For an instant again, as the battle cleared, two warriors showed in black silhouette, each leap of flame seeming to catch them in another contorted pose. The swords whirled, each blow parried
The thane's voice was almost affectionate. “Look at them, both sides. Those are the king's warmen and the best of the pirates. They are the
“Let's get out of here,” said Alfgar abruptly. The peasants stirred and muttered.
Suddenly the thane had Alfgar by the arm, fingers sinking deep.
“No. Listen. That is the king's voice. He is calling on his true men. Hear what he wants.”
“He wants the head of Ivar,” snarled a peasant.
Suddenly they were all moving forward, raising spears, bracing shields, the thane among them.
He knows it won't work, Shef realized—but I know what will!
He leapt in front of them, pointing, gesturing. Slowly the men caught his meaning, turned away, dropped their weapons, headed for the nearest of the blazing longships.
Over the clash of steel the Vikings too heard the king's voice calling, and understood him—many of them had had English bedslaves for years, and their fathers before them.
“King Jatmund wants your head,” cried one of the jarls.
“I don't want Jatmund's head,” Ivar called back. “He must be taken alive.”
“What do you want him for?”
“I will give that much thought. Something new. Something instructive.”
Something to put heart back into the men. This had all been much too close for comfort, Ivar reflected, edging from side to side to keep a clear view of the action. He would never have thought that the king of a little kingdom like this would have had the guts to challenge the Great Army in its own base.
“All right,” he said quietly to the Gaddgedlar, waiting behind the battle-line as his personal reserve. “No need to wait much longer. They aren't going to break through. Over here, between the tents. Now, when I give the word we are going to charge. Go right through them, don't bother to fight. I want you to catch the kinglet. King Jatmund. See him. There. The little man, the one with the war-mask over his face.”
Ivar filled his lungs to shout, over the din of battle, in mockery of the cry of Edmund. “Twenty ounces, twenty ounces of gold to the man who brings me the English king. But don't kill him. He must be taken alive.”
But before he could speak he felt Muirtach and the Irish gasp and stiffen around him. “Will you look at that!” “It's a fiery cross coming for us!”
Brand sprang aside, tripped over a rope and fell with a clang to the ground. Something struck Ivar a numbing blow on the shoulder. The Gaddgedlar scattered in all directions as the waxed flax walls of the tents started to blaze. The shrieking of women rose to add itself to all the other noises of the battle.
And instantly, running along the blazing timber itself, his face contorted with rage and delight, there came a half-naked churl, the slave manacles still on his wrist, hurtling through the scattered ranks of his captors. A spear stabbed at Ivar's face. Without thought he parried it, slicing the point from its shaft at the same moment his shoulder shrieked protest. The peasant raced on, reversing his clumsy weapon and smashing it at the side of Ivar's head.
The blow, the ground rising up, the fall into burning wax and skin. Struck by a peasant, Ivar's brain thought in the last instant of consciousness, darkness embracing him. But I am the champion of the North.
Through the flames other figures came leaping. It's that boy, thought Ivan, the one who fought the duel by the washing-place. But I thought he was one of mine….
A bare foot landed in his testicles, and his body gave up the fight.
Shef raced along the still-smoldering timber of the long-ship's mast. He was aware that his hands were burned, swelling, puffy already with blisters. There was no time for that. He and the thane and Alfgar had seized the smoldering timber, its yard still attached, as soon as the peasants had pulled it from the flame, had grasped the upper end and had run toward the fighting battle-line, struggling desperately to keep it upright till they could throw it into the warriors. But the instant they hurled it a wave of furious peasants had run straight past them and over them. And behind him, he knew, came King Edmund's champions, all beside themselves with rage and fear and the passion to kill. He had to reach Godive first.
In front of him a churl rained blows on an amazed Viking with a broken spear-staff. Something groaned and squirmed under his feet. Another peasant was down with a slash from the side. Yellow plaids seemed to be scattering in flight everywhere—the Gaddgedlar, in superstitious panic and fear of the fiery cross that had come to avenge their apostasy. And women shrieking.
Shef swerved instantly to the left round a tent. Bulging sides, the screaming just beyond it. He drew his sword, bent, and scored it open at knee level, instantly catching the flap and hauling at it with all his strength.
A wail of women erupted from it like water from a broken milldam, in their shifts, in their gowns, at least one still naked from her sleep. Godive—where! That one, there, the scarf over her head. Shef seized her shoulder, hauling her round to him, dragging the scarf down. A blaze of yellow hair, turned copper by the flames in the sky, and furious pale eyes, nothing like Godive's gray ones. A fist caught him full in the face and he staggered back, full of shock and incongruous pain: all around him heroes were dying and he had just been punched on the nose!
Then the woman was away, and Shef glimpsed a familiar body-shape, not scuttling like the other women but running full stride like a young deer. Straight into disaster. The English were everywhere now, inside the Viking square, taking their enemies from front and rear simultaneously, determined to wipe out the pirates' leadership and aristocracy in the scant seconds they had before rescue and revenge came down from the main camp. They were cutting at everything that moved, carried away with fear and triumph and long frustration.
Shef was on her, throwing himself forward, catching her round the hips and bowling her over just as a furious warrior, seeing something moving behind him, swung round and launched a body-severing blow at waist level. The two rolled sideways in a tangle of legs and dress and nails as new combat clashed above them. Then he had a grip round her waist and was hauling her by main force into the shadow of a pavilion, tenanted only by corpses.
“Shef!”
“Me.” He put his hand over her mouth. “Listen. We have to get away now. There won't be another chance. Go back to where I broke in. Everyone there is dead now. If we can just get through the fight we'll be out there, by the river. Understood? Now, let's go.”
Sword in one hand, clutching Godive tightly with the other, Shef stepped crouching into the night, eyes darting for a route through the fifty single combats that raged around him.
The battle was over, Edmund thought. And he had lost. He had broken the Vikings' last ring, sure enough, thanks to that rabble of churls that had sprung from nowhere with the half-naked youth in their midst. In the last few minutes he had done crippling execution among the Great Army's hardest of hard cores, so much that the Army would never be quite the same again. Or remember the camp on the Stour without a shudder. But he had not yet seen a Ragnarsson dead. There were little knots of men still fighting back-to-back and the Ragnarssons must be among them. Only if he held this place of slaughter, defeated and killed every one of them, could he be sure of lasting victory.
He would not get the chance to do it. Edmund felt the blood-rage inside him cooling, cooling to a slow and wary calculation. Ominously, the noise from the main camp above the Ragnarssons' tents by the river had lessened. Stung by arrows from the palisades, harassed by mock assaults and parties of running knifemen in their rear, the
