As he sprawled in the grass, gasping for breath before the next upheaval, Shef heard the voice of Brand, looking down at him with stony disapproval.
“There is an old saying,” it said. “‘When the army-leader weakens, then the whole army wavers.’ What do you expect it to do when he spews his guts out?”
Stand fast, thought Shef, and wait till he’s better. Please, Thor. Or God. Or whoever. Just do it.
Ivar, his eyes as pale as watered milk, stared out across the battlefield for the trap he knew must be there. At his feet—he had fought by choice at the tip of the wedge of his ship’s crew—lay three champions of the Mark, each in turn eager for the fame that would ring through the whole of Christendom for the bane of Ivar, cruelest of the pirates of the North. Each discovering in turn that Ivar’s slim height belied his extraordinary strength of arm and body, though not his snakelike speed. One of them, cut through mail and leather from collarbone to ribcage, moaned involuntarily as he waited for death. Quick as a snake’s tongue Ivar’s sword licked out, stabbing through Adam’s apple and spine beneath. Ivar did not want sport, for the moment. He wanted quiet, for consideration.
Nothing in the woods. Nothing to either flank. Nothing behind him. If they did not spring the trap soon it would be too late. It was almost too late already. Round Ivar his army, without orders or briefing, was crying out one of its many experienced battle-drills: securing a battlefield after victory. It was one of the many strengths of Viking armies that their leaders did not have to waste their energies in telling the rank and file how to do anything that could be turned into a routine. They could watch and plan instead. Now, some men went forward in pairs, one to stab, one to guard, making doubly and triply sure that no Englishman was lying still but conscious, ready to take a last enemy with him. Behind them came the loot-gatherers with their sacks, not stripping the dead of everything, as would be done later, but taking everything visible and valuable. In the ships, leeches were splinting and binding.
And at the same time every man kept a tense eye on their leader, for further orders. All knew that the moment of victory was a time to exploit advantage. They carried out their immediate tasks with savage haste.
No, reflected Ivar. The trap had been set, he was sure of that. But it had not been sprung. Probably the fools got up too late. Or were stuck in a marsh somewhere.
He stepped forward, placed his helmet on a spear, waved it in a circle. Immediately, from their concealment half a mile on the downstream flank of the English army, there broke a wave of riders, legs flapping as they kicked their horses into speed, steel glinting in the morning sun on point and edge and mail. The English swordsmen still shredding to the rear pointed, yelled, ran faster. Fools, thought Ivar. They still outnumber Hamal up there six to one. If they stood fast, formed line, they could finish him off before we got up to join in .And if we broke ranks to hurry they could win this battle yet. But there was something about armed riders that made scattered men run without even looking over their shoulders.
In any case Hamal and the mounted patrol—three hundred men, every horse that Ivar’s army had been able to lay bridle on—had targets other than single fugitives. Now, after battle, was the time to destroy leaders, to ensure that kingdoms could never recover their strength again. Ivar noted with approval the swerve as fifty men on the fastest horses aimed to head off the gold-coroneted figure now being urged over the skyline by his horse-thanes. Others pounded down on the straggle of carts and standards making laboriously for the rear. The main body was galloping hard along the ridge-line, obviously intent on the camp and the camp-followers that must be there, out of sight but only a few hundred yards the other side of the ridge.
Time to join them. Time to get rich. Time for sport. Ivar felt the excitement rise in his throat. They had balked him with Ella. Not with Edmund. They would not with Burgred. He enjoyed killing kings. And afterward—afterward there would be some one of the whores, maybe some one of the ladies, but anyway some soft, pale creature that no one would miss. And in the tumult of a sacked camp, with rape and death on every side, no one would notice. It would not be the girl that Sigvarthsson had taken from him. But there would be some other. Meanwhile.
Ivar turned, stepped carefully round the mess of entrails slowly spilling from the butchered man at his feet, replaced his helmet, waved his shield forward. The watching army, loot already stacked, men back in their ranks, gave a short, hoarse cheer and walked forward with him, up the hill, over the men they had killed themselves and the men the machines had slaughtered. As they tramped forward they shook out from their wedges to form a solid line four hundred yards across. Behind them the ship-guards already detailed watched them go.
So, from its concealment in the woods a mile upstream, did the Wayman army—confused, frustrated, already bickering over the limp shape of its leader.
Chapter Seven
“We cannot afford to wait any longer,” said Thorvin.
“We must settle this matter for good. And now.”
“The army is divided,” objected Geirulf, the priest of Tyr. “If the men see you too ride away, they will lose heart even more.”
Thorvin brushed the objection aside with an impatient gesture. Round him ran the cords with their holy rowan berries; the spear of Othin stood in the ground beside him next to the burning fire of Loki. Just as the time before, only priests of the Way sat in the sacred circle, with no laymen present. They meant to speak of things no layman should hear.
“That is what we have told ourselves for too long,” replied Thorvin. “Always there is something more important to think of than this central one. We should have solved the riddle long ago, as soon as we began to think the boy Shef might indeed be what he said: the one who will come from the North. We asked the question, we asked his friend, we asked Sigvarth Jarl—who thought he was his father. When we could find no answer we passed to other things.
“But now we must be sure. When he would not wear the pendant, I said, ‘there is still time.’ When he left the army and rode to find his woman, we thought, ‘he is a boy.’ Now he pretends to lead the army and leaves it in disorder. Next time what will he do? We have to know. Is he a child of Othin? And if he is, what will he be to us? Othin Allfather, father of gods and men? Or Othin Bölverk, God of the Hanged, Betrayer of Warriors, who gathers the heroes to himself only for his own purposes?
“Not for nothing is there no priest of Othin with the army, and few within the Way. If that is his birth, we must know. And it may be that is not his birth. There are other gods than Allfather who walk in the world.”
Thorvin looked, meaningfully at the crackling fire to his left. “So: let me do what should have been done before. Ride to ask his mother. We know which village she comes from. It is not twenty miles off. If she is still there I will ask her—and if her answer is wrong, then I say we must cast him off before worse befalls us. Remember the warning of Vigleik!”
A long silence followed Thorvin’s words. Finally Farman, the priest of Frey, broke it.
“I remember Vigleik’s warning, Thorvin. And I too fear the treachery of Othin. Yet I ask you to think that Othin, and his followers, may be as they are for a reason. To keep off worse powers.”
He too looked thoughtfully at the Loki-fire. “As you know, I have seen your former apprentice in the Otherworld, standing in the place of Völund the smith. But I have seen other things in that world. And I can tell you that not far from here there is far worse than your apprentice: one of the brood of Fenris himself, a grandchild of Loki. If you had seen them in the Otherworld, you would never again confuse the two, Othin and Loki, or think that the one might be the other.”
“Very well,” replied Thorvin. “But I ask you, Farman, to think this. If there is a war between two powers in this world, gods and giants, with Othin at the head of one and Loki at the other—how often do we see it even in this world, that as the war goes on, the one side begins to resemble the other?”
Slowly the heads nodded, ev
en, in the end, Geirulf’s, then Farman’s.
“It is decided,” said Farman. “Go to Emneth. Find the boy’s mother and ask her whose son hers is.”
Ingulf the healer, priest of Ithun, spoke for the first time. “A deed of kindness, Thorvin, that may come to good. When you go, take with you the English girl Godive. She has realized in her way what we have. She knows he did not rescue her for love. Only to use her as bait. That is no good thing for anyone to know.”
Shef had been dimly aware, through first the racking cramps and then the paralyzing weakness that succeeded them, of the leaders of his army’s factions arguing. At some point Alfred had threatened to draw sword on Brand, an action dismissed like some great dog brushing aside a puppy. He could remember Thorvin pleading passionately for something, some rescue or expedition. But most of the day he had been aware of nothing except hands lifting him, attempts made to get him to drink, hands holding him through the retchings that followed: Ingulf’s hands sometimes, then Godive’s. Never Hund’s. With just a fragment of mind Shef realized that Hund feared his leech-detachment might suffer if he saw too closely what he had done. Now, as the dark came on, he felt recovered, weary, ready to sleep: to wake to action.
But first the sleep must come. It had the nauseous taste about it of Hund’s mold-and-carnon draft.
He was in a gully, a rocky defile, in the dark. Slowly he clambered forward, unable to see more than a few feet, lit only by a last pale light in the sky—the sky visible only many yards above his head, where the gully’s jagged outline showed black against gray. He moved with agonized care. No stumble, no dislodgement of stone. Or something would be on him. Something no human could fight against.
He had a sword in his hand, gleaming very faintly in the starlight. There was something about the sword: it had a will of its own, a fierce urge. It had already killed its creator and master, and would gladly do so again, even though he was its master now It tugged at his hand, and from time to time it rang faintly, as if he had knocked it on stone. It seemed to know about the need for stealth, though. The sound would be inaudible to anyone or anything except himself. It was covered, too, by the rushing of the water at the bottom of the gully. The sword was anxious to kill, and ready to keep silent till its chance came.
As he moved into the dream, Shef realized, as he often did, what sort of person he himself was. This time, a man impossibly broad of hip and shoulder, with wrists so thick they bulged round the gold bracelets he wore. Their weight would have dragged a lesser man’s arms down. He did not notice them.
The man he was, was frightened. His breath came short, not from the climbing, but from fear There was a sense in his stomach of emptiness and chill. It was especially frightening to this man, Shef realized, because he had never felt such a feeling before. He did not even understand it, and could not name it. It was bothering him, but not affecting him, because this man did not know it was possible to turn back from an enterprise once begun. He had never done it before; he would never do so till the day he died. Now he was climbing beside the stream, holding his drawn sword carefully, to reach the position he had decided on and to do the thing he had planned, though his heart turned over inside him at the thought of what he must face.
Or not face. Even this man, Sigurth Sigmundsson, whose name would live till the end of the world, knew he could not face what he had to kill.
He came to a place where the gully wall on one side was broken down, falling into a jumble of scree and broken stone, as if some great metal creature had smashed it and rolled it flat so that it could get down to the water. And as he reached it, a sudden overwhelming reek stopped the hero in his tracks, a reek like a solid wall. It stank of dead things, of a battlefield two weeks old in the summer sun-but also of soot, of burning, with some extra tang about it that attacked the nostrils, as if the smell itself would catch fire if someone struck a spark.
It was the smell of the worm. The dragon. Dawn-ravager, venom-blower, the naked spite-creature that crawled on its belly. The legless one.
As the hero found, in the jumble of stone, a crack large enough to take his body and crawled inside it, he realized he had not been too early. For the dragon was not legless, and seemed so only to those who saw it crawling forward from a distance. Through the stone the hero could hear a heavy stumping, as one foot after another groped forward; in between and all the time, the heavy slither of the belly dragging on the ground. The leather belly, if reports were true. They had better be.
The hero tried to lie on his back, then hesitated, changing position rapidly. Now he lay on one side, facing the direction from which the dragon must come, propped on his left elbow, right elbow down and sword across his body. His eyes and the top of his head projected above the track. It would look like another stone, he told himself. The truth was that even this hero could not lie still and wait for the thing to appear above him, or he—even he—would be unmanned. He had to see.
And there it was, the great head silhouetted against the gray like some stone outcrop. But moving; its armored crest and skull-bones like a metal war-machine rotating. The bloated swag body behind it. Some trick of the starlight caught one foot planted on the stone, and the hero stared at it, shocked almost into paralysis. Four toes, sticking out from each other like the arms of a starfish, but each one the size of a man’s thigh, warty and gnarled like a toad’s back, dripping slime. The very touch of one of those would kill from horror. The hero had just enough self-command not to shrink back with fear. The slightest movement now would be deadly dangerous. His only hope was to be a stone.
Would it see him? It must. It was coming toward him, directly toward him, padding forward with great, slow steps. One forefoot was only ten yards from him, then the other was planted on the stone almost on the lip of his crack. He must let it walk right over him, the hero thought with his last vestige of sense, let it walk right down to the river where it drank. And when he heard the first noise of drinking, of the water gushing up as it must into the belly above him, then he must strike.
As he told himself this, the head reared up only a few feet above him, and the hero caught sight of a thing of which no man had spoken. The dragon’s eyes. They were white, as white as those of an old woman with the film-disease, but light shone through them, a pale light from within.
The hero realized what it was that he feared the most. Not that the legless one, the boneless longserpent, would kill him. That would almost be a relief in this terrible place. But that it would see him. And stop. And speak, before it began its long sport with him.
The dragon halted, one foot in mid-stride. And looked down.
Shef came from his sleep with a shriek and a bound, landing in one movement, just feet from the bed where they had stretched him. Three pairs of eyes stared at him, alarmed, relieved, surprised. One pair, Ingulf’s, looked suddenly knowing.
“You saw something?” he said.
Shef passed a hand over his sweat-soaked hair. “Ivar. The Boneless One. As he is on the other side.”
The warriors around Ivar watched him out of the corners of their eyes, too proud to show alarm or even anxiety, yet conscious that at any time now he might break out, turn on anyone at all, even his most trusted followers or the emissaries of his brothers. He sat in a carved chair looted from one of King Burgred’s baggage-carts, a horn of ale in his right hand, dipped from the great keg in front of him. In his left hand he swung the gold coronet they had taken from Burgred’s head. The head itself was on a spike in the stark ring surrounding the Vikings’ camp. That was why Ivar’s mood was grim. He had been balked yet again.
“Sorry,” Hamal had reported. “We tried to take him alive, as you ordered, to pin him between our shields. He fought like a black bear, from his horse and then on foot. Even then we might have taken him, but he tripped, fell forward on a sword.” “Whose sword?” Ivar had demanded, his voice quiet. “Mine,” Hamal had said, lying. If he had indicated the young man who had really killed Burgred, Ivar would have taken out
his spite and frustration on him. Hamal had a chance of surviving. Not an especially strong one, for all his past services. But Ivar had only studied his face for a moment, remarked dispassionately that he was a liar, and not a pretty one, and had left the matter there.
It would break out some other way, they were sure. As Dolgfinn went on with the tale of victory—prisoners taken, loot from the field, loot from the camp, gold and silver, women and provisions—he wished deeply that some of his own men would turn up. “Go round everywhere,” he had told them, “look at everything. Never mind the women for the moment; there’ll be plenty left for you before the night’s over. But in the name of old Hairy Breeks himself, find something to keep the Ragnarsson amused. Or it could be us he pegs out for the birds tomorrow.”
Ivar’s eyes had shifted past Dolgfinn’s shoulder. He dared to follow them. So—Greppi and the boys had found something after all. But what in the name of Hel, goddess of the dead, could it be?
It was a box, a wheeled box that could be tipped forward and trundled along like an upright coffin. Too short for a coffin. And yet there was a body inside. A dozen grinning Vikings pushed the box forward and tipped it to stand in front of Ivar. The body inside looked out at them, and licked its lips.
Ivar rose, putting down the golden coronet for the first time that evening, and stood in front of Wulfgar.
“Well,” he remarked at last. “Not such a bad job. But not one of mine, I think. Or at least I don’t remember the face. Who did this to you, heimnar?”
The pale face with its bright red, incongruous lips, stared back at him, made no reply. A Viking stepped forward, knife whipping clear, ready to slice or gouge on command, but Ivar’s hand stopped him.
“Think a little, Kleggi,” he urged. “It’s not easy to frighten a man who’s already lost so much. What’s an eye or an ear now?
The Hammer & the Cross Page 41