The Hammer and The Cross

“Well… How do I know you won't just cut my throat? And my men's?”

“You don't—but you have little choice. Decide.”

The reeve hesitated a moment longer. Remembered Merla, his wife's cousin, whom the abbot behind him had enslaved for debt. Thought of Merla's own wife and bairns, living still on charity with their man fled in terror.

“All right. But make it look as if you're treating me rough.”

Shef exploded with feigned rage, swung a blow at the reeve's head, whipped a dirk from its scabbard. The reeve turned away, shouting orders at the little knot of men who had collected at a few yards' distance. Slowly men began to push beached fishing boats towards the tide, to step masts, haul sailcloth from sheds. In a tight huddle the Vikings pressed down to the water's edge, hustling their captives. Fifty yards away, five hundred English riders pressed forward, ready to charge sooner than see the hostages taken off, held back by the bright weapons waving over tonsured heads.

“Keep them back,” snapped Shef to the abbot. “I'll let half your men go when we board. You and the rest go in a dinghy once we're afloat.”

“I suppose you realize this means we lose the horses,” said Guthmund gloomily.

“You stole them in the first place. You can steal some more.”

“So we pulled into the mouth of the Humber under oars just at dusk, beached for the night when we were sure no one could see us, then rowed upriver in the morning to meet the rest of you. With the take.”

“How much is it?” asked Brand, sitting with the other members of the impromptu council.

“I've weighed it out,” said Thorvin. “Altar-plate, candlesticks, those little boxes the Christians keep saints' finger-bones in, box for the holy wafers, those things for burning incense, some coins—a lot of coins. I thought monks weren't supposed to have property of their own, but Guthmund says they all had purses if you shook them hard enough. Well, after what he gave the fishermen we still have ninety-two pounds weight of silver.

“Better than that is the gold. The crown you took off the Christ-image was pure gold, and heavy. So was some of the plate. That's another fourteen pounds. And we reckon gold as outvaluing silver eight for one. So that counts as eight stone of silver: a hundredweight to add to your ninety-two pounds.”

“Two hundred pounds, all told,” said Brand thoughtfully. “We will have to divide it all between crews and let the crews make their own division.”

“No,” said Shef.

“You say that a lot these days,” Brand said.

“That is because I know what to do—others don't. The money is not to be divided. It is the war chest of the army. That was why I went for it. If we divide it up everyone will be a little richer. I want to use it so that everyone becomes a lot richer.”

“If it's put like that,” said Thorvin, “I think the army will accept it. You got it. You have a right to say how you think it should be used. But how are we all going to get a lot richer?”

Shef pulled from the front of his tunic the mappamundi he had taken from the minster wall. “Look at this,” he said. A dozen heads bent over the vast vellum sheet, faces wearing different degrees of puzzlement at the scrawled, inked marks.

“Can you read the writing?” asked Shef.

“In the middle there,” said Skaldfinn the Heimdall-priest. “Where the little picture is. It says ‘Hierusalem.’ That is the holy city of the Christians.”

“Lies, as usual,” commented Thorvin. “That black border is supposed to be Ocean, the great sea that runs round Mithgarth, the world. They are saying their holy city is the center of everything, just as you would expect.”

“Look round the edges,” rumbled Brand. “See what it has to tell us of places we know. If it lying about them, then we can guess it is all lies, as Thorvin says.”

“ ‘Dacia et Gothia’,” read Skaldfinn. “ ‘Gothia.’ That must be the land of the Gautar, south of the Swedes. Unless they mean Gotland. But Gotland is an island, and this is marked as being mainland. Next to it—next to it they have ‘Bulgaria.’ ”

The council broke into laughter. “The Bulgars are the enemies of the emperor of the Greeks, in Miklagarth,” said Brand. “It is two months' travel from the nearest of the Gautar to the Bulgars.”

“On the other side of Gothia they have ‘Slesvic.’ Well, at least that is clear enough. We all know Slesvik of the Danes. There is some more writing by it. ‘Hic abundant leones.’ That means ‘There are many lions here.’ ”

Again a roar of laughter. “I have been to Slesvik market a dozen times,” said Brand. “And I have met men who have spoken of lions. They are like very large cats, and they live in the hot country south of Sarkland. But there has never been one lion in Slesvik, let alone many. You wasted your time bringing back this—what do you call it?— this mappa. It is just nonsense, like everything the Christians count as wisdom.”

Shef's finger continued to trace lettering, while he muttered to himself the letters that Father Andreas had half-successfully taught him.

“There is some English writing here,” he said. “In a different hand from the rest. It says ‘Suth-Bryttas,’ that is, ‘South British.’ ”

“He means the Bretons,” Brand said. “They live on a large peninsula the other side of the English Sea.”

“So that is not so far wrong. You can find truth on a mappa. If you put it there.”

“I still don't see how it is going to make us rich,” replied Brand. “That is what you said it was going to do.”

“This won't.” Shef rolled the vellum up, thrust it aside. “But the idea of it may. We need to know more important things. Remember—if we had not known where Riccall was, that day in the snow, we might have been cut off and destroyed in the end by the churls. When I set off for Beverley, I knew the direction, but I would never have found the minster if we had not had a guide who knew the roads. The only way I found Bridlington and the man who could sail us out of a trap was because I had traveled the road already.

“You see what I mean? We have plenty of knowledge, but it all depends on people. But no one person knows enough for all the things we need. What a mappa should be is a store of knowledge from many people. Now if we had that we could find our way to places we had not been before. We could tell directions, work out distances.”

“So we make a knowledge mappa,” said Brand firmly. “Now tell me about rich.”

“We have one other precious possession,” said Shef. “And this we did not get from the Christians. Thorvin will tell you. I bought it myself. From Munin, the raven of Othin. I bought it with pain. Show them, Thorvin.”

From inside his tunic Thorvin pulled a thin square board. On it were lines of small runic letters, each one scratched with a knife and then marked out with red dye.

“It is a riddle. The one who solves the riddle will find the hoard of Raedwald, king of the East Angles. That is what Ivar was searching for last autumn. But the secret died with King Edmund.”

“A royal hoard,” said Brand. “Now that could be worth something, all right. But first we have to solve the riddle.”

“That is what a mappa can do,” said Shef firmly. “If we write down every piece of knowledge we can find, in the end we will have the right number of pieces to solve the riddle. But if we do not write them down, by the time we come on the last piece we need we will have forgotten the first.

“And there is another thing.” Shef struggled with an image in his mind, a trace of memory from somewhere, of looking down—down on the land in a way no man could ever in reality see it. “Even this mappa. It has one idea. It is as if we were looking down on the world from above. Seeing it all spread out below us Like an eagle would see it. Now that is the way to find things.”

Guthmund the skipper broke the considering silence. “But before we see or find anything, we have to decide where we go now.”

“More important even than that,” said Brand, “we must decide how this army is led, and under what law it shall live. While we were men of the Great Army we lived under the old hermanna log of our ancestors—the warriors' law. But Ivar the Boneless broke that and I have no wish to return to it. Now I know