“Thorvin,” he said. “Muirtach,” nodding to the strangely dressed one. “What's the stir?”
“I'm taking that thrall there.”
“No.” Thorvin seized Hund suddenly and pushed him through the gap in the enclosure, clenching his hand round the berries. “He is under the protection of Thor.”
Muirtach strode forward, sword raised.
“Hold.” The immense voice again, threatening this time. “You have no right, Muirtach.”
“What's it to you?”
Slowly, reluctantly, the immense man reached inside his tunic, fumbled, brought out a silver emblem on a chain. A hammer.
Muirtach cursed, swept his sword back, spat on the ground “Take him then. But you, boy—” His eye turned to Shef. “You touched yer hilt to me. I catch you on yer own before long. Then ye're dead, boy.” He nodded to Thorvin. “And Thor is nothing to me. No more than Christ and his hoor of a mother. Ye'll not fool me like ye've done him.” He jerked a thumb at the immense man, turned, and walked away down the track, head high, swaggering like one who has met a defeat and will not show it, his fellows straggling after.
Shef realized he had been holding his breath and let it out with careful and affected ease.
“Who are those?” he asked, looking at the retreating men.
Thorvin replied not in English, but in the Norse they had been using, speaking slowly, with stress on the many words the languages had in common. “They are the Gaddgedlar. Christian Irishmen who have left their god and their people and turned Viking. Ivar Ragnarsson has many in his following and hopes to use them to become king of England and Ireland as well. Before he and his brother Sigurth turn their minds back to their own country, to Denmark, and Norway beyond.”
“And there may they never come,” added the immense man who had saved them. He bobbed his head to Thorvin with odd respect, even deference, looked Shef up and down. “That was bold, young swain. But you have irked a mighty man. I too. But for me it has been long in the coming. If you need me again, Thorvin, call. You know that since I took the news to the Braethraborg the Ragnarssons have kept me with them. How long that will last now that I have shown my hammer, I do not know. But in any case I am growing tired of Ivar's hounds.”
He strolled away.
“Who was that?” asked Shef.
“A great champion, from Halogaland in Norway. He is called Viga-Brand. Brand the Killer.”
“And he is a friend of yours?”
“A friend of the Way. A friend of Thor. And so of smiths.”
I do not know what I have got into, thought Shef to himself. But I must not forget why I am here. Unwillingly his eyes drifted away from the enclosure where Hund still stood, toward the danger-center, the southern river-wall of the Viking base, the encampment of the Ragnarssons. She must be there, he thought suddenly. Godive.
Chapter Six
For many days Shef had no time to think of his quest for Godive—or anything else for that matter. The work was too hard. Thorvin rose at dawn and worked on sometimes into the night, hammering, reforging, filing, tempering. In an army of this size there seemed to be innumerable men whose axe-heads had come loose, whose shields needed a rivet, who had decided that their spears needed reshafting. Sometimes there would be a line of men twenty-long, stretched from the forge to the edge of the precinct and on down the lane that led to it. There were also harder and more complex jobs. Several times men brought in mail shirts, torn and bloody, asking for them to be repaired, let out, altered for a new owner. One at a time each link of the mail had to be laboriously fitted into four others, and each of the four others into four others. “Mail is easy to wear, and it gives freedom to the arms,” Thorvin had remarked when Shef finally ventured to grumble. “But it does not give protection against a fierce stroke—and it is hell on earth for smiths.”
As time went by Thorvin handed over the routine jobs more and more to Shef, and concentrated on the difficult or special items. Yet he was rarely far away. He talked continually in Norse, repeating himself as often as was necessary. Sometimes, in the beginning, using mime until he was sure Shef understood. He spoke English well enough, Shef knew, but he would never use it. He insisted too that his apprentice spoke back to him in Norse, even if all he did was repeat what had been said to him. In fact the languages were close to each other in vocabulary and in basic style. After a while Shef caught the trick of repronunciation, and began to think of Norse as a bizarre and aberrant dialect of English, which had only to be imitated, not really learned from the beginning. After that matters went well.
Thorvin's conversation was also a good cure for boredom or frustration. From him, and from the men who stood waiting their turn, Shef learned a great many things that he had never heard before. The Vikings all seemed enormously well-informed about everything that had been decided or intended by their leaders, and had no scruples about discussing it or criticizing it. One thing that soon became clear was that the Great Army of the pagans, feared throughout Christendom, was by no means a unit. At its heart were the Ragnarssons and their followers, maybe half the total. But to these were attached any number of separate contingents, joined to share the loot, of any size from the twenty ships brought down by the Orkney jarl to single crews from villages in Jutland or Skaane. Many of these were already dissatisfied. The campaign had started well enough, they said, with the descent on East Anglia and the establishment of the fortress as a base. Yet the idea had always been not to stay too long, but to gather horses, acquire guides, and then move suddenly from a firm base in the East Anglian kingdom against the true enemy and target, the kingdom of Northumbria.
“Why not land with the ships in Northumbria in the first place?” Shef had asked once, wiping the sweat from his forehead and signaling to the next customer.
The stocky, balding Viking with the dented helmet had laughed, loudly but without malice. The really tricky part of a campaign, he had said, was always getting started. Getting the ships up the river. Finding a place to beach them. Getting horses for thousands of men. Contingents turning up late and going down the wrong river. “If the Christians had the sense they were born with,” he had said emphatically, spitting on the ground, “they would pick us off before we got started almost every time.”
“Not with the Snakeeye in charge,” another man had remarked.
“Maybe not,” the first Viking had agreed. “Maybe not with the Snakeeye. But lesser commanders. Do you remember Ulfketil down in Frankland?”
So, better to get your feet planted before you tried to hit, they had agreed. Good idea. But this time it had gone wrong. Their feet were planted too long. It was that there King Edmund, most of the customers agreed—or “Jatmund” as they pronounced it—and the only question was, what was making him act so stupid? Easy to ravage his country till he gave in. But they didn't want to ravage East Anglia, the customers complained. Takes too long. Too thin pickings. Why in Hell didn't the king just pay up and come to a sensible deal? He'd had a warning.
Maybe too much of a warning, Shef thought, remembering the wasted face of Wulfgar in the horse-trough, and that indefinable buzz of rage which he had felt in the fields and woods on their journey. When he asked why the Vikings were so determined to march on Northumbria, largest but not by any means richest of the English kingdoms, the laughter at that question took a long time to die down. Eventually, when he unraveled the tale of Ragnar Lothbrok and King Ella, of the old boar and the little pigs who would grunt, of Viga-Brand and his taunting of the Ragnarssons themselves in the Braethraborg, a chill fell on him. He remembered the strange words he had heard from the blue-swelling face in the snake-pit of the archbishop, the sense of foreboding he had known at the time.
Now he understood the need for revenge—but there were other things about which he remained curious.
“Why do you say ‘Hell’?” he asked Thorvin one night after they had put their gear away and were sitting mulling a tankard of ale on the cooling forge. “Do you believe there is a place where sins are punished after death? Christians believe in Hell—but you're no Christian.”
“What makes you think Hell is a Christian word?” answered Thorvin. “What does heaven mean?” For once he used the English word,
“Well—it's the sky,” answered Shef, startled.
