The burly captain snorted in amusement. “Brave words, lord, and a good plan. I'd like to do it. Problem is…” He pulled the laces on the pouch at his belt and tipped the contents into his palm. “Look at this stuff. A few good silver pennies that I got from selling a horse when I was down South. The rest is imitations from the archbishop's mint here—mostly lead, if it's not copper. I don't know where all the silver's gone—we used to have plenty of it. But there's been less and less of it all over the North for twenty years now. We use the archbishop's money, but the Southerners won't take it; you have to have something to trade to deal with them. You can be damned sure the Army out there won't take it. And it's no good offering them grain or honeycombs.”
“But they're here.” said Ella. “We must have something they want. The Church must have reserves of gold and silver….”
“You mean to give Church treasures to the Vikings, to buy them off?” gasped Erkenbert. “Instead of marching out to fight them, as is your Christian duty? What you say is sacrilege, Church-breach! If a churl steals a silver plate from the least of God's houses, he is flayed and his hide nailed to the church door. What you suggest is a thousand times worse.”
“You imperil your immortal soul even to think of it,” cried the archbishop.
Erkenbert's voice hissed like an adder. “It was not for this that we made you king.”
The heimnar Wulfgar's voice cut across them both. “And you forget, besides, who you are dealing with. These are not men. They are spawn from the pit—all of them. We cannot deal with them. We cannot have them out there for months—we must destroy them….” Spittle began to show round his pale lips, and he lifted an arm for an instant as if to wipe it away before the truncated limb fell back. “Lord king, heathens are not men. They have no souls.”
Six months ago, Ella thought, I would have led the host of the Northumbrians out to fight. It's what they expect. If I order anything else there is the risk of being called a coward. No one will follow a coward. Erkenbert has as good as told me: If I do not fight they will bring that simpleton Osbert back. He is still hiding up there in the North somewhere. He would march out to fight like a gallant fool.
But Edmund has shown what happens if you fight on even ground, even when you catch them by surprise. If we march out in the old style, I know we will lose. I know we will lose, and I will die. I must do something else. Something Erkenbert will accept. But he will not accept an open payment of tribute.
Ella spoke with sudden decision, the weight of kingship in his voice.
“We will stand a siege and hope to weaken them. Cuthred, check defenses and provisioning, send away all useless mouths. Lord archbishop, men have told me that in your library there are learned books by the old Rome-folk who wrote on matters of war, especially of siegecraft. See what aid they can give us in destroying the Vikings.”
He turned away, left the wall, Cuthred and a trail of lesser nobles following; Wulfgar was tipped back on his stretcher and carried off by two stout thralls down the stone steps.
“The East Anglian thane is right,” whispered Erkenbert to his archbishop. “We must get these people away before they destroy our rents and seduce our thralls. Even our nobles. I can think of some who might be tempted into thinking they can do without us.”
“Look it out—Vegetius,” Wulfhere replied. “The book called De Re Militari. I had not known our lord was so learned.”
“He has been in the forge four days now,” observed Brand. He and Thorvin, with Hund and Hund's master Ingulf, stood in a little knot a few yards away from the glowing fire of a smithy. The Vikings had found it, still stocked with charcoal, in the village of Osbaldwich a few miles outside York. Shef had taken it over immediately, called urgently for men, iron and fuel. The four stared at him through the wide-flung doors of the smithy.
“Four days,” repeated Brand. “He has hardly eaten. He would not have slept except the men told him if he did not sleep, they still had to, and made him cease the din of hammering a few hours a night.”
“It doesn't seem to have done him much harm,” said Hund.
Indeed his friend, who he still thought of as a boy, a youth, seemed to have changed totally in the course of the past summer. His frame was not massive by the demanding standards of the Army, full of giants. But there seemed to be no excess flesh on it. Shef had stripped to the waist in spite of the gusts of an English October. As he moved round the forge, pecking now at something small and delicate, shifting the red-hot metal with tongs, barking quickly at his iron-collared English assistant to pump harder at the bellows, his muscles moved under the skin as if they lay directly beneath it, without blurring fat or tissue. A quick jerk, metal sizzling into a tub, another piece snatched from the fire. Each time he moved, separate muscles slid smoothly over each other. In the red light of the forge he might have seemed a bronze statue of the ancient days.
Except that he had not their beauty. Even in the light of the forge the sunken right eye seemed a crater of decay. On his back the thrall-marks of flogging showed vividly. Few men in the Army would have been so careless as to display such shame.
“No harm in the body, maybe,” replied Thorvin. “I cannot speak for the mind. You know what it says in the Völund-lay:
“He sat, he did not sleep, he struck with the hammer.
Always he beat out the baleful work for Nithhad.“
“I do not know what cunning thing our friend is beating out in his mind. Or who he is doing it for. I hope he will be more successful than Völund—more successful at gaining the desire of his heart.”
Ingulf turned the questioning. “What has he been making these four days?”
“This, to begin with.” Thorvin held a helmet up for the others to scrutinize.
What Thorvin held up was like no helmet they had ever seen. It was too big, bulbous as the head of a giant insect. A rim had been welded round it, filed to bright razor-sharpness in the front. A nose-guard ran down in front, ending in bars running back to cheek-protectors. A flared skirt of solid metal covered the nape of the neck.
More surprising to the watchers was the inside. A leather lining had been fitted to the helmet, suspended by straps. Once the helmet was on, the lining would fit the head snugly but the metal would not touch it. A broad strap and a buckle fitted under the jaw, to hold all firm.
“Never seen the likes,” said Brand. “A blow on the metal will not crash into the skull. Still, it's better not to get hit, I say.”
As they talked, the racket at the forge had ceased, and Shef had been seen diligently fitting small pieces together. Now he walked over to them, smiling and sweating.
Brand raised his voice. “I say, young waker-of-warriors-untimely, if you avoid the blow you don't need the helmet. And what in the name of Thor is that you are holding?”
Shef grinned again, and held up the strange weapon from the forge. He held it out horizontally, balancing it after an instant on the edge of one hand, just where wood joined metal.
“And what do you call that?” asked Thorvin. “A hewing-spear? A haft-axe?”
“A beard-axe that's had bastards by a ploughshare?” suggested Brand. “I don't see the use of it.”
Shef picked up Brand's still-bandaged hand and gently rolled back the sleeve. He put his own forearm next to his friend's.
“How good a swordsman am I?” he asked.
“Poor. No training. Some talent.”
“If I had the training, would I ever be fit to stand against a man like you? Never. Look at our arms. Is yours twice as thick round as mine? Or just half as thick again? And I am not a weak man. But I am a different shape from you, and yours is the shape for a swordsman, even more, an axeman. You swing a weapon as if it were a stick for a boy to slash thistles. I cannot do that. So if I were ever to face a champion like you… And one day I will have to face a champion like you. Muirtach maybe. Or worse.”
All five men nodded silently.
“So I have to even things up. With this, you see…
” Shef began to twirl the weapon slowly. “I can thrust. I can cut forehand. I can strike backhand without reversing the weapon. I can change grip and strike with the butt. I can block a blow from any direction. I can use two hands. I need no shield. Most of all—a blow from this, even in my hands, is like a blow from Brand, which few survive.”
“But your hands are exposed,” said Brand.
Shef beckoned, and the Englishman in the forge nervously moved over. He held two more metal objects. Shef took them and passed them over.
They were gauntlets: leather-lined, leather-palmed, with long metal projections designed to fit halfway up the forearm. Yet the striking thing about them, the men saw as they peered more closely, was the way the metal moved. Each finger had five plates, each plate fitted to the next on small rivets. Larger plates fitted over the knuckles and the backs of the hands, but they too moved. Shef pulled them on, and slowly flexed his hands, opening and closing them round the shaft of his weapon.
“They are like the scales of Fafnir the dragon,” said Thorvin.
“Fafnir was stabbed in the belly, from below. I hope to be harder to murder.” Shef turned away. “I have another task to do. I could not have done all this in time without Halfi here. He is a good leather-worker, though he is slow with the bellows.”
Motioning the Englishman to kneel before him he began to file at the iron collar. “You will say there is not much point in freeing him, since someone will enslave him again immediately. But I will see him outside the Army's watch fires in the night, and his master is shut up tight in York. If he has any sense or luck he will run away, run far away, and never be caught again.”
The Englishman looked up as Shef began gently to pry the soft iron from his throat. “You are heathens,” the slave said, not understanding. “Priest said you're men with no mercy. You cut the arms and legs from the thane—I saw him! How can it be that you set a man free where the Christ-priests hold him a slave?”
Shef lifted him to his feet. He replied in English, not in the Norse they had been using before. “The men who crippled the thane should not have done what they did. Yet I say nothing of Christians and heathens, except that there are evil men everywhere. I can give you only one rede. If you do not know who to trust, try a man who wears one of those.” He gestured at the four men watching, who, following the speech, silently raised their silver pendants: hammers for Brand and Thorvin, the apples of Ithun for the two leeches, Hund and Ingulf.
“Or others like them. It may be a boat for Njörth, a hammer for Thor, a penis for Frey. I do not say they will help you. But they will treat you as a man, not as a horse or a heifer.”
“You do not wear one,” said Halfi.
“I do not know what to wear.”
Around them, the normal noise of the camp was turning to hubbub as news spread; voices were raised, warriors shouted to each other. The men in the smithy looked up as one of Brand's men appeared, a broad grin splitting the tangle of his beard.
“We're off!” he cried. “The jarls and the Ragnarssons and the Snakeeye have all stopped riding round and round and pondering and scratching their arses. We take the wall tomorrow! Let the women and girls there beware!”
Shef looked darkly at the man, finding no humor in his words. “My girl was called Godive,” he said. “That is, ‘God's gift.’ ” He pulled on his gauntlets, swung his halberd thoughtfully. “I shall call this Thrall's-wreak'—the vengeance of the slave. One day it will do vengeance for Godive. And other girls as well.”
Chapter Two
In the gray morning light the Army began to filter through the narrow, hovel-lined streets of the outer town of York. All three main bridges over the Ouse were commanded by the walls of the old colonia, on the south bank of the river, but this had caused no difficulty for the skilled shipwrights and axemen who filled the Viking ranks. They had torn down a few houses and an outlying church for some bigger timbers, and had thrown a wide bridge over the Ouse close to their own encampment. The Army had crossed, and were now lapping their way up, like the tide, toward the yellow stone walls at the heart of the town. There was no sense of hurry, no shouting of commands, just eight thousand men, less the crews detailed to guard the camp, pressing forward toward their obvious goal.
As they tramped up through the narrow streets, men turned aside in small groups to kick down doors or break open shutters. Shef turned his head, stiff and clumsy with the unaccustomed weight of the helmet, and raised brows in silent inquiry at Brand, strolling peacefully by his side, flexing the scarred hand just unwrapped from its bandages.
“There are fools everywhere,” remarked Brand. “The runaways say the king here ordered the place cleared days ago, the men inside the fortress, all the others off into the hills somewhere. But there's always someone who knows better, thinks it won't happen.”
Commotion broke out ahead of them to lend force to his words: voices shouting, a woman shrieking, the sound of a sudden blow. Out from a shattered doorway squeezed four men, grins splitting their faces, a grubby, slatternly young woman writhing and twisting in their grip. The other men pushing up the hill stopped to exchange jokes.
“Make you too weak to fight, Tosti! You'd be better off with another pancake, keep your strength up.”
One of the men pulled the girl's gown up over her head like a sack, pinning her arms and muffling her shrieks. Two others seized her bare legs and pulled them roughly apart. The mood of the crowd passing by changed. Men began to stop and watch.
“Room for more when you're finished, Skakul?”
Shef's gauntleted hands clenched on the shaft of “Thrall's-wreak,” and he too turned toward the writhing, grunting group. Brand's enormous fist closed gently over Shef's biceps.
“Leave it, boy. If there's a fight she'll be killed for sure. Easy targets always are. Leave them to it, and maybe they'll let her go at the end. They've a battle to fight, so they can't take too long.”
Reluctantly Shef turned his eyes and walked on, trying not to hear the sounds coming from behind—and, as they walked further, from other sides as well. The town, he realized, was like a cornfield in autumn. It seemed to be empty, but as the scythemen walked through it, cutting the wheat down into a smaller and smaller square, so its inhabitants became more and more visible, anxious, terrified, finally running anywhere to get away from the voices and the blades. They should have gone when they were told, he told himself. The king should have made sure. Why can no one see sense in this world?
The buildings ended and before them was a cleared zone of mud and rubble with the yellow stone wall some eighty yards off, the wall the Rome-folk had made. Brand and his crew emerged from the alley, looked up at the top of the wall where figures moved and called jeeringly. A zip in the air, and an arrow thumped into the wattle and daub of a house wall. Another, and a Viking swore in anger as he looked at the shaft sticking from his hip. Brand reached over and pulled it out, glanced at it, tossed it over his shoulder.
“Hurt, Arnthor?”
“Just got through the leather. Six inches higher and it would have bounced off my jacket.”
“No punch,” remarked Brand again. “Don't look at those fellows. Someone gets one in the eye now and then.”
Shef plodded forward, trying to ignore the zips and thuds like the others. “Have you done this kind of thing before?” he asked.
Brand halted, called to his crews to halt as well, turned toward the wall and promptly hunkered down on his heels.
“Can't say I have. Not on this scale. But today we just do what we're told. The Ragnarssons say they've a plan and they will take the city if everybody stands by to lend their weight where needed. So we watch and wait.
“Mind you, if anyone knows what they're doing it should be them. Do you know, their old man, their father Ragnar, tried to take the city of the Franks—oh, it must be twenty years ago. Paris, it's called. So the Ragnarssons have thought a lot about stone walls and cities ever since. Though it's a far cry from some rath in Kilkenny or Meath
to this. I'd like to see how they go about it.”
Shef leaned on his halberd and stared around him. To his front ran the stone wall, topped with battlements, men loosely scattered along it, no longer wasting arrows on the mass of the Army drawn up on the fringe of the cleared zone facing them, but clearly ready to shoot at any forward movement. Surprising, Shef thought, how little range even a great stone wall could give you. The men on top of their walls thirty feet were impregnable, unreachable. Yet the archers on the wall could do virtually nothing to the men standing watching them. At fifty yards' range you were in danger, at ten you might well be dead. At eighty you could stand in the open and make your preparations at leisure.
He looked more closely at the wall. To the left, two hundred yards away, it ended in a round, jutting tower, from which men could shoot along the line of the wall, at least for as far as their bows would carry. Beyond the tower the ground dropped toward the brown and muddy Ouse, immediately beyond it on the other bank, the wooden stockade that guarded the river fringe of the colonia—Marystown, as the locals called it. It too carried a frieze of men, watching anxiously the preparations of the heathen so close, so out of range.
The Army waited, six- and eight-deep, facing the wall on a five-hundred-yard front; more packed into the mouths of the streets and alleyways, the steam of their breath rising into the air. Dull metal, grubby wool and leather were picked out only here and there by the bright paint on shields. The warriors looked calm, patient, like farmhands waiting for the owner.
There came a blare of horns from the center of the waiting ranks, maybe fifty or sixty yards to Shef's right. Shef realized suddenly that he should have been studying the gate in the center of the wall. A wide street ran out from it, no longer prominent in the waste of mud and trampled wattle where houses had been, but clearly the main road out to the east. The gate itself was new, not work of the Rome-folk, but massively formidable for that. Its timbers were seasoned oak tree-trunks, fully as high as the towers on either side of it. Its hinges were the heaviest iron that English smiths could make.
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