed man would find nothing but quick death; but in the opposite direction, toward the stockade walls, still dark, still quiet. Not completely. Shef realized now that there was battle not only close to him but also far away, in all directions round the further walls of the stockade. Spears were flying in the blackness, firebrands coming looping over the logs of the stockade. King Edmund had sent in simultaneous assaults from all sides at once. Each Viking had rushed to the nearest point of danger. By the time they realized where help was needed most, again Edmund would have won or lost.

Like a shadow Shef ran towards the slave-pens. As he neared them a figure lurched towards him in the fire-lit dark, its thigh black with blood, a longsword drooping in its hand. “Fraendi,” it said, “help me a moment, stop the bleeding—” Shef stabbed once from below, twisted the sword, withdrew.

One, he thought, grabbing up the sword. The pen-guards were still there, clustered in tight formation in front of the pen's gates, clearly determined to resist any attempt to break through. All along the logs of the slave-stockade heads were bobbing as the tethered slaves tried to peer over, to see what was happening. Shef lobbed the longsword over the nearest wall, followed it in one surge of motion. There was a yell as the guards spotted him, but no movement. Undecided whether to guard the gate or to follow him.

Figures all round him, stinking, clutching. Shef snarled abuse in English, pushed them away. With the longsword he slashed the leather bonds between one pair of hand manacles, did the same for the man's foot fetters, pushed the sword into the freed hands.

“Start cutting them free,” he hissed, turning instantly to the next man and drawing his own sword from its scabbard. The slaves saw what was happening, thrust their hands out, then snatched their leg-bonds, held them up for an easy cut. In twenty heartbeats half a score of slaves were free.

The palisade gate creaked open, the guards deciding to come in and catch the intruder. As the first Viking came through, hands caught his arms and legs, a fist slammed into his face. In seconds he was on the ground, his axe and spear snatched away, blows swinging at his fellows who crowded after him from the light into the darkness of the pen. Shef slashed furiously at leather, then saw suddenly the hands of his half brother Alfgar, a face staring at him in amazement and twisted rage.

“We have to get Godive.” The face nodded.

“Come with me. You others, there's weapons at the gate, cut yourselves free. Those with weapons, who want to strike a blow for Edmund, over the wall and follow me.”

Shef's voice rose to a bellow. He sheathed sword, stepped to the wall, caught the top of the logs and heaved himself over in a second powerful roll. Alfgar was with him a moment later, staggering from the shock of release, a score of half-naked figures swarming after him and more pouring over the wall. Some ran instantly into the friendly dark, others turned in rage toward their guards, still embroiled in their struggle round the gate. Shef ran back through the leveled tents with a dozen men behind him.

Weapons lay everywhere for the snatching, dropped where their owners had died or still lying where they had been piled for the night. Shef hauled aside a tent flap, rolled over a corpse, seized a spear and a shield. For a long, hard-breathing pause he studied the men who had followed him as they armed themselves too. Peasants mostly, he judged. But angry and desperate ones, maddened by what had happened to them in the pens. The one in the front, though, staring at him intently, rolls of muscle on arm and shoulder, he carried himself like a warrior.

Shef pointed ahead, to the struggle still going on round the untouched command tents of the Viking Army. “There is King Edmund,” he said, “trying to kill the Ragnarssons. If he succeeds the Vikings will break and flee and never recover. If he fails they will hunt us all down again and no village of any shire will be safe. We are fresh, and armed. Let us join them, break through together.”

The released slaves surged as one toward the fighting.

Alfgar held back. “You did not come with Edmund, half-armed and half-naked. How do you know where to find Godive?”

“Shut up and follow.” Shef sprinted ahead again, hurdling through the confusion towards the tents of the women of Ivar.

Chapter Eight

Edmund—son of Edwold, descendant of Raedwald the Great, last of the Wuffingas, and now by God's grace king of the East Angles—glared through the eyeholes of his war-mask in frustration and rage.

They had to break through! One more thrust and the desperate resistance of the Viking chiefs would crumble, the Ragnarssons would all die together in blood and fire, the rest of the Great Army would fall back in doubt and confusion…. But if they held… If they held, he knew, in a few more minutes the war-wise Vikings would realize that the assaults on their perimeter were no more than angry peasants with torches, that the real attack was here, here…. And then they would be down on the struggle by the river-bank with their overwhelming numbers, and it would be the English who were caught like rats in the last unmown square of the hayfield. He, Edmund, had no sons. The whole future of his dynasty and his kingdom had now narrowed down to this yelling, clanging tumult, maybe one hundred men on each side, as the picked champions of the East English and the last hard core of the Ragnarssons' personal forces fought it out: the one side straining every nerve in their bodies to break into the three-sided square of the Ragnarssons' tents down by the river; the other, standing poised and confident among the tangle of their guy-ropes, bracing themselves to hold out for five minutes more after the unimaginable shock of the English assault.

And they were doing it too. Edmund's hand tensed on the bloody sword-hilt and he swayed as if to move forward. Instantly the brawny shadows on either side of him, the captains of his bodyguard, edged slightly forward, blocking him in with shield and body. They would not let him throw himself into the melee. As soon as the initial slaughter of sleeping men had stopped and the fight had begun, they had been in front of him.

“Easy, lord,” muttered Wigga. “See Totta and the boys there. They'll get through these bastards yet.”

As he spoke the battle surged in front of them, first a few feet forward as a Viking went down and the English rushed at the momentary gap. Then back, back. Above the helmets and the raised shields a battle-axe whirled, the thuds as it struck lindenwood turning to a crash of steel on mail. The swaying mob ejected a body, cleft through its mail from neck to breastbone. For an instant Edmund saw a giant figure twirling its axe in one hand like a boy's ox-goad, daring the English to come on. They did, fiercely, and all he could see was straining backs.

“We must have killed a thousand of the bastards already,” said Eddi on his other hand. In a moment, Edmund knew, one or the other of them would say “Time to get out of here, lord,” and he would be hustled away. If they could get away. Most of his army, the country thanes and their levies, were already making for the rear. They had done their job: burst over the stockade behind the king and his picked strikers, massacred the sleepers, overwhelmed the ship-guards and set fire to as many beached longships as they could. But they had never expected to stand in line and exchange blows with the professional champions of the North, nor did they mean to. Catch them asleep and unarmored, yes. Fight them awake and enraged, man to man, toe to toe—that was the duty of their betters.

One break, Edmund prayed. Almighty God eternal, one break in this square and we will be through and attacking them from all sides. The war will be over and the pagans destroyed. No more dead boys in meadows and children's corpses tossed down wells. But if they stand another minute, long enough for a mower to whet his scythe… Then it is we who will break and, for me, it will be the fate of Wulfgar.

The thought of his tormented thane swelled his heart till it seemed the links of his mail must snap. The king shoved Wigga aside and strode forward, sword raised, looking for a gap in the fighters where he could thrust forward. He shouted full-throatedly, so that his voice echoed inside the metal of his ancient visor:

“Break through! Break through! The hoard of Raedwald, I swear it, to the man who breaks their ranks. And five hundreds to the man who brings me the head of Ivar!”

Twenty paces away, Shef gathered his little band of rescued prisoners in the night. Many of the tarred longships along the river were now blazing furiously, throwing lurid light on the battle. All around them, the Vikings' bivouac tents were down, flattened by the English charge, their occupants dead or wounded. Only in one place, in front of them, eight or ten pavilions still stood: the homes of the Ragnarssons, their chieftains, their guards—and their women. Round these the battle raged.

Shef turned to Alfgar and to the heavily-muscled thane beside him, standing a pace in front of the little knot of half-armed, heavy-breathing peasants.

“We have to break into those tents there. That's where the Ragnarssons are.” And Godive, he thought silently. But only Alfgar would care about that.

In the firelight the thane's teeth showed, a mirthless smile.

“Look,” he pointed.

For an instant again, as the battle cleared, two warriors showed in black silhouette, each leap of flame seeming to catch them in another contorted pose. The swords whirled, each blow parried forte a forte, the strokes coming forehand, backhand, at all angles, each one meeting a precisely timed counter. The warriors twisted and stamped, raising their shields, leaping over low strokes, moving with each blow into position for the next, trying to gain leverage even from the strokes of their enemy for a tiny advantage on the next counter, a weakened wrist, a strain, a hesitation.

The thane's voice was almost affectionate. “Look at them, both sides. Those are the king's warmen and the best of the pirates. They are the drengir, the hard here-chempan. How long would we last against them? Me—maybe I could give one a little trouble for half a minute. You—I don't know. These—” He gestured with his thumb at the peasants behind him. “Make sausage meat of them.”

“Let's get out of here,” said Alfgar abruptly. The peasants stirred and muttered.

Suddenly the thane had Alfgar by the arm, fingers sinking deep.

“No. Listen. That is the king's voice. He is calling on his true men. Hear what he wants.”

“He wants the head of Ivar,” snarled a peasant.

Suddenly they were all moving forward, raising spears, bracing shields, the thane among them.

He knows it won't work, Shef realized—but I know what will!

He leapt in front of them, pointing, gesturing. Slowly the men caught his meaning, turned away, dropped their weapons, headed for the nearest of the blazing longships.

Over the clash of steel the Vikings too heard the king's voice calling, and understood him—many of them had had English bedslaves for years, and their fathers before them.

“King Jatmund wants your head,” cried one of the jarls.

“I don't want Jatmund's head,” Ivar called back. “He must be taken alive.”

“What do you want him for?”

“I will give that much thought. Something new. Something instructive.”

Something to put heart back into the men. This had all been much too close for comfort, Ivar reflected, edging from side to side to keep a clear view of the action. He would never have thought that the king of a little kingdom like this would have had the guts to challenge the Great Army in its own base.

“All right,” he said quietly to the Gaddgedlar, waiting behind the battle-line as his personal reserve. “No need to wait much longer. They aren't going to break through. Over here, between the tents. Now, when I give the word we are going to charge. Go right through them, don't bother to fight. I want you to catch the kinglet. King Jatmund. See him. There. The little man, the one with the war-mask over his face.”

Ivar filled his lungs to shout, over the din of battle, in mockery of the cry of Edmund. “Twenty ounces, twenty ounces of gold to the man who brings me the English king. But don't kill him. He must be taken alive.”

But before he could speak he felt Muirtach and the Irish gasp and stiffen around him. “Will you look at that!” “It's a fiery cross coming for us!” “Mac na hoige slan.” “Mother of God be merciful.” “What in the name of Othin is it?” Over the heads of the struggling men a giant shape rushed toward them like a cross, a monstrous, blazing cross. The ranks of the English parted, Killer-Brand leapt forward with his axe raised. Then the huge timber fell forward, half hurled by the capering furies who grasped it.

Brand sprang aside, tripped over a rope and fell with a clang to the ground. Something struck Ivar a numbing blow on the shoulder. The Gaddgedlar scattered in all directions as the waxed flax walls of the tents started to blaze. The shrieking of women rose to add itself to all the other noises of the battle.

And instantly, running along the blazing timber itself, his face contorted with rage and delight, there came a half-naked churl, the slave manacles still on his wrist, hurtling through the scattered ranks of his captors. A spear stabbed at Ivar's face. Without thought he parried it, slicing the point from its shaft at the same moment his shoulder shrieked protest. The peasant raced on, reversing his clumsy weapon and smashing it at the side of Ivar's head.

The blow, the ground rising up, the fall into burning wax and skin. Struck by a peasant, Ivar's brain thought in the last instant of consciousness, darkness embracing him. But I am the champion of the North.

Through the flames other figures came leaping. It's that boy, thought Ivan, the one who fought the duel by the washing-place. But I thought he was one of mine….

A bare foot landed in his testicles, and his body gave up the fight.

Shef raced along the still-smoldering timber of the long-ship's mast. He was aware that his hands were burned, swelling, puffy already with blisters. There was no time for that. He and the thane and Alfgar had seized the smoldering timber, its yard still attached, as soon as the peasants had pulled it from the flame, had grasped the upper end and had run toward the fighting battle-line, struggling desperately to keep it upright till they could throw it into the warriors. But the instant they hurled it a wave of furious peasants had run straight past them and over them. And behind him, he knew, came King Edmund's champions, all beside themselves with rage and fear and the passion to kill. He had to reach Godive first.

In front of him a churl rained blows on an amazed Viking with a broken spear-staff. Something groaned and squirmed under his feet. Another peasant was down with a slash from the side. Yellow plaids seemed to be scattering in flight everywhere—the Gaddgedlar, in superstitious panic and fear of the fiery cross that had come to avenge their apostasy. And women shrieking.

Shef swerved instantly to the left round a tent. Bulging sides, the screaming just beyond it. He drew his sword, bent, and scored it open at knee level, instantly catching the flap and hauling at it with all his strength.

A wail of women erupted from it like water from a broken milldam, in their shifts, in their gowns, at least one still naked from her sleep. Godive—where! That one, there, the scarf over her head. Shef seized her shoulder, hauling her round to him, dragging the scarf down. A blaze of yellow hair, turned copper by the flames in the sky, and furious pale eyes, nothing like Godive's gray ones. A fist caught him full in the face and he staggered back, full of shock and incongruous pain: all around him heroes were dying and he had just been punched on the nose!

Then the woman was away, and Shef glimpsed a familiar body-shape, not scuttling like the other women but running full stride like a young deer. Straight into disaster. The English were everywhere now, inside the Viking square, taking their enemies from front and rear simultaneously, determined to wipe out the pirates' leadership and aristocracy in the scant seconds they had before rescue and revenge came down from the main camp. They were cutting at everything that moved, carried away with fear and triumph and long frustration.

Shef was on her, throwing himself forward, catching her round the hips and bowling her over just as a furious warrior, seeing something moving behind him, swung round and launched a body-severing blow at waist level. The two rolled sideways in a tangle of legs and dress and nails as new combat clashed above them. Then he had a grip round her waist and was hauling her by main force into the shadow of a pavilion, tenanted only by corpses.

“Shef!”

“Me.” He put his hand over her mouth. “Listen. We have to get away now. There won't be another chance. Go back to where I broke in. Everyone there is dead now. If we can just get through the fight we'll be out there, by the river. Understood? Now, let's go.”

Sword in one hand, clutching Godive tightly with the other, Shef stepped crouching into the night, eyes darting for a route through the fifty single combats that raged around him.

The battle was over, Edmund thought. And he had lost. He had broken the Vikings' last ring, sure enough, thanks to that rabble of churls that had sprung from nowhere with the half-naked youth in their midst. In the last few minutes he had done crippling execution among the Great Army's hardest of hard cores, so much that the Army would never be quite the same again. Or remember the camp on the Stour without a shudder. But he had not yet seen a Ragnarsson dead. There were little knots of men still fighting back-to-back and the Ragnarssons must be among them. Only if he held this place of slaughter, defeated and killed every one of them, could he be sure of lasting victory.

He would not get the chance to do it. Edmund felt the blood-rage inside him cooling, cooling to a slow and wary calculation. Ominously, the noise from the main camp above the Ragnarssons' tents by the river had lessened. Stung by arrows from the palisades, harassed by mock assaults and parties of running knifemen in their rear, the Vikings had let the Ragnarssons deal with their own troubles in their own way. But you could not fool these veterans for long; they would not stand by forever while their leaders were destroyed.

Edmund sensed that men were gathering beyond the reach of the flames. Those were orders being given. Someone was getting ready to come down like a warhammer on a hazelnut, with a thousand men together. How many had he left on their feet and not escaped into the night? Fifty?

“Time to go, lord,” muttered Wigga.

Edmund nodded, knowing that he had reached the absolute last instant. His escape route was still clear, and he had a handful of champions round him to brush aside any scattered interceptors there might be between him and the east stockade.

“Back,” he ordered. “Back to where we broke in. We'll run for the stockade from there. But kill everyone, everyone on the ground, ours as well as theirs. Don't leave them for Ivar. And make certain every single one is dead!”

Ivar felt consciousness returning. Yet it would not come back all at once; it was there and not there. He had to grasp it, grasp it quickly. Something terrible was coming toward him. He could feel the thump, thump, thump of heavy footsteps. It was a draugr—giant, swollen, blue as a three-day corpse, strong as ten men, with all the strength of those who live in the Halls of the Mighty, but come back to earth to vex their descendants. Or to avenge their deaths.

Ivar remembered who he was. In the same instant he realized who the draugr must be. It was the Irish king Maelguala, whom he had killed years before. Ivar remembered still his contorted face, glistening with sweat from rage and pain, but still cursing Ivar steadily and fearlessly as the wheels turned and the strongest men of the Army threw their weight on the levers. They had bent him back and back over the stone till suddenly—

As his mind registered the snap of broken spine, Ivar awoke fully. Something over his face; skin, cloth—had they wrapped him in his cloak already for burial? An instinctive movement checked a stab of agony from the right shoulder, but the pain burned away the mist from his head. He sat up instantly, more pain from his head, not the right side, the left side, the side opposite from where he had been hit. Concussion, then. He had felt that before. Get down and stay down. No time to do that now. He could tell where he was.

Ivar lurched slowly to his feet, the effort sending a wave of nausea and giddiness through him. His sword was still in his hand, and he tried to lift it. No strength there. He dropped the blade and leaned heavily on it, feeling the point sink into the close-packed earth. He stared to the west, between the ripped-open tents, toward an arena where still threescore of men fought desperately to buy time, or to annihilate their enemies, and saw doom approaching him.

No draugr, but a king. Heading straight toward him, evidently bent on escape, was the short, broad-shouldered figure in the war-mask. The English kinglet. Jatmund. Ranking and following him were a half dozen enormous men, big as Vikings, big as Viga-Brand, obviously the king's own personal bodyguard—the very heart and soul of the king's warriors, the chempan as the English called them. As they came they were stabbing carefully, economically, professionally, at every figure that still lay on the ground. They were doing it just right. One of them he would have squared off to, if he had been fighting fit and unwounded and the men had needed to be encouraged. Six. And he could hardly hold a weapon, still less could he wield it. Ivar tried to shuffle his feet round to face them, so that no one could say afterward that Ivar Ragnarsson, the champion of the North, had been caught unawares or trying to flee. As he did so, the war-mask turned toward him.

A cry of recognition broke from it, a wave, a pointing arm. All the English together broke into a run, charging toward him, swords raised, the bodyguards striving vainly to outstrip their king.

As Edmund attacked, Shef, dodging from dark space to dark space round the edges of the conflict, saw the gap between the tangled tents, pushed Godive violently into it, and tensed his muscles for the final dart to liberty.

Without warning she had torn free of his grasp, was rushing ahead of him. She had seized a man by the arm, a wounded man, was holding him up. By Christ, it was Ivar! Hurt, done for, staggering as he stood.

Shef's lips pulled back in a killing snarl, and he paced forward like a leopard—one step, two, three—sword dropped to hip level, already aiming the fierce thrust upward beneath the chin where no armor covered.

Then Godive was in front of him, clutching at his sword-hand. He tried to throw her off but Godive clung on, pounding his naked chest with her free hand. Shrieking.

“Behind you! Behind you!”

Shef flung her off and spun to see a sword already slicing at his neck. His own sword met it with a clang, driving it up; a second blow came instantly after the first. He ducked under it and heard the whizz as it slashed the air. Realized in the same instant that Godive was behind him and that he had to keep his own body between the swords and her.

Then he was backing between a maze of guy-ropes, half a dozen men crowding toward him behind the short figure in the fantastically molded and gilded war-mask. It was the king. But no matter who it was or how many supporters he had, for just this one moment it was Shef the slave, Shef the dog and the king of the East Angles facing each other.

“Get out of the way,” said Edmund, pacing forward. “You are an Englishman. You brought the ship's timber, you broke the line. I saw you. That is Ivar behind you. Kill him, let me kill him, and you will have the reward I promised.”

“The woman,” Shef stammered. He had meant to say “Just leave me the woman.” But he had no time.

Too late. As the gap between the tents widened, the champions of Edmund saw their chance. One was by the side of his king in an instant, stabbing furiously upward at the unarmored youth in front of him, converting the stab instantly into a slash, jerking his shield forward as the slash missed, to break a rib or smash a wrist. Shef stepped back, ducked, twisted, as he had against the Irishman Flann, making no attempt to strike back or parry. “You can have him,” he yelled.

He beat a thrust aside, ducked into a shield-boss, and with the strength of desperation grappled a wrist as thick as a horse's fetlock, twisted, and hurled Wigga the champion over his thigh in a village-green cross-buttock throw.

He was on the ground and legs were all around him; cries and blows and the clang of metal. A dozen Vikings had appeared, Viga-Brand at their head, to protect their chief. Now it was the English king whose men had to close round him, to die one by one while all the time Ivar called out for Jatmund to be spared, for the kinglet not to be killed.

Taking no notice of the fray Shef wriggled clear, saw Godive standing a few yards away from the edge of the battle, staring round in panic. He seized her by the arm and dragged her at full speed toward the dying fires of the long-ships and the muddy waters of the Stour. The English kingdom lay in ruins behind him, and if the pirates ever caught him again his fate would be terrible. But Godive was unhurt. He had saved her. Though she had saved Ivar.

Chapter Nine

The stars were paling in the eastern sky behind them as the young man and the girl stole carefully and cautiously through the depths of the wood. If he looked back Shef could see the topmost branches now silhouetted against the sky, moving slightly in the breeze, the little wind that comes before dawn. Down at ground level nothing of it could be felt. Where the two crossed the occasional clearing created by the fall of oak or ash, the dew soaked their feet. It would be a hot day, Shef thought, one of the last of the late, event-filled summer.

It could not come soon enough for him. Both were cold. Shef wore only the boots and woolen breeches which he had snatched up when the English attack came in. Godive had only her shift. She had stripped off her long dress before slipping into the water by the fired ships. She could swim like a fish, like an otter; and like otters they had swum out, underwater for as many strokes as they could, concentrating on noiselessness and cutting out both splash and gasp. A hundred slow strokes and ten breaths up the river, against the slow, weedy current; eyes alert every time they came up for watchers on the bank. Then a careful filling of the lungs while Shef warily eyed the stockade edge, where surely guards might still be posted. Then the deep dive and the long swim underwater, till it was time to come up and repeat the otter stroke, on, on, for another quarter mile before he decided it might be safe to creep ashore.

He had felt no chill while they were escaping, only a momentary prickle on his burned hands and body as he dashed into the water the first time. But now he was beginning to shiver uncontrollably, the great shudders wracking his body. Shef knew that he was close to collapse. He would have to let go soon, lie down, let his muscles relax. And let his mind come to terms with the events of the last twenty-four hours. He had killed a man; no, two men. He had seen the king, something he might have expected to do once or twice in a lifetime. But this time the king had seen him, had even spoken to him! And he had stood toe to toe with Ivar the Boneless, champion of the North. Shef knew he would have killed him if it had not been for Godive. He could have been the hero of all England, of all Christianity.

But she had stopped him. And then he had betrayed his king, delayed him, all but handed him over to the power of the pagans. If anyone were ever to know about that… But his mind shied away from the thought. They had escaped. He would ask Godive about her and Ivar when he could.

As the light strengthened, Shef's eye caught the faint trace of a trail. It was overgrown, had not been used for weeks. That was good. Used last to flee from the Viking landing. But at the end of the trail there might be something: a hut, a shed. Anything left behind would now be worth its weight in silver.

Now, the trees were thinning, there was something in front of him: not a hut, he realized, but a shelter, a lean-to made of branches. The coppicers must have made it to store their gear in as they worked through the forest cutting the poles that all farmers relied on for hurdles and fencing, for handles, and for the centerpieces for their flimsy wattle-and-daub walls.

There was no one there. Shef led Godive over. Turning her toward him, he held her hands in his own and looked down into her eyes.

“What we have here,” he said, “is nothing. One day, I hope we will have a real house of our own, somewhere we can live together untroubled. That is why I came to take you back from the Vikings. It will not be safe to travel in the day. Let us rest as well as we can till evening.”

The coppicers had rigged up a bark gutter beneath the roof of rough shingles. It led to a large broken crock, full to overflowing with clear rainwater: one more proof that no one had been there for weeks. The boughs inside were covered with old, torn strips of blanket. Stiffly the pair wrapped themselves, lay down huddled together, fell immediately into an exhausted slumber.

Shef woke as the sun began to pierce through the branches. He rose, careful not to disturb the still-sleeping girl, and crawled out of the shelter. Concealed beneath the boughs he found flint and steel. Should he risk a fire? he wondered. Better not. They had water and warmth, but there was no food to cook. He would take what he had found with them when they left. Slowly, Shef was beginning to think of the future. He owned nothing now, save his breeches, so every single possession he accumulated would be precious.

He did not think they would be disturbed, not this day. They were still well within range of the Viking fighting patrols he had seen on his way into the camp, but the Vikings would have other things to think about for a while. Everyone would be at the camp, counting casualties, deciding what to do—probably fighting among themselves for control of the Army. Had Sigurth the Snakeeye survived? Shef wondered. If he had, even he might have trouble in reimposing his authority on a shaken army.

As for the English, Shef knew that as he and Godive had left the river and started to make their way into the woods there had been other folk about. The refugees from King Edmund's army, the ones who had fled, or at any rate decided to retreat before the crisis of the battle. They were all making their way to their respective homes as fast as ever they could. Shef doubted if there would be an Englishman within five miles of the Viking encampment by now. They had guessed that their lord's attack had failed, and that he was dead.

Shef hoped so, remembering what his pirate guide had told him about Ivar's ways with defeated kings.

He lay in the sun on the blanket, feeling his body relax. A muscle jumped irregularly in his thigh. He waited for it to stop, looking at the puffed blisters on both hands.

“Will it be better if I prick them?” Godive was at his side, kneeling in her shift, holding up a long thorn. He nodded.

As she began to work on his left hand and he felt the slow tears rolling down his arm, he held her warm shoulder with his right.

“Tell me,” he said. “Why did you stand between me and Ivar? How was it with you and him?”

Her eyes lowered, Godive seemed unsure what to say. “You know I was given to him? By—by Sigvarth.”

“By my father. Yes. I know. What happened then?”

She kept her eyes down, studying his blisters attentively. “They gave me to him at a banquet, with everyone watching. I—I only had this to wear. Some of them do terrible things to their women, you know, like Ubbi. They say he takes them in front of his men, and if things do not go to his liking he hands them over to the men then and there, to be used by all. You know I was a virgin—I am a virgin. I was very frightened.”

“You are virgin still?”

She nodded. “Ivar said nothing to me then, but he had me brought to him in his tent that night, and he talked to me. He told me—he told me that he was not like other men.

“He is not a gelding, you know. He has sired children, or so he says. But he told me where other men can feel desire just at the sight of flesh, he needs—something else.”

“Do you know what that something is?” asked Shef sharply, remembering the hints Hund had given.

Godive shook her head. “I do not know. I do not understand. But he says that if men were to know how it is with him, they would mock him. In his youth the other young men called him the Boneless One because he could not do as they do. But, he says, he killed many men for mocking him and discovered it was a pleasure to him. Now all those who laughed are dead, and only the closest suspect how it is with him. If everyone had known, Sigvarth would not have dared to hand me over to him openly and publicly, as he did. Now, he says, men call him the Boneless because they fear him. They say that at night he turns—not into a wolf or a bear, like other skin-changers—but into a dragon, a great long-worm, that creeps out in the night for its prey. Anyway, that is what they think now.”

“And what do you think?” asked Shef. “Do you remember what they did to your father? He is your father, not mine, but even I felt sorrow for him. And though Ivar did not do that, he gave the orders. That is the kind of thing he does. He may have spared you rape, but who knows what else he had in mind for you. You say he has children. Has anyone seen the mothers?”

Godive turned over Shef's palm and began to lance the blisters that covered it.

“I don't know. He is hateful and cruel to men, but that is because he fears them. He fears they are more manly than he is. But how do they show it, this manliness? By violating those who are too weak, by taking their pleasure from pain. Maybe Ivar has been sent by God—as a punishment for men's sins.”

“Do you wish I had left you with him?” Hardness edged Shef's voice.

Slowly Godive bent over him, abandoning her thorn. He felt her cheek against his naked chest, her hands sliding along his sides. As he pulled her up next to him, her loose shift slid from one bare shoulder. Shef found himself staring at a naked breast, its nipple girlish pink. The only woman he had seen before like this was the slut Truda—heavy, sallow, coarse-fleshed. His roughened hands began to stroke Godive's skin with disbelieving tenderness. If he had thought of this happening—and he had, often, lying by himself in fisherman's hut or deserted forge—it was years in the future, after they had found a place, after he had deserved her and made a home where they could be safe. Now, in the wood, in the clearing, in the sunlight, without blessing of priest or consent from parents…

“You are a better man than Ivar or Sigvarth or any other man I have ever met,” sobbed Godive, her face still buried in his shoulder. “I knew you would come for me. I only feared they would kill you for it.”

He pulled at her shift, her legs squirming beneath him as she turned onto her back.

“We should both be dead by now. It is so good to be alive, with you—”

“There is no blood between us, we have different fathers, different mothers—”

In the sunlight he entered her. Eyes watched from a bush; breath drew in, in envy.

An hour later, Shef lay on the soft grass, in the sunshine where the rays of the now-hot sun came through the upper branches of the oak trees. He was torpid, completely relaxed. He was not asleep. Or he was, but at some dim level he remained awake, conscious that Godive had slipped away. He had been thinking of the future, of where they could go: into the marshes, he thought, remembering his night spent with the king's thane Edrich. He was still conscious of the sun on his skin, of the soft turf beneath his body, but they seemed further away. This had happened before—in the Viking camp. His mind was rising from the forest clearing, traveling out beyond the body, beyond the heart's confines….

A voice spoke to him—rough, gravelly, laden with authority. “Of mighty men,” it said, “the maid you have taken.” Shef knew he was somewhere else. He was at a forge. Everything was familiar: the hiss as he wound the wet rags round the scorching handles of the tongs, the heft in his back and shoulder muscles as he lifted the red-hot metal out of the heart of the fire, the scrape and scratch of the top of his leather apron across his chest, the automatic duck and shake of the head as the sparks flew up toward his hair. But it was not his forge, back in Emneth, nor Thorvin's forge within the enclosure of the rowan berries. He sensed round him an enormous space, a gigantic open hall so high he could not see the top, just mighty pillars and columns leading away to the top where the smoke clung.

He took the heavy hammer and began to beat out a shape from the formless mass glowing on his anvil. What that shape should be he did not know. Yet his hands knew, for they moved expertly and without hesitation, shifting the tongs, turning the bloom, striking from one direction and then another. It was no spear-blade or axe-head, no ploughshare or coulter. It seemed to be a wheel, but a wheel with many teeth, sharp-pointed ones, like a dog's. Shef watched with fascination as the thing came to life beneath his blows. He knew, in his heart, that what he was doing was impossible. No one could make a shape like that straight from a forge. And yet—he could see how it might be done, if you made the teeth separately and then fitted them all together on the wheel you had originally made. But what would the point of it all be? Maybe, if you had one wheel like that, turning one way, up and down like a wall, and another wheel, turning the other way, flat and level with the ground, then, if the teeth on the one wheel matched with the teeth on the other, the first could drive the second round.

But what would be the point of that? There was a point. It had something to do with the object, the giant construction, twice man-height over by one wall, just beyond his vision in the dimness.

Shef realized as his senses cleared that there were other figures looking at him, figures on the same enormous scale as the hall. He could not see them clearly, and he did not dare look up for more than moments from his work, but he caught their presence unmistakably. They were standing together and watching him, even discussing him, he thought. They were Thorvin's gods, the gods of the Way.

Nearest to him was a broad and powerful shape, an immensely scaled-up Viga-Brand, giant biceps muscles rolling beneath a short-sleeved tunic. That must be Thor, thought Shef. His expression was scornful, hostile, faintly anxious. Behind the shape was another god—keen-eyed, sharp-faced, thumbs stuck into a silver belt, eyeing Shef with a kind of concealed approval, as if he were a horse to be bought, a thoroughbred going at a bargain price from a foolish owner.

That one is on my side, thought Shef. Or maybe he thinks I am on his.

Others clustered behind the two: tallest of them, and furthest away, a god leaning on a mighty spear with a triangular head.

Shef became aware of two other things. He was hamstrung. As he moved around the forge, his legs trailed behind him uselessly, making him take the weight on his arms and pull himself from one place to another. High stools, stocks of wood and benches were littered around in seemingly random fashion, but actually, he realized, to support him as he went from one workplace to another. He could prop himself on his legs, stand, like a man balancing on two stout props, but there was no spring, no movement at all from the thigh muscles to the calf. A dull ache spread upward from his knees.

And there was someone else watching him, not one of the mighty figures, but a tiny one, down in the shadows of the smoke-filled hall, like an ant, or a mouse peering out from the wainscoting. It was Thorvin! No, it was not Thorvin, but a smaller and a slighter man with a long face and sharp expression, both accentuated by the thinning hair falling back from the high forehead. But it was someone dressed like Thorvin, all in white, with the rowan berries round his neck. He had something of the same expression too, thoughtful, intensely interested, but here also, cautious and fearful. The small figure was trying to speak to him.

“Who are you, boy? Are you a wanderer from the realms of men, set for a while in Völund's place? How have you come here, and by what fortune did you find the Way?”

Shef shook his head, pretending it was just a toss to keep the sparks out of his eyes. He tossed the wheel aside into a bucket of water and began to set to another piece of work. The three quick raps, the turn, the three raps again, and a glowing something flying through the air into the cold water, to be instantly replaced on the anvil by another. What he was doing Shef did not know, but it filled him with wild excitement and a furious impatient glee, like a man who would one day be free and did not want his jailer to know the joy inside him.

Shef realized that one of the giant figures was coming toward him—the tallest of them, the one with the spear. The mouse-man saw too and ducked back into the shadows, now visible only as the palest of blurs in the gloom.

A finger like the trunk of an ash turned Shef's chin upward. One eye looked down at him, from a face like the blade of an axe: straight nose, jutting chin, sharp gray beard, wide, wide cheekbones. It was a face that would have made Ivar's seem a relief, as something at least comprehensible, ravaged only by human passions like envy, hate and cruelty. This was far different: One touch of the thoughts behind that mask, Shef knew, and any human mind would go insane.

Yet it did not seem entirely hostile, more thoughtful, considering.

“You have far to go, mannikin,” it said. “Yet you have begun well. Pray that I do not call you to me too soon.”

“Why would you call me, High One?” said Shef, amazing himself with his own temerity.

The face smiled like a glacier calving. “Do not ask,” it said. “The wise man does not pry or peek like a maiden searching for a lover. He looks even now, the gray fierce wolf, into Asgarth's doors.”

The finger dropped, the great hand came sweeping across, over forge and anvil and tools, over benches and buckets and the smith all together, brushing them all away like a man sweeping nutshells from a blanket. Shef felt himself hurled into the air, spinning end over end, apron flying away from him, his last memory the little face-shaped blur in the shadows, watching and marking him.

In a heartbeat he was back on the grass, back beneath the open sky of England in the forest clearing. But the sun had moved off him, leaving him in shadow, cold and suddenly afraid.

Where was Godive? She had crept from his side for a moment, but then—Shef was on his feet, wide awake, staring round for an enemy. Tumult in the bushes, thrashing and fighting and the sound of a woman trying to scream with a hand over her mouth and an arm round her throat.

As Shef sprang toward the struggle, men rose from their cover behind the tree-trunks, and closed on him like the fingers of doom. Leading them came Muirtach the Gaddgedil, a newly livid weal across his face and an expression of bitter, contained, contented fury twisting it.

“Nearly you got away, boy,” he said. “You should have kept running, not stopped to try out Ivar's woman. But a hot prick knows no sense. It will be cold soon enough.”

Hard hands closed on Shef's shoulders as he lunged towards the bushes, desperate to reach Godive. Had they seized her already? How had they found them? Had they left some trail?

A jeering laugh rose above the babble of Gaddgedlar voices. Shef recognized it, even as he writhed and fought, drawing all the Vikings to him. It was the laugh of an Englishman. Of his half brother. Alfgar.

Chapter Ten

When Muirtach and the others had dragged him back inside the stockade, Shef had been close to collapse. He had been exhausted in the first place. The shock of recapture had also bitten deep into him. The Vikings had been rough with him as well as they pulled him back, punching and cuffing him repeatedly as they hustled him through the woods, eyes alert all the time for any fringe of scattered Englishmen still lurking in the trees. Then, as they came out onto the meadows and sighted their comrades rounding up such horses as remained, jerking their captive off his feet again and again in rough triumph. They had been badly scared. Having one trophy to take back to Ivar was not much of a set off against all they had lost. Dimly, through weariness and horror, Shef realized that they were in the mood now to work out all their earlier fears on such little satisfaction as they could find. But before he could take in much of that thought, they dragged him to the pen, beat him unconscious.

He only wished he had not had to come round. They had thrown him inside the stockade at mid-morning. He had been unconscious the whole of the long, warm late-summer day. When he finally blinked his blood-sealed eyelids open he was sore, stiff, bruised—but no longer dizzy or bone weary. But he was also chilled to the bone, dry-mouthed with thirst, weak from hunger—in a state of deadly fear. At nightfall he looked round to try to see some prospect of escape or rescue. There was none. Iron anklets on his feet were lashed to stout pegs. His hands were bound in front of him. In time he might have worked the pegs out or chewed through the rawhide lashings on his wrists, but the slightest movement in either direction brought a growl and a kick from the nearby guard. They had, Shef realized, almost no prisoners to watch. In the confusion of the night attack almost all the accumulated slave-booty of the campaign had fought itself free and vanished, taking the Vikings' profits with them. Only a few other figures, newly captured prisoners secured like himself, dotted the floor space of the pen.

What they said brought Shef no comfort. They were the very few survivors of King Edmund's picked men, who had fought to the last in the final attempt to destroy the Ragnarssons and cripple the Viking army's leadership. All were wounded, usually badly. They expected to die, and talked quietly among themselves as they waited. Mostly, they regretted their failure to make a clean sweep of their enemies in the first few minutes of their attack. But then, they said, it could never have been expected that they could get to the heart of the Great Army without resistance. They had done well: burned the ships, killed the crews. “We have gained great glory,” said one. “We stand like eagles on the bodies of the slain. Let us not repent, whether we die now or later.”

“I wish they had not taken the king,” said one of the warrior's comrades after a silence, speaking with difficulty through the wheezing of his pierced lung. At that they nodded soberly, and their eyes moved together toward a corner of the pen.

Shef shivered. He had no wish to face the aggrieved King Edmund. He remembered the moments when the king had come toward him, pleading with him—the gadderling, the thrall, the child of no father—to stand out of the way. If he had done so, the English would be counting the night still as a victory. And he would not have to face the wrath of Ivar. Dazed as he had been, Shef had heard the taunts of his captors about what their chief would do with him. He remembered the fool of a boy who had shown him round these selfsame pens only the evening before, and his stories of how Ivar dealt with those who crossed him. And he, Shef, had taken his woman. Taken her away, taken her carnally, taken her so that she would not be returned. What had happened to her? Shef wondered detachedly. She had not been dragged back with him. Someone had taken her off. But he could hardly worry about her anymore. His own fate was too all-encompassing. Above the fear of death, the shame of treachery, there loomed the fear of Ivar. If only, Shef thought again and again during the night, if only he could die now of cold. He did not wish to see the morning.

The thump of a boot in the back stirred him from torpor in the growing light of the next day. Shef sat up, conscious above all of the dry, swollen stick of his tongue. Round him the guards were cutting lashings, hauling bodies away; some had been granted Shef's wish in the night. But in front of him squatted a small, slight figure in a stained and dirty tunic, drawn lines of fatigue on the sallow face. It was Hund. He was holding a crock of water. For some minutes Shef thought of nothing else, while Hund carefully, and with many agonizing pauses, allowed him to drink a mouthful at a time. Only when he felt the blessed fullness under his breastbone, and knew the luxury of being able to roll an excess mouthful round his tongue and spit it onto the grass, did Shef realize that Hund was trying to speak to him.

“Shef, Shef, try to take this in. We have to know some things. Where is Godive?”

“I don't know. I got her away. Then I think someone else snatched her. But they had me before I could do anything about it.”

“Who do you think took her?”

Shef remembered the laugh in the thickets, the sense he had had, and had dismissed, that there were other fugitives in the wood. “Alfgar. He was always a good tracker. He must have followed us.”

Shef paused again for thought, dispelling the lethargy of cold and weariness. “I think he must have gone back, led Muirtach and the others to us. Maybe they did a deal. They got me, he got her. Or maybe he just snatched her while they were busy with me. There weren't enough of them to risk following very far. Not after the fright they'd had.”

“So. Ivar is more concerned about you than about her. But he knows you got her away from the camp. That's bad.” Hund passed a hand worriedly across his sparse, scanty beard. “Shef, think back. Did anyone see you actually kill any of the Vikings with your own hands?”

“I only killed one. That was in the dark and no one saw. It was no great deed. But someone may have seen me get into the pen and start freeing the prisoners—freeing Alfgar.” Shef's mouth twisted. “And do you know, I broke the Viking shield-wall with a burning timber when all the king's comrades could not do it.” Shef turned his palms and looked mutely at the pads of white skin, the tiny thorn holes where the blisters had been.

“Yes. Still, that might not be a cause for blood-vengeance. Ingulf and I have done a lot of favors during this last day and a night. There are many chieftains who would be dead or crippled for life if it had not been for us. You know, he will even stitch together entrails, and sometimes the man will live, if he is strong enough to stand the pain and there is no poison inside the body.”

Shef looked more attentively at the stains on his friend's tunic.

“You are trying to beg me off? From Ivar?”

“Yes.”

“You and Ingulf? But what do I matter to him?”

Hund dipped a lump of hard bread in the remaining water and passed it over.

“It's Thorvin. He says it is business of the Way. He says you have to be saved. I don't know why, but he is totally set on it. Someone spoke to him yesterday and he came running over to see us at once. Have you done something I don't know about?”

Shef lay back in his bonds. “A lot of things, Hund. But I'm sure of one thing. Nothing is going to get me away from Ivar. I took his woman. How can I pay boot for that?”

“When bale is highest, boot is nighest.” Hund filled the crock with water once again from a skin, placed a handful of bread beside it on the ground, and passed over the length of dirty homespun he had been carrying over his arm. “Food is short in the camp, and half the blankets are being used for shrouds. That's all I can find for now. Make it last. If you want to pay boot—see what the king can do.”

Hund jerked a chin toward the corner of the pen, beyond where the dying warriors had sat, called something to the watching guards, rose, and left. The king, thought Shef. What boot will Ivar take for him?

“Is there any hope?” hissed Thorvin across the table.

Killer-Brand looked at him with mild surprise. “What sort of language is that from a priest of the Way? Hope? Hope is the spittle that runs from the jaws of Fenris Wolf, chained till the day of Ragnarök. If we start only doing things because we think there may be some hope—why, we will end up no better than Christians, singing hymns to their God because they think he may give them a better bargain after death. You are forgetting yourself, Thorvin.”

Brand looked with interest at his own right hand, spread out on the rough table next to Thorvin's forge. It had been split open by a sword-blade between second and third fingers, cut clean open almost down to the wrist. Ingulf the leech was bending over it, washing the wound with warm water from which a faint scent of herbs drifted. Then he slowly, carefully, pulled the lips of the gash apart. White bone showed for an instant before the oozing blood covered it in the track of Ingulf's fingers.

“This would have been easier if you had come to me straight away, instead of waiting a day and a half,” said the leech. “Then I could have treated it while it was fresh. Now the wound has started to clot together, and I have to do this. I could take a chance and stitch it up as it is. But we do not know what was on the blade of the man who struck you.”

A trickle of sweat broke out on Brand's eyebrow, but his voice remained mild, contemplative. “You go ahead, Ingulf. I have seen too many wounds go bad to take that risk. This is just pain. The flesh-rot is certain death.”

“Still, you should have come earlier.”

“I was lying among the corpses for half a day, till some clever warrior noticed they had all gone cold and I hadn't. And when I came round and decided that this was really the worst wound I had, you were busy with more difficult tasks. Is it true you pulled old Bjor's entrails out, stitched them together and pushed them back in again?”

Ingulf nodded, pulling with sudden decision at a bone splinter with a pair of tweezers. “They tell me he calls himself ‘Grind-Bjor’ now, because he swears he saw the gates of Hell itself.”

Thorvin sighed gustily, and pushed a tankard closer to Brand's left hand. “Very well. You have punished me enough with your chatter. Tell me, then. Is there any chance?”

Brand's face was paling now, but he answered with the same even tone. “I don't think so. You know how it is with Ivar.”

“I know,” said Thorvin.

“That makes it hard for him to be sensible over some things. I do not say ‘forgive’—we are none of us Christians to pass over an injury or an insult. But he will not even listen, or think about where his interest lies. The boy took his woman. Took a woman that Ivar—had plans for. If that fool Muirtach had brought her back, then maybe—But even then I don't think so. Because the girl went willingly. That means the boy did something Ivar could not. He must have blood.”

“There has to be something that would make him change his mind, accept compensation.”

Ingulf was stitching now, needle rising high over his right shoulder as he pierced and pulled, pierced and pulled again.

Thorvin placed his hand on the silver hammer that hung on his chest. “I swear, this may be the greatest service you or I may ever do for the Way, Brand. You know there are some among us who have the Sight?”

“I have heard you talk of it,” admitted Brand.

“They travel into the realms of the Mighty, of the gods themselves, and return, to report what they saw. Some think these are just visions, no better than dreams, a kind of poetry only.

“But they see the same things. Or sometimes they do. More often it is as if they all saw different parts of the same thing, as there might be many reports of the battle the other night, and some would say the English had the best of it, and some would say we did, and yet all would be telling the truth and all would have been at the same place. If they confirm each other, that means it must be true.”

Brand grunted. Perhaps in disbelief, perhaps in pain.

“We are sure that there is a world out there, and that people can go into it. Well, something very odd happened only yesterday. Farman came to see me, Farman who is priest of Frey in this Army as I am priest of Thor, or Ingulf of Ithun. He has been in the Otherworld many times, as I have not. He says—he says he was in the Great Hall itself, the place where the gods meet to decide the affairs of the nine worlds. He was down on the floor, a tiny creature, like a mouse in the wainscoting of one of our own halls. He saw the gods in conclave.

“And he saw my apprentice Shef. He is in no doubt. He had seen him at the forge; he saw him in the vision. He was dressed oddly, like a hunter in our own forests in Rogaland or Halogaland, and he stood badly, like one who has been—crippled. But there was no mistaking the face. And the Father of gods and men himself—he spoke to him. If Shef can remember what he said…

“It is rare,” Thorvin concluded, “for any wanderer in the Otherworld to see another one. It is rare for the gods to speak to or notice a wanderer. For both to happen…

“And there is another thing. Whoever gave that boy a name did not know what he was doing. It is a dog's name now. But that was not always so. You have heard of Skiold?”

“Founder of the Skioldungs, the old Danish kings. The ones whom Ragnar and his sons would drive out if they could.”

“The English call him Scyld Sceafing—Shield with the Sheaf—and they tell a foolish tale of how he drifted over the ocean on a shield with a sheaf beside him, and that was how he got his name. But anyone can tell that Sceafing means ‘the son of Sheaf,’ not ‘with a sheaf.’ So who, then, is Sheaf? Whoever he was, he was the one who sent the mightiest king of all over the waves, and taught him all that he knew to make the lives of men better and more glorious. It is a name of great good luck. Especially if given in ignorance. Shef is only the way the English in these parts say ‘Sheaf.’

“We have to save that boy from Ivar. Ivar the Boneless. People have seen him on the other side too, you know. But he did not have the shape of a human being.”

“He is not a man of one skin,” agreed Brand.

“He is one of the brood of Loki, sent to bring destruction on the world. We have to get my apprentice away from him. How can we do it? If he will not do it on your urging, Brand, or on mine, can we bribe him? Is there something he wants more than vengeance?”

“I do not know how to take this talk of other worlds and wanderers,” said Brand. “You know I am with the Way because of the skills it teaches, like Ingulf's here, and because I have no love for the Christians or for the madmen like Ivar. But the boy did a brave deed to come into this camp for a girl. It took guts to do that. I know. I went into the Braethraborg to bait the Ragnarssons into this venture, as your colleagues told me to, Thorvin.

“So I wish the boy well. Now I do not know what Ivar wants—who does? But I can tell you what he needs. Ivar may see that too, even if he is mad. But if he does not, then the Snakeeye will make him.”

As he spoke on, the other two nodded, thoughtfully.

They were not Ivar's men who came for him, Shef noticed as soon as they appeared. Just from his few days in the Viking camp he had come to be able to discriminate at least in an elementary way between the various grades of heathen. These were not the Gaddgedlar, nor did they have the somehow non-Norse or half-Norse air of the Hebrideans and Manxmen whom Ivar recruited in such numbers, nor did they even have that vaguely footloose and less-than-respectable look that so many of even his Norse followers had. Younger sons and outlaws, the bulk of them, detached from their parent communities and with no homes to go to and no lives outside the camp. The men who came into the stockade now were heavily built, mature in years, almost middle-aged; their hair was grizzled. Their belts were silver, gold armlets and neck-rings shone on them, to prove years or decades of success. When the warden of the pen blocked their self-assured way, ordering them back, Shef could not hear the reply. It was given in a low voice, as if the speaker no longer expected to have to shout. The warden replied again, crying out and pointing down the ruined campsite, as if to the burned tents of Ivar. But before his sentence had ended there was a thud and a groan. The leader of the newcomers looked down for a moment, as if to see if there was any chance of further resistance, slid the sandbag back up his sleeve, and marched on without deigning to look round again.

In a moment Shef found the lashings on his ankles cut and himself jerked to his feet. His heart leapt suddenly and uncontrollably. Was this death? Were they dragging him out of the pen to a clear patch of ground, where in an instant they could force him to his knees and behead him? He bit his lip savagely for an instant. He would not speak or plead for mercy. Then the savages would have the chance to laugh, to mock the way an Englishman died. He stumbled along in grim silence.

Only a few yards. Outside the gate, along the fence-posts of the pen, and then, jerked to a stop in front of another gate. Shef realized that the leader of the newcomers was staring hard at him, deep into his eyes, as if trying to burn an understanding into the tough hide of Shef's face.

“You understand Norse?”

Shef nodded.

“Then understand this. If you talk—doesn't matter. But if he in there talks—maybe you live. Maybe. Lot to be answered for. But there's something in there that could mean life for you. Could mean more for me. Whether you live or die, you may need a friend pretty soon. Friend in court. Friend on the execution ground. There's more than one way to die. All right. Throw him in. Rivet him good.”

Shef found himself hauled inside a shelter propped up against the side of the pen. An iron ring hung from a stout post; a chain from it to another ring. In an instant the collar was being fitted round his neck, a bolt of soft iron forced through its two holes. A couple of blows with a hammer, a quick inspection, another blow. The men turned and tramped out. Shef's legs were free, but his hands still bound. The collar and chain round his neck gave him only a few feet of space to walk.

There was another man in the shelter, Shef realized, secured as he was; he could see the chain running down from a post into the half-darkness. Something about the figure sprawled there on the ground filled him with unease, with shame and fear.

“Lord,” he said doubtfully. “Lord. Are you the king?”

The figure stirred. “King Edmund I am, son of Edwold, king of the East Angles. But who are you, that talk like a Norfolk man? You are not one of my warriors. Did you come with the levies? Did they catch you in the woods? Move, so I can see your face.”

Shef moved round. The sun, now westering, streamed in through the open door of the shelter and caught his face as he stood at the limit of his chain. He waited in dread for what the king would say.

“So. You are the one who stood between me and Ivar. I remember you. You had no armor and no weapon, but you stood before Wigga my champion, and held him for ten heartbeats. If it had not been for you those would have been the last heartbeats of the Boneless One's life. Why would an Englishman wish to save Ivar? You ran from your master? Were you a slave to the Church?”

“My master was your thane Wulfgar,” Shef said. “When the pirates came—you know what they did to him?”

The king nodded. With his eyes adjusting to the light Shef could see the face that turned to him. It was pitiless, resolute.

“They took his daughter, my—my foster sister. I came to try to get her back. I was not trying to protect Ivar, but your men were going to kill both of them, all of them. I just wanted you to let me pull her aside! Then I would have joined you. I am no Viking, I killed two of them myself. And I did one thing for you, king, when you had need of it. I…”

“So you did. I called out for someone to break the ring, and you did it. You and a gang of churls from nowhere, with a ship's timber. If Wigga had thought of that, or Totta, or Eddi, or any of the others, I would have made him the richest man in the kingdom. What did I promise?”

He shook his head in silence, then looked up at Shef. “You know what they are going to do to me? They are building an altar now, to their heathen gods. Tomorrow sometime they will take me out and lay me on it. Then Ivar will get to work. Killing kings is his trade. One of the men who guarded me told me he was standing by when Ivar killed the Irish king of Munster, told me how he stood there while Ivar's men twisted the rope and twisted the rope and the veins stood out on the king's neck and he called out curses by all the saints on Ivar's name. And then the crack as his back broke over the stone. They all remember that.

“But tomorrow Ivar prepares a new fate. They tell me that he meant to save this for the man who killed their father, for Ella of Northumbria. But they have decided I merit it just as much.

“They will take me out, and lay me on their altar, face down. In the hollow of my back, Ivar will place a sword. Then—you have felt how your ribs make a house of bone, and how each of the ribs fits into its place on the backbone? Ivar will cut each of them away, working up from the lowest to the highest. They say he will use a sword only for the first cut. After that he will use hammer and chisel. When he has cut them all away, he will cut the flesh free, and then he will put his hands in and pull the ribs up and out.

“I expect I will die then. They say he can keep a man alive to that point, if he is careful not to cut deep. But when they pull the ribs out, your heart must burst. When it is done, they pull your lungs out of your back, and then turn the ribs out so they look like a raven's wings, or an eagle's. They call it ‘cutting the blood-eagle.’

“I wonder what it will feel like when he first puts the sword in the hollow of my back. You know, young churl, I think that if I can hold my courage at that point, the rest will be easier. But the feel of the cold steel on skin, before the pain begins…

“I never thought that I would come to this. I have defended my people, kept all my oaths, been charitable to orphans.

“Do you know, churl, what the Christ said when he hung dying on the cross?”

Father Andreas's lessons had been confined usually to the merits of chastity or the importance of paying contributions duly to the Church. Shef shook his head dumbly.

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The king paused for a long while.

“I know why he means to do it, though. After all, I am a king too. I know what his men need. These few months have been bad ones for the Army. They thought they would have an easy start here for their real march on York. And so they might have—if they had not done what they did to your foster father. But since then they have made no gains, caught few slaves, had to fight for every few beeves. And now—say what anyone wishes, there are many fewer of them than there were two nights ago. They have seen their friends die of wounds, and more of them are sitting waiting for the flesh-rot. If there is nothing grand for them to see, then they will lose heart. Ships will row off in the night.

“Ivar needs a display. A triumph. An execution. Or…”

Shef remembered the warning of the man who had pushed him into the pen.

“Do not speak too freely, lord. They want you to speak. And me to listen.”

Edmund laughed, in one sharp bark. The light had almost gone by now, the sun well down, though the long English twilight lingered.

“Then listen. I promised you a half of Raedwald's hoard if you broke the Viking line, and break it you did. So I will give you the whole of it, and you may make your own bargain. The man who gives them this can have his life and more. If I gave it to them, I could be a Viking jarl. But Wigga and all the others died rather than speak. It would not be fitting for a king, one of the line of Wuffa, to give way out of fear.

“But you, boy. Who knows? You may gain something.

“Now listen and do not forget. I will tell you the secret of the hoard of the Wuffingas, and from that I swear by God a wise man can find the hoard.

“Listen and I will tell you.”

The king's voice dropped to a hoarse murmur and Shef strained to hear.

The voice trailed away. “My last night, young churl. Maybe yours too. You must think what you will do to save yourself tomorrow. But I do not think the riddle of an Englishman will prove easy to the Vikings.

“And, if churl you are, the riddle of the kings will do you no good either.”

The king spoke no more, though after a while Shef tried faintly and despondently to rouse him. After an age Shef's battered body too began to drift off into uneasy dozing. In his sleep the king's words repeated themselves, twining round and round and running into each other like the dragon-shapes carved on a burning stem-post.

Chapter Eleven

This time the Great Army was troubled and unsure. So much King Edmund had foreseen. It had been taken in its own base, by a small state and a petty kinglet of whom no one had ever heard, and while they knew the matter had ended well enough, too many also knew in their hearts that for a time they had been outfought. The dead had been buried, the irreparable ships dragged onshore, the wounded had been treated. Arrangements had been made between this chieftain and that to sell or trade ships, to transfer or exchange men to bring contingents up to the mark. But the warriors, the rank-and-file oar-pullers and axe-wielders, still needed reassurance. Something that would show their leaders still had confidence. Some ritual to demonstrate that they were still the Great Army, the terror of the Christians, the invincibles of the North.

From the early morning, men were crowding down to the marked-out space outside the camp, which would be the site of the wapentake: the meeting where men could show their assent by vapna takr, the clashing of weapons, of blade on shield. Or, on rare occasions, under careless leaders, their dissent. From even earlier in the morning, from well before day, the Viking leaders had been making their plan, and considering the balance of forces, the sentiments that might swing their dangerous and unpredictable followers one way or the other.

When they came for him, Shef was ready, at least physically. His hunger was a hole inside him, thirst once more drying his tongue and his lips, but he was awake, alert and fully conscious. Edmund too was awake, he knew, but made no sign. Shef was ashamed to disturb him.

The Snakeeye's men arrived with the same brisk certainty as the day before. In a moment one had Shef's iron collar in his tongs and was forcing the rivet out. It came free, the collar jerked off, and brawny hands were pulling Shef out into the cold murk of an early-autumn morning. Fog still clung to the river, condensed in drops on the bracken roof of the shelter. Shef stared at it for a moment, wondering if he might lick it off.

“You were talking yesterday. What did he tell you?”

Shef shook his head and gestured with bound hands to the leather bottle at a man's belt. Silently the man passed it over. It was full of beer—muddy, thick with barley husks, drawn all too obviously from the bottom of a cask; Shef drank it down in steady gulps, till he could tilt his head back and drain out the last drops. He finished, wiped his mouth, feeling as if the beer had swollen him out like an empty skin, handed the bottle back. There was a grunt of amusement as the pirates watched his face.

“Good, eh? Beer is good. Life is good. If you want more of both, you'd better tell us. Tell us everything he said.”

Dolgfinn the Viking watched Shef's face with his usual, unblinking intensity. He saw on it doubt, but no fear. Also, stubbornness, knowledge. The lad would do a deal, he reflected. It would have to be the right one. He turned away and beckoned, a preconcerted signal. From a group a little way off, a large man came walking, gold round his neck, left hand resting on the silver pommel of a sword. Shef recognized him instantly. It was the big man he had fought in the skirmish on the causeway. Sigvarth, jarl of the Small Isles. His father.

As he strolled forward, the others drew back a few paces, leaving the two face-to-face. They studied one another for a few seconds, each staring the other up and down, the older man looking at the younger's physique, the younger staring intently into his father's face. He's looking at me the same way I'm looking at him, thought Shef. He's looking to see if he can recognize himself in me, just as I am at him. He knows.

“We've met before,” remarked Sigvarth. “On the causeway in the marsh. Muirtach told me there was a young Englishman walking round claiming he'd fought me. Now they tell me you're my son. The leech's assistant, the boy who came with you. He says so. Is that true?”

Shef nodded.

“Good. You're a burly lad, and you fought well that day. See here, son”—Sigvarth stepped forward and put a broad hand round Shef's biceps, squeezing gently—“You're on the wrong side. I know your mother's English. That's true of half the men in the Army. English, or Irish, or Frankish, or Finnish or Lapp for that matter. But blood goes with the father. And I know you were brought up by the English—by that fool you were trying to rescue. But what have they ever done for you? If they knew you were my son I dare say you had a hard life of it. Eh?”

He looked into Shef's eyes, conscious that he had scored a point.

“Now, you may be thinking that I just ditched you, and that's true, I did. But then I didn't know you were there. I didn't know how you'd grown up. But now you're here, and I see how you've turned out, well, I reckon you'll be a credit to me. And to all our kin.

“So, say the word. I'm offering to recognize you as my true son. You'll have the same rights you'd have had if you'd been born on Falster. Leave the English. Leave the Christians. Forget your mother.

“And, as my son, I'll speak for you to Ivar. And what I say, the Snakeeye will back up. You're in trouble here. Let's get you out of it.”

Shef looked over his father's shoulder, considering. He remembered the horse-trough and the beatings. He remembered the curse his stepfather had laid on him, and the accusation of cowardice. He remembered the incompetence, the dillydallying, the exasperation of Edrich at the way the English thanes preened and hesitated. How could anyone be victorious with people like that on one's side? Over his father's shoulder he could see, in the front of the group that Sigvarth had left, a young man gazing at them—a young man with decorated armor, a pale face, strong, projecting front teeth like a horse. He too is a son of Sigvarth, Shef thought. Another half brother for me. And he does not like what is going on.

Shef remembered the laugh of Alfgar from the thickets. “What do I have to do?” he asked.

“Say what the king Jatmund told you. Or find out from him what we need to know.”

Deliberately, Shef took aim, blessing the draft of beer that had moistened his mouth, and spat on his father's leather shoe.

“You cut Wulfgar's arms and legs off while men held him. You let the men rape my mother, after she had borne you a son. You are no drengir. You are nothing. I curse the blood I had from you.”

In an instant the Snakeeye's men were between them, hustling Sigvarth away, holding his arms down as he struggled to draw his sword. He did not struggle very hard, Shef thought. As they forced him back he was still staring at his son with a kind of baffled longing. He still thinks there is more to be said, thought Shef. The fool.

“You've done it now,” remarked Dolgfinn, the Snake-eye's emissary, jerking his captive along by the rawhide round his wrists. “All right. Take him along to the wapentake. And get the kinglet out of there and let's see if he's decided to be reasonable before the assembly sees him.”

“No chance,” remarked one of his henchmen. “These English can't fight, but they haven't the sense to give in. He's for Ivar now, and Othin before nightfall.”

The Viking army was drawn up outside the east stockade, not far from the place where Shef had vaulted over to intercept Godive and kill Flann the Gaddgedil barely three days before. It filled three sides of a hollow square; the fourth, nearest the stockade, occupied only by the jarls, the chieftains, the Ragnarssons and their immediate followers. Elsewhere, the men crowded together behind their skippers and helmsmen, talking to each other, calling out to men from other crews, offering advice and opinion without reproof and without control. The army was a democracy, in its way: Status and hierarchy were important, especially when it came to taking shares. But no man could be entirely silenced, if he cared to take the risk of giving offense.

As they shoved their way into the square with Shef, a great yell went up, and a simultaneous clash of metal. Vikings were hustling a tall man away toward a block in the corner of the square, the man's face standing out even from thirty yards away in a crowd. All the rest had the usual windburned faces of men who spend their time out-of-doors, even in an English summer. The tall one was deathly pale. Without ceremony they thrust him over the block, one Viking seizing his hair and pulling it forward over the nape of his neck. A flash, a thud, and the head rolling free. Shef stared at it for an instant. He had seen several corpses in Emneth, and many in the last few days. But hardly one in broad daylight, and with a moment to look. There will be no time once they give their decision, he thought. I must be ready as soon as they clash their weapons.

“What was that?” he asked, nodding towards the head being thrown into a pile.

“One of the English warriors. Someone said he had fought well and truly for his lord and we should take ransom. But the Ragnarssons say now is not the time for ransoms, it is time to give a lesson. Now you.”

The warriors pushed him forward and left him standing ten feet in front of the chieftains.

“Who wishes to press this case?” called one of the chieftains, in a voice that could compete with a North Sea gale. Slowly, the hubbub faded to a buzz. Ivar Ragnarsson stepped forward from the ranks of the leaders. His right arm was bound in front of him in a sling. Broken collarbone, thought Shef, noting the angle at which the arm was slung. That's why he could not wield a weapon against Edmund's warriors.

“I present the case,” said Ivar. “This is not an enemy, but a traitor, a truth-breaker. He was not one of Jatmund's men, he was one of my men. I took him into my band, I fed and lodged him. When the English came, he did not fight for me. He did not fight at all. He ran in while the warriors fought and took a girl from my quarters. He stole her away, and she had never been returned. She is lost to me, though she was lawfully mine, given to me by Sigvarth Jarl in the sight of all men.

“I claim ransom for the girl, and he cannot pay it. Even if he could pay it, I would still kill him for the insult done me. But even more than that, the whole Army has a claim against him for treachery. Who supports me?”

“I support you,” called another voice: a burly, grizzled man standing close to Ivar. Ubbi, perhaps, or Halvdan? One of the Ragnarssons, at any rate, but not the leader, not Sigurth, who still stood aloof in the middle of the line of men. “I support you. He has had a chance to show his true loyalty, he has refused it. He came to our camp as a spy and a thief and a stealer of women.”

“What penalty do you assess?” called the herald's voice again.

“Death is too easy,” cried Ivar. “I claim his eyes for the insult put on me. I claim his balls as compensation for the woman. I claim his hands for the treachery against the Army. After that he may keep his life.”

Shef felt the shudder running through him. His spine seemed to have turned to ice. In an instant, he thought, the cry would go up, and the clash of arms, and then in ten heartbeats he would be facing the block and the knife.

A figure strolled slowly forward from the ranks—a massive, bearded, leather-jacketed figure. His hand was in a great white bandage, with spots of dark blood showing through it.

“I am Brand. Many men know me.” A yell of approval and agreement came from the men behind him.

“I have two things to say. First, Ivar, where did you get the girl? Or where did Sigvarth get her? If Sigvarth stole her, and the lad here stole her back, where is the wrong in that? You should have killed him when he tried it. But since you did not, it is too late to start calling for vengeance now.

“And there is a second thing, Ivar. I was coming to help you when the warriors of Jatmund advanced on you—I, Brand, champion of the men of Halogaland. I have stood in the front for twenty years. Who can say that I ever held back when the spearmen were fighting? I got this wound there, right by you, when you yourself were hurt. And I challenge you to tell me I lie; when the fight was nearly over, and the English king was breaking out, he came straight toward you with his men. You were hurt and could not raise a sword. Your men were dead, and I had only my left hand, and no other man stood by you. Who stood in front of you with his sword but this youth here? He held them off—till I and Arnketil came down with his band and trapped the king. Tell me, Arnketil, do I lie?”

A voice from the other side of the square. “As you say, Brand. I saw Ivar, I saw the Englishmen, I saw the boy. I thought they had killed him in the stir, and was sorry. He stood bravely.”

“So, Ivar, the claim for the woman falls. The claim for treachery cannot be true. You owe him your life. I do not know what he has to do with Jatmund, but I say this: If he is good at stealing women, I have a place for him in my crew. We need some new ones. And if you cannot look after your women, Ivar—well, what is that to do with the Army?”

Shef saw Ivar stepping forward towards Brand, his eyes fixed on him, a pale tongue flickering on his lips like a snake. A hum of interest came from the crowd, not a hostile sound. The warriors of the Army liked entertainment, and here some was promised.

Brand did not move, but thrust his left hand into his broad sword-belt. As Ivar got to three paces of him, he held up his bandaged hand for the crowd to see.

“When your hand is mended, I will remember what you say, Brand,” remarked Ivar.

“When your shoulder is whole, I will remind you of it.” A voice called out behind them, cold as stone—the voice of Sigurth Ragnarsson, the Snakeeye.

“The Army has more important things to do than talk of boys. I say this: My brother Ivar must pursue his own claim for the stolen woman. In payment for his life, Ivar must give the boy his own life, and not cripple him so that he cannot live it. But the boy came into this camp as one of us. He did not behave as a true comrade when we were attacked, but thought first of his own advantage. If he is to join the crew of Killer-Brand we must teach him a lesson. Not a hand, or he cannot fight. Not a testicle, for no woman-theft is involved. But the Army will take an eye.” With great effort Shef stood firm as he heard the beginnings of the cry of assent.

“Not both eyes. One. What does the Army say?” A roar of approval. A clash of weapons. Hands dragging him, not to the block, but to the opposite corner of the square. Men parting, pushing each other aside to reveal a brazier, coals glowing red, Thorvin pumping at a bellows. From a bench rose Hund, face pale with emotion.

“Hold still,” he muttered in English, as the men kicked Shef's legs from beneath him and thrust his head back. Dimly, Shef realized that the brawny arms holding his head in a grip like a clamp were Thorvin's. He tried to struggle, to call out, to accuse them of treachery. A cloth thrust into his mouth, pushing the tongue back from his teeth. The white-hot needle coming closer, closer, a thumb pushing his eyelid back while he tried to scream, to twist his head, to clench his eyes tight shut.

Inexorable pressure. Only the searing point coming closer and closer to his right eye. Pain, agony, the white fire running from the eyeball into every corner of his brain, tears and blood streaming down his face. Through it all, dimly, the sound of sizzling, of steel being tempered in the tub.

He was hanging in the air. There was a spike through his eye, a continuous burning pain that made him twist his face and clench the muscles in his neck to try to reduce it. But the pain never went away or grew less; it was there all the time. Yet it did not seem to matter. His mind was unaffected, continuing to think and to ponder without distraction from the screaming pain.

Nor was his other eye affected. It remained open all the time, never even blinking. Through it, and from wherever in all the worlds he was, he could see out across a vast panorama. He was high up, very high up. Below him he could see mountains, plains, rivers, and here and there on the seas little collections of colored sails that were Viking fleets: On the plains scattered dust clouds that were giant armies marching, the Christian kings of Europe and the pagan nomads of the steppe permanently mustering for war. He felt that if he narrowed his eyes—his eye—a certain way, just so, he could focus in on anything he wanted to: read the lips of the commanders and the cavalrymen, see the words of the emperor of the Greeks or the khakhan of the Tartars even as they formed them.

Between himself and the world below, he realized, birds were floating—giant ones keeping station with never a flap or a flutter, just the little tremor along the trailing feathers of the wings. Close to him two passed by, staring at him with brilliant and intelligent yellow dots of eyes. Their feathers were glossy black, their beaks threatening, stained: ravens. The ravens that came to peck out the eyes of hanged men. He stared at them as unblinkingly as they at him; they slanted their wings hastily and swooped away.

The spike through his eye. Was that all that was holding him? So it seemed. But then he must be dead, no one could survive a spike through the brain and the skull, into the wood behind. Through the feel of the bark he could sense a bursting of sap, a steady pumping of fluid, up from roots unimaginably deep to branches far above him, so high that no man could ever climb them.

His eye stabbed him again and he twisted, his hands still hanging loose below him like a dead man's. There were the ravens again—curious, greedy, cowardly, clever, alert for any sign of weakness. They drifted in toward him, flapped their wings, came suddenly closer, landed heavily on his shoulders. Yet this time, he knew, he need not fear their beaks. They clung to him for reassurance. A king was coming.

The figure appeared in front of him, moving upward from a spot on Earth from which he had averted his eye. It was a terrible shape, naked, blood running from it down its ruined loins, an expression of ghastly pain on its face. Its back lifted up behind its shoulders in a parody of the ravens' wings; its chest was shrunken and twisted in; gobbets of spongy matter hung over its nipples. It carried its own backbone in its hand.

For a moment the two figures hung there, eye to eye. The creature recognized him, the hanged one thought. It pitied him. But it was going beyond the nine worlds now, to some other destiny where few if any would follow. Its blackened mouth twisted.

“Remember,” it said. “Remember the verse I taught you.”

The pain in Shef's eye redoubled, and he shrieked out loud, shrieked and twisted against the spike that restrained him, the bonds that held him down, the soft, gentle, immovable hands. He opened his eye and stared out, not at the panorama of the nine worlds from the great ashtree, but into the face of Hund. Hund with the needle. He shrieked again and threw up a hand to fend him off, and the hand clutched Hund's arm with desperate force.

“Easy, easy,” said Hund. “It's all over now. No one can touch you. You are a carl of the army, in the crew of Brand of Halogaland, and the past is forgotten.”

“But I must remember,” cried Shef.

“Remember what?”

Water filled both his eyes, the good one and the ruined socket. “I don't remember it,” he whispered.

“I have forgotten the king's message.”