The Hammer and The Cross

had carefully and artistically painted a great scar on Shef's face, the slash-mark of an axe or a sword across the eyes. Then he had bandaged the fake scar with the filthy rags of an English army-leech, letting only the edges of it hint at what lay underneath. Then he had splinted and strapped Shef's legs beneath his wide breeches so that it was impossible for him to bend a knee; and finally, as a refinement of torment, strapped a metal bar to his back to prevent any free movement.

“You dropped your guard,” he had said. “A Viking hit you across the face. As you fell forward you got the back of an axe, or a war-hammer, that crushed your spine. Now your legs can only trail behind you as you hobble on crutches. That's your story.”

But no one had ever asked Shef his story. No experienced warrior needed to. Another reason that the Mercian companions did not bother to interrogate the cripple and his meager attendant was that they were afraid. Every warrior knew that such a fate one day might be his own. Kings and lords might keep a few cripples, pensioners, as signs of their own generosity or out of some family feeling. But gratitude or care for the useless were too expensive luxuries for a land at war.

The ring of listeners turned to other interests. Hund emptied the bag, passed half of the bits to Shef, squatted by him as they both devoured their gifts, heads down. Their hunger, was not an act. For two days now they had worked closer and closer into the center of Burgred's camp, trailing behind it for ten miles each day, Shef slumped on a stolen donkey, living only on what they could pick up, sleeping each night in their clothes in the cold dew.

“You saw her,” muttered Shef.

“When she comes back I will throw her the sign,” replied Hund. Neither spoke again. They knew this was a moment of critical danger.

Eventually Godive could prolong her errand no further. Back in the women's quarters, she knew, the old woman Alfgar had set to watch over her would be growing suspicious, fearful: Alfgar had told her that if his whore of a wife found a lover, he would sell her to the slave-market in Bristol, where the Welsh chiefs bought cheap lives.

She began to make her way back across the still-crowded courtyard. There were the minstrel and his boy still. Poor folk. A blind cripple and a starveling. Even the Welsh would not buy such. How long would they live? Till the winter, maybe. They might outlive her at that.

The minstrel had raised his coarse brown hood against the slow drizzle that was turning the dust into mud. Or maybe it was against the cruel stares of the world, for his face was in his hands. As she came level with them, the attendant bent forward and dropped something onto the ground at her feet. Instinctively, she stooped for it.

It was gold. A gold harp, a tiny brooch for a child's dress. Small as it was, it would buy food for two men for a year. How could a wandering beggar have such a thing? Tied to it with a thread was—

It was a sheaf. Just a few cornstalks threaded together, but tied to make the shape unmistakable. But if the harp meant the minstrel, then the sheaf was—

She turned convulsively to the blind man. His hands came away from his face, bandage in them; she saw the one eye staring deep into her own. Gravely, slowly, the eye winked. As Shef dropped his face into his hands once more he said four words, low but clear. “The privy. At midnight.”

“But it's guarded,” said Godive. “And there's Alfgar…”

Hund stretched out his bag towards her, as if begging in desperation. As the bag touched her, he slipped a small flask from his hand to hers.

“Put it in the ale,” he whispered. “Whoever drinks it will sleep.”

Godive jerked back convulsively. As if rejected, Hund sank back, the minstrel dropped his face once more into his hands, as if too far gone in despair to look up. A few yards away, Godive saw old Polga hobbling towards her, reproaches already forming. She turned away, fighting an urge as she did so to leap, fighting an urge to run and embrace the old woman as if she was a young virgin with never a care or a fear. The lacerations on the backs of her thighs caught her woolen dress and slowed her to a cramped shuffle.

Shef had not expected to sleep on the edge of the abduction, but it had come upon him irresistibly. Too irresistibly to be natural, he feared. As he fell asleep, a voice was speaking. Not the now-recognized, amused voice of his unknown patron. The cold voice of Othin, fosterer of battle, betrayer of warriors, the god who took the sacrifices offered to Dead Man's Strand.

“Be very careful, mannikin,” said the voice. “You are free to act, you and your father, but never forget to pay me my due. I will show you what happens to those who do.”

In his dream, Shef found himself at the very edge of a circle of light, in the dark but looking in. Within the light, a harper sang. He sang to a man, an old man with gray hair, but with a forbidding, cruel beaked face like the ones on his whetstone. The harper sang to this man. But he sang, Shef knew, for the woman who sat at her father's feet. He was singing a lay of love, a lay from the Southlands about a woman who heard the nightingale sing in an orchard and pined away helplessly for her lover. The old king's face relaxed in pleasure, his eyes closing, remembering his youth and the wooing of his dead wife. As he did so the harper, never missing a note, placed a runakefli—a stick carved with runes—by the woman's skirt: the message from her lover. He himself was the lover, Shef knew, and his name was Heoden. The harper was Heorrenda the peerless singer, sent by his lord to woo the woman Hild away from her jealous father, Hagena the remorseless.

Another time, another scene. This time two armies faced each other by a restless strand, the sea hurling in rollers over the kelp. One man stepped forward from the ranks, went toward the other. It was Heoden this time, Shef knew, come to offer bride-price for the stolen bride. He would not have done it if Hagena's men had not caught up with him. He showed the bags of gold, the precious jewels. But the other man, the old man was speaking. Shef knew he was rejecting the offer: for he had drawn the sword Dainslaf, which the dwarves had made, and which could never be sheathed till it had taken a life. The old man was saying he would be satisfied with nothing less than Heoden's life, for the insult put upon him.

Haste and pressure, pressure from somewhere. He must see this last scene. Dark, and a moon shining through scattered clouds. Many men lay dead on the field, their shields cloven, their hearts pierced. Heoden and Hagena lay close together in a death-grapple, each the other's bane. But one figure was still alive, still moving. It was Hild, the woman, who now had lost both husband-abductor and father. She moved among the corpses, singing a song, a galdorleoth which her Finnish nurse had taught her. And the corpses began to move. Began to rise. Stared at each other in the moonlight. Lifted their weapons and began again to strike. As Hild shrieked in rage and frustration her lover and her father ignored her, faced each other, began again to hack, to chop at the splintered shields. So it would go till Doomsday, Shef knew, on the strand of Hoy in the far- off Orkney isles. For this was the Everlasting Battle.

The pressure grew till he woke with a start. Hund was pressing a thumb under his left ear, to bring him awake silently. Around them the night was quiet, broken only by the stirring and coughing of hundreds of sleepers in their tents and shelters, the army of Burgred. The noise of revelry from the great pavilion had finally stopped. A glance at the moon told Shef it was midnight. Time to move.

Rising from their places, the six freed slaves Shef had brought with him, led by Cwicca the bagpipe-player of Crowland, went silently to a cart standing a few yards away. They clustered round it, seized the push-handles and set off. Immediately a great squeaking of ungreased wheels filled the night, provoking immediate complaints. The gang of freedmen took no notice, marched doggedly on. No longer strapped and bandaged, but still dragging himself on his crutches, Shef followed thirty paces behind. Hund stood watching them for a moment, then slipped away in the moonlight toward the edge of camp and the waiting horses.

As the cart shrieked its way toward the pavilion, a thane of Burgred's guard stepped across. Shef heard his snarl of challenge, heard his spear-shaft crack across some unfortunate's shoulder. Wails of complaint, expostulation. As the thane stepped closer to find out what the men were doing he caught the reek of the cart and stepped back again, gagging and waving a hand in front of his face. Dropping his crutches, Shef slid past behind his back and into the maze of the pavilion guy-ropes. From there he could see again the thane ordering Cwicca's gang back, Cwicca cringing but sticking to his litany of explanation: “Clean out them pots now, they said. Chamberlain