When Muirtach and the others had dragged him back inside the stockade, Shef had been close to collapse. He had been exhausted in the first place. The shock of recapture had also bitten deep into him. The Vikings had been rough with him as well as they pulled him back, punching and cuffing him repeatedly as they hustled him through the woods, eyes alert all the time for any fringe of scattered Englishmen still lurking in the trees. Then, as they came out onto the meadows and sighted their comrades rounding up such horses as remained, jerking their captive off his feet again and again in rough triumph. They had been badly scared. Having one trophy to take back to Ivar was not much of a set off against all they had lost. Dimly, through weariness and horror, Shef realized that they were in the mood now to work out all their earlier fears on such little satisfaction as they could find. But before he could take in much of that thought, they dragged him to the pen, beat him unconscious.
He only wished he had not had to come round. They had thrown him inside the stockade at mid-morning. He had been unconscious the whole of the long, warm late-summer day. When he finally blinked his blood-sealed eyelids open he was sore, stiff, bruised—but no longer dizzy or bone weary. But he was also chilled to the bone, dry-mouthed with thirst, weak from hunger—in a state of deadly fear. At nightfall he looked round to try to see some prospect of escape or rescue. There was none. Iron anklets on his feet were lashed to stout pegs. His hands were bound in front of him. In time he might have worked the pegs out or chewed through the rawhide lashings on his wrists, but the slightest movement in either direction brought a growl and a kick from the nearby guard. They had, Shef realized, almost no prisoners to watch. In the confusion of the night attack almost all the accumulated slave-booty of the campaign had fought itself free and vanished, taking the Vikings' profits with them. Only a few other figures, newly captured prisoners secured like himself, dotted the floor space of the pen.
What they said brought Shef no comfort. They were the very few survivors of King Edmund's picked men, who had fought to the last in the final attempt to destroy the Ragnarssons and cripple the Viking army's leadership. All were wounded, usually badly. They expected to die, and talked quietly among themselves as they waited. Mostly, they regretted their failure to make a clean sweep of their enemies in the first few minutes of their attack. But then, they said, it could never have been expected that they could get to the heart of the Great Army without resistance. They had done well: burned the ships, killed the crews. “We have gained great glory,” said one. “We stand like eagles on the bodies of the slain. Let us not repent, whether we die now or later.”
“I wish they had not taken the king,” said one of the warrior's comrades after a silence, speaking with difficulty through the wheezing of his pierced lung. At that they nodded soberly, and their eyes moved together toward a corner of the pen.
Shef shivered. He had no wish to face the aggrieved King Edmund. He remembered the moments when the king had come toward him, pleading with him—the gadderling, the thrall, the child of no father—to stand out of the way. If he had done so, the English would be counting the night still as a victory. And he would not have to face the wrath of Ivar. Dazed as he had been, Shef had heard the taunts of his captors about what their chief would do with him. He remembered the fool of a boy who had shown him round these selfsame pens only the evening before, and his stories of how Ivar dealt with those who crossed him. And he, Shef, had taken his woman. Taken her away, taken her carnally, taken her so that she would not be returned. What had happened to her? Shef wondered detachedly. She had not been dragged back with him. Someone had taken her off. But he could hardly worry about her anymore. His own fate was too all-encompassing. Above the fear of death, the shame of treachery, there loomed the fear of Ivar. If only, Shef thought again and again during the night, if only he could die now of cold. He did not wish to see the morning.
The thump of a boot in the back stirred him from torpor in the growing light of the next day. Shef sat up, conscious above all of the dry, swollen stick of his tongue. Round him the guards were cutting lashings, hauling bodies away; some had been granted Shef's wish in the night. But in front of him squatted a small, slight figure in a stained and dirty tunic, drawn lines of fatigue on the sallow face. It was Hund. He was holding a crock of water. For some minutes Shef thought of nothing else, while Hund carefully, and with many agonizing pauses, allowed him to drink a mouthful at a time. Only when he felt the blessed fullness under his breastbone, and knew the luxury of being able to roll an excess mouthful round his tongue and spit it onto the grass, did Shef realize that Hund was trying to speak to him.
“Shef, Shef, try to take this in. We have to know some things. Where is Godive?”
“I don't know. I got her away. Then I think someone else snatched her. But they had me before I could do anything about it.”
“Who do you think took her?”
Shef remembered the laugh in the thickets, the sense he had had, and had dismissed, that there were other fugitives in the wood. “Alfgar. He was always a good tracker. He must have followed us.”
Shef paused again for thought, dispelling the lethargy of cold and weariness. “I think he must have gone back, led Muirtach and the others to us. Maybe they did a deal. They got me, he got her. Or maybe he just snatched her while they were busy with me. There weren't enough of them to risk following very far. Not after the fright they'd had.”
“So. Ivar is more concerned about you than about her. But he knows you got her away from the camp. That's bad.” Hund passed a hand worriedly across his sparse, scanty beard. “Shef, think back. Did anyone see you actually kill any of the Vikings with your own hands?”
“I only killed one. That was in the dark and no one saw. It was no great deed. But someone may have seen me get into the pen and start freeing the prisoners—freeing Alfgar.” Shef's mouth twisted. “And do you know, I broke the Viking shield-wall with a burning timber when all the king's comrades could not do it.” Shef turned his palms and looked mutely at the pads of white skin, the tiny thorn holes where the blisters had been.
“Yes. Still, that might not be a cause for blood-vengeance. Ingulf and I have done a lot of favors during this last day and a night. There are many chieftains who would be dead or crippled for life if it had not been for us. You know, he will even stitch together entrails, and sometimes the man will live, if he is strong enough to stand the pain and there is no poison inside the body.”
Shef looked more attentively at the stains on his friend's tunic.
“You are trying to beg me off? From Ivar?”
“Yes.”
“You and Ingulf? But what do I matter to him?”
Hund dipped a lump of hard bread in the remaining water and passed it over.
“It's Thorvin. He says it is business of the Way. He says you have to be saved. I don't know why, but he is totally set on it. Someone spoke to him yesterday and he came running over to see us at once. Have you done something I don't know about?”
Shef lay back in his bonds. “A lot of things, Hund. But I'm sure of one thing. Nothing is going to get me away from Ivar. I took his woman. How can I pay boot for that?”
“When bale is highest, boot is nighest.” Hund filled the crock with water once again from a skin, placed a handful of bread beside it on the ground, and passed over the length of dirty homespun he had been carrying over his arm. “Food is short in the camp, and half the blankets are being used for shrouds. That's all I can find for now. Make it last. If you want to pay boot—see what the king can do.”
Hund jerked a chin toward the corner of the pen, beyond where the dying warriors had sat, called something to the watching guards, rose, and left. The king, thought Shef. What boot will Ivar take for him?
“Is there any hope?” hissed Thorvin across the table.
Killer-Brand looked at him with mild surprise. “What sort of language is that from a priest of the Way? Hope? Hope is the spittle that runs from the jaws of Fenris Wolf, chained till the day of Ragnarok. If we start only doing things because we think there may be some hope—why, we will end up no better than Christians, singing hymns to their God because they think he may give them a better bargain after death. You are forgetting yourself, Thorvin.”
Brand looked with interest at his own right hand, spread out on the rough table next to Thorvin's forge. It had been split open by a sword-blade between second and third fingers, cut clean open almost down to the wrist. Ingulf the leech was bending over it, washing the wound with warm water from which a faint scent of herbs drifted. Then he slowly, carefully, pulled the lips of the gash apart. White bone showed for an instant before the oozing blood covered it in the track of Ingulf's fingers.
