The spike through his eye. Was that all that was holding him? So it seemed. But then he must be dead, no one could survive a spike through the brain and the skull, into the wood behind. Through the feel of the bark he could sense a bursting of sap, a steady pumping of fluid, up from roots unimaginably deep to branches far above him, so high that no man could ever climb them.
His eye stabbed him again and he twisted, his hands still hanging loose below him like a dead man s. There were the ravens again—curious, greedy, cowardly, clever, alert for any sign of weakness. They drifted in toward him, flapped their wings, came suddenly closer, landed heavily on his shoulders. Yet this time, he knew, he need not fear their beaks. They clung to him for reassurance. A king was coming.
The figure appeared in front of him, moving upward from a spot on Earth from which he had averted his eye. It was a terrible shape, naked, blood running from it down its ruined loins, an expression of ghastly pain on its face. Its back lifted up behind its shoulders in a parody of the ravens’ wings; its chest was shrunken and twisted in; gobbets of spongy matter hung over its nipples. It carried its own backbone in its hand.
For a moment the two figures hung there, eye to eye. The creature recognized him, the hanged one thought. It pitied him. But it was going beyond the nine worlds now, to some other destiny where few if any would follow. Its blackened mouth twisted.
“Remember,” it said. “Remember the verse I taught you.”
The pain in Shef’s eye redoubled, and he shrieked out loud, shrieked and twisted against the spike that restrained him, the bonds that held him down, the soft, gentle, immovable hands. He opened his eye and stared out, not at the panorama of the nine worlds from the great ashtree, but into the face of Hund. Hund with the needle. He shrieked again and threw up a hand to fend him off, and the hand clutched Hund’s arm with desperate force.
“Easy, easy,” said Hund. “It’s all over now. No one can touch you. You are a carl of the army, in the crew of Brand of Halogaland, and the past is forgotten.”
“But I must remember,” cried Shef.
“Remember what?”
Water filled both his eyes, the good one and the ruined socket. “I don’t remember it,” he whispered.
“I have forgotten the king’s message.”
Carl
Chapter One
For many miles the track had run over flat, well-drained land—the southern half of the great Vale of York, rolling up from the marshes of the Humber. Even so, it had been hard going for the Great Army: eight thousand men, as many horses, hundreds of camp-followers and bedfellows and slaves for the market, all trampling along together. Behind them even the great stone-laid roads built by the Rome-folk of old turned into muddy tracks splashing as high as the horses’ bellies. Where the Army marched along English lanes or drover roads it left nothing but a morass behind.
Brand the Champion lifted his still-bandaged hand and the troop of men behind him—three ships’ crews, a long hundred and five—eased their reins. The ones at the very rear, the last men in the Army, immediately faced about, peering at the gray, wet landscape behind them, from which the autumn light was already beginning to seep.
The two men at the very point of the troop stared closely at what lay in front of them: a deeply mudded track, four arm-spans wide, descending down and round a bend to what must be the bed of another small stream. A few hundred yards ahead the men could see the land rising again and the unhedged track running across it. But in between, along the bed of the stream, ran a belt of tangled forest, large oak and chestnut trees swaying their brown leaves in the rising wind, crowding up to the very edge of the road.
“What do you think, young marshal?” asked Brand, pulling at his beard with his left hand. “It may be that with your one eye you can see further than most men with two.”
“I can see one thing with half an eye, old kay-handed one,” replied Shef equably. “Which is that that horse-turd by the side of the road there has stopped steaming. The main body is getting further away from us. We’re too slow. Plenty of time for the Yorkshiremen to get in behind them and in front of us.”
“And how would you deal with that, young defier-of-Ivar?”
“I would get us all off the road and all go down the right-hand side. The right hand, because they might expect us to go down the left, with our shields toward the trees and the ambush. Get down to the stream. When we get to it, blow all our horns and charge it as if it were the gap in an enemy stockade. If there’s no one there, we look stupid. If there’s an ambush there we’ll flush them out. But if we’re going to do it—let’s do it fast.”
Brand shook his massive head with a kind of exasperation. “You are not a fool, young man. That is the right answer. But it is the answer of a follower of your one-eyed patron, Othin the Betrayer of Warriors. Not of a carl of the Great Army. What we are here for is to pick up the stragglers, to see that no one falls into the hands of the English. The Snakeeye does not care for heads thrown into the encampment every morning. It makes the men restless. They like to think every one of them is important, and that anyone who gets killed gets killed for a good reason, not just by accident. If we went off the road we might miss someone, and then his mates would come round asking for him sooner or later. We will take the risk and go down the track.”
Shef nodded, and swung his shield off his back, pushing his arm through the elbow-strap to grip the handle behind the boss. Behind him there was a clanking and rustling as a hundred and twenty-five men moved their weapons to a ready position and urged their horses forward. Shef realized that Brand had these conversations in a way to train him, to teach him to think like a leader. He bore no grudge when his advice was overruled.
Yet deep down he struggled with the thought that these wise men, these great and experienced warriors—Brand the Champion, Ivar the Boneless, even the matchless Snakeeye himself—were wrong. They were doing things the wrong way. Their wrong way had smashed every kingdom they had ventured against, not just the tiny and petty kingdom of the East Anglians. Even so, he, Shef—once thrall, slayer of two men, a man who had never stood in a battle line for ten heartbeats together—he was sure that he knew better how to array an army than did they.
Had he seen it in his visions? Was the knowledge sent to him by his father-god in Valhalla—Othin the Traitor, God of the Hanged, Betrayer of Warriors—as Brand obliquely continued to suggest?
Whatever the cause, Shef thought, if I were the marshal of the Army, I would call a halt six times a day, and blow the trumpets, so the flank-guards and the rear-guard would know where I was. And I would move no further till I heard the trumpets in reply.
It would be better if everyone knew the time when the trumpets would blow. But how could that be, once we are all out of sight of each other? How do the black monks in the minsters know when it is time for their services? Shef chewed on the problem as his horse took him down between the trees and shadows began to fall across the path. Again and again these days his head swam with thoughts, with ideas, with difficulties to which there seemed to be no solution in the wisdom of his time. Shef’s fingers itched to hold a hammer again, to work in the forge. He felt he could beat out a solution on an anvil instead of restlessly brooding in his own brain.
There was a figure on the road ahead of them. He spun about when he heard the horses—then let his sword slide back down when he recognized them.
“I am Stuf,” the man said. “One of the band of Humli, out of Ribe.”
Brand nodded. A small band, not very well organized. The sort of group that would let a man slip out of line and not think to inquire what had happened to him till too late.
“My horse went lame and I dropped behind. Then I decided to turn him loose and go on with just my own pack.”
Brand nodded again. “We have spare horses here. I will let you have one. It will cost you a mark of silver.”
Stuf opened his mouth to protest, to start the automatic haggling expected of any deal in horseflesh, b
ut then closed it suddenly as Brand waved his men on. He grabbed the reins of the horse Brand was leading.
“Your price is high,” he said. “But maybe now is not the time to be arguing. There are Englishmen around. I can smell them.”
As he said the words Shef saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. A branch moving. No, the whole tree sweeping downward in a stately arc, the ropes tied to its top suddenly visible as they tightened into a straight line. An instant later, movement all along the left-hand edge of the track.
Shef threw his shield up. A thump, an arrow-point just protruding through the soft lindenwood an inch from his hand. Shouts and screams behind him, horses rearing and kicking. Already he had hurled himself off the horse and was crouching below its neck, its body between him and the ambush. His mind registered a dozen facts as if in one flash of lightning, far quicker than any words.
That tree had been cut through after the Great Army had passed through. The rear-guard was even further behind than they had thought. The attack would be coming from the left; they wanted to drive their enemies into the wood to the right. No escape forward over the felled tree, none back through the confusion of shot horses and startled men. Do what they least suspected!
Shef ran round the front of his horse, shield up, and hurled himself straight at the steep left bank of the track, his spear gripped underhand. One leap, two, three—not pausing lest the muddy bank give way. A makeshift barricade of branches and a face glaring over it at him, an Englishman fumbling an arrow out of his quiver. Shef drove the spear through the barricade at groin level and saw the face contort in agony. Twist, wrench backward, reach over and drag the man forward through his own barricade. Shef drove his spear-point into the ground and vaulted over body and branches, turning instantly and stabbing at the ambushers, first one side then the other.
He realized suddenly that his throat was raw with shouting. A much bigger voice was bellowing in unison: Brand down on the track, not fit to fight one-handed but directing the startled Vikings up the bank and into the breach he had made. One instant a dozen figures were closing, on Shef, with him stabbing furiously in all directions to keep them off. The next there was an elbow in his back, he was stumbling forward, there were mailed men on either side, and the English were backing hastily, turning suddenly in open flight.
Churls, Shef realized. Leather jackets, hunting bows and bill-hooks. Used to driving boar, not to fighting men. If the Vikings had fled into the woods as they had been expected to, no doubt they would have been in a killing ground of nets and pits, where they would have wallowed helpless till speared. But these Englishmen were not warriors to stand and hew at each other over the war-linden.
No point, certainly, in trying to pursue them through their own woods. The Vikings looked down, stabbed or cut thoughtfully at the few men their charge had caught, making sure none would live to boast of the day. Shef felt a hard hand slap him on the back.
“You did right, boy. Never stand still in an ambush. Always run away—or else run straight toward it. But how do you know these things? Maybe Thorvin is right about you.”
Brand clasped the hammer pendant round his neck, and then began once more to bellow orders, hustling his men off the track and round the felled tree-trunk, stripping gear off dead or crippled horses, looking briefly at the ten or twelve men wounded in the skirmish.
“At this range,” he said, “these short bows will send an arrow through mail. But only just. Not enough punch in them to get through the ribs or into the belly. Bows and arrows never won a battle yet.”
The cortege wound its way up the slope on the other side of the little stream, out of the woods and into the last of the autumn light.
Something lay on the track in front of them. No, some things. As the Vikings crowded forward again, Shef realized that they were warriors of the Army—two of them, stragglers like Stuf, dressed in the grubby wadmal of the long-service campaigner. But there was something else about them, something horrifying, something he had seen before … .
With the same shock of recognition he had experienced in Emneth, Shef realized the men were too small. Their arms were hacked off at the elbow, their legs at the knee; a reek of seared flesh told how they had lived. For they were still alive. One of them lifted his head from the ground as the riders came toward him, saw the shocked and angry faces.
“Bersi,” he called. “Skuli the Bald’s crew. Fraendir, vinir, do what you must. Give us the warrior’s death.”
Brand swung from his horse, his face gray, drawing his dagger left-handed. Gently he patted the living corpse’s face with his bandaged right hand, steadied it, drove the dagger home with one hard thrust behind the ear. Did the same for the other man, lying mercifully unconscious.
“Pull them out of the road,” he said, “and let’s get on. Heimnars,” he added to Shef. “Now I wonder who has taught them to do that.”
Shef made no reply. Far off, but caught in the last rays of the sun now streaming almost horizontally through a breach in the clouds, he could see yellow stone walls, a thicket of distant houses on a slight hill in front of them, smoke streaming away from a thousand chimneys. He had seen them before. Another moment of recognition.
“Eoforwich,” he said.
“Yovrvik,” repeated the Viking standing next to him, struggling with the unfamiliar consonants and diphthongs.
“To Hell with that,” said Brand. “Just call it York.”
After dark the men on the city walls looked down on the innumerable twinkling points of the Great Army’s cooking fires. They were on the round bastion of the southeast corner of the old and impressive square Roman fortress, once home of the Sixth Legion, placed there to hold the North in awe. Behind them, inside the three-hundred-and-twenty-acre defended site, bulked St. Peter’s Minster, once the most famous home of learning and scholarship in the whole northern world. Inside the walls, too, lay the king’s quarters, the houses of a hundred noble families, the jammed-together barracks of their thanes and companions and hired swords. And the forges, the arsenals, the weapon-shops, the tanneries, the sinews of power. Outside there lay a sprawling town with its warehouses and jetties down on the Ouse. But this was dispensable. What mattered lay inside the walls: those of the old legionary fortress or its matching walled site across the river, centered on St. Mary’s—once the Roman colonia where the time-expired legionaries had settled and had walled themselves in as was their custom, against the turmoil or resentment of the natives.
King Ella stared down grimly at the countless fires, the burly captain of his guard, Cuthred, at his side. Close by stood the archbishop of York, Wulfhere, still in his purple and white, and flanked by the black figure of Erkenbert the deacon.
“They have not been much delayed,” said Ella. “I thought they might be held up by the Humber marshes, but they slipped across. I hoped they might run out of supplies, but they seem to have managed well enough.”
He might have added that he hoped they might have been discouraged by the desperate assault of King Edmund and the East Anglians, of which so many tales already were told. But that thought sent a chill to his heart. All the tales that were told ended with a description of the death by torment of the king. And Ella knew—he had known ever since the Ragnarssons were identified in England—that they had the same or worse in store for him. The eight thousand men camped round the cooking fires out there had come for him. If he fled, they would come after him. If he hid, they would offer money for his body. Wulfhere, even Cuthred, could hope to survive a defeat. Ella knew he must beat the Army or die.
“They have lost many men!” Erkenbert the deacon said. “Even the churls are out, to delay them, to cut off their rearguards and their forage parties. They must have lost hundreds of men already, maybe thousands. All our people are rallying to the defense.”
“That’s true,” agreed Cuthred. “But you know to whose credit that is.”
The group turned together to look at the strange contrivance a few yards
from them. It was like a shallow box, on long handles so that it could be carried like a stretcher. Between one pair of handles ran an axle with wheels on it, so that it could be trundled on level ground. Inside the box lay the trunk of a man, though now that the box was tipped forward he was upright, able to see over the battlements like the rest. Most of his weight was taken by a broad strap round his chest and under his armpits. His groin rested on a padded projection. He braced himself on the bandaged stumps of his knees.
“I serve as a warning,” rumbled Wulfgar, his voice shockingly deep-toned coming from such a seemingly small man. “One day I will serve as vengeance. For this and all the heathens have done to me.”
The other men did not reply. They knew the effect the mutilated East Anglian thane had had, the almost triumphal progress he had made from his home, ahead of the Army, halting in every village to tell the churls what lay in store for them and for their womenfolk.
“What good has all the rallying done?” King Ella asked bitterly.
Cuthred screwed up his face in calculation. “Not slowed them. Not lost them many. Made them keep together. May even have tightened them up. Still around eight thousand of them.”
“We can put half as many again in the field,” said Arch Deacon Erkenbert. “We are not the East Anglians. Two thousand men of military age live in Eoforwich itself. And we are strong in the strength of the Lord of Hosts.”
“I don’t think we’ve got enough,” said Cuthred slowly. “Not even counting the Lord of Hosts. It sounds good to say you’re three-to-two. But if it’s a fight on level ground it’s always one to one. We’ve got champions as good as theirs, but not enough of them. If we marched out to fight them we would lose.”
The Hammer & the Cross Page 16
