The Hammer & the Cross

by Harry Harrison

  Shef could see Brand trying to work out not the answer, but how to say the answer in fewest words. Finally he spoke, in a gravelly whisper.

  “They fight among themselves. That is what has always let us in. They are no seamen. And they breed few warriors. With us—a spear, a shield, an axe—you are a warrior. With them, it takes a whole village to arm one man. Mail-shirt, sword and lance and helmet. But most of all, the horse. Big horses. Stallions a man can hardly control. Have to learn to ride them with a shield on one arm and a lance in the other. Start when you’re a baby. Only way.

  “One Frankish lancer, no problem. Get behind him, hamstring horse. Fifty of ’em, problem. A thousand …”

  “Ten thousand?” asked Shef.

  “Never believed it. Aren’t that many. Lot of light horsemen. Can be dangerous because they’re quick, turn up when you don’t think they’re near.”

  Brand summoned his failing energies. “They’ll ride over you if you let ’em. Or cut you up on the march. Stick to rivers is what we do. Or keep behind a stockade.”

  “To beat them in open field?”

  Brand shook his head faintly. Shef could not tell whether he meant “Impossible,” or “I don’t know.” After a moment Ingulf’s hand fell on his shoulder, urged him out.

  As he came blinking from the tent into daylight, Shef found himself once more besieged with problems. Guards to be detailed for the substantial plunder of Ivar’s army, on its way to the treasury in Norwich. Prisoners’ fate to be decided: some of them Ivar’s torturers, some of them mere rank and file. Messages to be received and dispatched. At the back of Shef’s mind there hung always the query: Godive. Why had she gone off with Thorvin? And what did Thorvin himself think was so important that it could not wait?

  But now, immediately in front of him, Father Boniface, his own priest-turned-scribe, beside him another little man in clerical black with an expression of bitter, malignant spite on his face. Slowly Shef realized that he had seen him before, if only from a distance. In York.

  “This is Deacon Erkenbert,” said Boniface. “We took him from Ivar’s own ship. He is the master of the machines. The slaves who wound the machines—slaves first to York Minster and then to Ivar—they say that he built the machines for Ivar. They say the whole Church in York now works night and day for the Ragnarssons.” He looked down at Erkenbert with heartfelt contempt.

  The master of the machines, thought Shef. There was a day when I would have given everything for a chance to talk with this man. Now, I wonder what he can tell me. I can guess how his machine works, and in any case I can go to see for myself. I know how slowly they shoot, how hard they hit. One thing I do not know: how much else is there in his head and in his books? But I do not think he will tell me that.

  Yet I think I can use him. Dimly, Brand’s words were working inside Shef’s brain. Collecting into a plan.

  “Keep close watch on him, Boniface,” said Shef. “See the York slaves are well treated, and tell them they are free from this moment. Then send Guthmund to me. After him, Lulla and Osmod. And Cwicca, Udd and Oswi, too.”

  “We don’t want to do that,” said Guthmund flatly.

  “But you could do it?” asked Shef.

  Guthmund hesitated, not wanting to tell a lie, reluctant to concede a point.

  “Could do it. Still don’t think it’s a good idea. Take all the Vikings out of the army, load them into Ivar’s boats, press Ivar’s men into service as galley-slaves, and head round the coast to some rendezvous near this Hastings place …

  “Look, lord.” Guthmund spoke pleadingly, as near to wheedling as his character would go. “I know, me and the boys, we haven’t always been fair to the English you’ve hauled in. Called them midgets. Called them skraelingiar. Said they’re no use and never will be. Well, they’ve proved us wrong.

  “But there was a reason for what we said, and it goes double if you’re going to fight these Franks and their horses. Your English can shoot machines. One of them with a halberd hits as good as one of our boys with a sword. But there’s still a lot of things they can’t do, no matter how hard they try. They aren’t strong enough.

  “Now these Franks. Why are they dangerous? Everyone knows it’s because of the horses. How much does a horse weigh? A thousand pounds? That’s what I’m telling you, lord. To even get a few shots in at these Franks, you’ll have to hold them off for a while. Maybe our boys could do it, with the halberds and all. Maybe. They’ve never done it before. But it’s dead sure they can’t if you’ve sent them all off. What happens if you get caught with just a line of your little fellows between you and the Franks? They can’t do it, lord. They haven’t the strength.” Nor the training, Guthmund thought silently. Not to watch armed men walk right up to you and start hacking away. Or ride up to you. They’ve always had us to help them.

  “You are forgetting King Alfred and his men,” said Shef. “He will have gathered his army by now. You know the English thanes are as strong and brave as your men—they just have no discipline. But I can supply that.”

  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.