Hund gripped is arm. “Wait. Listen. Can you hear something?”
The sound strengthened as the two youths turned their heads this way and that. Noise. Song. Many men singing together. The sound, they realized, was coming from the other side of a slight rise maybe a hundred yards to their left, where the watermeadows ran into a tangle of uncultivated common.
“It sounds like the monks singing at the great minster at Ely,” murmured Shef. A foolish thought. There would be neither monk nor priest left within twenty miles of this place.
“Shall we look?” whispered Hund. Shef made no reply, but began to crawl slowly and carefully toward the sound of deep-voiced singing. It could only be the pagans in this spot. But maybe a small group of them would be easier to approach than the whole army. Anything was better than simply walking out across that flat plain.
After they had covered half the distance on their bellies, Hund gripped Shef's wrist. Silently he pointed up a slight slope. Twenty yards away, beneath a huge old hawthorn, stood a man, motionless, his eyes scanning the ground. He leaned on an axe two-thirds his own weight. A burly man, thick-necked, broad across paunch and hip.
At least he did not seem built for speed, Shef reflected. And he was standing in the wrong place if he wanted to be a sentry. The two youths exchanged a glance. The Vikings might be great seamen. They had much to learn about the art of stealth.
Gently Shef snaked forward, angling away from the sentry, round a thicket of bracken, between and beneath a tangle of gorse, Hund crawling immediately behind him. Ahead, the noise of singing had ceased. Replaced by a single voice talking. Not talking. Exhorting. Preaching. Could there be secret Christians even among the heathen? Shef wondered.
A few yards on, he parted the bracken stems and peered silently down into a little dell, hidden from view. There, forty or fifty men sat on the ground in a rough circle. All carried swords or axes, but their spears and shields were propped up or planted in the ground. They sat within a corded-off enclosure made of a dozen spears with a thread running between them. From the thread, at intervals, dangled clumps of the bright red berry that the English called “quickbeam,” now in autumn brilliance. At the center of the enclosure, with the men seated round it, a fire burned. Next to it was planted a single spear, point up, its shaft gleaming silver.
One man stood by the fire and the spear, his back to the hidden watchers, speaking to the men round him in tones of persuasion, of command. Unlike the others, and unlike anyone else Shef had ever seen, his tunic and breeches were neither natural homespun in color nor dyed green or brown or blue, but a brilliant white, white as the inside of an egg.
From his right hand there dangled a hammer, short-hafted, double-headed—a blacksmith's hammer. Shef's keen sight locked on the front row of sitting men. Round every neck, a chain. On every chain, a pendant displayed on the chest. They were of different kinds: he could see a sword, a horn, a phallus, a boat. But at least half the men wore the sign of a hammer.
Shef rose abruptly from his concealment and walked forward into the dell. As they saw him, fifty men leap simultaneously to their feet, swords coming out, voices raised in warning. A grunt of amazement behind him, a crashing of feet through the bracken. The sentry was behind him now, Shef knew. He did not turn to look.
Slowly the man in white turned to meet him, the two facing each other across the berry-fringed thread, looking each other up and down.
“And where are you come from?” said the man in white. He spoke English with a strong, burring accent.
What shall I say? thought Shef. From Emneth? From Norfolk? That will mean nothing to them. “I come from the North,” he said aloud. The faces in front of him changed. Surprise? Recognition? Suspicion?
The man in white gestured his followers to hold still. “And what is your business with us, the followers of the
Shef pointed to the hammer in the other's hand, the hammer-pendant round his neck. “I am a smith, like you. My business is to learn.”
Someone was translating his words now to the others. Shef realized Hund had materialized at his left, and there was a threatening presence just behind them both. He kept his eyes fixed on those of the man in white. “Show me a sign of your craft.”
Shef pulled his sword from its sheath and passed it over, as he had to Edrich. The hammer-bearer turned it over and over, looked at it intently, flexed it gently, noting the surprising play in the thick, single-edged blade, scratched with his thumbnail at the surface discoloration of old rust. Carefully, he shaved a patch of hair from his forearm.
“Your forge was not hot enough,” he remarked. “Or you lost patience. Those steel strips were not even when you twisted them. But it is a good blade. It is not what it seems. And neither are you. Now tell me, young man—and remember, death is just behind you—what it is that you want? If you are just a runaway slave like your friend”—he gestured toward Hund's neck, with the telltale marks on it—“maybe we will let you go. If you are a coward who wants to join the winning side, maybe we will kill you. But maybe you are something else. Or someone else. Say then, what do you want?”
I want Godive back, thought Shef. He looked into the pagan priest's eyes and said, with all the sincerity he could muster, “You are a master-smith. The Christians will let me learn no more. I want to be your apprentice. Your learning-knave.”
The man in white grunted, handed back Shef's sword, bone hilt first. “Lower your axe, Kari,” he said to the man behind the pair. “There is more here than meets the eye.
“I will take you as a knave, young man. And if your friend has any skill, he may join us too. Sit, both of you, to one side, till we have finished what we were doing. My name is Thorvin, which is to say, ‘the friend of Thor,’ the god of the smiths. What are yours?”
Shef flushed with shame, dropped his eyes.
“My friend's name is Hund,” he said, “which is to say, ‘dog.’ And I too, I have only a dog's name. My father —No, I have no father. They call me Shef.”
For the first time Thorvin's face showed surprise, and more. “Fatherless?” he muttered. “And your name is Shef. But that is not only a dog's name. Truly you are uninstructed.”
Shef felt his spirits sinking as they moved toward the camp. He was not afraid for himself, but for Hund. Thorvin had told the pair of them to sit to one side while they finished their strange meeting: first him talking, then some kind of discussion in the burring Norse Shef could almost follow, and then a skin of some drink passed ceremoniously from hand to hand. At the end all the men had gathered in little groups and joined hands in silence on one object or another: Thorvin's hammer, a bow, a horn, a sword, what looked like a dried horse's penis. No one had touched the silver spear till Thorvin had gone over, pulled it briskly into two parts and rolled them up in a cloth bag. A few moments later the enclosure had been broken up, the fire put out, the spears reclaimed, the men of the group already drifting away in fours and fives, moving warily and taking different directions.
“We are followers of the Way,” Thorvin had said in partial explanation to the two youths, still speaking his careful English. “Not everyone wishes to be known as such—not in the camp of the Ragnarssons. Me they accept.” He tugged at the hammer pendant on his chest. “I have a skill. You have a skill, young smith-to-be. Maybe it will protect you.
“What of your friend? What can you do?”
“I can pull teeth,” replied Hund unexpectedly.
The half dozen men still standing round had grunted in amusement.
“He says, ‘To draw teeth, that is an accomplishment,’ ” Thorvin translated. “Is it true?”
“It is true,” supplied Shef for his friend. “He says it is not strength you need. It is a twist of the wrist—that, and knowing how the teeth grow. He can cure fevers too.”
“Tooth-drawing, bone-setting, fever-curing,” said Thorvin. “There is always trade for a leech among women and warriors. He can go to my friend Ingulf. If we can get him there. See, you two, if we can get to our own places in the camp—my forge, Ingulf's booth—we may be safe. Till then—” He shook his head. “We have many ill-wishers. Some friends. Will you take the risk?”
They had followed him mutely. But wisely?
As they came toward it, the camp looked more and more formidable. It was enclosed by a high earth
