“Yes, Ivar,” repeated Shef. “Ivar and his machines. We cannot leave him behind us while we march to the South. He would grow stronger. For one thing, now Burgred is dead it will be only a matter of time till the Mercians elect a king to make peace with Ivar and save them from ravaging. Then Ivar will have their men and money to draw on, as he has already drawn on the money and the skills of York. He did not make those machines himself.
“So we must fight him. I must fight him. I think he and I are bound together now so that we cannot part till this is finished.
“But you, lord king.” The whetstone-scepter was cradled in Shef's left arm while he stroked its stern, implacable faces. “You have your own people to consider. Maybe it is best for you to march to your own place and fight your own battle, while we fight ours. Each in our own way. Christian against Christian and pagan against pagan. And then, if your God and our gods will, we shall meet again, and set this country on its feet.”
“So be it,” said Alfred, his face flushing again. “I will call my men and be on my way.”
“Go with him, Lulla,” said Shef to the leader of the halberdiers. “And you, Osmod,” he added to the leader of the catapult-teams, “see the king has his pick of horses and remounts for his journey south.”
As the only Englishmen on the council left, Shef looked round at those who remained, and broke into fluent, rapid Norse, tinged with the thick Halogaland accent he had learned from Brand.
“What are his chances? If he fights his way? Against these Franks? What do you know of them, Brand?”
“A good chance, if he fights our way. Hit them when they're not looking. Catch them when they're asleep. Didn't old Ragnar himself—bad luck to his spirit—did he not sack their great town back in our fathers' day, and make their king pay tribute?
“But if the king fights in the English way, with the sun high in the sky and everyone forewarned…”
Brand grunted doubtfully. “The Franks had a king in our grandfather's day: King Karl, Karl the Great— Charlemagne they call him. Even Guthfrith, king of the Danes, had to submit to him. The Franks can beat anybody, given time. You know why? It's the horses. They fight on horseback. About once in a blue moon they'll be there, with their saddles on, and their girthstraps tight, and their fetlocks plaited, or whatever it is they call them—I am a sailor, not a horseman, Thor be praised; at least ships never shit on your feet.
“But that day, that one day, you don't want to stand up to them. And if King Alfred's like all the other Englishmen, that's the day he'll choose.”
“Horses on one side, devil-machines on the other,” said Guthmund. “Enough to make anyone sick.”
Eyes scrutinized Shef's face, to see how he would take the challenge.
“We will deal with Ivar and the machines first,” he said.
Chapter Eight
Two figures dressed in the rags of incongruous finery cantered slowly down the green lanes of central England: Alfgar, thane's son, once favorite of a king; Daniel, a bishop without a retinue, still a king's deadly enemy. Both had escaped with difficulty from Ivar's riders by the Ouse, but had managed to end the day with a dozen guards between them, and money and rations enough to take them back in safety in Winchester. Then their troubles had begun. First they woke one morning to find their guards had simply deserted in the night, perhaps blaming their masters for defeat, perhaps seeing no reason any longer to put up with Alfgar's caustic tongue, Daniel's outbursts of fury. They had taken the food, money and horses with them. Striding across the fields towards the nearest church-spire, Daniel had insisted that as soon as he reached a priest, his episcopal authority would provide them with mounts and supplies. They had never reached the spire. In the troubled countryside, the churls had abandoned their homes for the summer and had built themselves shelters in the greenwood. The village priest had indeed recognized Daniel's status, enough to persuade his parishioners not to kill the pair of wanderers, and even to leave Daniel his episcopal ring and cross, and the gold head of his crozier. They had taken everything else, including Alfgar's weapons and silver arm-rings. After that, for three nights in a row the fugitives had lain belly- pinched in the dew, cold and afraid.
Yet Alfgar, like his half brother and enemy Shef, was a child of the fen. He could make an eel-trap out of withies, could catch fish with a cloak-pin on twisted thread. Slowly the pair had ceased to hope for rescue, had learned to rely on themselves. The fifth day of their journey Alfgar had stolen two horses from an poorly guarded stud, and the herd-boy's knife and his flea-infested blanket as well. After that they had made better time. It had not improved their humor.
At the ford of the Lea they had heard the news of the Frankish landing from a merchant disposed to be respectful to Daniel's cross and ring. It had altered their plan.
“The Church does not fail her servants,” Daniel had declared, eyes red with rage and weariness. “I knew the stroke would fall. I did not know where or when. Now, to the glory of God, the pious King Charles has come to restore the faith. We will go to him and make our report—our report of those he must punish: the pagans, the heretics, the slack in faith. Then the evil Way-folk and the graceless adherents of Alfred will find that the quernstones of God grind slow, but they grind to the last grain.”
“Where do we have to go?” asked Alfgar sullenly, reluctant to follow Daniel's lead but anxious to contact once again the side that might win, that might bring him vengeance on the ravisher, the bride-stealer, the one who had stolen first his woman, then his shire, and then his woman again. Every day he remembered a dozen times, with a shiver of shame, waking with the birch-twigs in his hand and the curious faces staring down: Didn't you hear? He took your woman? Trussed up your father, with no arms or legs, but just left you to lie there? And you never woke?
“The Frankish fleet crossed the Narrow Sea and landed in Kent,” Daniel replied. “Not far from the see of St. Augustine in Canterbury. They are camped at a place called Hastings.”
Surveying the walls of Canterbury, his base at Hastings left for a careful, six-day foray, Charles the Bald, king of the Franks, sat on his horse and waited for the procession trailing from the open gates to reach him. He was sure enough what it was. In the lead he could see holy banners, choir-monks singing, censers waving. Behind them, carried in a chair of state, came a gray-bearded figure in purple and white, tall miter nodding: surely the archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of England. Though back at camp in Hastings, Charles reflected, he had Wulfhere, archbishop of York, who would probably dispute this archbishop's claim. Perhaps he should have brought him and let the two old fools fight it out.
“What's this one called?” he asked his constable, Godefroi, sitting his charger next to him.
Godefroi—like his king, sitting easily in a deep saddle, high pommel in front, high saddle-bow behind, feet braced in steel stirrups—raised his eyes to heaven. “Ceolnoth. Archbishop of Cantwarabyrig. God, what a language.”
Finally the procession reached its goal, finished its anthem. The bearers lowered the chair; the old man stumbled out of it and stepped across to face the menacing silent figure in front of him, metal man on armored horse. Behind him the smoke of burning villages smudged the sky. He began to speak.
After a while the king raised a gauntlet, turned to the papal legate on his left, Astolfo of Lombardy: a cleric without a see—as yet.
“What is he saying?”
The legate shrugged. “I have no idea. He seems to be speaking English.”
“Try him in Latin.”
The legate began to talk, easily and fluently in the Latin of Rome—a Latin, of course, pronounced in exactly the same way as the inhabitants of that ancient city spoke their own, modern tongue. Ceolnoth, who had learned his Latin from books, listened without comprehension.
“Don't tell me he can't speak Latin either.”
The legate shrugged again, ignoring Ceolnoth's faltering attempts to reply. “The English Church. We had not known things were so bad. The priests and the bishops. Their dress is not canonical. Their liturgy is out-of-date. Their priests preach in English because they know no Latin. They have even had the temerity to translate God's word into their own barbarous speech. And their saints! How can one venerate names like Willibrord? Cynehelm? Frideswide, even! I think it likely that when I make my report to His Holiness he will remove authority from all of
