The Hammer and The Cross

Chapter One

For many miles the track had run over flat, well-drained land—the southern half of the great Vale of York, rolling up from the marshes of the Humber. Even so, it had been hard going for the Great Army: eight thousand men, as many horses, hundreds of camp-followers and bedfellows and slaves for the market, all trampling along together. Behind them even the great stone-laid roads built by the Rome-folk of old turned into muddy tracks splashing as high as the horses' bellies. Where the Army marched along English lanes or drover roads it left nothing but a morass behind.

Brand the Champion lifted his still-bandaged hand and the troop of men behind him—three ships' crews, a long hundred and five—eased their reins. The ones at the very rear, the last men in the Army, immediately faced about, peering at the gray, wet landscape behind them, from which the autumn light was already beginning to seep.

The two men at the very point of the troop stared closely at what lay in front of them: a deeply mudded track, four arm-spans wide, descending down and round a bend to what must be the bed of another small stream. A few hundred yards ahead the men could see the land rising again and the unhedged track running across it. But in between, along the bed of the stream, ran a belt of tangled forest, large oak and chestnut trees swaying their brown leaves in the rising wind, crowding up to the very edge of the road.

“What do you think, young marshal?” asked Brand, pulling at his beard with his left hand. “It may be that with your one eye you can see further than most men with two.”

“I can see one thing with half an eye, old kay-handed one,” replied Shef equably. “Which is that that horse-turd by the side of the road there has stopped steaming. The main body is getting further away from us. We're too slow. Plenty of time for the Yorkshiremen to get in behind them and in front of us.”

“And how would you deal with that, young defier-of-Ivar?”

“I would get us all off the road and all go down the right-hand side. The right hand, because they might expect us to go down the left, with our shields toward the trees and the ambush. Get down to the stream. When we get to it, blow all our horns and charge it as if it were the gap in an enemy stockade. If there's no one there, we look stupid. If there's an ambush there we'll flush them out. But if we're going to do it—let's do it fast.”

Brand shook his massive head with a kind of exasperation. “You are not a fool, young man. That is the right answer. But it is the answer of a follower of your one-eyed patron, Othin the Betrayer of Warriors. Not of a carl of the Great Army. What we are here for is to pick up the stragglers, to see that no one falls into the hands of the English. The Snakeeye does not care for heads thrown into the encampment every morning. It makes the men restless. They like to think every one of them is important, and that anyone who gets killed gets killed for a good reason, not just by accident. If we went off the road we might miss someone, and then his mates would come round asking for him sooner or later. We will take the risk and go down the track.”

Shef nodded, and swung his shield off his back, pushing his arm through the elbow-strap to grip the handle behind the boss. Behind him there was a clanking and rustling as a hundred and twenty-five men moved their weapons to a ready position and urged their horses forward. Shef realized that Brand had these conversations in a way to train him, to teach him to think like a leader. He bore no grudge when his advice was overruled.

Yet deep down he struggled with the thought that these wise men, these great and experienced warriors—Brand the Champion, Ivar the Boneless, even the matchless Snakeeye himself—were wrong. They were doing things the wrong way. Their wrong way had smashed every kingdom they had ventured against, not just the tiny and petty kingdom of the East Anglians. Even so, he, Shef—once thrall, slayer of two men, a man who had never stood in a battle line for ten heartbeats together—he was sure that he knew better how to array an army than did they.

Had he seen it in his visions? Was the knowledge sent to him by his father-god in Valhalla—Othin the Traitor, God of the Hanged, Betrayer of Warriors—as Brand obliquely continued to suggest?

Whatever the cause, Shef thought, if I were the marshal of the Army, I would call a halt six times a day, and blow the trumpets, so the flank-guards and the rear-guard would know where I was. And I would move no further till I heard the trumpets in reply.

It would be better if everyone knew the time when the trumpets would blow. But how could that be, once we are all out of sight of each other? How do the black monks in the minsters know when it is time for their services? Shef chewed on the problem as his horse took him down between the trees and shadows began to fall across the path. Again and again these days his head swam with thoughts, with ideas, with difficulties to which there seemed to be no solution in the wisdom of his time. Shef's fingers itched to hold a hammer again, to work in the forge. He felt he could beat out a solution on an anvil instead of restlessly brooding in his own brain.

There was a figure on the road ahead of them. He spun about when he heard the horses—then let his sword slide back down when he recognized them.

“I am Stuf,” the man said. “One of the band of Humli, out of Ribe.”

Brand nodded. A small band, not very well organized. The sort of group that would let a man slip out of line and not think to inquire what had happened to him till too late.

“My horse went lame and I dropped behind. Then I decided to turn him loose and go on with just my own pack.”

Brand nodded again. “We have spare horses here. I will let you have one. It will cost you a mark of silver.”

Stuf opened his mouth to protest, to start the automatic haggling expected of any deal in horseflesh, but then closed it suddenly as Brand waved his men on. He grabbed the reins of the horse Brand was leading.

“Your price is high,” he said. “But maybe now is not the time to be arguing. There are Englishmen around. I can smell them.”

As he said the words Shef saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. A branch moving. No, the whole tree sweeping downward in a stately arc, the ropes tied to its top suddenly visible as they tightened into a straight line. An instant later, movement all along the left-hand edge of the track.

Shef threw his shield up. A thump, an arrow-point just protruding through the soft lindenwood an inch from his hand. Shouts and screams behind him, horses rearing and kicking. Already he had hurled himself off the horse and was crouching below its neck, its body between him and the ambush. His mind registered a dozen facts as if in one flash of lightning, far quicker than any words.

That tree had been cut through after the Great Army had passed through. The rear-guard was even further behind than they had thought. The attack would be coming from the left; they wanted to drive their enemies into the wood to the right. No escape forward over the felled tree, none back through the confusion of shot horses and startled men. Do what they least suspected!

Shef ran round the front of his horse, shield up, and hurled himself straight at the steep left bank of the track, his spear gripped underhand. One leap, two, three—not pausing lest the muddy bank give way. A makeshift barricade of branches and a face glaring over it at him, an Englishman fumbling an arrow out of his quiver. Shef drove the spear through the barricade at groin level and saw the face contort in agony. Twist, wrench backward, reach over and drag the man forward through his own barricade. Shef drove his spear-point into the ground and vaulted over body and branches, turning instantly and stabbing at the ambushers, first one side then the other.

He realized suddenly that his throat was raw with shouting. A much bigger voice was bellowing in unison: Brand down on the track, not fit to fight one-handed but directing the startled Vikings up the bank and into the breach he had made. One instant a dozen figures were closing on Shef, with him stabbing furiously in all directions to keep them off. The next there was an elbow in his back, he was stumbling forward, there were mailed men on either side, and the English were backing hastily, turning suddenly in open flight.

Churls, Shef realized. Leather jackets, hunting bows and bill-hooks. Used to driving boar, not to fighting men. If the Vikings had fled into the woods as they had been expected to, no doubt they would have been in a killing ground of nets and pits, where they would have wallowed helpless till speared. But these Englishmen were not warriors to stand and hew at each other over the war-linden.

No point, certainly, in trying to pursue them through their own woods. The Vikings looked down, stabbed or cut thoughtfully at the few men their charge had caught, making sure none would live to boast of the day. Shef felt a hard hand slap him on the back.

“You did right, boy. Never stand still in an ambush. Always run away—or else run straight toward it. But how do you know these things? Maybe Thorvin is right about you.”

Brand clasped the hammer pendant round his neck, and then began once more to bellow orders, hustling his men off the track and round the felled tree-trunk, stripping gear off dead or crippled horses, looking briefly at the ten or twelve men wounded in the skirmish.

“At this range,” he said, “these short bows will send an arrow through mail. But only just. Not enough punch in them to get through the ribs or into the belly. Bows and arrows never won a battle yet.”

The cortege wound its way up the slope on the other side of the little stream, out of the woods and into the last of the autumn light.

Something lay on the track in front of them. No, some things. As the Vikings crowded forward again, Shef realized that they were warriors of the Army—two of them, stragglers like Stuf, dressed in the grubby wadmal of the long-service campaigner. But there was something else about them, something horrifying, something he had seen before….

With the same shock of recognition he had experienced in Emneth, Shef realized the men were too small. Their arms were hacked off at the elbow, their legs at the knee; a reek of seared flesh told how they had lived. For they were still alive. One of them lifted his head from the ground as the riders came toward him, saw the shocked and angry faces.

“Bersi,” he called. “Skuli the Bald's crew. Fraendir, vinir, do what you must. Give us the warrior's death.”

Brand swung from his horse, his face gray, drawing his dagger left-handed. Gently he patted the living corpse's face with his bandaged right hand, steadied it, drove the dagger home with one hard thrust behind the ear. Did the same for the other man, lying mercifully unconscious.

“Pull them out of the road,” he said, “and let's get on. Heimnars,” he added to Shef. “Now I wonder who has taught them to do that.”

Shef made no reply. Far off, but caught in the last rays of the sun now streaming almost horizontally through a breach in the clouds, he could see yellow stone walls, a thicket of distant houses on a slight hill in front of them, smoke streaming away from a thousand chimneys. He had seen them before. Another moment of recognition.

“Eoforwich,” he said.

“Yovrvik,” repeated the Viking standing next to him, struggling with the unfamiliar consonants and diphthongs.

“To Hell with that,” said Brand. “Just call it York.”

After dark the men on the city walls looked down on the innumerable twinkling points of the Great Army's cooking fires. They were on the round bastion of the southeast corner of the old and impressive square Roman fortress, once home of the Sixth Legion, placed there to hold the North in awe. Behind them, inside the three-hundred-and-twenty-acre defended site, bulked St. Peter's Minster, once the most famous home of learning and scholarship in the whole northern world. Inside the walls, too, lay the king's quarters, the houses of a hundred noble families, the jammed-together barracks of their thanes and companions and hired swords. And the forges, the arsenals, the weapon-shops, the tanneries, the sinews of power. Outside there lay a sprawling town with its warehouses and jetties down on the Ouse. But this was dispensable. What mattered lay inside the walls: those of the old legionary fortress or its matching walled site across the river, centered on St. Mary's—once the Roman colonia where the time-expired legionaries had settled and had walled themselves in as was their custom, against the turmoil or resentment of the natives.

King Ella stared down grimly at the countless fires, the burly captain of his guard, Cuthred, at his side. Close by stood the archbishop of York, Wulfhere, still in his purple and white, and flanked by the black figure of Erkenbert the deacon.

“They have not been much delayed,” said Ella. “I thought they might be held up by the Humber marshes, but they slipped across. I hoped they might run out of supplies, but they seem to have managed well enough.”

He might have added that he hoped they might have been discouraged by the desperate assault of King Edmund and the East Anglians, of which so many tales already were told. But that thought sent a chill to his heart. All the tales that were told ended with a description of the death by torment of the king. And Ella knew—he had known ever since the Ragnarssons were identified in England—that they had the same or worse in store for him. The eight thousand men camped round the cooking fires out there had come for him. If he fled, they would come after him. If he hid, they would offer money for his body. Wulfhere, even Cuthred, could hope to survive a defeat. Ella knew he must beat the Army or die.

“They have lost many men!” Erkenbert the deacon said. “Even the churls are out, to delay them, to cut off their rearguards and their forage parties. They must have lost hundreds of men already, maybe thousands. All our people are rallying to the defense.”

“That's true,” agreed Cuthred. “But you know to whose credit that is.”

The group turned together to look at the strange contrivance a few yards from them. It was like a shallow box, on long handles so that it could be carried like a stretcher. Between one pair of handles ran an axle with wheels on it, so that it could be trundled on level ground. Inside the box lay the trunk of a man, though now that the box was tipped forward he was upright, able to see over the battlements like the rest. Most of his weight was taken by a broad strap round his chest and under his armpits. His groin rested on a padded projection. He braced himself on the bandaged stumps of his knees.

“I serve as a warning,” rumbled Wulfgar, his voice shockingly deep-toned coming from such a seemingly small man. “One day I will serve as vengeance. For this and all the heathens have done to me.”

The other men did not reply. They knew the effect the mutilated East Anglian thane had had, the almost triumphal progress he had made from his home, ahead of the Army, halting in every village to tell the churls what lay in store for them and for their womenfolk.

“What good has all the rallying done?” King Ella asked bitterly.

Cuthred screwed up his face in calculation. “Not slowed them. Not lost them many. Made them keep together. May even have tightened them up. Still around eight thousand of them.”

“We can put half as many again in the field,” said Arch Deacon Erkenbert. “We are not the East Anglians. Two thousand men of military age live in Eoforwich itself. And we are strong in the strength of the Lord of Hosts.”

“I don't think we've got enough,” said Cuthred slowly. “Not even counting the Lord of Hosts. It sounds good to say you're three-to-two. But if it's a fight on level ground it's always one to one. We've got champions as good as theirs, but not enough of them. If we marched out to fight them we would lose.”

“Then we will not march out against them?”

“We stay here. They have to come to us, try and climb the walls.”

“They will destroy our properties,” cried Erkenbert. “Kill the stock, carry off the young people, cut down the fruit trees. Burn the harvest. And there is worse. The rents on Church properties are not due till Michaelmas, none have yet been paid. The churls still have their money in their pouches, or hidden in the ground, but if they see their lands ravaged and their lords penned inside a wall, will they pay?”

He threw his hands up theatrically. “It would be a disaster! All over Northumbria the houses of God would fall into ruin, the servants of God would starve.”

“They won't starve for loss of a year's rents,” said Cuthred. “How much of last year's have you got set aside in the minster?”

“There is another solution,” said Ella. “I have proposed it before. We could make peace with them. Offer them tribute—we could call it wergild for their father. It would need to be a mighty tribute to attract them. But there must be ten households in Northumbria for every man out there in the Army. Ten households of churls can buy off a carl. Ten households of thanes can buy off one of their nobles. Some of them will not want to accept, but if we make the offer publicly, the rest may argue them round. What we would ask for from them is a year's peace. And in that year—for they will come again—we will train every man of military age in the kingdom till he can stand against Ivar the Boneless or the devil himself. Then we can fight them three to two, eh, Cuthred? Or one to one if we have to.”

The burly captain snorted in amusement. “Brave words, lord, and a good plan. I'd like to do it. Problem is…” He pulled the laces on the pouch at his belt and tipped the contents into his palm. “Look at this stuff. A few good silver pennies that I got from selling a horse when I was down South. The rest is imitations from the archbishop's mint here—mostly lead, if it's not copper. I don't know where all the silver's gone—we used to have plenty of it. But there's been less and less of it all over the North for twenty years now. We use the archbishop's money, but the Southerners won't take it; you have to have something to trade to deal with them. You can be damned sure the Army out there won't take it. And it's no good offering them grain or honeycombs.”

“But they're here.” said Ella. “We must have something they want. The Church must have reserves of gold and silver….”

“You mean to give Church treasures to the Vikings, to buy them off?” gasped Erkenbert. “Instead of marching out to fight them, as is your Christian duty? What you say is sacrilege, Church-breach! If a churl steals a silver plate from the least of God's houses, he is flayed and his hide nailed to the church door. What you suggest is a thousand times worse.”

“You imperil your immortal soul even to think of it,” cried the archbishop.

Erkenbert's voice hissed like an adder. “It was not for this that we made you king.”

The heimnar Wulfgar's voice cut across them both. “And you forget, besides, who you are dealing with. These are not men. They are spawn from the pit—all of them. We cannot deal with them. We cannot have them out there for months—we must destroy them….” Spittle began to show round his pale lips, and he lifted an arm for an instant as if to wipe it away before the truncated limb fell back. “Lord king, heathens are not men. They have no souls.”

Six months ago, Ella thought, I would have led the host of the Northumbrians out to fight. It's what they expect. If I order anything else there is the risk of being called a coward. No one will follow a coward. Erkenbert has as good as told me: If I do not fight they will bring that simpleton Osbert back. He is still hiding up there in the North somewhere. He would march out to fight like a gallant fool.

But Edmund has shown what happens if you fight on even ground, even when you catch them by surprise. If we march out in the old style, I know we will lose. I know we will lose, and I will die. I must do something else. Something Erkenbert will accept. But he will not accept an open payment of tribute.

Ella spoke with sudden decision, the weight of kingship in his voice.

“We will stand a siege and hope to weaken them. Cuthred, check defenses and provisioning, send away all useless mouths. Lord archbishop, men have told me that in your library there are learned books by the old Rome-folk who wrote on matters of war, especially of siegecraft. See what aid they can give us in destroying the Vikings.”

He turned away, left the wall, Cuthred and a trail of lesser nobles following; Wulfgar was tipped back on his stretcher and carried off by two stout thralls down the stone steps.

“The East Anglian thane is right,” whispered Erkenbert to his archbishop. “We must get these people away before they destroy our rents and seduce our thralls. Even our nobles. I can think of some who might be tempted into thinking they can do without us.”

“Look it out—Vegetius,” Wulfhere replied. “The book called De Re Militari. I had not known our lord was so learned.”

“He has been in the forge four days now,” observed Brand. He and Thorvin, with Hund and Hund's master Ingulf, stood in a little knot a few yards away from the glowing fire of a smithy. The Vikings had found it, still stocked with charcoal, in the village of Osbaldwich a few miles outside York. Shef had taken it over immediately, called urgently for men, iron and fuel. The four stared at him through the wide-flung doors of the smithy.

“Four days,” repeated Brand. “He has hardly eaten. He would not have slept except the men told him if he did not sleep, they still had to, and made him cease the din of hammering a few hours a night.”

“It doesn't seem to have done him much harm,” said Hund.

Indeed his friend, who he still thought of as a boy, a youth, seemed to have changed totally in the course of the past summer. His frame was not massive by the demanding standards of the Army, full of giants. But there seemed to be no excess flesh on it. Shef had stripped to the waist in spite of the gusts of an English October. As he moved round the forge, pecking now at something small and delicate, shifting the red-hot metal with tongs, barking quickly at his iron-collared English assistant to pump harder at the bellows, his muscles moved under the skin as if they lay directly beneath it, without blurring fat or tissue. A quick jerk, metal sizzling into a tub, another piece snatched from the fire. Each time he moved, separate muscles slid smoothly over each other. In the red light of the forge he might have seemed a bronze statue of the ancient days.

Except that he had not their beauty. Even in the light of the forge the sunken right eye seemed a crater of decay. On his back the thrall-marks of flogging showed vividly. Few men in the Army would have been so careless as to display such shame.

“No harm in the body, maybe,” replied Thorvin. “I cannot speak for the mind. You know what it says in the Völund-lay:

“I do not know what cunning thing our friend is beating out in his mind. Or who he is doing it for. I hope he will be more successful than Völund—more successful at gaining the desire of his heart.”

Ingulf turned the questioning. “What has he been making these four days?”

“This, to begin with.” Thorvin held a helmet up for the others to scrutinize.

What Thorvin held up was like no helmet they had ever seen. It was too big, bulbous as the head of a giant insect. A rim had been welded round it, filed to bright razor-sharpness in the front. A nose-guard ran down in front, ending in bars running back to cheek-protectors. A flared skirt of solid metal covered the nape of the neck.

More surprising to the watchers was the inside. A leather lining had been fitted to the helmet, suspended by straps. Once the helmet was on, the lining would fit the head snugly but the metal would not touch it. A broad strap and a buckle fitted under the jaw, to hold all firm.

“Never seen the likes,” said Brand. “A blow on the metal will not crash into the skull. Still, it's better not to get hit, I say.”

As they talked, the racket at the forge had ceased, and Shef had been seen diligently fitting small pieces together. Now he walked over to them, smiling and sweating.

Brand raised his voice. “I say, young waker-of-warriors-untimely, if you avoid the blow you don't need the helmet. And what in the name of Thor is that you are holding?”

Shef grinned again, and held up the strange weapon from the forge. He held it out horizontally, balancing it after an instant on the edge of one hand, just where wood joined metal.

“And what do you call that?” asked Thorvin. “A hewing-spear? A haft-axe?”

“A beard-axe that's had bastards by a ploughshare?” suggested Brand. “I don't see the use of it.”

Shef picked up Brand's still-bandaged hand and gently rolled back the sleeve. He put his own forearm next to his friend's.

“How good a swordsman am I?” he asked.

“Poor. No training. Some talent.”

“If I had the training, would I ever be fit to stand against a man like you? Never. Look at our arms. Is yours twice as thick round as mine? Or just half as thick again? And I am not a weak man. But I am a different shape from you, and yours is the shape for a swordsman, even more, an axeman. You swing a weapon as if it were a stick for a boy to slash thistles. I cannot do that. So if I were ever to face a champion like you… And one day I will have to face a champion like you. Muirtach maybe. Or worse.”

All five men nodded silently.

“So I have to even things up. With this, you see…” Shef began to twirl the weapon slowly. “I can thrust. I can cut forehand. I can strike backhand without reversing the weapon. I can change grip and strike with the butt. I can block a blow from any direction. I can use two hands. I need no shield. Most of all—a blow from this, even in my hands, is like a blow from Brand, which few survive.”

“But your hands are exposed,” said Brand.

Shef beckoned, and the Englishman in the forge nervously moved over. He held two more metal objects. Shef took them and passed them over.

They were gauntlets: leather-lined, leather-palmed, with long metal projections designed to fit halfway up the forearm. Yet the striking thing about them, the men saw as they peered more closely, was the way the metal moved. Each finger had five plates, each plate fitted to the next on small rivets. Larger plates fitted over the knuckles and the backs of the hands, but they too moved. Shef pulled them on, and slowly flexed his hands, opening and closing them round the shaft of his weapon.

“They are like the scales of Fafnir the dragon,” said Thorvin.

“Fafnir was stabbed in the belly, from below. I hope to be harder to murder.” Shef turned away. “I have another task to do. I could not have done all this in time without Halfi here. He is a good leather-worker, though he is slow with the bellows.”

Motioning the Englishman to kneel before him he began to file at the iron collar. “You will say there is not much point in freeing him, since someone will enslave him again immediately. But I will see him outside the Army's watch fires in the night, and his master is shut up tight in York. If he has any sense or luck he will run away, run far away, and never be caught again.”

The Englishman looked up as Shef began gently to pry the soft iron from his throat. “You are heathens,” the slave said, not understanding. “Priest said you're men with no mercy. You cut the arms and legs from the thane—I saw him! How can it be that you set a man free where the Christ-priests hold him a slave?”

Shef lifted him to his feet. He replied in English, not in the Norse they had been using before. “The men who crippled the thane should not have done what they did. Yet I say nothing of Christians and heathens, except that there are evil men everywhere. I can give you only one rede. If you do not know who to trust, try a man who wears one of those.” He gestured at the four men watching, who, following the speech, silently raised their silver pendants: hammers for Brand and Thorvin, the apples of Ithun for the two leeches, Hund and Ingulf.

“Or others like them. It may be a boat for Njörth, a hammer for Thor, a penis for Frey. I do not say they will help you. But they will treat you as a man, not as a horse or a heifer.”

“You do not wear one,” said Halfi.

“I do not know what to wear.”

Around them, the normal noise of the camp was turning to hubbub as news spread; voices were raised, warriors shouted to each other. The men in the smithy looked up as one of Brand's men appeared, a broad grin splitting the tangle of his beard.

“We're off!” he cried. “The jarls and the Ragnarssons and the Snakeeye have all stopped riding round and round and pondering and scratching their arses. We take the wall tomorrow! Let the women and girls there beware!”

Shef looked darkly at the man, finding no humor in his words. “My girl was called Godive,” he said. “That is, ‘God's gift.’ ” He pulled on his gauntlets, swung his halberd thoughtfully. “I shall call this Thrall's-wreak'—the vengeance of the slave. One day it will do vengeance for Godive. And other girls as well.”

Chapter Two

In the gray morning light the Army began to filter through the narrow, hovel-lined streets of the outer town of York. All three main bridges over the Ouse were commanded by the walls of the old colonia, on the south bank of the river, but this had caused no difficulty for the skilled shipwrights and axemen who filled the Viking ranks. They had torn down a few houses and an outlying church for some bigger timbers, and had thrown a wide bridge over the Ouse close to their own encampment. The Army had crossed, and were now lapping their way up, like the tide, toward the yellow stone walls at the heart of the town. There was no sense of hurry, no shouting of commands, just eight thousand men, less the crews detailed to guard the camp, pressing forward toward their obvious goal.

As they tramped up through the narrow streets, men turned aside in small groups to kick down doors or break open shutters. Shef turned his head, stiff and clumsy with the unaccustomed weight of the helmet, and raised brows in silent inquiry at Brand, strolling peacefully by his side, flexing the scarred hand just unwrapped from its bandages.

“There are fools everywhere,” remarked Brand. “The runaways say the king here ordered the place cleared days ago, the men inside the fortress, all the others off into the hills somewhere. But there's always someone who knows better, thinks it won't happen.”

Commotion broke out ahead of them to lend force to his words: voices shouting, a woman shrieking, the sound of a sudden blow. Out from a shattered doorway squeezed four men, grins splitting their faces, a grubby, slatternly young woman writhing and twisting in their grip. The other men pushing up the hill stopped to exchange jokes.

“Make you too weak to fight, Tosti! You'd be better off with another pancake, keep your strength up.”

One of the men pulled the girl's gown up over her head like a sack, pinning her arms and muffling her shrieks. Two others seized her bare legs and pulled them roughly apart. The mood of the crowd passing by changed. Men began to stop and watch.

“Room for more when you're finished, Skakul?”

Shef's gauntleted hands clenched on the shaft of “Thrall's-wreak,” and he too turned toward the writhing, grunting group. Brand's enormous fist closed gently over Shef's biceps.

“Leave it, boy. If there's a fight she'll be killed for sure. Easy targets always are. Leave them to it, and maybe they'll let her go at the end. They've a battle to fight, so they can't take too long.”

Reluctantly Shef turned his eyes and walked on, trying not to hear the sounds coming from behind—and, as they walked further, from other sides as well. The town, he realized, was like a cornfield in autumn. It seemed to be empty, but as the scythemen walked through it, cutting the wheat down into a smaller and smaller square, so its inhabitants became more and more visible, anxious, terrified, finally running anywhere to get away from the voices and the blades. They should have gone when they were told, he told himself. The king should have made sure. Why can no one see sense in this world?

The buildings ended and before them was a cleared zone of mud and rubble with the yellow stone wall some eighty yards off, the wall the Rome-folk had made. Brand and his crew emerged from the alley, looked up at the top of the wall where figures moved and called jeeringly. A zip in the air, and an arrow thumped into the wattle and daub of a house wall. Another, and a Viking swore in anger as he looked at the shaft sticking from his hip. Brand reached over and pulled it out, glanced at it, tossed it over his shoulder.

“Hurt, Arnthor?”

“Just got through the leather. Six inches higher and it would have bounced off my jacket.”

“No punch,” remarked Brand again. “Don't look at those fellows. Someone gets one in the eye now and then.”

Shef plodded forward, trying to ignore the zips and thuds like the others. “Have you done this kind of thing before?” he asked.

Brand halted, called to his crews to halt as well, turned toward the wall and promptly hunkered down on his heels.

“Can't say I have. Not on this scale. But today we just do what we're told. The Ragnarssons say they've a plan and they will take the city if everybody stands by to lend their weight where needed. So we watch and wait.

“Mind you, if anyone knows what they're doing it should be them. Do you know, their old man, their father Ragnar, tried to take the city of the Franks—oh, it must be twenty years ago. Paris, it's called. So the Ragnarssons have thought a lot about stone walls and cities ever since. Though it's a far cry from some rath in Kilkenny or Meath to this. I'd like to see how they go about it.”

Shef leaned on his halberd and stared around him. To his front ran the stone wall, topped with battlements, men loosely scattered along it, no longer wasting arrows on the mass of the Army drawn up on the fringe of the cleared zone facing them, but clearly ready to shoot at any forward movement. Surprising, Shef thought, how little range even a great stone wall could give you. The men on top of their walls thirty feet were impregnable, unreachable. Yet the archers on the wall could do virtually nothing to the men standing watching them. At fifty yards' range you were in danger, at ten you might well be dead. At eighty you could stand in the open and make your preparations at leisure.

He looked more closely at the wall. To the left, two hundred yards away, it ended in a round, jutting tower, from which men could shoot along the line of the wall, at least for as far as their bows would carry. Beyond the tower the ground dropped toward the brown and muddy Ouse, immediately beyond it on the other bank, the wooden stockade that guarded the river fringe of the colonia—Marystown, as the locals called it. It too carried a frieze of men, watching anxiously the preparations of the heathen so close, so out of range.

The Army waited, six- and eight-deep, facing the wall on a five-hundred-yard front; more packed into the mouths of the streets and alleyways, the steam of their breath rising into the air. Dull metal, grubby wool and leather were picked out only here and there by the bright paint on shields. The warriors looked calm, patient, like farmhands waiting for the owner.

There came a blare of horns from the center of the waiting ranks, maybe fifty or sixty yards to Shef's right. Shef realized suddenly that he should have been studying the gate in the center of the wall. A wide street ran out from it, no longer prominent in the waste of mud and trampled wattle where houses had been, but clearly the main road out to the east. The gate itself was new, not work of the Rome-folk, but massively formidable for that. Its timbers were seasoned oak tree-trunks, fully as high as the towers on either side of it. Its hinges were the heaviest iron that English smiths could make.

Yet it was weaker than stone. Opposite it now, the four Ragnarssons strode forward. Shef picked out the tallest of them, looking almost frail beside his mighty brothers. Ivar the Boneless. Clad for the occasion in flaring scarlet cloak, grass-green breeches beneath his long mail-coat, shield and helmet silver-painted. He paused and waved to his nearest supporters, to a roar of recognition. The horns blew again, and the English on the wall responded with a cloud of arrows, to hiss by, thud into shields, bounce away from mail.

This time the Snakeeye waved, and suddenly hundreds of men were trotting forward, the Ragnarssons' own picked followers. The first line of them carried shields, not the usual round ones for combat, but large rectangles, capable of covering the body from ankle to neck. They ran forward through the arrow-sleet and halted, forming a V aimed at the gate. The second and third line were bowmen. They too ran forward, crouched behind the shields and began to shoot up. Now men began to fall on both sides, shot through throat or brain. Shef could see others crouching, struggling with arrows this time deeply embedded through mail and flesh. A trickle of wounded men was already beginning to walk back from the Viking ranks.

But the job of these first attackers was only to sweep the battlements clear.

Crawling forward from the mouth of the street up which it had been towed came the Ragnarssons' pride. Shef, looking at it as it emerged from the ranks of men, saw it for a moment as a monstrous boar. The legs of the men who pushed it from inside could not be seen. Twenty feet long, it was armored on either side with heavy, overlapping shields, roofed over with more.

Inside was an oak-trunk ram which swung on iron chains from its frame. Fifty men picked for strength heaved it along, pushing it on eight double-size cartwheels. From its front poked the iron snout of the ram. As it rolled ponderously forward, the warriors on either side of it cheered and began to surge forward with it, ignoring the English arrows. The Ragnarssons were on either side of the ram, waving their men back and trying to get them into some sort of column. Shef looked grimly at the flurry of saffron plaids. Muirtach was there, his longsword still not drawn, also waving and cursing.

“Well, that's the plan,” said Brand—he had still not bothered to stand up. “The ram bashes the door down and then we all walk in.”

“Will it work?”

“That's what we're fighting the battle to find out.” The ram was only twenty yards from the gate now, level with the foremost archers, accelerating to a rapid walk as the men pushing saw their goal through the frontal slit. On the battlement men appeared suddenly, drawing an instant hail of shot from the Viking archers. They leveled their bows, and fire-arrows shot down from wall to ram, thumping into the heavy timbers.

“Won't work,” Brand said. “Somewhere else maybe, but in England? After harvest? You'd have to dry that wood for a day at your forge before you could get it to take light.” The fires fizzled and guttered. The ram was at the gate, still accelerating till it stopped with a crash. A pause, as the champions left their drag-ropes and stepped across to the handles on the ram itself. The whole structure shifted as they swung it back on the iron chains hanging from the roof of the frame. Then a heave forward, propelled by a hundred arms and the massive weight of the tree-trunk itself. The gate shook.

Shef realized suddenly that the excitement of battle was beginning to take hold. Even Brand was on his feet now, and everyone was beginning to edge forward. He himself was ten yards further forward than he had been. No reply from the battlements, no harassing fire hoping to take its toll.

Now all attention on both sides was fixed on the gate. The ponderous frame of the boar was shifting again as the men heaved the trunk back. Another drive forward, a crash which carried even over the noise of thousands of voices, another tremor from the massive gate. What were the English doing? If they let the boar carry on its routing, their gate would soon be in splinters and the Army surging through.

Heads began to appear at the gate towers, bobbing up in spite of the waves of shafts directed at them. Each man—they must be strong men up there—held a boulder, heaved it over his head, hurled it over and down at the overlapped shields of the ram. It was a target that could not be missed. Shields cracked and broke. But they were nailed firmly in place, and sloping. The boulders fell, rolled to one side.

Something else was happening, He was closer now, just behind the line of the Ragnarsson archers, men behind him darting forward with bundles of retrieved arrows. What was it? Ropes. They had ropes in the gate towers, both of them, lots of ropes, and the men in the towers, still out of arrowshot, were heaving mightily at them. A Ragnarsson ran across his view—Ubbi, it seemed to be—shouting at the men pressing forward. He was telling them to throw javelins up over the battlements, to come down where the men seemed to be pulling. A few men ran forward to cast; not many. It was blind shooting, and a costly throwing spear was not something to waste idly. The ropes tightened.

Up over the edge of the gate came a round object, a great roller teetering slowly toward the edge. It was a pillar: a stone pillar from the Roman days, sawn off at both ends. Falling from thirty feet no frame could stop it.

Shef passed “Thrall's-wreak” to Brand and ran forward, yelling inarticulately. The men inside the boar could see nothing of what was happening above their heads, but others could. The trouble was, no one had a clear idea of what to do. As Shef reached the frame several men were clustered at its rear, urging its crew to drop the handles, turn back to the drag-ropes, and haul the whole contrivance back to safety. Others were calling to Muirtach and his stormers to come to the outside and add their weight to the withdrawal. As they did so, the English archers rallied again and the air was once more full of the zip and thud of missiles, this time coming at killing range.

Shef pushed a man aside, another, and ducked into the rear entrance of the ram. Inside there was an immediate reeking fog of sweat and steaming breath, fifty heroes gasping with exertion and confusion, some already at the drag-ropes, others turning away from the massive swinging trunk.

“No,” Shef bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Get back to the handles.”

Faces gaped at him, men began to throw their weight on the ropes.

“You don't need to push the whole thing back, just swing back the ram—”

An arm caught him in the back, he was hurled forward, other bodies charged past him, he found a rope thrust in his hand.

“Pull, ye useless bodach, or I'll cut yer liver out,” screamed Muirtach in his ear.

Shef felt the frame tremble, the wheel behind him start to turn. He threw his weight on the rope—two feet would do it, maybe three—they couldn't throw that great thing right out from the gate….

A ground-trembling crash, another violent blow in the back, his head making contact with a timber, a sudden terrible shrieking like a woman's that this time went on and on…

Shef stumbled to his feet and looked around. The Vikings had been too slow. The stone pillar, finally hauled over the edge by a hundred arms, had come down squarely on the iron snout of the ram, driving it into the ground, snapping chains and tearing out their fixing bolts. It had also smashed the front of the frame, and come down finally across the hips of one of the crew. He was the one—a massive grizzled man in his forties—who was shrieking. His mates backed away—frightened, shamed, ignoring the three or four silent bodies caught by flailing chain or smashing timber. At least, apart from the one man, no one was making any noise. They would begin to babble in a moment, but for a moment, Shef knew, he could bend them to his will. He knew what must be done.

“Muirtach. Stop that noise.” The cruel dark face gaped at him, seemingly without recognition, then stepped forward, pulling a dirk from his hose-top.

“The rest of you. Roll the ram back. Not far. Six feet. Stop. Now—” He was at the timbers at the front, examining the damage. “Ten of you, outside; take broken wood, spear-shafts, anything, roll that column right hard up against the gate. It's only a few feet wide—if we get the front wheel right up to it we can still swing the ram.

“Now, rerig these chains. I need a hammer, two hammers. Start pulling the ram back, right back on its slings…”

Time passed in a frenzy. Shef was aware of faces staring at him, of a silver helmet pushing in and out of the rear entrance, of Muirtach wiping a dirk. He paid no attention. For him, the chains and posts, the nails and broken timbers, were glowing lines in his head, shifting as he thought how they should be. He had no doubt what to do.

A roar of excitement outside as the Army tried a sudden escalade with makeshift ladders against a seemingly undefended wall. Only to be hurled back and off as the English rallied in defense.

Inside, gasps of effort, mutters: “It's the smith, the one-eyed smith. Do as he says.”

Ready. Shuffling to the back, Shef waved the champions to their ropes again, saw the ram rumble forward till its wheels lay against the column and its head; the shattered iron snout, chopped off and discarded, was once again flush with the gate, oak against oak. The champion seized their handles once more, waited for the word, swung back all together, and forward. And forward. They were singing now, a rowing song, putting their bodies into the stroke, heaving mindlessly and without direction. Shef ducked out of the frame once more and into the daylight.

Round him the aimless muddy waste of the morning had taken on the look of a battlefield. Bodies on the ground, hurt men walking or being carried away, spent shafts littering the earth or being picked up by scavenging archers. Anxious faces turning first toward him. Then toward the gate.

It was beginning to split. Movement ran across it now as the ram struck; one post was slightly out of line with the other. The men inside were inching the ram forward, to get a better stroke. In fifty breaths, maybe a hundred, it would go. The champions of Northumbria would surge out, waving their gold-handled swords, to meet the champions of Denmark and the Vik and the apostates of Ireland. It was the turning point of the battle.

Shef found himself staring into the face of Ivar the Boneless, only a few feet away, the pale eyes fixed on him, full of hatred and suspicion. Then Ivar's attention changed. He too knew the battle had reached its crisis. Turning, he waved both arms in prearranged signal. From the houses down toward the Ouse a horde of figures trotted. They carried long ladders, not makeshifts like those of the last escalade, but carefully made and concealed ones. Fresh men, who knew what they were doing. If the champions were at the gate, Ivar would send a wave in at the corner tower, which all the bravest and the best of the English would have left, to join the climactic struggle at the gate.

The English are finished, Shef thought. Their defenses are down in two places. Now the Army will go through.

Why did I do this to them? Why have I helped Ivar and the Army—the ones who burned out my eye?

From the other side of the quaking gate there came a curious dull twang, like a harp-string snapping, but immensely louder, fit to be heard above the din of battle. Up into the air there rose a mass, a mighty mass, a boulder bigger than ten men could lift. That's impossible, Shef thought. Impossible.

But the boulder continued to rise, up and up till Shef had to tilt his head back to look at it. It appeared to hang for an instant.

Then down.

It landed square on the center of the ram, smashing through shields and frame and supports as if they were a child's house of bark. The ram's head kicked up in the air and jerked sideways like a dying fish. From inside, hoarse cries of pain.

The scaling parties now had ladders up against the wall; they were scrambling up; one ladder had been pushed away, the rest were standing firm. Two hundred yards further off, across the Ouse, something was happening on top of the wooden stockade of Marystown: men crouched round some kind of machine.

Not a boulder this time, a line, rising as it streaked across the river, then falling as it headed for the ladders. The hero on top of the one nearest them had his hand on the stone battlement, and was just reaching over to scramble across. The streak intersected with his body.

He smashed forward as if struck in the back by a giant, smashed so hard the ladder broke under him with the impact. As the ladder fell beneath him and he turned, arms flung wide, Shef saw the giant bolt projecting from the man's spine. He folded over backward as if in two pieces and fell slowly onto the heap of his mates scrambling beneath him.

An arrow. But not an arrow. No human being could have shot it, nor heaved the boulder. Yet these things had happened. Shef walked forward slowly and considered the rock lying amid the ruins of the ram, ignoring the pitiful struggles and cries for help beneath it.

These things had been done by machines. And such machines! Somewhere inside the fort, maybe among the black monks, there must be a machine-master such as he had never imagined. He must find out. But now, anyway, he knew why he had helped the Army. Because he could not bear to see a machine mishandled. But now there were machines on both sides.

Brand had seized him, thrust “Thrall's-wreak” into his hands, was hustling him away, snarling angrily at him.

“…standing there like a wittol, they'll have a war-band out any moment!”

Shef saw they were almost the last men left on the cleared ground, the place of slaughter. The rest had filtered back down the hill as they had filtered up.

The Ragnarssons' assault on York had failed.

Very carefully, tongue protruding between his teeth, Shef laid the keen blade of his meat-knife to the thread. It snapped. The weight on the end of the wooden arm dropped, the other end flew up. A pebble arced lazily across the forge.

Shef sat up with a sigh. “That is how it works,” he said to Thorvin. “A short arm, a heavy weight; a long arm, a lighter weight. There it is.”

“I am glad you are satisfied at last,” replied Thorvin. “Two days you have been playing with bits of wood and string, while I do all the work. Now maybe you can bear a hand.”

“I will, yes, but this is important too. This is the new knowledge that those of the Way must seek.”

“It is. And important. But there is the day's work to be done as well.”

Thorvin was as keenly interested as Shef in the experiments, but, after a few attempts to help, had realized that he was merely standing in the way of the excited imagination of his former apprentice, and had gone back to the enormous pile of work an army, in being, created for its armorers.

“But is it new knowledge?” Hund asked. “Ingulf can do things no Englishman has ever been able to. And he learns how to do them by trial, and by taking to pieces the bodies of the dead. You are learning by trial, but you are only trying to learn what the black monks already know. And they are not playing with models.”

Shef nodded. “I know. I am wasting my time. I understand now how it can be done, but there are all kinds of things I do not understand. If I had a real weight here, like the one they really shot, then what kind of weight would I need to put in the other arm? It would be far greater than a dozen men could lift. And if it was as heavy as that, how could I wind down the long arm, the shooting arm? It would need some sort of a windlass. But I know now what the sound was that I heard just before the rock came over. It was the sound of someone cutting the rope, to release the rock.

“And there is another thing that bothers me even more. They shot one rock—that smashed the ram. If they had not hit with that one shot, the gate would have been down and all the machine-masters would be dead. They must have been very sure they could hit with the first shot.”

He swept suddenly at the lines he had been drawing in the dirt. “It is a waste of time. Do you see what I mean, Thorvin? There must be some sort of skill, some sort of craft, which would tell men where it would go without me having to try again and again. When I first saw the stockade round your camp by the Stour, I was amazed. I thought, how do the leaders know how many logs to bring with them to build a stockade that will hold all their men? But now I know how even the Ragnarssons do it. They notch a stick for each ship, ten notches to a stick, and then they throw the sticks down in turn in separate piles, one pile for each one of the three walls, or the four walls, or however many there are, and when there are no more sticks they pick the piles up and count them. And that is the reckoning of the greatest leaders and captains in the world. A pile of sticks. But what they have over there in the city is the knowledge of the Rome-folk, who could write in numbers as easily as they could write in letters. If I could learn to write in Roman numbers, then I would build a machine!”

Thorvin laid down the tongs and looked thoughtfully at the silver hammer displayed on his chest.

“You should not think the Rome-folk had the answers to everything,” he remarked. “If they had they would still be ruling England from York. And they were only Christians, when all is said and done.”

Shef jumped impatiently to his feet. “Hah! How do you explain the other instrument then? The one that shot the great arrow. I have thought and thought about that. Nothing will do. You could not make a bow big enough. The wood would break. But what can shoot except a bow?”

“What you need,” said Hund, “is a runaway from the city, or from Marystown. One who has seen the machines work.”

“Maybe one will come,” said Thorvin. A silence fell, broken only by the renewed pounding of Thorvin's hammer and the puffing of the bellows as Shef blew angrily at the forge. Runaways were a subject better avoided. After the failure of the assault the Ragnarssons, in rage, had turned on the countryside around the city of York—a defenseless countryside, since its armed men and nobles, its thanes and champions, were shut up with King Ella inside the city. “If we cannot take the town,” Ivar had cried, “we will ravage the shire.” Ravage it they had.

“I'm getting sick of it,” Brand had confided to Shef after the last sweep of an already-gutted countryside, all crews taking their turn. “Don't think I'm a milksop, or a Christian. I want to get rich and there are few things I won't do for money. But there's no money in what we're doing. Not much sport either, to my eye, in what the Ragnarssons and the Gaddgedlar and the riffraff are doing. No fun going through a village after they've been through. They're only Christians, I know, and maybe they deserve what they get for cringing to the Christ-god and his priests.

“It still won't do. We're picking up slaves by the hundred, good quality stuff. But where to sell them. Down South? If you do that you need to go with a strong fleet and a sharp eye open. We aren't popular down there—and I blame Ragnar and his brood for that. Round in Ireland? A long way, and a long time before you get your cash. And slaves apart, there's nothing. The churches got their gold and silver into York before we arrived. What money the peasants have got, or the thanes—it's poor stuff. Very poor stuff. Strange. It's a rich land, anyone can see. Where's all their silver gone? We'll never get rich the way we're going. Sometimes I wish I had not taken the news of Ragnar's death to the Braethraborg, no matter what the priests of the Way said to me. It's little enough I have got out of it.”

But Brand had taken the crews out again, probing up across the shire to the shrine of Strenshall, hoping for a haul of gold or silver. Shef had asked not to accompany him, sickened with the sights and sounds of a land crisscrossed by the Ragnarssons and their followers, each one intent on showing to the others his skill on racking secrets and information and buried treasure out of churls and thralls who had no information, and certainly no treasure, to yield. Brand had hesitated, scowling.

“We are all in the Army together,” he had said. “What we decide together, all must do, even if some of us don't like it. If we don't like it we have to talk the others round, in open meeting. But I don't like the way you think you can take some bits of the Army and leave the others, young man. You are a carl now. Carls do what is best for each other. That is why we are all given a voice.”

“I did what was best when the ram broke.”

Brand had grunted, doubtfully, and had muttered, “For your own reasons.” But he had left Shef behind, with Thorvin and a mountain of smith-work, in the guarded camp that watched York, ever alert for a sally. Shef had begun immediately to play with models, to imagine giant bows, sling-stones, mallets. One problem at least he had solved—if not in practice or even in theory.

Outside the smithy there was a pad of running feet, a gasping of exhaustion. The three men inside moved as one to the wide, open doors. A few feet beyond them Thorvin had set up a line of poles, connected with yarn, from which he had hung the rowan berries that indicated the limits of his precinct, the holy place. To one of the posts clung a panting figure, dressed in rough sacking. The iron collar round his neck indicated his status. Desperately his eyes moved from one to the other of the three faces staring at him, then brightened with relief as he saw, finally, the hammer round Thorvin's burly neck.

“Sanctuary,” he gasped, “give me sanctuary.” He spoke in English, but used the Latin word.

“What is ‘sanctuarium’?” asked Thorvin.

“Safe-keeping. He wants to come under your protection. Among the Christians, a runaway may grasp a church door in some churches, and then he is under the protection of the bishop till his case is tried.”

Thorvin shook his head slowly. He could see now the pursuers coming into view—half a dozen of them, Hebrideans by the look of them, among the most ardent of the slave-takers, not hurrying now that they could see their quarry.

“We don't have that custom here,” he said.

The slave wailed with fear as he saw the gesture and felt the presences behind him, and clung tighter to the fragile poles. Shef remembered the moment when he too had walked forward to Thorvin inside his enclosure, not knowing if he was walking to his death or not. But he had been able to call himself a smith, a fellow of the craft. This man looked as if he was just extra labor, knowing nothing of any value.

“Come along, you.” The leader of the Hebrideans said, clouting the cringing figure round one ear, and began to pry his fingers from the pole.

“How much do you want for him?” said Shef impulsively. “I'll buy him off you.”

Guffaws of laughter. “What for, One-eye? You want a bum-boy? I've got better down in the pen.”

“I said I'll buy him. Look, I've got money.” Shef turned towards “Thrall's-wreak,” stuck in the ground at the entrance to the precinct. From it he had hung his purse with the few coins in it that Brand had doled out as his share of the meager plunder so far.

“No chance. Come down to the pens if you want a slave, sell you one anytime. I've got to take this one back, make an example of him. Too many down there run from one master, think they might run from another. Got to show them it doesn't pay.”

The slave had caught something of the dialogue, and wailed with fear again, this time more desperately. As the men gripped his arms and hands and began to pull him off, trying as they did so not to damage the precinct-markers, he thrashed and fought. “The pendants,” he cried. “They said the pendant-men were safe.”

“We cannot help you,” Shef replied, speaking again in English. “You should have stayed with your English master.”

“My masters were the black monks. You know what they are like to their slaves. And my master was the worst of all—Erkenbert the deacon, who makes the machines….”

An angry Hebridean lost patience with the man's struggles, whipped a sandbag from his belt, and struck out. He missed his blow, caught the slave along the jaw instead of on the temple. A crack, the jaw lolling forward, blood trickling from the corner of the mouth.

“Er'en'ert. He' a de'il. Ma' 'e de'il-'chines.” Shef seized his gauntlets, pulled them on, ready to jerk his halberd out of the ground. The knot of struggling men swayed back a few paces.

“Hold on,” he said. “The man's valuable. Don't hit him again.” Ten words, he thought, ten words might be all I need. Then I will know the principle of the great bow.

The slave, fighting now with the frenzy of a tormented weasel, got a foot free, kicked out. A Hebridean grunted, bent forward cursing.

“That's enough,” snapped the head of the gang. As Shef leapt forward in entreaty he whipped a knife from his belt, stepped forward and drove upward, backhand. The slave, still held, arched and contorted, went limp.

“You blockhead!” yelled Shef. “You killed one of the machine-men!”

The Hebridean turned back to him, mouth twisting with anger. As he started to speak, Shef punched him full in the face with his armored glove. He sprawled backward, landed on the ground. A dead silence fell.

The Hebridean climbed slowly to his feet, spat one tooth, then another, into his hand. He looked at his men, shrugged. They dropped the slave's corpse, turned, walked off together toward their camp.

“You've done it now, boy,” said Thorvin.

“What do you mean?”

“Only one thing can happen now.”

“What's that?”

“Holmgang.”

Chapter Three

Shef lay on the straw pallet close to the banked fire of the forge, moving uneasily in his sleep. Thorvin had forced a heavy dinner on him, which should have been welcome after days of increasingly short commons in a camp dependent entirely on foraging for its food. But the rye bread and fried bullock lay heavy on his stomach. Heavier still were his thoughts. They had explained the rules of holmgang to him, far different from the impromptu brawl in which he had killed the Irishman Flann months before. He knew he was at terrible disadvantage. But there was no getting out of this. The whole Army knew, looked forward to the morning's duel as a major distraction. He was trapped. And he still thought about the machines. How were they built? How could better ones be built? How could the walls of York be breached? Slowly, he slipped into heavier slumber.

He was on some distant plain. In front of him loomed monstrous walls. On a scale to dwarf the walls of York, or any other walls that had ever been built by mortal man. High above were the figures he had seen before in his dreams, his “visions” as Thorvin called them—the massive figures with the faces like axe-blades and the expressions of severe gravity. But now their expressions were also of concern, alarm. In the foreground, moving up to the walls, he saw there was a figure even more gigantic than those of the gods, so enormous that it towered up even to the height of the walls on which the gods were standing. But it did not have the proportions of a human being: stumpy-legged, fat-armed, swollen-bellied and gap-toothed, it looked like an immense clown. A wittol, one of the children born deformed, who, if Father Andreas were not on hand very swiftly, would quietly have found their way into the fen in Emneth. The giant was urging on an immense horse, fully built to his own scale, and drawing a cart, on it a block of stone large as a mountain.

Shef realized the block was to fill a gap in the great wall. The wall was not complete—but nearly so. The sun in this strange world was setting, and he knew that if the wall were finished before the sunset, something appalling, something incurably dreadful would take place. That was why the gods looked their alarm, and why the giant was urging on his horse—his stallion, Shef saw—with whoops of glee and anticipation.

A whicker from behind. Another horse, this time a more normally proportioned one. A mare, too, with chestnut hair and mane blowing around her eyes. She whickered again, then turned coyly as if unaware of the effect her call had had. But the stallion had heard. His head rose. He shook in his traces. His member started to slide out of its sheath.

The giant shouted, beat the stallion round the head, tried to cover its eyes. Its nostrils flared, a whinny of rage, yet another encouraging whicker from the mare, now close by, heels kicking skittishly. The stallion reared, lashed out with mighty hooves at the giant, at the traces. Over went the cart, out tipped the stone, the giant dancing with vexation. The stallion was free, lunging towards the mare to sheathe his erect, chain-long penis. But she was coy, prancing away, provoking him to follow, then darting sideways. The two horses gyrated, suddenly dashed off at full gallop, the stallion slowly gaining on the mare but both rapidly out of sight. Behind them, the giant cursed and leapt in comic pantomime. The sun set. One of the figures on the wall strode forward grimly, pulling on a pair of metal gloves.

There is a forfeit to be paid, thought Shef.

Again he was on a plain, facing a walled city. It too was mighty, the walls rising far above the heights of those at York, but this time it was at least on a human scale, as were the thousands of figures milling about within the walls and outside the walls. Outside the walls the figures were heaving at a monstrous image—not a boar, like the Ragnarssons' battering ram, but a giant horse. A wooden horse. What is the point of a wooden horse? thought Shef. Surely no one could be deceived by it.

Nor were they. Arrows and missiles flew out against the horse from the walls, or flew at the men heaving at its mighty wheels. They bounced away, scattered haulers, did not dislodge or discourage the hundreds of new hands rushing to take the place of the fallen. The horse edged up to the walls, overtopping them. What would take place now, Shef knew, was the crisis of something that had gone on for many years, that had swallowed thousands of lives and would yet swallow thousands more. Something told him also that what happened here would fascinate men for generation upon generation—but that few men would ever understand it, preferring instead to make up their own stories.

A voice Shef had heard before spoke suddenly in his mind. The voice that had warned him before the night battle by the Stour—still with the same note of deep, interested amusement.

“Now watch this,” it said. “Watch this.”

The horse's mouth opened, its tongue slid out to rest on the walls. From the mouth…

Thorvin was shaking him, dragging relentlessly at his shoulder. Shef sat up, still groping for the meaning of his dream.

“Time to rise,” said Thorvin. “You have a hard day ahead of you. I only hope you live to see the end of it.”

Erkenbert the archdeacon sat in his tower room high above the great hall of the minster and pulled the candlestick closer to him. There were three candles in it, each of best beeswax, not stinking tallow, and the light they gave was clear. He viewed them with satisfaction as he took the goose-feather from its inkpot. What he was about to do was difficult, was laborious, and its results might be sad.

In front of him lay a confusion of scraps of vellum, written on, crossed out, written on again. Now he took his quill and a fresh, large, handsome piece. On it he wrote:

De parochia quae dicitur Schirlam desunt nummi XLVIII

“ ” “ ” Fulford “ ” XXXVI

“ ” “ ” Haddinatunus “ ” LIX

The list crept on and on. At the end he drew a line beneath the record of the minster's unpaid rents, drew a deep breath, and began the mind-wrenching toil of adding the numbers up. “Octo et sex,” he muttered to himself, “quattuordecim. Et novo, sunt… viginta tres. Et septem.” To assist himself he began to draw little lines on a discarded sheet, hatching them through when he completed a ten. He began also, as his finger crawled down the list, to put a little mark between the XL and the VIII, the L and the IX, to remind himself which bits were to be added and which were to be left. Finally he came to the end of his first calculation, wrote down firmly CDXLIX, and began to work his way down again with the figures he had omitted before. “Quaranta et triginta sunt septuaginta. Et quinquaginta. Centum et viginta.” The novice who decorously moved an eye round the doorway a few minutes later to see if anything was required returned in awe to his fellows.

“He is saying numbers of which I have never heard,” he reported.

“He is a marvelous man,” said one of the black monks. “God send there may be no harm in the learning of such black arts.”

“Duo milia quattuor centa nonaginta,” pronounced Erkenbert, writing it down: MMCDXC. The two figures now lay next to each other: MMCDXC and CDXLIX. After another interval of crossing and hatching, he had the answer: MMCMXXXIX. And now the real toil began. That was the sum of the failed rents for one quarter. What would this represent for a full year, if by divine punishment the scourges of God, the Vikings, were permitted to lie so long upon the backs of the suffering people of God? Many, even among arithmetici, would have taken the easier route and added the same figure up four times. But Erkenbert knew himself superior to such subterfuges. Painstakingly, he set up the complex procedure for the most difficult of all diabolic skills: multiplication in Roman numerals.

When all was done he stared at the figure, disbelievingly. Never in all his experience had he come upon such a sum. Slowly, with shaking fingers, he snuffed the candles in recognition of the growing gray light of dawn. After matins he would have to seek out the Archbishop.

It was too great. Such losses could not be borne.

Far away, a hundred and fifty miles to the south, the same growing light reached the eyes of a woman, snuggled deep in a nest of down mattress and woolen rugs piled high against the cold. She stirred, shifted. Her hand touched the warm, naked thigh of the man next to her. Recoiled as if it had touched the scales of a mighty adder.

He is my half brother, she thought for the thousandth time. Son of my own father. We are in mortal sin. But how could I tell them? I could not tell even the priest who married us. Alfgar told him we had sinned carnally while fleeing from the Vikings and now prayed God's forgiveness and blessing on our union. They think he is a saint. And the kings, the kings of Mercia and of Wessex, they listen to all he says of the menace of the Vikings, of what they did to his father, of how he fought at the Viking camp to set me free. They think he is a hero. They say they will make him an alderman and set him over a shire, they will bring his poor, tormented father home from York, where he is defying the heathens still.

But what will happen when our father sees us together? If only Shef had lived…

As she thought the name, Godive's tears started to leak slowly, as they did every morning, through closed eyelids onto the pillow.

Shef marched down the muddy street, between the lines of booths which the Vikings had set up to keep out the winter weather. His halberd rested on his shoulder, and he wore his metal gloves, but the helmet remained at Thorvin's forge. Mail and helmets may not be worn in holmgang, they had told him. The duel was fought as a matter of honor, so mere expediencies, like surviving and killing your enemy, were not the point.

That did not mean you would not be killed.

And a holmgang was a four-man affair. Each of the two principals took turns to strike at the other. But each principal was covered from the blows of the other by his second, the shieldbearer, who carried a shield for him and intercepted the strokes. Your life depended on the skill of your second.

Shef had no second. Brand and all his crews were still away. Thorvin had pulled his beard frantically, thumping his hammer again and again into the ground with frustration, but as a priest of the Way he could take no part. If he offered, his offer would be refused by the umpires. The same went for Ingulf, Hund's master. The only person he might have asked was Hund, and as soon as Shef framed the thought, he knew that Hund—once he realized the situation—would surely volunteer. But he had immediately told his friend he must not think of helping. All other considerations apart, he was sure that at the critical moment, with a sword-blow descending, Hund would stop to observe a heron in the marsh or a newt in the fen, and would probably kill them both.

“I will see it through myself,” he told the priests of the Way, who had gathered together from the whole Army to advise him, much to Shef's surprise.

“This is not why we spoke for you to the Snakeeye, and saved you from the vengeance of Ivar,” said Farman sharply—Farman the priest of Frey, famous for his wanderings in the other worlds.

“Are you then so sure of the ways of fate?” Shef had replied, and the priests had fallen silent.

But in truth, as he walked toward the place of the holmgang, it was not the duel itself which bothered him. What bothered him was whether the umpires would let him fight on his own. If they did not, then he would stand for the second time in his life at the mercy of the Army's collective judgement, the vapna takr. At the thought of the roar and the clash of weapons that accompanied a decision, his guts knotted within him.

He marched through the gates of the stockade and out onto the trampled meadow by the river where the Army was assembled. As he walked forward, a buzz of comment rose, and the watching crowd parted to let him through. At their center stood a ring of willow wands, only ten feet across. “The holmgang should strictly be fought on an island in a stream,” Thorvin had told him, “but where there was no eyot suitable, a symbolic one was marked out instead. In a holmgang there was to be no maneuvering: The participants stood and cut at each other till one was dead. Or could fight no more, or ransomed himself off, or threw down his weapons, or stepped outside the marked area. To do either of the two last meant submitting yourself to the mercy of your opponent, who could demand death or mutilation. If a fighter showed cowardice, the judges would certainly order either, or both.

Shef saw his enemies already standing by the willows: the Hebridean whose teeth he had knocked out, whose name he now knew was Magnus. He held a naked broadsword in his hand, burnished so that the serpent-markings on its blade wriggled and crawled in the dull, gray light. By him stood his second: a tall, scarred, powerful-looking man of middle age. He held an oversized shield of painted wood, with metal rim and boss. Shef looked at them for a moment, and then looked deliberately round for the umpires.

His heart checked as he recognized instantly, in a little group of four, the unmistakable figure of the Boneless One. Still wearing scarlet and green, but the silver helmet put aside; the pale eyes with their invisible eyebrows and lashes stared straight into his own. But this time, instead of suspicion they held assurance, amusement, contempt, as they recognized Shef's uncontrollable start of fear and the immediate attempt to replace it with impassivity.

Ivar yawned, stretched, turned away. “I disqualify myself from judgement in this case,” he said. “This barnyard cock and I have another score to settle. I will not have him say that I took advantage to judge unfairly. I leave his death to Magnus.”

A rumble of agreement came from the nearest watchers, and a buzz as the information was passed to those further back. Everything in the Army, Shef realized again, was subject to public agreement. It was always best to have public opinion on your side.

Ivar's withdrawal left three men there, all obviously senior warriors, well armed, necks, belts and arms flashing with silver to show their status. The middle one, he recognized, was Halvdan Ragnarsson, the eldest of the brothers: a man with a reputation for ferocity, for fighting when there was no need—not as wise as his brother Sigurth nor as dreadful as his brother Ivar, but not a man to show mercy on the unwarlike.

“Where is your second?” said Halvdan, frowning.

“I do not need one,” replied Shef.

“You must have one. You cannot fight a holmgang with no shield or shield-bearer. If you present yourself without one, then that is as good as surrendering to the mercy of your enemy. Magnus, what do you want to do with him?”

“I do not need one!” This time Shef shouted, stepped forward, jammed the butt of his halberd upright in the earth. “I have a shield.” He raised his left forearm, on which he had strapped a square buckler, a foot across, fastened firmly at wrist and at elbow, made entirely of iron. “I do not fight with board and broadsword, but with this and this. I do not need a second. I am an Englishman, not a Dane!”

A growl rose from the audience as they heard him—a growl with a note of amusement in it. The Army liked a drama, Shef knew. They might bend the rules if there was something to bet on. They would support a man who was in the wrong, if he showed enough daring.

“We cannot accept this proposal,” said Halvdan to the other two judges. “What do you say?”

A disturbance behind, someone forcing his way through the ring, stepping forward to join Shef as he stood before his judges. Another large and powerful figure, laden with silver. The Hebrideans stood frowning a little way apart. Shef saw with shock that it was his father Sigvarth. Sigvarth looked across at his son, then turned to the judges. He spread his burly arms with a cunning air of conciliation.

“I wish to act as this man's shield-bearer.”

“Has he asked you to?”

“No.”

“Then what standing do you have in this affair?”

“I am his father.”

Another growl from the audience, with a rising note of excitement. Life in a winter camp was cold and boring. This was easily the best entertainment anyone had had since the failed assault. Like children, the warriors of the Army were anxious not to see the show end too early. They pressed closer, straining to hear and to pass on the news to those further back. Their presence affected the umpires: They had to judge correctly, but also gauge the mood of the crowd.

As they began to mutter quietly among themselves, Sigvarth turned quickly toward Shef. He stepped close, bent the inch or two needed to be on a level, and spoke with a note of entreaty.

“Look, boy, you turned me down once before when you were in a fix. That showed guts, I've got to say. Look what it cost you. Cost you an eye. Don't do it again. I'm sorry—what happened to your mother. If I'd known she'd had a son like you I wouldn't have done it. Many men have told me what you did at the siege, with the ram—the Army's full of it. I'm proud of you.

“Now, let me carry this shield for you. I've done it before. I'm better than Magnus, better than his mate Kolbein. With me as shield-bearer nothing will get through to you. And you—you've knocked that Hebridean fool as dizzy as a dog once already. Do it again! We'll finish the pair of them.”

He gripped his son's shoulder hard. His eyes shone with emotion, a mixture of pride, embarrassment, and something else—it was the lust for glory, Shef decided. No one could be a successful warrior for twenty years, a jarl, the leader of warbands, without the urge to be at the front, to have all eyes fixed on one, to break down destiny by sheer violence. Shef felt suddenly calm, composed, even able to think of how to save his father's face while rejecting him. He knew now that his worst fear would not be realized. The umpires would let him fight on his own. It would be too much of an anticlimax to decide anything different.

Shef stepped clear of his father's near embrace.

“I thank Sigvarth Jarl for his offer to bear my shield in this holmgang. But there is blood between us—he knows whose it is. I believe that he would support me loyally in this affair, and his help would mean much to a young man like myself. But I would not show drengskapr in accepting the offer.”

Shef used the word for warriorhood, for honor—the word one used to show that you were above trifles, that you did not care for your own advantage. The word was a challenge. If one man laid claim to drengskapr, his opponent would be ashamed to show less.

“I say again: I have a shield, I have a weapon. If this is less than I should have, so much the better for Magnus. I say it is more. If I am wrong, then that is what we are fighting to see.”

Halvdan Ragnarsson looked at his two co-arbiters, saw their nods of assent, and added his own. The two Hebrideans walked immediately inside the round of withies and took up their stations one beside the other: they knew any hesitation or further argument would look ill to the Army, Shef walked over to face them, saw the two junior umpires taking their places to either hand, while Halvdan, in the middle, repeated the rules of the combat. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sigvarth still standing well to the front of the others, joined now by the young man he had seen before, the one with a horse's projecting teeth. Hjörvarth Jarlsson, he thought detachedly. His half brother. Just behind the pair of them stood a rank of men with Thorvin in their center. Even though he strove to keep his mind on Halvdan's exposition he saw that each was wearing a silver pendant, prominently displayed. Thorvin had at least mustered a body of opinion, in case it could have an effect.

“…combatants must strike alternately. If you try to strike twice, even if your enemy is off guard, you forfeit the holmgang and become liable to the judgement of the umpires. And it will not be light! So, begin. Magnus, as injured party, shall be the first to strike.”

Halvdan stepped back, eyes wary, sword drawn to strike up any illegal blow. Shef found himself in the midst of a great silence, face-to-face with his two enemies.

He swung his halberd forward and trained the point on Magnus's face, left hand gripping the weapon just below its massive and complex head. His right hand down by his right side, ready to seize the haft to block or parry in any direction. Magnus frowned, realizing he must now step to one side or the other and Signal his direction. He stepped forward and right, to the very edge of the line Halvdan had drawn in the mud to separate the combatants. His sword swung down, forehand, aimed at the head, the most elementary stroke possible. He wants to get this over with, thought Shef. The blow was merciless and lightning-quick. He swung up his left arm to catch it squarely in the center of the iron buckler.

A clang, a recoil. The blow left a dull line and a dent the length of the buckler. What it had done to the edge of the sword-blade, Shef, as a smith, did not like to think.

Magnus was back behind his line now, Kolbein stepping forward with the shield to cover him. Shef raised the halberd with both hands over his right shoulder, stepped forward to the edge of the line and stabbed point-first straight forward at Magnus's heart, ignoring the covering of the shield. The triangular lance-head drove through the linden-wood as if it were cheese, but as it did so, Kolbein jerked it up, so that the point stabbed past Magnus's cheek. Shef jerked back, twisted, jerked again, freeing the weapon with a crunch of broken wood. Now there was a gaping hole in the gay blue paint of the shield, and Kolbein and Magnus looked at each other with grave expressions.

Magnus came forward again, and realized that he must not strike on the buckler side. He swung backhand, but still at the head, still thinking that a man without proper sword and shield must needs be at a disadvantage. Without shifting grip, Shef swung the head of his halberd eighteen inches sideways at the descending sword, catching it not with the axe-side but with the reverse, the thumb-wide iron spike.

The sword flew out of Magnus's grasp, to land well on Shef's side of the line. All eyes flew to the umpires. Shef stepped back a pace, two paces, looked firmly at the sky. A buzz as the audience realized what was happening, a low growl of approval—a growl that went on as the keenly intent audience began to realize the potentialities of Shef's weapon and the problem the two Hebrideans were facing. Stone-faced, Magnus stepped forward, recovered his blade, hesitated, then saluted briefly with it and returned to his side of the line.

This time Shef swung the weapon over his left shoulder, and struck like a woodsman felling a tree, left hand sliding down the weapon as it swung, concentrating all his force and all the weight of the seven feet of metal behind the slicing half-yard of blade. Kolbein leapt quickly and decisively to save his partner, and got the shield well up above head height. The axe slashed through its edge and swung on, turned only slightly by the resistance of the metal rim, shore through two feet of lindenwood, and embedded itself with a thunk in the muddy ground. Shef jerked it free and stood once more on guard.

Kolbein looked at the half-shield still strapped to his arm and muttered something to Magnus. Impassive, Halvdan Ragnarsson stepped forward, picked up the severed oval of wood and tossed it to one side.

“Shields may only be replaced at the agreement of both parties,” he observed. “Strike.”

Magnus stepped forward with something like desperation in his eyes now, and swung a wicked blow with no warning, just above knee height. A swordsman would have jumped it, or tried to—it was just above the height a man might be expected to manage. Shef moved his right hand slightly and stopped the blow dead with his weapon's metal-reinforced shaft. Almost before Magnus could regain the shelter of his partner's shield, he was stepping forward, this time swinging upward, with the spike side foremost. A thump as it met the remnants of the shield, a resistance which this time was not one of wood alone, Kolbein staring at the foot-long spike which had driven through shield and forearm, splitting ulna and humerus bones.

Stone-faced, Shef slid his hand high up the head of the halberd, gripping tight, and jerked back. Kolbein staggered forward, put a foot over the line, recovered himself and straightened up, face white with shock and pain. There was a simultaneous yell as his foot went down, and then a confusion of cries.

“Fight's over, past the mark!”

“He struck at the shield-bearer!”

“He struck at the man. If the shield-bearer puts his arm in the way…”

“First blood to the smith, settle all bets!”

“Stop it now, stop it now,” Thorvin called out.

But over him an even louder voice, that of Sigvarth: “Let them fight it out! These are warriors, not girls to snivel at a scratch.”

Shef looked sideways, saw Halvdan, grave but fascinated, wave the opponents on.

Kolbein was shaking, starting to fumble with the buckles of the useless shield, clearly unable to hold it up much longer. Magnus too had gone white. Each strike with the halberd had come close to killing him. Now he had no protection left. Yet there was no escape, no chance to run or surrender.

White-lipped, he stepped forward with the resolution of despair, raised the sword and swung straight down. It was a blow any active man could dodge without thinking; but in a holmgang you had to stand still. For the first time in the contest, Shef twisted his left hand and swung a parry, full force, with the axe edge of the halberd. It met the descending broadsword halfway down the blade and battered it aside, knocking Magnus off balance. As he recovered, he glanced at his weapon. It had not snapped off, but was cut halfway through, and bent out of line.

“Swords may only be replaced,” intoned Halvdan, “by the agreement of both parties.”

Magnus's face sagged with despair. He tried to pull himself together, to stand straight for the deathblow that must come. Kolbein shuffled a little forward and tried to pull his shield-arm up into place with his other hand.

Shef looked at the blade of his halberd, running a thumb over the nick that he had just put in it. Some careful work with a file, he reflected. The weapon was called “Thrall's-wreak.” He was fighting because the man over there had murdered a thrall. Now was the time for vengeance, for that thrall and no doubt for many others.

But he had not knocked the Hebridean down because he had murdered a slave, but because he, Shef, had wanted the slave. Wanted to know about the machines the slave had made. Killing Magnus would not bring the knowledge back. Besides, he had more knowledge now.

In the utter silence Shef stepped back, drove his halberd point-first into the mud, unstrapped his buckler, threw it down. He turned to Halvdan and called out in a loud voice, making sure the whole Army could hear him.

“I give up this holmgang, and ask for the judgement of the umpires. I regret that I struck Magnus Ragnaldsson in anger, knocking out two of his front teeth, and if he will release me from the holmgang I offer him self-doom for that injury, and for the injury just inflicted on Kolbein his partner, and I ask for his friendship and support in the future.” A groan of disappointment mingled with shouts of approval. Yelling and pushing in the crowd as the two points of view found expression. Halvdan and the umpires pushed together to confer, after a few moments calling over the two Hebrideans to join their discussion. Then an agreement, slow quietening as the crowd waited to hear the decision and to ratify it. Shef felt no fear, no memory of the last time he had stood to hear a Ragnarsson pronounce. He knew he had judged the mood of the crowd rightly, and that the umpires would not dare to go against that.

“It is the judgement of all us three umpires that this holmgang has been fought well and fairly, with no discredit to any participant, and that you, Shef…” He struggled with the English name, could not pronounce it. “…Skjef, son of Sigvarth, had the right to offer to submit to judgement while it was your turn to strike.” Halvdan stared round and repeated the point. “While it was your turn to strike. Accordingly, since Magnus Ragnaldsson is also prepared to accept a judgement, we declare that this contest may be ceased without penalty to either side.”

Magnus the Hebridean stepped forward. “And I declare that I accept the offer of Skjef Sigvarthsson to self-doom for the injuries inflicted on me and on Kolbein Kolbrandsson, and we value them at half a mark of silver for each of us…” Whistles and hoots at the low rate set by the proverbially grasping islanders. “…on one condition:

“That Skjef Sigvarthsson, in his smithy, makes weapons for both of us similar to the one he wields, at the price of half a mark of silver each. And with this we admit him to our full friendship and support.”

Magnus walked forward, grinning, clasped hands with Shef as Kolbein too shambled forward. Hund was inside the ring as well, seizing Kolbein's bleeding and already-swollen arm, clucking over the filthy state of the sleeve. Sigvarth was there also, hovering behind the duellers, trying to say something. An icy voice cut through the babble.

“Well, you are all agreed on one thing and another. If you had meant to stop fighting as soon as two drops of blood were shed, you could have done it all behind the privy and not wasted the whole Army's time.

“But tell me this, little dunghill cock—” The Boneless One's voice fell now into a pool of silence as he stalked forward, eyes blazing. “What do you think you can do to get my full friendship and support? Eh? For there is blood between us too. What can you offer me in exchange for it?”

Shef turned and pitched his voice high, allowing once again the note of challenge and contempt to brazen it, so that the Army would know Ivar had been dared.

“I can give you something, Ivar Ragnarsson, that I already tried to get for you once, but that we know you cannot get for yourself. No, I do not mean a woman's skirts…” Ivar swayed back, eyes never leaving Shef's face, and Shef knew that now Ivar would never leave him, never forget him till one or the other was dead. “No. Give me five hundred men and I will give you something to share with all of us. I will give you machines stronger than the Christians'. Weapons greater than the one I used here. And when I have all those I will give you something else.

“I will give you York!”

He ended with a shout, and the Army shouted with him, clashing their weapons in tumult and approval.

“It is a good brag,” replied Ivar, glaring round at Sigvarth, at the Hebrideans, at Thorvin and his group of pendant-wearers, all clustered in support of Shef. “But it will be a sad one for the boy if he fails to carry it out.”

Chapter Four

Hard to tell when dawn comes in an English winter, Shef thought. The clouds come down to the ground, the showers of rain or sleet come sweeping across—wherever the sun may be, it has to cut through layer after layer before the light gets through. He needed light for his own men, he needed light to see the English. Till he had it, they could all wait.

He moved his aching body beneath the layer of sweat-sodden wool that was his tunic and the layer of stiff boiled leather that was still the only armor he had had time to acquire. The sweat was chilling now, after the hours of gasping, whispering labor. More than anything he would like to strip everything off and rub himself dry on a cloak. The men in the darkness behind him must feel the same.

But each of them now had only one thing to think about, one duty to carry out, and that duty something painfully and repetitively drilled into them. Only Shef had the image in his mind of all the things that had to happen, all the parts that had to fit. Only he could see all the hundreds of things that could go wrong. Shef was not afraid of death or maiming, of pain or shame or disgrace—the usual terrors of the battlefield, to be dispersed by action and excitement and battle-fury. He was afraid of the unpredicted, the unexpected, the broken spoke, the slippery leaves, the unknown machine.

To an experienced jarl of the pirates, Shef would already have done everything wrong. His men were formed-up, but cold, tired, stiff and uncertain as to what was happening.

But this was going to be a new kind of battle. This one did not depend on how men felt or how well they fought. If everyone did as he was supposed to, nothing needed to be done well. It just needed to be done. This would be battle like ploughing a field, or tearing out tree-stumps. No valor, no heroic deeds.

Shef's eyes caught a spark of flame. Yes. More sparks, a growing brush of flame, more flames further away, all from separate sources. The shapes of buildings could be seen now, and smoke was beginning to pour from them, blown by the wind. The flames lit up the long line of wall with the gate that the Ragnarssons' ram had assaulted two weeks before. All along the line facing that eastern wall, men were setting fire to the houses. Long tails of smoke billowing out, men rushing forward through it with ladders raised—a sudden assault, arrows flying, the blast of warhorns, more men coming forward as the first ones withdrew. The noise and flames and rushes were harmless. Soon enough the English leaders would realize this was a feint attack, would turn their attention elsewhere. But Shef remembered the desperate slowness and confusion of the Emneth levies; with the English what the leaders thought hardly mattered much. By the time they persuaded their men not to believe the evidence of their eyes he sincerely hoped that he would have the battle won.

The flame, the smoke. Warhorns on the ramparts blowing an alarm, faint signs of activity on the walls he could now see in front of him. Time to start.

Shef turned to his right and began deliberately to walk along the long line of houses above the north wall, his halberd swinging easily. Four hundred double-paces to count. As he reached forty he saw the great square bulk of the first war-machine, its crew clustered round it in the mouth of the alleyway where they had heaved it up with such immense labor. He nodded to them, reaching out the butt of his halberd and tapped the man in front—Egil the hersir, from Skaane. Egil nodded solemnly and began to tramp his feet up and down, laboriously counting under his breath every time his left foot touched ground.

Nothing in the whole job had been harder than making them do that. It was not warlike. It was not the way drengir should behave. Their men might laugh at them. Anyway, how could a man keep count of so many? Five white pebbles Shef had given Egil, one for each hundred, and a black one for the final sixty. At five hundred and sixty paces Egil would move off—if he did not lose the count, if his men did not laugh. By then Shef would have reached the far end of his line, turned, and paced back to his own station in the middle. He did not think Egil's men would laugh. The ten counters he had picked were all famous warriors. Dignity was something they defined.

That was a leader's job in the new kind of battle, Shef thought as he paced on. Picking men the way a carpenter picked pieces of wood for a house-frame. He counted eighty, saw the second war-machine, tapped Skuli the Bald, saw him grip his pebbles and start his count, paced on. And fitting together the pieces of the plan the way a carpenter would.

There had to be an easier way to do it all, he told himself as he passed the third and fourth machines. This would be easy for the Rome-folk, with their numbercraft. But he knew no forge hot enough to beat out this skill for him.

Brand's three crews manned the next three machines in the line. The Hebrideans came next, half a dozen of them clutching their newly forged halberds.

Strange, the volunteers he had got. After the holmgang he had asked Sigurth Snakeeye for five hundred men. He had needed more like two thousand in the end, not only to man the machines and make up the diversion squads, but above all else to form the labor gangs to forage for wood, to cut it into shape, to find or forge the massive nails he needed, to manhandle the great contrivances up the muddy slope from the Foss. But the men who had done the work had not been provided by Sigurth, Ivar, or any of the Ragnarssons, who after a few days had held aloof. They had been the men from the small crews, the uncommitted, the fringes of the Army. A high proportion of them wore the pendants of the Way.

Shef was uneasily aware that Thorvin's and Brand's beliefs about him were beginning to leak out into the ranks. People were beginning to tell stories about him.

If all went well they would have another to tell soon enough.

He reached the last machine at the count of four hundred and twelve, turned on his heel, striding out more briskly now as he realized his count was over. The light was strengthening all the time; the din was at its peak over by the eastern wall, smoke still rising in the murky air.

Unbidden, a verse came into his mind, a little English verse from his childhood:

No, that was wrong! It was “Dust rose to heaven, dew fell to earth, night went forth”—that was the verse… So what was the other verse…?

He stopped, doubled over as if stricken by cramp. Something horrible, in his head, just when he had no time to deal with it. He struggled to rise. Saw Brand approaching, concern on his face.

“I lost my count.”

“No matter. We can see forty paces now. We'll move when Gummi does. Just one thing…” Brand bent and muttered in Shef's ear. “A man's come up from the rear. He says the Ragnarssons aren't behind us. They're not following our lead.”

“We'll do this ourselves, then. But I tell you: the Ragnarssons, anyone—those who don't fight, don't share!”

“They're moving.”

Shef was back by his own machine, in the comforting smell of sawdust. He ducked inside its shell, hooked the axe-blade of his halberd over a broken nail he had hammered in himself last night, stepped to his appointed place at the rearmost push-bar, and hurled his weight forward. Slowly, the machine began to creak along the level ground toward the waiting wall.

To the English sentries, it seemed as if the houses moved. But not the little, squat wattle-and-daub houses they knew were there. Rather, it seemed to them as if thane's halls, church towers, belfries, were rolling toward them out of the rising mist. For weeks they had looked down from their wall at everything the eye could see. Now things were coming toward them at their own level. Were they rams? Disguised ladders? Screens for some other kind of devil-work? A hundred bows bent, loosed arrows. Useless. Anyone could see the constructions coming toward them would take no heed of bolts from a breast-bow.

But they had better weapons than that. Snarling, the thane of the northern gate hurled a white-faced fyrdman, a conscript in the service of some petty lord, back to his place on the battlements, seized one of his slave errand-runners, and barked at him.

“Go to the eastern tower! Tell the machine-folk there to shoot. You! Same tale, western tower. You! Back to the square, tell the men with the stone-hurler that there are machines coming up to the northern wall. Tell them machines! Definitely! Whatever is going on over there, this is not a feint attack. Go on, all of you, move!”

As they scattered he turned his attentions to his own troops, the ones off guard pounding up the ladders to their places, the ones who had seen already shouting and pointing at the shapes rolling closer.

“Keep your minds on what you're doing,” he bellowed. “Look down, for God's sake! Whatever these things are, they can't come up to the wall. And once they get close enough the priests' weapons will destroy them!”

If the Rome-soldiers still had been in the fortress, Shef, had realized, there would have been a deep ditch at the base of the wall, which any stormer would have had to cross before trying any kind of escalade. Centuries of neglect and refuse-tipping had filled this in, had created a swelling, turf-grown mound five feet high and as many broad. A man who ran up it would still be a dozen feet below the often-patched battlements. It had not seemed dangerous to the defenders. Indeed, without their knowing it, it had become one more hindrance to the enemy.

As the siege-tower rolled up to the wall the man at the front raised a yell, the push-teams stepped up their pace to a half-trot. The machine rolled forward, met resistance from the swelling mound, shuddered to a halt. Immediately a dozen men ran forward from their positions behind the tower. Half of them held up heavy square shields to block the arrow-shower. The others carried picks and shovels. Without words they set instantly to cutting a track along the marks of the front wheels, throwing the earth aside like badgers.

Shef walked forward between the sweating push-teams and peered through the light planking across the machine's front. Weight, that had been the problem. In essence the tower was simply a square frame eight feet wide, twelve feet long, thirty feet high, running on six cartwheels. It was unstable and unwieldy, and the whole of both lower sides were made of the heaviest beams the houses and churches of Northumbria could provide. As defense against the English bolt-throwers. They had had to save weight somewhere, and Shef had decided to skimp at the front. The wood there was only shield-thickness. As he looked out, arrows thumped into it, driving their points through. Only inches away the diggers shoveled frantically to gain the extra two feet to advance the wheels.

That was it. As he turned to call to the push-teams there was a tumult of yells behind him, and a great crash. Shef spun round, heart leaping. A bolt? One of the giant boulders? No, not so bad. Some burly Englishman on the wall had hurled down a rock, weighing fifty pounds at least. It had crashed through the shielding and bounced into the front of the machine, splintering the planks. No matter. But there was a man down, too—Eystein, lying with his leg crooked right under the left-hand wheel, gaping up at the engine towering over him.

“Hold it!” The men checked as they gathered their muscles for the final heave that would have gone straight over Eystein's smashed leg.

“Hold it. Drag him clear, Stubbi. All right. Pick-and-shovel party back into cover. Heave now, boys, and make it a good one. There—she's home! Hammer in the piles, Brand, so she doesn't roll back. Drop the ladders. Archers to the top platform. Storming party, after me.”

One pair of ladders took the heavily armed and armored men up twelve feet, all of them gasping now with exertion but swept along with excitement. More ladders, another twelve feet. A hand passed Shef his halberd, forgotten in the rush. He seized it, watched the men jamming close together on the top platform. Were they level with the wall?

Yes! He could see the battlements below him, not much more than knee height. There was an Englishman shooting upward. The point found a gap between the planks, whirred through till the shaft caught and snapped, ended an inch from his good eye. Shef broke it off and dropped it. The men were ready now, all waiting for the signal.

Shef laid the razor edge of his halberd to the rope and cut.

Immediately the drawbridge began to fall forward, slowly for a moment, then hurtling forward like a great hammer, its front edge weighted with sandbags. A thump, a cloud of sand blowing in the wind as a bag burst, bowstrings twanging just above him as the archer tried to keep the battlements clear.

Then a great grunt as Brand propelled his massive frame onto the drawbridge and hurled himself across, beard-axe raised. As Shef leapt to follow, arms closed round him from behind. He found himself staring over his shoulder at Ulf, the ship's cook, the biggest man in three crews, after Brand.

“Brand said not you. He said keep you out of trouble for a few minutes.”

The men poured by, first the detailed storming party, then the rest of the machine's crew, flinging themselves up the ladders and across the drawbridge without a pause. Then the men from the pick-and-shovel teams followed the rest of Brand's crew. Shef struggled in Ulf's grip, feet off the ground, hearing the clash of weapons, the screaming and shouting of the battle.

As complete strangers from other crews began to haul themselves up the ladder, Ulf released his grip. Shef leapt out onto the drawbridge, out into the open air, and for the first time could see how his plan had worked.

In the gray light, the cleared ground between wall and outer city was dotted with immense bulks, giant animals of some unknown species that had crawled there to die. That one must have shed a wheel or broken an axle on a bit of uneven ground, maybe an old cesspit. The one beyond them, the Hebridean one, seemed to have reached the wall successfully. The drawbridge was still in place from tower to battlements, and as he watched, another group of men trotted over it. Another, not as successful. They had cut the rope and then the drawbridge had fallen just feet short of the wall. It hung limply, like an enormous tongue from an eyeless face. Mailed bodies lay at the base of the wall beneath it.

Shef stepped off the drawbridge to let another wave of stormers pass by, then began to count. Three towers had not reached the wall, two had failed to get their men over the wall once they had reached it. That meant at most, five successful breaches. That had been enough. But they would have lost more if they had been slower, Shef thought. Or if they had not all come at once.

There must be a rule there. How would you say it? Maybe, in Norse, “Höggva ekki hyggiask.” Hit 'em, don't think about it. One heavy blow, not a string of little ones. Brand would think that a good rule, once it was explained to him.

He looked up and saw in the sky what for weeks he had seen in his dreams, in his nightmares: the gigantic boulder rising with superhuman ease, still rising after all sense demanded that it must stop, reaching a peak. Starting to come down. Not on him. On the tower.

Shef cringed in terror—not for his own skin but for the appalling crash that must come, the ripping and rending as all the timbers and wheels and axles he had sweated over sprang apart. The Viking on the bridge cringed too and threw up a useless shield.

A thud, a ripple of loose earth. Hardly believing, Shef gaped at the boulder now embedded in the earth twenty feet from the side of his tower, looking as if it had been there since the dawn of creation. They had missed. Missed by yards. He had not thought they could.

The man in front of him, a burly figure in mail, was hurled aside. Blood in the air, a thrum like the bottom note of a giant's harp, a line in the air that came too fast to be seen and drove in and through the warrior's body.

The bolt-machine as well as the boulder-machine. Shef stepped to the edge of the wall and looked down at the broken body now sprawled at its foot. Well, they might be in action now—but one had missed and both were too late. They must still be captured.

“Come on, don't stand there like young maidens who've just seen the bull!” Shef gestured angrily at the men clustered in the tower's exit. “It will take them an hour to wind their machines again. Follow me now and we'll see they don't get the chance.”

He turned and loped along the walkway behind the battlements, Ulf striding like an enormous nursemaid a pace behind.

They found Brand just inside the now-opened gates, in an open space scattered with the familiar debris of battle: split shields, bent weapons, bodies, incongruously, a torn shoe somehow parted from its owner. Brand was breathing hard, and sucking a scratch on his bare arm above his gauntlets, but otherwise was unhurt. Men were still pushing through the gates, being hailed and directed by the skippers according to some plan already agreed upon, all done with an air of frantic haste. As they approached, Brand called two senior warriors over to him and gave brief instructions.

“Sumarrfugl, take six men, go round all the bodies here, strip all the Englishmen and pile what you find over by that house there. Mail, weapons, chains, jewelry, purses. Don't forget to check under their armpits. Thorstein, take another six and go do the same job up along the walls. Don't get cut off and don't take any risks. Bring back all the stuff you find and pile it with Sumarrfugl's. When you've done that you can sort out our own dead and wounded. Now—you there, Thorvin!”

The priest appeared through the gates, leading a laden pack-horse.

“You've got your gear? I want you to stay here till we've secured the Minster and then come right along as soon as I send a squad for you. Then you can set your forge up and start melting down the take.

“The take!” Brand's eyes gleamed with delight. “I can smell that farm in Halogaland already. Estate! County! All right, let's get going.”

Shef stepped forward as he swung on his heel and grabbed an elbow.

“Brand, I need twenty men.”

“What for?”

“To secure the shooting-machine up in the corner tower, and then go on to the throwing one.”

The champion turned, still eying the confusion around him. He grasped Shef's shoulder in enormous metal fingers, squeezed gently.

“Young madman. Young snotnose. You have done great things today. But remember—men fight to rake together money. Money!” He used the Norse word fe, which meant every form of property together, money and metal and goods and livestock. “So forget your machines for a day, young hammerer, and let's all go get rich!”

“But if we have—”

Shef felt the fingers tighten crushingly on his collarbone. “Now I have told you. And remember, you are still a carl in the Army, like all of us. We fight together, we share together. And by the shining tits of Gerth the Maiden, we are going to loot together. Now get in the ranks!”

Moments later, five hundred men were tramping in dense column into the mouth of one of the streets of the inner city, heading firmly in the direction of the minster. Shef, at the rear, stared at a mail-clad back, hefted his halberd, looked longingly over his shoulder at the little groups left behind. “Come along,” urged Ulf. “Don't worry, Brand left enough men there to guard the loot. It's share and share alike in the Army, and everyone knows it. They're only there to keep off any stragglers from the English.”

The advancing column had speeded up almost to a trot and at the same time had shaken out into the familiar wedge-shape Shef remembered from his first skirmish. Twice it met resistance; makeshift barricades across the narrow street, desperate Northumbrian thanes hacking at their enemies across the war-linden while their churls and followers hurled javelins and stones from the houses above them. The Vikings stormed up, exchanged blows, poured into the houses, dislodged the archers and spear-throwers, broke down interior walls to take the English from flank and rear, acting all the time without orders and without pause, with a dreadful killing urgency. Each time there was a check, Shef seized his chance to struggle closer to the front, aiming for the broad back of Brand. He had to let them take the minster, he realized. But maybe once the loot had been secured, the precious relics of centuries, he could be spared some men to seize the machines. And above all, he must be near the leaders to save prisoners' lives—the lives of the skilled men, the number-workers.

The Vikings were up to a trot again, Brand only a couple of ranks in front of him. A turn in the narrow street, the men on the inside slowing fractionally to let their mates on the outside keep up—and there was the minster, looming suddenly above them like the work of giants, not sixty paces off, set back in its own precinct from the lesser buildings huddled round it.

And there too were the Northumbrians again, coming on one last time with the valor of desperation and the house of their God behind them.

The Vikings checked their rush, heaved shields high again. Shef, still thrusting forward, found himself suddenly level with Brand, saw a Northumbrian broadsword swinging like a meteor at his neck.

Without thought he parried, felt the familiar clang of a breaking blade, stabbed forward with the lance-head of the halberd, twisted and jerked to tear his enemy's shield aside. His back to Brand's, he lashed out blindly with a full-armed sweep. Space round him, enemies to all sides. He swung again, the axe-blade of the halberd hissing in the air, changed grip, and swept back as his enemies tried to dart in beneath the blows. A miss and another miss, but in those instants the Vikings had re-formed. Their wedge surged forward, the broadswords cutting from all angles, Brand leading them, swinging his axe with a joiner's precision.

As one wave the storming column broke over the English defenders, trampling them down. Shef found himself propelled forward at a run into open space, clear ground all around him, the minster in front, whoops of exultation in his ears.

Dazzled by the sudden gleam of sunshine he saw in front of him—saffron cloaks. Unbelievably, the familiar grinning face of Muirtach, driving a spike into the ground. A line of spikes, roped together, like the rowan-berry line that guarded Thorvin's forge. The whoops died uncertainly.

“Well-run, boys. But ye're off limits here. No one over the rope, d'ye hear?”

Muirtach backed away, spreading his arms, as Brand stepped forward. “Now take it easy, lads. Ye'll get yer share, I make no doubt. But it's all been fixed over yer heads. Ye'd have got yer share even if yer attack had failed, now.”

“They came in the back,” shouted Shef, “They never followed us this morning at all. They broke in the west gate while we attacked the north!”

“Broke in, nothing,” snarled a furious voice. “They were let in. Look!”

Out from the minster door, as composed as ever, still dressed in scarlet and grass-green, strolled Ivar. By his side paced a figure in a garb Shef had not seen since the death of Ragnar a year before: a man in purple and white, a strange, tall hat on his head, a gold-decorated crook of ivory in his hand. As if automatically, he raised his other hand in benediction. The Archbishop of the Metropolitan Province of Eoforwich himself, Wulfhere Eboracensis.

“We've done a deal,” said Ivar. “The Christ-folk offered to let us into the town on condition the minster itself was spared. I gave my word on it. We can have everything else: the town, the shire, the king's property, everything. But not the minster or the belongings of the Church. And the Christ-folk will be our friends and show us just how to wring this land dry.”

“But you are a jarl of the Army,” bellowed Brand. “You have no right to make deals for yourself and leave the rest of us out.”

Theatrically, Ivar moved one shoulder, rotating it and grimacing with exaggerated pain.

“I see your hand is recovered, Brand. When I too am fit we will have several matters to talk over. But keep your side of the rope! And keep your men in hand or they'll suffer for it.

“Boys too,” he added, his eyes falling on Shef.

From behind the minster men had been pouring, the Ragnarssons' personal followers in hundreds—fully armed, fresh, confident, eyeing their scattered and weary comrades coldly. The Snakeeye stepped out from among them, his two other brothers flanking him—Halvdan looking grim, Ubbi for once shamefaced, eyes on the ground as he spoke.

“You did well to get here. Sorry you got a surprise. It will all be explained in full meeting. But what Ivar says is right. Stay outside this rope. Keep away from the minster. Apart from that you can get as rich as you like.”

“Small chance of that,” shouted an anonymous voice. “What gold do the Christ-priests leave for anyone else?”

The Snakeeye made no reply. His brother Ivar turned, gestured. Behind the Ragnarssons a pole rose into the sky, was driven firmly into the packed earth in front of the minster doors. A jerk on a rope and from it spread—fluttering limply in the damp wind—the famous Raven Banner, the brothers' personal ensign, wings spread wide for victory.

Slowly, the once-united group who had stormed the wall and fought their way through the city lost cohesion, began to break up, mutter among themselves, count their losses.

“Well, they may have the minster,” muttered Shef to himself. “But we can still get at the machines.”

“Brand,” he called. “Brand. Now can I have those twenty men?”

Chapter Five

A group of men sat together in pale winter sunlight in a leafless copse outside the walls of York. Cords encircled them, rowan berries dangling scarlet between the spears. It was a conclave of priests, all the priests of the Asgarth Way who had accompanied the Army of the Ragnarssons: Thorvin for Thor, Ingulf for Ithun, but others too—Vestmund the navigator, charter of the stars, priest of Njörth the sea-god; Geirulf the chronicler of battles, priest of Tyr; Skaldfinn the interpreter, priest of Heimdall. Most respected of all for his visions and his travels in the other worlds, Farman, priest of Frey.

Within their circle was planted the silver spear of Othin, next to it the sacred fire of Loki. But no priest in the Army cared to take the great responsibility of the spear of Othin. There had never been a priest of Loki—though that he existed was never forgotten.

Inside the roped circle, but sitting apart and silent, were two laymen, Brand the champion and Hund the apprentice of Ithun. There to give evidence and, if asked, advice.

Farman spoke, looking round the group. “It is time to consider our position.”

Silent nods of agreement. These were not men to talk without need.

“We all know that the history of the world, heimsins kringla, the circle of the earth, is not foreordained. But many of us have seen for many years a vision of the world as it seems it must be.

“A world where the Christ-god is supreme. Where for a thousand years and more men are subject to him alone and to his priests. Then, at the end of that thousand years—the burning and the famine. And all through the thousand years, the fight to keep men as they are, to tell them to forget this world and think only of the next. As if Ragnarök—the battle of gods and men and giants—were already decided and men were sure of victory.” His face was as stern as stone as he looked at the circle of priests.

“It is against that world that we have set our faces, and it is that future which we mean to avert. You will remember that by chance I heard in London of the death of Ragnar Hairy-Breeks. Then it came to me in my sleep that this was one of those moments when the history of the world may take a different turn. And so I called on Brand”—he waved a hand at the massive figure hunkered down a few feet away—“to take the news to the sons of Ragnar, and to take it in such a way that they could not refuse the challenge. Few men might have survived that errand. Yet Brand did it, as a duty to us, in the name of the one who will come from the North. Come from the North, we believe, to set the world on its true path.”

The men in the circle touched their pendants respectfully.

Farman went on. “It was in my mind that the sons of Ragnar, falling on the Christian kingdoms of England, might break their power and be a mighty force for us, for the Way. I was a fool to guess at the meaning of the gods. A fool, too, to think that good might come from the evil of the Ragnarssons. They are not Christians, but what they do gives the Christians strength. Torture. Violation. The making of heimnars.”

Ingulf, Hund's master, cut in. “Ivar—he is of the brood of Loki, sent to afflict the earth. He has been seen on the other side—and not as man. He is not one to be used for any good purpose.”

“As now we see,” replied Farman. “For far from breaking the power of the Christ-god church, he has made alliance with it. For his own ends—and only that fool of an archbishop would trust him. Yet for the moment both are stronger.”

“And we are poorer!” growled Brand, driven beyond respect.

“But is Ivar richer?” asked Vestmund. “I cannot see what Ivar and his brothers have from this deal they have made. Except entry into York.”

“I can tell you that,” said Thorvin. “For I have looked well into this matter. We have all seen how poor their money is here. Little silver, much lead, much copper. Where has all the silver gone? Even the English ask each other that. I can tell you. The Church has taken it.

“We do not understand—even Ivar cannot know—how rich the Church in Northumbria is. They have been here two hundred years and all that time they have taken gifts of silver, and of gold, and of land. And from the land they wring more silver, and from the land they do not own they wring yet more. To splash a child with water, to make her wedding holy, in the end to bury them in holy soil and take away the threat of eternal torment—not for their sins, but for failure to pay the toll.”

“But what do they do with this silver?” Farman asked.

“They make ornaments for their god. It all lies now in the minster, as useless as when it was first in the soil. The silver and the gold in their chalices, in their great roods and rood-screens, in the plates for the altar and the boxes for the bodies of their saints—it comes out of the money. The richer the Church, the poorer the coinage.” He shook his head in disgust.

“The Church will hand nothing over—and Ivar does not even know what lies in his hand. The priests have told him that they will call in all the coins of the realm and melt them down. Purge out the base metal and leave him only the silver. And then with that they will make him a new coinage. A coinage for Ivar the Victorious, king of York. And Dublin too.

“The Ragnarssons may not be richer. They will be more powerful.”

“And Brand, son of Barn, will be poorer!” snarled an angry voice.

“So what we have done,” summed up Skaldfinn, “is to bring the Ragnarssons and the Christ-priests together. How sure are you now of your dream, Farman? And what of the world's history and of its future?”

“There is one thing I did not dream then,” replied Farman. “But I have dreamed him since. And that is the boy Skjef.”

“His name is Shef,” put in Hund.

Farman nodded agreement. “Think of it. He defied Ivar. He fought the holmgang. He broke the walls of York. And he walked up to Thorvin's meeting months ago and said he was one who came from the North.”

“He only meant he came from the north part of the kingdom, from the Northfolk,” protested Hund.

“What he meant is one thing, what the gods mean is another,” said Farman. “Do not forget also: I saw him on the other side. In the home of the gods itself.

“And there is another strange thing about him. Who is his father? Sigvarth Jarl thinks he is. But for that we have only his mother's word. It comes to me that perhaps this boy is the beginning of the great change, the center of the circle, though no one could have guessed it. And so I have to ask his friends and those who know him a question:

“Is the boy mad?”

Slowly, eyes turned to Ingulf. He raised his eyebrows.

“Mad? That is not a word to be used by a leech. But since you put it to me in that way, I will tell you. Yes, of course the boy Shef is mad. Consider…”

Hund found his friend, as he had known he would, standing amid a litter of charred wood and iron at the northeast tower, above the Aldwark, surrounded by a knot of interested pendant-wearers. He slipped between them like an eel.

“Have you worked it out yet?” he asked.

Shef looked up. “I think I have the answer now. There was a monk with each machine, whose duty was to see it destroyed instead of captured. They started the job, then scuttled back to the Minster. The men they left behind had no great desire to see the burning finished. This slave was captured,” he nodded at a collared Englishman inside the ring of Vikings. “He told me how it worked. I haven't tried to rebuild the machine, but I understand it now.”

He indicated the pile of charred timbers and iron devices.

“This is the machine that fires the bolts.”

Shef pointed. “See, the spring is not in the wood, it is in the rope. Twisted rope. This axle is turned and twists the rope which puts more and more force on each bow-arm and the bowstring. Then, at the right moment, you release the bowstring…”

“Wham,” said one of the Vikings. “And there goes old Tonni.”

A grunt of laughter. Shef pointed at the toothed wheels on the frame. “See the rust on them? They are as old as time. I do not know how long it is since the Rome-folk left, or if these things have been lying round in some armory ever since. But anyway, they were not made by the minster-folk. It is all they can do to use them.”

“What of the great boulder-machine?”

“They burnt that better. But I already knew how they were made before we got over the wall. The minster-folk had all that in a book, and the parts of the machine also, left over from olden times, so the slave says. I am sorry they burnt it all, for that alone. And I should like to see the book that tells how to build machines. That and the book of numbercraft!”

“Erkenbert has the numbercraft,” said the slave suddenly, catching the Norse word in Shef's still faintly English pronunciation. “He is the arithmeticus.”

Several Vikings clutched their pendants protectively. Shef laughed.

“Arithmeticus or no arithmeticus, I can build a better machine than him. Many machines. The thrall says he heard a minster-man say once, of themselves and the Rome-folk, that the Christians now are as dwarves on the shoulders of giants. Well, they may have the giants to ride on, with their books and their old machines and old walls left over from time past. But they are dwarves just the same. And we, we are—”

“Do not say it,” cut in a Viking, stepping forward. “Do not say the ill-luck word, Skjef Sigvarthsson. We are not giants, and the giants—the iötnar—are the foes of gods and men. I think you know that. Have you not seen them?”

Shef nodded slowly, thinking of his dream of the uncompleted walls and the gigantic, clumsy stallion-master. His audience stirred again, looking at each other.

Shef threw the iron parts he was holding onto the floor. “Let the slave go, Steinulf, in payment for what he has told us. Show him how to get well away from here, so the Ragnarssons do not catch him. We can make our own machine without him now.”

“Have we time to do it?” asked a Viking.

“All we need is wood. And a little work in the forge. There are still two days till the Army meeting.”

“It is new knowledge,” added one of the listeners. “Thorvin would tell us to do it.”

“Meet here tomorrow, in the morning,” said Shef decisively.

As they turned away, one of the Vikings said, “They will be a long two days for King Ella. It was a dog's deed of the Christian archbishop to hand him over to Ivar. Ivar has much in store for him.”

Shef stared at the departing backs and turned again to his friend.

“What is that you have there?”

“A potion from Ingulf. For you.”

“I need no potion. What is it for?”

Hund hesitated. “He says it is to ease your mind. And—and to bring back your memory.”

“What is wrong with my memory?”

“Shef, Ingulf and Thorvin say—they say you have forgotten even that we blinded your eye. That Thorvin held you and Ingulf heated the needle, and I, I held it in position. We only did it so it would not be done by some butcher of Ivar's. But they say that it is not natural for you never to speak of it. They believe you have forgotten your blinding. And forgotten Godive, for whom you went into the camp.”

Shef stared down at the little leech with his silver apple pendant.

“You can tell them, I have never forgotten either for a moment.

“But still.” He stretched out his hand. “I will take your potion.”

“He took the potion,” Ingulf said.

“Shef is like the bird in the old story,” Thorvin said. “The one the Christians tell of how the English in the North became Christian. They say that when the king Edwin called a council to debate whether he and his kingdom should leave the faith of their fathers and take a new one, a priest of the Aesir had said they might as well, for following the old gods had brought him no profit. But then another councillor said, and this is a truer tale, that to him the world seemed like a king's hall on a winter evening—warm and brightly lit inside, but outside dark and cold, and a world no one could see. ‘And into that hall,’ said the councillor, ‘flies a bird, and for a moment it is in the light and the warm, and then flies out into the dark and cold again. If the Christ-god can tell us more surely about what happens before man's life and after man's life,’ said the councillor, ‘we should seek to learn more of his teaching.’ ”

“A good story, with some truth,” Ingulf said. “I see why you think Shef could be like that bird.”

“He could—or he could be something else. When Farman saw him in his vision, in Asgarth, he says he had taken the place of the smith of the gods, Völund. You do not know that story, Hund. Völund was caught and enslaved by the wicked king Nithhad, and hamstrung so that he could work, but not run away. But Völund enticed the king's sons to his forge, killed them, made brooches of their eyeballs and necklaces of their teeth, gave them to their father, his master. Enticed the king's daughter to his forge, stupefied her with beer, raped her.”

“Why would he do that if he was still a prisoner?” asked Hund. “If he was too lame to run away?”

“He was the master-smith,” said Thorvin. “When the king's daughter awoke, and ran to her father and told him the tale, and he came to kill the slave-smith with torments—then Völund put on the wings he had made secretly in his forge. And flew away, laughing at those who thought him crippled.”

“So why is Shef like Völund?”

“He can see up and down. In a direction other men cannot see. It is a great gift, but I fear it is the gift of Othin. Othin Allfather. Othin Bölverk, Othin Bale-worker. Your potion will make him dream, Ingulf. But what will be in those dreams?”

Shef's sinking mind was brooding on taste. The potion Ingulf had sent him had tasted of honey, which was a change from the foul brews he and Hund usually concocted. Yet beneath the sweetness there had been another taste: of mold? of fungus? He did not know, but something dry and rotten beneath the mask. He had known as soon as he drank it that there would be something to be endured.

And yet his dream started sweetly, like one he had had many times before any of his troubles began, before even he had known that they meant him for a thrall.

He was swimming, in the fen. But as he swam on and on the power of his strokes doubled and redoubled, so that the bank seemed to fall away behind him and he was swimming faster than a horse could run. Now his strokes took him clear from the water and he was lifting in the air, no longer striking with his arms, but first climbing, and then, as fear left him, sweeping forward again, rising higher and higher in the air, like a bird. The country beneath him was green and sunny, with the new leaves of spring breaking out everywhere, and meadow rolling higher and higher to sunlit uplands. Suddenly dark. In front of him now there was an immense column of darkness. He had, he knew, been there before. But then he had been in the column, or on the column, looking out: he did not want to see again what he had seen then. The king, the king Edmund, with his sad and tortured face and his backbone in his hand. If he flew in carefully, and did not look out or back, he might not see him this time.

Slowly, cautiously, the wandering soul closed on the enormous darkened tree-trunk. To it was nailed, as he had known there would be, a figure with a spike projecting from its eye. He looked at the face with care—was it his own?

It was not. Its one whole eye was closed. It appeared to take no interest in him.

By the figure's head there hovered two black birds, with black beaks: ravens. They turned bright eyes on him, cocking their heads curiously. The flight pinions of their wings ruffled and shifted slightly as they maintained their positions without strain or effort. The figure was Othin, or Woden, and the ravens were his constant companions.

What were their names? That was the important thing. He had heard them somewhere. In Norse they were—That was right, Hugin and Munin. In English that would be Hyge and Myne. Hugin/Hyge. That meant “mind.” That was not the one he wanted. As if dismissed, the one raven spiraled down, perched on its master's shoulder.

Munin/Myne. That meant “memory.” That was what he wanted. But he would have to pay for it. He had a friend, a protector among the gods, so much he realized already. But it was not Othin, whatever Brand might think. So a price must be paid. He knew what the price must be. Again unbidden, another scrap of verse came to him, again in English. It described the hanged man, on the gallows, who swayed there creaking for the birds, unable to raise a hand to protect himself, while the black ravens came…

Came for his eyes. For his eye. The bird was there suddenly, so close that it blocked out all other sight, its black beak like an arrow only an inch from his eye. Not his good eye, though. His bad eye. The one he had already lost. But this was memory, back in a time when he still had it. His hands were down, he could not move them. That was because Thorvin was holding them. No, he could move them this time, but he must not. He would not.

The bird realized he would not move. It came forward with a shriek of triumph, driving its nail of a beak deep through his eye and into his brain. As the white-hot pain stabbed through him, the words shot into his head: the words of the doomed king.

He had done his duty. The bird released him. He fell instantly from the tree-trunk, tumbling without control, hands still locked, toward the ground miles below. Plenty of time to think what to do. No need for hands. He could just turn his body whichever way was needed, turn and roll till he was heading out into the sun once more, turn and dip till he was spiraling down gently to the place where he should be, where his body lay on straw.

Strange to see the land from here, and the people and the armies and the merchants coming and going, many of them spurring furiously, but not moving at all beneath his enormous twenty-mile circuits. He could see the fen, he could see the sea, he could see the great tumuli, the barrows swelling up beneath green turf. He would remember that, think of it another time. Now he had only one duty, and he would carry it out as soon as his spirit was back in its right place, in the body he could now see on its mattress, in the body he was entering….

Shef jerked from sleep in one motion. “I must remember, but I cannot write,” he called in dismay.

“I can,” said Thorvin, on his stool six feet away, dimly visible by the banked fire.

“Can you? Write like a Christian?”

“I can write like a Christian. But I can write like a Norseman too, or a priest of the Way. I can write in runes. What do you want me to write?”

“Write it quickly,” said Shef. “I bought this from Munin with pain.”

Thorvin kept his eyes down as he took a beech board and a knife and prepared to cut.

“It is hard to write English in runes,” Thorvin muttered. But he muttered it beneath his breath.

The Army mustered—in distrust and ill humor, three weeks before the day the Christians celebrated the birth of their God—on the open space outside the city's east wall. Seven thousand men take up a good deal of space, especially when all are both fully armed and heavily wrapped against the wind and intermittent sleet. But since Shef had fired the remaining houses on that side there was room enough to spread everyone in a rough half-circle from wall to wall.

In the midst of the semicircle stood the Ragnarssons and their supporters, the Raven Banner behind them. A few paces away, gripped and encircled by a flutter of saffron plaids, waited the black-haired figure of the king—of the ex-king Ella. His face was as white, Shef reflected from his place in the semicircle thirty yards away, as white as the white of a cooked egg.

For Ella was doomed. The Army had not pronounced yet, but it was certain as fate. Soon Ella would hear the clash of weapons by which the Army signaled assent. And then they would start on him, as they had on Shef, as they had on King Edmund, on King Maelguala and all the other Irish kinglets on whom Ivar had sharpened his teeth and his techniques. There was no hope for Ella. He had put Ragnar in the orm-garth. Even Brand, even Thorvin accepted that a man's sons had a right to take revenge in kind. More than a right, a duty. The Army watched judiciously, to see that the job was done well and warriorlike.

But it sat, or rather stood, also in judgement on its own leaders. It was not only Ella who was at risk here. Not even Ivar Ragnarsson, not even Sigurth the Snakeeye himself, could this time be absolutely sure of walking from the meeting with a whole skin, or with an undamaged reputation. There was tension in the air.

As the sun reached what passed for midday in the English winter, Sigurth called the Army to business.

“We are the Great Army,” he called out. “We are met to talk over what has been done and what should be done next. I have things to say. But first I heard that there are men in the Army who are not content with how this city was taken. Will one of them speak openly before us all?”

A man stepped forward from the ring, walked into the open space in the middle, and turned so that both his own supporters and the Ragnarssons could hear him. It was Skuli the Bald, who had led the second tower up to the wall, but had wrecked it without getting over.

“Put-up job,” muttered Brand. “Been paid to speak, but not too hard.”

“I am not content,” called out Skuli. “I led my crews to attack the wall of this city. I lost a dozen men, including my brother-in-law, a good man. We got over the wall just the same and fought our way up to the minster. But then we were prevented from sacking the minster, as was our right. And we found that we did not need to lose the men, because the city was already taken. We got neither plunder nor compensation. Why did you let us attack the wall like fools, Sigurth, when you knew we had no need to?”

A rumble of agreement, some catcalls from Ragnarsson crews. Sigurth stepped forward in his turn, silencing the noise with a wave.

“I thank Skuli for saying this, and I admit that he has right on his side. But I want to say two things. First, I did not know he had no need to. We could not be sure that we would get in. The priests could have been lying to us. Or if the king had found it, he might have put his own men on the gate that was opened. If we had told the whole Army about it, some slave might have heard and passed the news. So we kept it to ourselves.

“The other thing I have to say is this: I did not think Skuli and his men would get over the wall. I did not think they would even get to the wall. These machines, these towers, they are something we have never seen before. I thought they were a toy, and that everything would be finished with just some arrowshot and wasted sweat. If I had known different I would have told Skuli not to risk his life and waste his men. I was wrong, and I am sorry.”

Skuli nodded in a dignified way and walked back to his place.

“Not enough!” yelled a voice from the crowd. “What about compensation? Wergild for our losses!”

“How much did you get from the priests?” yelled another. “And why don't we all share?”

Sigurth raised a hand again. “That's more like it. I ask the Army: what are we here for?”

Brand stepped out, waving his axe, back of his neck purpling instantly with the effort in his shout. “Money!”

But even his voice was drowned in the chorus: “Money! Wealth! Gold and silver! Tribute!”

As the tumult died down, Sigurth shouted back. He had the meeting well in hand, Shef realized. All this was going according to a plan, and even Brand was going along with it.

“And what do you want the money for?” called Sigurth. Confusion, doubt, shouts of different answers—some ribald.

The Snakeeye drove on over them. “I'll tell you. You want to buy a place back home, with people to till it for you, and to never touch a plough again. Now I'm telling you this: there's not enough money here to get you what you want. Not good money.” He threw a handful of coins derisively on the ground. The men recognized the useless low-alloy coinage they had found so often already.

“But that isn't to say we can't get it. Just that it's going to take time.”

“Time for what, Sigurth? Time for you to hide your take?”

The Snakeeye stepped a little forward, his strange white-rimmed eyes searching the crowd for the man who had accused him. His hand reached for his sword-pommel.

“I know this is open meeting,” he called, “where all may speak freely. But if anyone accuses me or my brothers of not acting like warriors, then we will call him to account for it outside the meeting!

“Now I tell you. We took a ransom from the minster, right enough. Those of you who stormed the wall took loot as well, from the dead and from the houses inside the wall. All of us profited from what was taken outside the minster.”

“But all the gold was inside the minster!” That was Brand shouting, still incensed, and well forward so that he could not be mistaken.

A cold look from Sigurth, but no check. “I tell you. We will all pool all that we took—ransom, loot, whatever—and divide it up crew by crew as has always been the custom of the Army.

“And then we will lay a further tribute on this shire and this kingdom, to be delivered before the end of the winter. They will pay in bad metal, sure enough. But we will take that metal and melt the silver out of it and coin it again ourselves. And that we will divide up so that everyone gets his share.

“Only one thing. To do that we need the mint.” A buzz as the unfamiliar word was repeated. “We need the men to make the coins and the tools to make them with. And they are in the minster. They are the Christian priests. I have never said this before, but I say it now.

“We have to make the priests work with us.”

This time the dissension in the Army went on a long time, with many men stepping forward and speaking confusedly. Shef realized slowly that Sigurth's point was being carried, had a certain appeal to men tired of profitless harrying, yet there was determined resistance—from adherents of the Way, from men who simply disliked and distrusted Christians, from those whose still resented losing the sack of the minster.

And the resistance was not dying down. Violence at a meeting was almost unheard-of, for the penalties were so severe. Yet the crowd was fully armed, even to mail, shields and helmets, and every man in it used to striking out. There was always the chance of an outburst. The Snakeeye was going to have to do something, Shef thought, to get the crowd back under control. Just at the moment one man—it was Egil from Skaane, who had taken a tower to the wall—had got the attention of the Army with a furious diatribe about the treachery of the Christians.

“And one more thing,” he shouted. “We know the Christians never keep their word to us, because they think that only the followers of their god will live after death. But I tell you what is more dangerous. They make other men start to forget their word as well. Start to think a man may say one thing one day and another another, and tell the priest and ask for forgiveness, and wipe away the past like a housewife wiping shit off a baby's bottom. And I say this for you! For you, the sons of Ragnar!”

He turned to face the cluster of brothers, stepping closer to them in defiance—a brave man, thought Shef, and an angry one. He threw back his cloak deliberately to reveal the silver horn of Heimdall gleaming on his tunic.

“How have you remembered your father, who went to his death in the orm-garth here, inside this city? How have you remembered the boasts you made in the hall at Roskilde, when you stood on the stock and made your vows to Bragi?

“What happens to the oath-breakers in the world we believe in? Have you forgotten?

A voice supported him from the throng: a deep voice, a solemn one. Thorvin's, Shef realized, quoting the holy poems.

“Men forsworn!” shouted Egil. He turned and walked to his place, showing the Ragnarssons his back. Yet they seemed pleased, almost relieved. They had known someone would say it.

“We have been challenged,” called Halvdan Ragnarsson, speaking for the first time. “Let us reply. We know well what we said in the hall at Roskilde, and this was it: I swore that I would invade England in vengeance for my father…” All four brothers, bunching together, began to call out the words in unison.

“And so I have. And Sigurth, he swore…”

“…to defeat all the kings of the English and bring them into subjection to us.”

“Two I have defeated, and the rest will follow.”

Yells of approval from the Ragnarsson followers.

“And Ivar, he swore…”

“…to wreak vengeance on the black crows, the Christ-priests who counseled the orm-garth.”

Dead silence, for Ivar to speak.

“And this I have not done. But it is unfinished, not forgotten. Remember: the black crows are now in my hand. I shall decide when to close it.”

Still dead silence. Ivar went on. “But Ubbi, my brother, he swore…”

The brothers in unison again. “…to capture King Ella and kill him with torments for Ragnar's death.”

“And this we shall do,” called Ivar. “So two of our boasts will be completed, and two of us free before Bragi, the oath-god. And the other two we shall yet complete.”

“Bring out the prisoner.”

Muirtach and his gang were hustling him forward instantly. The Ragnarssons were counting on this, Shef realized, to alter the mood of the crowd. He remembered the youth who had shown him round the slave-pens back at the camp on the Stour, with his tales of the cruelty of Ivar. There were always some who would be impressed. Yet it was not clear that this crowd was.

They had Ella well out in front now, and were hammering a thick pole into the earth. The king was even whiter than before, the black hair and beard showing it even more clearly. He was not gagged, his mouth was open, but no sound came out. There was blood on the side of his neck.

“Ivar's cut his voice-cords,” said Brand suddenly. “They do it with pigs so they can't squeal. What's the brazier for?”

The Gaddgedlar, hands padded, were lifting forward a brazier full of glowing coal. Irons projected from it ominously, already shining red-hot. The crowd surged and muttered, some pushing forward for a closer look, others' sensing, apparently, that this was a distraction from their real business, but unsure how to reject it.

Muirtach whisked the cloak suddenly from the doomed man so that he stood naked before them, not even a loincloth to cover him. Some laughter, some jeers, some groans of disapproval. Four Gaddgedlar gripped him and spread-eagled him upright between them. Ivar stepped in front, a knife glinting in his hand. He bent towards Ella's belly, between the king and Shef's horrified gaze, not a dozen yards off. A mighty contortion, a thrashing of limbs, held mercilessly by the four apostates.

Ivar stepped back, a coil of something blue-gray and slippery in his hand.

“He's opened his belly and pulled his gut out,” commented Brand.

Ivar stepped over to the pole, pulling gently but remorselessly on the uncoiling intestine, watching the look of despair and agony on the king's face with a half-smile. He reached the pole, took a hammer, nailed in the free end he had extracted.

“Now,” he called out. “King Ella will walk round the pole till he pulls his own heart out and dies. Come, Englishman. The quicker you walk, the quicker it will be over. But it may take a few turns before you reach that. You have ten yards to walk, by my count. Is that so much to ask? Start him, Muirtach.”

The henchman stepped forward, brand glowing, thrust it against the doomed king's buttock. A convulsive start, a face turning gray, a slow shuffle.

This was the worst death a man could face, thought Shef. No pride, no dignity. The only way out, to do what your enemies wanted, and to be jeered for it. Knowing you must do it and come to an end, and yet not able to do it quickly. The hot irons behind so you could not even choose your own pace. Not even a voice to scream. And all the time your bowels pulling out from inside.

He passed his halberd silently to Brand, and slipped back through the shoving, craning crowd. There were faces looking down from the tower where he had left his helpers to keep an eye on their machine. A rope snaking down as they realized what he wanted. A scramble up the wall to the familiar clean smell of new-sawn wood and new-forged iron.

“He has walked round the pole three times,” said one of the Vikings on the tower, a man with the phallus of Frey round his neck. “That is no way for any man to go.”

Bolt in place, the machine swiveled round—they had thought, yesterday, to rest the bottom frame on a pair of stout wheels. Barb upright between the vanes, three hundred yards, it would still shoot a little high.

Shef aimed the tip of the barb on the wound at the base of the king's belly as he hobbled round to face the wall a fourth time, red-hot brands urging him on. Shef squeezed the release slowly.

The thump, the line rising and falling—clear through the center of Ella's chest and straining heart, and on into the ground behind him, almost between Muirtach's feet. As the king was hurled backward by the force of the blow, Shef saw his face change. Relax in peace.

Slowly the crowd rippled, every face in it turning to face the tower from which the shot had come. Ivar bent over the corpse, but then straightened, turning too, hands clenched.

Shef took one of the new halberds and went down the wall toward the throng, wanting to be recognized. At the edge of the semicircle he stopped, vaulted onto the battlement.

“I am only a carl,” he called out, “not a jarl. But I have three things to say to the Army:

“First, the sons of Ragnar fulfilled this bit of their Bragi boast because they had no heart to fulfill the rest.

“And second, whatever the Snakeeye says, when he sneaked into York by the back door with the priest holding it open for him, he was not thinking of the Army's good, but of his own and of his brothers'. He had no mind to fight and no mind to share.”

Shouts of anger, the Gaddgedlar whirling, looking for the gate into the city and the steps up to where Shef stood. Others obstructing them, grabbing at their plaids. Shef raised his voice even more above the din.

“And third: to treat a man and a warrior the way they treated King Ella has no drengskapr. I call it nithingsverk.”

The work of a nithing, a man beneath honor, a man with no legal rights, worse than an outlaw. To be proclaimed nithing before the Army was the worst shame a carl—or a jarl—could endure. If the Army agreed.

Some people were shouting agreement. Shef could see Brand down there, axe raised now and ready to strike, his men clustering behind him, thrusting off Ragnarsson followers with their shields. A stream of men coming from the other side of the circle to join him—Egil the Heimdall-worshipper at their head. Who was that moving out? Sigvarth, face flushed as he shouted reply to some insult. Skuli the Bald wavering by Ella's corpse as Ubbi bellowed something at him.

The whole Army was moving. Dividing. After a hundred heartbeats there was space between the two groups and both were edging further away from each other. The Ragnarssons in front of the furthest group; in front of the nearer one, Brand, Thorvin, a handful of others.

“It is the Way against the rest,” muttered the Frey-worshipper behind Shef. “And some of your friends thrown in. Two to one against us, I reckon.”

“You have split the Army,” said a Hebridean, one of Magnus's crew. “It is a great deed, but a rash one.”

“The machine was wound,” replied Shef. “All I had to do was shoot it.

Chapter Six

As the army marched away from the walls of York, snowflakes started to drift out of the windless sky. Not the Great Army. The Great Army would never exist again. That part of the once-great army which now refused the command of the Ragnarssons and could no longer live in fellowship with them—perhaps twenty long hundreds of men, two thousand four hundred by the Roman count. With them were a host of horses, pack-horses, pack-mules and fifty wooden carts creaking along with their burden of heavy loot: bronze and iron, smith-tools and grindstones—along with the chests of poor coinage and a meager handful of true silver from the division. Their burden, too, of wounded men not fit to march or straddle a pony.

From the city walls, the rest of the army watched them go. Some of the younger and wilder members had whooped and jeered, even launched a few arrows at the ground behind their former messmates. But the silence of the marching column, and of their own leaders on the wall, cast down their spirits. They pulled their cloaks tighter about them, and looked up at the sky, the lowering horizon, the frostbitten grass on the slopes outside the city. Grateful for their own billets, stored firewood, shuttered windows and draftless walls.

“It will snow harder before tomorrow's dawn,” muttered Brand from his position at the rear of the column, the main point of danger till they were well past the Ragnarssons' reach.

“You are Norsemen,” replied Shef. “I thought snow would not bother you.”

“All right while the frost stays hard,” said Brand. “If it snows and then thaws, like it does in this country, we'll be marching through mud. Tires the men out, tires the beasts out, slows the carts even more. And when you're marching in those conditions, you need food. You know how long it takes an ox-team to eat its own weight? But we must put some distance between us and those behind. No telling what they'll do now.”

“Where are we making for?” asked Shef.

“I don't know. Who's leading this army anyway? Everybody else thinks you are.”

Shef fell silent, in consternation.

As the last bundled figures of the rear-guard disappeared from view among the ruined houses of outer York, the Ragnarssons on the wall turned and looked at each other.

“Good riddance,” said Ubbi. “Fewer mouths to feed, fewer hands to share. What are a few hundred Way-folk anyway? Soft hands, weak stomachs.”

“No one ever called Viga-Brand soft-handed,” replied Halvdan. Since the holmgang he had been slow to join in his brothers' attacks on Shef and his faction. “They're not all Way-folk, either.”

“It doesn't matter what they are,” said Sigurth. “They're enemies now. That's all you ever need to know about anyone. But we can't afford to fight them just yet. We have to keep our hold on…”

He jerked his thumb at the little cluster a few yards away from them on the wall: Wulfhere the archbishop with a knot of black monks, among them the scrawny pallor of Erkenbert the deacon, now master of the mint.

Ivar laughed, suddenly. His three brothers looked at him with unease.

“We don't need to fight them,” he said. “Their own bane marches with them. For some it does.”

Wulfhere too scowled at the retreating column. “Some of the blood-wolves gone,” he said. “If they had gone earlier we might never have needed to treat with the rest. But now they are within our gates.” He spoke in Latin, to make sure hostile ears did not overhear.

“We must, in these days of strife, live by the wisdom of the serpent,” replied Erkenbert in the same language, “and by the cunning of the dove. But both our foes without the gates and those within may yet be overcome.”

“Those within I understand. There are fewer of them now, and they may be fought again. Not by us in Northumbria. But by the kinds of the South—Burgred of Mercia, Ethelred of Wessex. That is why we sent south the crippled thane of East Anglia, slung between his ponies. He will show the southern kings the nature of the Vikings and wake their drowsy spirits to war.

“But what, Erkenbert, is your plan for those now marching away? What can we do in dead of winter?”

The little deacon smiled. “Those marching in winter need food, and the ravagers of the North are accustomed to take it. But every mouthful they steal now is one less for a man's children before spring comes. Even churls will fight with that incentive.

“I have seen to it that the word of their coming will run before them.”

The attacks began as the short winter daylight seeped from the sky. At first they were little more than scuffles: a churl appearing from behind a tree, launching a stone or an arrow downwind, and then fleeing hastily, not even waiting to see if he hit the mark. Then a little knot of them coming in closer. The marching Vikings unslung bows if they had them, tried to keep the bowstrings dry, shot back. Otherwise they ducked heads behind shields, let the missiles bounce off, shouted derisively to their foes to stand and fight. Then one, irritated, launched a spear at a darting figure who seemed to come too close, missed and plunged off the track with a curse to recover it. For an instant a snow-flurry hid him. When it cleared he was nowhere to be seen. With difficulty his crewmates halted the column, plodding, head-down, and set off grimly to rescue him, a group thirty strong. As they lurched back with the body, already stripped and mutilated, the arrows came whipping from behind them again, out of the murk of the dying day.

The column was now spread over almost a mile of road. Skippers and helmsmen pushed and cursed the men into a thicker, shorter line, bowmen on both flanks, carts in the center. “They can't hurt you,” Brand bellowed repeatedly. “Not with hunting bows. Just shout and bang your shields; they'll wet themselves and run. Anyone gets hit in the leg, sling him on a packhorse. Dump some of that junk in the carts if you have to. But keep moving forward.”

Soon the English churls began to recognize what they could do. Their enemies were laden with gear, heavily wrapped and muffled. They did not know the country. The churls knew every tree, bush, path and patch of mud. They could strip to tunics and hose, rush in light-footed, strike and slash and be away before an arm was free of its cloak. No Viking would pursue more than a few feet into the gloom.

After a while some village war-leader organized the growing number of men. Forty or fifty of the churls came in together on the west flank of the column, beat down the few men they faced with clubs and billhooks, started to drag off the bodies like wolves with their prey. Furious, the Vikings rallied and charged after them, shields up, axes raised. As they straggled back, snarling, having caught no one, they saw the halted carts, the ox-teams poleaxed where they stood. The wagon tilts pulled open, their cargo of wounded men a burden no longer, the snow already blotting out the stains.

Prowling up and down the column like an ice-troll, Brand turned to Shef at his side. “They think they've got us now,” he snarled. “But come daylight I'll teach them a lesson for this if it's the last thing I ever do.”

Shef stared at him, blinking the snow from his eyes. “No,” he said. “You are thinking like a carl, a carl of the Army. There is no Army anymore. So now we must forget to think like carls. Instead we must think as you say I do, like a follower of Othin, orderer of battle.”

“And what are your orders, little man? Little man who has never stood in the battle-line?”

“Call over the skippers, as many as are within earshot.” Shef began to draw swiftly in the snow.

“We marched through Eskrick, here, before the snow got bad. We must be a short mile north of Riccall.” Nods, understanding. The area around York was well known from much foraging.

“I want one hundred picked men, young men, quick on their feet, not yet tired, to push ahead now and secure Riccall. Take some prisoners—we'll need them—chase the others out. We will stay there the night. Not much, fifty huts and a church of wattles. But they will shelter a lot of us if we pack in close.

“Another long hundred in four small groups to keep moving up and down on our flanks. The English won't rush in if they even think there might be someone out there to cut them off. Without their cloaks they'll keep warm running. Everyone else, just keep going and keep the carts going. As soon as we reach Riccall, use the carts to block all the gaps between the huts. Oxen and all of us on the inside of the ring. We'll make fires and rig up shelters. Brand, pick the men, get everyone moving.”

Two crowded hours later, Shef sat on a stool in the thane's longhouse of Riccall, staring at a grizzled elderly Englishman. The house was packed with Vikings, stretched out or squatting on their heels, already steaming as massed body heat dried the sodden clothes on their backs. As ordered, none paid any attention to what was going on.

Between the two men, on the rough table, stood a leather mug of beer. Shef took a pull at it, looked closely at the man facing him; he seemed to still have his wits about him. There was an iron collar round his neck.

Shef pushed the mug toward him. “You saw me drink, you know there is no poison. Go on, drink. If I wanted to harm you there are easier ways.”

The thrall's eyes widened at the fluent English. He took the mug, drank deeply.

“Who is the lord you pay your rents to?”

The man finished the beer before he spoke. “Thane Ednoth holds much of the land, from King Ella. Killed in the battle. The rest belongs to the black monks.”

“Did you pay your rents last Michaelmas? If you did not, I hope you hid the money. The monks are severe with defaulters.”

A flash of fear when Shef spoke of the monks and their retribution.

“If you wear a collar, you know what the monks do with runaways. Hund, show him your neck.”

Silently Hund unslung his Ithun pendant and handed it to Shef, pulled back his tunic to reveal the calluses and weals worn into his neck by years of the collar.

“Have any runaways been here? Men who spoke to you of these.” Shef bounced the Ithun pendant in his hand, passed it back to Hund. “Or those.” He pointed to Thorvin, Vestmund, Farman and the other priest, clustered nearby. Following the gesture, they too silently displayed their insignia.

“If they did, maybe they told you such men might be trusted.”

The slave lowered his eyes, trembled. “I'm a good Christian. I don't know about no pagan things….”

“I'm talking about trust—not pagan or Christian.”

“You Vikings are men who take slaves, not men who set them free.”

Shef reached forward and tapped the iron collar. “It was not the Vikings who put that on you. Anyway, I am an Englishman. Can you not tell from my speech? Now listen closely. I am going to let you go. Tell those out there in the night to stop the attacks, because we are not their enemies—they are still in York. If your fellows let us pass, no one will get hurt. Then tell your friends about this banner.”

Shef pointed across the smoky, steaming room to a clutch of the army's drabs, who rose from the floor and stretched out the great banner at which they had been frantically stitching. There, on a background of red silk, taken from the carts of plunder, a double-headed smith's hammer in white linen was picked out with silver thread.

“The other army, the one we have left, marches behind the black raven, the carrion bird. I say that the sign of the Christians is for torture and death. Our sign is the sign of a maker. Tell them that. And I will give you an earnest of what the hammer can do for you. We're taking off your collar.”

The slave was shaking with fear. “No, the black monks, when they return…”

“They will kill you most horribly. Remember this and tell the others. We offered to free you, we pagans. But fear of the Christians is keeping you a slave. Now go.”

“One thing I ask. In fear. Do not kill me for speaking of it but—your men are emptying the meal-bins, taking our winter store. There'll be empty bellies and dead bairns before spring comes if you do that.”

Shef sighed. This was going to be the hard bit. “Brand. Pay the thrall. Pay him something. Pay him in good silver, mind, not the archbishop's dross.”

“Me pay him! He should pay me. What about the wergild for the men we have lost? And since when did the Army pay for its supplies?”

“There is no Army now. And he owes you no wergild. You trespassed on his land. Pay him. I'll see you don't lose by it.”

Brand muttered under his breath as he untied his purse and began to count out six silver Wessex pennies.

The slave could scarcely believe what was happening, staring at the shining coins as though he had never seen money like this before; perhaps he hadn't.

“I will tell them,” he said, almost shouting the words. “About the banner too.”

“If you do that, and return here tonight, I will pay you six more—for you alone, not to share.”

Brand, Thorvin and the others looked doubtfully at Shef as the slave went out, with an escort to see him outside the sentry-fires.

“You'll never see money nor slave again,” Brand said.

“We'll see. Now I want two long hundreds of men, with our best horses, all with a good meal inside them, ready to move as soon as the slave returns.”

Brand pushed a shutter open a crack and looked at the night and the whirling snow. “What for?” he grunted.

“I need to get your twelve pennies back. And I have another idea.” Slowly, intense concentration furrowing his brow, Shef began to scratch lines into the table in front of him with the point of his knife.

The black monks of St. John's Minster at Beverley, unlike those of St. Peter's at York, did not have the safe walls of a legionary fortress round them. Instead, their tenants and the men of the flatlands east of the Yorkshire Wolds could easily put two thousand stout warriors into the field, with many more half-armed spearmen and bowmen to back them. All through the autumn of raids of York, they had known themselves safe against anything but a move by a major detachment of the Great Army. They had known it must come. The sacristan had disappeared months since with all the minster's most precious relics, reappearing days later with word only for the abbot himself. They had kept half their fighting force mobilized, the rest dispersed among their holdings to oversee the harvest and the preparations for winter. Tonight they felt secure. Their watchers had seen the Great Army split, one detachment even marching away to the South.

But a midwinter night in England is sixteen hours long between sunset and dawn: more than time enough for determined men to ride forty miles. Guided on their way through muddy, meandering farm-tracks for the first few miles, then picking up speed as they walked or trotted their horses along the better roads of the Wolds. They had lost a little time circumventing each village they came to. The slave, Tida, had guided them well, abandoning them only as the first paling sky had shown them the steeple of Beverley Minster itself. The guard-huts just beginning to disgorge sleepy female quern-slaves, to light the fires and grind the grain for the breakfast porridge. At the sight of the Vikings they ran shrieking and wailing, to drag incredulous warriors from their blankets. To be called fools for their pains and to become part of the utter confusion which was the English way of taking surprise.

Shef pushed open the great wooden doors of the minster and walked in, his companions jostling behind.

From inside the minster came the antiphonal song of the choirmonks, facing each other across the nave and singing sweetly the anthems which called the Christ-child to be born. There were no other worshippers, though the doors were unbolted for them. The monks sang lauds every day, whether they were joined or not. At dawn on a winter morning they would not expect to be.

As the Vikings paced down the aisle which led to the high altar—still wrapped in sodden cloaks, no weapons showing except for the halberd over Shef's shoulder—the abbot looked at them in shocked horror from his great seat in the choir. For a moment Shef's nerve and wit faltered in the face of the majesty of the Church he had grown up in, worshipped in.

He cleared his throat, unsure how to begin.

Guthmund behind him, a skipper from the Swedish shore of the Kattegat, had no such doubts or scruples. All his life he had wanted to be at the sack of a really first-class church or abbey, and he had no intention of letting a beginner's nerves spoil it. Courteously he picked his young leader up and put him to one side, seized the nearest choir-monk by his black robe and hurled him into the aisle, dragged his axe from under his cloak and embedded it with a thunk into the altar-rail.

“Grab the blackrobes,” he bellowed. “Search 'em, put 'em in that corner there. Tofi, get those candlesticks. Frani, I want all that plate. Snok and Uggi, you're lightweights, see that statue there…” He waved at the great crucifix, high above the altar, looking down at them with sorrowing eyes. “Shin up it and see if you can get that crown off, looks genuine from here. The rest of you, turn everything over and shake it, grab everything that looks as if it might gleam. I want this place clear before those bastards behind us have got their boots on. Now, you…” He advanced on the abbot shrinking back in his throne.

Shef forced his way between them. “Now, father,” he began, speaking again in English. The familiar language drew a basilisk stare from the abbot, terrified but at the same time mortally offended. Shef wavered a moment—then remembered the inside of the minster door, covered, like many, with skin on the inside. Human skin, flayed from a living body for the sin of sacrilege, of laying hands on Church property. He hardened his heart.

“Your guards will be here soon. If you want to stay alive you will have to keep your men off.”

“No!”

“Then you die now.” The point of his halberd pushed at the priest's throat.

“For how long?” The abbot's shaking hands were on the halberd, could not move it back.

“Not long. Then you may hunt us, recover your stolen goods. So do as I say…”

Crashes of destruction behind, a monk being dragged forward by Guthmund. “I think this is the sacristan. He says the hoard is empty.”

“True,” the abbot admitted. “All was hidden months ago.”

“What's hidden can be found again,” said Guthmund. “I'll start on the youngest, just to show I mean it. One, two dead, the hoard-keeper will speak.”

“You will not,” Shef ordered. “We'll take them with us. There will be no torture among those who follow the Way. The Asa-gods forbid it. And we have taken a fair haul. Now get them out where the minster-guards can see them. We still have a long ride ahead.”

In the growing light, Shef noticed something hanging on the wall: a flattened roll of vellum with no image on it that he could recognize.

“What's that?” he asked the abbot.

“It has no value to one like you. No gold, no silver on the frame. It is a mappamundi. A map of the world.”

Shef tore it down, rolled it, thrust it deep inside his tunic as they hustled the abbot and the choirmonks out to face the ragged battle-line of Englishmen at last roused from bed.

“We'll never make it back,” muttered Guthmund again as he clutched a clanking sack.

“Not going back,” answered Shef. “You'll see.”

Chapter Seven

Burgred, king of Mercia, one of the two great kingdoms of England still unconquered by the Vikings, paused at the entrance to his private chambers, dismissed the crowd of attendants and hangers-on, doffed his mantle of martenfur, allowed his snow-soaked boots to be removed and replaced by slippers of soft whittawed leather, and prepared to enjoy the moment. By command, the young man and his father were waiting for him, as was the atheling Alfred, there to represent his brother Ethelred, king of Wessex—the other surviving great English kingdom.

The issue before them was the fate of East Anglia. Its king dead with no successor, its people demoralized and uncertain. Yet Burgred knew well that if he marched an army to take it over, to add it to Mercia by force, the East Angles might well fight, Englishmen against Englishmen, as they had so often before. But if he sent them a man of their own, he calculated—one of noble blood, one who nevertheless owed absolutely everything, including the army he led with him, to King Burgred—well, that they might swallow.

Especially as this particular noble and grateful young man had such a very useful father. One who, so to speak—Burgred allowed himself a grim smile—carried his anti-Viking credentials with him. Who could fail to rally to such a figurehead? A figure-head and -trunk, indeed. Burgred blessed, silently, the day the two ponies with their leaders and their slung stretcher had brought him in from York.

And the beautiful young woman too. How affecting it had been. The young man, fair hair swept back, kneeling at his father's feet before ever they had unstrapped him from his litter, and begging forgiveness for having married without his father's consent. The pair might have been forgiven for more than that after all they had been through, but no, young Alfgar had been the essence of propriety all through. It was the spirit that would one day make the English the greatest of all nations. Decency, mused Burgred: gedafenlicnis.

What Alfgar had really muttered as he knelt at his father's feet had been: “I married Godive, father. I know she's my half sister, but don't say anything of it, or I'll tell everyone you're mad. And then an accident could happen to you. Men with no arms smother easily. And don't forget, we're both your children. If we succeed, your grandsons could still be princes. Or better.”

And after the first shock, it had seemed well enough to Wulfgar. True, they had committed incest, “sibb-laying,” as the English called it. But what did a trifle like that matter? Thryth, his own lady, had committed fornication with a heathen Viking, and who had done anything about that? If Alfgar and Godive had an incest child like Sigemund and his sister in the legends, it could be no worse than that gadderling brat he, Wulfgar, had been fool enough to rear.

As the king of the Mercians strode into the room, the men in it rose and bowed. The one woman, the East Anglian beauty with the sad face and the brilliant eyes, rose and made her courtesy in the new style of the Franks. Two attendants—they had been arguing quietly about the right thing to do—lifted Wulfgar's padded box to the vertical before leaning it back against the wall. At a gesture they resumed their seats: stools for all but the king and the heimnar. Wulfgar too was lifted into a highseat with wooden arms. He could not have balanced himself to sit on a stool.

“I have news from Eoforwich,” began the king. “Later news than you brought,” with a nod to Wulfgar. “And better news. Still, it has decided me to act.

“It seems that after the surrender by the Church of the town and of King Ella—”

“Say, rather,” cut in the young atheling from Wessex, “the disgraceful betrayal of King Ella by those he had protected.”

Burgred frowned. The young man, he had noticed, had little sense of respect to kings, and none at all for senior members of the Church.

“After the surrender of King Ella, he was unhappily put to death in vile manner by the heathen Ragnarssons, and especially the one called the Boneless. Just as happened to your master, the noble Edmund,” he added, nodding again to Wulfgar.

“But it seems that this caused dissension among the heathens. Indeed there is a strange story that the execution was put to an end by a machine of some kind. Everything at Eoforwich seems to have something about machines attached to it.

“Yet the important news is the dissension. For after it the Viking army split.”

Mutters of surprise and pleasure.

“Some of them have now left Eoforwich and are marching south. A lesser part of the Army, but still formidable. Where, I must ask myself, are they heading? And I say, they are heading back to East Anglia, from where they came.”

“Back to their ships,” snapped Alfgar.

“That could well be. Now, I do not think the East Anglians will fight them again. They lost their king and too many leaders, thanes and warriors in the battle by the Stour, from which you, young man, so valiantly fought your way. Yet, as you have all been telling me,” Burgred glanced sarcastically at Alfred, “the Vikings must be fought.

“So I shall send East Anglia a war-leader, with a strong force of my men to support him till he can rally his own.

“You, young man. Alfgar, son of Wulfgar. You are of the North-folk. Your father was a thane of King Edmund. Your family has lost more, suffered more and dared more than any other. You will put the kingdom back on its feet.

“Only it can no longer be a kingdom.”

Burgred locked eyes with the young atheling, Alfred of Wessex: eyes as blue and hair as blond as Alfgar's, a true prince of a royal line. But something queer, cross-grained about him. A clever look. They both knew that this was the sticking point. Burgred of Mercia had no more claim to East Anglia than Ethelred of Wessex. Yet the one who filled the gap would clearly become the mightier of the two.

“What would my title be?” asked Alfgar carefully.

“Alderman. Of the North-folk and the South-folk.”

“Those are two shires,” objected Alfred. “A man cannot be alderman of two shires at once.”

“New times, new things,” replied Burgred. “But what you say is true. In time, Alfgar, you may win a new title. You may be what the priests call subregulus. You may be my under-king. Say, will you be loyal to me and to Mercia? to the Mark?”

Alfgar knelt silently at the king's feet and put his hands between the king's knees in token of subjection. The king patted his shoulder and lifted him up.

“We will do this more formally by and by. I just wanted to know we are all agreed.” He turned to Alfred. “And yes, young atheling, I know you have not agreed. But tell your king and brother the way of it is now this. Let him stay his side of the Thames and I'll stay mine. But north of the Thames and south of the Humber: that belongs to me. All of it.”

Burgred let the tense silence hang a moment and then thought to disperse it. “One strange piece of news they told me. The Ragnarssons have always led the Great Army, but they have all stayed in Eoforwich. Those who marched away are said to have no leaders, or many. But one report is that among their leaders, or their main leader, is an Englishman. A man of the East Angles by his speech, the messenger said. But he could only give me what the Vikings call him, and they speak English so badly I could not make it out as a man's name at all. They call him Skjef Sigvarthsson. Now what could that be in English? Even in East Anglian?”

“Shef!” It was the silent woman who had spoken. Or gasped. Her eyes, her brilliant liquid eyes, blazed with life. Her husband stared at her like one who measures a back for the birch, while her father-in-law goggled and reddened.

“I thought you saw him dead,” snarled the heimnar accusingly at his son.

“I will yet,” muttered Alfgar. “Just give me the men.”

Nearly two hundred miles to the north, Shef turned once again in his saddle to see if the rear-guard was keeping up. Important to have everyone well closed up, all within earshot of each other. Shef knew that four times his own number were pounding the filthy road behind him, unable to attack while Shef held his thirty hostages, the choirmonks of St. John's and their abbot Saxwulf. It was important too to keep up the pace, even after their long night's ride, to outrun the news of their coming and prevent any arrangement being made for their reception.

The smell of the sea led them on—and there, as they came trampling over a slight rise, there as an unmistakable landmark was Flamborough Head itself. Shef urged the vanguard on with a yell and a wave.

Guthmund dropped back a yard or two, hand still clutching the bridle of the abbot's horse. Shef waved him over. “Keep up—and keep the abbot close to me.”

With a whoop he spurred his tiring gelding forward, catching up just as the whole cavalcade, a hundred and twenty raiders and thirty hostages, stormed down the long slope into the squalid huddle of Bridlington.

Instant confusion. Women running, snatching up blue-legged ragged children, men seizing spears, dropping them again, some racing for shelter down to the beach and the boats drawn up on the dirty snow-covered sand. Shef wheeled his horse and thrust the abbot forward like a trophy, instantly recognizable in his black robes.

“Peace,” he shouted, “Peace. I want Ordlaf.”

But Ordlaf was already there, the reeve of Bridlington, the capturer—though no one had ever credited him with it—of Ragnar. He stepped forward from his people, eyeing the Vikings and the monks with amazement, reluctantly taking responsibility.

“Show them the abbot,” Shef snapped to Guthmund. “Make those behind keep their distance.” He pointed at Ordlaf the reeve. “You and I have met before. The day you netted Ragnar.”

Dismounting, he drove his halberd-spike deep into the sandy soil. Putting his hand on the reeve's shoulder, he drew him a little away, out of earshot of the wrathfully glaring abbot, began to speak in urgent tones.

“It's impossible,” said Ordlaf a minute later. “Can't be done.”

“Why not? It's a high sea, and cold, but the wind is from the west.”

“Southwest a point west,” corrected Ordlaf automatically.

“You can run downcoast with it on your beam. To the Spurn. Twenty-five miles, no more. Be there by dark. Never out of sight of land. I'm not asking for a sea-crossing. If the weather changes we can drop sea-anchor and ride it out.”

“We'd be pulling into the teeth of it once we got to the Spurn.”

Shef jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Best rowers in the world, right with you. You can set them to it and stand back at the steering oar like lords.”

“Well… What happens when I get back and the abbot sends his men down to burn me out?”

“You did it to save the abbot's life.”

“I doubt he'll be grateful.”

“You can take your time coming back. Time enough to hide what we'll pay you. Silver from the minster. Your silver. Your rents for many a year. Hide it, melt it down. They'll never trace it.”

“Well… How do I know you won't just cut my throat? And my men's?”

“You don't—but you have little choice. Decide.”

The reeve hesitated a moment longer. Remembered Merla, his wife's cousin, whom the abbot behind him had enslaved for debt. Thought of Merla's own wife and bairns, living still on charity with their man fled in terror.

“All right. But make it look as if you're treating me rough.”

Shef exploded with feigned rage, swung a blow at the reeve's head, whipped a dirk from its scabbard. The reeve turned away, shouting orders at the little knot of men who had collected at a few yards' distance. Slowly men began to push beached fishing boats towards the tide, to step masts, haul sailcloth from sheds. In a tight huddle the Vikings pressed down to the water's edge, hustling their captives. Fifty yards away, five hundred English riders pressed forward, ready to charge sooner than see the hostages taken off, held back by the bright weapons waving over tonsured heads.

“Keep them back,” snapped Shef to the abbot. “I'll let half your men go when we board. You and the rest go in a dinghy once we're afloat.”

“I suppose you realize this means we lose the horses,” said Guthmund gloomily.

“You stole them in the first place. You can steal some more.”

“So we pulled into the mouth of the Humber under oars just at dusk, beached for the night when we were sure no one could see us, then rowed upriver in the morning to meet the rest of you. With the take.”

“How much is it?” asked Brand, sitting with the other members of the impromptu council.

“I've weighed it out,” said Thorvin. “Altar-plate, candlesticks, those little boxes the Christians keep saints' finger-bones in, box for the holy wafers, those things for burning incense, some coins—a lot of coins. I thought monks weren't supposed to have property of their own, but Guthmund says they all had purses if you shook them hard enough. Well, after what he gave the fishermen we still have ninety-two pounds weight of silver.

“Better than that is the gold. The crown you took off the Christ-image was pure gold, and heavy. So was some of the plate. That's another fourteen pounds. And we reckon gold as outvaluing silver eight for one. So that counts as eight stone of silver: a hundredweight to add to your ninety-two pounds.”

“Two hundred pounds, all told,” said Brand thoughtfully. “We will have to divide it all between crews and let the crews make their own division.”

“No,” said Shef.

“You say that a lot these days,” Brand said.

“That is because I know what to do—others don't. The money is not to be divided. It is the war chest of the army. That was why I went for it. If we divide it up everyone will be a little richer. I want to use it so that everyone becomes a lot richer.”

“If it's put like that,” said Thorvin, “I think the army will accept it. You got it. You have a right to say how you think it should be used. But how are we all going to get a lot richer?”

Shef pulled from the front of his tunic the mappamundi he had taken from the minster wall. “Look at this,” he said. A dozen heads bent over the vast vellum sheet, faces wearing different degrees of puzzlement at the scrawled, inked marks.

“Can you read the writing?” asked Shef.

“In the middle there,” said Skaldfinn the Heimdall-priest. “Where the little picture is. It says ‘Hierusalem.’ That is the holy city of the Christians.”

“Lies, as usual,” commented Thorvin. “That black border is supposed to be Ocean, the great sea that runs round Mithgarth, the world. They are saying their holy city is the center of everything, just as you would expect.”

“Look round the edges,” rumbled Brand. “See what it has to tell us of places we know. If it lying about them, then we can guess it is all lies, as Thorvin says.”

“ ‘Dacia et Gothia’,” read Skaldfinn. “ ‘Gothia.’ That must be the land of the Gautar, south of the Swedes. Unless they mean Gotland. But Gotland is an island, and this is marked as being mainland. Next to it—next to it they have ‘Bulgaria.’ ”

The council broke into laughter. “The Bulgars are the enemies of the emperor of the Greeks, in Miklagarth,” said Brand. “It is two months' travel from the nearest of the Gautar to the Bulgars.”

“On the other side of Gothia they have ‘Slesvic.’ Well, at least that is clear enough. We all know Slesvik of the Danes. There is some more writing by it. ‘Hic abundant leones.’ That means ‘There are many lions here.’ ”

Again a roar of laughter. “I have been to Slesvik market a dozen times,” said Brand. “And I have met men who have spoken of lions. They are like very large cats, and they live in the hot country south of Sarkland. But there has never been one lion in Slesvik, let alone many. You wasted your time bringing back this—what do you call it?—this mappa. It is just nonsense, like everything the Christians count as wisdom.”

Shef's finger continued to trace lettering, while he muttered to himself the letters that Father Andreas had half-successfully taught him.

“There is some English writing here,” he said. “In a different hand from the rest. It says ‘Suth-Bryttas,’ that is, ‘South British.’ ”

“He means the Bretons,” Brand said. “They live on a large peninsula the other side of the English Sea.”

“So that is not so far wrong. You can find truth on a mappa. If you put it there.”

“I still don't see how it is going to make us rich,” replied Brand. “That is what you said it was going to do.”

“This won't.” Shef rolled the vellum up, thrust it aside. “But the idea of it may. We need to know more important things. Remember—if we had not known where Riccall was, that day in the snow, we might have been cut off and destroyed in the end by the churls. When I set off for Beverley, I knew the direction, but I would never have found the minster if we had not had a guide who knew the roads. The only way I found Bridlington and the man who could sail us out of a trap was because I had traveled the road already.

“You see what I mean? We have plenty of knowledge, but it all depends on people. But no one person knows enough for all the things we need. What a mappa should be is a store of knowledge from many people. Now if we had that we could find our way to places we had not been before. We could tell directions, work out distances.”

“So we make a knowledge mappa,” said Brand firmly. “Now tell me about rich.”

“We have one other precious possession,” said Shef. “And this we did not get from the Christians. Thorvin will tell you. I bought it myself. From Munin, the raven of Othin. I bought it with pain. Show them, Thorvin.”

From inside his tunic Thorvin pulled a thin square board. On it were lines of small runic letters, each one scratched with a knife and then marked out with red dye.

“It is a riddle. The one who solves the riddle will find the hoard of Raedwald, king of the East Angles. That is what Ivar was searching for last autumn. But the secret died with King Edmund.”

“A royal hoard,” said Brand. “Now that could be worth something, all right. But first we have to solve the riddle.”

“That is what a mappa can do,” said Shef firmly. “If we write down every piece of knowledge we can find, in the end we will have the right number of pieces to solve the riddle. But if we do not write them down, by the time we come on the last piece we need we will have forgotten the first.

“And there is another thing.” Shef struggled with an image in his mind, a trace of memory from somewhere, of looking down—down on the land in a way no man could ever in reality see it. “Even this mappa. It has one idea. It is as if we were looking down on the world from above. Seeing it all spread out below us Like an eagle would see it. Now that is the way to find things.”

Guthmund the skipper broke the considering silence. “But before we see or find anything, we have to decide where we go now.”

“More important even than that,” said Brand, “we must decide how this army is led, and under what law it shall live. While we were men of the Great Army we lived under the old hermanna lög of our ancestors—the warriors' law. But Ivar the Boneless broke that and I have no wish to return to it. Now I know that not everyone in this army wears the pendant.” He looked significantly at Shef and Guthmund in the group around the table. “But it is in my mind that we should now agree to live under a new law. Vegmanna lög, I would call it. The law of the Way-folk. The first stage to that, though, is for the army to agree in open assembly to whom it will give the powers to make the laws.”

While they worked it out, Shef's mind drifted away, as it often did, from the wrangling debate that immediately broke out. He knew what the army would now have to do. March out of Northumbria to get away from the Ragnarssons, cross the shires of Burgred, the powerful king of the Mark, as fast as possible. Establish themselves in the kingless realm of the East Angles, and take toll of the population in return for protection. Protection from kings, protection from abbots and bishops. In a short while, toll on that scale would make even Brand feel contented.

Meanwhile he would work on the mappa. And on the riddle. And most important of all, if the Army of the Way was to protect its shires from other predators, he would have to give them new weapons. New machines.

As he began to draw, in his mind's eye, the lines of the new catapult, a voice broke through to his half-attention, arguing violently for a place in the council for all hereditary jarls.

That would include Sigvarth, his father, whose crews had joined the column leaving York almost at the last moment. He wished Sigvarth had remained behind. And his horse-toothed son, Hjörvarth. Still, maybe they need not meet. Maybe the Army would not make the rule about jarls.

Shef went back to wondering how he could replace the power of the slow and clumsy counterweight. His fingers itched again to hold a hammer.

Chapter Eight

Four weeks later the itch in Shef's fingers had been eased. Outside the makeshift camp where the Wayman army had halted for the winter, he stood on the catapult range. But the machine he stood behind was not one the Rome-folk would have recognized.

“Lower away,” he shouted to his eight-man team.

The long boom creaked down towards his waiting hands, the ten-pound rock in its leather sling dangling from two hooks, one fixed, one free.

“Take the strain.” The eight brawny Vikings on the other end of the catapult's arm put their weight on the ropes and braced themselves for a pull. Shef felt the arm—it was the top sixteen feet of a longship's mast, sawn off a little above deck level—flex between their weight and his, felt himself beginning to lift off the sodden ground.

“Pull!” The Vikings heaved as one, each man putting his full body-weight and back strength into it, as beautifully coordinated as if they had been heaving up a longship's yard in an Atlantic swell. The short arm of the catapult jerked down. The long arm whipped up. The sling, whirling round with sudden, vicious force, reached the point where the free hook was pulled off its ring, and swung loose.

Up into the murky sky soared the boulder. For a long moment it seemed to pause at the top of its arc, then began the long descent to splash into the Fenland soil two hundred and fifty paces off. Already a half-score of ragged figures were racing forward at the other end of the practice range, jealously competing to seize the ball and run back with it.

“Lower away!” bellowed Shef at the top of his lungs. His crew, as always, took not the slightest notice. They whooped and cheered, beating each other on the back, watching for the fall of the shot.

“A furlong if it's an inch!” shouted Steinulf, Brand's helmsman.

“Lower away! This is a speed test!” bellowed Shef again. His team slowly remembered his existence. One of them, Ulf the cook, ambled round and patted Shef tenderly on the back.

“Speed test be buggered,” he said companionably. “If we ever have to shoot it fast, we will. Now—it's time to get the food on.”

His mates nodded agreement, picked up their jackets from where they had draped them over the catapult's gallowslike frame.

“Good fun, good shooting,” said Kolbein the Hebridean, newly sporting his Wayman pendant, the phallus of Frey. “We'll come down again tomorrow. Time to eat.”

Shef watched them trail back toward the palisade, the cluster of tents and roughly roofed booths which were the winter camp of the Wayman army, wrath and frustration at his heart.

He had got the idea for this new-model catapult while watching Ordlaf's fishermen hauling on their mast-ropes. The giant boulder-thrower of the monks at York, the machine that had destroyed the Ragnarssons' ram three months before, had got its power from a counterweight. The counterweight itself was hauled into the air by men heaving at a windlass. All the counterweight really did was to store up the power the men had put into heaving on the windlass handles.

So why store the power? he had asked himself. Why not just have men attach ropes to the short arm and heave down on it directly? For small stones, like those they had roughly chipped into spheres, the new machine, the “pull-thrower” as the Vikings called it, was magnificent.

It threw in a perfectly straight line and could be aimed for direction within a couple of feet. The effect of the missile it hurled was literally pulverizing, turning rock to powder and smashing through shields like paper. As they learned how to shoot the weapon with maximum efficiency, its range steadily increased out to an eighth of a mile. And he was sure, if only they would do as they were told, that he could launch ten rocks while a man counted to a hundred.

But his team had no notion of the catapult as a weapon. To them, it was just a toy. Maybe useful one day against a stockade or a wall. Otherwise, a diversion during the tedium of a winter camp in the Fens, with even the traditional Viking amusements of raiding the surrounding countryside for girls and money severely forbidden.

But these throwers would work against anything, Shef thought. Ships. Armies. How would a drawn-up battle-line fare against a rain of boulders from men well out of bowshot, each one sure to kill or cripple?

He became aware that a cluster of excited, grinning faces was staring at him. The slaves. Runaways from the North-folk or from the lands of the king of the Mark, drawn to the camp here in the flat, soggy borderland between the streams of Nene and Welland by the astonishing rumor that here their collars would be removed. That food was to be had in return for services. They had been told, though they didn't believe it yet, that they would not be re-enslaved once their masters moved on.

Each of the ragged figures was clutching one of the ten-pound stones, which they had spent the last day or so chipping into shape with a couple of Thorvin's least-valued chisels.

“All right,” said Shef. “Take the pegs out, dismantle the machine, take the beams back and wrap them in their tarpaulins.”

The men shuffled and looked at each other. One of them, nudged forward by the rest, spoke haltingly, eyes on the ground.

“We was thinking, master. You being from Emneth and that. And talking like us and all. So…”

“Get on with it.”

“We was wondering, you being one of us and all, if you would let us have a shot.”

“We know how to do it!” cried one of his supporters. “We watched. We ain't got the beef they got, but we can pull.”

Shef stared at the excited faces. The scrawny, underfed physiques. Why not? he thought. He had always assumed that what you needed most for this task was raw strength and weight. But coordination was even more important. Maybe twelve lightweight Englishmen would be as good as eight heavyweight Vikings. It would never have been true with swords or axes. But at least these ex-slaves would do what they were told.

“All right,” he said. “We'll shoot five for practice. Then we'll see how many you can loose while I count fivescore.”

The freedmen cheered and capered, pushing for the ropes.

“Hold on. This is going to be a speed test. So, first thing. Put the stones close there in a pile so you won't have to move more than a step to get them. Now, pay attention…”

An hour later, his new team dismissed to store what they now called their machine, Shef walked thoughtfully towards the booth of Hund and Ingulf, where the sick and injured lay. Hund met him coming out of the booth, wiping bloody hands. “How are they?” Shef asked. He meant the casualties from his other machine, the torsion-catapult or “twist-shooter” as the Vikings called it, the dart-machine which had released King Ella into death.

“They'll live. One lost three fingers. Could as easily have been his hand, or arm for that matter. The other has most of his rib cage stove in. Ingulf had to cut him to get a piece out of his lung. But it's healing well. I've just smelt his stitches. No sign of the flesh-rot. That's two men badly hurt by that machine in four days. What's the matter with it?”

“Nothing wrong with the machine. It's these Norsemen. Strong men, proud of their strength. They twist the cogwheels tight—then one of them will throw his weight on the lever just to wring an extra turn out of it. The bow-arm snaps—and someone gets hurt.”

“Then it's not the machine at fault, but the men who use it?”

“Exactly. What I need are men who will take so many counted turns and no more, who will do what they're told.”

“Not many of those in this camp.”

Shef stared at his friend. “Not speaking Norse, certainly.” The seed of an idea had been planted.

The winter dark upon them now, he would take a candle and continue to work on the new mappa—the map of England as it really was.

“Nothing left to eat, I suppose, but the rye porridge?”

Silently Hund passed him his bowl.

Sigvarth looked round with a trace of uncertainty. The priests of the Way had formed the holy circle, within the rowan-hung cords, spear planted and fire burning. Once again the laymen of the Way were excluded: no one was present in the dim, sail-roofed shed except the six white-clad priests and Sigvarth Jarl of the Small Isles.

“It is time we came to a clear understanding, Sigvarth,” said Farman the priest, “and that is, how sure are you that you are the father of the boy Shef?”

“He says so,” replied Sigvarth. “Everyone thinks he is. And his mother claims him—and she should know. Of course she might have done anything once she escaped from me—a girl on the loose for the first time. She might have enjoyed herself.” Yellow teeth flashed. “But I don't think so. She was a lady.”

“I think I know the main story,” said Farman. “You took her from her husband. But a thing I cannot understand is this: She escaped from you, or so we hear. Are you usually as careless as that with your captives? How did she escape? And how could she have got back to her husband?”

Sigvarth rubbed his jaw reflectively. “This is twenty years back now. Still, it was funny. I remember pretty well.

“What happened was this: We were coming back from a trip down South. Hadn't gone very well. As we came back I decided, just for luck, to look into the Wash and see what we could find. Usual stuff. Pushed ashore. English all over the place, as always. Came down on this little village, Emneth, grabbed everyone we could. One of them was the thane's lady—I forget her name now.

“But I don't forget her. She was good. I took her for myself. I was thirty then, she was maybe twenty. That's often a good combination. She'd had a child, she was broken in all right. But I got the impression she had not had much joy from her husband. She fought me fiercely to start with, but I'm used to that—they have to do it to show they aren't whores. Once she knew there was no choice, though, she buckled down to it. Had a trick, a way to her—she used to lift herself right off the ground, me too, when she reached her moment.”

Thorvin grunted disapprovingly. Farman, one hand clutching the dried stallion-penis that was his badge of office, as the hammer was Thorvin's, hushed him with a gesture.

“But it's not so much fun in a rolling longship. After we pushed up the coast a bit, I looked out for a good place. Bit of strandhögg, I thought. Light fires, warm up, roast some beef, get out a couple of barrels of ale, have some sport for an evening. Put the boys in good heart for the ocean crossing. But not take any risks, mind, not even with the English.

“So, I picked a spot. Stretch of beach backed by good, high cliffs. One stream leading down to it through a gully.

I put half a dozen men there just to make sure none of the girls we'd caught escaped. I put one man on each of the cliffs to either side, with a horn to blow if he saw any sign of a rescue party turning up. And because of the cliffs, I gave each of them a rope tied to a stake. If we were surprised, they blew the horns, the party in the gully ran back, and the ones on the cliffs slid down the ropes. We had the boats, three of them, tethered bow and stem—bow to the beach, stern to an anchor well out to sea. In a hurry all we had to do was pile in, loose the bow-ropes, haul ourselves off on the stern-rope and set sail. But the main thing is, I had the beach sealed off tight as a nun.“

“You would know,” said Thorvin.

Sigvarth's teeth flashed again. “None better, unless he's a bishop.”

“But she got away,” Farman prompted.

“Right. We had our fun. I did it with her, on the sand, twice. It got dark. Now, I wasn't passing her round, but the men had a dozen girls they were sharing, and I felt like joining in—hah, I was thirty then! So I hauled in my boat, I left my clothes on the sand and got in it with her. I pulled out on the stern-rope, maybe thirty yards out, and made fast. I left her there, dived in the sea and swam back. Fine, big blonde girl there I fancied. She'd been making a lot of noise.

“But after a while—I'd got a roast rib in one hand and a mug of ale in the other—the men started shouting. Just outside the light of our fires there was a shape on the sand, a big shape. Beached whale, we thought, but when we ran over, it wheezed and came at the first man there. He backed off, we looked for our weapons. I thought it might be a hrosswhale. Whaleross, some say.

“And right that moment there was a lot of shouting from the top of one cliff. The lad up there, Stig was his name, shouting for help. Not blowing his horn, mind, but wanting help. Sounded as if he was fighting something. So I climbed up the rope to see what it was.”

“And what was it?”

“Nothing, when I got there. But he said, near in tears, he'd been attacked by a skoffin.”

“A skoffin?” said Vigleik. “What's that?”

Skaldfinn laughed. “You must talk more to old wives, Vigleik. A skoffin is the opposite of a skuggabaldur. The one is the get of a male fox and a she-cat, the other of a tom and a vixen.”

“Well,” Sigvarth concluded, “by this time everyone was getting unsettled. So I left Stig up there, told him not to be a fool, slid back down the rope and told everyone to get back on board.

“But when we hauled the boat in, the woman was gone. We searched the beach. I checked the party in the gully—they hadn't moved an inch while we were getting ready, swore no one had passed. I went up both ropes to both cliffs. No one had seen anything. In the end I was so angry, what with one thing and another, that I threw Stig down the cliff for sniveling. He broke his neck and died. I had to pay wergild for him when I got home. But I never saw the woman again till last year. And then I was too busy to ask for her story.”

“Aye. We know what you were busy with,” said Thorvin. “The business of the Boneless One.”

“Are you a Christian to whine about it?”

“What it comes to,” said Farman, “is that she could have swum away in the confusion. You swam to shore.”

“She would have had to do it fully dressed, for her clothes were gone too. And not just to shore. A long way, in the dark sea, to get round the cliffs. For she was not on the beach, I am sure of that.”

“A whaleross. A skoffin. A woman who vanishes and reappears carrying a child,” mused Farman. “All this could be explained. Yet there are more ways than one of explaining it.”

“You think he is not my son,” challenged Sigvarth. “You think he is the son of one of your gods. Well, I tell you: I honor no god save Ran the goddess who lives in the deep, whom drowned sailors go to. And the other world you talk of, the visions you boast of—I have heard them speak of it in camp about this Way of yours—I think them all born of drink and sour food, and one man's blather infecting another, till everyone must tell his tale of visions to keep in with the rest. There is no more sense in it than there is in skoffins. The boy is my son. He looks like me. He acts like me—like I did when I was young.”

“He acts like a man,” snarled Thorvin. “You act like a rutting beast. I tell you that though you have gone many years without regret and without punishment; still there is fate for such as you. Our poet said it when he saw the Hel-world:

Sigvarth rose to his feet, left hand on sword. “And I will tell you a better poem. The Boneless One's skald made it last year, of the death of Ragnar:

“That is poetry for a warrior. For one who knows how to live and how to die. There will be a place for such a one among the halls of Othin, no matter how many women he has made weep. Poetry for a Viking. Not a milksop.”

In the silence Farman said mildly, “Well, Sigvarth. We thank you for your tale. We will remember you are a jarl and one of our council. You will remember you live by the law of the Waymen now, no matter what you think of our beliefs.”

He pulled open the ropes of the precinct, to let Sigvarth out. As the jarl left, the priests began to talk in low tones.

Shef-who-was-not-Shef knew that the darkness round him had not been breached by light for twice a hundred years. For a while the stone chamber and the earth round it had glowed with the phosphorescence of corruption, lighting up the silent, heaving struggle of the maggots as they consumed the bodies, the eyes and livers and flesh and marrow of all that had been placed there. But the maggots were gone now, the many corpses reduced to white bone, as hard and inert as the whetstone lying under his own fleshless hand. They were nothing but possessions now, without life of their own, as unchallengeably his as the chests and coffers round his feet and under his chair, as the chair itself—the massive wooden high seat in which he had settled himself seven generations ago, for eternity. The chair had rotted underground with the owner—the two had grown into one another. Yet still the figure sat unmoving, the empty eye-sockets staring out into the earth and beyond.

He, the figure in the chair, remembered how they had placed him there. The men had dug the great trench, slid into it the longship on its rollers, placed the high seat as he had directed on the poop, by the steering oar. He had settled himself in it, placed the whetstone with its carved savage faces on one armrest, laid his long broadsword on the other. He had nodded to the men to continue. First they brought in his war-stallion, held it facing him, and poleaxed it where it stood. Then his four best hounds, each one pierced to the heart. He watched carefully to see that each one was quite dead. He had no mind to share his everlasting tomb with a trapped meat-eater. Then the hawks, each one quickly strangled. Then the women, a pair of beauties, weeping and calling out in spite of the poppy forced upon them; the men strangled them quickly.

Then they brought in the chests, two men to each one, grunting with the weight of them. He watched carefully again to see there was no delay, no reluctance. They would have kept his wealth if they dared. They would dig it up again it they dared. They would not dare. For a year to come the barrow would glow blue with the light of corruption beneath it; a man with a torch would ignite the balefires of the reek coming out of the ground. Tales would spread, till all feared and dreaded the grave-mound of Kar the Old. If grave it was for Kar.

The chests stacked, the men began to deck over the belly of the longship with its freight of corpses. Others piled stones around and behind him till they reached the height of the top of his seat with its silken canopy. Over them they laid stout beams, and over them in turn a sheet of lead. Around his feet and over his chests they tucked tarred canvas. In time the wood would rot, the earth fall in on the longship's hold, the dead women and beasts would lie mingled in confusion. Still he would sit here, looking out over them, the earth held at bay. They had been buried dead. He would not be.

When all was done a man came to stand in front of the seat: Kol the Niggard, men would call him, son of Kar the Old. “It is done, Father,” he said, face twisting between fear and hate.

Kar nodded, eyes unblinking. He would not wish his son luck or farewell. If he had had the black blood of his ancestors, he would have joined his father in the mound, preferring to sit with his treasures for eternity than to hand them over to the new king pushing up from the South, to enjoy life with dishonor, to be an under-king.

The trusted warriors, six of them, began to slaughter the slave-laborers and stack them round the ship. Then they and his son scrambled out. A few moments later the loose earth of the digging began to fall in clods on the deck, covering it quickly, mounting up over the planks and the canvas and the sheet of lead. Slowly he saw it rise, to his knees, to his chest. He sat unmoving, even when earth began to trickle into the stone chamber itself, to cover his hand on the whetstone.

Still a glimmer of light. More earth raining down. The glimmer gone, the dark deepening. Kar settled back finally, sighing with relief and contentment. Now he had things as they should be. And so they would stay forever. His.

He wondered if he would die down here. What could kill him? It did not matter. Whether he died or lived he would always be the same. The hogboy, the haugbui. The dweller in the mound.

Shef woke with a start and a gasp. Underneath the coarse blankets his body streamed sweat. Reluctantly he pulled them back, rolled with a grunt from the string-bed to the wet, tramped-earth floor. He seized his hemp shirt as the freezing air hit him, pulled it on, groped for the heavy wool tunic and trousers.

Thorvin says these visions are sent by the gods for my instruction. But what did that tell me? There was no machine in it this time.

The canvas flap over the booth-door pulled back and Padda the freedman shuffled in. Outside, the late January dawn showed only thick mist rising from the waterlogged ground. The Army would frowst late in its blankets today.

The names of the men in the dream: Kar and Kol. They did not sound English. Nor Norse, altogether. But then the Norsemen were great ones for shortening names. Guthmund was Gummi to his friends, Thormoth became Tommi. The English did it too. Those names in King Edmund's riddle: “…Wuffa, Wehha's offspring…”

“What's your long name, Padda?” he asked.

“Paldriht, master. Haven't been called that since my mother died.”

“What would Wuffa be short for?”

“Don't know. Wulfstan, maybe. Could be anything. I knew a man once called Wiglaf. Very noble name. We called him Wuffa.”

Shef pondered as Padda began to blow carefully on the embers of last night's fire.

Wuffa, son of Wehha. Wulfstan or Wiglaf, son of—Weohstan, it might be, or Weohward. He did not know those names—he must find out more.

As Padda fiddled with wood and water, his pans and the everlasting porridge, Shef unrolled the vellum mappamundi from its waxcloth wrapping, spread it out, corners weighted, on his trestle table. He no longer looked at the completed side, the side with the map of Christian learning. On the reverse he had begun to draw a different map. A map of England, putting down all the information he could uncover. He would sketch in rough outlines, names, distances, on birchbark. Only after information had been checked and proved consistent with what he knew already would he ink it in on the vellum itself. Yet the map still grew with every day, dense and accurate for Norfolk and the Fens, doubtful and patchy for Northumbria away from York, completely blank down in the South, apart from London on the Thames and the vague mention of Wessex to the west of it.

Padda had found a Suffolk man among the freedmen, though. In return for his breakfast he would tell Shef all he knew about the shire.

“Call him in,” said Shef, unrolling fresh birchbark and testing the point of his scratching-tool as the man entered.

“I want you to tell me all you can about places in your shire. Begin with the rivers. I know already of the Yare and the Waverly.”

“Ah,” said the Suffolk man reflectively. “Well, below that you've got the Alde, which reaches the coast at Aldeburgh. The Deben next. That comes into the coast ten mile south of Aldeburgh at Woodbridge, near where they say the old kings lie. We had our own kings in Suffolk once, you know, before the Christians came….”

Minutes later Shef pounded into the forge where Thorvin was preparing for another day of forging iron cogwheels for the twist-shooters.

“I want you to call the army council together,” he demanded.

“Why?”

“I think I know how to make Brand rich.”

Chapter Nine

The expedition set out a week later, under a lowering sky, an hour after dawn. The council of the Wayman army had refused to sanction abandoning the base and marching out in full force. There were still the ships to be guarded, hauled up on the banks of the Welland. The camp held not only warmth for the remaining weeks and months of the winter but also a laboriously gathered food supply. And it could not be denied that many of the councillors were reluctant to believe Shef's passionate conviction that his mappa held the secret of generations of wealth.

Yet it was obvious that more than a few crews were needed. The kingdom of the East Angles was a kingdom no more, and all its mightiest warriors and noblest thanes were dead. Still, there was the chance that they might rally if provoked. A small party of Vikings could be cut off and massacred by overwhelming numbers. Brand had rumbled that foolish as he thought the whole expedition might be, he had no wish to be woken one morning by the heads of his messmates being thrown into the camp. In the end Shef had been allowed to call for volunteers. In the tedium of winter encampment, there had been no trouble in finding them.

A thousand Vikings rode out on their ponies, eight long hundreds and forty, riding crew by crew as was their custom. Hundreds of pack-ponies carried tents and bedding, food and ale, led in strings by English thralls. At the center of the column, though, was something new: a string of carts, carrying ropes and beams, wheels and levers—all the beams carefully notched and marked for reassembly. A dozen pull-throwers, eight twist-shooters. Every machine Shef and Thorvin had been able to construct in their weeks at the base was here. If he had left them behind they would have been forgotten, dispersed, used for firewood. Too much work had gone into them for that to happen.

Round the carts there clustered a mob of thralls, the runaways of the region, each catapult crew stepping by its cart and its machine, each crew captained by one of Shef's original dozen. The Vikings did not like this. Yes, every army needed a gang of thralls to dig latrines, light fires, groom horses. But gangs this size? All eating their share of the supplies? And starting to think they might not be thralls after all? Even the followers of the Way had never considered admitting men who did not speak Norse to full fellowship. Nor did Shef dare to suggest it.

He had made clear to Padda and the rest of the machine-captains that they had better tell their men to keep their heads down. “If someone wants you to grind his meal or pitch his tent, just do it,” he had told them. “Otherwise keep out of the way.”

Yet he wanted his recruits to feel different. To take pride in the speed and dexterity with which they leapt to their places, turned the levers or whirled the beams.

To mark them out, every catapult-man now wore an identical jerkin, made only of rough sackcloth, hodden gray, over the rags they had been wearing when they arrived. On it each man had carefully stitched a white linen double-headed hammer, front and back. Each man, too, had a belt or at least a rope round his middle, and all those who owned them bore knives.

Maybe it would work, thought Shef, watching the carts creak forward, Vikings in front and behind, jerkined freedmen in the middle. Certainly they were much better already with the catapults than the Vikings they had replaced. And even on a winter day in the raw cold, they looked cheerful.

A strange noise split the sky. At the front of the train of carts, Cwicca, a thrall who had come in a few days before, escaped from the shrine of St. Guthlac at Crowland, had brought with him his treasured bagpipe. Now he led the carts along, cheeks puffed, fingers skipping briskly on the bone pipe. His mates cheered and stepped out harder, some of them whistling in unison.

A Viking from the vanguard turned his horse, scowling angrily, front teeth sticking out. It was Hjörvarth Sigvarthsson, Shef saw. His half brother. Sigvarth had volunteered instantly to join the expedition with all his crews, too quickly to be turned down, quicker even than Thorvin or the Hebrideans or the still-doubting Brand. Now Hjörvarth trotted back menacingly towards the piper, sword half-drawn. The music wailed discordantly and died.

Shef turned his pony between them, slipped off it and handed the reins to Padda.

“Walking keeps you warm,” he said to Hjörvarth, staring up at the angry face. “Music makes the miles go faster. Let him play.”

Hjörvarth hesitated, jerked his pony's head round. “Suit yourself,” he flung over one shoulder. “But harps are for warriors. Only a hornung would listen to a pipe.”

Hornung, gadderling, thought Shef. How many words there are for bastard. It doesn't stop men putting them in women's bellies. Maybe Godive has one by now.

“Keep playing,” he shouted to the bagpiper. “Play ‘The Quickbeam Dance.’ Play it for Thunor, son of Woden, and to Hell with the monks.”

The piper started again to play the jerky quickstep tune, louder this time, backed by united defiant whistling. The carts rolled forward behind the patient oxen.

“You're sure King Burgred means to take over the East Angles?” King Ethelred asked. His question ended in a fit of coughing—sharp, high-pitched, going on again after it had seemed to stop.

Ethelred's younger brother, Alfred the atheling, looked at him with concern. Also, a reluctant calculation. Alfred's father, Ethelwulf—king of Wessex, conqueror of the Vikings at Oakley—had had four strong sons: Ethelstan, Ethelbald, Ethelbert, Ethelred. By the time the fifth came along it had seemed so unlikely that he would ever be called upon to rule that the royal mark of the house of Wessex, the Ethel-name, had seemed unnecessary. He had been called Alfred after his mother's people.

By now the father and three of the strong sons were dead. None killed in battle, but all killed by the Vikings. For years they had marched in all weathers, lain in damp cloaks, drunk water from streams that flowed through the camps of armies careless of where they dumped their waste or relieved themselves. They died of the bowel-cramps, of the lung-sickness. Now Ethelred had contracted the wasting-cough. How long might it be, Alfred thought, till he was the last atheling of the royal house of Wessex? Till then, though, he must serve.

“Quite sure,” he replied. “He said so openly. He was mustering his men when I left. But he's not making it too obvious. He has an under-king, an East Angle, to put in charge. That will make it easier for the East Angles to accept his rule. Especially as he has a totem. The man with no limbs, the one I told you of.”

“Does it matter?” Ethelred dabbed wearily at spittle-slimed lips.

“The East Angles have twenty thousand hides. That, added to what Burgred has already, will make him stronger than us, far stronger than the Northumbrians. If we could trust him to fight the heathens only… But he may prefer easier prey. He could say it was his duty to unite all the kingdoms of the English. Ours included.”

“So?”

“We must put in a claim. See, Essex is ours already. Now the border of Essex and the South-folk runs…”

The two men, the king and the prince, began slowly to thrash out a claim to territory, a likely dividing line. They had no image of the territory they were discussing, only knowledge that this river was north of that one, this town in this or that shire. The debate took even more toll of Ethelred's waning strength.

“You're sure they've split?” said Ivar Ragnarsson sharply.

The messenger nodded. “Almost half of them marched south. Maybe twelve long hundreds left behind.”

“But no quarrel?”

“No. The word in the camp was they had some scheme for getting the wealth of King Jatmund, whom you killed with the blood-eagle.”

“Nonsense,” snarled Ivar.

“You heard what they got from the raid on the minster at Beverley?” asked Halvdan Ragnarsson. “A hundred pounds of silver and the same again in gold. That's more than we've taken anywhere. The boy is good at new schemes. You should have settled with him after the holmgang. He is a better friend than enemy.”

Ivar turned on his brother, eyes pale, face whitening in one of his celebrated rages. Halvdan stared back at him placidly. The Ragnarssons never fought each other. This was the secret of their power, even Ivar in his madness knew it. He would take his rage out on someone else in some other way. Another matter to keep secret. But they had done it before.

“Only now he is an enemy,” said Sigurth decisively. “We have to decide if he is our main one at this moment. And if he is… Messenger, you can go.”

The brothers put their heads together in the little room off the drafty hall of King Ella in Eoforwich, and began to reckon numbers, rations, distances, possibilities.

“The wisdom of the serpent, the cunning of the dove,” said Erkenbert the archdeacon with satisfaction. “Already our enemies destroy themselves and each other.”

“Indeed,” agreed Wulfhere. “The heathen make much ado and the kingdoms are moved. But God hath showed his voice and the earth shall melt away.”

They spoke over the clanging of the dies, as each of the lay brothers in the monastic mint put his silver blank in place, struck it firmly with his hammer to drive the embossed design into one side. Moved it to the other die, struck again. First the spread-winged raven for the Ragnarssons. Then the letters S.P.M.—Sancti Petri Moneta. Collared slaves shuffled by, carrying man-loads of charcoal, rolling out carts of rejected lead, copper, slag. Only choirmonks touched the silver. They shared in the wealth of the minster. And any who thought for a moment of his own advantage could reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict and the archbishop's power of chastisement written into it. It was long since a choirmonk had been flogged to death in chapter, or bricked alive into the vaults. But such cases had been known.

“They are in God's hand,” concluded the archbishop. “Surely a divine vengeance will fall upon those who stole the goods of St. John's at Beverley.”

“But God's hand shows itself through the hands of others,” said Erkenbert. “And we must call for help from those.”

“The kings of the Mark and of Wessex?”

“A mightier power than they.”

Wulfhere looked down with surprise, doubt, comprehension. Erkenbert nodded.

“I have drafted a letter, for your seal. To Rome.”

Pleasure showed on Wulfhere's face, perhaps anticipation of the much-rumored pleasures of the Holy City. “A vital matter,” he announced. “I shall take the letter to Rome myself. In person.”

Shef stared thoughtfully at the reverse side of his mappa, the map of England. Halfway through his work he had discovered the concept of scale, too late to apply consistently. Suffolk now bulked incongruously large, taking up a whole quadrant of the vellum. At one edge was his detailed drawing of all the information he had been able to wring out about the north bank of the Deben.

It fits, he thought. There is the town Woodbridge. That is in the first line of the poem, and the line must mean the town, because otherwise it would make no sense: all bridges are wood bridges. But more important is what the thrall says about the place, with no name, downstream of the bridge and the ford. That is where the barrows are, the resting place of the old kings. And who are the old kings? The slave knew no names, but the thane of Helmingham, who sold us mead, listed the ancestors of Raedwald the Great, and among them were Wiglaf and his father Weohstan: Wuffa, then, Wehha's offspring.

If the slave had remembered well, then there were four barrows together in a line running roughly south to north. The northmost of those. That was the place of the hoard.

Why had it not been plundered? If King Edmund had known it was the secret hiding place of the treasures of his realm, why was it not guarded?

Or maybe it was guarded. But not by men. That was what the slave had thought. When he had realized what Shef intended to do he had grown silent. Now no one could find him. He had preferred to take his chances of recapture than go to rob the grave.

Shef turned his attention to practicalities. Diggers, guards. Spades, robes, boxes and slings for hauling up earth from deep down. Lights—he had no intention of digging in daylight with an interested county watching.

“Tell me, Thorvin,” he said. “What do you think we might find inside this barrow? Other than gold, we hope.”

“A ship,” said Thorvin briefly.

“Close on a mile from the water?”

“See on your map. You could carry it up the slope there. The barrows are ship-shaped. And the thane told us Wiglaf was a sea-king, from the shores of Sweden, if he told us true. In my country even rich farmers, if they can afford it, will have themselves buried sitting upright in their boats. They think that this way they can sail over the seas to Odainsakr—to the Undying Shore—where they will join their ancestors and the Asa-gods. I do not say they are wrong.”

“Well, we will soon know.” Shef looked at the setting sun, glanced through the tent flap at the picked men—fifty Viking guards, a score of English diggers—quietly making ready. They would move only after dark.

As he rose to make his own preparations, Thorvin caught his arm. “Do not take this too lightly, young man. I do not believe—much—in draugr or in hogboys, the living dead or dragons made from corpses' backbones. Yet you are going to rob the dead. There are many tales of that, and all say the same. The dead will give up their goods, but only after a struggle. And only for a price. You should let a priest come with you. Or Brand.”

Shef shook his head. They had argued this out before. He had made excuses, given reasons. None of them true. In his heart Shef felt he alone had the right to the hoard, bequeathed him by the dying king. He went out into the falling dusk.

Many, many hours later, Shef heard a mattock strike on wood. He straightened from his crouch over the black hole. It had been a night to forget so far. They had found the site without trouble, guided by the map. They had encountered no one. But where to begin digging? The guards and the diggers had clustered together in silence, waiting for orders. He had had torches lit, to see if he could discover signs of soil disturbance. But the moment the first resinous bundle had crackled to life a sudden blue flare of flame had run up the barrow and into the sky. Shef had lost half his diggers in that moment; they had simply bolted into the night. The Viking escort had held together much better, instantly drawing weapons and facing about them as if expecting to be attacked any moment by the vengeful dead. Yet even Guthmund the Greedy, keenest treasure-hunter of all, had suddenly lost enthusiasm. “We'll spread out a bit,” he had muttered. “Not let anyone get too close.” Since then no Viking had been seen. They must be out there in the dark somewhere, in little knots, backs together. Shef had been left with ten English freedmen, teeth chattering with fear. Lacking knowledge or plan he had simply taken them all to the top of the barrow and told them to dig straight down, as near to the center as he could measure.

At last they had hit something. “Is it a box?” he called hopefully down the shaft.

The only response was frantic tugs on the ropes that led down into the eight-foot-deep hole. “They want to come up,” muttered one of the men standing round it.

“Haul away, then.”

Slowly the mud-stained men were dragged up out of the earth. Shef waited with what patience he could for a report.

“Not a box, master. It's a boat. The bottom of a boat. They must have buried 'un upside down.”

“So break through it.”

Heads shook. Silently, one of the ex-slaves held out his mattock. Another passed a faintly glowing fir-brand. Shef took both. There was no point now, he realized, in asking for further volunteers. He drove the halberd in his hand deep into the ground by its spike, took a rope, tested its anchor-stake, glanced round at the dark figures, only their eyeballs showing in the night.

“Stay by the rope.” Heads nodded. He lowered himself awkwardly, torch and mattock in one hand, into the dark.

At the bottom he found himself standing on gently sloping wood, obviously near the keel. He ran his hand over the planks in the faint torchlight. Overlapping, clinker-built. And, he could feel, heavily tarred. How long might that have lasted in this dry, sandy soil? He lifted the mattock and struck—struck again more firmly, heard the sound of splintering wood.

A rush of air and a foul stench enveloped him. His torch glowed with sudden force. Cries of alarm and scamperings from above. Yet this was not a stench of corruption. More, he felt, like the smell of a cow-byre at winter's end. He struck again and again, widening the hole. Beneath it, he realized, there was vacancy, not earth. The barrow-builders had succeeded in creating a chamber for the dead, and for the hoard, had not merely left it buried in the ground for him to sift through a shovel at a time.

Shef dropped the rope through the hole he had made and swung himself after it, torch in hand.

His feet crunched on bones. Human bones. He looked down, and felt a wave of pity. The ribs he had snapped were not those of the master of the hoard. They were a woman's bones. He could see her cloak-brooch glinting below the skull. But she lay facedown, one of a pair, stretched out lengthwise along the floor of the burial chamber. Both women's spines, he could see now, were snapped, by the great quernstones that must have been hurled down upon them. Their hands had been tied, they had been lowered into the tomb, their backs had been broken and then they had been left to die in the dark. The quernstones showed what they had been and what they were there for: they were the master's grinding slaves. Here to grind his meal and prepare his porridge into eternity.

Where the slaves were, there the master would be. He lifted his torch and turned toward the stern of the ship.

There, on his high seat, sat the king. Gazing out over hounds and horse and women. His teeth grinning out through shriveled skin. A gold circlet still lay on the bald skull. Stepping closer, Shef stared into the half-preserved face, as if looking for the secret of majesty. He remembered the urge of Kar the Old, to keep things his, to have them under his hand forever rather than live without them. Beneath this king's hand there was a regal whetstone, the ensign of the warrior-king who lived by sharpened weapons alone. Shef's torch suddenly went out.

Shef stood stock-still, skin crawling. In front of him there was a creak, a shifting of weight. The old king lifting himself out of his chair to settle with the invader who had come to take what he had hoarded. Shef braced for the touch of bony fingers, the awful teeth in the dried leather face.

He turned from his place and in the pitch-black walked back four, five, six paces, hopefully to the point where he had first descended. Was the blackness just perceptibly reduced? Why was he shaking like a common slave? He had faced death above—he would face death here in the darkness.

“You have no right to the gold now,” he said into the blackness, groping his way back to the high seat. “Your children's children's child gave it to me. For a purpose.”

He groped till his fingers found the torch, then bent over while he worked his flint and steel and tinder out of their pouch, strove to catch a spark.

“Anyway, Old Bones, you should be glad to give your wealth to an Englishman. There are worse than me who would take it from you.”

Torch alight again, he propped it against a rotting timber, stepped up to the seat with its grisly occupant, put his arms round the body and lifted it carefully, hoping the remains of flesh and skin and cloth would hold the crumbling bones together. Turning, he laid it down to face the women's bodies in the well of the boat.

“Now you three must fight your own battles down here.”

He took the gold circlet from the skull and pressed it down on his own head. Turning back to the empty chair, he picked up the whetstone, the scepter that had lain under the king's right hand and tapped its solid two-foot weight meditatively into one palm.

“One thing I will give you for your gold,” he added. “And that is vengeance for your descendant. Vengeance on the Boneless One.”

As he spoke, something rustled in the dim darkness behind him. For the first time Shef recoiled with shock. Had the Boneless One heard his name and come? Was he trapped in the tomb with some monstrous serpent?

Mastering himself, Shef stepped towards the noise, torch high. It was the rope by which he had climbed down. The end of it had been cut.

From above, dimly, he heard grunts of effort. Earth began, as it had done in his dream of Kar the Old, to patter down through the hole.

It took all his effort of will to reason this out. It was not a nightmare, not something to destroy one's wits. Call it a puzzle, something to work out and solve.

There are enemies up there. Padda and his men might have become frightened and run off, but they would not have cut the rope or thrown earth down on me. Nor would Guthmund. So someone has driven them off while I was down here, maybe the English, come to defend their king's mound. But they do not seem to want to come down after me. Still, I will never get out this way.

But is there another way? King Edmund had spoken of this as Raedwald's hoard, but this is the mound of Wuffa. Could he and his ancestors have been using this as a hiding place for wealth? If so, there might be a way to add to it—or to withdraw it. But the mound was solid above. Is there another way? If there is, it will be close to the gold. And the gold will be as close as it can be to the guardian. Stepping over the bodies he walked to the chair and pulled it to one side to reveal four stout wooden boxes with leather handles. Sound leather handles, he noted, fingering one. Behind them, cut neatly out of the planking where the bow of the boat curved down, a square black hole, hardly bigger than a man's shoulders.

That is the tunnel! He felt immense relief, an invisible weight lifted from him. It was possible. A man from outside could crawl along that, open a box, close a box, do what he needed. He would not even have to face the old king he knew was there.

The tunnel must be faced. He pushed the circlet down on his head again, gripped the torch, now burned almost to its end. Should he take whetstone or mattock? I could dig myself out with the mattock, he thought. But now I have taken his scepter from the old king, I have no right to put it down. Torch in one hand, whetstone in the other, he stooped and crawled into the blackness.

As he inched forward the tunnel narrowed. He had to thrust first with one shoulder, then with the other. The torch burned down, scorching his hand. He crushed it out against the earth wall and crawled on, trying to believe that the walls were not closing on him. Sweat sprang out on his head and ran into his eyes; he could not free a hand to wipe them. Nor could he crawl back now; the tunnel was too low for him to raise his hips and edge backward.

His hand before him met not earth floor but vacancy. A push and his head and shoulders were over a gap. Cautiously, he reached forward again. Solid earth, two feet ahead, leading only downward. The builders did not want to make this too easy, he thought.

But I know what must be there. I know this is not a trap, but an entrance. So I must crawl down, round the bend. My face will be in the soil for a foot or two, but I can hold my breath for long enough.

If I am wrong, I will die smothered, face down. The worst thing will be if I struggle. That I will not do. If I cannot get through I will push my face in the earth and die.

Shef crawled over the edge and twisted his body down. For a moment he could not make his muscles force him on, as his legs retained a lingering grip on the level floor he had left. Then he pushed himself down, slid a foot or two, and stuck. He was jammed upside down in the tunnel in the pitch-black.

Not a nightmare, no panic. I must think of this as a puzzle. This cannot be a blind alley, no sense to it. Thorvin always said that no man bears a better burden than sense.

Shef groped round him. A gap. Behind his neck. Like a snake he slid into it. And there was level floor again, with this time a gap leading upward. He heaved himself into it, and for the first time in what seemed an age, stood upright. Beneath his fingers he found a wooden ladder.

He climbed unsteadily upward. His head bumped against a trapdoor. But a door designed to be approached from outside would not open so readily from within. There could be feet of earth heaped on top of it.

Pulling the whetstone from his belt he braced himself against the shaft-wall and stabbed upward with the sharpened end. The wood splintered, creaked. He struck again and again. When he could get a hand through broken wood he wrenched more free. Sandy soil began to patter down into the tunnel, rushing faster and faster as the hole widened and the pale sky of dawn appeared above.

Shef hauled himself exhaustedly from the tunnel, emerging inside a copse of dense hawthorns, no more than a hundred paces from the barrow he had entered so long ago. On the barrow-top stood a knot of figures, staring down. He would not hide nor crawl away from them. He straightened up, settled the circlet, hefted the whetstone and walked quietly over toward them.

It was Hjörvarth, his half brother, as he had almost expected. Someone saw him in the growing light, cried out, fell back. The clump of men drew away from him, leaving Hjörvarth in the middle, by the still-unfilled hole. Shef stepped over the body of one of his English diggers, cut from shoulder to chest by a broadsword. He was aware now that Guthmund had a group of men drawn up fifty yards off, weapons drawn but unready to interfere.

Shef looked wearily at the horse-toothed face of his half brother.

“Well, brother,” he said. “It seems you want more than your share. Or are you maybe doing this for someone who is not here?”

The face in front of him tightened. Hjörvarth pulled his broadsword free, thrust his shield forward and paced down the slope of the barrow.

“You are no son to my father,” he snarled, and swung his broadsword.

Shef lifted the wrist-thick whetstone into its path. “Stone blunts scissors,” he said as the sword snapped. “And stone crushes skull.” He whipped the stone round backhand and felt the crunch as one of the carved, savage faces at one end sank into Hjörvarth's temple.

The Viking staggered, fell on one knee, propping himself for a moment with his broken sword. Shef stepped sideways, measured the blow and swung with all his strength. Another crunch of bone, and his brother toppled forward, blood streaming from mouth and ears. Slowly, Shef wiped the gray matter from the stone and looked round at the gaping men from Hjörvarth's crew.

“Family business,” he said. “None of you need be concerned.”

Chapter Ten

His appeal to the Viking council was not going Sigvarth's way. His face, white and strained, stared across the table.

“He killed my son—and for that I demand compensation.”

Brand lifted a great hand to silence him. “We will hear Guthmund out. Continue.”

“My men were spread out in the darkness around the mound. Hjörvarth's men came on us suddenly. We heard their voices, knew they weren't Englishmen, but were not sure what to do. They pushed aside those who challenged them. No lives lost. Then Hjörvarth tried to kill his brother Skjef, first by burying him alive in the barrow, then by attacking him with a sword. We all saw it. Skjef was armed only with a stone rod.”

“He killed Padda and five of my diggers,” said Shef. The council ignored him.

Brand's voice rumbled gently but decisively. “As I see it there can be no claim for compensation, Sigvarth. Not even for a son. He tried to kill a fellow member of the Army, protected under our Wayman-law. If he had succeeded I would have hanged him. He tried, too, to bury his brother in the barrow. And if he had succeeded in that, think what we would have lost!” He shook his head with disbelieving wonder.

At least two hundred pounds' weight of gold. Much of it of workmanship far exceeding the value of the raw metal. Carved bowls from the Rome-folk. Great torques of pale gold from the land of the Irish. Coins with the heads of unknown Rome-folk rulers. Work of Cordoba and Miklagarth, of Rome and Germany. And added to it, sackloads of silver wedged into the tunnel mouth where the kings' depositors had put them over the generations. Enough there, all told, for every man of the whole Wayman army to be rich for life. If they lived to spend it. Secrecy had vanished with the dawn.

Sigvarth shook his head, his expression unchanging. “They were brothers,” he muttered. “One man's sons.”

“So there must be no question of vengeance,” Brand said. “You cannot avenge one son on another, Sigvarth. You must swear to that.” He paused. “It was the doom of the Norns. An ill doom, maybe. But not to be averted by mortals.”

Sigvarth nodded this time. “Aye. The Norns. I will swear, Brand. Hjörvarth will lie unavenged. For me.”

“Good. Because I tell you all,” Brand looked round the table, “with all this wealth in hand I have grown nervous as a virgin at an orgy. The countryside must be buzzing with tales of what we have found. Shef's freedmen talk to the churls and the thralls. News goes both ways. They have heard that a new army has marched into this kingdom. An English army, from the Mark, come to reestablish the kingdom. You can be sure they have already heard of us. If they have any sense they will be marching already to cut us off from our ships, or to pursue us there if they are too late.

“I want camp struck and the men marching before the sun sets. March through the night and the next day. No halt before sunset tomorrow. Tell the skippers, get the beasts fed and the men in ranks.”

As the group broke up and Shef moved to see to his carts, Brand caught him by the shoulder.

“Not you,” he said. “If I had polished steel I would make you look in it. Do you know you have white hairs on your temples? Guthmund will take care of the carts. You travel in the back of a cart, with my cloak over you as well as your own.” He passed over a flask.

“Drink this. I saved it. Call it a gift from Othin, for the man who found the greatest hoard since Gunnar hid the gold of the Niflungs.” Shef caught the odor of fermented honey: Othin's mead.

Brand looked down at the ghastly, ruined face—one eye sunk and shriveled, cheekbones standing out over tight-drawn muscles. I wonder, he thought. What price did the draugr in the mound take for his treasure? He clapped Shef again on the shoulder and hurried away, shouting for Steinulf and his skippers.

They marched with Shef in the back of a cart, flask drained now, lulled to half-sleep by the rocking motion. Wedged in between two treasure-chests and a catapult-beam. Close beside each treasure-cart marched a dozen men of Brand's own crews, now detailed as close escort. Round them clustered the freedmen catapulteers, spurred on by the rumor that they too might earn a small share, hold money for the first time in their lives. To front and rear and on the flanks rode strong squads of Vikings, alert for ambush or pursuit. Brand rode the length of the column, changing horses as often as one flagged beneath his weight, continually cursing all to greater effort Someone else's job now, thought Shef. He slid again into a deeper slumber.

He was riding across a plain. More than riding—spurring frantically. His horse groaned under him as he raked the rowels again across its bleeding ribs, fought against the bit, was mastered and driven on. Shef rose in his saddle and looked behind. Over the brow of a low hill, a horde of riders pouring after him, one well out in front on a mighty gray. Athils, king of Sweden.

And who was he, the rider? The Shef-mind could not tell what body it occupied. But it was a man strikingly tall, so tall that even from the great horse he rode his long legs brushed the ground. The tall man had companions, the Shef-mind noted. Strange ones too. Nearest him was a man so broad in the shoulder that it seemed he had a milkmaid's yoke under his leather jacket. His face was broad also, his nose snub, his expression one of animal resource. His horse, too, was laboring, unable to bear the weight at the speed they were traveling. By him was a man unusually handsome—tall, fair, eyelashes like a girl's. Nine or ten other riders pounded along at the same killing pace in front of the tall man and his two nearest companions.

“They will catch us!” called the broad man. He detached a short axe from his saddle-bow and shook it cheerfully.

“Not yet, Böthvar,” said the tall one. He halted his horse, pulled a sack from his own saddlebag, reached inside, pulled out handfuls of gold. He scattered them on the ground, wheeled the horse again, rode on. Minutes later, turning on the brow of a hill again, he saw the pursuing horde check, fragment, break into a cluster of men pushing and thrusting their horses against each other while they groped on the ground. The gray horse detached itself, came on, other riders spurring to catch up in its wake.

Twice more the tall man did the same thing as the pursuit continued, each time losing more of the pursuers. But the spurs were having no effect now, the ridden horses moving at hardly a walk. Yet there was not far to go, to reach safety—what the safety was the Shef-mind did not know. A ship? A boundary? It did not matter. All that had to be done was reach it.

Böthvar's horse collapsed suddenly, rolling over in a flurry of foam and blood from its nostrils. The broad man leapt nimbly free, clutched his axe, turned eagerly to face the riders now a bare hundred yards off. Still too many riders, and the king in front—Athils of Sweden on the gray horse Hrafn.

“Drag him, Hjalti,” said the tall man. He reached in the sack once again. Nothing there for his fingers to draw out. Except one thing. The ring Sviagris. Even as death rode toward him, with safety a final spurt away, the tall man hesitated. Then, with an effort, he raised it and flung it far back down the muddy trail toward Athils, slipping instantly from his horse and running with all his might towards the safe haven across the ridge.

At the ridge, he turned. Athils had reached the ring. He slowed his horse, reached down with a spear, trying to pick the ring off the ground with its point and ride on without check. Failure. He wheeled his horse, confusing the men behind him, tried again. Again a miss.

In hatred and indecision Athils looked at his enemy there on the brink of escape, looked down again at the ring sinking in the muck. Suddenly he lunged from his horse, bent down, groped for his treasure. Lost his chance.

The tall man cawed with laughter, ran on after his fellows. As the broad one, Böthvar, turned questioningly towards him, he cried out in triumph: “Now I have made he who is greatest among the Swedes root like a swine!”

Shef sat up violently in the cart, mouthing the word svinbeygt. He found himself staring into Thorvin's face.

“ ‘Swine-bowed,’ is it? That is the word that King Hrolf spoke on Fyrisvellir Plain. I am glad to see you rested. But now I think it is time you stepped out like all of us.”

He helped Shef scramble over the side of the cart, jumped down beside him. Spoke in a low whisper. “There is an army behind us. At every hamlet your thralls manage to get more news. They say there are three thousand men behind us, the army of the Mark. They left Ipswich as we left Woodbridge, and they have heard now about the gold. Brand has sent riders ahead to the camp at Crowland and told the rest of our army to meet us ready for battle—at March. If we join with them we are safe. Twenty long hundreds of Vikings, twenty-five of Englishmen. But they will break as usual. If they catch us before March it will be another story.

“They say a strange thing, too. The army, they say, is led by a heimnar. A heimnar and his son.”

Shef felt a chill sweep through him. A volley of shouted orders rang out from ahead, with carts pulling aside and men suddenly unslinging packs.

“Brand halts the column every two hours to water the beasts and feed the men,” said Thorvin. “Even in haste he says it saves time.”

An army behind us, thought Shef. And us marching in haste for safety. That is what I saw in my dream. I was meant to learn from the ring, the ring Sviagris.

But who meant it? One of the gods, but not Thor, not Othin. Thor is against me, and Othin only watches. How many gods are there? I wish I could ask Thorvin. But I do not think my protector—the one who sends the warnings—I do not think he likes inquiries.

As Shef strode toward the head of the column, brooding on Sviagris, he saw Sigvarth by the side of the road, slumped on a folding canvas stool his men had placed for him. His father's eyes followed him as he passed.

It was just dawn when Shef's weary eyes picked out through the February murk the bulk of Ely Minster, to the right of their line of march. It had been gutted already by the Great Army, but the spire was still there.

“Are we safe now?” he asked Thorvin.

“The thralls seem to think so. Look at them laughing. But why? It is a day's tramp yet to March, and the Mark-men are close behind.”

“It is the fens beyond Ely,” said Shef. “This time of year, the road to March is a causeway for many miles, built up above the mud and water. If we needed to, we could turn and block the road with a few men and a barricade. There is no way round. Not for strangers.”

There was a stillness spreading down the column, a stillness in the wake of Brand. He suddenly stood before Shef and Thorvin, his cloak black with mud, face white and shocked.

“Halt!” he yelled. “All of you. Feed, water, loosen girths.” In a much lower voice he muttered to the two councillors, “Bad trouble. Meeting up ahead. Don't let it show on your face.”

Shef and Thorvin looked at each other. Silently they followed him.

A dozen men, the Viking leaders, stood to one side of the track, boots already sinking in the mire. Unspeaking in the midst of them, left hand always on sword-pommel, was Sigvarth Jarl.

“It's Ivar,” said Brand without preamble. “He hit the main camp at Crowland last night. Killed some, scattered the rest. Certainly caught some of our people. They must have talked by now. He'll know where we're supposed to meet. He'll know about the gold.

“We have to figure that he's already marching to intercept us. So we've got him to the north and the English a couple of miles to the south.”

“How many men?” asked Guthmund.

“They thought—the ones who escaped and rode to meet us—about two thousand. Not the whole York army. None of the other Ragnarssons there. Only Ivar and his lot.”

“We could take them if we were at full strength,” said Guthmund. “Bunch of criminals. Gaddgedlar. Broken men.” He spat.

“We aren't at full strength.”

“But we will be soon,” went on Guthmund. “If Ivar knows about the gold, I bet everyone in that camp knew about it first. They were probably all pissed drunk celebrating when he turned up. As soon as their heads clear, the ones who got away will head straight for the meeting ground at March. We meet them there, we're at full strength, or damn near. Then we'll settle Ivar's lot. You can have Ivar yourself, Brand. You have a score to pay.”

Brand grinned. It was hard, Shef reflected, to scare these people. They had to be killed, one at a time, till they were all dead, to defeat them. Unfortunately that was what was likely to happen.

“What about the English behind us?” he asked.

Brand sobered again, drawn from his dream of single combat.

“They should be a lot less of a problem. We've always beaten them. But if they come up on us from behind while we're engaged with Ivar… We need time. Time to pick up the rest of the army at March. Time to settle Ivar's hash.”

Shef thought of his vision. We have to throw them something they want, he reflected. Not treasure. Brand would never let go of it.

The old king's whetstone from the barrow was still in his belt. He pulled it out, stared at the bearded, crowned faces carved on each end. Savage faces, full of the awareness of power. Kings have to do things other men would not. So do leaders. So do jarls. They had said there would be a price to be paid for the hoard. Maybe this was it. When he looked up he saw Sigvarth was staring round-eyed at the weapon that had beaten out the brains of his son.

“The causeway,” said Shef hoarsely. “A few men can block it against the English for a long time.”

“They could,” Brand agreed. “But they will have to be led by one of us. A leader. One who is used to independent command. One who can rely on his own men. Maybe a long hundred of them.”

For long moments the silence was unbroken. Whoever stayed behind was as good as dead. This was asking a lot—even of these Vikings.

Sigvarth stared at Shef coldly, waiting for him to speak. But it was Brand's voice that broke the silence.

“There is one here who has a full crew to back him. One who made the heimnar that now is carried toward us by the English….”

“Do you speak of me, Brand? Do you ask me to set my feet and those of my men on the path to Hell?”

“Yes, Sigvarth, I speak of you.”

Sigvarth started to answer, then turned and looked towards Shef. “Yes, I will do it. I feel that the runes are already cut that tell of this. You said my son's death was the will of the Norns. I think the Norns are weaving fates together on this causeway too. And not the Norns alone.”

He raised his eyes to meet his son's.

The front ranks of the army of the Mark, hurrying on through the night in pursuit of their fleeing enemies, fell into Sigvarth's trap an hour after sunset. In twenty heartbeats of slaughter the Englishmen, packed ten abreast on the narrow causeway through the marsh, lost half a hundred picked champions. The rest—weary, wet, hungry, furious with their leaders—fell back in confusion, not even coming on again to recover the bodies and their armor. For an hour Sigvarth's men, standing tensely ready, heard them shouting and haranguing each other. Then, slowly, the noise of men retreating. Not frightened. Unsure. Wondering if there was a way round. Waiting for orders. Leaving it to the next man. Ready for a night's sleep, even in a sodden blanket on the ground, before risking precious life against something unknown.

Twelve hours gained already, thought Sigvarth, standing his men down. Though not for me. I may as well watch as anything else. I shall not sleep again after the death of my son. My one son. I wonder if the other is my son. If he is, he is his father's bane.

With dawn, the English returned, three thousand men, to see the nature of the barrier that blocked their way.

The Vikings had dug into the sodden February soil on both sides of the track through the fens. A foot down they had reached water. Two feet down and only mud came up. Instead of their normal earthwork they had dug a water-filled ditch ten feet broad. On their side of it they had jammed into the ground such bits of timber as they could break up from the cart Shef had left behind. A flimsy obstacle to be cleared in a few moments by a gang of churls. If there had been no men behind it.

There was room on the causeway for only ten to stand. For only five to wield weapons. The warriors of the Mark, coming forward cautiously, shields raised, found themselves floundering thigh-deep in freezing water before they were in sword-range of an enemy. Their leather shoes skidded on the bottom. As they edged on, bearded faces glared at them, two-handed axes resting on shoulders. Strike at the men? A man had to struggle up a muddy slope to get in a blow. While he did, the axemen could pick their spot.

Strike at the timbers then, at the breastwork. But take your eyes off the man above you and he would cut arm from shoulder or head from neck.

Gingerly, striving desperately for balance, the Mercian champions probed crabwise into battle, urged on by cries of encouragement from those not yet engaged.

As the short day drew on, the fighting gathered momentum. Cwichelm, the Mercian captain, deputed by his king to advise and support the new alderman, lost patience with the tentative assaults, pulled his men back, ordered forward a score of bowmen with unlimited arrows to line the track. “Shoot at head level,” he told them. “Doesn't matter if you miss. Just keep them down.”

Other men kept up a barrage with javelins, just over the heads of their fighting fellows. Cwichelm's best swordsmen, spurred on with appeals to their pride, were told to go forward and fence—to not rush forward. Tire them out for a while, then change places with the next rank. Meanwhile a thousand men had been sent miles to the rear, to cut brushwood, bring it forward, throw it under the feet of the fighters, let them trample it under to make, in time, a solid platform.

Alfgar, watching from twenty paces back, pulled his fair beard with vexation.

“How many men do you need?” he asked. “It's only a ditch and a fence. One good push and we'll be through it. It doesn't matter if we lose a few.”

The captain eyed his master-by-title sardonically. “Try telling that to the few,” he said. “Or maybe you'd care to try it yourself? Just take out that big fellow in the middle. The one laughing. With the yellow teeth.”

In the dim light, Alfgar stared across the cold water and the struggling men at Sigvarth, padding from side to side as he beat aside sword-strokes, sparred to get in a blow. Alfgar thrust his hand into his belt as it began to tremble.

“Bring my father forward,” he muttered to his attendants. “There is something for him to see.”

“The English are bringing up a coffin,” observed one of the Viking front-rankers to Sigvarth. “I would have thought they needed more than just one by now.”

Sigvarth stared at the padded box, held almost upright by its bearers, its occupant held in place by chest- and waist-straps. Across the water, his eyes met those of the man he had maimed. After a moment, he threw his head back in a wild cry of laughter, raised his shield, shook his axe, called out in Norse.

“What does he say?” muttered Alfgar.

“He is calling to your father,” translated Cwichelm. “Does he recognize the axe? Does he think it forgot something? Drop his breeches and he will do his best to remember.”

Wulfgar's mouth moved. His son bent to hear the hoarse mumble.

“He says he will give his whole estate to the man who takes that one alive.”

Cwichelm pursed his lips. “Easier said than done. One thing about these devils. You can beat them, sometimes. But it's never easy. Never, never easy.”

From the sky above them came a shrill whistling, dropping closer.

“Lower away!” barked the leader of catapult team one. The twelve freed thralls on the ropes thrust right hand over left hand over right hand, shouting hoarsely as they did so. “One—two—three.” The sling dropped into the leader's hands. As it came down, the loader sprang from his kneeling position, shoved a ten-pound rock into position, leapt instantly back into his place, reaching for the next one.

“Take the strain!” Backs bent, the machine's arm flexed, the leader felt himself pulled up on to his toes.

“Pull!” A simultaneous grunt, the lash of the sling, a rock whirling into the air. As it went, it spun, the chipped grooves on its surface setting up an ominous whistling. In the same moment, the crew heard the cry from behind them of the leader of catapult two.

“Take the strain!”

Traction-catapults were strange beasts in that they had most power at maximum range. They lobbed their missiles up in the sky. The higher they went, the harder they hit. The two teams of ex-slaves Shef had left behind with their cart and their machines had accordingly set up their pull-throwers a carefully paced two hundred yards behind Sigvarth's breastwork on the causeway; their missiles would strike twenty-five yards further on.

The narrow causeway was the ideal killing-ground for the machines. They threw perfectly straight, never deviating more than a few feet either side of the center. The English freedmen had perfected a drill designed to ensure that everyone did everything exactly the same way every time, and as fast as possible. For three minutes they shot. Then stood easy, panting.

The boulders dropped death from the sky on the Mercian column. The first one struck a tall warrior on the head as he stood unmoving, beating his skull almost into his shoulders. The second hit an automatically raised shield, shattering the arm behind it, caroming off to smash in a rib cage. The third hit a turned back, crushing the spine. In instants the causeway was jammed with struggling men, attempting to get back and away from a death they still could not see or understand. On the packed mass the stones continued to fall, varying a few yards forward or back as the launchers' heaves fluctuated, but never missing the causeway itself. Only those who crowded forward into the ditch closest to the Vikings remained safe.

At the end of the three minutes the warriors leading the attack saw only chaos and ruin behind them. Those who fled to the rear saw now that at a certain distance they were safe.

Cwichelm, in the fore, waved his broadsword, yelled out in rage to Sigvarth, “Come out! Come out from your ditch and fight like men. With swords, not stones.”

Sigvarth's yellow teeth showed again in a grin. “Come and make me,” he called, in an approximation of English. “You so brave. How many of you you need?”

More hours gained, he thought. How long does it take an Englishman to learn sense?

Not quite long enough, he reflected as the short February day drew toward its end in rain and sleet. The ditch and the stone-throwers had shocked them. But very, very slowly, maybe not quite slowly enough, they had got over their shock and worked out what they should have done in the first place.

Which was everything—and all at once. Frontal assault to keep Sigvarth busy. Spears and arrows launched overhead, to harass. Brushwood under the feet of the fighters, to build up a platform. Men coming up in thin lines, eyes alert, to give poor targets for the stone-throwers. Others floundering through the marsh in small bodies, to try to climb the causeway behind his block, splitting his meager force. Commandeered boats poling along to get behind him and threaten to cut off his retreat. Sigvarth's men were looking behind them now. One solid push by the English, regardless of casualties, and they really would be through.

One of the slaves from the stone-throwers was tugging at Sigvarth's sleeve, talking in broken Norse.

“We go now,” he said. “No more rocks. Master Shef, he said, shoot till rocks gone, then go. Cut ropes, throw machines in swamp. Go now!”

Sigvarth nodded, watching the puny figure scamper away. Now he had his own honor to think of. His own destiny to fulfill. He walked forward toward the front line of the fighters, clapping men on the shoulder. “Move,” he said to each one. “Get your horse. Get out of this now. Ride straight for March and they won't catch you.”

His helmsman Vestlithi hesitated as Sigvarth tapped him, “Who's bringing your horse, jarl? You'll have to move quick.”

“I have something to do yet. Go, Vestlithi. This is my fate, not yours.”

As the feet splashed away behind him, Sigvarth faced the five leading champions of the Mark, probing suspiciously forward, made wary of every opportunity by a long day of slaughter.

“Come on,” he called to them. “Only me!”

As the foot of the center man slipped, he leapt forward with appalling speed, slashed, countered, thrust sword through beard, leapt back again, feinting from one side to the other as the enraged Englishmen closed in.

“Come on!” he shouted, yelling again the words of Ragnar's death-song, which Ivar Ragnarsson's skald had made:

Over the clash of combat, one man against an army, Wulfgar's deep tones carried.

“Take him alive! Pin him with shields! Take him alive!”

I must let them do it, thought Sigvarth as he whirled and slashed. I have not bought my son quite enough time. But there is a way to buy him yet one more night.

It will be a long one for me.

Chapter Eleven

Shef and Brand, standing close together, watched the battleline, two-hundred-men wide, tramping slowly to ward them across the level meadowland turf. Over the advancing line battle-standards waved, the personal flags of jarls and champions. Not the Raven Banner of the Ragnarssons, which flew only when all four brothers consented to it. But above the central reserve a gust puffed out one long ensign: the Coiling Worm of Ivar Ragnarsson himself. Even at this distance Shef thought he could catch the glint of the silver helmet, the scarlet cloak.

“Going to be a killing-ground today. We're too evenly matched,” Brand muttered. “Even the side that wins is going to take very heavy losses. Takes guts to walk forward in the front rank, knowing that. Ivar's not in the front, pity. I was hoping he would be; I could have a go at him myself. The only cheap way for us to win this will be to kill a leader and take the heart out of the rest.”

“Is there a cheap way for them?”

“I doubt it. Our lads have seen the money. They've only heard about it.”

“But you still think we're going to lose?”

Brand patted Shef reassuringly. “Heroes never think things like that. But everybody loses some time. And we're outnumbered.”

“You haven't counted my thralls.”

“I've never known thralls to win battles.”

“Wait and see.”

Shef ran back a few paces from where he and Brand had been standing, beneath the Flag of the Hammer, at the rear center of their own—the Wayman line. It was drawn up in exactly the same style as Ivar's force, but only five-deep, with fewer reserves. Shef had placed his wheeled torsion-catapults—the dart-shooters—in the line, screened only by a single rank of men and shields. Well back behind the line stood the traction-catapults—the stone-throwers—all of them except for the pair he had left with Sigvarth, their half-crews clutching the flapping ropes.

But it was the twist-shooters that would do the work now. Using his halberd, Shef vaulted onto the central cart of the nine he had left, still drawn up, oxen still hitched. He looked up and down the line of men, seeing the faces of his catapult-crews turned toward him.

“Clear your line!”

The Vikings masking the line of fire shuffled sideways. The ropes were wound tight; loader stood ready with bundles of javelins; they were aimed and ready. The slowly advancing line of men was a target impossible to miss. Over the turf came the hoarse chanting of the Ragnarsson army: “Ver thik,” they shouted again and again. “Ver thik, her ek kom.”—“Guard yourself, here I come.”

Shef dropped the head of his halberd forward as he shouted, “Shoot!”

Black streaks, rising at the launch, falling as they flashed through the air. Plunging into the lines of advancing men.

The lever-men were rewinding furiously, javelins dropped into place. Shef waited until the last one was reloaded, the last hand up to signal readiness.

“Shoot!”

Again the thrums, the streaks, the swirls. A hum of excitement rose from the Wayman army. And there was something happening with the Ragnarsson line as well. They had abandoned their steady walk, their chanting wavered and died. Now they were trotting forward, anxious to close before they were impaled like roast pigs—without a blow struck. Running half a mile in armor would tire them nicely. The shooters had done one job already.

But they could not shoot much longer. Shef calculated that he could shoot twice more before the attackers reached the line. Kill a few more men, unsettle the rest.

As the machines leapt back on their wheels for the last time he ordered them back.

The crews lifted the trails, ran their machines back out of the line toward the carts, calling out with triumph. “Shut up! Man the throwers.”

In seconds the ex-thralls were loading and aiming the machines. Vikings would never have done that, thought Shef. They would have needed time to tell each other what deed they had done. He raised his halberd up and ten boulders were hurled simultaneously into the air.

They reloaded as quickly as they could, inched the clumsy frames round as the captains lined them up. A rain of boulders whistled out of the sky, no longer in volleys, each machine shooting as fast as its crew could lower and load.

Harassed and shaken, the Ragnarsson line broke into all-out charge. Already stones were flying high, landing behind the charging men. Still Shef saw with satisfaction a long trail of smashed bodies and writhing injured, like a snailtrack behind the oncoming army.

The two battle-lines met with a roar and a crash of metal, instantly swaying back and then forward as the impetus of the Ragnarsson rush was felt, held, returned. In moments the battle had become a line of single combats, men beating swords and axes on shields, trying to drag an arm down, stab under a guard, crush face or rib with shield-boss.

In unison the white-clad priests of the Way, grouped behind their men round the sacred silver spear of Othin, god of battles, began a deep chant.

Shef hefted his halberd in indecision. He had done the job he meant to do. Should he now thrust forward to stand amid the fighters? One man amid four thousand?

No. There was still a way to bring his machines to bear. He ran to the thralls round their throwers, shouting and gesturing. Slowly, they took his meaning, ran back to the dart-shooters, began to run the wheeled machines up onto the waiting carts.

“Around their flank—follow me! They battle face-to-face. We can get behind them.”

As the ox-carts creaked with agonizing slowness round behind the Wayman position, Shef saw faces turning. Wondering whether he was fleeing from battle. Fleeing in oxcarts? Some of them he recognized: Magnus, Kolbein and other Hebrideans, clustered at the rear in reserve. Brand had put them there, saying their weapons would be difficult to fence with in a packed mass.

“Magnus! I want six of your men with each cart for close defense.”

“If we do that there'll be no reserve left.”

“Do it and we won't need a reserve.”

Halberdiers closed round the carts as Shef led them in a long sweep round the flanks of both battling armies, first the Waymen, then the Ragnarsson troops gaping in surprise. But with battle joined, unable to see the lumbering carts as anything but a distraction. At last they were in a position well to the rear right flank of the Ragnarsson army.

“Stop. Wheel the carts left. Chock the wheels. No! Don't unload the machines. We'll shoot from inside the carts.

“Now. Drop the tilts.” Halberdiers whipped out the pins, let the wagon tilts fall forward. The wound and loaded catapults trained round.

Shef stared carefully at the scene in front of him. The two battle-lines were locked along a two-hundred-yard front, making no attempt to outmaneuver each other. But at the center of the Ragnarsson line Ivar had bunched a mass of men, twenty-deep, pushing steadily forward, aiming to break their outnumbered enemy by sheer weight. Above the central mass flew his standard. There was the place to aim—not at the front, where Shef might hit his own men.

“Aim for the center. Aim for the Coiling Worm. Shoot!”

The catapults leapt in the air as they shot, their recoil on hard planks instead of soft ground sending them skidding.

The thralls seized them and ran them back again, lever-men struggling to fit the winders back in place.

Round the Worm Standard of Ivar there was chaos. In the throng of milling men Shef saw for an instant a long spike with two bodies threaded on it like larks on a spit. There was another man threshing desperately to free a snapped javelin-head from his arm. Faces were turning, and not just faces. He could see shields as well, as men realized the attack had come somehow from their rear and turned bodily to meet it. The Worm Standard still waved, its bearer still protected by the ranks of bodies that had been behind it. Reloading complete, Shef screamed the command. “Shoot!”

This time the Worm went down, to a roar of delight from the Wayman center. Someone seized it, heaved it defiantly up once more, but the Ragnarsson center had yielded five blood-soaked yards, the men in it trying to keep their footing as they stumbled back over wet soil and their own dead. But there were men running now toward the carts.

“Change target?” shouted a captain, pointing at the advancing men.

“No! The Worm again! Shoot.”

Another hail of darts into the tight-packed throng, and again the Worm went down. No time to see if it would come up again, or if Brand would now finish the job. The lever-men were still winding desperately but they would not get in another shot.

Shef reached down with his armored gloves, seized “Thrall's-wreak” and the helmet he had never yet worn in battle.

“Halberdiers in the carts,” he shouted. “Just fend them off. Catapulteers, use your levers, use your mattocks.”

“What about us, master?” Fifty unarmed freedmen still clustered behind the carts, hammer-emblems on their jerkins. “Shall us run?”

“Get under the carts. Use your knives.”

Moments later the Ragnarsson wave reached them in a turmoil of glaring faces and slashing blades. Shef felt a weight roll from him. There was no need for thought now. No responsibility for others. The battle would be won or lost elsewhere. All he had to do now was swing his halberd as if he were still beating out metal at the forge: ward and cut, lunge overhand and stab downward.

On level ground the Ragnarsson followers would have rolled over Shef's outnumbered and half-armed force in instants. But they had no idea of how to fight men in farm wagons. Their enemies were feet higher than themselves, behind oak planks. The halberds Shef had made for them gave Magnus and his Hebrideans extra feet of reach. Vikings lunging under the halberds and trying to haul themselves into the carts were simple targets for the clubs and mattocks of the English thralls. Knives in skinny hands ripped upward at thigh and groin from behind sheltering wheels.

After a few desperate trials the Vikings fell back. Orders barked from the more level-headed among them. Men slashed the oxen free, seized the drag-poles, prepared to haul the carts off the thralls underneath. Javelins poised, ready for a united volley against the exposed halberdiers.

Shef found himself staring suddenly into the eyes of Muirtach. The big man paced forward, his own ranks parting for him, like a great wolf. He wore no mail, only the saffron plaid which left his right arm and torso bare. He had thrown away his targe, and carried only the dagger-pointed longsword of the Gaddgedlar in two hands.

“You and me now, boy,” he said. “I'm going to keep yer scalp and use it for a bum-wipe.”

In answer Shef jerked the pin free and kicked the wagon tilt down once more.

Muirtach charged before he could straighten up, faster than Shef had ever seen a human being move. Reflex alone hurled Shef backward, stumbling on the wheel of the machine behind him. But Muirtach was already in the cart, swordpoint down for the thrust. Shef leapt back again, cannoning off Magnus, unable to drop his halberd enough to stab or guard.

Muirtach was swinging already. A lunging lever from Cwicca deflected his stroke, guided it onto the bowstring of the fully wound but unloosed catapult.

A deep twang, a thwack louder than a whale-fluke on water.

“Son of the Virgin,” said Muirtach, staring down.

One arm of the catapult, released, had slammed forward the six inches which were all that it could travel. In those six inches it had expended all the stored energy that could drive a barb a mile. The whole side of Muirtach's bare chest was crushed in as if from the hammer-blow of a giant. Blood ran from the Irishman's mouth. He stepped back, sat down, slumped back against the wagon wall.

“I see you have turned Christian again,” said Shef. “So you will remember, ‘an eye for an eye.’ ” Reversing his halberd, he drove its butt-spike deep through Muirtach's eye and into the brain.

In the brief seconds of the confrontation everything had changed. Shef looked up and saw only backs. The Ragnarsson attackers had turned away, were throwing down their weapons, unbuckling their shields. “Brother,” they shouted, “fellow, messmate.” One, incongruously, was pulling open his tunic, hauling out a silver emblem. A Wayman, maybe, who had decided to stay with a father or a chief rather than march out of York. Behind them hundreds of men were moving forward in a bristling wedge, the giant figure of Brand at its apex. In front of the wedge the plain was covered only with men running, men limping, men standing in knots with their hands raised. The Ragnarsson army had broken. Its survivors had the choice only of running for their lives in heavy mail or hoping for immediate mercy.

Shef lowered “Thrall's-wreak,” suddenly weary. As he started to clamber from the wagon a flash of movement caught his eye. Two horses, one a rider with a scarlet cloak, grass-green trousers.

For an instant Ivar Ragnarsson stared from his saddle across the lost battlefield at Shef standing on the cart. Then he and his horse-swain were away, clods flying in the air from the trampling hooves.

Brand strode over, clasped Shef's hand.

“You had me worried there, thought you were running away. But toward battle, not from it. A good day's work done.”

“The day's not done yet. There is still an army behind us,” said Shef. “And Sigvarth. The Mercians should have been at our backs this dawn. He has held them twelve hours longer than I thought possible.”

“But maybe not long enough,” said Magnus Gaptooth from his place on the wagon. He stretched out an arm, pointed. Far away across the level plain, a stray shaft of winter sunlight sent up a prickle of darting reflections: the spear-points of an army, deployed and advancing.

“I need more time,” said Brand gruffly in Shef's ear. “Go talk, bargain, buy me some.”

He had no choice. Thorvin and Guthmund joined him as he walked toward the advancing Mercian battle-line, different from the one they had just broken, only—to outward appearance—by the three great crosses towering above it.

Behind them the Wayman army struggled to regroup. Perhaps a third of them were dead or gravely injured. Now even the walking wounded were furiously busy: stripping the surrendered Ragnarsson warriors of weapons and armor, scavenging the battlefield for whatever was usable or valuable—with the enthusiastic assistance of Shef's freedmen—herding the enemy wounded off in the direction of their ships still under guard by the Wash, carrying such few as had survived the attentions of the body-strippers off to the leeches.

The “army” was a mere front. A few hundreds of the fittest men in line to make a show. Behind them, rank on rank of captives, hands loosely roped, told to stand there and be counted in return for their lives. Half a mile behind them, thralls and warriors were hastily digging a ditch, setting up the machines—and rounding up horses and wagons ready for the next retreat. The Wayman army was not yet fit to fight—the heart had not gone out of it, not yet. But all tradition dictated a pause for celebration and relief after surviving a pitched battle against superior forces. Being asked to do the same again immediately was too much.

The next few minutes, Shef thought, would be very dangerous. Men were coming to meet him and his small party: three men walking together, one a priest. Two more pushing a strange, upright box on wheels. The thing in it, he realized an instant later, could only be his stepfather Wulfgar.

The two groups halted ten paces apart, surveyed each other. Shef broke the deep, hating silence.

“Well, Alfgar,” he said to his half brother, “I see you have risen in the world. Is our mother pleased?”

“Our mother never recovered from what your father did. Your late father. He told us much about you before he died. He had plenty of time.”

“Did you capture him, then? Or did you stand back as you did in the fight by the Stour?”

Alfgar stepped forward, hand reaching for his sword. The grim-faced man beside him, the one who was not a priest, caught his arm quickly.

“I am Cwichelm, marshal of King Burgred of the Mark,” he said, “charged to restore the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk to their new alderman and to make them subject to my kind. And who are you?”

Slowly, mindful of the frantic preparations still going on behind, Shef introduced the others on his side, let Cwichelm do the same. Disclaimed hostile intention. Declared intention to withdraw. Hinted at compensation for damage.

“You're fencing with me, young man,” broke in Cwichelm. “If you were strong enough to fight, you wouldn't be talking. So I'll tell you what you have to do if you want to see tomorrow's dawn. First, we know you took treasure from the mound by Woodbridge. I must have it all, for my king. It comes from his realm.”

“Second,” cut in the black-robed priest, staring fixedly at Thorvin, “there are Christians among you who have deserted their faith and betrayed their masters. They must be handed over for punishment.”

“You included,” said Alfgar. “Whatever happens to the others, my father and I will not see you march away. I will put the collar on you with my own hands. Think yourself lucky we do not treat you as we did your father.”

Shef did not bother to translate for Guthmund.

“What did you to my father?”

Wulfgar had not spoken till then. He sprawled in his box, held by the straps. Shef remembered the yellow, pain-racked face he had last seen in the trough. Now Wulfgar's face was ruddy, his lips showing red in the white-streaked beard.

“What he did to me,” he said, “I did to him. Only more skillfully. First we took the fingers, then the toes. Ears, lips. Not his eyes, so he could see what we did, nor his tongue, so he could still call out. Hands, feet. Knees and elbows. And never allowed to bleed. I whittled him like a boy whittling a stick. In the end there was nothing left but the core.

“Here, boy. A memorial of your father.”

He nodded and a servant threw a leather pouch in Shef's direction. Shef loosed the strings, glanced inside, hurled it at Cwichelm's feet.

“You are in poor company, warrior,” he remarked.

“Time to go,” said Guthmund.

The two sides backed away from each other, turned at safe distance. As they stepped briskly toward their own lines, Shef heard the Mercian warhorns bellow, heard a roar and a clash of mail as the English army came on.

Instantly, as prearranged, the Wayman line turned tail and ran. The first stage of its long, planned retreat.

Hours later, as the long winter twilight faded into dark, Brand muttered dry-throated to Shef, “I think we may have done it.”

“For the day,” Shef agreed. “I see no hope for the morning.”

Brand shrugged massively, called the orders to stand down, light fires, heat water, make food.

All day the Waymen had fallen back, screening Shef's machines, shooting as the Mercians deployed, making them check, loading the carts and pack-horses hastily and then falling back in sections to another line. The Mercians had followed them like men anxious to tether a savage dog, closing in, drawing back from the snarls and snaps, pressing forward again. At least three times the two armies had clashed hand to hand, each time when the Waymen had had some obstacle to defend: the ditch they had cut, a dyke along the edge of the fen, the shallow muddy stream of the Nene. Each time, after half an hour's slashing and hewing, the Mercians had fallen sullenly back, unable to force the crossing—and in doing so, exposed themselves again to the lash of the boulders and the barbs.

The Waymen had fought better as their spirits rose, thought Shef. The trouble was, the Mercians were learning too. At the start they had flinched from the first whistle in the sky, the first displayed twist-shooter in a battle-line. Each ditch in the boggy soil made them hesitate. Sigvarth must have taught them a bitter lesson in the fen.

But as the day wore on they grew bolder, seeing the true weakness of the Wayman numbers.

Still holding a half-eaten bowl of porridge, Shef sank back on a pack-saddle and fell into instant sleep.

He woke, stiff, clammy and bitterly cold, as the horns blew for first light. All round him men clambered to their feet, drank water or the last hoarded remains of ale or mead. They shuffled to the crude breastwork they had made in the hamlet Brand had selected for their last stand.

As the light grew they looked out on a sight to daunt the boldest. The army they had fought the day before, like themselves, had grown steadily more ragged—clothes sodden, shields defaced with muck, its men grimed up to their eyebrows, weakened by a steady trickle of casualties and deserters—down to the point where it was barely half again their own size.

It had gone. In its place, drawn up in front of them, rank on rank, horns blasting a continual challenge, stood a new army, as fresh as if it had never marched a mile. Shields blazed with new paint, mail and weapons glinted red in the dawn. Crosses towered over the ranks, but the banners—the banners were different. Next to the crosses, a golden dragon.

From the line in front of them trotted a rider on a gray horse, his saddle and trappings bright scarlet, shield turned outward in sign of truce.

“He wants a parley,” Shef said.

Silently the Waymen shifted an upturned cart to one side, allowed their leaders to edge out: Brand, Shef, Thorvin and Farman, Guthmund and Steinulf. Still silent, they tramped behind the horsemen to a long trestle-table, set up incongruously in the midst of the standing men.

To one side of it sat Cwichelm and Alfgar, faces set. Wulfgar in his vertical box a pace behind them. The herald waved the six councillors of the Way to stools opposite.

Between the two groups sat one man—young, fair-haired, blue-eyed, a golden circle on his head like the old king in the mound. He had a strange, intense look, thought Shef. As he sat down, their eyes met. The young man smiled.

“I am Alfred, atheling of Wessex, brother of King Ethelred,” he said. “I understand that my brother's fellow-king, Burgred of the Mark, has appointed an alderman for the shires once belonging to the king of the East Angles.” He paused. “That cannot be allowed.” Sour looks, silence from Alfgar and Cwichelm. They must have heard this already.

“At the same time I will not allow any Viking army from the North to base itself within any English shire, to rob and kill as has been your custom. Rather than do that I will destroy you all.”

Another pause. “But I do not know what to do with you. From what I hear, you fought and beat Ivar Ragnarsson yesterday. Him, I will have no peace with, for he killed my brother's fellow-king Edmund. Who killed King Ella?”

“I did,” said Shef. “But he would have thanked me for it if he could. I told Ivar that what he did to the king was nithingsverk.”

“On so much we agree, then. The thing is, can I have peace with you? Or must we fight?”

“Have you asked your priests?” said Thorvin in his slow, careful English.

The young man smiled. “My brother and I have found that whenever we ask them anything, they demand money. Nor will they aid us even to keep off the likes of Ivar. But I am a Christian still. I believe in the faith of my fathers. I hope one day even you warriors of the North will take baptism and submit to our law. But I am not a Churchman.”

“Some of us are Christians,” said Shef. “Some of us are English.”

“Are they full fellows of your army? With full rights to share?”

Brand, Guthmund and Steinulf looked at each other as they grasped the sense of the question. “If you say they must be, then they are,” said Shef.

“So. You are English and Norse. You are Christian and heathen.”

“Not heathen,” said Thorvin. “Wayman.”

“But you can get along together. Maybe that is a model for us all. Listen, all of you. We can work out a treaty: shares and taxation, rights and duties, rules about wergilds and freedmen. All details. But the center of it must be this:

“I will give you Norfolk, to rule under your own law. But you must rule fairly. Never let in invaders. And the one who becomes alderman, he must swear on my relics and on your holy things to be the good friend of King Ethelred and his brother. Now, if that is to happen, who shall the alderman be?”

Brand's scarred hand reached out, tapped Shef. “He it must be, king's brother. He speaks two languages. He lives in two worlds. See, he has not the mark of the Way on him. He has been baptized. But he is our friend. Choose him.”

“He is a runaway,” yelled Alfgar suddenly. “He is a thrall. He has the marks of the whip on his back!”

“And of the torturer on his face,” said Alfred. “Maybe he will see to it there is less of both in England. But console yourself, young man. I shall not send you back to King Burgred alone.”

He waved a hand. From somewhere behind them came a flutter of skirts. A group of women were led into view.

“I found this party left behind and wandering, so I brought them along lest worse befall. I hear one of them is your wife, young noble. Take her back to King Burgred and be grateful.”

His wife, thought Shef, staring deeply into Godive's gray eyes. She looked more beautiful than ever. What could she possibly think of him, covered in mire, stinking of sweat and worse, eye sunk in its socket? Her face showed utter horror. He felt a cold fist close round his heart.

Then she was in his arms, weeping. He held her tight with one hand, looked round. Alfgar was on his feet, struggling in the grip of two guards, Wulfgar bellowing from his box, Alfred rising with alarm on his face.

As the tumult ceased, Shef spoke. “She is mine.”

“She is my wife,” shouted Alfgar.

She is his half sister too, thought Shef. If I said that the Church would intervene, take her away from him. But then I would be letting the rule of the Church shape me and the law of the Way. The land of the Way.

This is the price the old draugr demands for his gold. Last time it was an eye. This time it is a heart.

He stood still as the attendants pulled Godive from him, drew her back to incest—her husband—and the bloodstained birch.

To be a king, to be a leader, demands things that cannot be asked of an ordinary man.

“If you are prepared to return the woman as a sign of good faith,” said Alfred clearly, “I will take Suffolk into my brother's realm, but recognize you, Shef Sigwardsson, as alderman of Norfolk. What do you say?”

“Do not say ‘alderman’,” said Brand, cutting in. “Use our word. Say he will be our jarl.”