them.”
“And then?”
“This will have to become a new province, ruled from Rome. With its revenues going to Rome. I speak only, of course, of the spiritual revenues, the proceeds of tithing, of fees for baptism and burial, of payments for entry into sacred offices. As regards the land itself—the property of secular lords—that must fall to its secular rulers. And their servants.”
The king, the legate and the constable exchanged looks of deep and satisfied understanding.
“All right,” said Charles. “Look, the graybeard seems to have found a younger priest with some grasp of Latin. Tell him what we want.”
As the list ran on and on—of indemnities, supplies to be provided, toll to be paid to protect the city from sack, hostages to be delivered and laborers to start work immediately on a fort for the Frankish garrison to be installed—Ceolnoth's eyes widened with horror.
“But he is treating us as defeated enemies,” he stammered to the priest who translated for him. “We are not enemies. The pagans are his enemies. It was my colleague of York and the worthy bishop of Winchester who called him in. Tell the king who I am. Tell him he is mistaken.”
Charles, about to turn away toward the hundreds of mailed horsemen waiting behind him, caught the tone of Ceolnoth's voice, though he did not follow the words. He was not an uneducated man by the low standards of Frankish military aristocracy. He had learned a trifle of Latin in his youth, learned too some of Titus Livius's stories of the history of Rome.
Smiling, he drew his long, double-edged sword from his scabbard, held it like a merchant's balance.
“This will not need translating,” he said to Godefroi. Then, bending from the saddle to Ceolnoth, he said slowly and clearly, two words.
Woe to the conquered.
Shef had considered all the possible plans he could use to attack Ivar's camp, weighed them like moves on a chessboard, rejected them one by one. These new ways of making war introduced complexities that could lead to confusion in battle, loss of lives, loss of everything.
It had been much easier when line had clashed with line, battled hand to hand until the stronger side won. He knew that his Vikings were becoming more and more displeased with these new things. Yearned for the certainty of the clash of arms. But the new ways had to be used if Ivar and his weapons were to be defeated. Old and new must blend.
Of course! He must weld the old and the new together like the soft iron and hard steel of a pattern-welded sword, like the sword he had forged and lost in the battle when Edmund was taken. A word formed in his mind.
“
“That is how we will fight our battle. We will make it the
Brand looked disbelieving. “The lightning-battle? I know Thor is with us, but I doubt you can convince him to hurl his thunderbolts to clear our way to victory.”
“It is not the thunderbolts I want. What I want is a battle fast as lightning. The thought is there, Brand; I feel I know what must be done. But I must make it clearer—as clear in my head as if it had already happened.”
Now, waiting in the mist in the dark hour before dawn, Shef felt sure his battle-plan would work. The Vikings had approved it—so had his machine-tending Englishmen. And it had better work. Shef knew that after his rescue of Godive, and then his collapse as the army waited to attack, his credit with the council and the army too was almost exhausted. Things were being kept secret from him. He did not know where Thorvin had gone, nor why Godive had slipped away with him.
As he had before the walls of York, he reflected that in this new style of battle the fighting was the easiest part. Or at least it promised to be so for him. Yet somewhere inside himself his flesh still crawled with a kind of fear: not of death or disgrace. Fear of the dragon he sensed in Ivar's skin. He fought the fear and repulsion down, glanced at the sky for the first pale streaks of dawn, strained his eyes through the mist to see if he could see the outline of Ivar's battlements.
Ivar had made his fortified camp in exactly the same style as the one which King Edmund had stormed south of Bedricsward by the Stour: a low ditch and bank with stakes driven into it, forming three sides of a square with the river Ouse as the fourth side, his ships drawn up along the muddy bank. The sentry who paced the bank behind the stockade had been at that battle too, and lived. He needed no urging to keep alert. Yet to him the dark hours were the dangerous ones, short enough at this time of year. As he saw the sky beginning to pale, and felt the little wind that comes before the dawn, he relaxed and began to think of the day that might follow. He had no great desire to see Ivar Ragnarsson at his butcher's work again among his prisoners. Why, he wondered, did they not move on? If Ivar had been challenged to fight at Ely, he had met the challenge. It was Sigvarthsson and the Way- folk who must feel disgrace.
The sentry halted, braced himself chest-high against the wall of the stockade, fighting to keep alert. He brooded on the sounds he had heard so often in the last few days, coming from under the bloody hands of Ivar. Out there two hundred corpses lay in fresh graves, the product of a week's sacrifice and slaughter of Mercian prisoners taken after the battle. An owl called, and the sentry started, thinking for an instant it was the shriek of a spirit come for vengeance.
It was his last thought. Before he heard the thrum of the bowstring the quarrel drove through his throat. From the ditch, the figures who had crept up in the mist caught him, eased him to the ground, waited. Knowing the other sentries on the wall had been dispatched in the same instant, on the cry of the owl.
Even the softest of shoes makes a sound moving through the grass. The hundreds of running feet sounded like small waves rushing down a pebbled strand. Dark bulks loomed, moving swiftly toward the western palisade of the camp, their moment carefully chosen. They were black shapes against a black sky behind them. But the lightening sky in the east would silhouette the defenders when they awoke and rushed to battle.
Shef stood to the side, watching the attack, fists clenched: the success or failure of everything depended on the next few seconds. Taking the camp would be like taking York—only simpler and quicker. No clumsy, moving towers, no slow development of the attack in stages. This was being done in a way even the Ragnarssons would understand—in explosive attack, win or lose in the first minute.
His eager men had shaped the bridges, stout planks pegged together. Twelve yards long and three wide. Iron bands clamped the oars beneath the structure, their handles projecting to either side. Each handle grasped by a Viking, secure in the feel of the familiar wood, proud of the strength needed to lift the structure and run forward with it at the stockade of the camp.
The tallest warriors were in front. As they ran they grunted with the effort, not only from carrying the dead weight—but at the last moment they lifted it over their heads until the front was more than seven feet off the ground. Enough to clear the six-foot-high stakes of the camp.
And clear it they did with a final explosive heave as they leaped over the ditch, slammed wood down on wood, the men in the front springing clear at the last second and rolling down into the ditch.
But not those that ran behind. The instant the bridge was in place they thundered up it and leapt into the enclosure behind. Ten, twenty, a hundred, two hundred were over before the bridge-carriers could unsheathe their weapons and join in the attack.
Shef smiled into the darkness. Six had been built, six had attacked—and only one had not succeeded in topping the wall. It lay half in, half out of the ditch, while cursing Vikings crawled out from under it and joined the rush to the other bridges.
Screams of pain, roars of anger over there as the sleeping men realized that the enemy was in among them. First the thud of axes into flesh, then the clang of metal as men woke, seized arms, defended themselves. Shef took one last look in the growing light, saw that the warriors were following instructions and advancing in a steady line, slaughtering as they went. But keeping position even after they had cut down the man they faced. Keeping pace with the murderous advance. Then Shef ran.
On the eastern side of the camp his English freedmen had waited in the darkness as they had been
