The reeds at the marsh's edge moved slightly in the morning breeze. They moved again and Shef peered out at the empty countryside. The Viking raiders were gone.
He turned and waded back through the reeds to the path he had found the previous evening. The small island was hidden by low trees. Edrich the king's thane was eating the cold remains of their dinner from the night before. He wiped greasy fingers on the grass and raised his eyebrows.
“Nothing in sight,” Shef said. “Quiet. No smoke that I could see.”
They had fled the battle, knowing it was lost, seeking only to save their own lives. There had been no sign of pursuit when they abandoned their horses and fled on foot into the marsh where they had spent the night—an oddly comfortable and pleasant night for Shef. He thought about it with mixed feelings of both pleasure and guilt. It had been an island of peace in a sea of anxiety and trouble. Just for one evening there had been no work to do, no duty that could possibly be performed. All they had to do was hide, protect themselves, and stay as comfortable as possible. Shef had splashed off into the marsh and quickly found them a dry island in the midst of the pathless fen, where it was certain that no stranger would ever penetrate. It had been easy to put up a shelter made out of the reed which the marsh-folk used for thatching. Eels had been snared in the sluggish water, and Edrich, after brief consideration, had seen no harm in making a fire. The Vikings had other things to do and weren't going to come splashing all the way over here just because of a bit of smoke.
In any case, before darkness fell, they could see smoke rising all around them. “The raiders on their way back,” said Edrich. “They don't mind sending up signals when they're retreating.”
Had he ever run from a battle before? Shef asked cautiously, nagged by the worry that kept on surfacing every time memory brought back the picture of his stepfather going down, engulfed by a tide of enemies. “Many times,” Edrich replied, in the curious camaraderie of this day stolen out of time. “And don't think that was a battle. Just a skirmish. But I've run for it often. Too often. And if everybody did that we'd have a lot fewer dead men on our side. We never lose very many while we're standing and fighting, but once the Vikings break through it's just a slaughter. Just stop a moment and think of it—every man who gets off the field is saved for another stand-up fight on even terms another day.
“Trouble is,” he smiled grimly, “the more often it happens the less likely most people are to be willing to try again. They lose heart. And there's no need for it. We lost yesterday because nobody was ready, not physically, not in their minds either. If they'd spend a tenth of the time they spend in whining afterwards in getting ready beforehand, we'd have no need ever to lose a battle. As the proverb says: ‘Often the deed—late in doom diminishes, in all successes. Starves he later.’ Now show me your blade.”
Face unmoving, Shef drew it from its scuffed leather scabbard and passed it over. Edrich turned it thoughtfully in his hands.
“It looks like a hedger's tool,” he remarked. “Or a reed-cutter's bill. Not a real weapon. Yet I saw the Viking jarl's sword snap on it. How did that happen?”
“It is a good blade,” Shef replied. “Maybe the best in Emneth. I made it myself, forged in strips. Much of it is soft iron. I beat it out myself from the iron blooms they send us from the South. But there are layers too of hard steel. A thane from March gave me some good spearheads in payment for work I did for him. I melted and beat them out, and then I twisted the iron and steel strips round each other and forged the whole into a blade. The iron lets it bend, the steel gives it strength. In the end I welded on a cutting edge of the hardest steel I could find. Four man-loads of charcoal the whole work cost me.”
“And with all that work you made it short and single-edged, like a work-tool. Put on a plain ox-bone handle, with no guard. And then you left it out in the wet and let it get rusty.”
Shef shrugged. “If I swaggered round Emneth with a warrior's weapon on my hip and serpent-patterns glittering on the blade, how long would I have kept it? The rust is just enough to discolor the blade. I make sure it eats no further.”
“That was the other question I meant to ask you. The young thane said you were not a freeman. You behave as if you were in hiding. Yet in the fight you called Wulfgar ‘father.’ There is some mystery here. The world is full of thanes' bastards, God knows. But no one tries to enslave them.”
Shef had faced the same question many times, and in another time or place would not have answered. But in the island in the fen, speaking one to another, status forgotten, the words came.
“He is not my father, though I call him that. Eighteen summers ago the Vikings raided here. Wulfgar was away from Emneth then, but my mother, the lady Thryth, was here, with her baby son Alfgar—my half brother, her child and Wulfgar's. A servant got Alfgar away when the raiders came in the night, but my mother was taken.”
Edrich nodded slowly. All this was familiar enough. But still his question was not answered. There was a system in these matters, at least for those of rank. After a while, surely, the husband might have expected to hear from the slave-marts of Hedeby or Kaupang, to tell him such and such a lady was ransomable, at a price. If he did not, then he could have considered himself a widower, free to marry again, to set his fine silver bracelets on another woman who would rear his son. Sometimes, it was true, such arrangements were disturbed by the arrival, twenty years later, of some withered crone who had managed to outlive her usefulness in the North and bribe her way, God knew how, onto a ship that would take her home. But not often. Neither case explained the young man sitting before him.
“My mother returned, only a few weeks later. Pregnant with me. She swore that my father was the jarl of the Vikings himself. When I was born she wanted me named Halfden, because I am half a Dane. But Wulfgar cursed her. He said that was a hero's name, the name of the king who founded the race of the Shieldings, from whom the kings of England and Denmark both claim descent. Too good for me. And so I was given a dog's name instead. Shef.”
The young man dropped his eyes. “That is why my stepfather hates me and wants to make me a slave, why my half brother Alfgar has everything, and I nothing.”
He had not told the full story: How Wulfgar had pressed and pressed his pregnant wife to take birthwort, to kill the rapist's child in her womb. How he himself had only been saved by the intervention of Father Andreas, who had denounced fiercely the sin of child-murder, even of a Viking's child. How Wulfgar in his rage and jealousy had taken a concubine, and bred on her Godive the beautiful, so that in the end there had been three children growing up in Emneth: Alfgar the trueborn; Godive, child of Wulfgar and his slave-lemman; Shef, child of Thryth and the Viking.
The king's thane passed back the hand-forged blade in silence. Still a mystery, he thought. How had the woman escaped? Viking slavers were not usually so careless.
“What was the name of this jarl?” he asked. “Of your…”
“Of my father? My mother says his name was Sigvarth. The jarl of the Small Isles. Wherever they are.”
They sat for a while in silence, then stretched out for sleep.
It was late the next day when Shef and Edrich walked cautiously out of the reeds. Well-fed and unharmed, they approached what they could already see were the ruins of Emneth.
All the buildings were burnt, some mere heaps of ash, others with blackened timbers protruding. The thane's house and stockade were gone, the church, the smithy, the huddle of wattle-and-daub houses for the freemen, the lean-tos and sandpit-houses of the slaves. A few people still moved, stumbling haphazardly here and there, poking in the ashes or joining those already clustered round the well.
As they came into the village area, Shef called to one of the survivors, one of his mother's maids.
“Truda. Tell me what happened. Are there more…?”
She was shaking, gaping up at him with horror and amazement, looking at him unharmed, his shield, sword. “You better… come see your mother.”
“My mother's still here?” Shef felt a slight lift of hope at his heart. Maybe the others would be there too. Could Alfgar have got away? And Godive? What of Godive?
They followed the maid as she hobbled clumsily along.
“Why does she walk like that?” muttered Shef, looking at her painful limp.
“Been raped,” said Edrich briefly.
“But… But Truda's no virgin.”
Edrich answered the unspoken question. “Rape's different. If you have four men hauling at you while another does it, all of them excited, tear sinews, breaks bones sometimes. Even worse if the woman tries to fight
