Light shone into the hall from many open shutters, but Brand halted when he got inside to let his eyes adjust, to look around, to get the feel of his audience. In later years, he knew, this scene would be famous in song and saga—if he played it right. In the next few minutes he would gain either imperishable glory or unthinkable death.
Inside the hall many men were sitting, standing, loitering, playing at one game or another. None looked at him as he came in, or at the other men silently filtering in behind him, but he knew they had registered his presence. As his eyes cleared he saw slowly that though there was no apparent order in the hall, indeed a careful avoidance of it—a pretense that all warriors, all true drengir, were equal—still the groupings of the men were all subtly poised on one center. At the end of the hall, there was a little space no one ventured into. There four men were grouped, all seeming intent on their own concerns.
He walked toward them, the padding of his soft seaman’s shoes audible in what had indiscernibly become silence.
He reached the four men. “Greetings!” he said, pitching his voice loud for the audience clustered around and behind him. “I have news. News for the sons of Ragnar.”
One of the four glanced over his shoulder at him, went back to paring his fingernails with a knife. “Great news it must be, for a man to come to the Braethraborg without invitation or passport.”
“Great news it is.” Brand filled his lungs and controlled his breathing. “For it is news of the death of Ragnar.”
Utter silence now. The man who had spoken continued his paring, intent on his left index finger, the knife slicing, slicing. Blood sprang out, the knife cut on down, down to the quick and the bone. The man made no sound and no movement.
A second one of the four spoke, picking up a stone piece from the checkerboard to make his move, a powerful, thick-shouldered man with grizzled hair. “Tell us,” he remarked, his voice carefully unperturbed, deliberately refusing to show unmanly emotion. “How did our old father Ragnar die? For it is not to be surprised at, since he was getting on in years.”
“It all began on the coast of England, where he was wrecked. According to the story I heard, he was caught by the men of King Ella.” Brand changed his voice slightly, as if to match, or to mock, the second Ragnarsson’s studied pretense of imperturbability. “I do not suppose they had much trouble, for, as you say, he was getting on in years. Maybe he offered no resistance.”
The grizzled man still held his draughtsman, his fingers closing on it tighter, tighter. Blood spurted out from under his fingernails, splashed on the board. The man put the piece down, moved it once, twice, lifted the captured draughtsman to the side. “I take, Ivar,” he remarked.
The man he was playing with spoke. He was a man with hair so fair it was almost white, swept back off his pale face and held with a linen headband. He looked at Brand with eyes as colorless as frozen water, under lashes that never blinked.
“What did they do once they had caught him?”
Brand looked carefully into the pale man’s unblinking stare. He shrugged, still elaborately unconcerned.
“They took him to King Ella’s court at Eoforwich. It was no great matter, for they thought him only a common pirate, of no importance. I believe they asked him some questions, had some little sport with him. But then, tiring of him, they decided they might as well put him to death.”
In the dead silence Brand studied his fingernails, conscious that his baiting of the Ragnarssons had almost reached its climax of danger. He shrugged again.
“Well. They gave him to the Christ-priests in the end. I expect he did not seem worthy of death from the warriors.”
A flush shot into the pale man’s cheeks. He seemed to be holding his breath, almost choking. The flush deepened, deepened till his face was scarlet. He began to sway to and fro in his chair, a kind of coughing coming from deep in his throat. His eyes bulged, the scarlet deepened to purple—in the dim light of the hall, almost to black. Slowly the swaying stopped, the man seemed to win some deep internal battle within himself, the coughing died, the face ebbed back to a startling pallor.
The fourth man who stood by his three brothers, watching the draughts game, was leaning on a spear. He had not moved or spoken, had kept his eyes down. Slowly now he raised them to look at Brand. For the first time the tall messenger flinched. There was something in the eyes he had heard of but had never believed: the pupils astonishingly black, the iris around them as white as new-fallen snow—startlingly clear—and surrounding the black totally, like the paint around an iron shield-boss. The eyes glinted like moonlight on metal.
“How did King Ella and the Christ-priests decide to kill the old man, in the end?” asked the fourth of the Ragnarssons, his voice low, almost gentle. “I suppose you will be telling us it did not take much doing.”
Brand answered bluntly and truthfully, taking no more risks. “They put him in the serpent-pit, the worm-yard, the orm-garth. I understand there was some little trouble, as to begin with the snakes would not bite and then—from what I heard—Ragnar bit them first. But in the end they bit him and he died. It was a slow death, and no weapon-mark on him. Not one to be proud of in Valhalla.”
The man with the strange eyes did not move a muscle. There was a pause, a long pause, as the intently watching audience waited for him to make some sign that he had heard, for him to show some failure in self-control like his brothers. It did not come. The man straightened finally, tossed the spear he had been leaning on to a bystander, hooked his thumbs in his belt, prepared to speak.
A grunt from the bystander, a grunt of surprise, drawing all eyes to him. Silently he held up the tough ashwood spear he had been thrown. On it men could see indentations, marks where fingers had gripped. A slight hum of satisfaction ran round the hall.
Before the man with the strange eyes could speak, Brand interrupted, seizing the moment. Pulling his mustache thoughtfully, he remarked, “There was one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“After the snakes had bitten him, as he lay dying, Ragnar spoke. They did not understand him, of course, for he spoke in our tongue, in the norroent mal, but someone heard, someone passed it on; in the end I was fortunate enough to come by it. I have no invitation and no passport, as you said just now, but it occurred to me you might be interested enough to want to know.”
“What did he say, then, the old man dying?”
Brand lifted his voice loudly so that it filled the whole hall, like a herald issuing a challenge. “He said, ‘Gynthja mundu grisir ef galtar hag vissi.’”
This time there was no need to translate. The whole hall knew what Ragnar had said: “If they knew how the old boar died, how the little pigs would grunt.”
“So that is why I came uninvited,” called Brand, his voice still high and challenging. “Though some told me it might be dangerous. I am a man who likes to hear grunting. And so I came to tell the little pigs. And you must be the little pigs, from what men tell me. You, Halvdan Ragnarsson”—he nodded to the man with the knife. “You, Ubbi Ragnarsson”—the first draughts-player. “You, Ivar Ragnarsson, famous for your white hair. And you, Sigurth Ragnarsson. I see now why men call you Orm-i-auga, the Snake-eye.
“It is not likely that my news has pleased you. But I hope you will agree that it was news you should be told.”
The four men were on their feet now, all facing him, the pretense of indifference gone. As they took in his words, they nodded. Slowly, they were beginning to grin, their expressions all the same, looking for the first time as if they were all a family, all brothers, all sons of the same man. Their teeth showed.
It was the prayer of the monks and minister-men in those days: Domine, libera nos a furore normannorum—“Lord, deliver us from the fury of the Northmen.” If they had seen those faces, any sensible monk would have added immediately: Sed praesepe, Domine, a humore eorum—“But especially, Lord, from their mirth.”
“It was news we should be told,” said the Snake-eye, “a
nd we thank you for bringing it. At the start we thought you might not be telling all the truth about this matter, and that was why we may have seemed displeased. But what you said at the end—ah, that was our father’s voice. He knew someone would hear it. He knew someone would tell us. And he knew what we would do. Didn’t he, boys?”
A gesture, and someone rolled forward a great round chopping block, an oak trunk sawn off. A heave from the four brothers together, and it crashed down firm on the floor. The sons of Ragnar clustered round it, facing their men, each raising one foot and placing it on the block. They spoke together, following the ritual:
“Now we stand on this block, and we make this boast, that we will—”,
“ … invade England in vengeance for our father”—so Halvdan said.
“ … capture King Ella and kill him with torments for Ragnar’s death”—so Ubbi.
“ … defeat all the kings of the English and bring the land into subjection to us”—so Sigurth the Snake-eye.
“ … wreak vengeance on the black crows, the Christ-priests who counseled the orm-garth”—so Ivar spoke. They ended again together:
“ … and if we go back on our words let the gods of Asgarth despise us and reject us, and may we never join our father and our ancestors in their dwellings.”
As they ended, the smoke-blackened beams of the longhouse were filled with a roar of approval from four hundred throats, the jarls, the nobles, the skippers, and the helmsmen of the whole pirate fleet in unison. Outside, the rank and file gathering from their booths and bunkhouses nudged each other with excitement and anticipation, knowing that a decision had been made.
“And now,” the Snake-eye yelled over the din, “pull out the tables, spread the boards. No man may inherit from his father till he has drunk the funeral ale. And so we shall drink the arval for Ragnar, drink like heroes. And in the morning we shall gather every man and every ship and take our way to England, so that they shall never forget us nor be quit of us!
“But now, drink. And, stranger, sit at our board and tell us more of our father. There will be a place for you in England once it is ours.”
Far away, Shef, the dark boy, the stepson of Wulfgar, lay on a straw pallet. The mist was still rising from the dank ground of Emneth, and only a thin old blanket covered him from it. Inside the stout-timbered wooden hall, his stepfather Wulfgar lay in comfort, if not in love, with the boy’s mother, the lady Thryth. Alfgar lay in a warm bed in a room by his parents, and so too did Godive, the concubine’s child, Wulfgar’s daughter. At Wulfgar’s homecoming they had all eaten lavishly of the roasted and the boiled, the baked and the brewed—duck and goose from the fens, pike and lamprey from the rivers.
Shef had eaten rye porridge and gone out to his solitary hut by the smithy where he worked, to have his only friend dress his new-got scars. Now he was tossing in the grip of a dream. If dream it was.
He saw a dark field somewhere on the edge of the world, lit only by a purple sky. On the field lay shapeless huddles of rags and bone and skin, white skulls and rib cages showing through the remains of gorgeous garments. Round the huddles, everywhere on the field, hopped and swarmed a great army of birds-huge black birds with black beaks, stabbing savagely into eye sockets and pecking bone-joints for a morsel of flesh or marrow. But the bodies had been picked over many times, the bones were dry; the birds began to croak loudly and peck at each other instead.
They ceased, they grew quiet, they clustered together to where four black birds were standing. They listened as the four croaked and croaked in ever louder and more menacing tones. Then the whole flock rose as one into the purple sky, circled and closed formation, then banked slowly like a single organism and flew directly toward him, toward Shef, to where he was standing. The leader flew straight at him, he could see the remorseless unblinking golden eye, the black beak pointed at his face. It did not pull back, he could not move; something was holding his head firm and rigid; he felt the black beak driving deep into the soft jelly of his eye.
Shef woke with a shout and a start, leaping straight off the pallet, clutching his thin blanket round him as he stared out of the hole in his hut’s wall into a marshy dawn. His friend Hund called from the other pallet.
“What is it, Shef? What frightened you?”
For a moment he could not reply. Then it came out as a croak—he did not know what he was saying.
“The ravens! The ravens are on the wing!”
Chapter Three
“Are you certain it is the Great Army itself which has landed?” Wulfgar’s voice was angry but unsure. It was news he did not want to believe. But he did not dare to challenge the messenger openly.
“There is no doubt,” said Edrich, the king’s thane, trusted servant of Edmund, king of the East Angles.
“And this army is led by the sons of Ragnar?”
Even more fearful news for Wulfgar, thought Shef as he listened to the debate from the back of the room. Every freeman in Emneth had crowded into their lord’s hall, summoned by runners. For though a freeman in England could lose everything—land-right, folk-right, even kin-right—for failing to answer a lawful summons to arms, for that very reason it was also their right to hear all issues debated publicly before they answered any call.
Whether Shef had any right to join them was another matter. But he had not been collared as a slave yet, and the freeman standing by the door to verify presence and absence still owed Shef for his mended ploughshare. He had grunted doubtfully, looked at the sword and shabby scabbard at Shef’s side, and decided not to press the point. Now Shef stood at the very back of the room among the poorest cottagers of Emneth, trying to hear without being seen.
“My men have spoken to many churls who have seen them,” said Edrich. “They say this army is led by four great warriors, the sons of Ragnar, all of equal status. Every day the warriors gather round a great banner with the sign of a black raven. It is the Raven Banner.”
Which the daughters of Ragnar wove all in one night, which spreads its wings for victory and droops them for defeat. It was a familiar story, and a fearful one. The deeds of the sons of Ragnar were famous all over Northern Europe, wherever their ships had sailed: England, Ireland, France, Spain, and even the lands beyond in the Middle Sea, from which they had returned years before laden with booty. So why had they now turned their fury on the poor and puny kingdom of the East Angles? Anxiety grew on Wulfgar’s face as he pulled his long mustache.
“And where are they camped?”
“In the meadows by the Stour, south of Bedricsward.” Edrich the King’s Thane was visibly beginning to lose his patience. He had been over this several times before, and in more than one place. It was the same with every petty landowner. They didn’t want information, they wanted a way out of their duty. But he had expected better from this one, famous for his hatred of the Vikings, a man—so he told it—who had stood sword to sword with the famous Ragnar himself.
“So what are we to do?”
“The order of King Edmund is that every freeman of the East Angles capable of bearing arms is to muster at Norwich. Every man over fifteen winters and under fifty. We will match their host with ours.”
“How many of them are there?” called one of the richer tenants from the front.
“Three hundred ships.”
“How many men is that?”
“They row three dozen oars, mostly,” said the king’s thane, briefly and reluctantly. This was the sticking point. Once the yokels realized what they were up against, they might be hard to move. But it was his duty to tell them the truth.
There was a silence while every mind confronted the same problem. Shef, faster than the others, spoke aloud.
“Three hundred ships, and three dozen oars. That’s nine hundred dozen. Ten dozen is a long hundred. More than ten thousand men. All of them warriors,” he added, more in amazement than fear.
“We can’t fight them,” said Wulfgar decisively, turning his glare away from his stepson. “We must p
ay tribute instead.”
Edrich’s patience was at an end. “That is for King Edmund to decide. And he will pay less if the Great Army sees that it is matched by a host of equal size. But I am not here to listen to talk—I bring a summons to obey. You and the landholders of Upwell and Outwell and every village between Ely and Wisbech. The king’s order is that we shall muster here and set out for Norwich tomorrow. Every man liable for military service from the village of Emneth must ride or be liable to penalty and punishment from the king. Those are my orders and they are your orders too.” He turned on his heel, facing the room full of stirring, unhappy men. “Freemen of Emneth, what do you say?”
“Aye,” said Shef compulsively.
“He’s not a freeman,” snarled Alfgar from his place by his father.
“Then he damned well should be. Or he shouldn’t be here. Can’t you people make your minds up about anything? You’ve heard your king’s commands.”
But Edrich’s words were drowned by a slow, reluctant mutter of assent from sixty throats.
In the Viking camp by the Stour, things were very different. Here the four sons of Ragnar made the decisions. They knew each others’ minds too well for more than the briefest discussion.
“They’ll pay in the end,” said Ubbi. He and Halvdan were very much like the rest of their army, in both physique and temperament. Halvdan ruddy, the other already grizzled, both of them powerful and dangerous fighters. Not men to be trifled with.
“We must decide now,” grunted Halvdan.
“Who shall it be then?” asked Sigurth.
All four men considered for a few moments. Someone who could do the job, someone experienced. At the same time someone they could afford to lose.
The Hammer & the Cross Page 4