begun to draw a different map. A map of England, putting down all the information he could uncover. He would sketch in rough outlines, names, distances, on birchbark. Only after information had been checked and proved consistent with what he knew already would he ink it in on the vellum itself. Yet the map still grew with every day, dense and accurate for Norfolk and the Fens, doubtful and patchy for Northumbria away from York, completely blank down in the South, apart from London on the Thames and the vague mention of Wessex to the west of it.
Padda had found a Suffolk man among the freedmen, though. In return for his breakfast he would tell Shef all he knew about the shire.
“Call him in,” said Shef, unrolling fresh birchbark and testing the point of his scratching-tool as the man entered.
“I want you to tell me all you can about places in your shire. Begin with the rivers. I know already of the Yare and the Waverly.”
“Ah,” said the Suffolk man reflectively. “Well, below that you've got the Alde, which reaches the coast at Aldeburgh. The Deben next. That comes into the coast ten mile south of Aldeburgh at Woodbridge, near where they say the old kings lie. We had our own kings in Suffolk once, you know, before the Christians came….”
Minutes later Shef pounded into the forge where Thorvin was preparing for another day of forging iron cogwheels for the twist-shooters.
“I want you to call the army council together,” he demanded.
“Why?”
“I think I know how to make Brand rich.”
Chapter Nine
The expedition set out a week later, under a lowering sky, an hour after dawn. The council of the Wayman army had refused to sanction abandoning the base and marching out in full force. There were still the ships to be guarded, hauled up on the banks of the Welland. The camp held not only warmth for the remaining weeks and months of the winter but also a laboriously gathered food supply. And it could not be denied that many of the councillors were reluctant to believe Shef's passionate conviction that his
Yet it was obvious that more than a few crews were needed. The kingdom of the East Angles was a kingdom no more, and all its mightiest warriors and noblest thanes were dead. Still, there was the chance that they might rally if provoked. A small party of Vikings could be cut off and massacred by overwhelming numbers. Brand had rumbled that foolish as he thought the whole expedition might be, he had no wish to be woken one morning by the heads of his messmates being thrown into the camp. In the end Shef had been allowed to call for volunteers. In the tedium of winter encampment, there had been no trouble in finding them.
A thousand Vikings rode out on their ponies, eight long hundreds and forty, riding crew by crew as was their custom. Hundreds of pack-ponies carried tents and bedding, food and ale, led in strings by English thralls. At the center of the column, though, was something new: a string of carts, carrying ropes and beams, wheels and levers —all the beams carefully notched and marked for reassembly. A dozen pull-throwers, eight twist-shooters. Every machine Shef and Thorvin had been able to construct in their weeks at the base was here. If he had left them behind they would have been forgotten, dispersed, used for firewood. Too much work had gone into them for that to happen.
Round the carts there clustered a mob of thralls, the runaways of the region, each catapult crew stepping by its cart and its machine, each crew captained by one of Shef's original dozen. The Vikings did not like this. Yes, every army needed a gang of thralls to dig latrines, light fires, groom horses. But gangs this size? All eating their share of the supplies? And starting to think they might not be thralls after all? Even the followers of the Way had never considered admitting men who did not speak Norse to full fellowship. Nor did Shef dare to suggest it.
He had made clear to Padda and the rest of the machine-captains that they had better tell their men to keep their heads down. “If someone wants you to grind his meal or pitch his tent, just do it,” he had told them. “Otherwise keep out of the way.”
Yet he wanted his recruits to feel different. To take pride in the speed and dexterity with which they leapt to their places, turned the levers or whirled the beams.
To mark them out, every catapult-man now wore an identical jerkin, made only of rough sackcloth, hodden gray, over the rags they had been wearing when they arrived. On it each man had carefully stitched a white linen double-headed hammer, front and back. Each man, too, had a belt or at least a rope round his middle, and all those who owned them bore knives.
Maybe it would work, thought Shef, watching the carts creak forward, Vikings in front and behind, jerkined freedmen in the middle. Certainly they were much better already with the catapults than the Vikings they had replaced. And even on a winter day in the raw cold, they looked cheerful.
A strange noise split the sky. At the front of the train of carts, Cwicca, a thrall who had come in a few days before, escaped from the shrine of St. Guthlac at Crowland, had brought with him his treasured bagpipe. Now he led the carts along, cheeks puffed, fingers skipping briskly on the bone pipe. His mates cheered and stepped out harder, some of them whistling in unison.
A Viking from the vanguard turned his horse, scowling angrily, front teeth sticking out. It was Hjorvarth Sigvarthsson, Shef saw. His half brother. Sigvarth had volunteered instantly to join the expedition with all his crews, too quickly to be turned down, quicker even than Thorvin or the Hebrideans or the still-doubting Brand. Now Hjorvarth trotted back menacingly towards the piper, sword half-drawn. The music wailed discordantly and died.
Shef turned his pony between them, slipped off it and handed the reins to Padda.
“Walking keeps you warm,” he said to Hjorvarth, staring up at the angry face. “Music makes the miles go faster. Let him play.”
Hjorvarth hesitated, jerked his pony's head round. “Suit yourself,” he flung over one shoulder. “But harps are for warriors. Only a
Hornung, gadderling, thought Shef. How many words there are for bastard. It doesn't stop men putting them in women's bellies. Maybe Godive has one by now.
“Keep playing,” he shouted to the bagpiper. “Play ‘The Quickbeam Dance.’ Play it for Thunor, son of Woden, and to Hell with the monks.”
The piper started again to play the jerky quickstep tune, louder this time, backed by united defiant whistling. The carts rolled forward behind the patient oxen.
“You're sure King Burgred means to take over the East Angles?” King Ethelred asked. His question ended in a fit of coughing—sharp, high-pitched, going on again after it had seemed to stop.
Ethelred's younger brother, Alfred the atheling, looked at him with concern. Also, a reluctant calculation. Alfred's father, Ethelwulf—king of Wessex, conqueror of the Vikings at Oakley—had had four strong sons: Ethelstan, Ethelbald, Ethelbert, Ethelred. By the time the fifth came along it had seemed so unlikely that he would ever be called upon to rule that the royal mark of the house of Wessex, the Ethel-name, had seemed unnecessary. He had been called Alfred after his mother's people.
By now the father and three of the strong sons were dead. None killed in battle, but all killed by the Vikings. For years they had marched in all weathers, lain in damp cloaks, drunk water from streams that flowed through the camps of armies careless of where they dumped their waste or relieved themselves. They died of the bowel- cramps, of the lung-sickness. Now Ethelred had contracted the wasting-cough. How long might it be, Alfred thought, till he was the last atheling of the royal house of Wessex? Till then, though, he must serve.
“Quite sure,” he replied. “He said so openly. He was mustering his men when I left. But he's not making it too obvious. He has an under-king, an East Angle, to put in charge. That will make it easier for the East Angles to accept his rule. Especially as he has a totem. The man with no limbs, the one I told you of.”
“Does it matter?” Ethelred dabbed wearily at spittle-slimed lips.
“The East Angles have twenty thousand hides. That, added to what Burgred has already, will make him stronger than us, far stronger than the Northumbrians. If we could trust him to fight the heathens only… But he may
