Shef pointed across the smoky, steaming room to a clutch of the army's drabs, who rose from the floor and stretched out the great banner at which they had been frantically stitching. There, on a background of red silk, taken from the carts of plunder, a double-headed smith's hammer in white linen was picked out with silver thread.
“The other army, the one we have left, marches behind the black raven, the carrion bird. I say that the sign of the Christians is for torture and death. Our sign is the sign of a maker. Tell them that. And I will give you an earnest of what the hammer can do for you. We're taking off your collar.”
The slave was shaking with fear. “No, the black monks, when they return…”
“They will kill you most horribly. Remember this and tell the others. We offered to free you, we pagans. But fear of the Christians is keeping you a slave. Now go.”
“One thing I ask. In fear. Do not kill me for speaking of it but—your men are emptying the meal-bins, taking our winter store. There'll be empty bellies and dead bairns before spring comes if you do that.”
Shef sighed. This was going to be the hard bit. “Brand. Pay the thrall. Pay him something. Pay him in good silver, mind, not the archbishop's dross.”
“Me pay him! He should pay me. What about the wergild for the men we have lost? And since when did the Army pay for its supplies?”
“There is no Army now. And he owes you no wergild. You trespassed on his land. Pay him. I'll see you don't lose by it.”
Brand muttered under his breath as he untied his purse and began to count out six silver Wessex pennies.
The slave could scarcely believe what was happening, staring at the shining coins as though he had never seen money like this before; perhaps he hadn't.
“I will tell them,” he said, almost shouting the words. “About the banner too.”
“If you do that, and return here tonight, I will pay you six more—for you alone, not to share.”
Brand, Thorvin and the others looked doubtfully at Shef as the slave went out, with an escort to see him outside the sentry-fires.
“You'll never see money nor slave again,” Brand said.
“We'll see. Now I want two long hundreds of men, with our best horses, all with a good meal inside them, ready to move as soon as the slave returns.”
Brand pushed a shutter open a crack and looked at the night and the whirling snow. “What for?” he grunted.
“I need to get your twelve pennies back. And I have another idea.” Slowly, intense concentration furrowing his brow, Shef began to scratch lines into the table in front of him with the point of his knife.
The black monks of St. John's Minster at Beverley, unlike those of St. Peter's at York, did not have the safe walls of a legionary fortress round them. Instead, their tenants and the men of the flatlands east of the Yorkshire Wolds could easily put two thousand stout warriors into the field, with many more half-armed spearmen and bowmen to back them. All through the autumn of raids of York, they had known themselves safe against anything but a move by a major detachment of the Great Army. They had known it must come. The sacristan had disappeared months since with all the minster's most precious relics, reappearing days later with word only for the abbot himself. They had kept half their fighting force mobilized, the rest dispersed among their holdings to oversee the harvest and the preparations for winter. Tonight they felt secure. Their watchers had seen the Great Army split, one detachment even marching away to the South.
But a midwinter night in England is sixteen hours long between sunset and dawn: more than time enough for determined men to ride forty miles. Guided on their way through muddy, meandering farm-tracks for the first few miles, then picking up speed as they walked or trotted their horses along the better roads of the Wolds. They had lost a little time circumventing each village they came to. The slave, Tida, had guided them well, abandoning them only as the first paling sky had shown them the steeple of Beverley Minster itself. The guard-huts just beginning to disgorge sleepy female quern-slaves, to light the fires and grind the grain for the breakfast porridge. At the sight of the Vikings they ran shrieking and wailing, to drag incredulous warriors from their blankets. To be called fools for their pains and to become part of the utter confusion which was the English way of taking surprise.
Shef pushed open the great wooden doors of the minster and walked in, his companions jostling behind.
From inside the minster came the antiphonal song of the choirmonks, facing each other across the nave and singing sweetly the anthems which called the Christ-child to be born. There were no other worshippers, though the doors were unbolted for them. The monks sang lauds every day, whether they were joined or not. At dawn on a winter morning they would not expect to be.
As the Vikings paced down the aisle which led to the high altar—still wrapped in sodden cloaks, no weapons showing except for the halberd over Shef's shoulder—the abbot looked at them in shocked horror from his great seat in the choir. For a moment Shef's nerve and wit faltered in the face of the majesty of the Church he had grown up in, worshipped in.
He cleared his throat, unsure how to begin.
Guthmund behind him, a skipper from the Swedish shore of the Kattegat, had no such doubts or scruples. All his life he had wanted to be at the sack of a really first-class church or abbey, and he had no intention of letting a beginner's nerves spoil it. Courteously he picked his young leader up and put him to one side, seized the nearest choir-monk by his black robe and hurled him into the aisle, dragged his axe from under his cloak and embedded it with a thunk into the altar-rail.
“Grab the blackrobes,” he bellowed. “Search 'em, put 'em in that corner there. Tofi, get those candlesticks. Frani, I want all that plate. Snok and Uggi, you're lightweights, see that statue there…” He waved at the great crucifix, high above the altar, looking down at them with sorrowing eyes. “Shin up it and see if you can get that crown off, looks genuine from here. The rest of you, turn everything over and shake it, grab everything that looks as if it might gleam. I want this place clear before those bastards behind us have got their boots on. Now, you…” He advanced on the abbot shrinking back in his throne.
Shef forced his way between them. “Now, father,” he began, speaking again in English. The familiar language drew a basilisk stare from the abbot, terrified but at the same time mortally offended. Shef wavered a moment—then remembered the inside of the minster door, covered, like many, with skin on the inside. Human skin, flayed from a living body for the sin of sacrilege, of laying hands on Church property. He hardened his heart.
“Your guards will be here soon. If you want to stay alive you will have to keep your men off.”
“No!”
“Then you die now.” The point of his halberd pushed at the priest's throat.
“For how long?” The abbot's shaking hands were on the halberd, could not move it back.
“Not long. Then you may hunt us, recover your stolen goods. So do as I say…”
Crashes of destruction behind, a monk being dragged forward by Guthmund. “I think this is the sacristan. He says the hoard is empty.”
“True,” the abbot admitted. “All was hidden months ago.”
“What's hidden can be found again,” said Guthmund. “I'll start on the youngest, just to show I mean it. One, two dead, the hoard-keeper will speak.”
“You will not,” Shef ordered. “We'll take them with us. There will be no torture among those who follow the Way. The Asa-gods forbid it. And we have taken a fair haul. Now get them out where the minster-guards can see them. We still have a long ride ahead.”
In the growing light, Shef noticed something hanging on the wall: a flattened roll of vellum with no image on it that he could recognize.
“What's that?” he asked the abbot.
“It has no value to one like you. No gold, no silver on the frame. It is a mappamundi. A map of the world.”
Shef tore it down, rolled it, thrust it deep inside his tunic as they hustled th
e abbot and the choirmonks out to face the ragged battle-line of Englishmen at last roused from bed.
“We'll never make it back,” muttered Guthmund again as he clutched a clanking sack.
“Not going back,” answered Shef. “You'll see.”
Chapter Seven
Burgred, king of Mercia, one of the two great kingdoms of England still unconquered by the Vikings, paused at the entrance to his private chambers, dismissed the crowd of attendants and hangers-on, doffed his mantle of martenfur, allowed his snow-soaked boots to be removed and replaced by slippers of soft whittawed leather, and prepared to enjoy the moment. By command, the young man and his father were waiting for him, as was the atheling Alfred, there to represent his brother Ethelred, king of Wessex—the other surviving great English kingdom.
The issue before them was the fate of East Anglia. Its king dead with no successor, its people demoralized and uncertain. Yet Burgred knew well that if he marched an army to take it over, to add it to Mercia by force, the East Angles might well fight, Englishmen against Englishmen, as they had so often before. But if he sent them a man of their own, he calculated—one of noble blood, one who nevertheless owed absolutely everything, including the army he led with him, to King Burgred—well, that they might swallow.
Especially as this particular noble and grateful young man had such a very useful father. One who, so to speak—Burgred allowed himself a grim smile—carried his anti-Viking credentials with him. Who could fail to rally to such a figurehead? A figure-head and -trunk, indeed. Burgred blessed, silently, the day the two ponies with their leaders and their slung stretcher had brought him in from York.
And the beautiful young woman too. How affecting it had been. The young man, fair hair swept back, kneeling at his father's feet before ever they had unstrapped him from his litter, and begging forgiveness for having married without his father's consent. The pair might have been forgiven for more than that after all they had been through, but no, young Alfgar had been the essence of propriety all through. It was the spirit that would one day make the English the greatest of all nations. Decency, mused Burgred: gedafenlicnis.
What Alfgar had really muttered as he knelt at his father's feet had been: “I married Godive, father. I know she's my half sister, but don't say anything of it, or I'll tell everyone you're mad. And then an accident could happen to you. Men with no arms smother easily. And don't forget, we're both your children. If we succeed, your grandsons could still be princes. Or better.”
And after the first shock, it had seemed well enough to Wulfgar. True, they had committed incest, “sibb-laying,” as the English called it. But what did a trifle like that matter? Thryth, his own lady, had committed fornication with a heathen Viking, and who had done anything about that? If Alfgar and Godive had an incest child like Sigemund and his sister in the legends, it could be no worse than that gadderling brat he, Wulfgar, had been fool enough to rear.
As the king of the Mercians strode into the room, the men in it rose and bowed. The one woman, the East Anglian beauty with the sad face and the brilliant eyes, rose and made her courtesy in the new style of the Franks. Two attendants—they had been arguing quietly about the right thing to do—lifted Wulfgar's padded box to the vertical before leaning it back against the wall. At a gesture they resumed their seats: stools for all but the king and the heimnar. Wulfgar too was lifted into a highseat with wooden arms. He could not have balanced himself to sit on a stool.
“I have news from Eoforwich,” began the king. “Later news than you brought,” with a nod to Wulfgar. “And better news. Still, it has decided me to act.
“It seems that after the surrender by the Church of the town and of King Ella—”
“Say, rather,” cut in the young atheling from Wessex, “the disgraceful betrayal of King Ella by those he had protected.”
Burgred frowned. The young man, he had noticed, had little sense of respect to kings, and none at all for senior members of the Church.
“After the surrender of King Ella, he was unhappily put to death in vile manner by the heathen Ragnarssons, and especially the one called the Boneless. Just as happened to your master, the noble Edmund,” he added, nodding again to Wulfgar.
“But it seems that this caused dissension among the heathens. Indeed there is a strange story that the execution was put to an end by a machine of some kind. Everything at Eoforwich seems to have something about machines attached to it.
“Yet the important news is the dissension. For after it the Viking army split.”
Mutters of surprise and pleasure.
“Some of them have now left Eoforwich and are marching south. A lesser part of the Army, but still formidable. Where, I must ask myself, are they heading? And I say, they are heading back to East Anglia, from where they came.”
“Back to their ships,” snapped Alfgar.
“That could well be. Now, I do not think the East Anglians will fight them again. They lost their king and too many leaders, thanes and warriors in the battle by the Stour, from which you, young man, so valiantly fought your way. Yet, as you have all been telling me,” Burgred glanced sarcastically at Alfred, “the Vikings must be fought.
“So I shall send East Anglia a war-leader, with a strong force of my men to support him till he can rally his own.
“You, young man. Alfgar, son of Wulfgar. You are of the North-folk. Your father was a thane of King Edmund. Your family has lost more, suffered more and dared more than any other. You will put the kingdom back on its feet.
“Only it can no longer be a kingdom.”
Burgred locked eyes with the young atheling, Alfred of Wessex: eyes as blue and hair as blond as Alfgar's, a true prince of a royal line. But something queer, cross-grained about him. A clever look. They both knew that this was the sticking point. Burgred of Mercia had no more claim to East Anglia than Ethelred of Wessex. Yet the one who filled the gap would clearly become the mightier of the two.
“What would my title be?” asked Alfgar carefully.
“Alderman. Of the North-folk and the South-folk.”
“Those are two shires,” objected Alfred. “A man cannot be alderman of two shires at once.”
“New times, new things,” replied Burgred. “But what you say is true. In time, Alfgar, you may win a new title. You may be what the priests call subregulus. You may be my under-king. Say, will you be loyal to me and to Mercia? to the Mark?”
Alfgar knelt silently at the king's feet and put his hands between the king's knees in token of subjection. The king patted his shoulder and lifted him up.
“We will do this more formally by and by. I just wanted to know we are all agreed.” He turned to Alfred. “And yes, young atheling, I know you have not agreed. But tell your king and brother the way of it is now this. Let him stay his side of the Thames and I'll stay mine. But north of the Thames and south of the Humber: that belongs to me. All of it.”
Burgred let the tense silence hang a moment and then thought to disperse it. “One strange piece of news they told me. The Ragnarssons have always led the Great Army, but they have all stayed in Eoforwich. Those who marched away are said to have no leaders, or many. But one report is that among their leaders, or their main leader, is an Englishman. A man of the East Angles by his speech, the messenger said. But he could only give me what the Vikings call him, and they speak English so badly I could not make it out as a man's name at all. They call him Skjef Sigvarthsson. Now what could that be in English? Even in East Anglian?”
“Shef!” It was the silent woman who had spoken. Or gasped. Her eyes, her brilliant liquid eyes, blazed with life. Her husband stared at her like one who measures a back for the birch, while her father-in-law goggled and reddened.
“I thought you saw him dead,” snarled the heimnar accusingly at his son.
“I will yet,” muttered Alfgar. “Just give me the men.”
Nearly two hundred miles to the north, Shef turned once again in his saddle to see if the rear-guard was keeping up. I
mportant to have everyone well closed up, all within earshot of each other. Shef knew that four times his own number were pounding the filthy road behind him, unable to attack while Shef held his thirty hostages, the choirmonks of St. John's and their abbot Saxwulf. It was important too to keep up the pace, even after their long night's ride, to outrun the news of their coming and prevent any arrangement being made for their reception.
The smell of the sea led them on—and there, as they came trampling over a slight rise, there as an unmistakable landmark was Flamborough Head itself. Shef urged the vanguard on with a yell and a wave.
Guthmund dropped back a yard or two, hand still clutching the bridle of the abbot's horse. Shef waved him over. “Keep up—and keep the abbot close to me.”
With a whoop he spurred his tiring gelding forward, catching up just as the whole cavalcade, a hundred and twenty raiders and thirty hostages, stormed down the long slope into the squalid huddle of Bridlington.
Instant confusion. Women running, snatching up blue-legged ragged children, men seizing spears, dropping them again, some racing for shelter down to the beach and the boats drawn up on the dirty snow-covered sand. Shef wheeled his horse and thrust the abbot forward like a trophy, instantly recognizable in his black robes.
“Peace,” he shouted, “Peace. I want Ordlaf.”
But Ordlaf was already there, the reeve of Bridlington, the capturer—though no one had ever credited him with it—of Ragnar. He stepped forward from his people, eyeing the Vikings and the monks with amazement, reluctantly taking responsibility.
“Show them the abbot,” Shef snapped to Guthmund. “Make those behind keep their distance.” He pointed at Ordlaf the reeve. “You and I have met before. The day you netted Ragnar.”
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