The Hammer and The Cross thatc-1

by Harry Harrison

  “So, we can expect reinforcements,” said Geirulf, Tyr's priest.

  “With the money that has been taken home, and the tales every skald is telling, you can be sure that every warrior of the Way who can raise a ship will be here looking for work. And every priest who can free himself as well. There will be many who take the pendant in hope, also. Liars, some of them. Not believers. But they can be dealt with. There is more important matter.”

  Brand paused, looking round the circle of intent faces. “In Kaupang, as I came home, I met the priest Vigleik.”

  “Vigleik of the many visions?” asked Farman tensely.

  “Even so. He had called a conclave of priests from Norway and from the South Swedes. He told them—and me—that he was disturbed.”

  “What about?”

  “Many things. He is sure now, as we are, that the boy Shef is the center of the change. He has even thought, as we have, that he may be what he said he was when first he met you, Thorvin: the one who will come from the North.”

  Brand looked round the table to meet the eyes fixed on him. “And yet, if that is true, the story is not what any of us expected, not even the wisest. Vigleik says, for one thing, he is not a Norseman. He has an English mother.”

  Shrugs. “Who hasn't?” asked Vestmund. “English, Irish. My grandmother was a Lapp.”

  “He was brought up a Christian, too. He has been baptized.”

  This time, grunts of amusement. “We've all seen the scars on his back,” said Thorvin. “He hates the Christians, just as we do. No. He doesn't even hate them. He thinks they are fools.”

  “All right. But this is the sticking point: He has not taken the pendant. He has no belief in us. He sees the visions, Thorvin, or so he has told you. But he does not think they are visions of another world. He is not a believer.”

  This time the men sat silent, eyes turning slowly to Thorvin. The Thor-priest rubbed his beard.

  “Well. He is not an unbeliever, either. If we asked him, he would say that a man with a pendant of a heathen god, as the Christians call them, could not rule Christians, not even for as long as it will take for them to stop being Christians. He would say that wearing a pendant is not a matter of belief, it would just be a mistake, like starting to hammer before the iron was hot. And he does not know which pendant he should wear.”

  “I do,” said Brand. “I saw it and said it last year, when he killed his first man.”

  “I think so too,” agreed Thorvin. “He should wear the spear of Othin, God of the Hanged, Betrayer of Warriors. Only such a one would have sent his own father to death. But he would say, if he were here, that it was the only thing to do at that time.”

  “Is Vigleik only talking of probabilities?” asked Farman suddenly. “Or did he have some particular message? Some message a god sent him?”

  Silently Brand pulled a packet of thin boards wrapped round with sealskin from inside his tunic and passed it over. Runes were cut on the wood, and inked in. Slowly Thorvin scanned them, Geirulf and Skaldfinn leaning close to look also. The faces of all three darkened as they read on.

  “Vigleik has seen something,” said Thorvin at length. “Brand, do you know the tale of Frodi's mill?”

  The champion shook his head.

  “Three hundred years ago there was a king in Denmark called Frodi. He had, they say, a magic mill, which did not grind corn, but instead ground out peace and wealth and fertility. We believe it was the mill of new knowledge. To grind the mill he had two slaves, two giant-maidens called Fenja and Menja. But so anxious was Frodi to have continuing peace and wealth for his people that no matter how much the giantesses begged for rest, he denied it to them.”

  Thorvin's deep voice broke into sonorous chant:

  “ ‘You shall not sleep,’ said Frodi the king,

  'Longer than the time it takes a cuckoo

  To answer another, or an errand-lad

  To sing a song as he steps on his way.'

  “So the slaves grew angry and remembered their giant-blood, and instead of grinding peace and wealth and fertility, they began to grind out flame and blood and warriors. And his enemies came on Frodi in the night and destroyed him and his kingdom, and the magic mill was lost forever.

  “That is what Vigleik has seen. He means one can go too far, even in hunting new knowledge, if the world is not ready for it. One must strike while the iron is hot. But one can also blow the bellows too long and too furiously.”

  A long pause. Reluctantly, Brand got ready to reply. “I had better tell you,” he said, “what the jarl, what Skjef Sigvarthsson told me this morning of his intentions. Then you must decide how this fits Vigleik's visions.”

  A few days later, Brand stood staring at the great stone now sunk into the meadow, near the spot where the muddy causeway from Ely debouched into the fields outside March.

  On it was carved a curling ribbon of runes, their edges still sharp from the chisel. Shef touched them lightly with his fingertips.

  “What they say is this. I composed it myself, in verse in your language as Geirulf taught me. The runes read:

  “ ‘Well he left life, though ill he lived it.

  All scores are settled by death.’

  At the top is his name: ‘Sigvarth Jarl.’ “

  Brand grunted doubtfully. He had not liked Sigvarth. And yet the man had taken the death of his one son well. And there was no doubt he had saved his other son, and the Army of the Way, by enduring his last night of torture.

  “Well,” he said at last. “He has his bautasteinn, right enough. It is an old saying: ‘Few stones would stand by the way, if sons did not set them up.’ But this is not where he was killed?”

  “No,” said Shef. “They killed him back in the mire. It seems my other father, Wulfgar, could not wait even till he reached firm ground.” His mouth twisted, and he spat on the grass. “But if we had set it up there it would have been out of sight in the marsh in six weeks.

  “Besides, I wanted you here to see this.”

  He grinned, turned, and waved an arm in the direction of the almost imperceptible rise that led toward March. From somewhere out of sight there came a noise like the squealing of a dozen pigs being butchered simultaneously. Brand's axe flicked from the ground as his eyes darted round for a lurking enemy, an attacker.

  Into sight, from down the deeply rutted track, came a column of bagpipers, four abreast, cheeks puffed. As his alarm receded Brand recognized the familiar face of Cwicca, the former slave of St. Guthlac's at Crowland, in the front rank.

  “They are all playing the same tune,” he bellowed over the din. “Was that your idea?”

  Shef shook his head and jerked a thumb at the pipers. “Theirs. It's a tune they made up. They call it ‘The Boneless Boned.’ ”

  Brand shook his head in disbelief. English slaves mocking the champion of the North himself. He had never thought…

  Behind the pipers, a score of them, stepped a longer column of men clutching halberds, their heads hidden in shining, sharp-rimmed helmets, each man wearing a leather coat with metal plates stitched onto it, and a small round targe strapped to his left forearm. They must be English too, Brand thought as they marched on. How could he tell? Mainly, it was their size—not a man much above five and a half feet. And yet many of the English ran to size and strength as well, to look at the hulks whom Brand had seen fighting to the last round their lord King Edmund. No, these were not only Englishmen, but poor Englishmen. Not thanes of the English, not carls of the Army, but churls. Or slaves. Slaves with arms and armor.

  Brand looked at them in skepticism and disbelief. All his life he had known the weight of mail, known the effort needed to swing an axe or a broadsword. A fully armed warrior might need to carry—and not just to carry, to wield—forty of fifty pounds' weight of metal. How long could a man do that? For the first man whose arm weakened in a battle-line would be dead. In Brand's language, to call a man “the stout” was a valued compliment. He knew seventeen words for “man of small
size,” and all of them were insults.

  He watched the pygmies tramp by, two hundred of them. All held their halberds the same way, he noticed, straight up above the right shoulder. Men marching close together could not afford the luxury of individual decision. But a Viking army would have straggled and held its weapons any way that seemed good, to show proper independence of spirit.

  Behind the halberdiers came team after team of horses, he noticed with surprise. Not the slow, dogged ox-teams that had dragged Shef's catapults round the flank of Ivar's army. The first ten pairs of horses dragged the carts with the disassembled beams he had seen before, the pull-throwers, the traction-catapults that lobbed stones. By each cart walked its crew, a dozen men with the same gray jerkins and white hammer-insignia as the pipers and halberdiers. In each crew, a familiar face. Shef's paid-off veterans of the winter campaign had seen their land, had left men to till it, and had returned to their master, the wealth-giver. Each one now captained a crew of his own, recruited from the slaves of the vanished Church.

  The next ten pairs were something new again. Behind the horses came a thing on broad cart-wheels, a long trail on each lifted high so that the other end bowed like a chicken scratching for worms in the mud. A twist-shooter, the torsion-catapults that shot the great darts. Not disassembled, but ready for action, the high wheels marking the only difference from the one that had killed King Ella: the ones that had brought down the Coiling Worm standard of Ivar. Again, a dozen men crewed each, marching with their winding-levers sloped and bundles of darts over their shoulders.

  As they too tramped by, Brand realized that the bagpipe music, though changed, had not moved into the distance. The five hundred men he had seen already were filing past and then turning back on themselves, lining up in ranks behind him.

  But here at last was something like an army approaching, scores and scores of men, not in ranks, not marching, but slouched on ponies and flooding forward down the track like a gray tide. Mail-shirts, broadswords, helmets, familiar faces. Brand waved cheerfully as he recognized Guthmund—still known as the Greedy—in front of his ship's crew. Others waved back, calling out as the English had not done: Magnus Gaptooth and his friend Kolbein, clutching halberds as well as the rest of their armament, Vestlithi, who had been the helmsman of Sigvarth Jarl; and a dozen others he knew for followers of the Way.

  “Some went off to spend their winnings, like you,” said Shef in Brand's ear. “Others sent the money off or kept it, and stayed on here. Many have bought land. It is their own country they are defending now.”

  The pipers ceased their din simultaneously, and Brand realized he was surrounded by a ring of men. He stared round, counting, calculating.

  “Ten long hundreds?” he said at last. “Half English, half Norse?”

  Shef nodded. “What do you think of them?”

  Brand shook his head. “The horses to pull the teams,” he said. “Twice the speed of ox-teams. But I did not know the English knew how to harness them properly. I have seen them try, and they harness them as if they were oxen, pushing against a pole. Cuts their wind off and they cannot use their strength. How did you realize that?”

  “I told you,” said Shef. “There is always someone who knows better. This time it was one of your men, one of your own crew—Gauti, who walks with a limp. The first time I tried to harness horses he walked by and told me what a fool I was. Then he showed me how you do it in Halogaland, where you always plough with horses. Not new knowledge—old knowledge. Old knowledge not everyone knows. But we worked out how to hitch up the catapults ourselves.”

  “Well and good,” said Brand. “But answer me this: Catapults or no catapults, horse-teams or no horse-teams: how many of your English are fit to stand in a battle-line against trained warriors? Warriors half their weight again and twice their strength? You cannot make front-fighters out of kitchen boys. Better to recruit some of those well-fed thanes we saw. Or their sons.”

  Shef crooked a finger and two halberdiers hustled a prisoner forward. A Norseman—bearded, pale-faced beneath windburn, a head taller than his two escorts. He held his left wrist awkwardly in his right hand, like a man whose collarbone is broken. The face was half-familiar: a man whom Brand had seen once at some forgotten campfire when the Viking army had still been as one.

  “His three crews tried their luck raiding our lands near the Yare two weeks ago,” Shef remarked. “Tell them how you got on.”

  The man stared at Brand with a kind of plea. “Cowards. Wouldn't fight us fair,” he snarled. “They caught us coming out of our first village. A dozen of my men down with great darts through them before we could see where they were coming from. When we charged the machines they held us off with the big axes. Then more of them came round from behind. After they had dealt with us they took me along—my arm was broken so I could not lift shield—to see them attack the ships we had left offshore. They sank one with the stone-throwers. Two got away.”

  He grimaced. “My name is Snaekolf, from Raumariki. I did not know you men of the Way had taught the English so much, or I would not have raided here. Will you speak for me?”

  Shef shook his head before Brand could reply. “His men behaved like beasts in that village,” he said. “We will have no more of it. I kept him to say his piece and he has said it. Hang him when you can find a tree.”

  Hoofbeats came from behind them as the halberdiers hustled the silent Viking away. Shef turned without haste or alarm to meet the rider cantering down the muddy track. The man reached them, dismounted, bowed briefly and spoke. The men of the Wayland army, English and Norse together, stretched their ears to listen.

  “News from your burg, lord jarl. A rider came in yesterday, from Winchester. King Ethelred of the West Saxons is dead, of the coughing-sickness. His brother, your friend Alfred the atheling, is expected to succeed him and take power.”

  “Good news,” said Brand thoughtfully. “A friend in power is always good.”

  “You said ‘expected’?” said Shef. “Who could oppose him? There is no other of that royal house left.”

  Chapter Two

  The young man stared out from a narrow window in the stone. Behind him, very faintly, he could hear the sound of the monks of the Old Minster singing yet another of the many masses he had paid for, masses for the soul of his last brother, King Ethelred. In front of him, all was activity. The wide street that ran east to west through Winchester was crowded with traders, stalls, customers. Through them pushed carts laden with timber. Three separate gangs of men were working on houses either side of the street, digging foundations, driving beams into the soil, fitting planks over timber frames. If he lifted his eyes he could see, round the edge of the town, many more men strengthening the rampart his brother had ordered, driving in the logs and fitting the fighting-platforms. From all directions came the sound of saws and hammers.

  The young man, Alfred the atheling, felt a fierce satisfaction. This was his town: Winchester. The town of his family for centuries, for as long as the English had been on their island, and longer even than that, for he could number ancestors among the British and the Romans too. This Minster was his. His many greats-grandfather King Cenwalh had given the land on which it was to be built to the Church two hundred years before, as well as the land to support it and provide its revenues. Not only his brother Ethelred was buried here, but his father Ethelwulf as well, and his other brothers, and uncles and great-uncles in number more than a man could count. They had lived, they had died, they had gone back to the earth. But it was the same earth. Last of his line, the young atheling did not feel alone.

  Strengthened, he turned to face the saw-edged voice that had been grating away behind him in competition with the sounds from outside. The voice of the bishop of Winchester, Bishop Daniel.

  “What was that you said?” demanded the atheling. “If I come to be king? I am the king. I am the last of the house of Cerdic, whose line goes back to Woden. The witenagemot, the meeting of the councillors, elected me w
ithout debate. The warriors raised me on my shield. I am the king.”

  The bishop's face set mulishly. “What is this talk of Woden, the god of the pagans? That is no qualification for a Christian king. And what the witan do—what the warriors do—that has no meaning in the eyes of God.

  “You cannot be king till you have been anointed with the holy oil, like Saul or David. Only I and the other bishops of the realm can do that. And I tell you—we will not. Not unless you satisfy us you are a true king for a Christian land. To prove this you must cease your alliance with the Church-despoilers. Remove your protection from the one they call the Sheaf. Make war on the pagans. The pagans of the Way!”

  Alfred sighed. Slowly he walked across the room. He rubbed with his fingers at a dark stain on the wall, a mark of burning.

  “Father,” he said patiently. “You were here two years ago. It was the pagans then who sacked this town. Burned every house in it, stripped this minster itself of all the gifts my ancestors had put in it, drove off all the town-folk and priests they could catch to their slave-marts.

  “Those were true pagans. And it was not even the Great Army that did it, the army of the sons of Ragnar, of Sigurth the Snakeeye and Ivar Boneless. It was just a troop of marauders.

  “That is how weak we are. Or were. What I mean to do”—his voice rose suddenly and challengingly—“is see to it that bane never comes on Winchester again, so that my long fathers can rest in peace in their graves. To do that I must have strength. And support. The men of the Way will not challenge us, they will live in fellowship, pagans or no pagans. They are not our enemies. A true Christian king cares for his people. That is what I am doing. Why will you not consecrate me?”

  “A true Christian king,” said the bishop, slowly, carefully, “A true Christian king cares first and above all for the Church. The pagans may have burned the roof from this minster. But they did not take its land and revenues forever. No pagan, not the Boneless One himself, has taken all the Church land for his own, and given it to slaves and hirelings.”