The Hammer and The Cross

was left in the center, to face the unpredictable.

“Er, Udd here's got an idea,” said Oswi, also shifting responsibility.

“Let's hear it.”

As the new recruit, first hesitatingly, then fluently and with confidence, began to describe the procedure of making mild steel, Shef watched him. An insignificant little man, even smaller than the others, with weak eyes and a stoop. Any one of Brand's Vikings would have dismissed him immediately as useless to an army, not worth his rations even as a latrine-digger. Yet he knew something. Was it new knowledge? Or was it old knowledge, something many smiths had always known, given the right conditions, but had been unable to pass on except to an apprentice?

“This steel bends, you say,” said Shef. “And springs back? Not like my sword”—tie drew from its sheath the fine Baltic sword Brand had given him, made like his own self-forged and long-lost weapon of mixed strips of soft iron and hard steel—“but made in one piece? Springy all the way through?”

Udd, the little man, nodded firmly.

“All right.” Shef thought a moment. “Oswi, tell the camp marshal you and your team are off all duties. Udd, tomorrow morning go to Thorvin's forge with as many men as you need to help, and start making strips the way you say. Fit the first pair to ‘Dead Level’ and see if they work. If they do, fit them to all the machines.

“And Udd: When it's done I want to see some of this new metal. Make some extra strips for me.”

Shef walked away as the horns blew to dowse fires and to mount the night-guard. Something there, he thought. Something he could use. And he needed something to use. For in spite of the newfound confidence of Thorvin and his friends, he knew that if they just repeated what they had done before, they would be destroyed. Every stroke teaches its own counter. And he had enemies everywhere, in the South and in the North, in the Church and among the pagans. Bishop Daniel. Ivar. Wulfgar and Alfgar. King Burgred. They would not stand up to be shot at a second time.

He did not know what would come, but it would be unpredictable. It was vital to be unpredictable in reply.

The dream, or vision, came this time almost as a relief. Shef felt himself surrounded by difficulties. He knew he did not know the way through them. If some greater agency did, he would welcome the knowledge. He did not think it was Othin in his guise as Bolverk, Bale-Worker, who was guiding him, for all that Thorvin continued to urge him to accept the spear-pendant, the sign of Othin. But who else would help him? If he knew, Shef reflected, he would wear that one's sign.

In his sleep, he found himself suddenly looking down. Down from what seemed a great height, at what he realized, as his eyes cleared, was a great board. A chessboard, with the pieces on it. In the middle of a game. And the players of the game were the mighty figures he had seen before: the gods of Asgarth, so Thorvin said, here playing at chess on their sacred board with squares of gold and silver.

But there were more than two playing. So gigantic were the shapes round the board that Shef could not bring them into focus all at once, any more than he could a mountain range, but he could see one of the players. Not the ruddy, Brand-shaped figure he had seen before, who was Thor, not the one with the axe for a face and a voice like a calving glacier, who was Othin. This one seemed somehow sharper, slighter, his eyes not level. An expression of intense glee crossed his face as he shifted a piece. Loki the Trickster perhaps. Loki, whose fire burned always in the holy circle, but whose followers went unknown.

No, Shef reflected. Tricky this god might be, but he did not have the Loki-look. The look of Ivar. As his vision cleared, Shef realized he had seen him before. It was the god who had looked at him as if he were a horse to be bought. And the expression on his face—surely this too was the owner of the ever-amused voice which twice had given him warnings. That is my protector, thought Shef. It is not a god I know. I wonder, what are his attributes, his purpose? What is his sign?

The board they were playing on, Shef saw suddenly, was not a board but a mappa. Not a mappamundi, but a map of England. He strained forward to see, sure now that the gods knew where his enemies were and what they planned. As he did so he realized that he was up on a mantelpiece, like a mouse in a king's hall. But like a mouse, though he could see, he could not understand. The faces were moving their pieces, laughing in voices like rumbles of thunder. None of it made any sense to him. And yet he was here, he had been brought here, he was sure, to see and understand.

The gleeful face had turned up toward him. Shef stood transfixed, unsure whether to duck back or to freeze. But the face knew he was there. It held a piece up to him, the other gods remaining intent on the game.

It was telling him, Shef realized, that this was the piece he had to take.

What was it? It was a queen, his eyes made out at last. A queen. With the face of…

The unknown god looked down, waved an arm dismissively. As if caught by a gale, Shef was toppling away, away back toward his camp, his bed, his blankets. As he fell he recognized in an instant whose the face was on the chess-queen.

Shef sat up suddenly with a gasp. Godive, he thought slowly, his heart thumping. It must be my own wish that sent me that vision. How could a girl affect the map of the contending enemies?

Outside Shef's sleeping-chamber, noise and upheaval, horses stamping, booted feet striding toward him past the cries of his bower-thanes. Pulling on a tunic, Shef opened the door before the boots reached him.

Facing him was a familiar figure: the young Alfred, still crowned with a golden circle, still as fresh-faced and full of nervous energy as before, but with a new grimness in his eyes.

“I gave you this shire,” he said without preamble. “I think now I should have given it to the other one, your enemy. Alfgar. Alfgar and his cripple-father. For between the two of them, and my traitor-bishops and King Burgred my brother-in-law, they have hounded me out of my kingdom.”

Alfred's expression changed, showed a sudden weariness and defeat. “I am here as a suppliant. Driven out of Wessex. No time to rally my loyal thanes. The army of Mercia marching on my heels. I saved you. Will you, now, save me?”

As Shef collected his thoughts to reply, he heard more running feet, coming from outside the circle of torches round Alfred. A messenger, too anxious and hasty to remember protocol. As soon as the man saw Shef standing in the doorway, he poured out his alarm.

“Beacons, lord jarl! Beacons for a fleet at sea. Forty ships at least. The men on watch, they say it can only be—it can only be Ivar.”

As Shef watched the consternation on the face of King Alfred, something cold inside him drew a conclusion. Alfgar on one side. Ivar on the other. And what have they in common? I took a woman from one. The other took the same woman from me. At least I can be sure now that it was a true dream the god sent me, whoever he may be. Godive is the key to this. Someone is telling me to use her.

Chapter Five

Early in his experience of being jarl, Shef had discovered that news was never quite as good or quite as bad as it was made to seem on first hearing. So it proved again. Beacons were a good way of signaling danger, and direction, and even—with care—number. They said nothing about distance. The beacon-chain started far up the coast, in Lincolnshire. It could mean only that Ivar—if Ivar it was—had left the Humber with, as Brand had immediately pointed out, the wind dead in his teeth. He could be three days off, or even more.

As for King Burgred, with Alfgar and Wulfgar in his train, Alfred was sure that he was in pursuit and that he meant, on the urgings of his bishops, nothing less than the entire destruction of the land of the Way, and the submission of the whole of England south of the Humber to his rule. But Alfred was a young man who rode hard, and who had only his personal bodyguard with him. Burgred was famous for the splendor of his camp-furniture and the number of ox-wagons needed to carry it. Forty miles to him was four days' march.