Only in the first six boats was there extra work for the men. In each, a ton and a half of dead weight squatted, carefully stowed before the mast: the onagers of Erkenbert, all the forges of York Minster had been able to turn out in the weeks Ivar had given them. Ivar had raged furiously about the weight, demanded that they be lightened. Impossible, the black archdeacon had replied. This is the way they are drawn in Vegetius. More convincingly, lighter models had knocked themselves to pieces in a dozen shots. The kick of the wild ass that gave these machines their name came when the throwing-arm struck the crossbeam. If there were no crossbeam the stone would not be hurled out with its astonishing force and velocity. A light crossbeam, however padded, would crack.
Ivar's meditations were interrupted by loud retching from behind him. Each onager was served by a dozen slaves from the minster; in command of them all, torn deeply against his will from the studies and library of the minster, Erkenbert himself. Now one of the lubbers had succumbed to the long, North Sea swell and was vomiting his heart out over the side. The wrong side, naturally, so that the meager contents of his stomach blew back over the nearest rowers, provoking shouts and curses, disruption of the long, automatic rowing-stroke.
As Ivar stepped toward the disturbance, hand dropping to the gutting-knife at his belt, Hamal the horse-swain, the man who had saved Ivar from the lost battle at March, moved quickly. The slave grasped the man by the scruff of his neck. A violent blow across the side of the head, repeated as Hamal heaved the wretched man off his feet and flung him across the thwarts to the lee side, there to retch in peace.
“We'll have the hide off him tonight,” said Hamal. Ivar stared unblinkingly for a moment, knowing well what Hamal was doing. Decided to leave it for the moment. Turned back to his thoughts in the prow.
Hamal caught the eye of one of the rowers, mimed wiping sweat from his brow. Ivar killed a man a day now on average, mostly from the valueless slaves of the minster. At that rate they would have no one left to wind a machine at all by the time they met the enemy. And no one could be sure who Ivar would turn on next. He could be diverted, sometimes, by sufficient cruelty.
Thor send that we meet the enemy soon, thought Hamal. The only thing that will cool Ivar's temper for good is the head and balls of the man who bested him—Skjef Sigvarthsson. Without that, he will destroy everyone around him. That is why his brothers have sent him out this time on his own. With me as his nursemaid, and the Snakeeye's foster father to report.
If we don't meet the enemy soon, thought Hamal, I am going to desert the first chance I get. Ivar owes me his life. But he is too mad to pay. And yet if he takes his rage out in the right quarter, something tells me there are fortunes yet to be gained, here in the rich kingdoms of the South. Rich and ripe to fall.
“It's a bugger,” said Oswi, once slave to St. Aethelthryth's of Ely, now captain of a catapult-team in the Army of Norfolk and the Way. There were nods of agreement from his crew as they looked thoughtfully at their much-loved but not-quite-trusted artillery piece. It was one of the torsion-catapults, the wheeled twist-shooters. Every man in the crew was desperately proud of it. They had given it a name weeks before: “Dead Level.” They had polished every wooden part of it many times over. Yet they were afraid of it.
“You can count the turns you give to the cogwheels,” said Oswi, “so it don't tighten too much.”
“And I put my head right down on the ropes every time and listen to 'em,” said one of his mates, “till I can hear they're in tune like a harper's harp-strings.”
“But she'll still bloody well break one day when you don't expect it; they always do. Break one or two of us for breakfast.”
A dozen heads nodded gloomily.
“What we need are stronger wooden arms,” said Oswi. “They're what goes.”
“Wrap 'em with rope?”
“No, that would work loose.”
“I used to work in the forge at my village,” the newest member of the team said hesitatingly. “Maybe if they had iron supports…”
“No, those wooden arms bend a bit,” said Oswi firmly. “They have to. Anything iron would stop them doing that.”
“Depends on the iron. If you heat and reheat and hammer it the right way the iron turns into what my old master called steel. But it's steel that bends a bit, not soft, like bad iron, but with spring in it. Now if we put a strip of that along the inside of each of the arms it would bend with the wood—and stop them flying apart if the wood broke.”
Thoughtful silence.
“What about the jarl?” asked a questioning voice.
“Yes, what about the jarl?” came another voice from behind the half-circle. Shef, strolling round the camp in response to Brand's advice, had seen the cluster of intent faces and had walked silently up to overhear.
Consternation and alarm. Swiftly the group of catapulteers rearranged itself so that their newest member was left in the center, to face the unpredictable.
“Er, Udd here's got an idea,” said Oswi, also shifting responsibility.
“Let's hear it.”
As the new recruit, first hesitatingly, then fluently and with confidence, began to describe the procedure of making mild steel, Shef watched him. An insignificant little man, even smaller than the others, with weak eyes and a stoop. Any one of Brand's Vikings would have dismissed him immediately as useless to an army, not worth his rations even as a latrine-digger. Yet he knew something. Was it new knowledge? Or was it old knowledge, something many smiths had always known, given the right conditions, but had been unable to pass on except to an apprentice?
“This steel bends, you say,” said Shef. “And springs back? Not like my sword”—tie drew from its sheath the fine Baltic sword Brand had given him, made like his own self-forged and long-lost weapon of mixed strips of soft iron and hard steel—“but made in one piece? Springy all the way through?”
Udd, the little man, nodded firmly.
“All right.” Shef thought a moment. “Oswi, tell the camp marshal you and your team are off all duties. Udd, tomorrow morning go to Thorvin's forge with as many men as you need to help, and start making strips the way you say. Fit the first pair to ‘Dead Level’ and see if they work. If they do, fit them to all the machines.
“And Udd: When it's done I want to see some of this new metal. Make some extra strips for me.”
Shef walked away as the horns blew to dowse fires and to mount the night-guard. Something there, he thought. Something he could use. And he needed something to use. For in spite of the newfound confidence of Thorvin and his friends, he knew that if they just repeated what they had done before, they would be destroyed. Every stroke teaches its own counter. And he had enemies everywhere, in the South and in the North, in the Church and among the pagans. Bishop Daniel. Ivar. Wulfgar and Alfgar. King Burgred. They would not stand up to be shot at a second time.
He did not know what would come, but it would be unpredictable. It was vital to be unpredictable in reply.
The dream, or vision, came this time almost as a relief. Shef felt himself surrounded by difficulties. He knew he did not know the way through them. If some greater agency did, he would welcome the knowledge. He did not think it was Othin in his guise as Bölverk, Bale-Worker, who was guiding him, for all that Thorvin continued to urge him to accept the spear-pendant, the sign of Othin. But who else would help him? If he knew, Shef reflected, he would wear that one's sign.
In his sleep, he found himself suddenly looking down. Down from what seemed a great height, at what he realized, as his eyes cleared, was a great board. A chessboard, with the pieces on it. In the middle of a game. And the players of the game were the mighty figures he had seen before: the gods of Asgarth, so Thorvin said, here playing at chess on their sacred board with squares of gold and silver.
But there were more than two playing. So gigantic were the shapes round the board that Shef could not bring them into focus all at once, any more than he could a mountain range, but he could see one of the play
ers. Not the ruddy, Brand-shaped figure he had seen before, who was Thor, not the one with the axe for a face and a voice like a calving glacier, who was Othin. This one seemed somehow sharper, slighter, his eyes not level. An expression of intense glee crossed his face as he shifted a piece. Loki the Trickster perhaps. Loki, whose fire burned always in the holy circle, but whose followers went unknown.
No, Shef reflected. Tricky this god might be, but he did not have the Loki-look. The look of Ivar. As his vision cleared, Shef realized he had seen him before. It was the god who had looked at him as if he were a horse to be bought. And the expression on his face—surely this too was the owner of the ever-amused voice which twice had given him warnings. That is my protector, thought Shef. It is not a god I know. I wonder, what are his attributes, his purpose? What is his sign?
The board they were playing on, Shef saw suddenly, was not a board but a mappa. Not a mappamundi, but a map of England. He strained forward to see, sure now that the gods knew where his enemies were and what they planned. As he did so he realized that he was up on a mantelpiece, like a mouse in a king's hall. But like a mouse, though he could see, he could not understand. The faces were moving their pieces, laughing in voices like rumbles of thunder. None of it made any sense to him. And yet he was here, he had been brought here, he was sure, to see and understand.
The gleeful face had turned up toward him. Shef stood transfixed, unsure whether to duck back or to freeze. But the face knew he was there. It held a piece up to him, the other gods remaining intent on the game.
It was telling him, Shef realized, that this was the piece he had to take.
What was it? It was a queen, his eyes made out at last. A queen. With the face of…
The unknown god looked down, waved an arm dismissively. As if caught by a gale, Shef was toppling away, away back toward his camp, his bed, his blankets. As he fell he recognized in an instant whose the face was on the chess-queen.
Shef sat up suddenly with a gasp. Godive, he thought slowly, his heart thumping. It must be my own wish that sent me that vision. How could a girl affect the map of the contending enemies?
Outside Shef's sleeping-chamber, noise and upheaval, horses stamping, booted feet striding toward him past the cries of his bower-thanes. Pulling on a tunic, Shef opened the door before the boots reached him.
Facing him was a familiar figure: the young Alfred, still crowned with a golden circle, still as fresh-faced and full of nervous energy as before, but with a new grimness in his eyes.
“I gave you this shire,” he said without preamble. “I think now I should have given it to the other one, your enemy. Alfgar. Alfgar and his cripple-father. For between the two of them, and my traitor-bishops and King Burgred my brother-in-law, they have hounded me out of my kingdom.”
Alfred's expression changed, showed a sudden weariness and defeat. “I am here as a suppliant. Driven out of Wessex. No time to rally my loyal thanes. The army of Mercia marching on my heels. I saved you. Will you, now, save me?”
As Shef collected his thoughts to reply, he heard more running feet, coming from outside the circle of torches round Alfred. A messenger, too anxious and hasty to remember protocol. As soon as the man saw Shef standing in the doorway, he poured out his alarm.
“Beacons, lord jarl! Beacons for a fleet at sea. Forty ships at least. The men on watch, they say it can only be—it can only be Ivar.”
As Shef watched the consternation on the face of King Alfred, something cold inside him drew a conclusion. Alfgar on one side. Ivar on the other. And what have they in common? I took a woman from one. The other took the same woman from me. At least I can be sure now that it was a true dream the god sent me, whoever he may be. Godive is the key to this. Someone is telling me to use her.
Chapter Five
Early in his experience of being jarl, Shef had discovered that news was never quite as good or quite as bad as it was made to seem on first hearing. So it proved again. Beacons were a good way of signaling danger, and direction, and even—with care—number. They said nothing about distance. The beacon-chain started far up the coast, in Lincolnshire. It could mean only that Ivar—if Ivar it was—had left the Humber with, as Brand had immediately pointed out, the wind dead in his teeth. He could be three days off, or even more.
As for King Burgred, with Alfgar and Wulfgar in his train, Alfred was sure that he was in pursuit and that he meant, on the urgings of his bishops, nothing less than the entire destruction of the land of the Way, and the submission of the whole of England south of the Humber to his rule. But Alfred was a young man who rode hard, and who had only his personal bodyguard with him. Burgred was famous for the splendor of his camp-furniture and the number of ox-wagons needed to carry it. Forty miles to him was four days' march.
Shef might expect a heavy stroke from each of his enemies. Not a sudden one.
It would have made no difference in any case. As Shef dealt with the immediate necessities of the situation, he thought only of what he knew he must do—and who he could trust in this situation to help him. There was only one answer to the latter. As soon as he could get rid of all his council-members on one errand or another, he slipped through the gates of his burg, sent back the troubled guards who had tried to accompany him, and made his way as unobserved as possible through the crowded streets surrounding it.
Hund was, as he expected, busy in his booth, treating a woman whose evident terror at the sight of the jarl suggested a guilty conscience: a drab or a hedge-witch. Hund continued to treat her as if she were a thane's lady. Only after she had gone did he sit down by his friend, unspeaking as usual.
“We saved Godive once,” said Shef. “Now I am going to do it again. I need your help. I cannot tell anyone else what I am doing. Will you help?”
Hund nodded. Hesitated. “I'll help you any time, Shef. But I have to ask. Why have you decided to do this now? You could have tried to get Godive back any time the last few months, when there was far less on your mind.”
Shef coldly wondered once more how much he could safely say. Already he knew what he needed Godive for: as bait. Nothing could enrage Alfgar more than knowing Shef had stolen her away. If he made it seem like an insult from the Way, Alfgar's allies would be drawn in. He wanted them to pursue Godive like a great fish striking. Onto the hook of Ivar. And Ivar too could be baited. By a reminder of the woman he had lost, and the man who had taken her.
But he dared say none of this to Hund, not even to his childhood friend. Hund had been a friend of Godive too.
Shef allowed concern and confusion to show on his face. “I know.” he said. “I should have done it before. But now, suddenly, I am afraid for her.”
Hund looked his friend steadily in the eye. “All right,” he said. “I dare say you have good reason for what you do. Now, how are we going to work it?”
“I'll get out at dusk. Meet me where we used to shoot the catapults. During the day I want you to collect half a dozen men. But listen. They must not be Norse. All English. All freedmen. And they must all look like freedmen, understand. Like you.” Undersized and underfed, Shef meant. “With horses and rations for a week. But dressed shabby, not in the clothes we've given them.
“And there's another thing, Hund, and this is why I need you. I am too easy to recognize with this one eye”—the one eye you left me with, Shef did not say. “When we went into the Ragnarsson camp that did not matter. Now, if I am to go into a camp with my half brother and stepfather in it, I need a disguise. Now, what I thought was…”
Shef poured out his plan, Hund occasionally altering or improving on it. At the end the little leech slowly tucked his apple-pendant, for Ithun, out of sight, adjusting his tunic so nothing showed.
“We can do it,” he remarked, “if the gods are with us. Have you thought what will happen here in the camp when they wake up and find you gone?”
They will think I have deserted them, Shef realized. I will leave a message, to let them think I have done it for a woman. And yet it wil
l not be true.
He felt the old king's whetstone dragging at his belt, where he had tucked it. Strange, he thought, when I went into the camp of Ivar, the only thought I had in my head was to rescue Godive, to take her away with me and find happiness together. Now I mean to do the same again. But this time—this time I am not doing it for her. I am not even doing it for me. I am doing it because it must be done. It is the answer. And she and I: we are just parts of the answer.
We are like the little cogs that turn the ropes that wind the catapults. They cannot say they do not want to turn anymore, and neither can we.
He thought of the strange tale of Frothi's mill which Thorvin had told him, about the giant-maidens, and the king who would not let them rest. I would like to give them rest, he told himself, and the others who are caught up in this mill of war. But I do not know how to release them. Or myself.
When I was a thrall, then I was free, he thought.
Godive came through the women's door at the back of King Burgred's immense camp-pavilion and began to edge down the long rows of trestle-tables, at the moment unfilled. She had a task, in case anyone questioned her—a message for King Burgred's brewer to broach extra barrels, and instructions from Alfgar to stand over him while he did it. Actually, she had had to get out of the stifling atmosphere of the women's quarters before her heart burst with fear and grief.
She was no longer the beauty she had been. The other women, she knew, had noticed, were talking among themselves about what had happened to her, talking with malicious pleasure at the fall of a favorite. They did not know what the causes were. They must know that Alfgar beat her, beat her with increasing fury and frenzy as the weeks went by, beat her with the birch on her bare body till the blood ran and her shift stuck to her morning after morning. Such things could not be done quietly. Even in the timber hall of Tamworth, Burgred's capital, some noise carried through the planks and panels. In the tents where kings spent the summer, the campaigning months…
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