Shef leaned on his halberd and stared around him. To his front ran the stone wall, topped with battlements, men loosely scattered along it, no longer wasting arrows on the mass of the Army drawn up on the fringe of the cleared zone facing them, but clearly ready to shoot at any forward movement. Surprising, Shef thought, how little range even a great stone wall could give you. The men on top of their walls thirty feet were impregnable, unreachable. Yet the archers on the wall could do virtually nothing to the men standing watching them. At fifty yards’ range you were in danger, at ten you might well be dead. At eighty you could stand in the open and make your preparations at leisure.
He looked more closely at the wall. To the left, two hundred yards away, it ended in a round, jutting tower, from which men could shoot along the line of the wall, at least for as far as their bows would carry. Beyond the tower the ground dropped toward the brown and muddy Ouse, immediately beyond it on the other bank, the wooden stockade that guarded the river fringe of the colonia—Marystown, as the locals called it. It too carried a frieze of men, watching anxiously the preparations of the heathen so close, so out of range.
The Army waited, six- and eight-deep, facing the wall on a five-hundred-yard front; more packed into the mouths of the streets and alleyways, the steam of their breath rising into the air. Dull metal, grubby wool and leather were picked out only here and there by the bright paint on shields. The warriors looked calm, patient, like farmhands waiting for the owner.
There came a blare of horns from the center of the waiting ranks, maybe fifty or sixty yards to Shef’s right. Shef realized suddenly that he should have been studying the gate in the center of the wall. A wide street ran out from it, no longer prominent in the waste of mud and trampled wattle where houses had been, but clearly the main road out to the east. The gate itself was new, not work of the Rome-folk, but massively formidable for that. Its timbers were seasoned oak tree-trunks, fully as high as the towers on either side of it. Its hinges were the heaviest iron that English smiths could make.
Yet it was weaker than stone. Opposite it now, the four Ragnarssons strode forward. Shef picked out the tallest of them, looking almost frail beside his mighty brothers. Ivar the Boneless. Clad for the occasion in flaring scarlet cloak, grass-green breeches beneath his long mail-coat, shield and helmet silver-painted. He paused and waved to his nearest supporters, to a roar of recognition. The horns blew again, and the English on the wall responded with a cloud of arrows, to hiss by, thud into shields, bounce away from mail.
This time the Snakeeye waved, and suddenly hundreds of men were trotting forward, the Ragnarssons’ own picked followers. The first line of them carried shields, not the usual round ones for combat, but large rectangles, capable of covering the body from ankle to neck. They ran forward through the arrow-sleet and halted, forming a V aimed at the gate. The second and third line were bowmen. They too ran forward, crouched behind the shields and began to shoot up. Now men began to fall on both sides, shot through throat or brain. Shef could see others crouching, struggling with arrows this time deeply embedded through mail and flesh. A trickle of wounded men was already beginning to walk back from the Viking ranks.
But the job of these first attackers, was only to sweep the battlements clear.
Crawling forward from the mouth of the street up which it had been towed came the Ragnarssons’ pride. Shef, looking at it as it emerged from the ranks of men, saw it for a moment as a monstrous boar. The legs of the men who pushed it from inside could not be seen. Twenty feet long, it was armored on either side with heavy, overlapping shields, roofed over with more.
Inside was an oak-trunk ram which swung on iron chains from its frame. Fifty men picked for strength heaved it along, pushing it on eight double-size cartwheels. From its front poked the iron snout of the ram. As it rolled ponderously forward, the warriors on either side of it cheered and began to surge forward with it, ignoring the English arrows. The Ragnarssons were on either side of the ram, waving their men back and trying to get them into some sort of column. Shef looked grimly at the flurry of saffron plaids. Muirtach was there, his longsword still not drawn, also waving and cursing.
“Well, that’s the plan,” said Brand—he had still not bothered to stand up. “The ram bashes the door down and then we all walk in.”
“Will it work?”
“That’s what we’re fighting the battle to find out.”
The ram was only twenty yards from the gate now, level with the foremost archers, accelerating to a rapid walk as the men pushing saw their goal through the frontal slit. On the battlement men appeared suddenly, drawing an instant hail of shot from the Viking archers. They leveled their bows, and fire-arrows shot down from wall to ram, thumping into the heavy timbers.
“Won’t work,” Brand said. “Somewhere else maybe, but in England? After harvest? You’d have to dry that wood for a day at your forge before you could get it to take light.”
The fires fizzled and guttered. The ram was at the gate, still accelerating till it stopped with a crash. A pause, as the champions left their drag-ropes and stepped across to the handles on the ram itself. The whole structure shifted as they swung it back on the iron chains hanging from the roof of the frame. Then a heave forward, propelled by a hundred arms and the massive weight of the tree-trunk itself. The gate shook.
Shef realized suddenly that the excitement of battle was beginning to take hold. Even Brand was on his feet now, and everyone was beginning to edge forward. He himself was ten yards further forward than he had been. No reply from the battlements, no harassing fire hoping to take its toll.
Now all attention on both sides was fixed on the gate. The ponderous frame of the boar was shifting again as the men heaved the trunk back. Another drive forward, a crash which carried even over the noise of thousands of voices, another tremor from the massive gate. What were the English doing? If they let the boar carry on its routing, their gate would soon be in splinters and the Army surging through.
Heads began to appear at the gate towers, bobbing up in spite of the waves of shafts directed at them. Each man—they must be strong men up there—held a boulder, heaved it over his head, hurled it over and down at the overlapped shields of the ram. It was a target that could not be missed. Shields cracked and broke. But they were nailed firmly in place, and sloping. The boulders fell, rolled to one side.
Something else was happening. He was closer now, just behind the line of the Ragnarsson archers, men behind him darting forward with bundles of retrieved arrows. What was it? Ropes. They had ropes in the gate towers, both of them, lots of ropes, and the men in the towers, still out of arrowshot, were heaving mightily at them. A Ragnarsson ran across his view—Ubbi, it seemed to be—shouting at the men pressing forward. He was telling them to throw javelins up over the battlements, to come down where the men seemed to be pulling. A few men ran forward to cast; not many. It was blind shooting, and a costly throwing spear was not something to waste idly. The ropes tightened.
Up over the edge of the gate came a round object, a great roller teetering slowly toward the edge. It was a pillar: a stone pillar from the Roman days, sawn off at both ends. Falling from thirty feet no frame could stop it.
Shef passed “Thrall’s-wreak” to Brand and ran forward, yelling inarticulately. The men inside the boar could see nothing of what was happening above their heads, but others could. The trouble was, no one had a clear idea of what to do. As Shef reached the frame several men were clustered at its rear, urging its crew to drop the handles, turn back to the drag-ropes, and haul the whole contrivance back to safety. Others were calling to Muirtach and his stormers to come to the outside and add their weight to the withdrawal. As they did so, the English archers rallied again and the air was once more full of the zip and thud of missiles, this time coming at killing range.
Shef pushed a man aside, another, and ducked into the rear entrance of the ram. Inside there was an immediate reeking fog of sweat and steaming breath, fifty heroes gasping
with exertion and confusion, some already at the drag-ropes, others turning away from the massive swinging trunk.
“No,” Shef bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Get back to the handles.”
Faces gaped at him, men began to throw their weight on the ropes.
“You don’t need to push the whole thing back, just swing back the ram—”
An arm caught him in the back, he was hurled forward, other bodies charged past him, he found a rope thrust in his hand.
“Pull, ye useless bodach, or I’ll cut yer liver out,” screamed Muirtach in his ear.
Shef felt the frame tremble, the wheel behind him start to turn. He threw his weight on the rope—two feet would do it, maybe three—they couldn’t throw that great thing right out from the gate … .
A ground-trembling crash, another violent blow in the back, his head making contact with a timber, a sudden terrible shrieking like a woman’s that this time went on and on …
Shef stumbled to his feet and looked around. The Vikings had been too slow. The stone pillar, finally hauled over the edge by a hundred arms, had come down squarely on the iron snout of the ram, driving it into the ground, snapping chains and tearing out their fixing bolts. It had also smashed the front of the frame, and come down finally across the hips of one of the crew. He was the one—a massive grizzled man in his forties—who was shrieking. His mates backed away—frightened, shamed, ignoring the three or four silent bodies caught by flailing chain or smashing timber. At least, apart from the one man, no one was making any noise. They would begin to babble in a moment, but for a moment, Shef knew, he could bend them to his will. He knew what must be done.
“Muirtach. Stop that noise.” The cruel dark face gaped at him, seemingly without recognition, then stepped forward, pulling a dirk from his hose-top.
“The rest of you. Roll the ram back. Not far. Six feet. Stop. Now—” He was at the timbers at the front, examining the damage. “Ten of you, outside; take broken wood, spear-shafts, anything, roll that column right hard up against the gate. It’s only a few feet wide—if we get the front wheel right up to it we can still swing the ram.
“Now, rerig these chains. I need a hammer, two hammers. Start pulling the ram back, right back on its slings …”
Time passed in a frenzy. Shef was aware of faces staring at him, of a silver helmet pushing in and out of the rear entrance, of Muirtach wiping a dirk. He paid no attention. For him, the chains and posts, the nails and broken timbers, were glowing lines in his head, shifting as he thought how they should be. He had no doubt what to do.
A roar of excitement outside as the Army tried a sudden escalade with makeshift ladders against a seemingly undefended wall. Only to be hurled back and off as the English rallied in defense.
Inside, gasps of effort, mutters: “It’s the smith, the one-eyed smith. Do as he says.”
Ready. Shuffling to the back, Shef waved the champions to their ropes again, saw the ram rumble forward till its wheels lay against the column and its head; the shattered iron snout, chopped off and discarded, was once again flush with the gate, oak against oak. The champion seized their handles once more, waited for the word, swung back all together, and forward. And forward. They were singing now, a rowing song, putting their bodies into the stroke, heaving mindlessly and without direction. Shef ducked out of the frame once more and into the daylight.
Round him the aimless muddy waste of the morning had taken on the look of a battlefield. Bodies on the ground, hurt men walking or being carried away, spent shafts littering the earth or being picked up by scavenging archers. Anxious faces turning first toward him. Then toward the gate.
It was beginning to split. Movement ran across it now as the ram struck; one post was slightly out of line with the other. The men inside were inching the ram forward, to get a better stroke. In fifty breaths, maybe a hundred, it would go. The champions of Northumbria would surge out, waving their gold-handled swords, to meet the champions of Denmark and the Vik and the apostates of Ireland. It was the turning point of the battle.
Shef found himself staring into the face of Ivar the Boneless, only a few feet away, the pale eyes fixed on him, full of hatred and suspicion. Then Ivar’s attention changed. He too knew the battle had reached its crisis. Turning, he waved both arms in prearranged signal. From the houses down toward the Ouse a horde of figures trotted. They carried long ladders, not makeshifts like those of the last escalade, but carefully made and concealed ones. Fresh men, who knew what they were doing. If the champions were at the gate, Ivar would send a wave in at the corner tower, which all the bravest and the best of the English would have left, to join the climactic struggle at the gate.
The English are finished, Shef thought. Their defenses are down in two places. Now the Army will go through.
Why did I do this to them? Why have I helped Ivar and the Army—the ones who burned out my eye?
From the other side of the quaking gate there came a curious dull twang, like a harp-string snapping, but immensely louder, fit to be heard above the din of battle. Up into the air there rose a mass, a mighty mass, a boulder bigger than ten men could lift. That’s impossible, Shef thought. Impossible.
But the boulder continued to rise, up and up till Shef had to tilt his head back to look at it. It appeared to hang for an instant.
Then down.
It landed square on the center of the ram, smashing through shields and frame and supports as if they were a child’s house of bark. The ram’s head kicked up in the air and jerked sideways like a dying fish. From inside, hoarse cries of pain.
The scaling parties now had ladders up against the wall; they were scrambling up; one ladder had been pushed away, the rest were standing firm. Two hundred yards further off, across the Ouse, something was happening on top of the wooden stockade of Marystown: men crouched round some kind of machine.
Not a boulder this time, a line, rising as it streaked across the river, then falling as it headed for the ladders. The hero on top of the one nearest them had his hand on the stone battlement, and was just reaching over to scramble across. The streak intersected with his body.
He smashed forward as if struck in the back by a giant, smashed so hard the ladder broke under him with the impact. As the ladder fell beneath him and he turned, arms flung wide, Shef saw the giant bolt projecting from the man’s spine. He folded over backward as if in two pieces and fell slowly onto the heap of his mates scrambling beneath him.
An arrow. But not an arrow. No human being could have shot it, nor heaved the boulder. Yet these things had happened. Shef walked forward slowly and considered the rock lying amid the ruins of the ram, ignoring the pitiful struggles and cries for help beneath it.
These things had been done by machines. And such machines! Somewhere inside the fort, maybe among the black monks, there must be a machine-master such as he had never imagined. He must find out. But now, anyway, he knew why he had helped the Army. Because he could not bear to see a machine mishandled. But now there were machines on both sides.
Brand had seized him, thrust “Thrall’s-wreak” into his hands, was hustling him away, snarling angrily at him.
“ … standing there like a wittol, they’ll have a war-band out any moment!”
Shef saw they were almost the last men left on the cleared ground, the place of slaughter. The rest had filtered back down the hill as they had filtered up.
The Ragnarssons’ assault on York had failed.
Very carefully, tongue protruding between his teeth, Shef laid the keen blade of his meat-knife to the thread. It snapped. The weight on the end of the wooden arm dropped, the other end flew up. A pebble arced lazily across the forge.
Shef sat up with a sigh. “That is how it works,” he said to Thorvin. “A short arm, a heavy weight; a long arm, a lighter weight. There it is.”
“I am glad you are satisfied at last,” replied Thorvin. “Two days you have been playing with bits of wood and string, while I do all the work. Now maybe you can bear
a hand.”
“I will, yes, but this is important too. This is the new knowledge that those of the Way must seek.”
“It is. And important. But there is the day’s work to be done as well.”
Thorvin was as keenly interested as Shef in the experiments, but, after a few attempts to help, had realized that he was merely standing in the way of the excited imagination of his former apprentice, and had gone back to the enormous pile of work an army, in being, created for its armorers.
“But is it new knowledge?” Hund asked. “Ingulf can do things no Englishman has ever been able to. And he learns how to do them by trial, and by taking to pieces the bodies of the dead. You are learning by trial, but you are only trying to learn what the black monks already know. And they are not playing with models.”
Shef nodded. “I know. I am wasting my time. I understand now how it can be done, but there are all kinds of things I do not understand. If I had a real weight here, like the one they really shot, then what kind of weight would I need to put in the other arm? It would be far greater than a dozen men could lift. And if it was as heavy as that, how could I wind down the long arm, the shooting arm? It would need some sort of a windlass. But I know now what the sound was that I heard just before the rock came over. It was the sound of someone cutting the rope, to release the rock.
“And there is another thing that bothers me even more. They shot one rock—that smashed the ram. If they had not hit with that one shot, the gate would have been down and all the machine-masters would be dead. They must have been very sure they could hit with the first shot.”
He swept suddenly at the lines he had been drawing in the dirt. “It is a waste of time. Do you see what I mean, Thorvin? There must be some sort of skill, some sort of craft, which would tell men where it would go without me having to try again and again. When I first saw the stockade round your camp by the Stour, I was amazed. I thought, how do the leaders know how many logs to bring with them to build a stockade that will hold all their men? But now I know how even the Ragnarssons do it. They notch a stick for each ship, ten notches to a stick, and then they throw the sticks down in turn in separate piles, one pile for each one of the three walls, or the four walls, or however many there are, and when there are no more sticks they pick the piles up and count them. And that is the reckoning of the greatest leaders and captains in the world. A pile of sticks. But what they have over there in the city is the knowledge of the Rome-folk, who could write in numbers as easily as they could write in letters. If I could learn to write in Roman numbers, then I would build a machine!”
The Hammer & the Cross Page 18