“We have to make the priests work with us.”
This time the dissension in the Army went on a long time, with many men stepping forward and speaking confusedly. Shef realized slowly that Sigurth’s point was being carried, had a certain appeal to men tired of profitless harrying. yet there was determined resistance—from adherents of the Way, from men who simply disliked and distrusted Christians, from those whose still resented losing the sack of the minster.
And the resistance was not dying down. Violence at a meeting was almost unheard-of, for the penalties were so severe. Yet the crowd was fully armed, even to mail, shields and helmets, and every man in it used to striking out. There was always the chance of an outburst. The Snakeeye was going to have to do something, Shef thought, to get the crowd back under control. Just at the moment one man—it was Egil from Skaane, who had taken a tower to the wall—had got the attention of the Army with a furious diatribe about the treachery of the Christians.
“And one more thing,” he shouted. “We know the Christians never keep their word to us, because they think that only the followers of their god will live after death. But I tell you what is more dangerous. They make other men start to forget their word as well. Start to think a man may say one thing one day and another another, and tell the priest and ask for forgiveness, and wipe away the past like a housewife wiping shit off a baby’s bottom. And I say this for you! For you, the sons of Ragnar!”
He turned to face the cluster of brothers, stepping closer to them in defiance—a brave man, thought Shef, and an angry one. He threw back his cloak deliberately to reveal the silver horn of Heimdall gleaming on his tunic.
“How have you remembered your father, who went to his death in the orm-garth here, inside this city? How have you remembered the boasts you made in the hall at Roskilde, when you stood on the stock and made your vows to Bragi?
“What happens to the oath-breakers in the world we believe in? Have you forgotten?
A voice supported him from the throng: a deep voice, a solemn one. Thorvin’s, Shef realized, quoting the holy poems.
“There men writhe in woe and anguish,
Murder-wolves and men forsworn.
Nithhögg sucks blood from naked bodies,
The wolf tears them. Do you wish more?”
“Men forsworn!” shouted Egil. He turned and walked to his place, showing the Ragnarssons his back. Yet they seemed pleased, almost relieved. They had known someone would say it.
“We have been challenged,” called Halvdan Ragnarsson, speaking for the first time. “Let us reply. We know well what we said in the hall at Roskilde, and this was it: I swore that I would invade England in vengeance for my father …” All four brothers, bunching together, began to call out the words in unison.
“And so I have. And Sigurth, he swore …”
“ … to defeat all the kings of the English and bring them into subjection to us.”
“Two I have defeated, and the rest will follow.”
Yells of approval from the Ragnarsson followers.
“And Ivar, he swore …”
“ … to wreak vengeance on the black crows, the Christ-priests who counseled the orm-garth.”
Dead silence, for Ivar to speak.
“And this I have not done. But it is unfinished, not forgotten. Remember: the black crows are now in my hand. I shall decide when to close it.”
Still dead silence. Ivar went on. “But Ubbi, my brother, he swore …”
The brothers in unison again. “ … to capture King Ella and kill him with torments for Ragnar’s death.”
“And this we shall do,” called Ivar. “So two of our boasts will be completed, and two of us free before Bragi, the oath-god. And the other two we shall yet complete.”
“Bring out the prisoner.”
Muirtach and his gang were hustling him forward instantly. The Ragnarssons were counting on this, Shef realized, to alter the mood of the crowd. He remembered the youth who had shown him round the slave-pens back at the camp on the Stour, with his tales of the cruelty of Ivar. There were always some who would be impressed. Yet it was not clear that this crowd was.
They had Ella well out in front now, and were hammering a thick pole into the earth. The king was even whiter than before, the black hair and beard showing it even more clearly. He was not gagged, his mouth was open, but no sound came out. There was blood on the side of his neck.
“Ivar’s cut his voice-cords,” said Brand suddenly. “They do it with pigs so they can’t squeal. What’s the brazier for?”
The Gaddgedlar, hands padded, were lifting forward a brazier full of glowing coal. Irons projected from it ominously, already shining red-hot. The crowd surged and muttered, some pushing forward for a closer look, others sensing, apparently, that this was a distraction from their real business, but unsure how to reject it.
Muirtach whisked the cloak suddenly from the doomed man so that he stood naked before them, not even a loincloth to cover him. Some laughter, some jeers, some groans of disapproval. Four Gaddgedlar gripped him and spread-eagled him upright between them. Ivar stepped in front, a knife glinting in his hand. He bent towards Ella’s belly, between the king and Shef’s horrified gaze, not a dozen yards off. A mighty contortion, a thrashing of limbs, held mercilessly by the four apostates.
Ivar stepped back, a coil of something blue-gray and slippery in his hand.
“He’s opened his belly and pulled his gut out,” commented Brand.
Ivar stepped over to the pole, pulling gently but remorselessly on the uncoiling intestine, watching the look of despair and agony on the king’s face with a half-smile. He reached the pole, took a hammer, nailed in the free end he had extracted.
“Now,” he called out. “King Ella will walk round the pole till he pulls his own heart out and dies. Come, Englishman. The quicker you walk, the quicker it will be over. But it may take a few turns before you reach that. You have ten yards to walk, by my count. Is that so much to ask? Start him, Muirtach.”
The henchman stepped forward, brand glowing, thrust it against the doomed king’s buttock. A convulsive start, a face turning gray, a slow shuffle.
This was the worst death a man could face, thought Shef. No pride, no dignity. The only way out, to do what your enemies wanted, and to be jeered for it. Knowing you must do it and come to an end, and yet not able to do it quickly. The hot irons behind so you could not even choose your own pace. Not even a voice to scream. And all the time your bowels pulling out from inside.
He passed his halberd silently to Brand, and slipped back through the shoving, craning crowd. There were faces looking down from the tower where he had left his helpers to keep an eye on their machine. A rope snaking down as they realized what he wanted. A scramble up the wall to the familiar clean smell of new-sawn wood and new-forged iron.
“He has walked round the pole three times,” said one of the Vikings on the tower, a man with the phallus of Frey round his neck. “That is no way for any man to go.”
Bolt in place, the machine swiveled round—they had thought, yesterday, to rest the bottom frame on a pair of stout wheels. Barb upright between the vanes, three hundred yards, it would still shoot a little high.
Shef aimed the tip of the barb on the wound at the base of the king’s belly as he hobbled round to face the wall a fourth time, red-hot brands urging him on. Shef squeezed the release slowly.
The thump, the line rising and falling—clear through the center of Ella’s chest and straining heart, and on into the ground behind him, almost between Muirtach’s feet. As the king was hurled backward by the force of the blow, Shef saw his face change. Relax in peace.
Slowly the crowd rippled, every face in it turning to face the tower from which the shot had come. Ivar bent over the corpse, but then straightened, turning too, hands clenched.
Shef took one of the new halberds and went down the wall toward the throng, wanting to be recognized. At the edge of the semicircle he stopped, vaulted onto the battle
ment.
“I am only a carl,” he called out, “not a jarl. But I have three things to say to the Army:
“First, the sons of Ragnar fulfilled this bit of their Bragi boast because they had no heart to fulfill the rest.
“And second, whatever the Snakeeye says, when he sneaked into York by the back door with the priest holding it open for him, he was not thinking of the Army’s good, but of his own and of his brothers’. He had no mind to fight and no mind to share.”
Shouts of anger, the Gaddgedlar whirling, looking for the gate into the city and the steps up to where Shef stood. Others obstructing them, grabbing at their plaids. Shef raised his voice even more above the din.
“And third: to treat a man and a warrior the way they treated King Ella has no drengskapr. I call it nithingsverk.” The work of a nithing, a man beneath honor, a man with no legal rights, worse than an outlaw. To be proclaimed nithing before the Army was the worst shame a cart—or a jarl—could endure. If the Army agreed.
Some people were shouting agreement. Shef could see Brand down there, axe raised now and ready to strike, his men clustering behind him, thrusting off Ragnarsson followers with their shields. A stream of men coming from the other side of the circle to join him—Egil the Heimdall-worshipper at their head. Who was that moving out? Sigvarth, face flushed as he shouted reply to some insult. Skuli the Bald wavering by Ella’s corpse as Ubbi bellowed something at him.
The whole Army was moving. Dividing. After a hundred heartbeats there was space between the two groups and both were edging further away from each other. The Ragnarssons in front of the furthest group; in front of the nearer one, Brand, Thorvin, a handful of others.
“It is the Way against the rest,” muttered the Frey-worshipper behind Shef. “And some of your friends thrown in. Two to one against us, I reckon.”
“You have split the Army,” said a Hebridean, one of Magnus’s crew. “It is a great deed, but a rash one.”
“The machine was wound,” replied Shef. “All I had to do was shoot it.
Chapter Six
As the army marched away from the walls of York, snowflakes started to drift out of the windless sky. Not the Great Army. The Great Army would never exist again. That part of the once-great army which now refused the command of the Ragnarssons and could no longer live in fellowship with them—perhaps twenty long hundreds of men, two thousand four hundred by the Roman count. With them were a host of horses, pack-horses, pack-mules and fifty wooden carts creaking along with their burden of heavy loot: bronze and iron, smith-tools and grindstones—along with the chests of poor coinage and a meager handful of true silver from the division. Their burden, too, of wounded men not fit to march or straddle a pony.
From the city walls, the rest of the army watched them go. Some of the younger and wilder members had whooped and jeered, even launched a few arrows at the ground behind their former messmates. But the silence of the marching column, and of their own leaders on the wall, cast down their spirits. They pulled their cloaks tighter about them, and looked up at the sky, the lowering horizon, the frostbitten grass on the slopes outside the city. Grateful for their own billets, stored firewood, shuttered windows and draftless walls.
“It will snow harder before tomorrow’s dawn,” muttered Brand from his position at the rear of the column, the main point of danger till they were well past the Ragnarssons’ reach.
“You are Norsemen,” replied Shef. “I thought snow would not bother you.”
“All right while the frost stays hard,” said Brand. “If it snows and then thaws, like it does in this country, we’ll be marching through mud. Tires the men out, tires the beasts out, slows the carts even more. And when you’re marching in those conditions, you need food. You know how long it takes an ox-team to eat its own weight? But we must put some distance between us and those behind. No telling what they’ll do now.”
“Where are we making for?” asked Shef.
“I don’t know. Who’s leading this army anyway? Everybody else thinks you are.”
Shef fell silent, in consternation.
As the last bundled figures of the rear-guard disappeared from view among the ruined houses of outer York, the Ragnarssons on the wall turned and looked at each other.
“Good riddance,” said Ubbi. “Fewer mouths to feed, fewer hands to share. What are a few hundred Way-folk anyway? Soft hands, weak stomachs.”
“No one ever called Viga-Brand soft-handed,” replied Halvdan. Since the holmgang he had been slow to join in his brothers’ attacks on Shef and his faction. “They’re not all Way-folk, either.”
“It doesn’t matter what they are,” said Sigurth. “They’re enemies now. That’s all you ever need to know about anyone. But we can’t afford to fight them just yet. We have to keep our hold on …”
He jerked his thumb at the little cluster a few yards away from them on the wall: Wulfhere the archbishop with a knot of black monks, among them the scrawny pallor of Erkenbert the deacon, now master of the mint.
Ivar laughed, suddenly. His three brothers looked at him with unease.
“We don’t need to fight them,” he said. “Their own bane marches with them. For some it does.”
Wulfhere too scowled at the retreating column. “Some of the blood-wolves gone,” he said. “If they had gone earlier we might never have needed to treat with the rest. But now they are within our gates.” He spoke in Latin, to make sure hostile ears did not overhear.
“We must, in these days of strife, live by the wisdom of the serpent,” replied Erkenbert in the same language, “and by the cunning of the dove. But both our foes without the gates and those within may yet be overcome.”
“Those within I understand. There are fewer of them now, and they may be fought again. Not by us in Northumbria. But by the kinds of the South—Burgred of Mercia, Ethelred of Wessex. That is why we sent south the crippled thane of East Anglia, slung between his ponies. He will show the southern kings the nature of the Vikings and wake their drowsy spirits to war.
“But what, Erkenbert, is your plan for those now marching away? What can we do in dead of winter?”
The little deacon smiled. “Those marching in winter need food, and the ravagers of the North are accustomed to take it. But every mouthful they steal now is one less for a man’s children before spring comes. Even churls will fight with that incentive.
“I have seen to it that the word of their coming will run before them.”
The attacks began as the short winter daylight seeped from the sky. At first they were little more than scuffles: a churl appearing from behind a tree, launching a stone or an arrow downwind, and then fleeing hastily, not even waiting to see if he hit the mark. Then a little knot of them coming in closer. The marching Vikings unslung bows if they had them, tried to keep the bowstrings dry, shot back. Otherwise they ducked heads behind shields, let the missiles bounce off, shouted derisively to their foes to stand and fight. Then one, irritated, launched a spear at a darting figure who seemed to come too close, missed and plunged off the track with a curse to recover it. For an instant a snow-flurry hid him. When it cleared he was nowhere to be seen. With difficulty his crewmates halted the column, plodding, head-down, and set off grimly to rescue him, a group thirty strong. As they lurched back with the body, already stripped and mutilated, the arrows came whipping from behind them again, out of the murk of the dying day.
The column was now spread over almost a mile of road. Skippers and helmsmen pushed and cursed the men into a thicker, shorter line, bowmen on both flanks, carts in the center. “They can’t hurt you,” Brand bellowed repeatedly. “Not with hunting bows. Just shout and bang your shields; they’ll wet themselves and run. Anyone gets hit in the leg, sling him on a packhorse. Dump some of that junk in the carts if you have to. But keep moving forward.”
Soon the English churls began to recognize what they could do. Their enemies were laden with gear, heavily wrapped and muffled. They did not know the country. The churls knew eve
ry tree, bush, path and patch of mud. They could strip to tunics and hose, rush in light-footed, strike and slash and be away before an arm was free of its cloak. No Viking would pursue more than a few feet into the gloom.
After a while some village war-leader organized the growing number of men. Forty or fifty of the churls came in together on the west flank of the column, beat down the few men they faced with clubs and billhooks, started to drag off the bodies like wolves with their prey. Furious, the Vikings rallied and charged after them, shields up, axes raised. As they straggled back, snarling, having caught no one, they saw the halted carts, the ox-teams poleaxed where they stood. The wagon tilts pulled open, their cargo of wounded men a burden no longer, the snow already blotting out the stains.
Prowling up and down the column like an ice-troll, Brand turned to Shef at his side. “They think they’ve got us now,” he snarled. “But come daylight I’ll teach them a lesson for this if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
Shef stared at him, blinking the snow from his eyes. “No,” he said. “You are thinking like a carl, a carl of the Army. There is no Army anymore. So now we must forget to think like carls. Instead we must think as you say I do, like a follower of Othin, orderer of battle.”
“And what are your orders, little man? Little man who has never stood in the battle-line?”
“Call over the skippers, as many as are within earshot.” Shef began to draw swiftly in the snow.
“We marched through Eskrick, here, before the snow got bad. We must be a short mile north of Riccall.” Nods, understanding. The area around York was well known from much foraging.
“I want one hundred picked men, young men, quick on their feet, not yet tired, to push ahead now and secure Riccall. Take some prisoners—we’ll need them—chase the others out. We will stay there the night. Not much, fifty huts and a church of wattles. But they will shelter a lot of us if we pack in close.
The Hammer & the Cross Page 24