“Going to be a killing-ground today. We’re too evenly matched,” Brand muttered. “Even the side that wins is going to take very heavy losses. Takes guts to walk forward in the front rank, knowing that. Ivar’s not in the front, pity. I was hoping he would be; I could have a go at him myself. The only cheap way for us to win this will be to kill a leader and take the heart out of the rest.”
“Is there a cheap way for them?”
“I doubt it. Our lads have seen the money. They’ve only heard about it.”
“But you still think we’re going to lose?”
Brand patted Shef reassuringly. “Heroes never think things like that. But everybody loses some time. And we’re outnumbered.”
“You haven’t counted my thralls.”
“I’ve never known thralls to win battles.”
“Wait and see.”
Shef ran back a few paces from where he and Brand had been standing, beneath the Flag of the Hammer, at the rear center of their own—the Wayman line. It was drawn up in exactly the same style as Ivar’s force, but only five-deep, with fewer reserves. Shef had placed his wheeled torsion-catapults—the dart-shooters—in the line, screened only by a single rank of men and shields. Well back behind the line stood the traction-catapults—the stone-throwers—all of them except for the pair he had left with Sigvarth, their half-crews clutching the flapping ropes.
But it was the twist-shooters that would do the work now. Using his halberd, Shef vaulted onto the central cart of the nine he had left, still drawn up, oxen still hitched. He looked up and down the line of men, seeing the faces of his catapult-crews turned toward him.
“Clear your line!”
The Vikings masking the line of fire shuffled sideways. The ropes were wound tight; loader stood ready with bundles of javelins; they were aimed and ready. The slowly advancing line of men was a target impossible to miss. Over the turf came the hoarse chanting of the Ragnarsson army: “Ver thik,” they shouted again and again. “Ver thik, her ek kom.”—“Guard yourself, here I come.”
Shef dropped the head of his halberd forward as he shouted, “Shoot!”
Black streaks, rising at the launch, falling as they flashed through the air. Plunging into the lines of advancing men.
The lever-men were rewinding furiously, javelins dropped into place. Shef waited until the last one was reloaded, the last hand up to signal readiness.
“Shoot!”
Again the thrums, the streaks, the swirls. A hum of excitement rose from the Wayman army. And there was something happening with the Ragnarsson line as well. They had abandoned their steady walk, their chanting wavered and died. Now they were trotting forward, anxious to close before they were impaled like roast pigs—without a blow struck. Running half a mile in armor would tire them nicely. The shooters had done one job already.
But they could not shoot much longer. Shef calculated that he could shoot twice more before the attackers reached the line. Kill a few more men, unsettle the rest.
As the machines leapt back on their wheels for the last time he ordered them back.
The crews lifted the trails, ran their machines back out of the line toward the carts, calling out with triumph.
“Shut up! Man the throwers.”
In seconds the ex-thralls were loading and aiming the machines. Vikings would never have done that, thought Shef. They would have needed time to tell each other what deeds they had done. He raised his halberd up and ten boulders were hurled simultaneously into the air.
They reloaded as quickly as they could, inched the clumsy frames round as the captains lined them up. A rain of boulders whistled out of the sky, no longer in volleys, each machine shooting as fast as its crew could lower and load.
Harassed and shaken, the Ragnarsson line broke into all-out charge. Already stones were flying high, landing behind the charging men. Still Shef saw with satisfaction a long trail of smashed bodies and writhing injured, like a snailtrack behind the oncoming army.
The two battle-lines met with a roar and a crash of metal, instantly swaying back and then forward as the impetus of the Ragnarsson rush was felt, held, returned. In moments the battle had become a line of single combats, men beating swords and axes on shields, trying to drag an arm down, stab under a guard, crush face or rib with shield-boss.
In unison the white-clad priests of the Way, grouped behind their men round the sacred silver spear of Othin, god of battles, began a deep chant.
Shef hefted his halberd in indecision. He had done the job he meant to do. Should he now thrust forward to stand amid the fighters? One man amid four thousand?
No. There was still a way to bring his machines to bear. He ran to the thralls round their throwers, shouting and .gesturing. Slowly, they took his meaning, ran back to the dart-shooters, began to run the wheeled machines up onto the waiting carts.
“Around their flank—follow me! They battle face-to-face. We can get behind them.”
As the ox-carts creaked with agonizing slowness round behind the Wayman position, Shef saw faces turning. Wondering whether he was fleeing from battle. Fleeing in ox-carts? Some of them he recognized: Magnus, Kolbein and other Hebrideans, clustered at the rear in reserve. Brand had put them there, saying their weapons would be difficult to fence with in a packed mass.
“Magnus! I want six of your men with each cart for close defense.”
“If we do that there’ll be no reserve left.”
“Do it and we won’t need a reserve.”
Halberdiers closed round the carts as Shef led them in a long sweep round the flanks of both battling armies, first the Waymen, then the Ragnarsson troops gaping in surprise. But with battle joined, unable to see the lumbering carts as anything but a distraction. At last they were in a position well to the rear right flank of the Ragnarsson army.
“Stop. Wheel the carts left. Chock the wheels. No! Don’t unload the machines. We’ll shoot from inside the carts.
“Now. Drop the tilts.” Halberdiers whipped out the pins, let the wagon tilts fall forward. The wound and loaded catapults trained round.
Shef stared carefully at the scene in front of him. The two battle-lines were locked along a two-hundred-yard front, making no attempt to outmaneuver each other. But at the center of the Ragnarsson line Ivar had bunched a mass of men, twenty-deep, pushing steadily forward, aiming to break their outnumbered enemy by sheer weight. Above the central mass flew his standard. There was the place to aim—not at the front, where Shef might hit his own men.
“Aim for the center. Aim for the Coiling Worm. Shoot!”
The catapults leapt in the air as they shot, their recoil on hard planks instead of soft ground sending them skidding. The thralls seized them and ran them back again, lever-men struggling to fit the winders back in place.
Round the Worm Standard of Ivar there was chaos. In the throng of milling men Shef saw for an instant a long spike with two bodies threaded on it like larks on a spit. There was another man threshing desperately to free a snapped javelin-head from his arm. Faces were turning, and not just faces. He could see shields as well, as men realized the attack had come somehow from their rear and turned bodily to meet it. The Worm Standard still waved, its bearer still protected by the ranks of bodies that had been behind it. Reloading complete, Shef screamed the command.
“Shoot!” .
This time the Worm went down, to a roar of delight from the Wayman center. Someone seized it, heaved it defiantly up once more, but the Ragnarsson center had yielded five blood-soaked yards, the men in it trying to keep their footing as they stumbled back over wet soil and their own dead. But there were men running now toward the carts.
“Change target?” shouted a captain, pointing at the advancing men.
“No! The Worm again! Shoot.”
Another hail of darts into the tight-packed throng, and again the Worm went down. No time to see if it would come up again, or if Brand would now finish the job. The lever-men were still winding desperately but they would not get in another shot.
Shef reached down with his armored gloves, seized “Thrall’s-Wreak” and the helmet he had never yet worn in battle.
“Halberdiers in the carts,” he shouted. “Just fend them off. Catapulteers, use your levers, use your mattocks.”
“What about us, master?” Fifty unarmed freedmen still clustered behind the carts, hammer-emblems on their jerkins. “Shall us run?”
“Get under the carts. Use your knives.”
Moments later the Ragnarsson wave reached them in a turmoil of glaring faces and slashing blades. Shef felt a weight roll from him. There was no need for thought now. No responsibility for others. The battle would be won or lost elsewhere. All he had to do now was swing his halberd as if he were still beating out metal at the forge: ward and cut, lunge overhand and stab downward.
On level ground the Ragnarsson followers would have rolled over Shef’s outnumbered and half-armed force in instants. But they had no idea of how to fight men in farm wagons. Their enemies were feet higher than themselves, behind oak planks. The halberds Shef had made for them gave Magnus and his Hebrideans extra feet of reach. Vikings lunging under the halberds and trying to haul themselves into the carts were simple targets for the clubs and mattocks of the English thralls. Knives in skinny hands ripped upward at thigh and groin from behind sheltering wheels.
After a few desperate trials the Vikings fell back. Orders barked from the more level-headed among them. Men slashed the oxen free, seized the drag-poles, prepared to haul the carts off the thralls underneath. Javelins poised, ready for a united volley against the exposed halberdiers.
Shef found himself staring suddenly into the eyes of Muirtach. The big man paced forward, his own ranks parting for him, like a great wolf. He wore no mail, only the saffron plaid which left his right arm and torso bare. He had thrown away his targe, and carried only the dagger-pointed longsword of the Gaddgedlar in two hands.
“You and me now, boy,” he said. “I’m going to keep yer scalp and use it for a bum-wipe.”
In answer Shef jerked the pin free and kicked the wagon tilt down once more.
Muirtach charged before he could straighten up, faster than Shef had ever seen a human being move. Reflex alone hurled Shef backward, stumbling on the wheel of the machine behind him. But Muirtach was already in the cart, swordpoint down for the thrust. Shef leapt back again, cannoning off Magnus, unable to drop his halberd enough to stab or guard.
Muirtach was swinging already. A lunging lever from Cwicca deflected his stroke, guided it onto the bowstring of the fully wound but unloosed catapult.
A deep twang, a thwack louder than a whale-fluke on water.
“Son of the Virgin,” said Muirtach, staring down.
One arm of the catapult, released, had slammed forward the six inches which were all that it could travel. In those six inches it had expended all the stored energy that could drive a barb a mile. The whole side of Muirtach’s bare chest was crushed in as if from the hammer-blow of a giant. Blood ran from the Irishman’s mouth. He stepped back, sat down, slumped back against the wagon wall.
“I see you have turned Christian again,” said Shef. “So you will remember, ‘an eye for an eye.’” Reversing his halberd, he drove its butt-spike deep through Muirtach’s eye and into the brain.
In the brief seconds of the confrontation everything had changed. Shef looked up and saw only backs. The Ragnarsson attackers had turned away, were throwing down their weapons, unbuckling their shields. “Brother,” they shouted, “fellow, messmate.” One, incongruously, was pulling open his tunic, hauling out a silver emblem. A Wayman, maybe, who had decided to stay with a father or a chief rather than march out of York. Behind them hundreds of men were moving forward in a bristling wedge, the giant figure of Brand at its apex. In front of the wedge the plain was covered only with men running, men limping, men standing in knots with their hands raised. The Ragnarsson army had broken. Its survivors had the choice only of running for their lives in heavy mail or hoping for immediate mercy.
Shef lowered “Thrall’s-Wreak,” suddenly weary. As he started to clamber from the wagon a flash of movement caught his eye. Two horses, one a rider with a scarlet cloak, grass-green trousers.
For an instant Ivar Ragnarsson stared from his saddle across the lost battlefield at Shef standing on the cart. Then he and his horse-swain were away, clods flying in the air from the trampling hooves.
Brand strode over, clasped Shef’s hand.
“You had me worried there, thought you were running away. But toward battle, not from it. A good day’s work done.”
“The day’s not done yet. There is still an army behind us,” said Shef. “And Sigvarth. The Mercians should have been at our backs this dawn. He has held them twelve hours longer than I thought possible.”
“But maybe not long enough,” said Magnus Gaptooth from his place on the wagon. He stretched out an arm, pointed. Far away across the level plain, a stray shaft of winter sunlight sent up a prickle of darting reflections: the spear-points of an army, deployed and advancing.
“I need more time,” said Brand gruffly in Shef’s ear. “Go talk, bargain, buy me some.”
He had no choice. Thorvin and Guthmund joined him as he walked toward the advancing Mercian battle-line, different from the one they had just broken, only—to outward appearance—by the three great crosses towering above it.
Behind them the Wayman army struggled to regroup. Perhaps a third of them were dead or gravely injured. Now even the walking wounded were furiously busy: stripping the surrendered Ragnarsson warriors of weapons and armor, scavenging the battlefield for whatever was usable or valuable—with the enthusiastic assistance of Shef’s freedmen—herding the enemy wounded off in the direction of their ships still under guard by the Wash, carrying such few as had survived the attentions of the body-strippers off to the leeches.
The “army” was a mere front. A few hundreds of the fittest men in line to make a show. Behind them, rank on rank of captives, hands loosely roped, told to stand there and be counted in return for their lives. Half a mile behind them, thralls and warriors were hastily digging a ditch, setting up the machines—and rounding up horses and wagons ready for the next retreat. The Wayman army was not yet fit to fight—the heart had not gone out of it, not yet. But all tradition dictated a pause for celebration and relief after surviving a pitched battle against superior forces. Being asked to do the same again immediately was too much.
The next few minutes, Shef thought, would be very dangerous. Men were coming to meet him and his small party: three men walking together, one a priest. Two more pushing a strange, upright box on wheels. The thing in it, he realized an instant later, could only be his stepfather Wulfgar.
The two groups halted ten paces apart, surveyed each other. Shef broke the deep, hating silence.
“Well, Alfgar,” he said to his half brother, “I see you have risen in the world. Is our mother pleased?”
“Our mother never recovered from what your father did. Your late father. He told us much about you before he died. He had plenty of time.”
“Did you capture him, then? Or did you stand back as you did in the fight by the Stour?”
Alfgar stepped forward, hand reaching for his sword. The grim-faced man beside him, the one who was not a priest, caught his arm quickly.
“I am Cwichelm, marshal of King Burgred of the Mark,” he said, “charged to restore the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk to their new alderman and to make them subject to my kind. And who are you?”
Slowly, mindful of the frantic preparations still going on behind, Shef introduced the others on his side, let Cwichelm do the same. Disclaimed hostile intention. Declared intention to withdraw. Hinted at compensation for damage.
“You’re fencing with me, young man,” broke in Cwichelm. “If you were strong enough to fight, you wouldn’t be talking. So I’ll tell you what you have to do if you want to see tomorrow’s dawn. First, we know you took treasure from the mound by Woodbridge. I must h
ave it all, for my king. It comes from his realm.”
“Second,” cut in the black-robed priest, staring fixedly at Thorvin, “there are Christians among you who have deserted their faith and betrayed their masters. They must be handed over for punishment.”
“You included,” said Alfgar. “Whatever happens to the others, my father and I will not see you march away. I will put the collar on you with my own hands. Think yourself lucky we do not treat you as we did your father.”
Shef did not bother to translate for Guthmund.
“What did you to my father?”
Wulfgar had not spoken till then. He sprawled in his box, held by the straps. Shef remembered the yellow, pain-racked face he had last seen in the trough. Now Wulfgar’s face was ruddy, his lips showing red in the white-streaked beard.
“What he did to me,” he said, “I did to him. Only more skillfully. First we took the fingers, then the toes. Ears, lips. Not his eyes, so he could see what we did, nor his tongue, so he could still call out. Hands, feet. Knees and elbows. And never allowed to bleed. I whittled him like a boy whittling a stick. In the end there was nothing left but the core.
“Here, boy. A memorial of your father.”
He nodded and a servant threw a leather pouch in Shef’s direction. Shef loosed the strings, glanced inside, hurled it at Cwichelm’s feet.
“You are in poor company, warrior,” he remarked.
“Time to go,” said Guthmund.
The two sides backed away from each other, turned at safe distance. As they stepped briskly toward their own lines, Shef heard the Mercian warhorns bellow, heard a roar and a clash of mail as the English army came on.
Instantly, as prearranged, the Wayman line turned tail and ran. The first stage of its long, planned retreat.
Hours later, as the long winter twilight faded into dark, Brand muttered dry-throated to Shef, “I think we may have done it.”
“For the day,” Shef agreed. “I see no hope for the morning .”
Brand shrugged massively, called the orders to stand down, light fires, heat water, make food.
The Hammer & the Cross Page 31