“No,” Shef bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Get back to the handles.”
Faces gaped at him, men began to throw their weight on the ropes.
“You don't need to push the whole thing back, just swing back the ram—”
An arm caught him in the back, he was hurled forward, other bodies charged past him, he found a rope thrust in his hand.
“Pull, ye useless bodach, or I'll cut yer liver out,” screamed Muirtach in his ear.
Shef felt the frame tremble, the wheel behind him start to turn. He threw his weight on the rope—two feet would do it, maybe three—they couldn't throw that great thing right out from the gate….
A ground-trembling crash, another violent blow in the back, his head making contact with a timber, a sudden terrible shrieking like a woman's that this time went on and on…
Shef stumbled to his feet and looked around. The Vikings had been too slow. The stone pillar, finally hauled over the edge by a hundred arms, had come down squarely on the iron snout of the ram, driving it into the ground, snapping chains and tearing out their fixing bolts. It had also smashed the front of the frame, and come down finally across the hips of one of the crew. He was the one—a massive grizzled man in his forties—who was shrieking. His mates backed away—frightened, shamed, ignoring the three or four silent bodies caught by flailing chain or smashing timber. At least, apart from the one man, no one was making any noise. They would begin to babble in a moment, but for a moment, Shef knew, he could bend them to his will. He knew what must be done.
“Muirtach. Stop that noise.” The cruel dark face gaped at him, seemingly without recognition, then stepped forward, pulling a dirk from his hose-top.
“The rest of you. Roll the ram back. Not far. Six feet. Stop. Now—” He was at the timbers at the front, examining the damage. “Ten of you, outside; take broken wood, spear-shafts, anything, roll that column right hard up against the gate. It's only a few feet wide—if we get the front wheel right up to it we can still swing the ram.
“Now, rerig these chains. I need a hammer, two hammers. Start pulling the ram back, right back on its slings…”
Time passed in a frenzy. Shef was aware of faces staring at him, of a silver helmet pushing in and out of the rear entrance, of Muirtach wiping a dirk. He paid no attention. For him, the chains and posts, the nails and broken timbers, were glowing lines in his head, shifting as he thought how they should be. He had no doubt what to do.
A roar of excitement outside as the Army tried a sudden escalade with makeshift ladders against a seemingly undefended wall. Only to be hurled back and off as the English rallied in defense.
Inside, gasps of effort, mutters: “It's the smith, the one-eyed smith. Do as he says.”
Ready. Shuffling to the back, Shef waved the champions to their ropes again, saw the ram rumble forward till its wheels lay against the column and its head; the shattered iron snout, chopped off and discarded, was once again flush with the gate, oak against oak. The champion seized their handles once more, waited for the word, swung back all together, and forward. And forward. They were singing now, a rowing song, putting their bodies into the stroke, heaving mindlessly and without direction. Shef ducked out of the frame once more and into the daylight.
Round him the aimless muddy waste of the morning had taken on the look of a battlefield. Bodies on the ground, hurt men walking or being carried away, spent shafts littering the earth or being picked up by scavenging archers. Anxious faces turning first toward him. Then toward the gate.
It was beginning to split. Movement ran across it now as the ram struck; one post was slightly out of line with the other. The men inside were inching the ram forward, to get a better stroke. In fifty breaths, maybe a hundred, it would go. The champions of Northumbria would surge out, waving their gold-handled swords, to meet the champions of Denmark and the Vik and the apostates of Ireland. It was the turning point of the battle.
Shef found himself staring into the face of Ivar the Boneless, only a few feet away, the pale eyes fixed on him, full of hatred and suspicion. Then Ivar's attention changed. He too knew the battle had reached its crisis. Turning, he waved both arms in prearranged signal. From the houses down toward the Ouse a horde of figures trotted. They carried long ladders, not makeshifts like those of the last escalade, but carefully made and concealed ones. Fresh men, who knew what they were doing. If the champions were at the gate, Ivar would send a wave in at the corner tower, which all the bravest and the best of the English would have left, to join the climactic struggle at the gate.
The English are finished, Shef thought. Their defenses are down in two places. Now the Army will go through.
Why did I do this to them? Why have I helped Ivar and the Army—the ones who burned out my eye?
From the other side of the quaking gate there came a curious dull twang, like a harp-string snapping, but immensely louder, fit to be heard above the din of battle. Up into the air there rose a mass, a mighty mass, a boulder bigger than ten men could lift. That's impossible, Shef thought. Impossible.
But the boulder continued to rise, up and up till Shef had to tilt his head back to look at it. It appeared to hang for an instant.
Then down.
It landed square on the center of the ram, smashing through shields and frame and supports as if they were a child's house of bark. The ram's head kicked up in the air and jerked sideways like a dying fish. From inside, hoarse cries of pain.
The scaling parties now had ladders up against the wall; they were scrambling up; one ladder had been pushed away, the rest were standing firm. Two hundred yards further off, across the Ouse, something was happening on top of the wooden stockade of Marystown: men crouched round some kind of machine.
Not a boulder this time, a line, rising as it streaked across the river, then falling as it headed for the ladders. The hero on top of the one nearest them had his hand on the stone battlement, and was just reaching over to scramble across. The streak intersected with his body.
He smashed forward as if struck in the back by a giant, smashed so hard the ladder broke under him with the impact. As the ladder fell beneath him and he turned, arms flung wide, Shef saw the giant bolt projecting from the man's spine. He folded over backward as if in two pieces and fell slowly onto the heap of his mates scrambling beneath him.
An arrow. But not an arrow. No human being could have shot it, nor heaved the boulder. Yet these things had happened. Shef walked forward slowly and considered the rock lying amid the ruins of the ram, ignoring the pitiful struggles and cries for help beneath it.
These things had been done by machines. And such machines! Somewhere inside the fort, maybe among the black monks, there must be a machine-master such as he had never imagined. He must find out. But now, anyway, he knew why he had helped the Army. Because he could not bear to see a machine mishandled. But now there were machines on both sides.
Brand had seized him, thrust “Thrall's-wreak” into his hands, was hustling him away, snarling angrily at him.
“…standing there like a wittol, they'll have a war-band out any moment!”
Shef saw they were almost the last men left on the cleared ground, the place of slaughter. The rest had filtered back down the hill as they had filtered up.
The Ragnarssons' assault on York had failed.
Very carefully, tongue protruding between his teeth, Shef laid the keen blade of his meat-knife to the thread. It snapped. The weight on the end of the wooden arm dropped, the other end flew up. A pebble arced lazily across the forge.
Shef sat up with a sigh. “That is how it works,” he said to Thorvin. “A short arm, a heavy weight; a long arm, a lighter weight. There it is.”
“I am glad you are satisfied at last,” replied Thorvin. “Two days you have been playing with bits of wood and string, while I do all the work. Now maybe you can bear a hand.”
“I will, yes, but this is important too. This is the new knowledge that those of the Way must seek.”
“It is. And important. But there is the day's work to be done as well.”
Thorvin was as keenly interested as Shef in the experiments, but, after a few attempts to help, had realized that he was merely standing in the way of the excited imagination of his former apprentice, and had gone back to
