out, not at the panorama of the nine worlds from the great ashtree, but into the face of Hund. Hund with the needle. He shrieked again and threw up a hand to fend him off, and the hand clutched Hund's arm with desperate force.
“Easy, easy,” said Hund. “It's all over now. No one can touch you. You are a carl of the army, in the crew of Brand of Halogaland, and the past is forgotten.”
“But I must remember,” cried Shef.
“Remember what?”
Water filled both his eyes, the good one and the ruined socket. “I don't remember it,” he whispered.
“I have forgotten the king's message.”
Carl
Chapter One
For many miles the track had run over flat, well-drained land—the southern half of the great Vale of York, rolling up from the marshes of the Humber. Even so, it had been hard going for the Great Army: eight thousand men, as many horses, hundreds of camp-followers and bedfellows and slaves for the market, all trampling along together. Behind them even the great stone-laid roads built by the Rome-folk of old turned into muddy tracks splashing as high as the horses' bellies. Where the Army marched along English lanes or drover roads it left nothing but a morass behind.
Brand the Champion lifted his still-bandaged hand and the troop of men behind him—three ships' crews, a long hundred and five—eased their reins. The ones at the very rear, the last men in the Army, immediately faced about, peering at the gray, wet landscape behind them, from which the autumn light was already beginning to seep.
The two men at the very point of the troop stared closely at what lay in front of them: a deeply mudded track, four arm-spans wide, descending down and round a bend to what must be the bed of another small stream. A few hundred yards ahead the men could see the land rising again and the unhedged track running across it. But in between, along the bed of the stream, ran a belt of tangled forest, large oak and chestnut trees swaying their brown leaves in the rising wind, crowding up to the very edge of the road.
“What do you think, young marshal?” asked Brand, pulling at his beard with his left hand. “It may be that with your one eye you can see further than most men with two.”
“I can see one thing with half an eye, old kay-handed one,” replied Shef equably. “Which is that that horse- turd by the side of the road there has stopped steaming. The main body is getting further away from us. We're too slow. Plenty of time for the Yorkshiremen to get in behind them and in front of us.”
“And how would you deal with that, young defier-of-Ivar?”
“I would get us all off the road and all go down the right-hand side. The right hand, because they might expect us to go down the left, with our shields toward the trees and the ambush. Get down to the stream. When we get to it, blow all our horns and charge it as if it were the gap in an enemy stockade. If there's no one there, we look stupid. If there's an ambush there we'll flush them out. But if we're going to do it—let's do it fast.”
Brand shook his massive head with a kind of exasperation. “You are not a fool, young man. That is the right answer. But it is the answer of a follower of your one-eyed patron, Othin the Betrayer of Warriors. Not of a carl of the Great Army. What we are here for is to pick up the stragglers, to see that no one falls into the hands of the English. The Snakeeye does not care for heads thrown into the encampment every morning. It makes the men restless. They like to think every one of them is important, and that anyone who gets killed gets killed for a good reason, not just by accident. If we went off the road we might miss someone, and then his mates would come round asking for him sooner or later. We will take the risk and go down the track.”
Shef nodded, and swung his shield off his back, pushing his arm through the elbow-strap to grip the handle behind the boss. Behind him there was a clanking and rustling as a hundred and twenty-five men moved their weapons to a ready position and urged their horses forward. Shef realized that Brand had these conversations in a way to train him, to teach him to think like a leader. He bore no grudge when his advice was overruled.
Yet deep down he struggled with the thought that these wise men, these great and experienced warriors— Brand the Champion, Ivar the Boneless, even the matchless Snakeeye himself—were wrong. They were doing things the wrong way. Their wrong way had smashed every kingdom they had ventured against, not just the tiny and petty kingdom of the East Anglians. Even so, he, Shef—once thrall, slayer of two men, a man who had never stood in a battle line for ten heartbeats together—he was sure that he knew better how to array an army than did they.
Had he seen it in his visions? Was the knowledge sent to him by his father-god in Valhalla—Othin the Traitor, God of the Hanged, Betrayer of Warriors—as Brand obliquely continued to suggest?
Whatever the cause, Shef thought, if I were the marshal of the Army, I would call a halt six times a day, and blow the trumpets, so the flank-guards and the rear-guard would know where I was. And I would move no further till I heard the trumpets in reply.
It would be better if everyone knew the time when the trumpets would blow. But how could that be, once we are all out of sight of each other? How do the black monks in the minsters know when it is time for their services? Shef chewed on the problem as his horse took him down between the trees and shadows began to fall across the path. Again and again these days his head swam with thoughts, with ideas, with difficulties to which there seemed to be no solution in the wisdom of his time. Shef's fingers itched to hold a hammer again, to work in the forge. He felt he could beat out a solution on an anvil instead of restlessly brooding in his own brain.
There was a figure on the road ahead of them. He spun about when he heard the horses—then let his sword slide back down when he recognized them.
“I am Stuf,” the man said. “One of the band of Humli, out of Ribe.”
Brand nodded. A small band, not very well organized. The sort of group that would let a man slip out of line and not think to inquire what had happened to him till too late.
“My horse went lame and I dropped behind. Then I decided to turn him loose and go on with just my own pack.”
Brand nodded again. “We have spare horses here. I will let you have one. It will cost you a mark of silver.”
Stuf opened his mouth to protest, to start the automatic haggling expected of any deal in horseflesh, but then closed it suddenly as Brand waved his men on. He grabbed the reins of the horse Brand was leading.
“Your price is high,” he said. “But maybe now is not the time to be arguing. There are Englishmen around. I can smell them.”
As he said the words Shef saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. A branch moving. No, the whole tree sweeping downward in a stately arc, the ropes tied to its top suddenly visible as they tightened into a straight line. An instant later, movement all along the left-hand edge of the track.
Shef threw his shield up. A thump, an arrow-point just protruding through the soft lindenwood an inch from his hand. Shouts and screams behind him, horses rearing and kicking. Already he had hurled himself off the horse and was crouching below its neck, its body between him and the ambush. His mind registered a dozen facts as if in one flash of lightning, far quicker than any words.
That tree had been cut through after the Great Army had passed through. The rear-guard was even further behind than they had thought. The attack would be coming from the left; they wanted to drive their enemies into the wood to the right. No escape forward over the felled tree, none back through the confusion of shot horses and startled men. Do what they least suspected!
Shef ran round the front of his horse, shield up, and hurled himself straight at the steep left bank of the track, his spear gripped underhand. One leap, two, three—not pausing lest the muddy bank give way. A makeshift barricade of branches and a face glaring over it at him, an Englishman fumbling an arrow out of his quiver. Shef drove the spear through the barricade at groin level and saw the face contort in agony. Twist, wrench backward,
