“Shef!” It was the silent woman who had spoken. Or gasped. Her eyes, her brilliant liquid eyes, blazed with life. Her husband stared at her like one who measures a back for the birch, while her father-in-law goggled and reddened.
“I thought you saw him dead,” snarled the heimnar accusingly at his son.
“I will yet,” muttered Alfgar. “Just give me the men.”
Nearly two hundred miles to the north, Shef turned once again in his saddle to see if the rear-guard was keeping up. Important to have everyone well closed up, all within earshot of each other. Shef knew that four times his own number were pounding the filthy road behind him, unable to attack while Shef held his thirty hostages, the choirmonks of St. John’s and their abbot Saxwulf. It was important too to keep up the pace, even after their long night’s ride, to outrun the news of their coming and prevent any arrangement being made for their reception.
The smell of the sea led them on—and there, as they came trampling over a slight rise, there as an unmistakable landmark was Flamborough Head itself. Shef urged the vanguard on with a yell and a wave.
Guthmund dropped back a yard or two, hand still clutching the bridle of the abbot’s horse. Shef waved him over. “Keep up—and keep the abbot close to me.”
With a whoop he spurred his tiring gelding forward, catching up just as the whole cavalcade, a hundred and twenty raiders and thirty hostages, stormed down the long slope into the squalid huddle of Bridlington.
Instant confusion. Women running, snatching up blue-legged ragged children, men seizing spears, dropping them again, some racing for shelter down to the beach and the boats drawn up on the dirty snow-covered sand. Shef wheeled his horse and thrust the abbot forward like a trophy, instantly recognizable in his black robes.
“Peace,” he shouted, “Peace. I want Ordlaf.”
But Ordlaf was already there, the reeve of Bridlington, the capturer—though no one had ever credited him with it—of Ragnar. He stepped forward from his people, eyeing the Vikings and the monks with amazement, reluctantly taking responsibility.
“Show them the abbot,” Shef snapped to Guthmund. “Make those behind keep their distance.” He pointed at Ordlaf the reeve. “You and I have met before. The day you netted Ragnar.”
Dismounting, he drove his halberd-spike deep into the sandy soil. Putting his hand on the reeve’s shoulder, he drew him a little away, out of earshot of the wrathfully glaring abbot, began to speak in urgent tones.
“It’s impossible,” said Ordlaf a minute later. “Can’t be done.”
“Why not? It’s a high sea, and cold, but the wind is from the west.”
“Southwest a point west,” corrected Ordlaf automatically.
“You can run downcoast with it on your beam. To the Spurn. Twenty-five miles, no more. Be there by dark. Never out of sight of land. I’m not asking for a sea-crossing. If the weather changes we can drop sea-anchor and ride it out.”
“We’d be pulling into the teeth of it once we got to the Spurn.”
Shef jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Best rowers in the world, right with you. You can set them to it and stand back at the steering oar like lords.”
“Well … What happens when I get back and the abbot sends his men down to burn me out?”
“You did it to save the abbot’s life.”
“I doubt he’ll be grateful.”
“You can take your time coming back. Time enough to hide what we’ll pay you. Silver from the minster. Your silver. Your rents for many a year. Hide it, melt it down. They’ll never trace it.”
“Well … How do I know you won’t just cut my throat? And my men’s?”
“You don’t—but you have little choice. Decide.”
The reeve hesitated a moment longer. Remembered Merla, his wife’s cousin, whom the abbot behind him had enslaved for debt. Thought of Merla’s own wife and bairns, living still on charity with their man fled in terror.
“All right. But make it look as if you’re treating me rough.”
Shef exploded with feigned rage, swung a blow at the reeve’s head, whipped a dirk from its scabbard. The reeve turned away, shouting orders at the little knot of men who had collected at a few yards’ distance. Slowly men began to push beached fishing boats towards the tide, to step masts, haul sailcloth from sheds. In a tight huddle the Vikings pressed down to the water’s edge, hustling their captives. Fifty yards away, five hundred English riders pressed forward, ready to charge sooner than see the hostages taken off, held back by the bright weapons waving over tonsured heads.
“Keep them back,” snapped Shef to the abbot. “I’ll let half your men go when we board. You and the rest go in a dinghy once we’re afloat.”
“I suppose you realize this means we lose the horses,” said Guthmund gloomily.
“You stole them in the first place. You can steal some more.”
“So we pulled into the mouth of the Humber under oars just at dusk, beached for the night when we were sure no one could see us, then rowed upriver in the morning to meet the rest of you. With the take.”
“How much is it?” asked Brand, sitting with the other members of the impromptu council.
“I’ve weighed it out,” said Thorvin. “Altar-plate, candlesticks, those little boxes the Christians keep saints’ finger-bones in, box for the holy wafers, those things for burning incense, some coins—a lot of coins. I thought monks weren’t supposed to have property of their own, but Guthmund says they all had purses if you shook them hard enough. Well, after what he gave the fishermen we still have ninety-two pounds weight of silver.
“Better than that is the gold. The crown you took off the Christ-image was pure gold, and heavy. So was some of the plate. That’s another fourteen pounds. And we reckon gold as outvaluing silver eight for one. So that counts as eight stone of silver: a hundredweight to add to your ninety-two pounds.”
“Two hundred pounds, all told,” said Brand thoughtfully. “We will have to divide it all between crews and let the crews make their own division.”
“No,” said Shef.
“You say that a lot these days,” Brand said.
“That is because I know what to do—others don’t. The money is not to be divided. It is the war chest of the army. That was why I went for it. If we divide it up everyone will be a little richer. I want to use it so that everyone becomes a lot richer.”
“If it’s put like that,” said Thorvin, “I think the army will accept it. You got it. You have a right to say how you think it should be used. But how are we all going to get a lot richer?”
Shef pulled from the front of his tunic the mappamundi he had taken from the minster wall. “Look at this,” he said. A dozen heads bent over the vast vellum sheet, faces wearing different degrees of puzzlement at the scrawled, inked marks.
“Can you read the writing?” asked Shef.
“In the middle there,” said Skaldfinn the Heimdall-priest. “Where the little picture is. It says ‘Hierusalem.’ That is the holy city of the Christians.”
“Lies, as usual,” commented Thorvin. “That black border is supposed to be Ocean, the great sea that runs round Mithgarth, the world. They are saying their holy city is the center of everything, just as you would expect.”
“Look round the edges,” rumbled Brand. “See what it has to tell us of places we know. If it lying about them, then we can guess it is all lies, as Thorvin says.”
“‘Dacia et Gothis’,” read Skaldfinn. “‘Gothia.’ That must be the land of the Gautar, south of the Swedes. Unless they mean Gotland. But Gotland is an island, and this is marked as being mainland. Next to it—next to it they have ‘Bulgaria.’”
The council broke into laughter. “The Bulgars are the enemies of the emperor of the Greeks, in Miklagarth,” said Brand. “It is two months’ travel from the nearest of the Gautar to the Bulgars.”
“On the other side of Gothia they have ‘Slesvic.’ Well, at least that is clear enough. We all know Slesvik of the Danes. There is s
ome more writing by it. ‘Hic abundant leones.’ That means ‘There are many lions here.’”
Again a roar of laughter. “I have been to Slesvik market a dozen times,” said Brand. “And I have met men who have spoken of lions. They are like very large cats, and they live in the hot country south of Sarkland. But there has never been one lion in Slesvik, let alone many. You wasted your time bringing back this—what do you call it?—this mappa. It is just nonsense, like everything the Christians count as wisdom.”
Shef’s finger continued to trace lettering, while he muttered to himself the letters that Father Andreas had half-successfully taught him.
“There is some English writing here,” he said. “In a different hand from the rest. It says ‘Suth-Bryttas,’ that is, ‘South British.’”
“He means the Bretons,” Brand said. “They live on a large peninsula the other side of the English Sea.”
“So that is not so far wrong. You can find truth on a mappa. If you put it there.”
“I still don’t see how it is going to make us rich,” replied Brand. “That is what you said it was going to do.”
“This won’t.” Shef rolled the vellum up, thrust it aside. “But the idea of it may. We need to know more important things. Remember—if we had not known where Riccall was, that day in the snow, we might have been cut off and destroyed in the end by the churls. When I set off for Beverley, I knew the direction, but I would never have found the minster if we had not had a guide who knew the roads. The only way I found Bridlington and the man who could sail us out of a trap was because I had traveled the road already.
“You see what I mean? We have plenty of knowledge, but it all depends on people. But no one person knows enough for all the things we need. What a mappa should be is a store of knowledge from many people. Now if we had that we could find our way to places we had not been before. We could tell directions, work out distances.”
“So we make a knowledge mappa,” said Brand firmly. “Now tell me about rich.”
“We have one other precious possession,” said Shef. “And this we did not get from the Christians. Thorvin will tell you. I bought it myself. From Munin, the raven of Othin. I bought it with pain. Show them, Thorvin.”
From inside his tunic Thorvin pulled a thin square board. On it were lines of small runic letters, each one scratched with a knife and then marked out with red dye.
“It is a riddle. The one who solves the riddle will find the hoard of Raedwald, king of the East Angles. That is what Ivar was searching for last autumn. But the secret died with King Edmund.”
“A royal hoard,” said Brand. “Now that could be worth something, all right. But first we have to solve the riddle.”
“That is what a mappa can do,” said Shef firmly. “If we write down every piece of knowledge we can find, in the end we will have the right number of pieces to solve the riddle. But if we do not write them down, by the time we come on the last piece we need we will have forgotten the first.
“And there is another thing.” Shef struggled with an image in his mind, a trace of memory from somewhere, of looking down—down on the land in a way no man could ever in reality see it. “Even this mappa. It has one idea. It is as if we were looking down on the world from above. Seeing it all spread out below us. Like an eagle would see it. Now that is the way to find things.”
Guthmund the skipper broke the considering silence. “But before we see or find anything, we have to decide where we go now.”
“More important even than that,” said Brand, “we must decide how this army is led, and under what law it shall live. While we were men of the Great Army we lived under the old hermanna lög of our ancestors—the warriors’ law. But Ivar the Boneless broke that and I have no wish to return to it. Now I know that not everyone in this army wears the pendant.” He looked significantly at Shef and Guthmund in the group around the table. “But it is in my mind that we should now agree to live under a new law. Vegmanna lög, I would call it. The law of the Way-folk. The first stage to that, though, is for the army to agree in open assembly to whom it will give the powers to make the laws.”
While they worked it out, Shef’s mind drifted away, as it often did, from the wrangling debate that immediately broke out. He knew what the army would now have to do. March out of Northumbria to get away from the Ragnarssons, cross the shires of Burgred, the powerful king of the Mark, as fast as possible. Establish themselves in the kingless realm of the East Angles, and take toll of the population in return for protection. Protection from kings, protection from abbots and bishops. In a short while, toll on that scale would make even Brand feel contented.
Meanwhile he would work on the mappa. And on the riddle. And most important of all, if the Army of the Way was to protect its shires from other predators, he would have to give them new weapons. New machines.
As he began to draw, in his mind’s eye, the lines of the new catapult, a voice broke through to his half-attention, arguing violently for a place in the council for all hereditary jarls.
That would include Sigvarth, his father, whose crews had joined the column leaving York almost at the last moment. He wished Sigvarth had remained behind. And his horse-toothed son, Hjörvarth. Still, maybe they need not meet. Maybe the Army would not make the rule about jarls.
Shef went back to wondering how he could replace the power of the slow and clumsy counterweight. His fingers itched again to hold a hammer.
Chapter Eight
Four weeks later the itch in Shef’s fingers had been eased. Outside the makeshift camp where the Wayman army had halted for the winter, he stood on the catapult range. But the machine he stood behind was not one the Rome-folk would have recognized.
“Lower away,” he shouted to his eight-man team.
The long boom creaked down towards his waiting hands, the ten-pound rock in its leather sling dangling from two hooks, one fixed, one free.
“Take the strain.” The eight brawny Vikings on the other end of the catapult’s arm put their weight on the ropes and braced themselves for a pull. Shef felt the arm—it was the top sixteen feet of a longship’s mast, sawn off a little above deck level—flex between their weight and his, felt himself beginning to lift off the sodden ground.
“Pull!” The Vikings heaved as one, each man putting his full body-weight and back strength into it, as beautifully coordinated as if they had been heaving up a longship’s yard in an Atlantic swell. The short arm of the catapult jerked down. The long arm whipped up. The sling, whirling round with sudden, vicious force, reached the point where the free hook was pulled off its ring, and swung loose.
Up into the murky sky soared the boulder. For a long moment it seemed to pause at the top of its arc, then began the long descent to splash into the Fenland soil two hundred and fifty paces off. Already a half-score of ragged figures were racing forward at the other end of the practice range, jealously competing to seize the ball and run back with it.
“Lower away!” bellowed Shef at the top of his lungs. His crew, as always, took not the slightest notice. They whooped and cheered, beating each other on the back, watching for the fall of the shot.
“A furlong if it’s an inch!” shouted Steinulf, Brand’s helmsman.
“Lower away! This is a speed test!” bellowed Shef again. His team slowly remembered his existence. One of them, Ulf the cook, ambled round and patted Shef tenderly on the back.
“Speed test be buggered,” he said companionably. “If we ever have to shoot it fast, we will. Now—it’s time to get the food on.”
His mates nodded agreement, picked up their jackets from where they had draped them over the catapult’s gallowslike frame.
“Good fun, good shooting,” said Kolbein the Hebridean, newly sporting his Wayman pendant, the phallus of Frey. “We’ll come down again tomorrow. Time to eat.”
Shef watched them trail back toward the palisade, the cluster of tents and roughly roofed booths which were the winter camp of the Wayman army, wrath and frustrati
on at his heart.
He had got the idea for this new-model catapult while watching Ordlaf’s fishermen hauling on their mast-ropes. The giant boulder-thrower of the monks at York, the machine that had destroyed the Ragnarssons’ ram three months before, had got its power from a counterweight. The counterweight itself was hauled into the air by men heaving at a windlass. All the counterweight really did was to store up the power the men had put into heaving on the windlass handles.
So why store the power? he had asked himself. Why not just have men attach ropes to the short arm and heave down on it directly? For small stones, like those they had roughly chipped into spheres, the new machine, the “pull-thrower” as the Vikings called it, was magnificent.
It threw in a perfectly straight line and could be aimed for direction within a couple of feet. The effect of the missile it hurled was literally pulverizing, turning rock to powder and smashing through shields like paper. As they learned how to shoot the weapon with maximum efficiency, its range steadily increased out to an eighth of a mile. And he was sure, if only they would do as they were told, that he could launch ten rocks while a man counted to a hundred.
But his team had no notion of the catapult as a weapon. To them, it was just a toy. Maybe useful one day against a stockade or a wall. Otherwise, a diversion during the tedium of a winter camp in the Fens, with even the traditional Viking amusements of raiding the surrounding countryside for girls and money severely forbidden.
The Hammer & the Cross Page 26
