The Hammer and The Cross

assist himself he began to draw little lines on a discarded sheet, hatching them through when he completed a ten. He began also, as his finger crawled down the list, to put a little mark between the XL and the VIII, the L and the IX, to remind himself which bits were to be added and which were to be left. Finally he came to the end of his first calculation, wrote down firmly CDXLIX, and began to work his way down again with the figures he had omitted before. “Quaranta et triginta sunt septuaginta. Et quinquaginta. Centum et viginta.” The novice who decorously moved an eye round the doorway a few minutes later to see if anything was required returned in awe to his fellows.

“He is saying numbers of which I have never heard,” he reported.

“He is a marvelous man,” said one of the black monks. “God send there may be no harm in the learning of such black arts.”

“Duo milia quattuor centa nonaginta,” pronounced Erkenbert, writing it down: MMCDXC. The two figures now lay next to each other: MMCDXC and CDXLIX. After another interval of crossing and hatching, he had the answer: MMCMXXXIX. And now the real toil began. That was the sum of the failed rents for one quarter. What would this represent for a full year, if by divine punishment the scourges of God, the Vikings, were permitted to lie so long upon the backs of the suffering people of God? Many, even among arithmetici, would have taken the easier route and added the same figure up four times. But Erkenbert knew himself superior to such subterfuges. Painstakingly, he set up the complex procedure for the most difficult of all diabolic skills: multiplication in Roman numerals.

When all was done he stared at the figure, disbelievingly. Never in all his experience had he come upon such a sum. Slowly, with shaking fingers, he snuffed the candles in recognition of the growing gray light of dawn. After matins he would have to seek out the Archbishop.

It was too great. Such losses could not be borne.

Far away, a hundred and fifty miles to the south, the same growing light reached the eyes of a woman, snuggled deep in a nest of down mattress and woolen rugs piled high against the cold. She stirred, shifted. Her hand touched the warm, naked thigh of the man next to her. Recoiled as if it had touched the scales of a mighty adder.

He is my half brother, she thought for the thousandth time. Son of my own father. We are in mortal sin. But how could I tell them? I could not tell even the priest who married us. Alfgar told him we had sinned carnally while fleeing from the Vikings and now prayed God's forgiveness and blessing on our union. They think he is a saint. And the kings, the kings of Mercia and of Wessex, they listen to all he says of the menace of the Vikings, of what they did to his father, of how he fought at the Viking camp to set me free. They think he is a hero. They say they will make him an alderman and set him over a shire, they will bring his poor, tormented father home from York, where he is defying the heathens still.

But what will happen when our father sees us together? If only Shef had lived…

As she thought the name, Godive's tears started to leak slowly, as they did every morning, through closed eyelids onto the pillow.

Shef marched down the muddy street, between the lines of booths which the Vikings had set up to keep out the winter weather. His halberd rested on his shoulder, and he wore his metal gloves, but the helmet remained at Thorvin's forge. Mail and helmets may not be worn in holmgang, they had told him. The duel was fought as a matter of honor, so mere expediencies, like surviving and killing your enemy, were not the point.

That did not mean you would not be killed.

And a holmgang was a four-man affair. Each of the two principals took turns to strike at the other. But each principal was covered from the blows of the other by his second, the shieldbearer, who carried a shield for him and intercepted the strokes. Your life depended on the skill of your second.

Shef had no second. Brand and all his crews were still away. Thorvin had pulled his beard frantically, thumping his hammer again and again into the ground with frustration, but as a priest of the Way he could take no part. If he offered, his offer would be refused by the umpires. The same went for Ingulf, Hund's master. The only person he might have asked was Hund, and as soon as Shef framed the thought, he knew that Hund—once he realized the situation—would surely volunteer. But he had immediately told his friend he must not think of helping. All other considerations apart, he was sure that at the critical moment, with a sword-blow descending, Hund would stop to observe a heron in the marsh or a newt in the fen, and would probably kill them both.

“I will see it through myself,” he told the priests of the Way, who had gathered together from the whole Army to advise him, much to Shef's surprise.

“This is not why we spoke for you to the Snakeeye, and saved you from the vengeance of Ivar,” said Farman sharply—Farman the priest of Frey, famous for his wanderings in the other worlds.

“Are you then so sure of the ways of fate?” Shef had replied, and the priests had fallen silent.

But in truth, as he walked toward the place of the holmgang, it was not the duel itself which bothered him. What bothered him was whether the umpires would let him fight on his own. If they did not, then he would stand for the second time in his life at the mercy of the Army's collective judgement, the vapna takr. At the thought of the roar and the clash of weapons that accompanied a decision, his guts knotted within him.

He marched through the gates of the stockade and out onto the trampled meadow by the river where the Army was assembled. As he walked forward, a buzz of comment rose, and the watching crowd parted to let him through. At their center stood a ring of willow wands, only ten feet across. “The holmgang should strictly be fought on an island in a stream,” Thorvin had told him, “but where there was no eyot suitable, a symbolic one was marked out instead. In a holmgang there was to be no maneuvering: The participants stood and cut at each other till one was dead. Or could fight no more, or ransomed himself off, or threw down his weapons, or stepped outside the marked area. To do either of the two last meant submitting yourself to the mercy of your opponent, who could demand death or mutilation. If a fighter showed cowardice, the judges would certainly order either, or both.

Shef saw his enemies already standing by the willows: the Hebridean whose teeth he had knocked out, whose name he now knew was Magnus. He held a naked broadsword in his hand, burnished so that the serpent- markings on its blade wriggled and crawled in the dull, gray light. By him stood his second: a tall, scarred, powerful-looking man of middle age. He held an oversized shield of painted wood, with metal rim and boss. Shef looked at them for a moment, and then looked deliberately round for the umpires.

His heart checked as he recognized instantly, in a little group of four, the unmistakable figure of the Boneless One. Still wearing scarlet and green, but the silver helmet put aside; the pale eyes with their invisible eyebrows and lashes stared straight into his own. But this time, instead of suspicion they held assurance, amusement, contempt, as they recognized Shef's uncontrollable start of fear and the immediate attempt to replace it with impassivity.

Ivar yawned, stretched, turned away. “I disqualify myself from judgement in this case,” he said. “This barnyard cock and I have another score to settle. I will not have him say that I took advantage to judge unfairly. I leave his death to Magnus.”

A rumble of agreement came from the nearest watchers, and a buzz as the information was passed to those further back. Everything in the Army, Shef realized again, was subject to public agreement. It was always best to have public opinion on your side.

Ivar's withdrawal left three men there, all obviously senior warriors, well armed, necks, belts and arms flashing with silver to show their status. The middle one, he recognized, was Halvdan Ragnarsson, the eldest of the brothers: a man with a reputation for ferocity, for fighting when there was no need—not as wise as his brother Sigurth nor as dreadful as his brother Ivar, but not a man to show mercy on the unwarlike.

“Where is your second?” said Halvdan, frowning.

“I do not need one,” replied Shef.

“You must have one. You cannot fight a holmgang with no shield or shield-bearer. If you present yourself without one, then that is as good as surrendering to the mercy of your enemy. Magnus, what do you want to do with him?”

“I do not need one!” This time Shef shouted, stepped forward, jammed the butt of his halberd upright in the earth. “I have a shield.” He raised his left forearm, on which he had strapped a square buckler, a foot across,