Thorvin laid down the tongs and looked thoughtfully at the silver hammer displayed on his chest.
“You should not think the Rome-folk had the answers to everything,” he remarked. “If they had they would still be ruling England from York. And they were only Christians, when all is said and done.”
Shef jumped impatiently to his feet. “Hah! How do you explain the other instrument then? The one that shot the great arrow. I have thought and thought about that. Nothing will do. You could not make a bow big enough. The wood would break. But what can shoot except a bow?”
“What you need,” said Hund, “is a runaway from the city, or from Marystown. One who has seen the machines work.”
“Maybe one will come,” said Thorvin.
A silence fell, broken only by the renewed pounding of Thorvin’s hammer and the puffing of the bellows as Shef blew angrily at the forge. Runaways were a subject better avoided. After the failure of the assault the Ragnarssons, in rage, had turned on the countryside around the city of York—a defenseless countryside, since its armed men and nobles, its thanes and champions, were shut up with King Ella inside the city. “If we cannot take the town,” Ivar had cried, “we will ravage the shire.” Ravage it they had.
“I’m getting sick of it,” Brand had confided to Shef after the last sweep of an already-gutted countryside, all crews taking their turn. “Don’t think I’m a milksop, or a Christian. I want to get rich and there are few things I won’t do for money. But there’s no money in what we’re doing. Not much sport either, to my eye, in what the Ragnarssons and the Gaddgedlar and the riffraff are doing. No fun going through a village after they’ve been through. They’re only Christians, I know, and maybe they deserve what they get for cringing to the Christ-god and his priests.
“It still won’t do. We’re picking up slaves by the hundred, good quality stuff. But where to sell them. Down South? If you do that you need to go with a strong fleet and a sharp eye open. We aren’t popular down there—and I blame Ragnar and his brood for that. Round in Ireland? A long way, and a long time before you get your cash. And slaves apart, there’s nothing. The churches got their gold and silver into . York before we arrived. What money the peasants have got, or the thanes—it’s poor stuff. Very poor stuff. Strange. It’s a rich land, anyone can see. Where’s all their silver gone? We’ll never get rich the way we’re going. Sometimes I wish I had not taken the news of Ragnar’s death to the Braethraborg, no matter what the priests of the Way said to me. It’s little enough I have got out of it.”
But Brand had taken the crews out again, probing up across the shire to the shrine of Strenshall, hoping for a haul of gold or silver. Shef had asked not to accompany him, sickened with the sights and sounds of a land crisscrossed by the Ragnarssons and their followers, each one intent on showing to the others his skill on racking secrets and information and buried treasure out of churls and thralls who had no information, and certainly no treasure, to yield. Brand had hesitated, scowling.
“We are all in the Army together,” he had said. “What we decide together, all must do, even if some of us don’t like it. If we don’t like it we have to talk the others round, in open meeting. But I don’t like the way you think you can take some bits of the Army and leave the others, young man. You are a carl now. Carls do what is best for each other. That is why we are all given a voice.”
“I did what was best when the ram broke.”
Brand had grunted, doubtfully, and had muttered, “For your own reasons.” But he had left Shef behind, with Thorvin and a mountain of smith-work, in the guarded camp that watched York, ever alert for a sally. Shef had begun immediately to play with models, to imagine giant bows, sling-stones, mallets. One problem at least he had solved—if not in practice or even in theory.
Outside the smithy there was a pad of running feet, a gasping of exhaustion. The three men inside moved as one to the wide, open doors. A few feet beyond them Thorvin had set up a line of poles, connected with yarn, from which he had hung the rowan berries that indicated the limits of his precinct, the holy place. To one of the posts clung a panting figure, dressed in rough sacking. The iron collar round his neck indicated his status. Desperately his eyes moved from one to the other of the three faces staring at him, then brightened with relief as he saw, finally, the hammer round Thorvin’s burly neck.
“Sanctuary,” he gasped, “give me sanctuary.” He spoke in English, but used the Latin word.
“What is ‘sanctuarium’?” asked Thorvin.
“Safe-keeping. He wants to come under your protection. Among the Christians, a runaway may grasp a church door in some churches, and then he is under the protection of the bishop till his case is tried.”
Thorvin shook his head slowly. He could see now the pursuers coming into view—half a dozen of them, Hebrideans by the look of them, among the most ardent of the slave-takers, not hurrying now that they could see their quarry.
“We don’t have that custom here,” he said.
The slave wailed with fear as he saw the gesture and felt the presences behind him, and clung tighter to the fragile poles. Shef remembered the moment when he too had walked forward to Thorvin inside his enclosure, not knowing if he was walking to his death or not. But he had been able to call himself a smith, a fellow of the craft. This man looked as if he was just extra labor, knowing nothing of any value.
“Come along, you.” The leader of the Hebrideans said, clouting the cringing figure round one ear, and began to pry his fingers from the pole.
“How much do you want for him?” said Shef impulsively. “I’ll buy him off you.”
Guffaws of laughter. “What for, One-eye? You want a bum-boy? I’ve got better down in the pen.”
“I said I’ll buy him. Look, I’ve got money.” Shef turned towards “Thrall’s-wreak,” stuck in the ground at the entrance to the precinct. From it he had hung his purse with the few coins in it that Brand had doled out as his share of the meager plunder so far.
“No chance. Come down to the pens if you want a slave, sell you one anytime. I’ve got to take this one back, make an example of him. Too many down there run from one master, think they might run from another. Got to show them it doesn’t pay.”
The slave had caught something of the dialogue, and wailed with fear again, this time more desperately. As the men gripped his arms and hands and began to pull him off, trying as they did so not to damage the precinct-markers, he thrashed and fought. “The pendants,” he cried. “They said the pendant-men were safe.”
“We cannot help you,” Shef replied, speaking again in English. “You should have stayed with your English master.”
“My masters were the black monks. You know what they are like to their slaves. And my master was the worst of all—Erkenbert the deacon, who makes the machines … .”
An angry Hebridean lost patience with the man’s struggles, whipped a sandbag from his belt, and struck out. He missed his blow, caught the slave along the jaw instead of on the temple. A crack, the jaw lolling forward, blood trickling from the corner of the mouth.
“Er’en’ert. He’ a de’il. Ma’ ’e de’il-’chines.”
Shef seized his gauntlets, pulled them on, ready to jerk his halberd out of the ground. The knot of struggling men swayed back a few paces.
“Hold on,” he said. “The man’s valuable. Don’t hit him again.” Ten words, he thought, ten words might be all I need. Then I will know the principle of the great bow.
The slave, fighting now with the frenzy of a tormented weasel, got a foot free, kicked out. A Hebridean grunted, bent forward cursing.
“That’s enough,” snapped the head of the gang. As Shef leapt forward in entreaty he whipped a knife from his belt, stepped forward and drove upward, backhand. The slave, still held, arched and contorted, went limp.
“You blockhead!” yelled Shef. “You killed one of the machine-men!”
The Hebridean turned back to him, mouth twisting with anger. As he started to speak, Sh
ef punched him full in the face with his armored glove. He sprawled backward, landed on the ground. A dead silence fell.
The Hebridean climbed slowly to his feet, spat one tooth, then another, into his hand. He looked at his men, shrugged. They dropped the slave’s corpse, turned, walked off together toward their camp.
“You’ve done it now, boy,” said Thorvin.
“What do you mean?”
“Only one thing can happen now.”
“What’s that?”
“Holmgang.”
Chapter Three
Shef lay on the straw pallet close to the banked fire of the forge, moving uneasily in his sleep. Thorvin had forced a heavy dinner on him, which should have been welcome after days of increasingly short commons in a camp dependent entirely on foraging for its food. But the rye bread and fried bullock lay heavy on his stomach. Heavier still were his thoughts. They had explained the rules of holmgang to him, far different from the impromptu brawl in which he had killed the Irishman Flann months before. He knew he was at terrible disadvantage. But there was no getting out of this. The whole Army knew, looked forward to the morning’s duel as a major distraction. He was trapped.
And he still thought about the machines. How were they built? How could better ones be built? How could the walls of York be breached? Slowly, he slipped into heavier slumber.
He was on some distant plain. In front of him loomed monstrous walls. On a scale to dwarf the walls of York, or any other walls that had ever been built by mortal man. High above were the figures he had seen before in his dreams, his “visions” as Thorvin called them—the massive figures with the faces like axe-blades and the expressions of severe gravity. But now their expressions were also of concern, alarm. In the foreground, moving up to the walls, he saw there was a figure even more gigantic than those of the gods, so enormous that it towered up even to the height of the walls on which the gods were standing. But it did not have the proportions of a human being: stumpy-legged, fat-armed, swollen-bellied and gap-toothed, it looked like an immense clown. A wittol, one of the children born deformed, who, if Father Andreas were not on hand very swiftly, would quietly have found their way into the fen in Emneth. The giant was urging on an immense horse, fully built to his own scale, and drawing a cart, on it a block of stone large as a mountain.
Shef realized the block was to fill a gap in the great wall. The wall was not complete—but nearly so. The sun in this strange world was setting, and he knew that if the wall were finished before the sunset, something appalling, something incurably dreadful would take place. That was why the gods looked their alarm, and why the giant was urging on his horse-his stallion, Shef saw-with whoops of glee and anticipation.
A whicker from behind. Another horse, this time a more normally proportioned one. A mare, too, with chestnut hair and mane blowing around her eyes. She whickered again, then turned coyly as if unaware of the effect her call had had. But the stallion had heard. His head rose. He shook in his traces. His member started to slide out of its sheath.
The giant shouted, beat the stallion round the head, tried to cover its eyes. Its nostrils flared, a whinny of rage, yet another encouraging whicker from the mare, now close by, heels kicking skittishly. The stallion reared, lashed out with mighty hooves at the giant, at the traces. Over went the cart, out tipped the stone, the giant dancing with vexation. The stallion was free, lunging towards the mare to sheathe his erect, chain-long penis. But she was coy, prancing away, provoking him to follow, then darting sideways. The two horses gyrated, suddenly dashed off at full gallop, the stallion slowly gaining on the mare but both rapidly out of sight. Behind them, the giant cursed and leapt in comic pantomime. The sun set. One of the figures on the wall strode forward grimly, pulling on a pair of metal gloves.
There is a forfeit to be paid, thought Shef.
Again he was on a plain, facing a walled city. It too was mighty, the walls rising far above the heights of those at York, but. this time it was at least on a human scale, as were the thousands of figures milling about within the walls and outside the walls. Outside the walls the figures were heaving at a monstrous image—not a boar, like the Ragnarssons’ battering ram, but a giant horse. A wooden horse. What is the point of a wooden horse? thought Shef. Surely no one could be deceived by it.
Nor were they. Arrows and missiles flew out against the horse from the walls, or flew at the men heaving at its mighty wheels. They bounced away, scattered haulers, did not dislodge or discourage the hundreds of new hands rushing to take the place of the fallen. The horse edged up to the walls, overtopping them. What would take place now, Shef knew, was the crisis of something that had gone on for many years, that had swallowed thousands of lives and would yet swallow thousands more. Something told him also that what happened here would fascinate men for generation upon generation-but that few men would ever understand it, preferring instead to make up their own stories.
A voice Shef had heard before spoke suddenly in his mind. The voice that had warned him before the night battle by the Stour—still with the same note of deep, interested amusement.
“Now watch this,” it said. “Watch this.”
The horse’s mouth opened, its tongue slid out to rest on the walls. From the mouth …
Thorvin was shaking him, dragging relentlessly at his shoulder. Shef sat up, still groping for the meaning of his dream.
“Time to rise,” said Thorvin. “You have a hard day ahead of you. I only hope you live to see the end of it.”
Erkenbert the archdeacon sat in his tower room high above the great hall of the minster and pulled the candlestick closer to him. There were three candles in it, each of best beeswax, not stinking tallow, and the light they gave was clear. He viewed them with satisfaction as he took the goose-feather from its inkpot. What he was about to do was difficult, was laborious, and its results might be sad.
In front of him lay a confusion of scraps of vellum, written on, crossed out, written on again. Now he took his quill and a fresh, large, handsome piece. On it he wrote:
The list crept on and on. At the end he drew a line beneath the record of the minster’s unpaid rents, drew a deep breath, and began the mind-wrenching toil of adding the numbers up. “Octo et sex,” he muttered to himself, “quattuordecim. Et novo, sunt … viginta tres. Et septem.-” To assist himself he began to draw little lines on a discarded sheet, hatching them through when he completed a ten. He began also, as his finger crawled down the list, to put a little mark between the XL and the VIII, the L and the IX, to remind himself which bits were to be added and which were to be left. Finally he came to the end of his first calculation, wrote down firmly CDXLIX, and began to work his way down again with the figures he had omitted before. “Quaranta et triginta sunt septuaginta. Et quinquaginta. Centum et viginta.” The novice who decorously moved an eye round the doorway a few minutes later to see if anything was required returned in awe to his fellows.
“He is saying numbers of which I have never heard,” he reported.
“He is a marvelous man,” said one of the black monks. “God send there may be no harm in the learning of such black arts.”
“Duo milia quattuor centa nonaginta,” pronounced Erkenbert, writing it down: MMCDXC. The two figures now lay next to each other: MMCDXC and CDXLIX. After another interval of crossing and hatching, he had the answer: MMCMXXXIX. And now the real toil began. That was the sum of the failed rents for one quarter. What would this represent for a full year, if by divine punishment the scourges of God, the Vikings, were permitted to lie so long upon the backs of the suffering people of God? Many, even among arithmetici, would have taken the easier route and added the same figure up four times. But Erkenbert knew himself superior to such subterfuges. Painstakingly, he set up the complex procedure for the most difficult of all diabolic skills: multiplication in Roman numerals.
When all was done he stared at the figure, disbelievingly. Never in all his experience had he come upon such a sum. Slowly, with shaking fingers, he sn
uffed the candles in recognition of the growing gray light of dawn. After matins he would have to seek out the Archbishop.
It was too great. Such losses could not be borne.
Far away, a hundred and fifty miles to the south, the same growing light reached the eyes of a woman, snuggled deep in a nest of down mattress and woolen rugs piled high against the cold. She stirred, shifted. Her hand touched the warm, naked thigh of the man next to her. Recoiled as if it had touched the scales of a mighty adder.
He is my half brother, she thought for the thousandth time. Son of my own father. We are in mortal sin. But how could I tell them? I could not tell even the priest who married us. Alfgar told him we had sinned carnally while fleeing from the Vikings and now prayed God’s forgiveness and blessing on our union. They think he is a saint. And the kings, the kings of Mercia and of Wessex, they listen to all he says of the menace of the Vikings, of what they did to his father, of how he fought at the Viking camp to set me free. They think he is a hero. They say they will make him an alderman and set him over a shire, they will bring his poor, tormented father home from York, where he is defying the heathens still.
But what will happen when our father sees us together? If only Shef had lived …
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