his friend's.
“How good a swordsman am I?” he asked.
“Poor. No training. Some talent.”
“If I had the training, would I ever be fit to stand against a man like you? Never. Look at our arms. Is yours twice as thick round as mine? Or just half as thick again? And I am not a weak man. But I am a different shape from you, and yours is the shape for a swordsman, even more, an axeman. You swing a weapon as if it were a stick for a boy to slash thistles. I cannot do that. So if I were ever to face a champion like you… And one day I will have to face a champion like you. Muirtach maybe. Or worse.”
All five men nodded silently.
“So I have to even things up. With this, you see…” Shef began to twirl the weapon slowly. “I can thrust. I can cut forehand. I can strike backhand without reversing the weapon. I can change grip and strike with the butt. I can block a blow from any direction. I can use two hands. I need no shield. Most of all—a blow from this, even in my hands, is like a blow from Brand, which few survive.”
“But your hands are exposed,” said Brand.
Shef beckoned, and the Englishman in the forge nervously moved over. He held two more metal objects. Shef took them and passed them over.
They were gauntlets: leather-lined, leather-palmed, with long metal projections designed to fit halfway up the forearm. Yet the striking thing about them, the men saw as they peered more closely, was the way the metal moved. Each finger had five plates, each plate fitted to the next on small rivets. Larger plates fitted over the knuckles and the backs of the hands, but they too moved. Shef pulled them on, and slowly flexed his hands, opening and closing them round the shaft of his weapon.
“They are like the scales of Fafnir the dragon,” said Thorvin.
“Fafnir was stabbed in the belly, from below. I hope to be harder to murder.” Shef turned away. “I have another task to do. I could not have done all this in time without Halfi here. He is a good leather-worker, though he is slow with the bellows.”
Motioning the Englishman to kneel before him he began to file at the iron collar. “You will say there is not much point in freeing him, since someone will enslave him again immediately. But I will see him outside the Army's watch fires in the night, and his master is shut up tight in York. If he has any sense or luck he will run away, run far away, and never be caught again.”
The Englishman looked up as Shef began gently to pry the soft iron from his throat. “You are heathens,” the slave said, not understanding. “Priest said you're men with no mercy. You cut the arms and legs from the thane—I saw him! How can it be that you set a man free where the Christ-priests hold him a slave?”
Shef lifted him to his feet. He replied in English, not in the Norse they had been using before. “The men who crippled the thane should not have done what they did. Yet I say nothing of Christians and heathens, except that there are evil men everywhere. I can give you only one rede. If you do not know who to trust, try a man who wears one of those.” He gestured at the four men watching, who, following the speech, silently raised their silver pendants: hammers for Brand and Thorvin, the apples of Ithun for the two leeches, Hund and Ingulf.
“Or others like them. It may be a boat for Njorth, a hammer for Thor, a penis for Frey. I do not say they will help you. But they will treat you as a man, not as a horse or a heifer.”
“You do not wear one,” said Halfi.
“I do not know what to wear.”
Around them, the normal noise of the camp was turning to hubbub as news spread; voices were raised, warriors shouted to each other. The men in the smithy looked up as one of Brand's men appeared, a broad grin splitting the tangle of his beard.
“We're off!” he cried. “The jarls and the Ragnarssons and the Snakeeye have all stopped riding round and round and pondering and scratching their arses. We take the wall tomorrow! Let the women and girls there beware!”
Shef looked darkly at the man, finding no humor in his words. “My girl was called Godive,” he said. “That is, ‘God's gift.’ ” He pulled on his gauntlets, swung his halberd thoughtfully. “I shall call this Thrall's-wreak'—the vengeance of the slave. One day it will do vengeance for Godive. And other girls as well.”
Chapter Two
In the gray morning light the Army began to filter through the narrow, hovel-lined streets of the outer town of York. All three main bridges over the Ouse were commanded by the walls of the old
As they tramped up through the narrow streets, men turned aside in small groups to kick down doors or break open shutters. Shef turned his head, stiff and clumsy with the unaccustomed weight of the helmet, and raised brows in silent inquiry at Brand, strolling peacefully by his side, flexing the scarred hand just unwrapped from its bandages.
“There are fools everywhere,” remarked Brand. “The runaways say the king here ordered the place cleared days ago, the men inside the fortress, all the others off into the hills somewhere. But there's always someone who knows better, thinks it won't happen.”
Commotion broke out ahead of them to lend force to his words: voices shouting, a woman shrieking, the sound of a sudden blow. Out from a shattered doorway squeezed four men, grins splitting their faces, a grubby, slatternly young woman writhing and twisting in their grip. The other men pushing up the hill stopped to exchange jokes.
“Make you too weak to fight, Tosti! You'd be better off with another pancake, keep your strength up.”
One of the men pulled the girl's gown up over her head like a sack, pinning her arms and muffling her shrieks. Two others seized her bare legs and pulled them roughly apart. The mood of the crowd passing by changed. Men began to stop and watch.
“Room for more when you're finished, Skakul?”
Shef's gauntleted hands clenched on the shaft of “Thrall's-wreak,” and he too turned toward the writhing, grunting group. Brand's enormous fist closed gently over Shef's biceps.
“Leave it, boy. If there's a fight she'll be killed for sure. Easy targets always are. Leave them to it, and maybe they'll let her go at the end. They've a battle to fight, so they can't take too long.”
Reluctantly Shef turned his eyes and walked on, trying not to hear the sounds coming from behind—and, as they walked further, from other sides as well. The town, he realized, was like a cornfield in autumn. It seemed to be empty, but as the scythemen walked through it, cutting the wheat down into a smaller and smaller square, so its inhabitants became more and more visible, anxious, terrified, finally running anywhere to get away from the voices and the blades. They should have gone when they were told, he told himself. The king should have made sure. Why can no one see sense in this world?
The buildings ended and before them was a cleared zone of mud and rubble with the yellow stone wall some eighty yards off, the wall the Rome-folk had made. Brand and his crew emerged from the alley, looked up at the top of the wall where figures moved and called jeeringly. A zip in the air, and an arrow thumped into the wattle and daub of a house wall. Another, and a Viking swore in anger as he looked at the shaft sticking from his hip. Brand reached over and pulled it out, glanced at it, tossed it over his shoulder.
“Hurt, Arnthor?”
“Just got through the leather. Six inches higher and it would have bounced off my jacket.”
“No punch,” remarked Brand again. “Don't look at those fellows. Someone gets one in the eye now and then.”
Shef plodded forward, trying to ignore the zips and thuds like the others. “Have you done this kind of thing
