“I see you have turned Christian again,” said Shef. “So you will remember, ‘an eye for an eye.’ ” Reversing his halberd, he drove its butt-spike deep through Muirtach's eye and into the brain.
In the brief seconds of the confrontation everything had changed. Shef looked up and saw only backs. The Ragnarsson attackers had turned away, were throwing down their weapons, unbuckling their shields. “Brother,” they shouted, “fellow, messmate.” One, incongruously, was pulling open his tunic, hauling out a silver emblem. A Wayman, maybe, who had decided to stay with a father or a chief rather than march out of York. Behind them hundreds of men were moving forward in a bristling wedge, the giant figure of Brand at its apex. In front of the wedge the plain was covered only with men running, men limping, men standing in knots with their hands raised. The Ragnarsson army had broken. Its survivors had the choice only of running for their lives in heavy mail or hoping for immediate mercy.
Shef lowered “Thrall's-wreak,” suddenly weary. As he started to clamber from the wagon a flash of movement caught his eye. Two horses, one a rider with a scarlet cloak, grass-green trousers.
For an instant Ivar Ragnarsson stared from his saddle across the lost battlefield at Shef standing on the cart. Then he and his horse-swain were away, clods flying in the air from the trampling hooves.
Brand strode over, clasped Shef's hand.
“You had me worried there, thought you were running away. But toward battle, not from it. A good day's work done.”
“The day's not done yet. There is still an army behind us,” said Shef. “And Sigvarth. The Mercians should have been at our backs this dawn. He has held them twelve hours longer than I thought possible.”
“But maybe not long enough,” said Magnus Gaptooth from his place on the wagon. He stretched out an arm, pointed. Far away across the level plain, a stray shaft of winter sunlight sent up a prickle of darting reflections: the spear-points of an army, deployed and advancing.
“I need more time,” said Brand gruffly in Shef's ear. “Go talk, bargain, buy me some.”
He had no choice. Thorvin and Guthmund joined him as he walked toward the advancing Mercian battle-line, different from the one they had just broken, only—to outward appearance—by the three great crosses towering above it.
Behind them the Wayman army struggled to regroup. Perhaps a third of them were dead or gravely injured. Now even the walking wounded were furiously busy: stripping the surrendered Ragnarsson warriors of weapons and armor, scavenging the battlefield for whatever was usable or valuable—with the enthusiastic assistance of Shef's freedmen—herding the enemy wounded off in the direction of their ships still under guard by the Wash, carrying such few as had survived the attentions of the body-strippers off to the leeches.
The “army” was a mere front. A few hundreds of the fittest men in line to make a show. Behind them, rank on rank of captives, hands loosely roped, told to stand there and be counted in return for their lives. Half a mile behind them, thralls and warriors were hastily digging a ditch, setting up the machines—and rounding up horses and wagons ready for the next retreat. The Wayman army was not yet fit to fight—the heart had not gone out of it, not yet. But all tradition dictated a pause for celebration and relief after surviving a pitched battle against superior forces. Being asked to do the same again immediately was too much.
The next few minutes, Shef thought, would be very dangerous. Men were coming to meet him and his small party: three men walking together, one a priest. Two more pushing a strange, upright box on wheels. The thing in it, he realized an instant later, could only be his stepfather Wulfgar.
The two groups halted ten paces apart, surveyed each other. Shef broke the deep, hating silence.
“Well, Alfgar,” he said to his half brother, “I see you have risen in the world. Is our mother pleased?”
“Our mother never recovered from what your father did. Your late father. He told us much about you before he died. He had plenty of time.”
“Did you capture him, then? Or did you stand back as you did in the fight by the Stour?”
Alfgar stepped forward, hand reaching for his sword. The grim-faced man beside him, the one who was not a priest, caught his arm quickly.
“I am Cwichelm, marshal of King Burgred of the Mark,” he said, “charged to restore the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk to their new alderman and to make them subject to my kind. And who are you?”
Slowly, mindful of the frantic preparations still going on behind, Shef introduced the others on his side, let Cwichelm do the same. Disclaimed hostile intention. Declared intention to withdraw. Hinted at compensation for damage.
“You're fencing with me, young man,” broke in Cwichelm. “If you were strong enough to fight, you wouldn't be talking. So I'll tell you what you have to do if you want to see tomorrow's dawn. First, we know you took treasure from the mound by Woodbridge. I must have it all, for my king. It comes from his realm.”
“Second,” cut in the black-robed priest, staring fixedly at Thorvin, “there are Christians among you who have deserted their faith and betrayed their masters. They must be handed over for punishment.”
“You included,” said Alfgar. “Whatever happens to the others, my father and I will not see you march away. I will put the collar on you with my own hands. Think yourself lucky we do not treat you as we did your father.”
Shef did not bother to translate for Guthmund.
“What did you to my father?”
Wulfgar had not spoken till then. He sprawled in his box, held by the straps. Shef remembered the yellow, pain-racked face he had last seen in the trough. Now Wulfgar's face was ruddy, his lips showing red in the white- streaked beard.
“What he did to me,” he said, “I did to him. Only more skillfully. First we took the fingers, then the toes. Ears, lips. Not his eyes, so he could see what we did, nor his tongue, so he could still call out. Hands, feet. Knees and elbows. And never allowed to bleed. I whittled him like a boy whittling a stick. In the end there was nothing left but the core.
“Here, boy. A memorial of your father.”
He nodded and a servant threw a leather pouch in Shef's direction. Shef loosed the strings, glanced inside, hurled it at Cwichelm's feet.
“You are in poor company, warrior,” he remarked.
“Time to go,” said Guthmund.
The two sides backed away from each other, turned at safe distance. As they stepped briskly toward their own lines, Shef heard the Mercian warhorns bellow, heard a roar and a clash of mail as the English army came on.
Instantly, as prearranged, the Wayman line turned tail and ran. The first stage of its long, planned retreat.
Hours later, as the long winter twilight faded into dark, Brand muttered dry-throated to Shef, “I think we may have done it.”
“For the day,” Shef agreed. “I see no hope for the morning.”
Brand shrugged massively, called the orders to stand down, light fires, heat water, make food.
All day the Waymen had fallen back, screening Shef's machines, shooting as the Mercians deployed, making them check, loading the carts and pack-horses hastily and then falling back in sections to another line. The Mercians had followed them like men anxious to tether a savage dog, closing in, drawing back from the snarls and snaps, pressing forward again. At least three times the two armies had clashed hand to hand, each time when the Waymen had had some obstacle to defend: the ditch they had cut, a dyke along the edge of the fen, the shallow muddy stream of the Nene. Each time, after half an hour's slashing and hewing, the Mercians had fallen sullenly back, unable to force the crossing—and in doing so, exposed themselves again to the lash of the boulders and the barbs.
The Waymen had fought better as their spirits rose, thought Shef. The trouble was, the Mercians were learning too. At the start they had flinched from the first whistle in the sky, the first displayed twist-shooter in a battle-line. Each ditch in the boggy soil made them hesitate. Sigvarth must have taught them a bitter lesson in the fen.
But as the day wore on they grew bolder, seeing the true weakness of the Wayman numbers.
Still holding a half-eaten bowl of porridge, Shef sank back on a pack-saddle and fell into instant sleep.
He woke, stiff, clammy and bitterly cold, as the horns blew for first light. All round him men clambered to their feet, drank water or the last hoarded remains of ale or mead. They shuffled to the crude breastwork they had
