Guthmund nodded, grudgingly.
“So each group must do what it does best. Your men, sail. With the ship and the machines. My freedmen, wind their machines and shoot. Alfred and his Englishmen, stand still to do what they're told. Trust me, Guthmund. You did not believe me last time. Or the time before. Or when we raided the minster at Beverley.”
Guthmund nodded again, slightly more willingly this time. As he turned to go he added one more remark.
“Lord jarl, you aren't a sailor. But don't forget another thing in all this. It's harvest now. When the night grows as long as the day, every sailor knows, the weather changes. Don't forget the weather.”
The news of Alfred's total defeat reached Shef and his truncated army two days' march south. Shef listened to the exhausted, white-faced thane who brought the news in the center of an interested circle—he had abandoned the custom of council meetings in private as soon as the still-grumbling Guthmund and his Norse fellows had boarded their captured boats. The freedmen watched his face as he listened, marking that it changed expression only twice. The first time, when the thane cursed the Frankish archers—who had shot such a rain of arrows that twice Alfred's advancing army had been forced to stand and raise its shields, only to be caught motionless both times by the Frankish cavalry charge. The second time when the thane admitted that no one had seen or heard of Alfred the king since the day of the disaster.
In the silence that followed the story, Cwicca, presuming on his status as Shef's companion and rescuer, had asked what all thought. “What do we do now, lord? Turn back, or go on?”
Shef answered immediately. “Go on.”
Opinion round the campfires that night was divided about the sense of that. Ever since the Viking Waymen had left with Guthmund, the army had seemed a different creature. The freed English slaves had always secretly feared their allies—so like their former masters in strength and violence, superior to any English master in warlike reputation. With the Vikings gone, the army marched as if on holiday: pipes playing, laughter in the ranks, calling out to the harvesters in the fields, who no longer fled at the sight of the first scouts and advance-guard.
Yet the fear the army had felt had also been a guarantee. Proud as they were of their machines, their halberds and their crossbows, the ex-slaves did not have the self-belief that comes from a lifetime of winning battles.
“All right saying ‘Go on,’ ” said one anonymous voice that night. “What happens when we get there? No Alfred. No Norse-folk. No Wessexers to help out like we were promised. Just us. Eh? What then?”
“We'll shoot 'em down,” said Oswi confidently. “Like we did with Ivar and them Ragnarssons. 'Cos we got the machines and they haven't. And the crossbows and all.”
A mutter of agreement greeted his statement. Yet every morning the camp marshals came to Shef with a new and growing figure: the number of men who had slipped away in the night, taking with them freedom and the silver pennies already paid to each man from the spoils of Ivar, but forfeiting the promise of land and stock in the future. Already, Shef knew, he had not enough men in the ranks both to man his fifty machines—pull-throwers and twist-shooters—and to use the two hundred pulley-wound crossbows that Udd's forges had produced.
“What will you do?” asked Farman, Frey's priest, the fourth morning of the march. He, Ingulf and Geirulf the priest of Tyr were the only Norsemen who had insisted on staying with Shef and the freedmen.
Shef shrugged.
“That is no answer.”
“I will tell you the answer when you tell me where Thorvin and Godive have gone. And why. And when they will come back.”
This time it was Farman's turn to give no answer.
Daniel and Alfgar had spent many angry days of frustration, first finding the base of the Frankish Cross-wearers, and then getting through its guards and outposts to see its leader. Their appearance had been against them: two men in soiled and sodden cloaks after nights in the open, riding bareback on the sorry nags that Alfgar had stolen. The first sentry they had approached had been amazed to see any Englishmen come near the camp of their own will: the local churls had fled long since, taking their wives and daughters with them if they were lucky. Yet he had not troubled to call an interpreter for Alfgar's English or Daniel's Latin. After several minutes of shouting up at him above the gate of the camp stockade, he had meditatively fitted arrow to bow and shot it into the ground at Daniel's feet. Alfgar had pulled Daniel away at once.
After that they had tried several times to approach the daily cavalcade of warriors streaming out from the Hastings base, to rob and forage while King Charles waited unhurriedly for the further challenge he was sure must come. The first time had cost them their horses, the second, Daniel's episcopal ring, which he had waved too eagerly. Eventually, and in despair, Alfgar had taken a hand. As Daniel shouted angrily at a Frankish priest they had discovered picking over the ruins of a ransacked church, he pushed him aside.
“Machina,” he said clearly, in the fragment of Latin he possessed. “Ballista. Catapulta. Nos videre”—he pointed to his eyes. “Nos dicere. Rex.” He waved at the camp with its flying banners, two miles off, made speaking gestures.
The priest looked at him, nodded, turned back to the barely coherent bishop and began to talk to him in strangely accented Latin, cutting Daniel's furious complaints short, demanding information. After a while he had called to his guard of mounted archers and set off back toward the camp, taking the two Englishmen with him. After that they had been passed from hand to hand, with cleric after cleric coming in to extract more and more of Daniel's story.
But now at last the clerics had gone. It was Alfgar, his cloak brushed and a substantial meal inside him, who stood in front of Daniel, facing a trestle-table, behind it a group of men with the look of warriors: one of them wearing the gold circle of royalty over a bald head. At his side stood an Englishman, listening carefully to what the king said. Eventually he turned to Alfgar, speaking the first English they had heard since they arrived in the camp.
“The priests have told the king,” he said, “that you have more sense than the bishop behind you. But the bishop says that you two alone know the truth of what has happened up there in the North. And that for some reason”—the Englishman smiled—“you are anxious to help the king and the Christian religion with information. Now the king takes no interest in your bishop's complaints and proposals. He wants to know, first about the army of Mercia, second about the army of the heathen Ragnarssons, and thirdly about this army of heretics which his own bishops are especially anxious for him to meet and fight. Tell him all that, behave yourself sensibly, and it will do you good. The king will have to have some Englishmen he can trust once his kingdom is established.”
Putting on his sincerest expression of loyalty, and looking the Frankish king firmly in the eye, Alfgar began his account of the death of Burgred and the defeat by the Ouse. As he spoke on, his English translated phrase by phrase into French, he began to act out the workings of the machines with which Ivar had demoralized Burgred's army. He laid stress on the machines which the Way-folk also had, and which he had seen again and again in the previous winter's battles. His courage rising, he drew the hammer-sign in wine on the king's table, told of the freeing of Church-slaves.
Eventually the king stirred, threw a question over his shoulder. A cleric appeared from the shadows, took stylus and wax, began to draw on his tablets the picture of an onager. Then a torsion-catapult. Then a counterweight-machine.
“He says, are these what you have seen?” asked the translator.
Alfgar nodded.
“He says, interesting. His learned men know how to make them also, taking them from a book by one Vegetius. He says he did not know the English were learned enough to make such things. But among the Franks these are used only for sieges. To use them against an army of horsemen would be foolish. Horsemen move too fast for them to be effective. But the king thanks you for your goodwill, and wishes you to ride with him
when he takes the field. He believes your knowledge of his enemies will be useful. Your companion will be sent to Canterbury, to await the inquiry of the legate of the Pope.” The English interpreter smiled again. “I think your chances will be better than his.”
Alfgar straightened, bowed, and walked backward from the table as he would never have done for Burgred, firmly resolving to find a teacher of French before nightfall.
King Charles the Bald watched him go, turned again to his wine. “The first of the rats,” he remarked to his constable Godefroi.
“Rats with siege-engines they use in the field. Do you not fear what he says?”
The king laughed. “Crossing the Narrow Sea is like going back to the time of our forefathers, when the kings rode to battle in ox-chariots. In all this country there is nothing to fight but the Norse brigands, harmless away from their ships, and the brave, stupid swordsmen we beat the other day. Long mustaches and slow feet. No horses, no lances, no stirrups, no generals.
“We must take our precautions now we know their way of fighting.” He scratched his beard thoughtfully. “But it will take more than a few machines to beat the strongest army in Christendom.”
Chapter Ten
This time Shef was anxious for the vision he knew would come. His mind buzzed with doubts, with possibilities. Yet he had no certainty. Something must come, he knew, from outside to help him. It came usually when he was exhausted, or sleeping off a heavy meal. That day he had walked deliberately beside his pony, ignoring the chaff from the ranks. In the evening, had stuffed himself slowly with the porridge they had made from the last of the winter store, before the new grain came from the harvesters. He stretched out to sleep, fearful that his mysterious adviser would fail him.
“Yes,” said the voice in the dream. Shef felt an instant surge of relief as he recognized it. The amused voice which had told him to seek the ground, which had sent him the dream of the wooden horse. The voice of the nameless god with the sly face who had shown him the chessqueen. This was the god who sent him answers. If he could recognize them.
“Yes,” said the voice, “you will see what you need to know. But not what you think you need to know. Your questions are always ‘What?’ and ‘How?' But I shall show you ‘Why?’ And ‘Who?’ ”
Instantly he found himself on a cliff, so high up he could see the whole world stretched out before him, the dust-plumes rising, the armies marching, just as he had seen them the day they killed King Edmund. Again he felt that if he narrowed his eye exactly right, he would be able to pick out anything he needed to know: the words on the lips of the Frankish commander, the place where Alfred lurked—live or dead. Shef gazed round anxiously, trying to orient himself so he could see what he needed to.
Something turned his head away from the panorama below, made him stare into the far, far distance, remote from the real world in space and time.
What he saw was a man walking along a mountain road, a man with a dark, lively, humorous face, one not entirely to be trusted, the face of the unknown god of his dreams. Now that man, Shef thought, drifting into the vision, that man has more than one skin.
The man, if man he was, came to a hut, a hovel in fact, a grubby shelter of poles and bark reinforced with turf and inept handfuls of clay on the chinks. That was the way men lived in the old time, Shef thought. They know better now. But who showed them better?
By the hut a man and a woman stopped their tasks and stared at the newcomer: a stranger couple, both bent over from continuous work, short and squat in physique, brown haired and sallow, bow-legged, crooked-fingered. “Their names are Ai and Edda,” the god's voice said.
They were welcoming the newcomer, showing him in. They offered him food, burnt porridge, full of husks, full too of stone particles from being hand-ground in a pestle and mortar, moistened only with goat's milk. The newcomer seemed undaunted by this welcome, talked cheerfully; when the time came, lay down on the heap of ill-cured skins between his host and his hostess.
In the middle of the night he turned to Edda, still dressed in her long black rags. Ai lay in a deep sleep, unmoving, stung perhaps by a sleep-thorn. The clever-looking man pulled up the rags, mounted upon her, thrust away without preliminaries.
The stranger in the vision rose next morning and went his way, leaving Edda behind him to swell, to moan, to bring forth children as squat and ugly as herself—but more active, more industrious. They carted dung, they carried brushwood, they tended swine, they broke clods with wooden spades. From them come, the Shef-mind said, the race of thralls. Once I too might have been a thrall. No longer.
The traveler went on his way, walking briskly, along through the mountains. The next night he came to a log cabin, well-built, its ends fitted into each other in deep, axe-cut grooves, a window on one side with solid, well-fitting shutters, a privy outside over a deep ravine. Again a couple paused from their work as the traveler came up to them: a stout and powerful pair, ruddy-faced, thick-necked—the man bald, with trimmed beard, the woman round-faced and long-armed, built for carrying burdens. She wore a long brown gown, but a woolen mantle lay close by to be put on in the cool evening. Bronze clasps lay ready to fix it on. He wore loose trousers like a warrior of the Viking fleets, but his leather shirt was cut into thongs at waist and sleeve, for show. This is how most folk live now, the Shef-mind thought. “Their names are Afi and Amma,” said the voice.
Again they invited the newcomer in, offered him food, plates of bread with fried chops of pork, ready-salted, the grease from the frying running into the bread—food for heavy laborers and strong men. Then they retired for the night, all three lying down together on a straw mattress with woolen blankets to pull over them. In the night Afi snored, sleeping in his shirt. The traveler turned to Amma, wearing only a loose gown, whispered in her ear, took her soon with the same speed and zest as before.
Again the newcomer went on his way, left Amma to swell, to bring forth children with silent stoicism, as strong and well-built as herself, but maybe more intelligent, ready to try a new thing sooner. Her children tamed oxen, timbered barns, hammered out ploughs, made fishing nets, adventured on the sea. From them, Shef knew, came the race of carls. Once upon a time I was a carl too. But that time has gone as well.
On the newcomer went, his road tending now to the great plains. He came to a house set back from the road, a garth round it of hammered posts. The house itself had several rooms, one to sleep in, one to eat in, one for the animals, all with windows or broad doorways. A man and a woman sat outside it on a well-crafted bench, called to the wayfarer, offered him water from their deep well. They were a handsome couple, with long faces, broad foreheads, soft skin unmarked by toil. When the man stood to greet the stranger he overtopped him by half a head. His shoulders were broad and his back straight, his fingers strong from twisting bowstrings. “These two are Fathir and Mothir,” said the voice of the god.
They led their visitor in, onto a floor strewn with sweet-smelling rushes, sat him at a table, brought him water in a bowl to wash his hands in, set before him roast fowl, griddle-cakes in a basin, butter and blood sausage. After they had eaten, the woman spun on her wheel, the man sat on a settle and talked with his visitor.
When night came the host and hostess seemed under some compulsion as they guided their guest to the broad feather bed with its down bolsters, placed him between them, lay while Fathir fell asleep. Again the visitor turned to his hostess, fondled her with fingers, served her like a bull or a stallion, as he had the two before.
The visitor went, the woman swelled, from her belly came the race of jarls, the earls, the fighting men. They swam fjords, tamed horses, beat out metal, reddened swords, and fed the ravens on the plains of slaughter. That is how men wish to live now, thought the Shef-mind. Unless it is how someone wishes them to live…
But this cannot be the end: Ai to Afi to Fathir, Edda to Amma to Mothir. What of Son and Daughter, what of Great-great-grandchild? And Thrall to Carl to Jarl. I am the jarl now. But what co
mes after Jarl? What are his sons called, and how far down the road will the wanderer go? The son of Jarl is King, the son of King is…
Shef found himself suddenly awake, perfectly conscious of what he had just seen, perfectly aware that in some way it related to himself. What he had seen, he realized, was a breeding program, designed to make better people as men bred better horses or hunting-dogs. But better in what way? Cleverer? Better at finding new knowledge? That was what the priests of the Way would say. Or quicker to change? Readier to use the knowledge they knew already?
One thing Shef was sure of. If the breeding was done by the tricky, amused face he had seen on the wanderer, the face that was also that of his god-protector, then even the better people would find there was a price to be paid. Yet the wanderer meant him to succeed. Knew there was a solution, if he could find it.
In the dark hour before dawn Shef pulled on his dew-soaked leather shoes, rose from the rustling straw pallet, wrapped his blanket-cloak round him and stepped out into the chill air of the late English summer. He walked through the still-sleeping camp like a ghost, with no weapon except the whetstone-scepter, cradled in the crook of his left arm. His freedmen did not ditch and stockade their camps like the ever-active Vikings, but at the edge sentries stood. Shef walked up to the shoulder of one of them, one of Lulla's halberdiers, leaning on his weapon. His eyes were open but he paid no heed as Shef walked quietly past him and out into the dark wood.
Birds began to chirp as the sky paled in the east. Shef picked his way carefully through the tangles of hawthorn and nettle, found himself on a narrow path. It reminded him of the path he had followed with Godive the year before, as they had fled from Ivar. Sure enough, it led to a clearing and a shelter.
The Hammer and The Cross thatc-1 Page 45