this he was now committed. Thoughts tumbled in his head: I have tried to kill my father. I have lost my foster father to a living death. My mother now hates me for what my father did. I have lost my chance to be free and have lost one who would have been my friend.
Such thoughts would not help him now. He had done this all for Godive. Now he must finish what he had begun.
Godive woke with a splitting pain in her head, smoke in her nostrils and someone struggling beneath her. Terrified, she struck out and pushed herself away. The girl on whom she had been lying began to whimper.
As her eyes cleared, Godive realized she was in a wagon, a moving wagon creaking along a puddled road. Through its thin canvas tilt, light shown on its cramped interior packed with humanity, half the girls of Emneth lying one on top of another. A steady chorus of moans and sobbing rose from them. The small square of light at the back of the wagon suddenly darkened and a bearded face showed at it. The sobbing dissolved into shrieks and the girls clutched at each other or tried to hide themselves behind their companions. But the face only grinned—its white teeth gleaming brilliantly—shook a finger in warning, and withdrew.
The Vikings! Godive remembered it all in one instant, everything that had happened: the wave of men, the panic, her dart for the marsh, the man rising in front of her to catch her by the skirt, the overmastering terror she had felt at being held by a grown man for the first time in her uneventful life…
Her hand flew suddenly to her thighs. What had they done while she was unconscious? But though the pain in her head grew and grew, there was no throb, no soreness in her body. She was a virgin. She had been a virgin. Surely they could not have raped her and left her feeling nothing?
The girl next to her, a cottager's daughter—one of Alfgar's playmates—saw the movement and said, not without malice, “Don't be afraid. They did nothing to any of us. They're keeping us for sale. And you a maiden too. You have nothing to fear till they find you a buyer. Then you will be like the rest of us.”
The memories kept arranging themselves. The square of people, with armed Vikings all round the outside. And inside the square her father being dragged forward, shouting and offering terms, to the log… The log. The horror when she realized what they were going to do as they had spread-eagled her father and the axeman had stepped forward. Yes. She had run forward, screaming and clawing at the big man. But the other, the one he had called “son,” had caught her. Then what? She felt her head gingerly. A lump. A splitting pain on the other side from the lump. But—she looked at her fingers—no blood.
She was not the only one treated like that; the Viking had hit her with a sandbag. The pirates had been in the trade a long time and were used to dealing with human cattle. At the start of a raid, charge in with axe and sword, spear and shield, to kill the menfolk or the warriors. But after that even the flat of a sword or the back of an axe were unhandy weapons for stunning. Too easy to slip, to fracture a skull or slice an ear from some valuable piece of merchandise. Even a clenched fist was unsafe, given the oar-pulling strength of the man behind it. Who would buy a girl with a broken jaw, or one with her cheekbone smashed and set awry? The skinflints of the outer isles, maybe, but never the buyers for Spain or the choosy kings of Dublin.
So, in Sigvarth's command and in many others, the men detailed for slave-taking carried in their belts or hooked inside their shields a “quietener”—a long sausage of canvas stoutly sewn and filled inside with dry sand collected carefully from the dunes of Jutland or of Skaane. A smart blow with that, and the merchandise lay still, and gave no further trouble. No risk of damage.
Slowly the girls began to whisper to each other, their voices trembling with fear. They told Godive what had happened to her father. Then what had happened to Truda, to Thryth, and to the rest. How they had finally been loaded into the wagon and pulled off down the track toward the coast. But what would happen next?
Late the next day, Sigvarth, jarl of the Small Isles, also felt an inner chill, though with far less apparent cause. He sat now at his ease in the great tent of the Army of the sons of Ragnar, at the jarls' table, comfortably full of best English beef, a horn of strong ale in his hand, listening to his son Hjorvarth tell the story of their raid. Though he was only a young warrior he spoke well. It was good also to let the other jarls, and the Ragnarssons, see that he had a strong young son who would, in the future, have to be taken account of.
What could be wrong? Sigvarth was not a man given to self-examination, but he had also lived a long time, and had learned not to ignore the prickles of oncoming danger.
There had been no trouble coming back from the raid. He had taken the column of wagons and booty, not back along the Ouse, but down the channel of the Nene. The ship-guards, meanwhile, had waited on their mudbank till an English force appeared, had traded jeers and stray arrows with them for a while, watched them slowly assemble a force of rowing-boats and fishercraft, and then at the appointed time had kedged themselves off on the tide and sailed gently up-coast to the rendezvous, leaving the English behind fuming.
And the march to the rendezvous had gone well. The most important thing was that Sigvarth had done exactly what the Snake-eye had said. Torches in every thatch and every field. Every well with a few corpses down it. Examples too, brutal ones. Nailed to trees or mutilated, not dead, to tell their tale to everyone they knew.
Do it like Ivar would do it, the Snake-eye had said. Well, Sigvarth had no illusions about being in the Boneless One's class when it came to brutality, but no one could say he hadn't tried. He had done well. That countryside would not recover for years.
No, it wasn't that disturbing him; that had been a good idea. If there was anything wrong it was further back. Reluctantly, Sigvarth realized that it was the memory of the skirmish that was troubling him. He had fought in the front for a quarter of a century, killed a hundred men, taken a score of battle-wounds. That skirmish should have been easy. It hadn't been. He had broken through the English front line like so many times before, brushed the fair-haired thane out of his way almost with contempt, and got through to the second line, as ragged and disorganized as ever.
And then that boy had come out of the ground. He hadn't even a helmet or a proper sword. Only a freedman, or the poorest of the cottagers' children. Yet two parries and Sigvarth's own sword was in pieces and he himself off balance with his guard too high. The fact was, Sigvarth concluded, if that had been single combat he would have been a dead man. It was the others coming up on each side who had saved him. He did not think anyone had noticed, but if they had—if they had, some one of the bolder heads, the frontmen or the duelers, might be thinking of calling him out even now.
Could he face them? Was his son Hjorvarth strong enough yet for his vengeance to be feared? Maybe he was getting too old for the business. If he couldn't settle a half-armed boy, and an English boy at that, then perhaps he was.
At least he was doing the right thing now. Getting the Ragnarssons on your side—that could never be a bad idea. Hjorvarth was coming to the end of his tale. Sigvarth turned in his chair and nodded at his two henchmen waiting near the entrance. They nodded back and hastened out.
“…so we burned the wagons on the shore, threw in a couple of churls that my father in his wisdom had kept back, as sacrifice to Aegir and to Ran, boarded ship, ran down the coast to the rivermouth—and here we are! The men of the Small Isles, under famous Sigvarth Jarl—and I his lawful son Hjorvarth—at your service, sons of Ragnar, and ready for more!”
The tent erupted in applause, horns banged on tables, feet stamped, knives clashed. The men were in a good temper at this fair start to the campaign.
The Snake-eye rose to his feet and spoke.
“Well, Sigvarth, we said you could keep your plunder, and you have earned it, so you need have no fear of telling us your good luck. Tell us, how much did you take? Enough to retire and buy yourself a summer home in Sjaelland?”
“Little enough, little enough,” called Sigvarth, to groans of disbelief. “Not enough to make me turn farmer. There are only poor pickings to be expected from country thanes. Wait till the great, the invincible Army sacks Norwich. Or York! Or London!” Cries of approval now, and a smile from the Snake-eye. “It is the ministers we must sack, full of gold which the Christ-priests have wrung from the fools of the South. No gold and little silver from the countryside.
“But some things we did take, and I am ready to share the best of it. Here, let me show you the finest thing that we found!”
He turned and waved his followers in. They pushed through the tables, leading with them a figure draped completely in sacking, a rope round its waist. The figure was pushed to the front of the center table, and then in
