“So tell me, heimnar. You are a dead man already; you have been since they did this. Who did it to you? Maybe he was no friend of mine either.”
Ivar spoke in Norse, but slowly, clearly, so an Englishman could pick out some of the words.
“It was Sigvarth Jarl,” said Wulfgar. “Jarl of the Small Isles, they tell me. But I want you to know, what he did to me, I did to him. Only more. I caught him in the marsh by Ely—if you are the Ragnarsson, then you were not far away. I trimmed him finger by finger and toe by toe. He did not die till there was nothing left a knife could reach. Nothing you can do to me will equal what I did to him.”
He spat suddenly, the spittle landing on Ivar’s shoe. “And so may perish all you Godless heathen! And it is my comfort. As you die in torment, for you it is only the gateway to the eternal torment. I will look down from Neorxna-wang, from the plain of the blessed dead, and see you blister in the heat. Then you will beg for the smallest drop from my ale-cup to cool your agony. But God and I will refuse.”
The blue eyes stared up, jaw set in determination. Ivar laughed suddenly, throwing his head back, raised the horn in his right hand and drained it to the last drop.
“Well,” he said. “Since you mean to be so niggard with me, I will do what your Christian books say and return you good for evil.
“Throw him in the keg!”
As the men gaped, Ivar stepped forward, slashing at the straps which held Wulfgar’s trunk and stumps in place. Seizing him by belt and tunic he lifted him bodily out of the container, took three heavy paces to the side, and thrust the heimnar deep into the four-foot-high, hundred-gallon butt of ale. Wulfgar bobbed, thrashing with the stumps of his arms, truncated legs not quite reaching the bottom.
Ivar put one hand on Wulfgar’s head, looked round like a teacher demonstrating.
“See, Kleggi,” he pointed out. “What is a man maimed like this afraid of?”
“Of being helpless.”
He pushed the head firmly down. “Now he can take a good drink,” he remarked. “If what he says is true, he won’t need it on the other side, but it’s as well to be sure.”
Many of the watching Vikings laughed, calling to their mates to come and see. Dolgfinn allowed himself a smile. There was no credit in this, no glory or drengskapr. But maybe it would keep Ivar happy.
“Let him up,” he shouted. “Maybe he will offer us a drink from heaven after all.”
Ivar seized the hair, heaved Wulfgar’s head up out of the frothing brew. The mouth gaped wide, sucking in air by frantic reflex, the eyes bulged with terror and humiliation. Wulfgar threw the stump of one arm over the edge of the barrel, tried to lever himself up.
Carefully Ivar knocked it free, stared into the eyes of the drowning man as if searching for something. He nodded, thrust the head back down again.
“Now he is afraid,” he said to Kleggi, standing by. “He would bargain for his life if he could. I do not like them to die defying me. They must give in.”
“They all give in in the end,” said Kleggi, laughing. “Like women.”
Ivar thrust the head spasmodically deeper.
Shef hefted the object Udd had brought him. They stood in the center of an interested circle—all Englishmen, all freedmen, catapulteers and halberdiers together—near the front the gang Udd had collected to help him forge the strips of mild steel.
“See,” Udd said, “we done what you told us. We made the strips, two-foot long. You said try and make bows out of them, so we filed notches in the ends and fitted strings. Had to use twisted gut. Nothing else strong enough.”
Shef nodded. “But then you couldn’t pull them.”
“Right, lord. You couldn’t, and we couldn’t. But we thought about that for a bit, and then Saxa here”—Udd indicated another member of his gang—“said anyone who’s ever carried loads for a living knows legs are stronger than arms.
“So: we took thick oak blocks. We cut slots for the metal near the front and slid the strips through, wedged ’em tight. We fitted triggers like we got already on the big shooters.
“And then we put these iron hoops, like, on the front of the wood. Try it, lord. Put your foot through the hoop.”
Shef did so.
“Grip the string with both hands and pull back against your own leg. Pull till the string goes over the top of the trigger.”
Shef heaved, felt the string coming back against strong resistance—but not impossibly strong. The puny Udd and his undersized colleagues had underestimated the force a big man trained in the forge could exert. The string clicked over the trigger. He was holding, Shef realized, a bow of sorts—but one that lay crosswise to the shooter, not up and down like a wooden handbow.
A grinning face from the crowd handed Shef a short arrow: short because the steel bow flexed only a few inches, not the half-arm’s-length of a wooden bow. He fitted it in the rough gouge in the top of the wooden block. The circle parted in front of him, indicating a tree twenty yards off.
Shef leveled the bow, aimed automatically between the arrow-feathers, as he would have with a twist-shooter, squeezed the trigger. There was no violent thump of recoil as there would have been with the full-sized machine, no black streak rising and falling. Yet the bolt sped away, struck fair in the center of the oak-trunk.
Shef walked over, grasped the embedded arrow, worked it backward and forward. After a dozen tugs, it came free. He looked at it speculatively.
“Not bad,” he said. “But not good, either. Although the bow is steel, I do not think in the end it strikes harder than the hunting bows we use already. And they are not strong enough for war.”
Udd’s face fell, he started automatically to make the excuses of the slave with a hard master. Shef held up a hand to stop him.
“Never mind, Udd. We are all learning something here. This is a new thing that the world has never seen before, but who made it? Saxa, for remembering that legs are stronger than arms? You, for remembering how your master made the steel? I, for telling you to make a bow? Or the Rome-folk of old, for showing me how to make the twist-shooters that started all this?
“None of us. What we have here is a new thing, but not new knowledge. Just old knowledge put together, old knowledge from many minds. Now, we need to make this stronger. Not the bow, for that is strong enough. The pull. How can we make it so that my pull up is double the strength of what I can do now?”
The silence was broken by Oswi, leader of the catapult-team.
“Well, if you put it like that, lord, answer’s obvious. How do you double a pull?
“You use a pulley. Or a windlass. A little one, not a great big one like the Norse-folk use on their ships. Fix it to your belt, wind on one end of the rope, hook the other end of the rope over the bowstring, pull it up as far as you like.”
Shef handed the primitive crossbow back to Udd. “There’s the answer, Udd. Set the trigger further back, so the bow can flex as far as the steel will let it. Make a winding gear with a rope and a hook to go with every bow. And make a bow out of every strip of steel you have. Take all the men you need.”
The Viking shouldering his way through the crowd looked suspiciously at the jarl surrounded by a throng of midgets. He had arrived only that summer, called from Denmark by incredible stories of success, wealth and profit, and of the Ragnarssons defeated. All he had seen so far was an army drawn up to fight that had then suddenly stopped in its tracks. And now here was the jar] himself, talking like a common man to a crowd of thralls. The Viking was six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and could lift a Winchester bushel with either hand. What sort of a jarl is this? he wondered. Why does he talk to them and not to the warriors? Skraelingjar such as these will never win a battle.
Out loud he said, with a minimum of deference, “Lord. You are called to council.”
His message delivered, he turned away, contempt in the set of his shoulders.
Greatly daring, Oswi asked what all had wondered: “Battle this time, lord? We got to stop that
Ivar sometime. We wouldn’t have minded if we’d done it sooner.”
Shef felt the reproach, overrode it. “Battle always comes soon enough, Oswi. The thing is to be ready.”
As soon as Shef stepped into the great meeting tent, he felt the hostility that faced him. The whole of the Wayman council was present, or seemed to be: Brand, Ingulf, Farman and the rest of the priests, Alfred, Guthmund, representatives from every group and unit of the joint army.
He sat down at his place, hand groping automatically for the whetstone-scepter left lying there for him. “Where is Thorvin?” he said, suddenly noting one absence.
Farman started to give a reply, but was immediately overridden by the angry voice of Alfred—the young king—speaking already in a fair approximation of the Anglo-Norse pidgin the Wayman army and council so often used with each other.
“One man here or there does not matter. What we have to decide on cannot wait. Already we have waited too long!”
“Yes,” rumbled Brand in agreement. “We are like the farmer who sits up all night to watch the hen-roost. Then in the morning he finds the fox has taken all his geese.”
“So who is the fox?” asked Shef.
“Rome,” said Alfred, rising to his feet to look down at the council. “We forgot the Church in Rome. When you took the land from the Church in this county, when I threatened to take the revenues from it in my kingdom, the Church took fright. The Pope in Rome took fright.”
“So?” asked Shef.
“So now there are ten thousand men ashore. Mailed horsemen of the Franks. Led by their king Charles. They wear crosses on their arms and their surcoats, and say that they have come to establish the Church in England against the pagans.
“The pagans! For a hundred years we have fought against the pagans, we Englishmen. Every year we sent Peter’s pence to Rome as a token of our loyalty. I myself”—Alfred’s youthful voice rose in pitch with indignation—“I myself was sent by my father to the last Pope, to good Pope Leo, when I was a child. The Pope made me a consul of Rome! Yet never have we had a ship or a man or a silver penny sent into England in exchange. But the day Church-land is threatened, Pope Nicholas can find an army.”
“But it is an army against the pagans,” said Shef. “Maybe us. Not you.”
Alfred’s face flushed. “You forget. Daniel, my own bishop, declared me excommunicate. The messengers say these Cross-wearers, these Franks, announce on all sides that there is no king in Wessex and they demand submission to King Charles. Till that is done they will ravage every shire. They come against the pagans. But they rob and kill only Christians.”
“What do you want us to do?” asked Shef.
“We must march at once and defeat this Frankish army before it destroys my kingdom. Bishop Daniel is dead or fleeing, and his Mercian backers with him. No Englishman will challenge my king-right again. My thanes and aldermen are already gathering to me, and I can raise the entire levy of Wessex, from every shire. If, as some say, the messengers have overcounted the strength of the enemy, then I can fight them on even terms. I will fight them on any terms. But your assistance would be greatly welcome.”
He sat down, looking round tensely for support.
In the long silence, Brand said one word. “Ivar.”
All eyes turned to Shef, sitting on his camp-stool, whetstone across his knees. He still seemed pale and gaunt after his sickness, cheekbones standing out, the flesh round his ruined eye pulled in so that it seemed a dark pit.
I do not know what he is thinking, reflected Brand. But he has not been with us these last days. If what Thorvin says is true, about the spirit leaving the body in these visions, then I wonder if it can be that you leave a little of it behind each time.
“Yes, Ivar,” repeated Shef. “Ivar and his machines. We cannot leave him behind us while we march to the South. He would grow stronger. For one thing, now Burgred is dead it will be only a matter of time till the Mercians elect a king to make peace with Ivar and save them from ravaging. Then Ivar will have their men and money to draw on, as he has already drawn on the money and the skills of York. He did not make those machines himself.
“So we must fight him. I must fight him. I think he and I are bound together now so that we cannot part till this is finished.
“But you, lord king.” The whetstone-scepter was cradled in Shef’s left arm while he stroked its stern, implacable faces. “You have your own people to consider. Maybe it is best for you to march to your own place and fight your own battle, while we fight ours. Each in our own way. Christian against Christian and pagan against pagan. And then, if your God and our gods will, we shall meet again, and set this country on its feet.”
“So be it,” said Alfred, his face flushing again. “I will call my men and be on my way.”
“Go with him, Lulla,” said Shef to the leader of the halberdiers. “And you, Osmod,” he added to the leader of the catapult-teams, “see the king has his pick of horses and remounts for his journey south.”
As the only Englishmen on the council left, Shef looked round at those who remained, and broke into fluent, rapid Norse, tinged with the thick Halogaland accent he had learned from Brand.
“What are his chances? If he fights his way? Against these Franks? What do you know of them, Brand?”
“A good chance, if he fights our way. Hit them when they’re not looking. Catch them when they’re asleep. Didn’t old Ragnar himself—bad luck to his spirit—did he not sack their great town back in our fathers’ day, and make their king pay tribute?
“But if the king fights in the English way, with the sun high in the sky and everyone forewarned …”
Brand grunted doubtfully. “The Franks had a king in our grandfather’s day: King Karl, Karl the Great—Chariemagne they call him. Even Guthfrith, king of the Danes, had to submit to him. The Franks can beat anybody, given time. You know why? It’s the horses. They fight on horseback. About once in a blue moon they’ll be there, with their saddles on, and their girthstraps tight, and their fetlocks plaited, or whatever it is they call them—I am a sailor, not a horseman, Thor be praised; at least ships never shit on your feet.
“But that day, that one day, you don’t want to stand up to them. And if King Alfred’s like all the other Englishmen, that’s the day he’ll choose.”
“Horses on one side, devil-machines on the other,” said Guthmund. “Enough to make anyone sick.”
Eyes scrutinized Shef’s face, to see how he would take the challenge.
“We will deal with Ivar and the machines first,” he said.
Chapter Eight
Two figures dressed in the rags of incongruous finery cantered slowly down the green lanes of central England: Alfgar, thane’s son, once favorite of a king; Daniel, a bishop without a retinue, still a king’s deadly enemy. Both had escaped with difficulty from Ivar’s riders by the Ouse, but had managed to end the day with a dozen guards between them, and money and rations enough to take them back in safety in Winchester. Then their troubles had begun.
First they woke one morning to find their guards had simply deserted in the night, perhaps blaming their masters for defeat, perhaps seeing no reason any longer to put up with Alfgar’s caustic tongue, Daniel’s outbursts of fury. They had taken the food, money and horses’ with them. Striding across the fields towards the nearest church-spire, Daniel had insisted that as soon as he reached a priest, his episcopal authority would provide them with mounts and supplies. They had never reached the spire. In the troubled countryside, the churls had abandoned their homes for the summer and had built themselves shelters in the greenwood. The village priest had indeed recognized Daniel’s status, enough to persuade his parishioners not to kill the pair of wanderers, and even to leave Daniel his episcopal ring and cross, and the gold head of his crozier. They had taken everything else, including Alfgar’s weapons and silver arm-rings. After that, for three nights in a row the fugitives had lain belly-pinched in the dew, cold and afraid.
Yet Alfgar, like h
is half brother and enemy Shef, was a child of the fen. He could make an eel-trap out of withies, could catch fish with a cloak-pin on twisted thread. Slowly the pair had ceased to hope for rescue, had learned to rely on themselves. The fifth day of their journey Alfgar had stolen two horses from an poorly guarded stud, and the herd-boy’s knife and his flea-infested blanket as well. After that they had made better time. It had not improved their humor.
At the ford of the Lea they had heard the news of the Frankish landing from a merchant disposed to be respectful to Daniel’s cross and ring. It had altered their plan.
“The Church does not fail her servants,” Daniel had declared, eyes red with rage and weariness. “I knew the stroke would fall. I did not know where or when. Now, to the glory of God, the pious King Charles has come to restore the faith. We will go to him and make our report—our report of those he must punish: the pagans, the heretics, the slack in faith. Then the evil Way-folk and the graceless adherents of Alfred will find that the quernstones of God grind slow, but they grind to the last grain.”
“Where do we have to go?” asked Alfgar sullenly, reluctant to follow Daniel’s lead but anxious to contact once again the side that might win, that might bring him vengeance on the ravisher, the bride-stealer, the one who had stolen first his woman, then his shire, and then his woman again. Every day he remembered a dozen times, with a shiver of shame, waking with the birch-twigs in his hand and the curious faces staring down: Didn’t you hear? He took your woman? Trussed up your father, with no arms or legs, but just left you to lie there? And you never woke?
“The Frankish fleet crossed the Narrow Sea and landed in Kent,” Daniel replied. “Not far from the see of St. Augustine in Canterbury. They are camped at a place called Hastings.”
Surveying the walls of Canterbury, his base at Hastings left for a careful, six-day foray, Charles the Bald, king of the Franks, sat on his horse and waited for the procession trailing from the open gates to reach him. He was sure enough what it was. In the lead he could see holy banners, choirmonks singing, censers waving. Behind them, carried in a chair of state, came a gray-bearded figure in purple and white, tall miter nodding: surely the archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of England. Though back at camp in Hastings, Charles reflected, he had Wulfhere, archbishop of York, who would probably dispute this archbishop’s claim. Perhaps he should have brought him and let the two old fools fight it out.
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