But though they heard, and though they knew, there was no one who would help her. Men would hide their smiles the day after a thrashing; women, to begin with, spoke quietly and consolingly. They all thought that it was the way of the world, however they speculated on how she had failed to please her man.
None of them—except Wulfgar, and he no longer cared—knew the weight of despair, and dismay that came upon her whenever she thought of the sin that she and Alfgar committed every time they lay together, the sin of incest that must surely mark their souls and bodies forever. No one at all knew that she was a murderess as well. Twice in the winter she had felt the life swell within her, though—thank God—she had never felt it quicken. If she had, she might not have had the strength to go into the woods, find the dog's mercury, the birthwort, and drink the bitter drench that she made from it to kill the child of shame in her own womb.
And even that was not what had made her face drawn and lined beyond its years, her walk stooped and shuffling like that of an old woman. It was the memory of pleasure that she hugged to herself. That hot morning in the woods, the leaves above her head, the warm skin and thrusting flesh in her arms: the sense of release and freedom.
An hour, it had lasted. The memory of it blotted out the rest of her young life. How strange he had looked when she had seen him again. The one eye, the fierce face, the air of pain mastered. The moment he handed her back…
Godive's eyes dropped lower and she half ran across the space kept clear outside the pavilion, crowded now with Burgred's personal guard, his hearth-band, and with the hundred officers and errand-runners of the Mercian army marching stolidly on Norfolk at their king's command. Her skirts brushed past the group standing idly listening to a blind minstrel and his attendant. Dimly, without thinking of it, she heard that they were listening to a lay of Sigemund the Dragon-slayer: She had heard it before in her father's hall.
Shef watched her go with a curious chill at his heart. Good, she was there, with her husband, in the camp. Very good; she had failed completely to recognize him, though not six feet away. Bad that she looked so ill and frail. Worse that when he saw her his heart had not turned over as he expected, as it had done every time he had seen her since the day he had known she was a woman. Something was missing in himself. Not his eye. Something in his heart.
Shef dismissed the thought as he finished his song and Hund, his attendant, pushed forward quickly, bag outstretched in appeal. The listening warriors pushed the little man from one to the other as he moved round the ring, but in little more than good nature. His bag filled a little with bread, a lump of hard cheese, half an apple, whatever they had about them. This was no way to work, of course. What a sensible pair would have done was to wait till evening, approach the lord after dinner and ask permission to entertain the company. Then there would be a chance of proper food afterward, a bed for the night, maybe even a gift of money or a bag filled with breakfast.
But their own ineptitude fitted their cover. Shef knew he could never have passed for a professional minstrel. He meant instead to look like a part of the debris of war that covered all England: a younger son crippled in battle, cast out by his lord, turned away as useless by his family, and now trying to keep from starvation by singing memories of glory. Hund's skill had created a story on Shef's body that anyone could read by looking at him. First he had carefully and artistically painted a great scar on Shef's face, the slash-mark of an axe or a sword across the eyes. Then he had bandaged the fake scar with the filthy rags of an English army-leech, letting only the edges of it hint at what lay underneath. Then he had splinted and strapped Shef's legs beneath his wide breeches so that it was impossible for him to bend a knee; and finally, as a refinement of torment, strapped a metal bar to his back to prevent any free movement.
“You dropped your guard,” he had said. “A Viking hit you across the face. As you fell forward you got the back of an axe, or a war-hammer, that crushed your spine. Now your legs can only trail behind you as you hobble on crutches. That's your story.”
But no one had ever asked Shef his story. No experienced warrior needed to. Another reason that the Mercian companions did not bother to interrogate the cripple and his meager attendant was that they were afraid. Every warrior knew that such a fate one day might be his own. Kings and lords might keep a few cripples, pensioners, as signs of their own generosity or out of some family feeling. But gratitude or care for the useless were too expensive luxuries for a land at war.
The ring of listeners turned to other interests. Hund emptied the bag, passed half of the bits to Shef, squatted by him as they both devoured their gifts, heads down. Their hunger, was not an act. For two days now they had worked closer and closer into the center of Burgred's camp, trailing behind it for ten miles each day, Shef slumped on a stolen donkey, living only on what they could pick up, sleeping each night in their clothes in the cold dew.
“You saw her,” muttered Shef.
“When she comes back I will throw her the sign,” replied Hund. Neither spoke again. They knew this was a moment of critical danger.
Eventually Godive could prolong her errand no further. Back in the women's quarters, she knew, the old woman Alfgar had set to watch over her would be growing suspicious, fearful: Alfgar had told her that if his whore of a wife found a lover, he would sell her to the slave-market in Bristol, where the Welsh chiefs bought cheap lives.
She began to make her way back across the still-crowded courtyard. There were the minstrel and his boy still. Poor folk. A blind cripple and a starveling. Even the Welsh would not buy such. How long would they live? Till the winter, maybe. They might outlive her at that.
The minstrel had raised his coarse brown hood against the slow drizzle that was turning the dust into mud. Or maybe it was against the cruel stares of the world, for his face was in his hands. As she came level with them, the attendant bent forward and dropped something onto the ground at her feet. Instinctively, she stooped for it.
It was gold. A gold harp, a tiny brooch for a child's dress. Small as it was, it would buy food for two men for a year. How could a wandering beggar have such a thing? Tied to it with a thread was—
It was a sheaf. Just a few cornstalks threaded together, but tied to make the shape unmistakable. But if the harp meant the minstrel, then the sheaf was—
She turned convulsively to the blind man. His hands came away from his face, bandage in them; she saw the one eye staring deep into her own. Gravely, slowly, the eye winked. As Shef dropped his face into his hands once more he said four words, low but clear. “The privy. At midnight.”
“But it's guarded,” said Godive. “And there's Alfgar…”
Hund stretched out his bag towards her, as if begging in desperation. As the bag touched her, he slipped a small flask from his hand to hers.
“Put it in the ale,” he whispered. “Whoever drinks it will sleep.”
Godive jerked back convulsively. As if rejected, Hund sank back, the minstrel dropped his face once more into his hands, as if too far gone in despair to look up. A few yards away, Godive saw old Polga hobbling towards her, reproaches already forming. She turned away, fighting an urge as she did so to leap, fighting an urge to run and embrace the old woman as if she was a young virgin with never a care or a fear. The lacerations on the backs of her thighs caught her woolen dress and slowed her to a cramped shuffle.
Shef had not expected to sleep on the edge of the abduction, but it had come upon him irresistibly. Too irresistibly to be natural, he feared. As he fell asleep, a voice was speaking. Not the now-recognized, amused voice of his unknown patron. The cold voice of Othin, fosterer of battle, betrayer of warriors, the god who took the sacrifices offered to Dead Man's Strand.
“Be very careful, mannikin,” said the voice. “You are free to act, you and your father, but never forget to pay me my due. I will show you what happens to those who do.”
In his dream, Shef found himself at the very edge of a circle of light, in the dark but lo
oking in. Within the light, a harper sang. He sang to a man, an old man with gray hair, but with a forbidding, cruel beaked face like the ones on his whetstone. The harper sang to this man. But he sang, Shef knew, for the woman who sat at her father's feet. He was singing a lay of love, a lay from the Southlands about a woman who heard the nightingale sing in an orchard and pined away helplessly for her lover. The old king's face relaxed in pleasure, his eyes closing, remembering his youth and the wooing of his dead wife. As he did so the harper, never missing a note, placed a runakefli—a stick carved with runes—by the woman's skirt: the message from her lover. He himself was the lover, Shef knew, and his name was Heoden. The harper was Heorrenda the peerless singer, sent by his lord to woo the woman Hild away from her jealous father, Hagena the remorseless.
Another time, another scene. This time two armies faced each other by a restless strand, the sea hurling in rollers over the kelp. One man stepped forward from the ranks, went toward the other. It was Heoden this time, Shef knew, come to offer bride-price for the stolen bride. He would not have done it if Hagena's men had not caught up with him. He showed the bags of gold, the precious jewels. But the other man, the old man was speaking. Shef knew he was rejecting the offer: for he had drawn the sword Dainslaf, which the dwarves had made, and which could never be sheathed till it had taken a life. The old man was saying he would be satisfied with nothing less than Heoden's life, for the insult put upon him.
Haste and pressure, pressure from somewhere. He must see this last scene. Dark, and a moon shining through scattered clouds. Many men lay dead on the field, their shields cloven, their hearts pierced. Heoden and Hagena lay close together in a death-grapple, each the other's bane. But one figure was still alive, still moving. It was Hild, the woman, who now had lost both husband-abductor and father. She moved among the corpses, singing a song, a galdorleoth which her Finnish nurse had taught her. And the corpses began to move. Began to rise. Stared at each other in the moonlight. Lifted their weapons and began again to strike. As Hild shrieked in rage and frustration her lover and her father ignored her, faced each other, began again to hack, to chop at the splintered shields. So it would go till Doomsday, Shef knew, on the strand of Hoy in the far-off Orkney isles. For this was the Everlasting Battle.
The pressure grew till he woke with a start. Hund was pressing a thumb under his left ear, to bring him awake silently. Around them the night was quiet, broken only by the stirring and coughing of hundreds of sleepers in their tents and shelters, the army of Burgred. The noise of revelry from the great pavilion had finally stopped. A glance at the moon told Shef it was midnight. Time to move.
Rising from their places, the six freed slaves Shef had brought with him, led by Cwicca the bagpipe-player of Crowland, went silently to a cart standing a few yards away. They clustered round it, seized the push-handles and set off. Immediately a great squeaking of ungreased wheels filled the night, provoking immediate complaints. The gang of freedmen took no notice, marched doggedly on. No longer strapped and bandaged, but still dragging himself on his crutches, Shef followed thirty paces behind. Hund stood watching them for a moment, then slipped away in the moonlight toward the edge of camp and the waiting horses.
As the cart shrieked its way toward the pavilion, a thane of Burgred's guard stepped across. Shef heard his snarl of challenge, heard his spear-shaft crack across some unfortunate's shoulder. Wails of complaint, expostulation. As the thane stepped closer to find out what the men were doing he caught the reek of the cart and stepped back again, gagging and waving a hand in front of his face. Dropping his crutches, Shef slid past behind his back and into the maze of the pavilion guy-ropes. From there he could see again the thane ordering Cwicca's gang back, Cwicca cringing but sticking to his litany of explanation: “Clean out them pots now, they said. Chamberlain said he don't want no shit-shoveling in daylight. Nor no shit-shovelers disturbing no ladies. We don't want to do it, lord, we'd sooner be in bed, but we got to do it, it's our hides if it ain't done by morning; chamberlain told me he'd have the skin off me for sure.”
The whine of the slave was unmistakable. As he spoke he kept pushing the cart forward, making sure the aged reek of twenty years of human dung got well to the thane's nostrils. The thane gave up, walked away still waving a hand in front of his face.
It would be hard to make this a story for poets, Shef reflected. No poet had ever found a place for the likes of Cwicca. yet the plan could never work without him. Slaves, freemen, and warriors looked different from each other, walked and talked differently. No thane could ever doubt that Cwicca was a slave on an errand. How could an enemy warrior be so undersized?
The gang reached the door of the women's privy, at the rear of the great quarter-acre pavilion. In front of it stood the permanent sentry, one of Burgred's hearth-companions, six feet tall and fully armed from helmet to studded boots. From his place in the shadows Shef watched intently. It was a critical moment, he knew. Cwicca had blocked as much of the view as possible with his cart, but just the same a watchful eye might be there in the darkness.
The gang surrounded the companion-sentry, pressing round him, deferential but determined, pawing at his sleeve as they tried to explain. Catching his sleeve, catching his arm, pulling him down as a skinny arm shut off his throat. A momentary heave, a strangled half-cry. Then a spurt of blood black in the moonlight as Cwicca passed a razor-sharp knife across vein and artery and windpipe, cutting down to the neckbone with the force of one slash.
As the sentry fell forward, was seized by six pairs of hands and upended into the cart, Shef reached them, grabbing the helmet, spear and shield. In a moment he too was out in the moonlight, waving the dung-cart impatiently on. Now any watchful eye would see only what was normal: the armed six-footer waving forward a gang of dwarvish toilers. As Cwicca's gang got the door open, pressed round it with their shovels and buckets, Shef stood for a moment in full view. Then stepped back into the shadow as if to watch the slaves more closely.
A moment later and he was through the door. And Godive was in his arms, naked beneath her shift.
“I couldn't get my clothes,” she whispered. “He locks them away every night. And Alfgar—Alfgar took the drink. But Wulfgar sleeps also within our booth, and he would drink no ale because it is a fast-day. He saw me leave. He may cry out if I do not return.”
Good, thought Shef, his brain cold as ice in spite of the warmth in his arms. Now what I meant to do all along will seem natural to her. So much less to explain. Maybe she will never know that I did not come for her.
Behind him, Cwicca's men were pressing in, still giving the impression of men trying to work quietly but openly.
“I am going into the sleeping-chamber,” Shef whispered to them. “The lady will show me. If you hear an alarm, flee at once.”
As they stepped into the unlit passage between the little individual sleeping-places of Burgred's most trusted courtiers—Godive moving with the sureness of one who had walked it a hundred times—Shef heard Cwicca's voice behind him. “Well, since we're here we might as well do the job. What's a few buckets of shit in a day's work?”
Godive paused as they reached the lowered canvas flap, pointed, spoke almost soundlessly. “Wulfgar. To the left. He sleeps in our room many nights, so I can turn him. He is in his box.”
I have no gag, thought Shef. I expected him to be asleep. Silently he caught the hem of Godive's shift, began to lift it up over her body. For a moment she caught at the material with automatic modesty, then gave way, let him strip her naked. The first time I have done that, thought Shef. I never imagined it would be no pleasure. But if she enters naked, Wulfgar, will be confused. It may give me an extra moment.
He pushed her bare back forward, felt the wince and the familiar feel of dried blood. Rage filled him, rage at Alfgar, rage too at himself. Why had he not thought, not once these long months, what they must be doing to her?
Moonlight through the canvas showed Godive walking naked across the room to the bed where
her husband lay in drugged sleep. A grunt of surprise, anger from the short, padded box to the left. In an instant Shef was standing over it, looking down into his stepfather's face. He saw the recognition, saw the mouth open in horror. Stuffed the bloody shift firmly between Wulfgar's teeth. Instant resistance, a furious twisting like a giant trapped snake. Though Wulfgar had neither arms nor legs, he still struggled desperately with all the force of his back and belly muscles to get a stump over the edge of the box, maybe roll to the floor. Too much noise, Shef knew, and the privileged couples sleeping in the little canvas boxes around him would wake as well, perhaps decide to intervene.
Perhaps not. Even noble couples learned to turn a deaf ear to the sounds of love. The sounds of punishment too. Shef thought of Godive's scarred back, thought of his own, conquered the momentary repugnance. A knee in the belly. Hands forcing the shift deep down into the throat. Twisting the ends behind the head and knotting them, knotting them again. And then Godive was with him, still naked, thrusting forward the rawhide ropes Alfgar's men used to fasten their trunks of belongings onto the pack-mules. Quickly they ran the ropes round the sleeping-box, not tying Wulfgar down, but making sure he could not climb out, crawl across the floor. As they finished, Shef waved Godive to the other end of the box. Carefully they lifted it from its stand, placed it on the floor. Now he could not even tip the box over, make a noise.
The short struggle over, Shef took two paces across to the big bed, looked down at Alfgar, asleep in drugged slumber in the moonlight. His mouth hung open, a steady snore coming from his throat. Still a handsome man, Shef recognized. He had had Godive these twelve months and more. He felt no urge to cut his throat. He needed Alfgar still. For the plan. And yet a gesture. A gesture would make the plan work better.
Godive was coming forward, in gown and mantle now, recovered from the box where Alfgar had locked them. In her hand she held her little seamstress's scissors, a look of set determination on her face. Quietly Shef blocked her, forced the hand down. He touched her back, looked inquiringly.
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