Shef nodded. “But then you couldn't pull them.”
“Right, lord. You couldn't, and we couldn't. But we thought about that for a bit, and then Saxa here”—Udd indicated another member of his gang—“said anyone who's ever carried loads for a living knows legs are stronger than arms.
“So: we took thick oak blocks. We cut slots for the metal near the front and slid the strips through, wedged 'em tight. We fitted triggers like we got already on the big shooters.
“And then we put these iron hoops, like, on the front of the wood. Try it, lord. Put your foot through the hoop.”
Shef did so.
“Grip the string with both hands and pull back against your own leg. Pull till the string goes over the top of the trigger.”
Shef heaved, felt the string coming back against strong resistance—but not impossibly strong. The puny Udd and his undersized colleagues had underestimated the force a big man trained in the forge could exert. The string clicked over the trigger. He was holding, Shef realized, a bow of sorts—but one that lay crosswise to the shooter, not up and down like a wooden handbow.
A grinning face from the crowd handed Shef a short arrow: short because the steel bow flexed only a few inches, not the half-arm's-length of a wooden bow. He fitted it in the rough gouge in the top of the wooden block. The circle parted in front of him, indicating a tree twenty yards off.
Shef leveled the bow, aimed automatically between the arrow-feathers, as he would have with a twist- shooter, squeezed the trigger. There was no violent thump of recoil as there would have been with the full-sized machine, no black streak rising and falling. Yet the bolt sped away, struck fair in the center of the oak-trunk.
Shef walked over, grasped the embedded arrow, worked it backward and forward. After a dozen tugs, it came free. He looked at it speculatively.
“Not bad,” he said. “But not good, either. Although the bow is steel, I do not think in the end it strikes harder than the hunting bows we use already. And they are not strong enough for war.”
Udd's face fell, he started automatically to make the excuses of the slave with a hard master. Shef held up a hand to stop him.
“Never mind, Udd. We are all learning something here. This is a new thing that the world has never seen before, but who made it? Saxa, for remembering that legs are stronger than arms? You, for remembering how your master made the steel? I, for telling you to make a bow? Or the Rome-folk of old, for showing me how to make the twist-shooters that started all this?
“None of us. What we have here is a new thing, but not new knowledge. Just old knowledge put together, old knowledge from many minds. Now, we need to make this stronger. Not the bow, for that is strong enough. The pull. How can we make it so that my pull up is double the strength of what I can do now?”
The silence was broken by Oswi, leader of the catapult-team.
“Well, if you put it like that, lord, answer's obvious. How do you double a pull?
“You use a pulley. Or a windlass. A little one, not a great big one like the Norse-folk use on their ships. Fix it to your belt, wind on one end of the rope, hook the other end of the rope over the bowstring, pull it up as far as you like.”
Shef handed the primitive crossbow back to Udd. “There's the answer, Udd. Set the trigger further back, so the bow can flex as far as the steel will let it. Make a winding gear with a rope and a hook to go with every bow. And make a bow out of every strip of steel you have. Take all the men you need.”
The Viking shouldering his way through the crowd looked suspiciously at the jarl surrounded by a throng of midgets. He had arrived only that summer, called from Denmark by incredible stories of success, wealth and profit, and of the Ragnarssons defeated. All he had seen so far was an army drawn up to fight that had then suddenly stopped in its tracks. And now here was the jarl himself, talking like a common man to a crowd of thralls. The Viking was six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and could lift a Winchester bushel with either hand. What sort of a jarl is this? he wondered. Why does he talk to them and not to the warriors?
Out loud he said, with a minimum of deference, “Lord. You are called to council.”
His message delivered, he turned away, contempt in the set of his shoulders.
Greatly daring, Oswi asked what all had wondered: “Battle this time, lord? We got to stop that Ivar sometime. We wouldn't have minded if we'd done it sooner.”
Shef felt the reproach, overrode it. “Battle always comes soon enough, Oswi. The thing is to be ready.”
As soon as Shef stepped into the great meeting tent, he felt the hostility that faced him. The whole of the Wayman council was present, or seemed to be: Brand, Ingulf, Farman and the rest of the priests, Alfred, Guthmund, representatives from every group and unit of the joint army.
He sat down at his place, hand groping automatically for the whetstone-scepter left lying there for him. “Where is Thorvin?” he said, suddenly noting one absence.
Farman started to give a reply, but was immediately overridden by the angry voice of Alfred—the young king—speaking already in a fair approximation of the Anglo-Norse pidgin the Wayman army and council so often used with each other.
“One man here or there does not matter. What we have to decide on cannot wait. Already we have waited too long!”
“Yes,” rumbled Brand in agreement. “We are like the farmer who sits up all night to watch the hen-roost. Then in the morning he finds the fox has taken all his geese.”
“So who is the fox?” asked Shef.
“Rome,” said Alfred, rising to his feet to look down at the council. “We forgot the Church in Rome. When you took the land from the Church in this county, when I threatened to take the revenues from it in my kingdom, the Church took fright. The Pope in Rome took fright.”
“So?” asked Shef.
“So now there are ten thousand men ashore. Mailed horsemen of the Franks. Led by their king Charles. They wear crosses on their arms and their surcoats, and say that they have come to establish the Church in England against the pagans.
“The pagans! For a hundred years we have fought against the pagans, we Englishmen. Every year we sent Peter's pence to Rome as a token of our loyalty. I myself”—Alfred's youthful voice rose in pitch with indignation—“I myself was sent by my father to the last Pope, to good Pope Leo, when I was a child. The Pope made me a consul of Rome! Yet never have we had a ship or a man or a silver penny sent into England in exchange. But the day Church-land is threatened, Pope Nicholas can find an army.”
“But it is an army against the pagans,” said Shef. “Maybe us. Not you.”
Alfred's face flushed. “You forget. Daniel, my own bishop, declared me excommunicate. The messengers say these Cross-wearers, these Franks, announce on all sides that there is no king in Wessex and they demand submission to King Charles. Till that is done they will ravage every shire. They come against the pagans. But they rob and kill only Christians.”
“What do you want us to do?” asked Shef.
“We must march at once and defeat this Frankish army before it destroys my kingdom. Bishop Daniel is dead or fleeing, and his Mercian backers with him. No Englishman will challenge my king-right again. My thanes and aldermen are already gathering to me, and I can raise the entire levy of Wessex, from every shire. If, as some say, the messengers have overcounted the strength of the enemy, then I can fight them on even terms. I will fight them on any terms. But your assistance would be greatly welcome.”
He sat down, looking round tensely for support.
In the long silence, Brand said one word. “Ivar.”
All eyes turned to Shef, sitting on his camp-stool, whetstone across his knees. He still seemed pale and gaunt after his sickness, cheekbones standing out, the flesh round his ruined eye pulled in so that it seemed a dark pit.
I do not know what he is thinking, reflected Brand. But he has not been with us these last days. If what Thorvin says is true, about the spirit leaving the body in these visions, then I wonder if it can be that you leave a little of it behind each time.
