worst of all—Erkenbert the deacon, who makes the machines….”
An angry Hebridean lost patience with the man's struggles, whipped a sandbag from his belt, and struck out. He missed his blow, caught the slave along the jaw instead of on the temple. A crack, the jaw lolling forward, blood trickling from the corner of the mouth.
“Er'en'ert. He' a de'il. Ma' 'e de'il-'chines.” Shef seized his gauntlets, pulled them on, ready to jerk his halberd out of the ground. The knot of struggling men swayed back a few paces.
“Hold on,” he said. “The man's valuable. Don't hit him again.” Ten words, he thought, ten words might be all I need. Then I will know the principle of the great bow.
The slave, fighting now with the frenzy of a tormented weasel, got a foot free, kicked out. A Hebridean grunted, bent forward cursing.
“That's enough,” snapped the head of the gang. As Shef leapt forward in entreaty he whipped a knife from his belt, stepped forward and drove upward, backhand. The slave, still held, arched and contorted, went limp.
“You blockhead!” yelled Shef. “You killed one of the machine-men!”
The Hebridean turned back to him, mouth twisting with anger. As he started to speak, Shef punched him full in the face with his armored glove. He sprawled backward, landed on the ground. A dead silence fell.
The Hebridean climbed slowly to his feet, spat one tooth, then another, into his hand. He looked at his men, shrugged. They dropped the slave's corpse, turned, walked off together toward their camp.
“You've done it now, boy,” said Thorvin.
“What do you mean?”
“Only one thing can happen now.”
“What's that?”
“Holmgang.”
Shef lay on the straw pallet close to the banked fire of the forge, moving uneasily in his sleep. Thorvin had forced a heavy dinner on him, which should have been welcome after days of increasingly short commons in a camp dependent entirely on foraging for its food. But the rye bread and fried bullock lay heavy on his stomach. Heavier still were his thoughts. They had explained the rules of holmgang to him, far different from the impromptu brawl in which he had killed the Irishman Flann months before. He knew he was at terrible disadvantage. But there was no getting out of this. The whole Army knew, looked forward to the morning's duel as a major distraction. He was trapped. And he still thought about the machines. How were they built? How could better ones be built? How could the walls of York be breached? Slowly, he slipped into heavier slumber.
He was on some distant plain. In front of him loomed monstrous walls. On a scale to dwarf the walls of York, or any other walls that had ever been built by mortal man. High above were the figures he had seen before in his dreams, his “visions” as Thorvin called them—the massive figures with the faces like axe-blades and the expressions of severe gravity. But now their expressions were also of concern, alarm. In the foreground, moving up to the walls, he saw there was a figure even more gigantic than those of the gods, so enormous that it towered up even to the height of the walls on which the gods were standing. But it did not have the proportions of a human being: stumpy-legged, fat-armed, swollen-bellied and gap-toothed, it looked like an immense clown. A wittol, one of the children born deformed, who, if Father Andreas were not on hand very swiftly, would quietly have found their way into the fen in Emneth. The giant was urging on an immense horse, fully built to his own scale, and drawing a cart, on it a block of stone large as a mountain.
Shef realized the block was to fill a gap in the great wall. The wall was not complete—but nearly so. The sun in this strange world was setting, and he knew that if the wall were finished before the sunset, something appalling, something incurably dreadful would take place. That was why the gods looked their alarm, and why the giant was urging on his horse—his stallion, Shef saw—with whoops of glee and anticipation.
A whicker from behind. Another horse, this time a more normally proportioned one. A mare, too, with chestnut hair and mane blowing around her eyes. She whickered again, then turned coyly as if unaware of the effect her call had had. But the stallion had heard. His head rose. He shook in his traces. His member started to slide out of its sheath.
The giant shouted, beat the stallion round the head, tried to cover its eyes. Its nostrils flared, a whinny of rage, yet another encouraging whicker from the mare, now close by, heels kicking skittishly. The stallion reared, lashed out with mighty hooves at the giant, at the traces. Over went the cart, out tipped the stone, the giant dancing with vexation. The stallion was free, lunging towards the mare to sheathe his erect, chain-long penis. But she was coy, prancing away, provoking him to follow, then darting sideways. The two horses gyrated, suddenly dashed off at full gallop, the stallion slowly gaining on the mare but both rapidly out of sight. Behind them, the giant cursed and leapt in comic pantomime. The sun set. One of the figures on the wall strode forward grimly, pulling on a pair of metal gloves.
There is a forfeit to be paid, thought Shef.
Again he was on a plain, facing a walled city. It too was mighty, the walls rising far above the heights of those at York, but this time it was at least on a human scale, as were the thousands of figures milling about within the walls and outside the walls. Outside the walls the figures were heaving at a monstrous image—not a boar, like the Ragnarssons' battering ram, but a giant horse. A wooden horse. What is the point of a wooden horse? thought Shef. Surely no one could be deceived by it.
Nor were they. Arrows and missiles flew out against the horse from the walls, or flew at the men heaving at its mighty wheels. They bounced away, scattered haulers, did not dislodge or discourage the hundreds of new hands rushing to take the place of the fallen. The horse edged up to the walls, overtopping them. What would take place now, Shef knew, was the crisis of something that had gone on for many years, that had swallowed thousands of lives and would yet swallow thousands more. Something told him also that what happened here would fascinate men for generation upon generation—but that few men would ever understand it, preferring instead to make up their own stories.
A voice Shef had heard before spoke suddenly in his mind. The voice that had warned him before the night battle by the Stour—still with the same note of deep, interested amusement.
“Now watch this,” it said. “Watch this.”
The horse's mouth opened, its tongue slid out to rest on the walls. From the mouth…
Thorvin was shaking him, dragging relentlessly at his shoulder. Shef sat up, still groping for the meaning of his dream.
“Time to rise,” said Thorvin. “You have a hard day ahead of you. I only hope you live to see the end of it.”
Erkenbert the archdeacon sat in his tower room high above the great hall of the minster and pulled the candlestick closer to him. There were three candles in it, each of best beeswax, not stinking tallow, and the light they gave was clear. He viewed them with satisfaction as he took the goose-feather from its inkpot. What he was about to do was difficult, was laborious, and its results might be sad.
In front of him lay a confusion of scraps of vellum, written on, crossed out, written on again. Now he took his quill and a fresh, large, handsome piece. On it he wrote:
De parochia quae dicitur Schirlam desunt nummi XLVIII
“ ” “ ” Fulford “ ” XXXVI
“ ” “ ” Haddinatunus “ ” LIX
The list crept on and on. At the end he drew a line beneath the record of the minster's unpaid rents, drew a deep breath, and began the mind-wrenching toil of adding the numbers up. “Octo et sex,” he muttered to himself, “quattuordecim. Et novo, sunt… viginta tres. Et septem.” To
