The Hammer and The Cross

Chapter One

Shef sat facing the crowd of supplicants on a plain, three-legged stool. He still wore a hemp tunic and woolen breeches, with no signs of rank. But in the crook of his left arm rested the whetstone-scepter taken from the mound of the old king. From time to time Shef ran a thumb gently over one of its cruel carved, bearded faces as he listened to the witnesses.

“…and so we took the case to King Edmund at Norwich. And he judged it in his private chamber—he had just returned from hunting and was washing his hands, God strike me blind if I lie—and he decided that the land should come to me for ten years and then be returned.”

The speaker, a middle-aged thane of Norfolk, years of good living swelling his gold-mounted belt, hesitated for a moment in his tirade, unsure whether the mention of God might not count against him in a Wayman court of doom.

“Have you any witnesses to this agreement?” Shef asked.

The thane, Leofwin, puffed out his cheeks with grotesque pomposity. Not used to being questioned, or contradicted, evidently.

“Yes, certainly. Many men were in the king's chamber then. Wulfhun and Wihthelm. And Edrich the king's thane. But Edrich was killed by the pagan—was killed in the great battle, and so was Wulfhun. And Wihthelm has since died of the lung-sickness. Nevertheless, things are as I say!” Leofwin ended defiantly, glaring round him at the others in the court: guards, attendants, his accuser, others waiting for their cases to be heard and decided.

Shef closed his one eye for a moment, remembering a far-off evening of peace in the fen with Edrich, not so very far from here in space. So that was what had happened to him. It might have been guessed.

He opened it again and stared fixedly at Leofwin's accuser. “Why,” he said gently, “why does what King Edmund decided seem to you unjust in this case? Or do you deny that what this man says is what the king decided?”

The accuser, another middle-aged thane of the same stamp as his opponent, blanched visibly as the jarl's piercing gaze fell on him. This was the man, all Norfolk knew, who had begun as a thrall in Emneth. Who had been the last Englishman ever to speak to the martyred king. Who had appeared—God only knew how—as leader of the pagans. Had dug up the hoard of Raedwald. Defeated the Boneless One himself. And somehow had gained the friendship and support of Wessex as well. Who could tell how all that had come about? Dog's name or no, he was a man too strange to lie to.

“No,” said the second thane. “I do not deny that was what the king decided, and I agreed to it as well. But when it was agreed, the understanding behind the decision was this: That after ten years' time the land in question should revert from Leofwin to my grandson, whose father was also killed by the pagans. That is to say, by the—by the men from the North. In the state in which it was in the beginning! But what this man has done”—indignation replaced caution in his voice—“what Leofwin has done ever since is to ruin it! He has cut the timber and planted no more, he has let the dykes and the drains go to ruin, he has turned ploughland into a watermeadow for hay. The land will be worth nothing at the end of his lease.”

“Nothing?”

The complainant hesitated. “Not as much as before, lord jarl.”

Somewhere outside a bell rang, a sign that the dooms-giving was over for the day. But this case must be decided. It was a hard one, as the court had heard already at tedious length, with debts and evasions of them going back for generations, and all the parties in the case related to each other. Neither of the men present today was of much consequence. Neither had seemed of special note to King Edmund, which was why they had been allowed to live on their estates when better men, like Edrich, had been called to service and to death. Still, they were Englishmen of rank, whose families had lived in Norfolk for generations: the sort of people who had to be won over. It was a good sign that they had come to the new jarl's court for judgement.

“This is my doom,” said Shef. “The land shall remain with Leofwin for the rest of his ten-year lease.” Leofwin's red face brightened into a beam of triumph.

“But he shall render an account of his gains each year to my thane at Lynn, whose name is—”

“Bald,” said a black-robed figure standing by a writing-desk to Shef's right.

“Whose name is Bald. At the end of the ten years, if the gain on the property seems more than is reasonable to Bald, Leofwin shall either pay the extra gain for the whole ten years to the grandson in this case, or else he shall pay a sum to be fixed by Bald, equal in value to the worth the land has lost during his stewardship. And the choice shall be made by the grandfather, here present today.”

One face lost its beam, the other brightened. Then both faces took on an identical expression of anxious calculation. Good, thought Shef. Neither is altogether happy. So they will respect my decision.

He rose. “The bell has struck. The dooms-giving is over for today.” A babble of protest, men and women pushing forward from the waiting ranks.

“It will begin again tomorrow. You have your tally-sticks? Show them as you enter and cases will be heard in proper order.” Shef's voice rose strongly above the babble.

“And all mark this! In the court of the Way there is neither Christian nor pagan, neither Wayman nor Englishman. See—I bear no pendant. And Father Boniface here”—he pointed to the black-robed scribe—“priest though he is, he bears no cross. Justice here does not depend on faith. Mark it and tell it. Now go. The hearing is over.”

The doors at the back of the room swung open. Attendants began to urge the disappointed litigants outside into the spring sunshine. Another, the hammer-sign stitched neatly onto his gray tunic, waved the two disputants of the last case over toward Father Boniface, to see the jarl's doom written out twice and witnessed, one copy to remain in the jarl's scriptorium, the other to be torn carefully in two and divided between the litigants, so that neither could present a forgery at some future court.

Through the rear doors there stalked a massive figure, head and shoulders above the people pushing out, in mail and cloak, but unarmed. Shef felt the lonely gloom of judgement suddenly lighten.

“Brand! You are back! You come just at the right moment, when I am free to talk.”

Shef felt his hand gripped in one the size of a quart tankard, saw his own beaming smile answered.

“Not quite, lord jarl. I came two good hours ago. Your guards would not let me through, and with all those halberds waving and never a word of Norse among the lot of them I had not the heart to argue.”

“Hah! They should—No. My orders are to let no one interrupt court of doom except for news of war. They did right. But I am sorry I did not think to make an exception for you. I would have liked you to attend the court and say what you thought of it.”

“I heard.” Brand jerked a thumb behind him. “The head of your guards there was a catapulteer and knew me, though I did not know him. He brought me good ale—excellent ale, after a sea-voyage, to wash out the salt—and told me to listen through the door.”

“And what did you think?” Shef turned Brand about and strolled with him through the now-cleared doorway into the courtyard outside. “What did you think of the jarl's assembly?”

“I am impressed. When I think of what this place was like four months ago—mud everywhere, warriors snoring on the floor for lack of beds, never a kitchen in sight and no food to cook in it. And now. Guards. Chamberlains. Bakeries and brewhouses. Woodwrights fixing shutters and gangs painting everything that doesn't move. Men to ask your name and business. And writing it down when you tell them.”

Then Brand frowned and looked about, lowered his enormous voice to an unpracticed whisper. “Shef—lord jarl, I should say. One thing. Why all these blackrobes? Can you trust them? And what in the name of Thor is a jarl doing, a lord of warriors, listening to a couple of muttonheads arguing about drains? You'd be better off shooting catapults. Or in the forge even.”

Shef laughed, looking across at the massive silver buckle holding together his friend's cloak, the bulging purse on his sword-belt, the ornamental waist-chain of linked silver coins.

“Tell me, Brand, how did your trip home go? Were you able to buy all you meant to?”

Brand's face took on a hucksterish look of caution. “I put some money in safe hands. Prices are high in Halogaland, and folk are mean. Still, when I hang up my axe for good, it may be there is some small farm for me to retire to in my old age.”

Shef laughed again. “With your share of all our winnings, in good silver, you must have bought up half the county for your relatives to look after.”

This time Brand grinned too. “I did pretty well, I admit. Better than ever in my life before.”

“Well, let me tell you about the blackrobes. What none of us has ever realized is the money the stay-at-homes have. The wealth in a whole county, a rich county of England, not a poor stony one in Norway where you come from. Tens of thousands of men, all tilling the soil and raising sheep and trimming wool and keeping bees and cutting timber and smelting iron and raising horses. More than a thousand square miles. Maybe a thousand thousand acres. All those acres must pay something to me, to the jarl, if it is only the war-tax, or bridge-and-road money.

“Some of them pay everything. I took all Church land into my own possession. Some of it I gave at once to the freed slaves who fought for us, twenty acres a man. Wealth to them—but a fleabite compared to the whole. Much I leased out straightaway, to the rich men of Norfolk, at low rates, for ready money. Those who got it will not want to see the Church come back. Much I kept in my own hand, for the jarldom. In future it will make money for me, to hire workers and warriors.

“But I could not have done it without the blackrobes, as you call them. Who could keep all this land, all these goods, all these leases, in his head? Thorvin knows how to write in our letters, but few others. Suddenly there were many lettered men, men of the Church, with no land and no income all of a sudden. Some now work for me.”

“But can you trust them, Shef?”

“The ones who hate me and will never forgive me, or you, or the Way—they have gone off to King Burgred, or to Wulfhere the Archbishop, to stir up war.”

“You should have just killed them all.”

Shef hefted his stone scepter. “They say, the Christians, that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. I believe them. I make no martyrs. But I made sure that the angriest of those who left knew the names of those who stayed. The ones who work for me will never be forgiven. Like the rich thanes, their fate now depends on mine.”

They had come to a low building within the stockade that ran round the jarl's burg, its shutters open to the sun. Shef pointed inside to the writing-desks, the men conferring quietly, writing on parchment. On one wall Brand could see hung a great mappa: a newly made one, devoid of ornament, full of detail.

“By the winter I shall have a book of every piece of land in Norfolk, and a picture of the whole shire on my wall. By next summer not a penny will be paid for land without my knowledge. And then there will be wealth such as even the Church has never seen. We can do things with it that have never been done before.”

“If the silver is good,” said Brand dubiously. “It is better than up North. I have been thinking this: It seems to me that there is only so much silver in this country, in all the kingdoms of the English put together. And there is always the same amount of work for it to do—land to buy, things to trade. Now, the more that there is locked up in the coffers of the Church, or traded for gold, or made into precious things that do not move, the more the less that is left—No, the harder the less that is left…”

Shef floundered to a halt, neither English nor Norse adequate to explain what he meant.

“What I mean is, the Church took too much out of the Northern kingdom and put nothing back. That is why their coins were so bad. King Edmund was less kind to the Church, and so money here was better. Soon it will be the best.

“And not only the money will be the best, Brand.” The young man turned to face his massive colleague, his one eye glittering. “I mean this shire of Norfolk to be the best and the happiest land in the whole of the Northern world. A place where everyone can grow from child to graybeard in safety. Where we can live like people, not like animals scratching for a living. Where we can help each other.

“Because I have learned another thing, Brand, from Ordlaf the reeve of Bridlington, from the slaves who made my mappa and led us to the riddle of Edmund. It is something the Way needs to know. What is the most precious thing to the Way, the Way of Asgarth?”

“New knowledge,” said Brand, automatically clutching his hammer-pendant.

“New knowledge is good. Not everyone has it. But this is just as good, and it can come from anywhere: old knowledge that no one has recognized. It is something I have seen more clearly since I became the jarl. There is always someone who knows the answer to your question, the cure for your need. But usually no one has asked him. Or her. It may be a slave, a poor miner. An old woman, a fisher-reeve, a priest.

“When I have all the knowledge in the county written down, as well as all the land and the silver, then we shall show the world a new thing!”

Brand, on Shef's blind side, glanced down at the taut tendons in the neck, the young man's trimmed beard now sprinkled with gray.

What he needs, he thought, is a fine, active woman to keep him busy. But even I, Brand the Champion, even I dare not offer to buy him one.

That evening, as the woodsmoke from the chimneys began to mix with the gray twilight, the priests of the Way met within their corded circle. They sat in the wort-yard, the garden of a cottage outside the jarl's stockade, in a pleasant smell of apple-sap and green growth. Thrushes and blackbirds trilled vigorously about them.

“He has no idea of the real purpose of your sea-trip?” asked Thorvin.

Brand shook his head. “None.”

“But you passed the news?”

“I passed the news and I got the news. The word of what has happened here has gone to every Way-priest in the Northern lands, and they will tell their followers. It has gone to Birko and to Kaupang, to Skiringssal and to the Tronds.”

“So, we can expect reinforcements,” said Geirulf, Tyr's priest.

“With the money that has been taken home, and the tales every skald is telling, you can be sure that every warrior of the Way who can raise a ship will be here looking for work. And every priest who can free himself as well. There will be many who take the pendant in hope, also. Liars, some of them. Not believers. But they can be dealt with. There is more important matter.”

Brand paused, looking round the circle of intent faces. “In Kaupang, as I came home, I met the priest Vigleik.”

“Vigleik of the many visions?” asked Farman tensely.

“Even so. He had called a conclave of priests from Norway and from the South Swedes. He told them—and me—that he was disturbed.”

“What about?”

“Many things. He is sure now, as we are, that the boy Shef is the center of the change. He has even thought, as we have, that he may be what he said he was when first he met you, Thorvin: the one who will come from the North.”

Brand looked round the table to meet the eyes fixed on him. “And yet, if that is true, the story is not what any of us expected, not even the wisest. Vigleik says, for one thing, he is not a Norseman. He has an English mother.”

Shrugs. “Who hasn't?” asked Vestmund. “English, Irish. My grandmother was a Lapp.”

“He was brought up a Christian, too. He has been baptized.”

This time, grunts of amusement. “We've all seen the scars on his back,” said Thorvin. “He hates the Christians, just as we do. No. He doesn't even hate them. He thinks they are fools.”

“All right. But this is the sticking point: He has not taken the pendant. He has no belief in us. He sees the visions, Thorvin, or so he has told you. But he does not think they are visions of another world. He is not a believer.”

This time the men sat silent, eyes turning slowly to Thorvin. The Thor-priest rubbed his beard.

“Well. He is not an unbeliever, either. If we asked him, he would say that a man with a pendant of a heathen god, as the Christians call them, could not rule Christians, not even for as long as it will take for them to stop being Christians. He would say that wearing a pendant is not a matter of belief, it would just be a mistake, like starting to hammer before the iron was hot. And he does not know which pendant he should wear.”

“I do,” said Brand. “I saw it and said it last year, when he killed his first man.”

“I think so too,” agreed Thorvin. “He should wear the spear of Othin, God of the Hanged, Betrayer of Warriors. Only such a one would have sent his own father to death. But he would say, if he were here, that it was the only thing to do at that time.”

“Is Vigleik only talking of probabilities?” asked Farman suddenly. “Or did he have some particular message? Some message a god sent him?”

Silently Brand pulled a packet of thin boards wrapped round with sealskin from inside his tunic and passed it over. Runes were cut on the wood, and inked in. Slowly Thorvin scanned them, Geirulf and Skaldfinn leaning close to look also. The faces of all three darkened as they read on.

“Vigleik has seen something,” said Thorvin at length. “Brand, do you know the tale of Frodi's mill?”

The champion shook his head.

“Three hundred years ago there was a king in Denmark called Frodi. He had, they say, a magic mill, which did not grind corn, but instead ground out peace and wealth and fertility. We believe it was the mill of new knowledge. To grind the mill he had two slaves, two giant-maidens called Fenja and Menja. But so anxious was Frodi to have continuing peace and wealth for his people that no matter how much the giantesses begged for rest, he denied it to them.”

Thorvin's deep voice broke into sonorous chant:

“So the slaves grew angry and remembered their giant-blood, and instead of grinding peace and wealth and fertility, they began to grind out flame and blood and warriors. And his enemies came on Frodi in the night and destroyed him and his kingdom, and the magic mill was lost forever.

“That is what Vigleik has seen. He means one can go too far, even in hunting new knowledge, if the world is not ready for it. One must strike while the iron is hot. But one can also blow the bellows too long and too furiously.”

A long pause. Reluctantly, Brand got ready to reply. “I had better tell you,” he said, “what the jarl, what Skjef Sigvarthsson told me this morning of his intentions. Then you must decide how this fits Vigleik's visions.”

A few days later, Brand stood staring at the great stone now sunk into the meadow, near the spot where the muddy causeway from Ely debouched into the fields outside March.

On it was carved a curling ribbon of runes, their edges still sharp from the chisel. Shef touched them lightly with his fingertips.

“What they say is this. I composed it myself, in verse in your language as Geirulf taught me. The runes read:

At the top is his name: ‘Sigvarth Jarl.’ “

Brand grunted doubtfully. He had not liked Sigvarth. And yet the man had taken the death of his one son well. And there was no doubt he had saved his other son, and the Army of the Way, by enduring his last night of torture.

“Well,” he said at last. “He has his bautasteinn, right enough. It is an old saying: ‘Few stones would stand by the way, if sons did not set them up.’ But this is not where he was killed?”

“No,” said Shef. “They killed him back in the mire. It seems my other father, Wulfgar, could not wait even till he reached firm ground.” His mouth twisted, and he spat on the grass. “But if we had set it up there it would have been out of sight in the marsh in six weeks.

“Besides, I wanted you here to see this.”

He grinned, turned, and waved an arm in the direction of the almost imperceptible rise that led toward March. From somewhere out of sight there came a noise like the squealing of a dozen pigs being butchered simultaneously. Brand's axe flicked from the ground as his eyes darted round for a lurking enemy, an attacker.

Into sight, from down the deeply rutted track, came a column of bagpipers, four abreast, cheeks puffed. As his alarm receded Brand recognized the familiar face of Cwicca, the former slave of St. Guthlac's at Crowland, in the front rank.

“They are all playing the same tune,” he bellowed over the din. “Was that your idea?”

Shef shook his head and jerked a thumb at the pipers. “Theirs. It's a tune they made up. They call it ‘The Boneless Boned.’ ”

Brand shook his head in disbelief. English slaves mocking the champion of the North himself. He had never thought…

Behind the pipers, a score of them, stepped a longer column of men clutching halberds, their heads hidden in shining, sharp-rimmed helmets, each man wearing a leather coat with metal plates stitched onto it, and a small round targe strapped to his left forearm. They must be English too, Brand thought as they marched on. How could he tell? Mainly, it was their size—not a man much above five and a half feet. And yet many of the English ran to size and strength as well, to look at the hulks whom Brand had seen fighting to the last round their lord King Edmund. No, these were not only Englishmen, but poor Englishmen. Not thanes of the English, not carls of the Army, but churls. Or slaves. Slaves with arms and armor.

Brand looked at them in skepticism and disbelief. All his life he had known the weight of mail, known the effort needed to swing an axe or a broadsword. A fully armed warrior might need to carry—and not just to carry, to wield—forty of fifty pounds' weight of metal. How long could a man do that? For the first man whose arm weakened in a battle-line would be dead. In Brand's language, to call a man “the stout” was a valued compliment. He knew seventeen words for “man of small size,” and all of them were insults.

He watched the pygmies tramp by, two hundred of them. All held their halberds the same way, he noticed, straight up above the right shoulder. Men marching close together could not afford the luxury of individual decision. But a Viking army would have straggled and held its weapons any way that seemed good, to show proper independence of spirit.

Behind the halberdiers came team after team of horses, he noticed with surprise. Not the slow, dogged ox-teams that had dragged Shef's catapults round the flank of Ivar's army. The first ten pairs of horses dragged the carts with the disassembled beams he had seen before, the pull-throwers, the traction-catapults that lobbed stones. By each cart walked its crew, a dozen men with the same gray jerkins and white hammer-insignia as the pipers and halberdiers. In each crew, a familiar face. Shef's paid-off veterans of the winter campaign had seen their land, had left men to till it, and had returned to their master, the wealth-giver. Each one now captained a crew of his own, recruited from the slaves of the vanished Church.

The next ten pairs were something new again. Behind the horses came a thing on broad cart-wheels, a long trail on each lifted high so that the other end bowed like a chicken scratching for worms in the mud. A twist-shooter, the torsion-catapults that shot the great darts. Not disassembled, but ready for action, the high wheels marking the only difference from the one that had killed King Ella: the ones that had brought down the Coiling Worm standard of Ivar. Again, a dozen men crewed each, marching with their winding-levers sloped and bundles of darts over their shoulders.

As they too tramped by, Brand realized that the bagpipe music, though changed, had not moved into the distance. The five hundred men he had seen already were filing past and then turning back on themselves, lining up in ranks behind him.

But here at last was something like an army approaching, scores and scores of men, not in ranks, not marching, but slouched on ponies and flooding forward down the track like a gray tide. Mail-shirts, broadswords, helmets, familiar faces. Brand waved cheerfully as he recognized Guthmund—still known as the Greedy—in front of his ship's crew. Others waved back, calling out as the English had not done: Magnus Gaptooth and his friend Kolbein, clutching halberds as well as the rest of their armament, Vestlithi, who had been the helmsman of Sigvarth Jarl; and a dozen others he knew for followers of the Way.

“Some went off to spend their winnings, like you,” said Shef in Brand's ear. “Others sent the money off or kept it, and stayed on here. Many have bought land. It is their own country they are defending now.”

The pipers ceased their din simultaneously, and Brand realized he was surrounded by a ring of men. He stared round, counting, calculating.

“Ten long hundreds?” he said at last. “Half English, half Norse?”

Shef nodded. “What do you think of them?”

Brand shook his head. “The horses to pull the teams,” he said. “Twice the speed of ox-teams. But I did not know the English knew how to harness them properly. I have seen them try, and they harness them as if they were oxen, pushing against a pole. Cuts their wind off and they cannot use their strength. How did you realize that?”

“I told you,” said Shef. “There is always someone who knows better. This time it was one of your men, one of your own crew—Gauti, who walks with a limp. The first time I tried to harness horses he walked by and told me what a fool I was. Then he showed me how you do it in Halogaland, where you always plough with horses. Not new knowledge—old knowledge. Old knowledge not everyone knows. But we worked out how to hitch up the catapults ourselves.”

“Well and good,” said Brand. “But answer me this: Catapults or no catapults, horse-teams or no horse-teams: how many of your English are fit to stand in a battle-line against trained warriors? Warriors half their weight again and twice their strength? You cannot make front-fighters out of kitchen boys. Better to recruit some of those well-fed thanes we saw. Or their sons.”

Shef crooked a finger and two halberdiers hustled a prisoner forward. A Norseman—bearded, pale-faced beneath windburn, a head taller than his two escorts. He held his left wrist awkwardly in his right hand, like a man whose collarbone is broken. The face was half-familiar: a man whom Brand had seen once at some forgotten campfire when the Viking army had still been as one.

“His three crews tried their luck raiding our lands near the Yare two weeks ago,” Shef remarked. “Tell them how you got on.”

The man stared at Brand with a kind of plea. “Cowards. Wouldn't fight us fair,” he snarled. “They caught us coming out of our first village. A dozen of my men down with great darts through them before we could see where they were coming from. When we charged the machines they held us off with the big axes. Then more of them came round from behind. After they had dealt with us they took me along—my arm was broken so I could not lift shield—to see them attack the ships we had left offshore. They sank one with the stone-throwers. Two got away.”

He grimaced. “My name is Snaekolf, from Raumariki. I did not know you men of the Way had taught the English so much, or I would not have raided here. Will you speak for me?”

Shef shook his head before Brand could reply. “His men behaved like beasts in that village,” he said. “We will have no more of it. I kept him to say his piece and he has said it. Hang him when you can find a tree.”

Hoofbeats came from behind them as the halberdiers hustled the silent Viking away. Shef turned without haste or alarm to meet the rider cantering down the muddy track. The man reached them, dismounted, bowed briefly and spoke. The men of the Wayland army, English and Norse together, stretched their ears to listen.

“News from your burg, lord jarl. A rider came in yesterday, from Winchester. King Ethelred of the West Saxons is dead, of the coughing-sickness. His brother, your friend Alfred the atheling, is expected to succeed him and take power.”

“Good news,” said Brand thoughtfully. “A friend in power is always good.”

“You said ‘expected’?” said Shef. “Who could oppose him? There is no other of that royal house left.”

Chapter Two

The young man stared out from a narrow window in the stone. Behind him, very faintly, he could hear the sound of the monks of the Old Minster singing yet another of the many masses he had paid for, masses for the soul of his last brother, King Ethelred. In front of him, all was activity. The wide street that ran east to west through Winchester was crowded with traders, stalls, customers. Through them pushed carts laden with timber. Three separate gangs of men were working on houses either side of the street, digging foundations, driving beams into the soil, fitting planks over timber frames. If he lifted his eyes he could see, round the edge of the town, many more men strengthening the rampart his brother had ordered, driving in the logs and fitting the fighting-platforms. From all directions came the sound of saws and hammers.

The young man, Alfred the atheling, felt a fierce satisfaction. This was his town: Winchester. The town of his family for centuries, for as long as the English had been on their island, and longer even than that, for he could number ancestors among the British and the Romans too. This Minster was his. His many greats-grandfather King Cenwalh had given the land on which it was to be built to the Church two hundred years before, as well as the land to support it and provide its revenues. Not only his brother Ethelred was buried here, but his father Ethelwulf as well, and his other brothers, and uncles and great-uncles in number more than a man could count. They had lived, they had died, they had gone back to the earth. But it was the same earth. Last of his line, the young atheling did not feel alone.

Strengthened, he turned to face the saw-edged voice that had been grating away behind him in competition with the sounds from outside. The voice of the bishop of Winchester, Bishop Daniel.

“What was that you said?” demanded the atheling. “If I come to be king? I am the king. I am the last of the house of Cerdic, whose line goes back to Woden. The witenagemot, the meeting of the councillors, elected me without debate. The warriors raised me on my shield. I am the king.”

The bishop's face set mulishly. “What is this talk of Woden, the god of the pagans? That is no qualification for a Christian king. And what the witan do—what the warriors do—that has no meaning in the eyes of God.

“You cannot be king till you have been anointed with the holy oil, like Saul or David. Only I and the other bishops of the realm can do that. And I tell you—we will not. Not unless you satisfy us you are a true king for a Christian land. To prove this you must cease your alliance with the Church-despoilers. Remove your protection from the one they call the Sheaf. Make war on the pagans. The pagans of the Way!”

Alfred sighed. Slowly he walked across the room. He rubbed with his fingers at a dark stain on the wall, a mark of burning.

“Father,” he said patiently. “You were here two years ago. It was the pagans then who sacked this town. Burned every house in it, stripped this minster itself of all the gifts my ancestors had put in it, drove off all the town-folk and priests they could catch to their slave-marts.

“Those were true pagans. And it was not even the Great Army that did it, the army of the sons of Ragnar, of Sigurth the Snakeeye and Ivar Boneless. It was just a troop of marauders.

“That is how weak we are. Or were. What I mean to do”—his voice rose suddenly and challengingly—“is see to it that bane never comes on Winchester again, so that my long fathers can rest in peace in their graves. To do that I must have strength. And support. The men of the Way will not challenge us, they will live in fellowship, pagans or no pagans. They are not our enemies. A true Christian king cares for his people. That is what I am doing. Why will you not consecrate me?”

“A true Christian king,” said the bishop, slowly, carefully, “A true Christian king cares first and above all for the Church. The pagans may have burned the roof from this minster. But they did not take its land and revenues forever. No pagan, not the Boneless One himself, has taken all the Church land for his own, and given it to slaves and hirelings.”

That was the reality, thought Alfred. Gangs of marauders, the Great Army itself, might come down on minster or monastery and strip it of its goods, its treasures and relics. Bishop Daniel would resent it bitterly, torture to death every last stray Viking he caught. But it was not yet to him a matter of survival. The Church could re-roof its minsters, restock its lands, breed new parishioners and even ransom back its books and holy bones. Pillage was survivable.

Taking away the land that was the basis of permanent wealth, land the Church had booked to itself from death-bed donations over many centuries, that was more dangerous. That was what the new alderman, no, the jarl of the Way-folk had done. That had taught Bishop Daniel a new fear. Daniel feared for the Church. He himself, Alfred realized: he feared for Winchester. Rebuilding or no, ransoms or no, long view or short view—he would never see it ravaged and burned again. Church was less important than city.

“I do not need your holy oil,” he said peremptorily. “I can rule without you. The aldermen and the reeves, the thanes and the councillors and the warriors. They will follow me as king whether I am consecrated or not.”

The bishop stared unwinkingly at the set young face before him, shook his head with cold anger. “It will not be. The scribes, the priests, the men who write your royal writs and book your leases: they will not aid you. They will do as I tell them. In all your kingdom—if king you call yourself—there is not one man who can read and write who is not a member of the Church. What is more—you cannot read yourself! Much though your holy and pious mother wished you to learn the craft!”

The young atheling's cheeks flushed with rage and shame as he remembered the day he had deceived his mother. Had had the priest read one of her much-loved English poems over and over until he had learned it by heart. Then had stood in front of her reciting it and pretending to read from the book he had coveted. Where was the book now? Some priest had taken it. Probably had scraped the writing from it so he could inscribe on it some saintly text.

The bishop's voice rasped on. “So, young man, you do need me. And not only for the power of my subordinates, the power I lend you. For I have allies, too, yes, and superiors. You are not the only Christian king in England. The pious Burgred of Mercia, he knows his duty. The young man you dispossessed of Norfolk, Alfgar the alderman, and his worthy father Wulfgar, whom the pagans mutilated—they know their duty too. Tell me, are there none of your thanes and aldermen who might not follow one of them? As king?”

“The thanes of Wessex will only follow a man of Wessex.”

“Even if they are told different? If the order comes—from Rome?”

The name hung in the air. Alfred paused, contemptuous reply checked on his lips. Once before in his lifetime Wessex had challenged Rome: when his brother Ethelbald had married his father's widow against all the rules of the Church. The word had come, the threats had been made. Ethelbald had died soon after—no one knew what of—the bride had been returned to her father, king of the Franks. They had not let Ethelbald's body lie in Winchester.

The bishop smiled, knowing his words struck home. “You see, lord king, you have no choice. And what you do does not matter in any case. It is only a test of your loyalty. The man you supported—Sheaf the son of the heathen jarl, the Englishman who was brought up as a Christian and then turned his back on it, the apostate, worse than any pagan, worse than the Boneless One himself—he has no more than weeks to live. His enemies ring him round. Believe me! I hear news that you do not.

“Sever your bond with him at once. Show your obedience to the Church your Mother.”

The bishop leaned back in his new-carved chair, sure of his power, anxious to mark an ascendancy which would last as long as the young man in front of him might live.

“King though you may yet be,” he said, “you are in our minster now. You have our leave to go. Go. And issue the orders I demand.”

The poem he had learned for his mother years ago came back suddenly to the young atheling's mind. It had been a poem of wise advice for warriors, a poem from before Christian times.

“Answer lie with lie,” it had said, “and let your enemy, the man who mocks you, miss your thought. He will be unaware, when your wrath shall fall.” Good advice, thought Alfred. Maybe my mother sent it.

“I will obey your words,” he said, rising humbly. “And I must beg you to forgive the errors of my youth, while I thank you for your prudent direction.”

Weakling! thought the bishop.

He hears news that I do not? wondered the king.

To anyone who knew him—and to the many who did not—the marks of defeat and shame and ignominious flight in the depths of winter, all were visible on Ivar Ragnarsson's face.

The terrible eyes were still there, the eyes under frozen lashes that never blinked. But there was something in them that had not been there before: an absence, a withdrawal. Ivar walked like a man with something forever on his mind, slowly, absently, almost painfully, shorn of the lithe grace that had once marked him out.

It was still there when needed. The long flight from the fields of Norfolk across England to his brothers' base at York had not been an easy one. Men who had slipped out of sight when the Great Army passed that way before now emerged from every lane and byroad as a mere pair of exhausted men cantered back. Ivar and the faithful horse-swain Hamal, who had ridden to save him from the Way. At least six times the pair had been ambushed by angry peasants, local thanes, and the border-guards of king Burgred.

Ivar had dealt contemptuously with them all. Before the pair were out of Norfolk he had slashed the heads from two churls driving a farm-cart, taken their leather jackets and blanket coats, handed them to Hamal without a word. By the time they reached York his kills had been beyond count.

Three trained warriors at once could not stand against him, reported Hamal to a curious, fascinated audience. He means to prove he is still the Champion of the North.

Takes a lot of proving now, his audience muttered, the carls of the Army talking freely as was their right. Go with twenty long hundreds, come back with one man. He can be beaten.

That was what Ivar could not forget. His brothers, plying him with hot mead in front of the fire in their quarters by the minster, they had seen it. Seen too that their brother, never safe, now could not be trusted at all in any matter that required calculation. It had not broken their famous unity—nothing ever would—but now, whenever they talked among themselves, there were three and one, where once there had been four.

They had seen the change the first night. Silently, their eyes had met, silently they did what they had done before, telling none of their men, not admitting it even to each other. They had chosen a slave-girl from the Dales, wrapped her in a sail, gagged and bound her, thrust her into Ivar's quarters at dead of night while he lay, unsleeping and expectant.

In the morning they had come and taken away, in the wooden chest they had used before, what remained. Ivar would not run mad for a while, not fall into the berserk mood. Yet no sensible man felt anything but fear in his presence.

“He's coming,” called a monk, poised at the entrance to the great workshop where the minster-men of York toiled for their allies-turned-masters. The slaves sweating at forge, vice or rope-walk redoubled their efforts. Ivar would kill the man he saw standing still.

The scarlet cloak and silver helmet stalked through the doorway, stood glaring round. Erkenbert the deacon, the only man whose behavior did not change, turned to meet him.

Ivar jerked a thumb at the workmen. “All ready? Ready now?” He spoke the jargon mixed of English and Norse that the Army and the churchmen had learned that winter.

“Enough of both to try.”

“The dart-throwers? The stone-throwers?”

“See.”

Erkenbert clapped his hands. Immediately the monks shouted orders, their slaves began to wheel and tug at a line of machines. Ivar watched them, his face blank. After his brothers had taken the chest away, he had lain without moving for a day and a night, his cloak over his face. Then, as every man in the army knew, he had stood up, walked to the door of his room, and screamed to the sky: “Sigvarthsson did not beat me! It was the machines!”

Since then, since he had called for Erkenbert and the learned ones of York to obey his wishes, the forge-din had not ceased.

Outside the workshop, the slaves set up the dart-thrower, identical to the one that had broken the first assault on York, inside the minster-precinct itself, training across a furlong of open space to the far wall. There a dozen churls hung a great straw target. Others wound feverishly on the new-forged cogs.

“Enough!” Erkenbert himself stepped across, checked the alignment of the barbed javelin, fixed Ivar with his eye, handed him the thong attached to its iron toggle.

Ivar jerked it. The toggle flew sideways, clanging unnoticed from his helmet, the line rising and falling in the air, a monstrous thump. Before the eye could follow it, the dart was buried deep—quivering in its straw bed.

Ivar dropped the string, turned. “The other.”

This time the slaves tugged forward a strange machine. Like the twist-shooter, it had a wooden frame of stout beams. This time the cogwheels were not on top but at the side. They twisted a single rope, embedded in its strands, a wooden rod. At the end of the rod, a heavy sling, its pouch just clearing the ground. The rod quivered against its retaining-bolt as the slaves turned the levers.

“This is the stone-thrower,” declared Erkenbert.

“Not like the one that broke my ram?”

The deacon smiled with satisfaction. “No. That was a great machine that threw a boulder. But many men were needed to move it, and it could shoot only once. This throws smaller stones. No man has made such a machine since the days of the Romans. But I, Erkenbert, the humble servant of God, I have read the words in our Vegetius. And have built this machine. The onager it is named: that is, in your tongue, ‘the wild ass.’ ”

A slave placed a ten-pound rock in the sling, signed to Erkenbert.

Again the deacon passed a thong to Ivar. “Pull the bolt,” he said.

Ivar jerked the string. Faster than sight the great rod leapt forward like a great swinging arm.

Stopping with a crash against a padded beam, the entire weighted frame jumped from the ground. The sling whirled round far faster than Shef's self-designed stone-throwers. Like a streak the rock flashed across the minster-yard, never rising—not lobbed but hurled. The straw target billowed into the air, slowly collapsed on its slings. The slaves cheered once in triumph.

Slowly Ivar turned to Erkenbert. “That is not it,” he said. “The machines that rained death on my army, they threw high in the sky.” He lobbed a pebble upward. “Not like this.” He hurled another at a pecking sparrow.

“You have made the wrong machine.”

“Impossible,” said Erkenbert. “There is the great machine for sieges. And this one for men. None other is described in Vegetius.”

“Then those bastards of the Way have made a new thing. One not described in—in your book.”

Erkenbert shrugged his shoulders, unconvinced. Who cared what this pirate said? He could not even read, still less read Latin.

“And how fast does it shoot?” Ivar glared at the slaves twirling their levers. “I tell you, I saw the stone-throwers hurl another while the first was still in the air. This one is too slow.”

“But it strikes hard. No man can resist it.”

Ivar stared thoughtfully at the fallen target. Suddenly he whirled, yelled orders in Norse. Hamal and a handful of companions sprang forward, pushed the slaves out of the way, and heaved the cumbrous, tense-wound machine round.

“No,” shouted Erkenbert, pushing forward. Ivar's arm clamped irresistibly round his throat, a wire-muscled hand forced his mouth shut.

Ivar's men pushed the machine round another foot, hauled it back a trifle as their leader ordered. One hand still effortlessly holding the limp deacon off the ground, Ivar jerked the string a third time.

The giant door of the minster—oak beams nailed across each other in double-ply, held fast over all with iron bands—exploded in all directions, splinters flying in slow arcs across the yard. From inside came a chorus of wails, monks leaping out, darting back, shrieking in terror.

They all stared in fascination at the great hole the boulder had smashed.

“You see,” said Erkenbert. “This is the true stone-thrower. It strikes hard. No man can resist it.”

Ivar turned, eyes fixed on the little monk in contempt. “It is not the true stone-thrower. There is another kind in the world of which you know nothing. But strike hard it does. You must make me many.”

Across the narrow sea to the land of the Franks beyond, a thousand miles away in the land of the Romans, there within the gates of a minster greater than Winchester, greater even than York, deep silence lay. Popes had had many troubles, many failures, since the time of their great founder. Some had met martyrdom, some been forced to flee for their lives. Not thirty years before, Saracen pirates had made their way to the very gates of Rome, and had sacked the holy basilica of St. Peter himself which was then outside the wall.

It would not happen again. He who was now the equal of the Apostles, the successor of Peter, the holder of the keys of Heaven, he had set his face above all toward power. Virtue was great: humility, chastity, poverty. But without power none of those could survive. It was his duty to the humble, the chaste and the poor, to seek power. In pursuit of it he had put down many mighty ones from their high seats on their thrones—he, Nicholas I, Pope of Rome, Servant of the servants of God.

Slowly the hawk-faced old man stroked his cat, his secretaries and attendants sitting round him in silence. The foolish archbishop from the town in England, the town with the strange outlandish name—Eboracum, evidently, though hard to tell with his barbarous pronunciation—he had been dismissed with courtesy, and a cardinal deputed to show him all honor and provide him with amusement. What he had said had been nonsense: a new religion, a challenge to the authority of the Church, the barbarians of the North developing intellect. Panic and terror-stories.

Yet it corroborated his other information from England: Robbery of the Church. Alienation of land. Willing apostasy. There was a word for it. Dispossession. That was striking at the base of power itself. If that were to become known, there might be too many ready to imitate, yes, even in the lands of the Empire. Even here in Italy. Something would have to be done.

And yet the Pope and the Church had other problems, many more pressing ones, more immediate than this matter of English barbarians and Northern barbarians fighting over land and silver in a country he would never see. At their heart lay the partition of the Empire, the great Empire founded by Charlemagne, king of the Franks, crowned emperor in this very cathedral on Christmas Day 800, a lifetime before. For twenty years now, that Empire had been in pieces, and its enemies ever encouraged. First the grandsons of Charlemagne had fought against each other, till they had hacked out peace and partition. Germany to one, France to another, the great, long, ungovernable strip from Italy to the Rhine to a third. And now that third was dead and his third of the Empire divided once again among three, the emperor himself, eldest son of the eldest son, holding a bare ninth of what his grandfather had ruled. And what did that emperor, Louis II, care about it? Nothing. He could not even drive back the Saracens. What about his brother Lothar? Whose only interest in life was to divorce his barren wife and marry his fertile mistress—a thing he, Nicholas, would never permit.

Lothar, Louis, Charles. The Saracens and the Norsemen. Land, power, dispossession. The Pope stroked his cat and considered them all. Something told him that here, here in this trivial, far-off squabble brought by a foolish archbishop running from his duty, might be the solution to all his problems at once.

Or was the prickle he felt one of fear? An alert to the tiny black cloud that would grow and grow?

The Pope cleared his dry old throat with a noise like a cricket creaking. The first of his secretaries dipped his pen instantly.

“ ‘To our servants Charles the Bald, king of the Franks. To Louis, king of the Germans. Louis, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Lothar, king of Lotharingia. Charles, king of Provence’—you know their titles, Theophanus. To all these Christian kings, then, we write in the same way… ” ‘Know, beloved, that we, Pope Nicholas, have taken thought for the greater security and the greater prosperity of all our Christian people. And therefore we direct you, as you will have our love in the future, to work together with your brothers and your kinsmen the Christian kings of this Empire, to this effect…’ ”

Slowly the Pope outlined his plans. Plans for common action. For unity. For a distraction from civil war and the tearing apart of the Empire. For the salvation of the Church and the destruction of its enemies, even—if what Archbishop Wulfhere had said were true—its rivals.

“ ‘…and it is our wish,’ ” the dry, creaky voice concluded, “ ‘that in recognition of their service to Mother Church, each man of your armies who shall join this blessed and sanctified expedition shall wear the sign of the Cross upon his clothing over his armor’.

“Finish the letters in proper form, Theophanus. I'll sign and seal them tomorrow. Pick appropriate messengers.”

The old man rose, clutching his cat, and left the office without haste for his private quarters.

“Nice touch about the cross,” remarked one of the secretaries busily drafting copies in the Pope's own purple ink.

“Yes. He got it from what the Englishman said, about the pagans wearing a hammer in mockery of the cross.”

“The touch they'll really like,” said the senior secretary, sanding vigorously, “is the bit about prosperity. He's telling them if they do what they're told they can loot all Anglia. Or Britannia. Whatever it's called.”

“Alfred wants missionaries?” said Shef incredulously.

“His very word. Missionarii.” In his excitement Thorvin betrayed what Shef had come to suspect, that for all his scorn of Christian learning he knew something of their sacred tongue, the Latin. “It is the word they have long used for the men they send to us, to turn us to the worship of their God. I have never before heard of a Christian king asking for men to be sent to his country, to turn them to the worship of our gods.”

“And that is what Alfred wants now?”

Shef was dubious. Thorvin, he could see, for all his belief in calm and self-control, was carried away by the thoughts of the glory this would bring him and his friends among the followers of the Way.

Yet it did mean something, he was sure, and not what it seemed. The atheling Alfred whom he had met took no interest in pagan gods, and had, as far as he could tell, a deep belief in the Christian one. If he was calling now for missionaries of the Way to be sent into Wessex it was for a deeper reason. A move against the Church, that was certain. You could believe in the Christian God and hate the Church that His followers had set up. But what did Alfred think he had to gain? And how would that Church react?

“My fellow priests and I must decide which of us, which of our friends are to go on this mission.”

“No,” said Shef.

“His favorite word again,” observed Brand from his chair.

“Do not send any of your own college. Do not send Norsemen. There are Englishmen now who know well enough what you believe. Give them pendants. Instruct them in what must be said. Send them into Wessex. They will speak the language better and will be more easily believed.”

As Shef spoke he stroked the carved faces on his scepter.

Brand had noted this before—that Shef did this now when he was lying. Shall I tell Thorvin? he thought. Or shall I tell Shef, so that he can lie better when need be?

Thorvin rose from his stool, too excited to sit. “There is a holy song,” he said, “that the Christians sing. It is called the nunc dimittis, a song that says ‘Lord, You may let Your servant die, for he has seen his purpose fulfilled.’ I have a mind to sing it myself. For more hundreds of years than I can count this Church of theirs has spread, has spread, across first the Southern and then the Northern lands. They think they can conquer all of us. Never before have I heard of the Church giving up what once it won.”

“They have not given up yet,” said Shef. “The king asks you to send missionaries. He cannot say they will get a hearing, or make the folk believe.”

“They have their Book, we have our visions!” cried Thorvin. “We shall see which is the stronger.”

From his chair, Brand's bass joined in. “The jarl is right, Thorvin. Send freed slaves of the English to do this task.”

“They do not know the legends,” protested Thorvin. “What do they know of Thor or Njörth, of the legends of Frey and Loki? They do not know the sacred stories or the hidden meanings within them.”

“They don't need to,” said Brand. “We're sending them to talk about money.”

Chapter Three

That fine Sunday morning, as every Sunday morning, the villagers of Sutton in the county of Berkshire in the kingdom of the West Saxons drew together, as directed, before the hall of Hereswith their lord, thane of King Ethelred-that-was. Thane now, so they said, of King Alfred. Or was he still only atheling? They would be told. Their eyes roved as they counted each other, assessing who was present, whether any had dared to test the orders of Hereswith that all should be present, to attend the church three miles off and learn the law of God which stood behind the laws of men.

Slowly the eyes turned the same way. There were strangers in the little cleared space before the lord's timber house. Not foreigners, or not obvious foreigners. They looked exactly like the forty or fifty other men present, churls and slaves and churls' sons: short, ill-dressed in grubby wool tunics, unspeaking—six of them together. Yet these were men who had never been seen in or near Sutton before—something unprecedented in the heart of the untraveled English countryside. Each leaned on a long stout stave of wood guarded with strips of iron, like the handle of a war-axe, but twice the length.

Without seeming to, the villagers drew away from them. They did not know what this novelty meant, but long years had taught them that what was new was dangerous—till their lord had seen and approved, or disapproved.

The door of the timber house opened and Hereswith marched out, followed by his wife and their gaggle of sons and daughters. As he saw the lowered eyes, the cleared space, the strangers, Hereswith stopped short, left hand dropping automatically to the handle of his broadsword.

“Why are you going to the church?” called out one of the strangers suddenly, his voice sending the pigeons pecking in the dirt into flight. “It's a fine day. Wouldn't you rather sit in the sun? Or work in the fields if you need to? Why walk three miles to Drayton and three miles back? And listen to a man tell you you must pay your tithes in between?”

“Who the hell are you?” snarled Hereswith, striding forward.

The stranger stood his ground, called out loudly so all could hear. His accent was strange, the villagers noticed. English, sure enough. But not from here, not from Berkshire. Not from Wessex?

“We are Alfred's men. We have the king's word and leave to speak here. Whose men are you? The bishop's?”

“The hell you're Alfred's men,” grunted Hereswith, freeing his sword. “You're foreigners. I can hear it.”

The strangers remained braced on their staves, unmoving.

“Foreigners we are. But we have come with leave, to bring a gift. The gift we bring is freedom: from the Church, from slavery.”

“You'll not free my slaves without my leave,” said Hereswith, his mind made up. He swung his sword backhand in a horizontal cut at the nearer stranger's neck.

The stranger moved instantly, hurling his strange metal-ribbed staff straight up. The sword clanged on the metal, rebounded out of Hereswith's unpracticed hands. The thane crouched, groping for the hilt, eyes darting from one stranger to the other.

“Easy, lord,” said the man. “We mean you no harm either. If you'll listen, we'll tell you why your king has asked us to come here, and how we can be his men and foreigners at once.”

Nothing in Hereswith's makeup urged him to listen or to compromise. He straightened, the sword again in his hand, and lashed out forehand at the knee. Again the staff blocked it, blocked it easily. As the thane recovered his blade, the man he had attacked stepped forward and pushed him back with the staff across his chest.

“Help me, you men,” bellowed Hereswith at the silent watchers, and charged forward, shoulder dropped and sword ready this time for a disemboweling thrust.

“Enough,” said one of the other men he faced, thrusting a staff between his legs. The thane crashed down, started to scramble again to his feet. From his sleeve the first man jerked a short, limp canvas cylinder: the slave-taker's sandbag. He swung once, to the temple, crouched, ready to swing again. As Hereswith fell forward on his face, to lie unmoving, he nodded, straightened, tucked the sandbag away, beckoned to the thane's wife to come and treat him.

“Now,” said the stranger, turning to his fascinated but still unmoving audience. “Let me tell you who we are, and who we were.

“We are men of the Way, from the North-folk. But this time last year we were slaves of the Church. Slaves to the great minster of Ely. Let me tell you how we became free.”

The slaves in the crowd, maybe a dozen of the fifty men there and the same proportion of women, exchanged frightened glances.

“And to the freemen here,” went on Sibba, once slave of the minster of Ely, then catapulteer in the Army of the Way, veteran of the victory over Ivar the Boneless himself, “to the freemen here we will say how we were given our own land. Twenty acres each,” he added. “Free of toll to any lord, except the service we owe to Shef Jarl. And the service we give freely—freely, mark you—to the Way. Twenty acres. Unburdened. Is there any freeman here who can claim as much?”

This time the freemen in the crowd looked at each other, a low growl of interest rising. As Hereswith was dragged away, head lolling, his tenants edged closer to the new arrivals, ignoring the broadsword left forgotten in the dirt.

“How much does it cost you to follow Christ?” began Sibba. “Cost you in money? Listen and I will tell you…”

“They're everywhere,” the bishop's bailiff reported. “Thick as fleas on an old dog.”

Bishop Daniel's brows knitted at his servant's levity, but he held his tongue: he needed the information.

“Yes,” the bailiff went on, “all men from Norfolk, it seems, and all claiming to be freed slaves. It makes sense. See, your grace, we have a thousand slaves just on our own estates here round Winchester and in the minsters and shires. The man you speak of, the new jarl as the heathens call him—he could have sent three thousand slaves in here to spread his word from Norfolk alone, if he sent them all.”

“They must be caught,” Daniel grated. “Rooted out like corn-cockle from amid the wheat.”

“Not so easy. The slaves won't hand them over, nor the churls, from what I hear. The thanes can't catch 'em. If they do, they defend themselves. They never travel in less than pairs. Sometimes they group together to be a dozen, or a score, no light matter for a small village to deal with. And besides…”

“Besides what?”

The bailiff picked his words with care. “What these incomers say—lies it may be, but what they say—is that they have been summoned in by the King Alfred…”

“The atheling Alfred! He has never been crowned.”

“Your pardon, lord. By the atheling Alfred. But even some of the thanes would be loath to hand over men sent by the king to the Church. They say—they say this is a quarrel among the great ones and they will not interfere.” And many would side with the atheling, last of the great line of Cerdic, against the Church anyway, thought the bailiff. But he knew better than to say it.

Liar and deceiver, thought the bishop. Not a month ago and the young prince had sat in that very room, eyes down like a maiden, apologizing and begging for direction. And he had left the room to call instantly for help from the unbelievers! And now he was gone, no one knew where, except that rumors came of his appearance in this part or that of Wessex, appealing to his thanes to deny the Church: to follow the example of the North-folk and the creed they called the Way. It did not help that he continued to protest that he remained a believer in Christ. How long would belief last without the land and the money to support it? And if things continued as they were, how long would it be before some messenger, or some army appeared at the very gates of the minster, ordering the bishop to surrender his rights and his leases?

“So,” Daniel said at last, half to himself. “We cannot cope with this thing in Wessex. We must send outside. And indeed there is force coming from outside which will cure this evil so that it never raises its head again.

“Yet I cannot afford to wait. It is my Christian duty to act.” And also, he added silently, my duty to myself. A bishop who sits quiet and does nothing—how will he seem to the Holy Father in Rome, when the moment comes to decide who shall bear rule for the Church in England?

“No,” the bishop went on, “the heart of the trouble comes from the North-folk. Well, what the North-folk caused, the North-folk must cure. There are some who still know their Christian duty.”

“In Norfolk, lord?” asked the bailiff doubtfully.

“No. In exile. Wulfgar the cripple, and his son. The one lost his limbs to the Vikings. The other lost his shire. And King Burgred too, of Mercia. It was nothing to me, I thought, who should rule East Anglia, Mercia or Wessex. But I see now. Better that the pious Burgred should have the kingdom of Edmund the Martyr than it should go to Alfred. Alfred the Ingrate, I name him.

“Send in my secretaries. I will write to them all, and to my brothers of Lichfield and Worcester. What the Church has lost, the Church will win back.”

“Will they come, lord?” asked the bailiff. “Will they not fear to invade Wessex?”

“It is I who speaks for Wessex now. And there are greater forces than either Wessex or Mercia astir. All I offer Burgred and the others is the chance to join the winning side before it has won. And to punish insolence: the insolence of the heathens and the slaves. We must make an example of them.”

The bishop's fist clenched convulsively. “I will not root out this rot, like a weed. I shall burn it out, like a canker.”

“Sibba. I think we've got trouble.” The whisper ran across the dark room where a dozen missionaries lay sleeping, wrapped in their blankets.

Silently Sibba jointed his companion at the tiny, glassless window. Outside, the village of Stanford-in-the-Vale, ten miles and as many preachings from Sutton, lay silent, lit by a strong moon. Clouds scudding before the wind cast shadows round the low wattle-and-daub houses that clustered round the thane's timber one, in which the missionaries of the Way now slept.

“What did you see?”

“Something flashing.”

“A fire not dowsed?”

“I don't think so.”

Sibba moved without speaking towards the little room that opened off the main central hall. In there the thane Elfstan, their host, a man who protested his loyalty to King Alfred, should be sleeping with his wife and family. After a few moments he drifted back. “They're still there. I can hear them breathing.”

“So they're not in on it. Doesn't mean I didn't see anything. Look! There it is again.”

Outside, a shadow slipped from one patch of darkness to another, coming closer. In the moonlight something flashed: something metal.

Sibba turned to the men still sleeping. “On your feet, boys. Get your stuff together.”

“Run for it?” asked the watchman.

Sibba shook his head. “They must know how many of us there are. They wouldn't attack if they weren't confident they could deal with us. Easier to do that outside than dig us out of here. We must try to break their teeth first.”

Men were scrambling to their feet behind him, groping for their breeches, buckling belts. One man undid a pack, began to haul from it strange, metallic shapes. The others queued in front of him, clutching the long pilgrim-staves all had carried openly.

“Force them down hard,” grunted the packman, struggling to push the first halberd-head on its socket over the carefully designed shaft.

“Move fast,” said Sibba. “Then, Berti, you take two men to face the door, one either side of it. Wilfi, you at the other door. The rest, stay with me, see where we're needed.”

The movement and the clanking of metal had brought the thane, Elfstan, from his bed. He stared, wonderingly.

“Men outside,” said Sibba. “Not friendly.”

“Nothing to do with me.”

“We know. Look, lord, they'll let you out. If you go now.”

The thane hesitated. He called to his wife and children, dressing hastily, spoke to them in a low voice.

“Can I open the door?”

Sibba looked round. His men were ready, weapons prepared. “Yes.”

The thane lifted the heavy bar that held closed the main double doors, and pushed them both open together. As he did so a groan came from outside, almost a sigh. There were many men out there, poised for a rush. But now they knew they had been seen.

“My wife and children—coming out!” shouted Elfstan. Quickly the children slipped through the door, his wife scurrying after them. A few feet beyond she turned, beckoned frantically to him. Her husband shook his head.

“They are my guests,” he said. His voice rose to a shout, addressing the ambushers outside. “My guests and the guests of King Alfred. I do not know who are these thieves in the night, within the bounds of Wessex, but they will hang when the king's reeve catches them.”

“There is no king in Wessex,” shouted a voice from outside. “And we are men of King Burgred. Burgred and the Church. Your guests are vagabonds and heretics. Slaves from outside! We have come to collar and brand them.”

Suddenly the moonlight shone on dark shapes, moving together out of the cover of houses and fences.

They did not hesitate. It would have been easier to catch their enemies sleeping, but they had been told what their enemies were: released slaves, lowest of the low. Men who had never been taught swordplay, who had not been conditioned from birth to war. Who had not felt the bite of edges over the linden-shield. A dozen Mercian warriors swarmed together at the dark doors of the hall. Behind them, now that concealment was gone, horns blew for the assault.

The double doors of the hall were six feet across, a man's full arm-span. Room only for two armed men to enter at once. Two champions rushed in together, shields up, faces glaring.

Neither saw the blows that killed them. As they peered into the gloom for men to face them, faces to hack at, the halberds swept from both sides, at thigh level, below shield and mail-shirt. The halberd-heads, axe one side, spike the other, were twice the weight of a broadsword. One shore through a warrior's leg and deep into the facing thigh. The other sliced upward from the bone, deep into the pelvis. As one man lay in the flow of blood that would kill him in seconds, the other flapped and twisted, shrieking, trying to tear free the great blade lodged in bone.

More men pushed over them. This time spearpoints met them from in front, driving through wooden shields and metal rings, hurling men back into the confusion of the doorway, groaning from belly wounds. Now the long blades, sweeping in six-foot arcs, chopped down the mailed warriors like cattle before the poleaxe. For a few seconds it seemed as if the sheer weight and numbers of the first rush would break through the defenders.

But against the dim-seen menace, nerves failed. The Mercians scrambled back, those in front weaving desperately behind their shields, trying to drag their dead and wounded with them.

“So far so good,” muttered one of the Waymen.

“They'll come again,” said Sibba.

Four more times the Mercians came on, each time more warily, trying now, as they realized the tactics and the weapons against them, to draw the blow and evade it, to leap forward before the halberdiers could recover their cumbrous weapons. The Norfolk freedmen used their advantage of numbers, two men to face each door, a man striking from each side. Slowly the casualties on both sides grew.

“They're trying to cut through the walls,” muttered Elfstan to Sibba, still on his feet as the sky began to pale.

“Makes no difference,” replied Sibba. “They still have to climb in. As long as there's enough of us to block each gap.”

Outside, a fair angry face stared at a bleeding exhausted one. Alfgar had come with the attackers to watch the destruction of the Waymen. He was not pleased.

“You can't break in?” he shouted. “Against a handful of slaves?”

“We've lost too many good men to this handful of slaves. Eight dead, a dozen hurt and all of them badly. I'm going to do what we should have done first.”

Turning to his men, he waved a group forward to the undamaged gable end of the hall. With them they carried thorn fencing. They piled it against the wall, stamped it into a pile of thick brush. Steel struck flint, sparks dropping onto dried straw. The fire flared up.

“I want prisoners,” Alfgar said.

“If we can get them,” said the Mercian. “Anyway, now they have to come to us.”

As the smoke began to pour into the drafty hall, Sibba and Elfstan exchanged glances. They could see each other now in the growing dawn. “They might still take you prisoner, if you went out,” said Sibba. “Hand you over to your own king. You being a thane, who knows?”

“I doubt that strongly.”

“What are we going to do?”

“What is always done. We will wait in here for every breath we can draw, until the smoke is thickest. Then we will run out and hope one or two of us may get away in the confusion.”

The smoke poured in more thickly, followed by the red gleams of fire eating at planking. Elfstan moved to draw a wounded man lying on the floor out of the smoke, but Sibba waved him back.

“Breathing smoke is the easy death,” he said. “Better than feeling the fire in your flesh.”

One by one, as their endurance waned, the halberdiers ran out in the smoke, trying to run downwind for a few yards of screen. Gleefully their enemies pounced, blocking their path, making them strike or lunge, leaping in behind with sword and dagger, and a long night of loss and frustration to avenge. Last and unluckiest ran Sibba. As he came out two Mercians, realizing by now which way their prey would go, stretched a rawhide rope across the path. Before he could rise or draw his short knife, there was a knee on his back, brawny arms on his wrists.

The last man left in the shell of his home, Elfstan stepped slowly forward, not running downwind like the others, but taking three long strides out of the smoke, shield raised, broadsword drawn. The Mercians running in hesitated. Here at last was a man like themselves. At a safe distance Elfstan's serfs and tenants watched, to see how their lord faced death.

Huskily Elfstan snarled a challenge, gesturing to the Mercians to come on. One detached himself, stepped forward, swinging backhand, forehand, clubbing upward with his iron shield-boss. Elfstan parried, edge to edge with the skill of a lifetime's practice, chopping with his own shield, circling one way then the other as he tried to detect a weakness in his enemy's wrist or balance or technique. For minutes the grave ballet of the sword-duel, the thing thanes were bred for, went on. Then the Mercian sensed the Wessex thane's exhaustion. As the shield-arm facing him drooped, he feinted a low cut, turned it into sudden short thrust. The blade drove in below the ear. As he fell, Elfstan stuck one last failing blow. His enemy staggered, looked unbelievingly at the arterial blood spouting from his thigh, and fell also, struggling to cover the flow with his hands.

A groan rose from the men of Stanford-in-the-Vale. Elfstan had been a hard master, and many had felt the weight of his fist if slaves, or the power of his wealth if free. Yet he had been their neighbor. He had fought the invaders of the village.

“Good death,” the Mercian captain said professionally. “He lost, but maybe he took his man with him.”

Alfgar moaned with disgust. Behind him, men rolled the traveling can of his father forward. Through the shattered palisade of the village, a further cortege advanced, black-robed priests in the van. In the midst of it the rising sun glittered on the bishop's gilded crozier.

“At least we have some prisoners,” he said.

“Two?” asked Bishop Daniel disbelievingly. “You killed nine and caught two?”

No one bothered to answer him.

“We must make the best of it,” said Wulfgar. “Now, how are you going to deal with them? ‘Make an example,’ you said.”

The two freedmen stood in front of them, each held by two warriors. Daniel paced forward, stretched his hand out, pulled a thong from round one captive's neck, broke it with a jerk. He stared at what lay in his hand, did the same to the other prisoner. A silver hammer, for Thor, a silver sword, for Tyr. He tucked them into his pouch. For the archbishop, he thought. No, Ceolnoth is too much a weakling, feeble as the weathercock Wulfhere of York.

These are for Pope Nicholas. With this silver in his hand he may reflect that the Church in England cannot afford weakling archbishops any longer.

“I swore to burn the canker out,” he said. “And so I will.”

An hour later Wilfi of Ely stood tethered to the stake, legs tightly bound to prevent him kicking out. The brushwood burned brightly, caught at his woolen breeches. As the fire blistered his skin he began to twist in his bonds, gasps of agony forced from him despite his efforts. The Mercian warriors stared at him judgementally, interested to see how a slave-born bore pain. The villagers watched more fearfully. Many had seen executions. But even the wickedest, secret murderers and housebreakers, faced no more than the noose. To kill a man slowly was outside English law. Though not outside Church law.

“Breathe the smoke,” yelled Sibba suddenly. “Breathe the smoke!”

Through the pain Wilfi heard him, ducked his head, breathed in great gasps. As his tormentors hesitated to approach, he began to fall forward in his bonds. As unconsciousness came on him, he rallied for an instant, looked upward.

“Tyr,” he called, “Tyr aid me!” The smoke billowed up round him as if in reply. When it cleared he hung limp. A rumble of talk rose from the watchers.

“Not much of an example there,” observed Wulfgar to the bishop. “Why don't you let me show you how to do it?”

As they dragged Sibba forward to the second stake, men went running at Wulfgar's word to the nearest house, came out moments later trundling the beer-barrel which even the meanest home could boast. At a gesture they stove in one end, tipped the barrel over, stove in the other to create a short stout cylinder. The barrel's owner watched unspeaking as his summer ale ran into the dirt.

“I've thought about this,” said Wulfgar. “What else have I to do? What you need for this is draft. Like a clay chimney in a fireplace.

They tied Sibba, pale and glaring, next to the stake where his comrade had died. As they piled the brushwood deeply round him, Daniel stepped forward.

“Abjure your pagan gods,” he said. “Return to Christ. I will shrive and absolve you myself, and you will be stabbed mercifully before you burn.”

Sibba shook his head.

“Apostate,” yelled the bishop. “What you feel now will only be the start of everlasting burning. Mark this!” He turned and shook a fist at the villagers. “His pain is what you will all suffer forever. What all men must suffer forever, if not for Christ. Christ and the Church that keeps the keys of heaven and hell!”

At Wulfgar's direction, they lowered the barrel over stake and condemned man together, struck sparks to the brush and fanned the blaze. The tongues of flame reached in, were sucked upward as the air burned out above them, leapt savagely at the body and face of the man inside. After a few moments the shrieking began. Continued, growing louder. A slow smile began to spread across the face of the limbless trunk that watched from its padded upright box.

“He's saying something,” snapped Daniel suddenly. “He's saying something. He wants to recant. Put the fire out! Pull the brush away.”

Slowly the burners raked back the blaze. Approaching cautiously, they wrapped cloths round their hands and lifted the smoldering barrel high over the stake.

Beneath it lay charred flesh, teeth showing white against blackened face and scorched lips. Flame had shriveled Sibba's eyeballs and was forced deep into his lungs as his body gasped for breath. He was still conscious.

His face lifted as the bishop approached, aware through its blindness that it was again in open air.

“Recant now,” shouted Daniel for all to hear. “Make a sign, any sign, and I will cross you and send your soul without pain to Doomsday.”

He bent forward under his miter to catch any word that burned lungs could pronounce.

Sibba coughed twice and spat the charred lining of his throat into the bishop's face.

Daniel stepped back, wiping the black mucus with disgust onto his embroidered robe, shaking involuntarily.

“Back,” he gasped. “Put it back. Put it over him again. Restart the fire. And this time,” he shouted, “he can call on his pagan gods till the devil has him.”

But Sibba did not call out again. As Daniel raved and Wulfgar grinned at his confusion, as the warriors slowly moved in to pull the fire in on the bodies and spare the need for burial pit, two men slipped away from the back of the crowd, unseen by any except their silent neighbors. One was Elfstan's sister's son. The other had seen his home destroyed in a battle not of his concern. The rumor of the shire had told them where to take their news.

Chapter Four

Shef's face did not change as the messenger, staggering with fatigue after his long ride, poured out his news: a Mercian army in Wessex. King Alfred vanished, no one knew where. The emissaries of the Way mercilessly hunted down wherever they could be found. The Church proclaiming King Alfred and all allies of the Way anathema, stripped of all rights, to be neither helped nor harbored.

And everywhere, the burnings; or, by order of the bishop of Winchester, where the dreaded living corpse Wulfgar was not present, the crucifixions. Long lists of names of those caught: catapulteers, comrades, veterans of the battle against Ivar. Thorvin moaned, shocked, as the list ran on and on, moved even though those caught and killed were not of his race or blood and were only for a few short weeks of his faith. Shef remained seated on his camp-stool, thumb running again and again across the cruel faces of his whetstone.

He knew, thought Brand, watching, and remembering the sudden veto Shef had imposed on Thorvin's eager readiness to spread the word himself. He knew this would happen, or something like it. That means that he had sent his own folk, Englishmen, men he raised from the dirt himself, to what he must have known would be death by torture. He did the same for his own father. I must be very sure, very, very sure that he never looks at me in quite that same considering fashion. If I had not known before that he was a son of Othin I would know it now.

And yet if he had not done it I would be grieving for the death of Thorvin by now, not for a bunch of gangrel churls.

The messenger ran down, news and horror finally exhausted. With a word Shef dismissed him to food and rest, turned to his inner council sitting round him in the sunlit upper hall: Thorvin and Brand, Farman the visionary, Boniface the former priest with his ever-ready ink and paper.

“You heard the news,” he said. “What must we do?”

“Is there any doubt?” asked Thorvin. “Our ally called us in. Now he is being robbed of his rights by the Church. We must march at once to his assistance.”

“More than that,” added Farman. “If there is a moment for lasting change, surely it is this. We have a kingdom divided within itself. A true king—Christian though he may be—to speak for us, for the Way. How often have the Christians spread their word through converting the king, and having him convert his people? Not only will the slaves be with us, but the freemen and half the thanes. Now is our chance to turn the Christian tide. Not only in Norfolk, but in a great kingdom.”

Shef's lips set stubbornly. “What do you say, Brand?”

Brand shrugged massive shoulders. “We have comrades to avenge. None of us are Christians—your pardon, Father. But the rest of us are not Christians to forgive our enemies. I say march.”

“But I am the jarl. It is my decision.”

Slowly, heads nodded.

“What I think is this. When we sent the missionaries we stirred up the wasps' nest. And now we are stung. We should have foreseen it.”

You did foresee it, thought Brand to himself.

“And I stirred up another when I took the Church's land. I have not been stung for that yet, but I expect it. I foresee it. I say let us see where our enemies are before we strike. Let them come to us.”

“And let our comrades lie unavenged?” growled Brand.

“We will miss our chance of a kingdom, a kingdom for the Way,” cried Farman.

“What of your ally Alfred?” demanded Thorvin.

Slowly Shef wore them down. Repeated his conviction. Countered their arguments. Persuaded them, in the end, to wait a week, for further news.

“I only hope,” said Brand in the end, “that good living has not made you soft. Made us all soft. You should spend more time with the army, and less with the muttonheads in your doom-court.”

That at least is good advice, thought Shef. In order to cool feelings, he turned to Father Boniface, who had taken no part, waiting only to record decisions or write down orders.

“Father, send out for wine, will you? Our throats are dry. At least we can drink the memorial for our dead comrades in something better than ale.”

The priest, still stubbornly black-gowned, paused on his way to the door.

“There is no wine, lord jarl. The men said they were looking for a cargo from the Rhine, but it has not come. There have been no ships from the South for four weeks, not even into London. I will broach a barrel of the finest hydromel instead. Maybe the wind is wrong.”

Quietly Brand rose from the table, stalked to the open window, stared at the clouds and the horizon. Why, he thought, I could sail from Rhinemouth to the Yare in my mother's old washtub in weather like this. And he says the wind is wrong! Something is wrong, but it is not the wind.

That dawn, the crews and captains of a hundred impounded trading vessels—half-decked single-masters, round-bellied cogs, English, Frankish and Frisian longships—all rolled unhappily from their blankets to stare at the sky above the port of Dunkerque, as they had done every day for a month and more. To see if the conditions were right. To wonder whether their masters would deign to make a move.

They saw the light that had come from the east, that had raced already across the tangled forests and huddled settlements of Europe, across river and toll-gate, Schloss and chastel and earthwork. Everywhere on the continent it had lit soldiers gathering, provision-carts mustering, horse-boys leading remounts.

As it swept towards the English Channel—though at this time men called it still the Frankish Sea—it touched the topmost banderole on the stone donjon within the wooden keep that guarded the port of Dunkerque. The guard-commander looked at it, nodded. The trumpeter wetted his lips, pursed them, sent a defiant bray down his metal tube. Immediately the quarter-guards answered from each wall, men began to roll from their blankets inside the keep. And outside, in the camp and the port, and along all the horse-lines that trailed off into the open fields, the soldiers stirred and checked their gear and began the day with the same thought as the sailors who were trapped in the port: this time, would their master stir? Would King Charles, with his levies, with the levies sent him by his pious and Pope-fearing brothers and nephews, give the sign for the short trip to England?

In the harbor, the skippers looked at their weathervanes, stared towards the eastern and western horizons. The master of the cog Dieu Aide, the cog which would carry not only the king but the archbishop of York and the Pope's legate himself, nudged his chief mate, jerked a thumb at the flag standing out stiffly from the mast. High tide in four hours, both knew. Current would be with them then and for a while. Wind in the right quarter and not dropping.

Could the landsmen get themselves down and embarked in time? Neither bothered to speculate. Things would be as they would be. But if the king of the Franks, Charles, nicknamed the Bald—if the king seriously wanted to obey the instructions of his spiritual lord the Pope, unite the old dominions of his grandfather Charlemagne, and plunder the wealth of England in the name of holiness, then he would never get a better chance.

As they watched the flag and the wind they heard, half a mile off in the donjon trumpets blaring again. Not for dawn, but for something else. And then, faintly, carried on the southwest wind, the noise of cheering. Soldiers acclaiming a decision. Without wasting words, the captain of the Dieu Aide jerked a thumb at the derricks and the canvas slings, tapped the hatches of the cog's one hold. Get the hatches off. Get the derricks over the side. We'll need them for the horses. The war-horses, the destriers of France.

The same wind, that dawn, blew across the bows of the forty dragon-boats cruising down the English coast from the Humber, almost in their teeth, making it impossible to rig sail. Ivar Ragnarsson, in the prow of the first boat, did not care. His oarsmen were rowing at their paddling-stroke, which they could keep up for eight hours a day if need be, grunting in unison as they heaved their oars through the water, feathering with the ease of long practice, continuing their conversations with a word or two as they swept them back, dipping and heaving again.

Only in the first six boats was there extra work for the men. In each, a ton and a half of dead weight squatted, carefully stowed before the mast: the onagers of Erkenbert, all the forges of York Minster had been able to turn out in the weeks Ivar had given them. Ivar had raged furiously about the weight, demanded that they be lightened. Impossible, the black archdeacon had replied. This is the way they are drawn in Vegetius. More convincingly, lighter models had knocked themselves to pieces in a dozen shots. The kick of the wild ass that gave these machines their name came when the throwing-arm struck the crossbeam. If there were no crossbeam the stone would not be hurled out with its astonishing force and velocity. A light crossbeam, however padded, would crack.

Ivar's meditations were interrupted by loud retching from behind him. Each onager was served by a dozen slaves from the minster; in command of them all, torn deeply against his will from the studies and library of the minster, Erkenbert himself. Now one of the lubbers had succumbed to the long, North Sea swell and was vomiting his heart out over the side. The wrong side, naturally, so that the meager contents of his stomach blew back over the nearest rowers, provoking shouts and curses, disruption of the long, automatic rowing-stroke.

As Ivar stepped toward the disturbance, hand dropping to the gutting-knife at his belt, Hamal the horse-swain, the man who had saved Ivar from the lost battle at March, moved quickly. The slave grasped the man by the scruff of his neck. A violent blow across the side of the head, repeated as Hamal heaved the wretched man off his feet and flung him across the thwarts to the lee side, there to retch in peace.

“We'll have the hide off him tonight,” said Hamal. Ivar stared unblinkingly for a moment, knowing well what Hamal was doing. Decided to leave it for the moment. Turned back to his thoughts in the prow.

Hamal caught the eye of one of the rowers, mimed wiping sweat from his brow. Ivar killed a man a day now on average, mostly from the valueless slaves of the minster. At that rate they would have no one left to wind a machine at all by the time they met the enemy. And no one could be sure who Ivar would turn on next. He could be diverted, sometimes, by sufficient cruelty.

Thor send that we meet the enemy soon, thought Hamal. The only thing that will cool Ivar's temper for good is the head and balls of the man who bested him—Skjef Sigvarthsson. Without that, he will destroy everyone around him. That is why his brothers have sent him out this time on his own. With me as his nursemaid, and the Snakeeye's foster father to report.

If we don't meet the enemy soon, thought Hamal, I am going to desert the first chance I get. Ivar owes me his life. But he is too mad to pay. And yet if he takes his rage out in the right quarter, something tells me there are fortunes yet to be gained, here in the rich kingdoms of the South. Rich and ripe to fall.

“It's a bugger,” said Oswi, once slave to St. Aethelthryth's of Ely, now captain of a catapult-team in the Army of Norfolk and the Way. There were nods of agreement from his crew as they looked thoughtfully at their much-loved but not-quite-trusted artillery piece. It was one of the torsion-catapults, the wheeled twist-shooters. Every man in the crew was desperately proud of it. They had given it a name weeks before: “Dead Level.” They had polished every wooden part of it many times over. Yet they were afraid of it.

“You can count the turns you give to the cogwheels,” said Oswi, “so it don't tighten too much.”

“And I put my head right down on the ropes every time and listen to 'em,” said one of his mates, “till I can hear they're in tune like a harper's harp-strings.”

“But she'll still bloody well break one day when you don't expect it; they always do. Break one or two of us for breakfast.”

A dozen heads nodded gloomily.

“What we need are stronger wooden arms,” said Oswi. “They're what goes.”

“Wrap 'em with rope?”

“No, that would work loose.”

“I used to work in the forge at my village,” the newest member of the team said hesitatingly. “Maybe if they had iron supports…”

“No, those wooden arms bend a bit,” said Oswi firmly. “They have to. Anything iron would stop them doing that.”

“Depends on the iron. If you heat and reheat and hammer it the right way the iron turns into what my old master called steel. But it's steel that bends a bit, not soft, like bad iron, but with spring in it. Now if we put a strip of that along the inside of each of the arms it would bend with the wood—and stop them flying apart if the wood broke.”

Thoughtful silence.

“What about the jarl?” asked a questioning voice.

“Yes, what about the jarl?” came another voice from behind the half-circle. Shef, strolling round the camp in response to Brand's advice, had seen the cluster of intent faces and had walked silently up to overhear.

Consternation and alarm. Swiftly the group of catapulteers rearranged itself so that their newest member was left in the center, to face the unpredictable.

“Er, Udd here's got an idea,” said Oswi, also shifting responsibility.

“Let's hear it.”

As the new recruit, first hesitatingly, then fluently and with confidence, began to describe the procedure of making mild steel, Shef watched him. An insignificant little man, even smaller than the others, with weak eyes and a stoop. Any one of Brand's Vikings would have dismissed him immediately as useless to an army, not worth his rations even as a latrine-digger. Yet he knew something. Was it new knowledge? Or was it old knowledge, something many smiths had always known, given the right conditions, but had been unable to pass on except to an apprentice?

“This steel bends, you say,” said Shef. “And springs back? Not like my sword”—tie drew from its sheath the fine Baltic sword Brand had given him, made like his own self-forged and long-lost weapon of mixed strips of soft iron and hard steel—“but made in one piece? Springy all the way through?”

Udd, the little man, nodded firmly.

“All right.” Shef thought a moment. “Oswi, tell the camp marshal you and your team are off all duties. Udd, tomorrow morning go to Thorvin's forge with as many men as you need to help, and start making strips the way you say. Fit the first pair to ‘Dead Level’ and see if they work. If they do, fit them to all the machines.

“And Udd: When it's done I want to see some of this new metal. Make some extra strips for me.”

Shef walked away as the horns blew to dowse fires and to mount the night-guard. Something there, he thought. Something he could use. And he needed something to use. For in spite of the newfound confidence of Thorvin and his friends, he knew that if they just repeated what they had done before, they would be destroyed. Every stroke teaches its own counter. And he had enemies everywhere, in the South and in the North, in the Church and among the pagans. Bishop Daniel. Ivar. Wulfgar and Alfgar. King Burgred. They would not stand up to be shot at a second time.

He did not know what would come, but it would be unpredictable. It was vital to be unpredictable in reply.

The dream, or vision, came this time almost as a relief. Shef felt himself surrounded by difficulties. He knew he did not know the way through them. If some greater agency did, he would welcome the knowledge. He did not think it was Othin in his guise as Bölverk, Bale-Worker, who was guiding him, for all that Thorvin continued to urge him to accept the spear-pendant, the sign of Othin. But who else would help him? If he knew, Shef reflected, he would wear that one's sign.

In his sleep, he found himself suddenly looking down. Down from what seemed a great height, at what he realized, as his eyes cleared, was a great board. A chessboard, with the pieces on it. In the middle of a game. And the players of the game were the mighty figures he had seen before: the gods of Asgarth, so Thorvin said, here playing at chess on their sacred board with squares of gold and silver.

But there were more than two playing. So gigantic were the shapes round the board that Shef could not bring them into focus all at once, any more than he could a mountain range, but he could see one of the players. Not the ruddy, Brand-shaped figure he had seen before, who was Thor, not the one with the axe for a face and a voice like a calving glacier, who was Othin. This one seemed somehow sharper, slighter, his eyes not level. An expression of intense glee crossed his face as he shifted a piece. Loki the Trickster perhaps. Loki, whose fire burned always in the holy circle, but whose followers went unknown.

No, Shef reflected. Tricky this god might be, but he did not have the Loki-look. The look of Ivar. As his vision cleared, Shef realized he had seen him before. It was the god who had looked at him as if he were a horse to be bought. And the expression on his face—surely this too was the owner of the ever-amused voice which twice had given him warnings. That is my protector, thought Shef. It is not a god I know. I wonder, what are his attributes, his purpose? What is his sign?

The board they were playing on, Shef saw suddenly, was not a board but a mappa. Not a mappamundi, but a map of England. He strained forward to see, sure now that the gods knew where his enemies were and what they planned. As he did so he realized that he was up on a mantelpiece, like a mouse in a king's hall. But like a mouse, though he could see, he could not understand. The faces were moving their pieces, laughing in voices like rumbles of thunder. None of it made any sense to him. And yet he was here, he had been brought here, he was sure, to see and understand.

The gleeful face had turned up toward him. Shef stood transfixed, unsure whether to duck back or to freeze. But the face knew he was there. It held a piece up to him, the other gods remaining intent on the game.

It was telling him, Shef realized, that this was the piece he had to take.

What was it? It was a queen, his eyes made out at last. A queen. With the face of…

The unknown god looked down, waved an arm dismissively. As if caught by a gale, Shef was toppling away, away back toward his camp, his bed, his blankets. As he fell he recognized in an instant whose the face was on the chess-queen.

Shef sat up suddenly with a gasp. Godive, he thought slowly, his heart thumping. It must be my own wish that sent me that vision. How could a girl affect the map of the contending enemies?

Outside Shef's sleeping-chamber, noise and upheaval, horses stamping, booted feet striding toward him past the cries of his bower-thanes. Pulling on a tunic, Shef opened the door before the boots reached him.

Facing him was a familiar figure: the young Alfred, still crowned with a golden circle, still as fresh-faced and full of nervous energy as before, but with a new grimness in his eyes.

“I gave you this shire,” he said without preamble. “I think now I should have given it to the other one, your enemy. Alfgar. Alfgar and his cripple-father. For between the two of them, and my traitor-bishops and King Burgred my brother-in-law, they have hounded me out of my kingdom.”

Alfred's expression changed, showed a sudden weariness and defeat. “I am here as a suppliant. Driven out of Wessex. No time to rally my loyal thanes. The army of Mercia marching on my heels. I saved you. Will you, now, save me?”

As Shef collected his thoughts to reply, he heard more running feet, coming from outside the circle of torches round Alfred. A messenger, too anxious and hasty to remember protocol. As soon as the man saw Shef standing in the doorway, he poured out his alarm.

“Beacons, lord jarl! Beacons for a fleet at sea. Forty ships at least. The men on watch, they say it can only be—it can only be Ivar.”

As Shef watched the consternation on the face of King Alfred, something cold inside him drew a conclusion. Alfgar on one side. Ivar on the other. And what have they in common? I took a woman from one. The other took the same woman from me. At least I can be sure now that it was a true dream the god sent me, whoever he may be. Godive is the key to this. Someone is telling me to use her.

Chapter Five

Early in his experience of being jarl, Shef had discovered that news was never quite as good or quite as bad as it was made to seem on first hearing. So it proved again. Beacons were a good way of signaling danger, and direction, and even—with care—number. They said nothing about distance. The beacon-chain started far up the coast, in Lincolnshire. It could mean only that Ivar—if Ivar it was—had left the Humber with, as Brand had immediately pointed out, the wind dead in his teeth. He could be three days off, or even more.

As for King Burgred, with Alfgar and Wulfgar in his train, Alfred was sure that he was in pursuit and that he meant, on the urgings of his bishops, nothing less than the entire destruction of the land of the Way, and the submission of the whole of England south of the Humber to his rule. But Alfred was a young man who rode hard, and who had only his personal bodyguard with him. Burgred was famous for the splendor of his camp-furniture and the number of ox-wagons needed to carry it. Forty miles to him was four days' march.

Shef might expect a heavy stroke from each of his enemies. Not a sudden one.

It would have made no difference in any case. As Shef dealt with the immediate necessities of the situation, he thought only of what he knew he must do—and who he could trust in this situation to help him. There was only one answer to the latter. As soon as he could get rid of all his council-members on one errand or another, he slipped through the gates of his burg, sent back the troubled guards who had tried to accompany him, and made his way as unobserved as possible through the crowded streets surrounding it.

Hund was, as he expected, busy in his booth, treating a woman whose evident terror at the sight of the jarl suggested a guilty conscience: a drab or a hedge-witch. Hund continued to treat her as if she were a thane's lady. Only after she had gone did he sit down by his friend, unspeaking as usual.

“We saved Godive once,” said Shef. “Now I am going to do it again. I need your help. I cannot tell anyone else what I am doing. Will you help?”

Hund nodded. Hesitated. “I'll help you any time, Shef. But I have to ask. Why have you decided to do this now? You could have tried to get Godive back any time the last few months, when there was far less on your mind.”

Shef coldly wondered once more how much he could safely say. Already he knew what he needed Godive for: as bait. Nothing could enrage Alfgar more than knowing Shef had stolen her away. If he made it seem like an insult from the Way, Alfgar's allies would be drawn in. He wanted them to pursue Godive like a great fish striking. Onto the hook of Ivar. And Ivar too could be baited. By a reminder of the woman he had lost, and the man who had taken her.

But he dared say none of this to Hund, not even to his childhood friend. Hund had been a friend of Godive too.

Shef allowed concern and confusion to show on his face. “I know.” he said. “I should have done it before. But now, suddenly, I am afraid for her.”

Hund looked his friend steadily in the eye. “All right,” he said. “I dare say you have good reason for what you do. Now, how are we going to work it?”

“I'll get out at dusk. Meet me where we used to shoot the catapults. During the day I want you to collect half a dozen men. But listen. They must not be Norse. All English. All freedmen. And they must all look like freedmen, understand. Like you.” Undersized and underfed, Shef meant. “With horses and rations for a week. But dressed shabby, not in the clothes we've given them.

“And there's another thing, Hund, and this is why I need you. I am too easy to recognize with this one eye”—the one eye you left me with, Shef did not say. “When we went into the Ragnarsson camp that did not matter. Now, if I am to go into a camp with my half brother and stepfather in it, I need a disguise. Now, what I thought was…”

Shef poured out his plan, Hund occasionally altering or improving on it. At the end the little leech slowly tucked his apple-pendant, for Ithun, out of sight, adjusting his tunic so nothing showed.

“We can do it,” he remarked, “if the gods are with us. Have you thought what will happen here in the camp when they wake up and find you gone?”

They will think I have deserted them, Shef realized. I will leave a message, to let them think I have done it for a woman. And yet it will not be true.

He felt the old king's whetstone dragging at his belt, where he had tucked it. Strange, he thought, when I went into the camp of Ivar, the only thought I had in my head was to rescue Godive, to take her away with me and find happiness together. Now I mean to do the same again. But this time—this time I am not doing it for her. I am not even doing it for me. I am doing it because it must be done. It is the answer. And she and I: we are just parts of the answer.

We are like the little cogs that turn the ropes that wind the catapults. They cannot say they do not want to turn anymore, and neither can we.

He thought of the strange tale of Frothi's mill which Thorvin had told him, about the giant-maidens, and the king who would not let them rest. I would like to give them rest, he told himself, and the others who are caught up in this mill of war. But I do not know how to release them. Or myself.

When I was a thrall, then I was free, he thought.

Godive came through the women's door at the back of King Burgred's immense camp-pavilion and began to edge down the long rows of trestle-tables, at the moment unfilled. She had a task, in case anyone questioned her—a message for King Burgred's brewer to broach extra barrels, and instructions from Alfgar to stand over him while he did it. Actually, she had had to get out of the stifling atmosphere of the women's quarters before her heart burst with fear and grief.

She was no longer the beauty she had been. The other women, she knew, had noticed, were talking among themselves about what had happened to her, talking with malicious pleasure at the fall of a favorite. They did not know what the causes were. They must know that Alfgar beat her, beat her with increasing fury and frenzy as the weeks went by, beat her with the birch on her bare body till the blood ran and her shift stuck to her morning after morning. Such things could not be done quietly. Even in the timber hall of Tamworth, Burgred's capital, some noise carried through the planks and panels. In the tents where kings spent the summer, the campaigning months…

But though they heard, and though they knew, there was no one who would help her. Men would hide their smiles the day after a thrashing; women, to begin with, spoke quietly and consolingly. They all thought that it was the way of the world, however they speculated on how she had failed to please her man.

None of them—except Wulfgar, and he no longer cared—knew the weight of despair, and dismay that came upon her whenever she thought of the sin that she and Alfgar committed every time they lay together, the sin of incest that must surely mark their souls and bodies forever. No one at all knew that she was a murderess as well. Twice in the winter she had felt the life swell within her, though—thank God—she had never felt it quicken. If she had, she might not have had the strength to go into the woods, find the dog's mercury, the birthwort, and drink the bitter drench that she made from it to kill the child of shame in her own womb.

And even that was not what had made her face drawn and lined beyond its years, her walk stooped and shuffling like that of an old woman. It was the memory of pleasure that she hugged to herself. That hot morning in the woods, the leaves above her head, the warm skin and thrusting flesh in her arms: the sense of release and freedom.

An hour, it had lasted. The memory of it blotted out the rest of her young life. How strange he had looked when she had seen him again. The one eye, the fierce face, the air of pain mastered. The moment he handed her back…

Godive's eyes dropped lower and she half ran across the space kept clear outside the pavilion, crowded now with Burgred's personal guard, his hearth-band, and with the hundred officers and errand-runners of the Mercian army marching stolidly on Norfolk at their king's command. Her skirts brushed past the group standing idly listening to a blind minstrel and his attendant. Dimly, without thinking of it, she heard that they were listening to a lay of Sigemund the Dragon-slayer: She had heard it before in her father's hall.

Shef watched her go with a curious chill at his heart. Good, she was there, with her husband, in the camp. Very good; she had failed completely to recognize him, though not six feet away. Bad that she looked so ill and frail. Worse that when he saw her his heart had not turned over as he expected, as it had done every time he had seen her since the day he had known she was a woman. Something was missing in himself. Not his eye. Something in his heart.

Shef dismissed the thought as he finished his song and Hund, his attendant, pushed forward quickly, bag outstretched in appeal. The listening warriors pushed the little man from one to the other as he moved round the ring, but in little more than good nature. His bag filled a little with bread, a lump of hard cheese, half an apple, whatever they had about them. This was no way to work, of course. What a sensible pair would have done was to wait till evening, approach the lord after dinner and ask permission to entertain the company. Then there would be a chance of proper food afterward, a bed for the night, maybe even a gift of money or a bag filled with breakfast.

But their own ineptitude fitted their cover. Shef knew he could never have passed for a professional minstrel. He meant instead to look like a part of the debris of war that covered all England: a younger son crippled in battle, cast out by his lord, turned away as useless by his family, and now trying to keep from starvation by singing memories of glory. Hund's skill had created a story on Shef's body that anyone could read by looking at him. First he had carefully and artistically painted a great scar on Shef's face, the slash-mark of an axe or a sword across the eyes. Then he had bandaged the fake scar with the filthy rags of an English army-leech, letting only the edges of it hint at what lay underneath. Then he had splinted and strapped Shef's legs beneath his wide breeches so that it was impossible for him to bend a knee; and finally, as a refinement of torment, strapped a metal bar to his back to prevent any free movement.

“You dropped your guard,” he had said. “A Viking hit you across the face. As you fell forward you got the back of an axe, or a war-hammer, that crushed your spine. Now your legs can only trail behind you as you hobble on crutches. That's your story.”

But no one had ever asked Shef his story. No experienced warrior needed to. Another reason that the Mercian companions did not bother to interrogate the cripple and his meager attendant was that they were afraid. Every warrior knew that such a fate one day might be his own. Kings and lords might keep a few cripples, pensioners, as signs of their own generosity or out of some family feeling. But gratitude or care for the useless were too expensive luxuries for a land at war.

The ring of listeners turned to other interests. Hund emptied the bag, passed half of the bits to Shef, squatted by him as they both devoured their gifts, heads down. Their hunger, was not an act. For two days now they had worked closer and closer into the center of Burgred's camp, trailing behind it for ten miles each day, Shef slumped on a stolen donkey, living only on what they could pick up, sleeping each night in their clothes in the cold dew.

“You saw her,” muttered Shef.

“When she comes back I will throw her the sign,” replied Hund. Neither spoke again. They knew this was a moment of critical danger.

Eventually Godive could prolong her errand no further. Back in the women's quarters, she knew, the old woman Alfgar had set to watch over her would be growing suspicious, fearful: Alfgar had told her that if his whore of a wife found a lover, he would sell her to the slave-market in Bristol, where the Welsh chiefs bought cheap lives.

She began to make her way back across the still-crowded courtyard. There were the minstrel and his boy still. Poor folk. A blind cripple and a starveling. Even the Welsh would not buy such. How long would they live? Till the winter, maybe. They might outlive her at that.

The minstrel had raised his coarse brown hood against the slow drizzle that was turning the dust into mud. Or maybe it was against the cruel stares of the world, for his face was in his hands. As she came level with them, the attendant bent forward and dropped something onto the ground at her feet. Instinctively, she stooped for it.

It was gold. A gold harp, a tiny brooch for a child's dress. Small as it was, it would buy food for two men for a year. How could a wandering beggar have such a thing? Tied to it with a thread was—

It was a sheaf. Just a few cornstalks threaded together, but tied to make the shape unmistakable. But if the harp meant the minstrel, then the sheaf was—

She turned convulsively to the blind man. His hands came away from his face, bandage in them; she saw the one eye staring deep into her own. Gravely, slowly, the eye winked. As Shef dropped his face into his hands once more he said four words, low but clear. “The privy. At midnight.”

“But it's guarded,” said Godive. “And there's Alfgar…”

Hund stretched out his bag towards her, as if begging in desperation. As the bag touched her, he slipped a small flask from his hand to hers.

“Put it in the ale,” he whispered. “Whoever drinks it will sleep.”

Godive jerked back convulsively. As if rejected, Hund sank back, the minstrel dropped his face once more into his hands, as if too far gone in despair to look up. A few yards away, Godive saw old Polga hobbling towards her, reproaches already forming. She turned away, fighting an urge as she did so to leap, fighting an urge to run and embrace the old woman as if she was a young virgin with never a care or a fear. The lacerations on the backs of her thighs caught her woolen dress and slowed her to a cramped shuffle.

Shef had not expected to sleep on the edge of the abduction, but it had come upon him irresistibly. Too irresistibly to be natural, he feared. As he fell asleep, a voice was speaking. Not the now-recognized, amused voice of his unknown patron. The cold voice of Othin, fosterer of battle, betrayer of warriors, the god who took the sacrifices offered to Dead Man's Strand.

“Be very careful, mannikin,” said the voice. “You are free to act, you and your father, but never forget to pay me my due. I will show you what happens to those who do.”

In his dream, Shef found himself at the very edge of a circle of light, in the dark but looking in. Within the light, a harper sang. He sang to a man, an old man with gray hair, but with a forbidding, cruel beaked face like the ones on his whetstone. The harper sang to this man. But he sang, Shef knew, for the woman who sat at her father's feet. He was singing a lay of love, a lay from the Southlands about a woman who heard the nightingale sing in an orchard and pined away helplessly for her lover. The old king's face relaxed in pleasure, his eyes closing, remembering his youth and the wooing of his dead wife. As he did so the harper, never missing a note, placed a runakefli—a stick carved with runes—by the woman's skirt: the message from her lover. He himself was the lover, Shef knew, and his name was Heoden. The harper was Heorrenda the peerless singer, sent by his lord to woo the woman Hild away from her jealous father, Hagena the remorseless.

Another time, another scene. This time two armies faced each other by a restless strand, the sea hurling in rollers over the kelp. One man stepped forward from the ranks, went toward the other. It was Heoden this time, Shef knew, come to offer bride-price for the stolen bride. He would not have done it if Hagena's men had not caught up with him. He showed the bags of gold, the precious jewels. But the other man, the old man was speaking. Shef knew he was rejecting the offer: for he had drawn the sword Dainslaf, which the dwarves had made, and which could never be sheathed till it had taken a life. The old man was saying he would be satisfied with nothing less than Heoden's life, for the insult put upon him.

Haste and pressure, pressure from somewhere. He must see this last scene. Dark, and a moon shining through scattered clouds. Many men lay dead on the field, their shields cloven, their hearts pierced. Heoden and Hagena lay close together in a death-grapple, each the other's bane. But one figure was still alive, still moving. It was Hild, the woman, who now had lost both husband-abductor and father. She moved among the corpses, singing a song, a galdorleoth which her Finnish nurse had taught her. And the corpses began to move. Began to rise. Stared at each other in the moonlight. Lifted their weapons and began again to strike. As Hild shrieked in rage and frustration her lover and her father ignored her, faced each other, began again to hack, to chop at the splintered shields. So it would go till Doomsday, Shef knew, on the strand of Hoy in the far-off Orkney isles. For this was the Everlasting Battle.

The pressure grew till he woke with a start. Hund was pressing a thumb under his left ear, to bring him awake silently. Around them the night was quiet, broken only by the stirring and coughing of hundreds of sleepers in their tents and shelters, the army of Burgred. The noise of revelry from the great pavilion had finally stopped. A glance at the moon told Shef it was midnight. Time to move.

Rising from their places, the six freed slaves Shef had brought with him, led by Cwicca the bagpipe-player of Crowland, went silently to a cart standing a few yards away. They clustered round it, seized the push-handles and set off. Immediately a great squeaking of ungreased wheels filled the night, provoking immediate complaints. The gang of freedmen took no notice, marched doggedly on. No longer strapped and bandaged, but still dragging himself on his crutches, Shef followed thirty paces behind. Hund stood watching them for a moment, then slipped away in the moonlight toward the edge of camp and the waiting horses.

As the cart shrieked its way toward the pavilion, a thane of Burgred's guard stepped across. Shef heard his snarl of challenge, heard his spear-shaft crack across some unfortunate's shoulder. Wails of complaint, expostulation. As the thane stepped closer to find out what the men were doing he caught the reek of the cart and stepped back again, gagging and waving a hand in front of his face. Dropping his crutches, Shef slid past behind his back and into the maze of the pavilion guy-ropes. From there he could see again the thane ordering Cwicca's gang back, Cwicca cringing but sticking to his litany of explanation: “Clean out them pots now, they said. Chamberlain said he don't want no shit-shoveling in daylight. Nor no shit-shovelers disturbing no ladies. We don't want to do it, lord, we'd sooner be in bed, but we got to do it, it's our hides if it ain't done by morning; chamberlain told me he'd have the skin off me for sure.”

The whine of the slave was unmistakable. As he spoke he kept pushing the cart forward, making sure the aged reek of twenty years of human dung got well to the thane's nostrils. The thane gave up, walked away still waving a hand in front of his face.

It would be hard to make this a story for poets, Shef reflected. No poet had ever found a place for the likes of Cwicca. yet the plan could never work without him. Slaves, freemen, and warriors looked different from each other, walked and talked differently. No thane could ever doubt that Cwicca was a slave on an errand. How could an enemy warrior be so undersized?

The gang reached the door of the women's privy, at the rear of the great quarter-acre pavilion. In front of it stood the permanent sentry, one of Burgred's hearth-companions, six feet tall and fully armed from helmet to studded boots. From his place in the shadows Shef watched intently. It was a critical moment, he knew. Cwicca had blocked as much of the view as possible with his cart, but just the same a watchful eye might be there in the darkness.

The gang surrounded the companion-sentry, pressing round him, deferential but determined, pawing at his sleeve as they tried to explain. Catching his sleeve, catching his arm, pulling him down as a skinny arm shut off his throat. A momentary heave, a strangled half-cry. Then a spurt of blood black in the moonlight as Cwicca passed a razor-sharp knife across vein and artery and windpipe, cutting down to the neckbone with the force of one slash.

As the sentry fell forward, was seized by six pairs of hands and upended into the cart, Shef reached them, grabbing the helmet, spear and shield. In a moment he too was out in the moonlight, waving the dung-cart impatiently on. Now any watchful eye would see only what was normal: the armed six-footer waving forward a gang of dwarvish toilers. As Cwicca's gang got the door open, pressed round it with their shovels and buckets, Shef stood for a moment in full view. Then stepped back into the shadow as if to watch the slaves more closely.

A moment later and he was through the door. And Godive was in his arms, naked beneath her shift.

“I couldn't get my clothes,” she whispered. “He locks them away every night. And Alfgar—Alfgar took the drink. But Wulfgar sleeps also within our booth, and he would drink no ale because it is a fast-day. He saw me leave. He may cry out if I do not return.”

Good, thought Shef, his brain cold as ice in spite of the warmth in his arms. Now what I meant to do all along will seem natural to her. So much less to explain. Maybe she will never know that I did not come for her.

Behind him, Cwicca's men were pressing in, still giving the impression of men trying to work quietly but openly.

“I am going into the sleeping-chamber,” Shef whispered to them. “The lady will show me. If you hear an alarm, flee at once.”

As they stepped into the unlit passage between the little individual sleeping-places of Burgred's most trusted courtiers—Godive moving with the sureness of one who had walked it a hundred times—Shef heard Cwicca's voice behind him. “Well, since we're here we might as well do the job. What's a few buckets of shit in a day's work?”

Godive paused as they reached the lowered canvas flap, pointed, spoke almost soundlessly. “Wulfgar. To the left. He sleeps in our room many nights, so I can turn him. He is in his box.”

I have no gag, thought Shef. I expected him to be asleep. Silently he caught the hem of Godive's shift, began to lift it up over her body. For a moment she caught at the material with automatic modesty, then gave way, let him strip her naked. The first time I have done that, thought Shef. I never imagined it would be no pleasure. But if she enters naked, Wulfgar, will be confused. It may give me an extra moment.

He pushed her bare back forward, felt the wince and the familiar feel of dried blood. Rage filled him, rage at Alfgar, rage too at himself. Why had he not thought, not once these long months, what they must be doing to her?

Moonlight through the canvas showed Godive walking naked across the room to the bed where her husband lay in drugged sleep. A grunt of surprise, anger from the short, padded box to the left. In an instant Shef was standing over it, looking down into his stepfather's face. He saw the recognition, saw the mouth open in horror. Stuffed the bloody shift firmly between Wulfgar's teeth. Instant resistance, a furious twisting like a giant trapped snake. Though Wulfgar had neither arms nor legs, he still struggled desperately with all the force of his back and belly muscles to get a stump over the edge of the box, maybe roll to the floor. Too much noise, Shef knew, and the privileged couples sleeping in the little canvas boxes around him would wake as well, perhaps decide to intervene.

Perhaps not. Even noble couples learned to turn a deaf ear to the sounds of love. The sounds of punishment too. Shef thought of Godive's scarred back, thought of his own, conquered the momentary repugnance. A knee in the belly. Hands forcing the shift deep down into the throat. Twisting the ends behind the head and knotting them, knotting them again. And then Godive was with him, still naked, thrusting forward the rawhide ropes Alfgar's men used to fasten their trunks of belongings onto the pack-mules. Quickly they ran the ropes round the sleeping-box, not tying Wulfgar down, but making sure he could not climb out, crawl across the floor. As they finished, Shef waved Godive to the other end of the box. Carefully they lifted it from its stand, placed it on the floor. Now he could not even tip the box over, make a noise.

The short struggle over, Shef took two paces across to the big bed, looked down at Alfgar, asleep in drugged slumber in the moonlight. His mouth hung open, a steady snore coming from his throat. Still a handsome man, Shef recognized. He had had Godive these twelve months and more. He felt no urge to cut his throat. He needed Alfgar still. For the plan. And yet a gesture. A gesture would make the plan work better.

Godive was coming forward, in gown and mantle now, recovered from the box where Alfgar had locked them. In her hand she held her little seamstress's scissors, a look of set determination on her face. Quietly Shef blocked her, forced the hand down. He touched her back, looked inquiringly.

She pointed to a corner. There it was, the bundle of birch-twigs, fresh ones, without blood. He must have been planning to use them later. Shef straightened Alfgar on his bed, folded his hands on his chest, placed the birch-bundle between them.

He moved over to where Wulfgar lay in the rays of the moon, eyes bulging, staring up with an unreadable expression: terror? disbelief? could it be remorse? A memory came to Shef from somewhere: the three of them, Shef and Godive and Alfgar, small children, playing excitedly at something—bulliers maybe, the game with the plantain-shoots, where each child took it in turn to cut at the other's shoot with their own, till the head of one or the other came off. And Wulfgar watching, laughing, taking a turn himself. It was not his fault he was a heimnar. He had kept Shef's mother, not repudiated her as he might.

He had watched his son flog his daughter half to death. Slowly, making certain Wulfgar saw every movement, Shef took the borrowed silver pendant from his pouch, breathed on it, polished it. Laid it on Wulfgar's chest.

The hammer of Thor.

Silently the two slipped from the room, headed through the darkness for the door to the privy, guided by the muffled sounds of scraping and clanking. A problem occurred to Shef suddenly. He had not thought of this in advance. A noble lady, gently bred and brought up. There was only one way out for her. Cwicca and his gang could walk out, protected by the obviously shameful nature of their task and their own size and gait, the unmistakable marks of the slave-born. He could seize the spear and shield again and walk with them, complaining loudly if need be about the shame of a noble thane escorting a shit-cart to see the slaves did not steal or loiter. But Godive. She must needs go in the cart. In her gown. With a dead body and twenty buckets of human dung.

As he got ready to explain to her, to speak of necessity, apologize, to promise a bright future, she stepped ahead of him.

“Get the lid off,” she snapped to Cwicca. She put her hand on the fouled edge of the cart, vaulted into the dark, stomach-gagging reek inside. “Now move,” came her voice from the depths. “This is fresh air compared with King Burgred's court.”

Slowly the cart squeaked its way across the courtyard, Shef striding ahead, spear-shaft sloped.

Chapter Six

Shef looked along the row of faces confronting him: all hostile, all disapproving.

“You took your time,” said Alfred.

“I hope she was worth it,” said Brand, looking with incredulity at the drawn and shabby figure of Godive in her borrowed churl-wife's gown, straddling the pony behind Shef's.

“This is not the behavior of a lord of warriors,” said Thorvin. “To leave the Army threatened on two sides, and ride off on some private errand. I know you came to us first to save the girl, but to go now… Could she not have waited?”

“She had waited too long already,” said Shef briefly. He swung from his horse, grimacing slightly from the pain in his thighs. It had been another long night and day of a ride, though the consolation was that even coming on hellbent, with the fury of Wulfgar and the bishops to spur him, Burgred must still be two days behind.

Shef turned to Cwicca and his comrades. “Go back to your places in the camp,” he said. “And remember. This was a great deed that we did. You will see in time that it meant even more than it seems. I will not forget to reward you all for it.”

As the men trotted off, Hund among them, he turned back to his councillors. “Now,” he said. “We know where Burgred is. Two days behind and coming toward us as fast as he can bring himself to march. We can expect him to reach our boundary the second night from this.

“But where is Ivar?”

“Bad news there,” said Brand briefly. “He came down on the mouth of the Ouse two days ago with forty ships. The Norfolk Ouse, of course, not the Yorkshire Ouse. Attacked Lynn at the river mouth straight away. The town tried to resist him. He battered the stockade down in a few minutes and stamped the place flat. No survivors to say how he did it, but there's no doubt it happened.”

“The mouth of the Ouse,” muttered Shef. “Twenty miles off. And Burgred about the same.”

Without orders Father Boniface had produced the great map of Norfolk and its borders which Shef had had made for the wall of his main chamber. Shef stood over it, estimating, looking from place to place.

“What we have to do…” he began.

“Before we do anything,” Brand interrupted, “we have to discuss the matter of whether you are still fit to be trusted as our jarl.”

For a long moment Shef stared at him, one eye against two. In the end it was Brand's eyes that dropped.

“All right, all right,” he muttered. “You're up to something, no doubt, and one day you may consent to tell us what.”

“Meanwhile,” Alfred put in, “since you went to such trouble to fetch the lady, it might only be polite to have some thought for what she is to do now. Not just leave her standing outside our tents.”

Shef looked again from face to hostile face, focusing finally on Godive's eyes—once more brimming with tears.

There is no time for all this! Something inside him shrieked. Persuading people. Lulling people. Pretending they are important. They are all wheels in the machine, and so am I! But if they thought that they might refuse to turn.

“I am sorry,” he said. “Godive, forgive me. I was so sure we were safe that my mind turned to other things. Let me present to you my friends…”

The dragon-boats cruised down the shallow, muddy stream of the Great Ouse river, the western frontier of the Wayland jarldom they had come to destroy, forty in line ahead. Some of the crews were keeping up a song as they wound through the green, summer countryside, the masts and furled sails marking their passage over the flat levels. Ivar's men did not bother. They knew the time without a song or a shanty-man to mark it. Besides, wherever Ivar Ragnarsson stood there was now a cloud of strain and tension, even for veteran pirates who would boast and believe that they feared no man.

Not far ahead the helmsmen—the rower-reliefs and the cowed slaves who manned Ivar's machines, one to each of the front six vessels—could see a wooden bridge across the river: not much of a bridge, not part of a town, just the place where the road happened to cross the stream. Chance of ambush from it, none. Just the same, veteran pirates grew to be veterans by taking no unnecessary risks at all. Even Ivar, totally careless of his own safety as he was, did things the way his men expected. A furlong short of the bridge, the figure in the prow, resplendent in scarlet cloak and grass-green trousers, turned and gave one harsh call.

The rowers finished their stroke, recovered oars, and then dropped them in the water, blades reversed. Slowly the ship drifted to a stop, the rest of the fleet easing into close line behind. Ivar waved to the two clumps of riders on both banks, here easily visible in the flat meadowland round the city. They moved forward at a trot, to check the bridge. Behind them the crews began with the ease of long practice to unstep their masts.

No resistance. Not a man in view. Yet as the horsemen slid from their ponies and moved to meet each other on the wooden cart-bridge, they saw that men had been there. A box. Left clear in the middle of the track, where no one could fail to spot it.

Dolgfinn, captain of the mounted scouting party, eyed it without enthusiasm. He did not like the look of it. It had been left there for a purpose. It had been left there by someone who had a very good idea of how a Viking fleet approached. Such things invariably contained a message or a sign of defiance. Probably it was a head. And there was no doubt that it was meant to be delivered to Ivar. Just to confirm his opinion, there was a crude painting on the top, of a tall man in scarlet cloak, green breeches and silver helmet. Dolgfinn had no great fear for himself—he was Sigurth Ragnarsson's own foster father, sent by the Snakeeye himself to keep an eye on his insane relative, and if Ivar had any lingering concern for what any man thought, it was for his elder brother. Just the same, Dolgfinn had no particular relish for the scene that was likely to erupt. Someone would suffer for it, that was sure. Dolgfinn remembered the scene many months before, when Viga-Brand had dared and taunted the Ragnarssons together with the news of their father's death. Good material for a tale, he reflected. Yet things had not turned out so well afterward. Had Brand perhaps, plain man though he seemed to be, foreseen what would follow? And if so, what of this?

Dolgfinn put the thoughts from his mind. Trap it might be. If so, he had no choice but to test it. He picked up the box—not a head at least, too light—walked down to the edge of the water where the dragon-boat was edging in, leapt from shore to oar to thwart, and strolled toward Ivar standing on the half-decked prow, near the giant ton-and-a-half weight of his machine. Silently he put the box down, indicated the painting, whipped a knife from his belt and offered it to Ivar hilt-first, to pry up the nailed lid.

A king of the English would have waved forward a servant to do such a menial task. Chiefs of the pirates had no such dignity to stand on. In four brisk heaves Ivar had the nails out. His pale eyes looked up at Dolgfinn, while his face broke into an unexpected smile of pure pleasure and anticipation. Ivar knew insult or provocation was coming. He liked the thought of something to repay.

“Let's see what the Waymen have sent us,” he said.

Hurling the box-lid aside, he reached in.

“First insult. A capon.” He lifted the dead bird out, stroked its feathers. “A neutered cockerel. Now, I wonder who that might signify.”

Ivar held the silence till it was quite clear that neither Dolgfinn nor anyone else had anything to say, then reached down again.

“Second insult. Tied to the capon, some straw. Some stalks.”

“Not stalks,” said Dolgfinn. “That is a sheaf. Do I need to tell you who that is for? His name was often in your mouth a few weeks ago.”

Ivar nodded. “Thank you for the reminder. Have you heard it said, Dolgfinn, the old saying: ‘A slave takes vengeance at once, a coward never’?”

I did not think you were a coward, thought Dolgfinn, but he did not say it. It would have sounded too much like an apology. If Ivar meant to take offense, he would.

“Have you heard another old saying, Ivar Ragnarsson?” he countered. “ ‘Often from a bloody bag come bad tidings.’ Let us riddle this bag to the bottom.”

Ivar reached again, pulled out a third and last object. This time he stared at it with genuine puzzlement. It was an eel. The snake-like fish of the marshes.

“What is this?” Silence.

“Can anyone tell me?” Still only headshakes from the warriors crowding round. A slight stir from one of the slaves of the monks of York, crouching by his machine. Ivar's eyes missed nothing.

“I grant a boon to whoever can tell me the meaning of this.”

The slave straightened up doubtfully, realizing all eyes were now on him.

“One boon, lord, given freely?”

Ivar nodded.

“It is what we call in English an eel, lord. I think it may mean a place. Ely, down the Ouse, Eel-island, only a few miles from here. Perhaps what it means is that he, the Sheaf, that is, will meet you there.”

“Because I must be the capon?” inquired Ivar. The slave gulped. “You granted a boon, lord, to whoever would speak. I choose mine. I choose freedom.”

“You are free to go,” said Ivar, stepping back from the ship's thwart. The slave gulped again, looking round at the bearded, impassive faces. He stepped forward slowly, gained confidence as no one moved to hinder him, leapt to the side of the ship, and then, in two moves, to a trailing oar and to the side of the river. He was off like a flash, heading for the nearest cover, running in awkward bounds like a frog.

“Eight, nine, ten,” said Ivar to himself. The silver-mounted spear was in his hand; he poised, took two paces sideways. The leaf-blade took the running slave neatly between shoulders and neck, hurling him forward.

“Would anyone else care to call me a capon?” inquired Ivar generally.

Someone already has, thought Dolgfinn.

Later that night, after the ships had moored a cautious two miles north of the challenge-ground, some of Ivar's most senior skippers were talking quietly, very quietly, round their campfire well away from Ivar's tent.

“They call him the Boneless,” said one, “because he cannot take a woman.”

“He can,” said another. “He has sons and daughters.”

“Only if he does strange things first. Not many women survive them. They say—”

“No,” cut in a third man, “do not speak. I will tell you why he is the Boneless. It is because he is like the wind, which comes from anywhere. He could be behind us now.”

“You are all wrong,” said Dolgfinn. “I am not a Wayman, but I have friends who are. I had friends who were. They say this, and I believe them. He is the Beinnlauss, right enough. But that does not mean ‘boneless.’ ” Dolgfinn held up a beef-rib to point out which of the two meanings of the Norse word he meant. “It means ‘legless.’ ” He patted his own thigh.

“But he has legs,” queried one of his listeners.

“On this side, he does. Those who have seen him in the Otherworld, the Waymen, say that there he crawls on his belly in the shape of a great worm, a dragon. He is not a man of one skin. And that is why it will take more than steel to kill him.”

Experimentally, Shef flexed the two-foot-long, two-inch-wide strip of metal that Udd, the little freedman, had brought him. The muscles on his arms stood out as he did so: muscles strong enough to bend a soft iron slave-collar by main force alone. The mild steel gave an inch, two inches. Sprang back.

“It works on the shooters all right,” offered Oswi, watching with interest a ring of catapulteers.

“I'm wondering if it would work for anything else,” said Shef. “A bow?” He flexed the strip again, this time putting it over one knee and trying to get the weight of his body behind it. The metal resisted him, giving only a couple of inches. Too strong for a bow. Or too strong for a man's arms? Yet there were many things that were too strong for a man's arms alone. Catapults. Heavy weights. The yard of a longship. Shef hefted the metal once more. Somewhere in here there was a solution to his puzzle: a mixture of the new knowledge the Way sought and the old knowledge he kept on finding. Now was not the time for him to work the puzzle out.

“How many of these have you made, Udd?”

“Maybe a score. After we refitted the shooters, that is.”

“Stay in the forge tomorrow. Make more. Take as many men and as much iron as you need. I want fivescore—tenscore—as many as you can make.”

“Does that mean we'll miss the battle?” cried Oswi. “Never get a chance to shoot old ‘Dead Level’ once?”

“All right. Udd chooses just one man from each crew to help him. The rest of you get your chance at the battle.”

If there is a battle, Shef added silently to himself. But that is not my plan. Not a battle for us, at any rate. If England is the gods' chessboard, and we are all pieces in their game, then to win the game I must clear some of the pieces off the board. No matter how it looks to the others.

In the early morning mist King Burgred's army, the army of the Mark—three thousand swordsmen and as many slaves, drivers, muleteers and whores—prepared to continue its march in the true English fashion: slowly, grumpily and inefficiently, but for all that, with mounting expectation. Thanes wandered toward the latrines, or eased themselves onto any unoccupied spot. Slaves who had not done so the night before began to grind meal for the everlasting porridge. Fires began to burn, pots began to bubble, the voices of Burgred's guardsmen grew hoarse as they attempted to impose the king's will on his loyal but disorganized subjects: get the bastards fed, get their bowels emptied, and get them moving, as Cwichelm the marshal endlessly repeated. Because today we move into enemy territory. Cross the Ouse, advance on Ely. We can expect a battle any time.

Driven on by the fury of their king at the violation of his own pavilion, by the exhortations of their priests and the near-incoherent rage of Wulfgar the dreaded heimnar, the army of the Mark struck its tents and donned its armor.

In the dragon-boats, matters went differently. A shake from the ship-watch, a word from each skipper. The men were over the side in minutes, and every one dressed, booted, armed and ready to fight. Two riders trotted down from the advanced pickets half a mile away, reporting noise to the west and scouts sent out. Another word, this time from Ivar, and half the men in each crew stood down immediately, to prepare food for themselves and the others still formed up. Detachments swarmed round each of the ton-weight machines in the six lead ships, attaching ropes and rigging pulleys. When the word came they would sway them up from the strengthened yards, drop each one onto its waiting carriage. But not yet. “Wait till the last moment and then move fast” was the pirates' watchword. The Wayman camp, four miles off in dense beechwood, made no sound and showed no lights. Shef, Brand, Thorvin and all their lieutenants had been round again and again the day before, impressing it on the most important Viking and dullest ex-slave. No noise. No straggling. Stay in your blankets till you're called. Get some rest. Breakfast by units. Then form up. Don't go outside the wood.

Obeying his own orders, Shef lay alert in his tent, listening to the muted bustle of the army waking. Today was a day of crisis, he thought. But not the last crisis. Maybe the last one he could plan. It was critically important, then, that this day should go well, to provide him with the start, the reserve of force that he would need before all was over.

On the pallet beside him lay Godive. They had been together four days now, and yet he had still not taken her, not so much as stripped off her shift. It would be easy to do. His flesh was hard, remembering the one time he had done it. She would not resist. Not only did she expect it, he knew she wondered why he had not. Was he another like the Boneless? Or was he less of a man than Alfgar? Shef imagined the cry she would make as he penetrated her.

Who could blame her for crying? She still winced every time she moved. Like his, her back must be scarred forever.

Yet she still had both eyes. She had never faced the mercy of Ivar, the vapna takr. As he thought of the mercy of Ivar, Shef's erected flesh began to shrink; the thoughts of warm skin and soft resistance dwindled like a catapult-stone going up into the sky.

Something else entered him instead, something cold and fierce and longsighted. It was not today that mattered, nor the fleeting good opinion of his men. Only the end. Stretched out, relaxed, perfectly aware of himself from crown to toe, Shef reflected on how the day might go.

Hund, he decided. Time for another call on Hund.

As the sun sucked up the morning mist, Ivar looked from his place with the ridge-line pickets to the familiar chaos of an English army advancing. Familiar chaos. An English army.

“It's not them,” said Dolgfinn beside him. “Not the Way-folk. Not Skjef Sigvarthsson. Look at all the Christ-stuff, the crosses and the black robes. You can hear them singing their morning massa, or whatever they call it. So either Sigvarthsson's challenge was just a lie, or else…”

“Or else there's another army hiding round here somewhere, to finish off the winners,” Ivar completed for him. The grin was back on his face, pinched and painful, like a fox nibbling meat from the wolf-trap.

“Back to the boats?”

“I think not,” said Ivar. “The river's too narrow to turn forty boats in a hurry. And if we row on there's no certainty they won't mount and catch us. And if they do that they can take us out one boat at a time. Even the English might manage that.

“No. At our Bragi boast in the Braethraborg, my brothers and I swore to invade England and conquer all its kingdoms in revenge for our father. Two we have conquered, and today is the day for the third.”

“And Sigvarthsson?” prompted Dolgfinn.

The grin spread wider, teeth showing like a rictus. “He will have his chance. We will have to see he doesn't take it. Now, get down to the boats, Dolgfinn, and tell them to unload the machines. But not this bank. The far bank, understand? A hundred paces back. And rig a sail over each one as if it was a tent. Have men ready to look as if they're taking them down when the English come in sight. But take them down English-style—you know, as if you were ten old gammers comparing grandchildren. Have the slaves do it.”

Dolgfinn laughed. “You have trained the slaves to work better than that these months, Ivar.”

The mirth had drained completely from Ivar's face, the eyes gone as colorless as his skin. “Then untrain them,” he said. “The machines on that bank. The men on this.” He turned back to his survey of the army coming forward, six-deep, banners waving, great crosses on standard-carts behind its center. “And send up Hamal. He will lead the mounted patrol today. I have special orders for him.”

From his vantage point beneath a great flowering hawthorn, Shef looked out at the developing battle. The Army of the Way lay in its ranks behind and to either side of him, well spread-out and under cover of wood or hedgerow. The bulky pull-throwers were still not assembled, the twist-shooters with their horse-teams well to the rear. English bagpipers and Viking horn-blowers had all alike been threatened with disgrace, torment and forfeiture of a week's ale ration if they sounded a note. Shef was sure they had remained undiscovered. And now, as the battle seemed likely to be joined, both sides' wandering scouts would have been called into the center. So far so good.

And yet already there was a surprise. Ivar's machines. Shef had watched them being swayed from the boats, had noted the way the yards dipped and the boats heeled: heavy objects, whatever they were, far heavier than his own. Was that how Ivar had taken Lynn? And they had been put on the wrong bank. Safer from attack, maybe, but unable to move forward if the battle shifted the other way. Nor could even Shef's keen sight see how the machines were constructed. How would they affect his plan to fight the battle?

Even more, his plan not to fight the battle.

Cwichelm the marshal, veteran of many battles, would have halted the army if he could, as soon as his advance-guard reported the dragon-boats on the river in front of him. A Viking fleet was not what he had expected to fight. Anything unexpected should be scouted first—especially when dealing with the folk of the Way, whose many traps he remembered from the fight in the marsh when Sigvarth had died. He was not left to make the decision. Vikings and Way-men were all the same to his king: enemies of decency. To Wulfgar and the bishops, all were heathens. Dragon-boats spread out in line? So much the better! Destroy them before they could mass together. “And if they are not Way-folk,” the young Alfgar had added with pointed insolence, “so much less to worry about. At least they will not have the machines you fear so much.”

Stung by the insult, aware that complex maneuvering would not work with the untrained thanes who made up most of King Burgred's army, Cwichelm took his men over the slight ridge above the river at a brisk trot, he and his assistants well out in front, shouting their war-cries and waving their broadswords for the rest to come on.

The English army, seeing the hated dragon-boats in front of them, each crew clumped in a wedge before its boat, cheered and came on with enthusiasm. Just so long as they don't get disheartened, thought Cwichelm, dropping back till the ranks closed round him. Or get tired before the battle's even started. He settled his shield firmly on his shoulder, making no effort to lift it to guard-position. It weighed a stone—fourteen English pounds—the rest of his weapons and armor, three stone more. Not too much to carry. A lot to run with. Even more to wield. Through the sweat that ran into his eyes he noted dimly the men on the far bank struggling with canvas. Not often you catch Vikings napping, he thought. It's usually us that's up last.

The first volley from Erkenbert's onagers smashed six holes in the English battle-line, each stone driving clear through the six-deep ranks. The one aimed for the commanders in the center—conspicuous in gold and garnets and scarlet tunics—lifted a trifle high, at head height. Cwichelm never felt or saw the blow that drove his head straight back till the neckbone snapped, that reaped a file of men behind him and crashed on to bury itself in the earth just short of the cart from which Bishop Daniel was chanting an encouraging psalm. In an instant both he and the army were headless.

Most of the English warriors behind their visored helmets did not even see what had happened to their right or their left. They could see only the enemy in front of them, the enemy so tantalizingly gathered in isolated clumps and wedges, each one forty-strong in front of its ship, five or ten yards between them. In a yelling wave they ran forward to beat on the Viking wedges with spear and broadsword, hacking at the linden-shields, sweeping at head and leg. Braced and rested, Ivar Ragnarsson's outnumbered men strained every muscle to hold them for the five minutes their chief had demanded.

Through the carefully measured firing-lanes the catapults launched their irresistible missiles again and again.

“Something's happening already,” grunted Brand.

Shef made no reply. For several minutes he had strained his one eye desperately to see what he could of the machines that were wreaking such havoc in Burgred's army. Then he fixed on one, counted his heartbeats carefully between one launch and the next. By now he had a good idea of what the weapons were. They must be torsion-machines—the slow rate of shot showed that, as did the smashing effect, the swirls of men bowled over as each missile struck. They were not on a bow principle. Little as he could see from a mile's distance, the square, high shape showed that. And the weight of them, the weight he could detect from the way they had to be slung on yards and pulleys—that showed they must be built stoutly to take some sort of impact. Yes. A little experiment, a closer look if he got the chance, and…

Time now to think more immediately. Shef turned his attention to the battle. Something happening, Brand said. And easy enough to guess what. After a few volleys, the men on the English side, nearest to where the stones were arriving, had started to edge sideways, realizing that safety lay in having wedges of their enemies between them and the machines. But as they edged sideways they hampered the efforts and the sword-arms of the champions trying to break through Ivar's crewmen. Many of those champions, half-blinded by their helmets, weighed down by their armor, had no idea what was going on, only that something strange was happening round them. Some of them were beginning to step back, to look for space to raise their visors, to shove off the men who should be backing them but were jostling them instead. If Ivar's men were concentrated they could use such a moment to break out. But they were not. They themselves were in small groups, each one liable to be swallowed instantly by superior numbers if they drove forward from their ships and the protecting riverbank. The battle hung in balance.

Brand grunted again, this time digging his fingers deep into Shef's arm. Someone by Ivar's machines had given an order to change targets, was enforcing it with kicks and blows. As the English swordsmen rushed forward, the clumsy standard-carts behind them were left exposed, each one with a waving banner on it—of king or alderman, or the giant cross of bishop or abbot. But now there was one fewer than there had been a moment ago. Splinters still flew in the air, turning end over end. A direct hit. And there again—a whole file of draft-oxen slumped onto their knees in a row and a wheel hurled itself sideways. From the Wayman army behind Shef and his group, all by now watching intently, there rose an exhalation, an exhalation that would have been a cheer without the instant kicks and curses of marshals and team-leaders. A cross held steady for a moment, then tipped inexorably over, crashed to the ground.

Something deep inside Shef clicked like a winding cogwheel. Thoughtfully, unnoticed in the rising excitement around him, he took a deep pull at the flask he had held all day in one hand: good ale. But in it was the contents of the little leather sack he had taken from Hund that morning. He drank deep, forcing himself to ignore the gagging reflex, the vile taste of long-rotten meat. How do you give a man a vomit, for a purge? he had asked. “That is one thing we can do,” Hund had said with somber pride. Shef felt no doubt, as the drench went down, that that was exactly true. He drank the flask to its end, leaving not a drop as evidence, then rose to his feet. A minute, maybe two, he thought. I need all eyes.

“Why are they riding forward?” he asked. “Is it a charge?”

“A cavalry charge like the Franks do?” replied Brand uncertainly. “I've heard of that. Don't know that the English—”

“No, no, no,” snapped Alfred, also on his feet, almost dancing with impatience. “It's Burgred's horse-thanes. Oh, look at the fools! They've decided that the battle is lost, so they're riding forward to rescue their lord. But as soon as he mounts… Almighty God, he's done it!”

Far away across the battlefield, a gold-ringed head rose into view from a ruck of bodies—the king mounting. For a moment he seemed to be resisting, waving his sword forward. But someone else had hold of his bridle. A clot of riders began to walk, then canter from the fighting. As they did so, instantly men began to shred away from the fighting-lines, following their leader, at first casually. Then briskly, hastily. Realizing the movement behind them, others turned to look, to follow. The army of the Mark, still undestroyed, still unbeaten, many of its men still unafraid, began to stream to the rear. As it did so, the stones lashed out again. Men began to run.

The Wayman army was all on its feet now, all eyes turning expectantly toward the center. The moment, Shef thought. Sweep forward when both sides are fully engaged, take the machines before they can change target, board the ships, take Ivar in flank and rear…

“Give me some horsemen,” Alfred begged. “Burgred's a fool, but he's my sister's husband. I have to save him. We'll pension him off, send him to the Pope…”

Yes, thought Shef. And that will be one piece still on the board. And Ivar—even if we beat him Ivar will get away, by boat or horse, like he did last time. And that will be another. But we must have fewer pieces now. In the end, one piece alone. I want the mills to stop.

Blessedly, as he stepped forward, he felt some dreadful thing rising inside him, his mouth filling with the terrible cold saliva he had felt only once before, the time he had eaten carrion one hard winter. Grimly he clamped it down. All eyes, all eyes.

He turned, looked at the men rising from bracken and bush, eyes glaring, teeth showing with expectant rage. “Forward,” he shouted, lifting his halberd from the ground and sweeping it toward the river. “Men of the Way…”

The vomit shot from his mouth so fiercely it caught Alfred high up on his enameled shield. The king gaped, uncomprehending. Shef doubled up, acting no more; his halberd dropped. Again the great retchings took him, again and again, lifting him off his feet.

As he rolled on the fouled earth the Wayman army hesitated, staring in horror. Alfred raised an arm to shout for his horse, for his companions, then dropped it, turned back to stare at the figure writhing on the ground. Thorvin was running forward from his place in the rear. A buzz of doubt ran along the ranks: What's the order? Are we going forward? Sigvarthsson is down? Who commands? Is it the Viking? Do we obey a pirate? An Englishman? The Wessex king?

As he sprawled in the grass, gasping for breath before the next upheaval, Shef heard the voice of Brand, looking down at him with stony disapproval.

“There is an old saying,” it said. “ ‘When the army-leader weakens, then the whole army wavers.’ What do you expect it to do when he spews his guts out?”

Stand fast, thought Shef, and wait till he's better. Please, Thor. Or God. Or whoever. Just do it.

Ivar, his eyes as pale as watered milk, stared out across the battlefield for the trap he knew must be there. At his feet—he had fought by choice at the tip of the wedge of his ship's crew—lay three champions of the Mark, each in turn eager for the fame that would ring through the whole of Christendom for the bane of Ivar, crudest of the pirates of the North. Each discovering in turn that Ivar's slim height belied his extraordinary strength of arm and body, though not his snakelike speed. One of them, cut through mail and leather from collarbone to ribcage, moaned involuntarily as he waited for death. Quick as a snake's tongue Ivar's sword licked out, stabbing through Adam's apple and spine beneath. Ivar did not want sport, for the moment. He wanted quiet, for consideration.

Nothing in the woods. Nothing to either flank. Nothing behind him. If they did not spring the trap soon it would be too late. It was almost too late already. Round Ivar his army, without orders or briefing, was crying out one of its many experienced battle-drills: securing a battlefield after victory. It was one of the many strengths of Viking armies that their leaders did not have to waste their energies in telling the rank and file how to do anything that could be turned into a routine. They could watch and plan instead. Now, some men went forward in pairs, one to stab, one to guard, making doubly and triply sure that no Englishman was lying still but conscious, ready to take a last enemy with him. Behind them came the loot-gatherers with their sacks, not stripping the dead of everything, as would be done later, but taking everything visible and valuable. In the ships, leeches were splinting and binding.

And at the same time every man kept a tense eye on their leader, for further orders. All knew that the moment of victory was a time to exploit advantage. They carried out their immediate tasks with savage haste.

No, reflected Ivar. The trap had been set, he was sure of that. But it had not been sprung. Probably the fools got up too late. Or were stuck in a marsh somewhere.

He stepped forward, placed his helmet on a spear, waved it in a circle. Immediately, from their concealment half a mile on the downstream flank of the English army, there broke a wave of riders, legs flapping as they kicked their horses into speed, steel glinting in the morning sun on point and edge and mail. The English swordsmen still shredding to the rear pointed, yelled, ran faster. Fools, thought Ivar. They still outnumber Hamal up there six to one. If they stood fast, formed line, they could finish him off before we got up to join in. And if we broke ranks to hurry they could win this battle yet. But there was something about armed riders that made scattered men run without even looking over their shoulders.

In any case Hamal and the mounted patrol—three hundred men, every horse that Ivar's army had been able to lay bridle on—had targets other than single fugitives. Now, after battle, was the time to destroy leaders, to ensure that kingdoms could never recover their strength again. Ivar noted with approval the swerve as fifty men on the fastest horses aimed to head off the gold-coroneted figure now being urged over the skyline by his horse-thanes. Others pounded down on the straggle of carts and standards making laboriously for the rear. The main body was galloping hard along the ridge-line, obviously intent on the camp and the camp-followers that must be there, out of sight but only a few hundred yards the other side of the ridge.

Time to join them. Time to get rich. Time for sport. Ivar felt the excitement rise in his throat. They had balked him with Ella. Not with Edmund. They would not with Burgred. He enjoyed killing kings. And afterward—afterward there would be some one of the whores, maybe some one of the ladies, but anyway some soft, pale creature that no one would miss. And in the tumult of a sacked camp, with rape and death on every side, no one would notice. It would not be the girl that Sigvarthsson had taken from him. But there would be some other. Meanwhile.

Ivar turned, stepped carefully round the mess of entrails slowly spilling from the butchered man at his feet, replaced his helmet, waved his shield forward. The watching army, loot already stacked, men back in their ranks, gave a short, hoarse cheer and walked forward with him, up the hill, over the men they had killed themselves and the men the machines had slaughtered. As they tramped forward they shook out from their wedges to form a solid line four hundred yards across. Behind them the ship-guards already detailed watched them go.

So, from its concealment in the woods a mile upstream, did the Wayman army—confused, frustrated, already bickering over the limp shape of its leader.

Chapter Seven

We cannot afford to wait any longer,“ said Thorvin. ”We must settle this matter for good. And now.“

“The army is divided,” objected Geirulf, the priest of Tyr. “If the men see you too ride away, they will lose heart even more.”

Thorvin brushed the objection aside with an impatient gesture. Round him ran the cords with their holy rowan berries; the spear of Othin stood in the ground beside him next to the burning fire of Loki. Just as the time before, only priests of the Way sat in the sacred circle, with no laymen present. They meant to speak of things no layman should hear.

“That is what we have told ourselves for too long,” replied Thorvin. “Always there is something more important to think of than this central one. We should have solved the riddle long ago, as soon as we began to think the boy Shef might indeed be what he said: the one who will come from the North. We asked the question, we asked his friend, we asked Sigvarth Jarl—who thought he was his father. When we could find no answer we passed to other things.

“But now we must be sure. When he would not wear the pendant, I said, ‘there is still time.’ When he left the army and rode to find his woman, we thought, ‘he is a boy.’ Now he pretends to lead the army and leaves it in disorder. Next time what will he do? We have to know. Is he a child of Othin? And if he is, what will he be to us? Othin Allfather, father of gods and men? Or Othin Bölverk, God of the Hanged, Betrayer of Warriors, who gathers the heroes to himself only for his own purposes?

“Not for nothing is there no priest of Othin with the army, and few within the Way. If that is his birth, we must know. And it may be that is not his birth. There are other gods than Allfather who walk in the world.”

Thorvin looked meaningfully at the crackling fire to his left. “So: let me do what should have been done before. Ride to ask his mother. We know which village she comes from. It is not twenty miles off. If she is still there I will ask her—and if her answer is wrong, then I say we must cast him off before worse befalls us. Remember the warning of Vigleik!”

A long silence followed Thorvin's words. Finally Farman, the priest of Frey, broke it.

“I remember Vigleik's warning, Thorvin. And I too fear the treachery of Othin. Yet I ask you to think that Othin, and his followers, may be as they are for a reason. To keep off worse powers.”

He too looked thoughtfully at the Loki-fire. “As you know, I have seen your former apprentice in the Otherworld, standing in the place of Völund the smith. But I have seen other things in that world. And I can tell you that not far from here there is far worse than your apprentice: one of the brood of Fenris himself, a grandchild of Loki. If you had seen them in the Otherworld, you would never again confuse the two, Othin and Loki, or think that the one might be the other.”

“Very well,” replied Thorvin. “But I ask you, Farman, to think this. If there is a war between two powers in this world, gods and giants, with Othin at the head of one and Loki at the other—how often do we see it even in this world, that as the war goes on, the one side begins to resemble the other?”

Slowly the heads nodded, even, in the end, Geirulf's, then Farman's.

“It is decided,” said Farman. “Go to Emneth. Find the boy's mother and ask her whose son hers is.”

Ingulf the healer, priest of Ithun, spoke for the first time. “A deed of kindness, Thorvin, that may come to good. When you go, take with you the English girl Godive. She has realized in her way what we have. She knows he did not rescue her for love. Only to use her as bait. That is no good thing for anyone to know.”

Shef had been dimly aware, through first the racking cramps and then the paralyzing weakness that succeeded them, of the leaders of his army's factions arguing. At some point Alfred had threatened to draw sword on Brand, an action dismissed like some great dog brushing aside a puppy. He could remember Thorvin pleading passionately for something, some rescue or expedition. But most of the day he had been aware of nothing except hands lifting him, attempts made to get him to drink, hands holding him through the retchings that followed: Ingulf's hands sometimes, then Godive's. Never Hund's. With just a fragment of mind Shef realized that Hund feared his leech-detachment might suffer if he saw too closely what he had done. Now, as the dark came on, he felt recovered, weary, ready to sleep: to wake to action.

But first the sleep must come. It had the nauseous taste about it of Hund's mold-and-carrion draft.

He was in a gully, a rocky defile, in the dark. Slowly he clambered forward, unable to see more than a few feet, lit only by a last pale light in the sky—the sky visible only many yards above his head, where the gully's jagged outline showed black against gray. He moved with agonized care. No stumble, no dislodgement of stone. Or something would be on him. Something no human could fight against.

He had a sword in his hand, gleaming very faintly in the starlight. There was something about the sword: it had a will of its own, a fierce urge. It had already killed its creator and master, and would gladly do so again, even though he was its master now. It tugged at his hand, and from time to time it rang faintly, as if he had knocked it on stone. It seemed to know about the need for stealth, though. The sound would be inaudible to anyone or anything except himself. It was covered, too, by the rushing of the water at the bottom of the gully. The sword was anxious to kill, and ready to keep silent till its chance came.

As he moved into the dream, Shef realized, as he often did, what sort of person he himself was. This time, a man impossibly broad of hip and shoulder, with wrists so thick they bulged round the gold bracelets he wore. Their weight would have dragged a lesser man's arms down. He did not notice them.

The man he was, was frightened. His breath came short, not from the climbing, but from fear. There was a sense in his stomach of emptiness and chill. It was especially frightening to this man, Shef realized, because he had never felt such a feeling before. He did not even understand it, and could not name it. It was bothering him, but not affecting him, because this man did not know it was possible to turn back from an enterprise once begun. He had never done it before; he would never do so till the day he died. Now he was climbing beside the stream, holding his drawn sword carefully, to reach the position he had decided on and to do the thing he had planned, though his heart turned over inside him at the thought of what he must face.

Or not face. Even this man, Sigurth Sigmundsson, whose name would live till the end of the world, knew he could not face what he had to kill.

He came to a place where the gully wall on one side was broken down, falling into a jumble of scree and broken stone, as if some great metal creature had smashed it and rolled it flat so that it could get down to the water. And as he reached it, a sudden overwhelming reek stopped the hero in his tracks, a reek like a solid wall. It stank of dead things, of a battlefield two weeks old in the summer sun—but also of soot, of burning, with some extra tang about it that attacked the nostrils, as if the smell itself would catch fire if someone struck a spark.

It was the smell of the worm. The dragon. Dawn-ravager, venom-blower, the naked spite-creature that crawled on its belly. The legless one.

As the hero found, in the jumble of stone, a crack large enough to take his body and crawled inside it, he realized he had not been too early. For the dragon was not legless, and seemed so only to those who saw it crawling forward from a distance. Through the stone the hero could hear a heavy stumping, as one foot after another groped forward; in between and all the time, the heavy slither of the belly dragging on the ground. The leather belly, if reports were true. They had better be.

The hero tried to lie on his back, then hesitated, changing position rapidly. Now he lay on one side, facing the direction from which the dragon must come, propped on his left elbow, right elbow down and sword across his body. His eyes and the top of his head projected above the track. It would look like another stone, he told himself. The truth was that even this hero could not lie still and wait for the thing to appear above him, or he—even he—would be unmanned. He had to see.

And there it was, the great head silhouetted against the gray like some stone outcrop. But moving; its armored crest and skull-bones like a metal war-machine rotating. The bloated swag body behind it. Some trick of the starlight caught one foot planted on the stone, and the hero stared at it, shocked almost into paralysis. Four toes, sticking out from each other like the arms of a starfish, but each one the size of a man's thigh, warty and gnarled like a toad's back, dripping slime. The very touch of one of those would kill from horror. The hero had just enough self-command not to shrink back with fear. The slightest movement now would be deadly dangerous. His only hope was to be a stone.

Would it see him? It must. It was coming toward him, directly toward him, padding forward with great, slow steps. One forefoot was only ten yards from him, then the other was planted on the stone almost on the lip of his crack. He must let it walk right over him, the hero thought with his last vestige of sense, let it walk right down to the river where it drank. And when he heard the first noise of drinking, of the water gushing up as it must into the belly above him, then he must strike.

As he told himself this, the head reared up only a few feet above him, and the hero caught sight of a thing of which no man had spoken. The dragon's eyes. They were white, as white as those of an old woman with the film-disease, but light shone through them, a pale light from within.

The hero realized what it was that he feared the most. Not that the legless one, the boneless longserpent, would kill him. That would almost be a relief in this terrible place. But that it would see him. And stop. And speak, before it began its long sport with him.

The dragon halted, one foot in mid-stride. And looked down.

Shef came from his sleep with a shriek and a bound, landing in one movement, just feet from the bed where they had stretched him. Three pairs of eyes stared at him, alarmed, relieved, surprised. One pair, Ingulf's, looked suddenly knowing.

“You saw something?” he said.

Shef passed a hand over his sweat-soaked hair. “Ivar. The Boneless One. As he is on the other side.”

The warriors around Ivar watched him out of the corners of their eyes, too proud to show alarm or even anxiety, yet conscious that at any time now he might break out, turn on anyone at all, even his most trusted followers or the emissaries of his brothers. He sat in a carved chair looted from one of King Burgred's baggage-carts, a horn of ale in his right hand, dipped from the great keg in front of him. In his left hand he swung the gold coronet they had taken from Burgred's head. The head itself was on a spike in the stark ring surrounding the Vikings' camp. That was why Ivar's mood was grim. He had been balked yet again.

“Sorry,” Hamal had reported. “We tried to take him alive, as you ordered, to pin him between our shields. He fought like a black bear, from his horse and then on foot. Even then we might have taken him, but he tripped, fell forward on a sword.”

“Whose sword?” Ivar had demanded, his voice quiet.

“Mine,” Hamal had said, lying. If he had indicated the young man who had really killed Burgred, Ivar would have taken out his spite and frustration on him. Hamal had a chance of surviving. Not an especially strong one, for all his past services. But Ivar had only studied his face for a moment, remarked dispassionately that he was a liar, and not a pretty one, and had left the matter there.

It would break out some other way, they were sure. As Dolgfinn went on with the tale of victory—prisoners taken, loot from the field, loot from the camp, gold and silver, women and provisions—he wished deeply that some of his own men would turn up. “Go round everywhere,” he had told them, “look at everything. Never mind the women for the moment; there'll be plenty left for you before the night's over. But in the name of old Hairy Breeks himself, find something to keep the Ragnarsson amused. Or it could be us he pegs out for the birds tomorrow.”

Ivar's eyes had shifted past Dolgfinn's shoulder. He dared to follow them. So—Greppi and the boys had found something after all. But what in the name of Hel, goddess of the dead, could it be?

It was a box, a wheeled box that could be tipped forward and trundled along like an upright coffin. Too short for a coffin. And yet there was a body inside. A dozen grinning Vikings pushed the box forward and tipped it to stand in front of Ivar. The body inside looked out at them, and licked its lips.

Ivar rose, putting down the golden coronet for the first time that evening, and stood in front of Wulfgar.

“Well,” he remarked at last. “Not such a bad job. But not one of mine, I think. Or at least I don't remember the face. Who did this to you, heimnar?”

The pale face with its bright red, incongruous lips, stared back at him, made no reply. A Viking stepped forward, knife whipping clear, ready to slice or gouge on command, but Ivar's hand stopped him.

“Think a little, Kleggi,” he urged. “It's not easy to frighten a man who's already lost so much. What's an eye or an ear now?

“So tell me, heimnar. You are a dead man already; you have been since they did this. Who did it to you? Maybe he was no friend of mine either.”

Ivar spoke in Norse, but slowly, clearly, so an Englishman could pick out some of the words.

“It was Sigvarth Jarl,” said Wulfgar. “Jarl of the Small Isles, they tell me. But I want you to know, what he did to me, I did to him. Only more. I caught him in the marsh by Ely—if you are the Ragnarsson, then you were not far away. I trimmed him finger by finger and toe by toe. He did not die till there was nothing left a knife could reach. Nothing you can do to me will equal what I did to him.”

He spat suddenly, the spittle landing on Ivar's shoe. “And so may perish all you Godless heathen! And it is my comfort. As you die in torment, for you it is only the gateway to the eternal torment. I will look down from Neorxnawang, from the plain of the blessed dead, and see you blister in the heat. Then you will beg for the smallest drop from my ale-cup to cool your agony. But God and I will refuse.”

The blue eyes stared up, jaw set in determination. Ivar laughed suddenly, throwing his head back, raised the horn in his right hand and drained it to the last drop.

“Well,” he said. “Since you mean to be so niggard with me, I will do what your Christian books say and return you good for evil. ”Throw him in the keg!“

As the men gaped, Ivar stepped forward, slashing at the straps which held Wulfgar's trunk and stumps in place. Seizing him by belt and tunic he lifted him bodily out of the container, took three heavy paces to the side, and thrust the heimnar deep into the four-foot-high, hundred-gallon butt of ale. Wulfgar bobbed, thrashing with the stumps of his arms, truncated legs not quite reaching the bottom.

Ivar put one hand on Wulfgar's head, looked round like a teacher demonstrating.

“See, Kleggi,” he pointed out. “What is a man maimed like this afraid of?”

“Of being helpless.”

He pushed the head firmly down. “Now he can take a good drink,” he remarked. “If what he says is true, he won't need it on the other side, but it's as well to be sure.”

Many of the watching Vikings laughed, calling to their mates to come and see. Dolgfinn allowed himself a smile. There was no credit in this, no glory or drengskapr. But maybe it would keep Ivar happy.

“Let him up,” he shouted. “Maybe he will offer us a drink from heaven after all.”

Ivar seized the hair, heaved Wulfgar's head up out of the frothing brew. The mouth gaped wide, sucking in air by frantic reflex, the eyes bulged with terror and humiliation. Wulfgar threw the stump of one arm over the edge of the barrel, tried to lever himself up.

Carefully Ivar knocked it free, stared into the eyes of the drowning man as if searching for something. He nodded, thrust the head back down again.

“Now he is afraid,” he said to Kleggi, standing by. “He would bargain for his life if he could. I do not like them to die defying me. They must give in.”

“They all give in in the end,” said Kleggi, laughing. “Like women.”

Ivar thrust the head spasmodically deeper.

Shef hefted the object Udd had brought him. They stood in the center of an interested circle—all Englishmen, all freedmen, catapulteers and halberdiers together—near the front the gang Udd had collected to help him forge the strips of mild steel.

“See,” Udd said, “we done what you told us. We made the strips, two-foot long. You said try and make bows out of them, so we filed notches in the ends and fitted strings. Had to use twisted gut. Nothing else strong enough.”

Shef nodded. “But then you couldn't pull them.”

“Right, lord. You couldn't, and we couldn't. But we thought about that for a bit, and then Saxa here”—Udd indicated another member of his gang—“said anyone who's ever carried loads for a living knows legs are stronger than arms.

“So: we took thick oak blocks. We cut slots for the metal near the front and slid the strips through, wedged 'em tight. We fitted triggers like we got already on the big shooters.

“And then we put these iron hoops, like, on the front of the wood. Try it, lord. Put your foot through the hoop.”

Shef did so.

“Grip the string with both hands and pull back against your own leg. Pull till the string goes over the top of the trigger.”

Shef heaved, felt the string coming back against strong resistance—but not impossibly strong. The puny Udd and his undersized colleagues had underestimated the force a big man trained in the forge could exert. The string clicked over the trigger. He was holding, Shef realized, a bow of sorts—but one that lay crosswise to the shooter, not up and down like a wooden handbow.

A grinning face from the crowd handed Shef a short arrow: short because the steel bow flexed only a few inches, not the half-arm's-length of a wooden bow. He fitted it in the rough gouge in the top of the wooden block. The circle parted in front of him, indicating a tree twenty yards off.

Shef leveled the bow, aimed automatically between the arrow-feathers, as he would have with a twist-shooter, squeezed the trigger. There was no violent thump of recoil as there would have been with the full-sized machine, no black streak rising and falling. Yet the bolt sped away, struck fair in the center of the oak-trunk.

Shef walked over, grasped the embedded arrow, worked it backward and forward. After a dozen tugs, it came free. He looked at it speculatively.

“Not bad,” he said. “But not good, either. Although the bow is steel, I do not think in the end it strikes harder than the hunting bows we use already. And they are not strong enough for war.”

Udd's face fell, he started automatically to make the excuses of the slave with a hard master. Shef held up a hand to stop him.

“Never mind, Udd. We are all learning something here. This is a new thing that the world has never seen before, but who made it? Saxa, for remembering that legs are stronger than arms? You, for remembering how your master made the steel? I, for telling you to make a bow? Or the Rome-folk of old, for showing me how to make the twist-shooters that started all this?

“None of us. What we have here is a new thing, but not new knowledge. Just old knowledge put together, old knowledge from many minds. Now, we need to make this stronger. Not the bow, for that is strong enough. The pull. How can we make it so that my pull up is double the strength of what I can do now?”

The silence was broken by Oswi, leader of the catapult-team.

“Well, if you put it like that, lord, answer's obvious. How do you double a pull?

“You use a pulley. Or a windlass. A little one, not a great big one like the Norse-folk use on their ships. Fix it to your belt, wind on one end of the rope, hook the other end of the rope over the bowstring, pull it up as far as you like.”

Shef handed the primitive crossbow back to Udd. “There's the answer, Udd. Set the trigger further back, so the bow can flex as far as the steel will let it. Make a winding gear with a rope and a hook to go with every bow. And make a bow out of every strip of steel you have. Take all the men you need.”

The Viking shouldering his way through the crowd looked suspiciously at the jarl surrounded by a throng of midgets. He had arrived only that summer, called from Denmark by incredible stories of success, wealth and profit, and of the Ragnarssons defeated. All he had seen so far was an army drawn up to fight that had then suddenly stopped in its tracks. And now here was the jarl himself, talking like a common man to a crowd of thralls. The Viking was six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and could lift a Winchester bushel with either hand. What sort of a jarl is this? he wondered. Why does he talk to them and not to the warriors? Skraelingjar such as these will never win a battle.

Out loud he said, with a minimum of deference, “Lord. You are called to council.”

His message delivered, he turned away, contempt in the set of his shoulders.

Greatly daring, Oswi asked what all had wondered: “Battle this time, lord? We got to stop that Ivar sometime. We wouldn't have minded if we'd done it sooner.”

Shef felt the reproach, overrode it. “Battle always comes soon enough, Oswi. The thing is to be ready.”

As soon as Shef stepped into the great meeting tent, he felt the hostility that faced him. The whole of the Wayman council was present, or seemed to be: Brand, Ingulf, Farman and the rest of the priests, Alfred, Guthmund, representatives from every group and unit of the joint army.

He sat down at his place, hand groping automatically for the whetstone-scepter left lying there for him. “Where is Thorvin?” he said, suddenly noting one absence.

Farman started to give a reply, but was immediately overridden by the angry voice of Alfred—the young king—speaking already in a fair approximation of the Anglo-Norse pidgin the Wayman army and council so often used with each other.

“One man here or there does not matter. What we have to decide on cannot wait. Already we have waited too long!”

“Yes,” rumbled Brand in agreement. “We are like the farmer who sits up all night to watch the hen-roost. Then in the morning he finds the fox has taken all his geese.”

“So who is the fox?” asked Shef.

“Rome,” said Alfred, rising to his feet to look down at the council. “We forgot the Church in Rome. When you took the land from the Church in this county, when I threatened to take the revenues from it in my kingdom, the Church took fright. The Pope in Rome took fright.”

“So?” asked Shef.

“So now there are ten thousand men ashore. Mailed horsemen of the Franks. Led by their king Charles. They wear crosses on their arms and their surcoats, and say that they have come to establish the Church in England against the pagans.

“The pagans! For a hundred years we have fought against the pagans, we Englishmen. Every year we sent Peter's pence to Rome as a token of our loyalty. I myself”—Alfred's youthful voice rose in pitch with indignation—“I myself was sent by my father to the last Pope, to good Pope Leo, when I was a child. The Pope made me a consul of Rome! Yet never have we had a ship or a man or a silver penny sent into England in exchange. But the day Church-land is threatened, Pope Nicholas can find an army.”

“But it is an army against the pagans,” said Shef. “Maybe us. Not you.”

Alfred's face flushed. “You forget. Daniel, my own bishop, declared me excommunicate. The messengers say these Cross-wearers, these Franks, announce on all sides that there is no king in Wessex and they demand submission to King Charles. Till that is done they will ravage every shire. They come against the pagans. But they rob and kill only Christians.”

“What do you want us to do?” asked Shef.

“We must march at once and defeat this Frankish army before it destroys my kingdom. Bishop Daniel is dead or fleeing, and his Mercian backers with him. No Englishman will challenge my king-right again. My thanes and aldermen are already gathering to me, and I can raise the entire levy of Wessex, from every shire. If, as some say, the messengers have overcounted the strength of the enemy, then I can fight them on even terms. I will fight them on any terms. But your assistance would be greatly welcome.”

He sat down, looking round tensely for support.

In the long silence, Brand said one word. “Ivar.”

All eyes turned to Shef, sitting on his camp-stool, whetstone across his knees. He still seemed pale and gaunt after his sickness, cheekbones standing out, the flesh round his ruined eye pulled in so that it seemed a dark pit.

I do not know what he is thinking, reflected Brand. But he has not been with us these last days. If what Thorvin says is true, about the spirit leaving the body in these visions, then I wonder if it can be that you leave a little of it behind each time.

“Yes, Ivar,” repeated Shef. “Ivar and his machines. We cannot leave him behind us while we march to the South. He would grow stronger. For one thing, now Burgred is dead it will be only a matter of time till the Mercians elect a king to make peace with Ivar and save them from ravaging. Then Ivar will have their men and money to draw on, as he has already drawn on the money and the skills of York. He did not make those machines himself.

“So we must fight him. I must fight him. I think he and I are bound together now so that we cannot part till this is finished.

“But you, lord king.” The whetstone-scepter was cradled in Shef's left arm while he stroked its stern, implacable faces. “You have your own people to consider. Maybe it is best for you to march to your own place and fight your own battle, while we fight ours. Each in our own way. Christian against Christian and pagan against pagan. And then, if your God and our gods will, we shall meet again, and set this country on its feet.”

“So be it,” said Alfred, his face flushing again. “I will call my men and be on my way.”

“Go with him, Lulla,” said Shef to the leader of the halberdiers. “And you, Osmod,” he added to the leader of the catapult-teams, “see the king has his pick of horses and remounts for his journey south.”

As the only Englishmen on the council left, Shef looked round at those who remained, and broke into fluent, rapid Norse, tinged with the thick Halogaland accent he had learned from Brand.

“What are his chances? If he fights his way? Against these Franks? What do you know of them, Brand?”

“A good chance, if he fights our way. Hit them when they're not looking. Catch them when they're asleep. Didn't old Ragnar himself—bad luck to his spirit—did he not sack their great town back in our fathers' day, and make their king pay tribute?

“But if the king fights in the English way, with the sun high in the sky and everyone forewarned…”

Brand grunted doubtfully. “The Franks had a king in our grandfather's day: King Karl, Karl the Great—Charlemagne they call him. Even Guthfrith, king of the Danes, had to submit to him. The Franks can beat anybody, given time. You know why? It's the horses. They fight on horseback. About once in a blue moon they'll be there, with their saddles on, and their girthstraps tight, and their fetlocks plaited, or whatever it is they call them—I am a sailor, not a horseman, Thor be praised; at least ships never shit on your feet.

“But that day, that one day, you don't want to stand up to them. And if King Alfred's like all the other Englishmen, that's the day he'll choose.”

“Horses on one side, devil-machines on the other,” said Guthmund. “Enough to make anyone sick.”

Eyes scrutinized Shef's face, to see how he would take the challenge.

“We will deal with Ivar and the machines first,” he said.

Chapter Eight

Two figures dressed in the rags of incongruous finery cantered slowly down the green lanes of central England: Alfgar, thane's son, once favorite of a king; Daniel, a bishop without a retinue, still a king's deadly enemy. Both had escaped with difficulty from Ivar's riders by the Ouse, but had managed to end the day with a dozen guards between them, and money and rations enough to take them back in safety in Winchester. Then their troubles had begun. First they woke one morning to find their guards had simply deserted in the night, perhaps blaming their masters for defeat, perhaps seeing no reason any longer to put up with Alfgar's caustic tongue, Daniel's outbursts of fury. They had taken the food, money and horses with them. Striding across the fields towards the nearest church-spire, Daniel had insisted that as soon as he reached a priest, his episcopal authority would provide them with mounts and supplies. They had never reached the spire. In the troubled countryside, the churls had abandoned their homes for the summer and had built themselves shelters in the greenwood. The village priest had indeed recognized Daniel's status, enough to persuade his parishioners not to kill the pair of wanderers, and even to leave Daniel his episcopal ring and cross, and the gold head of his crozier. They had taken everything else, including Alfgar's weapons and silver arm-rings. After that, for three nights in a row the fugitives had lain belly-pinched in the dew, cold and afraid.

Yet Alfgar, like his half brother and enemy Shef, was a child of the fen. He could make an eel-trap out of withies, could catch fish with a cloak-pin on twisted thread. Slowly the pair had ceased to hope for rescue, had learned to rely on themselves. The fifth day of their journey Alfgar had stolen two horses from an poorly guarded stud, and the herd-boy's knife and his flea-infested blanket as well. After that they had made better time. It had not improved their humor.

At the ford of the Lea they had heard the news of the Frankish landing from a merchant disposed to be respectful to Daniel's cross and ring. It had altered their plan.

“The Church does not fail her servants,” Daniel had declared, eyes red with rage and weariness. “I knew the stroke would fall. I did not know where or when. Now, to the glory of God, the pious King Charles has come to restore the faith. We will go to him and make our report—our report of those he must punish: the pagans, the heretics, the slack in faith. Then the evil Way-folk and the graceless adherents of Alfred will find that the quernstones of God grind slow, but they grind to the last grain.”

“Where do we have to go?” asked Alfgar sullenly, reluctant to follow Daniel's lead but anxious to contact once again the side that might win, that might bring him vengeance on the ravisher, the bride-stealer, the one who had stolen first his woman, then his shire, and then his woman again. Every day he remembered a dozen times, with a shiver of shame, waking with the birch-twigs in his hand and the curious faces staring down: Didn't you hear? He took your woman? Trussed up your father, with no arms or legs, but just left you to lie there? And you never woke?

“The Frankish fleet crossed the Narrow Sea and landed in Kent,” Daniel replied. “Not far from the see of St. Augustine in Canterbury. They are camped at a place called Hastings.”

Surveying the walls of Canterbury, his base at Hastings left for a careful, six-day foray, Charles the Bald, king of the Franks, sat on his horse and waited for the procession trailing from the open gates to reach him. He was sure enough what it was. In the lead he could see holy banners, choir-monks singing, censers waving. Behind them, carried in a chair of state, came a gray-bearded figure in purple and white, tall miter nodding: surely the archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of England. Though back at camp in Hastings, Charles reflected, he had Wulfhere, archbishop of York, who would probably dispute this archbishop's claim. Perhaps he should have brought him and let the two old fools fight it out.

“What's this one called?” he asked his constable, Godefroi, sitting his charger next to him.

Godefroi—like his king, sitting easily in a deep saddle, high pommel in front, high saddle-bow behind, feet braced in steel stirrups—raised his eyes to heaven. “Ceolnoth. Archbishop of Cantwarabyrig. God, what a language.”

Finally the procession reached its goal, finished its anthem. The bearers lowered the chair; the old man stumbled out of it and stepped across to face the menacing silent figure in front of him, metal man on armored horse. Behind him the smoke of burning villages smudged the sky. He began to speak.

After a while the king raised a gauntlet, turned to the papal legate on his left, Astolfo of Lombardy: a cleric without a see—as yet.

“What is he saying?”

The legate shrugged. “I have no idea. He seems to be speaking English.”

“Try him in Latin.”

The legate began to talk, easily and fluently in the Latin of Rome—a Latin, of course, pronounced in exactly the same way as the inhabitants of that ancient city spoke their own, modern tongue. Ceolnoth, who had learned his Latin from books, listened without comprehension.

“Don't tell me he can't speak Latin either.”

The legate shrugged again, ignoring Ceolnoth's faltering attempts to reply. “The English Church. We had not known things were so bad. The priests and the bishops. Their dress is not canonical. Their liturgy is out-of-date. Their priests preach in English because they know no Latin. They have even had the temerity to translate God's word into their own barbarous speech. And their saints! How can one venerate names like Willibrord? Cynehelm? Frideswide, even! I think it likely that when I make my report to His Holiness he will remove authority from all of them.”

“And then?”

“This will have to become a new province, ruled from Rome. With its revenues going to Rome. I speak only, of course, of the spiritual revenues, the proceeds of tithing, of fees for baptism and burial, of payments for entry into sacred offices. As regards the land itself—the property of secular lords—that must fall to its secular rulers. And their servants.”

The king, the legate and the constable exchanged looks of deep and satisfied understanding.

“All right,” said Charles. “Look, the graybeard seems to have found a younger priest with some grasp of Latin. Tell him what we want.”

As the list ran on and on—of indemnities, supplies to be provided, toll to be paid to protect the city from sack, hostages to be delivered and laborers to start work immediately on a fort for the Frankish garrison to be installed—Ceolnoth's eyes widened with horror.

“But he is treating us as defeated enemies,” he stammered to the priest who translated for him. “We are not enemies. The pagans are his enemies. It was my colleague of York and the worthy bishop of Winchester who called him in. Tell the king who I am. Tell him he is mistaken.”

Charles, about to turn away toward the hundreds of mailed horsemen waiting behind him, caught the tone of Ceolnoth's voice, though he did not follow the words. He was not an uneducated man by the low standards of Frankish military aristocracy. He had learned a trifle of Latin in his youth, learned too some of Titus Livius's stories of the history of Rome.

Smiling, he drew his long, double-edged sword from his scabbard, held it like a merchant's balance.

“This will not need translating,” he said to Godefroi. Then, bending from the saddle to Ceolnoth, he said slowly and clearly, two words.

“Vae victis.”

Woe to the conquered.

Shef had considered all the possible plans he could use to attack Ivar's camp, weighed them like moves on a chessboard, rejected them one by one. These new ways of making war introduced complexities that could lead to confusion in battle, loss of lives, loss of everything.

It had been much easier when line had clashed with line, battled hand to hand until the stronger side won. He knew that his Vikings were becoming more and more displeased with these new things. Yearned for the certainty of the clash of arms. But the new ways had to be used if Ivar and his weapons were to be defeated. Old and new must blend.

Of course! He must weld the old and the new together like the soft iron and hard steel of a pattern-welded sword, like the sword he had forged and lost in the battle when Edmund was taken. A word formed in his mind.

“Flugstrith!” he cried, leaping to his feet.

“Flugstrith?” said Brand, turning from the fire. “I do not understand.”

“That is how we will fight our battle. We will make it the eldingflugstrith.”

Brand looked disbelieving. “The lightning-battle? I know Thor is with us, but I doubt you can convince him to hurl his thunderbolts to clear our way to victory.”

“It is not the thunderbolts I want. What I want is a battle fast as lightning. The thought is there, Brand; I feel I know what must be done. But I must make it clearer—as clear in my head as if it had already happened.”

Now, waiting in the mist in the dark hour before dawn, Shef felt sure his battle-plan would work. The Vikings had approved it—so had his machine-tending Englishmen. And it had better work. Shef knew that after his rescue of Godive, and then his collapse as the army waited to attack, his credit with the council and the army too was almost exhausted. Things were being kept secret from him. He did not know where Thorvin had gone, nor why Godive had slipped away with him.

As he had before the walls of York, he reflected that in this new style of battle the fighting was the easiest part. Or at least it promised to be so for him. Yet somewhere inside himself his flesh still crawled with a kind of fear: not of death or disgrace. Fear of the dragon he sensed in Ivar's skin. He fought the fear and repulsion down, glanced at the sky for the first pale streaks of dawn, strained his eyes through the mist to see if he could see the outline of Ivar's battlements.

Ivar had made his fortified camp in exactly the same style as the one which King Edmund had stormed south of Bedricsward by the Stour: a low ditch and bank with stakes driven into it, forming three sides of a square with the river Ouse as the fourth side, his ships drawn up along the muddy bank. The sentry who paced the bank behind the stockade had been at that battle too, and lived. He needed no urging to keep alert. Yet to him the dark hours were the dangerous ones, short enough at this time of year. As he saw the sky beginning to pale, and felt the little wind that comes before the dawn, he relaxed and began to think of the day that might follow. He had no great desire to see Ivar Ragnarsson at his butcher's work again among his prisoners. Why, he wondered, did they not move on? If Ivar had been challenged to fight at Ely, he had met the challenge. It was Sigvarthsson and the Way-folk who must feel disgrace.

The sentry halted, braced himself chest-high against the wall of the stockade, fighting to keep alert. He brooded on the sounds he had heard so often in the last few days, coming from under the bloody hands of Ivar. Out there two hundred corpses lay in fresh graves, the product of a week's sacrifice and slaughter of Mercian prisoners taken after the battle. An owl called, and the sentry started, thinking for an instant it was the shriek of a spirit come for vengeance.

It was his last thought. Before he heard the thrum of the bowstring the quarrel drove through his throat. From the ditch, the figures who had crept up in the mist caught him, eased him to the ground, waited. Knowing the other sentries on the wall had been dispatched in the same instant, on the cry of the owl.

Even the softest of shoes makes a sound moving through the grass. The hundreds of running feet sounded like small waves rushing down a pebbled strand. Dark bulks loomed, moving swiftly toward the western palisade of the camp, their moment carefully chosen. They were black shapes against a black sky behind them. But the lightening sky in the east would silhouette the defenders when they awoke and rushed to battle.

Shef stood to the side, watching the attack, fists clenched: the success or failure of everything depended on the next few seconds. Taking the camp would be like taking York—only simpler and quicker. No clumsy, moving towers, no slow development of the attack in stages. This was being done in a way even the Ragnarssons would understand—in explosive attack, win or lose in the first minute.

His eager men had shaped the bridges, stout planks pegged together. Twelve yards long and three wide. Iron bands clamped the oars beneath the structure, their handles projecting to either side. Each handle grasped by a Viking, secure in the feel of the familiar wood, proud of the strength needed to lift the structure and run forward with it at the stockade of the camp.

The tallest warriors were in front. As they ran they grunted with the effort, not only from carrying the dead weight—but at the last moment they lifted it over their heads until the front was more than seven feet off the ground. Enough to clear the six-foot-high stakes of the camp.

And clear it they did with a final explosive heave as they leaped over the ditch, slammed wood down on wood, the men in the front springing clear at the last second and rolling down into the ditch.

But not those that ran behind. The instant the bridge was in place they thundered up it and leapt into the enclosure behind. Ten, twenty, a hundred, two hundred were over before the bridge-carriers could unsheathe their weapons and join in the attack.

Shef smiled into the darkness. Six had been built, six had attacked—and only one had not succeeded in topping the wall. It lay half in, half out of the ditch, while cursing Vikings crawled out from under it and joined the rush to the other bridges.

Screams of pain, roars of anger over there as the sleeping men realized that the enemy was in among them. First the thud of axes into flesh, then the clang of metal as men woke, seized arms, defended themselves. Shef took one last look in the growing light, saw that the warriors were following instructions and advancing in a steady line, slaughtering as they went. But keeping position even after they had cut down the man they faced. Keeping pace with the murderous advance. Then Shef ran.

On the eastern side of the camp his English freedmen had waited in the darkness as they had been instructed, trotting forward to the attack only when they heard the first clash of battle. Shef hoped his timing had been correct. He had stationed them two hundred yards form the palisade. Estimated that if they ran forward when they heard the attack they would reach the camp when the armed struggle was joined and intense. All eyes should be on the Viking attack-force—all of Ivar's men rushing to the aid of their comrades. So he fervently hoped. He reached the corner of the camp just as the running men appeared.

Halberdiers led the way, each weighted with a great bundle of brushwood as well as his weapon. To be hurled into the ditch before the sharp blades were wielded against the stakes and the leather thongs that bound the palisade together.

The second wave of attackers approached, crossbowmen who pushed between the halberdiers, used knives to sever the last of the bindings, heaved stakes aside, climbed over and through them.

Shef followed them, pushing forward through the jostling ranks. No need to shout orders. The crossbowmen were following their long-rehearsed instructions, pacing forward ten carefully counted steps, then stopping and forming a line. Others halted behind them to make a double line that stretched from wall to river-line. Swift runners dashed forward to cut the tent-ropes, fled back to safety as the archers fitted bolts to cocked strings.

A few drabs and youths had seen them, had stood gape-mouthed and fled. But incredibly, none of Ivar's men seemed aware of their presence, totally taken up with the familiar clash of weapons coming from the other wall.

Shef stepped a pace beyond the double line, saw the faces turning toward him for the prearranged signal. He raised his arm, dropped it. The heads turned to their front, sighted for an instant. Then the sharp snap of a hundred strings released together.

The short, stout arrows shot across the camp, driving through leather and mail and flesh.

Already the front rank had hooked onto their tackle to reload, while the second rank stepped forward between them, looked to Shef, caught his signal, loosed their second volley.

Shouts of alarm and disbelief were now mingling with cries of pain as the warriors saw men falling, all to the rear of the battle. Heads turned, faces pale in the dawn's light, to see the silent death that was striking them from the rear, while the Vikings of the Way still kept up their violent pressure from the front, expending energy furiously in an assault they had been promised would last only minutes.

The first row of bowmen was ready again. As each man finished loading, he stepped through the line in front to resume rank. Some faster than others. Shef waited impassively till the last had formed up—the lines must be kept separate if this maneuver was to work—before he dropped his arm again.

Four times the lines shot before the first of the defenders could turn, order themselves and race across the camp in a wavering line, hindered by collapsed tents and the embers of cooking fires. As they closed, the bowmen obeyed orders again. Shot if they had loaded, then turned and ran with the rest, through the ranks of halberdiers dressed behind them. The halberdiers shifted sideways to let their fellows pass, then closed ranks again in a solid line of points.

“Don't advance, just stand!” shouted Shef as he followed the last of the crossbows through. Few could hear him over the growing din of war-cries. Yet he knew this was the moment Brand had said would not work: the puny slave-born taking the full weight of a Viking charge.

The English obeyed their orders. Stood still, points leveled, second rank bracing the first. Even a man whose belly crawled with fear knew he had to do no more than he could. And the Viking charge did not come with full weight. Too many men shot down, and those the leaders; too many of the rest, uncertain, unprepared. The wave that came to hack at the wall of steel came piecemeal. Each man who ran in faced a point in front, blades chopping from either side. The blows they swung were caught by long shafts thrusting from the rear ranks. Slowly the Vikings drew back from the unshaken line, looking round for leadership.

As they did so a cry of triumph rang from behind them. Viga-Brand, seeing the battle-line in front of him thin and shred, had thrown his picked men through the center of what remained, to wheel instantly and to start to roll up the Ragnarsson line.

Beaten men began to throw their weapons down.

From the riverbank Ivar Ragnarsson stood and watched his men fall, then surrender. Sleeping in his ship, the Lindormr, he had rolled from his blankets too late to be more than an observer. Now he knew that he had lost this battle.

He knew why, too. The last few days of blood and slaughter had been a delight for him, a relief. The easing of some frenzy that had lain within him for many years, consoled only now and then and only for a time by the brief pleasures his brothers had arranged for him, or by the grand executions the Great Army had tolerated as appropriate. A delight for him; the army had slowly sickened of it. It had rotted their morale. Not much. Enough to make them put a little less than their best into the desperate defense they had needed.

He did not regret what he had done. What he regretted was that this attack could only come from one man, from the Sigvarthsson. The attack in the night, the instant breaching of his defenses. Then, when his warriors rallied for battle, the cowardly attack from the rear. The engagement was truly lost. He had fled a lost battle before—must he flee again? The victors were close on him, and on the other side of the river—moved across on clumsy punts and rafts five miles downstream—waited the ten torsion dart-throwers, lined up wheel to wheel, guided to their position by willing local churls. As the light strengthened, the twist-shooter teams lowered their sights on to the Ragnarsson ships.

On Ivar's ship, the Lindormr; the minster-slaves crouched round their machine. At the first noise of onset they had whipped the covers off it, wound and loaded. Now they hesitated, uncertain in which direction to shoot. Ivar stepped across and on to the gunwale.

“Boom off,” he ordered. “Leave that. Push out from shore.”

“Are you deserting your men already?” asked Dolgfinn, standing with a clutch of senior skippers a few feet away. “Without so much as a blow struck? That may sound bad when the story is told.”

“Not deserting. Getting ready to fight. Come aboard if that's what you mean to do. If you mean to stand round like old whores waiting for trade, stay where you are.”

Dolgfinn flushed at the insult, stepped forward with his hand on hilt. Feathers sprouted suddenly from his temple, and he fell. With the camp taken, the crossbowmen had fanned out again, shooting wherever they saw resistance. Ivar stepped behind the protecting bulk of the machine mounted on the prow of the ship. As the slaves clumsily poled the Lindormr out into the slow current, he pointed quickly to one man still on the bank.

“You. Jump. Over here.”

Reluctantly Erkenbert the archdeacon gathered up his black robe, leapt the widening gap of water, landed staggering in Ivar's arms.

Ivar jerked a thumb at the crossbowmen growing ever more visible in the dawning light. “More machines you did not tell me of. I suppose you will tell me they cannot exist either. If I live past today I will cut your heart out and burn your minster to the ground.”

To the slaves he shouted, “Stop pushing. Drop anchor. Drop the gangplank.”

As the mystified slaves heaved the weighted, two-foot-wide plank from gunwale to shore, Ivar placed the stout protective beam of his machine behind him, took a firm grip on Erkenbert's right wrist, and leaned back to watch his army die. Unafraid, he had only one thought left: how to spoil his enemies' triumph, how to sour victory into failure.

Firmly escorted, Shef walked forward through the chaos of the camp. His helmet was strapped on, his halberd was over his shoulder. He had not yet struck a blow or dodged one. Ivar's army was no more. The Waymen were rounding up prisoners while a few survivors ran toward the river, running in twos and threes both ways along the bank to get away. There were not many of them, surely not enough to be a threat.

The battle was won, Shef told himself, and won easily, exactly according to plan. Yet something still chilled in his belly: too easy, he felt, too easy. The gods demand a price for favors. What was it to be? He began to run in earnest, heading for the helmet of Brand, now at the very tip of the Waymen's advance toward the river and the ships. As he did so, a flash of color came from the mast of one of the ships only a few yards ahead, gold catching the first direct rays of the rising sun. It was the Coiling Worm. Ivar had broken out his banner.

Brand slowed to a walk as he saw Ivar standing, one foot on the gunwale of the Lindormr, with six feet of water between the ship and the bank. Ivar was fully dressed, wearing his grass-green breeches and tunic, his mail-coat and silver helmet. He had thrown his scarlet cloak aside, but the polished boss of his shield caught the red light of morning. By his side stood a small man in the black robe of a Christian cleric, a look of horror on his face.

As men on both sides saw the confrontation, fighting finally stopped. The Vikings on both sides, Waymen and Ragnarssons, looked at each other, nodded, accepted that the battle was won and lost. As the English halberdiers, less businesslike in their attitudes, closed in, those Ragnarsson troops still resisting began hastily to throw their weapons down, put themselves under the protection of their former enemies. Then all, English and Norse, Waymen and pirates, faced inward, to see how their leaders would behave. At the rear of the watching ring, Shef struggled and cursed to get through.

Brand checked for a moment, breathing hard with the exertion of ten minutes' desperate struggle. Then he strolled forward toward the gangplank. He raised his right hand, split between two fingers in King Edmund's battle the previous year. He moved the fingers to show how they had healed.

“We had words a while back, Ivar,” he remarked. “I told you you should look after your women better. You did not take my advice. Maybe you don't know how to. But you said when your shoulder was whole you would remember what I said. And I said when my hand was whole I would remind you of it. Well, I have kept my word. Will you keep yours? You look as if you are thinking of sailing away.”

Ivar grinned, showing his even teeth. Deliberately, he drew his sword and threw the decorated scabbard into the Ouse.

“Come and try me,” he said.

“Why don't you come to fight on firm ground? No one will help me. If you win, you will have free passage back to where you stand now.”

Ivar shook his head. “If you are so bold, fight on my ground. Here”—Ivar leapt forward onto the gangplank, took two steps forward—“I will take no advantage. We will both stand on the same plank. Then all can see who gives way first.”

A buzz of interested comment rose as the watching men grasped the situation. At first sight the outcome of the fight looked evident. Brand outweighed Ivar by seventy pounds at least, out-topped him by a head and more, was as skillful and experienced with his weapons. Yet everyone could see the plank flex with one man's weight on it. With two, and one as heavy as Brand, how would the footing feel? Would both men be awkward and clumsy? Or just one? Ivar stood braced, feet as far apart as the plank would allow, sword-arm forward like a fencer, not crouched behind his shield like a warrior in a battle-line.

Slowly Brand walked forward to the end of the plank. He had his great axe in one hand, a small round shield buckled to his forearm. Meditatively he unstrapped it, threw it to the ground, took his axe in both hands. As Shef finally wormed his way gasping to the front, Brand leapt onto the plank, took two paces forward, and lashed suddenly backhand and upward at Ivar's face.

Ivar swayed easily away, moving only the six inches necessary to avoid the blow. Instantly he was beneath the stroke, chopping at a thigh. The blow was beaten down with the metal-shod haft of Brand's axe, counterstroke slashing in the same movement at the wrist. For ten seconds the two men sent a rain of blows at each other, the cuts coming faster than the watchers could follow them: parrying, ducking, swaying their bodies to let thrust or slash go by. Neither man moved his feet.

Then Brand struck. Beating a blow from Ivar upward, he took half a pace forward, leapt high in the air, and came down with his full weight on the very center of the plank. It flexed, bounced upward, hurling both men off their feet. In the air, Brand swung the iron-shod butt of his axe at Ivar's head, connecting with a furious clang on his helmet's cheek-piece. In the same instant Ivar recovered blade and thrust with fierce dexterity through mail and leather, deep into Brand's belly.

Brand landed staggering, Ivar still in perfect balance. For a further instant both stood still, connected by the bar of iron between them. Then, just as Ivar tensed his grip for the savage twist that would rend gut and arteries forever, Brand hurled himself backward off the blade. He stood at the very end of the plank, groping with his left hand at the blood streaming through the torn steel.

With two hands Shef seized him by collar and waist and jerked him from the plank, thrust him staggering backward. The watchers roared disapproval, outrage, encouragement. Gripping his halberd in both hands, Shef stepped forward onto the plank. For the first time since the day he had been blinded, he looked full into Ivar's eyes. Tore his gaze away. If Ivar was a dragon, like the vision he had seen of Fafnir, then he might yet put on him the dragon-spell of terror and paralysis. A spell that could not be broken by steel.

Ivar's face split in a grin of triumph and contempt. “You come late to our meeting, boy,” he remarked. “Do you think you can succeed where champions fail?”

Shef raised his eye again, stared deliberately into Ivar's face. As he did so he filled his mind with the thought of Godive—of what this man, this creature, had meant to do with her. What he had done with so many slaves and captives. If there was a protection against Ivar's spell, it lay in justice.

“I have succeeded where you failed,” he said. “Most men can do what you cannot. That is why I sent you the capon.”

Ivar's grin had turned into a rictus, like the bared teeth of a skull. He flicked the tip of his sword slightly. “Come on,” he whispered. “Come on.”

Shef has already decided what to do. He had no chance at all toe to toe with Ivar. He must use other weapons. Drag him down. Use Ivar's open contempt against him.

Shuffling gingerly forward along the gangplank, Shef aimed a clumsy two-hand thrust with the spear-point on the end of his shaft. Ivar batted it aside without moving eyes or body, waiting for his incompetent enemy to move closer or lay himself open.

Swinging the halberd way up over his head, Shef prepared for a mighty stroke, a stroke that would split an armored man from nape to crotch. Ivar grinned more broadly as he saw it, caught the moan of disbelief from the bank. This was no holmgang, where the parties were bound to stand still. Such a mighty stroke could be avoided by an old grandfather. Who would then step over and stab for the throat while the wielder was off balance. Only a thrall-bred fool would try it: and that was what this Sigvarthsson was.

Shef swung down with all his force, aiming not at Ivar but at the plank at his feet. The great blade, swung in a drawing cut, slashed clean through the wood. As Ivar, surprised and off balance, tried to leap back the two steps to his ship, Shef dropped the halberd, threw himself forward, grappled Ivar round the body. Fell instantly with him down into the cold, muddy current of the Ouse.

As the two men hit the water Shef gasped reflexively. Instantly his mouth and windpipe filled. Choking, he struck out for the surface. Was held and forced below. He had dropped the halberd, but his loose-fitting helmet had filled with water, was dragging his head down. A hand like a strangling snake was crushing his throat, but the other hand was free, was groping toward the belt and the gutting-knife in it. Shef grasped Ivar's right wrist in his left hand with the force of desperation.

For an instant both men broke the surface, and Shef managed to blow his lungs clear. Then Ivar had him again, was forcing him down.

Suddenly the cold inner revulsion that had held Shef half-paralyzed since the fight had started—the dragon-fear—was gone. No scales, no armor, no dreadful eyes to look into. Just a man. Not even a man, shrilled some triumphant fragment of Shef's mind.

Twisting fiercely in the water like an eel, Shef grappled his enemy close. Ducked his head, butted forward with the rim of his helmet. The rim which he had filed again and again to razor-sharpness. A crunch, something giving way, Ivar trying for the first time to wrench back. From the bank above there came a great roar as the craning watchers saw blood spreading in the water. Shef butted again and again, realized suddenly that Ivar had shifted his grip, had caught him in a stranglehold, rolled him under. Now Ivar was on top, face in the air, grimly concentrating on holding his enemy under. And he was too strong, growing stronger with every breath.

Shef's right hand, thrashing wildly, caught Ivar's knee. There is no drengskapr in this, thought Shef. Brand would be ashamed of me. But he would have taken Godive and cut her in pieces like a hare.

He drove his right hand firmly under Ivar's tunic, seized him by the crotch. His convulsive, drowning grip closed round the roots of Ivar's manhood, squeezed and twisted with every ounce of the strength years at the forge had given him. Somewhere, he heard dimly, there was a scream of mortal agony resounding. But the Ouse drowned it, the muddy stream poured choking in. As Shef's straining lungs also gave way and let in the cold, rushing, heart-stopping water, he thought only the one thing: Crush. Crush. Never let go…

Chapter Nine

Hund was sitting by his bed. Shef stared at him for a moment, then felt the sudden bite of fear deep within him, sat up with a jerk.

“Ivar?”

“Easy, easy,” said Hund, pushing him back on the bed. “Ivar's dead. Dead and burned to ashes.”

Shef's tongue felt too big for him to control. With an effort he managed to gasp, “How?”

“A difficult question,” replied Hund judiciously. “It could be that he drowned. Or he might have bled to death. You cut his face and neck to pieces with the edge of your helmet. But personally, I think he died of pain. You would not loose him, you know. In the end we had to cut him free. If he had not been dead before, he would have died then.

“Funny,” Hund added reflectively. “He was quite normal, you know, in body. Whatever was the matter with him and women—and Ingulf had heard many tales of it—it was in his head, nowhere else.”

Slowly Shef's muddled brain disentangled the questions he needed to ask.

“Who got me out?”

“Ah. That was Cwicca and his mates. The Vikings just stood and watched, both sides. Apparently men trying to drown each other is a sport in their homeland, and no one wanted to interfere till they could see who had won. It would have been very bad manners. Fortunately Cwicca has no manners.”

Shef thought back to the moments before he had faced Ivar on the swaying plank. Remembered the sudden shocking sight of Brand jerking himself backward off Ivar's sword.

“And Brand?”

Hund's face changed to an expression of professional concern. “He may live. He is a man of great strength. But the sword went right into his guts. It was impossible for them not to be pierced. I gave him the garlic porridge to eat myself, and then bent down and sniffed the wound. It stank, right enough. Most times that means death.”

“This time?”

“Ingulf did what he has done before. Cut him open, stitched the gut, put it back. But even with the poppy and henbane drink we gave to Alfgar, it was hard, very hard. He did not lose consciousness. His belly muscles are thick as cables. If the poison starts to work inside him…”

Shef levered his legs over the side of the bed, tried to stand up, felt an instant rush of faintness. With the relics of his strength he fended off Hund's attempts to push him back.

“I have to see Brand. Especially if he is going to die. He has to tell me—tell me things. Things about the Franks.”

Many miles to the south, a weary and dispirited figure crouched over the fire in the hearth of a wretched hut. Few would have recognized it as the one-time atheling of Wessex, the king that was to be. His golden circlet had gone—knocked from his helmet by the stab of a lance. His mail and shield decorated with animal-patterns had gone, too, stripped off and dropped in the intervals of desperate flight. Even his weapons were missing. He had cut his sword-scabbard free to run when, finally, after a long day's slaughter there had been no final alternative but flight or death—or surrender to the Franks. He had carried his sword drawn for miles, fighting again and again with his last few bodyguards to get free of the pursuing Frankish light cavalry. Then, as his horse died under him he had dropped it, rolled over. When the running fight had moved past his body and he had staggered to his feet again, there was nothing there. He had run off into the welcome dusk and the deep, thick forest of the Kentish Weald as empty-handed as a beggar. He had been lucky to see a glimmer of light before the night came. To beg shelter in the poor, starve-acre cottage where he now crouched, watching the oatcakes on the griddle while his reluctant hosts secured their goats outside. Discussed, perhaps, who they should betray him to.

Alfred did not think they would betray him. Even the poorest folk of Kent and Sussex knew now that it was deadly dangerous to so much as approach the Cross-wearers from across the sea. They spoke even less English than Vikings, cared no more for the harm they did than pagans. It was not personal fear that bowed his shoulders, brought the tears prickling unmanfully to his eyes.

It was fear for something strange at work in the world. Twice now he had met the young man Shef with the one eye. The first time he had had him in the hollow of his hand: he, Alfred, atheling and commander of an undefeated army; the other, Shef, at the very last end of his resources, about to be overwhelmed by the army of the Mark. That time the atheling had rescued the carl, raised him to alderman, or jarl a the Way-folk said. The second time Shef the jarl had been the one with the undefeated army; he, Alfred, had been the fugitive and the suppliant. Yet even then not a suppliant without hope or without resources.

And now how did things stand? The one-eye had sent him south, said each should fight their own battle. Alfred had fought his, fought it with all the men he could gather to his banner from the eastern shires of his kingdom, men who had come willingly to fight an invader. And they had been scattered like leaves in a gale, unable to hold the terrible charge of the mailed horsemen. Alfred was sure in his heart that matters had not gone so in the battle his ally and rival had meant to fight. Shef would have won.

Christianity had not entirely driven from Alfred and his countrymen the belief in something older and deeper than any gods—pagan or Christian ones: luck. The luck of a person. The luck of a family. Something that did not change with the years, something you either had or did not have. The great prestige of Alfred's royal house, the descendants of Cerdic, depended silently on a deep belief in the family's luck, which had kept them in power for four hundred years.

To the fugitive sitting by the hearth it seemed that his luck and that of his family had run out. No. It had been cancelled by the luck of a stronger figure—the one-eyed man who had started as a slave, a thrall in the heathen language, who had fought his way up past the execution-ground to be a carl in the Great Army of the North, and then up yet again to be a jarl. What greater proof of luck could there be? With so much of it in one man, how could there be any left for his allies? His competitors? Alfred felt the heart-chilling despair of someone who has given away the advantage in a contest, lightheartedly and without thought of consequences, only to see the advantage grow and grow, the initiative pass forever into the other's hands. In that bleak moment he felt it was over for him, for his family, for his kingdom. For England. He sniffed back a tear.

Smelled as he did so the reek of charring bread. Guiltily his hand darted to the griddle, to flip the oatcakes over to cook on the other side. Too late. Burned through. Burned inedible. Simultaneously Alfred's belly cramped inside him at the realization that after sixteen hours of desperate exertion there was nothing, nothing at all left to eat. And the door of the hovel opened to let in the churl and his wife, to fill the air with rage and blame. Nothing left to eat for them either. Their last food wasted. Burned by a good-for-nothing. A vagrant, too cowardly to die in battle, too lazy to do the simplest task. Too proud to pay anything for the meal and shelter they had offered him.

As they loaded curses on him, the worst of Alfred's punishment was the feeling that what they said was true. He could not imagine, ever, the slightest recovery. This was the bottom from which no one could climb. Any future there was would not be for him and his like, the Christians of England. It would be decided between the Franks and the Norse, the Cross-wearers and the Way-folk. Alfred walked into the shelterless night, heart breaking with despair.

This time it was Shef who sat by the bed. Brand turned his head very slightly to look at him, face gray under the beard. Shef could see that even the tiny movements needed for that caused agony, as the poison spread inside Brand's belly cavity to fight against the strength still locked in his massive frame.

“I need to know about the Franks,” said Shef. “We have beaten everyone else. You were sure they would beat Alfred.”

Brand's head nodded, very faintly.

“So what is dangerous about them? How can I fight them? I have to ask you, for no one else in the army has met them in the field and lived. Yet many say they have had years of good plunder from the Frankish kingdom. How can they let themselves be robbed and still be enemies even you would rather not face?”

Shef could see Brand trying to work out not the answer, but how to say the answer in fewest words. Finally he spoke, in a gravelly whisper.

“They fight among themselves. That is what has always let us in. They are no seamen. And they breed few warriors. With us—a spear, a shield, an axe—you are a warrior. With them, it takes a whole village to arm one man. Mail-shirt, sword and lance and helmet. But most of all, the horse. Big horses. Stallions a man can hardly control. Have to learn to ride them with a shield on one arm and a lance in the other. Start when you're a baby. Only way.

“One Frankish lancer, no problem. Get behind him, hamstring horse. Fifty of 'em, problem. A thousand…”

“Ten thousand?” asked Shef.

“Never believed it. Aren't that many. Lot of light horsemen. Can be dangerous because they're quick, turn up when you don't think they're near.”

Brand summoned his failing energies. “They'll ride over you if you let 'em. Or cut you up on the march. Stick to rivers is what we do. Or keep behind a stockade.”

“To beat them in open field?”

Brand shook his head faintly. Shef could not tell whether he meant “Impossible,” or “I don't know.” After a moment Ingulf's hand fell on his shoulder, urged him out.

As he came blinking from the tent into daylight, Shef found himself once more besieged with problems. Guards to be detailed for the substantial plunder of Ivar's army, on its way to the treasury in Norwich. Prisoners' fate to be decided: some of them Ivar's torturers, some of them mere rank and file. Messages to be received and dispatched. At the back of Shef's mind there hung always the query: Godive. Why had she gone off with Thorvin? And what did Thorvin himself think was so important that it could not wait?

But now, immediately in front of him, Father Boniface, his own priest-turned-scribe, beside him another little man in clerical black with an expression of bitter, malignant spite on his face. Slowly Shef realized that he had seen him before, if only from a distance. In York.

“This is Deacon Erkenbert,” said Boniface. “We took him from Ivar's own ship. He is the master of the machines. The slaves who wound the machines—slaves first to York Minster and then to Ivar—they say that he built the machines for Ivar. They say the whole Church in York now works night and day for the Ragnarssons.” He looked down at Erkenbert with heartfelt contempt.

The master of the machines, thought Shef. There was a day when I would have given everything for a chance to talk with this man. Now, I wonder what he can tell me. I can guess how his machine works, and in any case I can go to see for myself. I know how slowly they shoot, how hard they hit. One thing I do not know: how much else is there in his head and in his books? But I do not think he will tell me that.

Yet I think I can use him. Dimly, Brand's words were working inside Shef's brain. Collecting into a plan.

“Keep close watch on him, Boniface,” said Shef. “See the York slaves are well treated, and tell them they are free from this moment. Then send Guthmund to me. After him, Lulla and Osmod. And Cwicca, Udd and Oswi, too.”

“We don't want to do that,” said Guthmund flatly.

“But you could do it?” asked Shef.

Guthmund hesitated, not wanting to tell a lie, reluctant to concede a point.

“Could do it. Still don't think it's a good idea. Take all the Vikings out of the army, load them into Ivar's boats, press Ivar's men into service as galley-slaves, and head round the coast to some rendezvous near this Hastings place…

“Look, lord.” Guthmund spoke pleadingly, as near to wheedling as his character would go. “I know, me and the boys, we haven't always been fair to the English you've hauled in. Called them midgets. Called them skraelingiar. Said they're no use and never will be. Well, they've proved us wrong.

“But there was a reason for what we said, and it goes double if you're going to fight these Franks and their horses. Your English can shoot machines. One of them with a halberd hits as good as one of our boys with a sword. But there's still a lot of things they can't do, no matter how hard they try. They aren't strong enough.

“Now these Franks. Why are they dangerous? Everyone knows it's because of the horses. How much does a horse weigh? A thousand pounds? That's what I'm telling you, lord. To even get a few shots in at these Franks, you'll have to hold them off for a while. Maybe our boys could do it, with the halberds and all. Maybe. They've never done it before. But it's dead sure they can't if you've sent them all off. What happens if you get caught with just a line of your little fellows between you and the Franks? They can't do it, lord. They haven't the strength.” Nor the training, Guthmund thought silently. Not to watch armed men walk right up to you and start hacking away. Or ride up to you. They've always had us to help them.

“You are forgetting King Alfred and his men,” said Shef. “He will have gathered his army by now. You know the English thanes are as strong and brave as your men—they just have no discipline. But I can supply that.”

Guthmund nodded, grudgingly.

“So each group must do what it does best. Your men, sail. With the ship and the machines. My freedmen, wind their machines and shoot. Alfred and his Englishmen, stand still to do what they're told. Trust me, Guthmund. You did not believe me last time. Or the time before. Or when we raided the minster at Beverley.”

Guthmund nodded again, slightly more willingly this time. As he turned to go he added one more remark.

“Lord jarl, you aren't a sailor. But don't forget another thing in all this. It's harvest now. When the night grows as long as the day, every sailor knows, the weather changes. Don't forget the weather.”

The news of Alfred's total defeat reached Shef and his truncated army two days' march south. Shef listened to the exhausted, white-faced thane who brought the news in the center of an interested circle—he had abandoned the custom of council meetings in private as soon as the still-grumbling Guthmund and his Norse fellows had boarded their captured boats. The freedmen watched his face as he listened, marking that it changed expression only twice. The first time, when the thane cursed the Frankish archers—who had shot such a rain of arrows that twice Alfred's advancing army had been forced to stand and raise its shields, only to be caught motionless both times by the Frankish cavalry charge. The second time when the thane admitted that no one had seen or heard of Alfred the king since the day of the disaster.

In the silence that followed the story, Cwicca, presuming on his status as Shef's companion and rescuer, had asked what all thought. “What do we do now, lord? Turn back, or go on?”

Shef answered immediately. “Go on.”

Opinion round the campfires that night was divided about the sense of that. Ever since the Viking Waymen had left with Guthmund, the army had seemed a different creature. The freed English slaves had always secretly feared their allies—so like their former masters in strength and violence, superior to any English master in warlike reputation. With the Vikings gone, the army marched as if on holiday: pipes playing, laughter in the ranks, calling out to the harvesters in the fields, who no longer fled at the sight of the first scouts and advance-guard.

Yet the fear the army had felt had also been a guarantee. Proud as they were of their machines, their halberds and their crossbows, the ex-slaves did not have the self-belief that comes from a lifetime of winning battles.

“All right saying ‘Go on,’ ” said one anonymous voice that night. “What happens when we get there? No Alfred. No Norse-folk. No Wessexers to help out like we were promised. Just us. Eh? What then?”

“We'll shoot 'em down,” said Oswi confidently. “Like we did with Ivar and them Ragnarssons. 'Cos we got the machines and they haven't. And the crossbows and all.”

A mutter of agreement greeted his statement. Yet every morning the camp marshals came to Shef with a new and growing figure: the number of men who had slipped away in the night, taking with them freedom and the silver pennies already paid to each man from the spoils of Ivar, but forfeiting the promise of land and stock in the future. Already, Shef knew, he had not enough men in the ranks both to man his fifty machines—pull-throwers and twist-shooters—and to use the two hundred pulley-wound crossbows that Udd's forges had produced.

“What will you do?” asked Farman, Frey's priest, the fourth morning of the march. He, Ingulf and Geirulf the priest of Tyr were the only Norsemen who had insisted on staying with Shef and the freedmen.

Shef shrugged.

“That is no answer.”

“I will tell you the answer when you tell me where Thorvin and Godive have gone. And why. And when they will come back.”

This time it was Farman's turn to give no answer.

Daniel and Alfgar had spent many angry days of frustration, first finding the base of the Frankish Cross-wearers, and then getting through its guards and outposts to see its leader. Their appearance had been against them: two men in soiled and sodden cloaks after nights in the open, riding bareback on the sorry nags that Alfgar had stolen. The first sentry they had approached had been amazed to see any Englishmen come near the camp of their own will: the local churls had fled long since, taking their wives and daughters with them if they were lucky. Yet he had not troubled to call an interpreter for Alfgar's English or Daniel's Latin. After several minutes of shouting up at him above the gate of the camp stockade, he had meditatively fitted arrow to bow and shot it into the ground at Daniel's feet. Alfgar had pulled Daniel away at once.

After that they had tried several times to approach the daily cavalcade of warriors streaming out from the Hastings base, to rob and forage while King Charles waited unhurriedly for the further challenge he was sure must come. The first time had cost them their horses, the second, Daniel's episcopal ring, which he had waved too eagerly. Eventually, and in despair, Alfgar had taken a hand. As Daniel shouted angrily at a Frankish priest they had discovered picking over the ruins of a ransacked church, he pushed him aside.

“Machina,” he said clearly, in the fragment of Latin he possessed. “Ballista. Catapulta. Nos videre”—he pointed to his eyes. “Nos dicere. Rex.” He waved at the camp with its flying banners, two miles off, made speaking gestures.

The priest looked at him, nodded, turned back to the barely coherent bishop and began to talk to him in strangely accented Latin, cutting Daniel's furious complaints short, demanding information. After a while he had called to his guard of mounted archers and set off back toward the camp, taking the two Englishmen with him. After that they had been passed from hand to hand, with cleric after cleric coming in to extract more and more of Daniel's story.

But now at last the clerics had gone. It was Alfgar, his cloak brushed and a substantial meal inside him, who stood in front of Daniel, facing a trestle-table, behind it a group of men with the look of warriors: one of them wearing the gold circle of royalty over a bald head. At his side stood an Englishman, listening carefully to what the king said. Eventually he turned to Alfgar, speaking the first English they had heard since they arrived in the camp.

“The priests have told the king,” he said, “that you have more sense than the bishop behind you. But the bishop says that you two alone know the truth of what has happened up there in the North. And that for some reason”—the Englishman smiled—“you are anxious to help the king and the Christian religion with information. Now the king takes no interest in your bishop's complaints and proposals. He wants to know, first about the army of Mercia, second about the army of the heathen Ragnarssons, and thirdly about this army of heretics which his own bishops are especially anxious for him to meet and fight. Tell him all that, behave yourself sensibly, and it will do you good. The king will have to have some Englishmen he can trust once his kingdom is established.”

Putting on his sincerest expression of loyalty, and looking the Frankish king firmly in the eye, Alfgar began his account of the death of Burgred and the defeat by the Ouse. As he spoke on, his English translated phrase by phrase into French, he began to act out the workings of the machines with which Ivar had demoralized Burgred's army. He laid stress on the machines which the Way-folk also had, and which he had seen again and again in the previous winter's battles. His courage rising, he drew the hammer-sign in wine on the king's table, told of the freeing of Church-slaves.

Eventually the king stirred, threw a question over his shoulder. A cleric appeared from the shadows, took stylus and wax, began to draw on his tablets the picture of an onager. Then a torsion-catapult. Then a counterweight-machine.

“He says, are these what you have seen?” asked the translator.

Alfgar nodded.

“He says, interesting. His learned men know how to make them also, taking them from a book by one Vegetius. He says he did not know the English were learned enough to make such things. But among the Franks these are used only for sieges. To use them against an army of horsemen would be foolish. Horsemen move too fast for them to be effective. But the king thanks you for your goodwill, and wishes you to ride with him when he takes the field. He believes your knowledge of his enemies will be useful. Your companion will be sent to Canterbury, to await the inquiry of the legate of the Pope.” The English interpreter smiled again. “I think your chances will be better than his.”

Alfgar straightened, bowed, and walked backward from the table as he would never have done for Burgred, firmly resolving to find a teacher of French before nightfall.

King Charles the Bald watched him go, turned again to his wine. “The first of the rats,” he remarked to his constable Godefroi.

“Rats with siege-engines they use in the field. Do you not fear what he says?”

The king laughed. “Crossing the Narrow Sea is like going back to the time of our forefathers, when the kings rode to battle in ox-chariots. In all this country there is nothing to fight but the Norse brigands, harmless away from their ships, and the brave, stupid swordsmen we beat the other day. Long mustaches and slow feet. No horses, no lances, no stirrups, no generals.

“We must take our precautions now we know their way of fighting.” He scratched his beard thoughtfully. “But it will take more than a few machines to beat the strongest army in Christendom.”

Chapter Ten

This time Shef was anxious for the vision he knew would come. His mind buzzed with doubts, with possibilities. Yet he had no certainty. Something must come, he knew, from outside to help him. It came usually when he was exhausted, or sleeping off a heavy meal. That day he had walked deliberately beside his pony, ignoring the chaff from the ranks. In the evening, had stuffed himself slowly with the porridge they had made from the last of the winter store, before the new grain came from the harvesters. He stretched out to sleep, fearful that his mysterious adviser would fail him.

“Yes,” said the voice in the dream. Shef felt an instant surge of relief as he recognized it. The amused voice which had told him to seek the ground, which had sent him the dream of the wooden horse. The voice of the nameless god with the sly face who had shown him the chessqueen. This was the god who sent him answers. If he could recognize them.

“Yes,” said the voice, “you will see what you need to know. But not what you think you need to know. Your questions are always ‘What?’ and ‘How?' But I shall show you ‘Why?’ And ‘Who?’ ”

Instantly he found himself on a cliff, so high up he could see the whole world stretched out before him, the dust-plumes rising, the armies marching, just as he had seen them the day they killed King Edmund. Again he felt that if he narrowed his eye exactly right, he would be able to pick out anything he needed to know: the words on the lips of the Frankish commander, the place where Alfred lurked—live or dead. Shef gazed round anxiously, trying to orient himself so he could see what he needed to.

Something turned his head away from the panorama below, made him stare into the far, far distance, remote from the real world in space and time.

What he saw was a man walking along a mountain road, a man with a dark, lively, humorous face, one not entirely to be trusted, the face of the unknown god of his dreams. Now that man, Shef thought, drifting into the vision, that man has more than one skin.

The man, if man he was, came to a hut, a hovel in fact, a grubby shelter of poles and bark reinforced with turf and inept handfuls of clay on the chinks. That was the way men lived in the old time, Shef thought. They know better now. But who showed them better?

By the hut a man and a woman stopped their tasks and stared at the newcomer: a stranger couple, both bent over from continuous work, short and squat in physique, brown haired and sallow, bow-legged, crooked-fingered. “Their names are Ai and Edda,” the god's voice said.

They were welcoming the newcomer, showing him in. They offered him food, burnt porridge, full of husks, full too of stone particles from being hand-ground in a pestle and mortar, moistened only with goat's milk. The newcomer seemed undaunted by this welcome, talked cheerfully; when the time came, lay down on the heap of ill-cured skins between his host and his hostess.

In the middle of the night he turned to Edda, still dressed in her long black rags. Ai lay in a deep sleep, unmoving, stung perhaps by a sleep-thorn. The clever-looking man pulled up the rags, mounted upon her, thrust away without preliminaries.

The stranger in the vision rose next morning and went his way, leaving Edda behind him to swell, to moan, to bring forth children as squat and ugly as herself—but more active, more industrious. They carted dung, they carried brushwood, they tended swine, they broke clods with wooden spades. From them come, the Shef-mind said, the race of thralls. Once I too might have been a thrall. No longer.

The traveler went on his way, walking briskly, along through the mountains. The next night he came to a log cabin, well-built, its ends fitted into each other in deep, axe-cut grooves, a window on one side with solid, well-fitting shutters, a privy outside over a deep ravine. Again a couple paused from their work as the traveler came up to them: a stout and powerful pair, ruddy-faced, thick-necked—the man bald, with trimmed beard, the woman round-faced and long-armed, built for carrying burdens. She wore a long brown gown, but a woolen mantle lay close by to be put on in the cool evening. Bronze clasps lay ready to fix it on. He wore loose trousers like a warrior of the Viking fleets, but his leather shirt was cut into thongs at waist and sleeve, for show. This is how most folk live now, the Shef-mind thought. “Their names are Afi and Amma,” said the voice.

Again they invited the newcomer in, offered him food, plates of bread with fried chops of pork, ready-salted, the grease from the frying running into the bread—food for heavy laborers and strong men. Then they retired for the night, all three lying down together on a straw mattress with woolen blankets to pull over them. In the night Afi snored, sleeping in his shirt. The traveler turned to Amma, wearing only a loose gown, whispered in her ear, took her soon with the same speed and zest as before.

Again the newcomer went on his way, left Amma to swell, to bring forth children with silent stoicism, as strong and well-built as herself, but maybe more intelligent, ready to try a new thing sooner. Her children tamed oxen, timbered barns, hammered out ploughs, made fishing nets, adventured on the sea. From them, Shef knew, came the race of carls. Once upon a time I was a carl too. But that time has gone as well.

On the newcomer went, his road tending now to the great plains. He came to a house set back from the road, a garth round it of hammered posts. The house itself had several rooms, one to sleep in, one to eat in, one for the animals, all with windows or broad doorways. A man and a woman sat outside it on a well-crafted bench, called to the wayfarer, offered him water from their deep well. They were a handsome couple, with long faces, broad foreheads, soft skin unmarked by toil. When the man stood to greet the stranger he overtopped him by half a head. His shoulders were broad and his back straight, his fingers strong from twisting bowstrings. “These two are Fathir and Mothir,” said the voice of the god.

They led their visitor in, onto a floor strewn with sweet-smelling rushes, sat him at a table, brought him water in a bowl to wash his hands in, set before him roast fowl, griddle-cakes in a basin, butter and blood sausage. After they had eaten, the woman spun on her wheel, the man sat on a settle and talked with his visitor.

When night came the host and hostess seemed under some compulsion as they guided their guest to the broad feather bed with its down bolsters, placed him between them, lay while Fathir fell asleep. Again the visitor turned to his hostess, fondled her with fingers, served her like a bull or a stallion, as he had the two before.

The visitor went, the woman swelled, from her belly came the race of jarls, the earls, the fighting men. They swam fjords, tamed horses, beat out metal, reddened swords, and fed the ravens on the plains of slaughter. That is how men wish to live now, thought the Shef-mind. Unless it is how someone wishes them to live…

But this cannot be the end: Ai to Afi to Fathir, Edda to Amma to Mothir. What of Son and Daughter, what of Great-great-grandchild? And Thrall to Carl to Jarl. I am the jarl now. But what comes after Jarl? What are his sons called, and how far down the road will the wanderer go? The son of Jarl is King, the son of King is…

Shef found himself suddenly awake, perfectly conscious of what he had just seen, perfectly aware that in some way it related to himself. What he had seen, he realized, was a breeding program, designed to make better people as men bred better horses or hunting-dogs. But better in what way? Cleverer? Better at finding new knowledge? That was what the priests of the Way would say. Or quicker to change? Readier to use the knowledge they knew already?

One thing Shef was sure of. If the breeding was done by the tricky, amused face he had seen on the wanderer, the face that was also that of his god-protector, then even the better people would find there was a price to be paid. Yet the wanderer meant him to succeed. Knew there was a solution, if he could find it.

In the dark hour before dawn Shef pulled on his dew-soaked leather shoes, rose from the rustling straw pallet, wrapped his blanket-cloak round him and stepped out into the chill air of the late English summer. He walked through the still-sleeping camp like a ghost, with no weapon except the whetstone-scepter, cradled in the crook of his left arm. His freedmen did not ditch and stockade their camps like the ever-active Vikings, but at the edge sentries stood. Shef walked up to the shoulder of one of them, one of Lulla's halberdiers, leaning on his weapon. His eyes were open but he paid no heed as Shef walked quietly past him and out into the dark wood.

Birds began to chirp as the sky paled in the east. Shef picked his way carefully through the tangles of hawthorn and nettle, found himself on a narrow path. It reminded him of the path he had followed with Godive the year before, as they had fled from Ivar. Sure enough, it led to a clearing and a shelter.

The day was up as he reached the clearing, and he could see plainly. The shelter was a mere hut. As he watched it, the ill-hung door opened and a woman came out. An old woman? Her face was worn with care, and had the pale, pinched look of the chronically underfed. But she was not so old, Shef realized, standing silent and motionless under the trees. She looked round, not seeing him, and then sank down in the feeble sunlight by the side of her hut. Put her face in her hands and began to weep silently.

“What's the matter, Mother?”

She started convulsively as she heard Shef's question, looked up with terror in her eyes. As she realized there was only one man, unarmed, she calmed.

“The matter? An old story, most of it. My man was taken off to join the king's army…”

“Which king?” asked Shef.

She shrugged. “I do not know. It was months ago. He has never come back. All summer we were hungry. We are not slaves, but we have no land. With Edi not here to work for the rich, we had nothing. When the harvest started they let me glean grain from what the reapers missed—little enough. But it would have been enough, only it was too late. My child died, my daughter, two weeks ago.

“And now this is the new story. For when I took her to the church to be buried, there was no priest there. He had fled, driven out, they say, by the pagans. The ‘Way-folk’? I do not know the right name. The men in the village were happy, they said now they would pay no more tithes, no more for Peter's pence. But what good was that to me? I was too poor to tithe, and the priest would give me a dole, sometimes, from what he had. And who was there to bury my child? How could she rest without the words said over her? Without the Christ-child himself to take her part in heaven?”

The woman began to weep again, rocking backwards and forwards. How would Thorvin answer this? Shef wondered. Maybe he would say that the Christians had not always been bad, till the Church went rotten. But at least the Church gave comfort, to some. The Way must do that as well, not think only of those who tread the path of the heroes to Valhalla with Othin, or to Thruthvangar with Thor. He fumbled at his belt for money, realized that he had none.

“You see now what you have done?” said a voice behind him.

Shef turned slowly, found himself confronting Alfred. The young king had dark rings under his eyes, his clothes were stained and muddy. He had neither sword nor cloak, but still wore mail, with a dagger at his belt.

“I have done? I think she is one of your subjects, this side of the Thames. The Way may have taken her priest away, but you took her man away.”

“What we have done, then.”

The two men stood looking down at the woman. This is what I have been sent to stop, thought Shef. But I cannot do it by following the Way alone. Or not the Way as Thorvin or Farman see it.

“I will make you an offer, king,” he said. “You have a purse at your belt and I have none. Give it to this poor woman here, so that at least she may live to see if her man returns. And I will give you your jarldom back. Or rather we will share till we have defeated your enemies, the Cross-wearers, as I have already defeated mine.”

“Share the jarldom?”

“Share all we have. Money. Men. Rule. Risk. Let our fates run together.”

“We will share our luck, then?” said Alfred.

“Yes.”

“There must be two conditions on that,” said Alfred. “We cannot march under your Hammer alone, for I am a Christian. Nor will I march only under the Cross, for that has been defiled by the robbers of Frankland and Pope Nicholas. Let us remember this woman and her grief, and march under the sign of both. And if we conquer we will let our peoples find comfort and consolation wherever they can. In this world there can never be enough for everyone.”

“What is the other condition?”

“That.” Alfred pointed to the whetstone-scepter. “You must get rid of it. When you hold it, you lie. You send your friends to their deaths.”

Shef looked at it, looked again at the cruel, bearded faces that ornamented each end: faces like that of the cold-voiced god in his dreams. He remembered the mound where he had got it, the slave-girls with their broken spines. Thought of Sigvarth sent to die by torture, of Sibba and Wilfi sent to the burning. Of Alfred himself, whom he had knowingly allowed to march to defeat. Of Godive, rescued only to be used as bait.

Turning, he hurled the scepter end over end into the deep undergrowth, there to lie once more among the mold.

“As you say,” he said. “We will march under both signs now, win or lose.” He held out his hand. Alfred drew his dagger, cut free his purse, threw it with a thump onto the wet ground by the woman's feet. Only then did he shake hands.

As they left the woman struggled with feeble fingers to pry at the lashings of the purse.

They heard the commotion before they had gone a hundred yards down the path: clash of weapons, shrieking, horses neighing. Both men began to run toward the Wayman camp, but the thorns and thickets held them. By the time they arrived, gasping, at the edge of the wood, it was over.

“What happened?” said Shef to the men who turned disbelievingly toward them.

Farman the priest appeared from behind a slashed tent. “Frankish light cavalry. Not many of them, maybe a hundred. They knew we were here, came all at once out of the wood. Where were you?”

But Shef was looking past him, at Thorvin pushing through the crowd of excited men, holding Godive firmly by one hand.

“We came just after dawn,” said Thorvin. “Got here just before the Franks attacked.”

Shef ignored him, looked only at Godive. She raised her chin, stared back at him. He patted her shoulder gently. “I am sorry if I have forgotten you. There are things—if… soon… I will try to make amends for what I did.

“But not now. Now I am still the jarl. First we must set guards on the camp, so we are not surprised again. Then we must march. But before that—Lulla, Farman, all priests and leaders to me as soon as the guards are set.

“And Osmod, one thing before that. Send twenty women to me now.”

“Women, lord?”

“Women. There are plenty with us. Wives, friends, drabs, I don't care. As long as they can push a needle.”

Two hours later, Thorvin, Farman and Geirulf—the only priests of the Way present among a half dozen English unit commanders—stared unhappily at the new device hastily stitched onto the army's main battle-banner. Instead of the white Hammer standing upright on a red field, there were now a Hammer and Cross, set diagonally, one across the other.

“It is dealing with the enemy,” said Farman. “More than they would ever do for us.”

“It is a condition made by the king for his support,” said Shef.

Eyebrows raised as the priests looked at the shabby, solitary figure of the king.

“Not just my support,” said Alfred. “The support of my kingdom. I may have lost one army. But there are still men who will fight against the invaders. It will be easier if they do not have to change religion at the same time.”

“We need men, for sure,” said Osmod the camp marshal and leader of the catapulteers. “What with this morning and the desertions we've had—seven, eight men to a team left, where we need a dozen. And Udd has more crossbows in store than men to use them. But we need 'em right now. And where are we to find them? In a hurry, like?”

Shef and Alfred stared uncertainly at each other, digesting the problem, groping for an solution.

An unexpected voice cut the silence from the back of the tent. Godive's.

“I can tell you the answer to that,” she said. “But if I tell you, you must grant me two things. One, a seat on this council. I do not care to be disposed of in future like a lame horse or a sick hound. Two, I do not want to hear the jarl say again, ‘Not now. Not now, because I am the jarl.’ ”

Eyes turned; first, in amazement, to her, then in doubt and alarm to Shef. Shef, hand fumbling automatically for reassurance to his whetstone, found himself looking into Godive's brilliant eyes as if for the first time. He remembered: the whetstone was no longer there, nor what it stood for. He looked down.

“I grant both conditions,” he said hoarsely. “Now tell us your answer, councillor.”

“The men you need are already in the camp,” said Godive. “But they aren't men, they're women. Hundreds of them. You find more in every village. They may be only drabs to you, as the jarl said before. Needle-pushers. But they are as good as men for some things. Put six with every catapult-team. The men released can go to Udd, to carry a crossbow, or the strongest of them to Lulla, to use a halberd. But I would also advise this to Udd: pick as many of the youngest women as you can, those who are not afraid, and put them with your crossbows as well.”

“We can't do that,” said Cwicca incredulously.

“Why not?”

“Well—they aren't strong enough.”

Shef laughed. “That's what the Vikings said about you, Cwicca, remember? How much strength does it take to pull a rope? Turn a lever? Wind a pulley? The machine gives the strength.”

“They'll get frightened and run away,” Cwicca protested.

Icily, Godive overrode him. “Look at me, Cwicca. You saw me climb into that dung-cart. Was I frightened then? And if I was, I still did it.

“Shef. Let me talk to the women. I will find the ones you can trust, and if need be I will lead them. Don't forget, everyone”—she looked round the circle challengingly—“it may be that women have more to lose than any of you. And so more to gain.”

In the silence Thorvin said, still skeptically, “This is all very well. But how many men had King Alfred here when he marched against the Franks? Five thousand? Trained warriors. Even if we use every woman in the camp, how can a third of that number hope to win? People, men or women, who have never shot so much as a bird-bolt before? You cannot make a warrior in a day.”

“You can teach someone to shoot a crossbow in a day,” said Udd unexpectedly. “Just wind 'em and point 'em.”

“Just the same,” said Geirulf, Tyr's priest. “We learned this morning the Franks will not stand still to be shot down. So what are we to do?”

“Listen,” said Shef, drawing a deep breath, “and I will tell you.”

Chapter Eleven

Like a great steel reptile, the Frankish army moved out of its base at Hastings, a little after dawn. First, the light cavalry in their hundreds, armed only with steel caps, leather jackets and sabers: their duty, to search out the enemy, hold the flanks, exploit breakthrough. Then, file after file of archers, mounted like every man in the army, but expecting to dismount for battle, when they would close to within fifty yards of an enemy line and pour in the arrows from their breast-bows: their duty, to fix the enemy, make them raise shields to cover faces, crouch down to cover unarmored legs.

In the center, the heavy cavalry, the weapon which had brought the Franks victory after victory on the plains of central Europe. Each man with mail-shirt and thigh-guards, back and bowels protected by the high-reaching saddle, each man with helmet and longsword, and above all, shield, lance and stirrups. The kite-shaped shield to cover the body, the lance with which to strike overhand or underhand, the stirrups to brace the feet for the stroke. Few men, and no Englishmen, could at once wield a lance in one hand, strap the other arm into an unmoving shield, and control a war-stallion with thigh-pressure and the fingertips of one hand alone. Those men who could, they believed, could ride down any infantry in the world, once they came out from their ships or their walls.

At the head of his main battle, nine hundred riders strong, King Charles the Bald turned in his saddle and looked back at the banners flying immediately behind him, at his guarded base beyond, at the ships clustered off the beach. His scouts had brought him good news. The last army south of the Humber, marching to meet him, careless and unprepared, but ready to give battle. That was what he wanted: one decisive shock, the leaders dead on the field, then surrender and the transfer of all the reins of government to his own hand. It should have come sooner, after the defeat of the gallant but foolish Alfred. Then the summer would not have been so far on.

At least the time was ripe. Maybe overripe. But today, or at worst, tomorrow, the decision would be made. Charles realized that his view was blurred by rain drifting in from the Channel. He turned, rode on, waved the English renegade up to ride by him with the translator.

“You live in this God-forsaken country,” he said. “How long is this rain going to last?”

Alfgar glanced at the drooping banners, noted the slow wind from the southwest, thought to himself that it looked as if it was settled in for a week-long soak. Not what the king wants to hear, he realized.

“I think it will soon pass over,” he said. The king grunted, urged on his horse. Slowly, as the army picked its way over the unharvested fields, the damp earth churned into mud—the advance-guards leaving a broad black swathe across the turf.

Five miles northwest, on a ridge a little south of Caldbeck Hill, Shef watched the Franks moving toward him. His banner flew from an ox-cart, the Hammer and Cross athwart each other. He knew the scouts would already have picked it up, told King Charles where he was. He had moved forward at dusk the day before, after the marauding Frankish light horsemen had pulled back to their base. His men—and women—had taken up their positions at night. Almost none of them were with him. This was a battle he could control no more. The real question, he knew, was whether his army could act according to plan—and keep on acting after they had lost touch with him and with each other.

One thing Shef was sure of: there were more people in his army than he knew about. All day the day before, he had overtaken little groups of men heading toward the battleground, churls with spears, woodsmen with their axes, even grimy charcoal-burners out of the Weald, called out by Alfred's summons of the fierd, the ancestral levy of Wessex and its dominions. All were told the same thing. Do not stand up to them. Do not form a line. Wait round the edges. Press in if you see your chance. It was a simple order, and they had taken it gladly, the more gladly from their king in person.

But the rain, thought Shef. Would it help or hinder? He would know soon enough.

The first shot came from the shelter of a half-burned hamlet. Fifty Frankish light horsemen, well forward and to the flank of the army's main advance, crossed the sights of “Dead Level.” Oswi squeezed the trigger, felt the thump of release, saw the great dart flash half a mile. Driving clear into the solid target of horsemen. Instantly the team—seven men and four women—were rewinding, dropping the next bolt into its slot. Thirty slow heartbeats before it could shoot again.

The leader of the hobbelars saw his man on the ground, shaft driven below his ribs, and bit his lip with surprise. Siege-engines, in the open. Yet the answer was clear. Spread out, scatter the targets, ride round behind them. The shot must have come from the right, the open flank. He spurred his horse, shouting, sent his men pouring across the fields.

Thick hedgerows, designed to keep the cattle in and the wild pigs out, channeled his rush into a sunken lane. As the hobbelars swept by, faces looked out from the thorns. At ten-foot range, the crossbow bolts thumped into leather-jerkined backs. As soon as the boots left the stocks, the shooters turned and ran, not even waiting to see if they had hit. In instants they too were astride ponies, spurring hard for cover.

“Ansiau's in trouble,” remarked the leader of another conroy of horsemen, watching the growing turmoil. “An ambush. We'll hook round behind it and catch them between him and us. Teach 'em a lesson; they won't try it again.”

As he began to lead his men round in a wide sweep, there came a thud in the air and a sudden terrible shrieking behind him: a great dart from nowhere, striking a man in the thigh, driving through, pinning the screaming man to his dead horse. Not from the ambush. From somewhere else. The leader stood up in his stirrups, searching round the featureless landscape for something to show him where to charge. Trees, fields of standing wheat. Hedges everywhere. As he hesitated, a crossbow-bolt, shot from a steady rest by a man under a hedge a hundred and fifty yards off, caught him full in the face. The marksman, a poacher from Ditton-in-the-Fen, made no attempt to leap to his feet and run. In ten heartbeats he was twenty yards away, crawling like an eel in a half-filled ditch. The waxed and twisted gut of his crossbow, he had already discovered, had took little harm from the wet. As the horsemen hesitated, spurred in the end toward the place where they thought the shot might have come from, the sights of another twist-shooter trained round.

Slowly, without horns or trumpets, like a cogwheel tightening a rope, twenty separate skirmishes began to grow into battle.

From his vantage point on the ridge, Shef saw the Frankish main force still riding forward: but slowly, at no more than a walk, with many checks. They did not like to advance without their flanks secured. And on the flanks, for long moments, there was scarcely anything to be seen. Then horsemen would appear, spurring round a copse, or charging a burned-out village in extended line. What they were charging or spurring after was usually invisible. Then, as Shef strained his one eye in the blurring rain, he caught a flash of movement far out to one side: a pair of horses side by side at full gallop, one of the twist-shooters bouncing behind, its team drumming their ponies with their heels in a long trail behind. Oswi and “Dead Level” pulling out at one end of a hamlet as the Franks poured in the other, the flanking movement that was meant to cut him off delayed and confused by shots from other directions. The catapult disappeared behind a dip in the ground. In seconds it would be unlimbered again, once more menacing a wide arc anywhere within its half-mile range.

Shef's strategy depended on three things. One was local knowledge: only those who lived, farmed and hunted over the landscape knew where there were passable tracks, safe lines of retreat. Every group he had sent out had attached to it a man or boy picked from those who had fled the area. Others were scattered in hiding places everywhere over twenty square miles, told not to fight but to guide and pass messages. The second thing was the shooting-power of the torsion-catapults with their great darts, and the new crossbows. Both were slow to load, but even the crossbows would pierce mail at up to two hundred paces. And they were best shot by men lying down in cover.

The most important part of Shef's strategy was his realization that there are two ways to win a battle. Every battle he had ever seen—every battle fought in the Western world for centuries—had been won one way. By shock. By forming lines and clashing till one line broke. The line might be broken by axe and sword, as the Vikings preferred; by horse and lance, in the Frankish style; or by stone and dart, as Shef had introduced. Breaking the line meant winning the battle.

This might be a completely new way to win a battle. To have no line, to produce no shock, but to wear and shred the enemy away by missile attack. Only Shef's unprofessional and unwarlike troops would do it: it went against too many ingrained habits of lifetime warriors. Ground was not important. It was there to be yielded. Face-to-face courage was not important. It was a mark of failure. But there could be none of the usual battlefield boosts to morale—the horns, war-songs, leaders shouting, most of all the sense of comrades alongside you. In a battle like this one it would be easy to desert, or simply to hide, to come out when all was over. Shef hoped his teams would keep on covering each other: they had gone out in bands of about fifty—a catapult, twenty crossbows, a few halberdiers together. But it was in the nature of the battle that they would split up. Once that happened, would they come back again?

Remembering the dogged, snarling attacks that the Yorkshire peasants had put in against him in the snow outside York, he thought they might. The men and women out there could see the country over which they were fighting, see its unreaped crops, its burned barns and cut-down orchards. To the children of the poor, food and land were sacred. They had too many hungry winters to remember.

As he watched the battle develop, Shef felt an odd sense of—not of freedom, but freedom from care. He was only a cog now. Cogs had to turn when they were wound. But they did not have to think about the rest of the machine. That would wind, or it would break, and the cog could do nothing about it. It had only to perform its part.

He dropped a hand on Godive's shoulder, standing beside him. She looked sideways at his ravaged face, allowed his hand to lie there.

King Charles, still moving forward toward the ridge of Caldbeck Hill—where from time to time through the rain he could see the taunting banner of his enemies displayed—held up his hand for the twentieth time for his main battle to halt. The leader of his light horse cantered up to him, rain now soaking through his wool and leather.

“Well, Rogier?”

The hobbelar shook his head disgustedly. “It's like fifty dogfights out there all at once. No one stands up to us. We chase them out and chase them out. Then when we reform and fall back they come back after us, or they come in behind.”

“What would happen if we just held together and rode forward? Up there.” The king jerked his thumb at the banner on the skyline a mile away.

“They'd shoot the hell out of us all the way.”

“But only as long as it takes us to ride a mile. All right, Rogier. Discourage these varlets and their bows as much as you can, but tell your men to ride forward in line with the main battle now. Once we have broken their center we can turn and deal with the flanks.”

Turning, the king raised his lance and swept it forward. His riders cheered hoarsely, once, and began to push their horses into a trot.

“They're coming now,” said Shef to Alfred, standing next to Godive. “But it's soft ground and they will save their speed for the last rush.” Barely fifty people stood by the three leaders on the ridge, mostly runners and message-bearers, but he had kept one pull-thrower team by him, with its clumsy, immobile machine. “Swan-stones,” he ordered.

Glad to move after hours of inactivity, the team—men and women together—sprang to their places. They too had only one role to play today. Early in their practicing, Shef's English machinists had discovered that chipping grooves in the stones their engines lobbed produced a strange warbling note as they flew through the air, like the noise of a swan. For their own amusement they had competed to see who could carve out the loudest. Now Shef meant to send a signal to his scattered troops that all could recognize.

His team loaded, braced, loosed. Launched one eerily whistling stone to one flank, heaved the machine round, launched to another. The dart-thrower and crossbow teams still lurking in ambush in front of the Frankish advance heard the signal, hitched up, retreated and swung round to join their leaders for the first time that day. As they appeared one by one, Shef pushed aside the farm-carts which he had set on the skyline, set the machines in the gaps, posted crossbows inside the carts. For every man, woman and machine, a horse or a horse-team stood no more than five yards away, horse-holders ready.

Shef walked up and down the line, repeating the order. “Three shots from each catapult, no more. Start at extreme range. One shot from each crossbow, on the word.”

As King Charles reached the foot of the ridge, his spirits rose in spite of the rain. His enemy had tried to harass and delay him, and now he was counting on the slope and the mud to take the force out of his charge. But the hobbelars had done their job in taking the casualties of skirmishing. And the English still did not appreciate the plan of the Frankish charge. Setting spurs to his horse, he drove up the hill at a canter rising to a gallop, overtaken in seconds by the counts of his bodyguard pulling ahead.

The catapults twanged, black lines streaking through the air, swirls in the massive body of metal plunging up the hill. Still they came on as the levers twirled behind the farm-carts. Again the musical notes, the streaks, the cries of pain from men and horses, the rear ranks hurdling over those who fell. Strange, Charles thought as the obstacle in front of him came into focus. A barricade, but no shields, no warriors. Did they think to stop him with wood alone?

“Shoot,” said Shef as the front ranks of the charge reached the white sticks he had planted that morning. Then, instantly, in a Brand-like roar, drowning the simultaneous thump of the crossbows, “Now run! Hitch up and run!”

In moments the slope behind the ridge was a flood of ponies, crossbows well in the lead, catapults taking seconds to hitch up, one team-leader cursing a sticking toggle. Then they too were away. Last of the throng, Godive suddenly turned back, jerked the Hammer and Cross from its frame, swung astride her gelding, and pounded off, banner dragging behind her like a lady's train.

Eyes glaring, lances poised, the Frankish cavalry swept up to the ridge-line, furious to strike at their harassers. A few drove their horses straight at the gaps in the enemy line, whirled round, stallions rearing to strike with their steel hooves at the foot soldiers who must be lurking there.

No one. Carts. Hoofprints. One single siege-engine, the pull-thrower Shef had abandoned. More and more squeezed through the gaps between carts, some finally dismounting and hauling the obstacles away. The king gaped up at the stout wooden frame from which Godive had hauled the Hammer and Cross. As he did so, tauntingly, the same banner rose again, on another ridge-line above a tangle of wood and gully, a long half-mile away. Some of the hotheads in his ranks, fury undispersed by action, yelled and began to spur again toward it. Sharp orders brought them back.

“I have brought a knife to cut beef,” the king muttered to his constable Godefroi. “But what is set before me is soup. Thin soup. We will go back to Hastings and think again.”

His eye fell on Alfgar. “I thought you said this rain of yours would stop.”

Alfgar said nothing, looked at the ground. Charles glanced again at the high frame from which the Hammer and Cross had been torn, still standing sturdily on its cart. He jerked a thumb at it. “Hang the English traitor,” he ordered.

“I warned you about the machines,” shrieked Alfgar as the hands seized him.

“What's he say?” asked one of the knights.

“I don't know. Some gabble in English.”

On a knoll well to one side of the track of the Franks, Thorvin, Geirulf and Farman conferred.

“What do you think?” asked Thorvin.

Geirulf, priest of Tyr, chronicler of battles, shook his head. “It is something new. Completely new. I have never heard of such a thing before. I have to ask: who puts it in his mind? Who but the Father of Warriors? He is a son of Othin. And such men are dangerous.”

“I do not think so,” said Thorvin. “And I have talked to his mother.”

“We know what you told us,” said Farman. “What we do not know is what it means. Unless you have a better explanation, I must agree with Geirulf.”

“This is not the time to give it,” said Thorvin. “See, things are moving again. The Franks are retreating.”

Shef watched the heavy lancers turn back from the ridge, with foreboding. He had hoped they would come on again, take more losses, weary their horses and exhaust themselves. If they pulled back now, there was too much chance that they would reach their base and come out another day of their choosing and renew the attack. Instinctively he knew that an irregular army cannot do one thing: defend territory. He had not tried to do so today, and the Frankish king had not tried to make him, sure that both sides desired the traditional, decisive clash. But there must be a way to make him attack. An undefended population all over southern England stood at the king's mercy.

He needed victory today. It meant taking greater risks for greater gains. Fortunately, retreating armies are vulnerable in a way that advancing ones are not. So far, hardly half of Shef's forces had been engaged. Time to commit the rest. Calling his errand-lads around him, Shef began to pass his orders.

Down on the sodden slopes rising from the sea to the down-lands, the Frankish hobbelars were learning sense. No longer did they ride in bunched groups presenting easy targets. Instead they too lurked in cover, moving only when they had to and then in short gallops. By a path through a dripping copse, one group tensed as they heard running feet. As the barefoot lad rushed by, intent only on his message, one rider spurred out, slashed savagely with his saber.

“He had no weapon,” said one of the Franks, looking down at the body draining blood in the rain-pocked puddles.

“His weapon was in his head,” grunted the sergeant in charge. “Get ready to move again.”

The boy's brother, running fifty paces behind, hid quiet as a vole behind a red-berried rowan tree, watched them go. Slipped off to find avengers.

The Frankish archers, so far, had done nothing but endure random shot, their bowstrings long since so wet as to be valueless. Their commanders, now, were using them to hold strategic spots as the army fell back. They, too, were starting to use woodcraft.

“Look.” One pointed to a conroy of hobbelars falling back over a field, one of them suddenly clutching his side and tipping from his horse. The archers, behind a wrecked barn, saw a figure suddenly slip from a hedgerow, seize a pony, and ride off unseen by its victims. But straight toward their ambush. As it came round the edge of the barn at full gallop, two men drove their short swords into the pony's chest, seized the marksman as the pony collapsed.

“What devil's work is this?” asked one, snatching the crossbow. “See, a bow, arrows. What is this at the belt?”

“Never mind the belt, Guillaume,” shouted one of his mates. “Look, it's a girl.” The men stared at the slight, short-kilted figure.

“Women shooting men from cover,” muttered Guillaume.

“All right. We've time to teach her a lesson. Give her some memories to take to Hell with her.”

As the soldiers crowded round the writhing, splayed-out figure, a dozen churls of the Kentish fierd crawled closer, wood-axes and billhooks ready. They could not stand up to mailed horsemen. Mere prowlers and robbers they could deal with.

Leaking men and horses, the great steel reptile oozed sullenly back toward its base.

King Charles, sunk in thought, did not notice the check in front of him till he was almost on his own archers. Then he paused, looked down. A sergeant caught his stirrup, pointed. “Sire, they are in front of us. Standing, for once.”

The village reeve Shef had found was positive that a day's rain and the passage of thousands of horses would turn the brook between the Brede and Bulverhythe into a quagmire. Shef had decided to take the chance and believe him. His runners had got through—most of them. The pull-thrower teams with their heavy guards of halberdiers had closed in from the far flanks where they had waited immobile. Assembled their weapons, lined up five yards apart along a hundred and fifty yards of front. On a fine day, in the open, against cavalry, suicide.

Osmod the marshal, peering through the rain, judged the Frankish vanguard within range. As he called the order, twenty beams lashed the air together, slings whirled, stones shot into the sky.

Charles's horse reared as the brains of a dismounted archer flicked its face. Another stallion, leg broken, screamed and pawed at the air. Almost before one volley had landed another was in the air. For a moment the Frankish army, surprised again and again, came close to panic.

Charles rode forward bellowing, ignoring the stones now aimed deliberately at him. Imperiously he drove the archers forward, launching feeble arrows. Behind them, following his example, his heavy lancers broke into a slow trot. Into the quagmire where a brook had been.

Charles himself was pulled clear of his bogged horse by two counts of his stable, stood in the end to watch. His men floundered through, some on horses still, some on foot, to reach the machines that flung an unending rain of stones. They were met by a line of men in strange helmets, swinging and stabbing with huge axes like woodmen's tools. Robbed of the élan which was their birthright, the Frankish knights stood and fought them weapon to weapon. Slowly, the big men in mail forced their smaller, strangely armed adversaries back. Back. Almost to the line of the machines, which they must stand to defend.

Horn-blasts from both sides. Floundering through the mud, Charles tensed, expecting the counterattack, the desperate last charge. Instead his enemies turned suddenly, all together, and ran. Ran unashamedly, like hares or leverets. Leaving their machines to the conqueror.

Gasping with exertion, Charles realized there was no way to carry the things off. Nor to burn them. “Cut them up,” he ordered. An archer looked doubtfully at the heavy timbers. “Cut the ropes! Do something to them.”

“They lost a few,” said one of his counts. “And they ran like cowards. Left their weapons behind.”

“We lost many,” said the king. “And how many swords and mail-shirts have we left behind us today? Give me my horse. If we reach base with half the strength we started, we'll be lucky.”

Yes, he thought. But we're through. Through all the traps. And half, behind a safe stockade, may be enough another day.

As if to encourage him, the rain began to ease.

Guthmund the Greedy, sweeping down the Channel under oars alone, ignored the rain and welcomed the poor visibility it brought. If he was going to go ashore he would much prefer it to come as a surprise. Also, in rain or fog, there was a chance of snapping up information. In the prow of the leading ship, he pointed off to starboard, called an order to increase the stroke. In moments the longship was alongside the six-oar fishing-boat, its crew looking up in fear. Guthmund pulled the hammer-pendant from round his neck and showed it, noted the expressions fading from fear to wariness.

“We are here to fight the Franks,” he called, using the half-English pidgin of the Wayman camp. The expressions relaxed another degree as the men realized they could understand him, took in what he said.

“You're too late,” a fisherman called back. “They fight today.”

“You'd better come aboard,” replied Guthmund.

As he took in the sense of what the fishermen told him, his pulse began to beat stronger. If there was one principle of successful piracy, it was to land where the defenses were down. He checked again and again: the Frankish army had been seen marching out that morning. It had left camp-guards and ship-guards. The loot of the countryside, Canterbury included, was in the lightly guarded camp. The fishermen had no hope that the Franks would find anything but victory. Still, Guthmund told himself, if his friend and jarl was defeated, it could do no harm to rob the conqueror. And a stroke in the rear might be a vital distraction. He turned to the fishermen again with another string of questions: The fleet drawn up in a bay? The stockaded camp on a hill? The nearest inlet to it? Steep sides but a path?

In the drenching rain the Wayman fleet, rowed now by chained Ragnarsson survivors, pulled one by one into the narrow mouth of the stream below Hastings and its camp.

“Do you mean to climb the walls with ladders?” asked one of the fishermen doubtfully. “They are ten feet high.”

“That's what those are for,” said Guthmund, waving cheerfully at the six onagers being slung over the side by derricks.

“Too heavy for the path,” said the fisherman, eyeing the way the boats heeled.

“I have plenty of carriers,” replied Guthmund, watching keenly as his men, weapons poised, unshackled the dangerous Ragnarsson galley-slaves a few at a time and made them fast again to the onagers' frames and carry-bars.

As the narrow inlet filled with men, Guthmund decided to make a short speech of encouragement.

“Loot,” he said, “lots of it. Stolen from the Christian Church, so we'll never have to give any back. Maybe we have to share it with the jarl, if he wins today. Maybe not. Let's go.”

“What about us?” said one of the chained men.

Guthmund looked at him attentively. Ogvind the Swede: a very hard man. Threats no good. And he needed these men to use their full strength up the steep hillside.

“This is how it is,” he said. “If we win, I'll let you go. If we lose, I'll leave you chained to the machines. Maybe the Christians will be merciful to you. Fair?”

Ogvind nodded. Struck by a sudden thought, Guthmund turned to the black deacon, the machine-master.

“What about you? Will you fight these for us?”

Erkenbert's face set. “Against Christians? The emissaries of the Pope, the Holy Father, whom I myself and my master called to this abode of savages? Rather will I embrace the crown of holy martyrdom and go…”

A hand plucked at Guthmund's sleeve: one of the few slaves taken from York Minster who had survived both Ivar's furies and Erkenbert's discipline.

“We'll do it, master,” he whispered. “Be a pleasure.”

Guthmund waved the mixed party up the steep hillside, going first himself with the fishermen and minster-men to reconnoiter, the Ragnarssons struggling up next under their ton-and-a-half burdens. Slowly, still cloaked by the rain, six onagers and a thousand Vikings moved into position four hundred yards from the Frankish stockade. Guthmund shook his head disapprovingly as he realized that there were not even sentries posted on the seaward side—or if there had been, they had all drifted over to the other side to watch and listen to the far-off rumor of battle.

The first sighting shot from an onager bounced short, kicked up and flicked a ten-foot post stump-first out of the ground. The minster-men pulled out coigns, lifted the frames a trifle. The next volley of five twenty-pound boulders smashed down twenty feet of stockade in a moment. Guthmund saw no point in waiting for a second volley. His army headed straight for the gap at a run. The startled Franks, mostly archers, bowstrings useless, faced with a thousand veteran warriors ready to fight on foot at close quarters, broke and ran almost to a man.

Two hours after setting foot onshore, Guthmund looked out from the Frankish gate. All his training told him to parcel the loot, abandon the now-unnecessary machines, and get back to sea before vengeance fell On him. Yet what he saw looked uncommonly like a beaten army streaming back. If so, if so…

He turned, shouted orders. Skaldfinn the interpreter, priest of Heimdall, looked at him in surprise.

“You're taking a risk,” he said.

“Can't help it. I remember what my grandpa told me. Always kick a man if he's down.”

As his men saw the Hammer ensign break out over what they had thought was their secure camp, Charles the Bald felt the morale of his army break. Every man and horse was soaked, cold and weary. As they straggled out of the copses and hedgerows and formed once more into ranks, the hobbelars could see that at least half their number were still lying out in the sodden fields, dead or waiting for death from some peasant's knife. The archers had been mere passive targets all day. Even the core of his army, the heavy lancers, had left a third of their best on slope or in quagmire, with never a chance to show their skill. The stockade in front of him looked unharmed and heavily manned. No assault would go in willingly.

Cutting his losses, Charles stood in his saddle, raised his lance, pointed toward the ships drawn up on the beach or anchored in the road. Sullenly, his men changed their direction of march, angled down towards the beach on which they had landed weeks before.

As they reached it, one by one, the dragon-boats cruised round from the inlet where their crews had re-embarked. Rowed into position, halted all together on the calm sea, swung bows on with the skill of veterans. From a vantage point by the stockade, an onager tried a ranging shot. The missile plumped into the gray water a cable's length over the cog Dieu Aide. Gently, the onagers trained round.

Looking down on the crowded beach, Shef realized that where the Frankish army had shrunk, his had swollen. The dart-throwers and crossbows were in place as he expected, hardly fewer than when they had started. His stone-throwers were coming up at a rush, recaptured from where the Franks had left them, unharmed or hastily re-rigged and now carried along still assembled by hundreds of willing hands. Only the halberdiers had lost more than a handful. And in their place had come thousands, literally thousands of angry churls out of the woodlands, clutching axes and spears and scythes. If the Franks were to break out it would have to be uphill. On weary horses. Under withering fire.

Into Shef's mind, unbidden, came the memory of his duel with Flann the Gaddgedil. If you wanted to consign a man, or an army, to Naströnd, to Dead Man's Shore, you cast the spear over their heads as a sign that all were given to Othin. Then no prisoners could be taken. A voice spoke inside him, a cold voice, the voice he recognized as the Othin of his dreams.

“Go on,” it said. “Pay me my due. You do not wear my sign yet, but do they not say you belong to me?”

As if sleepwalking, Shef drifted over to Oswi's catapult—“Dead Level,” wound and loaded, trained on the center of the Frankish army, milling in confusion below them. He looked down at the crosses on the shields: remembered the orm-garth. The wretched slave Merla. His own torments at the hands of Wulfgar. Godive's back. Sibba and Wilfi, burned to ashes. The crucifixions. His hands were steady as they pulled out the coigns, trained the weapon up to launch its missile over the Frankish heads.

Inside him the voice spoke again, the voice like a calving glacier. “Go on,” it said. “Give the Christians to me.”

Suddenly Godive was beside him, hand on his sleeve. She said nothing. As he looked at her, he remembered Father Andreas, who had given him life. His friend Alfred. Father Boniface. The poor woman in the forest clearing. He looked round from his daze, realized that the priests of the Way, all of them, had appeared from somewhere, were gazing at him with grave and intent faces.

He stepped back from the catapult with a deep sigh.

“Skaldfinn,” he said. “You are an interpreter. Go down and tell the Frankish king to surrender or be killed. I will give them their lives and passage home. No more.”

Again he heard a voice: but this time, the amused one of the wanderer in the mountains, which he had first heard over the gods' chessboard.

“Well done,” it said. “You defeated Othin's temptation. Maybe you are my son. But who knows his own father?”

Chapter Twelve

“He was tempted,” said Skaldfinn. “Whatever you may say, Thorvin, there is something of Othin in him.”

“It would have been the greatest slaughter since men came to these islands,” added Geirulf. “The Franks on the beach were worn out and helpless. And the English churls would have had no mercy.”

The priests of the Way sat again in their holy circle, around the spear and the fire, within the rowan cords. Thorvin had picked great bunches of the freshest berries of autumn. Their bright scarlet answered the sunset.

“Such a thing would have brought us the worst of luck,” said Farman. “For with such a sacrifice it is essential that no loot or profit be taken. But the English would not have regarded that. They would have robbed the dead. Then we would have had against us both the Christian God and the wrath of Allfather.”

“Nevertheless he did not shoot the dart,” said Thorvin. “He held his hand. That is why I say he is not a creature of Othin. I thought so once. Now I know better.”

“You had better tell us what you learned from his mother,” said Skaldfinn.

“It was like this,” Thorvin began. “I found her easily enough, in the village of her husband the heimnar. She might not have talked to me, but she loves the girl—concubine's daughter though she is. In the end she told me the story.

“It was much as Sigvarth told it—though he said she enjoyed his attentions and she… Well, after what she suffered it is not surprising that she spoke of him only with hatred. But she bore him out up to the time when he lay with her on the sand, put her in the boat, and then left her and went back to his men and their women on the beach.

“Then, she said, this happened. There was a scratching on the boat's gunwale. When she looked over, in the night, there was a small boat alongside, just a skiff, with a man in it. I pressed her to know what sort of man, but she could remember nothing. Middle-aged, middle-sized, she said, neither well-dressed nor shabby. He beckoned to her. She thought he was a fisherman who had come out to rescue her, so she got in. He pulled out well clear of the beach, and rowed her down the coast, saying never a word. She got out, she went home to her husband.”

“Maybe he was a fisherman,” put in Farman. “Just as the walrus was a walrus and the skoffin was a foolish boy afraid of keeping watch on his own.”

“I asked her—did he not want a reward? He could have taken her home. Her kin would have paid him, if not her husband. She said he just left her. I pressed her on this, I asked her to remember every detail. She said one more thing.

“When the stranger got her to shore, she said, he pulled the boat up on the beach and looked at her. Then she felt suddenly weary and lay down among the seaweed. When she woke, he had gone.”

Thorvin looked round. “Now, what happened when she lay in this sleep we do not know. I would guess that a woman would know by some sign if she had been taken in her sleep, but who is to say? Sigvarth had been with her not long before. If she had any suspicion, she would have nothing to gain by mentioning it. Or remembering it. But that sleep makes me wonder.

“Tell me now.” Thorvin turned to Farman. “You who are the wisest of us, tell me how many gods there are in Asgarth.”

Farman stirred uneasily. “You know, Thorvin, that is not a wise question. Othin, Thor, Frey, Balder, Heimdall, Njörth, Ithun, Tyr, Loki—those are the ones we speak of most. But there are so many others in the stories: Vithar, Sigyn, Ull…”

“Rig?” asked Thorvin carefully. “What do we know of Rig?”

“That is a name of Heimdall,” said Skaldfinn.

“A name,” mused Thorvin. “Two names, one person. So we hear. Now, I would not say this outside the circle, but it comes to me sometimes that the Christians are right. There is only one god.” He looked round at the shocked faces. “But he—no, it—has different moods. Or parts. Maybe the parts compete against each other, as a man may play chess, right hand against left, for sport. Othin against Loki, Njörth against Skathi, Aesir against Vaenir. Yet the real contest is between all the parts, all the gods, and the giants and monsters who would bring us to Ragnarök.

“Now, Othin has his way of making men strong to help the gods when they shall stand against the giants on that day. That is why he betrays the warriors, chooses the mightiest of them to die. So they will be in his hall the day the giants come.

“But it is in my mind that maybe Rig too has his way. You know the holy story? How Rig went through the mountains, met Ai and Edda and begot on Edda, Thrall. Met Afi and Amma and begot on Amma, Carl. Met Fathir and Mothir and begot on Mothir, Jarl. This jarl of ours has also been thrall and carl. And who is the son of Jarl?”

“Kon the Young,” said Farman.

“Which is to say Konr ungr which is konungr.”

“Which is King,” said Farman.

“Who can deny our jarl that title now? He is acting out the story of Rig in his own life. Of Rig and his dealings with humanity.”

“Why is the god Rig doing this?” asked Vestmund, priest of Njörth. “And what is Rig's power? For I confess, I know nothing of him but the story you tell.”

“He is the god of climbers,” replied Thorvin. “And his power is to make men better. Not through war, like Othin, but through skills. There is another old story you know, about Skjef the father of Skjold—which is to say, Sheaf the father of Shield. Now the kings of the Danes call themselves the sons of Skjold, the war-kings. Yet even they remember that before Skjold the war-king there was a peace-king, who taught men how to sow and reap, instead of living like animals by the chase. What I think has happened now is that a new Sheaf has come, however we pronounce the name, to free us from sowing and reaping and living only from one harvest to the next.”

“And this is ‘the one who comes from the North,’ ” said Farman doubtfully. “Not of the blood or tongue. One who has allied himself with Christians. It is not what we expected.”

“What the gods do is never what we expected,” replied Thorvin.

Shef watched the gloomy procession of disarmed Frankish warriors filing after their king aboard the ships that would take them home. With them Alfred had insisted on sending not only the papal legate and the Franks' own Churchmen, but also the archbishop of York, and his own Bishop Daniel of Winchester, Erkenbert the deacon and all the English clerics who had failed to oppose the invaders. Daniel had screamed threats of eternal damnation for the excommunicate at him, but Alfred had remained unmoved. “If you cast me out of your flock,” he had remarked, “I shall begin my own. One with better shepherds. And dogs with sharper teeth.”

“They will hate you forever for that,” Shef had said to him.

“That is another thing we must share,” Alfred had replied.

And so they had done their deal.

Both men single, without heirs. They would be co-kings, Alfred south of the Thames, Shef north of it, at least as far as the Humber, beyond which there still lurked the Snakeeye and his ambitions. Each named the other as his heir. Each agreed that within his dominion, belief in the gods should be free, for Christians, for Way-folk, and for any other that should appear. But no priest of any religion should be allowed to take payment, in goods or in land, except for a service agreed upon beforehand. And Church-land should revert to the crown. It would make them the richest kings in Europe, before long.

“We must use the money well,” Shef had added.

“In charity?”

“In other ways too. It is often said that no new thing can come before its time, and I believe it. But I believe also that there can be a time for a new thing, and then men can stifle it. Or churches can stifle it. Look at our machines and our crossbows. Who could say they could not have been made a hundred years ago, or five hundred, in the time of the Rome-folk? Yet no one made them. I want us to get back all the old knowledge, even the numbercrafts of the arithmetici. And use it to make new knowledge. New things.” His hand had clenched as if on the haft of a hammer.

Now, still watching the files of captives embarking, Alfred turned to his co-king and said, “I am surprised you still refuse to wear the hammer of our banner. After all, I still wear the cross.”

“The Hammer is for the Way, united. And Thorvin says he has a new sign for me. I will have to see if I approve of it, for the choice is a difficult one. He is here.”

Thorvin approached them, flanked by all the priests of the Way, behind them, Guthmund and a cluster of senior skippers.

“We have your sign,” said Thorvin. He held out a pendant on a silver chain. Shef looked at it curiously: a shaft, with five rungs sticking out from it on alternate sides.

“What is it?”

“It is a kraki,” replied Thorvin. “A pole-ladder. It is the sign of Rig.”

“I have never heard the name of that god. What can you tell me about him that should make me wear his sign?”

“He is the god of climbers. Of wanderers. He is mighty not through himself but through his children. He is the father of Thrall, of Carl, of Jarl. And of others.”

Shef looked round at the many watching faces: Alfred. Thorvin. Ingulf. Hund. There were some not there. Brand, of whose recovery he still had no news. His mother Thryth. He did not know if she would ever wish to see him again.

Most of all, Godive. After the battle a group of his catapulteers had brought him the body of his half brother—his mother's son, Godive's husband. Both he and she had looked for a long time at the purple face, the twisted neck, trying to find in it some memory of childhood, some clue to the hatred in the brain. Shef had thought of lines from one of Thorvin's old poems, said by a hero over the brother he had killed:

But he had not said the words. He meant to forget. He hoped one day Godive would forget too. Forget that he had first saved her, then deserted her, then used her. Now that the constant stress of planning and action was over, he felt inside himself as though he loved her as much as he ever had before he rescued her from Ivar's camp. But what kind of love was it that had to wait for the right moment to be admitted?

So Godive had thought. She had taken her husband and half brother's body for burial, left Shef unsure when or whether she might return. This time he would have to decide for himself.

He looked past his friends at the prisoners still filing by—the sullen, hating faces—thought of the humiliated Charles, the enraged Pope Nicholas, the Snakeeye in the North with a brother now to avenge. He looked again at the silver sign in his hand.

“A pole-ladder,” he said. “Difficult to balance on.”

“You have to do it one rung at a time,” replied Thorvin.

“Hard to climb, difficult to balance, to reach the top. But at the top there are two rungs to grasp on to. One opposite the other. It could almost be a cross.”

Thorvin frowned. “Rig and his sign were known in the ages before there ever was a cross. It is not a sign of death. No. It is one of reaching higher, of living better.”

Shef smiled, the first time he had done that for many days. “I like your sign, Thorvin,” he said. “I will wear it.” He slipped the Wayman's pendant round his neck, turned and looked at the misted sea.

Some knot, some pain within him was released, fled.

For the first time in his entire life he felt at peace.