by David Drake
Starkad laughed. "Well, I wasn't raised to be a farmer, my friend. And if you were, you hid the fact well enough the time we tried our hands at it. . . . No doubt this destruction's very awful and I should feel miserable about it, but right now I'm a lot more concerned about whether there's a roof left to keep some of this damned rain off us for the night."
Mael squinted at the sky. "Yeah, well," he said. "Not likely we're going to find a better place."
One of the outbuildings had not been burned. Its door was wrenched off, and rotted grain floored the lightless interior. Mael settled himself glumly in a corner, deciding whether to strip off his armor for comfort or leave it on for safety. The metal creaked and galled him every time he moved. Cursing under his breath, the Irishman pulled the mail over his head and began to unlace his gambeson as well.
Starkad ducked back into the rain. Mael heard his axe thock loudly. Mael froze, then realized that the blade had rung on the wood, not metal or bone. He resumed undressing as the Dane continued to chop in the gloom. After a few minutes, Starkad returned. He was clutching an armload of wood lopped from the roof beam of one of the houses.
"You're not going to build a fire?" Mael grumbled.
"Sure I am," said Starkad. He dumped the billets and leaned his axe against the wall. Drawing his big dagger, he began to slice curls from a log.
"It's too wet to burn. And anyway, it's not safe. Even if you don't burn us both up, you'll call down some patrol of Cerdic's. Then it'll all be over."
"This is dry on the inside," the Dane said, pointing to the billet he was shaving. "Go ahead, you light it. You're better at striking a spark than I am. And as for a smoke hole—" Starkad stood, his hair brushing the thatched roof even though he hunched. He raised his axe. With a single swift thrust, he straight-armed the head through the thatch in the corner diagonal to Mael. A quick twist enlarged the hole so it could pass enough smoke to keep the fire from smothering those it warmed. Water dripped in.
Mael scowled. "You think you can cure everything with your damned axe?" he demanded.
Starkad looked at him coolly. "Yes, pretty much. You think you're going to live forever?" The Irishman stayed silent. Starkad pressed, "I want to be warm and a little drier. This wood may smoke, but it's not going to toss any sparks into the thatch. And as for bringing Saxons down on us, we're going to meet Saxons anyway. Tyr's arm, Mael, that's what we're here for. We're going to have to talk our way out or fight our way out. We may as well be a little more comfortable tonight and meet 'em now, as meet 'em tomorrow in the rain."
Mael sighed and hitched around his wallet. With a pinch of dried moss from it and the shavings for a bed, he struck his firesteel on a flint until he had a small fire smoldering. "All yours," he said. "If it goes out, you light the next one."
Starkad, smiling, fed the fire with small doses of wood while he accomplished other domestic tasks. The Dane was generally cheerful on shipboard, too, Mael thought sourly to himself. That was because as a rule there would be killing at the other end of the voyage. Starkad covered the doorway with his cloak, pinning it to the withies supporting the thatch with his shoulder brooch and Mael's. The garment was of unbleached wool, so densely woven that it was virtually waterproof. A baulk of wood at the bottom kept the cloak firm against random gusts of wind. The shed began to warm at once. The stolid orange light of the fire did as much for Mael's disposition as the heat itself. He unlaced his sandals and began to strip the wool leggings from beneath them, humming under his breath. Smoke glazed the air. The odor of wool and bodies ripened as the shed heated. That was normal and inevitable; if Mael had a regret, it was that the fire lacked the peculiar pungency of peat-fueled ones like those with which he had been raised.
Starkad slid his own boots off. He cursed, but more in amazement than real anger. The condition of the ball of his foot would have justified a fiercer reaction. A blister three inches across had formed on the sole and burst. The skin hung in shreds. The cloth with which the Dane had packed his boot was glued to his foot by a film of pus and blood. Starkad dribbled a little beer from his canteen to loosen the fabric. "Told you that damned road wasn't fit for a man," he said.
Mael whistled in horror. "Are you going to be able to go on?" he asked. "That looks terrible."
"No problem, unless they get so slippery I keep falling down," Starkad joked. He was peering at his left sole where the callus seemed intact.
"Manannan, but you've got a nice mind," Mael muttered with a grimace.
"Don't see why you aren't having any problem, though," the Dane continued. "It's a damned hard road. I'd think it'd eat anybody's feet as fast as mine."
"No, I've got the gear for it," Mael explained, toeing one of his sandals over to his friend to examine. The sole was thick and multi-layered, studded on the bottom with a dozen hobnails. The iron was bright with recent wear, but a tracery of rust had already begun to hatch-mark the abrasions. The sandal was bound to the foot and high up the leg by straps that could be adjusted precisely. They gave a firm fit whether they were laced over cloth or leather against the cold, or bare skin in a hot climate. The footgear copied the Roman caligae, the sandals that had carried legionaries across the whole Mediterranean Basin and beyond. Mael had found it the most practical gear for a man who might have to walk far on a multitude of surfaces, so long as he was willing to accept weight in exchange for sturdiness. "Those buckets you wear," he said to Starkad, "may keep you dry and work well enough on dirt, but they let your foot slide around inside too much on a solid surface. And these roads were built solid."
"Damn well were," the Dane agreed, wriggling his toes toward the fire as he rummaged in his pack for a biscuit. "What'd they do, quarry 'em out of the bedrock? Must've been built a hundred years ago, too."
"Longer ago than that," Mael said. He leaned back against the wall, flexing his muscles so that the rough wattling would rub his shoulders. "I watched a slave gang trench through a road like this, digging a drainage ditch outside of Hispalia. . . ."
"Hispalia?" Starkad repeated. "Three years ago when the city senate was hiring to stiffen their militia against the Goths? We were both there, and I don't remember any road being cut."
"That's because you were in a whorehouse, as usual."
"Oh." Starkad frowned, then nodded. "You find the damndest things to do with your time when you could be screwing," he said. "What did the road look like?"
"Six feet thick and built like a fortress wall laid on its side," Mael said. He closed his eyes to remember. "Three and a half feet of rubble base. Six inches of rammed tufa to level it. Six inches of flints on top of that. Ten inches of pebble gravel set in loam. And then on top of everything, six-inch flagstones set in concrete. I tell you, they built roads to last, the Romans did. And they'll last a lot longer than the empire did that built them."
Starkad shrugged. He had taken a whetstone out of his pack and begun stroking the fine edge back onto his axe blade. Mael fell asleep with the gentle skritch, skritch of stone on steel sounding a warrior's lullaby in his ears.
Chapter Ten
The morning was dim but for a time the rain had stopped. Starkad walked without favoring his right foot. It would have amazed Mael had he not once seen the big man methodically hack apart an archer whose last shaft stuck out three inches on either side of the Dane's chest. Pain simply did not affect Starkad once he had decided to ignore it. Many a civilized warrior had discounted tales of berserkers—until one made for him, bloody but as inexorable as an earthquake. That had driven many a brave man to flight.
They passed near several openly sited villages and met a number of other travelers on the road the second day. Everyone left them alone. Even the six armed men heading north passed with hard glances but no direct comment. Mael and Starkad trudged forward purposefully, speaking to no one and in general projecting an aura of being busy but not too busy to cut throats if annoyed. They were not called on what was indeed no bluff.
That night they spent in the woods, wrapped
in their cloaks under a fir tree. Its branches looked thick enough to protect them if the rain should resume—as it did near dawn. The tree was some help, but not enough to make it worth continuing to try to sleep. The tenth milepost from Winchester stared crookedly at them from the margin of the road, unnoticed the night before when they had stopped.
"We'd better cut west pretty quick," Mael said, his foot scraping morosely at the old marker. "Otherwise we'll be at Venta. It's got a wall and the guards there won't ignore us. Even if we just get close there's going to be somebody who'll wonder if we turn off. Besides, farther south is likely to be out of our way, anyhow."
Starkad nodded. "I'm not arguing," he said. "You're chief for this raid. Anyway, I don't mind walking on something softer than this rock, rock, rock."
Half a mile farther on, a track joined to the left through a line of poplars. It was narrow, a slick band of mud and trampled dung gleaming in the wider area cleared by the shoulders of driven cows. Mael pointed. Starkad nodded again, and they turned onto the local track.
It had a gloominess not wholly explained by the constant mist. The two men walked single file of necessity, and without speaking because they did not want to alarm villagers whom the rain might otherwise keep inside. The Roman road had not changed in four hundred years, but it had been built by strangers and for strangers. Even in the midst of Cerdic's dominions, Mael had not felt out of place on those stones. This track was newer in one sense but from an earlier age altogether, and there was nothing eclectic about it. An Irishman would be noticed and watched in silent hatred—perhaps even ganged by the village bravos. But the same would happen to a man from a neighboring village—who might steal a pig or a kiss from one of the womenfolk, and was in any case not "one of us." In armor and in company with a man as big as Starkad, Mael felt there was little actual danger, but it was as well to slip by in silence.
The path forked. The friends looked at each other. They took two steps on the right hand branch before a goat's bleating warned them of a village nearby. They turned left instead. Three miles further on and an hour later, they almost walked into the fenced garth of a house. Behind the fence in the drizzle bulked other buildings. The path led straight through the center of the village. No humans were visible, but Mael and Starkad faded quickly back into the trees beside the trail. There were murmurs from poultry and a whiff of wood smoke now that the dwellings had called it to the men's attention.
"Well, do we just walk through?" Starkad asked.
Mael thought a moment, visualizing the topography as best as he could from the glimpses the rain had vouchsafed him. "No," he said at last, "let's cut around here to the right. We can pick up the path again on the other side . . . and there ought to be a stream pretty near. I'd like to refill the water bottles."
He and Starkad turned into the brush and through it into the second-growth hardwoods. The area had been cleared for agriculture not too long in the past. Beeches and oaks had overgrown the fields, but pines had not yet started to drive the hardwoods out. There was a slight falling-off to the left. Mael thought he heard the purl of a stream and nodded to Starkad. They stepped between a pair of oak saplings and out into the misty drizzle of a swale too low-lying to support normal trees. A grove of silver birches straggled up at the very edge of the stream some thirty feet away.
Starkad's left hand gripped Mael's shoulder and stopped him as still as an altar stone. The whole population of the nearby village, some forty Saxons of mingled sex and age, was clustered among the birches.
Silently, backing the necessary step without breaking a stick or letting their equipment jingle, the friends eased into the added gloom of the trees they had just left. They might have been seen by someone looking for them, but the rain blurred outlines and washed colors away. Kneeling at the forest edge, their armor gleaming no more in the weak sunlight than the wet boles around them, there was nothing to call attention to the men.
In any case, the Saxons were wholly intent on what was going on in their own midst. At the back of the circle were children, naked or nearly so, clutching the skirts and hands of their mothers. The women wore either dresses, simple tubes pinned at the shoulders and tucked at the waist by belts, or skirts and shawls. Hoods or the shawls covered their heads. Their garments were woolen; some, where the weavers had chosen fleece of contrasting shades, were patterned attractively in soft, natural plaids.
Within the circle of women, nearer the snowy trunks which displayed the only primary color on a gray morning, were the men. Despite the chill and the rain, they were lightly clad in linen tunics and half-cloaks of skin or wool. Most of the Saxon males also wore tight-fitting leather caps, sewn with the hair side in, but these were less clothing than armor—and the only armor worn, save by one of the two men in the very center of the group.
The man in armor was clearly the chief. He was larger and at least as tall as the biggest of the men around him, despite the fact that he was slightly downslope of them. He wore ring mail and a horned helmet that must have been an heirloom from an age when warfare was less pragmatic. The other men carried spears or weapons which were obviously agricultural implements—axes and mattocks and, in one case, a flail. The armored thegn was the only one to have a long sword, besides the spear in his right hand. He faced a smaller, older man across what seemed to be a trench, listening to the other intone a prayer with arms uplifted: "Hear us, oh Lady Nairthus. Be near to us in our sowing and in our reaping, now in our Spring and in our Fall. . . ."
Starkad had slipped his pack off without a sound. His big fingers played over the slipknot that attached his helmet to the rest of his gear. The rawhide had swollen and would not give. Without hesitation or effort, the Dane pulled the thong in half.
Mael laid his lips close to Starkad's hair and whispered, "What's going on?"
Holding the iron cap in his hand rather than donning it at once—the neck flare would separate him from Mael by three inches and there was need for them to talk—Starkad said, "Oh, it's a sacrifice to Dame Nairthus . . . the earth goddess, the crop goddess. They're getting ready to butcher a man to her, I'd judge. In my tribe, we prayed to Thor in the Spring and made do with cutting a goat's throat—you can eat the goat afterwards, too. But some of these Saxons, they're so backward they come to war waving stone hammers. Besides, if you've had a bad harvest the past year you start thinking back to old ways—and you've got more useless mouths in the houses than you do in the fold."
The wizened old man facing the thegn continued to pray in a cracked voice. He sounded nervous. If what Starkad said was true, the priest probably wasn't used to human sacrifice either. His head was bare. Rain had plastered his white hair away from the bald spot at the peak of his skull.
The priest stopped speaking and lowered his hands. The thegn stepped forward, then down into the trench. The crowd murmured, shifting a little. Mael saw heels flash briefly above the lip of earth as the sacrifice kicked. Already the victim lay face down in the boggy ditch. The thegn had one foot planted on its back. Then the Saxon slid his other foot forward to force the victim's mouth and nose down into the ground water in the bottom of the trench. The sacrifice began to scream in a high-pitched, feminine voice. The big Saxon leaned his weight down on the outstretched foot. The screams gurgled to a halt.
Mael cursed quietly. He put his iron cap on and set the slouch traveling hat back atop it. Starkad touched his arm. "Shall we slaughter the whole village, then?" the Dane asked with no hint of emotion. "We'll need to, if we try and break up this ritual, you know. All we need to do now is slip back into the woods and get on with our own business."
The Irishman looked at him. Starkad shrugged and donned his helmet.
Mael stood and took two measured strides beyond the masking bulk of the trees. He did not draw his sword and his shield hung by its strap instead of being advanced toward the Saxons. "Hold!" he thundered in a huge voice, trained to bellow commands across the steel-shattered chaos of a battlefield. Starkad walked to the right, a half
step behind Mael in the mist. His axe helve was balanced on his collarbone.
The pair of them loomed up above the startled Saxons, Mael a big man and Starkad a blurred giant in full armor. The leather hat brim flopped low over Mael's left eye as he had planned. The crowd's small noises were cut off by freezing panic as the Saxons stumbled away from the newcomers. The armored chieftain stepped quickly up from the pit. He unpinned his half-cloak and dropped it, then waited with rain dripping from the down-curved ends of his moustaches. He had not brought a shield, but he gripped his spear shaft with both hands.
Besides the thegn, only the Saxon elder stood his ground. As Mael strode closer, he could see that the old man's pupils were fully dilated and that the wizened face had blanched as pale as his hair. "Wh-what manner of men are you to interrupt the gift to Lady Nairthus?" the priest quavered.
"No men at all," Mael boomed back, walking steadily but slowly enough that the Saxons had plenty of time to give way.
It almost worked. The villagers were a dim semi-circle, some of them ankle-deep in the creek waiting for their thegn to act. The elder shuffled backward a step, slipped on the lip of the trench, and jumped across it away from Mael. When Mael was only three paces away, the Saxon chief trembled. Then he cursed and flung himself at the Irishman with his spear outstretched. Starkad had anticipated him. The Dane took a full stride, bringing his axe around as smoothly as a boy would a fly whisk.
The axe blade took the Saxon at a flat angle where the muscles of his left shoulder joined his neck. His head sprang off and the helmet flew loose from it. The two objects spun to the ground in opposite circles, thudding and clanging as they hit. Starkad's axe had continued, shearing the ring mail and separating the Saxon's right arm at the shoulder joint. The torso and the spear which the thegn's left hand still gripped pitched forward, but the impact of the Dane's blow had rotated the victim enough that the point did not even graze Mael's chest. The corpse struck the ground so near to the Irishman that the last spurt of blood from the severed neck covered his right sandal.