walls of a legionary fortress round them. Instead, their tenants and the men of the flatlands east of the Yorkshire Wolds could easily put two thousand stout warriors into the field, with many more half-armed spearmen and bowmen to back them. All through the autumn of raids of York, they had known themselves safe against anything but a move by a major detachment of the Great Army. They had known it must come. The sacristan had disappeared months since with all the minster's most precious relics, reappearing days later with word only for the abbot himself. They had kept half their fighting force mobilized, the rest dispersed among their holdings to oversee the harvest and the preparations for winter. Tonight they felt secure. Their watchers had seen the Great Army split, one detachment even marching away to the South.
But a midwinter night in England is sixteen hours long between sunset and dawn: more than time enough for determined men to ride forty miles. Guided on their way through muddy, meandering farm-tracks for the first few miles, then picking up speed as they walked or trotted their horses along the better roads of the Wolds. They had lost a little time circumventing each village they came to. The slave, Tida, had guided them well, abandoning them only as the first paling sky had shown them the steeple of Beverley Minster itself. The guard-huts just beginning to disgorge sleepy female quern-slaves, to light the fires and grind the grain for the breakfast porridge. At the sight of the Vikings they ran shrieking and wailing, to drag incredulous warriors from their blankets. To be called fools for their pains and to become part of the utter confusion which was the English way of taking surprise.
Shef pushed open the great wooden doors of the minster and walked in, his companions jostling behind.
From inside the minster came the antiphonal song of the choirmonks, facing each other across the nave and singing sweetly the anthems which called the Christ-child to be born. There were no other worshippers, though the doors were unbolted for them. The monks sang lauds every day, whether they were joined or not. At dawn on a winter morning they would not expect to be.
As the Vikings paced down the aisle which led to the high altar—still wrapped in sodden cloaks, no weapons showing except for the halberd over Shef's shoulder—the abbot looked at them in shocked horror from his great seat in the choir. For a moment Shef's nerve and wit faltered in the face of the majesty of the Church he had grown up in, worshipped in.
He cleared his throat, unsure how to begin.
Guthmund behind him, a skipper from the Swedish shore of the Kattegat, had no such doubts or scruples. All his life he had wanted to be at the sack of a really first-class church or abbey, and he had no intention of letting a beginner's nerves spoil it. Courteously he picked his young leader up and put him to one side, seized the nearest choir-monk by his black robe and hurled him into the aisle, dragged his axe from under his cloak and embedded it with a thunk into the altar-rail.
“Grab the blackrobes,” he bellowed. “Search 'em, put 'em in that corner there. Tofi, get those candlesticks. Frani, I want all that plate. Snok and Uggi, you're lightweights, see that statue there…” He waved at the great crucifix, high above the altar, looking down at them with sorrowing eyes. “Shin up it and see if you can get that crown off, looks genuine from here. The rest of you, turn everything over and shake it, grab everything that looks as if it might gleam. I want this place clear before those bastards behind us have got their boots on. Now, you…” He advanced on the abbot shrinking back in his throne.
Shef forced his way between them. “Now, father,” he began, speaking again in English. The familiar language drew a basilisk stare from the abbot, terrified but at the same time mortally offended. Shef wavered a moment—then remembered the inside of the minster door, covered, like many, with skin on the inside. Human skin, flayed from a living body for the sin of sacrilege, of laying hands on Church property. He hardened his heart.
“Your guards will be here soon. If you want to stay alive you will have to keep your men off.”
“No!”
“Then you die now.” The point of his halberd pushed at the priest's throat.
“For how long?” The abbot's shaking hands were on the halberd, could not move it back.
“Not long. Then you may hunt us, recover your stolen goods. So do as I say…”
Crashes of destruction behind, a monk being dragged forward by Guthmund. “I think this is the sacristan. He says the hoard is empty.”
“True,” the abbot admitted. “All was hidden months ago.”
“What's hidden can be found again,” said Guthmund. “I'll start on the youngest, just to show I mean it. One, two dead, the hoard-keeper will speak.”
“You will not,” Shef ordered. “We'll take them with us. There will be no torture among those who follow the Way. The Asa-gods forbid it. And we have taken a fair haul. Now get them out where the minster-guards can see them. We still have a long ride ahead.”
In the growing light, Shef noticed something hanging on the wall: a flattened roll of vellum with no image on it that he could recognize.
“What's that?” he asked the abbot.
“It has no value to one like you. No gold, no silver on the frame. It is a
Shef tore it down, rolled it, thrust it deep inside his tunic as they hustled the abbot and the choirmonks out to face the ragged battle-line of Englishmen at last roused from bed.
“We'll never make it back,” muttered Guthmund again as he clutched a clanking sack.
“Not going back,” answered Shef. “You'll see.”
Chapter Seven
Burgred, king of Mercia, one of the two great kingdoms of England still unconquered by the Vikings, paused at the entrance to his private chambers, dismissed the crowd of attendants and hangers-on, doffed his mantle of martenfur, allowed his snow-soaked boots to be removed and replaced by slippers of soft whittawed leather, and prepared to enjoy the moment. By command, the young man and his father were waiting for him, as was the atheling Alfred, there to represent his brother Ethelred, king of Wessex—the other surviving great English kingdom.
The issue before them was the fate of East Anglia. Its king dead with no successor, its people demoralized and uncertain. Yet Burgred knew well that if he marched an army to take it over, to add it to Mercia by force, the East Angles might well fight, Englishmen against Englishmen, as they had so often before. But if he sent them a man of their own, he calculated—one of noble blood, one who nevertheless owed absolutely everything, including the army he led with him, to King Burgred—well, that they might swallow.
Especially as this particular noble and grateful young man had such a very useful father. One who, so to speak—Burgred allowed himself a grim smile—carried his anti-Viking credentials with him. Who could fail to rally to such a figurehead? A figure-head and -trunk, indeed. Burgred blessed, silently, the day the two ponies with their leaders and their slung stretcher had brought him in from York.
And the beautiful young woman too. How affecting it had been. The young man, fair hair swept back, kneeling at his father's feet before ever they had unstrapped him from his litter, and begging forgiveness for having married without his father's consent. The pair might have been forgiven for more than that after all they had been through, but no, young Alfgar had been the essence of propriety all through. It was the spirit that would one day make the English the greatest of all nations. Decency, mused Burgred:
What Alfgar had really muttered as he knelt at his father's feet had been: “I married Godive, father. I know she's my half sister, but don't say anything of it, or I'll tell everyone you're mad. And then an accident could happen to you. Men with no arms smother easily. And don't forget, we're both your children. If we succeed, your grandsons could still be princes. Or better.”
And after the first shock, it had seemed well enough to Wulfgar. True, they had committed incest, “sibb- laying,” as the English called it. But what did a trifle like that matter? Thryth, his own lady, had committed fornication with a heathen Viking, and who had done anything about that? If Alfgar and Godive had an incest child like Sigemund and his sister in the legends, it could be no worse than that gadderling brat he, Wulfgar, had been fool enough to rear.
